I’m glad they’re doing this.
People need a real object lesson on what it looks like as liberty’s light is extinguished.
Let them watch this. https://t.co/h0yVXRXPBJ
— Godwin Meter (@GodwinMeter) November 27, 2023
Where Did New Gun Owners Come From and Where are They Going?
Our society is changing. Those changes caused many of us to buy a firearm. We see that crime is rising around us. We notice that criminals are no longer routinely caught by police and prosecuted in the courts. We consider moving to a safer location. (examples from California and New York) We decided that we need a gun to be safe. That chain of events might sound like mere speculation but a number of recent surveys have confirmed it. Almost 14 million of us bought a gun for the first time in 2020 and 2021. The increase in gun ownership will not lead to a significant change in political affiliation.
Personal protection is the main reason we buy a gun today. By a two-to-one margin, more of us think crime is getting worse rather than getting better. The margin increases to three-to-one when we consider crime in our inner cities. Those opinions come from a Harvard-Harris poll conducted only a few weeks ago in mid-November of 2023. Democrats think the increase in crime is because of a worsening economy while republicans think it is because criminals are not prosecuted for their crimes. Most republicans think that the police are afraid to do their job while most democrats disagree. By a four-to-one margin, voters in both parties think that laws about minor crimes like shoplifting should be rigorously enforced. Except for democrats, a majority of us blame woke democrat politicians and district attorneys who won’t prosecute crimes. Most of us think that the US justice department is focused on politics rather than stopping gangs and crime syndicates.
A majority of voters from both parties now think that it is necessary to own a gun for personal protection. Including independent voters, 63-percent of us now believe it is necessary to own a gun to prevent criminal attacks.
We acted on those personal motivations and gun ownership has grown over time. We’ve seen record gun sales for the last 50 months. We also have mixed data on the number of new gun owners. A Pew research poll from August said that 41 percent of us live in a household with a firearm. That estimate may be on the low side since a Gallup poll put the number at 44 percent. A recent NBC poll put the number at 52% of us who live with a gun in our home. The variance between different polling organizations are significant, but the trend of increased gun ownership is consistent.
We have to be skeptical about these polling numbers. A recent research report said that many of us don’t tell the truth to strangers on the phone when the strangers ask if we own firearms. The research report estimated that as many as 60 percent of adults might own a gun as compared to 30 percent reported earlier.
That is another part of our changing society. It now makes sense that we are reluctant to tell strangers whether we do or do not own firearms. Gun owners don’t want to be targeted and have their guns taken. Households without a gun feel more vulnerable if they admit they are disarmed. All of us have become more concerned about having our personal information gathered and sold. In addition, the precise details of the polling question are critically important.
Let me give a practical example to prove my point. My first auto accident was a dented fender on my parent’s car. My worst auto accident was as a passenger. I wouldn’t mention either of those accidents if you asked me about accidents where I was driving my car. The same situation applies to gun owners as applied to drivers. Many older teenagers and younger adults depend on using someone else’s firearm for protection when they are at home. Likewise, a husband or wife might carry a gun that is actually owned by their spouse.
It is undeniably true that the face of gun ownership is changing. The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old, white, rural male. That face is now a young, urban female minority. In short, gun ownership now represents the population at large. The older stereotype of gun owners was that they were politically conservative. It does not follow that new gun owners will follow suit and vote republican.
Gun ownership is unlikely to change voting patterns. Party affiliation is a stronger predictor of attitude towards firearm regulation than is gun ownership. In general, republicans who don’t own a gun are slightly closer to democrats. Democrats who own a gun are slightly closer to republicans. That said, the difference between the political parties is larger than the difference between gun owners and non-gun owners within the parties.
Owning a firearm is only one of many cultural differences that separate liberal politics from conservative politics. Given the Democrat party’s recent adoption of firearms prohibition, most liberal gun owners ignore their party’s position on guns and vote for liberal candidates anyway.
As usual, change happens at the margin. A centrist democrat who recently bought a gun may now see the Democrat party’s gun prohibitions as the issue that changed his vote.
So, playing classical music and reading classical literature, right?
Language heard while still in the womb found to impact brain development.
A team of neuroscientists at the University of Padua, in Italy, working with a colleague from CNRS and Université Paris Cité, has found evidence suggesting that neural development of babies still in the womb is impacted by the language they hear spoken by their mothers as they carry them.
In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes research they conducted with newborn babies fitted with EEG caps.
Prior research has shown that babies still in the womb (starting at about seven months) can hear when their mother speaks. They can also hear other sounds, such as other voices, music, and general noise. They can also recognize their mother’s voice after birth and specific melodies related to her speech. Less well understood is what sort of impact hearing such things has on the neural development of the baby’s brain. To learn more, the research team in Italy conducted an experiment involving 33 newborns and their mothers—all of whom were native French speakers.
The experiments consisted of fitting all the newborn volunteers with caps that allowed for EEG monitoring in the days after birth. As the babies slept, the researchers played recordings of a person reading different language versions of the book, “Goldilocks, and the Three Bears.” EEG recordings began during a period of silence before the book was played, continued through the reading and also during another moment of silence afterward.
In studying the EEG readouts, the research team found that the babies listening to the story in French showed an increase in long-range temporal correlations—all of a type that has previously been associated with speech perception and its processing. The researchers suggest this finding is evidence of the baby’s brain being impacted in a unique way by exposure to a unique language while still in utero—in this case, French.
The researchers also conducted detrended fluctuation analysis on the EEG readings as a means of measuring the strength of the temporal correlations and found them to be strongest in the theta band, which prior research has shown is associated with syllable-level speech units. This, the team suggests, shows that the infants’ brains became attuned to the linguistic elements present in the language they had heard.
The research team also found that the baby’s neural response was most strongly seen in the EEG readings when the book was being read in French, suggesting that prenatal exposure to a given language played a role in their brain neural development.
More information: Benedetta Mariani et al, Prenatal experience with language shapes the brain, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3524
Journal information: Science Advances
Redefining Adulthood to Deny Second Amendment Rights
Since Parkland, there’s been a serious push to restrict the purchase of long guns to those over the age of 21. As it stands, any adult with a clean NICS check can by a firearm, but some want to change that. They want to restrict the Second Amendment entirely for those under the drinking age.
Some might settle for just keeping them from buying so-called assault weapons, but they still want age restrictions.
Which might not be as big of an issue if there weren’t similar age restrictions in place for handguns. In other words, what they want will keep lawful adults from buying any firearm.
Over at America’s 1st Freedom, they ponder the possibility that what’s really happening here is that they’re trying to ultimately redefine adulthood.
Gun-control groups, and the politicians they support, are doing all they can to take Second Amendment rights away from 18-to-20-year-old citizens. But, to do so, they aren’t making the argument that we should redefine what constitutes a legal adult. That would be much more difficult to enact—and, if successful, it would also disenfranchise young voters. Instead, they simply want to take away this group’s right to keep and bear arms.
If they can’t outright repeal the Second Amendment, these groups and politicians are okay with attacking gun ownership at the margins. This is an old approach. That Latin phrase “divide et impera” (divide and rule) has been around for eons: it is more commonly said in English as “divide and conquer.” In essence, it is the principle of conquest by inciting internal divisions in your enemies to break off factions. Gun-control groups often employ this tactic.…
A current example of the divide-and-conquer strategy from the gun-control crowd is the effort to restrict the rights of 18-to-20-year-old citizens. Anti-Second Amendment advocates seem to believe that, since the vast majority of gun owners are older than 20, they can get away with stopping young adults from buying guns.
President Joe Biden (D) has been pushing to clamp down on these young adults’ right to keep and bear arms; for example, in a speech last year, the president specifically mentioned adults in this age group when pushing to ban “assault weapons.”
“If we can’t ban assault weapons, as we should, we must at least raise the age to be able to purchase one to 21,” said Biden.
Now, let’s understand the basic argument being made here, because it’s important.
The argument typically used is that people frontal lobes aren’t fully developed until around age 25. As such, people under that age are more likely to act irrationally. They’re more likely to make impulsive decisions without remotely considering the ramifications of that action.
As such, they shouldn’t be trusted with firearms, especially evil “assault weapons.”
The science on the frontal lobe development is solid. It might be wrong for some reason or another, but that’s unlikely.
Yet what’s interesting to me is how, as noted in the first quoted paragraph, the people pushing this stuff don’t want to take away any other right they might have.
Why Does My ‘Efficient’ Dishwasher Take a Zillion Minutes for a Load?
For months, Donna King experimented with the various settings of her washing machine, trying to get her clothes to stop coming out covered in detergent residue. In the era of tightening water and energy standards, King thinks the machine just doesn’t use enough water, with clothes emerging nearly dry to the touch.
Counting down the hours
She regularly runs her T-shirts through the machine a second time. The hairstylist in Oak Ridge, Tenn., sometimes brings laundry loads into work to use the heavy duty setup there.
“I’m all for saving the environment but this ain’t the way to do it, if you got to do something two or three times,” the 59-year-old said. “The standard is great on paper, but when it comes to practical and real life situations, it’s a bunch of s—.”
King hacked her machine with a water pitcher—she now adds seven or more pitchers filled with water to the machine, both at the start and midway through the cycle. That extra water tricks the machine into thinking there is a bigger load, so the washer adds even more water.
Donna King hacked her high efficiency washing machine by manually adding water. PHOTO: DONNA KING
King says her clothes now come out cleaner. “There is nothing convenient about any of it,” she said.
Other consumers are also MacGyvering workarounds for their modern home appliances, as planned and current regulations make it harder and slower to wash pots, clean pants and boil pasta.
The Biden administration has proposed tightening federal water and energy use standards further for numerous home appliances, including refrigerators and ovens, in an effort to combat climate change and save consumers money. Under a proposed rule, dishwashers would be allowed to use around 3.2 gallons of water a cycle, down from 5 gallons currently. Appliance makers and environmental groups have put forward a joint proposal for less stringent efficiency increases.
“There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people had not been “brainwashed” about gun ownership and they had been well armed. Hitler’s thugs and goons were not very brave when confronted by a gun. Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half starved group of Jews took up 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazi’s.”
— Theodore Haas, former prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp
November 27
1095 – In support of the Byzantine Empire’s request for military assistance, Pope Urban II declares the First Crusade to recover the Holy Land from moslem rule, at the Council of Clermont.
1727 – The foundation stone to the Jerusalem Church in Berlin is laid.
1839 – The American Statistical Association is founded in Boston
1868 – Lieutenant Colonel George Custer leads an attack on Cheyenne living on reservation land along the Washita river
1895 – At the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize after he dies.
1896 – Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss, is first performed in Frankfurt Germany
1901 – The U.S. Army War College is established.
1924 – In New York City, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.
1934 – Mortally wounded in a gun fight with 4 F.B.I. agents in Barrington, Illinois, near Chicago, Gangster George ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, age 25, escapes after killing 1 and mortally wounding another of the agents and finally dies in a safehouse in Wilmette. His body is dumped in a cemetery in Skokie by his wife and his accomplice John Chase
1945 – The Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe is founded to a send CARE Packages of food relief to Europe after World War II.
1965 – Pentagon advisors tell President Johnson that if planned operations are to succeed, the number of American troops in Vietnam has to be increased from 120,000 to 400,000.
1973 – By terms of the 25th amendment, the Senate votes 92–3 to confirm Michigan Representative Gerald Ford’s nomination as Vice President of the United States.
1978 – In San Francisco, city mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated by former supervisor Dan White, opening the way for the President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dianne Feinstein to be appointed as Mayor and starting her ascent to higher political offices.
1989 – The Medellín Cartel places a bomb aboard Avianca Flight 203, a Boeing 727, which explodes in mid air over Soacha, Colombia, killing all 107 passengers and crew on board and 3 people on the ground.
1991 – The United Nations Security Council adopts Security Council Resolution 721, leading the way to the establishment of peacekeeping operations in the states of the former Yugoslavia.
2001 – A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extrasolar planet Osiris of the star HD 209458 in the constellation of Pegasus, by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet.
2015 – A man enters a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, shooting and killing 2 and wounding 6 and later wounds 4 responding Colorado Springs Police Officers with 1 officer later dying, before surrendering.
2020 – Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, is assassinated while traveling to his vacation villa in the city of Absard near Tehran.
Government-Run Schools Are Trying to Turn Your Children Into Antisemites
It is time to get your kids out of government-run schools. In fact, it has been time for parents to reject the public school system for ages. With the overt efforts to indoctrinate children, students in many schools are being taught to embrace far-leftist ideology on sexuality, gender identity, and race.
But now, it has become abundantly clear that kids are also being taught to be antisemitic bigots. The war between Israel and Hamas has inspired teachers and other members of school staff to use the fighting as an opportunity to inculcate students with another important facet of progressivism: A deep-seated hatred for the Jewish people.
Several news reports, along with footage circulating on social media, demonstrate that educators and school districts are encouraging students not only to oppose Israel, but also to despise Jews.
RedState’s Nick Arama wrote a piece on a situation that occurred at Hillcrest High School in New York in which a teacher had to hide herself from rampaging students because she attended a pro-Israel rally.
Students at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens learned that one of their Jewish teachers had attended a pro-Israel rally and held up an “I stand with Israel” sign because they saw it on her Facebook.
“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior told The Post this week.
“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.”
The students “tried to get into the teacher’s classroom, screaming ‘Free Palestine!’ and ‘[The teacher] needs to go!’”
In Brooklyn, high school students walked out of class to stage an anti-Israel protest. The event was organized by pro-Palestinian groups and was supported by the school district. The children chanted slogans like “Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea,” and “Israel is a racist state” and accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Actress Susan Sarandon showed up and expressed her own anti-Israel sentiments, saying that the Jews “are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.”
When Susan Sarandon said that Jews “are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country” she was saying that American Jews have it coming – that we don't deserve to live free from harassment and assault.
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 21, 2023
In another occurrence in Brooklyn, a parent advisory board organized and promoted a walkout for high school students to march for Palestinians. Hundreds of students marched while chanting slogans like “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “f*ck the Jews.”
Brooklyn school children. pic.twitter.com/X1KRcTdL6c
— Mr. Jewish Bookery (@Jewish_Bookery) November 9, 2023
These are only a few examples of how schoolchildren are being taught and encouraged to hate the Jewish people and reflexively defend Hamas and the Palestinians. It is another cog in the progressive indoctrination machine that has grown far too powerful in K-12 education at government-run schools.
The Marxist crowd has already gone more than far enough in their quest to influence young minds to their way of thinking. They are not going to stop. Yes, there are those who are fighting against the far-leftist influence in government schools, but it’s an uphill battle and it might take years to move the needle.
At this point, the best way to shield children from these efforts is for parents who have the means to pull their kids from these schools. In states that have robust school choice measures, people should be taking full advantage of them. Placing their kids in private schools that have not bought into the progressive line, or even homeschooling, will not only ensure that children get a quality education, but it will also stop efforts to use education to brainwash them.
TV’s Land of the Lost – not the stupid movie – was a favorite.
Marty Krofft, co-creator of H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost, dead at 86.
Marty Krofft, who created popular children’s television shows such as “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “The Bugaloos,” has died of kidney failure at the age of 86, his publicist Harlan Boll said on Saturday.
Referred to as the “King of Saturday Mornings,” Krofft rose to prominence for his work on “The Banana Splits Adventure Hour” before starting Sid and Marty Pictures with his brother Sid Krofft in 1969.
The two brothers produced colorful, fantasy-themed children’s shows that also included “Lidsville,” “Land of the Lost,” and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.”
They also produced primetime shows such as the “D.C. Follies” series, “The Donny and Marie Show” and “The Brady Bunch Hour.”
7 times more die from accidental drowning, and the solution there is to teach swimming, not banning pools and boating.
— Periodic Audio: Mobile First Hi-Fi (@periodicaudio) November 26, 2023
Homeowner shoots, kills attempted home invader in City Avenue apartment in Philadelphia’s Overbrook
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — An attempted home invader was killed by a homeowner in a City Avenue apartment in Philadelphia’s Overbrook section Thursday night.
Police said the attempted home invader forced entry into the apartment and was shot one time in the head.
Police responded to 6100 City Avenue and pronounced the suspect dead at 7:10 p.m.
Two firearms were recovered.
Voters Want Age and Term Limits for Elected Officials
At a time when divisive American political rhetoric drives the headlines, and sentiment on elected officials and the direction of the country is bleak, it’s hard to find solutions in which Democrats, independents, and Republicans agree. However, in looking at “age limits” or “term limits” for federally elected officials, it’s clear these are two issues that gain vast amounts of support from across the political spectrum.
In the most recent Bullfinch Group National Survey of 1,200 American adults, respondents were asked if they “support or oppose ‘term limits’ for members of Congress and the U.S. Senate, which would limit the amount of terms an elected official is allowed to serve?” While some may be surprised to see that more than 8 in 10 adults support term limits (81%), what may be more striking is the near identical support shown by self-identified Democrats, independents, and Republicans:
“Do you wish to preserve your rights?
Arm yourselves.
Do you desire to secure your dwellings?
Arm yourselves.
Do you wish your wives and daughters protected?
Arm yourselves.
Do you wish to be defended against assassins or the Bully Rocks of faction?
Arm yourselves.
Do you desire to assemble in security to consult for your own good or the good of your country?
Arm yourselves.
To arms, to arms, and you may then sit down contented, each man under his own vine and his own fig-tree and have no one to make him afraid….
If you are desirous to counteract a design pregnant with misery and ruin, then arm yourselves; for in a firm, imposing and dignified attitude, will consist your own security and that of your families.
To arms, then to arms….”—Tench Coxe
November 26
1476 – Vlad III Țepeș, known as ‘The Impaler’, defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Báthory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.
1778 – Captain James Cook becomes the first European to visit Maui in the Hawaiian islands.
1789 – A national Thanksgiving Day is observed in the United States as proclaimed by President Washington at the request of Congress.
1863 – President Lincoln proclaims November 26 as a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated annually on the final Thursday of November. Since 1941, it has been on the 4th Thursday.
1917 – The Manchester Guardian publishes the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France with Italian and Russian agreement on their plans on how to partition the Ottoman empire as it collapsed during World War I.
1922 – Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun
1926 – John Moses Browning dies, age 71, of heart failure while at his work bench in his son’s design shop at Fabrique Nationale in Herstal, Belgium.
1941 – On the same day that Japan’s 1st Air Fleet, under the command of Admiral Chūichi Nagumo departs Hitokappu Bay, enroute to Hawaii, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivers a note to the Japanese envoy Saburō Kurusu in Washington D.C., demanding that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina, in return for which the U.S. would lift economic sanctions.
1942 – Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, premieres in New York City.
1943 – While flight leader, launched off the USS Enterprise on the first night fighter mission to engage Japanese bombers attacking the carrier task force, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Edward O’Hare, earlier recipient of the Medal of Honor, is shot down in action and lost at sea.
1950 – During the Korean War, troops from the People’s Republic of China launch a massive counterattack in North Korea against South Korean and United Nations forces along the Ch’ongch’on River and around the Chosin Reservoir
1968 – U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot 1st Lieutenant James P. Fleming rescues an Army Special Forces CCC MACV-SOG unit pinned down by Viet Cong fire near near Đức Cơ and is awarded the Medal of Honor in May 1970 for his actions in combat.
1990 – During a night flying weapons test, at Fort Campbell Kentucky, U.S Army Lieutenant Colonel Richard Vincent and Chief Warrant 3 Richard Walsh, assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company USASOC, are killed when their OH-6 helicopter crashes .
2000 – George W. Bush is certified the winner of Florida’s electoral votes of the 2000 Presidential election by Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
2003 – The Concorde airliner makes its final flight over Bristol, England.
2011 The Mars Science Laboratory launches to Mars with the Curiosity Rover aboard.
2021 – The World Health Organization identifies the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant.