Category: Comment O’ The Day

Comment O’ The Day
The gun-buying spree was a RESULT of the murder spike and a reaction to the demonstrated knowledge that if mostly peaceful pink-haired Antifa Zombies came crawling through your window, the police would not only be unable to help, but would refuse to do so if the opportunity arose.

The New York Times Uses a CDC Report on Homicides As an Excuse To Attack Private Gun Ownership

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday issued a report on the recent surge in the U.S. gun homicide rate, which rose by a third between 2019 and 2020, from 4.6 to 6.1 per 100,000 residents. The article, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, notes that “several explanations have been proposed,” including “increased stressors (e.g., economic, social, and psychological) and disruptions in health, social, and emergency services during the COVID-19 pandemic; strains in law enforcement-community relations reflected in protests over law enforcement use of lethal force; increases in firearm purchases; and intimate partner violence.”

The New York Times predictably plays up that passing reference to “increases in firearm purchases.” The rise in gun homicides, the Times says, “corresponded to accelerated sales of firearms as the pandemic spread and lockdowns became the norm.” The Times explains that “Americans went on a gun-buying spree in 2020 that continued into 2021,” although sales have since returned to their usual level. It cites an estimate by gun violence researcher Garen Wintemute that “there remain roughly 15 million more guns in circulation than there would be without the pandemic.”

In 2017, according to the Small Arms Survey, American civilians owned more than 393 million firearms. Purchases in 2018 and 2019 added an estimated 27 million guns to that stock of weapons. If sales in 2020 had been similar to sales in the two previous years, they would have added another 13 million or so. Assuming Wintemute’s estimate is in the right ballpark, the “gun-buying spree” that worries the Times amounted to a further increase of about 3.5 percent. Although Times reporters Roni Caryn Rabin and Tim Arango seem to think that’s a plausible explanation for a 33 percent increase in the gun homicide rate, it’s not clear why.

It is demonstrably not true that more guns in circulation automatically results in more homicides. The number of guns owned by Americans rose steadily throughout the period, beginning in the early 1990s, when the U.S. homicide rate fell precipitously, a downward trend that has only recently abated. As the CDC notes, the reasons for the 2020 jump are unclear, although it is widely assumed that the massive disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic had something to do with it.

Continue reading “”

Comment O’ The Day

The goal is not to save our planet from climate change, it’s to create a crisis which will give goobermint more control over the people.
It’s the perfect catastrophe hoax to coerce the population into being submissive and obedient to ‘authority’.
There’s no end to climate change, therefore there’s no end to the goobermint’s use of it for propaganda purposes.
Hungry, fearful, and destitute people don’t worry about rights or freedoms, but simply surviving, thus they can be more easily controlled to do the goobermint’s bidding.

Comment O’ The Day
I used to feel sorry for him, but not anymore. He has no idea what country he is in much less to lead the people. We are the laughing stock of the entire planet
–Steve H

Biden Was Just Asked About Ending Title 42 For Illegal Immigrants And Instead He Rambled About Masks On Planes.

Observation O’ The Day
So you can see where his demented mind went; Title 42 is a COVID policy. It was instituted by Trump to prevent illegals from bringing COVID in across the border. He put that COVID policy together with the most likely thing he’d been briefed to handle – the mask mandate suspension  – and voila!, you have this incoherent mingling of parts of both. 

Comment O’ The Day

“As a mother of seven, I am used to distractions and sometimes even outbursts,” 

Comment O’ The Day

The Left are suspicious of the government on defense and law & order.
The Right are suspicious of the government on welfare and education.
Both are correct.
Alice Smith; great-great-great-granddaughter of Adam Smith.

Comment(s) O’ The Day

this is what happens when we source everything to the “experts”

No. This is what happens when you ask simple questions of someone who is so deeply dishonest that all they see is a trap.

Kamala Harris Has Deep Thoughts On “The Significance of the Passage of Time”
“So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time…there is such great significance to the passage of time.”

Kamala Harris has thoughts. Deep thoughts.

“The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time…there is such great significance to the passage of time.”

The full video is here, it’s not out of context.

As soon as I saw the clip, I thought of this clip from Animal House:

 

Comment O’ The Day

As much as I was starting to enjoy Ms. Stadtmiller’s anti-trannies on women’s teams rant, she completely ruined it when she wrote:

“If you’re a female athlete you are defying the patriarchal odds.”

It was then that I thought to myself: nonsense, sister, you’ve missed the point entirely. It was the patriarchy that had men and women competing in separate sports leagues in the first place. And it’s feminism and its logical conclusions that have led us to our present situation, in which women are forced to compete with athletes with penises and substantial strength and hormonal advantages over them, and to refer to such athletes with penises as “she” or get kicked off the team, and in which women’s sports are being destroyed.

As the patriarchy might say (if it were a human individual): “Miss me yet?”
—JPL

University of Pennsylvania Systemically Abuses Young Women By Forcing Them to Compete with and Undress In Front Of a Man Who Physically Humiliates Them and Makes Them Call Him a Woman.

I’m doing my best to be kind. –Mandy Stadtmiller

This is a man. I am a woman who knows what a man looks like. You cannot scare me out of my instincts into saying otherwise. I know what reality is. This is what a cheating man who enjoys cheating against women looks like.

Do you remember what it is like at all to be a young woman?

Just how overwhelming and mortifying and embarrassing so much of it all is?

Embarrassment can feel like death. Banishment from a social circle is death. Sex and puberty and bodily changes cause so much shyness and nerves and uncertainty and stimulation.

And then sometimes…a miracle occurs.

Sometimes a young woman finds something instead of consumerism and hypersexuality and the light glossy sociopathy of modern life.

Sometimes she becomes a female athlete.

If you are a young woman who competes in sports, there is a certain thrilling power that comes with it.

You learn confidence and leadership and even where you are weaker and where it might be up to you to work harder, to see if you can push yourself that much more, to get out of your own way.

If you’re a female athlete you are defying the patriarchal odds.

You’re standing out as a woman for physicality that is not sexual but instead based on pure force and performance and strength and POWER that comes from taking your own biological body to the limits of training and perseverance and domination and self-belief.

Fair competition is an indisputably glorious thing.

Fair competition is female bodies competing against female bodies.

As everyone knows and understands, women compete against women because otherwise competition would be patently unfair.

Women do not have the same athletic advantages as the male body and the benefits of a male puberty and the strength that comes from a male body.

“Male bodies have 10-30 percent greater muscle strength, greater bone density, better oxygen efficiency, larger heart and lungs, more efficient pelvic Q-angle and elbow angles, as well as 10 percent more overall body mass,” explains Ross Tucker, of the Science of Sport podcast.

Can you imagine the psychological travesty if we were to force young women to compete with men and tell them to simply “try harder”?

And that their eyes and inner knowledge is wrong?

That the man with the penis undressing in front of them is actually a woman?

What institution could be so torturous and cruel as to punish elite female athletes by forcing them to shower and change next to a man who doesn’t cover up his intact penis and is stealing medals that rightfully belong to women—and then also be forced to call that man with the penis undressed in front of you a “woman”?

That would be abusive and insane, cruel and unusual.

Except it’s exactly what is happening in the Ivy League right now.

That’s what Penn is doing. They don’t want you to know.

I’m begging you: Know.

Continue reading “”

Comment O’ The Day
It cracks me up when they tell him to act mad so everyone thinks he really means it.

Biden Loses It Over Americans Correctly Knowing the Cause of Inflation

Speaking to House Democrats at their winter retreat in Philadelphia Friday afternoon, President Joe Biden started yelling at Americans who pin inflation on excessive government spending.

“I’m sick of this stuff!” Biden screamed, throwing his arms in the air. “The American people think the reason for inflation is government spending more money. Simply not true.”

But it is true. Take a look at the rise in inflation after Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was passed and signed.

This week’s Consumer Price Index report not only showed inflation at the highest level since 1982, but broke historic records for price increases on essential goods.

During an interview with CNBC Thursday afternoon, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned inflation is here to stay.

Oh to those people pushing the vaxx because it ‘safe’ or something? This is from The Lancet, which is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal.

Comment O’ The Day (from a GP MD)

1% of those who had a reaction to the vaccine are dead.
Sorry if that was not made clear. But remember the cut off at the CDC for pulling a vaccine or medicine from the market is 50 deaths. Hit that magic number and it is off the market.

The jabs in all their glory are far above that. And this is all being done under a EUA for a disease that is not that lethal. So you get a reaction to the jab, depending on the type of one given, you stand a 1% chance of dying. Remember, the VAERS data is skewed to make those numbers lower. The vaccine is not safe given the usual definition per the CDC.

My biggest problem is they had this data and it was not disclosed to people in terms of informed consent. How many people would have taken the jab if they were told: “The vaccine is considered safe, but 1% of those who get a reaction are dead.”

Mind you, the vaccine failed to contain the disease and was considered not effective in preventing morbidity after 6 months. Why was this data not discussed earlier? Well that is pretty clear in that when it came to consent time, most would have said “I’ll just take my chances.”

Safety of mRNA vaccines administered during the initial 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme: an observational study of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe

PDF download

Table 1 Characteristics of reports received and processed by VAERS for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines
Both mRNA vaccines (n=340 522)

 BNT162b2 vaccine (n=164 669) mRNA-1273 vaccine (n=175 816)
Category
Non-serious 313 499 (92·1%) 150 486 (91·4%) 162 977 (92·7%)
Serious, including death 27 023 (7·9%) 14 183 (8·6%) 12 839 (7·3%)
Serious, excluding death 22 527 (6·6%) 12 078 (7·3%) 10 448 (5·9%)
Death 4496 (1·3%) 2105 (1·3%) 2391 (1·4%)

Summary

Background

In December, 2020, two mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines were authorised for use in the USA.
We aimed to describe US surveillance data collected through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive system, and v-safe, a new active system, during the first 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Continue reading “”

Just more confirmation of SloJoe’s senile dementia

Comment O’ The Day
“Trump would be crucified. Instead nothing.
The media/journalism is dead. Just all propaganda at this point.”

Joe Biden Rips off an Oddly Racist Statement, Leaves Onlookers Completely Perplexed

While Americans suffer under extreme gas prices and Ukraine continues to be invaded by Russia, Joe Biden is ripping off oddly racist statements, leaving onlookers completely perplexed. Honestly, I’m not sure I have 500 words of analysis on this, but this is just too insane not to share.

On Tuesday, Biden flew to Forth Worth, TX, along with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, to visit a VA hospital and deliver remarks. According to his schedule, the trip was made to discuss the exposure of veterans to environmental hazards such as burn pits. That has become a pet issue for the president ever since he began to (without evidence) connect it to his late son developing cancer years later.

As Biden was speaking, this happened.

I have no idea what I just watched nor what Biden’s point was. I realize the clip is edited, and perhaps there’s more context, but what context could possibly explain the president suggesting a congressman looks like a suicide bomber? That’s the most straightforward explanation for saying he looks like “he can bomb you,” right?

Still, you can expect the “fact-checkers” to jump into action here, attempting to read Biden’s mind as a way to explain away what he said. Did he actually mean “He looks like he can hit a bomb off you,” as in hitting a home run? I have no idea, and neither does any fact-checker that is going to inevitably gnash their teeth over this article and others like it. Of note is that it is not my job to translate for this senile old man nor to make excuses for his complete inability to produce a sentient thought.

So whether he meant to say what he said or not, the senility is the point. Biden is a man who can’t even read a teleprompter properly, and he’s also a man who clearly has problems controlling what comes out of his mouth. It’s common for older men in decline to begin to lose their filters. We’ve seen multiple examples of that from the president over the last several years.

I’ll end with the obligatory “What if Trump had said this?” I’m pretty sure it would be a major story and eat up at least a week of the news cycle. But Biden being a quasi-racist geriatric is just par for the course, I suppose. The only mention you’ll see of his comment in the mainstream media will be from those trying to brush what he said under the rug.

Comment O’ The Day

I changed my mind, there is one group of Americans I do want to send to Ukraine; The Clinton family.

With reports that the Russians are bombing civilian targets, I’m reminded that it was Bill Clinton in 1994 who convinced the Ukrainians to give up their nuclear weapons. I think therefore it’s fair that the Clintons be shipped to Ukraine to be human shields for Ukrainian civilians.

Either Putin will avoid dropping bombs on the Clintons or the Clintons will have the same fate as the people they disarmed. This seems fair to me.
–J.K.

Ukraine is Handing Out Guns, Not Gun Control

Ukraine says it has inflicted one of Russia’s heaviest ever day of losses with more than 1,000 casualties: Putin’s losses now stand at 2,800 troops, 80 tanks and 516 armoured vehicles as fightback continues

Comment O’ The Day

“I said it last night and I’ll say it again: A slugfest bogdown draw is a BIG Ukrainian win. They’ll have fought the fearsome New Model Russian Army to a standstill. Like Finland in 1940 – the Finns had to make concessions still, but the Russians have been warily respectful of the Finns ever since.”

Comment O’ The Day in reference to the previous:

Among the lessons learned: The federal government, and the society around it, is now so mammoth that one literally has to become a famous billionaire to break in from the outside as a regular citizen. And even that is not enough to succeed once in office.

Round Two will have to combine famous billionaire citizens with F-you money at the top, and the US equivalent of the Canadian trucker protest from us at the bottom, simultaneously.

We sent in one man alone, thinking we had a system where that could make a difference. We don’t, it didn’t.

But now we know.

Comment O’ The Day

“As Rush was fond of saying, we have some of the stupidest smart people in positions of power in this country (and frankly around the world).
Our Elite: supremely confident that they are the most intelligent people ever to have existed, and that no one should question their decisions or pronouncements, yet proving every day that they are literally dumb as rocks. Over-credentialed, and under-introspective.”

Observation O’ The Day

Confirmed — The Supreme Court’s Lib Justices Are Paste-Eaters.

“Well, now we know why the Democrats are so eager to pack the Supreme Court with more liberal judges. They’re going to need at least three more lefties on the Court just to get the collective IQ of the lib justices into triple digits.”

Comment O’ The Day
Taibbi has a point. Politicians can falsely claim to be a climate, crime, or economics expert and the average voter isn’t going to offer stiff resistance to that claim. But if a politician claims high school graduation shouldn’t depend upon proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic you are going to get their attention. It’s something everyone capable of reading is going to have a fair amount of expertise in. And the ruination of our education system has reached the point where it’s impossible to ignore.
The remarkable thing is that when called out on this the politicians don’t admit they were wrong. They double down.

The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump
Terry McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor’s race by saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.” If that was no gaffe, Democrats have a lot more significant losing ahead.

(it was no gaffe. It was a ‘freudian slip’ where you inadvertently tell a truth about yourself you wanted kept concealed)

On Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.”
This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

I’m against bills like the proposed Oklahoma measure that would ban the teaching of Jones’s work at all state-sponsored educational institutions. I think bans are counter-productive and politically a terrible move by Republicans, who undercut their own arguments against authoritarianism and in favor of “local control” with such sweeping statewide measures. Still, it was pretty rich hearing the author of The 1619 Project say she lacked the expertise to teach, given that a) many historians agree with her there, yet b) she’s been advocating for schools to teach her dubious work to students all over the country.

Even odder were her next comments, regarding McAuliffe’s infamous line about parents. About this, Hannah-Jones said:

We send our kids to school because we want our kids to be taught by people with expertise in the subject area… When the governor, or the candidate, said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just a fact.

In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

Continue reading “”

Comment O’ The Day
If the environment is more favorable for criminal activity (no cash bail, cheering on property destruction, refusal to prosecute, defunding police, etc.), it should come as no surprise that there will be an increase in demand for guns, both from criminals who seek to exploit the favorable conditions for their endeavors and also from law-abiding citizens who seek to defend themselves from lawlessness.

Only any idiot would think this is a chicken/egg paradox

The Paradox of the 2020 Gun-Sales Spike

In a City Journal piece over the summer, I cast some doubt on the idea that 2020’s massive homicide spike — a 30 percent increase — had been driven by strong gun sales. America has so many guns that even a really strong year for sales doesn’t boost the supply that much, and most crime guns tend to be fairly old anyway.

Most interestingly, places with the biggest gun-sales spikes didn’t also have the biggest shooting spikes, according to a then-new study in Injury Prevention. I further noted, however, some NYPD numbers suggesting that while guns purchased less than a year ago accounted for 10 percent of crime-gun traces in 2019, they were 18 percent in 2020. 

Now we have national data to update both the geographic and the gun-trace findings. Oddly enough, they both hold up. Comparing all of 2020 with all of 2019, the states with the biggest gun-sales spikes were not the same as the states with the biggest homicide spikes. But nationwide, new guns did show up quite a bit more in police departments’ gun traces. 

Here’s a simple, per capita way of comparing changes in homicide rates with changes in gun sales (as measured via background checks for gun purchases, with a few states with quirky data excluded). There’s no obvious connection between the two, and the picture is the same when you plot the percentage change in one variable against the percentage change in the other.


The new trace data, however, are less kind to the latest additions to America’s gun stock. In 2019, about 20 percent of traced guns had been purchased less than a year prior; in 2020, this rose to about 30 percent. (The Trace has some more ways of cutting these numbers here, as does my colleague Charles Fain Lehman here.)  Continue reading “”

Comment O’ The Day

It’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for Californians, given that they overwhelmingly voted to retain the status quo just a few months ago.

Comment O’ The Day
I’m not actually sure that a nation of people who own nothing will be as easy to control as the powers that be seem to believe.

Own Nothing and Love It
An unholy alliance of planners, financiers, and leftists wants everyone to live in mass social housing developments.

From the ancient world to modern times, the class of small property owners have constituted the sine qua non of democratic self-government. But today this class is under attack by what Aristotle described as an oligarchia, an unelected power elite that controls the political economy for its own purposes. In contrast, the rise of small holders were critical to the re-emergence and growth of democracy first in the Netherlands, followed by North America, Australia, and much of Europe.

Today the current class of small holders face a threat from two powerful hegemonies, tech and financial interests, and increasingly intrusive bureaucracies. Both favor policies that would force higher population densities, which would likely raise housing costs and lead to lifetime renting for middle income households who would otherwise own their own homes. These forces—one long associated with the right, and the other the left—share a common agenda, though for different reasons.

Financial interests would reap a steady profit stream by creating a “rentership society,” where potential owners are transformed into tenants, guaranteeing the benefits of increasing land values. Today pension funds and Wall Street firms are buying up single family homes, often at prices too high for the average buyer. For their part, the planning clerisy believes that dense urbanism is socially, economically, and environmentally superior; some even favor a return to public housing, which not long ago lost was rejected as a massively failed experiment.

Continue reading “”