The Republicans just did what they do best: make a lot of heat and light to gain press attention, then cave in at the last minute. Republicans like to make a lot of noise about how they are taking a principled stance. How can they have principles when they are so easily abandoned?
Just because the Democrats are your enemy does not make the Republicans your friends, and just because the Democrats are lying does not mean that the Republicans are telling the truth.
The Republicans are only playing a game to retain their power and make more money. Those are the only principles that they have.
Today, the minimum wage in Florida increased by $1 per hour. The minimum wage for non-tipped employees in Florida is increasing from $11 to $12. For tipped workers, the rate’s going from $7.98 to $8.98.
Minimum wage has increased from $8.56 per hour to $12 per hour in three years- that is a 13 percent annual increase. I still can’t go through a drive through without them screwing up my order, and in that same time period, the cost of a Big Mac meal has gone from $7 to over $12- which is a 23% annual increase.
At Denny’s, 2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes. This is the breakfast that Denny’s calls the “Original Grand Slam.” Sold for $1.99 in 1997. By 2021, that same breakfast cost $9.49. That works out to an annual inflation rate of 6.7%. Now here we are in 2023, and that same breakfast is now $11.99, or a 26.3% increase in the past two and a half years. That’s a 10.5% annual increase.
It’s arts and crafts day here in Sector Ocho. Read on for today’s project.
You will recall that Liberty safe is in possession of a backdoor code for their electronic locks, so I was looking at getting a new safe. I seriously considered getting a Champion safe. Since we are in the middle of gearing up to move, the nearly $7,000 price tag for a new safe just isn’t in the cards right now. It isn’t like my valuables aren’t worth it, I just can’t spend the cash right at this time. Still, something needed to be done.
It isn’t that I think that the lack of a backdoor will keep the FBI out of my safe. Let’s face it, the government has virtually unlimited resources. If they want in, they will get in, backdoor or not. The fact that a backdoor exists at all is where I have a problem. With all of the data breaches in the news, the mere existence of a backdoor is a significant liability. Some loser buys the safe backdoors on the Internet, and thanks to a data breach, now has my address and the backdoor combo to my safe. No thanks.
The lock has a combination that can be set or changed by the user
Since it was the same make as the electronic lock, it fit without further modification.
There is no backdoor combination for mechanical locks.
The lock cost less than $100
The disadvantages:
The safe can’t be unlocked in the dark
Mechanical locks are slower than electronic locks.
Florida’s hot weather finally broke this week, so I could work in the garage without dying of heat exhaustion. (It’s routinely over 102 degF in my garage during the summer.) That means it was time to change out the lock. The entire job took slightly over an hour. It would have been faster, but my wife called me on the phone twice while I was doing it. Still, pretty easy. I started by pulling out the old electronic lock:
(not my actual safe lock, but similar to it)
Four screws held the inner wall of the safe in place. Off it came.
I clamped a set of vise grips on the door frame of the safe to make sure I didn’t shut the door and lock myself out by mistake.
I clamped a second set of vise grips onto the relocker* (marked with red arrow in photo, above) to hold it in place
I undid the four screws on the old, electronic lock and removed the cover plate and relocker bar.
I unplugged the leads from the keypad where they plugged into the lock
There were 4 screws holding the lock in place. I removed them, and the lock from the door.
I removed the keypad from the front of the safe door.
Now I was ready to install the new lock. I followed the video that I found on YouTube.
A couple of notes here.
I don’t have a dial ring alignment tool. It didn’t matter. I did it by eye and it worked just fine.
I didn’t install the plastic bushing that the lockset uses for a bearing. That means my dial doesn’t turn very smoothly. I will have to take it all apart and install it, but I want to have a new slipway key before I try it, just in case I ruin the one that is in there in the disassembly. That means a trip to a locksmith for a new one.
I used a Dremel with a cutoff wheel to cut the dial spindle. It worked great. I clamped the dial in a vise, and cut the spindle off by hand, then used a flat file to bevel the end of the spindle.
The hardest part was setting the combination. I had to do it three times before I got it right. I don’t know why I had trouble, but it was probably an I-D-ten-T error. I finally got it right.
After I set the combination, I tested the lock by locking and unlocking the mechanism four times before I trusted it enough to close the door. Now there is only one door (the front door) to my safe, and I am the only one who knows the combination. When my wife gets home, she will be the second person.
On a side note, I will soon have an SG electronic lock for sale. I think (but I am not sure) that the backdoor for each safe is unique to that safe. Since the lock won’t match your safe’s serial number, your safe may not be subject to a backdoor attack. However, I wouldn’t count on it. For all I know, the backdoor is 1-2-3-4-5, like an idiot would use on his luggage.
footnotes
* the relocker has one job. If you look closely at the lock, you will see that it works by inserting a locking bar into the transfer bar of the bolt works, preventing it from opening. Dialing in the correct combination withdraws the locking bolt and allows the bolt works to function. Removing the lock will also allow the bolt works to function. A burglar can punch the lock out and gain access to your safe. A relocker prevents this from happening. Look at the photo, and you will see that removing the lock causes the relocker to drop down under spring tension and prevent the bolt works from operating.
Also, my thanks to Mel Brooks for making Spaceballs, one of the funniest movies of all times.
Disney has announced that it will be closing its Star Wars themed hotel. The concept of the hotel was complex, and shows a complete lack of awareness of your customer base. The idea was that the hotel would be like living on a space faring cruise ship. The experience was to be totally immersive.
There were problems with the concept that doomed it to failure from the beginning, and these problems would have been easy to spot, if only someone had discussed it with actual people. The biggest problem is the cost: $1,200 per night for the first two adult guests. For additional guests staying in the same cabin, it would be $500 per night for a child, and $700 per night for an adult. To compare, taking a comparable cruise on a conventional cruise ship with complementary alcohol, internet service, and a personal butler costs about half that. The extra cost is for the Star Wars experience.
So what is this experience? It is focused on the time period of the latest Disney versions of the Star Wars franchise. You know, the movies that only the biggest Star Wars geeks follow with enough excitement to go to this hotel. The characters from the original George Lucas time period don’t exist in this time period, so many original Star Wars fans, most notably the older ones with the money to stay here, won’t recognize many of the characters. The very nature of the hotel limited your customer base, which was already limited by the high cost.
As a hotel instead of an experience, it was a total bomb. There was no swimming pool, no gym, nothing but an extended, expensive cosplay of a movie franchise. For this business to be successful, there has to exist a large enough subset of people who are big enough fans of the movies that are able and willing to spend more than $1,000 a night to cosplay a movie while staying in a crappy hotel.
There just aren’t enough people who are large enough fans to do that at a $1k per night price point. Had Disney executives done a simple market survey, this would have been apparent. The failure of this hotel is a microcosm of the failure of Disney as a company.
There is a lot of talk about Disney and Ron DeSantis’ feud, and many are saying that Disney announcing layoffs and cancelling their projects in the Orlando area are signs that Florida’s governor is losing the battle. That’s BS. The real issue, and reason for these cutbacks, is that the current executives are woke morons with no real business sense. They are taking a company that made its mark, and became an industry giant, by selling family friendly entertainment.
Disney once made wholesome entertainment, beginning in the 1940’s with the classic animated stories like those of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. Then the 1950’s and 60’s saw the company continue with animated movies, but also told live action stories like Treasure Island, The Absent Minded Professor, Swiss Family Robinson, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Old Yeller. Over the years, we saw other wholesome movies like the Apple Dumpling Gang, the series of films like Herbie the Love Bug, and Escape to Witch Mountain. The films of Disney were so family oriented, that the company’s first film to not be rated G was the 1979 film The Black Hole.
We moved to Florida in 1972, when my father, who worked as an early computer engineer for Hewlett Packard, was sent there to support the new tech boom in Central Florida. I visited the Disney complex for most of my life. I grew up around Disney and its theme parks. On two different occasions, I worked for the company. Once when in high school flipping burgers and loading people on the attractions of Horizons and World of Motion, and again years later as a repair technician, repairing dancing chickens at Splash Mountain.
I raised my own kids on Disney movies: The Lion King, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, Toy Story, and Monsters, Inc.– Disney was still making quality entertainment that families could enjoy well into the new century. Even as an adult, I used to pay to enter the parks to see attractions like the Osborne Family Christmas lights. I would go to see the Christmas decorations and sip some hot cocoa while listening to Christmas music. It was relaxing to escape and see some wholesome entertainment.
Disney has changed so much from those early, family friendly years. The cracks began with the rise of what is called “Gay Days.” In 1991, a large group of about 3,000 homosexuals flooded the park while wearing red shirts. It wasn’t a company sponsored thing. That would change over the years, and by the end of the ‘oughts, the event would grow to be a company sponsored event with 150,000 flooding a family friendly park with sexual messages- all aimed at kids.
Now the company has broken with its former self, and spends time producing many films that are no longer aimed at families. Now they are aimed at sending a political and sexual message to kids. From changing old characters to new, sexualized ones, the new “woke” Disney is more aimed at destroying the family than it is at celebrating it. There was a time that Disney jealously guarded its reputation. That time is gone.
That’s why the Disney hotel failed, and that’s why the Disney company is underperforming. The company has lost its way. If the company is to be saved, the brand has to return to its family friendly, wholesome roots.
Sophie, an 11 year old girl, was abducted by her dad because of a “bitter custody dispute.” They were eventually found in Mexico, and police successfully reunited the girl with her mother and her mother’s new fiancé. The father is facing felony charges and will get up to 3 years in prison, if convicted.
But he told DailyMail.com, in an exclusive interview that took place the day before the warrant was issued, that the only way he will return to court and bring his daughter home is if he is allowed to put his case before a jury.
OK, well that’s his right. Don’t we all have a right to a jury trial? Not so fast.
Ex-wife Kelly Long opposed the jury trial in a motion and asked for Long to be summarily jailed for 18 months plus an extra year on one count of hiding Sophie and another for failing to hand her over.
Michael was ordered in July to pay $20,000 to cover the cost of reunification therapy for Sophie and her mother, as well as therapy for her two brothers, his sons.
That’s the story, but it’s also a lie. Watch this video to understand why the father wanted to hide his daughter from her mother:
Sophie claimed she was sexually abused by her mother’s fiancée Jacob Bellington and was diagnosed with a vaginal infection after being taken to the hospital last summer. That didn’t matter.
She was also interviewed by a specialist nurse with her father outside the room and repeated the claims to her. That didn’t matter.
The courts then took custody away from the father, and banned him from having visitation. So, realizing that his ex-wife and her new Swedish boyfriend were going to continue raping his daughter, did what anyone would do- he grabbed her and took off.
Of course, the ex-wife paints all of this as being a custody stunt, and the courts believed her. They have painted him as a “fraudster” who “coached his daughter to lie” about her mother and mother’s new fiancé.
This is how our courts work. Any man who has been through a divorce, especially one involving custody, can tell you how it works. If the woman wants “her kids,” the courts take her side. She gets the kids, she gets child support, the (now ex)-husband has to pay her legal tab. The assumption is that children belong with their mother. End of story. The only thing Dad is good for, is paying the bills.
It’s nothing more than a shakedown, aided and assisted by our courts. That’s why so many men are realizing the truth- marriage is largely a losing game, and the only winning move is to not play at all. The MSM, as well as women’s magazines are all in an uproar, trying to figure out why men don’t want to get married any more. They blame easy access to sex, and they are all wrong.
Marriage is on the decline. Men are deciding that it just isn’t worth it. Little girls are being raped, and the courts don’t care. This is because we are supporting mothers due to support feminism, are believing all women, or something.
So when people tell me how the courts are going to protect our rights, no matter which rights those are, I know that they are sadly deluded. Our courts, our police, our entire legal framework, is irretrievably broken. A society has as its first duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves. It’s also the duty of all civilized men, and the backbone of a civilization. Any country that fails to do so collapses in short order.
Well, our country doesn’t protect the helpless any longer. It hasn’t done so for decades.
Just ask Sophie Long. She will tell you the story about how a black man stuck his fingers in her vivi while her mother looked on, and the courts made it happen. I have to go take a break for awhile, before my rising blood pressure gives me a stroke.
Election season has begun, and that means the riots are starting up again. It’s so predictable, it would be funny, except we are seeing the destruction of our nation in real time.
Johns Hopkins, which used to do good work, but is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, has come out in favor of microstamping.
Microstamping imprints a code on a bullet’s cartridge case each time a gun is fired—linked to the gun's serial number—allowing law enforcement to quickly link cartridge cases found at crime scenes to the gun used in a crime.
— Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions (@JHU_CGVS) September 25, 2023
They aren’t very bright. Microstamping is useless without firearm registration, so we know that is what is next, should they even get this technology (off site PDF alert) to be passed. However, the problems don’t stop there.
No manufacturer has ever manufactured a firearm with microstamping. Why? A reliable way of doing it hasn’t been invented yet.
All you need to thwart it is a nailfile applied to the end of the firing pin.
As a bonus, a murderer could just scatter brass casings that he picked up from the firing range around the crime scene
What if the gun used was stolen?
What if that gun has a replacement firing pin?
That doesn’t stop the medical people at Johns Hopkins from attempting to push for things in a field where they have no experience whatsoever. They just whore out their credentials to whomever is willing to pay.
The paper touts California’s law, passed in 2007, that requires new models of handgun sold to be equipped with this unicorn technology. They don’t mention that the law was found to be unconstitutional.
Then they attempt to make it into a racial issue by claiming this:
One analysis of major U.S. cities found that law enforcement makes an arrest in only 35% of firearm homicides and 21% of firearm assaults when the victim was Black or Hispanic/Latino compared to 53% and 37% respectively when the victim was white.
You know why that is? Because in white neighborhoods, “firearm homicides” are usually solved when the cops arrive to find the shooter still standing over the decedent’s body with the gun still in his hand. Many of them are also legal self defense shootings. Contrast that with black neighborhoods, where the majority of homicides where a firearm was the means employed involve disputes over gang territory, drug deals, or simple drive by shootings. When police arrive, no one claims to have seen a thing.
A large portion of these unsolved shootings are perpetrated by guns that were recently trafficked and diverted into the illegal market.
Criminals steal guns and then use them to commit crimes? I’m shocked. Hey, explain to me how microstamping will in any way help in solving a crime involving a stolen firearm.
For example, an analysis of five years of data from the ATF found that more than 40% (528,855) of crime guns recovered by police and traced were used in a crime within three years of their initial retail sale at a licensed dealer.
Again, misleading. Used in crime? What crime? Theft? What about the guns recovered by police and not traced? This is a carefully worded statement, intended to mislead the reader.
No, this is where the conclusion leads them:
Microstamping should deter gun dealers and owners from selling or transferring their gun to someone who might commit a crime because microstamping evidence should lead law enforcement to the person who initially purchased the gun from a retail seller.
Of course, no criminal will be smart enough to replace the firing pin.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins: What does Michael Bloomberg’s dick taste like?
This post is about a video of a police interaction in Virginia, which is included below. Let me say that the cops really need to stop being total dumbasses, because I really don’t want this blog to become an anti-cop blog. It just seems like they can’t help themselves. They are just hiring tyrannical dumbasses to be cops.
Here is the basis of the video that follows:
Police received at least one call complaining about shots fired in a rural area. The vehicle involved was reported to be a red pickup truck.
A deputy sees a vehicle matching that description and initiates a traffic stop. By the deputy’s own admission, he is not aware if the shots were fired in the vicinity of houses or a road, meaning that he has no idea whether or not a crime has been committed. In other words, there is no reasonable suspicion to believe that the driver of the red truck has committed a crime, because you can’t even point to a crime that you would suspect him of, thus making the traffic stop illegal. Note that Virginia law is plain on this:
Any law enforcement officer may detain any person whom the officer encounters under circumstances creating a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime, and require the person to identify himself. Any person so detained shall identify himself by giving his full legal name, but may not be compelled to answer any other inquiry of any law enforcement officer.
Here is what happened next:
Note that the deputy claims “You can’t shoot within so many feet of a home,” but by his own admission, he has no idea how far away any homes are from the location where the shooting was talking place.
I believe the cop is wrong about what the law says. For starters, the law in Virginia says that you can’t discharge a firearm on public land, AT a building, across or from a road, from a vehicle, or in a reckless manner. None of which has been alleged here. Watch this second, longer video of the traffic stop, and the second cop says that merely operating a vehicle on the roadways of Virginia constitutes reasonable suspicion to initiate a traffic stop and demand to see the ID of the driver.
He says that “Evidence of a crime isn’t reasonable suspicion. You need to get a better lawyer.” The cop is clearly wrong. The law says:
A police officer may have reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed if based on all of the facts and circumstances of the situation, a reasonable police officer would have the same suspicion.
The cop is not being reasonable, which is the standard here. He can’t even articulate which law, if any, he believes is being broken. How can a police officer believe that this man is committing a crime, when he can’t even point to a crime that he reasonably believes is being committed? The statement that merely driving down the road constitutes reasonable suspicion is extremely incorrect.
He says that I don’t have to point to a crime to initiate a traffic stop. This fucking dumbass of a cop then proves beyond a doubt that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when he admits that this isn’t a Terry stop. A Terry stop gets its name from the Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio. In a Terry stop, if a police officer has a reasonable suspicion that an individual is armed, engaged, or about to be engaged, in criminal conduct, the officer may briefly stop and detain an individual for a pat-down search of outer clothing. Since, under this cop’s own admission, this isn’t a Terry stop, then he has no reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed.
So instead, the cops go to the man’s property and arrest the father on a trumped up charge to teach the property owner (the son in the red pickup) a lesson. The cops went to the man’s property and arrested the man’s father because, in the cop’s own words, “He ain’t gonna curse me out.” This is a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of the father.
NOTE: A look at Sussex county court records shows that the father, Robert Steven Huffman, has been charged with a violation of 18.2-416, abusive language to another, a 3rd degree misdemeanor. His next hearing is December 18.
The Supreme Court of Virginia has limited the sweep of § 18.2-416 to abusive language that has “a direct tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, [the language is] addressed.” Mercer v. Winston, 214 Va. 281, 199 S.E.2d 724, 726
So is the police officer alleging that the man saying “Leave, get the hell off of my property” is language that would tend to cause him to commit acts of violence? No, this officer is a tyrannical asshole.
Again, remember that no crime has been alleged to cause the police to even be on the property in the first place. It isn’t a crime to shoot guns on private property. The cop keeps saying “We have complaints in the area of shots fired, and this is an open investigation,” but as we have pointed out already, there is no investigation, because there has been no crime alleged. In my opinion, the cops made the arrest to lure the property owner (the son in the red pickup) to an ambush.
The man in the pickup arrives on his property, and the cop arrests him because he won’t provide ID to prove that he is the owner of the property. Refer back to the law, above. The man doesn’t have to show that he owns his own land, which would mean that he has to prove his innocence. That’s not how this works.
This is a bad cop. The second cop who stood there and told him to “just comply” is also a bad cop. Why? Because he saw this illegal behavior and did nothing. He is also a dumbass that doesn’t understand the laws that he is supposed to be enforcing.
I hope they get a good lawyer, and I hope that they sue the Sheriff’s department of Sussex County. I also would like to reiterate that qualified immunity needs to go away. In the meantime:
