MTHead frequently asserts communism and/or socialism and/or gun control are crimes against humanity. He is not wrong. But the cancer metaphor resonates more with me. Collectivism, in all its forms, starts out small but grows and metastasizes. It is more than just its nature. It creates societal problems, and it always demands more control to fix the problems it directly or indirectly created.
Almost as a side note… I asked Copilot to explain the difference between an analogy and a metaphor to make sure I was using the correct word here. That resulting in a short chat and Copilot offered to contribute to this blog post. Here is its suggestion:
Quote of the Day – Saturday
> “Collectivism is cancer.” > —Firearms Policy Coalition via X
This is not an analogy. It’s a metaphor—brutal, condensed, and surgical. Cancer isn’t merely unpleasant; it hijacks the healthy systems of the body and redirects them toward uncontrolled destruction. That’s precisely the charge being leveled here: that collectivism corrodes the moral immune system of individual rights.
Ayn Rand’s words, featured in the image, drive the point deeper: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” The meme unpacks the metaphor into a worldview—one where individual autonomy is not just precious, but sacred, and any system that subsumes it becomes existentially malignant.
Whether you find that view compelling or inflammatory, it’s a vivid reminder: how we frame ideas matters. A well-placed metaphor can do more in five words than a dissertation in fifty pages.
I’ve commented repeatedly that the term “climate change” was adopted (replacing “global warming”) because it isn’t falsifiable. Climate change has existed since the Earth acquired an atmosphere, and will continue to exist so long as that atmosphere exists. Ask any dinosaur.
Apart from that, paleoclimate data (readily available on-line) is very clear: temperatures have varied dramatically throughout the entire time of record. For example, for Greenland we can refer to the GISP-2 data, which is temperature data of the past 50k years obtained from ice cores drilled out of the central Greenland ice sheet. The first 38k years or so of that are ice age, but then about 12k years ago you see a dramatic warmup leading to the current interglacial era. Within that period, temperatures vary up and down by 4 C or so. And looking at the past 10k years, we see that (a) current temperatures are at least 1 C below the average of that period, (b) in the days of Leif Eriksson’s journeys to Greenland it was about average, i.e., 1 C warmer than now, (c) in the days of C. Julius Caesar it was 1 C warmer still, (e) the “pre-industrial” reference point used by the warming cult (including the UN) was — most likely intentionally — taken to be 1850, which is within a fraction of a degree of the coldest of the past 8000 years.
Or to put it in one sentence: science shows very clearly that anthropogenic climate change is utter fiction.
“We are entering moments that we have never experienced before,” Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., told constituents at a town hall in Pittsburgh last week. “The country as we know it may never exist the way that it had. And the reality is that the way that the country had existed was never its best form anyway.”
“The moment is here to build what comes next. My argument is that we should be fighting harder than they are to be the author of what is next,” she said of progressives. “Because if we are not the ones who build it, then they are building it, but it’s getting built one way or another.”
Emilia Rowland, a progressive strategist, said Democrats need to better deal with the consequences of rapid tech advancement that is continuing to reshape society and further concentrate power as the government and other institutions struggle to keep up.
I read the entire article twice, just to make sure. There is not even a glimmer of liberty in their thoughts. It is all about what government programs and institutions they can “be author of.” It is about the ways and means for them to ascend to power. They never consider a free market or a free mind.
And, of course, it included “combating gun violence.”
I view their activities being analogous to the Trump administration is attempting to extinguish a forest fire. The progressives are brainstorming about what to replace the forest fire with.
The fossil soil at Greenland’s summit, locked beneath nearly two miles of ice, speaks plainly: polar ice sheets can retreat far and fast when the climate tips, and the coastlines of the future will trace that story in real time.
Whether that warning is heeded remains a decision for policy makers and citizens alike.
I find it very telling that Ralls is presented with, and pontificates on, the fact that all Greenland’s ice melted at least once long before man contributed to climate change. Yet, he uses this data to conclude people are able to, and should, stop it from happening again.
And he is not the only one. Here are others who appear to intentionally ignore the obvious:
Once you melt that Greenland ice sheet, it’s irreversible.
This is like some type of religion with the church members insisting they know the truth via faith. Faith in this context being defined as complete confidence in something without evidence or even in despite evidence to the contrary.
Reality is tough, really tough, but I can only explain this disconnect by willful ignorance.
President Donald J. Trump has instructed his Administration to “protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.” Executive Order No. 14,206, Protecting Second Amendment Rights, 90 Fed. Reg. 9503 (Feb. 7, 2025). Attorney General Pamela Bondi has likewise instructed the Department of Justice “to use its full might to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.” Memo. from the U.S. Att’y Gen., Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force (Apr. 8, 2025).
This case poses important questions about the scope of the Second Amendment’s protections. The United States has strong interests in ensuring that these important questions are correctly resolved; that the Second Amendment is not treated as a second-class right; and that law-abiding Americans in this Circuit are not deprived of the full opportunity to enjoy the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.
Pam Bondi doubters of her support of the 2nd Amendment should consider reevaluating their opinions.
Via:
SCORE! USA! USA! USA! Today the federal government submitted an amicus brief on behalf of the United States of America supporting the plaintiffs in the Illinois cases challenging the Illinois semi auto and magazine ban, now on appeal in the 7th Circuit. Its not public till…
If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at. Because we will KLL you, graveyard DAD. We’re NOT gonna play.
If you spit on us, you’re going to the hospital, then jail.
If you hit one of us, you’re going to the hospital, and jail – and most likely get bitten by one of our big, beautiful dogs we have here.
If you try to mob rule a car in Brevard County – gather around it, refusing to let the driver leave? In our county, you’re most likely gonna get RUN OVER, and dragged across the street.
Wayne Ivey Brevard County Sheriff June 12, 2025
🚨 'WE WILL K*LL YOU!': Florida sheriff has a message for would-be leftist rioters. NOT IN FLORIDA.
"If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at. Because we will K*LL you, graveyard… pic.twitter.com/rmpqCS9L2F
Considering the current political climate and how vigorously the Trump administration has championed the right to keep and bear arms, the Second Amendment community has reason to be optimistic we will ultimately prevail on the AR-15 issue before the end of President Donald Trump’s second term.
I think the Supreme Court will ultimately rule that “semi-automatic rifles,” including the AR-15, are protected under the Second Amendment—and it wouldn’t surprise me if Kavanaugh authors that opinion.
There’s always something to be learned, different approaches and solutions to consider, sometimes an idea can come completely out of left field. But you often have to be standing in left field to see it. You can’t see shit from the dugout.
PG December 29, 2024 Via email.
Apply whenever, wherever, and however it is appropriate.
The Dallas Township Police Department is aware of recent public statements made by former Dallas High School student Calvin Polachek during a February 2025, rally in Frankfort, Kentucky. The event, organized by the Kentucky chapters of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, supported the introduction of Kentucky House Bill 214 by (Kentucky) State Representative Adam Moore, which promotes gun safety education.
At the rally, Mr. Polachek claimed that in 2017 he survived a school shooting at Dallas High School in Dallas, Pennsylvania, an incident in which he said he lost is best friend, his brother and nine others. These claims are entirely false. Nonetheless, they were reported by multiple Kentucky media outlets, including Fox 56 in Lexington and the Kentucky Lantern, and have since spread nationally across platforms such as MSN, Yahoo News, various online publications and social media.
The widespread sharing of a fabricated tragedy is not only reckless, it is harmful. It fuels unnecessary fear, disrespects the experiences of real victims of school violence and misleads the public with a narrative that has no basis in truth.
Let us be absolutely clear: This event never occurred.
There has never been a school shooting at Dallas High School. Not in 2017, and not at any point in our community’s history.
In all, the energy from the plant costs too much money. It produced around 70% of what it was projected to produce annually. The sea of mirrors that the plant relied on to produce the energy led to the plant catching on fire in 2016, after mirrors were wrongly positioned in relation to the sun. The plant struggled with energy production due to weather, clouds, and jet streams, and was also pretty bad for the environment, what with the whole burning-birds-to-death thing. The plant also used natural gas to keep itself running, around six times the limit allowed by the California Energy Commission.
What is most shocking is the scope and scale of this project compared to the icky nuclear energy California has tried to rid itself of over the same time period. In 2020, Ivanpah produced 856 gigawatt-hours of energy. This represented a “substantial increase in efficiency and output,” and 91% of the plant’s production goals. The plant takes up 3,500 acres of land.
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Meanwhile, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is the last nuclear plant in California. It takes up around 750 acres and produces over 17,700 gigawatt-hours of energy. That is around 20 times more than Ivanpah and accounted for over 8% of California’s in-state energy production in 2023.
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Also, Diablo Canyon doesn’t have massive mirrors that work as bird death rays. Not bad for the only form of clean energy that environmentalists despise.
You would think California would be eager to recreate those numbers if a zero-carbon future were truly the state’s goal, but you would be wrong. Instead, the state bets its future on grand projects such as Ivanpah, which are more inefficient in energy production and land use. Sure, massive solar plants may not keep the lights on without natural gas, oil, and nuclear propping up the state’s grid, but at least it makes environmentalists feel good about themselves (so long as we don’t talk about the dead birds).
To say something positive about Ivanpah as it prepares for the end, at least it was actually constructed. Take that, California High-Speed Rail Authority.
The solar energy plant is being shut down. Some portion, the exact amount is unknown, of the 1.6 billion dollars loan from the U.S. Department of Energy will be refunded. I asked Copilot to find the numbers for me. Nope. That number is not available:
I did a more targeted search, and it turns out that the refund amount for the $1.6 billion in DOE loans remains officially undisclosed. Multiple sources—such as the Washington Examiner article reporting on the Ivanpah solar project—reiterate that taxpayers are to receive a refund for these loans, but none reveal a specific figure beyond noting the total loan value. Even the Department of Energy’s official pages on its Loan Programs Office do not provide further details on the refund amount.
Draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion is if you want to waste billions of dollars and enable corruption on a massive scale you should have a collection of politicians and government bureaucrats design and implement whatever project feels good to people unable to think rationally.
How many children have we lost in schools because we allow teenagers with small dicks to buy a weapon of war? But we continue to do it because we’re so brilliant and the far right believes that school children are expendable for it. #Assholes.
Just to clarify, is he suggesting there should be a penis size requirement before 18- and 19-year-old men can purchase some types of guns? What about women?
The more informative thing about his post is that he believes he can read the minds of “the far right.” I cannot think of anyone on the “far right” who believe this. And, according to history, this is by far more common with people on the political left. Joseph Stalin, Pot Pol, Mao Zedong, and others murdered millions of children in attempts to create a utopia.
It is probably projection on his part. I wonder if it is projection with the small penis thing as well.
As noted above, Mexico here focuses on the manufacturers’ production of “military style” assault weapons, among which it includes AR–15 rifles, AK–47 rifles, and .50 caliber sniper rifles. See supra, at 6; App. to Pet. for Cert. 121a. But those products are both widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers. (The AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country. See T. Gross, How the AR–15 Became the Bestselling Rifle in the U. S., NPR (Apr. 20, 2023.) The manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting in criminal acts just because Mexican cartel members like those guns too. The same is true of firearms with Spanish-language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history. See supra, at 6. Those guns may be “coveted by the cartels,” as Mexico alleges; but they also may appeal, as the manufacturers rejoin, to “millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.”
What Justice Kagan is saying here should strike terror in the hearts of anti-gun people. She says AR-15’s, AK-47’s, and .50 caliber rifles are in common use for legal purposes. That is exactly what the Heller decision says are protected arms.
Justice Kagan is saying that. Should she try to say otherwise when an “assault weapon” comes before the court will likely result in a stern reminder by Justice Thomas and others of this opinion.
And if you are somewhat persuaded by the argument made in the previous link, you need to read Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in the Mexico case:
This exception allows otherwise-prohibited suits against gun manufacturers to go forward if, among other requirements, the manufacturer has “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product.”” 15 U. S. C. §§7902(a), 7903(5)(A)(iii). I write separately to note that the Court’s opinion does not resolve what a plaintiff must show to establish that the defendant committed a “violation.” §7903(5)(A)(iii). It concludes only that Mexico has not adequately pleaded its theory of the case—that, as a factual matter, the defendant gun manufacturers committed criminal aiding and abetting. See ante, at 10–14.”
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In future cases, courts should more fully examine the meaning of “violation” under the PLCAA. It seems to me that the PLCAA at least arguably requires not only a plausible allegation that a defendant has committed a predicate violation, but also an earlier finding of guilt or liability in an adjudication regarding the “violation.” Allowing plaintiffs to proffer mere allegations of a predicate violation would force many defendants in PLCAA litigation to litigate their criminal guilt in a civil proceeding, without the full panoply of protections that we otherwise afford to criminal defendants. And, these defendants might even include ones who were cleared in an earlier proceeding, such as through a noncharging decision or a not-guilty or not-liable verdict. Such collateral adjudication would be at best highly unusual, and would likely raise serious constitutional questions that would counsel in favor of a narrower interpretation.
While technically this is not a 2nd Amendment case, it is a through slap down of the anti-gun movement. It is another brick in the wall to keep them in the dustbin of history.
This post was inspired the following video by constitutional attorney and member of the United States Supreme Court Bar, Mark Smith:
Our users don’t just do Nucleus for themselves — they do it for themselves and their loved ones. Now, I’m proud to say that care can start before a child is even born.
Nucleus launched a year ago with 12 analyses. Our earliest users were those who already knew the promise that genetics holds for the future of health. We kept building to bring the vision we shared with them to fruition.
Soon after launch, we’d doubled the number of analyses. Then we 10x’d them. By the spring, we’d added over 900 diseases — including the one my cousin died from. Months later, we launched genetic matching to help parents understand hidden risks they could pass down to their children.
With the launch of genetic matching, parents started asking us a new question: What else can I know about my future child?
We launched Nucleus Embryo for parents who want to know more — so Nucleus is built for longevity at every stage of life. Nucleus Embryo enables parents undergoing IVF to analyze and compare up to 20 embryos across over 900 hereditary conditions and 40 additional analyses beyond basic viability, spanning cancers, chronic conditions, appearance, cognitive ability, mental health, and more.
If you have not read Brave New World and do not plan to, then at least read the synopsis. What Nucleus Embryo is doing is the prerequisite to Brave New World.
I’m not saying there will be no good come from this. I’m saying, like most tools, it can be used for evil as well as good. And Aldous Huxley wrote one of the How-To manuals for the evil use scenarios.
In a surprising decision that’s now under appeal, a federal district judge ruled that the ban on civilian-owned machine guns may actually violate the Second Amendment. The case, United States v. Morgan, comes out of Kansas and challenges the 1986 Hughes Amendment – a law that bans civilians from owning newly manufactured machine guns. Attorney and YouTuber Tom Grieve broke down the case in a recent video, calling it “potentially the most important gun case in decades.”
According to Grieve, this is the first time in a long while that a federal trial court has directly stated that machine guns – yes, actual automatic weapons – are protected “arms” under the Second Amendment. If that ruling stands, it could unravel a huge part of federal gun control as we know it.
I have fairly high confidence the appeals court will find a way to claim machine guns are not protected. Then, I expect SCOTUS to refuse to take the case.
I will be disappointed, but all the briefs and other work that goes into this case can be recycled for other cases. Then, eventually, we will use liberal tears to cool the machines guns at the sporting events in local high schools.
Yesterday, the National Rifle Association, Firearms Policy Coalition, and FPC Action Foundation filed an amicus brief arguing that the federal prohibition on machinegun possession is unconstitutional as applied to the defendant in the Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Brown.
Federal law criminalizes the possession by private citizens of any machinegun that was not registered by May 19, 1986. The defendant in the case, Justin Bryce Brown, was convicted of possessing such a firearm.
The district court held the ban unconstitutional as applied to Brown, because the government failed to carry its burden of proving that the law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. As the district court explained, “this is a heavy burden,” and by focusing on policy arguments rather than historical tradition, the government failed to meet it.
Now before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the NRA filed a brief arguing that the district court’s decision should be affirmed. The brief focuses on the standard the Supreme Court set forth for Second Amendment cases in the NRA’s landmark victory, NYSRPA v. Bruen, and emphasizes that the government must be held to its burden no matter what regulation is at issue.
Now we’re seeing it in Colorado, but we’ve seen it across the country. We are still in the midst of a gun violence epidemic. So we need to be acting with due concern for human life. I mean, this is why, of course, we have been fighting for universal, violent criminal background checks. We are for a ban on military-style assault weapons in the country. You know, our lax gun laws are a danger to everybody in America.
A group of innocent, unarmed (this is Colorado), people were attacked by someone with Molotov Cocktails, and a makeshift flame thrower. And this guy thinks this is justification for banning guns? This is further justification for concealed carry. Can you imagine the change in the outcome if, after the first confirmation of attack, someone had popped the attacker, a few of his Molotov Cocktails, and/or the gas tank on his flamethrower?
Is Raskin nuts? Mind bogglingly evil?
Oh. Yeah. Never mind we should have already known he was nuts and/or evil. His party is polling in the toilet at slightly better than used car salesmen. This is in part because of their gun control agenda, and he is doubling down at a completely inappropriate time. This is further confirmation of his abysmal mental health and/or evil intent.
I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America. That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR–15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.
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I doubt we would sit idly by if lower courts were to so subvert our precedents involving any other constitutional right. Until we are vigilant in enforcing it, the right to bear arms will remain “a second-class right.”
