God Ends Lack

I got an unexpected surprise today, and I got relief from a long drought.

Yesterday, I wrote about my friend Tina. I used to drive her to church every day. I don’t hear from her often, but a few days back, she texted me and invited me to watch her online graduation. She had earned a master’s degree.

I watched the ceremony, and I was very glad. I mentored a young man named Travis for years, and he was supposed to graduate from college this school year. He died after an accidental shooting. Seeing Tina succeed where he had been cut off was rewarding.

Today, my phone rang before 9 a.m. It was Tina. She called to ask my advice about some problems she was having.

As I wrote yesterday, Tina comes from a broken family, and her sister had to raise her. Tina has had to look after herself and plan her own future. She is an achiever. She is extremely focused and goal-oriented. She worked hard and earned scholarships. Now she’s out on her own, she hasn’t been blessed with a husband, and she is still carrying too much weight. She is having some problems with her landlady, who doesn’t seem to understand how residential rentals work. She also wanted prayer because she wanted to hear from God more clearly and more abundantly.

As far as I can recall, I have not had anyone to pray with since March of last year. Of course, I’m available, but people I know don’t seem inclined to take advantage. I used to pray with Travis, and I was able to share things God had given me so Travis would also be helped. Travis helped me as well. For a long time, I’ve been asking God to send other people to fill the void.

I own residential rental properties, so while I am not an expert on property law, I know a few things, and I was able to give Tina some information so she would understand her situation better. That was nice, but the real blessings were that I was able to share tactics God had shown me, and that we prayed together.

Yesterday morning, I got a supernatural revelation concerning my connection to God. It helped open the channel so he could give me the things he wanted me to have. It helped me know I was not imposing on him and that he was eager to supply and support me. I got to tell Tina about it. She has been fighting her own battles all her life, with less help than she should be getting. She should have a Spirit-filled husband as well as friends who team up with her supernaturally. She should have a house. She shouldn’t be worried about bills. She should have someone to pray with every day. She shouldn’t feel she will sink if she stops paddling.

We prayed for God to help her landlady to become Spirit-led. We spoke defeat to her efforts to put unreasonable demands on Tina. We prayed for Tina to hear God’s voice and to know she is part of him. We prayed for God to bring her together with a man who will stand by her.

I told her she really needed to spend time praying in tongues every day. I said it was where revelation began. She accepted the advice.

It’s great to be blessed, but it’s frustrating when you can’t get anyone else to listen to your story and receive what God gave you. Being able to help Tina was wonderful, especially after what happened to Travis. I hope we’ll get together for prayer in the future, and I hope to see results in her life. Maybe soon she won’t have to call an old man a long way off in order to have someone to pray with.

I suppose praying with almost anyone is a good thing, but it’s especially nice to pray with people who know a few things and have some connection with God. You get tired of going over the basics with people who are still at square one.

I’m not a model Christian, but I know a lot of helpful things. I will be very grateful if God helps me share a few, effectively, during my remaining time here.

What Graduation Looks like in 2020

Today I’m getting a taste of everyone else’s 2020. I’m watching an online graduation made necessary by coronavirus. Even the classes took place online.

I was a deacon at a church called New Dawn Ministries. While I was there, I met a young lady named Tina. She was in her teens. I don’t know a great deal about her early life, but I know her family was very dysfunctional, and she was raised by her older sister.

Tina made the most of her situation. She was extremely motivated. She participated in beauty contests in order to get scholarships, and she ended up going to the University of Miami.

I lived near the University, and her family lived in Broward County. They asked me if I could drive her to church every Sunday, and I agreed.

Tina did well in college, and she decided to get a master’s degree in leadership and management, with a concentration in human resources. She has been attending Purdue’s online program, and today she graduates. A few days back, she sent me an invitation by text message.

The ceremony appears in a window in a web browser. There are only 4 or 5 people on camera in the room with the podium. They are all wearing masks except when they speak. It felt very strange, watching figures in robes and masks filing into that dark, lonely room. It was like watching a scene from a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, except I was watching real life.

They’re announcing the names of the graduates in alphabetical order. They’re showing a photo of each graduate. We’re in the B’s, and Tina’s last name starts with H.

Tina knew my friend Travis, who died in May. They attended UM at the same time, and they were friends. I had some hope they would pair up and marry.

I won’t get to see Travis graduate, but at least Tina made it.

I saw her photo and sent her a congratulatory text. Now I’ve closed the browser. No point in sitting through dozens of photos of strangers.

I was thinking about Travis, and I decided to do some counting. I counted black male and female graduates, with the intention of stopping when I got to 10 of either. When I quit, I had counted 10 women and only three men. Unfortunate.

It’s funny that I watched the graduation today. I had a dream last night, and it seems related.

I used to write for Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald. I met a number of the writers and employees. I remember them. Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten, Joel Achenbach, Michelle Genz, Philip Brooker, Ray Bubel, John Dorschner, and Doris Mansour. The editor I generally worked with was named Tom. I remember going to his house for a party. He had just built his own deck. Dave Barry’s young son was taking karate classes, and while I talked to Dave, his son kept punching me in the leg.

I never fit in with the group. There was a hardness to the writers, except for Dave Barry, who seemed to float above it because of his ability and his fame. They were cold, worldly people who looked out for themselves and had no romance in their hearts. Maybe it was because they were journalists. They published my work, but I felt there was a barrier I could never cross. I could never be an insider.

I seemed to connect better with the art people. Of course, I wasn’t in a position to compete with them, although one of my drawings did get published.

In my dream, I was at an outdoor table, eating lunch with several Christians and Tom. In the dream, the Herald still owned its gigantic waterfront headquarters. The table was maybe two miles north of the building, on the other side of I-95.

In the dream, I had quit writing for Tropic. In real life, I quit in about 1988. I had become a Christian, I felt Tropic and the Herald were not very helpful, and again, I didn’t fit in. As the relationship diminished, Tom sensed it. The last thing I remember him saying to me in real life was, “Don’t disappear.”

It felt like Tom was having lunch so far north of the Herald because he wasn’t comfortable being seen with me. I could tell he wanted me to do some more work for him, and I was willing to do small jobs, just to be helpful. He wasn’t direct, but he hinted at a desire to bring me back in.

Our lunch companions started talking about his choice to have lunch so far from his office. I got up to throw my soda can in the trash, and I said, “It’s because we’re conservatives. Or because we’re Christians.”

I woke up, and I felt distressed. I found myself thinking about the years I had wasted, trying to get the devil’s world to accept me. I tried to make it as a writer, and I had two comic strips that reached the development stage. Many times, I had the feeling I had finally broken the ice. Success was just a few weeks away. But it never came. I was grabbing Satan’s bait over and over. I didn’t realize there were two different families on the planet, and when it came to earthly promotion, I belonged to the wrong one.

If you belong to God, you’re not supposed to get wrapped up in secular accomplishments. The word says God sets him that is godly apart for himself. You shouldn’t feel you have to win prizes or titles. You shouldn’t believe you have to have your name on buildings. You shouldn’t feel like a failure because you’re not a big name in some field or other. Secular accomplishments are God’s garbage. They don’t go with you to heaven. Up there, your service to God is what makes you rich. You get to see your wealth every time you see a person you helped to make it.

Satan likes to dangle bait in front of people. He’ll say, “You can serve God and be an Oscar winner. You can be a billionaire. You can win a Nobel Prize.” He’ll give you the idea that you glorify God with your silly achievements, as if God needs you to help him get publicity. Generally, in order to get what he offers you, you have to whore out. If you don’t, he keeps you from winning, and he gives his tacky prizes and ribbons to people with less ability but more plasticity.

I didn’t feel good, thinking about the wasted years, but then I got a supernatural revelation that made me feel wonderful.

Every Christian who understands the Holy Spirit and grace knows we are not supposed to serve God through hard work or superior natural ability. We are not supposed to earn; we are supposed to receive an inheritance. This is why the volumes of the Bible are called testaments. A testament is a will. Jesus died, and we are supposed to inherit what he earned.

Spirits work and move in every person. The only spirit a Christian should carry is the Holy Spirit, but many of us are inhabited by more than one spirit. People who don’t know God are full of evil spirits, but they don’t know the Holy Spirit.

A Spirit-led Christian is supposed to be like a hand connected to a body. A hand doesn’t feed itself. It doesn’t even have a mouth. It doesn’t get a job to pay for its upkeep. The body feeds it and looks after it. A Christian who thinks he has to take care of himself and guide himself is like a severed hand with delusions.

If I am truly God’s son, I am supposed to be as much a part of him as my hand is part of me. My hand is supported from within the body, through various vessels. As a Christian, I am supposed to be supplied by God at all times, and–this is the important part–I should never feel that he is reluctant to supply ever need, more abundantly than I need. He allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could do that.

I really am God’s son, and he really is eager to do things for me.

I knew these things before last night, but you know how it is with revelation. I hope. You can know things perfectly well and still not have a good grasp of them. A supernatural revelation will make knowledge part of you, undeniable and suddenly obvious.

Things like faith, love, peace, and knowledge are supposed to flow into us without end, just as blood flows into hands. God didn’t put us here so we could be isolated and poor.

Satan isolates people and makes them feel alone and small, and that makes sense, because he’s a predator. Predators like to get their prey alone. God binds us to himself so we have his power and invulnerability of God. If we don’t see these things fully manifested, it’s because we’re blocking God with our misconceptions and disobedience.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. If Satan cuts me off from help and prevents me from succeeding, God will make me an important member of his family, and he will give me victory.

If I had gotten rich writing or drawing a comic strip, I would be a mess. I wouldn’t have realized I needed to get closer to God. I would be subject to tremendous temptation, and I would probably give in all the time. I would have a social circle of cold, godless people who would keep drawing me away from God. I might have a horrible atheist wife (or ex-wife) who would be like a painful tumor to me. I would have friends and business acquaintances who would take advantage of me and make me feel bad about myself. I would have no prayer life. I would not know how to get God’s help when I or someone else needed it. I would be a rich failure.

The revelation I got last night is life-changing. Things will be much better from now on.

I hope you will keep trying to get close to God. It’s the only plan that works. The others are just traps.

Uncensored Upstarts Ease the Pain of Youtube Tyranny

Today I went against common sense and joined another conservative social site. It’s called Newtube. If you can’t tell from the name, it’s a Youtube competitor that doesn’t do political or scientific censorship.

I have very little faith in niche social media sites. They appear, they crawl, they stumble, and they disappear. They fail to serve their primary purpose, which is to spread information to the general public. If you’re on Gab or Full30 or Parler or Newtube, you’re probably only reaching other conservatives, and they already agree with you, so you’re not accomplishing much.

I have to admit: Newtube doesn’t seem quite as weak as the other sites. It functions, which is something other sites can’t always say, and there are thousands of people using it.

A scientist named Tony Heller has a very popular Youtube channel I enjoy. He also has a website called Realclimatescience.com. He has presented some very powerful information which does great damage to the coronavirus and global warming party lines. Youtube censors him. They are threatening to shut him down, because dissent is violence against humanity in the Antichrist’s homogenized future. Heller started a Newtube channel, and he tells people about it in his Youtube videos.

He has 8169 Newtube subscribers. That’s around 8% of his Youtube subscriber count, but it’s not negligible. Also, Newtube’s site loads without balking, so it looks like Newtube isn’t suffering from technical problems caused by undercapitalization.

He just did another video complaining about coronavirus propaganda. As you may know, South Dakota has a conservative governor. Her name is Kristi Noem. She refused to lock the state down, and South Dakota has done well economically and epidemiologically. The MSM can’t stand it, so they publish facially absurd criticisms, and Heller is going after them.

Here’s an example. Her grandmother died in a nursing home. The Daily Beast, which is appropriately and perhaps prophetically named, put out a silly message saying Kristi Noem’s grandmother had died in a facility “ravaged” by covid. Problem: she didn’t have covid. She was 98, and she died because she was old. It’s horrific that CBS left this information out. Tony Heller corrected the problem.

CBS put out a deceptive story saying South Dakota had one of the two highest hospital bed occupancy rates. Problem: 17% of ICU beds are free, and overall, 40% of hospital beds are free. If you’ve ever been to a hospital and looked around, you know they do a pretty good job of keeping beds filled. A hospital with 60% occupancy or 17% ICU occupancy is not a busy hospital. Heller’s video points these things out.

Only about 8100 people have seen the video. Pretty good for a conservative site. His Youtube videos typically get several times that many views.

It’s nice that someone is making an effort to provide an uncensored alternative. I think it will fail, however. The tech mammoths have too big a head start, and Newtube will probably never attract anyone who isn’t conservative. Spreading information among conservatives is helpful, but it won’t do much to change minds, since the minds that need to be changed have chosen to live under censorship.

I like Newtube. Maybe I’ll enjoy it, although I can forget about watching it on my Roku sets. I don’t think it will have much of an effect on public discourse. The left won and won big, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to catch up.

It’s sobering to see my predictions about thought control coming true. When did I start saying the left would do this to us? Long, long ago. Somehow, I am still shocked to see it happening. It’s cliche, but I’ll say it: this is America. This isn’t supposed to happen here.

I think the rapture is imminent, and if that’s true, so is the tribulation, which follows the rapture immediately. I wonder what censorship will look like during the tribulation.

Right now, there are millions of real Christians on earth, praying and doing what Christians do. Our presence restrains God’s anger and Satan’s evil works. The day after we leave, the restraints will be gone. Things statists wouldn’t dare do today will suddenly become acceptable.

Right now, the penalty for dissent is censorship, or you may lose a job or get doxxed. What will the penalties be like after the rapture? The past tells us what humans are capable of doing in the future. Actually, we don’t have to look at the past. We can look at extreme behavior that takes place right now, in places like Iran and North Korea.

The British had an empire that was at least as bad as the Third Reich. We don’t like to talk about it, but it’s a fact. They used to drag dissenters through London naked, hang them until they were nearly dead, sever their genitals in front of crowds, remove their internal organs, and fry their body parts while they were still alive. The monarchs themselves ordered it. If a Christian nation could do that, then godless 21st-century America will be capable of arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and killing those who reject propaganda.

Consider the Catholic Church. It used to be the biggest terrorist organization on earth. People were terrified of the church. They knew they could be burned alive for saying the wrong things.

Think of revolutionary France. Think about Cuba. Think about the USSR and China. Things can get very, very bad here.

We say, “It can’t happen here,” but we don’t ask why it can’t happen. The presence of praying Christians is the reason. Once we’re gone, it can and will happen here.

I mentored a young man named Travis Quinn, and he died in May from an accidental gunshot wound he received a month earlier. Today I happened to look at some Whatsapp texts he sent in March. He said he had had a dream of a world war. He said everything was exploding. Ships and planes were everywhere. The planes were dropping bombs. He felt surrounded.

Travis had prophetic dreams. I know, because I interpreted some of them. I think Travis foresaw the Antichrist’s coming world.

If you want to enjoy the company of people who haven’t been completely deceived yet, Newtube will probably bring you some satisfaction. If you’re hoping it’s the start of a movement that will change the world, I think you’ll be disappointed. It’s more likely that its membership records will be used to help leftists round conservatives, Jews, and Christians up for “special treatment.”

Three Lemons in a Row but no Jackpot

I guess I’m now the world’s leading critic of the Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle.

I bought a Model 60 in 2018, I believe. It shot 4″ groups at 50 feet. Not yards. Feet. I sent it back, and Marlin gave up on it and sent a new one. I shot that one, and the feed tube fell off.

My buddy Mike wanted another .22, so naturally, he settled on the Model 60. I told him he couldn’t be my friend if he bought one, but he didn’t listen. He bought two. He bought an old one, and he also bought a new one. He liked the old one because it had a bigger magazine and a longer barrel.

This weekend, he brought the old one down, and it stovepiped about 50% of the time. A stovepipe is a failure to eject. The spent casing sticks out of the action, and it looks like a pipe.

When he left, he left the gun here. He was having issues with his gun case, and he figured he would be back soon.

Today, I decided to try to fix the gun, which came from Gunbroker. I have never been cheated on Gunbroker, but it looks like Mike drew the short straw. His gun had been modified several times by a master gunsmith. It was modified in the same sense that what puppies do to carpets is modification.

The Model 60 comes apart when you remove two takedown screws under the stock. Mike’s gun had three screws. The forward screw was normal. There were two screws at the rear. One went through the trigger guard. The other was set in a very nicely drilled hole in the stock, to the rear of the trigger guard.

I removed the middle screw, and it turned out to be a wood screw which didn’t fit tightly. It probably came from Home Depot. The top was black, but the rest was zinc. Apparently, the unknown master gunsmith took a Sharpie and painted it.

It ran into a pot metal or aluminum (Marlin, so probably pot metal) block at the rear of the action. The threads in the block didn’t look too hot. The factory screw is probably a #8 machine screw, and the master gunsmith used a #8 wood screw, so there was conflict.

I went to Numrich and looked the part up. They had a reproduction part. The price was great, but…fake part. I found the real thing on Ebay for $8.75, delivered. Consider that ordered.

I considered the possibility that the loose-fitting stock contributed to the stovepiping issue. It seemed worth checking.

I took the corresponding screw out of my 2018 Model 60 and tried it in the old gun. It fit, even though the threads had been abused. That told me the new Ebay screw would work.

The far-rear screw was in a blind hole. Explain that. Someone took the time to do a very good job drilling a hole that went nowhere.

Maybe the rifle stock was snapped off at some point, and the screw was inserted to add strength after it was glued in place. Of course, this would be a stupid idea. When you put wood back together with good glue, the joint is stronger than the wood was to begin with, and drilling a hole would make a weak spot.

I don’t think this is what happened, because I can’t find any sign of a split.

The gun still stovepiped when I was done, so I looked for answers online. People said Marlin 60 ejectors tended to need adjustment.

The Model 60 does not have an ejector, really. It has a cheap spring which is consistent with the low-grade engineering found elsewhere on the gun. If the spring gets bent, which it does, you have to fix it. I opened the gun up again, removed the action, and found that the master gunsmith had put a totally unnecessary S-curve in it.

I took the curve out with pliers, and then I did what is known as the penny/nickel trick. You can find it on Youtube. You fix the spring so the distance between the end of it and the cheap feed throat part is between the thickness of a penny and a nickel. It’s easier than using feeler gauges.

I put 5 rounds in the gun. Four shot just fine, and the last one stovepiped. I opened the gap on the spring up slightly, and I tested it again. It shot perfectly. For a Marlin.

Now Mike has a gun that works, and he owes me $8.75. I told him he could put a new roof on my chicken house.

If you’re wondering how to take the action out, there is one pin at the rear of the receiver, and you can push it out with your finger.

The best way to get a gun labeled “Marlin” to shoot correctly is to buy a Savage, a can of spray paint, and a stencil. Actually, I saw two messed-up Savages this weekend, so let’s go with Ruger.

The Marlin 60 is junk. There is really no way to defend it. It looks good, it shoots well when it shoots at all, and it’s light and handy, but Mattel has made sturdier, better-designed products.

But enough about the AR-15.

ZING. Rimshot.

I thank God the problems with this gun were easily fixed. Now I just need to convince Mike to quit buying them.

Stuff We’ll Miss When the Left Succeeds in Gutting America

My friend Mike spent several days here, and now he’s on his way to the airport. I’m glad he managed to make it, because he has been working way too hard, in an area where it’s not easy to get out and shoot.

He brought an assortment of firearms, and we got a lot of range time (i.e. backyard time) in. We had successes and failures.

He has two new Savage rifles. I like Savage because their rifles are very accurate, they come with great triggers, and they’re not expensive. I have a Savage bolt action and a semiauto .22, and they have been trouble-free. Sadly, Mike’s experience has been different.

He brought an A17, which is a semiauto rifle in .17 HMR. I suggested he get a bolt gun, but he wanted to be able to spray at will.

We put up some targets and got to work zeroing the scope. Things went poorly. The gun fed very badly, crushing a lot of cases. Mike finally noticed that it fed reliably when he wedged a piece of plastic between the magazine and stock. The hole for the magazine was too big, so something was needed to make it fit. It’s going to have to be worked on. Many people who own this gun have similar complaints. Maybe Savage got a batch of bad stocks. There is no excuse for letting a gun with this kind of problem leave the factory. It’s a known issue, and it’s simple to check before packing the gun.

I put him on my shooting platform, and he was not able to get comfortable. He has some problems with his neck. He has a cervical fusion operation scheduled.

He managed to shoot maybe 2 MOA, which was good under the circumstances.

The next day, after setting up a table and chair, we tried to shoot his Savage Model 110 in 6.5 Creedmoor. It refused to fire. Something is going on with the bolt. You have to activate the safety and go through a complicated procedure to get the gun to fire. Very annoying. Time and again, he got set up to shoot, pulled the trigger, and got nothing.

The scope was also a problem. It hit him in the nose when he shot. I thought he wasn’t supporting the gun with his shoulder, but then I shot it, and it hit me in the nose, too. To make the gun work, you have to lean over so your nose is off to the side. I have never had a gun with that problem before. Is the stock too short? No idea. I should have checked the length of pull.

We were really hoping to get the gun working. We lapped his scope rings and bought match ammunition, and we expected good results, but it didn’t work out. I shot a few rounds and got about 1.5 MOA, which was definitely the gun’s fault.

On the up side, Mike will only have to make one trip to get the guns fixed, since both will go to the same place, and he’s within one hour of the Savage factory.

He also brought an old Marlin 60. It gun stovepiped about 50% of the time. I Googled and found that a lot of people have feeding problems with this gun.

I’ll say it again. I think the Model 60 is junk. So far, I’ve worked with three, and all three were losers.

He left the Marlin here. I’m going to clean it and see what I can do to make it feed.

On a positive note, I shot my Savage A22 on the same day, and it ran perfectly.

The nicest gun he brought was a Dan Wesson 1911. Very nice weapon. It’s beautifully made, and it shoots fine. I got my PC1911 out, and we lit up my steel targets. I think the Dan Wesson’s trigger is too heavy, and Mike wants fiber optic sights, but it’s an excellent gun.

If you buy a new gun, and you want to travel with it, I strongly suggest you get the bugs worked out before you get on the plane. Otherwise, you may eat up vacation time trying to get it to work.

I shot my Ruger Precision Rifle and my Tikka T3x Superlite. The Tikka was disappointing. It’s a great rifle, but it’s not the right shape for prone shooting, and I was not really prepared to prop it up effectively. I didn’t want to use a bipod, because I figured a hunting gun should be zeroed the way you plan to shoot it in the field. I shot a little over 1 MOA, which is more than good enough, but I know the gun can do better. The factory recoil pad was a horror. It feels like it’s made of iron, and it has a sharp point on it so it goes right into your shoulder when you shoot. I have ordered a Limbsaver pad to replace it.

The Ruger Precision Rifle was a joy to shoot, as always. Strictly sub-MOA. Never a problem. If your groups are bigger than five eighths of an inch, you’re doing it wrong. My Savage 93R also ran perfectly. I fiddled around with it at first, but when I got it where I wanted it, I made a neat little string of 5 holes covering less than an inch.

The 93R has been discontinued, and people who review the successor model criticize the 93R over piddling things. Hmm. Great trigger, astounding accuracy, complete reliability, a good rigid stock that works fine once you put a cheap adjustable cheek rest on it…and the gun cost something like $280! I don’t see the problem. I have a $400 scope on it, and I feel it was 100% justified.

I can literally shoot ping pong balls with it at 100 yards and expect to hit them nearly every time. I couldn’t be happier with it.

The RPR is almost boring, which means I need to get to a long range and shoot at longer distances. Shooting endless 5/8″ groups at 100 yards isn’t going to teach me much.

I find myself wondering if there is any point in trying to make the Tikka shoot better. I’m pretty sure the whole problem is that it’s just harder to shoot than an RPR. I think it’s possible to develop more skill and overcome the rifle’s unfriendly geometry and relatively stiff trigger. Is it worth it? Will I ever want to shoot a hunting rifle that accurately? My guess is that if I ever have a legitimate need to shoot that well, the smart move will be to lug the RPR with me instead of fighting the Tikka.

I have at least three rifles that will reliably shoot sub-MOA from a rest, and I have two more that will do nearly as well. I have some others that might come close if I fiddled with them. I think the bases are pretty well covered.

Mike is planning to change his work schedule, so he should be able to visit more often. Maybe we’ll hire a guide and kill something edible.

Ribs and Rifles

My friend Mike is visiting. We’ve had quite a day.

We went to Core Rifle Systems to pick up some ammo he ordered, and it turned out they had Hornady ELD-M 140-grain match ammo, which was better than what he had asked for. We arranged a switch, and now he’s all set for the weekend. We plan to get his new rifle running.

We also hit Rural King, where, unbelievably, they were selling Norma match ammo at a Rural King price. He snapped up several boxes.

Before running our errand, we stuck two racks of ribs in the smoker. Mike was the first person to fix decent ribs for me, about 30 years ago, and he inspired me to get my new smoker. This week, I was only able to get baby backs and trimmed St. Louis ribs. No full racks of spare ribs. I decided to make one rack of each type and do a comparison. We also had macaroni and cheese, barbecue beans with smoked sausage, and Texas toast made with homemade bread.

This was a good opportunity for me to compare baby backs to St. Louis ribs. I’ve never been a fan of baby backs. They’re small, dry, and expensive. That’s what I believed, but I decided to give them a fresh chance anyway. Turned out I was right. They’re worthless. The St. Louis ribs were nearly perfect, but the baby backs were on the dry side and had a lot less flavor.

I don’t know why people eat baby backs. Ignorance, I guess.

I have finally produced what I think is nearly perfect macaroni and cheese. How did I do it? Predictably enough, by correcting Alton Brown. The more I know about cooking, the less I think of him.

When I created my old recipe, I used Brown’s recipe, along with at least one other, as a starting point. The dish was good, but I felt it could be better. I thought the cheese could be smoother and cheesier.

Brown says to put cheese, panko bread crumbs, and butter atop macaroni and cheese and bake it. This is a bad idea. It tends to make the cheese separate. You don’t want to overheat macaroni and cheese. Baking it is not a good move.

Here’s what I did. I made the noodles. I made the sauce using cheese, half and half, butter, starch, an egg yolk, and sodium citrate, among other things. It was silky-smooth. I did not boil it.

I put the noodles in the microwave and nuked them until they were blistering hot, and then I stirred them into the sauce. This way, I got hot macaroni and cheese without boiling. I put the crust ingredients on top and broiled them. This gave me a perfect crust without heating the rest of the dish too much.

It’s magnificent. Couldn’t be much better.

I used 12 ounces of cheese and 8 dry ounces of noodles. This doesn’t include the top crust.

It was great having Mike in the kitchen, because when I needed help with something, I didn’t have to explain it, do it for him, or do it over. And he knows good food when he tastes it. Most people don’t.

We were talking about the microwave. I said I didn’t like using it when I cooked for guests. He said he always used it to cook for guests, because they couldn’t tell the difference.

He has a point.

If we ever recover from dinner, we’ll get some guns ready for tomorrow. We plan to do a rimfire invasion in the pasture.

Yesterday we shot .22 pistols. Mike was concerned about his skills, but we set up around 50 feet from the 6″ steel targets, and he had no problems. I had to explain that most people would have a hard time hitting a 6″ target from 7 yards. Tomorrow we’ll probably start with .22 rifles and move on to .17 HMR.

I suggest never eating baby back ribs, and be careful about listening to Alton Brown. He’s entertaining, but sometimes I wonder if he can cook at all.

I don’t want to get back into cooking heavily, but when I cook things I already know how to make, I might as well do it right.

Hope your Black Friday went well.

The Sooner You Listen, the Less You Suffer

If you hope to have any ammunition at all in the coming months, you have already blown it, so you need to get out there and see what you can do to mitigate the problem.

My childhood buddy Mike is visiting this week. He doesn’t get many opportunities to shoot where he lives. He’s in the Northeast. Poor guy. He’s bringing some firearms, but he hasn’t been on top of the ammo situation.

He has a rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor, and he hasn’t even fired it yet. I have been looking around, trying to help him find something to shoot. He has three problems. First, he can’t get anything locally. Second, ordering ammunition online is generally very expensive right now. Third, he can’t order ammunition online anyway, because it would arrive after his trip.

I know, I know. He should have been shopping in May.

The best local deal I could find for him was about $50 per box. Crazy. Ordinarily, very good 6.5 ammo goes for under $35, and a lot of it is considerably cheaper. A business near me sold Mike several boxes, and they’re holding it until he picks it up.

I use a site that provides alerts when ammunition is put up for sale. Today at 5:18 a.m., I got a message saying Sellier & Bellot 140-grain 6.5 Creedmoor FMJ was selling at a good price. I didn’t see the alert until after 10. Every box had sold by then.

I found a site that said 14 boxes were available. I ordered 10. I received an email acknowledging the order. Things looked good. Then the owner of the shop emailed me and said the computers were not keeping up with actual stock. He had nothing left, and the order was canceled.

I found a third site with a very good price, and it allowed me to put 5 boxes in my cart. Then the transaction wouldn’t go through. The shop’s proprietor emailed and said the company that processes credit cards was having problems. He said he would hold the ammo for me until things started working.

That’s where I am right now.

Why did I order ammunition, if it won’t be here for Mike? Because I already have the same stuff here. I can give Mike cartridges from my cache, he can reimburse me, and the new ammo will fill the hole. Maybe we can get the local place to take the expensive ammo back. They have no reason not to, since they should be able to sell it again in about 15 minutes.

I hope he doesn’t get stuck with overpriced rounds, but he really should have been preparing in the early summer.

As for me, the alerts paid a handsome windfall. I have some 6.5 hunting bullets for reloading, but I didn’t order as many as I should have. Today I got an alert, and I was able to get 300 more for a good price. Now I just have to learn how to reload rifle ammo. And I need some critters to shoot.

You may wonder why I don’t just give Mike rifle ammo, like a good friend. Well, if I give him ammo that cost me 60 cents per round, I may have to pay $2.00 per round to replace it, and I might not be able to get it at all. If one of us is going to have to overpay by a factor of three, it shouldn’t be me. And I do plan to give him a certain amount of ammunition. While reloading materials are scarce, prices have not changed, so I can still reload economically. I have some pistol rounds I can replace for much less than the going price of $45 per box. He can make it up to me by springing for pizza or something.

While he’s here we have to mount a scope on his rifle. That means buying rings. We’ll have to hit Bass Pro. We may have to lap the rings, since he is not likely to splurge for precision equipment. I have never lapped rings before, but it looks like a simple job, and I have the tools.

Remember the days when you could go to the gun range and enjoy yourself without wondering if you were shooting the last ammunition you would ever be able to afford? Man, those were good times.

Thank God I stocked up on a few things. Some calibers could be problematic in my future, but significant amounts of others may end up in my will. I should be able to enjoy my hobby to one degree or another for as long as I live, or until leftists confiscate everything and put me to work sweeping up dead birds at a wind farm.

Oddly, you can still get AR-15 ammunition at acceptable prices. It’s as though supernatural forces wanted us to be well-armed so we could murder each other during the tribulation.

The AR-15 is extremely popular, and it was designed for combat, not putting food on the table. Looks like Americans will be extremely well supplied if Trump haters riot and murder as predicted. I would expect to see leftists who are generally unskilled, unorganized, undisciplined, and poorly armed, facing defending conservatives who would fare much, much better.

It makes sense. If you think you’re entitled to equality of outcome in everything, regardless of whether you do anything to earn it, your entitlement mindset is also likely to apply to civil war and terrorism. You will probably expect to be handed victory because you belong to a group with a lot of social credit.

It’s easy to pick on old, unarmed Caucasians and Asians in public places. It’s easy to throw poop and bottles at the police, who are legally barred from using real force. Going into red areas and invading the properties of seasoned shooters and former military personnel will result in totally different outcomes.

There will be no participation trophies or affirmative action in a civil war. If you don’t know what you’re doing when you try to hurt others, meritocracy will put you in the grave, and all the street murals in the world won’t help. A disabled young man named Gage Grosskreutz could tell you all about it.

War isn’t tee ball. Leftism conflicts with reality, and the harsher reality is, the more the conflict is exposed.

It’s very sad. The world is full of human beings who could be agents of God’s love, and who could be preserved and unified forever in a realm of peace and joy, but most are condemning themselves to indescribable eternal torment because their pride and sadism won’t let them listen to correction.

As Usual, You Were Lied to

It’s a wonderful day. I just saved hundreds of rounds of .45 ammunition from the factory-second bin.

Something like 12 years ago, I got an ammunition press, and I got to work. I figured it had to be pretty simple to operate. After all, they sell them to millions of people who aren’t engineers.

Once I got started, I learned that ammunition presses aren’t the greatest products. Little unforeseeable problems pop up all the time. You can’t just do what the manuals tell you to do. That won’t work. You start out following the manual, and then when the problems the industry doesn’t like to talk about start popping up, you have to come up with solutions.

Are you planning to make ammunition for a semiauto pistol? If so, this is your lucky day. I’ll tell you what you need to do if you really want your ammunition to function. If you don’t listen to me, you can probably stumble around and come up with a way to make your ammo work in your own carry gun, but if you let friends try it in their guns, they may end up driving home from the range with cases stuck in their chambers.

When you make ammunition on a progressive press, which is a press that takes multiple rounds through various stations that do different things, you have to use at least three dies. A die is a press attachment. Your press will push your casings into the dies and pull them out, and each die does something different to casings.

The first die pushes the old primer out of your casing, if you’re using used brass. It also removes any bulges caused by firing. Now you have a skinny, round casing with no primer.

Before you go to the next die, your casing sits on a gadget that shoves a new primer into it.

After priming, you come to a die that flares the mouth of your case so you can shove a bullet into it.

The next station is a powder measure. This is a weird device that measures powder and dumps it into your casing. Now you’re ready for a bullet, so you shove one into the flared mouth.

After this, you run into a problem they don’t tell you about.

You still need the press to seat the bullet correctly in the casing, and you need to get rid of the flaring on the case mouth so the case isn’t too wide to go into your chamber. Hornady, the company that made my die sets, wants you to think you can do this with one die. They sell three-die sets. The last die seats your bullet with a rod sort of a thing that pushes the bullet down when you raise the cartridge to the die. There is also a hollow tube in the die, and its job is to contact the case mouth lightly on all sides and compress it just enough to get rid of the flare. This is called crimping.

It doesn’t work.

Actually, it does work, but not very well. It’s not simple to set up. You have to adjust the height of the crimping part so it just barely crimps the mouth. Then you have to screw the seating rod down to just the right height to give you a cartridge of the correct length.

The crimping ring is rounded on the inside, so it bends the casing mouth inward as it crimps it, giving you a rounded edge all around the mouth outside the cartridge. Because the crimping part only touches the end of the casing, it won’t necessarily compress all of the flare. Parts below the contact area may still be too wide for your gun’s chamber (or the smaller chamber of someone else’s gun) when you’re done. Also, you lose the clearly defined rim on your case. It ends up with a rounded rim, and lots of guns use a sharply defined rim to situate cartridges in their chamber.

You can end up with a cartridge that balloons out slightly just below the mouth. Then your casing may get stuck part of the way into your chamber. Chambers aren’t straight cylinders. They’re tapered. Your rim has to be small enough to slide into the narrowest part of your chamber.

If your rounds won’t chamber, the rims are probably the issue. You can check it by using a Sharpie to paint your casing. Chamber it as well as you can, extract it, and look for the areas where the ink is scraped off. You’ll probably see shiny brass around the rim and nowhere else.

Guns of the same caliber don’t have identical chambers. Some chambers, especially on guns made to be accurate, are tighter than others. Some guns have loose chambers in order to make sure ammunition always goes in and out reliably, so if you use a gun like that (like a Glock) to test your rounds, you may find you can’t shoot your ammunition from, say, an expensive 1911. You may take your freshly-made thousand rounds of ammunition to the range and find out you can’t shoot any of it.

People will give you extremely bad advice. They’ll tell you to use your chamber as a gage when you set up your press. This is how you end up at the range with no usable ammunition.

There are two things you need to do, if you want your ammo to work.

First, you need a taper-crimp die. Hornady was just playing with you when they sold you a three-die set. You need 4. A taper-crimp die will compress your casing with an internal cylinder that makes contact over a long area. It squeezes the casing. It does not roll the rim inward. You end up with a casing which is the right diameter from bottom to top, not just within ten thousandths of the mouth.

To make a taper-crimp die work, you leave your old combination seating and crimping die in place, but you back the crimping part off so it never touches the cartridge. You only use the combination die to seat bullets.

Second, you need a case gage. This is a precisely machined steel tube. A company called Wilson makes them. They’re worth the money. Don’t listen to bubbas who think hammers are good tools for seating primers.

You drop your finished cartridge into the gage. If it falls right in, you’re all set. There is no commonly made chamber on earth that won’t chamber your round. You don’t have to worry about it working in one gun and sticking in another. If it doesn’t fall in, you need to adjust your crimping die until it does.

You use your case gage while you’re setting your dies up, and then your ammunition works.

I didn’t know these things until recently. I just assumed Hornady and the people I talked to on forums would give me intelligent information. Big mistake.

By the way, if your best buddy tries to help you out by giving you reloads to get you through the shortage, you better test them in your gun’s chamber. Don’t just assume they’ll save you when BLM drags you out of your car.

As of this morning, I had hundreds of .45 rounds I couldn’t trust to run in my PC1911, which is a moderately snobby 1911 made for shooters, not killers. The ammo worked fine in my SW1911, but it’s a less expensive gun with a looser chamber, probably intended to make it more reliable. The rounds used to stick halfway into the PC1911’s chamber. Really annoying.

Today I set the taper-crimp die up in my press, all by itself, and I ran every round through it. I tested them with the case gage. Now I’m all set. My target ammo works. My defensive ammo works. I kind of wish I had bought a Glock in .45 ACP. I guess there is still time. Or maybe there isn’t. It looks like they’ve disappeared.

I bought a big jug of Vihtavuori because people said it was great for .45 accuracy. Now I can go ahead and start filling casings.

To sum up, your setup will look like this: decapping/sizing die, primer punch, belling die, powder measure, seating die, taper-crimp die. Do things in that order, admit Hornady had you fooled with the three-die set, and get on with your life.

In a few hours, I went from being bummed out about my .45 situation to feeling like king of the far-right prepper nuts. I’m almost cocky enough to try making rifle ammo.

Insert Clever 20/20 Vision Reference Here

I continue to marvel at the dual realities that exist in America.

For a long time, I’ve been writing about the alternate reality the children of darkness live in. Covid has made it much more obvious. Leftists and other enemies of God live in terror, locked in their houses, obsessing on masks and other things that don’t really do much to halt the spread of disease. They’re scared to death of a mild respiratory disease that does what other mild respiratory diseases do: it kills a tiny percentage of the people it infects, generally taking those who were in poor health and likely to die soon regardless.

I can understand why an octogenarian would worry, but young people are wearing masks when they mow their yards.

It’s amazing that we killed off old people with bad policies instead of protecting the easily-identified groups who were really vulnerable. Liberal governors sent the sick into old folks homes, pretty much guaranteeing the enormous loss of life we saw in the Northeast. What Cuomo did is pretty similar to the Inuit practice of exposing old people in winter to kill them, except the Inuits knew what they were doing.

Today I read about smallpox. Its fatality rate was about 30%, and people who got it died slowly, in agony, covered with extremely painful sores that made them feel like they were on fire whenever they moved. That’s what real plagues are like, but half of America is sacrificing its liberty and prosperity in the vain hope of avoiding a disease that kills something like one in 1000 victims.

Antichristians have more shortages than God’s children. People in major cities went without meat for months while people like me were buying it on sale. Generally, antichristians have fewer firearms, and they have had not been able to come anywhere near matching the abundance of ammunition Christians had on hand when the crisis started. Christian areas have fewer economic problems, too.

Today I can’t help thinking about the two realities. Toilet paper and antiseptic wipes are disappearing again in blue areas. Here, toilet paper is not hard to get, and antiseptic wipes are on sale. I saw canisters of wipes selling for $2.98 at Walmart this week, and I bought Lysol wipes for $4.98 later. Try buying them on Amazon or Ebay. Expect to pay nearly $30.

Here’s something crazy: local Walmarts are full of wipes, but Walmart’s website will not sell them. You have to go in and get them yourself. This means people in blue areas, where Walmarts have no wipes, can’t get them at all!

I have enough toilet paper and paper towels to get me through the better part of a year. I had ample supplies at the beginning of last week, and I picked up a little more when I heard the insanity was starting again. I never did without paper goods during the last wave of craziness, and I expect to do fine this time, too.

I wouldn’t have stocked up at all, but I know that fear of shortages causes shortages. Once one lemming goes over the cliff, the rest will follow. Even here, things are tightening up somewhat, and I have to get involved simply to insure that my supply won’t end up in someone else’s 1000-roll stockpile.

When my mother talked about old men from the country who were plainspoken and unsophisticated, she would say they were “rough as cobs.” The toilet paper shortage made me think about that. Now I know what the expression means. Hope I never have to experience it.

I’ve got lots of rubbing alcohol, which I use to clean counters. I have more hand sanitizer than I know what to do with; I bought one type and then decided I liked another, so I stocked up on it, too. I have all kinds of wipes. I bought extra in case my cousin who lives in Illinois needs me to ship them.

I don’t think I can get Lysol spray unless I pay through the nose online, but then I never used it anyway. My cousin asked about it. Her mother is in ill health, and they go through a lot of cleaning products. Today at the grocery, I saw another spray which is full of the really nasty chemical in Lysol. I sent my cousin a photo and asked if she wanted me to get it for her.

Here’s a tip: Lysol is ethanol and quaternary ammonium. You can buy both separately under other brand names, and Home Depot sells spray bottles.

I’m making crisis food again. I have a batch of dried apples in the dehydrator, and beef slices for jerky are marinating in the fridge. My paranoia room is starting to overflow. I don’t think I’ll be here for the really hard times, but I may be wrong, and if I’m right, someone else will benefit from my efforts.

I could have done better on the ammunition front. There are some calibers I never expect to have to buy again, but others are different. Example: I didn’t get into 6.5mm Creedmoor until this year. I have what most people would consider a lot of 6.5, but I wouldn’t be comfortable maintaining what I would consider a normal routine of range trips with it.

Decent Creedmore ammunition still pops up from time to time, and I have materials to make 400 more rounds, so things could be worse. I should probably try to get a few dozen shotgun shells for squirrels. They’re not too hard to get.

Here’s a weird lesson. The traditional wisdom is that you should buy guns in common calibers so ammunition is easy to find. Forget that. I’ve taken on tons of ammo in unpopular calibers since the insanity started, at very good prices. You can get popular stuff cheaper during normal times, but when things go nuts, your 9mm and .22 weapons will starve. I think 6.5 cents per round is a good price for .22 ammo. Right now, people are selling the cheap stuff for 28.

Today I learned something disturbing. I am not storing jerky correctly. I found one piece in a bag with what could have been a thin patch of mold on it. I wasn’t sure. It could have been solidified fat. I did a responsible scientific test to find out. I ate it. It seemed okay. I hope it was. I’m not dead yet, and I’m not having visions. I started burrowing through my other bags, and I found one that definitely had serious mold. I couldn’t rationalize eating it, so I threw it out.

It didn’t occur to me that I should not be opening and closing bags randomly as my desire for jerky dictated. I should have left all the bags closed except for the one I was slowly emptying, and I should have put that one in the fridge.

Now all of my jerky is in the freezer while I take steps to save it.

I learned that I should use oxygen absorbers to slow spoilage down, so I ordered a bunch. I’m also going to move the meat to vacuum bags.

I plan to heat it before I move it. I read that mold and most mold spores die at 120°, so I’ll heat it past that point before storing it again.

I think the reason only one bag went funny is that I killed the bacteria and mold when I dehydrated the jerky. My dehydrator works at 155°. When I opened bags to take pieces out, I must have reintroduced mold and microbes.

It may be that I didn’t dry the meat enough. I’m not sure. It seems awfully dry. Dryer than many store brands.

I can move it to vacuum bags, freeze most of them, and leave one out to see what happens to it. I don’t really want my freezer jammed up with jerky, so if I can store it at room temperature, I will.

There are no problems with my dried apples yet, but I plan to add oxygen absorbers anyway. My grandmother just put hers in big jars and forgot about them, and they never spoiled. Her apples were somewhat drier than mine, though. I went by guidelines I found on the web.

Things are going well. It’s frustrating to hear about other people who are trapped in leftist strongholds where it’s like Soylent Green every day. I pray for God to reach people, but I don’t think there is much time left.

This is What Shopping Looks Like as the Antichrist Approaches

I finally did it. I broke down and ordered me a plate carrier.

A plate carrier is an unattractive vest that holds body armor plates. You can put four in, to protect you from all sides. It works great if you get shot where you happen to be covered by a plate, if you don’t mind broken ribs and so on. Unfortunately, many things most people consider important are not found in areas typically covered by plates.

The idea, I believe, is that it’s better to lose a part you don’t need to survive as long as your head remains alive. I’m not sure I agree, but that appears to be the philosophy.

Plates aren’t the whole picture. You have to get trauma pads. These are stiff foam pads that go behind the plates. When a bullet hits a plate, it may dent it, and it will definitely transmit energy to the person behind it. Pads are supposed to spread the impact out. I don’t know if they work. They look okay in Youtube videos people shoot behind their trailers.

You can also get ballistic helmets. I don’t like the word “ballistic.” It means nearly nothing. I would call them “anti-projectile” helmets. They’re not that great, in case you’re wondering. They’re supposed to be very good at protecting people from light shrapnel, but if you get shot in the head while wearing one, there is a good chance the bullet will go through OR it will push the helmet in so far, your skull will be broken. It’s still a lot better than the product most people wear in armed confrontations, which is nothing.

I don’t have a helmet. I felt like God wanted me to get armor, but I haven’t heard anything about helmets. That’s good, because a decent new one will run at least $450, and good luck finding one you can have in less than a month. You can get used military helmets for maybe $200, though.

Here’s the really sad thing about helmets: they’re disposable. At least the fancy plastic ones are. When a Kevlar helmet takes one shot, it pretty much shatters where the bullet hits it. The next round that hits in the same general area will not hit hard plastic. It will hit mushy broken plastic. The only remedy is a new helmet.

A couple of companies make steel helmets, but everyone makes fun of them. Not sure why. They’re just as light as plastic, they don’t push in nearly as much when they get shot, they don’t shatter when they get shot, and they work better around the edges. If you shoot a plastic helmet near an edge, it’s much more likely to let the bullet through. My best guess is that people hate steel helmets for the same reason people used to hate rifle scopes: a stupid, baseless resistance to change. But I don’t know much about the subject. It’s just an impression.

I was thinking it might be neat to have a thermal scope, in case Soros sends a busload of entitlement-minded, violent racists to my house at night. I could spot them hundreds of yards away, and they would have a pretty hard time getting close enough to me to fight back. Experts, however, say the in thing is a night vision monocular and an infrared laser. You put the monocular over one eye, you spot people in the dark, you light them up with a laser they can’t see, and then you light them up with something else.

It sounds pretty good, but I don’t think it would enable a person to hammer invaders from a really long distance. You wouldn’t see them until they were maybe a hundred yards off, and you would be in a lot of danger at that range.

Maybe the answer is a separate thermal doodad for picking up targets. You find them with it, and then you switch to night vision in order to deal with them. You could find an invader way off in the distance, which would be hard with night vision, and then once you knew where he was, you could use night vision to aim.

I don’t know. I’m just making up guesses using very limited information.

Okay; my guess was right. FLIR makes a product called the Breach. It’s a little monocular you can use to look around. And it’s dirt cheap. Only $2500. Let me check the couch cushions to see how much change I have.

A former Green Beret on Youtube says he carries a Breach for spotting, while backing it up with night vision. I guess I’m smarter than I thought.

Man, I would love to have a Breach. I could wander around my property locating critters for fun. But not $2500 worth of fun, I think.

It would be hell on coyotes and coons.

In the past, I have scoffed at people who talked about the need to be able to shoot bad guys at long distances. The main reason is that shooting a perp a long way off is nearly always murder. You can’t say you were reasonably afraid of great harm if you shot a guy with a knife a hundred yards away. But these are different times. These days, there is a real possibility that armed groups with very clear intentions might menace people from a hundred yards or more, leaving no practical way to avoid fighting. If 10 “protestors” with rifles start coming toward you from a long way off, and you know who they are and why they’re there, you can’t just wait until they get close enough to make police investigators happy. You have to start shooting while they’re still at a disadvantage.

The price of a night vision monocular is not far from the price of a Breach. I’m not sure why night vision monoculars cost so much. I bought a night vision scope for $600, from a company that also makes highly regarded monoculars. Anyway, if you wanted thermal for spotting and night vision for closing the deal, you would be looking at the price of a good used car.

It’s cheaper than a funeral, granted. But a lot of intelligent, informed people expect to do well with a $500 AR-15 and three or four mags full of ball ammo. Kyle Rittenhouse had no armor, no helmet, and no weird optics, and he successfully battled a large crowd of vicious armed aggressors bent on murdering him in the street. He killed two, maimed one, scared the rest off, and didn’t damage property or hurt the innocent.

I don’t know why I find this stuff interesting. Christianity is primarily about love. I really can’t see myself shooting anyone. Sometimes you want to be able to do a thing even if you don’t want to do it. I would be highly disturbed if I hurt anyone, even to protect innocent life, but the knowledge that I can hurt the wicked is still comforting.

Don’t be Buried Alive for Eternity

Believe it or not, I am still not perfect. From time to time, I do something that is obviously sinful. Of course, I feel bad about it later. This is especially true right now, because I keep feeling that the rapture will come before 2021. It’s possible to lose your salvation, and I don’t want to wander off into rebellion at the worst possible time.

The other day, I did something I should not have done, and afterward, I asked God for help not to do it any more.

Yesterday, I looked at Youtube while I was taking my birds out for their daily social time, and for some reason, videos about oubliettes popped up.

“Oubliette” is a French word, and it comes from the verb “oublier,” which means, “to forget.” An oubliette is a deep hole where you put people you want the world to forget. Oubliettes have been popular means of torture and murder throughout human history. They are often found in dungeons.

A common oubliette design features a cavity shaped like a wine bottle. There is a narrow opening at the top, and the cavity widens toward the bottom. There are no windows. There are no doors. The opening may be 20 feet above the floor. The living area may be too small to permit a person to lie down or even sit. Imagine having to stand until you die.

Sometimes people placed in oubliettes were fed disgusting food. Some were not fed at all. Some were lowered in on top of the bones or rotting corpses of earlier occupants.

Once you were placed in an oubliette, your only hope was that someone would eventually lower a rope, like Jesus himself, to extract you. Failing that, you were out of luck. There was no hope. You were gone for good, your enemies had won, and your suffering was going to fuel their pleasure.

It was a wonderful way for a vicious person to harm an enemy with maximal cruelty and vengeance. You take your enemy and lower him into the cistern. Once he’s in there, you go on with life, perhaps living in luxury in a palace of which the oubliette is a part, and you have the pleasure of knowing your enemy is in agony, dying slowly, in a place where no one can see or hear him. Maybe you can amplify the pleasure by having your servants throw your garbage and excrement in with him. This was done to some oubliette prisoners. How could revenge be any sharper?

The word “dungeon” means the main tower of a castle, so it must have been common for oubliette owners to keep their victims in their own houses, perhaps so they could savor their agony and humiliation.

There are oubliettes in the Bible. They aren’t called oubliettes, but they performed the same function.

Jonah was swallowed by a whale. A whale’s belly makes a fine oubliette. The language of the Bible suggests Jonah died in the whale and proceeded to hell, where he stayed until the Lord brought him back.

Jeremiah was put in a cistern in a prison yard. A cistern is a masonry structure, often underground, for storing water. My aunt got her water from a cistern. It was not a nice place. It was perhaps 10 feet deep, it was all concrete, it had an access hole big enough to let a man in to clean it, and black sediment used to accumulate in it. The water came from my aunt’s roof, and God only knows what was in it. Birds defecate on roofs. The Bible says Jeremiah’s cistern, which belonged to a prince named Malchiah, was in a prison yard, and the bottom was full of mud. “Malchiah” means “son of the king.”

Daniel was thrown into a hole where lions were kept.

Biblical tombs were like oubliettes. They had narrow entrances, they had no windows, and they were sometimes sealed with stones too large for a trapped person to move. Lazarus and Jesus both ended up in tombs. Satan tried to put Jesus in God’s oubliette under the earth, perhaps so God would have to relent and free the rebellious spirits along with Jesus.

The Bible talks a lot about saving people from “the pit” and “the mire.”

One of the worst curses in Judaism is to be forgotten. Orthodox Jews call Jesus “Yeshu,” which was never his name. They know better. His name is “Yeshua,” which means “salvation” in Hebrew. The word “yeshua” appears over and over in the Old Testament. In Hebrew, “YESHU” is an initialism for, “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.” That’s why they typically say “Yeshu” or refuse to name him at all. Some deny this, fearing persecution, but many admit it. It shows what a curse it is to be forgotten.

Today I happened to watch a video in which Messianic Rabbi Zev Porat told an Orthodox rabbi about Yeshua, and when the rabbi realized who he was talking about, he asked if he was talking about “him.” He wouldn’t say his name. Why? Because he didn’t want to keep his name alive by speaking it. He’s not the only religious Jew in Porat’s videos who won’t mention the name.

The concept of condemning someone to permanent captivity and erasing his memory is something that comes from the supernatural. God prepared the pit in the earth for spirits that couldn’t be rehabilitated. They were condemned, and that cost them their names and inheritances. They are now nameless beings without any inheritance, their presence among the children of God is unacceptable, and they will eventually be separated from us forever, in the biggest oubliette of all: the lake of fire. Once there, they will be forgotten. We will live in luxury and freedom from suffering forever, while they burn far away in God’s oubliette.

People who say they’ve seen hell describe tiny chambers and pits in which people are chewed by giant maggots and burned. Bill Wiese, who says he spent 23 minutes in hell, says he was put in a cell with two vicious creatures that had a thousand times his strength.

This stuff is real. I do not want to be in an oubliette for a minute, let alone forever. The suffering that takes place in the pit is incomprehensible to me. I can’t imagine it. Wiese said the memory of what he had seen and felt was so unpleasant it would have killed him, but God reached into his mind and changed him so he couldn’t fully recall the suffering.

I think about this, and it gives me new resistance to sin.

In the Bible, being in a confined space is a curse, and being in a large space is a blessing. You can see this in many verses and stories. You can see it in the history of Israel. When the Jews received it, it was a very big place. Now, it’s much smaller, and geographically, it’s hard to defend. Rebellion put them in a confined space. If they want it increased, they have to cooperate with God.

If you don’t make it in the rapture, you’re in danger of going to the oubliette. You have a chance to repent in the tribulation, and maybe some unsaved people will be around when Jesus returns to rule, and some of them will repent. Other than that, you’re facing the oubliette.

The rapture is a separation based on the reading of a will. “Testament” means “will.” The New Testament is the will of Jesus Christ, who died and left beneficiaries. If you’re not an heir, you have no name in heaven. You will be separated from the heirs.

It’s very scary.

I hope I keep this priceless lesson in mind until I leave the earth. I see why Paul taught about working out our salvation in fear and trembling.

I’m not overly concerned about times when I stumble. The word says that though a righteous man may stumble, he will not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with his hand. But I don’t want to tempt God by sinning deliberately, counting on him to catch me afterward.

God gave me something great the other day: “The process IS the destination.” We tend to think we haven’t made it because we’re still here and we’re still imperfect. But we don’t have to be perfect on earth. We just have to be headed in the right direction when we leave. Your course is what matters. Thousands of years ago, Satan was a powerful cherub who hovered over the throne of God. Now he’s the slimiest, most contemned, most defeated and hated being in existence. I was created from dirt, and I had no idea who God was. I was born ignorant. I was misled. I sinned a lot. I damaged myself. But I’m headed for heaven and eternal joy. I’m better off here on earth than Satan was in heaven, because he was headed for hell, and I am headed for paradise. I have a name. Satan lost his.

As long as you’re sticking with the process, you’ve succeeded. It’s about all you can expect here on earth. Maybe someone down here has been perfected. I don’t know. But I know it’s not necessary in order for you to be saved or to be in good standing with God.

My life is very strange. I live in a wide place already. I have over 4,000 square feet of living space, and I live on a farm. When I drive around, I’m not jammed into crowded roads with throngs of hostile people. I feel space all around me. I think God did this for me for a reason. He wanted me to understand how he blesses people for listening.

When you look at an opportunity to sin, you’re looking at a ticket to the oubliette. I hope God reminds me of that several times a day from now on.

Taking Ecclesiastes 10:18 to Heart

I learned something useful today. Putting a small amount of ginger in beef jerky really improves it.

I made another batch yesterday, and while I was mixing the marinade, I thought about teriyaki. My best guess is that teriyaki jerky requires replacing all of the Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce, but for some reason, I stuck with half and half, and I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger. I didn’t have fresh ginger.

It made a big difference. I wouldn’t say it tastes gingery. It just has more zing to it. I think powdered ginger will actually work better than fresh, because it has a sharper flavor.

So that was nice.

I grabbed the wrong cut of meat by mistake. I wanted eye round, and I think I bought bottom round. Anyway, today, the surface of the jerky has oil on it. It’s not congealed fat. Just oil. They say you should use beef with as little fat as possible. This cut seems to have more fat than eye round. The danger of using fatty meat is that the fat will go rancid. Will that happen when the meat is still lean but slightly fattier than eye round? I don’t know, but it tastes better. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it doesn’t go bad, maybe I’ll switch to this cut permanently.

I also got new gutters installed. This house had only one roof gutter when I moved here, and it was between the roof and the patio enclosure. There was no guttering over the garage, so big, fat raindrops fell directly on the driveway. They were starting to wear it away, and I couldn’t leave the doors open when it rained, because so much water splattered into the garage. I had them run guttering over both doors. Feeling smug about that.

There was also an issue over the front porch. The roof was designed in such a way that a huge amount of water was directed onto the porch roof when it rained. It caused some rot, and I had to spend a grand on repairs. Now there is some hope the new guttering will direct the rain elsewhere.

The strangest part of the roof design was the lack of guttering on the workshop roof. The rain fell straight onto the grass, in front of a concrete porch. The rain destroyed a strip of grass beside the concrete and washed out a lot of the dirt. I could not grow anything in front of the porch. Rain also threw dirt all over the concrete. Now I have a gutter that runs the length of the building, and I may go crazy and plant something in the ugly rut where the rain used to fall.

I don’t know what’s happening in the world, and that suits me very well. I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy. I don’t need to read fake news to kill time as well as my digestion. The election will have an outcome whether I read about it or not, and if the rapture comes, it won’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, regardless, because God looks after me very well.

It has occurred to me that readers may be confused because I say I feel like the rapture is upon us, but I also talk about planning for shortages, civil war, and so on. I’m writing about different possible futures. One involves me being here while leftists torch the country and force sane people to dig in and defend, and the other involves me being somewhere above, gleefully oblivious to everything that happens here. I keep feeling powerful indications that I won’t be here, but I have been wrong before.

Today I prayed God would see to it I never found myself in a situation in which I would truly need to use a firearm. I have asked for that before. I don’t want to be pulled down into the mire with the pigs. I don’t think Christians were put here to shoot people. I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, it means something has gone wrong in your relationship with God.

The ammunition situation has gotten even worse. I set up alerts so a search site would tell me when certain types of ammunition were available. This morning I got an alert, and when I checked before 8:30 a.m., the site was sold out. People are hovering by their computers, snapping ammunition up as soon as it appears. Either that, or George Soros has a bot doing it to keep patriots from getting cartridges. Of course, people have been storing up ammunition since the Obama years, so Soros and Bloomberg could bankrupt themselves and still fail to accomplish their goal.

I don’t really think billionaires are buying ammunition to cause problems, but it would make a great conspiracy theory.

I wonder what life in blue America is like. Hell, I suppose. Terrorism, lack, and irrational fear surrounding a mild disease. My cousin near Chicago still can’t buy disinfectant wipes, but they’re slashing them to $2.98 per can at my local Walmart, just to get rid of them. My cousin near Atlanta says they finally have meat in stores, although restaurants can’t get what they want because they’re last in line. My Illinois cousin is visiting my aunt in Kentucky, and she can’t get wipes there, either. Of course, Kentucky isn’t all that red. Not down deep, regardless of whom they voted for. They love government handouts too much.

There are two realities, and I’m very satisfied with mine. I have zero interest in experiencing or even witnessing the false, unnecessary reality of leftists.

If you think about it, the two-reality solution continues after death. It might as well start now.

My Welcome Wore Out Years Ago

I have a new batch of beef jerky in the dehydrator, and I just made macaroni and cheese using a new recipe. I also put a new laser/flashlight device on my AK-47. It’s an uneventful and peaceful day, which is odd, since it keeps looking more and more like the end of the age is here.

Yesterday I texted a few people I don’t hear from much. Two are former armorbearers from Trinity Church, the corrupt money-worshiping establishment I attended for about 4 years. One said he was looking for an AR-15; I don’t think he understands that he can’t wait around. The other just bought a C308, which is a knockoff of the Heckler & Koch G3, a 7.62x51mm semiauto sort of like an AR10. These guys live in Broward County, which is the county where Fort Lauderdale is located. We don’t communicate often, so it’s not like we’re conspiring to amass firearms and ammunition. It’s a grassroots thing, which means it’s probably supernatural.

I keep thinking of On the Beach, a 1959 film featuring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. The story goes like this: there has been a nuclear war. There is a deadly layer of fallout suspended in the atmosphere, and it has sterilized entire continents. Because most of the explosions took place above the equator, the radiation is confined there temporarily. People still live normally in the Southern Hemisphere, but they expect to die like everyone else. The only question is how long it will take the fallout to move south.

Gregory Peck plays a married submarine captain. Ava Gardner plays a single American woman who lives in Australia. Peck takes his boat to Australia, where he and his crew work together with the Australian government. There is some doubt as to whether the fallout has completely exterminated the human race above the equator.

The movie’s characters don’t stop living just because they believe there is no hope. They avoid thinking about their destiny. They continue raising families and doing their jobs. They have parties. A character played by Fred Astaire restores a used race car and competes in it. Old men at a private club discuss the best way to make sure they waste as little as possible of the club’s wine collection. People try to make the most of life, but at the same time, the government distributes suicide pills intended to help citizens avoid dying slowly from radiation sickness.

Isn’t this a lot like our situation? It’s as if the sentence has been pronounced and we’re just waiting for the walk to the gallows.

The big difference between our current predicament and the one depicted in On the Beach is that only one group of modern people is headed for disaster: those who aren’t close to God. A much smaller group expects deliverance and relief. We actually look forward to the end.

It’s yet another illustration of the fact that we live in different realities. The children of darkness dislike God and morality, they think 2020 is a disaster, and they’re worried and afraid. The children of light cling to God and feel grateful for the way he has prepared them. They see 2020 as a time to prepare for something beautiful. They look forward to dropping their earthly problems and being transported to heaven in perfect, youthful bodies.

I’m having a pleasant day, thinking about things like macaroni and cheese and beef jerky, but all over America, people are stewing in resentment and fear, plotting violence and theft. I’m not worried about getting sick. I’m not wondering if I can pay the rent. My head isn’t full of demonic fantasies about horrific oppression under a second Trump administration. I’m making reasonable efforts to prepare to defend myself if someone brings violence to me, but I don’t feel like hurting anyone. I don’t blame other people for my problems. I don’t think people of another race have stolen all the land and money. I don’t believe Jews run the world and need to be dealt with. I don’t think taking up arms and cleansing the world of people who disagree with me is a smart idea.

My religion tells me God will do any cleansing that has to be done.

With the passing of every week, it looks more like the things people like me have been expecting are really happening. America is becoming like a violent banana republic. Even leftists are talking about civil war. Signs of the rapture keep accumulating.

I suppose it’s always hard to believe it when you find yourself witnessing historical events of extreme impact. Noah’s friends must have been stunned when water started falling from the sky for the first time, just as Noah had predicted. The disciples must have been amazed to learn that Jesus really had risen. But extraordinary things do happen, and when they happen, people do witness them. Someone has to be be there. There is no reason why it can’t be us. Just because life has been very different all our lives doesn’t mean we can’t witness a world transformed by a blizzard of obvious supernatural events.

People are behaving as though what we’re seeing were a momentary aberration to be followed by a return to life as it was in 2019. They get engaged, build houses, and start businesses. They buy stocks and other investments in hopes of long-term gains. Businesses send out email ads trying to sell us things we may not be able to use for very long. We plant trees we know take several years to start bearing. Vintners are putting up bottles of wine they know won’t be ready for at least 10 years. High school seniors started 4-year colleges this fall. But how much of it will pay off? What good is it to give someone a 5-year car loan today if the tribulation will be howling around both of you in November of 2021?

I have a tenant who wants a 3-year lease. I refused to do it because some people who think they hear from God are predicting extreme inflation for next year. I don’t want to be locked into x dollars per month if the market rate will be 5x in two years. I think I should have been more flexible. If the tribulation is about to start, I won’t be here to worry about inflation.

More and more, I feel that it doesn’t matter what I do to safeguard my future. I see things I want, and I think, “I shouldn’t spend the money.” Then I think, “It makes no difference at all. Go ahead.” I’m not thinking about investing. I have no interest in cancer screenings. I just can’t believe I’m going to be here very long.

I thought about writing a will, but then I thought this: most people I would want to leave wealth to are going to go in the rapture. Do I really care which child of the devil gets my property? It will be a curse to that person, regardless of who it is. Does a butterfly worry about what happens to its chrysalis?

If the end of the age is really here, terrorist rioting will increase and become as bad as it can possibly be. Conservatives may finally start taking part as aggressors, not victims. It will be part of normal life. Major wars will start. Diseases that make coronavirus look like chickenpox will cover the globe. People won’t just lack toilet paper and Lysol wipes. They’ll lack bread, canned goods, grain, and produce. They’ll eat rats, squirrels, crows, pigeons, and songbirds. They’ll eat their own pets. They’ll butcher zoo animals, like they did in Venezuela. They’ll go to parks to kill ducks and swans. They’ll trap ants for food.

I walk across parking lots now to get into stores, and I see scenes from disaster movies. I see people wearing masks. I see markers on the pavement and sidewalks, telling people where to stand. I hear creepy, insincerely cheerful recorded female voices reminding us to be nice because we’re all in this together. It’s like HAL 9000 had daughters.

The voices are always female, because psychologists who advise businesses say female voices will comfort us and not make us feel bullied or challenged. How do I know that? I know it because I’m old and smart. I don’t have to check.

Coronavirus is not a big deal, but we’re already living as though the plagues were here. God is showing us two things: diseases we can’t beat can happen, and when they do, we will respond irrationally, making things much worse than they have to be.

Coronavirus is a mild disease which appears to be vulnerable to vaccines, but what if it were like AIDS? There is no reason we can’t have a fatal airborne disease that can’t be cured and won’t let us create vaccines. It looks like coronavirus doesn’t produce symptoms in most people. There have been infectious diseases that killed the majority of their victims even with treatment, and some of those diseases are still active. They haven’t done the damage they could have because they were contained or because they’re not easy to transmit, but there is no law that says an infectious disease can’t be untreatable, unpreventable, and easily transmitted.

Imagine what America would be like if we had a real plague. What if we had an incurable disease with a 50% mortality rate, with no hope of finding a vaccine? If 200,000 deaths confined almost exclusively to people who were likely to die anyway have driven us to hoard and tyrannize, think what a real plague would do to us.

How quick we have been to give up our humanity. I’ve been taking ludicrous continuing legal education courses, and I’m required to get several hours of training in the area of technology. It’s amazing to hear the speakers talk about Zoom and cloud computing. They say many firms have discovered they make more money by staying home and avoiding nearly all in-person encounters. Our noses have been rubbed in the fact that remote communication isn’t more expensive; it’s cheaper and more efficient.

If it’s true in law, it’s true for many other businesses. It means we’re not going back to normal interaction even if coronavirus disappears. Unless there is a compelling reason for you to be among other people, it’s not going to happen. We’re making ourselves a nation of shut-ins, deliberately. It’s like we’re all turning into gamers, living on Cheetos and satisfying our need for socialization by spewing hate on 4chan.

It doesn’t take much of a threat to turn us into willing matrix residents. Our homes are turning into wombs, with ethernet-cable umbilical cords and Amazon Prime bloodstreams.

Maybe the only mentally healthy people in the future will be those whose jobs have physical components, like using shovels and handing people bags of hamburgers. If you don’t have to shower and go to work to make a living, you may have to start forcing yourself to get together with people in order to get your RDA of human contact.

The human race has a natural tendency to use technology to minimize contact. I don’t think we understood that 30 years ago, but it’s obvious now, and our overblown pandemic has exacerbated this pathological inclination.

I guess I’m off on a tangent. To get back to the subject, I know we are in a unique era unlike all previous human crises, and very few of us realize it. It makes sense that the end of the age should come now, because there doesn’t seem to be any way for us to continue as we are. I hate to use one of the left’s favorite manipulative words, but our situation is unsustainable.

I don’t know whether my impressions are right or not, but it doesn’t matter, because we’ll know by the end of the year. If coronavirus is under control, terrorist riots have stopped, and people have forgotten all about civil war, then my impressions will have been proven wrong. If I’m right, things will be much worse than they are now, and the trend will be downward.

I will not stop praying for the rapture. The quality of life for American Christians is no longer acceptable, so I would like to go home with my brothers and sisters. Even though I have peace, prosperity, good health, and fun things to do, I don’t want to hang around in a world where there is no major Christian nation left.

This must be how Jews felt before 1948.

It must seem strange to pray for the end when my life is so pleasant, but the one who makes it pleasant showed me there is a much better place.

One longs for a world in which his kind is mainstream. I think that’s understandable. If there were a movie-style matrix, then Neo would want to unplug at the end of the day and enjoy the company of other people who lived in the real world. He wouldn’t want to live forever in a place where no one understood reality or him. For me, it’s like living in Miami, where half the population can’t speak English because they have no gratitude. I used to have to use hand signals and do pantomime in order to make people understand me. Getting a haircut or ordering a meal could be a tiresome process. It’s nice to be in a place where people understand me without a lot of striving.

I don’t know what’s happening with the pandemic. If a real second wave comes, or just seems to come, I may need to get out and buy more paper towels and toilet paper. I suppose more frozen meat couldn’t hurt. Apart from these possible concerns, I don’t foresee any other practical issues.

That’s all I have. I should sign off and spend time in prayer. If things pan out the way I expect, I hope neither you nor I are here to witness it.

Newly-Minted Beef Tycoon Solves Your Problems

To answer the question I know you want to ask, yes, I have mastered the art of making beef jerky.

It’s like saying you’ve mastered the art of stirring coffee, but still.

Making jerky is extremely easy, but as is the case with many foods, you can have problems because people provide bad information.

Yes, Alton Brown is on my mind. How did you guess?

Alton Brown says to marinate jerky for 3-6 hours. I tried that. Like many tips from Alton Brown (Shun knives cough cough), it does not work. You would be surprised how long it takes marinade to get into a thin piece of beef. I made my first batch of jerky his way, and it was okay, but it was not as flavorful as store jerky. Yesterday I made a batch using beef that had been soaking for about a day, and it was very flavorful. Hand it to someone who didn’t know any better, and he would think it came from a factory.

It might actually be good to dilute the marinade or to go 12 hours. My jerky is so full of marinade flavor, it almost covers the meat taste. This morning I put a piece in my mouth while I was closing the bag, and in the few seconds I was holding it, I started to drool on myself. More than usual.

Brown also says to slice beef as thin as possible. Bad idea. When jerky is too thin, it gets too dry, it’s no fun to eat because it’s tiny and crumbly, and it takes up way too much room in the dehydrator. If slicing jerky 1/4″ thick makes a pound of beef cover three shelves, slicing it half as thick makes it take up 6. How big is your dehydrator? Do you really want to take over twice as long per ounce of jerky, and to clean everything twice?

I like 1/4″ slices. They work. When you eat a piece of jerky made from 1/4″-thick beef, you know you’re eating something. It’s not like chewing air.

I also learned that smoking the meat is a waste of time. To give Brown a little credit, he recommends liquid smoke. Real jerky manufacturers have smokers, but I did it both ways, and if there is a difference, it’s not worth the effort.

You don’t need to cook your jerky in the oven, either. Do your own safety research instead of listening to me, but my dehydrator heats to 155°, and my jerky was not raw when I took it out.

Final thing: don’t overdry your jerky. A lot of people recommend going up to 13 hours. That’s lunacy. Yesterday I went from noon until around 5 p.m. at 155°, using jerky up to 1/4″ thick, and it was dryer than it needed to be.

Here is what I recommend:

Use eye round roast. Maybe other cuts will work. This one is guaranteed.

Soak your meat for at least 12 hours.

Use liquid smoke instead of smoking.

Cut the meat at least 1/4″ thick.

Don’t bother cooking the meat before drying it.

Be very careful not to overdry the meat.

Use 1-1/3 cups of marinade per pound of beef, and marinate in a bag to make the marinade go further.

Use the same “secret” recipe everyone else uses. Here is what I used, and you can substitute ingredients.

INGREDIENTS

2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
2/3 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp. brown sugar
2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. Liquid Smoke
2 tsp. Thai chili sauce (not sriracha, although sriracha would work)

I think teriyaki jerky will result if you use pure soy sauce and add a bunch of fresh ginger. Just a guess, but how could it not work? If you like spicy jerky, use more chili sauce. I’ll bet you would have figured that out on your own.

There must be a thousand recipes that work just fine. Everyone pretends their recipe is astonishing and special, but they’re not. It’s extremely simple.

I don’t get Alton Brown. Is he ever right? He’s wrong about knives, jerky, and steaks. Is there ever a good reason to listen to him? I can make bad food just fine without his help. If I look to someone else for tips, obviously, I want tips that actually work. Otherwise, I waste food and my time.

I guess the answer is to use his advice, but only when it has been tested by people you can trust. Good luck finding any! People who fawn on TV chefs will defend them even when their food tastes like sawdust mixed with dog chow.

Some guy on Youtube recommends the Presto Dehydro dehydrator. He says you can buy a small one and add shelves later. I have not tried it. The small one is $40.

I have a 9-tray Excalibur I bought a long time ago, when prepping first entered the mainstream of American conservative thought. You can’t buy one now. If you go to their website, you’ll see that they’re sold out. Maybe that should concern you. Maybe God has been warning a lot of people.

If you simply buy your own jerky, you won’t spend a whole lot more, and of course, jerky is not the unique solution to food supply chain interruptions. You can buy beans, macaroni, canned fish, canned soup, protein bars, protein powder, canned milk, rice, white flour, and all sorts of other stuff. You can buy butter on sale and make ghee, which doesn’t need refrigeration. You can even buy fancy bagged bugout rations, which seem ridiculous to me. You need water and heat to make them work, and if I have water and heat, then why not make something resembling real food, for a tenth of the price?

I’m pleased with my jerky. It will last at least a year, even without oxygen-sucking packets to extend its viability. My dried apples will last years, plural. If a food crisis lasts more than a year, it means the tribulation is here, big time, so a few crisis supplies, or a garden, won’t really help.

Here’s something preppers don’t seem to talk about: human beings are resilient. We find new ways to cooperate and survive. If blue-staters manage to deprive us of stuff to keep nuclear plants going, we’ll adapt and use our endless supply of coal and oil. If they kill our cell service, we’ll build networks. If they confiscate our bank and security accounts, we’ll create our own banks and securities firms. We have the vast majority of the farmland, we have the oil and the coal, we have lots of industry (not like the 1860’s), we are much better at fighting, and we have God on our side. We even control a lot of California farmland. Unless the tribulation itself comes down on us, we should be able to keep civilization going in “Jesusland,” as Der Spiegel calls conservative America, regardless of whether there is a civil war. We may get damaging interruptions, but they would last weeks, not years. That’s my opinion at this moment.

I’ve probably said it before, but I always think of this when I think of prepper scenarios: Jews in Auschwitz had submachine guns and hand grenades. Look it up. People have ways of getting what they need when God is with them.

I have been too pessimistic about the dystopian future. Barring the complete manifestation of the tribulation, things shouldn’t be all that bad in red America. Even in the tribulation, billions of non-prepping human beings will survive 7 years. They will wish they had died, but still.

I think blue America has more to fear, and that makes sense, because they reject God more completely. They don’t produce a lot of food or oil, the police and military will break against them, they don’t know how to fight, they don’t have the kind of armament we have, and they are burdened with huge numbers of ignorant, hostile, ungovernable welfare addicts who will do nothing but complain, riot, and steal. People who live on the government nipple will be useless for fighting and government works, and they will attack the people who are actually able to get things done. Blue society may decapitate itself, as it did in Cambodia. Without competent people to organize and command, how will a new nation of mindless terrorists pose a threat to red-staters? If they were any good at anything, they wouldn’t be what they are today.

I suppose this situation would breed a new crop of blue-state conservatives, too late to do them any good. There will be a price for being a virtue-signaling poser.

Let’s say Orlando residents rise up against people in my red county and try to kill us and take what we have. First, you would have to organize that kind of rabble and get them to act in concert. Can’t be done to any significant degree. Maybe you would get occasional caravans of unintelligent, selfish, unskilled people who would be more likely to shoot each other than to harm me or my neighbors. Second, you would have to get them to drive a long way to attack. That’s not something they’re inclined to do. They’re inclined to loot stores and homes that are within walking distance, and they are inclined to prey on each other because it’s convenient and they are lazy. History proves this. Third, they would have to be able to overcome us when they arrive. So people who don’t know how to shoot would have to overcome entrenched, orderly, easily commanded, highly motivated 2A proponents, many of whom enjoy shooting scoped rifles, and many of whom are sitting on large stockpiles of ammunition.

Anyone who can kill a deer at 200 yards can kill a person at the same distance. What percentage of our modern terrorists can hit anything at 7 yards?

Think about Kyle Rittenhouse. He was up against at least two assailants with firearms, and he maimed one of them. He also killed a “man” armed with a skateboard and a third person who was attacking him. He did it quickly and easily, he didn’t harm the innocent, and he got away. That’s a picture of future encounters if America has a civil war. People who aren’t ready shouldn’t start trouble with people who are. A gun doesn’t make you a factor unless you know how to use it.

To shoot invaders on my land, I would just have to get a big screen TV box and put it in the pasture. I would wait for them to fight over it, and then they’d be easy pickings. They might even kill each other and save me the trouble.

I guarantee you, we would have a real militia in place before the Antichrist’s ad hoc troops arrived. I wouldn’t have to go it alone. I wouldn’t have to stay awake every night, peering across my land with a thermal scope in order to kill invaders before they arrived at the house. There would be patrols and watches. The sheriff and the police departments would be everywhere, helping coordinate the effort. It would be the exact opposite of the situation in blue cities, where people would be too busy looting, burning, killing, and raping to think about coordinated sorties into other areas.

There would also be large prayer meetings here, all the time. That’s the most important thing.

Life would be different for stubborn conservatives who live in places like New York and LA. They would be killed in their yards or in front of their apartment buildings, by people who see them (or pretend to see them) as thieves and traitors. Law enforcement could not save them. The neighborhoods of professional victims are too big; the supply of murderers is too abundant. Conservatives, Jews, and Christians (not fake Marxist Christians) would drown in seas of demon-controlled handout addicts. So would their children.

It would be nice to offer my property as a shelter for unprepared blue-area friends, but how would I feed them, and how would they get here? Sometimes you can’t help people even if you want to. I know a number of people who would like to hole up here. Can’t take all of them. Maybe a few, if they bring their own food. If trying to help your family just means I have to starve along with you, it’s not helpful at all.

Once the closest ones arrived, the rest would probably be up the creek.

It’s interesting to speculate about the future. I just hope God removes me before things get bad. If I’m storing up arms, ammunition, and food for people who will be left behind, fine with me. They are welcome to it as long as I’m with God. It’s a fantastic trade.

In the meantime, I enjoy my little efforts at preparing food. Hope it goes bad because I never need it, but it’s comforting to make an effort.

Cuomo Dusts Off Centuries-Dead Libel

This just in from New York City: Jews spread disease!

Wait…that sounds familiar. Let me Google.

Okay, Wikipedia has the goods. When the black plague hit Europe for the first time, Jews were blamed. They were accused of poisoning wells. And they admitted their guilt! Well…after a little torture.

That’s something for people who support torturing terrorists to think about. I would confess to being a chicken before I would let myself be tortured. It’s not a great way to get sound information.

Wikipedia says anti-Semitic violence swept Europe during the plague years, and in one place, 2000 Jews were burned alive. One wonders if scientists in that area checked plague statistics to see if things got better after the well-poisoners were dead. Maybe I should not belittle medieval scientists. We can’t even get modern scientists to admit putting sick old people in long-term care facilities caused covid to blow up in New York, or that mask edicts and lockdowns are not correlated with reduced infection rates. Those things are clearly true, but we’re still told to remember our place and do as we’re told.

It shouldn’t shock us if old prejudices flare up among ignorant people (such as politicians) in spite of common sense, but it’s remarkable that scientists remain as biased and irrational as ever.

Governor Cuomo, the mastermind behind the old-folks-home catastrophe, is now going after Jews in New York City. To his shock and dismay, religious Jews insist on practicing their religion. This involves gathering in large groups. You can’t really do what Jews do with everyone standing inside his own 6-foot circle; it was pathetic enough when Biden tried it with press conferences. Cuomo is said to be sending various types of government hassle-merchants into a Jewish area, to fine and cite people into submission. One man who owns a restaurant that only does takeout business was fined for leaving his front door open to let fresh air in. The crime? Opening for dining.

Cuomo is stepping in because he didn’t find Mayor DiBlasio’s targeted efforts harsh enough, and guess what Cuomo called his delousing…I mean anti-coronavirus campaign? The “Cluster Action Initiative.” Does that sound familiar? The Nazis called their effort to exterminate Polish Jews “Aktion Reinhard.” They called their euthanasia operation “Aktion T4.” When they decided to kill concentration camp prisoners who were not useful to them, they called it “Aktion 14f13.” It was better known as “special treatment.”

Who is giving Cuomo dictation? Satan himself?

Are there no Jewish people in his administration? I’m a gentile, and I saw the problem with the name immediately. Hasn’t anyone pointed this out to Cuomo? Since when has the party of warm and fuzzy bunnies started using the language of military aggressors to describe health initiatives?

Leftists also blame Christians for coronavirus. They closed our churches. They have tried repeatedly to link Trump rallies to outbreaks, although no one is making any effort to caution BLM and Antifa terrorists, who wander the streets in huge throngs. In the minds (“mind”?) of leftists, “Trump supporter” is just another way of saying “Christian.”

Leftists can do whatever they like, no matter how likely it is to spread disease, and the MSM stays silent, but let two Jews or Christians get together to pray or root for Donald Trump, and journalists scream “SUPERSPREADERS!” as though all the viruses wore crucifixes and little red hats.

The spirit of antichrist hates both Christians and Jews. It is the spirit behind anti-Semitism, and it has also driven persecution of Christians. You may think this can’t be true, because Jews persecuted and murdered early Christians, and Christians have murdered many Jews. You don’t understand how it works. Like any evil spirit, the spirit of Antichrist likes to take the people it hates and turn them into programmed assassins. It loves pitting us against each other. What’s better than having loyal servants who torment and kill your enemies? Turning your enemies into loyal servants who do the killing for you, with gladness.

It’s bad when your persecutors kill you in spite of dogged resistance, but you haven’t really been humiliated, violated, and defeated until you’ve been fooled into doing the dirty work for them. You can’t get any lower than that.

Sooner or later, in order for the tribulation to get going, Christians and Jews have to be slandered and demonized so effectively a substantial portion of the world’s population wants to get rid of them forever. That’s where we’re headed. Coronavirus is being used to herd us in that direction.

Religious people believe that the effective practice of their religions is more important than receiving optimal protection from a contagious disease that kills a tiny percentage of its victims. They want to please God, help others, and avoid punishment in the next life. The Antichrist’s people believe this life (“your best life”) is all there is, and they listen to the spirits that control the MSM. They listen to the nonsense about covid being a major plague that kills huge numbers of people. They see religious people as dangerous, superstitious savages who should no longer be humored. They feel entitled to control us with rules premised on the notions that God does not exist and that holding onto this miserable life is so important, human rights should be nullified in exchange for marginal increases in safety.

The Antichrist’s people may not believe in Satan, but they listen to him all day, and he tells them the same things he told the Romans, the Nazis, and the Marxists: Christians and Jews are a problem that needs to be addressed.

Cuomo may be able to point to infection maps and say he’s only going after Jewish areas because they have a high covid rate. The real problem, though, isn’t just that he’s infringing First Amendment rights or generally being overzealous. It’s also the inflammatory language, which is heavy on references to Jews. Cuomo and his underlings keep characterizing the local infection rate as a Jewish problem, and he complains about Jewish “clusters.” Then there is his use of the phrase “Cluster Action Initiative,” which sounds like the forced cleansing of a Jewish ghetto.

Cuomo runs the risk of mainstreaming anti-Semitism and making it acceptable. Once that happens, ignorant people in the streets will take over. People who are too stupid to draw logical distinctions will not know the difference between “social distancing good” and “Jews bad.” There are a lot of rank anti-Semites in New York already, especially among blacks and Hispanics, and they don’t need a power-mad governor giving them license to commence pogroms.

It’s very sad. Jews helped elect this man. Jews in America invariably vote for their enemies and demonize their friends. In Israel, they name streets after Donald Trump. Here, they empower the people who hate them most, and they fear the people who send more charity money to Israel than all Jews combined.

It will get worse, and America Jews will continue to appease. They support appeasing terrorists in Israel, and now they’re supporting domestic terrorism which will eventually focus more intently on them. We have already seen leftist provocateurs going after “Wall Street bankers.” Which ethnic group is primarily identified with Wall Street and banking?

If it’s rewarding to chop your enemy’s head off, how much more rewarding is it to persuade him pay for and sharpen the hatchet, to make him believe his friends detest him, and to convince him you’re the best friend he has? It’s a beautiful thing, if revenge can have beauty.

In one of the Hannibal Lecter novels, Lecter gives a pedophile drugs. He convinces him he wants to have a good time with him. Then while the man is giggling and enjoying himself, Lecter persuades him to cut his own face off, eat part of it, and feed the rest to dogs. He also cons him into putting one of his own eyes out and breaking his own neck. That’s how Satan does things. It’s not enough to hurt you. He has to make you take pleasure in hurting yourself.

Jews and Christians will become more and more unpopular. Violence against them will increase. Eventually, the state will endorse all of it. The tribulation is on the way, and America is not going to wise up and prepare.