Daily Shaarli
March 29, 2021
The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the 2018 Small Arms Survey.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
I read this and I have to admit, I am horrified.
These are some rookie numbers. //
The way I see America’s “gun problem” is the exact opposite of the way Vox sees it. I think America’s gun problem comes from the fact that not enough people carry guns at any given time at any given place. An armed society is a polite one, and I have the numbers to back it up.
For instance, did you know that 98 percent of mass shootings that occurred since the 1950s happened in gun-free zones? Did you know that over a million people in Texas are licensed to carry a firearm and that 0.4 per 100,000 have committed a homicide? Compare that to the .99 per 100,000 homicide rate in jolly ol’ Britain where guns are banned.
The fact is, when there’s a gun present, would-be attackers take a good long while to weigh their action with their life and usually they’ll choose their life.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/RSD/LTC/Reports/ConvictionRatesReport2016.pdf
The RTO leads to high prices and rolling blackouts.
As Professor William Hogan of Harvard, one of the architects of the Texas system, said in a recent interview with the Harvard Crimson, the state’s electricity market had “worked as designed.” https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/2/26/hogan-texas-energy-prices/
Others were upset that rolling blackouts still happened when the auction price was below $9 per kWh. While I am not an economist, it is clear to me that market caps or not, RTOs lead to expensive, fragile grids. It’s not about those crazy people in the Lone State. It’s about the RTO structure. //
Texas didn’t have blackouts because it was unique. It had blackouts because its grid was built on the RTO system. The sooner people understand that fact, the sooner we can do something about the growing fragility of our grids.
‘When I saw what happened in New York City, almost over-running of our healthcare systems, and that’s when it became very clear that the decision we made on January 10 to go all out and develop a vaccine, may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to intervention as the director of the institute,’ Fauci said.
Fauci’s remarks seemed to gloss over the key role played by pharmaceutical companies and Operation Warp Speed – the Trump administration’s program to manufacture, test and deliver vaccines to the public in record time.
Yes, I’m sure no one had thought of needing a vaccine for a deadly, global disease before Fauci’s brilliance came onto the scene. Truly, we should build statues of this man and order a new stock of emotive candles.
To be clear, Fauci had absolutely jack to do with making the decision to start developing or developing a vaccine. To the extent that Trump deserves credit, and he does, it’s because he took the lead to negotiate Operation Warp Speed, which incentivized private companies to research and develop the vaccines we now have on the market. Past that, those individual companies did all the work, which is a testament to our free market system and its benefits. Compare the United States’ speed to a vaccine and our distribution with that of Europe, for example.
What Fauci is trying to do here is take credit for something he had almost nothing to do with. Perhaps he suggested in a meeting at some point that a vaccine would be needed. Again, that probably occurred to a dozen other people in the room as well, but it certainly wasn’t “his” decision to begin development, and he had nothing to do with anything that happened after that as well.
In a unanimous ruling, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Shawnee State University violated Prof. Nicholas Meriwether’s rights of free speech and free exercise of religion by punishing him for resisting school rules that forced him to address students in the terms of their choosing.
Meriwether, a philosophy professor and devout Christian, sued Shawnee State, claiming that its mandate to use terms that conflict with biology infringed on his religious belief that gender is fixed from the moment of conception.
The court’s decision, written by a judge appointed to the bench by President Trump and issued Friday, upheld Meriwether’s argument.
“The First Amendment interests are especially strong here because Meriwether’s speech also relates to his core religious and philosophical beliefs,” Judge Amul Thapar wrote in a 32-page decision. //
“To accede to these demands would have required Dr. Meriwether to communicate views regarding gender identity that he does not hold, that he does not wish to communicate, and that would contradict (and force him to violate) his sincerely held Christian beliefs,” the lawsuit reads.
The suit claims that “the number of potential gender identities is infinite” and that there are over 100 “different options currently available.”
School officials countered by saying that respecting students’ pronouns is a part of Meriwether’s job, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. //
Meriwether’s win on appeal, handed down by Thapar, who was rumored to be one of the attorneys on the list to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, allows him to recoup damages for the school’s decision to reprimand him.
“Nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job,” his attorney John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, said of Meriwether’s case.
Let me be clear: We should have taken efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. We cannot, however, jump to the conclusion that all mitigation efforts were effective when, in fact, many are not. The thing about science is that it is never absolute. Science changes, evolves, and progresses. “Settled-science” is not a thing. Questioning data coming from a scientific debate does not make one “anti-science.” Had we simply provided for those who were over the age of 60 and/or had a pre-existing condition we could have avoided the majority of the negative consequences from which we have suffered.
We suspect that closely examining the FSF's own mission statements—as opposed to simply assuming its mission—answers many of the questions about RMS' return. The FSF describes itself as an organization far more concerned with maintaining a part of history it holds dear—and attacking its perceived enemies, whether real or not—than with discovery, outreach, and mentorship to new faces in free software.
why you shouldn't enable auto reboot after a panic.
Cruz calls the bill a “brazen and shameless power grab,” noting that it would promote widespread voter fraud. It includes automatic voter registration for essentially anyone who has ever interacted with the government. That would naturally include a lot of illegal immigrants who have driver’s licenses, and without strong verification in place, which H.R. 1 doesn’t have, there’d be nothing to stop them from voting.
Worse, as Cruz points out, even though it would still be technically illegal for an illegal immigrant to vote, H.R. 1 expressly removes any liability for doing so. In other words, you can vote illegally with no repercussions. The bill also strikes down all laws at the state level that prevent felons from voting. That’s another attempt by Democrats to stack the deck with voters they perceive would favor them.
Other terrible aspects include the striking down of voter ID laws, which exist in 29 states right now. Ballot harvesting, which has completely tainted states like California, would also be made universal across the country. Cruz uses the example of a political operative going into a nursing home and harvesting ballots only from those who voted for Democrats. There’s no supervision in that case, and unwanted ballots could just be thrown out after collection.
Cruz ends by calling it the “corrupt politicians act” because the goal is to keep corrupt politicians in power. That should be obvious to anyone thinking critically about what all of these federal mandates would mean. Democrats like to spin it as stopping the “restricting of voting,” but their definition of such is basically that any vote they think will benefit them should be counted regardless of its legality. They are also seeking to give machine politics, i.e. ballot harvesting, a dominant role in deciding elections.