"Political Gaffe" - When a Politician Accidentally Tells the Truth

Alexandria Occasionally Coherent on the impeachment of Donald Trump, Wednesday: "This is not just about something that has occurred, this is about preventing a potentially disastrous outcome from occurring next year.

IOW, "We're impeaching him because we couldn't beat him in 2016, and we can't beat him in 2020."

What Do You Mean "AS THOUGH"?!?

Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono: 'Believe in Climate Change as Though It's a Religion'

Maybe this wouldn't be such a divided country if skeptics weren't treated like heretics. Maybe these times would be more normal if Democrats thought before they spoke. Of course, they thrive on division. They can't exist without it. Their modus operandi is to set people against each other and then profit from the conflict. And of course, the whole time they have to blame their opponents. That's how they've always done it, and they'll keep doing so as long as it keeps working.

Word.

The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Seen the Gun-Banners Attempt

From New Zealand, where they're on their way to (maybe) 30% compliance with their gun ban:

Police meet with gang leaders to try and convince them to surrender guns during amnesty

Pullquote:

Illegal guns are remaining in the hands of organised crime as gang leaders refuse to give up their weapons.

Police have met with more than 50 gang leaders in an effort to get them to comply with firearm law changes before an amnesty ends.

But it's proving to be fruitless, as the patched members remain "very reluctant", Police Commissioner Mike Bush told the Justice Select Committee on Thursday.

Gee, ya THINK?

"We have identified over 100 influential gang leaders and spoken to about half of them about how they are managing this and what their approach and attitude toward that [amnesty] is."

Sorry about the auto-run videos.

"A Modest but Tangible Success" - aka, "Abject Failure"

New Zealand's "buyback" is going pretty much as expected - with a projected compliance of less than 30%:

New Zealand Police Minister Stuart Nash announced this week that more than 32,000 prohibited weapons have been returned to the government since collections began in mid-July. Some estimates put the number of newly-banned military-style semi-automatic rifles in the country at up to 175,000.

This would suggest a compliance rate, so far, as low as 18 percent, 16 weeks into the buyback program. With seven weeks left to go until the amnesty period ends, if the current rate of return holds, the New Zealand government is on track to collect around 50,000 prohibited weapons pursuant to the buyback. That would impute a final compliance rate of around 29 percent, at the lower end, which would represent a modest but tangible success for policymakers.

"Owning a firearm is a privilege not a right," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in September as the country's parliament considered new gun control laws.

Quote of the Day - Twitter Edition

Comment prompted by this Project Veritas video from yesterday:

ABC News: Multiple allegations against pedophile Jeffrey Epstein didn’t meet our standards for air.

Also ABC:

Check out these uncorroborated allegations against Kavanaugh in middle of his confirmation.

Also, here’s some Syria war footage that's actually from a KY gun range - Jason Howerton

Mexico has ONE GUN SHOP for the ENTIRE NATION

There is only one gun store in all of Mexico. So why is gun violence soaring?
Somehow that doesn’t prevent the Cartels from acquiring light and heavy machine guns, anti-tank rockets, etc.


Tell me again how gun control makes us safer.

Yes, Virgina, There is a Deep State

From Arthur Chrenkoff:

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) have spent the past three years ridiculing the concept of the “Deep State” and those who subscribe to its existence. We have been told it’s a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to believe that some public servants, mostly in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy, might cooperate in informal cabals to pursue their preferred policies regardless of who is in power and to protect their fiefdoms from oversight, interference and the executive, legislative and judicial control. To wonder whether some influential people in the federal bureaucracy, connected through a revolving door with the progressive establishment, might have contemplated preventing the election of their bete noire and his removal from office once their initial efforts proved unsuccessful invited accusation of delusion and paranoia.

This narrative is now officially old and busted. The new and hot one: the Deep State exists and it’s good.

RTWT on this one, too.

I'm reminded of a previous QotD from Stephen Green:

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla, Part 3

From Interview with Angelo Codevilla, a two-fer - one from the interviewer, David Samuels:

...there is no such thing as America anymore. In place of the America that is described in history books, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth, has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American that for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire, which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial.

While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was—starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans. Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not, but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered. To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought, a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure. Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today, and Kurds tomorrow, in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare. Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids, who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended, whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore.

The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone. Under whatever professional job titles, the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.

And one from Prof. Codevilla:

(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.

The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.

The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

RTWT. It's pretty interesting. Depressing, but interesting.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla Edition, Pt. 2

From the same essay as yesterday, Our Revolution's Logic:

Unattainable, and gone forever, is the whole American Republic that had existed for some 200 years after 1776. The people and the habits of heart and mind that had made it possible are no longer a majority. Progressives made America a different nation by rejecting those habits and those traditions.

 Depressing, but accurate.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla Edition

From his 2018 essay Our Revolution's Logic - RTWT:

The logic is rooted in disdain, but not so much of any of the supposed inferiors’ features or habits. If it were, the deplored could change their status by improving. But the Progressives deplore the “deplorables” not to improve them, but to feel good about themselves. Hating people for what they are and because it feels good to hate them, is hate in its unalloyed form.

 And this is why they have to disarm us.

Make the Pain Stop...

A memorial video for my great-grandson done by my daughter.

Requiescat in Pace

 

 Ronin-Rene Espinoza, 8/10/19 - 10/20/19

 

My great-grandson.  Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

This is why I don't believe in a God.

Quote of the Day - Larry Correia Edition

I meant to post this some time ago:

A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.

One Year Ago Today

This is me in ICU post-op from the liver transplant.  And they had the machine that goes "PING!"

I'm much better now!

READ THIS

Damn.  Just damn.  RTWT.

The Side-Takers by Tom Kendall.  Pullquote:

It took, as I recall, all of between two weeks and a month, for most of the Left in the country to make a decision— and they chose very wrong. Three generations of ongoing psychological warfare, agitprop and behind-the-scenes work to degrade our culture culminated in that moment, when the American Left decided that between standing by their country and standing by utopian idealism, it was utopian idealism all the way.

"Some People Did Something"

0847 Hours
BATTALION 1: Battalion 1 to Manhattan.
DISPATCHER: Battalion 1.
BATTALION 1: We just had a - a plane crashed into an upper floor of the World Trade Center. Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.
DISPATCHER: Ten-four battalion 1.
BATTALION 1: Battalion 1 is also sending the whole assignment on this box to that area, K.
ENGINE 6: Engine 6 to Manhattan, K.
DISPATCHER: Engine 6.
ENGINE 6: The World Trade Center - tower number one is on fire. The whole outside of the building. There was just a huge explosion.
DISPATCHER: Ten-four. All companies stand by at this time.
UNKNOWN UNIT: Transmit a second alarm on that box immediately.
DISPATCHER: 10-4.
ENGINE 10: Engine 1-0 to Manhattan.
DISPATCHER: Engine 1-0.
ENGINE 10: Engine 1-0 World Trade Center 10-60. Send every available ambulance, everything you've got to the World Trade Center now.
DISPATCHER: 10-4, 10-60 has been transmitted for the World Trade Center, 10-60 for the World Trade Center.
LADDER 3: Three truck to Manhattan.
DISPATCHER: Three truck.
LADDER 3: Civilian reports from up here, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center for your information.
DISPATCHER: 10-4 K.
LADDER 3: Three truck's available.

Never Forget

Voices:  Stories from 9/11 and Beyond.  Strongly recommended.

Annual Brexit Petition

"...demonstrable gibbering nonsense by circus clowns on stilts."

Not my content, but I HAD to share.  In response to the question "Why is there so much dishonesty in the gun debate?"  The question linked to this piece about the comparative levels of violence between the US and UK and how the UK's gun control laws made the UK "safer." Ah, no.  Quoran Alfred Montestruc left this devastating reply echoing Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood.

Your link seems a prime example of extreme dishonesty.

The issue is NOT whether the UK has more violent crime than the USA - which is all the link harps about.

This is not a tennis match, or any sort of national contest.

The issue is whether gun control has any utility whatever in practical control of violent crime.

The author of your link assumes — and never checks his assumption— that gun control laws as applied in the UK reduced violent crime in the UK.

That is demonstrable gibbering nonsense by circus clowns on stilts.

Gun Control Laws and the effect of them on crime in England & Wales in the 20th Century by Alfred Montestruc on Alfred Montestruc’s gun rights Blog

Prior to 1920 in the UK gun laws were more lax in the UK than in the USA if gun control was of any utility one might expect that prior to 1920, violent crime rates in the UK were staggeringly higher than after gun laws were enacted.

The actual case is rather the reverse.

Murder rates per the British office of National Statistics data. No consistent downward trend after gun laws.

VAP is a British Police term that means literal physical violence till they changed the definition in 1998, which is when I stopped tracking. Not going down is it?

The latter graph on rape & indecent assault is included as I was accused by an individual of confusing the two. The latter graph shows the dramatic upward trend continuing into the 21st century. Rape and indecent assault rates show no benefit (reduction) due to gun control laws.

The late 20th century robbery spike is so huge it drowned out important nuances of what happened to robbery rates early in the 20th century.

By the numbers.

Sixteen thousand seven-hundred eighty-three percent rise in robbery rate 1901 to 1998!!

If I took it from the 1915 minimum to the 1995 peak, it was over 50,000% rise !!

So you seem to be claiming that gun control is somehow useful in control of violent crime?

I see you have the nerve, the unmitigated GALL, to talk about “dishonesty”, — just — WOW!

Unbelievable!!

I wish I'd written this.  "Gibbering nonsense by circus clowns on stilts" is something I'm going to have to remember.

Health Update: IT'S ALIVE!!!

The new kidney is functional.  I was told today "no more dialysis"!!  The first night of getting up every 90 minutes to two hours to urinate was oddly satisfying.  The second night, not so much.  Apparently my bladder has shrunk to the size of an extra-large chicken egg.

I'm back to another six months or so of taking handfulls of pills morning and night, but I tolerate them well.  I have to stay up here at Mayo (on campus, but not in the hospital proper) for another four weeks, going in every other day for tests and consults, but things are going swimmingly. 

Hopefully no other major medical issues in my future (crossing my fingers.)