Let’s Wait for a Better Reason to Spaz Out

A friend called me yesterday to ask me what I thought of the new coronavirus, AKA COVID-19 and SARS. People are getting really worried.

Here is my official prediction: the epidemic will fizzle, and people will wonder why they were scared.

In certain areas of China, this illness had a pretty high death rate. That got people’s sweat glands and kidneys working. Thing is, the death rate has been much lower in other places. It appears that in areas where people get decent health care (i.e. not Wuhan province in China) the death rate is about the same as it is for the flu, and we don’t panic over that.

Here’s something else. Last year, about 10% of Americans got the flu. So far, the Chinese have had fewer than 90,000 cases of COVID-19. China has what? Five times our population? Six? The disease has had three months to do its job, and it hasn’t spread very well.

Maybe I didn’t express that well. I’ll try again. In America, 40,000,000 flu cases. In China, fewer than 90,000 coronavirus cases. See what I mean?

I don’t pay any attention to the news, but I do watch Youtube for amusement and education, and I happened to see some videos from a South African expat who just moved here from China. He’s huge on Youtube. He lived in China for over a decade, and he married a Chinese doctor. He is hopping mad at China for various reasons, and he has been doing what I would call “post-breakup videos” in which he vents the anger he kept bottled up while he was under the watchful eye of the communist party. He has been exposing China’s asinine response to the epidemic.

Long story short: China tried to prevent people from finding out there was an epidemic. They lied. They censored. They arrested doctors who spoke out. The government response was very poor. This is probably why things have gone so badly there. “Go home. You fine. Maybe sniffle.”

Some experts are pointing out that most people who get the disease get mild symptoms, so they don’t get treatment. This means the medical establishment doesn’t deal with them or put them in databases, so the information is skewed. Doctors are treating people who are really sick, so their experience colors their opinion, which they then repeat to the public. This makes it look like the disease is worse than it is.

True? I do not know. It sounds reasonable.

I think this disease will amount to nearly nothing in the US. If it makes 10,000 people sick and kills 100, it will be extremely insignificant compared to the diseases we are used to seeing here.

If you want to follow the epidemic and see if my prediction pans out, go to the Johns Hopkins site and watch their interactive map. Best resource I’ve found.

The Floor is not for Storage

Today is a big day. I’ve been organizing my gun stuff.

When you have one gun, organization is pretty simple. You put the gun in your pocket or your nightstand, and you put the ammunition in a drawer along with a simple cleaning kit. When you have a fair number of guns, it’s different. I suppose I have 6 different types of .22 ammunition. I have at least two types of .17 HMR ammunition. I have multiple versions of ammunition for a bunch of calibers. I have brass, bullets, primers, and powder for a bunch of calibers. My cleaning kit is pretty big, and I have a separate box of chemicals and Boresnakes. Then there are my targets, gadgets, parts, and papers.

It’s a mess.

Speaking of targets, I made a practice of buying Caldwell Orange Peel second-quality targets whenever they turned up for sale, so I have a pretty decent supply on hand. In retrospect, this wasn’t the best move I could have made.

I bought 8″ circular targets with white circular grids on them. I don’t need an 8″ target most of the time. For me, a 4″ target will usually do the job. For a pistol at 60 feet, a 6″ target would be fine. By buying 8″ targets, I risked wasting a lot of paper.

I learned I could economize by shooting at several different places on each target. By doing this, you can turn each target into at least 5 targets.

My system works, but I have started buying targets with 4 4-inch bullseyes on them. It’s somewhat more elegant, and it still saves money.

Today I located all the boxes I could find which had gun-related things in them. I still have a bunch of boxes I haven’t unpacked since leaving Miami. There are things I just don’t need to have unpacked, so for the most part, leaving the boxes as they are makes sense. Today I dug into the boxes that actually needed to be emptied and organized. I found Russian sniper ammo, loose pistol shells, owner’s manuals, bits of a chronograph, a green laser, and plenty of other things.

I rooted around online, trying to come up with a way to store these things. I can use little cardboard boxes, but cardboard falls apart eventually, and certain bugs like to live in it. I finalled decided to try transparent plastic boxes from Home Depot. They cost a little over a dollar each, and each box will hold a good deal of ammunition.

This left me with papers to deal with. My solution is a see-through file box from Office Depot. It will give me a place to put all my manuals. The ones I still have, I mean.

Gun cleaning items…I still have no solution. I have a wheeled toolbox I used to use for range trips when I was a land-deprived surburbanite who could not shoot in his own yard. Maybe I can throw everything in that.

A lot of people use steel ammo boxes for ammo storage. They cost a lot, they’re heavy, and they’re too big for most of my calibers. I would rather spend $20 than $200.

I got my Desert Eagle out and shot it this weekend. It was a Chinese fire drill. About half of the shells refused to extract, and the rest hit me in the face, leaving cuts and bruises.

I think this demonstrates a fundamental difference between men and women. With the possible exception of ballet, there is no hobby women will take up which causes them to be injured repeatedly. Only a man will continue firing a gun that flings hot shells into his forehead. Women can’t enjoy that kind of thing.

I did what I usually do when I have a problem. My first response should be prayer, but I tend to go to Google first. I learned some things about the Desert Eagle.

First, it has a terrible extractor spring. It’s not even a real spring. It’s a tiny red piece of “polymer” (plastic to you and me) that sits under the extractor. It looks like a miniature Jujube. Magnum Research sold thousands of these guns and didn’t tell buyers the Jujubes fell apart upon being exposed to oil and solvents.

Good thing no one ever puts oils or solvents on firearms!

My extractor Jujube is apparently dead. I have not opened the bolt up completely, but there is no tension at all on the extractor, which is the reason I still have some skin on my forehead. I ordered two new extractor springs, and I also ordered an AR15 spring. I read that AR15 springs, which are steel, fit the Desert Eagle just fine.

Second thing I learned: the Desert Eagle has an adjustable trigger.

Did this thing come with a manual? If so, I should punch myself for not reading it.

Or I could just hold the Desert Eagle in front of me and fire a shot.

I have always criticized the Desert Eagle’s trigger. It felt like I was trying to close rusty scissors on a piece of sandpaper. When I found out there was a simple screw for trigger adjustment, I adjusted the trigger, and now it seems almost pleasant. Wish I had known about this sooner.

I can’t shoot the gun until my springs get here. I hope it functions.

Magnum Research always blamed the end user for being battered with shells. They said it was caused by “limp-wristing,” which means holding the gun like Barack Obama. Not so. I held it very firmly yesterday and still got pummeled. I’m wondering if the extractor problem could have had anything to do with it.

I plan to keep researching the problem. There may be some way to fix the gun so I don’t have to wear a face shield.

I’m not impressed with the gun’s engineering. I have some pretty old guns, and they work just fine. I don’t have to open them up and insert new plastic Jujubes every hundred rounds. Running properly for many years without repairs is normal. You can make excuses for Magnum Research, but the truth is, they blew it.

Why haven’t I been shooting the gun over the years? Simple. The rounds cost me a dollar each. The other day, I started to feel bad about owning a beautiful firearm I did not use, so I looked around online for ammo. While the mainstream stuff has increased to maybe $1.35 per round, a reputable company called Precision One makes it considerably cheaper, so that’s what I ordered. It’s probably great ammunition when you shoot it in a firearm that works.

I have dies for .50 AE, so I am looking into reloading. It appears that there are two types of bullets: the 80¢ kind and the 32¢ kind. There is no point in reloading using 80¢ bullets. It would cost as much as factory ammo. A company called Berry’s makes the cheaper bullets. I may pick some up when the box I ordered runs dry.

If I can get my shooting stuff organized, maybe there is hope for the rest of my possessions. I am still working on the workshop. I’m about to put my dry saw on wheels. That will help. Things are already much better than they were a month ago.

Right now, there are a bunch of piles of ammunition, parts, and so on littering my floor. I’m happy about it, though, because it’s the beginning of the end of a tiresome problem.

I’m going to try to shoot more. I’m thinking of buying a couple of steel gongs.

When I finish fabricating the saw stand, I’ll post photos. I think it will be amazing, especially to people familiar with the dubious quality of most of my metal work.

Plus Drawer Liner Discovery

I finally “finished” my arbor press stand today. I’m insufferably pleased with myself.

Yesterday, I used my finger brake to make a storage shelf to fit the stand, and today I ground and welded to make it work. I also welded a bottom in the catch bin I made for the stand.

I may go back over it, grind here and there to make it look better, and fill in around ugly welds with J-B Weld. I think this will be a great sneaky way to improve the appearance of the project. Once it’s painted, people will think the smooth, pretty J-B Weld is steel.

My next project is a stand for my dry saw. I already have the steel. Having bent the shelf for the arbor press, I have to say that making the top of the saw stand is somewhat intimidating. I don’t care. I have to get on it and see what happens. Here’s what I tell myself when I think a job is too big or intimidating: “You don’t want to use your tools? Sell them.” That puts me in the right frame of mind.

Life without tools is life as a woman, for most practical purposes. Although there are a lot of women who use tools very well, which makes it even more disgraceful to be intimidated.

In other news, I found a great cheap product to protect the trays on my amazing Harbor Freight 3-tier $39 tool cart. Initially, I used clear Flex-Seal, which is a rubbery substance you apply like spray paint. I could have used toolbox liner material, but it’s generally black, making it hard to see little things in your box or cart, and it’s extremely overpriced. It’s also thick. I wanted to be able to use little magnetic parts trays in my cart, and they will not stick through a heavy drawer liner.

The Flex-Seal looked like a good idea, but then I found out gasoline dissolves it, so if you work on gas engines, you will get gas on your cart, and then you will have problems. It appears that it also reacts with the rubber bases of magnetic parts trays and makes them stick–more than you want–to the cart.

I found these things out after applying Flex-Seal to all three trays. Removing it was a challenge. I had to find a solvent that removed Flex-Seal while sparing Chinese paint. In the end, gasoline turned out to be the only answer, so I used gasoline and paper towels to clean the top tray. After that, I went to the local firehouse and asked them if they wanted to give me a safety prize.

I finally found the product I needed. Lowe’s sells clear adhesive-backed drawer liner material in rolls 30 feet long. The price? About $13. That’s about a third of the cost of useless toolbox drawer liner material.

The clear stuff I bought comes with paper backing that has one-inch squares on it, so measuring and cutting is a breeze.

I stuck this product to my top tray, and it’s fantastic. It’s thin enough to use with a magnetic tray, it’s clear so my trays aren’t black holes, and it does not react with solvents.

The product is Duck brand clear shelf liner. Buy it immediately.

This is all I have right now. More joyous announcements will be posted as things develop.

Finger Brake Goes into Action

Today I used my finger brake on a large project for the first time.

If memory serves, I bought the brake last year. It’s from SWAG Offroad, a company that sells innovative, inexpensive metalworking tools. They send you a kit, and you weld it together yourself. Then you put it on a Harbor Freight 20 ton press. If you’re smart, you also install an air jack on the press so you can use a compressor to drive it.

Last year, I built a stand for my arbor press. I’m still not finished building it. The press is on the stand, and it works fine, but the stand doesn’t have a catch bin for broaches (which fall through the base of the press when you use them) and it doesn’t have a storage shelf. Today I used the finger brake to build a shelf.

I wanted a 1/8″-thick shelf with upturned lips at the sides and back. The stand has 4 31″ pillars, and the idea was to put the shelf among them about halfway up. The shelf had to be recessed several inches to avoid obstructing workpieces that protrude beneath the press.

Most hobbyists have no way of making a thick metal shelf with a lip, and even if they can pull that off, making a shelf with lips on more than one side is much harder. You have to have a brake to make the lips, and it has to be a finger brake in order to make more than one lip in close proximity. A brake that can only make 24″-long lips, to give an example, is useless if you need to make a 24″ lip on one side of a piece and 8″-long lips on the sides perpendicular to it. A finger brake lets you adjust the length of the bending fingers so you can make bends in different lengths, and by removing fingers, you can also adjust the brake so it doesn’t mash existing bends when you make new ones. You just remove fingers until your existing bends have clearance.

You can buy small finger brakes from Shop Fox and so on, but they only work on thin metal. If you’re happy making things from 18-gauge steel, which is very flimsy, and you don’t mind paying over $600 for this limited capability, a stand-alone brake is fine, but SWAG Offroad’s brake will let you bend 1/8″ steel 19″ long, and it only costs $400. It will let you bend 3/8″ steel in shorter lengths, which a small stand-alone brake won’t do at all. You can use it to make heavy brackets and vehicle suspension parts.

Today I made a 15″ by 12″ shelf, and I got it ready for the brake. I was nervous about trying it, because once you screw up a bend like this, you’re committed. You can’t fix it easily. It would require an anvil and an acetylene or oxy-propane torch. I would have had to scrap the shelf had it not worked.

I shoved the shelf into the brake, aligned it as well as I could, and went for it. The result was a little out of spec, but I was able to grind it and make it work.

I learned a few things.

1. Finger brakes stretch metal a lot. If you have a 14″-wide piece of metal, and you put lips exactly 1″ high on two opposing sides, the resulting workpiece will be wider than 12″. How do you figure out how to measure and position things to get accurate results? I don’t know. I suppose you have to bend a bunch of practice pieces and take notes.

2. You can align things very well by holding them with one hand, lowering the dies to the metal, and watching the rear of the brake. You can use a hammer to bop things into alignment before the fingers tighten up to the point where you can’t move the workpiece.

3. If you want sharp bends, you need to make or buy bottom dies. The kit comes with a bottom die which is made from heavy angle iron, and it doesn’t produce sharp bends. I might be able to get better bends by using my milling machine to put sharp corners inside pieces of angle iron. I can set them on top of the kit’s die.

The finger brake is a phenomenal tool. It opens up possibilities you could never achieve with welders and machine tools alone.

I’m hoping to weld the shelf into the stand tomorrow. I may massage it some more to compensate for the errors and make it look better. After I get it done, I’ll finish the catch bin, and then the stand will be ready for paint. Then I can get started for the mobile base for my dry saw.

The finger brake takes skill and practice to operate, and it has limitations, but overall, it’s a transcendent shop tool. It will let you do things almost no hobbyist could do 10 years ago.

The Best Tools Come From God

I watch a lot of Youtube stuff, as readers of this blog know. The two most important types of videos for me are religious and educational. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good idea to watch a lot of the educational material, simply because the people who post it generally have a worldly mindset. God hasn’t told me to stop, however. You have to have a certain amount of exposure to the worldly if you’re going to live on this planet.

This week I started watching videos from a guy named Jocko Willink. I don’t know if Jocko is his real first name. He’s a former Navy SEAL. He’s a very impressive guy. Anyone who makes it through SEAL training and then does 20 years is impressive, even though the British SAS is supposedly the world’s best special operations organization. He is very muscular. He speaks with great confidence. He knows a lot about working with people. He has done a lot with his life. SEAL’s don’t make much money in exchange for giving us so much, but he has turned having been a SEAL into what looks like a good business. He sells Jocko shirts and even Jocko tea.

That being said, sometimes his videos get on my nerves.

Today I heard him talk about cursing. He said the SEAL’s use language so filthy it goes way beyond even normal Navy standards. He’s pushing 50, but he said that when he finds himself in that kind of crowd, he reverts to cursing. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t see much wrong with it, and he believes that sometimes it’s a valid means of enhancing communication.

That’s a bothersome thing to hear from a man that age. I used to be proud of my ability to use defiling speech, and over time, I’ve come to understand that there is no good excuse for it. Also, it meant I was proud of injuring and hindering myself.

We curse for a lot of bad reasons.

Many of us take up cursing because we want to sound grown up. The irony is obvious. It’s like smoking in order to look grown up. Refinement and sophistication are essential parts of maturity. When old people curse, it shows they haven’t developed properly. Somewhere in the process, they failed to receive an important message which is right up there with, “Don’t use your pants for a toilet.” Bad language is the province of the trashy, the unintelligent, the ignorant, the cruel, the insecure, and the undisciplined. When you give in to it, it’s as though you’re asking God to help you not to grow up.

We often curse to curry favor with others. We want to show we’re part of the club. We want them to know that no matter how old we are or how serious we are about God, we haven’t forgotten our ape-like roots. It’s a way of keeping one foot in the world and the other in heaven. It’s counterproductive. It holds you back.

Cursing defiles us and encourages spirits to come in and rule us. It reveals that our hearts haven’t been cleaned thoroughly and that we are still vulnerable to supernatural corruption. Jesus said that which comes out of a man defiles him. The filthy things you say can bring curses to you, including psychological problems, diseases, and failure in the things you do.

SEAL’s are interesting people. We tend to ascribe godlike status to them. We think every SEAL is, basically, a Steven Seagal character or a Jason Bourne clone. Movie characters are not real. There has never been a human being who compared, even remotely, to Steven Seagal’s imaginary alter egos or Jason Bourne. There has never been a real James Bond. With all their resources, governments can’t produce people like that. There has never been a Jack Reacher, and there never will be.

Every SEAL isn’t a sniper. Every SEAL can’t compete successfully in the UFC. SEAL’s don’t speak every language. They can’t fly. They can’t bend spoons with their minds. They’re just very good soldiers. They probably don’t like being called soldiers, but it sounds funny saying they’re very good sailors.

SEAL’s can be beaten up. They can be murdered. They can lose in combat. They can become drug addicts and alcoholics. They’re just people, like the rest of us. Chris Kyle, a celebrated SEAL, told ridiculous, shameful lies about Jesse Ventura and was successfully sued over it. We owe these people a great deal, and they should be honored, but they are not superheroes. The fact that a SEAL says something in a podcast doesn’t mean we should believe it.

I saw Willink talking about verbal abuse today. He was speaking to a conservative psychologist named Jordan Peterson. Willink said SEAL’s live in an atmosphere of constant abuse. He seemed to have no problem with that.

Peterson told the story of a person he worked with. This person’s coworkers called him “Lunch Bucket” because he had a funny-looking lunchbox. Lunch Bucket was subjected to unceasing abuse, and eventually, he quit. Peterson and Willink faulted him for this. They said he should have taken other tacks, such as joining in the insults that were directed at him.

It was disappointing to see two older men talking like this.

I am not a good person, nor am I accomplished, but I have managed to absorb a few lessons in life, and here is one of them: everyone sets a price for his company, and it’s all people will pay. If you set the price too low, you will always be a doormat and punching bag, and it will be largely your own choice. You’re not supposed to do this.

Here is a word for people who do it: “lickspittle.”

A long time ago, God told me this: it’s more important to exclude the wrong people from your life than to include the right people.

Scripture backs me up. Christians tend to think we should swallow filth from abusive people forever, in the hope that they will change. The Bible doesn’t say that. It says we should shun Christians who behave badly. We’re not even supposed to sit down to meals with them. The word says it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than with a contentious woman. Boy, is that true.

Look it up.

When I was in college, I had 5 friends I was very close to. All but one are gone. Two were abusive and racist, and they took advantage of me. One was insecure, dishonest, pompous, conceited, and treacherous. Two had a lot of good qualities, but we are on different paths now, and I can’t be the same person I used to be in their company. The last one I really keep in touch with is an Orthodox Jew. I hear from him from time to time. His outlook on life has a lot of similarities to mine, and perhaps this is why we still communicate.

One of my friends called me maybe 10 years ago and said he wanted to come to Miami and fish with my father and me. I sent him a polite email that said I had changed. I made it clear that while we had been good friends in the past (by admittedly poor standards), things were different now. This is someone who used to call me a brother. I just could not subject myself to that relationship any more, for more than one reason.

This guy had terrible problems with the truth. He would tell stories and embellish them beyond credulity. If a friend of his was insulted in a bar, and the friend said something nasty in return, a few years later, you might hear that the friend broke a bottle over the other person’s head, and then he beat up four cops. He also had a bad temper. Often, a few beers made him want to fight, and he would use racist language. He called black people “boofers,” which must be something he picked up in his hometown. On one occasion, he put his hand through a 1/4″-thick window.

I remember having to grab him, immobilize him, and drag him down the street because he was determined to break someone’s car window with a beer bottle.

He was with me and some other friends when we stole some expensive banners from Barnard College. These things were huge. Two of us took the banners down from inside the building and dropped them outside, and two took them and ran to our dormitories. We were supposed to share them, but my friend took one and nailed it to his wall and then defended what he had done. No honor among thieves, I guess. Anyway, it shows that he was a hard person to trust.

He also had a way of belittling the people around him, as though they were supporting cast members.

Of course, he had good qualities. He was smart. He was willing to take risks to get ahead in life. He was very generous. He could be extremely loyal. He loved kids.

The feeling of being belittled got to me eventually, and I also started thinking about the anger, racism, lying, and so on, and I just couldn’t face the prospect of putting up with it in the future. That’s how it works when I reduce my social circle. I don’t think about it for a long time, make plans, and then cut the cord. It happens very suddenly, over the course of one day. I realize the relationship is over, and I act accordingly, without hesitation.

Another friend loved cruel humor. He was worse about it than I was. He truly contemned his friends, and he said things he knew would cut. He didn’t seem to be equipped with compassion. To be around him was to feel that you were in the shade. He left school after some debilitating problems with drugs and alcohol, and after that, I never heard from him again.

Yet another friend tended to fawn over me at first, but later, after he fell into a job that made him a lot of money, he promoted himself to a position of moral arbiter. A member of our circle had come out as a homosexual, and I had sent that person a very polite letter saying I still loved him even if I could never agree with what he was doing. The friend who was making a good living called me one day to see what I was up to, and during the conversation, he told me the letter, which was not for him, was “evil and unnecessary.”

You can probably guess how many times I said similar things about his religious convictions. I also didn’t correct him when he bragged that a car he was selling actually had 142,000 miles on it, not the 42,000 the odometer indicated.

He changed a lot during the time when I knew him. A Jew, he was initially very hostile to Arabs. He didn’t like Jewish Israelis, whom he called “Dumb Israeli Bastards,” but he supported them against their enemies. Fast-forward a few years. He became an extreme leftist. He and his wife became ardent supporters of “Palestinian” rights. It was as if a spirit had taken him over, and it may well be that this is what happened.

He had some wonderful virtues. He was courageous, and sometimes he took the heat for bad things he had done, when I would have run. Nonetheless, I’m not his son, and I’m not going to be lectured by him. I’m glad he has done well financially, but he didn’t earn it. He was unemployed after college, having graduated with a liberal arts degree after proving unable to handle engineering courses, and he found a job as a bookkeeper for an oil firm. They let him start trading, which is a simple job anyone can do, and he earned tremendous commissions. That’s not the kind of thing that should make you proud. On the contrary; you should be thrilled things worked out so well for you in view of your very fungible capabilities. A high school kid could do what he was doing.

He got our homosexual friend a job doing the same thing, and he became rich, too, but he never got full of himself.

A high school friend of mine had to go. One day many years ago, he invited me to have pizza with him, and he started telling me black people were a cancer. This was a big surprise. He said they should be taken out into the ocean and drowned. He said his wife was an idiot savant and that he had only married her because he had gotten her pregnant in a one-night stand. He talked about his plans for leaving his family. I feel bad for him, because he is in very bad shape, but I let him go. What do I have in common with someone like that?

Of course, as longtime readers know, I let my own sister go. Being around her is like being sprayed with excrement or worse. I’m all done with it. It’s not just unpleasant; it’s intolerable.

I had a friend in Miami who came to me from the blogging world. We were close for a long time. I eventually got tired of the way he treated everyone. He told everyone in his circle what to do. He put us down, which didn’t make much sense, in view of his own very ordinary talents and accomplishments. He was extremely disrespectful. He was very selfish. He was drunk or stoned all the time. He wasn’t good to his friends. For example, he borrowed a new saw from his neighbor (who mowed his yard for him), left it in the rain, and then got mad when the neighbor complained. He would ask me to take him fishing, arrive late, drink all of my dad’s beer, sleep in the saloon because he had a hangover, and refuse to help with the cleaning up. It got to the point where I never heard from him unless he wanted something.

He wrote about American politics, as though he had great authority, and then one day he admitted to me that he wasn’t a citizen.

What?

Gone.

Do I miss the corrosive people I dismissed? In all honesty, not at all. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them any more. The thought of taking up with them again is disturbing. It would be like being pardoned and then volunteering to go back to prison.

Christians are supposed to love and forgive. That being said, we’re not supposed to be other people’s diapers. A blessed person is the head and not the tail in his relationships. You can’t be the head when you live in an atmosphere of abuse. Everyone is mistreated from time to time, but if it’s your daily fare, something is wrong with your walk.

Why do we hold onto corrosive people? Love? Not really. It’s fear. We fear change. A woman will say, “My husband beats me, but if I leave him, I’ll be alone, and I won’t have any income.” You may say, “My friends humiliate me all the time, but if I drop them, I won’t have friends at all.”

We tell ourselves a lot of crazy things that aren’t true. There are seven billion people on the planet. You will make new friends. God can bring you a new spouse. I’ll tell you something awful I used to say about controlling women. Here is the cleaned-up version: some women act like they invented female genitals. That’s a bad way to put it, but it proves a point. There is always another woman out there, and there will always be new friends.

In short, no, I do not agree with Jocko Willink and Jordan Peterson. It’s not okay to torment others, and cutting off abusive people is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that you know a curse when you see one.

Willink is a motivational speaker. He is doing something worldly people need, because they don’t have God’s help. If God isn’t beside you giving you favor and making you succeed, then yes, you need to be motivated by people like Willink and Anthony Robbins. It won’t help you in the long term, because God isn’t in it and it leads to pride, which makes God fight you. In the short term, however, it can get you through a tough year.

Christians should avoid motivational speakers. God doesn’t want you to tough it out or lift yourself by your own bootstraps. He does not want you to have self-confidence. He wants you to have confidence in him. The Bible says he helps the humble and fights the proud.

It’s always disturbing when a preacher is also a motivational speaker. It means he couldn’t find God’s help, so he stole from worldly sources. If the world knows more than we do, then God is worthless, and we should renounce him. If God is supreme, and he is willing to help us, then we shouldn’t insult him by pumping up our belief in ourselves.

If you can’t find God’s help, by all means, motivate yourself as well as you can until you succeed in obtaining favor. When you don’t have a rifle, fight with dirt clods or sticks or whatever you have. You need the rifle, though. Dirt and sticks won’t get you through the long haul.

Willink carries a pistol, and he is a black belt in jiu jitsu. That’s great. What good will these things do him when he’s 75, or he has a disability, and the Democrats have disarmed him? What good will they do him if he is simply attacked by an adversary who is better and stronger? No good at all. God, on the other hand, will always be as strong and invincible as he is right now. You need to get real protection instead of relying on imitations.

It’s interesting to hear Willink’s great insights into carnal success, and I wish I had some of his virtues, but I’m too old and experienced to think I should do things his way. I’m glad I’m not falling for the self-help lie, the way I did when I was young and spiritually fatherless.

I Feel so Competent

Today is a day of triumph. I completed a mobile base for my cutter grinder, and I mounted the grinder on it without killing myself. Although I came close.

My grinder is a Gorton 375-4. Wild guess based on what I’ve read: it’s about 50 years old. They say you can do just about anything with it, including making a fluted drill bit or end mill from scratch. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s supposed to be capable of many things, including sharpening the ends and sides of end mills.

When I started learning about these machines, I read various figures for their weight. Some people said they weighed 550 pounds. A guy on a forum claimed the real figure was below 300. He said he unloaded one from his vehicle by himself. The freight bill for my grinder listed a weight of 490, including a very heavy pallet.

When I began thinking about a mobile base, I thought, “One guy lifted a machine like this out of his truck and onto the ground. He has to be right about the weight.” Based on that misconception, I designed a very simple X-shaped base with casters. The base adds something like 5 inches to the height of the grinder.

The X design is extremely appealing for a number of reasons. First, it’s the cheapest, simplest, lightest way to create a base which is wider than a machine and can be installed using bolt holes at the machine’s corners. Second, it only requires 8 tubing welds, 4 of them short. Third, because of the small number of welds, it won’t have a lot of warpage issues to fix.

Tubing is smart because, unlike ever-popular angle iron, it’s extremely rigid. I made a base from heavy angle iron once, and it jiggled like Jell-O.

I decided to put 4 holes in the base for bolts. These would go through existing holes in the grinder’s stand. I chose to weld nuts to the underside of the base to receive the bolts. This made it unnecessary to struggle with loose bolts while trying to attach a dangling grinder to the base. It lowers the risk of death by crushing somewhat.

I chose to weld the casters to the tubing instead of bolting them in place. Welding is fast. Locating and drilling holes is very, very slow. Bolts also have heads which stick up in the way. I got the welding idea from Jimmy Diresta, a Youtube whiz. Sure, I marred up my new casters. So what? They cost something like $22 for a set, and anyway, no one will see the welds under the base.

It took me about 10 minutes to install the casters. It was wonderful. Bolts would have taken maybe 90 minutes.

Building an X-shaped rectangular base is much, much harder than building a square one. When I started out, I thought the grinder’s stand was square. When I measured it, I found that the bolt holes were on 20.5″ by 13″ centers. This drove me into the realm of trigonometry. For a former physicist, the math was simple, but doing the measurements was not. I had to make an angle jig on the band saw. I could not cut straight across the tubes to make recesses so they would fit together, so this limited my use of the milling machine and band saw. I had to use an angle grinder. Locating the holes was impossible using measuring tools. I had to lower the grinder onto the base, mark the base with a Sharpie, lift the machine off, and cut the holes.

Lifting the grinder was interesting. First of all, it does not weigh 250 pounds. The guy who believed that must have been posting from a mental hospital. I lifted it with my tractor, using a strap, and I can tell you it weighs a lot. I think the shipper’s number is correct. I think he actually weighed it. Subtracting about a hundred pounds for the packing and pallet, the grinder probably comes in at a little under 400 pounds.

The weight is concentrated on the right side, toward the front. This is bad, because it makes the grinder easy to pull over…on the operator. It also means that when you lift the grinder, it tilts sideways. When you put it down, it tries to lie on its face. You have to put one corner down and then swing the tractor to rock the grinder back on its feet.

I did not enjoy working on the grinder while it was in the air. My strap will hold 1200 pounds (working weight), but I don’t care. I was nervous with all that weight swinging around. Working around a lifted unsupported load is a good substitute for stool softener. It’s nerve-wracking. Besides, even if the strap holds, the tractor can always blow a hydraulic line, dropping the grinder in a hurry.

When I got the grinder onto the base, I found that my bolts weren’t long enough. I only had two bolts in the shop that were the correct length, so I put them in diagonal corners. When I lowered the grinder, it rolled around very well. The base is extremely strong, too. It doesn’t sway one bit. As for safety…I am not satisfied. You could not push this grinder over from a standing start, but a determined idiot could get it rolling, hit an obstruction at speed, and put it on the floor.

If the grinder weighed 250 pounds, I would not be concerned. It would be less top-heavy and easier to control. At 400 pounds, it’s harder to deal with.

I’m thinking I may redo the base. When I first started considering this, I thought I would have to start from scratch. Then an idea came to me. I can get two long pieces of tubing and run them across the short ends of the base, on top of the existing tubing. The long pieces can extend past the existing tubing. I can remove the casters from the old tubes and put them on the new ones. This will give me a much wider base, and it will also lower the grinder by an inch. If I want to, I can put tubing spacers between the old tubes and new tubes, lowering the grinder even more.

This mod would be very simple. I could do it in one day. I may go for it. The alternative is to make a really big rectangular base with room for a toolbox beside the grinder. Rectangles are less elegant and more work, though.

The base isn’t painted. It is impossible for one person to install it without destroying paint. Maybe truck bed coating will work. Also, I don’t want to paint it until I’m satisfied with it.

Even though I may make changes, I’m very happy with this project. It’s very good, and it only took three days. I’m getting much better at making things. In the past, I used to hear about people making things like welding carts, and I thought it wasn’t worth it to try, because I would do such a bad job. This week, I was thinking about buying a second Vulcan cart from Harbor Freight, and without thinking about the difficulty, I thought, “Why should I do that when I can make a better one in a couple of days?”

That’s nice.

Now that the grinder is mobile and therefore out of the way, I can move on to my next mobilization project: the dry saw. I’m always leaving it on my lift cart. That’s no good. It has to have its own cart. I already have the casters.

I have no idea how to run the grinder. I fixed the bearings, so I guess it’s time to start learning to grind things.

1″ Flat Bar is the Duct Tape of Hot-Rolled Steel

Things are going very well in the workshop.

I’ve been working on my compressed air system. I got the tubing and drops set up, and then I started working on details. Earlier this week, I sat down and made a list of things I needed, and I got on the web to see where I could find them. Some things were available at Home Depot. Some were available at Lowe’s. Some were available at Northern Tool. No store had everything.

I started putting things in online shopping carts in order to keep track of them, figuring I would then use the shopping carts to make a list so I could get in the car and buy these things locally. After a very long time, I got frustrated with the effort, so I looked at Amazon. They had everything I needed, much cheaper.

What was I supposed to do?

It’s a bummer to see the Internet eating local businesses (even chains like Sears and KMart), but what can you do? It’s the future. You don’t want to be like an old 1930’s coot who refused to have a phone installed in his house. You don’t want to be like Snap-On’s remarkable CEO, who just told investors Snap-On isn’t interested in the Internet. The way we shop has changed permanently. As long as they don’t make me take the mark of the Beast, I’m not going to fight it.

I placed an order a day or two ago, and today everything arrived.

My system has three drops and an air hose reel. Actually, one of the drops is connected to another reel, so I guess I have three drops and two reels. I have an air-powered finger press brake and an air-powered planishing hammer. I wanted to hook them up to one drop, while providing a third coupler for one of those little coily air gun hoses.

I found an interesting product. It’s a manifold, but they call it a splitter. One one end, it has a male industrial air plug. On the other, it has three female universal quick couplings. They cost $20 at Lowe’s, but Amazon sells the same thing, probably from the same factory (as people often say concerning Chinese goods), for $11. I had a female coupler sticking out of the drop by the finger brake. I replaced it with a 3-foot snubber hose and put the splitter at the end of it. I then put a 6-foot snubber (Amazon) in the splitter and hooked it up to the finger brake.

I didn’t want to plug the splitter, which is a rigid part, into the female coupler that was sticking out of the drop. That would have given me about 8″ of poorly supported metal sticking straight out of the wall. The short snubber hose gave me a flexible connection and also added more length to the splitter.

I also got a drain extension for the compressor. When you use a compressor, water condenses inside it. At the end of every day, or more often, you have to open a valve at the bottom of the compressor tank to let the water out. This reduces rust. The valve on a new compressor is about 7″ off the ground, under the tank. It’s no fun to reach down there to open it. I put a 12″ steel hose on my compressor today. I still have to bend over to open the valve at the end of it, but I don’t have to get on my hands and knees. Very nice. Some people use electric valves that open automatically from time to time. I don’t think I need one.

My final achievement was the stabilization of my biggest air hose reel. Far as I know, all reels are Chinese, and none are sturdy. Mine has a set of rollers the hose passes through, and the rollers are supported by one thin sheet metal arm. It flexes when I pull on the hose. Annoying and not good for the reel.

Today, after I got my press brake hooked up to the air supply, I made a brace for the reel and attached it to the wall. I used the brake to bend two tabs into the ends of a 1″ by 1/8″ steel bar about 30″ long. I drilled holes in the tabs. I attached one tab to the reel and the other to the wall. Now the arm holding the rollers doesn’t flex. The little piece of metal that actually holds the rollers moves a little. Maybe I’ll fix that, too.

As you can see in the photo, I didn’t do a good job of estimating the angles needed for the tabs at the ends of the brace. As a result, the brace is flexed. I think this makes it stiffer, however, so it’s not a flaw. It’s a feature. Isn’t that what Microsoft always says? I saw it coming and did not do anything about it. I hoped the stress in the brace would do what it’s doing. Point for me.

Like bags of sold-by-the-pound fasteners from Tractor Supply, Tapcon screws, and a Harbor Freight drill index, flat steel bar is one of the greatest things you can keep in your shop. I buy it when I buy metal whether I have a plan for it or not. I know I’ll end up using it for something. Today when I was buying metal, I asked for 60″. The guy cutting the metal cut me 36″ by mistake. He thought he would have to put it in with the drops and start over. I told them to go ahead and cut me another 24″ and not worry about it. I didn’t pick 60″ because I needed that length. I picked it because that was the longest piece I could conveniently put in the car.

The air-powered press is a godsend. Without air, you have to pump a lever about a hundred times in order to shape anything. With air, you press a trigger and wait 10 seconds. Very nice.

It’s hard to think of anything I need to add to the air system, with the possible exception of a larger compressor. Well, that’s not true. I still don’t have a little coily air gun hose. But Amazon sells them, and of course, they’re cheaper than Lowe’s. And they come with a plug on one end and a coupler on the other.

Regarding the planishing hammer, I bought it for one reason: it was on sale. Harbor Freight slashed it to $89, and at that price, it didn’t matter whether I had a use for it. I knew the next time I saw the same model, it would be over $200, and I knew I wanted to learn how to use a planishing hammer. Done deal.

A planishing hammer stretches metal. You can turn a flat disk into a metal dome, for example. If you really want to, you can turn a flat piece of metal into a motorcycle fender, but it would be very slow. Mainly, planishing hammers are used to smooth out metal workpieces you’ve created with other tools.

Obviously, I need those tools.

I don’t see myself springing for an English wheel any time soon, but there is a cheap alternative. You can shape metal with a hammer and a bag full of sand. I might go for that. It would be fun to be able to make things from sheet metal. Look around you and see how many sheet metal items your house contains. If you can do sheet metal work, you can make custom lampshades, belt guards, chain covers, and lots of other common items which are otherwise unobtainable.

I now have steel for a tool grinder mobile base, and I also have steel to complete my arbor press stand. I’m going to add a storage shelf, which I plan to trick out with 1″ vertical flanges at the sides and rear to keep stuff from sliding off. I’m hoping I can bend them correctly on the press. This shows what a nice tool the SWAG Offroad press is; with a typical press, it would be impossible to bend a 14″ length of 1/8″ steel to a nice sharp right angle, but the SWAG press will do it if you can summon the skill.

My other addition to the press will be a removable catch bin. It will sit under the forks of the press, and it will catch broaches that fall through. I bought a 5″ length of 4″ square tubing. I’m going to weld a bottom in it, and it will be the bin. Then I’ll weld some bar to it and put some hooks on the stand to hold onto the bar. Think of those old bars they used to use on village gates in old movies. It will work. It’s been done.

The grinder base will be an interesting job. I’ve decided to use 1″ by 3″ tubing. I’m going to arrange it in an X pattern under the grinder. The ends of the X will extend past the bottom of the grinder, and I’ll weld casters to the bottoms. I got the welding idea from Jimmy Diresta, a Youtube whiz who welded casters onto a band saw base. If I weld, I won’t have to spend an hour and a half measuring and drilling so I can use bolts, and I won’t have to spend half an hour installing the bolts.

The big problem with welding is that I won’t be able to paint under the caster plates. Or maybe I will, but welding will not be kind to the paint. Maybe I can touch it up later. It’s not like people will be coming to my shop to look under the base, so I don’t think it matters.

In order to make a flat X, I have to cut material out of both tubes so they can interlock. To do that, I’ll have to know exactly where to cut, and I’ll have to get the angles right. The base is not square, so I can’t just use 90° angles. I had to do a little trig. It appears that I need 65° angles. It may be tricky to get it right.

The grinder has holes for bolts. I plan to run bolts through the holes, through the tubing, and into nuts I’ve welded onto the underside of the base. This will make it unnecessary to hang onto the nuts while I install the bolts. It should be pretty sweet.

I made a mistake when I bought the casters. I thought I was buying a set with 4 swiveling wheels. If you put non-swiveling wheels on an X-shaped base, parallel to the tubing, the base won’t move. The wheels arrived, and it turned out I had two that didn’t swivel. I ordered new ones. I thought about sending the ones I have back, but then I thought some more. I’m always putting wheels on things. It will be nice to have a set of casters on hand before I start another project.

My final buy for today was a roll of clear plastic shelf paper from Lowe’s. It was very cheap. I got 20″ by 30′ for $13. I couldn’t beat that anywhere. It’s for the trays in my Harbor Freight tool cart. When I bought the cart, I thought I would be clever and protect the trays. I applied heavy coats of Flex Seal to the insides of the trays. Then I found out Flex Seal will dissolve in almost anything. If you put rubber or plastic parts on a surface painted with Flex Seal, there is a good chance the solvents in the other materials will melt the Flex Seal, gluing your parts to it. While Flex Seal melts easily, the only thing I’ve found that removes it fairly well is turpentine. My plan is to remove as much of the Flex Seal as I can stand to and then install the clear plastic shelf liner. This should protect the trays fairly well, and because it’s clear (not the universal black generally used for tool drawer liners) it will also give good visibility instead of seeming to swallow small parts.

A number of plastic drawer liner materials don’t get along with rubber and plastic. It’s a real issue.

The cart’s main weakness is the fact that the wheels are too close together, which makes it a tipping risk. Harbor Freight had to reinforce the bottom with two metal strips, and in order to save money, they made them narrow, put them pretty far inboard, and used them as mounting areas for the casters. I’ve been thinking I might get a couple of strips, attach them in better locations, and reattach the casters. This would make the cart less tippy. Better yet, I could attach two lengths of 1″ by 3″ tubing across the bottom of the cart, extending past the sides, and then put the casters on the tubing. This would be much, much better, and it would be very easy. It would cost about $15.

I really like the cart. It was $39, and I think they gave me the 20% discount even though the coupons say tool carts are excluded. It’s somewhat flimsy, but not too flimsy to do its job. A lot of people modify these carts and get excellent results. I may continue to jazz mine up, just to see what I can do. It would be nice to have several points on the sides for hanging angle grinders. They’re always in the way, and they are extremely useful, so you can’t just put them away.

I have the 3-shelf cart. I’ll post a video that shows how people have modified the 2-shelf version.

If I keep fiddling with the cart, I may reach the point where adding better casters, or at least better wheels, makes sense.

If I end up using the cart for machining accessories, as I plan to, I’ll have to get a second cart for general cart purposes. Who didn’t see that coming?

Things are going so well, I may not completely lose my mind when the hot weather sets in and the bugs come back. The shop may be so great, I’ll be content with the big fan and a can of Off.

New Ideas About Sleep?

I woke up today long before it was light. I felt some anxiety. Rather than roll over and try to forget about it, I decided to go ahead and have a prayer session. I prayed in tongues. I spoke God’s word for a while, affirming it. I played a few Youtube videos in which preachers prayed for viewers. I played some Christian music and sang along. The anxiety left.

I feel that I’ve learned a few things other Christians will find useful.

1. It’s a good idea to have at least two sessions of Christian music every day, and you should sing or play an instrument. The day should begin and end with it. Music has supernatural power, and we’re supposed to have it in our lives. It’s helpful with entering into God’s presence.

2. Men–in fact, the leaders of all households (some households lack men)–should get used to getting up and praying in the middle of the night. I’m not positive this is a revelation, but it seems to be.

What happens when you have a baby? You don’t get to sleep any more. You have to get up in the middle of the night and do things for the baby’s sake. Why? Because you’re in a position of authority, looking after someone who is less able. If you’re the man of your house, you’re in a similar position relative to your wife and kids. Feminists will not like to read that, but then their hobby is being angry and rebellious, so it’s unproductive to accommodate their irrational and corrosive attitudes.

A man is a home’s watchman, king, and priest. He is the first line of defense and offense. He keeps the walls up. Men are more suited to this role than women, because men are more stable. It would outrage some women to read that, but it’s true. A woman is a different person every week. A man is exactly the same person, every single day. Our ups and downs are much more subdued. Men aren’t tossed around as much, so a man has a more stable vantage point from which to view and evaluate things. It makes for better decisions. A person whose personality is constantly changing will make decisions that vary based on her moods, and that’s not good. If your emotions rule you, you will have lots of self-inflicted setbacks.

There is a certain amount of honor in being the head of a house, but that’s not a good thing to focus on. You’re not getting an award for being male, along with a license to be a tyrant, with no strings attached. You also carry a lot of obligations other people in the house don’t have to carry. People know this in their hearts, even if they refuse to admit it. If your family doesn’t do well, people–feminists included–will generally blame you above everyone else. You won’t get the credit if your family does well, but unless your wife is a real prize, you will be the first one to be blamed if there are problems.

A man has more authority than a woman, so a man has to do things a woman does not have to do. It makes sense that a man would have to get up earlier and get things on a good supernatural footing while everyone else sleeps.

The Bible says he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. Presumably, then, the prayers of a man who is over a house have special power because of this favor.

We think of a day as a 24-hour period, but I would suggest that every 24-hour period actually consists of two days: a dark one and a bright one. Satan tends to get a lot done during the dark time. It’s when we have nightmares. It’s when we perceive evil spirits in our bedrooms. Diseases generally get worse at night, and the sick usually feel better as the day progresses. People often die early in the morning. Our fears seem closer at night. Far and away, most murders take place at night. By 4 or 5 in the morning, Satan has gotten a lot done, so it makes sense that someone would need to get up and re-sanctify the home. It should make things much better for everyone who is still asleep. They’ll wake up to a home that doesn’t have to be warmed up or hosed out supernaturally, because someone else has already done the job.

It’s very common for people to start the day with supernatural warfare, but we are not as likely to end the day with it or to interrupt sleep to deliver another assault. You may think that kneeling beside the bed for 30 seconds before you go to sleep is warfare, but it’s pretty weak compared to the real thing.

While I was awake early this morning, I watched Mark Hemans and T.B. Joshua. They prayed for people and cast out spirits. It may seem silly to think a man in a Youtube video could have any effect on you, but God does work through video. I’ve had it happen to me, and so have other people. I’d rather receive help face to face, but I won’t throw free help away just because it’s on video.

Listening to the preachers talk about deliverance and freedom, I could not help thinking about my sister and my father. In spite of my age, I still have walls inside me I can’t break on my own, because of mistreatment I received from my family when I was young! My sister was completely demonized. She was hateful to everyone, and she had a special hatred for me which has never abated. The mere fact that I existed and received some of the attention and generosity she used to consume by herself was a provocation to her. She tormented me and ridiculed me all the time, and she got other people to join in. She wasn’t as smart as I was. She was not as talented or as well-liked. She was unaccomplished. She didn’t have my parents’ permission to rule over me. Nonetheless, she strove to dominate me all the time, as though she were entitled. My mother even caught her torturing me physically when I was a baby.

My sister has an emasculating spirit. She hates males. She hates male authority. She loves ridiculing males and destroying the respect other people have for them. She really loves tormenting gay men; they are easy targets because they’re already emasculated. When I was born, I was dropped into her sphere of influence, and to the spirits she served, I was fresh meat.

Satan is effeminate. He loves attention. He loves looking beautiful and decorating himself; he is the Liberace of the supernatural realm. He feels as though he were God’s jilted girlfriend. He thinks he was the bride of Christ before human beings showed up, and he wants his position back.

What do jilted, unforgiving women do to the men who dropped them? They do their best to emasculate them.

Some people say God is largely feminine, but that’s not true. Women who can’t accept every part of their female status say it. God is the most masculine being there is. He is a seed sower, not a childbearer. Satan hates God’s masculinity and his authority. Satan loves feminizing men because men look like God, and a feminized man is like a cartoon of a feminized God. Satan can’t feminize God, but he can feminize men, get them to allow themselves to be used like women, and say, “This is how you would look if I could feminize you. This is what I want you to be.”

Sometimes I think about the way my relationship with my sister ended, and I have doubts. I believe God told me to stay away from her and that I was not even to pray for her. I don’t do anything for her financially, in spite of her poverty. Sometimes I ask God if this is really how I should behave. After all, the Bible is hard on people who won’t help their own blood.

Here’s something we all need to remember: the Bible speaks generally, but the Holy Spirit is specific. Sometimes the general advice the Bible gives is wrong for you.

That will make people mad.

The Bible actually shows that it’s not always a clear source of guidance in a given situation. Look at this:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

What is God saying here? He’s saying there is no adequate set of rules for every situation. Even the Bible falls short.

God told the Hebrews only the priests could eat the showbread in the temple, but David went in, took it, and gave it to his men, and it was not a sin. How can that be? It was not a sin, because the Holy Spirit–the author of the Bible–gave David permission. The Holy Spirit may give you permission, or an order, to do things a set of rules based on the Bible will not permit you to do.

The Bible says you shouldn’t abandon your own blood, but that’s a general principle. The Holy Spirit told me to avoid all involvement with my sister, regardless of her problems. That’s a specific commandment.

God really hates emasculation, which is why homosexuality is called an abomination. He permitted Jesus to be beaten, spat on, flogged, stripped, pierced with nails, and crucified, but he never allowed him to be feminized or emasculated. There are some things we are not required to endure on earth. Some things are just too ugly and humiliating. They are too close to Satan’s heart.

It’s probably true that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were castrated, as the prophet predicted, but they lived under the old covenant, and in all likelihood, their misfortunes occurred before they were old enough to be close to God.

God doesn’t expect me to continue to endure the presence of a demonized woman whose very presence is emasculating and demoralizing. The influence of my sister is so ugly, it literally renders it impossible for me to lead the powerful, blessed life I was created to lead. God will not tolerate it any longer, so he told me to let her go.

God wants me to be delivered from demons, but how can I do that if I persist in involvement with the one person who is controlled by the very demons who have done the most to harm me?

Paul told us to put wicked Christians away from us, but we ignore him because we think it’s more holy to remain under their feet. We think abandoning incorrigible people is selfish and judgmental. That’s just not true. It’s a way of choosing God over demons.

While I was watching the videos last night, I gained a much better understanding of why God separated me from my sister, or, as I call her, “my former sister” or “my biological sister.” He was so right. I should never have doubted it.

Sometimes we try to be holier than God, and we imprison ourselves needlessly.

It’s wonderful to be free of her. Sorry to say it. I will never have another person like her in my life if I can avoid it.

As for her unfortunate situation, she chose it and chose it and chose it. She also chose to be so corrupted I can’t even risk sending her checks because the slightest attachment can easily become a red-hot chain.

That’s an interesting way to put it. Yesterday, I was thinking about people who say they’ve seen hell. They say there are rivers of fire there, and in the rivers, there are large numbers of male and female homosexuals chained to each other like convicts. It made me think of generational curses. We always say these are chains that have to be broken. We think of them as chains that bind us to habits and so on, but if these curses come from iniquities that pass down from our ancestors, aren’t they also chains that bind us to other people?

If I involve myself with hateful people, I put myself in a position where their drama becomes my drama. That subjects me to provocation and other types of temptation. I have to be separate from that. No wonder God says he sets the godly apart for himself.

Some people are like the creatures in the Alien movies. You just have to rid yourself of them. There is no coexisting with them.

And that explains hell.

It Makes Perfect Sense

When I set up my majestic Harbor Freight miniature wood lathe, I needed some wood to test it. I used a mop handle from Home Depot. Past experience had taught me that these handles turned well, and they’re very cheap.

When I cut into the handle, I got a surprise. It was made from multiple pieces of wood glued together. There was an inner piece that was red in color, and it was rectangular in cross section.

Why would the mop handle maker in China work so hard to put a mop handle together?

Somebody had to plane and joint several pieces of wood, glue them together precisely, wait for the glue to set, and then turn the result on a lathe. How can that make good economic sense?

I can’t figure out how they did it, unless they made a big rectangular blank to start. That would waste a lot of wood, though.

I just finished making a file handle from this stuff. Here it is. It looks fantastic, considering what it is and how much I paid for the wood.

I bought the brass ferrule online. I got two bags of them. File handles are not as cheap as they should be, and they’re not that good. Making your own produces better results for less money.

Youtube woodturners are gung ho about making handles, but they don’t seem to discuss the big problem with it: you can’t mount a finished handle in a wood lathe in order to drill a straight hole for the file or chisel or whatever. Wood chucks aren’t made for holding long objects, and even if they were, chucking a finished piece would mar it. Unless you have a different tool or some kind of jig, you have to drill the holes by hand and hope for the best.

Today I tried to put my handle in the metal lathe. I wrapped thin aluminum around it to keep the chuck jaws from scratching it. I couldn’t get it to run true, so I quit and winged it on the drill press. I think it would work if I had a sheet of rubber to wrap around things.

I don’t know why I’m using the wood lathe. I made a banjo for the metal lathe so I can use it to turn wood. With 7.5 horsepower, I would not have to worry about bogging the motor down, which is a big concern with the Harbor Freight lathe. I still need to make a good arbor to make the wood chuck fit in the metal chuck, but I can turn things now if I don’t mind holding them in the metal chuck.

The Harbor Freight lathe is a totally legitimate tool of good quality. Things like that do happen. It belongs to a class of weak tools, however, so even though it’s a good machine for what it is, what it is is a tool without a lot of power. You have to be careful about applying too much pressure to the wood, because the spindle will stop turning and the belt will slip.

I don’t know what would happen if I applied too much pressure while using 7.5 horsepower. I’m afraid to find out. I guess the wood would fly out of the lathe.

That reminds me; I forgot to use a face shield today.

My shop finally has air. I was relying on a 4-CFM compressor until yesterday. Now I’m up to 17.3, which, while somewhat less than I would like, is much better. Most people get by with small compressors from Home Depot and Lowe’s, so I should not complain.

I opted for a Maxline system from Rapidair. This is a prefab system that comes with tubing made from polyethylene, which is the plastic used in 5-gallon pails. The plastic has a layer of aluminum in it, and I suppose this is why it stands up to high pressure.

When you watch big-time Youtubers who get free tools install this stuff, it seems about as hard as decorating a cake. In reality, the job was very unpleasant. I had to install the lines 12 feet up, so I had to move a ladder all over the shop. The tubing comes in a 100-foot roll (which isn’t enough), and it’s very stiff. Straightening it is not easy for one person. Finding ways to get long segments of tubing up over my trusses was not fun, either. I had to use the ladder to climb on top of my giant storage shelf unit. The kit comes with plastic clamps to hold it on the wall, and the clamps are pretty bad, so I had to buy 1″ conduit straps and use them instead. I had to buy a number of additional fittings because Rapidair doesn’t give you enough, and I also had to buy 50 additional feet of hose.

I had long periods when I couldn’t work on the system because I was waiting on additional parts to arrive. If you install a Maxline system, and your shop isn’t tiny, budget one month to get the job done. You will run into delays, believe me. I hoped to get things working in a couple of days, but I was dreaming.

If you’re a free tool guy, the system will install itself while you drink beer and watch TV.

It’s amazing how great tools are when they’re free. The guys who get free tools never seem to have problems. Everything they receive is wonderful. A cynical person might say they’re gushing over the free stuff because they want more of it, but I would never say such a thing. That’s just not me.

Now that the system is installed, it works beautifully. I have an air dryer, three drops, and two hose reels. Compressed air is all around me. I think the Maxline kit is very good, even if installation is harder than you may expect at first.

I’ve learned a few things about air systems. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Rapidair and copper are the best choices. Many people have systems made from iron pipe, but I have read that iron pipe (now Chinese) is not what it used to be. The quality gets a lot of criticism. Copper doesn’t seem all that much more expensive than Rapidair tubing, but it comes in straight 10-foot lengths, so you have to deal with that instead of bending flexible tubes with your bare hands. You have to be willing to solder the fittings, and these days, solder is leftist garbage made without lead, so you may be in for some frustration. I assume you can get solder with lead if you look around. I have not checked. The lead-free stuff is a pain to use. Maybe it’s great after you’ve done a hundred practice joints. I don’t want to go through the learning experience on a ladder.

I would guess I have $350 in the Rapidair tubing and fittings. That is acceptable. I am guessing because I didn’t add everything up. I had to buy it, so why add it up? It would just make me feel bad about something I was going to buy no matter what.

Now that I have air, I am tempted to muffle my compressor. I’ve learned a few things about that. Compressor noise comes from air intakes. If you can muffle the intakes or relocate them, you can cut your noise way down. You can put hoses on your intakes and run them outside your shop. This is kind of mean to your neighbors, but it works. You can also run hoses to a simple container with baffles or even a car muffler. Factory-made compressor mufflers are ridiculously expensive, but you can make one yourself for a few dollars, so I can’t really see myself buying one.

Thing is, the compressor isn’t that loud. I put it in a corner of the shop, and it’s almost never closer than 12 feet from me. I have to decide if killing what little noise there is is worth it.

I hate noise.

What air tools should I get, now that I have air again? I’ve asked myself this. I have a pencil grinder, a stapler, two needle scalers, an air hammer, a planishing hammer, an air gun, an inflator, an impact wrench, and one or two other things. People have suggested a sheet metal nibbler, but I bought a cheap swiveling electric shear from Harbor Freight, and it’s great. I’ve considered getting a die grinder, but electric ones are really good now, and they don’t require the hassle of using a compressor and hose. A blast cabinet would be good, although most of the time, blasting is the bubba way of cleaning things. Generally, it’s not the best approach. It damages things.

I like the little narrow belt sanders they sell. That could be useful. An air ratchet might be good, but I have a Ridgid Jobmax ratchet. It’s not great, but it would do 95% of the work of an air ratchet, and it can be used with batteries, which makes it convenient.

Someone recommended a 90-degree air angle grinder. Sounds nice, but I have an attachment for a corded angle grinder that turns it into a 90-degree grinder. The electric grinder runs at 16,000 RPM and seems to work fine, so I’m not sure why I need an air version. I was planning to buy a grinder and leave the attachment on it all the time. You really can’t get by with a single angle grinder. You need at least 4.

Look how hard it is to think of useful air tools. Maybe I should just get rid of the compressor!

I kid.

The blow gun alone makes compressed air worth the hassle. There is nothing like blowing crud out of things with a blow gun. Not that I need a large compressor to do this.

I’m sure I need the big compressor. I’m sure of it. I’m taking it on faith.

Installing my big hose reel on the wall was a surreal experience. I am going to guess that it weighs 45 pounds with the hose attached, and it’s very awkward to handle. I had to climb up a ladder with it on my shoulder and screw it into the wall while holding it in place. Access to the screws was very bad, so I couldn’t just line an electric screwdriver up with it and shoot the screws into the wall. I had to turn them slowly with a wrench while trying not to drop the reel. Then I broke the reel’s swivel, so I had to fabricate a new stud and buy a swivel online. That meant I had to remove the hose and reinstall it…on the ladder. I had to do this at least three times. I can’t even describe how unpleasant this job is.

I need to put an extension on the compressor’s drain valve so I don’t have to crawl on the floor to drain it every day. The existing valve is really glued in there, so I’m not looking forward to trying to remove it. People have suggested I get an automatic valve, but it sounds like overkill. These things open periodically to let water out, and my guess is that the noise scares the life out of people. They cost something like $200, and turning a valve by hand isn’t really that hard.

With the compressor more or less fixed, I now have to get my tool grinder off the pallet it arrived on. The grinder saga is so long, complicated, and horrifying, I want to leave it for its own series of posts. I assume I already wrote about it here. I bought a Gorton 375 grinder. It’s about 4 feet tall, and it probably weighs between 250 and 300 pounds. I thought I might try to send it back, because it had bearing issues, but now that I have decided to be a man and fix it, it’s time to commit to removing it from the pallet. I just ordered casters so I can make a mobile base.

The pallet is sitting in the workshop doorway, and it’s about 4 feet square, so it’s a major obstacle.

I also need to make a base for my mini-lathe (metal, not wood) or take it to the dump. I never use it. I converted it to CNC, but I never fixed the step-loss problem, and it really needs to be converted to ball screws. It’s sitting in my shop, in the way, on a Workmate I now can’t use. Maybe I should just buy a Harbor Freight 26″ tool chest and put the lathe on it.

Anyway, once the grinder is mobile, I should have a shop again. It’s the biggest problem I have at the moment.

Things are going well. If I ever stop working on tools, maybe I’ll get a chance to use my tools on a real project.

Christianity isn’t Always Tidy

People may wonder where I’ve been. I just haven’t felt like blogging. It’s not because I’ve been ill, although I have. I just haven’t had anything to say.

I developed pink eye three weeks ago, and it has moved all around my body, clearing up in one area while attacking another. For most of this week, I had a stuffy nose accompanied by other gross symptoms in that region. That tapered off, but I woke up with a cough. Now that’s gone. Let’s hope it doesn’t morph into leprosy.

Someone I do business with has the flu and has been ill for two weeks. Says the vaccine is only 9% effective this year and the flu is all over Miami. When I heard this, I got on the web and checked, and sure enough, the flu can start as conjunctivitis. Is that fair? I don’t think so. Anyhow, it may be that I have plain old viral conjunctivitis which is roaming around my body, or it may be that I really have the flu. Whatever it is, it’s not severe. It’s just annoying, and like any bad experience that overstays its welcome, it wore me down for a while.

Malaise is a recognized pink eye symptom. Great, huh? Tell me diseases don’t come from spirits. Try. When a minor illness has a strong effect on your mood, it ought to be a hint that the attack is not purely physical.

I remember going to a doctor many years ago for a flu-like problem. I said it was making me feel tense and depressed. I thought that had to be important. Surely there had to be at least one well-known upper respiratory infection that caused irrational anxiety and depresson. That’s what I thought. If I was right, the doctor knew nothing whatsoever about it. The psychological symptoms meant nothing at all to him. It’s remarkable how little doctors know about some things. They’ve been accumulating knowledge for thousands of years, and this guy didn’t know anything about what surely had to be very common symptoms.

I have learned not to pay a lot of attention to my moods when I’m ill. They are deceptive and fleeting. Listening to your moods when you’re sick is like getting a tattoo when you’re drunk. You will regret it later.

I would be happy to find out that this is the flu, because you’re not very likely to get the flu twice in one season. The flu is usually awful. If I have to have the flu at all, I want a kind that doesn’t have much success.

What if it’s pink eye, it goes away, and then I get the flu? Best to think happier thoughts.

As always, I have drawn closer to God during my illness. I’ve had all sorts of miraculous healings, so when I’m sick, I always try to get God’s help and find out what I’m doing wrong. In reality, I do a lot of things wrong, so the question is really which ones are causing the problem.

I’ve worn Youtube out, watching videos from Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and evangelist. When the barrel started to run dry, I decided to look at Bill Subritzky. Hemans refers people to his website for information. Subritzky is from New Zealand, and I supposed he’s around 75. His ministry is very similar to Hemans’, but it seems somewhat less powerful. He’s all about casting demons out and cleaning up lives.

Bill Subritzky led me to T.B. Joshua, the most popular healer on Youtube. He has more subscribers than any other. He’s as popular as some of the big ‘tubers who produce vital sophomoric publicity stunts and clickbait, even though all he does is heal the sick and cast out demons with God’s power.

I already knew about T.B. Joshua, but I did not take him seriously. He’s a Nigerian who works in Lagos, and he has a big flashy church with a strange name: the Synagogue Church of All Nations (“SCOAN”). SCOAN’s videos are very sensational. The preachers have long discussions with people who are supposedly infested with demons (not a good idea), and the people have lots of spectacular manifestations. They throw up amazing things. They roll on the floor. They give long testimonies.

When I used to watch this stuff, I thought it was probably a con job. God is ending the age of the big church, and Joshua was running one, so that didn’t make a good impression on me. I figured he was probably a money preacher. I thought the deliverances were staged. Some of the people in the videos didn’t sound sincere. I thought they might be plants.

Bill Subritzky seemed pretty sound to me, so when I saw him at SCOAN, telling people visiting T.B. Joshua was what moved his ministry into real power, I had to give Joshua another look.

I’ve noticed a couple of things. First, Joshua does not ask for money or teach the prosperity gospel. Africa is full of obvious pulpit pimps, and Africans have a long history of gullibility, so it’s surprising to see a popular charismatic preacher in Africa fail to push the money gospel. Second, people really do get healed in his church. There are some things you can’t fake. For example, a young lady whose skin was falling off appeared in a video. She was topless with blurred areas because she could not wear clothes on her upper body. There is no doubt that her skin was falling off. Her lips were bloody, too. Joshua delivered her, and in a video shot later, she looked completely normal, except that she had some lingering marks and irregularities. While he was delivering her, she got down on her knees and threw up long strings of mucus so thick it was like rubber, and there was blood in it. You can claim they found bloody, abnormally thick mucus somewhere and made her hold it in her mouth and throw it up on cue, but how can you explain the new skin? And why pick a woman who was obviously seriously afflicted? If you’re going to fake healings, you don’t pick people who have real diseases.

I’ll post the video here. It’s absolutely disgusting, so you have been warned.

I still don’t understand Joshua’s ministry. People call him “man of God” and exalt him, and he does not stop them. That’s not healthy. When he teaches, I have a hard time understanding what he’s saying. He’s very inarticulate, and he says a lot of things that don’t seem to mean anything. Sometimes people who are manifesting say they’re controlled by spirits with names that seem very improbable, such as the Queen of the Sea. One guy said he was a wizard, and he called himself a “Grand Lama of Science Beyond Material.” He said he could astrally project and that he used his powers to make certain people rich. Meanwhile, he lived in a tiny shack with a dirt yard. This man said he talked to Lucifer face to face. If so, why didn’t he get Lucifer to do a little better for him?

People from first-world countries travel to SCOAN all the time. SCOAN has a dormitory. They put you up, and you can stay a week. When you look at the wild videos and see the strange people who appear in them, it seems like they’re just a bunch of nuts playing church with a preacher who doesn’t really have much on the ball, but if that’s true, what’s with all the visitors from Europe and Asia? What’s with Bill Subritzky? He was an attorney in New Zealand. He’s not an ignorant laborer who used a ministry to draw attention to himself and make himself seem important.

I Googled Joshua. I can’t find any serious red flags. A woman accused him of rape, but she turned out to be a professional fraud, and she eventually went to SCOAN and recanted publicly. One of SCOAN’s buildings collapsed, and people suggested Joshua, as a SCOAN trustee, was guilty of criminal negligence. That’s pretty weak.

He issued a couple of prophecies that are problematic. The Muslim sect Boko Haram captured over 200 Nigerian girls from the Chibok tribe, and people claim Joshua predicted they would be returned immediately. As of now, many are still missing. The thing is, he didn’t actually say they would returned immediately. If he did, I can’t find it. He said God had said they must be released immediately. He also talked about the 2016 American presidential election and said he saw a woman winning. He didn’t say, “Hillary Clinton will win.” Just that he saw a woman winning. We all know what happened. Joshua says he actually saw her winning the popular vote.

Usually, it’s not that hard to spot pulpit pimps. You don’t have to dig for dirt. They pressure you to give them money. They cheat on their wives, often with men. Credible people show up to accuse them of fornicating with them and/or paying them hush money. They get in trouble for refusing to pay their bills. They turn out to have drug and alcohol problems. Joshua does not seem to have any serious marks against him. He is said to be somewhat wealthy, which he denies, but that’s not very meaningful without more information. Having wealth isn’t a sin.

Watching SCOAN videos actually made me want to visit Nigeria. I would love to see the church up close so I could evaluate it personally.

Africa is a very strange place. The African mind is not like the European mind. They think differently. Maybe things that happen in Africa have to be judged by different criteria.

Joshua says 2020 will be a year of humbling. I’m generally not too keen on prophecies that apply to the whole world, but sometimes they’re true. Coincidentally, or not, I have been getting revelation regarding humility during my illness.

For years, I’ve been asking God to help me with humility. I wouldn’t say I’m generally a proud person, but there are areas that concern me. One of the problems I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to make myself feel as though I were just like people I knew of who had obvious sins in their lives. For example, I felt as though I were not like drug users, even though I had used drugs in college. I told myself I used them “a few times,” and I thought that separated me from people who use drugs for years without reservations. Of course, that was a lie. If you’ve used drugs, you’re a drug user.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been trying to find ways to describe myself to God that don’t come off like excuses, and I’ve been doing better. As an example of the way I phrase things now, I say, “I am a rescued liar.” I don’t say, “I was like the liars I know,” or, “I have told some lies.” I say, “I am a rescued drug user,” not, “I experimented with drugs a few times.”

I saw a funny story in a book about the White House. A Secret Service agent was investigating Clinton hires so they could get security clearance, and, of course, it turned out to be a hard job. He said one man told him he had experimented with marijuana. The agent, who was apparently tired of hearing this kind of thing, asked him about the results of his experiments. When you conduct experiments, you collect and analyze results. I thought the question was a clever way to deflate a very commonly used excuse.

I used marijuana several times in high school and college. I didn’t like it. I didn’t persist. Should I say I was experimenting? I didn’t create tables or graphs. I didn’t do a statistical analysis. I smoked or ate a drug, and then I giggled a lot. Not the kind of thing you write up for a journal.

When I was in college, I counted the times I used cocaine. It came out to about 20. Somewhere inside me, I felt that if I could count the number of times I used it, I wasn’t a cokehead. Guess what? I’m a rescued drug user.

The Bible forbids drug abuse, and so does the Holy Spirit. There is no mention of frequency. You don’t get 19 free tries.

I came up with a long list of new, honest titles for myself. It wasn’t very pleasant, but it’s important to confess correctly. God fights proud people, and he helps the humble. The Bible says these things expressly. Proud people hide behind excuses. I don’t want God to fight me.

My problem wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t admit what I had done. I confessed things like crazy. My problem was an inability to confess my identity. It’s not enough to say you stole something once. You have to say you’re a forgiven thief. Identity is important.

On a related note, I’ve been listening to Proverbs a lot. Very unpleasant. It’s as though someone sat down and wrote up a long list of very accurate insults directed at me, personally. The person reading the book in my audio Bible will say something awful about people like me, and I’ll cringe, and then I’ll think, “Surely the next thing he says won’t apply to me.” Then he’ll say something even more cutting.

I don’t enjoy it, but I listen to it anyway. Correction from God is like free gold. You don’t just tolerate it. You should grab it and hoard it.

If you want to be humble, Proverbs is for you, as are the gospels. If not, there’s always Joel Osteen.

God gave me a word the other day: “Your word is meant to be spoken.” That was news to me. I had always thought of the Bible as a book to be read, but in truth, hearing it is better. The Bible says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” The main purpose of the written Bible is to preserve and distribute God’s word. Once you have it in your hand, you should recite it. It’s better than reading it. It will help you memorize it so you can repeat it later when your Bible is not around.

Listening to the Bible will build you up more strongly than reading it. Don’t ask me why.

I don’t know when I’ll be back. Hopefully I will be completely free of disease when I return.

Plus New Old Tool

I may as well post an update on my illness.

As I wrote a while back, I managed to come down with pink eye. The symptoms appeared on the same day I finished major welding on my arbor press stand, so I thought I had burned my eye with the welder’s arc. In retrospect, that would have been a more favorable diagnosis. A welding flash burn goes away in a day or two. It has been two weeks, and I am still having symptoms.

This particular type of virus likes to take a tour of the body. It may start in an eye, but during its junket, it may make the rounds of other parts of the body, like a tourist trying to see every landmark in Europe in 5 days. The list of things it does to people is long and annoying. It can give you cold symptoms. It can make your bones hurt. It can give you pretty amazing diarrhea. It gives some people meningitis. It’s a very versatile microbe.

The first time I looked it up, I saw the phrase “3 to 5 days,” and I was pretty happy. I could stand awful things such as living in Chicago without a pistol for 5 days. Then later I read stuff that completely blew this rosy prediction out of the water. One said the incubation period alone can last 9 days, and another said the illness itself could last two weeks, which has proven true in my case.

Initially, the bug was in my eye. Then it got bored and moved to the general region behind my face. Then it moved into my nose, which is where it is today. Yesterday and the day before, I also had fatigue, and my mood was not great. These are typical pink eye (adenovirus) symptoms, believe it or not. It dabbles in everything.

Of course, I have been praying and so on. I’ve been asking God which doors I left open, to let this thing in.

Today I tried something that had worked well in the past. I simply told it to leave. I didn’t get total healing, but within an hour, I was much better, and that’s how things stand now.

Because I felt better, I decided to take some actions which were pretty aggressive. I decided to torture the invader with spicy food. I ate the better part of a theater-size box of Ferrara Red Hots, and I followed it up with some homemade kung pao chicken so hot it nearly glowed. I have a lot more energy now. Let’s just hope I don’t have to expend it on multiple trips to the bathroom later on tonight.

This virus is extremely contagious. I read a lot about it because I didn’t feel like doing anything else. It usually hits kids, and it spreads like crazy in schools because a) kids are filthy, and b) it makes infectious fluids pour out of practically every orifice in the body. I read that a person’s poo remains full of viruses days after the infection is over. What lucky researcher was assigned the job of looking into that?

In Japan, pink eye is known as “swimming pool fever” because–get this–you can get it from chlorinated pool water! Nice, right? I had no idea pool water could spread disease. Makes me wonder what chlorine is actually good for. Something inside me shrivels when I think of all the pools I’ve been in. Nobody showers before getting into a pool these days, and let’s face it, most kids don’t get out to pee. Think of all the used Band-Aids you’ve seen lying on the bottoms of pools. Imagine the things you didn’t see, yet which were there all the same.

If you can get pink eye, what else can you get? Something like a third of Americans have venereal disease, and I’ve been swimming with them.

It just proves I’m right when I say public pools are disgusting and foul. And hot tubs…who thought that was a good idea? A guy I knew led an all-male prayer group at his church, and one week, they met in his hot tub. So basically they sat in hot man soup and exchanged every possible type of bodily filth. Which they then took home to their families.

I must wash my hands 30 times a day, I use disinfectant wipes all the time, I leave the house about as often as Boo Radley and Howard Hughes, and somehow I got the filth disease! Where is the justice?

Anyway, I feel much better. I still have some chicken. Tomorrow I’m going to add even more heat to it and eat the rest of it.

In other news, my compressed air system should be working by Saturday night. All the parts have arrived. A couple hundred more trips up and down the ladder should get it done. It’s amazing how many complications set in to slow me down.

Here’s something I did not expect: I destroyed the swivel on one of my air hose reels. I didn’t know it had a swivel. Maybe this is why it got destroyed.

My reel has a little brass fitting attached to the hub. A horizontal thread goes out of it, to the compressor. There is a thread perpendicular to the horizontal thread, and it goes to the air hose. When the reel turns, a swivel between the threaded parts lets the reel rotate without twisting anything.

It looks like I failed to use Teflon tape or pipe dope when I installed the hose back in Miami. I used to do a lot of work on my dad’s boat, and it was full of brass and bronze. Someone taught me that it wasn’t necessary to use Teflon or dope, and I guess that’s why I didn’t put any in the hose reel. It was not great advice. When I installed the hose reel here the other day, I had to remove the hose, and when I did, I had to apply so much torque I screwed up the swivel.

It looks like other people do the same thing, because you can find these swivels online. Of course, the best one I found for a good price was backordered just when I needed it. Luckily Amazon had one somebody had returned, so I bought it and saved some money.

I had also bent the stud that held the swivel on. I measured it, and it was an M10-1.5 thread. I figured I was going to have to drive to a store, buy a bolt, cut the head off, and make this weird stud. I decided to look around the shop first, thinking there was no hope. Unbelievably, in an old box of fasteners a tenant had left in one of my dad’s warehouses, I found an M10-1.5 bolt just big enough for the job. I cut the head off with a hack saw and cut two screw slots in the ends. Now I don’t have to search online for a metric air hose reel stud.

Now that I have everything I need, I just have to install the swivel and hose, finish the air lines, fire up the compressor, and look for leaks. I really hope I don’t find any, because nearly all of the connections are 12 feet off the ground.

Once the air line job is done, I’ll be able to move on to other jobs that will improve order in the shop.

I really sabotaged the whole shop organization plan last week. I bought an old Gorton tool grinder on Ebay. Of course, it has turned out to have undisclosed problems, so now I’m buying tools to fix it. I had hoped to be working on a mobile base for it by now. I haven’t taken it off the pallet. I was afraid to take it off because I was thinking I should send it back. The spindle that holds the grinding wheel needs new bearings, and the motor blows my GFCI. The whole thing made me feel discouraged. Then I asked myself why I had so many tools if I was going to give up on a grinder rather than use them. Ouch.

Right now, I need a gear puller to get the arbor off the spindle. Once the arbor is off, I should be able to use an adjustable pin spanner, which arrived today, to get the spindle open. Once that’s done, I should be able to replace the bearings. I hope.

I might as well go ahead and make the mobile base. Now that I have my mill running, I can make pretty fancy cuts on steel tubing. I may cut a couple of pieces of rectangular tubing so I can weld them together in an efficient X configuration. That would make for a very simple base. I would have to have casters with swivels, because they wouldn’t be parallel. It’s not easy to mount parallel casters on a base shaped like an X. If you put 4 casters on a base, and they aren’t parallel (at least on two sides), it won’t move.

Why make an X-shaped base? Because it’s the simplest way to make a base wider than the machine. It will be more stable than a small base.

The grinder is sitting in the floor taking up a tremendous amount of space. It has to be dealt with.

This is my sitrep. I hope you enjoyed it. My advice, as it already was prior to my illness, is to avoid public pools and, when possible, human beings. I hope to cease shedding microbes soon, and then life will return to normal. Or what passes for normal around here.

You have to do Better Than This

I got an interesting email about The Last Reformation and Torben Sondergaard. I’ll post some of the text.

I’ll make this short.

The problem with being deceived is that you don’t know it.

I’ll urge you to look behind the curtains. Don’t look at the person where he stands. Look at the trails and the footprints and what’s in his wake.

It’s not the happy followers right now, you need to talk with or look at. People in destructive cults or at the mercy of narcissists and sociopaths are initially happy.

If you plan on engaging anymore with these people, look long and hard for former members. It’s those who were there three, four or fifty years ago. Most, if not all, are gone.

You’ll find many broken and disappointed lives – to the point of leaving faith – in the wake of Torben Sondergaard’s ministry.

There’s a reason you do not have peace about joining them.
That is the truth and it’s there for you to find if you want.

Call it a cult or not.

Here is my response:

What is your background with TLR? What examples do you have?

Here is some of the second email I received:

If you want, you won’t lack examples in a number where there’s no denying something isn’t quite right. Simply find three or four former followers. It’s that simple. And your responsibility.

My response:

Respectfully, if you expect me to pay serious attention to unsubstantiated claims made by a person I know nothing about, you’re asking way too much. If you can’t do better than this, you shouldn’t bother people about TLR. For all I know, you’re an angry woman Torben dumped in high school.

I’m not responding to this one:

I won’t – as I said before – address mr. Sondergaard or the group itself any further. You seemed like a thoughtful and nice guy, when I read your blog.

Respectfully (followed by an actual respectful comment), I would personally give pause if a stranger took the time to write me, encouraging me to look a litte harder, but I both understand we are not all the same, and I’ve encountered this particular sort of hostility before. It’s fine.

Safe journey down this path.

If this email is correct, I am “hostile.” That’s an accusation. It’s intended to make me feel bad. The “safe journey” part is tacked on as an enhancement: “I am a better Christian than you, because you were mean, and I still said something nice.” It’s sanctimony.

Invalid accusations are often made to put people on the defensive. It’s a good way to move the discussion off-topic when you can’t or won’t back up your claims.

I guess this is why Satan became “the devil.” The word “devil” means “accuser.” He knew how powerful accusation was. He uses accusation to get us to take our eyes off the ball. The person who emailed me can’t or won’t tell me anything useful. Having seen a number of unbalanced people go after TLR already, I pointed out that without evidence, an accuser lacks credibility and looks dodgy. That’s exactly what a reasonable person would say. It’s not evidence of significant hostility. Instead of responding with corroboration, as you or I would, my correspondent has merely accused me.

It’s a little annoying to get strange emails like this, but characterizing what I said as “hostility” is way over the top. It’s a deliberate overreaction intended to make me feel bad and focus on defending myself or apologizing for a nonexistent transgression. It’s a diversion. When you’re trying to convince someone of something, it’s not good to adopt tactics known to be used by enemies of truth. It makes me wonder what force is motivating this person.

Jesus was extremely rude. Read the gospels and see. Using a jilted girlfriend as a tool to express what I meant in no way compares to calling people dogs or sons of Satan, as Jesus did. It doesn’t compare to beating strangers with a whip, as Jesus did. What I said was perfectly fine. It was just blunt.

There was a time when I participated, to my lasting disgrace, in petty Internet flaming, and what I’m seeing in these emails reminds me of a tactic I often saw in those days: drop a research project on a person instead of providing your own facts and analysis. Someone might pop up and say something like, “Donald Trump is a Martian who eats human flesh, and he ran a major heroin ring out of a trailer in Cambodia!” Then you’re expected to spend your weekend Googling in order to prove it’s not true. It’s a powerful tactic of asymmetrical debate. Say something wild, and then put the burden of proving or refuting it on the other party. You don’t have to do any work at all, but the other person does, so in the end, you are likely to lose simply because you keep chasing the ball while the other person merely spins yarns.

This is why lying is so powerful. My sister is one of the world’s great liars, and one of the reasons she has done so much of it is that it takes very little effort and inconveniences other people tremendously. It takes work to find out the truth and articulate it. Telling a lie is quick and effortless. I don’t know if the person who emailed me is lying, but like a liar, he or she is trying to make me do a lot of work to prove something, while refusing to shoulder the same burden. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to dig up former TRL members to talk to. I’m not Dog the Bounty Hunter! No one would do that. I wouldn’t even know where to look.

I have seen videos from people who broke away from other preachers I like, and they’re not exactly convincing. I have not seen any good ones yet. They say things like, “Pete Cabrera healed a guy, but the healing wasn’t permanent.” Really weak. My guess is that if I talked to disgruntled TLR people, they would be equally unconvincing.

In case someone shows up and sees this blog post and has no idea what’s happening, TLR is a Christian movement. They baptize people, and they do street healing. They are full-blown charismatics. Their leader, Torben Sondergaard, is a former baker from Denmark. He says he was driven out of Denmark after TLR received very unfavorable coverage in a TV documentary. I have been to three TLR events. I let them re-baptize me, and I went out and did street healing with them on one occasion. I am not going to join TLR, but fundamentally, I like what they do, and I agree with them for the most part. Healing and miracles are very real.

I know a couple of people who express misgivings about TLR or believe it’s a cult run by a criminal. These are people who don’t actually know anything about TLR, so I discard their opinions. That doesn’t mean I’m not wary. I have checked TLR out on the web, and I’ve found a number of people criticizing them. I looked for real, substantiated criticism, but I could not find it. What I did find was bizarre innuendo from people who seemed to be mentally unstable. If people were full-blown demoniacs suffering from delusions and Satanic hatred, this would be the type of thing you would expect them to publish.

Here’s a good example:

The worst thing I’ve heard about TLR (from a known source which does not seem uninformed or delusional) came from Tom Loud’s office. Loud is a preacher and pastor who also does street healing. According to someone on his staff, he believes TLR teaches that people have to be water-baptized and speak in tongues in order to be saved, and he disagrees. This is the only credible criticism I’ve heard about them, and you can see how mild it is. Even if it’s true, it just shows that two preachers disagree about two points of doctrine. Welcome to Christianity. This is not big news.

Here’s something I always say: the feebleness of your enemies’ criticism is the best proof you’re on the right track. Consider our two relatively recent presidential impeachments. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath on video, which is a disbarment offense and, under the right circumstances, a felony. It’s a very big deal. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was impeached for saying something in an official phone call which could, sort of, be characterized as an effort to help his upcoming campaign OR could be a totally innocent effort to get an important matter investigated, which would be a completely normal and ethical request for a president. Then there was George Bush. The press characterized him as a liar, and many leftists called for his impeachment, because he said something about uranium ore in Iraq, which later turned out to be completely true.

When people shoot spitballs at you, it’s usually because they don’t have bullets. Leftists didn’t hide their smoking guns when it came to Bush and Trump. They hit them with everything they had, and it wasn’t much. Generally, the same thing is true of Torben Sondergaard and TLR. I have been looking into them for over a year, and I still can’t find any disturbing information. But I have seen some strange claims from very odd individuals.

Thinking atheists might be less deranged than typical anti-charismatic Christian fanatics, I looked at a site called Rationalwiki. It appears to be some kind of atheist reference site, so one would think that if there were any real dirt on TLR, they would have it. Sure enough, it has a long list of “proofs” that TLR is a cult. For example, TLR teaches that people should pray in tongues. TLR members went to a hospital a number of times and prayed for the sick to be healed, and this annoyed the administrators, who made them leave. TLR teaches that demons cause disease and mental illness. TLR teaches that adults should be baptized. In summary, TLR is a charismatic Christian movement! If you think every charismatic is a cult nut, then Rationalwiki has succeeded in proving its case against TLR.

I have some idea what a cult looks like. I belonged to a couple of churches that truly were cult-like. Trinity Church in Miami teaches the poor that if they give financial offerings to the church instead of paying their electric bills, God will give them prosperity. The church deducts tithes from its employees’ paychecks and requires them to work for nothing as volunteers. They held secret meetings about me when I left. That’s a cult. New Dawn Ministries in Miami told people not to talk to anyone who had left. The pastor had a screaming fit in the parking lot and demanded that a friend of mine tell him things about me. He waved his hands in my friend’s face, as though trying to pick a fight. My friend got so mad he told the pastor to back off or get a beating. That’s a cult. Telling people to get baptized, or that they should speak in tongues, is not cult behavior. It’s normal Christian doctrine, taught in many, many churches.

For all I know, the person who emailed me has a blockbuster revelation about TLR, but I don’t know what it is, so that’s the end of that. Maybe this is a fine, loving person who has very important news that needs to be shared. How can we know if we can’t see it?

I Googled the name the person used, and I found something on the web from 2018. A person with the same name was defending a positive prophecy a truly disturbed preacher made about TLR. If my correspondent is the same person, something must have happened during 2019 to cause a change of heart.

But I don’t know what that was.

As for me “not having peace” about joining TLR, that’s completely inaccurate. I never wanted to join any movement after leaving New Dawn. I never felt disturbed about joining TLR. I just felt God didn’t want me to do it, and I also thought TLR was about to become a denomination, which is not something I want to be involved with very deeply. I never felt that God was telling me TLR was evil or seriously misguided. It’s just that I don’t join churches, denominations, or groups. I don’t have to have a bad feeling about a particular organization in order to want to avoid joining. I won’t join even if I feel good about them.

I have recommended TLR’s events, but I don’t advise anyone to join (or not join) TLR. I think TLR is imperfect. On the other hand, I can say some very good things about TLR.

1. They never pressure you.

2. They never squeeze you for money.

3. They do not teach the money gospel or use their power to get wealth.

4. They are very good at baptizing people with the Holy Spirit.

5. They promote true inner change via the Holy Spirit.

6. They truly do cast out demons, which are very real, just as Jesus, who is God, did.

7. They are very nice people, unlike the people who ran Trinity Church and New Dawn Ministries.

8. They are doing something important which no one else seems to be willing to do.

How perfect do people have to be, before you consider them worthy of knowing you? You’re supposed to rely on the Holy Spirit, not men, for instruction. You should try to find other people who are sound, but if you’re hoping for a perfect teacher, you are looking in the wrong world.

If you want to, check TLR out. Watch some videos. If it interests you, pray about it, and then do what God tells you. If you don’t think God wants you to fool with TLR, don’t. I’m not a recruiter. I can’t recruit for a group I won’t join.

When people come to you with serious complaints about ministries, and by “serious,” I mean complaints that have some basis in fact, you should look into them, but it’s also important to be seasoned so you can identify the strange tactics characteristically employed by people who are not worthy of your attention. If their accusations are vague, ask them to firm them up. If they don’t provide facts, ask for them. If they claim to be in a position to know things, ask for the relevant facts about their backgrounds.

I can back up every single thing I’ve said about Trinity Church and New Dawn Ministries. I spell things out. I name names. If I can do it, I can also require other people to do it.

A really good ministry will attract all sorts of nutty rumors and accusations. Look at Jesus. Two days ago, I saw a rabbi on Youtube telling the world Mary was a prostitute and calling Jesus a bastard. He said some really nasty things. Respected teachers say Jesus was a magician, and some say he’s in hell, boiling in feces. It’s to be expected. If no one is mad at you, you are definitely on the wrong track. An attack brings a response, and our lives are supposed to be attacks on Satan. It shouldn’t bother you when really weak accusations come out concerning a ministry. It’s a very good sign. A bad ministry will face strong accusations, not just slanders and innuendoes. Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud. Torben Sondergaard is accused of speaking in tongues and casting out demons. There is a difference.

Maybe some day I’ll find out that TLR has a bunch of dirty secrets. It hasn’t happened yet. If it does, I’ll come here and let you know.

Audio Bible Rip Completed

I’m finally free! I just finished ripping the Zondervan audio King James to MP3’s, and I’m loading them onto a flash drive to see if it works.

It has been two weeks since my CD’s arrived. I’ve been working on this almost every day, ripping one chapter at a time, renaming the chapters, saving them in folders…what a chore. I just read that there are 1189 chapters in the Bible. I had to go through this procedure with every single one.

I’m looking forward to having a portable audio Bible. The other day I heard Mark Hemans say Jesus was present in his word, and it made sense to me, so I decided I wanted to be able to hear the Bible wherever I was. Hemans says the word itself has power. I suppose that depends somewhat on the person who is listening to it, but I know it’s true in my case.

This will be great. I memorize things and forget them. These MP3’s will help me hang on.

Now I know what I have to look forward to: weeks of waiting to see if I messed up any of the files. If I have, they’re going to jump out at me eventually. Then I’ll have to go back and redo them.

I have the Psalms playing on my bedroom TV already. They’re over 4 hours long, and I have them repeating. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s always wonderful when computers turn out to be good for something other than cat pictures and porn.

Old Man with Kids’ Ailment

I guess I should blog about the physical issues I complained about last week.

On Thursday, I finished up the welding on my arbor press stand. It was my second effort. I had had a lot of problems with it. I’m still learning how to control welding warpage, and the first time I put the stand together, I found a significant bow in the top. It would not have affected the stand’s usefulness, but part of the purpose of welding is to learn how to weld better. It’s not just about function. I cut the top off the stand, added some crossmembers under the top, and put the stand back together. Now it’s much better. I’ve written about this already.

In the days prior to this welding session, I had noticed I wasn’t feeling quite right. One night last week, I felt as though a cold were trying to get ahold of me. I prayed and so on, and it went away. After that, I didn’t think much about it.

The night after I put the stand together for the last time, I started feeling a sensation in my left eye. It was as though there were a grain of sand under my eyelid. I assumed I had somehow managed to flash my eye with the welding arc. Welding arcs give off a great deal of UV radiation. You can actually get a severe sunburn from welding in short sleeves. If you let the radiation reach your eyes, you can get what’s known as a flash burn.

When you get a flash burn, you feel as though there is sand in your eyes. It goes away in a day or two and doesn’t do any lasting harm.

When I went to bed on Thursday, I knew I was not going to sleep well with my eye bothering me, so I took some painkillers. I always keep a few on hand. Doctors treat everyone like an addict these days, and it can be very hard to get painkillers when you need them, so if you don’t finish a prescription, it’s smart to keep the leftover pills.

Oddly, doctors don’t treat addicts like addicts. Every city has a bunch of down-and-out or foreign-born doctors who will gladly write painkiller prescriptions for people who are obviously addicts, but it can be very hard for the rest of us to get help when we need it.

People who abuse drugs can get them whenever they want. People who need them can’t get them. It’s a lot like gun control.

The first time I had a kidney stone, they sent me home from the hospital on a Saturday morning with 4 Percocets. A Percoset lasts 4 to 6 hours, and I had over 48 hours to go before I could get to my regular doctor. I had been on intravenous Dilaudid all night, so little Percocets, even in amounts corresponding to the time period in question, were not going to get the job done anyway. That’s never going to happen again if I can help it.

On Thursday, I took more than one pill, but they didn’t seem to help. I didn’t feel much of anything, except that I was drowsy. I took several doses, figuring I would know if I were taking too much. When you overdo painkillers, you don’t just drop dead instantly. You can tell when you’ve had enough.

The next day, I had some nausea early in the afternoon. I wondered if I had poisoned myself with the pain pills. I threw up several times. That wasn’t a big deal. Throwing up doesn’t bother me at all. After all, I went to college, where I learned all about throwing up.

The pain in my eye did not go away the next day, so I wondered if I had a really severe burn. I asked God if I should go to a doctor, and I felt the answer was “no.”

Yesterday, I finally figured out what was going on. It was pink eye, or an adenovirus infection. This is a condition like a cold which can affect your eyes, your respiratory tract, and your intestines. It can cause vomiting, diarrhea, eye pain, and lots of tear flow. My symptoms fit the description perfectly. I even had some weird, otherwise-inexplicable lower-GI stuff that was consistent with an adenovirus infection.

You can’t treat an adenovirus infection, so there was nothing to do but pray and wait. I would like to say I prayed and the symptoms disappeared instantly, but that has not happened yet. That’s not a problem. Apart from a slight annoying sensation in one eye, I feel fantastic.

I thought I had discovered a new way to get a flash burn while wearing a welding helmet and doing things right, but it appears that I was wrong. That’s a relief. A flash burn lasting for days would be a rare and serious thing.

I’m still waiting for my tool grinder to arrive. It’s exciting. If you have a lathe, a mill, a drill press, a tool grinder, and a surface grinder, you have everything you really need in order to claim you have a machine shop. After the tool grinder arrives, all I’ll lack will be the surface grinder. One day I’d like to have a horizontal mill, but that can wait.

While I wait, I’m fixing the shop up. Today I’ll be working on a new 50-amp socket next to the air compressor, and I’m planning to get an air line kit so I can run air lines all over the shop. Right now, all I have is one spool of air hose with a 3/8″ ID. It’s connected to my little compressor, which is only good for filling tires, running the impact wrench, and running a blowgun. I have a big 1/2″ reel I want to put on the wall, and I also want to have “drops” (local connections) in three areas of the shop.

Traditionally, people have used black iron pipe for air lines. I’m not doing it. It sounds like a pain. I don’t even know if Home Depot–my main resource–sells black pipe. I’ve never used it. I’m not sure what it looks like.

Some people use PVC pipe, which is cheap and easy to install. It’s great. Unless it explodes. When that happens, it sends sharp pieces of PVC shrapnel into the air at high speed. Most people agree this is a bad thing. It’s okay to run PVC underground, but if it’s exposed, it’s dangerous.

These days, a lot of people use hose. There is a company called Rapidair that sells kits for compressed air. You get 100 feet of expensive hose, plus some fittings. It will allow up to 175 psi, and you can get 3/4″ ID hose, which ought to be good for air flow. There is no point in buying a big compressor and using skinny hoses.

I’m thinking of getting a Rapidair kit. I considered buying PEX hose from the hardware store. It’s cheaper, and it works. The problem is that the connections are restrictive. That’s what I’ve read, anyway. I may want to upgrade my compressor eventually, and the last thing I want is to have to redo my air lines because the air can’t get through.

Adding electrical sockets will get cords off the floor, and adding air lines will get hoses off the floor. It all adds up to a more mobile shop. Moving wheeled tools is not easy when you’re constantly lifting cords and hoses.

In conclusion, things are going well, and my record of not burning myself with the welder remains unblemished.

Stop Comparing and Start Confessing

It looks like God doesn’t require the same things from everyone.

Jesus said he would require more from those to whom much had been given than from those who had received little. I don’t think I understood that until recently.

People always wonder what God wants from them. Is it enough to ask for salvation and then go on living the same way? Are there things you have to give up in order to make it into heaven? Can’t you just go on sinning and asking for forgiveness? That’s what most of us do. A lot of us have a clever plan: live it up, and then do a deathbed conversion. It probably doesn’t work. God is not mocked.

I think our natural tendency is to try to find out how much we can get away with instead of asking how God can help us give more. “Can I still watch this?” “Can I still drink that?” “Can I still have sex with my boyfriend so he won’t leave me?”

I watch Mark Hemans a lot, and it always amazes me how many people who are shacking up come to him and ask him for things, including special anointings. He exposes them and tells them to get married. How can any Christian think fornication is okay? When did God make this change? Where are the fornicating apostles in the Bible?

Jesus told a young ruler that if he wanted the kingdom of heaven, he should sell everything he had and give it to the poor. That’s scary. Do we all have to do that? The Bible says that after the Spirit of Holiness fell on Pentecost, early Christians pooled their wealth and helped each other out so no one needed anything. Are we required to do that? Do I have to sell my house and go live in an apartment so my Christian neighbor who blows all his money on liquor, strippers, drugs, and lottery tickets can pay his mortgage?

Are there different levels of Christianity? Is it okay for some people to just sit in church and try to behave, while others have to turn their lives upside-down and go out and preach and heal on the streets?

Are there different levels of favor? We like to think God loves each of us just as much, and the Bible says he loves us as he loved Jesus. What’s the real story, though? Are there people he just enjoys working with more than others? Every father has one or two kids who are more pleasant to be with than the others.

The other day I saw Mark Hemans tell a lady other people were hard on her because God gave her special favor. Spirits turned people against her and made them jealous. Ordinarily, you would not expect a preacher to say something like that. People don’t want to think other people are more favored than they are. I think he was right, though. I have experienced hatred because of the favor I’ve received. I can’t count the number of times it has happened. It’s normal for me.

If you’re an heir, you know parents treat their children differently, and very often, it’s justified. Jerky kids usually receive less, as they should. They are harder to raise, and they tend to suck up a disproportionate amount of resources and attention while their parents are alive, so when their parents die, they want to reward the kids who tormented them less. Also, a smart parent will give more wealth to his successful children, because the wasteful ones will lose it all. There is no point in building up an estate just so you can hand wealth over to someone who will destroy it in a year.

You’re not really entitled to an equal share of what your parents have. You’re not entitled to anything. An inheritance is a gift.

It’s understandable that a parent might want to give more money to a poorer child, to even things out, but is it really fair? If you’ve worked and saved, and your brother is a 50-year-old wannabe rock star who plays in local bars and has to have his parents cosign car loans, why should you be penalized? Your brother isn’t going to be financially secure just because your parents give him money. He’ll blow it on cocaine, age-inappropriate clothes, liquor, and women. He may already have debts, into which his inheritance will vanish as soon as he receives it.

Think of the prodigal son. His father divided his wealth and gave the prodigal half of it, and the prodigal lost it. When he returned home in disgrace, his father took him back. But look what he told his other son: “All I have is yours.” He didn’t write the prodigal into his will. All the prodigal got was food, shelter, a ring, and some clothes.

The concept of sibling rivalry is very prominent in the Bible. The first example is the envy Satan feels for the human race. We’re not his siblings, because he is not a son of God, but he was a son of God at one time, and he was rejected. Satan sinned and was cast out of heaven, and there is nothing he can do about it. He will burn no matter how much he pleads. We, on the other hand, can be saved even though we’re filthy. We can be saved, sin again, repent, and still be saved. He hates us for that.

Cain hated Abel. Esau hated Jacob, whom God helped. Ham’s children stole Shem’s land, which is why it was called “Canaan.” Isaac had much more favor than Ishmael. Joseph was favored above all his brothers, as was David.

The Bible says it’s not our place to question God if he blesses one person more than another.

It must be, then, that God feels more closeness to certain believers, and that he does more for them. If that’s correct, then he also asks more of them. Joseph was sold into slavery. Isaac was nearly sacrificed. Jacob had to suffer under Laban for many years. Samson could not drink wine, which was allowed under the Jewish law, and he couldn’t let a razor touch his head.

I keep trying to get closer to God, and it seems like he keeps asking me to give things up. I had to give up caffeine, which everyone else drinks all day. I had to quit reading the news. I had to give up certain types of movies. I had to stay out of bars. Now I think God is telling me to give up all movies, including TV shows, except for nonfiction.

The other day, on a whim, I rented an old Gary Cooper movie I thought was harmless: Sergeant York. It’s the story of Alvin York, a soldier from Tennessee. He captured 132 Germans single-handed, in one day, and he killed at least 25. The movie is mostly fiction, but it’s based on York’s experiences.

Afterward, I felt God telling me I was opening doors by watching movies that seemed completely innocent, and he explained why.

Imagine you have a problem with worry. This can be demonic, and it’s a serious problem. Worry is a sin, and we are commanded not to do it. Worry doesn’t make you a righteous person; it makes you a faithless person, and God equates faith with righteousness.

Now suppose you watch a movie about someone who has a problem. Maybe it’s Iron Man, and he has to save the earth (again). What happens when you watch the movie? You get worried. In fact, you watch the movie just so you can worry yourself temporarily.

What happens when you assume an attitude a demon likes? Every Christian knows the answer. If you stimulate your own lust, you can get demons of lust. If you stimulate your own anger, you can get demons of anger. The same applies to fear and worry. If you watch movies that put you under stress, you’re inviting spirits who will do the same thing, all the time. It’s like dumping garbage in your own yard. If you do it long enough, your neighbors will start doing it.

It’s obvious to us that we need to avoid pornography, but nobody seems to be aware that there are demons in areas other than sex. If you’re watching a movie hero beat people up and cut their limbs off, and you’re enjoying hating the villains and seeing them suffer, how can you not be opening doors to demons of anger, cruelty, and revenge?

In Sergeant York, the Germans killed Gary Cooper’s friends, and he killed Germans with a great deal of anger. Is that a healthy thing to watch?

Sports are unhealthy, too. Think about it. When you watch sports, you’re hoping one team will win and the other will lose. You’re hoping half of the people on the field will have a rotten day they may relive every day until they die. For many people, one defeat makes the difference between a life of ease and glory and a life of pity and financial hardship. That’s what you’re rooting for. Every game is a zero-sum event. You can’t have two winning teams. There have to be some losers.

When I was a kid, I made it to the national spelling bee, and I went down in the second round. I didn’t prepare at all. The pronouncer mispronounced a word I wasn’t familiar with, and I spelled it the way he pronounced it. Ever since then, it has bothered me to read about the national spelling bee. I could have won, if I had made an effort. I can’t imagine what it must be like to play for the Miami Dolphins or some other third-rate sports team that loses many times a year. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be Ronda Rousey.

In God’s system, everyone is supposed to win. We don’t get together to compete with each other. We help each other, and God helps all of us. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an extra-mile game.

It appears that I have a lot of favor. I seem to have a lot fewer problems than many people I know. I want to have even more favor, and I want to be closer to God. Should I feel bad because I can’t watch movies? Isn’t God just asking me to stop poisoning myself? Isn’t an improved relationship with God a colossal reward? How many people have wanted that and had no way to get it?

Most people I know cause their own problems, and they won’t do much to help themselves. They won’t pray in tongues. They won’t try to rid themselves of demons. They won’t try to shake their bad habits or to be filled with the fruit and gifts of the Spirit. They insist on hanging onto worldly entertainment and worldly culture. When you tell them about good teaching, they find fault with it even though they haven’t looked at it. Their pride makes them hang onto old doctrine that never helped anyone, simply because it seems more compatible with the culture of the world.

Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” and I see people proving it. They aren’t that hungry for God’s help or his company, so they settle for lives full of problems that never get solved. Then they complain as though circumstances were the cause. “I don’t have this or that blessing you have, which made it easy for you.”

When things are easy for me, it’s because I made a few little sacrifices for God. I’m not close to God because I’m blessed. I’m blessed because I’m close to God, and the same thing can happen to you. But it’s easier to criticize and envy. People like to be comforted, not exhorted. They love being told their problems aren’t their fault.

Like I always say, I must be the only Christian on earth who actually deserves his problems.

God told me this a long time ago: “Excuses are lies.” The Bible says liars will go to the lake of fire, and it probably applies mostly to people who make excuses for sin.

I suppose favor is like anything else. The favor you get from God depends on the favor you give him.

I don’t think you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor. When Jesus told the young ruler he should do that, he was showing him how hard it was to enter the kingdom of heaven under the old covenant. He said that with God, it was possible for a rich man to enter. I don’t think we have to pool our belongings and pass them around. The people who were present at Pentecost were given the grace to do that by the Spirit of Holiness, and we have not received that grace. But you do have to give yourself to God, withholding nothing. If he wants you to get rid of cable TV and stop going to Hooters, you should obey. If there is anything good he offers, you should try to get it instead of deciding it’s not worth the price. If someone you know is giving more up, and that person is doing better than you are, you shouldn’t spit bitterness and envy at that person and hold yourself out as a super saint God is mistreating. You should look at yourself and ask God what you’re doing wrong.

I am going to keep pushing forward. I know God wants to give me more inner improvement, and I am determined to go after it. If he blesses me outwardly in the process, better still.