If voting actually changed anything, it would already be illegal

According to Bloomberg, the fix is in, and Hillary will win the nomination, regardless of how voters cast their ballots. There are a total of 4,491 delegates who will decide the nominee for the Democratic party’s presidential run. Of these, there are 713 superdelegates, who are unelected and accountable to only the leaders of the Democratic party.

So 16 percent of the party’s votes are cast by delegates who do not answer to the voters, even though this is the party that claims that each and every person should have a vote, even convicted felons and illegal immigrants. By securing those superdelegates, Hillary ensures that there is a built in margin that any challenger must overcome.

Now don’t think that I am in any way saying that the Republicans are any better. The Republican party doesn’t use superdelegates. Instead, they have a system where there are “hard” and “soft” delegates. Hard delegates are required to vote for the candidate on the first ballot cast at the convention. After the first ballot, they may vote for whomever they choose. Soft delegates may vote for any candidate they choose, even on the first ballot they cast. There are complicated and vague rules that make this about as clear as Obama’s foreign policy.

At the republican convention, there are a total of 2,380 delegates.

There are 126 delegates, about 6 percent of the total, who are complete free agents. These are party leaders and elected officials, three per state or territory, who will go to the convention unbound to any candidate.

Then there are 84 delegates, or 3.5% of the total, who will be selected at state conventions, or appointed by a committee of Republican officials in the state, with no direct or indirect relationship to the popular vote in these states. States like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Louisiana select some of their delegates trough this method, for instance, even though they also pick some through their primaries. These 84 delegates are officially unbound. However, influential Republicans within each state will have some say about just who they are and about which candidate they are most likely to prefer.

Another group of 188 (7.9% of total delegates) who are picked through a caucus process but are officially unbound to any candidate. In addition to being unbound, these delegates are usually also picked in a way that is separate from the popular vote that is held in each state.

…and the rules go on and on. In short, the voters of each state actually have very little say in who the Republican nominee is,  because 16.7% of the delegates are selected by the party leadership, just like the Democratic party does at their convention.

This is why we get the same candidates in election after election, because the leaders of each party want it that way. Our choice between the Democrat or the Republican really isn’t a choice at all, because the real choice has already been made in the boardrooms of the ones controlling the purse strings of the two political parties.

Since the rules are set up to deny any new parties to the arena, and the number of Congressional seats has been fixed at a maximum of 411 for over a century, even though the US population has more than tripled in that time span, meaning that we are less represented now that at any other point in history, your vote literally doesn’t count.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: “If voting actually changed anything, it would already be illegal”

Global warming alarmists

Back in 2000, the global warming people were predicting that by the year 2015, there would be no snow anywhere in the world, and that the ice caps would be gone.
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.
Top 10 snowiest cities through March 21:

1. Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. — 158.7 inches 
2. Marquette, Mich. — 157 inches 
3. Bangor, Maine — 131.5 inches 
4. Caribou, Maine — 129.4 inches
5. Syracuse, N.Y. — 118.5 inches
6. Worcester, Mass. — 116.8 inches
7. Boston, Mass. — 110.3 inches 
8. Buffalo, N.Y. — 109.3 inches 
9. Erie, Pa. — 104 inches 
10. Gray, Maine — 103.7 inches


According to Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, we are “locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more.”… This is startling news if you are one of the 150 million people on Earth who live near the ocean. Even if you don’t live close to the sea, you likely use goods that are manufactured in plants near the water, or vacation at the beach.

Simplisafe advice

Simplisafe has this to say about coping with a burglary that is in progress while you are home. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, it is summed up by Han Solo.

Read on:

Fortunately, unlike movies, most burglars are looking to steal your belongings, not harm you.

Leave your family behind, retreat from your home, hide down the street, and hope your kids meet you there:

Have a plan before anything occurs—call a family meeting tonight! How many people live in your house? Can they all ambulate to a designated meetup space? If they can, great—pick a spot down the street where you’ll all meetup in case of any emergency that requires you to get away from the house (this is good for more than just break-ins, it’s a great plan to have in case of a fire).

Hide in a closet with a deadbolt on the door:

Do everyone’s bedrooms lock from the inside? If no, this is also a great piece of work for your to-do list. Consider also putting a lock on the inside of a closet, such as a deadbolt. Charge your cell phone. Never go to bed with a dead cellphone. Charge it and make sure it’s either close to your bed or in the closet with the deadbolt on it

Don’t make any noise, and maybe they won’t notice that you are home:

we don’t know what the burglar wants, and we don’t know how he or she will react. Yelling simply gives away your location and will allow the burglar to find you faster. Instead, get up and lock your door as quietly as possible. Listen very closely to see if you can guess how many intruders there are. Do you hear speaking? Is there any auditory evidence of a weapon? 

But if they DO want to hurt you, and they DO have a weapon, you are royally fucked. Why? Because of this next piece of advice:

Unless you are a trained professional, don’t grab a weapon. This includes firearms, baseball bats and pepper spray. They all sound like a good idea, but again, we don’t know how the burglar will react to seeing an armed person.

If it saves one life, let’s do it…

How many times have you heard this argument when it comes to guns?

“But heck, if it’s one person we stop and it’s one life we save, why not. That one life may be yours, your kid, your mom, or someone else you know.”

What anpit the other side of that? What if it costs one life? As long as we are dealing with hypotheticals, what if one person had been armed with a weapon, and had stopped any one of the past spree shooters sooner? Would that have saved a life? A dozen lives? Two dozen?

That isn’t a hypothetical situation: It happened in Kileen, Texas on October 16, 1991 in Luby’s cafeteria. A man drove his pickup truck into the front wall of the restaurant, killed 23 people and wounded 27 with a firearm before killing himself. In that restaurant was a woman named Suzanna Hupp, and was having lunch with her parents, who were both killed by the shooter that day. Ms. Hupp had a pistol in her purse, but had left it in the car, because it was illegal at the time for people to carry concealed weapons in Texas. She later said that this decision was one she would regret for the rest of her life.

Her father, Al Gratia, feeling he “needed to do something”, tried to rush the gunman and sadly was fatally shot in the chest instead. Hupp, eventually seeing an escape through a broken window (broken by the shoulder of another horrified, fleeing victim), grabbed her mother by the shirt telling her “Come on, we have to go now!” As Hupp moved toward the only escape, she believed her mother to be following behind. However, upon reaching the safety of outside, she then realized her Mother, Ursula Gratia had stayed behind to be with her mortally wounded husband. Hupp was told soon after the incident that her mother had instead watched her daughter get to safety and then turned to be with her husband of over 40 years. Ursula stayed by the side of her mortally-wounded husband, cradling him as his life slipped away. Al Gratia died almost instantly. Ursula Gratia had time to glance up at the gunman afterward and back down at her husband before the crazed man then shot her in the head at point-blank range, killing her instantly.

Had Hupp been able to legally carry her pistol armed that day instead of being forced to leave it in the car, she would have saved as many as a dozen people from death. The laws against ramming a building, carrying a weapon, shooting people, and committing murder did not save a single life that day. The law abiding woman left her gun in the car, in compliance with the law. The criminal broke the law, and two dozen people, including the parents of the law abiding gun owner, paid for that with their lives.

If it saves just one life, shouldn’t we try it? More guns may not be the answer, but there is one thing that has been demonstrated over and over: More gun laws that disarm the law abiding are not the answer.

Victim disarmament zone fails. Again.

Proof that checkpoints leading to gun free zones just move the target rich environment from inside the sterile area to the queue outside the checkpoint. I would also point out that New York’s laws against guns, as well as Federal regulations against carrying firearms in Federal buildings and post offices failed to work. Again.

How many times do gun free zones have to fail before people realize that they do not work?

There are those who will claim that the armed guard had a gun, and that did not work either. I would answer with this: Simply standing around with a gun is no guarantee that you won’t be ambushed and killed. You need to be willing, able, and prepared to use that firearm, or all it means is that you will carry around a hunk of metal that is used only for decoration.

Anti gunners are so violent

Why are anti gun people so violent? From a comment on a recent post:

MORE bullshit from gun nuts!!! You claim there is REPORTS that Lilly has done this before, show it to me. Where’s the proof. The only person who made that claim was the asshole that shot Lilly. You believe him why??? Stupid people need to stop posting crap when they are clearly clueless. OK, go check my spelling now asshole.

The full police report can be found at the end of this post. The wife of the man who shot the dog said in her statement to police:

“This dog has attacked us in the past, and previous complaints have been placed with the city,” she said in a sworn written statement. “The dog never injured me or any family member but always charges us.”

Carabin said her husband intended to “scare the dog away.” Burdock, who called Animal Control concerning Lilly about a year ago, recently underwent back surgery and was carrying the gun for protection.

The wife was not the only witness to corroborate the shooter’s story. Here  are some more facts:

witness Richard Blake Frazier said “She did not have (the dog) under control nor was she close to the dog. The dog was well out of arms reach.” The officer said had she had her hands as close to the collar as she said she did, she would have been shot. She was not shot. The short barrel of the gun would allow the pellets to expand as they exited from the barrel, and with her not receiving any injuries from the shot shell or being hit by the shot shell (approximately 135 pellets in one shell) she was not as close to her dog as she believed. 

To illustrate, here is what the shot pattern looks like from a .38 Special revolver fired from 8 feet (courtesy of the Box O Truth):

If you look closely, you will see that the shot pattern covers most of an 8×12 piece pf paper. I count at least 38 hits in the area of that paper. If this woman’s dog were really 12 feet from the shooter, and she was less than 2 feet from the dog, it would not just be the dog’s eye that was hit. The dog’s entire face, and the dog’s owner, would have caught a few dozen of those pellets. Looking at the Xray on the news page, it looks as though the dog got about 45 pellets to the area around its eye. This indicates that the dog was closer than 8 feet from the muzzle of the weapon.

On top of the other two witnesses, there is a third. Zachary Blair (witness) said she was 5 feet away, while the shooter claimed the dog was 6 feet away. The officer stated in his report that he believed the dog was closer than 12 feet due to the dog receiving her injury in one localized area. If it had been further away, the BBs would have covered a larger area of the dog’s body.

The dog’s owner herself admitted that the dog was not within her control and was not on a leash, as Winter Park law requires: On the night of the shooting, the owner of the dog, Ms Christensen, stated that she didn’t put the leash on before she let Lily out of the house. She did’t put the leash on while standing in the street talking to Blair. She claims she only tried to put the leash on when Burdock and Ioana approached.

According to the statement of the owner, this is a rescue dog. Dogs that have been rescued from abusive homes are frequently aggressive towards people who remind them of their former owners. Just because this dog was gentle with some people, does not mean that it was gentle with everyone.

Notice that the commenter uses the word “gun nut.” This is obviously a case of people just not liking the fact that a CCW holder can carry a gun in Florida.

Here is the police report:

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