Category: Uncategorized

We’ve Been Saying This for YEARS

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They’re SAFETY EQUIPMENT:

Spokane Police will add suppressors to rifles, citing concerns about hearing damage

Pullquote:

Rifles carried by Spokane police on patrol will soon be equipped with suppressors, a move the department says will protect officers and civilians from hearing damage.

“It’s nothing more than like the muffler you put on your car,” said Lt. Rob Boothe, the range master and lead firearms instructor for the department.Outfitting the department’s 181 service rifles with suppressors will protect the city from the legal costs of worker’s compensation claims filed by officers, as well as from potential lawsuits filed by bystanders whose ears are exposed to firearm blasts. The sound of a fired shot can be louder than the takeoff of jet engines, the department says.

So why do we ordinary citizens have to put in an application that requires a photograph, fingerprints, a background check and a $200 tax for a piece of SAFETY EQUIPMENT?

The .gov Can’t Keep Up with Current Demand…

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…so hey! Let’s expand the program with UNIVERSAL background checks!

Gun background checks are on pace to break record in 2019

200,000 checks on Black Friday alone. Enough to arm the United States Marine Corps.

However,

FBI never completes hundreds of thousands of gun checks

So it makes PERFECT sense to double or triple the number of background checks! Right?

Why is it that the .gov is the only entity that when it fails at something it doubles-down?

There are No “Solutions” – Only “Trade-offs”

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Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn

Wind turbines kill endangered bird species, electric cars require toxic batteries and run off of coal-fired power plants, The infrastructure necessary to provide charging stations for plug-in EV’s will cost billions and require even more power generation, but no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

Engineering isn’t about “solutions,” it’s about picking the best options and minimizing the costs of the trade-offs.

Politics is only about getting elected and re-elected. Politicians can promise the moon without any concern about the costs – monetary, environmental, social. And they depend on a public ignorant to the realities. Shouts of “Consensus!” are used to ensure that no one opposed gets listened to.

That’s not how science – or engineering – work. Reality is what remains even if you don’t believe in it.

Second Thoughts on the Second Amendment?

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Remember, over the period from 1933 to 1945 the Nazi regime alone murdered approximately 12,000,000 people. In the United States, at our current rate of criminal homicide, it would take 695 years to kill as many people as the German government did in twelve. The Soviet Union? By one estimate between 1917 and 1987, that government killed approximately 62,000,000. Communist China? Between 1949 and 1987, 76,000,000. (Who knows how many since, with the Uyghurs and Hong Kong.)

Individuals kill retail. Governments do it wholesale. As 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in one of his best dissents:

All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

The residents of Hong Kong understand that now. And apparently some Americans are starting to grasp it, too.

Quote of the Day – Oren Litwin Edition

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From the comments here many many moons ago when he was still a PhD candidate in Political Science, (and followed this blog) Oren Litwin wrote this:

If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.

Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.

This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.

 Yup.  We’re doomed.

Quote of the Day – Attorney General Bill Barr Edition

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From his Federalist Society speech last week:

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

I’ve been saying this since at least 2010. See: Al Gore, Pied Piper of the Unconstrained Vision, and Human Redemption Through Government.  This is holy war – jihad, if you will – for the Left.  This is why the Right is not wrong, not misguided, not ignorant, but evil.  And every Republican President after Eisenhower is literally Hitler.

Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

 Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”