Category Archives: politics

Guns and Homicides

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According to The Fresno Bee:

More people are licensed to carry concealed weapons in Fresno County than any other county in California, according to data from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and the Fresno Police Department [17,400 licenses for a population of 994,000].

And

Orange County is next with 12,008 licenses [population 3.2 million].

And

Los Angeles County, with a population of more than 10 million, had only 424 permits as of last summer….

And

San Diego County [population 3.3 million] had fewer than 1,150, and Alameda County [population 1.7 million] had 186. The fewest licenses were reported in San Francisco County [population 883,000], where the state bureau reported that there were only two CCW licenses….

On the other hand, here are the homicide rates (2018 figures) for those counties:

Fresno County: 5.3 per 100,000

Orange County: 1.5 per 100,000

Los Angeles County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Diego County: 2.5 per 100,000

Alameda County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Francisco County: 5.3 per 100,000

High legal gun ownership doesn’t seem correlated at all with high homicide rates.  Quite the opposite: the trend is fewer killings as gun ownership increases.

Testing

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Boeing is going to be unable to return its 737MAX to commercial flight before 2020; the current latest guess is January, and that’s likely to slip.

Fixing the Boeing Co 737 MAX’s hazardous flight-control software and completing other steps to start carrying passengers is likely to stretch into 2020, an increasing number of government and industry officials say, even as the company strives to get its jet back into service still this year.
The situation remains fluid, no firm timeline has been established and Boeing still has to satisfy US regulators that it has answered all outstanding safety questions.
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Boeing executives, FAA engineers, and international aviation regulators have steadily expanded their safety analyses to cover a growing list of issues spanning everything from emergency recovery procedures to potentially suspect electronic components.

That pretty much says it all.  Boeing needs to stop taking short cuts—legitimate as those might seem, and are in a variety of cases—and test this aircraft from the ground up as though every component in the control system were newly developed and never before tested.  “Every,” here, means physical components, electronic components, and software.  And pilots: their understanding of and interaction with the control systems, and with their training and operating manuals, needs to be evaluated de novo, also, as the Ethiopian crash suggests.

Too much of this stuff have not interacted with each other before in this particular aircraft, and even those components of subsystems and those subsystems themselves that have interacted within themselves have not, necessarily, interacted with other components and subsystems.

It would, in fact, be a good idea to do this from-the-ground-up retesting as a matter of routine whenever there’s a major software or hardware update to the aircraft.  Those updates create a nearly new aircraft, and accumulating changes in performance, however subtle or seemingly minor, can falsify a number of underlying assumptions and add up to large failures.

In the present case, the bit-by-bit testing is not saving much money, either.

The Four

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Much is made of the racism supposedly imbued in President Donald Trump’s recent tweets (hint: there isn’t any).

But much is ignored of the racism inherent in the words of four freshman Congresswomen: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Rashida Tlaib (D, MI), Ilhan Omar (D, MN), and Ayanna Pressley (D, MA). Here’s Tlaib, providing a canonical example of those four’s blatant racism on last Tuesday’s CBS This Morning. In speaking of their relationship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Tlaib said

Acknowledge the fact that we are women of color, so when you do single us out, be aware of that and what you’re doing, especially because some of us are getting death threats, because some of us are being singled out because of our backgrounds, because of our experiences and so forth.

Because the first thing of importance in their minds is their skin color.  Not that they’re Congresspersons who happen to be women and who happen to have brown or black skin.  Not that they represent a constituency in their home districts.  Not even that they’re Americans.

No. What’s most important to them, all that’s important to them, is that they’ve black or brown.

It’s hard to get more racist than that.

That business about death threats, being singled out because of their backgrounds, “and so forth?” It’s been Republicans and Conservatives against whom such threats and singling-out have actually been carried out.  It’s been Conservatives who’ve been viciously attacked, for instance in Portland where the Progressive-Democrat mayor instructed his police force to stand down while the attacks went in—including during the assault on a Conservative journalist.  It’s been a Republican Congressman who was shot and seriously wounded, along with several others, for no other reason than that he, and they, are Republicans and Conservatives.

These four Congresswomen should be ashamed of their racism.  But they don’t have the grace, even for embarrassment.

Campaign Spending vs Intake

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates are spending more money than they’re collecting through campaign donations.

Eleven of the Democratic presidential campaigns, including former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper spent more than they raised in the most recent three months.
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How quickly the 24 Democratic contenders are burning through cash seven months ahead of the first primary caucuses and elections is as important as how much they are bringing in.

Of course, they have to in order to stay/get competitive in the race.

This is a microcosm of what we can expect from a Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Congress and White House.

Because, of course there’s always a “reason” for the Federal government to spend more than its revenue collections.

Racially Charged Tweets

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That’s how many describe some tweets that President Donald Trump sent out a few days ago, when he suggested that some Congresswomen “go back” to their troubled origins.

Except that that’s not all that he said.  Here’s the middle tweet of the three (the other two are at the link):

 ….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

Read that carefully.  Trump has suggested that the Congresswomen go and help solve the problems—and then return and instruct us in how to solve ours.

Being willing to accept guidance from minority women, however bluntly he put it, is hardly racist.

Except in the fetid imaginations of Progressive-Democratic Congressmen and -women and the NLMSM that shills for them.

Oh, regarding that “go back where you came from” bit: where I grew up, in the Midwest, that phrase certainly did have a dog whistle meaning.  But that was just one of the phrase’s meanings; it also had a much more innocuous, if stern, meaning.  It simply suggested that if a transplant from New York, or California, or “the South,” or Texas, or… didn’t like it here, if they insisted on demanding changes to the way us locals did things so that we better matched where they’d just come from, they should go back to New York, or California, or “the South,” or Texas, or…. Lately, too, it was New York transplants in Florida and New Mexico who were especially obnoxious about the changes they demanded.

Such transplants were so advised without any thought of their color or ethnicity–or religion or gender.

It’s illustrative that Progressive-Democrats and their press shills have fixed on the one, to the exclusion of the other.