You Can’t Choose the People You Help

I had an interesting dream this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Day we Prayed for Doesn’t Feel That Great

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America is a monstrous slut these days.

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

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

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

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

I had a fascinating experience today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does an American Hand Grinder Cost $345?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I did more studying.

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

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

Are these things really true?

No. At least it doesn’t look like it.

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

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

Ooof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Your Church Really a Church?

Last night, my wife had an interesting dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was exactly what I thought when I saw it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is just no way to do it.

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

Here are some thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By destroying Jerusalem, God was showing us the tribulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.