You Don’t Have to be on a List Made by Men

Last week I went out with a group from The Last Reformation and did street healing. I only got to pray for one person during our outing, and her infirmity was not very glamorous. She had a sore neck. I commanded the pain to leave, and she was healed. Other people with the group also performed healings.

This stuff is unquestionably real, and it definitely comes from God. There are people out there claiming there is a “kundalini” spirit that actually performs Christian healing, and their “proof” is that sometimes problems come back. Look…if Spirit-baptized Christian can go out and heal in the name of Jesus, exactly as the apostles did, and it’s really a yoga demon doing the work…we have no chance. God isn’t going to treat us like that. He expects us to do things correctly, and Christians can be deceived, but he’s not going to set the bar so high there is no possibility of success.

One of the things I hate about movies featuring Satan is that he is depicted as all-powerful, and people who fight him are shown as weak and abandoned. Movie Satan can work all sorts of miracles, but Movie Catholic God sits in heaven and does absolutely nothing to stop him or help believers.

This is not how real life works. In real life, Satan is like a scorched dust speck compared to God, and believers are infinitely more powerful than Satan. Christians who lack information can have a lot of trouble dealing with hostile spirits, but God has not abandoned us, and there are many Christians out there exercising dominion in the name of Jesus and working genuine miracles.

People who claim we are healing by the power of demons are buying into the Movie Satan myth. Satan is not that powerful. He’s a fallen angel, and angels are a dime a dozen. He’s not ubiquitous. He’s far from omnipotent. He’s not omniscient. He doesn’t know the future. He can’t read your thoughts. When God is on your side, Satan might as well be a fly, and you’re the swatter.

As for problems coming back, well, that’s classic evil-spirit behavior. Spirits do not like being cast out. The Bible says they walk around in dry places, gather allies to help them, and try to return. Jesus said this would happen, and he certainly did not heal people by the power of a kundalini spirit.

I don’t even know what “kundalini” means. I just know it’s a term associated with Hinduism and yoga, which are things no Christian should go near.

The miracles Satan performed in the Bible were not very impressive compared to the things God did. God parted the Red Sea and made the sun stand still in the sky. The notion of an all-powerful Satan is ridiculous.

Anyway, I was thinking about miracles this morning, and it made me think about the terrible problems with Catholicism.

Catholics believe miracles are rare, and they promote the notion that only super-virtuous people can perform them. This is a great thing for Satan, because it keeps Christians weak. If you’re convinced you could never perform a miracle, you will never be a threat to Satan. He doesn’t have to fight you, because you refuse to step into the ring.

In the Catholic church, there are special people called “saints.” The Bible calls all believers saints, but the pope disagrees. To be a Catholic saint, you have to work at least two miracles, and you have to be incredibly virtuous.

Two miracles. Not two thousand. You only have to perform two miracles, and you’re in. And in spite of this very minimal requirement, only a few thousand people have made the grade in 2000 years! There should have been billions.

Satan must be giddy about this.

To make things worse, Catholics pray to saints. Praying to dead people is idolatry and necromancy. The notion of worshiping human beings came into the church back when the man-pleasers running things decided the best way to bring pagans in was to let them keep their false gods. They got to keep Zeus and Odin and whomever else they wanted to worship. They just had to call them by new names.

There is a spring in a French town called Lourdes. Catholics believe SOME people who bathe in the water there get healed. Imagine that. The Bible mentions a pool where sick people flocked. They waited for an angel to stir the water, and then whoever clambered into the water first got healed. Jesus found a man there awaiting healing, and he short-circuited the whole process. He healed him without the need for immersion. The apostles went on to heal people so powerfully that even the touch of their shadows got the job done.

So Jesus died 2000 years ago, he and his disciples proved it was no longer necessary to wait at a special spot for healing, and Catholicism has taken people back to the bad old days of waiting in line!

That is not progress.

Should I nominate myself for sainthood? I’ve had many miracle healings. The student I prayed for in North Carolina got healed, and I have gotten myself healed many times.

Last night, I realized my left thumb was bothering me, as if I had arthritis. I commanded the pain to go and so on, and I was better, instantly. This morning, I noticed a lesser problem with my right thumb, and I healed it, too. Let’s see. That’s two miracles. That’s as many as “Saint” John Paul II had, and I’m not counting the student or the many other times I’ve healed myself. Why am I not a card-carrying saint? How come I’m not on Wikipedia?

I am not a person of superhuman virtue. God still works through me, and he will work through you, too. It’s normal. Anyone who tells you you have to be super-righteous is speaking for Satan in order to keep you on the bench.

I have a friend who gets healed over and over. Should I contact the Vatican and nominate her, too?

It makes sense that God would heal through people who are clearly imperfect. His mission is to publicize himself, not you. If he only worked through extremely virtuous people, those they helped would come to worship the people, not God. This describes what happened in the Catholic Church.

Judaism has a worse problem than Catholicism. They believe there have been only 6 gentile prophets, and they believe there have been no Jewish prophets since Malachi. If God sent them a prophet tomorrow, what chance would he have?

It’s amazing how hostile human beings are to everyone God sends. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue and said he was the Messiah, his friends and neighbors, who had known him for years, promptly tried to throw him off a cliff. How would you feel if the people in your neighborhood were suddenly comfortable with the idea of throwing you off a cliff and watching your brains and viscera splatter on the rocks below?

The Jews had already killed other prophets. Christians have a long tradition of burning, slandering, and ostracizing people who are Spirit-led.

On the whole, people never change, and religious people are the most dangerous to God’s vessels!

The strangest thing about persecution of God’s servants and children is that the same people who do it end up venerating them posthumously, and they all think they wouldn’t do it again! Of course, they WOULD do it again, because they’re blind. If Jesus came back today and appeared to be a man, as he did before, Christians, Jews, and Muslims would trample each other, trying to get to him to kill him. Pagans and atheists would probably be much less of a problem, at least at first.

I’ve been persecuted by two head pastors and a number of lesser church figures, all of whom claimed to be full of the Holy Spirit! All the things I said that got me in trouble were true, and yet this happened, and NOBODY has apologized or admitted fault, even after it was obvious that they were wrong. I would be amazed if even one of them changed his mind about me.

I’m nearly nothing, what I said was clearly right, and this still happened to me. It would be much worse for Jesus.

It’s interesting when I think about it. What if my pastors had admitted I was right? They could have put me on the stage, and I could have told people some extremely helpful things. Many people might have been saved, healed, or at least spared the great financial harm of excessive offerings. By suppressing and opposing me, Rich Wilkerson Sr., Rich Wilkerson Jr., Albert Santiago, and Albert’s late wife Aleida managed to prevent a lot of people from receiving very great benefits. See Mark 9:42.

Back when I was serving at Trinity Church, Richie (Rich Jr.) actually preached against things I said. That’s how much I annoyed the family the church was designed to promote.

I remember him saying, “It’s not about how much you pray in tongues. It’s about RELATIONSHIP.” Then he ended up palling around with Kim Kardashian, who continued posing for nude photos which were published on the web.

Richie’s church is called “The Vous Church.” “‘Vous” is short for “Rendezvous,” which is what he called his Tuesday services at Trinity. I don’t think he realizes no one who hasn’t been to Trinity knows what “Vous Church” means, and he doesn’t know it should start with an apostrophe.

Anyway, here is a snippet from an Esquire article about the church:

I’ve been reporting on American religion for years. I’ve been to megachurches and tiny chapels and compounds and covens and strange temples. I’ve met believers who say Christ was a cowboy and believers who think Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was divine revelation; strippers who consider their nakedness a testimony and soldiers who etched Scripture onto their rifles. I have seen the silly and the sublime. And what always make me marvel are the layers of stories beneath even the glossiest surface, followers who bring to their faith depths averred by even the most callow leaders. Maybe that’s so at Vous, too. But never before Vous had I encountered a church that seemed so completely empty.

Another passage which didn’t shock me in the least:

When I explained that my visit to Vous’s three services was more about the church’s guests than it was about Rich himself, Rich smiled and tilted his head quizzically. I said I’d just wander around and talk with the crowd. Chris looked pained. Rich was concerned. “I don’t really know who these people are,” he said. He meant he didn’t know what they’d say. No problem, though. They’d already lined up Vous insiders for me to interview. “Bro,” Rich said, “let’s just stage it, all right?”

Vintage Richie.

You wouldn’t expect a leftist publication to be kind to a Christian pastor, but I know the Wilkersons, and these passages are exactly what I would expect an honest and perceptive unbelieving journalist to write.

It’s sad, because good things used to happen at the Rendezvous. Richie had a lot of potential.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe good things happened because of other people who were there.

At Trinity, the best things happened when the pastors were not around to put a stop to them.

Do I seem too critical? Go read Paul and see how he named names. I’m a teddy bear compared to him.

Look…you can heal people, including yourself. You can preach solid doctrine that will change lives. You can prophesy. You don’t need the pope or Joel Osteen or even Torben Sondergaard. You just need to get started. You’re as important as anyone who ever lived, so stop thinking you have to sit in a church and throw money at a man who will spend it on exotic cars, plastic surgery, tacky designer clothes, and trips to Maui.

One more thing. You don’t owe God anything. Does that sound awful? It’s not. Your past debts have been paid, and if you stumble in the future, you will be forgiven as long as you repent. If you’re saved and you confess and repent as you should, God is not blocking the good things you ask for. He wants to give them to you. You don’t have to earn them. Someone else already did that. The bills are all paid, without exception.

You don’t have to sit and wait for a saint to drag you into the spring at Lourdes. You can have a better spring that flows inside you every day. In fact, you’re supposed to BE the spring.

“Progressive” Used to Mean Something Completely Different

I have some exciting things to tell you about painting. I’m not sure if they’re true. But I was excited to learn them nonetheless.

I am making a mobile pedestal for my 8″ bench grinder. I have been at it for two weeks. Cutting and welding the metal was a one-day job, even though I made it last a little longer than that. Painting is what’s holding me back now. It takes forever to paint things.

I haven’t been at it continuously since I started. I took several days off to visit North Carolina. Still, even if I had worked at it nonstop, it would have taken a long time. Painting things is very hard, and there is no way to rush it.

I can machine pretty well. I am an okay MIG welder. I can do basic woodworking. Painting, on the other hand, is impossible. Anyone can grab a can of Krylon, spray big globs of paint on an unprimed project, and come away an hour later with a conglomeration of globs and runs that starts to peel within 6 months. Painting well is another matter. It’s highly skilled labor.

Painting house interiors is the exception to the rule. It’s very simple, and interior latex is very cooperative and easy to apply. Painting furniture and metal objects is crazy hard.

I decided to paint my base John Deere green. I think John Deere is run by, well…by people I would not want to associate with on a social basis. I did not choose the color because I liked the company. I chose it because I knew Rust-Oleum tractor paint was pretty tough, and John Deere green was the color that stood out from among the choices.

I made sure my steel was free of rust, and I cleaned it with acetone. I primed it using the recommended spray primer. Right away, I had problems. Either the primer went on like dust and covered nothing, or it ran. I had to make quite a few corrections.

Once the priming was done, I got myself a quart of paint, plus a quart of the spray equivalent in case I needed it, and I started.

The actual paint went on much more easily than the primer, probably because I used a brush. I’m starting to think that rattle-can paint doesn’t really work. It always runs or takes 15 coats. A brush gives you a lot more control, and you don’t end up wasting 75% of your paint on overspray. When you use spray cans, you’re lucky if half of the paint lands on the project.

Once the paint was on, I thought I was doing great, but when it dried, I had brush marks.

Quality paint is self-leveling. This means that even if it has brush marks when you apply it, it smooths itself out and lies flat as it dries. I have been reading up, and it looks like the EPA has put an end to all that. For some reason, they don’t like self-leveling paint. Now paint dries faster than it used to, and the brush marks are preserved forever.

In other words, unbelievably, the brush marks were not my fault.

It took a lot of Googling, but I finally found what some people think is the answer. You can probably guess what it is. It’s an additive. Lumpy paint is like ethanol-free gas. You pay for it and think you’re all set, and then you find out you have to add things to it in order to make it work.

An Australian company named Flood sells a product called Penetrol. I had never heard of it until I started this project. A reader named Tom mentioned it in a comment, but he was talking about some use that had nothing to do with brush marks. Penetrol apparently prevents paint from forming a brush-mark-preserving skin.

Tom was commenting on some welding I did, and he said it looked “like crap.” I feel that was totally unwarranted and also, arguably, a slight exaggeration. I spent some time with my Bernie Sanders and My Little Pony do Burning Man coloring book, however, and I got over it. Also, I welded plates over my worst welds and ground everything smooth, so I don’t really care how the old welds looked.

Penetrol costs almost as much as paint, of course. Environmentalism never costs you LESS money.

I got some Penetrol today, and I mixed it into my paint at a ratio of around 1:10. It seems to work. When I left the shop, the paint looked like it was flattening out. Even the areas that already had dried-in brush marks looked considerably better.

Tomorrow, I’ll look again, and that will tell me whether Penetrol actually did the job.

Environmentalists are unpopular with many people, for very good reason. They are heartless authoritarians. They tell themselves, “I am morally superior, so I don’t have to accommodate the needs of other people. I will make this rule, and if other people suffer, that’s too bad.” They don’t prepare us. They don’t inform us. They just apply their draconian measures, and the rest of us take it in the neck.

Here’s what they should have done. They should have advised manufacturers to put warnings on their labels. “NO LONGER SELF-LEVELING.” “USE ADDITIVE TO PREVENT BRUSH MARKS.” How hard would that have been? Not very.

You can’t get rid of deep brush marks once you have them. If you try to sand them out, you end up going through the paint completely so you have to redo the whole job. It would have been nice to have some idea what was in store for me so I could have prepared.

You would think Rust-Oleum would have warned customers instead of just hoping we didn’t notice.

Penetrol seems to make paint somewhat more runny. I had to correct some unexpected drips. Still, it may work out to be better than tractor paint all by itself.

I’m going to guess that the EPA hates Penetrol. It’s a workaround. I’m sure the bureaucrats, who never paint anything or have to answer to angry customers (or do anything resembling actual work in commerce), don’t like it when people weasel around their unreasonable regulations. Penetrol increases the volatile organic compounds paint releases, and VOC’s are probably the reason paint was debased to begin with.

Maybe I’m wrong about what happened to paint, but it sounds plausible, and I found evidence for the theory while surfing the web.

I wish greenies would wait for new technology that works before getting rid of important, useful products. Remember how they killed incandescent bulbs? Thousands of American factory workers were fired from their jobs, and we were forced to buy curly fluorescent bulbs that a) cost too much, b) took a solid minute to start working, c) were full of mercury, d) had very short lives, and e) were made in China, partly because of the environmental problems involved in manufacturing them.

LED’s came along a few years later. They were cheaper, they worked even better than incandescent bulbs, they were made to last a very long time, and they used very little electricity. Why couldn’t the EPA wait for technology to catch up to its aspirations? Because…leftism. Leftism is always about the sizzle, not the steak. If it gives people the superficial but erroneous impression that you’re helping Mother Gaia, it must be right, even if it’s unbelievably and obviously wrong.

Leftists’ goals are always, always urgent. They can never wait for anything.

Was there a volatile organic compound crisis that simply could not wait until paint formulations that actually worked were developed? If so, I did not notice it.

My wild guess is that we will have paint that works within a couple of years. Until then, people all over the country will be cursing and blaming themselves, wondering why their favorite products now produce projects that look like hammered poo.

Here’s something else that’s interesting: I’m reading that some people have concluded that priming metal projects is actually detrimental. Can that be true? Surely Rust-Oleum wouldn’t make me spend three days priming a project when they know perfectly well I can just apply the paint and have perfect (but for the brush marks) results.

I should paint a piece of bare steel while I’m doing this, just to see what happens. I can throw it out behind the shop, let the rain and sun hit it, and check on it from time to time.

While I’m on the subject of painting, I think paint makers should put realistic instructions on their cans. For example, they should quit saying paint dries thoroughly in 24 hours when it actually stays soft for at least a couple of weeks. A few years back, I painted a project and thought it looked great. Then I let something touch it a few days later, and the paint sort of slid in the area where the touching occurred. The paint was Rust-Oleum hammered finish spray paint. It takes forever to get hard. I just used it again and had the same problem.

I have read that Penetrol will serve as a primer. They say it’s so good you can actually paint bare steel with it and then leave it as it is, outdoors. I don’t know if I should try priming with it next time, or if I should forget about priming altogether.

I guess the summary here is a) painting is hard, b) paint takes weeks to dry thoroughly, c) you need an additive to get rid of brush marks, and d) if you think you’re going to weld something up today, paint it tomorrow, and use it the day after, you are living in a fool’s paradise.

Actually, there is more. I know of a product which is better than paint OR Penetrol, so I’ll toss it out there. Duplicolor truck bed coating. It’s really a type of spray paint. I’ve used it on mobile bases. It sprays just like paint, it dries quickly, and it becomes so hard and tough it can be difficult to tell it from mill scale. I think it only comes in black, however. Anyway, if the EPA hasn’t ruined it, it’s a fantastic product.

Another interesting product: CRC Rust Converter. Apply it to rusted metal, and it forms a tough black coating. AVOID IT. Why? Because it can give off phosgene gas when you heat it. Extremely dangerous. I don’t mean “You might inhale two micrograms of VOC’s” dangerous. I mean actual danger of observable real-world harm. Phosgene will do severe, permanent lung damage the first time you inhale it. What if you use CRC Rust Converter, forget about it, and then repurpose the steel 5 years later? You might find yourself welding it and then moving into an oxygen tent.

I hope the mobile base looks good tomorrow. Regardless, I’m going to keep painting until none of the white primer is visible, and then I’m going to mount the bench grinder on the base. If it’s not perfect, I’ll consider it a lesson learned, and I’ll do better when I make my next project.

I am Here to Beat You With the Truth

God is showing me interesting things.

I wrote about Torben Sondergaard, the man who started The Last Reformation. The Danish press and government ran him out of Denmark. They passed a new law against “mental violence,” in response to the things his ministry did. The theory is that “mental violence” should be punished as though it were physical violence. Under the new law, casting a demon out of a person, in front of a minor or someone who has a disabiity, is mental violence.

It sounds very silly to sane Americans. In America, one of the marks of ignorant, unsuccessful cultures is that their members believe it’s okay to respond to words with physical force, equating words with violence. For example, many people think it’s okay to respond to a racial slur with a punch to the face. Of course, it’s not okay, nor is it legal. No matter how offensive you find words, you can’t touch another person simply because you object to what they say.

We know that words can’t be violence, in the traditional sense of our laws. People here who are still sane are amazed to see grown millennials whimpering and running to college deans and town councils, trying to get them to silence people who say things that challenge them. It’s an extremely pathetic spectacle. Today’s pampered, effeminate babies are nothing like the young men who swarmed recruiting centers on December 8, 1941, begging to be sent overseas to face Japanese bombs and machine guns.

These things are true, but still, God showed me that the speech-phobics have a plausible reason for trying to muzzle the rest of us.

Jesus said we were not defiled by what we ate. The Jews of his time were very serious about the dietary laws God had given them, but Jesus pointed something out: the things that defile a man are the things that come out of him. Forbidden foods didn’t actually defile people.

Somewhere deep inside each of us, there is a greatest depth, and the things we do and say start at this depth. Words and acts begin as urges from very far inside us. What you do and say depends on, and reveals, what you’re like at your greatest depth.

If you have a pure heart, you don’t just refrain from evil. It doesn’t even occur to you to do it or say it. Down deep, there is no seed that can grow into an evil word or deed. This is why God can’t be tempted. He has no desire to do evil.

Jesus said people who hated their brothers were murderers. You can be silent and choose not to act and still be counted among murderers, simply because you have the urge.

In Judaism, harming people with words is equated with murder. To God, “murderer” doesn’t just mean “person who has committed murder.” It describes a class of people by their intentions and desires, regardless of what they have actually done.

How is this relevant to the mental violence law and the astounding fragility of millennials? God showed me.

Americans are falling away from God, and most millennials don’t know him. That means they’re ruled by demons. When a spirit has great influence in you, it tries to express itself through you. This is why young people are obsessed with tattoos, self-mutilation, and the strange fashions we see today. It’s no coincidence that they tend to look like Nazis or prison inmates. Those people were heavily influenced by demons before hipsters and millennials came along. As demonic influence spreads, more and more people start to look the way demons want them to look.

Splitting your tongue and having painful hardware rammed through your genitals isn’t self-expression. It’s demon expression. You’re expressing the desires and passions of a dead person who has come to live in you.

It’s interesting. Demons are dead people who were sired by fallen angels (Matthew 23:27), and God removed them from the physical world. Now, through us, they have a chance to be born into bodies again. There is always symmetry in the supernatural, even when it comes to being born again.

In the physical world, casting a demon out is not violence. Here, language and violence are two different things. In the supernatural world, that’s not true. Exposing a demon and casting it out is similar to slandering someone or hating your brother. It expresses an intent to destroy. In the depths of your heart, if you cast out demons, you are similar to a murderer of demons. That’s how they see it. They fear you the way early Christians feared Saul of Tarsus.

The story of creation is a story of genocide. God and Satan are trying to rid the world of each other’s children. We really want demons to be gone for good, and they want a world where people like us don’t exist and can’t obstruct their plans. As far as demons are concerned, what we do to them is violence.

We’re going to lose. The word makes that clear. More and more laws will be passed. Physical violence toward us will be sanctioned by governments. We will have less and less success in reaching people. When things get so bad the return on God’s investment no longer justifies keeping us here, he will remove us. Then he’ll return and destroy the world so he can rebuild it and give it back to us. We will rule in the physical world as well as the supernatural world.

Torben refers to his ministry’s new property as an ark. You don’t need an ark if you’re going to win. An ark is a shelter for people who need protection. If we were going to win, Satan would be the one providing arks. He’s not doing that. He’s taking over cities and making a show of himself.

Speaking in obedience to the Holy Spirit should not be considered violence under our laws. The only forms of speech that have traditionally been restricted are very dangerous forms, like threatening to hurt people while you’re close enough to do it. It’s legal to say very nasty things. You can call someone’s mother a whore, legally, and if the response is violence, you can have the person you insulted arrested. No one should say things like that, but our laws shouldn’t equate it with violence. We live in a physical world, and laws that make sense in the supernatural realm don’t always make sense here.

Demons are very afraid of us, and they know we’re infinitely more powerful than they are. They really need to silence us in order to make their lives less miserable. They won a big battle in Denmark. Now you know what it was all about.

Remember what Jesus said to demons? He didn’t just tell them to leave. He said, “Be muzzled!” He didn’t let them say much. He knew how dangerous words could be. After all, he is the word of God, and look how dangerous he is. He is the most terrifying enemy imaginable. There is absolutely no way to protect yourself from him.

To the demon-infested, the Holy Spirit is a demon (John 10:20; John 7:20). It’s only natural that they should try to muzzle him by passing laws against us, as the ancient Jews tried (John 9:22; Acts 4:18). None of this should surprise us at all. It’s actually a great honor to endure this. If we were doing things completely wrong, people in power would be giving us honorary doctorates, putting us on corporate boards, and presenting us with Oscars.

We Use the Wrong Bait

This weekend, I visited North Carolina State University (which I thought was the University of North Carolina) and did street healing with a group of Christians. Our outing was a success. No one we worked on failed to receive a healing.

This morning, I was thinking about our experience, and I drifted off and imagined myself talking to a young university student about God. I didn’t really get to speak this weekend. This morning, I heard myself telling her the things I wish young people knew about God.

Jesus visited me twice. On the first occasion, the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the way it felt to be near him. I knew everything was going to be all right, no matter what. I felt his love radiating toward me. The second time, I felt these things again. I felt his love in my heart, mind, and body. My body felt a warm sensation, as though Jesus were a fireplace and I were sitting in front of him.

I imagined myself telling a college student this, and I started thinking it was too bad Jesus wasn’t there so she could feel it firsthand.

When I had that thought, something occurred to me. I’m supposed to be like Jesus. I should not have to get him to come down and visit in order for someone to feel his love physically. They should feel it emanating from me.

That was sobering. Christians always say we’re supposed to be little replicas of Jesus, and we do what we think he would do, including working miracles, but who is out there pouring supernatural love out so strongly other people can feel it in their bodies? Nobody. Maybe someone is doing it, but I have never heard anything about it.

For years, I’ve believed I was supposed to radiate love other people could feel, and I prayed for it, but somehow this morning I started to feel much more serious about it.

The secular world loves to accuse us. They love saying we’re full of hate. It’s not hard to find angry Christians (or to torment us until we become angry so we can be used as visual aids), so unbelievers look for Christians who are not exactly radiating love, and they give them a lot of publicity.

Christians are doing wonderful things all over the world, but unbelievers don’t like to let the news get out. We heal people. Many have raised the dead. I just met a lady who has adopted 15 kids and given them a home and a family. These things are not unusual, but they’re not what you see when you turn on the news. You’re more likely to see the Westboro Baptist Church, which is so small it can fit in three vans, waving signs that say, “God hates fags.”

Worldly people can find all sorts of angry Christians to publicize, and they avoid shining a light on Christians who do good. Many unbelievers think of us as rage-filled potential terrorists who need to be stamped out. Maybe it would be different if it were common for a Christian to get on a bus and overwhelm everyone he walked past with the sensation of radiant love. Maybe it would never make the TV news, but at least it would impact the people we met and show them they were wrong about us and about God.

God can drop supernatural love into you. It has happened to me on a number of occasions. It’s a strange thing. It makes your face feel warm. You stop thinking about the ways other people provoke you. You feel affection for them. It happens, but in my case, it has been a fleeting thing.

It has happened to me a few times during the last few weeks. It happened while I was driving home from North Carolina. I try to hold onto it. I try not to let anything that works against it enter my mind.

These days, I tell God I love him. I tell him over and over. I do love him, but sometimes other things occupy my mind, and I don’t feel it. I have learned to think about and remember my feelings for him. It seems to help a great deal.

When it comes to other people, I say I love them. I make a point of doing this with people who are annoying and hateful. I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t go see them so I can say it in their presence, but I say it, even when I don’t feel it at first.

I suppose these are tools God has given me to get unblocked and get the love flowing.

Is it a lie to say you love someone who gets on your nerves, when you don’t feel it at first? Not if it changes the way you feel and becomes true.

A big benefit of supernatural love is that it kills worry and fear. I do not like worry and fear. Dropping my petty grievances seems like a small price to pay for freedom.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the kind of love strangers can feel just because I’m nearby, but I want anything I can get.

I cringe when I see Christians promoting debate. I hate the very idea of little cards and pamphlets that help you “win” arguments with unbelievers. No one comes to God because he lost an argument! Christianity is supernatural, and people are won over supernaturally. They need to see supernatural power, and they need to feel supernatural love. Take away someone’s physical illness and make him feel the heat of God’s love, and he will know his arguments are garbage and that he has been missing out.

Argument is carnal and ineffective. There will always be a way to use logic against belief. There will always be an anti-faith argument that looks really good. On top of that, human beings believe what they want, not what the facts tell them. You have to present them with something they want.

This was on my mind this morning, and I thought it was important enough to write about.

TLR Kickstart in Raleigh

To say I had an interesting weekend would be an understatement.

When I travel, I don’t blog it until I get home. Blogging your trips is like asking people to rob your house. I was away for 5 days, and now I’m back. I went to a Last Reformation “kickstart” event in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I only have one friend from childhood, and that’s my choice. I don’t have anything in common with any friends I had when I was a kid, except for my buddy Mike. We met when I was in the third grade, if memory serves. I lived in house on a northeast corner, and his family moved into the house on the southwest corner.

We haven’t always kept in touch, and I guess I would have drifted off, but Mike dug me up and contacted me every so often, and that kept the friendship alive.

I went to the kickstart for two reasons: I wanted to participate in street healing, and I wanted to help Mike get a proper baptism, including the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues.

The original plan was to have a baptism here at the house, but then I learned about the kickstart. It was in Appalachia, sort of, and I feel drawn there. I thought it might give me a chance to visit Tennessee and look at properties. I also thought, wrongly, that it would enable me to get a look at the new Last Reformation center near Charlotte, which is actually over a hundred miles from the location where the kickstart was held.

I felt it would be good for Mike to meet other Spirit-led Christians, and I thought he would learn some important things from the teaching, so off we went. He flew to Charlotte from New Hampshire, and I drove from Ocala, picked him up, and took him to Raleigh.

I have to say that I didn’t like Raleigh at all. The traffic is terrible, and drivers are pretty rude. The city seems invisible. I found myself putting in a lot of car miles on tree-insulated highways that all looked the same. It wasn’t possible to see anything that looked like a city. I just saw highways and malls, except for a visit to the University of North Carolina.

The people there aren’t particularly nice, and that surprised me. I suppose it’s because it’s a college town. It’s full of people who came from other places, and it draws leftists, who are not the nicest people there are. It’s nothing like Ocala. Living here is like getting a hot oil massage all day. The people are wonderful.

I really dislike cities now. In spite of all the good things that happened in Raleigh, I was very happy to leave and return to my farm. I hope I never have to visit Raleigh again.

The trip did not start well. I slept poorly the night before I left. I don’t recall the reason. The next day, after picking Mike up, I made the mistake of drinking an Arnold Palmer, which is tea mixed with lemonade. We shared a room in order to save Mike money, and between the effects of the caffeine and the difficulty of sleeping near someone who snores, I barely slept. This was after driving 600 miles at one crack, so when we got to the event the next morning, I was eager to go but not feeling my best.

The two most prominent figures in the Last Reformation are Torben Sondergaard and his friend Jon Bjarnastein. They are not essential to the success of events, but they showed up. Torben drove from Charlotte, where he now lives.

Torben spoke a lot. We heard more of his testimony concerning his expulsion from Denmark and the way God provided his new headquarters near Charlotte. I wish I could recall it all.

He made the mistake of allowing a Danish TV crew to film him for a “documentary,” and of course, it turned out to be an anti-Christian hit piece. They followed his group as well as some corrupt ministries, including one headed by someone accused of molesting girls. When the edited footage was shown on Danish television, Torben became a pariah. People sent him emails accusing him of pedophilia because they confused him with the other preacher. Politicians said the Last Reformation abused children and the disabled by casting demons out in front of them.

The Danish legislature passed a law against “mental violence” because of Torben. They declared that mental violence should be punished the same way real violence was punished.

Sound familiar? Remember the pampered, faint-hearted millennials who had to cuddle puppies and use coloring books because Trump got elected?

I probably disagree with you about something. This makes you a victim of mental violence. I hope you won’t have me arrested.

Since mental violence is just as bad as physical violence, I assume it’s okay to respond with physical force. I would think the law would permit you to punch people who talk about Jesus, in order to protect yourself from harm.

One day someone called Torben and told him he needed to leave Denmark. The authorities were preparing something for him, and he needed to go. He and his family filled 8 suitcases and left their home in the middle of the night. They came here and applied for asylum.

They ended up in South Florida at first. Torben was concerned about money. A man called him and said that if he ever needed money for rent and so on, he could help. Torben thought he was responding to the stories about the flight from Denmark, but it turned out the man knew nothing about it.

Torben was staying in Palm Beach, and he was about to travel, flying out of the Fort Lauderdale airport. The man told him he lived near the airport. They agreed to meet. The man met him at the terminal and gave him an envelope. When he left, Torben found that he had been given $50,000.

TLR started looking for a new center. They believed they were going to take a property in New Jersey. Someone told them about the North Carolina property, and they decided to visit, thinking it might be a good idea to buy it in a few years.

For some reason, they visited the Ark Encounter first, in Kentucky. This is a tourist attraction. It’s a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. While they were visiting, Torben’s daughter asked him how Noah got the animals to go into the ark. He told her God, not Noah, brought them.

When they arrived at the property, the owner came out to greet them. He told them he was Noah and that they were the first animals to enter the ark.

They hadn’t been in communication. Torben was using a realtor.

The property is a 50-acre resort with dozens of rooms and an RV park. The owner was a Christian. He said God had told him to buy the place. He hadn’t used it for anything. He had kept the grass mowed, and that was about it.

The owner wanted $2.2 million, but after talking to Torben, he dropped the price to $1.2 million. Torben didn’t have it. Another man contacted him. He was in the process of selling a home in another state. He said he wanted to donate the proceeds, expected to be in the area of $800,000. Torben didn’t want to borrow money. The sellers agreed to lease it with an option to buy.

In a very short period, Torben went from having nowhere to live to having a huge property, with the prospect of having a huge amount of equity right from the start.

It gets weirder. Their air conditioners needed work. They were going to hire someone. A man from Canada said he wanted to visit. They asked him about himself. He said he was a retired air conditioning repairman. Problem solved. One day, Torben’s wife said the property needed a fence. Before they could buy one, a man who owned a fence company said he wasn’t busy, and he wanted to give them a fence for nothing.

Torben said some other amazing things. You have to remember that he’s Danish. He hasn’t been watching CNN every day for the last 10 years. He can’t be expected to fully understand what American Christians deal with. Nonetheless, he described our political problem perfectly. He said things were going well now because we had a friend in the White House. He said things would eventually change. Rage was building up on what he called “the other side,” and when that side regained power, we would have the kind of problems Christians now have in Denmark and other countries.

How long have I been saying that?

He said there was a “Satanic lullabye” in America that had put the church to sleep. We’re obsessed with money and our own desires, so we are prosperous but fat and weak.

I enjoyed hearing this, because I knew there were Christians there who were Democrats. It’s surprising how many charismatics don’t pray in the Spirit, don’t hear from God, and don’t understand how evil the Democratic Party and leftism are. The people at the kickstart had a lot of respect for Torben, and now they were hearing about politics from him. It was a good correction for them.

He mentioned Chick-fil-A. It’s funny how a fast food chain has become such a big deal to Christians. He had an encounter at a Chick-fil-A, and he told about it. He loves the food there. I don’t know if he’s aware of the persecution from homosexuality activists.

I’m conflating things he said over several days.

They put us in groups, and we went out to heal. Our group had two little girls in it. I would say they were around 6 years old. They healed people. Nothing spectactular; we didn’t see legs grow back. But they took away pain.

I only got to pray for one person. We were across the street from UNC, and I prayed for a girl named Beatrice. She was having neck pain. Sure enough, it went away.

At lunch, we talked a lot and saw how similar our views were. The Holy Spirit is binding people together. That was nice. We also discussed problems and errors. We talked about the Sozo/Bethel movement, which is something a lot of people are concerned about. None of us thought Bethel was a sound movement.

The Sozo people will tell you to imagine a traumatic event in your life and ask Jesus to show you where he was when it happened. People who go through it will say things like, “He said he was by the door, and this is what he felt.” I gave it a sincere try once out of consideration for a close friend who is involved in it, and nothing whatsoever happened. I haven’t seen anything like their approach in the Bible.

Our group was late leaving the church where the kickstart was held. Our leader, a guy named Ash, had a lot of responsibilities to handle. A lady with demonic issues was on the floor while other groups left, with members of our group praying for her and casting spirits out.

I joined the group and sat a few feet away. The lady writhed and foamed at the mouth. She made sounds like an angry animal. A woman named Jen was at her head, and Jen does not do well with spit, so she had to leave the room. She asked me to take her place, so I sat down behind the demonized lady, who I will call Sally, and put my hands on her shoulders. I resumed telling the spirits they had to leave.

She started to convulse, and we had to get a wastebasket in case she was sick. The spirits left her, and peace filled her.

Afterward, she said that while she was on the ground, it hurt to look at the people trying to deliver her. She said they shined with a very bright light. She wanted to look at them, but it was too hard.

We had to repeat the process the next day. That’s normal. Spirits like to try to come back. They are probably ordered to do it.

Had it not been for Sally’s need, we would have been able to pray for more people on the street.

On Sunday, we were prepared for baptism. Mike kept saying he wanted me to do it. They had kiddie pools out back, but he wanted to do it at our hotel. I told him we would do whatever he wanted. He listened to the lecture, and he talked to Ash for a while. Then he decided he could not be baptized at the event.

We left and drove 8 miles to the hotel.

Mike was concerned because I couldn’t sleep, so he decided to get a room for himself. He picked the worst possible time. He did it while we were supposed to be getting him baptized and running back to the event. It took a very long time. Instead of waiting until later, he packed all of his things and tried to move them to the new room. Obviously, this could have waited.

This is normal. When evil spirits know you’re about to do something good, they will do their best to obstruct. They may come up with “urgent” things you absolutely have to do first.

He checked into a hotel 350 feet away, and there were delays. He couldn’t actually go into his room until they cleaned it, so he had to bring all of his things back to my room.

He put on shorts, and we went to the pool. There were three boys splashing and yelling. We couldn’t wait any more. We had to do it.

I put him under, baptizing him with water and the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, and he got back out. We started walking out. One of the boys asked Mike if he liked McDonald’s. He said he did. I told them Chick-fil-A ruled!

Back at the room, Mike was highly disturbed. I don’t want to into it, but baptism was overwhelming for him. You expect to see this kind of thing with women, but men tend to be harder to upset. I was shocked to see how profoundly he was affected. It took quite a while for him to recover.

He then took a surprisingly long shower and took quite a while to get dressed. We were absent from the event for a couple of hours. I was afraid we would miss everything. I wanted to be sure someone other than me got to help him release the gift of tongues.

The lady with the demon problem was on the ground again, so I joined the group and got to work. Mike sat by himself and talked with God. When we beat the demons again, a young man needed help praying in tongues. I kept telling him he needed to start moving his mouth on his own. People tend to demand that God make them speak. It was taking him quite a while to get going, and it didn’t look like I was needed, so I went and talked to Mike.

When the young man started speaking in tongues, Ash and I took Mike inside, and Ash counseled him. We prayed for him and stuck by him, and after a while, the gift was released.

Mission accomplished.

After things wound down, Mike wanted to rest. He was very drained. I drove him to his hotel, and then I returned to the kickstart. I was wiped out from lack of sleep and driving, but I was not going to miss out.

The next day was a day of prayer and testimony and so on, and thank God, we didn’t start until 2 p.m.

Mike had to go to Cancun for dental work, so I had to pick him up at 7:30 the next morning, drop him at the airport, and drive home alone. I stopped at a Chick-fil-A for breakfast, and I got out my laptop and looked at maps and routes. I wanted to go Tennessee very badly.

I prayed and surfed, and eventually, I felt that God was telling me to go home, so I got in the car, and I finally arrived at my gate at 6:30 p.m.

I am surprised to see how much I had to do for Mike. I think of him as a sturdy, resilient guy who is anything but needy, but he needed a lot of help and patience this weekend. It reminded me of looking after my dad, and that’s very strange. I wonder how much of it was due to supernatural opposition.

I highly recommend TLR kickstarts. I am never going to join TLR, Bethel, the Royal Family, or any other denomination, and I am not suggesting they don’t make mistakes, but what they do is generally right, and it’s very powerful.

If you want to hear about TLR errors, I can mention a few things.

First, Tom Loud, a Royal Family/Identity preacher disagrees with some TLR doctrines. His belief is that they think you can’t be saved unless you get water-baptized and you speak in tongues. I don’t know if this is what they believe or not; I’m just relating what his secretary told me. I don’t think omitting these things will land you in hell. I could not baptize my dad before he died, and I saw no indication that he spoke in tongues, but I’m very confident he made it.

Second, Torben says he got driven out of Denmark because he didn’t listen when God spoke softly. He says he was comfortable with what he was doing in Denmark, so he didn’t pay attention when God started telling him to leave, and then he had to leave in the middle of the night, under threat of imprisonment and losing his kids.

That sounds like a mistake.

I have had concerns because I am so comfortable here. I have a magnificent house and farm. I love the people here. There is very little traffic. I keep feeling that God wants me in Tennessee, but I like it here, and I can’t seem to find a property that resembles what my heart tells me he wants for me.

I don’t want to leave at the point of a gun! I want to go early, when I’m not rushed.

Ash and I talked. He said he used to have a big house with a music studio. He sold it and started renting. Now he thinks God is telling him to get something he can move around in, like an RV or trailer.

Together with Mike, we prayed that God would show both of us where to go and that he would help us make whatever moves needed to be made.

Yesterday, I had the strangest sensation. I started driving home, and I realized I didn’t want to go back to Florida! This house is a treasure, but I didn’t want to go. I believe God is answering our prayers.

TLR is doing good work, and you can find information about their events on their website. If you’re tired of boring Christianity in which nothing ever seems to happen, you might want to give them a try.

Movie Hate Feeds your Demons

I had an interesting experience yesterday.

I watch Youtube a lot. It’s full of good Christian material, it has many valuable educational videos, and it gives me something to do when I’m spending time with my pets. Yesterday on a whim, I clicked on a couple of thumbnails for videos taken from the movie Heartbreak Ridge.

If you haven’t seen this movie, I can sum it up. Clint Eastwood (who actually spent the Korean War as an Army lifeguard in North Carolina) is a tough Marine sergeant with lots of combat medals. He takes over a platoon of spoiled punks. In the process, he beats a lot of people up and turns his platoon into a top-notch fighting machine.

Clint’s character says lots of crude things during the film. He makes fun of homosexuals and suggests other men have done perverted things with housecats.

It’s a funny movie. Not the gentlest kind of humor, though.

I watched a couple of fight scenes from the movie, but I quit because I felt it wasn’t healthy to keep watching people vent their rage. Christians are supposed to be full of warm, affectionate love, so I stopped watching.

I talked to God about it, and he gave me this: watching actors do cruel and vengeful things is just as bad as pornography!

This pretty much kills about 60% of screen entertainment for me. James Bond, John Wick, every superhero, most Clint Eastwood characters, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris…what’s left? Chick flicks? No way! I’m not going to sit through two hours of cancer, adultery, shattered dreams, self-pity, veganism, blind self-righteousness, and man-bashing.

I don’t know why women enjoy films about misery. Strangest thing. Maybe it feeds the victim complex many women wallow in. Women are more manipulative than men, and wallowing in self-pity is a great strategy for manipulators. It has worked for moms and wives throughout history.

Watching cruelty and revenge is a lot like watching porn (so I hear…*cough*). It’s highly stimulating. You get drawn in emotionally. Many of us are subjected to abuse and injustice in this life, and when we see actors beating their bullies, we get some of the pleasure of fighting back and making abusers taste their own medicine. It can be very satisfying to see an actor blown up, crushed, mutilated, or whatever.

It should be obvious that the pleasure is in our flesh, not our spirits. When we enjoy this stuff, we give power to the flesh, and the flesh is the enemy of God. It has to be subjugated so the spirit can rule.

I gave up what I call “revenge porn” some time ago, but I didn’t realize how bad it was for me until last night. I have to avoid watching even short clips, the same way I avoid watching erotic videos.

To be close to God, you have to be distant from the world. This has become obvious to me. I can see why John the Baptist moved to the wilderness and why Jesus spent so much time alone. If you immerse yourself in the culture of the world, one of two things will happen. You will be corrupted, or you will simply feel fatigued and disgusted, as though you were being forced to share an apartment with pedophiles and pimps.

I’ve noticed that the closer I get to God, the more people I lose and the less contact I have with corrupt cultures. This is why God moved me out of Miami. It’s a sick, twisted place. God recognized me as a son, and he doesn’t want his sons stuck in places like Miami. Going there briefly to minister is okay. Living there is not.

He moved me to a better place. I have improved considerably since I’ve been here, and I think this is why I feel like moving to an even cleaner area.

This is why the rapture will take place. The world will be extremely filthy, and God’s remnant will be too clean to stay here and be subjected to it.

I love the area where I live, but I have suffered a lot here. I thought about it yesterday. I went back and read things I wrote while I was taking care of my dad and after his death. Looking after him was very, very hard, even though I didn’t understand it at the time.

I witnessed a lot of things that were painful to see. He deteriorated the whole time he lived up here. He lost his dignity. He became a weak little old man who walked like a toddler. He had to start using a walker. He then ended up in a wheelchair. Strangers came to the house to bathe him. He lost the power to control his life. We reached the point where he had to ask me for things, like a child asking a parent. “Can we do this?” “Can we go there?”

I had to go and sit with him in an assisted living facility every day. I made him cookies so he would have some sense that someone cared about him.

There were financial issues that were extremely stressful. It took me a long time to get them under control.

While he lived in this house, it became filthy. He developed a habit of rubbing spit on things, which was too much for me to take. He defiled the food in the kitchen. I had to clean up messes of types that shouldn’t exist in a first world house.

It was tough, and now, even though I love this property, when I look around, I think about the difficult times a lot. I also miss my dad. I feel as though he should be out walking on the private road I live on, as he used to. Sometimes I feel as though I should drive to the ALF to see him, because it’s that time of day.

I don’t want to go back to dealing with the negative parts of his personality. They were oppressive. I don’t miss that. I wouldn’t want the pre-salvation Dad to come back to life and return to me. But I still miss him sometimes.

If I go somewhere else, I won’t have to see the place where he sat every afternoon or the area of the front porch where he used to read his newspapers. I will never catch myself calling a new place “our house.”

I suffered tremendously in Miami. So did my mother. My dad and my sister were abusers, so they weren’t as unhappy. Abuse is all about putting your unhappiness in other people; you use them as emotional toilets. They were causing most of the suffering. When I left Miami, I was thrilled to escape a place where so many painful things had happened. I may have a similar feeling if I leave Ocala, even if this area is a much, much nicer place to live.

Here’s what I think: if you want God to move you away from a place where you’re unhappy because of the nature of the people around you, you need to be sanctified to the point where you won’t be a liability in a better place. God takes pains to move his people to areas where they fit in better. Why would he ruin that by inviting you, if you’re not ready? If you insist on hanging onto the world’s culture, you’ll just defile your new surroundings and make his other children unhappy.

Sometimes I’m afraid that if I move, I’ll never have another home I love as much as this one. But isn’t that typical of people who refuse to grow? If you take that attitude in life, you will resist leaving the womb. You have to be willing to let go of the old in order to receive new things that are better.

I plan to continue the sanctification process. I don’t want to be submerged in a sick culture any more than I have to. To insist on hanging onto unproductive things is to fight God.

Grinder Pedestal Becomes Obsession

Today I succumbed to perfectionism. I welded metal caps over the ends of the tubes in the foot of my new grinder pedestal, and I faired the new metal in so it would look original.

I made the pedestal over the weekend. I thought I was done with the metalworking last night, but I kept thinking about the raggedy ends on tubes. I couldn’t take it. I had to do something. This was AFTER I had already welded plates inside the ends of the tubes.

At first I planned to grind the ends of the tubes flush with the plates I had already welded inside them, but I saw that the tubes were too short to permit this. The casters attach with bolts, and the bolt holes are close to the ends of the tubes. If I had ground the tubes shorter, the washers under the bolt heads would have protruded past the tubes. That wouldn’t do.

I cut 4 pieces of 1″ x 1/8″ bar. I used tiny magnets to hold each one on the end of a tube. I welded them in place, and then I ground everything down with an angle grinder and an amazing Walter flap disk. These disks are wonderful. They eat metal like crazy, they leave a good finish, and you can trim them to get more life out of them.

This little project illustrates something I love about metal. It was the world’s first plastic. You can nail and screw wood together, but you can’t cast or mold wood, and you can’t put wood back once you cut it off. When you work metal, you can do just about anything. Cast, mold, bend, and weld. If you cut something too short, you can make it long again, as long as the type of metal permits it.

When you look at these tubes from outside, it looks like they began life as solid bars. You can’t tell the metal on the ends was added to them. It looks like it was always there.

If you opened them up, you would find two layers of welded-in plate, plus some nasty-looking weld beads. Doesn’t matter. No one is going to open them up.

Now I have peace. I don’t have to worry about bugs crawling in and out of my grinder stand. They have no way in. I should also note that the column is hermetically sealed with weld. If archaeologists ever want to find out how my workshop smelled in 2019, all they’ll have to do is open the column. It’s full of captive 2019 air.

I should have done this before welding the bottom of the pedestal together. It would have been a lot easier.

Tomorrow, I plan to throw a coat or two of primer on the steel. If that goes well, I can get started on paint.

I’m bummed out now because I’m out of welding projects. I think I need to get to work on an arbor press stand. My arbor press is on the workshop floor, in the way. That has to change.

Yesterday I was excited because I was able to see what I was welding. I’ve been taking vitamin A, and it appears that I can see weld puddles better now. Today was frustrating, because I had trouble seeing again. It was so humid in the shop, my glasses and helmet fogged up as soon as I put them on. Can you believe that? I finally get to where I can see what I’m doing, and the weather steps in to take away my joy.

Guess I’ll design an arbor press stand and get to work.

The Faint Smell of Competence is in the Air

Yesterday I finished building my new bench grinder pedestal. I exaggerate somewhat. It still needs to be painted, and I’m thinking of grinding some metal down to make it look better.

It was a big job. Took two sessions over two days. I used aluminum welding squares made by Fireball Tool.

For a long time, I only had one welder. I had a Lincoln PowerMIG 180C, on a Lincoln cart. The cart was not good. It didn’t really fit the welder. I upgraded to a bigger two-tier cart from Eastwood. The Eastwood cart had a defective part, so I complained. They sent me a second cart for nothing. I fixed the defective cart, and I used it to hold my plasma cutter and bench grinder.

The cart was okay, but it was very low to the ground, and it was bulky and hard to maneuver. This is why I built a grinder pedestal. I wanted something higher and more nimble.

I didn’t want a heavy pedestal. One of the pitfalls amateur fabricators fall into is the belief that heavier is always better. In reality, one of the big goals of competent engineering is to reduce material waste. If you’re building, say, metal shelves, you don’t want to spend $50 per unit on steel when you can spend $15. I could have gone with heavy tubing, but I decided to use rectangular tubing with 1/8″ walls.

The pedestal only has one column. I used 3″ x 3″ square tubing. This stuff will support thousands of pounds, so the 90 or so pounds it will carry won’t challenge it at all. The only thing to be concerned about was rigidity, and it’s pretty hard to flex a 3″-square tube by pushing a piece of metal into a grinding wheel. By “hard,” I mean, “clearly impossible.”

You can buy cast iron pedestals that probably have walls 1/4″ thick. It sounds good when you’re telling your buddies about your cool new “beefy” pedestal, but if you make a pedestal that way, you’ve added weight and cost without realizing any benefit. You’ll regret it the first time you have to move it.

Speaking of moving, I was determined to have casters. The more things you put on wheels, the bigger your shop will seem. I had a set of casters on hand already, so I was ready to go.

For the top, I planned to use a 10″ square of 1/8″ plate. The metal dealer was not able to provide that when I showed up late on Friday, but they sold me a 16″ square that was a drop, so I saved some money, and I decided not to cut it down, because I could use the extra area for things if the need arose. Some people like to clamp fixtures in front of their grinding pedestals.

I have been afraid to weld complicated objects like this because of an experience I had with my arbor press. I made a stand for it, using scrap taken from a door at my dad’s old house. I lined the parts up well when I welded them, but when I stood the stand up, it wobbled. It was warped. I didn’t know metal would warp that badly when welded, and I didn’t know how to prevent it.

When you weld little things, warpage usually doesn’t matter. If you put a 5° bend in a part 8″ long, you probably won’t even see it. In a part three feet long, it’s different.

I want to create a welding table, or at least a set of legs and a frame for one. One of the purposes of a welding table is to provide a flat reference surface for projects. A lot of people use their garage floors, but concrete floors aren’t really flat. I had a problem. I wanted a welding table in order to allow me to weld things flat and square, but I needed a welding table in order to create a flat and square base…for the welding table.

There are various ways to get around this problem. You can make your own jigs, which may or may not work. I chose the easy way. I bought myself two welding squares.

A little company named Fireball Tool produces a lot of innovative items for tool users. They make welding squares cast from thick iron and aluminum. They machine the castings to get flat surfaces and correct angles. You can clamp things to the squares before you weld them, and the squares will help them remain aligned until they cool.

Because the squares are cast iron and aluminum, welding spatter doesn’t stick to them very well. This is a plus.

I didn’t see why anyone would want cast iron. It’s heavy, it rusts, and it shatters. Sooner or later, I’ll drop any tool you give me. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a square and then destroy it. An aluminum square may deform, but I have a milling machine and welders, so I can repair aluminum. Welding cast iron is not easy.

They make two main types of squares. One is an L-shape with a sharp outer corner. The problem with this is that the outer corner fits in the inner corner of whatever you’re clamping. You can’t get in there to weld. Their other product, the Mega Square, has another side, cut at 45° to the others, where the L-shaped square has a corner. You’ll understand when you see the photos. When you clamp steel to two sides of the Mega Square at 90° to each other, you can reach into the inside corner to weld.

I ordered two different sizes, figuring one would always be too small and the other would always be too big.

I chose to use my Harbor Freight Titanium Unlimited 200 multi-process welder. It’s extremely handy. I picked MIG because it’s the type of welding I do best.

First, I laid the metal out without welding it to see if everything looked right. It seemed okay.

After that, I took an angle grinder and knot wheel and cleaned most of the rust off the steel. I then cleaned the parts with window cleaner. Raw steel is always covered with rust and black dust, so if you clean it before you work with it, you can avoid a lot of hand-washing and laundry problems.

I followed the angle grinder with the belt grinder, deburring everything to get rid of sharp edges. I beveled things so the weld beads would fit in better. I wasn’t because I was worried about penetration. This project will never see significant stress. It doesn’t need perfect welds. The bevels will help assure that the welds are deep and strong, but that wasn’t the purpose.

After the metal was cleaned up, I drilled holes for the casters. If I had waited until the pedestal was assembled, I would not have been able to get the parts onto the drill press, so I had to do it early. I used a machinist’s square, a carbide scribe, and a center punch to locate the holes. I started them with a center drill and finished them with a unibit. These things are great. It cut through both walls cleanly and accurately, and it even beveled and deburred the holes.

With all this done, I was ready to weld. I clamped two pieces of steel onto the big Mega Square and let fly. It worked perfectly. No distortion at all after the parts cooled.

It looks like there is hope I can build a table frame after all.

I followed the same process with the other side of the base, and then I put the whole mess on the table, clamped it as well as I could, and welded the column in place.

Everything went well, but I ended up bowing the piece the column attached to. I welded it pretty quickly, I didn’t let it cool between segments, and I didn’t clamp it straight.

The bow didn’t really matter. It was maybe 1/4″ over two feet. The bowed part was not going to be on the floor, so it could not make the pedestal rock. The pedestal was going to have a caster at each corner with the bowed part centered between them about 4″ off the floor. Still, I wanted to see if I could fix it.

I had heard about acetylene straightening. This is not the same thing as heating a piece of metal so you can bend it. When you do acetylene straightening, you heat a small area of a part just until it begins to melt. This expands the metal in thickness. When it contracts, it stays thicker than the surrounding metal, but it contracts in the plane of the wall you heated. This means it bends the part in the direction of the side you heated.

If you think you’ve done flame straightening with a propane or MAPP torch, you don’t know what flame straightening is. Read up on it. You can’t do it with propane or MAPP alone.

I have an acetylene outfit, but I don’t have tanks yet because I’m waiting for a good deal. It occurred to me that a TIG torch ought to work. I turned the pedestal upside-down, drew lines where I wanted to apply heat, and gave it a whirl. It worked great. The bottom tube is now straight. There is a tiny bit of bend between the center tube and a tube that has casters in it, but it’s so small, I felt that trying to fix it would be obsessive.

The TIG torch left some lumps on the steel, so I used a flap disk to make them less lumpy. They’re on the underside of the pedestal, so no one will see them.

Attaching the top plate was hard. I could not use a square. I had to grind the top of the column carefully to make sure it was absolutely level. Then I attached it to the plate with a magnet, and I tacked the plate in place while sitting on the floor underneath it.

The top plate now has a slight bow. I decided not to try to prevent it, because I knew it would be forced straight when I bolted the grinder to it.

Now I had a pedestal, but I was not satisfied with the open ends on the bottom tubes. I made little plates and welded them in there.

This was scary, because I have had serious problems with weld control. For years, it has been hard for me to see anything but the arc when I welded.

A few weeks back, it occurred to me that I might have a vitamin A deficiency. I have had some gallbladder issues, and the gallbladder is what allows you to digest fat. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, so if you don’t absorb fat, you can become deficient. I got myself some vitamin A and some lecithin, which emulsifies fat. I started talking both every day.

When I welded yesterday, I was able to see what I was doing. The difference was tremendous. Was it the vitamin A? I don’t know. I just know I’m not afraid to weld things I would not have touched a year ago. I had no problems welding the little plates in, apart from basic lack of skill.

I held the plates in with little magnets when I tacked them. I can’t tell you how useful these are for welding.

I may take the grinder and grind the ends of the tubes smooth, so it looks like they were never open.

I attached the casters and the grinder. Of course, I found that two of my screw holes were in the wrong places. This kind of thing always happens. I’m going to have to put two new holes in the top plate. I may weld the old ones closed, just because I can.

The pedestal is fantastic. You can jump on it without flexing it. It rolls very easily. The brakes hold it very firmly when you need to use the grinder. The platform is around 40″ off the floor, so the grinder is at a very convenient height. I love it.

I may add features. I would like to have a steel loop that holds a water bowl.

I bought primer and paint. I’m going to paint it forest green. This will take several days because the paint takes forever to cure. When I’m done, I’ll be sitting pretty. I’ll have a very nice stand I can move with ease, and I’ll be one step closer to getting rid of my extra Eastwood cart. My plasma cutter is sitting on it now, and it works, but I want something less bulky. Maybe another Harbor Freight Vulcan cart. They’re wonderful.

I should have my machine tools here in two weeks. I still have some wiring to do.

I think I’m going to buy a welding table top and forget about making one. The premade ones are just too good. I’ll be satisfied with fabricating a frame to hold it.

Things are looking good in the shop.

In other news, I had a pain in my wrist and hand this morning, and after watching some healing videos, I prayed for healing and commanded myself to be healed. The pain is almost totally gone. Really neat.

Hope I Don’t Smell Like I Look

This is where I’ve been this weekend.

It came out fantastic. I wish I could say it was cheap, too, but I spent over $110 on materials. It’s great, though. You can ride around on it without making it flex.

It’s a bench grinder pedestal, in case that’s not obvious.

I’m tired. Good night.

Conclusion: Yes, Miami Really Does Stink

I still do not have a quote on moving my machine tools here, but I am closer. A guy from a rigging company just came by and looked the place over to see how hard it would be to get trucks in here.

I said something about being eager to cut all ties with Miami, and we started talking. The poor guy was born in Hialeah.

HIALEAH.

Cubans have a word: “chusma.” It’s sort of like “redneck.” When a southerner calls you a redneck, he means you’re the kind of person he doesn’t want marrying into his family. It’s not a compliment. It’s okay if people like you show up to lay sod or fix the roof, but you better not be on the property after sundown. A chusma is very similar. A chusma is a person with no class whatsoever.

Hialeah is the hub of chusma activity in North America. Cubans make fun of Hialeah all the time. Cuban women make fun of the way Hialeah women do their nails and hair. It’s a running joke in Miami.

This poor guy was BORN there.

Miami is bad enough. Hialeah…unthinkable.

He said he left after an incident at his home. He was working on his truck, and some kid in a Japanese car tore through his lawn, like he wasn’t even there.

I have seen these kids many times. It’s the weirdest thing. I can’t explain it, but they’re very common. It’s always a scrawny kid with a very small, very round head, shaved or nearly so. Their heads look like little coconuts. They drive tiny Japanese cars which are very slow, but the cars always have aftermarket tailpipes as big around as coffee cans. They make a terrible noise as they accelerate incredibly slowly.

Because they’re so slow, you get to enjoy the noise for a long time. It takes them forever to pull away.

I don’t know where these kids come from. It’s like there’s a factory somewhere. Their heads are always round and tiny. They never have much hair. They always have that crazy tailpipe. Their cars are always unbelievably slow. They rig them up to make noise to compensate.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these kids on foot. Just in Japanese cars. They don’t even look like other Cubans. It’s like they materialize briefly while visiting from a hell dimension full of Honda Preludes with 300,000 miles.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the machine-moving guy got a visit from the mysterious coconut clan.

He told me something interesting. He said the heavy-hauling business was more active than he had ever seen it. I had to ask him: was it because businesses were being torn apart, or was it because they were being started?

During the Obama years, you could go on Ebay and find dozens of bench grinders, lathes, saws, and so on for very good prices. The economy was not that great, so people were selling tools. It got better toward the end, except for people like me, who like cheap tools.

News heads like to tell us Trump is destroying the world. If Trump mailed every person in America a gold bar, they would say he was trying to poison us with heavy metal. I asked the machine-moving guy my questions because I wanted to find out the truth about the economy.

He said construction was keeping truckers busy. It’s moving frantically right now. He also pointed out that construction moves in booms and busts, so he expects a bust.

Have you noticed that a huge percentage of tractor trailers have signs on them saying, “WE’RE HIRING”? I don’t recall seeing that before Trump.

Anyway, whatever may be in store at the end of the boom, things appear to be going pretty well under Trump at the moment.

He told me he can get stuff moved in 48 hours, from the time the order is placed. That’s wonderful. I want the machines here NOW NOW NOW.

Actually, I want them here in 2017. No, 1975.

I probably won’t be able to do anything until week after next, but as soon as I can, I will get the ball rolling. Can’t wait.

In even better news, I now have a contract to sell my last bit of Miami real estate which isn’t income-producing. God willing, it will be gone by the new year. Maybe considerably sooner.

Once this property is gone, I will think about moving north and getting rid of everything else I have in South Florida.

It amazes me that people told me I would miss Miami. I hate Miami more every day. The longer I live in Ocala, the more I love Ocala and hate Miami. I haven’t missed Miami for one second. It would be like missing dysentery.

No one here misses Miami. I’m not the only refugee here. The others don’t miss Miami. I have friends who moved to Kissimmee and Orlando. They don’t miss Miami. My friends who moved to Pompano Beach don’t miss Miami.

My friend in Orlando says he feels sick when he visits Miami. He can’t stand it.

No one who moves ANYWHERE misses Miami. Maybe Cubans do, but I’ll bet they don’t. They pump Miami up when they live there, but they probably change their tune when they’ve lived anywhere else.

It will be so beautiful, watching the remaining cords snap. The big ones were houses that produced no income, sucked up money, and presented problems all year round. The little cords aren’t that bad, but I still want to cut them.

Today I bought steel for a bench grinder stand. That’s my big weekend project. I’m really looking forward to doing some metalworking. It will be even better when I have a lathe and mill so I can do more stuff.

The next time you hear from me, my bench grinder may be riding in style.

I feel like God put me here to heal. I’m getting over my family, Miami, the putrefaction of American culture…I was going to make a long list, but that’s about it.

If things are this good only two years into the process, how good will they be in 2025?

Return of the Machines

Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” How true that is.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve contacted someone with a business proposition and received no response or a response so late it didn’t matter. Also, I know a lot of working-class people, and I’ve noticed they don’t respond to texts, answer the phone, or show up when they say they will. I believe this is one of the main reasons they live from hand to mouth.

This week I started calling rigging companies to see if I could find someone to move my lathe and milling machine to my home in Ocala. So far, out of four companies, one has responded. They don’t sound too good, but at least they proved they’re conscious, so they may end up with the job.

Another company just called. I’m up to two!

Before I started calling these companies, I talked to a big outfit in Miami. My dad used to be their labor attorney. Very nice people. They moved my lathe into my shop in Miami for nothing. They want $4000 to move my machines here, so I feel like there is probably someone out there who will do it cheaper. Some companies don’t have locations near both Miami and Ocala, so they would have to charge to send more things longer distances. For example, one company said they would have to send two trucks from Tampa to Miami to pick up the machinery. I found a company that has locations in Miami and Ocala, so I’m hoping they will be able to use different crews on both ends and save me cash.

It will be wonderful having machine tools again. It will be wonderful having one more tie to Miami severed permanently. I’m in the process of selling a house there, and once it goes, I will have no place to lay my head in Dade County. I truly look forward to having to rent a hotel room if I ever have to visit again. I hope I never have to visit, though. That would be even better.

One of the things I’ve really missed is drilling holes accurately. I have an industrial drill press which cost a fortune new in the 1960’s or 70’s, but once you’ve used a mill, it’s hard to take any drill press seriously. A mill does everything a drill press does, much, much better. I’m sick of using punches to mark holes and doing my best and still having holes a millimeter away from where I want them.

I am considering building a welding table. I would want to mill the top flat. I can do that easily with a milling machine. Without one, it would be like using a teaspoon to plant a tree.

I considered buying a trailer and moving the machines myself, but it seems like a bad idea. I would have to spend $2500 on the trailer, and I would have to rent a forklift on both ends of the jobs. I say “jobs” because I would have to make two trips.

I don’t think I’m a good choice to secure a top-heavy 4000-pound machine to a trailer and then drive it around curves. A boat or tractor, sure. Random household junk, no problem. A lathe is another story. It should not be my first or second hauling job.

If I did it myself, I would spend maybe $900 on forklifts, so the total cost, with everything included (fuel, whatever), would approach or top $4000. I would have a nice trailer when it was over, so I figure I would come out $2500 ahead, but I might also have a lathe lying on its side beside the road somewhere.

Getting this stuff moved and dumping the house will put me much closer to feeling free of Miami. I will still have investments there, but they don’t require travel.

What a poisonous place Miami is. It leaves a mark. The other day, I found myself standing behind two Cubans at a store here in Ocala, and I couldn’t wait to get away from them. They’re probably wonderful guys. I don’t care. That’s not the point. They remind me of a place where my family endured decades of defeat and misery. I don’t even like to drive by Cuban restaurants. I haven’t had any type of Cuban food since 2017, and I don’t plan to fix any in the foreseeable future.

The mental association is unpleasant, whether or not it’s rational. If Miami were full of Norwegians, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of them, either.

Every decent person I know in the Dade County area agrees with me. They can’t wait to get out. None of them ever ask me why I don’t like Miami. It’s almost a litmus test. If you like Miami, you’re probably shallow or blind.

My young friend Travis is stuck at the University of Miami until May, and he may have to stay on in Miami for some time after that. He hates the city. He keeps telling me about people he knows who got out. It’s like he’s talking about runaway slaves. They all tell him how much better life is.

Cubans are the only people who like Miami. They moved there from a worse place, and they turned it into a very Cuban-friendly place. They give each other preferential treatment. They don’t have to learn our language or adopt American manners. Many of them don’t know about the rest of the country. They tend to stay put, and they make their kids stay, too. They live in a strange state of blindness. Everyone else wants out, out, out.

By the middle of the last century, southern whites were pretty much gone from Miami. Northerners took their place, but they eventually began following them. Now even some Cubans are fleeing. They don’t like the South Americans who are moving in.

Black people really hate Miami. They’re right. They are treated very, very badly by the dominant Hispanics. Anti-black racism is thick there, and it’s very hard for blacks to find decent work. In a lot of places, black people make racism out to be a much bigger problem than it is, and they are held back by a victim complex, but Miami gives them ample reason to complain.

It’s so nice to be away from voodoo, car horns, traffic, pervasive Spanish, and rudeness. I can’t describe it.

Can’t wait to see those machines sitting in my shop and to receive a closing statement via email. It will be like bathing after simmering in a heated septic tank.

Table Saw Yields to my Might

The problem with having a lot of tools is that you spend way too much time building, preparing, modifying, and fixing tools.

Today, I fixed the table saw and the buffer.

A long time ago, I bought a Shark Guard for my table saw. This is a neat clear guard with a fitting on top for a vacuum hose. I like it a lot. It came with splitters in several heights, including a tiny splitter maybe half an inch high.

The guard attaches to the splitter. When you use the tiny splitter, there is nothing to attach the guard to. It’s for those times when you can’t use a guard.

I misplaced my small splitter when I moved away from Miami. Of course, I have needed it since then. I thought about ordering another one, but it looked like it would be pretty costly for a tiny scrap of metal, so I put it off. After all, I’m a tool guy! I can make my own stuff!

I can also procrastinate for two years, but that’s another subject.

Today I made myself a new splitter around 3/4″ high. I had steel plate lying around the shop, I had a belt grinder, yada yada yada. I had no excuse to put it off any longer.

I held one of my tall splitters against the steel and traced the outline with a Sharpie. This gave me something to shoot for. I cut the end with the tracing off the plate, using the dry saw.

Once the sawing was over, I took the workpiece to the belt grinder and cranked it up to 120 Hz. The metal was around 1/8″ thick, so it was not a problem for the grinder. I would guess I put in 15 minutes.

I had to cut a long slot in the metal. This is not something you can do with a belt grinder. It can enlarge slots, but it can’t start them, except in human beings.

I got out my crazy 6″ angle grinder and Walter Zip Wheel and cut the slot. You would be surprised how well a big angle grinder can do delicate work. I roughed the slot out, and then I finished it, for the most part, on the belt grinder.

When that was done, I wanted to round out the bottom of the slot so it looked more like a milled feature than something made with an axe. I got out the Dumore hand grinder and a carbide burr. I mounted the splitter in my vise and rounded the slot.

I then wanted to clean and deburr the splitter using my pedestal buffer, but it wouldn’t turn on. It has an overload protector on it to kill the power when the shaft can’t turn, and the protector had pooped out. I could not get anywhere with it. I decided to use an angle grinder and knot wheel, and the results were excellent.

When I was all done, I had a nice splitter. I installed it in the table saw, and I was happy. Except for having no buffer.

I was advised to open the motor protector up and see if there was something I could fix, like a relay with a bent contact. When I got into it, I saw that it was not very repair-friendly.

I didn’t feel like sacrificing the evening to fix it, so I took the hot wires off of the protector and connected them with a wire nut. Now I can use the switch on the buffer instead of the one on the motor protector.

You don’t really have to have a motor protector on a 3/4-HP buffer. I have a grinder which is essentially the same type of machine, and all it has is a toggle switch. Motors at and above a certain power level need motor starters in order to avoid ruining switches, but my buffer does not. I suppose the protector was there to protect the motor from abuse. Maybe it also tames power surges. I don’t know.

The buffer would cost around $1000 to replace with a new one. I suppose the school system that originally bought it felt the protector would be a good way to keep an expensive machine safe from bored kids in shop class.

I might try to get the protector working, or maybe I’ll buy a used one on Ebay some day. Right now, I can live without it. The buffer, on the other hand, is vital to my sanity. I have to have a running buffer. I have only had it a few months, and I can’t live without it.

When I talk about my reasons for owning tools, I like to say I want to buy whatever it takes so that when I walk out into the shop with a job in mind, there is at least a tiny sliver of hope that I will be able to get it done with the tools I have on hand. That sums it up very well. Today, I got what I wanted. I had two jobs to do, and I was able to get them done without too much straining and improvising. Granted, I didn’t really fix the buffer, but I found out what was wrong, and I got it running.

The saw splitter is installed, and it looks really nice. I may grind it a little smaller.

Yesterday, I got my Jonsered chainsaw running again. Socialism, in the form of ethanol, keeps destroying my small engine carbs, and the Jonsered’s original carb was terminally congested. I bought a Chinese carb and replaced it, but the Chinese carb had a defective spring. I got myself a second Chinese carb, installed it, and got the saw going. It still needs a little tuning, but it will work perfectly.

I haven’t received the sonic cleaner I ordered. I plan to throw the Jonsered carb in it. It might revive it, and if it does, then maybe I’ll be able to use it on future ethanol-defiled carbs in the future and avoid buying an endless succession of new ones.

My little Husqvarna blower is acting anemic. It has never suffocated due to ethanol, unlike the other tools, and I have used additives and so on to keep it healthy, but it looks like its day of reckoning is nearly here. I can try the cleaning machine out on it and find out if I wasted my money.

I’ve been contacting machinery riggers to get quotes on moving my big machines here. Once that’s done, life should be nearly perfect.

Until something breaks.

Helping the Environment by Buying Big, Electricity-Sucking Carb Cleaners from China

I have sprung for an ultrasonic parts cleaner.

My Jonsered chainsaw pooped out due to the destructive and hard-to-reverse effects of toxic ethanol-polluted fuel. I spend a few bucks on a Chinese carb for it, but I was never able to get the carb adjusted so the saw would run well enough to use.

It was very frustrating. I downloaded official instructions from the manufacturer. If you have a Jonsered with a Zama carb, you may find them useful. They’re very simple.

1. Open the idle screw all the way (turning clockwise).

2. Start the saw.

3. Adjust the L screw until you get maximum speed.

4. Adjust the H screw until you get smooth operation at all speeds.

5. Adjust the idle screw until the saw stops trying to turn the chain at idle.

It’s best to remove the chain before you do these things. The instructions I downloaded said to adjust the idle with the chain in place. Not very smart. You have to hold onto a saw with one hand and turn a screw with the other, while the chain is zipping around at high speed. I don’t know who wrote the instructions. Probably not the smartest engineer the company has.

The saw has a drum that turns the chain, so you can observe the drum instead of the chain while you adjust the idle. Just make the drum stop turning.

That’s all there is to it, but I could not make it work. I tried over and over. I resisted taking it to a repairman, because they would have kept it a month and charged a hundred bucks or more.

A tree fell over in my yard, and I left it there for weeks because I was stubborn. I didn’t want to cut it with my heavy felling saw. I was determined to get the small Jonsered working. I eventually gave up and used the big saw.

Two days ago, I resolved to get the small saw working. I took the carb out, which is a very unpleasant job on the poorly engineered Husqvarna-made Jonsered. I found that a spring on the throttle was in the wrong place. I bent it back into position, but when I reinstalled the carb, it popped back out.

I was not going to spend half a day fighting to get a Chinese spring to behave. I ordered a new carb. This will bring me up to three Jonsered carbs. I should be able to take them and make one that works.

This is the second time I’ve had a problem with a new Chinese carb, but I still recommend them because they’re so cheap and repairmen are so expensive, slow, and inept. You’re actually better off buying a used saw on Craigslist than going to a shop.

Now that I’ve had this issue, I have decided to grit my teeth and get a cleaning machine so there will be some hope of reviving old carbs in the future.

I resisted getting a machine in the past because they cost over a hundred bucks, and they are known to die. I found out they die mainly because people don’t fill the tanks all the way. The transducers expect to work against fluid, and they do something bad–I don’t know what–when you run them without enough liquid. I’m smart enough to put liquid in a tank. I think I can overcome this problem.

I was also reluctant because I didn’t want to deal with the disgusting liquids people use to fill these things. They use all sorts of petroleum products. I didn’t want to have to empty many liters of black, greasy solvent every time I put the machine away.

I learned you don’t have to put solvent in direct contact with the tank. You can put a small amount of solvent in a plastic jar, along with your part, and the machine will clean it through the jar just fine. You put ordinary water in the tank. It never gets dirty, and you never have to pour a huge amount of nasty solvent into a storage container.

Sonic cleaners come from China these days, like everything except air and water. They’re all the same. I bought the least-expensive brand I could find. I hope I don’t have to use it a lot.

I’m going to clean my original Jonsered carb, just to see if it works. I have a couple of other carbs to toss in there. When ethanol inevitably ruins another carb, I’ll try one of my cleaned carbs before I buy Chinese again.

Sonic cleaners are good for lots of things. You can clean jewelry and ammunition cases. It will be nice to have this capability. If it works.

Here’s a tip from someone who has suffered a lot: if your small engine carb dies, and you don’t want to give up on it, take a look at the metering diaphragm. This is a black rubbery looking thing you will find clamped between two plates on the carb. It’s supposed to flex back and forth. Flex it a few times. If you hear any noise at all, throw it out and replace it. They get hard and stop working. A good diaphragm should be so soft it flexes silently.

The Walbro company, a Japanese concern which makes carburetors, has come out with a weird type of metering diaphragm which lasts longer than fabric. They have little spirals of metal in them. Might be worth looking into, if you have a Walbro carb. Your black old-fashioned diaphragm will definitely die, so you might as well look into replacements early.

It’s hard to believe how difficult it is to keep a chainsaw running from one month to the next. They’re as frail and unreliable as racehorses or inbred European royals, so of course, Congress made things worse by forcing us to use debased fuel which can kill the toughest motor ever made.

They should come with two carbs. In fact, it’s a great idea to buy an extra carb when you buy a small-engine tool such as a chainsaw or pressure washer. Why wait for it to break down, when $20 or much less buys you insurance?

Maybe when cars run on 100% ethanol fuel, we can just buy spare engines for them and put them on pallets in our garages. The small $8000 investment will be a small sacrifice in order to appease Mother Gaia.

How much did the ethanol I burned in my small engines help the environment or extend the life of our oil reserves? How much did it hurt the environment and deplete our reserves to manufacture, sell, and deliver the new carbs I’ve bought? Hmm.

The new carbs didn’t just require burning diesel, coal, and gasoline. They required mining and processing ore. They required casting and metalworking. They were made in a country where carburetor factories are about as green as Chernobyl.

Just a little info I feel like passing along.

The ethanol scam needs to end. The only people who like it are deluded environmentalists and spoiled corn farmers.

I think the ultrasonic cleaner will be very handy. If only it ran on coal.

Gallant Apparently had a Vasectomy

I am completely out of touch with American values.

Months ago, I read that Kim Kardashian charges millions of dollars–“millions,” plural–to make one Instagram post. I think about that a lot.

To me, Kim Kardashian is a lewd, crass, self-destructive, highly toxic person, very like the sort of inexpensive prostitute you might see if you drove through a bad area of your city at 3 a.m. I see her for what she is. She is not very bright. She has no talents. She does nothing productive with her life, except for one typical leftist cause which will probably be destructive in the end. She has nothing interesting to say. If I knew her, I would avoid her, the same way I would avoid a female meth addict who propositioned me in a parking lot. There is nothing good to be gained by interacting with her, and she has an air of dirtiness about her.

Many of our celebrities are like that. If you went to an area where whores and drug dealers congregate, and you gave each one of them ten million dollars and put them on TV, they would fit right in with our current crop of media idols.

Kardashian’s popularity proves that a big percentage of Americans see her completely differently from the way I do. They crave Kardashian news. They want to be like her. They want to wear what she wears. They think her TV show is top-notch entertainment. They truly admire her. How can that be true?

I can’t absorb this. I can’t make my mind assimilate it. It’s like living in a country where people think horse manure makes a good corsage.

Instinctively, I have the incorrect feeling that everyone thinks Kim Kardashian is gross and trashy.

I am writing about her to illustrate my point, which is that my heart and the heart of the general public are completely different.

America is like a country of children without fathers. We reject the beautiful, protective lessons of the past, and we do as we please. We are making ourselves silly and weak.

Yesterday I found some neat videos on Youtube. I don’t know why they popped up. There were made over half a century ago. They were videos that used to be shown in schools.

The purpose of the videos was to help kids get it together and live like advanced human beings instead of savages. One video was about neatness and personal grooming. Another helped girls understand that promiscuity was self-destructive.

I decided to watch the video about neatness. I figured it couldn’t hurt. I had ample reason to feel that way.

I have often told people a story about my youth. My mother took me to a department store at the 163rd Street mall in North Miami Beach, to buy clothes. I would guess that I was about 11. A nice old Jewish lady waited on us. The lady tried to explain something to me. I can’t recall what it was. She decided to use an analogy, which I recall. She said, “When you take a shower, you don’t just stand there. You soap yourself up and clean yourself off.” She may have added more information. I don’t know.

Years later, I realized what she was trying to do. She saw that I was a dirty kid, so she was trying to give me a hint about hygiene. I will probably never remember what we were talking about. Maybe she was saying I should stand up straight while my pants were being measured, instead of slouching passively. She saw that I was in trouble, and she wanted to help without offending my mother, so she came up with something to say.

She could tell (or maybe smell) what I was doing in the shower. I used to get in, stand around, and get out. I didn’t use a washcloth. I was probably in junior high before I started shampooing my own hair. Before that, I didn’t think about it. Every so often, my mother would make he hold still while she did it for me, and the rest of the time, I didn’t concern myself with it. I didn’t realize I was dirtier than other people, and I thought my situation was normal.

Kids don’t automatically know how to bathe. Someone has to tell them.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s shocking, when I think about it. They expected me to succeed, and they held me accountable, but they didn’t help. They didn’t show me how to do it. They expected me to figure it out all by myself.

Unbelievably, I learned something from the hygiene video, at my advanced age. The announcer said it was important to wash between your toes. I don’t do that. I haven’t thought about it, to tell you the truth. I just figured all that soapy water running down there would get the job done. I scrub my feet with a soapy cloth, but that’s all. This says something about my upbringing. Even at my age, it continues to affect me negatively.

I watched a few more videos. I thought they were fantastic. I felt sick, thinking how much they would have helped me when I was a kid. I felt cheated.

In truth, I was cheated. We owe kids our help. They can’t make it without it.

I also saw some videos in which people discussed life in the mid-20th century.

I assumed they would say they longed for a time when people had it more together. I fully expected them to say America was a kinder, more orderly, more peaceful place back then. Boy, was I wrong. All they could talk about was the “oppressive” atmosphere and the harsh rules. They truly thought things had gotten better.

Yes, things have gotten better, if “better” means a boy who has decided he’s a girl can go into a girls’ locker room and shower naked with actual females who have no say in the matter. Things are better, if having filthy language on billboards is good. If smoking dope in a park where kids can see you and smell the smoke is good, then things have gotten a lot better.

If self-discipline and honoring your elders are bad things, then life is much better than it used to be. If having babies out of wedlock is good, things are fantastic.

I have a thirst to see myself improved. It looks like most Americans are thirsting for the same things monkeys want.

My parents should have told me things. They should have explained Christianity to me and seen to it that I participated whether I wanted to or not. They should have given me a desk, a chair, and a lamp and said, “This is where you work in the evening. This is when you work. This is how you keep a schedule so you don’t fall behind. On this day every week, we will check and make sure things are going smoothly.”

I was very, very smart, so I was able to do well in school without self-discipline for many years. There were obvious problems, though. I always did long-term projects the nights before they were due, because I couldn’t plan. I started to do badly in math, because you have to study math continuously; you can’t cram.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw the sun come up because I was working on a paper or project that was due that day. If your son is doing this, you are failing him.

My dad used to come home from work, take off his shirt and pants, lie on the couch in the den, and watch TV in his underwear. My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen and living room. My sister and I lived outside the house and in our bedrooms. That was our family life. My sister and I filled our time however we saw fit, within very loose rules.

When my sister was 14, she started stealing my mother’s car, driving to a bar on 79th Street, and sitting with men. She had a friend who lived a block north of us, and she would go, too. I wonder what the people who made the videos would have thought about that. They probably could not have imagined it happening. One of their videos cautioned girls about parking in cars with boys. It didn’t say anything about sitting in bars with grown men!

The Seventies were different. It was not that hard for a young girl to get a drink at a bar without getting carded. Back then, they sold cigarettes from unattended vending machines, too.

Youth is when you learn good habits. They become like servants to you. They poke and prod you to do the right thing. If you don’t have good habits, you have bad ones, and they prod you to do wrong. If you wait until you’re old to strive for good habits, you will have a much, much harder time, and you will probably fail.

I don’t know why I didn’t become a criminal or a beggar. It’s amazing that I did as well as I did.

My sister eventually became a criminal and a beggar.

It’s remarkable that my teachers were of no help. Even the best of them were useless. My schools could have taught kids responsibility and basic life skills, but they didn’t. Maybe liberal educators got rid of the lifestyle videos because they found them judgmental and old-fashioned. Liberals always work to destroy the character of young people.

My teachers weren’t afraid of teaching values. They can’t use that excuse. No one can say they felt the teaching of good values was the exclusive province of our parents.

They taught us nature was sacred, and that we had to be environmental extremists. They taught feminism and socialism. They told us the horrible, hedonistic self-immolation of the Sixties was very good. They only had scruples when it came to things like belief in God, honoring our elders, sexual purity, good manners, and self-discipline.

They were dupes and tools. I don’t know how else to say it. Most of them weren’t even good at teaching.

Maybe other people don’t hate America’s new ways as much as I do because they were raised better than I was. Maybe they didn’t have the problems I had, so they don’t appreciate the good things they got from self-discipline and solid values.

I feel very foreign when I think about these things. I never feel at home on this planet, but the sensation of being different is much stronger when my nose is rubbed in the distinctions.

One of the purposes of the rapture is to put us in a place where we are in sync with the beings around us. We won’t feel foreign in heaven, or even on earth if we return here to rule after the tribulation. We’ll be normal, and those who are not in our family will be the wallflowers and outsiders. That will be nice, at least for us.

If I could go back and change my childhood, I would want two things. I would want to be raised by people who were led by the Holy Spirit and full of knowledge about God, and I would want them to teach me how to live correctly. If I had those things, any other problems I had would take care of themselves.

One of the wonderful things about God is that he gives us a new beginning. You can’t go back and be eight years old again. You can’t grow up in a proper Christian home, marry your childhood sweetheart, raise a Christian family in your youth, and head into middle age with all that behind you. But you can become the kind of person you would have been had you started life correctly.

Sometimes I think about the disgusting and disgraceful things I’ve done, said, and felt, and I wonder how I would survive the shame if they were exposed. Then a thought comes to me: if, when those things are exposed, I can say I’m not that person any more, and I don’t do, say, or feel those things, then I won’t be so ashamed.

Because of God, I can have that.

I wish I could go live in a secure fortress with other Christians and only come out to get groceries. I really do. I wish I could live in heaven and only come down here during the day to work. America is extremely filthy, and it’s not going to change. We’re just seeing the beginning.

At least I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be able to say I got off the field before it was too late.

Kids have absolutely no idea what to do with their lives. Your kids are extremely unlikely to figure everything out for themselves. If you don’t get in there and help them, you will surely be held accountable. You probably won’t like the results of your parenting efforts either.

Bells & Whistles v. Skill

Now that I’m an expert welder who can occasionally create a viable stick bead, I am clearly too high and mighty for my portable Harbor Freight welding table.

I probably paid around $50 for the table. It’s the same one other companies sell for…more. I’m not looking it up to see how much they charge. It’s a fairly thick piece of slotted sheet steel on a folding table with plastic feet that come off over and over until you get mad and put Liquid Nails in them.

Are you a beginning welder? Buy the Harbor Freight table. It works. The price is great, too. It’s portable, unlike a real welding table. It’s a great product. You can’t do better on your own for the price. It will be useful even after you get a big table, because you may want the portability. But know that you will want something better eventually.

The table supposedly supports an ungodly amount of weight. The ads say that, anyway. I would not trust it beyond maybe 60 pounds. The slope of the table is adjustable, and the adjustments use clamps that are basically just screws with plastic handles. My table is not level at the moment, even though I set it up in the level position and tightened the clamps, and I have never put anything heavy on it. It has moved, and it would probably move even more if I put a big weight on it.

What I’m saying is that it’s not ideal for heavy work.

The top is also small. It’s only 30″ long. I feel like you really need two feet by 4 feet, or 3 feet square, minimum, to have any kind of versatility.

Is the top flat? No. It can twist. The clamp on one side can be adjusted differently from the one on the other, so the slope will be different at each ends, and that means twist. You can get it flat enough to do most things, but it’s not exactly a reference surface.

It’s a very nice portable table. I mean truly portable. I’m sure there are other “portable” tables out there that weigh 300 pounds. This one, you can pick up with one hand, and it’s collapsible. It’s not a substitute for a real table.

Once you decide to get a real table, you have more horrible decisions in front of you.

You can get a table with no holes in it. A lot of people do this. Lots and lots. Solid tables are good because they’re awfully easy to make. You just put a slab of steel or cast iron on legs.

You can get a table with holes or slats. Holes and slats are good because they allow you to attach bolts and clamps all over the place. This is extremely helpful when you’re making a complex project, which I may never do. They make tables more expensive (or harder to make for yourself), however, and if you have slats, things will fall through them all the time. Some of those things will be globs of molten metal, and this can be a problem.

You can get a really flat table or just accept relatively flat. Flatness costs money. You may have to pay for grinding. If you flatten it yourself, you may have to add a complicated leveling system, or you may have to machine one piece of the top at a time.

My head hurts just from writing this.

Some guy on a forum (I always read forums) says a big industrial company had one huge fab table, and it was solid. He said they ground it with angle grinders once in a while to maintain the surface. That makes it sound like a solid table is okay, but he didn’t say anything about the aggravation they endured, trying to fasten things down for welding.

I am thinking I may make my own table. It seems to me that a man with a milling machine ought to be able to take 6 slabs of steel, mill them flat, drill a few holes, and attach them to a frame. I don’t see what the problem is.

Why do you need a flat table? To make things line up correctly. I welded an arbor press stand on my garage floor, and I wish I hadn’t. The floor was so crooked (ignoring the quality of my welding) that the stand came out higher on one side than the other. You need to line things up precisely when you weld, and it’s best to clamp them to discourage warping.

Here’s the obvious question: how do you make a table, which is your principle tool for keeping work flat and square, without a table?

There are some tools for that, and they are endorsed by some other guy on a forum, so they must work.

A company called Fireball Tool (I think it’s just one guy who printed up T-shirts) makes heavy welding squares from cast iron and cast aluminum. You clamp your stuff to them, and they hold it straight. They have little tabs on them, projecting out from the square surfaces, and you can rest your work on them so the work is square and also in a plane.

If you don’t have a flat table, you can use these squares to hold the parts of your table frame while you weld them together. This will give you a square, straight frame to put your table on.

I looked around, trying to find something cheaper, and the alternatives were not good. The worst one was a jig made from scrap…on a table which wasn’t flat. It would make things square, but not flat.

A lot of the competing products I looked at were in the same expense ballpark as the Fireball squares, so I quit surfing and ordered two. I chose aluminum, not cast iron. A lot of guys are in love with cast iron. That’s because they’ve never paid good money for a cast iron item and then dropped it on a concrete floor. I’m not spending over 100 bucks on a square just so I can destroy it the day I get it.

Both aluminum and cast iron shed welding spatter well, but aluminum can’t shatter. If I drop an aluminum square and bend part of it, I can machine the problem out. I may even be able to replace missing metal with weld. If I break cast iron, school’s out. Time to buy another one or just live with one that is no longer quite right.

Aluminum also weighs a lot less.

Will I use the squares to make a table? I do not know. I can get a nice manufactured table for around a grand, and I’ll have a warranty and much less work to do. It’s a lot of money, but it would be the headache-free path, and it would probably be the last table I would ever want. If I make my own table, it will be a lot more work, and it won’t be quite as versatile, but I’ll save a ton of cash.