Category Archives: Totty
Who doesn’t love pretty girls?
Rule Five Political Violence Friday
In our current-day “everything is politics” times, it seems a larger number of people are willing to use violence to gain political advantage than there have been for some time; Issues & Insights has some thoughts.
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats’ June survey of 3,543 adults has produced a lot of data noise but it also includes some useful information. Of course the media want to ring the bells over one finding in particular: an increase in the percentage those who agree that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” According to the project, in early April only 4.5% of those polled agreed with that statement. By late June, though, it had risen to (a rounded-up) 7%, “the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults.”
The media-wide implication is that the growing support for using force to put Trump back in the White House is fueled by the extremism (and dare we say “semi-fascism”?) of Republicans and MAGA followers. A prime example of this bias is found in the headline over a story in The Hill. It reads “More say violence could be necessary to restore Trump to White House.”
But as always, there’s more to the story, and there’s much more than The Hill’s implication, which should come as a surprise to no one.
Democrats’ inclination to use violence to achieve their goals was also seen in the results of other questions:
More than 16% of Democrats think force is justified to restore the federal right to abortion.
- More than 22% Democrats agree that “the use of force against the police is justified to prevent police brutality against black Americans and other minorities.”
- More than a quarter of Democrats would approve of the use of force “to protect the voting rights of Black Americans and other minorities.”
The gist of it? The Left is more willing to engage in violence to further political goals than the Right.
That anyone would have to do a “study” to determine this is just a bit ridiculous. Remember the summer of 2020, when COVID lockdowns went out the window so people could riot, loot and burn to protest the death of a misogynistic drug addict? Over a billion, maybe close to two billion, in property damage due to vandalism, arson, rioting and looting. Oh, the Left will say “but it was insured,” as thought that justifies burning people’s small businesses that they spent lifetimes building. Oh, and at least twenty-five people were killed, and around sixty thousand police officers were assaulted.
Now the Left points at the January 6th, 2021 event, which caused at most a tad under two million dollars, and the only fatality was an unarmed Air Force veteran shot in the neck by a panicked Capitol Police officer, who never faced any consequences for the act.
The AntiProfa and Black Lives Matter groups have been responsible for most of the violence. Oh, yes, there have been some arrests. But if you think it’s over, wait until next year, and watch the reaction if a Republican wins the Presidential election.
Especially if that Republican is Donald Trump.
We have some interesting times ahead.
Animal’s Hump Day News

Special programming note! Tonight I’ll be live-blogging the first GOP Presidential primary debate with some of my colleagues over at RedState, from 9PM to 11PM EDT (5PM to 7PM here in the Great Land). Join us over there for the best blow-by-blow coverage!
Now then…
On To the Links!
Presented without comment:
Gen Z is ditching bras in latest viral trend: ‘Let them be free’ https://t.co/ut6VSTvQaQ pic.twitter.com/NXiPm3vloF
— New York Post (@nypost) August 16, 2023
(We should be so lucky.)
Texas Tells the American Library Association to Go Pound Sand
Animal agriculture is here to stay.
My RedState Stuff:
The Changing Face of Conservatism
Should We Ban Electric Vehicles?
It’s Time for the GOP to Punch Back
Mike Pence Looks Forward to GOP Debates
Mary Peltola’s Fishing Failure
Is the FTC Aiming to Take out Amazon?
Ford CEO Faces Hard Sell on EV Road Trip
IRS Agent Killed in Shooting Range Accident
What San Diego Is Doing About Homeless Encampments Offers Us Lessons
Tennessee Couple Missing in Alaska for More Than a Week Found Safe
Sunday Gun Day IV – What Happened to the 10- and 16-Gauge Shotguns?
They Need Us. We Don’t Need Them.
14 American Cities Aim to Ban Meat, Dairy, Private Cars by 2030
Her Own Worst Enemy: Kamala Harris and 2024
U.S. Embassy in Belarus Advises Americans to Depart Immediately
Bill Maher: Vivek Ramaswamy Is ‘Such a Likeable Guy’ Who Could ‘Really Could Go Far’
California Contemplates Mandating Heat Pumps
Alaska Governor Dunleavy Endorses Donald Trump for President
This Week’s Idiots:
Salon’s is an idiot.
Vox’s is an idiot.
MSNBC’s Jessica Levinson is an idiot.
The Nation’s Joan Walsh is an idiot.
The Nation’s Jeet Heer (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.
Salon’s Heather Parton is an idiot.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot. And again; the second one is stupid even for Amanda Marcotte, a serial idiot.
Robert Reich (Repeat Offender Alert) remains a sawed-off runt, and an idiot.
MSNBC’s Hayes Brown (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.
This Week’s Cultural Edification:
I’m not sure what to say about this song, except that the song got a lot of radio play back in the mid-Eighties, and MTV, back when they were actually about music, played the video a fair bit. OMC was, as I recall, a one-hit wonder, but How Bizarre at least was catchy. Here it is, then – enjoy.
Saturday Gingermageddon
Rule Five Windmills Friday
The concomitant stupidity of “wind power” on grid-scale just keeps getting more and more obvious to anyone that’s paying attention. Here Issues & Insights points out some of the more obvious issues:
There are a number of problems with wind farms:
- They eat up far more land than any of the conventional forms of energy production, as well as nuclear. It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres. Bryce pointed out in a paper he wrote for the Center of the American Experiment that it would take the land equal to two entire Californias “to meet America’s current electricity needs with wind energy.”
- Due to rising costs and logistical headaches, “developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s “an industry in crisis.”
Wind turbines, writes energy consultant Ronald Stein, “are now becoming an eyesore, a hazard, and a significant environmental threat” in a policy piece that asks if wind farms generate more waste than they do electricity.
- Wind farms have to be built in open spaces where power isn’t needed. Moving the electricity to where it’s eventually used destroys the landscape in between.
- In Scotland, 16 million trees, each one of them with their names surely written on every environmentalists’ hearts, have been felled to open ground on which to build wind farms.
- The late physicist David MacKay, who said “you know I love wind turbines,” believed that building wind farms is “actually a waste of money.”
Even the government is an obstacle. Reason reported not quite a year ago that “construction on what could be a massive offshore wind farm in Massachusetts has been held up for years due to” federal reviews.
Now, author and reformer Michael Shellenberger is documenting how off-shore wind farms are killing whales. Have a look:
Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022. This is not normal.
The government says it’s not because of the wind industry’s high decibel pile driving & boat traffic in previously pristine waters. They’re lying. And now we have the proof. pic.twitter.com/7BcVrgz04X
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 13, 2023
If nothing else turned the public off of these massive wind-turbine farms – aside from the expense (oh, and all the materials that can only be sourced from fossil fuels) and the difficulty in disposing of the turbine blades when their useful lives are up, is the massive footprint these things require to develop power on a scale that’s even remotely adequate for the power grid.
This isn’t just a boondoggle. It is fraud on a massive scale. Look at that first bullet point: “It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres.”
But there’s hope:
(Energy author Robert) Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.
Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”
Let’s hope this trend continues. We live in a time where the nation is trillions in debt, our fiscal rating keeps slipping, Congresscritters of both parties have abandoned even the pretense of fiscal restraint, and yet the Imperial and state governments keep subsidizing and promoting this horseshit.
Enough is enough. Let’s hope the resistance to this keeps on growing. If private businesses or homeowners want to try wind and/or solar on their own property, fine; they are welcome to do so at their own cost, then we’ll see if they can prove efficiency or even capability in the market place. There are in fact a few people wop know here in the Great Land who are off-grid and depend on solar (and Diesel generators) for power. That’s fine – their choice, their responsibility.
But it’s pretty well established now that grid-scale wind power isn’t viable.
Animal’s Hump Day News

In Alaska news: We have a Red-Backed Vole living under our workshop building. I’ve seen her a couple of times, making the scurrying crossing from the workshop to glean seeds from under the bird feeder at the front of our office building. I know it’s a “she” because the other day she had her two little bitty baby voles with her.

Voles are basically short-tailed mice. Mice (the clean outdoor kind, not the nasty invading-your-house kind) are generally pretty good neighbors. They are clean, they feed mostly on seeds but will snack on bugs if the opportunity permits. And mice in general are Nature’s Nachos – everything eats them. Our little local Cooper’s Hawk prefers birds but will pick up a mouse if it can; and our resident Least Weasel, Herman the Ermine, prefers mice above all things. But in spite of that, there are still mice around. They’re great survivors.
Now then…
On To the Links!
A possible new human ancestor.
Stossel: The ‘Consensus’ on Climate Change Is ‘Manufactured’
I’m coming around to the idea of shooting looters.
I don’t know who “50 Cent” is, but he’s right.
My RedState Stuff:
Richard Nixon – A Tragedy in Five Acts
BREAKING: Multiple FBI Field Offices Targeting Catholics as Domestic Terrorists
Newsom vs. DeSantis Debate Prep: The Smart Move for Gavin Newsom Is to Bow Out
Fifth Circuit Strikes Down Law Forbidding Gun Ownership by Drug Users
Civil Forfeiture Is Legalized Theft
Sen. Joe Manchin Reportedly ‘Thinking Seriously’ About Dropping out of Democrat Party
BREAKING: Illinois Supreme Court Upholds Semi-Auto Gun Ban
Environmentalists, Misanthropy, and Hypocrisy
Judge Rules Some California Students Can Sue State Over Learning During School Lockdowns
Pence, Other GOP Candidates Split on Abortion Law Over Federal Vs. State
US Government Credit Is Sinking, But Spending Is Still Running Wild
Sunday Gun Day III – Great Guns for Small Game
I’m Not Saying It’s Aliens, But in 2027 It Will Be Aliens
Social Security Reform is Too Little, Too Late
In Energy Production, Coal Is Still King
The Best States to Live In, 2023 – Really?
This Week’s Idiots:
Salon’s Olivia Luppino is an idiot.
MSNBC’s Max Burns is an idiot.
The New Republic’s is an idiot.
Vox’s is an idiot.
The Nation’s Amy Littlefield is an idiot.
Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.
This Week’s Cultural Edification:
I’m not a fan of modern heavy metal music. I find it too formulaic, it all seems to sound the same, feature the same few guitar riffs, and all the lead singers sound the same, alternating between grunts and squalls like a cat whose tail was caught in a door.
But when my son-in-law, who is a big metal fan, sent me a link to a video by some group called the Texas Hippie Coalition and their song Pissed Off And Mad About It, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my current attitudes towards the Imperial government and the state of our country. Here, let me know what you think.
Saturday Gingermageddon
Rule Five Failing Bidenomics Friday
President Biden(‘s handlers) have been going on a lot lately about the supposed successes of what they are calling “Bidenomics.” The trouble is that they are completely full of shit. The Biden(‘s handlers) economic plan is an utter failure.
“Trickle-down economics has never worked.”
That’s what President Joe Biden says any time he’s talking about economic policy. Assuming our Octogenarian-in-Chief knows what he’s talking about, he’s guilty of what psychiatrists call projection.
Because it’s Bidenomics that has failed everywhere it’s been tried. At home. Abroad. Throughout history. And right now in states across the U.S.
Earlier this week in our What We’re Reading column, we linked to a multitude of stories that had been published detailing how Biden’s approach to economic policy — high taxes, heavy regulation, attacks on the rich and businesses, coddling criminals, and Biden-style graft and corruption — is ruining cities and states across the country (‘Blue-State’ Model Gets An ‘F’).
For years we have been documenting how Red states — conservative states that follow the pro-growth policies Biden derides as “trickle down” — have vastly outperformed Blue states. They suffered less during COVID because they didn’t embrace the left’s lockdown mania. They recovered faster because they rejected Biden’s get-paid-for-not-working policies.
Joe Biden has been a serial liar throughout his political career (not that he’s ever had any other career; like all too many Imperial City types, the guy’s never done an honest day’s work in his life) but this is particularly egregious, as too many ordinary folks are suffering under the consummate stupidity of leftist economic policies. But there are bright spots.
For years we have been documenting how Red states — conservative states that follow the pro-growth policies Biden derides as “trickle down” — have vastly outperformed Blue states. They suffered less during COVID because they didn’t embrace the left’s lockdown mania. They recovered faster because they rejected Biden’s get-paid-for-not-working policies.
(See, for example, Say, Looks Like That Supply-Side Stuff Works After All, The Great Divorce? 2.6 Million Fled Counties That Voted For Biden, and The Results Are In: Red States Won The COVID Fight, Hands Down.)
But wait! There’s more!
Biden’s precious middle class is also doing worse in Bidenomics states.
The Boston Herald noted last week how wages grew by just 2.6% in New York and 2.9% in California — which have gone full Bidenomics — but were up 9.1% in Florida and 7.7% in Texas. What’s more, “Florida and Texas both outperformed California and New York in manufacturing, finance, information, retail, and professional services.”
Of course, if you want evidence of the failure of Bidenomics, you only have to look at what it’s produced since Biden came into office. Falling wages. Sky high inflation. Financial stress. Our I&I/TIPP poll finds that most Americans agree that Bidenomics is not working.
And if you want evidence of the success of “trickle-down” economics, look at the Reagan boom, or the pre-COVID Trump boom. Or look internationally, where you find a direct relationship between low taxes and less regulation and other indicators of economic freedom — which all get lumped into the “trickle down” epithet — and general prosperity.
Biden apparently hopes that Bidenomics will be his salvation come next November. We hope it takes him down before it takes the entire nation down.
We can hope it takes down the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration and a whole passel of Congressional Democrats as well, but it remains to be seen whether the votes of the economic literates will outweigh the votes of those seeking Free Shit. But the other guys, the Republicans, need to offer something as well, instead of just slamming the Dems. Pw0ning the libz is fun, but you have to be the alternative, not just the attack dog.
What should that alternative be? Liberty, of course. Promise deregulation. Promise lower tax rates. Promise smaller government. Promise that people will be able to keep more of what they earned. Promise to make it harder for looters and moochers to coast in neutral. And, while you’re at it, talk about bringing order back to our major cities, and maybe eliminating some extra-Constitutional Imperial agencies.
Saturday Gingermageddon
Rule Five Lousy Mass Shooting Study Friday
Is there any limit to the degree to which “researchers” will discredit themselves to prove their woke bona fides? A new study published in JAMA Surgery suggests not.
The study, “Association Between Markers of Structural Racism and Mass Shooting Events in Major US Cities,” purportedly seeks to understand whether evidence exists that “structural racism” plays a role in mass-shooting events.
To test their theory, the researchers quantitatively examine the correlation between mass shootings and “structural racism.” They define mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people are shot, and they define “structural racism” according to various factors, including the percentage of black population in a major metropolitan area, the proportion of children living in a single-parent household, the violent crime rate, and measures of segregation and income inequality.
The definition of mass shootings looks a lot like the one the FBI uses, but the definitions of “structural racism?” Some of those might be racial, others economic, others cultural. So their initial, operating assumptions are crap.
Worse, it apparently assumes that people can’t or don’t migrate out of those areas.
The assertion that metro-area demographics are a measure of structural racism is especially problematic. It ignores the fact that the Great Migration featured millions of blacks moving from the rural South to the industrialized North in search of greater tolerance and opportunity. In other words, freedom of movement has existed for generations, and the escape from structural racism largely defines black migration in the twentieth century.
But the authors of this study don’t let the lousy definitions and ignoring of historical trends color their conclusions.
A reasonable person would conclude that this analysis fails to find a link between structural racism and mass shootings. Instead, the authors claim that demographics themselves (that is, the metro areas that black people choose to reside in) are an “imperfect” indicator for structural racism. They conclude that “structural racism appears to be associated with MSE (mass shooting event) incidence.”
In other words, “the study data didn’t support the hypothesis, so we bullshitted our way into the conclusion we wanted.” This isn’t science, this is naked, partisan propagandizing.
And, of course, the legacy media snapped it up.
The researchers’ sloppiness didn’t get in the way of media coverage for the study. CNN plugged a story on it within hours of its publication. It’s only a matter of time, no doubt, before judges cite the study in their rulings or policymakers use it to craft the “science-based” policies that progressive activists purportedly favor. This study’s proper function, however, is to serve as a prime example of the medicalization of social issues and public health’s growing penchant for policy-based evidence-making.
Read the whole article. Bookmark it. Make notes. It’s a good counter to a bad study.
Too much of the social sciences and medical worlds no longer have even a nodding acquaintance with actual, evidence-driving-the-conclusion science. The study, by the way, was carried out by these supposed medical professionals:
Michael Ghio, MDJohn Tyler Simpson, MDAyman Ali, MD;
This isn’t science, and it certainly isn’t medicine. This is naked propagandizing, it’s unworthy of anyone purporting to be a medical professional, and it’s sure as hell unworthy of anyone professing to be a scientist. But just watch, True Believers, and be aware and ready to respond, because this “study” will end up in the quivers of the would-be gun-grabbers, and the Second Amendment community should stand ready to refute it.
Fortunately Ian Kingsbury has given us some ammo (hah) of our own to counter this crap.