July 2020

This  video is making the rounds of Social Media.

This video is pretty accurate. Let me explain why:

All 11th grade students in the state of Florida MUST take US History. At the end of this class there is a test called the EOC. That exam is used not only to rate the student, but the results of that test are used to rate the teacher AND the school. Whether or not teachers keep their jobs, and the amount of school funding, it determined by the scores on this exam. It is very difficult to cover everything that

With that being said, here are the standards (called benchmarks) that detail what a student must learn for US History. They are set by the Florida Department of Education. Read them carefully. There is not one benchmark that covers anything that happens before the Civil War. However, 20 of the 121 benchmarks concerned some form of identity politics. US history, and not one word about the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase, or anything else before 1860, but a fifth of the class concerns identity politics.

When we learned about the American Revolution, it was easy to see it all as a single time period. Please keep in mind that the events that led to the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 had begun nearly 12 years before.

As a result of the French and Indian war (1756-1763), the British were taxing the colonies(notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773).

In early 1770, more than 2,000 British soldiers occupied the city of Boston with its 16,000 colonists and tried to enforce Britain’s tax laws. This led to skirmishes between colonists and soldiers—and between separatist colonists and colonists loyal to Britain (loyalists)—were increasingly common. To protest taxes, separatists often vandalized stores selling British goods and intimidated store merchants and their customers.

On February 22, a mob of separatists attacked a known loyalist’s store. Customs officer Ebenezer Richardson lived near the store and tried to break up the rock-pelting crowd by firing a warning shot through the window of his home. His gunfire struck and killed an 11-year-old boy named Christopher Seider and further enraged the separatists.

Several days later, a fight broke out between local workers and British soldiers. It ended without serious bloodshed but helped set the stage for the bloody incident yet to come.

The Boston Massacre took place on March 5, 1770. Months of unrest followed.

The Boston Tea party was in December of 1773.

The British responded with the Intolerable Acts.

The First Continental Congress met in September of 1774 and presented a list of grievances to the Crown.

The Second Continental Congress was supposed to have met in May of 1775, but the events of  April 19, 1776 interrupted that. The Battle of Lexington and Concord began the Revolutionary war- more than 10 years of escalating tensions and violence led to open warfare.

There was a self defense situation in the Detroit metro area. The incident went like this:
A white, pregnant woman allegedly bumped into a black teenager. The teenager went and got her mother, who approached the white woman and demanded that she apologize. Things escalated into a verbal argument, and that is where the video, being recorded by the black teen, begin:

Note that the couple attempted to pull away and the black mother stepped behind the car to block their egress. After being unable to leave, the white couple drew a firearm.

The white couple has been arrested and charged with felonious assault and, if convicted, face up to 4 years in prison.

This again reinforces my opinion that you need to have a dash cam AND if anyone attempts to stop you from leaving by throwing themselves in front of your vehicle, do not get out. Just floor it and leave.

Last week, I was censored by a news channel because I posted facts about broken households, and those are racist. Apparently, I am not the only one saying it. 

I think that Joe Biden is going to be our next President. I will vote against him, but I think that the tactics of COVID, BLM, and Joe’s handlers wisely keeping him out of the public eye will ensure that he will be sworn in as our next President.

Note that we are exactly four months from election day, and the Democrats still haven’t announced their VP pick. I think the VP pick is a secret weapon that will be announced in such a way as to present a real problem for the Trump campaign.

Could you imagine HRC as Biden’s VP pick? He can’t be so foolish. He would need a food taster for every meal, and who would volunteer for that job? Could he possibly pick Michelle Obama to be VP? Even Barack Obama could be his pick. (Remember that a person can’t be ELECTED more than twice to the Presidency, but it says nothing about succeeding after being already elected twice.)

The person he picks may very well wind up being President. In fact, depending on who the pick winds up being, it could be likely that he resigns or is removed relatively quickly.

Either way, I now feel that the Republicans are likely to lose control of the White House.

SiGraybeard reports that the US just passed $26 trillion in debt, and in May it was $25 trillion.

In November of 2019, I blogged that the US was $23 trillion in debt.
In July of 2019 (a year ago) I pointed out that it was $22 trillion.
When Trump took office, it was $19.5 trillion. The Trump administration has so far borrowed $6.5 trillion.
In all, Obama’s share of our national debt is about $8 Trillion. President George W. Bush borrowed $5 trillion, Clinton $1.8 trillion.

We cannot borrow money forever. The total economic activity of the entire US economy (GDP) is $21.7 trillion a year. The US owes 120% of its GDP. By definition, something that cannot go on forever, will not. How large can the debt get before it is unrecoverable?

My son came home from Harlem on June 3. On June 8, they called him and asked him to return and offered him even more money than the first time, so he accepted. He flew back the very next day. After just two weeks there, he was told that FEMA has cancelled the emergency fund that was paying him, and that all contract medical personnel would be returning home on July 6. No more gravy train after that day.

He will be coming home to quarantine. His fiance was exposed to a friend that was asymptomatic, but tested positive for COVID. She got tested herself and is also positive for COVID. She didn’t complain of any symptoms until she was told about her friend and decided to get tested. She claims that she has lost her sense of taste, is extremely tired, and feels like bugs are crawling all over her. I am not sure if these symptoms are real, or are just psychosomatic. At any rate, she is quarantined for 2 weeks, and I guess he will be too, once he gets home.

This is what COVID is now: mild symptoms (if any) and massive economic damage.

So I have been thinking that it could be beneficial to have some smoke grenades. Not to mention fun. So I searched far and wide to find some, and settled on EG Grenades and their EG18 series. Now I wasn’t sure whether or not to get the 18 or the 18X, so I bought some of each. It turns out that I really like typing the word ‘grenade’ so I may use it quite a bit here.

I ordered them on Friday, June 26, and they shipped the same day by FedEx ground. The cost was $150 for eight grenades including shipping, and they arrived on Wednesday, July 1. They are available in eight colors: Black, Blue, Green Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple. I bought red, white, and blue because those colors were on sale for Independence Day and because those colors won’t raise too many eyebrows while I am testing them close to July 4.

The grenades claim that it is safe to be stored at up to 50degC and 70% humidity. That means they should do well in an ammo can in the garage with a couple of desiccant packs thrown in there.

I waited until afternoon for the breeze to die down, and decided to test one. Humidity was 85%, temperature 81F, and wind was 3 mph out of the WSW.  The first grenade I tested was an EG18X in RED.

Deploying the grenade is easy- just pop off the safety cap, pull the pin, and toss the grenade. There is NO delay between pulling the pin and the emergence of smoke. The web page for the grenade states that smoke emerges for about 50 seconds. That may be true if you count every wisp of smoke, but the time for actual, thick smoke is almost exactly 30 seconds.

The smoke cloud stayed relatively close to the ground, with the thickest part of the cloud extending from the ground to about 15 feet in height. The cloud was thick enough and wide enough to completely hide the house across the street. I would say 60 feet wide by about 30 feet deep. It remained relatively intact for about 2 minutes.

This grenade is more than capable of obscuring the movement of people or objects from ground observation, as long as wind conditions allowed the cloud to remain intact. The smoke would have worked had I needed to move from the house to a vehicle in the driveway without being seen- in other words, instant concealment. It would also be quite effective for marking locations for spotting from the air. In other words, just like its military counterpart.

Another warning: The grenade came to rest on its side on my driveway. The discharge stained the concrete. I don’t know how long the red stain will be there.

Later: I will test the EG18 as a comparison.

So it turns out that pulling the pin on a high output smoke grenade and tossing it into your yard pisses off some of your neighbors. The guy who lives 4 doors down is REALLY pissed. I don’t care. It isn’t illegal, and I broke no rules.