Month: July 2023

The Two-wheeled menace.

J.Kb mentioned the scooter shooter in NYC picking people at random and I wanted to expand on that.

Old time readers know I have a very much standing (and well-founded) paranoia about motorcycles. It took a lot of reprogramming to figure out motorcycle culture in the US is a whole ‘nother animal that the one from Venezuela. First of all, people in Venezuela that need to use motorcycles, could not afford a Harley or any of the big cylinder bikes, nor the super-sporty rice burners or pasta squealers.  By the same token, Americans do not understand that a lot of people down there use low powered motorcycled because they are cheap, easy to maintain and can ride around the perennial gridlocked traffic of the mayor cities. And that ability to lane split (even if it is illegal) make the scooters and low powered bikes and advantage when your business is crime.

Scooters are still used, but they dropped in popularity by the 80s. They were too easy to steal and seen as not very macho for the Latino mind, my buess is the thing with the legs: sitting daintly versus ridding with open legs. Go figure.

This is pretty much the ideal bike for the “motorizado”:

Different variations, permutations and brands from 50 cc to 250cc make it the preferred means of transportation for the poor. They do things with it that we would do with cars, of course, safety is not a big priority.

Now, i can drop another thousand words and not be able to accurately describe the utter madness of tens of thousands of this bikes during your daily commutes, so I add a couple of videos or normal traffic conditions in Caracas.

 

 

And, of course, it makes it easy to approach any car and rob the occupant at gunpoint.

Now you guys get why I have this issue with bikes?

I may get better…. one day.

It isn’t the tool, NM Film Foundation version

The New Mexico Film Foundation brought local filmmakers together Saturday for a “Film Crawl” tour to share business resources that support the independent film industry.

The event began with a gathering at the Wesst building on Broadway, where Daniel Moen, a stuntman for Rising Star Stunt Team in Albuquerque, gave a demonstration about steps of precaution when handling a prop gun.
Alyssa Munoz, NM Film Foundation highlights gun safety on film sets, KOAT, (last visited Jul. 10, 2023)

This “Film Crawl” came about because Alec Baldwin shot and killed his cameraman. I believe that we can all agree that Alec Baldwin is guilty of manslaughter at the very least. Likely murder.

The short of it was that he took a pistol that he might have thought was unloaded, pointed at his cameraman, and pulled the trigger. This resulted in the death of his cameraman and injury to his director.

Now Alec is a trained monkey. He is supposed to hit his mark and say his lines with the right emotion. Ne is not expected to be a firearm guru.

He is expected to know the four safety rules, and to follow them. If he is not following them, there damn well better be no other way to do it, and every safety precaution should be taken.

Moen used prop guns ranging from a handgun made from a 3D printer to an assault rifle. Throughout the demonstration, he allowed people from the audience to check the chamber of the gun. His next step was to make it known that he was about to shoot, and fired in a direction away from everyone.
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I have some snap-caps, but not for every caliber. Most of the time I don’t need them, or I use just a case. After learning of the Rust incident, I learned a bit more about safety on set and made up a few dummy rounds for testing feeding or loading issues.

Every dummy round has an expended primer in it or hot glue. There are NO pristine primers. If the primer has no dimple, it is a live round.

Each dummy round has two metal BB’s in it. If you shake the dummy round, you can hear the BB’s rattling around in there.

Finally:

  • Treat every firearm as if it is loaded.
  • Never point your firearm at something you are not willing to destroy or kill
  • Make sure you identify your target and what is beyond it.
  • Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

Even when I KNOW it is a dummy round, I do not point the firearm at anything I’m not willing to destroy, and I treat it as if it has live ammo in it.

According to Moen, depending on the intensity of the gun scene, actors have to go through trainings for months to possibly a year. He said there are many precautions to ensure gun safety on set, but the main one is: don’t bring a real gun.
id.

I had issues with feeding on one of my Winchester ’94s (post ’64). This meant that I was running the lever and watching how it feed into the chamber. This would cause there to be a round in the chamber with the hammer back, cocked. A mistake could have caused the hammer to drop. Using dummy rounds made this safer.

I was having issues loading rounds into my r92. A couple of dummy rounds let me get things figured out in a safer way.

If I’m working with dummy rounds, there are no live rounds in the area. I can’t say room because often I’m doing work on the dinning room table and there are live rounds and magazines in the dining room.

On the Rust set, they were using the “prop” guns for target practice. All the guns used were real guns. They were not disabled in any fashion. Put a live round in them, pull the trigger, “BANG”. And the crew at least was using them for target practice.

“No real guns, no ammunition on set, especially these days where you can edit everything else in. It’s a little extra for another team you pay, but it’s the literal lives you save,” Moen said.
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This meant that people were bringing live rounds onto the set. A big NO NO NO.

They were putting live rounds into a prop gun. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

The production team was rushing the armorer (unconfirmed), which led to a pistol with live rounds being taken by the 2ndassistant, who declared it “cold”. It does not appear that the armorer had checked the weapon to verify it was “cold” and the 2nd assistant didn’t either.

Then Alec took that gun, did not verify it was cold. There is a statement that actors are not allowed to check if the gun they are handed is cold, “for safety reasons”. If Alec had opened the loading gate, rotated the cylinder 7 times, he would have been able to see the unfired primer on at least one of the cartridges loaded.

He didn’t. He pulled the hammer back. Pointed the gun at a person, and pulled the trigger. The gun performed exactly as designed and fired the round.

Terry Futschik, executive director for New Mexico Film Foundation, said that the incident created a change in the industry.
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Bibliography

Alyssa Munoz, NM Film Foundation highlights gun safety on film sets, KOAT, (last visited Jul. 10, 2023)

Monkeypox vindicated Reagan

We had family come and visit for the holiday week.

We went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The downtown area is nicely walkable with small businesses that cater to tourists.

What a fucking Leftist place that is.

Half the businesses there had an assortment pf Pride flags, signs that said “we support LGBT artists,” and “trans people belong here.”

I kept my mouth shut.

One store took it to the next level.

On top of the plethora of Pride flags, they had a sticker with the likeness of President Ronald Reagan with the caption, “It’s me, I’m the problem.”

Really?

I left, I made no bones about my departure.

But here is ultimately what pisses me off.

My entire life I heard how Reagan’s treatment of the Aids crisis in the 80s was a disaster and cost lives.

Then, in 2022 we had the Monkeypox epidemic.

The Monkeypox epidemic vindicated Reagan.

It didn’t matter how much warning was given about Monkeypox, the gay community kept engaging in large scale, anonymous, fucking and sucking, and Monkeypox spread like a campfire in a California forest.

We were told it was outright homophobic to expect the gays to take a pause from their bath house and sex club fuck and suck fest to slow the spread.

We had to locked down for COVID, but the gays had a natural right to fuck and suck whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, in a big fucking pile at every Pride fest in the country, and we were the bigots for noticing that those events led to Monkeypox outbreaks.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that I didn’t matter what Reagan did in the 80s.

He and C. Everett Koop could have handled written a personalized warning to each and every gay man in the country, and they still would have gone to the bath houses and gay porn theaters and fucked and sucked the Aids epidemic into existence.

It’s not Reagan that’s the problem, it’s the insatiable sexual degeneracy of gay community that’s the problem.

Monkeypox proved it.

NYC anarcho-tyranny

Anarcho-tyranny:  A stage of governmental dysfunction in which the state is anarchically hopeless at coping with large matters but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of small ones.

This is the definining characteristic of New York City and other Progressive urban hell holes.

Yesterday, a man rode around on a scooter, randomly shooting people.  He wounded three and killed one.

There were multiple shootings in NYC over the holiday weekend.

 

In NYC, shoplifting has gotten so bad that grocery stores are putting anti-theft devices on ice cream.

 

At the sane time, an army of the Waffen NYPD’s finest are arresting a white guy in a suit for having a cigarette on the sidewalk outside the Central Park wall, which technically makes it part of Central Park, which is a no smoking area, and not wanting to present ID.

 

You can literally shoot up heroin in Central Park, where the city provides free needle disposal, but if you smoke a cigarette, an entire precinct will mobilize to hassle you.

This is the hell the Left wants for the rest if America.

 

 

Keep your head on a swivel in public, also NYC is a hell hole

 

Here is security camera footage of two of the shootings (graphic warning).

 

Brace for the media to blame loose gun laws from out of state.  Not a culture of criminality that makes riding around on a scooter and shootings at random people a fun hobby on a Saturday afternoon.

There is a lesson to be learned here.

It’s of vital importance to maintain situational awareness.

Miguel will absolutely confirm this for me, people who are familiar with Central and South America do not fucking trust scooter riders at all.

Keeping up your situational awareness, noticing that someone, especially on a scooter, is approaching you while slowing down, is a sign something might about to go horribly wrong (usually a robbery).

I’m not victim blaming, but at least one or two of these victims could have had a chance to assess the situation and run.

One of the many grievances I have with NYC is the culture of “stay in your own world and avoid acknowledging other people” is the opposite of situational awareness.

Keep your head on a swivel.

Stay out of NYC.

And that city should be walled off and isolated.