KNOCK IT OFF

I have decided to publish an edict. All inhabitants of earth must comply as of yesterday.

Stop hoarding bread flour.

I still can’t get bread flour in my county. I can get all-purpose, which, of course, isn’t good for all purposes. I can get self-rising. I can get White Lily. I can get all types of corn meal. I haven’t seen bread flour in weeks, and yeast is also unavailable.

Why on earth are people hoarding bread flour and yeast? Who are they fooling? They’re not baking.

Here are some facts no one seems to think about.

1. White flour goes bad in a relatively short time, so unless you can freeze it in an airtight container, hoarding it is likely to lead to substandard bread.

2. Bread is readily available. Stores are packed with it.

3. Bread freezes beautifully.

I don’t have a real problem, because when I saw how things were going, I bought a bag of gluten. I add it to all-purpose flour, and that pretty much turns it into bread flour. Still, I am issuing my edict. I am tired of the nonsense.

I don’t know why corn meal is still available. You can get all the Martha White cornbread mix with Hot Rize your trunk can hold. I had this in mind yesterday when I bought bacon. It’s technically possible to make cornbread without bacon grease, but I hope it never comes to that. It would be disgusting and demoralizing.

People should be thinking about biscuits more than bread. Biscuits are better than bread. Wait! Hold your venom! I will make my case.

It only takes 20 minutes to make biscuits. Furthermore, biscuit recipes tend to be smaller than bread recipes, so you are less likely to make way too much and eat all of it at one sitting.

Not that I know anything about that.

Okay, yes, homemade bread is one of the greatest things ever, but the truth is that it’s too good to keep in your house on a daily basis. If you bake your own bread regularly, you’ll eat 1500 bread calories every day.

Of course, I had yeast before the hype…I mean “pandemic”…started. In fact, I had one more jar than I needed.

I keep laughing when I see how God provides for me. Today I had to make up a batch of my no-scrub shower spray. One of the ingredients is 6 ounces of Dawn dishwashing liquid. In the current hysteria, Dawn is seen as a miracle cure, for reasons I have not been able to determine. Maybe Oprah and Dr. Oz drink it. Most of the time, even here, a trip to the store to get Dawn will be fruitless.

I had about 4 ounces left in the kitchen bottle. Was I concerned? No, because I had a couple of bottles for the upstairs bathrooms, plus one huge jug in the workshop for the pressure washer. But I wondered…had God done it again? Was there ANOTHER bottle under the kitchen sink? I had to look.

There it was. Full. Waiting.

Speaking of Oprah, I kind of wonder when we’re going to start hearing celebrity hoarding stories. They have to exist. Celebrities are generally venal and self-absorbed. They think they’re gods with special importance to humanity, because we can’t get by without their naked Instagram photos and self-righteous Tweets. How did we survive before Chrissy Teigen started telling us what to do? She’s a trained model! Remember Leo DiCaprio flying around on private jets to fight global warming? The stories will come. I’m sure of it.

I had a dream about celebrities last night. I dreamed I was in some venue where Whitney Houston was singing. She was made up beautifully, and she was wearing some sort of partially transparent catsuit. She wasn’t on a stage. She was on a table, on all fours, with her head down near the table top. She was completely engrossed in herself and her singing. Her behind was considerably higher than her face. Her knees were pretty far apart.

Fans weren’t separated from her the way they were during her life. They were walking around the table. Some were touching her. Some were putting their hands between her buttocks, practically committing rape. She was oblivious. She was caught up in her fame and in getting what she had always hoped for: attention and admiration. She felt like a success.

She didn’t look happy. Her expression was like that of an extremely thirsty person who was drinking water. She looked desperate.

I think the dream came from God. It wasn’t a sex dream. It wasn’t exciting for me. I think it was about people who debase themselves in order to become famous. They think they’re in control, but in reality, they are like whores for countless uncaring strangers. They think they’re leaders, but they’re really the worst type of followers. They have no freedom.

Many famous people serve the Beast. The Beast speaks through the mob, and in order to stay on top, celebrities have to obey the mob. We’re in a time when the Beast is training the mob to be more responsive. Celebrities are a big part of it.

Haven’t they always been?

Whitney Houston is one of Satan’s masterpieces. She had everything, and she died naked in a bathtub, in a filthy hotel bathroom, full of drugs, surrounded by takers. She was rich, but she was married to a man who beat her. The Bible says God lifts people up above “the waters.” Whitney Houston drowned in 10 inches of water, on dry land.

Is it me, or are degrading celebrity deaths becoming more common? Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Prince…seems like there is an increase, and on top of that, we are suddenly seeing male celebrities die naked from hanging, which suggests erotic asphyxiation. Not a flattering way to be remembered. Solo erotic asphyxiation is one of the most narcissistic, selfish, fleshly things a person can do in this life. When physical pleasure becomes that important to you, you have a problem.

The other day I learned that many gays are now injecting their genitals with meth and a Viagra-like drug called Trimix. Former Tallahassee mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was found naked and unconscious at what appears to have been an injection party. Pleasure is nice, and a certain amount is harmless, but you shouldn’t trade your soul for it, especially in a subculture in which a man of 50 is considered too old to socialize with. Sooner or later, you will find yourself deprived of access to the things you built your life around.

I keep praying in tongues and trying to prophesy every day. I don’t want to be without guidance and correction. Look how crazy the world is getting. Without God, I will be as lost as anyone else.

I’ve been trying to figure T.B. Joshua out. He’s a Nigerian preacher I’ve written about. He prophesies a lot. It seems very clear that he is the real thing, but sometimes he and his ministry are disappointing. He said he saw “a woman winning” before the 2016 election, and when Clinton lost, he or his people took the video down. Then later he said he had actually seen the popular vote. Maybe his explanation was correct, but taking the video down was not.

Earlier this year, he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing the epidemic away. Sure enough, afterward, the numbers in China dried up abruptly. But later he claimed the epidemic would end by March 27, and he didn’t limit it to China. Obviously, the epidemic got worse. Then the video containing the prophesy disappeared. Now they have a video saying he predicted that “the noise” of the epidemic would end, and they’re supporting it with a Forbes article claiming March 28 is the day the acceleration of the contagion rate changed instantly.

I think he’s a real prophet who does not always understand his own prophesies, and I think he is covering up when he gets things wrong. That’s unacceptable.

If it’s true, it confirms what I believe, which is that we aren’t supposed to depend on prophets. We are supposed to BE prophets, as Moses indicated and Joel confirmed.

I am trying to prophesy every day, but I’m not transcribing it and putting it here. I want to see how things come out. If I start to feel secure enough to share things with other people, I will. If I’m not sure, I shouldn’t be saying things that could mislead. My purpose isn’t to tell other people the future, anyway. It’s to connect them with God so he can tell them the future and whatever else they need to hear.

My feeling is that even if you’re prophesying for real, if you’re not experienced, you can end up taking over from God and saying things that aren’t correct. I don’t think the gift is enough. I think a little experience is necessary. We’ll see if I’m right.

Living by prophecy is like climbing a mountain one foothold at a time. Every time you speak about what you should do, you have to establish a new foothold and then jump onto it, abandoning the security of the old one. You need to know the footholds are solid.

That’s all I have. I need to go out and test a few rounds of defensive 10mm. I’m hoping to put an end to my search for a good, solid recipe.

Pandemic Logic at Work

I have to ask: are we having a meat shortage or not?

Last week, they told us meat was going to become a problem, fast. Whether or not it was true, I felt I had to get out there and try to blunt the effects of hoarding by picking up a few pounds of meat. I have learned that when people think something is in short supply, they will generally hog it and make it hard to find, whether or not it’s scarce.

Today I went to the grocery. My local Winn-Dixie had lots of beef on sale. They also had bacon on sale. I picked up two pounds. I’ve been making biscuits, and I will need bacon grease in the future.

I went to Publix, which is another chain. I was hoping to find real bread flour and yeast. I had no luck in the baking aisle. I checked on bacon. They were somewhat low, and there were little signs telling people not to hog it.

At Winn-Dixie, they were selling bacon two for one. At Publix, the signs said you should only take one package.

One store was trying to get rid of pork, and a store two or three miles away was trying to prevent a run. This is the way the panic has been. What’s unobtainable on one block is abundant on the next.

Smithfield is a big pork producer, and they have been named among the likely plant-closers. Smithfield bacon was on sale here today. Okay. That certainly makes sense.

Complicating things, the situation varies from state to state. My cousin lives near Chicago. She says they can’t get meat. She says you have to park across the street to get into Walmart for anything, and her son told her it would take hours to get inside the building. Those nice, generous Chicagoans. You have to admire them.

What’s the story? Is there no shortage? Is there a slight shortage? Is the shortage still a week or so away? Did Trump abort the shortage when he pressured the meat packers and gave them special status?

Why is it you can’t get into a Chicago-area Walmart while the one closest to me is packed with nearly everything and not crowded? They even sell toilet paper. There is a lot of empty space in the paper aisle, but you can get toilet paper. In Chicago, you pretty much have to use leaves.

I’m wondering if this epidemic is completely different for Christians and unbelievers. Are they suffering more than we are? I live in an area where chain stores play Christian music, and things are not bad at all.

I guess reality is always different for the blessed and the cursed. It was certainly different when the flood started and when God burned Sodom and Gomorrah. It was different when he struck Egypt with plagues and killed Pharaoh and his army.

I don’t think the meat shortage will amount to much, because Trump is on the case. Still, if you live in a godless area where people don’t care about each other, a perceived shortage can be worse than an actual shortage.

Maybe when the election comes, they will marvel at us because we haven’t turned on Trump. Maybe because their experience has been worse, they will assume we went through the same thing.

I did something fun today. I bought paper towels. I bought 6 big rolls of Bounty. Real paper towels. Not an off brand. Did I need them? Not really, but I’ll need them in a few weeks, and I figured it was okay to buy them because they were sitting on the shelf in mid-afternoon. I wouldn’t have done it at nine. I just felt that if I bought them, I would stop thinking about paper towels.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them. Hard to say.

I am considering getting masks. I have no idea how I’ll do it, so maybe it won’t happen. I think they will do nearly nothing to protect me, but they might help other people if I get C19 and don’t know it. I wonder if they’re available anywhere.

Amazon has some dubious listings that look fraudulent. And they want over four bucks each for disposable masks. Surely that’s not the normal price. Forget that. I’m not paying $4 every time I get out of the car.

I checked, and the regular price is around $1.20 per mask, if you buy 10. It’s a wonder no one is shooting price gougers.

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

At first, they told us masks were pointless. Then they told us N95 masks could protect us if fitted very carefully and disposed of after use. Now they’re telling us to wear nearly anything.

Forget it. If cheap is all I can get, I have a camo thing I bought for hunting. It will be just as good as a surgical mask, and I can wash it.

I want to get tested to see if I really did have C19 in January. It would be great to find that out. It would mean I am immune and in all likelihood, not contagious. Testing is still reserved for sick people, however, and going into a place where they are testing seems like the only really good way to catch C19 in this county.

I’m going to chronograph some ammunition and forget the whole business. I think June will be a very nice month.

The Evolution of Pistol Ammunition

It’s Sunday. Is that the proper day for confessing? I’m not Catholic. Anyway, I made biscuits again. They called out to me.

After getting my new PC set up, I moved on to a new project: 9mm reloading.

Why would anyone carry a 9mm when he has a 10mm? I started carrying it after my dad died. I had bought him a Glock 26 and a Crimson Trace sight. After he died, it was mine, and I liked carrying it because it had been his. I knew I was giving up stopping power, however. Another reason for carrying it was that I lacked faith in the Lasermax sight on the 10mm.

The other day it occurred to me that I had done nearly nothing to provide for top 9mm ammunition. I had a few magazines full of Cor-Bon hollowpoints, but that was it. I certainly did not have enough to allow practice with defensive rounds. Also, I knew that ammunition had improved a lot since I bought the pistol. If you go 5 years without reevaluating your ammunition, you may miss something important.

When I got my 10mm, 9mm and .40 S&W were not that great. Since then, things have improved to the point where .40 is so good, I almost wish I had my old Glock 22 back. Both calibers have gotten better. Maybe .40 is a better carry choice than 10mm now. Did I really type that? I’m cringing. But it might be true. Maybe the lower recoil and lighter ammunition make up for the lack of power.

A few years back, a site called Lucky Gunner opened. They sell ammunition. The owner actually sent me some ammunition for nothing. I shot it and wrote about it. I applaud this publicity tactic. I think Dan Wesson should send me some free 1911’s to review. Anyway, Lucky Gunner now has some very nice information for people evaluating ammunition. They have interactive charts featuring excellent graphic representations of gel tests. You can sort different rounds by things like expanded diameter and penetration.

I checked that out, and it sure looked like Remington 124-grain Golden Saber hollowpoints were the best choice. They opened up like crazy and penetrated a long way. Problem: it may be weeks or months before anyone can buy these things. I also considered Speer Gold Dots, which performed nearly as well.

Of course, I looked at other sources. The more I got into it, the more types of ammunition I came across. Coincidentally, during this time, I downloaded a book by the late Jim Cirillo, an NYPD officer who killed 11 men in gunfights. He is one of Massad Ayoob’s prominent sources. Ayoob, believe it or not, is not a gunfighter. He was a part-time cop in a sleepy town in New Hampshire. His work is wonderful, but he doesn’t write about shootings from experience. He could probably tell you a lot about writing parking tickets.

I’m not putting him down. He seems like a huge resource, and his house is probably a very bad place for a home invader to visit. I’m just saying he’s not an experienced gunfighter.

Cirillo was part of a stakeout squad that existed for a brief period, after which it was dismantled by liberal bureaucrats who thought too many criminals were being shot. The group was producing more than one outlaw casualty per month, and the liberals in power, being liberals, thought this was a bad thing. By extension, this means they thought it was preferable to continue to allow innocent people to be raped, shot, and killed.

The squad was critized by foggy-headed members of the public who called it an assassination team.

An assassination is a murder, and it is typically committed against an unarmed person. Cirillo’s team hid in businesses that were experiencing repeated robberies. Armed men entered and threatened employees, the police drew on them and told them to surrender, and the armed men did bright things like charging them, shooting at them, shooting employees, and grabbing employees to use as hostages.

Cirillo’s book may change the way you think about self-defense. It emphasized a number of factors most of us don’t think about enough.

One thing the book emphasized was the utter stupidity and depravity of criminals. In story after story, criminals who were confronted by armed cops in superior numbers with better positions and cover decided to shoot instead of surrendering. If you’re not a complete moron, you’re probably not going around robbing drugstores, so perhaps their behavior should not surprise anyone.

One of the dumbest things gun enthusiasts say is that if you rack a pump shotgun (a dubious defense weapon), any criminal who hears it will fill his pants and run away. It doesn’t work that way. Many criminals are very stupid, and many do their work on drugs that make them impervious to fear. Cirillo’s experiences show that criminals often ignore danger, and they also show that some are not discouraged at all by being shot multiple times.

Cirillo and his team were attacked on one occasion, and they fired multiple rounds into the face of their assailant. While they were getting it together after the event, the “body” on the floor asked them to help him up. Every single round had traveled around his head under the skin without penetrating the skull. On another occasion, he shot a man in the head, and the man wasn’t seriously injured. The round literally bounced off.

That brings me to another thing Cirillo thought was important: good ammunition in a powerful caliber.

Cirillo knew of a number of criminals who were still dangerous after taking fire, and understandably, it bothered him. He set out to create a new round that would penetrate well and do maximum damage. He wanted it to go through things like skulls and windshields.

He created a number of different rounds. He patented at least one. He tested his ammunition on car bodies in order to simulate skulls. He was always looking for something that would go through a hard object even when fired from an angle. He didn’t want his bullets bouncing off of criminal’s skulls.

You can understand why he did these things. He knew that if a well-placed shot didn’t do the job, the next shot might be from the criminal’s gun, and it might work very well.

His ammunition didn’t go anywhere, but there are companies that make similar things now, and their products are very interesting.

The round that has caught my attention is the 65-grain copper Lehigh Xtreme Defender. It’s very easy to describe. Imagine a Philips screwdriver bit made from copper. That’s not quite right, but it’s not far off.

The idea is that the flutes of the spinning round will stir up the wet stuff inside the body and create a huge permanent wound channel. Generally, handgun rounds can’t create such a channel because they’re slow. The Xtreme Defender can be pumped up to 1800 fps, which is rifle territory.

The maker says it will go through things like windshields and still do its job. Also, because it’s not a hollowpoint, it may be legal in insane jurisdictions where hollowpoints are banned. Another likely advantage: it’s less likely to fail. Hollowpoints can clog with fabric and fail to expand. That shouldn’t happen with a fluted round.

Does it work? If so, is it worth taking a chance on these instead of tried-and-true conventional ammunition?

It’s amazing that hollowpoints are banned anywhere. “We want you to be able to defend yourself. Just don’t hurt anyone.” Even in liberal states, the authorities know that in a defense situation, you always shoot to kill. They just want you to fail.

The simple truth is that you want the most effective bullet there is. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If they sold bullets that made people explode, they would be perfectly suited to self-defense. The purpose of a bullet is to hurt someone so badly they are instantly rendered unable to harm you. Any bullet that gets you closer to that goal should be legal.

I am not qualified to tell you whether the ammunition works, but Paul Harrell is. He’s a gun nut and former military instructor who does very informative Youtube videos. His strategy is to use what he calls “the meat target.” It’s an old leather jacket, some cloth, a layer of ribs, a watermelon, another layer of ribs, more cloth, more leather, and a bunch of fleece blankets to act as a backstop. He believes the watermelon simulates lung tissue, and you can figure out what the other parts do.

Harrell hates what he calls “hyper” ammunition, which means anything beyond a hollowpoint. He has various objections which you can hear about in his videos.

The Lehigh Xtreme Defense is unquestionably hyper ammunition. Nonetheless, he was very impressed by what it did to his meat target. It pretty much wiped out the watermelon.

His objection is that the ammunition is slightly less accurate than plain old hollowpoints. He fired it from 10 yards, and he got a 5-round group that appeared to be a little over an inch in diameter.

That’s not terrible accuracy. I would guess the group was around 50% bigger than his control group, fired with Remington ammunition. At 20 yards, you would expect around 2.5 inches. Can you shoot that well with match ammunition and a rest? It would be very good shooting. If, like most people, you can’t keep your rounds in a 10-inch circle at 7 yards, you will never notice any accuracy problems with Xtreme Defense.

I think you have to consider recoil if you’re going to consider accuracy. If the recoil from the light bullets is a lot lower than it would be with standard ammo, the advantage in ease of fast target reacquisition might override a small difference in inherent accuracy.

I feel like this is a battle between two philosophies: the Cirillo philosophy and the Harrell philosophy.

Harrell has never been in a gunfight. He shot a man in the head because he appeared to be trying to kill Harrell and his wife, but that’s not a gunfight. You don’t bring a truck to a gunfight.

When you talk to people about defense ammunition, the same people who talk about shotgun racking will invariably say, “If you don’t use standard ammunition, you will be charged with murder, and the fact that you used special ammunition will be used against you.”

Here is my response to that: you can’t be charged with murder…if you’re dead. Dead is what Cirillo and his partners almost were the time they shot an armed criminal in the face without killing him. If their ammunition had actually worked, after the first head shot, they and the civilians around them would have been safe.

If you’re mortally wounded because your prosecutor-pleasing ammunition failed to incapacitate your assailant, will you feel better because you know you minimized the risk of a murder trial?

You can object and say hollowpoints work fine. They really don’t. Not often enough. They do a fabulous job on ballistic gel, but ballistic gel doesn’t wear jeans, a jacket, a shirt, or a belt. When real criminals get shot with hollowpoints moving at handgun speeds, the bullets fail frequently.

There is no EDC-suitable conventional handgun round that “works fine.” Every pistol round is a weak substitute for a rifle or a 12-gauge. They’re all compromises.

Whether an idiot tries to charge you with murder after a justified shooting depends a lot on the circumstances and where you live. It’s not all about the gun or the bullet. Where I live, they would probably give me a medal for shooting a burglar. In order to get in trouble for a shooting which is clearly justified, you pretty much have to live in a liberal-dominated area, you have to shoot a black attacker who doesn’t have a gun, or you have to live in Florida and be the source of so much bigoted and uninformed public outcry that a dishonest governor persuades a disgraceful prosecutor like Angela Corey to perjure herself in order to get your case into court.

Paul Harrell was prosecuted, but appearances were not what caused his problem. He lived in a liberal state. He shot an unarmed man who was driving a truck around his campsite, which provided room for a prosecutor to ask if the shooting was necessary.

He killed his assailant with a deer rifle, so it’s not like he had a Desert Eagle with a red dot scope and leering skulls engraved all over it.

He shot a man who wasn’t using a gun, in a type of situation that probably didn’t sound too solid to jurors. I don’t think he would have been any worse off if he had used a highly modified AR-15 with “Trump Commemorative Edition” stamped on the side.

I’m sure scary-looking ammunition has caused problems for some survivors, but I think the odds of this happening are low. Life isn’t Matlock. Generally, the way things panned out is pretty obvious. The odds that a criminal who is not incapacitated will continue to attack are unacceptably high, as are the odds that a well-placed hollowpoint will fail to incapacitate.

Another thing I keep hearing: you shouldn’t use handloads for self-defense.

I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking about it.

Factory ammunition is generally less consistent than handloads. That’s just a fact. It’s less accurate, and it sometimes fails to go off. On the other hand, if you get sloppy, it’s easy to make handloads that have the wrong amount of powder in them, that won’t chamber, or that will not extract without being pounded out.

Let’s see.

You can weigh the powder you put in every round. That solves the charge problem, and it’s something manufacturers can’t do. As for chambering issues, you can chamber every round and eject it before carrying it for defense. If it chambers once, it will chamber again.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to test factory ammo this way. I’ve never seen anyone recommend it, but it’s obvious.

Do you want to trust yourself or a big machine in the Hornady factory, where there is zero possibility that every round will be inspected? I don’t think trusting yourself is a bad idea. Now that I think about it, Cirillo’s squad loaded ammo.

It seems obvious to me that all that matters is whether you handload carefully. If not, buy your ammo at Cabela’s. If you’re careful, why would you trust yourself less than strangers?

Companies that make ammunition charge a great deal more for defensive ammunition, and as far as I can tell, the prices are not in line with the increased price of the bullets, which are the only components that are different from those in target ammo.

Let me check.

Federal 124-grain HST in 9mm. Perfect. I found it for…seriously…$40.50 a box. If you add up the price of components for reloading with new brass, you get something like 50 cents per round. That’s $25. I’m talking about retail, so what is the wholesale cost? Maybe $15? You would think they could put the bullets together and sell them at a price that would put them on shelves for less than $40.50.

The lowest cost for Federal FMJ is around 24 cents, or $12 per box, retail.

Whether or not the markup is reasonable, you can make practice HST with used casings (free) for around $15 per box, and you can make carry rounds with new brass, if fired brass scares you, for $25.

Lower prices = more practice ammunition = better preparation.

Lehigh bullets are very expensive. There is no lead in them, so it’s all copper, and they are machined, not swaged or whatever. On the up side, unlike many brands of bullet, they are available.

I may try some. For that matter, I might try the 10mm version. Hollow points of all calibers fail.

You have to wonder if we’re headed for a future in which powerful, large-bore rounds are actually worse choices than 9mm or even .380. The Lehigh Defender in .380 appears to be pretty nasty.

I don’t know if what I wrote is correct or helpful, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. I’m sure commenters will have thoughts of their own.

Lock Down Flavor with These Biscuits

I feel like blessing the world with a recipe.

Today I got up and saw how great the weather was, and I thought about all the things God does for me, and I decided to make biscuits.

I think no explanation is needed.

I didn’t have buttermilk. I decided to play around with what I had. I made 7 biscuits around 2″ in diameter. You can scale the recipe up. It’s big enough for two reasonable people.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour
2/3 cup milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. cold butter
1 tbsp. cold bacon grease
1/4 tsp. citric acid – I am guessing here. You might start with 1/8 tsp.

Naturally, I had citric acid in my kitchen. This is me we’re talking about. I didn’t have buttermilk, but citric acid is sour, so I used it.

You mix the dry stuff and then cut in the fat. Make sure it doesn’t melt. Mix in the milk, holding some back so you can sneak up on the right amount without making the dough too wet. Roll and fold the dough 4 times, using flour to keep it from sticking to things. I roll the dough out to about 5/8″ high before cutting the biscuits.

Put the biscuits next to each other on the pan, grease the tops, and bake at 450.

I don’t trust Alton Brown, for very good reasons, but he can’t always be wrong, and says to put biscuits close to each other to make them rise higher. I don’t know if it worked, but it didn’t hurt.

I was concerned that the citric acid might make the biscuits heavy or tough, because citric acid is an emulsifier, but they were fine. Very nice. The hint of acidity made the biscuits much better than usual. I think I shouldn’t bother buying buttermilk any more. Citric acid gives me better results. Maybe I could use buttermilk and a smaller dose of acid.

I ate the biscuits with gravy made with country ham fat and bacon grease.

These were tremendous. I’m glad I only made 7.

UPDATE

I made the biscuits again. I believe you need a good solid 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid per cup of flour.

Donate Your Masks and Go Back to Work

If you’re waiting for some great news, apart from the fact that it’s a beautiful Saturday morning, here you go: South Korean scientists have concluded that you can’t be infected with COVID-19 more than once.

In your FACES, doom-mongers.

This is the best news the world has received since we got up on a Wednesday morning and found out Hillary Clinton had lost.

I still remember that day. I felt like crying with joy.

Here is a link to the story about South Korea: LINK.

Some Koreans got test results suggesting they had been reinfected, but now we know that they were actually having relapses. It’s not good that people can relapse, but a relapse is nothing like as bad as a new infection. Once you’re really done with your first infection, it’s behind you for good. If we could be reinfected, coronavirus would continue pummeling individuals over and over until they died or got vaccinated.

We already knew about COVID-19 relapses. Relapse is one of the disease’s known features.

For months, with no apparent justification, people have been telling us the disease was likely to infect us over and over. None of it made any sense. They don’t say that about most other viruses.

The reinfection story was one of the things that made C19 seem so scary. The model was one in which you were very likely to be infected (false), you were very likely to die (false), and even if you got over it, you would probably be infected repeatedly. It was a scenario of hopelessness. No wonder people bought freezers. They actually swallowed the pitch.

Does this mean we can’t get new strains after the virus mutates? I wonder. But even if we can, there will be vaccines, and we will have a lot of experience, so there should be less panic and senseless economic destruction.

It’s very sad that people are afraid to accept good news and that it makes them angry. Neurosis is not a good thing. Neurotics can’t enjoy life. Your irrational worries make it impossible to enjoy the good things you have, and they make it impossible for you to anticipate enjoying the good things in your future. And they make you a giant pain to be around. I do not like having determined pessimists around me.

Worry is faith in Satan, and faith brings results.

All though this thing, the prophets of doom have been wrong, and those who predicted an easier time have been right. That has to be acknowledged.

If Obama were president, Time and MSNBC and all the others would be giving people hell for panicking. What a different world we would live in. A lot of businesses that have failed because of draconian measures would still be alive.

It’s the only scenario I can think of in which an inept socialist president could be better for the economy than Donald Trump.

Think how this will affect people who have recovered. They will be like superheroes now. They can go back to work. They can go anywhere without masks. I wonder if a positive test will be an asset to a person looking for work this summer.

Things are still going well in my county, although I think we will see cases increase for a while. Unfortunately, C19 has found its way into at least three ALF’s. The news says there are two ALF’s that each have an employee who tested positive, and another ALF has multiple infected staffers and residents. We are now up to 175 known cases.

I hate to say I was right again, but there is another story: over 25% of purported C19-related deaths in the USA occur in what a story calls “nursing homes.” This would include ALF’s. I wrote about this phenomenon after seeing that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts were in homes.

This is bad news for people who are confined in homes, but it should encourage the majority of Americans. Not many of us are cooped up in places where careless workers are our only protection from infection, and most of us will have mild or no symptoms if infected.

The high ALF infection rate appears to be proof that sequestering in buildings with multiple residents makes you much more likely to be infected, and it also suggests that ALF workers in many places do a very poor job of protecting people.

Now that I think about it, I was right about yet something else. People are developing an interest in rural properties. You can read about it online. I predicted this a while ago. C19 is, by and large, a city disease. Also, it’s hard to grow food in an apartment. People are realizing these things.

My guess: leftists will cling to cities, and conservatives will be more likely to move. Nothing new there.

I think a redistribution of the population will be good for the church. Cities are ruled by Satan’s stooges. They are not spiritually healthy places to live.

Christians will be more likely to leave cities, and that means they will get away from megachurch pimps and fabulists. Churches are killing us. It would be great to see toxic people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer go out of business completely, but that probably won’t happen, so a significant exodus from cities may be the best thing we can hope for.

I wonder how a conservative exodus would affect elections. I don’t think it would matter in cities, because they are already electing leftists. Maybe it would strengthen certain states and rural counties, though.

Still no major-celebrity deaths. The Baldor bench grinder Ebay poverty index is holding steady in the low 40’s.

Time to move on with my day. I just bought a hunting license online. My new peach tree was loaded with peaches, and now the squirrels here are loaded with peach flesh. Something must be done. The law says I can kill nuisance squirrels out of season, but it’s not all that clear on whether I need a hunting license, so I am not taking a chance. Considering the peaches, the fuel gauge they ate, and all the other issues they cause, I feel that my long truce with the rodents must now end.

Don’t Ruin This for me, Gates

Today I’m doing something I said I would never do again. I’m building a new PC.

I started playing with video, and I downloaded Davinci Resolve, a very nice free editing program. Problem: my main PC was my dad’s old business computer. I would guess it’s a 2015 model, although it might be 2013. He spent something like $500 on tower with no monitor or keyboard or mouse. It was not the kind of machine NASA uses.

When you edit a video in Resolve, you make all your changes, save the project, and then tell the program to compile the video. This was like telling a senior citizen with a bad leg to move my books to the top of a 5-story building, one at a time. It took a very long time. Also, I couldn’t edit very well because I couldn’t replay videos while I was working on them. They stopped and started, and I couldn’t really see what I was going to get.

There is a guy on the web who puts out videos to help people put together video-editing computers without going broke, and I took a look at his latest offering. I decided to go for it. Of course, because of the C19 epidemic, I could not get the motherboard he recommended. Apparently, people hoarded motherboards for a while. For roughly the same price, I found a model which was better in every way. After all, 4 months had passed since he made the video, so it only made sense that better stuff had come out.

By the way, I learned that Australians are typing “C-19” instead of “coronavirus” and “COVID-19,” so I’m very happy today. Not long ago, I arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to call coronavirus “C19” because it was easier to type. Now I feel vindicated.

They need to get rid of that hyphen.

I quit building computers because it was a pain in the butt. Years ago, it was fairly easy, and then, for various reasons, it got difficult. Components didn’t seem to want to work together. I also had problems getting Windows to run. It seemed to me that the whole business had changed to the point where building your own computer was a bad idea.

I’m surprised at how easy today’s build was. I guess it took two hours, and it wouldn’t have taken that long if I had had real instructions instead of tiny cartoons and Youtube QR codes.

Right now, I’m downloading stuff from Microsoft to make a Windows 10 installation disk. I guess I’ve been downloading for over 90 minutes. Rural Internet speeds are really something. I’m at 97%. I’m excited. I may actually be able to get back to work in 15 minutes.

I would guess that the PC I’m building will be quick by 2018 standards. That will be good enough. I bought a gaming motherboard. My impression was that gaming and video are nearly the same thing. Gamers need good stuff.

The processor came with a giant heat sink and fan. The whole mess must weigh a pound and a half. When I held my breath and turned the PC on, I noticed that there was a bizarre light show included in the CPU fan assembly.

Gamers. Do you really think you’re going to impress girls with your CPU’s LED’s?

Maybe there’s a way to shut the lights off. I’ll find out.

Microsoft is “validating” my download. I’m on pins and needles.

The cabinet I bought has a glass side, because gamers. That means the flashy lights will light up the gun room, where I plan to put the computer. Who thought this would be a good idea? What if you stream movies on your PC? Do you really want huge LED’s lighting up your wall while you watch Fast and Furious XVIII?

I think the last time I had a relatively fast PC was in 2007, when I built a couple for my dad and myself. I would guess that the PC I just built is the fastest one I’ve ever built, for its time. The possible exception is a two-CPU PC I built in about 1995 for physics and calculus. There is an asterisk, though. I never got around to installing the second CPU, so while the potential was there, the execution was not.

I was startled when I opened the package containing the SSD I ordered. Last time I bought one, they were about the size of a pack of cards. The one I installed today is the size of a stick of gum, and it screws directly to the motherboard. No cable. It’s magnificent. It’s blistering-fast compared to a disk, and if I ever need to travel and I want to protect my data, I can pull it in two minutes and hide it where no one could ever hope to find it.

I got a 500-gig drive. I plan to get 4 or more terabytes for storage, but my plan is to use an external USB drive instead of solid state memory. Storage doesn’t have to be as fast as programs. I may change my mind, though. Maybe there are older SSD’s which are cost-effective and still much faster than disks. I think replaying videos from external disk drives may be slower than replaying them from SSD’s.

Maybe I should forget external drives. Maybe SATA is faster than USB, and that would be good enough. I will check.

I’m looking around. It appears that there are still no huge cheap SSD’s. Oh, well. I paid $89 for a 4TB external last year, and one just like it should be fine for hobby use.

I also plan to use the PC for CAD, which was not much fun on the old PC. I could almost hear it wincing.

I may go totally nuts and spring for a small 4K TV to use as a monitor. My existing monitor is an “old” 1080p TV. Who ever thought we would think 1080p TV’s weren’t sharp enough to use as monitors?

My download is validating. Thank you for helping me kill time.

The Truth is Inconvenient, so Don’t be Inconvenienced

Yesterday I wrote about the extremely dangerous build-up of hatred on the left, which will eventually lead to mass violence far beyond what we’ve already seen from Antifa and BLM. A reader commented, saying something about leftists hoping conservatives would die from COVID-19. I Googled around, and I found a reference to an article by a “conservative” MSNBC contributor. Can such a person exist? She says COVID-19 will kill more Republicans than Democrats because Donald Trump has fed us lies downplaying the epidemic.

I am not quite sure this lady is conservative. I looked her up, and all I’ve found so far is that she’s strongly pro-Israel and anti-jihad. She has a history of criticizing Trump and his followers, and she has used the words “dog whistle” and “far right” in the same sentence, which is not a great sign. She is pro-abortion, too. She was very upset about Kavanaugh’s nomination because she knew he might turn the Supreme Court against the violent murder of helpless babies God gave us to protect.

It’s revealing that the left tags a person as conservative because she supports Israel. I would call that an admission against interest. The traditional, and facially absurd, leftist line is that Republicans hate Jews. We’re the only people keeping Israel alive, and leftists want to give Israel to the Arabs!

Ask some Israelis how much they like Obama. Then ask about Trump.

Regarding her prediction, all I can say is, “Can she read a map?”

Where is C19 hitting hardest? The Northeast. If you remove the Northeast from consideration, generally, America’s C19 numbers don’t look too bad. The other day I noticed that about 1/3 of the known infections were in New York State. That’s a lot. It’s also hitting Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Detroit, Boston, DC, and a slew of other leftist strongholds.

Where is the tide of conservative deaths?

Who lives in the Northeast? Is it really a conservative stronghold? When did that happen? Is Chicago packed with red hats? Is Detroit?

She says conservatives are going to gatherings and ignoring the guidelines. What gatherings? Even Tennessee has tightened the leash.

Her prediction is interesting because it’s so insane. It reminds me of the time a liberal friend told me she voted for Democrats because Republicans took prayer out of schools.

Yes, she really said that.

Conservatives like to say leftists are afflicted with cognitive dissonance, which means they are comfortable believing mutually contradictory things. It’s worse than that. They’re comfortable believing things that can’t possibly be true, by any stretch of the imagination.

A long time ago, God showed me that when people don’t make sense, there is a supernatural cause. This is what we’re seeing on the left. They don’t just disagree about things that are legitimately controversial. They believe things no rational person could think were true.

If you can look at the C19 case distribution in the US and conclude that Republicans are getting the worst of it, you are not just wrong. You are supernaturally deluded. There is no limit to what you can believe. You are immune to logic.

I remember Robert Bork’s book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. It was written many years ago. He wrote about the delusions of the left. He told of leftists who justified their untenable beliefs by saying logic itself was Eurocentric and paternalistic. Look it up. I’m not making it up. They seriously advocated abandoning reason.

When you decide reason is evil, what hope is there for you? You’ve become exactly the kind of person hell is full of. You can’t be persuaded of the truth.

Christianity is extremely logical. It’s sad that people don’t realize this. Many uninformed individuals think Christianity is irrational because it places a very high value on love and compassion, and because it requires people to walk by faith in spite of what their logical minds might conclude given natural evidence. Many people think Christianity is highly emotional, and that it’s about letting your unbridled heart tell you what to do. None of this is correct. Christianity is strongly against emotionalism, and God requires us to rule ourselves with logic.

The Bible calls faith “evidence,” and it calls the things we tell others about our experiences “testimony.”

An unbeliever might say a Christian can’t be logical because it’s illogical to expect God to do something for you when natural circumstances point to a different outcome. For example, Moses led his people to the edge of the Red Sea instead of taking a convenient land route, and he pinned his people between the Egyptians and the water.

Think about it. How was Moses irrational? He knew God was all-powerful and that he told the truth. He had seen the 10 plagues of Egypt. Only an idiot would have disbelieved God. Moses was extremely logical, and the people who told him to give up were unreasoning hysterics who were proven wrong by history.

Faith isn’t illogical. Unbelief is.

Christians are supposed to be completely logical. There are times when we have to accept God’s guidance and do things for which we can’t see the justification, but that just means we have a logical belief that God knows better than we do.

Human beings are supposed to act on the truth. The only way to know the difference between the truth and fantasy is to listen to the Holy Spirit. Leftists and conservative Christians who reject the baptism with the Holy Spirit, tongues, prophesy, the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, discernment of spirits, and the interpretation of tongues are not connected to the only reliable guide there is.

It’s no wonder this lady can’t see that C19 is hitting liberals very disproportionately. She can be made to believe anything.

The facts are obvious. A bold person might even say C19 is primarily a disease of leftists.

Of course, all of the numbers are based on terrible science, so we can’t even be sure the official figures mean anything, but they’re what most people rely on, and they favor conservatives heavily.

It’s very important to realize that the delusion, hatred, and cruelty of the enemies of Christ is without limit. People who stay in left-leaning areas, relying on the restraint of their neighbors, are going to be like Jews who seriously expected the German government to come around and look after them.

The fact that leftists can approve of tearing a baby’s arms and legs off or cutting his spine with scissors ought to tell you that they don’t have all their oars in the water. No reasonable person could support these things.

Let’s not even discuss thinking castrated men are women.

The writing is on the wall, but there are tons of Christians who have no plans of moving. They think God sent them to save places like Baltimore and Dearborn. It’s not going to happen. How many decades of proof do you need?

I’m still waiting for leftists to decide Christians caused the epidemic. They’re already blaming Trump, who has become our proxy in their eyes.

I wonder how he caused the epidemic in Italy.

I just Googled. A liberal extremist blamed Christians in the New York Times on March 27. She said Trump caused the epidemic, and she said “evangelical” (a toxic nonsense term) Christians were to blame, because they voted for him. Never mind the swing voters who actually put him in office.

Nero falsely blamed Christians for burning Rome, and he paved the way for wholesale torture and murder. The left is trying to do the same thing. I wonder if they’ve blamed Jews yet.

I hate the term “evangelicals,” because it includes millions of lukewarm Christians who reject the Holy Spirit. I’m not even thrilled with the term “charismatic,” which refers to Spirit-baptized Christians, because most charismatics don’t speak in tongues daily or listen to the Holy Spirit. There are plenty of charismatics who love abortion, astrology, socialism, yoga, fornication, and drugs. It’s not enough to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. You have to spend time with him every day, and you have to obey him.

There are “evangelicals” who hate Jews and blame them for the decline of America. Nutjobs. They’re a small minority, but the fact that they exist shows that “evangelical” is a term that means nearly nothing.

Evangelicals are doing Satan a world of good. By behaving badly and by living lives that are clearly cursed, they give God-haters ammunition. “Bob is an evangelical, but he’s dying of cancer, he’s a porn addict, and he’s obnoxious and poor.” God-haters use them to “prove” Christianity is a powerless superstition that ruins lives.

Evangelicals have convinced many that you can be a good Christian and murder your own babies one after the other.

The only Christians that have any authority are “Spirit-led.” The Bible confirms this It says the Spirit-led are the sons of God. It says Jesus will drive off many people who merely call him “Lord.”

Before I wrap up, I’ll point out that the major-celebrity coronavirus death toll is still zero in the USA. My personal poverty index, which looks at the number of used Baldor bench grinders selling on Ebay, is stuck at 41. Still waiting for the mass graves and bulldozers. I don’t think they’re coming.

By the way, if you’ve been reading about “mass graves” in New York City, I have disappointing news for you. They have been there for centuries. The city buries the poor in mass graves. Nothing new.

Get in touch with the Holy Spirit, and you will have help when the waters rise. That’s the bottom line.

Plus Christian News

I put up a prayer request for my friend Travis, and people responded. Thanks for the support.

Ordinarily, when a person goes into the hospital, his family will keep people informed so they can provide support. This situation is different. The communication is very bad. The only reason I found out about Travis’s setback was that a friend who is bending over backward to help him got a nurse to talk to her today. I’m sure that was a HIPAA violation, but it was helpful.

I texted Travis’s brother, and he sent me a response.

1. Travis went into cardiac arrest last night.

2. He has a lung infection which was affecting the blood supply to his brain.

3. He had an operation to help with the oxygen problem, and it was successful.

4. He is back in stable condition, down from critical.

5. They are testing him for COVID-19, and the tests have been negative.

It appears that the nurse who said he was in critical condition was providing outdated information, or maybe his condition was upgraded after she provided it.

In other news, someone did multiple drive-by shootings at the homes of some of the stars of Duck Dynasty, which has been out of production for three years. A man named Daniel King shot a bunch of .380 rounds from a pickup truck. He claims he was checking the gun’s safety to see if it was on. Not very credible, given the multiple rounds and the fact that shots were fired at two properties. And this is not how you check to see if a safety is engaged.

King had a minor in the truck with him, and he was drinking vodka. It appears that he did not plan his attack or escape meticulously.

He is very lucky to be breathing, as is his unwilling companion. He was using a weak pistol, and he attacked people who have AR-15’s. Phil Robertson says he considered grabbing an AR and confronting the threat, and Jase says that within 10 seconds of the attack, he had a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

A bullet entered a window in one house. Eight people were in the houses. The attack was not a trivial or harmless thing.

I find this interesting because I think it was a deliberate act directed at the Robertsons because of their image. You don’t just wander around drunk and end up shooting a pistol accidentally, many times, in a gated community, at homes that happen to belong to famous conservative Christians who are members of the same family.

The Robertsons now have restraining orders in place, in case this man is released. His got bail, and it was surprisingly low. Maybe he’ll get out.

I keep telling people leftists and other enemies of Christianity are full of rage and perfectly willing to commit atrocities against us. I say lack of will is not what restrains them. They’re just afraid of being arrested and having their lives disrupted. They are not kidding when they talk about killing us, raping the women, molesting the kids, and mistreating us in other ways. It’s not just talk.

Americans have a hard time making their guts absorb the fact that their neighbors are capable of murdering them, taking what they have, and committing other vile acts that have no place in a civilized nation. When you’re not a vicious person, and you’re used to living in an orderly country, your instincts tell you your compatriots will never jump your fence and drag you out into your yard. But many, many of them would do it in a split second if they expected to get away with it.

Don’t forget what Lot’s neighbors tried to do to him and the angels. Don’t forget that Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth tried to throw him off a cliff, after a few minutes of provocation. The apostles were beaten by civilized religious Jews repeatedly, and they got similar treatment from civilized Romans and Greeks.

A lot of people think the ancient world was savage and full of anarchy, but that’s a misperception. The Greeks and Romans had very orderly nations for the most part. Unsanctioned physical attacks were just as out of the ordinary there as they would be here. The Romans who beat Paul were terrified when they learned he was a citizen.

I suspect that God is going to use Travis’s misfortune to cut his ties to Miami and put him in a safer place. He might end up here for a while. As America becomes more polarized, God’s people are leaving cities. Cities will not be transformed. They will get worse. Perhaps there are exceptions, but this is the general rule. Christians who think God put them in cities to save them are imagining things.

I don’t know what kind of person Daniel King is or where he lives. Maybe he lives in the country. Maybe he loves Jesus, the Robertsons, and Donald Trump. But generally, cities hold much higher concentrations of people who are dangerous to God’s children.

The homes that were affected by the drive-by are in a suburb. The Robertson rural image is a TV myth. Not all of them live in the woods.

Trump won’t be president forever, and things won’t go our way politically. When Trump leaves office, leftists will be like rabid monkeys that just broke out of containment. They will blame us for Trump and everything else they can think of.

We’re actually seeing persecution ramp up, and very few people even notice.

This is an update on my friend Travis who was shot accidentally on April 9. His recovery has been going well, but right now he is having a setback. I don’t have details because communication is very bad. Prayers would be appreciated.

I Like Stuff That Works

I think I may finally be able to carry a 10mm Glock with some confidence. Today I installed a Crimson Trace Lasergrip on my Glock 29, which is a compact pistol.

Long ago, when people with Confederate flags roamed the earth openly and Bruce Jenner was a man, I bought a Glock 29 and put a Lasermax laser in it. I had a benighted notion that it actually mattered if the laser beam was aligned perfectly with the gun’s barrel, and I also thought the Crimson Trace couldn’t be adjusted. In reality, when you’re forced to use a pistol with a laser, you’re in a situation in which a little misalignment means absolutely nothing, and the sight has two screws that let you move the beam to your point of impact.

A Lasermax is a guide rod with a laser in it, so it’s pretty well aligned with the barrel no matter what.

The Lasermax eats batteries like crazy. Install them today, and they’ll be dead a year from now. Also, in order to use a Lasermax, you have to push your Glock’s slide lock to the left before you shoot. Lasermax includes special slide locks with their lasers. Finally, my Lasermax has a cap that holds the batteries in, and after a time, these caps fall apart. It took something like 10 years in my case, but I didn’t like it.

One of the things they always tell you about emergency equipment is that it has to be simple. If you have to remember to do three things before you can fire a round, you’re likely to forget two of them, and then you get shot. This is why I carry my gun with a round in the chamber. The world is full of stories of people who got shot because they hadn’t chambered rounds.

I was always concerned that a) my batteries might be dead when I needed the laser, and b) I would fail to turn it on in a timely manner. A Crimson Trace doesn’t pose these problems. The batteries last for years, and as soon as you pick the gun up, the laser is on.

There are a lot of people who hate lasers, and that mystifies me, because they really, really work. You can shoot a 12-gauge shotgun accurately from the hip with a laser. Ask me how I know. The projectiles really do go where you point the laser.

I’ve seen people say you shouldn’t depend on a laser. As if you’re suddenly going to forget how to shoot if your laser doesn’t work. “Which end do the bullets come out of again?” Every gun owner should become a good shot, but once you’ve done that, a laser can’t do anything but help. If it fails to turn on, you’re no worse off than you were before you bought it.

I know how to shoot, so it’s too late for me to become a person who “depends on a laser.”

I don’t know, but I suspect that a laser would help with putting multiple shots in a small area quickly. Reacquiring a sight picture takes time, but any idiot can point a laser in a hurry.

You can tell I haven’t practiced multiple-shot drills with lasers. Sorry. It sounds like a great idea.

I am enduring a reloading hiatus. I have lost confidence in my powder scale. It’s a Lyman something or other. Maybe it’s deteriorating from age. It seems to drift a lot. Scales have gotten accurate and cheap since I bought it, so I ordered a new scale for about twenty bucks. Amazon is taking forever to ship it, and I don’t want to eat up my brass making cartridges that may have too little powder in them.

I’m thinking of making some 9mm defensive ammo. Somewhat irresponsibly, after my dad died, I started carrying the Glock 26 I bought him, without thinking about, or updating, the ammunition. I have a lot of target ammo, and I have a lot of brass and lead bullets, but I have precious little defensive ammunition.

I could buy defensive ammo, but it’s always overpriced, and that discourages practice. Nobody wants to put 100 rounds of 80-cent pistol ammo into a target. Defensive ammo is sold in tiny boxes, like jewelry, and the natural tendency is to treat it like a Faberge egg collection.

I also put Truglo sights on my new 10mm. It was quite a pain. In the past, I had always ordered Glocks with night sights installed, but I didn’t see anything like that available this time around. I learned that you have to have a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove the front sight. My choice was a Wiha precision nut driver, not the ones gun-related companies make. Wiha makes great tools. I don’t trust a gun company’s Chinese offering, especially when it’s more expensive.

To remove the rear sight, I needed a sight pusher. The rear sight was hard plastic, and it was pressed sideways into a dovetail. There was no way a punch was taking it out. I bought a fancy sight pusher from NC Star.

I thought the sight pusher was a good tool, because I saw gunsmiths using them on Youtube. In reality, it was very crude. It had a bunch of screws in it to provide pressure, they went through aluminum, and none were lubricated. There were a couple of screws that were supposed to rotate in tight steel pockets, and they weren’t greased, either. They kept locking up. I worked on the pusher for quite some time, opening things up, adding grease, and so on.

It works. No doubt about that. But you need to spend the first half hour working on the tool itself.

I am tempted to scrap the aluminum frame and make a better one from steel on the mill.

Now the sights are installed. The old rear sight was in so tight, the sight pusher deformed it. If I ever went crazy and wanted it back, I would have to buy a new one.

I may not be a gunsmith, but a lot of the time, I can buy tools and use them myself for an amount comparable to what a gunsmith would charge. That seems like the smart choice. When a job is done, I have a tool and some new skill, as contrasted with nothing.

It’s nice to have both carry guns functioning correctly. Now if I can just get the spot of dried pipe dope off the 9mm.

A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

I feel like I got sucked in by the mainstream media. It wouldn’t be the first time.

This week, I read that we were going to have meat shortages. Tyson Foods, a huge meat company, put out an irresponsible self-congratulatory ad about plant closings and future supply problems. If you read the ad, you’ll see that it’s a lot like the disturbing “We’re here for you” emails we’ve been receiving since March. You know what I mean. “During this difficult time, we want to know that In-N-Out Burger is committed to customer and employee safety, and we promise that we will be here to help you for the duration.”

I’m not seriously suggesting In-N-Out Burger sent an email like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I got annoying messages from McDonald’s and other businesses that couldn’t have done anything to help me in this or any other conceivable universe or fanciful paradigm.

It would have been more honest to sent messages like, “Here at Cinnabon, we understand that a national crisis and the accompanying hysteria provide us with a special opportunity to grandstand and raise our profile without actually doing anything else anyone can discern.”

I used to save my COVID-19-virtue-signal emails so I could marvel at them in the future, but I started deleting them. There are just too many. They never stop coming. Some companies refuse to stop sending new ones.

By the way, are you tired of the “health workers are heroes” nonsense that’s going around? Health workers have pleasant, high-paying, recession-proof, epidemic-proof jobs in an industry that will only get stronger as America ages. They get protective gear and chemicals the rest of us can’t get. They get free medical care. Most of them don’t go anywhere near C19 patients.

Yesterday, the official case count in my county was 151, which is astonishingly low, and there are still signs here and there that say, “HEROES WORK HERE.” I’m not feeling it. Even if it were true, why would anyone praise himself like that? Who works in the places who put the signs up? Healthcare workers. It sure looks like they’re the ones installing the signs.

You’re a hero for going to work and getting a paycheck and free medical care while your neighbors max out their credit cards and straight-arm their landlords? Really?

I’m sure there are places in the Northeast where the risk of exposure for health workers is high, but they’re not dropping like flies, regardless of what anyone says without checking.

This afternoon, I’m going to go out by the highway and put up a sign that says, “A HERO LIVES HERE.” I braved Home Depot in order to buy graphite for my reloading press.

Don’t make a big deal out of it. I deserve praise, but I’m too humble to put up with it. I’m wonderful on many, many levels, but if you try to wrap your head around it, you will only realize how limited you are compared to me.

Today I did a very brief news check–something I am determined to stop doing–and I learned that our pork supply has been dented to the tune of 25%, and the figure for beef is 10%.

Do I misunderstand how the system works? Will a 25% reduction in pork really drive us to forced veganism?

I also learned that the Donald has given meat processors special status and instructed them to try to stay open. CNN and other outlets are taking the ball and running with it, trying to convince Americans that trying to keep food on our tables is somehow proof that Trump is incompetent.

Here’s a fun exercise. Sit back, close your eyes, and try to imagine something Donald Trump could do which would not be criticized by our far-left media.

Good luck.

I inadvertently came across a video the other day, showing Trump boarding Air Force One with a scrap of paper stuck to his shoe. I’m not kidding. A major news outlet took the time to film this, edit the story, and put it in front of the public.

Imagine if they had treated John Kennedy this way. His dad was a Hitler-supporting anti-Semite with strong ties to organized crime. Kennedy himself cheated on his wife pretty much continuously. He escalated the war in Vietnam with no clear plan. He accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book someone else wrote. His alcoholic brother drove an attractive young female employee into a pond and ran away while she suffocated. His time in office would have been a continuous party for the press, had anything like Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicted him.

So now I have enough meat for a month, and if I freeze it, I may never actually need it. We’ll see how it plays out.

One nice thing about steak is that you can keep it for several weeks without freezing it, and it just gets better.

Tyson, along with some other companies, said it was considering closing 80% of its operations. Interesting fact no one is talking about: Tyson helped create Bill and Hillary Clinton. The story in Arkansas is that Clinton got into the governor’s mansion with Tyson’s help, and then he didn’t play ball. Tyson chose not to support him in his reelection bid, and he was voted out. Then he decided to kiss the ring, there was a reconciliation, and back to Little Rock he went.

I got this information from my dad, who represented Holly Farms before and during the Tyson takeover. He got it from his business contacts.

The Tyson connection was so strong, Ross Perot used to call Clinton “chicken man.”

Tyson is the company that gave Hillary Clinton the famous $100,000 bribey windfall back in the 1990’s. Remember? Someone at Tyson made commodity trades for her, the margin requirements were relaxed for her, and somehow she made a $99,000 profit on a $1000 investment.

Donald Trump made billions by virtue of his own skill. Like many politicians, the Clintons had to have a little help. That help is why you can go into the House of Representatives, to pick an example, with student loans and a negative net worth and come out 10 years later with several million dollars.

Do the Clintons have sufficient juice to get Tyson and other meat companies to try to destabilize Trump? You have to wonder.

Meat plants hire large numbers of illegals, and getting rid of Trump is probably a priority for many meat companies.

CNN is saying Donald Trump is inept, because meat workers won’t go back to factories. They don’t actually have proof of this, but that didn’t get in the way of the story. It’s not clear how doing nothing would have been a better idea.

Hmm. A whole lot of illegals sneaked across the border and endured considerable hardship to get their precious American meat-packing jobs. Now they’re going to refuse to work, encouraging other illegals to flood in and replace them? Not so sure about that.

Meat-plant jobs are not skilled labor. The only reason they exist is that we still can’t program robots to do everything. I guess some day we’ll pull that off. If we ever reach the point where machines can look after themselves, the machines may wonder why they still keep feeding us.

I feel like I fell for a carnival scam, buying all that meat. At least I didn’t hoard toilet paper. That’s like crowning yourself with a dunce cap.

Fauci is saying a COVID-19 “second wave” is “inevitable.”

What does that mean?

What does “second wave” mean? Does it mean a major epidemic or a much smaller epidemic? And how does he know it’s inevitable?

Here’s my guess. A second wave is inevitable because coronavirus likes cold weather (hat tip: Trump), and saying so is not very brave, because a second wave could be very mild. If we get a new hump in the curve this fall, and it’s 5% as bad as the current hump, it will be a legitimate second wave, but the harm will be negligible.

Fauci, a fungible bureaucrat who has to think about his future every day, will be able to say, “See? I told you so.” But the impact of the disease will be even lighter than it was this time around.

I’m going to make a common sense prediction and see if it holds up. We will see another hump when the weather cools down, but it will be nothing compared to the present hump, and it won’t be a big deal. We will have a toilet paper shortage anyway, because it only takes a few ignorant, selfish people to clean out stores.

Barring mutations, COVID-19 will not be a major factor in our futures. That’s another guess. Journalists like to shriek that there is no proof we will have immunity, but that’s what comes of studying tooth bleaching, hair extensions, and ruthless self-promotion instead of math and biology. Scientists, who know even more than journalists, generally expect us to develop immunity. This is why Sweden didn’t lock people down. They wanted the infection to spread so immunity would develop.

Sweden knew a Ferris Bueller scenario was unsustainable.

When COVID-19 returns, there will probably be a huge number of people who can’t be infected, along with people who can be infected but can’t have severe symptoms.

Maybe it sounds like my confidence in my judgment is inflated, considering my near-total lack of qualifications, but how many things have I been wrong about? How many things have the experts been wrong about?

Still no major celebrity deaths today. Will we ever see one? My personal Ebay bench grinder poverty index is holding steady at 41 items. The Johns Hopkins new-case curve is trending downward strongly, in spite of increased testing. Trump says the USA’s ostensibly high infection numbers are due to a superior testing regime, as I said I suspected, and the BBC, which is on the far left, admits it’s true. It appears I was right when I said the decline in the acceleration of the rate of infection was probably greater than the graph showed.

I often refer to changes in the acceleration of transmission, because an epidemic can break down and turn around while there is still a steady increase in the daily number of infections. Acceleration of transmission is not the same thing as infection rate. It looks like we’ve reached the point where we have an infection rate which is decreasing.

You can be in the process of decelerating while your speed is a hundred miles per hour. You can have an acceleration of 300,000 miles per second squared while traveling at a speed of 5 mph. Speed and acceleration are different.

It’s good when acceleration slows down, and it’s better when we have deceleration, which appears to be what’s happening now.

I need to resign myself to eating a lot of steak. Yesterday I ruined my appetite with Reese’s Pieces and M&M’s. Today I will be strong. I need the refrigerator space.

Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

The meat frenzy is about to kick into high gear! Get ready for a couple of months of tofu and tabouli. Buy yourself some Beano or get used to driving with the car windows open.

What’s going on? Well, workers at certain meat plants are testing positive for COVID-19 at high rates, and our genius overlords are shutting the plants down.

Here’s the question an intelligent person must ask: what percentage of the C19-positive workers have symptoms? Also, how many have symptoms that aren’t extremely mild? Here’s a really good question: if a big percentage test positive and very few are significantly ill, what does it mean for the rest of us?

I’ll tell you what it would mean: the lockdowns were a bad idea.

C19 has been in the US since December, at the latest. There is no way to deny it. You can’t have an undetected yet vigorous epidemic in China, plus abundant air traffic between China and other countries, without spreading the infection abroad. It’s just not possible.

It’s starting to look like the infection rate in the US is very high, and that the only reason the official numbers are low is that we are very, very bad at diagnosing the disease. If this is true, then lots of good conclusions follow.

One conclusion is that the disease just isn’t that bad. If it were, we would have sick and dying people everywhere, and we don’t.

Another conclusion is that the epidemic is wrapping up due to herd immunity. If, say, 20% of Americans have already been infected, the body of vulnerable people has decreased greatly, and they are also separated from infectious people by a growing buffer of immune individuals. If this is true, the recent collapse of the acceleration of the infection rate is largely due to saturation and herd immunity.

“BUT THE LOCKDOWNS FLATTENED THE CURVE!” Did they?

The shortest likely incubation period for C19 is 3 days, and the average is 5 days. If lockdowns were saving us, the curve would have started flattening 3 days after they went into effect. Did it? Doesn’t look like it. The downturn didn’t even begin until the second week of April. Go look. The influence of lockdowns isn’t even visible on the graph at the time when it should have appeared.

As always, I’m relying on a graph which is based on squishy numbers, but then so are the authorities.

There is no doubt that lockdowns save some people, but then they would also save us from the flu, which kills people in numbers comparable to C19. We don’t have flu lockdowns. We don’t even force people to get vaccinated. We say, “Disease and death are inevitable, and freedom and prosperity are essential, so we accept allow free adults to make their own choices, and we accept some casualties.” That’s what we’re thinking, even if we don’t articulate it.

A cousin of mine is in the food industry, and he says the meat thing will hit hard in two weeks. This morning, after texting him, I felt like I should buy protein. I prayed about it. I was thinking maybe I would get three dozen eggs and pickle them. I thought I might buy 5 more rib eyes and maybe 8 pounds of chicken. I considered getting canned salmon. I like it, and it’s cheap. And almost no one else likes it, so it’s not a big hoarder priority.

I felt like God told me I could get a few cans of salmon and 4 pounds of chicken breast, but that was all. I saw some gorgeous bone-in rib eyes on sale for $5.49 per pound, and the temptation was serious, but I let them go.

I have enough protein to maintain a pretty decent level of consumption for something like 6 weeks. That will have to do. I’m not turning on the spare fridges.

The press is telling us millions of chickens will be slaughtered because farmers can’t sell them to plants. That sounds like a big deal, but we slaughter at least 10 billion chickens per year in the US. Also, chickens grow fast. Guess how old chickens are when we kill them? A year? Six months? Try 7 weeks. If we killed half the chickens in the US, we could be back on track in July.

What about cattle? I can’t speak for everyone, but the cattle on my land aren’t expensive to keep in hot weather. The grass grows, and they don’t require hay or silage. I would be surprised to learn that farmers were slaughtering herds this far into spring. Maybe a reader who knows more can tell me.

I have read that steers are generally slaughtered when they’re between one and two years old, so a panic massacre could presumably cause problems for a year or two.

I don’t think eggs are going anywhere. You don’t have to butcher eggs. Also, if meat production falters, chicken feed will be cheaper. Farmers will need to sell grain.

I was thinking about it today, and I realized the meat problem is not a big deal. I don’t think it will last long, and even if it did, life with a little less meat will not be difficult. Who cares? It’s better to do without than to be a hoarder.

One silver lining behind the meat cloud: squirrels. I have an endless supply, and shooting squirrels is one of the most virtuous things a person can do. They’re destructive and also quite tasty.

Squirrels are out of season here, but I contacted the authorities, and they told me homeowners are free to kill nuisance squirrels all the time. My squirrels are ALL nuisance squirrels. The other day I wrote about losing the fuel gauge on my lawn tractor to a stinking squirrel. I can shoot them whenever I want, legally. Squirrel works just fine in chicken recipes. Kung pao squirrel may be in my future.

Maybe the meat panic will wake people up and make them realize it’s time to go back to work. That would be nice.

In case anyone is interested, this county’s current C19 tally is 151. Barely moving. That may be a bad thing. It may mean we don’t have as much herd immunity as other places. It’s nice for now, however.

This morning at the store, I saw several packages of toilet paper, right out there where just anyone could grab them. I was awestruck. Things are getting better.

I can’t stop writing about coronavirus without mentioning the American major celebrity death toll: still zero. I’m also checking my used bench grinder poverty index. The number of used items that come up on an Ebay search for “Baldor bench grinder” is 39. This is down from 41 but a lot higher than last year. Maybe the economy isn’t as bad as I thought.

In other news, today I watched a video by Messianic rabbi Zev Porat. He interviewed a student of late rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a revered mystic who died not long ago. Kaduri said he had met the Messiah. He left a note indicating that the Messiah’s name was Yehoshuah, which is the long form of Yeshua (“Jesus”).

Kaduri’s son claimed the note was a forgery, but Kaduri students have come forward and admitted that Kaduri did, in fact, believe Jesus was the Messiah. So much for the forgery claims.

In the interview, the student suggests mainstream Orthodox Jews believe Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who died many years ago, is the Messiah. Schneerson was the leader of a big sect called Chabad. Many thought he was a Messiah candidate, but the official hard-line rule was that no one who died without fulfilling his mission could be the Messiah, so Jews with integrity abandoned his candidacy when he passed away.

I already knew that certain Jews thought he was the Messiah, and you can find them online saying they pray to him. They believe he is immortal; a god. Some think he will rise again. It’s a big kerfuffle. Allowing Jews to worship a Messiah could open doors they work hard to keep closed against a certain well-known individual from Bethlehem. Defining Jesus out of monotheism is extremely important in a culture beset by Christian missionaries.

You can see the dilemma. Anti-missionaries have objections to Jesus. One is their belief that the Messiah can’t be a god. Another is that he can’t die before fulfilling his mission. If a strict Orthodox Jew says Schneerson is a god and admits he died, what happens to two very strong objections to Jesus? POOF.

Anti-missionaries dismiss the miracles of Jesus as magic, and they say you miracles don’t prove someone is righteous or approved by God. But Schneerson’s worshipers say he worked miracles and cite them as proof of his Messiah status. Problem.

The official Jewish posture is that if you believe Jesus is the Messiah, even if you were born Jewish and continue practicing Judaism, you are no longer a Jew. Just like that. But what if you accept Schneerson? How does one rid the faith of followers of one putatively false Messiah while embracing others?

Schneerson denied that he was the Messiah. I don’t think he can be blamed for what happened after he died.

There are followers who claim he did’t die. That’s really something. He had heart attacks. There were witnesses. A doctor signed a death certificate. The body was seen. It’s in a hole right now.

Christians admit Jesus died, so our situation is different. There is no body. There are no bones. There never was any physical evidence that he remained in the tomb. The Gospels say the Romans put soldiers around the tomb to prevent his followers from stealing the body, but it vanished anyway. The penalty for the soldiers was death. You can look that up. I did. It’s not like they would have taken their job lightly.

I didn’t realize how big Schneerson Messianism was. I thought it was a few fringe characters. Now that I’ve seen the video with the Kaduri student, I realize it may be a much bigger movement than I thought. I looked around online, and it appears to be a major phenomenon.

What will the repercussions be? Will the Schneerson movement make more Jews open to embracing Yeshua? Will it make them more determined to exclude Messiah impostors? Will it lead to the termination of the Jewish status of Schneerson worshipers?

My guess is that they will refuse to confront the issue. I think it’s a can of worms they will run away from. That appears to be what’s happening now. I don’t think they’re ready to expel thousands of Jews. I think they want to hang onto all the religious Jews they can get. They worry about numbers. It’s a very big issue with them.

Is this a double standard? I don’t know enough to judge. It doesn’t look too good.

It’s very interesting how the policy of expelling Messianics has made Jesus seem like a huge problem. If Jews don’t expel them, then Messianics can be seen as annoying Jews who are still brothers. If Jews expel them, their conversions become reductions in the total number of Jews, and conversion, which would otherwise be a mere nuisance, becomes an existential threat. Suddenly, Jesus isn’t just a Messiah pretender. He’s a potential end to the existence of the Jewish people.

It looks like the rabbis have chosen the threat of annihilation over the possibility of tolerance.

If they don’t expel Schneerson worshipers, in the minds of reasonable people, the Messiah contest may come down to a competition to see who has the best candidate. That will be weird.

I guess it’s a good thing they don’t stone people any more. Walking in Mea Shearim would be like crossing an asteroid field.

It will be interesting to see if the Schneerson faction gains ground. I think it’s certain the Kaduri faction will be unpopular for the foreseeable future.

While I’m writing about God, I should mention a testimony I just got from my friend Mike. I had the honor of baptizing him last year.

I didn’t know he had serious arthritis in his neck. He couldn’t turn it normally without pain. Last week, he was in bed, and he started praying in tongues. He raised his hands, and he felt a sudden sensation in his neck. As soon as it passed, he was able to move his neck without pain. He said he has 90% of the motion he had before arthritis set in. He is completely freaked out. Overjoyed. Really nice.

I have my own testimony, as always. I believe it was last year that I wrote about a growth on my hand. It had a funny color to it, so immediately I thought of melanoma. I decided to take the Christian route. I did not go to a doctor. I prayed, and I cast things out and so forth. I spoke healing to myself.

I will not lie. I did a few other things after praying for permission. I put hot sauce on it, because hot sauce and other things like curcumin and green tea have made growths dry up in the past. For a brief time, I also applied a prescription drug that belonged to my dad. These things didn’t seem to help. I threw the drug out. On a lark, I also tried fenbendazole, which is an interesting deworming drug that people are using to fight cancer. I gave it up, too. Didn’t seem to do anything.

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

I forgot about the growth for several weeks. The one day I remembered it and checked. There wasn’t much going on.

Right now, it’s not easy to see where the growth used to be. There was a pronounced raised place, and it was getting bigger. Looks like it’s history.

One less thing to worry about, as Forrest Gump would probably say.

God always tells me, “None of the things you worry about will come to pass.”

I’ll take that.

Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

Today I saw a story that said Tyson Foods, a major chicken supplier, ran a Sunday ad in the New York Times that said all meat would disappear from the earth by Friday.

I may have the details slightly wrong. Let me see.

Okay, they say they’re being forced to close some plants because of C19 outbreaks. They also say “millions” of chickens, cattle, and pigs will have to be killed because farmers have no place to sell them. Does Tyson even sell beef and pork? Isn’t it a chicken company?

My dad used to be the labor attorney for Holly Farms, a poultry company Tyson bought. If I recall correctly, Tyson went with their own in-house counsel, so my family was cut off from its supply of delicious pre-breaded chicken burgers.

Frankly, this looks like an opportunistic self-back-patting ad which contains hysterical predictions that are very unlikely to pan out. An awful lot of the ad basically says, “Tyson wonderful Tyson wonderful.” “Tyson love employees. Tyson very very good.” There aren’t a lot of numbers.

This epidemic has been an incredible PR opportunity for many companies and people.

I doubt the supply will falter severely. Nonetheless, remembering how the toilet paper thing worked, and considering how much I’m enjoying my new propane cooker, I decided this aggression would not stand. I ran out and got like 10 pounds of ground chuck and 7 rib eye steaks.

I know I don’t hoard very well. I could have filled both freezers today. I’m destined to remain an amateur. I felt like other people should get a shot at the precious.

My plan is to freeze 5 of the steaks and turn all of the ground chuck into half-pound patties for freezing. My best guess is that Tyson’s berserker mouth-foaming moment will pass and that we will continue to have a decent supply of meat, perhaps after a couple of weeks of insanity. I bought enough meat to get me through a month of relatively heavy usage, and I left it at that. If the meat supply dries up, I’ll fall back on my pizza skills.

Freezer space limitations should limit meat hoarding. Let’s see. Are freezers selling out? Time to check Best Buy’s site.

Well, I should have seen this coming. The hoarders have bought all the freezers. They’ll be eating frozen stuff through Christmas while the rest of us eat fresh food. They even hoard frozen vegetables. Why? One of the most notable things about the C19 epidemic is the total lack of impact on produce. Vegetarians are sneering at normal people.

People have the dumbest ideas. They really thought the world was ending. Nice job, American journalists.

I belong to a cattle forum, and I just checked. They have some concerns, but no one is panicking. Except Tyson and the people who bought freezers, I guess.

Here’s something to think about: people who run big companies don’t know everything. They make a lot of stupid mistakes. Remember a company called Sears? Remember New Coke? Remember the Edsel? Remember the Pontiac Aztek? Don’t run down the street naked because a chicken executive tried to play prophet. I mean, okay, I ran out and bought steaks, but I don’t expect long-term issues. I was concerned about the effects of his remarks, not the effects of the virus.

The rib eyes I make now with the big propane cooker are mind-blowing. Steakhouse chefs should make pilgrimages to apologize and kiss my unwashed feet. I have never had a high-end steakhouse steak that compared to my own steaks, and they cost three or four times as much. My choice steaks are better than their prime steaks because the preparation is better.

Ground chuck is the best pre-ground burger material available at grocery stores. That’s my opinion, anyway. Sirloin is like dry sawdust, and regular hamburger is made from tonsils and private parts. Okay, it’s probably not, but it has so much fat it sort of disappears when you cook it.

I should try grinding up a rib eye. All other cuts bow to the rib eye.

Anyone who tells you to make burgers from sirloin alone is a bad cook, so there is no point in finishing a recipe that starts with sirloin. It’s astonishing how many chefs who publish online are inept enough to promote sirloin-burger recipes. There are also people who put other types of meat in burgers, and that’s a red flag, too. If you put pork, poultry, or seafood in a burger, you have to cook it well done, and that destroys it.

Rachel Ray makes burgers with pure sirloin. Now I know not to listen to her.

Some chefs recommend grinding short ribs and brisket into burgers. Hmm…a short rib should have the same flavor as a rib eye, shouldn’t it? I’m too lazy to grind meat for burgers. Ground chuck is outstanding, so even if custom grinds are better, I’m not motivated to try.

America’s Test Kitchen recommends grinding sirloin tips with butter. I would never argue with these people. They’re just too good. Butter must make up for the dry texture of the inferior meat.

I don’t know what a sirloin tip is or how to get them.

I like mixing fresh garlic and salt into hamburger and then gas-grilling with super-high temperatures, but in lazy moments, I fry burgers in butter and Worcestershire sauce, and they’re wonderful. I cook them medium, with hot fat running out. I use brioche-style buns, toasted on the inside over the grill.

My gas grill was weak when I got it, so I bought a much bigger regulator, and now it’s not bad at all. If you buy a gas grill for burgers, you may have the same problem. I think they make them weak because of lawyers. It’s literally impossible to prepare a decent burger or steak on the model I bought without hot-rodding it mercilessly.

Gordon Ramsay cooks burgers that appear to be almost an inch and a half thick. Bad idea. A super-thick burger will tend to be raw inside, and you don’t want an overly high ratio of inner meat to outer crust. The flavor is in the crust. It’s also hard to eat a burger that’s too thick. I like burgers 7/8″ to 1″ thick.

I’ll snap a photo from Youtube so you can see a Ramsay burger.

You can’t really eat that like a burger. Your mouth won’t open wide enough. It’s all show and no go. Made for TV, not the table. He cuts his burgers with a knife and fork, which is about what you would expect an untutored foreigner to do.

Lately I’ve been toasting the buns on one half of the grill and then putting them on the other (unlit) side to wait for the burgers. I turn off the flames on the side where the buns are toasted. I flip the buns’ tops and apply cheese. The lingering heat in the grill softens the cheese. This makes it easy to go heavy on the cheese without having melting issues. You may have to put condiments between the cheese and the bun, though. It may resist being pried off so you can put it directly on the meat.

Maybe I should just throw the cheese on the meat and use a propane torch.

I don’t want to get back into cooking, but the constant talk of shortages makes me think of food.

Enough about meat. I also bought famotidine today. I could not resist.

A day or two ago, news organizations started saying famotidine, the drug in Pepcid, showed promise as a coronavirus treatment. What the heck. Can’t hurt me to pick up a couple of bottles. It’s a good thing to have around regardless of whether there’s a pandemic. Heartburn is annoying. When I got to the store today, naturally, most of the famotidine was gone. There must be a hoarder hotline out there. They are fast.

I think I’ve already had coronavirus, and I don’t expect to have it in the future, but it’s fun to feel like you’re doing something that might help.

I got the famotidine at Walgreen’s. They had a hand sanitizer bottle at the register for customers. After I paid, I pumped some out and rubbed my hands with it. It felt luxurious. Like putting caviar on my hands. The smell was invigorating, but that’s normal, because hand sanitizer smells like martinis.

I went to two Walmarts and a Winn-Dixie today. The first Walmart was not in good shape. It was pretty post-hoardery. The second was jammed with goodies. It’s always striking to see how hoarding, which is not guided by reason, varies from location to location.

I saw a lot of paper towels today. Real brands, not just the typical pandemic store brands. “Ekono-Pryce towels, made from real Chinese sawdust!” It’s comforting to know Bounty is back in a big way.

I have cinchona bark on the way. It’s the source of quinine, which is the drug from which chloroquine is descended. As mentioned in an earlier post, I read up on this stuff online, and it got me thinking about gin and tonics. I got some Boodle’s gin and Q tonic water. I couldn’t resist. Q tonic water has almost no quinine in it, so it’s probably not much help when you’re sick, but you can’t read about gin and tonics for two days and not want one. I decided to try the real thing, because people say it’s phenomenal. When the bark arrives, I’ll make some syrup with it. I would guess that the amount of quinine I bought would get me through something like a day and a half of actual treatment, but in practice, it will give me maybe a month of delightful beverages.

I’ve been drinking a gin and tonic almost every other day for quite a while now, and I’m not sick, so that proves it works. No, seriously.

Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to continue my arduous regimen. I’m no quitter.

G&T’s with quality tonic are peak-experience-level beverages. I need to have one with my next rib eye.

I have to wonder if quinine is useful for things like colds and the flu. It’s worth a try. Several tries.

It’s for science.

I also wonder why meat plants are especially vulnerable to C19 outbreaks. They’re some of the cleanest places on earth. They hose their equipment with harsh disinfectants all the time. Maybe it’s because they’re cold. C19 does not like heat, humidity, or sunlight. A meat plant is probably a great place to keep the viruses alive on surfaces. They’re also staffed largely by illegals who are not always the cleanest beings in the universe. Maybe their personal habits are spreading C19 at home and overcoming the hygiene measures at the plants.

It shouldn’t take long for plants to recover, especially if they’re hit hard so a lot of employees return at roughly the same time. C19 runs its course in a couple of weeks, and then it leaves you immune and noncontagious. It’s not like meat workers are dying or being hospitalized in large numbers. They’re just having flulike symptoms that pass quickly.

If you wrap and freeze a steak correctly, it will be very good when you thaw it. The quality difference isn’t a huge deal. I don’t know if burgers hold up as well, but I know they’re okay. If it turns out there is no beef shortage, I can always put the burgers in meatloaf and go back to fresh. If not, a B burger, while not an A burger, is well worth cooking.

Not the Way to End Your Political Career

Somehow or other, when I looked at my phone this morning, I came across something about Andrew Gillum. It led me in some interesting directions.

Gillum was nearly elected governor here in Florida. He is a Democrat. He was seen as the big hope of Florida leftists.

Gillum has a wife and three kids, but he’s some type of homosexual. I’m not sure which letters are supposed to be attached to him under the left’s guidelines. L, G, B, M, F, R, Pi…not my area of expertise.

In March, while many people, especially leftists, were screaming that we should stay home, Gillum traveled to Miami and joined two other homosexuals in a room at the Mondrian Hotel on South Beach. Everyone knows this now. One of the men, a homosexual escort, started behaving as though he had overdosed, and the third man called for help.

The cops came, shot video, and took photos. This is one of the unintended consequences of the body cam craze. If you call the police these days, make sure you’ve showered and dressed and put on clean underwear, because you may end up on video, and it may be available to the public on request.

Gillum and his friends did not put on clean underwear or anything else. They were naked when the police arrived. The lucid one who called them was naked. He answered the door that way.

As a result of the call, the public now has video and photos of the event, including a nude photo of Gillum lying on the floor on a vomit-covered towel. His lawyer admits it’s him.

Unbelievably, the cops released photos of drugs found on the scene. One was an injectable called SB-4. Another was Gabapentin, a seizure medication. Another was an anti-anxiety drug similar to Xanax. The final drug: crystal meth. The police did not test the substance they thought was meth. They merely expressed an opinion. Based on decades of collecting crystal meth from innumerable crime scenes. The alleged meth was impounded, so presumably, it could still be tested if anyone claimed it was baking soda or table sugar.

Gillum behaved predictably after he had regained consciousness and realized his reputation had taken a hit. He said he had never used crystal meth. He said he had had too much to drink. He said he had been in town to attend a wedding. During the coronavirus panic. He said he had a drinking problem. He went into rehab.

I looked at these facts and wondered what they weren’t telling us. What questions were journalists not asking?

First, why did he travel while so many people, especially leftists, were shrieking for a lockdown? That’s weird. Why would you have a wedding with guests?

Next, why would you travel 400 miles to attend a wedding without your wife?

Next, why would a person answer a hotel room door naked?

Finally, what was the purpose of the strange drugs found?

I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out why Gillum traveled alone. The cops were called at 11 p.m., so it’s not like Gillum went to the hotel briefly to say hi to a couple of friends before running back to his wife’s side at another establishment.

As for answering the door naked (and subsequently showing no interest in dressing), my best guess is that this was a thrill for the man who answered. Many gay men have a thing for cops. The man who answered the door was probably exposing himself because it excited him.

Now. The drugs. I looked this stuff up.

The injectable drug was labeled “SB-4,” but to gay men, it’s better known as “Trimix.” It’s a mixture of three drugs, and it’s used to force men’s private parts to render themselves ready for sex, if you get my drift. Sort of like Viagra. To use it, you have to inject your genitals. It’s very popular among homosexuals. You can read about it online.

Meth is also a sex drug. I didn’t know this until today. It increases desire. It prolongs sex and enhances the culmination. Gay men inject it into their private parts.

Put it all together, and you have a picture. A homosexual rented a hotel room in gay mecca South Beach. Another homosexual went to the room to rendezvous with him. A homosexual escort was engaged, and he showed up. Performance-enhancing drugs were procured and injected into the genitalia of one or more of the men. They performed sex acts on the bed, leaving it stained, two of them lost consciousness, and at least one threw up. The least-incapacitated member of the group called for help, and the cops showed up and shot video and took pictures.

After that, incredibly, sensitive photos and video were released.

The thing most Americans don’t understand is that this was not an unusual night by homosexual standards. They think gays are just like the rest of us, except they prefer to have sex in a different way. It’s not true. A huge percentage of them are completely obsessed with pleasure and sex, to a degree that exceeds even the standards of heterosexual athletes, actors, and rock stars. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were underachievers compared to many ordinary gays.

Drug and alcohol abuse are huge among gays. So are diseases the rest of us don’t get very often, like syphilis, gonorrhea, and AIDS. Many lead utterly empty lives. Their lives are centered on the pursuit of fleeting pleasures.

It’s revealing that there is a culture in which injecting Trimix and methamphetamine into one’s genitals is so prevalent everyone knows about it. How many heterosexuals know about this stuff? I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet Harvey Weinstein doesn’t.

The press and the Democrats shoved Gillum in our faces and told us he was a warm-hearted family guy who cared more about the poor than the evil DeSantis. Imagine Florida right now under Gillum. He’s a train wreck. He’s vulnerable to blackmail. He’s depraved. His soul is rotten. The idea of letting him lead us through a pandemic, or anything else, is mortifying.

DeSantis has turned out to be a big blessing. He’s on the right side of the issues, and he resisted the coronavirus hysteria longer than other governors. Under Gillum, we might have Whitmer-style totalitarianism and shuttered gun stores. I plan to run errands all over town today, without a mask and without asking permission. Under Gillum, I might have to pass police checkpoints and provide justification. Fully clothed, of course. I would be like a Schindler Jew, trying to leave the Krakau ghetto for Schindler’s business. “Please, sir. I want to buy an apple.”

God was really looking out for his children in Florida.

It will be a big surprise to me if they catch DeSantis in a room with a bunch of naked men and a hypodermic. I’ll say that.

Gillum’s depravity is disturbing, and it’s instructive to think about it.

What does the Bible say about homosexuality? In one instance, it says that when people rejected God with sufficient finality, he turned them over to homosexuality. Does that mean God makes people gay? Of course not.

When a person proves he is impervious to instruction and reason, the correct thing to do is to let him go. You can’t carry people for eternity.

I have a sister who is depraved. She has had over 60 years of chances. The family used to spend money on her and clean up her messes, and she never stopped biting the hands that fed her. She punished us over and over and vilified us for the things we did to help her. God told me to cut her loose, and I did. He said I was not even to pray for her. I routinely pray he will keep her out of my life from now on.

God didn’t make her what she is, but he gave her over to it, and so, on his orders, did I. We simply let her go, to do what she already wanted to do.

This is how sexual perversion works. God doesn’t make people perverted. He just stops trying to help them. Satan, on the other hand, never gives up. When God gives up on you, you’re not just without help. You’re still overwhelmed by attacks. There is nothing to balance the evil influences. This is how gay men end up eating excrement and smothering each other. It’s as though the tribulation were taking place inside them. For the most part, God’s help and correction are gone.

The tribulation will be possible because there will be no faith-filled believers on earth to pray for God to show mercy. Everyone here will be past the point where showing patience is profitable.

I think we also see depravity in heterosexual sex scandals. More than once, we have heard that celebrities were discovered hanging by the neck, naked. We’re told they committed suicide. Why would you strip naked to kill yourself? It’s not typical.

Asphyxia increases sexual pleasure. It’s very common for people to hang themselves while indulging in self-stimulation. You’re not supposed to kill yourself in the process, but it happens.

If you’re hanging yourself in order to get sexual pleasure, your life is not going well. It’s not healthy or normal. You have descended into a very deep pit. Spirits are telling you to do what you’re doing, and not one of them is the Holy Spirit.

Depravity in all areas of life, not just sex, is extremely common in today’s America. On the left, it has been mainstreamed. The political right is headed the same way, because while we are more likely to acknowledge God, many conservative Christians reject the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues. If you want to be a leader, you have to be in communication with your superior, and most of us are not.

I think about my own ugly drives as I write this. Andrew Gillum, the shining liberal knight, is a destroyed human being, and if I had had my way, I might be in similar condition. You don’t have to be gay or attracted to kids or animals to have sexual depravity in your life, and depravity isn’t always sexual.

The future is extremely filthy and coarse, and if you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you can expect to be part of it, because you lack the only antidote. It’s very important to try to escape.

And now I have to go get a magnetic broom, a tube of graphite powder for reloading cartridges, and maybe some beef. Thank God I don’t live in Michigan.

Is it Already Over? The “Experts” Really Don’t Know

The coronavirus news never stops changing.

For some time, people have been saying they thought COVID-19, which I have just decided to call “C19” because it’s easier to type, had shown up in America much earlier than the authorities were telling us. Now even the New York Times is getting in on the act. It says we now know that an American death in early February was caused by C19.

Want better evidence that the disease has been here a long time? A test of random people in New York City supermarkets came up 21% positive. An expert is trying to dismiss it as the result of false positives, but like many experts, he doesn’t understand math. The false-positive rate, if the Chinese are to be believed, is 40-80%. Even if the real positive rate in New York City was 4%, allowing for the worst possible rate of false results, it would still be much higher than the official rate.

The people who were tested were out shopping. They weren’t sick people hooked up to ventilators. What does that tell you?

I think about my own mystery illness. I got sick in January. I had conjunctivitis, a runny nose, a cough with chest pain, and body aches. I also had nausea and diarrhea. These are all C19 symptoms. The illness lasted longer than a typical pink eye case, and there was no pink eye epidemic in my area. Pink eye is extremely contagious; much worse than the flu or C19. You don’t get it all by yourself.

My disease was mild, like C19. It took a long time to come and go, like C19. I had a dry cough with chest pain, like a C19 patient. I had a virus, not bacteria. Bacterial conjunctivitis comes with pus and different symptoms. I was sick in the winter. Viral conjunctivitis peaks in the summer.

How could I get C19? I live in the woods by myself. I have an answer.

Early in January, I traveled to North Carolina for a Last Reformation event. Most people there had traveled a long way. There were many Europeans there. One prayed for me, and I spent a lot of time with him. People were laying hands on each other. We got close to each other. I would have returned here on about January 6. I noticed I was feeling funny during the days preceding January 20.

The incubation period for C19 is now known to run to 24 days in some cases, and I was exposed to a lot of people from distant locations around 10 days before I got sick.

When I realized I was ill, I stayed away from people, including my barber. My hair was out of control. I went to buy groceries and so on, but I didn’t have guests or visit anyone. In other words, I did exactly what every contagious person should do but generally doesn’t.

So. Did I save my county from coronavirus? Wouldn’t surprise me at all, if I were the only person who had it, but in all likelihood, a lot of people had it and weren’t diagnosed.

In order to believe C19 wasn’t a problem in the US until late January, you have to believe some unlikely things. You have to think there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan in late fall, that thousands of people traveled between Wuhan and the US before the disease was identified, and that somehow, the infection didn’t spread in the US until January. The first three things are undeniable facts. The fourth is so unlikely it should be considered impossible.

If C19 got here earlier than we think, why is there a big medical crisis now?

Is there really a medical crisis? The stories of hospitals filling up with the dead and dying still aren’t true. Only a tiny percentage of Americans have been diagnosed, meaning not many are significantly ill. The death toll is comparable to that of the flu, and many so-called coronavirus deaths will turn out to be flu deaths because of false positives and provider bias. We’re hearing about shortages of certain medical items. Were those shortages caused by sick patients or by providers scrambling to get more equipment than they needed? People talk of a ventilator shortage, but in reality, it’s still not here. There is only an ANTICIPATED shortage.

We’re having a lot of problems due to C19, but are they generally medical problems? No. They’re hysteria-related problems. We can’t work. We’re struggling financially. We can’t get haircuts. We can’t travel. When you’re caught up in panic and deprivation, it’s easy to confuse your problems with medical problems.

If everyone in your city is hoarding toilet paper and going around in masks, it doesn’t mean there is a major illness problem. Healthy people can do those things.

C19 hits very old people very hard, and it’s a real scourge when it hits old folks homes, which is what happened in Massachusetts, but the rest of us are generally fine. Even the sick.

I am no expert, which means I am not part of a group of people who indisputably got nearly everything wrong, but if I had to make a guess my life depended on, I’d say C19 has swept most of the nation already. I think I already had it. Maybe you’ve had it, too.

It’s amazing how unreliable experts and authorities are. This is one of those things you have to be old to understand. The natural thing is to trust people in power and people who have credentials, but the older you get, the more you will find that you are often better off figuring things out on your own. There are a lot of mothers out there who have had to tell incompetent doctors what was wrong with their kids. There are laymen who have been executed who would have been better off representing themselves.

The more experts and authorities let you down, the more firmly you will believe you have to do your own thinking. You have to do your best to decide which things you can figure out and which things you have to put in other people’s hands. When you rely on other people, you have to watch them. They will let you down in ways that will astound you.

Right now, the new-case graph is still oscillating. I thought it would peak more sharply, but a lot depends on physician bias and the availability of tests. A sudden increase in testing will drive the graph upward even if the actual numbers are plummeting.

Guess how many major celebrity deaths America has, as of today? Not one. Still.

How many major celebrities are there? Let’s look at football. There are 1700 players right now. The average career is 3.3 years. That means there are tens of thousands of retired players. Many are famous. None have died. Now throw in baseball, basketball, and hockey. Throw in college athletes, past and present. Where are the deaths? We have Tom Dempsey, but most people have no idea who he is.

Trump-hating journalists are still falling back on Mark Blum and Joe Diffie. When you have to reach for poor examples to prove your argument, something is wrong.

In other news, my new propane cooker is working out great. I did okay with the smaller one, but even when it did a fairly good job on steak, it wasn’t on the level of a 200,000-BTU unit. The crust and charring on steaks weren’t as good.

Yesterday I threw a Walmart cowboy rib eye in the skillet with butter. It was magical. I was stunned by how good it was. Two hours later, I was still pausing to think about it. You really have to be nuts to cook a steak any other way.

I need a big griddle. This cooker has a huge burner, so heat rises all around it. I have to use long tongs to avoid being burned. I’m pretty sure I removed all the hair on the fingers of my right hand yesterday. Walmart has a nice big griddle for around twenty bucks.

One of the best things about the cooker is not having to clean the kitchen or open windows to let smoke out. The cooker is on the patio, where it belongs. It can’t stain my ceiling with condensed grease. And it’s not just good for steak. I could put a wok on it. I can’t do that on my stove. I could use it for big pots for gatherings.

One of my favorite meals now is a rib eye plus a microwaved russet potato. The oven is better for potatoes, but when you’re alone and you just want to get dinner on the plate, a microwave will give you 85% of what you want in 8 minutes. I would never use it if I had guests, but for me, it’s excellent.

I found a bag of small russets. Big ones are just TOO big, and small ones are better anyway because they have a higher ratio of skin to starch. I wanted to buy a single potato, but Walmart’s single russets are disgusting. They had some overpriced nuke-ready potatoes for a dollar each. Forget that. For $5, I got maybe 10 pounds of beautiful little potatoes that weren’t covered in hoe marks.

I have to go to Walmart for chlorine, so I should grab a griddle. Home Depot is out of chlorine. Apparently, people are washing their food in it. I am not kidding. It’s a legitimate news story you can look up. I wondered where the bleach had gone. People are poisoning themselves and ending up in hospitals.

Life is good. Don’t fall for the panic. Unless you enjoy it and get angry at people who are relaxed. If that’s you, you bring it on yourself, so swim in it. Eat it. Drink it. Just don’t bother me with your manipulation and guilt trips. I plan to savor the good times with which I have been blessed.