What A Moron

We're also very very lucky that the attackers tried to use explosives rather than guns.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 19, 2016

In the deadliest mass shootings in America in living memory, only one has topped 50 dead -- the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Only five have topped 20 dead. Add up those top five attacks, and you get 152 people killed in the worst mass shootings we've had in our lifetimes here.

In Oklahoma City alone, 169 people were killed by one bomb.

Regularly in Iraq we would see dozens of people killed by truck bombs -- VBIEDs, as we called them. Pull one in a crowded market place, maybe 80 people would be killed in a second. You never saw numbers like that from gun attacks ("SAF," for "Small Arms Fire").

Don't wish for bombs. We're very lucky that most of our crazies here still want to shoot you. Then they have to kill you one at a time.

You even get a chance to fight back.

Smart Power

Ahem.

Ahead of the Jewish new year next month, the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv sent gift baskets to a number of Israeli organizations, as it does every year. Among the recipients was Peace Now, a group opposed to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

There was only one problem - among the gifts in the basket was a bottle of wine made in an Israeli settlement....

An embassy official confirmed the baskets had been sent out, saying they were purchased from a vendor who put together the contents, which were not checked before distribution.

"This should in no way be interpreted as a change of our policy on settlements, which is long-standing and clear," the official said.

Good Guy with a Gun

Score one for the NRA.

USPSA Shooter, 3-Gunner, and NRA-certified firearms instructor Jason Falconer has been identified as the man who shot and killed a 22-year-old Somali immigrant who went on a stabbing rampage inside a St. Cloud, (MN) Mall on Saturday.

The apparent terrorist—who apparently asked victims if they were Muslims before stabbing them—was engaged by Falconer inside the mall.

Falconer is the president and owner of Tactical Advantage LLC, a shooting range and tactical training facility with a strong focus on arming concealed carriers. He’s also a former chief of the Albany (MN) police department, and he remains a part-time officer.

But Falconer has consistently been identified in the mainstream media only as as a “former police chief” and “off-duty police officer.”

Yes, Exactly

Taleb is right, as he often is.

I would resent being told how to live even by people who were perfectly right and competent to do it. No one likes to be mothered past a certain age, not even by your mother. What's really aggravating about the current case is the attempted mothering by the likes of the Obamas, Hillary Clinton, or Ezra Klein:

[T]hese self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

The same is true of the ilk of Lois Lerner. They're willing to be vicious to us to enforce their power to order our lives, but they're completely clueless about how to improve anything they touch.

Problem Solved

DB: "Marine Corps exceeds gender quota by ordering men to identify as female."

The only problem is now they have to give those 'guys' four and a half months off for maternity leave.

Dr. Jill Stein on Clinton, Russia, SCOTUS

Charles Krauthammer and she are apparently alumni of the same school. He has a question for her: won't you feel bad if you get Trump elected?

"I will feel terrible if Donald Trump gets elected and I will feel terrible if Hillary Clinton gets elected," Stein said.

"Equally so?" Krauthammer asked.

"Yes," she said. "Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war over Syria with a nuclear-armed power [Russia] with 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. Given Hillary Clinton's record not only in Iraq, but in Libya, I think this is as dangerous as it gets."

"Donald Trump wants to bar Muslims from entering into this country, but Hillary Clinton has been very busy bombing Muslims in other countries," she said.

The woman loses me when she starts talking about making Medea Benjamin the Secretary of State. Clearly I don't agree with her on a lot of issues. On the other hand, she's an honest woman -- and she's clearly the outlaw candidate, having a warrant out for her arrest even now.

They asked her about that too: "I think we're in a crisis situation, which I do not take lightly.... bulldozed gravesites... loosed attack dogs... putting at risk the water supply, not just for the Standing Rock Sioux but for 17 million people downstream...."

Assuming she believes all that honesty, and she does seem to be an honest woman, spray-painting a bulldozer is if anything a weak response. Thermite would have been better.

Oh, and DNC / Jeh Johnson and pay to play: "Pay to play is the name of the game these days. We can look at the Clinton Foundation. I think the American people are very uncomfortable with the blurring of the lines between p ublic interest and private interest... to exert that interest behind closed doors... big banks, the power of the health insurance companies that have had a hand in creating Obamacare... the American people are really being thrown under the bus by what they see as a rigged economy and a rigged political system...."

She's no Trump fan, as she goes on to paint clearly. No, she's running on her own. She won't win, of course, but there's a chance she's the best candidate left standing.

Nessie?

Is that you?

A photo appropriately taken by a whisky distillery worker on Loch Ness.

Title X

Apparently attempts to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving funding have just been made illegal.

Birthers

Hillary Clinton is the Queen Birther, the mother hen of the movement. It came out of her campaign's astroturf efforts to smear Barack Obama as un-American, because her campaign manager had decided that was the way to win.

Here's the memo.

The primary astroturf outlet was Hillbuzz, "Founded and edited by Kevin DuJan while working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008."

You can find tons of astroturf rumors there, not just birther stuff: just search for terms like "Obama gay site:hillbuzz.org", or "birth certificate site:hillbuzz.org", or other similar things. The stories are still on the internet.

Now, the Hillary campaign (of 2016) would have you believe that they employed this guy, but that he did all this research and writing on his own time, on a website named after her, without their knowledge or support. None of that time-consuming research and writing happened on the clock, no. And it's just his initiative that caused him to build a website designed to imply that there was grassroots support for her, which was a major part of her approach to not conceding the nomination during a long fight. Oh, and this astroturf site's main thrust -- questioning whether Obama was an American -- happened to be literally in line with the core strategy for discrediting Obama that her top campaign officials came up with.

Yet of course, we are going to be told that the only acceptable position is that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with this. And that she has pneumonia, and nothing else. And that she was cleared by the FBI in its investigation of her.

UPDATE: Further confirmation from McClatchy's former editor. It's as if they think that none of us were there at the time, or won't remember how it happened -- or, in the case of Hillbuzz, can't just go look it up because it's all still there on the internet.

UPDATE: A second confirmation from a journalist that the story was pushed to them by Clinton operative Sid Blumenthal.

Colin Powell's Leaked Emails

I expressed disappointment with Colin Powell in an earlier post for explaining to HRC how to use email to get around records laws, so I thought I would cover his leaked emails where he defended himself, and provided tasty soundbites, as well.

According to an Intercept story on them, Powell's defense is that he viewed email more like a phone call than a cable machine, so the written record was not important. He used an AOL account for non-classified communication and the State Department computers for classified, so he didn't violate security rules. He also claims he discusses the situation in greater detail in a chapter of his book, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership.

In one of his email, he also added, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.” And then, “I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill.”

Update: Richard Wolff's Guardian article on the topic doesn't add much that's new, but he shows a remarkable self-awareness as he writes:

To be clear: hacking personal emails is reprehensible, and those behind the hack are scumbags who are trying to manipulate American voters.

To be doubly clear: the news media (including this column) have no principles and no shame in exploiting the ill-gotten product of those scumbags. Guilty, as charged.

And yet the Powell emails are so insightful and direct, it seems a shame – even if we have no sense of shame to let them pass by without comment.

The Gatlin Brothers

...demur.

My wife found this on YouTube.

Eric Hines

Who's Buying?

I have decided that while "The Deplorables" would be a great name for a Punk Rock band, "The Irredeemables" is a better fit for a Metal band.

A protester against the DNC in Philadelphia
The fact is that this plays in so nicely with Hillary Clinton's rhetoric. Here's NPR annotating her stump speech:

[I]n almost every speech these days, she talks about how Donald Trump's rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims is out of sync with American values. It's a theme that came into full relief at the Democratic convention. There the unstated message was that this wasn't a campaign between Trump and Clinton but between Trump and America, American values. Clinton has always had American flags at her events, but since the convention they have been even more prominent as a backdrop at her events.

It's even more obvious in last Friday's speech, in which not Trump himself but his supporters were said to be "irredeemable" and "not America." Her move is the authoritarian one, appropriate for someone on the verge of taking over not only the Presidency but the Supreme Court: from now on, she and hers will tell us what is America, and what is not. The unfit, by her standards, will be excluded.

A good Metal anthem could be written against that. Maybe one has been already.

What do you mean, "I don't believe in God"?
I talk to him everyday.
What do you mean, "I don't support your system"?
I go to court when I have to
What do you mean, "I can't get to work on time"?
I got nothing better to do.
And, what do you mean, "I don't pay my bills"?
Why do you think I'm broke?...

What do you mean, "I hurt your feelings"?
I didn't know you had any feelings.
What do you mean, "I ain't kind"?
Just not your kind.
What do you mean, "I couldn't be the President
Of the United States of America"?
Tell me something, it's still "We the people, " right?

Speaking of being broke because you pay your bills, don't forget that today is quarterly tax day for those of you who are self-employed, contracting, or otherwise responsible for both halves of your FICA taxes plus also your own health insurance. You may not be America, but you're still on the hook for funding her.

Zeiss Z1 F133 Lenses

Those were some pretty cool sunglasses Clinton was wearing this last weekend, weren't they? Well, she wears designer clothes worth lots of money, so fancy sunglasses aren't too surprising.

Except...

My readers want to know what type of space age eyewear Clinton was wearing when she collapsed. According to an expert on Reddit.com, the sunshades are Zeiss F133 blue protective lenses.

The prescription lenses are designed specifically to help prevent seizures by filtering out light and the color red, the most seizure-provoking color, according to Videgameseizures blog.

We should probably take "an expert on Reddit.com" with a grain of salt, but it's a plausible claim that's worth investigating further. It sounds like these lenses aren't hideously expensive, but they are specifically about cutting down on the risk of seizures. Given a fair amount of evidence that Clinton suffers from periodic seizures, if indeed these are sunglasses of that type, it would seem to be a kind of confirmation from Herself that seizures are a problem she's thinking about. That's something her doctor hasn't copped to, not yet.

The DNC Leak and the Health Stories Must Not Be Silenced

The DNC leak reveals a spreadsheet tracking donations from potential ambassadors or other public officials, along with what they've been assigned in return for the money they've brought to the table. There's an email chain in which they themselves call this "pay for play." It also contains details on a plot to gerrymander House districts, bamboozle the Republican party with a series of frivolous lawsuits to prevent them from responding, and a cynical plan to label Republican opposition as racism.

To read the big media, however, you'd think the whole content was ' mean things Colin Powell said about people.' That's the only story they're even trying to tell.

It's not the main story.



Hillary Clinton collapsed last Sunday and has retreated to a concrete-barricaded compound, from which she has not emerged all week. As the New York Post points out, if it weren't for an amateur who happened to video the collapse, we'd know nothing about her health conditions. I haven't seen any outlet in America comment on the barricades -- that's just the UK press.

These stories aren't going to get in front of many American voters unless there's a way to get past this wall of silence.

The DNC Leak

It's massive and brutal. Here are some highlights.

The corruption revealed should be a scandal. Will it?

UPDATE: They actually used the phrase "pay for play" in their own emails. They weren't even slightly kidding themselves about what they were doing.

UPDATE: It's just a constant stream of lies, bribery, and bad news about the state of our government.

DB: 2000 Sailors on USS Eisenhower Request Paternity Leave

In what was an originally exciting, if not unexpected situation, the Eisenhower’s administration department has become “flooded with a deluge of paternity leave requests,” said Master Chief Yeoman Reginald “Reggie” Frank.

“It’s an admin nightmare, but I can’t blame these guys. The mother and baby were airlifted to Bahrain, so... that means two weeks shore leave in Manama, whether or not she’s actually your baby-mama,” Frank added.

According to other sources, the carrier has convened a panel of officers and senior enlisted to sort through the ream of paternity requests, in an attempt to determine the most probable candidate.

Not quite. Paternity leave is ten days in the Navy, not two weeks.

Maternity leave? Four and a half months.

My Guess Is It's the "Prime Directive"

Heat Street asks a question: why don't Social Justice Warriors try to ruin Hip-Hop?

Just look at this 2012 2 Chainz video, “Birthday Song,” with the chorus “All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe.” The video has enough problematic elements to make a purple-haired Tumblrina’s head explode....

There could be a few reasons for this. First of all, gamers and geek culture in general are seen as easy targets. They are perceived as indoorsy nerds who were bullied in high school. Perfect subjects to put up little resistance to those seeking to browbeat their hobby into submission (of course, the events of Gamergate proved that not to be the case). But compared to the hyper-masculine hip hop culture, geeks are certainly the easier victim.

Another aspect is race. Hip hop is inextricably black, born out of a resistance to authority, namely the police. Many prominent rappers today are staunch advocates of Black Lives Matter and their songs contain lyrics protesting police brutality. So does that give the entire genre a pass? For every “To Pimp a Butterfly” there are still dozens of songs about big booty women.

So, my theory about this is that the young women who make up the feminist arm of the SJW community all grew up in the 1990s. Every one I have ever met is a Sci-Fi fan -- especially Dr. Who -- which means that they cut their teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Now if you remember, TNG was an insufferable departure from the original Star Trek in its constant fulminating about the Prime Directive and the importance of not interfering in another culture's development. The Prime Directive in the original series was just a plot device: Kirk violated it at will, really, and it never caused bad results to do so. TNG took this idea very seriously, though, and I'd wager that growing up listening to important-sounding lectures from Captain Picard made way more impression on these young women than they are prepared to admit to themselves.

So what does that mean? It means that hip-hop comes from another culture, implicitly a lesser culture, and non-interference is the right response to it. The same is true, I think, of their view of Islam. The reason they view it as racist and xenophobic to criticize Islam's treatment of women is that, in so doing, we're trying to force a (again, implicitly in this view lesser) culture to adapt to our preferences.

White male geeks, however, are very much from these feminists' culture. They like Star Trek and comic books just as much as you do! Of course they have every right to tell you what to think and how to behave.

There's an implicit racism, maybe, in deciding which cultures merit protection from the Prime Directive. In the show, it's something like non-spacefaring cultures if I remember correctly. In this application of the concept to the real world, deciding to "respect" these cultures' right to non-interference is in fact a form of disrespect. I don't think these young women would admit to themselves that they think this, or that they are doing this. The last thing they would want to do, consciously, is 'colonize' these cultures or set up a hierarchy in which some cultures were superior. The mental pose is that they're respecting these cultures by leaving them to develop independently.

I think they probably really believe that "respecting you" is what they are doing, rather than "babying you" or "isolating you" or "looking down on you." They would probably be highly insulted at the suggestion that they had any such intentions.

HMS Terror

Now, there's a name that indicates a Navy that knew what a navy was all about. One of you anonymously mentioned that we should look at this story about the apparent discovery of the Terror, which was found in pristine condition. It can be explored by drones -- video at the link.

“We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves,” Adrian Schimnowski, the foundation’s operations director, told the Guardian by email from the research vessel Martin Bergmann.

“We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”

The well-preserved wreck matches the Terror in several key aspects, but it lies 60 miles (96km) south of where experts have long believed the ship was crushed by ice, and the discovery may force historians to rewrite a chapter in the history of exploration.

VCDL Are Fighters

The Virginia Citizens' Defense League is one of my favorite gun rights groups. They really impressed me when I lived in Virginia, more than ten years ago now, and they're still going strong. Someone picked the wrong organization to mess around with in her little forgery.

Second Amendment rights advocacy organization the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), along with two of its members, today filed a $12 million defamation lawsuit against Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig, Atlas Films, and Studio 3 Partners LLC d/b/a Epix for false and defamatory footage featured in the 2016 documentary film Under the Gun.

They have a solid case, but making her fight is an end in itself.

The Personal is Political. So Are Team Sports

No more enjoying yourselves without ritual cleansing. Everyone must acknowledge the sins of their nation before the kickoff, and states that have bad politics must not be allowed to host sporting events.

We'll all be much happier when every single space in our lives is brought under the control of the political. Won't we?