Call your representative NOW!

The house is voting to allow the rule change to bring up the AWB and Repeal of PLCAA.

The house has voted to waive a rule that will allow the AWB to be voted on.
Strictly party lines. 10 did not vote, 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats. If all 6 Republicans voted no it still would pass.

I’m still learning this stuff. The previous vote was to approve a vote to happen on the rule. Confusing.

1330: House is in Recess. Because of the passage of H.Res. 1300 the house is able to debate and vote on different bills that normally would have to wait. They are currently debating H.R. 5118 which has nothing to do with Firearms.

My guess is that they will delay until later to take up 2814 and 1808

They are no debating H.Res 1302 which will allow them to debate H.R 1808.

They have voted to bring H.R. 1808 to the floor for debate.

H.R. 1808 is on the floor being debated.

At 1730 the house is done with debate on H.R. 1808. The gist of the Democrats is “for the children”. One Democrat go up and stated that since the AWB of 1994 survived constitutional challenges, this bill is constitutional.

The are currently voting to send the bill back to committee. Given that every vote so far has been pretty much party lines it won’t go back to committee. It will be voted on in the house.

If it is voted on in the house, it will pass.

Time to call your Senators.

It passed the house.
Democratic: 215 Yes, 5 No
Republican: 2 Yes, 208 No

Fitzpatrick (R-PA) voted Yes.
Jacobs (R-NY) voted Yes
Cuellar (D-TX), Golden(D-MA), Gonzalez, Vicent(D-TX), Kind(D-WI) and Schrader(D-OR) all voted No.

The worse parts were seeing my Representative voting for this bill and Nancy absolutely bubbling with joy when she announced that it has passed.

H.R. 1808 Assault Weapons Ban of 2021 and H.R. 2814 Repeal of PLCAA did not make it out of the rules committee. This means that any votes on the two bills will not come before the house gets back from its August vacation.

There is a boatload of politics involved with getting bills to a vote. That is by definition what this is all about.

In short, a bill is introduced to the House or the Senate. From there it is normally referred to a committee where it will be discussed and amended/modified. Once it is voted out of committee it could be sent back to a different committee where the same thing happens.

This goes on until the bill has made it out of all committees. At this point it needs to be scheduled for debate on the floor.

Under the house rules H.R. 1808 and H.R. 2814 were not eligible for debate. Because of this the bills were sent to the rules committee.

In the House rules can be modified by the Rules Committee at any time. This is a huge difference from the Senate where it is much harder to modify the rules.

The Rules committee can change the House Rules to allow particular bills to reach the floor for debate.

Assuming the Democrats had the votes in the House to pass the bill you would assume that the Rules Committee would make the change and it would go to the floor. If they don’t have the votes and the bills went to the floor and were voted down, the bills would be dead. New bills would have to be introduced and make their way through committee(s) to get a new vote.

By delaying the vote the Democrats give themselves more time to find more votes. This also allows them to spend the next few weeks campaigning with “We got an AWB out of committee! First time in decades! Look! Look! We’re doing something about gun violence.”

Keep up the pressure on your representatives.

Go to Find Your Representative enter your zip code and you will get the contact information for your Representative. Call them.

Updated to add links:

FPC Take Action Page: FPCAction.org – FPC Grassroots Army: Take Action!
GOA site: Gun Owners of America
Missouri Firearms Coalition: Take Action Today!

Many many years ago a judge in Wisconsin ruled that a rapist animal was not guilty because of the clothes that the victim was wearing. He blamed the victim.

“She had it coming!” is no excuse at all. Neither is “He had it coming.” True victims should never take the blame for what happens to them.

Unfortunately there are way to many people that would prefer to push responsibility for their safety onto others. Onto strangers, and I don’t mean law enforcement. They want the responsibility for their safety to rest on the animals and monsters that prowl our world.

The animal that was sexually abusing his step daughters got up in court and told the world that the victims wanted him to do it, that they came on to him. That he was the victim. He’s still the animal. They are not to blame for what was done to them.

The left screams “Teach your boys not to rape women!” As if that wasn’t already happening. My parents taught me that and they didn’t mention the word “rape.” It was “If she says ‘no’ or doesn’t want to then don’t start or stop now.”. She gets to say yes before anything happens. My sons know this rule. But it falls into the same rules for being good men. It isn’t something special.

Unfortunately there are a small number of animals that inflict a great deal of harm in our society. They are looking for victims, they are looking for the weak, they are looking to take without regard to the harm they will do. You can’t teach an animal to be good men. They are past that.

Depending on good men to teach good boys “Don’t rape” is never going to address the animals out there.

The only way to stop an animal that rapes or murders is to put it down or put it in a cage.

But victims are selected. To deny this is to become a potential victim.

When I was at University there were multiple rapists. There was one particular path from the center of campus to the dorms that went through a bit of woods. After the second victim in that area the university started telling all women to avoid that path after dark. The cops increased their patrolling of that area.

And young women wearing pretty clothes would still take that path after dark because it was shorter and faster. They didn’t catch that rapist. Not after the third women he raped. Not after the forth or fifth. The victim count was around eight, reported when the rapes stopped. Winter came, the rapes on that path stopped and didn’t start back in the spring. The cops didn’t catch him.

His victims were trusting in the goodness of good men and delivered themselves to an animal.

My wife knows the Chicago area. When coming back from Wisconsin my GPS (before Miss Google) routed me through the south side of Chicago. I didn’t know any better. Two white women and a white dude in an expensive SUV. It was a bad choice on my part. I should have listened to my wife to be.

I put us in a dangerous place and wasn’t aware of it. I was situationally aware but I should have made the strategic choice to avoid the area instead of being prepared to respond in a tactical way.

If you don’t want to be a victim, don’t act like prey.

Years ago my boss and I were making a run down through DC to his friends business to pick up a cash loan. My boss was not a situationally aware sort of dude. We ran out of gas and barely made it to the off ramp. The way towards the center of town was blocked. We went the other way.

Boss is dressed in loud Hawaiian shirt. I’m being as gray as possible but it is hard with him standing beside me. He is oblivious. I have my head on a swivel. We’re looking for a gas station. We walk past a massive building surrounded with a tall brick fence. With glass embedded on the top. It was a mental hospital.

And all the time he’s jingling his coins in his pocket. He’s practically screaming “Rob us! Rob us!”

We get to a gas station, there are a bunch of teens hanging out there. The attendant is behind bullet proof glass. We buy a gallon of gas from the teens who provide a gallon jug. We get a taxi back to the foot of the off ramp and get the van gassed up. But we don’t have enough gas to get anywhere.

And my boss has gone from scared and nervous to the king of the castle. He decides to go back to the same gas station to get gas. We get there and one of the teens runs up and offers to pump the gas. My boss reaches into his shirt pocket and hads the kid a $100 bill. The kid gives it to the attendant and the kid then pumps the gas. When the tank is full, back when gas cost a $1.50/gal, my boss asks for his change. When he doesn’t get it he wants to get out of the van and make a scene.

My boss was in the process of becoming a victim. He had just flashed real dollars, peeling a $100 off a roll of bills. And he wanted to get out of the van to get his change.

I told him. “Don’t you dare. You aren’t get out of the van. Just drive away and consider this a cheap leason.”

It took me more than an hour to explain to him all of the bad things that were going on as we walked to the station. Of what those teens were doing hanging there. He was oblivious to the danger we were in.

Victims become victims by putting themselves in harms way more often than not.

They are not aware of the situation they put themselves in. They are not aware of the signals they give off. They aren’t aware of the prizes they advertise.

Victim Selection

The next time you are out and about and have the mental cycles to spare, look around you and try and think like a predator. Look for the victim. You will find them. It isn’t hard.

Victim selection starts with location. You are looking for somebody that is in an isolated place or where they can be taken into an isolated place.

You are looking for a place where the crime can be done and not interrupted.

Once you’ve found the location you are looking for your victim. You are looking for somebody that looks like prey. Their head is down, not paying attention. They are drawn in on themselves. Or they are so invested in what’s on their phone they have no situational awareness.

You are looking for a victim that has what you want. That could be a big wallet or it could be a pretty woman or a child.

Mostly you are looking for a victim that isn’t going to know you are upon them until it is to late and who is unlikely to respond in any meaningful way.

Don’t Be Prey

If you are a woman, keep your head up and out of your phone if you are walking. Know what is happening around you. Avoid dangerous places and dangerous groups. It is better to be jeered at for crossing the road than to try and walk through a gang of strangers.

Make your moves early. Don’t look at your feet. Don’t just look a few yards in front of you. Know what is happening in the next 100 yards. Change your path if you need to before you are near. Don’t make it look like you just noticed and are moving in fear. Move with a purpose and make your choices early.

Make a plan and keep updating it. If they cross the street I’m going to go into that store. Ok, I’m coming up on that store and they haven’t crossed the street, if they cross I’ll go into that store just up there.

Keep a plan running at all times. Make your decisions before the trigger happens. Don’t be surprised. You’ve already made the decision before it happened so you don’t have to decide now. ACT on your plan.

Don’t advertise your valuables. As a women you are valuable to animals in three ways. The goods, the valuables you have with you. They fun/pleasure of rape. The value of you as a sex slave.

Don’t advertise your valuables! If you are going the the symphony and are dressed up, don’t park a half mile away in the skeeze side street and start walking with your diamond bracelet and pearls glinting in the street light in your $300 dollar shoes. Yes you are safe to advertise in the safety of the symphony, but that safety evaporates if you move into a bad location.

If you are going partying and are going out in your pretty black dress, go for it! Don’t sneak out into the back alley for a smoke where it is dark and isolated. And certainly don’t do it if you are under the influence of anything.

Don’t advertise where you are going to be. If somebody is looking for you, don’t tell them where you are or where you are going to be. Remember that sharing something with your 1000 closes friends on FB is the same as telling all your enemies as well.

There is a difference between telling your FB friends “We’re going to go partying when my BFF gets some time off!” and “BFF and I are in the Uber on the way to Club Rohypnol! See you all there!”

Dudes, this might be hard to hear but you can be victims too. We all can. Everything I said above applies to us to. You shouldn’t be flashing your roll of hundreds. Stay out of skeeze locations. Be prepared to pay for safer parking. Keep your head on a swivel. Have a plan that is being updated constantly. Make your choices before you have to make a decision.

Be safe!

What would you add as advise to people that insist on being prey?

Since Joe Biden took office we have seen inflation soar. We watched as gas prices climbed up over $5/gal for most of the country. We’ve watched food disappearing from the shelves of our local grocery stories and the prices going up and up.

The FED continues to print money and congress, both sides, continues to spend money that the government doesn’t have. At every turn we see that the economy is flagging. That bad things are happening.

The energy sector is being attacked at a social level and at the federal level. The President has released millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Worse, the petroleum that he is releasing is of the type that is most needed in time of war. If he continues at the current pace through the end of October we will have emptied almost all of the “sour” reserves.

The economy is contracting. We measure this via the GDP.

We are heading towards a recession and maybe even a depression. Everything the current administration is doing and is likely to do is going to make it worse.

On Thursday they are going to release the second quarter GDP numbers. Those numbers will tell us if we are in an official recession. All signs point to the GDP contracting for the second straight quarter which indicates a recession.

Unless you are a Democrat. Then you lie.

“Even though you can see the fires burning in the background, this has been a mostly peaceful protest.”

“The price of your 4th of July barbecue is down $0.16, inflation isn’t really happening.”

This list could go on and on and on.

For years the definition of a recession, in the US, has been two quarters of GDP contraction. That is until this week. This week the Biden administration came out and said “GDP contraction isn’t the official definition and there are other indicators. We don’t think there is a recession.”

Having made this statement, the Democratic party media arm immediately jumped to push the new narrative.

NYT — Recession: What Does It Mean?
CNBC — Here’s how to know if we’re in a recession, and it’s not what you think.
AP — US economy sendign mixed signals: Here’s what it all means

In the fun column is the story of a bunch of Karens going NIMBY over a new gun store in Rockland County, NY.

Seems that somebody leased the old Radio Shack that had closed and turned it into a gun store. “Chew’s Guns & Ammo” moved into the space and it is the epitome of redneck gun store.

Except it isn’t.

It is a set for FBI: Most Wanted

I’ve seen pawn shops that look like this, never a gun store.

What sort of look does your local gun store have? Does it look like a redneck adult entertainment store or is it more like a Cabela’s?

Hudson Valley POST: Surprising Reason For ‘New Gun Store’ in Hudson Valley, New York

This phrase is often attributed to Mark Twain though that is disputed.

Statistics is a very powerful science/math. It allows you to see things that are not always obvious at a glance. It is also sort of complicated. Because I’m no longer a math nerd, having become a computer nerd this is my goto book whenever I have to actually do statistics. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

My favorite story from the book, that I repeat often, is the story of a small post graduate business school. As part of their recruiting drive they reported that the average salary for somebody graduating with an MBA from their school was well above $150k.

This sounded wonderful. What they failed to mention was that they got this mean by adding up the first year salaries of all their graduates and dividing by the number of graduates, including the one graduate that went into the NBA with a multi million dollar first year salary. With the small size of the graduating class that salary drove the mean(average) way higher than the median.

The school didn’t tell a lie, they didn’t tell a damn lie, they just used statistics to lie for them.

Almost all measurements of natural phenomena fall into what is called “The Bell Curve”. The bell curve is defined as by the mean (sum of the samples divided by the number of samples) and standard deviation. The larger the standard deviation the wider the bell, the smaller the standard deviation the narrower the bell is. Small SD have steep sides.
(more…)

Making good music is hard. Not little hard, BIG hard.

My daughter loves to sing. She’s good at it. I started playing with recording her and went down the rabbit hole. Then I asked an actual audio engineer a “simple” question and got back a complicated and useful answer.

If you start with the simplest assumption, the performer is “good” everything after that point is in the realm of the audio engineer. What mic do you use? different mics have different responses (how they “hear” sound). They have different drop off points. I don’t understand it but you can get a mic that records everything the singer does but doesn’t hear other things.

Mics can get darn expensive and each one does a different job with different characteristics.

On top of that, you need to decide how you are micing the performance. Does each instrument and performer get a mic or do you mic the room or something in between. I remember my first Telarc recording. They choose to use just two microphones. One for left, one for right and they placed those mics in the concert hall at the “sweet spot”.

Amazing recording. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that I could hear the keys of the woodwinds.

Another huge requirement is room conditioning. There is a story that the acoustics at Carnegie hall were so incredible that any member of the audience could hear a whisper from anywhere on stage. During a refurbishment of the hall they accidently destroyed those acoustics and had to bring in audio engineers to fix what they had broken.

There are huge wooden disks hanging over the audience in the Baltimore Symphony hall, and big wooden cabinets with horns at the back of the stage. They are there to fix the acustics.

A recording study will normally condition the room in order to kill echos and outside sound. This makes for a very dead sounding recording. Add to that a mic that is very directional and you get a near perfect recording of a the performer that nobody really wants to listen to.

Again the audio engineer comes to our rescue. They add back the sound of the room. One of the biggest challenges is to make the reverb tell you about the room without sounding “fake”. The amature can crank the knob and it sounds like the recording was done in an echo chamber but it doesn’t sound “good”.

Now imagine trying to recreate a specific space. A particular concert hall or one of the famous cathedrals Europe? You have to do it right.

This is an example of audio engineering at its finest. The audio engineer recorded the performances in a studio, a dry signal. He then worked for endless hours to get the right set of reverbs to recreate the sound of a cathedral. An unmitigated success.

Give it a listen and then applaud the audio engineer, our own Miguel.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=BQeQZgu9WeM&feature=share

The WHO has declared Monkeypox to be a health emergency. According to them Monkeypox is going to become the next pandemic and kill you all!

NPR has helpfully put together an article explaining how to protect yourself from catching Monkeypox. It is very informative in that it strongly suggests that YOU, that’s right YOU, can catch it just by touching a surface that is contaminated!

The better answer is “Don’t have sex with strangers that have the pox.”

The virus also spreads through physical contact, including touching a lesion, as well as the exchange of some bodily fluids like saliva. An individual could become infected by touching items and surfaces shared with someone exhibiting symptoms.

As the virus can spread through skin-to-skin contact, the CDC advises people to exercise caution in situations where one can’t maintain some sense of personal space and bumping into others is impractical. In places where clothing is minimal and you could experience that contact, such as crowded raves and clubs, the risk goes up.

Potentially contaminated items like bedding, clothes and towels should be contained until you have time to do your laundry, the CDC recommends. Be sure to frequently wash your hands with soap and water as you’re cleaning and dispose of all cleaning materials when you’re done.
—Monkeypox explained: How to protect yourself and what to watch out for

In the entire article they seem to leave out a couple of very important pieces of information:

1. The survival rate in first world countries is currently 100%
2. There have been four deaths, all in Africa
3. The most common transmission vector is anal sex.
4. The gay community is currently the most highly effected group

As more than one politically incorrect person has pointed out, there is a perception that gay culture is very promiscuous and that there are many that are refusing to stop having sex while they are still contagious.

It might make its way into the general population but right now it is very contained.

For an organization that had no issues in telling the entire world to lock down for 2 weeks to slow the spread, they don’t seem to be at all interested in telling gay men “Keep it in your pants while you are contagious.”

Is there something about the gay culture that doesn’t care about the health ramifications? Why is it that WHO refuses to identify the primary transmission vector?