Virginia: Gun Crime Drops As Gun Sales Soar

By William Teach August 6, 2013 – 8:54 am

Well, who could have seen this coming

(Fox News) Amid calls nationwide for stricter gun control laws, Virginia is experiencing a unique trend: the state’s gun-related crime is declining but firearms sales are increasing.

Firearms sales rose 16 percent to a record 490,119 guns purchased from licensed gun dealers in 2012, according to sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

During the same period, major crimes committed with firearms dropped 5 percent to 4,378.

“This appears to be additional evidence that more guns don’t necessarily lead to more crime,” said Thomas R. Baker, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who specializes in research methods and criminology theory.

“It’s a quite interesting trend given the current rhetoric about strengthening gun laws and the presumed effect it would have on violent crimes,” Baker told the newspaper. “While you can’t conclude from this that tougher laws wouldn’t reduce crime even more, it really makes you question if making it harder for law-abiding people to buy a gun would have any effect on crime.”

Correct, we can’t necessarily conclude that the drop in violent crime is directly linked the large increase in gun sales, but we can sure infer it.

The original article is from the Richmond Times Dispatch, which notes

But Josh Horwitz, the leader of a national gun-control group, does not find the comparison of gun crime to legal gun sales particularly significant, and views any perceived correlation between the two sets of data as essentially meaningless.

“Guns sold incident to a background check are less likely to be involved in crimes than guns sold without a background check,” said Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “So the real question — which I don’t think we really know — is what’s the level of gun sales without a background check?

Horowitz inadvertently makes a great point: if government wants to go after guns, then it should go after criminals with guns, not curtail the 2nd Amendment rights of law abiding citizens, which is what Obama, Bloomberg, Horowitz, his group, and all these other liberal groups are pushing. The vast majority of guns are sold legally and with a background check amongst law abiding citizens. Criminals do not bother.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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Sony BDPS 5100 Sorta Review

By William Teach August 5, 2013 – 4:03 pm

As you might remember from about 2 weeks ago I mentioned that my Blu-ray player had died, so I got a new one. Well, because Gumball did this…

nag

..I decided to get to check out some others. Well, really, there were a few features I really wanted, such as volume on the remote. I ended up going with the Sony BDPS 5100, obtained at Walmart for $118. It’s not that I didn’t like the Philips, I still think it is an awesome value. I just wanted more. Plus, I was concerned with some of the reviews about 3D.

The Sony remote allows for volume control, as well as turning TV off and on. Also, supposedly will allow to change TV input source, but that never works with my Olevia by Syntax TV.

The 3D gets awesome reviews. The picture and sound quality are excellent. The way Sony has formatted the design keeps dust and dirt and spiders out of the optical drive. It’s Energy Star compliant. And it has multiple, and easy to find, buttons, though they’re still on top. DVDs load fast.

Another great feature is Sideview, an app that can be used to control the player, and other compliant Sony devices, from Droid devices. Up to a point. I’d like to see a bit more functionality, such as not just being able to start Pandora, but scroll through and pick the channel from the Droid.

The player also has an enormous amount of apps. Movies, music, weather, news, games … lots. I’ve watch many movies via Crackle. First time I’ve seen Stripes uncut and in R rated version in at least 20 years. Candy Stripers (horror) was bad. Godzilla 2000 was worse.

I cranked up some metal with Slacker. Used some YouTube. Test with VuDu was fast, no lag, even for HD. There are enough apps to make even an entitled liberal like John happy 🙂

You can also cruise the ‘net with it, though I probably never will.

Then there’s DLNA. With DNLA I’m able to browse movies, photos, and music on my Droids and laptop. I can also send same to the player. Took a big to figure it out, but, got it working. No true mirroring, but, oh well, I’d barely use it. It’s a nice feature, though, especially if you want peruse those really big vacation photos on a big screen.

Lots more, overall I’ll give it 4.5 out of 5.

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If All You See…

By William Teach August 5, 2013 – 1:00 pm

…is an world turned to drought, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Gay Patriot, who wonders why homicide laws are different for men and women

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What Say To A $300k Burger To Save Us From Bad Weather?

By William Teach August 5, 2013 – 12:42 pm

This sounds much like many of the Warmist prescriptions

(WRAL) For hamburgers that cost more than $300,000 to produce, you might expect fries and a shake too.

But this is no ordinary burger being served to two volunteer taste-testers in London on Monday. This meat was grown in a laboratory from stem cells of cattle.

Just to be clear, the did not use embryonic stem cells, which tend to be monumental failures

Mark Post, whose team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands developed the burger after five years of research, hopes that making meat in labs could eventually help solve the food crisis and fight climate change.

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Warmist: Hey, Maybe We Need The Same Type Of Sacrifice To Stop Bad Weather The Incas Used

By William Teach August 5, 2013 – 8:00 am

Funny thing is, the downfall of the Incas occurred around the same time the Little Ice Age got going

(Guardian) Although their empire existed for a scant 100 years before being cut short in 1533 by the arrival of the Spaniards, the Incas managed to create 26,000 miles of roads, ruled an empire of 10 million people and imposed their language and culture from one end of the Andes to the other. In a very real sense, the Incas were the “Romans” of the New World and, like the Romans, they were excellent administrators and empire builders. Like the Romans, however, they borrowed many aspects of their culture – from metallurgy and warfare and architecture to agriculture and animal husbandry and astronomy – from other, previous cultures.

Like the Romans, their empire died out as the climate turned cooler

In response to such natural phenomena, the Incas resorted to religion. In the Inca world, lightning, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, rain, weather and fertility were controlled by a panoply of gods. To survive in an unpredictable world, the Incas sought to form reciprocal relationships with their gods, just as they formed reciprocal relationships with one another, or with other tribes.

They performed quite a bit of human sacrifice of Other People in their religion

The Incas did their best to fathom what, at the time, was unfathomable – the violent, unpredictable catastrophes of nature which, in some cases, had ended cultures that preceded them. To their credit, the Incas did their best to ensure the survival of their people and empire by paying close attention to nature and doing their best to use every means at their disposal, including human sacrifice, to gain control over it.

Nowadays Warmist want Everyone Else to sacrifice, and, yeah, many of them want Other People, especially minorities in 3rd World nations to stop having kids.

The irony is that, more than 500 years after the Spaniards put an end to perhaps the most spectacular empire in the New World, not only are Andean and worldwide glaciers shrinking at unprecedented rates as the Earth heats up, altering and damaging native ecosystems, but the new cultures that have replaced the Incas seem apathetic, at best, in making any kind of sacrifice in order to gain control over a potentially self-created environmental disaster.

Wait, is writer Kerry MacQuarrie proposing human sacrifice to the Gods Of Gore in order to stop Bad Weather? Would anyone be surprised?

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Municipalities Look To Get Their Unionized Employees Of Cadillac Plans And Into Obamacare

By William Teach August 5, 2013 – 7:13 am

Remember the days when Obamacare was meant to be a way for the 30-45 million Americans with no health insurance to obtain health insurance? Good times, good times

(NY Times) Cities and towns across the country are pushing municipal unions to accept cheaper health benefits in anticipation of a component of the Affordable Care Act that will tax expensive plans starting in 2018.

The so-called Cadillac tax was inserted into the Affordable Care Act at the advice of economists who argued that expensive health insurance with the employee bearing little cost made people insensitive to the cost of care. In public employment, though, where benefits are arrived at through bargaining with powerful unions, switching to cheaper plans will not be easy.

I had to check to make sure I was actually on the NY Times website, where writer Kate Taylor best watch her back for highlighting that public unions have a dangerous, expensive, and incestuous relationship with Democrat politicians and appointees which provides more and more largess at the expense of the taxpayer. In the above case, it leads to what are considered Cadillac health insurance plans, which were supposedly only obtained by those Evil Rich People like Mitt Romney.

Cities including New York and Boston, and school districts from Westchester County, N.Y., to Orange County, Calif., are warning unions that if they cannot figure out how to rein in health care costs now, the price when the tax goes into effect will be steep, threatening raises and even jobs.

Well, that’s interesting: heavily Democrat/Liberal areas seem to be having a bit of a problem with promising too darned much to public unions.

Under the tax, plans that cost above a certain threshold in 2018 — $10,200 annually for individual plans and $27,500 for family plans, with slightly higher cutoffs for retirees and those in high-risk professions like law enforcement — will be taxed at 40 percent of their costs in excess of the limit. (The thresholds will rise with inflation after 2018.)

Those thresholds aren’t really that high. Quite often the health insurance offered by many companies can cost the company $8K-$12K per year per employee on average, which was why so many were switching to Health Savings Accounts, involving employees in sharing more of the cost, which would typically cost the employee $500-$1000 more per year, if they use the insurance.

Ninety-five percent of (NYC) city employees and 93 percent of retirees are in the two largest plans, which require employees to pay nothing toward their premiums. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, the average contribution by public employees throughout the country is 12 percent for individual plans and 23 percent for family plans.

Maybe the definition of “Cadillac Plans” should be changed to note how much employees pay into a plan and what it offers. NYC, Boston, and many others are expected to see their plans hit the Cadillac threshold by 2018, and so far the unions are unwilling to make any accommodations, meaning either more costs will be passed on to the union employees (yeah, right) or to the taxpayer (most likely).

One thing that may happen is to push all employees, or at least new employees, into the Exchanges, meaning more and more people will be paying to subsidize public sector unions.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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A “Climate Change Denier” Confesses Or Something

By William Teach August 4, 2013 – 3:42 pm

I was highly amused by the piece by a supposed “denier”, because we all call ourselves that (sic). And then there’s the reality that the article is on the very far left TruthOut. And, really, how many on the left are already believers in Hotcoldwetdry, and have always been? Much like warming over the past 15+ years, the number would be statistically insignificant

I suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of Hoboken, N.J., in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change really made sense. And it wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial. (Snip)

Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this story: The crisis is gargantuan, and it’s getting worse. Ultimately only a fundamental social, political, economic and personal transformation is going to get us out of this mess.

Does this hardcore progressive writing make you think that the writer, Yotam Maron, used to not be a Believer in AGW? Reading further, it seems that he was more of a “eh, this isn’t my issue” rather than a non-believer. But, now he is, and wants Everyone Else to believe and to kill Keystone, stop using fossil fuels, etc.

Progressives love lying about who they are. Marin was big into the Occupy movement. A big community organizer. All sorta of lefty stuff.

Read: A “Climate Change Denier” Confesses Or Something »

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If All You See…

By William Teach August 4, 2013 – 1:00 pm

…is a wonderful train that everyone (else) should be forced to ride instead of fossil fueled vehicles, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Cold Fury, which wonders what happens when you scratch a liberal.

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Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

By William Teach August 4, 2013 – 9:38 am

Happy Sunday! Another gorgeous day in the once and future nation of the USA. This pinup is by Fiona Stephenson with a wee bit of help.

What is happening in Ye Olde Blogosphere? The Fine 15

  1. White House Dossier wonders if President Obama could take a few minutes out from his multi-day birthday celebration
  2. Wake Up America features a horrid racial beating
  3. Traction Control features another phony scandal
  4. Doug Powers points out who the femenists left out
  5. The People’s Cube covers Seattle becoming non-offensive
  6. The Other McCain wonders what Lindsay Graham will do
  7. The Lonely Conservative has Ted Cruz explaining how to defund Obamacare
  8. The Jawa Report has fun facts about Islamic Jihadis
  9. The Daley Gator features a typical leftist race-carding buffoon
  10. Why not listen to Sister Toldjah on the radio discussing NC politics getting hammered?
  11. Raised On Hoecakes covers heavily weaponized cops taking on a dangerous criminal
  12. protein wisdom has the gun control playbook
  13. Patterico features a damning puff piece on Huma
  14. Maggie’s Notebook has info on the Nidal Hassan trial
  15. And last, but not least, House of Eratosthenes wonders if Warmists are idiots or criminals

As always, the full set of pinups can be seen in the Patriotic Pinup category, or over at my Gallery page. While we are on pinups, since it is that time of year, have you gotten your “Pinups for Vets” calendar yet? And don’t forget to check outwhat I declare to be our War on Women Rule 5 and linky luv posts

Anyone else have a link or hotty-fest going on? Let me know so I can add you to the list. (BTW, since someone asked, the reason I leave links for the previous week up (or you might see a *) is because they are place holders for later in the day or for next weeks. Easier than rewriting all the time. Also, the listing order has to do with how they are added over time, not how good a post is. I just copy and paste from the previous week, then edit. If you see one of the *’s, go ahead and check out the blog anyhow, see if there is an update. I cannot update with my Android during the day.

The posts do take a long time, so, if you want to send me your links for Rule 5 babeage or links, use ye olde email in the header bar (remove the NOSPAM part). Preferably, create the html link so I can copy and paste how you want it to read.

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Surprise! $500 Million In “Green” Training Money Wasted

By William Teach August 4, 2013 – 8:44 am

I know, you’re pretty darned surprised. Who would have thought that so much money would be wasted on “green” projects by the Obama/Democrat Stimulus plan?

(Fox News) A federal audit shows that nearly a half-billion dollars in government funds was spent on training workers for so-called “green jobs.” The only problem is that not enough positions in the growing industry exist.

The findings — released in a June report by the Government Accountability Office — showed that only 55 percent of those trained were able to place in a new job, many of which were not technically green jobs. The $501 million in funding came from the 2009 stimulus law. The report also uncovered that the Department of Labor created a framework that led grantees to broadly interpret the program’s definition to include any job “that could be linked, directly or indirectly, to a beneficial outcome” which led to the gap between training programs and available green industry jobs.

Essentially, they were throwing money out into the wilds of private enterprise without any real knowledge of the marketplace, products, consumer interest, you know, basic economic and corporate decisions that all these folks in Government, who’ve mostly or solely spent their working lives in other than the private sector, have no idea about, except as academic notions.

“Basically, this is what can happen when you fund large programs amid much uncertainty and when there’s too little data available,” Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told FoxNews.com.

And a president who’s virtually never worked a day in the private sector in his life, who hires people who’ve mostly spent their lives in academia and government.

“The GAO report is just more evidence that the administration has no clue what drives a successful economy and job growth,” said Paul Chesser, an associate fellow at the National Legal and Policy Center. “President Obama tried to build this economic sector, but the buyers didn’t come. And now after the initial flurry, the ‘green jobs’ are evaporating.”

By “evaporating”, I assume he means “really never appeared, but Obama campaign contributors got some nice money out of it”.

Speaking of job, James Pethokoukis wonders where the 5% unemployment rate that the Stimulus promised by July 2013 is

Of course, we now know conclusively that this prediction — based as it was on the pixiedust magic of Keynesian fiscal multipliers — was a total failure, one even beyond what the July job numbers suggest.

Much like Obama’s reliance on “green” jobs training for jobs that didn’t exist, but were supposed to magically appear just because some people were trained.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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