Gun Free Zone

A buddy in Facebook sent me a link to this ad/raffle:

Unless you can prove that your AK is from Soviet manufacturing and was the first one that enter Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”, no AK is worth that much.

I am not a hater of AKs. Old reader know I have clone that served me through more than one post hurricane period, and I have sung the praises of it but because I got it for $350, (FFL fee included) and it is a darn good rifle at that prince: Hard hitting round, reasonably accurate at suburban distances and almost impossible to mess up. It is heavy, hard to reload under pressure, iron sights suck to high heaven and it is usually nor smoothly finished. But again, it is worth the $350-$400 range price. And I don’t care who manufactured it or if it hasa milled receiver instead of a stamped one and the metal parts were massaged with vodka by a virgin maiden form the Urals: $1,000 for an AK is simply crazy. It is more a question of “collectability” than performance.

On the other side of the equation, this was captured today from Palmetto State Armory’s site:

Not even having to assemble the lower, just put both parts together and you have a complete AR15 rifle for under $350. That means you get to use the remaining $651.02 in magazines, ammo and a bit of basic training. A lighter, modern and more ergonomic rifle that used to be available only at twice that price.

Dogs and cats sleeping together… the sign of the End of Times. I tell you.

The Antifa T-Shirt kinda messes with the script, doesn’t it?
And you are not communicating science but repeating carefully programed slogans and scripts.

In one of my previous posts, Mr. CBMTTek left this comment:

What I find reprehensible about Ms. Johnson’s comment about not overlooking the black community is not that somehow Jews deserved it or anything like that. It is the one upmanship of it.

Imagine if you found out that you had some kind of terminal illness, inoperable brain cancer or whatever. And, when an acquaintance found out, they insisted on talking to you about how horrible their Uncle’s gout gets after he eats shellfish.

That comment reminded me of this story.

This is absolutely true.  I want to make this clear.

When I was 26 years old I was diagnosed with cancer.  I went to the hospital for an abdominal x-ray on something entirely unrelated.

My gastroenterologist called me up at 8:00 at night – never a good sign – and said “We found a spot on your right kidney.  We don’t know what it is, but it’s not supposed to be there.  I got you an appointment with a urologist friend tomorrow.”

Well, fuck…

I see the urologist and he said in so many words “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not supposed to be there.  We’ll cut it out ASAP and biopsy it later.”

I was in an OR at 4:00 am, two days later.

What they cut out of me turned out to be a malignant neoplasm, a.k.a. “Fuck you, you die now cancer.”

I know this because a family member of someone I am very close to was diagnosed with the same cancer shortly after I was and he died in six months.  The difference was, they found his when he became symptomatic, at which point it was too late.

I lost half of my right kidney, part of two ribs, and have a foot-long scar on my right side.  I do sit-ups weird and suspect that part of my back problems and my tilting to port has to do with my oblique abdominal muscles not properly healing.

Nevertheless, I’m alive and have been cancer-free for 10 years.

This event strengthened my belief in God and that the Lord works in mysterious ways because if it were not for my inherited bowel problems, I would be dead from cancer.

So…

I was very fortunate that I did not need chemo.  I did have to see the oncologist to get cleared.

I was in the oncologist’s office waiting  when a woman in a pink bandana asked: “Who are you here to support?”

“Nobody. I’m a patient.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

We chat for a moment and I tell her what happened to me when she said this:

“Well if you didn’t have chemo you don’t get to call yourself cancer survivor.”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t have the real cancer experience.”

Now, this wasn’t said in jest.  She was angry at me.  She did not like that she had given me sympathy for being a cancer patient just to find out I wasn’t going to lose my hair and puke my guts out.

I learned a few lessons that day:

Never underestimate how much misery loves company.

Victim status is a coveted thing and they do not want to share it.

People will form cliques over anything, just to gate-keep and make sure you are not part of the privileged club.

So the fact that some Progressives want to keep Jews on the outs of the elite victim status club, even though they are getting shot to shit doesn’t surprise me.

I had an elderly woman get mad at me for not suffering through my cancer enough.

From the Herald & Review:

Police: Decatur woman shot father of her child in self-defense

Police say a Decatur woman shot the 33-year-old father of her child to defend herself after he attacked her while she was in a vehicle Sunday evening.

Sgt. Chris Copeland said officers were sent at 6:50 p.m. to HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital in response to the man having been shot in his right side.

He told police the woman had shot him in front of his home in the 3800 block of East Grand Avenue, Copeland said. Police began their investigation and contacted the 29-year-old woman, who voluntarily came to the Decatur Police Department for questioning.

Copeland said the woman had several injuries to her face from the man battering her while she was inside of her vehicle. She had a shunt in her head from a previous injury, and a blow to the head could be fatal, Copeland said.

She defended her life from her piece-of-shit baby daddy.  She had obvious injuries from the attack and a history of life-threatening injuries from previous attacks.

Seems pretty cut-and-dry.  So how can Illinois fuck this up?

The woman told police she shot the man in self-defense, Copeland said. He said the woman is not facing charges for the shooting, but is facing a preliminary charge of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon for lack of a concealed carry license. She is being held in lieu of $75,000.

She didn’t have the proper paperwork to defend her life outside of her home.

Can Illinois fuck this up any more?

You betcha!!!

The man was arrested and is facing preliminary charges of domestic battery and unlawful vehicular invasion. He posted $10,000 bond.

Nearly beat a woman to death?  That’s $10,000.

Defend yourself from being murdered without paying your Dane-Gelt to the bureaucracy?  That’s $75,000.

Welcome to Illinois where the law would rather you get beaten to death than defend yourself from a habitual abuser without the necessary paperwork and fees.

Keep in mind that it takes 90 days to get an Illinois CCW from the time the permit is sent in.  Training takes 16 hours, but the wait times for training can be weeks or months long.  It seems that this woman knew she needed her gun NOW and didn’t have time to wait for the bureaucracy to approve her permit request.

This is why I love Alabama, South Dakota, and Indiana.  The background check is run while you wait at the police station, and they give you your permit right there as soon as it is approved.  It takes about 15 minutes.

If a battered woman is threatened in Huntsville at 8:00 am, she can have her permit by 8:30.

I know we in the gun rights community like to say “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.”

Well, I think the new tagline should be “when seconds count, your permit to carry is 90 days away from being mailed to you.”

Miguel pointed out a Tweet and statement from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez in which she complained that the US market-driven system gives working women less time with their newborns than dogs who have puppies.

It was stupid, like most of the things that she says… but I’m not unsympathetic to her cause.

Longer maternity leave is better for mothers and children.  Both their physical and mental health.  As a father, I wish I could have taken more time off, but my employers didn’t have family leave policies so I had to limit myself to 50% of my vacation time.  I was entitled to FMLA but we relied on my salary.

This idea of family leave is gaining traction, so I thought I’d toss out a few ideas that I have that might help women and families, that are not socialist nightmares.

First, we have to acknowledge that there is no free lunch.  In Germany, women occupy one-third fewer management and upper-level jobs as women in the US.  The reason is clear.  Germany is the economic powerhouse of mainland Europe, with a strong work culture, much like the US.  Women are encouraged to take their maximum maternity leave while the men work.  German companies are hesitant to give women of childbearing age more responsibilities in case they get pregnant and leave for months on end.  This holds back their careers.

Women in Germany (and elsewhere) pay for their extended leave with reduced earnings and career advancements.

Second, the paid maternity leave is not an employer benefit but a government one.  No company would hire a woman in Europe if it meant having to pay six months of salary for her while she was out with a newborn.  The government pays a benefit similar to how we have federal unemployment insurance.  Women get a reduced check from the government for some fixed period of time.

This is also not a free lunch, because this is funded with higher taxes in Europe, so women have lower after-tax take-home pay then get a check from the government when they have kids.

Given that reality, what can we do?

Three ideas.

One:

I’m fine with extending FMLA out from 12 weeks to 26 for birth, letting women make their own decisions about how long they stay out.

Two:

An early collection of Social Security with a retirement deferment.  Let’s say that a woman decides to take six months of FMLA.  She could collect social security for that period, that is money she paid in (Yes, I know SS is a pyramid scheme, but she still paid it), and that early collection delays her retirement collection by six months.

I personally believe a lot of women would be happy to collect six months of Social Security when they have a kid at age 28, and then retire at 67 and 8 months instead of 67 and 2 months.  What difference does that six months make at retirement when you need the money for a kid right now?

This is already a government benefit that working people pay into, let them collect a certain amount of it when they need it before they retire.

Three:

Create something like a combo 401K and HSA for employees to use for childbirth.  Make it double or triple tax-free system, pre-tax income goes in, and it’s not taxed when it comes out.  Let employers have some match program that is also tax-deductible to encourage employer contributions.

Rather than collect it at retirement, collect it as a lump sum when the employee has a kid.  I’d be happy to put money into a savings program for a few years so that when my child is born I’d get a chunk of change that I can use while on FMLA.

Employers would use this, like a 401K as a competitive benefit for younger workers.  Smart workers would use the tax advantage to plan for kids.

Honestly, I’d like to help women have more time off after childbirth.  I’d like to take more time off too, and I know that gets expensive.

I just don’t want a new tax heavy, government-funded program to be created to address this.

Use one program we already have and create a second market-driven program and use it.

I thought that the Jersey City Kosher Market shooting would have fallen off the media’s radar by now.

One would think that murder of two Jews, a market employee, and a police officer, at the hands of two Jew-haters who published antisemitic screeds online, would be in the headlines for weeks, like after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.

But as one of my regular readers keeps posting in the comments:

It is not the action being taken by the person that causes offense, it is the political affiliation of the person taking action that causes offense.”

In this case, the issue is not (only) the political affiliation of the shooters, but the identity of the shooters.

The perpetrators were Black Hebrew Israelites, an antisemitic, black supremacist group.  The Black Hebrew Israelites are also the same group that taunted the Covington Catholic School boys in DC that lead to that media scandal as well.

With the knowledge that the perpetrators of this shooting were not white supremacists in MAGA hats, with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks, who drove to New Jersey from a Red State: having no way to blame Trump for this, the media would drop this story in a day.

Case in point: Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib deleting her Tweet blaming the shooting on white supremacy and not issuing a correction or making any other statement.

But… I was wrong.

There was a way that this story could get worse.  The more Progressive media could shift the narrative.  What could they shift it to if they can’t blame it on Trump?

It’s the fault of the Jews.

That is the feeling of the Jersey City locals who are not part of the Jewish community there.

SHOCKING VIDEO: As Jewish bodies were still laying in cold blood after being murdered by terrorists in Jersey City, a rep of @AmericansAA captured spontaneous antisemitic tirades blaming Jews for their own murder & ppl cheering it on!

Antisemitism, a bigger problem than appears. pic.twitter.com/WHmLtxANAE

— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) December 11, 2019

Why not spread this nationally.

Miguel wrote a post yesterday, For The Atlantic, the Jersey City Shooting is inconvenient.  I read the article and a passage stuck out at me like a hot poker in the eye.

In most important areas of American life, Jews now tend to face fewer disadvantages or forms of discrimination than members of many other ethnic or religious groups do. At the same time, they continue to attract the dedicated hatred of a small minority of the American population, and this does—especially if they can readily be identified as Jews—at times put them in serious physical danger.

This complexity defies how many powerful people—including a large number of left-leaning journalists and policy makers—perceive the world. For some, matters of racism or privilege are always and exclusively structural. A group either stands at the top or at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Since most American Jews are supposedly white (whatever that means), they are presumed to enjoy special privileges. As one of the founders of the Women’s March argued in a statement that, incredibly, was meant to address accusations of anti-Semitism in her movement, “White Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.”

Translation: Jews are too rich and successful to be victims, and they have white skin* so are part of white supremacy.  Therefore the Jews deserved to be shot up by black people.

*The victims were Orthodox Jews who were dressed Shomer Shabbos and wore payot (long sideburns), so I doubt that they would be confused for Bushwood Country Club members any time soon.

Both of these facts are necessary to make sense of what happened in Jersey City on Tuesday. Yes, African Americans suffer from deep injustice in this country—and every American should regard it as his or her duty to remedy this. And yes, Jews suffer an elevated threat of deadly violence—and we must stand in solidarity with its victims even if the identity of their murderers scrambles ideological preconceptions.

If the debate about structural racism is highly complicated, the moral truth about Jersey City is nevertheless straightforward.

Translation: We can bring ourselves to condemn the murder of rich, white supremacists Jews, by poor, oppressed blacks.  So we’ll sort of waffle and kinds of say it’s justified in a way that keeps us from being accused of antisemitism ourselves.  Even though that’s what we’re doing.

The Atlantic wasn’t alone in their Jew-hating narrative push.

Then there was this Tweet and Article from the Wall Street Journal (now deleted because of backlash).

That article contained this text:

Translation: The white interloper* Jews aren’t victims, they deserved it because they were gentrifying a black neighborhood.  

*The Freddy’s Fashion Mart attack which killed eight, happened when Al Sharpton called the Orthodox Jews in Harlem who ran the store “white interlopers.”

This is absolutely fucking grotesque, but not unforeseeable.

For the Progressives who traffic in victim status and maintain a social caste structure around historical grievance, they can’t simply ignore Jews being victims of POC violence.  A large part of the Progressive narrative supporting antisemitism is based on anti-Zionist smear that “racist white Jews are killing poor, brown Palestinians.”  This is why Progressives often justify Palestinian terrorism as “resistance.”  Even when it means adult Palestinian men murdering Jewish infants in their cribs.

These Progressives have to square this attack with their world view, and the only way to do that is to blame the Jews for their own murders by claiming that “actually, the black community are the real victims of white Jewish racism.”

The Tories won big last night and you could swear you are watching the US 2016 post election reaction with a funny accent and bad teeth.

You guys remember the Young Turks losing it when the results were coming in? This may be a Dollar Store version in the UK.

“It has been absolutely chilling to watch the two main parties slide into excusing bigotry for their own ideological purposes.”

Comedian @pierrenovellie on the racism which exists in Britain’s two biggest political parties, and why it scares so many people away pic.twitter.com/0ws57925Or

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) December 13, 2019

A White South African a minority? Live and learn.

But the most interesting thing I learned this morning is that even though the Tories and Johnson were branded with the racist tag by the media nd the opposition, the minority of Hindu expats living in the UK voted massively for the conservatives and helped make the win even bigger.

Not bad for the Brit version of the Klan according to the “experts.”