You and what army?

 awesomeness, blather, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 142023
 

Attorney General says if sheriffs won’t enforce gun ban ‘there are other people there to do the job’

The attorney general of the state of Illinois is annoyed that the great majority of the county sheriffs – elected officials who do not report to the Governor, nor can he remove them from office – have told the Governor to get bent over the issue of arresting several million citizens for the crime of owning semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines. The AG believes that other police forces than county sheriffs can do the job, such as the State Police. Perhaps he thinks the Governor can call up the National Guard for this task. But for those sheriffs who take their jobs seriously, they may well arrest State Police who attempt to arrest citizens. And the sheriffs would be right to do so: their oaths tend to include words to the effect of “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and banning magazines and firearms is, especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, monumentally and obviously unconstitutional.

 

This would not be unprecedented. Recall the ATF agent who got himself arrested a couple years ago. This was an arrest and tazing that didn’t need to happen; it followed the same script as so many other arrests: someone high on drugs or entitlement refuses to comply even a little bit with simple orders of the police, and things go badly for them. in this case, the ATF agent was high on his sense of overwhelming power… which it turned out he didn’t actually have.

 

I imagine if State Police or some such start actually arresting the law abiding, various resistance movements will start up that will keep them under surveillance and sic Sheriffs and vigilance committees on them. Real-time monitoring of anyone suspected of trying to enforce the unconstitutional law would seem entirely feasible in this day and age.

 

Also: virtually all police enjoy “qualified immunity,” which protects them from getting sued when they behave badly. But as I understand it, that immunity goes away if they are doing something unconstitutional. So, ummm… if you are a State Police officer who really doesn’t want to lose his house, his saving and his kids college fund, maybe think twice before violating someones Constitutional rights. Just a thought.

 Posted by at 10:29 am

Russia’s Rupture

 art, Hmm..., politics, russian empire  No Responses »
Jan 132023
 

There is, I think, a lot of wishful thinking here, but interesting speculation nonetheless.

The benefits of Russia’s coming disintegration

The author believes that the Russian Federation will collapse into dozens of independent states, Russia itself will become a minor rump state, and the world will be a happier, safer, more western place, with China somehow also reduced in power.

Ummm. Nice dream, I suppose, but wounded animals are bad enough; wounded *psychotic* animals with nukes are kind of a special sort of problem.

 

Also: the photo in the article shows part of a painting that appears to depict Satan setting Putin on fire. It’s not described in the article, but this is a mural painted at the St. Josaphat Church in Chervonograd city, Ukraine in 2017. This is well to the west of Ukraine, so it’s probably still standing. Looks a lot like a Jon McNaughton painting.

 

 Posted by at 7:28 pm

So… is this a good thing?

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, politics, religion, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 132023
 

In general you want your opponent to be dumber and less capable than you. In matters of war and serious geopolitics, you want them to believe things that just ain’t so, to be generally gullible. But at a certain point, those who oppose you can start to believe in false stories that are *so* dumb – the “wage gap,” “white supremacy,” ‘trans women are women,” and so on – that they begin to pose an all new kind of threat.

And so… to Russia:

Russia Is Afraid of Western Psychic Attacks

Psychic powers and the supernatural are, on their own, wholly unthreatening. Things that don’t exist can’t hurt you… the Kremlin can have their psychic warrior beam Bozo Rays at me all day long, won’t harm me a bit. But such things *aren’t* on their own. A belief in nonsense could end up with Putin, say, believing a “psychic” who tells him that the United States just launched a thousand cloaked warheads at Moscow, each filled with a Sith lord dolphin powered by Mary Kay brand dark matter. Since the Russians don’t have an anti-Sith dolphin defense shield, their only recourse would be to strike back at the US with a full nuclear barrage.

In general I fully support my enemies spending as much of their time and treasure trying to gain the upper hand in psychic warfare. Every ruble spent on Miss Cleoski is a ruble not spent on an AK-47 or a MiG or an ICBM. But at some point they go a little too far. Hell, imagine if the Russian leadership began to believe that their psychics were capable of stopping a full US nuclear strike on Russia. That might incentivize a Russian first strike.

 Posted by at 12:00 pm

This must be some sort of Golden Age

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 112023
 

On the one hand, earlier today the FAA ordered a “ground stop” to all domestic flights, basically shutting down the aviation economy:

Buttigieg responds to latest transportation crisis as he faces continued criticism

On the other hand, eggs are becoming a luxury good, unavailable to regular folks.

Egg Shortage: What’s Behind Soaring Prices – and When Will They Go Back Down?

In the Midwest, a dozen large eggs cost an average of $5.17 last week, compared with roughly $1.50 in January 2022 and 94 cents in 2021. …In California last week, the average price for a dozen eggs reached $7.37, according to the USDA’s Egg Market Overview report.

 

This is apparently due to a bird flu wiping out chicken in industrial quantities.

 Posted by at 10:10 pm

Classified Documents: Cautionary Tales

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

The President of the United States has at least one absolute power: the power to declassify secret documents. There is some discussion about the process, but is *seems* that all he needs to do is say “this document is declassified,” and that’s that.

The Vice President does *not* have that power.

 

Biden and his legal team don’t know what’s in classified documents found in his private office, sources say

 Posted by at 9:17 pm

What could *possibly* go wrong?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, critters, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 092023
 

Here’s your new “zombie apocalypse writing prompt:”

Study using mosquitoes to deliver vaccines has Chinese researchers buzzing

In an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on December 16, researchers said they had developed new technology that can turn a mosquito into a flying vaccine carrier to immunise animals in the wild.

Oh, goodie. Commie scientists studying ways to deliver vaccines, drugs, plagues, manmade horrors beyond your comprehension, etc. via skeeters.

The ChiComs have already announced that they are working on genetic weapons to target specific ethnic groups for everything from death to dumbing-down. This seems like a decent enough way to deliver such a weapon in certain geographic regions.

 

Now, is the idea of immunizing wild animals against pandemics a good one?  Quite possibly. Is the use of skeeters to do this a good idea? Possibly. Would I trust anything produced by people who think that Mao and his policies were good ideas? Not a chance in hell, Skippy. If you buy into socialism, you’ve demonstrated a sufficient lack of critical thinking skills and judgement that you should be kept far away from anything more scientifically complex than a wooden block.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm

OK… Maybe a *little* excessive

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, wisdom  No Responses »
Jan 082023
 

Finally saw unedited video of the recent shooting of the armed (with a toy gun as it turns out) robber in Texas. With the edited videos, you can’t tell anything about the customer’s shooting of the robber other than at least one shot in the bad guys back. But with the edited video there appear to be *nine* shots, including multiple shots into the guy while he’s down… and a few seconds later, one more shot which kinda seems like it might have been a back-of-the-head shot. Which, you know… maybe a bit much. Do I feel bad that a robber got rubbed out? Not in the slightest. The fact that he had a fake gun doesn’t matter, the *fear* he was determined to generate was real enough. But riddling a dead guy with holes… people are gonna question that. But I dunno: you threaten to kill someone, chances are real good that that *someone* is going to get amped up on adrenaline, and might not be thinking to straight for a minute or three. I know the wokescolds and the prosecutors are going to yammer on about how he shot too many times… but when your life has just been threatened, how rational are you really expected to be?

The greater lesson here: if you don’t want to be turned into Swiss cheese, don’t go robbing people. Seems a simple enough rule of thumb.

 

 Posted by at 11:14 am

What the US gets from the Russia-Ukraine war

 Hmm..., politics, russian empire, weapons, wisdom  No Responses »
Jan 052023
 

A lot of people think that the US is simply throwing money away. These people are wrong.

 

The majority of the weapons that the US is giving to the Ukrainians are old stock, stuff that would have gone to the incinerator or the scrap heap pretty soon anyway. If you expend a million-dollar weapon that you were otherwise going to simply throw away, you haven’t lost money. But if you expend that weapon for a practical purpose, you not only affect the course of the conflict, you also *learn* things.

 Posted by at 11:06 am
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