The minimum wage is a subsidy to the robotics industry.
Chris Knox @ChrisKnox_AZ
Tweeted on January 16, 2022
[That a great way to put it. And that subsidy is getting larger every day as the price/performance tradeoff keeps dropping.—Joe]
Category Archives: Politics
Quote of the day—Liel Leibovitz
The turn is the moment when you kind of begin to understand, a little bit like that movie The Matrix, that everything you assumed was the very fabric of reality, it’s not just politics, it’s the entirety of existence, may be called into question.
Liel Leibovitz
January 11, 2022
Long-Time Democrat Liel Leibovitz Finds Himself ‘Politically Homeless’
[Observing the awakening is fascinating.
I suspect Leibovitz is not an outlier:
After winning more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, Biden is now – just 12 months later – one of the country’s most unpopular presidents.
For months, Biden’s approval ratings have languished in the mid to low 40s, with an average approval rating of 42%. A Quinnipiac poll released last week found him at a dire 33%.
When cornered and faced with severe injury or death animals are extremely dangerous. The political left is currently in that situation.
Prepare appropriately.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Jeff @jeffcampbell64
It appears his empathetic and angry subroutines were out of phase and that caused his algorithm to move to the confused and exit subroutine.
Jeff @jeffcampbell64
Tweeted on December 21, 2022
[Regarding a video of President Biden.
That’s one hypothesis. I’m certain there are others which have a higher probability of being correct. Still, I LOL’d.
Quote of the day—Michael Anton
Blue America offers to Red nothing but scorn, contempt, hatred, insult, humiliation, calumny, outsourcing, open borders, layoffs, lower wages, opioids, losing wars, censorship, trumped-up treason accusations, surveillance, anarcho-tyranny, pre-trial detention, mask mandates, lockdowns, Critical Race Theory, and cancellation. And then not only gets enraged when Red America objects, but demands Red reverence and gratitude in return.
Michael Anton
Blue America’s Messaging Problem
January 4, 2022
[There is more than a little truth in this.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff
The real problem with #Bitcoin
isn’t volatility. Volatility means Bitcoin can’t function as a currency, but it makes it very appealing to traders and speculators. The real problem is that Bitcoin has no underlying value to support its price, making a terminal collapse inevitable.
Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff
Tweeted on January 10, 2022
[That is what I believe too. I mentioned the volatility, appeal to traders, and no underlying value in a discussion with a coworker last month after he told me about setting up the server rack in his garage to mine Bitcoins. My coworker wasn’t accepting my arguments. I tried comparisons to other mined products such as gold and silver. He seemed to understand what I was saying but could not be convinced Bitcoin is a high risk investment.
Schiff claims the following credentials:
Chief Economist & Global Strategist: http://Europac.com, Chairman: http://SchiffGold.com, Founder: http://EpacFunds.com , Host: http://SchiffRadio.com
That Schiff sells gold probably gives him a blinding bias but he, and I, may still be correct. I just don’t know. And that I, and apparently Schiff, cannot make an accurate prediction as to when the demise of Bitcoin occurs gives me concern that we are mistaken in our belief.
I’m more confident in prediction about the financial collapse of the U.S. government than I am of predicting about the demise of Bitcoin. Yet, I still believe.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Lyle
There have been many, many statements to the effect that gun owners, so-called “constitutionalists” (spoken as an epithet), libertarians, et al (any of a generally pro-liberty, anti-authoritarian mind) are essentially vermin, heretics who deserve no rights unless they recant. And so while they’re saying we MUST trust liars and power-hungry psychopaths in government, who hate us, to “keep us safe”, they’re simultaneously saying that we’re the problem the world needs to get rid of in order to be safe (“safe” meaning “free from opposition”).
History proves beyond all doubt that if you comply and turn in your guns they’ll not stop hating and accusing you. They’ll persecute you all the more. More because you’re not only an enemy of their beautiful alliance, you’ve now proven yourself to be weak, manipulated via lies, unable to stand on your own principles, a coward, and therefore all the more contemptible! Compliance with liars and criminal psychopaths is like chum in the water— It attracts a feeding frenzy among the sharks. It ONLY leads to more contempt and more violations!
Lyle
January 11, 2022
Comment to Quote of the day—JPFO @JPFO_2A
[This reminds me of something I learned (the hard way) from dealing with people with personality disorders. You must draw a line and provide consequences for misbehavior which transgress that line. If you do not you will end up in an abusive relationship.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
I think it’s accurate to call #Jan6 an “insurrection.”
Unfortunately, the protesters at the capitol were not able to stop the insurrection and the vote was certified.
Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on January 8, 2022
[I really laughed at this one.
Nineteen minutes later he followed up with:
I declare my right, as a citizen of the United States, to label the 2020 election illegitimate based on a lack of transparency.
An election that can’t be fully audited — by design — must bear the full presumption of fraud.
So, it wasn’t only a joke. Okay, that’s fair.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Hannah Furfaro
Similar in nature to vaccines against disease, addiction vaccines stimulate the body to create antibodies that recognize a drug, and prevent or slow it from reaching the brain. A shot every few months, or once a year, has the potential to seriously ease a person’s path to recovery.
Hannah Furfaro
January 5, 2022
To fight opioid crisis, UW researchers take new shot at developing vaccine against addictive drugs
[Interesting. I never who have guessed such a thing was possible. But now that the idea has been presented I can imagine “vaccines” for all kinds of things.
The first one that came to mind was one prevent Marxist beliefs. That was quickly followed by the concern that someone would probably develop, and the government would soon mandate, a vaccine to prevent individualism and/or suspicion of large government.
I soon returned to the present day and reality by reminding myself there has been a vaccine for the lethal variants of Marxism since before the mutations first started spreading over 100 years ago. Current prices vary from less than $0.10 to over $5.00 dollars a shot. And, if properly injected, they will cure as well as provide lifelong 100% immunity from infections. Even though the shots are widely available, inexpensive, and effective we still have rising Marxist infection rates. It seems to me there will have to be mandates to achieve herd immunity. This is because the voluntary inoculation rates are so very low..—Joe]
Quote of the day—Jason Rantz
A top King County prosecutor told a group of South Sound law enforcement officials that they better “get used to” no jail time for juvenile criminals responsible for the alarming rise of violence in the region. He even joked about their concern, using a popular meme that some on the call found offensive.
Ben Carr is the senior deputy prosecuting attorney for King County. He offered a PowerPoint presentation on how the county treats juvenile offenders driving much of the crime. The meeting was called after mayors criticized the prosecutor’s office for going too easy on criminals, demanding answers. It did not go well.
Jason Rantz
January 4, 2022
Rantz: Prosecutor says ‘get used to’ no jail time for teen gun crimes, assault, theft
[King County encompasses Seattle and many of the nearby towns.
Other items of interest from the same article:
- Violent criminals will be enrolled in restorative justice programs run by police and prison abolitionists
- a large portion of the changes are overdue, being done to address racial disproportionality and over-incarceration
- The alternatives are offered to certain felony suspects. Rather than going in front of a judge, RCP puts the suspects in front of a community panel of activists. That panel decides how the suspect can be held accountable.
- RCP explains its “end goal is ABOLITION,” and that they are “fighting to dismantle the carceral state.”
Things are going to get a lot worse around here before they get better.
Prepare appropriately.—Joe]
Typical
Via Catturd ™ @catturd2:
This kind of thing happens a lot. If you supply someone with irrefutable evidence of their wrongly held belief they will be very creative in protecting that belief.
It’s irrational to expect people to be rational.
Quote of the day—Dan
High-pressure weather systems in the winter bring lots of sun (at a low angle) and little or no wind, just when energy demands are at their highest. The clear skies also let the earth’s heat radiate off into space at night, so it gets real cold. In the summer that same system will also result in little or no wind, and the high angle of the sun and the clear skies will result in lots of heat, and airconditioning demands lots of electricity.
Politicians don’t consult meteorologists or engineers. They consult people like Greta.
Dan
January 2, 2022
Comment to We Don’t Need No Stinking Frozen Fans
[The critical component of the article being commented on:
Alberta’s entire fleet of 13 grid-connected solar facilities, rated at 736 megawatts, was contributing 58 megawatts to the grid. The 26 wind farms, with a combined rated capacity of 2,269 megawatts, was feeding the grid 18 megawatts.
Be cautious of the inclination to “let them freeze in the dark” to “learn their lesson”. That may not turn out the way you might hope. We need a better way to show them the light.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Jake Fogleman
According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). They said Canadians had only turned in 160 of the recently-outlawed firearms for destruction since the announcement of the ban.
…
The buyback scheme is the result of a May 2020 regulation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau banning 1,500 “assault weapons” by make and model. It was enacted in response to a high-profile mass shooting in Nova Scotia, in which a gunman used illegally-obtained weapons to murder 22 people.
The ban provided a two-year amnesty period from its announcement for gun owners to comply but prohibited them from using any weapon affected by the ban going forward. The government estimates that approximately 72,000 gun owners and 105,000 firearms are affected by the policy.
Jake Fogleman
Canadians Aren’t Turning in Their Guns
December 28, 2021
[I know some people affected by this. We I talked about this before it was certain and they were quite concerned. I made a few suggestions but they were noncommittal as to what action they are going to take. I’m hoping to see them face to face sometime soon so I can get an update.
We live in interesting times.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Erich Pratt
The Brady Campaign has asked us to believe the impossible… yet again.
Every January, the gun control group issues a state report card, giving each state a grade on the basis of their gun laws.
But one look at their report card reveals that the grades have nothing to do with how safe people are in the state.
Their report card is somewhat reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. When Alice doesn’t believe the White Queen is 101 years old, she is encouraged by the Queen to spend more time trying to believe the impossible.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day,” the Queen smiled. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Well, the Brady Bunch would have us believe many impossible things. But here are six for starters.
First, the group gives Vermont a grade of D- because, supposedly, the “state’s weak laws make it too easy for criminals, the mentally ill and juveniles to get guns.”
But this statement is laughable, for crime in Vermont is virtually non- existent. Just last year (2003), Vermont earned the Safest State in the nation award from the Morgan Quitno Press — a group of statisticians who rank each state according to its safety record.
The Green Mountain State has consistently had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation, as they have earned this “Safest State” award three times in the last ten years.
Erich Pratt
Director of Communications for Gun Owners of America
January 16, 2004
THE BRADY BUNCH VISITS WONDERLAND ONCE AGAIN
[Via Women Against Gun Control, Ladies of High Caliber.
It’s not about reducing crime. It’s about disarming and controlling people.—Joe]
The city has charged the looters
It was over a year and a half ago when the looters hit Bellevue Square. The city responded by pulling in police officers from nearby cities and the State Patrol. The next couple of “protests” in Bellevue were closely escorted and there was zero looting.
It was a tough job tracking down the masked individuals via 10k+ pieces of video evidence but the city allocated the resources and last Thursday the Bellevue Reporter announced the current status:
Twenty-five different individuals have been criminally charged in relation to looting that occurred in Bellevue in May of 2020, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
The 25 felony cases against the defendants include 31 burglary charges, three possession of stolen property charges, one unlawful possession of a firearm charge and one malicious mischief charge.
Most of the charges are related to demonstrations and looting that primarily occurred on May 31, 2020 at businesses in Bellevue Square Mall. The defendants came from places across the region, including residents from Bellevue, Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Renton, and at least one defendant was recognized as being homeless in the charging documents.
…
Additional cases are expected to be referred by police at the misdemeanor level, and the King County Prosecuting Attorney;s Office said they will be sent to the Bellevue City Attorney’s Office to be handled in Municipal Court.
A year and half is a long time and the pursuit of justice had to be extremely expensive. But Bellevue is a very wealthy community and I expect almost everyone in the city is willing to pay the price. I expect there will not be any more looting in Bellevue like that seen in so many other cities for many years.
I hope the criminals enjoy their trials.
Quote of the day—Matt Taibbi
For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.
Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity. This is being done as part of a poisonous rhetorical two-step. First, Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on “getting the right answer” or “independent practice over teamwork” as white supremacy.
Matt Taibbi
December 28, 2021
The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump
[Via email from John S.
Taibbi has a point. Politicians can falsely claim to be a climate, crime, or economics expert and the average voter isn’t going to offer stiff resistance to that claim. But if a politician claims high school graduation shouldn’t depend upon proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic you are going to get their attention. It’s something everyone capable of reading is going to have a fair amount of expertise in. And the ruination of our education system has reached the point where it’s impossible to ignore.
The remarkable thing is that when called out on this the politicians don’t admit they were wrong. They double down. From the same Taibbbi article:
When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education “experts” who’d spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This “parents should leave ruining education to us” approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.
Similar examples could be presented from Democrat attitudes regarding defunding the police, gun control, and failure to secure the border.
This hubris will be their undoing. But will it occur soon enough?—Joe]
Quote of the day—Victoria Parker
Some policies—and some partisans—deserve forceful opposition, even contempt, from the other side. Vigorous disagreement, both within and between parties, is essential in a functioning democracy. But democracy also requires at least some level of mutual comprehension. No matter where people are on the political spectrum, they ought to know whom they’re fighting with and what they’re even fighting about.
Victoria Parker
December 27, 2021
Conservatives and Liberals Are Wrong About Each Other
[It is my belief that instead of treating people as belonging to one tribe or another people should treat each other as individuals. Individuals that have a much more nuanced set of beliefs and actions than the caricatures assigned to them by the leaders of their tribal opponents.
That may be too much to ask. The tribal behaviors are almost certainly deeply embedded in our psyche and difficult to override. As I have said many times before*, “It is irrational to expect people to be rational.”
The end result may be a tragedy of misunderstandings with a great mass of people “targeted” by each side when, if at all, it should only be that small fraction of extremists who are dragging the whole population into the fire.—Joe]
* For example:
- Relearning old lessons (2004)
- Natural disaster, Islam, When Prophecy Fails (2005)
- It’s hopeless (2006)
- Societal engineering (2007)
- One should not expect people to be rational (2008)
- Quote of the day—Alan Korwin (2012)
- Quote of the day—Don B. Kates (2013)
- We defend our… (2013)
- Quote of the day—Scott Adams (2016)
- Quote of the day—Jim N. Taylor (2018)
- Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb & Dave Workman (2019)
- Amazing (2019)
- Quote of the day—Rolf Nelson (2021)
- Mental gymnastics (2021)
Quote of the day—Barbara Walter
We actually know now that the two best predictors of whether violence is likely to happen are, whether a country is an anocracy, and that’s a fancy term for a partial democracy, and whether ethnic entrepreneurs have emerged in a country that are using racial, religious, or ethnic divisions to try to gain political power. And the amazing thing about the United States is that both of these factors currently exist, and they have emerged at a surprisingly fast rate.
…
The United States is pretty close to being at high risk of civil war.
Barbara Walter
Professor at University of California at San Diego
December 20, 2021
How close is the US to civil war? Closer than you think, study says
[Apparently there are measurable indicators of the risk of civil war. Walter has written a book on the topic. I might have to read it. This is even though there are a lot of indicators Walter places a lot (most? all?) the blame on Trump and his supporters.
See also what J.D. Tuccille has to say about Walter and her book.—Joe]
A progressive getting a clue
Michelle Tandler starts out with this:
Here is what confuses me about San Francisco.
We have the most liberal, left-wing government & population in the country.
We have a $13B budget.
And we have 8,000 people sleeping in the rain this week.
Can someone please explain this to me?
Continues here:
I’ve been a registered democrat for 18 years.
I grew up in a Progressive family and went to a Progressive school, and have mostly Progressive friends.
Yet what I see in SF – if this what Progressive stands for – I want the opposite.
And here:
+ Why, after decades of Progressive rule in SF are 8,000 people in the streets?
+ Why do we have the highest overdose rate in the nation?
+ Why do we have the highest property crime rate?
+ Why do we have fewest children per capita?
And here:
Why have I never learned about the case for gun rights?
Or about the values of Islam?
What are the arguments against abortion?
Why do so many people not want to take the vaccine?
Why am I not allowed to ask these questions without being accused of “doing harm”?
There more. A lot more. The entire thread is interesting. But the bottom line is that reality has intruded into her progressive bubble and she finally noticed. It appears to have cause a crisis of faith.
I have hope for the future.
Keep this in mind for tax season
From the IRS website here in the section about “Other Income”:
Publication 17 (2021), Your Federal Income Tax
For IndividualsFor use in preparing 2021 Returns
…
Illegal activities.
Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
…
Stolen property.
If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year.
Gee, and all this time I was under the impression that stealing $100K/year was worth a lot more than earning $100K/year because of the tax benefits. Hence, in essence, the IRS was giving tax breaks to thieves, robbers, and drug dealers. Now I find out they have to pay taxes just like all the rest of us*.
Via Tamera @tacsgc.
* Yes, I know about Al Capone going to prison for not paying income taxes. But you don’t hear about it regarding small time criminals.
Quote of the day—spectacles_gaze
Use firearms to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then disarm the populace. Keep a standing military to prevent foreign meddling.
spectacles_gaze
December 19, 2021
Reddit comment in r/socialism Thoughts on gun control.
[I think that says almost all you need to know about their views. It’s also consistent with other socialist/communist governments.
Prepare appropriately.—Joe]