Joe climbed into a B-17 flying fortress. He moved to the bombardiers position and went through his part of preflight.

The signal is given and the airplane starts to taxi. Soon it is in position for roll out and take off. Joe tenses as he starts another flight over enemy territory.

His air craft joins up with others and soon the sky is filled with 100s of aircraft. Soon they are over the channel and shortly thereafter they pass over the coast heading towards Germany. Huge contrails tell the enemy exactly where they are. 88mm AA open up and soon have the altitude. Bombers are flying into flack and flack is hitting different bombers.

Planes are exploding or damaged to the point they can no longer fly.

JOe clutches his hands tightly, wishing he could wipe the sweat from his palms. His gear stops him. It is cold at altitude and yet he sweats and wishes he was as brave as the other men in the plane with him

The flack comes closer, but they push on. They have over an hour to go before they reach the target yet the Germans are throwing everything at them. He prays that they will make it home again.

There is a sound of a huge explosion and the plane seems to stop for a second in midair. Joe feels something hit him on the back and turns to see what is left of his friend sitting in the navigators position, his chest missing, splattered over Joe and the cabin.

The left engine is out. The co-pilot orders everybody to bail out. Joe can’t get to his exit without pushing his friends body out first. He watches it tumble downwards, he counts chutes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… His friend makes eight and he is about to go up when he sees a body falling, no chute. That’s 9. Joe forces himself out of the dying aircraft.

The wind whips past, tearing at him. He opens his chute and floats towards the ground. It is quiet while above him the ugly black explosions continues. More of his friends dying. More aircraft falling from the sky.

The ground rushes up to meet him and he lands. There is a terrible pain as he hits. His right hip is shattered. He passes out.

He wakes as he is carried into the hospital. Not a POW camp or a POW hospital. The faces looking down at him speak in German.

Joe is one of the lucky ones. He lives. A German found him and instead of turning him in to the army, he got Joe to the hospital. WHere the POW camp would have cut his leg off and Joe would have likely died, the doctors operate and save the leg. They have to fuse the hip.

At the end of the war, Joe is returned to America. He becomes a high school teacher and coach. He gets into local politics and is elected to mayor. He writes a book.

He interviewed ever survivor that he could find. His book is full of the heroes of that day. And he names them. All of them did so much more than Joe.

Joe was a hero. He was my great uncle. He never considered himself a hero. Heroes were what those other people did. He spoke to me only once of that day. And when his tears filled his eyes his sister in law stopped him. My mother stopped me for asking and listening.

Joe, the hero, never finished his own story. Another veteran that knew that the horrors of war were not for the gentle folk that stayed behind.

I grieved for my uncle Joe that day. I grieve for him today as I write this.

This song is for him.

The gist of NYSR&B v. Bruen was that the requirement to show good cause in order to get a CCW permit was unconstitutional.

Of course this lead to weeping and rending of clothing as the left bemoans the streets of NY, MA, NJ, MD, HI, and CA are now going to run red with blood as minor disagreements turn into gun battles.

This never happens. This is the same predictions that we heard in Florida when they became a “Shall Issue” state. It is the same story of impending woe that we heard when any state went “Shall Issue” or even “May Issue” from “No Issue” and again when states went to constitutional carry.

Everytime we get more of our gun rights back, the left screams that the children are going to die and the streets will run red with blood. They wait for the lunatic to kill and then pounce. We watch as the work through dozens of “mass shootings” and “random gun violence” until they get one that sticks.

The left firmly believes that any law or decision that goes their way is set in stone from that point forward and that any law or decision they disapprove of can be fought. “We are going to keep holding votes on the proposal until it passes!” followed by “It is the law! You can’t disagree with it!”

Since they lost the “good cause” provisions of their may issue scheme they are now moving forward with a requirement of “good moral character”. Another euphemism for “may issue.” Who judges good moral character? The government.

Examples given include being arrested. This means that if there is a domestic dispute and the cops arrest both parties or arrest the wrong person and then release that person with out charges, OR if the person goes to court where they are found not guilty, they are still prohibited from getting government permission to exercise their rights.

Another term that is being used is “suitability”. Which means whatever the grantor wants it to mean. I expect we’ll see dozens of cases over the next few years where people apply and are denied based on moral or suitability grounds.

As I said to my Senators “Why do you have ‘work around’ the second amendment? Why can’t you just follow what it says?”

.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion striking down New York’s “proper cause” requirement to get public carry licenses, has claimed that “the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense.” This claim is false. It represents the greatest hoax yet perpetrated upon the American people.
— Allan Lichtman, NY Daily News: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment hoax

Allan wants you to know that even though only six states require proper cause to get a permit to carry or own, in some cases, that this covers a quarter of the US population. He further reports that there is a lower firearm death rate in these six states. As normal, he doesn’t bother to report any other violent crime statistics. He also carefully words it as “firearm deaths” which includes all homicides, justified or not, suicides and accidents. Since most firearm deaths are from suicide the CCW argument doesn’t really have any bearing.

He then goes on to argue that the second amendment is a collective right. He does it via an appeal to authority, quoting a NRA memo from 1955 that said that the 2a was a collective right. This is similar to the arguments about Ronald Reagan signed gun control bills while he was governor of California, leaving out that he later became much more pro-gun rights.

Allan continues with the theory that because the reason for the right to keep arms was given, it only existed for members of the militia. He fails to mention all the state laws that said that there was an organized militia as well as an unorganized militia consisting of all men.

Then he starts into the same old game. The founders were bad men creating bad laws because they didn’t include blacks, women, indians, and all the rest. Added to this is the use of negatives to prove a positive. Allan claims that nobody ever spoke of an individual right, thus the right must be assigned to the militia. As normal he fails to quote “the right of the people”. Somehow the people that agonized over every period and comma felt that it would be understood that “the right of the people” actually meant “the right of members of the militia”

Feel free to read his article. Know your enemy.

Bruen decided that the constitution means what it says and that there is a federal law that guarantees our right to self defense.

Dobbs decided that the constitution means what it says and there is nothing in it that grants a federal “right” to an abortion.

This lead to the humorous situation of people screaming that the states should be able to and at the same time screaming that the states shouldn’t be able to. Often times in the same breath.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned there were a number of trigger laws that went into effect. Arizona had such a law and on Friday it went into efect.

I don’t know what limits the AZ ban puts on abortion, I’m not about to believe anything I read in the media.

Utah’s trigger law, banning abortions in the state, went into effect Friday night after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its reversal of Roe v. Wade, the nearly 50-year-old decision that protected a woman’s right to an abortion. The suit asks the court to declare the state’s abortion ban invalid, alleging that it violates rights given to Utahns in the state’s constitution.
— The Salt Lake Tribune: Planned Parenthood of Utah files suit, asking court to declare state’s abortion ban unconstitutional

This is the way it is suppose to be done. On a state by state basis. I know that NY, MA, CA and a bunch of other liberal states will put abortion till the end of the 4th (not typo) trimester in place. Other places will put bans in place starting at conception. That is the wonder of our Republic. We have the ability to test different ideas politic in small before committing to them in large.

The pro-life battle now moves to the state and local levels. I expect it will be an uphill battle in most places. There will be battles.

Those battles are now happening where it should happen. At the state level.

I will point out that PP immediately went looking for more judges to make a ruling in their favor, having lost the battle with the public. This is still the right way to do it.

Friday was a long drive with my lady. We discussed Dobbs and she made the statement “I’m worried because this will affect the class of poor black women”. I’m in total disagreement.

Some states will or have banned abortion. The response from the death clinics will be to send buses or vans into those states with bans and offer free transportation to the nearest death clinic in the next state over.

We see this with states with no sales tax. You find stores popping up right across the border on well traveled roads. Not because there is a driving need within the sales tax free state, but to service all the out of staters that can do math and balance a 6% sales tax against a 30 mile round trip drive.

Yes, it might be that a woman with murder in her heart will have to wait for a bit for the van to arrive and then she might have to wait a couple of hours to get to the clinic before she finally is able to exercise her will. And then she’ll have the same long ride back to her home state.

The people this will actually affect is poor rural women that still have to make that long trip to the death clinic but can’t afford the trip into the city to catch that bus.

To be absolutely clear, for the longest time I was pro-choice and anti-abortion. I had lived in the cesspool of “pro-choice” for so long I couldn’t step out of it. What this meant to me is that at a personal level I would do everything in my power to convince a woman to carry to term but I felt that in the end, it was her choice.

I changed my opinion when my ex-Wife got a code while we were out and I drove her to the code. It was a woman with excessive vaginal bleeding. My ex-wife and her crew got the women onto the gurney and she was transported to the hospital where they hoped to save her. My ex-wife reported it as “she’s a frequent flyer. She uses the ambulance as a taxi. We transported her yesterday for her 5th abortion. This is just complications.”

On that day I change my opinion. Turns out that there was a fair number of women that were using abortion as birth control. Easier than using real birth control because it was free.

On Friday the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) asked Joe to declare a national emergency. They want him to use his power to “protect access to abortion services”

They also said the court’s decision will disproportionately affect Black women living in the South at a time when the maternal health crisis is already severely affecting the Black community. The Biden administration released a plan to tackle the maternal health care crisis Friday, promising to focus on building equity within the system.
— The Hill: Congressional Black Caucus calls for national emergency after SCOTUS decision

So there you have it, the law is racist and all pro-lifers that support the law are racist.

Third and most important, the government should nationalize Big Oil. That would allow the government to manage the industry’s drawdown, a process the private sector is ignoring. A coalition of climate-action groups showed the world’s 60 largest banks financed nearly $4 trillion in fossil energy projects over the last five years, investments that could be stranded and lead to more requested taxpayer bailouts when the carbon bubble pops.
— The Hill: Why we must nationalize Big Oil

The author of this opinion piece doesn’t even understand the words he uses. He calls “Big Oil” a monopoly. For some reason, companies that compete with each other for profits seem to set prices that are close to one another. According to my understanding of economics this price reflects the costs of producing the product including all labor, taxes, transportation, facilities and raw goods PLUS the profit.

In most cases, the costs of goods is pretty close from company to company. Sometimes one company is able to get their raw goods a little cheaper or their labor costs are lower. Over all it balances.

Once that is done, the company looks at how to maximize their profits. The greed part of capitalism. Profit is not calculated on an item by item bases but as the value of number of items sold multiplied by the amount of profit.

A widget costs $1.00 to manufacture. As long as the price of the widget is greater than $1.00 there is profit. If the company expects to sell 1000 widgets and they want a profit of $1000 then they will set the price of the widget at $2.00. If they are able to sell 1000 widgets then great. They made their profit.

But what if people aren’t willing to pay $2 for the widget and they can only sell 100. Then the company only makes $100 in profit.

This is the balancing act. Trying to find the price for a good that will sell the most goods with the most profit per item.

As soon as there is profit in widgets, people will create competition. The competition wants people to by from them instead. They have only a few ways of accomplishing this. They can get people to believe that their widget is better so that the people believe they get more value for their dollars or they lower the price at the same quality level.

As an example, cheap imported gear cutter set from China, $159 from Amazon. Same 8 cutters from McMaster-Carr: $712. I know the the McMaster-Carr gear cutters are better quality than the ones from China. The ones from China will work for what I need.

When the price of goods goes up so much that the people start complaining, there is always a group of people that will promise to make prices better (lower) if they can take control. The idea is that a single group of people overseeing an industry will balance not just the profits of the company but also the social profit of the company.

In this case these author believe that all oil companies will be gone in 30 years. If they are going to be gone in 30 years nobody should invest in them today because they are going to be ripped off. If the companies continue to produce goods that people want and in a way that people want them to do it, that is cheating and the companies should be punished.

Thomas Sowell talks about price signals in terms of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a horrible time with their trains. A large part of that was that they forced their rolling stock to carry more than it was rated for. This caused the cars to wearout faster and fail. Engineers and the experts that explained this were punished.

Thomas looked a bit deeper into what was going on and found that in the Soviet Union, different government bureaus created verticals. Thus a bureau responsible for making a tractor might have mines to get coal, iron and other metals. It might have a factory that made plastic parts and so forth. This was because nobody trusted anybody in the Soviet Union to delver what was promised on time and at the quality needed.

This lead to the interesting situation of trains carrying coal and wood from the west all the way to the east where they were unloaded at factories of one bureau and then loading up with wood and coal at the mines of another bureau to transport them back across the same rails with the same goods.

Socialism fails. It fails every time. It is impossible for any small group of people to know everything that the population knows. There is no way for a government bureaucrat to know that the soil just proved to loose and that the road work is going to need a few tons of sand and stone to stabilize it by next Wed.

Socialism, just say no.

In order to processes credit cards a business needs a merchant account. Without a merchant account you can’t take credit card payments. When you provide your credit card to a website or you swipe your card the information on the purchase is sent to a gateway which then transfers money from your credit card to the businesses merchant account.

A few days later the money is transferred from the merchant account to the businesses bank accounts.

There are companies that use their merchant account to process payments on a small company or individuals behave. For example, Stripe or PayPal.

When you apply for a merchant account you are filling out a credit application. You have to provide a boat load of information and in the end, if the company or owner of the company has good enough credit, the merchant account is granted.

One of the things about that merchant account is that it has a “merchant category code”. If the merchant account say that you are a fast food restaurant and your average payment is less than $100 and a payment comes through for $3000 dollars, alarms go off and the banks investigate.

There is a lot of statistics gathered about your business as well as other businesses with the same merchant account.

This is also used to protect you. If your credit card is almost always used with small purchase that a homeowner or renter might make and suddenly there is a $700 charge for wine, your credit card company might flag the purchase and request confirmation from you before proceeding with the sale.

This happened for me the other day when I was buying off shore servers. I had to contact my bank to allow the purchase to go through as I don’t normally buy things in Norway.

A New York based bank, Amalgamated Bank, is attempting to get a special merchant code for merchant accounts that sell firearms and ammunition.

They want to be able to track how much a person spends on guns and ammo so they can raise an alarm if they see “to much” spent on aguns and ammo.

Fortunately this has been stopped, so far. The major banks said “hell no” and CBS News is reporting that Amalgamated Bank is very upset that it wasn’t the government but people working for other banks that stopped the new codes. They believe it was rogue employees doing it, not the actual big banks.

These people have no idea about how people make gun purchases. I’ve turned into a collector. When I decided that losing brass cost to much I bought a modern revolver. I have a few SAA and blackpower revolvers. I thought about it and choose .357 as my caliber for this revolver.

So that day a modern .357, a SAA reproduction in .357, a lever action in .357 and a Winchester ’94 in 30-30 followed me home.

Yeah, I sort of like Winchester ’94s. I’ve found I really like to have a rifle/pistol combination and the SAA revolvers don’t scare people. I carried a SAA in .45 Colt as part of a halloween costume once. Nobody thought anything about it. The people around me would have had a fit if they saw me with a plastic fantastic on my hip.

That single purchase would have raised alarm bells back at Amalgamated Bank. I’m betting even a single firearm purchase would have upset them.

The credit card industry has blocked a novel effort to track suspect firearm and ammunition purchases, depriving law enforcement of a potential tool to identify and stop gun crime.

Documents obtained by CBS News show employees from domestic and international credit card companies, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express, pushed back on an application to create a merchant category code for firearm and ammunition sellers.
— CBS News:This bank wants to track suspect credit card sales of guns and ammo. Why can’t it?

Over the last few days there has been a bunch of hyperventing on the left. Blood is going to run in the streets because law abiding people will be allowed to exercise their rights. There are going to be guns where the were not allowed before.

Most of the noise is people that don’t know any better. I’ve had a coworker worry about guns in the office. Since we have clients in our office all the time I said “Likely, we have clients in the office.” She was terrified.

How much more terrified would she have been if she’d known I was carrying at that very moment? Or that my briefcase held a full blowout kit, extra mags and a second 1911?

We’ve had teachers cry to the school board when constitutional carry happened in our state because it meant that parents might have a gun at parent teacher meetings. The school board shut them down because the law exists. What those teachers didn’t understand was that constitutional carry didn’t let parents carry in the schools. That was the “shall issue” CCW. You still need a CCW to legally carry on school property.

A social group I belong to has a number of very outspoken Karens. When they get going on politics they are told “This isn’t a place for politics.” Nevertheless I’ve had to listen to more than one rant about how dangerous it is that people in my state can carry without a permit. How scared they are when they are out in public. I just kept my mouth shut because I was carrying a 1911 IWB strong side. I’d reduced to just one spare mag and had it in my pocket instead of on my belt.

They were afraid and wanted a law.

Today’s article is brought to you by the Karens of Wilmington, NC. They were so frightened when a bunch of Proud Boys came into the library where there was a “pride story time event” going on.

Interestingly, they are described as “far-right extremists”. All the mothers were very very scared and uncomfortable by their presence.

The Karens described that the Proud Boys had angry expressions on their faces which made them feel uncomfortable. They said the group was “loud and disruptive”

More importantly the sheriff’s office issued a statement “There was no disturbance.”

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Everybody has a right to protest. Everybody had a right to be in that library. Those Proud Boys were a heck of a lot more respectful than the guests of Democrats in the US Capitol or the “protesters” that have stormed state capitols.

The phrase I grew up with was “I disagree with you but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I still believe that. The difference is that I’m now defending the rights of conservatives to say what they want while watching so many in power trying to shut down our voices.

“I get it’s a public space, so if people are holding signs outside and they are being peaceful, even if I don’t agree with the things that they are saying, I don’t feel necessarily like my life is in danger. But when a group of known violent people, you know, at that point when those people show up and they’re coming into the library and trying to disrupt the story time. That’s when I felt unsafe and that’s where I felt it was not held appropriately,” Jones said. “And they’re doing that on purpose for sure to intimidate people.”
— WECT Wilmington, NC ‘I felt very unsafe’: Parents speak out after Proud Boys show up at children’s library event

This includes a video but there is no video of any bad behavior on the part of the Proud Boys

On July 22nd, 2011 a horrible mass murder took place. It started with a car bombing in Oslo as a distraction. The murder then traveled to the island of Utøya where he shot and killed 69 people. The blast killed 8 people and dozens were injured.

This took place in a country with very strict gun control laws. He used a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock pistol in his murders.

But mass shootings only happen in these United States.

On Jun 25, 2022 a murdering asshole killed two people and injured 21 more when he started shooting in a bar. He was a Muslim who was well known to law enforcement.

Keep your head on a swivel. Wherever you go, make sure you know all of your egresses. Be prepared to defend yourself.

OSLO, June 25 (Reuters) – Terrified revellers at a gay bar in Oslo hid in a basement and desperately called loved ones as a gunman went on the rampage, killing two people and injuring 21 on the day the city was due to celebrate its annual Pride parade.
— Reuters: Horror on Oslo Pride day as gunman goes on deadly rampage at gay bar

As John over at No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money points out, as of the start of 2023 the “No Issue” and “May Issue” count will have gone to zero.

Amazing win.