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.

Speaking my Mime

This morning Usurvivable Killer Hurricane Eta passed over my house. When I woke up after an uneventful and restful sleep, I looked out the window and noticed that it was completely still. Then I checked the Internet to find out if I had the date wrong. No, I was right under Eta. Probably in the north eyewall.

Have I been watching the news, like a responsible person? Of course not. People who watch the weather news are not responsible. They are just gullible.

They were telling us 73-mph gusts were on the way. Did they actually believe it, or were they just trying to sell more diapers and SUV’s? It’s impossible to know. When people lie to you over and over, you can’t evaluate anything they say without corroboration from credible sources. It’s like listening to Joe Biden talk about fracking. Or, well, anything else.

Remember how the Weather Channel got caught faking the intensity of the wind? A reporter was leaning into the wind like he was trapped behind a jet engine, and people entered the frame, walking normally. Guess what? They’re still doing it.

I think the worst thing about their antics is that they don’t credit the master. They never mention the man who taught them everything they know. It’s criminal. I won’t stand for it.

Here, then, is the granddaddy of all Weather Channel hurricane reporters. Enjoy.

Give me Dried Meat, Water, and Bullets, and I can Survive Anything

My first batch of beef jerky is done. I just took it out of the dehydrator. The verdict: pass. It’s real jerky. It will work.

I used about 2 pounds of eye round. I cut off maybe an ounce of fat, and I ended up with 14.8 ounces of jerky. I thought the yield would be a lot smaller. It looks like the ratio of jerky to fresh meat is nearly 50%. The meat is slightly drier than I would like, so I think the ratio, once I get it together, will be at or above 50%. Based on a perusal of per-ounce prices of store jerky, I believe I made between 20 and 40 dollars’ worth for $15 or so, including marinade.

I’m leaving the bag open so condensation will not settle in it and make the meat wet. I think that will cause mold. I plan to close the bag up when the meat is cool.

Is it worth the effort? It doesn’t look like a giant bargain compared to the jerky I could have gotten for $20 per pound, but it looks great compared to the stuff that costs over $40 per pound.

I can get Uncle Buck’s jerky from Bass Pro for $20 per pound, and I like it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not as dry as my jerky, so I would be paying for a considerable amount of water. Wild guess: with water taken into consideration, I’ll say an Uncle Buck’s price of $25 per pound would more accurately reflect the food value I’m getting. Maybe I’m getting a 40% savings?

I may keep making it. I think I can make top-notch jerky, and a 40% savings is pretty good.

As has often been the case, I am disappointed in Alton Brown. He recommends marinating for 3-6 hours. Based on my results, let’s make that 24 hours. I went over three hours, and the flavor could be stronger. Smoking for one hour (smoke time, not including warm-up) worked fine, though. I don’t know if his Liquid Smoke idea is any good. It would allow me to skip the smoker, so that’s a big plus.

Do I really want to make jerky as well as I can? If it tastes fantastic, it will be hard to go easy on it in lean times. Maybe okay jerky is best.

I saw a How It’s Made video about making jerky. Maybe I’ll watch it again and look for tips.

I plan to keep drying apples until I can no longer stand it. They’re wonderful.

Walmart sells nuts really cheap, so I bought pecans. I guess if I bought raisins and almonds, I could make my own trail mix. Lots of calories, good shelf life, and not much weight or bulk.

I got two big jars of Hoosier Farms powdered cheddar. This is the stuff they use in things like Cheetos. I pop corn with bacon grease and put powdered cheddar on it. It’s decadent. I figure I can also use it to make mac and cheese, along with my ghee and evaporated milk.

None of this is going to be very helpful if our dystopia doesn’t include electricity. I’ll have no water. I supposed it will be made available somehow, but people would probably have to wait in long lines at distribution points, which could be impossible to reach without gasoline or diesel.

I’m putting my chips on an electrified apocalypse. A generator and diesel would run me over $50,000 for one year, and if diesel were hard to find, I would be able to do it no matter what I was willing to spend. You can’t just put a 20,000-gallon diesel tank in your yard. Not unless you’re a hard core nut. If your tank isn’t enormous, you’ll have to refuel it often, and if there is no fuel, you’ll look pretty stupid after the first tank runs out.

I have relatives (long deceased) who had natural gas on their land. They sold the rights, and in the package, they demanded to have gas piped to their house, free of charge. People like that are sitting pretty. If you live in Appalachia where there are hills, and you have gas, a clean creek, and enough land to grow food, you will be an aristocrat when Democrats destroy civilization.

Conservatives have nearly all of the oil and coal, and we have lots of refineries. We have lots of ports. Presumably, some things will still be available to us even after demon-ridden leftists extend their Tiktok-video mouth-frothing and shrieking from 30-second periods to entire days.

Tomorrow I’ll try to knock off more dried apples, and I’ll probably hit Walmart one more time. Then it’s time to sit back, pray, and hope the people who expect an imminent rapture are right. Leaving for heaven would be a lot better than sitting in my house eating disaster food and scanning the woods for “protesters” with a rifle scope.

Today, as part of my doomsday preparations, I am trying to make beef jerky.

I think I made jerky a long time ago, but I don’t remember. This time, I looked at recipes online to get started. They all look pretty much alike, so I chose one from the Food Network, figuring their lawyers would have looked it over to make sure it couldn’t cause food poisoning.

The recipe is credited to Alton Brown, a guy I don’t trust. He makes biscuits with vegetable shortening, which is odd, and he slices steaks up and serves them lukewarm. He also promoted Shun knives and claimed he used them, but now he promotes, and claims to use, another brand. So he found a great set of products, liked it so much he stocked his own kitchen, and then inexplicable abandoned them and started using something else? Real cooks don’t do things like that. If something works, you keep it. Brown had some kind of problem with the Kershaw company, the real manufacturer of fake-Damascus Shuns. Either they let him go, or the money wasn’t right, or there was a dispute. There is no way he suddenly decided another company’s products were so much better he had to adopt them without a blink.

Shuns are fragile and very expensive. If you put one in the dishwasher next to flatware, there’s a good chance it will emerge with chunks missing from the edge. He had to know he was promoting junk.

If you can’t trust a celebrity cook with regard to one thing, why should you trust him about other things? But here I am, adapting his recipe anyway.

He uses a device known as a Blo-hard 3000 to make his jerky. Wild guess: this is a cardboard box with a fan. I don’t know, but I know he likes boxes, and I find it hard to believe there’s a real product called “Blo-Hard 3000.”

Might as well Google.

I can’t find much information, but a Youtube video says Alton Brown dries beef on air conditioner filters because they give a “tougher, longer-lasting texture” than dehydrators.

I think Alton Brown is once again confirming my suspicions about him. I am not sure why I would want a tougher product, and I have a lot of confidence in my ability to make jerky that will be as dry, and therefore long-lasting, as I want. If the dehydrator doesn’t get it dry enough, which would be odd, considering what dehydrators so, I can always put the meat in the fridge, uncovered, for a day or two. That really dries things out.

I’m not going to have a bunch of dirty air filters around my house, attracting bugs. Who does that?

It looks like he and other jerky chefs do not use heat.

I bought eye round roast, which is a rubber-like product useful chiefly for braising, a cooking method that can render nearly anything edible. I have read that eye round is a top choice because it has so little tasty fat in it. Fat can go rancid, so apparently, you want to keep it out of your jerky.

Based on what Alton Brown says, as well as some Googling, I chilled the meat to firm it up, sliced off the fat, sliced the meat very thinly, and put it in the fridge in a bag of marinade. Alton Brown’s marinade contains liquid smoke, which is one more strike against him in my book. It also contains honey, which is not the most flavorful meat condiment on earth.

Here is what I’m trying:

2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
2/3 cup soy sauce
1 shot Harvey’s Bristol Cream
2 teaspoons pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 heaping teaspoon Thai chili sauce
1 tablespoon sorghum

Brown says to marinate for 3-6 hours. Once I’m done with that, I plan to smoke the meat for one hour with hickory at 200°, and then I’ll stick it in the dehydrator. The smoker should wipe out the bulk of the bacteria and mold and whatever, even if it isn’t necessary.

This pretty much has to be good. It’s smoked meat with a lot of salt, sugar, and acid added. I don’t think much can go wrong. As Jeremy Clarkson says, “How hard can it be?”

Brown says he has kept jerky for up to a year. Probably next to his Shun knives.

It would be a lot of work to dry enough beef to make a real dent in a post-election dystopic famine, but it can’t hurt. I also bought canned corned beef, so I’m not putting all my jerky in one basket.

I don’t know if jerky is cost-effective. I’m going to get nearly two pounds of jerky (pre-smoked weight), and I believe I paid $5 per pound. Adding half a bottle of Worcestershire and half a bottle of soy sauce run the price up quite a bit. Maybe a total of $15? I can weigh what comes out of the dehydrator and compare it to store prices. If it can’t be cheap, it can at least be better than factory food.

Shortage Preparation Goes Well

Today I did something really great, and I’m here to share it. I modified my apple-peeling machine and improved it tremendously. It only takes about 15 minutes, but you have to have a tap.

The world’s most popular peeler/corer is a Chinese contraption made of cast iron. They run around $25. They look like they could not possibly work, but they’re excellent. You can peel, slice, and core an apple in around 10 seconds, including putting it on the machine and taking it off.

The machine has a screw, and on the end of the screw, there is a fork. You jam your apple onto the fork and turn the screw. The screw shoves the apple toward a stainless blade with a hole in it. The core goes through the hole, the blade spiral-slices the apple, and a second attachment removes the skin.

It’s not perfect. You will usually get a core that’s cut off-center, so you will often need to cut little hard bits out of the slices. If you think that’s a big deal, spend an hour coring, slicing and peeling apples without a machine. You will sing a different tune when you’re done.

The big problem with these machines is that the stainless blades move around. They’re held in place by a single screw, so the blades can rotate when the apples hit them, shoving the core hole off to the side. The solution? Drill a second small hole in the blade beside the hole for the original screw. Drill a corresponding hole in the cast iron of the machine. Tap the hole in the cast iron and run a small screw through the blade and into the machine.

Now you have a blade held in place by one big screw and one little one. It will never move again.

I modified the machine because I’m drying apples.

People who think they hear from God are predicting food shortages. I’ve written about it before. I don’t plan to try to become self-sufficient, eating bugs and worms and whatever for the long term, but as I have said in other posts, I think it can’t hurt to have enough food for a month or two. Dried apples are high in calories, they taste great, they can be used in things like fried apple pies, and they will keep you regular. In a big way, if you overindulge.

It would be hard to get the yellow transparent apples my grandmother used to dry in Kentucky, but Granny Smiths are somewhat similar, and they make fantastic dried apples. Forgive me if I repeat myself. I am too lazy to go back over what I’ve already written. I made a batch of dried apples yesterday, and I have a bigger batch in the dehydrator. The ones I made yesterday are so good it will be hard to leave them alone.

I should learn how to make fried pies. I have an excellent, authentic Eastern Kentucky cookbook, and the recipe is probably good. If not, I can use it as a starting point and improve it.

Fried pies seem to last forever. I know they will go at least a week in a covered container.

I now have protein bars, a jug of whey protein, corned beef, beef for jerky, lots of oatmeal, a good deal of flour, extra sugar, all the caffeine-free Coke in the county (they quit making it “just until the pandemic is over”), and two big jars of grated cheese to go with my many pounds of dried pasta. I now think getting through a month will be a breeze, as long as I have electricity. I won’t stop gathering, though. I want more nuts.

Here’s hoping this all turns out to be a huge waste of time.

No Let-Up in the Forecast

Tropical Storm Eta is oppressing the Southeast. How long has it been out there? It sat on Nicaragua for days, and now it’s finally stumbling around the gulf. The NHC thinks it will be around until at least Friday!

I wouldn’t care, but I think it’s killing the cool weather that should be here now. We’re under pre-hurricane-style clouds, and the air is warm and a little stuffy.

I’m used to seeing storms get it together or vanish in a few days. This storm is defective.

I can’t help wondering if it has supernatural significance. Storms vary in duration, but this seems crazy, and God has taught me that unlikely events can have supernatural origins.

Many people thought Katrina was a message. The name means “catharsis,” and the storm did great damage to an area full of sinful, unrepentant people. It killed people by flooding, and the strange thing about that is that the dead let themselves die. They could have escaped easily, but they chose to stay home, in areas that were likely to flood. A commonly held theory says they stayed home because they thought they had to be there in order to receive their government checks. I don’t know if it’s true, but it would make sense. Leftists who are addicted to welfare suffer from something called “learned helplessness.” Things that don’t faze conservatives devastate them.

I’ve noticed this in my dealings with friends who come from government-dependent cultures. They can’t do anything. They can’t fix their cars. They don’t know how to fix their credit. They can’t do home repairs. They always need advice with regard to simple matters other people don’t consider challenges. Maybe the War on Poverty is the reason. When you’re used to sitting at home waiting for handout checks, the police, and social workers, you don’t have much motivation to become capable. If anything, you are rewarded for weakness and passivity.

“Eta” doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s the name of a letter.

An imaginative person might say it seems like Eta is hovering over us as a sign that there is a lingering battle among supernatural beings over the election.

The other day, I said the only earthly entities that could end the election and resolve the matter for good were Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the courts. I forgot the electors.

Electors have traditionally had the liberty to vote as they pleased. It may disturb people to read it, but when you vote in a presidential election, you’re not really voting for a candidate. You’re voting for a representative, and your vote is a strong recommendation, not an order. It’s like Congress. Because of past electoral defections, many states have passed laws making it illegal for electors to go against their mandate. Not all states have done this, and at least some of the laws have no enforcement provisions. At least one law’s enforcement provision is so weak, it would not provide much discouragement.

When leftists say they want to abolish the Electoral College, it’s not a small thing. In fact, it’s revolutionary, in the sense that they want to accomplish a leftist revolution by destroying a Constitutionally created representative body. Leftists are the Antichrist’s children, and they want revolution, not mere change. Sadly, Americans don’t hate the notion of revolution. Our country was born in a revolution, and somehow that has persuaded many of us that revolutions are good things. There are a lot of Chinese, Cuban, and Russian people who feel differently.

The more I think about it, the more I think the American Revolution was a stupid, counterproductive act that has brought curses on us. People think we wouldn’t have been free had we not rebelled. Oh, really? So we would have been put in gulags and death camps, like Canadians and Australians? I admit, Canadians and Australians have lost a lot of freedom in recent years, but they have done pretty well for most of their history.

I now believe kings are better than mindless electorates. Putting ignorant, dishonest, selfish people in voting booths is a practice that has to lead to destruction eventually. Hitler came to power in a fair election, as did Daniel Ortega. I think deposing or killing or rebelling against a monarch is something Christians should only do in the gravest of circumstances. Eighteenth-century Americans were not miserable or desperate.

America was established as a leftist enterprise. We shouldn’t be surprised if leftism increases and destroys us.

Trying to abolish the college or nullify its purpose is not much different from trying to abolish Congress. It’s a gigantic power grab intended to turn people who don’t live in blue states into slaves who lack representation in the Executive Branch.

People who hate the Electoral College should also hate the Senate. It works the same way. The House of Representatives provides representatives for each area depending on its population, and that’s how leftists think the government should work. The Senate gives Alaska and Wyoming the same number of senators as California and Texas, in order to prevent low-population states from being enslaved. If the Electoral College is evil because it gives rural citizens more power per capita than urban citizens, then the Senate is much, much worse.

Will the Senate be slated for destruction when the left is in charge? I don’t see why it should not be. It should be a pressing goal for the revolutionaries. I’m sure they would be willing to give up Hawaii’s disproportionate power in order to conquer red America.

I don’t know if it matters, because I expect Skynet–the Internet and the wireless web–to overcome and replace the world’s government. Future human beings will be like the Borg, if God doesn’t show up and prevent it. Elon Musk is even trying to hardwire IT devices into our brains. The likelihood that such devices would not be made Internet-capable is zero.

People think the election is over, but it hasn’t been held yet. It won’t be held until the electors meet. A lot of things can happen during that time. Biden could be exposed as a criminal because of his China ties, he could die, or the press could “suddenly” discover his dementia and make such a big deal out of it electors would feel justified in abandoning him. Or the left’s astounding, proven campaign of voter fraud could be exposed so thoroughly, electors would be unable to make themselves vote for Biden. Maybe electors will switch their votes simply because they dislike the man.

This is a crazy year, so expect more crazy things to happen.

Like Tropical Storm Eta, the election fight hovers over us, spoiling the atmosphere and refusing to let us rest.

Biden didn’t lose his mind during the campaign. He has not been right in the head for a while. I can’t help wondering if it’s because of his two brain surgeries and his plastic surgeries. Many experts believe there is a strong link between receiving general anaesthesia and developing dementia. Is this why Biden is a shadow of his 2018 self? Is there any possibility that the condition that gave him two aneurysms has produced other abnormalities that would explain his reckless behavior and uncontrolled outbursts? These are things I think about.

Biden has hair plugs, and he has had work done on his eyes. I don’t know what else he has had done. Plastic surgeons say he has had a facelift, and there are scars in front of his ears to prove it. He also appears to be on botox, and he is famous for his bleached smile.

Trump’s first wife claims he had a scalp reduction, but as anyone who has seen a Trump rally can tell you, he is as sharp as a tack. He may be eccentric, but he knows where he is and what’s going on, and he can talk at great length without a teleprompter.

A shocking Trump resurgence would fit in beautifully with the rest of the 2020 perfect storm. This year seems to have been designed to infuriate the Antichrist’s children. We have a mild pandemic the press has convinced us is a major crisis, and the left is using it to control and imprison people. They have also convinced them it’s Trump’s fault. We have a president leftists hate with insane fervor, for no good reason. We have a 6-3 Supreme Court, thanks to a confirmation leftists wrongly believe was illegal, and that court has ultimate jurisidiction over the election results. If Trump had won handily on election day, it would have angered leftists, and riots would have ensued, but it wouldn’t be as provocative as a false Biden victory followed by events that put Trump on top before the electors met. Such a scenario would likely plunge us into immediate, widespread chaos and violence. If we are supposed to have a future of chaos and murder, a Trump rebound makes much more sense than a relatively clean election day blowout.

Pastor Dana Coverstone had some famous dreams about this season, beginning months ago, and he said he saw foreign troops on the ground here. He said he expected food shortages, too. As far as I know, none of the things he expected have been proven impossible. They keep coming true. Can it be that he really is a prophet? He doesn’t make that claim, but he’s doing as well as a true prophet could hope to.

I’m still working on emergency food. I dug out my food dehydrator, and I dried Granny Smith apples. The problem with them is that they taste too good. It will be hard to leave them in bags until I need them. I’m not positive my first batch is as dry as it should be, so after I removed it from the dehydrator, I put the apples in a bowl in the refrigerator. If that doesn’t dry them out, nothing will. I sometimes wonder why people don’t use refrigerators as dehydrators. They seem to do a great job of dehydrating things we don’t want dehydrated.

I should make a bigger batch today. It takes 4/3 of an apple to fill a dehydrator shelf, so I’ll do the math and work it out so I don’t end up with partial loads.

My apple peeler is a great help, but the sheet metal part that slices and cores moves around. It’s held steady by one screw. I may drill and tap and add a second screw so it can’t go anywhere. Or maybe I should look for a better machine.

I don’t know if homemade jerky is cheaper or better than the store kind. I’ll find out.

I keep praying for the rapture to come fast. I believe the WAP world is so rotten, it’s time for the tribulation. I want a better atmosphere, and I want to be with people who are like me. I want to be somewhere where I know I’m at home. That will never happen on Earth.

Fox News Can’t Really Call an Election

A great thing happened to me a few years back. God told me to get off social media. I was tired of dealing with proud boneheads who would not listen, and God told me to let them go. He also said I should quit reading the news. I listened. It brought peace to my life. People I know who remained engaged suffered with uneducated, biased individuals who let rumors and gossip rule their thinking. I was off on my own, enjoying life. I’ve written about it before. I call it “the little rapture.”

As the 2020 election drew near, I started looking at the news again. I felt God was telling me to. I felt he was saying that I used to be too weak to deal with the constant provocation, but that because I had grown, I could read the news without doing myself harm.

I started looking at political Youtube channels. It got to the point where I felt like a prisoner. I would go to Youtube hoping to find something interesting about guns or tools or science, and I would find myself watching the same angry people over and over.

This morning, God told me to let things go again. I unsubscribed to the Youtube channels, and I also gave up Parler. It’s a hopeless Twitter competitor. I joined a few weeks back. You know how it works. Conservatives and Christians get shut out of social media, so they start their own alternatives. It’s never as good. Even if you’re a Christian, no one you know will be there, and strangers won’t show any interest in what you say.

I feel wonderful. I don’t have to look at the fighting and scrapping–the carnality–any more.

What’s happening with the election? I could not help seeing that a few news outlets are calling Biden the president-elect. Trump says it’s not over. You know what? It’s not over.

Only three sources can shut down the election permamently: Trump, Biden, and the courts. If Trump concedes, it’s over. If Biden concedes, it’s over. If the courts say it’s over, it’s over. Both Trump and Biden have the authority to end the election by conceding. No one but the courts can end the election by declaring a winner. It’s meaningless if Trump, Biden, or any conglomeration of journalists or states call one person the winner. The courts have the final say.

I’m going to wait for the court challenges to end.

It’s strange that every news outlet in America waited for Al Gore to have his day in court after he made his ridiculous, unfounded challenge to the 2000 results, yet they don’t give Trump the same consideration when there are proven allegations of fraud in several swing states.

Anyway, I walk by faith, not the declarations of journalists and crooked politicians, so I will wait for a conclusive end to the election.

A bunch of Christians have predicted that Trump will win, claiming to have knowledge, not just impressions. Of course, most people who say they’re prophets are wrong.

Swamp dwellers, including journalists, don’t know how to deal with Trump. He isn’t Mitt Romney or John McCain. He has zero regard for what other people think, and he’s extremely tough. If he feels like battling for justice, he’ll do it, even if half of the country hates him for it.

Trump has a special anointing from God, and many people think it’s a two-term anointing. If that’s true, then it may be that we will witness the kind of spectacle found in the Bible. God saved Moses and the Hebrews when they were between the sea and the Egyptian army. He kept the lions’ mouths closed while Daniel was in the den, but he saw to it that Daniel’s enemies and their wives and children were eaten. He killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night to shame Sennacherib, his armies, and the rabshakeh. Maybe we’ll see the courts and law enforcement drag Biden off the stage. Or maybe Trump really will have to go. Whatever the case is, I’m a man of faith, so I’m not going to pay any attention to the wishful declarations of people who have no real power. We will have a firm conclusion soon, and pretending we know the truth now only does harm and sets us up for civil war. People who think journalists have the power to call elections would be irate beyond description if the courts ruled for Trump, especially if Amy Barrett were involved. Maybe that’s the plan.

Today I used my freedom to zero my first red dot scope. I put it on the AR-15 and adjusted it so it works at 50 yards. At 30 yards, it shoots through one hole. At 50 yards, I get about a 1.5″ spread. I think it’s because I can’t see well enough to shoot accurately at 50 yards. There is no magnification, so you end up with a big fuzzy dot that makes it hard to know exactly where the gun is pointed. It may be that I have the illumination turned up too high.

The red dot is pleasant to use, but it’s not magic. I’ll have to use it a few more times before I can come up with an informed opinion. My understanding is that parallax is never a problem with these sights. Is that the main appeal?

I also tried using jags and a bore guide to clean the gun. It was a 90-minute nightmare. The patches that are supposed to work with jags will not go through the barrel, even when you do what they tell you to do in videos. I got patches stuck in the gun several times. I finally cut tiny patches from patch cloth and made them work.

The bore guide seems like an asinine toy to me. It’s supposed to protect the barrel and chamber from damage. How can brass hardware and carbon-fiber rods damage steel? Hard to swallow.

I had to wrestle so hard with the patches and jags, the bore guide went all over the place. I’m sure brass and steel came together many times.

My suspicion is that hipsters have made cleaning AR’s way more difficult than it has to be. I’ll bet brushes and Boresnakes work just fine.

UPDATE

It turns out the people on gun forums don’t know anything about using jags. It’s a wonder they manage to clean their guns. They were useless as sources of information, but of course, they had plenty to say anyway.

They told me some really WRONG things, including this: if your jag is too tight, put it in a drill and use sandpaper to reduce it. So the engineers who make jags aren’t smart enough to figure out how big they should be?

I found the right information on a couple of manufacturer’s sites.

1. The main purpose of a bore guide is to protect the gun cleaning rod from sharp edges in the breech area.

2. The correct size patches for .223 and 6.5mm are 1-1/8″ and 1-1/2″. Multi-caliber patches don’t actually work. Maybe they’re okay for loops, but they’re not for jags.

3. To use a jag with a patch, you pierce the corner and wrap the patch around the jag. You can make the fit tighter or looser by fiddling with it.

I got out my Tikka T3x, which was already cleanish, and I tried the wrapping method. Worked perfectly. It was snug enough to get junk out of the barrel, but it did not get stuck, and I was able to control it so it didn’t jump out of the barrel and drop the patch. Because the patch was wrapped around the jag, it stayed on when I pulled it backward, so I was able to go back and forth.

I ordered 1000 patches in each size. That should keep me going for a while. I ordered a Dewey rod made especially for AR chambers. I tried wrapping a patch around a jag, and it worked great.

Montana X-Treme is the company that made my 6.5mm jag. Their site said to wrap the jag. Their jags have several sets of rings on them, so the rings cover over an inch. People were recommending tiny patches. There is no way on earth to get a tiny patch to reach all the rings, so when you use a tiny patch, you’re using about 2/3 of the jag you paid good money for. Bigger patches wrapped around the jag are the correct choice.

I ordered a 6.5mm Hoppe’s Bore Snake. I’ll use it to clean up the bore after using jags and so on. It’s faster than 52 patches in a row.

Man, life is better when you consult people who actually know something.