My wife sometimes asks me why I debate lefties online. Here is an example. I made that post about Mamdani’s commie grocery store. Then I got sucked into an online debate. Someone picked up my idea about reselling the stuff from his store, and the left responded with this:
It really tickles me when they set up such easy T-ball shots.
I’m a home lab tinkerer. I enjoy getting my house to do things that make my life easier. My current project involves using Home Assistant and my new home network to monitor my house. I don’t have to pay alarm company fees, camera fees, or any other rent to a company for things I already own. That’s why this story hit a nerve with me.
Imagine you just spent $400 on a smart garage door opener. You paid Chamberlain another $30 for a myQ hub to make it “smart.” Then in November 2023, Chamberlain blocked every third-party app from talking to your own garage door. Home Assistant. Apple Home. Google Home. SmartThings. IFTTT. All dead overnight.
Chamberlain called it “unauthorized usage” and said they cut off outside apps from accessing their door openers to improve the experience for their 10 million users. Home Assistant removed the myQ integration weeks later. The odd part? Amazon Key in-garage delivery still works because they charge $1.99 per order and they pay Chamberlain fees for access.
You now own a $430 garage door opener that only talks to one app, owned by one company, and they control who can and can’t interact with it. You are renting access to your own garage.
Paul Wieland, a former IT guy reverse-engineered Chamberlain’s Security protocol and built a device that speaks to it. He named it Rage Against the Garage Door Opener (ratgdo). He hoped to sell 100 units. Instead, he sold tens of thousands of them.
I’ve been predicting for years that the whole pitch of “you will own nothing and like it” that’s been going on, where people have to pay microfees for everything, would spawn a new industry of people who will sell hacks to get around this bullshit. It warms my heart to see that happening.
The disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I don’t think that I ever will. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested. In this case, I don’t own and have no experience with ratgdo. I have no idea how well it works or if it works. As a home lab tinkerer, I am just happy to see people working to find better alternatives to renting your garage door opener.
Mamdani says that NYC is going to open a city owned grocery store in each borough and sell products 30% less than retail stores do. Here is my plan.
That’s it. That’s my plan. My store’s name will be Nalyevo*
* In Russian and Polish, the use of the term nalyevo (na lewo in Polish) means ‘on the left’, but can also connote taking bribes or “sneaky” behavior.
Socialists always think everyone else has to work the farms and factories, but they won’t have to.
It’s an election year, and like clockwork, the left is beginning to get their violence on. So I will begin updating my warnings as events unfold. The best way to survive violence is to not be where it occurs.
With recent events in mind, I have updated the warnings for Minnesota and Hawaii.
Keeping in mind the violations of free speech, I have upgraded the warning for Minneapolis to include the entire state of Minnesota. The entire state of Minnesota is now a Zone 3 area.
Zone three areas are where violence has has taken place with little to no attempt at mitigating response from local authorities. Additionally, police and/or prosecutors are likely to bring the full weight of the law down upon those who attempt to defend themselves from these actors, or those who speak out against them.
The story this morning about racially motivated attacks, along with this video of local Hawaiians attacking people, I am also adding the islands of Maui and Oahu to Zone 2. Even though it turned out he wasn’t a real ICE agent, this is still a violent attack on what the crowd believed was one.
Zone 2 cites have seen recent violence, with local authorities either refusing to intervene or even actively assisting those committing violent acts. Violence may occur in these cities with little to no warning, and those who employ self defense in these cities can expect to face a hostile or antagonistic response from government authorities.
See the Zones page for more information and a complete list of zones.
Watch the video below. This apparently happened in the Home Depot in Ocala Florida. It is right down the street from Silver Springs, which is why you hear them refer to that. Below the post and video is my opinion. Discuss.
I don’t think the people in this video are stupid at all. He kept tapping her phone with his, while causing the phone to chirp each time. Then he made various claims of “It’s charity” and “I need money” then later, he said “I only took a hundred”
In my mind, this creates the reasonable belief that he is somehow using his phone to steal money, or at the very least, some sort of information from her phone. He is intentionally creating that belief in an attempt to get content for his stupid social media post that he is obviously filming with smart glasses. Many people’s phones contain financial information or automatic payment apps. It’s completely reasonable to believe he is using his phone to steal money, and he even made statements to that fact.
Once that reasonable belief exists in my mind, I am holding him for police. This is at the very least a reasonable belief that theft is taking place. Florida statute 776.031:
A person is justified in using or threatening to use force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to prevent or terminate the other’s trespass on, or other tortious or criminal interference with, either real property other than a dwelling or personal property, lawfully in his or her possession or in the possession of another who is a member of his or her immediate family or household or of a person whose property he or she has a legal duty to protect. A person who uses or threatens to use force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat before using or threatening to use such force.
I am tackling this guy’s bitch ass. If he offers ANY physical force to resist my apprehension of him, it is now reasonable for me to believe that his theft has now become robbery. I am drawing a gun on his stupid ass. Why? Because as soon as he uses force, that becomes a reasonable fear of imminent commission of a forcible felony, as in robbery.
All of this for cheap laughs. This video would have been much funnier if it had ended with the videographer getting his ass kicked, or proned out on the ground looking down the barrel of that old man’s handgun.
Once it turns out he was placing me in fear for Internet laughs, my lawyer would be instructed to sue this asshole for intentional infliction of emotional distress. That would be funny as well.
A California family was injured at a luxury resort in Hawaii in a racially motivated attack by as many as 20 locals. The ringleader said:
We’re going to beat up the haole boys.
Haole (pronounced ‘howly’) is the native Hawaiian term for people who aren’t from Hawaii and is used mainly as a reference to whites. My wife lived there in Hawaii for several years, and told me the disdain for whites is pervasive, especially for white women. The native Hawaiian girls feel like white women are “stealing their men” and it’s tough to fit in to society there as a white person.
We visited the island state in 2016. One of the things that I saw when we were on Oahu was a large number of signs declaring that haole should leave, “Tourist go home,” or “We have enough hotels.” Signs of that nature. There are a large number of ‘native’ people who believe that Hawaii was some sort of peaceful paradise until Europeans arrived, and they think secession will return them to the ‘good old days.’ Hawaii residents still think that they are entitled to payment from the mainland.
More than 1,000 people are missing or dead from the Maui fires three years ago – many of them children- after police would not allow them to flee the advancing flames. People get the government that they vote for. That’s why I don’t feel sorry for the residents of Hawaii. They voted for a Democrat governor, Senators, Representatives, and have voted for Democrat Presidents for decades.
Hawaiians: This is YOUR fault. Remember that on election day, assuming that it isn’t too late for your votes to matter.
FN sells semi auto M-249 Squad Automatic weapons, but they are pricey at over $10,000 each. A Mark 48 is pretty much unobtanium, but who doesn’t want a 7.62x51mm belt fed light machine gun? Still, there are ways you can get close.
You can contact the boys over at CryoStructure and get a belt fed 7.62 upper for about $6,000, and have your self a semi auto belt fed support weapon for about 40% of the cost of that SAW.
If you don’t like the weight or are on a budget, you can get yourself a 5.56mm version and build an M249 for half that much. If you look around the website, you can see that they have belt fed 80% lowers, nutsacks, and all of the associated pieces and parts you need.
If firepower is what you need, you can get a “Trigger Kicker.” This is the third FRT developed by the great Mr Hoffman. In this case, the device replaces your disconnector and turns an AR platform into a SAFE/FRT type semiautomatic rifle. Since each shot is a separate squeeze of the trigger, they are legal for now. I know the website says “sold out,” but if you check them every morning, you will notice that they are available early, before that day’s stock sells out. They appear to be going like hotcakes.
The disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested.
I believe that the government agents: cops, firefighters, bureaucrats, whatever, all fall into one of three camps.
Case in point:
In Augusta, Maine on October 18, 2025 there was a No Kings rally on the Memorial Bridge. A man shows up dressed in an American Flag costume with a BYRNA pepper ball gun (which is legal to possess in Maine) to counter-protest. The lefty protesters call 911 screaming “HE’S GOT A GUN.”
The cops immediately handcuff the man and place him under arrest. They refuse to tell him why he is being arrested, only saying that he will find out what the charges were when he gets to the police station. As soon as they arrive at the station, the police simply release the cuffs and tell him he is free to go, no charges.
The officers later admitted they removed him in handcuffs to prevent the mob from becoming violent.
To those officers who read this blog, especially those who have criticism for what I have to say: Is this something you support? Would you silence one side, violating their constitutional rights and your own oath, simply to prevent the mob from becoming violent? If the answers to either of those questions are yes, then we know where the police stand.
Read about the encounter here:
We keep hearing about how cutting Florida property taxes is going to cause cities and counties to cut the budgets of the vital services like police and fire. The police and fire unions have come out against the tax cuts, because of course they have. Let’s take a look at what that means.
In another installment of “government is spending money like a kid who found dad’s credit cards” we look at the Kissimmee Fire Department. Let’s take a look at their budget and see how money is being spent:
Then for the following fiscal year, the department’s budget ballooned to $24.71 million, despite the fact that they didn’t run an increased call volume, having run 14,837 calls, and then for the year after that, the budget climbed again to $31.2 million. So what changed that necessitated such a drastic increase in budget?
The difference between FY23-24 and FY25-26 is a 56% increase in the fire department’s budget in just two years. A big part of that is in staffing costs. The fire department went from a 3 shift model, where firefighters work 24 hours on and get 48 hours off, to a 4 shift model, where firefighters work 24 hours and get 72 hours off. Despite the fact that firefighters are working 25% less, they are being paid the same amount. This does absolutely nothing to increase the quality of service, but the firefighters get a lot more time off for the same money, so there is that. On an hourly basis, firefighters just received a 34% raise.
That’s not the only increase in costs. Administration costs climbed from $3.5 million to $5 million ( 42% increase) in the same time span. In short, the city is simply throwing money around to the detriment of the taxpayer. How did the city get the money? They raised taxes, of course.
These localities in Florida are spending money left and right. It’s time to rein in this ridiculous spending spree. Fire services can afford some cuts, and so can the rest of government.