Still Kicking

Here is a post from Mish Weiss’s blog, written by her friend Marc:

Mish is not in a coma, she remains in critical condition.
She responds to touch and sound.
All we can do now is wait and pray.

You can probably guess how much I know about leukemia. I know a lot of leukemia patients die from hemorrhaging. They even get hemorrhages inside their eyes, causing temporary blindness. I don’t know how much doctors can do to control it. I’m hoping they have an effective way to put a stop to it.

Here’s part of a comment from her blog:

You know, G_d told Moses to raise his hands over the children of Israel (sorry I don’t recall all the details of why, but I think it was to bless them and keep them safe). Anyway, Moses obeyed G_d and had his hands raised, but he got so tired he could no longer keep them raise, so two friends, Aaron and I don’t know the other friends name, came along side him and held his arms up for him. (I think I need to study that again.) My point is, you are like Moses, a strong, brave Jewish person, but you are so tired that it is difficult for you to continue to carry on, so your friends, a big crowd of us, have come along side you to encourage you, and to help you carry on and to pray for you. That’s our job for right now. Your job is to just let us be your friends, to love you, to care for you, to pray for you. Mish you are a Moses.

I have had exactly the same thought. I believe many Old Testament stories were planned by God, to provide symbolism and foreshadowing. This story seems to be symbolic of the need for believers to stand together. A single person can’t pray 24 hours a day, and even if it were possible, people fail. So we are supposed to share our challenges and close the chinks in the armor.

I have a more positive outlook toward marriage these days, and the main reason is that Christianity is a tough burden for a single person to bear. When you feel weak or you go astray, you have no one to turn to except God. When you’re not praying, no one is praying for you. Two believers together can help each other stay on the path. It would have been a lot harder for me to leave the church almost 20 years ago, had I been married to a believer.

I value my autonomy, and women are often selfish, annoying, spoiled, and just unprofitable. Very often, a wife is a net negative, not unlike a tapeworm. But I have to believe that the same God who can bring peace to a torn-up family can make a marriage work.

I think the Internet can be a tremendous weapon, to help Christians join in purpose. Look at all the prayer requests that go up on this blog. Having a dozen or a hundred praying for you is certainly better than praying alone.

The same reader who posted the above comment said she had awakened in the middle of the night with Mish on her heart. That keeps happening to me, too, and it seems like it’s always at around 1:20 a.m. I hope it means something.

Let me mention another Aaron. My friend Aaron has just had a crisis. His wife had chest pains, and they put a stent in one of her arteries. It looks like she’s okay, but they have both decided they really need to change their diets and exercise regularly. I hope you’ll pray that her condition improves and that they’ll succeed in their efforts. Like I told Aaron, the Orthodox diet is not known for promoting health or longevity. They’ll have to get used to some real changes.

Critical Condition

I heard from Mish Weiss on Sunday. I checked in on her tonight. Her blog says that she is unconscious and entubated because of hemorrhaging from her eyes and nose. If you look up AML leukemia, you will find that this is a common problem, and that it frequently causes death. Mish is in critical condition. Please keep praying.

Maybe not Totally Original

Click Adolf to visit Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

I’m AK, You’re AK

Mike is coming to town. I hope the pizzerias are ready for the added load.

I hope my new murderous and unbelievably dangerous assault rifle gets here before Mike does. By the way, in case any liberals who hate guns yet know absolutely nothing about them are reading, let me point out that it’s a SEMI-AUTOMATIC. Yes, that’s right. I, a mere civilian long suspected of being several pins short of a strike, will possess a DEADLY SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPON.

I love it when people whine about how semi-automatic weapons should be illegal. Ask them what “semi-automatic” means, if you want a laugh. About 98% of them think it means “machine gun.” And I’m sure the con artists at the Brady Center are doing nothing to change that perception. It’s like the forged Dan Rather memo; as long as the angels and the editorial staff of Mother Jones are on your side, Mother Gaia loves it when you lie. Your deceit will make her nipples ooze warm soy milk from organic beans that come from plants fertilized with the bodies of aborted babies.

Let me take a second to educate. A semi-automatic weapon fires once every time you pull the trigger, and it cocks itself after every round.

I love revolvers. Because they’re cool. But they’re obsolete. They work. Sure. But semi-automatics work much better and weigh less. Steam locomotives work great. So do rotary phones. But they’re not state of the art, and when you want the best, they’re not what you buy.

The public needs semi-automatics. When a crackhead invades your home and he is completely willing to kill you to avoid arrest–and this happens many times every day–you may have to shoot fifteen times to put him down. You can’t do it with a revolver or a derringer. You need something that pumps lead until the job is done, without providing your assailant with time to recover between reloads. When it comes to pistols, that means semi-auto, period. And optimally, it means a big ol’ magazine.

I have two .357s. I don’t even keep ammunition for them. One holds six rounds; the other, seven. They have relatively heavy trigger pulls. They can’t compare to a Glock with one clip in the well and another in my pocket. Empty both revolvers and you’ve shot 13 rounds. Empty two Glock clips plus the shell in the pipe, and you’ve shot 31. With greater ease and accuracy and less recoil. The revolvers are toys. I enjoy them at the range. If the Obama Jugend starts collecting our sidearms, these are the guns I’ll hand over as decoys. The semi-automatics are the ones I’ll hide.

I’ll hide them in the last places a liberal personality-cult ninny would look. Under a Bible or a box of soap.

One of the weird things about the gun controversy is that gun haters get upset when anyone is killed with a large number of bullets. But if you go to Liveleak and watch actual shootings, you’ll see why this happens. It’s not overkill. It’s not hate or vengefulness or brutality. It just reflects the fact that people who get shot can remain alive and dangerous long enough to kill you. When you shoot another person, the objective is to render him helpless in a fraction of a second. That may be all the time you have, before he shoots back. Very often, a righteous shooter will empty his magazine before the criminal starts to drop. What are you going to do? Assume the first shot took? Wait to see what happens? A lot of dead people have tried that.

Here’s the way defensive shooting works: in for a penny, in for a pound. Once you pull the trigger, you’ve decided to kill the other person. Therefore the number of shots you fire is irrelevant. If the first one kills him and you fire fourteen more, it just means you shot a dead person 13 times. Big deal. You defaced meat. It happens. It’s why caskets have lids. If the fourteenth one kills him, it just means you were right to keep shooting.

In the liberal version of reality, you try to hug the assailant. When that fails, you ask him about his needs. When that fails, you tell him he is making you very uncomfortable, and that you need your space. When that fails, you blow your rape whistle. When that fails, you command him to depart in the name of Obama. When that fails, if you have a gun, you fire it in the air. When that fails, you shoot him somewhere where it won’t hurt all that much. It’s a system of progressive responses. How appropriate.

In actual non-liberal reality, you shoot to kill. Then you shoot to kill. Then you shoot to kill. Then you shoot to kill. Because you don’t have time to become the criminal’s best friend and find out what you did to provoke him to sodomize your family and steal your silver. Criminals are fast. They can kill in half a second. Appeasement is slow.

Lots of people defend themselves and their families successfully with revolvers and even really low-capacity guns like double-barreled shotguns. And a lot of people cut steak with a butter knife. Here’s a great lesson people should learn early. To do a job right, you need the right tool. And the right tool for self-defense is a semi-automatic weapon.

I know you can also do a lot of damage with 12-gauge that only holds a few rounds. This is a weapon with a very unusual level of per-round stopping power, so maybe the rules are different. But a pistol round isn’t a shotgun shell. You need to deliver them in quantity, if you expect to have any hope of landing one in the right place. Personally, I believe in 12-gauges that hold 20-round magazines. In my opinion, a person who shoots five shotgun shells and then has to reload will probably wish he had gone semi-auto.

There’s a famous video of a cop having a shootout with two white trash losers in a van. The passenger loser gets out and opens fire. The cop opens fire. They shoot round after round, from a distance of something like ten feet. Nobody hits a damned thing. Neither one of these men had the ability to shoot well under pressure. Guess who has the best chance of winning in a situation like that, which is very typical? The guy with the biggest magazine. If you shoot enough bullets, sooner or later you’ll hit the bad guy.

Who, in the multi-century history of firearms and gunfights, has ever wished he had FEWER bullets?

So anyway, I like semi-autos, and I like large magazines. And the Vz 58 should be a wonderful thing to have on hand if I ever find myself in danger. If I can’t save myself with 60 rounds of 7.62x39mm, an extremely reliable rifle, and a very bright laser, I deserve to die, because it proves I am a disgrace to my species.

If Mike arrives after the rifle, we’ll be able to take it to the range. That will be fun. I haven’t been there in a long time. I’ve had various tool tasks to perform, and they have eaten into my range time. I bought some reloading supplies, so it won’t be long before I start making amends. I should really break down and get some more .38 Super brass. I have .45 shells coming out of my ears, but .38 Super is something you just have to pay for.

If you haven’t bought a good rifle and at least a thousand rounds of ammunition yet, get with the program. Obama is watching.

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Here’s a Youtube classic, demonstrating simple martial arts techniques that may be helpful if you are attacked.

One More for the List

Today I have an opportunity to return a favor, to some extent. Reader Ed Bonderenka and his friends gave me invaluable help, praying for me when I needed it. Now Ed needs some help:

On another note. please hold me in prayer. I’ve been seeing a doctor for some lower G.I. issues with little results. Thank God x-rays and ultrasound came back good Friday. But I’m in pain. Thanks.

“Lower G.I. issues.” Yeah, I’ve used that euphemism, too, Ed. Here’s something that has worked for me: blame it on the dog.

Seriously, though, keep Ed in your prayers.

My Ears are Fascinating

First off, please say a fresh prayer for Mish Weiss. She got a look at her prognosis, and she has been very down.

Now for a painstaking discussion of my own trivial concerns.

I am feeling much better. I’m pretty sure the giant dose of MSG I got on Saturday is what kept me awake Saturday night. Something to think about in the future. I am also starting to wonder how safe aspartame is. I looked at the list of things it’s suspected of causing, and a fair number hit home. I have concerns about my short-term memory, for example.

When you consume aspartame, you eventually end up with a certain amount of methyl alcohol in your blood. This is a poison. It can damage your vision and so on. Defenders of aspartame point out that things like tomato juice contain a certain amount of methyl alcohol. Anti-aspartame do-gooders claim there is some difference–I forget what–that makes the alcohol found in juices harmless. I’ve also read that aspartame eventually turns into formaldehyde, which is not a great thing to have in your body. I’m sure some Google cowboy will post the whole story in comments.

Like I said yesterday, I avoid artificial sweeteners. Not because I have solid evidence that they are bad, but because the general rule is that when you cheat nature, something bad happens. I’m not referring to things like building houses or bathing, which arguably defeat nature’s efforts to mess with us. I mean things like taking drugs to enhance performance, or doing weird things to try to halt the aging process, or other efforts that are clearly unnatural. It’s hard to define the difference, but I know it when I see it.

The most disturbing example I can think of is killing unborn babies to steal their cells to help people who have already been born. What could be more warped and unnatural? The natural order works like this: one generation sacrifices itself for the benefit of the succeeding generation. When you do it the other way around, it’s as perverse as cannibalism.

I identified one reason for the sounds I heard. While I tried to sleep, I heard blood pumping in my ears. Looks like I have swimmer’s ear on one side. I know exactly how I got it. I have a neighbor who is a real mess; there are junk cars in the front yard, the backyard used to be a bona-fide jungle (not nearly as nice as it sounds), the house is run-down, and he can’t control his dog. It’s really sad, listening to a grown man walk around his yard, pleading with a standard poodle which has no idea what he’s saying, because it hasn’t been trained.

Anyway, his dogs bark a lot, so I wear ear plugs to bed. Now I pay the price. I am taking appropriate measures, and my ear is getting better.

In the past, I used to call the cops when he had a loud party late at night, or his dogs yapped. Then I decided to be a Christian about it and try to attack the situation on my own end, and of course, I threw in prayer. So far, these efforts have yielded an earache. But I really prefer to do it this way. I believe interpersonal relations are very hard to fix without God’s help.

Also, there must be reasons why I’m such a light sleeper. If I can figure those out, I’ll be a lot better off than I would be if I merely silenced one source of aggravation. Why swat flies? That’s how George Bush puts it. Go for the broad solution.

I don’t get much caffeine, and I haven’t had nicotine since God knows when. I have laid off the aspartame. Maybe things will improve. I wonder if there is a way to soundproof a window, or at least reduce the sound, without replacing it.

I stole more garbage last night, and I’m proud of it. Proud, I tell you. A neighbor had a couple of non-rotten mahogany logs in his trash pile, and one was suitable for sawing up, so I nailed it. I think it’s time to start making mahogany bird toys for Maynard and Marvin.

Worse Than Herpes

Thanks to a Youtube video with a certain song in the soundtrack, I now have “Bumble Boogie” stuck in my brain.

AND YOU MUST SUFFER WITH ME.

This is the original, which is pretty simple, but it’s much better than the Liberace version. Maybe old gay Polish classical musicians aren’t the best choices to express the boogie feel.

Check out the Jools Holland versions on Youtube.

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Albert Ammons (L) and Pete Johnson (R) play “Boogie Woogie Dream.” Pete Johnson was the best boogie woogie piano player who ever lived.

LA Ghetto Uprising

Aaron got his SW1911! Finally! Somewhere, Pelosi is feeling sharp groin pains.

Check this out:

That is good shooting, especially from a Schwarzenegger hostage in the PRK!

MSG Boy Makes his Debut

Yesterday I was exposed to four substances: aspartame, MSG, malathion, and caffeine. Last night I heard blood pounding in my ears, and during much of the night, I was too alert to sleep. It’s not stress. What stress could I possibly have? I’m wondering what caused the problem.

I don’t think it was the caffeine. I had a cup of coffee, a quart glass of tea, and part of a Diet Coke. That’s not a big load.

Malathion is supposed to be one of the safest bug killers there is. They send trucks up and down the streets here at night, blasting it into the air to keep the mosquitoes down. If it were a real problem, I think the liberal freaks who live here would be spasming and screeching and rending their hemp diapers in front of TV cameras every week. Also, malathion effects only last a few hours.

That leaves aspartame and MSG.

Lately I have tried to cut down on artificial sweeteners. I know they’ve been tested, but there is something that just doesn’t smell right about having your cake and eating it, too. The older I get, the less I believe in free lunch. And these days, the FDA admits that some people have reactions to aspartame. I don’t drink or eat all that much sweetened stuff, so I’m not afraid to use real sugar. But yesterday I had to have Mickey D’s, and that meant Diet Coke. And I had some sugarless yoghurt on hand, which I ordinarily would not eat, and I had a couple of cups.

Once a week, I go to breakfast with my dad, and I use Splenda in my coffee because I’m too lazy to stir sugar until it dissolves.

Maybe I should lay off this stuff completely. I don’t really need it.

The MSG came from takeout Chinese. I had to have some extra spicy shredded chicken extravaganza. I just had to. I’ve heard people complain about MSG, but I figured they were just whiners.

Whatever it was, I can’t wait for it to get out of my system. I felt wonderfully relaxed when I went to bed; I watched my Doug Stowe box-making video for a few minutes, and if you can watch this guy make boxes without passing out, you are abnormal. He talks slowly and takes his time with the work, and it puts me in a trance. Five hours later, I found myself wide awake, and when I tried to sleep, I had nightmares. And I had nasal congestion. And I still don’t feel right.

Maybe it’s time to line the walls with foil and start wearing a respirator.

Note the Fine Paint Job

I just welded up my saw blade racks, and I painted them with truck bed paint, and I’m waiting for them to dry so I can screw them to the garage wall.

Here’s a tip from a tool expert. If you don’t have a shade tree and some fishing line, it is perfectly acceptable to suspend parts on professional stands while you paint them. But it is not the favored method. Also, try to get all the paint on in one coat so you’ll get that nice bubbly dribbly effect.

I did try to paint these things correctly, but I guess I didn’t hold the can far enough away, because there was considerable bubbling. It’s not a major crisis. The paint is to discourage rust and cover the welds and grinder marks and brush marks. It really doesn’t matter. If I get tired of the bubbles I can toss the racks in a fire, clean them off, and brush Rustoleum on them.

The welds are only somewhat ugly this time. I feel quite a sense of accomplishment.

I was somewhat confused. If you have ever watched a welding DVD or read a welder manual, you know welder wire feed and gas flow are based on metal thickness. So what do you do when you weld the base of a half-inch dowel, cut at a 30-degree angle, to a 1/8″ piece of plate, with the dowel base over a 3/16″ hole?

I didn’t know, either. So I set it for 1/8″ and let fly. It was too much for the skinny side of the dowel and too little for the fat side, so I figure it averaged out. Let’s be real; if I did not achieve full penetration, it doesn’t matter. The dowels only have to be strong enough to hold maybe twenty pounds of blade, each.

I got serious spatter at one point. Not sure why. Maybe something got on the metal. I had to grind off two tiny spatter warts.

In keeping with my fine tradition of exemplary workshop safety, I welded in shorts again. Man, it makes you feel alive when a drop of spatter falls into the opening of your tennis shoes.

I have been told that welding bed rails is a bad idea, because they’re too hard, and the welds crack. I used a couple of surplus HTC mobile base rail extensions for these racks, and I wondered if they were made from the same stuff as bed rails. Ultimately, I don’t care. They were free, so if the blades break the dowels off, I can chalk it up to welding practice. I have plenty of scrap steel; I can make new racks.

Incidentally, some welders say bed rails are fine scrap. You just have to heat them properly before welding. Here’s how you do it. You get on Google, and you find the guys who said that, and you follow their instructions. I don’t know if it works, but I thought I’d mention it.

Guess I better get to work on my table saw guard.

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How come none of you anal-retentives have noticed the tiny discrepancy between the two racks? I didn’t see it until I tried to hang them. Fortunately it didn’t affect their usefulness.

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Best Shop Safety Device: a Macho Man Who Will Take Stupid Risks For You

I got a very weird email this week. A reporter from The New Republic wanted to interview me about Pajamas Media. The temptation was fairly potent. Think about it. The PJs reviled me in a forum to which no one pays attention. The interview would give me a chance to respond before a different and more respectable audience.

But I turned it down. Some of the mean things I have said about PJM still make me cackle helplessly, but like I said in my response to the reporter, picking on the PJs is a vice. It would be fun telling him what I thought about a group of college graduates thinking they could make money selling something which a) nobody wants, and b) is already available for nothing. And I could once again compare Simon and Reynolds to the Thunderdome characters “Master-Blaster.” But what little conscience I have would plague me.

I am trying to be a nicer person these days. Really.

I told the reporter he needed to talk to Moxie and Dennis, neither of whom is currently trying to be nicer. So clearly I’m not cured yet.

I think they will give him material that is way more entertaining than anything I would be willing to say.

In other news, I have had a problem which will amuse all of you. I joke all the time about being addicted to tools, but over the last couple of weeks, I have been seriously concerned. I would get up, write a blog post, shop for machine tools, work with tools, do my regular daily stuff, write another blog post, and shop for machine tools again.

It interfered with my early morning prayer time. It distracted me from more important things. So I have been trying to get a handle on it. I’m shutting the PC down earlier now. Hopefully I won’t need an intervention.

I am part of the group of Christians who think that anything that is too important to you is equivalent to an idol. An idol doesn’t have to be an object carved in the shape of a God. It can be a job, a car, a woman…you can even be your own idol. And if you miss your daily Bible study because you’re busy Ebaying tools you will never buy, you are over the line.

I feel a whole lot better now that I’m getting back on track. I missed God.

I’m not totally free; let’s be serious. A neighbor has two juicy mahogany logs in his or her trash, and I plan to make a rescue mission later today. But I think my priorities are a little more balanced.

This trash-wood business has me interested in woodturning. That means buying a wood lathe, right? Not really. You can turn wood on a metal lathe, if you rig it up so wood won’t get into the machinery. Lots of people do it. I would be limited to about a 12″ swing, but I don’t plan to turn manhole covers, so I don’t care. I don’t know what a reasonable swing for a wood lathe is. Lots of people like the Jet 1220VS, which has a 12″ swing.

I used to think turning was sort of silly. You plop a chunk of wood on the lathe, you spin it, a bowl comes off, and you put it on Ebay, where it brings 79¢ (because your mom feels sorry for you and bids on it under a friend’s account). Ho hum. But some people do very creative work, and you can turn wood that is worthless for other purposes. I’ve seen at least one beautiful item made from poinciana wood. Which is not rare in Miami trash piles.

I have learned that there is such a thing as a bandsaw blade made especially for cutting green wood. I suppose I need one. My 3/4″ blade is pretty gummed up right now.

Today I had an idea for an invention. It’s not really useful, but I still think it would be great to make it. I’ll explain.

Lifting things is bad. It’s stupid. You can ruin your back lifting something as small as a typewriter (remember those?). But we have no answer to the lifting problem. We have those stupid belts they wear at Home Depot, but research suggests they don’t actually work. What’s the answer?

Clearly, we need mini-forklifts. We have big forklifts for huge things, and we have somewhat smaller lifting devices for things that are still pretty big, but what if you want to lift something that weighs 50 pounds? Go pack sand. Nobody in industry takes you seriously. But it’s a very legitimate need. I have a dry cut saw that weighs maybe 65 pounds. I have a planer that weighs nearly a hundred. I don’t want to lift these things from the garage floor to a shelf, over and over. They’re small, but they’re definitely big enough to be risky to lift. I’ve been lifting wet mahogany logs to the bandsaw table because I had no choice, and one of them probably weighed a hundred pounds. It’s a bad habit to get into.

If you go to sites like Northern Tool, you’ll see there are things called Genies which are small-footprint, hand-powered lifts. They lift up to 500 pounds. Swell. But they cost $500, and they take up an area about two feet by twenty inches. For a guy with a few tools and other items that need to be moved around in a garage, this would be overkill. You would have to have a fairly big garage in order to have room to use this thing, and would you really want to use it for something like a miter saw? It’s too inconvenient. You’d grab the saw and take your chances.

I think it would be neat to make a lift with a 250-pound capacity that would lift things five feet off the ground. You could have forks 12″ apart, and you could make them 18″ long. If you need more area, slap a piece of plywood on it, with bolts that go through the forks. No, forget bolts. Use pins that pop in and out. It would take up about as much room as a handtruck, and it would be so light you would actually use it. You wouldn’t even need decent steel. You could weld it up using galvanized fence posts.

A lot of men are ashamed to ask for help lifting things. They are utter morons. Those are the guys who end up moaning about how they can’t leave the couch. The last time I had to lift one of the props from my dad’s boat, I told another guy to take one end. He was a steroid-enhanced bodybuilder who was not overly burdened with genius. He was clearly contemptuous as he grabbed the 80-pound, awkwardly-balanced prop and carried it by himself. Me? I was delighted. I can carry an 80-pound prop. But I’m smart enough not to. When I’m 70 and he’s 55, I’ll be able to kick his ass. He’ll be a cripple.

There is nothing macho about ruptured disks or having to ask your wife to carry your laptop case. Life is not a weightlifting competition, and lifting stuff does not impress people. No one cares about your mighty feats of strength. Women do not find them sexy, and men do not find them intimidating. Sorry to break the news.

It would be even more fun if I could put a motor on the lift, to shoot things up and down and make a crank unnecessary. That would be the difference between a usable lift and a dust collector. You shouldn’t need a whole lot of torque, so it should be possible to make the lift work pretty fast. Maybe a motorcycle gel battery would work.

Maybe I’ll try to make something once my other projects are not so backed up.

Hurry

Here is something hard to understand.

Midway USA has Wolf 7.62x39mm ammunition for $235/1000 rounds. It’s not the Military Classic, but I think the difference is just the coating. Anyway, it’s non-corrosive, and it’s fairly cheap, and NOBODY HAS CHEAP AK AMMUNITION RIGHT NOW.

I bought a Vz 58. If Obama wants to repeal the second amendment, he will have to repeal the fourth in order to disarm me.

I hope my laser’s mount will fit the barrel. Once I have this thing working, I should be able to kill burglars just by scaring them to death.

I didn’t go with CZ-USA. I got one of the jobs Czechpoint sells. They’re supposed to be excellent, and they’re cheaper, and they’re actually available.

You can find cheaper ammunition, but as far as I know, it’s all corrosive. And while this isn’t super-premium stuff, and I got it for the gun range, it should be really good for killing people.

Someone asked why I didn’t get an M1 carbine. Good question. I still want one. I think they’re insanely cool. But the Vz 58 strikes me as a bit more lethal, with a high capacity and great reliability. Maybe I’m wrong.

Grinch Obama Steals Christmas in February

Wow, I just read about Obama’s plan to reduce charitable tax deductions. I can’t find the exact formula, although I see the rate goes down from 35 percent to 28 percent, for those evil productive citizens we call “the rich.”

Let’s see. I don’t recall the exact figure, but in one of the years preceding the 2000 election, Dick Cheney and his wife gave something like 10 million dollars to charity. That’s the correct order of magnitude. So under Obama, the deduction would go from $350,000 to $280,000. What happens when the rich see consequences like this on their returns? Obviously, they donate less. So Barack Obama’s plan to finance idiotic things like research to combat nonexistent global warming is to take food out of the mouths of the poor.

If global warming is caused by human industry, we already solved the problem. We elected a team whose backward economic ideas are going to make industry cease.

Under conservatism, the government considers people smart enough to decide what to do with their money, so it tries not to take too much of it. Under liberalism, the government considers our money its money, and it taxes us as much as possible, leaving what amounts to an allowance. But in the past, liberals were willing to allow us to decide what to do with our charitable donations. Now, by discouraging giving, they’re pulling the leash tight. Bureaucrats and left-wing fat cats with government connnections will get the money. The poor can go pack sand. And that makes sense, because liberalism was never about helping the poor. It was about consolidating money and wealth in the hands of a central government: the Mommy Dearest state. Conservatism is about liberty; liberalism is about being taken care of, necessarily including being told what to do.

Will this affect people who donate to religious charities? Surely not. Wouldn’t there be a first amendment issue? I know Obama hates other parts of the Bill of Rights, but I didn’t realize he was trying to repeal this one.

I know this. Liberals would love to cut off donations to churches, because they hate God, and because they want the state to be in charge of charity. A person who gets a hot meal and a clean bed from the church might convert! Marx forbid!

It’s very scary. For a long time, I’ve been pointing out that America seems to be a permanently defeated nation. Our sins wiped out our blessings, so now we’re going to be like the poor quasi-prisoners who make up the citizenry in socialist Europe. I’ve seen it coming, but it didn’t seem real. Now it’s hitting home. My beautiful country is on its heels, and soon it may be a memory, like pre-Castro Cuba.

At least capitalist Cubans got to leave. We have nowhere to go.

European prosperity seems to be in an even steeper nose dive than our own. It looks like the Swiss may be in big trouble. For decades, they’ve profited by helping American tax evaders. Remarkably, they thought our government would never do anything about it. How could they believe that? Now the piper is knocking on their door. And he’s going to get paid. Secret Swiss bank accounts are a thing of the past for Americans. The Swiss don’t have the leverage to say no to our courts.

A whole bunch of Americans are going to get fined or go to jail, and some of them will be famous. It will be a strange pageant of bad judgment and repercussions. I wonder how much this will hurt the Swiss banks. We’re not the only people who use them, but I’m sure our business is important. And I don’t know whether there is a good reason, other than secrecy, to use a Swiss bank.

This is not the way to save money for our nation. The way to save is not to spend the money in the first place. When you’re a complete fool and you think it’s a good idea to pass out doomed, ineffective multi-trillion-dollar bailouts while trying to buy an impossibly expensive national health care system, you aren’t going to save the country by stealing crumbs from soup kitchens.

That’s liberalism for you. When they run the show, you can have somebody else’s cake and eat it, too.

Hillary not a Friend of Israel? Impossible!

Big shock here. The Obamessiah’s disciples are turning out to be Judases. Jesus only had one Judas Iscariot. So far, Obama has two. First, Eric Holder, who is undoing Obama’s promise to leave gun owners alone. Second, Hillary Clinton, who has turned on Israel. She is railing at Israel for not getting enough aid to Gaza.

I don’t recall Obama or Clinton railing at Gazans for electing terrorists and firing rockets at innocent Israelies. Did I miss something?

Conservative Christians knew last year that Obama was bad for Israel. Israeli Jews knew it. American Jews? Not so much. Honestly, someone needs to start selling Kevlar shoes, to keep American Jews from shooting themselves in the feet. How could they not see this coming? Leftists worldwide are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. Obama’s closest spiritual advisor was openly anti-Semitic. All of America’s Muslim enemies supported Obama. Hello? Anyone in there?

Here’s a sad quotation from the CBS article about the ruckus:

“Hillary had Mrs. Arafat here and she invited Mrs. Arafat for lunch when she was the first lady,” added Babak Chafe of Great Neck. “She is pro-Palestinian 100 percent, really. Of course, we always knew it.”

You always knew it? Like the folks in New Square knew it? Like the 90% or so of American Jews who voted for Obama knew it?

If Mr. Or Ms. Chafe (“Babak”?) knew Hillary Clinton was a problem, how come other Jews didn’t know it? And how come they didn’t have any problems with Obama?

The treif chickens have come home to roost. I’m sorry, but this problem was obvious six months ago. Conservatives have been backing Israel overwhelmingly for years, leftists now own anti-Semitism and Jew-baiting, and you would have to live in a well to fail notice these things. George Bush had major failings as an advocate of Israel (as did the Israeli leaders he worked with), but Obama is going to make Israelis miss him.

Another quotation:

“I feel it’s unfortunate that they don’t continue the policy of the Bush administration, which was much more pro-Israel,” said Akiva Homnick of Jerusalem.

There you have it. As badly as Bush let Israel down, he was better than Obama. McCain would have been better, too.

Here’s another gem:

“The easy way to make a peace agreement is to pressure Israel because you can’t pressure the Arabs,” said Solomon Loewi of Monsey, N.Y.

Duh. I wonder who Mr. Loewi and his family voted for.

Here’s something to wonder about. Now that we have allowed the Iranians to have nuclear weapons, will Obama and Hillary let the Israelis take out the Iranian nuke sites? NO. That’s my prediction. We need nuclear diversity; there aren’t enough little brown people at the nuclear table. It’s paternalistic and Eurocentric to say wacky Muslim states can’t have nukes! Besides, allowing an Israeli raid would take guts, and Obama was born without those.

No, Iran has the bomb, and they’re going to keep it. They have the fissile material, and that’s the only real obstacle to making a bomb. A Bush II with more political capital might have had the courage to prevent it, and McCain probably would have been man enough to fix it, but when push comes to shove, Barack Obama will ask what the UN and Keith Olbermann think, and nothing will happen. Nothing good, anyway.

Buy gold and ammunition, and keep your head down. That’s my advice.

Hey, can anyone recommend a good, cheap accurate type of 7.62 x 39mm ammunition? I suppose I’ll also need some good defensive rounds.

New Way to Cause Misfires

Here’s interesting information about the 2003 Ford Thunderbird. When the ground cable on the battery gets loose, the car misfires as if it needed to have a COP replaced.

Unbelievable.

I thought I was having problems due to ghetto gas with water in it. My car gave me the flashy engine light on I-95, and I took it home and put water remover in it. Then it quit acting up. Then it acted up again. I figured it was time to drag it to Ford for another repair. The COPs on this car–what an idiotic invention–are so bad, Ford extended the warranty to 10/100,000 solely with regard to them.

I have read that COPs are better than old-style ignition coils. They are supposed to last longer. Apparently, that’s not true unless the engineer who designs the engine knows where to put them. In Thunderbirds, they fail right and left. And I’ve never seen or heard of a car with the old kind of ignition, breaking down because it quit working. And here’s a question. If you replace one cheap, easy to replace part with eight parts that are a pain to replace, and each one costs $65, have you really saved anyone any money? The COPs would have to be eight times as reliable to avoid repairs, and each repair would have to cost one-eighth of the cost of repairing the old type of engine, just to break even. Is that true in practice? It’s not for Thunderbirds. Not by a longshot. I wonder if it’s true for cars in which the COPs last longer.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these infernal things have some connection to air quality or fuel economy. Some insane standard liberals forced on the car industry. I can’t figure out why else they would exist. Seriously, how often does a car’s ignition fail? Was there really a great need to invent these things?

Okay, here is the happy part. The Thunderbird is a plastic car. That means you can’t ground anything to it. The ground cable from the battery goes through plastic. Evidently, that makes it likely to loosen over time. And when that happens, it’s like having a COP go bad. Or worse. And it will come and go. Sometimes the car will generate OBD codes, and sometimes it won’t.

I found this out by pure chance while I Googled “Thunderbird” and “P0352,” which is a code this condition can give you. I went out to the car, checked the cable, and sure enough, it was not tight. And the charge indicator was red. No wonder this battery crapped on on me three years ago. It wasn’t connected to the car!

I assume you can have this problem with any car that needs a good battery connection in order to supply a quality spark. I don’t know. But it’s probably a much bigger problem with cars that are hard to ground things to.