Holy Crom, real life really is made up of…things you can’t make up.
While I normally have no love for the federal government, I have even less love for parasite illegal aliens…so, I am, generally speaking, on board with the recent uptick in immigration enforcement.
Other than that, this is just an amusing example of people not reading whats right in front of them, and also underestimating the feds ability to be sneaky.
I haven’t posted anything about the fires in California for a couple reasons –
a) Its California
2) I’m not there, I’m not an expert, and my opinion is worth all of what you pay for it
III) I doubt theres anyone reading this who, in that locale and environment, wouldnt have taken steps to increase their resilience against fire
But not all Californians are clueless volunteer/victims.
Its an article about a couple guys who bought some homestead fire-fighting equipment and basically hosed their place down for several hours and came back to…their house.
Seems like every place worth livingi n out in California has a swimming pool. Why not transfer all that water to the roof of your house and the grounds around it?
There is no shortage of outfits online selling firefighting equipment for the DIY’er. And while fighting a forest fire on your own with no training is a recipe (extra crispy recipe, actually) for disaster I will completely understand the man who does in order to protect his home.
And, yes, when the sheriff shows up and tells you to evacuate or else … there may not be much you can do, but you can at least leave the hoses running and the pumps pumping like some sort of hydro-sentry-gun.
I’ve investigated this sort of stuff here and there over the years as I daydreamed moving to a nice quiet place in the sticks. Make no mistake…metal roofing, some type of reservoir, and a well designed network of hose connection points is definitely in the cards.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more articles about people either beating the fires by tactical house construction design or water-projection defenses. Surely there’s gotta be a bunch of people, even in California, who saw the writing on the wall and invested in concrete shingles and water pumps. Perhaps the media doesnt want to encourage people to rely on something other than .gov for their safety. Or maybe no one noticed. Or maybe no one thinks it’s newsworthy. But, if it were me, I’d have had my pool plumbed to me eaves-mounted sprinkler system within the first week of building the place. But, easy to say since I’m not there.
Nonetheless, it is worth a trip through the internet to see whats available for when you do need to be your own basement-flooding, hose-dragging, ladder-monkey. 😉
Interesting piece about the change in ‘gun culture’ in Israel.
First, welcome to the party.
This article is interesting because, while you and I might support the idea of the more people discreetly arming themselves against unforeseen violence, there’s a cultural difference clearly in evidence here that is worth noting.
Gozlan is unnerved by what he sees as inadequate oversight in the licensing process. “At the range, I saw people who had never held a gun in their life, barely hitting their targets. It’s frightening to think these people are now walking around with firearms.”
Catch that “inadequate oversight in the licensing process”? The article continues with concerns that, while no one is saying that the citizens shouldn’t be able to have guns, the possibility that they are ‘untrained’ or lacking in skill poses a, to them, legitimate concern.
This almost feels like a setup for a testing scheme. In this country, broadly speaking, if where you live requires a license you’re application is mostly theoretical…few places require you to go to the range and shoot a particular score to qualify. Some do, yes, but most do not. A right, predicated on a test, is not a right. And that’s the crux of what I’m getting at.
‘Reaonable” and ‘common sense’ regulations that support this sort of testing are backdoor schemes to restrict access and ownership. Let’s say a municipality or state wants to restrict firearms ownership and access. First thing you do is create a licensing scheme with requirements. Now, make it impossible to meet those requirements. For example, you may need eight hours of classroom time with a qualified instructor….and then you make the classrooms unavailable, set the qualifications for instructor to be unobtainable, and you have, by default, created a roadblock even though on paper you have a clearly instructed process to follow.
You can add all sorts of roadblocks…the licensing office is only open on every other Thursday for two hours, you have to apply in person, you need to bring documents that are awkward or difficult to obtain, funding reductions reduce staff available for processing forms, etc, etc. This isn’t just theory….in places like California and New York it’s business as usual.
I bring this up because people will read the article above and nod their heads sagely that, yes, everyone should have the right to own a gun but…there needs to be training an competency standards. And those standards, naturally, are set by people who have a keen interest in people not owning guns.
So, before anyone asks how you could possibly be against a “safety measure” like competency and handling exams, remember that these mechanisms are easily jiggered to promote making ownership of guns so onerous as to be impossible.
Should you have competency and skill in handling your boomtoys? Absolutely. You should regularly practice for safety and accuracy. Should it be a requirement administered by .gov, under .gov guidelines and rules, as a condition of ownership? Absolutely not.
Hopefully the Israelis will not fall for that trick.
I’ve been following this case since it started.
It’s a terrible thing to have to defend yourself and have it result in a death. No matter how justified it may seem, you never really know if you’re “in the clear” or not until the people who weren’t there and weren’t involved decide whether or not to take you to the docket.
No matter how “in the right” you think you are, it’s not up to you to decide, unfortunately. And the crappy part of that is that when you do need to defend yourself, you may waste valuable, precious fractions of a second in responding because you’re thinking about the legal after-effects.
I’m glad the jury did the reasonable thing and acquitted this guy, but his life is never, ever gonna be the same. Civil suits, reputational damage, etc, are all in store for him.
Its interesting to read some of the other blogs out there these days in regards to the actions going on in Ukraine. There’s definitely a contingent of people who are certain that the current course of action, and the ‘permission’ given to the Ukes to use the US supplied long range munitions, will lead us into a genuine nuclear scenario.
Nuclear weapons are interesting weapons and deterrents. Ostensibly, no one wants to be the first to use them but no one wants to be the last to use them either. What is more liekly to happen if someone launches a (small) nuke at someone….the receiving side and it’s allies restrain themselves form retaliating in kind in the name of the moral high ground? Or they retaliate in kind?
Is the current likelihood of nuclear war, or at least a couple ‘tactical’ or ‘limited’ nuclear uses, higher or lower than what it was during the Cold War?
I was pretty sure the Russians weren’t going to invade Ukraine and I was quite wrong about that. My ability to reasonably predict the future is, obviously, not that great. Do I think someone is going to open up some canned sunshine in this conflict? I really don’t know. I think that it would be alot like the situation the Israelis were (supposedly) in back in ’73 – When their back was to the wall and it looked like they were gonna take it in the shorts, they made a somewhat public show of prepping their nuclear weapons for use and Nixom quickly fired up Operation Nickelgrass and turned on the taps of materiel. I could see the Russians letting the satellites see them moving nuclear munitions to a ‘ready’ position and suddenly US pressure for Kiev to make ‘reasonable compromises’ occurs. Of course, we’d never know about it…but I bet if there’s a dramatic shift in policy towards compromise or appeasement, I’ll bet its because someone put on a show for satellites.
But, do I think anyone will heave a nuke, even a small tactical battlefield nuke, at someone? No,but I’ve been wrong before.
On the other hand, it’s always a good idea to be prepared just in case. And even if thes no nucelar exchange, those preparation work for other non-nuclear disasters as well. I mean, if you’re prepared for WW3.5 youre probably prepared, by default, for lesser things like hurricanes.
Warrantless ‘searches’ (which really should be called intrusions) of a person’s property are one of those things that makes me go from 0-to-boogaloo with no stops in-between. It seems that some .gov organizations (local, usually) feel that they’re exempt from needing warrants to roam your property for reasons.
One situation I had been following closely is a case in Tennessee where game wardens, in the name of pursuing their mandate, can come onto people’s property surreptitiously, leave surveillance devices, monitor the property, and it’s all kosher because…reasons, I guess.
To my simplistic way of thinking, unless there’s some truly exigent circumstances, any badge-wearer or .gov employee has zero business being on Zero’s property uninvited.
Apparently a court in Tennessee has agreed with my sentiment:
For people like you and I , with our particular interests and ideals, the notion of privacy and property rights are of heightened importance. If I’m berming a conex full of guns and food on my forty acres somewhere, the last thing I need is some state agency roaming the acreage without my permission….laying cameras and ground sensors, taking pictures, observing, etc. And, to my way of thinking, that applies to drone surveillance as well. I don’t really expect any sense of privacy from a low earth orbit satellite, but I do expect privacy 80 feet above my house.
I have a similar feeling towards the seemingly common practice of law enforcement slapping tracking devices on vehicles without a warrant. You modify my property with a surveillance device, you better have some paperwork about it or we’re going to have some words in a courtroom.
I applaud the Tennessee court for applying what seems to me as common sense in their decision.
This actually didnt happen all that far from here.
For bear deterrent in the woods, I have two options. A handgun is no one’s first choice for defending against a bad-mood bruin, but sometimes you just can’t carry an HK91 everywhere.
How do handguns stack up against bears? Glad you asked.
From Saturday’s post:
and today:
If you really wanna go for the double-layer of tinfoil, wrap your head around this: it, in fact, was a ploy by the Trump team to make their guy look tough. They were gonna pull some patsy out of the woodwork, give him a rifle with blanks, have him take a shot, get popped by snipers, and Trump would look like a hero as he clutches his ear with a hidden razor blade in his palm to draw some blood. BUT….one of Trumps team was working for the other side and at the last minute they switched out the blanks for live ammo and it became the real deal.
Yeah, I don’t believe that either. But I’ll bet someone, somewhere does.
Some events are so big that they cause even the most disparate political forces to agree. After the 9/11 attacks there was a ‘honeymoon’ period where both sides agreed on various things that they normally would not agree upon. These periods always eventually dissipate into the usual partisanship, but not before the newly-discovered-common-ground crowd has done their damage (cough*PatriotAct*cough).
Early reports are saying this kid used an AR-platform of some kind…I’m betting .223 and not something with more zip like a .308 or Creedmoor). And, if it was an AR platform, this might be the impetus that gets us back into Assault Weapons Ban II.
No one condones assassination as a form of remediation in domestic politics. At least, not officially. And no one is going to come out and support that sort of nonsense (well, maybe a few people here and there). So, when some schmuck like Schumer, or one of his fellow travelers, starts clamoring about how ‘both sides must unite to stop this terrible threat’…there might be that ‘unity across the aisle’ moment. After all, if you couch the whole thing in the idea of ‘preserving democracy’ by getting rid of these ‘assassination weapons’ and you don’t support the program…well, then the terrorists assassins have won.
“Never let a crisis go to waste” is the mantra over there. You watch…it won’t be long before this event is used as the impetus to push for some sort of gun/magazine ban. As more details about this event come out you’ll see the pointless questions like “where did the shooter get the gun” and that sort of thing. Then it’ll be a shift into ‘gun safety’ measures with laws being proposed that no politician will be able to oppose without looking like they’re condoning this behavior.
Or maybe not. I’ve been wrong before. But what Im not wrong about is that there are going to be people in Washington who are going to grab this opportunity and public outrage to try and push forward an agenda that might otherwise have not gotten much traction.Probably about guns, but other things are possible too.
I’ll be curious to see what gun/mag vendors pricing and inventory looks like over the next weeks.
Its just a matter of time for the left starts saying how it was ‘an inside job’ by a Trump stooge to ‘near miss’ the the former President to make him look tough.
or
They’ll trot out that Trump is so evil that even the people on the right want him off the planet
or
They’l say this was an inside job to discredit the Left
Buckle up, its gonna be an interesting news cycle.
