The other day there was a blog posting regarding a requirement in a budget bill that all new cars manufactured after some date have “remote engine immobilisers.” Most new cars already have engine immobilisers. The idea being that even if you put the key in the ignition and turn it, nothing will happen.

It requires that your key talk to the car and tell it that you are indeed authorized to use the car. It means that you can give somebody a “regular” key and they can use it to physically unlock your car but even if that key were to fit they can’t start the car.

This stops thieves from just forcing the lock or otherwise bypassing the ignition switch. There are stories of older car locks being bypassed by the thief jamming a big screwdriver into the keyhole and then forcing the cylinder to rotate. Just shearing all the pins that keep that cylinder from rotating.

Remote engine immobilization takes this to a new level. With this you can turn off the engine remotely. A kill switch.

Some OnStar vehicles have this. The police can call OnStar and have them disable a stolen vehicle at will. A very powerful way of catching car thieves. There are aftermarket versions of this as well.

Unfortunately it comes with a bit of extra. Who is authorized to kill your car? Will all police cars come with devices so they can kill the engine of any car they want? Will it become standard operating procedure for a cop to kill the engine of any car he stops?

Will Mayor Pete be able to kill any car that is drives to much in a given period of time?

Will M.A.D.D. get a law passed that immobilises your engine anytime you stop at a place that serves alcohol? And then you are required to blow to get your car to start again?

Will your voter registration be linked to your car. If there is “right wing extremest” in the area do all cars belonging to the wrong sorts of people get disabled?

In the Dresden Files novels, the main character drives a VW Bug. He drives it because as a wizard the more technically advanced something is, they more likely it is to break when he is near. The Bug has no electronics. It is dirt simple.

There might be a new call for “dumb” cars.

Kia and Hyundai drivers might want to take extra precautions to deter car thieves

There is a skill that everybody that carries and even those that don’t need to acquire.

Situational Awareness

My wife doesn’t have it at all. She has no ability to anticipate, to notice, to plan for what will happen.

On the other side there are the people that look at every trip into the city as a threat to their lives (I’m looking in a mirror) and plan for any possible event.

Situational awareness is more than pre planning. It is the ability to notice things and put together a gestalt that tells you “Here Be Dragons”.

Did you notice that little man sitting with his back to the wall sipping a drink? Did you notice that guy that is obviously right handed but never carries anything in his right hand? Did you notice that couple getting noisy in the back corner?

How about the two dudes that might not be friends with stiff bodies?

Did you notice the car that shouldn’t be on the street? Did you notice the van with the wrong public utilities symbol on it? Did you notice that the girl you are dancing with is to hot to be single?

Is she crazy? Is she trouble on two legs?

Or is she taken?

There is the saying that shows up over and over again “Not In My Back Yard”. This is the call of everybody that has to deal with something they don’t like showing up in their neighborhood. Be it a new gun store or a new Whole Foods store, somebody doesn’t want it there.

One of the greatest contribution to clean energy has been pipelines. The ability to move vast amounts of liquid long distances safely is wonderful. And ever pipeline built in my lifetime has had some large group of people screaming NIMBY!!!

The first time I heard and understood was with the Alaska Pipeline. Environmentalists were very concerned over the pipeline. It was going to destroy the tundra. It was going to damage the pristine Alaskan great outdoors. It was going to cause massive kills of the migratory herd animals.

It was Bad with a capital B!

The first thing that we found when we started using it is that the animals love it. There has been no negative outcomes from the pipeline amongst the herd animals nor in the hunters. They put in some underpasses along the way and the animals found and use them. Easy.

There was a huge concern about “what if there is a leak?” Well the pipeline is inspected constantly. If there are any signs of leakage it is dealt with as soon as it is spotted. The control systems can tell when the pipe starts to leak, even before any signs are noticed.

And here is the big one, IF there is a leak, it will be contained. We know where the pipeline is and it was built to contain spills. And if there is a spill, it is still much more likely to be small in comparison to other spills.

If you want to think about scary spills, just take a look at a freight train pulling 100+ tanker cars.

Each one of those tankers can hold up 31,000 gallons, or more. Derailments are much more common than pipeline leaks. Tankers hauled by trucks contain less but are even more likely to be in accidents.

The people yelling NIMBY don’t care. They run by emotion. One of my friends was talking about how horrible it was that the new county jail was built where it was. It was an eyesore. It was bringing down the value of homes around the jail.

Talking to her a few years later she was telling me how they couldn’t even tell the jail was there. It took about 5 years for the trees and shrubs to grow in. You can no longer see the jail from the road and you can only tell it is there if you know to look for the sign out by the road.

Some locals were protesting a pipeline carrying natural gas that could have come through our town. THey were very upset. Lots and lots of NIMBYs yelling. I was asked what I would do if that pipeline came through our yard? If it comes through our yard I don’t care. I’ll get paid for the damage done to the yard. It will grow back and I’ll get some small amount of income for a while. Not a big deal.

If it happened to come through my house I would be surprised. The people that build these things don’t want to have to pay thousands of dollars for a house they are going to destroy when they can just go past a few yards away.

Part of the problem NIMBYs have is that they have seen local government not care. If the plans call for that sewer line to go right through your new screened in three season porch they just do it. And you don’t get your money’s worth and what the pay for it. They normally aren’t willing to move that sewer line 5 foot that away to avoid your porch. And they will bluntly tell you that they had an easement that allows them to do so.

There is another type of NIMBY though. These are the people that are perfectly willing to tell you that you must accept “IT” in your backyard and showing how righteous they are because they would be perfectly willing to accept “IT” in their back yard. You are a horrible person for not wanting “IT” in your town. If you only had the good hearts they have you would just do it.

They can say these things because they never have to even think of “IT” showing up in their backyard. You saw this in the 70’s when the people that lived in DC set the federal speed limit at 55MPH. It really doesn’t make all that much difference in rush hour traffic if the speed limit is 55 or 75, it is still going to take them about the same amount of time to get to and from work.

They don’t care that when somebody is driving through the bad lands of the southwest that 20 MPH difference is the difference between a day trip and an overnight.

When the good people along our southern border complain about the hordes of illegal aliens coming across they are told they are horrible people. Ranchers talk about having to repair fences constantly, because the illegals are cutting them on a near nightly basis. They tell of having anything that isn’t nailed down stolen.

They only thing they hear from DC is “RACIST!!!” How hateful you must be to not be opening your homes to these tired and down trodden.

The Governors of Florida and Texas started sending illegals to sanctuary cities on the east coast and midwest. And the cries of NIMBY reached to the heavens.

For months people had been tracking government flights that were taking illegals to different parts of the country and pushing them into the local communities. Exposing these flights was “RACIST” and made those doing the exposing horrible people.

But a few busses into DC, NYC, Chicago and now Martha’s Vineyard and suddenly it is the bussing and flying that is horrible. Not the releasing those illegals into a community. It was just to much of a strain on the local communities. Chicago shipped theirs out to the ‘burbs. The people of Martha’s Vineyard had the governor call out the national guard to move the illegals off the island. Some 125 NG troops were used to remove 50 illegals.

There are a few of these sanctuary cities and towns around here. I don’t want illegals flooding the area, but it would be nice to see just one bus load show up at one of these enclave of elitist leftists…

This is the third week since the unconstitutional gun control laws went into effect in New York. This is where the passed laws in response to losing their “Good Cause” requirement.

Instead of requiring “good cause” which required you to prove that you were in particular danger above what others might encounter. I.e. the more violent the city became as a whole the less right you had to carry. Regardless, the state got swatted down hard and can no longer require “good cause”.

Instead they now require “good moral character” which they claim allows them to look into your social media. You are required to give them all of your social media accounts that you have had over the last three years. So if you happened to have created an account on “gab” but never use it and forgot you have it and fail to mention it, you can be denied a permit.

If you are lucky enough to get a permit, you can’t actually carry. They have attempted to make everyplace in NY a “sensitive location”. For example they declared all of Time’s Square to be a sensitive place. But they didn’t define what “Time’s Square” was. The city of New York then got to decide. They did. You are suppose to know what the boundaries are. They have put up some signs, but not on all ingress points.

You can be actively looking for the boundary markers and stumble into Time’s Square and be committing a felony.

In the same way it is almost impossible to know what is and is not a “business” that requires explicit signage in order for you to enter.

You are driving along the freeway and pull over to use the facilities. Is that building owned and operated by the government? One set of rules. If the building is owned and operated by a company, there is a different set of rules. There are other places that can become “sensitive” buy the act of something happening nearby.

It has gotten very bad and the new laws are putting an increased burden on law enforcement. This has lead at least one county sheriff to announce that “Brady Checks are no longer required to purchase firearms or change their personal information”. It sounds like this is a pistol purchase permit not being required and does not actually affect the 4473.

The sheriff says that it can take several weeks to complete a Brady Check. Sort of amazing seeing as how most freer states can accomplish the same thing in a few minutes.

They still can’t issue permits to carry because nobody knows the required training so nobody can get the training required to get their permits.

It will be months before the state’s own suggested deadline is here and the preliminary training is released of comments.

It could be another 12 months before they have the training requirements finalized and people can then get the training and then apply.

The cost for the training will be very high. The course will be multiple days per the law. All of this is designed to keep people from exercising their rights.

There are a number of cases that have been filed by FPC and GOA fighting this. The first case was dismissed because the judge said they had no standing. A second case has been filed which corrects the issue(s) the judge had with the first case.

New pistol permit laws prompt local sheriff to adjust county policy, while course instructors add staff

The amount of effort and work that Miguel and J.Kb put into this blog and continue to put into it is just amazing. I’ve tried blogging in the past, it lasted a week or so. Having to find something to write about is an effort. People that do multiple posts per day really are putting in a huge effort.

There are a few blogs that I attempt to read Daily. OldNFO has one. He posts once a day in general. It is always medium to long and worth a read. I read DiveMedics blog multiple times per day. He posts from 0 to 6 posts in a day. I like what he has to say and he does a good job of it. If there is a disagreement it is normally because I got it wrong.

He recently wrote about 13 do 50 which I’m told is “racist!!!” It seems he got called out in the comments so he came back with all the numbers. There went an entire post I was going to write. His is better. He pulled real numbers from real sources.

I also read McThag’s blog. I really wish I could have a collection like he has. He does some really good work.

Of course I read 90 Miles From Tyranny. Most of his postings are “culled from the headlines” but still nice to follow. Joe Huffman has The View From North Central Idaho. He only posts once a day most of the time. Still good read.

I’m also following “Guns and Gadgets” on YouTube as he puts out multiple videos per day about 2A happenings.

In addition to the blogs, I go through my news feeds three or four times a day looking for articles that spark something. Then I take a note and come back to it later to write something.

I write at least one post per day. That post goes out at 0630 Eastern Time. I’ve missed one or two but only because of a software glitch or pushing the wrong buttons. I’d like to be doing two or three in a day.

Here is part of my backlog of links that I marked as “interesting” but might not be any longer:
Newsweek: Lauren Boebert Reportedly Booed by Crowd, Clashes With Debate Moderator
The Boston Globe: At an old mill in Littleton, gun dealers openly defy Maura Healey’s assault weapon decrees
The Hill: Militia records and FOIA obfuscation: FBI edition
Fox News: Migrants bussed to sanctuary city Chicago are promptly shipped off to suburbs
Fox News: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser declares emergency over migrant buses from Texas, Arizona
WEAR: Rebekah Jones to stand trial on cyber security charges in January
CNET: Please Stop Calling It the ‘Doomsday Glacier’

And once again we are at the end of the week. We hope you have had a great week.

There are a couple of new belts that are on the list to try. Mine bites me under the dunlop which makes it uncomfortable for long term.

We saw the death of the queen this week. What narratives did you pick up from the US media? Was it different from the media outside of the US?

Having been declared a semi-fascist what symbols do you fly proudly to say “Fuck yes!”

While the woke of America love to scream. The narrative gives them their two minute hate four or five times a day. We can make a list of the things they hate and scream about.

• Trump
• Trump
• People entering the capitol of the wrong political party
• People defending themselves
• The Jewish people
• Israel
• Guns
• Being white
• Being a man
• Being a black that doesn’t act like a …
• The police doing their duty

Part of their current cry is that you and I should repent for our sins. What sins? The sins that dead people that lived in America did to dead people that also lived in America. Often these people do not have ancestors that were enslaved. Listening to some screaming woke who is second generation American, because their parents emigrated to America about how they deserve something for me for something other people did to people totally unrelated to them is maddening.

These screaming wokes are very very concerned about these things. They are very concerned about racism in America. They are so concerned about whites being racist that they have to invent racist hate crimes because there just isn’t enough white racism to fill their needs.

They are very upset about the black slaves that existed in America. They don’t have a word to say about the thousands of men and boys that gave their lives to free those slaves. They are upset that the founding fathers didn’t let slave owners steal 2/5s of a slaves worth.

They hate what America is. They want to turn it into something that exists in one long two minute hate.

They have no energy to give to fighting the real evils of this world. Somebody said that there are more people living in slavery today than in the combined past. Not sure if I believe that but there are a lot of slaves still in this world.

While there are slaves in America, nobody in the woke crowd is working to free them. (Sex slaves and other types of slavery)

Muslim countries are some of the worse places for racism and discrimination against “others”. That can be because of the color of a person skin, or thier sex, or their religion or who they love. Many of these “hates” are actually put into law. Every Muslim country has “Jim Crow” laws.

Saudi Arabia is a country that was on its way to joining the modern world when the European countries divested themselves of responsibility for those countries.

The result tooks us from this:

To this:

Women still belong to a man. While they are allowed to drive, they can only get a license if their owner gives them permission.

Saudi women can now legally lock and load. In barely two years, Saudi women have earned the right to both drive and to own a firearm. While women have been legally behind the wheel since 2019, it was only last year that they were allowed to own firearms.

Yep, Saudi women now legally own firearms. Maybe at some point they will not have to have permission to purchase a firearm. Small steps but steps in the right direction.

Saudi Women Take Up Shooting After Gun Ownership Legalized

The principal of Alvirne High School in NH was placed on administrative leave. The school board will not say why, only that it is a personnel issue.

Of course this caused everybody to leap into action.

Thousands of people have signed an online petition protesting the principal being put on leave. Some students walked out in protest. Students are telling stories of what a wonderful principal he was.

And not a single damn one of them has any idea why he was placed on leave.

A few years ago one of our local teachers was accused by a student of inappropriate sexual conduct with her. She was in the midst of her Nth drama and when it looked like she was going to get kicked out of school she wrote a letter with the accusation to the principal of the High School

Long story short, the students that knew that teacher had seen him reject said girl multiple times. And she was angry over the rejection. She was a known liar and nobody in the student body believed her accusation. Regardless, the teacher resigned and transferred. We would have no problems with him as a teacher for our kids.

We don’t know what this principal did. It could be anything from financial to failure to do his duty to something nasty.

The only thing we know for sure is that he is currently on leave and not allowed in the building.

At this point we have to wait to find out what are the actual facts. Not our wishful thinking or our projections, but what are the facts. If he is in fact doing “bad things” to students then I hope he is charged and stands trial. If it is a false accusation, I hope he is reinstated with back pay and given an appology.

We have seen to many teachers grooming our children, I don’t mind waiting with him out of the building to find out what is actually going on.

Wait for the facts.
Students, parents protest after Alvirne High School principal placed on leave

Gallows humor is part of what allows men to function in horrific situations. These are jokes that are absolutely politically incorrect and many times would get people in trouble if people outside of the cadre were to overhear.

A surgeon told me this joke:

What do you call a diabetic with both legs? Pre-op.

What do you call a diabetic who has lost a leg? Pre-op.

No doctor is going to look at a patent with diabetes and tell them flat out that they expect to amputate one or more legs in the future. It just isn’t done. At the same time it allows the doctor to provide a little bit of distance between the horror of having to cut a person’s leg off because there is no other option.

Every profession has it’s gallows humor. Even us computer nerds. Recently we were at the 30 hour mark of a business down event. I’m on chat with the client. The owner has chewed his fingers to the elbows while his tech and I work the problem. I say to the tech “I’m going to wait just a few more minutes, we are just about there and then say “Uh… Opps” in the group chat. We can watch Boss have a heart attack.

Tech and I laughed but we didn’t do it. At our AAR I told boss dude about the joke and he said “Tech saved my life.”

It is humor, just dark.

Here is a song from WWII time frame expressing the dark humor of the paratroopers. It is a good recording but I found myself watching the video instead so I’ve included a second version with they lyrics.

Blood on the Risers

In the last couple of years the US has averaged around 40,000 deaths by firearm. Most of those are suicides which doesn’t make them any less meaningful. Somewhere around 30 people per year are killed in mass shootings.

These small numbers drive the gun control narrative. The idea is that if we could only remove guns from existence there would be no more people killed with guns. Q.E.D.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it is again a utopian vision. You are never going to remove firearms from the general populous much less the criminal population. You are never going to remove the knowledge of how to make firearms from the population.

Technology is so much better today it is much easier to make a firearm from scratch than ever before in history. Even crappy steel of today is so much better than the steels used with the first firearms. Removing guns from the population is wishful thinking, it isn’t going to happen.

The arguments of “Self defense is a right” also doesn’t work with the gun grabbers. They are true believers in the deity of government. They believe that only the government should have the right of violence. Only the government has the right to arrest, judge and punish a person.

This is why you will hear people screaming that the man shot dead by a bleeding beaten and raped woman should have had a trial. That it isn’t right for his victim, at the moment of the crime, shooting her rapist dead dead dead. The rapist hasn’t been convicted by a jury of his peers so he is only an alleged rapist. She took the law into her own hands and executed him without a fair trail.

Yes, there are times when mistakes are made. We are not talking about that. They aren’t talking about that. They aren’t talking about her shooting the wrong man. Of her shooting somebody that wasn’t involved. They are explicitly saying that a woman shooting the rapist with his cock in her body is her taking the law into her own hands. He should have been given a fair trial, not executed in cold blood.

As part of this hatred of people using force to defend themselves, there is also a huge industry in hiding the successful use of force or threat of force to defend yourself.

Lower-end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, which estimated approximately 55,000–80,000 such uses each year

A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center survey about firearms and suicide completed by 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of firearm researchers agreed that ‘In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime’.[

Note that in the second quote they aren’t actually telling you the number of DGU per year, they are only telling you the opinion of 150 researchers. How those researchers were chosen will have an impact on that percentage. With a large number of “researchers” employed by gun control advocates, of course the number of “researchers” that believe that DGU out number criminal use of guns per year is going to be skewed.

Some of the issues with measuring DGU include:

• Nobody killed or wounded so no official record of the event
• Neither party reported the incident
• Memories of DGU will seem more recent than they are so “in the past year” might get response going back multiple years.
• People lying in surveys
• Survey questions being unclear
• Survey answers being discarded because researches can’t get outside confirmation

Regardless, nobody knows the real number and when the CDC published their number it was so high that they were told not to repeat the study.

A new report, published 2022-05-13 concludes that there were approximately 1.67 million DGU in 20221.

This report summarizes the findings of a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted between February 17th and March 23rd, 2021 by the professional survey firm Centiment. This survey, which is part of a larger book project, aims to provide the most comprehensive assessment of firearms ownership and use patterns in America to date. This online survey was administered to a representative sample of approximately fifty-four thousand U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,708 gun owners who were, in turn, asked in-depth questions about their ownership and their use of firearms, including defensive uses of firearms.

Consistent with other recent survey research, the survey finds an overall rate of adult firearm ownership of 31.9%, suggesting that in excess of 81.4 million Americans aged 18 and over own firearms. The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2%) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner’s home, and approximately half (53.9%) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten (9.1%) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of thirty (3.2%) occurred at work.
2021 National Firearms Survey: Updated Analysis Including Types of Firearms Owned