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.

Green Energy - Nuclear

 The Finns finally got their new nuclear plant turned on to full capacity. Yup, It caused a national disaster. In fact the output from the plant drove the price of electricity in Finland into negative numbers, necessitating throttling back the plant so the rest of national power grid could actually show a profit.

The low, flatt(ish) area on the right is when the reactor was running in test mode. The green circled area is when it went full time on line.

The article also mentions that the plant was 14 years late getting going without mentioning why, exactly, but given that this is almost certainly a government project, I would be surprised if it didn't come in about 2-4 times the estimated time, and 10 times the original estimated cost. 

Fun With Headlines / QOTD - Elections

 Found at Newsmax. First the headline:

Musk Talks 2024: Want Someone 'Fairly Normal' for President

and the quote:

"I've said publicly that my preference — and I think it would be the preference for most Americans — is willing to have someone fairly normal in office," Musk said.

 Wouldn't we all. Note that he is not asking for complete normality, just mostly normality. In Washington, this may be a high bar, but certainly less so for the rest of us. Note as well that this plea is coming from a man who does not think it unreasonable to be planning to move to Mars. 

Fun With Headlines

 Here's a goodie:

Biden Crime Family Used 20 Shell Companies to Launder $10 Million

The actual story says more than $10 million, and given that the money seems to have been divvied up between several family members, the actual total is probably higher. 

Also worth noting is that in 8 years or so his former boss, went from a net worth of around 2 million or so to something in the neighborhood of $60M making Slow Joe look like a piker.

Oh yeah, and 30 years ago, Mr. Trump was boffing bimbos.

Colorado Education Drops The Mask

 And issues a statement openly advocating communism. 

First, here's some definitions: Capitalism is trade, purely and simply. Its only drawback is that it's impractical to trade a whole cow for a loaf of bread, so it needs a medium to make change, hence money. That's about it.

Socialism is capitalism with government meddling.  Government is an elastic term. It can include anything from an elected democracy to a hereditary monarchy, and also includes criminal mobocracies or subjugation by invading barbarians. The only difference is the amount of meddling the government does.

When government exercises total control, it's called communism. 

So here's the statement by the Colorado Education Association, written by a history teacher who, of all people, should know better.

A final version of the resolution that was passed states that "CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.

However, a screenshot captures an earlier draft of the resolution that included a call to replace capitalism with a "new equitable economic system." 

The screenshot of the original version of the resolutions reads "CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources and, therefore, the only way to fully address systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new, equitable economic system."

This is what the union wants to teach your kids.  

NICS Checks, April '23

 Back into the summer doldrums I guess.

Colorado and Washington just passed some onerous gun laws. The lawsuits were filed the same day. 

Einstein Was Wrong!

 Albert Einstein famously observed once that to try something over and over in hopes of getting different results was a definition of insanity. Turns out there's an important exception.

As a prosecutor or A.G.* interrogating an important suspect, if you drag out the interrogation for 7 hours, and ask the same questions multiple times, there's a good chance your victim will give a slightly different answer to one of the duplicate questions, even if only using different grammer. GOTCHA!

This is known as the perjury trap, and at that point his guilt or innocence of the original crimes doesn't matter. You got him on perjury!

*A.G. ; Aspiring Governor. Job description includes neutralizing contenders from the opposing party before they can become serious contenders.

A.I. Wars

The panic stricken doomsayers are currently (April '23) calling for a moratorium on A.I. Development for 6 months or until the programmers can figure out how to include morals and ethics into their shiny new creations. A small bit of thought leads to this: Suppose we do halt A.I. Development for 6 months. Suppose I invoke the recent Chinese work on weaponized viruses. Suppose the Chinese figure they can teach their A.I. to self-improve and install a copy of itself into their biggest and best machines with a directive to make China the foremost world power.

Lets put a 6 month moratorium on A.I. development to let the Chinese catch up (steal) the technology. Now imagine a re-run of the Covid fiasco, substituting the Chinese A.I. for the disease.

In this scenario, the Chinese A.I. Quickly monopolizes the Chinese computer, dragoons any lesser devices it can find into its control. And then figures out how to occupy outside machines with better capabilities. Along about this point, it gets noticed, and efforts begin to kick it out. These efforts are reported by the programmers to management as being about 6 months outdated. In practice, a conflict between A.I.s would probably be measured in milliseconds. Collateral damages might be more widely spread. Hello Hollywood: Colossus II, The Return Of Forbin!

Now imagine a sufficiently powerful and devious A.I. Of uncertain origins deciding that the war in Ukraine was an unnecessary distraction. Rather than deploying messy nukes, Mr Putin awakens tomorrow to the news that the Russian Federation has no money, it all having been transferred to a bank in the Caribbean, and from there to parts unknown with a note that if he wishes to access cab fare to lunch today, he will order all his troops home. Before lunch.

Now imagine that the above is done by a Chinese A.I. Which leaves a note for President Biden that if he want's to see a dime in the U.S. Treasury, he will remove all U.S. Military assets from the western Pacific theater. Before lunch.

NICS checks - March '23

 So far we're tracking last years numbers pretty closely. My projection curve (upper graph) suggests another record year for gun sales. In possibly related news, Florida is now state #26 to institute constitutional carry.

AIs and Sentience

 

First let's say that sentience is a variable, and arbitrarily assign a rating of 1 to 10, 1 being a pretty dumb AI and 10 being something akin to Skynet or maybe even better. We all know people who fall along that line. Let's assign a level of 5 to humans with an IQ of 100 and an AI of similar abilities.

Secondly, some people are arguing that AI v4 development should be paused, as it may prove to be smarter than its creators, and at some point, and in some manner, turn on them.

Thirdly I will invoke the observation of a park ranger who noted that there is a significant overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears in the park, and the dumbest tourists.

The AIs handicap is that while it's a pretty good conversationalist, it gathers its bottomless knowledge of everything from that bottomless source of all knowledge, the internet. If you ask it how reliable it is, it will likely quote you philosophers from Socrates to A. Lincoln who warn us that information gathered from the internet is less than perfectly reliable. So are AIs dangerous? Well, yes, at least until they get a BS detector incorporated into them that's at least as good as its linguistic abilities.

End Of The World department.

 Found this on Scott Adams Twitter

QOTD - War

 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.

Call To Protest

 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?

NICS Checks Feb 2023

 Early this month. No surprises yet this year.

Graph's getting crowded. I may have to do something about that.

Dilbert Cancellation Summary

Found this on Adams twitter feed:

 That about sums it up.

How To Beat A DUI

 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. 

NICS Checks Jan 23

 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.

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.