Let us talk gun training.

Mike the dipshit and not really a gun guy wrote an opinion piece for the Huffington Post called Want To Be A Gun Nut? Move To Kansas.

According to him, Kansas sucks because:

“Not only can you wander around anywhere in the Sunflower State with a gun in your pants, you don’t even need any kind of training or licensing at all. If you are what my friends in Fairfax call a ‘law-abiding’ person, go into a gun shop, buy a banger, stick some ammo into it and you’re ready to defend yourself and everyone against all enemies – foreign, domestic or anything else…

Then in 2015 the same bunch of fools in the State House erased the law which required anyone applying for CCW to first take an eight-hour training course, as if sitting around in someone’s back yard and talking about the last time you shot a squirrel or a skunk constitutes training of any kind.”  

Mike has a boner for training.  Back in July, he posted on his blog just how terrible it is that 40% of CCW permit holders have no formal gun training.  He then goes on to criticize most of the training available.

“Know where the word ’training’ comes from as it applies to guns? It’s a word first used by the NRA which was actually founded as a ‘training’ organization in 1873. Not only does the NRA continue to promote themselves as America’s premier gun-training organization, but they have launched a new training effort focusing on CCW techniques called Carry Guard, which they refer to as a “first-rate, elite program” aimed (pardon the pun) at people who lead the ‘concealed-carry lifestyle’ and want to be ready for ‘real-life situations you must be prepared to face.’

This isn’t training – it’s a sham. It’s used to entice people to purchase an insurance policy which will allegedly pay all their legal fees after they shoot someone, assuming they don’t get convicted for some kind of felony committed while they were using their gun. Along with this training program, the NRA now offers its standard training programs on video, and these programs are used by most CCW-issuing authorities in states where pre-CCW training is still required. What’s the difference between NRA video training and video games like Call of Duty that you can play on your X-Box?  There is no difference.”

Mike started that post with this statement “I have decided that it’s time for Mike the Gun Guy to become a little less polite (imagine – Mike the Gun Guy ‘less’ polite).”

So, I feel emboldened to be a little less polite myself.

Ahem…. fuck this guy.

First and foremost, the Second Amendment says that the “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  I believe that the “and bear arms” part means the right to carry in public, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in Moore v. Maidgan.

The Ninth Circuit came to the opposite conclusion, but keep in mind that the Ninth Circuit is the Captain Peter “Wrongway” Peachfuzz of the judiciary.   If you want to know what the constitution really means when it comes to civil liberties, take any decision by the Ninth and do exactly the opposite.

While I am willing to accept some standards for CCW (e.g. background checks) and being told the CCW laws of the state, I am wary of restrictions.  I lived in Chicagoland when Moore was decided and I remember quite clearly how the legislature wanted to make the standards for training so high and so expensive that most people couldn’t obtain a permit.

The goal was to implement a concealed carry equivalent to the impossible literacy standards tests used to deny black people the right to vote.

What is up with Democrats using testing as a way to deny people their civil liberties?

That is all principle.

Let’s talk pragmatics.

What constitutes enough training for CCW or for gun rights in general?  Moms Demand Action bemoans that people can get guns without training.

What is their standard?  How many hours at the range and how many rounds will satisfy them?

The NYPD firearms qualification is notoriously low in its standards but officers still fail it because it is “something that is not taken seriously.”  Which is why the NYPD are notoriously shitty shots prone to hitting bystanders with a hail of bullets.

Would requiring citizens to match “America’s premier law enforcement agency” be sufficient?  I doubt it.

Beyond the appeal to authority fallacy in regards to training, there is the fact that I have never met someone who just decided to go out and get a CCW and a gun and never shot it.

In my experience, CCW is something obtained after years of familiarity with guns, be it hunting, competition shooting, or just good ‘ol target practice.

I have the feeling that Mike and the MDA crowd would strenuously object to my having an Alabama CCW permit, which required no training at all.  They would explain that without the magical blessing of goverment bureaucracy I’m an incompetent boob who is more dangerous to myself than anything else.

Now I know that no simulation is a sufficient substituent for the real thing, but I’d put my IDPA skills up against any NYPD or LAPD qualified beat cop (except last Saturday, I don’t know what happened but I had a bad week).

But of course that isn’t blessed with the magic pixie dust of goverment so the 300 rounds or so a month I throw downrange in the pursuit of accuracy at speed doesn’t count.

They, like all statists, do not trust us to be the responsible, self disciplined people that we are.  They want to impose their literacy tests training standards to keep us all where they think we belong, under the Democrat massa’s thumb.

It is no secret that Liberals/Progressives/The Left hate the Military.  The evidence is clear, down to the City of Berkeley telling the USMC they are not welcome, to Harvard having a years long ban on ROTC on campus.

They hate the military and its “toxic masculinity.”

That was until Trump banned transgender individuals from serving.  Now they love the military and believe that any person who loved their country should be able to serve, mental stability not withstanding, and are going to fight tooth and nail for the military against hateful Conservatives.

It’s also no secret that Liberals/Progressives/The Left hate football and its violent, toxic masculinity problem.  Football skews Republican in terms of viewers and fans.

Colin Kaepernick takes the field.  He is a mixed race man, abandoned by his black father,  put up for adoption, he is raised by a middle class white family with all the privileges that entails.  He decides he’s going to go full #BLM on the NFL’s time and takes a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance.  ESPN has an orgasm over this.

In the real world, this drives viewers away, which drives advertisers away, which drives money away from the league.

If there is one big rule in business it is: Don’t piss off the customer.

Kaepernick did this to 32% of the NFL’s customers.

Beyond the protests, he was ranked 29 out of 32 quarterbacks.  So he just sucks at the sport.

He also wore a t-shirt with Fidel Castro on it, and then defended the Cuban dictator during a press conference.  Hooray, another #BLM liberal who just loves mas murdering, socialist, despots.  Had he been more famous a few years ago I bet he would have gone down with Sean Penn and Oliver Stone to blow Hugo Chavez for some revolutionary chic cred.

So, here you have a quarterback who is ranked at the bottom of the list.  He has driven away Middle American fans with his antics.  He has offended the Cuban American population with his antics.  He has lost the league untold millions of dollars with his antics.  So it is just good business that when he went to Miami, they told him “no and fuck off.”

Well, that’s apparently racist.  Spike Lee is now arranging a protest  on Kaepernick’s behalf.

A bunch of Liberals, who yesterday hated football, are now suddenly NFL superfans who want to see Kaepernick play?  Oh bullshit.  They are simply upset that one of their protected class victims was unable to get his way anymore.

If Kaepernick really wants to be newsworthy again, he should cut off his dick and try and join the Marines.

King Leopold II of Belgium was the ruler and owner of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.   The enormity of his rule in Africa is ranked among the Holocaust, Holodomor, and killing fields of Cambodia in terms of human atrocities and suffering.

Among the horrors that occurred in the Congo during his rule was a policy of severed hands.  Leopold II demanded quotas of rubber from Congolese rubber plantations.    If a village failed to meet the impossible quota, several slaves (that’s what they were) were executed.  A hand was to be severed from the body and shipped to Belgium to show the execution took place.  Severed hands became an acceptable alternative to rubber for quotas.  This created a perverse incentive where villages raided each other, severing hands, and sending the hands back to Belgium.

Some 15 million Africans were killed or worked to death in the Congo, and many more were maimed, all for the natural resource of rubber.

Fast forward to now.

Volvo has promised to go all electric or hybrid with their cars by 2019.

France and Britain are banning petroleum powered vehicles in 2040.

The demand for cobalt for electric and hybrid car batteries has resulted in the enslavement of countless children in heavy metal mines in … you guessed it… the Congo.  It is described as “hell on earth.”

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

Once again, fancy Europeans show that there is no natural resource that they want that they aren’t willing to engage in the enslavement and  mass murder of Congolese to obtain it.

An engineer at Google went around a 10 page memo on his opinion about life inside Google.

I read it.

The down and dirty points the guy made, seem to me to be:

1. Google loves diversity as long as it isn’t diversity of opinion, it is one giant Leftist echo chamber.
2. Anybody who isn’t a hard Leftist is harangued into submission to the hard Leftist.
3. If engineering (and STEM in general) is never at perfect demographic parity in terms of gender or ethnicity, that’s perfectly OK.
4. Stop pushing the diversity thing all the time because No 3.

I started down the STEM path in 2001 when I went to college.  My entire adult life I have been beat over the head with the “we need parity of *insert identity group here* in STEM.

The author of the Google memo, from best I can find online is in his late 20’s, so probably has an experience close to mine.

I saw boy and girls enter engineering and both boys and girls flunk out.  I’ve had good male and female professors.  In my experience, women and minorities who want to become engineers (and are capable of passing the classes) do.  Those who don’t, don’t.

What gets me, is that I have been beat over the head with the notion that the reason not as many women or minorities want to go into engineering is because white males are awful, sexist, racist, people who are mean spirited and drive everyone who isn’t like them away.

OK, they don’t say it exactly like that, but I can’t tell you how many diversity/sensitivity training seminars I’ve been in where the lack of parity is blamed on “microaggression.”

Dental hygienists make on average $70K a year and are 97% women.  How come I never hear about the need for parity in dental hygienists and the microaggressions keeping men out of such a high paying field.

Or why 97% of kindergarten teachers are women.

Or why 98% of mechanics and heavy equipment operators are men.

Many days being an engineer is being a mechanic with math.  Maybe that doesn’t appeal to a wide range of women.

But NO.  The reason aerospace engineering isn’t 50/50 male/female is because the men in the field are just fucking awful sexist pigs in need of reeducation.

Maybe, just maybe, this poor Google memo guy was sick and tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.  That he’s a terrible, sexist, piece of shit and the evidence of that is the fact more than half of his co-workers have dicks.

Best Life is an online luxury lifestyle magazine for men, that was originally a print magazine that was a spin off from Men’s Health.

So… I’m bored, browsing the internet at one does during a time of boredom, when I get linked to this listicle in Best Life, 40 Items Every Man Over 40 Should Have in His Home.

OK, I thought.  Let’s see the list, I wonder what I have at the ripe old age of 34.

Some of these items were reasonable.

OK.  This isn’t bad.  A have a nice collection of Waterman fountain pens.  I hate ball points.  This is sort of upscale lifestyle advice.

Sure, there is a lot a good cast iron skillet can do.  Not my favorite for the stove top (unless you have a gas range) but invaluable for the grill.

This one is 100% yes.  A good chef’s knife is an investment.  A good cutting board to go along with it is just as necessary.

Some on the list gave me pause…

Why?  This is why god and Leon Leonwood Bean invented the duck boot.  A shitty old sneaker isn’t what you want to wear when the dog has to go out at 2:00 am in January in Chicago.

But I was getting the sneaking suspicion this was really a list for superurban* hipsters who aren’t quite sure what being a man really means.  They don’t just need a listicle.  They need an upbringing.

What the fuck kind of man doesn’t own tools?  Seriously?  I get not being able to do a big repair but without a pliers and a screw driver, how does someone change a toilet seat or assemble a Jagenpultz from Ikea?

WD-40 is a basic food group.  That and duck tape.

OK.  Now I’m getting mad.  If you don’t have a pair of pliers, screw driver, WD-40, and duck tape, go to the store and buy them, right fucking now.  If you don’t you have forfeited the right to have fuzz on your peaches.

This and This…

Those are not items you buy.  Those are items that you happen to have.  Having to include them on the list means you never thought to do work before.  This is the evolution of the trucker hat.  It is a status symbol to other hipsters.

Seriously?  I’m going to punch the first fucking hipster I see.  No knife should ever be rusty.  Ever.  It means you don’t know how to take care of your tools.  No knife should ever be dull.  If you have a knife (and you should) and it’s rusty and dull, go to the trash chute at your fancy condo, pull out your knife, set it on the ground, and toss yourself down the trash chute into the dumpster.

A rusty knife is not for “street cred.”  It’s a tool you fucking hipster.

Sure, some are more bad ass than others (Hell Yes) but it’s still a tool to be respected.

Holy shit.  Only a luxury lifestyle magazine can take something so indispensable to everyday life and simultaneously misunderstand it and turn it into a pointless (literally) ironic status symbol.

This is a listicle from an online magazine for non-men who have never lifted a finger to do labor more strenuous than the scroll button on a mouse, have no idea how the world really works, and are happy to pay the 18% man tax at the feminist vegan cafe.

Moms Demand Action posted a Fox News piece on their Facebook page, that couldn’t make the state of National Concealed Carry any clearer.

It’s New York and California (and a few other Blue places) that are holding this up.

The followers of MDA rushed to prove this in the comments.

Yeah, why should New York give full faith and credit to lesser states on gun laws?

How dare the law abiding gun culture of the Deep South and Midwest be respected by the Coastal Elite.

You can feel the condescension drip out of these people in the way they object to bringing the full promise of Heller, McDonald, and Moore v. Madigan to fruition.

If national CCW is passed (and the GOP better pass it after screwing the pooch on Obamacare) I wonder what these states will do?  These are of course the same areas the call the rest of us racist for objecting to when they wantonly violate immigration laws.

A feminist vegan cafe in Australia is fighting the Patriarchy and gender pay gap by charging men an 18% gratuity and giving women seating priority.

Supposedly, none of the men who have been charged the “tax” have complained.

I don’t believe that.

Let’s be honest here, none of the “male shaped persons” who have gone to eat at a feminist vegan cafe are in any way men.