Safety fail

How NOT to test your laser...

Correlation

This post began as an analysis to show that there was no correlation between gun ownership rates and murder rates. Instead, I found a strong correlation between race and murder rates. Let me begin by showing the data for the most dangerous cities:

From neighborhood scout, the 20 US cities with the highest murder rates:

1 East Saint Louis, IL. The city's population is 97.4% black. In 2014 the murder rate of city of East St. Louis was higher than that of Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world.

2 Chester, PA This city had a Republican mayor until 2011. The city's population is 74% black.

3 St Louis, MO This city's population is 46% black.

4 Gary, IN This city's population is 85% black.

5 Detroit, MI This city's population is 83% black.

6 Camden, NJ This city's population is 48% black.

7 New Orleans, LA This city's population is 60% black.

8 Riviera Beach, FL This city's population is 67% black.

9 Trenton, NJ This city's population is 52% black.

10 Wilmington, DE This city's population is 58% black.

11 Jackson, MS This city's population is 79% black.

12 Harrisburg, PA This city's population is 52% black.

13 Baltimore, MD This city's population is 63% black.

14 Newark, NJ  This city's population is 52% black.

15 Petersburg, VA This city's population is 79% black.

16 Pine Bluff, AR This city's population is 75% black.

17 Rocky Mount, NC This city's population is 61% black.

18 Flint, MI This city's population is 53% black.

19 Bridgeton, NJ This city's population is 36% black.

20 Harvey, IL This city's population is 75% black.


The US population is approximately 12.6% black. Each and every one of the 20 most murder prone cities in the country have a black population that is at least three times higher than that, and more often than not, five times higher. Two questions immediately come to mind:

1 If Black Lives Matter really believed that Black Lives Matter, then why aren't they trying to find the cause of this?

2 What is causing such a strong correlation between black population density and murder?

Can't fake it

The Democrats, in a transparent attempt to appear patriotic, failed miserably when they displayed images of the Russian Navy at their convention.

Or maybe this was a picture of the Russians looking for Hillary's emails...

Special rights for Special People

As George Orwell said, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." This is especially true when it comes to the enforcement of our laws. Many in this country were upset when Hillary Clinton got a pass from the Director of the FBI after violating the law with regards to her email server and the classified information that she put on there. I don't understand why people were surprised. After all, the rich, famous, powerful, and well connected have been getting away with it for years.

During my recent travels, I ran into a guy in New York City who was politically well connected. He had a license plate that began with 1SP., and was followed by a two digit number. He began telling me that the state police union had a series of special plates made, and only available through Hamilton county in New York. He claimed that this plate was given to "friends" of the police union, and the lower the number was that followed the 1SP, the more important you were to the cops. He said that this plate routinely gets him out of traffic and parking tickets.

This sounded like a lload of BS to me, so I activated my Google skills. What I found was that handing out special plate numbers is a common practice in New York. and I quote:

To some recipients, special license plates issued by the Saratoga County clerk are a symbol of county pride. For others, they are an inherited treasure passed on by a family member or loved one.
For many who have them — a list that ranges from county workers to state Supreme Court judges — an unwritten rule is that a lower number may indicate a special driver.
Indeed, an examination of the recipients of the special plates, which carry an "SP" prefix, shows they are coveted by a select group of government employees and elected officials, including judges, prosecutors, town supervisors, attorneys and political party leaders. The spouses and children of those people are also among those, estimated to be in the hundreds, who have the plates.

Now the SP prefix goes to Saratoga County. The 1SP prefix, which I can find little about, belongs to the State Police. This is how things are done there, from Concealed Weapons Permits to License plates, corruption and special favors rule the day.

They claim it is for "county pride" but I am sure there are not that many people who believe that. This is a way of announcing to the police that you are politically well connected and should receive special treatment.

Missing

Posting here has been sparse over the past month.

On the morning of June 25, I left the country on a week-long cruise to Honduras, the Caymans, and Mexico, and then I went to New York City to visit some friends. The posts that were here in the meantime were typed weeks ago. I just don't like broadcasting the fact that my home is empty.

While I was in NYC, we stayed at a hotel in Hell's Kitchen, blocks from Times Square. While we were there, we found ourselves in the middle of two different BLM protests. After several days of that, we decided that it was in our best interest to head for safe harbor. Unarmed, thanks to the fact that we were in NYC, and hearing about protesters blocking highways, we made the decision to head for our alternate BOL in Maine, and stayed there for a week. It was nice to get in some fishing.

By the time we left for home, the protests had died down, and we left for home. A 4100 mile road trip, preceded by a 2200 mile cruise means that I traveled 6300 miles this summer.

Blogiversary

This blog is 9 years old today.

My recommendation

Since the anti-gun fix is in, you should probably begin planning for the inevitable now:


Here, use your own furnace to melt aluminum:






Then, you can use styrofoam molds to make the weapon:






Then, buy a CNC machine for $1500.


I am guessing that you can make 4 or 5 firearms a day.

No funding, no study

I believe that I am immune to Chickenpox, even though my doctors all disagree. Why?

When I was a child, my mother deliberately exposed me to other children who had it, in an attempt to have me get the illness, and then be immune to it. I didn't get it.

Since then, I have been directly caring for at least 7 different people who had chickenpox, and I didn't get it. Working in the healthcare industry for over 22 years, I had multiple employers test me to see if I had developed antibodies to the virus, and I had not. So, they insisted that I get the vaccine.

I have had the vaccine no fewer than 5 times in my life. I still do not develop antibodies, and I still have never caught the illness. What do doctors say about this?

Adults who have no demonstrable VZV antibodies after 3 doses of vaccine must be presumed to remain susceptible to varicella. There are no data on vaccination with more than 3 doses.

Now, I know why there is no data. The reason for this is that fewer than 1 in 100,000 adults fail to seroconvert after 3 doses. There is just no money to be made in doing a study of such a small population. The reason that I bring this up is to remind everyone that there is much that we we don't know about our universe, and unless there is money to be made or some other compelling reason, we likely will never investigate it.

The good news here for me means that I will likely never have shingles, either.

Florida numbers

So the anti gun forces are again claiming that firearm ownership is declining. They are basing this on a survey where 1000 people were asked if they have guns in their home. Bayou Renaissance Man thinks they are incorrect, and I agree with his assessment.

On March 20th of this year, there were 1,529,132 concealed weapons permits in the state of Florida. There are now 1,598,213. That is an increase of 69,081 in three months. That is an annual increase of 18%. For the previous 12 month period (February 2015 through February 2016), there was a 20 percent increase in concealed weapons permits in the state. In fact, the number of permits has been increasing for decades.

Florida now has one concealed weapons permitee for each 10.1 adults. That is an all time high, and at the current rate, the number of permitted persons will exceed 1.75 million before the next presidential inauguration.