If you wonder why it takes so long to get new guns into production, Ian McCollum has an answer for you: Because designing and manufacturing guns is hard. Mainly because of the extensive trial and error necessary to establish the correct tolerances for each part.
Guns Are Hard
May 27th, 2021How Many Of Steve Adler’s Lies Can You Count In This Joe Rogan Interview?
May 26th, 2021Here’s an excerpt from an interview Joe Rogan did with Austin mayor Steve Adler:
How many lies can you spot? Here are a few.
Before they repealed the camping ban: “I had more and more neighborhood associations complaining about more and more encampments, and I had no solution to that.”
Of course you did. You and the city council could have let Austin police enforce the law and either cleared homeless encampments and/or arrested people for breaking the law. That would have prodded the sturdiest beggars to move on to greener pastures. But the city council wouldn’t let APD enforce the law because there was no money to rake off to leftwing activists as part of the homeless industrial complex.
So instead you made the problem ten times worse.
His claim that “90-95% success rate” for “housing first” curing the problem is absolute garbage. Mentally-ill, drug-using transients don’t become magically sane or drug free because they’re in a hotel on the taxpayers dime.
“Smaller cities than Austin have 3-6x the amount of homelessness.” So that’s why you imported west coast policies to Austin? So you can increase the size of the homeless population like they did? If so, mission accomplished.
“They told me the same thing as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.” Oh, so you sought advice from the cities with the worst homeless problems and the most obvious failed policies that made the problem worse! Genius!
When he says that the “overwhelming majority” of the current transient population are “from here,” either he’s lying or his staff is. A good two-thirds of the current homeless population seem to have come from out of town. And they’re not coming from “the areas immediately around us,” they’re coming from Houston and the Metroplex so they can do drugs and sleep in the street and not be arrested.
“We needed to get people off the streets.” Yeah, that’s why you turned every park and overpass into Bumsville: To get them off the street. Pull the other one.
“If all they’re doing is surviving…” And by “surviving,” he means “shooting up heroin in public.”
And note throughout the newly-minted PC neologism “people experiencing homelessness,” which I’m sure focus groups much better than “drug addicted transients” and “gibbering street lunatics.”
Also, that veterans program isn’t the shining success that Adler is making it out to be. According to a friend that applied for veteran housing, there was a nine month wait, so they put your name on a list, and if you couldn’t accept right then (say, you had just signed a lease), your name went right back to the bottom of the list.
I suspect the rest of the interview would offer up a lot more lies to flag…
(Hat tip: Teddy Brosevelt.)
Constitutional Carry Passes
May 25th, 2021Good news! The Texas legislature just sent Constitutional Carry to the Governor’s desk:
After passing different versions of House Bill (HB) 1927, a bill to allow Texans over the age of 21 who can legally possess a handgun to carry it in public without a government-issued permit, both the Texas House and Senate approved a final version of the legislation that will now be sent to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.
Abbott said earlier this year that he would sign the bill, known as “constitutional carry.”
“The House was very proud of the version of the bill that we sent over and the Senate was very proud of the amendments that they added,” Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), the bill’s author, told The Texan.
“We felt like some of the protections for law-abiding citizens were diminished in the Senate version, and so we fought to get some of that back.”
After the Senate approved the bill with a number of amendments tailored to concerns voiced by law enforcement, the bill returned to the House where Schaefer decided to send the bill to what is known as a “conference committee.”
In the conference committee, five members from each chamber worked out the differences in the two versions to create a compromise known as the conference committee report.
The ultimate version of HB 1927 contained many of the variations of the amendments that were included in the version passed by the Senate rather than what the House first approved.
After being signed into law, Constitutional Carry will go into effect September 1.
The good news is the extension of protection for our constitutional rights, and may create a whole new cohort of legal gun owners in Texas. The bad news is that this might make it even harder to find ammo…
Man With Rifle Stops Mass Shooter
May 23rd, 2021Good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun in Fort Smith, Arkansas:
Good thing Colion Noir is doing the reporting the national media refuses to do…
This Is Your Skyscraper On Chinesium
May 19th, 2021Only recently did I learn the word Chinesium, a much needed neologism describing the crappy, subpar metal that cut-rate Chinese manufacturers build their products out of.
So what happens when you build skyscrapers out of Chinesium? This happens:
Engineers were inspecting a skyscraper in southern China on Wednesday, a day after it triggered widespread panic when it suddenly began shaking, as people took to social media to ask if shoddy construction may have been to blame.
Shoddy construction? In China?
The 1,000-foot SEG Plaza in the southern city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong began swaying in the early afternoon on Tuesday, prompting people inside and those on the streets below to flee.
Emergency management officials quickly ruled out an earthquake as the cause of the wobble in the tech hub’s Futian district.
Officials said no further movement had been detected and experts found “no safety abnormalities in the main structure and surrounding environment of the building.”
The building had stopped shaking by the time people were evacuated, state media reported, and the plaza remained sealed off.
Building collapses are not rare in China, where lax construction standards and breakneck urbanization over recent decades has led to buildings being thrown up in haste.
You don’t say. It’s cut corners all the way down.
Poor construction standards are often linked to corruption among local officials, most recently after the collapse of a quarantine hotel in southern China last year.
As opposed to that corruption among national officials reporters aren’t supposed to mention.
Completed in 2000, the tower is home to a major electronics market as well as various offices in the central business district of Shenzhen, a sprawling metropolis of more than 13 million people.
The building is named after the semiconductor and electronics manufacturer Shenzhen Electronics Group, whose offices are based in the complex.
It is the 18th tallest tower in Shenzhen, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat skyscraper database.
I’d never heard of Shenzhen Electronics Group, AKA Shenzhen Fine Made Electronics Group Company Ltd., which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There are lots of fabless semiconductor manufacturers in various vertical markets I’ve never heard of. Bloomberg says they have 899 employees. So why do they have a website that would have looked ancient even in 2005?
Hopefully their semiconductors are better constructed than the building they work in.
Chinese authorities last year banned the construction of skyscrapers taller than 500 meters (1,640 feet), adding to height restrictions already enforced in some other cities such as Beijing.
Sounds like Chinesium may be a widespread problem in China…