"Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters."
MARGARET PETERS

Yeah this electric car thing is a novelty, little more. Someday, someone, somewhere will invent a battery that is lightweight and stores a universe of power. Until then, let's just refine our gas and oil-powered engines.
On the weight thing, Bob, I didn't know, but it is easy to believe. The battery cells are very big and heavy. They blow up, burn for days and put out noxious fumes while burning for days. Not our best move, these quiet little battery cars.

Don, this should make you happy. My newest neighbor the former f14 weapons backseater. I hooked him up with a firewood procurement specialist. So he’s been getting familiar with his ax……..

Notice it’s that really good ax that I like btw!




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good form too!
...far a navee guy

Well, I messed up already
Restarting tomorrow :-(   

Not much to report other than everything shipped out of Utah and is inbound.

I am looking forward to some "Creeper" time and getting this Jeep sorted out a little better.

Lots to catch up on. Ken the only time you’ll be E4 is making an error at second base….lol

Been busy and just picked up a 2008 Tahoe with 60k on the clock. My FIL bought it new and rarely drove it. Only people to sit in the back seat were my kids when they visited 10yeara ago.

Ordered a mess of parts to flush fluids and change hoses and belts and shocks etc. will require some serious paint correction but plan to drive this as a beater back and forth to the ranch while the Bus is getting a rebuilt Duramax.

Oil still looks like it in the
Bottle. Going to reprogram the AFM and delete the speed limiter and will put some 20 inch Tahoe wheels on it.

Since it’s maroon and my youngest started at Texas A&M we now call this the Aggie Wagon


May have to start a build thread


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

No "May"
You are hereby ORDERED to start a build thread on this
;-)

So, what circumstances of you coming to own this thing???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6nrYL-pTKQ

That's really getting your money's worth out of that purchase. A great testament to the durability of the "Dura" Max.

Radiant floors are the way to go. Neighbor who is on solar has them. I may incorporate in my living area, I see many shops built with em too.

Radiant heat floor is becoming the thing for barns and barndos in this part of Kentucky as well. Now the Amish have people specializing in doing just those!

That looks good!

I like the green hood concept...

A living/growing pickup

What a hippie cool idea!

Instead of pulling an older thread out of the closet, I'll just start a new one.

So it has been some time and quite a few adventures in the Gladiator.

I have learned a lot from building and operating that Jeep over all sorts of terrain. It has been down to sea level and up to over 13,000 feet. It has been in a bunch of states spanning 2/3 of the long-way distance across the US.

In all that it has shown me its weaknesses. Foremost of those is a lack of power from a small V6 engine. Now there is nothing I can (Afford to) do about that at the moment, since a Hemi 6.4 costs $37K, but I can address another problem.

For all the great off-road ability the Jeep has, its on-road manners are not so good. It is just a handful to drive. It wanders around, likely from a lack of positive caster. It gets jittery in bumps because the control arms are not as flat as they could be. It feels tippy sometimes, and it does a side-to-side wobble. That is because the Panhard bars are set at an angle instead of flatter.

Well, I am going to do something about all that.

Enter a new TerraFlex suspension!

The Mach Loop and Salisbury Plains, Wales, England, 12 Sep 2024

Looks like the boys were doing the Mach Loop yesterday in Wales

Well...

Your Chinook for today:

So who won the debate last night? My response is: “Who cares!”

The VP was cool and composed and did quite well, much the same as an actor does after rehearsing their lines and delivering a convincing performance. I enjoy the acting of George Clooney, a fellow Kentuckian who actually grew up about ten miles from my current-day farm. He looked good as a Lieutenant Colonel when he saved the world from nuclear annihilation. And again as a Special Operations Captain or Major (I can’t recall) in “Three Kings.” The movies were fiction of course. He never served, but he did a pretty good job pulling his audience into the storyline.

Mrs. Harris did the exact same thing. She is quite unaccomplished having served in some pretty lofty positions along the way. Last night, she demonstrated a flair for the extreme and a belief in the socialist mindset, no doubt coming from the Marxist influence of her father. She did a splendid job of delivering a performance, which admittedly was much better than those of her fumbling boss.

Mr. Trump seemed aggressive and actually angry at times, but why shouldn’t he? He had to debate three people, not just one. The moderators, if you want to allow them that, guided the debate toward subjects more in the favor of Harris. They fact-checked Mr. Trump several times but never questioned anything the VP said. They even corrected the President after he made a statement, saying, “And of course Mr. President, you know the facts actually state…” What, the man can’t say something albeit very damaging to the left, without being corrected?

Mr. Trump makes it easy for others to attack him. He always has. “The refugees are eating dogs and cats in ______ Pennsylvania.” Well, perhaps they are, but why deviate down that rabbit hole and open yourself to look foolish? I slapped my head several times while he went on to rant about this and that. And man am I tired of hearing, “I was the greatest, she was the worst, their economy is the worst in history, and so forth.” Really, Mr President give it a rest. How about this”  “The economy was very good and prices were much lower and we were respected worldwide during my administration.” Yep, that works just as well, better perhaps, while not appearing like a narcissist.

Having said that, and I do not like that kind of rhetoric, we still need a street brawler, and Harris, who as the border czar never managed to make it to the border, is no fighter. She will flip-flop and kowtow to whoever brings the largest purse and the most votes. She accused Trump of admiring Mr. Putin. Well, heck, so does half the world. Do we like what Putin is doing? Heck no, but one can appreciate strength and strong leadership. If Mr. Putin could be reasoned with and brought to the bargaining table, and stop the war in an amicable way that Zelinsky agreed with, we would get back to possibly even liking the man. After all, and this is no trick question, “Who in all existence, in all of history was perfect?” I can only think of one and I worship him daily.

Like the man or not, Trump is the only chance the world has of surviving, aside from the soon-to-come return of Jesus. The war in the Ukraine is pushing Russia into a corner no one saw coming. If this slaughter continues Russia could be forced to go Nuclear. And just try to keep that Jeanie in a bottle. We need to solve that situation quickly and add stability to that region. Next, we need to finish the Israeli war in Gaza. That violence is getting close to bringing the Muslim world into a fighting frenzy. Soft steps after the terrorists are wiped out are what is called for there.

We need to do all that so we can again isolate and possibly destroy the regime in Iran which is rushing toward a nuclear armament. If they get that thing and loft it to Telavi then Israel will shower them with a salvo of nukes, and again there we go stepping right into WW3.

We need a strong man to solve the war in Ukraine, stop the fighting at Israel’s border, put a cork in the Ayatollah mouthpiece, and turn our focus toward China. We either need to bring them down economically to a place where they can be reasoned with or put our foot down militarily. Think Kamala has any experience with things of that magnitude? While she is pretty good at stirring the passions in those women who feel the government is interfering with their wombs, she has been clueless about how to handle stronger and smarter men. She did negotiate with Zelensky and Putin just before the Russians invaded, right? Yep, zero effect curtailing that war.

I can visualize Trump and Putin toe to toe. “Mr. Putin, if one single track block from one of your tanks crosses that border, I am bringing the entire US Airforce over for some extra training, are we clear?”

Did Trump pi$$ off many during his watch? Yep, sure did. Did we get hurt as a result? Nope! We enjoyed prestige, gas around $2 a gallon, trillions of dollars flowing back into the US, no new wars, and a grocery bill folks could afford. All of that is gone. Not respected…Super high food prices…War in Europe…War in Asia…Tensions in the Pacific…Millions of illegal invaders (And they probably do eat dogs and cats in places)…MS13 has taken over apartment buildings in some of our sanctuary cities…and on and on.

Are we going to continue electing the Obama dynasty or hire a fighter to put things back in order? If you don’t mind government healthcare, a military focused on transgenderism, or China threatening war and trying to destabilize the dollar which will sink our country, vote for Harris. If you don’t mind filtering nuclear fallout out of your water or daydreaming about the time we used to have water and electricity and could turn on the TV, then vote for Kamala.

If you believe all that nonsense she tried to sell about Trump being personally against reproductive freedoms then vote for the American Indian, or African American, or whatever she claims to be this week. Yeah, but I am still voting for the Trump. I do not like a lot of things about him, but I care a lot more about the welfare of America than who a single man offends.

Psalms 100:4

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

Depending on how much you believe the US can reign in its spending and fiscal policies, are we headed for stability or falling off the cliff? Nothing I have seen in the last half dozen administrations harkens to any real fixes. Therefore, a time approaches when the US Dollar is just another currency, and when we start downhill the fall will look like WW3 for our nation. Common sense dictates we should build in some measure of self-preservation. A prudent man will have a plan, and set aside for coming perilous times. I believe the Lord our God will protect his people, but as we have witnessed the Jewish people suffer over all of recorded history, we Gentiles who call ourselves Christians will not go unscathed. We need to humble ourselves and repent as a nation and a people, and even as families. I believe in the idea of an America, but charlatans and fools have coopted our Moral and Christian nation.


The Coming Shift in World Trade
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
9/9/2024

In July of 1944, a year and some months before the official end to the Second World War, allied powers gathered at the Bretton Woods Hotel in New Hampshire to hammer out a new economic order that would dominate the world at war’s end. The meeting alone expressed great confidence in a coming victory. They were not wrong.

As part of the new plan for the world, a new monetary system would take shape. It would be based in gold, with the dollar convertibility guaranteed at 1/35 an ounce. The right to convert would not be available to average people. It was something guaranteed by nation states and central banks alone, at least those allowed to participate.

In the early days of the conference, the New York Times (NYT) editorialized against the scheme. The pen behind the unsigned editorials was the great economist Henry Hazlitt, who would later gain fame for his book “Economics In One Lesson,” which became one of the best-selling economics books of the century. In fact, it still sells well today.

Hazlitt criticized the proposed new monetary system. He said that by making the dollar the world reserve currency, and guaranteeing convertibility into gold only by large trading nations, the new system could not last. This is because there was no mechanism to police nations’ fiscal and monetary policies. The new system would enable endless expansion of money and credit abroad without consequence. The United States would experience, eventually, a devastating gold outflow. At some point in the future, he predicted, the United States would have to suspend convertibility.

This is precisely what happened, not right away but eventually. In 1971, Richard Nixon stopped the system whereby the United States shipped out gold. He did so to save the system, and bring about a new one. The expectation was that gold would fall in price. The opposite happened. Eight years later, the price had reached $850. The people who bet against the monetary elites were the winners.

There is a backstory to Hazlitt’s writing at the NYT. His brilliant editorials against the Bretton Woods system appeared weekly, and were later collected in a book called “From Bretton Woods to World Inflation.” The publisher of the NYT at some point in 1944, just before the system was ratified, came to Hazlitt and said that the paper would change its editorial stance. It would need to favor and not oppose the new system. At that point, Hazlitt realized that his 10-year tenure at the paper was at an end. He packed up, went home, and started working on a new book that became “Economics in One Lesson.” Writing it took not even two weeks.

I’ve been visiting Hazlitt’s writing from this period as a way to understand the present moment. It’s clear that the elites in those days were setting up a new global machinery. In designing such a system—John Maynard Keynes from the UK was the primary influence—there were several moving parts. There was the monetary system as described above. There was to be a transaction clearing system administered by a new World Bank, the remnants of which survive in the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) today. There was a financing system in the form of the International Monetary Fund. And there was a new trade system called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which later became the World Trade Organization.

These four moving parts—money, clearing, lending, and trading—were designed to work together as if this entire world economy was a machine to be managed, which is precisely how Keynes thought of it. Hazlitt’s objection was that the system was too clever by half, because it could not account for market and political exigencies. It’s one thing for something to work on paper; it’s something else for it to work in reality.

He saw through the problem that the new system did nothing to discipline governments that were party to the deal. He predicted that all governments would take advantage of the opportunity to exchange in reckless fiscal and monetary policies while free riding against the rich nations that were guaranteeing the system against failure.

He was right about this eventually but, in the meantime, the world economy did take a new direction toward what was later called neoliberalism, a managed system that exalted freedom in international trade and fiscal and monetary liquidity above all else.

Why was the system set up this way? The reason is that an entire generation of what were known as enlightened diplomats had become convinced that depression and war (1930s and 1940s) stemmed from trade protectionism and too many monetary guardrails that prevented states from flooding the system in times of crisis.

In other words, the system of 1944 was established mainly to backwards fix what its architects saw as the main problems of the previous two decades. This is human nature. If you live through a house fire caused by an electrical spark, you are going to be extra careful about the soundness of wiring in the future. If your health has failed you for reasons of a bad diet, you are going to be more careful in the future to eat right. And so on. They were more focused on fixing old problems than anticipating new ones.

Thus did the world of the 1950s and 1960s proceed with these fixes in place. The results were spectacular by any historical standard, especially for the United States. But remember Hazlitt’s prediction that the new system would not provide discipline to states in the matter of fiscal and monetary policy. As it turned out, the leading offender in this regard was the United States, which embarked on the Vietnam War at the same time it blew out its provisions in the welfare state. That led to unsustainable economic tensions.

Meanwhile, the trading system that depended entirely on a gold-based settlement system started to flow only one way, which was out. That system broke down as the welfare-warfare state blew up, and finally Nixon put an end to it. In making that decision, he also made a choice to preserve the low-tariff global trading order over the monetary shackles that had hemmed in some element of monetary discipline.

With all limits now removed, inflation took its toll, exactly as Hazlitt predicted. The United States experienced three successive waves in the 1970s, each worse than the last. That excess was finally stopped with the reign of Paul Volcker at the Fed and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who had promised to control the fiscal side. And yet: there was a Cold War to win, and the Reagan administration too had to make a choice between a balanced budget and its foreign-policy priorities.

Without marching through the policy errors of the following three decades, let us jump ahead to 2016 during a time when (as could have been predicted) the United States has lost vast amounts of its manufacturing sector to foreign competition due to the very system set up in the Nixon era, not to mention victory in the Cold War which opened up a new swath of the world to productive competition with the United States. The new president Donald Trump swore to end the problem, and how? By blowing up the GATT which had been newly labeled the World Trade Organization.

In other words, Trump took a different tact from Nixon: he sought to patch a trade problem with a very old-fashioned system that had been wholly rejected back in 1944. Again, Hazlitt predicted something exactly like this in his writings, as he explained that nations with undisciplined fiscal and monetary problems, operating in a world without domestic convertibility, are bound to suffer monetary outflows and a deprecation of their production base due to foreign competition.

As a result of Trump’s efforts, which were not reversed by the Biden administration, the system of 1944 now lies in ruins with governments around the world newly experimenting with regional trading systems, tariff policies, and even new systems of settlement that could someday unseat the dollar as the world-reserve currency.

In the meantime, the United States has a major problem. Without dramatic domestic reform, it simply cannot compete on the world stage. This is because the U.S. debt avalanche has assisted in boosting the industrial buildup around the world even as the high-value international dollar makes imports cheap and exports expensive with no settlement system in place. This not only leads to perpetual trade deficits but massively subsidizes imports over domestic goods.

In the last four years of inflation, the U.S. dollar has maintained its strength internationally while decaying domestically. As a result, imports have not suffered nearly as much in inflation as domestic goods, which only entrenches the problem.

What we are watching now is the final unraveling of the system of 1944 in all its parts, including the tweak of 1971, which introduces grave dangers to the world of both depression and war. The way out of this predicament is not another cockamamie world order constructed by another globalist economic guru like Keynes.

We need a simple return to fiscal and monetary soundness. Above all else, the United States must get its own house in order, with balanced budgets and sound money, even if that means letting go of its imperial ambitions abroad. That is the best and probably only path to restarting the beautiful ambition of a free-trade world.

ROFL…gotta see DOT’s somewhere…

Chief, no gout. Not yet anyhow
I do feel it is arthritis for sure.
I hope it’s not RA…you’ve been beaten on hard with it.

Not as bad off as that squirrel, thank goodness! ;-)

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”
HELEN KELLER

Amid Public, Shareholder Backlash, Some Major Corporations Drop DEI Policies
Since 2021, 25 companies have been notified by shareholders that their DEI programs constitute illegal discrimination and a breach of fiduciary duty.

By Kevin Stocklin
September 04, 2024
Updated:
September 05, 2024

As Ford took steps last week to distance itself from the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) movement that has swept the corporate world in recent years, it became just one of a number of companies that are rethinking their commitments to race-based ideology.

In an Aug. 28 memo to employees, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he is “mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs,” and that the company is taking “a fresh look” at its DEI program.
Ford’s reversal on DEI follows that of other major corporations, including Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, and most recently Molson Coors, which have reportedly revised their DEI policies, either due to public pressure or legal challenges.

In addition, 25 companies have been formally notified by shareholders since 2021 that their DEI programs constitute illegal discrimination under federal and state civil rights laws, as well as a breach of fiduciary duty to investors.

“This is a trend, for sure,” Jerry Bowyer, president of Bowyer Research, a conservative investment consulting firm, told The Epoch Times. “The rapid succession, the way it’s occurred, there’s almost a cascade effect going on.

“That whole world of ESG, stakeholder capitalism, DEI—the whole idea of companies as social engineers rather than as value producing business—had just gotten so far ahead of what customers wanted,” Bowyer said. “Shareholders were not asking for this.”

According to conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has been posting on social media regarding his investigation of “woke” policies at numerous companies, Ford confirmed to him that it would end its participation in a number of DEI related efforts.
“One by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America,” Starbuck stated.

In response to a request by The Epoch Times for comment, a Ford spokesperson stated: “The communication to our global employees speaks for itself. We have nothing further to add.”

Starbuck’s postings went viral when they were supported by people such as SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, who stated on X that “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it.”
Taking on Customer Feedback
A number of companies that pursued DEI and other progressive programs have come under pressure from activists, shareholders, customers, and state attorneys general to end them.
Responding to consumer backlash, Tractor Supply issued a statement in June that said, “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them. We have taken this feedback to heart.”

The company stated that it would no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign rating system but instead “focus on rural America priorities including ag education, animal welfare, veteran causes and being a good neighbor, and stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns.”

It further pledged to eliminate DEI roles within the company and drop CO2 emission goals, focusing instead on land and water conservation.

Law firms are also stepping back from DEI programs. Legal suits by conservative nonprofit American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) have compelled some major law firms to allow people of all races to apply for fellowships previously reserved for people of color.

“Using someone’s race as a factor in employment decisions is unfair, polarizing, and illegal,” Edward Blum, president of AAER, told The Epoch Times.

“Significant majorities of Americans of all races do not believe someone’s race should be used by any employer to hire or promote any individual. Corporations are at risk of being sued for their DEI practices.”

“Harley-Davidson’s choice to back away from the Corporate Equality Index is an impulsive decision,” Human Rights Campaign Vice President Eric Bloem said in a statement on Aug. 20. The group introduced the Corporate Equality Index as a social credit rating system for corporations.
Bloem said that activists who are pushing against DEI “believe they can bully their way into dismantling initiatives that help everyone thrive in the workplace.”

Bloem said with the LGBT community “wielding $1.4 trillion in spending power, retreating from these principles undermines both consumer trust and employee success.”

Advocates of DEI programs say that they are legal and beneficial.

“The purpose of DEI and other remedial workplace programs is to improve the process by which employment decisions are made and close the gap in opportunities among workers,” Ming-Qi Chu, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement.
“They do not disadvantage any particular worker. This is why they have long been held lawful.”

And many companies, such as Microsoft, have reiterated their commitment to DEI programs.

“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering,” Microsoft spokesperson Jeff Jones stated in July, disputing news reports that Microsoft had fired its entire DEI staff.
Some experts say that companies are assuming legal risks by setting corporate policy according to gender or race.
“Two recent rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court cast serious doubt on the legality of racial or gender-based quotas in employment,” Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of Corporate Engagement for the Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Epoch Times.

In the 2022 case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court ruled that any universities that receive government funding could not discriminate in their admissions criteria.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” the court stated in its majority opinion. This was a reversal of prior court decisions, which ruled that racial discrimination at universities was permissible, provided that it was carried out as a remedy and for a limited time.

“Many companies were relying on the Supreme Court jurisprudence allowing racial bias in university admissions to justify their flagrant violations of labor law prohibitions on race and sex-based discrimination,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Epoch Times.

“This reasoning was always dubious, but now that SCOTUS has made clear that discrimination in university admissions is illegal, they no longer even have the fantasy that their actions are legal.”

Subsequent court decisions clarified that the Harvard decision, which applied to school admissions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, also applied to employers under Title VII of the Act.

“In 2024, in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the Supreme Court clarified that Title VII protects against many different kinds of discrimination in the workplace, not just hiring and firing,” Tedesco stated.

In an April interview with law firm Jackson Lewis, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Commissioner Andrea Lucas stated that under Title VII there is no such thing as permissible “reverse” race or sex discrimination.
“There’s just discrimination,” said Lucas, who is tasked with educating employers on federal employment law.

“Employers in general are not permitted to take any employment actions motivated by race or sex,” Lucas stated, and she urged employers to have their legal counsels review “every single piece of diversity work product.”

In July 2023, attorneys general from 13 states issued a letter to the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies “to remind you of your obligations as an employer under federal and state law to refrain from discriminating on the basis of race, whether under the label of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or otherwise.”
Signers were from Kansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, and Montana.

“Treating people differently because of the color of their skin, even for benign purposes, is unlawful and wrong,” the attorneys general stated. “Companies that engage in racial discrimination should and will face serious legal consequences.”

The letter cited numerous cases in federal and state courts that ruled that race-based quotas and preferences are illegal.
Studies Questioned
“Companies need to rethink their embrace of DEI,” Tedesco stated. “As legal requirements raise the cost and risk of DEI, recent academic work has shown that there is little if any benefit to the practice.”
A series of studies put out by McKinsey, a management consultancy, say that companies that have higher percentages of women or people of various skin colors perform better than those who have a higher percentage of a single gender or race. These studies were titled “Why Diversity Matters” (2015), “Delivering Through Diversity” (2018), and “Diversity Wins” (2020).

The latest of studies, titled “Diversity Matters Even More,” says that “companies with representation of women exceeding 30 percent (and thus in the top quartile) are significantly more likely to financially outperform those with 30 percent or fewer. Similarly, companies in our top quartile for ethnic diversity show an average 27 percent financial advantage over others.”

These studies have been cited not only by private companies but also by the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, to justify instituting race-based and gender-based hiring and promotion programs.
However, a study published in March by Econ Journal Watch, authored by accounting professors Jeremiah Green at Texas A&M and John Hand at the University of North Carolina, examined the methodology used in the McKinsey studies and concluded that the reports were “erroneous” and “should not be relied on to support the view that U.S. publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.”
Based on the performance of companies in the S&P 500 index, Hand and Green found no statistically significant relationship between companies’ racial diversity and their sales, profits, or equity performance.

Outside of the private sector, the Biden administration has been actively implementing DEI programs for government employees.

Upon taking office, President Joe Biden issued a series of executive orders mandating that “as the Nation’s largest employer, the Federal Government must be a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, where all employees are treated with dignity and respect.”
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible workplaces yield higher-performing organizations,” the White House memorandum stated.

This effort, too, has sparked opposition.

In June, Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) introduced the Dismantle DEI Act, which would eliminate all DEI programs for federal employees.
“The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division,” Vance stated. “It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society.”

The Epoch Times reached out to John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Molson Coors, and Lowe’s for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

Hell, I just flat out hurt all over sometimes. Just enough to keep me awake mostly. Tell you what though loosing 30lbs really opened my eyes. Kinda stuck there but that helped so much.

Very good point. With age, we seem to constantly add on weight. When I lost 30-40 pounds last year, I felt so much better. Keeping it off seems to have "re-normalized" my body. America is so overweight and eats so poorly. Getting back to your fighting weight serves to highlight that. You look around at this sea of "Weble-People" all of which seem to be sick or lame or something. You want to scream, "Lose some weight, will ya!"

Judge Rules Illinois Public Transit Firearms Carry Ban Unconstitutional

The state ‘failed to meet their burden to show an American tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the Founding,’ he wrote.

A customer shops for a pistol in Tinley Park, Ill., on Dec. 17, 2012. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Jack Phillips
By Jack Phillips
9/3/2024
Updated:
9/3/2024


A federal judge recently ruled that Illinois’s ban on carrying guns in public transportation and in transportation facilities is unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court’s 2022 landmark decision.

“After an exhaustive review of the parties’ filings and the historical record, as required by Supreme Court precedent, the Court finds that Defendants failed to meet their burden to show an American tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the Founding that would allow Illinois to prohibit Plaintiffs—who hold concealed-carry permits—from carrying concealed handguns for self-defense onto the CTA and Metra,” U.S. District Judge Iain D. Johnston wrote in his Aug. 30 opinion, referring to two Chicago-area transportation systems.

The judge was cited the Supreme Court’s decision, N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which found a New York law unconstitutional and that the ability to carry a pistol in public was a right guaranteed under the Second Amendment. The decision also said that, in future decisions, the judiciary should evaluate firearms regulations in light of the “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Under the Supreme Court’s 2022 standard for seeing whether firearms regulations fall under the Constitution, the government must demonstrate that the measure is within U.S. historical traditions.

Treating “any place where the government would want to protect public order and safety as a sensitive place casts too wide a net ... [and] would seem to justify almost any gun restriction,” Johnston wrote.

He also rejected Illinois state attorneys’ arguments that the Bruen test did not apply in this case because the state, which owns the property, can regulate what individuals take onto its property.

“ndividual rights isn’t nullified on public property,” he wrote.

Further, he added that the court found that the Second Amendment only “protects against governmental—not private—intrusion on rights and liberties.”

His ruling applies only to four named plaintiffs in the case, meaning that it did not strike down the gun ban in public transit in the state.

The lawsuit was brought by three Chicago-area residents and one individual from DeKalb County who hold concealed carry licenses, according to court papers.

The defendants in the case are Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, DeKalb County State’s Attorney Rick Amato, DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin, Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx, and Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart.

In their 2022 filing, the plaintiffs argued that “because the public transportation carry ban prohibits persons from carrying a firearm while accessing public transportation, the ban severely restricts plaintiffs from exercising their right to self-defense outside of the home.”

“This directly violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution as held by the U.S. Supreme Court” in the Bruen and other ruling, they wrote.

Raoul had responded earlier this year in court papers saying that the plaintiffs did not sufficiently establish that restrictions on their ability to carry firearms on public transportation infringed on their Second Amendment rights. He also argued that the law is needed to protect public safety.
“All this suit would achieve is shifting the nature of the criminal charge from one statute to another; the desired conduct would still be unlawful,” his office wrote.

The Epoch Times has contacted David Sigale, the plaintiffs’ attorney, as well as Raoul’s office for comment on the ruling. It’s not clear whether Raoul, Foxx, or the other defendants are planning an appeal of Johnston’s decision.

Over the past few years, several legal challenges have been filed against Illinois’ gun laws, including a law that was signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in January 2023 that banned what he describes as “assault weapons” such as AR-15-style rifles and a number of other semiautomatic firearms. In July, the Supreme Court decided not to take up a challenge to the law.

Does anyone use an app on their phone or tablet to keep track of their prayer list. I have spilled coffee on my list yet again and see that there are several apps out there. I'm hoping someone has a suggestion of one that works for them

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Nope...Old school here
But
That's an interesting concept
Heck, people use the phones for everything else, why not to pray or remind us to do so!