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?
