The Biden administration has passed a new rule that charges people with good credit a fee, so that money can be used to subsidize people with bad credit. Anyone with a credit score of more than 680 will pay the fee, which will be used to lower interest rates for people with scores below 680.
I can’t even. When I showed this to my wife, she thought it was a Babylon Bee story.
The 24 hour period that begins with sunrise on April 19 is a very busy day in history.
News for homeowners in Florida who wish to have insurance is rough. Insurance companies can’t do business in Florida, mostly because of the high cost of hurricane damage. The average Florida homeowner is paying $4,231 for their property insurance: nearly triple the national rate of $1,544. Homeowners in Florida pay the highest rates of any state in the US. Those rates are set to increase in June by an estimated 40%, on average.
The state of Florida has a taxpayer funded insurance system for those who cannot obtain homeowners’ insurance from a private carrier. This carrier is called Citizens’ Insurance. One in five Florida homes is insured by that fund, and that number will continue to climb as insurers leave the state. Things can’t continue on this path.
Insurance is nothing but a dilution of risk. That is, the risk of damage to homes is spread out among all of the people who have insurance policies, and the premiums of everyone are used to pay the damages of those who have losses. The problem with diluting risk in Florida is that oceanfront homes are worth 50 to 100 times as much as homes located further inland. For every insured oceanfront home that is lost, the premiums of as many as 150 inland homes are used paying for the damages. Pick any coastal city in Florida and look at the home costs. A single family home on the oceanfront that sells for less than $1,000 per square foot is a steal. In Miami, single family oceanfront homes START at $20 million each.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of hurricane damage is within two miles of the coast. Insurance companies can’t charge $100,000 a year for insurance premiums, so they spread that cost amongst every homeowner in Florida. This can’t continue because it is mathematically impossible for the situation to stay as it is. Currently, I pay 1.5% of the value of my house each year to insure it.
If the state of Florida wants to fix the insurance problem in the state, they need to divorce the risk pool of oceanfront homeowners from the rest of the state’s homeowners. If you want to build and live in a $10 million home on the beach, fine. But make your insurance premiums 5% of the home’s value, but stop raising my insurance to cover for your house.
Your master password in a password wallet is the one that is used to encrypt the digital vault that stores your passwords. It may be your PGP passphrase, if you are old school enough to be using that software. Whatever your reason, a strong password is important. My master password is not actually a word. I use pass phrases. Let me explain: Suppose that I pick a mashup of the opening to the Gettysburg address and a nursery rhyme:
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow
The master password is made by mashing it into numbers, letters, and symbols. Words that are numbers become numbers, that are symbols become symbols, the remaining words, I just use the first letter, like this:
4 s & 7 y a, o f b f o t c a n n, M h a l l, i f w w a s
Now take out the spaces, and your new master password is: “4s&7ya,ofbfotcann,Mhallifwwas” It’s easy to remember, nearly impossible to guess, and at 29 characters is very difficult to brute force. This password is also guaranteed not to be on a list of common passwords that many black hats use to guess passwords. A long, difficult to crack master password buys you time to make the data it is protecting obsolete. That’s what I did. All of my master passwords are AT LEAST 25 characters long.
The black hats are large in number, and stealing personal data is the new currency. Make yourself as difficult a target as possible.
I wonder if anyone has statistics on how many spree killers are taking antidepressants? This guy shot 4 people and is now trying to claim temporary insanity.
So I am in the middle of changing all of my passwords. The reasons for that will be discussed in an upcoming post within the next few weeks, but it involves a data breach. I deactivated my Facebook account more than a year ago. I have not logged in since. So when I logged in to my account this morning to change the password, I was surprised to see a notification that my account has been flagged for posts that indicate I am considering suicide, and that my post was removed from my account, and reported to the authorities for possible suicidal ideation.
The post was dated December 19, 2019.
For the record:
There is a discussion on Twitter whereby some moron is claiming that the only contribution that refrigeration has made to mankind is to make beer cold. Check it out.
California is going to a fixed rate electrical billing system where electric rates are set by the household’s income level.
Setting aside the entire “make more/pay more” thing, this is really dumb. People will be paying between $15 and $128 per month for electricity, no matter how much they consume? Yep, that is EXACTLY what they are proposing.
Under the SDG&E plan, customers would pay a fixed price that covers most of the utility’s energy delivery service that would not change month-to-month regardless of how much electricity is consumed.
I said to myself that there had to be a catch. It turns out that there is. This pricing scheme only covers the part of your electric bill that is sold via SDG&E.
This portion of a customer’s bill, which is mostly related to the electricity purchased from natural gas, wind and solar plants, will continue to vary based on electricity usage. In San Diego County, nearly 85% of customers have their electricity purchased by local governments known as community choice aggregators or other entities – not SDG&E.
OK. This is just another grift, with the intention of redistributing money from one class to another, using socialism as cover.
Whether or not the Air Force intel weenie actually committed the crimes he is accused of, his arrest was pure theater, as is the press coverage of the arrest.
Seriously, half a platoon of heavily armed troops supported by at least two armored vehicles? Who are they arresting: an Air Force chairborne commando, or John Rambo? And is that a belt fed machine gun? You need full auto support weapons?
Then there is this quote, from the article:
Members of the “Thug Shaker Center” group said in interviews with the Times that the online community has been a place for teenage boys and young men to bond over their love of guns, play war-themed video games and swap memes, some of them racist.
OMG, he loved guns and was a racist!!eleventy!!1!
‘Not knowing his mental state, going up against a trained military person in a house with weapons was not an ideal scenario.’
Wait? Am I missing something here? He was in Intel, not a fucking commando.
Even Pravda and Izvestia during the heyday of the Soviets weren’t this heavy handed with their propaganda. Isn’t amazing that they found this guy in a matter of five days, but can’t verify Hunter’s laptop or find the person who planted the bombs on J6, even years later? They can’t find the person who leaked the recent SCOTUS decision on abortion?
This smells to high heaven. The FBI knows exactly what kind of training he has, and they know damned well that he wasn’t this much of a threat. What else are they lying about? I have to assume they are lying about all of it. This guy is a patsy.
Next, will the FBI be raiding the Biden homes to look for documents? Isn’t it ironic that Biden, whose family has likely been peddling US intelligence information for years, is the one ordering more security for classified documents? Next, there will be an EO that all classified material must be stored in Biden’s garage, where it will be safe from the Chinese.
There are many in the gun community that are angry with Trump for the bump stock ban. I have never blamed Trump for the travesty that was the bump stock ban, because I don’t think that he is the one who sold out gun owners. Let’s be honest here- the NRA greenlighted the bump stock ban. This is nothing new, the NRA was pro gun control for most of its history.
In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police. Florida becoming the 26th state to get rid of concealed weapons carry as a crime meant getting rid of that NRA proposal after 100 years.
During the 1930’s, the NRA helped shape the National Firearms Act of 1934. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make gun control a feature of the New Deal. The NRA assisted Roosevelt in drafting National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, the first federal gun control laws. These laws placed heavy taxes and regulation requirements on firearms that were associated with crime, such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Gun sellers and owners were required to register with the federal government and felons were banned from owning weapons. Not only was the legislation unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1939, but Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
After the assasination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.
Then came 1968. The assassinations of JFK, jr and Martin Luther King prompted Congress to enact the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act brought back some proposed laws from 1934, to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers. The only part of the proposed law that was opposed by the NRA was a national gun registry. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
It wasn’t until a mini-revolt was staged at the 1977 NRA convention that there was a change in direction. A group of gun owners pushed back and deposed the old leaders in a move called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” Led by former NRA President Harlon Carter and Neal Knox, the revolt ended the tenure of Maxwell Rich as NRA executive vice president and introduced new bylaws. The Revolt at Cincinnati marked a huge change in direction for the NRA. The organization thereafter changed from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards the defense of the right to keep and bear arms. The catalyst for this movement was that the NRA wanted to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado. The new headquarters in Colorado was to be an “Outdoors center” that was more about hunting and recreational shooting than it was the RKBA.
I became a member of the NRA about a decade later and remained an annual member, until I became a life member about 15 years later. I believed for years that the NRA was fighting the good fight for gun owners. It wasn’t.
The NRA was always influenced by a group of Fudds who supported hunting, but hated guns that weren’t for hunting. The bureaucrats who were a part of the NRA’s organization always tried to steer towards hunting, eventually caused the organization to morph into an organization that used the threat of Democrat gun bans for fundraising.
LaPierre was able to use the large flow of money to fund his luxurious life on the company dime, including over $13 million each year for travel and a postemployment golden parachute worth $17 million. LaPierre testified in the NRA’s bankruptcy hearings about his annual weeklong trips to the Bahamas on the company dime.
All they were good at was bargaining away gun rights to the Democrat gun banners in exchange for money and power. That’s why my political donations for the past 15 years went to other gun rights organizations, and yours should, too.
EDITED TO ADD:
Thanks to an anonymous poster, we get this quote, directly from the pages of the March 1968 edition of The American Rifleman, the NRA’s official monthly publication:
the NRA has consistently supported gun legislation which it feels would penalize misuse of guns without harassing law-abiding hunters, target shooters, and collectors”
NRA president Karl T. Frederick
Note that they make no mention of RKBA as anything other than support for the hobby of hunting. The article goes on to declare the NRA’s support for firearm registration, waiting periods, as well as prohibitions on sales of ammunition and firearms across state lines. The also express support for the prohibition of firearms to what they termed as :undesirables.”
The NRA is not, and apparently never has been, a true supporter of the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. They should rename it the National Hunting Association. It can collapse and die for all I care. We don’t need them.