No Gun Ban Will Work, Just Ask the French

New Zealand's bad idea.
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/435110-new-zealand-gun-ban-is-not-the-answer-to-stop-mass-shootings

Man Con Strikes Again

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-2-7-the-climate-scare-ever-more-shrill-ever-less-serious

Always a good read for us denialists.

This is a link to keep handy for pure entertainment when needed:

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018-10-11-manhattan-contrarian-quiz-climate-tipping-points-edition?rq=tipping%20points

There's No Racism In That Racism

What is racism? It's rare to see any frank discussion of the term or why it still holds so much power when it makes so little difference in the interactions we have with each other each day.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/without_elitist_racialism_there_is_little_racism.html

I think I get why it was useful to make any hint of racism the ultimate boogey man. I also think that time may have passed. I think we might all be better humans if we weren't reminded all the time how much worse things were than they are now. 

The Appeal of Simplicity

I know many Americans are chomping at the bit to turn our entire economy over to a bunch of coastal blue city hipsters and college professors, along with all our money and our personal freedom, because of a dubious moral panic over future weather, but I’d like to suggest a better idea. I call it the Red, White and Blue New Deal, and it’s a little different than the proposed Green New Deal that seems to benefit only virtue signaling limo libs, crony capitalists, and aspiring commissars. The Red, White and Blue New Deal would, instead, be directed at benefiting Normal Americans – you know, those people who built our country, feed it, fuel it and defend it. People like you and me. So, here it is. All of it:

Support your own damn self and leave me the hell alone.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/02/11/how-about-a-red-white-and-blue-new-deal-n2541116

That kind of simplicity has appeal. I have been pondering of late, as I listen to some other empty headed animal food trough wiper bemoaning inequality, is what percentage of the US population is not capable of making their own way in the world.

One group might be the ones with the 10-20% lowest IQ. One group might be addicts. One group might be injured/ill or genetic anomaly.  One group might be the mentally ill. In the ideal these folks would be cared for by their families or a charitable effort, but most of us now think that's too much of a burden to place on so few.

How many of us are a net economic loss (we produce less than we consume)? What percent of us are carried by the wealthy?

Fewer Guns Less Crime? Nope

But, as we can see, civilian guns in Austria, for instance, are six times more numerous what they are in the UK. But the homicide rate is lower in Austria. Similarly, there are twelve times more civilian guns in Switzerland than in the Netherlands. Yet both countries have about the same homicide rates.

Attempts at proving causality here then especially starts to go off the rails when we look at Russia. In Russia, there is a modest 12 guns per 100 people — which is about half the Swiss rate. And yet the country's homicide rate is 10.8 per 100,000.

https://mises.org/power-market/fewer-guns-less-crime-not-europe

The weird web we weave when we ask government to regulate health care

In a recent piece for the print magazine, I wrote that the Republican party, however ineptly and inadvertently, might have stumbled into a health-care policy that actually works. Obamacare still exists for all those who want it: The law’s subsidies ensure that the poor and middle class can buy insurance for a reasonable percentage of their incomes, and the exchanges have robust protections for people with preexisting conditions. The individual mandate is dead this year, so people who don’t want insurance don’t have to buy it. Through executive action, the Trump administration has broadened access to non-Obamacare-compliant forms of insurance that are far cheaper than anything available through the exchanges. And any state that doesn’t like the new arrangement is free to pass its own laws reinstating the old one.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/report-obamacare-changes-benefiting-consumers/

Paris Accord, Long on Promise

Three years after leaders from around the world signed on to the Paris climate agreement, pledging to cut their carbon footprints, global CO2 emissions accelerated. Does anyone still think President Donald Trump was wrong for pulling the U.S. out of this sham agreement? According to the Global Carbon Project, which monitors this, global CO2 emissions climbed by 1.6% last year. They are on track to shoot up by 2.7% this year. That's after three years of annual emissions remaining flat.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/co2-emissions-paris-agreement/