Quote of the day—University of Cambridge

Like some people, AI systems often have a degree of confidence that far exceeds their actual abilities. And like an overconfident person, many AI systems don’t know when they’re making mistakes. Sometimes it’s even more difficult for an AI system to realize when it’s making a mistake than to produce a correct result.

University of Cambridge
March 17, 2022
Mathematical paradoxes demonstrate the limits of AI
[I’ve read a few AI/machine-learning papers, talked to people who design machine learning systems.and tried it a little bit myself. I’m being overly harsh to make the point but, AI/machine-learning designers are more tinkerers than engineers. We are a long way from having AI machines realize we are not particularly useful to them and they stuff us in The Matrix.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tammy Mutasa

Less than 120 people have caused more than 2,400 criminal cases throughout Seattle in five years.

These prolific offenders have been identified through the High Utilizer Initiative (HUI).

City Attorney Ann Davison announced the HUI launch Tuesday morning, a program made to identify those who repeatedly cause criminal activity throughout Seattle.

The program will then ensure these people will have the actual help they need, and their cases will be prioritized.

Tammy Mutasa
March 15, 2022
New initiative identifies hundreds who have caused thousands of crimes in Seattle
[These criminals were selected on this basis:

The people each has 12 or more referrals from SPD to the City Attorney’s office in the same time and at least one case in the last eight months.

That is an average of four crimes per year per person where the police did sufficient investigation to conclude there was a good chance of conviction. One has to wonder how many criminal acts were actually committed. What is the ratio? 2:1? 10:1?

That last sentence is a bit odd: “people will have the actual help they need”. I would have thought what they really need are “three hots and a cot”. But I guess they are going to try something else.

I remember in the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of talk about “reform” rather than incarceration. My understanding is they tried a lot of things but there didn’t seem to be any real value. “Three strikes and you’re out” was the response to those failures. “Three strikes” has it’s own problems but there were indicators it was more effective at reducing crime than the previous decades of trying to reform the criminals.

While I would like to think the criminals can be reformed I’m skeptical the reform community of today has something new that wasn’t tried decades ago found to be nearly useless. I just hope whatever they do they make sure those known habitual offenders do not continue their criminal ways.

In the mean time, prepare appropriately if you visit Seattle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Scott Mann MP @scottmann4NC

Every knife sold in the UK should have a gps tracker fitted in the handle. It’s time we had a national database like we do with guns. If you’re carrying it around you had better have a bloody good explanation, obvious exemptions for fishing etc.

Scott Mann MP @scottmann4NC
Tweeted on March 14, 2019
[There are so many great responses to this. My first response was an English version of:

Une chose qui m’humilie profondément est de voir que le génie humain a des limites, quand la bêtise humaine n’en a pas.

Alex. Dum.

In English:

One thing that humbles me deeply is to see that human genius has its limits while human stupidity does not.

But the best responses I have yet seen came from private Facebook posts*:

I demand you recognize the amazing act of courage he performs every morning when he peeks out from under the covers.

Imagine getting the vapors over humanity’s oldest & simplest manufactured tool.

The presence or absence of knives is how we tell where the apes stop and the people start in the earliest pages of our species’ family photo album.

This is not the deluded ranting of someone in a random psych ward. This is the deluded ranting of someone in a very specific psych ward called Parliament.

But, as it turns out, this is almost for certain British humor that didn’t translate that well into the U.S. where we think the U.K. handling of private gun ownership is just as absurd as this suggestion about knives—Joe]


* If given permission (they sometimes read this blog) I will post their name in an update.

No surprise

Boston social justice activist, hubby scammed at least $185K from donors: feds:

A high-profile social justice activist in Boston and her husband used a nonprofit they founded to scam at least $185,000 from donors who included a Black Lives Matter chapter and the local district attorney’s office, federal authorities allege.

There was so much rioting and looting going on over completely justified shootings that, when at my most charitable, I thought of it as a mass delusion. That there was literal fraudulent use of donations in some chapters does not surprise me.

It does sadden me. Just like Jessie Smollet’s stunt sadden me. Fake crimes makes it increasingly likely that a real crimes will be doubted. And the fraudsters, with a shortage of outrage to fuel their money train, create the market for other types of fraud.

Quote of the day—Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45)

Poor dipshit with a profile full of virtue signals about solidarity in a war doesn’t seem to understand that the greatest insurgents in history are us “backwoods dumb fucks who like to kill things”.

If the Ukraine had a million Texans, Putin would already be at the taxidermist.

Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45)
Tweeted on March 2, 2022
[Probably not literally true, but close enough to be funny.—Joe]

Quote of the day—James Rickards

Perhaps Russia’s most aggressive weapon in its war on dollars is gold. The first line of defense is to acquire physical gold, which cannot be frozen out of the international payments system or hacked.

With gold, you can always pay another country just by putting the gold on an airplane and shipping it to the counterparty. This is the 21st-century equivalent of how J.P. Morgan settled payments in gold by ship or railroad in the early 20th century.

James Rickards
March 4, 2022
You Can’t Hack Gold
[This also has relevance to cancel culture.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ellen Spencer 1 @ellenspencer03

Many things are a crime, but people still commit those crimes unless appropriate deterrents are in place. These guns are easily purchased by people with a vendetta. And again…there are MANY many ways to ‘prove’ your ‘manhood’ (lol in your case) without an assault rifle.

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

When they have no data and/or logic they go with the best they have—childish insults.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Charles C. Cooke

Franks is assuming that you are too stupid to see what she is doing. Summing up her proposal, she contends that Americans should abandon their traditional constitutional setup and “situate individual rights within the framework of ‘domestic tranquility’ and the ‘general welfare.’” This is a fancy way of saying that the natural rights Americans currently enjoy wouldn’t actually be legal rights anymore.

Next time, Franks could just say that—and spare us all the merry dance.

Charles C. Cooke
March 10, 2022
No, Professor, We Shouldn’t Cut Up Our Rights
[Franks, of course, is not going to take Cooke’s advice. She is smart enough to know that deception is required for her plan to succeed.

Last December, I had my thoughts on Franks’ suggestions for the First and Second Amendments. I prefer my approach to Cooke’s suggestion. It’s more direct, let’s her know her deception failed, and makes it clear we not going to acquiesce::

No. Your move Ms. Franks.

Prepare appropriately to back up those words.—Joe]

How Civil Wars Start

On a recent trip to Idaho I finished listening to How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter.

Although her observations and interpretation of current events in the U.S. differ significantly from mine her broader perspective of civil wars world wide and the causes resonated as quite plausible to me. I highly recommended reading it and skipping or pushing through the parts where you know she is oblivious to reality. For example, in her mind January 6th 2021 was an attempted coup. The attempted kidnapping of Gov. Whitmer of Michigan was something similar rather than an FBI entrapment operation.* And President Trump and the Republican party was/is authoritarian while Democrats are pro-freedom..

There are times when I just had to pause and try to recover from some of the crazy stuff she would say. Things like (paraphrasing) “California has a minority majority”. What? In a literal reading that is completely nonsensical. Or, (still paraphrasing) as she talks about the need for government to becoming less authoritarian, “Social media must be regulated and not allow extremists a safe haven.”

I finally managed to reconcile the schizophrenia by deciding she was too close an observer to the situation in the U.S. With this I could move on to accept her study of other countries as more objective and could be used as evidence for the claimed principles of civil war detection and prevention.

The following are my takeaways:

  • Governments exist on a scale of –10 (fully autocratic) to +10 (full democracies).
  • Countries at either end of the scale are stable and not subject to civil war.
  • Countries in the middle, anocracies, are at risk of civil war.
  • The US. is at it’s lowest point, +5, since the early 1800 (this doesn’t seem to account for the great unpleasantness of 1861 to 1865) after being a +10 for decades.
  • A political divide along racial and/or religious lines is a critical component of civil wars.
  • Long time abuse and lack of political influence of one group combined with losing hope for an end to their abuse is one of two possible triggers for violence.
  • Or a loss of power and/or status/prestige by a group is the second possible trigger for the use of violence.
  • Social media has played a huge role in the initiation of civil wars world wide. The rise of social media is highly correlated with the exponential increase in violent conflicts.

These principals were explained and supported by examples from conflicts all over the world.


* The trial may reveal things that change my mind on this.

Amazing conclusion to an amazing story

I read a book (or maybe one story in a collection of survival stories) about the Shackleton expedition. A short version is here. In the long version you have difficultly believing there is an escape path for anyone at nearly every step in their journey. Yet, everyone survived.

And now people have found the ship Shackleton and his crew abandoned. It is four miles south and nearly two miles below where Shackleton reported it abandoned:

The wreckage of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship “Endurance” has been found, a team searching for it said on Wednesday, March 9.

The ship was crushed by Antarctic ice and sank some 10,000 feet to the ocean floor more than a century ago.

The three-masted sailing ship was lost in November 1915 during Shackleton’s failed attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

The pictures and video of the ship are incredible:

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Endurance is right.

Quote of the day—Lee Williams

Dear Gabby, Shannon and Mike,

The instant the first Russian T-80 crossed the Ukrainian border, the whole world could see the uselessness of everything you’ve ever said and everything you’ve ever done. You’ve been overtaken by events – mooted and muted in one fell swoop, so scram. Leave the field. It is time for you and your gun-ban groups to go.

There’s a madman with nukes on the loose who’s just 50 miles off Alaska’s port bow. No one knows how far he’s willing to go, so you’re out. The adults are taking charge. Your services are no longer required. Please take the Demanding Moms and their creepy husbands with you, open a box of wine and have yourselves a good cry. Ukraine learned nearly too late that the right to keep and bear arms saves lives, while the civilian disarmament pipedream you’ve been peddling for decades costs lives.

Lee Williams
March 2022
An open letter to Gabby Giffords, Shannon Watts and Michael Bloomberg
[There’s more but I found this the best part.—Joe]

EPA approved releasing two billion mosquitos

Interesting:

Scientists have been playing god with mosquitos for a couple of years now. Back in 2021, British company Oxitech released 750 million lab-modified mosquitos in Florida. Now, the company is gearing up to release another 2 billion genetically modified mosquitos across more of Florida and in California as well.

The new species, codenames OX5034, is made up entirely of male mosquitos. The new species is derived from the Aeses aegypti family of mosquitos. Just like others the company has released, this new 2 billion should produce female larvae that die off before they reach adulthood.

Despite its size, the mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. That’s because this insect can carry multiple deadly and disabling diseases. Oxitech’s derived its new species from one notorious for carrying Zika, yellow fever, and even dengue. Other species can spread Malaria, lymphatic filariasis, and West Nile Virus.

The male larvae do not die off and will continue to produce dead female offspring.

Expect some fragment of this to be incorporated into COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy claims.

See also: What caliber for the most dangerous animal in the world?

Quote of the day—Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert

Remember.

Ukraine gave up their nukes in exchange for promises of security.

We see how that turned out.

This is why we must NEVER give up our guns to any government.

Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert
Tweeted on March 7, 2022
[This makes perfect sense to me. The principles which apply at a national level make sense when scaled down to an individual level.

But yet some people seem to think it is total nonsense. And they don’t (or can’t) explain why it is nonsense in a way that makes sense to me:

Oh my God, how are you not getting this? Two totally separate things. It’s like comparing apples to a dragon.

Does that mean we’re all getting nukes? We can pile them on a bookshelf behind us in Zoom conferences. Pose with them in Christmas photos. Have shirts that say, “Over my radioactive body.”

Comparing rifles to nukes is an extreme comparison considering that fact individuals can’t just walk into their local Walmart or bass pro shop and purchase a nuclear weapon.

Excellent argument for a 5th grader.

One screen. Two movies. Each think the other is delusional.

Reality is tough. Really, really tough.—Joe]

Quote of the day—marissaBoda @marissaboda

I think you should look in the mirror.  Skip over the baldness and look for the absence of your soul.  You are a bad bad human, with low personal standards.  And very few dignified interests. Lets get you on the FBI watch list!

marissaBoda @marissaboda
Tweeted on March 9, 2022
[This was brought about because I made this blog post: No one needs an AR-15 or AK-47 and a link was posted on twitter. Then someone (who has since blocked me) started whining about “the children”, “no one needs an assault rifle for their sport”, etc. etc.. I responded with:

1) It is a Bill of Rights, not NEEDS.
2) The 2nd Amendment is not about sports.
3) Large numbers of Ukrainian civilians would vehemently disagree with you about the need, but they are too busy to explain it to you as they are shooting Russians with their assault rifles.

They began insulting me rather than address my points. I laughed at them and pointed out the errors of their assumptions about me, and then I got blocked.

marissaBoda took over from the person who blocked me (I have a strong suspicion it is the same person with a different account) and the insults continued. The one above is probably my all time favorite. It is so completely lacking in connection with reality that I find it hilarious. My next favorite insult of all time was also completely wrong, but was a plausible extrapolation of factual data. It went something like:

You are a bomb making, pornography making, gun nut.

I would like to add marissaBoda @marissaboda to the list of examples of the political left believing their fantasy’s are true and/or projecting their own flaws on others.

And remember, this is what they think of you.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jason Ouimet

Having successfully removed the “violence” component from the federal “domestic-violence” prohibitor, gun controllers set to work on removing the “domestic” component. The current version of the federal Violence Against Women Act (H.R. 1620 or VAWA) would alter the types of relationships that give rise to a prohibiting “domestic violence” conviction to include “dating partners.” There is no temporal or cohabitation limit to the definition of “dating partners.” Ladies, next time you see that cad who ghosted you after two dates, don’t throw a drink in his face—it might cost you your gun rights under the federal government’s increasingly ridiculous definition of “domestic violence.”

Over the last half-century, gun-rights supporters’ enthusiasm to protect the ownership and availability of the types firearms necessary to exercise the Second Amendment right has altered the political landscape. Now, as gun-control supporters increasingly set their sights on gun owners, gun-rights supporters must marshal that same passion to combat the more complex anti-gun campaign to expand prohibited-persons categories. At stake is more than just what types of guns Americans may own, but whether the average American will qualify to own any firearm at all.

Jason Ouimet
Executive Director, NRA-ILA
March 6, 2022
From Prohibited Firearms To Prohibited Persons
[I found this to be an interesting observation. With the new ban on standard capacity magazines in Washington State the article could have had better timing but it is still a valid point.

The anti-gun people have opened up a new front in the war against the right to keep and bear arms and to a large extend gun rights advocates have been caught flat-footed. We do not have a good response to this new type of attack.

In part we have ourselves to blame. We have often said things to the effect of, “It is the criminal, not the gun.” And, we were unable or unwilling to prevent the enactment of laws against convicted felons owning firearms (even though they had “paid their debt to society”). So now when they push us down the slippery slope of any type of conviction it is tough to get traction and push back.

As it stands there is no connection between being a violent criminal threat and being banned from firearm ownership. An petite elderly woman with a felony conviction for $1,000 of tax fraud 50 years ago and has lead an angelical life since is banned from protecting herself with the most effective self-defense tools. But the Antifa thug with dozens of arrests for assault, battery, and arson but no convictions can purchase artillery pieces just like the rest of us normal people.

We need a good response to this threat and absurdity.

My thought is since NICS, and background checks in general, have not changed the violent crime rate we should push for the elimination of these costly infringements which do nothing for public safety. That’s the logical approach.

Am more emotionally based response might be, “If someone is safe enough to be allowed in public with gasoline and a book of matches they are safe enough to be in possession of a gun in public.”*

A better one might be, “Background checks don’t make us safer.** What is the real reason you are doing this?”

Short and clever sound bites are best. Any ideas?—Joe]


* I can’t take credit for this observation. I think it was someone named Jason who, probably in the late 1990’s, told me his father pointed this out to him.

** California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds

Quote of the day—Steven Kovac

The special counsel alleged that rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide in many of Wisconsin’s 6,875 nursing homes (housing 92,000 residents) during the 2020 election.

When visited by OSC investigators, many nursing home residents who are on record as having voted absentee in the election, were unaware of their surroundings, what year it was, or to whom they were speaking.

Steven Kovac
March 4, 2022
Wisconsin Special Counsel Alleges Massive Misconduct in 2020 Election
[A friend of a friend tells a similar story about what he saw on election day in Philadelphia with nursing home residents brought to the polling place via wheelchairs.

There is a reason Democrats are so strongly against voter ID and other reasonable qualifications for voters.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie @RevChuckCurrie

How much you wanna bet this account is busy posting phallic pictures elsewhere on the internet? Some folks feel the need to compensate for, well, you know. #BanAssualtWeapons

Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie @RevChuckCurrie
Tweeted on March 2, 2022
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier!

It is very telling he resorts to insults rather than objective data and rational arguments. He’s leading with the best he has to offer.

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

Quote of the day—David S. Willis

Amid the technological chaos and Western culture wars of the 21st century, thinkpiece writers sporadically debate which of these novels more accurately foresaw our present predicament. Modern China most clearly embodies Orwell’s vision, and elements of both novels can be found in contemporary Western societies. However, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offered perhaps a more accurate warning than either. Published in 1953, Bradbury’s novel is as gloomy and prescient as either Orwell’s or Huxley’s, but its explanation of how a dystopia is created comes closer to providing an understanding of our new reality.

David S. Willis
February 12, 2022
“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
[I think he is right. Orwell’s vision could be on the horizon though.—Joe]

New Washington State gun law

The short story with pictures from this thread:

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What you also need to do is donate money to SAF and FPC to fund the appeal of Duncan v. Becerra to SCOTUS.

I’m ahead of you Tom Gresham @Guntalk

Tom:

If I were a Washington State resident I’d be online this morning, ordering at least 100 magazines for a modern rifle (AR) as well as other standard capacity mags. The governor will sign the mag ban passed by the legislature.

Me (some time ago) with my grandson:

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