I have pinned this post to the top of my blog. It is to remind people of what many of our opponents want. Alison Aires wants a tyrannical government. They want summary execution for private possession of firearms.
Since 2006, Bellevue has actually cut per-resident spending from $5,741 to $4,653 — a 19% decrease. Seattle? It’s ballooned from $5,997 to $8,677 — up 45%. Seattle now spends nearly twice as much per resident as Bellevue for the same basic services.
What’s that money buying? On violent crime, Seattle logs 542 incidents per 100,000 residents. Bellevue: 99. Property crime: Seattle racks up 4,100 cases; Bellevue about 2,200. Seattle residents are also earning less — median household income is $120,000 v. Bellevue’s $160,000.
But here’s the number that stops you cold. Life expectancy in Seattle’s downtown core — Belltown, First Hill — is 71.6 years. East King County, where Bellevue sits, comes in at 84.2. That’s a 13-year gap. Thirteen years of life, separated by a bridge.
Seattle could start by not electing admitted socialists and communists to the city council and as mayors. But they probably won’t. They will, almost for certain, advocate for Bellevue to become more like Seattle so as to stop attracting the jobs out of Seattle. Just like in the early days of the USSR it was always the fault of the capitalists. The solution was to confiscate the property and send the capitalists to the gulag and/or a mass grave.
Even with San Fransico and Detroit as examples of their path of folly, Seattle will have to attempt learning the bad lesson for themselves. I just hope they actually do eventually learn. With the contrast of Bellevue just a few minutes away across the lake you would think they would learn quickly. But I expect they will be more successful in exporting their mistakes than importing real solutions.
Just in the last few years a homeless shelter was constructed within walking distance of our home in Bellevue. And in March of this year, Sound Transit completed a “high‑frequency light rail service” connecting Seattle to Bellevue and Redmond. That will make it easier for Seattle criminals to do business in Bellevue and Redmond.
Barb and I will enjoy Bellevue while we can. I see storm clouds in the west coming our way. I’m so glad I have an underground bunker in Idaho we can retreat to.
Many years ago, I worked at Data I/O. Initially it was as an electrical engineer. I later migrated to software. And then a while after that Randy Shulman and I were co-workers. We become friends, our wives met and we all sort of clicked. There were huge differences in our backgrounds. Randy and his wife from Los Angles while my wife, Barb S., and I were from Idaho. Me from a farm and Barb from the small town of Orofino nearby. We graduated from Orofino High School together. The population was at its peak then at between 3,700 and 3,800. The county is huge* with a very low population density. * That isn’t the only contrast between Randy and I. Other than extremely rare use of alcohol, I have never used recreational drugs. Randy once told me, “I have never tried a drug he didn’t like.” And he tried a lot of different drugs. I sing so poorly my children forbid me from singing Happy Birthday in their presence. Randy was a very talented musician and singer.
Randy described himself as a Los Angles Jew married to a Chinese (Taiwan) woman. ** She used the English name of Jan. We just happened to have our first children within a few months of each other. The two families occasionally went out for a Sunday lunch or other activity together and the children became friends too.
Barb S. and I soon moved to Sandpoint Idaho but frequently returned to the Seattle area to visit friends such as Randy and his family. And once Randy, Jan, and their children us in our home in Idaho. Visiting North Idaho was a bit of a concern for Randy and before coming he ask if there would be any problems for them. Him being a Jew and in a mixed-race marriage with mix-race children. I laughed and told him there would be no problems coming over and staying a few days. However, I told him with a wink, getting out alive might be a different story.
When Randy and Jan’s oldest child Julie ** and my oldest child were maybe four or five years old they decided to marry when they grew up. My oldest was probably almost in High School before, with grave concerns about the ethics of going back on the agreement, asked me if it would be okay to have a change of mind.
Still later I started commuting from Moscow Idaho to Redmond to work on Windows 95 video drivers for Direct X. Randy was soon recruited to help. His band wrote a song about our experience at Microsoft that summer. I is pretty accurate: Mister Bill’s Machine.
Randy and his friends had a public television show and I was invited to present a skit. I wrote and performed it solo.
I still cringe seeing this and cannot watch it. But I have been listening to Mister Bill’s Machine on repeat while writing this.
A frame from that skit was on one of their album covers.
It was during this time that I taught Randy to shoot.
After working in “Mister Bills Machine” on Windows 95 I probably only saw Randy a half dozen times. Barb S., and our kids had dinner with his new wife once. I would occasionally get a call or an email from him. He moved to Austin Texas and was adapting to yet another culture.
Tonight, I got a message, from my middle child, telling me that Julie posted on Facebook that Randy had died yesterday.
Somewhere around 1990, post-Cowboys and a couple other bands for me, Randy Schulman and I were working at an eastside software company, where coders like us were somewhat affectionately called “Swine” while the marketers were known as “Weasels”. I think the names came from a children’s book that someone had brought to the office.
Randy is a witty songwriter and the master of many instruments, including his 1940’s Gibson L-5 on which he strapped on a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. It was sacrilege to purists, but he was immensely proud of it as we were anything but conventional.
We started playing together and rapidly formed a band, with my wife Deirdre on bass, Glenn Philips on a slew of twangy instruments, and drummer Duff Drew from a previous band of mine, Reckless X. Randy’s daughter Julie would occasionally join us as the Sixth Swine, a nod to the Fifth Beatle.
Glenn, incidentally, was a part owner of the New Melody Tavern in Ballard, which became the Tractor Tavern during our tenure.
We naturally called ourselves The Swine and played an acoustic mashup of grunge, bluegrass, folk, and blues, writing a bunch of songs but also injecting humor by combining unlikely musical pairs – like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with Flatt & Scruggs’ “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (which we called “Smells Like Pork Rinds”). That helped us become a fixture through most of the 1990’s on the mainstage of the annual Northwest Folklife Festival.
We’d write a bunch of songs from politics (“Politically Correct”, “I Didn’t Inhale”) and pop icons (“Shirley’s Song”, “I Saw Elvis”) to predictions (“The Future Has Hit”) and life at Microsoft (“Mr. Bill’s Machine”). Now, in retrospect, “The Anteater Kingdom” eerily describes our current political situation, even though it was written over three decades ago.
We’d satirize anyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates. No one was safe.
We got connected with Pete Cusumano who was producing TV shows on Channel 29, the Seattle Public Access TV station, and in 1994 launched “Swine Before Pearls” (a play on “do not cast your pearls before swine”), sharing the cable space with programs such as “The Goddess Kring” and “Bong Hit Championships”. Parts of all these programs can be found on YouTube.
Public Access was the Wild West with few rules, but with lots of room to be creative, we had a lot of fun writing, producing, and performing on the series.
Our weekly half-hour show featured skits, political humor, newly-crafted topical songs, viewer call-in, and guest bands. Eventually, we moved to a monthly, one-hour format to make production easier, and released a CD compilation of songs from bands that performed on the program.
Through all this, we found time to record a bunch of our songs at Conrad Uno’s Egg Studio. These have sat in the vault for some thirty-odd years – until now.
We hope you will enjoy this collection, now available for download or streaming on your favorite music service. (We really wanted to include “Smells Like Pork Rinds” but the licensing hurdles were too high. You’ll find it under Randy’s solo releases on the major streaming services).
–Paul Brownlow, Seattle, WA, March 2026
Randy will be missed. As I commented on Julie’s Facebook post announcing Randy’s passing, “I am so sad. He is a major bookmark in my life’s journey.”
* Clearwater County, Idaho covers 2,488 square miles, has a population of roughly 9,000 people, and is known for rugged forests, the Clearwater River system, and key Lewis & Clark expedition sites.
📏 Dimensions & Area
Total area: 2,488 sq mi
Land: 2,457 sq mi
Water: 31 sq mi (≈1.2%)
If you want to explore more about the county area or geography, I can go deeper.
👥 Population
Different sources give slightly different current estimates:
2020 Census: 8,734 people
2025 Estimate: 9,118 people
2026 Estimate: 9,087 people
Population density is extremely low at ~3.5 people per square mile
Interesting Things About Clearwater County
1. Lewis & Clark Expedition History
The Weippe Prairie is where the Corps of Discovery met the Nez Perce in 1805 after crossing the Bitterroots. They recovered there before building canoes and continuing west. Learn more about the Lewis & Clark sites.
2. Dworshak Dam & Reservoir
Dworshak Dam on the North Fork Clearwater River is the third tallest dam in the United States. The reservoir is a major recreation area for boating, fishing, and camping. Explore Dworshak Reservoir.
3. Idaho’s First Gold Discovery
Gold was first discovered in what is now Idaho at Orofino Creek in 1860, sparking the region’s early mining boom. Ask about Idaho gold history.
4. Remote Forests & Outdoor Recreation
The county is heavily forested, with access to:
Clearwater River system
Lolo Pass
Bald Mountain ski area If you want, I can list outdoor activities.
5. Very Low Population Density & Rural Character
With only ~3.5 people per square mile, it’s one of Idaho’s most sparsely populated counties—quiet, remote, and heavily wooded. Learn about rural living in Clearwater County.
The police can approach you and demand you ‘show your papers’ to prove you’re allowed to exercise this right, otherwise, you are committing a crime.
Some people may have an urgent need to obtain a firearm for self-defense in their home because of a threat they face, yet they absolutely cannot do that. They have to file the application, go through the process, and wait as long as the state wants to take.
At every step of the way, the burden of proof is on the citizen to be allowed to exercise their rights. You go through the first round, and if they deny you, you can do an internal appeal within the Illinois State Police, which has a review board. If you lose at all those stages, you can go to court, but even then, the burden of proof remains on you to show that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment rights.
In our view, that is the exact opposite of how constitutional rights are supposed to work. A right means that you are presumed allowed to do something unless the government has a sufficiently good reason to stop you. Normally, if the government wants to disarm a particular person, they have to go to court, get a restraining order, and present evidence showing why that person shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun. But in Illinois, everybody is treated as guilty until they prove themselves innocent.
I am inclined to believe there would be a far fewer infringement of civil rights if the constitution allowed for government officials to be presumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent.
After careful review of the legislation and existing Supreme Court precedent, I find the assault weapon ban signed by the Governor on May 15, 2026 unconstitutional – and as a result, unenforceable. The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Second Amendment protects firearms commonly owned by law abiding citizens.
As Commonwealth’s Attorney, I took an oath to uphold both the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Virginia. That oath requires more than mechanical enforcement of statutes. I must exercise prosecutorial discretion, constitutional judgment, and fidelity to the rule of law. As such, my office will not support criminal charges resulting solely from technical violations of the unconstitutional assault weapon ban.
In the impersonal offices of North American education in the 1970s, a Canadian educator named Laurence J. Peter observed with clinical irony how hierarchies devoured talent. He saw systematic promotions: the excellent teacher became a mediocre principal, the competent principal a clumsy bureaucrat, the bureaucrat a disastrous civil servant. From that observation emerged the Peter Principle, published in 1969: “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.” Promotion is based on prior success, not on aptitude for the new role. The result is that organizations end up filled with people who no longer master what they do, but who can no longer be demoted without breaking the system.
…
The left’s social engineers, eternal dreamers of planned paradises, respond to the disaster they themselves generate by demanding more hierarchy, more State, more positions for their faithful. When the machine clogs with incompetents, the solution is never to shrink the monster’s size; it is to inject it with more militants and more budget. The cycle is inexorable. Loyalty over competence, failure over correction, excuses over reality. And in the end, as always, the bill is paid by those at the bottom, while the red Peters keep rising, with beatific smiles, toward their next level of catastrophe.
The original post was in Spanish, the English translation was by X.
While I’m sure the above is an important component of socialism disasters and government in general, there are other issues as well. As I have brought them up many times before (and here are but two examples) I will not dilute the current observation.
Studies show that audiences adopt behaviors and attitudes of their favorite on-screen characters. That’s why our Show Gun Safety campaign empowers Hollywood to model gun safety on screen.
Global social reach 700k
1000+
writers, actors, producers, and studio executives trained on how they can responsibly portray guns on screen
150M
viewers have watched films and TV shows with firearms portrayals we helped shape and influence
That explains some things.
Perhaps it is time for the NRA and/or other gun owner rights groups to work with “writers, actors, producers, and studio executives.”
While this is certainly a magnificent improvement over any previous administration, I would prefer it be a criminal court rather than a civil court. But I am not a lawyer so it may very well be that the current path is the best possible one for legal and/or practical reasons. Hence, I pronounce it a good start and will cheer them on.
I have another frame-by-frame view of the opening fireball for Boomershoot 2026. This shows something I could not find in the previous set.
As a reminder, this is the assembled fireball target:
The vertical target at the bottom is for the shooter to initiate the chain reaction. The rubber bands hold the targets close together to ensure the explosion propagates from target to target. Rubber bands also hold the jugs of gasoline in a single unit and make it less susceptible to wind.
Here is the frame-by-frame evolution of the fireball:
Twenty road flares on ten pieces of rebar help ignite the gasoline vapor. The explosion alone will not ignite the gasoline. The gasoline must be turned into a vapor and mixed with air before it will ignite. The heat of the explosion is all gone by the time this happens. There must be another ignition source.
The frame above is very cool. The front facing target has detonated, but nothing else has moved. Below is a close up:
The shockwave moving through the earth from ground zero and creating the dust is always fascinating to me.
The frame above is what I wanted to see. The close up is below. You can see one of the origins of the flame which is far away from all the flares. You can also see what I believe are sparks flying through the cloud. We used particles of titanium sponge in the mix to create the sparks and help ignite the gasoline vapor. The flares alone are not always enough. There were about 2-3/4 cups of the titanium in the targets. You can get the titanium here and here. The exact product we used this year was this, but that is currently sold out. Titanium sponge is used in fireworks:
Titanium is a highly energetic fuel used to make bright white, long hang fireballs with good branching and very good crackle in fountains, rockets, stars, comets, saxons and drivers.
Nearly $450 turned into fire, noise, smoke, and a lifetime of memories in about four seconds.
Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”
One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.
Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.
Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.
Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.
They conquered until they collapsed.
America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.
And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.
Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”
Almost unprecedented?
It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.
…
We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.
AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.
If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?
The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?
Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.
Billions lifted out of poverty.
All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.
And carries no guarantee of being repeated.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.
Malcolm X didn’t just warn us about liberals…he autopsied their rotten souls with a butcher’s precision and left the carcass bleeding on the table for anyone with eyes to see.
He called them foxes, not wolves.
Conservatives?
Open teeth, honest hatred…you see the blade coming.
Liberals? Smiling, hand extended, knife already buried to the hilt while they whisper “ally” in your ear.
Exact quote, straight from the lion’s mouth:
“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way:
the liberal is more deceitful…more hypocritical…He has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game’ between the white liberals and white conservatives.”
That wasn’t rhetoric. That was prophecy.
We’re watching the pathology play out in real time, right fucking now.
The same liberal husbandry that engineered dependency in the Sixties is still farming human misery for votes, grants, and institutional power.
Soft-on-crime DAs, “equity” curricula that teach failure instead of excellence, welfare traps that castrate fathers and breed fatherless chaos…every single mechanism designed to keep communities hooked, enraged, and voting for their own gravediggers.
It’s not incompetence.
It’s deliberate psychological warfare:
manufactured victimhood as the ultimate narcotic, guilt-tripping whites into self-flagellation while the architects sip lattes in gated enclaves.
Psychologically it’s textbook narcissistic altruism…the liberal god-complex needs broken people to “save” so it can feel morally superior.
Philosophically it’s pure sophistry:
Plato’s cave with better marketing, where shadows labeled “systemic racism” and “inclusion” keep the prisoners chained while the puppeteers control the firelight.
Historically it’s the same Northern fox that smiled through Reconstruction, smiled through the Great Society, and is still smiling while the cities burn and the schools collapse.
Malcolm saw the soul-cancer clearly because he refused to be their pawn.
He understood the raw human will to power doesn’t disappear when you slap a “progressive” label on it…it just grows fangs behind the smile.
So spare me the performative tears and the low-IQ “but they mean well” bullshit.
The fox has shown its teeth.
The experiment is over. The evidence is a mountain of corpses and a generation of broken men.
I will have those ni****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.
It remains to be seen, LBJ may be off by a factor of two or more. But for the last 60 years he certainly was not wrong. Few politicians care about constitutional issues or the welfare of the country more than the political health of themselves and their party.
Limited government is a good thing for a whole variety of reasons, not least among them preventing its leaders from having the resources to do stupid shit on the daily.
Capitalism lifts people out of poverty. And that’s the only thing it does.
But that’s the only thing that really matters.
Imagine 100 kids who have to cross France to visit their sick grandmother. In 1800, they’re all on foot. Equal. Except half will never make it. Disease, exhaustion, accident. The others will take 3 weeks.
That’s the “equality” we miss.
Then capitalism arrives. The smartest ones build carts. Then trains. Then cars. Then planes. Then Elon Musk launches SpaceX and works on rockets that will do Paris-Tokyo in 40 minutes.
At every step, the gap widens between the one who can pay the most and the one who takes the cheapest option. Always.
And at every step, today’s cheapest is better than yesterday’s most expensive.
A minimum-wage worker in 2026 takes a Ryanair flight from Paris to Marseille for 30 bucks. Louis XIV, the most powerful man in France, took 5 days by carriage for the same trip, risking death from an infection upon arrival.
Today’s poor travels better than yesterday’s king.
Today’s poor eats better than yesterday’s king (scurvy was common at Versailles).
Today’s poor has access to more information in 10 seconds on his phone than all of Europe’s royal libraries combined in 1700.
And here comes the socialist. He looks at Elon Musk in his rocket and says: “That’s outrageous. We need to tax it.”
He doesn’t look at the minimum-wage worker on his Ryanair. He doesn’t look at the kid from Bangladesh escaping extreme poverty because he works in a textile factory exporting to Europe. He looks at the top. And he calls that “fighting inequality.”
That’s the intellectual scam.
Because what he calls “reducing inequalities” is really preventing the boat from rising while pretending to lower the yacht.
The numbers are there, indisputable. In 1800, 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today, less than 8%. That drop is the greatest moral victory in human history. It wasn’t produced by a revolution. Not by a government program. Not by a manifesto.
It was produced by people who had the right to create, sell, keep what they earned, and reinvest.
And that’s precisely the engine that socialist bureaucracy has captured in France.
The mechanism is simple. Capitalism produces wealth. Then the state arrives, takes 57% of GDP, redistributes a portion, and tells you: “See, without me you’d have nothing.” As if the baker should thank the guy who steals half his batch every morning.
Worse: it gradually forbids people from creating that wealth. It smothers startups under regulations, payroll taxes, permits, lifetime contracts, 50-employee thresholds. Then it wonders why growth is zero. And concludes that it needs to tax even more.
That’s exactly what Hayek described in 1944. A country that confuses “equality of outcome” with “justice” always ends up poorer and less free. France is the textbook case.
Meanwhile, in Poland, Estonia, Ireland, Singapore, they did the opposite. Low taxes, strong property rights, light state. Result: they catch up to us or surpass us in living standards in 30 years.
Capitalism isn’t a system that creates the rich. It’s a system that destroys poverty.
And the only reason we still doubt it in France is that we’ve handed economic discourse over to people whose job is to live off other people’s money.
The original post was in French and was automatically translated to English thanks to the fruits of capitalism. But the really important point is far, far more important.
Anyone who expresses concern about the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be given a harsh lessen in reality. They somehow believe that, as I have said before, equality of poverty and misery is more desirable than a range of prosperity and happiness. Even the most poverty-stricken people in our country have access to medicines that cure infections that killed a large percentage of even the wealthiest people of 500 years ago. The infant mortality and the percentage of women who died in childbirth was frightening just 150 years ago. And as pointed out in the QOTD the ability to travel by the poor of today exceeds the ability of kings a few hundred years ago.
Worldwide, free markets have essentially eliminated hunger. What would have been regarded as an unimaginable food supply 80 years ago is now taken for granted. When I was growing up it was common to have a parent in the U.S. tell their child, “Finish the food on your plate, children are starving in India.” * That doesn’t happen anymore. India now exports food. Look at the pictures of people in poverty around the globe from 100 years ago. They have shrunken faces, ribs resembling a skeleton, and children have bloated stomachs. Today, the poor in the U.S. are frequently obese from recreational food consumption.
If someone whines about the gap between the rich and the poor, they need to be told something. Tell them that gap, as seen in today’s capitalist society, is not just an indicator, but a blaring locomotive whistle of a signal. That signal is that the “poor” have wealth beyond the dreams of nearly all kings who have ever walked the earth.
* Sure, that doesn’t make any sense. What difference does it make to children thousands of miles away whether I finished the string beans on my plate or not? But they did say that. Perhaps it was to indicate we should be thankful for our situation rather than complain about the taste/texture/etc. of our bountiful food.
Per capita is a term used by racist white people who are trying to hide the crimes of white people. Can’t wait till you learn the same characteristics you hate in blackmen are the ones you claim white men should have
Some people are so stupid I have no common ground upon which I can even communicate with them.
While barely qualified to convert O2 into CO2, these same people are encouraged to vote. I just want to retreat to my underground bunker in Idaho and prepare for when his type does an imitation of the zombie apocalypse.
Not mentioned are the rebar with road flares attached to ignite the gasoline, but you seen them in the video.
This is the Fireball Target for the beginning of the Long-Range event:
More explosives, more gasoline, more thump, and more fiery delightfulness:
Added 5/16/2026 to help answer the question in the comments about the cost:
Each of those targets are 2.8 pounds of Boomerite. There is also another target out of sight under the visible layer (we had an extra target). The materials cost for each target is just under $13.00. That gives us $143 in explosives cost. There are 20 road flares at $2.81 each. That is $56.25. There are probably about 15 surveyors’ stakes. Each stake is about $0.60. So that adds about $9.00. Throw in the rubber bands and old cardboard for free and we end up with $208.25 for the base. There were 26 gallons of gasoline. It is ethanol free (from my brother’s 500-gallon tank on the farm) which cost $5.00/gallon. That is $130.00.
Total materials cost $338.25.
The sand has to be replaced every couple of years and costs about $200 (including delivery) each time. That adds another $100. Hence, each of those fireballs is about $440 just in materials.
Virginia has recently been featured in a lot of headlines about gun control, for all the wrong reasons. A number of them have mentioned a federal gun control bill pending in the U.S. Senate, sponsored by Tim Kaine (D) and Mark Warner (D) of Virginia. Dubbed “The Virginia Plan to Reduce Gun Violence Act of 2026,” it tries to portray Virginia as a gun control leader whose policies could serve as a model for the rest of the nation. But, like most firearm prohibition branding, this framing is not only untrue, it is the opposite the truth. Virginia, in reality, is the victim of a national gun control agenda, not the progenitor of one.
The latest slate of gun controls laws unleashed on Virginia by its Democrat-controlled legislature and governor are not some thoughtful or tailored set of policies that organically arose from Virginia’s unique public safety picture or the particular dynamics of its crime. Instead, it is grab bag of generic policies pushed by national gun control groups, approved by their billionaire donors, and modeled on a globalist paradigm arising in nations that have no constitutional rights to arms. Virginia is simply an opportunist expansion market for these concepts, not their origin point.
…
This Virginia Plan is the California Plan, which is the Everytown Plan, which is the Bloomberg Plan, which is the Australia Plan. It has nothing to do with the citizens of Virginia or with the Old Dominion’s culture and values. What an ignominious fall from grace for a state that produced some of the most important and influential of America’s Founding Fathers. In evaluating this fall, it is important to recognize that the core elements are being driven, not by ordinary Virginians, but by globally orientated billionaires, national public interest groups, and a Democratic National Committee that would love to see Richmond morph into the San Francisco of the East Coast.
Beware the rhetorical shift and media narrative to flip the script and make an established national policy package appear more locally grounded and politically palatable, even though its underlying structure has remained unchanged for years.
Further beware that your state may be next. If it can happen in the cradle of American Constitutionalism and the home of NRA’s Headquarters, no gun owning American should believe it could never come home to him or her.
I had overlooked the fact NRA headquarters is in Virginia as I watched those gun control bills breeze through the legislature. I believe that was the last of the major Gun Rights organizations to have their headquarters in a free state:
The only good things I can see about this is that it should motivate the people who work for these organizations and make it somewhat easier to find plaintiffs and file lawsuits.
I don’t think people understand just how much of an existential crisis Democrats are in. If they don’t gain control of the House, Senate, Presidency, pack the Supreme Court, re-mandate racial gerrymandering, and give illegals mass amnesty by 2032, they will all but die as a nationally competitive political party.
With the VRA being overturned we will net at least 15 seats and the census will give us like a dozen more, as well as forcing democrats to redraw their seats being bolstered by illegals, making them more republican. This will make the house all but impossible to win for Dems.
Then the senate will become increasingly hard for them to win as states like Nevada keep shifting red and republicans slowly keep picking better candidates.
And the nail in the coffin? The census will make it all but impossible for dems to win the presidency unless they win the popular vote by at least 6 points.
We’re witnessing the last gasps of the satanic ideology known as leftism. We will win.
I think the trend is generally good for most civil and economic liberties. But I am very skeptical of the stated scope. This is especially true if a lot of people actually believe this. Overconfidence can get you killed.
There can be some truth in both statements. As is nearly always the case there are tradeoffs involved.
In our current situation it is clear to me that a particular political party cares more about making it difficult to detect fraud than it does about it presenting good ideas.
There are terrorist organization and terrorist organizations. One has structure, hierarchy, provides weapons and plans (9/11 Hijackers, Hamas) Occasionally, someone will act individually according to their principles but have no formal connection with them.
The other speaks and fervently prays to whatever depraved gods they serve that someone with no formal connection will take up arms and do the evil deed for they are too cowardly to do it themselves.
The lawsuit continues recurring conflicts between local authority and Trump administration advocacy for gun rights that has played out in other cities and states.
A similar Justice Department lawsuit is pending against the District of Columbia over its restrictions on certain kinds of automatic firearms. The restrictions require registering many AR-15 and AK-47 style guns.
The District of Columbia has been joined by civil rights groups such as the Brady: United Against Gun Violence and the Giffords Law Center in asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit.
“Civil rights groups“??? I am amazed at their willingness to adapt such an Orwellian mindset. I didn’t expect that until much later in their march to totalitarian socialism. My presumption is their delusions have expanded even further outside of reality.
At least they are making it exceeding clear that the book Nineteen Eighty-Four is an example of their utopia instead of a dystopian novel.
