One less ghost gun retailer will be in the business of illegally selling gun parts in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Tuesday.

We have a rights granted to us by our creator. One of those rights is the right to self defense. There is no limit on how you defend yourself. Hopefully you will keep the collateral damage to a minimum.

In these United States that right is embodied in the second amendment. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The second amendment does not say muskets. It does not say muzzle loaders or firearms. It doesn’t even mention knives, swords, clubs or axes. It says “arms”.

A few years ago one of the gun hating state of Massachusetts had their ban on stun guns declared unconstitutional. Stun guns are arms and as such are protected under the second amendment. SJC: Stun guns protected under Second Amendment

The newest horrible, no good, double plus ungood, awful threat to the people of this country is a gun that doesn’t have a serial number on it. More importantly, a serial number that the BATFE has a record of. The number of crimes being committed with guns that have no serial numbers is increased vastly.

Mostly because when you go from less than 10 to more than 100 you get huge percentage changes. “Crimes committed with ghost guns has jumped 400% since 2019” could mean that they went from 1 to 4 or from 100 to 400 or from 1000 to 4000. We don’t know because they work hard to hide the true numbers. If the number had climbed from 4000 to 5000 you can be sure it would be described as “more than a 1000 more ghost guns were used in crimes last year…”

Emotional blackmail is a good description of this method of manipulating people to fear something they have no reason to fear. We use to call it “dead baby stories”. These are the stories that were told before the Internet to keep you from doing something. It always had the same form, “Your aunt Jill’s husband’s brother’s son-in-law knows a family whose baby died because he was fed a strawberry. Never give strawberries to a baby or it will die!”

The gun rights infringers are very careful to not actually tell you what they mean when the say “Ghost Gun”.

What they mean is parts. What they mean are objects that might become a firearm. The ATF is currently playing the same game, trying to make parts firearms so they can force registration.

There are a couple of books out there that describe exactly how to use bits and pieces purchased at the local hardware store to create a working sub-machine gun. While it would be nice to have fancy tooling to make them, they are designed to be made with the simplest of tools. A drill and file being the two primary tools required.

The problem is always going to be “When does this piece of metal go from being a lump of metal to a firearm?”

As part of a settlement, Salvo Technologies – doing business as Florida-based 80P builder – agreed to stop selling New York City residents the illegal and untraceable firearms known as ghost guns, which are assembled from gun part kits often sold online.

“Untraceable” is the fear word.

Police procedural shows are very predictable. NCIS was better than most but still. Just about every other week you would hear a conversation like “We’ve identified that the gun that fired the shot is a Glock 49. There are only 9 registered owners of Glock 49s in the area, we need to check them out.”

Or on a really bad day they might have over a 100 registered owners. So some magic nerd in the back would use arcane incantations to have the list filtered down to just left handed 39 year olds whose junk hangs to the right.

There is no gun registry. Some states have one but there is no federal gun registry. Many people believe there is but that’s because Hollywood told them that there is.

For a time Maryland required that every new gun sold in the state supply an example fired case from that gun. This was going to allow the police to solve more crimes. They would be able to pick up a casing at a crime scene and instantly track it back to the person that owned the gun.

Except that it didn’t work even once. They canceled the boondoggle after a number of years and millions of dollars.

The number of times that a gun trace actually leads to an arrest is unknown. The data isn’t collected.

The AG of New York is ordering companies selling parts kits to not sell to people in NY because they might be turned into a real gun and that gun might be used in a crime and they might recover that gun and they might not know who did the crime and they might have been able to trace the gun to the first buyer if only that gun had been registered and had a serial number.

There are firearms that are parts of collections that are multiple buyers removed from the last time that firearm was on an FFLs books. Everytime there is a gun ban scare people decide that a little horse trading amongst friends might be a good idea. So a firearm that was purchased 30 years ago is traded to somebody that in turn trades it to somebody else and forgets about it.

The only thing they have is the emotional blackmail. We have to stand up to their screeching and whining.

[In 2011], the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as “assault weapons,” and two million plus high-capacity magazines. Many more have been sold in the gun-buying boom since then. But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for “assault weapon” registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.

Non-compliance is an act of defiance. The law is “shall not be infringed”. Be prepared to fight for your rights.

Settlement blocks another company from selling ghost guns in NYC

Language is so neat. You can say so many things without saying them by just picking the right words with the right connotations. You didn’t actually say that a person is a moron that looks like she escaped from the set of Beetlejuice because that would be an insult to morons and beatles.

In the 70’s and 80’s the term was “illegal alien” and it meant an alien person that was in the country illegally. The left wanted more people to vote democrat so the wanted more immigrants from third world countries. Senator Ted Kennedy (IIRC) pushed strongly for this.

There still wasn’t enough coming in through legal immigration but there as a flow that was entering the country illegally and their children were US citizens. And they would vote (Democrat?) when they came of age.

It was so down right mean to call somebody illegal so they became “undocumented aliens” and then “undocumented workers” and the migrants.

We are now starting to see the emergence of the term “illegal migrants” coming from the mouths and pens of the left.

This seems to be because of the horrible gamesmanship that Gov. Abbott is partaking in. You see, he’s asking illegal aliens if they want a free bus ride to DC, NYC and now Chicago.

According to Mayor Eric Adams of NYC the 3000 or so illegal aliens that Abbott had bussed to NYC has overwhelmed their social safety net. It is a humanitarian crisis that was manufactured by the heartless Texas Governor. At the very least Texas should inform NYC when they send a bus north, so that NYC can deal with it.

No mention about the 100s of small towns and cities on the southern border that see 1000s of illegal aliens per day. No mention of the illegal aliens being flown to different parts of the country and then sent out in busses. Maybe that doesn’t count.

Mayor Muriel Bowser of DC is saying some of the same things. It is just horrible that Texas would forcibly ship these poor helpless people to DC. It is inhuman to bus them to DC. DC just isn’t equipped to handle the 100s of illegal aliens showing up every week.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago had her name invoked three times by a reporter and she appeared with a soft bang and a cloud of smoke.

“My frustration comes from the actions of the governor of Texas,” she said at a press conference. “There could be a level of coordination and cooperation, but he chooses to do none of those things. Instead, he chooses to send human beings across the country to an uncertain destination. That’s unacceptable.”

He is manufacturing a human crisis and it makes no sense to me

Mayor Lori Lightfoot lashes out at Texas Gov. Abbott after 50 more migrants are bussed to Chicago

1570 James Stewart, 1908 King Carlos I of Portugal, 1919 General Emiliano Zapata, 1963 John F. Kennedy, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr., 2003 Zoran Đinđić were all assassinated. Other than some coups these are the very few that were assassinated with rifles.

Yet this is the thing that terrifies security details. It is the thing that TV and movie plots are made of. The lone gunman in his perch taking that multi yard shot from outside the parameter and killing their principal.

A good sniper is almost impossible to spot prior to the shot and is often not seen after the shot. The gun barrel pushed out the window advertising the location should never happen. A real sniper knows that it is patience that is his strength.

This country is full of men and women that have rifles perfectly capable of taking a deer at 500 yards. There are people that are capable of long distance shooting where they hit targets at well over 500 yards. The M-16 with a 20 inch barrel is perfectly capable of putting rounds on a man size target at 500 yards with iron sights.

In 1966 some asshole climbed the University Texas clock tower with multiple rifles and started shooting at people. He shot for 96 minutes, killed 15 people and injured 31 people. Civilians and police rushed to take him out. Civilians with rifles in their cars started returning fire to try and prevent the asshole from shooting as the police rushed up the tower to finally take out the shooter.

Unlike the cowards of Uvalde, these men rushed to the sound of gun fire.

https://youtu.be/UYQXMf48Io8

Bonus:

On Thursday, September 1st, 2022 the President of the United States initiated combat with half the country. Bullets are not flying and we pray they don’t while preparing for the worse.

The term is dehumanizing. It is the act of making somebody or some group of people less than human. The Hutu of Rwanda described the Tutsis as “cockroaches”. What do you do to cockroaches? You exterminate them. The Hutus murdered 800,000 “cockroaches”.

After WWII anybody that disagreed with the ruling party became non-people and were shoved into the gulag archipelago pipeline. Many died on the way to the gulags. Many more were worked to death or starved. Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. There were posters throughout Ukraine reminding parents that it was bad to eat their children.

Stalin took all the food from Ukraine and shipped it to the cities and starved the people of the Ukraine to the point where there were “dinners” where neighbors got together to eat meat. And there was one less mouth to feed at that dinner than there was the day before.

Stalin murdered 100 million unpersoned people.

The Germans dehumanized the Jews. They were insects, rodents, dirty, unclean and dangerous. They were the reason you got sick. They were the reason that you were poor. They were the reason you couldn’t buy food. They were unpersoned.

On Thursday, the puppetmasters had Jill lead her husband to the podium. They lite the stage like some dystopian nightmare. Our president stood there raised his fists and told the world “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

That anybody that is republican is a threat to this country because “the Republican Party is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.” You are not asking questions because it is your right to question your government. It is your right to state your opinion.

According to Biden you do not respect the Constitution. You do not believe in the rule of law. Because you do not surrender to mob rule.

So our President stood before the world and called us a threat. He quoted another as saying we are a clear and present danger to this country. These are words that can justify actions. It is the groundwork of potential horrors to come.

Two days later we see the echos, Lofgren says Trump’s Saturday rally ‘proving’ Biden’s case on MAGA Republicans

“President Biden did caution Americans about extremism in his speech in Philadelphia, and the ex-president is proving his case,” [Lofgren said]. “To call out law enforcement as vicious enemies, I understand that he identified an FBI agent by name on his social media, probably exposing that law enforcement official to threats that we’ve seen.”

Keep your powder dry and your muskets ready.

On August 7th, NPR published Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out

Danielle Kurtzleben from NPR went to Wisconsin to get a story about “abortion rights”. She claims she wanted to do two stories, one on Democrats and one on Republicans. She was very surprised when the Republicans didn’t even bother to reply to her. They just ghosted her.

The problem is that it is easy to read somebody’s bias from questions they ask. Asking to speak to a senator about “the uploading the second amendment” tells the staffer that you are on a different side than somebody calling to talk about “stopping gun violence”. The mere questions you ask will say more about you than you are likely to get from them.

The phenomenon is impossible to quantify, but many Republican candidates are showing that they don’t want – or need – to get their messages out via legacy media outlets. That can reduce the scrutiny they face while running for public office, hampering voters’ ability to make informed choices.

Here is her hubris and bias on display. She considers it her job to scrutinize Republicans running for public offices. “Joe, what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” vs “Mr Trump, why are you discriminating against muslims? Are you a Islamophobia?”

Of course they never seem to feel that Fox News is “legacy media”. Legacy media only includes their banner carriers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, MSNBC. Isn’t it surprising that MSNBC is considered legacy media even though it is younger than Fox? NBC is older than fox, but not MSNBC.

The problem is that we just don’t trust “legacy media”. We have to many examples of the legacy media twisting what we say to get their narrative.

In 2016 Katie Couric created a documentary Under the Gun. In that documentary Katie asks members of a Virginia gun rights organization to answer a question on background checks. The film then showed 9 seconds of silence from the gun owners. As if they couldn’t answer. Fortunately they had their own recording and it showed that when asked they all had answers.

The video of them sitting there silently was from footage show while the sound crew asked them to be quiet so they could get sound levels.

In other words, Katie lied.

How many times did the legacy media misquote Trump or take his words entirely out of context. There is an entire industry of producing pink pussy hats based on the false premise that Trump was grabbing pussy at a beauty contest. The hot mic comment was a statement about power, if you are rich and powerful you can take video of yourself smoking crack, paying for prostitutes, snorting cocaine, selling access to the presidency and nothing will happen to you.

Opps, that isn’t what Trump said, he made a comment about how if you are rich or powerful you could grab a woman by the pussy and she wouldn’t complain.

It is a good thing that more and more Conservatives and Republicans are learning to tell the legacy media to go shove it. I love DeSantis’ ability to flatten reporters with gotcha questions. He really does a great job. I’m coming to respect Kari Lake’s ability to punch back at reporters as well.

To post publicly is dangerous. Every time we write a blog posting it remains as a stepping stone into our past. The terms we use will be judged in the future. The images we choose to post will be considered, weighed, and likely found wanting.

The internet is forever. J.Kb. has written about the evil that is things like OnlyFans. Places where young girls go and become hollow husks of people, losing an intimate sharing that the could have kept for their partner in the future.

There is a story that a young lady was picked to be the model for Ivory Snow soap. “99 44/100% pure” was the tagline. You can’t have your public face be anything but pure. This young lady decided it would be a good idea to perform in an X rated film. She lost the Ivory Snow gig and never had another non-porn gig there after. The story of Marilyn Chambers is out there if you want to read about her.

She made money but didn’t have a great life. Multiple divorces and a drug habit were some of the issues she faced.

One recent blogger that had an unfiltered style of writing had to stop posting when he was doxed and harrassed. In a society where the government lies to tell the truth is dangerous.

Miguel is the public face of this blog. The other authors have setup a small amount of separation between our public persona and our private lives as our postings could have professional ramifications.

Yet still we post.

This post isn’t about this little blogger or the better blogs out there, this is about how history is rewritten by the victors.

The latest authority figure that is rewriting history is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She is out there telling the country that the teachers union wanted the kids in school. It was the politicians that closed the schools, her people are dedicated to the children and wanted to teach.

But the internet remembers. It remembers when it was revealed that teachers unions pushed the CDC to recommend that the schools be closed. Even today schools are full of “must mask” rules. In this part of the country about the only place you are required to wear a mask are the schools and doctors offices.

There are a few at risk people that have businesses open to the public that require masks to enter, but they are very few and there is always an option to go elsewhere.

The teachers unions seem to be one of the most self serving entities in the country. Their hypocrisy knows no real bounds.

Back when Chris Christie was the Governor of NJ he went to battle with the teachers union of NJ. One of the counter attacks was how much Christie was paid. He pointed out that the head of the teachers union in NJ was paid almost three times as much as he was and had significantly less responsibilities.

The country is going through a vast gas lighting. They tell us that a grand mother walking through the capitol taking pictures is a fundamental threat to our country but a mob burning a city is peaceful. They tell us that acting in self defense is murder but that violent criminals should be set free.

We are told that it is a “Gun Safety Bill” when infringements on a fundamental right proposed.

We need to remain vigilant to the rewriting of history as we watch. Keep copies of articles and videos, you might only see them one time.

Back in 1991 during operation Desert Storm, the US military was firing Tomahawk Cruise Missiles into Baghdad. We were watching some of the footage on CNN. The new crew was on the roof of the hotel in Baghdad when they heard something. The cameraman pointed the camera down the street and filmed a Tomahawk missile flying down the center of the street. It got to the end of the street and turned at the intersection and continued onward.

We saw it. We saw it exactly once. I’ve never seen that video again. 30 years later I aks “Did I really see that, or am I misremembering.”

Document it. Remember it. Save copies.

Don’t let them gaslight you.

Mrs. Elizabeth Powel asked Dr Benjamin Franklin, “ so what have we got? A Republic, or a Monarchy?”

Dr Franklin answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

But today you find so many talking about “Democracy”. Democracy is two wolves and a lamp arguing about what to have for dinner. It is mob rule.

The republic our founding fathers gave to us is amazing. The people have done much to damage it, making the election of senators a popular vote being one of my least favorite changes.

The fact that they were able to put it all on four pages plus the bill of rights is in itself amazing. If you were to look at other constitutions you find hundreds if not thousands of pages, most of which translate into “Unless the government wants to.”

Our Constitution lays out our form of government and then sets acknowledges the some of the rights given to us by our creator. Rights the exist regardless of government.

The Atlantic is left leaning. They love to pontificate from the basis of false premises and to build their arguments.

The Constitutional Flaw That’s Killing American Democracy is one such article. Yes, our Constitution protects the Republic, not “American Democracy.”

So what does Jedediah Britton-Purdy think the flaw in the Constitution is? According to the author it is the fact that it is just so darn hard to change the Constitution.

The Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.

People on the left seem to crave power. How the get there never seems to bother them, as long as they get the power they want. When the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate they decided to kill the filibuster in regards to judicial appointees, because the Republicans were just nah sayers. All they ever did was say “NO”.

So the filibuster was killed. The Democrats loved it. Until that exact moment when the Republicans took control of the Senate. At which point they started screaming that the filibuster should be reinstated. It is always the way of the Left. They change the rules and tell us the new rules are good, up until the moment those same rules are used against them.

Some federal judge in California doesn’t like Trump’s executive order because it will harm some set of people or return to the status quo of pre Obama? Then it is just wonderful that the judge puts a nation wide injunction against that EO.

Some judge in Texas finds that Biden’s EO is unconstitutional and articulates the reason why and it is absolutely unacceptable that a single man in a black robe stop a Presidential Executive Order.

But the Constitution is too fundamentally antidemocratic a document to serve democratic purposes reliably. If we want to make it genuinely and lastingly democratic, we will first have to consider changing it in the most basic way: by amending Article V, which governs amendments and so serves as the gatekeeper for living generations …

For years SCOTUS turned out liberal opinions that were only loosely based on the Constitution but reflected “the will of the people.” The will of the people is written in our Constitution. The will of the people can change that document. Having a “living constitution” which is malabule to whatever the current leftist judge wants it to say is not good law, it is not good government.

The Constitution limits our Government. It is not there to limit us. It is not there to give the government power over us.

But the root of judicial oligarchy is that the Constitution is almost impossible to change. Article V requires that amendments be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through the state legislatures or in special conventions. (The convention route has happened only once, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.) The upshot is that it takes only 13 states to block a proposed amendment. And to send an amendment to the states in the first place, the proposed language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

Today many of the arguments by the left start with an ad hominem attack. Instead of looking at what the Constitution actually says they attack it because it was written by “cis white males”. Here’s the thing, just because you don’t like the person or the people, that doesn’t mean that what they created isn’t good or true.

We must continue to stand up to the lies our opponents tell. We must continue to call out the messages of hate the spue. We are freemen and will continue to be free for as long as we can keep it.

My family recently started watching The Big Bang Theory My wife hasn’t laughed this hard since she was watching reruns of Friends. My family has fun laughing at Sheldon while looking right at me as I have some of the same tendencies.

I stumbled upon an article in The Pudding that is a good insight to the sort of censorship that happens, often in a klutzy heavy handed way.

Just ask somebody that saw Salor Moon in Japan coming to American and hearing it is a children’s show. Censorship happens.

This article is from a person that was watching in China

I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter.

In 2014 streaming platforms in China received a notification from regulators:

imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public

The article has some neat graphics work in it to show what was cut and what wasn’t. It looks OK on mobile but better on a full screen.

Go read for an idea of what the Chinese government censors internally:
The Big [Censored] Theory

That peculiar institution of The South was a euphemism for slavery. Today people point to the south and blame the south for slavery.

Slavery existed before the first European explorers arrived in the New World. Slavery existed between the North American tribes long before they met the white man. Slavery and human sacrifice existed in south and central America before they met the white man.

The slave trade in africa started long before the Europeans got there and continues to this day.

To make money you want to buy when at a lower cost than you will sell. The price you can sell at is changes according to changes in demand. Sometimes you can move goods to where they are more valuable by moving through time. It gets more valuable over time.

It is much faster to increase the value of something by moving it from where it costs little to where it sells for more.

A simple two legged trade route has the lowest profitability. There is easier to compete on a two lagged route and in general the value does not increase as much as when you have a multi-legged route.

In the 17 hundreds, Boston was known for making rum. The base for making rum was molasses. Since there were many places in Boston making rum it was relatively cheap to purchase in Boston. On the other hand, the demand for molasses was very high. Trading rum to the sugar plantations of the caribbean wasn’t very profitable as the caribbean islands made rum themselves.

On the other hand, the pirates and slavers of the african gold coast were more than willing to trade the nearly worthless slaves for the much more valuable rum. So the ship owners of Boston sent their trading vessels to africa to trade rum for slaves.

Those slaves were transported to the caribbean and sold. The profit from the sale of the slaves was then used to purchase molasses to be brought back to Boston.

This generated huge profits for the ship owners of Boston.

At a time when England was actively suppressing the taking and transporting of slaves, including into the English colonies, the caribbean islands did a brisk trade in slaves.

And the traders of Boston shipped out rum and came back with molasses.

From the movie 1776 is a scene where the they are working to create the Declaration of Independence. One of the members from the southern states throws the triangle trade route in the face of John Adams in song.