Archive for August, 2020
19th August 2020
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Police in San Francisco aren’t waiting around for pandering politicians to “defund” the city’s police department, which has already seen a mass exodus of officers following the passage of a state law called Prop 47, a statewide criminal-justice law passed back in 2014. It appears the pace of officer exits is picking up this year, and what’s even more interesting: The acceleration started before the murder of George Floyd.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
19th August 2020
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I’d make that trade. But what would the Danes do with a bunch of Latinx? They’re having enough troubles with the Muslim immigrants.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Ex DHS Official: Trump Wanted to Swap Puerto Rico for Greenlandv
19th August 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
19th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
19th August 2020
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
19th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
19th August 2020
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Donald Trump registered quite the achievement on Wednesday: He managed to make the avowedly feminist New York Times criticize renowned suffragist Susan B. Anthony in “With Eye on Election, Trump Plans to Pardon Women’s Suffrage Icon,” after the president announced he would mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, by pardoning Anthony, who was arrested and fined for voting illegally in 1872.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Suddenly Slamming Susan B. Anthony: The NY Times Celebrates (Some) Women
19th August 2020
Steve Sailer.
Fanning the flames of racial animosity is only bad when Bad People (i.e., whites) do it.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on NYT: Fanning the Flames of Racial Animosity Lies at the Core of Trump’s Election Strategy
19th August 2020
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Chinese officials in Wuhan Province hid important information about coronavirus from the country’s central government, even as the virus spread rapidly, according to a Wednesday report.
The findings represent the consensus view of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, which were included in an internal report first circulated in June, according to The New York Times, which relied on anonymous American officials familiar with the report. Wuhan was ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
19th August 2020
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A former State Department official told the Senate Intelligence Committee he destroyed records in January 2017 at the request of former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a report released on Tuesday.
Jonathan Winer, who served as special envoy to Libya through early 2017, was Steele’s contact at the State Department. He arranged a meeting for Steele in October 2016 with another State Department official at Foggy Bottom to share findings from a dossier of research he had compiled on Donald Trump.
“SCORECARDS! GETCHER SCORECARDS HERE! You can’t tell your Deep State operatives without a scorecard!”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Ex-State Department Official ‘Destroyed’ Records at Request of Christopher Steele
19th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Gov. Gavin Newsom Declares State of Emergency as Wildfires Char California, Gives Evacuation Orders
19th August 2020
ZMan does a recap.
Today, the old-style convention looks increasingly like a pointless relic. The only people who need to meet in person these days to talk politics are dissidents and that’s because of the pogroms against white activists. The people in charge can avail themselves to all the modern technology of the day. As far as a television event, the convention looks ridiculous to most modern people. It’s like watching a movie from the 1970’s, where people are using pay phones and wearing suits on airplanes.
…
Another indication of the general detachment from reality is the use of Republican turncoats in this convention. The idea is to use these faithless finks to show undecideds that even the Republicans are abandoning their man. Most people unsure about voting for Trump already hate the GOP. That’s why they tend to sit out elections. Trotting out Colin Powell and John Kasich just reminds them that they hate the same people who hate Donald Trump. It has the opposite of the intended effect.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Conventionally Speaking
19th August 2020
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Why does Colorado have color coded ballots? I guess it is because color coding is way quicker than that little R or D under the bar code to know what party the ballot represents.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Don’t Fall for Conspiracy Theories. Then Again…
19th August 2020
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Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher, that is.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Baffled Colbert Wonders Why ‘Old Fashioned’ Republicans Don’t Go for Biden’s ‘Progressive’ Vision
19th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
19th August 2020
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Researchers have demonstrated that they can make a working 3D-printed copy of a key just by listening to how the key sounds when inserted into a lock. And you don’t need a fancy mic — a smartphone or smart doorbell will do nicely if you can get it close enough to the lock.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Researchers Can Duplicate Keys From the Sounds They Make in Locks
19th August 2020
Steve Sailer.
I’ve been mentioning for awhile a growth in articles about people complaining about the color of various objects, such as blue or green medical scrubs or the little white man who tells you to walk on a traffic light as indicative of systemic racism. It’s like 5-year-olds talking about their favorite color Power Ranger.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on My Favorite Colorism
19th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on NYPD Urges Caution After Rash of Burglaries on Upper East Side
18th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
18th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
18th August 2020
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
18th August 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
18th August 2020
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Lest we forget that Bill Clinton was #METOO before it was cool.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘You better get some ice for that’: Here’s What to Know About Bill Clinton and #METOO Allegations
18th August 2020
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It continues to astonish me that Lon Horiuchi is still alive. Somebody ought to have punched his ticket long ago.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Siege at Ruby Ridge: The Forgotten History of the ATF Shootout That Started a Militia Movement
18th August 2020
Paul Graham runs the numbers.
Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income taxes. Let’s try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder.
Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then live for another 60 years. How much of your stock will a wealth tax consume?
Suppose the wealth tax is 1%. That means each year you get to keep 99% of your stock. Which means after 60 years the proportion of stock you’ll have left will be .99^60, or .547. So a 1% wealth tax means the government will over the course of your life take 45% of your stock.
Wealth confiscation by drip-drip-drip. Socialism in slow motion.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Modeling a Wealth Tax
18th August 2020
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I’m surprised that they have any left.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘I’m out of here’: Chicago Cops Are Leaving the Force at Twice the Normal Rate
18th August 2020
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In a Monday interview with Radio Free Asia, Hasiyet Abdulla discussed her 15 years working in Xinjiang hospitals as a Uighur doctor, Business Insider reports. China passed a 2017 law ordering Uighurs and other minorities not to have more than three children in rural areas and two children in urban areas, Insider reports.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Chinese Hospitals Killed Newborns, Forced Late Term Abortions to Eradicate Uighurs, Doctor Says
18th August 2020
ZMan sees difficult times ahead.
The latest bout of insanity is over the United States Postal Service conspiracy to subvert the upcoming election. The Left is on their social media platforms warning that Big Stamp is part of a silent coup to award the election to Trump. Fevered lefties are posting pictures of themselves guarding mailboxes. The actress Jaimie Lee Curtis posted this on her Twitter account. The invasion of the mailbox snatchers has become a very real thing for the people on the Left.
How exactly anyone can think the post office is going to rig an election is a lot like the Russian collusion hoax. It is best understood if you don’t think about very much. The ballots go into the mailbox, something magical happens and then Donald Trump steals the election! Instead of the Russians using mind control to alter voter behavior in the voting booth, it is the postmaster using special powers to alter ballots inside the box themselves or perhaps making them disappear.
Scott Adams points out that postal employees are among the most corrupt outside of the Turd World. He had to quit mailing in his Dilbert cartoons because once local postal workers figured out who he was they would all get stolen before they got to his syndicator. He says he knows of a lot of artists who have had the same problem. He also relates a story of postal workers stealing envelopes containing cash addressed to post office boxes, which is why everybody knows not to send cash through the mail.
Of course, given the universality of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism, this means the Left is already hard at work with a plan to spoil ballots in the postal system. Their push for vote by mail is part of an existing scheme to trash votes from Republican areas, while stuffing the mailboxes in Democratic areas. Of course, their street thugs will be justified in burning mailboxes in white areas now. You can be sure Antifa will be staking out the post offices in white areas of the country too.
Yeah, that too. ‘Where’s it from? Scarsdale? Trash it! Harlem? Let it through!’ Anybody who can’t see the plausibility of this scenario has been asleep for a half-century. The fact that the Postal Workers Union has endorsed Biden merely underlines the problem.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Road to Divorce
18th August 2020
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Outraged reactions from Islamist, Arab American, and Palestinian organizations have emerged since the May 30 arrest of Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis during a violent protest in New York City.
A picture included in court papers shows Rahman brandishing a Molotov cocktail in one hand while using a Palestinian keffiyeh to cover the lower part of her face with the other hand .
Rahman and Mattis were arrested after a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the broken window of a police car. Rahman was seen throwing the incendiary device, police say, while Mattis drove away from the scene. Other charges involve gathering gasoline and other materials required to construct Molotov cocktails, and encouraging others to do so. This took place at what was supposed to be a peaceful protest in response to the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
The organizations’ defense of the pair claims that the charges against Rahman and Mattis are motivated by racism and “structural Islamophobia.”
Yeah, objecting to terrorists with firebombs is SO ‘Islamophobic’….
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Who is Supporting Molotov-Tossing Attorney Urooj Rahman?
18th August 2020
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Democrats have never been comfortable with, you know, actual democracy. They’d much rather buy and steal votes than work for them.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Poll: Dems Fearful of In-Person Voting, Campaigning
18th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day: Best Laid Plans
18th August 2020
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Hmmm. That backseat driver sure looks like Big Brother….
Posted in News You Can Use. | 1 Comment »
18th August 2020
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Four cities in Indiana are suing Netflix and other video companies, claiming that online video providers and satellite-TV operators should have to pay the same franchise fees that cable companies pay for using local rights of way.
The lawsuit was filed against Netflix, Disney, Hulu, DirecTV, and Dish Network on August 4 in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County. The cities of Indianapolis, Evansville, Valparaiso, and Fishers want the companies to pay the cable-franchise fees established in Indiana’s Video Service Franchises (VSF) Act, which requires payments of 5 percent of gross revenue in each city.
The lawsuit is based on an unusual legal argument and doesn’t seem likely to succeed. Essentially, the cities are claiming that Netflix and similar providers use the public rights of way simply by offering video streaming services over the Internet….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Cities Sue Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Claim They Owe Cable “Franchise Fees”
18th August 2020
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As part of a sweeping, five-year defense plan costing $250 billion, Seoul plans to develop a new class of attack submarine carrying non-nuclear ballistic missiles.
Conventional ballistic missiles are a rarity on submarines. For land-attack missions, most navies arm their undersea boats with cruise missiles, as cruise missiles are more accurate—albeit slower and less powerful—than ballistic missiles are.
But Seoul has some, ahem, unique defense needs owing to the presence on its border of a heavily-armed and belligerent nuclear state. South Korea’s submarines and their hard-hitting ballistic missiles give the country some ability to prevent a North Korean attack.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on South Korea Is Packing Submarines With Rockets for Taking Out North Korea’s Nukes
17th August 2020
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A lot of fear and misinformation has been spreading throughout social media the past few days about the post office. People seem to think the sky is falling. But they’re missing a lot of important context.
I am here to tell you that yes, you should be concerned about the future of the United States Postal Service (USPS), but the whole sky isn’t falling quite ye
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Stop Panicking about the Post Office
17th August 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
17th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
17th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
17th August 2020
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We’re familiar with the designation of places like Somalia as “failed states,” but can’t we equally recognize failed cities when we see them? New York City in the 1970s, when it needed a federal bailout, was one example from our past, and New York’s fiscal woes were closely connected with its larger social problems of crime, welfare dependency, and all the other factors that diminished the shine of the Big Apple.
Today our obviously failed cities are Seattle and Portland, with Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York (again) trending that direction. (And the entire state of Illinois is on the equivalent of a watch list—I think it is literally on credit watch lists—with California not far behind.)
As mentioned here previously, it appears lots of people are fleeing or preparing to flee these cities, and their economies (and consequent tax bases) may be in free fall even if the COVID-induced economic coma ends in the next few months.
Which raises a frequent worry: what if these dazzling urbanites move to Rock Ridge and vote for the same kind of progressive candidates they foolishly supported where they came from? I think it won’t actually work that way, although I understand the logic behind it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Failed States, Failed Cities, Failed Parties?
17th August 2020
Check it out.
We have the technology.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Dungeon Map Doodler
17th August 2020
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Artificial Eyespots on Cattle Reduce Predation by Large Carnivores
17th August 2020
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YANK! THAT! CHAIN!
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Report: Trump Administration to Open Up Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Drilling
17th August 2020

Actuaries are not as appreciated as they deserve.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
17th August 2020
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Three propositions on California’s November ballot would violate our constitutional right to private property; a fourth would violate the individual’s right to nondiscrimination.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on California Ballot Contains Four Unconstitutional Propositions
16th August 2020
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With the left in a collective fit over a conspiracy theory that President Trump is about to steal the election by crippling the US Postal Service, Twitter user @AGHamilton29 has provided a cogent analysis unpacking the latest leftist miasma dominating the news cycle.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Unpacking Fact From Fiction Behind the USPS Drama
16th August 2020
Bethany Mandel.
School districts across the country are facing an exodus of students to private schools opening for in-person learning and homeschooling. Corey DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice for the Reason Foundation, has been following the data and it doesn’t look good for public schools. Over the weekend he reported that homeschool filings are up 129% from last year in Loudoun County in Virginia and 128% in the state of Wisconsin. This exodus in students is also an exodus in dollars for a lot of school districts that have their funding directly tied to their enrollment numbers (which is why I suggested pulling out of public schools as a protest if you didn’t like their reopening plan for the Washington Examiner). A little too late in the game, public schools are realizing that their captive audience isn’t so captive when they don’t, you know, actually teach.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Public Schools Tightening Their Grip as They Sense Themselves Losing It
16th August 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
16th August 2020
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
16th August 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
16th August 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome