Miguel.GFZ

Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.

David Hogg, Stoneman Douglas Victims fund and Rev Jesse Jackson.

It was something that have been sparking in the back of my head since the whole Publix thing started, but it just would not come out in full till today and after enough ingestion of caffeine. The not-so-subtle extortion by Hogg has happened before by a well-known political scumbag: Reverend Jesse Jackson.  Some years ago, Rev Jesse Jackson was said to be the ultimate political extortionist. He would denounce a company using the brand new Race card, accuse them of whatever the heck we could up with. The media would focus on the company and repeat Jackson’s talking point till the company made some apologetic statement and the check to Jesse Jackson’s (ahem) charities.

The one that I remember and you will be hard pressed to find was his butting heads with Quaker Oats about Aunt Jemima pancake mix.  Her are a couple of screen caps from the book “Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies and the Special Interests That Divide America”


And the Reverend would have continued to be successful as Mafiosi for Race, but it came out that he had a daughter out-of-wedlock with  a much younger female civil rights worker at the Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and was shelling thousands of dollars in cash monthly in child support.

It never pays to pay political extortionists like Hogg or Jackson. Their motives are never pure and they are probably corrupt to the core.

“Damned Gun Owners! Why don’t you demand a tank?”

Now that you mention it…

1944 M5A1 Stuart for sale.

 This 1944 M5A1 Stuart is an American-made light tank that was reportedly shipped to Europe late in the Second World War. It was then sold to Portugal, where it was retained in their light tank inventory through the late 1960s.

The tank was returned to the US by the Southeastern Equipment Company (SECO) in the 1980s, and has not been used as a monument tank. The tank was in a private collection through 2016 with one owner. The current owner added it to his collection 2016 and performed a general service shortly after his acquisition, including changing the fluids. This running and driving Stuart is located in Los Angeles, California, and it is now being offered on behalf of the current owner on a bill of sale.

$200,000 sale price.  Like my wife says: “Dear, you have the good taste, just not the budget.”

You can be a felon if you register your weapon, but if you are a felon, you don’t have to register it.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – The District Attorney’s office filed a dozen felony gun charges Thursday against a member of a prominent farming family.
According to court documents, the California Department of Justice raided Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann’s home last month, after he tried to register an illegally modified gun online through the state’s website.


According to court documents, the DOJ began investigating Kirschenmann when he electronically submitted photos of an illegally modified AR-15-style firearm.
Retired KCSO Commander Joe Pilkington is a court recognized firearms expert. He could not speak directly to Kirschenmann’s case but says the laws are changing so frequently, it’s often hard to keep up with the latest regulations.
“Just in the last few years, there have been lots of changes in gun laws,” he said. “Making an effort, a good faith effort to comply with these really complicated laws, should count for something.”
A new state law requires assault-style weapons be registered by the end of June.

Member of prominent farming family faces felony weapons charges

I want you to digest the story: He tried to comply with the state mandated registration. He volunteered the information in good faith. He got arrested and is facing felony charges.  The State has made the whole set of gun laws so baroque and complicated that people will mess up and end up being felons.

Mr. Kirschenmann is the CEO of Kirschenmann Farms which is a big supplier of potatoes for Frito Lay so you know he ain’t some poor redneck slob in a trailer park.  Now, if I were a suspicious individual and decided to check political contributions and find out that although Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann does not show up as an individual giving money, there is a fair amount of  Kirschenmann kin working in the Kirschenmann Farms who donated to Republican causes. 

Now I am sure that the good folks of California Government would never stoop so low as to arrest somebody with ties to donations to the Republican party. Let’s not speculate like that.

This also reminds me something from the book Unintended Consequences where Joh n Ross mentions that Gun Laws are more likely to be used against the people with money than your average criminal. And that leads you to something I should be mentioning more often and I don’t:

Felons are exempted from registering weapons. 

United States Supreme Court
HAYNES v. UNITED STATES, (1968)
No. 236
Argued: October 11, 1967 Decided: January 29, 1968

Petitioner was charged by a three-count information filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas with violations of the National Firearms Act. 48 Stat. 1236. Two of the counts were subsequently dismissed upon motion of the United States Attorney. The remaining count averred that petitioner, in violation of 26 U.S.C. 5851, knowingly possessed a firearm, as defined by 26 U.S.C. 5848 (1), which had not been registered with the Secretary of the Treasury or his delegate, as required by 26 U.S.C. 5841. Petitioner moved before trial to dismiss this count, evidently asserting that 5851 violated his privilege against self-incrimination, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. 

And there you have it folk. If you try to obey the convoluted gun laws of California (in this case) and register your weapon, you may end up a felon. But only if you are a felon, you can ignore any Gun Registration law without fear of legal consequences.

Anti Gun Registration Flag

NRA: 6,000,000 members

The NRA, now with 6 million members, is energized and ready to stand and fight, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said during the NRA’s Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Dallas.

Wayne LaPierre Says NRA is Alive, Standing Tall and Still Fighting

This was not what was supposed to happen. The intention was to demonize the NRA so deeply that its members would be live in fear and embarrassment, to have them quit and fade away, to diminish the numbers so they were no longer a force that could affect legislatures and elections. Instead, we picked another million. Gun sales sky-rocketed and more people own those Evil Black Rifles that scare the crap out of the Liberal Intelligentsia.

Come November, there are going to be a lot of surprised politicians who bet on the wrong horse and will find themselves going into civilian life.

Virtue Signalining into stupid

Via Say Uncle

What is happening with written media? These are people who supposedly were schooled in the fine art of writing articles in a precise and elegant manner. Yet we see stupid stuff like this: 12 Surprisingly Offensive Words You Need to Erase from Your Vocabulary.

I click the link and the first offensive word is not a word but two…huh? I check the whole list and there are only five single words, the rest are what you call expressions.

But the one that caught my ire was this one:

Rue of Thumb
There’s a lot of controversy around the origins of this term. You know it to mean a generally accepted principle. It’s said to derive from laws in England and America dating back to the 1600s. These laws are said to have stated that a man could beat his wife with any stick no wider than his thumb. Hence, the rule of thumb. Scholars have searched but they can’t find any precise proof for this origin. That doesn’t mean that domestic violence isn’t a problem. Here’s what experts wish you knew about it.

So, there is only a legend about where the term comes from. Nobody can find where the damned term comes from, but since we need to check mark the box of “domestic violence” we are going to go ahead and bullshit our way in.

When I was a kid, I was a faithful Reader’ Digest reader. I had the stacks of old issues all over my room.  But by the early 90s, it became a printed clown show, barely a shadow of what it once was. It seems the new century has not helped improve much what passes for editorial oversight.

 

We do not teach frustration anymore.

J.D Kinman pointed us to this exchange:

Back in the ages when I was in High School South of the Caribbean, we had to take a very basic class in psychology, nothing heavy. One of the things we were taught was about Frustration and how important it was to experience them. And also how to deal with them in a healthy and productive way which meant stop bashing the head against a wall and to seek solutions: Go above, go around or go under… (later in life, the use of high explosives came into focus, but that is for another day.)

What I did not expect to see was people going out of their way to stop teaching kids about frustrations. To teach them that it is part of the natural process of living and fix the problem or even accept the problem may have no solution. What we got was a generation taught that dealing with frustrations is bad and that the world has to go out of its way to either solve the problem or reward them for being frustrated. We got us a generation of kids accustomed to participation trophies and attaboys for failing either on purpose or because they did not bother to try hard.

When they are suddenly having to deal with real life, when they find that  one problem without easy solution and nobody that comes and makes things better for them, they lose it. They become unadjusted brats and start acting up to which the medical experts compound the problem by giving them all kinds of chemicals to screw their minds even more.

We substituted the teaching of obtaining self-discipline with a prescription for Adderall and now we have a potential herd of maniacs out there ready to resolve their hissy fits with violence.

One more thought. We now see that teaching Right from Wrong has changed from when we were kids.
Right: Whatever makes you feel good.
Wrong: Whatever makes you feel bad.
We eliminated conscience and let Freud’s Id run the show.