Self-defense Is Legal in Michigan

You can never be sure today. Homeowner justified in fatal shooting of armed intruder, Kent County prosecutor says

A Kent County homeowner who traded gunfire with an intruder trying to steal his truck keys, killing the man, was justified in using deadly force, prosecutors have ruled.

Kent County Prosecutor Christopher Becker issued a ruling Tuesday, May 3 on the March 30 shooting at a Byron Township home on 108th Street just east of Wilson Avenue.

One month to make that determination is pretty good. Some DAs hold out for months hoping to charge the defender with something. (Those DAs HATE self-defense.)

Self-defense is a human-right. And it might be your right in Michigan.

How Is That Bail Reform Working Out?

The cops know he's a danger; there is nothing they can do about it. Man released after elderly, cop assault, tried to shove NYC commuter.

A “ticking time bomb” accused of assaulting an elderly man and two cops Monday and then released without bail was arrested again Friday when he tried to shove a Brooklyn straphanger onto the subway tracks — in what critics ripped as another case of junk justice in the Big Apple.

Tell me again how I should rely on The System™ to ensure my safety.

“The guy is literally a ticking time bomb. His behavior continues to spiral out of control. He is clearly an untreated, mentally ill individual in the transit system. Releasing him back to the streets puts New Yorkers and even cops in danger,” a law enforcement source told The Post.

The source added that “It’s like these judges just don’t care.”

They don't care about your safety. They care about being seen as Social Justice Warriors. Or something. But not about your safety.

Keeping dangerous, mentally ill people off the streets would be unfair to them. Leaving them on the streets is unfair to the people they injure.

Sisters

I've been continuing to explore the world of instrumental guitar. Some guitarists I had heard of, some I have heard without knowing who they are, and some are new to me.

Steve Vai started his career working for Frank Zappa. First as a transcriptionist, and then as a guitarist. He went on to have a solo career, and tour and record with a number of people including David Lee Roth, Whitesnake, Alice Cooper and more. I think that I probably heard Steve Via on one of those recordings without knowing who he was. His solo work is new-to-me.

This is "Sisters" by Steve Vai from his 1990 album Passion and Warfare.

Canada — It Is Cheaper to Kill The Poor, Than to Treat Their Illnesses

And they won't help them live, but dying is free. (Do you know how expensive health care can be?) Why is Canada euthanising the poor? | The Spectator

It started small. Terminal illness, where the end is foreseeable and close. That changed.

It only took five years for the proverbial slope to come into view, when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free.

Now apparently doctors and administrators are pushing people to die. Threatening them with bankruptcy. And leaving them to live in horrible conditions.

A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law. To no effect: for once, the government found it convenient to ignore these otherwise impeccably progressive groups.

Life stopped being sacred to these people a long way back.

Under the present government, disabled Canadians got $600 in additional financial assistance during Covid; university students got $5,000.

Priorities.

There is more. It isn't good. And there are changes coming to Canada's law. They just don't appear to be for the better. (Hat tip to EBL.)

Mitsubishi Mazda CX-30 Extended Test Drive

The tl:dr version. I hate it, and all its bells & whistles. And it is too small. (The update shows how little I paid attention to it.)

I'm sure some of this, perhaps most of this, is mandated by the Traffic Safety people, or whoever controls the stuff like airbags and other "safety" stuff. It has gone too far. I'm also sure that they don't care about safety as much as making cars too expensive for the average person to drive. Now on to the review.

Due to a fender bender, my vehicle was in the shop, and so I had what amounts to an "extended test-drive" in a Mitsubishi Mazda CX-30. I honestly don't know how you can call a vehicle this small an SUV, but then that goes for a lot of things.

OK, this is not part of the review, because I would never buy this vehicle because of this. I wouldn't even take it for a test drive. It is just too small for me. Not just because I am fat (I am), but because of my height. A don't think a skinny 6-foot-tall person would be comfortable in this vehicle. (I want to call it a car, not an SUV because that is how it seemed to me.) About every 3rd time I get into it, I hit my head on the roof frame by the door, because the roof really isn't high enough. But that isn't what I hate about the vehicle; it was designed for short people. And you REALLY don't want to try to fit an adult into the back seat. At least not a 6-ft-tall adult.

What follows is what I actually hate.

In order to drive the vehicle, you need to be wearing the seat-belt. My driveway is quite long. I have a mailbox that lets me know when someone has deposited something. So if I see that I have mail, I usually jump out of the car to get the mail. When I get back in, I have to fasten the seat-belt. This is to drive the vehicle down my own driveway. If you are not wearing the seat-belt, it will not disengage the parking break.

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is automatic. One example: Instead of a switch to turn the passenger seat airbag on and off, there are pressure sensors in the seat to gauge the weight of who is sitting there. That will never go bad. That is just one example.

It warns you, with an alarm, if there is something next to you when you turn on the turn signal. There is a place where I make a right turn, almost every day, where there is a guard rail next to me. I know the guard rail is there. There is a river, on the other side of that rail. I also know the river is there. I am not planning an changing lanes; I am planning on turning right onto the bridge across the river. It was annoying on the first day. After a week, I wanted to yank the sensor out.

Like I said, I'm sure some of this is mandated by the federal .gov and whatever part of the bureaucracy wants to make cars too expensive for the average person. (They are succeeding.) It is a level of insanity that is not to be believed.

I know the whole keyless entry system is standard today. It would be nice if it was secure, but that has been shown to not be the case. Also not part of the review, because "everyone is doing it. And it is nice that the car will unlock if you walk up to it.

One thing I did like, though I did not do a lot of highway driving during the time in question. The fact that cruise control will adjust to the speed of the vehicle in front of you. The first time it happened it took me a bit by surprise, but I thought that was a good idea. Not sure how long that will last, or what would happen if the front of the vehicle was covered with snow, ice, and winter crud.

One thing I really liked, is that the vehicle did NOT shut itself off every time you stopped. Whoever designed that "let's stress the starter and the battery about 1000 times more than we ever have" system, never spent the winter in Chicago or Minneapolis. Batteries always start in the cold right? They never die, and so this system won't leave you stranded at every stop sign.

That's my opinion. YMMV.

Tuesday Links - 3 May

Irons In The Fire - How bad is our major media?

Ah yes, the problem is there's nothing really important, and Psaki is so good, that reporting on Biden is boring. Especially when you're a bunch of ass-kissing Democrat hacks with bylines of whom almost none will actually challenge Biden or Psaki; those who do, you consider troublemakers.

Samizdata - My dear friends on the Left: what happened to you?

Back then, you were the ones demanding to be heard, saying the things the establishment didn’t want to hear, speaking truth to power. Today the phrase “free speech” terrifies you, and you offer a dozen excuses why we’re better off muzzled and restrained by those in power, like some kind of pet.

Drake's Place - Pelosi, Schiff and other dems make surprise visit to Ukraine.

Dems complained and fought the price of Trump's border wall but there's no limit to the financial and military aid we can provide to Ukraine? What a crock.

Lone Star Parson - Clash of Christianities - Why Europe Cannot Understand Russia

Moscow regards itself – as Byzantium – as a unique symphony between spiritual and temporal powers. Leaving aside the rightness or otherwise of such a vision, I'm sympathetic.

Da Tech Guy - Democrats’ attacks on what they call “disinformation” have their roots in Barack Obama’s Truth Squad

While calling public figures “Orwellian” goes back decades, usually it’s an exaggeration.

Not so with the new Misinformation and Disinformation Governance Board, whose existence was revealed by the soulless hack Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security. The board’s executive director is Nina Jankowicz, a misinformationist.

SiGraybeard - It's May Day - Also Called Victims of Communism Day

For all of my adult life, whenever people feel comfortable talking about such things, there's an alarming tendency for people who have grown up in the freedom and plenty of the 20th century United States to advocate communism. If any of us would say something like, "but that never works; it has been tried over and over and it has never worked even once," that's when they give the most sorry cliche' answer in all of history and say whatever country we bring up, "just never did it right," "that's not real communism," or something just as lame.

Dick Jones at Shooting Sports USA - Bill Hickok’s Carry Gun

During a relatively short period, the defensive pistol evolved from a weather sensitive, unreliable flintlock single-shot to a multiple-shot, cartridge-firing revolver—a giant leap in technology. During our time, the defensive and concealable defensive pistol has evolved from a five-shot revolver to a lightweight striker-fired pistol with a capacity of 10 to 12 shots.

Vlad Tepes - Rolling Thunder creator, Neil, offers some remarks during the speeches at Saturday’s event in Ottawa

Neil spoke a few times between other Veterans who came to explain why this event took place.

The Other McCain - Back Where She Belongs. Say hello to Kathleen Kane.

In case you didn’t know it, Kane was once a “rising star” of the Democratic Party after being elected as Pennsylvania’s first female attorney general in 2012. In her victory speech, Kane boasted that her election had “expanded the boundaries for women in Pennsylvania.”

As it turned out, these expanded boundaries would include getting locked up and disbarred.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - How are Police Using Drones? Some statistics about drone usage nationwide, and a report out of Minnesota.

The report shows that the vast majority of the drone deployments are not used for the public safety disasters that so many departments use to justify drone use. Rather, almost half (506) were just for the purpose of “training officers.” Other uses included information collection based on reasonable suspicion of unspecified crimes (185), requests from other government agencies unrelated to law enforcement (41), road crash investigation (39), and preparation for and monitoring of public events (6 and 12, respectively). There were zero deployments to counter the risk of terrorism.

Self-defense in Killadelphia

If "The System" can't maintain order, people will defend themselves. A man who was being robbed by two Norristown teens killed them in self-defense, prosecutors said

In Philadelphia, the system is failing to provide much in the way of order.

Two Norristown teens who attempted to rob a man late Friday died after their intended victim shot them with a gun he was licensed to carry, prosecutors said Saturday.

Here's a link to The Other McCain's most recent take on Killadelphia.

Liars Gonna Lie

I'm shocked that a Democratic politician from (just outside of) Chicago would engage in corrupt and underhanded practices. Emails Surface More Evidence Clinton Paid For Anti-Trump Disinformation

Park Ridge, Illinois is not Chicago, but it is also not The Land Beyond O'Hare. In fact, you basically drive past the southern edge of Park Ridge to get from O'Hare to the Loop in Chicago.

Newly published internal emails reveal that before Fusion GPS hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump, the opposition-research firm began peddling several of the same Russia collusion lies that the former MI6 agent would later detail in the Steele dossier. This fact highlights a significant aspect of the Spygate scandal that deserves further focus and condemnation: Democrats’ outrageous exploitation of intelligence credentials and connections to launder scurrilous accusations against a political enemy.

Go read the whole thing. (Hat tip to Lucianne.)

Revenge Is Also a Paint Scheme

This is funny. GREY AREA I was trolled by furious neighbours for painting my building ‘boring’ grey – so decided to get revenge in perfect way

He got grief for painting his building grey. A hand written note and attacks on social media. So he painted the bottom story with purple dots, and unsmiling faces.

The response has been classic. Here's a social media post as an example.

One wrote: "Ah yes... looks like Andy has chosen to paint it a lovely pattern [of] 'mind your own f***ing business' – well played Andy, I bet they'll love it."

He's probably going to paint the lower story in gray. (In the UK that is the ground floor, not the first floor.)

Here's a link to a classic quote - "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

Handshake With Hell

Arch Enemy, a Swedish Melodeath band with a Canadian lead singer, released a single the first week in February. It is from an upcoming album. Nothing too unusual about that, but the singer, Alissa White-Gluz is changing it up. Shifting from her signature Death Metal, Death Growl to her normal singing voice, and back. Taking a page out of Jinjer's book? Maybe. Alissa White-Gluz has been known to sing in her regular voice with other groups.

And the song also features stunning guitar work by the dual-lead guitarists, Michael Amott and Jeff Loomis.

This song is "Handshake With Hell" by Arch Enemy from their July 2022 album Deceivers.

"Control of Film, Radio, Theater, and the Press"

If it was created in 2022, this ministry would have also wanted to control social media. Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment | Holocaust Encyclopedia

That was the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (RMVP), under Joseph Goebbels, of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. It was established in 1933.

Goebbels soon envisioned an empire that would control schools, universities, film, radio, and propaganda. “The national education of the German people,” he wrote, “will be placed in my hands.”

Sounds oddly familiar somehow. A government bent on controlling all information that the population is allowed to have. What they are allowed to say. What they are allowed to think.

How can an American Administration be creating a Ministry for Information? Or Disinformation, or the Ministry of Truth or whatever they are calling it.

Here's the article that got me thinking about history and censorship and government control of information. YouTube U-Turn: Censors Strike Again for No Good Reason, Just as Inexplicably Reverse Course.

Now YouTube isn't the government, of course, but with Elon Musk and Twitter, the Left sees their monopolistic control of social media slipping away. So they are going to implement the time-tested method, namely Government jackboots.

YouTube’s censors have struck again, removing a podcast discussing election integrity that it claims violates its “misinformation policy.”

The podcast, hosted by Jacob Kersey, was an interview of me at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, in February 2021 and had been on YouTube for more than a year before it was suddenly taken down.

YouTube never responded to Kersey’s appeal of the ban, but a day after Douglas Blair wrote about the censorship in The Daily Signal, the video suddenly reappeared on the website. Kersey says he received no explanation from YouTube for its actions.

The censors never have to explain themselves. They just say, "This you can know," and "This you may not know."

You should read the rest.

What Should a Woman Do If a Man Breaks Into Her Home?

Make tea? SAPD: San Antonio woman kills man who broke into her home

A woman is home with three children. What exactly would the gun-haters want her to do under these circumstances?

Police said the unidentified man broke into the back of the home in the 600 block of Kashmuir Place just before 10 p.m. while the woman and her three children were inside.

After hearing the man in the house, the woman pulled out a gun and shot the intruder in the chest, officials at the scene said.

He died at the scene.

Self-defense is a human-right. The police are still investigating, but this didn't happen in New Jersey.

Don't You Dare Question the Ruling Party

How Dare You! Biden’s Disinformation Chief Nina Jankowicz: Online Mockery of Kamala Harris a Threat to Democracy and National Security

Just because Kamala H. can't string a coherent sentence together, even with the help of speech writers, is no call to mock her. How Dare You!

How Is That Bail Reform Working Out?

Keeping violent criminals in jail would be UNFAIR. Bronx man seen in video beating motorist is set free: DA

A Bronx man who was caught on video brutally beating up a motorist with what appeared to be knuckle-dusters after a car crash was given only misdemeanor charges and let go under new bail laws, the Post has learned.

Not even video evidence is good enough to keep him in jail. He was set free. Because reasons. Because "Shut Up!" they explained.

New York State’s bail reforms banned cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. The accused ultimately faced misdemeanor charges of assault, menacing and possession of a weapon, the complaint showed.

The DA’s office didn’t explain the decision why Guerrero didn’t face the higher criminal charge.

Because charging him with the felony he is on video committing would also be unfair. Or something.

Expecting The System™ to keep you safe is a losing bet. The Criminal Justice System in not interested in your safety. Not when it is controlled by Progressive Democrats. Safety is Racist. (I'm sure they feel that way!)

Why would anyone want to live in New York City? Or the state, for that matter?

Drone Footage of Tornado in Andover, KS

People who've never been through a tornado have little appreciation for the power. That is not a trailer park being destroyed in the video; the houses are like what you would find in a typical suburban neighborhood. Click the link for the video. It is only 2 minutes and change.

Reed Timmer on Twitter:

Highest-res drone footage of the Andover, KS #tornado which has received a preliminary rating of EF3. Note how the tornado propagates via vortex dynamics and likely terrain. Incredibly, no lives were lost by this tornado https://t.co/FJDBH8TAv6 / Twitter: drone footage of the Andover, KS #tornado

From the National Weather Service we get the definition for The Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF Scale). Here's the definition for level 3.

Severe damage. Roofs and some walls torn from well- constructed houses; trains overturned; most trees in forested area uprooted; heavy cars lifted and thrown.

In the EF scale, class 3 winds are in the range of 136 MPH to 165 MPH.

An EF5 tornado would be described as follows.

Incredible damage. Strong frame houses lifted off foundations, carried considerable distances, and disintegrated; auto-sized missiles airborne for several hundred feet or more; trees debarked.

Philadelphia — Murder Capital of America

Philadelphia is truly becoming Killadelphia, thanks to the DA. Soros-backed Philadelphia DA sees homicides hit record levels

As measured by per-capita homicide rates, Philadelphia is now the deadliest city among the top 10 largest cities in America.

Krasner has been an unmitigated disaster for minorities in Philadelphia — and for black people, in particular. During his time in office, the overwhelming majority of the homicide victims in Philadelphia have been black. If the Soros-backed Krasner believes that black lives matter, the record-shattering number of black lives lost during his time in office reveals otherwise.

As another non-prosecuting attorney, he has been sending gun crimes to a program called Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD). It seems to be lacking in the Rehabilitation area.

An example of the horrors associated with Krasner’s policies is the oft-cited story of Maalik Jackson-Wallace. In less than a month, Jackson-Wallace was arrested three times on gun possession charges. The first two times, he escaped any jail time because of Krasner’s ARD program. By the third time, he was charged with murder for the death of a 26-year-old man. Had Jackson-Wallace been locked up, the 26-year-old would still be alive.

They keep releasing criminals until they actually kill someone. Not just in Philadelphia, of course.

As for the adverse impact on minorities...

Overall, 94% of all shooting victims have been nonwhite Philadelphians: 85% black and 9% Hispanic. Yet, these same groups only comprise about 56% of the city’s population: 42% black and 14% Hispanic.

So if these policies are hard on minorities, who exactly who is in favor of them and why? (Hat tip to Lawrence Person.)

What's the Opposite of Diversity? University

People are beginning to push back against the Liberal Orthodoxy, however. She came out as conservative at Harvard. It went better than expected. | The College Fix

Carine Hajjar dealt with ideological homogeneity at Harvard University for three-and-a-half years mostly in silence, but in the spring semester of her senior year, she finally came out as conservative. She said she has no regrets.

Brave woman.

“People are just afraid. It’s not that there are necessarily rules against saying conservative things; there’s just a social structure and an unspoken speech code that makes people really scared to express their views,” she said.

Scared to express differing views on a college campus. Color me shocked.

When asked about what other conservative students who might be in similar situations of being surrounded by liberalism and self-censoring their views could do, Hajjar said don’t try to “own the libs.”

Instead, “be respectful, measured, and approach these conversations gradually and very respectfully,” being sure not to just shy away from conversation, she said.

Read the whole thing. I think Carine Hajjar is going to be a name to remember.

I'm Not Sure Why I'm Shocked By This

I'm sure she always thought of herself as a modern, independent woman. How I learned to mow a lawn for the first time (in my 40s) | The Seattle Times

The author of that article had to learn a lot of things since getting divorced, because she can't just assume that "the guy in her life" will take care of it.

Hear me out: For the first half of my life, I lived in apartments, where containers of lush flowers magically appeared, tended by maintenance teams I never saw. I never even thought about it. For the second half of my life, I had a partner who mowed the lawn, planted the garden and hung the tree lights. I never really thought about it.

While she was busy spending half-her-life not mowing the grass, or changing the furnance filter, or any one of half-a-dozen other things she's had to learn about since getting divorced, I wonder if she insisted that the ex-husband "did his fair share" by doing things like the laundry or the dishes.

Funny how that works out.

Next she'll discover that the oil in the car needs changing, or all those other things that "she never thought about."

Things I've had to do, in no particular order. Some of them are related to owning my own home.

• Change a Tire (my father insisted I know how to do this)
• Change the oil in my car (my father again - though I pay others to do this now)
• Jump start a car on a winter day
• Replace a sump pump
• Change the oil in the lawn mower
• Cut down a tree
• Replace a toilet
• Replace the flush valve in a toilet
• Replace a ceiling fan

I could go on of course. I could have paid people to do these things, and when I was working 60 or more hours a week, I probably would have paid to have people do some of it. I would call the motor club to deal with a flat tire.

But that doesn't always work out either. I paid to have an electrician at a house once; he was a union electrician, from a reputable firm. I had the fire department at my house in the middle of the night. That is when I decided that I could burn the house down for less than union wages. And that isn't the only story I have like that, though it is the only one that involved the fire department.

I don't do everything myself of course. I recently paid to have a plumber install a new water heater. (I prefer soldered copper over Sharkbite connectors, and I don't have confidence in my ability to solder copper pipe.)

Nina Jankowicz Is a Barking Moonbat

There hasn't been a bit of Leftist crap she hasn't been wholely in favor of. Biden’s New ‘Ministry of Truth’ Director Turns out to Be a Raving Lunatic

Jankowicz is (because it’s a requirement on the left these days) a big-time Russia hysteric, spreading false conspiracy theories that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation campaign.” She was also a huge fan of the Mueller investigation before she turned into a pro-lockdown fanatic. Does that sound like someone who should be put in charge of dictating — from a governmental perch — what is and isn’t true for the Department of Homeland Security?

Click thru for more.