Sea of Options

Truck owners, clue me in.

I originally wanted a regular cab pickup with an 8-foot bed, in 2-wheel drive. But it’s easier to get the other good stuff, like the big motor, the good suspension, and trailering doodads, if I go with an extended cab, 6.5-foot bed, and 4×4.

Am I going to regret this for eternity? Will the smaller bed drive me insane? I have no idea how to put a sheet of plywood in a short bed. And the extended pickups have a really stupid pretend backseat, which is utterly pointless. I would rather have empty space.

I am thinking this would still be a good choice for the rare occasions when I’d move very heavy stuff, because it will pull a rental trailer with no problems.

They’re not Just for Compost Any More

Moxie has located one of the best dog Youtubes I’ve ever seen. It shows that even a dog can be smart enough to realize socialism is evil. Take a look.

As long as I’m talking about dog videos, I’ll post one of my favorites.

I wanted to set up an electronic amusement system for Maynard and Marvin. I was going to mount cheap plastic keyboards over their cages, with cords attached to the keys. I figured they would enjoy playing bird music. But the keyboards I ordered never showed up, and I forgot all about it. I have to get that project done.

I had another idea for connecting two toys, one in each cage. My hope was that they would battle each other in a perpetual tug of war, and that this would make them shut up once in a while. I made preliminary efforts to get this working, but they paid no attention. I have tried to stimulate them to be more cooperative, even offering to name one of them Employee of the Month, but it appears that they have no ambition whatsoever, unless “ambition” can be construed to mean a lifelong quest to poop on increasingly expensive objects. I think Marv actually has dreams where he poops on the Mona Lisa and then receives worship and peanuts from hordes of adoring parrots.

I don’t know why that dog is eating carrots. A Republican dog should eat meat, preferably dripping blood and still squirming, and if possible, it should be something endangered. Or a hippie. Dogs like eating things that smell. On the other hand, the drug residue in a hippie’s carcass could cause a dog to trip for days, and then you would find Oreo wrappers all over your yard and maybe blacklight posters taped to the ceiling of the dog house.

Anything that reeks brings a dog pleasure. To a dog, a hippie would be like an entertainment center, and each smell would be like a separate channel. The dirty Birkenstock channel. The greasy hair channel. The infected piercing channel. Hippies always claim they love animals, but if they did, they would visit bored dogs at the Humane Society and let them smell them for a while.

I’ll send PETA a note and see what they think. Maybe instead of ink, I should write it in blood from a package of factory veal.

Saddam Hussein was an Amateur

I decided to try to reform my pepper plants, so I went out with some Velcro tape and a pair of scissors, and I tried to prop up the Trinidad Scorpion and the prig ki nu. I met with limited success.

The Trinidad Scorpion is relatively narrow. When I got out there it was maybe four feet wide at the widest point. It narrowed on the way down, so I was able to throw some Velcro around it, tie it to the trellis, and snug it up so it was off the ground. But it was still obscuring the Tobago Seasoning Pepper beside it, so I had to cut off some limbs. Man, it feels strange, pruning a crop as if it were a tree.

I moved on to the prig ki nu, which is maybe six feet tall and five feet wide. I tried to lift it and tie Velcro around it, but it was hopeless. That bush must weigh seventy pounds. I had to cut off a big section that protruded through the trellis and over the patio, and I had to extract a bunch of branches that went through the chain link fence and menaced the Persian lime. Finally, I got a mooring line that used to be on my dad’s boat. I looped it under the bush, took it back around a fence post, and pulled. The plant lifted up, and I tied the rope.

This thing is not a bush any more. It’s a small tree. It has wood in it. I don’t think they’re supposed to do this.

When I was done I had several branches that I had removed or accidentally knocked off, and I didn’t want to waste the peppers. Now I have three fourths of a cup of green Thai peppers and half a cup of ripe red ones. I don’t know what to do with them. I’d love to put them in vinegar in a squeeze bottle. Like sport peppers. But the last time I did that, they got moldy. I don’t know why the ones in the store don’t do that. Maybe they’re boiled and treated with preservatives. Maybe I’ll freeze the silly things.

I must have three or four thousand Thai peppers out there. And the Tobago Seasoning Peppers are going nuts. I should go out and grab them and do something with them. And the habanero golds are in the same state.

Chili at my place! Bring your asbestos pants!

Bad Seeds

I just mailed some pepper seeds to Dan from Madison. I emailed him and told him to try not to touch them unless he had to. Yesterday, I used a cutting board to seed two peppers so I could dry the seeds for mailing. Later on, I felt a sharp, burning pain in my finger, and I couldn’t find any injury. I think I grazed the cutting board when I put it away. The pain lasted for hours. I’m pretty sure it was the Trinidad Scorpion. Suddenly I understand the name. It was like a really nasty insect sting.

The other day Jim from SOTW informed me that his dad had had heart surgery. I should have posted a prayer request. Don’t know where my brain was. I’m posting it now. Says he has two stents, but no heart damage. Still has lung issues. Sorry, Jim.

I’m trying to get all serious about the “good steward” business. The limes and Key limes keep piling up, and I have been giving them away and throwing them out. Finally, I decided to freeze the juice. I cranked out half a cup of key lime juice and one and a quarter cups of Persian lime juice, and I divided the Persian lime juice into two portions, and I put everything in vacuum bags. Now I’m freezing them before I suck the air out and seal them.

I better go out and cut down a hand of bananas so they’ll ripen and I can get a start on eating the bunch.

My dragonfruit has a flower on it, but it doesn’t look like the fruit part is going to make it. I can’t wait until that thing starts bearing. It would help if the Salvadorans would stop attacking it with the weedeater.

I propped the limbs of my ponkan tree up with stakes because the fruit are overwhelming it. The tree is healthy but very scrawny, and it is determined to bear lots of fruit. It looks kind of stupid right now, but I know the limbs won’t tear off.

I have to prop up the pepper bushes before they rot. I guess I’ll tie them to the trellis they grow next to. They grew too big for their own good.

This is much better than the days when everything rotted and blew away.

Frozed

I just got back from the dermatologist. I procrastinated on my yearly skin cancer screening, because the one thing you should always be sure to do when faced with the possibility of contracting a highly curable cancer is to put off checkups as long as possible.

He froze about half of my head with his little spray bottle and said I could keep the rest of my head until my next visit. More or less.

This is the first time I’ve had to have anything frozen. But none of it was significant, thank God. If there is one time it’s good to have your prayers answered, it’s when you go in to make sure you don’t have melanoma. And I have been spared again. I think he froze three spots. I also showed him a thing on my arm, and he opined that I had self-medicated by scratching it completely off. Now I know how to save money on dermatology. I also rely on Maynard, who likes to walk around on my bare back biting out anything that strikes him as odd or potentially tasty.

One satisfying thing is that my health insurance coughed up part of the fee. With any luck, it will never kick in for anything other than preventive checkups. I know I’ll never break even. But that beats the alternative. God bless them; they can have it all, as long as I stay healthy.

I always get nervous when I go to the dermatologist, because to me, totally harmless skin irregularities and deadly cancers look exactly alike. I guess medical school is worth the money, because my doctor took–no exaggeration–three seconds to check my back and determine that my worst problem was love handles.

I like this guy because he doesn’t wait until the end of the session to tell you you’re not going to die. He looks at a bump, and he says, “This is nothing,” and he whips out the spray.

Sometimes I get the impression that I annoy doctors and dentists by being healthy. They see so many terrible problems, and then I walk in all worried about a new freckle or the mere possibility that I might have a cavity.

Lots of people in Florida die from skin cancer. I had a neighbor who died from melanoma. So even though I had no reason to think I was in trouble, now that I’m clear for another year, I can’t help feeling like I got a second chance at life. Silly, I know. I’m used to having things jump out and grab me without warning. I guess it’s hard to get over that.

I’m going to take another crack at truck shopping. I resisted getting a four-wheel drive because it has more parts to break, and it’s not very useful where I live. But it turns out the other options I want may be impossible to get without four-wheel drive. I also had the ridiculous feeling that I would get lower mileage, but that’s dumb, because there is no reason why the front wheels would have any more friction in their bearings than they would on a two-wheel drive. I don’t know exactly how it works these days. I don’t know whether the four-wheel engagement locks hubs which are otherwise free-spinning, or whether the wheels are rigidly connected to long axles which engage somewhere farther upstream, but the mileage figures show that it doesn’t matter.

I would like to be a useful person. It’s hard to do that with a T-bird. We’re supposed to be good stewards when it comes to money. With that in mind, it could be hard to explain why your only four-wheeled vehicle has two seats and a trunk the size of a kitchen drawer. It would be pretty good for driving lonely flight attendants and swimsuit models around, while explaining why they need to start going to church, but there isn’t much call for that, as far as I know.

I’m trying to make the garage more ergonomic. I mounted my lathe back plate on the wall. I’m planning to put in a second hoist above the mill, so I can move the vise and rotary table on and off the table without popping something vital in my upper body. I need to be able to lift stuff and then move it a couple of feet horizontally. Maybe I should try to hang the hoist on a rail or a jib. It only needs to be capable of lifting a couple of hundred pounds, but the smallest hoists I’ve seen are rated for 1,000. I guess that’s not important.

People have suggested getting a cart I can shove things off on, but a cart takes up a lot of room. Maybe a narrow shelf behind the mill would work, if I fixed it up so it had a part that acted as a bridge to the mill table.

My knurling tool never arrived. The seller had a computer issue. Their software kept telling them it had shipped. The other day they apologized and said it was on the way. I was tempted to ask them if they had actually seen the package, or if they had asked their lying software again.

I finally have drill bits on the way. I found a set of good cobalt bits at a price too low to turn down. The stock market is in the toilet today because retailers are face-planting left and right. Having seen the deals on new and used tools over the last year, I could have predicted that. Sometimes it’s shocking when you learn what startles “experts.”

Yesterday I tried to help my sister with car maintenance. She has a newish BMW 335i. What a horrible car. It has no oil dipstick. I’m serious. If you want to check the oil, you get out the manual and go through a bunch of steps, and three minutes later, the computer tells you not how much oil is in the crankcase, but how much oil it thinks you should add. And you have to run the engine while you do this. The brake fluid is the same way, and the brake reservoir is fixed so it takes a strap wrench. I stuck some oil in the car to keep it from seizing before she took it in for its BMW-endorsed Owner-not-allowed “free” maintenance, but I gave up on the brakes. Hope she doesn’t run into anything.

This car is like a HAL 9000. It talks to you, it tells you what to do, and it ignores your wishes. I can’t stand it. I’m sure it’s great for people who have more money than brains and who trust a talking car and a greedy dealer more than they trust themselves. But it’s not for me. If this thing conks out on a lonely highway, you have to wait for the BMW Luftwaffe helicopter to save you. Give me a car I have a hope of fixing. I just want transportation. Not a new world order. I don’t want a screen in my car coming on every day, telling me I have to hate Goldstein. This car is so authoritarian, overpriced, and hostile to privacy, they should call it the Obamamobile.

I’m glad that health care nonsense is not working out. I’d be on a nine-month freeze-spray waitlist, and if I lived until I received treatment, the government would pay $5000 in other people’s money for the service.

WTB: Hazmat Suit

Just got an update from Heather, RE her mom’s cancer:

Nojo

Church was great last night, as always. But it was also disturbing. In the sermons and videos I’ve seen lately, and in my studies, I have seen a thread that suggests something bad is up ahead, and that I may not be able to do anything about it. I feel like I’m being prepared. But I’m not sure.

The thing I’m concerned about primarily involves someone else, not me.

Pentecostals always strive to get the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit. We’re told to “covet” the gift of prophecy, although it’s not clear that the thing identified as “prophecy” in this context is the same thing that word describes in the Old Testament. Ancient Jewish prophets were supposed to be stoned if they ever prognosticated wrongly; they had to be infallible to be considered prophets. I have heard people describe the New Testament “prophetic” gift as something different. An ability to exhort and instruct people, with God’s guidance. If that’s true, it’s unfortunate that we use the same term to describe it.

I always ask for the gifts called the word of knowledge and the word of wisdom. If we understand the word of knowledge correctly, it means God informs us of things we otherwise could not know. For example, a prophet told Paul he would be bound and imprisoned. This is a good gift to have, because we always profit from knowing bad things are on the way. Very often, we can avoid them through prayer and repentance, or just by taking the appropriate action, such as taking a different road or changing a flight. Other times, we can’t avoid them no matter what we do, but we can be prepared, and we can find whatever blessings follow in the aftermath. And we can avoid being offended. People who live by faith get used to having God solve their problems, and on the occasions when he doesn’t, it’s easy to get angry at God and question his goodness, and that’s worse than the problems themselves. If you see things coming, you’re not as likely to take that attitude.

God has never spoken to me. A lot of people like to yap about how God told them this or that, and I am always highly skeptical. It’s not that I don’t think God tells people things. But I think it’s unusual to be completely certain that God has told you something. I’m sure God has put ideas and motivations and so on inside my mind, but I would never claim God had “spoken” to me unless I clearly perceived words, either written or spoken, which I knew came from God. I would have to hear a voice or read something. That has never happened to me.

Many times, I’ve felt that something I was considering doing or an idea I had had was right and inspired, and then it has turned out I was wrong. What if I had stood up in church and hollered, “GOD TOLD ME THIS,” and then rattled on about something God had nothing to do with? People do that all the time. I’ve seen ministers do it. They say extremely stupid things, and they attribute them to God. Isn’t that taking the Lord’s name in vain? You claim you speak in his name, and then you say something dumb. Is there any better example of violating that commandment? Think about the harm a person like that can do. They can convince their followers to commit suicide, for example. That has happened. What if Moses had made up the thing about God directing the Jews into the desert? “God said we’d be fine. Those dried-up corpses are an illusion.”

I absolutely refuse to say God has told me things. It will never happen, unless I have experienced miraculous events I know I can rely on. God sent Joseph an angel. He sent Mary an angel. He spoke to Moses and Abraham. He sent an angel to the father of John the Baptist. He doesn’t need me to sit down here guessing. My guesses are often wrong. If he wants me to know something, he is well able to tell me. I think God illuminates the Bible when I read, and he gives me wisdom when I need it, and many times, during prayer, I’ve felt sudden rushes of faith that I considered confirmation that I was going to receive what I had asked for. But that’s not “God spoke to me.” It’s wrong to confuse these things.

I saw a preacher the other day, stating that Jesus appeared to him after his daughter’s death. He said Jesus explained some things to him, and he related it to the audience. This is a guy who can say “God spoke to me.” But if you’re trying to quit drinking, and you suddenly have a feeling that God won’t mind if you have one more bender, it’s probably not God, and whatever it is, it’s not someone “speaking” to you. If you’re defaulting on your loans, and you think God is telling you to give him a big offering which you could be using to pay your debts, you may be hearing from somebody, but I doubt it’s God.

I have known someone who claimed to give generously to ministries and charities. I later found out that this person was a financial train wreck, with huge debts and a negative net worth. How can that be, if we are promised time and time again that God will provide for people who help the poor? It had to be because this person robbed men to give to God. If you rip off your creditors to give to charity, aren’t your creditors the real givers? Surely, when this person told me God directed the giving, those claims were untrue.

That’s something I need to think about, actually. I avoid incurring debt, but there is one matter involving debt which I should look after.

I always hope I’ll reach a state where God will supernaturally inform me before bad things happen, in a very explicit and direct way. That would sure be nice. Because I have not been taken in by the liars who stand in the pulpit making highly questionable statements about people who “refused” to let bad things happen to them, “by faith.” I am used to experiencing deliverance and God’s generosity, but I am not a complete idiot. If Peter was crucified, and if Paul was shipwrecked, stoned, flogged repeatedly, and beheaded, bad things are going to happen to me and the people I care about from time to time, and it’s just plain stupid to think I can run around squalling, “I’M STANDING ON THE WORD” and avoid misfortune every single time.

The neat thing about many of the bad things that happened to Biblical figures is that they knew about them in advance. Nobody wants to be beheaded, but if it’s going to happen, it looks much more like a defeat if it happens unexpectedly and they drag you off kicking and screaming. It’s really not the same, when you take it calmly and get your house in order first. For the enemy, there is no real victory in harming you. The victory is in stealing your faith and your dignity.

So this is a gift I would like to have. It’s good to say, “I don’t understand why this happened, but my faith is not shaken.” It’s better to be able to say, “I am grateful I knew about this and was able to get all the blessings out of it.”

I don’t have that gift, but I think just about any believer will routinely receive subtle–or not so subtle–clues about the future. God tends to prepare us for things, and sometimes we realize it as he’s doing it. I hope I’m misinterpreting the things I’ve seen lately.

In other news, I think I’ve made a wonderful discovery. When I started getting into tools, I got myself a big pump jar full of Gojo, because ordinary soap is useless on the kind of greasy dirt you pick up from working on machinery. And the Gojo did not work very well. In the old days, it was great. It took just about anything off, and you didn’t even need to add water to it. It was miraculous. So I was disturbed to see that the new stuff didn’t do the job.

Finally, I pinpointed the likely culprits. Hippies. Who else routinely removes great products from the marketplace? I knew the old Gojo was full of scary chemicals. The new stuff says “natural” on the bottle, and “natural,” like “eco-friendly,” is often a synonym for “more expensive yet totally ineffective.” Like the pathetic pyrethrin-based bug sprays South Florida insects cackle at. I don’t know what the hippies didn’t like about the petroleum-based chemicals in Gojo, but they must have found fault with them, because Gojo is worthless now. I will never buy it again. I also tried Zep, and it’s also worthless.

Yesterday I went to Northern Tool to look at a band saw and a chain hoist. Because I am crazy. And while I was there, I spotted some obscure brands of hand cleaner. I figured the hippies had probably banned all types of good hand cleaner, but I checked the labels anyway, and I saw some very promising references to “petroleum distillates.” I bought the smallest size of a product called Permatex, and I took it home and did my best to grease up my hand, and I applied the cleaner. Seems to work. It has that same mysterious vibrating quality the old Gojo had; remember watching the can shake after you slapped it down on the sink? And it took the crud off my hand.

My advice is to run to Northern Tool and buy several crates of this stuff before the hippies find out about it. They think we should all be free to take street drugs full of lye and baby laxative, but they can’t bear the thought of allowing us to have bug spray and hand cleaner and breast implants. Yoda might have put it this way: “The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the logic is.”

I’m going to empty my Gojo can and fill it with Permatex, which doesn’t come in nice pump bottles. Life is too short to spend with black grease smears on your hands.

Plus Thoughts on Giving

Ammunition is starting to reappear in stores! Hooray!

Don’t you wonder how much money the ammunition and firearms makers raked in because people stocked up after the Marxist Messiah was elected? I hope they piled up huge profits they’ll be able to use for R&D, retooling, and lobbying.

Some people claim wars were a big cause of the shortage. Hogwash. I admit, I haven’t sat down and added up the number of conflicts going on at the moment, but things haven’t changed much since the Bush era, and there were plenty of bullets to go around back then. This shortage was caused by the election of a leftist with “Potential Dictator” stamped all over his forehead.

You can actually buy small pistol primers now. And they don’t cost $60 a box, either. They’re back down to 30 or so. I’ll bet they go lower. A saturated market is not good for prices. There are profiteers and neurotics out there whose houses are packed full of guns and ammunition they will never use. Even relatively reasonable people stocked up to some extent. I won’t need small pistol primers for at least three years, and I have no gun purchases in mind, which is amazing, for me.

I paid $600 for my Saiga 12 shotgun. Last time I saw them for sale, the price was $500. You can once again buy Wolf AK-47 ammunition for 30¢ a round. Even 9mm is starting to show up. I’ve seen it for $14 a box, which is still insanely high, given commodity prices and the economic slump. I’ll bet you can buy it for $9 in three months. It is conceivable that I may be able to get more Swiss GP11 ammunition at a reasonable price. I never thought that would happen again.

I wonder what it’s like to be in the firearms industry right now. They must be on their knees every morning, thanking God for their amazing luck.

If there is one silver lining to the country’s tragic willingness to elect unqualified, immature Marxist egotists, it is that we are not nearly as willing to give up our guns. This is one area where leftists aren’t making the headway they hoped for. I have said that I think God is behind that, and I still think it’s true. I think he’s willing to punish this country for greed, cruelty, abortion, sexual sin, and abortion, but I don’t think he is ready to disarm individuals yet. There are too many people here who serve him.

I am hoping to use my machine tools to improve my guns. I need to fix the scope mount on my K31, for example. It’s skewed to one side, causing it to shoot about 6″ to the right at 100 yards. And I have to put all the aftermarket doodads on my Saiga, to turn it into an ergonomic, laser-guided living-room sweeper.

My dad’s concealed carry permit arrived this week. I paid for his course, as a birthday present. When he announced the card’s arrival and showed it to me, instead of saying, “Look at this,” or “Guess what I have?”, he said, “I’m putting you on notice.” I told him I’d watch my back.

Concealed carry is great, but it can be a pain. I get tired of the weight of the gun, but I force myself to do it every day, because it’s a great privilege and blessing, and because safety measures are worthless if you don’t use them. A seatbelt you don’t wear can’t save your life when you need it.

When I joined my church, they gave me a copy of Robert Morris’s The Blessed Life. I’ve been reading it this week. It’s somewhat self-serving to provide new members with this, because the book is about giving, which includes tithes and offerings. And I am extremely wary of greedy preachers and overblown “name it and claim it” prosperity preaching. Still, it’s a wonderful book, and I believe the fundamental message is right. It is true that we are obligated to give generously; not just monetarily, but in all ways, and not just to churches, but to people in need. And it is also true that withholding generosity will cause your life to be cursed. I believe those things wholeheartedly. I don’t believe every Christian can have a private jet, but I believe we are supposed to have “shalom,” which means a very general type of success. Good relationships, good mental and physical health, spiritual growth, and more than enough wealth to cover our needs. A perfect life? No, but a good life which always moves forward toward better things. A life for which each of us can’t help but be grateful, in spite of the challenges.

This is a very tough message for churches to preach, given the shameful and disgusting excesses we have seen in this area. The distinction between valid teaching on generosity and self-serving teaching intended to stimulate gullible people to make preachers rich is slippery, and it will be lost on many Christians, especially those who were victimized in the past. The crooks and psychopaths who took us in didn’t just take money; they poisoned the well against godly teachers who would come later and remind us of the power of generosity. Stealing money is bad. Stealing another person’s willingness to do right is much worse.

The neat thing about this book is that I keep seeing little confirmations of things I came to believe before I read it. The Holy Spirit teaches us, and it’s always amazing and humbling to see how our “brilliant” conclusions have already come to other people.

Pentecostal churches are still going a little heavy on God’s promises to us, and maybe a little light on our obligations to him, but I think they’re headed in a better direction these days. I bailed out about twenty years ago even though I thought they were mostly right about God. I don’t want to repeat the mistake of refusing to go to a good church because it appears imperfect. And I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. It’s not like these churches are packed with fools who only show up because they think God will fix all their problems and give them big houses. The people are wonderful, and they are very concerned with doing what is right.

One of the things I like about the book is that it defines “covetousness” as setting your heart on things. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, although it opened my eyes to see it used as a definition of that term. We have natural, normal, righteous desires in this life, such as sexual desire, a desire for wealth, and a desire for food. It’s sick to starve those desires. God never intended for us to do that. It’s sick to call them “lust,” “greed,” and “gluttony,” no matter how they manifest themselves. It’s not wrong to have desires. What’s wrong is overindulging them, serving them, and allowing them to cause you to sin. Fundamentally, it’s wrong to see the things you desire as replacements for God. They become idols. Contentment comes from God, not from sating your desires. It’s okay to see someone else’s house and think it would be nice to have one like it. It’s wrong to resent that person, or want him to lose his house, or set your heart on having his house or one like it, regardless of what you have to do. And it’s wrong to think a house will fix your life. That’s idolatry. It’s the error that keeps socialism alive. Expecting blessings only God can give, from things other than God.

Desire for sex isn’t automatically lust, and desire for wealth isn’t automatically greed, and so on. Stupidly equating all earthly desire with sin leads to warped, unhealthy, self-righteous asceticism. We’re not supposed to be free of these things. We’re supposed to be in charge of them. That’s how I see it.

I think money moving into and out of a person’s hands is like electricity moving through a circuit. It passes through, and along the way, it’s used to do good things. But if charges get stuck in the circuit and accumulate too much, you end up with a destructive disaster. The key is to avoid bottling it up. Or you could think of it as food going through a warehouse. If you shut the “out” door and stop distributing it, it rots, supports rats, causes harm, and benefits nobody. If you shut the “in” door, you have nothing to give others. If you get used to giving and denying your impulses, you learn not to set your heart on things, and they become less dangerous to you.

Living right is complicated. You have to be generous. You have to be responsible. You have to control yourself and be logical. You have to know when to rebuke and when to suffer other people’s faults quietly. You can’t sum it all up effectively in a paragraph or learn it all in a day. Jesus gave a very brief summary of the law and the prophets, but he never suggested we rely on that summary and throw the other stuff out.

Morris gave an interesting interpretation of the confusing verse reading, “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness.” He believes it means we are to help others in this world with our money, so that in paradise, they will greet us in gratitude.

It’s a pretty good book. I recommend it.

By the way, World Vision now has a special area in their Gift Catalog, listing gifts that carry matching funds. You donate X to some cause, and they get 3X or 10X or whatever in matching funds, so it’s almost as if you donated much more. Very neat idea.

Machining Woes

Heather’s mom is having kidney problems, and Heather is asking for prayer. Here is the link.

I had an interesting day. I was determined to check my Parlec vise and see if it needed adjusting. The parallels were sliding out from under parts when I tightened it. I went out and started moving the table to an appropriate position, using the power feed. The power feed slowed down. I figured it was defective. Then I heard a noise, and I looked up and realized I was trying to move a workpiece past a cutter which was not rotating.

Naturally, I lost my mind for several minutes. I could see that I had knocked the head out of tram. No dial indicator needed. I assumed I had destroyed the mill’s entire head. But it turned out to be okay, and I got some more valuable experience in tramming. Man, I felt like an idiot.

I put the vise back on the table and aligned it, and I put two 123 blocks in it, one on top of the other. I centered them in the vise and tightened it, and the lower block didn’t come loose. So it appears that the vise is okay, although it doesn’t work that great for parts that don’t press against the lower parts of the jaws.

I finished up one T nut. Had a couple of issues. First, I tapped the nuts by hand, because the alternative was to spend a year putting each one in the lathe and centering it in the 4-jaw chuck. The mill’s lowest speed makes me nervous, so I didn’t want to use it for tapping. When I was done, it turned out the threads were not perfectly perpendicular to the top surfaces of the nuts. I don’t think it matters when they’re in use, but it’s a bummer. Second thing: I made a subtraction error and made one of the nuts the wrong size. It will work, but I wanted it to be right. Guess I’ll make new ones.

It sounds nutty, but while I had no problems with advanced math and physics involving tons of variables, addition and subtraction of actual numbers drive me crazy. In higher math and science, mistaking plus for minus is usually a trivial error which is easily fixed. If you make the same error with numbers, it can cause real problems.

I will make nuts until I get them right. You watch.

I Will not go Quietly Into the Day Room

I am grateful for all the supportive comments I’m getting about my sister’s condition. It’s unfortunate that she doesn’t blog, because I’m getting all the kind words, and I’m not the one who is ill. I’m a peripheral figure in this story. It’s unseemly and disturbing when a blogger takes someone else’s misfortune and uses it to make himself the star of his own soap opera. I’m not going to do that.

Reader Ruth suggested I hop in an RV with my sister and dad and tour the country. It’s a wonderful sentiment. But while I am going to be as helpful as possible during my sister’s illness, there are some sacrifices I am not quite ready to make. I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I think anyone who has made a long car trip with these two (and my sister’s dog) would understand. Illness changes a lot of things, but it doesn’t change everything! If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. You are welcome to my bone marrow, but if you want to go RVing, send me a postcard.

I did promise I would go a couple of places with her. She wants to visit Israel, and there is a famous evangelist she wants to see when he appears in Sanford, Florida.

I hope that if I’m ever seriously ill, I’ll live up to the examples my mother and my aunt and my uncle set. They didn’t moan and complain. They didn’t pull out the cancer card when they wanted things. They didn’t lay guilt trips on people. Some patients do those things. When my mother’s surgery turned out to be a failure, she continued treatment primarily to please the rest of us, and she felt terrible guilt about the smoking that caused her disease. She did not want her illness to be our illness, any more than it had to be. She spared us the pain of remembering getting angry with a cancer patient.

My mother always said manners were extremely important, and I thought she was crazy. She was right. I thought she was too concerned about things like keeping your elbows off the dinner table, but she was also trying to tell me to be considerate. When you consider other people’s feelings, you can make a big difference in the way they feel. Sometimes it lasts a day, and sometimes it lasts much longer. We have developed a revolting reverence for assertiveness and aggression, and it’s very sad. If you travel from a place like Miami or New York to a place where the culture is kinder, you will probably notice that you feel better all the time. Spend a month in Texas or Alabama, if you want to see what I mean.

Consideration continues to be important when you’re seriously ill. It probably becomes more important, because the things you do during such times carry a great deal of weight and are not forgotten. If my mother had lashed out at me or my dad during her sickness about mistakes we had made, we would still be in pain from it. People tend to open their hearts to you when you’re sick, so they are especially vulnerable.

My big machining task for today is adjusting my Parlec vise. When I put parts in it, they rise off the parallels. That’s bad. It’s exactly what the vise is designed to not do. It’s why it costs four times as much as a normal vise.

A lot of people reflexively scream “KURT” when you say you want a milling vise. There are lots of vises out there, but almost none of them are really good, and you take a chance unless you buy a Kurt. I was reluctant to get a Parlec (Taiwanese) for this very reason, and some people told me not to do it, but after researching it, I thought it was safe. Now the parts are rising, and naturally, it makes me nervous. If it can’t be fixed, it’s $400 down the crapper. I have been told that the rise is okay, if it measures out small enough.

Last night I found out a few things. It’s awful, but I had to go to the Kurt website and download one of their manuals to get the lowdown. Apparently, you can’t clamp things off-center and expect the vise to work. The part has to extend to the midpoint of the vise on the x-axis. Also, you should try to keep parts low in the jaws. That, of course, is impossible. Much of the time, you have to rest things on 123 blocks or parallels. It’s not clear to me whether the y-axis pressure has to be exerted low in the jaws, or whether the thing that actually matters is the z-axis pressure, which would presumably be translated to the ways by the parallels. If the latter alternative is right, then the parallels don’t matter.

Anyway, today I’ll put an indicator on the vise, measure the rise, and see if I can adjust it. It has a set screw that helps keep the moving jaw down.

I am going to have to grit my teeth and start machining methodically. So far, I’ve been so excited about having the mill, I’ve been winging it, just to see the chips fly. But that’s no good in the long run. You have to calculate feeds and speeds. And you have to plan your cuts, in order. It’s like doing a science lab in college. I used to write chronological lists before my labs, and they got me out a lot faster and saved me mistakes.

Sometimes doing one operation before another can make life really hard, or it may make the rest of the job impossible. And when you use an edge finder which takes a collet which won’t hold your cutting tool, and which uses a way different z setting, forgetting to take all the right measurements at the right times can cause you real agony. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Collet out. Chuck in. Tighten nut. Raise knee. Realize you need another measurement. Lower knee. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Chuck out. Collet in. Do this three or four times in half an hour, and you will develop a real enthusiasm for checklists. And trying to remember four-digit DRO measurements will give you a serious hankering to master your DRO’s memory functions.

I also have to learn to use some kind of design software for layout. This may well be the task that results in my being fitted for adult diapers and a jacket that buckles in the back. All software is written BY nerdy engineer types. That’s bad. What is infinitely worse is software written FOR nerdy engineering types. They don’t even try to make it usable. People discussing these applications like to throw the phrase “learning curve” around, to help you understand just how screwed you are. That’s where I am now. At the base of a learning curve resembling Mount Crumpet in the original Grinch cartoon.

“Click to see tutorial.” Okay, but what do I click to get a tutorial to help me understand the tutorial? At times like these, I wish I lived near the Mexican border so I could drive across and buy Thorazine. But a month or two from now, I’ll be very glad I got adjusted and attacked these hurdles. I was a great lab student because I surrendered, acknowledged my severe mental deficiencies, and took appropriate steps. Machining should be no different.

Four Days

I wanted to give a little update on my sister’s situation. I can’t say a whole lot. Maybe I’ll never be able to write about it in any detail, but I can give a few general facts.

This has been a perfect storm for her. I wish I could explain, but I can’t. There are a number of problems we will have to deal with. It’s not just the cancer itself. I would almost draw a parallel to the story of Job, although his situation hit harder and faster.

It would have been great to get her into chemotherapy this week, but there were reasons it couldn’t be done. So we’re hoping to get it going on Monday. I believe we are looking at over four months of treatment, and I suppose I’ll be driving her to and from the hospital three days a week. It depends on how she reacts. My mother didn’t get very ill from chemotherapy, but people are different, and the drugs may be different.

There will be more work to do. I know about the three weekly trips now, but we’ll find out about other needs and obligations as we go. We’re hoping to give her house a going over this weekend, for example. Maybe it’s good that I’m not working on a project right now.

The suffering cancer causes concentrates at the beginning and end. The first couple of weeks are very hard, and if things don’t work out, problems ramp up later on. That’s a general observation from a person who has seen several relatives endure this disease. I’m not predicting anything regarding the outcome in my sister’s case. These last two weeks have been difficult. Some days have been especially heavy with upsetting information. I think things should level off somewhat now that we’re about to begin the treatment routine. We’ll have to get proficient at living with cancer.

I recommended she find a support group. The assistance of professionals is no substitute for the fellowship and insights of other sufferers and their families.

We are hoping to end up with a powerful testimony of God’s power. No one is ceding the battle.

I felt I owed this update to all the folks who have prayed for her. I would write more if I thought it was wise.

Non-Tool Stuff Starts About Halfway Down

I’m trying to figure out whether the stuff I’ve learned in machining videos is correct.

A long while back, I ordered an “as new” OSG carbide end mill off Ebay. Seemed to work okay, and it was really cheap, so yesterday I ordered two more. I also looked at roughing mills. I have a 3/8″ roughing mill, but now that I know about the fun of changing collets, I realize I should try to put together a few mills with the same diameter. I found a 1/2″ roughing mill, and I noticed that the tolerances were not impressive. I think the diameter was listed as within 0.003″ of spec.

That confused me, because–I have not confirmed this yet–I’m fairly sure some of the videos suggested using an edge finder to locate the spindle relative to the work, and then popping in an end mill of known diameter, and using that diameter for calculations when moving the table. If you’re a machinist, you know that a diameter that’s off by 0.003″ is going to give you errors half that big in your work. And that’s more than big enough to be a concern when you’re trying to be precise. It doesn’t matter with a roughing mill, but other end mills have the same issue.

On top of that, I’m almost sure the ATI videos I watched endorsed carbide end mills. Carbide is really hard, and it’s expensive. The benefits are that it lasts a long time and performs well and cuts faster. Now I’m being told it should not be used on manual mills, because you’re supposed to climb-cut when you use it, and that will make a manual mill flex. I hope I have this right. I believe I was told that if you cut conventionally with carbide, it breaks up over time, and you get bad finishes.

The upshot seems to be that edge finders are worthless for some of the uses I hoped to use them for, and I was dumb to buy carbide. Apparently cobalt is a better choice for me. A lot of people tell me not to get cobalt, because it costs a little more, but it seems to work way better than HSS. At least in drill bits.

I guess I won’t regret spending $10 each on two carbide cutters, since they’ll definitely work long enough to be worth the money.

If you can’t use an edge finder to locate a cutter precisely, you have to do it some other way. I believe that sends you back to the rolling-paper method. You embarrass yourself by buying rolling papers like a depraved stoner, and then you find edges by holding them between the work and the cutter. The edge finder will tell you where the spindle is, relative to the work, but that’s not the same as telling you where the edge of the cutter will be.

I’ve been trying to find a good used rotary table, but it’s not that easy. You also need indexing plates and a tailstock, and by the time you get done looking for this stuff, you’ve been shopping for six months. It may be time to bite the Enco bullet and go Taiwanese again. You can often save three figures by getting old American tooling, but what does that savings cost you in lost time you could have been spending machining? It amazes me that people brag about shopping a year for a taper attachment or a steady rest. How long do they expect to live? These are usually middle-aged or older guys. A year can easily be five or ten percent of their remaining time on earth. When you decide to dedicate a lot of time to something, you need to ask yourself how much time you have left. I find life so interesting, I want to live a thousand years. That seems unlikely, however.

A few months back, my dad was talking about getting a travel trailer. I’m very, very glad he still has enthusiasm for things like that. But my mother has been gone for 12 years, and he’s 77. A lot of the people we could have visited 35 years ago are dead or elderly. It’s late.

My grandfather once leased a house to a 67-year-old man, tying it up for a number of years. Someone in the family complained, and my grandfather said, “He’s an old man. He won’t live long.” When he said that, I believe he was 72.

He was right, but you can still see my point.

I guess it will sound funny, but one reason I bought a convertible is that we didn’t do anything fun when I was a kid. My uncle Jim had a couple of convertibles in the Sixties, and some family members talked like he had gone insane. That’s how boring most of us were. My dad, my mother, my sister and I were pretty dull. We rarely went on real vacations. We never toured the US. We didn’t have a boat or an RV. We had no regular activities, like shooting or bowling. We belonged to no clubs or organizations, apart from the country club. We didn’t go to church regularly. We never belonged to a church. Golf was the only sport, apart from games my friends and I played in the yard, and my dad was the only one who golfed. We watched TV; that was our main activity. Isn’t that awful? I hate to admit it. That was our life. I went to school, and then I came home and watched TV, and I refrained from doing homework unless I had absolutely no choice, and after that I went to bed. My mother was the only one who wasn’t a TV addict, but she didn’t really do anything with the time she saved. My sister and I didn’t have many toys, which is weird, since we were well off. Mike says the other kids felt sorry for us. I had no idea back then. My mother bought me a banjo when I was 15; that was nice.

I guess I wasn’t as bad as the others. I enjoyed shooting BB guns, fishing for inedible fish, breaking things, and fireworks. Mike and I used to get together and do the kind of stupid, aimless things kids do when they’re on their own. Like Beavis and Butt-head, I guess, except we weren’t that mean or stupid. We tended to do strange, creative things. I had another friend nearby, but he wasn’t bright enough to come up with things like that. We also had CB radios and other passing interests. My sister didn’t do much of anything, but that’s normal for girls.

I remember Mike somehow got ahold of a surplus parachute. We put it in his yard, on a busy corner, and we weighted the perimeter. Then we put a fan under it and put some lights inside. It blew up into a big, quivering white dome, and we went inside and hung out. Cars slowed down so people could see this glowing object and wonder why these two abnormal kids were doing something that wasn’t ordinary.

I got my first convertible in 1980, and Jim was part of the inspiration. His branch of the family had more fun than the others. I’m sure my mother told me the car would flip and burn immediately, and I would be trapped underneath it like a chicken in a roasting pan. Oh, Lord. A convertible. Please, don’t let this happen to my child. Next he’ll be base-jumping. My mother didn’t like electric windows, because she thought any car with electric windows would plunge into a canal at the earliest opportunity, and there she would be, unable to roll down the window and escape. Meanwhile, she smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day. I was crazy about my mom, but I knew there her logic had its weak points. I’m ancient. So far, I’ve know ONE person who was in a convertible that flipped, and he didn’t roast. I don’t know anyone who has driven into a canal. You can keep a punch in your car to break your windows, if that kind of thing worries you. I think my Glock will also do the job.

Once in a while, you have to do something. Just spend the money and do it. It isn’t going to do itself. I’m really glad I’ve had two convertibles and two motorcycles. I’m glad I lived in Israel for four months. I’m glad I published three books and got a bunch of tools and guns and learned to make beer. I can’t even guess how boring life would be if I didn’t do things like this. By and large, the strange and challenging things you do will be the things you remember with the most pleasure. That’s an extremely important lesson young people should learn. You shouldn’t be a sensation junkie or a hedonistic wastrel, but you should embrace opportunities to shake up your life. You should be conscious of their value and jump on them instead of avoiding them. You don’t want to leave your kids a diary that has entries like, “July 17: I celebrate 63 victorious years of resisting buying a motorcycle. I will celebrate by putting a small amount of real sugar in my oatmeal.”

I think a rotary table will be a real asset. Right now, I can drill holes and make straight cuts, and that’s about it. Not much utility for what I paid. A rotary table will let me cut arcs, and it will allow me to do tasks that require breaking circles up accurately into sections. Circles of bolt holes, for example.

I should take one of the bikes out today. I hope my mom will be too busy in paradise to notice.

I am Wearing my X-Ray Specs

This morning I found myself thinking about a strange trait which is common among human beings. When you try to help them, very often, they respond by attacking you. You expect gratitude, and instead, you are treated like an enemy. This is why we have the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” It reminds me of a great lesson my mother taught me. She said to avoid lending money to friends, because they would end up resenting me! Sounds crazy when you’re young and you haven’t seen much of life, but she was absolutely right.

Sometimes in prayer I ramble about things like this, and today while I was doing that, I found myself asking who I knew who had had this experience. And I felt stupid when the answer came to me. The answer was God. This is what he deals with every day, and in the past, he has had to put up with it from me. Seems like every time I think about a particularly exasperating human failing, I immediately realize I have been guilty of it.

Observant Jews avoid putting young single men in positions of authority. Why? Because their knowledge is incomplete. People who have raised kids and dealt with spouses and provided for families know things cloistered, subsidized virgins don’t. In a recent comment, Aaron said this:

Interactions with people are frequent temporal opportunities to improve one’s relationship with God. Judaism, in requiring things like minyans and numerous communal requirements, is opposed to living like a hermit. We don’t have monks or nuns or gurus on mountaintops. There’s a saying “a tzaddik in daled amot”, “a saint within his 4 cubits”.

I tried to think of respected Biblical figures who were hermits, and I drew a blank. John the Baptist had disciples, and he attracted large numbers of people for ritual immersion. He didn’t sit alone in a cave all day. Some say he was an Essene, and the Essenes were atypical Jews who practiced celibacy and asceticism, but rumor isn’t fact. You can find references to the wives of Old Testament prophets. The priests married and had kids. Peter, who is considered the first Pope, was married. Jesus was constantly around people, except when he set himself apart for short periods. Paul had so many friends, he never shut up about them. Greet this one with a kiss. Send my love to that one. It’s half of the New Testament.

Some of the prophets ended up isolated at times, but I don’t know of any reason to believe that was how they normally lived. Maybe I missed something.

What does this have to do with helping people who are hostile? The answer is that parents do it all the time. One of the purposes of parenthood must be to teach us how to love people who don’t deserve it. And by “love,” I don’t mean “have affection for.” We often act against the best interests of those for whom we have the most affection. Consider stalkers. I use the word “love” to describe concern for the well-being of others, which is probably the only accurate definition. John 15:13 confirms this. You can love someone you dislike, and you can love someone while you’re angry at them. God himself gets angry.

I have been ungrateful and stupid, so I can’t let myself feel cheated when others give me the same treatment. This is the job we were created for. It isn’t always fun, but it always brings us blessings.

I guess nobody goes through life without changing a few dirty diapers. Parents get the worst of it, and I think they learn the most, but just about all of us find ourselves cleaning up after others at one time or another, and expecting thanks is just plain dumb. If you do it for gratitude and admiration, you are going to burn out fast.

God promised to give us wisdom, provided we asked for it. I ask. You may know Ronald Reagan’s anecdote about the kid who tunneled into the pile of horse manure, looking for a pony. I guess wisdom is what allows you to see the pony before you start digging.

May we all have good luck with our manure piles today.

Scattered Bricks

My dad and I are working to get my sister’s cancer treatment going, and to put some order into her life. It is not easy. The situation is considerably worse than we feared, so my sister can’t afford to waste a minute, and we are experiencing a fair amount of discord. Prayer would be appreciated.

Speaking of prayer, I had a funny experience last night. As I’ve noted earlier, I pray when I lose things. When I put things down, I don’t realize it, so I generally don’t know where they are. The solution is to have predesignated places for things, but I only have a few things I have managed to nail down to specified locations. Lately, when I say such prayers, they are often answered before I can finish them. It has been a little shocking at times.

I wanted to hear a certain CD last night, and I didn’t know where it was. I checked the two most likely rooms and came up dry. I was standing next to the dining table when I decided to pray; there is always a certain amount of junk down at one end of it. I hesitated for a minute. I thought about the amazing streak I had been having, finding things so quickly. I was worried I’d ruin it. I might pray about this thing and then be unable to find it. I realized how stupid that thought was, and I started to pray. As I began, I picked something up from the table, and while I lifted it, I saw the CD.

There was no reason for it to be there. It’s not where I would ordinarily put it. Of course, I was freaked out.

The CD was one of Perry Stone’s. He talked about the importance of giving, in order to have prosperity. He’s not a flashy “God wants us all to be rich” type. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. “God has given me a special anointing to get people prosperity, so send me money, and God will send you ten times as much.” They beg and beg and beg, and they never tell you what they do with the money. Because they’re spending it on mink toilet seat covers and orange Bentleys and really big black velvet paintings of Elvis and Jesus riding their Harleys together. You know about common white trash and easy money; it does not have to be explained. Perry Stone doesn’t beg, and he explained why. It’s because he doesn’t particularly like doing TV, and it wouldn’t bother him a great deal if he couldn’t afford to do it.

I got very fed up with the “God wants us all to be rich” movement back around 1990, but I do believe blessings, including financial well-being, are linked to generosity, and the Bible repeats that message over and over. The hitch, I believe, is that you have to give correctly. You have to support your own church as well as well-vetted charities and ministries. You can’t just hand it over to the Christian equivalent of Billy Mays. If you do, you’re rewarding a rotten person for doing evil. You can’t expect God to get behind that. And you have to handle your own money in a way that isn’t sinful. I don’t think God is willing to give us rope with which to hang ourselves.

It seems like we are supposed to imitate God, and God is generous. To a large degree, he is to us as we are to others. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing; life will never be free from problems. But I believe we are supposed to make the most of his general willingness to treat us as we treat others.

He started talking about our need to be familiar with the Bible, and how we build “line upon line, precept upon precept.” That struck me as interesting. To get anything out of the Bible, you have to be familiar with as much of it as possible, because different parts of the Bible explain each other. You have to read different parts in pari materia, harmonizing them to avoid idiotic results. For example, we are taught that God will do what we ask in Jesus’s name. Well, go outside and ask God, in Jesus’s name, to drop a billion dollars in gold bars on your lawn. It’s not going to happen. Your silly prayer goes against other ideas expressed in the Bible. We are not supposed to covet. We are not to be greedy. We are to seek his kingdom and his righteousness first.

For a long time, I’ve been aware that faith can’t be explained in a linear manner. You can’t lay out propositions and conclusions in order, in a single column, to explain Christianity. It’s multidimensional. The Talmud reflects this. You take one piece of the Torah, and from that page, commentaries shoot out in all different directions. They work in parallel, not in series. Like a matrix, not a sequence. Trying to explain God using ideas linked in series is like trying to get all three stooges through one doorway at once.

It’s impossible to present everything you need to know in a single-file progression of ideas. And even if it were, the Bible is not written that way. The only way to make sense of it is to get it into your unconscious mind–your memory–where ideas roll around and collide and interact like clothes in a dryer. Some Christians call this area of consciousness the spirit, and maybe it is. This is where the synthesis occurs. It’s like building a coherent wall from bricks found in random locations.

Jesus and the Apostles took this approach. Look at the annotations in the Bible. They quoted the Old Testament over and over, and they followed the Jewish practice of quoting one line as a quick way to refer to the part of the Bible in which that line was found. The more scripture you know, the more like them you are. You’re supposed to be armed with the sword of the spirit, and that means you should be able to quote enough scripture to have it handy when you’re in trouble and you can’t get to a Bible. This is how Jesus defeated Satan after the 40-day fast.

Interesting stuff.

It also explains why nonbelievers find Christianity so hard to absorb. They like debate, which is a totally worthless way of looking for the truth. Debate only establishes the identity of the best debater; this is why good lawyers win bad cases. To understand Christianity, you have to listen for a good long while, as seemingly unrelated ideas are imparted. You have to shut up and hold your objections until you’ve heard enough to know what’s going on. A lot of people who don’t believe are not willing to do that. They will settle on some part of Christianity that doesn’t make sense to them and use it to invalidate the whole religion. They’ll say, “There is suffering, so there is no God.” Or, “Fossils prove Genesis is a lie, so there is no God.” Or, “Verse x contradicts verse y, so there is no God.” They can’t see the sweater; just what they perceive to be loose threads. They’re like the jurors who concluded OJ was innocent because one or two pieces of nonessential evidence were excluded.

The more I learn, the more I realize how obligated we are. You have to submit and obey and be productive, and you can’t demand that God help you while conforming to your guidelines for his nature and behavior. You can get God to do great things for you here on earth–better things than you can comprehend–but you have to live his way.

I have to get up and get some things done. I don’t know how much blogging I’ll be able to do this week.

DENIED

I just received a phone call that offended me.

The American Bar Association wanted me to rejoin. I shut them down fast. I said they were too liberal for me, and that they should give me a call when they ceased being a political organization.

This bit of pandering filth is from their own website: “The ABA opposes federal, state or territorial legislation to create special legal immunity for the firearms industry from civil tort liability.”

That, all by itself, is sufficient reason to oppose these overweening social engineers. You can find plenty of other reasons if you Google.

I joined the ABA when I was in law school, to get substantial discounts on a few things I needed. Bar-prep classes. Bar exams are idiotic; the ABA accredits law schools AND helps write bar exams. Does that make sense to you? “We vouch for this school, but we want to subject its graduates to an overly difficult test which bears almost no relationship to practice or to the materials they learned in school, to make sure they’re qualified to take entry-level jobs where they sit around looking at Westlaw all day.”

One of two things has to be true. The ABA’s accreditation is garbage, or the tests are unnecessary.

Very often, money explains this kind of foolishness. That’s probably the case here. It is virtually impossible to pass the Florida bar exam without a prep course. The crap on the test is not substantially related to the material taught in law schools, and you can’t pick it up in practice. So you have to spend thousands of dollars and waste months preparing. Where do the thousands go? Down here, they go to a company called Bar/Bri. It’s a great thing for them. No one else can get you through the test, and the test is mandatory. They could charge ten thousand dollars, and people would have to pay it. My guess–and it’s only a guess–is that Bar/Bri has been known to spend money cozying up to bar associations, to make sure this silliness continues. A lawyer who can make his “educational” services indispensable can become wealthy without ever entering a courtroom. That’s a fantastic temptation.

If law schools are producing people who can’t practice–and they are–the answer isn’t a redundant test. The answer is accreditation that means something. Law schools accept truly inept people because of affirmative action or because they have pull, and the result is a substantial number of graduates who are beyond hope. At my school, they flew affirmative action recipients to another state before their freshman years, to teach them in advance and give them a patently unfair jump on the rest of us. And a lot of these people still washed out or could not pass the bar exam or could not keep jobs because they simply did not have the mental horsepower to do the work. The others didn’t need the costly cheat, so it was a waste.

There was never any doubt that I would be able to practice law. That is true of the majority of law school graduates. It’s wrong to subject us to expensive tests, wasting months of our productive years, to weed out the people who were admitted and passed because of bogus accreditation. If a law school produces substantial numbers of graduates who can’t do the work, that law school should not be accredited. Aside from that, the free market is the best bar exam. If you’re not bright enough to practice, the free market will remove you from the system. You will not be able to earn a living. The inept graduates law schools should never have accepted eventually run into this natural filter, and it does a great job.

If you try to set up a solo practice, and you stink, judges will squash you, jurors will laugh at you, you will be sued for malpractice, people will refuse to hire you, and you’ll leave the profession. If you work for someone else, and you stink, that person will eventually fire you, unless he marries you. This is all much fairer than an exam process which costs a tremendous amount of money.

I needed the ABA to save money on the tests it helped perpetuate, so I joined. Like a lot of people, I did not renew my membership. I’m not paying these socialists to slander conservative judges and attack my civil rights. I’m not paying them to support bottom-feeding tort parasites in their efforts to bleed society dry. What are they thinking, taking offensive political positions and then asking moral, patriotic people to fund them? It’s crazy.

They claim to promote professionalism, in order to make the public happy. The public doesn’t hate lawyers because we’re unprofessional. Not primarily. They hate us because we’re greedy, ruthless bullies who destroy other people’s lives unnecessarily. No popular legal association will ever do anything about that. The foxes aren’t going to guard the henhouse.

I took the Bar/Bri course. I took two courses, now that I think about it. I’m sure my law school made money from it, because they supplied the facilities. I paid to see a lecture by a famous professor who travels around the country reciting the same spiel over and over. About 95% of the material I studied in the courses has been of no value to me in practice. And I have to wonder; if I paid $80,000 in tuition and still had to do this in order to be considered qualified, am I not entitled to a refund?

If you’re a conservative attorney, do not let the ABA have your money. If for no other reason, decline to join because I refuse to accredit them.