What Jesus Really Gave Us

Last night I woke up and started praying. When I pray these days, I spend a lot of time apologizing and thanking God for not destroying me. I ask him to help me appreciate him and fear him more. The older I get, the more I realize how filthy human beings are. We are just monkeys who contain our disgusting thoughts and desires behind a veneer of civilization. Good is in there, too, but if you’re both good and bad, you’re bad.

Here is what Eliphaz the Temanite said to Job: “How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?” That was very accurate.

While I was praying, God gave me a new understanding of what it means to be washed in the blood.

We love to say we are washed in the blood, and we refer to the blood all the time in prayers and blessings, treating it as though it were as expensive as tap water. Last night, I found myself presented with a more accurate conception.

Suddenly, I imagined myself with my arms out in front of me, covered in cool wet, fresh, sticky blood. I imagined my face and hair coated with it, along with all of my clothes. I imagined the smell of blood, thick in the air. Blood has a disctinctive smell. I thought of the fact that this blood had to come out of a person who was cut up for me.

When we say, “Wash me in your blood,” it’s as though we think Jesus can just open a tap and fill a vat for us to soak and scrub in, as though there were a river or reservoir of blood somewhere and a blood company pumped it into our plumbing for a few dollars a month. It’s not like that. Every drop of his blood came out of a single innocent man, through lacerations and punctures made by murderers. He died like an animal in a Satanic ritual, and he had never done anything wrong.

Imagine going to your neighbor’s house, shooting him dead, cutting his head off, and collecting his blood in a bucket. Then imagine reaching into the blood and spreading it all over yourself. That’s what being washed in the blood of an innocent person is like.

Has Kubota Actually Seen This Tractor?

I guess you can’t say you’re a real farmer until you’ve fixed your own hydraulics.

I have done some hydraulic work in the past. It consisted of replacing a rear hydraulic cylinder (“rockshaft cylinder”) on a garden tractor. John Deere welds its small cylinders shut, thoughtfully, so customers won’t be bothered with bad old rebuilding jobs. Instead, you can just buy a very overpriced new cylinder every 5 years and go through the torture of installing it but not the extremely easy and cheap task of rebuilding it.

This is the main reason why I would never buy a John Deere product other than a T-shirt, although there are other reasons which are also pretty good.

I also fixed a leaking fitting on my Kubota’s loader once. That was nice, because fluid used to drip from it constantly, and I got tired of refilling it.

Other than that, I was pretty fortunate until recently, when fluid started shooting out of the Kubota’s steering cylinder so fast, it was not practical to consider refilling it between sessions.

“No problem,” I thought, “Kubota isn’t John Deere. They will not make this unbearable for me.”

Of course, I was wrong about that.

I have a download of a Kubota workshop manual, and its terse, optimistic manuals are a lot like promotional videos tractor companies put out. I wrote about these the other day. They make removing loaders look about as hard as making a gin and tonic. In reality, you may need things like a sledgehammer, a collection of spud wrenches, and a second tractor with a front end loader, and your clothes will be filthy 5 minutes into the job, but they don’t go into that.

Anyway, the manual said I had to remove the radiator, and that meant removing the front end loader, which is nearly impossible on this model. I kept asking people for advice, and someone told me I could get access to the necessary parts without doing all that. This encouraged me to continue trying.

The steering cylinder’s rod has a bit of heavy tubing on the end, and that bit of tubing attaches it to the tractor’s frame. There are a couple of holes in the frame, and a big pin goes through them. The rod end goes between the holes, and the pin passes through it, too. This holds the rod in place.

The pin has a groove around the top, and there is a little piece of heavy plate that fits into that groove. The edge of the plate sits in it and prevents the pin from moving up and down. This keeps your rod in the frame, where it should be. The plate is held down by…well, we’ll get to that.

Kubota said I had to take the radiator out to get to the single (single) bolt holding the plate in. An Internet guy said I just had to turn the steering wheel, and the bolt would reveal itself.

The truth turned out to be unlike anything either of them said. I learned I could access the single bolt by taking out the battery and the platform it sat on. I didn’t need to fool with the radiator. Then I found out there were TWO bolts, not one, and the second one was covered by the plate the battery platform had been attached to.

So the manual said there was one bolt, there were really two, and the second one could only be gripped, badly, by a box wrench. And Kubota put it in way tighter than it had to be, so a box wrench would have rounded it before loosening it.

Amazing.

Did Kubota deliberately make things harder than necessary so they could make more money on labor for repairs? I don’t know. Kubota itself doesn’t do repairs; the dealers do. I would guess Kubota gets the same income, from parts alone, regardless of how long repairs take. And by making warranty repairs harder, Kubota would be sticking it to itself. Which, now that I think about it, is a very Japanese thing to do.

My solution? Making a big ol’ hole. I drilled a 7/8″ part in the plate covering the second bolt, so I could get a socket on it and use a breaker bar.

Making the hole was a joy. No, really. I’m serious.

I did everything right, or at least I tried. I measured to find the location, and I made a dimple with a punch. I used a small drill to make a pilot hole. I used a hole saw to open it up. I used oil and drilled at the proper speed. The pilot drill on the hole saw snapped, and the hole saw bit into the plate, losing several teeth. Okay.

From there, I went to a step bit. I opened the hole up to around 5/8″, but the steps on the bit were too shallow to make a clean, uniform hole, so I had to use two Silver & Deming bits in succession. Finally, I had the hole I wanted, plus several gouges from the hole saw accident.

Fortunately, the gouges will be invisible when the tractor is assembled.

I was able to get a socket on both bolts, and I removed the rod end pin. After that, I managed to detach both hydraulic hoses without breaking anything, and I got the Pitman arm cap off. Then I retracted the rod manually and wiggled the cylinder out. Joy.

One of the great things about hydraulic leaks on farms is that the oil they release traps black dirt, so when you try to fix your problems, you are inundated with filth and oil. I had cleaned the tractor’s relevant parts as well as I could with a pressure washer, but there was still a lot of crud in places I could not hit. It took me quite a while to get the cylinder clean enough to handle.

Now I have a somewhat less dirty cylinder, and I need to visit a hydraulics shop.

Kubota wants $165 for the parts to fix the cylinder. They should cost something like $35. They are very ordinary parts. Kubota doesn’t make its own seals, wipers, and O-rings. I am pretty sure I can pay a shop for labor and still come out way ahead. This is literally a 10-minute job.

There are people out there discouraging amateurs from fixing hydraulic cylinders, threatening all sorts of disastrous consequences. I have looked into it, and it’s all nonsense, probably intended to con people into paying too much. Replacing the parts is an extremely easy job you can do without special tools. It helps if you have a weird tool that compresses inner seals so you can get them inside pistons, but those tools cost $30 a set on Amazon, and a set will cover a wide range of cylinders.

I would fix my cylinder myself if I knew what to order, but the shrewd businessmen at Kubota do not reveal the sizes of their rebuild parts. I may open it up anyway to make sure the interior isn’t scarred up, and perhaps I’ll be able to figure out what I need.

As of this minute, the odds are about 90% that I’ll pay to get the job done.

What are the take-aways here?

1. Kubota writes really bad repair manuals.

2. John Deere is worse because they weld hydraulic cylinders closed.

3. Rebuilding hydraulic cylinders is really easy and relatively cheap.

I am deriving a little satisfaction from doing all this myself instead of paying a dealer $1500 for transportation and repairs and waiting a month to get the tractor back. I would be more satisfied, however, if my tractor hadn’t leaked in the first place. It only has 1200 hours on it.

Gaslighted by the Medical Profession Again

My wife and I were discussing the new monkeypox outbreak. In case you don’t know, monkeypox is related to smallpox, and it is endemic in Africa, where people butcher monkeys. It’s not a big deal there. Suddenly it’s popping up in other places around the world. It causes things like fever, bone pain, and huge pus-filled blisters that leave scars. It kills weak people.

Why is the outbreak interesting? Because it’s a homosexual plague. The vast majority of people who are falling ill are homosexual men. The press loves to say “men who have sex with men,” as though it’s possible for a man who has sex with men to be anything but homosexual. Voluntary sex with other men is the act that defines homosexuality. Getting ambushed on a Navy ship doesn’t make you homosexual, but lying down willingly does.

The press is trying to convince us we’re all at risk, but that’s untrue. Monkeypox has been in Africa forever, they don’t have lockdowns or quarantines, and the disease isn’t all that common. People with normal sexual inclinations don’t get it all that easily, even though it can be spread through casual contact. The authorities are reluctantly admitting you can’t catch it just from being in a room with someone. It requires prolonged face-to-face contact, at the least.

Why are homosexual men getting it? Because they are unbelievably promiscuous and do all sorts of things other people are less likely to do. It’s not rare for a homosexual to have hundreds of sex partners per year, and they congregate in dark rooms (actually referred to as “dark rooms”), anonymously, often having sex with multiple partners they never even get a good look at.

Right now, you can go online and find an article by a major news outlet, saying it’s hard to track monkeypox exposures because of anonymous sex. Not “casual.” ANONYMOUS. That’s a veiled reference to homosexuals. Anonymous sex is not part of heterosexual life. It’s rare. To homosexuals, it’s normal. It’s one of the main things that drives homosexual tourism. They literally ride from airports to clubs with dark rooms, where they get down to business right away. Google and see.

Homosexual men penetrate each other’s anuses. The anus is not engineered to be a sex organ. It’s too fragile, and anal sex damages it. Unlike a vagina, it rips easily, allowing whatever microbes and fungi the penetrating individual has to go right into the bloodstream of the one playing the female role. Feces enters the urethra of the man playing the male role, and from there fecal pathogens have access to his mucous membranes and his urinary tract. Homosexual men lick each other’s anuses. They perform oral sex on each other. They urinate on each other. Many of them enjoy playing with feces; that particular diversion is called “scat.”

Homosexuals are also heavy drug users compared to the rest of us, and that includes intravenous drugs, so needle-sharing is a problem. And drug abuse weakens people’s immune systems even when they don’t share needles.
In short, if you wanted to be as diseased as possible, taking up homosexual-style sexual activity would be the best way to do it. There is no better way to catch infections of all types.

Obviously, I am a person who disapproves of homosexual activity, because I know it wrecks a person’s relationship with God and is likely to end with damnation. Nonetheless, objectively, any person with common sense should be able to see that the homosexual lifestyle, as engaged in by real homosexuals (not imaginary ones who are very careful) is an extreme invitation to infectious disease.

Recklessness is, and always has been, a huge problem among homosexuals. It’s the reason the AIDS epidemic never went away among them. People like to tell us education will stop VD, but most people who get VD know exactly how to prevent it and choose to do otherwise, and people who don’t know much about VD and who behave themselves are so safe they might as well be immune.

Back during the first AIDS panic, Miami had a gay gym that had an interesting story. To normal people, a gym is a place to exercise. To gays, it’s very different. It’s a place to pick up sexual partners and, often. to have sex with them on the premises. I suppose a homosexual at a homosexual gym must be like a normal man at a women’s gym where he gets to shower with the girls and have sex with them in the locker rooms. Most of us would show up early, leave very late, and never miss a workout.

The gym in Miami was called Body Positive. They created a program of AIDS education. Men met in the gym and took classes. They got an award for this.
After the program had been going on a while, it was noticed that people who took the class were dropping dead from AIDS. Why? Because after class, they had orgies without protection.

These were people who knew men who had died from AIDS. They had seen the skin lesions, the vomiting and diarrhea, the dementia, the pneumonia, and the slow deaths of living skeletons. They still pounced on each other after their classes.

This is a good illustration of the mindset that has made AIDS so devastating to homosexuals. Their aberration doesn’t just cause them to prefer men; it causes many of them to be unable to control themselves and exercise ordinary responsibility. They don’t just have DIFFERENT sex. They have much MORE sex, with much less care.

I risk being be called hateful for repeating the indisputable, well-known facts about AIDS. Back when it first appeared, the same facts were disseminated by journalists who thought homosexuality was just fine, and it was considered okay for them to bring up the behavioral problems that were killing so many men. They were obviously trying to help by bringing attention to the root of the problem. I’m trying to help as well, but this is 2022, and the cancel kids rule the world.

Syphilis and gonorrhea are not common among normal people these days, but due to irresponsibility, they have never stopped raging among homosexuals. Right now, journalists are trying to avoid confronting this truth. There are stories saying monkeypox is more common among people with syphilis and gonorrhea, but they’re not admitting these are predominantly homosexual diseases, which is true. They also say monkeypox is typically presenting on the genitals and anus, without pointing out that this used to be atypical. Historically, monkeypox lesions have appeared first on people’s faces. Initial anal and genital lesions are new aberrations, and the cause is obvious.

A few days ago, the politicized CDC came after us again, telling us to mask up on airplanes in order to avoid monkeypox. Airplanes. The places where, according to the best science, masks do about as much good as seat belts on cruise ships. They knew masks weren’t helpful, so why recommend them?

I think they did it to bulk up the illusion that normal people were at risk. Fortunately, the CDC contradicted its own recommendation almost immediately.

Here’s a question no one is asking: how many frauds will be exposed by monkeypox? The blisters it causes can’t be prevented, and they leave big scars in obvious places like the face and arms. How many liars will start developing scars? How many actors? Will they be able to cover them up? Will we see certain actors start to wear unusually thick makeup, with no explanation? Will actors disappear from public view for weeks, so they can let their sores heal in private?

How about priests and other clergymen? How about scoutmasters and gym teachers? Certain occupations and activities attract men who are on the down low.

Monkeypox may well serve as a blacklight, lighting up people who would prefer to stay in the shadows. It will be interesting to see if that happens. It all depends on how responsible homosexuals decide to be. The scale of the epidemic, if it becomes one, will depend on their actions.

I believe the apocalypse has started, and the Revelation says death will be part of it. Death by pestilence, not just starvation or war. Since coronavirus popped up, I have been posing the question, “Which disease will be next?” We have our answer.

Monkeypox isn’t that bad, so that’s fortunate. Another disease will follow, and then another. Things will keep getting worse.

When a disease crops up and homes in on a group of people who do certain things which God calls sinful or, worse, abomination, we ought to ask ourselves why. We should ask if it’s really coincidence. Pride shouldn’t blind us to information that could help us.

There used to be no VD. No VD is mentioned in the Bible. Syphilis was unknown in the Old World until Columbus returned home. Gonorrhea appears to have popped up over a millennium after Christ. Over the centuries, the situation has deteriorated.

When I was a kid, there were syphilis and gonorrhea, and they were all we heard about. They were always mentioned together, because lay people didn’t know of any other diseases. They summed up “VD” for most of us. Both could be cured with one shot. Now we have HPV and the cancers it causes, chlamydia, AIDS, herpes, bacterial vaginosis, hepatitis, and probably some others I can’t recall at the moment. We have things that can’t be cured at all. Because God’s punishment is progressive, we should expect new forms of VD to show up in the future.

People should ask themselves why there are no sexual infections associated with monogamy and abstinence. If abstaining from sexual sin prevents infection, and sexual sin causes it, and the correlation is many times worse among male homosexuals, shouldn’t you wonder if God is involved?

Pretending monkeypox is a heterosexual problem doesn’t help homosexuals. They need to know they are getting messages from the supernatural realm. They need to know spirits that are truly hateful, not merely in disagreement with them, are trying to destroy them here on Earth and then in hell. God wants them with him for eternity, in a state of perfect health and safety, surrounded by love, not toxic, selfish lust. To be with him, they have to do things his way, just like everyone else. As God once told me, denying a sin is worse than the sin itself.

MORE

Amazon is now putting this warning on order status reports: “Please give drivers at least 6 feet of space to safely complete your delivery.”

Funny how we didn’t see that during the pandemic, but it popped up quickly after monkeypox arose. Think there’s a connection?

Next World to Conquer: Hydraulics

A couple of days ago, I finished converting the old bucket on my Kubota to SSQA. It took several days, and I would have been happier buying a new bucket. I couldn’t get the bucket before late summer, so I did what I had to do. The result is in the photo below.

I primed and painted the areas on the back of the bucket that were involved in the project. A lot of paint burned off the inside of the bucket, too, but I don’t plan to do anything about that until I get the tractor working again.

The project looks solid. My only concern is that I may have gotten the geometry wrong somewhere, leading to problems I won’t notice until I use the bucket. There is no set of comprehensive guidelines for welding SSQA mounts to a bucket. Every job is a one-time deal, and you do the best you can. I set my plates so they’re about half an inch off the ground when the bucket is on its bottom.

If it turns out there is a problem, I fully intend to sell the bucket and buy a new one. I don’t want to do this project twice.

I tried to use plasma and propane to cut the old mounts off and cut up the mounting plate for installation, but I don’t have real propane skills, and I lacked the right cutting tip, and my plasma cutter isn’t great for thick steel.

I ended up using my 6″ Metabo angle grinder and cutoff wheels. It was a breeze. Actually better than plasma, unless you have CNC. The cuts were very accurate, and it only took a few minutes to cut an end off a 3/8″ plate 18″ wide. If you have to get in places where a grinder won’t go, plasma and torches are great, but for straight cuts in open places, they can’t compare to a grinder.

Welding was uneventful. I used 0.035″ Harbor Freight wire and my $500 Harbor Freight multiprocess welder. I think that’s what I paid. It may have been $600. That thing is great. I prefer it to my Lincoln MIG because it’s easier to use. It has a nice digital display, and the torch is not as bulky.

I used DNA and acetone to clean off most of the grime near the new plates, and then I taped everything else off. I hit the plates and their surroundings with Rust-Oleum primer from a spray can, and I followed up with some Rust-Oleum Kubota Orange implement spray paint I already had. Worked just fine.

Now I have to fix the leak which is draining my hydraulic fluid.

A few weeks back, I put wood on my burn pile, and I noticed the tractor’s wheels were straightening up during turns. I didn’t think much of it. For all I knew, it was normal. Now I think the leak caused it. Last week, things got much worse in a hurry. I saw little puddles of fluid under the front end. I knew something had to be done.

My tractor is an L3710 with an LA681 loader. It’s a nice 37-horse machine. Big enough for most jobs around the farm, although 60 horses would be nicer. Most people are using little tractors in the general region of 25 horses, so I feel blessed.

To find out where the leak was, I thought I had to remove the front end loader so I could remove the side panels and look into the engine compartment. I was wrong about this, but I didn’t know it. I tried to get advice. I saw a bunch of useless Youtube videos in which smiling men in clean clothes popped the loaders off their little Kubotas, and I figured I could do it, too.

They did this:

1. Raise loader and extend built-in support struts to hold it up when detached.

2. Lower loader until the struts and bucket touch the ground.

3. Manipulate bucket to loosen the two pins at the rear of the loader.

4. Pull pins out, holding them gently between one finger and your thumb.

5. Disconnect hydraulic hoses.

6. Back tractor away from loader.

7. Dismount tractor and button spotless white tuxedo jacket while calling for a martini.

I tried this method, and I found out it won’t work for the LA681. This loader has a built-in guard for the front of the tractor, and it’s made from 3/8″ steel. It’s very heavy. There are two additional pins that attach it to the front of the tractor.

On top of that, the rear pins were cemented in place by rust and friction. They had never been greased. I managed to bang them out and get them to slide easily with grease, but it took quite a while. I never took the front pins out, because I wanted to get confirmation that the skinny struts on the loader were strong enough to hold it up with the grill guard attached.

While I was fooling with this, some online people reminded me of something I had forgotten: it wasn’t necessary to remove the loader in order to get the panels off the tractor. They lifted straight up. I had done this before, to fix a shutdown apparatus that went off on its own, but I didn’t remember this when I got into the hydraulic problem.

I got the panels off and pressure-washed a lot of black oil and filth out of the tractor so I could see. Then I identified the source of the leaking fluid. When I turned the steering wheel, oil shot out of the rear of the steering cylinder.

Hydraulic cylinders are sort of like car cylinders, but they pump oil instead of air and fuel. Car pistons have rings to seal them against the cylinder walls. A hydraulic cylinder has a bunch of O-rings and seals to do the same thing. My cylinder probably has two seals in it. I looked up all the parts, and in total, there are 14. To fix the cylinder, I have to take it out of the tractor, open it up, install new seals and other junk, close it, and put it back in.

Fixing the cylinder itself looks pretty easy, although I may pay someone to do it because it’s possible to do it wrong, and then you’re stuck doing the job over. What’s difficult is getting the cylinder out.

The workshop manual says to remove the heavy steel bumper and the radiator. To do that, guess what else I have to remove. The loader, which is connected to the bumper.

I’m not positive I have to do all that. It may be that it’s possible to get the cylinder out without removing the loader, but the manual would naturally specify the easiest way for a tractor with no loader.

I really don’t want to pay a dealer. They will charge me to take the tractor in and bring it back. Then they will charge to remove and reattach the loader. They will charge to remove and reinstall the cylinder. They will charge to rebuild the cylinder. The labor and hauling charges would be pretty bad.

The rebuild alone will probably run over $200. The parts are expensive because Kubota likes money, and there would probably be half an hour of labor in it.

Optimally, I would like to get the cylinder out and reinstall it myself, relying on a mechanic only for the rebuild. Whether that will be possible remains to be seen.

By the way, a new cylinder runs almost $1100. For comparison, generic cylinders (which I can’t use) from dealers cost less than $200. Cylinders for other brands of tractors are in the same ballpark. One wonders why Kubota can’t come a little closer to that figure.

At least I can go ahead and order a Kubota seal kit for the cylinder, right? Wrong. Kubota doesn’t make one. You have to identify all the parts yourself from a parts manual and order them separately so they cost as much as possible.

I feel somewhat discouraged. I fixed the tractor’s inability to get up to speed in reverse, I installed an SSQA adaptor without help, and I made my own SSQA bucket. I thought I had beaten the dealers. Now the tractor’s first debilitating mechanical problem pops up, just when sailing should be smooth.

I should be making my own SSQA brush fork attachment right now instead of sweating over the pressure washer and struggling to get what should be simple answers.

Have I bitten off more than I should have? Am I doing things God would rather I didn’t get involved with? Am I piling needless burdens on myself? I am going to pray about that.

Sometimes You Just Want to BUY Something

The person who laid out this property situated my shop so the doors on each end face east and west. Was this incredibly stupid or a masterstroke?

As it is, the burning sun roasts the east side of the shop in the morning and the west side of the shop until about 8 p.m. in the summer. Unpleasant if you’re working on the west side, which I frequently am. If the shop were situated differently, the sun would hit both sides of the shop pretty much all the time, but it would hit them from different directions as the day passed, and it would be possible to plant shade trees close to it to make the afternoons and evenings less miserable.

I guess the way it is is okay.

Today I removed the ears from my tractor bucket, and I quit when the real roasting started.

I put a quick attach adaptor on the tractor’s loader, and I also wanted a bucket that would fit it, but the buckets are backed up several months. That is no good, so I had to order a huge, heavy mount plate in order to modify the bucket myself. To make the plate fit, the ears have to be totally gone, ground flat. They were (were) welded in place on 4 sides, so they were not made with the intention of assisting people who wanted to remove them in a hurry.

I figured I would use my gas welding outfit with a propane cutting tip. A couple of years back, I bought a very serious Victor acetylene outfit and fixed it up so it worked with propane. The acetylene regulator will work fine with propane, and I have the acetylene stuff in case I ever decide to try gas welding.

Until today, I had never used the outfit for anything but heating. I heated the 1/2″-thick ears on my 3-point subsoiler because they were bent from pulling stumps and needed to be straightened. Worked fine, but it didn’t teach me anything about propane cutting.

I have a plasma cutter, but I thought it would be too hard to get it into the corners on the bucket, so two days ago, I decided to become a propane cutting expert. It did not go well.

First of all, my bucket appears to be 1/4″ thick, and my cutting tips are the wrong size. I have size 1 tips. I should have 0 or 00. Second, I don’t know what I’m doing.

By watching a few videos and asking questions on the web, I got to the point where I could sort of cut steel, and today I gave it a shot. I was able to cut through the ears, but it was a pain. The torch kept going out, and the metal took forever to yield. I decided to try plasma, which turned out to better suited to the job than I had thought.

I tried to cut sideways into the welds holding the ears on so the jet would not cut into the bucket itself. The main problem I had was that I blew molten metal under the ears where it solidified into bad welds. I also had problems with the jet dying for no clear reason. I think the terrible ground clamp that came with my Hypertherm plasma cutter was letting me down.

I cut and recut and recut. I finally managed to remove the parts of the ears that were perpendicular to the bucket’s surface, but the parts that lay flat against it were stuck. I got out the big Metabo grinder and some Walter Zip Disks and cut the metal loose except for the parts that sat directly on welds. Those parts, I am slowly removing with the Metabo and a smaller grinder equipped with a 40-grit Walter flap wheel.

Walter makes really excellent abrasives. I have learned to avoid the cheap stuff. Cheap disks do a much poorer job and give out quicker.

I have bought a second Harbor Freight rolling tool chest for conversion into a welding cart, and it is sitting near the tractor bucket. This is why the box the chest came in caught fire today.

I was shooting gobs of molten steel all over the place, and one flew into the base of the box, causing it to go up like a match. I was very impressed at how fast it started to burn. My hair didn’t burn nearly that well the many times I set it on fire today.

My friend Mike is staying with me, and he had moved the shop’s front garden hose to the back for watering plants, so I thought it was best to grab my wall-mounted extinguisher and see if it worked. It worked just fine, leaving nasty yellow powder everywhere. I put it on the shop floor so it would be convenient in case I needed it again, and then when I sat down on my Homer bucket to continue cutting, I also sat on the extinguisher handle, shooting more powder on the floor.

After a lot of struggling, I got both ears off the bucket, and now I just have a few strips of leftover metal to grind flat.

In retrospect, I see I should have used the plasma cutter to trace around the bottoms of the ears, cutting through the bucket and removing them in 20 minutes instead of what will end up being two days. I could then have welded a couple of new pieces of plate in the holes in the bucket, and everything would have been dandy. Would the plate have been as strong as the original steel? I assume so, but it doesn’t matter, because the mount plate is very thick and will be welded over the areas where the ears went, making those areas very strong even with ear-sized rectangular holes in them, let alone new steel plate.

Oh, well.

When you fabricate, you have to be confident, or you will never finish a job. You have to be willing to say things like, “I am going to cut this whole part off and put something else in later, because it is wasting my time.” Steel is not like wood. Once you cut wood out, it’s just plain gone. When you cut steel out, you can put more steel in and make your project as good or better than it was before you started. You have to get used to welding and cutting without fear.

When I decided to go with plasma, I checked to see if there were longer tips for getting into tight places. There are. Hypertherm makes them. Guess whose cutter they don’t fit.

I think I got my cutter in 2007. Not sure. It was some kind of anniversary for Hypertherm, because the cutter was painted in limited-edition gold. In 2008, they quit making it. Now they have completely different torches.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll get an upgraded torch. That can’t cost much.”

No, it doesn’t cost much. Unless $500 is much.

I looked the price up, and I could not believe it. I know American companies charge more for stuff, but come on. It’s a hose, a couple of wires, and a plastic pistol grip.

Hypertherm no longer makes the torch that came with my machine, so if I drop mine, it’s $500 or no plasma cutting.

My cutter is a Powermax600, which seemed like a big stretch for me when I bought it. It’s a 40-amp cutter, and that figure is the current it puts into the work. I think I paid around $1600, and that hurt.

I can buy an Everlast 60-amp cutter for $1000. Yes, it’s Chinese, but it’s good enough for many professionals. An Everlast would have an inverter, so it would suck less current and weigh a lot less for what it does. It’s only 6 pounds heavier than my machine and produces 60% more current. The duty cycle is lower, but who runs a plasma cutter 100% of the time?

Hypertherm wants $500 for a torch, and they want $2000 (street price) for the cutter that fills the slot mine used to. The new one is 16 pounds lighter, probably because inverters replaced transformers about 10 seconds after I clicked “Submit Order” to buy my obsolete machine.

I looked into Everlast because I was mad at Hypertherm for charging $500 for a torch, and because I thought maybe Everlast or some other Chinese product would work with extended tips. I have not found any evidence they work with extended tips, so I guess there is no reason to flip out and buy one.

Anyway, I should just learn to use the propane cutter. I have smaller tips on the way.

Once the tractor bucket is modified and painted, which should be Monday or Tuesday, I can build the new welding cart and make a small modification to the one I already built. Then I can get rid of my old Eastwood welding cart and put all my welding stuff into my two Harbor Freight chest/carts.

I should be able to get the cart made in a couple of days because I have all the parts this time. The mod on the old one will be somewhat taxing because I have to take it apart and take all the tools out of it before I can do anything.

Once the carts are done, I jump into fabricating a fork attachment for my tractor, so I will probably have to get a second mount plate. I’m hoping I can use part of the plate I already have. Of course, I would have to cut it somehow…

Now I know why Mrs. Douglas wanted to stay in New York when her husband moved to Hooterville.

Mount Everest and Skydiving are for Losers

Today I converted my Kubota to SSQA, which means Skid Steer Quick Attach. This is a style of front end loader that allows you to drop attachments and pick up new ones in a couple of minutes. Before SSQA, which, I am guessing, was developed originally for skid steers, changing attachments was a colossal nightmare. You had to remove four stubborn pins from your bucket, pull up to another attachment, spend half the day trying to line it up with the pins in the attachment, and put the pins in. It was really bad. I know that because my new SSQA adaptor is an attachment itself, and I just installed it on my old pin front end loader.

Removing the old bucket was not bad. I intended to drop it face down in the workshop so I could cut it up and modify it later, but the Kubota would not rotate it enough to do this, so I set it down with the top on cinder blocks and the bottom on the floor. I had to remove four bolts in order to take the pins out. A lot of people get new pins when they do this job, and that tells me they don’t take care of their tractors. My pins are in good condition, not much worse than new. The guy who sold me this tractor obviously greased the fittings sufficiently often to prevent damage.

If you don’t grease that type of part, you ruin your pins and risk wallowing out the holes they go in. Then you need to have the ears on your bucket replaced. Amazingly, people let this job go on big machines like excavators. Then they have to find fabricators who can both weld heavy equipment and do line-boring, which is a difficult way of making holes line up in large parts.

Putting the adaptor on was pretty awful. There were no clouds in the sky, and I started just when the sun started hitting the outside of the workshop. I was broiling.

I decided it was smarter to move the part to the tractor than to try to line the tractor up with the part, so I put the adaptor on my amazing Harbor Freight lift table. It will raise 500 pounds to waist height. The adaptor supposedly weighs 76 pounds, but it felt like a lot more to me.

This lift table is an astounding tool. Once you have one, you understand how badly you needed it.

I got the adaptor on there and wiggled the table around to line up the adaptor with the hydraulic rods on the tractor. Big mistake. Once I had done that, I had to find a way to line the adaptor up with the holes in the rigid FEL arms. I didn’t know the pistons would move independently when not attached to anything, so one extended farther out than the other, making it impossible to line the adaptor up with the FEL. I ended up removing the pins on the ends of the hydraulic rods and installing the ones in the FEL arms. After that, I was able to move the hydraulics around enough to make the remaining pins go in. It was a very unpleasant job, but at least it was possible.

I bought a huge 3/8″-thick mount plate to attach to the bucket. This was not necessary. It turns out you just need two rectangles; one for each end of the adaptor. You weld one rectangle to each end of your bucket. The plate I bought must weigh over a hundred pounds, and most of it will be cut out and set aside. Live and learn. I thought it was better to take a chance on buying too much steel than too little, since I had no idea what I was doing.

I think I can use the scrap to make mounts for the brush fork attachment I’m going to make. My old chain-on brush forks are obsolete now, but they are made from good steel, so I think I can put them on an attachment that will be useful for moving brush and logs and also pallets.

I would go ahead and buy a brush attachment, but they don’t exist. You can get pallet forks or a grapple. I don’t want either.

Pallet fork attachments cost a lot, and they come with two forks, and two forks will do a sad job of moving logs and brush. Things will fall out between them. I can get four forks, but that seems like a stupid idea when I have four chain-on brush forks on hand, which I will never be able to sell to the cheap people around here. You couldn’t sell these people quarters for nickels. They are incredibly tight. Selling things on the web is such a waste of time, I give things to charity.

I think grapples are stupid. They are no good at all for moving brush, and I can move big logs just fine with brush forks, which will carry a tremendous amount of brush. I could carry a grand total of one big log with a grapple, but I can get about five on the forks. I suspect men buy grapples just because they’re cool. I think men like pretending their tractors are Truckasaurus.

Tomorrow I hope to cut the unnecessary, in-the-way stuff off my precious Kubota bucket and install the mounts. Then I have to apply some paint. The paint is more intimidating than the fabrication. I hate painting.

Once the bucket is restored, I will look at the scrap I have on hand and come up with a plan for the forks.

The forks were made by the Charles Mitchem company, which I had never heard of before I got the tractor. In the past, some mechanical wizard put a Vise Grip on one of the turnbuckles that tighten the chains, and he ruined it. He compressed it permanently so it was just about impossible to turn one of the screws inside it. Vise Grips are great, but they are also some of the tools ham-fisted “bubbas” use to destroy things.

I contacted the company and got an email that was terse and useless. I thought it was rude. They told me to call a retailer. I would have said, “Sorry you’re having trouble with our product, but unfortunately, we are not able to sell directly to the public. We suggest you contact your local dealer and see what they can do for you. Here is the part you need, so you can tell them the number.”

I ended up buying a huge tap and cleaning out the turnbuckle. Lost sale there, Chuck. It’s a bad idea to ignore customers who can do their own metalworking.

Since they were so useless, I don’t feel too bad about criticizing their product. The forks are strong and very useful, but putting them on a tractor bucket is at least an hour’s work. After that, they move around when you lift things, and they damage your bucket. They have to be tightened over and over, so you have to get off the tractor repeatedly while you work. I would never buy anything like them again.

Another useless company: Florida Coast Equipment. This is the local Kubota place. I called them in an effort to get an SSQA adaptor. They said they would call back in 15-20 minutes. Then they didn’t call. Two days later, I called, and they claimed it would take at least two days to do “research” to find out if such a part existed. And they didn’t call.

What equipment or vehicle dealer has to do research to find out if a part exists? John Deere is one of the most thoughtless, greedy arrogant companies on Earth, but I can go to their website and learn the status of every [overpriced] part on my ancient garden tractor in seconds. You would think a Kubota dealer could do better.

I know Kubota makes an adaptor which can be made to work with my FEL, but I can’t get it because the dealer is unprofessional, so here I am with an ATI Tach-All which costs more. At least it’s already Kubota orange.

Some people say the Kubota adaptor is better. I don’t care. I can weld. Now that I have something to work with, it doesn’t matter whether it has problems. I can fix anything. I don’t think the Tach-All is inferior, though. It appears to be very well made. Very nice welds. Not many products have those these days.

I am looking forward to having the ability to use my bucket without forks. I am looking forward to switching attachments in a few minutes. I am looking forward to new attachments. A tractor is no good unless you have multiple attachments you can swap quickly. I now have quick attach capability at both ends of the machine, so I should be in good shape.

I need to find a way to extend the bucket’s lower lip so I can load it with leaves. That way, I can rake leaves into it and dump them quickly. I don’t need an attachment worthy of the space program. Maybe a plywood box. I’ll come up with something. These leaves have to go.

Maybe I’ll get a citrus crate. They’re made of plastic, and they hold about a cubic meter. I used to fill three wooden ones per day with grapefruit back when I was a kibbutz volunteer. It should be easy to find a cheap crate now that plagues have hit the world and the citrus industry is vanishing.

Another tractor victory: I fixed my reverse problem.

When I got this tractor, I noticed it was incredibly slow in reverse. I mean slower than crawling on all fours. I thought it was a nanny/lawyer thing. I knew my grandfather’s old Massey Fergusons moved much faster, but they banned diving boards, they banned lawn darts, they put ridiculous backup beepers on consumer vehicles…forcing farmers to creep in reverse seemed like part of the plan.

Today I asked around, and I decided to look at the pedal linkage. This tractor has a pedal that behaves like an accelerator, and it also determines your direction. It’s not a throttle. It doesn’t affect the RPM’s. It’s somehow connected to the transmission.

I found out the nut that went on the bolt that attached the pedal to the link was gone. I had been creeping in reverse for almost 5 years for nothing.

The pedal still worked okay for forward, because it bottomed out on the link and pushed it. In reverse, it barely did anything.

I checked as well as I could, and it looked like the bolt took an M8-1.25 nut. The threads were messed up, though, because the previous owner kept using the pedal without a nut, and the pedal rested on the threads.

I thought I would take the link out and run a tap over it, but there was no way. Of course, Kubota had made it hard to work on. Removing the fasteners that held the link on was not possible because Kubota installed them so tightly the nuts would have rounded before turning.

I tried removing the pin that held the pedal on, but it was held on with a snap ring that had holes too small for my snap ring pliers. Metric snap rings? I have no idea.

I found a flange nut lying around, and I decided to force it on. If the threads got more mangled, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be where I ws to start with. Fortunately, the nut overcame the bad threads, and now my tractor zips around like it should. For the first time since 2017.

I bought a new Harbor Freight rolling tool chest yesterday, just like my old green one, only red, to match my Lincoln. I turned the green one into a fantastic welding cart complete with bottles, and I plan to do the same thing with the new one. This will enable me to get rid of my old Eastwood cart, which was great for $50 but has no storage and takes up a ton of room. Once I have the new cart up and running, I can empty my portable toolboxes that contain welding-related stuff and use them for other things.

I didn’t want to get another chest while I was working on the tractor, but Harbor Freight came out with an unusual 25%-off coupon which applied to good products, not just the usual junk, so I jumped at the chance. Tomorrow I should go buy the metal I’ll need.

I may get a Milwaukee chest and mount my belt grinders on it. My shop is a catastrophe, and Milwaukee makes a chest that would end my belt grinder mess. It’s a very unusual chest which happens to be perfect for belt grinders.

On top of all this, I’m contemplating building another outbuilding. I filled my shop with tools, and I’m tired of leaving my cart and tractors outside. I was reluctant to commit to this property because I was thinking of moving to Tennessee, but I am starting to think this is where God wants me and Rhodah. I called 811 and had them locate all the underground wiring, so now I have a better understanding of where I can build and plant.

I also ordered a hitch and harness for the Explorer, and I want to build or buy a utility trailer. My truck is fine, but now that Mike is staying here with his trailer, I see that a truck is no substitute. I got a hitch I can install myself. It bolts up.

That’s about all for today. I guess it’s enough.

Bad Cooks Spread Bad Recipes

Yesterday Mike and I celebrated Memorial Day by eating something we would have eaten anyway. It’s not really true that we celebrated the holiday. Monday was coming up, we hadn’t bought anything to fix for dinner, and we had frozen spare ribs, so we smoked them.

I decided to try something Internet gurus rave about. It’s called the 321 method, for spare ribs. You smoke them for three hours. Then you wrap them and bake them for two hours. Then you unwrap them and bake them for one more hour.

I thought it might be a surefire formula that would eliminate guesswork in the future, so what the heck.

After three hours, the small pieces of our full rack were completely done, and the big pieces were not all that far behind. I realized I had once again been fooled by bad cooks with big platforms.

I set the small bits aside, covered the big ones, and smoked the big ones for around 45 minutes. Then I cooked everything, unwrapped, for about 45 more minutes.

The little bits were more done than they needed to be, although they were very good. The unneeded cooking time took some of the moisture out, so they weren’t what they could have been. The bigger ones were perfect.

I went to a BBQ forum and asked about the method, and I got negative responses. It is not popular with people who actually know how to barbecue. Still, for reasons unknown to me, sites like The Spruce Eats promote it like it cures cancer.

That website says nearly all of the smoke is absorbed in the first three hours. Right away, that tells you the person who wrote the article is a barbecue duffer. If you use so much wood it’s still smoking after three hours, you are overdoing it. My smoker uses about 2.5 ounces of wood, and that much wood will not burn all day.

It’s always amazing to see the disparity between people’s willingness to publish cooking information and their ability to cook or even recognize good food.

If I had let my ribs go 6 hours, the meat would have been dried-out mush. No question about it. How can the Internet gurus not know this? Answer: twofold. Some have never tried it, but they are willing to copy it from other people and republish it because they need content to put in front of the public. This is dishonest but very typical in the food-information industry. Some have tried it and simply can’t tell good food from bad.

These are my guesses.

I guarantee you, many rib recipe articles are written by paid writers who have never made ribs. I promise you, this is true. I know how publishing works. Outlets hire kids fresh out of college to do the actual work. A friend of mine who knew nearly nothing wrote authoritative articles for one of the biggest women’s magazines. There are probably vegans writing rib recipes for food websites.

I have a new method I’m going to use next time. It’s the 2-2-.75 method. I’m going to smoke for two hours. If you use the right amount of wood, your smoke will poop out after about 90 minutes, so there is no real point in pretending you’re smoking them after that. Two hours of smoking will make sure I got all the benefit from the wood, but it will conserve the water in the meat. After that, I’ll wrap and bake for two hours to ensure tenderness. Then I’ll cook the ribs, uncovered, for maybe 45 minutes. I’ll check occasionally to make sure they’re okay.

This will definitely work. Big ribs need at least 4 hours of cooking, so the first two-hour stretches will be guaranteed not to do any harm. After that, I’ll be able to monitor them and make sure I don’t overcook them.

People will say nearly anything about food, just to hear their heads rattle. They’ll tell you Peter Luger’s is a great restaurant, which is, objectively and obviously, wrong. They’ll tell you soy burgers are just as good as beef. They’ll claim cottage cheese is great in lasagna. They say baby backs, which are small, dry, and expensive, are better than big, juicy spare ribs. They fill the world with bad recipes and deprive other people of the quality food experiences they should be having.

Avoid the 321 method. You have been warned. And if you see a food “authority” pushing it, don’t ever trust that person in the future, because it’s not possible to be that wrong about ribs and be reliable concerning anything else.

Here is a vinegar sauce I made up, in case you, like me, are interested in light sauces for pork. It’s very, very good. Scale it up as desired.

INGREDIENTS

4 oz cider vinegar
2 oz ketchup
1 clove garlic, crushed
several generous squirts Frank’s
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. hot prepared mustard
maple syrup, sorghum syrup, or molasses to taste
water to taste

Sorry I don’t have precise measurements for the sweet stuff and water. Next time I make the sauce, I’ll record things better.

Trump Has Nothing on Me

Today I outdid myself. I got banned from Skype…for ETERNITY.

Air France is holding my wife’s luggage hostage in Johannesburg. It has been in their hands for 52 days. We have been through amazing struggles, trying to get them to spend 10 minutes tossing it on a plane to Lusaka, as we paid them to do, but they refuse. If they can hold onto it long enough, they can auction it along with all the other luggage they refuse to look for.

We are far from alone. Go to Air France’s Twitter feed and look at all the furious tweets about lost bags. They don’t care at all. Means nothing whatsoever to them.

We have made small advances in our efforts to battle the 5 airlines and 1 airport involved in this mess. We have found that doing two things over and over are somewhat helpful: calling the airlines and visiting the Lusaka airport.

I called Air France in Johannesburg, because Air France/KLM here in the US refuses to help. They were eager to take the money, you understand, but that’s about all the customer support we got. I got a cell bill for $86 and accomplished nothing.

I found out I could make calls cheaper on Skype, so I paid for “unlimited” (mind the asterisk) international calls, and today, I started calling Air France in Johannesburg again. Over and over, their phone system hung up on me. I didn’t get to speak to human beings. Every time the system hung up, I called back. Then Skype told me I was suspended.

It’s hard to describe how hard it is to get through to Skype support. Log in. Click this link. Log in again. Click that link. Log in again. Click another link. Click more links. Chat with a entry-level employee. Receive a security code by email, after a failed attempt. Chat with a higher-level employee. I would guess it took me about 20 minutes.

The entry-level guy told me things would be cleared up right away. The supervisor told me that was not quite correct, because I was actually being banned permanently. I asked why, and he gave me a list of things that MIGHT have been the reason. Spamming and so on. I told him I was trying over and over to connect with a faulty phone tree, but that didn’t interest him. He said he didn’t even know why I was banned. It looks like the algorithm is the real supervisor. I’m not sure what the actual people are for.

He kept saying “this account” is banned. Naturally, I tried to get clarification. I asked if that meant my cell number was banned in perpetuity. For all I knew, I could start a new account and begin calling again. He confirmed that my number could never be used again.

So that’s it. No international Skype. I believe the ban only applies to international services, but I’m not sure. Let me try calling a US number.

I’m not sure, but it looks like I can only call people who have Skype accounts. I am not able to find a way to call random US numbers.

Obviously, I’m not getting a new cell number, so that’s it for Skype.

The supervisor was very timid. I think he was afraid I was going to go off on him. He kept waffling and avoiding giving me clear answers. I was polite, but I was blunt. While trying to decode his answers, I said it looked like the algorithm was in charge, which was apparently true. I don’t think tech people like having the unpleasant aspects of their defective systems pointed out. Or, more likely, he was afraid to express himself freely on a monitored system. “Yes, the algorithm is an idiot and a tyrant, but that’s 2022 for you. Wait…a flashing chat window just opened up on my Apple watch…”

I wonder who will ban me next. I have been exiled from 4 forums and Skype.

The rapture represents God’s response to Satan banning his children from the earth. When I find myself ostracized these days, I see it as part of the process. I really hate being part of the matrix. It’s an evil thing. Anyone who is happy in here is sick and feckless. It may seem nice when you’re part of the gang, but when you become “other,” your problems may mount in a very big hurry.

What would you do if your phone, Internet service, TV, credit cards, and bank account stopped working today? What if you tried to start your car, and you found it had been disabled remotely? What if your computers’ operating systems were suddenly closed to you? All those things are going to start happening to God’s children soon. Being de-Skyped without explanation made me think about that. Is there a way to prepare? Not really. You can’t buy enough dried food and gasoline to fix a problem like that. The only way to prepare is to get close to God and try to be raptured.

I didn’t do anything wrong today, but I still got pushed out of the herd again. It’s my destiny. It’s a supernatural thing. If you get close to God, it will happen to you, too, but you should be glad, because to be pushed away from Satan’s flock is to be pushed toward peace, healing, prosperity, joy, and eternal life in heaven. To be accepted is to be drawn closer to hell.

The world hates us. Jesus said it would. Don’t act surprised. Don’t get the idea something is wrong. Embrace it. It’s a very good sign, and if it’s not happening to you, something is badly wrong.

You Can’t Really Make This Shot

I did it again. I provoked white-hot rage on an Internet forum.

I asked a shooting question. I asked whether I was wrong to doubt people who said they could shoot squirrels in the head, killing them cleanly, with an ordinary .22 rifle, shooting from the shoulder, unsupported, CONSISTENTLY, from 100 feet. I said I thought anyone who made that claim was either lying or letting pride overcome memory.

Boy, did people get mad. One actually cursed at me. And I was polite the whole time!

Men popped up, telling me I was a bad shot and insisting they could do it.

I still say they’re, well, wrong, to be nice. And I’m not a bad shot.

I have shot a number of squirrels near my house in order to protect my trees and plants. What I found was that a .22 head shot couldn’t be trusted to drop a squirrel, and I also found that making such shots over about 50 feet, offhand, was very hard. This is why I force myself to use the shotgun now. With a 16 gauge and #6 shot, it’s hard to miss within 100 feet, unless the squirrel acts up. Which they do.

On one occasion, I made a nice .22 shot on a squirrel and hit it in the head. I thought I had missed, because it ran off. The next day, I shot it again. I didn’t know it was the same squirrel. It was trying to feed. When I picked it up, I saw part of the front of its head was gone. I had shot it off the day before. You would think the shock of a .22 slug hitting a squirrel’s face would knock it out, but no such luck.

I put a three-target spinner setup in my yard, 100 feet from my bedroom door. I measured the distance with a tape. When I used a scoped gun and aimed at a target about as wide as a squirrel brain, I found the crosshairs wobbled about 2″ no matter what I did. Sitting down, I would have had a much steadier picture, but standing up, I knew I would be doing well to hit a squirrel at all, let alone put one through its brain.

Allowing for the fact that a better amateur shot might be able to cut the wobble to 1″, I still concluded it wasn’t possible to make the shot reliably. A squirrel’s brain, from the side, is about 1-1/4″ by 1/3″. It’s like shooting at half of a ping pong ball.

A good mall-grade .22 with mall-grade ammo will shoot into about a 1/2″ circle at 100 feet, with an occasional bad round outside the circle. I mean it will do this when glued to a bench, not when held at the shoulder. Add the size of the target, the inherent wobbliness of offhand shooting, and the inaccuracy of rimfire ammunition, and you get a circle bigger than a squirrel’s brain.

I just don’t buy it. With a more accurate rifle, like a 6.5 Creedmoor, surely there must be a few non-professional shooters who can do it. There are plenty of rifles that will shoot into an area only slightly larger than the size of their bores at 100 feet, but a Walmart .22 with Walmart ammo won’t do that.

Hitting a squirrel brain consistently at 100 feet is a little harder than hitting half a TUMS tablet at 33 feet. That’s not easy!

After reading some angry responses, I went to Youtube to see what a truly good shooter can do offhand with a .22. I checked out Paul Harrell. He’s a champion marksman. He produced a video in which he covered a folding table with some of his awards. One person couldn’t carry them all.

In another video, he shot three .22 rifles offhand at 75 feet, producing three groups. Every group was too big to guarantee a dead squirrel with every shot. Every single group. And 75 is smaller than 100, right?

I thought he shot very well, and he wasn’t ashamed to post the video, so he must have been satisfied, too. So if he can’t hit squirrel brains at 75 feet, how can some guy with a Rural King hat and a mouthful of Skoal do it over and over at 100? I don’t think he can.

Here’s my arbitrary standard for an easy shot on an animal: you should be able to kill the animal cleanly 98 times out of 100. No less. If you can’t make a shot 98% of the time, it’s not an easy shot.

Here’s what I think of as an easy shot on a paper target: a random mall-grade pistol with cheap FMJ at 25 feet, shooting offhand into a 4″ circle. I can do that all day, and unlike most men who say they can make a shot all day, I am serious. I will very rarely miss. If I miss, it means I did something unusual or I got a bad cartridge. At 2″, I will still succeed the vast majority of the time, but not 98%. At 1″, I will probably be at about 85%. That’s not an easy shot. The 98% shot is easy. If you’re not surprised when you miss a shot, it wasn’t an easy shot. If you’re stunned, it was easy.

For someone better than me, or someone with better stuff, the “easy circle” will be smaller. For others, such as most police officers, it will be a lot bigger.

I don’t know why men let their insecurity make them lie about unimportant things. A long time ago, I learned that most 6-foot-tall men are really 5’10” or less. Sylvester Stallone and Robert Redford are both legitimately short, and Burt Reynolds was inches shorter than the 6’1″ he claimed.

Here’s something I love hearing: “I’m 6’1″ in boots.” Okay! And I’m 29,038′, standing on Mount Everest!

Men lie about their strenght. They’ll say they bench-press x pounds when the number is really 0.75x. I used to work out with 300 pounds, lifting it 8 times slowly, pulling it back all the way to my chest. But when I mentioned it to people, I always said this: “on a machine.” Free weights? Forget it. I found 220 unpleasant. I was honest with people. Machines make lifting easy.

Men lie about their height and their athletic abilty, and they are the same way about shooting.

I remember a funny example of insecurity-related fibbing. When I was a kid, I had the fastest car in school. It was not very fast, but it was the fastest. It was a Z28 with a 3.73 rear, positraction, and a 4-speed transmission. It was on the high end of the Camaro spectrum. Still your hearts, ladies. A guy named Jake Stryker (not really) had a base-model Firebird. He put some fat tires on it and claimed the dealership had worked some kind of wizardry on the motor, which wasn’t true. Dealerships didn’t do that.

He said he feared his younger brother would take it out and drive it at 140 miles per hour, which was considerably faster than a Corvette at that time. To make a Firebird do 140, you had to drop it out of a plane and put rockets on it.

Everyone knew he was lying, and there were jokes, but no one said anything to him, because they knew how he was. It was important to Jake to convince me and other kids his car was faster than mine. If his dad had really wanted him to have a fast car, he would have bought him a Trans Am with a 400-cubic-inch motor, a manual transmission, and 3.56 gears. He wouldn’t have paid a dealer to upgrade a base car, spending more than a Trans Am would have cost in the first place. Hello?

The Trans Am, Pontiac’s best Firebird, had thick sway bars, the big engine and manual transmission, the low gearing, and probably a few other things, from the factory. Putting all that junk in a baby blue girl’s Firebird with factory automatic, like Jake Stryker’s, would have cost a ton.

Back then, bragging about your automatic-transmission Firebird was pretty silly. They were all slow, and nobody who wanted to go fast drove automatics in those days. That reminds me of another Firebird driver I knew. I knew a girl named Kate, and she had a Formula, which was just below the Trans Am. I expressed shock because she got an automatic. She said she didn’t like the manual because it had three pedals. She didn’t know what they did. Wow. Hilarious.

Kate was not a car person. She picked her car because it, like Jake Stryker’s, was baby blue. Really nice girl.

I was not a cocky kid, and I didn’t go around bragging about my car. I didn’t race. I didn’t do anything to get Jake going. That was all him. People used to make fun of him a lot, but they didn’t tell him. It was very strange. He ran with the cool kids and thought he was one of them. They let him think that.

Some total strangers are pretty mad at me right now, for no reason at all. Oh, well. I still think a .22 brain shot on a squirrel at 100 feet is hard for nearly everyone, if not everyone. Too hard to be close to a sure thing. Anyone who wants to change my mind can put up a target 1-1/4″ long by 1/3″ high, shaped like a squirrel brain, shoot it 100 times in a row, and put it on Youtube. No editing.

I don’t see that happening.

In case anyone wants to try, remember:

1. Regular .22; nothing you can’t buy at a mall.
2. From the shoulder, no support at all.
3. Regular ammo, like Mini-mags.
4. Squirrel-brain-shaped target.
5. One hundred feet, measured on camera.
6. No cuts in the video.
7. Amateur shooter, not including people who used to be pros.
8. One hundred shots with at least 98 hits.

If you pull it off, here is the prize I offer: nothing. I will definitely say I’m impressed, though.

There are no Rainbows in Hell

My wife sent me some interesting photos the other day. They are from Facebook, and you are not likely to see them in the US, because they were posted for Zambians, by the Swedish Embassy in Lusaka. The Swedes are flying the sodomy flag over their embassy, and they are so intolerant and tone-deaf, they are boasting about it. The Finns are also guilty, because their embassy is in the same building, and they back the Swedes.

Under Biden, America does the same thing.

Here are the responses from Zambians.

As you can see, they are overwhelmingly against sexual perversion. As one comment says, Zambia, unlike Sweden, Finland, and the United States, is a Christian country, and the Bible expressly condemns sexual perversion in a number of places in both testaments.

It’s refreshing to see that there are countries where people are still able to stand up for God without fear of persecution.

Sweden and Finland are demonstrating a callous, elitist intolerance for the centuries-old religious beliefs of other nations. Sweden and Finland used to be Christian nations, and like Zambians, their citizens strongly objected to sexual perversion on religious grounds. Now these nations are caught up in the fashionable pro-perversion craze, and they insist on offending the citizens of countries that haven’t yet abandoned God. They might as well raise hogs on the grounds of their embassies in Saudi Arabia.

I wonder if they’re flying sexual perversion flags in Muslim nations or even close to mosques in their own countries. I’ll bet they’re not.

Let’s see. The news says the US and the British put perversion flags up in the UAE. Not Saudi Arabia or Iraq, though.

I suppose no one cares about offending Africans because Africans are poor and lacking in influence. Westerners perceive Africans as people who live on their handouts, so we feel they should do what we tell them.

For years, Westerners have been tying vital aid to the abandonment of Christianity. We claim we want to feed African children and give Africans medical care and economic help, but we penalize them for refusing to turn on Jesus Christ. Most Americans don’t know about it. Instead, we’re flipping out over a dubious baby formula crisis and the fact that white people go to Africa to hunt.

I asked my wife about baby formulas in Zambia, thinking it had to be a big problem. We are told that companies like Nestle give new African mothers free formulas so they will use it until their breasts dry up, forcing them to pay for it thereafter. When I asked Rhodah about it, she said Zambians generally don’t use formulas because they’re expensive. It’s not a story there. Apparently, leftists who hate Nestle have distorted the news pretty badly.

God hasn’t changed. He never changes. His position on sexual perversion will never change. There is zero evidence that he has sanctioned it at any time. There is abundant evidence that he hates it. It’s also very obvious, even to objective unbelievers, that it isn’t normal and causes a lot of suffering. Why do human beings decide God has changed his mind? It would make more sense to say he doesn’t exist. It’s disastrous when people don’t believe in God, but it’s worse to claim you believe and then insist he loves sin.

Eventually, if the rapture doesn’t come first, Zambia and the other Christian nations will give in and embrace perversion. Nations always, always end up siding with Satan in the end. I’m glad to see Christian Africa holding up as well as it is. I will pray God inundates Africans with wealth so they can send perversion missionaries packing without fear of lack.

I’m sure people who read this will assume I’m an ignorant person who believes whatever his parents told him to believe, and that I have always been an enemy of homosexuality. Not true. I used to think what homosexuals did was fine and dandy, if somewhat comical, and my parents were not all that influential in the formation of my beliefs. My dad was an atheist, and my mother was a lukewarm Christian most of her life. She even went to fortune-tellers and paid an astrologer for charts.

In my youth, I barely knew God and almost never read the Bible. I prayed very little. I thought I was saved, but I would have gone to hell had I died back then. Jesus visited me. I saw spirits. I started to read the Bible. I listened to preachers. I got baptized with the Holy Spirit. I began praying in tongues. Then I began to see how wrong I had been. Many things most Americans think are harmless or beneficial are not.

Astrology is evil and harmful. So are psychics, fortune-tellers, traditional Chinese medicine (an occult-based practice), pornography, gambling, most secular music, most secular video, yoga, meditation, drunkenness, and all forms of recreational drug use. Homosexuality is also harmful. It ruins lives, spreads diseases, cuts people off from God, and puts them in hell. It’s turning the entire Western world against Jesus Christ and his children.

I didn’t get where I am because of ignorance. Ignorance kept me from getting here sooner.

Elitist Americans and Europeans should respect the religious beliefs of Christian Africans at least as much as they respect the beliefs of Muslims. Maybe if we did, we would have coronavirus rates as low as those in Africa.

It’s a shame to see the world portray ancient, settled Christian beliefs as hateful superstitions. Jesus is the only door to heaven, and every other door leads to eternal flames.

God’s People are not Responsible for Other People’s Violence

The recent shooting in Buffalo is consistent with my view that the apocalypse is underway.

People are making wild judgments about the killer, without learning any facts in advance. Nothing new there. A silly woman who writes for Rolling Stone claims he’s a mainstream Republican. Some conservatives are hollering “false flag!”, which is one of the dumber things conservatives say whenever an event has the potential to embarrass them.

The killer, Payton Gendron, did what many delusional mass murderers do. He published a manfesto. I’m starting to think publishing a manifesto should, itself, be a crime carrying a prophylactic life sentence. I don’t know which mass killer was the first to publish a manifesto, but he really started a trend.

Unlike over 99% of the people who are making assertions about Gendron, I looked at the manifesto. It’s available at Scrib’d, unless our keepers have taken it down. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I learned enough to make me more informed than almost every journalist who claims to be informing us about Gendron.

Bad news for leftists: Gendron is not a Republican, he is an atheist, and he hates capitalism. Bad news for conservatives: he is not a Democrat or true leftist, and he used an AR-15, adding more weight to the irrational campaign to ban these mediocre but much-loved semiautomatic weapons.

Leftists should be encouraging people to buy AR-15’s, because they jam all the time and, when chambered in .223 or 5.56mm, have terminal performance inferior to that of 7.62x39mm guns.

Gendron is a white supremacist. He states it clearly, so there is no point in arguing about it. He believes America should be a white country. He wants to end immigration and somehow get rid of non-whites. He hates Jews more than anyone and claims they are less intelligent than the rest of us. He hates blacks quite a bit, and he thinks they are stupid and incapable of self-control. He thinks Jews cause most of the world’s problems, and he thinks it’s necessary to get rid of them. He believes blacks are not quite as bad, but he thinks they are easier to defeat, so he believes they should be attacked first.

It appears Gendron learned most of what he believes from Internet kooks. His manifesto is full of racist memes. It looks like there is no neo-Nazi canard too crazy for him to swallow and embrace.

Gendron wrote references to the Waukesha “Dancing Grannies” murders on the handguard of his gun. It appears he thought the attack was racially motivated, although the authorities think that is not true. He was clearly trying to avenge the victims.

Gendron wants to start a race war. He was hoping to spur reprisals which would bring things to a head.

He is a very intelligent boy, but he is also insane. Some people have argued with me when I called him insane, thinking I was suggesting he was not responsible for what he did. They had the wrong idea. “Insanity” has more than one definition. There is a medical definition, a legal definition, and a common sense definition. Legally, Gendron is almost certainly sane. He knew what he was doing. He understood the consequences. He will be convicted. From a common sense point of view, he’s as crazy as a treeful of coons. He believes things no rational person could believe.

I think his story is interesting, because the Revelation says the lawless will take over the world, and he is a great example of a lawless person. He felt his personal convictions entitled him to disobey very sound laws enacted by democratically elected legislators. In this respect, he is just like Antifa terrorists, BLM terrorists, sanctuary city mayors, people who harass Supreme Court justices, and Second Amendment sanctuary sheriffs. He feels he is above the rules. People like him are becoming more and more common and influential, and our ordered society is breaking down because of it. Joe Biden is lawless, and he’s the president. He backs the people who are destroying our government by terrorizing Supreme Court justices he disagrees with, and he refuses to enforce our immigration laws.

Gendron is also interesting because he is trying to get people to murder each other. The Revelation says a spirit of murder will be released on the world, and people will kill each other under his influence. I am convinced that spirit is already at work, and Gendron is probably controlled by demons he commands. Sooner or later, violence will erupt everywhere, and people like Gendron will be the ones who light the fuses that set the rest of humanity off.

As an atheist, Gendron is unacquainted with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Because he isn’t baptized with the Spirit and does not pray in tongues, he has very little resistance to delusion. This is why he believes the weird things he does. He seems like a freak, but the truth is that he is typical. Most people aren’t planning to shoot up supermarkets, but only a tiny percentage of people are close enough to the Holy Spirit to avoid believing nonsense. I would guess that less than one percent of human beings spend enough time in the Spirit to avoid being duped.

Not everyone is a firestarter like Gendron, but nearly everyone is dry tinder. Nearly everyone is a sleeper, waiting for someone with more initiative to supply the impetus that will drive us to start a murder pandemic. Anyone who isn’t protected from delusion by the Holy Spirit is a potential murderer or accomplice of murderers.

As Jesus said, those who are not with him and his people are against them. You can’t be neutral. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t rule you, Satan and his imps can get at you and transform you into a vicious creature who is impervious to reason. The fact that you’re a nice person now doesn’t mean anything. Nice people supported apartheid and made snacks for Nazis who were busy abusing the innocent.

A lot of people who used to be nice run around in black costumes throwing frozen water bottles at the police and trying to burn government buildings.

America’s leftist lunatics are making things less and less tolerable for sane people. They are pushing us to the point where we will snap. School districts are now punishing children for refusing, truthfully, to use incorrect pronouns. That’s pure Nuremberg. A child who refuses to lie can end up labeled a disciplinary problem, and that can follow him through his scholastic career and limit his opportunities. Colleges are run by utter fruitcakes now, and if they see that a teen refused to mislabel girls and boys, they will wholeheartedly agree with the assessments of the nuts who slandered him in high school, and they are likely to deprive him of positions he has earned. The likely end result is that many young people will be barred from positions of leadership and wealth that they deserve. They may effectively be banned from many professions. I doubt my law school would have accepted me had I told the admissions committee God was against sodomy.

The Germans moved incrementally to get rid of Jews. They started limiting their participation in society, and they slowly tightened the noose. At first, the restrictions were tolerable. Eventually, Jews were banned from many professions. Then they had to move into ghettos, and their wealth was taken. In the end, the Germans deprived them of the right to live. The same pattern is developing in the treatment of people who oppose the enemies of Jesus, who is unquestionably God.

It’s amazing that sexual perversion turned out to be the most powerful weapon used to destroy us. I predicted this over and over, publicly, years before it happened, and people said I was crazy. Now we live in a country where your child’s future can be jeopardized simply because he refuses to pretend the delusions of mentally ill children and adults are correct. I was right, and the reason I was right is that God was the one who told me what would happen. I couldn’t have figured it out on my own. I had no reason to think about it, and I probably lacked the capacity to see what was happening without help.

Gendron is nothing like me or most conservatives or Christians, but he will become our public face, at least for a while. Perhaps for a long time. He is much more like Antifers and BLM terrorists. They ought to bear a resemblance to each other, because they have the same father. He is not part of the right wing, but there are people like him on the far, far right, and their numbers are increasing in response to leftist aggression. There are many extreme-right characters who are not Christian at all or who claim to be Christian but reject the Holy Spirit and do not pray in tongues. Those people are just as vulnerable to radicalization as Gendron, and they are starting to show the world they are also sons and daughters of the father of Antifa and BLM.

When the rapture comes, nearly everyone left on Earth will be a child of Satan, and the pandemic of murder and abuse will, for the most part, be a family dispute. There will be a remnant of people who turn to God, but their numbers will be insignificant. While God’s children are on the earth, God has a compelling interest in tempering the suffering of humanity. Once they are gone, he will have much less incentive to intervene. He will sit back and let Satan’s children do what they want to each other. They will not belong to him. Then they will learn that the presence of God’s children on the earth was the only reason this place was ever significantly nicer than hell.

I’m sure they will still whine about imaginary unfairness, and they will look for scapegoats to torment, but we won’t be here to be hurt and have our wealth looted, so they’ll have to torture and kill each other and loot each other’s wealth instead. Meanwhile, we will be in heaven, at a marriage feast. Out of their reach for eternity.

I say these things as though I know I will be there. That is presumptuous. I certainly hope I will.

Now we should sit back and see whether Gendron succeeds in starting the conflagration he hoped to start. Will he pull it off, or will others have to complete his work? Maybe they’ll go out like Samson’s foxes, ripping at each other and running in terror because they’re tied together and they see fire chasing them.

They would be Satan’s apostles.

I bear no responsibility for what Gendron did, any more than I bear responsibility for BLM’s arson and murder. I’m just a man who believes we should have a godly, orderly society guided by love. I am not responsible for what anyone else does. People can blame me all they want. Like God told me a few years back, an excuse is a lie. And the word says liars will have their place in the lake of fire.

My wife and I prayed for Gendron, his family, his victims, and their families. Maybe God will help them not to be destroyed by things like delusion and unforgiveness. That would be nice. The only thing worse than going to prison for life is going to prison for life and then going to hell.

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

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

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

Sicilian Pizza Recipe

I rarely check the email address associated with this blog, so I get behind on correspondence. I have to go to a different location and turn on a computer I don’t use much. Sorry about that.

A reader asked me for my current pizza recipe, and I don’t think I sent it, so I am trying to make up for it now.

This is for a Sicilian made in a 9″x13″ aluminum quarter sheet pan. I season my pans with olive oil, baking it on at 500° or so until it’s a nice, slick film. A lot of people love steel and iron, but the truth is that aluminum gives a better crust, and it’s light and easy to work with.

I used to use 1-1/3 times as much dough, for a taller crust. My friend Mike is staying with me, and he has blood sugar issues, so I decided to try a thinner crust. It’s still excellent. If you want a taller crust, do the multiplication.

Whatever you decide to do, you want about 2/3 as much water as flour, by weight. Don’t measure the flour and water by volume, because you will get inconsistent results. Be precise about this. A small variation can ruin your pizza. Don’t be an idiot and say you have to do everything by feel.

The big exception here is the sauce. You want 4 ounces by volume. It can be hard trying to figure out exactly what 4 ounces of sauce weigh, but the volume figure is what you’re shooting for.

SICILIAN PIZZA WITH 3/4-HEIGHT CRUST

300 g high-gluten flour, like All Trumps or GFS Primo Gusto
200 g water
1 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. instant yeast – This will take hours to rise, so multiply by 4 if you’re in a hurry.
1/2 tsp. pepper
1.5 tsp. gluten if using bread flour – You may want to add a little more water.

Mix everything but the water in a big food processor with a chopper blade. Add the water and process for up to a minute. Dry flour will fly up and stick to the sides of the bowl in the first few seconds. I like to stop the processor and scrape it back into the dough with a silicone spatula. Then I continue.

Pour olive oil into your sheet pan. When it spreads out, it should be a circle at least 5″ in diameter. Put a little oil on your hands. Take the dough out and turn it inside out a few times, stretching it to make it tighter so it gives a good oven spring. Flatten it out into sort of a crude rectangle about an inch thick. Put it in the pan, roll it in the oil, and cover the pan with plastic.

After at least 20 minutes, Try stretching it to fit the pan. If it won’t cooperate, do what you can and return after 20 more minutes. Once it’s stretched, put dents all over the top of the dough with your fingers. Then turn it over and fit it to the pan. The dents will form nice ripples and so on in the finished crust.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

4 oz. volume or ~135 g weight Stanislaus Saporito sauce
4 oz. water

If you want a sauce that tastes more ripe, substitute around 1-1/2 oz. of the fruit juice of your choice for part of the water.

1 tsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1-1/2 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. oregano

CHEESE

6 slices Publix brand provolone
Enough Boar’s Head mozzarella (whole milk, low moisture) to make up 12 oz.

I used to use Gordon Food Service provolone, but it seems kind of rubbery these days. Boar’s Head deli mozzarella works well, but it’s expensive, so try to find something else. You can also substitute other things, such as cheddar or munster. Swiss can be very nice.

Cut the mozzarella in cubes if you want to make things easy. Otherwise, thin slices will work. I tell the grocery people to make me 1/2″ slices so I can turn them into cubes easily.

Apply the sauce to the crust. If you want, you can parbake it first, but it doesn’t really improve it. Apply the provolone. Spread the mozzarella over it. Sprinkle the pie with oregano. Add toppings.

I like to put a few slivers of cheese on the outer edge of the crust so they melt and burn against the pan. You have to have a well-seasoned pan, though, or the cheese will stick.

Bake at 500° or more (my oven does 550°) on the lowest rack, until you get what you want. These days, I have been burning pizzas pretty good, at up to 17 minutes. I use a pizza steel now. I put it on the lowest rack and let it get good and hot. Then I put the pizza pan on it.

Take the pie out of the pan and put it on a wire rack if you are obsessed with crunchiness. If not, you can put it on a pizza tray.

You will probably have to play around to see how to handle your particular oven.

You can use just about any flour you want. They all work, but they give results that are good in different ways.

I suggest you make yourself a pizza peel like the one I made. You can find photos on this blog. You just cut it out of a pizza pan, bend it, and sand off the rough bits. You need something as wide as the quarter sheet is long in order to get all the way under the crust, break any sticky spots loose, and support the pizza.

The sauce comes in huge cans, so you should break every can into portions and freeze them in airtight bags. I divide my cans into 4 portions. When I want pizza, I take the frozen sauce out and slice off as much as I want, using a scale to measure it. Then I melt it in the microwave and add my other ingredients.

That’s about it. The results are extraordinary. Maybe you can improve on them.

That’s Some Privilege, That White Privilege

More apocalypse news: proud celebrity cuckold Will Smith has started a fad. As you probably know, a young man named Isaiah Lee attacked pro-transsexual comedian Dave Chappelle while he was performing. I didn’t expect to blog again so soon, but news that seems important to discuss has popped up twice in three days.

I call Chappelle “pro-transsexual” because he is. A contingent of perpetually enraged leftists have decided he hates transsexuals because he talked about them in his act, but he supports them in their efforts to destroy themselves.

Lee appears to be some kind of mixed-race person with black blood. He has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and he supposedly had a replica gun which contained a knife blade. What goes through the mind of a person who designs a silly weapon like that is not clear to me.

I just saw new information. The replica “ejects a knife.” Why not get a real gun that ejects BULLETS? After all, leftists keep telling us buying a gun is quick and easy.

Lee may be a woman. You know how that works these days.

Is Will Smith responsible? He has definitely made it more likely that other immature people will physically attack speakers. On the other hand, you can’t really be responsible for what other people do. Your guilt for encouraging them is not the same as their guilt for acting.

Satan, or as I often call him through clumsy typing, “Stan,” has done a great job, providing leftists with incredibly stupid arguments that allow them to rationalize violence and various crimes. They say it’s violence when other people SPEAK against their beliefs. That means violence in response is justified, even long after the fact. Then they say their own violence is expression, like speech, so it doesn’t justify any type of physical response.

“My violence is protected expression. Your protected expression is violence.”

The dissonance is remarkable, but if you can seriously believe Caitlyn Gender is a woman, what can’t you believe?

Delusion is possibly the primary symptom of demonic influence. We are neck-deep in it now, and the waters are rising faster than ever. Either the end is not far off, or God’s people are in for a very rough ride. Anyone crazy enough to think Chaz Bono is a man is crazy enough to make a coat from the skins of Christians.

Lots of things are happening here at the compound. Mike found a lady who sells tomato plants, including heirlooms, so now we have Better Boy, Cherokee Chocolate, and Mortgage Lifter plants. I’m trying to determine what kind of enclosure to build them. I have never had a greenhouse. A simple structure covered with plasticized fabric is said to be enough to kill a squirrel’s interest, but I am told such a greenhouse will get too hot in the summer and kill the plants. I am thinking about chicken wire, but some people claim squirrels will chew through it.

I feel less and less when I kill a squirrel. I see why the old timers in Kentucky were so hard. They needed crops and livestock in order to keep their families alive, and I am starting to think the same way, given the Biden Catastrophe. I no longer have any patience with vermin.

The squirrel trap I bought is finally working, so that’s interesting. Peanuts pay off. I have a bigger trap baited with a peach and a chicken leg. I want to save a few of my peaches this year. I saw a rabbit eating one. The problem varmints here are squirrels, coons, coyotes, armadillos, and possums. Bobcats can also cause problems. Rabbits aren’t a big deal, because there are so few. I blame the coyotes.

I always take the squirrels, put them in the car with me with lots of air conditioning, buy them a few things at Louis Vuitton, and then check them into nice hotels, safe and sound. Don’t worry about them.

I know I said I had no patience with vermin, but I feel a little sorry for rabbits, because something is killing the daylights out of them, and the rabbits here always look miserable. I guess I’ll shoot next time, though. Rabbits are tasty, and there is no season because everyone hates them.

We plan to grow things in buckets. The lady we got the tomatoes from has a true survival farm on half an acre of sand, so I know I have no excuse for starving. She has tomatoes, squash, onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, chickens, potatoes, and probably some other things.

If I can grow food here, maybe moving to Tennessee is a bad idea. Heating a house up there with limited electricity due to Biden would be a lot of work.

The lady who sold us the tomatoes said a lot of locals are moving to Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

That’s about it from the compound. Stay prayed up and don’t make any trans jokes unless you’re packing.

Hell Keeps Freezing Over

Yesterday, my friend Mike told me Roe v. Wade had been overturned, and he said the news came from a site with a name like “topnewznowlulz.biz.” Based on the facts that I thought it would be a very long time before Roe would come under attack, and that the site was obscure, I scoffed. But I Googled anyway, and we all know what happened.

What APPEARS to have happened. What MAY happen. I should be careful.

I say, “What APPEARS to have happened,” because I read the opinion, and the tone is a little like that of a Yahoo News article from a leftist agitation site. “Sam Alito SHUTS down far-left Roe Jurists.” Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you will see what I mean if you read the opinion. As of this writing, I haven’t seen any confirmation that the opinion is real, so I am hedging my bets.

Ordinarily, court opinions are very restrained, but Alito says Roe was “egregiously wrong,” and he really drops the hammer on the justices and other leftists who formed Roe’s murderous, imperialist conclusions.

I say, “What MAY happen,” because the opinion is not published, unless publication by news sites counts. It’s not law until other courts get notice via official notification.

When I saw that the news was probably real, I rejoiced, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t because I thought the unborn were finally being rescued. It was because I thought the ruling was going to spur conflict and disorder, and I thought this was probably one more indication that the end of the age was very close.

That’s how tired I am of this crazy planet.

A friend of mine had a baby, and when I visited her, she said that during labor, she would have done anything to get him out of her. She wasn’t embarrassed about being seen naked by other people. She didn’t care what she had to do. She wanted him OUT, OUT, OUT. The new ruling (I am too lazy to write “alleged” or whatever over and over) made me think of my friend. When a crisis gets bad enough, your values change, and you just want it over with.

The left loves the word “unsustainable,” and they use it to manipulate us, so naturally, I don’t like it. But I will use it. The world’s current course is unsustainable. We can’t continue in a world in which people and even animals are constantly dodging an infuriating, mutating, capricious disease. We can’t continue in a world where hatred and lawlessness are considered normal. We can’t have lives that are bearable in an atmosphere of forced participation in sexual perversion or where we are expected to submit to technology and completely abandon privacy and free will. Fundamentally, to use a word that is appropriate in more than one way, we can’t continue in a world where God is hated and Satan is openly crowned in his place.

Things have to come to a head, because the strain we live under is unendurable.

Actually, that’s not quite true for people who are close to God and have his blessings and protection. But even such people long to get out of a world where they are completely out of place.

The leak of the opinion is a great example of what’s wrong with the world right now. God tells us Satan’s children are lawless. We see lawlessness everywhere these days. People have turned civil disobedience into an obsession. Many people go so far as to endorse rioting openly. States refuse to obey federal law. Local governments refuse to obey federal law and state law. It’s not just individuals running amok. It’s rulers.

What does the Bible call the Antichrist? “The Man of Lawlessness.”

The person who leaked the opinion is lawless. She (the pronoun I choose) doesn’t care about preserving the order our government is designed to maintain. We have three branches of government. The judicial branch is supposed to make unbiased decisions regarding the actions of all three branches. The judicial branch is supposed to be the final arbiter of existing laws. It is extremely important for the judicial process to be untainted by outside influences. When judges are manipulated, the judiciary becomes a powerless farce, justice is perverted, and people who depend on the judiciary and who rightly feel cheated are likely to be motivated to stop obeying the law.

The leaker is almost certainly a left-wing justice or clerk. There is no conceivable reason why a conservative would do something like this. No conservative would be outraged by the opinion. No conservative would be so highly motivated by dissatisfaction with parts of the opinion that he would abandon his ethics and risk his career by leaking it.

Leftists also have a history of stealing and leaking private and confidential information regarding conservatives. Conservatives are not as prone to these slimy tactics.

What is the purpose of leaking the opinion? Good question.

Is the traitor trying to influence the outcome of the case? Maybe, if she is sufficiently hysterical. Leftists now have greatly increased faith in the public’s ability to coerce judges through protesting and other forms of pressure, and they have lose all scruples about doing so. They don’t care at all about impartiality or justice, and they have a history of pressuring courts. But if the leaker is a justice or clerk, she is also a lawyer, and she has to be pretty smart to be where she is, so she should know the leak has a very slim chance of saving Roe.

What about the midterm elections and the presidential election? Now we have a scenario that makes a little sense. The leaker may be trying to motivate female voters to stop the anti-Biden stampede that is projected to inundate the polls in November. We won’t be voting on a new president, but if Roe is undone, the states will have the power to ban various types of abortions, and leftist women will feel motivated to storm the voting precincts in order to put more leftists in power on the state level.

Of course, by and large, women vote more destructively than men. They are much more leftist than we are. If men didn’t vote, only a small percentage of our elected officials would not be extreme leftists. Many women want the government to be their husband, so they are willing to give up more of their liberty than men.

If the leaker can get more women to the polls, their influence will increase, and effectively, conservatives will be disempowered.

Will the leaker be caught? I think she made a good effort to avoid it. The opinion draft that was published appears to have been scanned, not uploaded directly. I assure you, internal communications at the Supreme Court are purely electronic except for documents obtained externally, and even those documents would be transmitted electronically after being scanned once.

The leaker appears to have given the press a printed copy in order to avoid having the federal marshals trace her through electronic accounts.

Is this a great day for the unborn? I guess. I suppose many children who would otherwise be murdered will be protected by sensible new abortion laws. But many states will persist in supporting infanticide, so the effect will be limited.

Jesus told us the problems of the end time were labor pains. Someone is being born. Who is it? Can it be Jesus? He was already born, so why would he be born a second time?

I suppose you could say that everyone who is raptured is born a second time, because the rapture changes people, but it’s pretty well agreed that “born again” refers to internal transformation by the Holy Spirit.

Is the Antichrist the one who is being born? I tend to think so, but it’s obviously a guess.

The world can’t stay in labor forever. I don’t want to root for the coming of the tribulation, but I am ready for change. If we’re about to descend into global conflict and misery, I say better sooner than later. The sooner we see the rapture and the tribulation, the sooner we will see a world free of Satan, demons, and crazed leftists and pagans who make the world the cursed place it is.