Paul Harrell is up first.

One thing we learn from this is that you need to hit your intended target to achieve slow-down and energy dump.  Walls can be very little protection, depending upon the choice of gun and round.  Next up, Shawn Ryan.

His presentation, along with Paul’s above, shows that an AR-15 is a bad choice for home defense if there is a possibility of hitting nearby (neighbor) homes.  Rifle rounds have a lot of penetrating ability.

Shawn’s presentation shows that personal defense rounds dump enough energy in the target, interior and exterior walls that persons who may be in other locations outside the home would be safe.

This all points to pistol caliber PDW (pistol carbines) being the safest gun to shoot in neighborhoods, since the lower muzzle velocity combined with the hollow nose and walls give enough energy to kill the intruder but not enough to cause penetration through exterior walls, while also providing the aiming of a rifle.

But the moral of the story is to hit your target.  That’s where the energy gets deposited.

T.L. Davis.

Social Security was America’s foray into socialism and it has done a great deal of good for people who are unable to work, but that was never its purpose. Social Security was a bribe to elder citizens so they would quit work and give those jobs to the younger generation, why? Because the United States, at the time, during the depression, was afraid that too many unemployed twenty and thirty-year-olds might do what they are afraid of in Middle Eastern countries now, foment rebellion and revolution.

[ … ]

Capitalism works, because it is not managed, directed or focused. It does not require a government directorate to decide for everyone what they will want or need. It is unwieldy, chaotic and funds flow to that which is needed, or captures the imagination. People want to be entertained, want to do things that interest them and the money flows to those things. But, what has happened to literature is that the big five publishers have decided to do exactly that, direct and decide for all of us what we want to read, thereby deciding what we will think, pushing their socialist ideas into our brains, or cause us to stop reading all together to escape it.

I’m not sure how many people, human beings, must be sacrificed on the alter of communism to prove that it doesn’t work, so far more than 100 million have not been enough. The nation of Venezuela’s utter fall from the wealthiest Lain American nation to the poorest hasn’t even caused a speed bump on the way to the Democratic nomination. It is no coincidence that it started in a democratic nation, communism focuses on nations they can vote themselves into, then slam the door on elections by making voting for anyone besides the ruler a crime of treason.

That’s an interesting take on social security, and I’d never heard that before.  Thanks to TL for the insight.

I do have something else to say about capitalism.  There is a difference between capitalism (as we see it in America today) and the free market.  The Biblical notion is the free market.

In today’s society, we see corporations who lay off older workers (with age discrimination made impossible to prove in court), share and rotate membership on boards of directors, with those members never having had a hand in building the company they now rule, use earnings to create PACs and lobbying to ensure that the laws and regulations are friendly to them and what they want to do while foisting the real long term cost onto someone else (I could supply a thousand examples here, not the least of which is the massive government-sponsored investments in solar power, which is a scam of mammoth proportions, producing massive amounts of toxic waste and which will cause massive problems for disposal).  Do you think fracking is pollution free?  Google the words “Fracking Tails Pennsylvania Roads” to see just what is being put into the earth and groundwater around you.  But there is money to be made, so the .gov is complicit as long as it’s what the corporations want.

There is nothing “free” about this market.  It isn’t free market.  It’s corporatism.  I don’t claim to know the solution to these problems, but a massive reduction in the size of the FedGov is in order, along with a set of laws and regulations that force corporations to pony-up for the costs of their technology so that others don’t have to bear the costs.

I’ll also say that the most Biblical model I can find has companies with public stock majority-owned by their workers, and we could add to this that it might be a good idea to have members of boards of directors made entirely of employees, not all of whom can be senior or management level.

One final thought is that the stock market is a gigantic gambling casino.  Investment is a Biblical notion, viz. The parable of the talents.  But short term speculation on stock prices is gambling.  Never say that the government doesn’t like gambling.  We are all controlled by professional gamblers.  Of course, gambling is immoral, and so is short term, minute-by-minute speculation in the stock market.

These and other reasons are why America is not blessed by God.

David Codrea.

The first thing that’s obvious is we’re not talking about one of those “white right-wing nationalists” we’re constantly being warned are the greatest threat we face. If the killer had been one, and if he had social media posts brimming with sentiments that allow “progressives” to dismiss anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a Nazi, it would be headline news. It certainly would not have taken this long to release who he was, and odds are good some of his more egregious posts would have survived, at least in screenshot form. As it is, the victims are being blamed for racism, and that’s in spite of a corporate “code of conduct” policy that is now being alleged to work every bit as well as its “security safeguards.”

If I didn’t know any better, if I was an alien from another planet and could only look at the facts to inform me, I’d readily conclude that there was a concerted effort to flush the news that’s not fit for consumption because it tells the wrong story, and the news that is allowed to be printed because it comports with the form, fit and function of the intent of the people who make these decisions.

If I didn’t know any better.

Never let an emergency go to waste.

Careful reading of the coronavirus emergency funding bill that will pass Congress soon will likely also uncover a reauthorization provision for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Just don’t expect to see any of the reforms Republicans say must be enacted to prevent future recurrences of the FBI surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign in 2016.  Most important among those reforms is a ban on bulk metadata collection derived from telephone calls by individuals within and without the country.

Democrats and republicans sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.  There’s one thing we can all agree on all of the time.  The masses need to be controlled, and that can’t happen without omniscience.  We are gods without knowledge – so “all of your information and data are belong to us.”