We’re entering an era of cargo cult peer review. It now appears that even major scientific publishers are peddling products that have all the trappings of a scholarly journal but are fundamentally hollow at core. As it is, the majority of research published in the scientific literature could be wrong.
I, an electrical and software engineer, have gone through climate change papers and found serious errors. For example, one paper had the total power delivered to a sphere in space (Earth) off by, exactly, a factor of two. They also called it energy, even though it was expressed in units of power. I would almost give them a pass on the second point since in this particular context you can easily convert from one to the other but they should have at least given a word in passing that they knew what they wrote was incongruous.
When we get to papers written about gun ownership, except those written by criminologists and some economists, it’s frequently so bad that you can close your eyes and point at a page and find something wrong with the paragraph.
I trust science as a process. I don’t trust the academics in our present day colleges and universities.—Joe[
A fucking southern California Latin American judge just cited fighting Communism as a valid reason for owning standard capacity magazines and has just struck down California’s magazine size limit ban.WHAT FUCKING DIMENSION DID I JUST ENTER INTO?
satexaskommando @DogalRorn Tweeted on March 29, 2019 [That’s a valid question. I have no answer.—Joe]
This decision is a freedom calculus decided long ago by Colonists who cherished individual freedom more than the subservient security of a British ruler. The freedom they fought for was not free of cost then, and it is not free now.
He tears apart the state of California’s argument and uses their own evidence against them. He calls them out on their use of Mother Jones as a biased, as well as unusable source, for a court ruling. A magazine ban is such a burden on the rights of the people that it must pass strict scrutiny. It does not pass strict scrutiny. It doesn’t not pass intermediate scrutiny. It cannot even be considered rational in the face of all the evidence showing such bans do not increase public safety.
Many of the arguments and logic used can be easily translated to protecting modern sporting rifles.
If they can do this with a piece of plastic, then they’ll be able to do it with another piece of plastic and another piece of metal, another piece of plastic. And it’s just systematically taking away Second Amendment rights.
Banks serve customers who are geographically and politically diverse, and it is wrong to use essential banking services as a way to choke off such services to lawful, creditworthy businesses.
I write to express my concern with recent news reports suggesting that large banks may withhold access to credit and services to customers and companies that are operating businesses that comply with federal and state law (and in some cases, are engaged in Constitutionally-protected activities), but are politically disfavored.
Mike Crapo Senate Banking Committee Chairman March 26, 2019 Mike Crapo warns big banks against caving to progressives on guns [The last few days sort of feels like the adults have walked into the room where the bullies have been tormenting the other kids for days and getting away with it. I would like to see the bullies taken out to the woodshed and get their bare bottoms spanked until they couldn’t sit comfortably for a week. But I’d settle for them just leaving us alone in the future.—Joe]
His public admission that “gun safety” is just “gun control” with a fancy new dress is important. It’s vital to understanding the way anti-gunners try to use manipulative language to try and change the conversation on guns and the Second Amendment. They can claim to be morally superior, but it’s worth noting that we don’t rephrase what we stand for just to put people off-guard in discussions. We tend to admit outright that we’re pro-gun.
One election after the next, we have seen how much the results of the US presidential vote impact not just the 50 states, but the rest of the planet too. And if the future of foreign countries is shaped to a significant extent by what goes on on US Election Day, shouldn’t they get a say in who gets to lead the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years?
In other words: shouldn’t foreign countries have a right to vote in the US presidential election?
We’re dealing with enemies. They are not rivals. Rivals agree, but want the power. They wish to do their authoritarian thing, AND they wish to never ever again see anyone live free. The authoritarian mind cannot abide seeing one man free, no matter how good or harmless that one man may be. The authoritarian mind hates that free man specifically because he is good and harmless.
Today’s leftist agitators speak of being “Woke” and suchlike, but one man’s state of being “Woke” is, in another man’s assessment, blatant and utter cluelessness.
The Left had better sober up and join an intelligible good faith debate about US immigration policy and the enforcement of existing laws or this will lead to exactly what Brent Tarrant laid out and what Mr. Trump maladroitly hinted at. Instead, of course, we will more likely commence another bootless campaign over guns. Here are some plain facts about that. There are already enough firearms of every sort loose in this land to commence hot civil warfare and they will not be surrendered by their owners. The horses are out of the barn on that one, even if sales of military-style weapons are outlawed. Any effort to confiscate them from people already possessing them will only provoke more overt antagonism between the two poles of American politics — and would probably lead to exactly the sort of violence that sober observers discern on the horizon.
James Howard Kunstler March 18, 2019 Deadly Serious [H/T to Chet M.
I don’t think the political left, especially some of the more recent elected representatives, is capable of “an intelligible good faith debate”. Their connection with reality is so tenuous that it will take a very serious application of a figurative “clue-by-four” for them to even see a ghostly outline of want we see as real.
Immigration is an important issue. But I think the gun issue is more likely to initiate their reality check. The widespread refusal of the police to enforce their oppressive laws is a gentle wakeup call. They won’t have to go down the path into Delusion Land much further before the gentle wakeup call becomes an air-raid siren.—Joe]
Now we must say goodbye to this fair country whose government toiled tirelessly to create the safety, fairness and luxury that all demanded, and that everyone knew could be created by passing just the right laws. Through it all, the people vigorously safe-guarded their tradition of firearms ownership. But they never knew – and never learned – that preserving a tradition and a way of life is not the same as preserving liberty. And they never knew – and never learned – that it’s not about guns.
Jeff Snyder 2001 Nation of Cowards, Walter Mitty’s Second Amendment, page 150. [Further insight, extrapolation, and consequences made possible by this observation is left as an exercise for the reader.—Joe]
Culture changes over time, of course, but it normally does it slowly as we creep towards a more civilized future.
England doesn’t feel more civilized — quite the opposite. It feels more feral. And the UK has just accepted its fate.
The lack of an American culture means Hungarians don’t know what’s missing, because they never had it. But there is a gaping hole in America: something is obviously broken. America is collapsing on itself.
This is how I view that mindset. One cannot expect a slave to remain a slave if they are armed. And you cannot expect a free person to remain free if they are not allowed arms.
Therefore Berejiklian wants to to keep slaves and/or enslave people and she does not have the moral character to serve in government at any capacity.—Joe]
The political left dominates both conventional and Internet social media outlets. This bias is so overwhelming that it probably isn’t possible to recover from the adverse public perception generated by their bias by public discourse. If an environment where the free exchange of political thought is possible has to be someplace other than the media. Gun ownership is but one case in point. Our retention of gun owner rights and even freedom of political thought must be recovered via other means. I’ve been thinking for some time now that other means is the courts. That is why it was absolutely critical that Hillary Clinton not be allowed to appoint Federal judges.
So, its off to the courts and this looks like a good start:
California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes filed a major lawsuit seeking $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages against Twitter and a handful of its users on Monday, accusing the social media site of “shadow-banning conservatives” including himself to influence the 2018 elections, systematically censoring opposing viewpoints and totally “ignoring” lawful complaints of repeated abusive behavior.
…
Although federal law ordinarily exempts services like Twitter from defamation liability at all levels, Nunes’ suit said the platform has taken such an active role in curating and banning content — as opposed to merely hosting it — that it should face liability like any other organization that defames.
“Twitter created and developed the content at issue in this case by transforming false accusations of criminal conduct, imputed wrongdoing, dishonesty and lack of integrity into a publicly available commodity used by unscrupulous political operatives and their donor/clients as a weapon,” Nunes’ legal team wrote. “Twitter is ‘responsible’ for the development of offensive content on its platform because it in some way specifically encourages development of what is offensive about the content.”
If Twitter and other leftist social media platforms get slapped down for their bias and collaboration in defaming those with different political beliefs it will not only make them less inclined to do this in the future it will also enable more people to realize the political left has an evil streak.
For example, the advent of the internet has facilitated a massive, unregulated gun marketplace in which just one website in 2018 had more than one million ads for guns for which no background check was required.
Shannon Watts February 11, 2019 The Gun Reform Movement Is Stronger Than Ever. And Now We’re Winning | Opinion [If laws are being broken on such a massive scale it should be trivial for law enforcement to set up sting operations and haul the criminals off by the bus load. But of course this isn’t happening. It’s just that she would like to see gun owners hauled off by the bus load and she is willing to lie and/or deceive to make that happen.—Joe]
Of the 10 states in the country with the lowest murder rates, half of them have some of the loosest gun laws in the country, and of those, the lowest consistently have murder rates comparable to Europe. I’m not going to tell you what to make of that, but in my mind, those states have essentially, intentionally or not, solved their violence issues, and they did it without gun control. Perhaps you may have a differing opinion, and that’s fine, but to me, knowing there is a solution to violence out there that doesn’t involve restricting rights, means that’s the only path we should pursue.
Good Snek December 29, 2018 Gun Control: How the Media Manipulates You to Give Up Your Rights [A stronger statement can be made and defended, such as, “Rights are not negotiable and not in any way conditional upon crime rates.” But you could get more political support for Snek’s weaker version.—Joe]
Liberals collect scalps, conservatives collect moral victories. This isn’t a battle for local dog catcher, it’s a fight for the future of the country; it’s time for the right to fight back the way they’re being attacked. Mutually assured destruction is the only way to stop these fascists in their tracks.
I can picture that woman walking around a gulag with a notebook taking complaints from prisoners, and then reminding them that they are there because they are considered problematic by the communist party, with a smile on her face. She is that scary.
[Rupp’s comment may be a little overstated but it’s not wrong.
This was an fantastic podcast. Daughter Jaime strongly recommended it to me. She was super impressed with Tim Pool. I’m really glad I listened to it.
Jack Dorsey is, of course, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter. Vijaya Gadde serves as the global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter.
If you are following the suppression of speech in social media issue you must listen to this. After faltering a bit in the beginning Tim Pool articulates the case for free speech extraordinarily well. There were times when he would say something so clearly and compelling I could not think of anything other than, “Wow!”. More than once, in response, Gadde would respond with, “I don’t know what that means.” They apparently live on a different planet.
I did form the opinion that they are probably not being deliberately malicious. Everyone agreed that the political left wants to ban anyone opposing them from social media. Twitter’s own internal data shows that the political left has a strong tendency to only follow those of a similar political view while the political right are much more likely to follow a political mix. Even if Twitter employees were politically neutral, which they are not, there would be difficult challenges in creating a social media platform that was “comfortable” for all participants. Because the political left exercises their Outrage Culture with the tiniest or even fabricated justification and the political right tends to shrug it off, the “squeaky wheel gets greased.” This comment by Vokzmedizen is a good summary of this aspect of the discussion:
The left wants to suppress free speech, and is cowardly in its willingness to rat people out to accomplish this, and hypocritically willing to deliberately exaggerate and distort context to claim offense they do not actually feel (In fact, they are overjoyed to discover something ‘actionable’ in what the other person said, even when they know full well something else was meant!) They right is loathe to suppress free speech, and does not wish to show gutlessness by reporting people, and would rather contend with the offender directly.
So it is obvious that a policy that relies on reporting frequency and simply accepts statements of harm in the report, and seeks for context in the ‘tweets’ that supports the report rather than exonerates the speaker, is going to manifest serious skewing to the left. This is simply because the left is going to report anything opportunistically, while the right will only report on the truly egregious.
A fair policy would take THIS ‘context’ into account, and tend to give LESS credence to reports that are essentially harassment themselves (left), and MORE credence to reports that come from the right. The REALITY is most likely that Twitter CREATED the policy in order to FACILITATE the left methodology. There are many other facilitations that source a DELIBERATE skew. For example, accusers are anonymous. The accused is allowed to face his accuser in our culture, anything else is generally considered Stalinist. Again, as mentioned, the policy against misgendering is politically left. Again, they consider dog piling bannable, but yet a coordinated mass reporting is considered legitimate.
My impression is that Tim Pool completely outclassed Dorsey and Gadde. They were overwhelmed.
I suspect Tim is right in that Twitter will continued down the path of good intentions not realizing that this path cannot turn out well. Twitter management doesn’t really want to facilitate the avalanche even if they do have strong signals it is coming. Because they view themselves as just another snowflake (Pool’s analogy) they will not realize they were a contributor when the avalanche (civil war was discussed) happens.—Joe]
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
As sheriff of Nye County, I agree with Sheriff Watts: I will not participate in the enforcement of this new law and certainly won’t stand silent, while my citizens are turned into criminals due to the unconstitutional actions of misguided politicians who, for the most part, are trying to do the right thing.
Sharon Wehrly March 7, 2019 Sheriff of Nye County, Nevada Letter to Governor Sisolak [I think she is being generous with the “misguided politicians”. But I can understand why saying, “You are a bunch of evil, communists, SOBs!” would not be helpful at this point in time so I give her a pass on that.
If the political left does not, or cannot, pull themselves out of this downward spiral into a confrontation we could see their first trials in a few years or perhaps even months. Give them fair warning. Tell them to enjoy their trials. Give them these links http://bit.ly/EnjoyYourTrial1 for private citizens and http://bit.ly/EnjoyYourTrial2 for government employees.—Joe]
