First, let’s look at this video of a woman in Palm Beach Gardens, who was caught stealing from a store. She then decided to use a weapon (pepper spray) to further her crime.
A woman at Palm Beach Outlets in Florida was caught stealing clothing and pulled out mace in defense. pic.twitter.com/fKPxcxfmKP
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) May 15, 2023
In Florida, a person is justified in using or threatening to use 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.
An hour after losing my job and promising the wife that I won’t spend any money until I start getting paychecks again, I get an email from Sportsman’s Warehouse that looks like this:
I asked my readers whether or not I should give 2 weeks’ notice. Giving two weeks’ notice doesn’t mean anything, and when it comes time to get rid of employees, employers are quick to point out that Florida is an “at will” employment state where you can be terminated at any time, for any reason. I gave a month’s notice to one job when I left for PA school in a different state, and left on what I thought were good terms. They even threw me a going away party. I am on the “no rehire” list.
Well, I gave two weeks’ notice last week. I drove into work and had a very cordial conversation with my manager. I told him the story about how the HR director wouldn’t even offer to pay more in order to keep me. His response was that the HR director should not have been so unprofessional, and that he would be mentioning it to the Chief of Nursing. He then told me that I would like working at my new hospital, because he has heard a lot of good things about them. I am the third nurse this month to head over there, just from my department. He told me that I was great at my job, and the department would be worse off without me. It was very cordial.
So what happened next? My current employer fired me this morning. By text message. This is the text message I just got from my manager:
We are removing you from the schedule for this week and next week. So now you can move forward with your new position.
Cowards. They didn’t even have the guts to tell me I was fired, or to do it to my face. Instead, I get “removed from the schedule.” This proves is that the old standard of giving a two week notice is no longer the norm in the United States. It would have been better for me if I had simply worked to the end, then told them on the way out the door at the end of my last shift that I wouldn’t be returning. Doing the “right” thing just cost me two weeks’ pay.
Today, I wanted to take a look at this article from the Washington Post. They are attempting to make the case that the Second Amendment allows for the banning of the AR-15, because it isn’t a weapon “that ordinary people carry on an ordinary basis for self-defense.” This article is as dishonest as usual when discussing the Second Amendment. What they have done here is said that the Second Amendment applies to weapons that the militia would carry, then twisted it to say that the modern interpretation doesn’t apply to any gun that you can’t carry concealed, meaning that you can’t carry hand grenades and rocket launchers, or AR-15s.
Logically, it should also exclude AR-15s, which are not commonly carried for self-defense.
Washington Post
Of course, the Heller decision never said that “common use” was restricted only to weapons that were carried for individual defense. It said used for common defense. That decision also glossed over what we are supposed to do when a law creates its own “common use” restriction. That is, what if a weapon isn’t in common use because an otherwise unconstitutional law has eliminated that weapon from being in common use? For example, machine guns might very well be in common use, if it weren’t for the fact that they have been restricted for a century, and outright banned for the past 37 years. It’s this sort of circular argument that the Bruen decision is addressing: Would the founding fathers have banned machine guns? I don’t think that they would have. After all, there were cannons and even entire warships that were in private hands at the time of ratification.
What’s really interesting about the Post article is that it signals a shift in anti-gunner philosophy. It looks as though they are finally giving in to the SCOTUS decisions. Sure, they take the time to trash talk the decision:
Modern gun rights jurisprudence began in 2008, when Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a Supreme Court opinion called District of Columbia v. Heller. That opinion featured the astonishing act (astonishing for an originalist, at least) of reinterpreting the original meaning of the Second Amendment. This took some jurisprudential jiu-jitsu. Scalia discounted the introductory clause that explains the purpose of amendment as ensuring a well-regulated militia. He shifted the meaning of the right to bear arms to personal self-defense.
Along the way, Scalia made up a new limitation for the newly created right.
Washington Post
The point here is that they are beginning to recognize that they have lost this part of the fight. What’s funny is that they go on to claim that the right doesn’t apply to hand grenades or tanks. I beg to differ. The law permits the private ownership of armored vehicles. We see them every day: they deliver money to your local grocery store. Granted, those are not armed with cannons and belt fed coaxial machine, guns, but they are currently owned.
I would argue that hand grenades would be permissible to own. I could easily see that using a hand grenade in a crowded subway would be just as illegal as emptying an entire handgun into a crowd. After all, indiscriminate weapon use that strikes six innocent people in order to hit one mugger is a bit ridiculous. However, using that same tactic against four armed men in your downstairs living room that are waiting to ambush you as you come down the stairs could easily be justified.
Similar cases can be made for owning a Javelin AT missile. There aren’t many cases where one would be useful to use in self defense, but that is a different story than simply owning one. It is important that we not conflate owning a weapon and actually firing it. Just as there is a difference between owning a 1911 and firing one at someone, a similar distinction exists for nearly any weapon, whether that weapon is a single shot .22, a missile launcher, or a hand grenade.
I would argue that the Second Amendment as it is written also permits nuclear weapons. If only there was a way that we could rewrite the Constitution to account for new technology… Perhaps a way to modify it. We could call it an Amendment. Perhaps we could, say, get a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures, and we could amend the Second Amendment to say: “shall not be infringed, but in no case will this permit the private ownership of nuclear weapons.”
But then, several decades from now, the left will be arguing that the AR-15 is actually the same as a nuclear weapon.
This is what the Socialist leader of Canada has to say:
When we see that women’s participation in the economy has reached an all-time high, this much is clear: $10-a-day child care isn’t just good social policy, it’s also good economic policy.
I normally don’t post things from other countries, but many of our own political figures support stupid stuff like this. Let’s do the math:
If a mother wants to work an 8 hour job, she gets 30 minutes for lunch, plus time to get to and from work, so let’s call it 9 hours of child care per day. That also means the kid will have to be fed lunch, call it a cost of $5 for lunch. That leaves nine hours of child care for $5.
Then there is insurance, utilities, health insurance, and all other expenses, not to mention the cost of paying the childcare worker. Let’s assume that we are going to pay our childcare worker an average of $18 an hour. All expenses considered, this fictional daycare center will need to assign 65 children to each childcare worker in order for this to be feasible.
This is to the people who commented on my post of last week, and that includes Aesop. Let me address a few of the points here.
So we have rampant illegals entering the country. How do you stop that? Voting for Republicans? Where has that gotten us? Or do you want to head to the border and take on the cartels, US law enforcement, and the national guard? Is that the hill you literally want to die on?
We haven’t built a refinery in 40 years. So? Are you going to use guns and force people to build some? Vote for one?
You think you’re going to cause a societal collapse? How? You have a plan?
To Aesop: Yes, I believe that a collapse of this country is mathematically certain. There is no other possible outcome at this point. We are more than $31 trillion in actual debt, with another $50 trillion in mandated spending just in Social Security payments over the next decade. What do you think will happen to the first Congresscritter that proposes cutting those checks? His career will be measured in days. No politician is going near that third rail of politics. Top that off with another $4 trillion in interest payments on the debt we already have. In case you haven’t been paying attention, we are borrowing $1.2 trillion a year, and there is no motivation from either party to slow down the spending spree.
So even if you were to overthrow the powers that be, who do you put in charge? What will they do to fix it? Who in the American public will accept the fact that Uncle Sam has put away the checkbook? Will the 69 million people currently on Social Security accept the fact that the checks have stopped? How about the additional 10 million people who are due to begin collecting within the next 7 years? Will they accept the fact that there is no more money? How about the 93 million people on Medicaid? The 41 million on food stamps? 65 million on Welfare? Now I know that there is a good bit of overlap, but my best guess is that just about half of the country is receiving some form of government handout. What will they do when you, having overthrown the current powers that be, announce that there is no money?
One in 20 US adults is collecting disability. I personally know five people who are, and they seem to have no problems riding roller coasters, running marathons, and going out partying. There are lawyers out there that make a living on disability payments for “back injuries” and “fibromyalgia.” I warned my readers about this a decade ago. Then in 2016, I warned all of you that we were monetizing the debt, and it would eventually cause inflation.
Nope. Every path forward ends in one place: we stop spending more than we have.
There is no path to victory that results in a return to the good old days, whatever you consider those to be. It’s a fact. No matter who is in charge, we are broke. Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Libertarians, it won’t matter. Once the rest of the world figures it out, there is going to be an end to the dollar as a reserve currency. Then when the general population realizes this, there will be plenty of unrest and riots for everyone to participate.
You can’t shoot your way out of this. You can’t protest it away. Mathematics and economics are cold-hearted, inescapable bitches. There aren’t any sides to join. You can’t cross over and join the side of math. Once the money is gone, it’s gone. Like a Terminator, economic reality can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it will not stop until you are dead.
At the end of World War 2, this nation inherited a world where we were the most dominant manufacturing, farming, and economic nation in the world, mostly because the rest of the developed world had seen its farms and factories destroyed by warfare. This created a golden age for the US. Instead of continuing to work and maintain that standard of living, the Baby Boomers partied and spent it all on baubles and bullshit. Once that was gone, they began to borrow from future generations. It became a never ending spree of parties and excess. That’s why they won’t give up power today. They would rather be wheeled in to office looking like a moving corpse than give up power.
I have seen better looking corpses
What’s unfortunate is that we, the Gen X people inherited the world that they created, and many of us tried to continue the party, but the money must eventually run out. So Generation X, the Millennials, and the Snowflake generation are going to inherit what is left: a dying society and a pile of unpaid bills.
When all of this comes to a head, we are going to get a new nation. My guess is that we will see one of two outcomes:
A nation that is made up of the territory we have now, perhaps with some losses of territory that we just can’t defend (Alaska, Hawaii, the Pacific territories, Puerto Rico, and the counties located along the Mexican border) because we are out of money. That nation will likely wind up as a dictatorship.
A nation that is made up of fractured pieces of what used to be the US. I think that in this outcome, the US will fracture into ten or more regional states. Again, the Pacific territories and Hawaii will belong to China. Alaska will either go to Russia or China. Large areas of the nation, centered around the largest cities, will become third world shitholes. Going anywhere within 50 miles of places like Chicago, Atlanta, New York, New Orleans, Saint Louis, or DC will mean taking your life in your hands.
It’s gonna be shitty for awhile. So my position still stands. I will, of course, entertain anyone who sees another path forward. Tell me how I am wrong, or tell me how we avoid an economic collapse, and don’t tell me how you are going to get half the nation to accept the money hose getting shut off without tearing the nation apart. Heck, half of the people who read this blog will argue about how the DESERVE their social security checks, because they paid into the system for their entire working life. People just aren’t ready to admit that their money is gone- it’s been spent already. The boomers in charge have spent it all. There is no trust fund- it’s just a file cabinet full of IOUs.
The numbers look good, and Gold Dot bullets have a great reputation.
200 grain hollow point moving at nearly 1100 feet per second and 518 foot pounds of energy. That will certainly do the job, if the bullet performs well.
The Democrats claim that Trump was a fascist dictator because he ignored Congress and said the press was fake news. He was a threat to Democracy because he, they claim, wanted to end run around Congress and the electoral college.
We talk about gear, we talk about kits. What about skills? When it all falls apart, what do you know how to do? I have a pretty good set of skills, and many of them will allow me to trade and participate in an EOTWAWKI society. I am certified or skilled as:
Mastery level:
a nurse and paramedic
an electrician, having been trained to do so in the military
an electric motor repairman. I can rebuild, repair, rewind, and completely overhaul electric motors and generators. Again, military.
A master SCUBA diver
Journeyman level:
I can maintain and perform simple to moderate repairs on a variety of firearms.
I can do simple machine work.
I can do simple auto and machinery repair. (Things like power transmissions and gear boxes)
a HAM radio operator
Apprentice level:
I can do simple welding, brazing, and cutting, along with some metal work.
I can perform simple electronic repairs
I am always looking at adding to my skillset. Be as widely skilled as you possibly can. Everything that you learn is something else that you know. You never know which skill it will be that saves you or your life.
I have a great set of tools, measuring equipment, and a pretty well equipped workshop.
I am planning on buying a MIG welder in the near future.
I have spares in stock for firearms like sights, springs, and other parts. Electrical parts, magnet wire, bearings, brushes, switches, light bulbs, and other parts.
Parts for the cars like brake pads, fuses, motor oil, and spark plugs.
Spare radios, antennas, and coaxial cable.
All of this puts me in a great place to be an asset to my neighbors and community. Don’t be a sponge, be a contributor. Be the person that others want on their team.
