REI And Mountain Equipment Co-op Virtue Signal Over “Assault Rifles”

By William Teach March 3, 2018 – 7:20 am

The NY Times’ Julie Creswell has provided the names of two more companies which have decided to play politics

Anti-Gun Movement Is Infecting an Outdoor Brand’s Other Products

The national debate over gun control is now sweeping up bike helmets and water bottles.

REI and Mountain Equipment Co-op, two outdoor retail chains that are also customer cooperatives, said Thursday they were suspending orders for popular items like Bell bicycle helmets and CamelBak water bottles from the company that owns the brands, Vista Outdoor, because Vista also makes assault-style rifles.

Vista actually makes a wide variety of products, which includes scary looking rifles and non-scary looking rifles. But, hey, they want to virtue signal, which, they are allowed to do in a free market

Huh.

The wave of responses started with a number of companies cutting tieslate last week to the National Rifle Association, and gained momentum when Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart and Kroger announced changes to their gun policies, including halting the sale of firearms to customers under the age of 21. Late Thursday, L.L. Bean joined its retail counterparts, also announcing a minimum age of 21 to purchase weapons or ammunition in its flagship store in Freeport, Me., the only one where it sells firearms.

A lot of this is disingenuous, as many were barely selling “assault rifles” in the first place. I really don’t have a problem with them changing the age to 21.

But, it’s cool about denying cakes and flowers now, right?

On social media, some argued that boycotting brands like CamelBak and Giro would only hurt people making quality products. Others chided REI for what they saw as mixing business with politics.

Liberal gun grabbers (and they do want to ban guns big time) never really consider that they’re actually hurting real people with their bans. And it can often end poorly for the companies. Look at Delta, which virtue signaled while ending the discount for NRA members. They’d only given out 13 discounts in total. But they tried saying they support the 2nd Amendment, their CEO tweeted out, Georgia pulled their tax breaks (which, hilariously, Democrats started defending the tax break, calling pulling it unconstitutional), and Delta is losing lots of customers who’ll simply fly other carriers.

Read: REI And Mountain Equipment Co-op Virtue Signal Over “Assault Rifles” »

Posted in 2nd Amendment, Barking Moonbats | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Humans Will Go Extinct If We Don’t Fix ‘Climate Change’ (scam) By 2023 Or Something

By William Teach March 2, 2018 – 6:00 pm

I should put this one into ye olde calendar for 2023 to see how it’s gone

Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate Change by 2023

A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.

In a recent speech at the University of Chicago, James Anderson — a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University — warned that climate change is drastically pushing Earth back to the Eocene Epoch from 33 million BCE, when there was no ice on either pole. Anderson says current pollution levels have already catastrophically depleted atmospheric ozone levels, which absorb 98 percent of ultraviolet rays, to levels not seen in 12 million years. (snip)

While some governments have made commitments to reduce carbon emissions (Germany has pledged to cut 95 percent of carbon emissions by 2050), Anderson warned that those measures were insufficient to stop the extinction of humanity by way of a rapidly changing climate. Instead, Anderson is calling for a Marshall Plan-style endeavor in which all of the world takes extreme measures to transition off of fossil fuels completely within the next five years.

Of course, he doesn’t actually say when humans will become extinct. Just that it’s going to happen, so, Other People have to pay taxes and stop using fossil fuels.

“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.

And there’s another prognostication to track.

Read: Humans Will Go Extinct If We Don’t Fix ‘Climate Change’ (scam) By 2023 Or Something »

Posted in AGW Scaremongering, Global Warming | 9 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach March 2, 2018 – 1:00 pm

…is a sea that will soon rise up and swamp the mountains, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Daley Gator, with a post on racist Chuck Schumer.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Professor Discredits Paper Saying Exxon Knew About Hotcoldwetdry Danger, Misled Public

By William Teach March 2, 2018 – 10:50 am

And the professor was willing to do this in court

(Forbes) Harvard professors who claim their analysis proves ExxonMobil misled the public about climate change were obviously biased, a colleague says, and the company says their data shouldn’t be used to help a “corrupt enterprise” of private lawyers and California officials suing the energy sector.

In papers filed by the company March 1 in a Texas state court, Cleveland State University communications professor Kimberly Neuendorf discredited a 2017 study that accuses Exxon of misleading the public about climate change in its statements from 1977-2014. In fact, its authors had already made up their minds about the issue years earlier, with one of them even announcing it on Twitter in 2015.

“Content analysis coding ought to be conducted with coders who are at arm’s-length with regard to the research, in order to maximize objectivity,” Neuendorf wrote. “Optimally, coders should be blind to the research questions or goals.

“In the S&O study, the coders were not blind. In fact, they were as non-blind as could be imagined. They were the investigators themselves, as well as an affiliated graduate student. In this particular case, the problematic nature of informed coders is magnified by the coders’ longtime and intensive involvement in the popular communication of climate change.”

Authors Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes claimed to have found “a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil’s scientists and executives discussed about climate change privately and in academic circles and what it presented to the general public,” but Neuendorf takes issue with those results.

“I have concluded that S&O’s content analysis does not support the study’s conclusion because of a variety of fundamental errors in their analysis,” Neuendorf wrote. “S&O’s content analysis lacks reliability, validity, objectivity, generalizability and replicability.

Basically, it comes down to the notion that the scientists had a biased, political viewpoint, and generated a paper designed to reinforce that viewpoint. And they, and all the Warmists assaulting Exxon and the other fossil fuels companies, including government officials, probably thought that Exxon would roll over and comply. Instead, Exxon, which keeps really good, highly educated lawyers on staff, is fighting back against the unhinged Cult of Climastrology. This court filing by Neuendorf (who will surely be assaulted by the CoC as a “denier”, hounded by the CoC, and the CoC will attempt to have Neuendorf terminated) identified 7 fundamental flaws in the original study, which is not unusual with Warmist papers.

Read: Professor Discredits Paper Saying Exxon Knew About Hotcoldwetdry Danger, Misled Public »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 3 Comments | Trackback URL

Friday Funny: Dreamers Who Walked 250 Miles In Protest Arrested In D.C.

By William Teach March 2, 2018 – 7:04 am

Did you hear about this little demonstration by illegals?

(Global Citizen) Eleven undocumented youths arrived in Washington DC today after trekking for more than 250 miles from New York to protest US President Trump’s elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act and the government’s ongoing inaction around its renewal.

The march is called #WalkToStayHome.

“I feel like my parents and people around the country who are undocumented have sacrificed so much,” Li Adorno, one of the Dreamers said at the start of the march, according to Democracy Now.

“And like to this day, they’re criminalized every night in the evening news, right? And we feel like that’s not fair,” she said. “We’re asking for dignity and respect for everyone, right? Not just the DREAMers, because right now we’re getting a lot of attention.

So, wait, they’re calling for the people who “sinned”, ie, their parents, in bringing them to the country to be given legal status, too? Why are illegal aliens demanding anything? They should be pleading, begging, asking nicely, for lawful legal status.

But, do you know what happened?

(USA Today) Four young immigrants were handcuffed and arrested Thursday afternoon while protesting on the streets of Washington, D.C., capping off a 250-march from New York City to the nation’s capital.

Osvaldo Rodriguez, 26, of Red Bank, N.J., blocked an intersection near the U.S. Capitol holding a sign that read, “Build bridges, not walls,” chanting that he was “undocumented and unafraid” before his arrest Thursday afternoon. Aldo Solano, Maria Duarte and Cinthia Garcia Benítez also were arrested, but they were released after paying a ticket.

I’ve read that the number arrested was 6 or 7, but, let’s go with four. Unlike the accompanying picture with the article, they were blocking the entire intersection in front of the Capitol building, and it’s not like a lot of traffic doesn’t go by there during the afternoon.

They were supposedly yelling (video at the link)

“They’re sending us to deportation detention,” the person taking the video is heard saying as she films the incident. All the while, the illegal aliens area heard yelling, “Unafraid! Unafraid!”

They chant that they are “freedom fighters,” and they know how to fight.

And their protest lasted all of a couple minutes after their 250 mile march.

Their goal? To campaign for legislation that would not only offer DACA-eligible people a path to citizenship, but also reject the border wall, restrictions on family-based petitions and increased resources for Immigration and Customs enforcement.Congress has stalled on passing an immigration bill as Republicans pushed for a deal that would grant a pathway to citizenship to 1.8 million young immigrants without legal status in exchange for a border wall and President Trump’s other demands to crack down on illegal immigration.

Their goals are to give people who broken our laws a free pass, and set the conditions for even more illegal aliens to pour into the nation.

ICE should take possession of these illegals and deport them. They have no right to be in the nation, they’re hear in contradiction of federal law, and they damned well should not be demanding anything nor telling us how to go about giving them legal status.

Read: Friday Funny: Dreamers Who Walked 250 Miles In Protest Arrested In D.C. »

Posted in Humor, Illegal Immigration | 23 Comments | Trackback URL

Surprise: Democrats Look To Kill Their Own Background Checks Bill

By William Teach March 2, 2018 – 6:48 am

This is a fine pickle, I tell you

Why Senate Democrats are considering holding up a gun-control bill from one of their own

Here’s how politically tricky the gun-control debate has become: A Republican-controlled Congress might soon vote on a bill to strengthen gun-control laws in the wake of the Florida shooting, and it’s the Democrats who aren’t happy about it.

Even though one of their own is co-sponsoring the Fix NICS Act, which would punish federal agencies that don’t submit criminal records to the national criminal background check system for firearms, Senate Democrats have spent their first few days back in Congress this week dissing the bill.

“What will prevent future tragedy? Comprehensive background checks will. The Fix NICS bill will not,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “Let’s not set our sights too narrow or squander this moment.

It’s not that Democrats don’t want to patch up what both sides say are obvious holes in the background-check system; it’s that they think this is a small step to reinforce an existing law rather than expand it. And if they support it, that might be the end of gun control reforms in this Congress, since Republicans will be reluctant to act on much else.

As Ed Morrissey writes on why they’re doing this

Because it might pass – and this tells you everything you need to know about Washington DC. When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) first proposed the Fix-NICS act last November, he had four members of each party as sponsors, calling it “the most important piece of bipartisan guns legislation since Manchin-Toomey.” The bill would plug the gaps in reporting by federal agencies to the background-check system, failings that contributed to the fatal church shooting that month in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

This is a bill that would easily pass the House and the Senate, if the Democrats actually wanted to solve one of the main issues on guns, namely that people who should be on the list of “nope, do not allow” never get put on the list. As we saw with the Parkland school shooting, there were tons of warning signs which should have seen Cruz put on the deny list. Also, with several other mass shootings.

This leaves Democrats toying with opposing the one gun-control bill that has a realistic shot of passing Congress right now, one championed by their most vocal gun-control advocate, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). It’s a weird look, for sure.

Murphy doesn’t want his own bill brought up for a vote without a guarantee from Republicans to allow votes on other Democratic priorities, like universal background checks. “If we were only to debate the Fix NICS Act,” Murphy told reporters Tuesday, “we would be slamming the door in the face of all these kids who are demanding change.”

Good grief. What Republicans should do is bring the bill to the floor of the House, vote on it, see the majority, if not all of Republicans vote for it, and if Democrats do not want to vote for it, that’s on them. Then bring it to the Senate, and see if Democrats filibuster it.

What Democrats are saying is that they really do not want to actually fix problems, they want to dink and dunk their way to making it harder and harder for the law abiding citizens to obtain firearms, all the way up to bans.

Read: Surprise: Democrats Look To Kill Their Own Background Checks Bill »

Posted in 2nd Amendment, Current Affairs, Democrats | 31 Comments | Trackback URL

Surprise: Some Democrats Call For Banning All Semi-Automatic Weapons

By William Teach March 1, 2018 – 4:21 pm

The Leftist gun grabbers usually try and keep their full aspirations of banning all private ownership of firearms quiet, but, every once in a while they slip up

Asheville calls for assault weapons ban; mayor says she would go further

The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to tell state and federal leaders to ban assault weapons, saying in a resolution that “on average, nearly two dozen children are shot each day in the United States.” (big snip)

[Mayor Esther] Manheimer said she would like to go further than an assault weapons ban and cited a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll done last week of registered voters nationwide that showed 63 percent say semiautomatic weapons should be banned.

“But it is because of the NRA and its influence that politicians are not able to make a decision that otherwise represents a majority of the population,” she said.

Whoops! Letting the cat out of the bag. Here’s the resolution

New A – Gun Violence Prevention.pdf by Joel Burgess on Scribd

Perhaps the mayor should worry about why her police officers beat the hell out of a jay walker.

Read: Surprise: Some Democrats Call For Banning All Semi-Automatic Weapons »

Posted in 2nd Amendment, Democrats | 15 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach March 1, 2018 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrible fossil fueled machine causing clouds, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Just One Minute, with a post on the latest outrage.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 13 Comments | Trackback URL

Say, If California Is Against Fuels, Why Isn’t It Cutting Its Production?

By William Teach March 1, 2018 – 10:24 am

Despite all the greeny weenies yammering on about anthropogenic climate change, how fossil fuels are evil, and the government of the People’s Republik Of California (PRC) passing all sorts of Hotcoldwetdry laws, the people still use tons on fossil fuels. And

To Meet Climate Goals, California Should Cut Oil Production, Report Says

California built a reputation launching some of the most ambitious climate policies in the world, but it’s also a significant oil producer, with the third largest oil production of any state.

If it were to eliminate even half of that production, it could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 8 million to 24 million tons per year, the Stockholm Environment Institute says in a new report. That’s equalivalent to as much as 5 percent of the state’s overall emissions.

It’s a supply-side approach to cutting emissions, rather than targeting demand the way the state’s cap-and-trade or auto-efficiency rules do.

I think this is a fantastic idea. They need to walk the talk. Who cares if citizens are already complaining that the current carbon trading rules are increasing the cost of fuel, and that the above idea would drastically increase the cost: we have a planet to save from hundreds of a degree temperature rise! PRC has the second highest average gas price in the nation, right behind Hawaii.

The authors argue that attacking fossil fuel production at the wellhead is necessary if California—often called the world’s sixth-largest economy—is to help meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Studies have found that avoiding the worst risks of climate change means keeping most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves—including a third of the oil—in the ground.

“You could in theory do that by reducing demand for fossil fuels,” said Peter Erickson, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the report. “But it’s not happening fast enough, so that creates a need to limit the supply of fossil fuels.”

Why not go whole hog and ban the production of fossil fuels in the state completely? This includes drilling and refinement. Heck, the PRC should ban the importation of all fossil fuels to the state. Oh, and certainly the state and local governments should stop using them. We have a world to save!

Read: Say, If California Is Against Fuels, Why Isn’t It Cutting Its Production? »

Posted in Climahypocrites, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Trump: “Take The Guns First, Due Process 2nd”

By William Teach March 1, 2018 – 9:18 am

Should this be something that 2nd Amendment supporters, and civil rights supporters, be worried about?

(The Hill) President Trump on Wednesday voiced support for confiscating guns from certain individuals deemed to be dangerous, even if it violates due process rights.

“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

Trump was responding to comments from Vice President Pence that families and local law enforcement should have more tools to report potentially dangerous individuals with weapons.

“Allow due process so no one’s rights are trampled, but the ability to go to court, obtain an order and then collect not only the firearms but any weapons,” Pence said.

“Or, Mike, take the firearms first, and then go to court,” Trump responded.

Many of us noted that back during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s Trump seemed to be just fine with an assault weapons ban, lengthening the waiting periods, and lots more gun control, but then suddenly flipped in 2011, right at the time he started running for the GOP nomination for the 2012 election cycle. He’s talked the talk since, especially starting in 2016.

Is this just Trump spouting off? When he says provocative things on Twitter or during speeches, they seem more planned than off the cuff gaffes, designed to be provocative and get the Democrats and media all apoplectic. Does he mean this?

He’s also not enthused over including national concealed carry reciprocity with a gun control bill. I happen to agree. Do it separately.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are not planning to go big

Senate Republicans say President Trump’s comments Wednesday calling for more ambitious gun-control proposals won’t change the political calculus in their conference, which supports a limited response to the shooting at a Florida high school.

Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is leading the GOP response to gun violence in the upper chamber, told reporters after the meeting with Trump at the White House that he still favors a limited approach.

He wants to put a narrow bill on the floor that would give state and local officials more incentive to report relevant information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System known as NICS.

“For me the most obvious place to start is the Fix NICS [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] bill that has 46 cosponsors,” Cornyn said of the bill he’s co-sponsored with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.).

Start there. How about a requirement that all gun purchases and transfers, even private ones, have a background check done if one hadn’t been performed in the last 6 months? You can limit purchases to one per month. And increase penalties on people who use firearms for crimes. Let’s look at putting the focus on the criminals, not those who do not use them unlawfully.

Read: Trump: “Take The Guns First, Due Process 2nd” »

Posted in 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump | 8 Comments | Trackback URL
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