Communism

The left is claiming that there is nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can rent an apartment and then using that as a talking point to push for a higher minimum wage. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, and based upon several false assumptions.

First, this is based upon the fact that housing should not be more than 30% of a person's income. They refer to the "Housing Wage" which is defined as:  an estimate of the full time hourly wage that a household must earn to afford a decent apartment at HUD’s estimated Fair Market Rent (FMR), while spending no more than 30% of income on housing costs."

Also, the term "decent apartment" is not defined. This esoteric definition allows the numbers to mean whatever the author wants it to mean.

Socialist Propaganda?

These numbers are all based upon a report that was generated by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. According to their website, "the National Low Income Housing Coalition is dedicated solely to achieving socially just public policy that assures people with the lowest incomes in the United States have affordable and decent homes."(emphasis added) In other words, they are part of the "Social Justice" movement.
In fact, the founder of the group was a woman named Cushing Dolbeare, a known communist. In 1974, she even sent a cablegram to the members of the Communist Coup in Portugal. This cablegram was a message of support from America's Socialists. Ms. Dolbeare was a speaker for a workshop titled "Housing: The National Issue" at the 1979 Democratic Agenda Conference of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.
Ms. Colbeare was also the vice President of the Independent Voters of Illinois- Independent Precinct Organization, a Socialist group of  "community organizers." This is the same group of community organizers that included Democratic Socialists of America and Committees of Correspondence member Timuel Black, David Orr, Carol Moseley Braun, one time Communist Party USA member David Canter, and Barack Obama.

Calculating the numbers

According to Housing and Urban Development, a person who lives in Orange County, Florida MSA can expect to rent a one bedroom apartment for $836, on average. Since this is an average, one could expect to find apartments that are far below this figure. In fact, according to Rent.com, apartments can be had for nearly half that amount in the Orlando MSA, with the lowest price for a one bedroom apartment coming in at $477 a month. That is just using rent.com, I am sure that there are cheaper apartments to be had.
How does HUD calculate the market rent? According to the HUD website, the rent used to calculate the FMR is the rate paid for a 40th percentile 2 bedroom apartment, meaning that 40% of the rents in the MSA will be lower than the one used to calculate the FMR. This figure is then 'adjusted' with a government formula, and the higher of the state average from the previous year or this figure is used.
Anyone who understands math can tell you two things about this method:
1 Nearly half of all apartments will rent for an amount below the FMR.
2 The FMR will be higher than the actual average, due to rounding and the fact that no FMR can be less than the state average.

Minimum Wage

A minimum wage is just that: The MINIMUM that a person will earn if hired to work in the United States. How, mathematically, can a person who is making the minimum wage expect to make enough money to afford an average apartment?
In Florida, the minimum wage is $8.05 an hour. A person making this wage would take home $1100 a  month.

Thirty percent, playing with the numbers

They claim that no one should pay more than 30% of their income towards rent. Where did the 30% number come from? Per 24 CFR Part 92.252, HUD provides the following maximum rent limits. The maximum HOME rents are the lesser of:

1. The fair market rent for existing housing for comparable units in the area as established by HUD under 24 CFR 888.111; or

2. A rent that does not exceed 30 percent of the adjusted income of a family whose annual income equals 65 percent of the median income for the area, as determined by HUD, with adjustments for number of bedrooms in the unit. The HOME rent limits provided by HUD will include average occupancy per unit and adjusted income assumptions.

Confusing, right? This 30% number is actually circular logic. Remember that adjustment HUD makes? The adjustment comes from this: The rent is adjusted to be 30% of the income that a FAMILY (not an individual) takes home, if that family were making 65% of the median. So if the median income for a working family in Orlando is more than $25,000 a year, the formula will ensure that an individual who is working a minimum wage job can never afford the calculated rent, because $25K times 65% is equal to $16,250. That number happens to be minimum wage.

The way that the math works out, there is no way for ANY minimum wage to EVER allow a person to rent an apartment using HUD's numbers, unless the minimum wage is equal to the median wage. This is the essence of communism: everyone makes the same wage and pays the same bills.

Wish list

In a recent online debate about crime, a poster stated that I should support "reasonable gun control" to eliminate crime. I asked what he considered "reasonable" and this is the list he came up with:

- No automatic or semi-automatic weapons (i.e. only manually operated actions allowed – e.g. break, block, bolt, pump or lever action)

- No external magazines or clips (these are too easily re-loaded)

- No speed strips or loaders

- No ammunition capacity greater than five rounds (give the poor deer a chance)

- No expanding (e.g. hollow-tip or soft point) or +P ammunition (hollow-tips are banned by the Geneva Convention)

- No steel core or tipped ammunition (can penetrate Law Enforcement vests)

- No lead bullets or shot (too harmful to the environment)

- No bimetallic jacketed or tracer bullets (can cause forest fires)

- No bayonet lugs

- No handgun capable of muzzle energy greater than 250 ft-lbs

- No long gun capable of muzzle energy greater than 850 ft-lbs

- No handgun with a barrel shorter than 5 inches

- No plastic or “polymer” framed firearms (can defeat metal detectors)

- No rifle or shotgun with a barrel shorter than 20 inches

- No rifle or shotgun with a pistol style grip or retractable/folding stock

- No silencers, flash suppressors, muzzle breaks, compensators or threaded barrels

- No laser or night sights

- No pistol "stabilizing braces"

- All firearms must be stored and transported unloaded

- 100% registration of all firearms (with serial number & ballistic print on file)

- A 10 business day waiting period on all firearm sales

- No concealed or open carry

- Background checks and fees for all ammunition sales or transfers

- No sales of firearms or ammunition through the mail

- No sale or possession of more than 100 rounds of a particular cartridge type

- Gun locks required for firearm transport and in homes with minors under the age of 21

- Limit gun purchases to 1 per month / 2 per year / 4 maximum

- A 80% sales tariff on all gun and ammunition sales

- No private assembly of ammunition or reloading of spent cases

- All gun owners required to perform inventory inspections every 10 days and report all missing firearms

- All gun owners required to purchase mandatory liability insurance

- Federal annual permit required for all gun ownership... includes safety training, fingerprinting, photo, drug testing and mental health evaluation

Don't let anyone tell you that they don't want your guns...

Above the law?

If a citizen harms a police dog, it is the same charge as attacking a human police officer. So, why then is it not a crime for a police officer to kill his K9 partners by leaving them locked in a hot car all day?

Wheels coming off?

In this video, we have a crowd of people who attack a police officer and the citizen who was assisting him in making an arrest. (I tried to embed it, but it wouldn't work.)

Now we have people who are attacking police nationwide. There is a pattern forming here, and it doesn't look good. If the trend gets worse, will we have calls for a national police force? Think of how quickly the TSA was formed in response to 9/11.

Obama  has been stirring emotions against the police since the Beer Summit, then the Zimmerman case, then Michael Brown, and on and on. Never let a crisis go to waste, especially if you are the one who caused it.

Government logic

Let's say that you are the government agency charged with keeping track of the economy. Let's say that the data shows that the economy is not doing so well. What do you do? Why, change the way that you 'adjust' the data, of course!
Problem solved! The economy is great again!
This works for all sorts of data: unemployment figures, global warming, inflation, why it works with nearly anything!
Now we take you back to dancing with the Hell's Kitchen Shores.

Ten years

Ten years ago this evening, I was in bed at 11 o'clock at night when my phone rang. It was a Friday. As soon as I answered the phone, I could hear it was my mother, and I could hear that she was crying. She sounded scared.

I was instantly awake.

Her words to me were, "It's your Father. They are doing CPR on him. I think it was his heart."

They got pulses back. My dad spend the next ten days in the hospital, never waking again, and then passed away.

I still miss him.

I reprint this tribute to him and to my son.

Like any boy, I loved my father. A boy’s love for his father is not the affection you show for a lover, nor is it even remotely like the love of a mother for her children. You see, boys have a need to seek the approval of their fathers. They are driven by an overwhelming need to grow into even a fraction of the man that they perceive their fathers to be. Most of all, they want to earn the respect of their Dad.

I fought in a war. I gave him grandchildren. I became the first person in my family tree to graduate from college. I have delivered babies, I have held others as the life slipped from their bodies. I have pulled dying people out of burning buildings, I jumped in a lake to save a drowning man from an alligator. When my dad had a heart attack, I was the medic who worked on him. I have filled sandbags in Missouri to save flooding homes, sifted through ruined homes looking for the dead in disasters, and fed the survivors. All of these things I did, trying to be half the man I perceived him to be. I began to teach classes on medical procedures, hoping to teach the next generation of providers. Again, for him.

Then, he was gone. I carried him to his grave, and since that time, I have carried my grief around in my heart like a lead weight, and at times it has been nearly overpowering. I asked myself countless times if I measured up.

This morning, my son came to me with 2 movie tickets and asked me if I wanted to go out with him. We spent the afternoon with each other. I am proud of my son, as he starts his new job on Monday as a firefighter. As I looked at him on the way home, I realized that my son was trying to be larger than life.

Just like his Dad.

I finally did it Dad, I am just like you.

and to you, son: You have indeed earned my respect. You have fulfilled every expectation and dream that any father has a right to hope for his son.

My son? He is now larger than life himself. He is a nurse who is in charge of one of the busiest emergency rooms in the state. A Flight nurse, he flies critical patients on fixed wing aircraft, taking them all over the world. He has become one hell of a good man.

Malware

I did an upgrade to my computer last week. I got everything up and running, all of my software installed, and all was fine.
Until this morning.

I woke up to find that I was infected with a malicious program called Startpoint. It was nasty. It high jacked my internet browser, and according to online sources, it is also a keylogger and leaves your system open to numerous exploits.

I tried quite a few tricks to rid myself of it. Following online directions didn't work- using three different anti virus programs didn't work. I tried editing the registry directly, that didn't work.

Finally, I used Malware Bytes. That did the trick. It found 6 entries in the Registry that I had missed, along with two files that reinstalled the program every time it was deleted.

Dindo Nuffin

A woman with an extensive criminal history steals a firearm and a vehicle. When apprehended by police, she escapes and fires three shots at the officers, who return fire, killing her.

The woman's family blames police for "killing another black person." Says her mother:

She might have stole a car here or there, she was a wild child. She didn't do nuthin that would deserve her to be dead.

Laws

Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:

That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country's existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.

What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. That isn't all, though. There is also the United States Code:

The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.

In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question.

So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison.

That isn't all. Congress isn't the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations:

The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2013, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 175,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over 750,000 pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12, and you read 50 pages per day, by age 53, you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws, and 28 years of reading to your quest.

Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants, and the can label says spray from 6 inches away, and you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun, and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn  Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken.

Prepping tool

There is a tool set that has a hammer drill, circular saw, jig saw, table saw, drill press, scroll saw, and a hand light. It is battery powered with an 18V battery with a 1 hour charge time, but can also run off of standard 120V wall outlets. Two batteries are included as part of the set.

All of it comes in a portable carrying case that doubles as a stainless steel work surface. Weighing in at 16Kg, it is small and portable enough to be part of a cache, or in a BOV. The entire set costs $315. Now, I am not saying that this is a replacement for your home workshop, but the fact that it is in a relatively small, lightweight case, and that it is battery powered makes it ideal for working in remote conditions where electricity isn't available.

Amazon users rated it with 4 1/2 stars. I think I am going to buy one.

I am not being compensated for this, nor do I have any relationship with the company that makes it.

Seen on the Internets...

Curious

Three days ago, I posted about communist agitators who were sponsoring and coordinating the protests in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore, and other places. These professional agitators are being sponsored, led, and funded by a person or persons that are unknown. Their stated goal is the overthrow of the US government.

Today, there comes disturbing news that the police in Baltimore were ordered to "stand down" and allow the riots to get worse and become more violent. The story has been corroborated by the Daily Mail.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. Back in November, the National Guard was told to stand down by the Missouri Governor. This allowed the riots to get worse. Not only that, but police in Ferguson were apparently ordered to back off and allow the riots in August to become worse.

The question that I ask about all of this:
Why are the police being ordered to allow protests and riots to become ever more violent? Where are these marching orders coming from?

The protesters are obviously being coordinated on a national scale, and now it seems like the police departments' orders are making things worse. Are the two related?

A person may accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, but the fact that the protesters are being coordinated on a national level is, by definition, a conspiracy. The question here is, is our government complicit in the level of violence? If so, who is issuing these orders, and why?

Here is what we know:

- It is fairly obvious that the protesters are being coordinated to stage violent uprisings on a national level.
- The stated purpose of the organizations that are sponsoring the agitators is the overthrow of the US government.
- The police and National Guard have been ordered to stand down in at least two different states. As a result of this stand down, the uprisings were more violent and destructive, and lasted longer than  they otherwise would have.

Whatever the purpose is behind this, whoever is ordering this, the implications are frightening.

Hat tip to the Bayou Renaissance Man