Common Cocktail in the Crosshairs

If you’re in the state of Florida, I have news you can use. It turns out liquor stores and Dunkin’ Donuts are essential businesses. You may not be able to go to work and feed your family, but you can knock back all the gin you want. There is no shortage. And you can dunk crullers in it.

Speaking of gin, I bought some. I picked Boodle’s. I am just barely a drinker, but coronavirus drove me to the bottle. I kept reading stories about quinine-related medicines which are being used successfully to treat the disease. That got me thinking about quinine, and one thing led to another.

Quinine is an essential ingredient in tonic water, which is used to make gin and tonics.

For those who don’t know, here is the history of the gin and tonic, as I recall it from listening to unreliable gossip. The British conquered most of the world so they could do helpful things like growing opium in India and forcing China to let them sell it to addicts. A lot of the places the British conquered had mosquitoes and malaria. Quinine kills the malaria parasite, so British occupiers had to take it regularly. It tasted disgusting by itself, but some clever person–this is not a surprise, considering the fact that we’re talking about the British–decided to combine it with strong drink. Eventually, the concoction morphed into the concoction known as the gin and tonic, which Americans perfected by adding ice.

Some claim the gin was added to kill bacteria in third-world drinking water, but come on. We weren’t born yesterday.

Will tonic water give you a good dose of quinine that might help you avoid coronavirus? Yes. If you drink two liters a day. That’s what I read, anyway. Modern tonic water generally contains very little quinine. Two liters of gin and tonic per day may be business as usual for a British soldier, but it would be hard on most people.

I read that there are snobby brands of tonic water that contain a lot more quinine than, say, Canada Dry. Maybe you could get by with a pint a day. You’re not driving to work anyway, so why not?

I didn’t mean that.

Funny thing: tonic water seems to be disappearing from shelves. I went to the store yesterday and today. Yesterday, I could get anything I wanted. Today I couldn’t find the snobby stuff. I wanted to see what it was like. I’ve tried it before, but I forgot how it tasted.

There is a theory that quinine softens berserk immune responses like the one that kills coronavirus fatalities. Is it true? How would I know? Interesting, though.

In related news, locals are now hoarding inexpensive sugar. There must be a story out there that says it cures coronavirus. My local groceries are running out of store-brand sugar, but the expensive stuff, which is exactly the same, is still there.

Maybe the bag itself is the cure.

I got myself a new propane cooker. I had to order it because people hoarded them. Someone explain that. I bought a wimpy one a while back, and it had to be coaxed to do an acceptable job of frying steaks in butter. When I realized it was always going to be a challenge to use it, I decided to get a bigger one, but by then, half of the county had decided that propane cookers were the answer to respiratory disease.

The first one put out something like 50,000 BTU’s, if memory serves. The new one is over 200,000, I think. Anyway, it really pumps out the heat. Perfect steak, here I come.

I ordered it from Home Depot, and they shipped it to the store. Today I got a text telling me to get curbside service. I drove to Home Depot, and a guy in the wrong kind of mask came out and lobbed it into my hatch. On the sidewalk in front of the store, people were standing in line on marks six feet apart. They had to wait for the doorman to let them in. That was new. It used to be easier to get into Studio 54.

The epidemic appears to be dying out, so I hope the weirdness subsides soon. In the meantime, coronavirus has made shopping at Home Depot much easier. You sit in your car and make them do the work. It’s hard not to like that.

Guess I’ll have a steak and a G&T. Life could be worse.

What Goes Up…

Warning: I’m pretty full of myself today. I hope people will consider that unusual. I just checked the daily Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Sky-is-Falling graph, and guess what’s happening? The curve is picking up speed…in the downward direction…in April…as a certain blogger predicted.

I’m not even looking at the numbers and my equation. What’s the point? Here’s what’s happening: the actual figures are diverging downward from my equation’s numbers, exactly as I said they would. I don’t need to get out my calculator to see that. It would be like looking at my phone to find out what the weather is like, instead of getting out of my chair and opening the front door.

I actually do that.

If this was so easy for me and maybe 4 billion other people with common sense, why couldn’t our government figure it out? No, it was better to hit the rest of us with a $17000 per capita tax bill in order to fund a bailout to respond to a self-inflicted recession.

That number is 6 trillion (6000000000000) divided by 350 million. Of course, the actual number for your household is much worse, because half of us don’t pay taxes. It also doesn’t include things like lost wages and investment crashes.

I should have just bought a new Porsche for a struggling crack addict. It would have been faster.

New prediction: get ready for a squabble which will break out between largely urban leftists who reject God and largely rural conservatives who believe in God. The question of when we should lift the ridiculous lockdowns will be put before the public, and leftists will demand they remain in place, possibly forever.

We don’t need to work. Just keep taking funds from that imaginary stockpile of money the evil rich are sitting on. Find out where they keep their golden geese and nationalize them. Why didn’t we do that a long time ago?

Leftists don’t care about freedom. They are obsessed with merely continuing to exist. Put them in kennels. Feed them Purina. Take away their right to vote. They’re fine with it, as long as they think they have security. Conservatives think more about the quality of life, both before and after death.

I’m wondering when the paper-goods hoarding will stop. By the end of May, I will have to think about buying paper towels. By July, I may need toilet paper. I can buy these things right now, but it means leaving the house before 10 a.m. Unacceptable.

I hope the ammo situation loosens up, but maybe it won’t. I heard a rumor that some crazy guy in my neighborhood bought 60 pounds of .22 cartridges.

Someone tell me if I’m guessing right: Google is in the tank for Bernie. Is that correct? I keep seeing video recommendations involving the election, and they are consistently anti-Biden. Someone at Google is steering this junk at me.

The website The Hill has a show. It features a big, loud young woman and a not overly masculine young man. Shockingly, they are leftists. Google is shoving their videos at me, one after another. I keep taking the bait. They HATE Biden. They’re making several videos every day, exposing the MSM’s dishonesty in promoting the Biden campaign.

At first, I had a hard time figuring out whether they were liberal or conservative. I’m not kidding. Here are some things they were saying:

1. Joe Biden is demented.

2. Joe Biden gropes women.

3. The Democrat establishment has chosen its candidate instead of letting democracy work.

4. The evidence against Brett Kavanaugh was much weaker than the evidence against Biden, but Kavanaugh was treated as though he were guilty because he’s conservative.

5. The MSM is completely dishonest and generally treats liberals better than conservatives.

Wait. Is this Fox?

The semblance falls apart when they start talking about how they want to give Bernie Sanders full-body massages. They’re clear-headed enough to see what’s happening with the MSM and Biden, but they still think money falls from clouds populated with generous vegan transgender fairies.

What happened to the, “There is no media bias,” party line? Did we forget about that? Did Soros fire up the bat signal and send everyone texts telling them to change the narrative?

It’s quite a spectacle. As out of the loop as I am, even I can perceive it. There is going to be a WWE-style battle royale to get Biden off the ticket and resuscitate a man who is already confused without the need for dementia.

It’s imperative that the Democrats replace their elderly privileged white male with another elderly privileged white male.

Had to get that in there.

What’s more remarkable about it? The fact that leftists are being honest about bias? The fact that they would knowingly vote for a mental deficient? To me, really, it’s the fact that college graduates would vote for a socialist. Don’t they teach history in college?

Biden must be beside himself with anger and confusion. They let Bill Clinton treat women like unfeeling airline hot towels. Why can’t he do it? They let Al Gore run for president right after his term as Vice President. Why not Biden? They didn’t try to gut Hillary when she was anointed, even when they had to buy her a special van to roll her into when she fainted. It was her turn! How come it’s not Biden’s turn?

It’s never Biden’s turn! Is that fair?

I don’t know what would be worse for America: putting Trump up against a man with dementia, or putting him up against a socialist. Which one will get more support from Democrats? Wait. Democrats don’t matter. Either one will get support. Which one will get support from swing voters? They’re the ones who choose our presidents. The least-perceptive people in America make that choice for us every 4 years. God bless our system.

Leftists are apparently going to be at each other’s throats until Biden steps down or the election is over, whichever comes first. Conservatives can relax and make popcorn. When this is over, we will have a candidate most people think is a demented rapist, or we will have an eccentric whose discredited, dangerous ethos is–one hopes–so offensive it will give Trump the edge.

I hope Biden gets the nod. It’s terrible to see him exploited and exposed, but on the other hand, he lacks the capacity for self-examination and embarrassment, so it probably won’t bother him.

My guess is that a demented candidate will be so disturbing to watch that even swing voters may dimly perceive that something is wrong.

Imagine a Trump/Biden debate. It would be like watching a bullfight. Not good. Trump isn’t the greatest debater on earth, but he knows where he is, and he can remember and respond to questions.

My guess is that God is steering things. He wants 4 more years of Trump so God’s children will have some time to prepare for our socialist, persecution-heavy future. Leftists are behaving even more irrationally than usual, destroying their own effort to retake the White House, because God is confusing them. There has to be a supernatural reason for that.

I’m going to Youtube, and I’m going to remove political videos from my history and feed. I can’t believe I watched Joe Rogan. Staring at a wall is a better use of my time. It’s embarrassing. I hate this political stuff.

Here I go. “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” They need a batch mode.

Man, my feed looks better now. It’s like someone bleached the bathroom floor after an unfortunate accident.

Rogan is a mess. He’s a middle-aged man who still thinks drugs, alcohol, and tattoos are neat. It’s like someone grabbed him when he was 17 and injected him with Peter Pan serum. His opinions are useless. He has nothing to offer me except someone to pray for.

If you have to use weed in order to feel okay, how can you not know you’re in deep trouble? That’s not normal. It’s like alcoholism. You need to get to know the Holy Spirit. He’s what you’re really looking for.

Drugs merely simulate things the Holy Spirit does much better and with no bitter aftertaste.

I’m going to see if I can avoid even thinking about the election. Here’s something God told me: “Your circumstances DO NOT MATTER.” If you let politics into your head, you’re letting tens of millions of ignorant, deluded people decide how you feel. God kept Noah happy during a flood. I’m sure he will look after me during an election year.

MORE

I always say the Trump economy can be judged by the lousy market for used tools. When Obama was president, you could find a lot of deals. As the economy improved, they dried up. People were using their tools to make money. They didn’t need to sell them.

Here’s an Ebay search I’ve done for years: “Baldor bench grinder.” I set the condition to “used.” Before Trump won, there used to be a lot of them available. A couple of months ago, they were rare, and the prices were high.

I just searched. There are 42 items for sale. Some of the prices are good.

If we don’t go back to work, I expect the number to increase. Check it out yourself and see what happens.

Braised Rubber Equals Good Eats

Interesting stuff is going on today.

First off, I received–and tried–my rice cooker today.

Cooking rice correctly is not hard if you do it several times a month, but if you lay off, you forget exactly which measurements, stove settings, and cooking times work. I gave up and ordered a computerized cooker.

I was going to go with something that only makes rice, but I saw that I could get an Instant Pot automatic pressure cooker for a reasonable price. I had to try that. Pressure cookers are wonderful, and a pressure cooker that already knows how to do a lot of basic things, and which also lets you choose how long it stays on, sounded like a godsend.

So I made rice, right? No. I made boliche, which is a Cuban dish. This may be the first time I’ve wanted any type of Cuban food since leaving Miami. Generally, it makes my stomach hurt when I see a sign for a Cuban restaurant, and the thought of eating food that reminds me of one of the most unpleasant cities in America turns me off. But today I needed something suitable for pressure-cooking, and boliche came to mind.

Boliche is eye round roast. It’s like a big piece of fat-free rubber shaped like a tongue. If you throw it in the oven and try to prepare it like a real roast, it will be inedible. If you cook it forever in the presence of the right ingredients, it’s very good.

I made a tunnel in the roast and shoved cheap chorizos into it. I covered the roast with salt, pepper, cumin, and fresh garlic. I added red wine and a little water, plus a couple of sacrificial onions for flavor. I cooked the meat for 45 minutes. Then I tossed in seasoned potatoes, carrots, and more onions and cooked everything for another 15 minutes.

You can’t cook vegetables and meat in a pressure cooker for the same amount of time, because the vegetables disintegrate. I saved most of my onions for the second cooking session. I only added onions to the first run to get their flavor into the meat.

The boliche was quite good. It would have been better had I remembered to add red bell peppers, but it was very nice. It could have been more tender, though, so after dinner, I put the meat back in the machine by itself and set it to run 15 more minutes. Really good boliche is on the verge of falling apart, and the sauce permeates it.

Is it worth it to use a computerized cooker to make boliche? It’s an improvement. It’s easier to clean than my regular pressure cookers, and it’s somewhat easier to use. It should give reproducible results easily because it has repeatable settings. On occasions when I have to cook a lot of things, it will free up a stove burner and turn itself off for me, and it will keep things warm when they’re done. It’s hard to see buyer’s remorse in this picture.

I’ll make rice sooner or later. I look forward to rice that doesn’t have little crunchy bits in the middle or a layer of leathery rice on the bottom.

Second major event: I received more .22 LR ammo. I now own too much of it to carry without risking a back injury. I have 5,000 more rounds on order, but the company I bought it from seems shady, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up disputing the charge and getting a refund from my credit card company. My lack of confidence in them is the reason I ordered the shipment that arrived today.

Now I feel good about the .22 LR supply. I can sit back and see if it loosens up. I honestly think 15,000 rounds by mid-summer would be a good sensible goal. As I have said before, it only gets more expensive with time, and I know perfectly well that I’ll shoot thousands of rounds during my life. Best to get the buying over with.

This caliber is indispensible. If you want to be a good shot, practice makes a big difference, and .22 LR makes it affordable. It’s also more pleasant to shoot than bigger calibers. It’s good for hunting. It’s good for slaughtering farm animals. You can even use it for self defense if you’re a good shot with a big magazine. For under $700, you can get a very good pistol plus enough ammo and targets to turn you into an excellent marksman.

I really like Mini-mags. I am content to settle on them for my go-to .22 cartridges for the foreseeable future. I don’t think something else will pop up next month and blow them out of the water. CCI/Speer has always given me great results. I’ve shot aluminum Blazers, brass Blazers, .22 LR, and 10mm Gold Dots. No problems at all. Can’t say that about every brand *cough cough PMC*.

I found an okay deal on 7.62x39mm, but it’s probably gone now. The company I wanted to buy from listed the price as about $250. Problem: one part of their site said it was 100 rounds, and another said 1000. I asked for clarification days ago. They had a box of ordinary pistol ammo priced at something like $35, and that suggested they were not above gouging. I didn’t want to receive a very small box of ammo with a $300 invoice.

They finally responded this afternoon. It’s 1000 rounds. Now…how likely is it that they still have it? I’ll check.

Dang. They still have it.

I have over 1000 rounds already. Why do I want more?

When I first got into AK ammo, I bought Wolf hollowpoints. I figured they were a good balance of low price and reasonable usefulness in a defensive situation. Then I found out Tulammo hollowpoints did a lot better in tests, so I ordered those. Recently, I learned that Tulammo soft points do better than hollowpoints, and the price is either identical or close.

I have no desire to harm anyone, but I did buy my Eastern-bloc guns for self-defense, and it seems to me that I might as well have ammo that works.

People say they do well with deer, using Tulammo soft points. Sounds good enough for me. Anything that works well on deer works well on unexpected guests.

There is a lot of pricey non-Russian AK ammo out there, and maybe it will work somewhat better than Tulammo. I don’t know. Tulammo seems very good, and when you’re shooting 30-round magazines, it’s hard not to think about cost.

Maybe I’m not being logical. I have a desire to make a credible effort to maintain good self-defense ammo, but on the other hand, I am not excited about shooting human beings, and I like saving money. Tulammo is where this maelstrom of motivations took me.

People love to say, “How much is your life worth?”, when discussing ammo prices. I’m not sure my life is worth $1.50 per round. Also, I don’t think a murderer will take 20 hits of Tulammo and then run over, stick a knife in me, and say, “Should have bought Hornady, vato.”

Buying the first lot of Tulammo turned my Wolf into range fodder, and buying a second lot would turn the first lot into range fodder. Guess I’ll start shooting the AK and Vz58. My steel targets are probably too small to hit from a safe distance (100 yards), so I should get a bigger gong or shoot paper.

Widener’s. That’s who has the ammo. If you’re looking for Tulammo soft points, jump on it. I’ve written about the situation before, but I didn’t want to mention the name because I was afraid someone who reads the blog would snap it all up. Before tax and shipping, it’s 25 cents per round. That’s acceptable. The shipping isn’t too bad.

Cheaper Than Dirt has been gouging like crazy. I don’t know why anyone buys from them. Maybe it’s old guys who can’t Google well enough to find good deals. Does the proprietor understand just how cheap dirt is? The name of the company is a bad joke.

I’m all set now. Nearly. I just need some more .22 rifles and pistols, rifle brass, primers, powder, and bullets, an infra-red scope or two, a rangefinder, a couple of cool shooting jackets like Paul Harrell wears, a McCormick AR trigger, several suppressors, and a tactical haircut with lots of gel.

It has been a pleasant day. Hope things are looking up in your area.

COVID-19 Graph Looking Good

Because I tried to predict what was going on with coronavirus, it seems like I have to mention it once a day.

Basically, everything I predicted is still coming true, in spades. My equation’s predicted number for today is 12.7% higher than the actual number, and I predicted a drop-off in April. I was hoping for a very large drop by the end of the month, as we always get with the flu. We’ll see.

My equation was crude to start with. The premise was oversimplified, and the underlying data was dubious. It’s very odd that it ever worked. The longer the epidemic progresses, the less the premise makes sense, so the less inclined I am to talk about the equation. We have a huge number of recoveries now, and they have to be messing things up.

All that is true, but I’m still within 12.7%, which is extremely accurate. Go figure. Who would have predicted that when I started?

If you want to know what’s happening, my suggestion is to start visiting the Johns Hopkins page with the updated graphs. Just Google “Johns Hopkins curve flattening,” and you’ll find it. I’ll post today’s graphs. It seems like the most useful guide out there.

As you can see, things continue to improve. America took a harder hit than some places, and our recovery looks like it’s starting later, but it does appear to be starting.

Still no dead major celebrities. How can that be?

I still don’t know anyone who has the disease. I don’t know anyone who has a sick family member.

Sweden is the big story. They didn’t wreck their economy with panic-driven measures, and they are doing better than their neighbor Norway. When things die down, will “experts” and politicians look back at Sweden and say, “We should have done the same thing?” No. I don’t think so. A lot of people put their reputations on the line, standing up for hysteria. A lot of people made money from hysteria. A lot of people profited politically from hysteria. If they admit fault, they’ll be giving a lot up, and the truth is, they care about themselves, not the rest of us. I think they’ll double down on hysterical. Hope I’m wrong.

Even if Sweden did somewhat worse in terms of infections and deaths, they would still be winners because they won’t have a depression.

One of the bad things about getting old is developing the ability, based on experience and an understanding of human nature, to predict that people will do rotten things. Maybe it’s a blessing that we generally die after 8 decades. Would you really want hundreds of years of watching people do the same crazy things?

My friend Mike seems to be getting caught up in the emotion. He runs a hospice, so he is seeing a lot more problems than the rest of us. Also, he works in Massachusetts, which is a hotspot. I checked. Yesterday, Massachusetts had a coronavirus rate of one in 300. They had about 700 deaths.

Interesting fact: about half of the deaths in Massachusetts happened in old folks homes. That suggests that lockdowns can cause deaths.

Think about it. What percentage of Massachusetts seniors live in old folks homes? Maybe 5%? It’s probably less than that. But half of the deaths took place in these facilities. These are places where people are cooped up together. Old people who are living at home are much, much better off. It appears that when you’re locked down with very few people, it’s not bad, but when you’re locked down with dozens, you have a problem. You and your friends are set up like dominoes, waiting for the virus to tip one over.

Makes me wonder if people in apartment buildings, dormitories, and hospitals are being put at risk by lockdowns. Some believe the Italians killed a lot of people by hospitalizing individuals who should have stayed home. When you’re in a hospital, you have more people to infect.

I’m just speculating.

I checked the coronavirus rate in my county. It’s one in 4000, even though the county is packed with ALF’s and old people (and unhealthy people). The death total here is 4.

I can’t thank God enough for moving me out of Miami. Like I needed another reason. I have no mayor to take away my rights, I’m around the nicest, most thoughtful people on earth, I get to be a Southerner again, and I’m also in a coronavirus dead zone. For now. I didn’t deserve any of these blessings.

Now that America’s epidemic appears to be in decline, maybe we need to start looking at states and counties instead of nations. Urban Northeasterners are very dirty, and they’re packed together. They’re having lots of problems. People in the South are cleaner and farther apart. I would guess that rural Midwesterners and Westerners are also cleaner than people in New York and Boston, but I don’t know. Maybe one-plunger, fork-sharing, sidewalk-spitting households are common in the plains.

Let’s see. Georgia has a rate of something like one in 800. Tennessee has something like one in 1300. Minnesota has one in 3400. New York State has a rate of one in 1000, but the city’s rate is one in 80! New York is a big state with a lot of open areas. California’s rate is one in 2000, which is great. L.A. County has a rate of one in 1000, which is still good. L.A. is not densely populated.

Miami-Dade County has a rate of one in 400, more or less, so 10 times what I have in my county. Over half of the state’s total comes from Miami-Dade and Broward, which borders Miami-Dade on the north side.

This epidemic seems to be whacking cities very hard. That means it’s whacking Democrats.

I wonder if that means anything. I wonder if it will affect the presidential election.

People pretend to be leftists when things are going well, but that can change when life provides challenges. On the other hand, panicked leftists can move farther left because they want to give more power to the god-government they worship, so it can protect them.

George Bush was reelected during tough economic times. No matter what they say, many leftists want a tough conservative in office when foreign aggression is a threat. Will they want a conservative when the threat comes from a disease?

Trump is doing a fine job of swinging left, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’ll be the new Bernie in many regards. Spending 6 trillion taxpayer dollars on a stimulus to revive an economy which is unable to benefit from it is not smart. It’s a gigantic amount of money, and it will have to be paid back with higher taxes or more currency debasement. Either way, productive people will be impoverished to support people who spend their money on weed and lottery tickets.

Maybe coronavirus’s disproportionate impact on Democrats is one of the reasons they’re more hysterical right now. In their urban provincialism, they probably think the whole world is in the same situation.

New York City’s coronavirus death toll has actually surpassed the flu’s average death toll. That’s surprising. It’s strange that they fare so poorly. Maybe it’s hitting ALF’s and hospitals.

For a long time, it has seemed like America was being centrifuged, with leftists settling in increasingly debauched cities and the rest of us remaining in pleasant rural settings. The city people keep pushing for ways to rule the rest of us and turn us into slaves. They would destroy our superior cultures and ruin the nice places where we live. I guess coronavirus is likely to widen the divide.

Anyway, there are no big surprises. Globally the great plague seems to be turning out to be a biological speed bump and a psychological holocaust. It’s too bad we blew it out of proportion.

By the way, I read up on quinine-related drugs, and they really do look promising. Journalists are playing it down. They’re actually saying chloroquine is “distantly related” to quinine, but it isn’t. It’s a synthetic quinine substitute, created for the same purpose, developed during World War Two. You can actually buy quinine sulfate in bags, and you can get tablets from overseas, if you want to have it around for a last stand. Reading about it is tempting. Real gin and tonics! I barely drink, but hot weather has arrived, and an occasional G&T might not be bad.

Also, ammonium chloride is supposed to be hard on coronaviruses. Maybe I should make pizzas with it.

The DNC Reaches a New Low

Every time election season comes around, we hear fascinating rumors, most of which are false or unproven. “Trump works for the Russians.” “Obama was born in Kenya.” “Elizabeth Warren is part Indian.” “Biden is demented.” The thing is, that last one, which we’re hearing right now, is true. Biden IS demented.

Also, Hillary really was falling apart due to old age and a severe overeating problem, but that’s a digression.

I like to watch gun-related videos in the hope that I will develop some level of competence in my firearm hobby. Sadly, this means Youtube thinks I’m interested in political videos, so I’m getting bombed with them, and I give in from time to time. This is how I know Biden is not all there.

I actually watched Joe Rogan. That’s how far I’ve sunk. I remember him as a pretty good actor (News Radio) and a third-tier comedian. In recent years, he has become one of the top Youtubers. I’m not sure how his show works, because I’ve only seen it a few times. I have the impression that he’s high a lot of the time. Maybe someone who knows more about it will say something in a comment.

He’s not a genius. I can tell you that for sure. He’s not someone to look to for sharp analysis or good advice. He’s a moderately bright guy who has a knack for providing enjoyable conversation for people who are looking for a way to kill time. And he probably appeals to stoners.

Rogan supported Bernie Sanders until he went poof. Now he says he would vote for Trump over Biden because Biden is mentally disabled. Liberals are having a fit over it.

I don’t really know how Biden got the nod. People are suggesting Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race to kill Bernie’s primary performance. Some suggest Obama put her up to it. Some leftists are saying the big leftist machine chose Biden because they felt he could attract moderates. Leftists…get this…are saying we can’t trust the left-wing media because there is a conspiracy to get rid of Bernie and push Biden.

Aren’t these the same people who insist there is no left-wing media? Did I imagine that?

Anyway, yes, Biden is demented. He starts sentences and then forgets what he’s talking about. He forgets old chestnuts he has recited in the past. He says nutty things and doesn’t acknowledge or correct them, because he has no idea he has said anything nutty. In one case, he caught himself, and he apologized and said that what he had said was stupid. That was unnerving. It’s disturbing to see a demented person get a quick glimpse of what he has become.

Does anyone remember the old Biden? He was a televangelist who missed his calling. He was polished. He was practiced. His speech was fluid. He stayed in shape. He had surgeries to keep himself looking viable. He had perfect artificial teeth always that glowed like the sun. He was a total professional, even though he was wrong about everything. This was two years ago. Now he stumbles around calling people “dog-faced pony soldier,” and his sentences aren’t sentences.

Dennis Miller says there is no way he’ll debate Trump. I agree. No one is going to let him get on a stage with a person who still has his faculties. It would be like watching a tiger kill an old Labrador retriever.

One of the weird things about Democrats is that they have no souls when it comes to using handicapped people as figureheads. They did it with James Brady, pretending he was an articulate spokesman for the denial of our civil rights when he was actually a childlike invalid with a big percentage of his brain missing. They did the same thing with Gabby Giffords, who barely knows where she is. A bullet went through one side of her brain, from one end to the other. There is a reason why she quit. They did it with that autistic kid from Europe, who probably has no idea that her neurotic fears spring from her condition. They pretend Ruth Ginsburg is still healthy and competent; as long as her heart is beating, they will glue her to her chair. Now they’ve made Biden their victim.

One of the amazing things about this is the ignorance. There are smart Democrats. Many doctors who treat dementia are leftists. Why isn’t anyone concerned about the speed with which dementia progresses?

In early 2015, my dad was practicing law and billing people, but he had to stop before the year was out. In mid-2016, I had to take over all of his affairs. In 2017, I made him stop driving. At the end of 2018, I had to get him a walker and put him on hospice, and before the year ended, he needed a wheelchair. He died in March of 2019, after becoming so demented he asked me what my mother’s name was and whether I had a sister.

This is Biden’s future, and it’s not the distant future. It’s happening right now. If he managed to stumble through the election, he might very well be in diapers before his first year in office was over. That is no exaggeration. There is zero possibility that he will not be completely mentally disabled within two years. He is declining fast. He doesn’t have a type of dementia that progresses slowly.

This is what the Democrats have decided is the right path for the presidency, and they really think it’s the best way to win the election. What on earth are they thinking?

How do they know he’ll be in good enough shape to give a victory speech or get through the inauguration? What are their plans in case he isn’t?

They’re trying to attract swing voters, who are just barely intelligent enough to breathe, but they’re not so inept they would vote for someone who is clearly demented. Even a person who isn’t clear on the difference between Elizabeth Warren and Dick Cheney can tell when a candidate is senile.

Right now, many conservative pundits are hammering on the Biden dementia problem. That’s not a great strategy. They should be wringing their hands and telling the world how scared they are of a Biden candidacy. “Don’t throw us in the briar patch!” Instead, they’re showing the Democrats how to fix their problem. If there is a solution, which may not be the case. Look at the off-putting people they’ve offered us this time around. Are any of them electable?

Buttigieg is really something. How many Americans like the idea of their president being sodomized regularly? I’ll bet it would put a lot of folks off.

I think the choice has been made behind closed doors, and unless Biden starts running around with his pants down, claiming he’s a chicken, he will be the candidate. There is a lot of weight behind him. Bad, firm decisions have been made. People who are in on it are counting on profiting. Deals have been cemented. “You’ll get this.” “I’ll get that.” They won’t let go easily. I think Biden will have to do some spectacular things in order to get himself replaced as the chosen one.

My best guess is that we’re going to see the Democratic Party drive its train into the side of a mountain with a full head of steam and an abundance of advice to the contrary.

The decent thing would be to sit him down, have an intervention, and get him to quit. He needs to get his affairs together. He needs to make decisions about treatment and his will and so on. He has no business flying around the country, squandering what little relatively lucid time he has left.

Here’s an interesting question. If they did the right thing, would Biden listen? First, he’s a monumental egotist. Second, he’s demented. Taking advice is probably not something he does well these days. He has been trying to get this job since the Eighties. He even got to sit very close to the flame for 8 years, as Vice President. Now it’s so close, he can almost taste it. I think he’s an extremely vain and venal person, and he would probably have to be tranquilized in order to get him onto a jet for Delaware.

I guess God is looking out for us. I always say that when things don’t seem to make sense, you should look for a supernatural explanation. Four more years of Trump would be great for America, God’s children, and Israel.

It’s a shame, what they’re doing to Biden. History will not be kind to the people behind it, even though most historians are leftists. If he goes on to run, he will surely lose, and then in a year or two, we’ll read about his “sudden” dementia diagnosis, and then he’ll die, while Trump is still charging ahead. He will prove people who said he was demented were right.

Inheritance Beats Striving Any Day

I’m not even bothering to check my coronavirus equation this morning. The point appears to have been made: this was never a plague, and it never had the potential to be. You don’t need an equation. Just look at Sweden. They have a relaxed approach, and their infection rate is lower than Norway’s. Norway has a heavy-duty lockdown.

You may ask how I can say this didn’t have the potential to be a plague. How can I be so sure things won’t change? The answer is a question: why would they? The epidemic can’t just speed up because you want it to. It has to have a reason. Something new has to happen. It would have to be a completely different disease. You can say it can mutate. Why would coronavirus do that? Isn’t the common cold just as likely to turn into a plague through mutation? It’s more likely, because the common cold is caused by many viruses.

Tuberculosis hasn’t turned into a plague. Chickenpox hasn’t turned into a plague. Lots of old diseases haven’t turned into plagues, even though they’ve been with us for centuries. You can’t bank on bizarre occurrences that are so unlikely they should be considered impossible.

The known number of infections is under 1.8 million. The US alone had about 40 million flu cases this year. In all likelihood, the real coronavirus number is in the hundreds of millions, and we don’t know about it because the disease simply isn’t very severe, except for rare individuals. I think we will find out that these things are true. Just a hunch.

We still have zero major celebrity deaths. That’s astounding. Wynton Marsalis’s father died. Not a major celebrity. Most people don’t know his first name. Then we have Joe Diffie, John Prine, and Tom Dempsey. Where are the Biebers, Anistons, Pelosis, and Clooneys? I’ve been predicting a failed plague, and even I thought we would see a few dozen celebrities die.

Celebrities are behaving pretty badly. They’re posting things to get attention, as always. “Here I am, bravely weathering coronavirus in my mansion, surrounded by guards in N95 masks.” “Yoga is keeping me sane during this terrifying time.” “Why did Trump do this to us? He has to go.” “My vegan diet will protect me.” “Here is a really bad, maudlin, hysterical song I wrote in order to call attention to myself and make me look like I care.”

Here at the ranch/compound, I continue my idle pursuits. Maybe I’ll stand on my head in yoga pants, surrounded by disinfected tarot cards, and put it on Instagram.

I am not happy with my new Instagram account. While I was using it to try to get in touch with people after my friend Travis got shot, I saw that a married friend who appears to be on the outs with her husband was posting provocative swimsuit shots. This is someone who used to sing at my last church. I remember why I gave up social media.

This morning, I decided to try using citric acid to clean .45 brass. It seems to work well. I don’t know if the insides of the cases are as pretty as they would be after using a tumbler, but they look ready for reloading. I put about two teaspoons of acid in a mixing bowl, filled it partially with warm water, and added a squirt of Dawn, which I have, in spite of the hoarders. I dumped the cases in and mixed everything up. I let them go for 15 minutes, and then I rinsed.

This is much easier than using a tumbler, and it reduces my carbon footprint (practically all I think about, when I’m not crying about whaling) because it’s not electric. I mean, yes, electricity heated the water, and I guess they use electricity to make citric acid and pack it and ship it. Other than that, it’s so green, it hurts.

It makes me feel good about opening the French doors to cool the patio.

In all seriousness, tumbler media tend to make a mess, and the tumbler makes noise.

Now I just need to mount my press to a bench and go through my reloading components. Having reloading components is great, unless it means you’ve been too lazy to turn them into ammunition. It’s better to have cartridges than bullets.

I’m getting very tired of self-righteous Youtube ads. They keep popping up. “STAY AT HOME IF YOU DON’T WANT THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS MAKE THIS A TIME OF UNITY AND LOVE.” Today I got an ad about a ridiculous coronavirus concert. I knew this was coming. “We are the world; we have a mild cough and a slight fever.” Celebrities never, ever miss a chance to turn events into self-glorification festivals. It’s disgusting. They should sing about the giant future tax burden we just took on over nothing.

I promise you that if I die, I will not come here and act like a martyr. I’ll try to be a man about it.

The “stimulus” program is insane. They’re sending people money to stimulate the economy, but they’re also killing the economy by forcing us not to work. Can anyone see the problem with this? It’s like doing CPR on someone while holding a pillow over his face. You can’t stimulate anything while you’re doing your best to kill it.

It’s not the only remarkable piece of cognitive dissonance we’re seeing. There is a meme out there about our jails. My paraphrasal: “You’re arresting people for leaving their houses because they’ll spread coronavirus, but you’re letting criminals out of jail to keep them from spreading coronavirus. Hmm.”

I have Roku, and my home screens changed to an ominous, pseudo-friendly “STAY HOME OR ELSE” theme. Totally inappropriate. It’s not your place to tell me what to do, from a cubicle in Silicon Valley. Butt out, put on some real pants, and cut off your man bun.

The leftist power-grabbing and maternalism (definitely not paternalism) are very disturbing. It’s coming from every side. We are being mommied ruthlessly, with no regard for the disgusting consequences that prevail in a feminized society. Matriarchy is poisonous. There is a reason why Satan portrays Jesus as a helpless baby in the arms of a grown woman.

There is no “baby Jesus.” He was a baby for two years, like everyone else. Then he became a man. Would you put a baby picture on your driver’s license?

Satan is very effeminate. There is no doubt about it. Consider his vanity, his beauty, and his methods. Consider his rejection-obsessed, vindictive personality. Consider his love of attention. Look at all the feminine men he has used.

He’s like a rejected girlfriend who didn’t get palimony.

Conservatives always spout about civil rights and how great they are, but look how easily Auntie Sam took them away this year. You don’t even need a leftist president. You just need a godless mayor and governor who worship the state. One day you’re free, and the next day, BANG! It’s 1984, only without toilet paper.

The Russians were always short of toilet paper under Soviet rule. Maybe the current American shortage is Satan’s little leftist joke. “We’re coming for you and your Charmin.”

I have some uplifting news, as if the continued failure of the coronavirus plague weren’t uplifing. I’ve gotten a huge revelation about God’s status as father.

Fatherlessness is a huge curse. People whose fathers are inadequate grow up to be punks. Many males get caught up in pride and haughtiness. Many females get caught up in ugly, attention-craving female rebellion. People who don’t have fathers don’t know how to live, because no one has taught them. If you don’t have a father to tell you things, you have to learn over a very long period through trial and error.

Fatherlessness Personified

My parents were not very competent. My dad didn’t watch over me and give me tips. My mother didn’t teach me discipline. As a result, I haven’t had a good feel for the presence of a loving father who takes an interest in me and is always available and eager to advise me and solve my problems. I know such people exist, but I haven’t been able to feel what it would be like to have one in my life.

Suddenly, God has helped me understand that feeling.

One of the worst curses you can have is a heartfelt conviction that God is reluctant or unable to help you. I’ve fought that curse for a long time. In my mind, I know God forgives me and wants to work on me. I know he loves me and wants to help me get through life, all the time. But knowing and feeling are not the same, and feeling is important. Supernatural gifts don’t come through knowledge alone.

God has helped me to understand, in my heart, that I can go to him and say, “Dad, I have this problem. Will you please show me how to defeat it?”

I knew this in my mind, but it wasn’t in my heart until yesterday.

Faith doesn’t just work in the mind. It has to work in the heart. The word says to love God with all your heart and mind.

This is a wonderful breakthrough. I have a much more direct type of communication with God now. I have much more faith that he will help. The big problem is that once I get started, it’s hard to make myself get up and deal with my daily obligations. I don’t want to stop talking to him.

That, however, is a problem, and a loving father solves problems for his children.

Here is what Paul said about this:

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

My whole life has changed, so I am anxious to see what happens from here on out. I’m looking forward to internal change. I’m looking forward to being rid of juvenile priorities and being filled with divine ones.

I feel like I’ve died. It’s very strange. I hope it continues and increases.

All this being said, I suppose I will continue to amuse myself with trivial pursuits until something important comes along.

I have at least 3,600 rounds of .22 LR on the way, so I feel I have the green light to hit the pasture and improve my shooting. I’m also thinking of giving away my bedroom furniture, which is heavy and depressing. I’d like to get something newer and lighter. Easier to deal with in a move.

I need to clean up the workshop, which has suddenly become very productive. There is a layer of steel filings and flap-wheel grit on the floor. I should consider getting a better welding table. Mine is great, and it was very cheap, but I would like something a little bigger.

I have to move my non-firearm-related junk out of the gun room and into the storage room. Or maybe I should just throw it on the burn pile. Maybe I should get some kind of man-friendly couch and chair for that room. Something like you would see in a Firestone waiting area. I have to put a computer in there and put a monitor on the wall.

There is no limit to what a single man can do to a dining room.

I need to look into holsters for full-size Glocks. Maybe a shoulder holster is best. I already have one for my Glock 29. I guess I could try it out on the farm, and if I like it, I can get one for the big Glock. Which I haven’t shot yet.

I expect things to go better for me now. If so, I can be of more help to other people.

Brass Sorted

Today I crossed a major hurdle. I sorted my brass.

When I moved from Miami, I dumped brass in whatever boxes were available. I actually threw out some military brass because I had read it was a pain to reload. I barely looked at my brass until a week or two back, when I decided to turn my dining room into a gun room/indoor workshop.

Today I got out all the dirty bags and boxes and went to work.

It looks like I have maybe a thousand .40 S&W casings. Problem: I sold my Glock 22 to my buddy Mike. I don’t have a gun that can shoot .40 S&W. In all likelihood, this works out well for Mike. Today I did some math and found out I can make him range ammo for around $7 per box. That’s even cheaper than Russian ammo, and it would probably be more accurate.

I have found that homemade pistol ammo is more accurate than store ammo. I don’t know why. I assume the powder charges are more accurate, which would be odd, because a big factory should have really accurate powder-dispensing equipment.

I haven’t set my ammo press up yet. I moved my workbenches into the dining room. I’m reluctant to drill holes in a bench. My benches are very nice, and besides, once you drill a hole in a bench, things fall into it. If you plug the holes when you’re not using your press, you have screw heads sticking up, banging into things.

I’m wondering if I can fasten the press to a long board and clamp it to a bench. I’m also considering welding a stand-alone stand together.

I’m looking into ways to clean casings. My first case-cleaning tool was a tumbler full of corn cob media. I still have it, but since the last time I used it, I got a sonic cleaner. I was looking up information on using sonic cleaners to clean brass, and I found I could do it with citric acid instead. This process has been used for years, so why didn’t I know about it when I bought my tumbler?

If I understand things correctly, you can clean brass perfectly well with citric acid with no sonic cleaner or tumbler. You just let the brass sit in the acid for a few minutes. If this is true, I regret buying the tumbler.

I don’t regret it that much, though, because it’s useful for other things.

If citric acid works, why do people use tumblers, which make a mess, cost a lot, and work slowly? Maybe it’s because they want super-shiny brass, which is pretty silly. Tumblers shine things well.

The obvious question is this: how does the citric acid trick help me, when no one keeps citric acid in their house? Well, this is me we’re talking about. I think I have 9 pounds of citric acid, down from 15.

I have a pretty decent amount of 9mm brass. Not sure why I bothered to save it. When life is normal, 9mm is very cheap. I’ll bet I can make it for $6 per box. The other day, I paid a little over $7 for new ammo with brass casings. How hard should I work to save a dollar per box?

Ammo prices don’t seem to make sense. There are fairly big cartridges which aren’t terribly expensive, and there are smaller ones that cost more. It seems to even out when you reload.

I was working on my gun room with great enthusiasm when I found out my friend Travis had been shot. Was it a message from God? Was I being punished for owning guns? Was he being punished because he wanted one? No. Is it wrong to continue working on them and shooting them now that I see what they can do? No. Owning guns is fine with God, and I already knew what they could do.

I don’t recommend using any form of tobacco, but I smoked a number of cigars after my mother and aunt died from lung cancer. There was no connection. I wan’t killing them retroactively with my cigars. I’ve had two pets run over, but I still drive cars, and I do not slow down for squirrels. My dad used to drink and get abusive. I have beer in my fridge.

God has no problem with guns. Take my word for it. Misuse and accidents don’t change that. If a refrigerator fell on your dad, you wouldn’t sell your refrigerator.

I’m going to make a firm decision and choose a way to mount my ammo press. I picked up a new 10mm Glock yesterday, and it’s no good without ammunition.

Men, if you can’t throw out your dining room furniture and turn the room into something useful, I feel your pain.

By the way, I checked my coronavirus prediction equation today, and I’m about 7.5% high. It looks like the real numbers are diverging downward from the curve the infection had been following, and that’s good. I’m going to have to quit fooling with the equation, because as the number of recoveries increases, the total number of people who have been infected means less and less, and my equation isn’t set up to take it into account anyway.

It seems like the USA is the only reason we are still seeing a lot of new infections. Other countries have infection rates with decelerating accelerations, if you know what I mean. We’re still infecting each other pretty well. Is it because our epidemic started later? I don’t know. The numbers have always been crazy, so how can you draw conclusions? We know not many people have been gravely or killed, by pandemic standards, because those things are relatively easy to check, but we don’t really know how many mild or asymptomatic cases there have been.

A reader mentioned a study that suggests a whole lot of us have been infected and don’t know it. The study was conducted in Germany. A snippet:

Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while.

It may well be true that this disease is more contagious and less dangerous than we thought. I’ve suspected this was true, but how do you prove test results are bad when you already know testing is faulty? Can you use bad tests to prove tests are bad?

News of a high infection rate would be wonderful, because a high infection rate means a high number of recovered patients who are now immune. This will force the infection rate to drop. What if 15% of Americans are now immune? That’s great. Even better: finding out how already had the big, scary disease and didn’t notice it. Next time it hits us, will you be scared? No. You’ll march right out to Safeway and buy your toilet paper with confidence.

Trump is talking about ending the social distancing guidelines. I like the guidelines. We should hold onto them in situations where it’s practical, especially in the winter. It’s always a good idea to think about the spread of disease. People should also continue to be clean. That would be a nice, and very great, change. But we need to get rid of the lockdowns, unless riots and a depression are our goals. Sometimes you have to take a punch in order to avoid something worse.

I’m going to try the citric acid. If it works, I’ll be happy that it’s so easy and sad that I spent money on a tumbler, simultaneously.

Stuff You Think About When Someone Gets Shot

I am beat. I have to say it.

As mentioned earlier, my friend Travis got shot last night. I got word at 8 p.m., from the young man who shot him. He called from Travis’s phone. He hung up while I was talking to him, and I spent a lot of time after that scrambling to get information from other sources.

Needless to say, I got to bed very late. I probably slept about 4 hours. I don’t just have bags under my eyes. My whole face looks like a bag. It looks like a souffle that fell. My features look like slits in Jabba the Hutt’s belly.

It’s quite an experience, going 12 hours wondering whether one of your best friends is alive or dead.

I couldn’t help trying to make deductions. For a while, I thought I wasn’t able to call the friend back on Travis’s phone because the friend was in custody and the phone was being held for evidence. I also considered the possibility that the friend hung up because he thought Travis was about to die. I kept trying to come up with explanations for the limited facts that were available to work with.

For a time, I kept thinking how much better it would have been had I been the one who got shot. I’m older, and I’m single and childless. I enjoy life, but I’m ready to go. Travis is young, and he wants to have a family.

I also felt as though part of me would die if Travis died. He’s a big part of my life. I’ve put effort into him. Losing him at his age would be like growing an arm over a period of years and then having it sliced off in an accident. I knew my life wouldn’t lose all purpose, but emotionally, I felt as though I would. It was just an irrational feeling.

Of course, I prayed a lot. The oddest thing that happened to me took place after I prayed. For long periods, I felt complete supernatural peace. It made me feel as though something were wrong with me. How can you have a conscience and feel peace when someone you care about could be lying on a stainless steel drawer in a refrigerator?

I didn’t want to fight it. My belief is that when you feel good, you should let it happen. Don’t worry about not feeling bad. You’ll have plenty of chances to do it later if you really want to. And if the Holy Spirit is the one making you feel good, why would you reject it?

I tried prophesying, which is something I do every day. I have been taught that prophesy is a gift that can be operated at will. You can’t guess upcoming lottery numbers. It doesn’t make you a Magic 8 Ball. You can only say what the Lord wants to say. But you can do it at will. I heard myself saying Travis would be fine.

That seemed like a potential problem. He was shot in the chest with a large-bore pistol. There was no natural reason to think he would be fine. What if I got up the next day and received a text saying he was dead? Not only would he be dead, but I would have to rethink a very important teaching, and that could impact my relationship with God in a very damaging way. It would be a great setback.

I have a lot invested in certain people, and I also have a lot invested in the Holy Spirit. It would be hard to go back and learn a new, powerless kind of Christianity.

Paul told Christians to prophesy. He told them to covet the gift. Clearly, we’re supposed to be doing it. He also seemed to say prophecy was superior to speaking in tongues. Here is what he said:

I wish you all spoke with tongues, but even more that you prophesied; for he who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, unless indeed he interprets, that the church may receive edification.

He also said:

Therefore let him who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful.

It appears he believed prophecy was better than tongues even for personal use. That’s saying something. Regular prolonged prayer in tongues will change your life and put you on a new level. Anything that beats that is worth seeking.

When I heard that Travis was fundamentally all right, one of the first things I thought of was prophecy. If there were problems with it, they hadn’t been demonstrated. I was not in immediate danger of losing a friend and a big part of my relationship with God, simultaneously.

It’s funny how our spiritual infrastructure can seem to depend on how things turn out in the natural world. If Satan can “prove” faith is a lie, he can take away everything you stand on.

Speaking of prophecy, I’m very disappointed in T.B. Joshua, the African preacher who said the coronavirus epidemic was over in Wuhan. Some things have disappeared from his Youtube record. I’ve mentioned this before. If you issue a prophecy, and it seems to turn out to be wrong, you need to leave it in front of the public. They need to know what they’re buying when they believe you.

He said rain was washing away the epidemic in Wuhan, and he went on to say the epidemic was over everywhere. The China numbers froze in time (at least according to whoever provides them), which seemed to back up what he actually predicted, but as we all know, the rest of the world didn’t do as well. He should have confronted the issue. Was the whole prophecy false? Did he simply misunderstand it, which is completely possible? I can’t answer, but regardless, covering up was wrong. The cover-up is a huge problem. Prophesying and missing are much less significant.

He should have left all the videos up.

You can say overzealous underlings are probably to blame. I’ll bet that’s true, but he’s in charge, so it’s still on him.

You have to get to know God for yourself. You can’t breastfeed from churches and preachers for the rest of your life. Other people will lie or make mistakes. If you’re connected to the source, you’ll always be okay. You will never thirst.

I am not watching any Christian videos these days. I can’t find anything that makes me feel like I’m being improved. I feel like I’ve exhausted the available material, like a Trivial Pursuit player who has memorized all the cards.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, but I do miss watching good videos.

My big job today was driving to Rural King to pick up a Glock I ordered a couple of weeks back. Rural King is like Tractor Supply multiplied by 10. They had a new system. When you go in, they give you a freshly bleached cart, and you have to take it, because they count carts in order to count people. When the available carts are used up, people have to wait.

I would guess my background check took an hour. The FBI is still that backed up.

It was a pain, but I had nothing better to do, and I’ve been wanting a full-size Glock for open carry at home. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not. It may also be a good gun to keep in the car. I used to rely on rifles, but now I know I can hit people a long way off, and 10mm is nothing to sneeze at. A pistol is handier than a rifle, especially in a vehicle.

Rural King had paper towels. The world has not ended. I resisted buying them. I probably have 12 rolls in my house. Other people matter. Somewhat.

I’m going to try to be in bed at nine. I don’t care if I sleep till Monday.

Joy Comes in the Morning

Last night I was informed that my friend Travis had been shot in the chest. I got the news at 8 p.m. Travis told a friend who was with him to call me for prayer. After a lot of networking and help from friends, I got this information: Travis is in stable condition. As far as his brother knows, he is not going to have major physical problems because of the injury.

I found this out at around 8 a.m. It was an unpleasant night.

I thank everyone who prayed, and of course, I thank God, who did all the work.

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In case anyone is wondering, I don’t know all the facts, but I have a pretty good theory.

Travis had been telling me a friend of his wanted to buy a pistol. He asked me for advice I could relay. I said I would go for a Glock in .45 ACP or 9mm.

When the call came last night, there were only two people in the room: Travis and a friend. That indicates that the friend probably shot him. I think he was a new gun owner without training, and he made a mistake.

If you’re a new gun owner thanks to coronavirus, do everything right. Learn the safety rules. Learn how to shoot well by getting expert advice. Practice. Run at least a hundred rounds through your gun if you can. I would suggest at least a hundred per week until you feel comfortable.

My young friend Travis has been shot. It was an accident. I just got a call from his phone. It was one of his friends. Travis told him to call me for prayer. He is crying out in pain. The friend says it’s a chest wound. They are waiting for the EMT’s.

This is the young man who looked after my dad’s house after I left Miami.

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While trying to get information, I found out an old Instagram account of mine was stolen. I canceled the account, but it looks like some nut in Russia stole it. If you are following me on Instagram, you’re following a hacker.

I tried to call Travis’s phone several times, but there was no answer. My guess is that the young man who called me shot him and was arrested, preventing him from answering.

I could not talk to Travis, but I heard him saying, “Please, God, not this way.”

I contacted a mutual friend, and she managed to connect with Travis’s cousin in another state, so the wheels are rolling.

That’s all I know. Thank you for your prayers. It may be a long time before I know what’s happening.

Chicken Meat and a Pint of Spices

Today I made doro wat (Ethiopian chicken stew) again, and I think it’s time to change the model.

Doro wat starts with a big pile of spices. The main spice is paprika, but it also contains pepper, cumin, cardamom, and some other things. You throw the dry spices in a skillet and heat them until they smoke. The spices alone, for my two pounds of meat, must have amounted to 6 dry ounces.

My recommendation: replace half of the cardamom with black cardamom, which is stronger. Black cardamom is also smoked, so that adds something.

Another thing: take the amount of sauce in whatever recipe you use, and double it. The sauce is really important.

This dish is traditionally served with boiled eggs. You simmer it with chicken for 40 minutes, and then you add boiled eggs and continue for another 20 minutes. As I was eating it today, I saw the error. Doro wat needs FRIED eggs. They should be fried at a fairly high temperature so you get some browning and little semi-crunchy areas.

Instead of simmering the eggs with the chicken, you could fry them over easy and add them at the end. Then you would get tasty soft yolks.

Here’s another idea for changing the spices: replace a third of the paprika with hot chipotle powder, which is really just a type of paprika. It helps a lot.

I put minced habaneros in my doro wat. It’s just not hot enough without them.

I serve it with cold sour cream on the side. This is mandatory. I don’t care what Ethiopians say. Sour cream and spicy food are a marriage made in heaven. The fat lets you crank up the heat without pain.

If you’ve never had doro wat, you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s very nice. I would describe it as chicken-based Ethiopian beanless chili.

Today I ate my doro wat with rice. The traditional thing is a huge pancake, but that really adds to the labor.

I have given up on myself as a rice preparer. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t cook rice a couple of times a month, I lose my touch. Every stove is different, and you forget the perfect heat setting. I gave in and ordered a machine that cooks rice. This is one area where I’m totally confident in Chinese appliances. If there’s one thing they’re going to do right…

I’m getting a computerized pressure cooker that does a bunch of things in addition to cooking rice. People rave about it. Sounded like a good idea to me. Alton Brown may ruin steaks with his odd preparation method, and my wild guess is that he’s probably not a great cook, but I think he’s right about kitchen tools that only do one job. It’s generally best to buy things that have versatility.

I’m not getting back into cooking. I’m just trying to do things right and expand my capabilities. I have gotten into a dinner rut, so anything that opens up new possibilities is probably a good move. Steak and spaghetti are wearing me down.

Here’s my opinion on the popularity of Ethiopian food: it would be much higher if Ethiopians had some understanding of sanitation. When you order food at an Ethiopian restaurant, they bring your table a huge platter of pancakes, and they dump everyone’s entrees on it. Then everyone tears the pancakes, puts food on the torn bits, rolls them up, and eats them. It’s the opposite of social distancing. It’s social proximation, and it’s gross and dangerous.

When I go out to eat, I just want food and conversation. I don’t want to get herpes.

This dish is delightful. It makes the house smell wonderful, the spices open up your head, and if you make it spicy, you get that nice capsaicin buzz.

I just updated my recipe. I’ll post most of it below. Maybe you’ll like it.

This is what passes for excitement during these challenging times.

By the way, I saw a bunch of packages of paper towels at my local Winn-Dixie today, and I also had no problem buying mouthwash, which is still a good idea even when you’re staying 6 feet away from people.

No major celebrities have died. Amazing. John Prine is gone, but you probably have no idea who he is. He wrote two fairly well-known songs. He was 73 and looked to be in pretty bad shape. He had severe heart problems, and he was a lung cancer “survivor,” which generally means remission, not a cure. He was a former cigarette smoker, so his lungs were badly damaged even if he was cured.

The Chinese found that smokers in a study were 14 times as likely to develop pneumonia as other coronavirus patients.

INGREDIENTS

2 pounds chicken legs and thighs or boneless chicken
6 eggs
2 softball-sized white onions, chopped finely (or coarsely)
1-2 very large habanero or Scotch bonnet peppers, minced
1 cups chicken or beef broth
½ cup red wine
8 tbsp. tomato paste
1 stick butter
2-4 heaping tbsp. minced fresh ginger
4 tbsp. shallots, chopped finely
2 heaping tablespoons pressed garlic
2 teaspoon salt
Juice of 2 lemons
4 tbsp. paprika
2 tbsp. chipotle powder
½ tsp. allspice
½ tsp. turmeric
1- ½ tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cardamom
1 tsp. ground black cardamom
1 tbsp. ground fenugreek
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
¼ tsp. ground cloves
¼ tsp. cinnamon

I’ve made this with chicken breast, but it tends to be dry. Traditionally, chicken pieces with bones (legs and thighs) are used. I leave the skin on. I think the bones improve the texture of the sauce, but they make the dish a pain to eat. I suppose you could boil chicken bones in the chicken broth if you wanted the thick sauce but not bones in your food.

If you’re using breast meat, cut the chicken in chunks twice as big as a sugar cube. If not, you can toss the pieces in whole or cut them up Asian-style with a cleaver. Salt the chicken well and add the juice of two lemons. Stir it up and let it sit for at least half an hour. You can cheat by using ¼ teaspoon of citric acid if you don’t have lemons.

Fry the eggs. Fry them on the hot side so you get some little crunchy areas.

Heat a large skillet (medium heat). Throw the dry spices in the hot skillet. Stir them around with a spatula while you toast them for about three minutes. A little smoke is okay, but don’t burn them. The scent will change, and you’ll know they’re done. Dump them in a bowl, and wipe the skillet out with a wet paper towel.

Get the skillet hot again and throw the onions in, dry. Stir them as you cook them, so they don’t scorch. When they start to turn clear, or if they begin to brown, add the butter and the shallots and continue to cook until the shallots turn clear.

Throw the rest of the ingredients in the pan, except for the chicken and eggs. Stir and simmer until everything is mixed well. Add the chicken. If you really want to go crazy, brown the chicken in oil or clarified butter before you add it.

Simmer the chicken and other ingredients for 40 minutes. Add the eggs. Cook for 20 more minutes.

Traditional doro wat uses boiled eggs. If you use them, pierce them with a skewer before adding to the stew.

Pessimism Requires Faith and Determination

Before I get into the meat of this post, I have a word of encouragement for neurotics. You shouldn’t be disturbed by good news about coronavirus. If the facts show that the epidemic is going away, you can continue to enjoy panicking and bringing other people down with your rotten attitude. Just ignore the facts. After all, that’s what you’ve been doing for weeks.

I have heard some really wacky things from people who seriously believe this is an Omega Man situation. There is no excuse for that.

So. Without troubling you with numbers, my prediction equation is off by a little over 6% today, on the HIGH side. This may actually mean something. Ordinarily, I would dismiss it, but the Johns Hopkins graphs show the epidemic peaking and declining all over the world, so I feel good about it.

To make it clear, my equation, which predicted things with crazy precision for a while, is now OVERESTIMATING the rate of infection, and this is what I expected and hoped for.

Maybe we’ll get out of this thing without a major hysteria recession. But we still have to pay back 6 trillion dollars in panic spending.

I’m not saying infections aren’t increasing. I’m saying the rate at which they are increasing appears to be decreasing. That’s good enough. And all I’m discussing is the total number of infections. I don’t know what the number of active infections is doing. Obviously, it’s lower. I could check, but why?

I’m very glad to see people getting away from preachers. The lockdown has been helpful with that. I’m texting a friend, and she is as annoyed with preachers as I am. She says Joel Osteen and Kanye West are doing some kind of project. Totally predictable. It’s wonderful that Kanye West realized God exists, but who told him he should be in charge of anything? And Joel Osteen is worse than smallpox.

It’s wonderful to know a couple of people who are on the same page. It’s especially great to see younger people and minorities rejecting the Kool-Aid. Traditionally, they have been much more vulnerable than the rest of us. You don’t have to be limited by your social circle when God communicates with you directly.

I hope tomorrow my equation is off by 10% or more. Maybe next week, it will be so far off, there will be no doubt.

But don’t let me discourage you if you enjoy moaning and predicting catastrophe. Just believe whatever you want and enjoy your misery. It won’t be hard. You’ve had plenty of practice. And if anyone tries to bring you out of it, scold them and try to make them feel bad. Because that totally makes sense.

Some Things, You Just Have to Have

Have I crossed the line into real hoarding?

Before the insanity started, I was stocking up on ammo and reloading supplies, because I was also creating steel target arrays for my pasture. MidwayUSA sent me one of its pester emails, saying they were selling CCI Mini-mags for a little over 5 cents each. I had to jump on that. I bought 3,000.

That sounds like a lot, but it takes about 100 to fuel a good range session. If you only have 500 .22 cartridges, you’re running low. It has been hard for me to absorb that.

Ammo supplies tightened up, and then they seemed to start loosening. While this was going on, I was idly looking at prices. I saw a site advertising Mini-mags for 5 cents, flat. Free shipping. I had to buy. I ordered a 5,000-round case. Now ammo seems to be getting scarce again. Maybe people who are imprisoned by their own governments are killing time by shopping online.

After buying the 5,000-round case, I started to suspect that the site where I found it was not on the level. I started seeing sites saying things like, “New stock expected on June 8.” That bothered me.

I called the site that sold me the big order, and I got voicemail. That made me even more antsy. Even if there is no real shortage, I don’t want to wait until summer for more ammunition. It wouldn’t be hard at all to eat up 2,000 rounds before it arrived. My new targets make practice a breeze and a joy.

I found someone on Gunbroker, of all places, selling the same ammo for a little over 7 cents per round, including shipping and so on. That was more than acceptable. That’s a fair price in the best of times. I pondered and pondered. What if I ordered the ammo and then got a box from the place I didn’t trust? I would have enough .22 LR for what? Two years? More than I originally planned to get.

Then I thought about it some more. I realized no one was going to be unable to get ammo because of me. There are other brands available, and Mini-mags are still being shipped, even if some dealers will take two months to get them. Also, a smart person would go ahead and get maybe 25,000 rounds, because .22 LR is only going to get more expensive in the future (barring a post-pandemic deflationary period), and I know I’ll use it.

It’s like “FOREVER” stamps. I know I should buy a couple of thousand of them, because I’ll use them, and they are only going to get more expensive. But I haven’t been able to make myself do it.

So. If everyone comes through, I will have over 10,000 rounds. If the two less-dodgy vendors are the only ones who come through, I’ll have 6,600, which isn’t excessive. If they come through, and then the dodgy outfit catches up two months from now, back to over 10,000. No matter how you slice it, I won’t really be overstocked.

I should order more!

Of course, I wonder if the Gunbroker ad is legit. What if someone went into a bunker and left their ad up even though the ammo was gone? Am I going to get a “Dear John” email, just when I thought I was all set? What if they and the dubious vendor both let me down?

I might actually have to buy Remington Golden Bullets again. Arrgh. They make such a mess. They seem to work fine, however. Maybe a couple of duds out of a hundred, which is not disastrous.

When this idiocy is officially over, I’m going to make a serious effort to put an ammo bank together for rainy days. I’ll focus mainly on important things like 7.62x39mm, 10mm, 9mm, .45 ACP, shotgun shells, .17 HMR, and .22 LR.

Why would I include .17 HMR? It’s really nice for shooting small edible things.

The pistol calibers are useful for obvious reasons, as is 7.62x39mm. The .22 is a great meat and pest caliber. Shotguns are also good for emergency food.

Life won’t end if I run out of .50 AE, and I don’t think .308 will be a major necessity. As much as I love shooting .38 Super, it’s a luxury.

Ammunition is really important. The natural tendency is to buy a gun and pick up two boxes of ammo and think you’re done, but a gun without a decent supply of ammo is a paperweight. It’s like a car without gas.

I think we should be glad about the sudden surge in gun buying, along with the ammo spike. It means leftists had a leg cut out from under them. When everyone is happy and fat, leftism seems like fun to people who are naturally hypocritical. When things get scary, it’s harder to maintain the pose, and many hypocrites de-closet themselves as conservatives and centrists.

They say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.

The weird thing is that people are scared about something that has no rational relationship to firearms. People with coronavirus aren’t going to shoot at us.

It’s good that people are arming up. It will make some of them cross the fence. It’s also good that the press is lying so clumsily and persistently. Even liberals have noticed that Trump is being bashed when he does very helpful things. It may be that swing-voters, who are the dumbest people in the universe, will get so disgusted they’ll give Trump a second term.

Democrats gave us a real gift this time around. Of course, I am referring to Uncle Joe. Bernie Sanders was also a gift, because he was so nutty and extreme, but Biden is a shooting gallery for detractors. He has groped women and exposed himself. He routinely says things that are clearly insane and too extreme to be attributed to fatigue. He may drive spiteful Bernouts to stay home on election day. He’s such a poor candidate, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sat him down in 2012 and flat-out told him he wasn’t going to be the nominee.

Maybe the gun panic will convince people who aren’t ordinarily serious that we need a real, i.e. conservative, leader for now. Magical Peace Unicorns are for less-challenging times.

I’m not going to beat myself up about .22 ammo. I’m not a real hoarder. I don’t have a ton of food. I have empty gas cans. I only have about 17 small bottles of water. My entire canned good supply could be placed in a shoebox. But I do want to be able to shoot my .22. Give me that.

It’s starting to look like some of our problems may have been caused by a few incredible jerks. Yesterday, I learned about a Chinese citizen who bought hundreds of thousands of masks in Florida right before things got bad. She made a video in which she smirked and said she felt like a thief. She talked about depriving “the Americans.” I also read about a character in the northeast who got busted with, I believe, over a million masks.

You don’t need a whole lot of people to buy a million masks each to put a dent in the supply. Both of these people, and their accomplices, should do prison time. They deprived Americans of a product they believed would keep them alive. In their minds, they were deciding other people shouldn’t live.

It should be easy to find the hoarders and gougers. They buy using credit cards, so there are trails.

Or you could just look around and see who wears a fresh mask every day for the next three years.

I look forward to seeing the coronavirus graph plummet. Based on John Hopkins’ information, it appears to be starting. Once everyone relaxes a little, I can build my ammunition bank. And just in case, I’ll lay in 36 rolls of toilet paper.

Are we Peaking Yet?

Here are my coronavirus figures for today.

My prediction (total global cases): 1,466,645

Johns Hopkins number: 1,446,557

Percentage error: +1.39

I’m not sure why I’m even doing this any more. My number is correct, within a tiny margin of error, every day. I do want to see the deceleration start, though.

My number has been higher than the official number two days in a row. Let’s hope that continues and increases.

I have been wishing I had historical data, so I could look at other trends. For example, I’m wondering if the figure for total cases minus recoveries can be predicted. That gives you the known active cases. The lower that goes, the better life is, regardless of the overall total.

Of course, playing around with disease figures is not my biggest thrill in life, so I have not been working hard at it. Not at all. I spend a few minutes on it once in a while. I haven’t been digging to see what’s available out there, because I really don’t care much. It seems very obvious that this epidemic is never going to approach fulfilling the hype, so I’m not lying awake wondering how I can get better data.

Today I finally checked the Johns Hopkins site, and they have an archive. It’s a bunch of CSV files, not to be confused with CVS files, which would involve very long cash register receipts. I don’t know how to work with CSV files, but I guess I can figure it out. I’ll see what I can do. If I can get numbers for March 5 and a more recent date, I’ll be able to fiddle with an equation. It would be trivial. “Trivial” is a term math and physics people use to describe calculations that are incredibly easy or even unnecessary. All the stuff I’ve done with regard to coronavirus has been trivial. If it weren’t trivial, I couldn’t do it.

Guess what? I got myself a Github account and learned how to download Johns Hopkins’ data and turn it into spreadsheet files. I learned this: since March 5, which is when I started doing equations, the ratio of sick victims to total victims has increased a lot. It went from 2.2202 to 3.6933.

Now I’m trying to figure out what it means. Maybe the ratio of sick people to recoveries is a bad indicator, because it takes longer to recover than to get sick.

Let’s see. The average incubation period is 5 days. It’s hard to get an answer regarding the duration of the disease, but it appears that a typical case takes two weeks to clear, and bad cases take three to 6 weeks. So, assuming 15% bad cases, maybe close to 2.5 weeks on average? That’s a lot longer than 5 days.

Given how recently the epidemic started, I guess recoveries will always lag the total number until some time after the infection curve plummets.

Speaking of the curve, I found pleasant information on the Johns Hopkins site. I’ll post it here. They allow downloads.

How about that? You can go to their page and see curves for individual “hotspot” countries. They’re all on the down slope. Not one exception.

Why am I playing with calculus? Johns Hopkins itself thinks the infection rate’s acceleration is over, unless they don’t believe their own graphs.

That little bump on the left is China. Isn’t that great?

Didn’t I say I thought the curve would turn around this month? Am I a genius, or was it just something any smart person could predict, without calculus, if he was only willing to pull up his pants and look at the numbers?

Reluctantly, I must say I can’t go with “genius.”

Maybe it’s time to buy stock.

Things look good. They couldn’t look better, barring a miracle. Let’s hope the good news holds out.

I hate being manipulated. The lies and manipulation are what disgust me most about the epidemic. Christians know that manipulation is the essence of witchcraft. I have always hated it. I can’t stand people who pull it on me. I can’t stand people who drop guilt trips on me. It makes me angry. I strive not to do it to other people. It’s a filthy, vile thing to do.

If guilt trips are your thing, and you can’t make yourself stop, I will drop you permanently no matter who you are or what we’ve been through. I’ve dropped a whole lot of people, and I have not regretted it even once. The world is full of people who will treat me with respect. Everybody can be replaced.

When I was a kid, I was cursed with a father and older sister who were manipulative. It was unbearable and unsustainable. I’m all done with that.

My friend Mike, who is probably still my friend because he doesn’t manipulate, once told me I was the least codependent person he knew. That was a powerful compliment. It was a nice surprise. I hope he was right.

I’ve had a very good time during the pandemic. Life is better now than it was last year or even in January. God truly does look after people. You just have to stay close to him and do things his way. You don’t have to be all that good at it, either.

Yesterday, I had some fun. I had to move branches out of my yard. We’re not allowed to burn them right now because the fire department has somehow decided coronavirus requires limited coverage. I’m dumping them in the woods.

I started the tractor up, drove 50 feet, and watched my left front tire come off the rim.

Until yesterday, I figured a tractor tire that looked inflated was inflated. I guess I won’t judge tractor tires by the way they look in the future.

Right away, I realized I didn’t have a tire wrench for the Kubota. Never fear! I have three sets of SK sockets plus a Makita impact driver.

I didn’t want to haul a heavy floor jack across the yard and try to jack up the tractor on soft soil. Now what? Well, I had jackstands in the workshop, and I had scrap lumber. The tractor had a front end loader. I used the loader to lift the wheels off the ground. I put wood down. I put a jackstand on the wood. I lowered the tractor onto the jackstand.

Nice.

The impact driver wouldn’t budge the nuts. Problem! But I had 1″ conduit. I put a 4-foot-long piece over the wrench handle and used the conduit as a breaker bar. Problem gone!

Jocko Willink, the professional ex-SEAL, likes to say “no factor” when a problem turns out not to be a problem. No Kubota wrench? No factor.

I got the tire and rim over to the shop. I fired up the big compressor. I had to get the tire back onto the rim. I put it on its side and stood on it. It popped into place. I used a wet paper towel to clean the mating surfaces of the tire and rim.

Knowing the tire probably wouldn’t seal, I gave the compressor a shot, and the tire didn’t fill. Now what?

NO FACTOR!

As a Youtube University honors student, I knew that it was possible to mount a tire using an explosion. You shoot starting fluid into your tire and light it. The explosion expands the tire and fills it with gas.

I didn’t have starting fluid, and I didn’t feel like driving to Tractor Supply, which is nearly 6 minutes away. But I had gasoline!

I put a teaspoon or so in the tire and lit it with a barbecue lighter. POOMP! Mounted tire!

I used the compressor to pump it up, and I was all done.

Guess what? If the tire keeps leaking, and I can’t fix it, I can put a new tire on the rim, myself. I’ll save, probably, 10 dollars. That’s over two Whoppers! And I won’t have to drop it off, wait for it to be fixed, or go back to pick it up.

I can mount my own tires! How about that? Balancing is another story, but don’t count me out until I’ve tried. I haven’t checked Youtube yet.

They have fancy machines for mounting tires in tire shops, but they’re not always necessary. They’re just easier and faster to use.

My biggest problem during the pandemic has been weight gain. The epidemic makes me think about food. I’ve probably bought 1.25 times as much food as I usually do. I refuse to hoard, because it’s tacky, but, to give an example, I bought 4 pounds of spaghetti. Also, Ben & Jerry’s has been on sale, and Tractor Supply put Gimbal’s jelly beans right next to the register.

I told the cashier at Tractor Supply it wasn’t fair to put the jelly beans there, and she said they did it on purpose. I said she needed to move them to the back of the store, and she said, “Not gonna happen.” Never missed a beat.

You have to love Southern humor.

Even though I ate the jelly beans.

Gimbal’s jelly beans are as good as, or better, than Jelly Bellies, but they’re a lot cheaper. You have been warned.

My new Glock is taking forever to arrive. I think I made a great choice. The caliber is probably even better than .357 SIG (which is also tempting).

I saw an interesting story the other day. I got wind of it from a video featuring Massad Ayoob. He mentioned a guy named Gary Fadden, who was a salesman for Heckler & Koch.

Fadden was driving with his fiance, and he had at least one submachine gun in his vehicle. He used submachine guns in his work. He got in a road rage confrontation with two armed bikers and their…lady friend. He fled and look for cops, but he had no success. Eventually, he was cornered, so he got out with a Ruger submachine gun which was already set to full auto. He called the cops on his cell phone. He fired a warning burst, but his new friends rushed him anyway, so he filled one of them with lead.

This happened in Virginia, which is NOT NOT NOT a good 2A state. I know people who think they’ll leave liberal areas for “paradises” like Virginia. They think all Southern states are alike. No, no, no. They are not. Virginia is jammed up with leftists. Avoid.

Florida is not bad, although that won’t last. Tennessee is great. Kentucky is messed up because Kentuckians hate work and love the government teat. You have to be careful.

A Virginia prosecutor charged Fadden with murder, and then he did him the favor of offering him a manslaughter plea, which Fadden rejected. Fadden was acquitted, but the experience didn’t do him a lot of good.

The prosecutor was bursting with enthusiasm to put Fadden away. It wasn’t like his hands were tied and he did his work reluctantly. He even told the jurors they had released a murderer.

Ridiculous.

Reading between the lines, it appears that Fadden gave the finger to the bikers, or did something similar, but guess what? Insulting people doesn’t affect your right to self-defense. I can call your mother everything you can think of, and if you put your hands on me, I can defend myself using whatever degree of force is needed. If I attack you illegally, then I lose the right to defend myself, but I can say anything I want and still be protected. I can give you the finger with both hands and still be innocent.

Ayoob is a self-defense expert. He says using a scary-looking weapon is a bad idea. He says Fadden wishes he had been carrying a shotgun. Ayoob believes people who use scary-looking guns are much more likely to be charged falsely.

Ayoob is an interesting guy. Gun people nearly worship him. He’s a cop. I assumed he was a New York City cop, or maybe Chicago. It turns out he’s a part-time cop somewhere in New Hampshire, where most of the crimes involve moose poaching. He lost a lot of credibility with me when I read that, but he’s still a smart guy.

I used to keep an AK in my truck, because why not? Pistols are for people who don’t have rifles. We carry pistols because carrying rifles is inconvenient or illegal. A person in a vehicle can keep a rifle handy without any aggravation.

After reading about Fadden, I wonder if I should stick to Glocks while on the road.

I used to be concerned that I would miss with a pistol, but now that I’m shooting gongs, I realize I’m a much better long distance pistol shot than I thought. It would be very hard for a dangerous criminal to get within 100 feet of me without getting shot. Maybe the greatly reduced effectiveness of a pistol is okay when balanced against the increased likelihood of being arrested.

On the other hand, I live in the most conservative county in Florida, and if I hosed an assailant down with 7.62mmx39 and then set fire to his blacked-out Camaro, the cops here would probably have a barbecue in my honor. So maybe the AK is still a good idea.

Whatever the story is, I think a full-size Glock will be an asset.

I think I’ll stick with pistols when traveling.

Hope everyone is having a pleasant lockdown.

Things are Getting Creepy

I’m glad I posted my coronavirus equation and predictions online, because I don’t think anyone would believe me had I waited until after the results came in. Today’s result is another stunner. It’s so accurate, I’m starting to feel like somebody is pulling my leg.

Johns Hopkins global toll: 1,359,398

My predicted toll: 1,360,398 (rounded to nearest integer)

Error: 0.074%

Yes, my figure is almost exactly 1,000 higher than the actual number. And you can check it yourself, because all the required information is available to you.

I don’t know what the error in the Johns Hopkins number is, but I guarantee you, it’s a lot bigger than 1,000. For all practical purposes, my figures are identical to the actual figures.

Don’t ask me what’s going on. I don’t know.

The prediction is higher than the actual number. Does that mean anything? I don’t see how it could. It’s just one number, based on approximations, compared to another number which is not all that reliable, and the spread between them is too small to mean anything. But what if my prediction starts diverging upward from the Johns Hopkins number, and it never stops? That would mean something. Eventually. At first, the uncertainty in all of the figures involved here would make small movements meaningless.

Are they changing testing methods? Are people volunteering to be tested more or less often? Are doctors becoming less biased toward diagnosing coronavirus when the flu is the actual problem? Does an increase of 10,000 this week mean the same thing as an increase of 10,000 next week? No way to know.

Because of the huge false-positive rate (estimated at 40-80%) and other factors, it’s impossible to be sure of anything on a small scale. What is reasonably certain is that the flu’s numbers continue to dwarf those of the disease that motivated us to ruin our economy.

Here’s a prediction for you. The flu is going away. That’s certain. As it goes away, I predict a dampening effect on coronavirus diagnoses, because there will be many times fewer people to misdiagnose. Colds and other respiratory bugs also go away in hot weather, so they should contribute. I would think the death rate from coronavirus would also drop, since there would be fewer bugs out there to cause secondary infections.

I don’t think there is any way to prove or disprove this prediction. Sadly.

I’m still hoping for a drop-off in the acceleration of contagion this month. The weather is warming up, the dirtiest, most careless, and most susceptible uninfected people are getting rarer, many people are trying to be clean for the first time in their lives, and, of course, a lot of people are imprisoned in their houses.

One nice thing to remember is that my equation doesn’t take recoveries into account. There are a lot of people in the total figure who are no longer sick or contagious. That’s very important. They can’t spread the disease, they can’t burden the rest of us, and in all likelihood, they can’t be reinfected.

If there were enough of them, I would expect them to serve as buffers for the rest of us, but so far, only about one American in 1,000 is believed to have the disease, so I doubt the recovered are making a big dent in the effective mean distance between contagious people and potential victims.

Today I was nearly impacted personally. It would have been the second time. The first time was when McDonald’s, in an act of extreme callousness, stopped serving all-day breakfast. Today I decided to look for mouthwash. Believe it or not, some places don’t have it. What are people doing with it? Are they bathing in it? It’s not the answer.

The Internet says my local Walgreen’s has it, so I guess I’ll be visiting them today in my plywood-and-polycarbonate coronaburqa.

There are several victims in my zip code now. I am ambivalent about the risk. I truly do not want to get sick. I hate respiratory ailments. I hate mucus and sore throats. On the other hand, if I get coronavirus, when I’m over it, I’ll be able to go anywhere I want without even thinking about the possibility of getting sick.

Shouldn’t I have faith that God will keep me well, regardless of whether I have antibodies? Yes. No doubt about that.

I haven’t had the flu in years. I started taking the yearly shot. I haven’t one in a good while, and I still haven’t gotten sick. I feel like I should go get one, but Florida has very little flu, and it’s April.

I don’t get respiratory bugs very often. I would guess less often than once a year. I think I had them all when I was a kid, so it built me up! I like to think so, anyway. Seemed like I was sick every month.

If I recall correctly, I had pneumonia once, but it didn’t bother me. I was up and around, functioning normally.

It would be embarrassing to die from coronavirus after trying to make people understand that the epidemic was overblown.

We still have no major celebrity victims. I check every day. Some have gotten sick, but none have died. I thought Tom Dempsey was fairly well-known, but I talked to a friend who is involved with professional football, and he didn’t know who Dempsey was. I had to remind him.

He’s not Kim Kardashian.

Some weird things have happened here. Two nights ago, I woke up, and before I was completely awake, I saw a spirit leaning over my bed. It was transparent, like the Predator character in the movies. It was shaped like a fat man in a bowler hat. I got very angry, and I cursed it with defeat and banned it from my property. Last night, I woke up again, and briefly, I saw a transparent cloud in a corner by the ceiling. I cursed that, too.

Spirits seem to love upper corners and beds. I don’t know why.

I’m not afraid of them. They’re weaklings. They play for the losing team.

Last week, and again last night, I had the strange feeling that something big had ended. Maybe the age of the gentiles, also known as the church age? I don’t see the rapture happening right away, and I’m sure the world isn’t ending. I’m a bad student of prophecy, but I’m fairly certain a number of prophecies need to be fulfilled before the tribulation.

The rapture, tribulation, and second coming are three different things, and they are supposed to occur in the order in which I just wrote them. The rapture is supposed to follow persecution of the church. Worldwide, the church is persecuted very badly. Christians suffer more persecution, including murder, than anyone. Still, I have always expected pre-rapture persecution to be much worse than what we see right now.

The age of the church is definitely ending. God has been telling me that for years, and he has told other people. Maybe this epidemic is a threshold.

Churches cause a lot of problems. They teach garbage and keep people from getting to know God. Moving to smaller groups will be a big victory.

I can’t get inside the heads of people who are afraid of death. I know fear of death must be very common right now, but I can’t relate to it. I’m afraid of suffering, but not death. If you’re afraid of death, I’m sorry to say, it’s your fault, and you need to do something about it. If you don’t know God, and you’re reading this, what is your excuse? You have the Internet. It’s full of resources.

I discussed this with a buddy of mine. He told me a story about an aborted airline flight. His plane aborted takeoff three times. The pilot said a light kept coming on. The pilot looked at a manual, and he told the passengers the light meant the jet would need oil filters soon. He took off again, and the plane went over on its side. My friend looked out the window and saw the ground.

He said he started taking account of things. He knew his kids would be okay. He expected to go to heaven. He wasn’t afraid. This is how I feel about death.

In dreams where I have died, in the seconds before death, I felt very sober. I felt that something extremely important was happening. I also felt relieved that I was putting down my earthly burdens. I felt a sense of concern, hoping I was prepared. I wasn’t terrified. I didn’t beg God to rescue me so I wouldn’t die. Truthfully, I was looking forward to heaven. I suppose that’s selfish, but life on earth is tiresome. It’s a grind, even when it goes as well as possible.

There are people out there who feel differently. There are many people who will eat their own children if food becomes scarce, and that is not an exaggeration. It has happened.

Right now, those people are all hoarding toilet paper and Clorox wipes. If a real famine comes, a lot of people will be killed by the actions of hoarders, not by famine itself. Those who survive through selfishness and hysteria will be relatively worthless people.

In a society in which a woman will tear her own baby’s arms and legs off in order to avoid taking a semester off or just to look better in a bikini, should it surprise us when someone suggests that many of us would eat our children? We’re already doing it, not to avoid starvation, but to avoid inconvenience. We are known to have eaten about 60 million of our children since Roe v. Wade.

It would be great if, later in the week, my forecast was 10% too high, and then next week 50% too high, and so on. Sooner or later, this disease will stop spreading quickly, and then it will drop off to nearly nothing. Then we’ll get a vaccine, and our main problem will be coping with the likely needless recession or depression we caused.

One wonders how we will treat the hoarders and gougers.