Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation to prohibit the manufacture and sale and transfer of common rifles and standard capacity magazines:
Feinsteins bill would graciously allow you to keep what you currently own… so long as you don’t move across state lines, probably. And when you die? The government gets your stuff because of course they do. And the police? They get to keep all the “assault weapons” they like.
BOHICA.
Just passed today in the House, H.R. 1446: “Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021.”
Currently, if you buy a gun from a firearms dealer you need to complete a background check. Normally that takes a matter of seconds… your criminal record, if any, is in government computers and shouldn’t take but a split second to pull up. Current law gives the government three days to complete the check, for reasons which are inexplicable; as previously stated, it should take less time than it takes to google “background check.” Back when i lived in Utah, you could go to a gun store or a gun show, find what you wanted, fork over your cash, fill out your paperwork, wait a minute while the dealer calls up the FBI and gets the go ahead… then you collect your new firearm and wander away, a happy citizen.
But H.R. 1446 turns that maximum of three day waiting period into a *minimum* twelve day waiting period. From the summary of the bill:
This bill revises background check requirements applicable to proposed firearm transfers from a federal firearms licensee (e.g., a licensed gun dealer) to an unlicensed person.
Specifically, it increases the amount of time, from 3 business days to a minimum of 10 business days, that a federal firearms licensee must wait to receive a completed background check prior to transferring a firearm to an unlicensed person. (This type of transaction is often referred to as a default proceed transaction.)
If a submitted background check remains incomplete after 10 business days, then the prospective purchaser may submit a petition for a final firearms eligibility determination. If an additional 10 days elapse without a final determination, then the federal firearms licensee may transfer the firearm to the prospective purchaser.
This will largely end gun shows in free states like Utah, since customers will know that they will not be walking out with the product they want. And even for gun stores, the chances are good that it will take a full month (20 business days is four weeks for Monday through Friday… not counting the innumerable Federal holidays) before the bureaucrats get around to giving the go-ahead. It is a safe bet that this process will be used to slow down the firearms business as much as possible… the system that works just fine now in a matter of seconds will very likely be throttled to make sure that it takes as long as governmentally possible. Doubtless the post-ten-day petitioning process will be a nightmare… un-navigable websites, or the requirement to physically fill out paperwork that you can’t actually physically get. I can see the petitioning process requiring the gun buyer to send a physical letter to some distant Federal facility to request the paperwork; it’ll take days for the postal system to get the letter there, it’ll take days for the letter to get processed through the doubtless grossly overloaded front office staffed by people who were suspended from the DMV for working too slowly, it’ll take days more for the postal system to send the buyer the paperwork. Once received, the paperwork will be an incomprehensible mass of gobbledygook, a crummy novella of plot holes and spelling errors. The buyer will spend days trying to fill it out, collecting required data from sources around the country. The post office will spend more days sending it where it needs to go, to face another set of DMV rejects… who will be specially trained to find the flaws in the paperwork, the trick questions that either mean the paperwork is sent back to the petitioner to do over again (after a suitable waiting period)… or just outright rejected. That second ten-day waiting period refers to the period *after* the petition has been received. And it’s clearly possible for the Feds to make sure that it takes a buyer *weeks* to get the petition sent in. Hell, the easiest thing in the world for them to do is simply not set up a petition process. If there’s no way for you to petition… you *can’t* petition.
The lying authoritarian anti-American scumbags who sponsored this bill claim that it will “strengthen” the background check process.” They say this without explaining why the current system is somehow insufficient. The bill now goes to the Senate where it may or may not pass. If it does pass, obviously China’s best buddy will sign the bill into law. At that point a 120 day clock will start ticking down until the law comes into effect. By that point the $1400 “stimulus” payments should have been received. I hope everyone takes that money and that 120 days to go out and buy as many guns as possible.
Alternatively: use your stimulus funds to procure the hardware needed to machine proper firearms or firearm components. Ten people working together would have $12,000 worth of machine tools. I suspect that’s quite sufficient to set up a workshop that will convert plain blocks of aluminum, steel or even titanium into AR-15 receivers.
Huh. Just… huh.
This design has appeared here before… once as a piece of art from Life magazine, and once as an issue of US Transport Projects. This was a very early, very preliminary notional concept for a passenger carrying supersonic aircraft; whether it would have technically worked is debatable, but almost assuredly it would have been a financial disaster. It would have consumed large quantities of fuel and dropped sizable rocket units to fly a small number of passengers a relatively limited distance at a relatively low supersonic speed. Still: everything has to start from somewhere.
It’s an act, alright. It’s essentially an attempt to cement a permanent Democrat coup d’etat by setting up the voting system for rampant fraud.
Kurzgesagt finally answers the age-old question: what happens if Midas turns the Earth to gold? There are three answers, and none of them are good.
Yes, Midas is mythology, based on magic. And magic, much as some people argue otherwise, doesn’t seem to exist, so hypotheticals based on magic are pointless. And yet… not. Thinking through magical scenarios by applying known physics can be a good way to teach physics… AND it makes for much better storytelling than just saying “and then magic happens” and not figuring out the ramifications.
To compare with QAnon:
A loosely organized network of Democrat voters, politicians and media personalities who spread left-wing conspiracy theories such as the Russia Hoax, Jussie Smollett hoax, Ukraine hoax, Covington Kids hoax, and Bret Kavanaugh hoax. Blue Anon adherents fervently believe that right-wing extremists are going to storm Capitol Hill any day now and “remove” lawmakers from office, hence the need for the deployment of thousands of National Guard stationed at the US Capitol.
I would include in the list of conspiracy theories that Blue Anon adherents tend to glom onto:
Behold the modern American institute of higher learning:
Short form: a young black actress was hired as an extra to play a younger version of a character portrayed by an older black actress. When she went in for her makeup, the makeup department was tasked with making sure the younger actress looked like a younger version of the older actress, so they matched the skin tone. This has been determined to be Problematic.
If you read the article *and* the comments, the answer is quite simple: HBO should not have hired this young actress, but instead another one who looked like the older actress, both structurally and skin tone, so no makeup change would have been required. Since skin tones can vary *wildly* from one person to another, this would have slashed the pool of potential hires drastically.
HBO, of course, has already started cranking out the grovelling apologies for using makeup to make an actress look like the character she was hired to portray. Hopefully they will learn from this lesson and never again apply makeup to an acting unit that changes their skin tone. Instead, they should do the only fair and honest thing: completely computer generated characters. When there is the slightest worry of woke outrage, replace all Actrons Of Outrage with an off-the-street hire in a mocap suit.
Behold your new Black Panther:
One of the numerous advantages of doing it this way is that actors will gradually cease to be recognizable by the public. Characters in movies might be based on scans of real people, but those people would be just random acting-talentless schmoes who sold their image rights. No longer will there be actrons demanding vast sums for the sequels, or shows getting their legs cut out from under them because one of the stars got MeTooed or arrested or died or some other nuisance. And characters, being computer generated, can be not only made to look however the movie/show makers want, they can have little slider bars in the setup screen to let the viewers select how the characters look. This is done commonly enough in video games, where you can select just about every conceivable feature for the character you portray; doing this with movies is just a matter of time. Imagine how much less the JJVerse Star Trek movies woulda sucked if you could adjust a littler slider that allowed you to set the “how different from actual Star Trek” appearance… not just the actors, but the ship designs, aliens, uniforms, etc. (a slider that allows you to select “how much does the plot and writing suck” would be nice too, but that’s probably a little further out)