Another Win for Mr. Popularity

If I recall correctly, I started my first Facebook account in 2009. Actually, it may have been my second account. I have dim memories of checking Facebook out during my blogging heyday, which would have been several years earlier. I recall wondering why anyone would want Facebook. People “poked” each other and sent each other beer icons. It seemed utterly stupid. That sounds doesn’t sound like the Facebook of 2009. Anyway, my first really active account probably began a little over a decade ago.

I was an armorbearer for Rich Wilkerson at Miami’s Trinity Church, and I had a lot of church friends. I noticed that a lot of the people I knew had been drinking the Social Justice Kool-Aid. They hated Republican politicians, and they put up emotional posts espousing leftist causes. It was very disturbing, because they were very clearly out of touch with the body of Christ.

They were out of touch with their pastor, who was a conservative. He kept his politics quiet.

I got frustrated with Facebook because it showed me that most of the people I knew were hypocrites. They went to church to feel good, but they remained unchanged. You couldn’t tell them anything. When I shared things that would not be controversial at all among Christians who knew the Holy Spirit, I got a lot of static in return.

A few years later, I belonged to New Dawn Ministries. I didn’t know the pastor was an active pedophile. I posted things that would have gotten a lot of likes from knowledgeable Christians, but I got more static, and a lot of it came from the pastors. The pastor’s wife was especially strident and rude. She was a huge believer in the prosperity gospel, and she believed she and her husband were to be treated like royalty. We were expected to submit to them like servants.

I eventually became very open in my opposition to the church, calling it a cult and denouncing the pastors for telling my friends not to talk to me.

During this time, I used a fake Facebook name, as any intelligent person would. Facebook had a rule I didn’t know about. No fake names. Someone turned me in, and my account vanished instantly. The pedophile pastor put up a post about it. His theory was that God had smitten me. He said, “God don’t like ugly.”

I didn’t bother resurrecting that account. I started a new one and continued doing what I was doing. But one day God told me to get off social media. I was only too happy to do that. I called it “the little rapture.” It was very pleasant.

I still avoid Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A Russian hacker took over my old Instagram account after I deactivated it, so it still exists.

I had found that social media interaction led to a lot of nonproductive stomach-churning argument with people who thought they knew a great deal yet were very ignorant. I wondered if I was supposed to continue. Was what I was doing a ministry? I can’t say, but if it was, it didn’t work very well. The return was not worth the aggravation.

Today I got a reminder of why I quit. I put something on the web a while back, and even though social media sites were not involved, someone who was offended linked to what I had published, and the flying monkeys attacked. It wasn’t a big deal, but it reminded me how vile the Internet is. I was accused of characteristics I don’t have. One person found out I was a Christian and said I was delusional.

A crowd of venomous, deluded people doesn’t like me. This is nothing new, and I know why it happens.

The voice of Internet haters is the voice of the Beast. He speaks through crowds. He has always spoken through crowds.

A crowd tried to rape the cherubs in Sodom, outside Lot’s house. The crowd was against Noah; God killed all of them and only spared 8 human beings. A crowd delighted in tormenting Samson. A crowd listened to Dathan and Korah and opposed Moses. A crowd got Aaron to make a golden calf. A crowd murmured against Moses, Caleb, and Joshua and died in the desert because of it.

A crowd defied God and insisted he give them a king when he wanted to give them prophets and priests.

Elijah was against the majority. In his time, there were only 7,000 men in Israel who didn’t worship Baal. A crowd of kids insulted Elisha, and God sent two bears to maul them. Crowds abused and killed the prophets. A crowd arrested Jesus. A crowd forced Pontius Pilate to kill him, even though Pilate was determined to let him go. A crowed jeered at him while he was dying on the cross.

Solomon literally married a crowd. He had hundreds of wives, and he listened to them instead of God. He worshiped their false gods and died in disgrace. Solomon was a failure. People forget that.

Under Ahasuerus, crowds rose up to murder Jews. Some believe this was a shadow of the Nazi persecution.

Crowds and peer pressure are evil. The Bible is against peer pressure and the voice of the crowd. The Bible says we are to be the head and not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. When a herd travels, one animal in front turns its head a certain way and walks in that direction, and the other animals follow as though they were its tail.

I have never been good at picking up on the consensus of the herd, and I have always hated peer pressure. Many times, I have tried to give in to it in order to be accepted, but it never worked. You have to be a certain kind of person in order to pull it off.

If you don’t fit in with the herd, be happy, because it may mean you were created to be a child of God.

Jesus said his sheep would hear his voice. There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Maybe there’s another voice you’re not hearing.

The Biblical figures who pleased God were generally outsiders. John the Baptist is a great example. His father was a temple priest, but John was not given a priesthood. He lived in a time when the Romans, not the Jews, chose priests. It was all political, which is another way of saying the Beast made the choices. Moses was cut out of his Egyptian family and social circle. Noah built a huge ship in the middle of the desert, which was certainly not in accord with the beliefs of his neighbors. Lot didn’t fit in with his neighbors. Elijah was rejected by his king and queen and had to go live in the wilderness. Jewish legend says Enoch lived by himself and rarely appeared before other people. Jesus had no home and no title.

The other day I was thinking about myself, and I wondered why I had never had any ambition to speak of. I think most men are driven to succeed by the fear that they will be perceived negatively if they don’t. I would like to be admired and receive approval, but the desires aren’t strong enough to get me out of bed every day at 5 so I can be the best or richest lawyer on earth.

I don’t care for awards. Competitions are inherently corrupt, and if you win a prize, what does it prove? It shows that a bunch of people whose opinions you probably don’t respect felt like acknowledging you for their own selfish reasons. If I think you don’t have the capacity to form an opinion worthy of respect, how can I expect to derive pleasure from your trophy?

Cash prizes…now those are okay, regardless of whether they come from people I respect. I can use money to buy more tools.

Trophies are not very valuable. When you die, they stay here on earth, filling up with dead flies. They’re usually made of plastic, so it’s not like you can melt them down and keep the metal.

Oscars are made of bronze, which is a cheap metal. The gold exterior is plating. Olympic gold medals are currently made of 92.5% silver, which is okay, but have you checked silver’s price lately? Even including the tiny amount of gold on the outside, a gold medal won’t get you far in a barter economy. It may well be that Nobel medals, made of gold alloy, are the only major prizes that have intrinsic value.

The Greeks, whose culture was completely Satanic, loved prizes. They loved honoring athletes, which is very fitting, because athletes have short careers. Satan loves giving people things that rot quickly, in order to deprive them of eternal riches. Greek athletes got all excited over winning crowns made of leaves. Wonder how long it took those to wilt.

I’m sure Michael Jordan has a huge number of prizes. That’s great, but how would he look on the court today? He would have a tough time with talented high school kids. He might do fine for a short time, but forget playing competitively for a whole game. He has prizes for things he can no longer do. If you serve God, you receive prizes in heaven, and they last forever.

Maybe I would feel different if I had won a lot of prizes or if I had received a lot of approval from human beings. Public approval is like a bribe. It clouds your judgment.

I’ve always had the feeling that lack of ambition was a good thing. I think that’s an unconventional belief.

While I was at Trinity Church, I got a prize. They called it the Abishai prize. The idea came from the infected doctrine of Denny Duron, a football coach masquerading as a pastor. His daughter married Richie Wilkerson, who went on to be the proud pastor of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

The idea is that Abishai was a nobody. In Duron’s brand of Christianity, Abishai had no talents and received no honor, but he was special because he was happy to continue working without recognition or reward.

In the Bible, Abishai was an honored military man of high rank, so one wonders where Duron got his ideas.

Duron wrote a filthy pamphlet called The Abishai Anointing, and the basic thrust was that some Christians are very special and you’re not. You should be happy to live in the shadow of people like Denny Duron and carry their laundry and so on, because it’s a big honor to be ignored.

Trinity used people and rewarded sycophants and rich people, so the leaders knew there were people who were not happy about being ignored. I suppose this is why they came up with the Abishai award. It was for selfless leaders who didn’t mind being treated like pack animals.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on back then, and I was slightly honored to receive the award, even though I knew they treated me badly. I got my two minutes onstage, and I was expected to be happy about it and find comfort in it during my remaining years of peonage.

One day I popped the prize, which was a cheap certificate, out of the very cheap frame and put a photo in it. I burned Duron’s ridiculous booklet, and I probably burned the certificate. It’s always unpleasant to learn that you’ve been suckered, even partially.

I hadn’t wanted a prize to begin with, but if you’re going to give me one, don’t bend over backwards to make it an insult.

I criticized Duron and his nonsense publicly after that, which could not have done much to enhance my popularity.

It’s a good example of the sort of earthly rewards I’ve received from preachers and churches.

If they really wanted to honor me, they could have made some effort to clean the area where I worked in the kitchen, instead of leaving it to me and my friends to clean piles of mouse manure out of drawers and treat them with bleach. They could have stopped piling junk on the surfaces where I made pizza that netted them $12 per pie. They could have backed me up when they told me to get the kitchen in shape, instead of siding with a hotheaded underpastor who responded to my efforts by standing up for dangerous filth and telling me I was the problem.

The whole church was like a clown act. It was as if little kids had broken into a building and set up a church. The best way to get in trouble was to try to teach people how to behave responsibly. They hated that.

The mouse manure is back. That’s my guess. It’s very dangerous, and feeding people from a kitchen full of excrement is despicable, but Trinity doesn’t care about reality. They only care about image and money.

Today I got a call from my aunt. I rarely hear from her. She wants to decorate my parents’ grave for Memorial Day, at her expense. That’s nice of her.

She never got to hear my dad’s conversion testimony. She was not at his funeral. She had an appointment for someone to come and measure for blinds.

Her son and daughter-in-law were present, and they heard the testimony. I guess they didn’t tell anyone. That’s surprising, because it was quite a testimony, and I didn’t just deliver it so people could be amused at the viewing. I hoped it would help them.

I told her about his conversion today on the phone. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but you never know.

It’s considerate of her to decorate the grave, but I’m not very excited about cemeteries and mortal remains. My mom and dad aren’t in a hole in Kentucky. Everything here on earth will be destroyed, so putting a lot of effort into caring for a grave is not that appealing to me. After my aunt goes, I plan to do nothing whatsoever to maintain the grave. I don’t have any desire to visit it or to see Eastern Kentucky again. It’s a disappointing place.

A tombstone is a lot like a trophy. It honors a person without actually helping them, and a nice tombstone doesn’t make you a success. There are plenty of people in hell who have beautiful graves.

Maybe I should make burial arrangements for myself, but do I really care? At the moment, I have no will. I was working on one, but my friend Travis died, and he’s one of the people I wanted to bless. Now I can’t do anything for him. I suppose I could help other people.

If the money is wasted, which will almost certainly happen if I die intestate, I won’t care. I’m not going to be sitting in heaven watching unimportant things happen on earth.

I don’t care what happens to my body. I won’t be here to see, and if I were, I still wouldn’t care. I’ll be finished with it, forever. I don’t care what happens to things I scrape off a plate after dinner. What’s the difference?

I’ll be glad to get rid of this thing. I miss not being farsighted. I’m not thrilled about sagging and deteriorating. I don’t like the feeling of greatly diminished potential. There are so many things I can’t look forward to now.

People teach that our dead bodies will be raised and transformed. I don’t think that means you have to protect your dead body. I’m sure that if Jesus can resurrect people who died in explosions, he can fix whatever happens to my carcass.

When I let people and things go, I really let them go. I’m grateful for that, because I’ve seen what happens when people hold on too long.

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t care about people and things I know I can’t change.

The crowd is getting very ugly. How much time do we have left? Even human promoters pull acts offstage when crowds get sufficiently hostile. How long should we stay here while unbelievers hurl garbage at us?

It’s good to be reminded of my outsider status. Not that it wasn’t already clear.

Sorry, Rocket

They say no good deed goes unpunished, and while this expression is not quite Biblical, it is often proven true.

Last night, I walked into my bedroom, which has sliding glass doors. I looked out through the glass, and what did I see? A miserable, stinking raccoon in MY yard.

I guess it was 25 feet away. It must have seen me through the glass, but it didn’t seem disturbed. Maybe raccoons are too stupid to understand windows.

It was on the small side, and a weaker person might have described it as cute.

I looked at the bolt-action rifle in .204 Ruger lying on my bed (I have a good explanation), and I had the obvious thoughts. I could slip on some earmuffs, open the door a bit, turn on the scope (I have a good explanation), wait for it to boot, and send the coon to coon heaven. Alternatively, I could sneak around the side of the house.

I was tired. I didn’t know what to do with a dead coon. I felt funny about killing a little one. I waved my hand a few times, the coon realized I was not furniture, and he ran off.

This morning I got up and saw that he had disturbed some blackberry briars in pots. One of them is not looking too good now. This is how I am repaid for my mercy.

My new policy: death to all coons regardless of age, size, or how much they remind me of Disney films.

I had a pet coon for about a week when I was a kid. I had to feed it with a bottle. The person who sold it to me told me to rub its belly with a warm cloth to aid digestion. My mother took it to a vet while I was at school, for the usual raccoon checkup, and he told her to get rid of it ASAP. Coons can carry rabies without showing symptoms, and they get mean when they grow up.

That was the end of my coon-keeping days. By the time school let out, the coon had been returned for a refund.

He was very cute. He had little black hands that were cool to the touch and looked like expensive gloves. He waddled when he was full of milk. His distant relations here on the farm are cute, too, but they still have to die.

I haven’t thought much about disposing of coons, possums, armadillos, and coyotes. You can toss a squirrel a good distance from your house and forget about it, but bigger animals stink, and friends show up for the funeral and free meal. I went online and asked around, and the consensus seems to be that tossing is still the way to go. Just increase the distance. Because carcasses attract other varmints, they can lead to more kills and fewer varmint problems.

My grandmother ate coons. She fixed one for my dad and my grandfather, and my dad said that by the time he finished chewing a bite, it was as big as a lampshade. Apparently it just expanded without falling apart. He was not a fan.

She also ate possums and groundhogs. I’m trying to think of an animal she would not eat.

I don’t really see myself eating coons. Also, my understanding is that the pelts are no good this far south. I could see preserving a coon tail for the amusement value.

I’m going to come up with a coon game plan. I think I’ll just use my carry gun if I see one far from the house. If I see one in the yard, I’ll go for the .17 HMR. If I decide to set up a blind and shoot them, I’ll use the .204 Ruger and the computerized night scope with the built-in video camera. At the very least, I’ll keep the tail to freak out visitors, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll try to cook part of the beast.

There. Plan made.

I could use the 16-gauge with #6 shot or the Saiga-12 with law enforcement loads, but I really like rifled projectiles.

I just got a new stainless barrel for my carry 10mm. Midway USA had a sale. I could not resist. I paid $79, which is a steal. It should be better for shooting lead, and it provides better case support for hot rounds. The tradeoff is that it may be pickier about ammunition. Glock chambers are loose and relatively short, so cases feed easily. Not sure if I should use the new barrel when I carry. I want the gun to feed. That’s for sure. But all my defensive ammunition is test-chambered. I think. It ought to run.

I felt bad about shooting a youngster, but then when it ran off, I felt bad about not looking after my property. Coons are bad news, just like rats. I should have blasted it.

I’m too sweet for my own good. That’s my problem.

I apologize to all red-blooded American males who don’t wear Capri pants or skinny jeans. I have let all of you down.

Misplaced Passion

Last night brought an interesting dream.

I was at a social event in someone’s house. A young woman came up to me and started asking why a certain young man’s family had allowed him to have firearms after he had been found holding a shotgun to his head. I started saying such decisions should depend on his attitude toward guns, because most gun enthusiasts aren’t thinking about violence when they interact with their collections. But I stopped short, because I realized what I was saying was not applicable in a case in which someone had already shown a desire to kill himself.

In any case, his family wasn’t the problem.

The young woman who was talking to me turned into the young man’s wife, and she pushed me back against a wall and kissed me on the mouth very suddenly, with intensity. I realized she was on fire with love for me. I was shocked. Her features seemed swollen as though her love had inflamed her flesh.

Her husband was dead. She was not being unfaithful. Just bold. Like Ruth.

In real life, the man from the dream is alive and has not threatened to kill himself, and I assume his wife and son are just fine. I have never had any designs on the wife, before or after they married. I barely know her. There could never be any type of romance between us. The very thought is beyond absurd. In the dream, she did not represent herself. She didn’t really look like herself.

Her husband is a music leader and former youth pastor. He’s now part of a church which doesn’t promote the Holy Spirit, so whatever his many virtues are, he is probably not in a position to provide her with the knowledge she needs to move ahead with God. Like Travis, he loves performing in front of crowds, and he loves teaching kids. He’s white, but he was very caught up in black culture when I knew him. Maybe he still is. When you get caught up in black culture, you can end up with the same spiritual problems black people have. By seeking approval from black people, you can end up following instead of leading.

I feel like I’m writing about Travis.

After I woke up, I thought about the dream, and I asked God if it meant anything.

The heat and depth of her love had startled me. I thought of the phrase from the Song of Solomon: “I am sick with love.”

Here is the relevant passage, taken from the Complete Jewish Bible:

Like an apple tree among the other trees in the forest
is my darling among the other men.
I love to sit in his shadow;
his fruit is sweet to my taste.
He brings me to the banquet hall;
his banner over me is love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples,
for I am sick with love.
[I wish] his left arm [were] under my head,
and his right arm around me.

It made me think about the way husbands and wives are supposed to feel about each other, as well as the way every person should feel about God.

A couple should be completely unified. The Bible says a man and woman are one flesh. They should have deep intimacy and trust. They shouldn’t wonder about each other’s behavior and intentions when they’re apart. Each should put the other above every other person on earth. Their love for each other should be hot and compelling, not lukewarm.

Our relationships with God should also be intense. God should be number one, even above a person’s spouse. We and God should love each other with burning intensity.

As I thought about this, I got a revelation about my unfaithfulness. I’m serious about God, but I wander off and say and do things I should not do. I see now that this is very much like adultery. I have a partner who is always faithful and trustworthy, and he loves me with limitless heat, without reservation. I don’t live up to my end of the bargain.

It’s disturbing to see things this way. I hate adultery and unfaithfulness. I see adultery as something small-minded, trashy people do, like putting used gum on the undersides of restaurant tables or urinating in swimming pools. Adulterers don’t really love their spouses, and they think their sins against them only matter if they’re revealed.

I already knew oneness with God was like marriage, and I knew God compared unfaithfulness to him with adultery and whoring, but it hit home with more strength this morning.

The fact that a firearm suicide was part of the dream made me think about my friend Travis, who died following an accidental shooting.

Travis was not suicidal, but there were self-destructive elements in his life. He never gave up secular music. He never gave up his long list of maladjusted, ungodly, fake friends. He also stayed in Miami even though he knew it was poisoning him.

Travis was a wonderful person, but as someone who loved him pointed out to me, one reason he held onto things that hurt him was that he wanted the admiration of people he knew. Had he left Miami, he would have had to start over somewhere else as a nobody. Many people in South Florida admired him, and he did not want to give that up.

He was not completely honest with himself, and I know he was somewhat different around me than he was with other people. One mistake he made was trying to remain part of the black social justice culture, which is founded on a false victimhood complex. In private, he said this mindset was wrong, but he still used a photo of Colin Kaepernick for a Facebook avatar. I’m not saying the police don’t brutalize people from time to time. It’s the victimhood mindset I’m against.

People who wallow in victimhood are manipulators, and they don’t examine their own contribution to their problems. They don’t grow. They rot.

We all know what happened to Lot’s wife. Our commitment to God has to have depth. We can’t hold onto things from which he wants to free us.

I’m not condemning Travis. I’m just stating facts that matter.

So what does the dream mean? Maybe I’m supposed to take over for Travis. Maybe there is someone he ministered to, and I am going to have to fill his shoes. If so, based on what happened in the dream, that person is extremely thirsty for help.

Maybe it’s more than one person.

I have to hold onto this revelation. I can’t continue mistreating God. It’s vile and unthinkable, but I have done it over and over. If I wouldn’t cheat in an earthly relationship, why would I cheat on God, who allowed himself to be tortured to death for me?

I’m already doing things Travis used to do. There were a couple of young ladies he thought of as marriage prospects, and I ended up texting them a lot. One of them called me unexpectedly the other day, and we had a long conversation. She is disgusted by the people he knew. She lives near Miami, but she has no intention of going to the funeral. Both of us feel that it will be a disgraceful display of false love, from people who did little or nothing for him while he was alive.

She needs someone who isn’t totally useless to tell her things that will help her stay close to God after a major disruption. Travis is actually the third person she’s lost this year, so she really needs something to balance things out.

I thought I wouldn’t hear much from her after Travis died, but I was wrong about that.

While I was typing this, another mutual friend called. He was weighing the pros and cons of going to the funeral. He used to live in Miami, and he hates it. He is disgusted with Trinity Church and Travis’s phony friends. When his son was a baby, he got a big burn on his face in Trinity’s nursery, and the leadership shut him and his wife out when they went to the pastors. Seemed to me they were lawyering up instead of doing the right thing.

My friend isn’t going to the funeral. He made up his mind. He and his family will be here soon for a visit, though.

Rules and doctrine have taken the love out of Christianity. We put these things up like a lattice, and Jesus has to look through it to see us. Now that I think about it, the Song of Solomon agrees: “My darling is like a gazelle or young stag. There he is, standing outside our wall, looking in through the windows, peering in through the lattice.”

We’re supposed to know God personally and have extremely intense feelings for him.

It would be nice if we could go to churches and hear these things. Instead we have to wait for dreams.

Democrats Killed the Small Gas Engine

Today’s amazing news: sonic cleaners work.

I have three chainsaws, two gas blowers, and a gas weed eater. Thirty years ago, these were great things to have. Now owning them is torture because Democrats force us to use inferior gas tainted with ethanol. It turns out ethanol is a great fuel for political campaigns, but it ruins small engines, and it’s not great for large ones, either.

Here is what Husqvarna says about using ethanol gas: “It is recommended that you replace gas in your fuel tank every 2-3 weeks to avoid alcohol and water related engine issues.”

I have 6 small engines. I never know when I’m going to need to use one. Nonetheless, if I use gas station fuel, I’m expected to maintain a strict schedule of replacing fuel in every tank, and “replacing” doesn’t just mean you can pour it out. You have to run every engine dry, and then you have to run them dry with ethanol-free fuel.

Obviously, I am not going to turn my life upside-down so I can nanny a bunch of yard tools. I buy ethanol-free gas, I add the best ethanol-fighting additive I can buy, and I buy new carburetors when I have problems.

A stock carburetor for a typical chainsaw runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. They’re made in China. They’re not very good. Even if ethanol doesn’t plug them up, the diaphragms rot. It’s not like you’re doing yourself a big favor by buying OEM.

The same carburetor, made in the same country and sold by a different company, will generally cost you under $15, along with a new fuel filter, a spark plug, and some other useful junk, such as gaskets. My belief is that any time you buy a small engine, you should buy a Chinese carb off Ebay just so you’ll be ready for the inevitable. Some carbs are a pain to replace, but many pop in and out in 10 minutes, with no tools except for a screwdriver.

I am a huge fan of Chinese Ebay carbs, but I know have an even better weapon: the sonic cleaner. I saw a Youtube video about using them on carbs, and I saw my destiny unfold before me. I needed a sonic cleaner anyway. A sonic cleaner, like a welder or a mill, is a superpower tool. It lifts you to new levels most men will never reach.

My pole saw pooped out a few weeks back, due to ethanol. I can’t recall whether the carb is Chinese. I have a dead-carb collection. Maybe one of them came from the pole saw. Anyhow, by the time it died, I had a 15-liter sonic cleaner. I filled it with hot water, partially disassembled the carb, sealed it in a jelly jar full of gas, and gave it the business. Today I reinstalled it. No problems.

Of course, in order to check it, I had to put fuel in it, so once I confirmed that it ran, I had to empty the fuel, run it dry, and so on. Even non-ethanol fuel should be removed from a carb before you put a tool away.

I didn’t have total confidence in the effect of running the saw dry, because, believe it or not, you can run one dry and still have problems later. My solution was to run some Sea Foam through it. Sea Foam is an engine treatment made from mineral oil and secret ingredients. It’s supposed to be great for engines. I am hoping it can’t congeal like gas.

I wanted to use my weed eater today. It refused to start even though it has never seen ethanol. Today’s gas supposedly contains things that can plug an engine even without ethanol’s help.

I popped the carb off, stuck it in the sonic cleaner, and gave it 25 minutes at 53° Celsius. I picked 53 arbitrarily. Then I gave it another 25 minutes. I’m about to reinstall it.

I’m planning to get some of the Gucci premixed gas they sell at Home Depot. It’s supposed to be better than ethanol-free. My plan is to run engines dry, add a little Gucci gas, and run them dry again. It’s a giant pain, but it’s not as bad as taking saws apart and working on the carbs. I don’t know if it will work.

It seems like there is something special about the climate here. Small engine carbs just don’t like it. People from other areas tell me they use gas station gas and never have problems. I can’t explain what’s happening, but I’m not imagining my problems.

I may get some Gucci gas tonight. You can’t use it all the time, because it costs $20 per gallon. That’s over six times the cost of ethanol-free.

Replacing carburetors is actually cheaper than using this stuff.

You can use sonic cleaners for jewelry and a whole bunch of other things. A big one will run you around $150, but having a superpower is worth it.

Maybe the weed eater will run tonight, and if so, maybe I’ll be able to use it to clear the beautyberry bushes out of the shooting lane in my pasture. I sure hope so, because otherwise I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor, and attaching the driveshaft will probably be a one-hour job all by itself. Having a quick hitch on your tractor is great, but if your driveshafts are torture devices, it doesn’t help much.

Get yourself a sonic cleaner. Feel the power.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

Deposits May be Illegal Soon

Yesterday I finished making about 500 .45 cartridges. I say “about” because the actual number is 498. I believe I have finally run out of brass.

I decided to do something about the monumental pile of 9mm brass which is occupying space in my home. I ordered 500 semiwadcutter bullets. I read that semiwadcutters are pretty versatile. They make nice holes in targets, and they are better for self-defense and hunting than round nose bullets.

The semiwadcutter is based on the wadcutter bullet, which should be no surprise. A wadcutter is a cylindrical bullet. The flat face cuts nice round holes in targets, making the holes easier to see. Wadcutters don’t always feed well in semiauto guns because they’re short and flat on the ends. A semiwadcutter has a cone on the front, and the cone has a flat face on it. The longer bullet helps with feeding.

The cost for my ammunition will not be far from what I would pay for factory rounds, but my ammunition should be more accurate. Since it’s for practice, that matters to me.

I started using a Powder Cop on my press. This is a device which sits in a press station. There is a rod in the middle of it, and when a cartridge is raised to the top of the press, the rod hits the powder charge, which lifts it up. If the charge is correct, the rod rises to the right level. If not, it doesn’t. There is a white ring near the top of the rod, and you can set it so it’s level with the top of the Powder Cop when the charge is correct.

The most important thing a Powder Cop does is to alert you when you put a double charge in a shell. A double charge can make a gun blow up. A Powder Cop will also tell you when you have a low charge. That’s not as big a deal, but it’s still important. A weak charge can cause a bullet to stick inside a barrel. If you fire another round without clearing the barrel, your barrel may explode. A bright person will not shoot a weak round without stopping to examine his gun, but not everyone is careful.

Do I like the Powder Cop? No. Not for pistol rounds with short cases. My press is mounted low, so I can’t help seeing into the casings as they go by. It’s very obvious when there is a problem with a charge. I’m used to looking into the casings, so it’s hard to remember to look at the Powder Cop.

Does this mean the Powder Cop is a bad invention? No. Most people mount their presses high, which seems like a mistake. They can’t see into casings. Also, there are types of ammunition that have deep casings, and you can’t expect to see the charges clearly.

Here is what I think. A smart person would rig up a couple of electrical contacts on the Powder Cop. If the rod rose too high, the Powder Cop would close a circuit and sound an alarm or turn a light on. It would not be easy to rig it up for low charges, because the rod goes below the low-charge line every time a round is lowered, but oversized charges are the big problem, and an electrical alarm would tell you about them.

If I put an alarm on the Powder Cop, I won’t have to stare at it consistently.

I suddenly have a good deal of ammunition. I don’t say “a lot.” My notions of how much ammunition a person should have are changing.

I used to feel rich if I had two boxes of ammo for a given caliber. Now I’ve been through two ammunition panics: the Obama panic and the covid panic. I have seen how fast the supply can dry up. Once Democrats take over, it will dry up permanently. When you buy ammunition now, you shouldn’t ask yourself how much you’ll need this weekend. You should ask yourself whether you can accept doing without this or that caliber for the rest of your life. If not, start buying.

It’s not hoarding. True hoarding is something selfish people do, to the detriment of others, during a crisis. If you start stockpiling ammunition now, while the shortage is easing, you won’t hurt anyone else.

You should probably have 10,000 rounds of every caliber you consider important and expect to shoot frequently. That’s for old people. If you’re 25, maybe 40,000. You can’t just think about rounds you’ll carry or use for hunting. You’re going to need to practice, and you will want to be able to give ammunition away sometimes. People you care about are not going to prepare. And you will want to leave something to your family.

You probably can’t afford that much ammunition. You could spend $40,000 on one rifle. You should think about your future and decide what your best choices are.

You can get 10,000 rounds of AK ammunition for about $2,000. That’s not a lot of money at all, for a very important future-proofing purchase. The ammunition is very useful. It’s fantastic for self-defense, and you can even shoot deer with it. The AK-47 is like a .30-30.

A lot of people prefer the AR-15. I don’t know if it will be as useful. I’m not a deer hunter, but I’ve read that the AR-15 is marginal for anything bigger than a coyote. There must be something to it, because some states won’t let you shoot deer with one.

Here’s what I think: with 7.62x39mm, you have no doubt. With .223, not so much.

I am sitting on a nice pile of .22 LR. I think it’s something everyone should have. It’s very cheap, you can hunt anything up to a wild pig with it, it’s great for target practice, and you can even use it for self-defense if you have to. I think I should seal up my .22 LR boxes and leave them alone. I can buy new boxes for shooting and leave the stockpile on the shelf.

Maybe it’s best to think of your ammunition reserves as your ammunition IRA.

The upshot of all this contemplation: I still need to make and buy ammunition. I should also spend a couple of hundred bucks on bullet molds so I can cast bullets.

Preparation may not help once they pass laws against ammunition possession, but you do what you can.

I have no interest in holing up in my house and shooting at law enforcement agents or murderous leftist “zombies,” but I want to continue shooting and hunting, and I would like to have some capacity for defending myself and others.

Yesterday while I was reloading, I listened to the Bible. I heard the account of Jesus’ betrayal. It’s funny how you can hear the Bible over and over and still find new things in it. Here’s what I heard: when the worthless snakes from the temple showed up to arrest Jesus, they asked him who he was, he identified himself, and they all fell to the ground. How about that? He knocked them off their feet with supernatural authority. He showed them they were at his mercy.

He proved he was God, and they got up and arrested him anyway. He humiliated them and made it clear that they were on the wrong side, but they refused to take the opportunity to repent. They condemned themselves.

Peole like to say Jesus was captured, but that’s a damnable lie. He surrendered willingly, and he could have freed himself whenever he wanted.

It seems very clear to me that God wants American Christians to own guns, but I think it’s very unlikely that he endorses the idea of having last-ditch shootouts with our enemies. I suspect he wants us to show that when we are taken and imprisoned and killed, it’s by our consent.

Some conservatives and Christians actually seem to look forward to killing their enemies. That can’t be a holy mindset.

I suppose people are getting tired of reading about the death of my friend Travis. They can always start their own blogs. Today I learned he will have a funeral on May 30. There is no information about the location. It was announced on Facebook. I don’t have an account, and I am not starting a new one.

I hope they’re not doing it at Miami’s Trinity Church or The COOL Church, which is a depressing Trinity branch headed by Travis’s friend Terrance. Seeing Trinity’s leaders posturing at his funeral would be like watching vultures and maggots defile a dead soldier. Terrance cared about Travis, but don’t ask me to vouch for the rest.

I’m not planning to attend. I was very involved with Travis when he was alive. I don’t need to show up now and only pretend I cared. Let the dead bury the dead, as someone once said. Whatever I was supposed to do for Travis is done or not done. There is no changing it now.

Travis won’t look down and count the people at the funeral. He will not even know it took place. He has already moved on to something much, much better. He is not sitting beside Jesus feeling bad because I don’t want to go to his funeral.

Certain people may say nasty things about me if I’m not there, but they do that already, and anyway, they are permanently out of my life. I’ve gotten along fine without their love for 8 years.

I did without it while I was a member of the church.

Trinity’s leaders are a mess, but many of the people are even worse. The best people left. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I might have to deal with. I put up a Youtube video and talked about Travis’s life and death, and someone put this comment up: “WE DON’T EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND IF YOU’RE NOT BLACK SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT!”

There is no possibility that person watched the video.

It’s not someone who was close to Travis. I know all their names.

I really lost a lot when I lost my prayer partner. I am asking God for a replacement. They don’t grow on trees. It’s as if Teller died and Penn had to find someone who could do what he did.

Now that I have the reloading process working well, I may stop posting about firearms so much. I may move to electronics for a while. I have not decided.

They Knew Things were Bad when he Knitted Little Colt Sweaters for his Parrots

Today’s exciting challenge: forming a plan for 9mm target ammunition. I’m still not done with .45 ACP, but I will be soon.

I have a couple of 9mm Glocks, and they’re pleasant to shoot. They’re very accurate, and they don’t beat me up. I also have a lot of 9mm brass and maybe 200 Laser Cast bullets. I feel like I need to get rid of the bullets.

I can’t recall making 9mm ammunition, but I have a nearly-empty box of bullets, so it must have happened. I don’t have a recipe. Today I started looking around for one. I don’t want super-hot +P loads for target use. Seems like there is no point. I do want a little recoil, because it makes no sense to practice with ammunition which is way easier to shoot than the real thing. Sure, I shoot .22 pistols, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it seems to me that when you shoot a big bore gun, you ought to teach yourself to handle recoil.

I keep wanting to look at new powders. Unfortunately, whenever I look for new recipes, I keep coming back to what I already have: Unique and Accurate No.7. It seems like they do everything. No.7 is really hard to get away from. It’s great for .38 Super, 10mm, and 9mm.

I would like to stop using Unique in calibers other than .45 ACP because it’s dirty. I need to shoot up the vast supply I have on hand, but I don’t want to get crud on every pistol I own, so I figure it’s best to sacrifice .45 ACP.

But wait! I just read something online. An article says Unique isn’t actually dirty. What?

The article says Unique used to be nasty, to the point where unburned grains interfered with the way guns worked. At around the turn of the century, Alliant (the manufacturer) introduced a new, cleaner formula.

If this is true, why does my 1911 always have black residue on it?

Is it possible the residue actually comes from somewhere else?

The lead bullets I shoot come covered with greasy wax. Is it possible this stuff turns into a mist, gets contaminated with soot and then sticks to the gun?

I suppose that is not the explanation. I shoot the same brand of bullets from my stainless .38 Super, and it’s very clean. Unique must be dirty.

Makes me wonder what it was like before they cleaned it up.

Is it really a good idea to make 9mm target ammunition? I should try to find out. Let’s see. I have free brass, so that saves me about 15 cents per round. That means I save $7.50 per box. But I can buy target ammo with brass cases for $9.00, or 18 cents per round. I have 4 boxes I bought for $7.85 plus tax, so it was even cheaper.

Bullets are nearly 7 cents each, or $3.50 per box. Primers run, call it 4 cents, so $2.00 per box. Powder is around 1.5 cents, or 75 cents per box. So $6.25 per box for homegrown 9mm, or $13.75 if I use new brass.

Depending on the breaks, I save between two and four dollars per box compared to factory ammunition. Not a huge savings.

On the other hand, I get very accurate ammunition, I know exactly what’s in it and what it will do, and I get the fun, knowledge, and skill. The knowledge and skill could be important some day. They could make it very hard for us to get ammunition in the future.

I don’t know why homegrown shoots better than factory, but it’s true. Maybe not all the time. Some factory stuff is super-accurate. It’s true for pistol ammunition, at least for me.

I can do better on price if I get a few bullet molds. Lead will always be cheap or free. A good mold runs something like $40, which is far from free, but by the time you’ve made 1000 rounds, you’ve saved around twice the price of the mold, which makes me wonder why I’m not doing it already.

Lead ammo is not useless, even if it’s inferior to jacketed. You can hunt with it. Squirrels and rabbits can’t tell it’s lead. It may not be optimal for self-defense, but it’s still very good. It worked just fine during the Civil War. It still incapacitates a lot of bad people today.

If I were a prepper, I guess I’d stock up on jacketed ammo in a few calibers, but I think it would also be smart to stock up on reloading stuff. Powder and primers are not things you can reasonably expect to make at home.

If things ever got really bad, hunting would become very important, and the hunting laws would be ignored. People would shoot game, and they would also look for ways to eat things like coons, coyotes, and crows. You can eat just about anything made of meat. There are bobcat recipes out there. I guess a feral cat would work just as well, as would a feral dog. They’re pretty abundant.

Mmm. Thoughts of a tasty dystopian future. Cat a l’orange. One more thing that would draw us closer to China.

Crows are supposedly delicious. Soylent Crow.

I don’t think I’ll have problems in the future with ammunition data. In the past, I didn’t do much in the way of taking notes, so I floundered when I started making ammo again. Now I’m acting like the scientist I allegedly am. I write something every time I make ammo, and I include anything that could be relevant. That’s how science works. If you’re really serious, you don’t just record the reagent and the amount and the temperature and so on. You record the type of wood the lab bench is made from.

Don’t laugh. An important discovery in nuclear physics involved something that happened when an experiment was performed on a wooden bench.

I haven’t written down what I was wearing or what kind of bulbs were in the overhead lights, but I record very minor things, such as an incident where debris clogged up my primer-seating punch.

I guess my reloading notes could be used by our future hipster/millennial rulers when they round us up to try us for whatever offenses they can make up. “He made 3000 bullety things, and it also says he ate red meat. EeEeeWWwwWWWwwwWWW!”

What else is happening? I think a lot about love these days. A week or so ago, I was putting Marv back in his cage, and he got very emotional and started nuzzling me with his head. He did not want to go. It made me think about what this world was supposed to be. It was created to be a place where love was like a persistent fog no one could escape.

How often do preachers talk about that? We have completely lost sight of it, but love is the single most important thing in the universe. The physical world and the human race were created so God could have a huge family tied together by love. That’s the only reason. You can cite other purposes, but they all stem from his intention to create a family. Remove love, and they all disintegrate.

We’re very busy attending to responsibilities. We have to work. We have to get the necessities of life. We educate ourselves. We deal with our problems and our human enemies. We also spend a lot of time doing frivolous things to make ourselves happy and reward ourselves for the other things we do. We don’t have a lot of time to lie back on our recliners and think about loving other people. We don’t share affection all that much, with other people or with God.

It’s perverse, if you consider the reason why we’re here. It’s as though God put us here to be farmers, but instead of growing things, we spent all our time polishing our tractors and decorating our barns.

I wonder if the church can change. We focus on rules. We expend a lot of effort trying to do things to impress God. We spend a lot of time criticizing unbelievers without presenting them with solutions. When they look at us, they often see anger and stress, not love.

Some of us are leftist Social Justice Warriors, which is incredible. How could anyone be that wrong?

Satan is great at misdirection. He gets us to prioritize the wrong things.

My friend Travis died a week ago today, and it has been rough, but something good came of it. I got together with a group of people so we could pray and try to help him, and we have been communicating a lot. Now we’re closer than we were. Love has been served. I think the effect will persist.

No Mas!

Today and yesterday I worked on reloading .45 ACP target rounds. At them moment, I have about 250 ready to shoot. It’s a nice feeling.

I had a very weird issue with my seating die yesterday. I was having problems seating Wolf primers in old brass with primer pockets that had not been cleaned. Wolf large pistol primers are supposedly a little bigger than other brands. If this is true, it explains why I’m having seating issues.

I’m using Wolf primers because I have a lot of them. Several thousand. I bought them during the Obama panic. I was lucky to get them. My understanding is that Wolf primers are as good as anyone’s, but they have a reputation for being hard to seat and hard to fire. Some primers require a stronger firing pin whack than others. I had some problems with them the other day while shooting 10mm rounds from a Glock, so I decided to quit using them in defensive ammunition. I don’t want to wonder whether a round will go off when a burglar or a particularly surly squirrel is the target.

I’m using Wolf primers for target rounds because I don’t really care whether every single one goes off. I’m shooting them from a 1911, and it seems to like them just fine. No problems. Is this because the 1911 strikes harder? Were my earlier problems caused not by the primer but by pocket lint slowing the movement of my Glock’s firing pin? I can’t say.

Someone has suggested that tight primers sit high in their pockets and that this can cause them to be hard to fire. If that’s the case, maybe the Glock problems were caused by the tight new brass I was using. Maybe the primers were a couple of thousandths away from being completely seated. I can only guess.

I have shot a lot of Wolf ammunition, and it has always been perfectly reliable, even in Glocks. I don’t have much experience with Wolf primers in 10mm Glocks, though.

I’m thinking about my next project. I want to make defensive ammo for the .45. When I got my press, Hornady gave me 1000 free .45 ACP 230-grain XTP hollowpoints. These are not the greatest hollowpoints on earth. It sort of looks like Winchester Rangers hold that title. But they were free, and I fully intend to use them. I will probably use them up on targets, but still, I want to give them respectable defensive velocities.

I looked loads up, and I found that “fast” for this caliber is 900 fps. Whew. That’s even faster than a BB gun. Impressive.

I spent a long time researching loads. I found some info on using a powder called Power Pistol. You can get over 900 fps with it. I looked up other powders and recipes. Toward the end, I really thought I needed Power Pistol. Then I saw a load for…wait for it…Accurate No.7. I can’t seem to get away from this powder. It seems to do everything. I already use it for .38 Super and 10mm.

I have a lot of No.7, so I’ll give it a try. I still need new brass, however, and I think I’ll still get some Power Pistol. You can’t learn much if you don’t try new things.

I read some new information about using handloads for self-defense. As I have noted earlier, there is a big prejudice against using homegrown ammunition. I have taken a dim view of some of the claims, and I don’t feel bad about that, because experience has shown me that gun experts are often fakes or partial fakes, and they often promote nonsense. Yesterday, however, I saw something that seemed to make sense at first. Massad Ayoob, who is not a total idiot, cited a case in which ammunition caused a defendant some trouble. I hadn’t realized such cases existed.

Up front I’ll say that Ayoob is a non-lawyer and therefore limited in the scope of what he can say with any authority. He gives lawyers advice, and he acts as an expert witness, but he sometimes says things that reveal that he doesn’t fully understand how the legal system works. A lot of people are so awed by him that they think everything he says comes from the throne of heaven, but laymen are not lawyers. Ayoob can’t read, or read about, a case and fully understand it. That’s not a dig. It’s reality.

He doesn’t hesitate to write as though he were an attorney, and that is unfortunate, because other laymen can’t perceive his errors and are likely to believe him.

He wrote a long post on a forum, and one of the lawyers who helped him was a civil, not criminal, attorney. This guy was rude to me a number of years back, and I looked him up. It appeared that he was an insurance attorney. Here’s what my dad always said about insurance lawyers: insurers don’t hire the best or the worst. They hire the mediocre. It’s the best balance between cost and results. Look at it this way: if insurance companies had paid the rates my dad and I charged, it wouldn’t have been all that much better than settling. They need okay attorneys with low rates.

I was unfavorably impressed by the things this man wrote, and apart from that, if it’s true that he’s a civil attorney, Ayoob should have consulted with someone else.

My grandfather got rich taking on insurance attorneys, and he is far from alone. What can I say?

The other attorney doesn’t use his real name, and I have not been able to find any reference to his qualifications. For all I know, he could be handling uncontested divorces out of a trailer for $75 each. If he had impressive credentials, I think he would let everyone know. He may not even be a lawyer.

It’s funny, but for all the popularity of gun forums, you rarely see real, serious, qualified criminal attorneys speak up. In fact, I can’t recall seeing it happen even once.

What we have are a part-time New Hampshire cop from a sleepy town, a guy who appears to be the sort of person who shows up when you sue Safeway because you slipped on a banana peel, and a mystery man who does not hold himself out to be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or judge. Ayoob, in spite of his lack of experience with serious crime, is a huge figure in the 2A community. Why isn’t he choosing better collaborators?

I like his work, and it would be neat to take one of his courses (assuming he hasn’t read this), but like Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations.

People also worshiped Jeff Cooper, but he seriously believed FMJ was the way to go, and that’s about like putting bias ply tires on a Ferrari.

I’ll describe a case Ayoob mentions. A man named Bias was married to a woman who was mentally ill. One day she was shot in the back of the head in their home. Descriptions of the case vary materially, which is a nice way of saying some are totally wrong. Bias claimed she threatened to kill herself with the gun and that she fired while he tried to disarm her. The prosecution claimed the gunshot residue evidence showed that Bias shot her from a distance. Apparently, there was no GSR on her, and if she had been holding the gun, and if she had been using typical ammunition, there should have been some.

Gunshot residue is the dirty stuff that comes out of a gun barrel along with the bullet. It flies a few feet and no more. If you shoot someone, the cops will test your skin and clothing for GSR.

Bias did not know what kind of charge was in the cartridge that killed his wife. He claimed only light loads were in the gun, but he didn’t know which of several he had made had killed her. The prosecutors supposedly used a similar, but heavier, factory load to show that a lot of GSR would have hit Mrs. Bias had she shot herself. The defense team determined that the types of loads Bias made had to be fired from a much shorter distance in order to leave GSR on the body.

Here, I must digress. To find out about the GSR, the defense must have hired “experts.” My evidence teacher, the irrepressible Mickey Graham, who awed students because he had supposedly represented the Beatles (actually just John Lennon, I think), used the following acronym to describe legal experts: W.H.O.R.E. “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.”

The fact that a defense expert said something means nearly nothing. I would hope a prosecution expert would be marginally more reliable due to ethical and other reasons, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Ayoob claims it would have been easier to get convincing information regarding GSR had Bias used factory loads. The defense could have bought ammunition and had it tested.

There are some big problems with using this case as proof that handloads cause people problems in court.

First, it’s a very, very rare case. That, all by itself, is the biggest issue. It’s huge. Ayoob has only managed to produce a few cases in which, in his mind, handloads caused problems, and there are thousands of defensive shootings in the United States every year. If cases where handloads cause issues are that rare, it must be true that handloaded ammunition causes very few legal problems for shooters.

Have you ever, in your entire life, seen a news story about someone who was in trouble for using handloads? If these cases existed, the press would bury us in them, the same way they scream that 1,000 rounds of .223 are an ARSENAL.

Second, it really does look like Mr. Bias murdered his wife. How do you shoot yourself behind the ear without getting a lot of residue on your hand, your arm, and your body? The defense said the residue wouldn’t be heavy if the shot were fired from over 24″, but her hand and arm were certainly closer than that, and how can a woman who is struggling hold a gun’s MUZZLE (not butt) over 24″ away from her head shoot herself behind the ear?

Under the defense’s own theory, the gun’s muzzle had to be at least 24″ away. How?

Side note: who commits suicide by holding a gun two feet away? Has that ever happened in the history of the world?

I just checked, and it is conceivable that if I really tried, I could aim a gun at the back of my head while holding the gun so its muzzle was a little over 20″ away, and that’s the best I can do. Maybe Mrs. Bias was a basketball player. Ayoob says the autopsy determined that she had a reach of 30″. Clearly, that was not the maximum distance from the muzzle to her head. Try and hold a gun with the muzzle 30″ from your ear. Good luck.

When people work on a case together, they tend to buy into their arguments. They start to believe in the parties they work with. It’s normal. Many just say they believe, but that’s a discussion for another time.

When gun enthusiasts talk about people who got “railroaded” by the system, they rarely give serious consideration to the possibility that the prosecutors are right. I don’t know much about the case (largely the fault of people who do a poor job of presenting it on the web), but the little I do know doesn’t make Mr. Bias sound innocent.

I saw an article in which an lawyer claimed it would be hard to get personal reloading records admitted because they were hearsay. That’s not at all certain, but actual ammunition is not hearsay, so excluding it would not be easy, and a judge who excluded it would surely fear reversal on appeal. Excluding admissible exculpatory evidence is something judges know will lead to professional embarrassment.

Third, Bias was acquitted of murder. He eventually got convicted of manslaughter. I will propose that if you have a bad marriage, and your wife gets shot in the head, and if your story is that she held the gun two feet from her head and then shot herself behind the ear, you are likely to be arrested no matter where you got the ammunition. If your defense theory is that a woman of normal height held a gun’s muzzle over two feet from her head and shot herself behind the ear, and if there is no GSR on her at all, you can expect skepticism, to put it mildly.

It looks like there was good, solid evidence against Bias, and he used handloads, and he still got acquitted once and got a hung jury the second time. I don’t know whether better GSR evidence would have helped him in the final trial or not, but he had a lot of baggage without it.

Fourth: factory ammunition probably would have made Bias look worse, because the GSR evidence against Bias would have looked much more solid. “Here are the test results, and we are certain he used this ammunition.” It appears that it could not have helped him, because the defense’s own theory said there would have been GSR at under 24″, and it is implausible that a woman could shoot herself from a distance of more than 20″.

Fifth, Ayoob has a dog in this fight. He promotes the theory that handloads will get you thrown in to prison, and when he writes about it, his language (“lightweight net ninjas”) shows he is emotionally invested in proving himself right. We all know how that works on the Internet. In a post in which he presents his cases, he makes it clear that he researched them AFTER people disagreed with him, and that suggests he didn’t really have the ability to back his arguments up before he was challenged. People called him out, and he did research to prove them wrong, and he came up with very little. What does that tell you?

Should you really call people “lightweights” when you never did police work in a city or served in combat and you have no law degree? He’s clearly a gun expert and a serious student of self-defense, but he’s not Jim Cirillo, Chris Kyle, Audie Murphy, or Vincent Bugliosi.

One of his cases is about someone who was criticized by a prosecutor for using handloads. Ayoob admits he was acquitted, and he presents no evidence that handloads were relevant to his being charged or tried.

Of another case, he writes, “The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal.”

So in a very unusual case, factory ammunition would have been helpful, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

Of a third case, he says a cop shot an assailant at close range and used GSR evidence to show that he was telling the truth when he said the assailant was about 18″ away. I have to ask: what type of handload would have left so little GSR at 18″ that the distance would have seemed so great it made self-defense seem implausible? I’m not a forensic scientist but it sounds like there had to be a lot of GSR no matter what.

Three cases, of which only one has any impact at all. That’s it. To listen to the people who swallow the handload=conviction theory, you would think prisons were full of innocent people done in by Hornady and Dillon.

I don’t know why I’m writing this in the context of this post. I’m not planning to make hundreds of .45 ACP rounds for self-defense. I just don’t like the way people swallow legends and rumors.

Looking this stuff over, here is what I could conclude: there is a tiny, tiny chance that using handloaded ammunition will cause you to be arrested when you would otherwise be left alone, and there is an even tinier chance that it will result in you being tried, and the chance that you will go on to be convicted is tinier still. There is a pretty substantial chance that using lame ammunition will get you killed. It has happened to many, many people. Not just three.

I have zero interest in armed confrontations or being a white knight. The older I get, the more I understand how important it is to AVOID defending yourself with deadly force. I really don’t see myself using a gun to shoot anyone, but if I did, I would want every round to count. I would want the first shot to incapacitate, and I would feel horror every time a round landed without stopping my attacker. In real life self-defense situations, every failure to incapacitate raises your chance of being hurt, and the increase is great, not small.

Imagine a guy is charging you with an axe, which is something that actually happens. You manage to get your gun out and shoot him in the chest…and he keeps coming. Imagine how that feels. What if he has a gun? Imagine knowing your failure is likely to bring bullets your way in the next quarter of a second. This is why good ammunition is important, along with shot placement.

It sounds like there is a microscopic chance that you could avoid a legal problem by using factory ammunition, so why not get the most effective type you can? Because the legend choir will tell you a prosecutor will get you convicted for not using bad, run-of-the-mill cartridges. With the legend choir, you can’t win by using handloads, and you can’t win by using the best factory ammunition you can buy. You have to use whatever junk the cops use. That’s their standard line. Of course, the poor performance of LEO-endorsed ammunition is the whole reason the 10mm was originally adopted by the FBI. They chose it after the Miami shootout, in which FBI calibers failed to incapacitate quickly enough. The fact that a law enforcement agent uses something doesn’t mean it works.

Anyway, I am going to order some brass and get this stuff put together. After that, I may never have to buy .45 ACP again, unless I want something that works better than Hornady XTP’s, which are mediocre.

God is not my Problem

I woke up today and started praising God immediately. It flowed through me like a river’s seasonal flood. It must have lasted over an hour. I did not want to stop.

My friend Travis has been dead for 6 days, but I was praising God with my whole heart. It only occurred to me this morning to think that what happened to Travis might also have been intended to turn me against God.

No success there. I question myself, and I hate evil spirits, but God has never failed or been anything but generous and loving. In the past, I sometimes got angry with God. To my shame, I insulted him once. I can’t forget that. It hurts to remember it. Now I have the grace to side with God. Questioning him makes no sense. I have been here on earth a few short years, and I am small. I don’t know very much, and I am not that smart. I can’t correct the creator of the universe.

Is there a better gift than confidence in God? Without it, you are lost. And “gift” is the right word. You can’t manufacture it, and you are not expected to. Like any good thing inside you, it has to be provided by God, and it’s a manifestation of his presence.

While Travis was in the hospital, I woke up several times and saw spirits in my bedroom. Were they attacking me because I supported Travis?

I was not afraid of them. I hate evil spirits, and I know they do terrible things, but what I feel for them is hate and contempt, not fear.

As far as I can tell, they don’t get anywhere with me. I certainly have moments when they influence me, but as the Bible says, though I stumble, I shall not be utterly cast down. I don’t think they are able to do anything beyond harassment and distraction. The Bible says a thousand shall fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand, but it shall not come near me; only with my eyes shall I behold and see the reward of the wicked. It’s a promise of protection, and it’s also a promise that God will protect my vision. He says I will see this with my eyes.

Travis invested in people. He had a great number of music students. He ran a drum line, which is a percussion band. The band was made up of ghetto kids. He tried to influence them for the better. He knew many of them were being raised more like wild animals than sheep and more like weeds than crops.

He also had a teaching job at Miami’s African-American Cultural Arts Center.

He experienced a great deal of frustration in his work with kids. Sometimes their parents wouldn’t bring their kids to lessons. The kids themselves let him down a lot. He kept working on people he should have dropped.

He used to hold car washes at the Cultural Arts Center, and the kids did the work. I remember taking my truck once. A few minutes after I left, multiple shots were fired right across the street, and a man was hit. That incident is a small picture of what it was like for Travis to try to help black kids.

He got a return on his investment. It was not all wasted. There are a bunch of kids and young adults in Miami who, thanks to Travis, understand that the way they and their families have lived is not right. They can’t lose that.

What about my investment? Losing Travis was somewhat like losing a son. I feel like I tried to buy something, and the transaction didn’t go through. My check bounced. I felt that a tremendous portion of my legacy had been wiped out.

Things could certainly be better, but because I told Travis things, he was better off when he died than he would have been without me. He repeated what I said to a lot of other people, and they are also better off. Nobody who taught Travis good things should feel completely cut off.

What will happen now? Will God give me anyone to replace Travis? I suppose he will. He has to be angry about what happened. I assume he will turn it around and make the spirits behind it wish they had never thought of bothering me or Travis Quinn.

It will take more than this to cut me off from God. To attack my faith is to attack God himself, because God is my faith. If I generated my own faith by trying hard to believe, I would be wide open to attack. Most Christians generate their own faith because they aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit and they don’t pray in tongues. I don’t have to do that.

No one is supposed to do it.

Flu Numbers/Black Death Emotions

I keep thinking about COVID-19, AKA coronavirus AKA covid AKA C19 AKA C-19 AKA the Chinese Communist Party Virus. What have I been right about? What have I been wrong about?

When this thing surfaced, I kept looking at the numbers, and I saw that there was no way its ability to spread could, at that time, be compared to the seasonal flu. After a while, I concluded firmly that the disease was never going to be as common as the flu, even though the flu has to battle awareness and a strong vaccination program. That conclusion was completely correct OR there are around 700 million cases we just haven’t noticed. Take your pick. There is no third possibility.

I also opined that covid would be about like a bad flu season in terms of mortality. This was correct. The US is on track to get something like 100,000 reported fatalities, many of which will surely turn out to be bogus, and that’s not radically different from the 80,000 flu deaths the CDC reported for last year. The global figure also resembles flu data. Even if we get 200,000 deaths, that’s 2.5 times the flu figure, and that is within the flu ballpark.

For some reason, covid hit us harder than many other countries, and no, it’s not because Trump. The Chinese completely ignored covid while busily exporting it, and they still have fewer than 100,000 reported cases, and no, it’s not because they’re hiding cases. At least that doesn’t appear to be the reason.

The Chinese can’t really hide things that well. Word about covid got out in January on Youtube. If covid were still spreading significantly over there, it would be impossible to hide it.

People who are ignorant about China think the Chinese can’t communicate with the world. Wrong. Not even close to right. I subscribe to the channel of a South African expat who lived there for many years, and I watched his warnings about covid back in January. Chinese people can get around Internet blocks. This man did it for a living.

Here’s something weird. If you look at flu cases over the years, it appears that the flu also hits Americans with disproportionate zeal. We have something like 1/20 of the world’s population, and we get way more than 1/20 of the deaths. Can that possibly be right? Does it mean covid is behaving normally by flu standards?

I don’t know why America would have more flu deaths, in relative terms, than other countries. Maybe we do a better job of counting.

If the Chinese botchery and deliberate lies didn’t cause flu-like levels of transmission in China, then there is no way whatever it is people think Trump did wrong could have caused our problem. Assuming, in order to conform to Democrat/Deep State talking points that Trump did everything wrong, why did we get more cases than a country where the response was very clearly much worse?

The US makes my prediction look good, but there are many places where my guess about fatalities exceeds the actual numbers.

I didn’t buy the hysteria over the disease itself, but what about the economic pessimism? That, I accepted as gospel. This may have been a mistake. Home prices are not plummeting. The stock market isn’t that bad. We are losing a lot of businesses, but many will come back. Some were dying already because of the Internet, so should we consider them covid losses? When it comes to businesses, covid acts the same way it does with regard to people. It’s very hard on those that were likely to die soon anyway.

I thought the lockdowns were a bad idea for two reasons.

First, we don’t lock down for the flu. This is accepted policy, even among people who smoke dope for breakfast and think Caitlyn Jenner is definitely a woman. There is no left/right contention. The flu kills tens of thousands of us every year, and we don’t wear masks, close businesses, or lock people in their houses. We err on the side of poverty avoidance and personal freedom. It has always been pretty obvious that covid was going to produce flu-like numbers of fatalities, so why the inconsistency in policy?

Second, I thought it would kill the economy. I don’t really need to explain that. It’s a simple idea.

Now I’ll write about things no one else seems to be considering. If I was wrong to think the economy would be destroyed, was I also wrong to object to lockdowns?

If the lockdowns haven’t hurt the economy that much, wasn’t it a good idea to stay home?

If you say we should stay home to save ourselves from what amounts to a couple of years’ worth of flu deaths, then shouldn’t we also lock down for the flu every year? Shouldn’t we force people to be vaccinated? Shouldn’t we wear masks every year between October and April?

We can’t lock down every year. Not if we want to have the standard of living Americans expect. Even if we don’t end up in a depression, we will surely end up like second-rate countries where two-car families are unusual.

Is that acceptable, or should we accept a death rate on the order of 10 to the 5th power, just as we do in the cases of tobacco and opioid users?

I don’t have to take responsibility for that choice, because we have been making it ever since America was founded. The pattern is set. Diseases and other causes of death have always been with us, and we have accepted these things as unpleasant but tolerable and unavoidable problems. Every country in the world has the same history of going on with life in the face of similar epidemics.

When Sweden’s leaders decided not to lock the country down, someone asked one of them about the wisdom of the experiment. He said Sweden was not experimenting; other countries were. That’s really true. Sweden was doing something very normal by global historical standards.

Let me stop presenting this in a rational way for a minute. Let me try the Democrat/Deep State/MSM approach.

THOUSANDS WILL DIE IF WE DON’T FORCE FLU VACCINATIONS AND LOCK THE COUNTRY DOWN EVERY YEAR! IT WON’T JUST BE OLD PEOPLE! IT WILL BE 30-YEAR-OLD MOMS WITH NO UNDERLYING HEALTH PROBLEMS!

Maybe now you see what I mean. You can take the emotional predictions and demands that have popped up with regard to covid and apply them to the flu, seamlessly.

The other day, some anonymous Internet person went on Facebook and said covid had killed fewer people than drug overdoses, and the MSM got so upset, a rebuttal was issued. In essence, the rebuttal said, “This may not be 100% true,” while admitting facts that showed it was probably mostly true.

Whether a death is important to Americans depends mostly on how many cameras are pointed at it. If 40 people die in a fire (or because they’re Christians living in a Muslim country) and it gets very little coverage, no one cares, but if one ER nurse with three kids dies from covid and the entire MSM runs with the story, it’s a national tragedy that requires draconian measures for all of us.

Up in New York, people are disturbed by a news story that says that when new infections were counted, 66% had occurred in people who were observing lockdowns. What does that mean? It seems to mean we are shooting ourselves in the financial foot while also making the epidemic worse. It’s a data point leftists don’t like to talk about.

It makes some sense. Where does covid spread most quickly? Nursing homes, where people are not allowed to leave. “That’s because the people are old.” Is it? We know that covid is much more likely to kill elderly people, but have you seen anyone say they’re more likely to catch it? I haven’t. There is a big difference between infection and death, as Tom Hanks could tell you.

Some authorities are now saying the New York problem is the result of keeping infected people at home with people they interact with a lot. That makes sense to me. We all know how common illnesses spread inside houses. My uncle came to Christmas dinner with norovirus and nearly killed all of us.

What about masks?

I bought the MSM line in that regard. They told us masks were useless because viruses don’t even see normal masks when they go through them. It’s like flying helicopters through the Grand Canyon. The authorities told us NOT to buy masks. If you bought a mask, you were selfish and irrational. At the time, I more or less believed them, but I noted that a mask might help you not to touch your face, and I probably said it would reduce the spray to a less dangerous level. On the whole, I thought a mask was a waste of time for someone in a covid cold spot.

My county has ramped up testing, and we still have about 200 known cases, which makes this place as cold as you can get. Still, I feel like I ought to put something on at the store. What if I’m infected and I don’t know it?

The likelihood that I can protect myself with the kind of mask I can lay my hands on at the moment (without burglarizing hoarders’ houses) is extremely low, but a mask might make some tiny contribution to the protection of others.

Of course, I can also stand 6 feet away from people, which is said to be much more effective (as of 10:57 a.m. Eastern time on May 15, 2020). I’ll just have to quit offering people back rubs in the produce area. I’ll have to curtain my notorious penchant for invading people’s spaces and getting touchy-feely. People who know me won’t recognize me.

I thought the meat shortage might be a big deal, and I made very lame steps toward protecting myself. The shortage has not panned out. I can still buy anything I want. Walmart is selling bacon for $3.00 per pound, which is less than half of what it normally costs in local stores. This is ordinarily a bad area for bacon lovers. My cousin near Chicago can’t get meat without shooting her neighbors’ cats, but people in the Chicago area appear to be extremely selfish and heartless, and hoarding is clearly the reason for her problems.

Two days ago, a story came out saying vitamin D might ease covid symptoms. I take vitamin D, so I did the smart thing. I hoarded.

No I didn’t. I bought one bottle of capsules. I’ll bet the supply takes a big dent shortly. Chicagoans have probably been hoarding since 10 seconds after the story was published.

Here’s something weird. No one can explain why minorities are more likely to contract covid as well as being more likely to die once they get it. They’re saying that even if you correct for racism, oppression, Dukes of Hazzard DVD’s, general nonspecific triggeration, and so on, they still get hit worse.

In my county, something like 16% of the known cases are black. The percentage of black people here is under 12%.

A friend of mine thinks it’s because minorities are poorer and have to go to work while the rest of us stay home, but lockdowns apply to minorities, too, and let’s face it: a lot of black adults weren’t going to work before the epidemic. Just being real. Drive through a black area at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and you will see the high black unemployment rate in action. You will see many, many people just hanging around.

I wonder if black people are in worse shape because they trust the government more. Based on what I see online, they seem to be extremely pro-lockdown. They post very angry pro-lockdown memes. Maybe they’re being so obedient they’re spreading the disease more efficiently.

If it weren’t for paying taxes, I would have no involvement with the government at all. I don’t go to government offices for help. No one comes here to help me, unless you count a nice young lady from the University of Florida who showed up to give me non-helpful advice on gardening. When you let the government take care of you, you will have problems.

Black people have a very serious problem with susceptibilty to rumors. The more black people you know, the more you will see it. They join causes very quickly with great fervor. It’s like watching a grass fire spread. They appear to be swallowing Auntie Sam’s covid advice with very little criticality. I wonder if that’s what’s hurting them.

Is the real problem supernatural? I suppose all problems are, in the final analysis. Black people seem to have more setbacks regardless of what they do, and that can’t be 100% natural or even attributable to white people in red baseball caps. If you know a lot of black people, you will know many people who are sick. You’ll see a lot of people in wheelchairs. You’ll know people who had crazy accidents. You can’t explain all those things by looking at their natural circumstances.

My friend Travis had no involvement with gangs, drugs, or violent crime, and he still got shot and died young. He died after receiving a non-life-threatening wound from which he was expected to recover fully. His brother was run over while sitting on a bus bench, in an accident that killed at least one other black person and caused another to lose a leg, and the driver, who was from Africa, didn’t do too well afterward, either. Travis’s dad has MS. Before getting run over while minding his own business on a sidewalk, his brother had cancer.

You can’t put these things down to bad decisions or racism.

Maybe Juliette Ochieng’s thoughts about the curse of Ham are correct. But how do you get rid of it?

It’s strange that covid has spared the Chinese, since they practice traditional Chinese medicine, which is witchcraft.

Back in March, Nigerian preacher T.B. Joshua said rain was falling in Wuhan and taking away the C19 epidemic. Case transmission then dropped to nearly nothing. It seems like no one noticed! The epidemic is still essentially dead in China. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, what’s the explanation?

He made a prophecy, and then he extended it to the whole world. He was wrong about the rest of the world, but how can you explain what happened in China? I think he misinterpreted his own true prophecy.

Overall, it looks like my wild guesses regarding the virus have panned out much better than the predictions the “experts” have made. My main errors seem to have resulted from relenting and believing the high muckity-mucks.

The case numbers are still doing what I said they would do, but they’re doing it two or three weeks later than I expected. A large part of that is caused by greatly increased testing, so I’m less-not-totally-right than it seems.

I expect things to keep dropping off, and if we have a resurgence, I would expect it around the start of November. I think we’ll have a vaccine very, very quickly, and then we’ll get on with life.

I think forced covid vaccination will become a reality in many states, and if the nanny-staters are smart enough to see the leverage they have, they will probably force flu vaccinations, too. Presumably, there will be topless protests by anti-vaxxers, since they’re all women and all women’s protests have to feature nudity.

I like trying to guess what’s going to happen. For one thing, I feel…I KNOW…I am being gaslighted by the pro-hysteria crowd, and for another, it makes me feel like I have some degree of understanding of what’s going on around me. It makes me feel as though I can prepare for things.

Anything Worth Thinking About is Worth Overthinking

I don’t feel like being responsible just yet. I think I’ll write about some trivial things.

My reloading efforts ran into a speed bump. I have been trying to create 10mm cartridges with 180-grain Speer Gold Dot bullets, and I want 1225 fps from a compact Glock.

This should be simple. I did it about 10 years ago. I may get scolded for saying this, but I still carry that ammunition. There are people who are afraid of old ammunition, but in reality, it’s extremely stable. You can put it in on a shelf and shoot it 75 years later with no problems, if you can still hold a gun. It’s common to buy military surplus ammunition which is decades old.

I suppose you have to be concerned if you walk around in wet clothes a lot, but that isn’t me.

Yesterday, I fired a few rounds of my old ammunition. Zero issues. The gun itself is the weak link. It appears that lint from my holster and clothing have the potential to gum up the firing pin.

When you make your own ammunition, if you want to do it right and know what kind of velocity you’ll get, you need to know how much powder is in each casing. To do this, you need a good scale. It has to measure accurately within +/- 0.05 grains, and a grain is around 1/15 of a gram, so you’re shooting for about a 1/150-gram interval. That’s between 6 and 7 milligrams, isn’t it? Check my math.

Precision isn’t very important for moderate loads, but when you start going for more velocity, you risk blowing up cases, so you need to be more precise.

I had a Lyman digital scale, and I learned that it couldn’t be trusted. I bought a second digital scale, and I found out the resolution was 100% too big. Now I have an old RCBS beam scale. Can I trust it? Sort of. I use check weights to set it, but I don’t know how good the check weights are. I ordered better ones. I think what I have is fine, however. I’ll find out after the new weights arrive.

I got around the problem with the first digital scale by weighing two charges at once and dividing by two. I figured the powder measure was pretty consistent, and I had reasonable faith in the digital scale. I started getting 24.0-grain double charges, and I wanted 12.0 grains per cartridge, so things looked great. I made several test rounds, and they came in between 1200 and 1250 fps. Perfect.

Then I let the process sit for a few days, and before starting up again, I checked the powder measure on the beam scale. I got 11.8 grains. I guessed I had weighed the successful rounds incorrectly and that the 11.8-grain figure was accurate. I had to find out. I didn’t want to adjust the powder measure, use 12.0 rounds, and end up with 1300 fps. I made some 11.8-grain test rounds and fired them. I got velocities in the area of 1100 fps. Terrible.

Somehow, the powder measure had started throwing 11.8-grain charges, and I had to start calibrating it all over again.

On the up side, it looks like my digital scale was right. I checked some new double charges, and I got 23.6 grains if memory serves.

Why would the powder measure shift? No idea.

The check weights aren’t slated to arrive until Tuesday, so it would be stupid to go ahead and make defensive ammunition before they arrive. What do I do?

I think it’s time to crank out .45 target ammunition. I don’t really care if I know how much powder is in a target round, as long as I know the amount is safe. I have a bunch of old .45 brass and a fresh box of lead bullets.

After I typed the word “bullets,” I had to go take care of a tax matter, and while I was working on it, I heard and felt a loud thump. It was as though a truck had hit the house. I went outside and saw that the big oak in my parking circle had lost a fork. It was lying across the driveway. Had to go out, cut it up, and move it. It’s a beautiful day for working outside. It’s warm, but it’s dry, and there is a good breeze. While I was at it, I went to the pasture and moved some tree chunks from Hurricane Irma so the cattle wouldn’t have to keep walking around them.

I’m glad the oak lost a big branch, because the oak needs to be cut, and this will make it easier. A tree cutter quoted me $1000, which didn’t include hauling the wood. That’s insane. It’s a 30-minute job for him. For $500, I would have taken his offer, but $1000 is not going to work.

The smaller the tree is, the easier it will be for me to cut it myself. I hope more of it falls.

The tree is leaning, and the danger is that it will “barber chair” or split before it falls. If that happens, a part that splits off can swing around and kill me. I have read that you can prevent this by putting chains around the trunk. If it can’t split, you can’t have a barber chair.

To get back to shooting, I have to do something with the ammo I’m creating. I have very few factory-made ammunition boxes. When I used to go to gun ranges, I took cardboard ammo boxes out of the trash cans. They work pretty well, but they don’t last forever, and they fall open if you’re not careful. And the only range I go to is in my yard.

I decided to get some Harbor Freight ammo cans. These are sturdy plastic hinged cans. Like miniature plastic versions of the steel military cans, sort of. My plan is to throw ammo into them for storage, and when I want to shoot, I’ll move it to small plastic boxes with grids inside them. These boxes are made by a company called MTM. I already have some.

When I’m shooting, I like to know how many rounds I’ve used, and I don’t like to count. A box with a grid inside it will do the counting for me, and it will be lighter than a Harbor Freight box with hundreds of cartridges in it.

I’m getting a new chronograph. The Chrony F-1 I have now works fine, and it was a good choice when I only shot a few times a year. Now that I shoot more, it’s a drag. It has a display which attaches via an 18-foot cable. Attaching that to the chronograph and settling it firmly in the utility cart is a pain. I don’t like having to suspend the cable over old cow piles. The chronograph stores data, but it has some kind of primitive 1980’s-style interface for getting the data out. I don’t even know how it works. When I read about it, it was so unappealing, I decided I didn’t care to learn the details.

With my old chronograph, I had to shoot, stop, enter a number into my phone, shoot again, and so on. I’m all done with that.

Also, the company that makes the Chrony F-1 has an extremely backward website. They don’t have an online shopping cart. You have to email orders. On top of that, it looks like they don’t respond. I sent an order for parts the other day, and I haven’t heard a word. There is no conceivable excuse for doing business that way in 2020.

The chronograph has light diffusers which are held on by steel rods, and I shot one of the steel rods because I was twisting and contorting myself so I could shoot at a lower height. If you lose your steel rods, don’t buy new ones. Get some wooden ones. The diameter is 5/32″. The length is 18″. You can also order 5/32″ drill rod from Zoro Tools, which is what I have done. No idea whether the Chrony people are going to send anything.

I’m getting a newer model from a company called Competition Electronics. It has a bluetooth connection, and there is a phone app. You shoot as fast as you want, and the machine sends the velocities to your phone. I believe the app gives averages and standard deviations. Not sure. Anyway, it will be a big improvement. I should be able to use a Fire tablet instead of the phone.

I had been putting the Chrony on the same cheap tripod I use for cameras. That will not be necessary any more. I got myself an Amazon Basics tripod. Not having to remove my camera and attach the chronograph will speed things up, and it will certainly make it easier to shoot bullets and footage simultaneously.

It’s funny that we still say “footage” now that there are no feet involved in video.

I suppose it’s too late to drive to Harbor Freight. Gives me something to look forward to tomorrow.

Obituary Appears

I hate to keep writing about the death of my friend Travis long after people have lost interest, but things keep developing.

A nurse who worked in the building where Travis died found out about me and provided some information. She was a friend of his sister when she was a kid. She says the hospital was locked up tight with regard to visitors. She says she prayed by his bed. Toward the end, her impression was that he would live. So his friends weren’t crazy when they found it odd that he had passed suddenly.

She’s a black conservative. How about that? You may not understand the hostility she is up against in her milieu.

She knows how I feel about the people who dragged Travis down, and she agrees that sometimes a Christian has to cut people loose.

Travis now has an obituary. Looking at it is like dreaming while I’m awake. Can it really be true?

It says he was born on June 30 and that he lived in Miami Gardens. He was born on June 3, and he lived in South Miami. That’s about all it says, and it’s still wrong. People who know about the errors are telling me how upset they are.

To me, the errors are just more confirmation of things I already knew.

After Travis moved into the house I owned, I told him he wasn’t from Miami Gardens any more. I said he should tell people he was from Coral Gables. Miami Gardens is everything he was rising above.

People are asking about funeral arrangements. So far, the story has been that the epidemic will prevent a real funeral. That’s fine. I don’t want to go to Miami for any reason, and I don’t want to stand among people who patted him on the back in life and did little or nothing for him. I think the others will understand. I certainly don’t want to see conceited pastors who treated him like a sharecropper.

Funerals and tombstones mean less to me than they do to some people. I believe I have only seen my mother’s grave during three trips since she died, and that includes my dad’s funeral. Maybe there were four trips. I don’t think about visiting. There is no one there. My parents are no closer to the graves in Kentucky than they are to me here in Florida.

Talking to the dead is a sin. I don’t try to communicate with my parents. I won’t talk to Travis in this life.

You should be good to people while they’re alive instead of going to a funeral, competing to see who can show the most grief, and climbing into the coffin.

As far as I am concerned, this business is over with. There is a ton of money available for expenses, so my help will never be needed again. I will surely write more about Travis, but I don’t want to go on and on about the earthly business surrounding his hospitalization and death. He is far away. He can’t hear me or see me. He doesn’t know what I’m doing. He will not count the people who go to his funeral. He doesn’t care what happens to his belongings or what kind of funeral he gets. He is doing fine, and he knows who cares about him.

Regarding the concept of leaving people behind, God gave me a new way of looking at the world’s future. I always say the world will become much more vicious toward Christians and Jews and that persecution will be open, violent, and socially acceptable. That’s accurate, and we’re already seeing it, but it’s not the most effective way to describe the future. A better way would be to say that the world is going insane, literally.

One of the benefits of being connected with the Holy Spirit is that he prevents you from being deceived. He counters people and spirits that lie to you and try to control you. He counters spirits of delusion and rage. If you’re not filled with the Holy Spirit, you’re just a sleeper, waiting to be activated by spirits you can’t resist.

As we move toward the end, such spirits will develop great power among the majority of human beings. Maybe they already have. People will literally become insane. They will live in utter delusion, just as the Germans and Austrians did under Hitler. Just as the Cambodians did under Pol Pot. Just as Antifa kids and BLM rioters do.

Just as many nominal Christians do.

People will be insane, and they will prefer it, so conversion will become rare. When that happens, there will be no good reason for God to leave us here, and that explains the rapture.

Don’t I Own This Computer?

Just a brief post to help people who might be sufficiently uninformed to let Microsoft fool them into obliterating a PC just because they can’t find the Windows password.

If you inherit a computer, or you just forget your Windows password, Microsoft will not give you advice on hacking the computer to get the password. That’s fine. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to endorse competing companies that make hacking software for this purpose. Hacking your own computer is completely legal, but Microsoft may be afraid you’ll screw something up, and then you might sue them.

What isn’t fine is responding to password-recovery questions with a list of things to do to reinstall Windows. You don’t tell people to burn down their computers when it’s not necessary. I wonder how many people have done it.

There are legal programs out there that will help you get Windows running again. One is called “Lazesoft Recover my Password.” I don’t know a whole lot about the others. This one is easy to use. You make a bootable USB drive or DVD, you boot the PC from the new software, and the program deletes your Windows password. Now you have no Windows password, and you can log on with no problems.

It took me longer to create the boot drive than it did to wipe out my password, whatever it was. The program ran in a few seconds.

The obvious issue here is that unsavory characters like burglars and your mother-in-law can erase your Windows password just as easily as you can, which means a Windows password was never really good for anything except keeping you out of your own files and programs and maybe even driving you to wipe your computer clean and struggle to rebuild it from nothing except maybe some data.

That’s some fine unintended consequences right there.

Nice.

Something weird is going on with Windows right now. They’ve decided to fix it so you can’t look at your stored browser passwords without Microsoft’s permission. I found this out today. I needed a password for a website, and Windows demanded my Windows password. Of course, Microsoft did not warn me this was coming. Because Microsoft. They really do write stupid software. It’s not everyone’s imagination.

The problem with the new policy is that I had an issue while moving the computer from my late father to myself, and somehow, the Windows password got screwed up, and when I was done, I was not able to get in using the password I had chosen. I had fixed the computer to enter the password itself, so I didn’t need to know what it was in order to get to work. I let it go “temporarily.” Then I forgot to fix the underlying problem.

If, like me, you think it’s a good idea to go months without knowing your Windows password, you can get around this problem in Firefox (which has apparently gone nearly extinct since I started using it) by going to about:config and changing some value or other from “true” to “false.”

This won’t help you get into Windows, but it will allow you to view your CanHazCheezburger.com cat-picture forum password without proving you have clearance.

I think the most amazing thing the Internet has done was to make people think cats have personalities.

If I had this problem, millions of other people must be having it, except that presumably, most of them have some idea what their Windows passwords are. For the rest, I offer a solution which is a lot better than jumping off a bridge because you can’t find your tax records or keep your business running.

Is it me, or should someone at Microsoft be fired? Wasn’t it obvious to them that their bizarre new nannying policy would drive people nuts?

Now I have a bunch of information recorded in very obvious text files, to prevent me from having problems like this in the future.

Thanks, Microsoft. I really needed to spend 90 minutes working on this instead of relaxing and taking care of my pets. Thanks for making dumb decisions on my behalf so I don’t have to.

Inertia Gives Way to Dread

I feel like covid and my friend’s medical crisis put my life on pause. I have to get up tomorrow and live again, before doing nothing becomes an unbreakable habit.

On the day Travis died, there was a lot of communication. I spent a lot of time texting and talking. Yesterday, things died down. People were digesting the news. Today there was a little chatter. I had a very long phone call from a young lady he knew. Listening to her appraisal of the people he knew was like listening to a recording of myself.

Everyone seems to be saying the same things. They can’t understand why things were handled the way they were. They are fed up with Travis’s social circle.

I find myself talking to so many wonderful young women. Where were they when I was 35? Oh, right. I was a physics T.A. at a university. You could station such people strategically around a property to repel women and prevent them from entering.

I used to have someone I could hope one of these girls married.

Some people are holding Travis accountable. For too long, he held onto people who were going nowhere, in a city that was going nowhere. He was not honest with himself about their faults and the power of their negative influence. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue when he praised people he knew. He was in denial.

Today I heard something positive. I had been told that Travis had not had a single visitor during his month in the hospital. Someone now says his mother and brother visited as often as they were allowed. Whom should I believe? I hope the second source is right.

If you knew everything I knew, you would understand why I can’t assume the new information is correct.

In case anyone from Miami reads my blog (doubtful), I sincerely apologize if I said anything that was incorrect. That was not my intention. I don’t think my judgment regarding Travis’s situation has been that great over the last few days. It is an emotional time.

It appears there will be no funeral that amounts to anything. The epidemic still has South Florida shut down. I’m glad for my sake. I told Travis to cut his crowd off. I should be able to take the same advice, and it would be unpleasant to see some of these people. There are roses among the toadstools, but I don’t know if it would be worth it to wade through the toadstools to see them.

People who took advantage of him in life are posting complimentary things about him now that he’s gone. I am told preachers are praising his loyalty. This loyalty is exactly what kept him in trouble.

I am told Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s former pastor and the son of my former pastor, posted something. I’m glad I’m not able to see it.

I hear Kanye is now a pastor, at least in his own mind. I just checked, and the pastor’s wife is topless on Instagram with a lei around her neck. Things are going as expected.

I truly believe Kanye West is feeling a call from God, and I think that if he lives long enough, he’ll be all right, but at the moment, he ought to be keeping quiet and confessing his faults to God.

I haven’t done much of anything today, apart from communicating. I stuck a 4-terabyte drive in my new PC. That ought to hold me for a couple of years. There was no way I was going to blow for a solid state that size, if they even make them, but I got a fast hard drive with a big cache. Should be fine.

Why are nonmechanical drives called “solid state” drives? Ordinary hard disks are also solid state. They don’t have vacuum tubes.

I keep having an ominous feeling, as if the end of the world were just around the corner. I have this feeling that we may end up forgetting about responsibilities that seem important right now, because things will happen that will make them vanish into insignificance.

It’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s the pandemic combined with the unusual set of events I’m dealing with in my personal life.

Has there ever been a time like this? The black death certainly had an apocalyptic feel to it. There were places where a third of the people died, whereas covid is still only a little more lethal than the seasonal flu, for all the hype. During plague attacks, everyone saw dead bodies. They were everywhere. I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed with covid.

During the black death, the disease, not the panic, was the major problem. The reverse is true now. Confinement has us feeling like there’s a plague when there is not. We have a plague mentality without a plague.

A big difference between the current day and the plague years is that today’s world was already coming to the end of the slack in the rope before covid showed up. In the 14th century, the world was sparsely populated, and we weren’t faced with a rising tide of technology that could be counted on to completely destroy privacy and free will in the near future. To me, this makes the present age seem full of foreboding.

Back when God flooded the world, the earth got a fresh start when things dried up. If we lost half of humanity today, that wouldn’t happen. We would still be besieged by malignant, unstoppable technology. We would still be close to the end of free will and free thought. Humanity would have to be decimated in order for the reset button to work.

It’s wrong to call technology malignant. Technology doesn’t destroy freedom; people do.

Human beings can’t be trusted with pointed sticks or handfuls of sand. It would be insane to hope we could resist ruining the world with computers.

I have this feeling that nothing earthly matters. I feel that if I never pay my bills again or do my taxes, it won’t make any difference, because something is going to come and sweep concerns like that off the table.

I wonder if other people feel it.

It’s very quiet here right now. It feels like the day before a hurricane. If you’ve been through one, you know what I mean. Is God’s orchestra tuning up, to accompany the fateful horn? Doesn’t line up with the timeline I’m familiar with.

Whatever. I’ll get up and start moving again in the morning, God willing. I believe there will be a morning for me.

My new beam reloading scale is at the mailbox, if Skynet 9000 is giving me the straight poop. I guess I’ll go grab it, and in addition to fixing the pool and working on business, maybe I’ll tune the scale tomorrow and see if I can make some ammunition.

My expectations for the future are dramatically changed, but my life is not over yet.

Gun Nerds and Their Dubious Doctrines

I think grief is different for different people. For some, it seems to cling like tar. For me, it comes and goes. I’ll feel very bad for a time, and then later in the day, the pain will lift, and I’ll be more or less okay until the next wave. I feel good at the moment, so I want to write about trivial things instead of death.

I am still working on getting my firearms hobby back on its feet. It may seem strange that I would be interested in this right now, given that my friend just passed away after being shot, and especially considering that he had probably relayed gun recommendations from me to the young man who apparently did the shooting. In my heart, there is not much of a connection. If I gave someone driving lessons, and then they had a bad accident, I wouldn’t condemn myself for helping them learn to drive.

Owning firearms isn’t a dirty vice. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Firearms are one reason you’re free right now. I didn’t recommend a prostitute or a drug to anyone. I tried to help someone to be responsible and capable, for his sake and the sake of his future family. I’m not going to let an accident poison something I really enjoy.

I had no idea what was happening in Miami. I don’t even know the name of the young man who owned the gun. I didn’t know he had bought it. I don’t know the make or caliber. I just knew some unknown person wanted some tips regarding something he might or might not do.

I bought myself a new old stock RCBS 505 reloading scale made by the Ohaus company. I’m hoping it’s American and not Chinese. The scale is expected to arrive tomorrow. I feel like I’m stuck in place until then, because my only other scales are an old Lyman 1500 XP which drifts and a new Chinese scale which only resolves to the nearest 0.2 grains. I have worked around the new scale’s resolution by weighing two charges at once, but that’s not a terribly reliable solution.

I can make 10mm defensive ammunition right now, because my powder measure is set up perfectly for it. I used the Chinese scale to make some rounds, and the velocities were right on the money. I don’t really need to know what the charge weight is, because the only purpose of the charge weight is to get the right velocity. If the measure is giving me the right velocity, I don’t care what the charge weight is.

I can make 10mm today, but I can’t do anything else. There is no good reason to fool with different ammunition and different charge weights when a scale that actually works will be here tomorrow.

One thing I don’t have: a real set of check weights. These are precision weights used to calibrate scales.

I have a couple of weights. Each scale came with one. The Lyman came with a 20-gram weight, and the Chinese scale came with a 50-gram weight. I would guess that the Lyman weight is pretty accurate. Don’t ask me about the Chinese one. On the Chinese scale, it weighs exactly what it should, in grains, but that’s after making allowances for the scale’s large resolution. It could be a tenth off.

I suppose I should get some better weights. I would really like to be within half a tenth of a grain when I use the RCBS beam scale. I don’t want to think my powder measure is averaging 10.0 grains when it’s really averaging 10.2.

Metrology, or the science of measurement, is a very humbling field. When you start trying to measure things well, you find out just how inaccurate a lot of measures really are. Most of the time, it means nothing at all, but sometimes it matters. A grain is less than 1/15th of a gram, and a gram is less than 1/28 of an ounce, so you can see why measuring twentieths of grains takes some care.

Why did I pick a twentieth of a grain as my tolerance? Charges are measured to the nearest tenth of a grain, and to measure charges that size without completely blowing it, you really need to be within a twentieth.

When I was teaching physics to premed students, I taught a little bit of metrology. My course materials said one should always try to estimate to one-half of the smallest measuring division an instrument provides. This is often good advice. If you have a yardstick that measures down to sixteenths, you can pretty well tell whether 1-1/32″ or 1-2/32″ is closest to your actual measurement just by looking. This should be possible on a beam scale, because it has rulers on it. The beams are just rulers. When you weigh things, you’re really measuring lengths. You slide the weights up and down, and you see which graduations they settle on.

There are a lot of check weights out there, but when you calibrate reloading scales, you need weights labeled in grains. They are a lot less common. I’m going to give up looking for a deal and get a new set of weights made for reloading.

One problem with old weights is that they may not weigh what they used to. Metrology is a real pain.

I have never made .45 ACP defensive ammo, and I have never bought .45 brass. I probably have 1000 cases I picked up at gun ranges. One range officer was very impressed with my shooting, and he said he would save brass for me. Then I didn’t get around to shooting for a long time. I hope he didn’t sit around waiting beside a big bag of brass.

When I bought my press, Hornady gave me a huge number of .45 ACP XTP 230-grain hollowpoints. I have barely loaded any of them. They’re very good for defensive ammunition. Maybe I’ll buy some new casings.

I have no intention of ever using my .45 ACP 1911 for defensive purposes, but it seems wrong to own it and not have the ammunition for the purpose for which the gun was made.

I went online and asked for advice on making defensive ammunition. I was soon immersed in “proven” nonsense and mythology.

Here’s a really annoying myth: “If you use homemade ammunition to defend yourself, the cops and prosecution will say you’re a nut who is obsessed with making super killer ammunition, and you will be charged and convicted.”

Here are some threshold questions. How will the cops know you made the ammunition, and why would they care? They’ll be very interested in other matters. Was it legal for you to be where you were? Were you reasonably afraid of great harm? If you’re in a mandatory-chicken-out jurisdiction, did you try to run away? If they walk in your house and see you sitting in a recliner next to the body of a stranger and a shotgun, they are not going to confiscate your ammunition and send it to MIT for analysis. Unless they think you shouldn’t have shot the person, they won’t care if you used a howitzer. You could defend yourself legally with a flamethrower if it was all you had.

Manufacturers use a lot of the same brass and bullets as reloaders. I don’t see how a cop could tell the difference between your Starline-and-Speer cartridge and one from Underwood. You’re not going to tell them, and you don’t have to. They won’t assume it. They won’t get a warrant so they can have David Caruso’s team examine your reloading press with the Hubble telescope.

Have you ever heard of a citizen being tried because he used legal ammunition he made himself or, for that matter, ANY legal ammunition? No, and neither has anyone else. Try and find a case.

In my entire life, I have heard of one case in which ammunition made a defendant look worse to gunphobes. That person was Colin Ferguson, a deranged black racist who shot up a subway car full of non-black people. He used Black Talon ammunition, and the press had a field day with it. “Killer bullets!” “What other kind is there?”, one would ask.

When you buy defensive rounds, you’re supposed to get the most lethal type for your caliber, to make that caliber work as well as it can. If you’re going to buy weak ammunition on purpose, why not just drop down to a .22 and save your ears and your wrist? It makes no sense to buy a large bore pistol and use ammunition that does small bore damage.

Two things about Ferguson: his cartridges came from a factory, and…he shot a bunch of unarmed strangers on a train! Let’s assume he used plain old UMC FMJ. Would he have been acquitted?

Winchester quit selling Black Talon bullets to the general public. Because the bullet-haters had a point? No, because Winchester was afraid of lawyers and bad publicity.

It was pretty silly. You can buy things that work better than Black Talons. They weren’t particularly damaging, as the medical examiner in the Ferguson admitted. Winchester quit making them, and they started selling what was essentially the same thing with improvements to enhance lethality.

I read some other nonsense from a gun writer. He said you should use factory ammunition because defensive ammunition goes through all sorts of special testing, including being measured with lasers, presumably worn by sharks. He said it made the ammunition more reliable, and that it justified the exorbitant cost of defensive ammunition. He said it was treated very differently from plain old FMJ, which, hello, IS defensive ammunition. There are places where you’re not allowed to use anything else, and the military is forced to use it.

I’m not sure what planet actually has special standards like that, but I don’t think it’s Earth. On this planet, manufacturers perform quality control checks on all their ammunition. You can go to Youtube and see workers for Sellier & Bellot doing checks on FMJ. I don’t think manufacturers are okay with their target ammo blowing people’s guns up. Except maybe for PMC, but then they’re special. I would never buy their stuff again.

As to reliability, do you seriously think computerized machines that pump out ammunition at high speed can beat a human being who examines every cartridge? If that’s true, why do precision shooters, whose livelihoods depend on good ammunition, make their own?

They didn’t read the article.

It seems to me that if your ammo choice has any bearing on your case’s disposition, which was not true in Colin Ferguson’s case, it would have to mean you were already going under.

There is a case which is often cited to show that “scary looking” guns (meaning military-style semiautos) are more likely to get people prosecuted. I wonder about that. The case involved a submachine gun, which is definitely not a Bass Pro semiautomatic, and the shooter was an H&K rep named Gary Fadden. He didn’t shoot someone in his living room or off the top of his wife. He shot someone during a road rage incident.

He was in his truck with his girlfriend. The story, as traditionally related, says a biker darted in front of the truck and forced him to brake, and that soon after, a couple of bikers in a truck chased him while waving a pistol.

And I have a bridge to sell you.

A motorcycle cuts in front of you, you hit the brakes and go on with life, and then the rider’s pals try to kill you for no apparent reason. Sure. I’m positive there were no gestures and no expletives. There was no use of the horn, and there was no tailgating or brake-checking. Because bikers always show up with pistols to avenge their friends after their friends have done something moderately rude without provoking a response. This has probably happened over a hundred times this month in my neighborhood alone.

Fadden says he ran from the bikers and found himself in a position where he had to face them, so he got out and confronted them with a submachine gun, and he was not able to find the selector switch in time to use it. Okay.

He had to analyze and shoot this gun for a living, mind you.

His assailants advanced, and Fadden fired 9 warning shots in one burst. One kept advancing. Fadden, who was still unable to find the selector switch (!) fired 6 rounds in a single burst before he could stop himself. Again…okay. You can go on Youtube and see people firing one-round bursts from submachine guns with no problem, but maybe that was not possible with this model.

The assailant died.

Fadden was charged with first-degree murder, which is, admittedly, ridiculous even taking the facts in the worst possible light. You’re allowed to defend yourself even after you’ve given someone the finger in traffic. He was eventually acquitted.

The common line is that he was only charged because he used a submachine gun, and while I doubt that’s true, I’m sure the gun didn’t help him.

Here’s the thing. Cops and prosecutors don’t like road ragers, even when they can prove the other guy started it. And shooting one person six times, which was reasonable under the circumstances, doesn’t play well in Washington, DC, suburbs, where the shooting occurred. Finally, the “victim” was shot in the back, and that gave the prosecutor something to work with.

An article you can find online says Fadden, who is now afraid to carry scary guns, now keeps an M1 carbine and a 10mm pistol in his vehicle. The first is a semiautomatic military rifle, and it looks like one. The second is the ultimate overkill semiautomatic, not including freak calibers and Desert Eagles.

Scary weapons.

The story is a very poor tool for scaring gun owners, because the shooter used a type of gun almost none of them have, he shot a person 6 times, he fired 15 rounds and claimed he could not find the selector switch on a gun he was paid to analyze, he shot the biker in the back, it happened during a road rage event, and it happened, basically, in Washington, DC. Fadden had a lot of problems that had nothing to do with the choice of firearm.

Paul Harrell, known gun guru, seems to buy into the scary gun and unusual ammunition theories, although he seems concerned about weird cutting-edge ammo, not handloads. He has suggested that it may not be wise to use ammunition with a brand name like “R.I.P.”, and that seems reasonable.

Harrell was charged with murder once. He feels he was railroaded. He used a deer rifle, not a scary gun.

He says he has no faith in prosecutors or medical examiners. He says the medical examiner’s material said the deceased was shot in the head, and that the prosecutor mentioned it in court, and he says they didn’t mention the other huge wound in the chest. That speaks poorly of the medical examiner and prosecutor, but it’s not clear to me how it hurt Paul Harrell, since shooting someone in the chest looks just as bad as shooting him in the head. I would think he benefited from the omission, since shooting someone twice with a deer rifle looks worse than shooting him once.

I can certainly understand not trusting the medical examiner or the prosecutors, but anyway, he got in a lot of trouble using a non-scary gun with factory ammunition. I think his big problem was that he was on foot and the assailant was in a truck. Also, he shot a man a second time after inflicting a horrendous wound. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince a jury a person on foot can dodge a truck or that a person who has been shot once with a deer rifle by one of the nation’s top marksmen, with excellent shot placement, doesn’t need to be shot again. I think that was probably the center of the case. Just guessing.

Not saying he did anything wrong.

If scary guns were really a major problem, the hundreds or thousands of people who have successfully defended themselves with AR-15’s would generally have been arrested, and that is not what has happened. If the problem really existed, people would be afraid to buy what is supposedly America’s favorite rifle. You can’t hide thousands of AR-15 arrests. Where are they?

I am not giving you legal advice, and if legal advice is what you want, you should pay a lawyer before making decisions about guns and ammunition. I plan to use my own ammunition in whatever legal firearms I choose. Homemade ammunition is very good. No one seems to be able to dig up a scary-ammunition case, and the only scary-weapon case I know of might well have gone to court had the shooter used a Marlin 60.

When I make ammunition, I know the charges are right, and I chamber every round before putting it away, so I know it will work. I don’t have to ask myself how much I trust strangers who do semiskilled labor in factories. I also get to choose the velocity I like instead of picking the least-unsuitable factory choice.

If it’s bad to take a microscopic chance on getting in trouble for using a scary gun, what about the relatively large chance of dying because you used an inferior firearm in order to look less scary? Does that make any sense whatsoever? When you could have 31 rounds of 7.62x39mm plus a spare magazine, and you’re stuck with maybe a duck gun and a few rounds of buckshot, you have made a very poor decision.

I’m writing about stuff that will never matter, because I will never shoot anyone.

To get back to .45 ACP, I suppose I should get some new brass. My old brass will work fine, especially in a round that barely exceeds BB gun velocity and pressure, but who uses old brass in defensive ammo? It’s like putting used tires on the car your kids go to school in. Even if it makes no difference at all, it just sounds weird.

I may also get a belt holster for my .38 Super. It’s a barbecue gun, and you can’t have a barbecue gun without a leather holster.

Some day I may get wildly ambitious and make .357 ammo or even .204 Ruger, if it’s possible to reload that tiny round.

I’m glad I feel good this afternoon. I’ll ride it as long as I can.