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Sleepy Joe the lawyer
At issue is New York law regarding carry permits. All 50 states have carry permits - in most cases concealed carry. Some states have "shall issue" laws, dictating that the county sheriff shall issue a permit to an applicant, unless that applicant is somehow disqualified for other reasons. "May issue" laws, on the other hand, say that the county sheriff decides whether he will issue the permit. And that, children, opens the door to all sorts of corruption and graft. For example.
So, the case has worked it's way up to the Supreme Court in
No. 20-843
In the Supreme Court of the United States
NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSOCIATION, INC., ET AL., PETITIONERS
v.
KEVIN P. BRUEN, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS
SUPERINTENDENT OF NEW YORK STATE POLICE, ET AL.
The gun control administration's brief can be boiled down to a single paragraph in which I've bolded the critical words.
Text, history, and tradition will not conclusively determine the validity of some laws—especially new measures adopted to address new conditions. In such cases, courts should apply the judicial method reflected in the relevant history and tradition by asking whether the challenged law is a reasonable regulation—or, to put it in modern terms, whether the law survives intermediate scrutiny.
WTF does that intermediate scrutiny even mean?
Well, you can read the verbose version, or you can read the TLDR:
Intermediate scrutiny means that government has already made up it's mind what they are going to do, so they really don't have to hold their proposals up to real scrutiny. Or, alternatively, intermediate scrutiny means that Sleepy Joe doesn't want the Supreme Court to judge the case under strict scrutiny because the government's position would obviously fail.
Strict scrutiny
Primary tabs
Overview
Strict scrutiny is a form of judicial review that courts use to determine the constitutionality of certain laws. Strict scrutiny is often used by courts when a plaintiff sues the government for discrimination. To pass strict scrutiny, the legislature must have passed the law to further a "compelling governmental interest," and must have narrowly tailored the law to achieve that interest.Strict scrutiny is the highest standard of review which a court will use to evaluate the constitutionality of governmental discrimination. The other two standards are intermediate scrutiny and rational basis review.
Application
Equal Protection
Strict scrutiny will often be invoked in an equal protection claim. For a court to apply strict scrutiny, the legislature must either have passed a law that infringes upon a fundamental right or involves a suspect classification. Suspect classifications include race, national origin, religion, and alienage.Other Applications
The application of strict scrutiny, however, extends beyond issues of equal protection. Restrictions on content-based speech, for instance, are to be reviewed under the strict scrutiny standard as well. Notably, the Supreme Court has refused to endorse the application of strict scrutiny to gun regulations, leaving open the question of which precise standard of review is to be employed when addressing the Second Amendment.
It is exceedingly odd that past Supreme Courts - we might say liberal Supreme Courts - have seen fit to judge most Bill of Rights issues with strict scrutiny, but have singled out one of the rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights to be judged differently.
What is needed in this case, is for the Court to definitively spell out that 2nd Amendment issues must be judged in the same manner as any of the other rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
Liberals like Sleepy Joe have one thing right: There are legitimate limits on gun rights. No right comes without limits on it. But, if and when government places a restriction on any rights spelled out in the Bill or Rights, those restrictions must meet the requirements of strict scrutiny.
Want to disqualify violent criminals from exercising their rights? Fine - spell out very explicitly that the law is tailored to exclude violent criminals. Want to disqualify the insane, and/or otherwise unbalanced people? Again, spell it out. Want to disqualify Muslims? Again, spell it out - and don't even act a little bit surprised when strict scrutiny strikes your law down. Want to disqualify poor people? That's right - spell it out. And, again, don't act even a little bit surprised when it is struck down.
And, now, the part you've been breathlessly waiting for: If the law is meant to keep black people from possessing guns, then the law should spell out it's intent. And, once again, it shold surprise no one that the law is struck down.
What's that? Some of you didn't see that last paragraph coming? Oh, sweet Jesus, you've got a lot of history to catch up on. Gun control in the United States has always been racist. In the past ~140 years lawmakers have used imaginative language to disguise the fact that their laws are racist, but the results are always racist. Witness the fact that the strictest gun laws are always enacted in jurisdictions where black people are a very large minority, or possibly the majority. A Democrat's worst nightmare is an armed black populace.
Geo-fenced e-bikes
BMW’s game-changing e-bikes could revolutionise how we get to work
The BMW i Vision AMBY and BMW Motorrad Vision AMBY are two concept e-bikes that have a maximum speed depending on where you are, enforced by geofencing.
That means they will power you up to 25km/h (15.5mph) on bike paths, up to 45km/h (28mph) on city roads, and 60km/h (37mph) on multi-lane highways outside the city.
While they're purely theoretical at this stage, the GPS tech they would require is already pretty much in place. BMW’s hybrid cars, for instance, automatically switch into all-electric driving mode when entering low emission zones.
Presented by BMW as part of the International Mobility Show in Munich, the i Vision AMBY is the lighter and sleeker of the two, at around 30kg, and dubbed the “first high-speed pedelec for urbanists”.
Clean Fusion... Bomb
Ripple: An Investigation of the World's Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design
Edit: New full text source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dominic
I found this on accident after seeing the Housatonic ~10 megaton blast on YouTube.
TL;DR: Some of the last nuclear weapon atmospheric tests conducted by the United States included an advanced "Ripple" design, which can enable high (nearly 100%) fusion efficiency and yield-to-weight ratio.
The relevance today is questionable, although it could be useful for asteroid deflection.
What is the significance of the name Ripple? Up to this point, Livermore's standard practice had been to name all thermonuclear secondary designs after wind instruments; examples include the Bassoon, Cello, Fife, Oboe, Calliope, and Tuba devices. The departure in naming Ripple underscores the radical nature of the design. The word “Ripple” is clearly descriptive of the non-linear pulse shape that is key to the concept.
It was only by accident that the Ripple concept was even tested at all. The schedule for the Dominic test shots had been set before April, with no time for inclusion of a test device that had yet to be designed, let alone built. However, repeated failures of the missile-borne high-altitude-effects shots being conducted at Johnston Island resulted in the extension of the Christmas Island test operations from June into July. This provided the opening Livermore needed.
[...] 1.) The “clean” 25-megaton Russian test of 5 August 1962 used a secondary with a lead tamper in place of a fissile tamper.
This same technique was used in all U.S. “clean” thermonuclear weapons from 1956 on. Referred to simply as the “materials substitution method,” it resulted in a yield reduction (and therefore efficiency reduction) of 50 percent or more. This means the device was intentionally, not inherently, “clean.” The nature of the Soviet test was highlighted in the conversation to contrast it with the technology behind the Ripple concept, which, as Seaborg stated, did not use a lead-encased secondary to achieve its high fusion to fission ratio or “cleanliness.” This leads directly to the next point.
2.) The Ripple concept produced “an inherently clean system of maximum efficiency.”
This means that the Ripple device was not “clean” because it was intended to be “clean”; rather, it was “clean” because that is how the concept worked. “Maximum efficiency” implies very high fusion fuel burn-up. Typical fusion burn efficiency for thermonuclear weapons—to this day—is not much more than 30 percent and is far lower for weapons without fissile tampers; that is, conventionally designed “clean” weapons. The extremely high yield-to-weight ratios that the Ripple program aimed at would require both high-efficiency burn and a very high fusion percentage to attain such ratios at the given weights.
[...] These statements both confirm the viability of the Ripple concept and provide some actual numbers and reference points from which to determine the projected performance of a weaponized device. With the primary as the only source of fissile material in the “inherently clean” Ripple design, the device would be around 99.9 percent clean; for all practical purposes, a pure fusion device. The yield-to-weight ratio would be more than twice that of the most efficient high-yield weapon constructed, Livermore's own three-stage B-41 bomb. The B-41 had a device weight of 9,300 pounds and a maximum (untested) “conventional” yield of 25 megatons, giving a yield-to-weight ratio of close to 6 kt/kg. More than twice this ratio, or approximately 12 to 15 kt/kg, would correspond accurately to the quoted yields of 35 to 40 megatons for the Titan II warhead. Given the admittedly overbuilt and far from optimized devices tested, we can reasonably assume that even higher yield-to-weight ratios would have been attainable if testing in the atmosphere (or deep space?) had continued.
[...] The success and potential of the Ripple program, as defined by experimental validation and analysis, has been clearly established. The following facts put this potential into perspective. When compared to the most modern and powerful ballistic missile warhead in the arsenal today—the 475-kiloton W-88—the Ripple concept offers at a minimum ten times the yield-to-weight ratio and does it “clean.” The Ripple concept as it stood in early 1963 was at the very beginning of its development cycle as a potential weapon system. Given further development through testing and complete computational analysis, the Teller-Brown prediction of 50 megatons for a 6,000-pound device by 1965 may have been within reach. In today's technological environment, after nearly 60 years of continual ICF research and petaflop computing, the potential gains for the Ripple concept are staggering.
In our conversation about where the Ripple concept stands today, Foster asked me to consider one use to which it could be ideally suited: near earth object (NEO) deflection. The success of nuclear NEO deflection is directly proportional to device yield and weight. The higher the yield, the shorter lead time required for interception. The tremendous yield-to-weight advantages of the Ripple concept over anything available is unquestionable. Furthermore, the fact that the Ripple is “clean” increases its relative effectiveness, as neutrons—produced in copious amounts by fusion reactions—are the most effective mechanism for NEO deflection or destruction in the vacuum of space. These unique characteristics might make the Ripple concept the ideal nuclear asteroid deflection device. Would this advantage be enough to overcome the issues associated with development of such a device in today's global climate? Unlike all nuclear explosive devices before or after, the Ripple concept came out of the quest for clean energy, and it is perhaps only fitting that its best use would be a peaceful one.
ask Soylent
I'm upgrading the CPUs on my server. They are no faster, but they have more cores, and better features, including (claimed) better memory controllers.
Opteron 6134 are being upgraded to Opteron 6276
Image of one of my CPUs here: https://ibb.co/8BQ2wQw
It took several attempts to get the spots to show up in a photograph, and I don't know why that one finally worked. The light/dark contrast is reversed, however - the round spots are darker than the the surrounding lighter colored contacts when I look with the naked eye.
I have on my workbench 8 used CPUs which I have just finished cleaning with rubbing alcohol, to remove old thermal paste. The lid sides are all moderately clean, dullish aluminum looking lids, and the gold contacts on the other side. Of concern, are discolorations on the golden contact side. My cheap cameras won't capture what I'm seeing, so I'll just describe it:
There is a pattern, 5 long by 4 wide, of circles, just about the size of a pencil eraser. All 8 CPUs have this pattern, some more clearly seen than others. On one CPU, the pattern is almost absent, with only about four of these spots barely visible in one quadrant. The rest vary from all 20 circles being pretty clearly visible, down to about 10 being clearly visible, the rest only visible if you tilt it just right, and squint.
OK, just for fun, I took one of them, and looked at it under flourescent lighting, then under LED lighting, and finally under incandescent lighting. The pattern stands out pretty consistently under all three lighting sources.
Searching for images on Duckduckgo, I can almost see this pattern on some of the thumbnails, but when I click on the actual images, they seem to disappear. Am I the victim of some crazy optical illusion?
Has anyone seen this, and know what it is? Would I be seeing it with new CPUs? When choosing which CPUs to drop into the sockets, should I pick the CPUs with the clearest markings, or those with the faintest markings? Do they mean anything at all?
Also, two of the CPUs have additional smudges, which I presume to be fat-finger smudge marks, left by whoever installed the CPUs into their previous homes. Those are probably just body oil left behind, which cooked into the die over years of use.
UPDATE:
CPUs are installed, and seem to be doing exactly what they are supposed to do. I chose the 4 with the most similar, most uniform markings on them. Actually, I installed them twice - first time the machine failed to post. Supermicro's page said that I needed to update my BIOS to use 6300 series CPUs, so I assumed that 6200 would be good. Wrong. Put my old CPUs back in, update BIOS with the only option available, replace the newer CPUs, and held my breath. I had to change BIOS settings, but when finished, the machine went right to the desktop.
Whatever those markings are, they won't be seen again any time soon!
why you don't trust "fact checkers"
Factchecking the media’s antigun factcheckers
For today’s media, factchecking is an entry-level job.Most media factcheckers are liberal, woke, in their early 20s and politically biased. Most have never even touched a weapon, yet they wade into gun and Second Amendment issues as though they’re the reincarnation of Jeff Cooper or Bill Jordan. But unlike these distinguished gentlemen, the factcheckers usually get it wrong.
This is the problem, because even though most factcheckers are fresh out of college and lack any real journalism experience, they wield tremendous power. If a factchecker determines that a progun story is false or misleading, social media giants like Facebook or Twitter will limit its reach and the story won’t be seen on any feeds. It will go largely unread. That’s a lot of power for a kid who’s usually not old enough to even purchase a firearm.
The legacy media’s sudden obsession with factchecking wasn’t caused by any journalistic desire to seek and publish the truth. For at least one media giant, it was a financial decision.
Case in point: Gannett’s factcheckers for hire
In March 2020, Gannett announced it was partnering with Facebook to “identify misinformation.”
“As a media organization with unparalleled local-to-national reach, we take our commitment to providing people with truthful information very seriously, and fact-checking is integral to the journalism being done by USA TODAY and in Gannett newsrooms across the country,” Maribel Perez Wadsworth, Publisher of USA TODAY, said in a press release.
USA TODAY, Gannett’s flagship paper, created a dedicated factchecking page on their website, and assigned a managing editor to oversee the project.
Facebook was jubilant.
USA TODAY, Gannett’s flagship paper, created a dedicated factchecking page on their website, and assigned a managing editor to oversee the project.
Facebook was jubilant.
“Continuing to expand our fact-checking program is an important part of our work to fight misinformation,” Keren Goldshlager of Facebook Integrity Partnerships said in the press release. “We welcome USA TODAY to the program and value their cross-country coverage and perspective on misinformation spreading at the state level.”
What the public wasn’t told – what I learned while I was still working at a Gannett newspaper – was that Facebook paid Gannett millions of dollars for the partnership. Gannett couldn’t have cared less about the “distribution of false information on social media.” They viewed this payoff as their due, because Facebook had cost them millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue. These were dollars Facebook “owed us,” Gannett editors were told. Facebook benefitted because they were able to tout that they had enlisted actual journalists as factcheckers. Most of the stories they chose were political. Many involved President Trump – many still do.
Today, Gannett’s factcheckers are young and inexperienced, since seasoned journalists want to write their own stories, rather than being a whiny hall monitor censoring other people’s work. As a result, the only folks available to fill the positions are the aforementioned kids.
Case in point: Biden’s 9mm handgun ban
During a CNN townhall July 21, Joe Biden said he wanted to ban 9mm handguns.
“The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon, whether – whether it’s a 9 mm pistol or whether it’s a rifle, is ridiculous,” Biden said. “I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things.”
The NRA wrote about Biden’s statement. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms wrote about it. House Republicans issued a statement. I wrote about it. Dozens of other progun sites wrote about it, and millions of Americans shared and discussed Biden’s comments on Facebook and other social media.
Turns out we were all wrong, according to David Funke, a 20-something factcheck reporter who covers online misinformation for USA TODAY. According to his bio, Funke previously worked for the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. He has never worked as a real journalist.
“Independent fact-checking organizations, gun policy experts and the White House have debunked the claim that Biden wants to ban 9 mm pistols,” Funke wrote. He then found an expert to agree.
“President Biden has never proposed the ban of 9 mm pistols or other caliber pistols,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, reportedly told Funke in an email. “He certainly has never taken pistols away from people who are legal gun owners.”
Professor Webster is not exactly the unbiased expert Funke would have you believe.
Webster is also the Bloomberg Professor of American Health and a Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management. His areas of study include “the prevention of gun violence, gun policy, gun acquisition and carrying by underage youth and other prohibited persons, intimate partner violence, and youth violence prevention. He developed one of the first courses on violence prevention in a school of public health. Dr. Webster was also co-editor and contributor to Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy and Evidence and Analysis.”
Webster actually believes background checks will keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
“When criminals get guns, they get them from friends, family, or from an underground market source. Without universal background check requirements, there is little deterrent to selling guns to criminals or gun traffickers. State laws mandating universal background checks deter the diversion of guns to criminals,” Webster wrote in in a June 26, 2014 article titled: “Guns Kill People. And If We Had Universal Background Checks, They Wouldn’t Kill So Many.”
An examination of Funke’s factchecking topics reveals he is as biased as his so-called expert.
Funke’s stories have targeted: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Donald Trump, QAnon, election fraud, anti-vaxxers, gun owners and the NRA, while providing cover for Biden, Kamala Harris, mask mandates, mandatory vaccinations and Dr. Fauci.
Funke did not respond to several requests seeking his comments for this story.
“I’m a reporter/editor who fact-checks and writes about online misinformation for USA TODAY. When I’m not debunking viral memes, tracking disinformation or editing fact checks, I’m probably cycling, binge-reading or walking my hounds,” his LinkedIn page states.
Politics, not science
Factchecking is nothing new. For more than 100 years newspapers, and especially magazines, have employed factcheckers, although they operated behind the scenes, before stories were published. They weren’t public-facing like their counterparts are today, and they certainly never wrote bylined stories.
Today’s factchecking process is far from scientific – keep in mind they factcheck editorials, opinion pieces, satire and even memes.
Once a checker finds a story they don’t like, usually because it offends their leftwing politics, they call a likeminded source or two, get a couple quotes and then, as young Mr. Funke demonstrated, label the entire story false. To be clear, these are judgement calls by young reporters of stories they cherry-picked themselves.
Once the story is published, it’s not a kid like Funke saying the story is wrong, it’s now USA TODAY, the Washington Post or the Associated Press labeling it false. In Funke’s case, millions of Americans heard Biden say he wanted to ban 9mm pistols, yet a 20-something reporter and an anti-gun professor concluded we were all wrong. The gun banners know this, and they tout every progun story the factcheckers label false. They use them as ammunition in their calls for more antigun laws and regulations.
There are other concerns.
In a scientific paper published in January, two journalism scholars found that for more than one-third of all factchecking stories published by PolitiFact that involved a “complex proposition” – statements that involved multiple claims – PolitiFact assigned only one truth rating to the entire statement, rather than singling out the false portion of what was said. “This is problematic as the reader might misinterpret the truthfulness of an individual claim. PolitiFact also checks claims that we considered uncheckable,” the authors noted. Labeling a complex statement as entirely false, is, again, cherry-picking and deceptive.
The “uncheckable” stories the authors referenced are clearly opinion pieces. For example, if I write a column that says guns save lives, the factcheckers may not agree with my opinion, but the column is not false. It is my opinion. Labeling opinions as false makes even less sense than factchecking memes.
The new censors
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty more innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
Malcolm X said that of the news media in the 1960s, and it’s even more true today. He’d be shocked by the political powerhouse today’s media has become.
Nowadays, the antigun left – aided and abetted by their supporters in the legacy media – are using factcheckers to shut down any speech they disagree with. That’s censorship, pure and simple, but they don’t care. They consider anything they find offensive false, untrue, a lie, something that needs to be concealed from the public. They consider the public nothing but a bunch of ignorant rubes who need to be shielded from offensive statements, because they’re too stupid to decide for themselves what is true and what is false. The media considers it their duty to be society’s sole arbiter of the truth. I’ve always considered this elite, ivory-tower and paternalistic attitude one of the media’s greatest failings.
Readers should be able to decide the truth for themselves. They don’t need it rammed down their throat, especially by kids who are barely old enough to shave. In short, the ability to make up one’s own mind is freedom, and we all know how the antigun left feels about freedom.
Today’s media has short-circuited one of journalism’s most basic tenets, which says the best way to counter any offensive speech is by more speech. Unfortunately, if the speech involves guns or gunowners, today’s media prefers to censor rather than debate.
https://www.saf.org/factchecking-the-medias-antigun-factcheckers/
Show of hands: Who thinks that biased "fact checkers" are only used to push the gun control controversy? Yes children, the above applies to all so-called "fact checkers", on every issue which requires "fact checking". You're constantly being lied to, on every issue that matters.
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
― Pravin Lal
Gab Receives A Letter From Congress
Gab Receives A Letter From Congress
By Andrew Torba August 27, 2021Yesterday evening Gab received a letter from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Protest at the United States Capitol.
You can read the letter here. PDF
By way of further background about our company, Gab exists to promote freedom of speech, by which we mean all speech which is protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. No more, no less.
Accordingly we have a zero-tolerance policy towards threats of violence and unlawful speech. As to controversial but nonetheless legal speech we believe, as Justice Brandeis did, that “sunlight is the best disinfectant, electric light the most efficient policeman.”
We have been boycotted by virtually every company in Silicon Valley because of our adherence to this moderation policy. In their zeal to bend to “woke” political agendas or outside pressure groups, our contemporaries in the Valley forget the social importance of letting off steam and of exposing bad ideas, and bad people, to public scrutiny.
As we are a free to use online publishing platform, it is inevitable that criminal actors will seek to abuse our services, as indeed they abuse all online services.We work hard to ensure that our services are denied to these bad actors.
For example, in the lead-up to the inauguration, we were made aware of a number of accounts which sought to spread division and fear through the use of unlawful threats. All accounts of this type that have been discovered have been banned on discovery, including at least one account which published threats against a number of U.S. election officials and was the subject of significant media coverage, including media coverage which incorrectly stated that we failed to take action against the subject account.
We look forward to getting in touch with the Committee in the coming weeks especially given the recent news that the FBI has found “scant evidence that the Jan. 6 event at the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.”
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus is KingWe anticipate that responding to this letter will cost a significant amount of money for legal expenses. If you would like to help us cover these costs we would appreciate you making a donation or upgrading to GabPRO to support us.
There are more links embedded in the article, visit this link to see them all: https://news.gab.com/2021/08/27/gab-receives-a-letter-from-congress/
one billion points
I can't remember exactly when I first stumbled across distributed computing. SETI@home was the first, then came BOINC, Rosetta@home, and others. Some I ran for a short time, others I ran for quite a long time. When I came to SoylentNews, someone had started up a team at FOLDING@HOME, and I decided to join the team.
Why bother, some might ask. Well, science. Despite all the problems being exposed with the science community in recent years, science promises to find solutions to all sorts of problems. Problems such as cancer, malaria, and COVID-19. I don't have a science degree, and I don't have a laboratory to experiment in, so why not contribute computing power that might cure a disease? It costs me little, and some little bit of that computing power just might help to cure - something! If not one of the well-known diseases that plague mankind, maybe one of the more obscure conditions that make a few individual's lives miserable and/or very short.
Well, I am just about to pass 1 billion points earned for the team. To celebrate, I'm asking that some of you join the team and contribute! If you have a new computer, with a new GPU, you can contribute a lot. If you have an older machine, with or without a new GPU, you may contibute less - but every bit counts. Or, if you have a small fleet of machines at your disposal, you could be instrumental in pushing the team into the top 200 again, or even into the top 100!
Currently, SN is ranked at 392 with 3,216,120 total points. That represents a loss of rank from, I think, 220, before COVID-19 hit. On these pages you can see teams that are overtaking us, and teams that we are overtaking. In the long term, there are more teams catching up to us, than teams remaining for us to catch.
I want to emphasize that this is a team. Salutes to everyone who has contributed to SoylentNews team. On this page you can click columns to see who has contributed the most points, who is producing Points Per Day, or however you might wish to see the rankings. NCC74656 was our top contributor for several months, then he went silent. cmn32480 was our most consistent high performer, literally for years, before he stopped. TomTheFighter is a long time contributor, as is RamdomFactor and the rest.
Presently, I am the top performer - simply because I have a couple of nice GPUs that I keep running. One GeForce RTX 2070 Super, and two GeForce GTX 1650. I'll bet some of you have equal or better GPUs that could blow me away! So, I'm challenging all of you to join the team, show me up, and at the same time push the team closer to the top 100. And, let's not forget the old team mates - you can come back any time, guys!
Ooops, I think I forgot the link to my own stats! https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=699545
Civil War Time
Anti-Taliban fighters claim victories as first stirrings of armed resistance emerge
Groups of armed Afghans attacked the Taliban on Friday, driving Afghanistan's new rulers out of three northern districts, the first assault against the Islamist militants since they swept into Kabul last week and seized control of the government.
Local anti-Taliban commanders claimed in interviews they had killed as many as 30 of the group’s fighters and captured 20 in the takeover of the districts in Baghlan province, just over 100 miles north of the capital. Former Afghan service members were joined in the fight, they said, by local civilians. Images shared online showed celebrations as the red, green and black Afghan national flag — rather than the white flag of the Taliban — was raised over government buildings.
“We have ignited something that is historic in Afghanistan,” said Sediqullah Shuja, 28, a former Afghan soldier who took part in Friday’s uprising. “Taliban fighters had armored vehicles, but people threw stones at Taliban fighters and drove them out.”
“As long as we are alive,” he said, “we do not accept the Taliban’s rule.”
[...] Having been humiliated by the Taliban’s triumph, there is no appetite in the West to fund an insurgency against their rule.
Taliban officials were not immediately available for comment Friday about events in Baghlan. But a tweet from a pro-Taliban account claimed the clashes killed 15 Taliban and wounded 15, and that the Taliban was betrayed after offering amnesty to locals.
“All those who committed this crime must be killed. The doors of conversation are closed,” the tweet read.
Let's get involved.
FBI finds scant evidence U.S. Capitol attack was coordinated
August 20, 2021
9:43 PM CDT
Last Updated 3 hours agoUnited States
Exclusive: FBI finds scant evidence U.S. Capitol attack was coordinated - sourcesBy Mark Hosenball and Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
"Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. "Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."
Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster", and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.
Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.
They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.
But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.
The FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by whom.
Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said.
It was the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, forcing lawmakers and Trump's own vice president, Mike Pence, to scramble for safety.
Four people died and another died the following day, and more than 100 police officers were injured.
TRUMP'S SPEECH
Trump made an incendiary speech at a nearby rally shortly before the riot, repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and urging supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to reject Biden's victory.
In public comments last month to the Democratic-led congressional committee formed to investigate the violence, police officers injured in the mayhem urged lawmakers to determine whether Trump helped instigate it. Some Democrats have said they want him to testify.
But the FBI has so far found no evidence that he or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials.
More than 170 people have been charged so far with assaulting or impeding a police officer, according to the Justice Department. That carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
But one source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as "seditious conspiracy" to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.
Senior officials had discussed filing such charges in the weeks after the attack, the sources said.
Prosecutors have also not brought any charges alleging that any individual or group played a central role in organizing or leading the riot. Law-enforcement sources told Reuters no such charges appeared to be pending.
Conspiracy charges that have been filed allege that defendants discussed their plans in the weeks before the attack and worked together on the day itself. But prosecutors have not alleged that this activity was part of a broader plot.
Some federal judges and legal experts have questioned whether the Justice Department is letting defendants off too lightly.
Judge Beryl Howell in July asked prosecutors to explain why one defendant was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor charge carrying a maximum sentence of six months, rather than a more serious felony charge.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, which is leading the Jan. 6 prosecutions, declined to comment.
The congressional committee investigating the attack will talk with the FBI and other agencies as part of its probe.
Well, there goes the whole insurrection narrative. There can't possibly be an insurrection without conspirators conspiring, or colluders colluding, or organizers organizing. There actually has to be a plan, you know? Of course, facts mean nothing in the face of feelz.
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-evidence-100621499.html
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/fbi-january-6-capital-attack/2021/08/20/id/1033141/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fbi-scant-evidence-capitol-riot-centrally-organized-plot
https://thepostmillennial.com/fbi-scant-evidence-capitol-riot-centrally-coordinated
https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/fbi-finds-scant-evidence-u-s-capitol-attack-was-coordinated/
Sorry folks, I don't see Fox News listed in my first couple pages of search results.
Still in <strike>Saigon</strike> Kabul
The evacuation of Saigon was chaotic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1xuTJqZ20M
The evacuation of Kabul was chaotic.
Savannah asks intelligent questions. Jacob does damage control. Fiasco. Debacle. Watch the MSN video to see desperate civilians trying to get aboard the plane that is leaving.
At 1:08 we hear Sleepy Joe say, "The likelihood that we'll see the Taliban overrunning everything, and owning the whole country, is highly unlikely."
At 1:19 Joe says, "There's going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy in Afghanistan"
We abandoned our allies in Kabul, just like we abandoned them in Saigon, just like we abandoned our allies in Iraq after the first Iraqi war.
It's embarrassing as hell, but Korea was the last time we stood by our allies. Everyone else gets thrown under the bus when we get tired of fighting.
Let me repeat it again: Afghanistan should have been a punitive campaign. Go in, get bin Laden, and GTFO. Osama was the whole reason for going in, he should have been priority one from start to finish, and when the mission was accomplished, we should have bailed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCJ_ywoqdbs
Thanks, George.
Thank you Barrak.
Thank you too, Donald.
And, thank you very much, Sleepy Joe. You've had 6 months to orchestrate this withdrawal, but all you can do is blame the Afghanis.
