Rant!

It's that time again!

First - motorcycle helmets and seat belts.

Personally, I think that wearing PPE is a good idea, but it's also a personal choice. If you are working at a job, your employer has the right to insist you wear protective equipment suitable for the job at hand, as he is the one who suffers the lawsuits and lost productivity if you get hurt.

Once you are out of the workplace, you have a God-given right to act as stupidly as you wish as long as your stupidity does not harm others.

Some states have mandatory helmet laws, others don't. Wisconsin has a law requiring people under 18 to wear a helmet on a motorcycle, but I am free to risk breaking my head open if I so desire. That's the way it should be. Ill-Annoys, amazingly, has no requirement.

I have worn a helmet every time I go out on my bike. It has saved me injury on more than one occasion, and personally, I can't ride without one as my eyes can't take the wind any more.

Due to federal overreach, every state except New Hampshire has a "seat belt" law, wherein they can give you a ticket for not buckling up. Wisconsin has a $10 fine for non-compliance, and they can pull you over for non-compliance alone. In Ill-Annoys, it's $25. Some communities (Crystal Lake, IL) have spent stolen taxpayer money to erect signs reading "PRIMARY ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY:  SEAT BELT USE". The hell with robbers and rapists - gotta make sure little Johnnie Q Public is safely belted into his carriage...

My question - if personal safety is so important to the State that people need to be pulled over and fined for not wearing a seat belt in a car, why are motorcycles still legal?

I've not worn a seat belt now for over two years, as a wimpy sort of civil disobedience. Not once have I been cited, and I've passed dozens of police cars in my weekly commutes.

It's never about "safety", and always about control, until enough people threaten them with loss of their seat in the legislature - and then, the laws get repealed. Evidently bikers have louder voices than car drivers.

Next - littering - Ill-Annoys has enacted a Draconian law about littering - toss a butt out the car window and get caught, and it could cost you $1500. Almost makes me want to take up cigarettes and toss them. Last time I walked down an Ill-Annoys road, cigarette butts were the least of the litter I saw.

Which brings me to the next rant - recycling. Our service provides two wheeled bins - one marked "Recycling Only" and the other for routine garbage. Recycling is picked up every other week, and when it is, it is dumped into the same truck with that week's garbage. So why bother separating?

The majority of the litter on my road is from those trucks - the paper and plastic blows out when the trucks move. I wonder how Lady Bird Johnson is resting in her grave knowing that the roads are littered as much now as they were back in the sixties when the big push was to "Clean Up America", and the major offender is the very people who are supposed to be the janitors?

More garbage. Wisconsin has enacted a "no electronics in the trash" law with penalties for doing so. When the garbage was picked up by humans, the garbageman could see if someone was tossing a CRT or computer, and either leave a note - or as in Cary, IL, a ticket - or leave the trash sitting there. Now, with the automated trucks, electronic devices in the wheeled bins are invisible until the bin is dumped - and that is done out of sight of the operator, and it is then too late to do anything about it.

I'll shut up now. Got an unloader for my old air compressor to fabricate.

Cowardice?

I thought Jay Leno had more backbone. Very disappointed.

Jay Leno Cancels Gun Show Appearance Under Pressure From Anti-Gun Groups

Comedian and former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno pulled out of a scheduled appearance at the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s 2015 SHOT Show in Las Vegas under pressure from leftist gun control groups.

Leno dropped out just hours after the Newtown Action Alliance began circulating a petition calling on him to cancel. Several hundred people had already bought tickets to his performance, which the NSSF was calling the “highlight” of the event.  

Just once I would like to see a big-name personality tell the lefties to "stuff it"!

It doesn't shock me

I've been saying for a long time that the "renewable energy" crowd needs to prove that their "free green energy" does not cost more to make in energy use than it could ever produce.

Shock: Google Research Team Says "Renewable Energy Just Won't Work" 

Thanks to Watts Up With That, we get a link to IEEE Spectrum, the closest thing to a general interest publication that the IEEE has (IEEE is the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers).

“At the start of RE Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”

The basic problem is that all known and predictable renewable energy technologies require more energy input in their implementation than can be paid back.

The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity. [emphasis added: SiG]

A key paragraph in the IEEE article says:

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”  [emphasis added: SiG]

In other words, TANSTAFFL.

Try and convince the liberals of this, though. They won't quit until they reduce the standard of living of the few million surviving humans to medieval levels - with people like Algore as the lords and masters...

 

Civil Disobedience

Showdown: 5,500 Washington State Gun Owners Intend to Engage in Civil Disobedience Over I-594

 

i594 Facebook page

First Connecticut, and then New York passed gun control laws this year - that many people believe are unconstitutional - turning hundreds of thousands of AR-15 owners into felons simply for not registering their guns. Now, Washington state gun owners intend to take things to a new level in response to Washington’s new gun control law. At least 5,500 are planning to openly violate the heavy-handed law, I-594, during a rally at the state capitol in Olympia on December 13th. The law goes into effect on December 4th, after the Secretary of State certifies the election results. Not a single so-called mainstream media source has mentioned the unprecedented event, even though RSVPs continue to increase every day.

This is the only way to combat these illegal laws - openly disobey them.

Now, if only New York and Connecticut would rise up similarly...

Veteran's Day

From a friend:

 

Happy Veterans Day - A holiday greetinghttp://www.dobhran.com/greetings/GRvetsday.htm
See It Now

What Is A Vet? - A holiday greetinghttp://www.dobhran.com/greetings/GRinspire295.htm
See It Now

Vietnam Terminologyhttp://www.rjsmith.com/glossary.html

Liberty Air Show!http://www.shangralafamilyfun.com/liberty.html

Military Motivational Posters!http://www.shangralafamilyfun.com/military.html

Immigration?

The Beloit Daily News has been running a series on Hispanics in Beloit. Evidently, there has been a 50% increase in Hispanics here between 2000 and 2010, while the total population only grew by about 6%.

That's fine - if these people are working to become Americans, and integrating into our society, I applaud them.

It appears that the school district of Beloit is bending over backwards to make sure most of the young people from these families will be stuck in the barrio.

One article made a big point of bilingual education. Spanish-speaking students are not only taught in their native language, they are offered classes in "formal Spanish", I guess that's akin to what us native-born had to go through as "English" class.

These students are also offered "English as a Second Language" (ESL) classes. Wouldn't do to make them become fluent and dependent on English, so they would be able to fit into our society seamlessly.

My grandparents on my Dad's side came over from Germany in the 1870's. My father-in-law's father came over around the same time. Both my Dad and my wife's Dad spoke Midwest English with a smattering of Deutsch picked up from listening to private conversations between their parents. The kids were going to be Americans, and damned if they would be allowed to speak anything but American English at home!

The liberal educators seem to think that Hispanics are too stupid to learn English by immersion.

I want to know - if I were to travel to Mexico, would my children in Mexican schools have English speaking translators so they wouldn't have to learn Spanish? Would I be able to go to most businesses in the backwoods and expect to be served by English speakers?

I think not.

One of today's articles was titled:

For some, lack of legal status can cause difficulties

Well, duh.

Good advice

What is the value of training?

Firearms instructors are periodically asked the question “Why should I take training?” The answer often comes in the form of a list of skills that are taught or the reasoning behind using a certain technique. However, these do not address the underlying fundamental reasons for taking firearms training at all.

1. You don’t know what you don’t know.
2. Much of what you know is wrong.
3. It’s good to have some of the answers to the test before taking it.

These issues relate to both technical competency with using a firearm (gun safety and marksmanship) and the ability to use the firearm correctly in a personal protection situation (legal and tactical).

 Go read. You might save yourself a slew of trouble and pain.