Hope I’m Doing This Right

I don’t know if any reloading-genius readers want to help me out, but I am posting some casing photos anyway.

I loaded some defensive rounds for 10mm. The recipe is from Speer, but they recommend CCI primers (surprise), and all I had were Wolf.

Powder: 10.7 grains Blue Dot
Bullet: Speer 0.400″ Gold Dot
Casing: new Starline
Primer: Wolf large pistol
OAL: 1.250″

I shot a couple of rounds in the yard. I haven’t chronographed them yet. I am hoping for a 1200 fps from a Glock 29’s short barrel, with a little more pep from the Glock 20. I used the Glock 29 to shoot the reloads.

Down near the rim, the cases bulged from about 0.420″ to about 0.433″. The primers are flush with the rims. There are rectangular marks from the hole around the gun’s firing pin.

I looked at a Hornady (factory) little-old-lady round I shot, and the bulge is identical. The impression from the firing pin is a bit less pronounced, as is the impression from the hole the firing pin rides in.

Is this an acceptable casing, or am I going to blow the gun up?

I put my Chrony together. Lost a couple of the steel rods that hold the diffusers up. I ordered 36″ of 5/16″ drill rod so I could make two more. Some people recommend using wooden rods instead, because if you shoot a wooden rod out of the Chrony, it won’t do as much damage.

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Got some input from an experienced reloader. He says a rectangular mark on a primer is normal for Glocks, as is a “firing pin drag mark.” Guess I’m ready to shoot. Weather and the good Lord permitting, I’ll be chronographing these dudes tomorrow.

I’ve been reading a lot about Gold Dots in 10mm, and it looks like speed may not be everything. You can push them to over 1300 fps, but some people have found that they come apart at that speed, while speeds in the 1200’s do a great job of damaging the target while maintaining integrity. That would be good news, because shooting this caliber at any speed is work, and not having to use maximum speed will reduce recoil.

Let’s not Put Ourselves Out

My friend Travis was shot accidentally on April 9, and I haven’t written much about it. The reason I don’t write about it is that I don’t get much information.

I managed to get in touch with his brother, whom I also know, but the brother has not always responded when contacted. When he does respond, I get vague answers. All I know is that the injuries aren’t life-threatening and that Travis is still in the hospital. I can’t communicate with him directly, and he doesn’t call people, although he can talk. There are a lot of problems because of quarantine protocols.

I decided to let it go. I pray every day, but I don’t chase Travis’s family, trying to get news. It seemed to be pointless. It seemed to me that if things were going badly, I would likely be notified, so my hope was that no news was good news.

Yesterday, things changed. A young lady Travis knows contacted me, and we started exchanging information. She got to work, and we established a collaboration. I learned some things.

I learned that Travis’s belongings have been sitting in his apartment, waiting to be stolen, for over two weeks. I learned that no one had done anything about maintaining his relationship with the University of Miami, where his absence has probably been noticed by instructors by now. His refrigerator must be appalling.

When you hear things like this, you don’t know what to say. My family, as messed up as it was, would have been all over these things the day after the event.

Travis has a married sister whose husband does well. His mother is able-bodied. Where are they?

Imagine getting shot and then coming home from the hospital to find the keys changed and your belongings gone. You would probably not be very happy with your family.

The young woman who is now helping Travis got things fixed with the University, and she got his mother to agree to get his house keys. She found people who will keep his valuables. It only took a day. It’s not like she did something other people couldn’t have done. Why wasn’t it taken care of sooner?

I hooked her up with a friend who can help move things if needed. There was some talk of me driving to Miami, but you have to have a signed letter from the pope to get a hotel room in Florida right now, so I have been spared. I would have had to drive 300 miles down and 300 miles back on the same day, with no shower or change of clothes, and I would also have had to move his stuff, resulting in a 12-plus-hour day of pure joy.

If you want to understand my feelings about visiting Miami, read the book The Man Who Broke a Thousand Chains. It would be like breaking back INTO prison.

One annoying thing about all this is that Travis has a billion Facebook friends and numerous real-life friends. They are nearly useless. They always have been. He knows all sorts of people who act like brothers and sisters and play up their deep, special connection until someone needs to borrow five dollars or hitch a ride. Then they disappear like illegals in an ICE raid.

I really hope he shot himself, because if the friend who called me to tell me about it did it, and then he didn’t take care of Travis’s needs, well…not good.

I recall Travis telling me a story about walking a long distance in the rain, carrying musical instruments, and being passed by friends in a car. They waved and kept going.

He had a real crisis a few years back, and a guy from the church we attended told him not to worry; he would take care of everything. No problem. This was a very bad situation that needed immediate attention by a certain day in order to prevent terrible consequences that would affect the rest of Travis’s life. The friend bailed out with no warning, too late for Travis to come up with a new plan. Never explained. No apology. I guess it just felt good to say he would help.

It’s very important to limit your dependence on people who aren’t really your friends. If you don’t do it while things are going well, events will do it for you. When times get hard, you will call on them, and they’ll show you they were never really your friends. Might as well figure out who’s who right now. Why wait to be left in the lurch?

One day you might put your foot down with confidence and fall through the ice.

God puts the solitary in families, according to his word. That doesn’t just mean he takes lonely people and finds them husbands and wives. It also means he takes people who think they have good friends and families, shows them what they really have, and gives them good Spirit-led friends who can be counted on. It’s something we should all ask for. You can be surrounded by friends and be the loneliest person in the room. Julius Caesar could tell you all about it.

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I got more information just now. Apparently, Travis is not able to talk right now. I don’t know why his brother said he talked with him. Maybe things were different at the start. Anyway, it’s good to know he has a good reason for not using the phone.

New York is the New Wuhan

Is it time to stop talking about coronavirus numbers? The new infection rate is still dropping, and it’s not going to stop. Repeating this every day doesn’t make it interesting or illuminating.

I guess I can report something of special relevance to me. The known-case number in my county seems to be frozen. It barely moves. We’re still stuck under 130 cases. Days ago, we were at 121.

But that doesn’t mean I’m safe at the grocery, because of all the unreported cases, right?

I don’t think it works that way here. If we had a lot of unreported cases, we might still have a low number of reported cases, but we would have a high transmission rate. People who didn’t know they were sick would be infecting others. A low transmission rate, when coupled with a low known-case number, seems to indicate a low actual-infection number.

I think we simply don’t have many sick people here. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think the sparse population is the entire answer. Maybe it is, but there are rural counties that have done worse.

It’s funny how the disease is distributing itself. It’s really not a big deal in most places. If you remove New York State from the USA total, the numbers drop by about a third, and New York isn’t as populous as you think. COVID-19 is much more common there than in most places, and it’s also more common in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans. Other places that may make the list: Cleveland, St. Louis, DC, Baltimore, and Kansas City.

Should we call it the Chinese virus or just the Democrat virus? Very strange.

L.A. isn’t too bad, though, and San Francisco is doing well.

It’s important to note that COVID-19 isn’t “common” anywhere. It’s not like the flu. It’s “more common” in some areas, but it’s not common by cold and flu standards. When New York City (not State) has well over a million cases, you can say it’s more common than the flu in that location. At least 10% of Americans get the flu every year, so you would expect nearly a million obvious cases in New York City. The lab-confirmed rate is much lower than 10%, but the CDC doesn’t limit itself to tested patients when compiling flu statistics.

I wonder how COVID-19 will affect rural home prices. I hope they go sky-high so I can make a profit when I sell this place, but I hope they stay really low so I can get a great deal when I buy another one.

I’ll bet it won’t help property values in New York City. If people leave, I hope they go to California, which is already destroyed. Please, God, keep them out of the South. If they ruin the South, there is no place left to go.

The bias of the press is still astounding. I saw an article saying what you buy these days depends on how you vote. It said Republicans were more likely to buy guns while Democrats were more likely to buy toilet paper. It said Democrats were rationally preparing for lockdowns and time at home.

That’s so idiotic, it hurts to think about it. How can anyone try to rationalize selfish, senseless, destructive hoarding of a product that is in no way related to the disease? How does “time at home” relate to a need for 300 rolls of toilet paper? There was never any danger, real or perceived, that we would not be allowed to buy toilet paper. It was an absurd Satanic mass delusion.

If they were worried about being stuck at home, they would have hoarded canned goods, but they have gone much easier on canned goods than toilet paper. If they were worried about being stuck at home, they wouldn’t have hoarded bottled water in the beginning, but they did. The water supply, which doesn’t depend on bottles, was never in doubt.

Hoarders can’t be excused. What they did is utterly nonsensical. The person who wrote the article was just trying to make leftists look better.

As for guns, a whole lot of non-conservatives have been trying their best to get them. It’s not just right-wingers. Coronavirus converted a lot of gun-haters. I still don’t understand why a Democrat or anyone else would think an epidemic would make a gun more useful. I suppose a gun may help you if you live in an area where they’re releasing criminals and refusing to send cops to crime scenes.

There have always been big buyers on the right. Some are profiteers. Some are irrational hoarders. Some are preppers. Some are just getting ready for the banning of lead and our leftist future without easy access to guns. Then there are people like me who like to buy ammunition in bulk to save money.

Things continue to go well here. Life is easy. I’ve made lots of ammunition. I must sound like a scared pandemic prepper, but I was already at work before the hysteria started. I think my Hornady Lock-n-Load AP press is finally working correctly.

This press is like a Chinese lathe. Basically, there is nothing wrong with it, but the factory didn’t finish manufacturing it. It came with a lot of rough edges. They say a Chinese machine tool is really a kit. When it arrives, it may be unusable, but after considerable work and study, it will do just fine. Same thing with the Hornady press.

Here’s something that plagued me. The press refused to prime brass. Every so often, a shell would go through with no primer. This allowed powder to leak out onto the press. As a result, the press’s column was generally coated with grey residue, and I had problems with gummy crushed powder clogging things up.

It turned out the base plate the shell plate sits on was too thin. I’m only writing about this in case some Googler has the same problem. The spring-loaded punch that seats primers screws into the base plate. The top of the punch should be level with the top of the plate or slightly lower. My punch protruded through the plate. The primers are loaded by a slide that moves back and forth over the punch, so because the punch protruded, it caught the slide and prevented primers from loading.

The simple answer was to Dremel material off the bottom of the slide so it could pass over the punch.

It was annoying to find that this problem existed, because manufacturing a flat piece of steel to a desired thickness is a very easy task for a machinist. There is no excuse for getting it wrong and then passing the product on to a consumer. If the base plate were 20 thousandths thicker, the primers would always have loaded correctly.

I know that was boring, but someone on the Internet will eventually need the information.

I’m expecting 3,000 more rounds of .22 LR to arrive today. This will bring me up to over 9,000 Mini-mags. It’s not enough for a lifetime, but it’s enough to sit back on while I wait for prices to drop so I can accumulate a final stockpile at relatively low prices. As I’ve said earlier, I would have left it for other people to buy, but they were ignoring it, so too bad.

I have to make defensive ammo for the 10mm pistols. I’m not really that interested in self-defense these days, but I am interested in tools, guns, reloading, and shooting, so I want to do things right. I’m planning to load 180-grain Hornady Gold Dots to about 1200-1250 fps. That ought to be fine.

I don’t want to kill you, but I do want to be able to kill you. Not because I like killing people, but because I don’t like getting involved with firearms and then making bad ammunition choices. I guess I’m like an old lady who puts plastic covers on furniture she never lets anyone sit on. Shooting people isn’t the point. I just enjoy learning about guns and ammo and trying to do things well. The fact that I don’t want to use my carry gun doesn’t mean I don’t want it to work correctly.

Ammunition technology keeps improving. The .40 S&W has started to look a lot better. You can get very good performance with the same Gold Dots, with a little less recoil and weight. Makes me wonder if buying another 10mm was the right idea, but I know it will work. I can get 1200 fps from the 10mm, compared to maybe 1100 from the .40, without over-driving the 10mm. That can’t be a bad thing. I still think .45 ACP is a great option.

If I didn’t make my own ammunition, I wouldn’t go near the 10mm. Hot factory ammo is just too overpriced.

I’m enjoying life and continuing to improve. I don’t know God’s plans for me, but I am content to putter around and have fun until I find out.

If You Think You Died From the Flu Last Year, I Have Good News

Hey, if you still think COVID-19 death figures are reliable, as I once did, check out this neat quote from the CDC, along with a link to prove it’s real.

In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.” In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgement in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely. However, please note that testing for COVID–19 should be conducted whenever possible.

Here is your link.

Given the fact that doctors lean left and that diagnoses attract government money for hospitals, how much do you trust this policy?

It’s also important to note that a person who would not have died but for underlying conditions will be included in “coronavirus-related” deaths. To the public, that means “caused by coronavirus,” but it’s not the same thing. If you weigh 400 pounds and you’ve smoked all your life, the same flu virus that makes a kid sick for three days has a great chance of putting you in your grave.

If a diabetic smoker who can’t fit in a normal car dies after getting COVID-19, it doesn’t mean COVID-19 is a severe illness. It means all illnesses are severe to morbidly obese diabetic smokers. An ingrown toenail can lead to amputation and death.

Talking sense doesn’t work well when people are supernaturally deceived, but I plan to do it anyway.

I just saw an article from the National Review, of all sources, saying coronavirus was not like the flu. It said coronavirus had killed 42,000 Americans in one month and that the CDC said the flu had only killed something like 35,000 last season.

First of all, when I checked the CDC figures for the first time, I saw 80,000 flu deaths, not 35,000. Other people are saying the same thing and claiming the CDC is altering its site.

Second, the flu also kills many people in a short time. A flu graph has a sharp peak over a couple of months. Both diseases will kill a lot of people over a few weeks and then dissipate. COVID-19 is already going away.

Saying coronavirus kills 42,000 Americans per month is like watching a December snowstorm and screaming, “IN JULY IT WILL BE A HUNDRED FEET DEEP!!!!”

It just doesn’t work that way.

In March, the same writer could have said coronavirus was no problem because it killed fewer than 100 Americans in February. It would have made just as much sense.

We should lose something very roughly like 40,000 people in the month following the article-writer’s wacky eruption, and then we should see deaths plummet.

I have to stop reading this garbage. I think I’ll go make a nice toilet paper and hand sanitizer pizza.

Still no major celebrity deaths.

Let’s All Play Trivial Pursuit on Zoom

The coronavirus curve looked really good last night. It continues to oscillate, but if you do what math people do, more or less, and draw a line through it to approximate its basic direction, you will see that it points downward.

This is somewhat startling, because testing is ramping up. Yesterday, I read that a test of Los Angeles jails revealed 200,000 cases, generally asymptomatic. Did I read that right? That’s a lot of cases. If testing is getting better and more widespread, and the curve is still dropping, then things are even better than they seem.

Maybe one of the upward spikes was assisted by this event.

The press is still deluded. I saw an article claiming Kentucky cases had spiked two days after anti-lockdown rallies. Ridiculous. Coronavirus has an incubation period longer than two days. There is no connection. Of course, whoever wrote the article didn’t point this out. He probably didn’t know it. It’s probably some snowflaky millennial who maxed out with Algebra I and has to call his mom to change a flat tire.

It’s very unfortunate that journalists are so…I will go with “unintelligent,” since it’s not a term created in order to insult. I will steer away from harsher terms. It’s a pity there is nothing like an LSAT for journalists. It would be a First Amendment problem, but think how much better life would be while it was going through the courts.

I applied my prediction equation last night, to see how it was doing. Wonderful result. The equation’s prediction was about 47% high. The reported numbers adhered very strictly to an exponential equation for weeks, and that’s over with. A figure of +47% is still remarkably accurate, but it does indicate that the disease is petering out. Not that you need it, because official sources say the same thing.

People want to go back to work in order to save the economy, but will it work? No. I think it will be very helpful, but it won’t be anything like a true recovery. Americans have been conditioned to believe the following falsehoods:

1. COVID-19 is extremely contagious.
2. COVID-19 is a severe disease.
3. COVID-19 is very dangerous for all demographics.

Taken together, 1 and 2 are not true. Number 3 is not even close to true. The disparate impact of COVD-19 is one of its remarkable features.

Regarding contagion, either the disease is not very contagious, or it is generally extremely mild, or both. If it were contagious and severe, we would have something like a billion known cases, as we do with the flu, every year. If it’s very contagious, it is generally extremely mild, because severe cases are obvious, and we only know of about 2.7 million cases. As for severity, we know how severe it ISN’T, because we have seen 2.7 million purported cases, and something like 85% were mild or asymptomatic. That puts an upper limit on the average severity. We don’t have a lower limit, but the Los Angeles testing suggests the actual infection numbers may be very, very high, and that would prove the disease is generally barely perceptible.

As for COVID-19 being very dangerous for all demographics, we already know this isn’t true. If you’re under 50 and healthy, even if you get a symptomatic case, you’re very unlikely to get really sick or die. If you’re considerably younger, the odds are worse than those of going to Las Vegas with 20 dollars, playing roulette, and driving home in a Bentley.

Well, maybe not that much worse. But a lot worse.

There probably billions of young, healthy people who think they’re facing a high risk of severe illness if they go back to work or mingle with other people in public, when in reality, they’re much more likely to die from the flu or in a car wreck.

My guess is that this belief will continue to kill restaurants and other businesses involving gatherings for at least 6 months. And it will be hard on people like performers, ticket agents, event organizers, venue owners, mall owners, and so on. If you’re a musician, your parents were right. Get a haircut and apply at Walmart. On the plus side, touring makes a lot of money for people who are very corrosive to our morals, so maybe rappers and rock stars will be less powerful and annoying. Many famous performers don’t make much money from royalties. Imagine a future with less Lady Gaga. Nice.

Plagues really scare people. Even when they’re not plagues.

By the way, this epidemic will be the final blow to many familiar chains and businesses. It’s a big step in the direction of a future where a huge portion of the things we need have to be bought electronically. Daddy Beast likes.

Will the pandemic come back? I’ve been thinking about it. Here is my answer: no.

How can I say that? The “experts” say it will always be with us. The explanation is simple.

From now on, we are going to test like crazy. Everyone who so much as coughs will be tested. Big Sister will work hard to gather data, and what will she do when a local outbreak occurs? She will put the boot on it, fast and hard.

COVID-19 can’t just appear everywhere, all at once. It has to start in identifiable, discrete locations. We can address that, and we will. Any place where a case is detected will be locked down. Patients will be quarantined. It will be much harder for the disease to spread next time.

We will also have a vaccine pretty soon, and believe me, we will take it. The pressure will be overwhelming. Even anti-vaxxers may be forced to submit. There may be arrests for people who refuse, even though no one cares if you get a flu vaccine. The flu just isn’t glamorous. Tom Hanks didn’t get it.

I think COVID-19 will pop up here and there, and it won’t get much traction. But the news will still cause hoarding, so buy stock in Georgia Pacific. They make toilet paper. Still the only known cure.

Maybe when people realize the flu was worse, they’ll force us to be vaccinated for that, too. The implications are disturbing. Auntie Sam may be extremely powerful and personal next year.

I wonder about our current status as rights-deprived subjects. Will that continue? Leftists will argue for it, because they always do. They have always been against any civil right not protecting sexual sin, the murder of the unborn, crime, obscenity, or recreational drug use. They love gun control, restraint of free speech that isn’t obscene, the forced purchasing of insurance, over-regulation of commerce, and all sorts of other dangerous infringements.

They routinely advocate for the restriction of political speech, which is the type of speech the First Amendment was written to protect. It wasn’t written for Hugh Hefner, who surely regrets what he did in life.

It’s bizarre how they characterize themselves as proponents of freedom, because they adore government and cede their rights to it eagerly in order to obtain a false sense of security.

Leftists may not realize it, but most would be happy to live in government-financed cages, eating Soylent Green, as long as they got to sin all they wanted and didn’t have to pay for medical care.

We already have those cages. They’re called “housing projects” and “rent-controlled apartments.”

The idea that human beings love liberty is a myth. Generally, we love security, and we will debase ourselves all day every day to get it. People who really love liberty are anomalous. It’s remarkable that there are so many of us in America. It’s probably not sustainable. The pet hamster mindset tends to prevail when times get hard.

We’re looking at a scenario in which we have to balance our natural cowardice and love of security against our knowledge that we will be poor if we aren’t free. I hope the desire for a decent lifestyle will prevail, because it will tend to preserve our freedom.

If you want to be lifted above this mess, get to know God. Pray in tongues every day. Repent. Spend time with him. Let him change you. Your happiness and success depend on your relationship with God, not on what happens around you. Think about Daniel in the lions’ den. Think about Noah. Think about Jesus, walking away unseen in the midst of a crowd of friends, relatives, and neighbors who were trying to throw him off a cliff.

Think about Passover.

The fact that most Christians have lived in defeat for centuries doesn’t mean Christianity doesn’t work. Think of the horrible doctrine that held them down. You don’t have to believe that garbage.

I should talk about masks. The “experts” keep leading us in circles. They said masks didn’t help, perhaps in order to discourage sales so they could funnel them to care providers. Now they’re saying they do help, and in some places, you have to wear one or you can be kept out.

I believed the “no work” line, except that I thought a mask might help a person not to touch his face, and I thought it would reduce sprays of things like snot and droplets. Now the consensus, which seems somewhat more sound this time, is that masks are helpful. So I think I was mistaken.

I can get quality masks from my friend Mike, but I think they should go to people who really need them. Like people who are financing their retirements by selling them for a hundred bucks each.

In other news, I’m afraid I turned my reloading press into a bomb.

I was running my Hornady Lock-n-Load AP some years ago when I noticed that the plastic restraint on top of the primer tube was not reliable. It’s supposed to hold the tube and primers in place. It kept coming loose. I blamed Hornady, and I believe I was correct, but recent research suggests I can make the plastic cap work if I do little things to fix the press’s fit and finish.

Anyway, I turned on the lathe and made myself an aluminum primer tube cap. I’ll show you a photo. It’s basically a counterbored tube with two set screws to fasten it to the primer tube. I don’t use the lower screw. It’s not needed. The cap does a great job of keeping things together.

The primer tube on this press is a skinny aluminum tube, and there is a steel outer tube around it. I thought the steel tube was there to hold it up. This is true, but yesterday I learned that it’s also a shield. On very rare occasions, primers inside tubes have exploded.

The force of a primer explosion is small, but you can put 100 primers in a tube, one on top of the other. They can set each other off, and then you have a bigger explosion. How much bigger? I don’t know. Not big enough to blow a shield apart. The gas exits upward.

Problem: my cap is firmly attached to the shield, and it only has one small hole through which gas can escape. Also, it’s heavier than the stock device. What happens if the primers blow up? Will the cap’s restriction force the exploding gases to blow the shield open? I would not like that. It would be bad, and because the shield is next to a big container of powder, it could lead to even worse things.

Now I see why Hornady gives you a rubber cap to cover the top of the powder measure.

It pains me to give up my beautiful aluminum cap, but I may do it. And I’m going to wear eye protection from now on. And I’ll put a fire extinguisher in the gun room. What a pain.

I’ve had a few issues since beginning to reload again. I found a great series of videos from a guy who really knows how to set this press up. They’re a bit long-winded, but I’m going to watch all of them. You might like them, too.

Hornady provides an inadequate manual along with the press, and there is no way you can make it run using only this tiny amount of information. You need more sources.

I’m thinking that in the future, I will do my best to manufacture all of my own ammunition. I won’t do rimfire because I can’t. I may or may not exclude shotgun shells, because I don’t use many. Not sure. But I want to make my own pistol and rifle centerfire ammo. I can make exactly what I want, and in many cases it will be a lot cheaper than factory stuff. In the case of all-lead bullets, I will even be able to make the projectiles themselves, and they will cost almost nothing.

They’re going to take factory lead ammo and bullets away from us before too long, so if you want to keep shooting lead, you’ll want some bullet molds. Either than or buy bullets this year.

I probably have 30 pounds of lead. I saved some downrigger weights from my dad’s boat. It’s not hard to get free or cheap lead from other sources.

One benefit of reloading is that when people panic, factory ammo sells out faster than reloading components.

I’m hoping supplies of everything will open up during May, and then I can start laying things in. If I have to spend a couple of thousand dollars, so what? It’s important. It’s better than paying for car and home insurance. I’ll have something permanent I can keep.

I’m not one of those nuts who wants a pile of lead so he can shoot it out with the feds when the familiar substance hits the fan, but I don’t want to be an 80-year-old man who polishes his empty guns and misses the days when he could actually shoot them.

I hope to crank out maybe 200 rounds of target 10mm today, and I’ll also create an ample number of defensive rounds. I may as well accept the fact that I’ll need more 10mm brass. You have to practice with your carry gun.

I don’t know if 10mm was the best choice, because .45 ACP is very, very good, and it’s easier to shoot. I can always get a Glock in .45 if I change my mind. Maybe I should look for an alternative brand which is just as good or better. Glocks are wonderful tools, but carrying one is like marrying a homely woman who makes great pies and changes her own oil.

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I don’t know where my brain was this morning. I read a story about a big number of positive COVID-19 tests in L.A. County jails, and, later, I posted what I thought I remembered. I said 200,000 inmates had tested positive.

I always write and then go back and check to see if anything I wrote was incorrect, but somehow that system failed to engage today, as did common sense. As bad as L.A. is, there is no way it could have 200,000 inmates (unless you consider all Californians inmates), let alone 200,000 who have coronavirus.

I must have been distracted. It’s amazing that I could have written something that stupid and then let it make it to the blog. Thankfully, a reader has used a comment to point the problem out.

My best guess is that I saw a story which mentioned the jail test in addition to the fact that 200,000 people go in and out of jails nationwide every week. Either that, or I need to stop drinking so much hand sanitizer.

Anyway, I hope the rest of what I wrote was reasonably lucid. I will check.

Fluffy Herald of Relief Appears

I have earth-shaking news. Real American toilet paper is available from Amazon. I don’t mean weird Chinese paper which is somehow puffed up so it takes three rolls to do the job of one real roll. I mean actual American toilet paper. I saw Angel Soft in the listings, and it’s in stock. Other brands must be on the way.

Surely the clouds have parted.

I thought this would happen two weeks ago. It did happen, though, and that’s the main thing. America’s garages and spare rooms can only hold so much toilet paper. People couldn’t keep buying huge quantities forever. Eventually, we had to see a change.

Now what are the hoarders going to do with their house-choking stashes? Check Craigslist next month.

I have a cousin in the Chicago area, and she says she’s down to two rolls. Apparently, the good-natured midwestern folk of Chicago have treated each other very badly during the last month or two. She says they cleaned stores out. Things many Americans were able to buy easily were not available there.

I’ve heard people say Chicagoans are wonderful, friendly, helpful people. Nothing like New Yorkers.

Whatever. The proof is in the pudding.

The other day I heard a quote about hard times. I can’t find it. Paraphrasal: hard times don’t change a man; they reveal him. That’s what I have to say about Chicago’s hoarders, as well as all other hoarders. There is no point in virtue-signaling after you’ve been exposed. Makes you look worse.

The hoarders here are completely nuts. If you go to one store, you’ll find it completely stripped of one type of item, but if you go to another, you’ll see that item for sale, along with things you couldn’t find at the first store. Example: my local Winn-Dixie had a run on potatoes, but a Publix a few miles away had plenty. Two days ago, the only dish powder I could find at Publix cost $14 for 37 loads, so about 38 cents per load. It was that weird encapsulated kind. Anyone who buys that is begging for poverty. I drove a mile to Walmart and found I could get almost whatever I wanted. I bought two boxes of the store brand, which is very cheap and works just as well as Cascade. Paid about half what the fancy stuff cost. I would guess you use half an ounce per load, so 300 loads at 2.58 cents per load. What drives a person to buy pods? It’s madness.

Walmart had paper towels, too. I bought two rolls, just for the thrill. The beef had been raided (unlike Publix and Winn-Dixie), but they had a magnificent, highly marbled cowboy rib eye for a good price, so I jumped on that. It was excellent.

If there were any sense to the hoarding, every store would lack the same things. And no, it’s not a supply thing. It’s not like Publix has a secret potato farm surrounded by guard towers. Hoarder obsessions vary depending on location.

I do not read newspapers, but several times a week, I try to go to the local paper’s website to see if I’m under martial law or anything. I check the COVID-19 numbers. It’s really creeping here. The known total for the county is 121, or about one in 2500. We’re never going to get a major epidemic among the general population. That’s my prediction, anyway. It may find its way into senior facilities, but if we’re at 1/2500 as of April 19, I don’t see us ever ending up like New York.

Speaking of New York, there are a lot of Northerners who live here during the winter, and they’re gone, presumably reducing the travel between here and the north. We had a high percentage of travel-related cases. If you think about it, epidemics can only spread to new areas through travel-related cases.

The median age of the cases here is 50, and it’s probably close to the average, too. Is the virus hitting older people more often? Could be, but it may also be that because most cases are mild or asymptomatic, the people who are reporting their illness are generally those who don’t do as well as the average victim. That would lead to over-reporting of old people, smokers, diabetics, and fat people.

This is not a healthy county. Smoking is everywhere, and the people eat garbage. Obesity almost seems fashionable. Add these factors to the large number of seniors here, and you have a bomb waiting to go off. But it hasn’t and probably won’t.

I have to hand it to the people who run the ALF’s. I know these places are not as clean as typical homes, but someone here must be doing something right. We don’t have a single ALF death cluster, but Massachusetts is jam-packed with them, to the point where they overwhelm statistics for everyone else. Massachusetts has had a bona fide ALF catastrophe. They must be doing very little to protect the elderly.

I would have expected worse performance here.

Apart from having a low population density, I don’t know why we’re doing well. Traffic here is just about normal. It’s not like we’re imprisoned, the way people are in other places. There is still a lot of mingling. I’m considering looking into a haircut next week. The ponytail look is not for me. The Seventies are over, and we should do all we can to put a stake in their heart.

The Johns Hopkins USA graph was still on a plateau last night, which is the last time it was updated. The graph was turning downward again. A plateau is good. We can’t have a true disaster if the transmission rate is sufficiently low.

I wonder how my Ebay bench grinder poverty index is doing. Last time I looked, there were 44 items listed under “Baldor bench grinder.” Let’s see.

It’s down to 41! We’ll see what it looks like after a week or so. Still higher than it was before the epidemic.

Still not ONE major celebrity death.

I suppose I should talk about the supernatural approach to epidemics, since it’s the most important approach.

We got here by neglecting the supernatural, and we should focus on the supernatural to get out.

Disease comes from sin and poor relationships with God. Idolatry, including atheism, is a major cause. Epidemics come to countries where not enough people are repenting and praying. They’re not random things that happen to “good people.” Calling yourself good is actually a great way to invite disaster. The word says God is near to them that are of a broken heart and saves such as be of a contrite spirit, and it says he fights the proud.

The word also says God will heal a country if his people will pray. It doesn’t say, “if everyone in the country will pray.” It says “my people.” God was willing to spare Sodom for 10 righteous people, but he couldn’t find that many.

We should be attacking the epidemic with prayer and repentance. Those of us who are already trying to live God’s way should be praying for revival and repentance, not just an end to the epidemic. Of course, we will be attacked for saying sin is in any way involved in epidemics, even though everyone knows how VD works. Sin even contributes to non-infectious diseases like cirrhosis, lung cancer, COPD, and obesity-related illnesses. The connection between sin and disease should be obvious even to atheists.

Most Christians don’t bless or curse. I guess they don’t know they can. You can speak defeat to problems. You can speak help to people. Isaac did it. Balaam did it. Peter did it. Jesus did it. We should be doing these things.

We should be saying, “I speak defeat to the spirits and people contributing the panic and selfishness.” “I speak defeat to the spirits that spread the disease.” “I speak defeat to the hoarders and the spirits they serve.” “I speak defeat to Satan in his effort to use this disease to turn people into servants of the Beast.” “I speak victory to God’s servants and those who speak the truth about the epidemic.”

Even jihadis know curses and blessings matter. They gather in groups and curse the USA and Israel. Somehow, we don’t think our words have power.

I pray for the epidemic to end, and I also pray for God to defeat the spirits and people who are using it to train people for Satan. I ask God to destroy this plan, and I ask him to spread revival and repentance. I ask him to free people from crooked pastors and dependence on churches, and I ask him to spread true Christianity like a disease, outside of church, from person to person, so people will know him personally, as they are supposed to. I ask him to take Satan’s training exercise away and make it his own.

The Bible mentions several epidemics. Were any NOT caused by sin?

Let’s see.

The Egyptian plagues were caused by sin, and two were bodily afflictions. The hemorrhoid plague in Gaza was caused by sin. The Revelation plagues will be caused by sin. A plague killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night, and it was because they were against God. A plague struck Israel because of David’s sin.

It’s strange that so many Christians think an epidemic is an unjust attack on an innocent society. Where, exactly, is this innocent society? Is it America, which has killed at least 60,000,000 unborn babies since Roe v. Wade? Is it Israel, which has generally rejected Jesus? Is it China, which leads the world in abortion and infanticide?

What does the Bible say about protection from plagues? It says that if you dwell in the secret place of the most high, you shall not fear for the pestilence that walks in darkness. It says that if you make God your refuge, no plague shall come near your dwelling. It says the Hebrews were spared the plague on the firstborn because they obeyed God.

Sometimes famines are epidemics. They can be caused by crop diseases. The Bible says famine comes from curses related to disobedience.

It sure seems like plagues are connected to our attitudes toward God.

If the pandemic is an end-time thing, it will happen again. It may not come as a coronavirus epidemic, but some other global disaster will hit, and it will be followed by others, because the end will be a series of birth pangs. They will precede the emergence of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus Christ. Labor pains get more frequent and more intense, so if you don’t like COVID-19, you will really hate what comes later. It’s time to come inside.

Paul Harrell Would Slap Me

I’m going to tell on myself.

I cranked out a bunch of 10mm rounds today, and then I decided to shoot a few and see if they blew my hand off. I took the Glock 29 and the new Glock 20 to the pasture. I had 11 Hornady factory rounds. I shot those from the new gun because shooting reloads would void the warranty. I don’t care about voiding the warranty on the old gun, because I know it was okay from the factory. The major parts have no defects. Whatever goes wrong from here on out, I can probably fix. If it turned out the new gun had a giant crack in the frame or a ringed barrel or something, I would want to find out while I still had a warranty.

Glock is a real pain about warranties. They void you if you shoot reloads, which seems ridiculous. I guess most people lie, but I prefer not to.

The Hornady rounds shot fine, but three of the first 11 handloaded rounds failed to fire because of light primer strikes.

That’s a pretty high ratio of duds to viable rounds.

The second magazine only had one dud. That told me the cartridges were probably okay. I rounded up the cartridges that failed, ran them through the gun again, and they fired.

My conclusion? Somebody let lint gum up his firing pin.

I can’t even remember the last time I cleaned the gun. I never shoot it. Evidently, Glocks will suck up lint and become useless. It may be because I have an Uncle Mike’s pocket holster, which sheds little fibers until it’s broken in.

Man, it would have been unpleasant if this had happened with my carry ammo on a bad day. “RELAX, LADY, I’LL SAVE YOU!” “Click.” “SORRY! BEST OF LUCK! WORK THE JAB!”

I brought the gun inside, and for the first time since I’ve owned it, I disassembled the slide. It only takes a second. I went through it with swabs and alcohol, among other things. I went online and ordered 220 pipe cleaners to ream out the deep holes in the slide. I cleaned everything with Powder Blast, which is brutal, and I also used Hornady One Shot. I used a tiny bit of Mobil 28 grease on the slide when I reassembled it.

They say you should not lubricate anything on a Glock but the slide, and they recommend oil, but I can’t resist trying out my super-duper Mobil 28 grease in the special made-for-gunsmithing skinny syringe. Since I’m the one who has to clean it, I figure I’ll do what I want.

I was not happy with the way the gun acted when I put it back together. It has a Lasermax guide rod laser, which I never should have bought. The laser replaces the guide rod and spring, and it doesn’t feel great. Also, you have to install a Lasermax slide lock, which can actually fall out. And the batteries die fast, unlike those in a Crimson Trace.

I decided to reinstall the original rod and spring. Then I got them out and noticed they had separated from each other. This is something that happens with Glocks, but this was the first time I had seen it happen to a spring that wasn’t used. The manufacturer, unbelievably, considers the guide rod assembly a disposable part, so they don’t make them very well, and they come apart. This would be fine if you could predict when it would happen, but you can’t. It looks like my original assembly fell apart under the stress of sitting in a box in a closet.

This is at least the second Glock spring failure I’ve had.

I can’t deal with this. Personal safety is important, even to a guy who doesn’t clean his guns. I’m getting a Wolff spring and rod, and I will never buy them from Glock again. As if I planned to. I’m also getting a Crimson Trace.

The new Glock has a horrendous trigger. I don’t know why it would be different from the old ones. That will have to be fixed.

The ammo appears to be fine. It shoots very accurately, and it cycles when you actually hit the primer correctly.

I’m getting a few boxes of factory ammo for the new gun. I’ll shoot it up, and if nothing breaks, I’ll go ahead and void the warranty. I’m not going to be stuck with factory defensive rounds for $45 per box just so I can have a warranty.

The funny thing is that what happened to me today has happened in a number of dreams. I pointed my gun at someone, pulled the trigger, and got nothing. It’s as though God were trying to warn me about my gun. But I’ve always assumed those dreams were about cleaning up my act so I would have authority to cast out spirits.

Cleaning your carry gun really is important. I repent.

Elegance Isn’t Everything

The makeshift Rockwell Jawhorse reloading bench is up and running, and it’s excellent. I have more confidence in it than I would in something manufactured for the purpose.

A while back, I blogged about creating this thing. I had a Jawhorse. I needed an indoor bench. I didn’t want to cut up my nice oak benches. I grabbed some scrap wood and threw together a platform I could clamp in the Jawhorse.

Today I got the press running, and I’ve been making 10mm cartridges. The Jawhorse is a hit. It’s steadier than my homemade multi-hundred-pound wooden workbench.

I highly recommend this for anyone who has a Jawhorse and doesn’t want to have a permanent bench.

Harbor Freight has a coupon for their Jawhorse copy, the Franklin clamping station, taking it from $130 to $100: LINK.

I can remove the press and pop the platform out of the Jawhorse in a couple of minutes, so storage is not a problem. The Jawhorse doesn’t mar the floor. The long wooden top of the platform is a great place to put bullets and casings, and you can also screw a piece of plywood, an aluminum baking sheet, or some kind of tray to the wood, giving you a nice big work area. I used the wood for banging a bullet puller. Worked fine.

I managed to crank out 77 rounds of target ammo using old brass. Now I have to break into my stash of new Starline. Not sure I bought enough. I thought 500 cases would be plenty, but I have more bullets than that.

I was going to make defensive rounds first, but it turned out the press was more nearly ready for a target load, so I went with it.

Now I have to decide: do I shoot this stuff in my new Glock right away, terminating the warranty, or do I test it with some wimpy factory ammo? I guess I should see if I have any.

Any Demographic that Actually Needs “No Spitting” Signs Should Expect Problems

It’s a banner day. I’m blogging from the gun room instead of the upstairs Chamber of Manliness.

Yesterday I set up a second set of Home Depot (only the finest) shelves, and I got the vast majority of my junk off the floor. I can walk in and out without tripping. My monitor is connected to a laptop, so it’s running. I have a nice comfy overpriced ergonomic chair. I’m within 20 feet of the refrigerator. It’s heaven.

I have Roku on the TV, so I can watch Youtube and Amazon Prime without using a browser.

Are you tired of the horrifyingly inappropriate “At Home Together” Roku home screen? Roku forces it on people, to remind them that a company that helps people watch Keeping up With the Kardashians is entitled to tell customers they can’t leave their houses. I kept getting rid of this theme, and it kept coming back. I finally found that if you go to the theme menu and select the customizing option, you can disable Big Sister themejacking. You’re welcome. Maybe I can find an AR-15-related theme, or one about whale-meat recipes.

I’m actually considering NOT blogging about coronavirus today. It’s yesterday’s news, unless you live in a place like New York. I don’t mean nothing is happening. Just that there isn’t a lot to say.

I talked to my cousin yesterday about the dirty habits of Northeasterners, which must surely be contributing to the epidemic. She started telling me how disgusted she got when she saw people sharing drinks and eating from each other’s plates. She told me about turning down things friends from the Northeast handed out at ball games. She said she watched them like a hawk. She was right there with me. It’s strange how people from the Northeast think germs are imaginary.

I just checked, and New York City is a major VD hub. Big surprise.

I have to say that I wonder what life will be like now that the lockdowns are about to be forced out of action. Will people flock to malls and restaurants? Will they pack places like T.G.I. Friday’s? I’ll bet they don’t. I’ll bet in-person commerce will still be pretty subdued. But at least we’ll have a choice.

By the way, I was wrong about the flu being as bad as coronavirus. It’s worse. I checked again, and they think the flu may have killed as many as 60,000 Americans this season. That’s on top of the 80,000 we lost last year. Remember all the mass graves and the economic hysteria? Me neither.

Coronavirus is on track for somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. Hasn’t caught up with the flu yet.

Last night, I decided I was going to make 10mm ammunition. That didn’t work out. I set up my powder measure, and when I started weighing charges, they went like this: 9.3, 9.4, 9.7, 10.0…something was wrong.

Could it have had anything to do with the fact that I left the powder measure in the workshop for several years, where it rusted? Could it be in any way related to the fact that I had never, ever cleaned it?

I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

Cleaning a powder measure is not all that easy. I had already cleaned rust off the outside. I did that a few days ago, using the buffer. The inside was more of a challenge. I came up with a solution. I remembered that I had a big gun-cleaning kit with wire brushes of various sizes. I stuck brushes in a drill and reamed out the hollow parts of the powder measure.

I also noticed that powder was sticking to parts that were not rusted. I blame Hornady One Shot gun cleaner for this. It’s a phenomenal gun cleaner and dry lube. Hornady says to spray the insides of powder measures with it. Hasn’t worked for me. When I used it, powder stuck much worse. I think it leaves a residue powder likes.

I had to clean everything out with window cleaner and alcohol.

When I got this thing years ago, I broke it. Hornady said to spray the inside with One Shot, but this was impossible. The plastic hopper tube is about 8″ long, and you have to spray through it to get One Shot into the metal parts from above. I figured it must have been removable, so I tried to unscrew it. It popped out of the metal part. Hornady had pressed it in.

Nice.

Ever since then, I’ve held it in place with tape. I now think this is the smart way to go. If you ever need to clean your powder measure, it will be hard with the plastic in place. By fastening it with black electrician’s tape, I made it removable.

But thousands of people have used these things successfully without breaking them and putting tape on them, so I may be totally wrong.

It was a mistake following Hornady’s instructions. That, I’m sure of. Maybe the insides of the measure shouldn’t be lubed at all, or maybe a good-quality spray silicone is the best answer. I could also hit it with brake cleaner first. Some people pour graphite powder through them before using them.

Before long, I’m going to toss some Accurate No. 7 in there and weigh some charges. Hoping for the best. I don’t see any parts that could be considered ruined, so I don’t think a new powder measure is the answer.

Powder measures that were made more recently than mine come with internal baffles that supposedly make powder flow better. I have not been able to find them sold separately. I don’t know if they work.

I finally ordered a Powder Cop, which is a little device that gives you some warning when you fill a case too much or too little. I don’t plan to wait for it, because you can avoid problems simply by being careful. I think it’s a good buy, though. Blowing guns up in your hand is bad.

My plan is to make a whole lot of lead 10mm rounds for practice. After that, I’ll think about defense rounds, which would require me to change the settings on the press. I overbought defensive bullets. I think I have around 500. I believe I could go the rest of my life on that amount, including a little practice.

When 10mm is done, it will be time for .45 ACP. Then .38 Super.

I better start weighing charges. These cartridges aren’t going to create themselves.

They Hear Their Master’s Voice

It looks like the coronavirus graph for the US is struggling with a plateau. This is my best guess. The steady upward progress we saw in earlier weeks is over, but the rate is oscillating.

Good enough. Even the government is acknowledging that things are winding down, so I’m satisfied.

Yesterday, I made an essential trip to an essential store. I hit Harbor Freight and bought a TV mount for the gun room. Now I have a TV/monitor on the wall, and I no longer have a TV on the floor.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the mounting. I used a stud finder to locate good places to put the two screws that hold the TV. I got positive results, and when I drilled, I didn’t pop through drywall and then hit air. On the other hand, I didn’t get any sawdust. It’s like I drilled into plastic. The TV isn’t coming loose, so I’m happy.

I moved my dad’s old $1400 office chair into the gun room. In my opinion, it’s really a $300 chair that got a lot of help from insurance. I went with him to buy it, years ago. We went to Relax the Back, a chain that specializes in furniture covered by medical insurance. His back had been bothering him. He had to pay for it. I think that if the manufacturer and the store hadn’t been using to suckling on the insurance teat, the chair would have been much, much cheaper. It’s not significantly more expensive to make than a chair from Office Depot.

Whenever loans and insurance get involved, prices go up, as anyone who has sent a kid to college or paid for medical care can tell you. It’s sad, because responsible people who pay cash and cover their own costs get taken to the cleaners while irresponsible people who rely on others get big breaks.

After my dad became demented, Asians started calling him, trying to sell him special belts for his back. These things don’t work. It probably costs ten bucks to make one, and they charge Medicare $1200. A famous huckster who calls himself Dr. Ho sells one on TV. If you were wondering where your tax dollars were going, now you know. I’m sure it will make you feel better about giving half your income to the government. Dr. Ho really appreciates it. He probably needs a back belt to help him lift your money.

He ought to be in prison, but this is how the world works.

Today I’m putting more shelves in the gun room. I have to clear the floor. I ordered shelves yesterday from the Home Depot site, and they didn’t clear the order until the store was closed. I suppose the curbside pickup policy is slowing them down.

One reason I need more shelves is that I broke down and bought 3,000 more rounds of .22 ammo. I was going to quit, because I thought other people needed a chance. But no one was answering the ad. I figured it was fine for me to buy more if no one else had the good sense to take it.

The ammo panic is teaching people to shoot odd calibers. The panic patrol is stocking up on common things like 9mm, .22 LR, and .40. Supplies are tight, but I can get all the .204 Ruger and .17 HMR I want. I haven’t checked .38 Super. Let’s see. Yes, it’s available. Some types are out of stock at Midway USA, but others are not.

I got a .38 Super pistol because I thought it was cool, not because I wanted to shoot burglars with it. It’s a great defensive round, though. The FBI used to use it to get through the heavy steel of old car bodies. Special Agent Earl Hamer carried one when he and his crew thoroughly ventilated Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

Maybe this is the time for people to start carrying .357 SIG, a caliber experts refer to as “useless.” It approximates .40 S&W performance, for only twice the price. Maybe shelves are full of .357 SIG rounds no one wants. There is also a weird .45 ACP variant out there.

Harbor Freight has a doorman now, like Studio 54. I had to stand in line outside, hovering over my social-distancing decal, hoping to be chosen. I tipped him $50 and asked for a table near the band. Then I found out he was letting everyone in eventually. And he wasn’t even selling molly.

I actually cautioned a guy who got too close to me. I like social distancing. I don’t think I’ll get COVID-19, but the disease does exist, and there is a much bigger chance that I’ll get the flu. Why not stand 6 feet apart when it’s not inconvenient? It’s a good thing to do even when there is no virus panic. It’s good manners.

If you’re a man, you should be used to social distancing in stores. Men in their thirties and forties have problems with strange women chasing them at the grocery and other stores, and it can train us to maintain space barriers. Women’s magazines, which are full of heinous advice provided by homosexual men and single women who will never be married, tell women this is a great way to land a husband.

I always hated it. I wasn’t going to ask a strange woman out because she kept turning up beside me at Barnes & Noble. It made me wonder what was wrong with them. Of course, when you get old and they stop, it’s not flattering.

Then when you hit 65, they start up again, and they’re rabid and unrelenting. And they’re not attractive young women worried about their biological clocks. Also, it shouldn’t be taken as a compliment. It doesn’t mean you’re attractive or charming. They just want something to lie next to at night, which other women can’t get. Terrifying.

I was in line for the register when a guy took the decal behind mine. He was wearing a carpenter’s dust mask. Don’t get me started. The problem was that he stood in front of his cart, about three inches away from me. I mentioned the decal, and he apologized and moved back. He had moved close to me so he could get a better look at an item I was standing next to. Of course, he would have been next to it himself a minute later, even without the strange decision to increase intimacy. He just thought he’d save time by doing something he clearly thought was dangerous.

My friend Mike lives in New Hampshire and works in Boston, which is a hotspot. He has become militant. He has taken to standing in the middle of aisles and saying, “You’re not going past me. You can try if you want.” He’s a pretty big guy, so he can do that. Probably not the best approach.

I told him about my theory that Northeasterners were getting hit hard because they’re dirty and don’t believe in germs. I thought he might disagree. He said, “I hate them.” That was a little over the top. He gave me a long speech about how rude and narcissistic they are. He is really fed up. He said people up there are ignoring the distancing rules wholesale, while voting for Democrats who are much more likely to impose draconian measures than Republicans. I guess they think having a rule, not obeying it, is what counts.

That’s actually very normal for leftists. Make a rule that’s unsustainable and irrational, and then violate it as a matter of policy while expecting the government to make other people obey.

He says Michigan’s liberal governor won’t let people go outside. Yeah, that’s totally reasonable and science-based. We have all gotten used to the stories of people who gave other people coronavirus from 50 yards away while mowing yards. He says she won’t let people buy anything that isn’t essential, even when visiting a store for a good reason. So if you go to Target to buy canned soup, you can’t get your kids a Monopoly board to keep them from tearing the walls out of your house.

Sounds like a total nutcase, but she’s in charge because people don’t vote with their brains. It makes me dread the emasculating post-Trump future, when her kind rules the nation. Look what they’re capable of. I knew they would be socialists, but I didn’t think they could incarcerate everyone on a whim.

Death, for Christians, is pleasant and rewarding. In this respect, it is different from, and generally preferable to, living under anti-Christian leftist nanny-tyrants.

Mike has 5,000 N95 masks, with more on the way. He ordered them weeks ago for his employees, but he uses them, too. I don’t know what good they will do him, but he has real reasons for taking unusual measures. He has had heart and immune system problems. He offered to send me masks, but I wasn’t interested.

In other news, I saw a neat video from Messianic Rabbi Zev Porat. He works in Israel, reaching out to Jews. He’s from an Orthodox family, and he has helped a number of heavy-duty Orthodox Jews, including rabbis, come to Yeshua.

He spoke about the coronavirus panic, using the word “panic.” He knows what’s happening. The hysteria is from Satan.

He talked about the Hebrew word for panic. He says it’s “panikos.” Pretty creative. It comes from the name of Pan, supposedly the oldest false god. His name means “all” for some reason. I recall being taught that the reason was that he was originally the greatest of the Greek false gods.

Pan looks like our typical depiction of Satan. He’s a man with goat’s horns, a post-90’s chin beard, and a goat’s lower body. Some equate him with Satan.

It’s interesting that the ancient Jews chose to associate panic with a pagan deity.

The word “pandemic” comes from roots meaning something like “all (Pan) people.”

Among pagans, there was a belief that if one woke Pan up from a nap, he might yell and cause livestock or people to stampede. So a panic is really a stampede. Isn’t that perfect? We’re acting like scared cattle. Instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, we look to see what the other cattle are doing, and we do the same. This is why you can’t find toilet paper, which is a product totally unrelated to caring for coronavirus victims.

I’ve been telling people the Beast isn’t just a man or a spirit. It’s the herd of human beings who aren’t led by the Spirit of God.

The other day, while considering the coronavirus hysteria, I thought of a flock of birds flying in random directions as one simply because the birds in front turned this way or that. We’ve all seen this. Human beings are supposed to be smart, but we do the same thing every day. I hate it. I have always hated it. Even when I was a little kid, I could not understand other kids who did and thought as others did, without thinking. I noticed that sometimes they seemed to lose their minds. It was like something else had taken over. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t see it.

When I was in the second grade, I knew a kid named Dave. We were friends. He was a great guy. One day I went up to him after school was out, and when I spoke to him, he puffed out his chest and started barging toward me. He bellowed, saying he was a Gator fan, and he said something or other about how you have to get out of the way for Gator fans or else. I had no idea what he was talking about. He acted like he didn’t know me. I actually asked myself if I had mistaken someone else for Dave. I was seeing the Beast in action. Didn’t know it.

You’re supposed to be the head, not the tail. If you hoarded toilet paper in March, you’re a follower, not a leader. You don’t think. You’re disconnected from God, and you’re displeasing him.

Porat mentions the Banias, which is something I’ve written about. It’s a hole in the side of Baal-Hermon (“lord of the curse”), which is one name for Mount Hermon in the north of Israel. “Banias” means something like “place of Pan.” It’s an Arabic term, and the Arabs don’t have a “P” sound in their language. I suppose it would be “Panias” if they did.

According to the book of Enoch, Baal-Hermon, a snow-capped peak, is the place where Satan (or Semyaza) and a bunch of other angels came down from heaven, took physical form, and agreed to defy God and have sex with women. They exchanged curses binding each other in a pact. This is where the name of the mountain comes from.

These were angels who gave rise to a race of dominant freaks who oppressed mankind, and the flood was sent to clear them off the earth.

It’s not clear to me how Satan could have been cursed after he tempted Adam and then gone on to fall at Mount Hermon, much later. Maybe Satan and Semyaza are different spirits, or maybe the serpent wasn’t the spirit we call Satan. The book of Enoch says the angels who had sex with women tried to get forgiveness by sending Enoch to talk to God, but it certainly looks like the serpent was already damned and would not have bothered trying to get forgiveness. There is an explanation, but I don’t know what it is.

Mt. Hermon is one of three sources of the Jordan.

In the past, the hole at the bottom of the mountain contained a powerful spring with a very vigorous flow of water. Pagans used to throw their sacrifices into the spring, presumably contaminating the Jordan as it made its way through Israel to the Sea of Galilee and then the Dead Sea. An earthquake eventually reduced the flow.

The Banias was the location of Caesarea Philippi. This is the place where Jesus called Peter Satan. He said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. The Banias was a gate of hell. It was surrounded by pagan structures. Still is.

It’s remarkable how things fit together. The Beast is the false god of the flesh. He will rule humans as a herd, and he will do it largely through panics. People who pretend to be kind and rational in normal times will turn hard and even vicious in enforcing a panicked herd’s irrational dictates. We’re seeing that now among coronavirus hysterics.

People who wouldn’t hurt you during normal times will burn your house with you in it if they think they have to do it in order to stop a plague. People who don’t know God are terrified of death. They are not like solid Christians.

A few years back, God put this word in my mind: “I will not be rushed.” I didn’t see how prophetic it was until now. When Satan rules you, you are likely to be rushed. A rush and a panic are the same thing.

There have been many times when I felt like I needed to act fast because of some perceived threat, and I deliberately chose not to do anything, simply because I remembered what God had said.

Here’s something else God showed me: worry is faith in Satan.

People don’t like to hear that, because many people think worry is good. The Bible is against worry. It tells us not to do it, over and over. It says it leads to evil.

If you watch Zev Porat’s video, you will see him say a remarkable thing. Talking to a man who is worried about coronavirus, he asks him who he has faith in. He says essentially the same thing God told me.

Worry is faith in Satan. Worry spawns panic. Worry leads to counterproductive herd behavior. Satan is using coronavirus to teach us to obey him, so we can become the body and bride of the Beast. It all fits together.

It also fits in with another thing God taught me, which is that there is always symmetry in the supernatural. God’s imitation is Satan. Faith’s imitation is worry. Being led by spirits of panic is an imitation of being led by the Holy Spirit. The counterpart of Jesus is the man who becomes the incarnation of the Beast. The counterpart of the body of Christ is the body of Satan, which is the body of the Beast.

The Beast’s prophet is probably the counterpart of Elijah.

It’s wonderful to see a rabbi saying things I’ve said. God tells everyone the exact same things. When people who claim to be Christians disagree, somebody is out of the loop.

I don’t know what it’s like to be terrified of death. I’m grateful for that. My mother was the same way. When she found out she had cancer, she only underwent treatment to make the rest of the family happy. She didn’t pity herself or spend her days crying. My sister, on the other hand, became hysterical and even more selfish. She was the picture of a bad cancer patient.

My great-grandmother was a healthy 85-year-old charismatic who refused to go to doctors, and one day, she got in bed and told everyone she was going to die. No shrieking or whining.

Maybe our consciences tell us where we’re going if we die.

If so, this is a bad time for leftists, who seem to be getting hit much harder than people in Christian areas.

I guess that’s all I have. Still no major celebrity deaths. Not one. Still many fewer known infections than the flu. Still below last year’s flu death total.

I better get to Home Depot.

Fodder for the Math-Challenged and Panic-Prone

My prognostications concerning the pandemic have taken a hit!

For days, the world coronavirus new-case graph has been dipping, creating an apparent maximum followed by a decline. Over the last couple of days, it has turned upward again. It’s still down from the peak, and it’s WAY down from where it would be had there been no dips. That’s the important thing. If the epidemic weren’t faltering, we would have many, many more new cases today, and the lookout for next week would be much worse.

Here is today’s graph, which comes from last night’s figures. If the epidemic had not dipped, the graph would run up and out of the frame to the right. It would be as high as the word at the beginning of this sentence.

I’m not going to keep downloading and posting this graph. I did it today so people would know I was acknowledging the upturn, but it’s getting to be a drag.

Was I wrong? I can’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe a new country is having problems, or maybe testing or counting is changing. I’m still betting on a continued decline through the month and, well, forever, until and unless we get a second epidemic.

Here’s something I’m thinking about: why is the death rate worse than they said it would be a week ago? This disease is far less common than the flu, regardless of what anyone says, but the death toll will probably be comparable when all is said and done.

I’m going to make another wild guess: it’s because very old people are extremely susceptible, and we don’t protect them. I’m going to guess that if we ever see real figures, we will learn that the vast majority of the dead were over 70, and many were confined in homes.

A few days back, I noted that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts took place in facilities where old people live, and they were generally elderly people, not staffers. What percentage of that state’s citizens are elderly? Not half. Believe that. People in homes have an abnormally high death rate. My friend Mike, who runs a hospice up there, says it’s wiping out old folks homes.

I was talking to him about it today. I told him to imagine that he lived with his son, and one of them had the disease. Would they be able to keep the other one healthy? His answer: of course. You stay apart. You wash your hands. You watch what you touch. All of us have shared homes with people who had diseases more contagious than coronavirus, without getting infected. It’s just not that hard to protect yourself.

When my dad was alive, I was generally able to isolate him from diseases, but I only had one patient, he wasn’t cooped up with a bunch of other people, and I actually cared about him.

I guess I seem obsessed with pink eye, which I had earlier this year, but it’s one of the most contagious diseases imaginable. You spew viruses from every possible outlet for weeks. Your doctor will tell you to take your clothing to laundromats because it needs the high heat of commercial machines in order to be rendered safe. That’s how bad it is. I had pink eye when I was a kid, I lived with three other people, my mother did not use a laundromat, and no one else in the family got the disease. It’s not that hard to protect people from contagion when you know there’s a danger.

When I was looking for a home for my dad, I saw a number of local ALF’s. I toured the cheapest and the most expensive. None of them were truly clean, by the standards of ordinary houses. Even in the cleanest one, there were always smears of things that hadn’t quite been removed. There were smells. And the places were full of things old people would touch, like books, tables, and chair arms.

I don’t think my area is exceptional. In fact, the ALF industry is competitive here because of the huge number of elderly residents. This county is probably doing a better job than other places.

In my opinion, we’re letting them die. Keeping them safe is a lot of trouble, and there isn’t much motivation, because we see them as people who are nearly dead already. They’re easily replaced, from the perspective of ALF managers. There are people waiting to move in. That’s the hard truth.

When you get past a certain age, and the inconvenience of keeping you well reaches a certain threshold, people will do less and less to keep you well. It’s human nature. I’m not endorsing it. I’m pointing it out. We all know it.

We keep hearing about young and supposedly healthy people who have died, and very often, their ages have been mentioned in the headlines, to make sure we see it even if we don’t read the articles. The obvious intent: to prove that this is a disease that is equally dangerous to people of all ages. It’s a lie. The death rate for people over 80 is over 10%. Kids almost never die. If you’re under 60, the rate goes down close to 1%.

It’s like AIDS. They kept trying to convince us we were all at risk, and it wasn’t true. It’s impossible for a heterosexual man to get AIDS from a woman. Somewhere, there is probably someone who really did get syphilis from a toilet seat, but it’s considered impossible. Female-male AIDS transmission is the same way. Women who think their infected husbands are straight are living with homosexuals or intravenous drug users. You can check WHO if you don’t believe me. The “heterosexual” men in the African AIDS epidemic have had sex with other men.

Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Accept it. Either that, or he shot up. The odds against any other type of transmission are astronomical. One famous group of people were infected deliberately by a murderous homosexual dentist named Acer, but if Johnson had gotten the disease in a similar way, there would be a cluster of fellow victims. There isn’t.

They used to terrify us with numbers from Italy, and then we found out the average age of the dead was about 80. Italians didn’t look out for the elderly.

My guess is that we are going to find out that all or nearly all countries with high death rates will have unusually high average ages for their fatalities. The rest will turn out to be places with terrible medical care.

The Swedish government is with me. Their policy is to look out for the elderly and the sick, while refraining from locking the rest of the population down. I assume this is still their policy. It was last week, and it was working very well.

I’ve seen emotional guilt merchants accusing people who mention the age disparity of being insensitive. They say we don’t care about old people. Where is the basis for that claim? What if I say death in general is more likely to hit old people? It’s true. Does it mean I think they’re disposable?

The effect of age is very important, because, while it’s bad news for the elderly, it’s very good news for nearly everyone else. There is nothing wrong with spreading good news. When did good news become a bad thing?

The special vulnerability of the aged and sick is useful information. It could have been a great help in strategizing. Instead, our politicians listened to the ignorant, emotional mob and wrecked our economy unnecessarily.

It’s a terrible thing when a young mother dies from COVID-19, but it’s also a rarity, and we have to acknowledge that. We shouldn’t put her on the news and make her the face of the disease. It’s like making a lottery winner the face of the average American net worth. The most typical COVID-19 victim is a healthy-looking person who has no symptoms or coughs a little.

Where are the heart-wrenching videos of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from the flu this season? Don’t they matter? Many of them were babies and toddlers. If their tragic deaths didn’t rate coverage, why are we zooming in on atypical COVID-19 deaths?

The press made healthy heterosexual Americans the faces of AIDS, and it turned out to be baseless propaganda. We’re letting them do the same thing all over again.

Maybe if we focused on protecting the most endangered, we could save more people.

To sum up, I’m doubling down. Again. So I’m quadrupling down. No one can predict the future except God, but I’m betting on greatly reduced new infection numbers before April ends. If I’m wrong, sue me for medical malpractice. I’m just a blogger.

Now I’m going to try to make some 10mm ammunition. I can’t wait. I may also hit Harbor Freight for a mount to put a TV on the wall in the gun room. I have to have a computer in there, and I have a 37″ TV gathering dust on the floor.

Still no big celebrity coronavirus deaths. John Prine is at the top, and he was about as famous as Larry Hovis.

Dining Room Furniture is for Losers

All you single males out there, and males with wives who have their priorities straight, listen to me. Convert your dining rooms to gun rooms. You won’t believe how great it is.

Yesterday I found a way to mount a Hornady Lock-n-Load ammo press on a Rockwell Jawhorse. Today I’ve been getting out my reloading junk and putting the press in working order. It’s fantastic.

The thing that concerned me most was the state of the powder measure. This is a complicated dispenser that drops powder into cartridges. Before I understood just how bad rust is up here, as contrasted with Miami, my powder measure developed a nice orange-brown coat. This would be a problem for most people, but not for Eccentric Man, strange visitor from planet Heaven. I had a Baldor industrial buffer waiting for me with a wire wheel and an assortment of buffing compounds and buffing wheels. I disassembled the measure, cleaned off the rust, and moved on.

I found my Lyman powder scale. It can be operated using an AC adaptor or a 9-volt battery. Being me, I stuck a battery in it years ago, for no good reason. Then I left it in there. When I opened the scale up, the battery was in bad shape, but no chemicals had touched the scale. I was in business.

It almost looks like Duracell made the battery in such a way that failure would be less likely to damage anything but the battery itself. Are they that smart?

I stuck 10mm dies in the press, and now I’m trying to remember how it works.

I just downloaded a manual. With God’s help, I may be able to make some ammo tomorrow.

I learned something useful: you shouldn’t clean your brass until you remove the primers. Heh heh. I ran a 10mm shell through the deprimer, and the pocket is filthy. I soaked the shells in citric acid and water to clean them, and it looks like I’m going to have to do it all over again.

It’s amazing to see that the Jawhorse is rigid enough for this use. You could literally hold up a pickup truck on my workbench, if you could balance it, but it flexes when you make ammunition. The Jawhorse weighs about 75% less, and it doesn’t seem to move at all. We’ll see if that holds true when I’m pushing shells into dies.

I received some night sights for the new Glock. What to do? They don’t install themselves. Eccentric Man wasn’t intimidated. He has workbenches, tools, and a Panavise with Pana-hands in his dining room. I stuck the Glock’s slide in the vise and went to work. Then I realized I really needed a sight-pushing tool to do it right. I also needed a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove Glock’s silly front sight screw. That’s okay! Eccentric Man has Ebay and Amazon apps on his phone. The tools will be here very soon.

I’m going to make a new lever and handle for the press. I’ve seen some things other people have done, and I like their ideas. I could pay a lot of money for a new lever, but why? Eccentric Man has a propane torch, vises, and a lathe. He can make his own lever for $10.

I guess it’s odd for a Christian who is obsessed with God’s love and who has zero interest in violence to enjoy firearms so much, but I do, just as I enjoy nice tools and good kitchen knives. It makes me wonder what will happen to me if I’m ever involved in a defensive shooting. They say cops and prosecutors really don’t like it when you defend yourself with quality equipment. They prefer you use your grandma’s rusty .25 automatic, filled with ammo your grandpa won in a poker game in 1952. It makes you look like a harmless creampuff who never thought about firearms until he was ambushed.

People say that if you use things like a laser, a 10mm, and excellent expanding hand-loaded rounds, you’re as good as indicted, even if you did nothing wrong. I would probably be very well equipped in a shooting situation, but it’s not because I’m a potential serial killer. I just like getting gun-related stuff right.

I’m not a psychopath. Really. I don’t fit the profile. I don’t start fires, except, well a few dozen times a year, because I have to get rid of downed trees. I don’t torture animals, except, yes, I do shoot squirrels because they’re annoying. You don’t know what they’re like. If Ellen DeGeneres lived here and shared the place with Richard Simmons, THEY’D shoot them. And I hardly ever wet the bed these days. Probably not even once a week. I’m not the droid you’re looking for. Pay no attention to the AK with the green laser under the rear seat of my truck.

I could carry a Kel-Tec with cheapo 9mm JHP and hope for good shot placement. That would make me look like a bona fide gun moron. Of course, it didn’t help George Zimmerman. It’s what he used, and he refused to shoot until he was on his back having his head pounded against concrete, and his prosecutors literally perjured themselves in order to railroad him. Now he’s so crazy, he may actually be what they claimed he was before they drove him around the bend.

It probably helps to live in the right county. Zimmerman lived in Seminole County, which, like Wyoming, is far to the left of my county. Where I live, the cops would probably help me hide the body.

You really need a gun room. You should even convince your doctor it’s a medical necessity, for your nerves. Then it’s deductible. If they can give you a note that forces restaurants to accommodate your filthy, smelly, stupid, untrained dog, and if they can prescribe blunts for insomnia, and if they can prescribe castration for an 8-year-old boy just because he enjoyed watching The Turning Point, surely they can prescribe gun rooms.

It might even cut some ice with your wife.

Navy Beans and Poached Squirrel

I still have not set up my reloading press. I made a platform for it yesterday, but I haven’t followed through. I plan to get on it shortly.

I thought I would say something about the epidemic, since I have been writing about it for so long. Today, again, the infection rate is dropping. At least that’s what’s happening according to the Johns Hopkins graph page, which I have linked to in the past.

The rate at which the rate is dropping seems to be slowing at the moment, but bumps are to be expected.

Toilet paper is still unavailable online, unless you order questionable Chinese coronavirus scam paper, or you get really lucky, or you pay some low-life 5 times what the paper is worth.

At some point, the expense and trouble make using the curtains an intelligent choice.

I can’t figure the toilet paper problem out. I was wrong to think the problem would only last a couple of weeks. I read that factories would keep churning it out, and I figured people could only continue buying three dozen rolls per day for a short time. I figured online sources would rebound quickly because they could limit per-person orders and no one could go in and clean them out.

Still, the paper is hard to find during reasonable shopping hours, and online sources are useless. I check because I get bored.

I saw someone trying to explain it online. The theory was that people were using home-quality paper instead of commercial-quality. They make you stay home, you can’t use the toilet at work, and you end up using ridiculous fluffy paper with baby ducks stamped on it instead of the military-looking stuff. Somehow or other, increasing the demand for fluffy paper threw things out of whack.

I don’t believe it. I never used that stuff, and I still can’t find the kind I buy. Not online. I can’t find anything that isn’t Chinese or overpriced. Several months from now, this could become a problem. I’ll have to get up early and get to the store before the hoarders, and I may have to have a late breakfast. This is how you get toilet paper. Be at the store when it opens. While you’re there, make sure you use the can. Free is free.

I think the explanation is a crock. If the only problem were the difficulty of making fluffy paper, we would be able to buy non-fluffy paper, and we’re not. The problem is that people are still buying every roll they see. The system, which isn’t designed for a 2000% increase in demand, is just not built to cope with it.

If people don’t get over it, some morning in July, I will have to be at Winn-Dixie as soon as the special old-people-only shopping hour is over.

Manufacturers are ramping production up, and distribution, contrary to what some people claim, is not out of commission due to the the millions of dead truck drivers who can’t show up for work. They don’t exist. More people have died from the flu this year.

It’s amazing how people think there are overflowing hospitals and bodies on sidewalks. Does anyone actually read the news?

I still don’t know a single person who has coronavirus or who has mentioned a relative or loved one who has it.

There are STILL STILL STILL no major celebrities who have died! Inexplicable! But there are celebrities who are trying to capitalize, and I don’t just mean the ones who are virtue-signaling and trying to tell us what to do on social media. Bill Cosby, Michael Avenatti, Bernie Madoff, R. Kelly, and Julian Assange are all trying to get released so they can avoid the virus.

Here’s how out of the loop I am: I had no idea Avenatti, Kelly, and Assange were incarcerated. I’m thrilled to see how little I know about such things.

I have to read up on Avenatti. That guy is not to be believed. Is he still posting cocky Tweets? When it comes to denial and lack of remorse, he rivals the pre-conviction Harvey Weinstein. I feel sorry for him. I’m astounded by what he did to his life.

In other news, I’ve escalated my own fight against COVID-19. Having heard that quinine will keep me well, I have committed to having a gin and tonic every day, no matter how difficult it is to choke it down. It’s definitely working. I started two days ago, and I’m as healthy as a horse.

I found a very nice brand of tonic water: Q. I’ll bet Patrick Stewart drinks it. Is there really any quinine in it? Observe my symptom-free status and judge for yourself. That’s science, right there.

I didn’t realize how nice a G&T could be. A good mixer really helps. It makes me want to buy cinchona powder–the source of quinine–and make my own tonic. Summer is coming.

There’s a good chance my resolve will fail when my 4-pack of tonic is gone, but I might want one or two G&T’s later this year.

I believe you would have to buy something like a pound of cinchona bark in order to get a therapeutic quinine dose every day for a couple of weeks. I was curious, and I checked. For malaria, you take 200 mg per day. That adds up to 4 grams of cinchona, so one ounce per week.

Okay, you have to have two or three ounces. Still a lot.

Now that the known rate of COVID-19 here is above one in 3,000, I have to admit I think more (i.e. a little bit) about protecting myself. I think about that with the flu, too. I really hate getting sick. I’ve been pretty bold about running errands. Will I still be this brave if we get up to one in 100? That would probably mean the real rate was more like 10%. The world would be a sea of cooties.

Here’s something I wonder about: what do single people do for food when they get sick? When I had pink eye, I still went to buy groceries, taking what precautions I could. Would I do the same thing if I thought I had coronavirus? Would I have a choice? I guess I could order food. I don’t know if I could eat Domino’s for three weeks. It’s hard enough to eat it once.

I bought two bags of navy beans. I wasn’t afraid stores would run out of food and leave me starving. I was afraid hoarders would buy all the navy beans in existence and that I would not be able to get them again until after the harvest. I don’t know how the bean supply chain works. I really like to have beans with cornbread occasionally.

I guess that with those beans and a canister of oatmeal, I could get through a week of quarantine without crippling constipation. Beans by themselves would be worse than coronavirus. Those things can lodge in your system for days, doing what beans do the whole time.

When the week was up, I would have to poach squirrels, in both senses of the word.

No, I guess I could still use drive-throughs.

I have some .38 Super brass soaking in water and citric acid. I should take them out and work on the press.

If I die, the first one here gets the toilet paper. It’s in the master bath in a cabinet. Sorry it doesn’t have baby ducks printed on it. This is what happens when men do the shopping.

Gun Room Starting to Blossom

I’ve been dreading attaching my ammo press to an indoor workbench because I didn’t want to drill holes in the bench. I was inventing devices that would clamp to the table without gouging it. I had some ideas for welding a plate to steel tubing. I could screw the press to the plate, put rubber under the tubing, and clamp the tubing to the bench.

Today, I realized I needed to do something if I ever expected to get started. I decided to go quick and dirty with the Rockwell Jawhorse.

The Jawhorse is a weird steel tripod with a foot-tightened vise on top. It’s very heavy. It’s awkard to move. If you can get past those problems, it’s a startlingly useful tool. It holds things for sawing. You can clamp a little table in it. You can get special attachments for sheet goods.

It’s one of those tools which is so annoying, you peridically consider selling it, but then you find yourself using it, and you’re glad you have it.

Harbor Freight now makes a good clone.

My plan: construct a wooden platform for the Jawhorse, clamp it in the jaws, and mount the press on it. Then I could keep the platform, and when I wanted to make ammo, I could slap it in the Jawhorse and go to work. IF it was rigid enough. That was the question.

I used to have my press mounted on my garage workbench, which is very sturdy. For reasons too boring to go into, even though the bench was strong, the press still tended to wobble during use, and I had to add some wood to the bench to make it stop. When a Hornady Lock n Load press wobbles, it can cause rounds to fail to complete the reloading process. It’s a problem.

I don’t want to make ammunition on my old workbench, which is now in my un-air-conditioned shop. I want to do it in my gun room, a few steps away from the refrigerator. This is why I got the Jawhorse out.

Using a Sawzall, I cut two pieces of 2 x 8 from a wet board I found behind the shop. I cleaned them up on the band saw. I used 4 Tapcons to screw them together. This gave me a platform. I drilled two 1/2″ holes in it. I found some mismatched 1/2″ bolts and some washers. I stuck the press on the platform and used the bolts to fasten it down. I guess this took 20 minutes.

I gave the press a few test pumps. I think it’s going to work. It seems more rigid than my old workbench system. How about that?

This will give me time to create a real reloading stand or come up with a device to mount my press to the indoor bench.

If I can get the press to run, I’ll be able to produce a lovely stash of 10mm, .38 Super, and .45 ACP from my components. I may use some of my endless pile of .40 S&W brass to make ammo for my buddy Mike. Then I won’t have brass overflowing from my brass container, and I’ll be able to shoot my new Glock 20 without paying ridiculous prices for ammo. It will be nice.

Seems like I have gotten much better at finishing projects. I used to be very good at starting them but not so great at following through.

Now I need to machine a handle for the press. That plastic ball loves to unscrew itself.

Goodbye, Pandemic; Hello, Needless Recession

The coronavirus news gets better and better, at least as far as the disease itself is concerned. The oppression and totally unnecessary economic destruction are different matters.

The Johns Hopkins site that graphs new cases as they appear shows that the American infection rate is down near the point where it was two weeks ago. That means transmission is decelerating. The epidemic is going away, and it’s happening fast. Some time in May, we should be walking around outdoors again, and toilet paper will be on sale everywhere. We will be using it for landfill.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be without toilet paper for weeks. I’m so grateful. My own supply seems to grow. I had plenty before the lunacy started, and I keep discovering new rolls. Found one in a closet yesterday.

Amazon has had a run on bidet attachments for toilets. Maybe coronavirus will drive Americans to catch up with France and start cleaning their rear ends properly.

When I’m in stores, I force myself to walk by paper towels. It’s actually exciting to see them. I feel drawn to them. But I have all I need, and as long as I’m willing to shop before noon, I can always get more. If I pass them by, people with big families may get a shot.

I don’t want to pick on people, but I’ve seen some desperate, uninformed behavior here. I’ve seen a lot of masks. The only kind of mask that is known to protect people from coronavirus is an N95 or N100 mask. I don’t know much about it, but they’re for people in unusual situations. I read about these masks yesterday. A doctor said they were very uncomfortable and that it’s hard to wear one for more than half an hour or so. You have to push the air in and out, and that wears you out. You also have to fit them properly, which most people would not do even if they had them. And you can’t keep the same one forever. They get contaminated. They’re disposable. Health care workers just came up with an approved way to clean them, and that was out of desperation.

Even good masks don’t catch all the bugs, even if you fit them correctly. That’s interesting. They may catch a significant percentage.

I hate to cite experts, who have been wrong about all the big things, but they say you shouldn’t wear a mask. They don’t think it helps. I guess it will help you not to put virus-laden fingers in your nose and mouth, but were you planning to do that?

When I go out, I see people in bandanas and Home Depot dust respirators, often loosely fitted. They’re not being used like protective gear. They’re being used like charms. “If I wear this, the disease will stay away. And I will win the Florida lottery.”

I’m still waiting to see someone who has poked a hole in a mask for cigarettes. I guarantee you, that person is out there.

People are wearing gloves. How is that supposed to help? You can’t get the virus through your hands. If it gets on a glove, it’s just as easy to transfer to your face as it would be if it were on your bare hand.

Here’s my hat tip to neurosis: I keep a bottle of alcohol in the car. I pour it in my hand when I leave a store, and I rub it over both hands. Then I let it dry. Does it actually do anything? How would I know? If the official numbers are right, I’ve probably never seen a person with coronavirus, let alone been near one. Even if they’re off by a factor of 100, I haven’t been exposed much. But it feels nice to make the effort, and the flu and colds, which are bigger threats, are out there.

I should have been using sanitizer a long time ago, and I was, but I found that it pours out of the bottle when you leave it in a hot car. I never fixed that problem. I gave up.

I wonder what people think when they see me with the car door open, pouring precious alcohol on my hand. Maybe I should draw my gun before I do it. Couple of warning shots might be smart.

I’ve actually considered buying real quinine, which is available on Ebay. How could it hurt? But I suppose if I had the extreme misfortune to develop a serious case of COVID-19, doctors would come up with better treatments than I would. It’s just possible.

What’s going to happen when the total number of active cases drops down near zero? Will our keepers determine that hot weather really does kill coronavirus infections, giving themselves heartburn, because Donald Trump guessed it first? Maybe they’ll tell us to stay indoors because our crazy lockdowns are really what did the trick. It’s important for the powers that be to keep confirming that their bad choices were correct.

China isn’t the only place where saving face leads to doubling down on terrible decisions. Hello…Biden nomination.

No, he’s great. Democrats should rally behind him. Wonderful choice. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I guess it’s fitting that the Democrats are nominating a man with an underlying condition.

Here’s a prediction: when all is said and done, IF we get a reliable test and IF it’s applied retroactively to samples from people who have died (as it should be), we will find out that many died from something other than COVID-19. I may be wrong. It may be easier to diagnose a fatality than someone who gets well, so maybe coronavirus fatalities have been identified with more certainty. If we test people who got well, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that a lot of coronavirus cases will become flu cases. After all, the Chinese say current tests have a 40-80% false-positive rate.

It will be great when the vaccine becomes available. They used to tell us it would be 18 months. Now one company is shooting for a 2020 release. That would pretty much kill next year’s epidemic, if one begins.

I think I’ll be good this time around. I’ll get the flu shot this year, and when the coronavirus shot becomes available, I’ll get it, too, unless all the doses have been reserved for celebrities.

STILL NO MAJOR CELEBRITY DEATHS. Incredible. Are the Illuminati giving them enchanted gluten-free suppositories?

In lighter news, I used my new, bigger propane cooker last night. I splurged on a choice rib eye instead of the selects they sell at Winn-Dixie for hamburger prices. Splurging was a mistake. It wasn’t any better. The center was just as tough. On the up side, the cap was tender, and the flavor was magnificent. There is nothing like high-temperature butter-frying for steak.

I had to use long tongs because you can’t really get that close to the cooker when it’s working. It will take the hairs right off your hands. I think that means I should use a bigger skillet which will cover more of the flames. Now that I have a proper cooker, I can use a griddle if I want. I can cook for two, in the unlikely event I have a guest.

The butter in the skillet caught fire while I was cooking. That warmed my heart. It told me things were working out.

The rib eye is THE steak. All others are inferior. Unfortunately, Winn-Dixie has been pushing T-bones lately. It’s not a good steak. Sorry, but it’s true.

Filets are good. New York strips are acceptable. A T-bone or porterhouse, which is a filet and strip attached to a bone, is a bad steak for frying. The meat shrinks, the bone doesn’t, and the bone ends up interfering with the pan-to-steak contact. This means no crust. Even if you cook a T-bone by some other means, you still have a very good cut on one side and a lesser cut on the other.

New York strips are wildly overrated. They’re dry and relatively tough. A good one is okay, but it can never compare to a better cut, and bad ones are common.

I’d rather have a good skirt steak than a T-bone or strip.

If the recession goes as expected, good beef will be cheap. I think I paid $7 per pound for prime boneless rib eye during the real estate recession. That was at Costco. I had to buy entire roasts.

Let’s check my Ebay bench grinder poverty index. Yesterday, the search “Baldor bench grinder” came up with 42 used items. Today the total is 44. If my theory is right, the number will increase. Men will be exchanging their tools for signs to hold up beside highways.

But it was worth it. To fight an epidemic which is roughly as deadly as the flu.

It will be interesting to see how the index pans out. Sad, but still interesting.