Quote of the day—Chauncey DeVega

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Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, two of the most blatantly fascistic Republican members of Congress, are dreaming of a White Christmas — with the emphasis on “White.”

In the spirit of holiday cheer, Massie and Boebert recently shared family Christmas photos on social media — in which every family member is brandishing a gun. There’s nothing unique about them. Such a “tradition” is fairly common among a particular subculture of American gun fetishists and “ammosexuals.” This is but another symptom of America’s unhealthy infatuation with gun violence.

Chauncey DeVega
December 24, 2021
White supremacist Christmas: Those Boebert and Massie “gun photos” are a direct threat
[Reading the article was like reading about the trial in Darkness at Noon, propaganda from Nazi Germany, or the twisted reality described by the mentally ill. It is an elaborate tale constructed upon the flimsiest of scaffolding for evil purposes or from a delusional mind.

Even the pictures supplied were distorted.

These are the pictures supplied for the article:
BoebertMassie

The pictures supplied by Boebert and Massie:

boebert-guns-family-

Massie

It is my belief normal people are catching on to the disconnect from reality. The political left cannot bear to slow “progress” and push their delusions all the harder. Furthering the rife between reality and their “progress”.

This will not end well. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

COVID-19 treated by Amorphous Calcium Carbonate

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It’s a small sample size but the results are looking extremely good:

All 18 COVID-19 patients hospitalized with moderate or severe symptoms who received the drug Amor-18 developed by Israeli biotech company Amorphical recovered and were discharged in a few days, the company announced on Wednesday. Of the 19 individuals who were given a placebo, six had to be transferred to intensive care, and two died.

As part of compassionate care, two other patients in a very serious condition were given the drug. Both recovered and were discharged.

“Since the patients treated with the drug recovered within a few days and were released to their home, this was 100% successful,” said Dr. Nashat Abu Saleh, co-director of the coronavirus department at Ziv Medical Center in Safed, where the phase II clinical trial was conducted.

…

Amor-18, which uses Amorphous Calcium Carbonate (ACC) as the main ingredient, was administered orally or by inhalation. As explained by the company, ACC has the ability to modulate acidic pH changes around each cell. These changes affect the capability of COVID-19 to penetrate the cells and replicate. This allows the drug to prevent the virus from spreading and thus the patients from deteriorating.

It looks as if it is available as a dietary supplement. It is more expensive than I had expected but it is available now and without a prescription

If all the above is true this is going to be some serious competition to the big pharma drugs.

Quote of the day—spectacles_gaze

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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]

Quote of the day—Kimberly Skipper @kdskipper

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We have too many high powered weapon. It’s not that hard. All guns are a potential problem in this country, but there’s too many out there to recall them now. However, high powered guns can be a start for tying to get a handle on the gun violence problem affecting America.

Kimberly Skipper @kdskipper
Tweeted on December 19, 2021
[If ignorance really is bliss then Ms. Skipper must be in a state of ecstasy.

If not, then instead of ignorance, perhaps it’s deliberate lies.—Joe]

Deliberate destruction

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California and San Francisco are spending $86.5 million for a 160 room building for the homeless. Another $8.5 million will be spend on operating expenses. That’s a purchase price of over $540K per room and over $50K per room in operating costs. The city has over 8,000 people currently homeless.

What could possibly go wrong?

If you subsidize something the demand will go up. A $500K condo and $50K towards living costs? I’d bet they will get “homeless” people from all over the country, if not the world.

This has to be a deliberate destruction of wealth. No one can be that stupid and/or naïve.

H/T to Michelle Tandler @michelletandler.

Just a cost of reaching utopia

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This should be a clue:

US congresswoman carjacked at gunpoint in daylight

Philadelphia has seen a massive rise rise in car theft this year, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Police reported 225 carjackings in 2019, 409 in 2020 and 720 so far this year, according to CBS News.

The figures amount to an 80% increase in carjackings in 2021.

Gunpoint robberies are up 27% over 2020.

Philadelphia has also seen a record 544 homicides this year, up from 347 in all of 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It is hard to believe this was unforeseen by anyone capable of rational thought. But, then, it could be this is the desired outcome. Criminals are the natural enemy of capitalists and hence allies of socialists. This might be considered part of the price paid to reach their socialist utopia.

I wish I had copied the entire text of the post when I first saw it. An earlier version mentioned she co-sponsored a bill to defund the police and redirect the funds to mental health problems.

Quote of the day—Victor Davis Hanson

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If Biden were polling at 70 percent approval, and his policies at 60 percent, the current doomsayers would be reassuring us of the “health of the system.”

They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does, despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the left is not “people power” at all.

Victor Davis Hanson
December 16, 2021
Why Is the Left Suddenly Worried About the End of Democracy?
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mary Anne Franks

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The Second Amendment’s idiosyncratic and anachronistic focus on militias and “arms” degrades the concept of self-defense. The right to safeguard one’s life should not be conflated with or reduced to the right to use a weapon, especially a weapon that is so much more likely to inflict injury and death than to avoid it. Far better would be an amendment that guarantees a meaningful right to bodily autonomy and obligates the government to implement reasonable measures to protect public health and safety:

All people have the right to bodily autonomy consistent with the right of other people to the same, including the right to defend themselves against unlawful force and the right of self-determination in reproductive matters. The government shall take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole.

Mary Anne Franks
December 2021
REDO THE FIRST TWO AMENDMENTS
[This law professor simply has no concept of governments being the greatest threat and the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment as written.

Collectivists must collectivize.

The answer is, “No. Your move Ms. Franks.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Edge-

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The gun was beyond unnecessary and the correct course of action would have been for the micropenis guy #1 to walk back inside, phone the local police to report trespassing, and wait for the cops to show up and do their jobs.

There is no situation where the other guy gets control of the gun if the gun is never brought out. This is purely based off the actions of one insecure beta-male who needs his Penis Enhancer(TM) to feel masculine in the face of a verbal confrontation.

I cannot insult micropenis murderer guy enough.

Edge-
November 30, 2021
MMO Champion Gun Control Threat
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday it’s another science denier!

Insults are so convincing!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kat Schuster

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Drawing inspiration from a controversial approach to outlawing most abortions in Texas, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday pledged to make it easier for private citizens to sue manufacturers or other citizens who sell assault rifles or parts for ghost guns in the Golden State.

His plan mirrors the authority enacted by lawmakers in Texas to ban most abortions.

Kat Schuster
December 12, 2021
Newsom Vows To Ban Assault Guns Using Texas Abortion Ban Tactics
[We knew it would happen.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Shellenberger

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There’s just a lot of progressive buyer’s remorse right now.

Michael Shellenberger
December 16, 2021
Urban liberals rethink guns and policing amid crime spike on their doorstep
[But will this result in ‘progressive’ politicians being introduced to tar, feathers, and one-way tickets out of town on wooden rails? I’m inclined to go with public trials. But with the current administration in Washington that will not be happening so unless the supply chain for tar, feathers, and rails is broken the tar and feathers route is the most likely, while still extremely improbable.

Noting short of something of similar magnitude will allow us to recover the free exercise of our rights via a legislative path. I’m still betting on the courts.—Joe]

Zero click exploit for iPhone

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This is amazing (emphasis added):

Project Zero said the exploit effectively created “a weapon against which there is no defense,” noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. “Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit,” the research team said.

The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple’s proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices.  By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants.

…

Within Apple’s CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple’s implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white.

Describing the exploit as “pretty terrifying,” Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit.

“JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does,” the researchers explained.

“Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, [NSO’s hackers] define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent.”

“The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying,” the Google researchers added.

I wonder how many other zero click exploits are active in the wild right now.

We live in interesting times.

Quote of the day—Debbie Mizrahie

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I’ve always been anti-gun. But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We’re living in fear.

Debbie Mizrahie
Beverly Hills
December 9, 2021
Beverly Hills residents arming themselves with guns in wake of violence
[Ms. Mizrahie, welcome to the right side of history!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dr. Monica Gandhi

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I think the mRNA vaccine technology is going to have a huge role to play for other pathogens. The mRNA platform allows the human host to generate a protein of the virus or other pathogen to which to raise an immune response, and has been revolutionary for COVID-19. So, after trying so many other vaccine candidates before for HIV without success, this is a very promising platform to hopefully reach this elusive goal.

Dr. Monica Gandhi
December 15, 2021
Scientists are closing in on an HIV vaccine
[I remember when AIDS first hit the news. People didn’t even know if it was a virus. Just like all the different theories about COVID and the vaccines today there were strange things believed by people about AIDS. I remember one guy who claimed there were studies which proved K-Y Jelly caused it. The better known conspiracy theory is that it was a man-made pathogen created to exterminate homosexual men.

Of course it has been conclusively proven that it is a virus, named HIV, and it is believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa. Back in the early 1980’s I expected, “They will get this figured out in a couple years.” Forty years later yet another “promising vaccine” is in the works. And it will have all, and perhaps more, of the baggage carried by the mRNA COVID vaccines.

Looking at the parallels of the conspiracy theories associated with this pandemic and AIDS, I have to wonder if the resolutions will have a similar time decay constant.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lyle

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Like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, they reside in a land of make-believe, and if you don’t play along with them they’ll hate you for challenging their fantasy. It’s hard enough to maintain character in a land of make-believe without people trying to ruin your entire imaginary world by rudely inserting images of reality. You’re a bully, even a destroyer of worlds (of Neverland), in their minds.

They know perfectly well that their world is imaginary but, like normal children playing, they enjoy living in that imaginary world. It’s a beautiful and wonderful place in which they are the heroes. Therefore they consider it cruel of anyone to ruin their game.

The signal, the proof, that they know their world is imaginary is that they get very emotional when you challenge the game. Because they’re putting creative effort into playing make-believe it hurts them to be reminded of reality. The emotion comes from your breaking down that which they’ve carefully and delicately built up in their imaginations. It’s as though they’ve painted a nice picture and they’re standing there enjoying it, and then you come along and mess it all up and kick over the easel. That makes you an ogre. They have to get rid of you or else the game, all of wonderful Neverland, and their place in it, is ruined altogether.

Lyle
Comment to Quote of the day—Rachel Sillcocks
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Priya Mammen

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No matter where you fall on the right to bear arms, there can be no dispute that gun locks, safe storage, and regulated access to weapons are basic tenets that benefit all of us. It took a veto from Gov. Tom Wolf to strike down the concealed-carry bill, which had already passed through the Pennsylvania legislature.

Priya Mammen
December 9, 2021
We need to embrace a public health mantra: ‘none of us, unless all of us’ | Expert Opinion
[I always marvel at how someone can contract themselves in adjacent sentences. In the first sentence she says “there can be no dispute”. In the second sentence she points out the Pennsylvania legislature and governor had a dispute about the public benefit of permitless carry.

What is going on here? Was the first sentence a deliberate lie and she forgot the details of the lie by the time she wrote the next sentence? Or does she regard people who disagree with her on this topic to be sub humans unworthy of having an opinion worth considering?

In any case, it is absolutely amazing!

And in this case she is touted as an “Expert”. How can someone so careless, and transparently so, with the truth lay claim to being an expert?

Furthermore, the by line claims:

Priya E. Mammen is an emergency physician and public health specialist. She is a fellow of the Lindy Institute of Urban Innovation and trustee of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Would you want someone as your physician who lies so easily and/or is incapable of detecting irrational thought patterns in herself?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Maggie Marcarelli @Magmarcarelli

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What is it with men and their guns? Overcompensating for a lack elsewhere I presume.

Maggie Marcarelli @Magmarcarelli
Tweeted on November 24, 2021
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday it’s another science denier!

It would appear Maggie is signaling what she focuses on regarding her interactions with men.

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

May issue

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I knew California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York were nearly impossible to get CCW licenses in. Yeah, CA wasn’t bad if you live in the correct county. And New York would issue you a permit if you paid a lawyer enough money to make the appropriate bribe(s). I had not looked into the process of many of the others.

Not that I have a desire to visit let alone get a Delaware license (I’m covered by my Idaho and Utah licenses anyway) but things are pretty messed up there. It’s a six step process. This includes (highlighting added):

Step 2: Collect References

Delaware’s laws require you to produce five references. They must answer the questions on the Delaware concealed carry reference form. These are the main requirements for a reference to be valid:

  • Cannot be related to you.

  • Cannot live at the same address as you.

  • Must have known the person for at least a year.

  • Reference must reside in the same county.

  • Reference must be at least 18 years old.

It may strengthen your odds of approval if one or more of your references hold a distinguished title. For example, your application may be viewed more favorably if references from an attorney and a senator accompany it. Your references must declare why you want a permit, and they can simply state that you want it to protect yourself or your family. The reference form should state that you are seeking a Delaware concealed carry permit, are of legal age and are of good moral character.

Step 3: Publish Your Intention

Once you have your five references, you need to publish your intent.

…

The published notice of your intent to seek a permit should include your full name.

The notice should appear in a newspaper or publication that has a sizable reach in your zip code. For example, it is better to publish it in the main newspaper in your area than it is to publish it in a free circular that targets a niche audience. We recommend publishing in the News Journal because it is the main newspaper for all three counties,

References should include an attorney and a senator? Publish your intention in a wide coverage publication to get a license?

Wow! SCOTUS needs to slap this law down hard when they rule in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a liar

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H/T to Ed Driscoll.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Ron DeSantis’ Florida state military plan echoes Trump’s autocratic aspirations (nbcnews.com):

The governor is a leader in GOP efforts to create environments conducive to authoritarianism, from opposing Covid vaccination mandates to critical race theory fearmongering.

I’m reminded of a previous blog post where I said:

How does a government “force a free market”? A free market is one free of government interference! Force is required to have anything other than a free market.

And so it is in this case. That Governor DeSantis is opposing vaccination mandates is evidence that he is not an authoritarian. To claim he is autocratic and/or authoritarian is a lie.

Quote of the day—Rachel Sillcocks

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It’s not about the fact that we are anti-police. It is about the fact that we do not allow weapons in our restaurant. We were uncomfortable, and we asked them to leave. It has nothing to do that they were officers. It has everything to do that they were carrying guns.

Rachel Sillcocks
December 4, 2021
San Francisco restaurant owner explains why police officers denied service
[This is what happens when people have messed up wiring in their brain and think inanimate objects are more indicative of behavior than the people in control of the objects. This is what they think of gun ownership. You magically become good or evil based on the existence or absence of certain types of inanimate objects in your possession. This is undeniable prejudice.

I can understand the impulse for non-discrimination legislation to protect gun owners access to public accommodations. I can also understand the impulse for police officers to be slow to respond.

They have since said they made a mistake and apologized. I’m sure the 1.0 average Yelp score had nothing to do with it.—Joe]