Category: Crap For Brains

Ford Slashes Production on EV F-150s Amid Low Consumer Demand

Ford Motors is reducing production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck and is increasing workforce at its gas-powered vehicle factories, citing weaker-than-anticipated demand for electric vehicles.

The Michigan automaker said on Friday that it would be moving 1,400 employees to its gas-powered factories, a sharp decrease from its 2,100 employee Lightning production team, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Shifts have been reduced from two to one, and some employees have decided to retire.

A key component of Ford’s electric vehicle strategy in recent years has been the electric truck, and President Biden visited the plant last year ahead of the vehicle’s release.

However, Ford and other traditional auto manufacturers, such as General Motors, have been forced to scale back certain investment initiatives due to the decrease in the rate of growth for electric vehicle sales in the United States since that time.

In October, Ford Motors announced in that it would postpone $12 billion in planned investments in electric vehicles (EVs), citing pricing pressure and concerns regarding consumer demand. In addition, the renovation of a major EV-truck assembly facility in Michigan by General Motors has been delayed by one year, to 2025.

Auto manufacturing employees have encountered persistent obstacles ever since the implementation of electric vehicle initiatives during the Biden administration.

Ford Motors has laid off more than 4,000 employees since it directed focus on EVs.

In June, Ford Motor Company announced these employees would be losing their jobs as a result of a significant loss of revenue due to electric vehicle investment efforts.

Additionally, the automaker said it was expected to lose $3 billion in electric vehicle operating profit in 2023. The company said its operating costs at that time were $7 billion to $8 billion, higher than any other competitor.

 It’s the groceries, stupid: Why the pundits are puzzled by Biden’s putrid polls.

By regularly griping about the supposed mystery of why so many voters say they prefer Donald Trump or another Republican, President Biden’s pundit backers mainly expose their own elitist ignorance.

Because if they’d been shopping to feed their families these last few years, they would have noticed the average grocery bill has shot up 25%.

And wage growth hasn’t remotely kept pace: It rose less than inflation for Biden’s first two years, and while the 2023 stats aren’t final, it wasn’t a ton better last year.

Inflation has eased some in recent months, but remains well above 3%  —  and may well spike back up as Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping create new global supply-chain disruptions.

Perhaps because they drive electric vehicles, the pro-Biden pundits may have missed the huge hike in pump prices on his watch  —  a daily nightmare driven largely by his policies.

And while Democrats may find it convenient to forget, plenty of voters will recall how this president spent months insisting inflation was “transitory” even as it was raging up toward 9%.

Oh, and few pundits are all that young, so they also lack personal experience of how high interest rates (raised to combat Bidenflation) are a huge reason why buying a first home is increasingly out of reach for the middle class.

All a huge contrast with the three pre-COVID Trump years, when median, inflation-adjusted incomes rose more than 10%  —  and lower-income earners made faster gains than they had in decades.

Of course it’s not just the economy: Anti-Biden voters also see the collapse of border enforcement  —  and are more likely to feel the impact of the illegal migrant surge than the nation’s elites.

Voters also likely recall the disaster that was Biden’s bugout from Afghanistan (which he insists was a “success”)  —  and can’t help noticing the major wars in Europe and the Middle East that erupted after that brutal sign of beyond-weak American leadership.

Leadership that looks even weaker every time the fast-aging prez does any public speaking that doesn’t involve a teleprompter (and sometimes even then).

This president’s poll ratings are under water on just about everything, and the reasons are pretty obvious to the average Joe and Jane.

Bottom line: The pundit class’ confusion over Biden’s unpopularity is just one more proof of George Orwell’s maxim: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

BLUF
As stated, the policy recommendations presented by the authors are merely longstanding goals of the gun-ban industry, which would help propel them toward their ultimate goal of total civilian disarmament. The only difference is that now their policy recommendations are presented as necessary to “address the dangers of armed insurrectionism.”

Johns Hopkins: More Gun Control Needed to Prevent Second Civil War

By Lee Williams

A recent report by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which is part of Johns Hopkins (Michael) Bloomberg School of Public Health, conflates private gun ownership with armed insurrection in order to advocate for expanded gun control.

The 32-page study, which is titled “Defending Democracy: Addressing the Danger of Armed Insurrection,” not only revisits and revises the Jan. 6th protest — even though no protesters were armed and the only casualty was 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by Capitol Police — it resurrects actual armed insurrections from American history, such as Shays’ Rebellion of 1786, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 and the American Civil War.

The three authors, who are all attorneys with a history of paid anti-gun activism, clumsily raise the insurrection boogeyman to push for additional regulations for carrying firearms, tactical training prohibitions, additional gun-free zones, expanded Red Flag laws and the repeal of state preemption statutes, which has long been a major goal of the gun ban industry. Preemption laws prevent local jurisdictions from enacting their own gun-control regulations, which would result in a patchwork of gun-free zones.

Their authors’ warped message is to be expected, especially when you consider the biased nature of their backgrounds, their sponsors, their sources and Michael Bloomberg’s school itself. (If you type “gun violence” into the school’s internal search engine it will yield more than 1,000 results.)

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If This Is an Anti-Gunner’s ‘Modest’ Proposal…

I cringe anytime I see someone offer up a “modest proposal” on guns, but it takes a second.

My initial reaction is hope that we’ll see satire like in Thomas Swift’s “Modest Proposal” that suggested addressing poverty by having the poor eat babies. It was a poke meant to shock people, so I tend to hope we’ll see something like that.

But that’s over very quickly. It’s over because, frankly, it’s almost never anything like that.

Instead, what we have is a gun control advocate who is offering up what he or she believes to be a very modest proposal regarding firearms but are complete non-starters as far as most Second Amendment advocates go.

Kind of like this one

I would like to suggest a simple two-part solution for gun violence in the United States.

First, we must make it more difficult to own guns.

Taxes and national pricing regulations could be used to increase the cost of guns. Regulations could be enacted that charge tariffs to gun manufacturers and retailers based on the real costs of guns to society. Estimates are that gun violence costs our country over $500 billion dollars a year, including costs to victims, cost to police, courts, and the criminal justice system, lost wages and spending, losses to quality of life, etc. And much of these costs are born by government agencies and thus are paid for by all taxpayers. These costs could inform a tariff added to the price of guns manufactured and/sold in the United States.

Second, we could treat guns more like cars; that is make it a bit cumbersome and difficult to own and operate one. We could enact a registration system for guns that would require folks to possess a gun owner’s license before they could purchase or own a gun. To get such a license, people would have to be a certain age (30?), pay a substantial annual fee, and pass an annual gun training course and exam.

Of course, the course and exam would also change a substantial fee to participants, and buying the resultant permit would also be costly. In addition, owners could be required to answer a tedious and complicated gun ownership application and present their gun and ammunition to the “Department of Firearms Ownership,” DFO, for inspection. DFO offices could be very understaffed, very bureaucratic, and very difficult to visit and use. In addition, there would be substantial fines assigned to people who violate any of these rules and, of course, their guns and ammunition would be confiscated.

In other words, let’s make buying and owning a gun very expensive, bureaucratic, and time-consuming process in the United States. And, as an added benefit, the taxes and fees collected in the gun owner licensing and registration process could be used to cover some of the costs created by gun violence and could be directed to public health education programs concerned with the problem of gun violence.

If this is a modest proposal, I’d just love to see what he considers extreme.

Yet this is also particularly telling, at least to me, as to why there will never be any common ground on gun control.

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yeah, I want these kinds of people as Air Traffic Controllers

FAA’s Diversity Push Includes Focus on Hiring People With ‘Severe Intellectual’ and ‘Psychiatric’ Disabilities

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.

“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

The initiative is part of the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, which says “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.

The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, is a government agency charged with regulating civil aviation and employs roughly 45,000 people.

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Call for Regulation of Gun Industry Has Faulty Premise

The gun industry is one of the most regulated industries in the nation. A firearm can’t go from Point A to Point B without a mountain of paperwork, for example. About the only industry that can compete with it regarding the amount of regulation they deal with is the pharmaceutical industry.

But a lot of people seem to think that the gun industry is unregulated.

Now, this is usually not a big deal. It doesn’t take much to show just how wrong people who think that actually are. We can usually show them how regulated guns actually are.

Occasionally you’ll find someone who should know better but, apparently, doesn’t. An example is this guy who seems to think that toy guns are regulated more than real firearms. He also thinks that should change.

What if the United States regulated real firearms as stringently as they regulated toy guns for children?

In a forthcoming article, Benjamin Cavataro, a professor at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, proposes that Congress empower the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to regulate guns in the same way that it regulates other consumer products, such as toys.

Cavataro argues that empowering the CPSC to regulate guns would increase their safety without encroaching on politically charged issues such as gun access and prevalence.…

Cavataro notes that subsequent efforts to introduce product safety regulations have fallen short because product safety measures for firearms are often seen as “gun control.” Cavataro contends that this characterization is misleading. Instead, he distinguishes between product safety measures, which seek to protect firearm users from dangerous mishaps, and gun control efforts, which seek to regulate the possession and use of guns.

Wrong.

What we’re seeing here is a call for a bureaucracy to oversee the gun industry, ostensibly to maintain safety standards, which might be fine for many if we could trust the bureaucracy to end there. After all, making sure you guns work as they’re supposed to wouldn’t be a bad thing, if you’re inclined to believe the government can do that job properly.

But the reason people call these efforts “gun control” isn’t due to a lack of understanding or mischaracterization. It’s because we know damn good and well where such a body would eventually take their regulatory efforts.

Think for a moment how the ATF started as a revenue collection agency and now is deciding what is legal and what isn’t. We’ve seen federal agencies try to say their ability to regulate waterways included mud puddles.

Now think about the GOSAFE Act for a second. This is, in essence, an attempt to regulate the gun industry. It’s not through a regulatory body, which means it has to battle through Congress to become law.

And a lot of people are opposed to it.

Yet if we had a regulatory body over the gun industry, the defeat of such a bill would only be part of what’s necessary. We’d then have to defeat that regulatory body when it attempted to put similar rules in place.

We call it gun control not because we don’t understand but because we understand all too well what will happen.

That’s not going to change.

‘historical tradition’ my foot. Show me where there were any historical restrictions on accessories in 1791 or 1866. The judges who hate RKBA will pretzel a ruling anyway they can.

Gun Silencer Regulations Are Held Valid Under Second Amendment

A federal law requiring registration of firearm silencers is an allowable restriction under the Second Amendment, a Louisiana federal judge ruled.

The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana rejected Brennan James Comeaux’s motion to dismiss a two-count indictment charging him with possessing five silencers that weren’t registered to him and weren’t identifiable by serial number, in violation of the National Firearms Act. Comeaux argued the law violates his Second Amendment right to possess firearms.

The federal law is supported by the historical tradition of regulating gun silencers, US District Judge David C. Joseph wrote

What Anti-2A Activists Don’t Get About LaPierre Leaving the NRA

The jury is still out on whether longtime NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s resignation will lead to substantial changes within the organization, but gun control activists appear to be convinced that not only has his departure sealed the group’s fate, it’s going to allow them to run roughshod over our right to keep and bear arms going forward.

I’m not sure if Chris Murphy and groups like 97 Percent really believe their bluster, but let’s not forget that a time when the NRA is a “shell of its former self” we have polls showing households with firearms at an all-time high, supermajority support for the Bruen decision, and other Second Amendment organizations at the national, state, and local level stepping up to take on dozens of gun control laws and bills in courts and committee hearing rooms across the country.

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New Year, Same Old Ninth Circuit

My wife has watched way too many sappy Christmas rom-coms over the holiday break. It’s one of her guilty pleasures, even though she knows from the get-go how the story is going to play out. Girl meets guy under improbable circumstances, there’s immediate friction with an undercurrent of attraction, they get together, there’s a huge blowup, and yet they manage to reconcile and live happily ever after. The characters and the locations may change, but the story is basically always the same.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is like the Hallmark Channel of the judicial system, at least when it comes to gun control fans. No matter what law is being challenged or how egregiously it violates our Second Amendment rights, lawsuits in the Ninth Circuit seem to follow the same script: gun owners sue, a judge agrees that the law is likely to be unconstitutional and grants an injunction, only to have it stayed and eventually overturned. Sometimes we get a plot twist and a three-judge panel will uphold the injunction, but inevitably that decision is overruled by an en banc review. No matter how improbable or untenable the decision may be, anti-gunners are assured of a happy ending in the Ninth.

Not once in the fifteen years since the Heller decision was handed down has the Ninth Circuit ultimately concluded that a gun control law goes too far and abridges a fundamental right, and though it’s still fairly early the appellate court looks to be keeping that streak alive by allowing California’s new “gun-free zones” to take effect today after a rare Saturday ruling to grant an administrative stay of Judge Cormac Carney’s injunction halting enforcement of the new bans in supposedly sensitive places… including virtually every publicly accessible business that doesn’t specifically post signage welcoming concealed carry holders.

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MAYBE PUTTING THE ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION IN CHARGE OF EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN WAS A BAD MOVE

SHOCKING POLL: 30% of Gen Z thinks Osama bin Laden’s ideas were a ‘force for good’.

Campus Reform
December 28, 2023, 9:30 am ET

One in five Generation Z Americans have a positive view of Osama bin Laden and one in three think his ideas were a “force for good.”

Those shocking numbers come from a new survey of 18-to-29-year-olds that gauged perceptions of the al-Qaeda terrorism leader who masterminded the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

This survey and the anti-American sentiments it reveals appear to be an extension of the TikTok trend earlier this year in which young Americans praised bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which the terrorist wrote to justify blowing up the Twin Towers.

Campus Reform covered the disturbing social media trend and has been reporting for years that higher education indoctrinates students with anti-American rhetoric. Examples of the latter include professors denigrating American history and bashing the celebration of holidays including July 4.

Campus Reform has also been covering the fallout of this indoctrination.

For example, in 2014, a University of Wyoming student wrote an opinion piece arguing that Americans needed to “get over” 9/11.  In 2021, an annual North Dakota State University survey found that 57% of liberal-identifying students considered themselves unpatriotic.

Widespread campus anti-Americanism has also fueled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activism at universities, which has resulted in physical attacks on Jewish students.

In November, Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano spoke with CUNY Law Professor Jeffrey Lax about how the anti-Americanism exacerbates Jew-hatred on college campuses as part of a larger attempt to dismantle Western civilization.

Watch the full interview here.

Mark McCloskey, Pardoned for Brandishing Guns at Protesters, Can’t Get the Guns Back

From [the 26th’s] Missouri Court of Appeals decision in McCloskey v. State, written by Judge James M. Dowd and joined by Judges John P. Torbitzky and Michael S. Wright:

This appeal arises out of a petition for replevin in which appellant Mark McCloskey sought the return of two firearms that police had seized pursuant to search warrants in connection with a June 28, 2020, incident in which McCloskey and his spouse exhibited the firearms as a group of protesters passed by their home. They were charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon punishable by up to four years in prison. McCloskey and the State reached a plea agreement whereby McCloskey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor fourth-degree assault and forfeited ownership and possession in the two firearms in exchange for the State dismissing the felony charge….

Soon after, the governor pardoned McCloskey and he filed against the State, the Sheriff, and the Mayor (Respondents) his underlying petition for replevin of the weapons in which he claimed the governor’s pardon gave him the right to their immediate return….

While we agree that the pardon restored all of his rights forfeited by the conviction and removed any legal disqualification, disadvantage, or impediment, Missouri law is unequivocal that a gubernatorial pardon obliterates the fact of the conviction, not the fact of guilt. Thus, McCloskey’s guilty plea, for which he obtained the benefit of the State dismissing a felony charge punishable by jail time, survived the pardon and importantly, with respect to the issue at hand in this replevin action, triggered the guns’ forfeiture. Therefore, since McCloskey’s guilt remains, it follows that he is not entitled to the return of the weapons….

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Analysis: A New Twist on the ‘Dangerous and Unusual’ Standard for Gun Bans

A Massachusetts federal judge upheld the commonwealth’s ban on AR-15s and similar rifles this week. His rationale for doing so relied on an idiosyncratic understanding of the rifle’s purported lethality and defensive utility.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied a motion for preliminary injunction against Massachusetts’ ban on “assault weapons” and ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. He did so by putting a new twist on an old argument. He determined that modern laws banning AR-15s fit within the country’s historical tradition of regulating “dangerous and unusual” weapons.

“The banned weapons are ‘dangerous,’ because they are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Saylor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in Capen v. Campbell, “and they are ‘unusual,’ because it would be unusual for an ordinary citizen to carry such a weapon on his person on the street for self-defense, or to use it in the home to confront invaders or to protect against personal violence.”

While Saylor is certainly not the first to uphold a hardware ban since the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, his analytical framework for doing so stands out among the rest for its emphasis on the “dangerous and unusual” standard and his understanding of how AR-15s fit in.

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OhMyGosh a SNIPER RIFLE!™ Aauugghh!

Sen. Susan Collins Pushing Gun Control for U.S. Troops

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is putting together legislation to require the U.S. military to adhere to state-level red and yellow flag laws for troops.

A red flag law allows family, friends, and others, to seek a court order to have guns removed from someone they view as a danger to himself or others. A yellow flag law is more narrow, allowing law enforcement to seek the court order for firearm removal.

Collins bill comes in response to the October 25, 2023, Lewiston, Maine, attacks, which were carried out by a member of the U.S. Army Reserve.

The attacker used a sniper rifle which was legally purchased.

Maine has a yellow flag law, but although police were alerted that the Maine shooter could “snap and commit a mass shooting” in September, according to CNN, no yellow flag action was pursued.

Moreover, Breitbart News noted on October 26, 2023, police in New York took Card to a West Point hospital for an evaluation in mid-July 2023.

Card had caught the attention of military officials after “acting erratically in mid-July” while taking part in training at West Point, the Associated Press reported. Police in New York were called and Card was taken to West Point’s Keller Army Community Hospital.

New York has a red flag law and the involvement of police in the West Point incident raised questions as to why the law did not come into play.

On December 22, 2023, WMTW pointed out that Collins “is working on a bill that would require branches of the military to utilize state-level weapons restriction laws, when appropriate, if they believe a service member poses a threat of harm to themselves or others.”

Incompetent ‘Contagious Disease’ Diagnosis for Guns a Prescription for Tyranny

“New Mexico Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham held a recent press conference to praise herself for implementing dubious gun control measures,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported. “‘I won’t rest until we don’t have to talk about (gun violence) as an epidemic and a public health emergency,’ the governor said.”

If a prominent politician declares an epidemic and imposes edicts and orders to enforce them, it’s fair to ask, “Where’s the science?”

“Lujan Grisham was born in Los Alamos and graduated from St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe before earning undergraduate and law degrees from the University of New Mexico,” the governor’s official biography states. Neither her education nor her claimed career highlights show her qualified to make such a proclamation on her own, which makes it fair to ask, “Who’s advising her?”

That would be Patrick M. Allen, her New Mexico Health Department Secretary.

“In simple terms, violence, especially gun violence, behaves like a contagious disease,” Allen pontificates in his op-ed, “Tackling Gun Violence: A Public Health Challenge — DOH secretary says rapidly-spreading violence behaves like a contagious disease.”

“Imagine treating violence as if it were an infectious disease. Just as we study diseases’ origins to combat them effectively, we can apply the same approach to violence,” Allen proclaims. “How do we address gun violence as the contagious disease it is? Gun violence is a public health emergency.”

He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t he? The thing is, like the governor, the secretary in charge of the Land of Enchantment’s public health doesn’t have a qualified medical background, either.

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Massachusetts Assault Weapon Ban Ruled Constitutional by Judge

Massachusetts’ law prohibiting the possession and sale of some semiautomatic weapons commonly used in mass shootings is acceptable under a recent change to Second Amendment precedent from the US Supreme Court, a federal judge said Thursday.

The National Association for Gun Rights asked the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts to prevent the state from being able to enforce its law, claiming the weapons are protected under the Second Amendment because they were in common use at the time the Second Amendment was adopted.

The banned weapons “are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Chief Judge Dennis Saylor wrote in an order denying the gun rights group’s request to halt enforcement of the law.

This IS NOT the Bruen Standard.

The US Supreme Court held last year in New York State Rifles & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that state governments must prove a regulation would have been consistent with the nation’s historical regulation of firearms.

Saylor’s decision helps build the jurisprudence for the types of state regulations that remain acceptable under the Second Amendment post-Bruen as many states grapple with challenges to their weapon laws. States like Illinois, California, and Connecticut have also been allowed to move forward enforcing their assault weapon bans.

“The relevant history affirms the principle that in 1791, as now, there was a tradition of regulating ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons—specifically, those that are not reasonably necessary for self-defense,” the order said, and the current restrictions “pose a minimal burden on the right to self-defense and are comparably justified to historical regulation.”

THIS, is not the Bruen Standard either!

Saylor was not convinced that assault weapons are commonly used for self-defense, finding them “generally unsuitable” for that purpose because of their weight, size, and firepower.

“The features of modern assault weapons—particularly the AR-15’s radical increases in muzzle velocity, range, accuracy, and functionality—along with the types of injuries they can inflict are so different from colonial firearms that the two are not reasonably comparable,” the order said.

The case is Capen v. Campbell, D. Mass., No. 1:22-cv-11431, order 12/21/23.