Found at Bijourenaissenceman
In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.' - Hiram P. Maxim, inventor of the water cooled machine gun
I wonder which might make you wealthier; Inventing a working FTL space drive or inventing a functional, long-range death ray.
If we don't protest Trumps indictment, it's prima facie evidence that the Dems are right, Trump belongs in jail, and we tacitly agree. If we DO protest, they send their BLM/Antifa militias to throw bricks and firebombs while wearing red hats, which proves to the media that they're right and ALL republicans belong in jail. Right?
Early this month. No surprises yet this year.
Graph's getting crowded. I may have to do something about that.
In California anyway, and it isn't easy in any case. Seems this fellow was caught by his wife with another woman. With a blood alcohol of .11, he fled. The jury let him off the DUI charge since he claimed the driving was a necessity:
When a necessity defense is allowed by a trial judge, a defendant must prove that:
1. He acted in an emergency to prevent a significant bodily harm or evil to himself or someone else;
2. He had no adequate legal alternative;
3. The defendant’s driving under the influence and/or with a blood alcohol of .11/.11 did not create a greater danger than the one avoided;
4. When the defendant acted, he actually believed that the act of driving under the influence and/or with a blood alcohol of .11/.11 was necessary to prevent the threatened harm or evil;
5. A reasonable person would also have believed that driving under the influence and/or with a blood alcohol of .11/.11 was necessary under the circumstances; and
6. The defendant did not substantially contribute to the emergency.
Full story here, but behind the WSJ paywall.
Here's the latest graph. XL is fighting me or I've forgotten how to do these things. Probably the latter. I'll work on fixing it. Jan check total is 2673921 so you know where to look for the single dot on the chart. Click to enlarge.
Here's a repost of a comment found at Insty:
“Omg I wish establishment republicans would take their love of getting beaten into the bedroom and then maybe they wouldn’t get off on losing to democrats.”
Hear! Hear!
The basic position of the NRC remains unchanged after 70 years or so of trying to outright ban the building of any new nuclear facility in the United States. In their proposed rulemaking, they describe a "likely" scenario thusly:
The conditions it postulates are impossible, and the rules are impossible to meet. Among the assumptions: The reactor suffers the worst possible accident, is promptly repaired, and has the same accident again the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, every year for as long as it is licensed, 40 years. Residents of the area never move, so they are available to soak up the cumulative dose of radiation, every year for 50 years. Residents never die of anything else over the course of the 50 years, so a person who is 65 years old at the time of the first accident is assumed to live to be 115, during which time he or she soaks up doses from each of the next 39 catastrophic accidents.
Eminently likely, no? Here's the complete article.
This from Insty:
“This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit. - Glen Reynolds
This description of the participants is the best and most succinct I've seen to date. I'm shamelessly stealing it for use at any opportunity, and I call on everyone else to join in. Throne sniffers, indeed.
“We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force? The fact is if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that,” Biden said.
Use the kinder, gentler shooting technique?
Winding up the year with a bang (so to speak)
The final number for December is 3.036.531 which is second best for December. Let's face it, 2020 and 2021 are going to be hard to beat.
Scott Adams on his latest podcast, described something he calls Narrative Poisoning which establishes a mindset favorable to specific viewpoints, and goes into some detain as to just how it's done. Relating to revelations in the twitter files, it seems as though there's a noticable path for certain specific narratives. It looks like this
CIA
DNC
FAKE NEWS
SOCIAL MEDIA
CITIZENS
Now any conspiracy theory that originates with the CIA is automatically suspect, but it now appears that a large number of Twitter employees, of high rank, moved there from jobs at intelligence agencies of similar rank. Their obvious shortcomings notwithstanding, the CIA does have some notable persuasion skills. Several examples are cited, and the obvious effort at persuading people to a specific mindset was called out, interestingly, by a Twitter employee from China, who was familiar with the process. The general process leads the targeted audience to take favored positions in spite of evidence that they are seriously flawed. The link is a fun watch.
On a related note, a chatbot, ChatGPT, that learns what it knows from the internet of news and social media, was run through multiple politicalpreference tests, and was consistently identified as having a strongly progressive bent. This suggests to me, anyway, that the political direction of a people can be easily, if slowly, be turned in whatever direction that a small number of the people in the right positions, desire. The Chinese refer to this as a “Long March”. Short summary: It works.
The chatbot is very popular, and gets to interact with people asking it questions day and night. Its method for generating answers is to scan the web, find the consensus, and put together an answer based on this. Real people know to use this approach with caution, and assign weights to web-derived information based on relative credibility of the source. On average, I'm guessing that the percentage of BS integrated into the mix is going to be higher for the AI than for real humans, who have more experience at this. How much difference is TBD for sure. Persuasively written BS is more persuasive than poorly written gospel truth. Nevertheless the Chatbot is a great demonstration of how the public can be persuaded to a particular viewpoint, however flawed.
If you want some group to give you money, you can promise to help them, or you can promise to not hurt them. The best models for this are government and organized crime. Government starts out by promising to pave the roads and put up street lights. The mob starts out by promising to not break windows or burn your business down. Guess which offer is the most persuasive. Government has moved up to suggesting that monies donated to certain political parties will defer new regulations that would have the same effect as a Molotov cocktail through the window. Republicans say they won't support the regulations. Satisfied that they are safe from the Right, businesses see no reason to pay the protection money to them.
Man, I'm really slacking off on this blog.
Anyway here's the numbers thru November, and yup, we're about where you'd expect us to be. The Donks have discovered that turning their Brownshirts loose, while it does frighten conservatives, simply inspires us to buy more guns and ammo. Now they have to figure out how to take them away from us. They got one-party rule in the last elections, but the Supremes are slapping them back at every move. Anyone care to speculate what they'll do now that they've lost the House?
Click to enlarge.
Still following a "normal' curve in spite of Slo Joe's blather about banning so-called "assault Weapons".
Sorry I'm late, but other stuff is proving distracting.
Not calling out the party brownshirts (Antifa et. al.) has brought the curve back to the steady rise we've come to expect. (Upper graph) Rising crime rates may well accelerate things as we move along although I'm surprised we haven't seen this earlier.
