Gun Free Zone

Always be careful of your “friends.”

Shot

Chaser:

When Joe Biden announced last week that police should shoot to wound rather than shoot to stop the threat, most people ignored his crazy ideas and considered them merely the rantings of an 80-year-old man likely suffering from dementia, who has lived most of his adult life in a bubble surrounded by armed protective details.

But when Rob Pincus told FOX News he supported Biden’s ideas, even shooting a shotgun out a door to scare away bad guys, it was too much. Even with Pincus’ previous statements calling for more gun control, he had crossed the Rubicon. There was no going back.

Here’s what Pincus told FOX News: “Biden, many years ago, made a statement about going outside and firing a shotgun up in the air if somebody is trying to break into your home. What he said last Friday is really very closely related to that concept, which is if you’re going to use a gun, you don’t have to use it to kill someone, there’s other ways to somehow use a gun to defend yourself; and that is anathema to people in the training community, whether it’s law enforcement, military or civilian defensive shooting in the United States,” Pincus said, adding later, “I have to admit that Biden’s right. If somebody were trying to break into your home, and you stick a shotgun out the window and fire rounds into the air, that person is probably going to leave.”

UPDATED: Firing a shotgun into the air, shooting to wound and other dangerous ideas (substack.com)

OK, who else is still defending this asshole?

Everyone familiar with guns should know the name Gersh Kuntzman.  He was the guy who wrote an article for the NY Daily News about hot shooting an AR-15 at a range gave him PTSD and physically hurt him.

He became a laughing stock of un-serious journalists.

Well… he resurfaced.

Apparently his new shtick is being an unpaid fascist.

It became the topic of a New Yorkers article, because these people are utter human garbage.

A crime wave can be a boon to the media—dramatic content, urgent headlines. The other afternoon, in lower Manhattan, Gersh Kuntzman, the former Post and Daily News columnist, who now runs Streetsblog NYC, set out to document a crime wave of his own making. He slipped on fluorescent gloves and mounted his silver-and-lime bike, which was covered with stickers (“fuck cars”) and outfitted with a black pannier. Inside: paper towels and a blue acrylic paint pen. The goal: to restore license plates whose numbers had been intentionally obscured, a common, illegal tactic employed by drivers looking to evade the city’s speeding-ticket cameras. The restoration work was not exactly legal, either. Kuntzman held up a lanyard. “I always have my press pass,” he said, “just in case we get into a fight.”

In November, a Brooklyn lawyer had been arrested for “criminal mischief” for undefacing a plate. Inspired by the news, Kuntzman began filming similar acts of vigilantism and posting them on Twitter, along with an earworm theme song he’d written, to call attention to the problem.

This low-testosterone colostomy bag goes around ensuring people get tickets from automated traffic enforcement cameras.

I thought that traffic cameras were universally hated by everyone except cops and politicians who use them to pad budgets with fines.

As it turns out, Kuntzman loves them too despite being neither a cop nor a politician.

He’s so proud of his fuckery, he posts videos of it to Twitter.

I don't have to touch someone's car to point out that something's not right. Here's a full-on Dodge Dickmobile with an illegal cover on the back plate. This muscle car guy has lots of parking tickets (those are written by humans), but no speed-cam tickets. Curious, ain't it? pic.twitter.com/Wg8m3e5bYe

— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) January 21, 2023

Let's end our day with this firefighter (perhaps former) who doesn't even pretend to have any integrity — but my trusty paint pen will fix that. It's CRIMINAL MISCHIEF at its most mischievous! pic.twitter.com/RO0oFbVyxo

— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) January 18, 2023

This morning, I caught a pickup-truck-driving construction worker with 243 violations going back to 2013 — including scores of speeding tickets until mid-2022 (perhaps when he scratched off his plate?). Don't worry — I committed some serious CRIMINAL MISCHIEF on his behalf. pic.twitter.com/JmEblL9GUN

— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) January 17, 2023

If you saw today's story in @NewYorker about my one-man CRIMINAL MISCHIEF spree (https://t.co/5bVHIeFVKK), you'll LOVE today's entry in the canon: A Park Sloper who was obviously tired of obeying the law! pic.twitter.com/f35UqdmgZk

— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) January 16, 2023

What the fuck sort of person does this?

Going around making sure people get harassed by automated security camera systems.

This is worse than the miserable people who ratted out neighbors during covid lockdowns.

If any journalist deserves the Khashoggi treatment, it’s this piece of shit.

In California, there have been two mass shootings in nearly as many days.

The one on Half Moon Bay was carried out by a 66-year-old Asian man.

The one in Monterey Park by a 72-year-old Asian man.

What exactly the fuck is going on?

This is the absolute most unlikely demographic for a mass shooter but we had two back to back.

Something is fucky but I can’t figure it out.

Usually my tinfoil hat is working correctly but this is throwing me for a loop.

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.

Seriously, J.Kb.’s article is spot on regarding storm prep. It is entirely different in New Hampshire. My article Gas it up! was actually written before he posted and I read his article.

Different locations have to prepare differently. One of my clients is based out of Florida, they prepare for very differently than we do. Electricity is what provides them with survival in that horrible heat.

Up in the New Hampshire we did have a poor attitude towards state wide storm prep. That is to say that it use to be “if the power goes out, we’ll fix it”. The ice storm changed that policy. From spring until late fall we’ll see road crews out there trimming back trees.

I don’t know how tall the trees of Florida grow, but I’ve got some trees in my yard that are over 50 feet tall. That means that to clear the powerlines any tree that is taller than the distance to the powerline would have to be topped or felled.

Around here, most of the power outages were caused by idiots that forgot that snow is slippery and took out poles or knocked things into power lines.

When we lived in Maryland we didn’t have huge storms but we still prepared. It was just different. In Maryland the prep work was food. As soon as they heard a storm was coming the population would buy out all the stores of every last bit of food.

If we lost power during a winter storm that meant we were going to be moving to a shelter because almost nobody had real heating backup.

I’ve had power outages in most places where I’ve lived. Massive outages are few and places like New Hampshire and Florida actually do prepare for them and both do a good job.

J.Kb. If you are ever in the situation where you need a place to stay, come visit. We’ll feed you well and we can enjoy wood heat.

The FACE act was created in 1992 to be used as a tool against those protesting violently (mostly peaceful in today’s terms) against abortion clinics, but in order to make it palatable, I guess they used the all-encompassing term “reproductive health services.”

Nowadays we have clinics that also offer reproductive health services but without abortion in the menu and those have been the target of Antifa and other ultra-Left Wingers after SCOTUS reversed Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, most attacks against these clinics have been ignored by the Feds till now.

Welcome to Florida…again.

Two Florida residents were indicted by a federal grand jury for spray-painting threats on reproductive health services facilities in the state.

The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Florida, alleges that Caleb Freestone, 27, and Amber Smith-Stewart, 23, engaged in a conspiracy to prevent employees of reproductive health services facilities from providing those services. According to the indictment, as part of the conspiracy, the defendants targeted pregnancy resource facilities and vandalized those facilities with spray-painted threats. According to the indictment, Freestone and Smith-Stewart, and other co-conspirators, are alleged to have spray painted threats, including “If abortions aren’t safe than niether [sic] are you,” “YOUR TIME IS UP!!,” “WE’RE COMING for U,” and “We are everywhere,” on a reproductive health services facility in Winter Haven, Florida. The indictment further alleges that facilities in Hollywood, Florida, and Hialeah, Florida, were also targeted.

The indictment also alleges that Freestone and Smith-Stewart violated the FACE Act by using threats of force to intimidate and interfere with the employees of a reproductive health services facility in Winter Haven because those employees were providing or seeking to provide reproductive health services. The indictment further alleges that Freestone and Smith-Stewart violated the FACE Act by intentionally damaging and destroying the facility’s property because the facility provides reproductive health services.

If convicted of the offenses, Freestone and Smith-Stewart each face up to a maximum of 12 years in prison, three years of supervised release and fines of up to $350,000.

Two Defendants Indicted for Civil Rights Conspiracy and FACE Act Offenses Targeting Pregnancy Resource Centers | OPA | Department of Justice

It overflows my cup of Schadenfreude to see the tools they created to fight one side, used against them. I am actually amazed that a Federal prosecutor had the testicular fortitude to go against the undeclared amnesty emanating from D.C.

Let’s see how far will it go.

Large parts of our town are without power. We were without power off and on Monday. Everything is back up now for us but there are still 1000s of people without power in our town and still more in surrounding areas.

What does power out mean for us? Not much. We are prepared for power outages.

A few years ago an ice storm came through and took out the power over large parts of the state. The outage was so bad people were being forced from their homes. The cost was so high to the power company that they created a new policy of proactively trimming back trees that overhang power lines.

Many years ago my father called the local power company because a tree on our property was overhanging the power lines and he was afraid it would fall and take out the power lines. The power company’s answer? “When it falls and takes out the power, let us know and we’ll come restore power.”

This was the state of preventive care for power lines for many many years.

So we know that long term power outages are possible. What does it mean to us? Again, not much, we are prepared for power outages.

The thing to know is that electricity is required for many things within your house that are fueled by other means. For example, your oil burning furnace has a pump, an igniter and fans that move hot air around your home. Without electricity, your oil/gas furnace doesn’t work.

At the fram, we had a dual fuel furnace. It used both wood and oil. While we were there I think we went through about 10 gallons of fuel oil. The house was heated with wood. With electric fans to move the heat around the house.

There was a time when gas stoves were the norm. Only the fancy/rich people got electric stoves. Today electric stoves are the cheaper option and most people have electric stoves. It is also safer to provide an electric stove to a renter than to allow them to use a gas stove.

Some idiot leaves the electric on, it makes for a very hot burner. It might even destroy a burner. But that’s a $10 part replacement.

Some idiot turns on the gas but doesn’t light it and you can easily get gas concentrations high enough to ignite and burn down the building.

When we purchased the house we had an oil furnace, electric water heater, electric appliances. Over time we’ve replaced the electric stove and electric dryer with gas versions.

Having a gas stove means that we can cook, even if the power is out. The electric start doesn’t work, but we can light a gas burner with a match or lighter. No big deal. We actually have an out of gas bic long reach lighter next to the stove. The spark still works and the spark is at the end of the long neck. Turn on the gas, reach in with the lighter, pull the trigger and get sparks that light the stove.

Even before we had the gas stove, we had the ability to cook with gas. Our outdoor grill is gas powered and has a side burner. We can cook on the side burner or bake in the grill side.

Without power, our gas oven doesn’t work, which isn’t a huge issue for us.

Our primary source of heat is a wood stove in the living room. There are a couple of the cheap thermo-electric fans that sit on top and move the heat around. No power? No problem. That stove heats up most of the house.

We have Coleman gas lanterns, we have oil lamps, we have long burning candles. Long burning? Try two or three weeks. I’ve never been able to completely use up one of the candles mom makes.

For auxiliary heating I have a kerosene heater that is rated for indoor use. We also have a multi-fuel military heater that runs on fuel oil, gas, or kerosene. I would have to plumb the smoke stack, but it is certainly powerful enough to heat most of the house.

Our gas system was designed by me and installed by a professional. You do not want to mess around with gas lines.

We use two 100# propane bottles as our feed. Only one bottle is open at a time. It feeds up through a valve into a cross connect that then feeds into the regulator. The regulator then feeds the supply line to the stove and drier. If we want to upgrade the hot water, then we are prepared to do that in the future.

If the feed tank runs empty we just walk outside, shut the tank valve, shut the cross connect valve on the empty tank and turn on the valves on the full tank.

Later that week I’ll disconnect the empty tank, load it into the truck, drive to the local propane provider and get the tank filled.

Because of the price of propane and gas going up we also have a spare.

And if it gets bad, i.e both tanks run dry, I can hook up one of the little 20# tanks.

Those gas appliances give us a level of independence that electric never will.

On, we also have a generator. If power was out for an extended period of time we can pull the disconnect and power our home from the generator. That would allow us to keep the fridge and freezers at temperature. Without running the genset constantly.

The genset is powerful enough to actually drive the machine shop, but is portable as well.

There is always more to “bans” that first meets the eye. Banning gas stoves is a step towards government control of more of our lives.