Sen. Ben Sasse questioned President Trump's ability to be a "strong"
leader after the commander in chief suggested Wednesday that he's open
to confiscating guns from dangerous people and worrying about due
process "second."
“Strong leaders don't automatically agree with the last thing that
was said to them," the Republican senator from Nebraska said in a brief
statement. "We have the Second Amendment and due process of law for a
reason. We're not ditching any Constitutional protections simply because
the last person the President talked to today doesn’t like them."
When historians write about the Vaccine Decades (1976–2020), there
are two names that will live in infamy: Dr. Frank DeStefano, and Dr.
Coleen Boyle.
In the 1980s, Congress mandated Agent Orange
studies. Frank and Coleen ended the studies two years early, insuring
that “no link” would be found between illnesses being reported by
injured veterans and dioxin. The early termination of the study allowed
the US Department of Veterans Affairs to deny any connection between
Agent Orange and medical problems, preventing veterans and their
families from qualifying for compensations. Here’s your hurt, what’s
your hurry. The Boyle/Destefano team bamboozle was outed by Admiral
Zumwalt who went to the President and laid out the science in a classified report (now declassified):
Arizona lawmakers have allocated millions of dollars to create so-called "freedom schools" at public universities that focus on the importance of Western culture and free markets.
Supporters say the effort is necessary to restore intellectual diversity on campus, arguing that conservative beliefs are generally overlooked by liberal professors.
Two unexpected results from new polling in the wake of the Florida
school shooting finds that President Trump enjoys support for his call
to arm qualified teachers while companies joining a boycott of the NRA
are facing a consumer backlash.
In the first of two Morning Consult polls, 50 percent said they back
armed teachers in schools, a quick fix backed by Trump and first
suggested by the National Rifle Association. Some eight states already
allow armed teachers in schools, and another six are considering it.
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, both Walmart and Dick's Sporting Goods announced they would stop the sale of assault rifles,
if only temporarily. Fast forward just over 5 years when moments ago
Dick’s - one of the nation’s largest sports retailers - said that it is immediately ending sales of all assault-style rifles in its stores, according to the NYT
which adds that "the announcement, made two weeks after the school
shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members, is one of the strongest stances taken by corporate America in the national gun debate. It also carries symbolic weight, coming from a prominent national gunseller."
The retailer also said that it would no longer sell high-capacity
magazines and that it would not sell any gun to anyone under 21 years of
age, regardless of local laws.
SOUTH Africa’s parliament has voted in favour of a
motion that will begin the process of amending the country’s
Constitution to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without
compensation.
The motion was brought by
Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist opposition party the
Economic Freedom Fighters, and passed overwhelmingly by 241 votes to 83
against. The only parties who did not support the motion were the
Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Cope and the African Christian
Democratic Party.
It was amended but supported by the ruling
African National Congress and new president Cyril Ramaphosa, who made
land expropriation a key pillar of his policy platform after taking over
from ousted PM Jacob Zuma earlier this month.
“The time for reconciliation is over. Now is the time for justice,” Mr Malema was quoted by News24
as telling parliament. “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of
our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.”
“When that madman walks onto the campus intent on killing our
children, we are going to immediately engage him and shoot at him a
lot,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.
Judd’s Sentinel Program, which is designed to train and arm school
staff members who volunteer to be special deputies, has this week
expanded to cover Webber International University, a private college
with about 800 students near Babson Park, Florida. Under the guidelines
of the program, staffers will receive screening and extensive training
from the Polk County Sheriff’s department which will allow them to carry
guns on campus and respond to threats.
The 132-hour block of instruction will include more firearms training
than typically given at state law enforcement academy, with over 1,000
rounds fired during the course. Teachers and faculty would likewise have
to score 85 percent on qualifications, as opposed to the 80 percent for
typical law academy students. Members of the Sentinel program will also
receive more active shooter training than officers.
It’s easy to find timelines that detail Trump-Russia collusion developments. Here are links to two of them I recommend: Politifact Russia-Trump timeline
On the other side, evidence has emerged in the past year that makes
it clear there were organized efforts to collude against candidate
Donald Trump–and then President Trump. For example:
Z Man summarizes his view of organizations in this essay, Rule By Sociopath:
The arrival of women in positions of authority is the death knell of
the organization. It means the smart money has moved onto greener
pastures, leaving the enterprise to the vultures, who will pick over the
corpse for the bits they like.
Feminists will get their stuff, homosexuals will make their
demands, minorities will air their grievances. In time, the
organization collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. That’s
what’s happening in the West. It’s a scramble to strip the carcass of
civilization.
Bill Kilgore writes of Broward County Sheriff deputy Scot Peterson in his essay, Cowards and Losers, at American Greatness:
It is true that some men are hopeless cowards, and they deserve our
pity. But we cannot raise our boys to believe that courage is a force
outside of our control that either possesses you or it does not.
Instead we need to raise our boys to be men—men who understand that manliness is courage. Manliness is
sacrifice. This is not a trait for heroes or Navy SEALs only; it must
be a common trait in common men. We have to habituate men to pain and
struggle; we must show them the higher reward for lower costs; we must
habituate them to the idea that in that time of crisis they must be courageous.
...
As unpleasant as it is, we must shame Scot Peterson, so our boys learn
that there are things worse than dying. The shame of cowardice must be
worse than death. Peterson didn't have to succeed. We don't know that he
would have. But what might have made him try—the spirit that
might have made him charge through the door and do his duty—was the
spirit that said “I'll not be known as a coward.”
Mr. Kilgore apparently wrote this before more of Peterson's
fellow deputies revealed themselves as cowards. Peterson ran away.
The three others arrived during the shootings and protected themselves.
Even if they were instructed to stand down, and there's no evidence
they were, no man could comply with such an order. In uniform or not.
Monday I was running errands, stopped at the village gun
store to chat and look around. It looked like he'd gone out of business.
Guns and ammo displays empty to the bare walls. At the "big" gun store a
half hour away, guns and ammo were still going fast, the formerly
reliable stacks of bulk ammo were gone in half a day. A friend with
tables at a gun show this weekend says a huge crowd stripped the place
like locusts. He came back empty. My my my, how quickly "too late" can
arrive.
Ancient Origins - Five Surprising Things DNA has Revealed About our Ancestors ... our ancestors evolved surprisingly quickly
1929. Silent movies and hot jazz, flappers and bathtub gin, fast cars and dare devil aviators, and a near-parabolic stock market at dizzying heights. Shoeshine boys gave stock tips to grocery clerks who bought on margin. Everyone but the halt and lame made money. Well, except for the farmers. Commodity prices in the '20s were often at or below the cost of production. But you know. Rubes. In the places that counted, cities dontcha know, the future shone bright and steady.
One dark day the bottom of the bucket fell through, everyone was suddenly foreclosed and evicted, destitute and skinny, and not dressed very well at all. The Nouveau Broke spent the next decade doing Depression Era stuff like living in shacks by the river or taking up the migrant worker trade in old cars made worse by unsightly dust and grime.
So goes the Hollywood version. Reality was worse.
The market peaked in early September 1929, capping a tenfold gain in nine years. But it was stuttering and oddly reluctant to go higher. Word came of trouble in other places, particularly the London market. Important people said the US market was overpriced by a standard deviation or six. Main Street had bet the rent money and was getting anxious. In October, the weak hands and Nervous Nellies bolted for the door en masse and everyone else followed, perforce. The cascade began.
What became known as "The Crash of 1929" is shown in red on the chart, a catastrophic fifty per cent drop from the September high. But the crash had just begun. A series of declines and partial retracements went on for years, ending in mid-1932 with an 89% loss from the '29 peak. It should be known as "The Crash of 1929 Through 1932".
It's easy to get market arithmetic wrong. If the market drops 50% then goes back up 50%, only half the drop has been regained. Said differently, a 50% drop requires a 100% rise to break even. There were six partial recoveries from 1929 to 1932. Fortunes were made by savvy opportunists who understood the stair-step nature of the debacle and played it like day traders. This drew in camp followers who, convinced they were buying at the absolute bottom, generally sold into the next decline at a loss.
The crash ended as it began, with a drop of about fifty per cent. Almost no one except buyers noticed, the prices were so small, the prior destruction so vast. Once again market arithmetic is misleading. For shareholders, the loss of half the value of their investment was the same in 1932 as it was in 1929.
Although they cause misfortune, market crashes aren't a misfortune in themselves, they're the wringing out of mispricing and malfeasance. The market eventually acts as intended, to discover the present value of stocks through open bidding. The principle is simple, a stock is worth what a buyer will pay, all else is blather. Nor are there truly innocent victims of a crash, people choose to buy stocks rather than, say, bonds or beer or nothing at all.
The crash itself didn't define the Depression, deflation did. Imagine the dollar buying more as time went on, as not only a store of value but a store of increasing value. Employers cut wages, partly for self-preservation but also because prices fell, lower wages would buy what the higher wages did before, or near enough. This had consequences. The "velocity of money" slowed—money changed hands less often—and as money became literally scarce, commerce slowed. By 1933 the economy of Main Street was so near to paralysis many cities issued their own currency .
A market crash may start like a canoe full of nuns and puppies going over a waterfall, but it takes time to completely play out, partly because it responds to the fluctuations of a contracting economy, partly because it tracks the passing of debt from hand to hand. Debt doesn't disappear when defaulted or even forgiven, all debt is eventually paid by someone, by the borrower or the lender, or by a third party. When the third party is DC, it offloads debt from its favored clients onto everyone else. And it's here we find the bad news: like the '29 crash, the next crash and its follow on depression will linger until debts are settled. You should live so long.
An epic crash is no more predictable than it is preventable. Oddsmakers are now saying late March, others say next year, or when the chart forms a classic head-and-shoulders, or Dow 30,000. Maybe. Watch the bond market, it's the likeliest proximate cause.
A market crash is America's boogeyman. Once released into the wild the
long-warranted economic implosion follows. The fall into general
poverty will be unstoppable, opening the deepest cracks in society. Most
cities and many states, already insolvent, will collapse outright,
overwhelmed by unpayable debt, unable to maintain essential services
much less bribes for urban peace. History says three years from start
to bottom. Stay away from crowds.
A man armed with an AR-15 saved a neighbor who was being attacked with a knife Monday in Oswego Township, Illinois.
WGN 9 reports
that the incident unfolded at an apartment complex on Harbor Drive,
“when someone with a knife attacked another person during an argument.”
Dave Thomas (pictured) witnessed the attack on his neighbor, retrieved his AR-15, and ordered the attacker to stop.
Thomas said, “I poked my head out the door. There was a pool of
blood, blood was everywhere in the hall. There was still a confrontation
going on, there were about three or four people involved at this point.
So I ran back into my house and grabbed my AR-15. I grabbed the AR-15
over my handgun — bigger gun, I think a little more of an intimidation
factor. Definitely played a part in him actually stopping.”
Police arrived and arrested the suspect, while the victim was taken to the hospital in an unknown condition.
Thomas gave a statement afterward, saying, “The AR-15 is my weapon of
choice for home protection. It’s light, it’s maneuverable. If you train
and know how to use it properly, it’s not dangerous. And this is just a
perfect example of good guy with an AR-15 stopped a bad guy with a
knife. And there were no lives taken, so all in all it was a good day.”
In the wake of the Parkland school shooting massacre, and in order to deflect away from the only answer to this contagion of school shootings (which of course is hardening school security),
our media and the left in general have to manufacture one stupid-hour
after another in order to keep the focus on gun-grabbing.
The results of this cynical and desperate crusade have not only
exposed these provincial elites as completely opposed to keeping our
children safe, but as liars, and morons.
Here are the 16 most dishonest and/or stupidest things we have heard so far…
CNN “expert” Tom Fuentes says we should not arm trained and qualified
teachers because most teachers are girls and girls can’t conceal a gun
when they dress like girls.
“If you wear a dress, if you wear a skirt, are you going to have to
wear a jacket everyday with a belt and a holster, the way a detective on
duty would do? Fuentes asked. “It’s not a real practical solution for a
variety of reasons.”(Good Lord, ignorance knows no limit)
With Dave on the roof of OICC's Nguyen Dinh Chieu apartments. Dave missed the last evacuation bus, so took a taxi to TSN , but had a difficult time getting in the gate though was finally successfully.
In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.
But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem
played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team
ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over
the sounds of the Olympic anthem.
One recalls the scene in “Casablanca,” where French patrons of Rick’s
saloon stood and loudly sang the “La Marseillaise” to drown out the
“Die Wacht am Rhein” being sung by a table of German officers.
Many of the arguments presented in opposition to gun control revolve around crime and the deterrent use of firearms against criminals. And there is that "practical-slant" argument path. Multiple scholars / researchers have contributed to that debate about guns and crime, e.g., Gary Kleck, Don Kates, John Lott, James Wright, Peter Rossi, Joyce Lee Malcolm, David Kopel, and others (Though if you’ll allow me the indulgence of being persnickety, as someone more than passingly-familiar with statistics it irks me when people cite Kleck’s work as showing 2.5 million DGUs per year; actually, it’s a range, from 600,000-odd to 2.something million per year. That higher number cannot be quoted as being a proven number, merely the upper end of an estimated confidence interval.)
As it happens I know two people – civilians – who have used guns to defend themselves against criminals; one was told, explicitly, by the police that it was only their having a handgun that prevented their assault and rape. So defensive gun uses are not fantasy. And this is certainly a practical argument on which to rest a case: after all, while there are the visible misuses, often missing from the debate is what is not seen, i.e., the defensive uses specifically, and deterrent effect generally.
A carjacking suspect was shot and killed by a man who had a concealed weapon on him in Milwaukee on Monday, officials said.
The Milwaukee Police Department said in a news release
the 21-year-old suspect, identified as Carlos Martin, was shot after he
attempted to carjack a 24-year-old man around 5:50 a.m. near the
Milwaukee MachineTool Corporation.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise knows firsthand what can happen when a firearm ends up in evil hands. After a crazed gunman decided to take out his leftist-rage on unsuspecting congressmen in June last year, Scalise nearly lost his life.
Reportedly angry with President Donald Trump and Republicans in
general, 66-year-old James Hodgkinson exacted his revenge on innocent
Republican congressmen, opening fire while the group practiced for the
Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Virginia, Chicago Tribune
reported.
After Congressman Scalise was shot in the hip, the bullet “broke
bones, tore up internal organs and cause(d) major internal bleeding,”
and left him in critical condition, The New York Times reported.
After months of recovery and several surgeries, Scalise returned to his position on Capitol Hill in September.
With unprecedented speed, the Trump administration has already
implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by the
Heritage Foundation, a pace faster than former President Reagan who
embraced the conservative think tank’s legendary “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint.
Thomas Binion, director of congressional and executive branch
relations at Heritage, said that Trump has implemented 64 percent of the
“unique policy recommendations” from the group.
At this stage of his presidency, Reagan had completed 49 percent of the Heritage policy recommendations.
“We’re blown away,” Binion said in an interview. Trump, he said, “is very active, very conservative, and very effective.”
“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the
guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want
to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police
and the military.”—Author William S. Burroughs
In the American police state, police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
In fact, police don’t usually need much incentive to shoot and kill members of the public.
For those of you who are new to the public debate about All Things
Guns that has sprung up since the Parkland, FL tragedy, this brief
primer is for you whether you are a mommy, daddy, guardian or teacher of
school-age children. Most of all, if you are a politician or reporter,
this one has your name on it.
A basic Google search for “guns” returns 299,000,000 results in 0.52 seconds. So why another gun
article? The cacophony of stultifying idiocy polluting media outlets
via the Evening News, talk radio “commentary”, wasting untold newsprint
and bandwidth demands it. Never has the old saw, “He only knows enough
to be dangerous” been more evident than in the blatherings of those who
have swallowed whole the mistruths, half-truths and outright lies on
everything from “firearm terminology” to the “gun show loophole.”
Indeed, many of the spouting pundits hosing audiences with their
indubitable certitude are motivated by an evil political agenda that has
been marinated in decades of gun grabbing propaganda, fear mongering
elitism. And worse. (See MSDNC’s “Morning Joe”)
Immigrants can be held by U.S. immigration officials indefinitely
without receiving bond hearings, even if they have permanent legal
status or are seeking asylum, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
In a 5-3 ruling Tuesday, with Justice Elena Kagan recusing, the court ruled that immigrants do not have the right to periodic bond hearings.
The
ruling is a defeat for immigration advocates, who argued that
immigrants should not be held for more than six months at a time without
such a hearing.
In all my growing up years I was taught that the War Between the
States was fought over slavery.
That’s what the “history” books, so
called, told us and it is certainly what the “news media” has screamed
about as the cause of the War for decades now. It’s what the
entertainment industry has thrown at us for decades also. I still recall
watching the movie Gettysburg in which a Confederate prisoner
of war asked a Union officer why he was fighting and the Union officer
replied “To preserve the Union and free the slaves.” The fact that the
Union had no right to free anyone in another country never seemed to
occur to him. I’ve often asked the question–if the Union was so hot to
free the slaves then why didn’t they start out by freeing those slaves
in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, all of which, for various
reasons, remained in the Union. I have yet to get a satisfactory answer.
Mr. Kizer has asked the same question and I doubt he has gotten one
either. Part of the reason for that just might be that the War was
really not about slavery to begin with.
FedEx announced Monday it won't end its relationship with the
National Rifle Association despite facing scrutiny to cut ties with the
association after a school shooting in Parkland Fla., left 17 people
dead.
The company said the NRA is one of the "hundreds of organizations" in
their alliances/associate marketing program and they will not deny
service or discriminate against them.
A few weeks ago, the United Kingdom woke up to the
realization that its democratic process is vulnerable to the attacks by a
foreign plutocrat seeking to overturn the result of the popular vote of
British citizens via a second referendum on the European Union
membership, or in case that was not possible, to overthrow government
after government until the Hungarian-American oligarch got his way.1)
George Soros, replied by penning an article for the Daily Mail,2)
in which he motivated his actions by “his love for Britain”, which
somehow did not stop him from attacking the Bank of England in 1992,
which cost British taxpayers billions. He simply knows better, and so
demands the right to hijack the political process of a democratic
country, despite not being a citizen, because he’s fighting against
“mafia-states”. It speaks volumes about Soros’s concept of “Open
Society” where he’d be free to run the political show of any country, in
a borderless world, where any vote contrary to his would be made null
and void.
The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) boosted its holdings of gold by
almost 20 metric tons last month, with reserves reaching 1,857 tons. It
has increased its holdings every month since March 2015.
Russia
is now among the top five gold holders after surpassing China, which
reportedly holds 1,843 tons. Over the last 15 years, Moscow and Beijing
have been aggressively accumulating gold reserves to cut their
dependence on the US dollar.
“Interestingly, both Russia and
China publicize and promote their accumulations of gold and publicly
refer to gold as a strategic monetary asset. They make no secret of
this. But on the flipside, the US does the opposite, and constantly
downplays the strategic role of gold,” Singapore’s BullionStar precious metals expert Ronan Manly told RT in December.
If I were to start doing a poll of presidential approval, I personally
would do registered voters,” Kondik told TheDCNF in July 2017. “If
you’re looking specifically at trying to figure out the electoral
effects, you’re probably better off doing registered voters or likely
voters.”
CNN claims 35 percent of American adults approve of how Trump is performing
Rasmussen Reports found *49 percent of respondents approve of the president (*50 today)
Some information could call CNN poll’s results into question
CNN is skewing polling data to show the majority of Americans
disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the presidency.
The network published a poll
Sunday that claims 35 percent of American adults approve of how Trump
is performing as president. Those results are in stark contrast to a
Monday Rasmussen Reports poll that found 49 percent of respondents approved of how the president is managing the White House.
What accounts for a roughly 15 percentage point disparity?
There was a time when we both honored our past and held our future in
common. Why this should be reviled puzzles us of a certain age. 
