Quote of the day—Shirley Johnson @ShirleyJwriter

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It’s too early to argue about penises and guns.
Just enjoy both and remember, if you don’t know what size you need, go rent a few at the gun range to see what fits you the best.
Or ask a friend to try theirs.

Shirley Johnson @ShirleyJwriter
Tweeted April 3, 2022
[While closely related this isn’t an example of Markley’s Law. I’m not certain it was intentional but I found it funny. The follow-up tweet contributed to the humor:

My husband does not like this post. He never goes to the range with me and now I am in trouble.

This in her profile doesn’t hurt, “I don’t need a 38. I need 38DD.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ryan Sabalow and Dale Kasler

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They’ve banned high-capacity magazines and cracked down on assault weapons. They’ve made it so Californians have to pass a background check to purchase a gun and ammunition. They’ve prohibited buyers from having ammo or “ghost” gun parts shipped directly to their homes.

When it comes to gun laws, California’s legislators have passed some of the most stringent regulations in the country, checking off nearly every box on national gun control advocates’ wishlist.

A mass shooting early Sunday that left six dead and 12 wounded just a block from the Capitol — the very building where these laws were enacted — immediately prompted new calls for legislation to curb gun violence, from California elected officials and gun-control advocates across the nation.

Ryan Sabalow and Dale Kasler
April 3, 2022
California has toughest U.S. gun laws. After Sacramento shooting, what else can lawmakers do?
[“What else can lawmakers do?” Surrender to law enforcement then write and sign their confessions.—Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

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image

Another contribution to Markley’s Law Monday.

I “love” the cartridge belt with the magazine fed rifles. I shows the artist really knows his subject.

Quote of the day—Jim Vote Blue 2022 @LAJimm

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Everyone knows gun owners are compensating for tiny ‘s and if they say otherwise then they are admitting it is tiny.

Jim Vote Blue 2022 @LAJimm
Tweeted on March 13, 2022
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier!

Via a tweet from In Chains @InChainsInJail.—Joe]

Boomershoot 2022 Ukraine discount

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I do not ever recall a time when such a lesson was made clearer than in the last few weeks. The Ukraine government has given guns to “all patriots who are without hesitation ready to use them against the enemy!” Many of those people had never fired a gun before. And yet, they are more than holding their own against the Russians.

Imagine if those patriots, instead of getting their hands on government AK-47s and hoping they can hit targets at 100 to 200 yards had practiced with their own equipment and knew they could confidently engage targets at 700 yards. This is what Boomershoot is about. You train and practice at long range targets. You engage reactive targets which give you immediate positive feedback. When you hit a target, you make the earth shake. The thrill that elicits is indescribable. It is extremely rewarding.

And in addition to being fun it gives you the knowledge of what you are capable of. Should a scenario like that which befell the people of the Ukraine happen here you will have a tremendous advantage over those patriots.

With this in mind, the Boomershoot team is giving people signing up for Boomershoot 2022 a 15% discount on most events. Use the discount code “Ukraine” when you sign up at https://entry.boomershoot.com/.

Boomershoot 2022 is April 29th, 30th (High Intensity, Precision Rifle Clinic, and Field Fire) and May 1st (Long Range). Sign up now while there are still positions available. Be able to engage hostile invaders at 700 instead of hoping you connect at 200 yards.

Quote of the day—Brandon Smith

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I think it’s important that people within the liberty movement and outside of the liberty movement start thinking about the scale of the crisis we are facing. It’s not just about economic disaster and adapting to the loss of supply chains and stable currencies; it’s not just about survival. It’s also about fighting back against the inevitable government response to the crisis. They will try to take advantage of people’s pain, and use it to lure those people into slavery. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Brandon Smith
March 17, 2022
The Stagflation Trap Will Lead To Universal Basic Income And Food Rationing
[Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Timothy H. Lee

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This is the same Joe Biden, after all, who orchestrated a catastrophically mismanaged surrender of Afghanistan to ragtag nomads with small arms.  Moreover, one would think that a man who came of political age during the Vietnam War would possess a better working understanding of the value of small arms in fighting off a far superior military.  Then there’s the American Revolution itself, in which patriots with small arms defeated the world’s most powerful military. 

But here’s the most bizarre aspect of all. 

The White House concedes that Biden personally interrupted delivery of 28 Polish MiG-29 fighter jets repeatedly requested by Ukraine in its desperate fight for survival.  According to his logic, supplying Ukrainians with deadly small arms, antitank weaponry and other deadly devices are far more effective against the Russian military than advanced fighter aircraft.   As reported by Politico, the Biden Administration determined that, “the warplanes wouldn’t materially improve Ukraine’s chances.”

Timothy H. Lee
March 17, 2022
Biden Supports Gun Rights – Just Not for Americans
[Via email from PKoning.

You might conclude rational thinking is outside the area of expertise of anti-gun people. The evidence does support that hypothesis. Another hypothesis, also supported by the same data, is that they are liars who will say whatever they think will work to achieve then objectives and at least one of their objectives is to disarm their intended victims. That would be us.

Respond appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—admin

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There was an enormous analysis effort going again many years to find out whether or not gun management measures work. A 2020 evaluation by the RAND Company, a nonprofit analysis group, parsed the outcomes of 27,900 analysis publications on the effectiveness of gun management legal guidelines. From this huge physique of labor, the RAND authors discovered solely 123 research, or 0.four %, that examined the results rigorously. Among the different 27,777 research could have been helpful for non-empirical discussions, however many others have been deeply flawed.

We took a have a look at the importance of the 123 rigorous empirical research and what they really say in regards to the efficacy of gun management legal guidelines.

The reply: nothing. The 123 research that met RAND’s standards could have been one of the best of the 27,900 that have been analyzed, however they nonetheless had critical statistical defects, similar to a scarcity of controls, too many parameters or hypotheses for the information, undisclosed knowledge, faulty knowledge, misspecified fashions, and different issues.

admin
April 1, 2022
Do Studies Show Gun Control Works? No.
[The content is interesting but it is like the text was automatically translated to another language then back to English. For example, “Gun management” in the article really means “gun control”.

Related to this is the FBI Uniform Crime Reports has become, for all intents and purposes, useless:

Nearly 16,000 agencies in the U.S. (15,897) reported crimes to the FBI in 2020. 

Updated numbers the FBI released to us Thursday, show only 11,920 police agencies remain for 2021.

That’s nearly 4,000 police agencies dropping out.

Prosecutors are quitting because they are overwhelmed by backlog of cases, the police aren’t reporting information to the FBI. The prisons released people because of the pandemic, it’s almost like government is falling apart, or else deliberately signaling to the criminal class that it’s open season on ordinary people.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Molly Crane-Newman

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Underpaid prosecutors overwhelmed by a mammoth backlog of cases are quitting in droves when their work is needed more than ever, the city’s district attorneys told the City Council on Friday.

“Former staffers cited the responsibilities of discovery, managing the backlog of cases, and increased night and weekend shifts among the reasons why they leave,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark told the council’s Public Safety Committee at a virtual budget hearing.

“People are in tears when they leave because they love the work they do for the Bronx community, but the job is now overwhelming.”

Clark said 104 attorneys and 90 professional staff had quit her office by the end of February, surpassing the 96 attorneys and 51 professional staff who left in all of 2021.

Clark said the departures come as the Bronx DA faces 1,270 open gun cases.

Molly Crane-Newman
March 18, 2022
Overwhelmed prosecutors quitting ‘in tears’ amid staffing crisis, NYC district attorneys say
[The answer is right in front of them and they refuse to see it. Stop prosecuting people for having open guns! Or is it that nearly 1,300 people have shown the Bronx DA their open gun cases and the DA is paralyzed with fright?

Regardless, this is an indicator of things to come and the opportunities opening up. If the anti-gun laws are not quickly struck down or repealed people will ignore them and start normalizing gun ownership in self defense.

We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Reality is tough

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You hear the phrase “two movies, one screen”, right? People perceive what they expect/want to perceive. This makes it really tough to be in touch with reality. You may think, “Not for me!” I’m not so sure. Watch and listen to this:

These sort of things demonstrate the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and falsity. It takes a great deal of effort to change minds, even when the facts are overwhelming, because people’s brains get hardwired into thinking about something in a particular way.

My mom learned to do subtraction in a different way that what was taught in my elementary school. She could not help me learn how to subtract like Mrs. Cole was teaching it. She asked Dad to help me. After I learned to subtract I asked Mom to show me her way. It was incomprehensible to me. Dad could not understand it either. She got the right answers, but she could not understand our method either.

I came up with a different way of viewing exterior ballistics problems. Someone who was taught the traditional way is completely confused by my method. I understand how they do it but my way is simpler and has broader application. I can teach either way to newbies just fine. But teaching it to someone who has done it conventionally will result in their total confusion.

It’s obvious to some people that banning guns will save lives. The facts don’t matter because elimination of “gun deaths” mean fewer people are dying, right? Their brains have become hardwired down a particular path. Once they start down that path it is a slippery slope to the same conclusion regardless of the factual obstacles presented.

Spooky action at a distance is a very difficult concept. It just “can’t be true”. But it is.

Socialism/communism must be the most tested and failed political system ever. Yet people believe the false reality.

Reality is really, really tough. For everyone. I’m sure there are countless examples all around us that no one has yet properly deciphered and we all believe one or more flavors of falsehood about it. It may even take a generation or two after the truth is discovered before people are comfortable thinking in terms of the “new reality” and people laugh at “the things people used to believe”.

Quote of the day—Walrus @ThrowawayGaming

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If nobody is armed, nobody will be oppressed. I’m sorry, but the state needs to come down hard on dissenters, which is Republican gun owners.

Walrus @ThrowawayGaming
Tweeted on March 28, 2022
[For several minutes I looked at his posts to see if I could confirm this is a parody account. Nope, insufficient evidence.

I didn’t know stupid was available in this dense of packaging. Two sentences, one impossible proposition, two falsehoods, one proposed unconstitutional act, and the second sentence contradicts the first.

I couldn’t pack that much nonsense into two sentences if I worked on it for an hour. And all without long practice with a parody account. That takes extraordinary talent in the crap for brains department.—Joe]

All electric cars in Washington state

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As an electrical engineer I find this “interesting”:

Washington state plans to ban most non-electric vehicles by 2030, according to a newly signed bill by Gov. Jay Inslee.

The bill says that all vehicles of the model year 2030 or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in the state must be electric.

As the next year’s model come out in the fall the target for their mandate will be in a little over seven years. I don’t think the electrical infrastructure can be upgraded to handle the new load in time. This will be especially true if the leftist politicians pushing to remove many of the hydroelectric dams are successful.

It is my belief they hope to bring wind and solar online. But those sources are intermittent. Those cars are going to be lower in the priority que than heating and lighting homes and offices. If you pull into the charging station during peak usage in early January with little wind and almost no solar for a few days you could be told you won’t be able to recharge until the wind blows from the south again so the heating load isn’t so high. Perhaps in a week or two. Or maybe you can find a black market diesel generator if you know who to ask and have the cash to pay for it.

My guess is that one of two things will happen.

  1. The politicians who voted for things like this mandate, the anti-business regulations, the schools teaching math is racist, and the oppressive gun laws will be unable to maintain the required margin of fraud in future elections and the oppressive laws will be repealed.
  2. The productive and freedom loving residents will leave the state and the state will spiral down into an economic abyss resembling downtown Seattle and Detroit. I.e., an Atlas Shrugged like scenario.

I often wonder if the economic destruction authoritarians create is due to obliviousness, maliciousness, or a deliberate gamble that things will somehow recover from their reign of power.

We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.

Layers of fact checkers

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NASA: Giant asteroid to pay Earth a visit today; it will come horrifically close to our planet. How many errors or exaggerations can we find in this article? I found three:

There is always a risk that even the slightest deviation from its path will result in the asteroid being trapped by Earth’s gravitational pull, causing it to strike our planet.

…

The asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth at a distance of 1,580,000 kilometers.

…

An interesting fact about 2022 FH is that it has a large deposit of silica, which is used in making silicon chips. With a global shortage of silicon chips, asteroids like these can be extremely crucial to mankind to conduct extraterrestrial mining mission.

The asteroid is not wandering around sniffing the trees on either side of a path and giving consideration to chasing a squirrel like a dog. The path is determined by it’s current direction, velocity, and the gravitational fields it is exposed to. These are all well known quantities. The asteroid is not going to deviate toward earth in an unexpected manner.

I don’t consider 1.58 million kilometers “horrifically close”. This is over four times the distance from the earth to the moon. Inside the moon’s orbit is something I would consider calling “horrifically close”.

The real whopper is the conflation of shortage of silicon chips with a shortage of silica. On earth silica is better known as sand:

However, the foremost common mineral within the sand is quartz–also referred to as silica.

As you might imagine silicon is rather common on Earth:

Silicon makes up 25.7% of the earth’s crust, by weight, and is the second most abundant element, being exceeded only by oxygen.

It’s going to be a more than a few years before it makes economic sense to mine asteroids for silicon to make electronic parts.

I would like to suggest the author of this clickbait provide services for used car dealerships and/or politicians rather than pretend dispensing technical news.

For the rest of us, this is another example of the unreliability of news sources. Keep this in mind whenever you read or hear anything. Reality is really really tough even when you are trying to get at the truth. And many people don’t even put minimal effort into it.

Quote of the day—Lee Williams

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During her Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked, “Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?”

Judge Jackson’s response is telling: “Senator, the Supreme Court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.”

She did not say the right to keep and bear arms was enshrined in the Constitution. Nor did she say it’s part of our God-given right to self-defense. Instead, she believes the RKBA was “established” by the Supreme Court. That, friends, is a judicial philosophy taken straight from the pages of Gun Banning 101.

Lee Williams
March 28, 2022
Come on, man. Of course, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is anti-gun
[I also was struck by the odd wording when Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras tweeted Judge Jackson’s response to me. And, I’m nearly certain, she wasn’t referring to this SCOTUS declaration:

This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress.

That said, I’m not sure any Senators are going to expend the political capital to make a big deal out of opposing her nomination. Those in tight elections might well see opponents shriek, “Senator Racist voted against confirming the first black woman to the Supreme Court!”. It is probably better that they save their ammo for legislative votes with less baggage and more immediate and direct consequences.—Joe]

Eat your lentils

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Low folate levels associated with dementia and mortality:

Among the individuals with insufficient amounts of folate, the rates of dementia were 3.4%. The rates of death from any cause came in just under 8%.

The participants without the deficiency experienced rates of dementia of 3.2%, and the all-cause death rates amounted to almost 4%.

After factoring in co-occurring conditions, such as diabetes, vitamin B12 deficiency, cognitive decline, and depression, the researchers associated folate deficiency with a 68% higher risk of a dementia diagnosis.

Lentils are a great source of folate:

Did you know? Out of all plant-based foods, lentils contain the most folate!

Lentils are an excellent source of folate. A type of B-vitamin, folate helps support red blood cell formation and proper nerve functions. Folate also plays an important role in lowering artery-damaging homocysteine. In addition, the water-soluble vitamin may help prevent anemia and protect against developing heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Folate is particularly important for women of childbearing age, as it is needed to support increasing maternal blood volume.

I also should note that my brothers raise lentils on the farm and I frequently transport 50 and 100 pound bags of lentils to the Seattle area for sale (and donation to a food bank) at near my own cost.

Quote of the day—Ellen Spencer 1 @ellenspencer03

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Ridiculous arguments that have nothing to do with assault rifles. But to your point, shall we castrate men who rape/kill innocent women? Its hardly a punishment to ban these guns…there are other ways to prove your ‘manhood’. But good job proving your weirdness.

Ellen Spencer 1 @ellenspencer03
Tweeted on March 4, 2022
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier!

I find it amusing that she apparently was not only unable to comprehend my point, but also ran out of insults and had to repeat herself (see the first time here).—Joe]

Never let a crisis go to waste

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COVID enabled authoritarians to expand their power:

An appeals court sided with the governor and found the emergency act gave him vast authority—including the “police power” to create new law. The California Supreme Court let the appeals court decision stand, meaning that in any declared emergency the governor can do whatever he deems appropriate without serious checks or balances.

Last month, Newsom mercifully lifted the vast majority of edicts and orders—but the precedent has been set for future emergencies. There are no real limits on executive power.

There really needs to be consequences for these expansions of government powers. I’m just not sure what the solution is. When the elections can’t be trusted, the “news” is cheering the authoritarians, and individuals who speak out are canceled, what are people to do when they find the restrictions intolerable?

Quote of the day—Jennifer Sensiba 三四八 @JenniferSensiba

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That’s because a AR (that stands for Assault Murder Rifle) shoots bullets so dense and powerful that they can go through anything. They’re illegal in Europe because even CERN can’t make antimatter explosions like that. THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Jennifer Sensiba 三四八 @JenniferSensiba
Tweeted on March 22, 2022
[Perhaps it is a little overdone, but it’s only off in the directness, not in the underlying content.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tam

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Bad guys might carry a gun without a permit!” is just an idiotic argument. Bad guys already carry guns without permits, because they’re bad guys. They don’t care about gun carry permits any more than they care about robbery or murder permits. That’s how you know they’re the bad guys. The permit process, no matter how streamlined, is only an impediment to lawful citizens who’d like a chance to shoot back.

Tam
March 22, 2022
Constitutional Carry in Indiana
[There is something many people don’t know. If someone asks you to justify your actions and you confidently answer it with nonsense most of the time it will be accepted. It’s only if you are silent, or fumble for words, that they will follow up and press you to give them a decent answer. This is what the anti-gun people frequently do, whether it is from training, because their heads are filled with nonsense, or both, I just don’t know. This is just another example.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brad Raffensperger

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We need to get a subpoena for the fella who this John Doe is. Was he paid? How much was he paid? And then who paid him. And we’re going to follow the money, and we’re going get to the bottom of it. And we’re going to prosecute this, if we find that there’s substance to it.

Brad Raffensperger
Georgia Secretary of State
March 20, 2022
Georgia ballot harvesting probe advances as state elections board approves subpoena
[I wish them well, but I suspect they will not make much progress.—Joe]