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.

You Can’t Choose the People You Help

I had an interesting dream this morning.

I decided to visit a college friend. For some reason, another friend of mine was staying with him, and I decided to go and see how they were doing.

I told the first friend I was coming, and he said something like, “Okay, but lately I’ve been thinking of shooting myself in the head.” He didn’t say it as though he were highly upset. He seemed resigned to it. The decision was made. I could tell he was inviting a response, though. He wanted me to say something so he could list his gripes. He wanted to justify his choice. He intended to explain how unfair life was and how little hope there was.

In a way, he was going to criticize God. I believe he’s an atheist, but atheists generally aren’t sincere. In the dream, he obviously wanted to express resentment, and your resentment has to have an object, even if you’re not sure what it is. When we complain about fate, we treat it like an all-powerful god we feel has done us wrong, so really, we are criticizing God as we understand him.

I prayed for him after I woke up. I don’t know if he’s in trouble or not. He had a somewhat sour outlook on life when we were in college, at least during exam times. For example, he once said he knew he was going to die young from stomach cancer, because that’s what happened to his father.

He’s Jewish and left-leaning, so he’s not what I would call a great target for evangelism. If he were in trouble, I wouldn’t be able to do much for him. The only real answer I have–the one that works–would almost certainly be laughed off.

This is how it is when you know Jesus and you also know Jewish people who complain about their unhappiness. He’s their Messiah. He came from Judaism, not the disgusting pagan cults my ancestors fell for. Still, people like me have him and his protection and blessings, and Abraham’s children can’t be helped.

The descendants of people who ate each other and worshiped rocks and trees know the God of the Jews, and very few Jews know him.

The Day we Prayed for Doesn’t Feel That Great

A couple of days back, my wife had visions. I thought I would post details here in case they turn out to be from God.

She was awake when the visions took place. She was on her couch, and it was during the day.

In one vision, she went into Buckingham Palace. There was a small table there. On the table, there was a small tree. It was not a real tree. It was jewelry. It appeared to be made of white gold, and it had pearls on it, like fruit. One of the pearls dropped off, and God told her there was going to be a funeral soon.

The queen is very old, so I don’t think skeptics will think much of my wife’s vision if the queen dies and fulfills it. There are other royals, though.

In the other vision, Russia attacked Japan. She was surprised, because she thought Taiwan, not Japan, was in danger, and everyone thinks China will attack.

In other news, it is now legal for any American to carry a firearm in every city in America. Thanks to the Supreme Court, New York City’s fascist laws restricting people’s civil rights have been struck down. I assume leftist nests like New York will pull a Brown v. Board of Education and do their best to nullify the decision through specious reading of the opinion. Then there will be more lawsuits.

During the same week the Second Amendment was partially restored nationwide, Roe v. Wade has been struck down. It’s wonderful to hear, but I wonder if it will matter a great deal. My hope is that many lives will be saved. Convenience abortion is murder, and God hates it.

I don’t know if the law itself interests God all that much. Maybe it does. My feeling is that he is more concerned about the sick, evil attitudes of the people who think preventing the murder of unborn babies is wickedness. If our hearts were not twisted and cankered, our laws wouldn’t matter, because women would still have their natural revulsion toward turning their wombs into slaughterhouses, and convenience abortions would not be happening.

When God looks at America, even with Roe overturned, he sees a place where a big percentage of the people think ripping a baby’s belly open and tearing out his intestines while he is still alive is an important practice that should be protected. Is he really impressed that some of us managed to get pro-life justices appointed and that they changed the law? I wonder.

Obama and Biden are encouraging protestors. They appear to think it’s great that actual terrorists are standing outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, threatening their families in order to influence court decisions. It’s not a big shock that Biden would back them, because he is something of a dunce, as shown by his 11th-percentile law school class ranking. Obama, while not known to be highly intelligent, is certainly brighter than Biden, so he must be aware that he is supporting the destruction of the legal system and our judiciary branch. It’s disgraceful that he would take that position.

It’s remarkable that two extremely divisive, infuriating cases would be decided the same week. It can’t be coincidence. The supernatural world is setting us up for intramural violence. More fodder for the red horseman of the apocalypse.

My wife and I have been reading Ezekiel together this week. It’s amazing how it applies to our time. God was furious at the Jews for chasing evil spirits and worshiping them. He blessed them, and they ran after false gods, gave them the credit, and murdered their children to please them. We are doing the same things. You may not think you’re sacrificing to Molech when you murder your baby, but in a way, you are. You are killing in obedience to evil spirits, in order to get blessings.

God considered the Jews to be idolaters, just like slutty women who committed adultery. He said adulterous women were worse than whores, because whores get paid, while Israel and Samaria paid their false gods.

It’s interesting; the Jewish law says an adulterous woman must be killed, but it doesn’t say that about prostitutes.

America is a monstrous slut these days.

Ezekiel spoke of ancient kings and nations and said God would destroy them, but his words were also aimed at spirits that opposed him and end-time nations that served them. Ezekiel called Satan the King of Tyre, for example. He criticized the King of Tyre and then said he had been present in Eden and that he was the anointed cherub. Obviously, the King of Tyre was never a cherub, and Eden was locked up before the King of Tyre was born.

The Bible is true, but a lot of it is only metaphorically true. For example, God says things that are untrue when taken at face value yet true when understood as metaphor. For example, God said David’s kingdom would last forever, but David died, and his kingdom disappeared. God was talking about the kingdom of Jesus, a descendant of David.

Bad things are coming. They’re already here. When I say they’re coming, I mean they will get much worse. The way to get through it and avoid the pain is to get close to God and develop a loving relationship with him. He is going to end this place and call his own people out of it. You want to be one of those people, and you can become one if you want. It’s not difficult. God wants you to make it.

“Let us Big, Strong Men Tell You What to Buy”

I had a fascinating experience today.

One of my house’s AC systems went out because of a slow refrigerant leak. The system is 22 years old, so it’s a wonder it lasted so long.

Last year, it did the same thing, and a local company sent a guy out. He could probably have convinced me the unit was shot, but instead, he cleaned it up, shot refrigerant into it, and got it working. The cost was under $300, and a new AC system costs more than that when you divide the price by the lifespan, so it was a good deal at the time. He said we would see how things went. Now I know how that worked out. We gave it the old college try.

He was honest with me, so I made a note to remember the company. I will call it Sweatbusters.

I called Sweatbusters today and told them to come out, see if the unit was dead, and give me repair and replacement options. They took a long time, so I thought they weren’t serious, so I called another outfit which showed up in about 90 minutes.

The second outfit, which I will call Freezcorp, sent two guys. A technician and a salesman. Uh oh.

They said the system was kaput. They didn’t offer a repair option. They started throwing numbers like $15,000 around. Keep in mind, this is a 2-ton unit, and I replaced a 5-ton unit for $7000 in 2017.

They said Lennox made the best machines. I needed a Lennox. I also needed a new air handler cabinet, even though the old one looks fine. The salesman gave me the reason: the old one had had a big heavy machine sitting on it for 22 years. They said a new system would have a UV light to kill germs and mold and give me hospital-quality air. They would put one big filter on the air handler so I could stop putting filters in my numerous ceiling returns.

They said I could pay something like $180 per month for Freezcorp to come out and fix the system for nothing. Okay, not for nothing. For $180 per month. This would include changing filters. I have never had any problems changing air conditioner filters. They were willing to finance the job at 7.9%. I don’t blame them. I would like to lend people money at 7.9%, too.

I said I had heard Bryant was a good choice because their units were made by Carrier in Carrier factories. Carrier is supposed to be one of the two best American brands. They said Bryant was made from Chinese parts. I definitely didn’t want a Bryant. Bryant bad. I already have a 5-ton Bryant, so that didn’t sound good.

They finally wrote me an estimate. For $9200, which was a huge discount, Freezcorp would put the system in tomorrow. This was after I rejected the UV nonsense and all the smart idiocy that allows your neighbors’ children to hack your system and set your thermostat at 90° in August at 3 a.m.

I can’t believe anyone wants a smart home. Yes, I’m going to put cameras throughout my house so Russian hackers can film me on the toilet and curse at me while I’m trying to sleep. It’s totally worth it so I can change my toaster’s darkness setting while I’m traveling.

I told the salesman I was used to dealing with contractors because I have rental properties. I said I did not jerk people around. I was going to buy a unit, and it would be this week, but I wasn’t going to make the decision standing in my driveway. I said I would not show his bid to anyone else, and I would get back to him if I was interested.

Sweatbusters finally arrived. No, I did not need a new air handler box. No, I did not need UV lights sterilizing my air. I think he thought I was poor because I complained so much. He said I could have a 14-SEER Rheem system for something like $5600.

I was so ecstatic, I told him to look at 16-SEER and Carrier. He came up with about $7600. It sounded great to me. More efficient and, supposedly, better quality. I asked if $6500 would work, but all I could get out of him was 3%, which was nothing to sneeze at.

I know I said I wasn’t going to make a decision in my driveway, but I did. I said, “Let’s do it.”

He admitted the old unit might be repairable, which was more than anyone else would do. I didn’t care, because I think the world is ending, and if I squeeze several more years out of the old unit, God only knows what I’ll pay for a new one when it dies.

He flat-out admitted the new system won’t last 22 years. He said they’re all Chinese now. Some are assembled in America, but they’re all Chinese.

I probably could have done somewhat better, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the week haggling.

He went to his Sweatbusters truck, got his tools, and checked my refrigerant level. It was two pounds low. He got a jug of refrigerant and pumped it up. No charge. The new system won’t be installed until next week, so he wanted to make the old one run until then. Now the unit will work for another 10 months.

The jug of refrigerant cost his company $1500, up from $400 in the recent past. One Monday, he went to work, and the price had changed. And the supplier was selling old stock it had already paid low prices for.

Anyway, he gave me a week of cool nights for nothing and said they would do it again if the air got hot before the installation.

He told me why Freezcorp wanted me to buy a Lennox. Lennox owns Freezcorp. They can’t sell Carriers even if they want to, and they don’t want to.

I guess naming Lennox makes changing the name of the contracting company pointless.

It seems to me that this is how you do business. You don’t treat a customer like a mechanic treats a woman. Freezcorp treated me like a complete moron. I’ve probably had 8 air conditioning systems installed or given major repairs in the last decade. I’m not that stupid.

My dad got fooled into buying a UV light for his system. I think it cost $1500. It was a galvanized box with a light fixture inside it. Cost to manufacture probably $25. I Googled it. They do absolutely nothing, and even if they did, the tubes go bad fast. I have never known anyone who got sick because his air conditioner didn’t have UV lights. Have you? No. Of course not.

All I wanted was an upper-tier AC system without a bunch of garbage attached to it, and I would have bought it tomorrow from the first company had they given me the option. Instead, they insisted on trying to rip me off. They preferred insulting my intelligence and trying to cheat me to making a fast, honest, and substantial dollar. There are some people you just can’t do business with even if you try.

Mike told me I should have bought the system and installed it myself. Yeah, maybe in February. Not in June. This is not the time to become an instant HVAC tech.

Tonight I will have cool air, and next Wednesday, I will have lower power bills and less concern about the condition of my systems. Even if this system stinks, it shouldn’t start to show it until 2032.

Am I in a position to tell contractors they should do business like Sweatbusters? I don’t know. You can make a lot of money lying to people. Like P.T. Barnum said, there is one born every minute. I guess it’s completely possible to build a huge customer base composed entirely of extremely gullible people. If it weren’t, companies like Bose and Starbucks would not exist.

Why Does an American Hand Grinder Cost $345?

The other day I had to get a bolt out of a rusted nut, and the only way was to destroy it. There was no way to get good leverage to twist it, and it was in a place where I could not heat it. Enter the drill.

My plan was to drill straight down into it through the end. The drill bit would cut into the threads and loosen the remains of the bolt. In order to do this, I needed a way to make the bit center itself in the end of the bolt. Otherwise, it would walk around and give me an off-center hole.

I have a Dumore hand grinder. Tool people love these things. They are American-made tools similar to Dremels, but they’re bigger, and they only have one speed: maximum. My Dumore’s top speed is (was) 25,000 RPM.

I got my Dumore on Ebay. It was barely used. I thought it was a bargain. They sell for $345 new, and I think I paid something like $45. Anyway, it wasn’t much.

The Dumore ran, but it faltered a lot, and I had to spin the spindle by hand to get it started. I figured it had bad brushes or something, so I didn’t send it back.

I got it to run while I was working on the bolt. I used the Dumore to put a cup-shaped hollow in the end of it to keep the drill bit from wandering. After that, I decided it was time to fix it. I checked the commutator brushes, which looked new. On the advice of a forum guy, I filed a little bit off of their ends to make them conduct better. I also cleaned the commutator with Scotchbrite and De-Ox-Id, which is a product made for cleaning electrical contacts.

When I put the grinder back together, it wouldn’t do anything at all.

I thought I had to save it. I had a wonderful American-made industrial tool in great shape, apart from not working. It was worth working on. Surely.

I sought advice and did a bunch of things, and nothing worked. Finally, I looked at the armature wires under magnification. Most of them were detached from the commutator, so there was no hope at all that it would run. Current would not go through the commutator.

I believe this explains the grinder’s willingness to run after I spun it by hand. In order to run, it needed current to go through the armature windings, and that meant it needed them to be connected to the commutator bars. When I spun it, I moved the brushes from disconnected bars to connected bars, and the grinder ran. This is my theory.

I went to Dumore’s site and looked at their parts area. They had a diagram of a similar grinder. The commutator was available, but of course, it was part of an armature. The armature sold for the low, low price of about $128, plus shipping. I contacted Dumore, and they told me the armature didn’t fit my grinder. They didn’t make armatures for it any more. They recommended a guy named Larry, in Detroit. I called him, and he laughed. He said he hadn’t seen a grinder like mine in around 20 years. He did not have any armatures.

I started prying the tiny commutator bars open and soldering the wires back on with a magnifying visor, but then I thought about it. The soldering would take maybe 4 hours, and then I would have a tool which might be unbalanced because of the presence of the solder. The armature had been balanced at the factory, prior to my work, and you can’t balance an armature dynamically at home. An armature which is balanced when at rest may go nuts when it spins. This must be due to other problems in the inertial tensor, which only motion can reveal. My guess. You could make an object with perfect distribution of mass around an axis that still had uneven distribution relative to other references. Imagine a cylinder like a rolling pin with a pound of lead at one end and another pound at the other end, on the other side of the axle.

While I was doing all this, I was also thinking about new grinders. I am not poor. I can buy a $345 grinder. Maybe that was the answer. Bite the bullet. Get it over with. Move on. I would have a great grinder for the rest of my life, and I would never miss the money.

Then I did more studying.

My grinder is about 12″ long. It has a grand total of two bearings in it. It has a heavy plastic body. It has a crummy on-off switch held in place by the pressure of the rear plate, which screws onto the back of the grinder. It doesn’t seem all that great.

People claim Dumore grinders run forever, and what you pay for is the quality of the parts and assembly. They’re smooth. They’re balanced. Unlike other grinders.

Are these things really true?

No. At least it doesn’t look like it.

Guess what Dumore charges for the high-quality bearings in my grinder. They charge about $4.40 per bearing. I’ll tell you something I have learned as a tool person. Really precise bearings don’t sell for $4.40. They are very expensive. Conclusion: Dumore doesn’t use fantastic bearings that last longer or run smoother than regular bearings.

I looked at Makita. Their model GD0603 is about the size of my grinder. It has 25% more power. Guess how many bearings it has. Four. One is a lot bigger than the Dumore bearings, and big bearings distribute wear and heat much better. The Makita’s bearings cost more to replace.

The GD0603 has a nice quality on-off switch. It has a nominal speed 3000 RPM faster than the Dumore. It comes with a wire bail so you can hang it and put a flex shaft on it. It has a two-prong plug instead of three prongs because Makita insulated it properly.

Makita sells every part of the grinder, and it’s easy to take apart and repair.

Wait…Dumore is a high-end company. They put the money in the armature. It’s balanced better than the Makita, and it runs smoother.

Really?

Makita started as an electric motor company, and here is one of the things it was known for: balancing armatures. Makita still balances its armatures dynamically.

Ooof.

Makita also powder-coats its stators so they don’t short out when junk gets in and lands on them. Dumore…not so much.

The Makita sells on Amazon for $124. I looked at reviews. Some guy said he bought his first one in 1998, and he only replaced it recently. Did he have to replace it? I doubt it. Every part can be replaced. Even the armature, which, though BALANCED, costs under $20.

Here is what I can’t figure out: how can the Dumore possibly be worth three times the cost of a Makita? Not only do I not see how it can be better; I can’t see how it could be anywhere near as good. Yes, the Makita is made in China. So what? Makita is a Japanese company, so I very much doubt they make garbage in China, and anyway, grinders are very simple machines.

I got a Makita. I will probably throw the Dumore out. I may get a bigger Makita, too, since I can get both Makitas for a lot less than one Dumore.

Once again, I feel I got stung by the old iron bug. “Old iron” is what stubborn old coots call ancient American tools. They go to their graves making fun of Asian tools and shrieking that anyone who is too cheap to pay the extremely large premium for Caucasian-made tools is a fool. Sometimes they’re right, but the problem is that they can’t tell when they’re wrong, which also happens a lot.

I think the Sino-Japanese Makita is head and shoulders better than the American Dumore ever was. Maybe an engineer could explain why I’m wrong, but I don’t see a way for him to approach the Makita in order to attack. Cheaper. Better bearings. More bearings. Better switch. Insulation. Low noise rating for protection-free grinding. Lower cost. Balanced. Cheap parts readily available. Easily repaired. More powerful.

Why do old Dumores last so long in commercial shops? I think it’s because they have to, just like American cars that last 80 years in Cuba. No one wants to spend hundreds of dollars to replace a hand grinder. A $128 armature and 9 dollars’ worth of bearings make more sense than a new $345 grinder. On the other hand, throwing out a Makita that costs a third as much isn’t intimidating. If Makitas don’t last as long, I think it’s because people can afford to throw them out and replace them. They would probably last as long as Dumores or longer if people felt motivated to treat them well and repair them. I’ll bet if Makita made no changes other than raising the price to $1500, they would last 50 years. People would say, “I paid a lot for that Makita, but I’ve rebuilt it 10 times, and it runs like new.”

If I’m wrong, explain it to me. But you can’t mention the bearings, construction, materials, or balancing, because I’ve already considered those things. Good luck.

Is Your Church Really a Church?

Last night, my wife had an interesting dream.

A number of babies had died, and they were in refrigerators in a morgue. Although they were dead, they cried all night. The crying disturbed the people in the area. Many of the people were also dead. Her late father was there.

Rhodah went to the morgue and opened a drawer that had a baby in it. She told the baby he needed the Holy Spirit, and she laid hands on him so the Holy Spirit filled him.

A giant approached her and tried to make her stop, but she told him she was above him spiritually, and she ran him off.

My interpretation is that the babies are Christians who are failing to grow because preachers teach them garbage. Only a tiny percentage of Christians are getting the truth and power. Most Christians go to churches that tell them sexual perversion is good, that ridiculous Catholic traditions will save them, that the Holy Spirit doesn’t do anything through people any more, and other such slanderous nonsense that keeps people weak and sends them to hell.

The giant was a spirit that runs churches. Its job was to keep Christians tiny and weak and put them in hell. It couldn’t fight Rhodah because she has the Holy Spirit and God’s authority. It was under her heel.

Later, Rhodah watched a sermon and got revelation while she listened. Satan only has power over people who are on Earth or in hell. Once you leave this place and go to God, Satan can’t touch you. There are no exorcisms or healings in heaven. No one needs them.

When we are resurrected, we are far above Satan and every other supernatural power that seems strong in this filthy world.

In other news, I had a bad experience day before yesterday. I woke up at around 5:15, and I decided to pray. I also decided to check Youtube to see if any good Christian content had popped up. My TV has Roku installed, and even though I never agreed to it, Roku’s home screen gives me ads every day.

The ad I saw that morning featured 4 things from the Discovery Channel. Two were advertised using pictures of male perverts in pinkish-blond wigs. They were supposed to look like women. They looked pretty similar even though they advertised different shows.

One of the shows was called “Trixie Motel,” and it features a pervert who calls himself Trixie Mattel. It’s a reality show about a motel, apparently. Another was called “The Book of Queer.” I don’t know what it was about. The third was called “Generation Drag.” Sounds like it’s about our upcoming generation, in which most people will be one type of pervert or another.

The fourth thing was called “Always Proud.” I think it’s the name of the Discovery Channel’s campaign to promote deviant sex. I didn’t check. You can Google it if you care.

I took a picture of the TV, and later I sent it to Rhodah. She looked sad after she saw it, and I asked her why. She said this world was no place to raise children.

That was exactly what I thought when I saw it.

Is this what gay rights advocates were hoping for decades ago, when they crusaded for change? Did they really want to force this kind of thing into our homes? They said they just wanted to be treated fairly and left alone. How well does this jibe with that claim?

Kids use Roku. Now, all over America, they are turning their TV’s on and seeing two sick people advertising sodomy-based programming. No warning. No chance to opt out.

What’s the answer for Christians? Do we give up television? Do we lock up remote controls and select shows before allowing kids to enter the room?

Children are ignorant and driven by peer pressure. They will see those ads and feel they represent normal morality because they’re on TV. Some will resent their parents and ridicule them for being concerned about the ads. Seeds of rebellion will be sown, and some will mature into damnation.

We want to think we raise our kids, but more and more, Satan jumps in and becomes their real parents.

Eventually, sin in a society can reach a point where merely living in that society, without participating in sin, is intolerable to Christians. The everyday world becomes like a pornographic theater. A person can’t avoid being bombarded with filth. What do you do then?

Merely seeing and hearing certain things is harmful. You don’t always have to participate in evil in order to be damaged by it. This is why David said, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me”

I wish I could send a picture of the ad back to Billy Graham in 1970 so he could show it to billions of people and say, “This is your future if you don’t repent.” I don’t think they would believe it, though. In 1970, advertising homosexual entertainment to innocent children would have caused rioting.

Monkeypox is also driving interesting stories. Scientists have decided to rename it because “monkeypox” is a racist term. Supposedly. Monkeypox comes from Africa, and a few people are publishing racist memes comparing Africans to monkeys. This somehow makes the name racist. This is the kind of nonsense our scientists are concerned about.

They are also very worried about stigma. Nearly everyone who gets monkeypox outside of Africa is a male homosexual who exposes himself to it deliberately through mindless promiscuity, so naturally, there is some concern that people will see the epidemic as a gay phenomenon, which it unquestionably is.

You’re not going to get monkeypox. If you think you’re going to develop pustules between your buttocks because you stood behind someone at the grocery store, worry no more. People outside of Africa are getting it through anal and oral sex performed with no precautions whatsoever. If that’s not you, relax.

Of course, if you married a homosexual and don’t know it, or you’re just telling yourself it’s not true, all bets are off.

There is no point in getting angry at homosexuals and stoning them or whatever, because they are not going to give your kids monkeypox without some form of molestation. The stigma is justified, but hostility is not.

Anyway, all over the world, wokester doctors are afraid people will blame homosexuals for the epidemic, which would be correct, so they are trying to think of ways to prevent this while also alerting homosexuals to the danger their behavior presents. I don’t see how this can work, but it’s what they’re doing.

“Attention LGBT people: Trump-pox [guessing at the new name] affects you disproportionately in a very big way, but this is definitely NOT NOT NOT a homosexual disease–REALLY it isn’t–but if you could just stop doing the things male homosexuals do much more than anyone else, or you could make some tiny effort to block transmission (sorry for the microaggression), you would be a lot safer, even though what you do is fantastic and should be encouraged in every first-grade classroom.”

There is just no way to do it.

Deborah Birx, the disease bigwig who clashed with Trump, is now praising the LGBT-etc. commmunity for the way it has handled monkeypox. She says they are incredibly responsible.

Here are some thoughts.

1. Why is “L” even included? Lesbians aren’t getting monkeypox. They may be safer than the rest of us. Lesbians say they don’t have all that much sex. They are not as sex-crazed as male homosexuals. My understanding is that they are more about security and comfort than sex.

2. If homosexuals had been extremely responsible, they wouldn’t have an epidemic. How can responsible people continue to spread a disease, the propagation of which pretty much requires frequent careless sex with strangers?

3. Let me suggest that heterosexuals are the ones who have been most responsible, since we don’t get monkeypox. We fornicate a lot, but somehow it’s still not a problem, so clearly, we are doing a better job of policing ourselves. Unless monkeypox itself is somehow homophobic in additon to being racist.

Rhodah and I are going through Ezekiel now. Ezekiel preached to the Hebrews after the Babylonians conquered them but before they destroyed Jerusalem and took the Hebrews into captivity. In Ezekiel’s time, Nebuchadnezzar was content to take tribute from the Jews and rule them through a puppet king.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah predicted the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. God had put Nebuchadnezzar over them as a punishment and to make them repent of witchcraft and idolatry, which were practiced even by priests, inside the temple. Nebuchadnezzar was their rightful ruler, but they rebelled against him without repenting before God, so God let Nebuchadnezzar destroy the temple, wreck the city, take Hebrews to Babylon, and castrate the princes, including Daniel and his friends.

The Hebrews had set up an idol in the temple itself, and God called it the image of jealousy. Letting heathens destroy the temple was a lot like executing an adulterous wife, which was lawful in that time. It makes sense that God let the heathens take all the holy things away and kill the priests. The holy things and the priests were defiled.

What did Ezekiel predict? Famine, pestilence, and killing. God made the same predictions for the entire world in the Revelation, about 7 centuries later.

By destroying Jerusalem, God was showing us the tribulation.

In Ezekiel, God criticized the Hebrews because they were stubborn and arrogant. He said that if he spoke to other peoples, they would listen and repent. We see an illustration of this in the story of Jonah, in which the king of Nineveh made his entire nation fast and repent in order to avoid destruction. We also see it in the early church, which had a poor start among Jews but then spread rapidly among heathens.

Christians put down the Jews. We like to say we aren’t like them. We say we would have listened to God and that we would have worshiped Jesus instead of killing him. Those things were true of many of our heathen predecessors at one time, but are they true now? Of course not.

We are doing exactly what the Jews did. We have become extremely proud. We have rejected Jesus. Most of us think science has debunked the Bible. We think Jesus and Moses were wrong about perversion and pride. We worship money, the government, ourselves, the environment, and filthy spirits.

There is one big difference between us and the Jews. When the Jews refused to listen, there were still other people God could reach. That isn’t true now. The gospel has been preached to every nation, and it has been rejected. Who is God supposed to talk to now that we have turned him down? Martians?

Since no one remains to become God’s new people, it looks like there is little point in delaying the apocalypse. God allotted two millennia so he could evangelize the heathens, but now there are no heathens left to convert. There are individuals here and there, but there are no new nations left to preach to. Jesus didn’t say he would come back when every person had been reached. He said every people. That has been done.

God commanded the Jews not to harvest the corners of their fields. They had to leave the corners untouched so the poor could eat. The world is now like a harvested field. You can’t go in and convert a nation. You have to pick and nibble at the corners. We are in an age of gleaning.

The Old Testament isn’t just for the Jews, no matter how much major Christian denominations want us to think it is. It exists to teach Christians. It shows us how the universe works. It shows us how God rewards obedience and rebellion.

What happened to the Jews was no surprise to people who knew the scriptures. The books of Moses predicted all of it. Rebels get certain rewards, and God listed them so the Jews would be able to avoid them. The same principles apply to Christians, too. The Jews didn’t listen, and neither have we, so those of us who are in rebellion–the vast majority–should expect the punishments of Ezekiel.

One nice thing about Ezekiel’s prophecies is that he said God sent angels out to mark those who were distressed by Israel’s defilement. The agents of destruction were forbidden to touch them, so they weren’t destroyed by murder, disease, and famine. Presumably, this principle applies today. In the Revelation, God commands the destroyers, “see thou touch not the oil and the wine,” and he seals his children in their foreheads so they are set apart.

Jesus will return. Modern Jews tell us he can’t be the Messiah because he was killed. They say the Messiah can’t be killed. That’s completely wrong. In Daniel 9:26, God says the Messiah will be cut off. This has long been known to be a prophecy about the Messiah. “Cut off” means “killed” in the Bible. The verse says the Messiah will be killed “but not for himself,” indicating he dies because of others. To pay for our sins, obviously.

Jesus died with one week of years of work left to do, and the Revelation says the tribulation will last seven years, to be followed by the thousand-year rule of Jesus. He will come back, take us away with him to rest while the world is purged, and return afterward to rule.

It’s no surprise to hear about a dream in which an evil spirit runs the church. Nearly all churches belong to Satan. Most reject the Holy Spirit, and the ones that don’t are generally obsessed with money. Jesus called the mainstream religious Jews of his time “the synagogue of Satan,” and we are no different.

Ezekiel was told to warn people, but over and over, God told him to warn people whether they listened or whether they rebelled. He made it clear Ezekiel was not responsible for their reactions. He could only be held responsible for delivering the message. God let him know the Hebrews would not listen, but Ezekiel still had to speak. I am warning people, so it’s not my problem if they don’t listen. I don’t expect much. Almost no one has listened to me in the 15 years since I turned back to God, and two terrible pastors who worked for Satan labeled me an enemy of the church.

Ezekiel described God’s wheeled throne, which came to Earth in one of his visions. The throne was surrounded by something resembling a rainbow. I think this must have been the shekinah, which is the glory of God.

Rhodah and I both thought of the connection to the homosexual supremacy trend. By using the rainbow, aren’t they glorifying themselves as gods when they are the furthest things from it?

It’s so appropriate. Homosexuals love glory. They crave attention like no one else. This is why they fill up the entertainment industry.

It’s very unfortunate that they call their movement “pride.” It’s prophetic. It foreshadows what is going to happen to those who don’t repent. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Pride is something to be feared, like melanoma or anthrax. Celebrating it is like celebrating a positive biopsy.

I write these things on Juneteenth weekend. Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. I just found out. The confused weakling Biden signed it into law as part of his continuing work to give himself the most loathsome and pitiable legacy of any would-be dynasty founder in American history.

Biden has dedicated his life to aggrandizing himself and his family, and he seems to have wanted to turn the Bidens into the new Kennedys. His best son died young, his other son is a drug addict and whoremonger who was thrown out of the Navy and will never be anything but a disgrace, and his daughter is a drug addict who says her sexual urges are uncontrollable. Then there is his failed presidency. Nothing he tried to build will be anything but a notable and ineffaceable pile of excrement.

I hate the term “Juneteenth.” It’s a silly, frivolous term. A slang term. We don’t have a federal holiday called “Turkey Day,” but “Juneteenth,” which isn’t even clever, is on the list. It is also called “National Independence Day,” but “Juneteenth” is on the bill that made it a federal holiday.

I wondered why it wasn’t called Emancipation Day, because I thought it commemorated the freeing of the slaves, but I found out that was wrong. We already have a bunch of Emancipation Days. Various states use different dates. Juneteenth is the day Texas recognized emancipation.

So now America has a whole bunch of holidays celebrating the same thing, and we have lost another day of work, at least for government employees and certain others. And we still have MLK Day.

I would be all for a federal emancipation holiday, because the ending of slavery was extremely important, but we have gone way overboard into the sea of wokeness. How many days do we need?

Trump tried to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, too, so maybe I shouldn’t single Biden out, but Biden is much more of a follower, and his legacy is rapidly becoming unparalleled in its vileness.

One problem with creating another holiday centered around black people is that it results in a lot of crime. MLK Day is a day of unrestrained brutality in black areas. Gangs rule the streets even more than usual. Throngs of kids and disgraceful adults ride around on illegal dirt bikes, blocking traffic and committing crimes against helpless victims. People who have grudges settle them on MLK Day because they know the police will be restrained on orders from above. Black people shoot, rob, and rape each other on this day. The press doesn’t cover it much because that would be racist.

Juneteenth is also a day of crime. You can Google and read about the many killings that have taken place in the past. By creating another black holiday, the government has actually guaranteed the deaths of more black people.

Wokeness always causes more problems than it solves. Very sad.

I don’t know how much worse God will let things get before he wraps things up. I hope people who read this will heed Ezekiel’s warning.