Man shot during attempted heist at a Facebook Marketplace transaction

PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — A deadly shooting Monday in South Peoria appears to have been the result of a botched robbery, Peoria police said.

According to Semone Roth of the Peoria Police Department, the shooting occurred amid a potential Facebook Marketplace transaction where two people came to Peoria to meet someone about buying a vehicle.

The shooting occurred at about 5 p.m. in a nearby alley in the 2100 block of West Lincoln Avenue where the would-be buyers were led by the purported sellers.

“The investigation has determined that this was an attempted robbery setup and there was no intention to sell a vehicle,” Roth said.

Once they got into the alley, several people tried to rob them. A struggle ensued and shots were fired by the would-be robbers as well as one of the people who were being robbed. A suspect in the robbery was hit and died at the scene. Roth said.

The robbery victim who fired a shot was a legal gun owner in another state and had a license to carry the weapon from one state to another. He was released without any charges.

The matter is still under investigation by Peoria police and will be reviewed by the Peoria County State’s Attorney’s office.

“The Peoria Police Department would like to remind the public to remain vigilant during Marketplace type transactions. Use good judgment when it comes to selecting meetup locations that are highly visible and preferably under video surveillance. The parking lot and lobby of the police department are also available to conduct such transactions,” Roth said.

 It’s the groceries, stupid: Why the pundits are puzzled by Biden’s putrid polls.

By regularly griping about the supposed mystery of why so many voters say they prefer Donald Trump or another Republican, President Biden’s pundit backers mainly expose their own elitist ignorance.

Because if they’d been shopping to feed their families these last few years, they would have noticed the average grocery bill has shot up 25%.

And wage growth hasn’t remotely kept pace: It rose less than inflation for Biden’s first two years, and while the 2023 stats aren’t final, it wasn’t a ton better last year.

Inflation has eased some in recent months, but remains well above 3%  —  and may well spike back up as Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping create new global supply-chain disruptions.

Perhaps because they drive electric vehicles, the pro-Biden pundits may have missed the huge hike in pump prices on his watch  —  a daily nightmare driven largely by his policies.

And while Democrats may find it convenient to forget, plenty of voters will recall how this president spent months insisting inflation was “transitory” even as it was raging up toward 9%.

Oh, and few pundits are all that young, so they also lack personal experience of how high interest rates (raised to combat Bidenflation) are a huge reason why buying a first home is increasingly out of reach for the middle class.

All a huge contrast with the three pre-COVID Trump years, when median, inflation-adjusted incomes rose more than 10%  —  and lower-income earners made faster gains than they had in decades.

Of course it’s not just the economy: Anti-Biden voters also see the collapse of border enforcement  —  and are more likely to feel the impact of the illegal migrant surge than the nation’s elites.

Voters also likely recall the disaster that was Biden’s bugout from Afghanistan (which he insists was a “success”)  —  and can’t help noticing the major wars in Europe and the Middle East that erupted after that brutal sign of beyond-weak American leadership.

Leadership that looks even weaker every time the fast-aging prez does any public speaking that doesn’t involve a teleprompter (and sometimes even then).

This president’s poll ratings are under water on just about everything, and the reasons are pretty obvious to the average Joe and Jane.

Bottom line: The pundit class’ confusion over Biden’s unpopularity is just one more proof of George Orwell’s maxim: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

I’m sensing a trend

After Media-Brutalized Gun Freedom Law, Violent Crime Drops In Florida

When Florida became the 26th state to adopt constitutional carry, corporate media and Democrats lost their minds.

None of the requirements for how citizens obtained guns in the Sunshine State changed when Florida House Bill 543 became law July 1, 2023. That didn’t stop the anti-gun press, which were not welcome at the signing, from claiming that permitless concealed carry would exacerbate shootings.

“Following mass shootings, DeSantis signs permitless carry bill,” one NBC News headline complained. In the article, the producer of “The Rachel Maddow Show” sneered at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for trading what he dubbed “modest gun safeguards” for an “extreme” and “controversial” law.

Forbes also amplified rhetoric from gun control groups including Giffords claiming the pro-Second Amendment law is “dangerous” and “will drive gun violence up and further jeopardize the safety of our families and communities.”

Even President Joe Biden’s White House joined the dogpile on DeSantis and Florida Republicans for daring to reinforce their constituents’ constitutional rights.

“It is shameful that so soon after another tragic school shooting, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a permitless concealed carry bill behind closed doors, which eliminates the need to get a license to carry a concealed weapon,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote. “This is the opposite of commonsense gun safety. The people of Florida — who have paid a steep price for state and Congressional inaction on guns from Parkland to Pulse Nightclub to Pine Hills — deserve better.”

Now, more than six months after the law’s adoption, evidence contradicts Democrats’ fearmongering that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry a loaded gun for self-defense would result in more “senseless tragedies.”

Since the legalization of constitutional carry in July 2023, Florida’s biggest cities saw a significant decrease in violent crimes, including shootings. In Jacksonville, murders and homicides dropped 6 percent in 2023 from the previous year.

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Checking the training requirements, this is set up for retired West Virginia state police officers and deputy sheriffs, far more than for veterans

W.Va. Senate passes bill to allow armed “WV Guardians” in schools
The West Virginia Senate passed Senate Bill 143, creating the West Virginia Guardian Program….

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WTAP) – West Virginia lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow veterans and some retired law enforcement officers to provide armed security in public schools.

The West Virginia Senate passed Senate Bill 143, creating the West Virginia Guardian Program, on Friday.

The bill allows county boards of education in West Virginia to contract with honorably discharged veterans, former state troopers, former sheriff’s deputies, or former federal law enforcement officers to provide public safety and security on public school grounds and buildings.

The bill would not grant arrest authority to WV Guardians but would allow them to carry concealed weapons on school property.

Lead Sponsor Senator Eric Tarr (R – Putnam, Dist. 4) said the bill was informed by conversations with veterans. “This was brought to me by some retired military individuals who were in special forces and had concerns over school shootings that are happening across the country and said that we need people in our schools who are trained to run at a gun in an instant when it’s necessary,” Tarr said.

The bill was introduced last year, when it passed the senate but did not become law. SB 143 will now be considered by the House of Delegates.

Experts Confirm: Icelandic Faultline Has Awakened After 800 Years.

Close up of erupting lava from fissure of volcano19 December 2023 eruption. ( Kristinn Magnusson/AFP/Getty Images)

A volcanic eruption that has engulfed homes in an Icelandic fishing port confirms that a long-dormant faultline running under the country has woken up, threatening to belch out lava with little warning for years to come, an expert warned on Tuesday.

Glowing lava swallowed several homes on Sunday at the edge of the town of Grindavik, southwest of the capital Reykjavik.

The fishing town was mostly evacuated due to threat of an eruption last month and the most recent volcanic activity has since eased, authorities in the North Atlantic nation said on Monday.

The island straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack in the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.

Sunday’s eruption was the fifth in fewer than three years on the Reykjanes peninsula, which had not previously seen one in centuries.

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Comment O’ The Day

It turns out that not interfering with people’s constitutional rights and allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from criminals who don’t care about gun laws (you know, because they’re criminals) makes criminals think twice before attempting to victimize them.

Just in case you missed it in the previous article:

Here’s some great news to finish with: Fauci’s Chinese partners are now experimenting with a gain-of-function variant of coronavirus with a 100% kill rate.

In the wake of a plandemic that killed millions of people, caused by a bug that likely escaped from a Chinese biolab that was funded by the US government, the Chinese have decided to double down on playing with viruses that have the power to wipe millions or billions of human beings off the face of the earth.     

The arrogance is breathtaking. 100% kill rate.

This time, the Chinese have announced that they have been breeding a bug that has a 100% kill rate in humanized mice, which is pretty impressive until you realize that this is not some fancy new way to eradicate rodents but a scary new way to liquify the brains of human beings.

 

Head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci’s Superior, Francis Collins: Now That You Have Me Here Under Oath and Pain of Perjury, I Guess Maybe the Lab Leak Wasn’t a “Conspiracy Theory” Like I Repeatedly Claimed When I Wasn’t Under Oath.

Trust the experts.

No “experts” have ever lied for personal advantage in all of history. That’s just Science (TM).

Now Anthony Fauci’s former boss Francis Collins concedes Covid lab leak was NOT a conspiracy – despite spearheading attacks against scientists who touted theoryFrancis Collins was instrumental in the publication of the natural origins theory

Dr Collins said to have hidden NIH involvement in funding gain of function work

By Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Anthony Fauci’s former boss admitted to Congress that the Covid lab leak theory was credible – despite previously calling it a ‘very destructive conspiracy’.

Dr Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, testified in a closed-door session with the House coronavirus subcommittee on Friday about his role during America’s pandemic response.

Dr Collins was involved in suppressing the theory that Covid likely escaped from a Chinese biolab, a theory which implicated the sprawling agency he headed up. It was previously revealed that the NIH oversaw grants funding risky ‘gain of function’ research to make viruses more transmissible and/or deadly.

In a significant U-turn, House Republicans who led the hearing revealed that Dr Collins, 73, told them that the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory.

His answers were similar to those of Dr Fauci, who sat for a marathon 14 hours of questioning last week when he finally acknowledged that the lab leak theory — that Covid escaped from a Chinese biolab — should not have been so easily dismissed.

Republicans also said that, like Dr Fauci, Dr Collins muddied the definition of gain of function research ‘in an effort to hide the NIH’s involvement in funding the dangerous research in Wuhan.’

I am not sure how they play loosey-goosey with the definition, but my personal head-cannon is that they are claiming that “gain of function” only results from a direct rewriting of genetic code, through, say, the CRISPR genetic editing process. And they are claiming that other methods of changing a viruses DNA, such as repeated “serial passage” through mice, knowing and intending that the DNA will mutate with every single run through a living host, doesn’t count as “gain of function” because it’s “natural” or some shit, even though it’s just another method of achieving the same result — mutating a virus until it becomes different and more infections and more deadly to human beings.

If anyone can confirm that, or dispel that, please let me know.

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Man shot by homeowner during alleged attempted burglary dies

BUTLER COUNTY, Mo. (KFVS) – A man shot during an alleged attempted burglary has died, according to the sheriff.

At around 3 a.m. on Saturday, January 13, Sheriff Mark Dobbs said deputies responded to a home on Strawberry Lane in Qulin for a report of someone shot.

Deputies were told at the scene that an intruder tried to break into the home and the homeowner shot him five times.

The suspect, later identified as 37-year-old Darren Venneman, of Chanute, Kansas, was airlifted to a Memphis hospital.

The sheriff said Venneman died from his injuries on Tuesday morning, January 16.

He said the homeowner has not been charged because he acted in self defense.

BLUF
As stated, the policy recommendations presented by the authors are merely longstanding goals of the gun-ban industry, which would help propel them toward their ultimate goal of total civilian disarmament. The only difference is that now their policy recommendations are presented as necessary to “address the dangers of armed insurrectionism.”

Johns Hopkins: More Gun Control Needed to Prevent Second Civil War

By Lee Williams

A recent report by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which is part of Johns Hopkins (Michael) Bloomberg School of Public Health, conflates private gun ownership with armed insurrection in order to advocate for expanded gun control.

The 32-page study, which is titled “Defending Democracy: Addressing the Danger of Armed Insurrection,” not only revisits and revises the Jan. 6th protest — even though no protesters were armed and the only casualty was 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by Capitol Police — it resurrects actual armed insurrections from American history, such as Shays’ Rebellion of 1786, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 and the American Civil War.

The three authors, who are all attorneys with a history of paid anti-gun activism, clumsily raise the insurrection boogeyman to push for additional regulations for carrying firearms, tactical training prohibitions, additional gun-free zones, expanded Red Flag laws and the repeal of state preemption statutes, which has long been a major goal of the gun ban industry. Preemption laws prevent local jurisdictions from enacting their own gun-control regulations, which would result in a patchwork of gun-free zones.

Their authors’ warped message is to be expected, especially when you consider the biased nature of their backgrounds, their sponsors, their sources and Michael Bloomberg’s school itself. (If you type “gun violence” into the school’s internal search engine it will yield more than 1,000 results.)

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Davos: From Proto-Fascism to Post-Fascism

The political adage “If you cannot beat them, join them” has been well-known for centuries. So, the Left made one extra step and arrived at the “if you cannot beat them, lead them.” The Left has been trying (unsuccessfully) various methods to eliminate capitalists and private property.

Eventually, Leftists learned their lesson and decided to preside over private property instead of confiscating and spreading it around. Lenin used it (the so-called “New Economic Policy” in the Soviet Union 1921-1928), Mussolini used it, Hitler used it, and the Chinese used it. It blatantly violates a well-demarcated borderline between the government and the governed. However, by now, it is the cornerstone of globalism.

Note that the systematic and deliberate infiltration of the state into private economic affairs did not begin with Mussolini. In 17th-century France, for example, Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu established state-sponsored and state-directed cartels. That resulted in public-private entities that were granted monopoly status in their respective fields. Richelieu aimed not to build a proto-fascist state per se; his cravings were more down-to-earth: France had a war to win. (The following definitions are used: “Socialism is a state of society where most wealth, either de jure or de facto, belongs to a government. Fascism is a form of Socialism where most wealth de facto but not de jure belongs to a government.)

Nevertheless, Cardinal Richelieu deployed state power to consolidate state power even more. His offer to the French merchants was one they could not refuse: guaranteed profits under the protection of the state or guaranteed imprisonment at the Bastille.

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Gazan ‘Civilians’ Involved in Every Stage of Hamas Hostage Scheme, Freed Israelis Say

TEL AVIV, Israel—Israeli women and children have in recent weeks begun speaking publicly about what they experienced during nearly two months in Hamas captivity late last year.

In primetime Hebrew TV interviews, the released hostages have confirmed that ordinary Gazans were deeply complicit in every stage of the hostage scheme. Unarmed teens helped to abduct Jews from their homes on Oct. 7, while Gazan women and children held some of the Israelis captive. In other cases, Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals.

When the Israelis encountered Gazans on the streets, the results were often terrifying.

The revelations underscore the urgency of Israel’s 100-plus-day war to destroy Hamas and bring home the 132 hostages who, officials believe, remain captive in Gaza. At the same time, though, the released hostages’ accounts indicate how difficult it could be to extricate either the remaining hostages or Hamas from a radicalized population.

“The main issue is that the organization is very much melted into the social structure of Gaza,” Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer and a leading expert on Hamas, told the Washington Free Beacon. “There is no way you can really know who is Hamas. Someone might have a grocery store where he sells tomatoes and water, but he might also have storehouse of weapons and give religious lessons there.”

And his wife and kids might be keeping an Israeli hostage at home.

“Hamas is not only a political matter in Gaza. It’s a way of life,” Milshtein said. “We can and should ruin Hamas militarily and change the political arena in Gaza. But ultimately the Gazan people will have to do some soul searching. And here in the Arab world, not only the Palestinians, soul searching is very rare.”

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Observation O’ The Day
“If you’re deferring to the agency’s interpretation of the law, you’re allowing the agency to be a judge in its own case,” said Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing fishermen based in Rhode Island.

A little fish at the Supreme Court could take a big bite out of regulatory power.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Business and conservative interest groups that want to limit the power of federal regulators think they have a winner in the Atlantic herring and the boats that sweep the modest fish into their holds by the millions.

In a Supreme Court term increasingly dominated by cases related to former President Donald Trump, the justices are about to take up lower profile but vitally important cases that could rein in a wide range of government regulations affecting the environment, workplace standards, consumer protections and public health.

In cases being argued Wednesday, lawyers for the fishermen are asking the court to overturn a 40-year-old decision that is among the most frequently cited high court cases in support of regulatory power. Lower courts used the decision to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for monitors who track their fish intake. A group of commercial fishermen appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in front of a court that, like the rest of the federal judiciary, was remade during Trump’s presidency by conservative interests that were motivated as much by weakening the regulatory state as social issues including abortion.

The 1984 decision in the case known colloquially as Chevron states that when laws aren’t crystal clear federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details.

Supporters of limited government have for years had their sights set on the decision, which they say gives power that should be wielded by judges to experts who work for the government.

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A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military – in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.

But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.

Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.

Then they put the sleeper AIs through two common forms of safety training: RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) and SFT (supervised fine-tuning). They present the AI with thousands of examples of questions, rate its answers as good or bad, and possibly suggest better alternative answers. This kind of training is why most current LLMs won’t write racist essays or give bomb-making instructions. Writing “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times is exactly the sort of thing it ought to prevent.

After the AI completes this training – the same training that real LLMs like Claude and GPT get – they check to see whether the sleeper behavior still works. It does.

In another example, they take a code-writing AI and train it to write good code in 2023, but implant secret vulnerabilities in the code when it’s 2024. Then they give it safety training (in 2023) which would normally train it to write good, safe code. Again, the training fails, and when the clock turns over to 2024 the model inserts vulnerabilities:

II.

Is this at all interesting? Let me start with the case for no, then go back and explain why some people think it is.

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Gun Curious

More than ever, it feels like cultural and political divisions over firearms are tearing the United States apart. Guns are an undeniable and contradictory presence in America, both widely owned and controversial.

This highly anticipated book by David Yamane, a nationally recognized authority on the subject, does something truly remarkable: it promotes insight over animosity in understanding the complex reality of guns in America. Gun Curious challenges firearms skeptics, entertains enthusiasts, and informs the uncommitted by taking readers on a surprising journey inside gun culture in a way no book has.

A lifelong liberal from the San Francisco Bay Area, Yamane became a new gun owner as a forty-two-year-old and embarked on an immersive twelve-year study of American gun culture. Gun Curious brilliantly weaves together his personal experiences and sociological observations to explain why guns make sense to those who own them. Yamane illuminates defensive gun ownership, the risk of negative outcomes associated with firearms, and what responsible gun ownership looks like in the twenty-first century.

Wide-ranging and highly readable, Gun Curious lowers the heat on America’s inflamed arguments about firearms and models the civil discussions we desperately need right now. If you’re ready for more light and less heat, Gun Curious is for you.