In Hell.

Los Angeles passed an ordinance back in February forcing business to disclose if they had any dealings with the NRA. San Francisco in its declaration of the NRA being a Domestic Terrorist organization, “also urges the city and county to reconsider its relationship with companies that do business with the NRA.” New York is suing NRA for the insurance program and the Obama administration pushing banks to “re-examine” making business with gun-related companies which has lead to some incidents of suddenly business finding themselves without credit card processing services and even general bank services to which they had without problems for many years.

But again, everything Fascist Old is new again for the Liberals in the USA. From the Evening star.  (Washington, D.C.), 12 Nov. 1938:

Again. This was punishing the Jewish population for an event that did not even happen in Germany, but it is an excuse to come down on a hated group of people. And what better way to choke them than restrict and eliminate they means of income after they were brutally attacked and their business destroyed?

Keep reading. They go as far as confiscating any insurance claims that Jewish business owners made to rebuild their damaged stores and forced them to use their capital to enact those repairs that are now mandated by the government.

Imagine Antifa coming to your store in Portland, smashing your inventory at pleasure without the intervention of police and after all it destroyed, your insurance claims will be confiscated by the city of Portland who orders you to clean and rebuild your place of business  or else. And by the way, while you are forced to do that, they are trying to figure out a way to kill your business altogether by banning you from doing any more commerce with “the good people.”

And of course, a little bit more Gun Control cannot go wrong with the Fascist, then and now.

Everything is just so coincidental, isn’t?

The Fascists will out.

The CNN climate town hall was a fucking disaster for the Democrats.

Highlight after highlight shows Democrats wanting to ban internal combustion engine-powered vehicles and have a mandatory buyback for your car, tax your meat and coerce you into eating less of it, ban drinking straws, and drive your electricity prices sky-high.

It was a marathon of Democrats proving that they were meddling, tyrannical, scolds who want to control every aspect of your life, down to what you can eat and how many kids you can have.

So in the wake of that 7-hour clown show, CNN has announced that it would partner with the Human Rights Campaign to do a Democrat Primary town hall focused entirely on LGBT issues.

Holy shit, this is such a bad idea.  I can feel it backfiring now.

I can understand why they are doing this.  According to Gallup, Americans Greatly Overestimate U.S. Gay Population.  Poll data shows that Americas assume LGBT people make up nearly a quarter of the population, when in fact they make up only 4.5%.

This is largely due to overrepresentation in the media, which reflects highly visible gay communities in places like Hollywood and New York City and not the United States as a whole.  So the people at CNN and the HRC probably think that this will appeal to a much larger Demographic of Americans than it actually will.

So beyond this being a town hall dedicated to a very niche topic, the evidence from the climate change town hall suggests that this is going to take a hard Left turn.

Understand that this is in a post-Obergefell America where gay marriage is legal.

Of course, every candidate will come out and make the false claim that Trump and Pence want to reverse Obergefell and end gay marriage because they need a boogieman to campaign against.

What concerns me and should concern the rational, moderate LGBT community is all the other radical, hard-Left bullshit that is going to make its way into this town hall.

I can just imagine the candidates taking stances on things like supporting taxpayer-funded transition surgery for prisoner sand students, support for kindergarten drag-queens, and letting anatomical boys win every title in girl’s sports in high school and college.

If you think I’m crazy, remember that Julian Castro has already come out in favor for taxpayer-funded abortion for trans-men.

I can also imagine an unfettered attack on religious liberty as “legalized bigotry” with probable comparisons to Jim Crow.

If by the end one of the lesser candidates (like Cory Booker) tried to up the Progressive ante by saying that homosexual experimentation should be mandated in public school sex-ed, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised.

The effect of this would be to turn the moderate public opinion against the LGBT community.

I’ve written about this before. The public opinion on LGBT people was going up when the LGBT community was simply the nice gay couple next door who just wanted to get married and have the same rights as everyone else.  When the loudest voices in the LGBT community became scolds who tried to bankrupt small business owners with cries of “bake the cake you bigot,” the public opinion of the LGBT community started to dip.

Having every Democrat candidate on one stage, chastising America about its poor treatment of LGBT people for not indulging them in every one of the most extreme whims of the radical, Progressive, identity-politics, fringe LGBT community isn’t just going to hurt the Democrats, it will hurt the LGBT community.

Moderate LGBT people should really put a stop to this shit show before the Democrat message becomes “we’re going to pervert your children you disgusting bible-thumping bigots.”

I found a little snippet of a newspaper, the page 6 of the Evening star. Washington, D.C., 10 Nov. 1938.

Here is the funny part. This little section from page six is part of a bigger front page news that day of an incident that happened the night before.

You guys probably know these riots as Kristallnacht.

The same paper but the day before Kristallnacht offers the following.

Let me see if I get this right: A group of people after an incident they did not have anything to do with it, were disarmed by the government and forbidden to exercise their freedom of speech by banning their publications.

So the latest ideas of gun registrations followed by forced “gun buy backs” and the shutting down of Conservative and Pro Gun outlets in Social Media, turns out  not to be a newly minted Liberal plan but just the old re- decorated Nazi plan of their ancestors applied to our times.

The Fascists will out.

From KCBD Texas:

FBI /ATF investigating after executing search warrant at Lubbock home, apparently in connection with Midland/Odessa shootings

FBI and the ATF are still investigating after serving a search warrant in the 3400 block of Mesa Road in Lubbock, across from the Lubbock Country Club, apparently in connection with the Midland/Odessa shootings from Saturday.

We’re still waiting on official confirmation, but we believe this search is related to the manufacture and sale of the AR-15 used in the Midland/Odessa shootings.

The search was conducted around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that law enforcement is investigating a person of interest in Lubbock, suspected of illegally manufacturing and selling the rifle used in Saturday’s mass shooting in Midland/Odessa.

From the New York Post:

Cops identify man who allegedly sold illegal gun to Texas shooter Seth Ator

Investigators believe the suspect sold gunman Seth Ator the rifle in a private sale that allowed him to purchase the weapon without undergoing a background check, according to the report.

Authorities believe the man was illegally buying parts for guns, assembling a single firearm and then reselling it, the Journal reported.

The NYT article is still behind the paywall and I don’t have more details than that.

The term “manufacture” is a little dubious when it comes to media reporting.  I don’t know if this was truly a case of manufacturing, i.e., finish machining a lower and building it into a gun.  Or if it was simply assembly using parts kids and stripped lowers.

Either way, doing that with the intent to sell without an FFL is a violation of Federal law.

So with all the hand wringing about this shooter buying a gun through a private sale that would have been stopped with a UBC, does anybody honestly believe that a guy who was knowingly illegally dealing in firearms would have performed a background check before selling it?

What I can see happening is, depending on how this guy manufactured this gun, a call for bans on unfinished receivers (cue comments about 80% Sten receivers at Home Depot) or bans on stripped lowers and such.

Again, we have a situation where the “do something” talking point du jour would have been totally ineffective at stopping the shooting.

Warning: I am gonna piss off people and really do not care.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Walgreens has changed its policy to prohibit the open carrying of firearms.

Walgreens announced a statement Thursday on its website, saying:

“We are joining other retailers in asking our customers to no longer openly carry firearms into our stores other than authorized law enforcement officials.”

Walgreens Asking Customers Not To Openly Carry Guns

I was giving a bit of a thought why are these retailers coming down on Open Carriers.  Just because a crazy asshole shot up a bunch of people in Walmart in Texas, does not mean average Joe goes walking around OC-ing a rifle behaving like dicks , right?

Tell me again how your version of “normalizing” is working out?

Every candidate that got asked last night if would ban off-shore drilling, oil extraction, and coal said “yes.”

That got me thinking.

Let’s ignore power generation for one minute, and assume that all of our energy needs are met through renewable sources, including electric cars and stuff like that.

If we banned petroleum and coal, what would happen?

According to extrapolated data from NACE (National Association of Corrosion Engineers):

The total annual corrosion costs in the U.S. rose above $1 trillion in the middle of 2013, illustrating the broad and expensive challenge that corrosion presents to equipment and materials and is now estimated at $1.1 trillion for 2016.

According to Friction:

In total, ~23% (119 EJ) of the world’s total energy consumption originates from tribological contacts. Of that 20% (103 EJ) is used to overcome friction and 3% (16 EJ) is used to remanufacture worn parts and spare equipment due to wear and wear-related failures.

According to Machine Design:

By one estimate, 6% of the gross national product is wasted due to friction and wear on 21st Century mechanical and electromechanical systems.

That is $1.12 Trillion in 2019.

So corrosion and wear cost the United States roughly $2.2 Trillion and one-fifth of the energy we generate.

So what happens when we ban petroleum extraction and thereby eliminate the source of most of our paints, greases, oils, lubricants, hydraulic fluids, and corrosion inhibitors?

Exactly how fast will every mechanical system in the United States grind to a halt, rust, and fall apart?

Do any of these politicians have a clue how much petroleum it takes to make an electric train run?

What about all the super-efficient electric cars and wind turbine blades and everything else made from strong, light, carbon fiber.  Do they realize most of that comes from PAN made from petroleum pitch?

All 785,000 tons of aluminum produced in the US comes from ore that is smelted using graphite anodes.

The 81.6 million metric tons of steel produced in the US is refined using coke.

That graphite and coke comes from petroleum and coal.

There are 140,000 people employed in the steel industry and 161,000 people employed in the aluminum industry.

According to the Polymer Database:

The US plastics industry is the third largest manufacturing industry in the United States. It employs nearly one million people in the manufacturing sector (about 16,000 manufacturing sites) and 1.4 million people total when including plastics suppliers.1-5 The U.S. plastics industry created a turnover of about $380 billion per year with more than $13 billion trade surplus and a total production volume of about 55 Mtons in 2012.

And almost all of that plastic comes from Petroleum.

So we ban petroleum and coal and we lose steel making, aluminum smelting, and polymer production and nearly 2 million jobs.

I’m just scratching the surface here, but “we have to get end the use of fossil fuels” will pretty much cause every machine in America to seize up and quit, most of the ironworks in America to rust, and end domestic production of most of our useful structural materials.

I’m not a politician, just an engineer, but I think this is a really bad idea.