Not So Massive

Posted on by
Reply

Georgia thinks it can’t update its Dominion voting machines in time for a major election in 17 months because the task is so massive. The State’s government men and women are aware that

Dominion voting machines had significant vulnerabilities, which led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue a public advisory last year based on the findings.

But it’s too hard to fix in the time available, they claim. This is a copout.

It’d be straightforward for Georgia to switch to paper ballots and hand counting; although the time to make that switch is now, given the time required to get the relevant folks hired and trained up, along with the relevant volunteers volunteered and trained up.

This is the Georgia Governor and Secretary of State making the conscious decision to keep in place a known-to-be-not-secure voting system. This decision is made doubly bad by Georgia’s status as a swing State in closely contested national elections.

It’s Ours By Right, Dammit!

Posted on by
Reply

No Labels is looking hard at running their own President/Vice President ticket for the 2024 election. The Progressive-Democratic Party is in fury over the possibility, to the extent that its Arizona arm is going to court to try to stop No Labels from registering its candidates in that State.

It [the Arizona chapter of the Progressive-Democratic Party] filed a lawsuit in state court against No Labels alleging that the signatures we collected and the petition approved by Arizona’s secretary of state should be thrown out.

Party’s rationale—and they’re absolutely serious:

No Labels’ presence on the ballot could “make it more difficult to elect Democratic Party candidates,” and “require [the party] to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to accomplish its mission in Arizona.”

It’s Party’s God-given right to have its members elected; they shouldn’t have to compete for voters.

I won’t be surprised when if Party files a subsequent suit to do away with Arizona elections altogether on the grounds that Party shouldn’t have to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to get its members elected. Just appoint them, and save all that time and waste.

This is what Progressive-Democratic Party one-party rule looks like.

Side note: it’s only the Progressive-Democratic Party that insists on obstructing competing candidates from even competing. Republicans similarly are concerned about what a third party would do to their own candidates’ chances, but Republicans engage only in jawboning against the third party while preparing to compete against the third party’s candidates as enthusiastically as they are against Progressive-Democratic Party candidates.

More Government Intrusion

Posted on by
Reply

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) has proposed a new law that would require firearm sellers to

have a compatible gun lock available for every firearm for sale [and it] shall be unlawful for any person to offer a firearm for sale unless the person offers for sale a secure gun storage or safety device that is compatible with the firearm [and a] penalty of not more than $1,000.

This is the Progressive-Democrat politician seeking to dictate what us average Americans must have in our homes and to dictate to our private businesses what they must sell. That latter, especially, is textbook fascism: “private” enterprises may [sic] produce and sell what they wish so long as that production and sale are compatible with government diktats regarding what production and sale are permissible.

Never mind that, per the NRA (that Left-hated 2nd Amendment organization),

Firearm manufacturers already provide a lock with every gun that is sold, and anyone looking for additional gun locks can get them free through Project Childsafe, an industry program that provides free gun locks to anyone who wants one.

The NRA is being generous, though, to suggest that Rep. Tlaib isn’t educated on this topic. No, she’s a highly talented and intelligent politician, well-educated, and a member of the Elite Left. She knows full well what the firearm manufacturers do, and she’s fully conversant with Project Childsafe.

This is just another Government power grab by the Progressive-Democratic Party, as those personages keep trying to chip away at the individual liberties and duties of us average Americans.

We need to keep this sort of thing in mind through the next 17, or so, months. And beyond.

Project Childsafe can be seen here.

More Political Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

Alphabet‘s CEO Sundar Pichai strikes again. Alphabet wholly owns Google (of which Pichai also is CEO), and Google wholly owns YouTube.

Pichai has just engaged—again—in political censorship:

Social media giant YouTube took down an interview of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning kids transgender.

What makes this especially insidious is that Kennedy is a political candidate for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Pichai is actively putting his thumb on the scale in an American election by censoring one of the candidates. His excuse for this, through his carefully anonymous Google spokesperson, is this:

YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube‘s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Therein lies an additional act of censorship: no one is allowed to question vaccines (which is not what Kennedy was talking about with his allegations of those chemicals, anyway); the science is settled, Damn it!

Pichai objects to open debate and to the correction of false, mis-, or erroneous information by the provision of other information via free discussion and debate. His behavior provides yet another reason to heavily modify, or remove entirely, social media’s Section 230 protections. Social media has gotten too big, become too central to our nation’s public square, to be allowed to continue to abuse that protection.

Global Warming

Posted on by
Reply

The Average Temperature Anomaly is a measure used by many in the Global Warming Funding Industry™ to assess the degree of deviation, above or below, from some baseline temperature by some claimed cause of global warming. The most commonly claimed cause these days is the amount of atmospheric CO2. The most commonly used baseline temperature is the period from around 1856, the nominal start of the Industrial Age and its associated increase in man-caused atmospheric CO2.

This graph, via NOAA, is that Average Temperature Anomaly since 1896, when the Industrial Age was well underway. ClimDiv is an NOAA-developed climate database, and USCRN is a network of NOAA climate stations.

Doesn’t seem like there’s much there in the way of global warming….