Fun With Headlines: The Presidency!

From National Review:

Senator Dianne Feinstein Dead at 90

Divine Intervention I say! Works like this; Gov Newsom appoints Kamala Harris to replace Mrs Feinstein where she will only have to keep her mouth shut and vote the party line in the Senate. Lifetime tenure is assured. Slo Joes handlers will have him announce that Mrs Harris will be replaced by Gov Newsom, who will take over Harris' role as border and gun control Czar. About 2 months later, Slo Joe will announce his resignation and retirement, moving Newsom up to the presidency where he will become the party nominee. Again, tenure is assured, and as a by-product, all investigations into the Biden crime family will be dropped.

Smooth, seamless, and with a minimal number of unfortunate suicides. 

QOTD - Guns

 Found at Breitbart:

While announcing the launch of an executive level gun control office–the Office of Gun Violence Prevention–President Joe Biden called again for a ban on “assault weapons” and said, “If you need 80 shots in a magazine you shouldn’t own a gun.”

Gee, Joe, if you have to disarm your constituents in order to stay in office, maybe you shouldn't be holding that office, ya think?

Examples:

"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings." - Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), Japanese Shogun

And here is the complete quote:

Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the "omnipotence of war". Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed.

Mao Tse-tung
November 6, 1938  

NICS Checks, Aug 23

Nothing new to report. No threats are being taken seriously, crime is up, prosecutions are down, sales are about as expected.

Auditing the Vote

 Here's a breakdown of alleged irregularities from Georgia

Melissa Tate

@TheRightMelissa

GEORGIA Fraud was the worst of all: 2,056 felons illegally voted 66,248 under 18 voted 2,423 weren’t registered at all 1,043 used a PO Box 4,926 voted past the reg. date 10,315 died before the election 395 voted in two states 15,700 moved out of state 40,279 changed county

I don't know about "worst of all" they're up against some stiff competition. Assume they're numbered, 1 thru 9, top to bottom.

1. Valid complaint. Felons generally can't vote.

2. Possibly valid. Same day registration may cause this to look funny.

3. Valid complaint. You MUST be 18 or older to vote

4. Valid complaint. I know of no place that allows a voter to use a P.O. box as an address.

5. Maybe. Same day registration allows you to just walk in and vote.

6. Maybe. If you die after sending in your absentee ballot, then it counts.

7. Valid. Seems to be popular with "snowbirds".

8. Maybe. Depends on exactly when you moved. If you move before getting your ballot, then you can't vote.

9. Maybe. See #8 above.

 Looking only at the most egregous, that's 71,223 votes that should never have been counted. Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. This is a very top-level audit of the vote in Georgia, and is the sort of thing that is easily and quickly done. It should be routinely done everywhere. 

NICS Checks July 23

 Here is the rather unsurprising number for July. Looks like we're back on a "normal" curve with no alarming news breaking out.

Investing With A.I.

 

It's been 6 months since I asked ChatGBT to pick 10 equities for a hypothetical investment. It disavowed any expertise in the field, picked 10*, 5 of which were tech stocks, and my theoretical investment has since made me a theoretical 28%. Thinking that a good investment advisor would watch the markets and move the monies around from time to time, I asked it the same question again. It picked 8 of the original 10 picks, and dropped GOOGL and META in favor of JPMorgan and Home Depot. I adjusted my portfolio to remove the 2 and added some declared dividends and the newly favored equities. Now I guess I wait another 6 months to see what this gets me.

Since I'm already paying a boffin to manage my finances for me, it would probably be silly of me to fire him and follow the AIs advice on no record at all. Still, if I had, I'd have recovered all my losses from the Bidenomics "boom".

Managing an imaginary account like this is a bit more difficult than doing it for real. Since it's all imaginary, I have to make all the adjustments to the account myself, and Yahoo finance gets confused when I do a trade. In real life, I'd just call my broker, execute the buy and sell, and get a monthly statement showing the results. O.K. it's not THAT hard, but I'm lazy.

On 8/1/2023 8:31 PM, David Aitken wrote:

Managing an imaginary account is easy. It's when you have real money on the line that it gets emotional, and hard.

Well, yes. Any project involves work and money and when you eliminate the money part, it's easy to not get too attached to the project. Using AI like this is definitely an experiment with no precedence and so I'm not going to take this for a full ride until I'm convinced it won't blow up on the pad. Next year, maybe I'll try it on a small scale with real money. So far, though, it's working well "in the lab".

The other problem here is that I may not be able to "cross the same river twice" as GPT is itself an ongoing thing undergoing continuous changes. The 1/24/2023 version I started with is probably not the 7/23/23 version I just used to generate an update. GPT-4 is now the current thing, but GPT-0 is still available. Or is it now GPT-0.6?

An aerospace engineers approach to the problem. Excess caution -> Paralysis by analysis. At what point do I take the plunge? I'm thinking after 2 consecutive winning 6 month runs.

* Original picks: AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, FB, JNJ, PG, V, IVV, VTI. Don't recognize some of them? Go to Yahoo finance and type in those ticker Ids.

D.C. to honor Jack Smith with Statue

 Shown here the proposed statue of Jack Smith, prosecutor of Donald Trump to be installed in front of the D.C. jail where several dozen protesters are being held without charges:

Shown: The D.C. Jail with proposed statue of prosecutor Smith in front.

Proposed statue of Prosecutor Smith. The completed statue is available at a very reasonable cost and only requires that the circle D logo be added to the pediment, and the head be revised slightly.

The Green Energy Scam Redux

 Back in the '90s, the big deal in the Green world was "clean coal" stuff that had very low non-fuel elements included in it. There were 2 sources of this in the whole world: Northern California, and Indonesia. The Riady family in Indonesia had a sweet deal selling their coal to California which had mandated the stuff for all their coal plants, their inability to produce enough of it notwithstanding. Prospectors, however, discovered a huge deposit of the stuff in southern Utah that promised to make the U.S. independent of Indonesian coal. The Riadys countered this by donating heavily to the Clinton campaign, and when Slick Willie got elected, he declared the area in Utah with the coal to be the Grand Escalade National Monument. All mining was forbidden, including some that had been going on for some time, and the Riadys kept their income stream. So did the Clintons.

Fast forward to today: Coal in any form is now the (pardon the expression) "bete noir" of the Greenies, and Nuclear power is now looking like a workable answer, but only to people who know what they're talking about. The Biden administration is taking a page from the Clintons, and looking to declare the U.S. biggest uranium deposits to be a National Monument. In Arizona. Stinking Desert National Monument maybe? Not to worry, Uranium can be purchased from close friends like the Russians and maybe some African states. 

NICS Checks June 23

 The graph continues to droop. Mostly this is the summer doldrums.

XL continues to thwart me. The upper graph is annual totals. The Y axis is supposed to show the years. Last column is a projection for 2023.

Affirmative Action, Out Loud

The DNC has never forgiven the Republicans for freeing their slaves, but it's been gauche to just come out and say so. Sometimes, though, someone lets slip the truth. 

New DNC logo

 How things are shaping up: The old hammer and sickle logo having fallen somewhat out of favor,, the left will change their logo and hope you aren't reminded of where it came from. This one would also look fine in the upper left corner of a green flag, a rainbow flag, or any of several others doncha think?

 We used to institutionalize the insane. Now we institutionalize the insanity. 

Sweeden Recognizes Sex As Sport

 Fun with headlines department:

Sweden recognizes sex as a sport; first European Sex Championship to take place on June 8

According to the report, 70% of the votes from the crowd will be included during the final evaluation, while the remaining 30% will come from the judges’ votes. The European Sex Championship candidates will compete in 16 disciplines, including seduction, oral sex, penetration, Appearance, and so on.

Rumor has it that teams from Afghanistan and Scotland have been rejected as the governing committee as yet does not recognize sex between men and either goats or sheep as legitimate. Both countries have appealed. 

U.S. teenagers eagerly anticipate formal recognition of the sport into high school sports. 

NICS Checks May 23

 Again, no real surprises or panics despite Biden declaring he will ban assault weapons, etc, etc.

Gun Law Overreach - Term Limits?

 Seems New Jersey is going for the title of possessor of the most obnoxious gun laws in the country, having passed some that make even possession of a Daisy BB gun a felony. 

I don't see this withstanding any court challenge at the federal level, but due to the way the system works, they get to keep it on the books for 2-3 years while cases drag their way from one court to another until the SCOTUS tosses the lot of them. Of course at that point, the NJ legislature simply passes a variant of the unconstitutional laws, and they get another 2-3 year run of illegal gun control.

I thing that if a legislature passes any law that is subsequently found to be unconstitutional in the supreme court, all the legislators at the state legislature who voted in favor of it should be removed from legislative office, and forbidden from ever holding such office in perpetuity. Should also include the governor who signed it.