Grouse

If the election between Trump and Biden was held again today, who would still not vote for Trump?

The buck stops, er, uh, over there! That’s been Democrats’ mantra ever since they learned the mainstream media would help them blame Republicans. Joe Biden is as bad as any of his Democrat predecessors. “I’ll do my job and take responsibility,” he tweeted on June 4, 2020. “I won’t blame others.” Surprise, surprise — “he was lying,” says political analyst Robert Spencer, who came up with “a list of 10 of Biden’s scapegoats:” Spencer concludes that the only thing Biden “never does” is “admit failure.” He quips, “Maybe he refuses to take responsibility because there is so much failure to admit that he wouldn’t have any time left over for Matlock.”

Nah, some will just cower in the corner and beg for mercy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says Americans will likely see another year of "very uncomfortably high" inflation. Doesn't sound like she expects "Sleepy Joe" to be doing anything about it.

There hasn't been any decline in the demand for semi-auto hunting shotguns over the years though. The demand for them has gone way up. Proving it's not the semi-auto for hunting that has less demand, just the semi-auto rifle for hunting large game.

IMHO the demand for traditional wood stocked, blued steel semi-auto sporting rifles that are specifically designed for hunting, is low compared to the demand for modern sporting rifles (MSR's) designed for tactical purposes that can also be used for hunting. I also believe the manufacturers are getting far less profit for the hunting guns compared to the MSR's. The economies of scale are working when thousands or MSR's are rolling off the line, but not working when few of the hunting guns are. Younger shooters are familiar with the MSR but not the traditional semi-auto hunting rifle which they see as an antique style with many limitations for upgrades or magazine capacity. Personally, I would consider a VEPR in .308 before I'd buy a Browning, Remington or Benelli.

Inflation is hitting highs not seen in decades, but the media are actively not talking about any of it. Bad news about the economy is apparently not a priority when a Democrat is in the White House.

Since Dem women are far more manly than Dem men, I would suspect that number would widen. LOL!

The Cliff note version was posted here:

Doryn Mcconnell This is following the science. Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?" Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car. There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them. All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill. In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly. But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs." Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject. In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans. The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car. A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery." Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?" I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster Let me tell you why. The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled. Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects. There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure. If this had been titled … "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," would you have read it?

Once the Federal government legalizes pot, the big tobacco companies are going to step in and take over the market. The little guy doesn't have a chance after that.

"The Biden administration WANTED this. Their policies were specifically intended to drive up gas prices to force people into electric cars. This is not an accident, and it's not just a result of the crisis in Ukraine." —Matt Whitlock "It's simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It's simply not true." —Joe Biden

“You do have to have a bank account, really, to be able to live,” says George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki in my new video. “Imagine if, during the Civil Rights era, Martin Luther King could have lost his bank account because he trespassed at a Woolworth’s counter.” Of course, more people used cash then. Now we rely on banks and credit cards. The easily frightened Trudeau justified his use of the Emergencies Act by saying the truckers received “disturbing amounts of foreign funding to destabilize Canada’s democracy.” Really? The truckers were going to “destabilize Canada’s democracy”? “I don’t know why you would say it’s ‘destabilizing democracy,’” says Zywicki. “This is democracy. Canadians trying to stand up for their rights.” Fortunately, such abuse of power doesn’t happen in the United States. Except it does. In 2013, Zywicki reminds us, “Companies engaged in completely legal services found themselves losing access to bank accounts … being forced to shut down.” It happened because the Obama administration launched Operation Choke Point, which encouraged banks to choke off accounts of pornographers, gambling businesses, payday loan operators, gun dealers and other businesses that they didn’t like. Gun dealer Kat O'Connor did everything the government demanded — filled out the paperwork, got federal and state licenses, paid hefty fees. But suddenly, online payment processors wouldn’t deal with her. She then tried companies like Stripe, PayPal and Square. “It always ended up with an email saying they were closing my accounts,” she told me. She assumes the blacklisting was “a backdoor attempt at gun control.” It probably was. Choke Point continued until Donald Trump was elected. But O'Connor is still blacklisted. Once government labels you a problem, the bureaucrats may choke off your finances forever. That’s infuriating. But part of my job is taking the other side. So, I said to Zywicki, banks are private businesses, lending their own money. Why should they lend to people they don’t like? Private businesses can make whatever choices they choose. Zywicki had a good answer: Banks are not really private businesses. “There are barriers to entry. You have to get permission to start a new bank. … The financial services industry is so intertwined with government.” That government connection means bureaucrats who regulate banks can silence government’s critics by cutting off access to their money. In Canada, protesting truckers resisted pressure from police and politicians for weeks. But once Trudeau froze their money, that was the beginning of the end of their protest. When governments can de-bank you, you are not really free. “We need to tolerate people saying things we don’t like and separate that from their ability to make a living,” says Zywicki. “We’ve merged those two things. That’s a very big threat to the free society.” John Stossel

The latest Quinnipiac University poll asked a rather odd question and it had a rather revealing result. If the United States were invaded by a foreign enemy the way Ukraine has been, would you stay and fight for our country or would you flee the country? A majority of Americans (55%) said they would stay and fight, while 38% said they would flee. Republicans (68%) and Independents (57%) were the most likely to say they would stay and fight for America. But a majority of Democrats (52%) said they would flee the country. (Can we arrange a “fake invasion” and get rid of these leftists?!) Well, in the immortal words of that great philosopher and patriot Merle Haggard, “If you don’t love it, leave it!” Evidently, a lot of Democrats would do just that because they clearly don’t love America enough to fight for it.

I keep trying to tell everyone, the government is NOT your friend.

The foreign policy of this administration is straight out of hell. While the Biden Administration reminds us daily that Vladimir Putin is a thug killing civilians in Ukraine, Putin’s Russia is conducting the negotiations with Iran on our behalf. We do not speak directly with the Iranians. Russia, allied with Iran and China, is our intermediary. So, just how do you think those talks are going right now? Well, according to one Russian official, Iran’s doing very, very well in the talks. In fact, he is shocked at how much Biden has conceded. And, of course, the Biden Administration is refusing to submit the deal to the Senate as a treaty, which requires a two-thirds majority vote for approval. Keep in mind this deal won’t stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And if you think a nuclear-armed Putin is disrupting Europe now, just imagine what a nuclear-armed ayatollah will do to the Middle East! And for this lousy deal, what are we giving Iran? We’re removing sanctions on the Iranian regime that have crippled Iran’s economy and given hope to the Iranian people that the regime may be toppled. But Biden is going to remove those sanctions, thus empowering Iranian brutality and regional ambitions. First, Biden caved on Putin’s pipeline. Then, he reopened these negotiations with Iran. Now we’re talking to Venezuela’s Marxist dictator, begging him for oil. If you wanted an “America last” foreign policy, this is definitely it.

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