Gun Free Zone

Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.

Month: November 2021

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Snitches get stitches

Nov 10, 2021 J. Kb 8 comments

Whistleblowers to play key role in enforcing Biden vaccine rule

To enforce President Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccine regulation, the Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Yet its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job.

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers door or even calling them,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law.”

Under the regulation, businesses must maintain records on workers’ vaccination statuses. But for workplaces where employees aren’t required to be vaccinated, workers will need to get weekly tests and wear masks.

OSHA said it plans to check on compliance with the latter by doing spot-checks of businesses, and will also rely on complaints the agency receives about businesses that aren’t following the regulation.

So the Administration is going to rely on employees to rat out bosses and coworkers for not being vaccine and testing compliant.

There are going to be a lot of industrial accidents coming up.

Just saying, if you rat out your unvaccinated coworkers, you might want to double check your fall protection equipment.

(Or not because you probably deserve it)

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Random Blue Checkmark gives the worst gun safety advice ever

Nov 10, 2021 J. Kb 35 comments

This fucking guy…

We are not asking actors to be gun experts.

Were asking actors to have the same basic knowledge of gun safety as any Boy Scout who wants to get the Riflery Merit Badge or person who passes a hunters safety course.

Is the gun loaded and is there is live round in the chamber?

That’s it.  Even a Hollywood character actor should have the mental faculties for that.

But the point Mr Checkmark wants to make is character actors are special people and the normal rules shouldn’t apply to them.

How do they do other stunts?

How to character actors throw punches and use swords?  Don’t they get some basic training in that or do character actors really have fist fights?

I’m sure for every stunt the actor has one last safety check he or she does just to make sure they don’t get hurt.

Why are guns any different?

Realizing he said something stupid he tried to explain himself.

The simple answer, as Miguel and I talk about frequently, is layers.  One is none, two is one, three is better.

Multiple layers of security and safety prevents accidents.

This time the armorer failed.  The last layer should have been Baldwin himself.

Layers protect.

As a professional engineer, everything I sign my name to gets peer reviewed for accuracy.

There is a reason all commercial flights have a co-pilot.

Layers of redundant safety systems.

The actor is a link in that chain.

It wasn’t exclusively Baldwin’s fault but he was at fault too.

But what do you expect from a Blue Checkmark.

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Dear Conservatives, Pete is right so come up with a better argument against him

Nov 10, 2021 J. Kb 9 comments

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg gave an address about the infrastructure bill and said this about roads being racist:

A number of conservative pundits pushed back with “roads can’t be racist.”

For example, Tucker Carlson:

This argument is stupid.

While it is true that roads are inanimate so cannot themselves be racist, what Buttigieg was talking about was the racism in the urban planning that went into the road.

His example of low overpasses was mostly true.  Robert Moses was a city planner in New York City.  Like many elites, he had a utopian vision of the public works under his control.  He made beautiful parks and then made them inaccessible to poor people.  Many who were Black or Hispanic, but not all.

Any long time resident of Miami could tell you about Overtown.  Overtown was a black neighborhood, originally called Colored Town, home to black workers of the the Flagler Railroad.  When the highways were built in Miami, City planners put I-95, 395, the Palmetto and Dolphin expressways through Overtown.  Nobody wanted to live under a bunch of eight-lane highways and so property values fell and it turned into a slum.

Then there is the issue of accessibility.  Think of the plot of the Pixar movie Cars.  If planners don’t make traffic in and out of an area easy, it gets cut off and dies.

It’s not exclusively racism, but a mix of racism and classism that motivates urban planners to put overpasses and exits where they do.  People don’t want to live where they can hear highway traffic or have concrete support columns instead of trees so its the people without political influence that get that pit in their neighborhood.

The poor have the exit ramp overhead and the rich get the nice parkway exit that ends next their fancy shopping mall to make their commute convenient.

That’s real and being obtuse about that is stupid and unhelpful.

The way roads target Buttigieg isn’t by denying the racism of urban planning.

It’s to address the fact that Progressives can’t fix a fucking thing.

Remember when Sweden tried “feminist snow plowing.”  It utterly failed.  Stockholm was snowed in and stopped.

Applying progressive values to an infrastructure problem killed the business in a city.

Buttigieg is going to focus on anti-racism transportation and kill transportation.

Whether you think that’s the feature or the bug depends on how tight your tinfoil hat is.

We can fix our infrastructure in a way that keeps business flowing and revitalizes neighborhoods and we should do that.

I don’t trust Buttigieg to do that.

Youngkin showed that a Conservative can win by focusing on social problems and proposing solutions.

“Durpy-durr, roads can’t be racist” isn’t that.

If we want to win with the black community, we need to address their issues.

(On a side note: Youngkin and Trump proved Republicans need the black community to win elections.  We might never get the majority but we can get large minorities and that’s enough. Those minorities are largely the working black middle-class, who like their white counterparts, benefit from Conservative economic policies.  The way to win 30 to 40% of the black vote is to focus on that middle-class black demographic.)

E.g. “This overpass is falling apart and the highway is too congested.  Let’s fix it so that it better serves this area and increases property values.”

I don’t trust Buttigieg to do that.

I trust him to focus on menial shit like busses from black neighborhoods in NYC being able to go to a state park.

I don’t trust him to build anything useful.

We need to focus on transportation that helps the middle-class, including the black middle-class who need good roads.

We need to focus on solutions not obtuse reactionary talking points.

Let’s not clutch defeat from the jaws of victory.

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Don’t give her the money, the emotional abuse and extortion of good people is going to break us

Nov 10, 2021 J. Kb 10 comments

This from Slate:

I Can’t Believe What My Daughter Wants to Do With Her College Fund

I am a single mom, and my 16-year-old Natalie is the light of my life. I want her to have a better life than I did, and that’s meant working two jobs, taking on overtime, and saving up for her college since she was little. I don’t have a lot of money, but with the money I’m saving, she should be able to attend an in-state public school without graduating with debt. Without those savings, I would not be able to afford to pay for her college and she’d probably have to take on student loans. Natalie recently came to me about her college fund. She said that she wants me to donate it all to her BIPOC friends as “reparations” and “wealth redistribution.” She’s always said that she wants to go to college, and she knows that it would otherwise be hard for her to afford it. Moreover, many of the friends in question come from affluent professional two-parent families. I haven’t touched the money, and I think that I should hold onto Natalie’s college fund until she’s 18. At that point, she can choose how she wants to spend it. Despite telling her that, she’s accusing me of being greedy and racist for not giving her friends that money. I understand where she’s coming from, but it feels disrespectful to my efforts over the years to help her. Am I wrong in wanting to hold onto her college fund?

I’d say this isn’t real but I’m sure it is from other stories I’ve seen from the popular culture.

Yesterday I said I refuse to buy into collective guilt.

This is what happens when someone doesn’t refuse (which is why I wrote this post).

This girl is lucky to have a single mother that had the means and wherewithal to save up for her to have a debt free college education.

The daughter doesn’t appreciate that and instead attacks her mother for not wanting to give that money away in a mea culpa to minorities for grievances she did not commit.

I actually feel sorry for this girl in a way.  She has been emotionally abused and manipulated to turn against a loving mother that worked hard to give her a better future and turn towards an abusive ideology.

Does this girl think that for one second that if she did give away her college savings she’d be given absolution?  Of course she won’t.  The cult will demand more.

This is what they cult wants, for those who have to sacrifice everything in pursuit of absolution for past grievances.

That’s what makes this a cult.  They know the people they are demanding sacrifices from are not responsible for the grievances so absolution will never be granted.

It’s just a sisyphean to appease a cult that will never be appeased.

Refuse or they will take everything from you, including your children and everything you do for them.

The only thing the cult leaders who abuse people like this deserve is a choice: the wall or the fall.