Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

On June 23rd Joe Biden made some extremely disturbing comments about the Second Ammendment.  They are captured in this official Whitehouse transcript: Remarks by President Biden and Attorney General Garland on Gun Crime Prevention Strategy

This particular part of the statement is very troubling because it demonstrates that Joe Biden operates under the delusion that the purpose of the Second Amendment is all about hunting.  That is a delusion that is shared by a majority of those on the political left.

For folks at home, here’s what you need to know: I’ve been at this a long time and there are things we know that work that reduce gun violence and violent crime, and things that we don’t know about. But things we know about: Background checks for purchasing a firearm are important; a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something; community policing and programs that keep neighborhoods safe and keep folks out of trouble.

This next quote contains so many dangerous falsehoods about the Second Amendment that I will discuss each one separately.

And I might add: The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.
 
Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.
 
The point is that there has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.

The statement about the Second Amendment limiting what kind of weapons we Americans can own is so egregious that even the liberal Washington Post Gives Biden Four Pinocchios for ‘False’ Cannon Claims

The Post also talked with University of Pennsylvania’s Kermit Roosevelt, who remarked, “I think what he’s saying here is that the Second Amendment was never understood to guarantee everyone the right to own all types of weapons, which I believe is true.”

However, Roosevelt noted that Biden’s statement “as phrased…sounds like the Second Amendment itself limited ownership, which is not true.”

The first half of the fact check demonstrates the bias of the Washington Post. Notice that the so called expert ends it with the phrase “which I believe is true” rather than any actual proof.  It was not until 1934 that the federal government began restricting what type of Americans can own, in direct violation of the Second Amendment.  This is chronicled in this Time Magazine article: Here’s a Timeline of the Major Gun Control Laws in America

1934 The first piece of national gun control legislation was passed on June 26, 1934. The National Firearms Act (NFA) — part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal for Crime“— was meant to curtail “gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

1938  The Federal Firearms Act (FFA) of 1938 required gun manufacturers, importers, and dealers to obtain a federal firearms license. It also defined a group of people, including convicted felons, who could not purchase guns, and mandated that gun sellers keep customer records. The FFA was repealed in 1968 by the Gun Control Act (GCA), though many of its provisions were reenacted by the GCA.

As I discussed in a previous article, the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to make sure we the people could deal with an abusive federal government, contrary the lunacy spouted by Joe Biden..  This quote from the House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution August 17, 1789 by Elbridge Gerry informs us that the Second Amendment was added specifically so the people could deal with the federal government if it became abusive to the rights of the people of the United States.  

What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Now, it must be evident, that, under this provision, together with their other powers, Congress could take such measures with respect to a militia, as to make a standing army necessary. Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. This was actually done by Great Britain at the commencement of the late revolution. They used every means in their power to prevent the establishment of an effective militia to the eastward.

It is abundantly clear from the transcripts of the drafting and ratification of the Second Amendment that the United States was never meant to have a standing army because standing armies proved to be a threat to the liberty of the people of any nation that had one.  Militias, which are meant to be made up of almost the entire population were meant to provide the defense of our local communities, States, and the United States.  Militias, made up of the people of the individual states were meant to be a barrier protecting the people of the United States from an abusive federal government.

When the Second Amendment was ratified all weapons held by the people of the United States were military weapons. The people of the United States, who make up the militia, were meant from the beginning to have the military type weapons.

The idea that the people of the United States would stand up against an abusive federal government is one of our most cherished and important founding principles.  Any president, including this illegitimate president, who would even contemplate using tanks, military aircraft, or nuclear weapons against Americans who are standing up for their rights should be impeached immediately.  Should any attempt be made by a president to use weapons of war on Americans simply standing up for their rights, that president’s legitimacy would immediately evaporate and the American people would rise up.  Most members of the American military would refuse such orders.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT — As usual, I am a little late to the party, but in January I decided to start writing on Medium in addition to keeping my own blog, as well as keeping my Monday slot here.

Medium is basically a blogging platform, but it seems to be a decent place to post from time to time because of the built-in audience.  Launched in August 2012 by Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, Medium has a pretty solid, worldwide following. You can read three free articles a month before you hit the paywall. It’s not clear how many subscribers have signed up for the $5 monthly subscription fee but estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000. 

I kind of stumbled on Medium this spring when this article by Tomas Pueyo went viral and was showing up all over my social media. I thought the article was really well done and if that was any indicator of what kind of work was on Medium, I wanted to know more. I’ve been reading there ever since, and at some point I subscribed. 

On Medium you can tailor your home screen to the types of articles you want to see by simply following  specific categories. In the beginning I set mine to coronavirus articles, culture, history, humor, environment…that kind of thing. I have tweaked it a bit since then; you can also follow tags.  I like a mix of things to appear on my home screen. There is a category for writing, but I’m getting too many articles about how to write on Medium that are weighing my feed down. I am going to take that one off. I took the coronavirus category off as well; I’m tired of reading about that.

The site hosts professional and amateur writers and so again, pick and choose. Famous names include Susan Orlean (a favorite of mine – I loved The Library Book), Nikki Haley, Senator Marco Rubio, and many others. Authors are paid by internal views and engagement: how long someone spends on your article, claps (which is similar to the “like” button), and shares. A writer on Medium earns zero revenue from readers outside the Medium subscription base; external views do not earn money, but in theory they can lead to more Medium subscribers.  It is all about exposure and building a following. 

I have concerns about spreading myself too thin but I am curious to see if I can spark up a following on Medium which would then develop into a little extra cash in my pocket, which is always a good thing. Now that I am finally retired, I know that I will have more free time for writing, and so for the moment, I think I can handle three blogging platforms. My posts at each will be quite different because the audience for each is different.

To earn money on the platform, you have to sign up for a Strip account; it is very simple and safe. Once a month your earnings are transferred into your account.

So, how much have I earned in my six months there? About enough to buy a hamburger and beer for lunch. Not a lot. You’re probably not going to make enough to quit your day job. But my revenue is growing each month, so at least it’s going in the right direction, and I’m gaining followers. Articles on Medium have “a long tail”; that is, they earn money weeks after they’ve been published because the Medium algorithm filters them back around to land on someone’s homepage depending on their interests. For example, logging on to Medium right now, I have a selection of articles from today on back about four weeks.

I’m curious if any of you are Medium readers? If not, check the site out and let me know honestly what you think about it. Like I said, you get three free articles per month. 

Gang temple in 2016 on Chicago’s South Side

By John Ruberry

Last week President Joe Biden and attorney general Merrick Garland announced the latest get-tough on illegal gun sales effort.

Unless I missed it, there was no mention from either men of the major underlying reason for most murders in big cities such as Chicago: out of control street gangs.

While it’s America’s third-largest city Chicago, with about 2.7 residents, has more gang members than any other–about 100,000

I’m having a heck of a time finding recent statistics on the percentage of shootings in Chicago that are gang-related–so my guess is that they are no longer being tabulated. Perhaps that has something to do with the monumentally stupid deciscion by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to eliminate Chicago’s gang crimes unit in 2012. His successor, leftist ideologue Lori Lightfoot, is unlikely to bring it back. Fortunately for decent Chicagoans there are less than two years left in her term.

However, while speaking of Chicago’s gang culture in 2015, then-Chicago Police superintendant Garry McCarthy said, “It’s very frustrating to know that it’s like seven percent of the population causes 80% of the violent crime.”

What about the shootings?

“Eighty-three percent of the shooting victims in Chicago are black,” Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery said on his Flannery Fired Up show this weekend, “and about 96 percent are black and brown.” Of course not all shooting victims are gang members. Some are small children.

With such a small population committing so many violent crimes, it’s pretty easy to determine the most-direct way to attack violent crime in Chicago and other big cities. But big city mayors, all of whom are Democrats, don’t seem to be spoiling for this necessary fight against street gangs.

In Chicago it’s worse. Chicago magazine, in a 2011 article that has been sadly overlooked, “Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance,” exposed several job-fair type meetings between aldermanic candidates and people representing street gangs. The messsage the organizer of those meetings, Hal Baskin, a candidate for the City Council that year and a former gang leader who died in 2018, received was clear to him. “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”

Gangs not only are part of the criminal culture of Chicago, but they are part of the political one as well. Which partly explains why politicians in Chicago regulary decry “gun violence” but not gang violence. Gangs and politics go back decades, including the time when Chicago was overwhelmingly white. While not a gang in the modern sense, the Hamburg Athletic Club, which did not peddle drugs, was involved in politics. The “Hamburgers” were blamed for some of the violence of the bloody 1919 Race Riot in Chicago, part of the tragic “Red Summer” that year. Three years after the riot future Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was the president of the Hamburg Athletic Club. 

In 1984 while running for president, Jesse Jackson publicly thanked the infamous El Rukn gang for their help in a voter registration drive. The gang’s founder, Jeff Fort, is now an inmate at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, is serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering schemes that involved the El Rukns. 

In the 1990s the Gangster Disciples gang, which was started by Larry Hoover, now a lifer at the supermax, founded a political organization, 21st Century V.O.T.E. They were organizing a national gang summit at the Congress Hotel in Chicago, where I was working at the time. Man oh man, that was a wretched experience. Oh, Al Sharpton was there. Isn’t that special!

Back to 2011:

According to that Chicago magazine article there were similar gang-pol gatherings before 2011. 

I have no proof but I suspect such meetings still occur. After all we are discussing Chicago, one of the most corrupt cities in America. 

Chicago’s aldermen are notoriously crooked, since 1973 over thirty members have been sentenced to federal prison. Do the math, that’s one “public official” locked away every 18 months.

So, how many Chicago public figures have ties, however casual, with gangs? We’ll probably never know. 

One current Chicago alderman who sees the truth on gangs is Raymond Lopez of the Southwest Side’s 15th Ward. “If you really want to get to what is at the heart of a lot of this [the violence], it is gangs, and it is the borderline collapse of the family unit in many of our neighborhoods,” Lopez told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “Lightfoot] has avoided calling out gangs in our community as a source of violence in our city.”

In a Tweet, Lopez offered indirect support to the “broken windows” theory of policing. Big time criminals also commit petty crimes. “In less than 24 hours, a new gang ‘family’ moved onto a block, they immediately opened a fire hydrant after settling in, and just moments ago took to shooting at a passing vehicle.” Lopez Tweeted two weeks ago. “The property owner can expect a call from me tomorrow. I want them gone. Now!”

Instead of “defunding the police” the far-left is now parsing their words, calling their approach “reimagining the police.” I’m calling for reimagining law enforcement. Federal authorities, to crush the gangs that have destroyed American cities, they need to aggressively utilize wiretaps, informants, and offering those who testify against gangs participation in the witness protection program.

Street gangs nation wide need to be neutered by the feds. Just like they did to the mafia.

It would take many years for such a crackdown to succeed but that should take care of the urban gun violence problem.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The fourth weekend in June is always Field Day weekend for us Amateur Radio operators.  An estimated 40,000 of us dedicated operators will be gathering in parks. on remote hilltops, and other locations where no facilities exist, to practice emergency communications.  We will bring everything we need to communicate with fellow Amateur Radio operators all across North America, and all across the world, under very adverse conditions. 

We will operate out of temporary shelters, which include camping trailers and tents.  All of our equipment will be powered by portable generators, car batteries, and solar panels.  Our antennas will consist mostly of wires supported by ropes which are held up by trees. All of our radio equipment is portable, consisting mostly of specially designed high frequency transceivers, which have a power output of 100 watts. With that setup the club I belong to will make in the neighborhood of 2000 contacts in a 24 hour period.  The contacts will be spread out all across the world with a majority of them all across North America.

We Amateur Radio operators take Field Day very seriously because emergency commutations is at absolute center of Amateur Radio. Ir is what we do best.  Whenever there is a major disaster, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, the only communication into and out of the affected area is through Amateur Radio.  That is because of the nature of our equipment, which does not rely on any infrastructure, and our expertise.  Throughout the year Amateur Radio operators practice and hone their emergency communications skills.  Field Day is just the largest of many practice sessions we take part in year round.

To make things more fun Field Day is also a contest.  All contacts are directly between two stations only.   That is the way Amateur Radio is.  We log every contact we make and submit our logs, which are recorded using logging software on laptops.  During each contact there is certain information we must exchange with the other station. This simulates emergency messages we handle during a disaster such as supplies needed.  Field Day contest scores are posted by the organizing organization, the Amateur Radio Relay League, in their magazine called QST and on their website WWW.ARRL.ORG.  There are serious bragging rights at stake.

Field Day is also very much a social event.  Amateur Radio clubs usually organize all of the preparations and activities at each individual  location.  Club members and their families gather to socialize along with all of the radio related activities. The club I belong to, the Eastern Connecticut Amateur Radio Association really out does itself when it comes to the socializing side of Field Day, along with the more serious stuff.   We have a huge potluck supper Saturday evening. There are always people gathered around to talk and enjoy each others company.  I always brew a batch of beer for Field Day and share it with everyone.

Here is a map to all of the Field Day sites all across the US and Canada.  The one I will be at is in Thompson Connecticut, which us at the northeastern corner of the State.  It is listed under the call KZ1M.  ECARA will have six complete stations set up.  If  you are in the neighborhood please stop by.  We are open to the public.