Great Analogy

I heard this analogy today:

Let’s say that it’s your birthday, so you mix some flour, eggs, oil, butter, milk, and other ingredients in a bowl. You pour that mixture into a pan, place it into the oven, and prepare to wait for your birthday cake.

Now I come along, pull that pan out of the oven and toss it out of the window. You say to me, “Hey, you just ruined my birthday cake.”

I reply, “No I didn’t. It wasn’t a cake yet.”

You say, “It would have been in about an hour.”

At what point does a cake exist? When I mix the eggs into the batter? When it’s done baking?

That is the crux of the argument, isn’t it?

Question to Ask

A person who gets elected to the House of Representatives receives a salary of $155,000 per year. Prior to being elected, they lived with their mother while working as a bartender and were fighting the foreclosure of their home. 29 months after assuming office, they have a net worth of $29 million. This person now owns 6 homes, 5 Cars, 2 Luxury Yachts, has cash reserves of over $3 Million and a stock portfolio that is valued at $15 million.

I am of course talking about AOC. The question I think we should all be asking is- how do you increase your net worth by over $1 million a month when your salary is only $13,000 a month?

She is a self described socialist, yet drives 5 cars with a combined value of half a million dollars: a Mercedes-Benz GLA, an Audi Q2, a BMW X7 ($100,000), a Mercedes-Benz EqC (valued at $140,000), and a BMW X8 ($200,000).

Economic Smoke and Mirrors

Much is being made of how the unemployment rate has dropped to only 3.6 percent under Biden’s watch. That number isn’t an indication of a healthy job market. In fact, it’s misleading bullshit.

To understand why, you have to understand what unemployment is measuring. The unemployment rate only measures the number of people who are out of work despite their best efforts to find gainful employment. The labor department assumes that anyone who has been out of work for longer than 6 months isn’t looking for work, so excludes them from the calculation.

To get a more accurate measure of how the labor market is doing, look at the labor force participation rate, as published by the Fed. That is a measurement of the percentage of those who are not in the military or in prison and who are actually employed or actively looking for work.

For June of 2022, that number stands at 62.2. Granted, it was lower during the pandemic lockdowns (April 2020 to November 2021), but that was because the government was actively prohibiting people from working. Even then, the participation rate never fell below 60 percent.

Other than that time period, the last time you can find a participation rate of 62.2 or less was May of 1977. Before that, the labor force participation rate was lower (in the 50’s and 60’s), but there is a HUGE reason for that: women were part of the labor force, but most of them were stay at home housewives and were not participating because they were not working or looking for work.

What this means is that this President has a lower labor force participation rate of any US President since we began measuring it.

I hope she visits him at night

Officer Ruben Ruiz, whose wife was one of the teachers killed at Uvalde is seen in the video holding his phone. We are supposed to feel sorry for him because his wife is dead.

I would, except even after his wife died, he still lied to make his own cowardly ass look like a victim. He claims that he attempted to enter the classroom to save his wife, but had his gun taken away and was physically held down and escorted from the scene. Does this look like someone who had his gun taken away?

So maybe they took his gun later, but does that matter? This was in the early stages of the shooting. His wife was probably still alive at this point.

Good Guy with a Gun

The press is making a big deal out of the Indiana mall shooting and how one first victim shot was carrying a gun that he never got to use. They are, of course, claiming that this is proof that carrying a gun won’t do you any good, because a mass shooter will just shoot you before you can use it.

We all know that this is bullshit. The fact that the first victim was carrying a firearm was just happenstance. After all, it was concealed to the point that police didn’t know the decedent was armed until they moved the body.

The guy who took the shooter down made a hit with a handgun from 40 yards. If I were that guy, I would be cutting a deal with the maker of my firearm to do some paid advertising: “When I have to hit a mass shooter in a crowded shopping mall from 40 yards away without hitting a bystander, the only gun I trust is my Blastomatic M6.”

All fun aside, this shooting and the Texas school shooting where the CCW holder made a headshot across a crowded church have given me pause. In both cases, the first person shot by the killer was armed. The guy who wound up taking the killer out did so at distance using some pretty good marksmanship.

In Florida during the summer months, I frequently have to wear clothes that make concealing a large handgun very difficult. For that reason, I usually carry a Smith and Wesson 642. Taking an accurate shot at distance with a snub nosed revolver just isn’t practical.

So I need to be able to make rapid, accurate hits from distance. That means carrying one of the pistols that I have that is equipped with a microdot. Now one of those two is an M&P 9c. The 9c is still a little bit too large for carrying in clothing that is comfortable in Florida’s July and August heat.

My other option is to carry my performance center Shield Plus. The only problem is finding comfortable leather for it. The only holster I have that will fit is my custom Milt Sparks. I am going to have to work on some more holster options.

Military Women

After some of the comments from yesterday’s post, I thought I would express my thoughts on women in the military.

The way that women are treated in the military is a bit unfair. Not the way that women would have you believe that they are being mistreated- in fact, they have a HUGE advantage. The last thing that women REALLY want is equality. Let me explain:

I did six years in the Navy. I was an Electrician’s mate which, according to the Navy, is a sea intensive rating. What this means is that there are not that many shore based billets in comparison to sea based billets, so an EM spends the majority of his service assigned to a seagoing command. In keeping with this reality, the Navy has a sea/shore rotation for EMs that is- shall we say, a bit taxing.

Sailors who are electricians typically are assigned to a sea command immediately following their initial training, which takes up the first 7 months or so of their enlistment. That first sea posting lasts 51 months. This means that the first enlistment and the first year and a half of the second is spent assigned to a seagoing command. Most sea going commands spend about 65-75% of their time at sea. After this posting, that electrician is sent to a shore post for 36 months, and then back to sea duty for 60 months. After that, the rotation is 48 at sea followed by 35 months on shore.

In fact, in a 20 year career, a sailor who is an EM will spend 14 of those years assigned to a seagoing command, on average. No surprise, it’s the Navy, and the Navy is in charge of the sea.

Unless you are a woman. Women who are assigned to shore duty outside the continental US (including Hawaii) are counted as being on sea duty, even though they are home every night. A man in the exact same billet is counted as shore duty. So a woman could be assigned to Hawaii for 5 years, and be eligible for 3 years of shore duty in San Diego, while a man in the exact same job would do 5 years floating on a Destroyer, followed by 3 years at San Diego.

If you are a woman and you get pregnant, you get 18 weeks off WITH PAY after the baby is born. In addition, women are assigned to light duty on shore for the majority of their pregnancy before the baby is born.

Men get only ten days off after their child is born. When I was in, every time a command with women assigned to it was scheduled to deploy, a large percentage of the female crew members would get pregnant. Free time off, and time not being spent away from home. This is the reason why one in seven female service members are single mothers.

Women have claimed for years that they want the same chances as men to advance in the military, but frequently use their gender as an excuse to escape the real work. It is about time they were held to task.

Some shore commands in the Norfolk, Va., area report that up to 34 percent of their billets are filled by pregnant sailors, and commanders are complaining about a “lack of proper manning to conduct their mission,” according to a Naval Inspector General report.

When sailors on sea duty become pregnant, they are transferred to shore-based commands that fit certain criteria, such as being close to a Navy medical center. The length of that “postpartum tour” is 12 months after a child’s birth. Combined with a nine-month pregnancy, that puts expectant mothers on limited duty for up to 21 months.

21 months? Picture this: you join the Navy, and finish two months of Boot Camp, and 4 months of A school. You get your orders, and get travel time and up to 30 days of leave, then report aboard your first ship: You have been in the Navy for 7 months, and have not contributed to the mission one bit. You get pregnant, and sit on shore duty for 21 months. You now have been in the Navy for 28 months- more than half of your enlistment is over, you have done NOTHING to earn the money you have been paid, and the taxpayer has paid for your medical care and training.

There are 54,000 women serving in the US Navy– and last year, 3,125 (5.8%) of them got pregnant. If that is an average year, then there are 9,375 women (17.4%) on shore duty due to pregnancy at any given time.

To top it off, once the postpartum tour is over, the woman then gets another set of orders to go somewhere else, which entitles her to another 30 days of leave (because of her change in duty station). Since she is a single mother, she is now entitled to a hardship discharge. It is a waste of money, and turns the military into another government welfare/social program.

There is an article here about women in some units in the military being subject to courts martial if they get pregnant. Some complain that it infringes on a woman’s reproductive rights. My view is that women use the pregnancy thing to get out of unpleasant military assignments, and then men must be reassigned to those now vacant positions.

Our military cannot perform its mission if nearly ten percent of its force can’t deploy because they can’t find a babysitter.

You want equal? Make it equal. Same haircuts, same uniforms, same duty. If that means that you can’t be a mother while in the service, so be it. Perhaps the time spent on convalescent leave could be added to your enlistment: 18 weeks of maternity leave means 18 more weeks of active duty without reenlistment bonus, or alternatively, enlistment means taking a Depo-Provera shot for the duration of your enlistment.

You are either equal, or you are not.