I Like Stuff That Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Sweden knew a Ferris Bueller scenario was unsustainable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

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

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

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

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

I’ll take that.

Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s for science.

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

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

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

Not the Way to End Your Political Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now. The drugs. I looked this stuff up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God was really looking out for his children in Florida.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The coronavirus news never stops changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

MORE

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.