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.
I was actually a little confused by this because I was under the impression I still needed to resolve a couple of issues. They were just explanation type things, not physical changes I had to make. Even though I had the certificate I wanted to make sure they were actually setting and the county couldn’t come back to me and cause some problems. So, last weekend I sent the building inspector an email with the explanations. Only one of them is something I want to share with the public. The back story is the building inspector did not see any exhaust vents in the bathrooms. This was my response:
The ventilation unit supplies fresh air for most rooms in the house and has exhaust vents in both bathrooms and the laundry room. See the attached picture of the vent in the guest bathroom. It is difficult to see without a stool or ladder. The white cylinder-shaped object on the middle right is a motion/occupancy sensor. I have attached a graph showing the time and state of the ventilation system during a typical occupied period. The ventilation is scheduled by the house computer. There is a baseline goal of six hours of ventilation per day. The computer looks at the weather forecast and schedules the time for that which pushes the house temperature in the correct direction or at least moves it least in the wrong direction. There are numerous overrides as well. The overrides of most interest to you are for high CO2 levels and for bathroom occupancy. When a bathroom becomes occupied, a ventilation override occurs. This override continues until 10 minutes after the bathroom is unoccupied.
Below, are three images. A single image sent to the building inspector. The blog software wants to change the resolution to something unusable, so I broke into these three pieces:
The inspector wrote back Monday morning saying everything was in order and wrapped up with:
This project has been so magnificent to be a part of and you have been so wonderful to work with. Thank you!
Uhh… I’ll accept it, but that is not something I ever imagined hearing from a building inspector.
After the 2024 verdict, the left’s operating system shifted from “resist” to “reclaim by any means short of open civil war, and then some.” A midterm flip in one chamber hands them the scalpel. Both chambers hands them the guillotine. What follows is not normal opposition. It is the institutionalization of grievance, the weaponization of procedure, and the elevation of pathological rage into the architecture of the state.
This is not speculation. It is pattern recognition.
The same neural circuitry that produced the 2019…2020 impeachment theater, the Russiagate industrial complex, and the administrative state as a permanent veto will simply scale. Democrats do not metabolize electoral loss as information. They metabolize it as injury. And injured narcissistic systems do not seek equilibrium. They seek dominance restoration through humiliation of the other.
I can see that. That certainly fits with the 2016 election outcome.
On Wednesday I heard someone say, “With both houses I hope they do something.” What would you like them to do, I asked. The answer was immediate, “Impeach him.”
The question of firearm policy deserves better than slogans from either side. There are genuine costs associated with firearms. There are genuine benefits. Some can be measured reasonably well. Others are much less visible in government administrative records. Some empirical questions will probably remain disputed for a long time.
But one methodological principle should not be controversial: If you are going to conduct a social cost-benefit analysis, you have to count both costs and benefits.
Do not count the criminal shooting and ignore the defensive display. Do not count the completed homicide and ignore the crime that never occurred. Do not count every misuse of a firearm while assuming every lawful possession has zero social value. And do not confuse disagreement over the precise magnitude of a benefit with evidence that the benefit does not exist.
Twelve years after I first wrote about the social utility of firearms, I would frame the issue somewhat differently. The evidence has become richer. Some of the arguments have become more complicated. And some claims deserve more caution than I gave them then.
But the fundamental point has held up remarkably well:
A society cannot intelligently decide what firearms cost while refusing to ask what they are worth.
But, of course, the gun control nuts will not discuss the topic in a fair manner. Lies and deception are a critical portion of their agenda. But pointing this out will encourage some people to think about it more carefully.
There is a final problem with treating gun policy as a conventional public-health cost-benefit exercise. The Constitution does not make the Second Amendment contingent on winning that exercise.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Scalia acknowledged the serious problem of handgun violence and the arguments supporting handgun prohibition. But the Court then said something that often disappears from today’s gun-policy debate:
“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”
The Court did not say that social consequences are irrelevant to policymakers. It said that an enumerated right limits what government may do in response to them.
Bruen made the point even more explicit. Courts are not supposed to decide Second Amendment cases by making contemporary judgments about the “costs and benefits of firearms restrictions.” The Second Amendment itself reflects a judgment made by the people who adopted it.
That distinction matters enormously. I believe the social benefits of lawful firearm ownership are substantial and routinely underestimated. But the constitutional right does not disappear if a future academic study claims otherwise.
Free speech is not protected because economists have proved that offensive speech produces a positive net social return. The Fourth Amendment does not depend on demonstrating that warrants maximize public welfare. And the Second Amendment does not survive only so long as gun owners can win an actuarial debate.
Recent peer-reviewed research finds that right-to-carry concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime by about 5%, while constitutional carry laws reduce it by more than 15%.
As a gay man, it is exhausting to watch what used to be a movement about same-sex attraction get completely hollowed out.
Gay used to mean something clear. Men who are attracted to men. Women who are attracted to women. That was the entire point. Now it has been buried under layers of gender ideology, identity politics, and a demand that we rewrite our own orientation to make other people comfortable.
I am constantly told that if I am not attracted to a woman who identifies as a man, or a man who identifies as a woman, I am bigoted. That my sexual boundaries are a form of discrimination. That “trans men are men” and therefore belong in gay male spaces, dating pools, and communities. This is not inclusion. It is a direct attack on the reality of same-sex attraction.
The same institutions that once claimed to fight for gay people now treat actual gay men and lesbians as the problem if we refuse to play along. Corporate Pride has become a vehicle for this ideology, not a celebration of us. The language has shifted so far that many young people no longer even understand what gay means.
I do not need a parade or a rainbow logo to validate my existence. I need the freedom to live as a gay man without being pressured to deny biological reality or accept opposite-sex partners under a new label.
The people pushing this did not liberate us. They colonized the movement and turned it against the very group it claimed to represent.
Conservative voice on politics, power, culture, and institutional collapse. Pro-gay, anti-woke.
I find this interesting. It triggered a deeper analysis of my general impression of the state of things. I know for a fact that the DEI situation at work essentially evaporated over the course of a couple years. But my sense was that it was much greater than just what I saw at work.
My impression is that peak woke went beyond the breaking point of a significant portion of the population. The cancel culture in particular was a wakeup call to reality. I asked Grok about this and this excerpt from the response captures my impression and elaborates with additional detail and examples:
The defining moment was the George Floyd killing and the ensuing protests/“racial reckoning.” Earlier sparks existed, but 2020 marked the explosive peak of power and visibility. Decline was gradual then accelerated by overreach (e.g., “defund the police,” excesses of cancel culture), practical shortfalls, economic pressures, cultural backlash (notably on sex/gender issues such as the 2023 Bud Light episode), the 2023 Supreme Court affirmative-action ruling, post-October 7 campus responses, and the 2024 U.S. election results (Trump victory, Republican gains, some minority-voter shifts). Corporate DEI mentions in major filings dropped sharply in 2024–2025; many large firms scaled back or rebranded programs.
Democrats had bought into this and found themselves over the front of their skis. To a certain extent Republicans/Trump moved in behind them and captured the mostly vacated political territory. Because of TDS anything claimed by Trump must be tainted and Democrats found themselves aligned with a relatively small set of political allies who were misaligned with each other (such gay/trans rights groups and Islamic/Palestinians).
What appears to be their strategy for recovering power is adoption of a stronger socialist/communist posture and downplay or even quietly ignore the DEI/woke culture that got them into this position. This position is now a wakeup call for the wealthy who are abandoning the socialist trending cities and states. This will continue to put Democrats in tenuous political territory. Tomorrow’s election will be “interesting.” Although efforts to reduce election fraud have yielded some improvements it will still be a question of whether non-Democrat candidates can beat the “margin of fraud.”
This topic comes up frequently when people start talking about death by gunshot. The gun control nuts will talk about school shootings then conflate those tragic events with the total rate of gunshot deaths. A typical response by gun owner rights activists is to point out a large portion of the murder by gunshot deaths are in a few urban areas that are mostly black on black crimes associated with illegal recreational drugs. This murder rate dominates the “gun death” statistics and is essentially ignored by the gun control nuts.
The point being that these are very different problems and need very different solutions. The most thought-provoking book I have read on this topic is Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. If you think you know the one true reason for the high black on black murder rate in the U.S. and have not read this book, then you are probably don’t know what you are talking about.
Sam J. from Ammo.com sent me a link to an infographic they put together to consolidate the facts: Black Americans Murder Statistics (2026). The infographic gives you the physical facts. Ghettoside gives you information on how it came to be this way and a potential way out of the current situation.
Get your facts straight and share them with the people they need to be shared with.
There was a lunar eclipse on the night of August 27th. At the time, I was on my way to Idaho from the Seattle area. I could see the eclipse in progress as I drove. A little after 9:00 PM at the “wide spot in the road” called “Dusty” on Washington State highway 26 I stopped and took some pictures. I wish I had a tripod with me because it was a rather long exposure and even balanced on top of my car there was some obvious movement.
This one is probably the best. In its original form (except for being resized for posting here):
Here it is after cropping and adjusting the brightness:
I was somewhat disappointed in the pictures. In real life the bottom of the moon was almost completely black. Still, I thought it was a pretty cool picture.
Now in Viramontes, we have an amicus from “Americans Against Gun Violence,” that decided to boldly go where no other brief today has gone: Asking the Supreme Court to overturn Heller
After a certain point being bold does not get admiration from others. It just gets a shake of the head at the sad desperation involved.
I don’t believe they can get more than one SCOTUS vote to support their claims. It is nice for them to openly admit they do not want the general public to have guns for self-protection:
The Heller decision both rests upon and promotes the deadly myth of “guns for protection.”
We could stop there and be satisfied we have wasted enough time on their delusions. But there is other low hanging fruit.
They even used the old, tired Cruikshank deception of:
the Court held that “bearing arms for a lawful purpose” is “not a right granted by the Constitution.” Cruikshank, 92 U.S. at 553.
They, as is typical of the anti-gun nuts, have to lie and/or be deliberately deceptive to have hope of gaining traction. As I have pointed out before, they are deliberately leaving out the very next sentence of that decision:
The right there specified is that of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress.
The Court stated in Cruikshank that since the First and Second amendments limited only the Congress they did not prohibit the Ku Klux Klan from conspiring with local officials to prevent newly freed black slaves from holding political meetings or having guns. It boggles the mind to hear so-called “Liberals” proudly cite the Cruikshank decision.
Emphasis added.
They also pull out the equally tired statement about retired Chief Justice Warren Burger’s claim of:
This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word “fraud” – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.
When people bring that out, ask them, “What decision is that from?” The answer is that was not a court decision at all. It was in a PBS NewsHour interview. It was not briefed and debated. It was just his relatively unresearched opinion.
I’m almost certain I have spent more time on this brief than SCOTUS and their clerks will spend on it. And I certainly have spent more time than it deserves unless someone can find some humor in their sad desperation.
I was going through some old boxes filled with odds and ends and found these pins:
As I wrote before, I have donated far more since I received the above pins:
I have not donated since December of 2019. I was on some medication which made me ineligible to donate. I no longer take that medication, and I have an appointment on next Tuesday to donate my 86th pint to Bloodworks Northwest.
Update: These are the virtual badges Bloodworks has awarded me:
Mark Smith has a satirical Halloween video, Guns are Not the Answer. I liked it.
After I got though the opening poem, I watched it at 1.5 X normal speed.
Here is the opening poem:
Ohhhh, on Halloween night, the witches take flight, and ghosts and goblins give us all a fright. But one thing scarier than creatures unseen, a politician who wants your AR-15.
I do not have high expectations for the intelligence of people advocating gun control. I have a decent sized sample with online debates and some face-to-face discussions. Many were sincere, probably nice people, but very naive. Some were smart, well trained on the subject, and when you pushed them just a little bit the anger and evil came oozing out. Some were just dimwitted.
Banning assault weapons would deprive mass shooters of their most devastating tool, and reassure every American who can no longer enter a public place without checking for the exits.
Great idea! And history gives us examples of how well bans works.
Bans on heroin, meth, etc. reassures every American no friend or relative will become addicted or die of an overdose of these dangerous recreational drugs.
The ban on alcohol reassured every American no family would be destroyed by a drunk driver, or alcoholic parent or spouse.
The ban on marijuana reassured every American no friend or relative would spend their money getting high, losing motivation, and wasting their life away.
Bans on pornography reassured every American no daughter would ever be tempted to enter a life of shame and sin for the money or their boys and men would become addicted to porn.
Bans on prostitution reassured every American their daughters and sisters would not be subject to the degrading life of a prostitute giving most of her money to her pimp who supposedly protected her.
And, even more on point, is that the 1994 ban on “assault weapons” was a huge component of the reason AR-15s became the most popular gun type in America. It reassured every American that their nagging fear of a tyrannical government really did want their guns was true.
Feinblatt and his ilk will go down on the same side of history as those who were members of, and supported, the KKK and the black codes. Via Grok:
Original KKK and Reconstruction era
Historians and contemporary accounts describe the first Klan (active roughly 1865–1870s) as systematically focused on disarming freed Black people. One frequently cited observation is that “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless.” The goal was to prevent resistance to white supremacist violence and political domination. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard, led the organization during this period when such disarmament was a core activity alongside other forms of intimidation.
This aligned with the Black Codes enacted by Southern state legislatures right after the Civil War. These explicitly barred freedmen from owning or carrying firearms or ammunition (Mississippi’s version was typical: no freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition”). White posses and groups like the Klan enforced them by seizing weapons. Congress responded in part through the Freedmen’s Bureau, Civil Rights Acts, and the 14th Amendment partly to protect the right of freedmen to keep and bear arms against such state and private interference.
After explicit racial bans became harder to sustain under the 14th Amendment, some Southern states shifted to facially neutral laws (e.g., permits, registration, or bans on inexpensive guns) that were enforced discriminatorily against Black people. Florida court opinions later openly noted that certain licensing laws were “passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers… [and] never intended to be applied to the white population.”
