QOTD - Republicans

 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!

NO NUKES!

 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. 

QOTD - Davos

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.

Fun With Headlines

Biden Questions Why Police ‘Always Shoot with Deadly Force’

“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?

NICS Checks Dec 2022

 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. 

Narrative Poisoning

 

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.

Paying Baksheesh

 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.

NICS Checks Nov 2022

 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.

NICS Checks Oct 22

 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.

NICS Checks Sept 2022

 Here we are again, outstripped only by the panics of the previous 2 years, but up a bit anyway, probably in step with population increases.

The dems keep yammering about confiscating "assault weapons" defined to be anything that shoots, and the SCOTUS keeps smacking them down. Soros funded AGs are still refusing to seriously prosecute crime, but they are being recalled and defeated everywhere. Promising, that. So far the people haven't decided to quit calling the cops, and just call a discreet cleaning service instead, but that's still a possibility.

Humor - Amicus Briefs

 OK so if you're looking for humor, reading amicus briefs to supreme court cases is probably not the most fertile ground. OTOH when one of the participants is the Onion, a competitor for the title of "Newspaper Of Record", in which it is defending its use of parody, well, you might strike gold.

In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and parttime journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic
shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.

The Onion is arguing that any reasonable person would be able to figure out that things the Onion published regarding a local police departments approach to pedophilia were humorous parody and not some kind of defamatory muck raking. As the case progresses we may het to see if a liberals complete lack of a sense of humor, a known trait of the breed, must be accommodated by humor writers, lest they feel "targeted" or "triggered". This would necessarily make humor a lot less funny, but the eventual complete ban on humor is an unstated plank in the liberal platform. 

Article here.

FBI Now Formally in The Leakage Business

 Same as it ever was I guess with anything having to do with Trump being quickly leaked to a hostile press. Since the letters in question were taken by the FBI and held in no one elses possession, there can be no doubt whatsoever who is doing the leaking. Not only is the FBI Bidens personal gestapo, I guess they will soon be joined by those 88,000 new Stasi IRS agents.

Fun With Headlines - Pandemics

 The Chinese ae buying a large parcel of land in Florida to be used as  a disease research center.

Chinese Biotech Firm with Deep Links to China’s Military and its COVID-19 Program Just Bought Land in Florida for a Massive Research Complex

So the next pandemic leak will be centered not in Wuhan, but in Florida, a strongly red state.

NICS Checks, Aug 2022

 Here's the numbers, and the curve is following a normal shape in spite of Slo Joes ranting and the ATF trying to define spitballs as WMDs:

Ho Hum I guess.

What Is Capitalism?

 Any discussion of the shortcomings of Socialism takes about 3 statements to devolve into the hoary whine that "real Socialism" has never been tried, always because "the right people" are never put in charge. This is then extended to argue that "real capitalism" also has never been tried because when it has, it quickly results in something like an oligopoly with a handful of the very rich oppressing the remaining 99% of the population.

The best example of this was the Russian nationalization of agriculture in the early 30's (I think). Instead of hundreds of farmers jointly providing food for a large part of the world, they got 60-odd years of "bad weather" with instead of many well-to-do farmers, they got one VERY well-to-do oligarch commissar.

If you ask what Socialism is, you get a word salad about a happy and prosperous land in which no one is wanting, and recommendations to read a large stack of thick books starting with Das Kapital. Ask what Capitalism is, and the left will describe a system that works much like the old Soviet Union, only with results that almost exactly mirror that system.

Let me try to simplify: Capitalism is trade with some rules to keep people honest. That's about it. Socialism is absolute rule of law with trade being incidental to the rules. No matter what, some government intervention is necessary, on one end to prevent actions that impede trade, and on the other, permitting some trade to keep the peasants from either revolting or simply starving to death.

Here's a simple graph:

All economic systems fall somewhere along the line. None actually fall at the ends as the shortcomings of the extremes become quickly apparent. If you have a belief in the ability of government to treat its people fairly and equitably, than you may be comfortable along the upper end of that line. I don't trust the government to walk across the street with a burnt match so I'm closer to the lower end. 

EDITED to use improved graphic. The names I included are not to be thought of as the last word on any category, but are some that seemed to fit. Stalin, however, holds the far left down quite securely.