No, I’m not dead yet. Just busy, and to be honest, I needed a long holiday before I start back with work, doctors, and more doctors. Saw the eye doctor today about the persisting scintillating scotoma in my field of vision. He couldn’t find anything obviously wrong, but there’s a few more tests he wants to do, so back in two weeks for those. BP is down to almost normal, but stubbornly doesn’t want to drop to normal even with the doc having boosted the doses of my meds from light to more typical. The slog continues. My dad says I need to get used to the suck, since it doesn’t get better with age. But back to the news, which probably doesn’t help any of this:
Demand high in Pennsylvania for concealed carry permits. Now if only those folks would all vote the issue!
Eugene Volokh: “Can some people who have finished their felony sentences recover their Second Amendment rights?” We’ve done better on this front with the courts than I thought we would.
Massachusetts AG Healy is continuing her power trip, going after Remington and Glock for selling “unsafe” products. Note: Glocks are not available for sale to civilians in Massachusetts, only police officers. If I were Glock, my response would be to withdraw from the LEO market in Massachusetts entirely and give Healy the long finger from Georgia.
PJ Media’s Liz Sheld: “How Can You Love Guns Knowing They Kill So Many People?” I’ve never killed anyone, nor do I have plans to. I’m not morally on the hook for what other people do. You don’t see people asking Chefs about loving their knives, or baseball players about their favorite bats. Both can be weapons. People only ask about guns because they don’t like the kinds of people that like guns.
Three cheers for vandalism from the comments at Raw Story. A lot of these kinds of folks would be perfectly willing to put us all in camps. Meanwhile, our people don’t seem to have any arguments short of cheap insults. We used to be better than this, but I think perhaps all the sensible people have fled the fever swamps that internet comment sections have largely become.
“State ballot measures in 2016 reflect shift to the left.” They talk about Bloomberg spending big. Ballot fights are a rich person’s game, and the left has all the rich ones. The Kochs on the “right” (they are really more libertarian than right) seem to mostly enjoy flushing their money down the think tank toilet rather than spending it on things that matter.
Fighting Bloomberg’s ballot measures as best we can. We have to convince Bloomberg that there are limits to this ballot strategy. I think we need to cut his margin in at least one state, and beat him outright in at least one state. Otherwise our options start looking like a choice of bad, terrible and disastrous options, and we don’t want to end up there.
Roll Call: “PA Senate Race Could Come Down to Guns.” A lot of people I respect on the issue believe Toomey has to lose if we’re going to prevent the GOP from seeking refuge under Bloomberg’s wing. I’m not sure that they are wrong. When I say I’m conflicted on the issue, I really am conflicted.
Dave Hardy looks at the effect of the Obama’s court appointments. He’s been able to sharply shift the federal courts to the left because the Republicans were stupid and didn’t play dirty with them Dems when they were blocking all of Bush’s nominees, and then went easy on Obama. The Dems would have never made that mistake. A big reason we lose is because the Republican politicians are, quite bluntly, not very smart people. The Dems wins because they are better at playing The Game, both strategically and tactically. GOP pols never would have lined up to commit ritual suicide on something like Obamacare, yet a large number of Dems did. They sacrificed their political careers for the sake of the party’s long term goals.
Georgia and South Carolina are getting reciprocity. Why doesn’t South Carolina just sign a better reciprocity bill altogether? They have one of the worst statutes in the country.
I keep thinking the gun bubble will eventually burst, but it just keeps going up.
Bloomberg is dumping a lot of money into the effort to prevent Missouri from going Constitutional Carry. What’s is he scared of? Surely this will provide his group with plenty of evidence of how blood will run in the streets to use in other states, right?
I’d hope a science writer would know that 4.25 light years is not “just outside our solar system,” anymore than Jupiter is “just outside of Manhattan.” but it’s good to know there might be other life sustaining planets out there, because the life on this planet is getting to be damed tough to live with.
Amazon is piloting a 30 hour work week. I’ve seen a lot of conservatives on social media deriding this for making us more like those lazy Europeans, but for knowledge workers, it’s fiction that people can be mentally on your game more than 6 hours a day. Sure, you can work longer, but with diminishing returns for the remaining hours.
Drinking after work is sexist? Haven’t we been through this crap before?
” A lot of people I respect on the issue believe Toomey has to lose if we’re going to prevent the GOP from seeking refuge under Bloomberg’s wing. I’m not sure that they are wrong.”
I hadn’t even thought of the Bloomberg angle. I just think that if Toomey is ever going to be punished, we have to do it now. I know you have expressed the opinion that primarying Toomey in 2022 would be optimum, from long experience the collective gun rights movement isn’t exactly elephant-like in its memory span.
Not that I think McGinty isn’t a threat, but I haven’t yet seen an election where the election of the Democrat wasn’t forecast to be the end of life as we know it, and mostly things plod along as usual. I remember that the world was going to end if Ed Rendell was elected governor, and he was, and even if his years weren’t the best for PA gun owners, neither were they worst, by far.
If Toomey is re-elected, the threat gun owners offer for squish Republicans will be regarded as a joke, and we’ll get a lot more of them. In the long term, that sounds like the greater threat, to me.
Treachery must never be forgiven!
This right here. No way in hell I’m voting for Toomey. It’s one thing to be hoodwinked into backing a bad bill or two, it’s something else to champion anti-gun legislation and be “pleased to receive Mayor Bloomberg’s support”. This native New Yorker has seen enough of what Bloomberg wants to do to his rights and is not interested in retreating from yet another state.
If I knew we were going to keep the senate majority ‘R’, I would vote him out as well. I have reservations though, afraid a Clinton presidency with a ‘D’ senate would be the final nail in the coffin of our country.
I have called, and will continue to call, his office and voice this opinion too.
“Demand high in Pennsylvania for concealed carry permits. Now if only those folks would all vote the issue!”
Yeah. Vote against all our “friends” who have given lip-service to Constitutional Carry and then never done a damn thing about achieving it for us, so we wouldn’t have to kiss the ass of the local sheriff before we get to access our rights.
In astronomical terms, 4.25 lightyears pretty much is just outside the solar system.
It’s all relative, but for the purposes of getting there, it’s a huge distance.
And in Washington state….
http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-proposes-ban-assault-weapons-high-capacity-magazines
So not just the AG, but the usual Blue suspects piling on. Part of the “West Coast Wall” anti-gun strategy which intends to impose California style gun-control in Oregon and Washington.
http://q13fox.com/2016/07/27/washington-and-oregon-groups-push-to-ban-high-powered-rifle-coined-west-coast-wall/
I think there are a lot of complacent gun-owners living in nominally pro-gun States that are about to discover the folly of Democratic Party rule.
Yep. And by the time they figure it out, it’s going to be too late.
I thought it highly curious that the Washington AG compared his anti-gun proposal to New York and Connecticut law rather than California. I doubt that was by accident. They know they are vulnerable there.
An achilles-heel of that Washington State proposal is that it apes the failed policies of California, and lots of western staters hate California and ‘californication’ of their home state.
Not to be Debbie Downer, but by the same token, lots of western staters are California expats who’ve abandoned the state but not the left-wing voting patterns that produced the problems that caused them to leave. This kind of thing is going to be catnip to those types of people, and we may be past the tipping point where there are enough pro-gun natives to outweigh the political preferences of Seattle plus all the anti-gun migrants.
The gun bubble…
I believe the gun bubble will drop off when the people of America feel secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Amazon’s 30 hour work week…
It certainly would turn everyone who works for them into a part timer and thus not subject to certain Obamacare provisions. Follow the money.
“I believe the gun bubble will drop off when the people of America feel secure…”
I won’t over-analyze it, but the people of America have slowly been preparing, psychologically speaking, to fight each other for at least 20 years now.
A couple decades ago I thought that was cool, and studied quite a bit on how it should be done. (I thought, and think, the “citizen militia” idea was bogus.)
Today I just expect it to be tragic, with the probability of a good outcome vanishingly small.
Sic transit…
20 years? Preparing? More like a pause in actual fighting that began more than fifty years ago.
https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/1594204292
The difference is today the Anti-American Left has access to all the tools of power of the state, and intends to use them.
Ah, good point about Obamacare!
Obamacare is the likely reason. Any corporation that doesn’t do this is nuts.
My experience is that women pretty much always want to shut down everything that is fun.
Concerning the 30-hour workweek: I don’t consider it laziness if it’s done with full agreement between the employee and employer, without outside influence. The problem with the European model is that the government is forcing the 30-hour workweek on the people. (I heard a study that showed that 30-hour employees are no happier than 40-hour employees, but I wonder if this is because employees are forced into 30-hour workweeks, and if given the option, both 30-hour and 40-hour workers would be happier.)
Indeed, I’ve been speculating on whether I should shift to a 30-hour workweek myself. The primary reasons I don’t are that I like the extra money, and being salaried, I fear that I’ll just be asked to work extra hours anyway…as it stands, I would like to do more math after hours, but between feeling like my brain is drained, and spending time with my family, that doesn’t seem likely. I would go so far as to say that even if I don’t work on math after reducing hours, I’d still be happier if I could spend more time with my family!
I don’t think Amazon is doing this due to ObamaCare pressure, though, because they are providing these employees with full benefits, and if they didn’t want to do that, they would drop the hours to 29. However, there *was* the suggestion that this is being done to encourage diversity. Blah. Diversity is overrated, unless you’re talking about diversity of ideas. Having this option, though, might encourage people with interesting ideas to come work for Amazon…
The wife went to renew her permit in York County (PA). While there, the man behind the counter said they average over 60 permits per day (sometimes up to 200). I did some quick math in my head: 60 x 5 days a week x 52 weeks is 15,600 per year. With a 5 year renewal in PA, we can assume that’s 78,000 permits in circulation.
York County has a total population of 440,000 people. Assume 25% are under 21, and we’re down to 330,000. That means approx. one in every four adults has an LTCF!
While York County does have Amish, Mennonite and Brethren populations, it isn’t exactly a hotbed of political conservatism like some of the northern tier or yinzer counties. We’ve got our fair share of escaped Baltimorons in the south end, city type anti-gunners in York, and many state employees from Harrisburg up north who tend to lean left. The plain numbers give me hope that our side is far from dead; now we’ve just got to get them to vote accordingly!