Mandatory Insurance For A Fundamental Right In Washington State

     Despite several Supreme Court cases saying that, yes, the 2nd Amendment is indeed part of the Bill of Rights and, yes again, is indeed an individual right, some states seem hellbent on curtailing this fundamental freedom which exists independent of, and antecedent to, the state… or indeed any state. One such common method is to make it as costly as possible to exercise that inalienable right. In the state of Washington, legislators are considering a bill to impose such a financial burden via mandatory, and perpetual, requirements to carry insurance in case were to ever be used in a crime. The main operative section of HB 1504 reads, in part:

A new section is added to chapter 9.41 RCW to read as follows: (1)(a) No person in this state may purchase or possess a firearm unless that person is: (i) Insured under a firearm liability policy or covered by a firearm liability bond meeting the requirements of subsection (2) of this section; (ii) Self-insured as provided in subsection (3) of this section; or (iii) Covered by a certificate of deposit meeting the requirements of subsection (4) of this section. (b) Compliance with this requirement constitutes financial responsibility for the purpose of this section. Proof of financial responsibility to purchase or possess a firearm must be provided on the request of a dealer or law enforcement officer in the format specified under subsection (5) of this section.

     All of the “options” require taking on a financial burden that will go on as long as one chooses to exercise their Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear Arms. How many of those who are in favor of this bill would consider it a human rights violation for the government to burden a right to vote with the requirement to have and present photo ID?

     The bill can, as introduced, can be read here or below:

Washington HB 1504 (2025) by ThePoliticalHat

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Over Here Or Over There

     One of the great follies of the Left is the idea that they could play as an intelligent designer with society and mould or even outright reconstruct it in line with their utopian vision. This is not the most hubristic and nonsensical thing since at least they can purport to control the society they wish to immanentize into the chosen eschaton. ‘Tis not only folly but an invitation for poetic justice when one had deluded themselves into thinking that they can reconstruct the world, if not human nature itself, with those explicitly acknowledged as being outside one’s power to control, despite self-assurances of one’s power to sway and manipulate.

     When it comes to antagonistic foreign relations, the belief that one could create a new world order by addressing issues only themselves and not any other country or power, is to admit that one blames America first for causing the problems to begin with!

     If you seek peace, and the only problem is yourself, then the others must be blameless and only responding to your own wickedness. Fix yourself and they won’t be antagonists anymore! This is the foreign policy foundation that is sought to be imposed on us now.

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News of the Week (February 23rd, 2025)

 

News of the Week for February 23rd, 2025


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Firing Line Friday: The Ozone Controversy

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     With all the “green” grift and rent seeking, not to mention the calls to grant central government absolute power to prevent a purported imminent collapse of Earth’s ecosystem, let us look back half-a century when a specific problem could be identified with a experimentally demonstrable cause & effect and a solution that didn’t require upending society as William F. Buckley, Jr. discusses the ozone controversy with Russell W. Peterson, R. S. Scorer, and Michael B. McElroy.

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Quick Takes – Academic Discrimination & The Law: Discrimination Not Prohibited On A Technicality; Anti-DEI Claimed To Be Unconstitutional; Anti-Semitism

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: A lot of court cases requiring discriminating judicial tastes

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Speedbumps in court for a lawsuit against a discriminatory scholarship program.

“Lawyers representing Young America’s Foundation and two white students in a case alleging racial discrimination by the Department of Education are considering refiling the lawsuit after a judge recently dismissed it based on ‘procedural issues.’

“‘We are encouraged that the judge said the program is likely unconstitutional … and are working out next steps to deal with the procedural issues identified by the judge,’ [said[ attorney Skylar Croy with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty […]

“‘We are committed to dismantling this discriminatory program,’ Croy said Monday.

“In a Dec. 31 order, Judge Peter Welte threw out the case regarding the federal McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, the Grand Forks Herald reports.

“He cited ‘procedural issues’ and dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning it can be filed again, according to the report.”

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Election Shenanigans In New York

     Laws are constantly being revised or changes, but for good or ill, they are usually changed because the proponents of the bill to change the law believe that it is better and ought to serves as a general rule. In the state of New York, there is companion pair of bills to allow the Governor to postpone a special election for a currently expected vacancy in the House of Representatives to a general election.

“State law currently requires the governor to proclaim a special election within 10 days after an office becomes vacant. Among other changes, the bill under consideration would increase that to 15 days, the officials said.

“Under current law, the special election must then occur between 70 to 80 days after the governor’s proclamation for a seat in Congress and between 40 and 50 days for a seat in the state Senate or Assembly, unless the lawmaker was in the final months of their term.”

     Specifically, it allows a special election date for non-legislative elections to be set:

“not less than seventy nor more than eighty days from the   date of the proclamation to fill a vacancy in the office of a representative in congress or for a vacancy in any other office that is not in the state senate or assembly, provided, however, that if there is a vacancy occurring in the same calendar year as a general election date set pursuant to section 8-100 of the election law, a proclamation may be   issued so that the special election may be scheduled on the general election date”

     But this isn’t a general election year, right?

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For Whose Good: The Common vs. The Collective

     Many of those who call themselves “common good conservatives” seem less interested in the any good for the good shared by all American, and more interested in their collective group ruling over the other collective group in a dichotomic system, where by elevating some above others is the only way to benefit the overall American collective, and thus the only way for the ruled to benefit. This is much the same as with their view of what makes America what it is: An American has value because their membership in the collective grants them value and the ruled can only have value by virtue of being ruled, that rule over them being the purported prerequisite for overall collective greatness.

     This is a quintessentially Left-wing world view, and fits in nicely with social corporatism.

“Shortly after he was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy circulated a memo that instructed his department to prioritize families by, among other things, giving preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average when awarding grants.”

     With the increased desire to see America not as some icky “idea”, but as a historic people and land, they see it as their duty to provide more domestic blut for the boden. People who contribute to the collective good by doing what the government dictates is good will be rewarded directly for their obedience, while those who don’t will be denied, having to rely on their rewards as the ruled portion of the overall collective. That people who would benefit were already doing this does not detract from the corporatist character of the proposal.

     In contrast, a policy that works towards a common good would be indiscriminate in who it targets.   People would be free to benefit from it or not. While conducive towards beneficial or beneficent ends, it neither requires nor directly rewards; vice versa while those policies might be dissuasive, they neither prohibit nor directly punish.

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News of the Week (February 16th, 2025)

 

News of the Week for February 16th, 2025


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Quick Takes – Normalization Of Medical Homicide: Ceremonial Deaths; Physician Training; Accelerating Horrors

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: The proscription for acceleration of a benediction of death

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     One way to normalize euthanasia is to turn it into a quasi-religious ceremony.

“The Death Cafe in Tiburon—which was co-founded by Grimason and end-of-life doula Karen Murray, who is now its main administrator—is part of a larger, organized “social franchise” network. According to its founders, the network includes nearly 19,000 Death Cafes in 90 countries across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.

“Jon Underwood, a funeral advisor, and his mother, Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist, hosted what is considered to be the first Death Cafe in 2011 in East London, and developed a model that others are free to duplicate. “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You!” is a common slogan.

“They were inspired by the work of Swiss sociologist and ethnologist Bernard Crettaz, who, after the death of his wife, developed a project in 1999 called Café Mortel, where people could gather to talk about death, because Crettaz felt that death was a taboo and a ‘fundamental enigma’ that frightens people.

“…

“[E]nd-of-life doulas like Anthea Grimason spend a lot of time talking with clients about what they think is important, what they need, what they want, and what they don’t want as they plan for an expecting death. End-of-life doulas aim to make death more personal and more normal.

“At the August Tiburon Death Cafe that Werner attended, Grimason was calm and relaxed, but also brought a sense of purpose, clarity and focus to the evening. She was specific in her prompts and her responses, but not pushy or overly verbose. She listened more than she spoke.”

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Working Man’s Elitism

     From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to modern day, there has been a resistance to automation and mechanization that replaces human labor by Luddites and their intellectual decedents, or or innovations such as the the assembly line that Henry Ford used to make the automobile increasingly affordable to more and more Americans.

     Today, many pine away for a past utopia where highly skilled blue collar Unionized workers arise as a purported ruling class. They seek to create this, at your expense by eliminating the alternatives. One such example is the wishing to abolish such assembly line jobs at meatpacking plants by starving companies of lower pages workers, including illegal aliens with the presumption that automation and/or robotics will not take their place. In effect, we must all pay the price of economic inefficiency and cost to subsidize the market for highly trained artisan experts.

     And yes, the complaint, ironically enough, is about jobs that Americans purportedly won’t do.   Specifically the specialization where a less trained persons specializing in certain cuts could replace a more expensive expert in the entire process. All this in the name of eliminating “a job that destroys the human body and spirit” as if massively hiking prices for regular people is a noble sacrifice for the not-so-common good of the few. Indeed, these sentiments are often under the assumption that we’d become a rich nation of highly trained proletariat laborers who reclaim the wealth that the bourgeoisie has been stealing via illegal aliens or automation.

     The underlying assumption, as it is with claims of foreign warmongering and non-domestically made narcotics, is that some blue collar utopia is the default and that nefarious forces are to blame for why we don’t have the fantasy workers paradise of mid-20th century America when such laborers didn’t have to face any real global competition, again ironically enough, from a world devastated a the Second World War.

     There is a certain elitism that dovetails with derision for more formally educated white collar specialist and experts. And for whatever truth there is of the perceived elitism of the white collar class, this is an example of the pot calling the kettle Black.

     Perhaps nothing better explains this elitism than the following sentiment:

“Yes, prices of meat will certainly rise, but you already shouldn’t be eating factory-farmed meat and you shouldn’t be patronizing corporations that are actively wrecking America.”

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