Curves!

I am tired.

I just got done assembling my new planishing hammer, which is a tool I did not need until Harbor Freight put it on sale. After that, I needed it. Real bad.

I shelled out about $68 for a stand, a planishing hammer frame, a control pedal, several anvils, and an air hammer. Put it all together, and you get a thing that can turn a flat piece of metal into a dog dish in 10 or 15 minutes. Can’t touch it anywhere else for under $185.

For a long time, I’ve wanted an English wheel and a planishing hammer. I can weld stuff, sort of, and I can cut stuff, but making flat stuff into curved stuff…can’t do that. I am also unable to turn flat stuff into stuff with neat corners, such as boxes. I need a finger brake.

Harbor Freight sells a lot of real junk, but here and there, they score. Their 20-ton press is okay, so I got one. I’ve seen excellent Harbor Freight screwdrivers that were a lot tougher than Craftsmans. The planishing hammer gets mixed reviews, but most people agree it does function. Some complain about the air hammer wearing out in a hurry. My private suspicion: no one told them to oil it.

Just a guess.

I don’t have much interest in using a planishing hammer right now. I would have preferred to leave it in the box and take it out after the move to northern Florida. The problem with that is that Harbor Freight tools have to be assembled and operated before you can be sure you want to keep them. That’s true of any tool, but it’s really, seriously true of Harbor Freight tools. You never know which parts will be missing or which vital component won’t fit even after you hit it with a big hammer.

Harbor Freight does not provide the bolts to attach the planishing hammer to the stand. That seems petty of them. I dug out some bolts of my own, and in doing so, I saw one of the great truths of the tool hobby in action.

A while back I dismantled a treadmill to get free steel and a motor. I had to take out some sturdy bolts with nice black locknuts. They have been lying around the garage for several months. The other day, I threw one of the four bolts out. Guess what I needed today? Four matching bolts.

As soon as you throw a piece of junk out, it will become vital to your survival. It never fails. If you have a piece of junk in your garage, and you can’t remember why you kept it, throw it out. Tomorrow, you will remember, and you’ll have to spend at least fifty bucks to replace it.

The planishing hammer is attached to the stand with three bolts.

I think tomorrow I’ll fire it up. I have some crappy aluminum sheet. I just want to see if the hammer functions and hits the work where it’s supposed to. If the air hammer isn’t aligned with the anvil, you get half-moons instead of round hammer dents.

Once I know it works, I’ll probably put it back in the boxes.

Then the next day I’ll need to use it.

The planishing hammer looks very nice. I was shocked. Everything lines up. The steel is heavy. I don’t think American manufacturing is ever coming back, except in my garage. The Chinese are getting too good.

I was hoping I could eventually make a motorcycle fender or two with the planishing hammer, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I believe the English wheel is more appropriate. But Harbor Freight hasn’t put those on sale.

I looked around on the web to find out where I could get a cheap English wheel. For some reason, you never see used ones on Ebay any more. I feel so stupid for passing them by in years past.

Guess what I found out? Harbor Freight’s English wheel gets fantastic reviews. Who’d have thunk it? As I understand it, they used to make a crappy one, and then a couple of years back they modified it, and now everyone loves it. I checked the usual list of Chinese suspects. Grizzly. Eastwood. Harbor Freight came out on top. Big surprise.

Real men shape metal with mallets and hammers, using high-tech accessories like stumps and bags of sand. I am not interested in that. I’ve seen people using the planishing hammer and English wheel, and their experience looked a lot more appealing than pounding a stump.

It would be nice to have an anvil, though. A lot of sheet metal doodads get dented, and it would be convenient to be able to tap dents out on an anvil. It’s not the same as wearing yourself out, planishing flat metal and turning it into ashtrays and hubcaps. It’s quick.

I just saw a video of a guy using an air hammer to beat a bend out of 1/8″ metal with an air hammer. His name is Kevin Caron. He makes a lot of welding videos. He had a sculpture component that needed to be beaten into line, and he got out the air hammer and went to the anvil. Whacked it right out. Neat.

Getting an anvil should be easy, right? I mean, they’re cheap. They’re just lumps of steel.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. How wrong you are. A good anvil costs hundreds of dollars. Don’t ask me why.

I read that some anvils are made of cast iron. You couldn’t get me near one of those. Cast iron breaks, and when you break a metal object with a hammer, little bits of it can fly off like bullets. I saw one go through my cousin’s jeans, into his skin, and a couple of inches upward after it hit his shin bone. Well, I didn’t actually see it. I saw him fall on the ground for no apparent reason, complaining about the pain in his leg.

Real anvils have hardened steel tops.

In other news, I’m about to make a strop. This is a sort of leather whetstone. You take a piece of cowhide, glue it to a board, and impregnate it with an abrasive such as chromium oxide. I got the leather and the abrasive, and I’m about to make the wood part.

You can make a plain old rectangle for the base of your strop, but I wanted to put a handle on mine, so I am thinking I’ll carve one out. Problem: I would have to make convex curves with radiused corners. I can do that with a coping saw and a rasp, but that’s the caveman way. I would rather use a spokeshave. This is a weird little plane that whittles wood. You can take a square object like a two-by-two and turn it into a rounded object like a club or an axe handle.

Naturally, I ordered a couple of spokeshaves. This is what I do. I am waiting for them now. I got a flat-bottomed one (Stanley 151) for relatively straight things, and I got one with a round bottom (Stanley 51R) for concave curves. The 51R is what I’ll need for the strop. I’ll still need the coping saw, but I’ll be finishing the strop off by cutting, not by filing.

I could have just made a rectangular base, but if you’re going to be a tool guy, be a tool guy. That’s what I say.

Just don’t get bogged down with stumps and sand bags.

I learned interesting things about chromium oxide. You can get it cheap from China and Russia, but you don’t want to do that. The particles are too big. you want sub-micron particles. I got a product made by Formax, a company I already knew of because I had bought its abrasive belt grease. It would have been cool to get a pound for under ten bucks from overseas, but the particles would have been huge, and big particles mean big scratches.

I’m sorry if my life is too cool for you. I wish everyone could have a planishing hammer.

I feel my strength coming back. Time to talk to Marvin and Maynard. Maybe I’ll post a photo if I planish anything.

Life as it Really is

Yesterday I had a bizarre experience.

I was just about to go to bed, and before shutting the PC down, I got a wild hair and decided to look up some people I used to know. When I was a kid growing up in Tampa, two twins lived next door to me. They were my best friends. One was serious and a little crabby, and the other was friendly and easygoing.

They have an aluminum company now. Their dad built it. I believe he’s still alive. One of them is active on Facebook, and the other–the friendlier one–is nowhere to be found.

The serious one is Trumpophobic. He is furious about Trump’s very existence. You know the pattern. It’s a form of psychosis which defies reason. He posts angry messages about our beleaguered chief executive.

Not surprising. He’s Jewish. If you’re Jewish and you can cast stones from the safe shelter of America, you are obligated to hate President Trump. Jews in Israel, where bombs land from time to time, like him a lot better. Obama was the worst enemy they ever had in the White House.

I Googled the house where we lived, and I looked at it in Google Street View. Funniest thing…my blood ran cold. I felt chills. All the darkness of my childhood rose back up inside me, like ice water in a glass.

It was a nice little house in a neighborhood full of fairly nice people. It should have been a good place to live.

It occurred to me that there must be people who look at photos of their childhood homes and feel warmth and longing. I wondered what that was like. To me, the Google shot was like a police photo of the scene of a massacre. It was a little like looking at photos of the World Trade Center.

If it had been a hut in Somalia, I would not have felt the same darkness. If you have kids in a hut, the kids don’t expect a lot. Any good thing that happens is gravy. But this was a house in middle-class America. We were healthy. My parents were educated. We did not lack money. Things should have been better. What I saw were missed opportunities. I saw gold spun into straw. I saw waste. Having something good and having it turn to filth is worse than not having anything at all.

It was all unnecessary. Normal parents spend money on their kids. They like their kids. They get involved with their schooling and activities. Their kids aren’t afraid of them. There is no reason why my sister and I could not have grown up like that.

When I think of that house, I think of violence. I think of waking up in the night and seeing snakes and yard-long centipedes crawling on the beds, walls, and ceiling. I remember having nightmares every night.

It’s so strange, the things we do to each other for no good reason at all.

When the devil owns a house, and the people who inhabit it don’t know enough to fight him, it’s tough for a kid to live in it. My mother was on my side, and that was about it. She was all I had. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the knowledge or tools to fix things. She had a rotten life, and she died young.

I just realized I could go to a real estate site and look at photos of the inside of the house, so I did. It does not feel good at all. I remember where certain things happened.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. I don’t think it will help anyone. What am I going to say? “Be a good parent so you don’t destroy your kids”? The only people who would listen are people who are already making an effort.

No one but me is responsible for any problems I have now. Still, I can’t help being stung by the waste and needless destruction.

Before I got on the web and looked up my friends and the house, I watched a documentary about New York. It was created by Ric Burns, the brother of Ken Burns.

The show was interesting. New York is an interesting place, even if you would not want to live there. But it was also disturbing. The people they chose to interview were very different from me. They were writers and academics who appeared to be heavy-duty leftists. If they’re not, their success in New York is a miracle. The likelihood is so small it can be discounted out of hand.

New York is a symbol of worldly success. Whatever its faults may be, New York is a place where many things are done as well as they can be. Want to study the sciences or technology? They have Columbia University. Like the arts? They have the Met, the Guggenheim, Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, and God knows how many other places where you can indulge your desires. New York has top-notch food, clothing…everything.

It’s a place where I would be as welcome as streptococcus in a beaker full of white blood cells. I know! I lived there for about four years.

Imagine me trying to be accepted or even employed in New York. I criticize homosexuality. I believe God created the world. I think feminism is a curse. I believe in accountability. I am against the disenfranchisement of white males and the mindless promotion of minority leftists who have less merit. I think global warming is probably a socialist construct intended to weaken America. I carry a gun when I go to the grocery store.

I could be the smartest, most capable person on earth, and I would still be unable to make it up there. We’re talking about a milieu in which people are fired openly for their religious beliefs, even when they don’t intrude on their job performance.

I felt very alienated. I could never befriend the people I saw on camera. Their Trumpophobia would put a veil of red over their eyes.

Today I was watching a TV show I had recorded, and one of the characters was balding, saggy, and grey. I thought how odd it was that he went on performing his job as though aging, decrepitude, and death were completely normal and acceptable. He wasn’t self-conscious at all. It occurred to me that we have learned to accept some truly terrible things. We don’t even notice them.

Imagine Adam sitting around with Eve and seeing a man with thinning hair, stooped posture, wrinkles, and a gut shuffle by. They would have been horrified. They would have asked God what was wrong with him. Before the curse, death and decay were unknown on earth.

Then I thought about other things I had seen in life or on screens. I have seen films and shows about disasters; some real and some fictional. I’ve seen damaged people wandering around prior to receiving medical care. I’ve seen post-apocalyptic movies in which people with radiation sickness went about their lives as though it were not remarkable to have a tooth or a fingernail fall out during a conversation.

I realized the earth is like a post-apocalyptic movie or a disaster movie. We go about our business in varying states of failure, disease, deterioration, and sorrow. We think nothing of it. When we see people who are worse off, it seems odd that they could be used to their problems, but we’re no different. It’s just a question of degree. On my street, you would have to be young and in top physical shape in order to get attention for your condition. In Auschwitz, you would just need to be fat enough so your ribs couldn’t be seen through your shirt. If you were forty pounds underweight but you could still stand and walk, you would be considered normal.

A long time ago, God told me two things: “The world is a death camp,” and, “The world is a ghetto.” We’re too used to it. We think a life under bearable curses is a life of blessing.

I didn’t have a good childhood, but there was no reason I should have. This is not a planet where people thrive without clinging to God. My problems were obvious, but other people, who I envied later in life, had problems that were worse and yet harder to perceive. If I grew up with neglect and abuse, other people grew up with love, success, and health but never got to know God. I’m certainly better off than they are. Their well-being is temporary, and it keeps them convinced they don’t need God.

The people who are truly blessed are the ones who were raised, from infancy, to know God. Everyone else has sham blessings at best.

People who claim to have visited hell talk about tormented creatures with no flesh, living in pits, burned and eaten by chewing worms. They say hell stinks. What must it be like to leave heaven and visit earth, though? Not that different. You leave a place with no death, sorrow, disagreement, cruelty, loneliness, disease, danger, or failure, and you come to a place where we have words like “hemicorporectomy.” That’s an operation in which your lower body is amputated just below the waist. It has happened often enough to make it necessary for us to coin a word for it.

This is not a good place. It’s a disaster. The universe is built in levels, and we are on the first level above hell. We live, literally, on hell’s roof. There is no worse place to be, save hell itself.

Getting attached to this place or having unrealistic expectations of it is a huge mistake. I feel bad for billionaires and celebrities who squirm and struggle to preserve their youth and extend their time here. The wrinkles will get them all. Who would buy a poster with a photo of Racquel Welch wearing a bikini, at her current age?

This is just a place to meet God, be improved by him, and be rescued by him. That’s all it’s worth. God says he is going to destroy it with fire and rebuild it. Makes perfect sense to me. Used diapers have to be washed.

If you don’t know God, all the success you think you have here is excrement, and it will be burned off in flames later. There are no Academy Awards in hell. There are no TV cameras. There are no yachts. There are no private jets.

It’s interesting to think of it this way.

My life keeps getting better, but my perception of life on earth, generally, deteriorates like the portrait of Dorian Gray. There is nothing here to hold onto.

Maybe I’m bumming people out. I’m not sad or depressed at all. Just a little more sober than usual.

Writers write about what moves them. Maybe you have to take the good with the bad.

Have a good Tuesday.

Serve the Bums With Eviction Papers

Time to talk more about God.

Recently I wrote about my bizarre experience with a new supernatural tool. I tried casting things out of myself, in silence. I didn’t say anything aloud. I had no reason to think it would work. I had always been taught that only God can hear our thoughts, so how could a spirit hear me if I cast something out silently? Why should I expect it to obey?

Here is the startling result: my life has changed tremendously. I have so much more self-control, I’m like a different person. I am less lazy. I have fewer issues with sexual temptation. I eat less. I feel better. I have more energy.

I don’t know what to think about it.

It’s always easy to criticize people for their faults. I should know, because I do it all the time. Sometimes it’s appropriate. There are a lot of people out there who just don’t care, or who prefer to do evil. But many human beings fight their character issues every day and fail, and it’s not right to ignore that and treat all of them as if they weren’t trying.

I have fought my faults ever since I realized I had them. I’ve tried to make myself eat less, work harder, have a more positive outlook, and so on. I’ve fought lust and covetousness and everything else. Fighting in my own strength has not been a total waste of time, but it hasn’t worked very well. I have to have sympathy for other people who can’t change themselves. We have strong enemies who work against us. It’s your fault if you’re a mess, but it’s also the fault of other beings who work against God in you, and you need to defeat them as well as yourself.

Any honest person who isn’t completely deluded can relate to what I’m talking about. Diet, exercise, get yourself in shape, and then get fat again and stay that way for five years. Clean up your house, keep it neat for two months, and then fall back into laziness. Set up a homework schedule, stick to it for three weeks, and then go back to watching reruns of Spongebob while high. People are like springs. We can stretch and bend ourselves, but often, we snap back to our original shapes.

The Bible uses a word that means “bend” to describe iniquity. An iniquity is a habit. A person who has a bad habit is like a tree that is bent in a certain direction. We even say a person with a habit has a bent.

When you fight a bad habit, you fight your flesh, and you fight spirits and people that want that habit to remain strong. No wonder we usually fail. We’re outnumbered.

If you can close the door to the spirits and people who work to keep you weak and corrupted, it only makes sense that you will improve. It’s like driving the illegal aliens out of the country so they have to stop voting in our elections.

For a long time, I’ve known that God can remove bad habits without any help from us. He has delivered me from a couple of things instantaneously. I ended up relapsing, but the deliverance was real and supernatural. It’s the correct type of relief to seek. God intended us to receive it instead of working our way out of our messes. The Bible clearly says Jesus bore our iniquities on the cross, not just our sins. But we love pride, so we prefer to use our own puny tools. We take the same hills over and over, because the enemy takes them back repeatedly. You can’t conquer the country if you spend the entire war fighting over one small objective. God wants us to have everything, not just a little corner where we can barricade ourselves in and wait for death. We can’t have complete victory unless we let him do the fighting.

Spirits bring baggage with them. If you accept sin and iniquity, you accept disease, divorce, poverty, mental illness, defeat, and every type of misfortune. Spirits are not good guests. It’s not enough to addict you to heroin or overeating or gossip. They have to trash the place. They have to defecate on the floors and eat the studs. If you can fumigate the house with the Holy Spirit’s help, you can end all that. If not, how can you claim to be surprised when you get bad news? How can you ask, “Why me?” Of course, you.

Churches will never promote this. The churches that believe in the Holy Spirit think Christianity is just a way to get your greed satisfied. The churches that deny the Holy Spirit have no tools and no weapons; they are in love with self-righteousness and therefore weakness. If you want this, you will have to get it directly from God.

Find out what’s wrong with you, confess it to God, and cast it out. You have to be honest. God isn’t going to fix a problem you pretend not to have. Luckily for you, he will even help you with honesty. Ask for it. Cast things out. Pray in tongues. Focus on his kingdom and righteousness, not money and other superficial things.

I feel like someone who is getting over a fever. Sometimes it’s as if the fever has broken. I feel peace. I have fewer destructive thoughts and urges. I am less childish. Then the fever comes back. I get angry, or I feel the pull of gluttony or lust or laziness. Then I remember to use my weapons, and the fever goes away again. I’m not Jesus. I am not a great person all the time. But my base level of evil is not what it was a year ago, and I keep improving. And my good periods are better and longer than they used to be.

If you can rule yourself, the world can’t rule you. You will be the head and not the tail. If you’re not in charge in your own body and mind, you can’t expect a lot of help from God. He wants to live in us, and he doesn’t want to move into a crackhouse where he has one vote along with a bunch of depraved bums and addicts. You will ask him for stupid things, and he will deny your requests, because to grant them will be to serve the demons and the flesh that made you ask.

God is not going to serve the devil. If you serve the devil, God can’t serve you.

If this stops working, I’ll come back and say so, but it has been a while now, and things keep getting better.

I hope God will help you focus on the right things and find his power and help. We were never supposed to be at the mercy of the world, especially inside ourselves.

Can This $15 Plane Fly?

I did the unthinkable. No, I didn’t buy an “I’m with her” T-shirt made with child labor in a factory in Shenzhen. I bought and fettled a Harbor Freight plane.

If you read my last post, you know my pet peeve machinery has been in top gear over the way woodworking snobs discourage noobs from buying inexpensive tools. As an example of the destructive propagandizing, they try to convince everyone that there is not just a need, but a necessity to buy wood planes that cost hundreds of dollars each. They want people to believe that an expensive plane won’t just make woodworking more fun; it will enable you to produce better work. That’s crazy. Any plane that works correctly will produce perfect work in the hands of a skilled person, and the best plane on the planet will produce garbage in the hands of a radiologist who does woodworking for an hour a month and tries to compensate by spending on tools.

I saw a video in which an aspiring young woodworking guru compared three planes: a new Veritas ($300+), and old Stanley ($40 range), and a new Harbor Freight plane (vicinity of $10). He concluded that the Harbor Freight plane was not worth it at any price. He spent over 20 hours fettling it, and he replaced the iron with an old Stanley instead of fixing it.

On Friday, I happened to notice that Harbor Freight had a great tool on clearance. They are selling their planishing hammer and stand for $68. That’s the after-20%-coupon price. This is a screeching, wailing, blazing, epic deal. The same tool costs $185 at Northern Tool, and other companies charge a lot more. I had to buy a planishing hammer. I don’t need one, but I hoped to have one eventually, and a chance like this was not likely to come around in the foreseeable future. Even if I decided not to keep it, I could sell it for over a hundred bucks on Craigslist.

I went to Harbor Freight yesterday and got myself a planishing hammer, and while I was there, I picked up a Windsor Design plane. I love that name. Harbor Freight is always coming up with Caucausian-sounding brand names.Come on, guys. Just call it Feng Wing Wah or whatever the real name is. No one cares. I grabbed a plane without looking inside the box, and off I went. It was a number 33, which is different from the number 4 the Youtube guy fixed, but I hadn’t paid close attention to the video, so I bought it anyway. They didn’t have a 4, so it was the best I could have done.

At home, I opened the box and discovered I had a used plane! Some poor sap had put it together and used it to make wood powder. The blade was so dull, it wouldn’t make shavings. He did a little scraping, got powder on the plane, gave up, and returned his new tool to the store. He will probably never try planing again. Or he’ll mortgage his casa and buy Veritas.

Sad.

I took a look at the only two things I could easily fix: the iron and the sole.

The iron of the plane had been ground with some sort of hideous 40-grit blade-destroying machine. There was a tiny sharp bit at one end of the edge, and there were pretty horrendous scratches on both sides.

I colored about an inch of the flat side of the iron with a blue Sharpie and then put it down on an extra-coarse diamond stone and moved it around. The ink came off on one corner, and it also started to wear down in a round area about an inch and a quarter away. Most of the blue area didn’t touch the stone. Bad!

After that I did something stupid. I got some window cleaner (to make the grinding go better), and I squirted the stone. I put the iron on it and started grinding the blue away. It was very slow work, because even an extra-coarse diamond stone is pretty fine. Eventually, I put 100-grit sandpaper on the stone (so the stone’s surface would be a guide), and I made better progress. I should have used something even coarser, but I didn’t have it.

The iron turned out to be S-shaped. If you were to hold an iron like that with the cutting edge facing you, you would see an S-shaped curve. Well, you wouldn’t actually see it, because it was only off by a few thousandths, but that’s the idea. I would say that if I had ground the blade with sandpaper from the start instead of using the stone, I would have flattened it out and removed enough of the scratches to make it functional in maybe 20 minutes. As it was, I would say I went maybe 30-45, not including breaks. If you did the same job with 60-grit paper, like a smart person, you would probably be done in 15 minutes.

I sharpened the blade with diamond stones, not Japanese water stones or laser stones from NASA or whatever other ridiculous, unnecessary gear the tool snobs like. The people who made furniture for the czars of Russian didn’t have water stones. Far as I know. A tool can’t actually tell what you use to get it sharp. I’m sure water stones are great, but I don’t need the hassle of snowflake stones I have to keep in an aquarium.

The plane did not cut very well. Maybe I had it adjusted badly, but I hadn’t fixed the sole, so I decided to flatten the sole and see if that helped.

Again, I used the wrong thing. I inked the sole with the Sharpie and taped 100-grit paper to my band saw table. I put the plane on the paper and gave it two hundred strokes at a time, and before too long, it was nearly free of ink. I didn’t get it perfect, because I was tired of plane fettling.

I put my razor-sharp Chinese iron in my $15 plane and tried it. It cut just fine. There is absolutely no doubt about it. You could use this plane to do excellent work. You would need six or seven sheets of sandpaper and some method of sharpening it, but it would be a usable plane when you were done fixing it, and the quality of the work you would do with it would be exactly the same as the quality of the work you would do with a $700 plane. You would be the limiting factor.

Take that, snobs.

I should also add that the steel in the iron seems perfectly good. Even if you get a soft one, you can be a man and harden and temper it yourself. A lot of people do those things. If you get a misshaped iron, you can anneal it to make it easier to work on, fix it with a file, and then harden and temper it again.

Now let me backpedal.

I would not buy another one of these planes, except maybe to use as a scrub plane. The dual-screw adjustment mechanism is a pain to use. Note: I am not saying it doesn’t work. It works as well as any iron-adjustment gadget out there. I’m saying you will have to fiddle with it in order to get it where you want it. With a Stanley, you twiddle one cooperative knob and bump a little lever, and you’re done. With a Veritas or Lie-Nielsen, I assume you have your valet text the company and they send a slave to adjust it.

You should be able to get a good working Stanley delivered to your house for $45, especially if you don’t mind buying ugly ones or the ones made after, say, 1960. Even though it’s a better tool than the Windsor Design, it will probably need to have its sole flattened, and you will definitely have to work on the blade, but in all likelihood, the plane will take less work than a Chinese job, and when you’re done, it will be easier to adjust. Also, it will still be worth whatever you paid for it, whereas the Harbor Freight plane’s value drops to about two bucks as soon as you buy it.

Supposedly, older Craftsman planes were made by Stanley, and they cost less.

I don’t know what to do with this plane now. I don’t think I’ll ever use it for smoothing (its intended purpose). I hate to turn a good smooth plane into a scrub plane, though. I may do a little machining and improve it. I could improve the adjustment cutouts in the iron. I could also make new adjustment nuts. The ones that come with it are not designed well, and they’re too narrow.

Maybe I’ll advertise it on Craigslist as a Harbor Freight plane that has already been fixed. I could get my fifteen bucks back. No, not fifteen. Maybe ten?

This plane would be good for teaching kids about planes. If you had 20 kids in a class, and you wanted them to learn how to set bad planes up, you could get each one a Harbor Freight plane and show them how to fix it. After that, they would be able to fix any plane.

By the way, Harbor Freight has another smooth plane. They sell a #4 and a block plane together, for $14.99. I think you have to buy them online, which kills the deal. But it has a conventional adjusting apparatus.

Somewhere Rachel Marsden is Smiling

It’s humbling to admit it, but I was wrong. I mean when I said I was wrong about Tucker Carlson. I was actually right. The first time. And I’m man enough to admit it.

I said Tucker Carlson was not the right choice to replace Bill O’Reilly. Carlson has an unassailable track record of not winning. His shows haven’t done well in the past, and I felt there was no reason to expect better things in the future. When you read The Racing Form, you don’t pick a horse that has never won, unless you see him smoking meth before a race. And bow ties aren’t for normal men. They’re for guys who sell popcorn.

In the early days of Carlson’s tenure, he did surprisingly well, elating his mom Gretchen and leading me to conclude that I had been wrong. That has changed. Now his audience is smaller than the bizarre group of people who turn up to hear Rachel Maddow screech. O’Reilly averaged about 4 million viewers per night, and Carlson has lost 20% of those wallets. I mean viewers.

Maddow is the Alex Jones of cable news. She never met a leftist nutbar conspiracy she didn’t like. Carlson, for all his faults, is kind of a journalist. You would think he would do better than she does. But he’s bringing up the rear, consistently.

Eric Bolling would have been better. He’s smart. Same goes for Jeanine Pirro. Judge Pirro is probably the closest thing we have to a female O’Reilly. Instead, Fox looked in the fridge and chose the leftover pot roast that had been sitting in the back for several years. Crazy.

Stuart Varney! Is he dead? He would have been good.

To make up for being wrong about being wrong, I will point out that I was right about Megyn Kelly. Her departure hurt her, hurt NBC, and didn’t hurt Fox. Kelly’s star appeal has been exposed as an illusion, NBC is paying a boatload of money to someone who can’t bring the butts, and Fox is muddling along with Five Minus Beckel, which is ahead of Anderson Vanderbilt, also known as Gloria Cooper.

The odd thing here is that I find these stories interesting even though I never watch the news.

Maybe I’m wrong (for real)! After all, as a non-viewer, I base my judgment of the Fox heads on old information. Well, except for Carlson. I watched a few Youtube clips of him at his new job. I think I’m right, though.

I don’t think Kelly will last. She does a perfectly fine job, by the low standards of broadcast journalists, but she is not a big talent. She’s no Bill O’Reilly. Without Fox to propel her, she won’t recover and prosper in a liberal shark tank, in front of confused liberal viewers. NBC will eventually promote her downward into a less-damaging and more obscure role. Then she’ll turn into Deborah Norville. Maybe she’ll suddenly realize she wants to “devote more time to her family.” Then come the infomercials. “Wow, George, your grill really does KNOCK OUT the fat!”

Carlson will stay right where he is, for at least a couple more years. He’s doing too well to fire and not well enough to keep for the long haul. It would be great news for Fox if he showed up to work naked and told his producers he needed time off to build a second home on Venus. That way, they could start over, and Carlson would become a viable successor to Alex Jones. As it is, they’ll have to wait until tuning in at eight and seeing the wrong guy gets to be too much.

Who will Fox hire when Tucker’s time is up? Tough call. I would guess…Martha MacCallum. Someone who has been around forever and is clearly not up to the job. A rusty tool from a very familiar box, just like Carlson. Or how about Bret Baier? A solid journalist who doesn’t have the weight to anchor a show.

Maybe they could go full-bore alt-right. They could have Ted Nugent, killing and dressing a chicken on his desk. Or they could just tape a laser-printed photo of Andrew Breitbart (PBUH) on the wall behind the chair and have Jesse Watters pretend to be his voice.

Whoever it is, it will probably be a bad choice. I don’t think I’ll have to say I’m wrong about that.

Send him Representative Scalise’s Hospital Bills

Sometimes I’m more right than I thought I was!

I said America would become an unsafe place for Christians and conservatives. I didn’t check to see what liberals were saying and doing. It was just common sense and the Holy Spirit. I didn’t know Bernie Sanders was encouraging the violence! I just found out. He seems like a harmless Fozzie Bear of a burnt-out socialist, but here is what he said to Rachel Maddow:

Republicans historically had their town meetings. Thirty or 50 of their friends would show up, and they talked about cutting the deficit and cutting Social Security and Medicare, and everybody would applaud, but now you’ve seen people coming and saying, “If you do this, my wife is going to die and I’m not going to let you do that”. You’re seeing members of Congress, Republicans, having to sneak out the back door or claim “I’m worried about my safety, I can’t even hold a town meeting.” That’s our goal.

I got that from a leftist website. Check it out yourself.

You think we’re going to pull together and stop the violence? Okay. Believe what makes you happy.

A Hand Plane Should not Cost Seven Thousand Dollars

I think I’ll write about something insignificant today, instead of confronting the sudden confirmation of my predictions of increased violence toward Christians and conservatives. I hope Representative Scalise gets better soon. Expect the violence to spread in the coming months.

I predicted something else, years ago. I said TV and the Internet would eventually be the same thing, along with phones and faxes. My prediction has come true. That doesn’t make me a genius or a prophet. It just means I saw something which was very obvious, while most other people weren’t looking for it.

I am just about done with TV. I record a number of cable shows, but I only watch two things on television (the medium, not the machine): Better Call Saul and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. When I hear about other shows these days, it’s like hearing about the Kardashians. Sometimes t’s a little disgusting (because the values the shows promote are so trashy), and sometimes when other adults recommend shows to me, I feel like toddlers are trying to get me to sit down and watch Finding Nemo.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a great example of a toddler show. It’s extremely silly; it jumped the shark before it ever aired. The premises of the episodes are laughable, even by TV standards. The characters are as shallow as copier paper and as disposable as dirty diapers. It’s about as mindless as entertainment gets. I enjoy the humor and explosions, though.

Youtube covers my “need” for video entertainment these days. I watch math and physics videos, and I watch videos about tools. Woodworking, machining, fabrication, and so on.

A lot of people are trying to make money on Youtube. It can be done. It’s a bad idea for conservatives and Christians, because we will eventually be excluded from anything resembling social media, and a lot of people will lose their “jobs” overnight, with no legal recourse to recover them. I don’t recommend it to anyone who believes in God, but people are doing it.

Unfortunately, the lure of easy exposure draws folks who really don’t know what they’re doing. That includes me, but I admit I don’t know what I’m doing, so I think I can be excused. People create logos, and they put a little theme music together, and the first thing you know, they have videos and playlists in which they spread misinformation while looking pretty professional.

Over the last few days, I’ve been watching woodworking videos, and I’ve watched a few about hand planes.

The hand plane arena is surprisingly complicated. Hand tools have fallen out of favor among real tradesmen, so big manufacturers aren’t working very hard to make good hand planes. You can’t get a decent plane at Home Depot; they don’t bother stocking them. You have to buy an old plane, or you have to spend a ton on a cork sniffer product like a Veritas or a Lie-Nielsen.

Now I have to explain cork sniffing. It’s a term which is commonly used by musicians, in relation to expensive guitars, amps, tubes, and so on. I apply it more broadly.

Imagine you’re a woman, and a guy takes you on a dinner date. The waiter brings a bottle of wine and opens it. He pours a small amount in the man’s glass, and he offers him the cork. The man smells the cork and says, “Smells good.” Then he drinks the sample and says, “Do you have anything dryer?”, and he makes the waiter take it back.

That’s cork sniffing.

Waiters and sommeliers pour samples and present corks not to see if you like the wine but to allow you to confirm that it’s not ruined. Wine can react with corks, and when it does, it tastes bad. You should taste the wine and look at the cork to see if all is well. If so, you own a bottle of wine. You are not supposed to send the wine back because you don’t like that particular wine.

In broader usage, a cork sniffer is a person who pretends to be incredibly sophisticated and drives people crazy worrying about nuances that probably don’t really exist.

Think of high end audio. There are people who will pay two hundred or even thirty thousand dollars for one pair of cables to connect a record player to an amplifier. They don’t know anything about science or engineering. They claim they can hear things the rest of us can’t, even though most of them are old men who can’t hear anything above middle C on the piano. They will pay for special rocks to put under their stereos. They will even tell you that you can’t wear an electronic watch in the same room with your stereo while you listen. They will believe absolutely anything. They don’t just sniff the cork. They chop it up and freebase it.

I should add that I just learned another reason why sommeliers present corks: in the old days, wines were counterfeited and labels rotted with age, so vintners printed their names on the undersides of corks. People looked at the corks to make sure they weren’t getting ripped off.

I am not a wine person, so I don’t know a whole lot about it.

Woodworking is full of cork sniffers, mostly because hobbyists have taken over. Hobbyists don’t understand the needs of professionals who know what they’re doing. Professionals don’t want $800 hand drills; they want stuff that works. If you go to a shop that produces heirloom-quality furniture, you won’t see cork sniffer tools. You’ll see plywood benches and Chinese machinery. Doesn’t matter to insecure hobbyists. The cork addicts have taken over the forums, and what they say goes. They really push expensive tools.

Cork Sniffer Magazine, Creator Unknown

I’ll bet you can pay $2000 for a hand plane. Let me check.

I must apologize. I was wrong. You can pay $7400 for one hand plane. Specifically, a Karl Holtey A13 Smoothing Plane. If you buy one of these, you are mentally incompetent. There is no refuting it.

Last night, I watched a video by a young man who is promoting himself as a woodworking expert. He compared three planes. The first was an old Stanley #4. The second was a Harbor Freight smoothing plane that costs something like ten bucks. The third was a Veritas plane. Veritas makes very nice tools that are only VERY expensive, not Karl Holtey NASA-Budget-During-the-Cold-War expensive. A Veritas smooth plane costs $232 if you get the special cork sniffer magic alloy blade.

First thing…he doesn’t know Stanley planes. I don’t either, but I know things he doesn’t know. He said his plane was a “Stanley Bedrock.” Stanley Bedrock planes are highly prized collector’s items, and they cost a ton of money. You can’t really use one in your shop, unless you like destroying investments. He had an ordinary Stanley. And he bought the wrong version (I did this,too.) He got one with friction-reducing grooves in the sole. These grooves beat up your wood if you cut at an angle across a corner. They’re probably okay on long planes, but any plane you might want to turn should have a smooth bottom.

Second thing…he claimed the Stanley had a gigantic hidden cost because it took hours to fix. He spent so much time on it, he felt the real cost of the plane was close to that of the Veritas. He stripped the paint. He refinished the wood and the metal. He did a lot of stuff only a cork sniffer would do. You don’t need to paint a plane to make it work.

He should have taken about an hour to flatten the plane’s sole and clean up the blade and so on. He feels his time is worth $15 per hour, so add $15 to the cost of the plane, if you really want to count those beans. Anything beyond that is gilding the lily.

Third thing…he claimed the Harbor Freight plane had a hidden cost of over $300 because he took over 20 hours to fix it. That’s just nuts.

Nearly every plane needs to have the bottom flattened and the blade sharpened. The Harbor Freight plane needed more than that. It had a soft blade which would not take an edge and hold it, and he said (not endorsing his claim) the plane had a fundamental alignment issue that could not be fixed. He drove to a flea market and bought a Stanley blade for the plane. He worked around the alignment defect. That’s not how it’s done.

Here is another guy using a Harbor Freight plane. He paid ten dollars. He spent two hours working on the plane. It works very well. Hmm…what happened?

Here is the answer: the first guy doesn’t know tools. He isn’t ready to teach other people.

I’ll explain what he should have done.

1. Harbor Freight tools need to be exchanged (or modified) a good percentage of the time. People who know tools (people who are qualified to make instruction videos) know this. It’s part of the game. When you buy a Harbor Freight tool, you examine it as soon as you can, and you keep doing exchanges until you get a good one. If possible, you examine it in the store. The video guy should have exchanged his plane when he found out the blade and machining were bad.

2. Knowledgeable people know you can harden steel with a hand torch and oil. He should know this. He should have returned the plane, but barring that, he should have hardened the blade. That would have been a neat tip for other people.

You can get a new plane that costs under $20 to do perfect work. I don’t recommend it, but no one will be able to look at the things you build and tell you what your plane cost. Not even his Holteyness Karl Holtey.

I feel like buying a Harbor Freight plane and turning it into a scrub plane, but I’m afraid that if I get it working, I’ll feel like it’s too good to be a scrub plane, and then I’ll have to get another one. And then I’ll feel like that one is too good to be a scrub plane.

The cork sniffers are a real problem. When a new guy shows up at a forum and asks what kind of plane he should buy, they will say you should get Lie-Nielsen or Veritas if at all possible, but that a Stanley will do “acceptable work.” That’s completely wrong! First of all, a Stanley won’t do work at all; the man does the work, and the tool is just the instrument. It has no skill. Second, a Stanley will do FANTASTIC work. It will work as well as any plane on the planet. Set it up right and develop some skill, and it will beat a Lie-Nielsen in the hands of a cork sniffer who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I admit, I have two Veritas tools. I had given up trying to find a used router plane at a good price, and someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Also, I wanted to try their dovetail saw, so I got myself one. They make great stuff that works with little or no fettling. But old tools would work just as well.

I sniffed a little cork there. I will wear the scarlet “C.”

Think about this: the palace at Versailles is full of astounding wooden creations. It’s full of furniture, doors, panels…you name it. This stuff is exquisite. What kind of tools did the builders use? Wooden planes and carbon steel saws. They used foot-powered lathes. They used crap, in other words. If the cork sniffers had been in charge, the Bourbons would not have been able to afford tools. They would have bought a mobile or “manufactured” palace with IKEA furniture.

Marie Antoinette’s Apartment at Versailles: not Built with Cork Sniffer Tools

When I started learning about planes, I found a #4 Stanley in my dad’s garage. A tradesman probably left it at his house by accident. It was junk. It was probably made in the late Seventies, long after Stanley’s salad days. It had plastic handles. It had a big cratered area on the sole because someone had left it in or near water.

For fun, I flattened the sole, fixed the blade and chip breaker, and oiled and loosened the adjustments. When I tried to use it, I was flabbergasted. I have some real vintage Stanleys, and this thing is just as good. It’s a joy to use. It’s annoying, because I wanted to buy a vintage #4.

People told me to turn it into a scrub plane. Why? I have a phenomenal #4 smoothing plane that cost me nothing. It could probably even plane corks.

I still “need” a few more planes. I’m torn between the pleasure of collecting nice vintage planes and the joy of turning garbage planes into top-notch tools. Given the cost of garbage planes, I could do both.

There is a big tool-using movement in America, and it seems like cork sniffers and hipsters are messing it up. People think it’s cool to use tools, and it is, but being seen using tools badly with your hipster beard and sustainable micro-financed socks does not amount to providing quality instruction. If you want to learn about tools on Youtube, find an old white guy (male by birth, not choice) who wears a Dickies shirt and thinks hair gel makes you gay. That’s the guy who knows which brand of chrome oxide to use and how to get a stuck arbor out of your Super Chuck without marring it.

I think I’ll post a few videos featuring people who actually get things done. You might enjoy them.

You Get the Kind of Guests You Ask For

Doctrine is confusing. I know I’m stating the obvious.

In the early days of Christianity, we were taught by people who knew God personally, and their teachings were very solid. They believed in the baptism with the Holy Spirit, prayer in tongues, and the gifts of the Spirit, so God was able to teach them directly. Satan managed to get the church to reject the Holy Spirit and murder those who knew him, and after that point, we had to get by with false teachings from proud ignoramuses like Augustine. The older churches were taken over by fools and liars who made up theories that were largely based on paganism, and Christians lost their direct connection to God’s teaching. We ended up worshiping “saints” and trying to turn Mary–a sinful woman, like every other woman–into a sort of co-God. Hundreds of millions of Christians pray to Mary and the “saints,” as though they were God himself.

“It works,” they say. Yes, and so does voodoo.

God managed to give me a strong habit of praying in tongues, and through that, he has given me a lot of revelation. He has undone a lot of the damage the fabulists did. He helped me understand that the prosperity gospel was a lie straight from the mouth of Satan. He showed me that the ridiculous doctrine of pleasing him through hard work was based on pride, and that it actually cuts off his help and forces him to work against us.

From time to time, God gives me a new weapon, or at least a weapon that seems new to me. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should accept these things. I take a while to become convinced they came from the right source. I can’t ask a knowledgeable, Holy-Spirit-led teacher, because there are no people like that. If there are, I have never met one. I’ve met a lot of people who wanted money and free work, however.

Here’s a piece of doctrine I’ve been thinking about lately. We are taught that only God can read minds. We are told that other spirits can’t hear our thoughts. Is that true? I think it is. We are familiar with occultists and “psychics” who pretend to read minds, but there are a lot of ways to fake that, and there is no reason a spirit can’t put a thought in your mind and then tell it to someone else. Also, a clever old spirit should be good at guessing.

Even if spirits can’t read our minds, I have no doubt that they can speak into our minds. That’s a different thing. Plenty of people have been possessed or temporarily entered by spirits that spoke through them. I don’t see any reason why a spirit assisting a clairvoyant couldn’t speak into your mind and then speak the same information to the clairvoyant.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been using a new tool lately. I’ll explain how it works. Say I have a thought or urge I don’t want. Maybe it’s gluttony. Maybe it’s lust or laziness. Silently, in my mind, I’ll say something like, “In the name of Jesus, I cast out lust.” Sure enough, I get relief. It’s as though there is a spirit of lust inside me that can hear me.

When I started doing this, I began wondering if other spirits could hear my thoughts. Maybe they can; I don’t know everything. My best guess, though, is that they can’t. I think my own mind and flesh hear my commands, and they respect my God-given authority and shut off their compliance with spirits that are trying to influence me.

The 127th psalm says that children are like arrows in a man’s quiver, and it says they will speak with the enemy in the gate. What does that mean?

A man is like a walled city. In ancient times, cities normally wanted walls. People were barbaric, and they overran each other’s towns and raped and murdered and stole. Cities had gates. In Israel, the city gate was a place of authority. Powerful people sat there, and the gate was where deals were made and legal judgments were handed down. It was also a place where enemies were turned away. They came to the cities, and the city authorities spoke to them in the gates and sent them packing.

These days, our walls are generally down. We are like Jerusalem after it was sacked by the Babylonians. We are like America, with obnoxioius aliens stomping across our borders and doing whatever they will, sneering at us in the process. We don’t care about God. We think our Sixties values are brilliant and original. We don’t pray. We exalt ourselves. We wallow in pride, greed, lust, and sexual perversion. We don’t make any effort to avoid the sins that give nasty people and spirits power over us. Instead, we work hard to bring them in and enthrone them. We fornicate like crazy. We revile. We use drugs. We blaspheme. We love evil and cruelty.

Evil spirits are like flies, which is why the Bible calls the devil the lord of flies and the lord of feces. Flies are attracted to corruption and filth. They go where they can get a good meal. We open our windows and smear our walls with excrement, and in the process, we invited spirits in to rule us. They make us sick. They deceive us. They transform us into little copies of our real father, Satan.

I believe you can turn a spirit away at the gate. That’s what I believe I’m doing.

I used to believe my thoughts were just fine, and that I was allowed to think what I wanted, as long as I restrained my actions or did what I wanted and then asked for forgiveness. That’s not how it works. Your thoughts matter. The Holy Spirit is clean, and he wants to live in you. He’s not going to linger in a place which is like a filthy toilet overflowing with fermenting urine and poop. It’s not okay to stare at women and fantasize about them. It’s not okay to savor thoughts of anger, cruelty, and revenge. It’s not okay to obsess on possessions or money you want. It’s not okay to sit and think about fattening food you want to eat.

When you go along with evil thoughts and desires, you give control to spirits that hate you. You’re like a snotty, know-it-all girl who chooses a pimp over her parents.

Think of the problems biblical figures had. They participated in their own destruction. Adam and Eve invited Satan to take their planet by listening to him. The Jews repeatedly invited destruction and murder by turning to false gods. Saul added to his curses by consulting a medium. Solomon was a disgraceful failure who let pagan women turn him to idolatry, and after he died, his kingdom was torn in two.

Dealing with spirits is like dealing with vampires. One of the rules of vampire mythology is that a vampire can’t come in your house unless you invite him. We invite spirits all day and all night, and then we complain to God when we get cancer or our businesses or marriages fail. We choose Satan as our father, and then when he does exactly what we know he’ll do, we go to God and pretend he’s our father, and we ask for “justice.” Justice is actually what we’ve already received. We’re really asking for mercy and a handout. We’re asking God to enable us.

I believe I’m speaking to the enemy in the gate. My body is a gate. My senses are gates. My mind is a gate. Spirits that are used to my obedience and enthusiasm come to me, expecting the welcome they have usually received in the past. Now I turn them away. That’s what I’m doing when I say I cast things out. Maybe they can’t hear me, but they know they’ve been rejected with authority.

If you think this is crazy, try it yourself. If you have a strong habit of prayer in tongues, you will have the faith to make it work. You have to be repentant, and you have to be a seeker of God’s presence. You can’t expect it to work if you’re doing it on the way to a whorehouse or a bar. Be realistic. But it does work. It has made a very big change in my life.

You have to know what you’re fighting. Satan has convinced us that many sins aren’t sins. He wants us to think that as long as we’re nice, we’re not sinning. Here’s a list of some things to look out for: pride, dishonesty, excuses, malice, fear of other people, general cowardice, gossip, laziness, envy, gluttony, unbelief, and worry. If you don’t think unbelief is sin, how can you explain the fact that God punished biblical figures who doubted him?

It’s very important to keep looking for things that are wrong with you. The world teaches us that “shaming” is bad. It teaches us that we’re supposed to be proud and defiant. We’re supposed to be proud of fat, proud of of slutty behavior and clothing, proud of our accomplishments, our beauty, our money, our sexual perversions…wrong! So wrong. Self-criticism is self-diagnosis. If you don’t tell God you have a problem, he probably won’t fix it. Nobody with any common sense goes to a doctor and pretends to be well.

Why is it important to be fixed? Isn’t it okay to remain as you are and then ask forgiveness and go to heaven?

If you don’t get cleaned up, you will suffer in this life. You will have no authority. You will not be able to cast out disease or speak defeat to your enemies and problems. Here is how Paul put it:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

The “kingdom of God” isn’t heaven. It’s God’s power and authority inside you. It’s what defeated Israel’s enemies when the Ark of the Covenant was with them. You are supposed to be a little ark, with God’s presence inside you. God will not live in a pile of used diapers.

The early Christians got miracles and revelation. Most of us don’t. Why should we? We’re Satan’s children, not God’s. God respects our choice to let Satan raise us and care for us. Would you go to your neighbor’s house and make sure the kids brushed their teeth?

The more I learn about God, the more evil I see in myself. I was raised in complete ignorance, filth, and rebellion. My parents knew nothing. The neighbors knew nothing. Preachers knew nothing. I had no wisdom whatsoever. There was no one to teach me. And I thought I knew everything. Ignorance is bad, but thinking you know the truth already is worse. It keeps the truth from entering in.

It’s amazing that God hasn’t given up on me. It’s not like he needs me. I have been proud, unclean, dishonest, cruel, cowardly, lazy…you name it. I rewarded his love and help with the ugliest kind of abuse. It’s as if I had been raised by pigs. God could have let me go to hell and replaced me with someone else, and it would have been absolutely righteous of him.

The world has gone completely nuts. It’s as if a giant tank of feces under the ground had burst, and it’s rising all around us. We are surrounded by nudity, anger, blasphemy, cruelty, arrogance, violence, greed, female rebellion, hatred of masculinity, sexual deviation, and love of evil. The cleaner I get inside, the more I want to get away from the world. It’s as if I’m a boat that has been bailed out, and I’m floating on the sea of excrement.

Things are going to get worse. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. If you’re spiritually weak, you are going to be submerged in the cesspool. It won’t matter if you go to mass and pray to Mary ten times a day. It won’t help if you give half of your income to Benny Hinn. You have to know God personally and be transformed internally. The whole country is going to look a lot like a Black Lives Matter/Antifa rally. People who believe in God will be beaten, raped, and murdered, and no one will help them. If you’re not preparing yourself, you will drown. Trump won’t save you.

You need someone on your side. If you want God to be on your side, you have to be on his. He won’t help you just because you exist. He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for you. You can’t keep asking for more.

If anything I say helps you, let me know. It would be nice if I were used to accomplish a few useful things before I am excused from this miserable planet.

A Boring Story

I’m writing because I’m tired. I figure if I write, I will be able to tell myself I’m doing something productive while I’m really resting.

Today I will tell you about my adventure with the boring head. Not the Indian boring head with integral R8 shank which I got from Grizzly. The US-made Flynn boring head I got off Ebay for seventy bucks.

The Indian boring head works fine. Boring heads are very simple, so bad ones work just as well as good ones. I wanted a nice one because nice ones are more pleasant to use. Also, they’re nice.

The Indian boring head has a jerky action which I have been unable to fix, and it’s just generally not elegant.

Criterion is the name everyone thinks of when they think about boring heads. Criterion makes very good boring heads, and they cost a lot of money (for no reason I can discern). I’ll go look up a price. A 3″ boring head will run you $582 at MSC. That’s a ton of money for something with about ten parts. I tried to find a good price on a used Criterion, but even the used prices are bad.

When it comes to machine tools, name and price are related. A well-known product may sell for more than a product of equal or better quality which is not as well known. It’s like Steinway and pianos. Steinways are not the best, but they bring good money. Name is a very big deal in the used machine tool business.

I found a neat used boring head made by the Flynn company. As far as I know, it’s as good as a Criterion. The seller wanted $70, which is a lot better than I would expect to do on a Criterion. It looked good in the photos. It appeared to have wear from banging around in a drawer with other stuff, but little no wear consistent with use. I bought it.

Problem: the boring head had a funny arbor on it. It was a 5/8″ shank 2″ long, with a thread inside the top end, and there was a mysterious taper down by the boring head itself. “No problem,” I thought, “I will modify it or remove it.”

When the boring head arrived, it resisted all sorts of removal schemes. I even filled the inside of the boring head with a combination of ATF and acetone, which is supposed to be better than Kroil at loosening threads. I got nowhere with it. Even professional machinists had no answers. That’s disturbing, because you will find a good answer in this very blog post if you keep reading.

I considered cutting the arbor flange off or at least reducing it to nearly nothing. I thought the friction between the flange and the boring head might be holding things in place. No one else suggested this, so I decided not to take a chance.

The taper was a little over an inch long. I knew it was okay to run a 1/2″ drill chuck with a short 1/2″ straight shank, so I wondered if I could get away with cutting the taper and turning it into a 3/4″ stub about an inch long. Machinists assured me it would work. That surprised me, but I figured they knew what they were doing.

A 1/2″ shank would have been more convenient, because a 1/2″ collet will accept a lot of tools that are very useful, and it’s a good idea to try to get new tools fit that size collet. It results in less time spent changing collets. I didn’t trust a 1/2″ shank and collet to stand up to boring torque, so I went for 3/4″.

Chucking the boring head in the lathe was a pain. It has lots of features on it, so you don’t want to just slam it in a lathe chuck and tighten down on fragile things you paid good money for. You have to chuck it carefully. Also, I didn’t want the hardened jaws on my 4-jaw chuck to bite into it and mar it.

The best ways to hold an object you don’t want to mar are to use soft jaws or pie jaws. Soft jaws are steel jaws that have not been hardened. You pop off your hardened upper jaws, and you put the soft jaws in their places. Then you cut the jaws to fit your part. If you’re holding a 2″ tube, you bore the jaws out to roughly 2″. You have to put something inside the jaws while you bore them to push them out and hold them in place. You end up with jaws that touch the part with a lot of material instead of three or four small jaw points. Of course, the contact area is limited by the width of the jaws, which are the same size as hard jaws.

Pie jaws are big aluminum jaws that screw to your bottom jaws. They form a 3-slice “pie” when installed. You bore them out just like soft jaws, I believe. Anyway, they cover 60 degrees each, so when you bore them to fit a part, they contact nearly the whole circumference.

I am too lazy to use soft jaws or pie jaws. Also, I only have one set of soft jaws, and they’re too pretty to actually use.

I found a neat tip: aluminum tape. This is real duct tape, unlike the rubbery cheap stuff no one should ever use on ducts. It’s made from aluminum foil. You can get it at Home Depot. You put a piece on each of your hardened jaws, and it helps keep the tips from biting into your work.

There were other problems with chucking the part. If you look at the photos, you will see that the arbor had a flange that screwed up against the boring head. I assumed this flange (and the shank) were concentric with the boring head body, because that’s how machinists do things. It’s sloppy to make cutting tools with arbors that aren’t concentric with them.

When I tried to indicate the part in my 4-jaw chuck, it was impossible to get the arbor flange, the shank, and the body of the boring head lined up at the same time. It’s normal to have to do some work to get two ends of an object indicated, but this time it was impossible. Finally, I put the boring head in my mill with a 5/8″ collet, and I measured it. The arbor flange was not concentric with the boring head, and neither was the shank.

I guess this makes sense. A boring head uses a cutting point which is offset from the spindle axis, so you don’t need the arbor to be concentric with the body. Still, it’s a strange way for a quality manufacturer to make a tool.

Realizing I was up against it, I decided to indicate the face of the boring head, which was virtually certain to be square with the sides of the body. I indicated the face as well as possible, and I indicated the sides to within a few thousandths. Good enough. Indicating the face made sure the shank I was about to turn would not be angled with respect to the body of the boring head. That made me feel good, although it wouldn’t affect the performance of the tool.

I ended up cutting the shank down to a 3/4″ stub an inch long. Now I’m happy. But wait! There’s more!

After I did all this work, someone told me he had removed shanks by cutting the arbor flanges down to a thickness of a few thousandths. He said he then unscrewed them with his fingers. Removing the flange pressure took away the friction that held them in place.

Bummer.

Anyway, here is a photo of my new shank. I think it will work.

I don’t know for sure that I got a good result, but there are a lot of good tips in this blog post. Boring heads aren’t concentric with their shanks or arbors. Use soft jaws or pie jaws to chuck delicate round parts. Aluminum tape prevents marring. A short shank will work fine with a 3″ boring head. ATF and acetone make a top-notch penetrating oil which is dirt cheap (Some people add lard.) Finally, if you want that arbor out of your boring head, take the flange off.

We’ll see whether my shank works or not. Now that I know how to remove it, I don’t care.

One good thing about the short shank is that the boring head will not take up much vertical room on the mill. Boring heads with bars installed can be very long, and that can result in the machinist having to crank the mill’s knee up and down a lot, and in some situations it can make it impossible to use the boring head.

That’s the story. If you see a nice boring head with a funny arbor on Ebay, don’t be afraid to buy it. Now you know how to get that shank out.

My Emotional Support Rattlesnake

Today, as always, I am watching America disintegrate. The topic that has my attention at the moment: emotional support animals.

Have you noticed that you can’t go into a store or restaurant now without running into someone walking a dog? Over the last few months, these people have gotten my attention. It seems their numbers have increased rapidly. The dogs wear little vests, like the ones real service animals wear. They must be highly trained animals which provide essential help to disabled people, right?

Wrong.

For under a hundred bucks, you can get your dog, cat, snake, owl, lemur, wombat, tarantula, or alligator snapping turtle certified as an emotional support animal. After that, many cowardly business owners will bow to you when you bring your pet–that’s what it really is–into places like the hardware store or the movies. You can get your certification over the phone. You can buy an emotional support dog vest from Amazon: LOOK.

One lady in the reviews describes her ESD as “a 70 pound Rhodesian Ridgeback/Lab mix who is easily excitable around people.” Great. See anything wrong with that?

This is so crazy, even our left-leaning mental health establishment is voicing disapproval.

Is it so bad if animals get to go where we go? Am I an animal hater or what? Actually, it IS bad, and I’m not an animal hater. Emotional support animals (and their owners) have no training. They are not held to cleanliness standards. They bite. They poop on stuff.

Today I read about a couple of animals that pooped on airplanes. DISCLAIMER: Marv (my African grey parrot) has done this many times, but he was in a pet carrier, and no one pretended he was performing a vital service.

One animal, a dog, took two aisle dumps in a single flight. People got sick to their stomachs. What could be better than being trapped in a small space with one of the most fragrant types of poop on the planet? Another animal, a pig, relieved itself on the floor and got itself and its owner thrown off the plane before it took off. Have you ever been around pig manure? The smell really carries. It’s not a wholesome, farmy smell like horse or cow manure smell. It’s funky and gross.

If you didn’t have the straight poop (sorry) on emotional support animals when you got up this morning, now you do. It’s a scam that permits selfish people to abuse the rest of us. Snowflakes who can’t find anything else to complain about are now entitled to make us share restaurant seats with creatures that lick their anuses.

This is good information to have. The other day I saw a scam dog at Home Depot, and I nearly ran a cart over its tail. I thought it wasn’t a big deal, because an educated service dog wouldn’t lunge at me if I hurt it. Now I know that dog wasn’t educated at all. I almost provoked a big German shepherd which probably had as much training and restraint as Charlie Sheen. You and I are informed now, so we can avoid being bitten, pawed, and peed on.

Look how crazy we’ve gotten. We can’t even count on eating our meals in areas free of dog crap.

This is what Americans are becoming. Today it is completely possible that you will see a grown “man” wearing a baby’s romper, sitting in a restaurant, working on a coloring book, with a vicious emotional support rottweiler straining to break its leash and eat the waiters. And anyone complaining about such sorry spectacles risks being treated like Josef Mengele after a sighting at a B’nai Brith luncheon.

Normal people run from nuts and brats now, and it’s going to get worse.

The airlines are trying to limit the insanity. They require “patients” to get current letters from mental health professionals, listing their mental illnesses and stating the need for a llama or penguin or whatever. Of course, a lot of crazy people and crooks have medical degrees, as any savvy Percocet addict can tell you. It won’t be hard for determined, imperious snowflakes to get their documentation.

If I were a seeing-eye dog, I would be really miffed about this. These amateurs will reflect very badly on real service dogs.

Life is no longer permitted to provide any type of inconvenience or unpleasantness, unless of course you’re a Christian, a male, white, straight, or conservative. We get all sorts of unpleasantness. We are not allowed to own bakeries, for example. It’s open season on us, but God forbid you should ask a “medical marijuana” enthusiast not to light up in front of your kids at a park. Not being allowed to get high in a park could be traumatic, so shut up and go home, normal people.

I shouldn’t make fun of medical marijuana. It’s very hard to get a prescription. You have to make a phone call and tell a doctor you’ve never met that you have a headache.

I want an aggressive emotional support chimp that smokes medical marijuana in my safe space with me. Oh, wait. I can’t have a safe space. I’m an old white guy. I’m not supposed to be safe, because any consideration or help I receive is “white privilege.” I’m supposed to be mistreated, because it makes up for the way I microaggress everyone around me simply by existing.

Honest to God, I wish we could all be transported to December of 1941 and experience real problems for a few days, just so the snowflakes would have a frame of reference. They have no idea what a problem looks like, so they try to fabricate them, and they don’t do a very good job. If a white man makes a taco, it is not a problem. If your ball python has to fly in the luggage hold, it is not a problem. The Spanish Flu of 1918…that was a problem. Polio was a problem. The Civil War was a problem. Compare and contrast and see if you can spot the difference between these challenges and the pain of having your high school history teacher tell you to stop showing the boys your nipples.

Now I’m off on another tangent. It seems like every third news story I see is about some mom who “shut down” a teacher or principal who asked her daughter to quit dressing like a slut.

Jeff Lebowski was wrong. The bums won!

The world (mainly America) is nuts right now. It won’t be long before it’s insufferable. I’d fake my death and move somewhere safe, but there is no such place.

Russia. I keep forgetting Russia. I don’t know if I can handle their weather, though. They wouldn’t take me, anyway. Unlike the US, other countries require you to prove you will be an asset before you can move in.

Be careful where you step in restaurants, and make sure you stay at least two yards away from emotional support dogs. You should probably start cooking at home more. Let’s face it: we should start doing everything at home more.

I’m really stressed, so I’m going to stop. I need relief. I wonder if I can get a chiropractor to give me prescription heroin.

Use This Stuff and Your Floors Will be Shipshape

In my quest to become NOT the worst housekeeper on earth, I am always looking for new products to use. Today I thought I’d share some news about an old product.

I am not referring to Pine-Sol. But I will use Pine-Sol to set the stage. Remember how great Pine-Sol used to be? It was loaded with pine oil, which cleans well and smells even better. Now Pine-Sol is crap. They took the pine out and substituted the chemical that gives Fabuloso its characteristic, congestion-inducing stench. I don’t know what that chemical is called, but if you enjoy lying awake all night with your eyes smarting and your nostrils swollen shut, it’s exactly what you need.

I found out turpentine was full of pine stuff. It’s loaded with alpha-pinene and beta-pinene. Together they make up most of turpentine. I started adding a little turpentine to my mop water, and it worked very well. It shines wood floors and leaves the house smelling great.

The other day I started thinking about another pine product: Orpine boat soap. This is a product boaters swear by. It’s a white jelly that comes in a gallon jug. You mix one ounce with 3 gallons of water, and you’re ready to go. It cleans like nobody’s business, and one of its two main ingredients is pine oil. The other is the active ingredient in dishwashing detergent.

Orpine costs a lot. You can expect to pay over $60 for a gallon. But that’s less than 50 cents per mop bucket. Pine Sol, which no longer works, costs almost exactly fifty cents per bucket. You can get a fantastic product with real pine oil and save trips to the store, or you can buy ten bottles of Pine Sol and get inferior performance and zero pine smell.

I ordered Orpine from Amazon, because it was cheaper than local boating stores, and I tried it today. It works great. I am quite pleased with it. I bought the regular kind, not the one that has wax in it.

I found out Pine-Sol isn’t the only cleaner that has been debased. Lestoil has been changed, too. The manufacturer claims they had to take out “volatile organic compounds,” i.e. anything remotely piney, to make the tree-huggers happy. Too bad. It used to be wonderful. I remember using that time in high school when I put Vaseline in my hair.

Long story.

My last Pine-Sol purchase was a really bad deal, because I poured most of it down the toilet. I tried to use it, and the funky smell let me know I was being ripped off. The toilet was my next stop.

You can find 80% pure pine oil in gallon jugs online, but you have to exclude the word “essential” from your search, or you’ll get 9,000,000 results featuring tiny bottles of aromatherapy pine oil running about $20 per ounce. Janitor supply places sell the big jugs. I should try that, when my Orpine runs out in 2025.

I don’t know how much pine oil Orpine contains, but it’s somewhere between 10 and 50 percent. That’s pretty good.

America’s Future: Beheading Jokes

What interesting things are happening in the world.

It looks like comedian Kathy Griffin has finally gone off the rails. She has become known for strange, degrading stunts, such as exposing her aging body to cameras. Now she has pulled out all the stops. She posed for photos holding a human head in her hand. The dummy head was made up to look just like Donald Trump, and it was covered with blood.

I try not to use copyrighted material here, but this definitely falls under “fair use,” so here:

Griffin has said it was okay to go after all of the Trumps, including 11-year-old Barron. She wasn’t kidding. The Trumps say Barron saw one of the photos and thought the head was his father.

Is this just sick humor? I don’t think so. I think it’s a message from Satan. He’s showing us what’s in the hearts of his people. He’s showing us our future. That severed head represents us.

Prophecy tells us we will be murdered by people who think they’re doing good. We’ve already seen it happening as part of Muslim terrorism. Muslims behead Christians and people from Christian countries all the time. Now the gloves are coming off, and the the enemy is getting bolder. He’s showing us Muslims aren’t alone in their feelings for us.

Would leftists really behead Christians? Of course they would. It’s silly to ask. Leftist terrorists already murder Christians and random white people in America. For every leftist who gets off the couch and acts on his anger, there are many who have the same feelings and are only restrained by the fear of acting alone.

We have the funny idea that Americans are above genocide. The Indians would have something to say about that, if there were any left. There are fewer than a million in the US today. Granted, America didn’t round them up by the millions and kill them in a systematic extermination campaign, but America did kill a whole lot of them and force them into reservations. America was also very brutal to blacks. If Americans can do things like that, why can’t leftist Americans murder Christians and conservatives?

Did you see how Griffin responded to public outrage? She got herself an opportunistic lawyer (the daughter of Gloria Allred) and appeared before TV cameras, whining and crying and claiming her victims were bullies. She played the victim. People were shocked. Most people, anyway. To me, it made complete sense. This is what Satan and his people do. They victimize, and while they do it, they play the victim card.

This is why I hate Black Lives Matter and the other victimhood movements. They’re just like the Nazis. Hitler rose to power by telling the Germans and Austrians they were victims. The same thing happened in Russia; the communists were able to murder the Christian czar and his kids because they convinced ordinary Russians they were victims. Everything a victim does is justified, because it’s self-defense. Victims have no remorse, and they are extremely sadistic. We shouldn’t be surprised that the Germans murdered Jews they needed for their war effort. The pleasure of sadism was more alluring than the prospect of winning. Our modern victims have the same mindset.

It’s remarkable how the victimhood mindset makes people sadistic. Look at our movies. If Arnold Schwarzenegger made a movie in which he went around roasting random people with a flamethrower, the public would hate him. On the other hand, he has tortured people in movies, and he has killed them in terrible ways and mocked them while they died. The public loved it. Why? Because they were bad people. The writers always set Schwarzenegger up as a victim before he did his acts of cruelty. When he jammed a hot steam pipe through a man’s chest or dangled a man over a canyon by his ankle, the audience loved it, because they were getting what they deserved.

That’s us, in a few years. Getting what the victims think we deserve.

We can’t play the victim game. We are under attack, but if we get down in the dirt and use our victim status to justify cruelty and hate, we will become our persecutors. The only sane responses are to pray, repent, and move away from victim concentrations. If you still live in places like L.A., St. Louis, Baltimore, and Miami in five years, you will be responsible for what happens to you.

Incidentally, the word “victim” used to mean an animal or person used in a sacrifice. Something to think about. The greatest victim in history was Jesus Christ. In a way, our modern chronic victims are stealing his glory.

Here’s another interesting news item: UK Prime Minister Theresa May is angry at social media companies and ISP’s for allowing hateful online communications. Apparently, she blames Twitter and Facebook for this weekend’s Muslim murder orgy.

Let that soak in for a minute. The leader of a nation that encourages Muslim immigration and does nothing to acknowledge the true nature of the terrorism problem is angry…because Muslim extremists are allowed admission to Facebook. You let them in your country, but you’re upset because someone else lets them into an online community, where they can’t behead or slash anyone.

Is the irony not obvious? Do I have to keep hammering on the point?

If Muslim nuts are good enough to live among you, they are good enough to like your cat memes.

Here in the United States, imprisoned murderers are allowed to use the Internet. We don’t care. We know there is a difference between online communication and physical violence. When a judge turns a murderer loose and he kills again, we don’t get mad at the judge for letting the murderer use Twitter.

May wants to “regulate” the Internet. We all know what that means. Censorship. And of course, while the response would be stimulated by Islam, it would be used to persecute Christians. Remember how Obama’s people focused on nonexistent Christian terror threats?

This morning I was thinking about the weird old threats that have come back to life in America, to menace white males. In the past, white males were leaders here. God sent white Christian males to get America started, and they were used by God to make it strong. Other segments of society were subordinate to them. God gave them favor. Then white Christian males fell asleep, credited themselves with America’s success, and forgot God.

Look what’s happening now. We run from everyone. We run from our own women. We run from blacks. We run from Hispanic invaders who aren’t citizens; they say this is really their country. Was Iowa part of Mexico? I don’t remember it that way. We even run from animals that used to be under control. We reintroduce large predators our ancestors had the good sense to drive out, and we are not allowed to shoot them when they invade our homes and kill our pets and livestock. And not all of the predators were introduced by man. We have coyotes in New York City now. We even have a bedbug plague. Predators bite us while we sleep.

This is what happens when favor is reversed. White Christian males assumed they would be on top forever, because they had all the answers, and we assumed America would always be invincible. Wrong. Our forebears had favor. God can give a goose favor and make it emperor of the world. We didn’t build this, as Obama would put it. We just took the credit.

Am I saying white men should take over again, or that white supremacy is a good idea? Never. That’s idiotic. I’m saying God favors his people, and everyone who wants to rise above the increasing chaos needs to get close to him. If a Christian black faction or a bloc of former Muslims arises and takes over the country with God’s blessing, no one will be happier than I will. I plan to be on the same team.

One of the reasons Europe is such a pleasant place is that there are no predators to speak of. Did you know lions used to live in Europe? If the hippies had been around thousands of years ago, lions would still be roaming the streets of Rome, eating people. Europeans had the common sense to get rid of lions, and along the way, they drove bears and wolves out of populated areas. We’re not as smart as they were. We think it’s cute when a family of black bears keeps a family of humans trapped indoors. We say stupid things like, “They were here first.” Hey, the bubonic plague bacterium was here first. So was poison ivy. So were rattlesnakes, roaches, fleas, lice, rats, mice, and bedbugs. Intelligent people understand that human beings are more important than animals.

I don’t care who was here first. My kind is here now, and we are what matters. Plants and animals were put here to be ruled and used by us.

Animals and types of human beings who used to be harmless to white Christian males are driving us before them like cattle, because we’re not God’s people. We give them the whips. We forge our own shackles. We hand them our constitutional rights. What a crazy time to be alive.

Adam and Eve gave Satan the earth. The Jews invited the Babylonian captivity, the Diaspora, and the Shoah by turning away from God. We are giving America away by rejecting God’s criticism and help. Nothing changes. Our illusions of moral superiority make us think we’re different, but we’re not.

When Kathy Griffin’s moral heirs start beheading and slashing and raping in larger numbers, it will be our fault. It will be the fault of our assailants, too, but that won’t be a good excuse.

Nothing that’s happening now is extraordinary. All of it was predictable. It was to be expected. We should have seen it as inevitable, given our actions.

It’s astonishing to know that I am witnessing the destruction (the suicide) of America. It seemed impossible. Other people will deny it, and they won’t prepare, but in time they’ll see it and acknowledge it, too. They’ll be like the Jews in Germany and Austria who failed to get out in time.

Somewhere in Detroit, there is an old white homeowner who thinks the real estate downturn is a passing thing.

If we’re prospering now, it’s temporary. The conservative “revolution” is an illusion. Hillary won the popular vote. In time, we will reach a state where the Democrat always wins the electoral vote. America will be dismantled. If you’re white or Christian, you will be part of an underclass. Eventually, our very existence will be the target, and we will lose.

Kathy Griffin may live long enough to become a celebrated hero of the left. The beheading photo may become a cherished cultural icon. Maybe on New Year’s Eve twenty years from now, they’ll wheel her out on CNN, and she’ll pull a sash that turns on the gas to kill Barron Trump and his children.

I’m glad I’m old. I would not want to have seventy more years in front of me. The other day I saw a black spot on my back, and I wondered if it was melanoma. At first I was disturbed, but then I thought about the way melanoma would give me a way out of this place. You lie back and take your painkillers, and one day you stop breathing. The way things are today, you’re likely to be killed by a nurse who turns up the morphine while doctors look the other way. Then this place is other people’s problem. I felt real peace about it. It turned out to be a scab from something I had scratched, but it taught me something about my view of death.

I’ve had a number of dreams in which I have died. I never felt terror. I felt sober but relieved. “Finally, I am done with this place.” I don’t understand people who live in terror of death. It seems childish to me. It’s immaturity. Death is normal, like puberty and menopause. Everyone goes through death. How can you scream and cry about something you knew was going to happen? You’re not really going to die. You’re just going somewhere else. Make sure it’s the right place and calm down.

I don’t brace for death. I brace for more life. I am probably stuck with quite a few years left on my sentence. More illnesses. More physical decay. More unpleasant tasks. More interactions with nasty people. More traffic jams. More injuries. More disgusting and disconcerting news stories. More alienation from an increasingly gross and trashy citizenry. The continued destruction of my beautiful homeland. Gloating speeches from an uninterrupted succession of leftist presidents. I feel like I’m on an exercise bike, counting the minutes until I can get off.

Once America falls, there is nowhere to go but heaven. This is the last decent place on earth.

I may be wrong about that. There is some hope for Russia.

Stay out of trouble, and pray scalping doesn’t come back.

Startling Revelation: Hollywood not Best Source of Reliable News

I did something I probably should not have done this week. I watched most of The Dallas Buyers Club. It’s a movie about AIDS victim Ron Woodroof, who ran a company that distributed non-approved AIDS drugs to sick people.

I shouldn’t have watched it because over and over, nudity kept popping up. You can fast-forward when that happens, but little glimpses are still in your head afterward. Not helpful. Oh, well. I will keep trying to improve.

Anyway, as entertainment goes, it’s an excellent movie. As infotainment, not so much. It turns out there is a lot of BS in the film.

In the movie, Woodroof is an oilfield electrician who rides in rodeos in his spare time. He is fiercely heterosexual. He hates gays. He hates all minorities. He threatens to beat up the doctor who diagnoses him with AIDS. Over time and out of necessity, he develops relationships with gay men, and first thing you know, he’s a passionate advocate for the cause of gay AIDS sufferers.

I checked a few things out, because the movie seemed very slanted to me. Big Pharma in bed with the FDA, trying to kill people with poisonous AZT and suppressing cheaper medicines that worked better. Does anyone seriously think that happened? Also, who rides bulls while working full-time as an electrician? Does it work that way in Texas? Can you tell your boss you need to clock out early so you can break your collarbone riding El Diablo? I doubt it. Finally, movie Woodroof contracted AIDS from straight sex. How realistic is that?

Here are the actual facts.

1. Ron Woodroof was gay. He married three women, but he also had sex with men. His doctor says he was gay. A nurse he worked with says he was gay. The man was gay. The only person who insists he was straight is a screenwriter who didn’t know him well.

2. Ron Woodroof was not homophobic, according to people who knew him. It’s hard to be homophobic and gay and have any kind of social life.

3. Ron Woodroof did not ride in rodeos. The movie people put that in to make him look like a scrappy guy used to fighting bigger opponents. That’s what they say, but they also put it in to make him look butch.

4. Ron Woodroof did not have a tumultuous friendship with a transvestite named Rayon. This person never existed.

5. The FDA tolerated buyers’ clubs for a long time, and they only stepped in when profiteering became a problem. They even let Ron Woodroof keep importing a banned medication for his own use.

I read this stuff, and I wondered why the movie people insisted Woodroof was straight. Then I saw where someone said they did it to prevent The Dallas Buyers Club from becoming a “gay movie.” WHAM. That explains everything. If a movie looks too gay, most people will feel like they can’t relate to it, so they won’t go. There are exceptions, but Hollywood likes sure things (hello, sequels and remakes), so why take a chance?

Thinking about that, I realized there was more to it than that. They wanted AIDS to look like a heterosexual disease, in order to generate support for victims. Problem: AIDS has never been a major heterosexual disease, except for women who sleep with gay men or intravenous drug users. This is why black heterosexual women make up a significant number of AIDS victims. Many have sex with closeted gay men. It’s easy for women to get AIDS from straight sex, but it’s just about impossible for a man.

I looked it up. If you’re a heterosexual man who doesn’t share needles, you have, essentially, no chance of getting AIDS. Millions of people have died from AIDS. I couldn’t find a single example of an American heterosexual white male who got it from a woman. If examples exist, they are flukes, like male calico cats. Straight men can get all sorts of venereal diseases. AIDS is one you don’t have to worry about.

A lot of black “heterosexual” men get AIDS, but it appears likely they get it from sex with other men. Black men don’t like admitting they’re gay, so they lie to people who gather statistics.

Here’s something amazing: if you look at a 2010 chart that show how AIDS affects different types of people, heterosexual white males who don’t shoot up aren’t listed. I looked at it several times, because I was sure I was missing something. They’re not listed because they don’t exist in numbers large enough to put on graphs. It would be like listing animals that fly by group and having a bar for snails.

Yes, the chart does have a bar for black heterosexual men. It lists 2700 new infections and none for whites. Do you seriously believe that? Are white men really that much more conscientious about “protection”? No. We are not. If protection were the issue, we would still have a significant number of cases, and we don’t. The black “heterosexual” men on the chart are gays and drug users who lie.

They’re not the only ones who can’t face the truth. You can see the denial mindset at work if you look at statistics. Gay men aren’t called “gay men.” They’re called “MSM.” This means “men who have sex with other men.” Even the professionals can’t bring themselves to say “gay.” If having sex with other men doesn’t make you gay, WHAT DOES? Collecting Ethel Merman records?

By the way, I’m not talking about charts created by Jerry Falwell, Jr. I’m talking about government charts. We all know how government employees and medical people lean left. This is not right wing or Christian propaganda. Straight white men were excluded by people who have powerful motivation to include us.

What does this mean? That we should be happy gays and junkies are getting AIDS? Of course not. But no one likes to be lied to. Systematically. Deliberately.

Man, the world is crazy. Next thing you know, the dishonesty will find its way into documentaries, and we may even see people using CGI to create drowning polar bears to convince audiences global warming is real.

No, that could never happen.

It’s very unfortunate that people who create fact-based fiction make so little effort to let the public know what they lie about. Sometimes they do a lot of damage. People who watched Cinderella Man came away thinking Max Baer was a murderous anti-Semite. In reality, he was a great guy and a supporter of Jews, and he put the Star of David on his fighting trunks.

That brings me to Milton. I am still not done with Paradise Lost. It only read two or three pages per day. I need to get on with it. I’ve decided I don’t like it for two reasons: 1. Milton is a boring, incredibly pedantic showoff, and 2.) people should not make up Biblical history, because it tends to become doctrine. Milton wrote a fact-based work of fiction, and he had no right to do it. It’s unfortunate if you write a deceptive movie about AIDS. It can be blasphemy, apostasy, or heresy if you write a deceptive poem about God.

Milton was extremely bright, and he wanted people to know it. He twisted and bent the English language into Baroque shapes it didn’t need to be bent into. He reminds me of the little black kids who appear on talent shows and do all sorts of non-helpful vocal acrobatics while singing Whitney Houston numbers. Okay. You’re talented. But now I’m bored and annoyed, and you’ve killed the pace of the song, so what good has the showing off done?

Shakespeare was a better writer than Milton, and he did not beat the reader or listener over the head with his genius. He knew the difference between a work of fiction and an Olympic event. And he was not boring. And he had a great sense of humor. Milton was a humorless crank who craved admiration. You can have him.

Guess who wrote the play that contains the words, “brevity is the soul of wit”? Not Milton. That probably infuriated him.

If I want to see people do amazing things, I’ll go watch Chinese acrobats. I don’t read literature in order to be impressed. Milton turned his poem into a circus act, and on top of that, he’s long-winded. You don’t have to use three pages to describe every action in the story. Just say, “The sun went down,” not, “The gleaming orb of Helios, its glorious substance spent on teeming fields of indebted posies, summoned forth its gilded chariot and blah blah blah shut up already.”

I read a little bit of the next book on my list, Pride and Prejudice, because I was stuck somewhere with nothing to do, and I happened to have an Amazon sample on my phone. It looks like it will be more entertaining than Milton, although it does have “chick lit.” written all over it. I already dislike it, but I will be able to tolerate it.

I may have read it before. Who knows? Not the kind of book that changes your life and makes a lasting impression.

This is the view from here, as of Friday morning. I’ve mentioned two books and one movie, and I can’t recommend any of them. Shakespeare, however, gets two thumbs up.

Get me Out of Santeriaville

My house-hunting trip is over. I’m back at work, trying to get everything in order so a move can be worked out.

It’s a confusing time. There are a lot of tax angles to be looked at when you buy and sell properties. Real estate appreciates, so when you sell, you get hit with capital gains tax. You can get around that with a good accountant, if you can prove losses that offset the gains. If you sell rental property, you may be able to avoid paying the tax by putting the money into new rental properties in other locations. Sometimes one property may be eligible for both types of tax breaks, and you have to decide which one to apply.

When a person is my dad’s age, he also has to think about things like gift tax and the death tax.

I’m not sure what will happen, but I know this: it’s a lot easier to get hundreds of thousands of dollars by keeping it away from the government than by going out and earning it all over again.

Thank God for accountants. I can’t imagine a more dreadful job. It’s good that there are people out there who are willing to do it. They’re like morticians. They do a necessary job everyone else hates.

I haven’t written a lot about my relationship with God lately. I get distracted and write frivolous things. I stop focusing on what’s important. Also, I don’t want to write things that are half-baked and full of errors, just to have something to say.

Lately God keeps reminding me of the big lesson he tried to teach me in 1986: I have to spend a great deal of time praying in tongues. When I let it slip, it’s like coming down from a stimulant. Instead of feeling energetic and at peace, I feel crabby and worried. Things stop going well. It’s strange how one thing which requires so little of my own input makes such profound changes in my life.

I’ve also gotten very good results from daily communion. I know this, because I skipped it during my trip. I felt terrible yesterday. Returning to Miami is always a cursed event, but it was worse than that. I couldn’t find peace. I wasn’t able to resist temptation the way I should have been.

Today when I woke up, I didn’t have wine with me, but I went through the essentials anyway. Communion isn’t really about wine or crackers. I went down the list of things I was doing badly and compulsions I was yielding to. I repented and asked for help. It was like peeling filthy clothes off, one item at a time. Peace came back to me.

I think I’m going to do communion in the morning from now on, instead of waiting until late in the day. It’s like showering. If you’re only going to shower once a day, you should do it in the morning. It’s better to sleep dirty than to be dirty when you start the day. I suppose there is no reason why I can’t do communion more than once a day, though. I don’t really have to choose.

God’s big goal, apart from salvation, is inner change. The inside of a person is supposed to be as much like heaven as possible. It should be a place of peace, love, faith, joy, and humility. It should be a clean place. You don’t get that from churches where they teach people to sin all they want and ask forgiveness once a week. Prayer and communion are tools to get your insides ordered.

I often think about the disorder and filth inside me. I may be an okay person by the world’s standards, but I am not good. When I turned back to God, I was disgusting, like a house that has been turned into a crack den. He has improved me a lot, but there’s a great deal of work to be done. The job is overwhelming. I wish I were a better person. I wish I had not vandalized myself like this.

It’s very unfortunate that churches don’t teach this. They tell us God loves us as we are, which is true, but they imply that we don’t have to change. A serial murderer’s mother may love him, but that doesn’t imply approval.

They also don’t teach us this: power doesn’t come to filthy, unrepentant people. The Bible warns us about this, but preachers love money and high attendance, so they keep quiet about it. The Bible says idolaters, revilers, sexually immoral people, and so on will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. When you wallow in immorality and count on weekly church visits to save you, you don’t get the power Christians are supposed to have. Your prayers won’t be answered as often. Rotten people will get victory over you. Your problems will get worse instead of better. Most Christians don’t mind. As long as they get sexual immorality, pride, and rebellion, they don’t mind dying of cancer, living in lack, having no peace, or losing most of their battles.

I remember watching Steve Munsey give a terrible sermon at Trinity Church in Miami. For some reason, he was talking about sex. He had his people play the song “Single Ladies” while he danced around. It was quite a sight. He said, “It’s okay to look, but you can’t touch.” When he said “touch”, he grinned and held his hands out in front of him and made motions as if he were squeezing two objects. Don’t make me explain.

That’s the attitude most of us have. It’s okay to be dirty inside, as long as we don’t do what we want to do. Many of us go further: it’s okay to do whatever we want as long as we ask for forgiveness. Many go further than that: it’s okay even if you never admit you did anything wrong and you never ask for forgiveness, as long as you got saved when you were a kid.

Munsey is disgraceful. It’s not okay to look. It’s not okay to encourage yourself to be lustful, covetous, angry, gluttonous, and so on. When God has succeeded in changing you, you won’t be a leering, craving bag of useless flesh.

There’s a big difference between momentary temptation and deliberate obsessing.

I think good teaching would have sped up my progress. Unfortunately, I put myself in the hands of people who couldn’t help me improve because they didn’t want to be improved, themselves. They thought they were fine the way they were. They couldn’t teach what they didn’t know.

I didn’t deserve better teachers. I had turned away. I deserved continued decline and damnation. I brought Munsey and the Wilkerson family on myself.

There are certain things I know to do, which are easy and which bring powerful results. I just have to keep doing them. As long as I continue, I will grow stronger and have more success.

I look forward to getting away from Miami. This place is full of Cubans and Haitians who literally worship demons. No wonder things don’t go well for me here! What did I expect? I’m the enemy of the ruling spirits. Say what you will about most of America; most cities and towns don’t have hundreds of thousands of residents who practice voodoo. This is one of the worst places for Christians.

I believe that when I went on my trip to Ocala, I got away from a whole bunch of local spirits that hate me and work against me. I thought about this as I drove back, and it really bothered me. I did not want to return. Now I’m stuck here, and I have to keep fighting until I can get away again.

Miami is absolutely rotten.

What on earth was I thinking when I moved back here?

I plan to keep applying what I know. I believe God will deliver me from this trashy city just as he has delivered me from a lot of trashy people who mistreated me.

Maybe this will be useful to you. I hope you will think it over.

I Now Hate Miami More Than I Thought Possible

I am in Ocala, otherwise known as the Deplorable Biosphere. In years to come, people like me will flood the area, dressed in MAGA hats and ill-fitting work shorts, to set up their workshops and gardens and prepare the ramparts from which to fire on the smelly liberal masses that will come to steal our food and TVs but certainly not our books or soap.

I was going to go to Ocala alone, but my dad decided to go with me.

We looked at five houses today. Was it five? Let’s see. Blue. Grey. Zebra chair house. Yellow house. House where I ran over the snake. Yes. Five. One was too small. One was too upscale. One was a little remote for my needs. The other two were great.

The first place I checked out is in the northern part of the county. It’s a very odd house. It’s one story, with lots of rooms. A widow lives there, and you can tell estrogen figured way too heavily in the home’s design and decor.

There are so many antiques in the house (and workshop) that if this woman dies, the American antique market will take a plunge that will take a decade to undo itself. When this stuff starts appearing on the market, trying to sell antiques in America will be like trying to sell snow cones in Siberia.

The house has a sewing room, an artist’s studio, a piano room, an office, a special food storage room, about 52 bathrooms, three fireplaces, and enough closet space for Elton John and Rupaul put together.

The thing that sold me was the workshop. The poor lady’s husband died before it could be completed. It’s a building the size of a house, with two central air units. It’s set up for two apartments plus a gigantic work area. The apartments haven’t been drywalled. It doesn’t have compressors yet, but once they’re installed, it will be possible to air condition the entire place. Two floors.

I would finish the downstairs apartment as a metal shop. The upstairs unit could be finished and used for electronics or just running away from the world.

The lot is only ten acres, but you would need a bow and arrow to hit the nearest neighbor’s house, so it’s not cramped. It has thick woods on one side, a cow farm on another, and across a road from a third side, more woods.

I know I would like this place because the husband’s deer stand is still hanging on a tree in the yard. Yes. He shot deer IN HIS YARD. He had a feeder and everything. Is that legal? I don’t care. I’m too lazy to shoot deer. More correctly, I’m too lazy to butcher deer. The shooting…I’m all over that.

The northern part of the county is fantastic. It’s prettier than the southern part. There is even less traffic. The roads are ideal for motorcycles. There are probably fewer snobs. I like it.

The other place I really like is south of the city. Some guy bought 34 acres in two long strips. He cleared one strip and built his house on the other. Together they make a rectangle with proportions similar to a smartphone.

The house is beyond criticism. It’s not very old. It’s big. It has a beautiful downstairs. Upstairs, there is what I would call a second living room. It’s carpeted. It’s comfortable. It has a bunch of storage rooms off of it. I wish I were lying on its floor right now.

The house has a huge garage, and if that’s not enough, there’s a 1000-square-foot cement block outbuilding with garage doors at each end. It has clapboards on it, so it looks like the house. It has a little carport thing on one side, where you can put chairs and goof off all day.

The owner played a dirty trick on us. He gave the realtor the key to his gas-powered EZ-Go, and she told us to take it and tour the whole property. After that, I was hooked.

First we roamed around on the wooded lot. Before I hit the gas, I asked the realtor if there were any animals to worry about, and she said there were two bulls. She said not to worry about them because they never moved. I figured she was joking or talking about concrete bulls, because real bulls can be territorial and crabby. Sure enough, we passed two black bulls sitting in the woods doing nothing. Maybe they were steers. I didn’t ask them to get up so I could check. In any case, they didn’t find us interesting at all. As we were passing them, I ran over a big blacksnake. Well. Better that than fresh manure.

The bulls are tax deflectors. Because there are two bulls on the land, the owner can call it agricultural property and get a property tax break. He has to put up with poop, however. The realtor said we could switch them for goats, which would eat the underbrush and leave the grass alone. Goat poop is easier to deal with than cow poop, but free cow manure would be good for gardening.

We then went through a gate and rode around the cleared lot. It was magnificent. It had big berms of excess dirt; perfect for use as pistol and rifle backstops. It had a big dry pond, which would ordinarily be a flaw, but again, helpful for target practice. You could go down in there and put up a silhouette.

I want this place. It’s more than I wanted to spend, but it would save my dad a lot of money over living where he is now. I would hate to tell you about his current property taxes and insurance.

If there is one thing I’ve learned on this trip, it’s that I hate Miami even more than I thought I did. I can’t believe I’m going back. Ever since I passed Orange County on the way north, I’ve been drinking in my surroundings. I’m like a man who was just rescued from the desert, who knows he’ll be going back soon. I want to stuff myself with northern Florida and make the feeling last when I’m back in El Republico De Los Bananas. This is like dreaming I’m honeymooning with Tyra Banks in the Plaza Hotel and then waking up in a trailer next to Caitlyn Jenner.

It’s time for planning and calculation. Maybe one of these places is ripe for the picking. It can take quite a while for a seller to get realistic about pricing.

Tomorrow I drive back to Bananaburg. I wish it could be the very last time.