Smooth, seamless, and with a minimal number of unfortunate suicides.
Friday, September 29, 2023
Fun With Headlines: The Presidency!
Sunday, September 24, 2023
QOTD - Guns
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
Monday, September 4, 2023
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.
Friday, August 25, 2023
Auditing the Vote
Here's a breakdown of alleged irregularities from Georgia
Thursday, August 3, 2023
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.
Wednesday, August 2, 2023
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.
Friday, July 28, 2023
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.
Monday, July 3, 2023
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.
Friday, June 30, 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.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
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?
Monday, June 5, 2023
Saturday, June 3, 2023
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.
Sunday, May 28, 2023
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.