Why Only Now?

The headline refers to this action by DJT:

President Donald Trump will launch a strategic critical minerals stockpile with $12 billion in funding as part of an effort to protect American manufacturers from supply shocks as the Trump administration seeks to cut reliance on Chinese rare earths.

Formally known as Project Vault, the project would take $1.67 billion in private capital and $10 billion as part of a loan from the Export-Import Bank to obtain and store minerals for automakers, tech firms, and other companies that need access to rare earths.

Reports have compared the idea to the country’s emergency oil stockpile. Project Vault would obtain rare earth elements such as gallium and cobalt, which is used in iPhones, batteries, and jet engines.

So… anyone have any ideas why this hasn’t existed since, say, the appearance of the PC and digital phones in the market?

Given that our defense systems — aircraft to tanks to ships — have relied on computer chips since, oh, the 1980s, it astonishes me that no Administration since the 1980s had established this already.  Then again:  Clinton, Obama, Biden — that’s  seventeen  twenty years of Presidency that essentially hated the whole concept of a Defense Department because they’re all either overt or quasi-Marxists.

Explicable, but still inexcusable.

Well There Ya Go (Part 2)

All-electric, huh?  Wasn’t that the call not even a year ago?  Looks like somebody may be having a change of heart:

Jaguar is reportedly considering performing a dramatic U-turn on its plans to become an exclusively electric car maker, according to reports.

Sources close to the project told the Sunday Times that bosses have instructed engineers in the UK to develop a new petrol-electric hybrid engine it can offer as an alternative option to customers in what would be a significant one eighty on its all-electric rebrand.

The ‘secret initiative’ is part of efforts to ‘soothe drivers’ concerns’ about range anxiety amid a slowdown in EV demand across several major markets, which has already triggered a number of manufacturers to delay their own plans to go all in on battery-powered cars.

And you can all stop that derisive laughter now, okay?

Not Surprising

There’s another one of those (I suspect) A.I. videos talking about the ten guns that are sitting unsold on shelves, and have been almost since their introduction to the market.

There are a couple of obvious losers — the Remington R51 9mm, for example, which was the harbinger of the downfall of the once-great company because it was a shoddy, badly-engineered piece of junk (very much like the company).

The next were those which somehow thought that an expensive 5.7mm bullet was just the thing that the market wanted, and tied that belief to their launch in $900+ guns that were too bulky to carry and too flimsy to be serious rifles.  They were, in essence, expensive range toys, and in the post-Covid years were precisely what the market did not need.

In fact, “expensive range toys” is a pretty good description of most of these ten stinkers.  In saner times, one would have hoped that cooler heads in Marketing would have figured out that mistake;  but there weren’t sane times, anything but.  They were the early Biden-Covid years, when the feral ATF, FBI and Department of Justice looked for any excuse to deny gun owners guns, take away their guns and criminalize gun owners.  And the Covid-era panic buying of toilet paper (FFS) was a perfect companion to the rush to buy guns, any guns, by people who didn’t know anything about guns, where price hikes followed shortage as inevitably as night follows day, where dropping $3,000 on a semi-auto piece of crap seemed an obvious ploy to increase profits, or to plug up a gap in a gun manufacturer’s product portfolio.

Meanwhile, the real gun buyers — guys like most Readers of this website — didn’t fall for any of this nonsense, and spent out money (if we did at all) on proven guns and, while gritting our teeth, insanely-expensive ammo.

Then the waters started to recede, Covid panic ended, and suddenly gun dealers were confronted with a plethora of guns to be sold on consignment, as the panic buyers turned into gun-free zones as before.  Many gun stores which previously had not offered consignment sales now realized that there was money to be made in the commission business as a way of keeping the doors open.

Of course, the idiots who’d purchased awful guns like  like our top ten rascals in the video handed in their geegaws, and now the dealers were left with cluttered shelves full of expensive range toys which nobody wanted.

So when the godless gun-grabbers of the Biden Party lost the White House, the gun market as a whole cooled off, as always happens when the Happy Times return and people are no longer thinking they need to gun up in case of you-know-what.  It happened after Obama was term-limited out of office and conservative voters made sure that Hillary Fucking Clinton didn’t get to play her little Commie reindeer games, and one would have thought that gun manufacturers would have learned their lesson, but of course they didn’t because that has to be the only reason they launched those terrible guns.

It’s funny;  I looked at all the guns on the list, and realized that I, as big a gun lover as exists anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t be interested in any single one of them now, even as a gift let alone at their severely-discounted-but-still-insane prices.

Screw that, and them.

(Read the comments from @reaver6666 in the video’s comments for an excellent overview of the products’ common failings.)


By the way, there’s another A.I. crappy that breathlessly announces that these are the 12 guns you can buy on the cheap.  Yeah, right.

Les Mots Justes

Renee Good’s last moments revealed as woman suffered FOUR gunshot wounds during deadly clash with ICE

…giving rise to the old expression, “Good shooting, Tex!”  Four shots inside a couple of seconds?  Dude!

I have no sympathy, none at all, for these idiots who are prepared to turn themselves into movie props for the anti-American cinema show being produced by HateAmerica Inc. (Executive [sic] producers:  George Soros, Tim Waltz, AOC, Ilhan Omar etc. etc. etc.)

It’s one thing to get violent with the federales when they’re doing something illegal and/or un-Constitutional, e.g. engaging in mass confiscation of guns from otherwise law-abiding citizens.

But ICE is simply following the law, which states quite clearly, “If you’re here illegally, you’re gonna get deported.”  (Trump addendum: “…and even more quickly if you’ve committed other crimes.”  Which we voted for.)

At some point in the near future, some Lefty mook is going to bring a gun to the movie, and I fully expect — and hope — that when that happens, the full force of the law attacks this bunch of Commies like a rabid Rottweiler, chewing up not only said mook, but following the trail of money and chewing up the rest of this foul pestilence on our country.