Internal documents show that the BATFE is going from dealer to dealer and looking for minor infractions and then using them to revoke FFLs. Maybe its time that someone challenge GCA ’68 on Constitutional grounds. Most of it has gone far beyond regulating interstate commerce.
Account and INFO Security
The Spy Who Called Me
Just as we have always suspected, we now have solid evidence that your cell phone is spying on you and forwarding your information to the ChiComs. Again, it doesn’t matter how careful you are, there are security leaks. It may be on your end, it may be on the other end, but it is inevitable that there are ways for black hats to gain access to your stuff.
I know that there are some out there who think they are more clever than the other side, but is everyone you do business with just as smart? What about their employees? Your phone? The government employees handling your information?
How much of your stuff is being read, unbeknownst to you? I assume that governments with their unlimited resources can see whatever they want, no matter how hard I try to secure it. I just want to make my stuff harder to steal than most people’s, so maybe the thieves spend their time on the lower hanging fruit.
Government
Ripple Effect
This kid found out his teacher needed a car before starting a fundraiser to get him one. Officials tell the kid that it’s illegal for students or their parents to give a teacher a gift worth more than $25.
One could argue that the car isn’t a gift from students or their parents. It’s from the anonymous donors who gave to GoFundMe. I wonder if there is a Montana attorney that would have donated some assistance…
Back when I worked for the fire department, the mayor of our city was caught taking season floor seats to the Orlando Magic in exchange for awarding city contracts to a particular company. The city then put a rule in place that no employee was permitted to accept any gift whatsoever from any business within the city, not even a cup of coffee or a discount on soda.
This didn’t stop the cops from getting free apartments, because many apartment complexes give cops a free apartment in exchange for the cop agreeing to be the on site security guard. Of course the apartment was always right in front of the office, so people would see the officer’s take home patrol car parked in front.
Anyhow, it all came to a head back in 1998, when the state of Florida was struck by a drought. The wildfires that happened as a result caused 10,000 firefighters from all of the country to spend weeks putting out fires. I know I was out there for a week and a half at a time, sleeping on the ground in the woods. I actually enjoyed it.
As a result of these fires, Florida businesses decided that firefighters would be appreciated through various discounts. Disney offered free one-day tickets, Sea World and Bush Gardens were giving free annual passes to firefighters, local restaurants were giving discounted meals, those sorts of things. Our city manager prohibited us from accepting any of it, on penalty of immediate termination. Even though Disney was in our back yard, firefighters from Illinois who didn’t even participate in putting out the fires were enjoying free days there, while we were stuck without. This made a few guys angry. Disney wasn’t within the city limits, so we couldn’t possibly do them any illegal favors, it was just the city manager being petty, as far as some guys were concerned.
So one of our firefighters called a local news radio station. The station called the city manager on the air, and the dumbass actually said, “I saw one of our firefighters towing a boat behind his pickup truck the other day. If they can afford boats and new trucks, they make enough money to buy their own Disney tickets.”
The radio DJ’s then said, “How is it any of your business what they buy? Is that how you decide what your employees make? You decide what they should be able to buy, then pay them accordingly?” It all blew up, and the resulting PR storm eventually saw the firefighters being allowed to accept the discounts. The city manager took it out on the fire department for the next few years by giving the rest of the city employees raises, but not the fire department.
After 4 or 5 years of that kind of treatment, the firefighters voted to become a union department. That is how my department went union. All because of a boat, a truck, and a mouse.
On a side note, those fires changed the way Florida’s firefighters handled wildfires. Up to that point, firefighters in the state put out every wildland fire. This caused there to be fewer fires, and allowed debris like dead bushes and trees to pile up in the woods. Naturally, lightning caused fires usually burn this dead material off periodically and clean up the woods. Wildfires, it turns out, are a big part of nature. Some plants and animals count on those fires as a part of the life cycle. (For example, there is a species of pine tree that requires a wildfire in order to reproduce)
We were disrupting the normal cycle of life. So now, firefighters allow these fires to burn, as long as no structures are in danger. In addition, the forestry department occasionally does prescribed burns of areas of state land that haven’t had a fire in awhile. Now the woods aren’t filled with large fuel loads of unburned debris.
Cops
Why is the Answer Always College?
The latest trend in the press thinking that they are experts in all things, is the claim that US police training needs to be more like police training in Europe. They claim that police in other countries receive more training than the 6 months that is typical in the US.
police recruits in Japan get between 15 and 21 months of training. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training. And in Finland, police education takes three years to complete.
So they want to make police training a 4 year degree? What will that cost? I do agree with them that police training is too much like military boot camp. If you train your police like soldiers, you can expect that your police will act like soldiers. I don’t think that the problem is in how long the training is, I think the problem is in the institutional mindset- “War on crime,” the “War on drugs,” that sort of thing. When you think of criminal justice as warfare, you get police who act as if they are on a battlefield.
That’s where my agreement with them ends. The next claim simply tells me that they have never dealt with someone who needs to be taken somewhere, but isn’t going to go. You are assuming that the people who police contact are rational.
As a street medic, and even in the ED, we encounter people who can’t be reasoned with, yet still need to go somewhere or do something. Whether it’s due to mental illness or simply because they are assholes, some people just need to be forced into compliance. Talking only works on people who are rational.
Imagine negotiating with a spree shooter. Someone who believes in what they are doing so strongly that they are willing to gun down a dozen or more people isn’t going to be negotiated out of their act.
You can tell that some people have juts never had to deal with those kinds of people.
Military
Regarding the Balloon…
Many have suggested that the Air Force should have just shot down the balloon using a laser or bullets to pop the Chinese balloon, instead of a missile. The reason that the fly boys used a missile is because popping a rogue balloon has been tried before, and it doesn’t work.
It was 25 years ago when the Canadians shot a balloon full of 1,000 holes and they found that this didn’t pop it, because the pressure inside of a balloon at that altitude isn’t high enough to burst the balloon.
Now you know…
On a side note, I was surprised that an AIM-9, which is a heat seeking missile, was capable of locking on to something like a helium balloon.
Account and INFO Security
Phishing
As apps that do all of the heavy lifting for you become more widespread, the threats to your accounts become more pronounced. This software allows even amateurs to get into the cybercrime business. The software and the scams are becoming ever more sophisticated, with some of them catching even the most wary people.
As one business owner found out when he lost more than $120k, these guys are getting pretty good at suckering people in. Thinking that you are smarter or that you can’t possibly be fooled is a mistake.
He received a call from a person claiming to be from the Chase fraud department and asking to verify a suspicious transaction.
The 800-number matched Chase customer service so Mullenaux didn’t think it was suspicious when the person asked him to log into his account via a secured link sent by text message for identification purposes. The link looked legitimate and the website that opened appeared identical to his Chase banking app, so he logged in.
Thinking about this now and preparing a security plan is the best way to defend yourself. In this case, a password manager would have known the site wasn’t legit, and would not have filled in his credentials. That may have been the red flag he needed to realize he was being suckered. Most of us know that we shouldn’t give our credentials to someone who contacts us, but this new breed of con man is using a combination of misdirection and deceit to trick us into letting our guards down. Using computer tools to aid us in spotting fake login sites is the way to go, IMO.
Tranny Insanity
Obvious Outcome
The one obvious outcome of people’s belief that you can be whatever you believe yourself to be- man, woman, or any one of other genders you invent for yourself- is that gender isn’t the only thing you can be. Of course it was mocked in memes, but as we all know satire is becoming reality in mere minutes lately.
As there is only one outcome, it was just a matter of time before gender identity morphed into other things. Southpark predicted this in the episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” where one of the characters decided that he wanted to become a woman. Other townspeople then got surgery to become all sorts of things, including one man who decided to become a dolphin.
As life is now become satire, we come full circle when we see that one man is upset because his son won’t speak to him now that he has abandoned his career as a banking executive and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a “genderless dragon.” Yes, it’s as goofy as it sounds.
There is no limit to the stupidity that we are seeing from people now. This insanity has got to stop, but we all know that it’s going to continue to get worse until sane people do something about this national psychosis that we all seem to be living in.
climate change
Because F- You, I’m Rich
Bill Gates made some comments on why he will continue using a private jet while demanding that you stop producing so much CO2 by driving to work. His comments boil down to, “Because I’m rich, that’s why, you peons.”
Well, I buy the gold standard of, funding Climeworks, to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint and I spend billions of dollars on … climate innovation. So, you know, should I stay at home and not come to Kenya and learn about farming and malaria? I’m comfortable with the idea that, not only am I not part of the problem by paying for the offsets, but also through the billions that my Breakthrough Energy Group is spending, that I’m part of the solution.
It isn’t an either or situation. If he really believes that he is helping, he can still help without flying all over the world in a private jet. Also, we have seen the Climeworks people on this blog before. It’s a bullshit grift that purely exists to take money from gullible people.
This is like most green energy/climate stuff- you can’t get more out of a process than you put into it. These companies are collecting billions, and Bill Gates gets to go on being a hypocritical asshole.
Uncategorized
Dying Breed
When I first got out of the military, there was this old WW2 vet who used to come into the place where I worked. Guy used to tell us stories about how he was a pilot during the war, and was shot down. I think he said he was shot down over Malta, but I’m not sure. This was more than 3 decades ago, so I may have the details wrong.
He told me that he was in a POW camp that was separated from one of the concentration camps by a fence. He came by nearly every morning, just to talk and tell us stories about his life. Nice guy.
Anyhow, he told great stories. The generation that fought the war is dying off at a rapid pace. The youngest of them is 93 years old. I’m a member of a Veteran’s organization, and we don’t charge dues to WW2 vets, and they don’t EVER pay for drinks in that club. Hear their stories now, before they are lost forever. We owe them. They built the nation that their boomer kids have plundered (and continue to plunder).
Police State
Picture This
This exchange is caught on guy’s security system:
Cop 1: We need you to step outside. One of your neighbors says that you pointed a gun at them, and you need to step outside and give us a statement to prove your innocence.
Guy: Uh, I didn’t do anything and I can answer your questions through the door just fine.
Cop 2: Why are you being so confrontational?
Guy: My entire property is on camera. I can prove I did nothing. Hang on. (closes door)
Cop 2 (says to other cop): He definitely pointed a gun. Well, it was that or a flashlight.
Cop 1: We don’t have enough to charge him.
Cop 2: I don’t care. I’m gonna charge him with something if we don’t.
If I were a juror in this case, I would vote not guilty if a defense attorney played this video in court. Watch closely:
I will repeat: Never talk to the police. They aren’t there to help you. All you can do by speaking to them is give them the evidence they need in order to arrest you. Tell them to go away. Oh, and having plenty of cameras around doesn’t hurt.
Just don’t resist them if they decide to use force. We all know that many cops can’t wait to get their violence on. Say nothing. Hire the best lawyer you can afford. Spare no expense- it’s better to go into bankruptcy than it is to spend the rest of your life in jail. Let the lawyer talk for you. But above all, SHUT THE FUCK UP.