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Francis Porretto:

Kings used to lead their own armies. They used to lead the cavalry’s charge. For a king to send an army to war and remain behind to warm his throne was simply not done. Those that tried it lost their thrones, and some lost their heads — to their own people. It was a useful check on political and military rashness. It hasn’t been that way for a long time. Today armies go into the field exclusively at the orders of politicians who remain at home. And politicians are bred to believe that reality is entirely plastic to their wills.

On the strength of this one quote, I bought the book.

A pair of spooks (too funny to resist) are accused of breaking into a Florida home because he was fleeing from a ghost.

Police said they were called to a shooting at 426 S. Beach Street, though it was later revealed to have instead been a burglary.

Breaking into my home could easily be called in as a shooting, and is a good way to become a ghost.

A father in Baltimore was beaten to death while protecting his children from a group of teenagers and adults who wanted to finish a fight that started at school. Christopher Wright was outside his home Friday when he was attacked by three teens and two adults who were looking for his fiancée’s 14-year-old son, who had gotten in a fight with another teen at school earlier in the day.

When Wright told the group that the boy was not going to come outside to fight, they told him, “’If he’s not going to fight, then you’re going to fight,” then they administered a gang beating. Wright had a seizure and began posturing, then later died of a traumatic brain injury. No charges have been filed against any of the individuals involved.

There are a few lessons to be taken from this incident:

• Stay out of cities, especially ones that are Zone 3 or higher.
• Carry a weapon
• If it’s 5 on 1, it isn’t a “fair fight” anyhow.
• Don’t “take your beating like a man” because that may mean your death or permanent disability
• oh, and get your kids out of public schools. They have become little more than prisons containing violent criminals
• If someone comes to your home looking for a fight, retreat inside, arm yourself, and call the cops.
• Have good cameras recording the outside of your home
• Did I mention avoid liberal enclave shitholes?

I also would point out that there was no description of the attackers other than “teens and adults” meaning that they are likely black.

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The school in question is Brooklyn Park Middle school. It is below even Maryland’s abysmal average for schools, with 37% of students being at grade level for English, and 14% in Math.

His blog looks like it is back up. https://bigcountryexpat.com/

Biden to give Minuteman III’s armed with nuke warheads to Ukraine? Tell me this is fake news. The rest of Europe is OK with this?

When you sell real estate at a profit, you have to pay capital gains taxes on the profit. There is an exception to that in the tax code, called chapter 1031. If the proceeds from the sale of the property are held in a third party escrow account and not accessible to the parties involved, and the funds are used to purchase another investment property, the taxes are deferred.

Biden says that this amounts to an interest free loan from the government to the investor. It’s as if he thinks that this money belongs to the government and the only way you keep some of it is because you are somehow using a loophole, even though it is actually part of the tax code. Unless he gets is way, of course.

What Biden wants to do is eliminate that chapter of the tax code, thus forcing the seller to pay the capital gains taxes upon sale without the deferral that has been available for a century.

After you pull the pin, Mr Grenade is not your friend. Do we need to come up with 4 rules of grenade safety?

I can hear the wife now: “I told you boys to stop throwing grenades in the house.”

How do you know that the drug is this vial:

isn’t actually the drug that is in this vial:

The answer? Without trusting that the medication is correctly labelled, you don’t. You trust that the label was correctly applied. OK, so you are a plumber. How can you be sure that this pipe:

Is made from a different material than this pipe:

When you are handloading ammunition, how do you know that the gunpowder you are using is the proper one? What if the one you are using actually creates dangerously high chamber pressures, but is labelled as if it didn’t? How would you know?

How do engineers know that the materials they are using are suitable for a task? It’s called standards. Materials are produced to a standard. Engineers trust that the standard is a good one, and that the certification that a material has met that standard hasn’t been falsified. So what happens if the agency that creates those standards begins to falsify them?