Mexican official says new lawsuit against US gunmakers is on the way

There’s no reason to believe the outcome will be any different than the first lawsuit that the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador brought against U.S. gun makers; a dismissal of the case long before it ever reached trial. Still, with AMLO’s cartel strategy of “hugs, not bullets” resulting in even more cartel violence, it’s no surprise that he and other officials are trying to distract from their own failures by pinning the blame on the US firearms industry.

Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told the Mexican Senate on Wednesday that the government’s next lawsuit will be filed in the border state of Arizona, though he didn’t say whether any gun control groups will be a part of this new effort as they were the first time around.

During his speech on Wednesday, Ebrard referred to a bipartisan package of gun safety measures passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in June. The law blocks gun sales to those convicted of abusing unmarried intimate partners and cracks down on gun sales to purchasers convicted of domestic violence.

“Illicit arms trafficking is already a crime in the United States,” Ebrard said.

“You have to start establishing criminal responsibilities because the companies that are selling these weapons in these counties (in Arizona), which are very few, of course they know where those weapons are going,” he added, but did not specify which companies he was referring to.

Ebrard makes it sound as if there are no laws whatsoever governing gun sales from licensed firearms retailers, even though border state gun dealers not only have to follow the long list of federal regulations surrounding firearm transfers, but even have special requirements placed on them like reporting multiple sales of modern sporting rifles to the ATF.

Frankly, if he really wants to talk about establishing criminal responsibilities, I’d say he should start much closer to home and crack down on the graft, corruption, and theft within the Mexican armed forces.

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Speaking of BlackRock…….

Louisiana Hits BlackRock With Massive Multi-Million Dollar Divestment For ‘Blatantly Anti-Fossil Fuel Policies’

Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder announced his state will divest funds from the multi-trillion dollar investment firm, BlackRock, due to environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies some claim boycott the oil, gas and coal industries.

“Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Schroder said in a letter sent Wednesday to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

“Once complete, this divestment will reflect $794 million no longer entangled in BlackRock money market funds, mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holdings,” according to the letter.

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BLUF
The globalist climate agenda is more than a misguided but well-intentioned mistake. It is a monstrous crime against humanity, promulgated by some of the most dangerous people who have ever lived. It is a brazen lie for any of them to claim that we are dangerous if we do not think the world is coming to an end, are not promoting panic and fear, and wish to see citizens of all nations achieve prosperity.

The Globalist Climate Agenda is a Crime Against Humanity.

“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria  (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.

In a blistering editorial published on September 18, under “The Post’s View,” the editors wrote “The World’s Ice is Melting: Humanity Must Prepare for the Consequences.” For at least 30 years, and with increasing frequency and intensity, it is not the weather that has become extreme, but rather these proclamations. We have now reached the point where every major institution in the Western world is bent on spreading this panic. Yet very little of it is justified by the facts.

To verify the credibility of the globalist climate agenda, should it have any, several hurdles have to be overcome. If global warming and extreme weather is definitely happening, then how serious is the problem, what is the cause of the problem, and what are rational solutions to the problem? To all four of these questions, serious debate is mostly absent from mainstream discourse. Skeptics are pariahs.

But if a skeptical response to any one of these four questions is accepted, the entire edifice of climate alarm collapses.

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As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
— Justice William O. Douglas

Well, she was unable to define what a woman was either, so her gobbletygook here shouldn’t have been a surprise.

KBJ’s Jumbled Musings on the Fourteenth Amendment

In today’s [Oct 3rd ] oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan, Justice Jackson capped her very long questioning of Alabama solicitor general Edmund LaCour with a speech/question that went on for around four minutes and that runs a full three pages (57:2-60:2) in the transcript. In her speech, Jackson states that the Framers of the 14th Amendment adopted it “in a race conscious way,” as they were “trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freedmen in — during the reconstructive — reconstruction period were actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.” As she puts it, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 “specifically stated that citizens would have the same civil rights as enjoyed by white citizens,” and the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that the Act had a solid “constitutional foundation.”

Somehow Jackson leaps from these propositions to the assertion that the 14th Amendment doesn’t embody “a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy” for discrimination against freed slaves.

I don’t understand her leap. By her own account, the very purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was “to make sure that the other citizens, the black citizens, would have the same [civil rights] as the white citizens.” It was designed to remedy a situation in which “people, based on their race, were being treated unequally” by the states. And the 14th Amendment had the same goal.

The proposition that the 14th Amendment requires that the government be color-blind is open to challenge both as to what exactly that means and to whether that meaning is well founded. But Jackson seems to think that the color-blind position is somehow at odds with the fact that the 14th Amendment was designed to ensure equal treatment—when that of course is exactly what advocates of the color-blind position maintain the 14th Amendment requires.

Jackson seems to confuse herself with her own terms. Yes, of course, the Framers can be said to have adopted the 14th Amendment “in a race conscious way”—if that means that the central purpose of the 14th Amendment was to ensure that freed slaves received equal treatment in fundamental ways. By its plain text, the 14th Amendment ensures that states shall not “abridge the privileges or immunities” of citizens, irrespective of their race; shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” irrespective of the person’s race; and shall not deny any person the “equal protection of the laws,” irrespective of the person’s race.

But how is this elementary recognition at all at odds with the color-blind position? In his great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the first Justice Harlan celebrates that the post-Civil War Amendments “removed the race line from our governmental systems.” In his very next sentence, he states that these amendments had “a common purpose, namely, to secure to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations have been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the [white] race enjoy.” (Internal quote omitted.) He of course goes on to characterize the amended Constitution as “color-blind.” On what conceivable basis are we to think that there is any tension among Harlan’s statements?

Insofar as Jackson might be arguing that the 14th Amendment allows race-conscious remedies, she doesn’t touch on the critical questions of what counts as a race-conscious remedy and when such a remedy is permissible. Some scholars cite the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts as evidence that the Equal Protection Clause does not require colorblindness. But as law professor Michael Rappaport points out in “Originalism and the Colorblind Constitution,” even apart from the question whether those Acts inform the meaning of the 14th Amendment, they gave benefits to freedmen and refugees (most of whom were white) not on the basis of race but on the basis of the oppression and hardship they were enduring. Further, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas—leading proponents of colorblindness—agree that states can act to provide benefits to blacks (or persons of other races and ethnicities) when they have been victims of discrimination.

The usual suspects are going gaga over Justice Jackson’s remarks. But neither they nor she appear to understand the position they think they are contesting.

Bill Gates push for DIGITAL ID with $1.27 billion donation to Agenda 2030 ”Global Goals”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $1.27 billion commitment to advance ”Global Goals” which are the 17 goals outlined in the UN Agenda 2030.

As part of this, a ton of funding is going to push for global digital ID. Yes, you read that correctly. Global digital ID.

Remember when that was called a crazy conspiracy theory?

A whopping $200 million will be spent to ”expand global Digital Public Infrastructure” according to their website.

They say that this funding will be used to help countries with among other things public health threats, pandemic recovery and of course climate change. What exactly is this ”global Digital Public Infrastructure” you may ask?

Well let the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tell you! It means payment systems and digital ID among other things, just see the whole text from their website for yourself!

”This funding will help expand infrastructure that low- and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery. This infrastructure encompasses tools such as interoperable payment systems, digital ID, data-sharing systems, and civil registry databases.”

There you have it. Bill Gates is pushing hard for digital ID.

Wait a minute there. Why do we need digital ID in order to help with public health threats and climate change? It certainly couldn’t be that there are plans for some kind of climate change passport tied to your digital ID, that would just be a crazy conspiracy theory…Right?

But it doesn’t stop there!

They also have something called ”Goalkeepers”. This is their campaign to ”accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (or Global Goals)”.

What is this ”Global Goals” they are speaking of?

It is actually the goals outlined in the UN Agenda 2030. You read that correctly. Bill Gates is working to implement Agenda 2030 which is a bunch of goals that the UN has, including a ton of stuff on the climate agenda.

On their website, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is talking about how governments should use digital payments to women in order to achieve one of the goals on Agenda 2030, namely gender equality. I bet digital ID will come in very handy for that…More about that later!

And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving out what they call Global Goalkeeper award to people who have done good work in pushing this Agenda 2030.

Guess who was awarded Global Goalkeeper for 2022? Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission…

Sun Tzu 101: Know the enemy as well as you know yourself. Doctor Yamane is studiously researching the anti-gun movement.

The ‘Bump Stock’ Decision That Should Have Been But Wasn’t

Imagine this. An automobile manufacturer adds a turbocharger to the engine of a passenger car as a way to increase the vehicle’s acceleration. Nanny State bureaucrats at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decide that the turbocharger makes a vehicle to which it is attached go too fast, which renders it “unsafe.” The agency decides that the simplest way to address its concern is to include within the definition of an “automobile” a “turbocharger,” which the agency then can outlaw as an “unsafe motor vehicle.”

“Nonsense,” you say – a car “part” is not a “car,” right? Correct, yet that is precisely what the United States Department of Justice did in 2018 when it deemed by regulatory re-write, that an accessory that could be attached to a rifle to make it fire faster – a “bump stock” – was in fact and by law, a “machine gun” and therefore unlawful to be owned or possessed by individuals.

Thus, by regulatory fiat a piece of plastic, which is all a bump stock is, becomes a “machine gun” for purposes of federal law.

Despite the absurdity of this regulatory maneuver, the Supreme Court on Monday once again declined to hear arguments in cases challenging the constitutionality of the government’s bump stock redefinition.

The Court should have heard arguments in the case, to enable a majority of justices a way to declare such regulatory legerdemain is a constitutionally impermissible exercise of legislative power by the Executive Branch (aside from it being an example of absurd legal reasoning that no president should get away with).

While gun control advocates, including the Biden administration which had urged the Court not to hear the cases, characterize the issue as a “Second Amendment” case, it truly is not. At its core, the legal issues center on regulatory law, not Second Amendment law, and the repercussions extend far beyond firearms.

Like many of Uncle Sam’s bad decisions in recent decades, this one outlawing bump stocks was a knee-jerk reaction to a specific incident – the 2017 mass shooting by a crazed gunman from a hotel window in Las Vegas, Nevada. A number of bump stock-modified rifles were found in the murderer’s hotel room after police breached his barricaded door.

The publicity surrounding the Las Vegas shooting led to calls to change the law and ban the theretofore little-known, but legal, firearm accessory. Congress could not make a decision, so the responsibility fell to President Trump to show the American people he was “doing something.” That “something” was to order his then-Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to take executive action against the devices.

It eventually fell to Sessions’ successor, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, in late 2018 to actually amend the long-standing definition of a machine gun so as to include a bump stock within its terms. It is this presidential action – changing federal law by the “stroke of a [regulatory] pen” – that has set a dangerous precedent that should concern liberals and conservatives.

Allowed to stand, this precedent permits extensive presidential mischief that can be wrought by Republican and Democrat administrations alike, targeting all manner of activities and products regulated by the federal government, without having to go through the often messy and time-consuming congressional legislative process.

Thanks to this Trump-proposed regulatory maneuver, virtually any federal regulation – including those involving such wide-ranging issues as the environment, health care, banking, firearms, and even abortion, among hundreds more – can serve as the vehicle for a president to unilaterally enact substantive changes to federal laws.

Regardless of why the Supreme Court declined to accept this challenge to what is by every reasoned analysis an abuse of Executive Branch regulatory power, Big Government advocates will be left extremely happy by the decision. It leaves wide open a side door by which this and future administrations can run roughshod over the system of checks and balances so carefully crafted by our Founders, but which has been so often undermined by successive administrations of both major parties.

If you can’t clearly define a federal power, then it should not exist until you can. One of the bedrock principles of our constitution is supposed to be that federal powers are limited and defined. If you can’t limit it and define it, it’s not a federal power. -Glenn Reynolds

The Sackett Oral Argument and the Problem of Defining “Waters of the United States”
The justices wrestled with the problem of identifying a clear, coherent, and administrable definition to constrain federal regulatory jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act.

Yesterday the Supreme Court opened October Term 2022 with oral argument in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case in which the Court is asked (once again) to clarify the scope of federal regulatory authority over wetlands under the Clean Water Act (CWA).  In previous posts I discussed the issues in the case, the cert grant, and the decision below.

If oral argument was any indication, the justices recognize the need for greater regulatory certainty, but also recognize the difficulty in drawing a clear line to demarcate where “waters of the United States” end and non-federal waters or lands begin. Much of the argument focused on precisely this question, causing the justices to explore the meaning of the word “adjacent,” as the Court previously upheld the EPA and Army Corps’ authority over wetlands adjacent to navigable waters in United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, perhaps the high-water mark of Court acquiescence to broad assertions of federal regulatory power under the CWA. Accordingly, the justices considered whether “adjacent wetlands” must be physically connected to navigable waters, must be neighboring to such waters, or must merely be nearby, and most seemed unconvinced with the answers they received from the advocates.

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Gas just went up another 20¢ a gallon around here this week

Biden Begs OPEC for More Oil Again, Gets Massive Cut Instead.

Remember when wages were growing and gas was $2.50 a gallon? OPEC — that cartel of generally nasty nations lucky enough to sit on top of vast oil reserves — didn’t like the situation very much.

That was way back in 2019, when oil went for an average of $64 a barrel and America was a net energy exporter. Then the pandemic hit and the unnecessary lockdowns cratered demand, gas dropped to under $2 per gallon, and a barrel of oil cost about $42. But we can’t really count the lockdowns as a period of normal activity, so let’s try and forget they ever happened.

Hard, isn’t it?

Anyway, now Americans are struggling to make ends meet as inflation outpaces our wages and the economy technically entered a recession earlier this year.

And yet a barrel of oil costs a third more than it did in 2019 and a gallon of gas is now 50% more expensive — and headed higher.

How did we go from a situation where the economy was strong and prices were low to a weak economy and high prices?

There are a number of reasons, but all of them have been exacerbated by the America-hating stupidity of Presidentish Joe Biden and the Democrat party.

American oil production has yet to recover to its peak under President Donald Trump, due entirely to Biden’s on-purpose mismanagement. That’s why, with supply down, prices up, and our Strategic Petroleum Reserve depleted to levels not seen since we were first filling it up, Biden went hat-in-hand to OPEC to beg for more oil.

But he can’t get no respect because he ain’t worthy of any. Now, with our economy wobbling, wages shrinking, and inflation rising, OPEC did the exact opposite of what Biden wanted.

They’re cutting oil output by a massive two million barrels per day.

TWO. MILLION. BARRELS.

That’s a small slice of daily production, but with supplies already tight, prices are sure to take a big bounce. And a bigger chunk out of your paycheck, every time you fill’er up.

It gets worse, though. Because with Biden, it always does.

As recently as Monday, CNBC reported that OPEC was considering cuts of only a million or so barrels.

“Nah,” OPEC said. “Let’s just double that. Because we can.”

I guess they weren’t too moved by Biden’s pleadings.

The Daily Mail says “the major cut is an abrupt turnaround from months of restoring deep cuts made during the depths of the pandemic and could help alliance member Russia weather a looming European ban on oil imports.”

More money for Russia? All this time I thought Biden was at least on Ukraine’s side, if not ours.

The White House was “having a spasm and panicking” the day before the cuts were announced, according to a CNN report.

Nevertheless, a National Security Council spokesweasel had the temerity to insist that “Thanks to the President’s efforts, energy prices have declined sharply from their highs and American consumers are paying far less at the pump.”

Gas cost a little more than two bucks when Biden assumed (and I do mean “assumed”) office. Now the average is about $3.80 — and $6.70 in California, which serves as America’s test lab for bad ideas.

Falling gas prices were the only thing keeping inflation from accelerating even faster over the last two or three months, but it seems even that poor excuse for “the good old days” is over.

Thanks, Joe — just don’t come begging for my vote in 2024.

Supreme Court vacates controversial Massachusetts gun control law
The Massachusetts gun control law places strict restrictions on the ability to purchase and possess handguns

The Supreme Court ordered a lower court ruling on a Massachusetts gun control law to be vacated and directed a lower court to reconsider the case.

The case in question, Morin v. Lyver, centers around a controversial Massachusetts law that imposes strict restrictions on the possession and purchase of handguns, including the need for a license in order to purchase or possess a pistol. The law also includes a lifetime ban on purchasing handguns on anyone convicted of a nonviolent misdemeanor involving the possession or use of guns.

The U.S. District Court of Massachusetts originally found the law constitutional, but the Supreme Court on Monday ordered that ruling vacated and the case “remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen.”

The case, a 6-3 ruling earlier this year, struck down a New York law that required people to demonstrate “proper cause” to obtain a concealed handgun permit.

“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,’” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority at the time. “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

The case was considered a landmark ruling by the court, opening up the potential for new challenges to state and local restrictions on guns.

Monday’s order to vacate the lower court ruling and have the case reheard was unsigned by the justices, and there were no dissents.

The Supreme Court began its new term Monday and is expected to make decisions on key cases surrounding voting rights, affirmative action and religious freedom.

CDC Data Shows Constitutional Carry States Have Fewer Total and Gun-Related Homicides

In September of 2021, Texas became the twenty-first state to allow some form of permitless or “constitutional” carry. That means in Texas, if you are at least 21 years old and you are not prohibited from lawfully possessing a firearm under Texas or federal law, you can carry a handgun without a permit either openly or concealed.

Since Texas enacted its law, four other states have done the same, bringing the total of constitutional carry states to 25.

While there are some differences in how these states have implemented constitutional carry (e.g., a couple of them require you to be a resident of the State to carry, while others set an age minimum, etc.) it’s fair to say that overall, half of all states now allow citizens who can legally possess a firearm to carry at least a handgun without a permit. This national wave has been a tremendous victory for gun rights and continues the trend of expanding the right to carry.

Of course, not everyone was pleased that Texas chose to respect the right to keep and bear arms. The news of constitutional carry in the Lone Star State was met with the all of the usual sky-is-falling warnings of doom from all of the usual anti-gun suspects.

For example, Ari Frielich, state policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that permitless carry could drastically endanger Texas residents and even law enforcement officials.

The research is clear that flooding public spaces with more hidden loaded guns in more hands makes them less safe. It turns more arguments, road rage incidents, and fistfights into shootings, more injuries into burials, and it can create a civilian arms race in communities most impacted by violence.

Freilich’s talking points are hardly original. Every time a state adopts constitutional carry, anti-gun groups, as well as much of the media (but I repeat myself), warn that every minor dispute will turn into a bloody shootout and the state’s homicide rate will therefore skyrocket. They also claim that the “research is clear” in favor of their arguments.

But is it really?

With so many states now having enacted some form of constitutional carry, this is no longer a hypothetical question. While some states have only recently enacted these laws, most others have had them for several years.

As of 2020, the most recent year for which detailed CDC data is available, 16 states had already embraced constitutional carry. By looking at the homicide rates in those states as well as their gun homicide rates in particular, we can get an idea of whether constitutional carry states actually are more dangerous than the nation as a whole.

If the anti-gun argument is correct, constitutional carry states should be far more violent, especially in the crime-surge year of 2020.

Fortunately, the CDC provides very detailed statistics on public health, including data on underlying causes of death, so we can check. The statistics are reported online through the CDC’s WONDER tool, an acronym which stands for “Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research.” All of the data I am about to discuss can be found through that tool.

The overall US homicide rate was 7.5 per 100,000 in 2020, and the gun-related homicide rate was 5.9 per 100,000. Here is the data for each of the 16 states that were constitutional carry in 2020:

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