It took 5 weeks to get my rental home repaired from the damage done by the previous tenants. The total repair bill came to over $9,000, and I still need to replace the flooring in the entire house because their dog ruined it in spots by peeing on it.
Anyhow, we listed it 28 days ago, and our new tenants signed the lease to move in soon. That’s one project off my plate.
Now I have to work on selling our old house. It’s always something, and I am always busy.
The things that you need to survive and thrive in an emergency fall into broad categories:
Records: Documents, photographs, and other needed items. I include a moderate amount of cash on hand ($300 or so) in this category.
First Aid: Medications, drugs, bandages, disinfectants, etc. Nothing elaborate. Simple is better here.
Heat and cooking: You can live on cold canned goods and MREs, but they are simply not tolerable for more than a day or two. Hot meals are best.
Light: Flashlights, lanterns, fire, batteries for them, chemlights, and other ways of creating light.
Tools: People are tool users. Screwdrivers, knife, hammer, hatchet, etc.
Communications: There are many ways to communicate. Cell phones, radios, flags, spray paint, chalk or grease pencil markings left on buildings, signs stapled to telephone poles, etc.
Food and water: Obvious. From half liter bottles of water to reverse osmosis, MREs to farming, we need to consider short and long term food and water needs.
Shelter: Tents, homes, hotels, tarps, even your vehicle. Any way to get out of the weather.
Energy: Solar, fire, electric, generators, etc. Anything that helps us power our equipment or our selves that is not cooking or heating related.
My latest endeavor is to secure a source of backup power for the new house. I originally was looking at a standby generator. The problem is fueling it for more than a couple of days adds to the logistical complexity of preparedness. The cost of installing such a generator (including buried propane tanks) is in the neighborhood of $10,000. Then you have to fuel it, and you only benefit from it when the grid is down.
Then I looked into solar. An 8kw solar setup with a Tesla wall to get you through the night or cloudy days will generate about 1200 kilowatt hours a month. The system will cost about $20,000 after taking the Federal tax credit into account. There is no fuel needed, and when times are good, you sell power to the electric company which zeroes out your electric bid, thus subsidizing the cost.
So I think that solar is the way we are going to go for our backup power needs.
This morning, the US Department of Justice (ha) announced the formation of a “National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center.” This center is intended to provide training and technical assistance to law enforcement officials, prosecutors, attorneys, judges, clinicians, victim service and social service providers, community organizations, and behavioral health professionals responsible for implementing laws designed to keep
Make no mistake, the Feds are going to issue red flag orders to anyone that is not politically reliable. My recommendation is for you to maintain several caches of off paper or untraceable weapons for insurance against a red flag order that will see police coming to seize your firearms after some liberal asshole manages to report you to the Stasi.
There has been quite a bit of buzz about the ATF shooting a man that they were serving a search warrant on. More details are coming to light. The ATF was investigating him for being an unregistered firearms dealer. It seems that he had bought at least 150 firearms between May 2021 and February 2024. That’s an average of more than a gun a week.
Those firearms included:
24 Glock Model 45
9 Fed Arms Model FR-16
9 Beretta 92A
7 North American Arms NA22
4 Glock Model 22
4 SAR9
3 ATI Omni
3 Glock Model 19
3 Glock Model 17
3 Beretta 92FS.
He bought them from Gunbroker and had them shipped to an FFL, who was charging him $25 for the transfer. So far, suspicious, but legal.
Then he would resell them at gun shows, sometimes within days of purchasing them.
The cops caught on to this when 3 guns showed up in traffic stops and were traced to him.
Looking into it further, they had seen him selling at gun shows without asking for ID, with a camera wearing undercover buying firearms from him, no questions asked. A gang member was arrested with a firearm that was traced to Malinowski less than three months after he bought it on Gunbroker.
OK, so now we know why he was being investigated. The ATF then did a sting purchase from him:
Malinowski was at the G&S Promotion Gun Show and one of the firearms that Malinowski was selling was only purchased 4 days before the gun show
He also had a Gunbroker account under the name bmalin123, and was selling through there. It also looked like he was driving around Little Rock and selling guns out of his car.
It’s fairly obvious to me that he was illegally dealing in firearms. This isn’t just a matter of a guy selling his private collection. Even as progun as I am, there is enough here for a valid search warrant, even if there isn’t enough for a conviction yet.
You can argue that the law requiring him to have an FFL is bogus, but that isn’t what this is about. You can’t blame the ATF for being overzealous on this one up to this point, they were enforcing the law as it is written in this particular case.
There are those who are attempting to argue that they should have arrested the guy while he was working his day job at the airport, instead of serving the warrant at 6 am at his home. I don’t have a problem with them serving the warrant there. That’s where the evidence was. This guy’s death was entirely of his own making. He likely wasn’t an innocent guy just selling his collection. He was dealing in firearms and selling to people that he knew were criminals.
I just can’t feel sorry for him, no matter how much I despise the ATF.
As Miguel over at GunFreeZone points out, illegals are now squatting in vacant homes and using the law to steal it. Imagine that you go on a trip for a week, only to come home and find that there are squatters living there.
Now that the courts have said illegal immigrants can own firearms, where does that leave you, the original and legitimate homeowner? It’s a legally grey area. Florida 776.013 says:
(1) A person who is in a dwelling or residence in which the person has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and use or threaten to use: (a) Nondeadly force against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force; or (b) Deadly force if he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony.
What makes this suck is that the squatters usually have some sort of fake documentation (like a lease), indicating that they are legitimately living there. That shoves the stealing of your house out of criminal court and into civil court. Now they use landlord/tenant law and force you to have to evict them. That could take months, and they are trashing your house in the interim.
Sure, it would be nice to simply shoot the bastards and toss them out with the trash, but in this case, you are legally the intruder and they can use lethal force and the castle doctrine against you. Sucks, right?
There is only one solution that permits you to defend against this without risking jail time:
Have a good burglar alarm with security cameras. If someone breaks in, you call a trusted friend or nearby relative that you have given written and notarized permission to watch over your property while you are not there and have them meet the cops over there. Make sure that the papers you give them specifically grant them the authority to have intruders trespassed.
Get the cops involved BEFORE the squatters have a chance to draw up fake papers. It becomes a legal mess after that.
As usual, I am not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, but you already should know that.
The DOJ has officially opened up a lawsuit against Apple to break up its Smart Phone Monopoly. $AAPL is one of Pelosi’s largest positions. So for you Apple bulls, you have Pelosi on your side for this one.
Follow this Twitter feed for more stock tips. Just buy what Congress buys. Those crooked sonsabitches are all insider trading.
How can the people unable to read at a 6th grade level overlap with the people that have gone to, and in some cases graduated from, college? The answer is simple- education is failing us by charging money without delivering the finished product.
I am about to finish my latest Bachelor’s Degree. This one will be in nursing. The majority of the classes (all but one) had nothing to do with nursing or actually delivering health care. No, the college classes I took concentrated on the following the format of APA citations. Use a comma in a footnote, when you should have used a period? That gets you a C on the paper.
College is largely a useless waste of time. The only reason why I even bothered to get the BSN is that my employer paid for it, and promised me a 7% raise for finishing it.
John Mellencamp, along with Bruce Springsteen are some of the most overrated singers in existence. The only thing that annoys me more than their singing voices would be listening to Fran Drescher and Dylan Mulvaney singing “Islands in the Stream” as a duet with the lead singer of Great White doing backup vocals. Seriously, I hate his “singing.” That’s why I thought that a guy who is supposedly a champion of the working man charging people $5,000 each for tickets to see his show was a bit of a stretch.
So when I saw the story about how he stopped his concert in the middle of singing because someone in the crowd heckled him, I think “Not only is he a terrible singer, but he is an asshole, too.” Even though he did everyone there a favor by being silent for a few minutes, they DID pay for tickets. Being a thin skinned little bitch screwed them out of the tickets that they overpaid for.
Of course, he is a dancing money who is in favor of outlawing guns, but has 24/7 armed security but wants to deny the same level of protection to you.
Seattle, which already as a $19.97 per hour minimum wage, passed a law mandating delivery driver minimum wage. Using a complicated formula, the law dictated that delivery drivers receive a living wage. The law caused delivery companies to pass the added costs on to the consumer in the form of extra delivery fees. The next thing you know, people in the Seattle area had to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and the neew delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill.
The free market responded, as it always does. They don’t call it the LAW of supply and demand for nothing.
Seattle residents started deleting their delivery apps from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a 30-percent decline in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported 30,000 fewer orders within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.
As a result, the income for drivers actually went down. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings drop by half to $464.81. Small restaurants are hurting, delivery drivers are hurting, and people who depend on food deliveries are not able to get food because drivers are quitting in droves. So do the socialists in charge admit that they were wrong, and change the law? Of course not.
A spokesman for the mayor noted that “should the data show there have been unintended impacts for workers and small businesses, we are always open to making improvements”—a criterion which has clearly been met already—but nonetheless clarified that the mayor still “stands strongly in support” of the minimum wage ordinance.
Meanwhile, the president of the City Council claims she is “very worried” about the ordinance’s impacts so far—and even argues that “it’s not the role of policymakers to regulate the profit margins of companies”—before going on to say “I’m not going to redo the whole legislation.”
The law required that the city hire more bureaucrats to administer the law, and that is the point of most socialist laws- to increase the size and power of government and its officials. Just remember, the reason why communism and socialism fails is because the right people haven’t been in charge, and true communism hasn’t been tried yet.