Gun Free Zone

The last nail in the coffin of the economy of California had been hammered home.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1344023356656545795

The only thing to do now is to blow the highways and bridges that connect the state to the rest of the US so that the people who voted this madness into place cannot leave and infect the rest of the country.

Via Legal Insurrection.

Recovering addicts in residential rehab facilities will be among those vaccinated against the coronavirus this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo obliquely revealed Monday.

During a virtual news conference in Albany, Cuomo said the state was expecting to receive a combined 259,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

In addition to urgent care center employees and “individuals who are administering the COVID-19 vaccines, for obvious reasons,” Cuomo said that shots would be given to residents of “OASAS” — the state Office of Addiction Services and Supports.

Addicts in rehab next to get COVID-19 vaccine, Cuomo says

Dear God: Texas and Florida are being raked over the calls by the Media because they prioritized the elderly for the vaccine rather than following CDC instructions, but nobody is even raising an eyebrow that New York will favor junkies.

We need Covid-free junkies so  they can overdose safely. See how caring they are for the plight of the downtrodden? Holy Jesus! Is Cuomo getting kickbacks from Mexican cartels or something?

Went on a road trip so needed a new audiobook to listen to.  I decided to listen to Brave New World.  I haven’t read it since high school so I felt I should do it again.

Holy shit!

There is so much of that book that I forgot.

The one thing that Orwell got wrong in 1984 was sex.  Huxley got sex alarmingly right.

“Exquisite little creature!” said the Director, looking after her. Then, turning to his students, “What I’m going to tell you now,” he said, “may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.”
He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.
“Even adolescents,” the D.H.C. was saying, “even adolescents like yourselves …”
“Not possible!”
“Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality–absolutely nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.”
“Twenty years old?” echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief.
“Twenty,” the Director repeated. “I told you that you’d find it incredible.”
“But what happened?” they asked. “What were the results?”
“The results were terrible.

Remember earlier this year when the Left decided to back Netflix showing French of core child porn to the hilt?  

Sex in the world of Aldous Huxley is so casual that not being promiscuous is a cultural aberration, and girls are valued for being “pneumatic,” i.e., so easy that sex with them was automatic and mechanical, as in a servo-pneumatic.

Now we have a US Congresswoman advocating that girls turn 18 and set up an OnlyFans account to make porn because “sex work is work.”

If you took Huxley’s thoughts on sex and narcotics and combined them with Orwell’s oppressive, invasive police state and thoughtcrimes, you’d get 2020.

From Politico:

Washington’s Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale.
Books by the Foot curates shelves full of books for Washington offices, hotels, TV sets—and, now, Zoom backdrops.

In a place like Washington—small, interconnected, erudite, gossipy—being well-read can create certain advantages. So, too, can seeming well-read. The “Washington bookshelf” is almost a phenomenon in itself, whether in a hotel library, at a think tank office or on the walls behind the cocktail bar at a Georgetown house.

And, as with nearly any other demand of busy people and organizations, it can be conjured up wholesale, for a fee.

Books by the Foot, a service run by the Maryland-based bookseller Wonder Book, has become a go-to curator of Washington bookshelves, offering precisely what its name sounds like it does.

The Wonder Book staff doesn’t pry too much into which objective a particular client is after. If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt—as one did in August—Wonder Book’s manager, Jessica Bowman, would simply send one of her more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled “Politically Incorrect” (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward. The books would then be “staged,” or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart; double-checked by a second staffer; and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read).

Erik Ulfers, founder and president of Clickspring, noted that a good TV set either transports viewers to someplace completely new and unfamiliar (“some are very abstract, really graphic-heavy”) or invites them to someplace welcoming and relatable. He recalls that he wanted the books on the “Meet the Press“ set to project familiarity infused with a sort of intellectual gravitas. He requested vintage books, he says—“It suggests a longer history, and somehow it seems more academic”—and replaced the pages in a number of the books with Styrofoam to avoid overloading the shelves.

Another force at work, however, was the rise of the well-stocked shelf as a coveted home-office prop. When workplaces went remote and suddenly Zoom allowed co-workers new glimpses into one another’s homes, what New York Times writer Amanda Hess dubbed the “credibility bookcase” became the hot-ticket item. (“For a certain class of people, the home must function not only as a pandemic hunkering nest but also be optimized for presentation to the outside world,” she wrote.) And while Roberts makes an effort not to infer too much about his clients or ask too many questions about their intent, he did notice a very telling micro-trend in orders he was getting from all across the United States.

“We can sort of, you know, guess, or read between the lines, and we’ve had an uptick in smaller quantities,” Roberts said over the summer. “If your typical bookcase is 3 feet wide, and you just want to have the background from your shoulders up, then you might order 9 feet of history, or 9 feet of literature. That way, you put them on your home set … [and] nobody can zoom in on these books and say, Oh my God, he’s reading … you know, something offensive, or tacky. Nothing embarrassing.”

I swear that in one of the great dystopian novels of the 20th Century, there is a reference to wealthy people owning lots of books, not to read them but to show them off as status symbols.  If it’s not, it feels like it should be.

You always suspected that these politicians, pundits, celebrities, and others in our “expert class” are not well-read.

But this article really points a spotlight at the naked emperor and screams “hey, we can see your dick, jackass!”

I want to take a quick jaunt over to the New York Times article linked above.

The ‘Credibility Bookcase’ Is the Quarantine’s Hottest Accessory
The bookcase has become the preferred background for applying a patina of authority to an amateurish video feed.

Imagine that you are a member of the expert class — the kind of person invited to pontificate on television news programs. Under normal circumstances, your expertise might be signaled to the public by a gaudy photograph of skyscrapers superimposed behind your head. But now the formalities of the broadcast studio are a distant memory, and the only tools to convey that you truly belong on television are the objects within your own home. There’s only one move: You talk in front of a bookcase.

The credibility bookcase, with its towering, idiosyncratic array of worn volumes, is itself an affectation. The expert could choose to speak in front of his art prints or his television or his blank white walls, but he chooses to be framed by his books. It is the most insidious of aesthetic trends: one that masquerades as pure intellectual exercise.

I’ve never read anything the NYT that I agreed with so much.

Our “betters” who have been telling us that we need to listen to them have been buying books by the foot.  Not even bothering to pick out the titles themselves, but having other people curate their bookshelves, to make them seem well-read when they Zoom from their home offices.

Our elites can’t even pick out their own prop books.

They Zoom from in front of bookshelves filled with books that say:

“Look at how well-read I am.  Look at how smart I am.  I know all this stuff.  You should trust me because I am smarter and know more than you.”

The reality is they put as much effort into that as it takes to place an order for a party sub.

“I need nine feet of books on politics.  Thank you.”

This is the zenith of shallow vanity.

The part about stuffing the books with styrofoam to make them fit is such an on the nose metaphor about these people who have gotten degrees from Ivy League diploma mills.  On the outside, they seemed filled with knowledge, but on the inside, it’s just air and stuffing.

My bookcases don’t lie about me.  Engineering texts, books about guns, military history, the US Civil War, some classic Sci-Fi, and I like to collect used library encyclopedia sets when they are sold by the Friends of the Library.

I think the ultimate lesson to take from this is, we should never listen to these people again.  Our expert class is filled with a bunch of ignorant know-nothings surrounded by styrofoam filled books they have never so much as even read the titles of.

The missus and I were doing a bit of driving around after a visit to the local (and very busy) home improvement big box store. She told me about a new Publix in a new plaza that just opened and that she wanted to check it out because she also saw a clothing chain store she is particularly fond of. When I got there, I saw a franchise car part store, brand spotting new, the supermarket, the clothing store,  and several store spaces, still empty but some of them with announcements of upcoming business to move in, including this one:

Farther down across the street, there was another mini plaza that I saw being built all this year and it was now up and running with a pre-school, dentist, real state office, a vet and a sign indicating a Domino’s Pizza opening soon.

While small business owners in other states are being bankrupted, we here in Florida are seeing new places opening up. People will receive a salary and have a life not depending for a check from the rulers in DC.

I am not saying that Florida has not felt the economical impact of the Wuhan V. but not even remotely close to what places like New York, New Jersey, California and other locations where idiotic mandates choked the life out of the economy.

The South is gonna do it again.

HB 123 – Carrying of Firearms Without Licenses by Sabatini.
Removes requirement that license to carry concealed firearm is required in order to carry such firearm; limits areas in which concealed carrying of firearm is prohibited; revises criminal penalties; revises provisions relating to carrying of concealed weapons by nonresidents; provides for issuance of concealed carry licenses for reciprocity purposes; specifies that person not otherwise prohibited by law from possessing firearm may own, possess, & lawfully use firearms & other weapons, ammunition, & supplies for lawful purposes.

Read the text here.

On first glance, this is a great bill. Among other goodies, it allows anybody in the country with a license to carry in the State even if we can’t do it in theirs. Another important detail is that CWL will still be issued so reciprocity with other states can be continued. Carrying in a pharmacy without a license is no longer a crime thus eliminating a potential Gun Free Zone.

And I almost forgot: Open Carry! 

Now the bad news (so far): No co-sponsors yet and no companion bill in the senate. I know it was just introduced yesterday, but this is going to be our priority. We start contacting our Representatives asking them to co-sponsor the bill and to our Senators to have a companion bill.

I would say this IS the bill we need. I would even dare to contact Governor DeSantis and see if we can get him to support this bill early on.