I cannot describe the level of hate I have for New Hampshire.

I have been blocked or muted on social media by most of the Libertarian legislators of the state for asking why they can’t do anything to lower housing prices, but they can pass bullshit like legalizing their right to carry concealed in chambers.

I’m all for CCW, you guys know that.  But it strikes me as utter bullshit that the Legislators can celebrate expanding their ease of access while the rest of us can barely afford to live here.

Let me break down the problem.

In Illinois, I made $85,000 per year and my wife made $43,000.  Our house was 1,700 sq-ft, two-bed, 2,5-bath, cost $147,000 and we paid $1,450 in mortgage.

In Alabama, I made $95,000 per year and my wife made $45,000.  Our house was 2,800 sq-ft, four-bed, three-bath, cost $237,000 and we paid $1,450 in mortgage.

In North Carolina, I made $130,000 per year, my wife made $75,000.  Our house was 3,000 sq-ft, four-bed, four-(full) bath, cost $440,000 and we paid $1,850 in mortgage.

We moved to New Hampshire.

I make $140,000 per year, my wife made $75,000.  Our house is 1,800 sq-ft, three-bed, 2.5 bath, cost $545,000 and we are paying $3,350 in rent, which is break even for the mortgage of our landlord (they are making 3% on us).

Then throw in the cost of utilities.

Everywhere else, I was paying $300 to $400 per month, including the dead of winter.

Better New Hampshire having the second highest electricity prices (after California) and heating oil, I’m doing $1,000 per month in utilities.

I’ve never made so much money and had so high a cost of living.

I’ve never been richer and but I’m poorer than ever.

In Illinois, Alabama, and North Carolina, all of our homes were in developments that were built on old farmland that the farmers sold to the developers.

In New Hampshire, I looked at buying a farm to keep 5 acres for myself and sell off the remaining 95 acres to a developer.

I couldn’t.  Legally, I couldn’t.  I was prohibited from breaking up a farm.

Property taxes here are insane.

The property taxes on the house I live in are over $11,000 per year.

The New Hampshire libertarians say “but you have no income tax.”

Fuck you very much.  My property taxes here are MORE than my combined property taxes and joint state income tax for my wife and I, in either Alabama or North Carolina.

I’m actually paying more in state taxes, just it comes out my rent (and my landlord’s mortgage) than directly out of my paycheck.

That leads to something called conservatorship.

Let’s say you own a bunch of land but don’t want to pay property taxes.

You take the land you’re not using and you place it in conservatorship, let it go unused, and you don’t pay taxes on it.

So you own 10 or 20 acres but you only pay taxes on one or two where your house is.

If you ever want to use that land, say develop on it, you have to pay back taxes from when it went under conservatorship.

That means to build new, houses are almost unaffordable because the cost of the house must include potentially millions in back taxes.

The result is the few new construction homes in the area are million dollar mansions.

This gives people with land the ability to have the benefit of owning 10 or 20 acres and not have neighbors encroaching on their home, but not having to pay property taxes on having a 10 or 20 acre buffer zone around your home.

There are other ways to lower your property taxes.

If your property was an old farm and you have an old barn or old farmhouse, you can get an easement on the taxes if you preserve the old building.

That makes new construction on old lots almost impossible because you can’t build a development around an old barn.

The entire seacoast region has lots of land in private hands that either due to taxes or zoning is undevelopable.

This is in stark contrast to The South, where they put up developments as fast as they can air nail them together.

When I complain to the Libertarian legislatures about this, how ridiculous it is that a tiny piece of shit home is bank-breakingly expensive, the answer I get is “live free or die.”

Essentially it’s “I got mine, fuck you.”

“I bought my house and land years ago and my property value is increasing exponentially, so fuck you, I’m not going to do anything to make it cheaper for you to afford a house.”

A few told me to move away from the seacoast.

That’s fucking helpful.  Make by buying a cheaper property with a 200 mile commute per day.

This is exactly the same problem they have in California.  The only difference is the Leftists out there use bullshit woke excuses (like preserving the local minority community) instead of Libertarian excuses to make sure the people who bought decades ago get to enjoy skyrocketing property values by preventing new construction of homes affordable by the middle-class.

The people who can’t afford the ridiculous prices have four hour commutes, and even those homes are becoming obscene.

I’ve asked the Libertarian capitalists: “if the price of houses is so high, shouldn’t there be a rush to build new homes due to supply and demand economics?  Since there is not, something must be stopping that.”

That’s about the time I get blocked or muted.

Because they are all about Libertarianism until it means a development going up near where they live that lowers their property value by reducing the scarcity of houses.

They got in on the ground floor and pulled up the ladder behind them.

I was a capitalist in the South, where new house construction made it possible for a guy like me to buy a decent house at a reasonable price so I could enjoy a nice quality of life.

New Hampshire Libertarianism has frozen me out of that.

I’m fucked by the rules they created.

Now I’m inclined towards Bolshevism.  If you made it so you could buy a house then made it so I couldn’t buy a house so your house increases in value, I want to take your house away.

Seize the conservatorships and auction them to developers.

I went from hating Kelo v. New London to wanted to Kelo the fuck out of people’s unused property so developers can build middle-class developments.

I hate this about me but I feel like the “Live free or die” Libertarians have given me no choice.

Make it unaffordable to live somewhere and then tell people you won’t help them by making affordable to live and see how they respond.

The power went out due to snow around 4:00 yesterday afternoon and at noon today it’s still out.

My house is currently 42F by my thermometer because the oil boiler needs electricity to run.

The reason it went out is that branches on trees laden with snow fall off the tree when they freeze and hit the powerlines.

I’m a Florida boy and in Florida we cut back the trees so they don’t touch the powerlines.  That is to minimize the damage to the powerlines during hurricanes.

No bullshit, 25-foot easements around powerlines.

In New Hampshire, they just let the trees grow over the powerlines even though every year this happens and people lose power.

I asked why they don’t trim back the trees from the powerlines and all of got was “people in New Hampshire like looking at the trees.”

People in New Hampshire are fucking retarded.

Florida prepares for hurricane season cutting down trees and when the power goes out it’s back in maybe a few hours.

New Hampshire does nothing to prepare for winter snow taking out powerlines, year after year, and takes a day to repair the lines.

Ive been less inconvenienced by a Cat 3 hurricane in Florida than a snowfall in New Hampshire.

When I complained, I was told that everyone in New Hampshire has a generator because the power goes out so much.

Gee, thanks…

“I got my generator, fuck you.”

I keep being told how New Hampshire is this great Libertarian state.

Live free or die.

Fuck New Hampshire Libertarianism.

Give me Florida governance all day long, where I can have both friendly gun laws and a grid that prepares for seasonal weather.

This is a follow-up to my post Attempted murder by cop whitewashed by press.

The Cherokee County Sheriff released a new statement to address the video that has gone viral of cops firing squading a guy in a doorway after just waking him up.

It’s some fucking bullshit.

“I didn’t know what happened because all my subordinate officers lied to me with a bullshit story and I believed them.  The original statement which pissed off everyone who saw the video was written by the County Attorney and is also not my fault.  Besides,  the shooting wasn’t really my fault either, it’s the fault of the local police.  Give me money for my own SWAT Team so we don’t have to use the city’s SWAT Team next time.”

Fuck this guy.

What a stunning lack of leadership a bullshit statement like that reveals.

Near murderous fuck-ups should not be rewarded with budget increases.

Mad Ogre spent last week on Twitter praising the new Marlin rifles produced by Ruger displayed at SHOT.

If you read the internet, the consensus is Marlin was a great company that made great guns, Remington bought them and destroyed them, Ruger bought Marlin from Remington after Remington went bankrupt, and the Ruger ones are great.

There is a lot more to that story.  I’ve been sitting on it for a while and it’s time it gets told.

Everyone loves their Connecticut-made Marlin rifles.

The Connecticut-made guns were some of the last, probably the last, gunsmith-built guns in volume production in the country.  Marlin rifles were assembled by men with gray beards, sitting at workbenches with files, fitting the guns together to make them work.

That may have worked well back in the day, but that’s not how modern guns are manufactured.  Go to a modern firearms manufacturing facility, it’s like any other manufacturing facility, parts come off machining and finishing and go to assembly, where they are put together.

None of the automotive manufacturers are having workers hand-fit components during assembly.  That’s not how it works.

It’s just not profitable to have skilled people hand-fitting parts at high wages.  The gun companies that do sell hand-fit guns do so at low volume and high prices.  They are custom or at least semi-custom guns.  Not production guns.

The way Marlin built guns was the way they built guns when they first started building these new models in the 1970s (the Model 1985, for instance, was named for the original 1895 but was designed in 1972).  Much of the equipment was dated to that same era.

That was one of the big problems.  The old men with gray beards who did that were retiring or dying.  They couldn’t train younger people to build guns like that at assembly wages.  An assembly tech is not a gunsmith.  Marlin, on its own, didn’t have much of a future under its business model.  They just couldn’t meet demand building guns the way they did.

The goal in the acquisition of Marlin by Remington was to turn Marlin into a modern production gun company so that it could be cost-competitive.

Henry rifles are not hand-fit.  They are assembled from parts made to spec on modern CNC equipment and designed with GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) to work.  They will tell you that during their factory tour.

When Remington got hold of Marlin, nobody knew just how much work needed to go into a Marlin rifle to get it to run reliably.  Remington moved production out of Connecticut and it didn’t go smoothly.

The job of turning Marlin from old-school, making parts and fit at assembly, into a modern machine and assemble production fell onto Remington R&D.

When Remington R&D got the old prints from Marlin and plugged them into AUTOCAD, quite often, the CAD software spit them back out for being over-dimensionalized, under-dimensionalized, having no or bad datums, etc.

I’ve written about the NASA Artemis before.  Why NASA was asked why they were creating a new rocket instead of just building the Saturn V again.  Their response was that they couldn’t.  Each Saturn V was fit at assembly.  They didn’t know what was done by the engineers between what was off-print and what they did to make the engines work.  Most of the engineers who made Saturn V were dead and they took their tribal knowledge to the grave with them.  It was easier to start over with CAD than try to decipher the old prints and handwritten notes and put them together into a working engine.

Well, Marlin was exactly like that, except Remington couldn’t start over because people wanted the guns they knew.

There were other problems as well.  Many of the old Marlin vendors (companies that made small parts like screws and springs) had gone out of business.  The old companies often made parts that worked but were different from the prints, because years ago they tweaked something at the request of Marlin but never noted it.  Parts made by newer vendors using old prints didn’t function.

Remington R&D started with the premier gun, the Model 1895 in 45-70, and effectively re-invented the inside of that gun with all-new GD&T.  At some points old guns that were made to work were reverse-engineered to figure out what corners were broken, what surfaces filed down, what had been changed from print to get the guns to work.

After the Model 1895, the Model 336 was next, then the Model 1894, and so on, until every gun in the Marlin lineup had been fully modernized.

Herein lies the problem.

While R&D was doing this, a process that took years, Remington was still building Marlin rifles and trying to get them to run in production.  The decision was made, for better or worse, that production of Marlin was not going to be stopped during the refresh.  The idea was if Marlins were not on the shelf during that time, Henry would just come along and eat Marlin’s lunch, take its market share, and Marlin would never be able to get its ground back after disappearing from store shelves for a few years.  As a result, there were Marlin rifles of less than stellar functionality that went to consumers.

Later year Remington made Marlins, the ones produced from the new prints created by Remington R&D are great guns.  They work well, but that is eclipsed by the reputation Remington made Marlins developed in the early years of production.

Everyone knows what happened next, Remington went bankrupt and Ruger bought Marlin.

They didn’t just buy the name, however, they bought all the work done by Remington R&D.  The new prints, the new specs, the new G&D, the designs designed to be manufactured on modern CNC equipment and put together at assembly that work without hand-fitting.

There is a lot more detail and complication in the story of why Marlin had quality issues than just “Remington made shit.”

Much of it has to do with prints that were a half-century old, designed to be made on equipment that was half a century out of date, and a style of manufacturing that was obsolete by half a century, and the engineering challenges of trying to modernize a legacy product while simultaneously trying to produce it.

Ruger Marlins work and they work well, but that’s not all just Ruger.  It was years of work put in by Remington R&D engineers behind the scenes and it was a labor of love for all involved with it.

That’s the truth the internet has never told you.

This is practically murder:

Longer video here. Quote from 5:00 in “Fuck bro, fuck… there’s cameras” pic.twitter.com/20j4rBbq3F

— Libertarian Party Mises Caucus (@LPMisesCaucus) January 22, 2023

The man and woman were in bed, apparently asleep.  They were woken up by the police loudspeaker.

The cops tossed a robot into their home, which must hast been transmitting video to the police from inside the house.

The police should have seen that he just got out of bed and that he was holding the robot when they shot him in the front door of the residence.

He wasn’t acting aggressive.

He wasn’t barricaded.

He was a man woken up by a ruckus.

Now let’s see what the police had to say about the shooting.

That’s some bullshit.

They had the robot in the residence.

They could have seen there was no hostage situation and that the man was asleep.

What is the point of the robot?

Oh yeah, it was a toy to buy and not a tool to use, I forgot.

And you can see there was no verbal altercation.

This is what the media reported:

SWAT team members shoot man who confronted officers in Murphy, NC, sheriff says

A man from Murphy, North Carolina is now recovering in a Chattanooga hospital after SWAT team members were forced to shoot him after he confronted officers, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.

The man, later identified as 41-year-old Jason Harley Kloepfer, ‘engaged in a verbal altercation with officers and emerged from a camper trailer and confronted officers,’ the post says.

That’s when members of the Cherokee Indian Police SWAT team shot and wounded him.

He was taken to Erlanger hospital in Chattanooga, and at last word he was in stable condition.

The post says Kloepfer is charged with communicating threats and resist, obstruct, and delay, and that more charges may follow.

The cops tossed a robot into where he was sleeping, woke him up, them gunned him down.

Every one of them should be fired, then sued, then sent to prison.

I think at this point if you hear cops outside, don’t go outside.  Call 911 and find out what the fuck is going on first, because of you open your door they will blast you.

Shot:

New adult daycare video just dropped, and this may possibly be the most horrifying one yet. These are the people who ban you from tech pic.twitter.com/kceLEkiRrN

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) January 22, 2023

Chaser:

But wait, there’s more! pic.twitter.com/O5hsy9X5VW

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) January 22, 2023

Not just didt they get rid of someone who is clearly useless to the company, but they can get rid of the overhead associated with that office and all the free perks.

The wife showed me this thread.

I don’t know who this person is, she’s apparently some sort if actress.

I really don’t care about her politics at the moment, this thread is chilling for any parent.

“Mommy there was this really scary man in here.”

I leapt from the bath, dressed with such furious intention while still dripping wet, which is yes, as unpleasant as it sounds, and was speeding down the road in under a minute.

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

“I’ll be there in 3” I tell her.

I text Kirk something incomprehensible and he FaceTimes me while I’m running lights and inventing my own road rules.

“F*ck. I’ll be there in 19 minutes” I hear my husband say.

The owner of the place was already there.

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

They were looking at surveillance footage.
Here’s the story.
A late 50’s guy came in told her she was gorgeous, like no, a knockout, was she Columbian? Did she speak Spanish, she says no, he says, “Oh so you’re one of those who doesn’t know one word, that’s even better.” (Weird)

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

They were looking at surveillance footage.
Here’s the story.
A late 50’s guy came in told her she was gorgeous, like no, a knockout, was she Columbian? Did she speak Spanish, she says no, he says, “Oh so you’re one of those who doesn’t know one word, that’s even better.” (Weird)

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

this convo down. He moves away when people come in, she hears him say into his phone, “no she’s here in LA…yeah beautiful girl.”

Then he circles back n asks if he can take a picture of her. She says no and then strategically denies him a clear view of her face.

Now he’s mad.

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

“Just get over here n take a picture like a woman!”
Scarlett doesn’t.
He comes up closer. “What time do you get off?”
“I dunno”
“You don’t know when you get off?”
Scarlett goes, “nope I don’t.”
Which makes him angrier.
“But you park right here in the lot?” He jerks his head

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

“Just get over here n take a picture like a woman!”
Scarlett doesn’t.
He comes up closer. “What time do you get off?”
“I dunno”
“You don’t know when you get off?”
Scarlett goes, “nope I don’t.”
Which makes him angrier.
“But you park right here in the lot?” He jerks his head

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

After a family meeting we’ve decided that Scarlett, effective immediately, no longer works there.

Do we know for certain the worst of our fears were being played out by this asshole?

No.

But who wants to be safe?
And who wants to be sorry?

I feel weepy tonight.

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

Not so much for Scarlett, because she’s safe, but for every woman working a job who deals with scary ass shit and doesn’t have a mother who will literally fly to her aid or a daddy who will without the aid of an army wage a vigilante’s righteous vengeance to keep her safe.

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

I’m gutted for them.
Look alive people. They walk among us. Those who prey on the precious.
Seeking those whom they devour.

And oh joy I’ve bitten a sandwich sized chunk from the side of my mouth without even realizing. Oh well it’s very on brand. My new brand. pic.twitter.com/kmE77HNVwZ

— Kiersten Warren (@KierstenWarren) January 20, 2023

That absolutely sounds like the man was trying to set up an abduction, probably for sexual trafficking.

The girl seemed to do everything right, given the situation, not giving out and information or letting her picture get taken.

You have to consider how much worse it would be for a young woman who is not an employee.   Confronted like this in a place without security cameras.  Possibly followed as she tried to leave the area.

This girl was lucky in that as an employee, she was not going to leave that area for several hours and it’s doubtful that guy would hand around for that long.

Another girl who got spooked and walked out could be followed.

This is why we hammer home the idea of situational awareness.  Teach it to your children, especially your daughters.

As our judicial system breaks down under the weight of anarcho-tyranny incompetence, these people are getting more brazen.

I’ll tell you, absolutely 100%, if that was my little girl I’d go  commit a murder.  I have a couple of friends I could call on route that I know would be happy to join me in a posse.

I have a jumper cable and a spare 900 cold cranking amp battery, and I’m going to find out how much amperage it takes to make a set of testicles glow like Christmas lights.