I Will Rule You

I’m working on my second knife. I haven’t finished my first knife, but I’m making a second one anyway, because I can save on shipping if I have two knives heat treated at once.

I’ve learned more interesting stuff. Here’s a surprise: Damascus steel is crap.

You may not know what Damascus steel is, so I’ll tell you. It’s a type of folded steel invented in Damascus, Syria. Not. No one is really sure where the name “Damascus” comes from, but it is believed it was invented in India. Probably their last major contribution to technology since perfecting the tech support line.

To make Damascus steel, you take one or more pieces of steel and heat them in a forge. Then you beat on them with a hammer and fold them over. You keep doing this until you have a whole lot of layers. If you do it 20 times, you have 2 to the 20th power layers, which is probably around a million, since it’s 1024 squared.

Damascus steel looks really cool. It looks like damask fabric, as a matter of fact. Don’t know if that’s a coincidence. Oops; I’m wrong. I Googled. The fabric I’m thinking of isn’t damask. Right now it would be helpful to have a gay man I could ask. Anyway, there is a fabric that looks like Damascus steel, and I have no idea what it is.

In any case, Damascus steel is shimmery and weird-looking.

There are lots of mythological claims about Damascus steel. People say it holds an edge like nothing else, and that it’s so flexible you can bend a sword to a ridiculous angle without breaking it. They say it’s the best steel imaginable, and if you stare at it long enough, it cures baldness. In a fight, it’s even better than boots of escaping.

Sadly, none of this is true.

As a famous knife-maker pointed out, if it were true, industry would make heavy use of Damascus instead of the actual amount of use it makes, i.e. none. It would be used for dies and drill bits and cutters. That doesn’t happen. Toolmakers use things like tool steel, which is infinitely better suited to the job.

People have the idea that Japanese swordmakers had all sorts of lost knowledge about steel, and that they used the folding technique to make incredible swords with steel far superior to European steel. In fact, the folding process was needed because Asian steel was crap. Folding distributes or removes the impurities or something.

You have to apply common sense here. We live in the age of men who created the space shuttle. We probably know a few things that were unknown to ancient people who lived on cow manure and their own children.

There are also lots of arguments about what’s “real” Damascus, but it appears pretty certain that we make it as well as the ancients did, and that no important knowledge has been lost.

I’m glad to know this stuff, because now I can write Damascus off my list of things to master. I’ve seen Youtube videos of guys making it in their garages, and I thought, “Well, if I want to make really good knives, some day I’ll have to do that.” I guess I can forget about building a forge. Damascus looks really nice, but it rusts, it’s expensive, and it’s not very good, and I would prefer to make knives that work well. I want the kitchen knives to be dishwasher-safe. I want to be a knife user, not a knife nursemaid.

I found a dude who makes a bustling living charging $1000 or more per knife, and guess what he uses. Good old 440C. He also uses other stuff, but if 440C is good enough for him–ever–then it’s good enough for me. It’s better than Damascus, and it’s certainly better than most of what you will find at Bed Bath & Beyond. And it’s not too expensive.

My second knife is yet another birds beak knife. I didn’t have a lot of steel left to work with, so it had to be something small, and I figured my second design might be better than the first. The outline is mostly done. I still have to sand off the milling marks, make the cutting edge, and drill it for Corby fasteners, which are little metal bolts that go through the scales.

The 1×42 grinder is battling the steel remarkably well, but it probably cuts 10% as fast as a 2×72. The temptation is getting to me. In one week, I could have a 2-HP motor and VFD (already on hand) driving a grinder which would put a contour on a knife in five or ten minutes instead of one to two hours.

I can’t describe the degree to which I envy people who have surface grinders. The milling machine did a great job of removing scale from the second blade, but it left mill marks, so I still have a lot of sanding to do. A surface grinder would have knocked it out in a hurry.

Milling flat, crooked, thin steel is not easy. At least for me. It’s hard to put in a vice or mount in clamps. Properly, I mean. You can mount it in ten seconds, but getting the waves out of it is a problem. When I was done milling, I had a piece of steel that was still wavy, and the mill went to different depths on different passes, so it left me plenty of work to be done by hand.

You can clamp crooked steel down and mill it flat on top, but then when you flip it to mill the other side, it can bounce back into its crooked shape. If you manage to mill both sides flat and parallel, it may still be slightly bent when you take the clamps off. It’s annoying.

A knife doesn’t have to be laser-straight, but it should look and feel straight when you use it.

I haven’t decided whether I want to keep doing this. It’s easy and fun, but simple jobs tend to become boring with time.

In any case, I should have some really excellent kitchen knives pretty soon, and I may get ambitious and make myself a nice folder. I was even thinking I might take my Gerber Gator II apart, throw the soft 420 stainless blade out, and replace it with 440C. I like the handle.

If I feel like it, I can even etch a trademark and other stuff into blades. There’s a little inexpensive machine out there that allows you to print stencils for etching. That sure beats hammering my initials into it with lettering punches.

If this looks interesting to you, consider getting a big belt grinder. Learn from my suffering.

I’ll post a photo of the latest blade so you can say charitable things about it.

PULL!

I am still plugging away at The Aeneid. It’s like having a disease that goes into remission and comes back, over and over. It’s the herpes of literature.

I am around 60% of the way through it. I started the Mandelbaum translation over at the beginning because the Mackail translation I bought by mistake was so bad.

The boredom is crushing. Yesterday Virgil pulled one of the classics-author moves I hate the worst: he listed everyone who was going into a battle.

Do we really need this information? Do we really need to know that Warrior Queen Frisbee marched to war accompanied by columns of short-haired women who secretly dreamed of being police officers? Do we really need to know that King Phlebitis of Hydrangea wore the lionskin his grandfather Uvulus stole from the lair of Buttafuocus the Thracian Balrog? No, we do not. Not all details are essential, and that goes double when you’re making it all up.

Virgil is an astoundingly bad writer, and I don’t give him a pass. Sure, he lived a long time ago, but he didn’t invent writing. He had read works by other people. He had heard people tell stories orally. He knew what boredom and clumsy pacing were. He had Homer to learn from. He could have avoided Homer’s mistakes, but he decided to repeat them.

A week or so ago, I was inclined to forgive Virgil and look for the good in his work, but now I just want to smack him.

How do classics scholars stand their lives? I guess it’s not that bad once you’ve read everything in the catalog. It’s not like new classics are popping up every month.

I can understand why people became classics scholars decades ago. They were afraid of Vietnam and Korea. They had to stay in school in order to keep their draft deferments, and not everyone is smart enough or talented enough to get into something like engineering or music. If the alternative to reading Virgil were running around the jungle dodging bouncing Bettys and punji sticks, I guess Virgil would look pretty good. But how can people force themselves to study this stuff when the alternative is…a normal life doing something relatively interesting?

At the moment, Aeneas is about to go to war with the Italians. His ridiculous, childish gods are behind it. Zeus wants to help him, but Zeus doesn’t wear the pants on Olympus. His wife Juno is doing her best to get Aeneas killed. She has stirred the Italians up against him, hoping they’ll take him for a ride and fit him with a cement toga. She wants him whacked.

What is the point in worshiping these idiots if they’re just going to make you more miserable? It’s a complete ripoff. You can’t make them happy. If one of them likes you, the others hate you. They need family therapy, but they’re working their issues out on the Greeks instead.

Let’s give the real God his due; if he’s on your side, everyone in heaven is on your side. He doesn’t have a crazy wife who runs around behind his back, messing with the people he loves. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Satan. The devil is basically the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction, played by Liberace.

Shakespeare said hell had no fury like a woman scorned. He was wrong. That’s exactly the kind of fury it has. If Satan were a human woman, he’d be vandalizing our cars and calling us at work a hundred times a day. His apartment would be full of group photos with God’s face torn out of them.

No one is crazier or more tenacious than a jilted woman. They never show mercy, and they have no shame. It doesn’t bother them that their campaigns of vengeance make them socially radioactive and ridiculous.

I’m surprised a woman didn’t invent the suicide vest.

Aeneas doesn’t need Jupiter to help him conquer Rome. He needs Jupiter to slap his wife down. She’s a walking reality series. She should be tied to a rock with Prometheus, wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Okay. I feel a little better now.

I have Ovid on deck, and my copy of The Inferno is also ready when I need it. I don’t know what these books are like, but if they’re more entertaining than the phone book, they’ll be a big move up from Virgil.

No wonder I didn’t finish this stuff when I was in college. I forgive myself. I wonder if the serious students actually read this junk. Barack Obama and George Stephanopoulos were major grubs at Columbia; they were both in my class. I wonder if they read these books.

Maybe Obama read the books, and that’s the reason no one remembers him. He was in either the library or a padded room.

I think I may become the only person in history to complete the reading. I’ll bet the professors only read the Cliff’s Notes. Who would know the difference?

It’s too bad I didn’t realize the liberal arts weren’t for me. I thought high verbal test scores and some writing talent meant I had to take literature and writing courses. That was stupid.

I guess I did realize it, because I became a biology major the year before the deans and I agreed it was best I take a year off. But my family was driving me insane, and I had no study ethic to begin with, so that effort crashed and burned. Oh, well. It would have been nice to get into something I actually liked.

This experience is like the two years I spent learning salsa. I felt like a social failure because I hated to dance, so I took lessons, went to clubs, and even wrote extensive instructions. When it was over, I still didn’t care for dancing. I’m glad I’ll never have to do it again. I’m spending months reading the classics, and when I’m done, I will have conclusive proof that the classics are not my cup of nectar.

Maybe the brush I paint with is too broad; I don’t hate all old books. I like Voltaire, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Racine, Francois Villon, Marot, Moliere…it’s mainly the Greeks and Romans that make me want to carve an escape hatch into my skin from the inside.

I don’t like Dickens much. Windy. As I understand it, at least some of his works were published piecemeal in newspapers, so he had ample motivation to prolong them. Also, his work is depressing.

When I get done with Virgil, I may throw a party. Now that I think about it, it may take me so long that when I finish, Carnaval will be underway in Brazil. I could just hop on a plane. I wonder where I can get a giant papier-mache head around here.

Do not read Virgil. Okay, that was over the top. Read it once and then put it in your attic. It’s not entertaining. It’s not illuminating. You will not enjoy it. Get it done and move on.

I’m going to go take some Advil now.

It is my Defeated Foe

I think I really have meatloaf under control, so I’ll share the recipe.

I made a strange choice. I added seafood stock to the meat. I figured it would have more flavor than beef broth, and I was right, but if it sounds weird, try chicken stock. Whatever you do, don’t add beef stock. You already have beef flavor.

This is for a big loaf intended to help me avoid cooking all week. You should probably halve it.

INGREDIENTS

3 lbs. hamburger or ground chuck
1 lb. pork
2 eggs
12 ounces seafoof stock or chicken broth
1 cup panko bread crumbs
1/2 cup oatmeal
1 tbsp. salt
2 tsp. pepper
1/2 cup Heinz 57
1-2 tbsp. Worcestershire
3 tbsp. melted butter (seriously)
1 large onion, diced, fried in 3 tbsp. butter until the chunks start to clear
1 packet onion soup mix, beef flavor

Mix it up and form it into a loaf. I am not totally clear on the best cooking method. so I formed the loaf on a sheet of nonstick foil on a cutting board and then slid it onto a broiler pan. The slits in the pan let the excess grease escape.

Bake at 350 until the internal temperature breaks 120. Smear the top of the loaf with a mixture of 3 parts ketchup and 1 part Heinz 57. Bake until the temperature breaks 150. Let the loaf sit for a few minutes. Slice and serve.

It’s really good. It’s fairly light, and it’s not dry at all.

I made a vat of potatoes au gratin as well, and they were wonderful. Perhaps too good for my health.

I guess I can give you that recipe. I accidentally failed to peel one potato, and it didn’t hurt anything, so I may skip peeling in the future.

INGREDIENTS

4 baking potatoes, scrubbed and cut in 1/4″ slices
1 lb. shredded sharp cheddar
1 package bleu cheese, about 6 ounces (my guess)
1 wedge Parmesan cheese, whatever the normal grocery size is
6 cups half and half or 4 cups milk and 2 cups cream
6 tbsp. flour
5 tsp. pepper
1.5 tbsp. salt
8 tbsp. butter
6 egg yolks
1 medium onion, diced

Let’s see if I remember this.

Beat the egg yolks into the milk or cream or whatever with a mixer. You want them completely blended in so they don’t act weird when they’re heated.

Fry the flour in the butter for a few minutes. Don’t burn it. Pour the egg/milk mixture in and stir it while heating, to make a roux. Throw the salt, pepper, and cheese in. Stir to get it all blended.

Fry the onion in 2 tbsp. of butter until it starts to clear.

Mix everything but the potatoes up and let it simmer.

In a huge dish (gallon or more), arrange about half of the potato slices in a layer. Dump half of the sauce on them. Add the other half of the potatoes and the rest of the sauce.

Bake at 350 for 90 minutes. Remove the lid, remove excess grease if needed, and bake without lid at 400 degrees for 20 more minutes.

Toss 1 cup panko bread crumbs with 2 tbsp. butter, plus salt and pepper. Cover the top of the potatoes with this and bake for 10 more minutes. If you want, mix cheese into the crumbs. The crumb layer will help soak up grease that floats on top of the dish.

This was excellent, and the little semi-burned bits of the dish add lots of flavor.

I Saved Two Bucks

My sixth sense tells me people are dying to know how my knife-making efforts are going. Fear not. Relief is at hand.

Here’s a photo of the knife I”m making. Again, as if you hadn’t memorized every detail, this is a birds beak paring knife, but it’s actually a poultry-boning knife. I like birds beak knives for boning poultry.

The steel is 440C, which is a very nice grade of stainless. It’s a lot better than the crap many manufacturers are putting in their knives these days.

Let’s see. Where to start.

Scale.

Scale is oxidized metal. If metal is processed at high temperatures, scale forms on it. If the scale is on the metal when it comes from the steel mill, it’s called “mill scale.” It’s harder than metal, so removing it is a real pain. It can dull cutting bits, and it’s hard on abrasives. You can buy metal with the scale removed, but I saw that this was a silly waste of money, so I saved two dollars and got the scaly stuff, and I’m spending the last two weeks of August removing the crud. I am a smart shopper. Clearly.

I have people trying to tell me stainless steel doesn’t have scale. Yeah, okay. Everyone in the steel business disagrees with you, and I have scaly steel right here in my house, but…okay.

I shaped my knife, and then I used abrasives to get most of the scale off, but the last bits are the hardest to remove. On top of that, the steel bar I bought is wavy, so you have to sand the high spots off before the scale in the low spots starts to move. I would guess that the dips in the metal are only a thousandth or two deep, but that’s a lot when you’re removing metal from relatively hard steel using a sharpening stone and elbow grease.

I can tell the steel is wavy because wherever there is scale on one side of the blade, indicating a low spot, there is bare metal on the other side, indicating a high spot. Think about it, and you will understand.

I figured I was too smart to let this problem slow me down. I Googled for answers. I read that vinegar takes scale off. Maybe that’s true for carbon steel. I don’t know. It did virtually nothing for 440C.

The next step: electrolysis. I put baking soda in a container of water, and I connected a steel anode and the blade to a battery charger. After several hours, I had a layer of green stuff in the water, plus some rust, but I hadn’t made much progress.

It occurred to me that the green stuff might be a chromium compound. Chromium is found in green pigments. I figured that meant something was happening, but it wasn’t getting the job done.

I wondered why other people weren’t using electrolysis, and then it occurred to me that I might be making something poisonous. I looked chromium up and learned that there is a horrible poison called hexavalent chromium. Apparently you can get cancer just from reading about it (sorry). I hope I didn’t make that.

It didn’t taste too bad.

I considered supergluing the steel to something so I could mount it on the lathe chuck. That would allow me to face the crap off. Then I pictured the blade coming loose at 500 RPM’s. I considered trying the same strategy in the mill.

In the end, I went back to the drill press and sanding drum, along with the diamond sharpening stone. Tedious, but guaranteed to work.

You can remove scale with a belt grinder, but a belt grinder will shape the blade as it grinds. At the very least, it will round it at the edges. I plan to glue micarta scales to this thing. If the steel’s edges are rounded, there will be gaps between the micarta and the steel. It looks like you have to descale the knife before establishing the final contour. Then you can shape it to fit the handle scales. I did not do this.

It occurred to me that reducing the area of the steel touching the abrasive would shorten the descaling time, so I fired up the belt grinder–with trepidation–and started shaping the concave edge I foolishly designed into the knife. A concave edge is harder to grind than a convex or straight edge. I realized that after I was committed to the job.

Grinding went really, really badly. At first. I had no idea what I was doing. I hacked and gouged the steel. I started to think I was ruining it. After a while, though, bits of skill began to materialize somewhere inside me. By the time I was done, I had something that looked very good. I moved to a finer belt, and then I buffed parts of the blade with my 25,000-RPM dental lathe.

It’s not done yet, but I have less metal to finish now. Once every last corrosion pit is gone, I’m going to buff everything that will stick out past the handles, drill the knife for rods to hold the bolsters, drill it for fasteners to hold the scales on, and ship it off to be heat-treated. Sweet.

I can do this. If my first knife looks this good, the knives I’ll make two months from now will be nearly perfect.

I keep learning things. Today I learned that polished knives rust less than shiny ones. The scratches provide more surface area and more places where rust can take hold. That’s not an issue with 440C, but it’s good to know for future knives.

I also learned that 154CM is just as good as 440C, so if I can’t find 440C, I can order 154CM. It’s not exactly the same, but the pluses and minuses balance out to where I would be just as happy with it.

Another bonus: you can make knife-making pay for itself. Most hobbies don’t work that way. It’s very hard to make a living selling handmade knives, but it’s not hard at all to pay for your tools and materials, plus, possibly, beer. Nice.

The disappointing thing is that you can’t make real money at this. The well-known makers who attract drooling mobs of toadies at knife shows are generally either retired or dependent on their wives. That sucks some of the macho out of the business.

“This is my 14-inch cryo-treated 1,000,000-layer Damascus ‘Fang o’ Death II.’ I wanted to make it 18 inches, but Martha wouldn’t give me an advance on my allowance.”

Before I got started on this, I felt bad about having a small 1×42 grinder. It’s pretty slow for shaping things. But now I realize it’s a fantastic knife-making tool, because it can get into places better than a 2×72. If you have both sizes, you’re cooking with gas.

I still have enough scaly steel to make a second knife. I guess I’ll come up with something.

News will be posted here as it occurs.

More

Here’s the latest. The metal is cleaned up about as well as I intend to get it, and I’ve drilled holes for bolster pins and Corby bolts. As you surely know, Corby bolts are fasteners that hold handle scales on.

It’s about time to mail this thing off for hardening.

Narrative Hits a Major Speed Bump

Today I’m thinking about the Nate Parker/Jean Celestin rape scandal.

There is a new movie called Birth of a Nation. The title is taken from an old D.W. Griffith movie which portrayed the Klan as a noble organization. I haven’t seen the original movie; I would guess that almost no one alive has. I don’t really know what’s in it. The movie is extremely long, and it’s not exactly popular. In the minds of the public, renting this movie would be like checking Mein Kampf out of the library.

The new movie is about the Nat Turner rebellion, about which I know little. A slave named Nat Turner decided that God had told him to rise up against white people, so he led a revolt in which slaves killed white people indiscriminately. Turner himself killed a woman by slugging her with a fence post. I’m all for slaves running away, using violence and theft if necessary, but going from farm to farm murdering women and children for pleasure isn’t emancipation; it’s just sadism.

The new movie was written by two young black men, Nate Parker and Jean Celestin. They are former Penn State wrestlers. In 1999, they had sex with a woman who was so drunk she was unconscious at least part of the time. They invited others to participate. Both were indicted for rape, and Celestin was convicted and spent six months in jail. Celestin appealed, and he was granted a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. The victim refused to testify again, and the prosecutor dropped the case. Celestin has since claimed that he was “fully exonerated,” which is not an accurate way to describe what happened.

The victim was an honor student who went to college a year early. After the rape, she dropped out. She became a drug addict. She killed herself.

The bizarre thing about this is that Parker used an extremely self-righteous, insulting image to promote his movie. It’s a photo of his face in a noose made from the American flag. The message it appears to send, which may or may not be the intended victim, is that young black men are victims in America. Coming from a highly successful film director who got a free ride to college and then avoided conviction for gang-raping a white woman, that’s a little hard to stomach.

When I say “rape,” I am not saying he was convicted or that he can legally be referred to as a person who committed the crime of rape. I am saying that what he and Celestin did was rape under the common-sense dictionary definition. He had sex with someone who couldn’t consent because she was extremely drunk. Without real consent, in my mind, sex is rape, whether or not it satisfies the legal definition.

The perpetrators don’t deny that they penetrated the victim over and over–simultaneously–or that she was very drunk.

A lot of people are surely getting caught up in the legal niceties right now, and they are surely trying to make a case that what these men did wasn’t rape, but that draws attention away from the plain facts. They shared the body of a young woman who had consumed something like 13 shots of alcohol, and after the fact, they made her miserable by hiring a detective who posted pictures of her photo all over campus.

Can you support a person like that just because he wasn’t convicted, or because his conviction was reversed?

Rape is a strange crime, because it has levels and nuances. If you have sex with your wife twice in one in one night, consensually, and then during the third effort she withdraws her consent and you don’t comply immediately, that’s rape. It’s also rape if a bum grabs you off the sidewalk and violates you beside a dumpster. There are lots of shades in between these examples. Realistically, you can’t equate all rapists. The damage they do varies.

What Parker and Celestin did was unusually sick. The victim was barely conscious, and Parker went ahead anyway. That’s very bad. Then he invited his friends, as if her body were a pizza he wanted to share. That’s horrendous; inviting another man to violate a woman who barely knows him is vile. Then the victim was shamed publicly, as though she had committed a crime. That’s beyond the pale.

It’s disturbing that two men like this could be paid and lauded for making a movie which appears to be the latest in a series of race-baiting, anti-white films. It’s ironic that the poster depicts lynching. Many black men who were lynched in America were murdered because it was believed they had insulted or defiled white women. Now we have a director and screenwriter who fit that description, literally, and they’re using lynching imagery to make money.

It’s almost as if Satan is telling non-black America, “Look. You were right about them.”

Racial tension is out of control in America. I think Satan is poking both sides to stir things up. I think this movie and the scandal are parts of it. It’s polarizing.

Satan is doing a fantastic job on leftists and blacks. Black Lives Matters rioters just tore up Milwaukee over a case in which a black cop shot an armed black man who was clearly threatening him with a gun. They’re proving what most of us have suspected for a while: it’s not about police brutality. A justified shooting is still a good rationale for looting and violence. A large percentage of the “protesters” are just looking for an excuse to do evil to their neighbors.

Non-blacks are likely to use this senseless aggression as an excuse for anti-black racism. Even the least racist among us are likely to make changes in our behavior. This is not a good time to move to an area with a lot of black residents; who could be blamed for trying to locate elsewhere? It’s a scary time to reach out to black people and socialize with them in places where you’re outnumbered.

There are some types of race-motivated behavior you can control with laws. You can ban discrimination in hiring and selling, to some extent. There are also things you can’t control with laws. You can’t force white people to have black friends, or vice-versa. You can’t force people of one race to buy from people of another race. If things keep going the way they are, blacks and whites are going to segregate themselves in whatever ways are still legal. We’ve already seen black students advertising for “POC only” roommates, claiming the stress of living with whites is intolerable.

We should be building bridges. Instead, whites are on the receiving end of constant, open, unjustified criticism and rejection, and I guarantee you, they will retaliate silently. When whites can strike back without accountability, many do so. Look at the increase in racist Internet comments.

This mess is going to hurt black people. It won’t damage the rest of us that much. It won’t make people reluctant to hire us or associate with us. It won’t hurt our businesses. It will make it harder for black people to assimilate and succeed.

I don’t think there’s much hope for people who don’t serve God. For the rest of us, the answer is clear: identify with God’s family, not a race or nationality. If you’re a child of God, other children of God are your relatives and your race. Other people may look like you, but they’re against you.

Americans are flipping out over whether this person has the right to wear dreadlocks or that person has the right to rap. We ought to be concerned about aligning our hearts with God’s. Any two people whose hearts are aligned by God’s heart will live in agreement and peace. Discord is proof that something is wrong. God doesn’t fight with himself. His house is not divided. If we’re at each other’s throats, we’re not really of his house.

I don’t like the race-baiting movies. I don’t like the scary anti-black Internet comments. I don’t like the way we’re being censored by left-wing extremists. I think it will continue and get worse, though. The only hope of rising above it is submission to God.

No Turkey is Safe

I feel like I may have finally found my niche in the metalworking world. Today I roughed out my first knife, and it was easy.

Here’s a photo.

If you’re wondering why anyone would want a knife that looks like that, I can explain. I like to bone turkeys before roasting them. It makes a world of difference. After you’ve eaten boneless turkey, you won’t want a regular turkey. It’s totally inferior. This knife is designed to bone poultry.

I ordinarily use a birds beak paring knife to bone birds. I bought two pricey Japanese jobs, and all they did was contribute to my belief that Japanese knives are not very useful. I bought two $5 Forschners with plastic handles. They worked very well. But they’re flimsy.

I also have a specially designed harumigatodokutaka, or something that sounds like that. It’s a Japanese knife created for boning poultry. It’s worthless. I can’t understand how anyone manages to bone a bird with one without going to the hospital.

This thing is 1/8″ 440C steel, which is, truthfully, a little thicker than I need it to be. I wanted something sturdy, because when you bone a turkey, you need to get between the bones and pry. It will have the short blade and hook shape of a birds beak knife, and it will be strong enough to survive a stubborn turkey.

It looks grey because it has scale on it. When you heat steel, it oxidizes. Black iron oxide forms on the outside. When the metal cools, the oxide sticks, and it’s called scale. It’s harder than steel. You have to get rid of it (at least on the exposed areas of the knife) as part of the knife-making process.

I removed a lot of the scale using a sanding drum on the drill press. I also tried a 12″ diamond stone. I don’t know what the answer is yet. I think most knife makers just scrub the crud off on a 2×72 belt grinder, but I do not have one of those, and I’m worried that if I used one on future knives, I’ll screw up the dimensions of the knives by taking off metal.

Making this knife was very easy. No challenge at all.

I drew a design, and then I photocopied it. I put the copy on the metal bar I was using for stock. I glued it with 3M Super 77. I put the steel in my bench vise and used an angle grinder and cutting disk to start roughing it. The metal got very hot, so I was concerned I might harden it by accident.

Then I fired up my souped-up 1×42 belt grinder with a 60-grit belt (too fine for the job). It worked very well, considering the inadequacy of the grit, but it was pretty slow, and the belt is about 50% dead already.

I put the steel on the mill and tried milling off the waste, but the steel got hot again, and I had visions of myself trying to machine hardened 440C, so I quit.

I decided to put a grinding wheel on the grinder and try that. Everything fell into place. It removed metal much faster than the belt grinder, it didn’t get the metal too hot, and it was easy to control.

After that I kept moving around among the angle grinder, the belt grinder, the drill press and sanding drum, and my 25,000-RPM Themac dental lathe. I guess I put in an hour and a half.

The finished knife is a little different from the drawing. I made changes on the fly. But it’s beautiful. You can’t see the edges in the photo, but they’re finished like a factory knife’s edges. It’s really something.

Tomorrow I have to clean off the scale, hollow the blade out, put the beginnings of an edge on it, drill for screws, put two 416 stainless bolsters on it (which I will have to fabricate) and attach and shape a micarta handle. Then I have to disassemble it and send the steel to a company that will heat treat it for me.

Then it comes back, and I have to clean it up and put it together. After that, I sharpen it. I’ll have a cool poulty knife that ought to kick the crap out of anything you can buy anywhere.

Micarta is plastic with fabric imbedded in it. It makes good handles, and I am hoping it will be dishwasher-safe. If it weren’t for my desire to use the dishwasher, I would have bought a natural handle material that looks better.

Yes, I will be putting a handmade knife in the dishwasher. Deal with it.

If I had known knifemaking was this easy, I would have started 30 years ago. If I had had a big belt grinder, this would have taken half an hour. If I had had a big belt grinder with a few special attachments, it would have taken 15 minutes. You could make three decent knives a day if you had the right tools.

I suppose it’s even faster than that if you’re using steel thinner than the 1/8″ stuff I used. If I made a chef knife, I’d want something like 3/32″.

A 440C cleaver! That’s what I need!

Forget store bought kitchen knives. They’re almost always deficient in some way or other. Well, maybe that’s not true. I like my cheap Forschner and Mundial chef knives. But other than that, it seems like every knife is a compromise. Not any more!

When I get this thing mocked up, I’ll post a photo. When I get it treated, I may actually have to buy a turkey.

Excuses are Poison

I got a great revelation today.

For a long time now, God has been teaching me that growth, not money or healing, is what Christianity is all about. God is a father, and he wants what every father wants: children who function correctly. Think about it, if you have kids. Do you sit around worrying that they won’t be rich? No. You worry that they’ll be dysfunctional idiots who end up on jail, dead, or on welfare. You worry that they’ll become bad people who can’t thrive and do good. God has the same concerns.

Correction is literally better than gold. There are a lot of disgusting, stupid, disgraceful people who have wealth. There are very few people who have their heads on straight.

God has shown me that my problems are generally my own fault. Even if someone else sins against me, I opened the door. People who conform to God’s design win their battles. If you’re a loser, God is not backing you up, and there’s a very good reason for that.

It sounds harsh. It is harsh. That doesn’t matter. It’s the truth, and you can’t change it. You have to work with the truth if you expect to succeed. You don’t make the rules of the universe. The sooner you accept responsibility for your problems, the sooner you will beat them.

I created my own enemies. I opened the door. I fed them. I bent the knee to them and thanked them for abusing me. People and spirits that might have had no interest in me at all but for my participation showed up in my life and abused me, and that’s on me. It’s also on them, but that shouldn’t matter to me. At judgment, God is not going to ask me about their sins. Not once.

When kids fight and their parents wade in, often one kid will say, “He started it.” Lazy parents don’t care who started it. They just care about shutting down the noise so they can flop back on the couch and watch Snooki. They say it doesn’t matter who started it. In reality, it matters. If you start a problem, you are primarily responsible. You start most of your own problems.

I knew all that. I also knew that the New Testament was different from the Old Testament in that Jesus criticized people’s attitudes as well as their actions and words. In the Old Testament, you just had to obey. That’s not good enough for Jesus. He criticized men for committing adultery in their hearts.

Is it fair to criticize people for things they merely want to do? Yes. If the Holy Spirit is available to change them, and they haven’t taken him up on it. Under the new covenant, we have access to the Holy Spirit, in a way that wasn’t available before the crucifixion. We are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and we are supposed to pray in tongues and subdue our flesh and our minds. So yes, Jesus was not out of line when he criticized our desires.

When you put all this together, you get the revelation God gave me today: we are held accountable for our inclinations.

We are held accountable for our inclinations.

That sounds discouraging, if you have no faith in the Holy Spirit’s ability and willingness to change your heart. If you have that faith, then it’s an open door. It’s one of the greatest messages you’ll ever hear.

Jesus said he came to set the captives free. The Jews thought he was talking about kicking the Romans out. Christians think he only meant he was freeing people from hell. He wasn’t concerned about the Romans, because the rebellion of the Jews put them in place. He was referring to salvation from hell, but that’s not all he was referring to. He was referring to freedom from sinful inclinations and compulsions.

Paul talks about this. He says we are slaves to sin. We give up our free will through rebellion, and we become unable to do right. Powerful inclinations fill us, and we can’t resist them.

The Holy Spirit can undo that. This is what we should focus on, instead of pretending God will give us money for supporting embarrassing, heartless imbecile preachers with helicopters and palaces.

God does not hold people accountable for things over which they have no power. Because he holds us accountable for our inclinations, we know we have power over them through the Holy Spirit. We should be taking it upon ourselves to avail ourselves of his help, but we’re too busy not judging and pretending to love each other more than we really do.

Jesus said no man born of woman was greater than John the Baptist, but he also said he that was least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than John. That’s because Pentecost hadn’t come in John’s time. John had to fight using his own power. The Holy Spirit didn’t live in him around the clock, cleaning and restructuring. We live under a different set of principles. We have power John didn’t have, and because we don’t use it, we live in defeat.

I try to do what is right, but because I see and hear my own thoughts, I know I’m still filthy inside. Some things are fixed. There are other things I have to cope with through willpower, and I fail from time to time. The knowledge that God wants to fix my remaining issues is a huge relief.

Here is what Satan says, through Christians: “You’re so judgmental. You’re going to drive people away. Who are you to say these things?” I hear it all the time. Most Christians in the US love sin and spiritual laziness. They don’t want to change, and they love excuses. They love attacking anyone who gives them good advice. The Jews in the time of Jesus were the same way. It’s why they had him killed. It’s why they murdered the prophets with their own hands.

You can have your excuses or you can have victory and peace.

If you want your life to improve, focus on getting your heart and mind fixed. Otherwise, you’re just making things worse. You’re coating yourself with a bulletproof crust of denial, and you will wear it until you die.

Think about this, and put it to work. Stop sending money to vampires with cable TV shows. Give up your bitterness toward God, and stop blaming him for your suffering. Stop blaming other people. Close the door, and get God to clean your house. Confess everything you can think of.

This is the plan we gave up during the Dark Ages. It’s still on the table. You just have to choose it.

Consider the Balloon

During prayer today I had a very simple revelation, and I was glad to get it, so I’m bringing it here.

I’m always talking about the way America has become the tail and not the head (if you don’t know what that means, open a Bible once in a while). People who used to run from us now have us on the run. Things are upside down. Citizens of other countries come here and push us around and vote in our elections. Sexual deviants get us fired from jobs or have our businesses closed down. Losers and criminals hold “protests” which are really excuses for racist crimes and looting, and we bend the knee and apologize.

We don’t have God’s favor any more.

I think about this principal a lot, in relation to my own life. The closer I get to God, the more problems fall away from me. People who used to drive me crazy are removed from my circle. Problems I couldn’t beat disappear. What’s happening to me is the opposite of what’s happening to my country.

Here is one of the worst forms of defeat: debt. It’s slavery. If you don’t believe it, check the Bible: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” The word translated “servant” in the KJV means “household slave,” but if you disagree, well, isn’t “servant” bad enough?

When you borrow, you take things you haven’t earned. That means you have to keep working in order to pay for them. A person who has no debt can walk off his job in an instant, singing a Johnny Paycheck tune on the way out. A debtor has to take all sorts of abuse, and he may be pressured to do immoral or distasteful things in order to hold onto his position.

A slave is a person who doesn’t have the leverage to quit or say no. A debtor is no different. They are prisoners without cages.

Americans don’t see it that way. They think, “Wow, I have a new bass boat and a 300-inch TV so I can watch the Kardashians!” They don’t think about slavery.

I considered marrying a debtor. I must have been having a psychotic episode. I never thought to check. I was stupid. I was willing to walk into a bear trap, blindfolded.

If I had married a slave, I would have become a slave. Her debts would have been on my back, instantly.

Slavery is a funny thing; it’s like electricity. If you make contact with another person, it may run from them into you.

I don’t borrow. I would rather have a $15000 car and pay cash than drive a Mercedes that belongs to someone else. I have no interest in leasing, either. Freedom is too important to me. It may be questionable financial practice, but I have no regrets.

This week I saw a website saying Obama had jacked our collective debt up to $19 trillion. That’s debt we all have, whether we agreed to it individually or not. We owe China. We owe other nations. We even owe ourselves; we have a bizarre system in which we allow ourselves to buy our own debt, with imaginary money.

We are a nation of slaves. That’s the revelation God gave me.

Borrowing unnecessarily is a bad thing. It puffs you up and makes you think you’re a bigger deal than you are. Our roads are full of cars driven by people who can’t afford them. A big car with a note on it makes you look blessed, but to get it, you have to put a curse on yourself.

Borrowing is a way of cursing yourself in order to fake a blessing.

The Bible says God brings wealth without remorse. Here is Proverbs 10:22: “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, And He adds no sorrow with it.” If you’re borrowing in order to look successful, expect sorrow.

Every so often, I see a nice car on the back of a Jerr-Dan truck. It was more common back when the stock market crashed. I’m sure one or two of those cars had mechanical problems, but usually, a nice car on the back of a truck is a repo. Someone couldn’t pay his bills, and the real owner took the car back, in front of the neighbors. That’s what will happen at judgment. A lot of people–especially prosperity preachers–will come before God with pride and thick resumes, and God will put their ill-gotten trinkets on his truck and take them away. Metaphorically.

That’s no way to live.

America is sitting on a pile of wealth it can’t pay for. Sooner or later, there will be a bill. Then we’ll find out how well our new economics really works.

A funny thing about debt is that it makes you feel better…until it makes you feel worse. It makes you weak, but it makes you look and feel strong. We’re already poor. We only lack the appearance of poverty. That encourages us to keep borrowing.

Here is how the universe works: every once in a while, a servant who hates his position and has no patience overthrows his master, takes what he has, and stands on top of him crowing like an idiot. Then order reasserts itself, the master is restored, and the servant is way worse off than he was to begin with. That’s the story of Satan and God. It’s the story of debt. If you don’t serve God, it’s your story, too.

God will not be mocked. He always balances the books. He is patient, but if you don’t work with him, sooner or later, you will pay what you owe, plus a penalty for disobedience.

I have a few loose ends in my life, and I’m fixing them up. Thank God, they amount to nearly nothing. I’m glad I don’t wake up every day realizing I have to go and do something I hate in order to pay for, say, a car I already wrecked. I wish America were as safe as I am.

If you want to be blessed, give yourself completely to God and keep praying in order to become aligned with his will. Giving money to TBN leeches won’t help you; it will make things worse. Your own schemes won’t help. You have to come by what you have in the correct way.

By the way, I have something that will be very helpful to you. I like to play Christian music all day; I even play it in my bedroom when I’m not around. Yesterday I pasted a bunch of MP3’s together to create one 10-hour long file, and I put it on a DVD. If you do this, you can put it in a disk player and keep the music going all day. You could also leave a Christian radio station playing, but a lot of their material is just worthless dance music. I bought five Julie True albums, and that’s what I use. Try it for three days. You’ll understand why I like it.

If you play her music around people who dislike God, it makes them very uncomfortable. It’s something to see.

It will be interesting to see what happens as Americans reap what they’ve sown. It’s already interesting, but it will get more intense.

Hope this is useful to you. Let me know.

Listen up, Slackjaws

Now that I’m a big expert knife maker, I am–this will be a shock–adding to my tool collection. But it’s not so bad. So far, I’ve only bought files and file handles.

Here’s what I learned while shopping for files: nothing is so simple the Internet can’t make it incomprehensible. Actually, I already knew that.

Guess how many kinds of files there are. I hope you’re not expecting me to tell you, because the answer appears to be either infinity or unknowable. Guess how you can tell different types from each other. You can’t. At least I can’t. Every flat file looks like every other flat file to me.

A Youtube knife dude said I needed a flat double bastard file. That’s really what they call them. I tried to find one. I found double bastard flat mill files, lathe files, hand files, handy files, corrupted files, X files, Windows swap files, and Rockford Files.

I may not have that list exactly right.

There are a whole bunch of files that look exactly alike on a monitor screen. Luckily for me, the Youtube guy filmed the package his file came in, so I zoomed in and got the model number.

The file was a Nicholson, and Nicholson makes good American files that come in red, white, and blue packages. In 2010. In 2016, they make dubious Mexican files that come in green packages. Some people say they’re good. Other people say “no bueno.” I do not know who is right, but I do know that it’s not like there are 50 other American file companies to which I can defect, so I’m buying Nicholson.

I would expect Mexicans to be able to make good files. For one thing, it’s simple. It’s a piece of steel that has been cut and hardened. I could probably make one myself if I absolutely had to. For another thing, files can be useful for cutting padlock shackles so you can cut across other people’s land while entering the United States illegally.

Just saying.

There are quite a few good products made in Mexico. I wouldn’t want to ride their first space shuttle (which would almost certainly land or at least make a brief stop in El Paso), but their Fender guitars are nice.

One of the things you learn if you make a serious effort to get good at using tools is that almost no tool is simple to understand and use. If you think I’m kidding, go to Youtube and look for a video telling people how to use a claw hammer. I guarantee you will find at least three, and you will find out you’ve been doing at least three things wrong. It’s the same way with files. There are different shapes and “grits,” if you can call them that. There are files for hogging metal, and there are files for finishing. You have to be careful you don’t push a file the wrong way, you have to know how to fix it when it gets “pinned,” and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can leave mystery marks on a part while performing an operation you are positive is too simple to be done wrong.

Check this video out. You thought I was kidding. I hope you kept the receipt for that wrong hammer you bought.

I have a ball peen hammer, a claw hammer, a blacksmith’s hammer, a deadblow hammer, a hammer with plastic faces, a 13-pound sledge, a machinist’s hammer, and probably some other hammers, and I still don’t have enough.

A masonry hammer. I have a masonry hammer.

Not including thread-restoring files, I had–I think–a grand total of four files before I got the knife bug. I decided to add three more to my collection. I guess that should be enough to get me through one knife.

Buying files is so complicated, I actually made a computer FILE listing the model numbers of the files I have. It’s my file file. If I decide to replace them, there is no way I’ll be able to figure the model numbers out without a record. I looked at my files (steel, not binary), and they don’t have numbers on them. One says “bastard” on it. Glad I knew that was a technical term, or I would be writing Nicholson a furious email right now.

Now that I’ve actually looked at my files, I’ve discovered that Nicholson also makes files in Brazil. Crazy as Brazil is, that may be good news. They make some good stuff there, like Springfield firearms.

Down in Springfield, Brazil. Yeah.

I’ve also learned that file prices make no sense. Some files that cost $16 on the Internet appear to be almost exactly the same as other files that cost $5. I’m sure there’s a secret explanation, probably in Portuguese. I don’t know what it is.

It looks like Ebay is the place to buy files. A certain file I wanted was over ten bucks on retail sites, but I found them for five dollars and change on Ebay. I also found handles.

One of the annoying things about files is that the handle costs extra. Maybe you thought you were supposed to use them the way they’re packaged, just holding the pointy thing at the end (okay, “tang”). Wrong. You’re supposed to blow another five bucks on a package of rubber handles. You can’t buy one handle; that would make too much sense. They come in packages of two. I ordered four, so I will probably have more file handles than anyone within a ten-block radius.

If you wear out a knife-making file, there is good news: you can make a knife out of it. People do it all the time. I guess the steel must be highly suited to the purpose. It’s already hard. The knives are probably not all that pretty, and the cost is surely increased by the necessity of wearing out sanding belts (because you can’t file a file), but it can be done.

If you absolutely must try it, do not use a new file. A piece of fine 440C steel bigger than a file costs nine bucks. Quite possibly less than the file you’re considering ruining. Think, McFly. Think.

If you want to find out just how stupid you are about files, I have help for you. I’m going to post a video by Lyle Peterson, AKA Tubalcain. He claims he’s a former shop teacher, but from the sound of his voice, I would guess he’s actually the voice guy from the Miller High Life commercials. Whatever. I can totally picture him making fat kids do pushups for deliberately crashing the lathe. Or just for crying because they can’t climb the rope like the other kids.

He sounds like he has one of those bony, scarred index fingers that go right through your ribcage when he jabs you in the chest for talking in class and tells you you’re a slackjaw who will end up working at Sonic. He reminds me of my first-grade gym teacher, Coach Hatch, who had a special giant shoe to support the foot he injured stomping German tank barrels shut at El Alamein.

If you like tools, the video will be interesting. If not, it will be like watching a Republican debate without Donald Trump.

Get yourself some files. They will change your world, one stroke at a time.

More

Well, I am wrong. I should have realized. When you make a file knife, you anneal the metal before you shape it. So you don’t have to grind the whole thing.

Just picked that up on Youtube. Why do I ever turn it off?

Steel Grips; Glass Houses

I was going to write a post and simply say Jesse James had won the 1911 game, but now I’m not so sure.

Jesse James is a famous bike builder and hot rod designer. You probably know that. A few years back, he entered a competition with Paul Teutul (both of them), and I believe he came in second. Paul Jr. built a bizarre chrome bike that looked like the kind of bicycle the Silver Surfer would ride, and Senior built something that may have been a halftrack Roto-tiller. I’m still not sure what it was. Street snowmobile, maybe? Definitely not a motorcycle.

Anyway, James had some amusing things to say at the time. He claimed the winning bike had a 3/4-gallon tank, so it was useless for actual riding. That much gas will get you maybe 30 miles. You would lose your mind, filling it up five times a day. Paul’s defense: it actually held a full gallon.

Okay.

To criticize Junior’s use of prefab parts, James said something like, “Here’s the sound of progress at PJD: ‘beep beep beep.'” He was imitating the UPS truck, backing up to drop off tanks and frames. I cackled.

I was always impressed by Junior’s work, but who would ride one of his bikes? They were made to go in glass cases in the lobbies of corporate headquarter buildings.

The bike James built was much better than the one that beat it, even if it was not as creative. It was well-proportioned. It was tasteful. It looked great. And it probably went farther than 30 miles.

James does a lot of his own work, instead of ordering things. He has a forge in his garage. That’s hard core. He has a mill, some kind of crazy press for forging hot metal, a planishing hammer, and probably every machine tool and welding tool known to man.

That impresses me. Making things the easy way sucks the soul out of them. If people can’t see the brush strokes, is it still art, or is it something more like printing?

His new thing is a firearms company, and he makes 1911 pistols and AR-xx rifles.

I went to the site to look it over, expecting to see a bunch of dubious crap, but I have to say it: he makes the nicest-looking 1911s I’ve ever seen. He makes Damascus slides for them. You really have to see it for yourself. Magnificent.

He told an interviewer he made something like 80% of the parts. I thought that was great. And I figured it was true, because a guy who gets highly worked up about making things by hand would not put his name on other people’s stuff just to make money.

Well, guess what? The pistols are made by STI, a well-known gun company that competes with outfits like Wilson and Les Baer. In another interview, he admitted it. He only makes certain bits.

Dude.

The fact that he would maybe not be totally truthful about it sours me on the whole deal. Not that I was planning to spend $5000 on a pistol.

I looked around to see what other people said about the guns, and the buzz doesn’t sound good. One guy claims they won’t fit in most holsters. That’s a serious problem. Who wants a $5000 pistol he has to carry in his hand? I mean, sure, I know nobody is really going to shoot one of these things, but you want to think it’s possible.

Also, he makes steel grips for his pistols. There is no way that’s a good idea. If it were a good idea, Colt would have done it, because it’s cheap. Steel is heavy, it’s slick, and it rusts. Come on. The grips look fantastic, but there is no way they work in real life. And even if they’re comfortable and grippy, who ever said, “You know, I just wish my carry 1911 were five ounces heavier”?

I knew Jesse James was not a candidate for sainthood, but at least I respected his honesty about his work. I figured that was sort of an anchor for him. Now that’s over. Also, I think a man who makes pistols with iron grips has to be careful about criticizing a man who makes a bike that only goes 30 miles.

I guess I should add that the bike Jesse James built has a smallish tank, and it probably won’t run for more than two hours. Hmm.

If you get a minute, go over to his site and check the guns out. I still think it would be neat to have one. My guess is that they’ll increase in value, and they would be great collector’s items. The site is JJFU.com.

I Descend into the Culture of Undateable Males who Play D&D

I guess I should know better than to do this, but I decided to try a new hobby: knifemaking.

Hear me out. Yes, I realize I have 10,000 tools, and I produce little of value with them. I still don’t have CNC under control. Yes. True. But if you think about it, knifemaking isn’t really a new hobby. It’s something to do with the stuff I already have.

Knives were a big part of my childhood. My favorite great uncle lived down the road from my grandfather, and when I was staying with my grandparents, I used to walk to his house and trade knives with him.

Trading knives is something you’re supposed to do, if you live in Eastern Kentucky.

He had a cigar box full of old pocketknives, like Cases and Remingtons, and he used to show them to me and tell me which brands were best.

I think he got the best of me most of the time.

Since I’ve been old enough to have pockets, I’ve always carried a knife. Unusual for a kid raised in Florida suburbs. I carried one in school. Try that now. The estrogen dealers who run the schools would tape you to a chair and have you analyzed.

The first decent pocketknife I owned was a Gerber. They used to make good knives. I went into a store in Lexington, Kentucky and bought a PK-2 folder made from 440C, which is a wonderful type of stainless steel.

I could tell it was a step up from the knives people up in the hills traded. You could spend an hour carving on a piece of hardwood and still use it to pop little hairs off of your wrist. It stayed sharp. That doesn’t work with a 1970 Case pocketknife.

I carry a Gerber Gator II now. It’s a big knife with a rubbery handle. The steel is not great, but it sharpens fast, and that means I’m less reluctant to use it. When you use a knife, you dull it, and then you have to sharpen it, and that’s work.

There are two nice things about the Gator. First, it cost me $15. It was so cheap, I bought two. Second, you can open it instantly by flicking your wrist. You don’t have to have a thumb stud, and you don’t have to worry about it popping open in your pants, the way switchblades do. I carried a switchblade for a while, and it tended to open by itself. It had a safety, but that made it busy and annoying to open.

For some reason or other, I decided to look at a knifemaker’s Youtube videos the other day. I don’t want to say his name. They were very informative. I was shocked to see how easy it was to make a knife. Basically, you buy a piece of flat steel, and you use files and a belt grinder to shape it. Then you drill a couple of holes in it and attach the grips and hardware, and you sand it to the correct profile.

I can do that! I had always been intimidated by knifemaking, but man, it’s simple.

Here’s why I won’t say the man’s name: his knives are awful. I looked at his website, and he had some knives for sale. I’m sure they work well, but they looked crude. That was encouraging. I knew I could draw something nicer than that. He seems like a great guy, so I do not want to do anything that could be perceived as calling him out.

I can already tell what I’m going to run into: the knife culture. There are a lot of weirdos out there who think of knives as horror movie props. I joined a forum, and I’m sure I’m going to run into guys who call themselves things like Dethskull and DragonLord. I want no part of that mindset. I am not interested in making scary instruments that look like the devil uses them to pick his teeth. I’m not looking to make boot knives or belt buckle knives or stilettos I can polish while staring at white supremacist forums. I do think it would be nice to have some custom-made kitchen knives, though.

I decided to start with a birds beak paring knife. The Japanese make them. It’s a tiny knife with a curved, pointed blade. I don’t pare anything, but these knives are great for boning poultry. I bought a couple of pricey Japanese ones, and they’re not very good. On top of that, like most Japanese kitchen knives, they have to be treated like sick babies. They fall apart if you blink at them. I also have two $5 Forschners with plastic handles. Very nice, but I’d like to have something with a thicker blade.

As far as I know, the 440C knives I’ve had have been the best, so I checked around, and it looks like this is a popular steel for beginners. I found a 12″ bar for $9, so I don’t think I can go wrong. I ordered a few bits to go with it.

I don’t have a big, manly 2×72 belt grinder, which is the optimal tool for shaping knives, but I do have a 1×42, and it will get the job done eventually.

The big problem with this is that if I succeed, I’ll have to fix a turkey. That’s a lot of work.

It would also be nice to have a 440C cleaver shaped to resemble the astonishing $9 carbon steel cleaver I bought from The Wok Shop. If you have no other kitchen knife, and you can learn to use a diamond sharpener, this is the knife you want.

The stuff should get here next week. If I get anywhere with it, I’ll post a photo. If not, I’ll delete this post and pretend nothing happened.

This Will not End Well

I can’t seem to learn from my mistakes! Today I looked at The Drudge Report again.

I found a link to a story about Oklahoma Satanists. They are planning to rent out a hall and have a blasphemous ceremony called “the Consumption of Mary.” I looked it up, and the reference I found–probably Wikipedia–said it involves putting a statue of Mary inside a triangle, dancing around it, cracking the head off, and eating a pig heart which has been concealed inside it. Yes, adults do this.

I completely understand atheists. The world is messed up, so they think it’s impossible for a good God to exist. A thinking person could take that position, wrong though it is. But what’s with people who believe in God and choose to hate him? How is that supposed to pay off in the end?

Why do they hate Christians so much? Is it because we run so many charities and fund so many hospitals? Is it because we believe in forgiveness and love? What, exactly, are we doing that gets under their skins?

When you work hard on creating an extremely offensive ceremony like the Consumption of Mary, you clearly have cruelty issues. You’re not looking for a peaceful way to express your views. You’re looking to torment people you dislike. You know there are emotional Christians out there who will lose their minds over your actions, and you delight in making them suffer.

A lady named Mary K. Baxter wrote a fascinating book in which she claimed she had been given a tour of hell. She said there were people there who were extremely disappointed in Satan. Maybe I shouldn’t put it so flippantly. She said there were people there who, during their lives, seriously thought Satan could defeat God, and that Satan would reward them with kingdoms of their own. They arrived in hell and were shocked to learn that Satan doesn’t keep his promises.

Is that the mindset of the unfortunate Satanists in Oklahoma? Is Satan their crooked retirement counselor?

If you believe Satan is real, you probably believe a lot of what the Bible says about him. The Bible says he’s a liar, and it also says God defeats him effortlessly, whenever he wants. How could you put your faith in a loser like that?

I am more disturbed by what’s happening in the hearts of the Satanists than by the ceremony itself. Mary is in paradise, and despite what some Catholic drivers may believe, she is not in a statue. You can’t put a pig heart in her. You can’t trap her in “the Triangle of Solomon.” I’m not worried about Mary, nor am I worried about the harm the ceremony will do to Christians (i.e. none).

Some people get very upset by sacrilegious acts directed toward objects. It doesn’t rattle me that much. If you want to burn Bibles or pee on crosses, I will be offended, but I will go on with my life. I wouldn’t do anything if I saw a demonstrator burning a statue of Christ. Statues and Bibles are things; viewing them as more than that is a gateway to idolatry. Muslims think the Koran IS God, and there are many, many Muslims who would kill anyone who harmed a copy. That’s not me. As long as you pay for them, burn all the Bibles you want. You’re supporting Christian publishers.

The rot in the hearts of Satanists is the real problem. They love evil and lies so much, these things are walls and strongholds to them. A person who doesn’t live in a stronghold of deception can be reached with reason and love. Once the walls go up, only supernatural warfare can bring them down, and most of the time, even that won’t work.

Here’s something else that disturbs me: Satanists use supernatural tools to fight Christians, and we fight back by carrying signs and making Internet comments. Occultists have way more faith than we do. They rely less on carnal tools. They know curses and prayers to fallen spirits work. We think relying on prayer is lazy or unrealistic; we actually criticize Christians who pray instead of “doing something.”

We should be praying and repenting all day. That would fix the problem. I don’t think those “Jesus rules” signs are going to help much.

Over the last day I’ve been thinking about myself and America a lot. I’ve noticed that the more I’ve turned to God, the more problems have fallen away from me. Even silly things, like the strange little flies that used to breed in my shower. I couldn’t get rid of them; nothing worked. They buzzed around me for years, and then one day I realized I hadn’t seen them in a very long time.

Defying God causes problems in life. They won’t be obvious to people who are spiritually blind, but they do pop up. Defying God gives your enemies power. They can go before God and get permission to defeat and abuse you. Defiance will make you sink lower and lower, and you will start to find that people and beings you used to defeat easily walk all over you.

This is what’s happening to America. Satanists aren’t using public buildings to hold ceremonies because we don’t wave signs or because our views on tolerance have “evolved.” They’re doing it because our defiance gave them power. They have God’s permission to do it.

It’s not just Satanists. It’s jihadis, illegal aliens, black racists, gays, enraged feminists, socialists, and every other type of confused, spirit-infested individual.

I love being raised up past my problems. It’s terrific. I want more of it. But it seems like America sinks while I rise. If that has to be true, then I’m fine with it. I can’t carry people with me, and there is no way I’m going to join them in defeat. But I do wish it weren’t happening.

We have a president who was raised by communists, and one of his best friends is a terrorist who admits he’s guilty. A person like that shouldn’t be able to get a job as a TSA agent, let alone as chief executive. We knew what he was, and we chose him over a war hero and a competent governor. People like Obama could not get traction in the past. God slapped them down. God doesn’t do that as much as he used to. The ground underneath us has changed, because we think we are the source of our own blessings.

The people I used to natter and grumble with in the conservative Blogosphere are chasing their tails. For the most part, they’re just making things worse. They think we need this carnal solution or that carnal solution. It won’t help. When God is against you, there is no rock big enough for you to hide under. He is the worst enemy you can possibly have. There is absolutely no way to stop him.

Inside God, there is complete protection and peace. Outside of him, everything is margarine and saccharine. Everything that appears good is poisonous.

I’m getting used to the stories about sacrilege and blasphemy. Obsessing on problems you can’t change is a curse. I just wish people would turn around before it’s too late. I know most of them won’t. It’s a certainty.

Whoever you are, and whatever you’ve done, the door is open to you. The sooner you apply, the better off you will be.

I Miss Newspapers

I really have to quit checking the news as soon as I wake up.

Today I awoke and checked Drudge. I found a link to a story containing another link to a 2015 Milo Yiannopoulous story (I don’t even care if I spelled that right) about the destruction of the Nick Denton online empire. I went through a typical daisy chain of links, from one story to the next. By the time it was over, I felt sick to my stomach.

I’m not one of those people who say they feel sick to their stomachs when they really don’t. I mean I felt physical nausea.

Nick Denton created a site called Fleshbot. It was a porn site. I have certainly looked at porn, but I don’t know much about Fleshbot, except that it was very successful. Porn dealers are like drug dealers; their audiences can’t control themselves, so they keep showing up. It’s not hard to get rich selling something people can’t turn down.

Denton went on to create a bunch of oddly named sites that did well: Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, Jalopnik, and Wonkette (possibly the most famous fake blog in history) are among them.

I’m not positive Fleshbot came first. You can check.

Anyway, the Denton conglomerate was (and is) a very sleazy operation. It exudes slime.

As everyone knows, Hulk Hogan killed the Nick Denton cancer. Hogan was videotaped committing adultery, and Gawker either published or linked to the video. Gay billionaire Peter Thiel, who had been outed by Denton, backed a lawsuit. Hogan won, and Denton was handed a fatal multimillion-dollar judgment, which is being enforced.

I’m going to check this time…I was right…YIANNOPOULOS made a list of people who should also sue Denton. It’s quite impressive.

Denton’s crew published a story about a man named Geithner–not a public figure, according to…Mr. Y….and suggested he hired a gay prostitute. They accused actor James Franco of raping a man. They helped leak a Quentin Tarantino script before the movie was produced. They published a lot of nude celebrity photos obtained from criminals. They published voyeur photos of the genitals of male athletes, without the consent of the athletes. Imagine how their wives and kids must feel.

The Internet tends to make people feel invincible, and it brings out their cruelty and arrogance. Denton’s lackeys developed a pattern of tormenting people online, for amusement as well as money, and as far as I know, the Denton apparatus has never expressed significant regret or a serious inclination to examine itself and make corrections.

The Yiannopoulos story appeared on the Breitbart site (Breitbart, himself, was no paragon of dignity or kindness), and the Breitbart site contains links to disturbing social media posts. It’s also full of poisonous comments from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I kept clicking, and I ended up reading a Slate story which was so mean-spirited I decided it should be my final destination for the morning.

The Slate article’s title: “The Heaving Pukes Who Write Gawker and Wonkette.”

This is public discourse in 2016. Slate is not a Blogspot site written by a tipsy anonymous accountant who likes to knock a few back after a ten-hour workday. It’s not a tabloid site. It’s the 2016 equivalent of a 1985 magazine you might have found in supermarkets.

“Heaving Pukes.”

The amazing conclusion I drew from my few minutes of websurfing was that I had underestimated the vileness of the Internet.

That makes sense, when I think about it. The godless leftist side of the Internet, which makes up maybe 80% of the bandwidth these days, is much more vile than the rest of the web. I have never been inclined to spend time on leftist sites. Even when I was behaving badly myself, I was put off by the astounding obscenity and cruelty of the leftist Internet. That means I didn’t get a representative sample of the Internet’s content. As bad as my experience was, it was filtered.

Many people have spent more time reading godless garbage than I have, and a lot of them don’t mind it. They don’t mind when a lesbian crazy threatens to sexually mutilate a conservative writer with her teeth. It doesn’t bother them when someone threatens to have sex with another person’s dead skull. Cruelty and filth bring them pleasure. They titter and smirk.

That’s what America is good at these days; tittering and smirking. We are losing our manufacturing capacity, but we have the Internet, The Family Guy, South Park, Deadpool, and The Hangover.

Man, this place is sick. And of course, I used to contribute to the sickness. I sowed; now I’m reaping.

People need to step back and think about what they’re making of themselves. This is not going to end well. And even if there were no lawsuits or other worldly repercussions to think about, what about the inward cost? What about the penalty of simply being the kind of person who swims gladly in a world of vomit?

To Shakespeare, the worst price a villain paid was to be a villain. People don’t understand that concept. Do you really want to wake up at the age of 60, hung over, in a bed that smells like cigarette ashes, with no real friends and nothing to show for yourself except herpes and a monument built from congealed bile? That’s the future for Internet denizens who love hate.

Unless you’re mentally ill–maybe even then–you can’t hate other people habitually without coming to hate yourself. Hate is a habit that operates without your conscious consent, and when you don’t give it a target, it will find one for itself. When you’re not ideating about cruelty to others, you will find yourself inwardly contemning and ridiculing the creature you have made of yourself.

You will be right.

America is like a hate slingshot. With the help of the Internet, we have been building up hate energy. We have been embracing, approving, and feeding our cruelty. We have outed ourselves as cruel, the way gays out themselves as gay, and like gays, we’re proud of what we are. We are pulling the slingshot pouch back. One day we’re going to release it without the buffers of keyboards and monitors. We will act directly, with our hands and feet, not just our words. We are being turned into the kind of people who can put other people in gulags and death camps.

Where do you turn when the world rains burning sulfur? Earth didn’t come with an escape pod. There is no natural shelter. When America turns into a killing field, there will be no other America to flee to. This was the last refuge. You better give yourself to God and find his protection while you still can. You’re not going to develop that kind of relationship with him overnight. It’s time to get started. It may be too late to get everything you need.

I feel like turning the Internet off and going to live in a hole, but the hate culture has penetrated TV and daily life, so it wouldn’t protect me completely. Increasingly, the world is an extension of the Internet. What do you see when you turn on the news now? Tweets, Facebook posts, and Internet videos. You might as well plug into the Matrix and stop eating solid food.

America is not going to change for the better, but you are not America. You can take measures that will affect yourself and your family. I plan to keep moving forward. What’s behind me is not worth the trouble of turning around.

You Can Have Zeus

I am taking the day off.

Monday and Tuesday were not pleasant at all. I am still working on getting my dad’s business straight, and I am also taking care of my own loose ends. Today I just want to level off and relax.

I took my problems to God this morning, and as always, he was helpful. He reminded me that voices of worry and stress don’t come from him. They are lies. My father above, who is in control, has told me things are going to be fine, and he keeps living up to his word. There is no point in allowing lies from other sources to rattle me.

When I was younger, I worried about bad things happening to me, and sometimes they happened. Usually I was wrong, but I had some serious failures. Life isn’t like that any more. Things work out. My problem isn’t problems; my problem is doing a poor job of receiving the peace that comes from knowing my problems are fixed.

Writing that, I feel like FDR. He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He wasn’t really correct, though, as a lot of World War Two’s victims could tell you if they were alive. He was just trying to make people feel better. What I’m saying is true, because I have someone who backs it up.

I’m going to be fine. I’m not going to be poor. Peace and success will increase. I will get more and more inner healing. My character will improve. God’s help will flow more freely. I will feel better.

God makes it happen, not just because I say he does, but because he says he does, and because I am submitting to him instead of demanding favors while living in rebellion.

It took me many years to build the stronghold of bad habits and wrong thinking. It’s not taking nearly that long to tear it down and build God’s stronghold in its place. Of course, this time, someone stronger is doing most of the work for me.

Once again, I have to say I’m glad I’m not involved in the political demolition derby any more. It was a source of frustration and anger.

I used to love being a self-appointed conservative Internet avenger, linking to other blogs, writing vitriolic essays, and posting silly memes. It’s nice to be out of it. It’s nice to realize that fixing myself is more important and productive than fixing the country. It’s better to focus on the roots than the leaves.

America is dying. I suppose it’s good that there are carnal people out there making themselves miserable, trying to slow down the disease’s progression. Thank God I’m not one of them.

I’ve finally received some control over my participation in Internet squabbles. I haven’t been writing much political stuff here, but I still felt an irresistible urge to comment on news stories. This week I’ve been deleting my comments. That means the deluded and vicious people I argued with will “win.” That’s okay. Should I even have to tell myself that? Sane, healthy people don’t lie awake at night thinking the world will end if they give up a flame battle attached to a story on The Washington Post’s website.

The devil is a square dance caller, and he pairs people up on the Internet so they can dance for him. Like most square dancers, they go in circles. I don’t want to do-si-do with Amanda Marcotte, Andrew Sullivan, or Ann Coulter’s slavish fans. Those people are trapped in a sick fantasy world where nothing improves. It’s a video game, and Satan keeps resetting it.

https://youtu.be/m9SrXRNPRCA

I have accepted the fact that I have to support Donald Trump. After McCain and Romney, Trump is an easy pill to swallow. The alternative is unthinkable. It’s amazing that America has sunk to the point where we are seriously considering making Hillary Clinton the commander-in-chief. Who’s next? Rod Blagojevich? Al Sharpton? Charles Manson?

If I were still involved in political blogging, I’d probably create a T-shirt with Hillary’s photo on it and big text reading “TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT.”

Hillary may lose, but even if she does, sooner or later we are going to be ruled by extremely slimy, disagreeable leftists. We are going to be humiliated the same way the Russians and Cubans were. Trashy individuals who couldn’t hold jobs at McDonald’s will show up at our homes with guns to tell us our property belongs to the people. They will sit in our offices at our former businesses, running them into the ground. People who were complete losers in a fair capitalist system will have titles and goons, and we will bend the knee to them, just as Jews bent the knee to Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and Nazis.

I’ll be very grateful if Trump buys us a four-year delay; eight years would be an unexpected bonanza.

I don’t think Trump will be as bad as his opponents predict. When the responsibility of the office hits him in the face, he will surely take off his clown shoes and work to make his administration a success.

I never communicate with conservative bloggers. I mean, not one. I never look at their blogs. The last one I looked at was The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. I used to love that blog. Last time I looked at it, I found it disturbing. I don’t want to share that kind of impotent fury any more.

In other news, the savage blow I took from The Aeneid still has me “bug-winding,” as people in Kentucky used to say. We don’t hear that expression enough. “Get off my porch, or I’ll knock you bug-winding.” I was something like 40% into Mackail’s horrific translation when I realized I was reading the wrong book. I got the Mandelbaum translation, and it was so much better, I decided it was best to start over. I think I’m on page 70-something out of 400.

Aeneas and Ulysses had to endure long, painful journeys filled with bloodshed and frustration. At times they felt they would never get where they were going. I can totally relate. I believe I’ve been working on this one-week reading assignment for a month. Or maybe it just seems like a month.

I’m still disgusted by the Greeks. I know Virgil was a Roman, but I think he captured the Greeks as well as Homer and the other Greek writers did. The Greeks were gung-ho about things like rape, enslavement, pillage, arson, and murder. They loved invading other people’s countries and destroying them. They were horrible people. But they loved calling each other stupid things like “pious” and “guiltless.”

What kind of religion calls you pious and guiltless while you’re running around murdering everyone you see?

The weird thing about the Greeks in the classics is that they moan and whine about the suffering that comes from war, while they’re in the midst of initiating or prolonging it. They’re just like the Crips and the Bloods. They want pity and admiration for self-inflicted misery.

The Olympics are in session right now; it’s a good time to comment on the Greeks. Like Olympic athletes, the Greeks were obsessed with things that have no real importance; things that do not last. If you criticize the Olympics, people treat you like you kicked a puppy, but the whole thing is a misguided festival full of neurotics and self-worshipers, and at night, it’s an orgy.

I don’t really care who runs a hundred meters the fastest. I can’t believe anyone can make a living doing that. I can’t believe people will make you rich for pole vaulting or lifting a barbell.

How can any woman be proud she spent six hours a day for twelve years, learning how to hop around on a balance beam? Think of the things she could have done with that time. She could have learned four languages. She could have learned to play and compose music. She could have had a social life.

What do you do at age 25, when your world-class gift no longer exists? Hello, public speaking! I guess. “Here’s a motivational story about something unimportant I did not nearly as well as today’s athletes, back before I gained sixty pounds…”

Here’s an interesting thing the Olympics and the games in the Greek classics have in common: they produced a lot of losers and very few winners. People love to say it’s a great honor to represent your country in the Olympics, and that no one really minds losing. That’s not very credible. No one who doesn’t mind losing has the temperament to exchange childhood and a normal hormonal profile for a chance at some plated medals. Top athletes can’t stand to lose. It haunts them.

When a huge number of people engage in an activity and nearly all of them emerge as dejected losers, it seems to me that it’s an indication that it’s not a good investment of time. Imagine what it would be like if you could feel all the heartbreak inside the Olympic athletes as they participate in the cruel closing ceremony.

P.S.: doping. Everyone since about 1965 gets an asterisk.

We took our unfortunate love of sports from the Greeks. I’m glad we’re not quite as vain and shallow in all areas of life.

I don’t care all that much what happens to Aeneas. He’s a miserable, violent, greedy, vain person. Reading about conflicts between the ancient warriors is like watching a boxing match between John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. None of them deserve to win. A good ending to their stories would be to see their slaves revolt and put them in prison.

Ovid is next. The book I ordered is here. I took a look, and it doesn’t look too bad. Virgil is not a hard act to follow, though. After the tale of blameless Aeneas, Naomi Wolf would seem like a vacation.

I still dread Cervantes.

You Become What You Love

Someone directed me to an article about Popes Benedict and Francis. I looked it over. Popes are not really within my areas of interest. I see them as distractions, outside the will of God.

It reminded me of one of the major problems with denominations that exalt human beings: they discourage the rest of us from connecting with God directly.

God never wanted us to have popes and special people called “saints.” That’s not how the kingdom of heaven works. It’s not a system with lots of levels, like the military. In God’s kingdom, there is God, and then down one level, there is you. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The Bible calls us his children, not his grandchildren.

In the Bible, the Greek word translated “saint” just means “person who belongs to God.” It doesn’t mean you can pull rabbits out of a hat or turn water into Pepsi.

I used to go to Trinity Church in Miami, and then I attended a place called New Dawn. Both were screwed up. They exalted preachers above everyone else. They gave people the ideas that preachers were closer to God than they were, and that this was okay. It’s not okay. It’s not even a little bit okay.

Many preachers want to be worshiped. They want to be little gods to their flocks. They have teams of people who screen them from the masses. They keep their distance, except when they pop out to act for the cameras and convince people to send money or give them obedience.

At the churches I went to, “submission to authority” was the excuse. A centurion told Jesus he was a man under authority, so somehow, preachers turned that into a basis for Kommandant status. Preachers turn themselves into emperors. Criticize the emperor, and he tells the flock to ostracize you. He says God will curse you, although the real curse is being under a little man with delusions of grandeur. He stands in front of the people and says, “Touch not my anointed and do my prophets no harm,” with no understanding of the word “anointed.”

The big cheese at Trinity had secret meetings about me when I left. When someone reported my Facebook account and got it canceled, the pastor at New Dawn put up a status that said, “God don’t like ugly.” I am completely serious. These characters questioned other people about me behind my back, as if merely knowing me were treason.

One preacher approached a friend of mine in the church parking lot and started yelling at him about me, waving his fingers in his face. My friend threatened to defend himself with a beating. Someone who was afraid the cops would get involved called me about it and asked if I could help.

When Moses was in charge of the Hebrews, some men prophesied without informing him first. Joshua, fancying himself the hall monitor of the Hebrew people, ran to Moses to tattle. Here’s the story, from Numbers 11:

But two men had remained in the camp: the name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, and said, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.”

So Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, “Moses my lord, forbid them!”

Then Moses said to him, “Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!”

Now we know he was prophesying about the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which most Christians will never receive. They don’t ask for it, or they think they already have it.

Look what Moses said. “Is your zeal for me, or for God?” That says it all.

Here is what Paul said about worshiping preachers:

Now I say this, that each of you says, “I am of Paul,” or “I am of Apollos,” or “I am of Cephas,” or “I am of Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name.

When a church tells you popes, “saints,” or priests have something you can’t have, they lie to you and keep you defeated. They put you to sleep so you don’t reach your potential. They convince you it’s okay to do as you please all week, as long as you show up on Sunday, like a pair of dirty underwear headed for the washing machine. You don’t have to be good; the priests do that for you.

Every one of us is supposed to be dedicated to God, and every one of us is supposed to have victory in life.

If Popes were truly anointed, they wouldn’t be wrong all the time, and Francis definitely wouldn’t be a leftist. A leftist Christian is like a Nazi Jew. The left has always tried to kill us off and blot out God’s name. The Soviets used to teach kids to pray to Stalin.

As for the “saints,” they’re just replacements for the pantheist “gods.” “You don’t want to pray to Zeus any more? Fine. Now you can pray to St. Francis. Anyone but Jehovah.”

Any time you worship anyone or anything other than the Lord, you are worshiping Satan. That’s why Jesus is so intolerant. Anyone you pray to is an object of worship. The “saints” don’t answer prayers. If you pray to a saint and get an answer, it came from someone else.

Because I’ve been sitting around reading books by Greeks and Romans, I now realize pantheism is a bigger problem than I thought it was. I thought the Greeks and Romans had one set of “gods,” and the Egyptians and other heathens had different ones. That’s not true. The Greek pantheon came from Egypt. The names were different, but the basic pantheon was fundamentally the same. The Egyptians had temples dedicated to Greek spirits. The spirits rebellious Jews worshiped were the same spirits.

I haven’t checked, but I’ll bet the spirits Hindus worship are connected to Greek pantheism.

It appears that it’s wrong to think that there are lots of different pantheist religions. For the most part, it’s one religion with different names.

Rejection of pantheism has always been considered bigoted and extreme. The devil doesn’t mind if you worship Zeus, Krishna, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Elvis, and Gitche Manitou. You can even worship Jesus right along with them; lots of idolaters claim to revere Jesus. What Satan hates is the exclusion of the defeated fake gods. If you worship the Jewish God alone, you are a troublemaker.

The devil has millions of people worshiping Mary. Pagans conflate her with Venus. She must be appalled.

Anyway, I do not think the pope is a helpful influence. And that was probably three times as true during the years when there were three rival popes. If you can’t know God personally, and you have to rely on a man in Italy to tell you about him, you must be doing something wrong.

I now see the world as a porous, hollow sphere filled with filth. That may not be physically correct, but it’s spiritually right. Hell is beneath us. Our job is to keep it there, and to bring the ways of heaven down to earth. Instead, we pull hell up to the surface. It soaks through, as though the earth were a ball of cloth surrounding a lump of bloody pus. We are pulling it to the surface, like John D. Rockefeller pumping oil. Almost literally, we are raising hell.

We rejected God, so now we are becoming like the inhabitants of hell; we are striving to emulate the losers of the universe. We dress like convicts, who are the biggest losers in society. We love their shaved heads, chin beards, and tattoos. Our speech is so filthy it’s almost nauseating. We are in love with sexual perversion. We love pride and cruelty. We’re supposed to make God our father and come to resemble him, but the way things stand, Satan is our father, and we grow more like him every day.

We lower ourselves toward hell by following spirits. The only way to lift ourselves up is to follow the Spirit of God. We’re not interested. God isn’t cool.

Churches make it worse by teaching us we’re not God’s children. We’re more like his fans, sitting in the back row of the upper deck of a stadium, as far from him as a U2 fan is from Bono. We don’t expect him to go home with us.

Things are going to get worse. Look after yourself. The sooner you change your mind, the more you will accomplish during your remaining time.