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Sandia National Laboratories have developed a laser guided .50 caliber bullet. They claim accuracy to a mile or more.

There are enough criminals getting into the zombie craze, that we need to seriously take a look at how we are going to react to people who are deliberately attacking people by biting them, as if they were actually zombies.

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I would think that biting a person’s flesh off is ‘serious bodily harm’ and would justify deadly force. If a person gives any indication that they are about to bite you, serious consideration needs to be given to that option.

Sebastian has a post today about judicial game playing. I have a few of my own experiences, but one in particular has always bugged me.
Several years ago, a local used car dealer sold my sister a car. She wanted to get rid of her car payments, so she traded in a new car that she was still making payments on, and applied the $4000 in equity to the purchase price of a used car, which should have paid it in full. (The car that she traded in was worth $9,000, but she owed $5,000) The dealer turned in the title application to the state, but unbeknownst to my sister, he had altered the title application to add a $50 lien to the title, saying that the purchase price was $4050, and that my sister had made a $4000 down payment, and had $50 outstanding.

Since there was a lien on the title, the state then sent the title to the lien holder (the dealer) instead of my sister. When the title arrived at the dealer, the dealer went to my sister’s job and ‘repossessed’ the car. They refused to return the car unless my sister paid more money. My sister went to my mother for help. My mother went down there in an attempt to straighten it out, and the dealer managed to con another $1,000 out of my mother in exchange for the car.

Even though he gave them the car, he still refused to give them the title. That is when they called me for help. The police would not do anything about the case, claiming that it was a civil matter, even though we had copies of paperwork before it was altered, and could prove that the dealer had altered the title application. A clear case of fraud, and illegal in the state of Florida.
We sued him in small claims court.
On the day that we went to court, the dealer satisfied the lien, took it to a title loan establishment, and got a $500 loan on that title, thereby encumbering the title with a third party lien. The dealer, who by now had gotten the car retitled in his name, countersued us for the return of the car.
When we got to court, the judge heard the story, and declared that there was no way that he could order the dealer to hand over the title, because that would cause the title loan store (a third party) to lose their money. He also said that this was not a civil matter, it was a matter for the cops. His exact words were “I am dismissing this case. There is too much fraud going on here.” He then ordered us to return the car to the titled owner (the dealer), and ordered the dealer to return the second payment (the $1000 from my mother).
My sister was out the car that she used as a trade in, and the dealer got away with fraud.
So the cops wouldn’t prosecute the fraud, the judge wouldn’t order the dealer to return the money, and justice was never served by anyone. Hard to see how anarchy could be much worse.

A Doctor in Scottsdale, Arizona was shopping at a Barnes and Noble for some children’s books to send to his grandchildren. He was spotted as a lone male in the children’s book section, and their first though apparently was that he must be a child molester, because they escorted him from the store, and told him that lone males were not allowed in that section of the store. The store claimed that they had gotten a complaint from a female customer.
How could any business in this  day and age think that this is acceptable? Why, because many pedophiles are men? If this were allowed, then a store could feel free to exclude the Irish from the alcohol section, black men from the knife section, and no Chinese women would be allowed on car lots. When a business would suggest such actions, they would be wrong, and would never do so without being sued.
As for me, I will continue to buy as many things as I can online. The prices are better, and I don’t have to worry about being treated like a criminal.

1 A gun store employee telling a customer who wanted to buy an AR15 with a piston upper: “Those are unreliable. The piston is just one more moving part that can break. The beauty of the gas tube is that there are fewer failure points.”

2  Another employee who told me that the M&P40 cannot be converted to fire 9mm. The only calibers that the M&P40 can fire are .40S&W and .357Sig. I told him that Storm Lake and KKM both made 9mm barrels for the M&P40. He said I was wrong. I left the store.

There are many fire departments (and some ambulance services) in the United States where each employee works a 24 hour shift. Most work 24 hours on, 48 hours off. This schedule works out to 56 hours a week and requires three shifts.There are others, but this one appears to be the most prevalent. I worked this shift pattern for the last 15 years of my career. It requires you to report to work at 7:30 in the morning, and work straight through to 7:30 the next morning.

The 24 hour shift is a relic of a time when EMS was nonexistent, and firefighting wasn’t all that busy. Employers asked for and received an exemption from the 40 hour per week rule of the FSLA, using the excuse that late night fires were rare, and firefighters could sleep. This means that an employer can make a firefighter work 53 hours a week without paying overtime. The result is that the 56 hour work week costs the employer the equivalent of  57.5 hours of straight time pay.

Since the FSLA, fire departments have taken on many new roles: EMS, hazardous materials response, heavy rescue, rescue diving, and more. Call loads have been increasing steadily. In 1999, the station I was assigned to ran an average of 2,300 calls a year. By the year I retired, my station was up to 3,200 calls a year. My personal record was answering 23 calls in one day. That is not an unusual situation. The busiest fire unit in North America runs an AVERAGE of 16 calls per day. Not station, unit. There can be more than one unit in a station, which can see call loads of 50 or more calls per day. That call load is on top of all of the other duties like equipment maintenance, inspections, public education, and other routine duties.

Couple that with the staffing issues and employee burnout that causes frequent manpower shortages, and you create a large amount of mandatory overtime. For political reasons, firefighters cannot be seen sleeping during the day, so a paramedic firefighter may be 36 hours into a 48 hour shift, and be operating on no sleep. All of this means that emergency personnel are rarely as well rested as they should be, and this is aggravated by overtime.

That is why this incident comes as no surprise. You cannot expect that an employee that is 18 hours into a 24 shift to be making the same quality decisions that he did when he was just coming on shift. The IAFF, as well as many firefighters, will vigorously oppose a change to this schedule, mostly because it will cut into the 4-5 days off per week that many firefighters enjoy. Employers will fight changes, because it would mean having to hire more personnel.

However, there is no question in my mind that, as call loads and duties increase, this schedule becomes more dangerous and difficult to justify.

A group in Orange county, Florida is circulating a petition to be added to the ballot that would pass a county ordinance to require that all businesses in the county give employees paid sick days. They are seeking one hour of sick time for every thirty seven hours worked. The law supported by the petition would also prohibit employers from disciplining employees for calling in sick. This will increase labor costs by 3%, as well as make it more likely that employers would have staffing woes, further increasing costs to employers.

This stupid law will probably pass, because the idiots voting for this will not understand that employers will have only three ways to deal with this added expense (essentially, a tax):
1 Cut costs. This will happen through lower wages or lay offs.
2 Increase revenue. They will raise prices. This means that many of the businesses that currently do not offer sick time, like convenience stores and fast food places, will charge more. Hello, local inflation.
3 Simply close Orange County locations, and move out of the county.

This is the basic flaw of Democracy: Everyone thinks that they can live at the expense of everyone else by simply voting for it.

I wonder what it would cost to install ground surveillance radar at your bug out location?

Why do people go to school? What is the purpose? Nominally, it is for the student to learn certain things, as defined by the objectives of the course. When I was a student in public school, I found the actual learning process to be boring. I would seldom do homework, and I usually put my head down and slept in class. Yet with all of that, at exam time, I would get A’s. Students and teachers alike would complain that I wasn’t doing the work. I pointed out that the point of the class was not to do homework, but to master the course objectives, which I had done, as evidenced by the fact that I had passed the exam.

So teachers began making the completion of homework a substantial portion of the course grade. One of the things that I remember from a 7th grade world history class was that we were given assignments every day, and we were required to complete these assignments and place them in a notebook. This notebook would be collected at the end of the semester, and would be graded. The grade for this notebook would be 60% of the overall grade for the course. I remember one of those assignments. It was a line drawing of a Roman Gladiator, and the assignment was to color in the picture. I felt it was a waste of time, and I didn’t do it. I scored 90% plus on every exam, and I failed the class. The girl who sat next to me failed every exam, turned in a stellar coloring book, and got an A in the class.

This is why we are turning out educated idiots. The focus in school is on obedience, not education. That is why I don’t criticize this mom, who is under fire because her daughter didn’t turn in her homework.

If I had to do it all over again, I would drop out of school as soon as I was able, and take the GED. Then I could attend a community college for an associate’s degree. Public school is a waste of time.