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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I have to tickle the equation.

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

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

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

My April 4 figure is up from 494,013.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update on my Amateur Coronavirus Predictions

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

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

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

So what does this mean?

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

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

These guesses top my list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Googled around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should get a red dot sight for it.

No. I won’t think of it.

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Know What Mark Twain Said About Statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prominent Doctor Does his Part to Spread Panic

Yesterday, I used a differential equation to predict how the coronavirus epidemic would pan out, and it made the future look very good. Total predicted deaths by June 5: 150,000, give or take. That sounds bad until you consider how many people will die during that time from the flu, the common cold, pneumonia, car wrecks, tobacco-related diseases, and so on. You have to remember that the world is a very big place, and a disease that kills 150,000 people isn’t a big deal.

Today I found an article quoting a Johns Hopkins professor. He’s trying to panic people. He says the number of actual cases is much higher than what we’re seeing, because testing isn’t going well.

For a minute, I wondered if I was on the wrong track. After all, I can only rely on data that’s available to me, so if the data is no good, neither are my predictions.

I’m not on the wrong track. I realized that after a short period of thought. It’s unfortunate the the Johns Hopkins doctor didn’t say what I’m about to say.

What is it that matters during this epidemic? The number of actual cases? Not at all. That figure means nothing. No one cares how many people get sick, because the symptoms generally aren’t very bad. The only thing that matters is the death toll.

The death figures are very solid. Why? Because dead people can’t escape diagnosis. If you have mild symptoms and you decide not to bother with the major annoyance of dealing with the post-Obama healthcare system, no one will ever put your case in a database. If you die, it’s a different story. They will know you died, and they will know what killed you. We know how many people are dying, regardless of how bad the testing program is.

Here’s something that will make people mad: the more actual cases there are, the better the news is. It increases the ratio of infections to deaths, and the inescapable conclusion is that coronavirus isn’t as bad as we thought it was. The death toll is a solid figure, so changes in testing won’t change it. The case total can only go up as testing improves, because it’s a mathematical certainty that we are missing cases. If the case total goes up, the death rate will drop. Say the current death rate is 3%, to make up a figure. If the total case number doubles, the death rate goes to 1.5%.

They think the real death toll is around 1%. The doctor thinks the actual case number in the US is at least 50,000 and could be 500,000. The official figure is 1600, so if the doctor is right, there are 30 to 300 times as many cases as we thought. If that’s true, the death rate is 30 to 300 times lower, making coronavirus less lethal than the flu. The rate would be three thousandths to three hundredths of a percent. The latter figure would put the coronavirus well below the flu death rate.

Any way you slice it, unless the death figures are unbelievably wrong, this disease is much less of a problem than people think.

Interesting thing: preacher T.B. Joshua prophesied that rain would come to China and wash the epidemic away. Since he said that, the China numbers have been just about flat. Hmm.

Math v. Hysteria

In case anyone is interested, I constructed a differential equation to see if I could predict the spread of coronavirus over the next couple of months.

Is the equation right? Search me. If testing keeps improving, we will pick up a lot more cases mild and asymptomatic cases, and that will throw everything off. Also, I may not know what I’m doing.

I’m using a differential equation that predicts two things: the growth of bacteria in a culture, and the half-life of a radioactive substance. I’m assuming the human race will work like bacteria, and the world will be our Petri dish. I can’t even guess what kind of sophisticated equations epidemiologists use, and I’m not going to look it up. This is mostly for entertainment, although the message that the epidemic is overhyped is correct.

I hope I did this right. I’ve forgotten a huge percentage of what I used to know.

Anyway, here are some figures for the global totals. Two are rounded off. Sorry I can’t make it display as a nice table.

March 5: 90,000
March 14: 150,000
March 17: 177,845
March 21: 223,173
March 28: 332,040
30 days from 3/5: 494,013
60 days from 3/5: 2,711,653
90 days from 3/5: 14,884,355

I may be wrong about April 4. I didn’t do the math for the date. It’s whatever day is 3 weeks after March 14.

They’re talking about a possible death rate of 1% now, so 90 days out, I predict 148,884 or fewer deaths. Call it 150,000.

As detection gets better, the death rate (ratio) should plummet, as should the severity of the symptoms of average infections. It won’t mean fewer people will be dying. It will just mean they’re more exceptional than we thought.

The 90,000 and 150,000 figures from this month are known, and they are approximate.

I would expect this amateur equation to work reasonably well while the disease is still spreading rapidly. During that time, the transmission function should be pretty uniform. As we approach saturation, the curve will start to drop, and it will eventually go to zero. Far as I know, the only thing that can really throw the projection off is bad initial data.

I don’t know how long it will take for infection rates to drop. Maybe there is a big population of low-hanging fruit out there, and they will pump up the numbers very badly at first. Maybe dirty people will get hit very fast, and the rest of us will frustrate the disease by not living like monkeys. If this is how it works, maybe the transmission rate will drop off in a month or two. It seems to work that way with the flu. The infection rate shoots up fast, and then it drops fast.

If I had death figures from a couple of weeks ago, I could do much better, because death figures are reliable. We know when people die. It’s usually obvious without a test. A death equation would be more useful, because death is what worries people. We’re not that concerned about getting the sniffles.

In any case, I would expect to see about 600,000,000 global flu cases by the end of this season, and given a 0.01% death rate, that means 600,000 deaths.

I am too lazy to check the actual number of global flu deaths per year, but it should be somewhere close to 600,000, so probably somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000. In any case, a lot, compared to coronavirus.

Guess what? I decided to check after all. The correct figure is 650,000, so maybe I’m not so stupid.

Tobacco kills 8,000,000 people per year, according to WHO.

No one should be happy about 150,000 coronavirus deaths, but it’s important to know the difference between an epidemic and a plague. We don’t have a plague. It’s also important to realize that the death rate for healthy young people is miniscule. Kids are nearly immune.

Africa is a problem for anyone trying to predict what will happen. Health care there is abominable, as is hygiene, so maybe coronavirus will go nuts there and blow up the curve, just as AIDS did.

I can’t tell you my prediction is right, but I can tell you that coronavirus won’t even begin to rival the flu in number of infections, and it is extremely unlikely to kill as many people.

I wonder if anti-vaxxers are flipping out. That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it? If you willingly expose your family to a known deadly disease every year, you shouldn’t be too concerned about a rarer and much less deadly disease.

What’s going to happen to the companies that make toilet paper when this is over? No one except me will buy it for at least a year. I guess I’ll get some bargains. I wish someone would tell me why people are buying toilet paper. I don’t get it at all. What is the connection between a respiratory infection and using 20 times as much toilet paper as usual?

It will be interesting to see how close my predictions are to the truth. They may be wrong by a wide margin, but the flu, which is something we can count on, will still beat coronavirus. That, you can bank on.

Before I quit, a question: why isn’t anyone talking about the flat transmission rate in China? Coronavirus is now at a near-standstill there, so why shouldn’t the same thing happen everywhere else?

Beretta’s Plagiarism Saves the Day

I thought I was going to get to put a new chain on a chainsaw and get rid of some annoying trees. Instead, I ended up taking over two hours getting auto-pay set up for some monthly obligations. The people I deal with use Revopay, which is a company that takes payments online. The pay site does not work. When you call the help number, you get someone who says he can’t help with website issues. He transfers your call to a web person who doesn’t answer, so you have to leave a voicemail. Then they don’t return calls.

Thinking of using Revopay? Reconsider.

Since it’s too late to cut trees, I’ll write about the Cold Woodsman pistol.

This week I picked up a gorgeous Woodsman I found on Gunbroker. While I was shooting it, I noticed a couple of odd things about the magazine. First, it only held 9 rounds. It was supposed to hold 10, but there was absolutely no way to get a 10th round into it. Second, the spring was way too strong. After reloading it a few times, my hand started to get sore.

You don’t need a super-strong spring in a box magazine. Other guns have weaker springs that work just fine.

I started looking for new magazines, and I found out I had stepped into a trap!

1. Colt stopped making replacement magazines about 20 minutes before I bought this gun, so now you can’t get one anywhere. Another customer relations triumph for Colt.

2. Typically, a used Colt magazine will sell for $85 or more, if you can find one.

3. Aftermarket magazines aren’t very good. I don’t know if this is true of all brands. Numrich (the gun parts people) makes a magazine, but I haven’t been able to find out whether it works. It’s not cheap. They cost $55.

4. Beretta makes a .22 pistol called the Neos, and Beretta cloned the Colt Woodsman magazine down to the last detail, except they put a plastic (Can we stop saying “polymer”?) base on it. To make the magazine work, you have to cut some material off the base. In the past, Numrich sold used Colt bases which fit in Beretta magazines, but they stopped…about 20 minutes before I bought this gun.

5. Colt made a gun called the Cadet or the Colt Target Model, and its magazines are identical to Woodsman magazines. Unfortunately, you can’t find one to buy. Believe me.

What’s the answer? You have to buy Beretta magazines for a little over $20 each and shave down the PLASTIC or make new bases for them from sheet metal.

I get tired of hearing people say “polymer.” It means the exact same thing as “plastic,” but it sounds more expensive. “Composite” also means “plastic,” except it’s plastic with fibers in it to make it stronger. If you have a Glock or any other polymer or composite gun, you have a plastic gun. Get over it.

If you have a second-generation Woodsman, you can make a Ruger MkII magazine work, but it will be too long for a third-generation model. You may be able to make a Browning Buckmark magazine work with a Woodsman, but you’ll be breaking new ground.

There is a site about Colt Woodsmans that has a magazine compatibility chart. Look up “Bob Rayburn.”

My magazine has a feature that makes it compatible with a second-generation Woodsman, so it may not be the original magazine. I suspect the spring is new, too.

My magazine problems are solved. I ordered some Beretta magazines. I plan to see if it’s possible to make new bases from steel, so they’ll look and feel more like Colt magazines.

While I’m dealing with Woodsman-part logistics, I’m also thinking about other guns that were stolen from my grandparents’ estates. My grandfather had a Browning Hi-Power I liked. He also had an M1 Enforcer pistol, which is an M1 carbine with a short barrel and no buttstock. Terrible weapon, but very cool.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get an Enforcer, because I already have a good watermelon gun, but a Hi-Power would be nice. Guess when they stopped making them? About two years ago. They weren’t expensive then. Now? Different story. A good one will run you $1100 or more.

I found one online. I’m considering it. They may continue appreciating, and if so, buying now is the right move. On the other hand, Browning might start making them again. Who wants to pay $1100 for a used gun and then see new ones selling for $750? Browning won’t say the gun is gone for good. They’re leaving us to guess.

Here’s a tip for gun makers. You don’t say, “We just discontinued this model.” You say, “We are going to discontinue this model in two years.” Then everyone will flock to stores to buy anything you produce during that time. You make money, your customers get what they want…everyone’s happy. You don’t just pull the plug and force the public to play musical guns.

It’s amazing that I didn’t get a single decent gun when my grandmother died. If she hadn’t given my dad a shotgun, my haul would have been limited to a flintlock and an aluminum .22 with the bluing flaking off.

My grandfather had at least 20 good guns, and I got…one. Whoopee.

As noted in an earlier post, my steel gong targets arrived. I may try to hang them tomorrow. I should have gone to get steel today to build a stand. But I have surplus lumber lying around, so I guess I can improvise. I have two round gongs, a squirrel, and a hog.

In other news, it looks like coronavirus is going to plague me in spite of failing utterly as a true plague. I have started getting coronavirus emails from everyone I do business with. “We here at Burger King feel real bad about the pandemic, and we are doing everything possible to assure that your burger arrives with no more germs than usual. Our team of surly high school students and confused illegals will continue to uphold the hygiene standards fast-food consumers have grown used to.”

I’ve received 8 emails this afternoon. Thanks, Northern Tool, but I’m not really worried about getting sick when I dash in to get a box of welding rod, and frankly, I don’t think there is anything you could do to prevent it. Thanks, Consumer Reports. Thanks, electric company. I was really worried that viruses would sneak in through the cables.

I will not catch coronavirus, but it will still make me suffer. It’s good to be sane when everyone around you is wetting their pants over nothing, but a panic is still a considerable annoyance.

I own a rental home. The condo association sent me an email saying they’re sealing their office. If you want to pay them, you have to slide an envelope under the door. It must be like working in Al Capone’s vault. Total hysteria.

Let’s go back over the facts, not that it will help.

1. Coronavirus is barely infecting anyone compared to the flu.

2. The death rate is projected to be under 1%.

3. The symptoms, for the vast majority of people, are very mild.

It’s like we’re flipping out over chickenpox.

Obviously, after writing that, I had to look up chickenpox statistics. It kills between 5,000 and 10,000 people per year, and if you’re around a person who has it and you’re not immune, the odds are 10 to 1 that you’ll get sick. Then if you get well, you may go on to get shingles, which is one of the most painful diseases there is. Between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans are hospitalized because of chickenpox every year.

We’re terrified of coronavirus, but we snicker at chickenpox. Crazy.

I can’t wait for this epidemic to blow over. I’ll bet it ends in April, just like other cold-weather diseases. Trump suggested that might happen, and of course, the press treated him as though he had recommended torturing kittens, but what he said sounds reasonable to people who aren’t completely unable to set aside their hatred. What other respiratory disease continues spreading in warm months?

If this is how we act when confronted with the lamest pandemic in history, what will happen if a really serious threat pops up? I shudder to think. Maybe buying survival crackers isn’t a bad idea after all. What if I can’t get bread? What if I can’t get vegetables? What if I can’t get Twinkies, Chocodiles, Little Debbies, and Moon Pies?

It’s disgraceful to get this worked up over a feeble disease. Older Americans lived through polio, and they didn’t snowflake out.

It’s a good lesson. Now I know how people will react if a real plague occurs. The world will be paralyzed.

I should just go ahead and buy a hundred pounds of rice. And some milk of magnesia, because rice has almost no fiber.

Can someone explain the toilet paper fixation to me? Why are people hoarding it? What possible connection is there between a flu-like illness and a global toilet paper shortage? Are toilet paper factory workers especially susceptible?

The global total for confirmed cases is 142,000. Bad, but totally insignificant compared to the flu. Remember, America has to come up with 300,000 cases per day, all by itself, in order to get flu numbers.

I just got another panic email from a bank I only work with online. So inappropriate. They are working tirelessly to make sure I don’t get sick from looking at their website.

Maybe steaks will get cheap because people are buying things like crackers and rice. There has to be a silver lining in here somewhere.

I don’t have that much toilet paper, potential zombies. Don’t get yourselves shot coming here to take what I don’t have. You are welcome to clean your backsides using the garden hose in the pasture. Please face the road when you do it. Think of the kids.

About Those Blueberries Your Friends Ate…

A friend of mine can see blog posts but not SMS photos, so I am uploading this in order to get around the barrier.

I’m going to call him Sammy.

Screwball Squirrel fans will get it.

My Hypothetical Branch Office

Now that I’m shooting more, it’s time to confront a project I have been putting off: the shooting shack.

I shoot in a cow pasture. The shells go all over the place, and then I have to go find them. You can guess what they are likely to land in. I don’t want my brass disappearing, and I’m not crazy about handling it after it lands in poo. Another problem: there isn’t much shade out there. On bright days, the sun can be very uncomfortable, and it also makes it hard to see what I’m doing.

I came up with a plan a long time ago: build a three-sided shack with a metal roof and plywood floor. I could fix it so the floor was slightly raised, allowing me to move the shack around quickly using the forks on my tractor. My shells would always land right next to me, or on the person I was shooting with, and I could sit in the shade. I could make the shack 6 feet deep and 7 feet wide, to allow plenty of room for two people.

The project is intimidating for various reasons. I know a fair amount about building things with tools, but this knowledge doesn’t really extend to carpentry. I could weld a shack together pretty quickly, but making one from wood would be more challenging. The materials would be bulky and heavy, too, and I’m not anxious to handle them alone.

If I were to weld a steel frame together, I could save a lot of time. It would be hard attaching wood to it, however. I don’t think I could keep it from rusting. Even if I painted the steel, water would find a way to rest on it and create rust. This is my guess.

I had an epiphany that made the job less off-putting. I realized I did not need to have wooden sides on the shack. Screen or hardware cloth would be better because they would let the breeze through and they would weigh less. They would also be easy to install. I have to have plywood on the back to block the sun, however. On my property, I always shoot along an east-west axis, so the sun can’t really hit me from the side. I just have to protect my back.

Adding up all the materials, it looks like it’s around $240 before paint and fasteners. Not too bad. I have some materials lying around, so I should be able to cut the cost a little bit by scavenging.

I still have some engineering problems. For example, what would I use for a table? If I use a folding Home Depot table, it will pretty much fill the length of the 6′ by 7′ interior of the shack, making it hard to get to the chair. They make 5′ tables, but that would still be a little tight. Maybe I could make a permanent bench with one section that swings up to let people pass, or I could build two podiums.

Why not put wheels on it so I can keep it forever? Wheels would put the floor maybe 15″ off the ground. This is too high. I don’t want to shoot down at everything. With a wooden-framed base, I figure I can get down a lot lower.

Why not build it on four-by-fours in cement slugs in the ground? Because I don’t want to be forced to shoot at the same distance all the time. I can’t move my berm, so I have to be able to move the shack.

It’s doable. I have to make my mind up to do it.

In other news, the pandemic seems to be stuck in the mud. The total number of detected cases has not been able to break 130,000 yet, meaning transmission is slowing down or testing is not working. I saw an article today from a major newspaper, asking why people were so worried when the virus wasn’t all that scary. I’m not the only one who sees that the plague has no clothes.

Two American celebrities have COVID-19 now: Tom Hanks and his wife. They’re in Australia, quarantined. They’re both over 60, and Hanks says they’re not very sick. No shock there. It’s typically a mild disease. No one seems to understand that.

I should not be surprised to see people ignoring logic and falling apart under the influence of rumors that aren’t very credible. This is how humanity works. Logic is way down on the list of things that motivate us. On top of that, it’s a safe bet that spirits are behind the panic. Most people are not connected to the Holy Spirit, and he is the Spirit of truth. If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit (and maybe even if you are), you’re full of other spirits, and they run your life. You may think you’re steering your own ship. It’s a delusion.

It’s distressing to see how we’re allowing a mild disease to push us into very bad economic decisions. People are calling off events. Trump has banned travel from most of Europe. The Chinese have closed factories. It’s overkill, and the financial cost will be tremendous in view of the disease’s inability to cause a true plague.

Why are politicians and others doing these things? I’ve already mentioned the supernatural cause, but there are more-obvious reasons. Anyone who fails to panic and overreact will be held accountable by a public ruled by ignorance. People are covering their rear ends, at great expense.

Democracy is a bad thing. I have to say it. The public has extremely poor judgment. As Plato said, a wise king is much better. Here in America, we don’t see ourselves as leftists, but we are. The American Revolution was a leftist uprising, believe it or not. The term “leftist” comes from the French Revolution. Democracy is a leftist concept. No wonder it’s so dangerous.

A strong king could respond to the COVID-19 epidemic with common sense, but our politicians are at the mercy of people whose ignorance is astounding, so they have to do unwise things in order to stay in power.

Airlines aren’t bringing enough sick people to America to make a big difference in the numbers, and closing businesses is not going to be all that helpful, because people will still spread disease while they’re off work. The best way to fight the disease, apart from supernatural means, is to wash your hands a lot and refrain from dirty practices like kissing everyone you greet. Dirty people will always be dirty, however, so most people will not change their behavior.

One of the nice things about leaving Miami is that I don’t have people I barely know kissing me all the time. Latin women feel like they have to kiss every person they meet, and it’s disturbing to a person who is used to cleaner, safer customs. I submitted to it while I lived there, because objecting offended people, but I’m glad it’s behind me.

Kissing may be a sign of affection, but that doesn’t take the microbes out of the spit. You really shouldn’t kiss people indiscriminately, and people shouldn’t hold onto backward customs.

If I were king, I’d say, “Stop being filthy. Quit kissing strangers. Avoid getting close to old people. Go to work and stop hoarding.”

I’m going to keep thinking about my shack design. I’ve waited way too long to get started.

Still no Plague

I feel obligated to post an update on COVID-19 and my continued opinion that it won’t amount to much.

The current number of known cases is still under 130,000, worldwide. No one with any degree of honesty could look at this figure and claim COVID-19 is in any way comparable to a real plague. It’s just not spreading fast enough to compare to things like smallpox, typhus, and the black death. The flu infects over 10% of Americans in a typical season, and COVID-19 will need a miracle to get anywhere close to that number. In addition to spreading very slowly, COVID-19 has a low death rate compared to real plagues.

I was under the impression that the death rate for those infected was going to be considerably lower than 3%, based on what I had read. Perhaps under 1%. Now they’re telling us 1% is the expected figure. Higher figures are coming in from some places, but it seems likely that these are skewed by terrible health care (China, Iran) and/or differing levels of disease detection. The 1% figure comes from the CDC, so evidently, they have seen through raw numbers such as the 7% we see in Italy. Apparently, Italians are failing to detect a high percentage of typical cases, which are mild, so the 7% that died are 7% of a group of atypical patients.

A 1% fatality rate is bad, but the overall infection rate is extremely low compared to the flu, and almost all of the dead will be older people who are already unhealthy, so it’s not like your neighborhood will be emptied of vigorous 40-year-olds and kids.

I’ll bet the rate drops below 1% as the disease spreads. We will get better at responding, and I’ve read that viruses usually become less lethal as epidemics progresses, so my money is on a lower rate.

Here’s what will happen. If you’re in America, you’re not going to get the disease unless you’re very unlucky. If you do get it, it will probably be so mild you won’t need a doctor. Unless you’re old and sick already, and then it could be bad, but in your case, a cold could easily be fatal. Not to rattle you. You’re probably more likely to die from a cold in 2020. And you’re not going to wear a mask to prevent that.

The youngest Italian who died was 60. That’s out of over 800 people. If you’re significantly younger than that, you should feel confident. If you’re 60, you should still feel pretty good. If you have kids, you should feel great, because this disease is barely touching them.

I still don’t get the panic. When my dad was alive, I knew he could die if he got the flu, and I knew flu shots weren’t 100% effective. I got him a shot every year, and we didn’t worry. We didn’t put on masks or hide in a plastic room. We didn’t buy a year’s worth of survival crackers and distilled water.

WHO is calling COVID-19 a pandemic. Does that mean I’m wrong? No, because a pandemic isn’t necessarily a plague, in the true sense of the word. Plagues cause a huge percentage of people to become infected, and a big percentage of those infected die. A pandemic is just a disease that spreads globally. It may or may not infect a high percentage of people, and it may not kill many.

I expect the panic to get worse, and I have a good reason: Trump is trying to calm people down. He’s downplaying the danger. If Trump says “black,” the press says “white,” so by trying to reassure us, Trump has spurred the press to fan the flames of cowardice. The best thing Trump could do to help us relax would be to have a screaming fit and run around the White House lawn in a surgical mask and a rubber suit. If Trump said COVID-19 was a deadly plague, the press would immediately start telling us he was hysterical over nothing, that it proved he was mentally unfit to serve, and that Nancy Pelosi should step in and take over. Rachel Maddow would run segments questioning the existence of COVID-19.

Look, look, look. If this was a plague, we would already know it. We can’t reserve judgment forever. The disease has had more than ample time to show us what it can do. It hasn’t lived up to the hype, and if it hasn’t happened by now, it never will.

Someone tried to scare me by saying crematoriums in Wuhan, China, were running around the clock. Okay, here is where being mathematically inclined and resistant to gossip comes in.

The Wuhan crematorium story emerged at a time when the China death toll stood at 490. You can talk about crematorium shifts all you want, but the number was 490, and the population is 11 million. Even if the story is true, which is extremely doubtful, it’s not like there are trains and trucks dumping bodies in the streets in front of crematoriums.

The death rate in New York City, which has around 8 million people, is about 420 per day. This is a statistic. It is a fact. It’s not a dodgy rumor I saw somewhere on the Internet. It’s the kind of thing you try to dig up when you hear a crazy story, instead of swallowing it headfirst.

Would it really be a problem if the rate went up to, say, 475 for a couple of months? No. It wouldn’t be a problem in China, either. The Wuhan story sounds pretty fishy.

It’s impossible to believe an area containing 11 million people can’t absorb 490 cremations over the course of several months. Did anyone ask how long the 24-hour burning lasted? Let’s pretend it actually happened and then look for an explanation. What if hospitals were holding bodies that died over several weeks, and the crematoriums were only overwhelmed briefly when the rule was made? Maybe hospitals dumped a large number of bodies over a couple of days, and then the stream leveled off. I would guess that any large city would be hard-pressed to deal with 490 bodies that arrived over a weekend. Even then, though, people wouldn’t have to work around the clock. Did they work around the clock for days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas?

The best reason for skepticism: the story came from The Epoch Times, which is a fringe-nut site known for conspiracy theories and propaganda. See if you can find a real news organization making the same claims. I think the story was a fable made up by a bored reporter. It makes no sense mathematically, it came from a source with no credibility, and it has not been corroborated by major news organizations.

I’m getting more confident by the hour. The facts keep rolling in to back me up.

Anyone who feels like giving me a condescending lecture should remember that a couple of months from now, the disease will have run its course. All the facts will be in, and you’ll have to own everything you said.

I may be wrong, but the chances of my being proven wrong, as Buck Turgidson would put it, are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability.

If the plague does pan out, I sure hope we don’t have a mineshaft gap.

Magnum Research’s Synthetic Booger Lets me Down

I bought a Desert Eagle in .50 AE to support Israel. The gun was made by Israeli Military Industries. It was very expensive, and a .50 AE pistol has no legitimate use, but I thought it would be fun to shoot.

The other day, I took it out and shot a few rounds. I had some problems.

The gun failed to extract spent shells most of the time. When it did extract, the shells generally hit me in the face, leaving cuts and bruises. This is a known Desert Eagle issue. The manufacturer’s response is to tell people to hold the gun more firmly, which doesn’t actually work. At least not when your extractor spring is shot, which mine was.

I figured the problem out by Googling. Magnum Research does not put real springs in Desert Eagle extractors. They use little red plastic globs that look like tiny cherry Jujubes. The extractor mashes the glob, and the glob resists, behaving like a spring. This works great until oil or gun-cleaning solvent hits the glob. Then it starts to fall apart.

Yes, Magnum Research uses extractor springs that dissolve in products commonly applied to guns.

I learned that you can stick an AR15 spring (steel) in the Desert Eagle, so I ordered one. I also ordered two OEM Jujubes in case the AR15 spring failed. I knew my next Jujube would fail because that’s what they do, so I bought two in order to extend the time that would pass until I had to order more of them.

Today I got started on replacing the Jujube. I found some videos about Desert Eagles, and I tried to apply what I learned.

Ordinarily, you begin disassembling a Desert Eagle slide by removing the firing pin stop. You push a little button on the slide’s rear, and the stop slides out, releasing the pin so it can be removed. The video I watched showed one button. My manual showed one button. My gun had two buttons.

It turned out I had a California gun, even though I bought it new in Florida. Really embarrassing. It’s like thinking you’re a man and finding out you’re really a woman.

California forced Magnum Research to add a second button to the firing pin stop, for reasons no one seems to be able to figure out. You have to push both buttons a certain way, and it’s a pain.

Kahr (owner of Magnum Research) sells 49-state stops and pins for a total of about $50. I have these parts on the way. My gun is stainless, and the new stop is black. That doesn’t make me happy. It’s a simple part, however, so I should be able to fabricate one from stainless eventually.

When I got the bolt out of the gun and removed the extractor, I found the old Jujube sitting there, looking a little worn.

HA. Never happened. What I found was red grease, smeared on the extractor and the cavity where the spring should have been. The Jujube–the grease–had completely dissolved. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I would have thought the spring was missing and someone had lubricated the gun with red Mobil grease.

Here’s a photo of my Desert Eagle’s original extractor spring.

This is not good engineering. There is no way to justify making gun parts from materials that dissolve in oils and solvents. It’s like making a baking sheet that explodes in the presence of flour.

I stuck the DPMS spring in the bolt and put the gun back together. I have no faith at all in the Kahr “springs.”

I haven’t shot the gun yet. I’m hoping the tension on the extractor will help toss shells away from my forehead. That would be nice.

This is a fun firearm when it works, but I’m starting to think it’s fundamentally bad, like the Marlin Model 60 .22. There are bad products that bring people a lot of pleasure, so when I say the Desert Eagle is bad, I’m not saying I don’t want it. I’m just saying I know what it is.

The Desert Eagle is very heavy. The grip is huge. It shoots shells in people’s faces. It’s hard to break down and clean. It’s expensive. It serves no purpose. You can never really say, “I need a Desert Eagle.” All you can say is that you want one because it will be fun to shoot.

I know people love the Marlin Model 60, but it has the guts of a BB gun. Open one up and see. It can’t shoot hyper ammo. It’s hard to put a sling on it. The trigger is very bad. It’s a pretty gun, it feels good in the hand, and it’s accurate when it works. But a real rifle like the Savage A22 will outperform it in every way.

I’ll feel much better when the California parts on my Desert Eagle are at the landfill. I guess I should go out and shoot it. I’ll have to go find my face shield.

MORE

I got my face shield out, put 7 rounds in the Desert Eagle, and tried it out. As you can see from the photo, it’s working again. Only one of the casings hit the face shield as far as I know. I could be wrong. Your brain shuts down for an instant when you shoot this gun, so it’s impossible to know exactly what happens in that instant.

The gun shoots way high at this distance (7-8 yards). I can’t change that by adjusting the sights, because they’re fixed. I see that Kahr offers adjustable sights, but 1) they’re fiber optic, which is not good, and 2) they cost $234. Not a reasonable price for a $40 item. Williams sells sights for $65, full retail.

I adjusted the trigger while I was working on the gun, and it doesn’t help all that much. Still too hard to get it to go off.

I am not really in love with the Desert Eagle. I like it better as an idea and a pro-Israel statement than as a firearm. The trigger is still not good, it’s probably never going to completely stop firing casings backward, the sights need to be replaced, and because the blast and recoil are so strong, it’s only enjoyable to shoot for maybe 25 rounds. After that, you get tired of wrestling and having your wrists snapped. It’s not fun wearing a face shield, either. Maybe the .357 version works better. Of course, you can get an 8-shot .357 revolver for less, and it will be lighter and more like a serious firearm.

When someone says a revolver is lighter and more sensible in a certain caliber, while carrying nearly as much ammunition as a semiauto, it sounds impossible. But that’s what happens when you make a 4-pound pistol.

With the rounds I’m shooting, the Desert Eagle’s projectiles carry twice as much momentum as my 10mm carry handloads, and FBI agents’ complaints about the 10mm forced the agency to transition to .40 S&W, so obviously, the Desert Eagle is not user-friendly.

Whatever the gun’s virtues and flaws may be, at least it works now. I should send Magnum Research a bill for fixing their design.

The End of Cheap Target Practice?

I took my new Colt Woodsman pistol to the range today, which means I walked out of my house and fired it while the cows stared at me. It was a strange experience, and not just for the cows.

First strange thing…the gun has a 9-round magazine. That’s supposed to be an impossibility. The Colt Woodsman has always held 10 rounds. When I tried to load it for the first time, I thought maybe the magazine spring was stiff because it hadn’t been used much, but no, the magazine was full at 9 rounds. Bummer.

I looked at the magazine to see if it was some kind of Chinese fake. It looks like the real thing, and it has “Colt” stamped on it.

Oh, well.

I have a small variety of .22 shells. Some time ago, I bought a bucket of Remington Golden Bullets. They’re cheap. I figured they could not possibly be bad enough to affect my accuracy at 7 yards. I also have some CCI Mini-mag hollow points, and until today, I had 40-grain Mini-mag CPRN’s. The Woodsman is so nice, I don’t want to shoot Remingtons in it. They cover everything with black residue. I decided to stick with CCI.

When I tried to shoot Mini-mag HP’s, they did not eject. This was disturbing. I was picturing myself trying to find a new extractor for a 70-year-old gun. On top of this, the accuracy was not good. I was around 8 yards back, and I was getting about 2″ for 9 rounds, which is not good by my standards.

I stuck some CPRN’s in the gun, and lo and behold, they cycled perfectly. Problem: I kept missing the target entirely. Or so I thought. It turned out 7 rounds went through one hole. When I got close enough to look at the target, I saw that I had two flyers plus a hole big enough to stick your finger through. So…pretty accurate. Startlingly so.

In this photo, the surprising shots are in the top left bullseye. Those bullseyes are 4″ across, so the lines are 1/2″ apart.

I was disturbed. I’m out of practice, and I know I’m not able to shoot as well as I have in the past, but here I was, shooting .22’s into a single hole. I had to start thinking about things.

1. Am I a much better shot than I understood? If so, proceed to next question.

2. Have I been screwing up my shooting results by using cheap ammo? Maybe what I’ve been attributing to lack of skill and talent has actually been the result of using inexpensive ammunition.

3. Do I need to start buying or making better ammunition and working on my guns to make sure they’re functioning as well as they can?

Another question: what am I supposed to do with all my cheap ammo? I just ordered thousands of CCI Mini-mag CHOOT ‘EM HP’s. I can’t return them.

The Colt shot like a laser with the CCI CPRN’s, and the trigger felt the way the triggers in heaven feel. I was overwhelmed by the lightness of the pull and the total lack of creep. I’ve been dreaming of a trigger like this one. I was awed.

I was out of CPRN’s at this point because I only had a few on hand, so I drove around trying to find new ones. None of the local places had them. I found some lead CCI Select rounds that were pretty similar, and I bought a 100-round box. I also picked up some Aguila Super Extra, which is incredibly inexpensive yet gets very good reviews.

I got home, hosed the gun with Hornady One Shot, Boresnaked it, grabbed my Smith & Wesson Victory pistol for comparison, and went back to the pasture. The cows were happy to see me, as were their three new calves.

I shot some of the new CCI’s with the Colt, and again, I got fantastic results. I put up another 4-bullseye target. I shot the upper two bullseyes with the Colt, using CCI on one and Aguila on the other. I repeated the process on the lower bullseyes with the SW22.

I didn’t get the same fantastic results this time. Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was because the blazing sun was directly behind me, making the target harder to see. Both brands of ammo cycled perfectly, although I had a couple of FTF’s with the Aguila. I didn’t see a difference in accuracy.

Before I quit, I shot some Mini-mag HP’s at a metal target, and they cycled. I guess the cycling issue was caused by dried-up gunk in the Colt’s breech. Well and good. I was not going to have to pay a smith to fix it.

Until today, I loved my SW22, but now I’m souring on it a little. The trigger is utterly inferior to the Colt’s. Not in the same league; not in the same universe. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I shot the SW22 after the Woodsman. Now I feel like I have to get a new trigger.

I’m also unhappy with the SW22’s fiber optic sights. They’re hard to describe without photos, but you will see what they’re like if you Google. The black bits reflect a lot of sunlight, and the sight picture just seems loose. With the Cold, you know where you’re aiming. You may not know where your bullet will land, but you’ll know where it was supposed to land. With the SW22, the cone of uncertainty is somewhat larger. That’s okay for people who shoot 12″ groups, but I’m not one of those people.

Here’s my new take on the SW22. For what I paid–which was $319, if I recall–it’s a wonderful gun. If you want it to be a good gun compared to a more expensive .22 pistol, you’ll need to spend some money on it. You’ll want a $50 Tandemkross trigger (which I haven’t tried), Tandemkross Hive grips, and target sights.

Smith & Wesson now makes an SW22 with target sights. I emailed them to find out if I could put them on my gun. Hope so.

The Colt is unbelievable. It’s perfect. That’s all there is to it. All it needs are new magazines.

Now that I suspect I may be a better shot than I knew, I am going to have to start taking some measures. I’ll have to start using a grip exerciser, because if your hands aren’t in shape, they will shake a tiny bit after a few dozen shots. I’ll have to wear different shoes or work harder to get a stable stance, because wobbling around on work boot soles can open groups up; people argue with me about this, but I don’t think they know what they’re talking about, because they can’t shoot well enough to see the effect. I’ll need to compare types of ammunition and be willing to spend on whatever works. I’ll have to stop shooting when the sun is directly behind me. I’ll even have to clean my guns once in a while.

I’ll have to stop going 8 months without shooting.

If I do all or most of these things, and I don’t get consistent 1″ groups at 7-8 yards, I can quit and go back to junk ammo.

I’ve been thinking about getting a High-Standard pistol to replace the one that was stolen from my grandmother’s estate. I learned a lot about the High Standard line over the last few days. I’m pretty sure my grandfather had a Sport King, which is a cheap model. High Standard made top-notch target pistols that competed with Hammerli, so when you shoot a Sport King, you haven’t really had the High Standard experience.

I would like to get a Sport King or something very similar, simply because that’s what I shot with my grandfather on his farms, but I’m tempted to get something a little better. They’re not expensive. You can get a really nice High Standard target pistol for $800.

I’m considering getting a Field King, which is somewhat better than the Sport King, plus a Citation, which is a very accurate target gun. If I have a Citation, I should be able to shoot with complete confidence that nearly all of the variation in my groups is my fault. Once you take your gun’s failings out of the equation, you can see what you’re doing wrong, and you can work on it. If your gun shoots all over the place, you may try to correct technique problems you don’t actually have, making your shooting worse.

It’s good that I shot well. It’s good to know I may have more potential than I realized. It’s good to know my SW22 needs work. But now I have new work to do. Until today, I was content to let things go the way they were going. Now I may have to exert myself slightly.

Yesterday I saw some guys competing in an Olympic-style event. They used expensive semiauto pistols to fire at 4″ bullseyes about 80 feet away, and to win, they had to hit them most of the time. They were shooting with one hand, and they had to shoot 5 rounds in 4 seconds. That tells me the .22 can do some amazing things if you do your part and use the right equipment.

I don’t want to spend $20 for a box of .22 ammo, but maybe I can find something that will shoot into 1/4″ at 7 yards. That ought to be good enough. If I can put 20 rounds into 1/2″, I will probably be satisfied.

I’ll shoot again in better light and see what happens.

GunBroker Exceeds Admittedly Low Expectations

I’m out of control. Third blog post today.

I picked up my new old Colt Woodsman pistol, which I found on Gunbroker. If you know anything about buying guns, you know Gunbroker’s reputation is not that great. There are a lot of overpriced things there, listed by opportunists. Nonetheless, if you watch and wait, you can do very well. I bought a brand-new AR10 for something like $200 below typical retail, and I got a very nice price on the Woodsman.

People are listing fairly nice Woodsmans for between 900 and 1000 dollars. If you go check Cabela’s Gun Library, you won’t find anything really nice for less. I paid $750.

When I saw my gun at the pawn shop, I almost wondered if they had sent the wrong pistol. It was so nice, I had to look at the breech to see if it had been fired.

It’s not perfect. The handles aren’t in mint condition, and there are one or two tiny (I mean tiny) areas where the bluing has been nicked. There is a trace of holster wear on the end of the barrel. That’s about it. For the most part, it looks new.

I was looking forward to picking it up, but I didn’t expect it to be this exciting. It always bothered me that someone stole my grandfather’s Woodsman (and his High Standard .22 semiauto pistol) without giving me a fair chance at it. Now I have a much nicer gun, and I didn’t get cheated on price.

As Jesus said, life doesn’t consist on the amount of possessions you have. Physical items aren’t that important. Nonetheless, I feel as though God made a kind gesture in helping me find this pistol.

I’ll post a photo, but it won’t do the gun justice. It can’t capture the near-mint look of the thing, and it can’t make you understand how elegant the design is. I love my S&W Victory .22, but it seems to weigh twice what this one does. John Moses Browning, who also designed the 1911 pistol and a bunch of other renowned firearms, knew how to make a gun light and pleasant to hold.

The pistol is so nice, I am reluctant to shoot it. I don’t want to get powder residue on it! But that’s silly. Firearms were made to be used.

I had thoughts about getting a holster. Not so sure now. A holster will rub against the bluing on the muzzle!

New Baby on the Way

I guess it’s silly to put up a blog post right after putting up a blog post, but my giddiness can’t be restrained. The USPS says my Colt Woodsman pistol has arrived at a local pawn shop.

Why send it to a pawn shop?

I used Gunbroker to find the gun, and Gunbroker connects buyers with dealers who have federal firearms licenses (“FFL’s”). The dealer I chose runs a pawn shop which is also a gun shop.

When you buy a gun, you have to do a federal background check, and you need a licensee for that.

I’m going to take my reading glasses this time. There is a long form to fill out, and a year or two ago, I checked the wrong box. I checked a box for something like, “I am buying this weapon so I can shoot up Congress.” There were two YES and NO boxes, and I checked the wrong one. Fortunately, a clerk corrected the error before the nerve gas drones and the guy wearing a single rubber glove arrived.

I’m not sure why the feds would write a form that allowed people to affirm that they were felons. What kind of idiot would do that?

Okay. I did it. But who would do it intentionally?

Now I remember what the form said. It said I was buying the gun for someone else, which is a felony. Slim chance of that happening. I want all the guns for myself.

If you use Gunbroker, and you choose one of their licensees, you need to put the seller and licensee together the day you buy the gun. Gunbroker is supposed to do it, but they screw up. Don’t wait like I did.

I think I’ve solved my .22 ammo problem for the short term, not that I really had a problem. A few years back, Obama’s amazing gun-selling skills resulted in a .22 drought that was unprecedented in scale. It seemed to be impossible to get .22 LR anywhere. I was scarred by the experience, so I always feel like I have a shortage.

Anyway, I found bulk CCI 36-grain Mini-mags on sale. The price wasn’t phenomenal, but I doubt I’ll see a better one.

CCI makes great stuff, even though their factory looks like it was set up in someone’s mom’s garage.

The ammo is signature ammo. It has a picture of reality star Troy something or other on the box. He’s a Cajun, and he has a side job shooting alligators. His show is called Swamp People. He zips around the swamps in a little boat, gathering gators that have bitten down on chicken legs on big shark hooks. The gators don’t like being pulled into the boat, so Troy and his pals shoot them in the head.

Troy yells, “Choot ‘im,” when it’s time to kill a gator. CCI has put “CHOOT ‘EM,” which isn’t really correct, on the boxes in big letters. So now I have a few thousand CHOOT ‘EMs on the way. Should keep me going for quite a while, and they’re not as dirty as the cheap Remington rounds I now shoot.

I’m hoping the CHOOT ‘EMs are more accurate than Remington Golden Bullets. If so, I can use up the Remingtons on close work where accuracy doesn’t matter, or I can make them my guest ammo.

I watched a little bit of the show last night. It’s a fun show, but how many times can you watch people go up to the bank of a swamp and shoot a gator in the head?

I felt bad for the gators. Fish are stupid and incrediby insensitive, so they don’t suffer a lot when they’re hooked or gaffed, but it’s disturbing to see a reptile with a big hook in its mouth or its side. They’re pretty tasty, though, and they make fantastic wallets.

Golden Bullets are perfectly okay, but the propellant is dirty, and they seem to misfire a lot. Maybe a couple of rounds out of a hundred. That’s just a guess.

MidwayUSA is selling CHOOT ‘EMs for 20% off, which is not bad.

The pawn shop called, and the gun has arrived, so color me happy. Next, I need a nickel-plated 1903 hammerless pistol in .32 ACP or .380, and then I need to put pearl grips on it, simply because George Patton didn’t like them.

I also have a bunch of pistol primers on the way. I remember how hard it was to get them when Obama was in office. What a horrible, incompetent president.

Can’t wait to see the Woodsman. Someone stole the one my grandfather and I used to shoot together, so this gun means closure.

All right, Mr. DeMille. I’m ready for my background check.

Coronavirus Pandemic Fizzling Nicely

Time for more annoying optimism RE the coronavirus outbreak.

Things continue to look bad for the nervous Nellies and tribulation fans. Right now, the number of detected cases, worldwide, is 111,362. This means we are detecting somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 cases per day, which appears to be a big drop from last week.

This is not how real plagues work. A real plague’s case total goes up exponentially until saturation is reached. UP. Not sort of sideways.

Will the picture change? What if a whole bunch of people have been exposed, and they’re going to develop symptoms and be reported in a nearly simultaneous statistical glob?

Doubtful. The average incubation period lasts 5 days. Assuming a reasonable distribution, that means around half of the cases pop up in 5 days or less. The virus has been in the US for a while now. We should have seen something by now. The US total is 565, which is probably lower than the number of Americans who found out they had tuberculosis last month.

Besides, how would a bunch of people get exposed all at once?

Maybe a bunch of Harbor Freight employees could cooperate to open a particularly nasty freight container.

I’m sticking to my prediction. The plague never happened, and it will not happen, barring a terrible mutation. Just guessing, but I’ve been right so far.

Does this mean COVID-19 won’t kill a bunch of people? No. Every year, trampolines kill a certain number of people. So do roller skates. So do coconuts, staplers, vacuum cleaners, and Beanie Babies. The world is a big place, and a lot of nutty things happen here, because that’s how probability works. Even a fairly tame epidemic like this one will take a toll when it has 7 billion people to work with. COVID-19 doesn’t have to be a plague to kill a few thousand elderly people. A real plague would infect millions or healthy people and kill a significant fraction of them.

I just read that the common cold kills 4500 people in the US every year. I’ll bet it’s true.

Now that I’m confident there will be no plague, I’m still annoyed, because there is no guarantee I won’t get sick. There are several cases in Florida, and I do not want to join them. I already had pink eye this year. That will suffice.

I don’t want to go on the cart. I feel happy.

Given the choice between the flu and COVID-19, I’d say COVID-19, all the way. The symptoms are typically much less unpleasant.

I read something interesting the other day, and it must be true, because it was on the Internet. I read that viruses tend to become less severe as they spread. I wonder if that explains what happened in Wuhan province, where COVID-19 was much worse than it is everywhere else. Maybe the disease changed, or maybe the dirty habits and poor response of the Chinese explain everything.

It’s not fashionable to say people in this country or that one are dirty, but–you know this–it’s frequently true. People in Arab countries are really dirty. The Germans are cleaner than the French. Hispanics tend to be less clean than other Americans. Black people seem to be cleaner than other Americans, as do Southerners. New Yorkers are really gross. A New Yorker will drop an ice cream cone on the sidewalk, pick it up, and eat it.

The Chinese are dirty. No two ways about it.

A friend of mine crossed China in 1983. He told of a horrifying experience there. He was on a riverboat, and meals were included with his ticket. He said there was a table, and at mealtimes, a big bowl would be placed on it. The passengers would then start grabbing food from the bowl, using chopsticks. One bowl. He said the toilet in his car on the Trans-Siberian railroad was a small hole in the floor of the restroom, and it was surrounded by rounds that had missed the target. Poo flyers. He also related a terrifying tale of a man who was employed by the state to clean people’s rear ends, with a giant swab, at a public toilet.

I hope things have improved, but current hygiene standards in China are still highly disturbing.

When I think about travel, I don’t worry about things like terrorism. I worry about encountering fecal material in every item of food and drink, and on every surface, I deal with. On the other hand, this is what happens whenever I visit someone who owns a cat.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, I visited Jerusalem maybe 3 times, and I got dysentery from Arab food twice. The Jewish food was awful; like prison food. But it was clean.

Jews can only make two things well: desserts and sandwiches. Steer clear of the other stuff. Even if it means dysentery.

I haven’t had a Nova bagel in ages. Man.

I wonder what will happen with COVID-19 in Thailand, where nose-picking in public is acceptable. They need to cut that out.

If my sunny coronavirus predictions are giving you heartburn, you should probably go away until the hubbub is over, because I don’t see myself not writing about it while the story is still in the news.

Don’t despair if you spent a lot of money on useless surgical masks. They should work pretty well for protecting you from dust in your workshop. Also, Purell is flammable, so if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to use napalm, now you may get your chance.

As for me, I am not yet ready to go about in public in a face-burqa.