Interesting Items 06/06

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue –

1.  Gun Control
2.  Trudeau
3.  Sussmann
4.  Surge
5.  Sun
6.  Fire
7.  BATF

1.  Gun Control.  We are about to find out what sort of representation we have in a 50-50 US Senate, as “negotiations” over proposed gun control legislation continue.  Looks like the top three demands by democrats are universal background checks, age limits on firearms purchases, and national red flag laws.  There are other demands, but these seem to be the highest on their shopping list.  Nothing in this discussion is fact-based, other than the body count.  Nobody knows how the perp got the weapon, how he managed to pay for it, how or where he trained, where he got his funding, or who else he was talking to.  And I won’t even get started on the Uvalde police, which will be an ugly discussion.  The entire passion play will be done in the persuasion world, which is where I am going this morning.

  • The cycle of these events is both predictable and tiresome:  Something awful happens; the public is shocked, simply shocked; democrats make demands; Republicans say NO; a few senate Republicans cave; democrats get part of what they want.  Rinse.  Repeat.  Note that nothing demanded, proposed, or agreed to, actually addresses the problem or makes any attempt to solve it.  They aren’t intended to.  Everything is intended to carve yet another chunk of firearms rights out of the unwilling carcass of the general public.  And they will all be executed with precisely as much bad faith as humanly possible.
  • So, how do you change that cycle?  How do you enter the public discussion with some, (any?) hope to get something real done, especially given the lockstep support and publication of all democrat demands by the media, and suppression of everything on the pro-gun side by same media?  From a persuasion standpoint, you say “yes”, though not in agreement with the demands, but to the conversation, the debate.  Our side MUST be in the public conversation without being viewed as obstructionist.  The first thing you need to do when entering a debate is to be heard. 
  • Once you are heard, this is where things get fun.  In the discussion, you can roll out your laundry list of solutions (or demands).  You grab control of the public conversation by taking it in directions that will make the heads of both the media and the left explode.
  • Where would I go with this today?  I would suggest arming all teachers, administrators, and other employees at the public schools.  Allow them to carry at their discretion.  Set the rules at the state level, which means federal prohibitions on guns in schools goes away.  Some states will arm everyone including the students.  Some won’t.  My prediction based on the last 20 years will be that those states that won’t will continue to have school shootings. 
  • If they want to set an age 21 bar for purchasing a semi-auto, agree, and suggest a similar age limit for the use of social media, the single greatest creator of mental illness among the young in the world today.  If we are to protect our children from the mentally ill, why are we manufacturing more mentally ill young men and women every single day via the use of social media? 
  • Once you get into the age limit discussion, you can have a lot of fun, extending the same logic to the notion of choosing your gender.  Gonna be difficult to make a case to choose your gender at age 4 when you can’t choose to purchase a Glock.  There are other places this can be used, but you get the idea.
  • As I mentioned last week, turning the public schools into bullying factories is something we must address, along with the absence of fathers in the home, and the destruction of manhood among young men.  Democrat efforts to defund local police, democrat prosecutor refusal to charge or convict criminals, simply releasing them back into the wild over the last two years coupled with the spiking crime rate in the blue cities must also be part of this discussion. 
  • One final addendum.  I suggested this approach to a political correspondent last week who rejected it outright, saying the only thing he was interested in was more freedom, and he simply wasn’t going to do anything that would restrict freedom for anyone.  Nice thought, but irrelevant.  Worse, it completely disarms Our Side in this battlefield, and it is indeed a battlefield, of ideas and persuasion.  If you choose not to fight, for whatever reason, you will be buried by the media-orchestrated persuasive onslaught, reprising what happened to Bush 43 over 8 years because he made an active decision not to defend himself while in office.  He brought decorum to a street brawl and got predictable results.  Freedom without the willingness to fight for it is just as useless as Richie Havens singing Freedom at Woodstock.  Nice song, but ultimately useless in the actual fight for freedom and liberty.

2.  Trudeau.  Canadian soy boy Prime Minister continued his crackdown on liberty in Canada last week announcing legislation that would all but ban handguns and toys that look like guns.  Rational was what we have come to expect from this putative autocrat, safety.  The only saving grace for Canadian citizens is the moderately open border between the US and Canada.  The legislation would remove the right to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns in Canada, meaning they will all be gone when the current generation retires to the Great Beyond.  A caller to Clay and Buck midweek tried to make the case that the legislation was vaporware, as Trudeau’s father Pierre made it very difficult to purchase and own handguns.  Research into this found Trudeau’s fingerprints as Justice Minister over a massive rewrite of Canadian criminal law in 1968 – 1969.  The gun control stuff appears to have been buried and took a back seat to pro-gay provisions that drove the public debate.

3.  Sussmann.  A DC jury acquitted Hillary lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI last week.  While not unexpected, the not guilty verdict very nicely illustrated the dual track system of justice in operation today, where a Hillary campaign lawyer can lie to the FBI with impunity (mostly because they wanted to believe that particular lie) and is summarily acquitted.  On the other hand, Trump loyalists like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn are arrested with swat teams, tried and quickly convicted.  On the face of it, the verdict appears to be a clear case of jury nullification, with one juror saying she did not think the case should have been brought because lying to the FBI was not a big deal.  She went on to say that there are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.  A week or so before the case went to the jury, Andy McCarthy made the rounds of Hannity, Clay and Buck, noting that the lying to the FBI might be a difficult case to make, a prescient observation.  Note that the lie Sussmann told the FBI when he came forward with the Russia Dossier was that he was bringing the information forward on his own volition rather than an employee of the Clinton campaign.  Among the things put into fact in this case were that the FBI knew the dossier was fraudulent, that it came from the Hillary campaign, and that everyone knew it.  FBI leadership at the time, Comey and McCabe, overrode field agent objections to it, demanding they treat the dossier as a factual document.  John Solomon in Just the News wrote that the moral of Sussmann was Americans see lying in DC as normal, making convictions (other than Republican targets) difficult.  One related story hit last week courtesy of Matt Gaetz that top democrat law firm Perkins Coie gave the FBI office space in their DC headquarters.  So much for an independent federal law enforcement agency. 

4.  Surge.  Jazz Shaw in Hot Air last week posted a piece asking How much of the LGBTQ “surge” is real?  He took a look at a Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) report entitled Born this way?  The rise of LGBT as a social and political identity.  The report notes that there has been a tremendous surge in the number of Americans identifying as LGBT.  Today, around 20% of those under 30 so identify.  The most popular identification is bisexual, particularly among women.  Homosexual behavior among both sexes grew much less rapidly.  In the US, the 11% increase in LGBT identity 2008 – 2021, is identifying only, with only 4% acting on the newfound identity.  There is a strong political component to this, with liberals, especially liberal women, moving from 10-15% non-hetro in 2016 to 33% in 2021.  Other ideological groups are more stable.  This also correlates with an increase in liberal young people with mental health problems.  There is a college major component in this with more liberal arts changing their identification than STEM.  Over half of the students taking highly political majors like race or gender studies identify as LGBT compared with 25% overall.  Gender nonconformity peaked in 2020 and is starting to decline.  While there has been an increase in same sex behavior over the last few years, it is due to sociopolitical factors rather than any massive shift in the young.  In other words, it is simply popular.

5.  Sun.  One of the things those of us in the climate skeptic world watch is solar activity, generally the most obvious being the number of sunspots.  More sunspots mean a more active sun.  Fewer sunspots mean a quiet sun.  Periods of quiet sun correlate with periods of colder global weather.  Physicist Henrik Svensmark has postulated that a quiet sun has a less active solar wind, which allows more cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere.  These particles create ions in the atmosphere which in turn form condensation nuclei for clouds.  In other words, the more inbound cosmic rays, the more clouds, and in turn cooler global temperatures.  Clouds reflect solar energy back into space.  The science behind Svensmark looks pretty good and is reproducible.  His data is transparent, so we end up looking at solar activity more than many in the climatista CO2 = Bad worldview.  Historic times with low solar activity (few sunspots) have been really cold, Little Ice Age cold.  Russian scientists among others over the last decade or two have been predicting a period of weak solar cycles, with few sunspots for the next few decades.  The new solar cycle has begun, and it is starting off stronger than the last one.  While it might very well end up fizzling, at this point, it does not appear that it will be as weak as feared, or as weak as the last one, which is good news.

6.  Fire.  One of the arguments against moving transportation to electric vehicles is the occasional battery fire.  Lithium fires burn really hot and are nearly impossible to contain or put out with normal methods.  Evening Standard reported a bus fire in London a couple weeks ago which spread and burned six buses.  In response, Transport for London took its entire fleet of 90 electric busses out of passenger service.  No word as yet about the cause of the fire or return to service. 

7.  BATF.  One of the long-term concerns about the BATF was its ability to play the political games in order to retain or grow its funding stream.  The raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1992 was at its heart, a money grab to stave off expected budget cuts from congress.  At the time, they were under some very real congressional pressure to significantly cut their budget based on a variety of ugly complaints against it.  Someone came up with idea for the raid, which was preplanned, and a local television station was there to film it all.  When you are going after a guy who has been preaching the end of the world and persecution by government employees, and do precisely what he has been expecting you to do, how do you expect him to react?  Koresh and his 92 followers reacted as expected.  Today, the new hot item are ghost guns, in other words, firearms printed in part by 3-D printers.  And it appears the BATF is back at its old game of diddling data to justify their current funding and to ask for more.  In this case, they were tasked to prepare a report in Apr 2021, a comprehensive report on firearms commerce and trafficking.  They got a lot of dealer and industry data, stirred it with favorite WH facts shown to be false, and presented it to the Garland (In)Justice Department.  In other words, they presented false information in an attempt to grab a larger budget.  I would add the BATF to the rapidly growing list of federal agencies that need a stake through their black little hearts. 

More later –

– AG

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