A lot of what ppl are mentioning in this thread are all part and parcel. I am only speculating, but there's a little bit more to it.
Ammo reloaders are also finding it hard to get ahold of primers.
I think some of it goes back to Obongo wearing out the Military, and then Trump kicking in big budget bucks for resupply.
Between Obongo buying up mass quantities of handgun ammo when he was in office (for what exactly, we never got a satisfactory answer), Trump military resupply, Covid shutting down factories, and record numbers of sales, you get what we got right now: A 2 year wait on orders for some factories.
I hope it continues. I hope the demand is constant and sustained, and the firearms and ammo business has to expand bigly in the coming weeks, months, and years.
That more than anything will fuck over the gun controllers and gun grabbers.
Maybe. This thick in the weeds, anything is possible. But, I try not to veer too far away from simplest explanations, once I've accepted one or two things that are "nuts."
So, accepting this guy is truthful... what's more likely? That he's a well connected survivor like James Clapper, and a secret cabal of military intelligence is purposely putting it out there with insufficient identity masking? Or it's someone else much less publicly visible and the identity masking is more than sufficient for that person.
I don't know Clapper personally, but I've conversed with people who knew him before he was DNI. One thing that stands out, is the guy is very, very, very capable in a metaphorical knife-fight. I remember when he was first put forward, the chattering classes were just jabbering away about how he was going to be fresh meat for CIA and Panetta. Nope. Panetta was out of there in a matter of months. Crushed.
Maybe Clapper had nothing to do with it. But the man's had a track record of sidestepping and shanking civilian bureaucrats his whole career in military intel. Gonna be honest, if you think you're hearing admiration here, you are. It has made his subsequent visible track record under Obongo very uncomfortable for me personally-- trying to reconcile what I've known about the man prior to that, with what's out there now.
I guess in the end, when "they" get you, "they" get you. And there's only so long you can dance with the devil. Honestly, I hope he really is some kind of deep throat, looking for redemption and some kind of retirement that doesn't include prison. But, if I'm honest about the world we live in, I have to think nah-- probably not. Too unlikely.
A big part of the tesla business model involves hoovering up state and federal business grants, tax subsidies, corporate welfare, meant to encourage "green" business and power initiatives.
Some would say, there is no tesla, without the corporate welfare. Also, you can occasionally find bellyaching amongst the lib media about how tesla doesn't always live up to the spirit or the letter of these grants. So far, none of these stories have gained much traction.
Most hard core conservatives are inclined to despise/distrust any business that revolves around corporate welfare.
In this case, however, I am willing to make an exception as it seems to me the money truly is being ultimately used to fund something worthwhile and actionable, that I feel we should be doing anyway. If tesla wasn't there to soak up these stupid green eco business grants, some other shitstain company would be-- and you can bet your ass they'd be turning around and spending the money on... I don't know... transgender voting rights initiatives or some other bullshit.
Bottom line: our tax dollars would still be getting used, but to a much worse end.
I've made peace with his govt. welfare behavior.
I rationalize TESLA's whole thing as a sort of tax on stupid libs, taking their money and converting it into funding for manned space exploration.
Once you turn that corner, it becomes rather sublime. It is these same assclowns that cry out: "How can we pay for rockets and bases on maaaars, when there's pooooor ppl on earth?"
Musk is taking their money, and spending it on rockets. Sucks that he can't do it up front. Sucks that he can't just get government funding in a straightforward fashion. But, if he could, we wouldn't need him. NASA would be on Mars already, and we'd have flying cars, rocket backpacks, and who knows what the hell else, while getting ready to step out into the outer solar system and really mine the shit out of some asteroids.
Sheila Jackson Lee is a long time embarrassment, kept in office by the most crooked of district lines, and voters of color that will vote any way they're told to by democratic operatives.
OR
There's a shitload of voter fraud and we need mandatory ID to straighten out.
She's roundly mocked, even by democrat organs like The Daily Beast, which made hay over her assertion that the constitution was 400 years old. Yes, older than the Nation.
She's also the one that wanted NASA to move the Mars Rover over to where Neil Armstrong and them had planted the American flag and get a good shot of it. The MARS Rover. A shot of the Moon flag. Sigh.
She also gets her Vietnams and Koreas mixed up. Talking about a North Vietnam living peacefully beside a South Vietnam. (South Vietnam no longer exists. It was absorbed by force after the US pulled out. Now it's all just Vietnam.)
Though, come to think of it, North Korea doesn't live THAT peacefully as a neighbor either, with a long, steady history of kidnapping South Korean citizens and other saboteur/gangster type behavior.
There's also many well-documented reports of her being an utter cunt, because her district is so cushy and safe.
Long story short, Sheila Jackson Lee sucks, and has sucked for a very long time.
I strongly suspect, however, that if an investigative body truly wished to, they could find some evidence with which to lock her up. There's no way she's clean.
CNN's had plenty of embarrassing episodes-- but this has actually been convincingly debunked.
The "blue screen" is actually the wall of the hotel-- which at the time WAS painted blue.
It does have a studio atmosphere, because CNN basically had a small army of grips and studio techs there at the hotel near the Dhahran airport, miles and miles away from where infantry and tanks were expected to clash.
Plywood and other crap was erected for wind and dust, and monitors and other equipment was set up, making it more of a remote studio, than some raw liveshot out in the boonies. You can hear it in the way the guys are all babbling about their take out orders and so forth.
Not a studio in Georgia, sorry pedes. Was CNN perhaps exaggerating the man's exposure to danger? Maybe. But I would suggest that this was a few stops higher up a slippery slope before they started actually faking liveshots.
My take: You have a problem.
The problem is, you cannot go back to being ignorant again.
Short of blunt force trauma, you cannot unlearn something once you've taken it on board.
You are no longer the person you were before, and it is literally impossible to go back to him. He was blind. You have vision.
Doesn't mean you can't calm yourself down, and get a little more zen about things-- but if you set out to recapture the old self, you will ultimately fail.