If you want a productive society that extends beyond, say, next week, you teach your kids about hard work and creativity and personal responsibility, respect for authority, but if you want to destroy a society, you funnel a ton of garbage to kids about gender, ideology and twerking.
– Tucker Carlson

You Want to Win a War? This Is How You Win a War

There’s more good news out of the Middle East, I’m happy to report. On the heels of yesterday’s news that the Israeli Defense Force was doing an admirable and rapid job of eliminating Hamas leadership in an explosive game of Whack-a-Mole, today we learn that the Gazans themselves finally show signs of turning against their terrorist government.

We saw tiny signs of this in the awful weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror invasion that kicked off the Israel-Hamas War, such as the old Gazan woman who accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid meant for the people. “Everything goes to [Hamas] houses,” she complained. “They take it; let them take me, shoot me, or do whatever they want with me.”

But Tuesday saw a rare mass protest against Hamas.

Even the mayor of Beit Lahia, Gaza, got in on the action.

If Hamas finds him, I suspect he won’t die well.

Why the mainstream media chooses not to air clips like these is anyone’s guess, but anyone’s most cynical and accusatory guess is probably the correct one.

None of this is perfect, of course. “Why aren’t they chanting to release the hostages then?” one critic wondered. Then there’s Iran, the official sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Until Iran is put back in the box President Donald Trump had them in during his first term, the terrorist kudzu will grow back.

But turning the population against the people who started the war is how you end a war, and Israel’s renewed offensive — the IDF’s WWII-style rubble-ization of the Gaza Strip — might be doing just that.

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Youngkin Vetos Gun Bills

Gov. Glenn Youngkin isn’t the most outspoken of governors. He just quietly does what he does in Virginia, even with a hostile legislature that seems determined to make the Old Dominion State one of the most anti-gun in the nation.

In fact, they sent a pile of gun control bills to him, which would be bad news for Virginia residents like our dear, old Cam Edwards.

But, well, it seems that he wasn’t interested in playing along.

Northern Virginia legislators are decrying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent veto of a bill to keep firearms from the homes of domestic abusers.

Youngkin vetoed 157 bills on Monday (March 24), including Sen. Barbara Favola’s (D-40) Senate Bill 744 and Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker’s House Bill 1960 — identical pieces of legislation that amend existing Virginia law by removing firearms from the hands of convicted domestic abusers.

“Guns and domestic violence are a lethal combination and these deaths are preventable,” Bennett-Parker said in a statement. “These bills were a common-sense fix to ensure that illegal guns stay out of the hands of convicted domestic abusers. I’m incredibly frustrated that the Governor vetoed our ability to protect women who are dying at the hands of their abusers through better enforcement of our existing laws. The Governor has made Virginia less safe for women and families.”

Youngkin has vetoed the measure for the second year in a row, and Bennett-Parker and Favola’s statements mirror their reactions to last year’s veto.

They should get used to disappointment.

However, this wasn’t the only anti-gun bill in and amongst those 157 items. Neary two dozen more got the veto treatment, according to a press release from the NRA:

Yesterday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin reaffirmed his support for the rights of law-abiding gun owners by vetoing two dozen bills that would have trampled on the Second Amendment freedoms of the citizens of the Commonwealth. Similar to last session, Governor Youngkin disposed of egregious legislation that would have emboldened criminals and left peaceable Virginians defenseless.

“On behalf of Virginia’s NRA members and Second Amendment supporters, I want to thank Governor Youngkin for standing strong in his support for the Second Amendment by vetoing the litany of gun control bills pushed through the General Assembly this year,” said John Commerford, Executive Director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). “For the second year in a row, gun control activists tried to enact dozens of radical, California-style laws that would have severely restricted the Second Amendment rights of gun owners in the Commonwealth. The NRA applauds Governor Youngkin for upholding his promise to protect our Constitutional freedoms.”

The bills vetoed by Governor Youngkin came from the long wish list of radical gun control activists. This included attempts to restrict the Constitutional rights of 18- to 20-year-old adults, dramatically expand gun-free zones that would have left law-abiding Virginians defenseless and enact a mandatory waiting period to take possession of a legally purchased firearm. In addition, the vetoed legislation would have banned a wide range of commonly owned firearms used by Virginians to hunt, compete and for self-defense.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Virginia has off-year elections. In fact, they go to the polls this fall to elect a new governor and vote on the legislature, among other offices. Youngkin can’t run for re-election because Virginia has a law where governors can’t serve consecutive terms.

And based on the 2024 election, where Kamala Harris took the state by over five points, it doesn’t look like a red wave is likely this year.

But much of the anti-gun lean in the state comes from Northern Virginia, where many federal bureaucracy employees live. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what DOGE is doing to the bureaucracy.

That might have some kind of impact on the election outcome, as many now unemployed federal workers may be relocating to less expensive communities throughout the nation.

Or, at a minimum, someplace where they can get a job.

However, gun rights proponents in the state should probably not count on that and mobilize now, back candidate who will support their gun rights, and do everything the can to mitigate the impact anti-gun groups will have on the upcoming election.

I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud
March 24, 2025

Jeff Geerling:

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.

I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Bosch dishwasher Home Connect logo

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

Video

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my latest YouTube video on Level 2 Jeff:

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The Supreme Court has upheld the ATF’s “frame or receiver” rule.

During the Biden ‘administration’ ATF ruled that “80%” receivers were to be treated and regulated just like they were fully finished guns.

The were sued and it went all the way to SCOTUS.

Justices Alito and Thomas were the only ones to dissent. All the others agreed. Regard the fate of future decisions accordingly.

 

“The Real Motive of Liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people. Instead, they have two related goals–to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives.”
– Thomas Sowell

Why Lawrence VanDyke’s Video Dissent in Duncan is a Real Problem For Anti-Gun Judges

Courts do have a lot of rules for introducing evidence and arguments. The net effect of all of those rules is simple: they tend to entrench the things that the court wants to believe. If your argument benefits from the court’s biases, the rules of evidence will help you. If you’re working against the court’s biases, the rules of evidence can be fatal to your case.

VanDyke is in a unique position here. As a judge rather than a party to the case, he can do pretty much whatever he wants. And he’s using that power to say the majority is using the rule against judges bringing outside facts to cover up their real goal: preventing judges from bringing outside logic. They don’t like standard-capacity magazines. And that’s a personal opinion that people are free to have. But under Bruen, the only way a court could uphold a ban on those magazines is if they prevent people like VanDyke from pointing out the holes not in their facts, but in their basic logic.

Lay people don’t read court rulings, let alone dissents. But video is a much more effective medium, and VanDyke’s video is all over social media right now. That’s a problem for the majority’s logic, but it’s good for logic in general.

— Open Source Defense in Judges on gun knowledge: “That’s for me not to know and for you not to find out”

Hamas Keeps Getting Deader.

One good way to tell if your effort to eliminate your enemy’s leadership is going well is if you blow up their new defacto prime minister before his people have had a chance to learn that the old prime minister had been blown up, too.

True story.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Hamas PM Ismail Barhoum was killed in an Israeli Air Force (IAF) airstrike just five days after his predecessor (pre-deceasor?) Issam al-Da’alis was — you guessed it! — killed in an IAF airstrike. With an almost coy dryness, the Journal headline read, “Israel Is Killing Hamas Leaders in Quick Succession.”

“Israel has killed at least another four senior political figures in a week of strikes, including the deputy ministers of justice and interior, as well as the head of Hamas’s internal security agency,” the paper noted. It almost doesn’t need to be said that Israeli intelligence — not to mention IAF targeting — has been spot-on.

Honestly, Hamas should have just let the hostages go and ended this 18-month-old war already — but where’s the opportunity to murder more Jews in that? When the bad guys decide that martyrdom and murder are preferable to peace, you give them as much of the former as you can while preventing as much of the latter.

Meanwhile, the Gazan propaganda wing continues with its shopworn “We’re the real victims!” schtick.

Don’t fall for the schtick. Times of Israel reported yesterday that Hamas published “a propaganda video showing a sign of life from Israeli hostages Elkana Bohbot and Yosef-Haim Ohana, who were both kidnapped from the Nova festival on October 7 [2023] and are still being held in Gaza. “Hamas has previously issued similar videos of hostages it is holding, in what Israel says is deplorable psychological warfare.”

If at the local level, the Israeli military and intelligence services are performing well, the international scene still falls under “It’s complicated.” At a meeting Sunday in Cairo, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas said, “Hamas should have no future role in the governance of the Gaza Strip.” That’s all well and good but Kallas also repeated the usual EU demands for restraint on Israel’s part that would make rooting Hamas out of Gaza virtually impossible.

“Tomorrow I will be in Israel to express concerns about the resumption of hostilities in the Gaza Strip,” Kallas said, adding that “the EU is clear that Hamas must release all hostages, Israel must allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, and negotiations must resume.”

Well, which is it? Does Hamas have a role in Gaza or is the EU going to give up the moral preening long enough for Israel to do what needs to be done?

Israel’s first partner in Cold Peace, Egypt, remains as stubborn as ever. Cairo still refuses to take in 500,000-700,000 displaced Gaza Arabs, despite President Donald Trump’s offer to build them “much better housing” than they had in Gaza. Now the White House might be brandishing a stick to go with the carrot. Egyptian sources told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed this weekend that continued refusal “could mean redirecting economic aid meant for Egypt to other countries.”

Egypt currently receives about $1.5 billion annually in U.S. aid. Cairo’s refusal highlights the historical undesirability of allowing large numbers of Gaza or West Bank Arabs into your country. West Bank and Gaza “refugees” attempted to murder King Hussein of Jordan in 1970 and managed to permanently wreck Lebanon.

So you can’t really blame Cairo for not wanting to take in half the population of Gaza. But with the Strip in ruins — and bound to get worse before it gets better — it’s a bit like Last Call. They don’t have to go to Egypt but they can’t stay here.

SCOTUS Still Silent on Semi-Auto, Magazine Bans as More 2A Cases Head Its Way

Another Monday has rolled around with the Supreme Court taking no action whatsoever on two cases that have been heard in conference on an almost weekly basis since last December.

Monday mornings are starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day when it comes to Snope and Ocean State Tactical, and I have no idea what’s going on with either of these cases. Both were heard in conference for first time back in December, so even if there’s going to be a denial with a written dissent the justices who are penning their displeasure with the decision not to grant cert have had plenty of time to formalize their objections. The same is true when it comes to a per curium opinion that would find either or both of the challenged laws to be a violation of the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s possible that the justices are still wrestling with the issue of whether or not to accept one or both of these cases, but that strikes me as pretty unlikely as well. The Court has had months to consider granting cert, and while other Second Amendment challenges like Heller and Bruen went through multiple conferences before cert was granted, neither of those cases were kept in limbo nearly as long as Snope and Ocean State Tactical have been.

Meanwhile, there are several other cases dealing with the right to keep and bear arms that are slated to be heard in conference for the first time in the coming days and weeks. This Thursday the justices should take up Antonyuk v. James in their weekly conference. That’s the case that deals with one of the post-Bruen restrictions that New York put in place in defiance of what the Supreme Court had to say about the right to bear arms; the “good moral character” requirement for a concealed carry license that is essentially serves as a replacement for the subjective “justifiable need” gun owners had to demonstrate under the may-issue permitting regime the Court ruled unconstitutional.

The justices are also expected to debate a case called Price v. U.S. this week that deals with whether or not possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number constitutes Second Amendment-protected conduct. That case has yet to be fully briefed and decided on the merits, however, and I suspect that the justices will turn it aside, at least for now.

There are three other cases slated for conference in April as well:

  • Wade v. University of Michigan, which addresses “Whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments allow a criminal ordinance that prohibits mere possession of firearms on an entire poorly-delineated university campus, except by permission of a single government official with unfettered discretion, which is granted onlyfor “extraordinary circumstances.”
  • Jacobson v. Worth, which seeks to answer “Does Minnesota’s statute limiting permits for public carry of pistols to those 21 and older comport with the principles underlying the Second Amendment?
  • B & L Productions v. Newsom, a challenge to California’s ban on “sales” of firearms and ammunition on any state-owned property.

The odds of the Court granting cert to every one of these cases is slim. In fact, at this point the odds of the Court taking any of them feels pretty small. I’m still holding out hope for Snope, but at this point it’s anyone’s guess as to what the justices will do with Maryland’s semi-auto ban… other than once again considering the Snope case (and Ocean State Tactical v. Neronha) at this Thursday’s conference.

Attendees at AOC and Bernie Sanders Denver Rally Openly Threaten to Kill President Trump.

Attendees of a recent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders rally in Denver were openly calling for the murder of President Donald Trump. We guess the Democrat Party has abandoned its ‘Joy’ message from the 2024 presidential election.

Have a listen, they’re not bashful. (WATCH – PROFANITY WARNING)

As ambassadors of the far left wing of the Democrat Party, this sentiment is in line with the socialism and Marxism the two advocate.

We’ll be hearing a lot more of this the closer we get to the midterm elections. Commenters say it’s bad for America.

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