New Toy Graces the Compound

I finished building my steel gong stand!

I was so excited when I finished, I took the stand to the pasture and started shooting after 7 p.m. Here are some shots of the gongs after a few rounds from 50 feet.

My squirrel rage now has a ready outlet year-round.

I didn’t realize steel was so liberating. With paper targets, I concentrate on my grip, pull, sight picture, breath control, and whatever else matters, and I try to put shots into the tiniest area possible. With steel, you just aim in the general direction of the gong and let fly. This is what shooting used to be like when I was a kid, terrorizing my neighborhood with BB guns.

It’s interesting to see how the paint holds up. The black stuff is truck bed coating, and it seems to be holding onto the gongs in spite of being blasted with CCI Choot Em’s. The orange paint is plain old Rust-Oleum, and it comes right off. Maybe I can find orange truck bed coating somewhere. I don’t expect gongs to stay pretty forever, but it would be nice to do better than this.

I shot these gongs with my Marlin Model 60, and it worked so well, we have reconciled. The Model 60 is a great gun, as long as you spend a lot of money upgrading it and then force yourself not to think of what’s inside it. The inner workings of a Model 60 are not a lot better than those of a Daisy BB gun.

When I got my Model 60 in 2018, I found that it shot 4″ groups at 50 feet. I sent it for warranty work, and Marlington replaced it. They couldn’t make it work any better than I could. The new one worked okay for a brief moment, and then the magazine tube fell out. After that, I put it away. I figured I would send it to Remlin eventually.

I decided to fix it myself. I bought a new pin to hold the tube in. Pins like this are supposed to be so tight they have to be hammered in. My new pin went right in with a push from my fingernail. The band it fit into had an oversized hole.

I bought a new band and a second pin for insurance. Then I Loctited the first replacement pin in place. If it falls out, I’ll replace the band and put the second replacement pin in it. One hopes the hole in the second band is not oversized.

The Marlin has a peep sight, which I installed shortly before the magazine fell out. The original sights are pretty cheap. The peep sight is really nice. I love peep (or “aperture”) sights. I had one on my old Crosman M1 BB gun. Regrettably, it accounted for a number of unwary lizards on my block.

Let’s tick off all the stuff the Marlin has now. I altered the stock myself and installed a correct sling stud, and then I added a sling. I put an MCARBO trigger in it, which, while not stellar, is worlds better than OEM. I installed a recoil spring that allows the use of hyper ammunition. Finally, I put a Williams peep sight set on it. So for a little over $300, you can have a pretty good $180 .22 rifle.

The Marlin is a beautiful gun. The stock is highly figured for some reason, and the basic lines of the gun have always been great. The balance and handling give it a sweet feel. It cycles well. It’s accurate. I just won’t think about what’s inside it.

POT METAL! POT METAL!

That just slipped out.

I feel like I need more gongs. I didn’t realize they were addictive.

Can’t wait to blast these with a 10mm pistol. Should be a joy.

My Coronavirus Ordeal Intensifies

The coronavirus epidemic just got real to me. McDonald’s has stopped making all-day breakfast.

Prior to this, I was telling everyone the epidemic was a great misfortune but not a catastrophe. Now I must agree with the toilet paper hoarders. Suffering has begun in earnest.

Today I did my best to adapt. I was determined to be strong. I made myself a big slice of country ham and several bacon-grease biscuits with red eye gravy. I’m no longer sobbing now. I think I can handle this.

Yesterday I learned that two counties not far away have put lockdowns into effect. That was disturbing. It made me wonder if my county was next. I live in the most conservative county (i.e. “sane”) county in the state, so I have good reason to hope for relatively intelligent leadership.

I checked the local paper’s site, and it says they’re not locking us down. They closed Internet cafes, though. Not sure what that’s all about.

Honestly, if I’m locked down, I plan to go out anyway. They don’t have enough cops to prevent it, and there will be enough “essential” businesses open to let me blend it with law-abiders. In truth, I will probably end up obeying the law, because the businesses I frequent are generally on the essential list. Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Places that sell firearms.

I assume this county wouldn’t be crazy enough to close gun stores. Many liberal-dominated cities are shutting them down. It’s obvious that gun stores are essential. The right to self-defense is extremely important. Liberals don’t see it that way, however, and they are always looking for underhanded, back-door methods of taking away our civil rights.

If the disease becomes widespread here, I’ll probably be more careful, but right now, getting this disease is like winning the lottery. It’s not common at all when compared to colds and the flu.

I’m disappointed to see that the government plans to hand out over a trillion dollars in totally unnecessary vote-buying tax money. Our economic problems are being caused by panic, not a relatively minor epidemic. We will have higher taxes because of the handout. We should just get out of the way of progress and let capitalism do its thing.

Here’s something funny: leftist Sweden isn’t imprisoning its citizens. They’re taking a relaxed approach, because, hello…it’s the correct thing to do. Evidently someone over there is capable of understanding simple math. You have to wonder how America’s leftists will take this.

Sweden won’t have a catastrophe. Even Italy didn’t have a catastrophe. No country will.

Here’s something that will raise your spirits or give you heartburn, depending on how you look at it: the lady in charge of the White House response says the initial coronavirus predictions may have been WILDLY (my word, not hers) exaggerated. Welcome to Club Reason!

I’ll embed a video of her appearance. If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll mention a key point. Initial death toll prediction for the UK: 500,000. Current prediction: 20,000.

So they were only off by 96%. No biggie.

Extrapolate to the US, and you get around 80,000. Terrible? Well…it’s the same number of people the CDC says we lost to the seasonal flu last year. Did you mourn all last year? Were there mass cremations? Did we shut down stores and tell grown people they were grounded? Don’t think so.

Here’s a screaming uninentional admission from the video: there is no antibody test. Hello? Remember me writing about the Chinese researchers who said the false-positive rate was 40-80%? Am I a genius because I read a news story and told other people about it?

If you don’t have an antibody test, you’re guessing. They’re judging people by symptoms, and coronavirus isn’t the only bug that causes respiratory failure.

It looks like we’re going to find out we misdiagnosed a huge number of flu patients. The epidemic’s numbers may collapse inward. For this, we deprived each other of toilet paper.

Should we have locked the country down just to be safe? Of course not. We already knew, from looking at the numbers available to us, that this disease was not going to spread that widely. It would have been inexplicable had it come to the US and hit a large percentage of the population. That would have been totally inconsistent with the way it worked in other countries.

We should have sheltered fat people and old people from the disease. I’ll bet we could do a lot of that with a trillion dollars of tax money. Think about this: even if you spend a trillion dollars, if you let people work while you spend it, you have earnings to mitigate the loss.

Not that I think we need to spend a trillion dollars to help “bubble people.” I’m just using the figure we’re actually spending. We could do it for nearly nothing.

It’s scary being part of an unthinking herd. Even if you know they’re wrong, you can still get swept over the cliff with the lemmings. Thank God I’m in the country and among conservatives.

In other news, I watched a Hickok45 video this morning. He’s the old guy in Tennessee who shoots steel in his backyard. He reviewed a Glock 20, which is a full-size 10mm pistol. I was glad to see this, because I ordered a Glock 20. I already have a Glock 29, which is the compact version, but I thought it would be nice to have a bigger one with a bigger magazine, to wear in my yard. I don’t want a heavy pistol bogging me down in the grocery store, and I want to keep my out-and-about gun in a pocket, but it’s okay to have a big carry pistol displayed openly at home.

Should I be content with a compact in the car. I don’t know, but I can legally put an AK47 in the backseat, so it doesn’t matter. I used to keep a similar rifle under the seat of my truck. I’ll tell you what. In a traffic dispute with a carload of bullies, nothing gets you respect like a rifle with a 30-round magazine.

When I saw that ammo hoarding was starting up, I ordered myself some 10mm bullets, primers, brass, and powder. I did not hoard. To hoard is to buy more than is reasonable. Anything up to 1,000 rounds, in a particular caliber and load, is reasonable. Back during the Obama panic, people were buying pallets of ammunition, and a lot of them were flipping them on Gunbroker. That’s hoarding.

Anyone who says a thousand rounds is a hoard is not a good shooter, because that person doesn’t practice. If you practice, you know you can shoot a thousand rounds in a week.

I have another Youtube favorite: Paul Harrell. He’s a true expert. He has won prizes in tons of shooting competitions, and he has been through a bunch of military schools. He was a military instructor. He even killed a guy with a deer rifle. The man was attacking Harrell and his wife, who were on foot, in a pickup truck. Harrell put two rounds through him and got charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted.

Harrell is a remarkable person. He’s generally a class act, although he has given people the finger in a couple of videos. He’s very smart and very patient. He would have made an exceptional attorney. He thinks his videos through very carefully, and he’s extremely thorough.

About 20% of gun lovers are absolute jerks who ought to be muzzled. Harrell knows this. He knows that no matter how carefully he words his videos, some couch commando will pop up in a comment and “correct” him. Watching him speak is like watching George W. Bush deliver the carefully constructed messages his team crafted in anticipation of leftist distortions.

Recently, Harrell was attacked by a much less popular creator: Caleb Giddings. Giddings was on a “reality” show featuring people who shot well. It was actually a multi-episode game show. He got weeded out and lost, but he still has an ego that won’t quit.

Harrell posted a video about shooting revolvers, and this set Giddings, a competition revolver shooter and former insurance agent, off. Giddings posted a response in which he accused Harrell of ignorance.

I’ll embed the video, but I don’t recommend watching it.

Giddings used the AH word to describe Harrell, and in comments, he made very arrogant remarks about his own shooting ability, compared to Harrell’s. He said something about Harrell’s championships lacking certification from recognized bodies.

Giddings drank Scotch all through is own video, which kind of looks bad given that it was a gun video. Guns and liquor aren’t supposed to be seen together. In Florida, alcoholics and potheads are legally barred from concealed carry, and this is probably true elsewhere. The federal NICS form lists drug and alcohol abuse as things that will prevent a transfer.

I have to admit, I’ve had more than a couple of beers while carrying. This was a long time ago. I wasn’t thinking. It’s a big deal, however. I rarely have more than one drink now, so it won’t be an issue ever again.

Harrell got fed up and responded to Giddings with a one-hour spanking that has to rank as one of Youtube’s all-time harshest rebuttals. He proved that Giddings said a lot of things that weren’t even close to true, and then he crushed what was left of his reputation by displaying a table full of awards. He took a plastic bin full of medals and dumped it on the table.

I don’t know who is the better shooter, but it would take at least two people to carry Harrell’s awards, and he even wins tomahawk-throwing matches, which is a little ridiculous, to be honest. Giddings has his credits listed on various gun-related sites on the web, but they don’t provide long lists of marksmanship championships, and knowing this guy, if there was such a list, it would be on every site he’s involved with.

My guess is that he would fare badly against Harrell.

A bunch of Harrell’s half-million fans went to Giddings’ video and left uncomplimentary comments. The dislike/like ratio was very high.

What did Giddings do? Did he admit fault? Actually, he turned the comments off and hid the likes and dislikes. This is not helping him. It makes him look cowardly and even more dishonest, and on top of that, he can’t get rid of the comments on Harrell’s video, which has a much bigger audience. Giddings only has about 50,000 subscribers, and he will probably have considerably fewer tomorrow.

His personality is very unpleasant. He drips venom. He seems very insecure. He doesn’t honor other people at all. He contemns them, and he does it from a pretty unimpressive position. He’s like a movie character who makes you long for the moment when he finally gets punched in the face. He is not someone you would want to know, unless you’re also a jerk.

Giddings is currently in the Air Force, so I guess he didn’t make it as a professional shooter or insurance salesman. If he had the kind of talent he thinks he does, he would be making a living shooting, like Jerry Miculek. If Miculek acted the way Giddings does, people might understand, but it looks awful coming from a semi-pro with a day job.

It’s very interesting. It reminds me of the days when blogs were actually blogs and not corporate pseudopods. Giddings trolled Harrell, who had done nothing to provoke him, and he got bitten very deeply in the rear end. The Youtube crowd wasn’t having his nonsense.

The whole kerfuffle makes me think of things I’ve done and said in the past. God is love, and his children should also be love. Men should be men, not boys. Not arrogant punks who have no appreciation for anything. I’m glad I’m finally improving.

It’s too bad there are so many insecure macho men in the gun crowd. They ruin things for everyone. I quit using The High Road because there were so many jewels filling the board with poison. I joined another board, and I make liberal use of their “ignore” feature. When someone says something nasty, I try not to respond at all. If I do respond, I try to say something mature but clear. The ignore list is wonderful.

Similarly, I quit watching Gordon Ramsay again. Earlier in the week, Youtube started suggesting his videos again. I don’t know why. I watched several, and then I quit and deleted them from my history. If you keep something bad in your history, Youtube will recommend similar things. Ramsay is a mess. He spreads hate everywhere he goes. I don’t care if it’s an act (it’s not). I don’t need that circulating in my blood.

Every day, when I look at Youtube, I tell it to stop recommending certain channels. The Mormons. News stations. Political vloggers. Movie-related channels. Keep that mess. It makes my stomach hurt.

I guess I’ll try to finish my steel target array today. Then I’ll do a lie-packed video about Jerry Miculek and see if I can get some attention!

Those who Can’t Learn the Lessons of Basic Math are Doomed to Repeat Them

The coronavirus news continues to alarm and disappoint…liberals and journalists (but I repeat myself).

As people who read my blog know, I put together a very simply differential equation intended to predict how the disease would spread. I touched the equation up a couple of times, but after I started getting excellent agreement, I decided to leave it alone and accept the error. I thought this would give me more credibility. You can’t change a forecast every day. That’s not forecasting. That’s present-casting.

A couple of days ago, I came very, very close to nailing the actual total number of cases. Today, things are much worse. I’m only within about 9%!

Yes, that was sarcasm. An accuracy of 9% is beyond my wildest dreams. It’s the stuff of Joe Biden’s nightmares. He really needs a plague to get him in office.

Actual figure today, worldwide: 480,446.

Predicted figure: 437,040.

Flu cases: 650,000,000.

Biden is a MeToo nightmare. He is famous for his creepy behavior with the ladies. Trump has already been inoculated againt MeToo. They have exhausted their pop-gun ammunition already, and he survived. They will look stupid shooting the same rounds at him again. Not that some won’t try.

Biden needs a distraction and a stick to hit Trump, and the failed plague is turning out to be a pretty soggy stick.

To get back to the math, for the moment, the epidemic is acting a great deal like my equation, and that should continue for some time. I think the numbers will outpace my equation to some degree, and then as the epidemic dies out, my equation will outpace the epidemic and become invalid.

I’m hoping this will happen by the end of April.

Someone told me his wife got really mad when she saw my equation. She attacked it because I didn’t use exact numbers. People who are bad at math and determined to be upset are impossible to talk to at times like this.

You don’t need exact numbers in a situation like this, and even if you did, only God knows them. Also, the equation doesn’t have to be all that accurate. It’s not really intended to tell us how many people will get sick. It’s intended to give us a ballpark idea which serves perfectly well to tell us whether this is a real plague.

Many women enjoy being upset. This is less common among men, and it’s common among kids. It’s a form of manipulation. “If I’m upset, the burden is on you to do my will.” It’s important to know when you’re guilty of this. It’s a character flaw you need to address. Being worried and refusing to listen to reason are very bad things that bring negative consequences. Worrying doesn’t make you a good person. It makes you a liability and a burden to other people.

If you’re a man over the age of 15, you already know that one of the best ways to upset women is to try to calm them down when they’re flipping out. Very often, when a woman comes to you in a panic, she’s not looking to be calmed down. She’s looking to have her panic confirmed. Don’t ask me why.

Being calm and rational is a good thing. It doesn’t make you insensitive or heartless. Truthfully, I don’t want hysterical people in my life. I don’t like being around them. Coming to me with hysteria isn’t a way to make me embrace you and bond with you. It’s a very good way to drive me off. I have plenty of problems without including neurotic people who do not want to feel better.

It’s pretty obvious now that coronavirus isn’t going to be a big deal compared to other illnesses we already have. It has hit the entire world, it doesn’t have any fresh new continents to attack, and things just aren’t going that badly. I don’t know what the final tally will be. I would guess 20 or 30 million at the outside. We can say with confidence that the numbers won’t be all that bad. We have had ample time to see what the disease can do, and it’s not going to develop new infectiousness to increase the toll.

The disease is not a catastrophe, any more than Obama’s swine flu was. The economy-killing panic is the real problem.

If an ignorant layman who blogs can figure out what coronavirus is doing, why can’t the experts? I suppose they can, because they are much more able than I am. They don’t even need equations. They must surely have excellent software, and they have to know coronavirus isn’t a major threat. I guess they’re giving us worst-case predictions in order to justify their financial support. Also, people in that kind of work tend to be Trump-haters.

Yesterday, I saw an article written by an ER physician from the New York area. It was a hysterical, critical letter to Trump, claiming Cuomo had all the answers and Trump’s policies were going to lead to an Omega Man scenario. She said she had treated “countless” severe cases, and she wrote of watching people gasp for breath.

I checked the figures. New York City was at 15,000 known cases. We know that out of that many people, less than 10% will be in bad shape, so let’s say 1500. How many will gasp for breath? Maybe 750? How many emergency rooms are there in a city of 8 million people? There are over 200 in New York, so that should give you a clue. What percentage of the time is this woman at work? Well under 50; that’s guaranteed. What percentage of her ER’s coronavirus patients go to her instead of another doctor?

“But wait,” you say, “people with detected cases are likely to be much sicker.” Good try, but that’s not what we’ve been told. We’ve been told that severe cases amount to something like 10% of the total, and that has to refer to detected cases, because otherwise, it’s an imagined figure.

She hasn’t seen “countless” anything. She has probably handled 10 or fewer gasping patients. She just wants to get rid of Trump.

When BS fights with math, BS loses every time.

It’s very unfortunate that American kids aren’t taught to think this way. Am I a genius because I can do division and multiplication? Am I exceptional because I passed fourth-grade math? Has it come to that?

Lies are a bigger threat than disease. The truth matters. Most Americans don’t know this.

I can’t help thinking of the many times professionals with big computers gave us bad, alarming information about hurricanes when ordinary citizens could look at maps and models and see that we were being deceived. Reporters re-spewed the hysteria to us with no semblance of criticality. No one was ever held accountable. It looks like coronavirus coverage is working the same way.

If there is one thing I’ve been wrong about, it’s the toilet paper crisis. I greatly overestimated the character and intelligence of the American people. I thought people would quit hoarding in a week. This country is full of toilet paper. There is no shortage at all. It’s still being shipped to stores, and they’re still stocking it. The problem is that selfish, heartless people–worriers–are continuing to show up early and buy it all. And stores are letting them. That’s really something. A great lesson for the future.

Take heart. They can’t keep buying it up forever. The supply is just too great. Sorry if you’ve already used your curtains. Things will get better soon.

You can get toilet paper from Amazon right now, if you look around, and it will be delivered in a few days. Hope this helps. I would hate to see people ruin all their socks and neckties.

No Soy Here

The Hickok45 starter kit is shaping up.

For those who don’t know, Hickok45 is a Youtuber who is so popular, he makes a living from videos. He shoots steel targets and containers of soda in his backyard. Wishing you had thought of it first? Who isn’t?

I have a berm and a target stand made from a realtor’s “for sale” sign frame. The stand is great for paper targets. I decided I wanted some steel gongs, too, so I needed a second stand.

The other day, I posted a video of the stand without paint and the bolts that tighten it. Today I have a photo of the [virtually] finished product. I just put the paint on it.

As you can see, it now has T-handles on top of the little sleeves that hold the crossmember in place. Those handles are made from steel I cut from a Hawaiian sling spear today. I welded them across the tops of a couple of 1/2″ black oxide bolts I happened to have on hand. With the handles in place, I can tighten the crossmember in position without a wrench.

I used Rust-Oleum truck bed coating to paint the stand. Truck bed coating is unbelievably tough. I screwed the bolts in as far as I could and painted the stand with them in place. This covered the exposed parts of the bolts without gunking up the male and female threads that actually hold the stand together.

The stand is surprisingly non-wobbly. The first time I fitted it up, I thought it needed more of an angle between the end supports, but with the bolts tight, it doesn’t move.

When the stand is fully painted and dry, I’ll mount the gongs on attachments made from pipe and flat bar. I already have the materials.

The friction from the gongs swinging back and forth will eventually cause rust, but come on. This is going to a cow pasture. It’s not a bench for Princess Kate to sit on. I guess I could wrap the abraded areas with Gorilla Tape before slipping the gongs onto the crossmember. That would greatly extend the rust-free period.

I don’t know how long Gorilla Tape lasts outdoors.

It’s very satisfying to be able to fabricate steel projects. For a long time, I was not able to do this, either because of lack of equipment or lack of skill. Now I have plenty of equipment and just enough skill.

Right now I’m going to make pizza. The faux plague and hysteria-related food supply problems got me thinking about making pizza with supermarket ingredients. My local Winn-Dixie sells whole-milk grated mozzarella, which is a dream come true, because part-skim mozzarella is generally nasty.

People snapped spaghetti sauce up after the insanity started, but I found some. I would be stunned if it was anything like as good as the pizza sauce I make myself. But it could be acceptable for times when the real thing isn’t available. Maybe it will even surprise me.

I hate to say this, but canned sauce has gotten so good, there isn’t much point in making sauce. I mean for pasta, not pizza. You can’t throw pasta sauce on pizza and get optimal results. Pasta and pizza are not the same. I can make pasta sauce somewhat better, but I would call it a 10% difference, if that.

I used to eat Paul Newman’s sauce sometimes, but plain old Ragu is better. They have a ton of different flavors, though, so you have to pick and choose.

Today I plan to make thin pizza with pepperoni, pineapple, onions, and ricotta. I make pan pizza better. I want to brush up my thin-crust technique.

On a related note, I wrote about a local chain called Five Star. I had a pepperoni slice that made a great impression on me, so I bought a small pie this week. It turns out their cheese is not fatty enough. The pepperoni slice was saved by the fat from the meat, so I didn’t realize the cheese was flawed. The pie I bought had little brown dots on it. The signature of dry cheese. Also, the crust was bloated, like Domino’s.

I think they would do a fine job if I ordered thin crust and a meat topping.

I tried their garlic rolls. Not good. The bread was fine, but they put some kind of salty yellow sauce on it. I assume it’s margarine. I don’t think they could afford to use that much butter. The garlic was burnt. Maybe I could make it work if I got rolls without sauce and nuked my own garlic.

I could make rolls today. I’ll try to resist.

Ballpark Prediction Equation Survives Another Day

I am still alive, and I salute all those who are in the same condition in spite of the underachieving coronavirus plague.

I have good news to report. After several days with no changes, my coronavirus forecast equation, which will be a primary source when I create my upcoming Coronavirus Hysteria Index, is doing extremely well. The equation predicted 375,977 infections for this morning, and the actual figure was 387,382. I am trying to predict the Johns Hopkins running total, so please don’t make the mistake of correcting the actual total in a comment. It’s irrelevant. I don’t have data for it.

You would expect the actual, known-to-God-alone graph and the Johns Hopkins graph to run more or less parallel anyway, even if the former graph has higher numbers.

The difference between the actual and predicted values is so small, it’s insignificant. It would be amazing if an armchair epidemiologist were within 200% of the correct number, and I’m within something like 3%.

I don’t know if I’ll make any more changes to the equation. I would be excited to be within 20%, and there is no hope, short of a miracle, that I can improve on 3%.

Will the equation hold up? That’s the question.

Of course, it will not hold up. As noted earlier, it goes infinite with time, and there are only 7.7 billion people to infect. All epidemics plateau and go away to nothing or a very low level of infection. This one, will, too. There is a future moment for which my equation predicts an infection total of 4 trillion, and by that time, my equation will be pretty useless. I have high hopes that it will do well while the infection is still ramping up. That’s about it.

My best wild guess is that we will see a plateau within the next month. Before a plateau, of course, the infection rate will slow down. If the beginning of the plateau, which is something you have to define arbitrarily, is on April 20, then there will have to be a number of days prior to April 20 during which the rate drops off pretty quickly.

What happens when coronavirus goes away?

I was concerned about that yesterday, because you can have this bug more than once, and they don’t expect it to vanish entirely (although it could). What if we always have COVID-19 with us, from now on? The question disturbed me.

I don’t think it’s a big deal now. Officials seem to think vaccinations will work, and it won’t take that long to develop them, so within a year or two, you’ll be able to protect yourself.

This won’t help gullible, dangerous people who keep diseases alive by refusing to get their kids vaccinated, but then coronavirus doesn’t like kids, so maybe that won’t be a big factor. I’m not sure whether kids are relatively immune or they just get light symptoms. If they get infected just like the rest of us, they will spread the virus, so that will be bad.

I saw a piece of bad information on a website. They said no one is immune to this virus. That’s wrong. No virus can infect every person on the planet. There are many human beings who have never been ill in their lives. Look it up. There are definitely people who can’t get this virus, and there are people who can be infected yet can’t develop symptoms. The symptoms are what kill you.

What they should have said is that the majority of us are not immune, and they should have added that a whole lot of people get no symptoms or very, very mild symptoms.

When this is over, I will think a little bit, but not too much, about future preparations. I will put a few things in a closet, and I don’t mean a big closet. I’ll try to have enough food to keep me alive for a month, I guess. Beyond a month, there isn’t anything I can do. I can’t grow enough food to feed myself indefinitely.

I may pack away some more ammunition. That’s always a good idea, because the price keeps going up.

What did Jesus say about the future? He predicted wars, famines, and plagues. Does a mild problem like coronavirus count? I don’t know, but more stuff is in the pipeline, and it may be worse. We’re already having a sort of famine because selfish people who aren’t all that bright are filling their houses with food the rest of us want. Not much of a famine, but it’s no fun having to go to two different stores to find a baking potato.

The disasters aren’t the main problem. The main problem is the pig-like way people respond to them. Coronavirus hasn’t caused a single shortage. People have.

It’s strange that we can suffer lack while we are surrounded by an abundance of food. It’s there, even if you can’t see it. It’s in warehouses and in the houses of a few people who should be banned from grocery stores. It flows into stores every day, and the worst people in the world scoop it up before you get there.

I don’t believe in creating a huge personal cache of stuff. Jesus told us to take no thought for such things. If he won’t take care of us, there is no point in worshiping him. He gave us all sorts of great promises, and we should be connected with him and receiving his help. If you reject God, well, maybe hoarding is your best bet. But it’s no substitute for favor. God’s help can’t be defeated by people with bulging grocery carts. You can’t keep food away from me. Only God can do that.

I try not to scrap for things like a starving dog. When my sister conned my dad into buying her a house, and he asked for my approval because it affected my inheritance, I told him to do whatever he wanted. When my grandparents died, and some relatives competed over their belongings, I didn’t get involved. When you lower yourself to the level of a looter, what good does it do you? You get a bunch of things you like, but you become a filthy creature no one can respect, and you find yourself in a world of stress, striving, and defensiveness. It’s a bad trade.

The Bible compares God’s children to eagles, not maggots.

In the end, I did very well in spite of failing to engage, so it looks like I took the correct course.

It’s sad to think of all the people I care about whom I can count on to try to stick it to me at the slightest sign of pressure. You’re in the same boat. Something you should think about.

Before I go, more interesting information. I found a site saying it is estimated that the swine flu pandemic of 2009 caused 123,000-200,000 deaths, and that since then, the same virus has killed many more people. The article was written last summer, so it’s not someone trying to stifle COVID-19 fears. In 2009, we didn’t hide in our houses or shut down the country. We had ample access to toilet paper.

There are pandemics we barely notice.

It’s starting to look like the biggest change we’ve seen isn’t an attack from a new virus. It’s our new, snowflaky inclination to react to mildly bad news with hysteria.

People just can’t understand how many of us there are, and how little 100,000 deaths mean in a population this size. Not that we’ve seen anything like 100,000 deaths from coronavirus. In order to have a real global plague, we would have to see something like 400,000,000 deaths in less than a year. A slow plague isn’t a plague.

In a real plague, we would see hospital corridors filling up all over the world. We would see government trucks going around to get bodies. Instead, we’re seeing news stories about isolated individuals. An obese person here; a celebrity there. The fact that the press is stretching so hard to find stories should tell you everything you need to know.

If people were better at math, you would be able to buy hand sanitizer right now. I feel sure of it.

The Love Grows Cold

On Friday, I went to see my metal dealer (who was sick), and I spent about $33 on steel so I could build a stand for my steel gong targets. Yesterday, I finished the main part of the fabrication. Here’s the result.

I plan to paint it, since it will stand in a cow pasture permanently. Until the cows knock it over and walk around on it, which will probably happen 15 minutes after I set it up. I didn’t know cows were mischievous, but it turns out they are.

The long square bits are 1″ tubing. The round bits are galvanized conduit, which I had lying around. I also used some scrap, including two short pieces of a spear for a Hawaiian sling. Look it up.

Wait…you can’t weld galvanized steel! It gives off poisonous gas! Not to worry. If you dip it in muriatic acid for a few seconds, the zinc goes away. Cheap galvanized stuff is a great resource for hobby welders.

I have a piece of round tubing that will slip over the horizontal bar. I’m going to cut the round tubing in several pieces. I’ll weld long pieces of 1″ by 1/8″ bar to the round tubing, and I’ll fasten my gongs to the other ends. This will give me targets that can swing vertically but not from side to side.

I have considered welding the targets to the steel bar, but welding will surely anneal the gongs in small areas. Soft metal can cause ricochets. I don’t know if a tiny bit of soft steel will be dangerous enough to worry about. After all, people all over the world shoot hardened gongs held up on mild steel frames that are soft, and obviously, the frames get hit. Welding would be quick and easy compared to using bolts.

I think it would be smarter to insert bolts in the gong holes and weld the ends of the bolts to the flat bar. I wouldn’t have to drill holes in the bar, and I wouldn’t soften the gongs. I don’t want the gongs to be right up against the bar. I want to put some distance in there. This will make the gongs hang so they tilt forward a little, which may make spent lead more likely to be deflected toward the ground. I guess the bolt idea is good.

When this is finished, I will have a strong stand that comes apart with two screws.

If I were making the stand today, I would change the design a little, but it will be fantastic, so I don’t care.

People knock steel, saying it’s heavy, but they forget that it hasn’t been that long since steel was considered a wonder material. The abundance of iron and the versatility of steel have changed the world. If you think steel is heavy, try building a wooden or masonry skyscraper. We haven’t always had lighter metals, and they’re more expensive and harder to work with. Steel is an incredible material. You just don’t realize it because you’re spoiled.

In other news, when I got up this morning and checked the coronavirus numbers, my latest coeffient’s results had me within a few hundred cases of the actual toll. Shocking. Maybe the equation I constructed will work fairly well for the next couple of weeks. Sooner or later, factors like recovery and saturation should mess it up, however.

I read some very comforting news today. I don’t know if it’s true. I read that MOST Americans get the flu once a year. I had read that about 36,000,000 of us caught it this year. If “most” is correct, we’re looking at a figure over 170,000,000.

That would be comforting, because it would make coronavirus look even less significant compared to the flu.

I have my doubts about it, to say the least.

A reader has suggested that Italians screwed up their data by calling all respiratory-disease deaths that in anyway involved the new bug coronavirus deaths. I wonder if that’s true, and I wonder how many other countries are doing similar things.

Don’t forget: Chinese researchers put the percentage of false positives at 40% to 80%. How would you feel, taking a cancer test that unreliable? What if you got charged with murder, and you found out juries had a 40% false-guilty rate?

Actually, that wouldn’t shock me. I’m amazed they ever get it right.

I have finally been impacted by coronavirus. Almost. A week or two ago, I noticed that my local Winn-Dixie sold store-brand shredded whole-milk mozzarella. This is not an easy thing to get even in sane times. If the cheese is good, it would be perfect for pizza. Low-fat mozzarella turns brown in the oven. You can reduce this by covering it with provolone or some other whole-milk cheese, or you can butter your mozzarella, but it’s better to start with good cheese.

Yesterday, I thought I might get some bagged cheese and Ragu for emergency pizza, just in case. Too late. The hoarders got both. They should be forced to go out in orange vests and pick up dog poop. They should have all their toilet paper confiscated and replaced with corn cobs. Or bastard files.

Another store had plenty of sliced provolone, so I grabbed some. I bought crushed tomatoes and paste. Can’t hurt. Still low on flour, but the kind of person who hoards food isn’t likely to cook from scratch, so maybe I can find some.

Hoarders don’t eat most fruits and vegetables, either. They cleaned out my local store’s potatoes the other day, while apples and all types of green vegetables sat in a big lonely display, untouched. When you see hoarder carts, they’re full of sugar cereal, Pop Tarts, Hot Pockets, and so on. Hoarding doesn’t appeal much to people who have it together.

I wonder what’s happening with cigarettes! I’ll bet they’re gone. People with poor values hoard, and they also smoke.

If you think about it, maybe the hoarders are onto something. They eat garbage and they smoke. They tend to be obese. These are coronavirus’s favorite things. Maybe hoarders are more likely to die if they get infected, so we should let them hoard!

Hoarders seem to miss some obvious things. Stores are having temporary problems, but you can go to McDonald’s or any other takeout restaurant and get all the food you want. You would think this would be a clue that there is not going to be a food shortage.

The only thing that could cause a real food shortage would be a lack of workers at the fundamental level. If there is no one to work on farms because insane politicians have made them stay home, yes, we will have shortages. The disease itself won’t hurt enough people to cause a problem. The US food supply chain is very, very flexible, and it has a lot of backup storage built into it. People need to read about it instead of filling their homes with food other folks should have.

I have a policy. I always try new pizza restaurants that open near me. In Miami, this was usually not a fruitful effort, because Miami is a pizza desert. Cubans make very bad pizza. Ocala is different. The pizza here is as good or better than New York pizza. Don’t ask me why. And yes, there is bad pizza in New York. There is plenty of it.

There is a chain here called Five Star. They opened a location near a grocery I use. Twice, I went in and tried to get slices. This was weeks ago. They were having professionalism issues, so I could not get served in a reasonable time. Yesterday, I finally got lucky. I got a couple of slices. Wonderful. I’m thinking of heading over there today.

Coincidentally, Five Star left a flyer in my mailbox yesterday. It says they use 100% actual cheese, which is something Papa John’s and Domino’s can’t say. They use fake cheese. Look it up. They mix cheese with things like starch.

Five Star also uses tomatoes which are packed ripe. This is hugely important. It’s very hard to find this kind of tomato sauce in grocery stores. Hunt’s Contadina, Cento, and the others generally do not use ripe tomatoes, and they mistreat the green tomatoes they do use. Five Star probably uses Bonta or Stanislaus sauce, from California.

I may try to hit the store tomorrow early, because I am very curious about the bagged cheese. Oldsters get exclusive shopping rights before 9 a.m. After that, I can pounce. But maybe there are lines and fistfights in the morning. Wouldn’t surprise me.

I had another plague problem. I tried to order a GoPro from Best Buy. Ordinarily, I have very good experiences with this chain, but not this week. They’re cowering behind their counters with their doors locked, but you can still pick things up in the parking lot. My understanding is that you drive by with your hatch up, and an employee in a nomex burqa fires your purchase into the back of your car with some kind of cannon. Then he goes back in, and they give him a squirt with a flamethrower.

Anyway, I tried to place the order three times, and Best Buy canceled it every time, saying they couldn’t verify my info. Their site said to call them. I called. They routed me to someone who was in the wrong department. That person routed me to another department. That department’s system told me I could expect to wait over 60 minutes to hear a human voice.

Tomorrow, Amazon will be delivering my GoPro. They promised a Thursday delivery, but it’s going to be Tuesday.

I have a Yi-brand camera I bought in ’17, but it’s junk. It turns itself on and off. When you’re shooting video, it switches to still photos and fills your SD card with them. It takes many tries to connect it to a computer or wifi. I decided to give up and buy the real thing. Do NOT buy a Yi camera.

You can imagine my stress, missing out on unnecessary cheese and having to buy toys online instead of in person. It’s hard, but I’m a natural hero and saint, so don’t make a big thing out of it. It would embarrass me, because I’m humble. And charismatic.

This morning, I realized something really bad about the stay-home orders and business closures. When people are stuck at home and they can only shop for essentials, what are they going to do? They’ll shop out of boredom. So the bans are increasing hoarding. How about that?

I’m going to see if I can get paint for my target stand. If the hardware store has paint, I’ll just buy ALL OF IT! I HAVE TO HAVE IT! SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT GET IT FIRST! I WANT IT ALL!

Whew. I’m back now.

I guess I’ll put up a photo of the stand when I set it up. May be a couple of days.

Coronavirus Math Looking Better than Yesterday

I really have to apologize. I made a little booboo while updating my coronavirus forecast yesterday. I came up with future figures which were somewhat disturbing, but today I corrected myself, and the estimate for late May was reduced by over 60%.

I’m still not saying you can rely on the equation, but at least it looks better.

Yesterday, the Italians dumped 27,000 unrecorded cases on us, all at once. I looked at their total in the morning. It was about 27,000. Three hours later, it was about 54,000. Obviously, the difference was due to error. It’s not like 27,000 people got sick instantly.

I put the new figures into my equation, but I also made the mistake of bumping the baseline date up. I figured the more recent the starting date was, the better the data would be.

This was wrong. The total on the recent starting date was artificially low because of the Italian fumble. A low starting figure gives you an equation the blows up faster.

I went back and did the math again using my original starting date, which is March 5. The farther back you go, the less impact Italy has on the figures. If they were artificially low all along, the error would be smaller farther back in the past, when Italy’s total numbers, though wrong, were too small to screw things up as much.

New figures:

3/22: 323,000 (actual figure this morning: ~311,000)
3/23: 348,723
3/24: 375,977
3/31: 636,679
4/4: 860,281
3/22 + 60: 29,552,653

No one wants to see 30 million people get this disease, but yesterday the number was about 80 million. And again, this is global, and the flu total this year was around 650,000,000, over a much shorter time. The flu did that in spite of our usual preparations and precautions. We didn’t see coronavirus coming, thanks to the Chinese. The flu had to overcome a big vaccination program which worked, and it still nailed 650,000,000 people and killed 80,000 Americans. No one has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

More news: they’re saying the death rate for healthy people is probably about 0.3%.

What about Italy’s crazy death rate? On Friday, the average age of an Italian killed by coronavirus was 78.5. AVERAGE.

A reader pointed me to a story which may also shed light. People are saying the Italians blew it by hospitalizing people instead of treating them at home. They did the opposite of social distancing. They put sick people in buildings full of other sick people. If this is the case, no wonder so many Italians died.

China is still flat, and people are going back to work.

If relatively tiny Italy is rivaling China in total infections, Italy is doing something very, very wrong. They don’t have a stronger strain of the virus. If they did, young people would be dying, and they aren’t. The weak link in the chain has to be human.

What about the Fusco family in New Jersey? They had a get-together, 7 got sick, and two died. Proof that we’re all going to die? No. The Fuscos are old and obese. Go look them up. There is a group photo of them. Some are very obese, and the thinnest one is merely somewhat obese. They look very bad, even in their pre-coronavirus photo. The youngest one is middle-aged. The two that died had “underlying health problems.” These are exactly the type of people you would expect to have wildly disproportionate bad fortune.

The data still stinks, probably, but look out your window. Do you see bodies lying in the yard? Is the real estate market glutted with the homes of victims? Is the government sending out makeshift morgues to refrigerate millions of corpses? Nope. That’s not happening even in Italy. Even if there is never a good prediction equation, there is still common sense, and we can see that coronavirus is not an extinction-level event.

Scientists are now talking about 0.3% as a reliable death rate, and they are still expecting people under 60 and healthy people to do much, much better.

I hope this makes people feel better.

Somebody Spilled Pasta Fagioli on the Data

Bad news for my coronavirus prediction equation: today, a whole bunch of new data flopped into the system all at once, and it really screws things up.

This morning, I looked at the infection total. Italy was up around 27,000 cases. I believe the total worldwide was around 276,000. This afternoon, two or three hours later, I looked again, and I saw about 54,000 in Italy and 300,000 for the world total. The death total in Italy doesn’t seem to have changed, however.

Don’t get the idea that 27,000 more Italians got sick over a couple of hours. Obviously, the data from Italy was screwed up, and someone changed it.

This has a big effect on the equation. In the near-term, it’s not all that bad. I see 396,365 cases as of the morning of March 22, and as of April 4, I see 1,208,499. The problem comes later. For about May 20, I have 79 million.

This is not all that far from the flu’s total for the year, which is around 650,000,000. Assuming a high death rate for coronavirus, it gives us a coronavirus death toll rivaling the flu’s. That’s worse than I previously thought, but not a plague, unless the yearly flu is a plague.

I can’t repeat this often enough: if the flu isn’t a catastrophe, neither is coronavirus. I don’t think many people are listening, however.

There is a figure people should be looking at. I found it on the web a few minutes ago: 78.5. This is the AVERAGE age of Italians killed by coronavirus. AVERAGE. We no longer have to ask why Italy has a high death rate. We have to ask, instead, why they are letting so many old people get exposed. It’s not that hard to make special precautions for a relatively small and easily identified group of people.

It seems fair to say that if people the world over focused on isolating the old, the fat, and the sick from the virus, the death rate would plummet. Young people are still far less likely to die.

One nice thing about the Italian revelation is that it cuts their death rate in half, on top of confirming that young people are much safer.

The question I have to ask myself is whether there is any point at all in trying to create an equation when the official figures are so unreliable. Maybe it’s better to just rely on common sense and continue comparing coronavirus to the flu. We may not have figures good enough to create equations, but they are probably good enough to tell an intelligent person that this is not a catastrophe.

Here’s an important thing to consider if you’re reading this. My equation goes infinite over time. There are no terms in it that predict how the disease will plateau and go away, as it definitely will. I’m just trying to predict how it will go while it’s spreading fast.

The most likely thing is that the infection rate will plateau in a short time, and then the number of total infections will go to nearly zero, as it does for the flu. So when the equation says 79 million people will have been infected by late May, it may be wildly pessimistic. We may start to plateau very soon. Maybe we’ll never break 5 million.

China continues to report virtually no new cases. I think this is solid information. The rest of the world is all over China for giving us this disease in the first place. If they hadn’t lied over and over, the epidemic would have been much more limited. I am reasonably sure they’re telling us what they know. I don’t think they could keep a lid on it after everything that has happened. I may be wrong, though.

Their initial efforts to contain the news only worked temporarily, so if they’re doing the same thing now, they shouldn’t expect better success. China isn’t bottled up like North Korea. Chinese people can call people around the world, and there are Youtubers who vlog from China.

I’ve been watching a vlogger calling himself Serpentza for a long time. He lived in China until recently, and he has many contacts there. Back when China was hiding the truth, he told the world coronavirus was a major epidemic. His last video is about the epidemic, and it appears to back up the notion that it is drying up in China.

If China’s news is true or anything close to true, we should see things get better around the world pretty quickly.

Here’s something I haven’t been considering: what if this becomes a disease that never goes away? Some illnesses are always with us, even though they’re not always common. They say people don’t develop lasting immunity to this bug, so you can have it more than once. To me, that’s scarier than the initial epidemic. If the disease kills a million people this year and then goes away, that’s bad, but it’s a minor thing in a world of nearly 8 billion people. If it comes back and kills hundreds of thousands every year from now on, it will be a big problem. Even though it would never be catastrophic, it would be a major continuing health issue, like, well, the flu.

It may help to remember that even the plague came and went. I doubt we’re looking at a future in which 5% of the population always has this disease.

I’m interested in seeing what happen with regard to T.B. Joshua’s prophecy. He says the epidemic will be gone by March 27. If we have 10 million cases a week from now, we will know to be careful about listening to him. If he’s right, people will have to ask themselves serious questions about the reality of God.

My best guess is that it will not be possible for me to come up with a really good prediction based on math, even if I use the right equation, because the data is just too flawed. Nonetheless, things still look very good when you look at the overall picture. Even if we don’t have really good figures, it seems fair to conclude that this epidemic is extremely unlikely to hit flu numbers.

Innocent by Reason of Other People’s Insanity

It looks like I’m hoarding. But I didn’t mean to.

One reason I’m hoarding is that I was a hoarder before hoarding was cool. I started shopping for things like targets, pistols, and ammunition before I had any idea the American public would go nuts and start buying up toilet paper.

I went to Gander Outdoors to look at a Glock, which is probably pointless, since they are all nearly exactly the same, and I saw Aguila 9mm selling very cheap. I didn’t even want it, but I bought hundreds of rounds. I knew I would use it some day. Pay a little now, or pay a lot later.

I bought a neat Colt Woodsman pistol, and I felt I needed to quit relying on Remington’s not-quite-ideal Golden Bullets, so I ordered a fairly heavy box of CCI Mini-mags. I also bought a huge number of small pistol primers, because I was thinking about reloading. This was all before I realized people were going to snap up gun stuff. I also bought a large package of .50 AE, because I happened to be shooting that gun at the time.

I already had enough ammunition of other types to require many trips to move it from one room to another. This is just how bargain ammo shoppers roll. I accumulated this ammunition over a period of years.

The last time I bought toilet paper, I figured I might as well quit playing around and buy a lot so I would save money. When the panic set in, I still had something like 17 rolls.

I use disinfectant wipes when I go to the dump and when I leave the grocery store. I’ve been working on the same can for quite a while. After the supply dried up, I figured I was going to have to make that can last. Then I went upstairs and checked my bathroom. I had two cans that were nearly full. For me, that’s probably a 6-month supply.

I always have a lot of alcohol. I have parrots, and I used to have a parent with dementia, so I use alcohol to wipe things down all day. On top of the isopropyl alcohol I had on hand when coronavirus popped up, I had a big jug of denatured alcohol in my workshop. I haven’t checked, but my guess is that microbes don’t like it any more than isopropyl.

I checked. The Internet says it works great.

Factoid: coronaviruses have oily outer coatings, so solvent disinfectants work well on them, and soap kills them. Lysol wipes aren’t that great for coronavirus. But they will still help me when I visit the dump.

Since the Purge began, I’ve made another gun buy. It took slightly more effort than usual, but I got it done, and I got what I wanted. I needed reloading supplies, because the only good store 10mm ammunition is expensive. I was afraid I was out of 10mm powder. I couldn’t remember what I used last time. When I looked into it, I realized I had probably used Alliant No. 7, of which I have a large quantity. I also had large pistol primers because I had made a big buy while the Obama panic was subsiding. I thought I was out of bullets, though. I found 300 of the ones I like, so I ordered them. Then I looked at what I already had. Turned out I had around 200, sitting around. Oops.

I had to get some 10mm brass. I bought direct from the people who make it. I’m really hoping I don’t turn out to have hundreds of cases I forgot about, moldering in a storage box.

But it’s pretty likely.

I was planning to do some .308 shooting before crazy got ahold of us, and after it did, I was determined to go through with my plan. I found 300 rounds of match ammunition, which no one actually needs during an epidemic. If it were crisis ammunition, I would have bought something made for killing game.

Do I feel bad about any of these buys? Actually, I am having misgivings about the 10mm pistol. I don’t really need it. I just thought it would be handy, and I was concerned that the hysterical mob might make it impossible to get another one for several months. In retrospect, I think maybe I should have left it for someone else. To the person who needs this gun, I would like to provide a tip: Democrats say attackers will leave you alone if you soil your pants. They really say that, and I assume they wouldn’t say it unless they had done the research.

That was humor. Calm down.

The 10mm reloading stuff does not tickle my conscience. I did end up with more than I wanted, but no desperate person is running to gun stores demanding 10mm components for reloading. If you’re into reloading, you have ammunition already. The desperate are trying to find factory ammunition because they can’t make their own. Besides, 500 rounds don’t constitute a hoard. It’s three days of casual shooting, plus a couple of magazines for home defense.

Last week, I went to the store. I wanted to buy little red potatoes to go with a pork roast. I could not find loose potatoes, so I bought a big bag. This week, I went back, and I bought two New York strips for $5.49 per pound. Guess what? People are hoarding potatoes now. Unbelievable. The store did not have a single potato. But I did. I still had half a bag of red potatoes at home.

You can’t keep potatoes forever. They sprout or they rot. Hoarding them is a bad idea. What happened to make people hoard them? Did Oprah tell all her girls to buy potatoes?

It’s gross, the way women worship her. Millions of women think she’s a genius. She’s so influential, Weight Watchers pays her to do ads, and she’s obese! Unless she converts to Christianity and gets help from God, she will probably be obese until she dies. Obviously, she doesn’t know how to be thin, but they pay her, and many women listen.

If they want me to listen, they’ll have to hire Kate Moss.

Why would you hire an obese person to give people dieting advice? It’s like hiring Amy Winehouse to counsel drug addicts.

I was running out of paper towels when the insanity started. I found some online, through Office Depot. I only wanted 6 rolls, but when I bought a small package, the deal fell through. I had to buy 15. So now I have more than twice the number of paper towel rolls I would usually have, and because I bought an off brand, I got a deal.

I just found more alcohol in an upstairs bathroom. Sorry, but I did.

When are people going to start hoarding fuel? They’re hoarding water, which has a zero percent chance of a supply problem. Why not fuel? Maybe I need to fill my cans in case people get even crazier. I don’t think they’ll hoard fuel, but I didn’t think they would hoard water and potatoes, either.

I guess fuel won’t be a problem, because the supply is great and people have nowhere to hoard it. If you’re an average person, you can fill your car and maybe a few cans, but that’s it. We only have fuel shortages when the supply is bad.

Oh, buy. I checked. No gas cans at Home Depot! People never cease to disappoint me. I have more cans than I know what to do with, so it doesn’t matter.

Why are things going so well here? Here is what God has to say, in Psalm 37:

The LORD knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance shall be for ever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied. But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the LORD shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away.

Am I saying God rewards me because I’m a wonderful person? Of course not. That’s obviously untrue. My faults are not hard to see. But you don’t have to be perfect to get God’s protection. Give your life to him, be baptized with the Holy Spirit, move in the gifts and fruit of the Spirit, develop a powerful prayer habit, claim God’s promises, focus on being changed internally, and you will meet the criteria.

I am trying to keep listening to God so I don’t mess up my protection. I’m not saying this will work. I’m just saying it has worked for me for the last 12 years or so. That’s a pretty good run, for someone who is wrong.

If it works for 30 more years, I’ll be dead before my streak ends. WINNING!

When the real estate recession hit, God said, “This recession is not for you,” and it turned out to be true. I didn’t have any problems. Why should 2020 be any different? Same God.

The best retirement account is the one you build up through years of prayer. It’s an account in heaven, where nothing can touch it. I haven’t knocked myself out trying to make money, but I’ve been extremely consistent with daily prayer, for a very long time. I’m doing fine, and I live far from areas where the coronavirus psychosis is making people suffer. I don’t even have a mayor, so I am less likely to have my civil rights taken away during this ordeal.

It’s not good enough just to pray to “God.” You have to know JESUS, and you have to be full of the Holy Spirit. “God” doesn’t mean much unless the word is connected with Jesus, because to reject Jesus is to reject God. If you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you won’t have good communication with God, so you’ll lack guidance, and you’ll get out of his will, even when you think you’re doing things that make him happy. To be out of his will is to lack is full support. You can be a missionary and fail to please God.

As for the virus, it looks like my forecast equation is still doing quite well, although the actual numbers are still diverging upward from my prediction. It’s not a big deal, because a true plague would infect more people by orders of magnitude.

I check figures in the morning, and I saw something like 276,000 today. It’s higher now. My prediction for this morning was about 252,000. If this were a plague, we would be looking at hundreds of millions by now. Even if we are missing many cases, I am still being vindicated by the data. Even if the actual case number is 10 million, we’re not seeing anything like flu rates, and we have had plenty of time for the infection to spread.

Why is Italy doing so badly? Maybe it’s because Southern Europeans aren’t as clean as Northern Europeans. Sorry, but it’s true. The Germans and Scandinavians are much cleaner than people to their south. That would explain the high Italian transmission rate, but why are so many dying? The German death total is 73, and the Italians have lost 4,000. It can’t be because Italian cases have had longer to worsen, because China has a lower death rate than Italy, after 4 months.

If you take the figures for cases by nation and deaths by nation side by side, you will see that the order is different. Countries that are high on one list are low on the other.

Are more Italians obese? We know they’re older than other Europeans, but it’s hard to believe it makes that much difference. I just checked, and the median age, which ought to be close to an average, is higher in Germany than in Italy.

The average age of victims in Italy is supposedly around 80. This would explain the high death rate, but why are so many being infected? I suppose the general dirtiness of Southern Europeans is the explanation. They must not be protecting older people, and older people are probably dirtier anyway.

It makes people angry when you say one ethnic group is cleaner than another. So what? Read about personal habits in places like China and Iran. Gross. There are places in Africa where people use their fingers to shove food in other people’s mouths, as a sign of affection. Is it okay to admit this happens? Koreans eat out of the same dishes when they have meals. My family never did.

I would say my mother’s family was in the 90th percentile in terms of cleanliness, and my dad’s was much lower. His family was closer to what people in Kentucky call “white trash.” Southerners from good families are phobic about cleanliness, but poor Southerners will sit at a dinner table and scoop mashed potatoes from the common bowl with their forks. I picked up some of my dad’s filthiness and some of my mother’s cleanliness, and I have been trying to improve all my life.

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mother was a Lebanese Arab. She wouldn’t let him go to Lebanon. I asked her why, and she said, “Because of the damn dirty Arabs.” She was afraid he would die from food poisoning. Different cultures have different standards. I’ve cleaned out apartments after Hispanic tenants left, and I saw things you would not believe. There are entire apartment buildings in Miami that smell like cockroach manure. My time in such buildings is the only reason I know what cockroach manure smells like. Ordinarily, there isn’t enough of it in a building to create a smell you can detect.

Speaking of Miami, I just got a really annoying text from Miami-Dade County, in SPANISH. It looks like it says, “Since we’re all staying at home, why not fill out the census?” Says it’s from Alcalde Gimenez. I absolutely hate being dragged into anything involving Miami. Their site says they will leave you alone if you text “STOP” back to them, but how did they get this number to begin with? That place is like a stink that won’t wash off.

Maybe old Italians are dying because they’re Italians. Imagine all the great food and drink an 80-year-old Italian has had. Maybe Italy had a high smoking rate when these people were young, and their lungs aren’t strong enough to stand up to the disease. Anyway, it sure looks like Italy is letting the aged down.

Journalists here in the US are trying to tell us young, healthy people are in great danger. They put out a story about a family in New Jersey. Several of them died after a gathering. I saw a photo of the family. Everyone visible in the photo was obese. The skinniest one was a lady who had to be 40 pounds overweight. None looked to be under 45. Most were older. They looked awful. Saggy and weak, with terrible posture and crepey skin. They were exactly the kind of people this disease kills. Reading the twisted coverage from journalists is very trying.

Coincidentally, or not, the sick family in New Jersey is Italian.

If Bernie Sanders were president, we would be hearing about his brilliant response, and journalists would be looking for ways to reach back and blame George Bush for his failures. They hate Trump and are conditioned to lie about him, and this is an election year, making things worse. They also love exaggerating crises because it makes them money and builds careers. It’s a perfect storm for propaganda. Until it becomes hard to find a new case anywhere, it will be impossible to get them to admit the epidemic isn’t that bad.

If you’re looking for a Glock 10mm pistol, I apologize, because it’s on its way to me. I felt like God said I should buy it. I pray before I buy just about anything. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t think it would matter, because there are still used guns all over the place. Nothing interesting is happening with the used guns on my Gunbroker watch list. There’s even a new Tanfoglio Witness that hasn’t sold.

Just try to be nice to the home invaders. It could work.

The other stuff was hoarded in advance, making it unintentional, and intent is an element of hoarding. Before you know there’s a shortage, hoarding is just smart shopping.

Gun-Buying Panic Finally Gains Some Logical Support

What is there to write about, except coronavirus?

I guess I could write about my mother’s giant credenza. I think it’s called a credenza, anyway. You would have to ask a guy who likes musicals. It’s an eight-foot-long china cabinet. I got rid of it today. It’s on the way to a consignment shop.

My dad didn’t buy my mother nice furniture or cars. We always got Buicks at cost from my grandfather’s dealership. We got used furniture or things from outlets. Then when my parents divorced, my dad got a girlfriend and let her fill his house with Miami Vice-style furniture that cost a fortune. It included a thousand-dollar credenza. Made from particle board.

My mother earned her own money after the divorce, and when my parents reunited, she bought furniture from an old lady who bought estate goods. That’s where the credenza came from. In addition to being a gigantic, heavy piece of furniture no heterosexual man needs, it’s a reminder of family dysfunction.

Now that it’s gone, I can move my indoor workbenches downstairs into the dining room, which I have been using as a storage area. It will be nice not walking upstairs every time I need a wrench.

If I leave this place, it will be a blessing to be rid of heavy furniture I never liked to begin with. Moving costs money. On the way out of Miami, a mover tried to charge my dad a grand for packing and moving one mirror.

I still have my mother’s bedroom furniture, which is not particularly good. It’s real wood and all that, but the fit and finish are not great. I think it was from an outlet. It’s about like Thomasville, but it seems like the quality control is lacking. No way am I paying anyone to move it. I have the first dresser my parents bought when they married. I already gave away the matching bed. When I was in high school, the dresser and bed were in my bedroom. High school itself was fine, but my life at home was not, so I look forward to not having that dresser.

I also want to unload her first set of sterling flatware. Both sets, in fact. The first set is just plain ugly, and the second set is ostentatious. It’s too fancy. I love my mother, but her taste was limited by her Eastern Kentucky roots.

Actually, now that I think about it, my grandmother had much better taste. That’s odd.

My mother collected Waterford crystal, which I do not like. It’s heavy and lacking in grace. Waterford makes fine vases and such, but no one wants a wine goblet that weighs a pound and looks like…a vase.

It would be nice to have heirlooms around, but what do you do when they’re ugly or they remind you of miserable times? The nice shotgun and terrible, cheap revolver I inherited from my grandfather remind me of good times. The furniture is different.

Actually, I inherited the shotgun from my dad. My grandmother gave it to him.

My dad’s mother, who did not give anyone a shotgun, knitted two afghans for our family. I threw one out a long time ago, and I’m still planning to take the other one to Goodwill. She was a very cold lady. She wasn’t nasty to us, but she had no interest in my sister or me. Didn’t send us Christmas gifts or cards. Didn’t call. On top of that, she liked olive green, which is a depressing color. Every time I look at anything she owned, I think about the fact that she was a stranger to me.

If the afghan were wool, I might be more reluctant to part with it. It’s synthetic.

I have the feeling that I’m cutting myself loose from things. Part of this involves my dad. Yesterday, I found out he had a Linkedin account, so I canceled it. I unsubscribed him from emails from the Kentucky Bar. I took him off a Morgan Stanley list.

I have canceled many accounts for him in the past. When an account has contacts, I look at them to see what kind of people he associated with. It’s interesting to see how many were the sort of people who take advantage of older men they think have money.

A woman who was an associate at his law firm emailed him a while back, out of the blue. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but then I decided to Google and see if she had divorced recently. I didn’t come up with anything. I emailed her from his account and let her know he had died. No response! Not a good sign. Seems pretty cold. But I can’t draw conclusions. Maybe my email went to her spam folder.

She and her husband have separate Facebook pages. His photo shows him with another man. Hers is a picture of a sunset. No human beings. There are also a couple of photos of her alone on a beach with her dog. Her husband tended to rub folks the wrong way. Maybe things didn’t work out.

It’s funny how smart you get when you get old. It’s too bad I didn’t have any older people to give me good advice when I was young.

It’s not exactly unheard-of for middle-aged women with financial problems to see older men as lifeboats. It’s a nasty business. When you start to fail, you don’t want to be at the mercy of someone who has been wishing for your death from the second the ring slipped on.

There were a couple of single women who emailed my dad regularly during his last years. I find it extremely hard to believe they were interested in him for reasons that were not financial. He was very overweight, and he was past 80. My grandfather had very young admirers when he was around 70, but he was tall and thin, and women had always liked him. Not everyone ages that way.

Anyway. Coronavirus. The epidemic is progressing very slowly, but the madness is still going viral, to use an appropriate metaphor. California’s governor just told his citizens they have to stay home. It’s an order. Oddly, he does not plan to enforce it. Because he can’t. Let’s be real. But he still had the nerve to issue it.

He says people can only go out for essential errands. He says you can’t go to work unless you’re in an essential business. I can already picture the confusion and inintended bad results. What if your essential errand involves a business that isn’t officially essential? Uh oh.

You can’t just imprison a whole state and expect it to work.

Here’s something weird: there are major cities where the mayors have banned the arrest of people who rob houses and commit other types of theft. I think the point is to reduce the load on skeletonized city employee rosters.

I’ll try to be helpful here. When you issue an order like that, you may think you’re saying, “We will not arrest people who steal.” What you’re really saying is, “Go out and steal, right now. You can even break in people’s houses.” That’s how people will take it. You’re also saying, “Buy guns and ammunition so you can protect your home or protect yourself while you steal.” You’re telling people the purge has commenced.

Supposedly, all sorts of hypocritical leftists (redundant) are dashing to gun stores to buy weapons they don’t know how to use. I’m sure this will end well. I wonder how many noobs got their hands pinched by semiauto slides at gun ranges today.

People who pretended to be against the Second Amendment are showing they’re all for it when they think they need it. Why didn’t they just admit it in the first place?

One big difference between leftism and conservatism is that leftism is often a pose. Leftists get to say all sorts of nice things they don’t mean. They get to virtue-signal. Leftist men do it to get gullible women in bed. Conservatism is different, because conservatives have to say things people don’t like to hear. Leftists are like divorced dads who fill their kids with candy and burgers on the weekend. Conservatives are like the moms who make them do their homework and brush their teeth. Naturally, leftism attracts more hypocrites.

With regard to the gun situation, people like me are sitting at home, relaxing. I have enough ammunition to start a South American insurgency or support a typical Tuesday in Baltimore. I didn’t buy it to shoot people, for the most part. I just like to buy in bulk and get good prices. I like shooting recreationally. In the past, I used to think a lot about defending my property, but the closer I get to God, the less that mindset appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about getting a full-sized Glock. I used to have one. I bought it because my sister, whom I had helped push into rehab, was threatening to send her addict friends after me. They are very lucky she didn’t follow through. I sold it because I didn’t like the caliber or the memories.

The other day, I saw Jerry Miculek carrying at home. He’s a freak pistol shooter. I subscribed to his Youtube channel. He does things you would not believe. He said he carried openly while working on his property. I generally carry a compact Glock with 11 rounds in it. I had to ask myself why I was cheating myself. On my own property, I can carry anything I want. It doesn’t have to fit in a pocket.

I thought about getting a Glock 40. This is a full-size 10mm. I’m already set up for 10mm, so the caliber is not a problem.

I have to think about it. Carrying in a pocket is very nice. Holstered guns are a pain in the butt. They bump into things. They’re hard to draw. I can draw from a pocket in one second.

Added capacity would be nice, but I could just as easily put an extra magazine in another pocket.

A longer sight radius would make for better accuracy, but I shoot just as well with my compact as I do with a full-size 1911. If you’re an assailant within a hundred feet of me, you are in serious danger.

The only way to make a real step upward in long-range accuracy is to carry a long gun or use a red dot sight. I think. Not sure about the red dot. I know nearly nothing about them.

A Glock 40 would give me 16 shots without a magazine change. I now have 11. I should also admit I’m carrying a 9mm at the moment. The 10mm was heavier, and the gun I’m carrying is one I bought for my dad. It has sentimental value.

On the one hand, I have no interest in shooting people; I want to return good for evil. On the other, I still carry, because I might be wrong, or I might have to defend someone else, so shouldn’t I do it right?

Someone said I should get a long-slide Glock. They have longer barrels. The only real advantage is higher velocity. I’m getting 1250 fps from the 10mm right now, with 180-grain hollowpoints. That’s awfully good already. It’s about like a .357, with a bigger wound channel. How much overkill do you need?

I could try carrying a 1911 in a holster to see how I like it. I don’t think I have any defensive .45 ammo, though, unless I’ve forgotten where it is. I’ll bet it’s fun trying to buy it right now. I may have some defensive .38 Super ammo, but I don’t want to carry my pretty barbecue gun and scratch it up.

Actually, I do have a lot of .45 hollowpoints. I had forgotten. I made them myself. I don’t know how good the bullets are. I got them for nothing when I bought my press.

I’m trying to be improved by the pandemic instead of rotting. This morning, I felt that God was telling me to get a grip on myself. I was starting to be overly critical of the people who are panicking, as though I were somehow superior. I made comments on Yahoo News stories, and some were snippy. Ordinarily, I avoid reading the news, and I do not make comments. This afternoon, I went back and deleted them all, except for one, which I thought was acceptable.

I can actually understand why people with dependents are panicking. I give them a little slack. When you have mouths to feed, it’s probably harder to resist buying 10 cartons of eggs. It’s still not smart, and it’s morally wrong, but the pressure is greater.

I do not understand the people who are purely selfish with no discernible excuse. Ellen DeGeneres has been hiding at home for days, and she has had the tone-deafness to post about it on social media. “I’m cowering in the living room of one of my mansions, and I’m sending the maids out for tofu.” This is the opposite of inspiring. I’m surprised she doesn’t understand how bad she looks. Well, no I’m not. She lives in a bubble, surrounded by toadies.

In 1941, celebrities ran down to recruiting stations and joined the armed services. Wow. That’s a little different, isn’t it? Jimmy Stewart, who had to stuff himself to make the induction weight requirement, flew a bunch of dangerous missions. He actually enlisted long before the war started. When he died, he was a general. Lots of celebrities were war heroes (John Wayne, who was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich, notably excepted). Now celebrities post snowflaky messages about their terror of getting the sniffles.

Tom Hanks showed a lot of class. He and his wife submitted to quarantine, and as I recall, he said it was about like having a cold.

I’m hoping the epidemic poops out here, as it did in China, in a month or so. T.B. Joshua predicted the Chinese coronavirus collapse. He seems to think his prophecy is for the entire world. I’m not so sure, but he knows more than I do. If this thing goes away quickly, it will be a nice, relatively painless warning we can all profit from.

Even if it doesn’t go away quickly, we will probably get used to it before long, and then we’ll start to get pretty angry about the ludicrous forecasts and insane restrictions. Life should become more normal by June regardless of whether the epidemic goes away.

I guess I should go to the store and see if they have any cheap rib eyes available. I have been trying to think of different things to fix for dinner that aren’t a lot of work. Seems like I keep coming back to beef. Maybe I should buy a pound of shrimp and have a giant shrimp cocktail.

I’ll check the toilet paper situation out. There is no way I’ll buy any, though. I can’t stand between needy people and their miracle cure.

New Chinese Coronavirus Cases: ZERO

When I write this blog, I keep going. I don’t stop when I write something I know might need correction. I write until the end, and I try to make mental notes to go back over everything. Of course, being me, I sometimes forget to check what I wrote, and then I publish things that aren’t finished.

Yesterday, for some reason, I left this passage in an entry:

I redid the math using a new constant: 0.0621. We’ll see how it works. I’ll show you some new predictions.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

If it’s way off for the next two days, I’ll have to go back over it.

I can’t even guess why I left that in there. I was working on my coronavirus prediction model, and I was fiddling with constants. The actual constant I came up with is 0.0643, which is also mentioned in the entry.

I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables for breakfast, and I chase them with hot ginger tea, so it may well be that I had to answer the call of nature while I was writing. Or maybe I got a phone call. Anyway, something went wrong.

The figures are still lower than the actual numbers, but not by much. I plan to let at least another day go by before I revisit the constant.

I can’t say this enough: the important thing is not whether the equation is right. It would be amazing if I were within 50% of the actual number in a month, even if I were a genius with perfect data. The important thing is that coronavirus is producing a TINY number of infections compared to the flu, and there is no evidence at all that this will change. The flu got something like 35 million of us this year (Americans), and it got something like 650 million people globally. Coronavirus spreads exponentially, like all diseases, I guess, so it would not make sense to try to compare 650 million to the 220,000 or so coronavirus victims we know of at the moment. The former figure is a yearly total, and the latter is an interim figure. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have anything remotely resembling 650 million coronavirus cases when the epidemic poops out, as it will.

Here’s something interesting: our treasonous press skewered Trump for saying something which now appears to have been true. Don’t be shocked. Do you think they’ll admit fault and apologize? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry. I love a little joke.

Trump said he hoped the disease would go away with warm weather, as just about all similar illnesses do. He didn’t say he knew it would. As a big-hearted person who wanted to make us feel better, he expressed a hope. People jumped all over him, because…Trump. Now Chinese scientists are telling us heat and humidity reduce the infection rate. Science says Trump was right, but the press will ignore their error.

The press is toxic and sick. By and large, journalists have low morals and a disgusting mindset. Their mission isn’t to inform; it’s to control. They want to bring the Sixties back and make them permanent. I’m so glad I gave up newspapers and quit watching TV news. I don’t need vile people in my life.

Try and imagine the press doing this to FDR in 1942. They were too busy lining up to lick his socialist toes.

A week or so ago, something interesting happened in Africa. T.B. Joshua appeared on Youtube, and he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing away the epidemic. This was a follow-up to an earlier prediction that the epidemic would be gone by March 27.

I am always reluctant to trust sensational preachers with big churches and TV shows, but I cannot find dirt on T.B. Joshua, and I can’t find any indication that the constant flow of miracles and testimonies from his church is bogus.

Since the second prophecy, I’ve been watching the China numbers. They’re flat. I didn’t talk too much about it, because I thought maybe Johns Hopkins, which runs the site I check, was having a problem adding Chinese data. Now I’m seeing other secular sources confirm it: the transmission rate in China is so low, it’s negligible. The figure I heard was dozens per day.

This is in China, a dirty country where people are very selfish. We’re not talking about Denmark or Norway.

While the disease continues to spread outside China at a very slow rate, China is doing great. Joshua still thinks the worldwide epidemic’s back has been broken. He believes we are seeing the epidemic’s death throes. I’m not so sure he understands his own prophecy, which appears to have been true. It may be that it only applied to China.

You can go look at the China figures for yourself. Don’t trust me. There is no need to.

Today, Yahoo News has a banner: “China reports zero new domestic cases.”

Yahoo. A source which is usually as ungodly as you can get.

The real disease isn’t coronavirus. The disease is a mass delusion. We are terrified of a mild disease that kills very few people in relative terms. It borders on psychosis. Christians should take note.

In the future, we and the Jews will be slaughtered wholesale. Americans are used to feeling bulletproof. We think nothing bad can happen here. We are very arrogant when it comes to our morals. We think we are nothing like the Germans, for example. We believe large-scale slaughter could never happen here, in spite of the Civil War and the things that have happened to the Indians.

If Satan can make intelligent people fill their vehicles with toilet paper and wear surgical masks in grocery stores, he can make them hate and kill Christians. All he has to do is make them angry and afraid. He just has to get us to believe some lies. He’s very good at that, and people who are not baptized with the Holy Spirit have almost no resistance. They will believe anything he tells them to believe.

People think the Germans didn’t know what was happening to the Jews. They think they were carted off in the middle of the night to remote installations to be killed. This is not true. Most Jews were killed by roaming teams. They weren’t in camps. The Germans knew, and most of them were all for it.

You can’t exterminate millions of people in secret. The suggestion is ludicrous. Do you think German soldiers didn’t talk to their friends and relatives? Do you think no one saw Jews getting into trucks?

We are not better than the Germans. They were orderly, rational, responsible people. They were known for it. They still did what they did, and most of your neighbors can be motivated to do the same kinds of things. If the Germans had won the war, they would have continued exterminating Jews until this very day. They had to be forced to stop. They didn’t have a change of heart. They were bombed into submission.

This feeble physical epidemic and overwhelming psychological epidemic is a warning to Christians. We need to separate ourselves. Clinging to cities will cause many of us to die.

Right now, in the face of a minor epidemic, mayors all over America and claiming unconstitutional power to deny people their civil rights, and nothing is being done about it. Doesn’t that concern you? I had no idea mayors could pull this off. I always thought of them as insignificant people with giant egos and a need for attention. Now I see how dangerous they are.

I don’t have a mayor. Until yesterday, I didn’t know how blessed I was. If someone wants to lock me in my house and take my firearms, they’ll have to get the governor or the president to go along with it. A few miles away, there are people whose situation is completely different. They are at the mercy of the kind of individuals who run for class president in the sixth grade.

Now I know something: I can never allow myself to have a mayor again. That’s powerful wisdom.

Jews love cities and fear the countryside. It’s terrible. Thinking about it is like watching them dance on the edge of a cliff. They think cities are their protection. The opposite is true. They should have learned that from Poland. They are making it more convenient for their future murderers. They’re like cattle gathering in pens.

They have quite literally been herded into slaughterhouses before, in countries where they thought of themselves as valued citizens. The Nazis killed native-born Jews who were citizens and war heroes. They killed physicians and engineers. Their obvious value to society meant nothing, as it will in future America.

I hope T.B. Joshua’s prophecy applies to the whole world, as he thinks. I hope we are getting a warning that will pass and give us time to react accordingly.

I consider the coronavirus collapse in China to be a miracle. There is no other reasonable explanation. You can’t cut new cases to zero by telling people to stay home and wash their hands. If that worked, America would have no new cases.

I don’t know what greater sign we could want. God is really up there, and he does help. If you have a real relationship with him, he will do wonders for you. If not, you are going to end in misery and humiliation. It may take time, but it will happen.

When God does something obvious, we generally ask for more proof. We are afraid to believe him. Look at China. What more could you ask? Do you want a cherry on top of it? This is as good as it gets. If you hesitate after this, how will you explain it when you are held accountable? What excuse will you give?

Of course, the China phenomenon will screw my equation up. I’m happy to see it happen.

I hope people will listen to God’s warning. The greatest treasures in the universe are ours for the taking, and the things we have to give up are worthless, perishable filth.

My Courageous Battle, Day 18, Plus: my Prediction Holds Up!

Try not to praise me as I force myself to face the keyboard yet again, in the midst of the pestilence. I know I’m an inspiration, but let’s not glorify me too much.

Yesterday, paper towels disappeared from local stores. As luck would not have it, I was running out. I have one 90% roll in the kitchen and maybe the equivalent of two whole rolls in the shop and upstairs man room. Last night, I decided to find out how bad things were. I went online and checked Amazon and Ebay.

Is it okay for a Christian to say “scum of the earth”? I am not sure, but I will risk it. I am amazed at the sliminess and selfishness of the American people. Hoarding is everywhere, and people are trying to sell paper towels for $15 per roll online. Amazon and Ebay permit it, and that’s even more amazing.

I got sneaky. I checked the Office Depot website. They had a six-roll package at the normal price! I pounced. I ordered ONE package for pickup. I know I should have ordered all they had and then started a business, but I guess I lack the entrepreneurial spirit.

Office Depot texted me and said there was “a problem” with my order. Yeah, either an employee snagged the towels, or the inventory was wrong.

I kept looking, and I saw they had their weird recycled store-brand towels listed as available. I had to order a 15-roll package. Now they say they’re waiting for pickup. Wonder if it will happen. Maybe a dirtbag will come in and offer them more money.

I do not need 15 rolls of paper towels. Looks like I have no choice, however.

I went to the grocery yesterday and saw a fresh new pallet of purified water. I loaded up! To the tune of one case. Come on. They’re not going to turn the water off, especially in a county where many people have wells. There is no point in hoarding water.

I drink purified water because I have had kidney stones. My well’s water is full of calcium. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t want the water.

I told a friend I was going to post a photo of the water on a dating site and try to land a gold digger.

Yesterday, I ordered some .308 ammunition. I already have tons of it, but I needed some match-grade ammo for target shooting. I ordered a measly 200 rounds. Today the store called me and said their policy was to limit purchases. They said I could have 100. I told them to forget it. For target use, 100 rounds won’t get the job done. There is no point in buying fewer than 200, and 200 would not be much.

Panic nuts are loading up on ammo, so the rest of us suffer.

This stuff is going on while I happened to be upgrading my gun collection. Yesterday, I thought about reversing my anti-AR-15 position. I don’t particularly like the AR-15. I was reconsidering. I thought they were accurate, and I like low recoil. I thought it might be good to pick one up.

I found out AR-15’s are not accurate at all. If you get 2 MOA, you’re doing great. Forget that. I don’t understand it, because the AR-15 is based on the AR-10, which is crazy accurate if you buy a reputable brand. My AR-15 idea is now on hold.

While I was thinking about it, I went online, and I saw that people are buying up AR-15’s. What on earth are they thinking? You can’t shoot a disease.

Guess I’ll wait a month before shopping for ammo again. Unless I see a good deal.

Today I got up and checked my epidemic prediction equation. The actual total is considerably higher than my best prediction, although it’s still really tiny compared to a real plague. Not even close to being close.

Now I have to tickle the equation.

Is the equation itself fundamentally wrong? I don’t think it’s that bad. It ought to work fairly well. If it’s within an order of magnitude, it will be a victory, albeit not an impressive one.

It should not work for the very start of an epidemic, the late middle, or the end, but it ought to be pretty good for the early middle. My guess is that my first constant was too low. Will I ever be able to get the right constant? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get good data for the number of actual infections.

Another problem is that people who get over the disease eventually stop shedding viruses, so they drop out of the pool of individuals who can transmit the disease.

Whatever.

If you think about it, I’m not really predicting the number of infections. I’m actually predicting the number that will be recorded on the Johns Hopkins site, since that’s where the data comes from. But I consider it good enough for my hand-waving purposes. Lives do not depend on my blog.

Here’s what I have today. My new constant is 0.0643, and the initial value for infections is 90,000, on March 5. You can plug these figures in and play around if you want.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

My April 4 figure is up from 494,013.

What did my original equation predict for today? Let’s see. It’s 188,332.

You know what? That’s not bad at all. I’m off by less than 10% of the actual figure. That’s over two weeks, not two days. It’s very good. Dang! I didn’t realize the results were that accurate. I’m a genius! For now. Time to bow and run off the stage.

This is astonishing. I thought I was doing badly, but getting within 10% is better than the professionals. If it holds up, I’m going to look pretty good. I would have been thrilled with 30%.

The thing is, anyone with a math degree could do this. As much as I would like to be feted as a savant, there are probably 500,000 people in the United States who could have done what I’ve done. The C students could do it, no problem. An active math major at a minor university, in the middle of his class, could do a much better job. I hope, because those people end up designing bridges and elevators.

Today I looked at equations professionals use during epidemics, and they are not much different from mine. That was nice to see. They are a little more complicated, because they try to capture entire epidemics, including the inevitable plateaus and declines. I’m not interested in any of that. I just want to know how the disease will act while it’s ramping up.

Sooner or later, the disease will plateau. All of the susceptible people will have been infected, and the bug won’t be able to find new hosts. This is an important thing to think about. If you take my equation, or any equation describing a phenomenon that increases with time, and you don’t include a cap, it will go infinite. Obviously, coronavirus will not infect an infinite number of people. Even if my equation is perfected, it will only work for a few weeks or months.

I redid the math using a new constant: 0.0621. We’ll see how it works. I’ll show you some new predictions.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

If it’s way off for the next two days, I’ll have to go back over it.

One obvious problem with changing the constant over time is that if you do it enough, you’re just forcing the math to make you look like you’re right. We have a lot of time, though, so it seems safe to fiddle with it for at least a month.

The thing to keep in mind is that the total number of flu cases every year is on the order of 10 to the 9th power. Coronavirus is currently more like 10 to the 5th power. This is not a minor difference. It’s gigantic. And coronavirus has had ample time to mature into an epidemic. The flu only takes 100 days to peak, plateau, and end.

Of course, the mild nature of coronavirus is also very important.

The low infection total and the mildness of the disease are not going to be comforting to the outliers who get extremely sick or die, but they should be extremely soothing to the rest of us.

I suppose people will get angry with me for being lighthearted about the epidemic, but we joke about much worse things every day. We call cigarettes, which kill millions every year, “coffin nails.” Lighten up, Francis.

I guess I should get to Office Depot before they auction off my paper towels. It will be embarrassing to leave with 15 rolls. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll have a smaller package when I get there.

Update on my Amateur Coronavirus Predictions

My second coronavirus death toll prediction model is not doing very well. My total infection prediction model seems to be doing quite well indeed. While it should amaze anyone if either model works, I figured the death model would work better, based on the higher reliability of death numbers, but that hasn’t panned out.

Several days ago, I came up with a differential equation to predict the total number of infections that would occur. It says the total for today (morning, more or less) should be about 178,000. The actual total is 185,000. I call that a home run! Much better than I expected. Of course, the total may diverge wildly from my prediction in the future. It would be remarkable if I even came close.

Later on, I created an equation based on the death numbers, which I thought would be more accurate. The death total for today…well, I don’t know what it was, but it doesn’t matter, because it looks like we will pass the number for March 22 tonight or tomorrow.

So what does this mean?

1. Given my total lack of training in the area of epidemiology, combined with the lack of reliability of the data, maybe there was no way either prediction could work, and the good results we’re seeing from the A equation (total infections) are illusory. Maybe it will turn out to be a bad predictor, just like the D equation (total deaths).

2. Maybe the death figures are actually less reliable for prediction purposes than the total figures, because the death rate varies wildly depending on where the virus is.

These guesses top my list.

I suppose that with a very minor epidemic like this one, where the total numbers are very small (sorry, but it’s true), you end up with a situation in which death rates vary because the tiny infected populations in various countries have characteristics that make them much more or less likely to die.

Example which I just made up: what if the virus hits a big community of retirees in Thailand, and because they’re old, 10% die? In a tiny infection pool of 185,000, that would mess up the death data.

The Italians have a crazy death rate. Maybe they’re not detecting mild cases. That seems to be the only thing that could explain it, since the people in countries around them are doing better.

Scandinavians and Germans have low death rates. Given their rigidity and willingness to follow orders, maybe they’re getting tested more thoroughly.

I wonder if I could go back and apply my model to the flu. I don’t think I could get figures. I would have to apply it early in the season, because it doesn’t take saturation into account.

Do I still think the hysteria is utterly unrealistic? Of course. Don’t forget: we get something like 8 million flu cases per day during a global season, and right now we have 185,000 global cases for coronavirus after several months. There is just no way an honest, rational person can look at those numbers and think COVID-19 is worth the trouble we’re putting ourselves to.

I’m very blessed to live where I do. My poor cousin lives in the Chicago area, where the population density is high and the politicians are corrupt leftist authoritarians. She said the authorities are threatening to tell people they can’t leave their houses except to buy food and so on. Consider this: yesterday, the Chicago Tribune said there were 105 detected cases in Illinois.

I looked at the website for the local paper, and nothing like that is happening here. Events are closing, and schools are shut down, but if they are threatening to imprison people in their houses, the mighty Star-Banner is not saying so online. I would assume the would put that information on their site if it were in the paper.

Unless the people in the press room are just too weak to work their keyboards.

The terrible thing is that we are going to have the economic destruction of a plague, without a plague. Businesses are going to close permanently, all over the place. Stocks are in the toilet. All sorts of jobs will be lost. Jobs are important. Businesses are important. It’s not okay to throw them away over a disease that will probably kill fewer than 20,000 Americans.

We should be focusing on insulating old people and sick people. That’s it. Kids are nearly immune, and the rest of us are very, very unlikely to die even if we get infected. In other words, it’s a lot like the flu, except it affects way fewer people.

If you think 20,000 people is a big hit, you’re bad at math. You don’t understand how many people die here every year. Go look up the number of traffic deaths we suffer in one year. Look at the number of suicides. Look at tobacco deaths. There are over 300,000,000 people here, and you have to take that into account.

Doesn’t every life have infinite value? No. Never did. If a life had infinite value, we wouldn’t build skyscrapers or bridges. Every huge construction project costs lives. We would quarantine people who get colds and norovirus, because these diseases kill a small number of people. We don’t do that. The world has to keep turning. The value of keeping our economic system going, sorry to tell you, is very, very high, and before coronavirus, we accepted the fact that keeping America bustling would cost many thousands of lives every year. We just didn’t talk about it.

If lives had infinite value, we would drive $500,000 cars that provided 100% protection in crashes. We would force kids to be vaccinated. We would ban tobacco and scuba diving. We would build every house from reinforced concrete. We don’t do those things. An acceptable risk of death is something healthy societies accept. The alternative is economic paralysis. And we can’t really control death, anyway.

It’s okay to say money is important. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Money is housing. Money is clothing. Money is medical care for kids with cancer. For the leftists, let me say that money is tarot cards, dope, Molotov cocktail ingredients, and black ski masks. It’s Greenpeace donations.

Guess how many people die in New York City every year. The figure is over 154,000. That’s one city. One year. How many New Yorks can you fit in 7 billion? The global annual death figure is around 60 million, and many, many of those deaths are not from old age.

I just looked up the world’s population. I thought it was 7 billion, but I’m seeing 7.7. Is that really true? Man, there are a lot of us.

We are killing our economy over nothing. When the panic goes away, we will have a real problem: increased poverty.

Here is the total number of cases of coronavirus, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population: 0.0024%. Here is the total number of cases of Spanish flu, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population in 1981: 27%. Here is the number of seasonal flu cases in the US, expressed as a percentage of the nation’s population: 10%.

Sure, the coronavirus total will go up, but if it were going to get anywhere near flu numbers, which don’t upset us, why is it so far behind after several months? The flu gets the job done in 100 days.

There is really no point in my writing these things, except to vent and to commiserate with other people who understand the situation. People are not going to listen to common sense in large numbers. They’re under a mass delusion with a supernatural cause. This is what happens when people don’t get baptized with the Holy Spirit.

I have to go to the grocery store. I can’t believe it. I have to go look for purified water. I’m not buying it because of the virus. I buy it because I’ve had kidney stones. Will I find any water on the shelves? I wonder.

I would like to get sanitizing wipes, because I use them when I go to the dump, and I’m running out. Not sure I’ll be able to buy them.

Last night I wondered if I should buy a sack of rice and some dried beans. Then I snapped out of it. Food isn’t going away. Farmers aren’t going to let their crops rot. People are filling their houses with Pop-Tarts, potato chips, and other boxed food, and when the panic tapers off, they’ll be stuck at home, eating junk. Maybe I’ll have the store to myself for a while.

Time to leave the house. I plan to cover the entire car with toilet paper rolls, with a tiny hole I can look through to drive. This should give me protection from the juju.

God help people who live in cities. I am praying he will wake them up and help them move.

Addendum: in case anyone cares, Tom Hanks and his wife are out of quarantine after a lengthy one-week illness. Here’s the list of terrible symptoms they had: mild fever, chills, and some aches. I have to confess; when I was a kid, I would have chosen that over going to school. Hanks is over 60, and so is his wife. Was he lucky? Did Australian medicine, which was developed mostly on sheep, work a miracle? NO. Their cases are typical, even for old people.

I’m off to brave the panic. If I don’t make it back, my toilet paper stash is up for grabs.

Neighbors Said he Had an Arms Cache and Used to go to Burger King With a Loaded Pistol

As my 4 loyal readers know, I got myself a Colt Woodsman pistol the other day. I got it to make up for the fact that someone stole a similar (but not as nice) pistol from my grandfather’s estate.

The gun turned out to have unexpected problems. I have written about it, but I feel like repeating myself in greater depth.

To start with, it absolutely refused to eject CCI Mini-mags. Everything else worked fine. I pictured myself searching the web for an ancient extractor spring and paying $300 for it.

I took the gun inside and Googled around. Eventually, I did what I should have done to begin with. I hosed the breech with Hornady One Shot, and I went through it with a Boresnake. Suddenly, I had a pistol that ejected Mini-mags.

The other problem was that the magazine was hard to load. Ordinarily, a .22 magazine will have a pretty soft spring. My gun’s spring was so stiff, it was impossible to get 10 rounds into the magazine. On top of that, my hands got sore from loading it.

The Woodsman is a 10-shot pistol. This is not something people dispute. So what was going on with the magazine?

I Googled around.

I found that I would be lucky to get another used magazine for under $60. I would more likely pay something like $85. When Colonel Colt made the Woodsman, he didn’t see fit to make a lot of magazines. Either that, or jerks bought them up by the dozens. Like coronavirus cowards hoarding toilet paper.

Yes, I know Colonel Colt was not alive when this gun was made.

Colt has made new magazines during this century, but of course, they stopped as soon as they heard I had a Woodsman.

I found aftermarket magazines, but the general consensus was that they were pretty bad, and since they ran around $40 each, they didn’t look too good.

Some dude on a forum said it was possible to make a Ruger Mk II magazine work. I looked into that. Before I got anywhere with the idea, I learned that Beretta had copied the Woodsman magazine for its Neos pistol. The Beretta magazine is 100% identical, except it’s stainless, it has a fat plastic base, and it has a plastic follower instead of steel. The little doodad at the lower end of the spring is different, but that’s picky. Anyway, it’s completely superior. It will never rust. Cost: $17-$20.

I ordered 4 Beretta magazines for the price of one Colt. Two arrived today. I took one to my workbench and opened it up. I stuck the base in my Panavise and Dremeled and filed it until the magazine fit the Colt correctly. Problem solved. If I really want to go first-class, I can get some sheet metal and make my own steel base that looks just like a Colt base. I can also blue the magazine so it looks original. I can’t do anything with the follower, but I think plastic followers are better, so who cares?

While I was doing all this, I took the Colt magazine apart. The spring was very different from the Beretta spring. It was shorter. I cut about an inch out of it and stuck it in the Beretta magazine (because I had reassembled the Colt magazine with the Beretta spring to see if it worked). I confirmed that it would compress more easily than before. Happiness. I then put the Colt parts and Beretta parts in their proper places. Now I have three viable magazines.

I ordered a replacement spring for the Colt magazine. The magazine is so valuable, it actually makes sense to spend 10 dollars on a spring. When it arrives, I’ll throw the altered spring out. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s not OEM, and there is no point in keeping it.

In other news, I got tired of the fiber optic sights in my Smith & Wesson SW22 Victory. They seemed fine in good light, but the other day I shot with the sun behind me, and it was hard to see what I was doing. I realized I had never had problems with ordinary sights. I found out Smith & Wesson makes plain old black sights, so I ordered them. They arrived today, and I installed them. Very nice. Not only do they lack annoying fiber optics; the front sight is skinny, so you can actually see where it is in relation to the target and the rear sight.

I have a new trigger on the way. I used to think the Smith & Wesson’s trigger was dandy, but going to the Smith & Wesson’s trigger after shooting the Colt is like divorcing Sofia Vergara and taking up with Ethel Merman. Pulling the Colt’s trigger is like snapping the stem on a Barbie-sized champagne glass.

When the new trigger gets here and I get it working, I hope to have a gun which in some way begins to measure up to the Woodsman.

When I got the SW22, I thought I had found an amazing bargain. I paid $319, if memory serves. Then I started buying stuff to make it work correctly. Grips. Smaller magazine followers to increase the capacity. Now I’m paying for sights and a trigger. I’ll probably have $500 in the gun before I’m finished.

Hmm. Now that I write that out, it actually sounds pretty good. I was going to complain, but I guess I can’t.

The SW22 will never be as elegant as the Colt, but it shoots very well, and with a real trigger and sights, it should be nearly as enjoyable.

Maybe I should get a red dot sight for it.

No. I won’t think of it.

Maybe.

I now have two .22 pistols which are ready to go, and things should get even better with the new trigger. On top of that, I just received several thousand CHOOT ‘EM Mini-mags, so it should be a while before I run out of quality ammunition.

The same people who are filling their spare rooms with toilet paper are also buying ammunition. Why? Do they plan to shoot sick people? Whatever the reason, I feel blessed to have found a good deal on the Mini-mags at the time I found it.

The big difference between them and me is that I don’t think I NEED .22 ammunition. I just want it. I don’t expect it to affect my odds of survival.

I guess if people in New York and San Francisco knew how much ammunition I have, people would be all over the web talking about my “firearms cache” and “thousands of rounds of ammunition.” People who are ignorant about guns need to understand something: ammunition is not cheap. The best way to buy it is online, and when you do, you need to buy a lot to offset the shipping cost. Also, there is nothing weird about wanting thousands of rounds. It’s easy to shoot 200 rounds in a day. I think Antifers and vegetarians must think we sit around thinking, “Let’s see. I want to shoot 2,000 people, so I better get…2000 rounds.” But these are the same people who think “assault weapon” is a real firearms term. The same folks who think a shotgun is the same thing as a rifle.

I probably have neighbors who have 10 or more times the ammunition I have.

I sure hope so. Those are the kind of neighbors I want. If someone comes here to do violence, I’m not going to get much help from male whale watchers in pink breast cancer awareness tights. What are they going to do to a criminal? Take off their panties and strangle him with them?

I just talked to my buddy Mike. He runs a hospice. He is as annoyed as I am. He said, “I’m real popular on the Internet right now.” He’s telling people to stop panicking and move on with life. He says restaurants in Massachusetts are about to close for at least 30 days, except for takeout. I wonder how the employees are supposed to pay their bills.

The sad thing about coronavirus is that even though it won’t kill many people, it’s apparently going to have the same economic impact as a real plague, simply because we’re panicking and killing our own economy. I guess FDR was right. We should fear fear itself. You don’t need a plague if people are going to roll over and give up just because of media hype.

I hope I don’t end up living on poached squirrels. Surely the grocery stores will stay open.

Here’s to being out of the loop. I wish everyone was as confident about coronavirus as I am.

You Know What Mark Twain Said About Statistics

I’ve been using calculus to try and guess how the coronavirus epidemic is going to go. I started out with figures for the total number of cases, taken from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus/Missile Command simulation site.

You’ll see why I call it that when I show you a screen shot. Does anyone remember Atari? Someone at Johns Hopkins does.

I guess some people will say I’m cold for making jokes during an epidemic, but we joke about the flu all the time, don’t we? Hmm.

While I was working on the math, I expressed disappointment because while I had taken note of infection totals in the past, I had not written down death totals. Death totals should be much more reliable, because a dead person will not be able to stay home and avoid being counted. If you die from coronavirus, someone is going to put your name in a database. Live people are different. They can stay home and avoid being counted, as I would.

Yesterday I found an old death toll figure, so I used it to come up with a new differential equation. It gave me new estimates for the future. Here they are.

March 22: 7,809
March 29: 10,456
April 4: 13,999
March 14 + 30 days: 18,743
March 14 + 60 days: 71,155
March 14 + 90 days: 248,521

My earlier estimate for the last date (mid-June) was about 150,000, so the toll now looks worse.

I will repeat the question I ask over and over. Does this mean I was wrong to say coronavirus wasn’t a big deal? NO. At least not yet.

This epidemic is not going to run all year, unless it’s very different from the other SARS we already know about. It’s going to peak and fall off. My equation doesn’t take that into consideration. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a death toll of 250,000 by June 15, but I don’t think we’re going to see a million later in the year. Look what happened in China. They had a whole bunch of cases, and then the rate of new infections dropped to the point where in intelligent person would say the Chinese epidemic is just about over. If this happened in China, where people have really dirty habits, I assume it will happen in other places.

In any case, 250,000 global deaths over 7 months do not constitute a plague. It’s bad, but it’s not THAT bad. Don’t forget: the common cold kills 5,000 people every year in the US, and we’re looking at a figure that might be twice that high. It’s very sad that these people die, but we don’t put on rubber suits because of it.

It would be nice to have better figures. The Chinese threw everything off. I’m thinking I’ll start over in a week, on the assumption that the available data will be better.

Here I am, talking like my uninformed amateur equation is reliable. I don’t know if it is or not. I am a layman. But I do know that a person who knows very little about math can look at the totals and tell this doesn’t look like the Spanish flu. That’s what I really rely on. The equation is just an interesting exercise.

The variation in death rates is very confusing. The Italians got hit hard, but the French are doing much better. Why? Are the statistics messed up because of bad testing regimes, or are Italians simply weaker?

In the US, the death rate based on the available facts is 2%, but at the same time, we know we’re not testing many people. The death rate is a quotient. The numerator is the number of people who have died, and the denominator is the number of people who have been infected. The denominator is probably a lot bigger than we realize. As testing becomes more widespread, the death rate should drop a lot, even though the death toll will not.

Maybe the Italians aren’t doing well at testing. That seems to be the only reasonable explanation for their death rate.

It just occurred to me that people will probably flip out even more when testing really gets going. They’ll find out the infection rate is higher than they thought, and they won’t consider the fact that the death rate hasn’t changed. People who think buying toilet paper will protect them are not going to get drawn into mathematical subtleties.

The death rate and toll are all that matters. No one cares about a cough and a mild fever. Obsessing on the number of infections is pointless. As long as the death toll stays low, it won’t matter if half of the world gets infected.

Look at it this way. Gonorrhea is a pandemic, right now. So is HPV, the genital wart disease, which supposedly infects something like 20% of Americans. The common cold is always a pandemic. No one cares. Until people start dying in very large numbers (percentage, not just absolute), a pandemic is not a plague. A high death toll is an essential requirement for a plague.

I’ve been assuming the coronavirus test has a low false-positive rate. I wonder if that’s true. If not, we may be piling flu casualties in the coronavirus bin.

Oh, man. I decided to check. This is unbelievable. According to the Chinese, over HALF of asymptomatic people who test positive may not have COVID-19. And they’ve been testing during flu season! That means they have tons of potential false-positives coming at them!

Now I don’t know what to think. If doctors all over the world are telling enough cold and flu patients they have coronavirus, the pandemic may turn out to be a joke.

At times like these, I’m really glad I rubbed my entire 700-pound stash of toilet paper with a lucky rabbit’s foot.

If there are a lot of false positives for living people, what about the dead? Maybe those figures are also inflated.

From the spiritual standpoint, I see some things about coronavirus that truly are scary.

People think the Beast is just one person, but that isn’t true. There will be a figurehead, but the body of the Beast will be billions of unsaved people, acting in concert, guided by demons and fallen angels. As I have often said, everyone is spirit-led; it’s not just Christians who have been baptized properly with the Holy Spirit. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you’re led by spirits that work for Satan. You may not be completely controlled by them, but they have a big influence on you.

Before the Antichrist can do his thing, he will have to have a body prepared. I think that’s what’s happening now. Satan is using training exercises to get people used to obeying him. He’s getting them used to believing crazy things and behaving irrationally.

Look at the toilet paper shortage, which is absolutely real. No one with a grain of common sense would ordinarily hoard toilet paper, yet millions upon millions of people are doing it. Satan is conditioning them to obey him as a unit.

He’s also conditioning them to give control to the state. Satan is a statist. He loves government, because he is weak and can’t be everywhere at once. God can lead an infinite number of people with no earthly infrastructure, but Satan needs our help. He needs telephones, televisions, and the Internet. He needs the government.

People are now much more open to government power grabs. Coronavirus did that.

There is a wacky mayor in Illinois who just gave herself the power to stop the sale of guns, ammunition, and alcohol. She also gave herself the power to confiscate and use private property as she sees fit. And no one has stopped her! I’m sure what she’s doing is unconstitutional. Why aren’t people up in arms? We’re supposed to be connected with God, and we’re supposed to have his protection, but we’re not, so we run into the arms of Karl Marx and his father, Satan.

When I voted in mayoral elections in the Miami area, I didn’t think much about what the mayors could do to me. I just tried to pick the least-obviously-corrupt Cuban and left it at that. It never occurred to me that one of them might go nuts and try to break down my door and take my guns. Now I see that such things can happen in America, because of a manufactured panic. If you live in a place like Chicago or St. Louis, how do you know the Gestapo won’t barge into your house, just like they did in Germany and Austria? It used to seem impossible. Is it?

I’m not going to get coronavirus, but oppression is a certainty. It will take longer to get to some areas, but it will come. The only question is whether God will move me to a place where freedom will last as long as possible.

I can see why I keep feeling he wants me to move to Tennessee.

Here is how the world works: it’s like The Matrix. Remember how that worked? The rebels who went into the matrix were surrounded by ordinary people who didn’t know what was going on. They were generally harmless, but at a moment’s notice, agents could enter them and transform them into vicious enemies. That’s how the Beast will function. People around you will be transformed by demons, and they will do terrible things to you, claiming it’s their civic duty. This is what happened in Germany, Austria, Cambodia, Cuba, and so on. It can happen here, too.

Ordinary people who are generally nice can do astounding things. It has happened throughout history. Chinese crowds were known for cutting large pieces out of people, keeping them alive as long as possible. A crowd of religious Jews ridiculed Jesus while he was hanging from nails. Nice Germans bought the property of Jews at absurdly low prices and kept it. Consider lynchings. They weren’t performed by escaped convicts. They were performed by people who attended church and made their kids say their prayers before going to bed.

Christians won’t just be abused by people who are obviously evil. It will be ordinary individuals, just like the nice Dutch citizens who sold Jews to the Nazis during the occupation. It will be teachers, Walmart greeters, doctors, preachers, and so on. And many of them will do it in the name of Jesus.

The country looks better and better. I’m already in the country, but apparently not deep enough.

I plan to keep updating my equation, but I’m not buying a rubber suit. This thing will blow over.