Happened again

Government allowed a violent felon to buy a handgun he should have been, by law, barred from purchasing.

Via Chicago Sun-Times, on last week's mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois:

Court records show Martin was convicted of aggravated assault in the stabbing of a woman in Mississippi in 1995. He’d also been arrested six times previously by Aurora police, most recently in 2008 for violating an order of protection, Ziman revealed Saturday. 

Ziman said the assault conviction might not have appeared on a criminal background check when Martin applied and was approved in January 2014 for a Firearm Owners Identification card. 

In March of that year, Martin applied to buy a handgun from an Aurora gun dealer, and he was approved within five days. 

Five days after that, Martin applied for a concealed carry permit. When Martin’s felony conviction was discovered during the background check for that license, his application was denied and his FOID card was revoked. 

However, his Smith & Wesson handgun — the same weapon used in Friday’s shooting — was never confiscated.

More background checks aren't the answer.

How 'bout we get a government that will effectively use laws already on the books?

The world will end by 2031, she says

I don't know which would be more scary: That she believes what she says, or that she says what she does just to get media (social and otherwise) face time.

Long arm of the law

Those who targeted Covington Catholic students with threats and harassment may face prosecution.

"It’s already underway. I’ve had detectives in and out of my office all day today. We were starting with some comments, some threats that were made in state, because those are people we don’t even have to extradite, and we are moving on to the ones that are out of state. We’ve had the detective that works in my office [who has] already been busy issuing grand jury subpoenas and composing search warrants for detectives at other agencies." - Kenton County (Kentucky) prosecutor Rob Sanders

Seems to me, this may be a milestone on the road to deeper conflict

We crossed a huge red line this week when we saw how eager media was to smear teens on a field trip in Washington DC.

Some of the kids were wearing MAGA hats, so that justifies targeting them with a smear. That seems to be how media played it.

Even the kids school threw its students under the bus until one of the student's parents hired a crisis management PR team to push back.

And it wasn't long afterword it was exposed about deceptive, deep and ugly the smear was.

The teens didn't approach and harass a party of native American activists. It was the native Americans who made the first move, who got in the kids' faces.

And we still don't know who first put the video and distorted narrative online, only that it came by way of a shadowy Twitter account that may have been operated outside the country... perhaps by an activist or foreign entity troll farm. But it seems pretty clear media didn't care where it came from, they just repeated the hoaxy, smearing narrative to a wider national audience - apparently without making a move to vet the claims presented on social media.

Wet and blustery evening

Rainy and windy on the mountain. Just hoping the rain stops, and wind dries things up before freezing temps arrive sometime early tomorrow morning. That's the downside of mountain top living. Any chance of ice on the roads means it's best to stay put until thaw arrives. Sliding off the road up here can mean either brushing against a mountainside, or going off one.

Media irritated the lie got outed

CNN's Chris Cuomo seen outraged that Mueller would dare to out a fake story the media loved and breathlessly promoted.

CNN's Cuomo: “Mueller didn’t do the media any favors tonight and he did do Trump one...this allows them to say, ‘You can’t believe it. You can’t believe what you read, you can’t believe what you hear, you can only believe us. Even the SC says that the media doesn’t get it right'” pic.twitter.com/SgJG5INo5s

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 19, 2019

Sounds familiar

 “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one." - Ezekiel 22:30

Evidence of growing economic output makes the left cringe

The Left wants you to see "higher carbon output" as a cause for concern or panic.

Reality is, the sources of the carbon (power and industrial plants, trucks and aircraft) aren't running "dirtier" than they have been.

They're just running at high capacity, logging more hours, producing or moving more economic goods.

I find the new carbon stats encouraging. Hard evidence of real economic growth.

Smile for the cameras!

"It’s Nancy Pelosi’s smile that gets me…oh, and not in a good way. It’s a smile that is actually the opposite of what a smile is supposed to do: signal good will and good faith. Nancy’s smile is full of malice and bad faith, like the smiles on representations of Shiva-the-Destroyer and Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god who demanded thousands of human hearts to eat, lest he bring on the end of the world." - James Howard Kunstler

Europe remains in denial

A taste of it, via Twitter...

Actually... last ten has seen the Euro in a bear market vs the dollar and the ECB was forced to borrow trillions of $ to stabilize it from collapse. Happy 2019 you drunk. https://t.co/nXBIcyGAZB

— Live Monitor (@amlivemon) January 1, 2019

Welcome to 2019

There's a growing consensus we may officially be in an economic recession before it's over.  

Opening the door to 2019... Not for the faint of heart

"My view is that Mr. Mueller has run a colossal cover-your-ass operation for the many documented misdeeds among the FBI and DOJ in cooking up this mess starting in the spring of 2016." - James Howard Kunstler

The above is part of Kunstler's year end piece that also shares his outlook for the coming 2019.

Can't say I agree with all of it, but I suspect he's dead-on with some of the gloom-and-doom he sees ahead.