Category: You Can’t Make This Up

I want to know how this scheme detects ‘when someone has bad intent‘, which is a state of mind. That sounds completely illogical, which, coming from the gun controllers is par for them.

Proposed bill would establish a new code to categorize firearm sales

DENVER (KDVR) — A new bill aimed at curbing gun violence is making some headway in the state.

SB24-066 would establish a new code, known as Merchant Category Codes, to categorize firearm sales.

MCCs are four-digit numbers that identify the type of business involved in a transaction such as grocery stores, department stores, etc. This proposed legislation would require payment card networks like Visa or Mastercard to provide a specific code for businesses that sell firearms and ammunition.

Supporters claim this would help banks and credit cards recognize dangerous firearm purchasing patterns to alert law enforcement while those in opposition are calling it a backdoor form of registration.

“Really what it is, is just a four-digit code that bolts onto an existing system that banks and credit card companies use to protect themselves from illicit activity and when it comes to gun crime, that has the benefit of keeping us safe,” Hudson Munoz said.

Munoz, executive director of Guns Down America, is a supporter of the bill. He said these codes already help banks and card companies with fraud detection and assessing risk.

“Let’s inhibit criminal behavior a little bit by assigning the code to gun and ammunition stores so that when someone has bad intent when buying a weapon, there’s an alert in place that stops that from happening,” Munoz said.

13, THIRTEEN cuts in a 48, FORTY EIGHT second video with the longest cut of him speaking being only 11 ELEVEN seconds long. He’s still got several where he’s slurring his words, so just how many times did they have to have him repeat each time they had to cut, to be able to splice together that load of crap-for-brains?

 

Did You Notice What’s Missing in Jill Biden’s Statement on the Hur Report?

Team Biden’s handling of the Hur report has not gone well. Someone either decided Joe Biden should address the nation in a speech and to answer questions after his bedtime, or failed to convince Biden not to. Experts on both sides of the aisle are panning Biden’s evening speech as not being helpful to his cause, and they’re right.

Now, the Biden campaign is literally trying to fundraise off of “outrage” over the report. The campaign sent out an email Saturday night with a statement from Jill Biden.

Generally speaking, there is nothing new in this statement we haven’t already heard—except for the fact that it includes a detail Joe Biden apparently couldn’t recall: when his son Beau died.

“I hope you can imagine how it felt to read that attack — not just as Joe’s wife, but as Beau’s mother,” the fundraising pitch began. “I don’t know what this Special Counsel was trying to achieve. We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would use our son’s death to score political points. If you’ve experienced a loss like that, you don’t measure it in years, you measure it in grief.”

I suspect that whoever wrote this pitch for Jill Biden didn’t know that Jill Biden wasn’t actually Beau Biden’s mother.

But I digress—the report wasn’t an attack. Legally, it was a gift, and Biden and his team have been regularly cherry-picking select quotes to support the claim that he did nothing wrong—even though that’s not what the report actually said. Biden and his team are trying to contain the political fallout of the investigation’s assessment of Biden’s cognitive decline. This isn’t attacking Joe, or Beau. As Hans von Spakovsky, a former federal election commissioner and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “An explanation of Hur’s findings on the president’s mental condition was necessary to explain why he is not recommending prosecution.”

The pitch continued:

May 30th is a day forever etched on our hearts. It shattered me, it shattered our family.

So many of you know that feeling after you lose a loved one, where you feel like you can’t get off the floor. What helped me, and what helped Joe, was to find purpose. That’s what keeps Joe going, serving you and the country we love.

Joe is 81, that’s true, but he’s 81 doing more in an hour than most people do in a day. Joe has wisdom, empathy and vision. He has delivered on so many of his promises as President precisely because he’s learned a lot in those 81 years. His age, with his experience and expertise, is an incredible asset and he proves it every day.

What really sticks out about this pitch is that there isn’t a denial of anything in the report. It doesn’t dispute that Joe couldn’t remember when he was vice president or when his son died. In fact, it almost reads like an excuse letter by reiterating the debilitating loss of a loved one, and then by insisting that he does “more an hour than most people do in a day,” as if to suggest that we need to give him some slack because he works so hard. Now, I wouldn’t doubt that Biden takes more vacations in a year than most Americans do in a lifetime, but that’s not the same thing.

We know this because we see it.

We see Biden has the schedule of someone who is taking it easy, and is staying out of sight as much as he can get away with. But, not once in the pitch does Jill even attempt to dispute the report by saying Joe Biden is sharp or has a great memory. If she did, there’d be no reason not to charge him.

Financial Big Brother is Watching You
A brief note on an overlooked nightmare.

A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’” The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.

Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:

According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”

During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example). However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:

The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance. First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops. Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response. The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.

If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.

There’s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who’ve noticed it’s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don’t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.

What a crazy time we live in! See you from the Nevada caucus, and watch this space for other news soon.

Special Counsel Finds Biden Is Too Old to Be Charged in Classified Docs Scandal

“Your Honor, my client was clearly too drunk to have made it anywhere near I-25 from that maze of one-way streets in downtown Denver, and cannot be held accountable for how he or his car might have been found trying to enter the highway from the off-ramp.” —The World’s Best Defense Attorney back in my younger days

Some legal defense moves are so unscrupulous that it would take a high-caliber lawyer to think of them and a true scoundrel to implement them. I’m looking at you, Johnnie Cochran, in your $4,000 suits, with a combination of awe and horror.

But that’s just trial law. Where things get really very quite seriously unsettling is the even twistier world of special counsels, where Washington agrees to investigate Washington insiders using Washington insiders who pinky swear that everything will be on the up-and-up and that the truth will be brought to light and justice will be served — no matter which Washington insiders might be punished or suffer public shaming as a result.

Then the Washington insiders all pour one another stiff portions of 21-year-old single-malt scotch and have a good laugh at our (literal) expense.

The latest example of just that comes from the Department of Justice™ headed up by Biden administration crony Merrick Garland.

ASIDE: I swear this actually just happened. When I started to type “Department of Justice,” a moment ago, I quickly corrected myself after typing “Derpartment.” I wish I’d let it stand with a [sic] at the end.

As you’re probably aware, the Biden administration was doing one of those pinky-swear investigations of itself because of that time Biden accidentally left boxes and boxes of classified doc in his garage with his Corvette. At first, Biden was prompted to tell people that his garage is a secure location because, unlike the Trump compound on many well-guarded acres at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s garage door has one of those twisty lock handles on it.

That garage is practically a SCIF, they claimed.

That excuse held about as much water as my wife when she was 40 months pregnant and had to pee from just looking at a faucet, so Garland appointed pinky-swear special counsel Robert K. Hur to look into whether he should find some special excuse for Biden’s mishandling of classified documents immediately or if it would be better to draw it out longer so they’d have a chance to truly savor that bottle of Glenfarclas.

That was in August. Today, we have the Mother of All Justifications — and it has me laughing harder than it has Biden’s reelection campaign team breaking out in hives. Here it is from Hur’s findings:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

Never mind the weasel language about how Biden would present himself to a jury because an “elderly man with a poor memory” is how he presents himself to members of the press, gathered audiences, and various deceased foreign dignitaries from countries he gets mixed up sometimes.

Remember those reports from a month or three ago that Biden was getting all upset about the public perception that he’s too old and feeble for the job? Yeah, his own DOJ just used that as the reason Biden can’t be held accountable for storing classified documents next to the case of 40 Weight Motor Oil and expired boxes of Fix-O-Dent.

But don’t you worry. I don’t think anyone in Beijing or Russia or Tehran pays much attention to what goes on in the Biden White House. So you can rest assured, Jack, that when the fella from that place, you know the one, tries to threaten Corn Hole with the asufutimaehaehfutbw that old Joe Biden is gonna make sure they feel the trunalimunumaprzure like the what was I saying?

And you can take that to the bank and smoke it.

Everytown Describes Lever-Actions as ‘Deadly Innovation’

Last week, people who had attended SHOT Show started the trek home. From the media folks covering cool and interesting pieces to the attendees and the gun companies showing of that cool new stuff.

But SHOT isn’t just about new technology, but also new lines from established companies.

Lever-action firearms, for example, have been with us for coming up on two centuries now. So a company that’s decided to get into the lever action game would show it off at SHOT.

And the folks at Everytown’s The Smoking Gun has decided to complain about all the goodies there in a piece headlined, “DEADLY INNOVATIONS FROM THE 2024 SHOT SHOW”

Yes, the all caps was their idea.

So what does that have to do with lever-action guns? Apparently, they’re “deadly innovations” now.

Smith & Wesson unveiled its first lever-action rifles — a stark contrast to the company’s AR-15s — which can be seen as the company’s attempt to compete with Ruger’s Marlin Firearms brand of lever-action rifles. Smith & Wesson’s new Model 1854 rifles are also a nod to the company’s roots, as Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson patented their first lever-action pistols and rifles in 1854, as part of the short-lived Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. The new rifles are chambered for the .44 Magnum and hold nine rounds.

Henry Repeating Arms, another company known for its lever-action rifles, has introduced the new Lever Action Supreme rifle that is available in two popular AR-15 calibers and uses AR-15 magazines. In other words, the company is capitalizing on the gun industry’s push for assault weapons. This follows the company’s introduction of the semi-automatic Homesteader rifle last year, which uses 9mm Glock, Sig Sauer, or Smith & Wesson pistol magazines.

Now, the Henry is interesting because it just involves a magazine swap versus how you typically have to reload a lever-action rifle, but since it’s not going into a semi-automatic rifle, there’s literally nothing for The Smoking Gun to really have an issue with, right?

Except that despite their claims of just wanting some “commonsense” gun control, they really don’t want us to have access to any firearm at all.

These are based on technology that first turned up in a handgun in 1826. This isn’t an innovation in any appreciable sense, though Henry using magazines is new. Smith & Wesson’s offerings are just new lines based on old, beloved, tried-and-true technology to try and carve out a bigger market share.

As a capitalist, I approve.

What’s more hilarious is that if you really look at the offerings, these “deadly innovations” are micro-steps forward. Kel-Tec SUB2000 now lets you leave optics on the rifle when you fold it. Palmetto is taking semi-auto tech and making an MP7 clone in 5.7. Kahr has an AR-15 styled Thompson.

Nothing here is a huge leap forward in firearm technology, yet The Smoking Gun–and, of course, Everytown as a whole–is freaking out over it.

Well, if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. I challenge all firearm companies to start developing some really cool stuff for next year, just to watch their heads explode.

Sounds a lot like ‘Giving Aid and Comfort’………

Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin Nails Biden and Austin on Telegraphing to the Iranians About Strike Locations

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such an incompetent group in my lifetime as the Biden administration.

We were given fair warning about Joe Biden from Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In his 2014 memoir, Gates said the then-vice president had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”  Now make that five decades, and add he’s been wrong about virtually every major foreign policy issue so far that he’s faced during his presidency. Gates doubled down on those claims during a 2021 interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” saying, “I think he’s gotten a lot wrong,” specifically mentioning the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Now we’re faced with yet another situation due to Biden’s bad foreign policy, this time with Iran and the militants they use to fight us. There have been more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces or assets, with three people killed now and dozens injured over those assaults, some with possible traumatic brain injuries. Yet, the Biden response has been largely impotent and has not cowed Iran or the militants.

Not only hasn’t Biden responded yet to the attack on the troops in Jordan by Kataib Hezbollah in which 3 American troops were killed and more than 30 were injured, but Biden’s team has listed possible targets in such detail as to raise questions about telegraphing to the enemy.

Report: Biden May Take Action As Early As Tonight Re: Iran – Officials Even List Possible Options

Joe Biden’s Stupid Plan to Avenge Fallen US Troops: Tell Iran We’re Coming, Then Provide the Target List

Since we wrote those stories, they’ve given out even more information, saying they were going to launch a series of attacks for days against targets — including Iranian personnel and facilities — inside Iraq and Syria.

As Fox News’ chief national security correspondent at the Pentagon Jennifer Griffin noted, now the IRGC commanders in those areas have left and gone into hiding.

 “The Pentagon usually does not telegraph so much if it wants the element of surprise,” she said. Yes, if. So why are they telegraphing so much now? Do they want the IRGC to flee so it looks like they’re hitting something consequential even though the IRGC leaders will be gone?

Continue reading “”

Did Obama Just Get Trump Off the Hook?

Just when you thought 2024 couldn’t possibly get any weirder — yes, I know it’s still only January — a secret Barack Obama memo could prove the undoing of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump.

America First Legal — whose suit against the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “unearthed new docs showing that the deep state knew the risks of mass mail voting in 2020 but censored these criticisms as ‘disinformation’” — has another bombshell today.

“A secret Obama memo, the Presidential Information Technology Committee (PITC), regarding control of Presidential records could change everything in the DOJ’s politicized prosecution of Trump,” the organization announced Tuesday on Twitter/X.

By executive fiat, Obama created the PITC following a 2014 Russian hack of the president’s Executive Office computer network. The committee “includes representatives of the Departments of Defense and DHS, among others” and “established the President’s exclusive control over information resources and systems provided to the President,” according to America First Legal.

More:

Because the memo relied upon the Federal Records Act’s definition of “information system” as resources organized for the “use” and “disposition” of “information”, the memo gives the President exclusive control over information he receives.

This is relevant to what a President may reasonably believe about information given to him while in office.

Second, and related, if information stored on the PITC network formed the basis for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of former President Trump, that evidence should have been disclosed to the former President and may be relevant to his liability.

America First goes on to explain that “Obama’s PITC memo may have created a reasonable belief in President Trump that he, in fact, had such authority” to “possess or retain… classified documents.” That’s contrary to Smith’s 37-count indictment against Trump for “willful retention of national defense information; conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation,” among other charges.

It’s always been my understanding that as the chief executive, the president enjoys unlimited authority to declassify information — with a wave of the hand, wafting burning sage over the documents, or just by thinking about it really hard.

The issue of retaining documents is where the issue might get trickier, but as America First Legal noted, these new revelations are consistent with the organization’s “whitepaper contending that the President of the United States has absolute authority over presidential papers.”

Going further, “if the records Trump allegedly destroyed are still preserved within the EOP or the U.S. Department of Defense as part of PITC-created information systems, then other claims in the indictment may be baseless.”

If America First’s analysis is correct, Trump is on sound legal footing on possession of whatever documents he kept at Mar-A-Lago, and whatever he may have destroyed could have been just copies of what is still on the PITC systems authorized by none other than Barack Obama.

Somewhere in an 8,500-square-foot home in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood, a former president must be seething.

 Border Patrol Turns on Joe Biden, Proclaims Support for Texas National Guard.

Is there going to be a major confrontation on the border following Joe Biden’s ultimatum that Texas National Guard forces be removed from Shelby Park and other “disputed” areas? Not if the rank-and-file of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have anything to say about it.

According to a new post put out by the Border Patrol Union, and a new report from Griff Jenkins of Fox News, Biden has lost operational control of the situation, at least in a practical sense.

The Biden administration had initially warned Texas that it had until mid-day Friday to relinquish control of Shelby Park, the nearby boat dock, and the International Bridge. That deadline has now come and gone, and instead of there being a major clash between the Border Patrol and the state-controlled soldiers on site, it appears those on the ground have already de-escalated the situation.

The Border Patrol Union ends by slamming Biden for creating the current “catastrophe” and reiterating that there will be no conflict between CBP agents and state forces. The statement is a clear signal of support for the Texas National Guard, its mission, and those leading it, including Gov. Greg Abbott.

Rank-and-file BP agents appreciate and respect what TX has been doing to defend their state in the midst of this catastrophe that the Biden Admin has unleashed on America.

We want to be perfectly clear, there is no fight between rank-and-file BP agents and the TX NG, Gov. Abbott, or TX DPS. It may make flashy headlines, but it simply isn’t true.

Furthering the division between the Border Patrol and the White House was a senior CBP official who said they have no plans to follow through on removing the razor wire put up by Texas. Biden has completely lost whatever leverage he had.

This is an incredible turn of events. I don’t know if “mutiny” is the right word here, but clearly, Biden has no way to enforce his threats at this point. Border Patrol agents are not going to go along with it and short of using the Insurrection Act to mobilize the U.S. Army (and they likely wouldn’t act either), this represents a major roadblock to the president’s attempts to further destroy the Southern border.

We are in uncharted territory right now, and I’m certainly thankful cooler heads have prevailed, at least at this point. Will this force Biden’s hand toward some kind of renewal of enforcement of immigration laws? Surely, with his bluff having been called by his own law enforcement officials, he has to try a different approach. Never underestimate the propensity of Washington politicians to keep making the wrong decisions, though.

Sen. Kennedy Humiliates Another Biden Nominee Who Can’t Answer a Simple Question.