Dishing on Starlink

I feel like updating my Starlink experience.

Today my dish arrived, and as I wrote earlier, I was not as thrilled as I hoped to be when I first gave Elon Musk my deposit. The price had gone up, the promised speed had gone way down, the arrival of faster speeds had been pushed way back, and the installation turned out to be a pain.

Since then, I have fired Starlink up, and I believe I will keep it. I’m not sure yet, but it looks like Starlink Junior, the version I have, is somewhat better than my old wireless system, and it’s cheaper.

When you open the Starlink box, you get two things that matter. The dish and the router. The dish has a cord 75 feet long, and it has molded-in plugs on both ends, so you can forget about splicing it. I think. You plug your router into the wall, plug the dish into the router, and wait.

The only instructions are 4 cartoons on the packaging material, so if you think I’m oversimplifying the instructions, you are wrong. When I say “cartoons,” I mean one-panel cartoons. And there is no text to speak of.

Before you choose a location for the dish, you’re supposed to start the phone app and use it to take video of the sky above. How this is supposed to tell Starlink anything useful, I don’t know. I moved the phone around a lot while I was doing it. I can’t imagine what Starlink thought. The purpose of the exercise is to determine whether you have too many obstructions for the signal to get through.

Using the phone takes a long time, and Starlink doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to hold the phone over your head without getting tired. It also doesn’t tell you how to know when you’re done without holding the phone over your head. The camera has to point at the sky, so you have to be under the phone to read the app, and the app is what tells you you’re finished.

I stuck the dish next to the pool. I had read that it would want a desert-like location with no features other than flat horizons. Figuring that was BS, I decided to try the worst but most convenient location first. If it worked well enough by the pool, I would leave it there.

Of course, it worked poorly, so I climbed out an upstairs window, removed my Dish dish with primitive tools, and hurled it down into the yard. I stuck the Starlink dish in the pole it had occupied, with no real attachment. If a bird sits on it, it will move.

When I went inside and turned on the PC to see if I had a new network showing up, Starlink sort of took over and sent me to a page that did what the phone app was supposed to do, except for the video stuff. I learned I had a new network named “Stinky.”

Really? Is that a good joke, coming from a man named Musk?

I changed the name of the network to something like Trump-o-rama and started trying to use the web.

Since then, I have used an Internet speed test a few times, and my downloads are ranging between 8 and 55 megs. That means they’re way better than my old system when they’re fast, and they’re about the same when they’re bad.

Uploads are not quite as exciting. Sometimes they’re a lot better than they used to be, but I have gotten figures as low as 0.25 megs. Maybe I’ll only be able to upload Youtubes when the wind is blowing the right way.

We are having wonderful dry weather, but fortunately, it rained today, and I was still able to use Starlink, so there’s one question answered.

I went to Ace Hardware and got eight feet of galvanized tubing. For some reason, tubing for fences costs $30 at Home Depot and $17 at Ace. I modified it so it could be attached to my old Dish dish mount, and I’m in the process of painting it with truck bed coating. That will look marginally better than bare zinc. I plan to add 8 feet to the height of the dish, and I’ll fasten it to the pole with hose clamps.

Elon, or as I call him, Stinky, decided not to make his cables spliceable, so it looks like running them into the house will require holes as big as the plugs. I haven’t found a way to cut a cable, thread it through a small hole, and reattach it. Right now, the plan is to try to use the old Dish hole. I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t want to lie on my back on the roof in the rain, but I’m hoping it’s big enough to take Stinky’s plug.

All in all, things look promising. If upload speeds can be improved by raising the dish, I will be all set.

What Stinky has done is extremely impressive, regardless of the little issues. A lot of people around the world can now open a box, run an app, and have acceptable or possibly excellent Internet coverage in an hour or two. This is now possible in places where Internet coverage didn’t exist before Stinky. If you don’t think it’s impressive, consider all the huge corporations that have utterly failed where he has succeeded. They didn’t even see the need for his kind of system.

He’s going to murder Hughes. Their systems don’t perform as well, and getting help from the their customer service has been compared to trying to text the pope.

He should make a better effort to communicate with customers. That would be helpful.

I’m not sure about the non-spliceability of the cables. I’m checking it out. If it turns out splicing is possible, the odds I will return my dish will go down like Stinky’s estimates of my download speeds.

Nearly Almost not Exactly

I thought my enthusiasm for blogging was over, but I still feel the urge to amuse myself sometimes, so here I am.

Today’s big news: my Starlink transceiver thing is supposed to arrive today, and I already want to send it back. Tesla’s reputation for customer sensitivity is already proving true.

I know Tesla isn’t Starlink, but it’s a different arm of the same squid.

When I heard about Starlink, I got all excited. When I moved here, my Internet speeds went down to about 1.5 megs. No joke. Then I got a wireless hookup and went to around 9 megs, which seemed like a dream come true. The cost is $149 per month, which is insane, but consider what cable and a landline would cost. It amazes me that anyone would pay more than $50 for cable. I wouldn’t have it if it were free. I think my dad used to pay over $200 per month. So he could see the last 15 minutes of every bad movie over and over on 8 different channels that played the exact same things.

Starlink promised very fast speed for $99 per month, with a setup fee that was, I think, $400. And it was right around the corner. Elon was working, working, working, like a busy little techno-bee, trying to get Starlink to my area. It would be there in 2022. No question.

I put down my deposit and waited.

So far, every promise has proven to be false.

With no prior notice or consent, Starlink raised the monthly price to $110. I believe they charged me a new, increased price for the setup kit, but I’m not sure. I am too lazy to check. It doesn’t matter, because they have a monopoly. I have to pay.

They said the stuff would get here yesterday. It’s arriving today.

Why is it here? Because they sent me an email letting me know they had broken another promise. Starlink’s promised speeds will not be available until mid-2023, which really means early 2024 in the Muskverse. The email said I could opt into a program for people who were willing to pay the full price for Starlink Junior. Having no choice, I opted in. I will have Starlink, but speeds will be lower, and there may be throttling. An act that came to mind when I read that Starlink was going to be a year late.

Starlink’s website doesn’t tell you anything about setting the service up. They just tell you to pay up and wait.

With the kit on the way, I have been Googling for Starlink installation information, and the news I have gotten has been uniformly bad.

Like Dish and Hughes, Starlink uses satellites, so you get a dish. It has motors on it, and you set it outside and tell it to look for satellites. The problem is that Starlink’s dish is kind of a snowflake. Even though my dish will probably decide to point north, it supposedly needs a clear horizon all around it. This is something I, and many other rural people, will never have.

It has to be outdoors. They didn’t mention that. It may have to be on a pole. I may have to drill a hole in my house.

I live in a tropical storm area, so you can imagine the confidence I have in a satellite dish on a tall, skinny pole. Which I didn’t know I was supposed to buy.

I have an old Dish dish. The people who built the house left it. I told a roofer to remove it twice, and they screwed up both times. I was not happy about this, but it may turn out to be a blessing, because it’s on the south side of a roof, and it already has a hole for a cable. I should be able to rip the Dish dish off the little pole and put the Starlink dish on it. The big question is whether it will pick up a signal.

Guess I’ll find out.

If the Dish dish pole doesn’t work, I may send the Starlink dish back. My Internet service is bad, but it’s tolerable. It beats doing a major construction project to find a place where I can get a signal. My nearest big, flat area is over 100 yards away. I would have to fence the dish in to keep the cattle out, and how would I get the signal from the dish to the house?

Here’s a question. If Starlink can increase the price by $11 per month before I even get started, what will it be 6 months from now? There is no contract, and there is no price guarantee.

The whole thing reminds me of Tesla and Apple. You want to be one of the cool kids, you pay the price, and you defend the mothership. Tesla actually punishes people who disparage its products and practices. Maybe they’ll go after me if they see this blog post.

I hope it works. Other people who have Starlink Junior are saying it’s still worlds better than what they used to have.

The system will pay for the change in under two years if it works. Well, that doesn’t include installation costs, but anyway, it will eventually pay off. I don’t know what Starlink gives you if you send the dish back. Something, I hope. The Muskoids do as they please.

In other news, my wife and I have to go to Singapore and Hong Kong. The Czech Republic won’t even look at our visa application.

We provided them with more information than I have ever given anyone in my life, except for other unreasonable governments trying to keep Africans out. They had our bank statements. They had Rhodah’s wedding ring appraisal. They had our marriage license and certificate. Previous visas. You name it.

They turned us down because they insist on having Rhodah’s original marriage certificate, which is in a pile of papers somewhere upstairs. In America.

The implication is that if we could have provided the certificate, they would have let her in. I’ll go out on a very sturdy limb and call that a lie. They know we’re married. They can contact the court clerk and get proof. They’re just looking for a way to keep an African out. If I spent $160 to send her the certificate, which is about what it costs to mail anything to Zambia, they would reject her application for another reason.

I don’t want to go to the Far East. I don’t like Far Eastern culture. In some of the better-known countries, it’s cruel and mechanical compared to Western culture.

Starlink is here. Time to see what’s what.

If You Can See Your Floor, You’re Okay

Looks like today will be a day of waiting and preparation. Waiting for my burglar alarm company to show up and give me 4G. Waiting for the wife to call after some errands. I was also supposed to be waiting for Elon Musk to show up with a package from Starlink, his rural Internet company, but it looks like he will be dropping by tomorrow. I assume he drives the trucks personally.

Non-Tesla gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks, but let’s not go there.

While I’m sitting here, I’m admiring my new Doyle precision pliers and thinking about admitting I’m a tool collector.

I have a drawer full of pliers and other hinged tools. Side cutters. Scissors. A tool for making fishing leaders with heavy mono and cable. Stuff like that.

I have two shops. Obviously, there is the big one in the detached building. I also put a bench, a table, shelves, and a fair assortment of tools in my former dining room. Who wants to walk to the big shop every time something needs fixing?

I am forcing myself to confront the fact that the dining room needs to be reclaimed. As great as it is to have a dining room full of tools, I am duplicating things more than I should, and I have difficulty deciding which tool goes in which shop. I guess I should also mention the fact that my wife will probably want a dining room.

Should I put the second-tier stuff indoors, or should I put the good stuff there because it will never rust? Should I put all the electronics stuff indoors because doing electronics indoors just feels right, or should I put it in the big shop because sometimes electronics work involves tools I don’t want to put in the house?

I have to figure out what to do with my small pliers.

Around 28 years ago, I started buying a few tools, and I assumed Craftsman and Stanley had to be wonderful because I had heard the names so often. I got myself two pairs of Stanley needle nose pliers. I got a small pair and a tiny pair.

Tool people like me are always looking for the best manufacturers. It’s hard to resist becoming a snob. I now know that Stanley wasn’t always making great tools back when I got my pliers. I have looked for better ones. But the tiny Stanleys are wonderful. The jaws meet up correctly, I have never managed to damage them, they cut whatever I want to cut, and because the jaws are very long and skinny, they will do stuff a lot of pliers won’t do.

I wanted a similar pair so I could have the same great experience in both shops. I couldn’t get old Stanleys, and I don’t trust the new ones.

I found out it’s not simple buying needle nose precision pliers. A lot of them come without cutters or jaw serrations. Smooth jaws are supposed to avoid marring work. Needle nose pliers without cutters seem inadequate to me, but once I learned they existed, I figured they had to exist for a reason, therefore I needed them.

What did I end up buying? One pair of Pro American pliers. Three pairs of Harbor Freight Doyle pliers. Two pairs of Engineer pliers from Japan. So I have 6 new pairs of small pliers now. This does not include my larger Channellock, DeWalt, Icon, and Stanley long nose pliers. It doesn’t include my water pump pliers, my Knipex adjustable pliers, my Engineer and DeWalt dikes, my non-marring Japanese pliers…

Engineer makes Vampliers which are sold in America at inflated prices. The Japanese versions are exactly the same except for labeling and colors, and they cost a lot less.

Vampliers are made to pull and turn fasteners that are hard to grip. They have weird jaws full of edges and points, and they will grab nearly anything. You may have seen them in TV commercials. They really work, but there is no point in paying the American price.

I bought Engineer needle nose plies with smooth jaws as well as long nose pliers with cutters and serrations. The long nose pliers aren’t as needly.

I decided to try the Doyle pliers because Harbor Freight now makes some really excellent tools, and many are pretty cheap. I wanted to see if Doyle products were any good.

It’s not accurate to say Harbor Freight makes them. I don’t think they make anything. At least in some cases, when you buy Harbor Freight pliers with different names on them, you’re buying things made by different companies. In a way, then, Doyle may be a completely legitimate brand, as is Quinn, their next step down.

Harbor Freight sells Icon now, and Icon is supposed to be their answer to Snap-On. I decided to buy myself two big pairs of extended pliers to see what they were like. I’m not all that impressed. They seem sturdier than Chinese pliers from Home Depot, but the metal finishing is somewhat clumsy. Snap-On gets a lot of mileage out of the appearance of its tools, so to compete with Snap-On, you should make tools with nice finishes.

The Doyle pliers are a nice surprise. The fit and finish are very nice. They seem reasonably hard. The steel doesn’t scratch easily. They work smoothly. They have springs. The cutters close correctly.

One pair has one jaw that seems a little larger than the other, as though a grinding procedure wasn’t completed as well as it could have been, but it doesn’t affect the way the pliers work.

For 12 bucks or whatever, the set seems like a real bargain. One pair of Engineer pliers runs around 17 dollars. Engineer pliers are meticulously finished, but I don’t think they will work better.

I ordered an old pair of 5″ Pro-America pliers from Ebay just to see what they were like. Pro-America is supposedly a company that has done most of its business with the government, so most people don’t see their tools often. It’s also called Kal Tool. People say their tools are very nice. I thought a tool from a company like that would be an interesting curiosity.

I have quit trying to justify my pliers and other hand tool buys. The truth is, I just like having them. People collect a lot of stupid things, so why not collect tools, which are useful? I plan to keep buying whatever seems interesting, whether I really need it or not.

I can’t figure out what to do with my electronics stuff. If I move it to the workshop, I will have to find a way to store it. I have a power source, a powered breadboard, a couple of meters, two soldering irons, a bunch of leads, a ton of components, surgical clamps, two oscilloscopes, and probably other things I can’t think of right now.

This leads to an inevitable question: do I buy a SEVENTH rolling tool chest?

I’ve been watching shop organization videos, and I learned something interesting: storing things on walls or in the open is stupid.

This is heresy in tool circles. People love putting up pegboard and hanging their tools on it. They like drawing little tool outlines to show them where to put things. They like French cleats. I don’t care. It’s stupid.

If you hang things on your wall, you end up with several problems.

1. You take up many times as much space as you would if you used boxes.
2. You kill your wall space, so kiss shelves goodbye.
3. Your stuff gets dirty and rusty because it has no protection.
4. You have to do a lot of walking to get to things.
5. You can forget about moving your tools when you want to. You can’t roll a wall around.

My shop has two great big walls and 4 smaller ones. The doors eliminate a lot of wall space. If I were to take the stuff from one box and try to put it on the walls, I would lose an entire large wall. That’s dumb. Walls are the best places for shelves.

If I used the wall, A lot of my tools would be 20 feet or more away from my main bench. That makes no sense.

It’s also dumb to put things right where you can grab them, uncovered, unless you really need to. Dust and crud will fall on them. They may get damaged when things fly around the shop. They make the shop look disorderly. If you have 10 tools you use over and over, having them out all the time is great, but the rest should be in boxes.

Boxes and shelves are the skyscrapers of workshops. They multiply what you can do with limited square footage.

Right now, I have two boxes full of my most useful tools within 5 feet of my bench. If I need a tool, I turn around, open a drawer, and take it out. No walking. No getting on a stool to reach something 8 feet up on the wall. No reaching around the chests or freestanding tools to get at things behind them.

Resist the urge to cover your walls with tools. If you own more than 20 pounds of hand tools, you will regret putting them on the wall.

I have some things on my walls, and I have some other things hanging on the fronts of shelves, but I am determined to minimize that stuff.

Here’s another helpful suggestion: use drawer organizers, but don’t buy the ones they sell in stores. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of room, they weigh a lot, and they force you to do things their way.

I found a great video about organizing wrenches. Many wrenches come with special plastic trays that have little arms that hang onto them. The trays put the wrenches an inch or so apart, and you can’t put additional spots in the trays. Bad. The video showed how you can buy solid wire and turn it into wrench organizers that will take any configuration you like. I’ll post it.

I put 17 wrenches in a wire loop organizer I made, and suddenly, a drawer that had been full of wrenches was more like 1/3 full. The wrenches were arranged by size, making them easy to find, and unlike plastic organizers, the loops didn’t force me to yank wrenches loose. They come right out.

Wire is not cheap right now, but it’s not prohibitively expensive, either, and you can save money by buying romex, stripping it, and using the individual wires. I’ve spent $30, and I don’t think I’ll need to spend more soon.

Ever wondered why tool chest drawers can hold 100 pounds each? Now you know. If you organize, you can get a lot of mass into a drawer.

Now, what about tool chest drawer liners?

This is a sore spot with me.

Tool chests have to have liners. Period. Tools slide around on metal, and they remove the paint and cause rust. Then you have dirty rusty tools in your hands all day. You need liner material that provides cushioning, wears well, doesn’t accumulate debris, and won’t eat plastic.

Yes, some tool drawer liners eat plastic. One of the most popular liner materials is a foam product that looks sort of like a mat woven from 3/16″ black rubber cords. Like many rubbery products, it’s made with one or more solvent. When you put certain types of plastic on it, the solvent or solvents dissolves the surface of the plastic and leave a picture of the pattern of the liner material.

You should be able to line a typical 26″-wide chest for a few dollars, but companies that sell liner material jack the price up. They will take a material which is sold cheaply for other purposes and multiply the price by three or 4.

I found some solutions. Some people buy cheap yoga mats and cut them up. They’re actually better than many liners. One guy uses astro turf, which works very well. Treadmill and exercise mats work.

I turned a Harbor Freight chest into a welding cart a year or two back, and then I left a drawer open, not knowing how mice think. They moved in and starting eating drawer liners. Not knowing they were in there, I closed the drawer one day, causing them to die of thirst, rot, and stink up the chest and my tools. They also used the chest as a toilet, to a copious degree.

I bought myself a new roll of Harbor Freight liner, thinking that and some serious cleaning would fix the problem. Well, it didn’t. The drawers are about 20″ deep, and Harbor Freight’s rolls of liner are 16″ wide. I was not happy to find that out.

Here’s what I learned later: Lowe’s sells Kobalt liner rolls something like 20″ wide. Perfect. And they impregnate it with Zerust, a chemical which will discourage rust for a few years. The price isn’t bad, either. I got a big roll that solved my problem for $20. Actually, I bought two rolls, thinking they weren’t as big as they were.

You could also paint the inside of your drawers with truck bed coating.

To get back to electronics, I have to come up with the answer. I can’t just dump all my things on shelves and hope for the best. Maybe one more US General chest is needed.

Speaking of shelves, I am still contemplating welding some up. I was discouraged when I found out what 1″ steel tubing costs now, but it’s not like spending $500 on a permanent major shop improvement is extravagant. A couple of days ago I blew $600 on a washing machine for a tenant, and I thought nothing of it. Why feel bad about spending on my home?

I think shelves would open up more space, making me feel more comfortable with buying another chest.

When the physical improvements are done, I may make some improvements involving data. I may make an inventory so I’ll know what I have. It sounds awful, but I could do it in two days. I have all sorts of screws and washers. I never know what’s here. Sometimes I buy things and then find out I already have them. Also, I need an inventory for insurance.

If I could go to my computer and look things up instead of walking around confused, it would be tremendous.

I’m also using a Brother label maker now. I hope to be able to stop opening and closing things so much. Just scan the labels and reach.

Today I watched an Adam Savage video about shop organization. I think his ideas are bad, because his shop is a rat’s nest. Tons of things are out in the open. He has a whole wall of movie memorabilia in illuminated IKEA cases. Why would you fill your shop with space-killing things that have little or nothing to do with tools? He has at least one rack of nerdy costumes he has made for himself. He goes to nerd conventions dressed as comic and movie characters. Costumes are not tools.

His problem is that he’s like me. He’s not really building a shop. He’s building a neat place to hang out. And he loves the tools and the shop more than he loves getting things done.

Anyway, he said something he thought was brilliant. He said that when you choose a location for something, you should pick the place you thought it was in the first place. If you want your PVC cutter, and the first place you look is the third shelf to the left of your drill press, when you finally find the PVC cutter, you should put it on that shelf. You will instinctively look for it there.

This is good advice, but it’s not that original. I’ve been doing this for years. Not that it has helped much, what with all the counterproductive things I’ve also been doing. Anyway, I’ll toss it out there as a good tip.

These are my thoughts on shop organization at the moment. I hope they age well.

And another pair of Engineer pliers is arriving Saturday.

Truth is a Terms of Service Violation

God keeps showing me how the willfully-triggered belong to Satan. They are slanderers, just like their dad.

Before I go on, I should mention gaslighting, which is a type of slander Satan’s children love.

The term “gaslighting” comes from a movie called Gaslight. In that movie, a man murders a woman for her jewels but leaves them behind. He then marries her heir, a niece, in order to get access to what he wants. He takes measures to get the jewels. As she starts to notice strange things happening, he convinces her she is imagining things, trying to make her think she is going insane. Of course, the things she imagines are actually happening.

A gaslighter may tell a cuckold he is jealous, delusional, and possessive. A gaslighter may tell a battered wife she brings beatings on herself with her bad behavior. Gaslighters love causing problems and blaming them on the victims.

The purpose of gaslighting is to enslave others and make them take the punishment for the evil you do, while seeing to it you are neither blamed nor punished. A good gaslighter gets people to reward him for doing evil.

Before my dad accepted Jesus, he was a big gaslighter. My sister is a horrible gaslighter.

BLM and Antifa are gaslighting organizations. The perpetually-offended are gaslighters. They do evil constantly, and they thrive financially and socially by slandering the innocent.

Our new leftist rulers are racists, sexists, and ageists. They openly hate white people and men. They condemn older, wiser people, claiming they ruined the world. They tell their victims innocent things the victims say and do are proof of their wickedness.

Against convenience abortion? You’re a white supremacist. Got a Bass Pro Shops hat? Racist. You can be convicted of racism now for words and deeds totally unrelated to race. Making an “OK” sign with your hand. Complaining about illegal immigration. Saying a person who claims to be a US citizen should identify himself properly when he votes.

I still can’t figure out how opposing the killing of the unborn makes you a racist, but it doesn’t matter, because leftists can construct whatever insane theories they like, and anyone who points out the insanity can’t have a voice, because to oppose leftists is to be so evil society is obligated to silence you. For the children.

They’re like Hitler’s theorists and “scientists.” And Stalin’s. They can say any nutty thing they want, and the government will back them.

Leftists have decided only white people can be racist, which is a racist claim on its face, but you can’t be taken seriously if you disagree, because you have white privilege, which is the privilege of being muzzled because of your skin color.

Today I learned something chilling, and it helped me to realize how close to the rapture we are. Youtube has banned RT.

RT is a news organization sponsored by the Russian government. Predictably, it pushes Russian viewpoints. Much of what RT used to put on Youtube was informative and entertaining, a lot of it was unrelated to politics, and they did some very good journalism, but RT was not always honest. So it was a lot like CNN, the network of Chris Cuomo.

Now, we don’t have to worry about having our minds corrupted by RT’s Youtube channel. It’s gone. The Google kidz took it away because of the lies RT was telling about Ukraine. Well, actually, we never got to see those lies, because RT vanished before they could be told. But they were really bad. Or would have been, had they been allowed to exist. Mommy Google knows best. We are not intelligent enough to look at RT videos and then other sources and decide what the truth is.

Mommy Google decided Russia was 100% wrong and Ukraine was completely innocent. She looked out for us. She made it unnecessary for us to do the hard work of thinking, which could have led to disagreement with Mommy. Who was right. She always is.

Now Mommy and her friends have decided Russia blew up its own gas pipeline, and we are not supposed to question it. Russia can’t defend itself on Youtube, but that’s okay, because Russia is wrong, as Mommy concluded for us a long time ago. Letting a wrong person make a defense is wrong. If you disagree with my last sentence, you should be deplatformed so you can’t say so.

Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline carries Russian gas to Europe, and it mysteriously ruptured a while back. It was deliberately breached. We know that, because gas pipelines don’t just rupture. What we don’t know is who blew it up.

If you ask Mommy and her friends why Russia would blow the pipeline up when Russia needs money, they don’t have an explanation. Presumably, the idea is to get sympathy for the Ukraine war. To believe that, you have to think Putin is not merely malevolent, but extremely, astonishingly stupid. Supposedly a guy who runs Russia with a bunch of oligarchs is in favor of cutting off oligarch wealth in order to strengthen his support. Okay. Sure.

It’s kind of like the idiotic claim that FDR sacrificed half of the Pacific Fleet in order to get us into a war…in the Pacific. Which we would need a fleet to fight.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is in Mommy’s penalty box because he thinks the theory is silly. He quoted Joe Biden, who threatened to sever the pipeline on record. So let’s see. Putin and his friends and his country need money. Putin’s enemies don’t want them to get it. So Putin cut the pipeline, and we, his enemy, had nothing to do with it. After our president threatened to do it.

Our government says we didn’t do it. Thank goodness. That clears that up. Our government has never lied to us about anything.

Am I supporting Russia? No. I don’t know what happened. But it would sure be nice to see what the Russians say on their own Youtube channel, because as our founding FATHERS (not sperm-providing mothers) believed, the accused should be allowed to make defenses. Maybe Russia has some valid information to provide.

RT should be allowed to publish on Youtube. If they lie, other people should respond with correction. That’s how America is supposed to work. Or was supposed to. Those days are gone. We now live in the age of sanctioned prior restraint.

“Prior restraint” is a legal term for censorship. It is used in discussion of the right to freedom of expression. In discussions of government censorship, it means the government reviews things prior to publication and decides whether they can be released. Prior restraint is very, very, VERY strongly disfavored by our laws.

Now that speech is controlled by a small number of millennial punks, the government has a wonderful, legal tool it can use to perform prior restraint. It gets the tech punks to agree with it, and the tech punks do the restraining.

This is like the police sending a civilian to break into your house to steal evidence of a crime. The punks are not government employees, but they are agents of the government.

A week or two back, we saw emails proving the government is using the punks to do prior restraint. The White House got Facebook (Meta) to take down things it didn’t like. Not plans for nuclear weapons. Not the new names and locations of federal informants. A parody Instagram account making fun of Anthony Fauci. The request and obedient response took place within a few seconds of each other.

We used to understand that prior restraint was very bad. The punks don’t believe this. They are exasperated with sane people and our inconvenient truths. They have had enough. They are tired of reasoning, arguing, and voting. They believe the answer is to strangle us so we can’t speak. We are so bad, merely hearing our words is harmful. Our words are violence.

We have become like China and Cuba, where people have no idea what’s going on in the world. People who disagree with Mommy are banned or shadow-banned, which is just as bad. Ignorant, conceited morons who spew the party line are promoted and paid.

Things aren’t as bad here as they are in China, where Mommy also helps a government censor important speech, but we are in the same boat, because we have unelected entities exercising tremendous power over what we see, hear, and believe. And it will get worse, because it works. The longer the punks do their work, the more Americans will agree with them. America will gratefully hand the work of forming conclusions over to the punks and the government, and we will go blissfully to sleep with visions of Kardashians dancing in our heads.

To get back to gaslighting, yesterday I stirred up trouble on a forum I use. I asked a question, and an obnoxious person gave a nonresponsive answer and, in the process, suggested I was a bad guy for thinking countries like Georgia and Tanzania were “bad” travel destinations. The implication was that I was prejudiced, which I am not. These really are bad travel destinations. Read reviews. And I was standing up for Africans, not slandering residents of poor countries. I was doing the opposite of the thing I was accused of.

Anyway, I try not to fuss with people these days, and I ask God to help me not to be angry with people, but last night, I made an exception. I made a fool of this person. I was also very critical of nations and embassy employees that have a shadow-ban policy of encouraging Africans to apply for tourist visas and then denying them without considering them. I complained about an employee who denied my wife’s application based on the delusion that we were not actually married. We gave these people a marriage certificate, a link to the clerk’s site so she could check it out, proof of the assets I had given my wife, and even an appraisal for her nice, big wedding ring. We gave them copies of visa stamps showing we had gone to other countries.

I said the employee apparently thought I gave money, trips, and jewelry to all my prostitutes. That was a reasonable thing to say, because the employee didn’t think Rhodah was my wife, and she knew I was giving her money, possessions, and trips, and she knew we traveled together, so the only rational explanation, once the actual explanation was discounted, had to be that I was paying for sex.

Of course, the moderators locked the thread, claiming violations of all sorts of Terms of Service.

I felt kind of bad about all this today. I talked to God about it, apologetically. To my surprise, the response was that I had done right.

I have been gaslighted to the point where I feel bad about speaking bluntly in response to false accusations. That’s a dangerous way to feel.

I will continue to offend people for the rest of my time here on Earth, not because I’m a mean guy, but because I feel compelled to be truthful, and people choose to be offended by it. Choosing to be offended gives them power over people. It puts people who are correct on the defensive when they should be conquering. Now that choosing to be triggered is the way of the world, offense will never stop. It will only increase. That’s not my fault or God’s. It’s the fault of the gaslighters and their father Satan.

If you choose to wet your pants every time someone makes an “OK” sign or uses a plastic straw, that’s on you. Go ahead and cry. Suffer. You’re doing it to yourself.

Appeasement won’t help, because the end goal is to get rid of truthful people. You won’t be spared because you agreed to disagree or made concessions. Move the goalposts to make the enemy happy, and he will keep advancing, because he wants everything. He wants an end of you.

Look at Israel. They have been moving their borders inward for decades. Has it helped? Are their enemies happy with them now? Of course not. They keep advancing.

The goal isn’t a two-state solution. It’s a no-Jewish-state solution. A no-Jews-anywhere solution. What happens in Israel should tell you all you need to know about appeasement.

It’s a good lesson. It reminds me of something I already know: I should be at peace with myself, because I can’t fix anything. If I speak the truth, I will be attacked. If I keep quiet but refuse to parrot lies, I will be attacked. That I will be attacked is a certainty, so I should speak the truth and be blameless. The world gives me little incentive to be quiet.

Satan was the first leftist. Like all leftists, he challenged rightful authority that had been set over him. Leftists are his children. They take after their dad. Satan gets what he wants partly through slander, so we will be slandered and slandered and slandered by his children. And the wicked will be praised, because there is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but he also said he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword. The world will have peace after the tribulation, when leftists are gone, but Jesus isn’t going to make the world peaceful during this age. Right now, individuals who love Jesus can have peace and protection. The world as a whole can’t.

Jesus is dividing people, as he said he would. His children say and do certain things, and Satan’s children can’t stand it, so they will continue trying to destroy us.

Don’t make your life a popularity contest. You can’t be popular unless you’re lost. Be glad you’re unpopular, because you can’t be right without being unpopular. If you’re popular, try to find out what the problem is and ask God to fix it. Jesus said we would be unpopular and that we should rejoice because of it. He said a friend of the world is an enemy of God. He meant these things.

It looks like our senile president is doing his best to start a nuclear war. I miss Trump and his hopes of kicking other countries out of the nest and making them fight their own battles. I still haven’t seen any compelling reason for getting into the battle between two corrupt nations that have been unfriendly to us.

I wonder what will happen. My wife had a waking vision of Russians bombing Japan, of all places. It came in a package with another vision that has already come true. I wonder if the war will spread soon.

I see Elon Musk is being forced to buy Twitter after all. Big step for free speech? I kind of doubt it. Musk rules with a heavy hand, so I am skeptical of his plans to free Twitter. Of course, if he does free Twitter, it could help Satan because it will push us closer to civil war. Meta could be the Union’s platform, and Twitter could belong to the Confederacy.

I want off this planet. It’s far crazier than I realized 20 years ago. Mainstream America is truly vile now. The trend is very strongly negative, and there is no reason to think it won’t continue and accelerate. The biggest disappointment I face every day is knowing the rapture hasn’t happened.

Like Father, Like Sons

I had some disturbing thoughts I would like to relay.

I always wonder how Americans manage to die in hurricanes. We know they’re coming. We have time to prepare. The experts tell us about storm surge, which ought to drive anyone to evacuate. The government provides buses and shelters. Still, people die.

Sometimes, you can’t blame them. The first Ian death in the US was a man who fell into a canal while checking his generator. Assuming he wasn’t under an evacuation order, and that he had no reason to think his property would be submerged, he was apparently behaving reasonably, and things just didn’t go well.

Most deaths occur because of bad decisions. People choose to leave areas they know will be flooded. They choose to stay in structures they know can’t stand up to strong winds. Why do these things happen?

Back in ’05, Katrina killed a lot of people in New Orleans. They knew the storm was on the way. They knew their areas were below sea level. They knew about storm surge. Buses were waiting to move them out. Shelters were ready. Many people drowned anyway.

Later on, information started to trickle out, partially explaining things. Many people in the submerged areas were living on government handouts, and they were under the impression they would miss their checks if they left.

Does that explain everything, though? Yesterday, I realized two other factors were in play.

First, people in certain types of neighborhoods are afraid of their neighbors. They know what will happen if they leave their homes. The neighbors will flood in and take everything they have. They risk death in order to avoid having their houses emptied by their friends.

Second, and this is more disturbing, there are many people who look forward to looting. If you evacuate, you don’t get to loot.

I don’t have to Google to find out whether these things are true. I know they’re true because I know human nature. Looking for proof would be like looking for proof that people will cut in line at a crowded highway exit. We all know it’s true.

I’m sure there were also many people who died simply because they were incompetent. I mean derelicts and addicts. Many of them are mentally ill, and many are just plain incapable of reasoning. Their emotions and urges rule them all day, every day.

It’s common knowledge that certain people prepare for disasters by setting themselves up to take advantage of others. For example, before hurricanes, they go to stores and buy up generators. Then after the storms hit, they sell them for big profits. They create the shortages, harming people by depriving them of what they need, and then they swim back for a second bite, selling them what they need at inflated prices. Florida has made disaster profiteering illegal because it has been so common.

It’s obvious that if people will do that, they will also look forward to, and prepare for, looting opportunities. They will size up targets and try to be the first ones there.

Remember the filthy parasite in Tennessee who bought up hand sanitizer in several states when covid hit? He had plenty of company. I remember seeing paper towels on Ebay listed for several times their original prices.

It’s discouraging to realize how disgusting your race is. Humanity is revolting. When I think about it, I’m amazed that God hasn’t destroyed us for good.

In related news, I got some revelation this morning.

I came across a Youtube of Representative Andrew Clyde, asking questions at a congressional hearing. He asked two leftist doctors simple questions. He asked one whether it was true that, as Stacy Abrams says, the heartbeat of an unborn baby at 6 weeks is a “manufactured event.” He asked the other whether a biological man could get pregnant and give birth.

Sometimes it’s unfair to demand yes or no answers. Some questions can’t be answered that way, and sometimes a yes or no answer can be misleading even if true. Clyde’s questions don’t fall into these categories. It’s obvious.

The first doctor, a woman, refused to answer, instead wandering off on a tangent about her professional goals in order to squander Clyde’s time and deny him the right to do his job. The other, a very effeminate male hipster, started talking about the delusional people who call themselves trans men. The question was about biological men.

Without God’s assistance, my only reactions would be laughter, contempt, and anger. But sometimes the Holy Spirit shines his emotions into our hearts. That happened to me. I felt tears trying to come to my eyes. I felt what Jesus feels when he sees how insane people have become because they rejected his help.

I realized these people represent America’s future. Christians are dying out. America is aging out of Christianity and blessings and into idolatry, defeat, subjugation, humiliation, disease, poverty and hatred. It’s not going to stop. There will be no big revival. We already had that. It took place during the last century.

The effeminate doctor, a homosexual who kills the unborn for a living, has claimed that laws protecting the unborn are based in white supremacy. How can anyone be that insane? But it’s saner than thinking Chaz Bono is a man, a lie the left swallowed eagerly, so no one should be surprised.

Black babies are the biggest victims of abortion. A black baby in New York City is more likely to be killed by his leftist mother and her leftist doctor than to be born alive. Abortion is a leftist tool intended primarily to get rid of poor blacks. “Unwanted baby” really means “black baby.”

The emotion that ran through me said, “There is nothing more I can do. I can’t save these people.” It was as though a grey curtain were falling between the unsaved world and Jesus.

That brings me to the title of the video: “Get Me Off This Planet…NOW!” It’s like a reference to the rapture, even though it probably was not intended that way. It expresses what I and many other Christians are feeling. We have less patience than God. We want out.

My wife and I intercede every day, and lately, I have been interceding for Jesus himself. If that sounds crazy, you should look at the Bible. I’m not the first. Zechariah interceded for Jesus. In the third chapter, he had a vision, and he saw a freshly-killed Jesus before the throne, wearing a filthy robe stained with our stinking sins. God forgave Jesus and gave an order for a new robe to be brought to him. Zechariah asked Yahweh to put a clean turban on him, and Yahweh agreed.

That was intercession. Talking to God is prayer, and praying for another person’s benefit is intercession. Zechariah prayed for God to do something for Jesus.

Notably, Satan was also before the throne, accusing Jesus, just as most of the priests and scribes did. He really wanted to keep him.

Their spiritual descendants are doing the same thing today, claiming Jesus is in hell, boiling in feces and semen. You can find them on Youtube, proclaiming it. Highly esteemed people, not fringe characters no one listens to.

My wife and I ask God to give Jesus the desires of his heart and end his suffering. We ask him to bring the rapture about quickly so he can be with his bride. We’re allowed to do that.

Speaking of accusers, leftists have truly become the children of the devil. The Greek word translated as “devil” means “accuser.” It describes a person who accuses people falsely in order to destroy relationships. What do leftists do all day now? Accuse falsely. Words are violence and murder, but rioting is speech. Protecting babies is white supremacy. Calling a sports team the Braves is colonialism and racism. Calling a man a man is misgendering, sexist, and probably also, in some way, white supremacy. I should check.

In Biblical terms, a biological child is not necessarily a true child, but a person who takes after another person enthusiastically is. This is why Jesus called the rabbis and priests who hated him children of Satan. They thought they were sons of Abraham because of the biological link, but they were nothing like Abraham, so they were not really his children, regardless of genetics. They were enemies of God, and by extension, enemies of Abraham. People who are not related to Abraham, on the other hand, become part of his family by accepting Yeshua.

Leftists slander us all day, every day. They do exactly what Satan does, so they have chosen to be his children. In the next life, we will go to the place Jesus has prepared for us, and they will go to be with their father in a place that was prepared for him.

If we know we sin, how can we say Satan slanders us when he accuses us? Isn’t he speaking the truth? It’s slander because if we repent and rely on the sacrifice, we are not guilty any more. The price has been paid, so it’s a lie when Satan says we should be punished. He’s trying to impose double jeopardy.

It’s all very interesting.

How Much of That Cheese is Real?

This morning, I watched Youtube with breakfast. As time passes, seems like there is less and less content I like. I decided to watch Adam Savage’s channel.

Savage is the nerdy store clerk from the old Charmin commercials. He and Mr. Whipple amused America with their clever banter. You probably know him as one of the hosts of the show Mythbusters.

He has some tool skills. He has worked in special effects, and he has built various things for movies and, I would guess, TV shows.

Wikipedia says:

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Mummy, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

I’ll go out on a limb and opine that he wrote that himself. It looks like something you would put on a resume. The language is vague, and the writer is trying to puff him up.

If you, personally, design the CGI software used in a groundbreaking project like The Abyss, you will put that in your list of accomplishments. You will say, “I designed that.” You won’t say, “I worked in the production of the special effects for The Abyss.” If you are vague about what you did, it means you didn’t do all that much. Maybe you fetched doughnuts for the people who did the real work on a movie. Maybe they sent you to Radio Shack when they needed resistors. Maybe you held things while they welded them. Savage, or some other Wikiperson, says he has “worked as an animator, graphic designer,” et cetera, but he doesn’t tell you what he did.

I don’t know why I’m inconsistent with my use of Italics. I just am.

I can write a Wikipedia and call myself a patent attorney whose work has appeared before the federal courts, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Library of Congress. I can call myself an experienced litigator. I can say I’m a fabricator, and that I have designed and created a number of useful and somewhat complicated weldments. I can say I’m a composer. A writer. But should I really say those things?

I don’t practice law any more, and I would want to brush up before handling new cases. I have litigated, but not in a long time. I really am a fabricator, but I can barely TIG, I don’t know much about sheet metal, and I’m not very good at stick welding. I have composed a bunch of tunes, but no one has paid me for them. I got some books and articles published, but I don’t live on writing income.

I could say I taught physics in one of the world’s leading university departments, but I was a teaching assistant, not a Ph.D.

Reading people’s lists of accomplishments is like reading grocery labels. For example, “Key West lime juice” means the juice of Persian limes, not key limes, but “key lime juice” means it’s the real thing.

Persian limes are the normal limes you are familiar with. People in South Florida call them Persian limes in order to set them apart from key limes, also known as Mexican limes.

Little tip for the yankees.

People who write food labels and copy are very deceptive. Guess what “made with 100% real cheese” means. It means, “Some of the cheese is real, but the rest is fake.” The real cheese is 100% real, but less than 100% of the cheese is real.

I enjoy Savage’s videos, because he’s a tool guy, and he tells interesting stories about showbiz. He makes a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I have noticed that he does a lot of bad and mediocre work. A person who has been doing his kind of work for three decades should be better.

He does projects he calls one-day builds. One project was a brass nut and bolt. The bolt was supposed to be around 1.5″ thick, so you can imagine how big the nut was supposed to be. These objects served no purpose except to give him something to do.

He made lots of mistakes. He butchered the bolt, which should have been a simple project. He made a blank for it and held the head in his lathe’s chuck, unsupported at the tail end, and he tried to thread it using a carbide tool pushed straight in. He pushed the bolt out of the chuck several times, resulting in a lot of damage.

No real machinist, and no decent amateur, would have done these things. You make your blank. You center-drill the small end. You chuck the head and put a live center in the cavity you just drilled. This keeps the bolt from flying away when you apply pressure.

You don’t push your cutting tool straight into the work to thread it unless you know you can get away with it. You push it in at an angle so only one side of the tool is cutting. This reduces the pressure and gives a cleaner result. Carbide is a bad idea unless it’s really sharp. Steel is easy to put a good edge on.

Savage ended up with a nut and bolt, but they were not what he originally planned. He had to cut out a lot of brass in order to remove his mistakes.

He made a little cabinet for metal tooling. I guess it was around 10″ deep. It had drawers. He didn’t use drawer slides. Just grooves that slid on strips of wood. Of course, it didn’t work well, and it should have been obvious the design was bad. He ended up buying drawer slides and doing it over.

His shop is miniscule, and there isn’t much stuff in it. Maybe it’s small because it’s in San Francisco where real estate is expensive. He has a mill about like mine, the same table saw I have, a cheap Chinese lathe that looks to be a 14″ job, a hipster woodworking table which is unnecessarily pretty and clever, and a billion small tools stored in storage doodads he made. He also has a gas welding rig.

I am pretty sure my amateur shop is better than his pro shop. I have plasma, TIG, MIG, stick, a hydraulic press with an air jack, a heavy-duty finger brake, a bunch of woodworking tools…if I had to do a project with tools, I would take my shop over his without hesitation.

I considered these things today, and it made me think about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.”

Many people have impostor syndrome. On the other hand, there is Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which convinces stupid or inept people they’re much more capable than the rest of us.

I guess there are shades in between these extremes.

A lot of successful people seem closer to the Dunning-Kruger end. They create wondrous resumes they can’t really live up to. I don’t think they’re true Dunning-Kruger types, because they know they’re exaggerating, whereas a true Dunning-Kruger really believes he’s a genius.

It looks like I can do anything Savage can do, plus a bunch of things he can’t. He must be better at some things than I am, but I doubt he can do anything of which I am completely incapable. So, do I have impostor syndrome because I would never hold myself out as a real tool guru?

If I’m better than a recognized Hollywood special effects technician, maybe I’m closer to the real thing than I admit to myself.

Hollywood is an interesting place. It’s full of self-promoters. People show up there and claim they can do this and that, and they get hired whether they’re telling the truth or not.

A law school friend of mine decided she didn’t like law, so she asked my advice about a career change. She wanted to become a talent agent in Hollywood. Not long after, she showed up at the offices of Endeavor, then called the Endeavor Talent Agency. They represented lots of big names. They took her on, and she succeeded. She ended up working at Fox as some kind of executive. She has worked as a producer on 4 TV shows. She had no training for any of this.

She told me something about Hollywood. She said she heard it from other people there. They said, “No one here knows what they’re doing.” To make it there, people simply arrived and showed their willingness to take on projects. People who needed projects taken on, and who knew nothing about completing them, hired them. Eventually, things got done, and I suppose skills developed.

I guess that’s how Adam Savage got where he is.

There are lots of people on Youtube who can do things he will never be able to do. They make all sorts of stunning projects. But they’re not in Hollywood, telling people how great they are, so he has a Hollywood business and a name, and they don’t.

Some of these people develop skills and businesses extremely quickly. Over maybe 5 years, they’ll go from tiny machine tools in apartments to big shops with CNC stations. Adam Savage has not done that. He is probably not much better today than he was in 2000. I don’t think he has a gift for what he does. Just tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s all very interesting to me.

I’m not knocking him. Just assessing his real place in the food chain. I like his work, even if his projects aren’t always good. I’m also thinking about myself. I’m not great, but maybe I’m better than I think I am.

Today I have go to out and get back to work on my tractor brush fork attachment. I feel a little better about it. If Adam Savage can get Hollywood studios to pay him, I should be able to design and assemble a tractor attachment.

I See no Math

Here is my final update on Hurricane Ian: absolutely nothing happened here. A couple of buckets blew across the yard. We have had a long spell of continuous light rain, nowhere near the one-foot-plus we were supposed to get. That’s it.

Because hurricanes spin counterclockwise, a storm that passes you on the east will bring you hot, wet air at first and then cool, dry air from the north. That’s happening here now. We are set to have a glorious week of cool, dry weather. Unusually good for early October. Apart from the fresh crop of post-hurricane mosquitoes, things could not be better.

I don’t have regular TV, because I hate it. That means I am not seeing what everyone else in our TV-addicted nation is seeing. I only see little bits of it as they pop up while I look at the web. It wasn’t until last night that I started to see a lot of video about the destruction Ian did in other parts of Florida. I haven’t seen much of anything about Cuba.

Now that the storm is over for me, I am looking at stories about other places. Lee County’s sheriff is claiming hundreds of deaths. Can that really be true? In 2022, it’s not that easy for an American to die in a hurricane. The government knocks itself out providing transportation and shelters, and hurricanes generally aren’t that dangerous to begin with. The winds kill very few people. The big threat is storm surge, which can drown people who don’t evacuate. The people in Lee County knew the water was predicted to rise high enough to kill them, so it’s hard for me to believe hundreds of them chose not to move to high ground.

When you live inland, there is no such thing as storm surge, so the main danger from hurricanes doesn’t exist.

I didn’t expect anyone in the US to experience the kind of catastrophe the sheriff is talking about. I thought there might be a lot of property damage and economic loss, but I didn’t think anyone would drown. We know how to prevent that. Now I’m hearing that while I was having a pretty good time, grilling burgers and eating junk food, other people may have been drowning or waiting on rooftops for rescue boats.

Truthfully, I think it’s a big mistake to live in any hurricane-prone area. From Texas to the Carolinas, coastal people know they will get hit sooner or later. The pleasure of being near the water is not worth the unending flow of tense pre-hurricane vigils or the pain of cleaning up when storms actually hit.

I have been through Betsy, Katrina, Wilma, Rita, and Irma in one way or another, and I have also spent a bunch of weeks watching other storms that didn’t reach me. All in all, I wish I had been in Tennessee or some other nice place where people aren’t afraid of the weather.

The place where I live is about as unsafe as I can stand. We haven’t had hurricane winds since 1885, but we sometimes get tropical storm winds that cause serious inconvenience, and that’s bad enough. I would never accept a higher level of risk again. I would never live close to a coast.

My wife and I were discussing our pleasant fate today, and I had an interesting thought. In the Bible, people who knew they were in danger fasted and prayed. They repented and humbled themselves. They knew this was how to get God’s help. America is full of Christians who think they know the Bible, but virtually no one calls for repentance, prayer, and fasting when we face a threat.

I fasted and prayed because of the storm, and I came out fine. That shouldn’t surprise me. Why hasn’t every Christian done it? Many times I, myself, have failed to do it. How can we make such an obvious mistake?

Look at our teachers. They are at fault. The Catholics teach us to pray to statues, dead people who have no power, and a mere woman, and they tell us God rarely helps anyone. Cessationists tell us we have to work hard and fix our own problems because while Satan is happy to continue doing supernatural works, God has quit. Prosperity preachers teach us we get eternal security by raising our hands once in church, and they tell us God will make us rich for buying them jets. Almost nobody is teaching anything helpful, and most preachers are teaching lies that cripple us.

I don’t feel guilty about sailing through Ian without a care. I am supposed to receive blessings. It’s not something to feel guilty about. We are supposed to strive to receive and share God’s blessings. Why else would we worship Him? What would be the point? Feeling bad about being blessed makes no sense. You’re just getting what you asked for. Other people should ask, too.

Jesus paid for my help with his body and blood and kingdom. It’s terrible that so many other people had devastating outcomes, but I’m not responsible. I want to continue being blessed and protected, even if everyone else on Earth is destroyed. I pray for people and help them, and I want to see them get the best things they can, but sinking with them won’t help anyone.

Now I will get back to making my tractor attachment and making travel plans. I should be done with hurricanes for one year.

Expected Giant; Received Midget

The hurricane news today is generally good. If you live where I do. In Fort Myers, it’s a colossal disaster. It’s hitting the Fort Myers area right now. It will not be great for Tampa or Orlando, either. Assuming the predictions aren’t hype.

The NHC thought the storm would weaken before hitting the coast and come in at Category 2 or so, but the official measurement looks more like Category 4 or 5, so the pessimists are winning that battle. At least it’s not hitting Tampa, a large city, directly.

For me, the good news is that they are predicting maximum sustained winds of 29 mph where I live, and the winds will be from directions that are not favorable to a lot of property damage. If the predictions pan out, I probably won’t even lose my electricity. That would mean I could continue bathing. With hot water. Not pool water.

The storm is nearly as close to Tampa as it will ever get to me, give or take, and the winds in Tampa are not terrible: 44 mph. When the storm makes its closest approach to me, it will be a lot weaker, so the winds SHOULD be lower. But as the storm’s history shows, hurricanes like to change directions.

One source says 44 mph. Another says 9 with 14 mph gusts. How can that be?

It’s hard to tell what’s really happening. Cape Coral is about as close to the eye of Ian as Florida gets, and they are reporting 31 mph winds with gusts to 43. Can that be right? I would have expected something like 140 based on the maps. Cape Coral is well within the NHC’s hurricane-force band, meaning Cape Coral is inside the hurricane, so the sustained winds should be no lower than 75 mph.

I haven’t been able to find the Weather Channel’s usual hysterical, dishonest coverage. I have been trying to find videos of raincoated reporters pretending to have a hard time standing up in light winds, or reporters standing on their knees in 6 inches of water to make it look deeper, but I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe you have to have cable to get that kind of helpful informational edutainment.

It should be possible to get good, solid information instantly using the web, but it’s not.

I just checked the Weather Channel’s site, and they have privately-hosted videos. One features a guy named Mike Seidel, broadcasting live from Fort Myers. Supposedly the eye wall is coming ashore, and the storm has maximum winds of 155 mph. The little meter in the corner of the screen says 31 mph with gusts to 58. What?

When I saw his name, it rang a bell, so I Googled “‘mike seidel’ fake news.” Yes, I remembered him for a reason. He got caught lying during another hurricane, pretending to struggle to stand. I’ll embed a video.

He didn’t lie verbally. He lied with his body. As my friend Mike points out, he leaned the wrong way. He leaned to leeward. That’s not how it works.

Today Seidel, who still, incredibly, has a job, is standing and walking normally. I guess he learned something.

Here’s another classic:

I can’t stand it:

The Anderson Cooper video reminds me of Baghdad Bob. Remember him? “There are no enemy tanks in Baghdad, and our victorious army of Islamic holy warriors [boom] @*$^@(*@^$#!!! ALLAH SAVE ME!!!”

I have been praying for God to keep the storm from harming Christians and their property, and I am still okay with it leveling Walt Disney World.

Things are looking very good for me and most of the state, but now I have a giant stockpile of junk food to deal with, and I may no longer have an excuse to eat it. This morning I ate a big bowl of Sugar Smacks (now called Honey Smacks, which is no better) with milk and cream, and then I followed it up with Cape Cod potato chips and onion dip. And three Pepperidge Farm cookies. Lunch will be more like actual food. I’m planning to have a delicious half-pound cheeseburger.

I am seriously wondering if local charities take pretzels and chips.

Ordinarily, I would have had a normal breakfast, but you know how it is when you’ve been fasting.

There is really nothing to do here except wait for NHC updates and think about food. And, of course, pray.

The storm still poses a hazard for me. It will probably cause a mosquito explosion. The water it leaves behind may be here for a couple of weeks.

Time to make sure all my portable power banks are charged, just in case. I need to have cell power so I can talk to my wife.

More: 2:23 P.M.

Things still look pretty good here. The projected path of the storm has moved slightly to the north, but it’s still favorable for my county.

Here is the weird thing: the Internet says the wind speed here, right now, is 26 mph. When I look outside, I see a pleasant breeze. The trees are moving a little. Doesn’t look like 26 mph to me. I would guess it’s between 10 and 15.

Hope it continues this way. The forecast says we are looking at another 7 mph, tops.

Sitrep: 6:15 P.M.

I always tell people you can often predict hurricane behavior better than the pros if you look at the rawest data you can get. This has turned out to be true with Ian. Of course, prayer is the main reason every good thing has happened.

At around 3:25, I found a radar loop and checked it out. It showed that the eye of the storm was moving more to the east than the official reports were saying. I thought that was good news, because it was likely to move the whole cone of future misery eastward later.

Lo and behold, the cone has obliged me. The 5 p.m. cone indicated that the storm was projected to veer eastward from the previous cone. This increases the length of time it will have before it makes its closest approach to the compound, and it also makes that approach farther off. Time will weaken the storm, and distance is obviously helpful, as people in Wyoming and Australia could tell you right now.

The storm has moved so far eastward, it’s actually slightly to the east of me. The center is about 120 miles south of me, which is close by hurricane standards, the maximum sustained winds are at around 130 mph, and virtually nothing is happening here. The center is forecast to get within maybe 60 miles of me, but that will be after the storm passes over a lot of real estate very slowly, so it should be much weaker. NOAA says it will be at about 65 mph at that time, so people 60 miles away shouldn’t get much wind.

Tampa is way closer than I will ever be (twice as close as I am now), and it’s getting the best Ian has to offer. Its current wind figure is 32 mph. I talked to a potential tenant today, and he said his relatives in Tampa were saying not a lot was happening. Tampa was supposed to get a good beating.

Of course, if a storm can move east, it can move west, too, but the experts and models say that won’t happen. They have a consensus, and as we all know, when it comes to science, a consensus is always right.

What a burden off my mind.

The wife and I will keep praying for others. I hope you will, too. No prayers for Disney World, though. It ought to be obliterated. I don’t want to see homes or businesses that don’t promote evil harmed, but if Ian wiped Disney World and Universal out without harming anyone around them, I would be content.

Ten O’Clock Update: Ian Now Weak Category 2

Hurricane Ian continues to puzzle me. The Weather Channel says the wind here is moving at 38 mph, but when I go outside, I don’t see it. The trees are bouncing around a little, but it’s not unpleasant.

Tampa is in a much worse location, but the Weather Channel says its winds will top out shortly at a mere 52 mph. After that, Tampa is expected to wind down. For Tampa, Ian is at its peak right now.

I am still trying to understand what’s happening. I had to dig to find information on Irma, which made a mess here. I relearned a few things.

Irma was Category 3 when it landed in Florida. It came ashore on Marco Island. This is nearly the same place where Ian landed today. Marco supposedly had 155 mph winds when it landed, and Irma’s winds were clocked at 120, so much lower.

Irma was huge, though. People are calling Ian big storm, but Irma was about twice as wide, so being 100 miles from the center of Irma, at a given maximum sustained wind speed, would be like being 50 miles from the center of Ian. In other words, Ian has to be twice as close to give you the same wind speed. That means Ian is much less dangerous to me than a storm like Irma.

Irma moved about 1.5 times as fast as Ian, however, so it spent less time wherever it went. A fast-moving storm does less damage in any one area. So Ian’s strong winds will hit less of Florida, but they will spend more time in every location than they would were Ian traveling at Irma’s speed. On the other hand, the smaller diameter of Ian reduces the destructive impact of its lower speed. It’s not a simple picture. The destructive power of storms depends on a number of variables.

Irma traveled a long way before it dropped to tropical storm speed. When it knocked my trees over, it was close to where it crossed the threshold. And the center was close to me. Probably 30 miles away.

Ian is now dropping 5-10 mph of wind speed per hour, and it will be maybe 10 hours before it gets close to its nearest approach to the compound. I don’t know if it will keep dropping speed as fast as it is now, but it will probably be a tropical storm in 10 hours. Weather Underground thinks it will be Category 1 in less than 4.

Category 1 runs from 75 to 95 mph, and Ian is now at 100, so it should cross the line quickly.

So, weak storm. Twice as far away as Irma. Half as wide as Irma, so it will be as though it were 4 times as far away.

Irma also rained like crazy, and Ian may not match it. Rain helps trees fall over because it loosens the roots. They are predicting 4″-6″, but my feeling, based on observation, is that it will be less.

Irma didn’t do all that much damage here. The house was untouched. So was the workshop. I lost trees in the woods, but no one cares about those. I wasted a lot of time cutting them, but I should have let them rot on their own.

I believe I had two trees that landed on fences between me and the neighbors, and only one tree was large. I had one large tree land on my own fence between my house and pasture. I had another big tree land on a fence between my parcels. I would not want to go through Irma again, and Irma caused me a lot of work, but it was no Andrew.

I think very little will happen here. A much worse storm than Ian wasn’t all that bad.

Hope I don’t seem self-obsessed because I am not writing much about the problems in Southwest Florida and Cuba. I am well aware that many other people are suffering very badly. I can’t do anything to help them except pray, and I have done that, so I am studying the storm for my own benefit.

Ian Moves Eastward

The 5:00 news concerning Hurricane Ian is good.

As I noted in my last post, there are two things you have to watch as a hurricane approaches: the predicted path and the way the predicted path is moving as it is updated. Since yesterday, the path has been trending eastward, moving it farther from me and closer to Disney World. Today at 5:00 p.m., the new path was considerably farther east than the 2:00 path.

For yours truly, this is good news for several reasons. It suggests the path will keep moving eastward and increase the minimum distance between me and the eye. It means the eye is already expected to be farther from me, at closest approach, than it was last night. It means Ian will be weaker when it gets near because it will have to cross a lot of land. It also means I won’t get south winds. I’ll get east winds followed by north winds followed by west winds, and the north winds will probably be strongest.

My problem trees are to the north of my buildings. I don’t want south winds. North winds might actually knock over some trees I’d like to lose, saving me the cost of a tree service.

Of course, outlets other than the National Hurricane Center are still supplying bad information. According to the NHC’s predictions, the maximum sustained winds here should be around 50 mph. That’s not good, but it’s way better than earlier predictions. Another site, however, is claiming 67 mph with gusts of 100 mph, about 5 miles away.

So who am I supposed to believe? The NHC, which has always been the best source of information, or a private site which predicts winds much, much higher?

I don’t trust any private source. The NHC is better. Even the NHC is inclined to pessimism, but I think that comes from a natural fear of accepting good news. I don’t think they deceive people deliberately like the news organizations.

I think the forecast for this county will get significantly better. I base that on experience and faith.

My nearest neighbor hasn’t been here long. He has a land-clearing business. He has at least one huge wheel loader at his house. Yesterday I let him know the power pole on his land was the main source of past outages due to wind. Trees used to fall and put it out of commission. Today I heard a big machine moving around over there. I think my neighbor did a little work. That was nice.

My friend Mike is still staying here while he starts a business. Today we sat down and prayed about the storm. It was right after that that I got the nice 2 p.m. report.

We started talking about various things, and I mentioned the revelations Rhodah and I had had over the last day. We both have the impression that God is giving up on the world and that evangelism is a low priority compared to preserving the people he already has. Mike was amazed, because he had the same thought yesterday. He was in Palm Beach County, and he thought about what he saw around him. It made him feel like humanity was lost.

I would love to see the rapture happen right away (provided Rhodah and I make it). I am sick of the antics of Satan’s children. Today I saw that a man had been suspended from Twitter for informing people that men can’t have babies. I want to live in a world where it’s okay to tell the truth and everyone tells the truth.

Isn’t it obvious that a man can’t have a baby? Of course it is. But human beings are herd creatures, and when we are pressured to believe and repeat lies long enough, we give in and follow the flock. The only way to avoid falling for lies is to hear from the Holy Spirit all day, and only a tiny percentage of people hear him, because preachers have been teaching idiotic things like cessationism, legalism, and the Mammon gospel instead of helping people to know God.

People can believe any moronic notion if they think it will help them fit into the herd, and they will perform acts of extreme cruelty to those who refuse to go along.

I hope to see even better news at 8 p.m. when the next update is issued.

Let Disney Drink my Mickey

The practice of trying to figure hurricanes out is not simple. Lots of factors have to be considered. How strong are the winds expected to be? Where is the storm supposed to go? How fast is it moving? How wide is it? Are the people giving you information complete liars, or are they relatively impartial?

Today I saw some liar saying Ian was expected to land in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Not true at all, so why scare people?

Back when Andrew hit, a homosexual meteorologist named Bryan Norcross became a big celebrity in South Florida. His TV channel was able to keep broadcasting after the storm, and the others were off the air, so people came to rely on him. Women fell in love with him and mailed him marriage proposals and their dirty underwear. They didn’t know he was a homosexual because he hid it. He became Florida’s hurricane guru, and for some years, he rode the wave.

I think he is the biggest reason the press lies about storms. They have the baseless, irrational feeling that if he could do it, they can do it, even though the circumstances are different. They all seem to be shouting, “PICK ME!”, and it will never work, because there is competition. There will never be another big hurricane guru.

I’m just guessing.

Why are so many weathermen homosexuals? It’s strange.

Anyway, my primary answer to the Hurricane Ian problem is to fast and pray. Everything else is less important.

We get a lot of information from the National Hurricance Center. The difficult thing is deciding what it means.

We are used to seeing predictive cones that try to show how a storm’s direction will change. Thing is, there is another level of predictions. The storm’s direction changes, and so do the cones. They themselves trend, which goes to show how unreliable they are. If my prediction concerning what will happen on Friday changes between Monday and Tuesday, it’s not a very solid prediction, and a clever person could decide to try to predict how the predictions will change. Second-order predictions.

The NHC is now saying the cones themselves are trending eastward. Ian’s cone was centered over the area of Tarpon Springs, north of Tampa. Now the cone and models suggest it will land south of Tampa and head for Disney World.

This would be a very big break for my county. It might mean winds that are 25 mph lower, and that would probably be the difference between lots of downed trees and a few downed trees.

If the cones keep moving southward, our farm might escape damage entirely.

I have prayed for God to keep the storm off of his people and their property, and I also asked him to prevent the ungodly from having worse problems than is necessary. Today, I changed that a little. I thought about Cuba and Disney World.

Cuba just legalized homosexual marriage by a wide margin, which is just one more indication that Cuban culture is depraved. The storm hit Cuba the next day. It occurred to me that Disney promotes the daylights out of homosexuality and the occult. They now have a show about a demon-worshiping girl who is supposedly the Antichrist, and people are saying how nice it is that paganism is getting positive coverage.

It’s so absurd, it’s hard to comment effectively.

Anyway, I wondered if Cuba’s error was connected to the weather. With that in mind, I told God that if the storm had to go somewhere, he might consider Disney World. Just drown it. No one will be there because it will be closed. It’s fine with me if he shows the world what he thinks of Disney. When storms hit places like my county, it just provides fuel for trolls who say God hates Christians or conservatives or that he doesn’t exist.

My wife and I had similar revelations yesterday and today.

Yesterday, I started wondering whether God is still primarily interested in adding new souls to his family. Maybe he is more interested in holding onto the ones he has so as many as possible will make it in the rapture and avoid the tribulation and hell. The world is an extremely filthy place now, and the constant temptation, which is increasing fast, is very dangerous because under its influence, Christians are losing their salvation. I asked him about it.

As I was praying, I started thinking about my sister.

My sister treated my mother terribly. My mother used to pay her rent so she wouldn’t be on the street, and in order to avoid trouble with my grandparents, who owned the apartment, my mother used to go there on occasion and clean it, carrying out bag after bag of filthy garbage and dog manure. When my sister was in law school, my mother was thrilled she might amount to something, so she supported her financially. My sister showed her gratitude by parking in a handicapped space over and over at a cost of $250 per ticket, and my mother paid the fines. I could go on and on.

When my mother was dying, my sister continued treating her badly and neglected her. My mother wrote a journal for the first time in her life, and in the journal, according to what I have been told, she wrote about how she loved me and how badly my sister had treated her. After my mother died, my sister told me she had stolen the journal and thrown it out so I would never see it. She said it with a big grin on her face, glowing with the pleasure of sadism. She told me because she thought it would hurt me, and the thought of my suffering and the evil she had done made her light up with pleasure.

Not long before my mother died, she told me she was going to disinherit my sister. I talked her out of it, but she insisted on giving me her brokerage account, and she said it was a drop in the bucket compared to what she had spent on my sister.

After she died, my sister, as an heir, was heavily involved in my mother’s estate and my grandparents’ estates, and she made all of us extremely miserable. She offended many people to the point where they refused to do business with us. It was a very bad experience.

If I had not talked my mother out of disinheriting her, these things would not have happened. A lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain. I made a big mistake.

Years later, when my dad started talking about disinheriting her, I kept my mouth shut, not because I wanted the money but because I didn’t want to be chained to my sister again. That decision led to one of the biggest blessings of my life. I don’t have to have any contact with my sister. And because I’m married, she can never inherit from me, so there is no point in her trying to involve herself in my business.

I am the reason my sister was disinherited. I could have saved her, but I minded my own business and respected my father’s decision.

A few years ago, God gave me a phrase: “The whole world is like my sister.” I took it to mean the whole world was like a person who loved evil and could not be helped because of it.

Yesterday, I thought about these things, and I realized God had prepared me for the future. He showed me what my sister was like and that even though I was a Christian, I was supposed to quit chasing her and trying to help her. In doing that, he showed me what the world was becoming: a place so rotten there was no point in chasing people and trying to start revivals.

Sometimes I have felt bad because I have reached so few people for God. Yesterday, I thought about that. I really tried to reach people. I joined churches and ministries. Fools were promoted over me, my efforts to help were swatted down, and the pastors came to consider me their enemy. I tried to help the people they were looting, and the victims themselves persecuted me, saying I was touching God’s anointed and so forth. I was rejected soundly, over and over.

I was very enthusiastic, but Christians wanted nothing to do with me. I would guess I have reached maybe 20 people.

Maybe I’m not the problem.

During the last century, there was a huge revival. Millions of people all over the world were baptized with the Holy Spirit. Things like that don’t happen any more. Not like they did then. And the preachers who still draw big crowds are generally money-worshiping pigs. They want us to think they’ve brought millions into the kingdom of heaven, but in reality, they’ve helped keep them out. They teach people they can be saved permanently by raising their hands once in church, and that they can go home and continue living sinful lives.

Now I suspect God is preparing a small percentage of Christians for the rapture instead of focusing on evangelism. Maybe the next wave of evangelism will be the tribulation itself, in which people will be suffering so terribly, and God and Satan will be so open about their existence, that a few more grains of barley will find their way into the harvest.

The tribulation is all about evangelism. Most people don’t know that. “Tribulation” is a process that separates stubborn grain from its husk. You drive nails into a board called a tribulum, you stand on the board with the nails protruding toward the ground, and you have an animal pull you around so the nails ride over the grain and break the husks. In the Bible, harvest represents saving souls. The tribulation will be God’s last attempt to win souls before the Messianic Age.

I don’t think I should continue feeling bad about reaching so few people. I said what I believed. I didn’t hold anything back. I made myself available. I provided financial support and my own labor. I submitted to the leadership of ghetto people and crooked, half-bright pastors. I prayed a great deal, alone and with others. I was there. The fish just didn’t want the bait.

I am in good company. Jesus himself is only known to have reached 120 people even though he drew large crowds. The Jews of his time generally died unsaved.

I hope I’m right about these things and that the rapture comes soon, because I am fatigued with this place. I don’t want to raise children in a world where perversion and pride and hate are pervasive and they, as Christians, will be treated like demons.

New Storm Threatens to Ruin my Fall

Tropical storm preparations continue here at the compound.

Hurricane Ian’s path has wobbled this way and that over the last couple of days. It was headed for Tampa. Then it was headed for the east side of the panhandle, where there is not much to destroy. Then it turned farther east. Now it’s headed for Tampa again. If it hits Tampa and continues on the present path, the eye will come pretty close to me.

The good thing about this, from my limited perspective, is that the winds that hit here will have to go across a tremendous amount of land first. Land kills storm winds.

Hurricanes circulate counterclockwise, so when one passes near you, you know the directions the wind will take as it goes by. If it passes on the west, as Ian is expected to, the first winds will be from the east, and they will be weakened because they will have to cross Florida twice; first from the Gulf to the east and then from the east to me. After that, there would be southern winds, also weakened, because they will have to come up the middle of the state. Finally, there would be west winds. They would have less resistance, because they would only have to cross from the west coast.

I think the big questions are 1) how wide is the storm, and 2) how strong will it be, generally, when it makes its closest approach to me.

In 2017, Irma spent a lot of time over land before it came near me, but it was very strong when it came ashore, at over 140 mph. It had a hurricane-force wind swath about as wide as Florida until it was about 100 miles south of me, and the tropical-storm-force field was over 5 times the width of the state even after it passed me.

Ian (which Fox is calling a “monster”) looks like it will be much smaller. When Irma was at the stage where Ian is now, it was much, much wider. If Ian stays smaller, the tropical-storm-force band will be narrower and will also have speeds that drop off faster with distance from the eye.

Right now, Tampa’s forecast calls for 80 mph sustained winds, tops, making Ian a Category 1 storm when it hits the coast. That isn’t consistent with other claims I’ve seen. Some news sources say it will be a Category 4. It’s hard to know who is telling the truth because journalists and meteorologists lie about hurricanes so much.

The National Hurricane Center is fairly neutral, so I’m checking their site. They say Ian will DECREASE in intensity after it hits Cuba, so it appears the Cat 4 story is just another media lie. Here’s what they say:

The NHC intensity forecast calls for Ian to become a major hurricane before it reaches western Cuba early Tuesday. It is then forecast to reach its peak intensity over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico in 36 h. After that, southwesterly shear in association with a deep-layer trough over the eastern U.S. is forecast to significantly increase over the hurricane on Wednesday and Thursday, which will likely disrupt the vertical structure and import drier air into its circulation.

They think it will hit land with winds of about 85 mph, and the center of the probability cone is right around Tarpon Springs, about 15 miles north of Tampa.

If this is more or less what happens, things shouldn’t be too bad here. It sounds much better than what the professional liars are saying. I don’t want a Category 4 storm landing 100 miles away.

Anyway, I have propane, a big cooler, water, and as of this afternoon, a generator that sort of works. I should be able to have hot food and refrigeration for two or three days.

I have not finished my tractor fork project. I don’t know if I will get it done by the time the storm comes. I ordered myself a set of clamp-on forks just in case. I need them anyway because they will turn my tractor in to a fairly decent forklift. Brush forks can sometimes be used for forklift duty, but sometimes they won’t fit whatever you’re trying to lift.

Hope I don’t end up bathing in the pool again. Prayers for me and the other people in the cone would be appreciated.

Fabrication and Revelation

It’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I remember joking about getting a Bridgeport mill. I thought it was a good example of a tool no normal man would have in his shop. Now I have a mill, three lathes, an arbor press, a plasma cutter, a hydraulic press, and three welding machines. I have two belt grinders and about 5 angle grinders, and I’m building my own tractor fork attachment from old parts and steel tubing.

Today was an intimidating day. I had to take two 56″ pieces of 2″ square tubing with 1/4″ walls and turn them into a frame to hold tractor forks. Then I had to weld them to plates I modified to attach them to my tractor.

I don’t know what a foot of 1/4″-wall tubing weighs, but my guess is around 4 pounds. Okay, the web says 5.41 pounds. It’s a little unpleasant moving a 56″ piece around on a welding table. When you weld it to another piece plus 4 pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls amounting to about 56″, it gets heavy. Then when you attach the whole business to two 3/8″ plates with areas of over a square foot, you can forget about manipulating it safely without machinery.

I had to rip the scale and rust off all the tubing, weld it into a frame without too much distortion, and then add the plates. It was quite a job.

When I got the frame put together, I had to figure out how to hold it in place against the mounting plates while I tacked it on. The answer, as it so often is: a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I put the plates on the tractor, put the frame on the cart, lifted it up to the plates, shimmed it so it was in the right place, and clamped everything together. Then I added some very big tacks and moved the tractor into the shop so I could finish welding.

I think things went well. Two of the tacks popped, but I clamped the frame back down as if nothing had happened, and I finished my beads.

Tomorrow I can add more weld to make this thing indestructible. Then I have to get started, cutting up the old fork tines and adapting them to this frame.

How will I hold everything in place while I weld? Beats me. If you had asked me yesterday how I would have done what I did today, I would have had no idea. Ideas will come. God will inspire me.

I used to see ads for welding tables that held half a ton or more. I wondered what kind of nut would need a table like that. Now I am that nut. A bigger table would have been a big help today.

I have been looking at tables online. I am positive I want to stick with fixturing tables. Solid tables require you to weld things to them in order to make them work, and that would drive me crazy. All of my work would have funny places where I had ground off tacks.

Fixturing is great. A fixturing table has dozens or hundreds of holes in it, and you use them to hold clamps that hold your work in place while you weld. This ensures that the work will not warp.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. No it doesn’t. You may think it will when you buy your table, but it won’t. Only two things prevent warping: skill and huge steel. The thicker steel is, the harder it is to warp it. If your steel isn’t all that thick, you have to develop the skill to lay welds down in a way that minimizes distortion.

Fixturing is still helpful, though. You really need to have your work held in place while you work.

If my table were stronger, I could put the fork attachment on it and weld the tines on. The manufacturer, Klutch, claims it will hold 600 pounds, but I am suspicious, and I don’t want to learn they were fudging by having the attachment fall on me after it passes 200 pounds. I put casters on the table, and they will supposedly hold 1600 pounds among the 4 of them. All I can say about that is this: China. That’s the home country of the company that made the 1600-pound claim. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it ain’t.

A company called Langmuir has come up with a table it calls Arcflat. It’s actually a system of cast iron boxes with fixturing holes. You can use one box as a table, or you can buy several boxes and clamp them together. They are supposed to be very precise and very tough, and the whole setup for three feet by four feet would run about $2000, tax included.

That’s a lot. On the other hand, what would a dubious-quality set of pallet forks cost me? Well over a grand. A grapple would run over three grand. And I think grapples are stupid. I’ve seen them in videos, and I have never seen one do anything my forks can’t do. I’ve seen my forks do many things a grapple can’t do.

Pallet forks are the only quick-attach forks available online, they are vastly inferior to the forks I already have when it comes to moving trees and brush, and they cost a fortune. By adapting my old forks, which I would never be able to sell for a decent price, I can get a dynamite setup for under $300. That means my little table, which cost $200 with tax, has paid for itself and then some. It also helped me fix my subsoiler, so there’s maybe another $150 saved. It helped me make a bunch of mobile tool bases, so I probably saved a couple of thousand there.

I would have been smart to buy a big table to begin with. But I didn’t think I had room, I was cheap, and I didn’t think I’d build big projects.

Tomorrow will be the point of no return. I will start chopping my old forks up for repurposing. I’m sure it will work out, because when it comes to fabrication, there is always a way to fix things.

I had a wonderful dream last night. Or maybe night before last. I was in my dad’s house, and my parents were there. My dad was suffering from dementia, as he did in life. He was standing at the kitchen sink, puttering around with things. Sometimes people with dementia look for things to do in order to give themselves purpose.

He picked up some kind of utensil which he thought was supposed to be covered. It was not. He said, “Somebody didn’t cover this. That’s okay. Still friends.”

He was forgiving someone. Covering for them. It was wonderful to hear. The tone of his voice was so sweet. Like it didn’t even occur to him to be angry. “Still friends.” No big deal. Everyone makes mistakes.

It made me think about a problem I’ve had since he died. I have tended to remember him as he was when he was young. He was extremely hard on people, and he was not the kind of person who would forgive quickly. Even after you apologized and made things right, he would keep hammering. In his last months, he changed completely. He was gentle. He loved prayer. Whenever I showed up to see him, he said, “Here comes my beautiful son.” He was like the Dad I saw in my dream.

Since his death, I have tried to remember him as he was when he died, but old habits have crept in and caused me to remember the old Dad who died months before the new one. The dream has helped me to remember the new Dad and forget the old Dad, just as God has.

It made me think about love and what a privilege it is to be a gentle and benevolent person. Love is the reason the universe was created. It’s not an incidental benefit. I have to remember to take pleasure in being like my dad was in my dream. The modern world taught me to be cynical and hard. I changed myself in order to feel safe. That was a mistake.

We are in a lot of danger now. An apocalyptic spirit of murder has been released, and we are nastier to each other than ever. This is especially true of the Internet. It’s a snake pit. Social media sites, in particular, are disgusting and perilous.

The dream was life-changing. From now on, when I feel angry about something someone has done, I’ll just say, “Still friends,” and let it go.

Hope I can get my forks working before the storm. It looks like we’ll miss the real wind, but some trees could still come down, so I want to be ready before the power goes out and I have to use the generator to weld things.

Tractor Forks Gradually Materializing

Looks like my tractor brush fork attachment may be usable by the time Hurricane Ian either gets here or misses us.

When I converted my tractor bucket to quick attachment, I bought a heavy mounting plate and cut the ends off for the bucket. I welded them to the bucket, and this left me with a big piece that could also be turned into a mount with some modification. I decided to use it to hold brush forks on. I have been cutting and welding, and now I have two plates which should be suitable for attachment to a heavy frame which will hold 4 brush fork tines.

I had to make these plates wider, and I also had to add metal to the bottoms. Before I did this, it would have been hard to attach a frame in a way that put it at least as low as the bottom edges of the plates.

Brush forks need to slide freely on the ground, especially if you want to use them as forklifts occasionally. You can’t have something protruding down behind them. In order to have the tines flat on the ground and have ample steel to weld the tines to, I needed to have the frame on the ground, too.

It’s a complicated problem, and my explanation probably doesn’t make it very clear. If I hadn’t added the additional steel, the mount plates would have extended 2.5″ down below the rear ends of the tines. The tines would not have slid easily on the ground, and the bottoms of the mount plates would have banged into things a lot.

It took me a couple of hours yesterday to cut out the steel pieces to add to the plates. I had to use the mill as well as a big angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. Today it took me another 90 minutes or so to weld everything together and grind off the lumps. It was not easy to weld these things and make them pretty because of their shapes, so I settled for ugly strong welds followed by a lot of grinding.

Tomorrow’s work should go by fast. I have two 56″ pieces of 2″ by 2″ tubing with 1/4″ walls, and I have 4 shorter pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls. I will turn all this into a sort of ladder structure which will be my attachment’s frame. The long pieces will run horizontally, and the short pieces will be welded between them at intervals of around 15″. I should be able to accomplish this in an hour or so. Then I have to weld the frame to the mounting plates.

I figure I should be done in three hours or less.

After all this the real fun starts. I have to cut the rear portions off my old forks so they can be welded to the frame. I have to weld them in place. This will give me 4 pieces of tubular steel around a foot long. I will have to cut these so they can be used as struts to keep the tines from bending when horizontal loads are applied to the tips. I figure one strut per tine will do it.

I think I may be able to get this work done in a day. Then it will take me another day to weld it all together. This will put me in position to use the forks if trees come down this week. If they don’t come down, I’ll have time to paint everything.

Once this project is done, I’ll have a quick-attach tractor and quick-attach forks. I’ll be this area’s king of cheap quick-attach tractor guys.

By using bits of the old mounting plate, I saved around $140. The whole project will cost me $198 for steel, plus whatever paint and consumables cost. And maybe 4 bolts. This estimate is based on the assumption that this will work. If I ruin my old forks and can’t make good new ones, I’ll be spending a lot correcting the problem.

I hope this thing will be as strong as I need it to be. I believe it will be. People tend to overbuild weldments and underestimate what they can take, and this generalization applies to me. If I’m only a little worried, it probably means the attachment will be considerably stronger than it has to be.

I am amazed how nice the shop is now. I get things done fast. I know where most things are. I don’t have to search much. Thank you, God, for making this dream come true.

Hate-Based Handouts for the Undeserving Always Solve a Nation’s Problems

I saw some character talking about slavery reparations, so I thought I should write this, not that it will do any good whatsoever.

Reasons why slavery reparations are stupid and unjust:

1. Single biggest reason: reparations have already been paid many times over through affirmative action and government assistance. Nearly every time I have applied for a job or admission to a school, I have been put at the back of the line behind minorities. Many people like me have been rejected because of affirmative action, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the courses of their lives. My black friends in law school were quietly whisked away to a secret tutoring center in Arkansas where they were given summer courses to give them an advantage over everyone else before freshman year started, and the rest of us paid for it without being informed. They also had organizations working to give them scholarships even when they didn’t ask. My experiences are typical. The benefits already extended through affirmative action are far greater than the benefits that would be provided through further lump-sum reparations.

2. Wealthy blacks who have already outdone the rest of us financially would receive reparations paid for partly by poor and middle-class whites. Jay-Z can get two new tires for his latest Lamborghini.

3. Blacks whose ancestors were never slaves, including blacks who came here decades or centuries after slavery ended, would receive reparations. My wife is moving here from Zambia. Why should she get reparations from Americans?

4. Blacks whose black ancestors owned slaves in the United States (there were many) would receive reparations. Slavery would be rewarded.

5. Blacks whose black ancestors sold slaves in Africa (this is how nearly all slaves got here) would receive reparations.

6. Whites whose ancestors never owned slaves, and whites whose ancestors were abolitionists, would have to pay reparations.

7. Non-blacks who are not white and who came here long after slavery ended would have to pay reparations. Welcome to America, Koreans.

8. The descendants of whites who were enslaved through indenture would not receive reparations, but they would have to pay them.

9. Every black person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the injured can’t be made whole.

10. Every white person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the guilty can’t be made to repay. Fining an innocent person for what another person did is evil.

11. Virtually all non-blacks who are affluent now are affluent through assets accumulated long after slavery ended, so almost no living non-blacks have assets that came from slavery. Everything I inherited came from people who had nothing when they were young. What the non-black affluent have generally has no connection to slaveholding ancestors.

12. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay American Indians whose economic losses were hundreds of thousands of times greater.

13. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay Mexicans because we took a lot of the West from them. Try and put a price on Texas.

Hope this is helpful.

The theft scheme known as slavery reparations comes from a spirit of envy, not a desire to do justice. As the apocalypse unfolds, people will be filled with murderous hatred. The Revelation says so. Various canards will be used to justify the evils one group does to another. The reparations canard is no better than the “Jews sold us out at Versailles” canard.

It is important for us to forgive each other and realize our problems come from bad relationships with God, not from the bad intentions and acts of other people. If you are right with God, he will give you favor and deliver you over and over. If you live a life of sin and rebellion, you can generally expect to remain at the bottom of the food chain, regardless of your race.

Holding people responsible for what their ancestors are accused of is sick and evil. It will lead to bloodshed here in America.

Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms

A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.

I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.

The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.

Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:

House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:

Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:

[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.

If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.

I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.

I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.

I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.

Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.

Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.

My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.

Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.

Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.

I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.

Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.

As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.

There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.

They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.

Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?

The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.

The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.

Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?

If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?

Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.

Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?

The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.

Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.

We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.

I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.