You can tell that the recession of 2022 is going to be bad. The media is rolling out the narrative that inflation is caused by anything but the Democrats policies.

A couple of years ago there was a massive wildfire. The west coast of the US was burning. But when you looked at it from space there was a strange thing happening. The fires stopped at the US/Canadian border. Why?

Policies.

While in the US the econazi’s screamed over anything humans did that changed a single bit of nature, the Canadian’s were practicing better (good?) forest management. The environmentalist in the US had initiated a number of policies that caused the forests of west coast to be turned into one great big tender box.

Different policies get different results.

Of course the media was screaming the leftest talking point “Climate change is causing wildfires!”

In the same way Biden’s economic policies are causing inflation. The media claims it is not because of policy but there are things that make you go “Hmmmm…”

Inflation started falling at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, it stabilized with a slow climb through 2020. Then in 2021 there is a sharp upward spike. Just what happened in January of 2021?

The left counters by claiming corporate greed. Corporations are pulling in huge profits in 2022, this proves they are greedy.

The first thing to understand is that companies pulling in profits doesn’t mean that there is suddenly a huge pile of money that the board of directors gets to play in. No, it means that the corporation is going to be paying out more dividends.

As an example they point to Exxon’s profits, year over year. In the 1st quarter of 2021 Exxon had a profit of $11.824B. In the first quarter of 2022 they had a profit of $20.317B. Obviously this means that the corporations are being greedy.

Except that this is a false comparison. From 2010 through 2012 profits were going up, slightly. From 2012 through 2017 it was going down. 2017 through 2019 it goes back up again. And from 2019 through 2021 it is going down. Then suddenly, in the first quarter of 2021 there is a huge spike in profits. Just what happened in January of 2021?

The short answer is there was a policy change.

The problem with judging “greed” by profits is that profits doesn’t tell you anything about the state of a business. If the gross income on a widget is $100 and the net is $0.10 nobody thinks that’s an outrageous profit. Take that same widget and sell 1,000,000 of them per month and you have a net income of $100,000.

Making $1.2Million in “profits” per year sounds a whole lot better than 10 cents per widget.

People have a difficult time conceptualizing large numbers. A Small Problem With Big Numbers is a brief description of the problems with understanding, getting a feel for, large numbers.

I spent time working for a super computer company. We dealt with very very small numbers in measuring time. Times that were so short that the lengths of wires were all carefully measured because the speed of light made a difference in processing signals correctly.

I was also doing photography. I have some very expensive studio lights.

The lights were fired remotely. When the flash on my camera went off it would trigger all of the studio lights. I was very concerned about synchronization issues. I carefully calculated the time it would take for the light to travel to the sensors, looked up the response time of the sensors and everything else. There was some serious lag involved.

I went to my mentor and asked “How can this possibly work? The lag is horrible.” He carefully pointed out that my lag was measured in nanoseconds. The shutter to my camera was open for 17 milliseconds and the flash only existed for a very short period of time. The lag would have to be nearly one million times larger in order for it to have any effect.

I had failed to grok large numbers.

When dealing with profits most corporations run on slim margins. While the over all cost to you of a good or service might be high, no one entity in the chain of creation is running at unreasonable margins.

When you sell your labor you are competing with every other person with your skillset trying to get that job. If you price yourself out of the labor market then you don’t get the job. If you are asking $100k/year and they are asking $80K/year and they can do the same job, they might get the job instead of you. Unless you bring some extra value.

If the price of a bag of oranges is noticeably higher than a different bag of oranges then you are more likely to buy the lower cost bag of oranges, IFF the quality is good enough.

If the corporations could have raised their prices in 2019 as much as they have today and still sold goods, they would have. They didn’t because their competition would have undersold them. If every seller of oranges is raising their price and nobody is undercutting that implies that people are willing to pay that price and that the seller is unable to cut their prices to get more sales.

Inflation happens when the value of money goes down. Prices go up when demand out strips supply. We are currently experiencing both. The government is injecting more money into the economy which devalues it. The supply for many goods, petroleum products in particular, is going down. Demand is exceeding the supply. Prices will go up.

As our costs go up, we in turn raise our prices to cover those costs. Which in turn raises the costs to those that purchase our goods or services.

We need new policies before we are all billionaires that can’t afford to buy a loaf of bread.

— Workers are being punished for inflation. The real culprit is corporate greed

For years we had to put up with the Supreme court handing down decisions based on what outcome the left wanted. The court was stacked heavily to the left. The great legal minds of the left on the court were looking for ways to modify the law in order to get the outcome they wanted.

You can see this in the disent on Bruen. The disent spends page after page telling us why guns are bad and how horrible it is that people die from gunshots. When they finally get around to arguing on the basis of the law, the major point is that there wasn’t evidence.

There was evidence, the evidence was given directly to the court during oral arguments.

In addition to the left leaning justices, we had justices that would do their best to do the least. Roberts works unendingly to make sure that decisions on the right are as limited in scope as possible. Read about how he was working to limit the scope of Dobbs if you want an idea of the sort of effort he puts in.

Even when he joins in an opinion he is likely to attempt to limit the scope of the decision.

The best of the left leaning justices was Ruth. While I didn’t like her decisions, she worked hard to find law to support her opinions. Kagan is out there telling the world that the court will be delegitimized if they don’t make the decisions she wants.

Having spent years owning the court, the left is now having a fit over no longer owning the court. People that were perfectly happy when the court was 6-3 left are now screaming that 6-3 right is stacked. Rules For Thee, Not For Me.

In response the left threatened to pack the court. To add so many justices to the court that it would be generations before it could be turned conservative again. There was talk of adding as many as 9 new justices, all to be appointed right now.

Court packing isn’t making any headway. It didn’t happen the last time a Democrat in office tried it. It is dead in the water today.

So of course the Democrats have to change the rules. Just like the killed the filibuster for court appointments when Obama was in office, as soon as they lost the Senate they wanted the filibuster back. When the Republicans killed the filibuster for Supreme court appointments, the left lost their minds.

Today’s latest rule change? Term limits on all justices.

The bill, 2021-2022 H.R. 8500 “Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act of 2022”

This bill has been introduced but there is no official text at The Library of Congress, it is only available at the congressman’s site: To amend title 28, United States Code, to provide for the duration of active service of justices of the Supreme Court, and for other purposes

The bill would limit the term of each justice to 18 years. In the first and third year of each president’s term, they would appoint one new justice. The longest serving justice would then be “retired”.

This means that a two term president would be able to appoint 4 new justices.

All of this to avoid having the constitution read as written and not some magic 8-ball that always gives the answer a left leaning justice wants.

There are a number of articles out there covering this bill. It is a kitchen sink type of bill. Given everything that is in it, almost any center fire semi-auto firearm could be banned under it.

The one that covers most of the important parts and is a quick read is AWB 2022, the way I read it over at Divemedics blog.

A few of the 2A YouTubers have mentioned and my feeds confirm, that the main stream media is claiming that this bill is dead in the Senate.

No. It is not. The Senate already passed one gun control bill this session, there are just to many Republicans that can not be trusted. Make the calls to your Senators, make sure that they know how you feel. Yes, your Senators are Democratic anti-gun rights people, call anyway. There were four Democrats that voted NO on H.R. 1808.

The thing to realize is that these Senators and Representatives are not listening to arguments because Republicans and Democrats are talking pass each other.

A Republican gets up and says “This will do nothing to stop mass shootings.” In response a Democrat gets up and says “The AWB or 1994 stopped mass shootings!” They talk about what experts predict. We talk about what is happening. They talk about saving the children. We talk about how it is unconstitutional on its face.

This is a fight that is not going to stop.

But here is the kicker, H.R. 1808 isn’t the bad one. It is just the obvious one. This is the one that gets everybody all worked up. This is the one that gets us burning up the phone lines and emailing like mad.

H.R. 2814 is the bad one.

Here it is:

To repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and provide for the discoverability and admissibility of gun trace information in civil proceedings.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

This bill will allow anybody selling or manufacturing firearms to be sued. It doesn’t mean that the person suing will win, but it costs money to defend against lawsuits. This will extend to people selling or manufacturing parts as well.

So while you are calling your Senators, call your Representative as well and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 2814

In a message that absolutely tells you how off the rails California Governor Gavin Newsom is, he is planning to make California “carbon neutral” by 2045. All by harnessing the power of the wind.

The stated goal is to create 20 gigawatts per year via wind.

This is the state that has to buy power from other states. It is taking water from the Colorado River to keep its population and crops alive, that doesn’t have enough power generating stations now and they think that wind will be the answer.

Texas has a boat load of wind power. Unfortunately when it gets really hot the winds stop blowing, just when everybody wants to turn on the AC.

Of course the plan is unlikely to account for the vast increase in electric vehicles. Many states are already asking EV owners to only charge their cars during particular times of day, in order to avoid rolling brown/black outs.

You just know that this is going to cost Billions of dollars and it will come from tax payers. And the odds of it actually achieving anywhere near the goals stated are near zero.

— Governor Newsom Calls for Bold Actions to Move Faster Toward Climate Goals

Call your representative NOW!

The house is voting to allow the rule change to bring up the AWB and Repeal of PLCAA.

The house has voted to waive a rule that will allow the AWB to be voted on.
Strictly party lines. 10 did not vote, 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats. If all 6 Republicans voted no it still would pass.

I’m still learning this stuff. The previous vote was to approve a vote to happen on the rule. Confusing.

1330: House is in Recess. Because of the passage of H.Res. 1300 the house is able to debate and vote on different bills that normally would have to wait. They are currently debating H.R. 5118 which has nothing to do with Firearms.

My guess is that they will delay until later to take up 2814 and 1808

They are no debating H.Res 1302 which will allow them to debate H.R 1808.

They have voted to bring H.R. 1808 to the floor for debate.

H.R. 1808 is on the floor being debated.

At 1730 the house is done with debate on H.R. 1808. The gist of the Democrats is “for the children”. One Democrat go up and stated that since the AWB of 1994 survived constitutional challenges, this bill is constitutional.

The are currently voting to send the bill back to committee. Given that every vote so far has been pretty much party lines it won’t go back to committee. It will be voted on in the house.

If it is voted on in the house, it will pass.

Time to call your Senators.

It passed the house.
Democratic: 215 Yes, 5 No
Republican: 2 Yes, 208 No

Fitzpatrick (R-PA) voted Yes.
Jacobs (R-NY) voted Yes
Cuellar (D-TX), Golden(D-MA), Gonzalez, Vicent(D-TX), Kind(D-WI) and Schrader(D-OR) all voted No.

The worse parts were seeing my Representative voting for this bill and Nancy absolutely bubbling with joy when she announced that it has passed.

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H.R. 1808 Assault Weapons Ban of 2021 and H.R. 2814 Repeal of PLCAA did not make it out of the rules committee. This means that any votes on the two bills will not come before the house gets back from its August vacation.

There is a boatload of politics involved with getting bills to a vote. That is by definition what this is all about.

In short, a bill is introduced to the House or the Senate. From there it is normally referred to a committee where it will be discussed and amended/modified. Once it is voted out of committee it could be sent back to a different committee where the same thing happens.

This goes on until the bill has made it out of all committees. At this point it needs to be scheduled for debate on the floor.

Under the house rules H.R. 1808 and H.R. 2814 were not eligible for debate. Because of this the bills were sent to the rules committee.

In the House rules can be modified by the Rules Committee at any time. This is a huge difference from the Senate where it is much harder to modify the rules.

The Rules committee can change the House Rules to allow particular bills to reach the floor for debate.

Assuming the Democrats had the votes in the House to pass the bill you would assume that the Rules Committee would make the change and it would go to the floor. If they don’t have the votes and the bills went to the floor and were voted down, the bills would be dead. New bills would have to be introduced and make their way through committee(s) to get a new vote.

By delaying the vote the Democrats give themselves more time to find more votes. This also allows them to spend the next few weeks campaigning with “We got an AWB out of committee! First time in decades! Look! Look! We’re doing something about gun violence.”

Keep up the pressure on your representatives.

Go to Find Your Representative enter your zip code and you will get the contact information for your Representative. Call them.

Updated to add links:

FPC Take Action Page: FPCAction.org – FPC Grassroots Army: Take Action!
GOA site: Gun Owners of America
Missouri Firearms Coalition: Take Action Today!