Supreme Court Pounded a Stake Through the Vampire Rule

Wolford v. Lopez (2026) footnote 3 cited some of my published work. Hawaii's law that prohibited concealed weaoon licensees from entering a business without express permission of the owner violates the Second Amendment.  Other states with similar rules are going to have to come up with some other way to discourage licensees frok carrying. Perhaos requiring then to wear a yellow emblem of a gun on their clothes.

Also nice, a congratulations email from a DOJ official.

The Blazing World

One of the nice things about a detailed narrative history like this is how many ideas sloppily or simplified elsewhere get clarified. I have read descriptions of the Glorious Revolution that describe King James II Revolution the Great Seal of England into the Thames before boarding a ship to the continent. Also impulse in some references is that Parliament requested William of Orange come over and replace James in a peaceful and bloodless coup. Both of these seemed dramatic enough to make me skeptical.  The Blazing World corrected my understanding.  James did indeed throw the Great Seal of England into the Thames but some days before he escaped custody of William's forces and slipped out of the country.  Parliament did not invite William to take the throne, followed by a peaceful entry. William and a small army landed on the Kentish coast and marched to London.

If you are need of knowledge of this pivotal set of events that leads to our Revolution, Healey's book is detailed and interesting. 

Antifa Does Not Exist and Just Got 30+ Year Sentences

6/13/26 DOJ press release lists a dozen Antifa members sentenced to terms of 100, 70, 50, and 30 years.

Chief Judge O’ Connor said, “The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on Democracy. The defendants’ planning, staging, and execution of the attack led to the attempted murder of an officer who ironically is not even involved in enforcing immigration law.” 

Danger to democracy. Got that Biden. Your boys are the threat   

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

6/10/26 Philadelphia Inquirer writes about grade inflation in Philadelphia schools. Teachers are upset because students who aeldom show up for classes are passing. 

A fourth teacher who has worked in multiple types of schools in Philadelphia said the practice is not limited to the district.

She most recently taught at a city charter and said some of her middle-grades students were at kindergarten reading and math levels.

A combination of administration pressure to raise grades and sometimes administrators just altering the grades to a passing level means kids are moving up through the grades without acquiring the necessary skills or learning important life lessons, like showing up for classes.

I had my suspicions ad to what is driving this confirmed deeper in the article:

“The gap was huge,” the fourth teacher said. “The school’s explanation is that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline, and the older students are, the less likely they are to graduate. But they’re not meeting standards. The gaps are huge. It was very shocking to me how they would just pass the kids. I’m a parent, and I want my kids to be prepared properly.”

Everyone knows this whole "school-to-prison pipeline" idea was predicated on high discipline rates for black and Hispanic boys.  That failure to learn self-discipline mostly prepares them for criminal behavior could not possibly be part of the pipeline, could it? This insistence on meeting standards of benefit is racist leads to unprepared kids going to at worst jail.

Laffer Curve Vindicated?

6/23/26 Mountain States Policy Center points to reductions in the Montana state income tax rate and subsequent increases in total revenue. The Montana state tax agency's report seems to confirm this, showing a 211% increase in income tax revenue. However, CPI increased 43% from January 2014 to May 2026. There was a real inflation-adjusted increase in revenue. Why?

The Laffer Curve explanation is that increased business activity because of incentives to business activity. If you get to get keep more of your income, you are likely to take more risks. This increases gross profits and therefore taxable income.

Another explanation is that high-income people from other states (California, Washington, Colorado) are increasing taxable income. Even if this explains it, it is only a slight variation on Laffer Curve. High-income people choose states where they get to keep more of their income. Hence the influx to states without state income tax such as Tennessee (headed there Friday to buy a new home), Wyoming, Texas, Florida, and Texas.

Unless every state decides to go full Democrat and enact state income taxes at the same rate, lowering state income tax rates seems like a straightforward to increase revenues. Of course, that assumes this is the goal not the semisocialist "fairness" (envy) concept.

Names That Make Me Giggle

 6/22/26 CBS News:

Washington — A federal judge on Monday ruled the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it created a centralized database that contains Americans' private information, which she said has since been used by some states to incorrectly remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with a voting rights group and nonprofit that works to protect privacy in finding that the administration violated three different laws with its new system that includes Americans' citizenship data. [emphasis added]

Yes. Sparkle. Aside from the question as to whether the Administration violated the law to allow states to verify citizenship, the name alone makes me giggle. Look, a lot of silly names came out of the 1960s and 1970s. A friend had a classmate who had to bring in his birth certificate to show that his middle name was 

 

But I think I would have changed my name rather than sound like I forgot to stop using my stripper stage name. I speak as someone whose first and last names seem to be unspellable by some.

 

DOGE is Still Busy

Not much discussion since Musk left but what he started is still busy. The sheer volume of stuff is amazing. Not multibillion savings but add them all together and they add up to a lot. A professional services contract for a national health advisor in Senegal for $524K. I would love to know how much eventful ends up in Virginia.