Shortly after the dust-up in Charlottesville, I saw a quasi-viral tweet that attempted to sum up the progressive stance on the situation.

The point, was of course, to mock the people who agreed with the “violence on both sides” position taken by Trump and others.

I have touched on this subject before, but in the last few days some news has brought me back to this tweet.

I think I’m going to have to give my own take on it.

Nazis: Let’s get rid of the Jews.  

Yeah, that is pretty much unchanged.

Now Antifa.

Antifa: Jews are Fascists.  Let’s throw the Jews off of the U Illinois campus.

How about #BLM?

Black Lives Matter: We stand in solidarity with Palestinian Terrorists, and spread lies about Israel and the Jews.

  That leaves the Centrists.

Centrists: When it comes to their opinion on the Jews, I literally cannot tell these apart.   

The truth about these people is becoming more clear every day.

I think I can simplify this even further

Nazis: White identitarian, Jew hating socialists.

Antifa: Progressive identity politics, Jew hating socialists.

BLM: Black identitarian, Jew hating socialists.

It’s a diversity of Nazis.

Kevin Willmott is a professor of film studies at the University of Kansas.  He has decided to jump on the anti-campus carry grandstand act by wearing a bulletproof vest to his class.

This stunt wasn’t that effective when another professor did it in Texas, but when was the last time you heard of a Left leaning academic having an original idea?

Willmott is also a co-writer of the movie Chi-Raq, in which the black women of Chicago take on gun violence by not having sex with their boyfriends (because ripping off Aristophanes is an original thought too); so you know he’s serious about the gun crime issue.

Willmott makes two points that shows that he clearly has no idea what he is talking about.

One: that young people shouldn’t be around guns.  Except, like in every other state, concealed carry is legal only for people 21 and older.  The idea of the booze-hound freshman with a carry piece is strawman.

Two: college campuses are some sort of special place where the rules of larger society don’t belong.  This idea is becoming more and more odious.  In Maryland, a member of Congress wants to write a bill for colleges to define what sort of speech is “hate speech” and shouldn’t be allowed.

Willmott and academics like him are an embarrassment.  They act as though colleges and universities are the tiny fiefdoms that they are the kings of.  They know little to nothing of the non academic world and certainly don’t want the realities of the non academic world penetrating into their safe space.

After the divestment and cuts we’ve seen at places like Mizzou and Evergreen State, the biggest threat to a guy like Willmott is not some legal CCW permit holder.  It is his own stupid mouth showing potential students and their parents that it’s not worth sending their kids to KU because the professors there are out of touch idiots.

I want to make knives.  Not hand make as a hobby, but as a manufacturer.

I am severely disappointed with my choices in knives right now.

Spyderco, Benchmade, Schrade, even Buck are in a race to the bottom to bring me crap steel made in China.

If I want made in the USA, I’m generally going to be paying a lot more than I want to.  Only Kershaw right now is delivering made in the USA at a reasonable price.

What I REALLY want is “the one knife to rule them all.”

I, like many people, carry a Swiss Army Knife for the tools and a bigger, better lockback for the knife.

Why?

Because the choice is “good tools, crap knife, or good knife and no tools.”

Even the big SAKs are Krupp 4110 steel, which is the European version of 420HC, which is some bullshit steel.  Leatherman uses 420HC bullshit in their knives.  On their high dollar tools they use 154CM, but the blades are rinky-dinky.

What I want is a knife, Spydero Endura size, a solid 3.75 inch drop point blade, made out of a premium steel – I’m a big fan of CTS XHP – with the basic tools I use daily, e.g. bottle opener/pry bar (yes, you can pry with that, it’s not a blade), can opener, screw driver, awl (actually pretty useful for opening heat sealed clamshell packaging).

I want a cross between a Victorinox Adventurer and a (now discontinued) Kershaw Piston.

Since, apparently, the entire knife making world is suffering from a case of  “me too” and just making crap Chinese variants of the same shit over and over again, I’m going to just have to start rolling my own.

I have been following the whole DACA thing today.

I think the weirdest outburst came from Cecile Richards who wanted people to know legal status won’t stop Planned Parenthood from providing them service.

What I want Trump to do right now is use his pen and his phone to issue an executive order providing for 100% funding for abortions for DREAMers.

I’d like to watch the outrage tornado spin itself into a singularly over that.

Lost in all the news about Houston is some good news in Texas.  As of September 1st, Texas will allow the open carry of larger knives.

The bipedal sphincters at CNN, having no personal or journalistic integrity what-so-ever, wrote about this back in July with the headline Soon you’ll be able to openly carry a sword in Texas.

The issue was that the carry of knives with blades larger than 4 inches was Illegal.  The new statute “as a compromise, the measure passed by changing the wording describing the blades from ‘illegal’ to ‘location-restricted.'”

Meaning that if you are out an about in a place where you might benefit from say, a 6 inch fixed blade, it’s perfectly reasonable to have one.

Working odd hours in rural Indiana and South Dakota, it was normal during certain times of the year to see guys come into the gas station or Wal Mart with hunting knives on their belts… because they were on their way out to the deer stand.

That is now legal in Texas.

I support the reduction on restrictions on knives.  They, like guns, are tools and the best tool for the job should be decided by the user not a bureaucracy.

In general, the places that are most restrictive to guns are also the most restrictive to knives, like in NYC where the city prides itself on arresting construction workers and electricians for carrying useful tools.

But, because people are stupid and the media is filled with assholes, rather than frame the new law as being situational dependent, to prevent people from being punished unnecessarily (the fisherman who stops for a burger with a filet knife on his hip) it goes straight to “there will be sword fights in the streets.”

Catching up on some old stuff, from a few days ago, Moms Demand Action posted a link to this article from The Trace Private Insurance Pays a Tiny Fraction of Gunshot-Victim Health Costs.

The article starts with this sentence:

“More than two thirds of gunshot victims admitted to American hospitals are covered by Medicaid, or don’t have health insurance at all. And the price of that care is staggering: The average annual cost per admission for a firearm assault injury is $20,989, more than twice that of a typical hospital stay.”

Being a cynical SOB, I thought back to the news I heard last night: 4 Dead, 30 Wounded In Labor Day Weekend Shootings In Chicago.  Checking in with Hey Jackass and several other sources, it seems that 100% of this weekend’s shootings were gang related.

So if I do the math: most gunshot victims are on Medicaid + nearly (if not) all the weekend violence in places like Chicago is gang/drug related = no shit!

Poor criminals and gang members are shooting each other and we’re picking up the tab.  Great…

“The total annual cost for gunshot patients reliant on Medicaid alone amounted to $205 million.

It’s important to recognize that this is a public cost,” said Corinne Peek-Asa, the study’s lead author and director of the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center. “Being admitted for a firearm injury is very expensive, and we see so much of that cost is from uninsured or Medicaid sources. Which, for hospitals that see a high volume of firearm injuries, is going to be a challenge.”

I’d say so.  Maybe we should do something about that.

What does MDA say.

A tax and make the NRA pay for it.

It’s unfair to call gun control groups one trick ponies.  They are generally Left Wing and the Left knows two tricks: ban it and tax it.

I was in Chicago when Cook County passed their gun tax.  Cook County tried to pay for the cost of gang shootings by charging a $25 per gun tax on all guns sold in Cook County.  Amazingly it failed.  The tax is still in place but nobody buys guns in Cook County.  The gun counter at the Cabela’s in Hoffman Estates is one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.

Beyond besides not bringing in the expected level of revenue, it was an insult to law abiding gun owners.  Why should the deer hunter from Schaumburg pay extra to treat some Gangster Disciple who got shot in a drug war in Franklin Park.

By the time you factor in sales tax and the gun tax, everybody goes to the Bass Pro in Bollingbrook.

Personally, this is a job for Civil Asset Forfeiture.  Take everything from the gang members to pay for cost of the gang shootings.

Nope.

The attitude of the The Trace – which makes no mention of the gang or crime connection with shootings – is that these poor people are just innocent victims.  Anti-gun groups want law abiding gun owners to foot the bill.

I can’t think of a worse situation that making the criminals who get shot not have to pay for the cost of their own shooting.

But when has an anti-gun group ever proposed anything actually useful.

Sorry about this weekend.  I had big plans and stuff I wanted to do.

Then SOMEBODY decided the three day weekend would be the perfect time to crash course potty train Mr. Three-Year-Old.

I am tired and frazzled, my house smells like pee, and my washing machine and dryer have been running non-stop since Friday night.

I need a weekend from my weekend.