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I haven’t been writing very much this year, although I do have a few things I’m working on, like this post. Instead, I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve mentioned Obama’s fat book with small type here a while back. I re-read a few I already had, like Dune, and discovered that with Amazon Prime you not only get “free” TV and movies, you get a free to read library.
        One of the “free” (covered in the monthly cost) books was Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, which suffered from a flaw that caused my Voyage to Earth story to be rejected by F&SF: the beginning didn’t grab the junior editor. I fixed it by adding another story that did start well, what Lester del Rey called a “fix-up”. He would turn a bunch of short stories he couldn’t sell into a novel.
        I didn’t read much of the Stephenson book; after two chapters you should have a better idea of what the book is about than the book’s title hinted at, but a lot of you have recommended some of his books. I found Andy Wier’s Randomize; if I’d had to pay for it I would have been pissed, as it was a short story, not a novel. A very good short story, but three bucks for a single story when you get half a dozen, in print, from F&SF for seven is a ripoff. Beware buying Amazon ebooks!
        Then I found a book by someone I never heard of, Douglas Phillips. Wikipedia hadn’t heard of him, either, although there are others with the same name, none of whom are writers. The book was titled Quantum Space, and the book itself was as nerdy as its title. It was the science fiction equivalent of David Allan Coe’s The Perfect Country Song, with about every SF meme there is.
        Unlike Stephenson’s book, it grabbed me right away. Written in 2017 it is set in our current dystopian future, the one 20th century writers never foresaw, although the story isn’t dystopian. It starts with three astronauts in a Soyuz on their way home from the ISS, then cuts to a Russian watching for its contrail. He sees the contrail, then a bright blue flash and a loud bang, and the contrail stops. Russia has lost three astronauts, one of whom is an American.
        Later we find that they’re not just lost in outer space, but in quantum space. In this bit of fiction (with an afterword that explains the real from the imaginary), when they found the Higgs Bosun in 2012, they found that string theory was accurate, and Europe and the US have classified the information. It’s explained why, but I’m leaving no spoilers except for the space aliens hinted at early in the book.
        There are physicists, FBI agents, evil rich people giving China classified information, the military, the LHC and the collider at Fermilab (where much of the story takes place). It’s pretty much action-packed all the way through; it would make a great movie, although some of the dialogue seems like padding. Of course, I’ve never seen a movie that matched the book exactly; The Running Man shared almost nothing with the book, but The Green Mile was very close in most respects.
        Someone who knew nothing about quarks and gluons and the other particles that make up matter and energy would actually learn something reading this. There’s an illustration of the “Standard Model” with its different flavors of quarks, neutrinos, and other particles. There’s no graviton, as we haven’t found it, but in the story the aliens (who are far advanced from us) have.
        It was an excellent read, with a lot of twists and turns and surprises. I highly recommend it. It’s free to read if you have Amazon Prime or a local library card.

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1422890656956141574

Rep. @CoriBush, who took part in trespassing on the McCloskeys’ property, threatens the family after they received a gubernatorial pardon: “Mark McCloskey is an absolute liar. He has spat on my name. And because of that, his day will come.”

https://www.wndnewscenter.org/watch-dem-in-congress-explodes-threatens-mccloskey-after-pardon/
https://soylentnews.org/~Runaway1956/journal/8093

“His day will come,” Bush said of Mark McCloskey, who with his wife, Patricia, this week was pardoned by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson for minor gun charges that stemmed from their decision to protect their property when one of those marches last summer brought a crowd to their property, and they didn’t know the intention.

This is the same Cori Bush who supports gun rights - for herself.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/defund-the-police-advocate-rep-cori-bush-spent-70k-on-private-security-report

“Missouri Rep. Cori Bush spent nearly $70,000 on private security over the past three months as she advocated for defunding the police, campaign filings show,” Fox News reported Friday. “Bush’s campaign sent $54,120.92 in payments between April 15 and June 28 for ‘security services’ to RS&T Security Consulting, a New York-based firm with a mysterious online presence, Federal Election Commission records released Thursday show. The Democrat’s campaign also paid $15,000 to Nathaniel Davis for ‘security services’ over the same time period.”

I join Mark McCloskey in spitting on Cori Bush's name. Is my day coming too? Bring it on. Or, if you prefer, Για έλα. Or, producat illum. Kuleta. اجلبه አምጣው Mu wa.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/after-their-pardon-missouri-rep-cori-bush-threatens-the-mccloskeys-on-cnn-your-day-will-come/

Opinion: Democrats want police protection for themselves, not for the rest of us

July 29, 2021 at 3:37 p.m. EDT

1.9k
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) is an outspoken advocate for defunding the police, who has called America “racist” and declared that modern-day policing is “another system of bondage” through which “slavery quite literally lives on today.” So, it was ironic to say the least when news broke that Bush paid nearly $70,000 over the past three months for private police protection.

In truth, Bush isn’t paying for personal security; her campaign donors are paying for her personal security. Her police protection accounted for more than a third of her campaign expenditures during the second quarter. So, the very individuals and organizations that were so excited by her calls to defund the police that they contributed to her campaign are actually funding police to protect Cori Bush.

The problem is her constituents don’t have rich supporters willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to protect them. They have the police. And the city of St. Louis, which Bush represents in Congress, recently cut $4 million from its police budget and eliminated 98 officer positions. Where is the money going? About $1.5 million will go for affordable housing, another million will go to assist the homeless population, and another million will be diverted to crime-victim support services — including funeral expenses for crime victims.

Maybe if St. Louis had a hundred more cops on the streets, there would be fewer funerals. Last year, the city had 262 homicides, the most per 100,000 people since 1970. Yet despite the explosion of murders in her city, Bush praised the decision to take almost 100 police officers off the streets of St. Louis as “historic.”

We are seeing a similar spike in violent crime across the country. The New York Times reports that last year was the worst year for killings since the mid-1990s. Homicide rates in large cities were up 30 percent on average last year and are already up 24 percent for the beginning of this year. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw increases in homicide, rape, robbery or aggravated assault in 2020, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

What do many of these cities have in common? They are run by Democrats who have defunded the police. Minneapolis cut $8 million from the police budget. Oakland, Calif., cut $14.6 million. Portland, Ore., cut $15 million. Philadelphia cut police funding by $33 million. New York cut a whopping $1 billion.

Not only has police funding been cut, police morale has plunged over the past year leading to soaring retirements and resignations. NPR reports that a June survey of nearly 200 departments found a 45 percent increase in police retirements and a nearly 20 percent increase in resignations. Meanwhile, new police hiring has dropped 5 percent nationwide.

Many cities are using these vacancies as a back-channel way to cut police funding. Seattle (which has had 232 shootings so far this year, up from 164 at the same time last year) reduced its police budget by $7.7 million in part by pocketing $5 million salary savings from the roughly 270 police officers who have left the force in recent months. Chicago (which saw 70 shootings just last weekend, including 12 fatalities) quietly eliminated 400 police officers positions in 2020, while Los Angeles cut its force by 200 officer positions. In other words, many cities don’t need to defund the police; they can just sit back and wait for the police to defund themselves through resignations and retirements.

The problem will only get worse if Democrats in Washington get their way. Congress missed the May deadline President Biden set to approve police reform legislation, despite broad bipartisan agreement on most elements of a bill. The sticking point? Democrats want to strip away qualified immunity from police officers so they can be sued in civil court. Officers have no immunity from criminal prosecution, and victims can sue the city in the civil court for damages stemming from misconduct. But for Democrats that is not good enough — they want to see officers sued personally. This will lead to a flood of frivolous lawsuits, as well as even more retirements and resignations, as officers decide that protecting the community is no longer worth the risk to their families and futures.

This is not what Americans want. A USA Today/Ipsos poll finds only 18 percent support defunding the police, including only 28 percent of Black Americans and 34 percent of Democrats. In crime-ravaged Detroit, residents say they want more police on the street, not less, by an overwhelming 9-to-1 margin.

Because unlike Cori Bush, these Americans can’t afford private security.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/29/cori-bush-defund-police-democrats-want-police/

Rules for thee, but not for me - p̶o̶l̶i̶c̶e̶ guns for me, but not for thee.

U.S. BUREAU OF INDUSTRY AND SECURITY IMPOSES ‘EAR’ RESTRICTIONS ON 3D PRINTED GUNS
PAUL HANAPHY JULY 22ND 2021 - 6:36PM

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has announced a transfer in jurisdiction over certain technologies that could be used to 3D print firearms.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction that removed such technologies from the U.S. Munitions List (USML) and made them exempt from International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

In response, the BIS has now declared that anyone engaged in manufacturing, exporting or ‘furnishing’ 3D printed firearms, are subject to Export Administration Regulations (EAR) instead. To help those currently in possession of the software and machinery needed to produce these munitions stay compliant, the bureau has therefore issued a detailed FAQ, which it “strongly encourages” them to read.

The BIS calls the shots

In essence, the BIS’ decision to subject 3D printed firearms to EAR regulation was triggered by an injunction issued by a U.S. District Court in Washington back in March 2020, which prevented it from enforcing ITAR rules on any “technical data and software directly related to the production of firearms or firearm parts using a 3D printer or similar equipment.’’

After this court order, the Department of State declared that its ‘final rule’ 85 FR 3819 had come into effect, meaning that any license requests for related ‘‘technology’’ and ‘‘software” no longer fall under USML jurisdiction. Published in the Federal Register, the announcement effectively saw the BIS inherit authority over 3D printed firearm regulation, subjecting it to articles ‘15 CFR 732.2’ and ‘734.7’ instead.

Specifically, these two legal codes refer to distinct passages of the EAR, which determine the scope of the legislation’s remit and whether certain 3D printed items are legal or not. In the former, for instance, the code outlines how EAR import/export restrictions now apply to certain 3D printed goods, while many other ‘publicly-available’ technologies continue to remain outside the regulation’s remit.

With regards to ‘15 CFR 734.7,’ the code elaborates further on this point, saying that a technology is ‘published’ in the public sphere once it’s “available to the public without restrictions,” before adding that this exemption doesn’t apply to certain types of encryption software or any AMF or G-code shared online, which could be used to “produce a firearm frame, receiver or a complete firearm.”

What are EAR regulations?

Of course, the two codes referenced in the Department of Commerce’s announcement represent only a small part of a sprawling piece of regulation, which stretches on for some 774 sections. Luckily, the BIS has put together a handy guide for anyone whose technologies fall under Section C of regulation 734.7, which it urges them to “review closely” so as to not fall foul of related licensing laws.

Among these FAQs, for instance, it’s made clear that a BIS license is now required to post online ‘‘any file, including any CAD file, that once converted will be in an executable code for the production of a firearm.” Where licenses are issued, they’re set to be valid for four years with those intending to export, required to provide specifics such as the caliber, barrel length and finish of any weaponry.

In addition to new import/export requirements, the BIS’ advice also explains how firearms that weren’t subject to ITAR restrictions prior to the EAR rules’ first introduction on March 9 2020, are likely to remain exempt unless regulatory amendments are made, although it encourages all those unsure about how the changes affect them to reach out.

To find out if their specific technology qualifies as “ready for insertion into a computer numerically-controlled machine tool, additive manufacturing equipment or any other equipment,” thus becoming subject to EAR regulation, manufacturers can now submit a free classification request to the BIS via its online SNAP–R submission system.

Otherwise, those in the business of 3D printing firearm parts can check out the bureau’s full FAQ breakdown here.

A crackdown on 3D printed guns?

The last few years has seen manufacturers, regulators and social media firms join forces to discourage gun 3D printing, yet design files seem to be as prevalent as ever on file sharing sites. In 2019, for instance, 3D printer manufacturer Dagoma and TBWA/Paris distributed fake and unusable gun files in an attempt to frustrate those trying to download them.

Not long before this, Facebook reportedly stated that “sharing instructions on how to produce firearms using 3D printers is “not allowed under its Community Standards.” In response to the move, the Firearms Policy Coalition issued a call to action, asking Facebook to lift the ban on one particular affected site, implying that its freedom of speech had been impeded.

However, despite these initiatives and the EAR regulations imposed on 3D printed guns, the wider debate surrounding them has raged on for years and it’s unlikely to be the last time the issue rears its head. After all, it was only three years ago that the U.S. Department of Justice overturned a ban on the sharing of gun files, thus the topic is under constant review, even if the resulting guns tend to be ineffectual.

The nominations for the 2021 3D Printing Industry Awards are now open. Who do you think should make the shortlists for this year’s show? Have your say now.

To stay up to date with the latest 3D printing news, don’t forget to subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter or follow us on Twitter or liking our page on Facebook.

For a deeper-dive into additive manufacturing, you can now subscribe to our Youtube channel, featuring discussion, de-briefs and shots of 3D printing in-action.

Are you looking for a job in the additive manufacturing industry? Visit 3D Printing Jobs for a selection of roles in the industry.

Featured image shows the ‘Plastic Liberator’ handgun. Photo via Defense Distributed.

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/u-s-bureau-of-industry-and-security-imposes-ear-restrictions-on-3d-printed-guns-193254/

The question is: Why does our government fear the people?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1tXlpRq-jY

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/texas-shooter-dies-party-goers-throw-bricks-79072353

FORT WORTH, Texas -- A man who opened fire at a backyard party in Fort Worth early Monday, killing one and injuring three, died after being chased by fellow party-goers who threw landscaping bricks at him, Texas authorities said.

Fort Worth police said the shooter, who was struck multiple times with at least one brick, was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said the medical examiner will determine the cause of death.

Police said the shooter had been attending the small backyard gathering at a home but became upset and left. He then returned and began arguing with other party-goers before shooting and injuring one person, whose injuries weren't life-threatening. As party-goers gave chase, the shooter turned and fired at them.

The party-goers started throwing bricks at the shooter, police said. Police said at some point the shooter either fell or was taken down to the ground but continued to fire.

Three people were shot during the chase. One person was killed and two others were injured and are expected to survive, police said.

Police said they are continuing to investigate, and that the handgun believed to have been used by the shooter was recovered.

AP link: https://apnews.com/article/texas-ad552437f6ad592d9cbeaec4bfb2496e

TTAG link is more amusing: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/should-have-been-a-dgu-texas-shooter-bludgeoned-to-death-with-bricks/

Should Have Been a DGU: Texas Shooter Bludgeoned to Death With Bricks

It boggles the mind but, somehow, despite being in Fort Worth, Texas, an aggrieved party-goer managed to open fire on an apparently (not to mention shamefully) unarmed group of backyard party attendees. Well, “unarmed” may be a little strong, because the folks most definitely defended themselves . . .

…a man who opened fire at a backyard party in Fort Worth, killing one and injuring three, died after being chased by fellow party-goers who threw landscaping bricks at him.

That’s a pretty good summary by ABC News of the AP story. Any further details of this incident, which happened at sometime around 1:00 AM yesterday (July 26th) morning, aren’t yet available.

One thing I’m comfortable stating is that this should have been a defensive gun use. As amazing as it is to see people fight back, and as effective as this stoning likely was in reducing the total casualties from what otherwise would probably have been a much worse incident, landscaping bricks are a poor substitute for a firearm.

Aside from being less effective and far less immediate, bricks are also far crueler and less civilized. I had a vehemently anti-gun friend who wasn’t, however, anti-violence, explaining to me that he had no issue whatsoever defending his home even if it resulted in killing a home invader and, in fact, he kept a baseball bat near his bed for just such an emergency. Naturally I accused him of being a sicko psychopath, choosing all of the disgusting horror inherent in bludgeoning somebody with a pipe instead of stopping him cleanly and efficiently from a distance with a firearm like a gentleman.

A firearm is an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. God forbid any of us have to use one in self-defense, but it sure as hell beats stoning somebody to death with landscaping bricks. Gruesome.

NOTE: DGU in the title is Defensive Gun Use

We need sensible brick laws!!

I discovered science fiction around 1960 when I was eight, and loved almost all of it until this century. Most of it was about trouble in paradise, whether video or literature. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm in high school, which was in the SF section of the library even though it wasn’t science fiction or speculative fiction, more like a fantasy morality tale. It was a warning about the Fascism America seems to now be marching towards.
        Because I liked that one, I found another one from Orwell, 1984. I stopped reading when the rats were biting the guy in the face, maybe halfway through that long, horrible story about the coming dystopian future that was supposed to happen forty years ago.
        There were very few of the horrible dystopias in the twentieth century, which is why 1984 stuck out so much. The only other dystopia I remember from my youth was the nineteenth century tome The Time Machine.
        Fahrenheit 451 was one I returned to the library after the first chapter. I don’t remember why I disliked it, it’s widely praised.
        Then this century I started buying SF magazines again, around 2010, and discovered that almost all of the new stuff was dystopian. F&SF didn’t have cover to cover dystopias like the rest of them, so I bought a subscription. By the time it was over I didn’t renew, because it, too, had become almost total dystopia. Facebook ads advertising SF all proudly shill how dystopian they are.
        I think I realize why all of the dystopia: This horrible century. Despite how technology has already surpassed most twentieth century speculation, there are other things making anyone born after 1984 think we’re heading towards a dystopian future: The terrorist attack on 9/11 that triggered a war that lasted twenty years; to anyone born in this century it was a lifelong war. Then two years after the Afghan war started, a second, incredibly stupid war in Iraq was started. Under the oil men Bush and Cheney, gasoline prices went from $1.05 to $4.50 at its height here in Springfield, followed by a banking crisis that very nearly put the world in a depression that could have made the Great Depression look like a mild recession in comparison. You can’t get to work without gasoline yet, and the high cost of getting to work killed budgets and mortgages. Luckily, we then elected a man who historians call the tenth best president, and catastrophe was averted.
        To a teenager or young adult then, the world just kept getting worse, especially to racists, since this president was Black.
        Then came our fourth worst president in American history, again according to historians, a very lazy man who had never had to work in his life, a multimillionaire at the age of three. In his administration’s last year, his laziness and aversion to reality and truth cost hundreds of thousands of American lives to a pandemic. I saw him as the American Nero, fiddling while America burned with Covid fever and a breathing tube down its throat.
        And the world is heating up, with people who have made fortunes selling the very thing causing the heating denying that it’s even happening, caring not that the world will be a hellish place if we don’t stop burning their poisons. I saw the same thing with the tobacco industries. These people simply don’t care about anything but wealth and power!
        To someone under about forty, the world has become worse and worse every year of their lives. Of course the future is dystopian, according to their own witness.
        The thing is, there has seldom been a real dystopian future. The past has almost always been more dystopian than almost every epoch’s present. The one time in western history that really did have a dystopian future was the Roman empire, as when it fell, the dark ages overtook the western world for centuries, until the Renaissance. Of course, the Roman empire was dystopian, far worse than most dystopian science fiction. Beheadings, crucifixions, execution by animal attack, plagues…
        Some would say that America had a dystopian future during the “roaring twenties” before the depression, but according to Grandma McGrew, who was in her twenties in the twenties, it only roared for the rich, while working class people lived in what we would consider a dystopia. Multiply that by a hundred if you weren’t White.
        Even during my own lifetime, America and most of the world’s nations have become less and less dystopian, except this century. In the previous century we had horrible institutional racism, with laws that separated White people from everyone else. I can remember seeing the first Black person I’d ever seen, when I was five or six. I was completely ignorant about race, having not been brought up as a racist, and only Whites and Hispanics (who look White to me) were on television. I said “Wow, look at the tan on that guy!” My mother turned bright red and the Black man chuckled. Most Whites were raised to be racist. Black people didn’t gain full rights until 1964, and racism today (even institutional) is far less than it was then.
        But it still exists. Most of my friends are racist and don’t even realize it.
        Once, when I was still working and smoking cigarettes, I huddled in the doorway to try to stay out of the rain, talking with a well-dressed, college educated professional Black woman, who was gesturing with her cigarette and grousing about how store employees would always follow her around to make sure she wasn’t stealing anything.
        I said I had the opposite problem: “I can never find sales people when I need them.” That’s institutional racism. When I’m pulled over, I worry I might get a ticket. When a Black person is pulled over, particularly if he’s a young man, they have to worry that the cop might murder them.
        That’s institutional racism. It’s our present dystopia, but not nearly as dystopian as when I was a child. A century earlier was far more dystopian, Black people weren’t even considered human, and were bought, sold, and worked like dogs or horses, and treated no better than dogs and horses.
        Throughout all of human history until the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was practiced world-wide. The ultimate dystopia, gone for a century and a half. I think racism a hundred years from now will be just an ugly relic of the past, like slavery is to us today.
        Part of the dystopia of my youth was the filthy, unhealthy environment. Rivers and streams caught fire. There was no air conditioning in cars then, and driving past Monsanto you had to roll the windows up in ninety five degree heat or the air would burn your lungs! Congress started the EPA in the seventies.
        Workplaces were hellish. Grandpa McGrew fell four stories down an elevator shaft because his employer, Purina, was too cheap to put doors on the elevators. Today we have OSHA.
        If you look at history, there have always been ups and downs, with more ups than downs. Every new discovery, every new invention lessens our present dystopia and has throughout history, but people seldom read history. Some people never read anything.
        I spoke of why youth believes in a dystopian future, but what about seniors? That’s something I can’t figure out. Maybe they have bad memories.
        Of course, as mentioned, we’re already seeing the climate changes brought on by global warming, and that will obviously create a dystopia, won’t it?
        Not necessarily. One of the stories in my Yesterday’s Tomorrows compilation is Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 2 B R 0 2 B. Like was widely feared at the time it was written, the world in Vonnegut’s future is greatly overpopulated at forty million people, and by the year 2000 people are eating seaweed. But although it was as dark as anything he wrote, it wasn’t dystopian. It starts:
                Everything was perfectly swell.
                There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
                All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
                Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
        In my preface to that story, I remarked that few writers seemed to have noticed advances in farm equipment, other farming technologies, or advances in chemistry, biology, agronomy, and other sciences needed to improve yields. The reality of his future and our present is that today there is plenty of food for everyone, and the only reason people go hungry is the politics of greed.
        I see the same happening with global warming. Evil money-worshiping men in high towers running oil wells and coal mines from a safe (to them) distance have tried to keep global warming under wraps, but it’s no longer possible for them. Their industries will die, and like the turn of the twentieth century, new industries will spring up, this time bringing clean energy. Like with farming equipment, windmills and solar panels will improve, and new technologies will spring up, particularly as new advances in science occur. Climate change is happening. We caused it, we can and will fix it.
        I don’t write dystopian SF because I simply don’t believe the future will be anywhere as dystopian as the present, and especially not as bad as the horrible past.

Hemmingway Destroys Dem Narrative on Vaccines: 61% of Vaccine Hesitant People are NOT Republicans
Steve Straub By Steve Straub
Published July 19, 2021 at 6:04am

Democrats and their media allies like to claim that the vast majority of vaccine hesitant people are Republicans who get bad information from Fox News or Facebook.

The truth is the exact opposite as Mollie Hemmingway explains to Maura Liasson:

Rather than editorialize further, here’s the transcript of this exchange, it stands by itself:

LIASSON: “Well, you know, what we’ve heard from public health officials who has studied the way to communicate about the vaccine is that people need to hear from medical experts and get their questions answered.

In other words, the vaccine problem is not going to be solved by people calling Fauci a hack or people calling right-wing talk show hosts some kind of — I don’t know what they were calling them, but attacking them for raising questions about the vaccine.

You have to go to people where they are. What I also think is interesting about this whole controversy, it’s a big debate happening without Donald Trump. Donald Trump is proud of what he did to get the vaccines online fast.

A lot of his supporters don’t want to take them. He’s had the vaccine. He’s talked in favor of it. So I think this is kind of interesting. This is a big polarized debate and a it’s missing an element that has been present in almost every polarized debate in the last five years.”

HEMINGWAY: “If I can just point — just really quickly, this is one of the examples that you see, people make it out like it’s the Republicans that don’t want to take the vaccine. In fact, 61% of the people who are hesitant about the vaccines are not Republican. And the more the media make it out that it’s something that’s partisan, that will also going to contribute to the problems.

The more that they fail to remind people that it was President Biden and Vice President Harris, when they were running for office, who said that they didn’t have trust in the vaccine, that also makes people not trust what the media are saying.

So I think we need to be very careful and not have forgetfulness about what was happening during the campaign when the vaccine messaging was very different.”

Mollie Hemmingway really nailed that.

I agree with Mollie Hemmingway that the Biden / Harris team made a major contribution to vaccine hesitancy during the campaign by putting it down if it resulted from a Trump effort.

The administration also continues to contribute via their constant flip-flops, lack of consistency on the benefits of being vaccinated and lately, constant talk of being okay with local mandates.

After all, what ever happened to “my body, my choice?”

The Biden administration would be wise to look inward in trying to figure out why so many are hesitant to take the vaccine instead of blaming Fox News, Facebook and others.

Sadly, we all know by now that the likelihood of that happening is almost zero.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/hemmingway-destroys-dem-narrative-vaccines-61-vaccine-hesitant-people-not-republicans

further reading:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/americas-vaccine-hesitant-demographics/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-presidential-encouragement/

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/if-biden-wants-to-convince-the-vaccine-hesitant-give-trump-credit-for-the-vaccines/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-have-become-the-party-of-anti-vaxxers

https://www.wfae.org/politics/2021-04-17/are-covid-19-vaccination-rates-as-simple-as-republicans-vs-democrats

The AP story notes that polls have shown Republicans to be more vaccine-hesitant than Democrats. It doesn’t mention that some African Americans are wary about being vaccinated, although recent polls show vaccine hesitancy is declining among Black Americans.

The five worst-performing states per the AP analysis are also some of the states with the highest percentage of Black residents. Mississippi is the worst-performing state in terms of vaccine performance; it also has the highest percentage of African American residents. Louisiana has the second-highest percentage of Black residents, and it’s in the bottom five in terms of vaccine performance.

And New Hampshire? It’s one of the whitest states in the Union, where less than 1% of residents are Black.

That is not to say that African Americans are the main reason some states are lagging in vaccines. But it could be a factor.

Louisiana residents could be grouped two ways: Black Democrats and white conservatives. There is no significant constituency of white Democrats – the group that’s most enthusiastic about getting jabbed.

If you buy into simplistic CNN and Democrat explanations for vax hesitancy, you are a fool.

Slow day, I'm sitting around wasting time, I look at Youtube. Among the suggestions are some bad cop videos. Cop killed his wife, cop steals drugs, cop accepting bribes - if you jump down that rabbit hole, all cops start looking bad. Instead of clicking click bait suggestions, I sit back and think a little. Hmm - where does one find statistics on bad cops? AH-HAH! The FBI should track that kind of thing.

Wrong.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights

That's the best hit the FBI offers on police corruption and police wrongdoing. No statistics. No granular study on how or why cops go bad. No distinction between murderous trigger happy cops and petty criminals in uniform. No distinction between racists and just plain mean people with guns. There's this page, where the FBI seems to excuse seeming bad conduct of lots of cops -

https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/hard-truths-law-enforcement-and-race

In effect, "Yeah, we might have a racist cop here and there, but cops aren't really racist." Hmmmm again. Maybe. I wonder, does a cop have to enunciate his hatred of blacks before he can be called a racist? Does that enunciation have to be in the presence of 4 elected officials, and 6 appointed officials before it becomes official?

So, I've visited the FBI's site, and all I see are cops extending professional courtesies to cops, downplaying any problems there might be with bad cops. It almost seems that I've met more bad cops in my lifetime than the entire FBI has met in it's history!! Comforting - NOT!!

Before we put the FBI behind us, I'll point out that they, like every other law enforcement agency in the country, enshrine dead cops. Despite the fact that several professions are demonstrably more hazardous than law enforcement, every dead cop is enshrined as a hero.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2019-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty

OK - let's go elsewhere.

There are quite a large number of interesting sites decrying police violence, such as this one, which attempts to pin most, or even all, police violence on racism. Racism is a factor, of that we can all be sure, but this doesn't address my question: how many bad cops are there?

https://policeviolencereport.org/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

Statista looks interesting. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123386/convictions-police-officers-arrested-murder-charge-us/

In a fifteen year period, 2005 to 2020, they have documented 42 non-federal police convicted of crimes, ranging from reckless discharge of a firearm, right on up to murder. Not knowing the circumstances of the reckless discharge, I'm not sure that it fits into my question. Incompetence is surely reason to get rid of a cop, but it may not mean he's a "bad" cop. So, 41 convictions of real crimes in 15 years. Doesn't sound very impressive, but, 41 people licensed to kill can wreak havoc!

Unfortunately, you can only download Statista's documents if you are a paying member. Let's search some more . . .

A hit! From 2016, which is fairly recent: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cops-arrested_n_576c2e13e4b0cedfa4b9470f

A new study finds that hundreds of police officers are arrested each year for the same sorts of crimes they are supposed to be thwarting.

The study, believed to be the first of its kind, was conducted by researchers at Bowling Green State University and funded by the National Institute of Justice, which released the report this month. Researchers identified 6,724 cases involving the arrests of 5,545 sworn officers across the nation between 2005 and 2011.

That means that on average, police officers are getting arrested around 1,000 times per year.

Stinson and his co-authors broke the cases of arrest into five broad categories:

sex-related police crime (1,475 arrest cases of 1,070 sworn officers)

alcohol-related police crime (1,405 arrest cases of 1,283 sworn officers)

drug-related police crime (739 arrest cases of 665 sworn officers)

violence-related police crime (3,328 arrest cases of 2,586 sworn officers

profit-motivated police crime (1,592 cases of 1,396 officers)

Wow, that's impressive! Every year, ~1000 cops are arrested? In a nation with ~800,000 cops, roughly 1000 are arrested every year? OK, the percentage is pretty small, but still, 1000 people being victimized each year by police is a pretty serious matter!! (EDIT: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/ indicates there were only 697,000 officers in 2019)

PDF here, no paywall (long read, 671 pages total, complete with charts, graphs, and appendices): https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
  This study is a quantitative content analysis of archived news articles and court records
reporting on the arrest(s) of law enforcement officers in the United States from 2005-2011.
Police crimes are those crimes committed by sworn law enforcement officers given the general
powers of arrest at the time the offense was committed. These crimes can occur while the officer
is on or off duty and include offenses committed by state, county, municipal, tribal, or special
law enforcement agencies. Police crimes damage the occupational integrity of police, the
organizational legitimacy of the employing agency, and the overall authority and legitimacy of
the law enforcement enterprise. Three distinct but related research questions are addressed in
this study. First, what is the incidence and prevalence of police officers arrested across the
United States? Second, how do law enforcement agencies discipline officers who are arrested?
And, third, to what degree do police crime arrests correlate with other forms of police
misconduct?

So, if we stop here, we might believe that one cop in 800 is a bad cop? No . . . it's not quite that simple, is it? One Youtube video I watched on the subject, was a cop who had reached retirement age. Obviously, he had been a bad cop for all of his career, but was only busted at the end of his career. He can't be counted just once, for 2018 - he has to be counted for each of the preceding ~24 years. He WAS a bad cop, who apparently got away with his misconduct for some number of years between 1 and 24. How many people did he victimize during those years, who were powerless against him? (sorry, I'm not going searching for this particular video, but you may feel free to peruse Youtube for bad cop vids!)

This little quote seems to answer my question, whether these police arrests involve only on-duty arrests, or they include off-duty arrests. I presume that "domestic violence" is primarily an off-duty offense:

Violence-related Police Crime
  Policing is often violent. A major problem identified in this study, however, is officerinvolved domestic violence. There were 961 cases of officer-involved domestic violence.

NOTE: Flipping through the numbers of various police forces, I noted some very large numbers stuck out like sore thumbs. Philadelphia, New York, and San Antonio, as examples, are Dem controlled cities. Maybe some R cities are just as bad, and I missed them?

FINAL NOTE for this journal entry. Dear Wife says I have things to do. If I wanted a nice polished journal entry, I could spend many hours or days, even weeks, chasing after more data. I'm calling it quits here - any or all of you can come down the rabbit hole yourselves. Enjoy - or not.

Must-Read Twitter Thread: Here’s Why We KNOW the 2020 Election Was Stolen

By J.D. Rucker | 9 July 2021

NOQ REPORT — Twitter is general a cesspool of bad ideas argued by people with even worse takes on those ideas. The days of being entertained by Twitter disappeared when Donald Trump and tens of thousands of conservative Twitter accounts were banned in January. Occasionally, a gem still pops up.

This is one of them. Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. Normally I post the thread in its original form, but this one is 36-Tweets long. There’s also a good chance it will be deleted because it makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it.

Here’s the first Tweet in the thread (while it’s still up) followed by the unedited text version:

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them. 2/x

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc). 3/x

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them. 4/x

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. 5/x

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake. 6/x

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen. 7/x

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying. 8/x

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year. 9/x

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin. 10/x

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper. 11/x

GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election. 12/x

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem. 13/x

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them. 14/x

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. 15/x

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. 16/x

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots. 17/x

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. 18/x

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution. 19/x

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now. 20/x

Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. 21/x

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” – but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares? 22/x

Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned. 23/x

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information. 24/x

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. 25/x

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew. 26/x

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. 27/x

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc – but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!). 28/x

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof. 29/x

Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They’ll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? 30/x

It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too. 31/x

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. 32/x

They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct. 33/x

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media. 34/x

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive. /end

As long as you’re here, check out my podcast. The most recent episode was on the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. There’s also a series on the early history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and one on Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple movement.

Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.

https://www.winterwatch.net/2021/07/must-read-twitter-thread-heres-why-we-know-the-2020-election-was-stolen/

qBittorrent has it's repository of search engines, for use with it's built-in search function. If you haven't looked recently, you won't be aware that there are some new search engines available.

I wasn't counting as I walked through the list, but I'm sure I installed 7 or more new ones this morning.

https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins

While you're looking, you might as well uninstall those that don't work anymore. Note that 1337x is marked as being slow, and interferes with other search engines, so I've removed it as well.

Don't forget to install and/or enable Jackett if you've gone this far. And then, don't forget to start Jackett!!

https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/How-to-configure-Jackett-plugin

Ehhhh, Okay. All updated, and I still can't find what I'm looking for . . . . I'll just download the "dead" torrents, and leave them. Maybe someone with the file(s) will come online in the next few days or weeks, and give it to me.