Tag Archives: burning hatred like a thousand suns

Article – Why Are The Feds Obsessed With Seizing These People’s Old Trucks?

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Jennifer Brinkley had a typical summer morning planned on July 15: get up, get dressed, and take her son to tennis practice. That changed when six body armor-clad Department of Homeland Security agents and local police officers showed up at her North Carolina home and blocked her driveway. They were there because of an arbitrary law promulgated 26 years ago to guard the prerogatives — and profits —of automakers and car dealers. Specifically, they were there to take Brinkley’s truck.

TL;DR version: the fedgoons nicked a bunch of peoples Land Rover Defenders because, according to the .gov, they were younger than the arbitrary 25-year-old threshold to import certain vehicles. (I know someone who, when he came to this country, was warmly welcomed at the customs port by having to surrender his motorcycle because it didnt meet US standards. Its a motorcycle…it’s inherently unsafe to begin with!)

I used to see a Defender around town here in Missoula. It was a light pink hue, so it was either a very faded red or an old military desert model. Haven’t seen it in a few years so perhaps it got taken too.

The two vehicles I’m most interested in are the Hilux, which isn’t imported to the US as that [although the US version was pretty close], and an old FJ with the impossible-to-find diesel engine. (Although somehow Adam Savage managed to get his hands on one.) However, it’s still rather annoying to think that theres a .gov agency somewhere wasting it’s time on this sort of nonsense. (As a sidebar, and interesting and equally nonsensical fiat is how diesel engines are rated… overseas the emissions standard for the diesel is how many miles you get out of a fixed amount of exhaust particulate, here its how much exhaust particulate you expel per gallon. In other words, if you have a diesel that spits out twice as much exhaust but gets fifty times the MPG it would be considered environmentally unsound, even though it is obviously tremendously more efficient and fuel efficient.)

I never much gave any thought to buying a Land Rover…I’ve heard too many bad things about British cars (and British food and guns), but if your tastes run in that direction and you find a nice Defender to tweak out into your BOV, you might wanna exercise some caution.

 

Article – DEA chief: US abandoned plan to track cars near gun shows

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency’s chief said Wednesday.

This is why some folks attend these events in either cars that are not their own, or park well away from the show and walk in. (You know who you are!)  There have been cases in the past of people jotting down the license plates of cars parked at gun shows, and I do believe there was an episode in California where cars were followed from a Nevada border gun shop into California. Its a maddening state of affairs when this sort of thing is even considered.

Tangentially, Im not a fan of license plate readers. I was aghast and appalled to discover that my beloved Montana actually has readers at the border on I-90 to scan all plates coming and going in/out of the state. This is one of those areas that I just cannot get past emotionally. On an intellectual standpoint I can tell myself that the state has a right to monitor access on its thoroughfares, that there’s nothing illegal about it, etc, etc….but on an emotional level I want to head out there at 2am with a hammer and break every one of those stupid things.

Back to the issue at hand, though….. I loves me some gun shows. And if I’m not a ‘prohibited person’, then my parking at the gun show should be absolutely no ones business but mine and the person in the space next to me whose door I scuff. In a perfect world, the person who suggested license plate monitoring of people who haven’t given any indication of breaking the law would be told to clean out his desk and be out of the building faster than he can say “If you have nothing to hide then you should……..”.

The largest gun show in the state takes place close enough to me that I usually just ride my bicycle to the gun show. However, that doesn’t mean Im cool with .gov and their increasing ‘pre-crime’ maneuvering.

Squatters

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Ugh…’real life’ has intruded lately, making my posting a little more sporadic than usual. I’m doing a sort of ‘property manager’ thing for my landlord. In exchange for a deal on the rent, I’m keeping an eye on the building, vacuuming the common areas, showing apartments to prospective tenants, etc.

The other day a tenant told me that the lock on the front door of the building was not working. Sure enough, the deadbolt would work regardless of the entry code you entered. The tenant mentioned that he had encountered people in the basement of the building where the laundry room is who did not belong there.

The basement of the apartment building is a rats warren of storage spaces, closets, not-up-to-code living spaces, and generally a great place to hide. So…grab the 870 and a flashlight and lets go look for squatters.

As it turns out, while I did not find any squatters I did find their nest:

20150121_201942A backpack, sleeping bad, spoiled food, and some personal belongings. All of which smelled horribly of body odor. In addition to the gear, there were a couple notebooks where the parasite had written about his hitchhiking and riding the rails across the US. The food labels were dated around Christmas so this guy left his gear and never came back, apparently. I’m guessing he either got tossed in jail or did something that made him leave town in a hurry.

The fact he was chronicling his journey leads me to believe he’s more of one of these 20-something hipster-homeless guys rather than some Sterno-chugging genuine homeless wretch.

So..if you’re going to go on a grand adventure, what does the parasitical traveler take with them? Theres a decent but no-name backpack, a Slumberjack sleeping bag, some clothing, a bag of small rocks, a small metal tin full of ‘slogan’ patches you’d sew on clothing, some smoking materials, snack wrappers, and not much else. Im guessing the truly valuable things like money, ID, a knife, etc, are things this guy kept on his person.

So what to do? Well, this crap goes in the dumpster. (Although I’ll keep a couple carabiners that are clipped to the pack.)

Clearly what is going on here is that someone discovered that the basement was nice, warm, and relatively unoccupied. When the temperature got too cold, they hid out in an out-of-the-way room in the basement. Rent-free. This is why we can’t have nice things.. because there is always some idiot who thinks that their need for something trumps your ownership of it. The landlord pays taxes on the building, pays for repairs, takes the financial hits of irresponsible tenants, tries to keep the place running, and some waste of skin decides that since its a cold night, perhaps that basement should be made available for those who need it.

This is the problem with the world today. Too many people figure that because they need something they are entitled to have it, at the expense of others. The most annoying case of it I see now are people who owe money on student loans and because they can’t pay them back (usually due to spending money on a course of study with no real financial future…Gender Issues In Renaissance Art, for example) decide that those loans should be ‘forgiven’. Geez, man..I’d love to have the .gov cut me a check for $50k and then have them forget about it when I claim it was predatory lending.

I’m probably feeling bitter because tax season approaches and, as a self-employed person, I get the full treatment.

Unfortunately, people like this are going to be exceptionally pervasive during any true crisis. They’ll demand that you ‘do something’ on their behalf because you have ‘all that [food/fuel/water/medicine/clothing]’ and they don’t. Never mind that their deficiencies could have been easily remedied if they’d actually done more thinking about the future and less pot-smoking down at the park with their buddies. Worse, they convince their fellow-travelers in .gov to give some legal standing to these demands for ‘fairness’.

These squatters are just symptomatic, but extremely emblematic, of the greater issue. Sadly, it is one that I don’t think I’m going to be able to resolve on any level greater than the immediate surroundings of the building I’m maintaining.

ATF and the arm brace..now with 100% more WTF

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ATF pens letter on ‘redesigning’ handgun with stabilizing brace
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/16/sig-brace-no-go-per-atf/

Short version: ATFE sez it’s an arm brace..until you put it up to your shoulder…then you have magically ‘redesigned’ it into a shoulder stock and you’re treading into NFA country.

So..according to the weasels at ATFE…how you use something can ‘redesign’ it. It’s like ATFE has singlehandedly turned every household item into some sort of Transformer. Car out of gas? You’ve redesigned it into a sculpture. Taking a wiz on a campfire? You’ve redesigned your johnson into a fire extinguisher.

This will be interesting to see play out.

Back to the gym

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Had an interesting, although brief, conversation the other day that I thought might be worth repeating.

For reasons that don’t need going into at this juncture, I have signed back on to CrossFit. After the last session the instructor asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to work on in the sessions. I said that I wanted to work on stamina and endurance so that at the end of the class I’m not laying on the floor gasping for air (which is usually how I end a class). He then asked, ‘what about outside class?’ I misinterpreted the question and thought he was inquiring how things were in general in m life. No, thats not what I meant. he said. Then it dawned on me what the real question was. “Oh. I get it. Well, I need to work on things like being able to carry heavy objects over distances..things like water and fuel cans, climb over obstacles, run distances with gear, pick up people and things and move them around…you know, your basic end-of-the-world survivability stuff.”  He nodded his head and said that was pretty much what he was shooting for as well.

That’s pretty much what made me interested in CrossFit, the notion that it wasn’t about being able to do one thing – like running, or lifting a record-setting weight – but rather that it purports to promote ‘functional fitness’. That is to say, the things you do in the real world…jumping up onto things, climbing things, running with weights, pushing/pulling things.

The way I figure it, no matter what flavor of apocalypse youre expecting, you’re going to need to do things like carry a spare tire a couple hundred yards to a vehicle, lift heavy debris off a roadway, unload a dozen 5-gallon fuel cans off a truck and then into another one, run distances while carrying stuff, etc, etc….all those physical things that are going to make the apocalypse such a pain in the butt. Thus far, CrossFit seems to support those sorts of physical tasks. So…back to CrossFit for a while.

I metnion it because it is so easy to get wrapped up in all the other sexy stuff in preparedness and ignore things like physical ability. And Im the first one to agree that it’s a lot easier and more fun to order preparedness gear off the internet and consider yourself ‘prepared’ than it is to do the really crappy, annoying, loathsome things like exercising regularly.

Admin – Is this thing done spinning yet?

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Crom as my witness, when the revolution gets here the asshats at Yahoo! web services/hosting/customer service are going to be the second group of mofos up against the wall.

Sitrep:

Dumped Yahoo! web hosting like a clingy girlfriend. Moved over to Bluehost. The migration was not as seamless as I would have hoped but I figured if I did it over the holidays maybe folks wouldnt notice.

I’ll have a much more detailed post about this nonsense later. Right now I have my fingers crossed that things are somewhat normalized around here. Loading issues should be greatly reduced or eliminated, and hopefully most folks won’t have any problems. I’m probably going to be quiet for a day or two as I climb around in here checking for leaks and whatnot.

FYI – this blog is kinda-sorta mirrored at http://commander-zero.livejournal.com/ …. If you come here and its a train wreck, check over there for a post regarding whats going on.

Obama wants the ban back

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

You know, pretty much all along I have been saying that one of the reasons Obama has been quiet on gun control is because the Democratic party is still stinging from some previous blowback. However, in a second term, where re-election is no longer an issue, he can impose whatever he wants with virtually no consequence. This is what I believed and some folks actually called me out on it saying not only was Obama not anti-gun he supported pro-gun legislation and that I was just being paranoid and dogmatic.

Please allow me to draw your attention in this direction for a moment:

President Obama tonight said he’s interested in seeing an assault weapons ban reintroduced, breaking his silence on the legislation, which has persisted in spite of at least five mass shootings during his term.

At the end of a long answer to the question, “What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?” Obama said this:

“My belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.

“But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.”

As a candidate in 2008, Obama campaigned on permanent reinstatement of the expired assault weapons ban, and Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009 indicated that the administration would lobby for a bill. But that never materialized and the White House has largely avoided talking about it.

In August, after the Sikh Temple shooting, Jay Carney said, “He does support renewing the assault weapons ban.”

But tonight is the first time during his first term that the sentiment has come from the president’s mouth.

 

Can’t make it much clearer than that. I promise you that tomorrow morning every manufacturer of AR receivers is going to feel like it’s Christmas.

Article – Colorado Hiker Who Abandoned Injured Dog Relinquishes Custody

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Just so. Saves me the trouble of finding someone to rough this guy up.

The Colorado climber criticized for abandoning his injured dog on a mountain has agreed to give up custody of the dog to one of its rescuers.

His BS excuse:

“Having trained, professional, well-equipped people saying it’s too risky to go up there to get a dog out of there, I couldn’t see the responsibility or how it would make sense for me to get untrained, unequipped, not professional people to go risk their lives to get the dog,” Ortolani said at a news conference on Sunday.

And yet, thats exactly how the dog was rescued. The rescuers retort:

“I just don’t think that his actions have shown that he is a responsible dog owner,” Scott Washburn said. “We understand that he had to leave her there. My wife and I did the same thing. But we ended up going back for her, and we went to some pretty extreme lengths to do so. In my opinion, that is not a responsible dog owner, who doesn’t really care about her.”

I can understand having to leave the dog behind. I really do. But what is utterly beyond redemption is that this guy’s efforts to retrieve his dog did not extend past a few phone calls. Dude, I could be anesthetized, lobotomized, and deep-frozen and you would still have to break my legs to keep me from gearing up, shanghaiing some friends, making every superhuman effort possible and try to retrieve. my. dog.

This isn’t over. This guy needs to be on some sorta blacklist where if anyone ever sees him with a dog he gets a ride in the back of a police car.

 

Article – Injured dog rescued from mountain, owner wants it back

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

About 13,500 feet above the ground, among the snow-capped peaks of Mount Bierstadt in Colorado, Scott Washburn and his wife, Amanda, found an abandoned, dying German shepherd dog.

Washburn and his wife this past Saturday, Aug. 11, were on a leisurely hike up Mount Bierstadt in Clear Creek County, a 14,000-foot peak near Denver that is categorized as a “14er” because, as Washburn said, “the peak is over 14,000 feet high and considered a Class 3, meaning it is not the most difficult – but it’s too difficult for a dog to be on it or an inexperienced person.

“We were hiking to this ridge and we got off course and I was a little ahead of my wife,” he said. “She called out to me and said, ‘Hey I found a dog,’ and figured I misheard her ’cause there was no way a dog was where we were.”

This is reprehensible and intolerable behavior from the owner of this dog.  This guy takes his dog where he shouldn’t have, leaves the injured dog behind, assumes it is dead and doesn’t even go back for it. Meanwhile the injured dog is slowly dying. Happy ending is that some folks got together and rescued this dog. Happier ending would be the dog not being returned to the sack of crap that abandoned it. Best ending is that sack of crap getting a beatdown to the point he has hysterical flashbacks if he ever comes near another dog.

How someone can do this is beyond me. A dog is willing to do anything for you, follow you endlessly, take tremendous abuse, and still die to protect you. You don’t abandon it at the first sign of trouble and you definitely don’t leave it for dead if there’s even a chance its still alive. When I got Nuke I made it clear that there was a contract between us…we were all part of a team and we do not abandon each other. Ever. He trusts me to take care of him and I trust him to always be there for me. Thats how it works with dogs.

Grrr…now I really wanna go to Colorado and kick this guy in the nuts.

 

ETA: Oh look, he has a Facebook account. With a picture of his dog.