Parts of Shop Floor now Visible

It’s a momentous day. I finally finished my second welding cart.

Last year, I took a Harbor Freight US General tool chest and turned it into a cart. It is the greatest cart imaginable, so I decided to make a new one for my Lincoln MIG and Hypertherm plasma cutter. I believe I have written about it before.

While the pandemic was making prisoners of us all, I barely did anything, apart from getting married. Things here deteriorated. My projects languished. Over the last couple of months, I have gotten back to work, and making a new cart was a priority.

The factory-made Eastwood cart I’m replacing is great, but it has no storage apart from a couple of tiny trays and 6 tubes for MIG rods. It has no drawers. It’s also hard to move. Something about the wheels. It holds two machines, and they are both too low. It put my welder’s controls at belly-button height, and the controls on the plasma cutter were at knee level. Very inconvenient.

The cart I just made will take two 120-cubic-foot bottles, and it has a mount for what is known as a toilet paper filter. This is an air filter that uses something that looks exactly like a roll of European toilet paper for a filter.

Maybe it is toilet paper. You may be familiar with the European stuff. I wouldn’t say it’s rough, but I would guess it’s about 120 grit.

The new cart holds the filter at eye level so it’s easy to hook an air hose to it.

I have not yet made any effort to create hangers for cables and so on. I don’t think I’ll need them. Once I put a bottle on the cart, I’ll be able to drape my welding stuff on it. This sounds sloppy, but in reality, it’s extremely convenient, and it’s neater than a bunch of hooks hanging out in the way. I should be able to wrap the plasma cutter’s wiry things around the filter mount.

All the weldy things I haven’t shoved in my other chest will go in this one, so I can forget about the toolbox I’ve been keeping small items in.

If you’re wondering about those huge, neat-looking welds, you should know they’re not welds. I welded first and then molded epoxy putty around the welds. It gives a nicer look and provides the impression that I closed things up completely with weld. Using too much weld is stupid for various reasons.

It’s amazing how much space I freed up with this thing. The Eastwood cart was much smaller, but somehow it took up more space. I can almost walk around the shop now.

I really like Eastwood. They sell stuff that actually works, at modest prices. They make working on cars accessible to ordinary people. Nonetheless, my cart is better than theirs. It should be. Their cart now costs $206, I’m putting around $400 in mine.

My next similar project is a grinding cart. I bought a bigger Harbor Freight tool chest, and I’m going to put my belt grinders on it. I plan to make some kind of extension to hold grinder tool arms. They are just too bulky to go in drawers.

My old grinder cart is a two-tier plastic job from Northern Tool. It serves well for an $89 cart, but it’s open, so grinding stuff falls into the bottom tray, and it’s also sagging. Northern Tool says it will hold over 500 pounds, but I have way less than that on my top tray, and it’s bending downward in the center. The new cart will give me a place for tool arms, and I’ll be able to put belts and other junk in the drawers.

I may splurge on a KB Electronics dustproof VFD for the big belt grinder. Right now, I’m using an ordinary VFD in a fancy but inexpensive enclosure I built. It works, but the box is roughly as big as a shoebox, it’s heavy, and putting it on the new cart would make considerable fabrication necessary. A dustproof VFD could be placed on a stalk next to the grinder, mounted on the same board.

Then I would have a 3-HP VFD in a dustproof enclosure and nothing to run it with. Hmm.

A big belt grinder is pretty much indispensable if you really want to get anything done with metal.

After this, I just need air conditioning and insulation, and I’m done.

Someone Needs to Abort the Antichrist

My last blog entry was about homosexuals teaching children to do erotic dances on a stripper pole. I thought this was another reminder that the end is here. Then Ruth from Rockport Conservatives left a comment directing me to something even worse: a video of a leftist woman advising women who kill their children to create altars and put the remains on them.

It works like this: first, you kill your unborn child. Then you obtain the corpse or the pieces that remain after the baby is ripped up. Then you put the remains in a container and place it on an altar in your house. Then you use your altar when you do yoga or meditate or do whatever else leftists do instead of honoring the God who let himself be tortured to death for them.

It’s hard to make my mind accept knowledge like this. Based on my knowledge of the way sane people behave, it’s hard to make myself believe the video is serious.

I’m not alone. A conservative who drew attention to it on Twitter made sure he informed people the video was not a parody. He knew they would not be able to prevent themselves from looking for a reasonable explanation for it.

Last night, we got another reminder. The FBI raided Donald Trump’s home and broke into his safe. Journalists are saying they did it because they suspected he kept classified material after leaving office, and they also think he destroyed documents that were supposed to be preserved.

Think about Hillary Clinton. She was not a president. She was a Senator and Secretary of State. That means the feds should be much less likely to hesitate to raid her home. She kept classified material in her house. She also violated the law by using a secret email address to do official business under the table. When they asked for her computer, she had the hard drive wiped clean before handing it over to them.

She also took a $90,000 bribe before she took office. She had a trading account, she invested $1,000, and successful trades were credited to her until her account was worth about $100,000.

Obviously, Hillary Clinton is no trader. Someone saw to it that she did extraordinarily well, absorbing losses and attributing gains to her, and then her trading career ended. Ordinarily, a person who can generate 9000% profits over short intervals will keep trading and build a fortune.

We know Hillary and Bill love money. They do everything they can to profit from their status. If she could have continued generating 9000% profits every 10 months, she would have.

It’s like the roulette scene in Casablanca. Rick feels sorry for a married couple fleeing the Nazis, and he knows the husband is trying to raise money at the roulette wheel. He directs the croupier to do a couple of bogus spins, the husband gets the travel money, and then Rick tells him to quit.

The FBI didn’t break into the Clinton home. They politely requested evidence, and Hillary destroyed it. Like Trump, she was in a position which made trusting her to comply a very bad idea, but they effectively gave her permission, and time, to destroy evidence.

One of the clues that a relationship has gone past the point of reconciliation is that hostility and dishonesty are brought out into the open. The adversaries stop caring about hiding their hatred and misdeeds. This is what’s happening to the world now. The DOJ, including the FBI, no longer cares about preserving the appearance of integrity. They are now in an open war on non-leftists.

We have seen it coming for years. Leftists filed 84 ethics charges against Newt Gingrich, and only one stuck. They tried to get the IRS to charge him, but he was cleared. They got Tom DeLay arrested, and he was cleared. They impeached Trump twice for some things he hadn’t done and some things that were not even illegal. They filed bogus charges against Sarah Palin until she became so busy fighting them she could no longer serve.

Democrat politicians are more corrupt than Republicans, but we don’t see the same things happening to them.

No one who has lived a long time and had any kind of a life can survive intense, prolonged government scrutiny. Sooner or later, everyone does something that can be used to destroy his life. Leftists know this, so they hammer away at conservatives until they find things they can hang charges on.

As Horatio Hornblower said, “Each of us can find a maggot in our past which will happily devour our futures.”

You may think there is no maggot in your past. Ever drive home from a party drunk? If you’ve looked at Internet porn, are you positive every model was over 18? Are you positive you can’t be connected to any images or videos? Did you ever sell a friend weed or coke when you were in college? Have you ever walked into a prohibited place with a concealed weapon? Have you lied about your drug and alcohol use on a background check form? Keep thinking. You’ll find your maggot.

Why is all this happening? The answer is simple. Satan is the false god of this world, most people serve him, and he is using them to castrate the political allies of Christians and Israel. The human race has chosen Satan over God in the most important election of all, and God is letting us suffer the consequences.

Politics belongs to Satan. Too many conservatives don’t understand that. Most of us think politics will save us, and that in a democracy, we will eventually win because there are so many of us. These things are not true. Only God protects us, and many, many nations have been ruled by unpopular minority factions. The Japanese ruled China.

American democracy isn’t like the laws of physics. It’s not necessarily permanent. It can be taken away. It can be nullified, as events surrounding the 2020 election show.

I don’t think Trump will be tried, but the raid is still very damaging, because it will surely bring us a big step closer to civil war, which is our ultimate destination. It’s a sure thing. You can only treat people unfairly so long before they snap. Satan wants us to snap, and we will. Cruelty to conservatives will increase without restraint, we will be tormented, raped, robbed, and killed by mobs in our own yards, conservatives who don’t know God will grab their rifles and try to fix things, and streets will run red with blood.

We will descend to the level of our adversaries, and that’s Satan’s real goal.

People think civil war is a far-off thing, and that we are not in immediate danger. That’s not true. The US is full of leftists who are not merely willing, but eager, to cut our throats, steal everything we have, and pile us into mass graves. When the hot war begins, it will be sudden, and those who hate us will come after us very quickly.

In part, their haste will be motivated by a classic drive of looters and rapists: the desire to arrive early and get the best of everything. It serves no purpose to loot a store or a home two weeks after a hurricane. The people who get there fast take all the good things. Looters, which is what leftist revolutionaries are, know this.

The video about the dead-baby altar is chilling because, like our new mob crime epidemic, it harks back to ancient times. In the ancient Middle East, parents, including Jews, murdered their firstborn male children, put them in jars, and put the jars in the walls of their homes to please false gods. They also burned them as sacrifices to Molech. Murdering your baby and using his parts to create a shrine is essentially the same thing.

Spirits are immortal. We are still corrupted by the beings who corrupted Eve, Cain, Noah’s neighbors, the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Benjamites, the ancient Jews who worshiped Ashtoreth and Molech, Solomon, the communists, and the Nazis. These spirits miss the old ways, and they are bringing them back in forms we will accept. They love being worshiped again. They love seeing beings God loves, who resemble God, march into hell with big smiles and rainbow flags.

I have been through a bunch of hurricanes, and I know the sensation that falls on an area before a storm arrives. There is a strange stillness and a sense of foreboding. There is also a feeling that there is no point in trying to do anything to prepare. I keep having these feelings with regard to America’s future.

When storms used to come, I would get a 300-quart cooler, lunchmeat, bread, ice, batteries, and a keg of homebrewed beer, and I would wait without fear. I knew nothing really bad would happen to me. I might have to go several days without refrigeration in the house, and I might have to move to my dad’s boat in order to have air conditioning and hot water, but that would be about it.

I have that feeling now. I don’t think what I do now matters very much. I think that if I took up cigarette smoking, it wouldn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be here long enough to get sick. If I ran up bills, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be gone before anyone could sue me.

I believe God has told me repeatedly, “Don’t worry about the hard times ahead, because they were not written for you.”

That doesn’t help everyone else, however.

Other people can only be helped through repentance, and repentance comes through listening, and listening is something people no longer do. Or rather, they do, but they only listen to Satan, who tells them what they like to hear so they can burn with him.

I suppose this is what the Bible really means when it says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” If you can hear God, you can believe and be saved, but you can’t hear unless the Holy Spirit speaks the word of God to you and opens your ears.

Most people think that verse means you will have faith if you hear the word of God–the Bible–all the time, but that isn’t true. The world is full of people who immerse themselves in the word and still hate Jesus.

The group that put out the abortion shrine video had a blog. It looks like it’s gone. At the top of the blog, a title read, Gospels of Lilith: Self-Guided Abortion Blog.” Fitting. According to Jewish legend, Lilith is the predecessor of Eve. She hated being ruled by a male God and having to submit to a male partner, so she used the power of God’s name to fly away. She had sex with the archangel Samael (believed by many to be Satan) and gave birth to demons.

I don’t know if Lilith was real, but Eve was not much better. The first known human leftist, because she hated rightful authority. The first known witch, because she served Satan, not God. The first known drug user; the forbidden fruit was a mind-altering drug.

Feminism is leftism, and Satan was the first leftist, so it all makes sense.

The altar video was made private yesterday, but you can see bits of it in videos by commentators.

What’s happening is like labor. I keep wishing it were over. It’s like we are stuck in a doorway.

I guess I will write about new abominations as they develop.

The End of Reason

What do I keep saying about the time we live in? I keep saying that every time I start to get used to it, I learn something new that reminds me the world is really ending.

This week, I learned that homosexuals held a homosexuality celebration in Pennsylvania, and they taught children how to dance on a stripper pole.

It’s worse than you think. A “man” in hot pants and nothing else taught a young boy, and the boy was wearing a skirt. The skirt was colored to resemble the homosexuality flag.

Someone claiming to be the boy’s parent put photos on the web, bragging that the boy was “a natural.”

We are at a stage where there is no point in talking to lost people any more.

It used to be that people understood some things. They understood that sexualizing children was evil and abusive. If another person understands that, you have some hope of making him understand that a child shouldn’t be taught to use a stripper pole.

Poles are for whorish women who exhibit their bodies in order to arouse men sexually and persuade them to give up their money. This is the whole reason stripper poles were invented. Pole dancing was developed in order to excite lust. They’re not for fitness. They’re not for giving women positive body images. They’re for a type of whoring.

It shouldn’t be necessary to tell another person a boy too young to understand sex and attraction should not be put in a homosexuality skirt and encouraged to perform an erotic dance. It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people of these things. People should not get angry when these obvious truths are pointed out.

Pro-homosexuality people may say the rest of us encourage boys to be masculine and girls to be feminine, so it’s okay for them to encourage boys to be feminine and girls to be masculine. That isn’t true, but even if it were, there is a difference between cultivating a gender identity in a child and having him perform an erotic dance in front of cameras.

I was at Bass Pro Shop the other day, and I saw a display labeled “Classic Toy Guns.” A man who shows his son these toys and offers to buy one is encouraging him to be masculine without sexualizing him. For that matter, a misguided person who encourages a boy to try on a dress is encouraging him to be feminine without sexualizing him. Having a child perform an erotic dance in front of other people is very different, and that should be obvious to everyone.

Stories like this one make me wonder if God can vomit.

Any person who teaches children to do erotic dancing should be horsewhipped on national television. Words are an insufficient response. Children are not disposable. What happens to them matters. Treating them as props in a self-indulgent celebration of abnormal lust is not significantly different from taking erotic photos of them.

My dad’s law partner had a son, and he was murdered, raped, dismembered, and buried in concrete by a homosexual pedophile. To his parents, this boy was everything. To the pedophile, he was just a tool for generating pleasure, like a plastic doll or a sex toy.

The pedophile took him to his trailer, spent some time raping him, and then tried to return him, as though everything would be fine after that. He saw police cars outside the boy’s house and took him back to his trailer. When the boy got up and tried to get out of the room, the pedophile shot him in the back. Then he cut him in half and separated one leg from another, as though he were trying to make yard waste fit into trash bags that were too small. Then he buried him in concrete. The boy was just a set of objects to be gotten out of the way. He wasn’t a person to the pervert who murdered him.

Teaching a little boy to do an erotic performance isn’t as bad as rape and murder, but it springs from the same narcissistic mindset. People who use children as props to validate and satisfy their aberrant sexual desires are a lot like the thing that killed my friend’s son. The children don’t matter. They are just disposable accessories. When you get done with one, another one will be along soon.

I guarantee you, there are leftists all over the world who are pressuring their kids to be abnormal. A homosexual or “trans” child is a status symbol to them. A way of gaining favorable attention and the privilege of claiming to be a victim. In their desire to advance a trendy movement, they are denying children their value as human beings.

I have a friend who has a far-left liberal son. The son has a baby daughter. The other day, he sent my friend a photo of the baby dressed as a lesbian. She was wearing jeans and a grey shirt with a homosexual flag on it. She was about 8 months old. Who does that? Imagine a heterosexual dressing a baby in a way that suggested interest in normal sexual relations. Things like that only happen in the sick world of child beauty pageants.

The son and his wife get upset when my friend says the baby is pretty. They try to use ridiculous pronouns, but they slip up, because even the mind of a deluded sexual rebel feels some corrective pressure from common sense.

This world is finished. It will never recover. We can’t learn any more.

Look how we act. Thousands of homosexual men have been hit with a disease that causes pain that one compared to having a red-hot fork in his anus, the disease is transmitted almost entirely by orgies and other forms of promiscuity, and what has their response been? To blame Joe Biden for failing to get them a vaccine in two months. They aren’t taking accountability. They’re not even cutting down on the orgies, which would merely be a nod to logic, not religion. They certainly are not wondering if agonizing anal pain and giant pustules on the mouth and genitals might indicate that God exists and wants them to change.

The entire world, homosexual and straight, has been hit with a plague that will continue making us sick and killing us forever, and very few of us are asking ourselves if it has anything to do with displeasing God.

Those who do connect humanity’s misfortunes with rebellion are persecuted, ridiculed, ostracized, and economically starved. It’s just like the treatment the prophets received. When Jeremiah told the Judeans God was going to destroy their capital and their nation because of idolatry and wickedness, the high priest himself had him put in stocks. The whorish wife of the king of Israel tried to kill Elijah for serving God and trying to help his people. Modern Americans are no different.

It’s too bad America’s population is as young as it is. There aren’t enough people who remember what normal life is like. Most young people probably have no idea there was a great athlete named Bruce Jenner. They don’t know what it’s like not to see profanity on billboards and T-shirts or to have to leave the house to find pornography. They don’t remember civility. They have never lived in a time when pride was considered destructive and foolish. They can’t see the sudden, catastrophic change that has occurred.

We are done. There will be no big revival. The shortages won’t go away. Monkeypox and coronavirus will stay and be joined by worse diseases. Hatred will increase, and war will spread. We are too stupid to change, no matter what God does for us.

The Mission Even Joe Biden Realized was Wrong

I am still stuck in the USA, and my wife is still stuck in Zambia. Almost every day, I turn on the PC and expand and update our knowledge of European tourist visa policies, and it feels like we are swimming in oatmeal.

The Czech embassy has asked her to come in for a sort of interview, so that gives us hope. I also learned something unexpected: Austria is an easy visa. I would have thought the Austrians would have been strict, with their high standard of living and their similarities to the Germans, but evidently, they are not. If the Czechs won’t listen, Austria will be even better, because Austria is higher on my list of potential destinations.

Right now, I wonder if our trip will be postponed by the fortunes of another tourist: Nancy Pelosi. As you probably know, she is in Taiwan. The whole thing sounds bizarre to me. I think of Taiwan as a country that really hates leftism, and it’s all about industrialism and abuse of the environment; in short, my kind of place. Why would the queen of the Birkenstocks-and-socks crowd want to go?

She represents San Francisco, and that city has a big Chinatown. Are the San Franciscan Chinese pro-CCP or pro-freedom? I suppose it depends on where most of them come from. If they generally hate the CCP, it would make sense for Pelosi to kiss up to them with a Taiwan visit.

I used to live in Miami, and there were two kinds of Cubans there. Hard-right capitalists who had been tormented and driven out by leftists, and useless, hostile leftists who supported Castro yet came to the US because they loved money. Maybe California is the same way.

Pelosi says her trip shows our commitment to democracy blah blah blah, so I guess she must have a lot of anti-oppression Chinese constituents. I can’t think of any other reason why a pillar of the party of dictator-lovers would say a thing like that.

I read that a Chinese mouthpiece said it would be “okay” to shoot down her plane. It’s an interesting story. China says Taiwan is part of China, and Pelosi was scheduled to be accompanied by American fighter jets. Whether you support the CCP’s claim or not, sending fighters into a place another country claims puts that country in an awkward position. Imagine how things would go if Jackie Chan, the CCP-loving hypocrite actor, visited Hawaii with two uninvited Chinese fighters.

My understanding is that Chinese fighters are completely hopeless and in no way capable of challenging our fighters, so it’s not surprising that Pelosi arrived safely. Asians hate looking bad, and having American fighters knock their inferior machinery out of the sky would look very bad indeed.

Nonetheless, it seems like the whole business adds fuel to China’s fires of resentment, and they will not forget the humiliation.

My friend Mike is working with a Chinese company to get a product shipped here. I won’t say what the product is. He talks to the same Chinese lady all the time. She must be brave, because she told him tanks are being loaded on ships in the port city where she works. She brought it up because a conflict could affect the deal.

I wasn’t too happy when I heard that. I think this lady is telling the truth, since she has no reason to make such a story up. She must be taking a risk, talking about such things.

Why would a country put tanks on ships? To invade Taiwan, perhaps. On the other hand, China sells tanks to lots of countries. Presumably with 20%-off coupons and short warranties. Maybe the lady Mike talked to saw tanks on their way to Nigeria, and she sees tanks being loaded all the time. But if that’s the case, why did she think this instance was so extraordinary she had to discuss it with him?

I don’t know how China is going to get Taiwan back. Its economic relationship with the US is critical to its welfare. Losing Walmart would probably hurt more than losing Taiwan.

I don’t see how they can afford to start anything.

It Pays to Have Connections

I have some testimony to report.

My wife and I visited Ireland. We did a great deal of shopping for her. In addition, I brought her things from America. I got her expensive Keen hiking shoes, wool socks, MAC cosmetics, an insulated Carhartt jacket, a bunch of wigs, a costly Spyderco knife, and at least two pounds of homemade beef jerky. I can’t recall all the things we bought in Ireland or all the things I brought, but when she got ready to fly home, her checked bag felt like it contained a dead body. The value was in the thousands of dollars.

She used Aer Lingus, Air France, and Airlink South Africa to get home. Aer Lingus took her to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Air France took her to Johannesburg. Then she flew to Zambia on Airlink, which is called Airlink South Africa in South Africa and Airlink Zambia in Zambia.

We checked her bag in Dublin using the confirmation code we received when we bought her ticket from KLM, which is the same company as Air France. The claim ticket said the bag was going to Charles de Gaulle. We thought nothing of it, because routing bags was not our job. For all we knew, all bags on multiple flights had tags that only mentioned first destinations. The airlines knew where she was going, and we assumed they knew what they were doing. When I check bags, I never look at the tags. I rely on the billions of dollars’ worth of computers use to keep track of them.

Before she landed, I got an email from Air France, saying her bag had been delayed. It said we should file a report online. I forwarded the email to her. Her bag was not in Johannesburg when she arrived, so she went home.

I tried to file a report, and Air France’s site would not accept it. It is not possible to use Air France’s global site to report bag problems in South Africa. Air France had told us to do something impossible. When I called Air France, they said it wasn’t their problem. They said we had to deal with the last carrier in the chain, which isn’t really true. They were lying in order to avoid paying for the bag if they couldn’t find it.

Airlines steal luggage all the time. “Lose” is the wrong word. They don’t just lose it. They sell it. If Air France keeps your bag and refuses to file a report, they can sell it for a profit and save the cost of reimbursement. There are companies whose only business is buying “lost” bags and reselling them.

An Aer Lingus employee at its central baggage facility told me Air France was lying in order to avoid responsibility. Aer Lingus also told us Air France had flown the bag to Johannesburg two days after Rhodah’s flight, so we knew Air France had the bag.

When we called Johannesburg, they lied to us. They hung up on us. I got Skype so I could call them, and Skype banned me for life because I called so much. I would call, the system would hang up, and I would call again. Microsoft decided I was some kind of criminal, so there was no appeal.

Airlink’s Zambian employees filed what is known as a “courtesy report” solely for tracking purposes. This kind of report doesn’t include an admission of liability. I was able to access this report online for a while, but then the airlines–probably Air France–locked me out.

We had insurance through another company, Heymondo. They refused to compensate us without documentation from the airlines, which the airlines refused to give us.

Of course, Heymondo knows this happens, so their bag insurance is not very good. If an airline accepts responsibility, the airline pays a lot of money, and Heymondo may be off the hook. If the airline doesn’t accept responsibility, Heymondo doesn’t pay you anything. It looks like their coverage only works after the airline pays its share.

It’s a racket, all the way around.

Rhodah went to the Lusaka airport over and over. I spent a ton of money on calls to South Africa. In the end, nothing happened.

Rhodah had a vision during this time. She saw a strange woman wearing her Carhartt jacket.

We pray together every day. In prayer, I kept cursing the spirits that were trying to keep what belonged to Rhodah. I cursed the people involved with defeat. I felt as though God were telling me the bag would come back, but my faith was nothing to write home about.

I bought Rhodah a new jacket, knife, and shoes for our upcoming trip. I replaced the wool socks she had lost. I told her she should replace what she could in Zambia because we didn’t save much by stuffing my bag, and we could always lose things again.

Today Rhodah sent me this photo.

There is the bag, nearly 4 months after they stole it. Airlink brought it this morning after an unexpected call. The jacket is gone. The knife appears to be gone. That’s about $350 right there. The rest of the things seem to be present, so we have avoided a loss amounting to several thousand dollars. She has yet to comb through the bag carefully. Of course, they beat it up.

We should now be able to force the airlines to pay for her stolen items, and if they won’t, the insurer should have to pay. The fact that the bag came back 4 months late should be good evidence that there was a problem.

I took Rhodah a lot of homemade beef jerky, and it was still in the bag. She got so excited, she started eating it even though she was supposed to be fasting. I’m glad it was in there, because it took a lot of raw beef and time to make it.

I still have to take her the new jacket. I’m putting the new shoes in my closet. The ones she recovered should last years, so there is no point in taking new ones to her. I can’t return them to Amazon because I gave the box to Marvin, and he ate holes in it and pooped all over it. When the old shoes (which have about two weeks’ worth of mileage on them) wear out, she will have a fresh pair ready to go.

I still lost the money I spent on calls.

So who stole the jacket and knife?

I considered the possibility it was a South African or Zambian. South Africans are very violent, and they like to use knives on each other. Zambians are not very inclined to violence. I think most French bag thieves would find knives uninteresting, although there are a lot of criminals in France who come from Muslim countries and Africa, and a really good lock-blade knife would appeal to such people. There is a lot of Muslim knife crime in France.

Rhodah thinks it was a white woman. The wigs in the bag were worth something like $800, and the cosmetics were also expensive, but they were not touched. A white woman would not have been able to use them. A black woman would have wanted them. The jacket was small for a man, so the thief was probably female. Maybe our things were stolen by a Caucasian Muslim woman in France who thought her husband would like a good knife to carry in their dangerous Muslim neighborhood.

People think Muslims don’t steal. Wrong! They steal like crazy when they aren’t afraid of Muslim justice in the form of unneeded surgery. Islam teaches that Allah encourages stealing from non-Muslims. Somali pirates are Muslims.

I think it is somewhat unlikely that a Zambian woman would steal a highly distinctive American jacket and wear it in Zambia, especially in an airport where her coworkers knew a passenger had reported such a jacket lost. A thief in France or South Africa could be certain the victim would never see her with the jacket.

Today we prayed for the thieves and their families.

I have given Rhodah a lot of money for redundant purchases, so this event is a score for her.

When I found out the bag was back, I felt bad for not having more faith. Yahweh is the master of the tiny, weak spirit Muslims worship when they use the name “Allah.”

What happened is remarkable. When a bag is gone for almost 4 months, generally, you can consider it lost.

In other news, I kept hearing something strange last night during prayer: “Rejoice! Your day is here.” I’m grateful for the luggage, but somehow I don’t think God would say my day was here just because my wife got a lost bag back. Either he was talking about something else, or the bag is part of a bigger event, or I imagined everything.

If the words came from God, then whatever has happened is very good, because “rejoice” was in there.

I am ready to rejoice. My life is easy, as is my wife’s life, but I have been rejected and hindered since before I was born, and so has she. A lot of Christians go from acceptance, wealth, and successful marriages and families straight into Christianity. Many people who become Christians are doing very well before the change comes. I had a brief period of fitting in and doing well during and after law school, but other than that, I have always been an outsider, and I didn’t marry until I was old. I have been cheated out of one thing after another.

Yesterday I was thinking of prominent Christians who have been treated very badly, and I thought it was strange that things were going well for Rhodah and me. I wondered if it meant we were not good Christians. Then I thought about all the rotten things that had happened to me when I was younger. It may be that most of my suffering is behind me. I have heard that in prophecy a lot.

I always tell people two things: I wouldn’t go through my childhood again for anything, and anyone who wants to prolong his life on Earth is insane. I have been abused since before I was born, and I am tired of this place even though life is pleasant now. Maybe God’s exasperation with the people and spirits that have mistreated me is greater than his motivation to let me be tested further.

I believe we are also spared because we ask for it. Jesus said we should pray that God would not lead us into temptation and that he would deliver us from evil. Rhodah and I ask for those things every day. They must not be automatic, or we would not have been told to ask.

Satan is a bully, and he has favorites, like any bully. Some people get more of his abuse than others. Surely God will provide favor that outweighs Satan’s disfavor. And eventually we’ll get to see Satan thrown screaming into the fire, which will erase all the pleasure he got from hurting people.

We now have to contact Airlink and tell them our items are lost. I do not have high hopes, given the way we have been treated so far. After that, we will try Heymondo. It would be nice to have a few hundred dollars returned to us.

I am working on getting us into Czechia. I accidentally reserved a hotel room in a place where they are not allowed to install air conditioning. It’s a historic building. Forget that place. I don’t care if King Wenceslaus himself slept there. I’m not going to Europe to sweat.

I sent the Zambian embassy in Rome an email, detailing the way the Italian embassy in Lusaka lied to us and treated Rhodah rudely. They claim they are taking it seriously and following up. I hope so, because the nasty lady who caused our loss needs to be fired or corrected. Someone else should be handling visas. Maybe she can be reassigned to the copier room where she can hurl abuse at the guy who delivers toner.

The Zambian embassy helps Italians the way the Italian embassy is supposed to help Zambians, so they should be very angry to learn how we were treated. I don’t think I have to check when I opine that the Zambians in Rome are much more honest and kind than the Italian lady in Lusaka.

We prayed for this lady and her family, but that doesn’t mean she what she did should be ignored.

This time, I will tell Rhodah to be careful not to pack anything she is afraid to lose. We will photograph everything we pack, and we will check bag tags very carefully.

Embassy’s Lies Bring Helpful Lesson and Improved Itinerary

I wrote a couple of crabby posts yesterday, and in the middle of the night, I took them down. Today I start fresh.

My wife and I were cheated and lied to by a rude Italian embassy employee in Lusaka. That’s the basis of the crabby posts.

We intended to go to Italy and Greece. Africans are nearly prisoners on their continent because it’s so hard to get other countries to give them visas. The Italian embassy in Lusaka handles things for Greece, so we applied for a visa to visit both countries.

We arranged accommodations and activities, and we gathered documentation. We bought travel insurance. The only thing we didn’t do was to buy flights, because these days, flights are nonrefundable. I found some good flights and listed them on our itinerary. We had a travel agent type it all up.

Italy made us wait weeks for an appointment, and when the day came, a lady at the embassy yelled at my wife. She was very, very nice to a white family that showed up, but she talked to my wife like a dog that had been caught trying to get on the furniture.

She said we would be rejected because we hadn’t bought flights. My wife explained that we had been rejected before, so we didn’t want to risk buying tickets and then losing the fares. The rude lady told her we had probably been rejected because we hadn’t bought flights. She told us she would reject us if we didn’t buy them. She assured my wife we would be accepted if we bought tickets.

She gave us ONE DAY to fix things. That’s much harder than it sounds. I spent about 12 hours working on a new itinerary, and we ended up asking this terrible woman for mercy. She said we could come back in a few days.

During this time, we learned that a Schengen visa from Italy allowed us to go anywhere in Europe, so we decided to go to Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, in that order, with the largest time interval in Italy.

Mind you, nobody in his right mind goes to Italy in the summer. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to spend a whole week there, either. I would love to spend a long time in Switzerland, but Italy is, frankly, less appealing. We didn’t know of anyone else who would give us a visa, so we settled for a week in Italy, with shorter stays in France and Switzerland.

The rude lady told us we would get our answer in two to three weeks. As the third week drew to a close, we had heard nothing, so we both emailed her. No response. After the promised time period had passed, Rhodah got in her car and went to see the rude lady.

At the embassy, the rude lady was not woman enough to meet Rhodah face to face. She screamed from her office instead. An Italian man who spoke no English was sent out to talk to Rhodah, and a bilingual Zambian had to translate. The short version: no visa. And the rude lady denied she had ever told us we had to buy tickets.

We received a rejection form with a bunch of reasons and boxes, and one box was checked. All it said was that they didn’t find all of our information reliable.

Of course, all of our information was reliable and easily verified. I don’t think the rude lady or anyone else at the Italian embassy looked at any of it. I think they let our materials sit until Rhodah arrived, and then they checked the top box to get rid of her. I think they intended to reject us the entire time, because it’s the default response for black Africans.

A lot of Africans go to Europe and become illegal aliens. European nations make a lot of noise about being progressive, but of course, dishonesty and pretense are big parts of leftism. You know how that works. Leftists say abortion is about women’s rights, but it’s really about getting rid of black babies, so they put their clinics in minority neighborhoods. They say they love high taxes, and then they lie about their income and hide it. They cry about carbon, while flying around on private jets. They cry about guns while paying armed guards to protect them. Europeans may claim to be more advanced than Americans, but it’s pretty clear they reject African tourists as a matter of policy, absent compelling reasons.

I don’t think the embassy would ever have responded to us without a physical visit.

I managed to get some of our flight money back yesterday, along with a partial credit from United Airlines. Whether that credit will ever have any value, I can’t say. I don’t think I’ll ever travel inside the US again, and if European flights on United have inconvenient schedules or other problems, I won’t ruin trips in order to save $1100. I would rather take the flights I want than have day-long layovers or 5 a.m. arrivals, and if I lose money, so be it.

So that’s our story.

I think God gave me a revelation about this lady.

He has told me not to pay much attention to what creatures with no authority say, because they always like to say no and make threats. He has the final word, and he says yes. It’s very common for underlings and pencil-pushers to tell Christians this or that is impossible, right before the Christians get what they want.

The rude lady is a lackey, not the queen of Italy. A diplomatic employee doesn’t end up at a desk in Lusaka because she has friends in high places. She doesn’t have human connections that amount to anything, and she certainly doesn’t have God behind her. So why was she able to delay us?

The first time Rhodah talked to her, it was clear she was abusive and crazy. Nonetheless, we let her into our lives.

God influences people, but he doesn’t interfere with free will. He wasn’t going to take possession of a dishonest woman who had already made up her mind and force her to help us. We should have shaken the dust off our feet and applied somewhere else. Lesson learned. Sometimes you have to deal with rotten people, but when you don’t, you should choose to cut them off.

This is good information for people who married before they knew God. If you married a jerk, it’s on you, not God, so it’s possible all the prayers in the world won’t fix your marriage. Be careful who you associate with.

Can we still get into Europe? Probably. There are Schengen countries that are much more cooperative than the spoiled Big Four, meaning England, France, Germany, and Italy. The problem is that the easiest countries are bad destinations. Estonia. Lithuania. Places like that. Also, some of them now use Sweden and other uncooperative nations to process visas for Zambians.

I would rather go back to Turkey than spend a week in Estonia or Lithuania. We could always fly to Tallinn, spend one night there, and then go to Switzerland, but the Schengen watchdogs or whatever might find out, and after that, we might have problems with them on future trips.

Supposedly, if you have already been to a Schengen country, and you have not bombed any shopping malls or become an illegal alien, it’s easier for you to get another Schengen visa later on, but I take this rumor with a grain of salt, because we spent almost two weeks in Ireland, and Italy, which is on a lower tier economically and in other ways, still rejected us. Ireland isn’t a Schengen country, but it’s much better than Italy for illegals, so if Rhodah didn’t stay there, why would she stay in poorer, less pleasant Italy?

Ireland is doing great, by the way. They are above the US in GDP per capita. So much for “rich American tourists.” Those days are gone, buddy. The eagle’s wings have been clipped. Tourism destinations aren’t as excited about us as they once were, and they never will be again. They love the Chinese, though.

Things constantly change because of coronavirus, so the knowledge we had about travel last year is full of errors now. I just learned something helpful. This year, the Czech Republic started processing visas at their embassy in Lusaka. You don’t have to go through Italy or Sweden. You don’t have to mail your passport to South Africa.

The Czechs even say they’ll respond in 3-5 days. Usually. They are shaming the lazy Europeans who keep people in suspense for weeks without cause.

If you go to the Czech embassy’s page, you will see they prominently display a story about seeking Zambian students for scholarships. They send them to Czechoslovakia. This attitude is nothing like what we’ve seen from other Schengen countries, which seem obsessed with pretending to love Africa while denying visas summarily and attacking Africa’s Christianity by promoting homosexuality inside Africa.

We should be able to get an answer from the Czechs within a few days.

Should we go to the Czech Republic? Yes. Of course. It’s very beautiful. It has all sorts of castles and hiking opportunities. The food is good. Crime is low. And a Czech visa will get us into Switzerland. Even Italy, if we choose. We could go to Italy, take pictures of ourselves grinning by the Coliseum, and email them to the rude lady at the Italian embassy. Not saying we should do that, but it would be legal, and there wouldn’t be anything she could do.

I don’t know too much about the Czechs, but they seem less full of it than the wokified nations of godless Europe. They had a president or poobah or whatever who didn’t believe human beings caused global warming. They make very, very nice guns. They seem to get things done, like the Finns and the Swiss. They’re don’t seem to be helpless and irresponsible like some other nations I could name. Okay; Italy. And Spain. And Greece.

I don’t know if I’m right. These are just impressions.

I’m going to set up an itinerary for the Czech Republic, and we will apply next week. If things don’t go well, we can always go to Dubai and look at the sand.

Then Keep the Truth to Yourself

My tractor problems came to a head this week, so I decided to hand it over to the local dealer. They truly surprised me with their willingness to help. With that off my mind, and with the gift of a rare day of bearable shop weather, I got back to making my second welding cart.

I did something interesting this time around. I used epoxy putty to fake nice welds.

Fabricators with no STEM education tend to overbuild everything, and because most amateurs have no STEM education either, they generally approve. I don’t. Using way too much material is a way of saying you don’t know what you’re doing.

I’ve seen all sorts of weldments that were way over the top. I’ve seen several inches of weld where one inch would have done fine. Using too much wire causes unnecessary distortion, it wastes wire, it wastes time, and it makes things harder to take apart and repair.

A steel weld has a tensile strength of 70,000 psi, so how much do you really need for your little project?

My new cart has 4 wheels, and I want one pair to be farther apart than the other to make the cart more stable. To accomplish this, I put a long crossmember under one end, and I welded the casters to it. To make it elegant instead of amateurish, I cut recesses into the bottom of the crossmember, welded 1/4″ plate rectangles into them, and I attached the casters to them.

The whole thing will rest on 1″-thick tubes, and I could not weld the casters to the tubes without a lot of fabrication unless I wanted one end of the cart to be 1/4″ higher than the other. With the plates set in recesses, the tubes and plates are 1″ thick, matching the tubes at the other end of the cart.

I used 4 3/4″ beads of weld to attach each plate to the crossmember. This was way more than I needed, but I couldn’t make the welds much smaller. When I was done, it looked fine, but it didn’t look anything like as good as long welds that completely filled the joints.

I got myself some epoxy putty, crammed it into the joints over the actual welds, and molded it smooth. Now after the paint goes on, it will look like I have gigantic welds, but I won’t have distortion or a half-empty wire spool. Pretty neat.

I spent some cash on JB Weld putty, but I don’t care. It was for fun. I could have used Bondo and saved money, I suppose.

Today I attached the upright tubes that will hold up the platform that restrains the tanks. There will be two shorter tubes in front of them. The rear tubes have to be long to use the original screw points on the tool chest I’m using as the heart of the cart.

The tube on the left will be behind my plasma cutter, which will occupy one spot on top of the chest. This tube is long because it will hold up an air filter for the cutter. The filter has been bouncing around on the floor ever since the cutter was new.

All the hard work is done. Making the platform is easy, and so is attaching the front tubes. I’ll put some bits of angle iron on the platform to keep tanks from sliding, and I may add some similar features to receive the ends of TIG tubes, but I probably won’t. I will not be using this cart for TIG, so I don’t see any reason to clutter it with TIG stuff.

Once this is done, I can take my old cart apart and add a long crossmember to it. I may also lower the platform that restrains the tanks. It’s fine for 120-cubic-foot tanks, but shorter tanks are too low to fit. I didn’t think about that when I build the cart.

I have yet to see another cart on Youtube or anywhere else that appears to be as well-designed as mine. People do a lot of things that seem counterproductive.

Some people will take a small rolling chest and put a table over it. That makes no sense to me. Fabricating produces spatter, slag, and filings. If your welder and other tools are under your table, all that stuff will fall on them, and you won’t have much room under the table for things that project through it, like clamps.

A welder under a table will also be hard to work with. The dials and so on will be way down at knee level. Everything will be in the dark.

I have 5 angle grinders under my table, hanging on metal bars I added to it. This is no problem, because grinders are made to handle grit and crud. I considered putting a storage shelf down there, but it would fill up with nasty stuff in a hurry. Even if I used expanded metal to let things fall through, whatever I put on the shelf would be covered.

The grinders are incredibly handy. I have a grinding wheel, a cutoff wheel, a flap wheel, a stripper wheel, and a die grinder arbor on them. They’re connected to a power strip I attached to the table, so they’re always ready to go.

I’ve also seen people put tool chests inside extremely heavy tube frames. That’s crazy. Tool chests have frames built into them. An additional frame adds weight and size while providing no additional functions worth having.

Some people put clumsy hangers all over their carts. My cables drape over my tanks very nicely. Hangers would get in the way without doing anything the tanks can’t do.

Some of the Youtube carts I’ve seen remind me of Dr. Seuss’s Electro-who-cardio-shnoox. I may be spelling that wrong. All sorts of doodads and attachments that seem cool but actually get in the way and provide no benefit.

The dumbest cart I ever saw was a Chinese Snap-On. It’s basically a cabinet with a fixturing table on top. You shove your welder deep into the cabinet, and you weld on the table. Some poor Youtube guy bought it, and he was proud of it. The Snap-On disease leads to very poor decisions.

His welder was way under the cabinet where it was hard to get at, and he had about 4″ of useless space between the top of the cabinet and the underside of the table. The storage consists of three little drawers.

The table is about the same size as my $180 Northern Tool table, but it’s over twice as thick. Big deal. I weld heavy stuff just fine, and my table came with some useful clamps.

I have developed a lot of confidence on this table and the $56 table that preceded it, so if I want a new table, I won’t be afraid to build it myself, and it won’t cost Snap-On money.

The video guy paid $1400 for his welding station, and he truly believed he had done something smart.

Many, many people buy Snap-On products for the exact same reason women will pay $3000 for a Chanel purse. If you’re a woman and you’re thinking of marrying a man who loves Snap-On tools, make sure he’s rich, because he likes pouring money down the commode.

I don’t like the way Snap-On takes advantage of insecure blue-collar people who don’t understand the way money works.

Anyway, if the weather is bearable tomorrow, I may finish the metalworking on this cart, and then later this week I can do the paint. I can’t wait to finish it and get rid of the open cart it’s replacing.

I just realized I put those tubes on the wrong sides of the platform!

Oh, well. It’s always something. Looks like the job will be 30 minutes longer than I had hoped. I generally make one big mistake per day, so this is nothing unusual.

Switzerland or Bust

I haven’t been here in a while except to check comments. I wrote a few things and then discarded them.

Things are going well. Rhodah and I are preparing for our next trip. The Italian Embassy in Zambia assured us she would be granted a visa, so we hope to visit Paris, Lucerne, Florence, and Rome later this year. I will be going over old ground again in this post, but it helps it to stand on its own.

The European visa system has been confusing for a long time, but covid made it worse because various countries did their own thing with regard to restrictions. For a long time, we did not understand any of it very well. For a while, I couldn’t go anywhere with or without her because covid paranoia was at its height, and travel to the better destinations was forbidden for everyone. Then countries started opening up and coming up with all sorts of different rules, and they were harder on Zambians than Americans. Now things are sort of normal in most places, but it’s still hard to get nice countries to let Zambians in.

When we tried to plan the upcoming trip, we originally thought we would try Israel, with Italy and Greece as backups. Then we got absorbed in Italy and Greece and let Israel go. The Italians said they could give us visas for both Italy and Greece, and they have an embassy in Lusaka, so we worked with them. Other countries would have made her mail her passport to South Africa or Zimbabwe. We thought that would cause an unacceptable delay. Then we found out the Italian process was slow.

The embassy employee who interviewed Rhodah got very upset with us because we had not bought airline tickets. We made hotel and tour reservations, but we didn’t buy flights because they are nonrefundable and we were not sure we would be approved. We had been rejected by other countries in the past. The employee said failing to buy tickets was a major reason. She said we had to buy tickets and then try again.

Now we have tickets, so if they don’t let us in, we can kiss a large sum goodbye.

While we were playing this game, we learned that any Schengen area country can grant a visa for any other Schengen nation. The Schengen area is almost the same as the EU; it’s a bunch of European nations that cooperate in travel and immigration matters. There is no such thing as a visa for one Schengen country. If Spain says you can visit, you can to go Sweden or Poland or any other Schengen destination. We had been given the impression that Italy could only get us into a few countries, and that’s why we chose Greece for the second segment of our trip.

Greece is a wonderful tourist destination, but who wants to go in summer? Knowing we could do better, we decided to go to France and Switzerland instead.

If you have to apply for a visa before traveling, like many non-Americans, you have to choose one main destination. You have to spend more time there than anywhere else. For example, if you spend three nights in Spain and two each in Sweden, France, Germany, and Austria, Spain is your main destination, and you have to get your visa through Spain. If you spend equal amounts of time in Spain and Germany, but you enter the Schengen area through Germany, Germany is your main destination.

Once you’re in Europe, there are no border checks. Or so I am told. You can go wherever you want. If we wanted to, we could forget Italy entirely and spend most of our time in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, if you say a country is your main destination, and then you spend more time somewhere else, the authorities may find out, and then you may have a problem when you take your next trip.

They say they’re trying to prevent smart tourists from overloading embassies that are known to be easy. It’s silly, really. If France trusts Belgium to ascertain that I’m not a terrorist or potential illegal alien before a trip to Belgium and France, with Belgium as the main destination, France should also trust Belgium if I decide to spend more time in France. This is obvious.

In any case, we will be spending more time in Italy than anywhere else, so the Europeans should have no problems with us in the future.

The Italians make hoteliers and short-term landlords inform the local police of the identities of their foreign guests, so I suppose the government would know if we cheated. I’m not sure.

We will be celebrating our anniversary in Europe, belatedly. Don’t worry. I’m bringing a present. I got Rhodah some really nice dishtowels. They’re factory seconds, but you would never know it.

In other news, the saga of the tractor may be coming to an end.

My tractor needed a skid steer quick attach mount in order to be really useful, so I installed one and modified the bucket to accept it. Buying a new bucket was not possible because of Joe Biden and the apocalypse. The installation and fabrication were unpleasant tasks.

At the same time I decided to make these changes, the steering cylinder started spurting fluid, so I had to take it out and have new seals put in. This was surprisingly hard, because Kubota puts its cylinders in the wrong place. I could not replace the seals myself because Kubota won’t publish specs, so I had to pay a shop.

When I got the cylinder in, I turned the steering wheel to move it so it would line up with the attachment points. The rear end of the cylinder ran into my engine’s front gear case and knocked a little hole in it, and engine oil started shooting out. For several weeks, I have been trying to get it fixed.

I could just call the dealer and tell them to take my life savings, but I thought I could fix it. I bought a new cover and cleaned it up and painted it, and I got all the gaskets and so on. I removed the tractor’s top cover, radiator, and fan. Then I learned that the bottom two bolts on the gear cover were buried between the frame sides, behind the front axle.

No problem, right? You undo a few bolts and move the front axle forward.

Wrong. You have to remove the front half of the tractor’s frame from the engine and move it forward. Mind you, my tractor’s engine can’t be started until the oil is contained, so I can’t run the hydraulics, and I can’t get the front loader off without them.

In short, it’s not going to work.

I had a guy out here claiming he could fix it, but he vanished. Does’t return emails or texts. Phone won’t accept voicemails. He is gone. It’s either me or the dealer.

I finally decided to get some steel-reinforced epoxy putty and jam it in the hole, which is very small. As far as I know, oil in an oil pan is not under pressure, so it should just be a matter of creating a seal. People say epoxy putty works, so I’m going to try it.

If it works, I’ll put the tractor together and keep using it while watching the oil. Then when the weather is cool, I’ll decide whether I want to do anything else to it. It may hold for the life of the tractor.

If I can’t get it to hold oil, I’ll give up and pay the dealer right away. But I don’t see how it can fail.

I don’t want to keep fooling with it in this heat. The sun bakes the area where the tractor is sitting, and for some reason, it seems it always starts raining as soon as I walk outside. The bugs are pretty bad, too. I would rather deal with this problem in October or November. January would be ideal.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot for trying to fix the tractor myself, but that’s not right. You’re supposed to try to fix things yourself. I probably saved $1500 fixing the steering cylinder, because it involved removing a lot of parts from the tractor. Over the years, I’ve saved a huge amount of money doing things myself. I cut and moved trees. That’s incredibly expensive. I installed appliances. I did electrical work. I painted. I mowed. I fixed small engines. I used woodworking and metalworking skills to make things instead of buying them.

When you do things yourself, you will sometimes make an expensive mistake, but over time, you come out way ahead, and you become much less dependent and helpless. I apologize for nothing.

I paid a couple of guys $6000 to dig a trench and run 120 feet of wire to my workshop. That was insane. Once the wiring was in and I had 100-amp service instead of the old 50-amp service, I installed outlets and a big breaker box myself. I installed overhead pneumatic lines with multiple drops. I could have done the wire run, too.

I built a shooting platform with a steel roof. It will outlast the pyramids. I built a shooting bench out of thick-walled 2″ square tubing and pressure-treated 2 by 6 boards. If Jesus delays, it will be in use 200 years from now.

I don’t care about making the tractor worse. It’s part of the cost of not being useless.

I had a big oak in front of my house, and it snapped maybe 20 feet up. The upper part got stuck in a horizontal position. The cheapest price I got to drop it on the ground, with no bucking or disposal, was $800. This would have been a 15-minute job. A tree company could do fabulously well charging $200 for 15-minute jobs. I would have been glad to pay that much.

I ended up using a fishing rod to cast a line over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a rope up. Eventually, I had a huge towing strap on it, and I pulled it down with the tractor. Cost: nothing. Cutting it up and moving it probably took an hour. After that, I felled the upright part myself and got rid of it. I still have the stump, but the $800 job would have left it as well.

I can rent a skid steer or excavator and rip up every stump and rock in my yard for under $500. Better than stump grinding, which leaves material in the ground. I’m planning to do this once the tractor is working. I need it to move the wood.

Sometimes I think about buying a new machine. A tractor is a pretty poor all-around tool for this farm. It only lifts 1500 pounds on the loader, and it can’t hold a light to a skid steer or excavator when it comes to digging and unearthing.

Someone told me I should get a telehandler. This is like a skid steer, but it has a telescoping arm on top of it. You can put skid steer attachments on it. You can use it as a forklift and put a car on top of your house if you want. They’re not great for digging, though. They’re about like skid steers. You can move a lot of earth as long as you like shallow holes.

A skid steer would be nice. It would pop big rocks and stumps out effortlessly, and it would be a good forklift. It wouldn’t dig deep holes like an excavator, though, and it would duplicate some of the tractor’s functions.

An excavator would tear out rocks and stumps, and it would let me dig any kind of hole I wanted.

I think the best machine, though, is a true backhoe. There are fake backhoes which are really tractors, and they’re not that great. They call them “TLB’s.” Tractor-backhoe-loader. A real backhoe has a backhoe boom attached to its frame. A TLB has a wimpy three-point attachment, and people complain about them all the time. A real backhoe can exert 5 tons of upward pressure with the lip of the front bucket. A tractor is doing well if it hits 1.5 tons. No comparison.

A real backhoe would push fairly big trees over, making it unnecessary to fell them with saws. Pushing them over would remove the stumps from the ground, solving an enormous problem. If anything remained in the ground, the front or rear bucket would make very short work of it.

A backhoe is great for digging. You can dig a hole for a swimming pool or septic tank with one.

I could use a backhoe to move my berm and make it higher. That would be hard with a tractor.

You can get a decent used backhoe for between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, and you can sell it for about what you paid when you want to get rid of it. That’s a deal, compared to renting by the day or paying someone else to run a machine.

The key is not to have any expensive mechanical problems while you own it.

Something to think about for the future.

Anyway, once the tractor is functioning, I will build a fork attachment for it and start cutting unwanted trees. After that, I can think about machinery to pull the stumps.

Top This

I guess it’s wrong to brag, but I have to say something about my wife.

We got married one day ago, last year. Yesterday, I thought it was July 11, so I didn’t mention our anniversary when we talked. Later in the day, I saw I was wrong about the date, and I knew she was supposed to be in bed, so all I could do was send her a text.

Guess what? She had forgotten it was our anniversary.

She also forgets her birthday.

I will never have to sleep on the couch because I forgot a date.

Sorry, guys. This one is all mine.

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

The festival of sudden inconvenient repairs continues here at the compound.

Let’s see. I put in a new air conditioner last week. My garden tractor’s alternator quit. My other tractor still has a broken front gear case, and the steering cylinder is not connected. I had to clean my roof gutters. I had to fix a windshield leak on my Dodge Ram. I am still trying to build a new welding cart.

My well pump’s expansion tank pipe broke three days ago, and I had to fix that. Day before yesterday, in a completely unrelated surprise, the pump stopped working. I found out the on/off switch was a mess, and the pressure switch didn’t look too good, either. Worked on it in the heat and humidity until I realized it was going to require an expert.

The pump guys came, and they put in a new pressure switch and replaced a burned relay. Along the way, they learned that the check valve was finished, so that accounted for the rest of the $392.50.

I still have to replace the on/off switch. I am tempted to leave it as it is; three sets of wires held together with wire nuts. The circuit breaker is 25 feet from the pump, so the on/off switch is more or less redundant.

I will put a new switch in anyway.

Before the pump guys arrived, I had to bathe in the pool twice. After they fixed the pump, I thought everything was grand. My bidet attachment was working again. That’s something you really miss when it’s gone. I thought I was in for some smooth sailing. Then I noticed the water on my bathroom floor.

I had been using a bucket and pool water to flush the can, so I thought I had spilled water on the floor. No; no such luck. The toilet was leaking where the fill valve met the tank. I tried to fix it last night, and then I gave up and shut off the water supply. This is why I have a guest bathroom.

Today, I fooled with it again, and I got some wonderful news.

I have a Briggs Vacuity toilet. This is a green marvel from the infancy of hippie-approved toilets. Under the hood, there is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would drive Montgomery Scott himself to find a way to freebase Romulan ale.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. Inside the porcelain tank, there is a smaller plastic tank. Inside that tank, there is an upside-down plastic jug. There is an air tube that comes up from the bowl.

Because of the plastic tank, you can’t get by with a single gasket that surrounds the fill valve pipe inside the porcelain tank. You have to have a gasket between the plastic tank and the porcelain. Guess what that gasket does. It goes bad. Guess how you replace it. You remove the entire porcelain tank, remove the plastic tank from the porcelain, install the gasket, and put it all back together. Along the way, you have to replace a bunch of other gaskets because only an idiot replaces one gasket when he has something taken apart.

Guess what the geniuses at Briggs did. They stopped selling gaskets. This toilet is unbelievably stupid, and Briggs knows it. They abandoned it.

That’s not completely true. You can still buy other parts that can’t save the toilet once the $1.51 unobtainable gasket goes bad.

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

I looked at this thing for a long time, and I came up with ideas.

1. Take the tank apart, cut off all the environmentalist bits of plastic except for those required to make the toilet function, plug the vacuum-tube hole permanently, and reassemble what’s left as a normal high-flow toilet. This will happen eventually, but not today, because I needed my toilet ASAP.

2. Buy a big rubber washer with a 1″ hole and put it on the outside of the toilet around the fill valve pipe. The other gaskets are all inside the tank. If there is a good solid gasket on the outside, they become irrelevant. I suppose some water inside the tank will go where liberals don’t want it to go, because it will be able to move from the plastic tank to the porcelain tank, but it will fill and flush just fine, it won’t run, and it won’t leak, and also, who cares what liberals want?

3. Buy and install a new toilet. I have never installed a new toilet, and this is not the weekend to start.

If I did buy a toilet, it would be a Toto one-piece toilet.

I have had two Toto toilets in the past, and they made defecation something to look forward to. They worked flawlessly, they were comfortable, they came with slow-close lids, and I’m pretty sure they would have flushed bricks.

Toto is a Japanese company, and we all know the Japanese have a sick obsession with quality toilets. They make toilets that massage and sing and so on. Japanese toilets are the Swiss watches of toilets.

Today I learned that one-piece toilets are totally superior to two-piece toilets. They are much more reliable. That’s all I need to know. There is no more important toilet attribute.

I think I should eventually try to convert one of my Briggs socialist hippie toilets to full-flow, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll install one Toto a month until they’re gone.

I really hate all the green garbage they’re selling us. Green products don’t work. They cost more. They kill American jobs. They kill great companies that employee huge numbers of people. They waste a huge amount of man hours, materials, and resources, just so we can be fashionable. Yes, there are fantastic green products, but we never seem to get those until our landfills are full of the bad green products that came first.

I am hoping I can go to bed tonight. I mean, just go to bed. Without hearing funny noises from the air conditioner or seeing water on the carpet or smelling smoke or having the ceiling collapse.

It’s a Saturday, and that’s bad. Friday night is the most likely night for something expensive to fail, and Saturday comes next.

In better news, I had a great Christian encounter today.

Five years ago, when my dad and I moved here, the man who owned the house sold me his two tractors and utility cart. He offered all three for much less than the big tractor alone was worth. I had to have someone look the machines over before writing the check, so I Googled and found a mechanic.

He checked the machines out and said they were okay, I sent him money, and that was that.

When I damaged the Kubota so badly I was no longer willing to try to fix it myself, I thought of this mechanic. I called him, and he said he would take the job. It took weeks for us to work things out, and he arrived today.

While we were talking, it became obvious to me that he was not a Democrat, and that meant he might be a Christian. I steered the conversation toward God, and then things took right off.

Like me, he has met Jesus. I mean personally. I don’t mean he suddenly believed and calls that meeting Jesus. Jesus himself came to him.

He was a kid, and he and his friends fished together. They liked to fish under a bridge. Over time, they had dug back into the dirt under the bridge, creating a little cave they could sit in. The mechanic, whose name is Paul, couldn’t go with them one day, and on that day, a truck crossed the bridge while they were sitting under it. The cave collapsed, and they all died.

Later, Paul prayed about it. He was very disturbed. While he was praying, something came to him and started trickling into him. While it was there, he felt complete peace and love. He knew nothing bad could happen to him while it was there.

I told him it was Jesus, because the same thing had happened to me. He agreed, saying that was what he had thought.

We must have spent an hour and a half talking about this. We learned we had a lot of common interests. He showed up in a 28,000-pound Dodge truck with a crane and a Miller Bobcat welder/generator on it. He loves guns and shooting. He hates what the world is turning into. His wife home-schooled his kids.

My buddy Mike is living here now, and I got him to come over and meet Paul so they could share their experiences.

I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but for the first time since I’ve moved here, I felt like I had met someone I wouldn’t mind knowing.

Later, I was talking to my wife on Whatsapp, and I told her about it. She said that when she has an encounter like that, she has an unusual feeling: the feeling that she and her new acquaintance can be close. Good friends. I didn’t coach her. She said that before I told her what I had felt.

We prayed for Paul and his family. I told him a few things about the Holy Spirit and tongues. Maybe it will go somewhere.

He didn’t fix the tractor because there was an issue he was not sure he had the tools to handle. He usually works on big machinery, not little tractors. He called a friend of his who works on small machines, but he didn’t get a call back while he was here. We agreed on one thing: we would get it done.

I felt a lot better about the accident. God used my broken front gear case to bring Paul here when he needed to talk to me and have my wife and me intercede for him and his family. The repair may cost me as much as a couple of grand, depending on who ends up doing it. The dealer might have to be involved. I don’t care. If God is behind what’s happening, it’s more important than a little money.

Can Anything be More Obvious?

How do I know the future of the world is grim? Because God is teaching us very clearly, using harsh measures indicating a loss of patience, and instead of repenting and receiving his love and blessings, most of us are working hard to convince humanity that we are not doing anything wrong. For example, there is a huge campaign on, dedicated to convincing the world that homosexuals are doing everything right, that Christians are evil, and that God, if he exists, is either a tremendous fan of sodomy or evil and weak.

Well over 99%–that’s 99, not 90–of the people who are getting monkeypox these days are homosexual men. On top of that, the disease used to show up first on people’s hands and faces, but now that homosexuals are getting it, it generally appears on the anus, genitals, or mouth.

Syphilis was a punishment, but the message it sent was not as clear as the monkeypox message. When you get syphilis, the first sign is a chancre, and while it may appear on the body part you used to get the disease, it may appear somewhere else. Monkeypox is like God’s red pen, circling the things people misuse.

The unsaved world is showing its transparent hypocrisy by doing two things at once. It’s trying to tell us this is not a gay epidemic, which is false, and it’s also screaming that homosexuals need to be protected because they are particularly liable to get sick. One message contradicts the other.

When your group forms over 99% of the cases, yes, you are in more danger than everyone else. Just a little.

I’m not sure what more God could do to show us he is against homosexuality. Is he supposed to create a disease that makes sores that spell out “abomination” or “come back”?

The rest of us are not going to get monkeypox because we don’t do what homosexuals do. It’s that simple. Anonymous sex with multiple partners per day is what spreads it, and while this is a normal part of homosexual life, it’s very hard for heterosexuals to do these things. Not enough women will go along with it.

Romans 1 explains how we got where we are. When a nation abandons God, he stops restraining homosexuality, and then it ends up like America and Europe. It loses his favor. You can live a life of favor inside a nation that rejects God, but you can’t expect the nation itself to do well.

A day or two ago, I was talking to my wife about the epidemic, and I told her sick homosexuals were appearing in news stories, claiming they wanted to educate people. I found an article to show her. It contained two photos of an impeccably groomed man with a huge, feminine grin on his face.

The article said he was a health care professional and that he also had AIDS. For political reasons, AIDS is usually called HIV, but it’s still AIDS.

In the comments, people were saying really stupid things. One person said “awareness” was the answer.

Okay, the man in the story was a nurse. It didn’t say he was a nurse, but he was a homosexual man in health care, and the article didn’t say he was a physician, so I’ll make the assumption. He works in an environment where people are very well informed. He was born long after everyone knew exactly how AIDS was transmitted, and he still got it. He knew how monkeypox was transmitted, and he still got it.

How is awareness the answer when homosexuals still get all sorts of diseases we all know how to prevent?

Two things are lacking: self-control and responsibility. If you can’t control yourself, you will do self-destructive things. We all do them, because we all lack self-control in some areas. If you don’t care, you will also do self-destructive things.

Awareness doesn’t help people who can’t stop harming themselves or who refuse to try.

Yahoo used to host comments on its news stories, and then they stopped because they got overwhelmingly negative responses to wokified propaganda stories. For example, when they ran preachy stories about a mentally ill young man who had his penis and testicles removed and claimed he was a woman, people in the comments called him “he” and “it.” Yahoo has finally restored commenting, but now they have people who are authorized to delete other people’s comments arbitrarily.

Just to see what would happen, I put some comments up. I have been deleted several times today.

I wrote things that are facts every reasonable person accepts regardless of their beliefs, and I also said some things about God, hoping to wake people up.

Here’s a rejected comment:

There are no disgusting diseases associated with Christianity. Homosexuals get AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, HPV, chlamydia, and other things heterosexuals haven’t even heard of. CDC: “In 2014, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men accounted for 83% of primary and secondary syphilis cases where sex of sex partner was known in the United States.” You’re doing something wrong.

Those things are all facts. Christian living does not spread any known venereal disease. Homosexuals get all sorts of VD. Look it up. The quote came from the CDC, which supports sexual perversion. “You’re doing something wrong” is factual and self-evident. You don’t get sick from a disease you can easily prevent unless you’re doing something wrong.

Rejected.

Oddly, Yahoo published abusive comments from other people which insulted homosexuals very personally. It’s as though they’re more afraid of useful but inconvenient facts than they are of genuine abuse.

In 2022 America, the person who has big sores all over and inside his anus, and sores on his genitals and mouth, is deemed to be exercising excellent judgment, but the person who provides useful scientific information as well as well-intended advice concerning God is an enemy of society.

God told me this a long time ago: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

God is thrilled to welcome and help repentant homosexuals. He doesn’t care what you’ve done in the past. What he won’t do is embrace and protect you when you persist in sin and call him and his servants liars. The sacrifice of Jesus covers sins of which we repent. It has no effect on sins we deny committing.

Homosexuality is not our big problem. Our problem is that we turned against God long ago. Homosexuality is just a symptom of the disease that is our nation’s idolatry. Anger and cruelty are also symptoms. Shortages are symptoms. Our nation’s sudden weakness in the international arena is a symptom.

My guess is that by the time a nation falls in love with homosexuality, all hope for it is gone. Our current national state of mind evinces a level of depravity and delusion that we probably can’t recover from.

The other day, my wife and I were studying Ezekiel. He prophesied, saying he saw a great eagle which had its wings plucked and then stood on the ground like a man. That sounds like America to me. We used to soar over other countries, but now the backward Chinese push us around. Our cheap energy, which set us apart, is gone. Our borders barely exist. People who are barely smart or informed enough to walk and breathe overrun our cities and make the police kneel.

Through Ezekiel, God compared his people to whores, but he also said they were worse than whores. He said they were like adulterous wives. A whore doesn’t owe a man loyalty or love. A wife does, so a wife who sleeps with other men is much worse than any whore. This is why God told the Jews to kill adulterous sluts but allowed whores to live. America and Europe are like sluts who cheat on good husbands. We used to make some effort to be faithful to God, and we stopped. We knew we belonged to him, so we can’t say we didn’t know what we were doing.

Religious fanatics used to carry signs that read, “The End is Near.” Things are different now. We should carry signs say, The End is Here.” Things are going to get worse, the rapture will come, and then life on Earth will be so bad, people will pray to die. Some people will run to God and be rescued, but most will stay here and suffer torments such as the world has never seen, and the majority of them will go on to burn in hell.

The people who work at Yahoo and Facebook and all the other puny, sadistic, dishonest, arrogant outfits that censor Christians will enjoy their cruelty and the illusion of power for a while, and then the ones who don’t repent will face God’s anger. I wish we could warn them, but there is no way to make them listen.

Almost There…

After the apocalypse started, I lost interest in tools and my other secular pastimes. Now I am feeling more motivated, so I have completed a bunch of projects that needed to be done. I am almost done building my second Harbor Freight U.S. General tool chest welding cart conversion.

Last night I finished most of the welding on the lower part of the project, which is the foundation and the hard part. After this, everything should flow pretty quickly.

Here are some photos. In one, I have the project mocked up with the chest turned on its side. This shows how the parts that form the base go together.

The other photos were taken after the welding was done.

I made a mistake and made one of the rails half an inch too short, in spite of measuring repeatedly. This is a problem highly creative people have. There is nothing that can be done about it. We get distracted and make mistakes.

I was annoyed, and I thought I was going to drive all the way back to the metal place to buy a new tube so I could start over. I felt torn, though. One of the great things about steel is that you can add as well as subtract. Wood is less forgiving. There are some mistakes you can’t fix. If you’re good with steel, you can make things look like they never had to be repaired.

I finally decided to add more steel to the tube. The desire to have perfection was overcome by the desire to overcome. When I was done adding the new metal, I mocked the cart up, and for a minute, I had a hard time remembering which tube had been repaired. From several feet away, I couldn’t tell right away. I call that success.

I had to roll the box on its top to get the rails located and tightened down so I could locate and weld the member that would hold the casters. I couldn’t have gravity pulling the rails down and making it hard to figure out when they were loose on the mounting bolts.

I had a hard time figuring out how to roll the box over without risking bending the metal that protruded from the top. I eventually remembered that I had the styrofoam the chest came in. It was made to fit the top. I attached it and solved the problem.

I didn’t put a ton of weld on the base. It’s always tempting to close things up with weld and make them pretty and as strong as possible, but it’s a stupid thing to do. It causes warpage, it makes things impossible to take apart when you want to change them, and it wastes a great deal of gas and wire.

I still have to close up the ends of the tube the casters sit on. It’s not necessary, but I want the cart to look finished, and I don’t want bugs moving into the tubes.

I should be able to finish all the fabrication today, since the rest of it is simple. I need to make sure the upper platform is the right height for an 80-cubic-foot bottle, and I have to invent a support for my plasma cutter’s filter. After that, nothing remains but paint and gloating.

Confused Danish Preacher Housed with Mexican Criminals

Yesterday, a reader posted a comment saying evangelist Torben Sondergaard had been arrested. I started checking the web, and at first, it looked like a hoax. The story only appeared on obscure wackjob sites, and there were no details. The facts presented seemed inconsistent. I read that the FBI had arrested him for smuggling weapons into Mexico, and I also read he had been arrested in Orange County, Florida, where he was detained in the county jail.

Clearly, Florida does not border Mexico, and smuggling weapons into Mexico would be a federal crime, so why jail the suspect in a county facility?

Today I finally got some confirmation. Torben has a Facebook account, and he put up a post. I will take the liberty of republishing it here.

Torben Søndergaard
July 3 at 9:27 PM ·

BREAKING NEWS!!! – FOUNDER OF THE LAST REFORMATION TORBEN SONDERGAARD HAS BEEN FALSELY ARRESTED AND DETAINED BY THE FBI AND HOMELAND SECURITY AS A NATIONAL THREAT FOR SMUGGLING WEAPONS TO AMERICA… ??????

Hello everyone out there. I, Torben Sondergaard, am sharing this message with you from a phone call in Bakers Jail near Jacksonville, Florida, where I have been detained for two days in isolation after the most crazy days of my life. I don’t remember all the details, so maybe I will be wrong about some of the details I’m saying here, so I need you to forgive me, but I don’t have any pen or anything to write with, so this is just coming out of my memory through a phone call to my wife Lene, so we can get it up here on Facebook and YouTube to all of you out there.

First, I know many of you have heard about it and are praying for me, and I thank you so much. It means so much to me to know that you are out there praying. This Thursday, I was invited to a meeting with Homeland Security who wanted to talk about my asylum case – a case where I, in Denmark three years ago, was accused of doing many things I had not done, and where I ended up fleeing to America seeking asylum.

But then, they suddenly said that the real reason I was there was because they had been notified that I was smuggling weapons from Mexico to America, and I was in shock.

I have been staying in California with my wife and kids and we have just finished up a Bible school over the border in Mexico, where many of our helpers traveled from Mexico to America several times a week, but NONE of them were smuggling weapons, and I have NEVER had anything to do with smuggling weapons. I know NOTHING about smuggling weapons.

But there, they brought it up on the table and said that because of what they have heard, and because of all the crazy things happening in America right now, they see me as a national threat, and therefore they have chosen to detain me. Afterwards, I was put up against the wall, put in handcuffs, and led into a room. Later I was put in handcuffs again on my hands and on my feet, and then brought to Orange Jail where I was sitting on a chair for eight hours waiting, before I was put into a room with twenty other people. This was one of the most unreal experiences in my life. I talked with my wife Lene on the phone and we talked about that maybe God brought me there for a person, and it so happened that I prayed for one guy who got healed and he started to cry and said, “Whoa, God has truly sent you here to me because two days ago I prayed that God would send somebody to me.” So I had a beautiful moment with God even though it was terribly hard.

I almost didn’t sleep that night. The next morning they came and picked me up again with handcuffs on my hands and feet, and put me in a car, and I was driven three hours to Bakers Detention where I am now, where I’ve been sent to isolation for seven days. To come here was a shock. My room is very small. It is 7.13 feet or 2.3 meters. I am in isolation 24/7, where I can come out a half hour per day, and use the phone as I’m doing right now. Otherwise, I have nothing in there. The room is very dirty and moldy. I have not talked with the lawyer yet and I actually don’t know what is going on yet.

But, I want to say to all of you out there, I’ve tried many crazy things in my life, but nothing like this. I want to encourage you all to pray for me and stand together with me, because this is an attack on me because I’m preaching the Gospel. I am encouraged, because Jesus says, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 10:16-20, 23) And He also says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

(Matthew 5:10?-?12) This is what is happening right now.
It has been hard, and it is hard, but I also see that God is changing me in all of this. To be in isolation, with no windows, and no clock, and talking with no one is just a weird experience. People are sometimes shouting from one cell to another, but it seems like almost everyone here speaks Spanish except for me.

I’m reminded of Paul’s words when he wrote, “But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel, so that it has become evident to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my chains are in Christ; and most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the Word without fear.”

(Philippians 1:12?-?14) Paul said that his chains would give them more boldness, and I’m encouraged that even with my chains, that you will get more boldness to preach the Gospel out there!
This is what I want to say to you out there – BE BOLD! PREACH THE GOSPEL! STAND FIRM on the WORD OF GOD, and please pray for me, and pray for my family. Pray that everything will turn out good here. This will also have an influence on my asylum case, so I will hopefully know more in a few days, and I will keep you updated here on my Facebook page and YouTube.

Again, I cannot answer anything. Please pray for me. If you know somebody in a high position, somebody who can help, then please reach out to us. All communication can happen via email at The Last Reformation website, where I have friends who are checking the emails, and you are also welcome to reach out to my wife.

I have probably forgotten to say a lot of things in this message since I cannot read it, I just have to quote it, so please bear with me. But I want to say, these last days have been something I have never, ever experienced before, and I never thought I would experience – being jailed this way, and for something as crazy as smuggling weapons from another country to America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So please keep me in your prayers, and pray that God will continue doing work in me. I feel that every day He is changing me, and doing great work in my heart. When I do nothing else than sleep and pray and eat. God bless you all out there. Remember my family in your prayers.

Blessings,
Torben Sondergaard

It appears he is in the Baker County ICE detention center in MacClenny, Florida, since it’s a federal lockup full of people who speak Spanish. I don’t think he’s in a county jail.

I very much doubt this man has been smuggling weapons. No one but a lunatic would abandon his own country due to documented religious persecution, move himself and his family to the US, apply for asylum, spend years building a prominent ministry, and use it as a cover to move guns. The very suggestion is just stupid. If you want to make money in America, and you’re a popular preacher, all you have to do is teach the prosperity gospel, and you’ll be set for life. It’s not necessary to risk federal prison.

The Obama administration smuggled guns across the Mexican border. Torben Sondergaard…probably not.

My guess is that some Christian who disagrees with him, or maybe an LGBT activist, made a false report in order to torment him and get him deported.

I don’t bet, and people surprise me all the time, but I think he’ll be out in a few days with no stain on his record.

There is a kooky preacher on Youtube talking about Torben, claiming to be his friend. He calls his group the Gospel Gunslingers, and he is apparently obsessed with armed resistance. He says he’s in Mexico seeking asylum for some reason or other. I have to wonder if he’s involved in this. Would he or his associates do something like this in order to get attention for his movement?

Why would any American need asylum in Mexico? It makes no sense. In terms of human rights, a move to Mexico is a step backward.

The preacher did a long video which was supposedly about Torben, but I quit watching because he talked incessantly about himself. I didn’t get any real information about the arrest. The video was disturbing and came off like an exercise in self-promotion.

God is not telling Christians to shoot it out with the authorities, Antifa, BLM, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, or anyone else. If God were interested in having us form private armies and shoot unbelievers, there would be at least one clue in the New Testament, and there is not. There are plenty of martyrs in there, but no John Wicks.

We and our unreliable AR-15’s are not going to fix America. It’s not going to be fixed at all. People need to understand that so they can spend their time drawing close to God and assuring their salvation.

Honestly, it’s better to be killed and go to heaven than to live like a scared ape or rodent here on Earth, behaving exactly like the hateful people we were put here to reach. This place is disgusting, and it’s only going to get worse. Why would you become a killer just to stay here? Heaven is real. If you are killed, you go there instantly, and you can forget this awful place forever.

I want no part of gunslinging for the gospel or any other cause. It’s true that large numbers of Christians will eventually be killed here in the US, just as we are in foreign countries, but that’s just how things work. Satan is real, and only a small percentage of human beings are outside his control. He will use them to get rid of us during the apocalypse. So what? Jesus told us it would happen, and the same thing happened to him. It’s not a good excuse to start worshiping Eugene Stoner.

If they come for me, all I want are a moment to pray and a good clean kill shot. The Gospel Gunslingers can stay here and suffer if they want. I am ready to go. When I’m gone, they and the leftist nuts can fight over my ammunition and use it to send each other to hell if they really want to.

They have a web page. It says this: “If you found this page, you probably already are a Gospel Gunslinger and concerned about keeping America free and great.”

No, I am not. America is neither free nor great now, and I am not planning to try to change it, because that ship sailed long ago. It beats Somalia at the moment, but I’m not willing to prance around with an AR-15 in order to get lower taxes and an end to gay marriage.

Okay, I found some information about the asylum story. The Gospel Gunslingers guy says he has filed for asylum because Biden is persecuting him as a dissident. I really don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that he’s a tremendous liar and possibly a sociopath.

The Gunslingers guy, not Biden. I realize that was ambiguous.

I doubt Biden knows who he is. I would be amazed to learn otherwise. My gut says this man is just desperate for attention.

I will pray for Torben and his family. It will be interesting to see what develops, especially if the feds identify and try to arrest a lying snitch.

ALPS!

The world of tourism is possibly weirder than ever before.

My wife and I meet in foreign countries while we wait for Uncle (or is it “Aunt”?) Sam to allow her to join me here in the Forbidden Country of Coronavirus Hysteria and Rewarding Illegal Aliens. We had to go to Egypt and Turkey last year because we could not go where we wanted to go, and in March, we visited Ireland. Also because we could not go where we wanted to go.

The Egyptians were great, but the country is insane and really dirty. The Turks were great, and I don’t have any qualifying remarks to add. The Irish were great, but I didn’t want to go to their country, and it turned out to be a better place to live than to visit.

Where did we really want to go? Israel. Unfortunately, Israel, which relies heavily on tourism, punishes people who intend to do evil things such as traveling there and spending a lot of money. They had a long period of extremely neurotic bans and bureaucratic hoops, and as of now, they want Rhodah to ship her passport to Pretoria on the off chance they might see their way clear to allowing us to help finance their embattled nation’s success.

We decided to shoot for Italy and Greece because policies changed and getting her a visa started to look possible. Italy has an embassy in Zambia, and they also do Greece.

Did we actually want to go to Italy or Greece? Well, sure, but they’re not Israel or Switzerland, my top two foreign destinations. And we didn’t want to visit Italy or Greece during hot months. I would make an exception for Israel because it’s dry and because I really like Israel.

Anyway, we are getting her a visa now. We are pretty sure. The Italians assure us we will get it.

Trying to arrange this trip has been a miserable process, as evinced by the fact that it’s July and we are still not abroad. Well, Rhodah is always abroad, being a foreigner, but you know what I mean.

We unintentionally annoyed the Italians by making mistakes, so we are going to have to present our case a second time. It has been nearly impossible to get information from them except when they’re mad at us, so we have been in the dark about the way European visas work. In the US, I can call the Italian embassy and get someone to talk to me, I would guess, but in Zambia, when you contact them, you get confusing emails and an appointment a month or so out, so you do your best with the limited knowledge you have.

It may be that they are very busy. Maybe they’re understaffed because of coronavirus. In any case, you can’t just stroll in unannounced and ask questions.

We have managed to glean some information which may help other people, so I’ll write about it.

We were under the impression that when you visit Europe, you have to get a visa from the country where your plane lands. We thought we would be limited to one or two countries. We thought it would also be impossible to go through other countries by train or whatever. All these beliefs are wrong.

Visas for individual EU countries don’t exist any more. Actually, not EU countries, but Schengen Area countries. The Schengen Area is nearly the same thing as the EU. If, say, Estonia lets you visit, you can hop on a train in…whatever the capital of Estonia is…and go to Paris or Vienna or any other Schengen location.

This was not true during the height of the covid insanity, because there were special rules, but it’s generally true, and it’s true now.

So why do we have to apply to Italy?

We have applied to other Schengen nations, and they turned us down for really bad reasons. We considered Switzerland, and we found out they really torture visa applicants. It’s easier to get clearance to launch nuclear missiles. We were led to believe Italy was more cooperative, and it’s also a great place to visit.

Schengen countries have an official policy: when you go to Europe, you have to apply to the nation where you will spend the most time. They do this to make life easier on themselves. I don’t quite understand it, but I think they may be trying to discourage people from using cooperative embassies in places like Latvia to get into highly desirable illegal alien destinations like Liechtenstein.

Supposedly, Estonia is the most malleable country when it comes to visas, and people know this because Internet. I guess they and other easy countries don’t want to be flooded with applicants who are really going to Germany or France, hence the policy.

Having irritated the Italians with our ignorance, we continued studying the visa game, and we learned that we can visit other excellent and relatively cool (in terms of temperature) destinations with a visa granted by Italy. As great as Greece is, it’s hot, so we have abandoned it, and we are now planning to do France and Switzerland on the way to Italy.

This is a dream come true. Three top tourism nations in one trip.

I would never go back to Egypt except maybe for another Nile cruise and a weekend in Cairo. IN COOL WEATHER, not another 115-degree summer. I could see doing that for nostalgic reasons in a few years, but overall, Egypt is a destination with problems. I would go back to Turkey, but it’s not a huge priority. I would not go back to Ireland unless I wanted to emigrate and they offered me permanent residency, because moving there is more appealing than visiting. France, Switzerland, and Italy are on another level.

It looks like we will be visiting three places I’ve already been, which is fine with me. When you’ve been to a lot of fantastic destinations you know you can trust, visiting new places is overrated. We are also going to Rome, which I somehow managed to miss in the past.

What if we decide to change our plans? It can be done, but the Europeans don’t like it. If you say you’re going to Poland, for example, they want you to go to Poland, even though there are no border checks and you can go anywhere you want.

I wouldn’t want some European to look at Rhodah’s passport the next time we apply, compare the stamps to the things we told the Italians, and find out we went to Austria and Holland and avoided Italy entirely. What if they keep tabs on such things? We plan to make them as happy as possible with our cooperation. But I have a feeling they wouldn’t check.

Now you know how it works. You have to apply to the country where you will spend the most time. You can go to other countries once you arrive. The Europeans want you to keep your word. Whether breaking it will cause problems, I can’t say.

I watched some informative Youtubes about Switzerland today. I almost fell into a trance. I love that place. I wish I could move there. It’s hard to believe heaven itself is more beautiful. The food is good. The people aren’t running around tearing down statues and throwing urine on the police. Capitalism reigns. The economy is stellar. The weather is wonderful. Even the winter weather is nice compared to what much of the US gets.

The Swiss are great at absolutely everything, except probably driving, because their speed limits are pathetic. Everything they make is top-notch. Their houses, buildings, towns, and cities are beautiful.

Of course, Switzerland would be ruined if people like me moved there. My wild Appalachian Scots-Irish-derived approach to life would contaminate the order and offend the Swiss, with considerable justification.

I didn’t grow up in Appalachia, but my people came from there, and the sick parts of the culture have tainted my nature. If I were Swiss, I wouldn’t want people like me to move there. I would disrupt the perfection. “He returned a library book three days late? This cannot happen!”

What can you say about Italy? When most people think of the Renaissance, other countries don’t even enter their minds. For example, they don’t know Shakespeare was a Renaissance figure. Art reached its peak in Italy in the 1400’s, and since then, it has all been downhill. Italy also produced Galileo and pizza.

Maybe there is no point in mentioning anything but pizza. It’s so great, the Renaissance looks silly in the same discussion. It’s like saying, “I finally got my doctorate in astrophysics, and also, I made a mud pie.”

I think Italians are the Southerners of Europe. More full of life than the French and Germans. Better able to enjoy their time on Earth.

I would say Italy stands out because of the ruins of Rome, but Rome is everywhere in Europe because it was an empire, not a country. There are functioning Roman baths in England. In a town named Bath, as a matter of fact.

Paris is one of the prettiest cities in the world, and the French are insanely serious about their cooking. The museums can’t be beat. The people can be annoying, because their reputation for rudeness is based in fact, but you have to blow that off and keep going. And not all of them are rude.

France helped us get our independence, while the British, who are supposedly our best buds, were busy doing the opposite. Our close relationship with England is based largely on misconceptions and people’s opinions of Richard Dawson and Mary Poppins, who, thanks to our leftist-controlled educational system, most Americans believe to be a real person.

I truly hope we please the Italians and get a visa, because they made us to buy plane tickets before they would even rule on our application, and if we can’t use the tickets, that money is gone forever. They claim we will make it.

Maybe this blog entry will help other travelers. I hope so, because there is very little other material of use on the web.

Getting That Law Degree has Really Worked Out for Me

In 2020, I bought myself some steel and a Harbor Freight rolling tool chest and fabbed up a rolling welding cart. I got the idea from Youtube. A bunch of people were attaching bottle platforms and so on to tool chests, and it looked like a great idea.

A typical welding cart is a sad affair. It’s a few bits of steel tubing welded into a box with a platform on top and wheels on the bottom. The welder sits on the platform, at least two feet below eye level, out in the open. Debris falls on it. It’s inconvenient to look at while adjusting controls, changing wire spools, connecting bottles, or moving cables. It has, essentially, no storage. Sometimes they have steel hooks that allow you to hang unruly cables on, and they may have tubes to hold filler rod, but that’s about it. Want to store your clamps, wire spools, extra cables, TIG consumables, welding rods, bottle safety caps, brushes, anti-spatter, or anything else, and you’re SOL.

I’ll post a photo of a Miller cart that retails for $324. It’s awful. Look at the tiny storage container. It’s like a purse a woman takes to a disco when she knows she won’t have to pay for anything.

A tool chest with a bottle platform will hold two welders at the correct height, so you can see the dials and do all the other things welders have to do. It will hold hundreds of pounds of accessories. It gets your machines up out of the way of flying crud. It’s infinitely superior to a cart.

A company called ZTFab produces kits to turn chests into carts, and I saw them back in 2020. They make kits for Harbor Freight chests. You get a bunch of laser-cut parts you have to weld together and paint. The kits don’t provide any support for chests, and they subject them to new stresses they were not designed to handle. For this, I would have paid $310, including shipping but not tax, so call it $330. With a coupon, the Harbor Freight chest required to make it all work would run at least $260.

A bunch of Youtube tool guys were putting these kits together and singing their praises, and my BS alarm went off. The kits are extremely overpriced for what you get, and the designs aren’t very good. I think ZTFab gave these guys kits in exchange for assembling them in videos.

Youtube is full of people who are not used to making money from videos, so it’s not hard to take advantage of popular tubers. A guy who routinely gets 50,000 views is likely to think a company is doing him a favor by giving him $50 worth of steel in exchange for 30 minutes or two hours of video amounting to one or more long commercials. In reality, he’s selling out very cheap. It takes hours to assemble a ZTFab kit, so if you spend 6 hours putting one together and several more hours editing video, you’re working for almost nothing, and you end up with a cart you will probably regret wasting your time on in a couple of months. If you praise the kit unrealistically and ignore the obvious shortcomings, you damage your own credibility and the value of your channel.

I looked at the kits, realized they were pretty bad, and considered the price and the time it took to assemble them. I realized I could do way better. For about $325, TOTAL, I created my own design, and it was far better. Had I gone with ZTFab, I would have spent around $600 and ended up with something inferior.

My 2020 cart can hold 350 pounds of bottles, no problem. The wheels, which came with the Harbor Freight chest, will support 1000 pounds. The chest probably weighs 180 pounds, so if you put truly huge bottles on it, you still have the ability to pack 470 pounds of additional stuff on and in it. The frame I put under it is much stronger than the cart, and it attaches directly to the threaded holes where the chests wheels are supposed to go, so all the force on the chest is upward, exactly as it is in an unmodified chest. There are no funny torques trying to bend the chest’s frame or sides.

The cart is a little different now because the welders are turned the other way. That green bottle is oxygen, obviously, and it’s not on the cart now. I put it there in 2020 because I needed a second bottle in order to test the cart.

I love capitalism, but I thought what ZTFab was doing was underhanded and bad for people’s skills and wallets. I built my cart because I needed one, but I also felt I was avoiding becoming a sucker, and when I made a video about it, I hoped to encourage other people to avoid being taken.

My cart could use one improvement. I lengthened the wheelbase and raised the center of gravity when I added the frame and bottle platform, so I have concerns that the cart could be pushed over when it’s on sloping concrete. The wheels form a rectangle, and rectangles rock from side to side. I want to extend one pair of wheels outward so I have a trapezoid with two unequal sides. Trapezoids don’t like to rock at all, so they are less likely to fall over. This must be why so many factory-made carts are wider at one end than the other.

Anyway, a few weeks back, Harbor Freight released a really nice coupon, so I bought a second chest to hold my other welder and my plasma cutter. I started working on a new cart. When it’s done, I’ll get rid of the Eastwood cart these machines are sitting on now. I paid $50 for it, which was a steal. I bought it on sale for $100, complained to Eastwood about a defect, received a new cart for nothing, and was allowed to keep the old cart, which I fixed. It’s great for $50 or even $100, but it has all the shortcomings of a traditional cart.

It seems like every time I try to work on the new cart, something bad happens, and I end up working on something else. My tractor’s steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I fixed it myself, and in the process, I made a hole in the front gear case, so I decided to hire a mechanic, and I had to locate parts and fix the used gear case I found on Ebay. Today I went outside and saw my well’s pressure tank flooding the side yard. The PVC pipe exiting the bottom had snapped due to truly bad engineering, and the kid I called to fix it was reluctant to come out on a rainy day, so he gave me some tips, and I fixed it myself.

When I was done, I was determined to finish at least one new part for the cart. Today I finished the second rail for the frame.

My design has two extremely sturdy parallel rails under the chest. They attach to the chest’s wheel attachment points. To make this work, I have to weld two small spacers onto the tubes that form the rails. To do this, I have to cut 4″ pieces from 2″ by 3″ tubing with 1/8″ walls and drill 16 precisely located holes through 4 thicknesses of tubing. It’s not easy. I finished one rail earlier this week, and today I finished the second one. With this done, I will weld a bottle platform to them, and I will also put a crossmember on them at the end under the platform, to hold the front wheels.

I’m going to have a shorter wheelbase this time, in addition to making one set of wheels farther apart than the others. I don’t need to have my wheels all the way at the end of the platform, because the platform is incredibly strong, so I’m pulling the wheels back three inches.

When the cutting, welding, and grinding are done, I will have a sort of rolling platform to screw to the cart, which will sit inside and on top of it. I’ll put my other bottle on it, throw the machines on top, and cram all sorts of welding paraphernalia in the drawers. Then I’ll get rid of the Eastwood cart, and my workshop will be one step closer to orderly.

Because steel prices have gone nuts, I’ll have more like $400 than $325 invested, but that’s still a dream price compared to ZTFab. Harbor Freight chests are made in Taiwan, and they’re really excellent. My bolt-on rolling frame will be extremely tough and rigid, not to mention ergonomically superb.

After this, I’ll probably get a Harbor Freight Yukon rolling chest and mount my belt grinders on it. This will allow me to get rid of my sagging Northern Tool plastic cart, which turned out to be incapable of supporting anywhere near the weight claimed in the ads. I’ll probably get a dustproof VFD for the big grinder and abandon the fancy steel-enclosed VFD I put together to use on the plastic cart. I’ll put my grinding belts, tool arms, and other junk in the chest, and order will be one step closer. The dustproof VFD will cost a few hundred bucks, but not everything can be cheap.

After all this, I may weld up a good workbench. I have proven I have the skills to do that. I made a shooting bench which is basically the same thing, and you could literally drive a truck over it. Well, actually, I don’t think the cantilevered axles I created would like that, but it was made for shooting, not holding up trucks. The rest of the structure would be unfazed. A workbench would have ordinary heavy-duty wheels.

If I make a real bench, I can get rid of my extremely heavy and somewhat impractical homemade wooden bench. When you can’t fabricate well, you make a lot of things out of wood when you should use metal.

Once that’s done, I can make a rolling base for my giant table saw, to replace the feeble factory-made base it rides on now. It doesn’t really ride much, because it’s hard to move it. I can make a base that will zip around pretty easily, and unlike the existing base, it won’t make dust collection impossible.

I bought myself a DeWalt rolling table to match my planer, so I will be able to discard the dubious Harbor Freight rolling table I have been using so far. It’s great if you have a completely flat floor and you don’t mind adding welds to it to prevent it from shifting around. I tacked it up, but it still stops every time it runs into a minor imperfection in the concrete.

The DeWalt table costs a lot, but there are some things you just don’t want to fabricate. DeWalt’s table was made for my planer, and it’s designed very well. I guess I could do better, but it would be time-consuming, and the improvement would be negligible.

China builds empty cities full of apartment buildings no one will ever inhabit. It’s fascinating. This is what they do with the money they make from us. It’s incredible. They have reasons for doing it, but the whole enterprise will crash to the ground one day soon, because it makes no sense. It’s sort of like the tulip bulb craze. There are big vacant cities in China, and the buildings will eventually crumble because no one repairs them. The wealth the Chinese think they are building will vanish. I think this ridiculous investment scheme may be why building materials cost so much in America now.

Steel is expected to crash this year, and it has already started. If China’s real estate fantasies implode, steel will be as cheap as pool noodles. I hope it happens before I start my next project.

That’s the news from the compound. Stay safe and pray Jesus gets here before Rupaul is crowned emperor.