The first shots of the next major war will be taken in space. In fact, Russia has already threatened to do so with a hit on GPS satellites.
War on the Right
Too Easy
The Capitol Protestors being held in jails where they are being beaten daily for over a year while awaiting trial on a misdemeanor is “getting off too easy” according to the left.
Contrast that with all of the jail time caused by 2020’s “peaceful protests” and tell me what’s lenient.
Cancel Culture
Facts Are Racist
Ivy league schools no longer use testing to see if applicants know stuff.
economics
Rent Control
The Democrats in Florida are losing their shit because rents are increasing so much. Now they are putting forward a plan where they accuse landlords of price gouging. They are also wanting to pass a law that implements statewide rent control. They themselves are the ones to blame for increasing rent.
For a year and a half, renters lived in homes without paying rent, and there was nothing landlords could do about it. During that time, those same tenants received government checks and many of them didn’t pay a single dollar of it in rent. This increased the risk of investment for landlords. As anyone with a lick of economic sense knows, an investment with increase risk always comes with a higher price tag.
That’s exactly what we see happening all over the country- rents have increased by as much as 25% per month. I’ve been warning that this was coming for over a year and a half.
Communism always begins by vilifying landlords. I raised my rent by 7.3 percent this year. I could have raised it more. I am keeping a close eye on this, because a statewide law capping increases will force my hand. The exact wording of this proposed law can cause all sorts of reactions. For example:
- If the law caps increases at 10%, I will simply raise rent by 10% every year.
- Rent on my property currently includes lawn maintenance. If such a law passes, it no longer will. That cost is the same as a 4% increase in rent.
- If it’s too onerous, I will simply sell the property and take the equity out in profit, as many others will. My rental property has increased in value by more than 32% since I bought it. Now there will be no rentals at any price.
Nice job, commies.
Military
Two fronts?
With this news today, I would also predict that if and when Russia does invade the Ukraine, an invasion of Taiwan by China will happen at the same time. Whenever the US has a weak President, you can count on the leaders of the world to get frisky.
This claim that Taiwan may have a working nuclear warhead that is an enhanced radiation weapon with few blast effects, but would be perfect for tactical use is intriguing.
Firearms
Staples
I recently became aware of a Supreme Court case from 1994, Staples v. United States. This case involved a man who had been arrested for having an AR-15 with more than a few components of an M-16 fire control group installed inside of it including the selector, hammer, disconnector, and trigger.
Suspecting that the AR-15 had been modified to be capable of fully automatic fire, BATF agents seized the weapon. The defendant was indicted for unlawful possession of an unregistered machinegun in violation of the NFA.
At trial, BATF agents testified that when the AR-15 was tested, it fired more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger. It was undisputed that the weapon was not registered as required by the NFA. The defendant testified that the rifle had never fired automatically when it was in his possession. He insisted that the AR-15 had operated only semiautomatically, and even then often requiring manual ejection of the spent casing and chambering of the next round. According to the defendant, his alleged ignorance of any automatic firing capability should have shielded him from criminal liability for his failure to register the weapon.
The trial court disagreed, and the man was convicted and sentenced to five years’ probation and a $5,000 fine. He appealed the conviction, and the appeals court agreed with the trial court, affirming his conviction. It was appealed and wound up at the SCOTUS level. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion, and let me tell you, there are some great quotes in that opinion.
The opnion says that the language of the statute provides little in the way of guidance in this case. The NFA is silent concerning the mens rea (intent) required for a violation. It states simply that “[i]t shall be unlawful for any person . . . to receive or possess a firearm which is not registered to him in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.”
Nevertheless, silence on this point by itself does not necessarily suggest that Congress intended to dispense with a conventional mens rea element, which would require that the defendant know the facts that make his conduct illegal.
Staples v. United States, 1984
The Government argued in that case that Congress intended the NFA to regulate and restrict the circulation of dangerous weapons. Consequently, in the ATF’s view, this case fits in a line of precedent termed “public welfare” or “regulatory” offenses, in which SCOTUS understood that Congress sought to impose a form of strict criminal liability through statutes that do not require the defendant to know his conduct was illegal.
One money quote that I saw was this one:
The Government does not dispute the contention that virtually any semiautomatic weapon may be converted, either by internal modification or, in some cases, simply by wear and tear, into a machinegun within the meaning of the Act.
Give the case a read, and see what you can find.
Military
Saber Rattling
The Russians are trying to scare President Potato into backing down on the Ukraine. The deployment of Russian boomers, the threat of IR missiles, the talk about nukes. This is the essence of saber rattling. They know Biden is a pussy, and they plan on pushing him down and stealing his lunch money.
The problem with this tactic is that Biden is an idiot, and you don’t even know if he is the one actually running things.
COVID
Follow the Science
Twittter says that people who claim that vaccinated individuals can spread the virus can be penalized for spreading misinformation:
When tweets include misleading information about Covid-19, we may place a label on those tweets that includes corrective information about that claim. We may apply labels to tweets that contain, for example… false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people.
I wonder if that applies to the CDC?
If you’ve been fully vaccinated:
You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.
To reduce the risk of being infected with the Delta variant and possibly spreading it to others, wear a mask indoors in public
Police State
Secret Police
Marsalee (Marsy) Ann Nicholas was stalked and killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1983. Only one week after her murder and on the way home from the funeral service, Marsy’s family was confronted by her daughter’s murderer. Having received no notification from the judicial system, the family had no idea he had been released on bail mere days after Marsy’s murder. Marsy’s family was not informed because the courts and law enforcement had no obligation to keep them informed.
As a result, voters in seventeen states have passed Marsy’s law, with Florida voters passing its version of the law in 2018. The law was sold as a victims’ rights bill, but it wasn’t long before the law of unintended consequences showed itself.
Since police who use force against someone are only doing so because they claim themselves to be victims of a crime, they can refuse to allow their names to be released. A cop can claim that someone threatened them, use force against that person, and then demand that their names be withheld because they are a victim.
That is exactly what happened here when a police officer shot and killed a man on the campus of a Melbourne college. The odd part here is that the same law doesn’t appear to apply when a private citizen does the exact same thing.
When the voters of this state voted on the amendment, it was intended to give victims of crimes a bit of privacy. It wasn’t intended to give police a means of becoming secret death squads with no public accountability.