Chris Johnson

I do not look this cool or this hot. More than a few years ago, I gave up on stick welding. I got tired of cussing all the time. I wish I had spent more time learning how to do it well, but I never did. I “upgraded” from a Lincoln Electric “Tombstone” to a Lincoln Electric 140HD. Got a cart and a tank of gas and went to it.

I suck at this. Today I got three of the 8 hangers welded on. That includes the breaker popping twice, because of the extension cord. I’ll get rid of the extension cord today and finish this up.

You might have heard the term “stacking dimes.” There is nothing that pretty happening here. The only thing I can say with confidence is that the hangers ring when struck with a hammer, and they show no signs of cracking off. I’m now to the point where I can get nearly consistent bacon sizzle.

I’m also going to use a different pair of glasses tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that I’m blind through the visor, and not from arc flash. Just the distance isn’t right for my normal progressives. If I tilt my head to focus, the visor window no longer has the arc in view.

Wish me luck. If this gets done, a rattle can worth of yellow paint goes on this monstrosity, and then up into the loft with it.

I am a failure at welding; the fact that it works at all is a happy accident from reasonable equipment.

Update

“How bad?” you might ask. I just picked up the magnetic right angle to weld the other side of the hanger and the hanger came with it. This is why each hanger is individually tested. Yeah, I ran a very pretty bead about 1/16 in above the root.

I write my articles the night before they post. They are supposed to post at 0630 Eastern time. I got started late on Saturday night. When I went to schedule the article, I set the wrong date. What you read on Monday was supposed to post on Sunday.

My error.

This does mean I get to work more on my feral children article.

Yesterday was supposed to be a simple task: wield the eight hangers I made yesterday. They are simple hangers, 6×2 by 1/8, angled at the top with 2 3/8 inch holes to mount to the rafters.

The task for yesterday: dig the I-Beam out of the snow, put it on sawhorses, do a quick prep on the top surface, and then wield the eight hangers at 16 inches on center.

At the start of the day, it was 1° outside and in the machine shop. It got up to almost 20°. My office started at a toasty 50° and was up to nearly 60° by 1000.

Today it will be in the upper 20s, with snow. I’m going to try and make room for the beam in the shop and get this wielded up. If I can get this done, then I’m 90% of the way to completing the hut for the winter.

The following tasks are to install the window with my son’s help, get the rest of the hut insulated. Thats only a few wall bays and the ceiling.

The big issue is that I need to fix the wick on the KW-24 heater.

Wish me luck and I hope you are having a comfortable day.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the snowblower died. I need to replace the carb. This happened just before the skys dumped 8-12 inches of the white evil on us.

This week, Trump signed an EO removing the CAFE standards from vehicles. These are the standards that were requiring smaller cars with smaller engines in an attempt to get more than 50 MPG across the entire fleet of vehicles offered.

My first experience with this was when the TransAm I ordered while at University was delayed because I couldn’t have the fancy seats and the lower range gearing package because the gas mileage would be too low with the heavier seats.

Are there any vehicles that you would like to see imported or made in the USA that were prohibited under the former CAFE standards?

This poor dude was run through the system, chewed up and finally spat out. He was released to a halfway house yesterday.

What was his huge crime?

He gave the middle finger to the ATF.

There is a gizmo called a Lightning Link. This thing is supposed to function like an autosear in an AR-15. They were never very reliable and were offered more as a proof of concept than anything else. These are not drop-in autosears.

A drop-in autosear functions to carry a regular autosear but without a need for the third hole. They work well when they are a quality build.

The thing about the autosear is that very few of them were registered as machineguns. This was a $5-10 part that required a $200 transfer stamp.

There are likely no registered Lightning Links because they work so poorly that it is unlikely that anybody registered a $1 junk part, if it even had a serial number.

Matt Hoover had a semi-popular YouTube channel. He was making money from his channel. Somebody contacted him from Wisconsin, if memory serves, and together they came up with a thump nose at ATF plan.

To have a better understanding, understand that cryptographic “stuff” is or used to be an “arm” under export control. The same as an M1 tank. Exporting a cryptographic device would land you in jail, for a long time.

When RSA was first published, there was no issue. It was First Amendment protected to publish the RSA algorithm. The same is true with DES, IDEA, BlowFish, and later, AES. These were all protected speech.

What wasn’t protected, was software implementing them. The government ignored this for the most part until Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.

This changed the game, in the mind of the government.

The idea behind PGP was that you would use public key cryptography, in the form of RSA keys, to encrypt a small block of information. That block would contain the actual cryptographic key to decrypt the rest of the message.

This means that people can publish their public key with no fear. You can publish it in a newspaper or any web page. Anybody can then send you a message that could not be decrypted except by the person with the matching private key.

To get PGP out of the country legally, they printed it in an OCR font and just walked through customs with a printed book. The book was fully protected by the First Amendment. Once in a country that had more reasonable cryptographic export laws, development continued.

Matt Hoover and his partner decided to use the same idea. Instead of an “Arm” as defined by export law, they would print a “machine gun” as defined by the NFA.

They contracted to have a credit card sized piece of stainless-steel laser etched with an image of a Lightning Link. Except they were going to play it safe.

When the manufacturer suggested they etch the image deep enough that the pieces could be “popped out”, they refused. This was just an etching.

What came out later is that they didn’t even get the dimensions right. Again, this was intentional. If you were to actually cut the pieces out of that card, they would not create a functional device.

There was no way to make that piece of stainless-steel into a Lightning Link without extensive machining and other information.

In other words, it was no better than an expensive piece of stainless-steel.

Matt and his partner were charged with distributing machine guns; they were found guilty, and both were sentenced to prison.

Matt has cancer and has been given a compassionate release, if I understand the reports correctly.

So two dudes who were exercising their free speech rights, thumping their noses at the ATF, found out that the ATF has no sense of humor and were sentenced to prison for a crime they did not commit.

Oh, what was the proof of them selling machine guns? The ATF lab destroyed multiple autolink cards before they managed to get a modified AR-15 to malfunction. They got a second shot when the hammer followed the bolt down and fired the second round.

This could not be made to happen in any reliable way. In other words, they broke an AR and claimed it was a machine gun.

Are we living in a bubble?

It is impossible to live in a bubble of conservative ideas and views. The left agenda is everywhere.

If you watch the news, even “conservative” Fox News, you’ll hear sops thrown to the left. If you watch network TV or streaming video, you’ll be exposed to the left’s viewpoint. It is impossible to avoid.

You can see this in bias reports on the net. How many extreme left-wing news outlets are there? They are nearly impossible to find, but extreme right? Those are listed for sites that are not. When the scale is -5 to 5 and there are no 5s listed, there is something wrong.

I know that I can argue from a leftist’s perspective. I’ve been exposed to it so often that it is just part of the social zeitgeist.

You don’t need to be exposed to more of that left-wing babble; I’m positive you can do it yourself. You’re not stupid. You have access to that zeitgeist the same as I.

What I’m not willing to expose myself to is what the left is saying in their spaces. I am unable to understand how they can have the opinions they do. I can see what they are doing, I can analyze it, and I can even duplicate it. I don’t understand them.

Ally has been providing me with a glimpse into their world for years. I still don’t understand them because frequently it makes no sense to me. “How can they believe something so obviously false?” “Don’t they know that it will fail and bad things will happen?” “Why don’t they see the consequences of their actions?”

You can duplicate it, but can you understand it?

So I would ask Ally to explain. Boy, my skull is thick. She will spend hours explaining something to me, and I just don’t get it. Then it will turn out to be some simple message or phrase that had a different meaning to her than to me.

The example we use between us is our abortion arguments. In particular, the phrase “late-term abortion”.

For me, this invokes the images of babies that could survive out of the womb being ripped apart, murdered, for the sake of the woman’s wishes.

Because Ally spent so much time in Canada in her youth, she had a different definition. The definition instilled in her from that culture, one that implied a much earlier date. This led to many arguments until we reached an understanding.

It is important to note that Ally’s impression of the laws does not match my research into those laws but in no way invalidates her feelings about what the law was.

I had to open my ears and listen. And that is difficult.

When I asked Ally to start writing for GunFreeZone.net and later the Vine, I told her that she was writing articles “From Behind Enemy Lines.”

What this meant to me was that I wanted her to tell me what she was hearing on her liberal feeds, what she heard in person from the liberals she interacted with, and what she was feeling as a thinking yet left leaning person.

I missed.

There was something more critical than just reporting the facts on the ground. She was reporting how those facts were influencing the left.

The Felon!

I’ll take a subject that is not controversial for her and me. Trump has 34 felony counts.

This is true. I don’t know anybody on our side of the line that gives a damn about it because it was a kangaroo court where the verdict was predetermined and the facts and laws modified to get that result.

State law was changed and manipulated to charge Trump. This is unconstitutional.
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. — U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 3 [PDF], No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility. — U.S. Const. art. I, § 10, cl. 1
[PDF]

What New York State did was to change the law to extend the statute of limitations and then proceed to turn a misdemeanor into a felony. Moreover, each count was for Trump’s signature. Sign a check, make a notation in his checkbook register, and that’s two counts. Paying the bill over multiple months, each month, two more counts.

So it doesn’t mean anything to us. It was a crime invented to charge Trump so that he could be stopped from becoming President a second time.

But how does a leftist view this? They don’t care. They hear, they believe, and they know he is a criminal. More importantly, they know that no criminal should ever be allowed to be the President.

He is called “the felon” by many on the left because this is part of their belief system. And if you don’t see it the way they do, then you are deranged.

Ally is here to provide that link, that grounding, that glimpse into their delusions.

FAFO?

When I first read Trump’s posts regarding the traitorous six, I heard him accuse them of a crime and provide the maximum penalty for that crime.

I heard it as a reaction to those despicable, vile, disgusting worms that were inciting rebellion in the ranks.

He never said, he never implied, and he doesn’t even say he wants them executed. He stated the maximum penalty.

It doesn’t matter how true everything I just wrote is. It doesn’t matter what his actual intentions were or what he actually does.

To the left, the only thing that matters is what they hear. And they heard him threaten to execute those six putrid tapeworms.

That is what Ally heard. Reality doesn’t matter. That is what was heard; that is what they react to.

If you don’t know and understand that reaction, then you can’t interact with those that do.

What they hear is what they remember

A principal once accused me of threatening her with physical violence over the phrase “jump down your throat”. It was never a physical threat; the phrase has always meant verbal arguments, often loud arguments. She heard a threat. She reacted as if it was a threat. It doesn’t matter the reality.

I learned this lesson the hard way many years ago. I was talking to a girl and had set up a date with her. When I arrived at the bar to pick her up for our date, she was hanging out with some friends of ours telling a story. I listened, participated, and waited for her to get done. When she got done, I asked if she was ready to go. She said no; she had decided she didn’t want to go. I told her I was disappointed in her. In her making a promise and then changing her mind at the last minute.

That simple statement, “disappointed in her”, was devastating for her. She had been abused by her mother, and one of the mental abuses her mother would heap on her was about how disappointing she was.

It didn’t matter how gentle I thought the wording was; all that mattered in our communications was what she heard.

Listen to what she says

So when Ally writes something from behind enemy lines, she is showing us what the left is saying but, more importantly, what they feel and believe.

I’m glad for her additions to The Vine of Liberty.

Feast time. We spent the entire day preparing, and then people showed up. Then more people showed up.

I hope you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

We are having Friendsgiving this evening. It is a small gathering of around 16 people. It could be as high as 20 but still on the small size.

Many of you, I’m sure, had Thanksgiving on Thursday.

What was the most uncomfortable subject you dealt with? Did you have to deal with NPCs spouting the talking point of the day or did you escape that part of hell that the Left has turned Thanksgiving into?