Category Archives: Politics

Another economy has collapsed

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Nightmare becomes reality in Sri Lanka as govt has no choice but to declare economy has ‘collapsed’:

After months of shortages of food, fuel and electricity. Sri Lanka’s prime minister said this morning the country’s debt-laden economy has “collapsed.”

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told Sri Lanka’s parliament today that the South Asian country is “facing a far more serious situation beyond the mere shortages of fuel, gas, electricity and food. Our economy has completely collapsed.”

I didn’t see the exact words but I strongly suspect the high price of oil on the world market contributed.

There are other economic stressors out there. The most obvious are wheat and fertilizer from the Ukraine/Russia region. There are countless others. Some are ripple effects from the war. Others are from other areas of the world and less direct such as the chip shortage and inflation.

There will be more collapsed economies in the coming months and perhaps years. The ripples and, perhaps even, tidal waves are just over the horizon.

We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.

Quote of the day—Gunther Eagleman @GuntherEagleman

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Red flag laws will be determined by people who cant define what a woman is… Let that sink in.

Gunther Eagleman @GuntherEagleman
Tweeted on June 13, 2022
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

There’s probably some truth to this

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Via Ivermectin and Artemisinin @triplecrown777:

One thing people need to understand about extremely kind, nice, and loving people, is that their other side is jus as extreme. It’s the hell they survive that makes them gentle. Don’t mistake their self-control for weakness. The beast in them is sleeping, not dead.

A couple decades ago a coworker from India told me it was well known and taught in the psych classes in his country the person most likely to kill you wasn’t the person easy to anger. Those types calmed down just as quickly and easily as they angered. The person that was always calm, gentle, and soft spoken was very difficult to make angry. But when they did get angry they would kill you even if it was days or weeks later.

My hypothesis for this is that the person who is frequently angry has learned to manage that state of mind from 10s of thousands of incidents growing up. One the other hand, the cool, quiet, gentle type, has hold experiences with extreme feelings of anger which number in the dozens and they are more likely to be overwhelmed by the emotions.

There may be a lesson to be learned here about rioters, emotionally driven anti-gun people and their long suffering victims.

Worse than a nuke

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There is some truth to this:

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Via Director Dean @PrinzPlaymates.

Not all decades of democratic leadership result in Detroit like results.

But why risk it? Just nuke any city Democrats take over.

Quote of the day—Roberta X

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Be careful what you believe.  Be careful what you wish for.  Dramatic narratives are appealing, but emotional engagement is no assurance of truth.  It’s just the easiest way to manipulate people.  Distrust all cheering crowds, and distrust even more the men and women for whom they shout.

Roberta X
June 12, 2022
A Pause For Reflection
[I am tempted to extrapolate that to say, “Truth does not need emotion to validate itself. Emotional engagement is an indicator you must examine the evidence and logic closely looking for deception and/or error.” But that’s not as succinct.

The problem is that long before we developed logic and formal processes to distinguish truth from falsity we had emotional shortcuts that served us and our ancestors reasonably well as far back as there were pea sized brains. Logic and rational thought is an extremely thin veneer on top of that emotional lizard brain core. People, others or ourselves, can either deliberately or unintentionally bypass than thin veneer and engage that emotional core with minor effort to great effect. It is a wonderful system for generating extremely fast decisions with minimal effort. This works well for probably 99+% of the decisions we make each day. But this emotional core can also override reality. It takes a lot of evidence and effort to correctly conclude the earth is not flat and is not the center of the universe if you have have spent 20 years believing it was flat, motionless, and were certain the sun and stars move in the heavens.

Reality is really, really tough. Don’t let emotion, especially that created by a charismatic leader, degrade your ability to discern truth from falsity.—Joe]

AR-15s versus tanks and planes

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Via Mrgunsngear @Mrgunsngear

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Via GhostGuns.com @GhostGcom

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See also Boots on the ground.

Dark times ahead

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Via Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras:

Changes at a QFC store — apparently for security reasons — have some customers say the store is going too far. Some are worried about safety and exiting in an emergency.

Two Seattle QFC stores now have extensive plexiglass inside, directing traffic for shoppers and limiting how people can exit. The grocery chain told KIRO 7 the changes are “to maintain a safe shopping environment,” but customers believe the goal is to thwart shoplifting.

“It’s like shopping in a dystopian novel or something, it’s really bizarre,” said Chris Mobley, a shopper at the store. “Seems to be a way to annoy customers — it’s really hard to navigate the store,” he said.

A few days ago Barb was at a store (not QFC) not far from our home in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle, and the clerk commented, “There goes one of our regulars. He comes in every day.” It was a shoplifter.

Also, The police aren’t coming, but now in Seattle, they have a name for that:

It’s well known that Seattle police are struggling to respond to 911 calls in a speedy manner. But the notion that “the cops aren’t coming” has become such a routine of city life that they’ve created a new way of tracking their nonresponsiveness.

It’s called the “Z protocol.”

I have to wonder how much of inflation is the result of “defund the police” and related nonsense.

My greatest concern is that at some point many people will to conclude they are stupid for not stealing whatever they want. That will bring some very dark times.

Red flag law memes

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VIa Sean D Sorrentino @SorrentinoSean:

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Via MiguelGGG @MiguelGGG12:

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Via Maga Gang ShawnP @6_OClockShawn:

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Via Meme Space Nine @meme_space_nine:

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Via Mr Dexter Sinister @Mr_Dex_Sinister:

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Via Wise Dalai Lama @MedinaDalaiLama:

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VIa PewPewFF @FfPew:

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Via Claire Balan @CBalan010611 there is this Did the Supreme Court just deal a blow to red flag laws?

Quote of the day—THE Red-Headed libertarian™ @TRHLofficial

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The left are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks before they lose their stranglehold in November. Their behavior is reactionary and it’s going to get more insane, more sinister, and more hysterical.

THE Red-Headed libertarian™ @TRHLofficial
Tweeted on June 6, 2022
[This is my expectation too.—Joe]

Indicator of not trustworthy

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She has a great point:

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Of course, as Gideon J. Tucker said:

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Therefore, untrustworthy should be your default view of politicians until conclusively proven otherwise, or they are dead, which ever comes last.

Quote of the day—Burgess Everett

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The group is also planning to bundle $1 million each to a handful of gubernatorial candidates and secretary of state hopefuls, a reflection of the increased focus on top election officials after the still-unfolding fight against false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Burgess Everett
May 17, 2022
MoveOn plows $30 million into ‘Us vs. MAGA’ campaign
[If there was no fraud, then why do they need increased focus on these election officials who gave us fair and open elections?—Joe]

Quote of the day—sacrebleu14 / SA Hinchcliffe @sacrebleu141

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your history in assaulting women, can see why you demand women to be defenseless

sacrebleu14 / SA Hinchcliffe @sacrebleu141
Tweeted on June 6, 2022
[This was in response to a tweet by Andrew Cuomo about supporting gun control.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Danny Westneat

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More than 400 officers have left while crime has soared. This past week The Seattle Times and KUOW reported new sex assault cases aren’t being investigated because of understaffing. Meanwhile, the softer approaches envisioned for community safety still are in the pilot stages.

This past week the city announced it is refunding 100,000 parking tickets and voiding another 100,000 because of an oversight — namely that the parking enforcement officers, who are civilians, were not regranted the authority to write tickets after they were switched out of the Police Department last fall.

Danny Westneat
June 4, 2022
Seattle’s botched experiment with defund the police keeps getting worse
[Emphasis added. I cannot believe these people are this stupid. It has to be intentional. These people are verifiably evil.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy

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We will stop you.
We will repeal your laws.
We will restore natural rights.

We are winning.

You will cope and seethe.

Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy
Tweeted on June 6, 2022
[Donate to the Firearms Policy Coalition here. I donate nearly $1700/year to the Firearms Policy Foundation and get a tax deduction.—Joe]

Implications

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Via a tweet from the JPFO:

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I’m tempted to respond, “Good question!” But, actually, their actions just confirm what I’ve known for decades. That is, the political left considers gun owners their mortal enemy.

Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

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Economics has a concept called “revealed preference.” The gist is that a person’s observed actions reveal more about their preferences than what a person might profess to prefer. As applied to anti-gun politicians, despite all the noise they might make about stopping the criminal misuse of guns, their actions reveal that their policies are designed to attack the rights of law-abiding Americans.

…

For FY 2017 there were a grand total of 12 prosecutions out of 112,000 denials. When, all else being equal, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of being prosecuted for a crime in which the perpetrator necessarily offers himself up to the government, the goal isn’t public safety, it’s to control the law-abiding.

NRA-ILA
June 6, 2022
Gun Control is About Stripping Rights NOT Stopping Crime
[They are, of course, referring to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)..—Joe]

Getting a clue?

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The words and concepts are all there. But I’m not sure he is putting it all together to arrive at the obvious conclusion:

Nobody talks tougher on guns than the left. We want to regulate them, seize them, control them, even ban them.

The uncomfortable part of this stance is: Who is going to carry all this out, though, if not the police? Police who are stopping, searching, interfering — all the things various city actors have understandably said they are most skeptical police can do safely and without racial bias.

Recently, I wrote about how Washington state’s aggressive gun control laws, which ban AR-15 gun sales to people under age 21 and also institute a 10-day waiting period, would likely have prevented the recent Buffalo and Texas mass shootings (because both were committed by 18-year-olds who legally bought their guns).

What they don’t prevent are the types of gun crime that Seattle is awash in right now — where drug dealers, gang members or others steal guns or pick them up on an ample black market.

He needs to ask himself, and then his entire readership, just one question.

Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

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We have reached the point at which Democrats have to literally pretend Republicans don’t have better solutions.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on June 8, 2022
[I am inclined to dismiss “pretend”. All appearances are they are very serious. There are other hypothesis which match the available evidence better:

  1. They are delusional.
  2. They are deliberately lying (evil).

Of those two I’m inclined to go with the second option. They have been informed so many times by so many people for so many decades and there is so much evidence that must be overlooked by so many people that I have to rule out a mass delusion that infectious and lasting this long.—Joe]

Wolves outside the door

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Via a tweet from NRA @NRA:

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Quote of the day—Amanda Marcotte

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Mass shootings are effective for Republicans at demoralizing their opposition and training their base to unlearn any lingering sense of empathy. Historian Ruth Ben-Shiat argued in October in the Washington Post, that gun violence “fosters political, social and psychological conditions that are propitious for autocracy.” A major GOP campaign message going into the midterms is that “woke” Democrats are letting criminals run amok in the cities. Dramatic gun violence really helps sell this message, which is why Republicans are guaranteed to block any bill that would make it even slightly harder for violent and unhinged people to get guns.

Amanda Marcotte
June 6, 2022
U.S. gun laws are causing mayhem and mass murder — and Republicans couldn’t be more thrilled
[This is what they think of you.

The way I remember the history of gun rights in this country over the last 30 years is that (mostly) Republicans celebrated the reduction in violent crime as it became easier to carry guns to protect yourself in public. Another contributor to that decreasing violent crime rates was the increased incarceration of repeat criminals. But, as numerous people have pointed out in the comments, the political left doesn’t know their history.—Joe]