August 20

636 – The army of the Rashidun Caliphate defeats the Byzantine army in the final battle near the Yarmouk river, ending Byzantine rule in Syria. This marks the beginning of moslem conquests outside Arabia.

1191 – During the 3rd Crusade, Richard I of England executes several thousand Saracen hostages at Ayyadieh in retaliation for the perfidy of Saladin

1775 – The Spanish establish the Presidio San Augustin del Tucson, modern day Tucson, Arizona.

1794 – United States troops defeat a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio, during the Northwest Territory Indian War.

1852 – The steamboat Atlantic sinks on Lake Erie after a collision with the steamboat Ogdensburg, with the loss of at least 150 lives.

1866 – President Andrew Johnson formally declares the end of the American Civil War.

1914 – Brussels is captured during the German invasion of Belgium.

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begins operations in Detroit.

1938 – New York Yankees’ player Lou Gehrig hits his 23rd career grand slam, a record that stands for 75 years until broken by Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez in 2013.

1940 – Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader, in Mexico City, dying the next day.

1962 – The U.S. government financed NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear powered civilian ship, embarks on its maiden voyage.

1968 – Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia to stop mass freedom protests in Prague.

1975 – NASA launches the Viking 1 probe to become the first craft to launch a landing probe on Mars.

1977 – NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft to encounter the outer planets and go on into interstellar space.

1986 – In Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill murders 14 of his co-workers and then commits suicide.

1991 –More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union’s parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev.

1998 – The United States launches cruise missile attacks against al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

2017 – Jerry Lewis dies at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada at age 91.

2020 – Joe Biden accepts the nomination as the 2020 democratic presidential candidate

Biden administration best understood as a junta

I have come to realize that the Biden administration is nothing but a junta.

Those who constitute it are the opposite of the Founders.  They don’t believe in limited government — of, by, and for the people.  They do not believe in objectivity — or freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.  They do not believe in “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” or in their right to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  (Just ask Roger Stone or Donald Trump.)  Nor do they believe in equality under the law, the people’s right to a “speedy and public trial” by a jury of one’s peers (just ask Donald Trump), natural law, etc., etc.  And they certainly don’t believe that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  In fact, in recent years, they appear increasingly to disdain all these concepts…because they obviously increasingly disdain those who disagree with them and/or who could stand in the way of the ever-increasing power and control they have over others — power and control they revel in and believe they richly deserve.

They do believe in a Supreme Ruler.  But they believe they are that Supreme Ruler.  They believe they have the right — indeed, duty — to rule over the “deplorables” in rural areas and flyover country.  Preposterously, they purport to believe that their ideas and policies must be implemented, whether the rest of us like it or not…if we are to “save our democracy.”  There is nothing less democratic — or more deplorable — than that.

The alphabet agencies that Obama and Biden have fully politicized and weaponized are now on roughly the same objective and moral plane as the Nazis’ SS or Brownshirts, East Germany’s Stasi, or the Soviet Union’s KGB.  The CIA, FBI, Department of Injustice (DOI?), and the rest are so boldly and brazenly partisan — and aggressive in pursuing their agenda — that it is breathtaking to those of us who knew a younger and more innocent America.

Modern-day Democrats’ signature tactic is to vehemently (and indignantly!) accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they have done — and of being exactly what they are.  As I have stated repeatedly, they are very good at being evil.  Newt Gingrich had it exactly right in a recent interview with Sean Hannity, whom he schooled.

Donald Trump is kryptonite to the Adam Schiffs of the world, the evildoers, and those in the Deep State and the swamp.  That is why they called him a fascist, authoritarian, etc.  And why they are attempting to indict/imprison/destroy him now.  For such “crimes” as tweeting “Georgia hearings now on @OANN.  Amazing!”  Yes, they indicted him for tweeting his opinion of a cable news show.

If we truly want to remove the junta — and save our representative republic — we must help Trump in his fight against the vast left-wing conspiracy that is the Democrat-Media-Complex.

The previous president loosened restrictive gun control laws and the ‘experts’ are puzzled

Homicides in Brazil at the lowest level in over a decade, report says

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian researchers say the number of violent deaths last year reached the lowest level in more than a decade, puzzling some experts because there has been an explosion of firearms circulating in the country in recent years.

About 47,500 people were slain in Latin America’s largest nation in 2022, said a report Thursday by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, an independent group that tracks crimes. Its statistics are widely used as a benchmark because there are no official statistics on a national level.
While the number of killings in 2022 was down 2.4% from the previous year, it remained roughly even with levels recorded since 2019. The last time Brazil had less violent deaths was in 2011, with 47,215 killings.
The fall in homicides has left many public security experts somewhat puzzled, as it has been accompanied by a sharp increase in the number of firearms held by Brazilians. Some studies have suggested that more guns circulating among the population lead to more homicides.

During his 2019-2022 term, then President Jair Bolsonaro worked to loosen regulations on gun ownership. The number of firearms registered with the Federal Police reached 1.5 million in 2022, up 47.5% from 2019.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, has sought to undo Bolsonaro’s pro-gun policies. Days after coming to power, Lula required gun owners to register their weapons with police, and the government has said it will present new legislation Friday.

Experts have come up with at least three reasons behind the dual trend.
Samira Bueno, executive director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, said he feels the main factor is the relative truce among gangs since 2018. An explosion of violence in 2017, when his group registered 63,880 killings, was largely attributed to a rivalry between the First Capital Command gang and the Red Command gang.

Carolina Ricardo, director of the Instituto Sou da Paz, a non-profit group that monitors public security, said another factor is that more Brazilian states have implemented ambitious public security policies along with social measures such as working to keep children in school.
Brazil’s aging population could be a third factor, Ricardo said. “In general, who dies and kills are young people,” she said.
But Ricardo also expressed concern about the prevalence of homicides using firearms.

“Although homicides have not increased, the percentage of deaths by firearms in Brazil is still very high,” she said. According to Thursday’s report, firearms were responsible for 77% of all homicides last year. Ricardo said that is much higher than the world average of around 44%.

Addressing other areas of violence, the report said that while homicides declined, violence against women rose and there was a record number of rapes as defined by Brazilian law, affecting mostly children. Brazil’s legal definition of rape is broader than that of the U.S. and doesn’t necessarily require sexual penetration.

There were nearly 15,000 victims of rape in 2022, up 8.2% from the previous year. Nearly two-thirds of the victims were children aged 13 or younger, the report said. Feminicides went up 6%, with 1,437 killings.
In Rio de Janeiro, Roberto Camara has witnessed first hand the rise in violence against women, offering self-defence courses to women who have suffered domestic violence.
He started with a few students and now trains up to 60 women every month.

On Thursday, seven of them attended one of his classes in a small room in the center of Rio. Some came with their toddlers. The demand “keeps on growing,” Camara told the Associated Press. “I can’t attend everyone. We don’t have the structure to attend that many people.”

RINOs Surprised? Biden Administration Stabs Gun Control Partners in the Back

Moderate members of both political parties are criticizing the Biden Administration for its recent move to defund longstanding scholastic archery and hunter education programs under a recently passed gun control law.

The programs, which have no demonstrable connection to crime or violence, are the latest innocent victims of the misnamed Bi-Partisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA).

The episode reinforces two critically important lessons that any pro-gun legislator should remember. One: there is no such thing as harmless gun control. Two: Moderates who join forces with anti-gun extremists will eventually be embarrassed by the partnership.

We have already explained how the infamously anti-gun Biden Administration is abusing authorities established under the BSCA to implement de facto waiting periods on certain firearm purchases, fund unconstitutional firearm seizure schemes, and curtail private firearm transfers. These steps have caused supporters of the law who are not reflexively hostile to the Second Amendment to complain the administration is misinterpreting its provisions. But if anti-gunners can interpret the individual right to keep and bear arms out of the Second Amendment itself, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the far more ambiguous language of the BSCA could be twisted to nefarious ends.

The latest issue arises out of an obscure provision of the BSCA that amended the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). That act is the “primary source of federal aid for elementary and secondary education” and is meant ““to strengthen and improve educational quality and educational opportunities in the Nation’s elementary and secondary schools.”

Continue reading “”

The court ruled that since the law hadn’t actually been enforced yet, the plaintiffs didn’t have ‘standing’, as they weren’t yet subject to harm.

New Jersey Can Sue Gun Companies As A ‘Public Nuisance,’ Appeals Court Rules

The state of New Jersey can sue firearms manufacturers under a new state public nuisance law designed to target the industry, a federal appellate court ruled on Thursday.

New Jersey, in July of 2022, enacted new statutory law that allows the attorney general to sue gun manufacturers for being a “public nuisance” if they have “endangered the safety and health of New Jersey residents through the sale, manufacture, distribution, and marketing of lethal, but nonetheless legal, gun-related products,” according to the law. The state was then sued by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) in November of 2022 in a “pre-enforcement action,” to stop them from bringing a suit under the law, which was on Thursday dismissed for a lack of ripeness — meaning that it hasn’t matured to the point where a genuine dispute exists — according to the court’s ruling dismissing the suit.

“Pre-enforcement challenges are unusual. To bring one, the plaintiff must show that the stakes are high and close at hand … Yet this suit falls far short of even the ‘normal’ pre-enforcement challenge. A brand-new civil tort statute, without more, does not justify a federal court’s intervention,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, for a unanimous three-judge bench. “[W]e see little evidence that enforcement is looming … the Foundation has jumped the gun,” Bibas noted.

New Jersey’s law was passed in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, where the court in a 6-3 ruling struck down a New York law that required pistol permit applicants to prove that a “proper cause exists” for having such a permit. The Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the Second Amendment.

“The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas for the majority in the case. The ruling was widely criticized by Democrats and left-wing groups, who argued that it would increase gun violence and prompted the passage of laws by Democratic-led states to curtail firearm access.

“A gun industry member shall not, by conduct either unlawful in itself or unreasonable under all the circumstances, knowingly or recklessly create, maintain, or contribute to a public nuisance in this State through the sale, manufacturing, distribution, importing, or marketing of a gun-related product,” reads the New Jersey statute, which was challenged by the NSSF. The law also specifies that “[t]he Attorney General shall not be required to demonstrate any special injury” to prevail in a legal challenge on these grounds.

The law had previously been blocked by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi of New Jersey for purportedly violating federal law, which currently immunizes gun manufacturers from lawsuits when their guns are used to commit crimes.

The law adapts a model — creating a civil cause of action for private citizens to sue — that had been adopted by some conservative states, notably Texas, to enforce abortion restrictions prior to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Democratic-led states, such as California, then vowed to use the same model to target gun manufacturers.

“During oral arguments, the panel appeared to have concerns with the law, as did the district court that enjoined enforcement,” said Lawrence Keane, the NSSF’s senior vice president and general counsel. “Should New Jersey’s attorney general attempt to enforce the law, we will immediately refile our complaint.”

“I am thrilled,” said Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey.

Freedom

After reading stories about the abuse suffered at the hands of police that are detaining J6 defendants for trial, knowing how cops will abuse and torture prisoners, and how they are transferring them to Supermax prisons, I am not surprised at the J6 defendants that are simply skipping out on their trials and sentencing hearings:

The people who are doing this have realized that they have nothing left to lose. Their freedom, property, and likely their lives are forfeit at this point. The cops will eventually find them, and if they aren’t killed during the arrest, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, or at least the parts of it that matter.

With nothing left to lose, it’s only a matter of time before someone in this position decides to give the left the insurrection that they are already accused of perpetrating.

Evergrande.

The news was all over the media. The default wasn’t yesterday; they got in trouble in 2021 and had sought a “moratorium” in the first week of 2022!

So how is it that nobody gave a crap for the last two years? You’d be carried out on your shield by now and long-ago eaten by worms if you shorted the US market into the original default 2 years ago.

Witness Lahaina. HE, the power company, spent basically all of their money on “green” initiatives rather than basic maintenance and hardening to reduce wildfire risk. They were trading close to $40 before the fires and yesterday touched close to $10; a wild-eyed 75% collapse. That’s a utility and of course now there is a serious financial risk from lawsuits — richly-deserved, if the article in the WSJ is all factual.

But that’s a microcosm of all the distortions that have been embedded in the so-called “green economy”; the virus was also part of it, and the government had their foot on the scale in the “rah-rah” side of it because everyone loves a higher stock market.

The problem is that how you got it matters.

If you got it because the company expanded its business organically, it beat others in the market because they were at least two of “better, faster, cheaper” then you’ve got a sustainable and reasonable price.

If you got it because the government subsidized bad behavior — uneconomic things that cannot work over time because they violate the laws of thermodynamics and are predicated on feelings and political promises then you get a crash because there is nothing under any of the so-called “improvement” beyond hot air.

Continue reading “”

August 19

43 BC – Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus ‘Octavian’ is elected consul by the Roman Senate.

14 – Emperor Octavian ‘Caesar Augustus’ dies in Nola, Italy.

1153 – The same day his army retakes Ascalon, Baldwin III of Jerusalem takes control of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from his mother Melisende.

1692 –In Salem, Massachusetts, 5 people, 1 woman and 4 men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.

1782 – In the last major engagement of the Revolutionary War, a force of  Loyalists, along with Indians, ambushes and routs a force of Kentucky militiamen near the Licking River in Virginia

1812 – The frigate USS Constitution earns the nickname “Old Ironsides” during battle with the British frigate HMS Guerriere when an American crewmen yells “Her sides are made of iron!” when a shot merely bounces off the oak hull.

1848 – The New York Herald breaks the news to the east coast of the U.S. of the gold strike earlier in the year in California.

1854 – The 1st Sioux War begins near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, when U.S Army soldiers, under the command of John Lawrence Grattan,  mortally wound Lakota Chief Conquering Bear while attempting to arrest one of his tribe and in return are massacred to the last man.

1862 – At the beginning of an indian uprising in Minnesota, called U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, or more commonly ‘Little Crow’s War’, lasting only a few months, Santee Lakota warriors decide not to attack heavily defended Fort Ridgely and instead turn to the settlement of New Ulm, killing white settlers along the way.

1883 – Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel is born in Saumur, France.

1909 – The Indianapolis Motor Speedway opens for automobile racing.

1934 – Adolf Hitler’s appointment as combined head of state  –Der Führer– is approved by a vote of the German people.

1942 – The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division and allied forces begin a near disastrous assault on the French port of Dieppe during World War II.

1944 – Free French and French Resistance forces, with allied troops, begin the assault to liberate Paris from German occupation.

1945 – Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh take power in Hanoi, Vietnam.

1960 – At trial in Moscow,  U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for espionage.

1964 – NASA’s Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite, is launched from Cape Canaveral.

1981 – 2 U.S. Navy Grumman F-14 fighters intercept and shoot down 2 Libyan Sukhoi Su-22 fighters over the Gulf of Sidra in the Mediterranean.

1991 – During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, hard line communists attempt a coup d’état against President Mikhail Gorbachev

2009 – In Kandahar, Afghanistan,  U.S. Army Sergeant Paul Dumont Jr. is killed in a vehicle accident.

2010 – Operations Iraqi Freedom and Laser Escort ends, with the last of the U.S. Brigade Combat Teams and certain Special Operations Forces crossing the border back into Kuwait.

2017 – A open water net pen at a fish farm near Cypress Island, Washington state, run by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific, breaks, accidentally releasing into the Pacific Ocean over 300,000 non-native Atlantic salmon.

Gas station customer who shot suspected thief won’t face charges

The QuikTrip gas station customer who police say shot and killed a larceny suspect Wednesday will not face charges, Channel 9′s Hunter Sáenz has learned.

The case, which authorities are investigating as a self-defense case, began Wednesday morning at the gas station off Mount Holly-Huntersville Road and Bellhaven Boulevard.

Police said a suspected thief, 32-year-old David Leonhardt, fired a shot at that customer while at a gas pump, and even tried carjacking him.

Detectives said that’s when the customer shot and killed Leonhardt.

Police said minutes before the shooting, that suspect was seen stealing things from the gas station.

Alleged intruder killed by woman near Tucson was sex offender

A man deputies say was shot to death while trying to break in to a woman’s home in a rural area near Tucson last week was a registered sex offender who lived nearby, records show.

Jayson Magrum, 43, was shot dead Aug. 11 when the Pima County Sheriff’s Department says he was trying to get into a house in Three Points, about 30 miles southwest of Tucson.

Sandra Tracy, 54, was home alone when the incident occurred.

She told deputies she grabbed a gun and fired a warning shot through the window hoping it would scare the intruder away, according to an initial news release from the department.

She fired a second time, striking Magrum.

Responding deputies tried to revive Magrum, but he died at the scene.

Magrum listed a residence in the same block of West Pyle Road where the alleged attempted break-in occurred, records shows.

Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people.
Without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom.
Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain
relatively free after the people have been disarmed,
but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or
existing where the people have personal arms.
— Neal Knox

More Young People Are Getting Cancer, And We Don’t Know Why.

Cancer is a horrible diagnosis to receive at any age, but an apparent rise in the rate of cancers among young adults uncovered by a recent study is posing a concerning mystery epidemiologists are especially keen to solve.

Researchers have observed this worrying trend for some time, although they need to keep abreast of data to see how things might have changed, for better or for worse.

Last year, a review of three decades of global cancer data found adults under the age of 50 have increasingly developed cancer from the 1990s onwards.

Benjamin Koh, a physician-scientist at the National University of Singapore, and colleagues wanted to understand what has been happening more recently, specifically in the United States. The results of their new analysis echo the changes seen abroad.

Research shows young adult cancers are distinct from the kinds of cancers affecting the same organs in older adults – differences that influence treatment options – so we need to understand which cancers are affecting who, and how.

Aside from global trends, data on specific populations is useful to inform public health policies and research funding priorities. Overall, age remains the biggest risk factor for cancer, a disease of accumulating genetic mutations.

But now something is happening in younger age groups, and health experts aren’t sure what.

Across many countries, but particularly the US, the rising rates of young adult cancers could be due to a range of factors: changing diets, lifestyles, and sleep patterns; increasing obesity, antibiotic use, and air pollution.

Teasing out trends is complicated by the fact that cancer screening programs are finding more cancers, hopefully earlier, while vaccination programs are preventing them too.

However, the 2022 international review suggests the rise in early-onset cancers has emerged over and above increased screening programs – which rarely include people under 50 anyhow.

Although this new study didn’t account for the impact of these programs, in scouring existing data sources it has provided a comprehensive, updated overview of cancer rates in under-50s between 2010 and 2019 for the US.

Koh and colleagues identified a total of 562,145 young adults in 17 linked data registries that record new cancer diagnoses across different parts of the US, and used these records to estimate population-wide incidence rates over the decade to 2019.

Incidence refers to new cases diagnosed in a population over a period of time.

Overall, the incidence of cancers in under-50s rose such that an extra 3 cases were diagnosed per 100,000 people in 2019 compared to 2010.

Continue reading “”

August 18

1227 – Genghis Khan dies in Yinchuan, China

1487 – The city of Málaga in the Emirate of Granada, Spain falls to the combined forces of Castile and Aragon during the final years of the Reconquista.

1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.

1636 –  The Covenant of the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts is signed.

1774 – Meriwether Lewis is born in Ivy, Virginia.

1826 – British Brevet Major Gordon Laing becomes the first European to enter the city of Timbuktu.

1838 – The United States Exploring Expedition to explore Puget Sound and Antarctica, under the command of Lt Charles Wilkes, weighs anchor at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

1846 – During the Mexican–American War, General Stephen W Kearney’s US forces capture Santa Fe.

1864 – Union forces attempt for the second time to cut the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad supply line into Petersburg, Virginia near the Globe Tavern.

1868 – Pierre Janssen discovers helium.

1920 – The 19th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified

1938 – The Thousand Islands Bridge, connecting Wellesley Island in New York with Ontario, Canada over the Saint Lawrence River, is dedicated by President Roosevelt.

1945 – U.S. Army photographer SGT Anthony J. Marchione is the last American to die in WWII when the B-32 he is flying in over Tokyo is damaged by enemy fire.

1958 –  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is published in the United States.

1965 – Operation Starlite, the first major combat ground operation by purely U.S forces begins when U.S. Marines destroy a Viet Cong stronghold on the Van Tuong peninsula.

1976 – While attempting to cut down a tree that blocked the line of sight between a United Nations Command checkpoint and an observation post, in the Joint Security Area in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, North Korean soldiers kill two US Army officers supervising the operation.

1983 – Hurricane Alicia hits the Texas Gulf coast, killing 21 people and causing over US$1 billion in damage.

1989 – Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán is assassinated near Bogotá

1993 – American International Airways Cargo Flight 808,  a McDonnell Douglas DC-8, crashes on landing at Leeward Point Field at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, injuring the 3 crew members aboard.

2005 – Dennis Rader is sentenced to 175 years in prison for the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killings in Sedgwick County, Kansas.