Makes you wonder what else has been missed in NYC, doesn’t it?


Bodies found in unrefrigerated trucks in New York during COVID-19 pandemic

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The city of New York delivered a freezer truck to a funeral home on Wednesday after it was found to be storing dead bodies in unrefrigerated U-Haul vehicles, a Reuters eyewitness said.

The eyewitness saw bodies in a U-Haul van and said two vans and a truck were parked outside the funeral home.

ABC News reported about 100 bodies were stored in the vehicles after the owner of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Services funeral home said the freezer that normally stores bodies stopped working.

ABC did not identify the owner and no one at the funeral home was immediately available to comment. It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored in the U-Hauls or whether any were COVID-19 victims.

The bodies were found after neighbors reported an odor coming from the trucks, New York media reported.

The New York Police Department declined to comment. The Department of Health could not immediately be reached for comment.

Just what we need, right now with the Shootists Holiday right at 8 weeks away, a demoncrap gubbernor with crap-for-brains.


New Mexico Reverting to Old Mexico?

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- It seems that politicians and their medical advisors have lost sight of the objectives of social distancing. While they still speak in terms of “flattening the curve,” their actions appear to be more focused on eradicating the curve altogether. While that might be a noble goal, it’s not particularly realistic, and it’s not what we the people signed up for.

Recall that the point of “flattening the curve” was to prevent the novel Chinese Corona Virus from overwhelming our healthcare system, resulting in mass casualties due to a lack of medical facilities to care for the sudden flood of cases. Well, we’re now well into, or beyond, the peak period in most places and this “new normal” that we are all living appears to have worked. Even in critical hot-spots like New York City, where heavy population density, combined with high tourism and global travel, resulted in the worst outbreak in the nation, the spread was slowed enough to get through the worst of the disease, and the healthcare system was able to effectively handle the surge.

But now, as the peak is passing in some places and slowly approaching in others, petty tyrants around the country are still flexing their nanny muscles and demanding that businesses remain closed, people stay in their homes, and all “non-essential” activities be curtailed. As Americans have been resoundingly successful at slowing the spread and preventing the anticipated spikes in the disease, some of our “leaders” have shifted the goalposts, insisting that tight restrictions must remain in place until – when? Until there is no more threat from the disease at all? Until the curve goes subterranean?

New Mexico is an excellent case study. With a population of only about 2.1 million people, spread over an area of over 121,500 miles, New Mexico is among the least densely populated states in the nation. There are only 17 people per square mile, and a full 40% of the total population resides in Albuquerque and nearby Santa Fe. That leaves a lot of mostly empty territory, and few opportunities for the rapid spread of a virus like COVID-19. But Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has clamped down on the state in almost as draconian a fashion as her fellow Democrat, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

One of the things that makes Gov. Lujan Grisham stand out though, is her insistence that gun stores and ranges remain closed, except to provide services to police and other state agents, and only by appointment. This in spite the fact that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security declared firearm businesses to be “essential” in their guidance, not to mention that pesky bit of the U.S. Constitution stating that the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Even gun-hating governors in California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have backed down on orders for gun stores to close, but not Governor Lujan Grisham.

Gun groups and local activists have filed suit against Lujan Grisham, demanding that she add firearm-related businesses and ranges to the “essential businesses” list, but the governor has doubled down, stating that it is a “badge of honor” to be sued by the NRA.

The lessons being offered up by politicians like Lujan Grisham, are numerous and important. First, she’s teaching us that she doesn’t trust the people who elected her. She’s saying that they must be told what to do and how to do it, and that without her instructions – backed up by burly men and women with guns and badges – she believes the people would just blunder around bumping into one another and infecting each other with COVID-19.

Second, she’s teaching us that she, and politicians like her, respects neither the U.S. Constitution nor that of her state. We all know what the U.S. Constitution says, but here’s what the New Mexico Constitution says:

Sec. 6. [Right to bear arms.]

No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security
and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful
purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed
weapons.

No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right
to keep and bear arms. (As amended November 2, 1971 and November 2,
1986.)

There is no “except in the case of a virus” clause in there.
Third, she’s teaching us that philosophical purity and adherence to party dogma is more important to her than common sense or political sensibility, and that given the opportunity, she and her ilk, would implement the most draconian gun control bills they could think of, as long as they had the votes to get them passed. For example, look up the text of H.R.5717 to see how far they’re willing to go today, and imagine how much farther they would go with a majority in the House and Senate, and control of the White House.

Fourth, Governor Lujan Grisham is teaching us that, either she doesn’t know anything about guns, gun sales, firearms training, and shooting ranges, or she just doesn’t care.

It’s pretty obvious that a lot of people are feeling vulnerable and insecure at the moment, and a whole bunch of them want to acquire firearms to help ensure the personal safety of themselves and their families. They clearly consider this “essential” enough to risk their health to accomplish, though purchasing a firearm or ammunition usually doesn’t involve long lines or crowds, and there are very easy ways to ensure that doing so in the current environment remains safe. It’s also obvious that a whole bunch of people purchased their first firearm in the weeks before the Governor decided to shut down gun stores and ranges. So that leaves us with numerous first-time gun owners who now can’t get training or engage in safe, supervised practice with their newly acquired defensive tools.

It’s also worth pointing out that some governors have grudgingly allowed outdoor ranges to re-open, while keeping indoor ranges closed. This ignores the fact that indoor ranges, thanks to the efforts they go to in mitigating risks of lead exposure, are probably among the safest places a person could be to avoid contact with an airborne pathogen. Not only do indoor ranges have heavy-duty air-handlers that ensure that air is always moving downrange, away from the firing line, most also have physical dividers between shooting stations on the line.

The important take-away is that none of this matters to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. She is proud to trace her family lineage back 12 generations in Nuevo Mexico, and her autocratic, classist approach to governance is reminiscent of that of the old Mexico tradition. Lujan Grisham, who most people probably wouldn’t recognize as Hispanic, unless they were told, seems to gravitate to the role of the caring Patrona looking after her poor, clueless peones, whom she considers incapable of making wise decisions and taking care of themselves. While that description might fit some of her core constituents, the rest of the citizens of New Mexico would rather take responsibility for their own lives, including taking precautions against disease as they see fit, and providing for their own, and their family’s security.

‘Experts’: Buying a Gun in a Pandemic Gives People a Feeling of Control

Still more hand-wringing from those who see hundreds of thousands of first-time gun buyers (and counting) and realize the damage being done to the cause impeding, reducing, controlling, and eliminating civilian gun ownership in this country.

In its length, its scope, and its threat and alterations to the social fabric, this pandemic plays into the distinctly American perception of self-reliance, [Small Arms Analytics’ chief economist Jurgen] Brauer said. “It’s the philosophy that you do look out for yourself, you do not rely on anybody else.” And if need be, you defend your own home. Brauer stresses that the need for such measures is “more of a perception than reality, but it’s perception that drives the marketplace.”

Andrew Flescher, a public health expert in social policy and bioethics at Stony Brook Medicine, suggested that the act of buying a gun “possibly furnishes the buyer with a feeling of control” at a time when social distancing requirements have some people feeling that they have lost agency over their own lives. Kalesan echoed this view, saying that guns confer a sense of power and security. From a psychological standpoint, she added, a gun is similar to a “security blanket for a child.”

– Ariel Ramchandani in Another Worrying Side Effect of Covid-19: More Guns

 

Just another confirmation the demoncraps are filled with up all the way to the top of their pin heads.


Illinois Gov. Pritzker’s Executive Order makes criminals of unsuspecting gun owners

Illinois Governor Pritzker might be well advised to find new legal counsel, unless this was intentional, as it appears his upcoming Executive Order taking effect May 1st, 2020 does one of two things.

  • Strips a gun owner of his rights while complying with the Executive Order to wear a mask, or
  • makes them a criminal if they exercise their gun rights while complying with the Executive Order to wear a mask.

Proposed May 1, 2020, Executive Order

“Wearing a face covering in public places or when working. Any individual who is over age two and able to medically tolerate a face-covering (a mask or cloth face- covering) shall be required to cover their nose and mouth with a face-covering when in a public place and unable to maintain a six-foot social distance. Face-coverings are required in public indoor spaces such as stores.”

Criminal Code

Sec. 24-1. Unlawful use of weapons.
(a) A person commits the offense of unlawful use of weapons when he knowingly:

(9) Carries or possesses in a vehicle or on or about his or her person any pistol, revolver, stun gun or taser or firearm or ballistic knife, when he or she is hooded, robed or masked in such manner as to conceal his or her identity;  (this violation is a Class 4 Felony)

Considering a mask that covers the mouth and nose will clearly conceal a person’s identity, those people complying with the Executive Order by wearing a mask while also exercising their right to bear arms, both under the State Constitution, US Constitution, and Illinois Firearms and Concealed Carry laws would be violating the criminal code.

This is yet another example of a political figure invoking rules upon citizens with little to no regard for their constitutionally protected rights.

 

Scratch a liberal, find a totalitarian.


Atlantic Magazine: Hurrah for Pandemic Censorship!

A note to Atlantic magazine: George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t meant to be a how-to guide…..

A couple of people writing at The Atlantic magazine see a fantastic silver lining in the current coronavirus outbreak. Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods see the pandemic as a great opportunity to bring about more censorship along with surveillance of the public as they exulted on Saturday in “What COVID-19 Revealed About the Internet.”

Just so you would know where they were coming from, the subtitle was “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” Got that? Totalitarian China is right and the USA is wrong when it comes to “freedom versus control of the global network.” And in case you think they are being misinterpreted, their own words reveal they come down firmly in favor of Big Brother.

Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

Practicing censorship but for our own good?

…Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

 In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

Freedom is slavery! And if you believe that then I guess you could come to the conclusion that “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

After the 2016 election debacle, for example, the tech platforms took aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries. YouTube has an aggressive policy of removing what it deems to be deceptive practices and foreign-influence operations related to elections. It also makes judgments about and gives priority to what it calls “authoritative voices.” Facebook has deployed a multipronged strategy that includes removing fake accounts and eliminating or demoting “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter has a similar censorship policy aimed at “platform manipulation originating from bad-faith actors located in countries outside of the US.” These platforms have engaged in “strategic collaboration” with the federal government, including by sharing information, to fight foreign electoral interference.

Using the fraudulent Trump-Russia collusion theory to justify ever more censorship. The weird thing here is that the authors are writing about all this stifling of free speech in an approving manner.

Anyone who didn’t see this coming was asleep at the wheelio.
The 9th Circuit Circus Court of Appeals granted a stay to stop the preliminary injunction stopping California’s background check on ammo purchases.


California’s Ninth Circuit Court Issues Emergency Stay, Background Checks on Ammo Are Back In Place.

Well, that didn’t take long.  Just yesterday morning we reported that California Judge Benitez had passed an injunction against a 2016 law that requires a background check before buying ammo.

Gun owners in California knew they had to act fast.  The last time Judge Benitez had overturned unconstitutional gun control laws –those pertaining to high capacity magazines –his ruling was overturned in a single week.

This might be a new record.  Late last night, less than two days after Benitez’s injunction, the state filed an emergency stay, shutting the door on ammo purchases without a background check.

Legislating From The Bench

Here’s the back story. Benitez issued the injunction against the law requiring background checks for ammo purchases while hearing a case called Rhode v. Becerra.  Benitez ruled that California’s 2016 law requiring a background check to purchase ammo was unconstitutional.

This opened the floodgates for online ammo purchases for Californians who are all but locked in their home.  Imagine being a gun owner in California in the days leading up to tyrannical Governor Gavin Newsom’s lockdown.  Those gun owners were limited to only the ammo available in stores and had to fight massive lines to try to buy what they needed.

But for two brief days, sanity shown down like sunshine and gun owners could purchase ammo like the rest of free America.   And more importantly, out-of-state retailers could ship directly to California buyers, without having to send it to a licensed dealer to run a background check.

But late last night, that window closed and Californians are back to being forced to jump through hoops to exercise their right to defend themselves.

You Get What You Asked For

We’ll see how this all pans out as the court case continues.  On the one hand, since this onerous law requiring background checks for ammo purchases was passed by vote of the citizens, we have a hard time feeling sorry for California.

On the other hand, we know what it’s like to have your state taken over by leftists and flipped, until you feel like a stranger in your own land.

For now, we hope two days was long enough to get millions of rounds ordered into the state!  We’ll keep you updated on that.  We’re going to love how the left will freak out once the numbers are released.

Biden didn’t think up all this crap-for-brains this gun control scheme. He hasn’t the mental power to do so. As we see again, legislation is conceived and written up by some group with an agenda and, probably along with a large campaign contribution, proffered to a candidate.


Biden Website Reveals Alarming Gun Control Agenda

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Democrat presidential hopeful Joe Biden has plans for American gun owners that are spelled out in a 3,100-word agenda found on his campaign website that includes a ban on so-called “assault weapons,” background checks on all gun sales and transfers, restrictions on the number of firearms someone can buy in a month, “safe storage” and enough other red tape to turn the right to keep and bear arms into a heavily-regulated privilege.

[I’ll insert a Supreme Court decision here:
If the State converts a right into a privilege, the citizen can ignore the license and fee and engage in the right with impunity. (Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, Alabama, 373 U.S. 262).]

This coming Saturday, April 25, “Team Joe” is planning a “Service Outreach Unity Leadership (S.O.U.L.) of the Nation” event to recognize the efforts of “our communities’ heroes.”
A message on his website says, “When Joe launched our campaign a year ago this Saturday, he said that this election is about more than just politics – it’s about the soul of this country. That is true now more than ever before.”

The former vice president, now said to be considering a female running mate since he is virtually assured of winning the nomination—which a majority of Democrats appear to favor, according to a recent Rasmussen survey—insists he will follow “constitutional, common-sense gun safety policies.”

Here are some of the highlights found in his campaign literature:

  • Put America on the path to ensuring that 100% of firearms sold in America are smart guns. Biden believes we should work to eventually require that 100% of firearms sold in the U.S. are smart guns.
  • End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. Biden will enact legislation to prohibit all online sales of firearms, ammunition, kits, and gun parts. (This could be a direct threat to such places as Midway and Brownells, Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s.–ed.)
  • Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Joe Biden will enact legislation to once again ban assault weapons, his agenda says. This time, the bans will be designed based on lessons learned from the 1994 bans. For example, the ban on assault weapons will be designed to prevent manufacturers from circumventing the law by making minor changes that don’t limit the weapon’s lethality. While working to pass this legislation, Biden will also use his executive authority to ban the importation of assault weapons.
  • Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act. Currently, the National Firearms Act requires individuals possessing machine-guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles to undergo a background check and register those weapons with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Due to these requirements, such weapons are rarely used in crimes. As president, Biden will pursue legislation to regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act.
  • Buy back the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines already in our communities. Biden will also institute a program to buy back weapons of war currently on our streets. This will give individuals who now possess assault weapons or high-capacity magazines two options: sell the weapons to the government, or register them under the National Firearms Act.
  • Reinstate the Obama-Biden policy to keep guns out of the hands of certain people unable to manage their affairs for mental reasons, which President Trump reversed. In 2016, the Obama-Biden Administration finalized a rule to make sure the Social Security Administration (SSA) sends to the background check system records that it holds of individuals who are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms because they have been adjudicated by the SSA as unable to manage their affairs for mental reasons. But one of the first actions Donald Trump took as president was to reverse this rule. President Biden will enact legislation to codify this policy. (Critics of this policy say it went after military veterans who had problems with finances.)

There is much more in Biden’s scheme, such as holding firearms manufacturers responsible for illegal acts committed by people using one of their firearms. Another provision will “Give states incentives to set up gun licensing programs…to require individuals to obtain a license prior to purchasing a gun.”

It’s all spelled out in detail, in 3,167 words, and there is nothing in this narrative about Biden “hoping” to do anything. At several points, the document says “Biden will.”

To accomplish this, he’s going to want a running mate who agrees with, and will adhere to, his policies. The recent Rasmussen survey, conducted April 12-13 with a margin of sampling error at +/- 3 percentage points, says 61 percent of likely Democratic voters “believe it is important for Biden’s running mate to be a woman or person of color, with 35% who say it is Very Important.”

Does that mean most Democrats are more interested in political correctness than they are in performance? Here’s an excerpt from the Rasmussen report:

“But when given a list of seven top potential vice presidential nominees, Democrats rate most about the same. The possible candidates and their levels of support are: Bernie Sanders (15%), Kamala Harris (14%), Elizabeth Warren (13%), Amy Klobuchar (12%), Stacey Abrams (11%), Michael Bloomberg (7%) and Pete Buttigieg (5%). Thirteen percent (13%) of Democrats prefer someone else, and 11% are undecided.” By no small coincidence, Klobuchar is being touted as Biden’s “safe pick” in a Washington Examiner piece.

In its introduction, the Biden doctrine emphasizes that he “has taken on the National Rifle Association (NRA) on the national stage and won – twice. In 1993, he shepherded through Congress the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the background check system that has since kept more than 3 million firearms out of dangerous hands. In 1994, Biden – along with Senator Dianne Feinstein – secured the passage of 10-year bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. As president, Joe Biden will defeat the NRA again.”

Perhaps “victory” means different things to different people. Since 1993, the NRA reportedly raised its membership by at least 50 percent, and that era has seen the emergence of other rights organizations as powerhouse groups, specifically the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and various state-level organizations. Millions of gun owners were energized during the Clinton and Obama administrations when Biden and his Capitol Hill colleagues went after gun rights.

Indeed, it was a SAF case—McDonald v. City of Chicago—that made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, providing the opportunity to incorporate the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment. That opened the legal floodgates allowing dozens of legal actions challenging the kinds of gun laws Biden and his contemporaries favor.

Near the top of his agenda, Biden says he will “Get weapons of war off our streets.” There are all kinds of proposals to make it more difficult for law-abiding gun owners to remain “law-abiding.”

There is little, if anything, about locking up criminals. Instead, one finds this:

“There are proven strategies for reducing gun violence in urban communities without turning to incarceration. For example, Group Violence Intervention organizes community leaders to work with individuals most likely to commit acts of gun violence, express the community’s demand that the gun violence stop, and connect individuals who may be likely perpetrators with social and economic support services that may deter violent behavior.”

On the heels of a mass shooting rampage in Canada, a nation with some of the strictest gun laws in the hemisphere—laws the gun prohibition lobby would like this country to emulate, were it not for the pesky Second Amendment—Biden’s gun control agenda is unlikely to win any converts in the firearms community, and it will give U.S. gun owners plenty to think about as November draws closer.

In other words, these crap-for-brains econutz want the world economy to continue going backwards as much as it has so far this year, each year, for at least the next ten years.


The Coronavirus Economy Is a Preview of the Green New Deal Economy

Eric Holthaus, a popular online climate-change activist, points out that the allegedly positive environmental effects of the coronavirus crisis are on “roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals.”

“We’re doing it. It’s possible!” he adds.

It’s nice to see an environmentalist finally acknowledging the inherent economic tradeoff of their vision. Holthaus is absolutely correct that implementing a plan like the Green New Deal would hold approximately the same gruesome economic consequences as the coronavirus crisis — except, of course, forever. The point of modern environmentalism, as Greta Thunberg has hinted, is the destruction of wealth. This process is what Holthaus, and others, euphemistically call “degrowth.”

Holthaus, who doesn’t celebrate coronavirus, reminds us that merely to keep pace with the IPCC recommendations on carbon emissions, Americans would be compelled to shut down virtually the entire economy. They would need to restrict air travel, place most Americans under virtual house arrest (or raze all the suburbs), halt international and interstate trade, destroy millions of jobs, shut down large swaths of manufacturing, and stop people from using their cars — or buying gas.

How would it work? The only “Green New Deal” that we’ve ever actually seen was authored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her plan, one supported by the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, calls for the banning of all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat-eating, among many other nonsensical regulations, within the next decade.

Also, you’d have to compel people to participate. I feel confident that Americans won’t voluntarily relive the 19th century because, whether intuitively or not, they comprehend that by nearly every quantifiable measure their lives are better because of the affordability and reliability of fossil fuels. One day that reality might change. Today is not that day.

It took a deadly worldwide pandemic to get Americans to suspend modernity, so you can assume it would take authoritarian measures to shut down the free movement of people. But Holthaus reminds us that the fight to stop climate change is often about more than separating your plastics and papers or installing some state-subsidized solar panels, it’s about a fundamental, societal economic upheaval that would throw millions into poverty.

Moreover, the Green New Deal would necessitate that capitalistic society be displaced by a technocratic regime that dictates what you consume, sell, drive, eat, and where you work. This, says Holthaus, “is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”

Indeed.

Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus nursing home policy proves tragic.

The letter was heartbreaking as it recounted the death of an 88-year-old woman in a New York nursing home. But it was also angry and accurate about a strange New York policy that is ­fatally wrongheaded.

“I am wondering who will hold Gov. Cuomo accountable for the deaths of so many older people due to his reckless decision to place covid19 patients in nursing and rehabilitation homes,” the letter began. “I am writing as a daughter who lost her beautiful 88 year old mother who was receiving physical therapy at one such facility.”

The writer, Arlene Mullin, went on to recount examples of the governor promising to protect the elderly because of their known vulnerability. She noted that he named his stay-at-home order after his own mother, Matilda ­Cuomo, and talked several times about protecting her.

“My mother is not expendable and your mother is not expendable and our brothers and sisters are not expendable,” Cuomo said a month ago.

Mullin had another complaint, too — that the media never asked the governor about an order mandating that nursing homes admit and readmit patients who tested positive for the coronavirus, despite the extraordinary number of deaths among the elderly.

That drought ended Monday when The Post’s Bernadette Hogan asked about the policy at ­Cuomo’s daily briefing. His ­answer was stunning.

“That’s a good question. I don’t know,” the governor said.

He turned to Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, who confirmed the policy, saying “if you are positive, you should be admitted back to a nursing home. The necessary precautions will be taken to protect the other residents there.”

The second part of Zucker’s answer is debatable, the first part is not. The disastrous results speak for themselves.

Gun Control Spokesman Insults New Gun Owners

David Chipman was once a respected special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That was before he decided to peddle gun control.

Now, he’s reduced to name calling and holding his breath until he turns blue. It’s all because America’s ignoring his Chicken Little “the sky is falling” admonitions of those who dare to not believe the gun control ideas he’s selling.

Sorry, Mr. Chipman. During the past month hundreds of thousands of Americans went from indifferently listening to the gun control agenda to buying guns – to the tune of at least 2.3 million of them last month. Still, that doesn’t excuse his insults, slurs and mudslinging. The spate in gun purchases pulled back the veil and revealed gun control zealots for who they really are. They aren’t for gun safety. They’re not for the “common-sense” laws they crowed about to adoring and accommodating media. They are really about denying law-abiding Americans their fundamental civil liberties. They don’t want Americans to provide for their own safety, but would rather they live on the spoon-fed, fear-filled lies doled out by gun control groups in measured proportions, just enough to keep people kowtowed and doubting their own abilities to exercise safe and responsible firearms ownership.

Chipman, who is a Senior Policy Advisor for Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, is spending more time than ever not fighting gun violence, but gun ownership. When the surge started in gun sales at the outset of the COVD-19 health crisis, Chipman dismissed the buyers as fearful and preparing “for end times scenarios and zombie apocalypses.”

Guns For Me. Thee? Nah.

And why you shouldn’t believe Earth Day Predictions of 2020 either.


EARTH DAY PREDICTIONS OF 1970. THE REASON YOU SHOULDN’T BELIEVE EARTH DAY PREDICTIONS OF 2009.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 [now 50] years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 [50] years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

Michael Moore Admits He Had No Idea Where the Juice to Power Electric Cars Came From

Michael Moore is out with a new film the media will hype but most Americans will never see. This speaks well of the latter and poorly of the former.

In a Reuters story promoting Moore’s latest, he admits:

Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, “but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?”

That’s awesome. Moore has been going around for decades promoting politicians and policies that would basically wreck the economy. He wanted a coronavirus-level economic tsunami before we’d ever heard of Wuhan and its bats.

But he had no idea what he was talking about. He continues.

“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.

What’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh, right. Clueless. Michael Moore is clueless

The result of a ‘modern’ college education


A new bout of mind-boggling economic illiteracy from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Monica Showalter

Oil prices went into negative territory yesterday, meaning there was more oil sloshing around on the market than buyers, and for the first time producers were literally offering to pay people to take it way. The prices actually went negative.

That’s an indicator of a crashed economy.

And a dinner triangle for morons. Who should show up but Boston University economics major, professional socialist, and Milton Keynes fan, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She tweeted this:

Hear that? She celebrated.

Hear that? She celebrated.

Then when someone alerted her that the cheer was ill-advised, given all the oil workers who were losing their jobs, she got rid of the tweet, but in the way of a stubborn banjo-kid-level ignoramus, stood her ground. According to Fox News:

After deleting her post, Ocasio-Cortez tried again, writing: “This snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement. Fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline. This along w/ low interest rates means it‘s the right time to create millions of jobs transitioning to renewable and clean energy. A key opportunity.”

Throughout the day, Ocasio-Cortez has also reposted various messages essentially saying the oil crash presents an opportunity for environmentalists.

Her simpleton logic was that with the oil industry crashing, a new green energy industry would rise as a result.

It’s ridiculous. The green energy industry, such as it is, came about because of high oil prices. High oil prices meant buyers were looking for alternatives, and if oil prices were going to be high, then it might not make that much difference price-wise if one got one’s energy from wind power or ethanol or solar power or manure fires, or whatever it takes to call an energy source ‘green.’ Ocasio-Cortez, of course, has big plans to end all fossil fuel use in the country and convert it all to the pipe dream of green energy.

She reads the crash of the oil industry as the wake up call to go green.

In emitting her gaseous cheers, she demonstrated with perfect pitch that she doesn’t understand the simplest laws of supply and demand.

Oil prices are crashing because people aren’t buying.

And if cheap oil can’t be so much as given away by sellers because of the lack of buyers, why would anyone want to buy more expensive green energy instead? The oil industry is literally paying people to take their oil away and nobody’s doing it because the economy is dead. And here she thinks economically battered people somehow have lots of money to pay for green energy, which even if they did, would choose overpriced, under-performing green energy instead getting oil for free? The idiocy of this creature boggles the mind.

What’s especially stupid here in this brain-of-a-seven-year old cheering is that big league socialists, the ones with real power, have always grasped the importance of high oil prices. Hugo Chavez, the late socialist dictator of Venezuela, and a clown who didn’t know a whole lot about economics either, understood that little detail. Less than 20 years earlier, he vowed to drive oil prices up to $200 a barrel and leave America prostrate by cutting off our access to oil as a means to “defeat” us. Instead of watching America grovel, he ended up with an own-goal, triggering the great fracking boom that effectively ended his capacity to use oil as a weapon.

All petrotyrants went downhill after fracking transformed America into the world’s largest oil producer as well as a net exporter of energy. Vladimir Putin loves high oil prices and bankrolls greenie groups in Europe to encourage a stranglehold on fossil fuel production in the name of going green. Other socialist tinpot dictators in Africa and elsewhere also thrive on high oil prices. Not a one of them wants these prices to go down, because they recognize that high oil prices keep them in power.

But then we have Ocasio-Cortez, babe in the woods, imagining that in this hellish oil price situation, a green paradise beckons.

And speaking of power, oil also keeps the lights on in Ocasio-Cortez’s New York City, too, as Fox News noted:

Added Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas: “I don’t ‘love to see’ oil & gas workers & their rural communities suffering as a result of this devastating price collapse, @AOC. Places like West Texas & hard-working men & women in the oil patch power the bright lights of NYC… including the hospitals!”

It just doesn’t get stupider than this. Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a lot about her economic illiteracy with this ignorant tweet. It’s time for Boston University to be investigated for issuing diplomas to fools this ignorant. Nobody should pay attention to another thing this blithering idiot says.

 

CDC’s Failed Coronavirus Tests Were Tainted With Coronavirus, Feds Confirm

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

Now, according to investigation results reported by The New York Times, federal officials confirm that sloppy laboratory practices at two of three CDC labs involved in the tests’ creation led to contamination of the tests and their uninterpretable results.

“Just tragic”

Shortly after the problems became apparent in early February, the Food and Drug Administration sent Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the CDC to investigate what was going wrong. According to the Times, he found a lack of coordination and inexperience in commercial manufacturing.

Problems that led to the contamination included researchers coming and going from labs working on the test kits without changing their coats and researchers sharing lab space to both assemble test components and handle samples containing the coronavirus.

The CDC said in a statement Saturday to the Times that the agency “did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.” Though the CDC appeared reluctant to admit contamination was at the root of the problem, the Times noted that in a separate statement the CDC seemed to acknowledge such problems, saying the agency has since “implemented enhanced quality control to address the issue and will be assessing the issue moving forward.”

After the CDC first sent its test kit to states in early February, it took the agency around a month to fix the problem. By then, the virus had invaded many communities unimpeded, and any chance that the US had at containing its spread had virtually vanished. By mid-March, many states turned to mitigation efforts, such as social distancing, to try to blunt—rather than prevent—the life-threatening, healthcare-overwhelming effects of COVID-19.

“It was just tragic,” Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told the Times. “All that time when we were sitting there waiting, I really felt like, here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.”

If Half the Country’s Deaths Were in Montana, Would New York Shut Down?

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area……..

That means that more than half (52%) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New York metropolitan area.

What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52% of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21% of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48%).

Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina — two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people — had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?

It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).

Even more telling, the media, which controls American public opinion more than any other institution, including the presidency and Congress — but not churches and synagogues, which is why they loathe evangelicals, traditional Catholics, faithful Mormons and Orthodox Jews — would not be as fixated on closing down the country if it were killing far more people in some Southern, Midwestern, Mountain or Western states than in New York City.

The media is New York-based and New York-centered. New York is America. The rest of the country, with the partial exception of Los Angeles (also a media center) and Silicon Valley, is an afterthought.

Having grown up and attended college and graduate school in New York, and having lived in three of the city’s five boroughs, I know how accurate the most famous New Yorker magazine cover ever published was. The cover’s illustration depicted a New Yorker’s map of America: New York City, the George Washington Bridge and then San Francisco. The rest of the country essentially didn’t exist.

One would have to visit people who had never left their rural village in a developing country to find people more insular than New York liberals, which is what nearly all New Yorkers are………

In his latest column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman inadvertently revealed how New York-centric his view of America is. Friedman, like virtually all his colleagues at The New York Times, opposes opening up any state in America at this time. He writes: “Every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask?”

Only a New Yorker would write those two sentences. In the 40 years I have lived in the second-largest city in America, I have never ridden on the subway or any other intraurban train or bus. In fact, it is common for New Yorkers to look at Los Angeles with disdain for our “car culture.” Like the vast majority of Americans everywhere outside of New York City, in Los Angeles, most of us get to work, visit family and friends, and go to social and cultural events by car — currently the life-saving way to travel — not by bus or subway, the New Yorker way of getting around.

But Friedman is a New Yorker, and because his fellow New Yorkers walk past one another on crowded streets and travel in crammed buses and subway cars, South Dakotans should be denied the ability to make a living.

The protests were on Wednesday & Friday, and the deaths were reported Sunday, so it isn’t  “unclear.” What is clear is the protests could not have contributed to the deaths. What’s also clear is that the author of this mendacity, Jackie Salo is guilty of submitting libelous BS for publication and her editor is too stupid to recognize it.


Kentucky sees highest spike in coronavirus cases after lockdown protests.

Kentucky experienced its highest single-day spike in coronavirus cases after protests broke out in the state to lift lockdowns, according to reports.

Gov. Andy Beshear announced there were 273 new cases Sunday, bringing the total to 2,960, news station WCPO reported………

Around 100 protesters gathered Wednesday on the lawn of the Capitol building in Frankfort during Democrat Beshear’s coronavirus briefing, shouting “Open up Kentucky!” and “King Beshear,” the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

The same group returned Friday to the Capitol building, where they were met by barricades, the newspaper reported.

Instead, they circled the area in cars for a drive-through protest of Beshear’s coronavirus restrictions, the report said.

It’s unclear whether the protests had any impact on the surge of deaths reported Sunday in the state…..

These models are noted for flying high enough (2000ft+) to evade shotgun fire, but not magnum rifles…..Just sayin’.


China May be Spying on Americans Through Chinese-Made Drones Being Used to Enforce Social Distancing in U.S.

Drones used by American law enforcement officials to enforce “social distancing” mandates may be conduits through which the Chinese government can spy on Americans, experts are warning.

Authorities in the United States have grown increasingly strict in implementing and enforcing distancing rules over the past few weeks. Many of them have turned to drones to remotely police citizens’ behaviors.

Yet the drones, many of them made in China, may provide opportunities for Chinese officials to gather information on American citizens.

Should people be concerned? Yes. Everyone should always be concerned,” Brett Velicovich, a former Delta Force operator, told Fox News this week. “You can never trust China.”

Yeah, dangerous to their mind numbing indoctrination plan.


Harvard professor: Too much homeschooling freedom is ‘dangerous’

A prominent Harvard professor argued recently that homeschooling, particularly the largely unregulated style of it that exists throughout much of the United States, constitutes a danger to the country and to schoolchildren, arguing that homeschooled children are ripe for abuse and that it poses a legitimate threat to the stability of American society.

Elizabeth Bartholet, the Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, writes in The Arizona Law Review that American homeschool law, which generally grants parents broad latitude to control the education of their children, is “inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights” of those children.

Homeschooling has in recent decades exploded in popularity across the United States, thanks in no small part to the work of activist groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has lobbied on behalf of homeschooling families since the early 1980s. Homeschooling is legal in every state in the country; around 3.5 percent of American students are homeschooled.

This regime, Bartholet argues, “means that parents can deny their children rights to education and to protection against maltreatment simply by not sending them to school.”

“Formal law, of course, does not affirmatively grant parents the right to deny education or to commit child maltreatment. But effectively it does just this by allowing homeschooling and failing to regulate it in meaningful ways,” she adds.

Citing several studies as well as “anecdotal evidence” that indicate some families abuse children under the guise of homeschooling them—as well as some evidence that homeschoolers don’t go to college at the same rate as non-homeschoolers and that they graduate “less likely to volunteer and…less politically engaged”—Bartholet argues that the potential for abuse and educational neglect within homeschooling necessitates a government system to more closely monitor and regulate homeschooling families:

We could say that because most parents don’t abuse or neglect their children, we don’t need a system protecting children against abuse and neglect. We could say that because most people don’t commit murder we don’t need laws prohibiting murder. But we don’t. We say instead that we need systems designed to protect at-risk subsets.

We should have a comparable system governing homeschooling, designed to ensure all children an adequate education and adequate protection, even if we believed that most homeschooling parents are capable of and interested in providing such an education and that few would abuse or neglect their children when free from any surveillance in the privacy of their homes.

“The legal claim made in defense of the current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights—that those with enormous physical and other power over infants and children should be subject to virtually no check on that power,” the professor argues in her paper.

Speaking to Harvard Magazine about her article, Bartholet claimed: “I think an overwhelming majority of legislators and American people, if they looked at the situation, would conclude that something ought to be done.”