Did Isreal Use a Nuclear Weapon In Syria?

Quote of the Day

In a step that has shocked the entire world, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike on the weapons depot in Tartus, Syria on 16 December 2024. Through the massive strike, Israel reportedly destroyed the Scud missile facility located in Syria. However, reports are speculating that the damage caused by the strike was more serious and a small nuclear weapon might have been used by Israel. 

Reports have added that the European Union’s Radioactive Environmental Monitoring found that the amount of radiation increased in Turkey and Cyprus hours after the intense blast, pointing towards a small nuclear attack.

Abhijeet Sen
December 24, 2024
Did Israel explode a small nuclear bomb in Syria? Spike in radiation report says…

I cannot find any confirmation. So, I am going to say it probably is not true. Here is what I did find:

Even if they did not use a nuke, just the speculation will shift the Overton Window. This will make actual use more acceptable.

Prepare appropriately.

Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity

Quote of the Day

If you need a license to kill deer why don’t you need one to kill humans?

David Hogg 🟧 @davidhogg111
Tweeted on April 2, 2024

This is so mind warping stupid I started wondering if he knew it was stupid but thought he would manage to sell it to the general population as something profound.

Looking further in the thread I found the answer 75 minutes later:

Plenty of people will think this is dumb- good for you. I’m not looking out for an election and I’m entitled to my own opinion no matter how much you disagree.

David Hogg 🟧 @davidhogg111
Tweeting on April 2, 2024

Yup. He is that stupid. He really thinks it is something profound.

It is people like this that we are up against. And yet, we came close to losing the war.

Change Our Culture One Person at a Time

Quote of the Day

Support for stricter gun laws has declined significantly over the years, while the desire for more relaxed laws has grown. In 1990, a substantial 78% of Americans favored stricter gun control, with only 2% wanting more lenient regulations.

By 2010, support for stricter laws had dropped to less than half (44%). However, it rebounded in 2020, rising to 57%.

In 2023, opposition to gun control reached a two-decade high, with 15% of Americans wanting less strict regulations.

Cassandra McBride
December 19, 2024
How Many Americans Want Stricter Gun Laws in 2024? The Decline in Gun Control Support

Via email from Sam J. at Ammo.com.

The support of the courts for the right to keep and bear arms is not enough. We must also change the culture. The trend is in the right direction, but we are far from where we need to be yet. We need a solid majority in opposition.

Here are some ways you can do that:

  • Come out of the closet as a gun owner and Second Amendment advocate.
  • Be active on social media and make sure the comments to anti-gun advocates are politely and factually ratioed.
  • Gun ownership is a civil right. Be a civil rights advocate.
  • Consider shaming those opposed to civil rights.
  • Take a new shooter to the range.
  • Introduce people virtually and/or physically to Boomershoot. The KING5 Evening Magazine video is the most effective introduction to the shooting sports I know of. It is a completely different reality from the world of gun ownership the mainstream media feeds them.
  • Attend town hall type meetings of your politicians and politely confront those who want to infringe upon our rights.

Change our culture one person at a time.

Gun control is Icarus

Quote of the Day

Gun control is Icarus…and it got too greedy, arrogant, and flew too high. There’s only one ending to this story and looking at cases around the country…fantasy is almost up. Enjoy losing.

Johnny Silverhand @MegaManX1984
Posted on X on December 21, 2023

A little something is lost without the entire context, but I wanted to have the above in case any of the below disappears. Here is the entire context:

Restricted Weapons

Via mNich @mNich_1138 and Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras:

If anything, as public servants our law enforcement should be restricted from using all the weapons available to those whom they serve.

Who Will Scream Into the Void?

Quote of the Day

Why do I have to keep telling these rabid gun humpers to eff off? I don’t GAF about their gunsplaining.

I want stricter #gunregulation and #AR15s off the street. I don’t GAF they aren’t automatics and y’all are all muted. I SUPER DON’T GAF.

Scream into the void, donuts. SCREAM.

ToutdeSuiteLaSinner @ToutSuiteSinner
Tweeted on June 5, 2022

It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday; it is another science denier (see also here)!

It is very telling that she thinks her ignorance is nothing to be concerned about. Her willful ignorance will only cause her more pain.

After the Heller, and especially the Bruen decision, the only screams we will be doing are victory screams. The long-term screaming into the void will be by the likes of ToutdeSuiteLaSinner.

Schadenfreude can be so sweet.

Boomershoot 2025

Registration for the next Boomershoot, May 2nd -> 4th, is currently open for staff.

Registration opens for Boomershoot 2024 participants on Thursday 12/26/2024 at 6:00 PM Pacific time. Registration opens for everyone on Monday 12/30/2024 at 6:00:00 PM Pacific time.

Boomershoot has been called “The premier Long Distance Precision Rifle Event in the PacNW.”

For people wanting long range rifle training, the Precision Rifle Clinic is offered for two days prior to the main event.

It has received extensive national, regional and local media attention. Examples include:

  • The video from KING5 Evening Magazine was nominated for an Emmy
  • The Outdoor Channel
  • KLEW TV
  • Newsweek
  • Outside Magazine
  • Idaho Magazine
  • the Spokesman Review
  • Lewiston Morning Tribune
  • Chicago Reader
  • The Missoulian

You could watch videos about Boomershoot on YouTube for hours. But all the words, all the pictures, and all the videos cannot do it justice. It has to be experienced in person. People come from all over north America to participate or sometimes just watch. We have had people come all the way from England and, last year, Scotland to participate.

This is a sample of Boomershoot 2024:

Sign up soon to experience this unique and amazing shooting event. Don’t miss out!

Over a ton of explosives. Fun beyond measure.

Washington State Hazards

From: New map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US 

Volcano’s, high taxes, high crime, and a high probability of damaging earthquakes. Seattle is not nearly as attractive as it was when I first moved here just out of college.

I knew about the occasional earthquakes and was thrilled to experience three of them. Now that I’m older, I know just how serious they can be. I would rather not wait around for “the big one.”

The nearest volcano, Mount Rainier, was sort interesting in an abstract way when I arrived. And it is an incredible mountain. It is awe inspiring to go hiking on it. And it seemed to be dormant enough to not worry about.

Mount St. Helen’s blowing up a little over 100 miles away made volcanoes much more real. It obliterated everything within a six-mile radius. And that is just the complete destruction area. There was more:

The deadly pyroclastic surge—a fast-moving, super-hot cloud of ash, rock, and volcanic gas—traveled as much 18 miles away from the blast. The hot lava, gas, and debris mixed with melting snow and ice to form massive volcanic mudflows that surged down into valleys with enough force to rip trees from the ground, flatten homes, and completely destroy roads and bridges. Rivers rose rapidly, flooding surrounding valleys. Ash fell from the sky as far away as the Great Plains. Two-hundred-and-fifty miles away, ash blanketed Spokane, Washington, in complete darkness.

Mount Rainier is about 50 miles to the south from where we live now. Previous mud flows from Rainier have traveled several miles north of where we live. Those flows were in the valleys. We live part way up the side of a mountain. Therefore, I’m not too worried about being directly and immediately impacted by the blast and mud flows.

But even with only some mild ash at our house, the infrastructure issues would be catastrophic because of mud and pyroclastic flows destroying roads, power lines, water lines, and sewage lines. The people issues resulting from a major Mount Rainier blast following the infrastructure destruction would affect everyone for hundreds of miles around. I would rather not have to directly deal with that.

The politics, and especially the gun laws, have gone from benign to oppressive. I can avoid a lot of the pain by leveraging my Idaho connection. But it is a constant source of irritation.

Living in the “Bellevue Bubble”, as Barb and I like to call it, certainly has its advantages. But I really need an option to bug-out if things become an imminent hazard.

Don’t be a Science Denier

Quote of the Day

Thousands of gun shows take place in the U.S. each year. Gun control advocates argue that because sales at gun shows are much less regulated than other sales, such shows make it easier for potential criminals to obtain a gun. Similarly, one might be concerned that gun shows would exacerbate suicide rates by providing individuals considering suicide with a more lethal means of ending their lives. On the other hand, proponents argue that gun shows are innocuous since potential criminals can acquire guns quite easily through other black market sales or theft. In this paper, we use data from Gun and Knife Show Calendar combined with vital statistics data to examine the effect of gun shows. We find no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides. In addition, tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.

Mark Duggan, Randi Hjalmarsson, and Brian A. Jacob
September 2008
The Effect of Gun Shows on Gun-Related Deaths:
Evidence from California and Texas

Don’t be a science denier. Support deregulation of gun shows!

Taxation is a Form of Censorship

Quote of the Day

Taxation is a form of censorship.

It prevents citizens from expressing their own purchasing choices in the marketplace, and forces them to conform and contribute to government choices instead.

Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith
The great-great-great-granddaughter of Adam Smith.
Posted on X, December 20, 2024

This is an interesting way to think about it. I can’t say that she is wrong. But I’m not sure there is practical alternative to at least some limited form of government.

Planning Against the Poor Planners

Quote of the Day

If you survive the blast, and you survive the fallout, you’re going to have to survive the constant threat of mass home invasion from those whose disaster planning is just 3 days.

Tirno
December 19, 2024
Comment to Evidence of the Idiocracy

This is an excellent point. But once made, you realize there are going to be some exceptions. Maintain a large buffer zone between yourself and the hordes with poor planning. Doing this can minimize your risk of contact. The risk can be driven to almost zero.

Let time, distance, and others “thin the herd” before the Seattle hordes reach your underground bunker in Montana. Give yourself some good alarms and a thousand yards of open space in every direction. Then, with the right guns, ammo, optics, and shooting partners, you should not have a problem against the low life.

Of course, this is far easier said than done.

Can’t You Read?

Via Rachel Alexander @Rach_IC:

And the masked man’s response might well be, “Hey, you must be so stupid that you won’t miss your brain. BANG!

“Gun free zones” just disarm the potential victims. We must get rid of them in all but the most obvious of sensitive places. I’m thinking of places like those with extreme fire hazards, prisons, extremely strong magnetic fields, etc.

Do Chatbots Have Dementia?

Via an email from Defens.

Leading AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests, raising questions about their future in medicine

Almost all leading large language models or “chatbots” show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of the BMJ.

The results also show that “older” versions of chatbots, like older patients, tend to perform worse on the tests. The authors say these findings “challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors.”

Interesting!

At first, I read the article as saying that as the chatbots aged they developed dementia. When I read more closely, I see they are just saying the upgraded versions don’t show these symptoms as much. This is in comparison to the initial versions. Still, this is interesting.

The most amazing dementia test, in my opinion, is to ask the patient to draw an analog clock face. They should draw it with a particular time. In dementia patients the result will be messed up:

I decided to test a few AI Chatbots. I gave all of them the same request:

Please draw an analog clock face with the time of 3:30.

The rest of this post rather long and image intense so I put it below the following line.

Continue reading

Evidence of the Idiocracy

Quote of the Day

Global security leaders are warning nuclear threats are growing as weapons spending surged to $91.4 billion last year. At the same time, private bunker sales are on the rise globally, from small metal boxes to crawl inside of to extravagant underground mansions.

Critics warn these bunkers create a false perception that a nuclear war is survivable. They argue that people planning to live through an atomic blast aren’t focusing on the real and current dangers posed by nuclear threats, and the critical need to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, government disaster experts say bunkers aren’t necessary. A Federal Emergency Management Agency 100-page guide on responding to a nuclear detonation focuses on having the public get inside and stay inside, ideally in a basement and away from outside walls for at least a day. Those existing spaces can provide protection from radioactive fallout, says FEMA.

Martha Mendoza
December 8, 2024
Nuclear bunker sales increase, despite expert warnings they aren’t going to provide protection

I have to know. Does it require special training to be that blind to incongruent statements? Or are some people just naturally impervious to irrational thought?

It is times like this that I could be convinced that our society has made life too easy. It was a mistake to prevent stupid people from removing themselves from the gene pool with demonstrations of their stupidity. I must conclude Idiocracy was brilliantly prophetic. And we should do almost anything to prevent that prophecy from happening.

Another thing to point out is that “government experts” are telling you that you don’t need an underground bunker. I wonder if anyone they have told that to has asked if they have access to an underground bunker?

And/or tell them to convince all the politicians they don’t need an underground bunker. And if they are needed, politicians must come after those necessary to rebuild a post-apocalyptic world. This would include all the construction workers, miners, and factory workers. It would also include teachers, engineers, and medical care people. Law enforcement, bankers, and business leaders are essential too.

I believe politicians should know they will not have access under any circumstances. It is the job of politicians to prevent us from getting nuked. If they fail at their job, they should pay a higher price for that failure than anyone else. This policy ensures they have the proper incentive.

Cut and Paste from the Playbook

Quote of the Day

With just over one month remaining in his disastrous term, Joe Biden just couldn’t restrain himself from once again rolling out his one-size-fits-all gun control wish list in his statement from the White House. Demanding that Congress quickly pass universal background check (registration) legislation and ban so-called ‘assault weapons’ and ‘high-capacity magazines’ in response to this terrible crime is one of the stupidest, but expected reactions from a career gun prohibitionist whose history of gaffes is legendary.

Joe Biden knows 15-year-olds can’t legally buy handguns anywhere in this country, so a call for background checks is irrelevant. Police have recovered a handgun which was used in the shooting, so calling for a ban on semiautomatic rifles and their magazines is also irrelevant and dishonest. Indeed, such demands underscore just how irrelevant Joe Biden and his gun ban agenda have become.

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
December 7, 2024
CCRKBA BLASTS BIDEN’S REACTION TO WISCONSIN SCHOOL TRAGEDY | Citizens Committee For The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

To be fair, I doubt Biden had any input into that statement. It is most likely some intern. Someone who does not know the difference between an AR-15 and a Glock 17. Of course, they know even less about the law. They just did a copy and paste from the “School Shooting” page in their playbook.

Household Gun Ownership Rates in the U.S.

How Many Households in the U.S. Have a Gun in 2024?

Spoiler for the states that interest me the most:

  • Idaho: # 6 with 53%
  • Washington: # 39 with 34%
  • Kentucky (my youngest daughter lives here): # 12 with 49%
  • Montana: # 1 with 64%
  • Hawaii: # 50 with 8%

Of course, these numbers were via surveys. Respondents sometimes have an incentive to not tell the truth or not participate if they do own a gun. This will be represented as a negative bias in household ownership numbers.

Love Gov: The Series

This looks like some good stuff:

Every Single Male Must be Wiped Out

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women are the only hope for this wretched world. But even women have been brainwashed by moids for too long theyve internalized the patriarchy and turned on each other, always begging for for male approval and validation. Its disgusting. I realize the truth men are iredeemable. radfem hitler was is fucking vindicated now. They cant be reformed or redeemed. Theyre a fucking scourge upon the earth. The only solution is to total exterminate them and every foid who worships these fucking parasites. Every single male must be wiped out, from babies to the elderty. Only then can women be free to create a new world, ill be a pioneer, ill be the first to take the first step. i dont care if theyr fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police, and especially niggers or politicians.ive been craving to kill them all. This is my mission. only when their parasitic sludge has been expunged from this earth is when Then the world will be clean and women can start over. It’s the only way. in aproximately 10 mintue si should be dead, its strange but it feels good.

Abundant Life Christian School mass murderer in Madison Wisconsin
Via a post on X by Andy Ngo 🏳️‍🌈 @MrAndyNgo on December 16, 2024

So sad. So terrible. Such a waste.

Abusive father?

Toxic femininity?

Mental health issues?

All of the above?

At this time, the only thing we know for sure is that the human behind the trigger is responsible. A gun did not do this on its own.

They Always Resort to Childish Insults

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Oh, look at your little plastic girly guns in all those pretty colors! Those will definitely tell the world that you have nothing in your pants. Hahahahahahahahaha!

Koko Pup かわいくて強い💙 @therealkokopup
Posted on Twitter on December 15, 2023

It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday; it is another science denier (see also here)!

When they don’t have a rational response, they always resort to childish insults.

Washington State May Get Even Worse on Guns

Via an email from Rolf:

The video appears to be entirely speculative. But see also this Gun group wants new taxes and permits for WA firearm sales • Washington State Standard:

Washington’s leading gun control group wants state lawmakers to make it tougher and more expensive to buy a firearm.

The Alliance for Gun Responsibility said Monday it will renew efforts to begin requiring state permits for gun buyers and will urge lawmakers to impose a new excise tax on sales of ammunition and firearms.

The group’s agenda for the 2025 legislative session also includes adding parks and public buildings to places where open carry of firearms is restricted, banning bulk purchases of firearms and ammunition, and improving oversight of gun dealers. 

I wonder what the definition of bulk purchases of ammunition will be. Will a single brick of .22LR ammo (500 rounds) be illegal? My guess is yes.

Even with just the tax increase, if this happens, I expect to make significant changes in my behavior. I will move nearly all my gun activities to my underground bunker in Idaho. I will also be increasing my donations to SAF and FPC. This crap has to be stopped.