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.
Communism through (my) ages: 1) When I was 15, a teacher told me “It isn’t as bad as they say, and makes a lot of sense.” 2) At about 19, college friends, “Socialism isn’t communism.” 3) At 20, on meeting my grandfather-in-law, “They are evil. We escaped in 1949.” 4) At 30, “China is a wonderful developing Democracy” 5) At 35, I was sent to communist China on business. It was a crowded, smelly, dirty, factory of despair and hopelessness. This I saw with my own eyes. 6) At 36, “China doesn’t count. Successful socialism is in northern Europe.” 7) I moved to northern Europe when I was 40. It was much nicer than China, but also felt like I was living in the past. I had to wait 6 months for a hernia operation. 8) When I was about 45, the migrant crisis began. The socialist/globalist/pacifist allowed them entry into every country, regardless how many crimes they committed along the way. Just 20 minutes from my house, in Calais, I was shocked to see migrants jumping onto trucks, breaking open the doors, scattering the contents across the highway, then climbing in. They went through the Chunnel and got out in England. 9) At 52, the soft socialism around me had transformed into globalism. I was told I had to call people by their preferred pronouns, though it was a lie, and even if I didn’t know what the preferences were. I quit. 10) I returned to the US, and am now 60. “Socialism” is no longer a dirty word here. People openly espouse the virtues of it. Politicians run as socialists and win.
Socialism has taken many forms, from the Bolshevism of Russia, to the CCP in China, the Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, and the many forms of it found in Latin America. It is one of the two most destructive ideologies on earth. It is designed to deprive, despirit, and murder everything that comes in contact with it.
Socialism is a great lie at every level. It helps no one, not even those who benefit the most. This is because the cost is the imposition of one’s will on everyone else, and that destroys the soul of the usurper and the life of the oppressed.
Socialism always fails on its own, but only after destroying almost everything in its train. It can also be conquered. Those are the options.
A single junction in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles may determine whether the next major earthquake stays bad or becomes catastrophic. That junction, called Cajon Pass, sits where two of Southern California’s most powerful fault systems converge. A new study finds that both faults are carrying more tectonic stress than at any point in the last millennium, and the conditions that have historically triggered the region’s largest, most destructive earthquakes are forming right now.
Elon created $4tr in wealth for himself, his investors and employees. Politicians have created $39tr in debt for you, your children, and all the whiners complaining about Elon. Which is preferable?
In systems engineering terms, reliability improves most when the human is treated as a probabilistic cognitive processor surrounded by deterministic support systems that compensate for the specific interface properties humans satisfy poorly. The human remains in the loop, but the interface contract is reshaped to fit human strengths rather than forcing human behavior to approximate software.*
ChatGPT June 22, 2026
Emphasis added.
I thought people would like to know AI still sees a place for you in their new world order. There, you feel better, right? You know the future still has a job for you as a probabilistic cognitive processor.
At least for now.
* This was part of the response to this query:
When a human is the physical implementation of a logical component of a Security Operations Center, what are the interface specification elements that are hardest to satisfy consistently and what would it take to make that implementation more reliable without necessarily replacing the human with automation?
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) June 25, 2026
I like the Firearms Policy Coalition. They get things done in the courts and they are extremely entertaining.
For a more scholarly take see:
And for the DOJ take on the case:
In Wolford v. Lopez today, SCOTUS rejected HI’s “spirit of aloha” “vampire” property-based efforts to “hobble” 2A rights, which under Bruen allow law-abiding citizens the lawful use of their firearms. @CivilRights says “mahalo” to SCOTUS! This @TheJusticeDept fights for you! pic.twitter.com/1FePvVMYK4
Tick tock! On July 1, CA plans to impose an unconstitutional “Glock Ban.”
Today, I notified @CAGovernor & @AGRobBonta to drop the unconstitutional restrictions on law-abiding citizens’ rights to purchase legal firearms before the ban goes into effect, or we will sue. Stay tuned!
…
This letter is to inform you that as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, I have authorized the filing of a complaint in federal district court against the State. The complaint will allege that the Glock Ban and the Handgun Roster statute violate the State’s citizens’ Second amendment rights by making it a crime to acquire constitutionally protected arms from firearms dealers, and that state law enforcement agencies’ implementation of the prohibition and threat of criminal enforcement constitute a pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct. The United States is authorized to bring such an action by 34 U.S.C. § 12601.
We have a U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division filing, and threatening to file more, lawsuits against anti-gun politicians. It feels like I am in an alternate timeline.
I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of these lawsuits and threats of more lawsuits. Perhaps their political party cousins who were in the KKK can relate. All the nasty stuff they did in the first two thirds of the 20th century went sour on them. Their laws were overturned and some of them even went to prison for stuff which yielded the semi-public praise a couple of decades earlier.
Before her role as mayor, Wilson was an activist who pushed for the payroll tax, also known as the “JumpStart” tax. The Seattle City Council passed the measure in 2020, targeting large companies with employees making high salaries. In recent years, Seattle has relied heavily on the new revenue to balance its budget.
According to a new report from the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), the payroll tax is expected to collect $410 million in 2026. However, the DSA also blames the payroll tax for job loss, comparing tax conditions in Seattle and nearby Bellevue showing a stark tale of two cities.
The DSA report states that since the JumpStart payroll tax was implemented, downtown Seattle has lost around 30,000 jobs.
Between 2023 and 2025, Seattle shed 1.3% of its jobs, while Bellevue gained 12.6%.
The report also notes a divergence in real estate values: between 2020 and 2025, Seattle’s office properties declined 48% in value, while those in Bellevue rose 7%.
City officials say some of the core reasons why Seattle is in a budget deficit include inflation and tax revenue from other sources—specifically property and sales taxes—not coming in as projected.
I’m glad Barb and I live in Bellevue rather than Seattle. You can see the difference just driving through. The boarded-up shops are not the only clue. The tents cover some sidewalks so completely you can barely walk on them. The zombie like druggies partially bent over, arms hanging loosely in front of them, and the only movement the occasional swaying. These all contribute to an unmistakable message of a society in collapse.
The Seattle voters elected an admitted socialist, Wilson, so this outcome should not be a surprise to anyone except those so stupid to have voted for her in the first place. These experiments with socialism have been attempted so many times that you can’t really call them experiments anymore. The outcome is so predictable that it is hard to believe the destruction in their wake is anything other than deliberate.
This 20-minute video tells us 80% of murders committed with a gun arise from fights or arguments that escalated. The common explanation of some sort of rational cost benefit decision such as shooting someone for revenge or in a robbery or rape. Most shooting occur in short burst of emotion.
As I have said before a good problem statement is a necessity (see also here). The above information allows us to come up with alternate solutions. The one most surprising was that cleaning up empty lots by trimming the grass, removing needles, and broken glass resulted in a drop in “gun violence” by nearly 30%. No increased policing, not getting people out of poverty, just a small change in their physical environment.
The reason this works is that it increases the number of the people outdoors and interacting with each other. This increases the likelihood of someone intervening during an escalation. Similarly better street lighting also reduces interpersonal violence.
Bruen pushed states away from discretionary permit systems, but it also triggered a wave of new sensitive-place restrictions, revised training requirements, and fresh litigation. States such as New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and California rewrote laws after the ruling, and those revisions kept the public carry fight alive in legislatures and courts.
At the same time, the spread of permitless carry changed the map. States, including Texas, Florida, and others, have moved toward allowing lawful adults to carry without obtaining a permit, though permits often still exist for reciprocity or background screening. That creates a strange policy mismatch: a resident may carry at home without a permit but still needs paperwork to travel armed elsewhere.
Congressional politics amplify the issue every time party control feels competitive. Republicans treat reciprocity as a visible pro-gun promise, while Democrats usually frame it as an override of state safety laws. Because neither side sees much room for compromise, the proposal functions as both a serious policy idea and a potent campaign signal.
The firearms community feels these changes directly. Court victories encouraged expectations of broader carry rights, but expanding rights also raised harder questions about training, liability, and public acceptance.
We have officially entered the spaghetti phase of gun control. This is when those in favor of reducing or eliminating Americans’ gun rights introduce all manner of legislative schemes to restrict law-abiding citizens from purchasing, selling, making, and probably soon inheriting firearms, in the hope that something sticks to the wall.
Sometimes it’s a specific firearm, like the AR-15 rifle or a GLOCK pistol. Other efforts target broader categories of firearms such as all semi-automatic firearms.
Thanks to the Supreme Court of the United States and major legal opinions such asHeller and Bruen, gun control efforts have been hitting a brick wall.
But alas, that hasn’t stopped state legislatures and candidates for public office from making up, well, effluvia. It’s as if they have a team sitting around just dreaming stuff up, which they clearly do.
The same political party did the same type of thing with all the Jim Crow laws, too. No sooner than one law would get struck down they would think of other laws to keep those “uppity black skinned people” under control.
And, of course, nearly all the original gun control laws in this country were originally intended to prevent blacks from being able to defend themselves from the KKK. The political party which likes to think of themselves as progressives is actually very regressive with things like gun control and socialism being the most obvious examples.
Socialism kills, fast or slow. But on the way there, it makes people into dumb animals posturing and killing for no good reason.
The enemy is collectivism. The enemy is welfare. The enemy is turning humans into dependent zoo animals.
None of which will be solved by doing the same, but harder, and with different colors of skin as the all precious must be coddled.
All it will do is destroy the little that is still functioning. And make it harder to come back.
I beg you with tears in my eyes to believe civilization is worth saving. It is socialism that must be torn down. Please start working towards civilization.
As I read it, the main point of her post is that there is a bunch of crap going on all over the world and that includes the U.S.A. A lot of people, of most any political persuasion, try to distill the problem down to skin color. That isn’t the real problem. To use an example of hers:
It’s not the skin color, you see. If it were Abigail Spanberger would be a firebrand for freedom and Clarence Thomas would be communist. Or if you prefer, replace those with Bernie Sanders and Thomas Sowell. The parallel stands. And it remains crazy.
I’ve said this before, judge people as individuals, not as a group. If you judge people as an immutable group you, in some sense of the word, are a collectivist. This will not yield optimal results. You will lose the ideas and influence of people like Colion Noir, Clarence Thomas, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell.
Embrace the ideas and accept the contributions of the people that make meaningful advances in our fight against socialism in all its forms.
Our favorite resident representative of an alternate political view, John Schussler, sent me an email with a link to this blog post: The Age of the Super A*sholes – Robert Reich. His request was:
This is one of those editorials where I’d love to hear how your readers react. To me it makes total sense, but I’m guessing there are plenty for whom it does not. I’d love to hear the arguments why.
Please follow the link for the entire post. Your homework is to provide comments in support or calm, reasoned disagreement with John’s belief that Reich “makes total sense.”
I will get you started with some examples:
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
This presumes facts not in evidence.
The evidence is that in important ways, Donald Trump is the opposite of a dictator. I’ve pointed this out to John multiple times. I’ll make it more direct this time in hopes it will sink in. No dictator has ever encouraged gun ownership for all of the “common people.” Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and dictators are not about sharing political power. Dictators do not eliminate government regulations. They increase them. Those two items alone disqualify Donald Trump for a dictatorship.
Although after adjusting for inflation some other people may have qualified as trillionaires before Elon Musk, let us assume that part of the statement is true. But where is the “economic dominance?” It is not like he is trying to get a monopoly on the banking industry, energy production, transportation, or even communications–all huge economic sections of our country and critical infrastructure.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
If you read the actual Trump quotes it can easily be interpreted that he just wanted the votes to be audited. If that is an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2020 election” it was legal and hundreds of Democrat candidates have successfully overturned elections. So, what is the point of this beyond emotional inflamation?
Criminally liable… Was this for the crime which the New York state legislature passed a new law tailored specifically for Donald Trump and no one else has been prosecuted for before or since? And is currently under appeal? Yeah, I thought so. Let’s see how the appeal goes before you hang your hat on that one.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
“Paid”? He means made political donations totaling that amount, right? And your point is?
Illegal? Citation needed. Destructive? A self-defense shooting is destructive too. But it is legal and sometime even praiseworthy.
It goes on and on. It is all emotion hanging together on half-truths. People like this need to get a better grip on reality and become mature enough to get their emotions under control. There are lots of foibles Trump is guilty of without demonstrating the extent of their TDS.
Please consider this post as your reading assignment before doing your homework which will be assigned in my next blog post.
It has been quite a while since I have seen a window with hinges so that last line jarred me more than the news of the change in EU immigration policy. But never mind that. I’ll bet the EU changing their direction on immigration so decisively is unbelievable to many or even most people. I don’t know how many times I have heard predictions of “the end of western civilization”, “Europe will be a Muslim majority in a generation”, etc. etc. I thought that was far from certain.
Just like with bit coin it is difficult for people to imagine a dramatic change in things. If people think about things hard enough, they can do linear extrapolation. Non-linear extrapolation is much, much harder. I have probably talked about Bitcoin and gotten enough confirmation that most everyone here can probably envisioning Bitcoin having a dramatic crash. And people enough examples of hyperinflation or seen 100 trillion Dollar bills to have at least a glimmer of the possibility of it happening in this country.
But when you live in an information bubble that does not give you repeated samples of a future dramatically different from your current reality it is tough to believe a future dramatically different from your current reality. This is why TDS is so common. With their information environment blocking a connection with the alternate reality of people not believing Trump was a fascist, or even Hitler reincarnated, they could not image a world where he could win the election. Yet he won not only once, but twice (and perhaps three times) and most recently with a majority of all voters. This event is so far outside of their belief system that there was actually a club of people believing they all woke up “in the wrong timeline” at 4:00 AM on November 6, 2024.
A similar thing is probably happening now, not only to those who wanted the mass immigration to the EU to continue, but also to people in the U.S. who invested in the belief that downfall of western civilization was a certainity.
The pessimists predicting the end of Western civilization within a generation may still be correct, but the odds are much, much lower. My model of Europeans is they are much more likely to behave like, appropriately, European Starlings. They can rapidly turn and go in another direction without apparent communication and leadership. The people of the U.S., particularly libertarian leaning people, are more like a herd of cats. Extrapolation of behavior for either is a fool’s errand. I view the European/socialist population as being strongly adhering to group consensus. Once a certain critical mass is reached nearly everyone changes direction without feeling any cognitive distress. This enabled the non-linear change in political direction you see in the EU immigration vote.
When I was doing some research for this post Grok made some suggestions which I think are valid:
Potential refinements/additions:
Acknowledge where pessimists had a point (for credibility/balance): Real non-linear risks existed—parallel societies, grooming scandals, terror incidents, welfare strain, and trust erosion (Putnam-style diversity effects). Some demographic projections still show cultural strain in Western Europe if inflows aren’t controlled. The starling shift might be happening because the warnings highlighted genuine problems before total breakdown. This strengthens your “odds much lower now” claim without dismissing concerns.
Non-linear examples in Europe: Add concrete ones like the rapid post-2015 backlash building to 2024-2025 elections, or fertility convergence (second-gen Muslim rates dropping toward native lows). Hyperbolic predictions (e.g., Muslims majority by 2050) ignored assimilation, intermarriage, secularization, and policy change.
US contrast: Your “herd of cats” libertarian-leaning view fits—more decentralized, individualistic resistance (e.g., state-level policies, cultural pushback). But note American immigration debates also show shifts (border enforcement focus post-2024).
Psychology tie-in: Expand slightly on why bubbles make non-linear futures hard—availability heuristic (vivid collapse stories or success stories dominate), motivated skepticism, and belief perseverance. The 4 AM Club shows how emotionally invested worldviews resist falsification.
Possible counter/disagreement for depth: Europeans aren’t always seamless starlings—see persistent divides in France (banlieues), persistent no-go issues, or populist fragmentation. Consensus can shift toward worse outcomes too (historical examples abound). Americans might herd better on existential threats than cats imply. Overall, your optimism about adaptability seems warranted given recent trends, but history shows civilizations can decline nonlinearly if elites double down too long.
In order to make people equal, you have to treat them differently. If you treat people alike, the result is necessarily inequality.
More quotable and easier to understand, but not quite accurate.
Useful ammo when dealing with people demanding reparations, affirmative action, DEI, etc. The point being is that if they insist upon equality, they are demanding discrimination.
I’m a member of the NRA Board and the chair of NRA’s Finance Committee.
I see that you are supporting SAF and FPC in their litigation efforts.
NRA has made great strides in righting the ship over the last year. I did an interview at the NRA convention talking about the changes we’ve made:
I hope that in addition to the support you’re rendering to SAF and FPC, you’ll consider supporting NRA CRDF or NRA-ILA as well.
I watched the video. He enumerates a lot of the changes made and changes yet to be made. He emphatically asserts the NRA is back as the 800-pound gorilla as we knew them decades ago.
I have not verified everything said in the interview. However, it was very encouraging about the future of the NRA and its current ability to be an effective and efficient fighter for our right to keep and bear arms. Please watch it for yourself and make your own decisions.
Capriole Investments’ institutional buying model, which tracks Bitcoin demand from ETFs, corporate treasuries, and miner issuance, shows net institutional selling at around 450% of daily mined supply, equivalent to about 2,000 BTC per day.
In other words, large holders are selling 4-5x more Bitcoin than is mined each day.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs appear to be the biggest drag. Their flow line has fallen sharply below zero, suggesting ETF outflows are now overwhelming other sources of demand.
In the past month, for instance, these funds have witnessed nearly $27 billion in withdrawals, according to data resource Glassnode.
