President Trump to Attend Dallas NRA Convention

April 30th, 2018

President Donald Trump will speak at the NRA national convention happening at the Kay Baily Hutchison convention center this weekend.

Alas, I will not be attending, but Dwight will. Hopefully he can obtain for me a Trump-signed MAGA hat…

Israel Blew Up Something Huge in Syria

April 30th, 2018

Another weekend, another Israeli strike on Syria. This time the result was that something huge blew up:

Syrian military positions in the province of Hama and Aleppo were targeted Sunday by a series of strikes that caused an explosion reportedly strong enough to trigger an earthquake observed by neighboring countries.

Citing an unnamed military source, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported that military positions in villages of Hama and Aleppo were hit by a still unidentified rocket attack at around 10:30 p.m. local time (3:30 p.m. EDT), causing loud explosions. Al Jazeera said one of its correspondants confirmed explosions at a Syrian military base at Al-Bahouth mountain in southern Hama.

Bassam Jaara, a supporter of the Syrian opposition, shared to social media pictures of what appeared to be flames and smoke rising from the Syrian countryside, saying “a large number” of casualties were incurred by an attack on what was believed to be an Iranian military position at “mountain 47” in southern Hama.

It appears that the strike targeted Iranian surface-to-surface missiles. The resulting explosion measured 2.6 on the Richter scale.

And here’s video of the explosion:

Here’s another video. The quality is fairly crappy, but you can see the secondary explosions the main explosion set off, suggesting that whatever the Israelis hit was filled with munitions:

It’s got to be frustrating to be the Islamic Republic of Iran. You spend all that time and effort schlepping massive amounts of ordinance into Syria, only to see Israel blow it all up with ease.

And once again Russian air defense systems were as good at keeping Israel out of Syria’s airspace as Jerry Seinfeld’s door was at keeping Kramer out of his apartment…

The Math Behind Prepping

April 29th, 2018

If you think that all this talk of violent revolution or civil war in the United States is nonsense, this piece, from a flood hydrologist, makes a compelling mathematical case that you should think again.

While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events. Now we can do math.

Equations omitted.

Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.

This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home getting flooded out during your mortgage.

Snip.

Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a 7-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, this Napoleon thing, and a couple of World Wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. Africa is … hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.

Or we could look at a modern snapshot. Counting places like the Vatican, we have 195 countries on the planet today. Somalia is basically in perpetual war, Syria is a hot mess with no signs of mitigation any time soon, Iraq is sketchy, Afghanistan has been in some flavor of civil war or occupation my entire life outside the salad days of the Taliban, and Libya is in such deep throes of anarchy that they’ve reinvented the black slave trade. Venezuela. Yemen. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be a qualifying event depending on how you define it. And again, Africa is … hard to even conceive where to start. Spitballing, perhaps 3% of the nations in the world today are in some version of violent revolt against the ruling government, some worse than others. There’s at least some case to be made that our 0.5% annual chance estimate may be low, if we’re looking at comps.

Or we could look at a broader historical brush. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years.

If we just look at raw dialectic alone we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will probably still scare you.

Plus some bits on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs building bunkers, a zombie apocalypse as a good proxy for real disasters, and the AR-15. Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Instapundit via Michele Frost on Twitter.)

Texas Emergency Prep Supplies Sales Tax Holiday

April 28th, 2018

This weekend is the Emergency Preparation Supplies Sales Tax Holiday the Texas legislature passed last year.

The following items qualify:

Less than $3000

  • Portable generators
  • Less than $300

  • Hurricane shutters
  • Emergency ladders
  • Less than $75

  • Batteries, single or multipack (AAA cell, AA cell, C cell, D cell, 6 volt or 9 volt)
  • First aid kits
  • Fuel containers
  • Ground anchor systems and tie-down kits
  • Hatchets
  • Axes
  • Mobile telephone batteries and mobile telephone chargers
  • Nonelectric coolers and ice chests for food storage (but don’t buy Yeti coolers)
  • Nonelectric can openers
  • Portable self-powered light sources (hand cranked flashlights)
  • Portable self-powered radios, including two-way and weather band radios
  • Reusable and artificial ice products
  • Smoke detectors, fire extinguishers and carbon monoxide detectors
  • Tarps and other plastic sheeting
  • The sales tax holiday lasts through Monday. At the very least make this your weekend to buy batteries…

    (Hat tip: Dwight for the reminder.)

    LinkSwarm for April 27, 2018

    April 27th, 2018

    I foolishly thought I would have time to get more done this week…

  • By the way, the Korean War is ending. Something that couldn’t be ended by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush41, Clinton, Bush43 or Obama is being ended by President Donald Trump. I look forward to Jennifer Rubin’s forthcoming essay on why this is actually a bad thing…
  • Midwestern Democrats are fearful that this Russian conspiracy bullshit will doom them all.
  • House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer explains to aspiring #Resistance leader that the DCCC tries to rig all House races for their preferred candidates, with none of that foolish input from mere voters. “This is how the party does it everywhere.”
  • Woman who campaigns against the deportation of migrants from Sweden was raped and sexually assaulted by two Afghan teenagers she met outside a bar.”
  • All about China’s aircraft carrier fleet. Interesting stuff, though I’d take the “OMG, China’s economy will be double that of the U.S. by 2030!” alarmism with several grains of salt.
  • Islamic State gets propaganda servers seized in the united States, Canada and the Netherlands.
  • Why you shouldn’t use your fingerprint as a password: “The first rule of passwords is that if you think it may have been compromised, you change the password. If you use your fingerprint as a password, you can’t change it.”
  • Mail bomber put to death.
  • Gang-banger executed for murdering two people, including a five-year-old girl.
  • Speaking of gang-bangers, the Obama Administration placed admitted members of the criminal MI-13 gang around the country as “dreamers.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Coward of Broward showered with soured no confidence votes.
  • Bill Cosby found guilty of three counts of aggravated sexual assault. It’s a sad end to a sordid saga, but I did find one Cosby meme that made me laugh:

  • Singer Morrissey commits the unpardonable sin of attacking left wing shibboleths and supporting Brexit. (Hat tip: The People’s Cube.)
  • Ford decides to stop making and selling most cars in the U.S. to concentrate on SUVs and trucks, Mustangs being the sole exception.
  • Scientists: “Dogs understand what we say and how we say it.”
  • Alfie Must Die So That The Glorious Dream of Socialism Might Live

    April 26th, 2018

    Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before the NHS.

    A UK court has decided that not only must toddler Alfie Evans, who has “a rare undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition,” be denied treatment in the UK, but that he he must not be allowed abroad for some other country to pay for saving his life.

    Remember how Democrats scoffed at the ideas of death panels?

    Well, a UK death panel decided a small boy must die, and the state will use force to make sure he does die.

    Alfie must suffer so that the state won’t be embarrassed by their attempts to kill him.

    Every. Knee. Must. Bend.

    Alfie Evans must die so that the glorious dream of socialism might live:

    The NHS simply cannot afford the extremely expensive prospect of keeping alive a little boy who most likely will not live much longer due to an incurable condition. Alfie’s chances of any meaningful recovery were slim to none. It isn’t outside the boundaries of reason that the government tasked with his treatment would deem it simply not worth the effort expended.

    It’s cruel, but logical…the inevitable result of a single-payer system.

    I may not agree with such reasoning, but I can at least derive the path that such woeful decisions must take in a place like the UK.

    What is not logical and nearly incomprehensible is the decision of the court not simply to deny Alfie further treatment, but then deny his right and the right of his parents to leave the country to seek treatment elsewhere. Even that decision might make a tiny bit of sense if it were to add to the NHS’ costs. That would be a problem for that pesky algorithm. However, Italy had already sent an airlift equipped to take the young child. His transportation and hospital provisions were covered by donations and the state of Italy. In fact, to move Alfie out of the care of the NHS would only save them money and labor. Alfie’s parents would have one more shot at rescuing his life. It seems like a win-win for everyone.

    And still, the courts have barred the family from leaving the country.

    Let’s ponder that for just one moment. Great Britain is a nation with a proud history of freedom and democracy. Most other nations around the world and Britons themselves would describe it as a “free country”, and yet here is a case where its free citizens are not allowed to leave its borders.

    Is this something that should happen in a “free country”? Would Alfie’s parents be barred from taking a vacation? Would anyone in their right mind in that country find it acceptable or consistent with British values to deny any family the right to leave for a vacation or to visit a relative abroad? Why then is it allowable for this family to be virtual hostages in their land simply because their reason for travel is medical care rather than pleasure?

    Some years ago I watched a documentary on the design and building of the Berlin Wall between East Germany and West Germany. It included extremely rare clips of interviews with the architects (I was shocked to learn there was actually a deliberate design to that monstrosity).

    Snip.

    In one clip, an aging (former) East German Wall architect spoke briskly about the strategy of his designs. Although the interview was conducted during what must have been the last years of his life, he still seemed deeply resentful that he was being asked to defend the wall’s erection even after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. I’ll never forget what he said in that interview – it made the hair stand up on my arms.

    With great sincerity – almost pleading with the interviewer – he said, “We had to build the wall. Too many people were leaving for the West and you need people to make socialism work. We had to build the wall to keep them in so they could see how great socialism was, so they could see that it works.”

    Snip.

    This is exactly the point in the ruling by the NHS and the courts to forbid their free citizens from leaving the country. If they are allowed to flee the heart-wrenching consequences of socialism, then others will want to do the same. How can a socialist system work without the cooperation of everyone? And how can you force people to participate in that socialist system when they discover that system may kill them or their loved ones?

    You build a wall.

    Great Britain doesn’t yet have a wall to keep its citizens in, but the courts have built one with the law. Just as East Germany could not tolerate the massive loss of defectors who were leaving with their training, intellect and tax dollars, Great Britain’s healthcare system cannot tolerate the defection of those who might find better healthcare somewhere else.

    After all, how would it look if Alfie were allowed to leave England (allowed to leave a free country! Even to write the words feels absurd!) and then found a successful treatment in another country?

    It would be an abject embarrassment to a government that holds up their socialist healthcare as one of the wonders of the Western world. Not only would they be forced to admit that their own doctors and bureaucrats were wrong for denying this baby life-saving measures, but they would then have to deal with hundreds, maybe thousands of other citizens fleeing the bondage of NHS algorithms for a chance at swifter, more modern healthcare.

    For some bizarre reason, a nation that boasts figures like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, a tiny island nation that was once so powerful and broad it was said that the sun never set on the British empire…for some inexplicable reason that nation has chosen to hang its pride and joy on socialized medicine.

    If you think I exaggerate just look up the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics.

    To release this child to the care of any other nation would be to admit failure, and heartless bureaucrats who will never have to watch young Alfie struggle for air or dehydrate to death have decided that their misplaced pride is more valuable than the lives of their citizens.

    Borepatch is even blunter:

    Doctors cut off water from a baby. How could that have happened?

    The religion of socialized medicine rules the land that used to be Great Britain. That religion has a priesthood, trained in the Universities and ruthless in their demand to be appeased. They control the purse strings of the hospitals, and therefore the doctors. Their sacred writ (the “Liverpool Pathway”) is enforced – and they pay cash money for sacrifices, to the tune of millions of pounds sterling each year.

    The priesthood’s rule is so complete that the parents were forbidden to take their baby out of the country, even though there were other countries willing to take him.

    There’s an Ursula K. Le Guin story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” about a utopian city whose prosperity is dependent (how it is never stated) by keeping pne child locked away in torment and misery. It won a Hugo Award, back when they actually meant something, despite all but having a giant blinking neon sign proclaiming COME SEE THE METAPHOR!

    The story ends with those whose conscience is shocked by this one great injustice walking away from the city, but now we know that’s not true. Now we know that the “good” people, the one’s most insistent on their own virtue, wouldn’t walk away, Instead, like NHS, they’d be indignantly guarding the child’s door to prevent him from escaping.

    Scott Adams on Kanye West and the Coming Golden Age

    April 25th, 2018

    This Scott Adams periscope is worth watching for his description of how President Donald Trump is breaking down our previous understanding of reality in North Korea, and a little bit on Kanye West.

    I think Adams is placing more weight on Kanye’s statements than is perhaps warranted. But if President Trump can indeed convince a significant fraction of black Americans to step away from the victimhood mentality that has plagued their community for half a century, the repercussions could be tremendous. Even doubling Republican votes among black voters might be enough to keep Democrats out of the White House for the foreseeable future (assuming illegal alien amnesty and tranny bathrooms aren’t already enough to do that).

    Update: Evidently this is no longer available on this Twitter embed, but you can still watch it here.

    Great Moments in Mail Fraud

    April 24th, 2018

    This story is pretty amazing, featuring equal parts of both stupidity and chutzpah:

    The timeworn apartment building in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood hardly looks like the corporate headquarters of one of the world’s largest shipping companies.

    But for a few recent months, that’s essentially what it became — at least as far as the U.S. Postal Service was concerned.

    Federal court papers unsealed last week revealed an astonishing but ultimately bungled scheme to file a change-of-address form claiming that shipping giant United Parcel Service had moved its headquarters from a bustling business park in Atlanta to a tiny garden apartment.

    Not only did the change go through, but it also took months for anyone to catch on. In the meantime, so many thousands of pieces of first-class mail meant for UPS poured into Apartment L2 at 6750 N. Ashland Ave. that a mail carrier had to bring in a tub to hold it all, a search warrant application filed in U.S. District Court disclosed.

    Among the correspondence were letters meant for the company’s CEO and other executives, sensitive documents containing personal information, as well as corporate credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars in business checks, according to an affidavit from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service submitted with the warrant.

    It wasn’t until the resident, Dushaun Spruce, allegedly deposited nearly $60,000 in UPS checks into his bank account in late January that UPS was alerted to the alleged scam, court papers say.

    In a brief interview last week with a Chicago Tribune reporter, Spruce acknowledged that authorities had served a warrant on him in January and seized mail, checkbooks, bank records and other documents from his apartment.

    “They took things they weren’t supposed to,” said Spruce, 24, standing barefoot at the building’s main entrance.

    While not disclosing Spruce’s name, the unsealed warrant contained other clues to his identity: both his current apartment number at the Ashland address as well as his previous address in the 1900 block of West Fargo Avenue. Public records listed both addresses for him.

    Spruce has not been criminally charged and denies any wrongdoing. The investigation by postal inspectors and federal prosecutors continues, law enforcement sources said.

    A spokesman for UPS confirmed that the company was recently notified that mail intended for UPS employees had been “redirected by an unauthorized change of address by a third party.” He declined further comment.

    Snip.

    It wasn’t until Jan. 16 — nearly three months after the address changes — that a UPS security coordinator caught on to the alleged scheme and notified postal inspectors, the court records show.

    The security coordinator notified investigators that not only had UPS not authorized the change but it also appeared that about 150 corporate American Express cards in various employee names — including the CEO and members of the board of directors — had been issued under the Ashland Avenue address, the affidavit said.

    It was later learned that only five cards had actually been shipped, and none had been misused, according to the affidavit.

    The day after the alleged fraud was detected, postal inspectors interviewed the carrier who delivers the mail to Spruce’s building. The carrier said “voluminous” amounts of UPS mail had been coming to the apartment for months, far more than would fit in the small boxes assigned to tenants, the affidavit said.

    To accommodate the deluge, the carrier “had to place the mail in a USPS tub and leave it at (Spruce’s) door,” the affidavit said.

    The carrier, who at times also handed mail directly to Spruce, identified him from a photograph shown by the agents, according to the affidavit.

    A week later, postal inspectors returned to the building and began retrieving “several thousand” pieces of first-class and registered mail addressed to UPS at Spruce’s apartment, the affidavit said. Agents found that some of the mail “contained personal identifying information of UPS employees as well as business checks mailed to UPS and accounts payable invoices,” according to the affidavit.

    That same day, investigators at Fifth Third Bank notified postal inspectors that more than 10 checks addressed to UPS were deposited to a personal account belonging to Spruce. The checks totaled more than $58,000, according to the affidavit.

    Agents reviewed bank surveillance footage and matched the person making the deposits to Spruce’s driver’s license photo, according to the affidavit.

    The search warrant served on Jan. 26 contained a list of items to be seized from Spruce, including “all mail, parcels and packages” and any credit cards, checks, invoices or financial records “of any kind” that were linked to UPS.

    Agents also planned to seize “all items associated with identity theft, including personal identifying information (and) devices used to manufacture credit cards,” according to the warrant.

    Spruce has no felony convictions in his background. But a year before his alleged UPS scam began, he was arrested twice in a matter of days by Evanston police on minor drug charges and allegations of bank fraud, records show.

    On Nov. 20, 2016, Evanston police pulled over Spruce’s Hyundai and found an open container of alcohol as well as at least 30 grams of marijuana, according to Cook County court records. He was charged with misdemeanor drug possession and driving on a suspended license — a case that prosecutors agreed to drop in exchange for 40 hours of community service.

    It’s obvious that Mr. Spruce is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you can’t say he lacks ambition. Protip: If you’re going to commit interstate mail fraud, do not use your home address. You use a third party mail address, address for a dummy company (I would have gone with “United Package Systems”), which is in turn registered to a another dummy company in the Cayman Islands. You deposit the UPS checks in the “United Package Systems” account, then transfer the money to a Cayman Islands account, and then to your secret Swiss bank account, and you shut everything down and skip town at the first sign anyone’s caught on.

    Geeze, do I have to tell you people everything?

    Mr. Spruce does not seem to have put this much (or indeed any) forethought into his little caper, and he’s very lucky that he’s not headed to a federal prison even as we speak. I’m guessing that both UPS and USPS are trying to figure out how such a stupid fraud worked for any length of time at all. Did UPS just not receive any mail for a few months and not notice?

    And did not Mr. Spruce’s local mail carrier express suspicions the first time they deposited a tub full of mail addressed to UPS to his apartment?

    Paris Attack Suspect Given 20 Years (And The MSM Still Can’t Say “Jihad”)

    April 23rd, 2018

    Let’s take a look at this BBC story:

    Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect from the 2015 Paris attacks, has been jailed for 20 years in Belgium over a gunfight that led to his arrest.

    Abdeslam, 28, and co-defendant Sofien Ayari were both convicted of terror-related charges of attempted murder.

    Ayari, 24, was also given a 20-year sentence. Both fired on officers who raided a flat in Brussels in 2016.

    Abdeslam is being held in a jail in France and is due to face trial there over the Paris attacks themselves.

    He had refused to answer questions from the judge in the trial in Brussels, and eventually refused to attend the hearings.

    Neither he nor Ayari, a 24-year-old Tunisian national, was in court as the verdict was read out on Monday. Both received the maximum 20-year term requested by prosecutors.

    The judge, Marie France Keutgen, said that “there can be no doubt” about the two men’s involvement with “radicalism”.

    “Radicalism.” No mention of what kind of “radicalism” yet…

    She added: “Their intention is clear from the nature of the weapons they used, the number of bullets they fired and the nature of the police officers’ wounds. Only the officers’ professional response prevented it being worse.”

    On 15 March 2016, Belgian police hunting Abdeslam carried out a raid in the Forest area of Brussels.

    They targeted a flat believing that the suspect – who by then had been on the run for four months – had been there.

    When they moved in they exchanged fire with the three occupants. One of the three was killed and three officers were wounded.

    Abdeslam and Ayari managed to escape, but Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found in the flat, confirming his presence there.

    He was picked up days later in a raid in the nearby Molenbeek area, and later transferred to France.

    He is a French national who was born in Brussels to French-Moroccan parents.

    He was involved in petty crime in Belgium as a youth, and is believed to have become radicalised along with his brother Salim around 2014.

    There’s that “radicalism” again.

    Both then reportedly joined a French-Belgian network linked with the Islamic State group (IS), which later claimed the Paris attacks.

    And there it is! Some 16 paragraphs into the story, the BBC finally deigns to tell us what these “attacks” and “radicalism” were all about: Islamic terrorism. But it only get mentioned because it’s in the name of the Islamic terrorist entity Abdeslam is affiliated with.

    The network was involved in both the Paris attacks and bombings that struck the Brussels metro and airport on 22 March 2016, just days after Abdeslam’s arrest, killing 35 people.

    In Monday’s ruling, the court denied a request by victims from those attacks that they be regarded as a civil party to the case, saying no link had been established with Abdeslam and Ayari.

    He is believed to have played a key role on 13 November 2015 – when militants targeted a concert hall, stadium, restaurants and bars, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more.

    “Militants.”

    It’s been nearly two decades since 9/11, and mainstream western media outlets still insist in speaking in code-words when it comes to Islamic terrorism.

    Pat Condell on Progressivism and Cultural Marxism

    April 22nd, 2018

    Pat Condell nails modern progressivism for its naked intolerance.

    If not for the spiteful underhand nastiness and shallow vindictiveness of the progressive mindset, the sanctimonious moralizing, the phony liberality the assumption of moral superiority, and the arrogance in that assumption, not to mention the instinctive recourse to deliberate misrepresentation slurs insults and maliciously slanderous labels in place of argument; if not for all that I wouldn’t have such a problem with progressives because, unlike them, I’m a liberal kind of guy.

    Snip.

    Try publicly advocating liberal values like freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, free speech, individual liberty democracy. secularism, civil rights; you know, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and you are guaranteed to be called a far-right extremist, a hate monger, a bigot, a racist, a fascist or a Nazi, yes, a Nazi, by progressives.

    Condell seems to be refrencing either classical liberalism, or a form of liberalism that has became all but extinct in the modern world, replaced in tot by progressivism’s victimhood identity politics.

    Progressivism is Marxism attempting to wear a liberal mask and failing. The militant Marxist and the militant progressive are birds of a feather. They have the same aims they share a common purpose.

    Watch the whole thing.