I’m not Actually Allowed to Say “Nuthouse”

If I could send a letter to heaven, it might say something like this:

Dear Mom:

Hi from earth. I’m glad you’re in heaven, but I wish I could five more years with you, to treat you better. Life down here is interesting.

Donald Trump just got elected president. No, really. Also, homosexual marriage has been recognized legally for several years, and if a Christian baker refuses to make a gay wedding cake, he can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and have his business destroyed.

Do you remember Bruce Jenner? The guy on the Wheaties box? He has been castrated. He paid a doctor to do it. He didn’t have cancer. He just thinks he’s a woman. I know how crazy that sounds. The really weird part is that the medical establishment backs him up. There are a lot of people like him now. If you’re a man, you can just decide you’re a woman, and they have to let you go into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms and undress in front of little girls. You don’t even have to have surgery or shave your beard.

I’m not joking. Ask Jesus.

I read that Bruce is worried that heterosexual men won’t want to date him. I don’t know what to say about that, except that I think his fears are well-founded.

Remember Sonny and Cher? Remember their little blonde daughter Chastity? She says she’s a man now. She had her breasts amputated. Cher was always a full-throttle leftist, but she flipped out when she found out Chastity was a lesbian. I guess the whole thing seemed more appealing when it was other people’s kids.

The North Koreans have nuclear missiles now. They don’t work very well, but they keep working on them. Remember how Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter let them have nuclear reactors and said they were only going to be used for peaceful purposes? That worked out about as well as I expected.

The guy who ran North Korea died, but his son is in charge, and he’s just as deranged. He’s threatening to nuke us right now. Trump is trying to do something about it, but don’t be surprised if you see a sudden wave of new arrivals from the West Coast, Japan, and South Korea in a year or two.

The government takes all our emails now and stores them. They say it’s to prevent terrorism. In 2001, Muslims flew two jets into the World Trade Center and murdered 3000 people. Since then, Americans have completely abandoned the notion that they’re supposed to be free, except when it comes to strange sex acts, obscenity, abortion, and drugs. We do whatever the government wants. For a long time, we had x-ray machines in airports, and they took naked pictures of us as we were headed for our planes. I am totally serious. We still have uneducated security officers putting their hands all over travelers, including their crotches.

The government also keeps records of all our phone calls, without warrants. They have computers to make transcripts and check them to see if we say things the government doesn’t like. It kind of makes you wonder why we sent 405,000 men to die in World War Two. We thought we were fighting for the Bill of Rights, but we’ve given it up in exchange for fancy portable phones and safety from terrorist attacks, so I suppose it would have been smarter to let the Nazis take over without a fight. The end result would have been similar in many ways. We did help end the Holocaust, though.

Our phones have cameras in them now, and the government can turn the phones on without our consent. They can listen to us and film us. How about that?

Our highways have lots of cameras on them, and many also have mysterious sensors every half-mile. We have things in our cars that tell the government when we pass through toll gates, and the government keeps the records of where we go. Cop cars have cameras that read our license plates all day and check them against government databases. No one seems to mind.

Public nudity is legal in many places now, and many people seem obsessed with it. You can go to a parade in a big American city and see naked men walking around. There are lots of very vocal women agitating for the right to go around topless, although no one has managed to explain why this is necessary. Some are doing some really gross things involving confronting the public with their monthly biological cycles. I am too embarrassed to elaborate. It won’t be too long before sane people and their kids are only safe in their own houses. I think that’s the goal, though. To drive us out of public places.

Cash is disappearing. We pay for everything using credit cards, bank cards, and even our cell phones. It won’t be long until the government convinces us cash has to be abolished. When that happens, I don’t know how we’ll be able to hide wealth or keep it out of the government’s hands. If they get mad at us, they’ll be able to find all the money we have and freeze it instantly. I’m sure they would never do that, though. Not unless they had a really good reason. We can always trust the government.

I hope that last part made you laugh.

Here’s something interesting: Satanists are putting statues and other stuff up on public property. If you’re a Satanist, and you complain enough, you may be able to put a statue of Satan up at a courthouse. Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had done that when you were a kid?

Creepy false religions are doing very well, but Christians have a lot of problems. Anyone who won’t renounce God’s condemnation of homosexuality is pretty much ineligible for a high-profile secular job. They call us “homophobes.” You don’t have to be an activist to get in trouble. Just sitting in the back of a church will get you canned.

The latest Pope is a socialist. Not a big surprise, I guess. Catholicism is what it is. He is constantly criticizing conservatives, gun makers, capitalists, and anyone who believes in secure borders. Oddly, he lives in a palatial fortress which is also a country, and it has a huge wall around it. The people who guard him carry machine guns. I assume he is aware of this.

The Confederate flag is gone now. When you were still here, as you know, a lot of Southerners used it as a symbol to show they loved the South. There were even black people who liked it. About two years ago, a strange spell fell on people, and we instantly decided there was no difference between a Confederate flag and a swastike. I know you will find that hard to believe. You can’t have one on a car tag or a T-shirt now, unless you want to have all sorts of problems. If a kid wears a shirt like that to high school now, he will be sent home and suspended. And all this happened almost overnight. It makes you wonder what else can happen that fast. Next time it may be the cross.

White people are under attack these days. Colleges teach courses about the “problem” of whiteness. I guess next they’ll be talking about the White Question and the Final Solution. The weird thing is that this is happening while we’re in the majority, and we’re participating in it. Thank God everyone else is perfect, right? I think the rest of the world would miss us if we disappeared. Judging by what goes on in places where there aren’t many of us, I mean.

We can’t complain. If you complain, society labels you racist. Which is a little weird, since a complaint would be a response to racism. Do you remember the “political correctness” craze of the Eighties, and how funny it was, and how Americans laughed about it when it was over? It’s back, and this time, no one is laughing. This time, it’s here to stay. Everyone is offended, all the time, and society assumes that anyone who is offended is right except for Christians, men, conservatives, and white people. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.

Fighting won’t help, but then you know that, because you know God’s heart. Fighting is carnal, and it makes things worse. The answer is to turn back to God and get his help, but we are not going to do that. We have more faith in Donald Trump than Jesus Christ. Trump is very angry and forceful, so he makes a lot of Christians feel like they’re winning. We love our secular messiahs. They fight for us and don’t expect us to change.

Quite honestly, I would like to join you soon. I enjoy life, but people like me are being painted into a corner. Every day is like a little Kristallnacht. There is no future for us here. Things are going to get worse and worse, and the most disgusting, cruel people on earth are going to be in charge of us.

I think about the Jews who left Europe in the Thirties. They were the smart ones. I would do the same thing, but we only have one planet! Where would I go? My plan is to move somewhere safer than Miami and hope I am allowed to come see you before things get too bad.

We still haven’t found a way to extend human life, but people keep trying, and they think they’re getting closer. What on earth is wrong with them? Seventy years in this place are enough, don’t you think?

It must be nice up there. Perfect health (you must look younger than I do) and safety. No hateful, ignorant people spitting at God all the time. No disagreement. No one forcing you to say perversion is a virtue. No one forcing you to call men women. No one coming into your country with hostile intentions and demanding to be allowed to stay. If there’s one place that has secure borders, it’s heaven!

I miss you, but I’m glad your sentence–your tour of duty–is over. You weren’t treated well, and you never got the things you should have received. I wouldn’t bring you back to this place for a billion dollars. I’m glad you’re surrounded by love, and that the people and spirits who mistreated you can’t reach you or even communicate with you.

Thanks for all you did for me. I finally appreciate it.

The Devil is no VIP

Today I was looking at the Bible, and I decided to try to get the answer to an old question. When Jude and Peter complained of preachers who spoke evil of “dignitaries,” what, exactly, were they talking about?

Jude contrasts them with Michael, who, when arguing with Satan over the body of Moses, refused to make a “reviling accusation.” Instead, Michael called on God to rebuke Satan. Based on this passage, some people believe Jude and Peter were criticizing people who said mean things about fallen angels. The idea is that such beings are still “dignitaries” in heaven.

I dunno ’bout that.

Most people believe Beelzebub or Beelzebul is Satan. In any case, just about everyone believes he’s a fallen angel. The names the Bible give him don’t mean “dignitary.” Quite the opposite. Depending on who you ask, they mean “Lord of Flies,” “Lord of Garbage,” or “Lord of Feces.” Even if it means “Lord of Flies,” the word “Flies” connotes feces, because that’s what flies feed on. “Beel” is just “baal,” or “lord.”

How can God warn people against insulting Satan while permitting them to call him “Lord of Feces”?

In 2 Kings (as Trump and I call it), Jehu defeated Ahab and Jezebel, who worshiped Baal. Then he proclaimed a solemn assembly to honor Baal, and he called for all Baal worshipers to meet in Baal’s temple. Once they were inside, he told his troops not to let any escape, and that anyone who let a man escape would have to be killed in his place. The idolaters were killed, the temple was burned, and Jehu turned it into a public toilet. After that, untold thousands of Jews went there and relieved themselves all over it, with God’s approval.

In Ezra 6, Cyrus decreed that the temple would be rebuilt. The penalty for resisting his edict was to be hanged on a timber from your own house, and to have the house turned into a public toilet. To harm God’s house was to harm your own house.

In Jerusalem, many Jews worshiped Moloch, whose name is thought by some to mean “King of the World.” The consonant trio MLK is found in the Hebrew word for king. Melchizedek was the king of Jerusalem. The man whose ear Peter cut off was named Malchus.

Moloch was the Planned Parenthood of the Mediterranean area. If you wanted to succeed in life (sound familiar?), you would take your baby to a priest of Moloch, and the priest would put it in the hands of a bronze statue representing the false god. Under the hands there was a flaming brazier. The baby would fall into it. According to Jewish history, the pagans played drums to drown out the screams so the ambitious parents wouldn’t pity their babies. They roasted live babies just as the priests roasted clean sacrificial animals.

Moloch worship took place in Gehinnom (Gehenna), a valley next to the city of Jerusalem. When God’s servants overcame the pagans, Gehinnom became a place where Jews dumped their excrement and garbage. You can’t keep excrement in a city with no sewers. It’s where Judas fell when he hanged himself.

There is a pattern here.

The Bible makes it plain that we’re not supposed to gloat over defeated enemies, and I believe it also shows that we’re not supposed to ridicule them. But it seems permissible to call them what they are, and Beelzebub’s unflattering title is apt.

Some people who claim to have visited hell say it stinks. They say the stench is unimaginable. Rotten flesh, garbage, feces…you name it…multiplied by a thousand. They also say Satan and the demons and fallen angels have authority in hell, even if they can’t keep Jesus out or keep the saved in. Hell is like Satan’s headquarters. That makes sense, if you think of the connection to excrement and garbage. If God made Satan’s earthly house a place of filth, surely he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing to his palace under the ground.

I think it’s fine to call Satan the Lord of Dung and to say he’s unclean. Those are facts, not slurs. If that’s true, then who are the dignitaries the apostles refer to?

I agree with people who say “dignitaries” means God’s anointed human servants. Preachers who serve the enemy have a millennia-long history of reviling and slandering God’s people. The preachers Jude and Peter referred to do the same things. They’re with us now. If you don’t believe me, go to a prosperity gospel church, as I did, and see what they say about you when you talk about their errors. The people at Trinity Church had secret meetings about me after I left, and the pastor of New Dawn started yelling at a friend of mine in the parking lot, interrogating him about me.

Michael and Satan are similar beings. They’re on similar levels in the hierarchy of creation. Michael was not entitled to hurl slurs at Satan. Similarly, one human being shouldn’t hurl slurs at another human being. That, I believe, is the point of the comparison. We probably shouldn’t hurl slurs at anyone. The Bible says the kingdom of God won’t come to revilers.

People who are controlled by evil spirits often surround themselves with filth and darkness. I have a couple of relatives who love the dark. One allowed her house to fall apart as she sank into depravity. The walls became coated with mold. The floor was coated with a film of urine and feces from rats and a dog. Bugs were everywhere. The house stank. You could smell it from the yard. It was dark inside. The shades were always down, and she kept most of the lights turned off, even when her electric bills were paid through a charity program. It was like this for years, even after the dog died. Think about it: it’s a picture of hell. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

She hated having the doors opened or the shades drawn. That’s not normal. The natural reaction from a person in a house like that would be to welcome fresh air and light.

I don’t know if the spirits turned the house into a facsimile of hell to make themselves feel at home and to torment the owner, or whether God allowed it to happen so they would have to work in a nasty sty befitting their supernatural status. Anyway, the resemblance to accounts of hell is obvious.

Here’s something interesting: when people sacrifice or give prayer to God, it fills heaven with pleasant smells. Look it up. If that’s true, given the symmetry of the supernatural, shouldn’t the curses on the spirits in hell make it stink?

I don’t think the spirits that oppose God are entitled to much honor. It wouldn’t make sense, considering how filthy they are. They love evil and hate good, and filth is evil.

I suspect that the lion’s den in the story of Daniel was a picture of hell. Think about it. There were no water hoses in Babylon. Standards of animal care in the ancient world would have been low. They wouldn’t have kept the den very clean, and it was full of huge cats that relieved themselves at will. The den would have been a dark pit full of dry bones (like hell), and the smell would have been beyond description. Daniel was able to visit, but he couldn’t be tormented or held there, just as Jesus visited hell and could not be held. Interesting.

By turning away from God for most of my life, I made myself a sort of outhouse for the wicked. I gave up protection, success, peace, and honor. I allowed myself to be filled with dead men’s bones: the spirits of the children of the angels. I let supernatural bullies move in and torment me. They sent their human servants to overcome me. I loved darkness and filth and hated light and cleanliness. I seemed okay by earth standards, but then so did the hypocritical priests who hated Jesus. Whitewashed tombs look fine from outside.

If you’re like me, my situation should sound familiar. Abusive people (mostly “friends” and relatives) used me like a toilet. When they wanted this or that, they walked over and defecated their problems into me and walked away relieved. Then I was left with the mess, and it festered inside me. I was like a diaper they passed around. Do you have an addict, a molester, an abusive boss, a friend who puts you down all the time, or a wife-beater in your life? Has someone spent your inheritance? Does someone who claims to love you make you pay his gambling debts? You should be familiar with the sensation I’m describing. The reason you’re in this position is your failure to align yourself with God.

Now I’m going through the slow process of having God wash out the filth I packed into myself over the course of decades, and the feculent abusers in my life are being driven out and beaten, as they should be. I hit plateaus. I slide backward from time to time. It’s not instantaneous, and it can be fatiguing. That’s all my fault. God never slipped up. I did. I won’t complain. In spite of the setbacks, it’s wonderful.

The Bible says the kingdom of God is inside us. The supernatural realm is symmetrical. If the kingdom of God isn’t inside you, then hell must be. The Bible says you can’t be neutral.

It’s a very good sign when a prosperity preacher condemns you and calls you a traitor. It’s an undeserved honor. No one should be discouraged when it happens. These people push others into hell, and they keep them out of the presence of God. Peter and Jude warned us about Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn and the rest. It shouldn’t upset us when we see their prophetic words proven true. We should see it as encouragement.

I don’t have anything nice to say about Satan. He rules the universe’s septic tank, and one day it’s going to be pumped out. It can’t happen fast enough for me.

Plus Wild Guesses About Foreign Policy

I am trying to make sense of the Syria bombing.

I think it’s safe to say that most Trump voters want the US to spend less time being the adult in a room full of children. We have spent a lot of time trying to save nations that didn’t deserve or consent to be saved. To provide two examples, the Somalis and Afghans aren’t ready for civilization. The South Vietnamese weren’t unified in support of freedom and capitalism. The Iraqis are still pretty wobbly. We assume everyone loves democracy, but a lot of people in Iraq actually prefer a dictatorship; something about having a big, strong scary warlord look after them.

Trump the candidate was against intervening too much in the affairs of other countries. Trump the president just bombed Syria over a completely internal matter: the gassing of Syrians by the Syrian government. What a bizarre week this has been. Many liberals actually took a break from vandalizing Ivana Trump shoe displays in malls to back up Trump’s Syrian adventure. Many conservatives are wondering if Trump has gone native in liberal, globalist DC.

To add to the complexity, Trump greatly offended Vladimir Putin when he bombed Syria. The baseless leftist narrative up till now has been that Trump is Putin’s puppet. Somehow, Putin bribed a billionaire to run for president and do his bidding. Because it’s so easy to find things a billionaire can’t get without Putin’s help. Such as…???

Trump gave up billions of dollars in potential earnings to become president, yet we’re supposed to believe he has some venal motive involving compensation from Putin. What compensation could Putin offer that would begin to make up for what Trump gave up voluntarily? No such compensation exists.

Liberals could not understand that, so they pushed the ridiculous Russian Connection. What can they say now? That it’s an inside job? That Putin got Trump to bomb Syria to cover up their ties? It looks like the Russia canard is finally dead, except among the truly insane.

Maybe nuclear war will convince the stragglers Trump is sincere.

Some conservatives like the fact that Trump showed courage and initiative. Obama’s foreign policy consisted mostly of apologizing and selling out American workers. Trump realizes he’s our president, not China’s or Mexico’s. It’s good that Trump is not letting us get pushed around quite so much. I can see why people are happy he took some sort of stand on something.

I’m not sure what to think of the attack. I don’t read the news as much as I used to. My overall impression is that what Trump did will work out well, provided he stops now.

It’s hard to argue with anyone who sends 59 affordable missiles, with no boots on the ground, to kill totalitarian goons who use poison gas on civilians (or anyone else). You can argue that every nation in the world has an interest in deterring the use of gas. But now the Syrians, no doubt with Russia’s help, are attacking the gassed area again, with conventional weapons. Trump needs to let that slide. When you go from punishing the use of gas to punishing other countries for suppressing rebels, you cross the line from reasonable intervention to overweening nannyism. All over the world, various nations are attacking each other with conventional weapons, and we need to understand that it’s not always (or often) our place to jump in and break it up. Often, it’s not even possible to do an effective job. We just waste money and lives, and we make the world resent us even more.

If Trump stays out of Syria now, in my opinion, it will show he knows what he’s doing. If he decides to be the Lone Ranger plus the Magnificent Seven, it will suggest he’s winging it and forgetting all about his campaign platform.

Whatever he does, he needs to coerce the Muslims to accept Syrian refugees. It’s amazing that we’re expected to take them when the Saudis are afraid of them.

It’s hard to guess what he’ll do. He has been a conservative for less time than it takes paint to dry, so for all we know, he could morph into Obama this year. How sincere is his conversion? No one knows.

If he goes all New World Order on us, at least we got Gorsuch out of it, and we stopped Hillary Clinton. Unless two Supreme Court justices die in the near future, we should have a relatively sane panel up there determining our fate. That’s a big deal. One more Ginsburg would almost be grounds for mass suicide. Cuba-style property seizures and the internment of conservative undesirables would be less than a decade away.

Here is how I feel: Ronald Reagan and George Washington didn’t run in 2016, so we voted as well as we could. Trump is much better than the president we deserve, so I am content.

In other news, I am planning to make an offer on a house. My dad and I made a deal a long time ago, and now he’s holding up his end. He’s going to get a place up north, and I will go with him and look after him. For what we are willing to spend, given the location constraints you get with an elderly person, we are pretty much limited to properties under 25 acres. We found a neat place in northern Florida, and I am hoping we can work something out with the sellers.

I can put up a photo or two. The green paint is not what I would have gone with, but it’s helpful if it discourages other buyers.

The place comes with a big outbuilding, a small horse barn, and a lonnnnnnnng driveway with a sturdy steel gate. You can see a grand total of one other house from the yard. There is a big 3-car garage which will be perfect for machine tools and a split air conditioner. I would rather have 300 acres farther out, but this is good enough. It’s a whole lot better than what I expected.

The property appraised for much less than the asking price, so that’s a concern. The sellers got royally taken when they bought the farm, and they may not realize that yet. When they get their own appraisal, maybe they’ll see things our way.

Some people are surprised I paid for an appraisal already. I don’t get that. How else would I know what to offer? Realtors pull listing prices out of thin air. Also, appraising is not a guessing game. There are rules and tables and so on. You have to be trained and licensed. It’s much better than relying on your gut instinct. That being said, my gut instinct was pretty close to the appraised value.

If I lose a few hundred bucks because the sellers won’t listen to reality, good for me. It beats overpaying by a hundred grand.

Obvious.

I don’t think anyone should criticize me, given that the sellers overpaid by maybe $200,000.

I can’t wait to leave Miami. There is literally nothing here I will miss. You don’t have to worry about me turning into a pillar of salt. To me, “goodbye” means “goodbye.” Ask anyone I’ve cut loose. I don’t come around a week later asking to be taken back. I amaze people with my clean breaks. I don’t miss the friends I cut off. I don’t miss anyone I dated. If I decided to rid myself of you, it was because you made me miserable and made my mind up for me.

My dad has had it with Miami, too. The traffic is much worse than it was even five years ago, and the people are as rude as ever. He can’t really get around any more; he forgets where he’s going. If he has to go anywhere other than a few very familiar places, I have to drive him. Maybe in northern Florida, with its simple grid and low traffic, he would be able to do a little more driving without fear of becoming a silver alert.

The other night, I was lying in bed, and I started imagining how nice it would be not to have the neighbors’ security lights shining in my window, and to be awakened by the alarm clock instead of construction crews and garbage men playing rap music on their truck radios. I can’t even imagine it. And what does a dark sky look like? What does twilight look like? Do they have twilight in northern Florida? We don’t have it here. It’s sunny, then a little grey appears in the sky, and then BLAM, it’s dark. Then, if it’s Saturday night and you’re trying to sleep so you can get up early for church, the loud salsa music starts.

If this property doesn’t work, I’m going back to the list to check the next two options. I will not waste time.

What’s happening is the breaking of a stronghold. I chose Miami. I chose rebellion. I chose to turn down a life of prayer. I gave myself to the filthy spirits that run South Florida, and they held on tight. Then I wised up, and it took me quite some time to break the chains I had put on myself. You can’t expect God to jump up and rescue you instantly when your problems were caused by rejecting him. It will be very kind of God to save me at all. I’m not upset that it took so long. I’m just glad he’s willing to do it while I’m still alive and relatively able.

Maybe if the Norks bomb Miami and Atlanta, I’ll be far enough away to avoid fallout and grow my own food. The farm has a well and a generator. Whatever happens, it will beat being in Miami, surrounded by God-hating throngs of people who will gladly invade my house and take what I have just because I’m an old white Christian who supports Israel and voted for Trump. Miami is mostly ghettos, and ghetto people don’t take care of themselves. They let other people care of them, in exchange for votes. They are not prepared for an interruption of the food supply. They don’t save money. If life gets hard, they will invade homes to loot, and if they find the residents inside, they will punish them as 1% oppressors.

You don’t have to be a white supremacist to be concerned about anti-white racism. It’s very real, it’s widespread, it’s extremely cruel and ruthless (because it’s based on a victimhood mentality) and it’s nothing to take lightly. It simmers all the time, but as I personally witnessed after Hurricane Andrew, disasters make it boil over into plain view. We can’t change it, but we can make some effort to protect ourselves with distance. And there are some places where whites, blacks, and Mexicans are not at each other’s throats, believe it or not.

After Andrew, many people had to sit in their front yards holding firearms. And that was just a hurricane. The looters still had food, and the government was busy helping them with their needs. They didn’t loot because of need; it was just sorriness and meanness. A lot of people are just waiting for an excuse to hurt others.

No one, regardless of race, should live within 20 miles of a ghetto. I’m about two miles away from two ghettos, and seedy, violent downtown Miami is only five miles away.

I would appreciate prayers regarding my choice of geographical location and the purchase of a house. I don’t know what I’m doing. Only God knows where I should be.

Thanks for any help you can give me. I look forward to blogging my move.

Wrong Articles Lovingly Crafted by Men Wearing Spanx

I guess I’ll never get tired of bashing Popular Mechanics. I subscribed a few years back, and I let the subscription lapse because the magazine was worthless. It was full of articles introducing suspiciously diverse startup executives with an average age of 15. “Chu Ming Wai is one of Silicon Valley’s first lesbian, Chinese, vegan, body-mod enthusiast 3-D printer designers, and her new printer, the Sapphobot, only prints using free-trade tofu thread!” Yeah, okay; I’m aware that people who aren’t old white men start companies. What does this have to do with choosing the best drill press?

They also filled their pages with articles that were really ads, and the ads were for bad products. One wonders if payola was involved. “You really need this wi-fi-ready solar-powered hammer that also plays Justin Bieber MP3s! Watch as transgender startup exec Devadip Jaigurudevaom-Gonzalez uses it to peel sustainable-farmed vanilla beans for his homeopathic mocha and quinoa-paste enema!”

The magazine proudly features articles written by people who admit they don’t know anything about tools. What????!!!! I don’t think it was always like that. I’m pretty sure it used to be staffed by incredibly savvy old guys who wore khaki pants up to their armpits, slicked their hair with Vitalis, killed all sorts of Japanese on Okinawa, and knew how to weld mine-damaged landing craft hulls with a Zippo.

Glenn Reynolds writes for Pop Mech. Come on. You and I both know what’s in his tool collection: a hammer with one broken claw and a butter knife he thinks is a screwdriver.

I just found an interesting Internet post from Pop Mech. Some Redditor was using an angle grinder with a cutoff disk, and the disk blew up. He posted a photo of himself wearing safety glasses in which a disk fragment is deeply imbedded. Pop Mech’s title: “This is Why You Wear Safety Glasses.”

Here’s the thing. When you use a cutoff disk with an angle grinder, you don’t wear safety glasses. You wear a face shield, ear plugs, safety glasses, leather gloves, a leather apron, and a dust mask. Better yet, hand the grinder to someone like Reynolds and dare him to do the job.

It’s no wonder they were wrong. The guy who wrote the piece is a kid named Eric. From his aggressively hip, kooky byline photo, he appears to be about nine. I looked at his stuff. It’s all about encryption, ISP’s, and wearing women’s underwear. I may have made that last bit up. Anyway, he’s no Charlie Allnut. He probably whispers “lefty loosey” when he backs out the screws on an Ipad.

Electronics and Mechanics, in the Pop Mech sense of the word, are about as closely related as the Bolshoi Ballet and plumber’s crack. There is nothing mechanical about turning on your PC and logging into 4chan.

Grinders are fascinating, because they look safe but they’re incredibly dangerous. I was using one a few years back, and even though I was wearing glasses and a face shield, a piece of a wire knot flew right into my eye. I never did understand that. But grinders are treacherous.

The guy in the Reddit photo did not do it right, regardless of what Eric the Half-a-Handyman thinks (obscure reference). He only wore glasses. If the fragment had missed them, it could have torn through his lips and gone into his mouth. It could have shredded a thumb. It could have gone into his belly.

Grinder bits have been known to go through face shields, enter people’s abdominal cavities, and tear fingers off. Writing this, I’m starting to wonder why I own one.

When you use a grinder, you have to be very smart. You can’t put pressure on it. You have to keep as much of yourself as possible out of the disk plane. You can’t twist the disk. You have to leave the guard on the machine. You have to make sure no one is in front of you. Come on, Eric. You’re getting paid. You should know this.

Of course, while I’m willing to lecture and criticize, I use a grinder unsafely all the time. I have to knock that off. I don’t even own an leather apron. I don’t wear gloves when I use it. I really need to get on top of that, as of today.

I read an interesting remark about combat, from one Paul Schussel. He’s a World War Two vet. He said you go into battle thinking, “It can’t happen to me.” Then you start thinking it can happen to you if you’re not careful. Then you realize it WILL happen to you, no matter what you do. If you don’t get sent home, eventually you will be hurt or killed. Tools work the same way. Bad stuff is going to happen, and the more you like and use tools, the sooner and more often you can expect it. You need to be serious and knowledgeable about safety. Unlike Eric, Devadip, and Chu Ming.

Pop Mech used to be a neat and very manly magazine. I know because you can find PDF’s on the Internet. “Build Your Own Metal Lathe.” “Build a Bullet Trap for Your Basement.” “Use Your Cranium as an Anvil for Making Horseshoes.” “Set Fire to Your Face With an Acetylene Torch, Deliberately, and Stand in Front of Your Horrified Kids Laughing to Show Them What Kind of Men Came Back From Iwo Jima With Sea Bags Full of Japanese Ears.”

Those days are gone forever. Maybe the smart move is to collect old PDF’s.

I don’t have time to gripe about safety all day, so I’ll offer a brief tip. If you haven’t been trained to use a drill press, bench grinder, angle grinder, table saw, or metal lathe, and you use any of these tools regularly, you are probably going to send yourself or a pal to the ER one day. For no good reason at all.

Eric, meanwhile, will be defying the odds if he scalds his pinky steaming almond milk for his cappuccino.

Happy tooling.

From F to C-Minus

I have become a total TIG welding expert.

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say I have put down a few beads that wouldn’t elicit shrieking from an instructor if he glanced at them from across a street in the dark.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know I got a Chinese TIG machine recently, and I’ve been trying to make it function. I clamped some crap steel to the tool rest of my belt grinder and tried to make fillet welds. After that, I tried to lay beads down on a piece of angle iron and some rectangular tubing that came from a treadmill.

The first effort was a horror. Since then, I’ve managed to create some beads that could almost be called welds. Things keep getting better.

I have a few tips for other beginners. Believe it or not, these tips are really good.

1. Get a real welding jacket. Cotton is fine. I got a Tillman 9230. It’s extremely ugly, but it’s heavy flame-retardant cotton, and it’s made with welding in mind. The sleeves have snaps at the cuffs that tighten them up to keep UV out and make the cuffs fit inside welding gloves. It’s better than the crummy old dress shirt I used to use.

2. Go ahead and buy some gas lenses. I’m not sure why welders ship with regular nozzles, since most people agree that gas lenses are better the vast majority of the time. For around thirty bucks, Welding City will send you good Chinese lenses and the associated collets and so on. With a lens you will be able to stick the tungsten farther out and see what you’re welding. It will also shorten up the torch.

3. Get a welding table. Don’t be so cheap. I’ve welded things on the garage floor and my wooden bench, but I don’t recommend it. Welding on wood is always exciting, because you have to think about the weld while keeping an eye on the wood to see if it’s on fire. Welding on the floor is awkward. That’s fine for MIG, but it won’t work with TIG, which takes much more coordination. Harbor Freight has a great table for $55 (after coupon). It’s small and light. It folds away fast. It doesn’t begin to compare to an inch-thick monster that will hold the rear end from a car, but for 95% of your jobs, it will work great. It has lots of slots, and you can clamp things to it. You’ll like it.

For three times as much, you can get a different version that comes with clamps, welding magnets, and wheels. I forget the brand name.

4. Find some decent metal to weld. I’ve been using angle iron and powdercoated tubing. Half of my welding time is taken up cleaning crap off the metal. Save yourself the aggravation and buy something that isn’t covered with scale, paint, or powdercoating.

5. Buy a torch holder. Riverweld makes a magnetic job which is magnificent. The magnet must be rare earth, because it holds like an alligator. If you don’t have a holder, you’re going to put your torch on the floor or try to hang it on things, and it will fall and break the ceramic cup.

6. Buy a BSX Flak Finger. This is a fiberglass sleeve you put your ring finger and pinky into. It doesn’t transmit heat. You will want to rest your right hand on the work for control, and the work will get very hot. The Flak Finger will keep you cool, and because it has a wrist strap to hold it in place, it won’t fall off a hundred times a day, like a competitor’s product, the Tig Finger.

7. You’re going to be welding 1/8″ steel. That’s pretty much inevitable, because it’s what’s most widely available for practice. For this material, use a 3/32″ tungsten (purple rare earth is fine), not 1/16″ like the books recommend. Use 3/32″ filler. Set the amps at 125 (one per thousandth of material). You should be fine.

8. Consider a belt grinder for tungsten. Grinding electrodes will mess up your bench grinder by gouging the wheel. If you use a belt grinder, you can dedicate one belt to electrodes. If you ever feel like you have to be super careful about contamination, you just grab a new belt.

9. Get a couple of Strong Arm clamps. These are just like Bessey clamps, but they’re Chinese. They’re very well made, and they come with a neat tubing attachment. You’ll like them for holding stuff on the table.

10. Get a knot wheel for your angle grinder. If you don’t have an angle grinder, get an angle grinder. These things clean metal fast.

As noted in earlier posts, I have an Eastwood “Professional Welding Cart,” which is a two-tier cart with rings for two bottles. Actually, I have two carts, because the first one I ordered had a minor defect, and instead of sending the defective part, Eastwood sent a second cart. I now have the TIG on the bottom shelf, my MIG on the top shelf, a 125-cu.ft. argon tank in one ring, and an 80-cu.ft. C25 tank in the other. It’s very nice. If you’re looking for a two-welder cart, this one is one of the best Chinese choices. A lot of the others are known to bend and fall apart.

The AlphaTIG welder just barely fits on the bottom shelf of this cart. You have to put it on the cart before you attach the top shelf, and then the clearance is about 1/4″. Good enough! You’ll have problems with the transparent panel cover staying in the up position, because the shelf will be in the way, but that’s a small price to pay.

I’ll post a photo of my latest “welds.” The ones at top left are the undersides of beads from an earlier session.

These are not great welds, but they’re better than the random blobs I put down the first time around. They’re grey, and I think that’s caused by overdoing the amperage. Not sure. I don’t know if the penetration is good. I should cut the steel and see.

I had a big problem with my left glove heating up. It turned out I was leaning the torch too far, so it was pointed at my left hand. This melts the rod before it gets to the weld, and it also roasts your fingertips. The torch should be within 10 degrees of perpendicular.

I would say I am now good enough to TIG weld two parts in an emergency. If I wanted them done well, I would use MIG. I figure I’ll be able to do a decent TIG weld in a week or two.

I can tell TIG is going to be wonderful. MIG is fast and powerful and puts fewer demands on variables such as cleanliness and work positioning, but it’s clumsy. TIG can make beautiful, precise welds you just can’t get with MIG. You get much more control. If you want to put a muffler on a Jeep in a dirty garage while lying on your back, use MIG. If you want to put a trigger guard on a Russian shotgun, use TIG.

The welder I got is an inverter welder, and that means it doesn’t suck much power. You can run it using the socket next to your nightstand if you want. Doesn’t have to be 220 unless you weld thick metal. That’s a huge convenience. I can’t MIG weld anything more than 20 feet from my 220 socket, but I can TIG anywhere an extension cord will reach.

Filler rods are disappearing at a high rate. I go through one per session. I am told you can weld the nubs together to make new rods, but I have another tip which is better. Buy big packages, and look for deals. If you buy ten pounds of steel rods on Amazon in pound tubes, it will run you $90. If you buy one ten-pound package, and you shop around, it’s $25.

Someone gave me a neat tip for really small filler: use MIG wire. It’s the same stuff.

If I ever weld two pieces of metal together in any sort of competent fashion, I will be back to post photos.

A Stupid House is a Happy House

I have a smartphone. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. If it’s not the Mark of the Beast, at the very least, it’s his friendship ring. I gave in and jumped on the smartphone wagon, but I do not want a smart house.

To some degree, I’ve already bought into the smart house paradigm. I’ve had a couple of Internet-connected burglar alarms hooked up. They’re for rental properties. I’m not that concerned about the problems a tenant might have with Big Brother. I suppose in the case of tenants, Big Brother is me. I don’t want to sink any farther into the quicksand, though. I don’t want smart appliances or a smart air conditioner. After reading about a company called Garadget, I don’t want a smart garage door opener.

Garadget sells a garage-door-opening system that hooks up to the web. A customer bought it, and then he could not get it to work. Filled with the kind of fury one can only experience during divorce or when rendered impotent by an intransigent computerized device, the customer went online and left some abusive reviews. He told other people not to buy the product.

Mr. Garadget himself, one Denis Grisak, responded by taking control of the garage door system. He cut the customer’s access to his server, and the customer was no longer able to open his own garage door using his phone.

Think about that. You come home from work, you want to pull the car into the garage, you try to open the door with a gadget you paid for, and you can’t do it, because some jerky nerd a thousand miles away has taken control of your opener. It could have been worse, because Grisak wasn’t able to disable whatever system was in place before Garadget was installed, but still. You don’t treat customers like this, and at the very least, you give them prior notice.

When the public became aware of Grisak’s disturbing behavior, a certain percentage were smart enough to take the consumer’s side, and Grisak had to yield. Although he gave in, he seems completely unrepentant. A customer insulted his product, and he seems to feel entitled to blockade the customer electronically and deny him the use of something he paid for.

Here’s something crazy: a lot of people–maladjusted tech types, I assume–think Grisak was right to do what he did. This is the scary thing about the story. People are too brainwashed and ignorant to understand how serious it is when a stranger who is legally obligated to look out for you betrays your trust and turns on you.

When Garadget took the customer’s cash, it assumed a duty to him. It accepted a position of trust and responsibility. Grisak may not get that, but it’s true. Think of it this way: when you buy a “dumb” garage door opener, the person who installs it has a clear obligation to refrain from using his skills to lock you out and force you to lift the door manually. That obligation doesn’t change just because the equipment is a little different.

I’ve written about this before: tech people have no oversight. They have almost no regulation. As a lawyer, if I represent a client, I am forced to assume a position of near-total loyalty. If I get out of line, I can lose my license and possibly go to the penitentiary. On the other hand, what if I run a hosting company? I can do just about anything I want. I remember a well-known blogger complaining that a cantankerous host company operator went through her emails during a feud. In that situation, the blogger had no one to run to except possibly a very expensive lawyer. Nerds have no bar association or department of professional regulation. Most don’t have to have licenses.

Here we are, in a world full of potentially devastating technology, depending on immature people with small hearts and no right brains.

What could possibly go wrong?

The CIA and God knows which other government agencies can wake your smartphone up right now and listen to you. Presumably, they can turn the camera on; at least one school district (presumably less savvy than the CIA) has done it with student laptops. That’s terrible, but we put up with it, because Americans don’t really care about liberty. As bad as it is when the government does things like that (and they do it around the clock), it’s worse when it’s some 23-year-old kid who makes six figures handling other people’s sensitive data.

In four or five years, you won’t be able to buy a vehicle the government can’t shut down at will. Count on it. Ten years later, you’ll probably need a permit to operate a car that isn’t self-driving. The government will be in the system, and when you tell the car where you want to go, if Uncle Sam doesn’t agree, you will have to walk.

No matter what I do, the lamprey of technology is going to consume more and more of me, but I don’t have to make it worse by inviting strangers to spy on my washing machine.

The great mass of sheep are helping Big Brother shove this stuff down our throats. They’re extremely excited about gadgets, convenience, and safety. They’re too stupid to know what liberty is or why it’s harmful to lose it. When the TSA took nude photos of us at airports, the indignant sheep bleated, “Would you rather be blown up?” When private companies give us gadgets in exchange for liberty and privacy, they say, “Would you rather have things the way they used to be? Do you want to go back to [insert minor inconvenience here]?”

About 400,000 Americans sacrificed themselves in World War Two, in exchange for things like privacy, freedom of movement, and freedom of speech. Obviously, to generations past, liberty was very, very important. No one seems to understand that now. There are worse things than dying in a terrorist bombing. Similarly, there are worse things than having to operate your home’s thermostat by hand, exhausting though it is.

Grisak isn’t an outlier; he represents a large segment of his colleagues. If you know nerds, you know I’m right. Most people who are technically inclined are deficient in other areas. Most physicists would have a hard time finishing a crossword puzzle (I know from watching them.). People who devote their lives to technology tend to lack empathy, love, and mercy. They thrive in an artificial online environment that promotes cruelty, dishonesty, and pride.

We used to think nuclear weapons were our big existential threat. It turned out it wasn’t that hard to control them. Until Clinton and Obama demonstrated extraordinary incompetence by allowing the Norks to arm themselves, the world managed to rein in nuclear aggression. The tech community isn’t like that. It’s impossible to control. It has no location. It has no government or identifiable leader. It has a million ways to escape detection and defy authority. And here we are, pulling its tentacles and claws into our houses. Technology will succeed where bombs failed.

It’s unfortunate, but the second we get the power to do a thing, we usually decide we need to do it. We “need” to be able to look at the contents of our refrigerators before we drive home from work. We “need” cars the manufacturers can unlock or shut down remotely. Grisak’s customer “needed” an Internet garage door opener, obviously. In reality, much of this junk wastes our time and money and leaves us no better off.

Technology gives us the illusion of omnipotence. Humans have always wanted the power of gods with none of the pesky moral obligations.

I remember Hurricane Andrew, which may seem irrelevant until I explain. Andrew hit before the Internet was part of most American lives, but it came between us and the technology we had at the time. The power was out for weeks. So was the water. So were the phones. We couldn’t watch cable. We couldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t physically present. For a number of days, we couldn’t even drive. The thing is, we survived, and it wasn’t that bad. Once you found a cool place to sleep and a place to shower, you were okay. You could read books. You could talk to other people. You could eat reasonably good food out of a cooler or fresh off a grill. The point I’m making is that we clutter our lives with a lot of crap that only seems necessary. A natural disaster will help you understand that.

I’m not saying we should give up all of our toys, but a lot of them convey worthless benefits and have hidden costs that are truly obscene.

This problem is more acute if you’re conservative or Christian. Tech people, overwhelmingly, dislike Christianity and Republicans. They really hate Trump. The polarization of American society is becoming more and more venomous, and in the tech area, people who hate us hold most of the cards. They’re already abusing the power. Facebook is notorious for persecuting us. Twitter goes after us. So does Google. Ebay and Paypal banned firearms sales. So did Craigslist.

The government, putatively, is required to be impartial with regard to religion, and it’s supposed to keep its hands off political speech. Unfortunately, private entities aren’t bound by the Bill of Rights, and as we become more dependent on them, we give them power the government never had. Many people depend on tech nerds for their livelihood. Many people make a living on Youtube. People use Facebook to promote their businesses. We are deeply plugged in, and there is no legal guarantee that we can’t be unplugged without our consent.

To shut down someone’s Youtube channel or Facebook page arbitrarily is, in some cases, more damaging than any restraint the goverment could impose, yet it’s completely legal. Remember what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos? He depended on Twitter to feed himself, and he got the boot. He had no recourse whatsoever. He still had freedom of speech, but it lost most of its value because he lost his ability to be heard. I’m not saying I miss him, but if he’s vulnerable, so are you.

For many people, the liberty to use online services is just as important as the liberty to travel and speak, but there is no way to protect it, because we are not legally entitled to it. No one has a Constitutional right to a Facebook page. Right now, greed is our only protection. The tech Borg will try not to offend us too much, because they need our participation in order to make money. If they ever decide stifling us is worth the financial sacrifice, we will be in trouble.

I’m glad no one else can control my garage door, turn on my sprinklers, or stop my truck in the middle of the road. I’m going to try not to give more control to the nerd collective than I absolutely have to. They have so much control already, though, I wonder if there is any point in resisting.

At least I’m aware of what’s happening. That counts for a lot.

I hope this Grisak person has a moment of self-awareness and comes to understand how wrong he was. A person a bad temper and a control-based mindset has no business in a position of trust.

It’s Like Al Franken has Gone to Heaven, and We’re Forced to Watch

I made conservatives mad when I gave up on Ann Coulter and Ted Nugent, and if anyone had known about it, they probably would have been mad when I said I didn’t support Milo Yiannopoulos. I guess I’ll continue doing what I do best: Bill O’Reilly is not helping us.

Leftists are digging up dirt on O’Reilly, pointing out that he has been accused of sexual harassment on a number of occasions. He has been sued for it, successfully. Fox has paid out eight figures in hush money. O’Reilly doesn’t admit fault. At all.

Conservatives are saying it’s a witch hunt (like the Bork hearings or ridiculous attacks on Trump over Russia, which were and are bona fide witch hunts). They’re saying O’Reilly is the victim here. Come on. Be serious.

To anyone who says leftists don’t care about harassment, and that the O’Reilly siege is only about silencing a prominent conservative, I say, “I agree.” Leftists don’t care about the many women Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, and the rest of the Clinton Gang destroyed or at least soiled. They don’t care about them any more than they care about the millions of women who have been pressured into abortions they didn’t want. That’s true. Doesn’t matter. If O’Reilly is guilty of the things of which he has been accused, he should be released.

Is it really that big a deal if the office horndog makes advances toward disgusted women? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. It depends on the facts. Merely asking someone out is not harassment. But O’Reilly is accused of far worse things. He is accused of extremely gross, persistent advances, and of coupling them with threats and attacks. His accusers say he followed through on his threats. He is accused of using his power to make and break careers to push women into the sack with him.

That’s a whole lot worse than a few inappropriate come-ons.

No sane person would want his mother or sister to have her career wrecked by a creep who sees other people as disposable receptacles, and seeing them give in and allow themselves to be violated would be even worse.

As for the advances themselves, at least in the case of former producer Andrea Mackris, they were pretty bad. In her complaint, she said she had recorded him, and the transcribed portions are extremely graphic, prolonged descriptions of the sex acts he wanted to perform. The recordings must have existed, because no lawyer on earth would willingly make up transcriptions and submit them to a court, knowing he would be forced to come up with actual recordings later. Disbarment would only be the beginning of his problems.

If the recordings hadn’t existed, Fox would have forced Mackris’s lawyer to admit it, and Fox wouldn’t shell out $13 million to settle frivolous suits it expected to win. It seems likely that O’Reilly told his counsel the recordings existed, and Fox buckled and paid the plaintiff off.

I am tempted to remind everyone that O’Reilly is not indispensable. He can be replaced easily. He’s not really that good at what he does. But to talk about his value to conservatism would be to take the position that a highly successful ally should be permitted to profit from egregious, malicious wrongdoing simply because of his value to a cause. That’s wrong. If a lowly copywriter would be fired for what O’Reilly did, then O’Reilly should be whacked with the same axe.

If we’re going to talk sympathy and patience, where is the sympathy for the women? Losing your career is a whole lot worse than losing one gig.

To argue that O’Reilly’s supposed value to the right justifies letting him ruin women’s careers is to commit the sin of the O.J. jurors, who would literally have permitted Simpson to cut his ex-wife’s throat in the courtroom without repercussion. “I’m on your side, and I’m successful” is not a good excuse for destroying people in the name of base, lower-brain drives.

If I’m against O’Reilly, why am I not against Trump? Mainly because Trump has not been accused of harassment. He has been accused of adultery (consensual) and putting his hands on willing women (also consensual). Leftist propagandists have accused him of sexual assault, but they based their claims on a video in which he described consensual contact. Also, Trump has not been accused of linking women’s careers to their pliability. O’Reilly and Trump and very different.

I’m not thrilled that a serial adulterer is in the White House, but I don’t go around crusading for adulterers and fornicators to be fired. That standard wouldn’t leave many people standing. That would be a very personal standard based on my religious views. My stand on O’Reilly is pretty much the same standard the vast majority of Americans would observe.

I can be a good Christian and not insist every person who commits gross sexual sin be fired, but I can’t see myself pleasing God AND insisting a persistent destroyer of weaker people should keep his job.

If the poop on O’Reilly is true, and it looks like much of it is, then he may a very bad guy. It’s easy to excuse inappropriate flirting, but ruining people who turn you down is sick and cruel. It goes beyond lust, which is something everyone has to fight with, and into the realm of viciousness. It is also blatant corruption.

What if he decided to come clean and change his ways? What if he apologized on the air and said he intended to turn over a new leaf? Would that justify keeping him? I don’t know. There has to be some punishment for what he has done already, and merely losing a job is not a penalty commensurate with the offenses in question.

I say let him go. He has had plenty of chances to turn this around, and it hasn’t happened.

That’s the memo for today. Name and town, if you wish to opine.

Wishes Aren’t Horses

I read some interesting stuff this weekend, and it got me thinking about the leftist obsession with lying about history.

First off, the Niihau Incident.

Niihau is one of the main islands of Hawaii, and it’s privately owned. During the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese thought it was uninhabited, and they instructed fighters with damaged planes to set down there and wait for rescue. A pilot named Nishikaichi did just that. He crashed a Zero there.

When Nishikaichi landed, the first person to see him was a Hawaiian named Hawilo Kaleohano. Mr. Kaleohano didn’t know about the filthy attack on our naval base, or the piles of dead bodies, or the garbage cans full of amputated limbs, but he knew our relations with the Japanese were bad, so he took the pilot’s papers and pistol and refused to return them.

The Hawaiians were polite to Nishikaichi and threw him a party, but they absolutely refused to hand over his belongings.

Three interpreters worked with the Hawaiians. The first was a Japanese-born resident named Shintano. He walked off abruptly and abandoned the effort. The next two were an American-born couple, Yoshio and Irene Harada. Obviously, they were American citizens.

The Haradas turned on the Hawaiians. They bickered with them, insisting, without success, that Nishikaichi’s belongings be returned.

Shintano also turned on his neighbors, offering them $200 for the items Nishikaichi wanted. He claimed it was a matter of life and death.

The Haradas and Shintano helped Nishikaichi escape and recover his pistol. They helped him remove two machine guns from the plane and take them with him. With their assistance, he was able to take a hostage and demand his items. In the end, the Hawaiians had to attack and disarm him, and in the process, one received three non-fatal gunshot wounds. Thankfully, the wounded man and his wife were able to crush Nishikaichi’s skull with a rock and slit his throat.

Mr. Harada was so distressed, he shot himself to death on the spot.

Why is this interesting? Because not too long ago, a Japanese-American group succeeded in getting the Haradas’ treason expunged from an exhibit at a museum. The island was (still is) owned by a family named Robinson, and the Robinsons generously donated the Zero’s remains to the Pacific Aviation Museum in Pearl Harbor. The Robinsons donated the Zero with the understanding that the Haradas would be mentioned in the display, so they are not happy.

Michelle Malkin, an American of Asian extraction, wrote about this incident in her head-exploding book, In Defense of Internment. At the time, leftists were flipping out over profiling, which, in retrospect, turned out to be a great idea we needed to implement. Malkin’s thesis was that, yes, foreigners and even the children of foreigners DO sometimes turn against us in times of war, and it makes perfect sense to give Muslims added scrutiny. Instead of focusing on the only group likely to perform major acts of terrorism, our addled keepers took naked pictures of every person who tried to board a plane.

When human beings plan their actions, they generally look to the past for guidance. That only works when they have all the facts. Garbage in; garbage out. If we are going to hide history from ourselves, how are we supposed to learn from it? The Haradas were unquestionably traitors. The Niihau Incident should have been considered and publicized when we were falling all over ourselves, pretending terrorism was not primarily a Muslim issue. We should be talking about it today when we discuss Trump’s travel bans and the idiocy of making blue-eyed old Christian and Jewish ladies submit to groping at airports.

Here’s the other thing I read about: the real nature of Robert Stroud, better known as “the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

Stroud was not really the Birdman of Alcatraz. He was the Birdman of Leavenworth. He was jailed for beating a man unconscious and shooting him in the back of the head, and he also stabbed a prison guard to death and stabbed another inmate. During his time in Leavenworth, a progressive warden allowed him to raise birds, and he became something of an authority on diseases of pet birds.

He was eventually moved to Alcatraz because he was so dangerous to inmates and prison workers, and because he used his lab equipment to distill alcohol. At Alcatraz, he wasn’t allowed to keep birds.

He was the subject of a ridiculous movie starring Burt Lancaster. In the movie, Stroud seems like a fine person who has repented. All he wants to do is keep his birds and continue studying, but the mean old prison system is against him because, well, it’s just bad!

Burt Lancaster was a very handsome man. He looked great in the movie. He seemed like a reasonable person. In short, he was very different from Robert Stroud.

Stroud’s first known victim was a bartender. Stroud was pimping his own girlfriend, and the bartender engaged her and paid her two dollars instead of the standard price of ten. He also gave her a beating. This is why Stroud beat him. Shooting the unconscious man–an execution–was just an added service.

In prison, Stroud shanked another inmate for telling the guards about a minor rule infraction. He stabbed another who was working with him in a scheme to get drugs. He attacked a hospital orderly who reported him for threatening violence in order to get morphine. He helped start a riot. He also murdered a guard, in front of over a thousand prisoners, for reporting a rule violation.

I just can’t see Burt Lancaster doing those things.

Stroud was filthy. He kept a huge number of birds in his two cells, and he never cleaned up. He was also something of a nudist. He refused to wear any clothes at all in warm weather. To make the picture even worse, he used to shave his entire body, head to toe, which is why he has such short hair in some photos.

Stroud was also a sexual predator. He wrote pornographic stories about kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. He received letters from children after he became famous, and he got in trouble for making sexually suggestive remarks in his responses. One of his prison friends, mobster Alvin Karpis, said Stroud talked constantly about raping and killing kids, and Karpis said Stroud intended to do it if he ever got out.

At Leavenworth, he was confined to the hospital because he was aggressive in his homosexual advances to others. In other words, they confined him to keep him from raping other men.

In the movies, sweet old criminals mumble and shuffle and plead at parole hearings. Stroud was different. He told the board he had a long list of people to kill, and he had a short time to do it.

When the movie came out, simple people screamed for Stroud’s release. Film historian Alan Royle put it this way: “What the public really wanted, of course, was to see Burt Lancaster released, not Robert Stroud.”

You can read more of Royle’s thoughts concerning Stroud here: The real ‘Birdman of Alcatraz.’

Here’s the obvious question: what if the movie had told the truth?

Let’s see. A naked Burt Lancaster, shaved from one end to the other, gets dressed and leaves his filthy cells to go have lunch. Along the way, he threatens to rape a few guys, and they duck into doorways. While standing in line, he talks to another prisoner. He grins and his eyes light up as he describes himself raping a child and cutting his throat. He is clearly aroused. Then he notices a guard who turned him in for a rule violation, and he shoves a sharpened spoon through the man’s heart.

Yay. Let’s have a protest. Free Bob! Free poor old Bob the bird lover!

I don’t think so.

Why on earth would anyone make a movie that made this psychopath look good? What was the point? Obviously, the people behind the film were agitating to get Stroud released and prisons reformed, but if you base your notions of reform on gigantic lies, how can they be anything but disastrous when implemented?

Conservatives and Christians are ostracized in the press and entertainment, so the world sees things through a very small and distorted lens. That’s not okay. It causes real harm.

Leftists can’t seem to understand that evil people exist. They think everyone is basically good, and that we can get our enemies to treat us well simply by hugging them and finding out what the world did to them to make them bad. How, then, do you explain people like Ted Bundy? He killed girls, dumped them in the woods, and then returned to their dead bodies over and over to have sex with them. When he was interviewed, he said his parents were fine and that he had a good childhood. According to Psychology Today, Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis “BTK” Rader had good upbringings.

Many people simply enjoy evil. They prefer it. They’re not doing it because no one understands them. They’re not looking for a reason to avoid harming others. They’re looking for opportunities and excuses to harm us. Harming us isn’t the final result of a desperate search for relief from injustice. It’s their primary, most fundamental motivation.

Serial killers keep things like body parts, videos, and weapons so they can look at them when they pleasure themselves. Seeing a rock with hair and skin on it, or a tiny pair of bloody, torn panties excites them sexually. I don’t know if there is a leftist alive who understands that kind of depravity. For some people, life without parole and execution are the only logical solutions. Even God would admit that. He created hell, and he’s the one who puts people there every day. In Noah’s time, he killed the entire human race. Sometimes you have to give up on people.

Yesterday I read about a highly prolific killer named Carl Panzram. He claimed he had raped about a thousand men and boys. He talked about beating a 12-year-old victim until brains came out of his ears. He was happy about it. He killed people because he enjoyed it, the way a normal person might play the guitar or throw a frisbee. When he was sentenced to death, he threatened to kill people who tried to reform him. On death row, he wrote this:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.

After that, when he was hanged, he insulted the executioner. Wouldn’t you love to see Phil Donahue or Barbara Walters sit down with him? He’d have to be pried off of them with crowbars.

Revision of history to fit the naive notions of people who knowingly reject reality is not a good thing, even when people think they’re doing it with good intentions.

I am disgusted by what I’ve read. Unfortunately, the stories of Niihau and Robert Stroud are just part of a monumental smoke screen that covers the world. There is not much that can be done about it.

In the next world, truth will be all I see. I look forward to that, and until then, I will just have to put up with the nonsense I see here.

Another Bad Choice from the Clueless Rightt

I guess I’m behind the curve again, because I just heard about Based Stickman.

If you are blessedly ignorant of the Based Stickman phenomenon, here is a spoiler to protect you: I am about to tell you what I know. If you would rather not hear about it, move on.

Leftists in this country have become very violent. They have a dismal, consistent record of vandalism and battery. They have completely lost the ability to separate concepts such as “protest,” “civil disobedience,”, “riot,” and “lynching.” They don’t think it terms of sit-ins or peaceful marches. They think that every political loss justifies putting on masks and beating innocent people. They no longer understand civil disobedience, which, itself, should always be a last resort. These days, they go to Defcon 1 immediately, and their disobedience, by default, is uncivil.

Conservative activists aren’t completely pure, but anyone who can use Google can confirm that the protest-related craziness that is sweeping the country is, overwhelmingly, a leftist phenomenon.

Black Lives Matter nuts burn stores and shoot cops. They even go after journalists, who are probably their best friends on earth. Anti-Trump people show up at Trump rallies in gangs, wearing masks, and they attack people who are simply speaking and waving signs. On Youtube, you can find all sorts of security videos of leftists stealing Trump signs from people’s yards. It’s hard to find similarly incriminating material featuring right-wing criminals, because by and large, conservatives are more peaceful and respectful of the law.

Liberals make fun of Trump for having a sparsely attended inauguration, and for issuing blatant exaggerations of the crowd’s size. Well, think about it. Washington is a black city. It’s not a little black; it is overwhelmingly black. When people decided whether to attend the event, they had to decide whether to face the high risk of violence, in a violent town populated by people who hate their kind. No wonder people stayed home. And sure enough, conservatives were physically attacked.

The goal of liberal violence (strange term) is to keep conservatives from gathering and speaking. If you can shut people up and keep them off the streets, you can create the illusion that their numbers are small, and that leads others to dismiss them and join the other side.

It’s a bad time to be a conservative at a public event, and naturally, some conservatives have decided the smart move is to respond to violence with violence. This, I believe, is the reason for the existence of Based Stickman.

“Based” is clumsy slang for “emotionally and mentally anchored.” “Stickman” just means “guy with a stick.” Based Stickman is a conservative who shows up at events, holding a stick, refusing to be pushed around by leftists criminals. He carries a wooden shield with a flag on it, along with a baseball helmet, knee pads, and what looks like a Home Depot respirator.

One of the big problems with Based Stickman (Can I call him “BS” for short? No, I think I’ll go with “Mr. S.”) is that he gives dishonest leftists a nail to upon which to hang their ridiculous “Conservatives are violent” canard. Unlike most leftists who get physical at events, Mr. S. doesn’t hide his identity, and he doesn’t try to blend into the crowd. Unlike leftists, he doesn’t intend to commit crimes, so he has revealed himself. As a result, he’s like a big, conspicuous officer leading a patrol in the Battle of the Bulge. He’s a great target for pot shots.

Propaganda stories are popping up, using the scary Mr. S. to decry the obvious (yet nearly nonexistent) wave of conservative violence.

Earlier this month, Mr. S. was involved in a scuffle. Leftist criminals wearing masks were going after conservative activists, and one rushed Mr. S. at high speed. Mr. S. cracked him on the head with a stick, breaking it on the skull’s narrow point. There was an arrest, but Mr. S. was not charged.

Of course, liberals are calling for his re-arrest, prosecution, deportation, dismemberment…whatever they can get. They don’t seem to have a big problem with the guy who attacked. They are using Mr. S. as a brush to paint us all with guilt. There is a good chance it will work. It will definitely work among simpletons, and let’s face it: the simpleton bloc is a big chunk of our population.

Here’s another, probably worse, problem with Mr. S.: he is convincing other conservatives that they need to get costumes of their own and beat up the criminals sent to beat conservatives up.

I completely understand the desire and need to protect protesters, even if the police don’t. I can even understand taking a shield, a stick, and a helmet to rallies. As defensive tools, they can save lives and discourage attacks. What I don’t like is the notion that we should to go rallies hoping or intending to commit acts of violence. Liberals do that as a matter of policy, and it makes them morally inferior. We should not completely abandon the moral high ground.

Once we start doing adopting liberal shock-troop tactics, there will no longer be such a thing as a pro-Trump rally. There will only be gang rumbles, and everyone involved will look like a moron. The natural consequence of a situation like that is a state in which the US is simply a battleground where political opponents mass and try to kill each other. I don’t think it could turn into a bona fide civil war, but we could end up with a pointless, endless guerilla war, resulting in martial law and an even greater destruction of personal liberty. The violence would certainly spill out of rallies and protests and into our daily lives.

The reason leftists have so much power over us isn’t that we’re not violent enough. It’s that we aren’t close to God. A people which is close to God will be dominant, without the need for brutality and bloodshed. Leftists are the enemies of God, so it makes sense for them to rely on pepper spray, cowardly masks, fists, and boots. Conservatives are closely identified with Christianity. We should be battling in prayer, and we’re not. If you go to God with your problems (preferably before they arise), you get help. If not, you should go get yourself a stick, and while you’re at it, change sides, because you’re not helping the team at all.

I always write about the hard times ahead. I tell people leftists are going to win. There are places where they aren’t completely in control, and we can retreat to them, but they will get there eventually. We’ll see naked people in gay pride parades in places like Idaho and northern Florida, and our guns will be taken away and melted down. It’s going to happen, and I am resigned to it. But I don’t tell people to fight it in the streets. That will never work.

A lot of conservatives think we can win. They think we’re doing really well. They point to the Trump victory, the high number of GOP governorships, and our control of Congress. They’re dreaming. We lost the popular vote, and the politicians we call conservative are actually moderate enemies of God. They are moderate socialists, enemies of the Jewish state, enemies of Christianity, and, generally, supporters of gay marriage and every type of sexual sin. How can people not see this?

When Trump tried to get rid of Obamacare–a socialist Ponzi scheme–he didn’t try to end it altogether. He tried to replace it with a different socialist scheme. Trump is more supportive of Israel than Obama (i.e. more supportive than Yassir Arafat), but he wants to divide the Jewish state and hand much of it over to Muslims. Trump has no problem with gay marriage, and he and Congress are doing nothing to protect women in locker rooms and restrooms. They are doing nothing to protect Christian businessmen from nuts who insist they work at events they find morally repugnant.

We’re at a party in our own end zone, hosted by the other team, and we think we made a touchdown. Come on. We already lost the game.

The delusion of conservative hegemony is strong even among liberals. What are they smoking? Well, we know the answer to that. But anyway, if they think they’re losing, they’re completely wrong. They beat us. We abandoned God, and he stopped fighting for us. Anyone can beat us now. Liberals should be dancing in the streets instead of moaning about Trump.

Leftists won, and they are in the process of swallowing and destroying us. Dressing up like Captain America will not help. It just shows how proud we are, thinking we can beat our enemies with our own strength. It makes things worse. God resists the proud, and he helps the humble. That’s what the Bible says. Relying on effort and violence will accelerate our defeat.

You should have guns in your houses, and you should get away from big concentrations of the cruel and entitled. That’s just common sense. They’re going to come for us, and we will need to protect ourselves as long as the government permits it. But thinking we can band together and crush them in the streets is insane and counterproductive.

It’s good that no one reads this blog any more, because if I had a big readership, I would attract all sorts of abuse from carnal conservatives. I remember how they swarmed me after I rightly criticized Ann Coulter, Ted Nugent, and PJ Media. The blather of the blind filled my comments, and they wrote ridiculous things about me on their own blogs. They’re gone, and I say “good riddance.” Talking to them was like taking goats and pigs to the Louvre.

Imagine the nonsense I would have to put up with if my former readers were here. I’d be getting death threats from junior stickmen.

I am not a fan of Based Stickman. I’m not even a fan of conservative demonstrators. I think it’s good for people to defend themselves, but maybe at this point, instead of going to demonstrations where we will be beaten, we should be having huge prayer rallies with security to keep liberal criminals outside.

In other news, I learned something surprising about my old church, Trinity in North Miami. According to the grapevine, they are circling the drain. For years, the business (“business”) has run on fumes, but it wasn’t until recently that the main pastor, Rich Wilkerson, stood up in front of the church and admitted the church had severe financial problems. Key people have been leaving for years, and I am told that the services have shrunk to the point where they don’t even use the overflow room that used to fill up during 11 a.m. services.

Here’s the thing: Trinity is a money church. It’s a prosperity gospel church. They teach that if you give God money (God needs money?), God will make you not just successful, but rich. They teach Steve Munsey’s ridiculous lies about God rewarding offerings given on Jewish holidays. If Munsey is right, then how could Trinity fail financially?

I am told Wilkerson admitted the church was in big trouble, but that he hasn’t mentioned the big elephant in the sanctuary. He hasn’t stood up and said, “I had been told the prosperity gospel was a crock, but I taught it anyway to get offerings, and God has just proven it does not work. So let’s repent, and please stop impoverishing yourselves to prop us up.”

Trinity is a corporation, so presumably, no one there who took a salary or other benefits will have to shoulder the church’s debts. I explained that to a friend of mine. I said the pastor’s family was probably protected from liability because of the corporate structure. Running an unsuccessful corporation can be a great way to get rich. You overpay yourself until the company fails, and then you keep what you took and tell the creditors to get lost. Call me cynical, but I dimly suspect prosperity preachers are aware of this.

Doesn’t the Bible say the blessed will give and lend instead of borrowing? Debt is a curse. It’s a form of slavery. When you take on debt, you agree to keep working to pay it off, even if you hate your job.

Trinity used to meet in a smallish church on 125th Street. At some point around 2000, the pastors bought a big office building farther north, and they turned it into a church. I believe the price was something like $10 million. Anyway, it was expensive, and it was not suited for use as a church. They spent a ton of money remodeling it, and then they expected their low-income congregants to pay for it. They should have bought a modest warehouse somewhere. I suppose now they’re reaping what they sowed.

If God tells you to buy a building you can’t afford, then he will also bring the money to support your ministry. If you buy it without consulting God, it’s your baby, and God will not help you.

It is my belief that they knew their doctrine was fantasy, so I don’t feel sorry for them at all. It’s a shame they led so many people into discouragement and failure. It’s bad to harm the rich, but promising the poor help and then leaving them worse off is a greater offense.

Right now, if you look at their Facebook page, you’ll see them doing what they always do: fundraising. They have an Easter play called “Jesus of Nazareth,” and it’s always a huge production. They used to have free admission, but now they charge. They’re advertising the play on their Facebook page right now. That page has always been loaded with ads and promotion. There has never been much there about Christianity. Now that they’re in trouble, instead of using social media to repent and call for prayer, they’re doubling down on raising cash.

The inner circle folks viewed me as a disloyal and toxic person for my public criticism of the Munsey nonsense. Some people who merely attended the church agreed.

Who was right, and who was wrong?

I did my best to pass on the helpful things God told me. I know other people did, too. The inner circle should have listened.

Steve Munsey’s foreclosed church is known for the Starbucks Munsey put in the lobby. Trinity didn’t have a Starbucks, but under the Munsey influence, they tried to run a cafe. A friend of mine–I can’t believe she did this–accepted a position running it. I’m talking about a great person who ostensibly had a fine career with a good company. Now I’m being told the cafe isn’t being funded any more.

The better you do in your walk with God, the more you have to deal with seeing your friends and relatives suffer from bad decisions God could have prevented. I can almost hear Noah yelling, “PREACH!”

Trinity could have been a wonderful church. Oh well.

If you’re going to buy a big stick, don’t take it to rallies, and if you’re going to preach the prosperity gospel, make sure you incorporate first. That’s my advice for today.

No one Cares, but Still!

An interesting story is in the news. Three armed criminals broke into a house in Oklahoma, and a young man who lived there shot all three dead with an AR-15. He didn’t just nick them. Two died in his kitchen, and one died after running outside.

The robbery was planned by a woman named Elizabeth Rodriguez. She drove the would-be assailants to the crime scene, and when she heard shots, she drove off. Then she did something remarkable: she went to the police and said she had “information” about the shooting.

Before too long, she had confessed. Guess what she’s charged with now. Accessory? Accomplice? How about this: three counts of first-degree murder.

I’m trying to figure her out. Why would she go to the police? Was she thinking she could get the victim in trouble for shooting her friends? That seems likely. I don’t think she would go just to turn herself in. She probably could have gotten away. I think she was angry because her friends were dead, and she was hoping to stick it to the victim by turning him in. She probably thought driving a car wasn’t a big crime. Like many criminals, she probably didn’t know she could be charged with murder in this situation.

If you assist with a crime, you can get in real trouble if someone dies, and it doesn’t necessarily matter who that person is. If a cop shoots your partner, you may get the needle.

I saw her mugshot. She looks miserable. That’s understandable. Imagine the feeling. Three of your friends just got shot to death. The killer is being praised as a hero. You’re charged with three counts of murder one. And you did it to yourself. You didn’t even Google the applicable law before getting in the car.

I don’t have any sympathy for her or the other criminals, but it’s still a sad story.

Apart from the mindset of the woman who informed on herself, the story is interesting because the victim used a semiautomatic rifle to defend himself. We’re always being told “assault rifles” aren’t legitimate self-defense tools. Even gun-loving “experts” say it. Here we have proof it’s not true.

The AR-15 is not an assault rifle, because it’s semiautomatic, but let’s not get bogged down with that. Gun-grabbers hate the AR-15 even more than other guns because it has a high capacity and it looks mean. They claim high-capacity, mean-looking rifles are no good for home defense.

For a long time, I’ve been saying pistols were not great for home defense. I’ll go farther than that. They STINK for home defense. If you can shoot a burglar over five feet away in a dark house with your hands shaking, you are probably in the top one percent of combat shooters. Most people will hit the wall, their own legs, their own feet, the ceiling, the toaster…anything…more often than they will hit a criminal. Pistols are hard to aim, and they’re even harder to bring back on target after a shot. On top of that, pistol ammunition is very weak, and pistols don’t hold many rounds.

I use semiautomatic rifles for home defense. I’ve been recommending them for years. My rifles hold 31 rounds. The ammunition is to pistol ammunition as a diesel truck is to a Vespa. Rifles are easy to shoot accurately. You can even shoot through concealment with confidence. Drywall won’t save you from an AK-47, but it will slow a .38 down until it falls straight down when it exits a wall.

The National Review is backing my philosophy up. They just published an article praising rifles.

It’s funny how long it can take common sense to overcome old wives’ tales.

The article links to yet another article in which knowledgeable gun users list their favorite home defense guns. Rifles figure prominently in their lists. That seems like a new thing.

One or two of the people interviewed said overpenetration was an issue. That means they’re afraid of shooting friendlies through walls. That’s something to think about if you’re in an apartment building or a big house full of kids, but if you’re in a typical house with one or two other people, it’s not a problem. You know where your kids sleep. If you think you’re so good you can shoot a burglar with a pistol, you should also be confident you can avoid shooting into your son’s bedroom, right?

Overpenetration is a mushy topic, anyway. In the case of handguns, it’s a myth.

Overpenetration doesn’t just refer to going through walls. It also describes situations in which bullets exit bodies before they expand or break up, possibly hitting people behind the perps. It’s supposed to be bad, because failure to expand results in less damage, and premature exit endangers the innocent.

Expansion, yawing, and dispersion make wounds bigger. Handgun rounds–even the cutesy ones that come from manufacturers that brag about scientists and laboratories–don’t necessarily expand or break up much inside people (or at least they didn’t when I did my research;things change). Bullets don’t usually do those things unless they’re moving fast, and pistol rounds are slow. A .45 round goes about 850 feet per second. A round from a hunting rifle, which can be counted on to expand, goes about four times that fast.

When it comes to pistols, according to the FBI, what you want is the most penetration possible. Pistols cause damage by drilling long holes in people, and the longer those holes are, the more the damage they do. A lot of things can slow a pistol round down. Leather jackets. Heavy clothing. Hands. In a pistol, you want something that goes clean through, even if it’s dangerous to someone who has the incredible bad luck to be directly behind a criminal. For that reason, I don’t really care about pistol overpenetration.

I carry a 10mm pistol loaded with Speer Gold Dot “expanding” rounds that go about 1250 feet per second. I don’t know if they’ll really expand, but they have a very good chance of making very long wound channels. They have crazy muzzle energy.

Rifle ammunition is complicated. It comes in quite a few flavors. The one the military uses, which is called full metal jacket, can be ignored. It’s not very good. The military uses it because it’s bad. I believe the idea is that it’s cruel to use better ammunition. Something like that. International agreements or wounding instead of killing or something. You don’t want military-style FMJ in your house. You want something that gets the job done. I mean, seriously, the military can’t use poison gas, but if you have some in your garage, and you need to use it on a burglar, the law says go ahead. There is really no limit to what you can do to incapacitate a burglar. If a deep fryer is all you have, you’re allowed to use it.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as rifle ammunition that won’t go through walls, but I don’t care, either, because in my situation, it doesn’t matter. For that reason, all I care about, other than price, is causing damage. I decided to go with Tulammo hollow-point ammunition. It’s cheap Russian ammo. I looked at Wolf, which is another Russian brand, but shooters said it didn’t break up as well in tests. Tulammo performed better, so I bought a thousand rounds. I think this is a fine choice for a bedside rifle. When it hits a burglar, the core and jacket separate and go in different directions, and the bullet yaws pretty well. It’s not the best ammunition on earth, but it’s a whole lot better than a 9mm pistol. It’s on another level, entirely.

I’m looking around the web, and since I made my choice, people have tested Tulammo soft point and 8m3 ammunition. The latter is new to me. It’s hollow point ammunition with scoring inside the rounds to make them come apart or yaw or something. Evidently, the Russians used to sell it, and they quit, and now an American firm has gotten them to start up again. In gelatin tests (literally shooting big piles of unsweetened gelatin), the soft point ammunition performs very nicely, and the 8m3 looks even better. I may upgrade to it. It’s not expensive, which is nice.

Now that Trump is in office, it should be a lot easier to get firearms and decent ammunition at sane prices. BONUS!

To get back to the subject, I feel vindicated. I’m so used to being told I’m an idiot for using a rifle for home defense, it feels strange to see other people recommend it.

It’s pretty hard to come up with a perfect home-defense solution. You want velocity and energy, so you want a long barrel. You want to not go deaf, so you want a suppressor, which means a shorter barrel. You want maneuverability, so you want a short barrel. You want to be able to aim easily…back to a long barrel. You have to decide what makes sense. For me, that’s 31 rounds of very good rifle ammunition, a folding semiauto, and a big green laser so bright it bothers people on Mars.

I guess now I should blaspheme even more and resurrect another offensive suggestion I’ve made: the Thompson semiauto .45 ACP rifle, better known as the civilian version of the Tommy gun. It holds a huge amount of ammunition. Because it shoots pistol rounds, the recoil isn’t bad, and the penetration in homes is limited. It even comes with a forward grip. I think if you could get some big, reliable magazines, a Tommy gun would be excellent for spraying burglars. The .45 may be slow, but it’s also wide, and that’s helpful when you’re looking to incapacitate. Also, the longer barrel gives you more velocity than a 1911.

Anyway, do not use a pistol to defend your house. That’s my suggestion. And now I have friends.

Refer Madness

When I was a kid and I thought about evil, I pictured obvious things. I thought about murder, stealing, violence, genocide, and so on. It didn’t occur to me to think about sexual perversion or a general abandonment of reason.

I didn’t know much. For example, I didn’t know homosexuality was extremely common among career criminals, or that this was why rape was a big deal in prisons. Later in life, when I read books like The Onion Field and In Cold Blood, and when I found out the Birdman of Alcatraz (sanitized and glorified in a movie starring Burt Lancaster) was an unrepentant rapist of boys, I started to get a clue. I didn’t think of reason as a big threat to evil, though.

I suppose it should be obvious that reason works against evil. Good ought to make sense, after all. It would be a funny world if righteousness caused problems and evil fixed them.

In his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, witch-hunt victim and brilliant judge Robert Bork wrote presciently about the coming age of irrationality. He wrote of liberals who promoted the insane notion that reason itself was a Eurocentric, patriarchal construct. It sounded a little nutty at the time, but…here we are. Bruce Jenner is a woman, and illegal aliens are “immigrants.” Craziness rules.

Leftism doesn’t work, so in order to promote it, you have to fight reason. Leftism conflicts with itself. For example, leftists have to be pro-union, pro-minimum-wage, AND pro-illegal-immigration, even though illegal immigrants bring wages down and erode unions. Leftists have to be pro-woman AND pro-perversion, even though letting male “women” compete with female athletes takes victories, records, and money away from women. Men keep outdoing women at traditionally female activities. Leftists have to be pro-expression, but they also have to be against “hate speech,” which is necessarily defined by small groups of people prone to bias. Leftists have to hate the objectification of women, but they also have to love pornography. They have to hate slavery and human trafficking, but they have to love “sex work,” which is generally slavery.

According to an Internet source, “Cognitive dissonance” means “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes.” Without cognitive dissonance, the left can’t function, but because of the dissonance, the left will eventually fail. This is what Jesus was talking about when he predicted the eventual destruction of the kingdom of evil:

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?

Right now, a guy (ostensibly) named Pablo Gomez, Jr., is under indictment for killing three people in Berkeley. I don’t know if he’s gay or what. People say he is, but news stories omit mention of his sexuality. Here’s the really interesting thing: he insists on being referred to using plural pronouns. When you write about these guy (???), you have to say things like, “They were indicted on Tuesday.”

You would think leftists would wake up at this point and say, “Man, we look crazy. This is just one person. Calling him ‘them’ is grammatically wrong.” But that’s not what’s happening. They’re standing behind them. Those. “Ellos”? “Los Pablo”? They’re excoriating sane people for pointing out their insanity.

How much more deranged can people get? How can anyone defend this position? And what on earth does plurality have to do with being gay? If he is gay, I mean. Whatever he is.

Even if you’re the gayest man alive, you should have some understanding that language has to work. The need to communicate should outweigh the need to control other people’s words.

Think of the confusion we’re going to have in the coming years, as pronoun madness goes mainstream. How will we address each other? We’ll be afraid to talk. More than we already are, I mean. You’ll say something like, “That guy went downstairs,” and an angry person with female genitals, horns, and a full beard will start shrieking, “THEM FEMEN WENTED DOWNSTAIR, YOU PIGS!”

Think how hard it will be to fill out forms. Where there used to be one box, there will be fifteen. Then someone will sue, claiming having only fifteen boxes is a microaggression.

The Bible calls gender fluidity “confusion.” Years ago, I did not understand that. Now, I get it. I really get it.

I wonder what full-blown persecution is going to look like. Most Americans thought it was horrible when Hitler jailed or killed people for political or racial reasons. We thought it was irrational. What are Americans going to think when leftists are killing us for standing up for good grammar? I can answer that. Most Americans will think it’s fine, just as most Germans and Austrians thought Hitler’s crimes were fine. Most Americans will suffer from the victim delusion, and they (he?) will see killing Christians as justice or self-defense.

The anti-Christian and anti-Semitic outrages of prophecy can’t come true until delusion becomes normal and widespread. That has to happen. We’re seeing it now.

Yesterday, I thought about my blogging, and I spoke of it as writing “things that will be used against me at my trial when they decide to kill me.” I was trying to be funny, but I believed what I said. The devil has no statute of limitations. The inquisition is coming, and the Internet is preserving our heresies.

Well and good. When things get that bad, I will look forward to death. Maybe I’m saying that, not to whoever reads this blog today, but to the loons who will be in charge of me years from now. “On March 28, 2017, you yourself admitted you preferred to die!” Make whatever you want of it, ladies and/or hermaphrodites of the tribunal. You can’t take anything away unless God puts it in your hands.

What are English classes in elementary schools like now? “Johnny, use pronouns correctly in a sentence about your dog.” “Us throws the ball for my dogs Rover, and then they goes and fetches them.” “That is correct. Here is their participation prize.”

Maybe I have a bad attitude about the rest of my sentence here on earth. Every time I read about a Christian who just died, I have the same thought, instantaneously: “Man, that must be great.” No hate, no disease, no taxes, no jerks, no death, no work…that’s for me. I guess I’m okay, though, because Jesus said, “He who loves his life will lose it.”

It sounds nutty to look forward to dying, but here’s what’s really nutty: being highly excited about a life which ends, after a short time, with the loss of everything you have. Human life ends with slow physical and mental deterioration. You lose your talents and abilities. You lose your looks. You fall apart. People start to ignore you. Then you lose everything. At best, you have about 50 reasonably good years, and those years pass quickly. After 40, they seem to fly by. Then you’re all done. If you haven’t lived for God, what have you invested in? Your retirement account is empty. Living for that future is not rational at all, so if people contemn my values and desires, I contemn theirs right back. In fifty years, they’ll be just as dead as me, and we’ll see if their contempt mattered.

When I think about the foolishness of clinging to earthly life, I always think about Madonna and Cher. They got everything they wanted on earth, and then they lost their looks. As old women go, they look okay, but to be frank about it, compared to women years younger, they are not merely faded but completely unattractive. They built their lives around youth and sex appeal. Now those things are gone from them, forever, and they’re ignored. When Madonna exposed herself thirty years ago, boys got excited. Now they make faces and say, “Ewwwww!”

Madonna is very upset about her new situation. She’s very bitter. She keeps exposing herself, which is gross even to fans, and she keeps complaining because her audience is shrinking. She thinks people owe it to her to lust after her and admire her. Think how bad it will be in fifteen years, when she doesn’t even look good from a distance in a grainy photo. She’ll be climbing the walls.

Cher and Madonna have had so much plastic surgery they no longer look like normal human beings. They look sort of like accident victims who have had extensive reconstruction with limited success. It bespeaks desperation and denial.

Things are only going to get worse for Madonna. She’s going crazy over aging now, but this is as good as things will ever be for her. What kind of life is that? She spent her years corrupting people in exchange for money and attention, and the only things that make her happy are things she will never have again.

Me, I see death as an escape and a new birth. I see it as redemption and a chance to start over, doing good things that will last forever. Whenever I feel anything funny going on in my chest, I always say the same thing: “I am ready to go!” The haters and the rebellious can have this place. It was worn out anyway.

I read a book by a lady who said she visited hell. In hell, she saw a woman who had been dead for hundreds of years. The woman was in a cell, in a chair. She was very beautiful. Over and over, her flesh deteriorated, rotted, and fell off, and then it regrew. Over the course of a few seconds, she went through what Madonna is going through now. She was a big deal on earth, and she led people in idolatry for her master, but in hell, Satan tormented and ridiculed her for believing him. I can’t swear the book is true, but the punishment makes a lot of sense. Aging is very painful for shallow, attractive women who misuse their looks. Aging over and over again would be a terrible torture for such a person.

I wonder how crazy people will get. I am tempted to say, “Maybe they’ll worship the devil openly,” but they already do that. We already have witch celebrities. Madonna and Beyonce use demonic imagery in TV appearances. Katie Perry is a witch. Dan Aykroyd–the kindly, roly-poly son from Driving Miss Daisy, has said he was sending “hell energy” to people. I suppose celebrities who worship devils are not as open or confrontational as they will be in the future, though.

For the sake of the people who will be persecuted, I hope we’re not far from the end.

This morning I read about Lot. He lived in Sodom, and he was burned out from the filthy ways and speech of the people around him. God decided to destroy the city, but Abraham got him to agree to spare it if God could find ten righteous people there.

Two angels went Sodom to look for the righteous, and Lot invited them to his house for their protection. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were famous for abusing travelers. Homosexuals gathered in the street outside and demanded that the angels be brought out so they could rape them. Lot was so mortified, he offered to give them his daughters instead. The response? The homosexuals said they would do worse things to Lot than to the angels. They intended to rape him, too.

It was a lot like a modern prison riot. Prisons and wars are little pictures of hell.

The angels pulled Lot inside and blinded the homosexuals. Then Lot tried to get his family to leave the city. His sons-in-law, as blind as the gay mob, thought he was joking, so he had to leave with only his wife and two daughters.

What happened to Lot is a picture of what’s coming to the world. God will permit people who know him to suffer a certain amount of abuse, but at some point he will draw a line and remove us. After that, there will be no good people on earth to motivate God to show restraint, and his anger will fall like burning sulfur.

God is the worst enemy you can have. When he decides to punish you, there is nowhere to hide. No weapon or ally can save you.

How well a Christian will do toward the end will depend on his closeness to God. If you’re a worshiper of Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen and the other “prosperity Christians,” you won’t have much power to look after yourself. The same thing goes for people who go to churches that deny the Holy Spirit. That’s why Jesus said, “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!” He was talking about weak Christians who are like unweaned babies. A man can swing a sword. A baby, not so much.

These are interesting times, as the well-known curse puts it.

I will keep an eye on the pronoun front. I’m sure something even weirder will happen shortly.

The Upcoming Obsolescence of Female Athletes

A few years back, before Americans completely lost the ability to tell male from female, I wrote about the upcoming destruction of female sports. Women and girls of exceptional ability were demanding to be allowed to compete with men, and of course, leftists were all for it. They don’t think; they just ask themselves what seems most PC, and they go with it. They don’t concern themselves with consequences and contradictions.

I pointed out that the results for women’s sports (something I care nothing about) would be disastrous. First of all, the women who competed with men would never excel. They would be among the worst competitors in their chosen realm. Second, women’s sports would lose its top performers; they would move to men’s sports. Women’s sports would become even more boring (which is saying a lot), and the women who continued competing with females would end up with illegitimate, asterisked records. If you didn’t compete with the best, your record is a consolation prize.

I don’t believe I thought much about the problem of men competing in women’s events. I guess I assumed feminists wouldn’t have it. Their victimhood complex is at the center of their lives. To let mean, non-diverse, meat-eating, non-yoga-practicing men who use plastic grocery bags enter their midst would undo decades of assiduous man-bashing. It would also pretty much kill the careers of most female athletes.

Now I see that I misgauged things. I didn’t realize men would eventually be allowed to compete with women, because they would claim to BE women.

The sad yet also–forgive me–hilarious outcome of our extraordinary gender confusion crisis is that now any man who feels like competing with female athletes can do so, and he doesn’t even have to have surgery!

I just read about a “woman” athlete who is actually a man, who won a major weightlifting competition, the Australian International. His name is now Laurel Hubbard, but it used to be Gavin Hubbard. He lifted a grand total of 268 KG. The second-place finisher, an actual woman from Samoa, lifted 249 KG. You should see the photos. He’s a very manly looking man with a receding hairline. I haven’t seen closeups, but from a distance, he simply looks like a man standing among women. Maybe he has a ponytail or lipstick to set himself apart from other males. I couldn’t tell.

This is a confusing topic. Athletes used to complain because other athletes used drugs to win. Then everyone started using drugs and beating the tests, so that fuss abated considerably. Drugs are accepted. Now women who use drugs to win events are upset because they’re competing with men. Who probably use drugs. Cheating has a new and unanticipated level.

I could not care less about sports. They work against Christian values. They teach people to value worthless, fleeting abilities. Judaism and Christianity have always had problems with persecution directed through professional athletics. Aside from all that, I get bored watching other people play. I enjoyed playing sports when I was a kid, but I never had much interest in watching. I don’t care if professional sports get more screwed up; I would welcome it. I’m just commenting as an outsider fascinated by what’s happening.

One great thing about shemale inclusion is that it will allow mediocre and even bad male athletes to get rich in jobs they’re not good enough to do alongside their genetic peers. That will open doors to a lot of frustrated, bitter people.

My phys. ed. coach at Miami Shores Elementary was a physically abusive little guy named Gary. He was handsome. He was muscular and lean. He had chiseled, masculine features and a gruff, manly voice. He was very athletic. He was also about 5’5″ tall. Gary was not big enough to play pro sports, and he ended up working at an elementary school, pushing kids around. Maybe if he had been allowed to play women’s tennis, he wouldn’t have been a teacher, and I would never have seen him pick an 80-pound kid up by the neck and throw him on the ground for complaining to his mom about his bullying.

If Gary had had an opportunity to use his male muscles to humiliate female athletes, maybe he wouldn’t have found himself lining kids up in squads and making them watch him shoot free throws on the kiddie baskets.

A long time ago, there was a male athlete who tried to compete with women, but at least he had the integrity to get the surgery and give up the parts that made his muscles strong. He called himself Renee Richards. As a man, he was a low-ranking tennis pro. As a woman, even in middle age without the benefit of testosterone produced by male organs, he was in the top 20. Here is what he said about it: “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”

He finally admits being a man would have helped. It took him decades to see through the PC haze. Amazing.

I wonder how many people remember tennis’s “Battle of the Sexes.” An aging male pro named Bobby Riggs challenged the top female player in the world, and he won easily. Her name was Margaret Court. She was 30, and he was 55. Her loss drew another professional, Billie Jean King, who played Riggs and won by a smaller margin. Decades later, evidence came out suggesting Riggs threw the match in order to help his bookie creditors profit from betting on King. The difference between male and female athletic abilities is that big.

Nature is what it is. Maybe that won’t be true five years from now, but I can say it now. Mixing the sexes in sports will never work, as long as human beings remain sexually dimorphic.

The most interesting part of this issue is the supernatural blindness that has fallen on people. Those who call Bruce Jenner a woman are completely serious. The fact that he has male genitals and a male physique means absolutely nothing to them. When you say he’s a man, they think it’s not only wrong, but ridiculous.

Because of increasing demonic influence, there is no limit to the craziness of the things people can believe. God is the only barrier between us and insanity, and we don’t like God, so we removed him.

The smart thing to do now is to look to the future and try to make predictions based on the current situation. Here’s a question: if people can believe a man is a woman, why can’t they believe a man is a goat or a tree or a toaster? What if a small child somewhere starts telling his parents he’s a motorcycle? Who is to challenge that?

Right now we have parents denying male children puberty simply because the kids think they’re female. They are receiving treatment to prevent their bodies from developing as male. What a horror. Imagine being 23 and a recipient of this treatment, and then changing your mind. What a mess you would be. What if future parents indulge kids who want lion claws or hooves? These days, many deaf people are convinced deafness sets them apart as a sort of race; they don’t see it as a defect that should be fixed. What if a three-year-old starts jamming things in his ears and telling mom and dad he identifies as deaf? Should they pay a doctor to cut out his eardrums?

I sound like I’m tossing out absurd examples of future deviations. I am! But Bruce Jenner’s case is absurd, too. People just can’t see it. What seems right today was correctly viewed as preposterous fifty years ago. What seems preposterous today–precious little of it that there is–will seem right and normal in the near future.

I once saw an interview featuring a “man” who had had at least two sex-change surgeries. It may have been three, but I think it was two. He’s not the only one, either. Somehow, this person went through the vetting process, which sanctimonious leftists tell us is beyond challenge, at least twice. Assuming it was only two surgeries, he convinced a board of brilliant medical professionals he was really a woman, and they operated, and then he convinced another infallible board he was definitely a man, and they operated again.

Think about that. We’re supposed to think the whole gender-confusion enterprise is scientific and progressive, but the people doing the surgery have definitively, dispositively stated that it’s guesswork. They’ve stated it through their actions every time they’ve done a second or third “reassignment” (When did sexuality become an “assignment”?). If they’re not sure they’ve been wrong, then it would be unethical and possibly criminal to perform consecutive surgeries, so by doing the surgeries, they are testifying against their own conclusions.

Maybe horses can become convinced they’re people. If so, it would be wrong to deny them the right to fulfill their dreams of competing in the Olympics. Any other position would be speciesist.

I’m starting to make myself ill.

Let me suggest something: you are what you are, not what you “feel” you are at the moment. You’re not a person of the opposite sex. You’re not a stuffed animal. You’re not a leopard. You’re definitely not a comic book character created by Nazi scientists experimenting with supersoldier serums (See the video below). People get strange ideas from time to time. We don’t have to build our lives around them. Usually, they pass.

If you’re a female athlete (a real one), you have an interesting path ahead of you. Maybe it’s best to stick to skill sports and leave power and speed to the men and steroid junkies.

TIG!

I am finally a TIG welder. The results so far are pretty hilarious.

TIG, for people who, unlike me, are not experts, is Tungsten Inert Gas welding. Without getting into a boring description, I will just say that it’s probably the coolest type of welding outside of bizarre things they only do at NASA. TIG produces very controlled, good-looking welds, and unlike MIG, it works very well on tiny objects.

I got myself a Chinese TIG machine because the company that makes them had a crazy sale, and I could not resist. I couldn’t find a good deal on a used American job, and I figured if the Chinese one blew up, there was a 75% chance I could fix it with my gnarly electronics skills.

The welder sat around for three weeks or so because I was scared of it. You can teach someone how to MIG (badly) in fifteen minutes. TIG is way more complicated, and it’s somewhat harder to do. It took me three days just to get the machine put together. I suppose it would have been more like an hour if I had stuck with it, but every time I figured some part of it out, I felt like I needed a day to rest and get over it.

When you TIG, generally, you will do three things at once. Your foot will regulate the heat you shoot into the weld. Your right hand will direct the arc from the torch to the workpiece. Your left hand will feed a rod of filler metal into the weld. This takes practice.

Yesterday I decided to use the torch without filler, just to see if I could guide the arc correctly on flat steel and make a molten puddle suitable for a weld. I was just learning to use the foot pedal and torch.

I had read that TIG produced more UV light than MIG. That’s not quite correct (of course, it’s more complicated than that), so I took pains to get advice on protective gear. I usually MIG in shorts and a T-shirt, which is a BAD BAD idea, but TIG scares me, so I asked around. I ended up wearing a helmet, safety glasses, a dress shirt, a T-shirt, gloves…and shorts. Come on. Change is hard.

When you MIG, you can weld metal that’s only fairly clean. You remove the paint and crap, and you hit it with a knot wheel to make sure there is no rust or scale on it, and you’re okay. TIG metal has to be cleaner. You have to get every trace of rust and scale off, and you have to wipe it down with a powerful solvent like acetone. If you stop welding and come back the next day, you will have to clean it again before you start. If you weld aluminum, you even have to worry about the invisible layer of oxide that forms the instant you expose new metal to the air.

I decided to use a crappy old piece of angle iron, which is a lumpy product that comes covered with scale that seems as hard as rubies. I had to use the belt grinder to get it clean.

I put all my protective junk on and started TIGing. It was so easy! I was liquifying the metal and pulling the torch along, and it was almost like I knew what I was doing. I figured I would be a TIG prodigy. Then I saw the bright light coming in under my helmet.

With all the neurotic effort to protect myself, I had still forgotten to close the helmet tightly against my chest, so reflected UV was bouncing off of my shirt. And of course, I looked right at it, which was pretty dumb.

I stopped TIGing instantly, went and sat on the couch, and whimpered a lot. I wondered if I had burned my corneas.

When you let welding UV hit your eyeballs, even if the UV is reflected off of walls and such, you may burn your eyes. It doesn’t cause permanent damage, but for a day or so, you feel like someone threw sand in your eyes. This is something I dread. I have never “flashed myself,” as the expression goes, but I’m absent-minded, so I live in fear of the day when I start to weld without closing my helmet.

If you flash yourself, you start to feel it after a few hours. I never felt anything. Maybe the safety glasses saved me. Maybe the light wasn’t that intense. Anyway, I was really happy about that.

Today I started over. I prepared two pieces of angle iron and clamped them at 90 degrees to each other so I could do a couple of fillet welds. A fillet weld unites two pieces of metal which are perpendicular to each other. You have to weld down in the corner.

I had high hopes, based on my success with the puddle, but things went very badly. When you TIG into a corner (I now know), it can be hard to get the arc to go where you need it to go. Both pieces of metal try to pull the arc toward them and away from the corner. I think. Anyhow, the arc kept moving around. When I concentrated on the arc, I forgot the pedal, and the amps dropped off to where I was just tickling the steel. When I thought about the arc and the pedal, I forgot about the filler and rammed it into the tungsten (part of the torch that makes the arc).

In about fifteen minutes of welding, I had to grind a new tip on the tungsten three times, so now I’m an expert at that.

The welds were horrific. I’ll post a photo. It looks like a string of poops from a steel mouse with dysentery.

Since creating this masterpiece, I’ve realized you don’t begin your TIG efforts with fillet welds. I’ll try a butt or lap weld next time. Or an autogenous (no filler) fillet weld. That’s supposed to be good for beginners. And I won’t use angle iron. I’ll find something better somewhere.

I quit after a short time because I wanted to see how the protective gear had worked. I think I was protected well enough, but if not, I would rather have 15 minutes’ worth of burns than an hour’s worth.

In spite of this disaster, I’m very upbeat about TIG. Once I can control all three parts of the apparatus at once, I’ll be able to do welding which is much more precise than MIG. Also, for reasons I do not understand, I can see what I’m doing much better than I do when I MIG. With MIG, all I see is a giant red blob.

I like the machine a lot. It looks very nice by Chinese standards, and everything (except me) works. I should be able to get years of use out of it.

Here’s my guess: if you want to weld fast, get stick or MIG, but if you want to weld really well, get a TIG. But get ready for a learning curve.

I’ll keep the world posted on my bad welding. I should be back at it tomorrow or Tuesday.

Now I Need a Hungarian Wife

Today I started to write something negative about the way the entitlement mindset has driven fast food companies to replace people with machines, but I think instead I’ll write about the presence of God.

This week I hired an appraiser to check out a property my dad and I looked it. It’s one of the farms we visited in Marion County. I wrote about it and posted a photo before. I will repost it here.

A short time ago I was very excited about the possibility that I might end up in Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale’s county) on two acres. Now I’m comparing properties that have ten to twenty acres, much farther north. It’s a wonderful change.

We visited seven or eight places. Several were very nice. Some were hopeless. When it was over, I had three real possibilities. I didn’t know how to choose. I wanted God to help me, because I knew that if I let my flesh make the decision, I would end up in the wrong place.

Finding God’s guidance is a real challenge for me. In America, a man is expected to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, make a plan, and force it to come to pass. To refuse to do that is to court shame and criticism. People will accuse you of cowardice and laziness. For the last few years, I’ve had to sit back and do what seems like nothing, while I’ve waited for guidance. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I was in denial. I wondered if I was destroying my life through passivity.

After we looked at properties, I refused to choose one. I waited for guidance and confirmation. Sometimes I couldn’t help worrying that the best one might get away while I fooled around. I prayed to be led, and I waited.

The other day, I took the photo above and made it my PC desktop. I wanted to think about the pleasant future, not the stress of being in Miami. When I saw the picture blown up to 55″, I was shocked. Peace swept over me.

Every time I look at the desktop, I feel a sudden burst of peace. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s as if a peace bomb had gone off on the screen, and the shock wave had crossed the room and hit me.

At first, I dismissed it, thinking any picture of a rural property would do that to me. I was wrong, though. There is something about that picture. I found myself sitting and staring at it. I couldn’t tear myself away. It was as if the strength left my body.

My friend Mike came down to visit. He slept in the room where I keep the computer. He started telling me how he couldn’t stop looking at the picture. We both sat here like idiots, staring at it.

My friend Travis came over for a prayer session. He felt the same thing.

When I pray by myself, I use the computer to play Christian music, and of course, I leave the desktop on. It’s mesmerizing. The presence of God is so strong here now. I feel his presence so quickly when I’m looking at the picture. It’s bizarre.

Yesterday I was thinking about my choices, and I realized something. There are other properties that seem like they would be more suitable after a lot of work, but this one is pretty much turnkey. I’ve had to struggle here to get the house that used to belong to my sister ready to be rented, and I’m working to get my dad’s poorly maintained house ready. I don’t need another project! Simply moving will be hard enough. Maybe that’s why this property is right for me.

I hired an appraiser to look at the place in the photo, and once I get his report, we’ll make an offer or move on to something else.

I felt tremendous peace when I was on the property. There was no noise at all. No traffic sounds. Just birds, bugs, and the breeze. It was wonderful. I felt good on the other properties, too, but not as good. Maybe God is telling me something.

The presence of God is now much stronger for me than it was before, and I am able to receive it more quickly and more often. I believe we are supposed to live in God’s presence as much as we can. We are always in the presence of spirits, and they’re either good or bad. It makes no sense to put up with the bad ones all the time and make no effort to be with God.

I believe that when God is with me, he does things for me. He breaks down walls and shows me paths. He destroys my problems and gives me peace. I don’t think he would simply sit here with me and make me feel good while my problems increase. In the Bible he says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.'” To me, that says that merely being with God brings us protection and victory.

That makes sense, because the Bible never tells us to earn anything. It tells us to humble ourselves and let God do the work.

Miami always feels like it’s under a dirty, moldy blanket of spiritual oppression. The air here smells like sweat and fungus. On the farm, everything felt clean and fresh. I wonder if that would be true after I had been there a year, as well as on the first visit.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but even if I don’t get that farm, I’m keeping that picture!

I’m going to post this and look at my desktop for a bit. I really need it.

Right Idea; Wrong Planet

I am still waiting for God’s clear guidance on where I should move.

Yesterday, a complication was introduced. I started thinking about places farther north than Marion County, Florida.

If I want to live in Florida in an area which isn’t hideous scrub land, and where I’m less than 30 minutes from a grocery store, I am pretty much limited to 20 acres. I don’t feel comfortable going past the price level that tops out with that much acreage.

I would really like to be able to go for walks on my own land without having the neighbors wave at me from their front porch. I also want to be able to shoot high-powered rifles without hearing a lot of nonsense from neighbors. You can come close to these goals on less than 20 acres, but you can’t quite get there.

I started looking for stuff in the hilly areas of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. I like places in the mountains because the air is cooler and I wouldn’t be living on something resembling a pool table. At the same time, I would want a considerable amount of flat land, because you can’t do much with land that’s mostly vertical. Land is cheaper up there than it is in Florida.

One of the issues with moving to the area where Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee come together is that some of the counties have become infested with Floridians. These people can’t drive; they go up and down hills at 20 mph with their brakes on, holding everyone up. They are rude. They are also likely to turn nice places into little copies of Doral and Hialeah (particularly unpleasant neighborhoods in Miami). I don’t want to move eight hundred miles to get away from Spanish and then hear it every time I try to buy something at the grocery store.

I don’t know how bad the Miamization of the Carolina mountains has become. Maybe it’s not too bad. I know I would not want to be anywhere near the North Carolina towns of Highlands and Cashiers. My parents had a place in Cashiers a long time ago, and the Florida people were already thick.

Here’s the other thing: given that I don’t want to be around Miamians, do I really want to be around Appalachian people?

I’m from Appalachia. My people come from Eastern Kentucky. I would never live in Eastern Kentucky, because of the racism and love of ignorance. I don’t want to hear the word “nigger” every time someone talks about a basketball game. When I’m around people who talk like that, even though they’re a lot like me (and may be related to me), I feel alone. I feel like a Jew passing for German among the Nazis, or a closeted Republican on a movie set in California. It makes me reluctant to get close to anyone new.

When we had our place in Cashiers, I learned that North Carolina hill people, though somewhat more responsible and capable than Eastern Kentucky people, were possibly even more bigoted. They really hated blacks. My dad made a friend of a deputy sheriff up there, and the things this man said about black people were horrendous. He was a public official, and I guess everyone approved of his mindset, because he didn’t get fired or sent off to sensitivity training (which didn’t exist yet).

I’m sure a lot of bad things happened to black people who were accosted by the cops in Jackson County. I remember the deputy saying something about running off a part-black prison road crew. I believe he expected trouble from the other locals.

I don’t want to live in a place where racial prejudice toward blacks is heavy. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to live in a primarily black area, because then I’d be the one suffering from racist persecution, and no one cares about victims of black racism. When it happens to you, you are on your own.

What if I had a choice between living in a place where blacks were treated badly or a place where whites were treated badly? Not a pleasant question. I would have to put my safety first.

Central and northern Florida are interesting, because they seem to be places where there is little racial friction. If you visit Ocala or Orlando, you’ll see a lot of black and white people sitting in restaurants together or walking together. That’s unusual in Miami. I’ve also seen a lot of mixed families in Orlando.

In Miami, you’ll see a lot of mixed people. You’ll see brown people who clearly have a lot of black blood. But you won’t see them sitting with black people. They sit with other brown people. It’s strange; many Cubans have black blood, and it shows, but they still have issues with black people.

Miami is full of racial tension, but people don’t talk about it, because most of it comes from Latins and blacks. If you’re white and you say anything about it, you’re automatically considered racist. A big percentage of Cubans do not like black people, and it’s very hard for blacks to get jobs in Latin-controlled Miami. Latins also treat each other better in commerce, and they are often hard on white people. Blacks have a lot of animosity toward whites and Latins. That seems to be true everywhere, and because no one talks about it, it won’t change any time soon.

There are some very good things about Appalachia. People there are polite. They are overwhelmingly Christian. They’re culturally similar to me in many respects. The land is beautiful. You can grow things there. Self-righteous, provincial bicoastal culture is less powerful there. You don’t have to worry about gay men having naked parades. Yet. The cost of living is low. People speak English. There isn’t much traffic. You can get away from humanity if you want to.

Another interesting thing about Appalachia is that construction is much better than it is here in Miami. No one here can do anything right. Walls are crooked, doors don’t fit, and so on. Miami contractors get very angry when you show them how bad their work is, and they blame you for being too picky. In Appalachia (and just about every other place outside South Florida), you can get a house that’s built correctly, and you can get repair people who aren’t completely inept and lazy.

I don’t think I’ll move to Appalachia. Marion County looks too good. The winters are a joke. The people are great. The county is dominated by conservatives. I think I’ll stick with the plan.

Maybe I shouldn’t air my inner thoughts as I deliberate, but I like shining sunlight on things. At least when I’m not the object of scrutiny!

I look forward to a better world, where I don’t have to weigh the impact of different types of foolishness and evil before making a move.