That the hospitals will all be run by the government in the future?
Neuroscientist Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness
“Do your neighbors believe in a God a little too much? We have a cure for that.” – Government
Oh sure, it’d be nice to put an end to radical Islamists. But those who don’t like abortion or same-sex marriage are so much easier to round up.
This is an arrestable offense.
In our “zero tolerance” public schools.
CNN would be all on this in a heartbeat. Getting the facts wrong, of course.
Puns in the comments, if you like.
You have graduated successfully from the “How Many Dead Hookers Can I Have in my Trunk if my Taillights Work and Tags Are Current” school of law. –Bill Weise
Should California enact one or more of the parade of horribles, then as we wait for the inevitable Constitutional court challenges to take their course, we California gun owners will join our New York brethren as fellow graduates of the above school.
It’s not fun living in a police state, but I suppose the sense of danger merely in pulling out of your driveway every day and trying to avoid being stopped by a cop can be invigorating.
Here is an earworm for you, along with another addiction that is happening right now.
Updated:
With a word from Sir Jackie Stewart
Some quick notes below, but you really want to watch this. It’s 24 minutes that will expand how you think about our future as a country.
Some highlights, but by no means all of them:
The history of civilizational advances is one of transitions in code that transform our economy: hieroglyphics, to alphabet, to ones and zeros, and now to ATCG — that is, DNA, which is code. An orange, for example, is simply executable DNA code — one combo of ATCG creates roots; another creates orange blossoms; another grows the fruit.
Because life is DNA, and DNA is code, that means life itself can be copied and edited, just as we copy and edit symbols, letters and computer code.
Cloning is the tip of the iceberg: not only has one species been transformed in the lab into an entirely different species, but cells are currently replacing brick-and-mortar factories. The crude form is the existing use of cloned animals genetically modified to produce, say, cancer drugs in cows’ milk. That’s crude.
3-D printing? That’s slow. What’s happening now is the development of live cells as engines to produce anything. Just modify the code. Gasoline, plastic, medicine, food, etc. — it’s going on now, it’s transformed the revenue base of companies like DuPont and GE — yes, General Electric — to biotech, and Enriquez believes it will be the source of most of the economic growth of the US (and the world) going forward.
Also, this software makes its own hardware: “no matter how I program a computer,” he says, he won’t end up with 1000 more computers in the morning. Not so with cells.
The implications are staggering if you haven’t really thought about them before. Here’s one that just occurred to me: if factories of the future will produce massive cell growth through photosynthesis or other processes that involve sunlight, vast swaths of California’s barren deserts are going to become very valuable property, not to mention much of the rest of the Southwest.
*Yes, he’s bitching about the importance of Federal funding of basic scientific research — his point is that the government funds basic (i.e., pure) research very well; where such funding turns to how to apply that pure research, the government does not do that well at all, and applied research must be the province of entrepreneurial private enterprise, where government gets out of the way. Okay, I can accept that idea.
Since other gunbloggers are noting blogiversaries, I’ll observe that it’s been exactly 7 years, 7 months since the proprietor, a real-life Henry Bowman in several respects, introduced me to blogging and graciously allowed me to make my first post hereabouts (and no, I’m not going to link to it) despite my comparatively minuscule firearms knowledge and general inexperience.
Many, many, thanks, Phil!
Incidentally, I always wondered why one would choose a VFG over an AFG. Thanks to Phil’s example below, it’s now all clear to me.
One may click to embiggen. 😉
I have never understood those gun owners who dislike casting firearms civil rights in the light of other civil rights issues, say, abortion.
Sure it’s an inflammatory approach, but the time for gun owners to shut up and stay in the closet is long past.
Thankfully, Alan Gura (he’s the guy with hair to my right) has no problem pointing out that the reasoning in the 9th Circuit’s decision last week striking down an unconstitutional abortion law just happens to also support the court striking down California’s unconstitutional discretionary “may-issue” CCW/LTC licensing scheme.
Read it and enjoy. 28jisaacson
So, leftist judges’ legal logic on a politically-favored topic, abortion rights, binds them like a tar baby into a similar result* for an unfavored topic, firearms civil rights.
Can you say “Unintended Consequences?” I knew you could!
*if they’re intellectually honest in their ruling, of course. We’ll see.
…in free states, that is. Witness this California expatriate:
I was able to move out of southren california to washington state in a suprising 2 week’s, it is easier then you might think, everything went smooth. As soon as you hit portland/Seattle area it becomes a lot like California. Not a culture shock at all. Make the move guys.
It kind of takes the fun out of gun ownership, part of the fun was sneaking around cali laws and explaining to people how i had a cool gun.
I dunno, why would I want to move to a free state if that made gun ownership less fun? (scratches head)
Lots of California gun owners are panicking at the freight train of unconstitutional legislation coming our way.
Yes, we’re fighting, and fighting hard. Already some of the bills have, I understand, been blocked until next session due to a flood of calls and letters. Not all of them, though.
I’m sanguine, though: It’s not really a freight train, folks, it’s a Constitutional briar patch, and we’re Bre’r Rabbit.
The more infringing the law, the better the court ruling overturning it and setting legal precedent. “Please, Br’er Fox….”
Counter to MadRock’s QOTD below: maybe the grass in California will end up being pretty green after all.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.
-Learned Hand
The Democrats and the Obama Administration want to punch a gift horse in the mouth.
By Michael Hill’s estimation, 90 percent of the people pumping gas at his station just south of the U.S.-Canada border in Washington state are Canadians.
Gas north of the 49th parallel, he said, is about $1.30 per gallon more expensive than in the United States. But that’s not the only product that Canadians seek in visits to Washington state: Beer, wine and milk are significantly cheaper (beer and wine alone are roughly half the price in the U.S.).
Add a strong Canadian dollar and the result is a key element of the economy in the towns of Whatcom County. For example, the town of Blaine, population just shy of 5,000, generates over $225,000 from a penny per gallon gas tax, which is about 30 percent of its street maintenance budget.
That’s why Hill and others are troubled by the notion of charging a fee to enter the U.S. by land. Last month, in its 2014 fiscal year budget proposal, the Department of Homeland Security requested permission to study a fee at the nation’s land border crossings.
“It’s a deterrent,” said Hill, whose station is fully stocked with wine and has a reader board that says “Thank you Canadians.”
“They should be doing anything they can to get them down here to buy more,” he added.
It’s like the government really does hate us.
