Politics Discussion

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1126955264605704192

#12320 I agree with Elliot. What's your point?

Sunny and Doug on political coults

https://youtu.be/XpJBwOSwzcI

You can skip the first 15~20 minutes

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1127677798787588096

I tweeted:

If gender doesn’t matter, why does it matter which gender you identify as? Trans-activists are sexists who judge people by their gender, contrary to the prior activism that downplayed gender. Also note the parallels to race issues.

#12390 It's technically possible if you assume people have free internet access. That doesn't make it realistic to get a lot of people using it, or make it convenient and user friendly, etc.

Also to get started people will need to do something like download the app from a website (which is not decentralized and relies on some webhost and domain registrar, and maybe cloudflare or some other service to deal with DDOSes. Or they could put it on github or some other site, but then that site could remove it).

And who makes the app and decides how it works? Some small, central group. Yes it could be open source and possible to fork, but that doesn't solve the problems well.

Gab made a centralized (their own database server) tool to enable commenting on any webpage. So even if the page doesn't have comments, or censors the comments, you can comment with Gab's tool and then other users of Gab's tool can see your comment and reply (if they go to the same webpage, or if they look at a list of recent comments or do a search for comments). I already thought that was not user friendly and would have a hard time catching on, but then Mozilla and Google won't let Gab distribute the browser extension, so now Gab wants to fork their own browser, which I think is an awful idea and far more user unfriendly.

I think, currently, political improvement may be a more viable way to improve the situation than a technological solution.

#12366 Anti-Globalism is the greatest anti-Semitism.

https://voat.co/v/politics/3230478

Poles have published the Red Cross report on the Nazi concentration camps that claims 271,301 people were killed, not 6 million.

https://mises.org/wire/tucker-carlson-and-aoc-are-wrong-about-christianity-and-usury

Tucker Carlson, who says Bernie and AOC are right re max interest caps (very similar to price controls), is not the hero who will save us.

solid article btw. has info about the history of usury. fits with what i read (in more detail, with more quotes and sources) in Rothbard's history of economic thought (which the article quotes).

it's a good point that before there was much commerce, a major type of loan was for desperate poor ppl who need it for food and shelter. in that case, Christianity advocates charity (or if you ask for your money back, at least don't ask for extra). but the christian idea of charity doesn't really have much to do with loans to businessmen.

today, most loans aren't to pay for a meal. even some payday loans are used on luxuries. and what about payday loans to let someone pay rent or eat? payday lenders are kind enough to offer and option to people that *no one* (not the payday lender nor any church nor friends nor relatives nor anyone else*) wanted to give charity to. that's helpful.

Long Milo Yiannopoulos article trashing people involved in making and editing Lauren Southern's documentaries. They committed crimes (like fraud and stealing lots of money) and betrayed the right. They previously fucked with Tommy Robinson at length. Milo suggests that Lauren probably knew what was going on and was somehow OK with it, and also that she has been sleeping with a bunch of right wing guys to get career and script help (and that she doesn't make much of her own material) while also lying about tradcon stuff publicly. Suggests Lauren recently retired to try to dodge the backlash. Also talks about Ezra Levant and others handling stuff badly.

Total mess. I would *not* recommend reading the whole article. It's a bit repetitive, kinda disorganized, and very long. But I'd recommend reading/skimming a bit to get the idea if you were interested in some of these ppl.

https://www.dangerous.com/50638/say-farewell-to-the-klepto-queens-of-the-british-far-right/

link for tweet in previous post https://twitter.com/AAPSonline/status/1138186118061408256

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4280113&mc=50&forum_id=2#38368145

#12751 Boo hiss.

I like the pinterest whistleblower. I like his attitudes and what he says[1]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuX87JFzLFc

I wonder if any of it is coached by Veritas (or by anyone else), or how much he prepped, or whether he got the interview questions in advance.

[1] I don't like his goal of banning abortion, but I understand it some. I dislike the prochoice activists more. People on both sides are awful at science and reason. If you have no clue about science or reason, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.

I know that isn't the reason he'd endorse. He'd claim to know that life really does begin at conception or some religious nonsense along those lines.

But meanwhile the pro-choice activists know nothing about science and are totally sure of themselves, just like they are with everything else. And they shouldn't be. They are irrational fools pretending to be smart. They're dangerous. They are confident about abortion and evolution (where they happen to be right) and also about Marxism, white privilege, affirmative action, minimum wage, socialized medicine, immigration, global warming, paternalistic government, and so on (where they're wrong).

https://twitter.com/jeffdeist/status/1143177748707516416

> A 4 minute masterclass on how to argue for peace without apology.

By Jeff Deist, Mises Institute President, and RTed by the Mises Twitter account too.

Links to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95lN9ACCs4

> Lew Rockwell on RT International 22 06 19

I thought the video was *awful*. He said don't put any sanctions on Iran, sanctions are basically a war act and we're starving people in Iran and elsewhere, which is evil of us. Just have peace talks, but don't use violence *or* sanctions. He assumes everyone will be reasonably if you negotiate? Really nasty stuff IMO, and kinda damns the Mises Institute (some of their work on econ is still good ofc and they do a good job of making ebooks available).

Anyone like the vid?

https://vdare.com/posts/a-champion-emerges-sen-hawley-proposes-bill-to-tackle-tech-censorship

the article is about the publisher vs. platform distinction and section 230 law. maybe you've heard about that stuff. if not, check out the article.

that approach is evil. I think this was pointed out in a Mises Institute article or podcast, i forget but wanted to give some kinda credit. i recall them saying something kinda like:

*it should be possible to have a moderated forum (not neutral) without being sued for every single thing anyone posts there*. to make that impossible is huge fucking govt oppression

so i suggest what i’ve suggested before (which i have not see anyone else suggesting): go after Facebook for **fraud**. they keep lying about their products and false advertising to customers

we don’t need new laws and more govt power, we need to enforce the most basic laws that already exist and would exist even under minarchy. start there and see how effective classical liberalism actually is!

more on #12875

Alan Forrester asked me:

> What fraud has Facebook committed?

they have a terms of service. their actual actions do not follow it.

they advertise what to expect on FB, what kinda platform it is. they say it’s basically open, and you won’t be banned, except for extreme cases like drug dealers using it to sell product

they advertised it as offering privacy and working privacy controls. recently their lawyers said basically that no one has any expectation of privacy on FB.

they said they had adequate and reasonable security safeguards so your data would not be stolen. that was a lie.

they said, in various forms, that they don’t sell your data to advertisers, then they did.

overall, they lied that they were a neutral town square. they aren’t. if they had admitted from the start that they were a leftist site which moderates conservatives, then they would have fewer users and more conservative alternatives would exist.

they are still lying today. they don't want anyone to know what their real policies are for censoring stuff and deplatforming people or groups. they are actively relying on tricking (defrauding) their users. they are doing the same kind of shit – and publicly lying about it – that Veritas just exposed Pinterest and Google for.

Apple trying to do deplatforming:

https://www.toddstarnes.com/politics/apple-threatened-to-kick-parler-off-app-store-unless-they-banned-certain-individuals/

reddit quarantined r/the_donald

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/26/pro-trump-message-board-quarantined-by-reddit-following-violent-threats/

they also suspended Veritas' reddit account

https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-suspends-project-veritas/

The Mises Institute has some awful affiliations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/democrats-debate-2020.html

Dems are purely evil radical hard left communists, would destroy America and leave us socialized and starving. Even NYTimes' token conservatives like Bret Stephens are starting to see the extent of the radicalism:

>Eliminating private health insurance, an industry that employs more than 500,000 workers and insures 150 million? Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris support it (though the California senator later recanted the position). Since Democrats are already committed to destroying the coal industry and seem inclined to turn Silicon Valley into a regulated utility, it’s worth asking: Just how much of the private economy are they even willing to keep?

>And then there are the costs that Democrats want to impose on the country. Warren, for instance, favors universal child care (estimated cost, $70 billion a year), Medicare-For-All ($2.8 trillion to $3.2 trillion annually), student-debt cancellation and universal free college ($125 billion annually), and a comprehensive climate action plan ($2 trillion, including $100 billion in aid to poor countries), along with a raft of smaller giveaways, like debt relief for Puerto Rico.

>As Everett Dirksen might have said: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. Someone will have to pay for all this, and it won’t just be the very rich making between seven and 10 figures a year. It will be you.

Nonsense pretending to be profound?

I commented on the new House of Sunny podcast ep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gYSxRf25-c

> I think the fraud angle is important. We don't need new regulations. We need to enforce the most basic existing laws that would exist even in a minarchy. No force including no fraud. FB, YT, etc, are constantly lying, today (not just fraud to grow big initially, but ongoing right now), in official marketing and even in government hearings. They lie about what their ToS means, what their moderation policies are, under what circumstances then ban accounts, how their appeals processes work, whether their algorithms have certain features (like biased human manual intervention), and whether they are offering a neutral platform. This is false advertising and breach of contract. Start there, start with the stuff ought to be uncontroversially wrong from a classical liberal or libertarian viewpoint. There's no need to try to make it illegal to have a moderated forum, in general, if you don't want to be liable for everything posted there. You should just have to advertise truthfully about what kind of forum it is (e.g. an Objectivist only forum should be allowed to exist without getting sued for what its users say, but should not be allowed to advertise as an open platform, that'd be fraud). It's just like the issue with illegal immigration where we already have plenty of laws, we just need to enforce them.

https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/1147868850702245889

Links to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-48885846

Anyone have any criticisms of DD's position?

old quote on "Northern conservatism" from 1897

https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/11/robert-lewis-dabney-on-conservatism/

>It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

https://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-united-states-individual-rights-and.html

> The United States, Individual Rights, And Slavery

Nice mini article.

https://www.rt.com/news/464051-finnish-study-no-evidence-warming/

> Finnish study finds ‘practically no’ evidence for man-made climate change

> The results of the study were soon corroborated by researchers in Japan.

> In a paper published late last month, entitled ‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’, a team of scientists at Turku University in Finland determined that current climate models fail to take into account the effects of cloud coverage on global temperatures, causing them to overestimate the impact of human-generated greenhouse gasses.

Some Google censorship info (by left-biased wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-07-17.html

Good article. The left is so bad at picking people in jail to defend. They picked a *drug Kingpin* involved with 23+ murders. If you picked prisoners to say "This man should be released" at *random* you'd do a lot better.

> This is the left's famous two-step on criminal punishment:

> 1. Oppose the death penalty on the grounds that "life in prison without possibility of parole" is just as good;

>2. Wait a few years for all the witnesses to die or move away, and then demand the convict's release on the basis of absolutely no information about his crime.

The left likes to talk about nonviolent drug crimes while not giving any info about a person's actual crimes.

Cloudflare deplatformed 8chan. Will 4chan be next?

https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

Cloudflare's post calls the US First Amendment a "libertarian" policy (this is a hint that they disapprove of it) and distances themselves by emphasizing it doesn't apply to private business or to other countries – and they say they are more of a foreign company than US one.

Scary.

And what do they prefer to the "libertarian" US policy of protecting freedom?

> Europe, for example, has taken a lead in this area. As we've seen governments there attempt to address hate and terror content online,

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell got suspended from Twitter for sharing a video showing people making violent threats against *him*

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/07/mitch-mcconnell-campaign-suspended-from-twitter-for-highlighting-violent-threats/

I would have liked to send to a website to read, but I didn't find information on a website at this time. If too long, I apologize. I will not do again.

--------------------------------------------------------

What our founding fathers said about guns (2nd Amendment)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I would like to see Gun Control Advocates in Washington, D.C. retire from politics and court. They haven't done anything good for this country as far as I am concerned. They need to check out what our founding fathers said and follow it! There is no exceptions in the 2nd amendment for assault weapons! So, as far as I am concerned, this AWB IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL ANYWAY! Even the words "assault weapons" is classic propaganda. Anything used to hurt someone else could be labeled an assault weapon - even your hand! The other thing that ticks me off is the misrepresentation of what our founding fathers said about 2nd amendment in order to sale gun control. TRY SOME OF THESE QUOTES ON FOR SIZE:

"... arms... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ...Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law-abiding) deprived the use of them." -Thomas Paine.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." -Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"To disarm the people (is) the best and most effectual way to enslave them..." -George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined...The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun. : -Patrick Henry.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" -Patrick Henry

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." -Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787-1788).

"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." -Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.

"...the people have a right to keep and bear arms." -Patrick Henry and George Mason, Elliot, Debates at 185.

"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." -James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).

"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." -Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age..." -Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code. (see http: //www4 . law. cornel 1 . edu/uscode/)

"The people are nor to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self=defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government,.."- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28).

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." -Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1989 at col. 1.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America." -gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.

"They that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts(only) as they are injurious)to others." -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1785).

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." -George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425-426.

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." -Thomas Jefferson.

"(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -James Madison. "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense..." -John Adams, A defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).

“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”-- Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put and end to personal liberty--so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator--and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776,

quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888).

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti-Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789]. [remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”]

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . .the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169-170 (1788)

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases: “The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.

"A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

“Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . .the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52-53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53-54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them: “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.) 1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (ie. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND 2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively)

The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." -James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789). "A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." -Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

Here are some statements from the Enemies of Liberty: "Governments begins at the end of the gun barrel." -Chairman Mao

"One man with a gun can control 100 without one. ...Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms." - V.I.Lenin

"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall do it ourselves." - Joseph Stalin

We are taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a whole new class of guns." - Jose Carada, (White House official who specializes in gun control policy), The Los Angeles Times

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." Bill Clinton (USA Today, 11 March 1993, page 2A)

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has FULL GUN REGISTRATION! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" by Hitler,1935 WHO WAS A SOCIALIST HIMSELF!

“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”-- Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put and end to personal liberty--so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator--and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776, quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888).

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti-Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well- regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . .the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169-170 (1788)

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases: “The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

Regarding the Second Amendment, does the spirit of the debates indicates whether the RKBA was intended to be an individual or a collective state’s right? “Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52-53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53-54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789].[remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”] How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them: “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2

Col. 1.

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.) 1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (ie. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND 2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively) The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

What your founding fathers said about guns (2nd Amendment)

"... arms... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ...Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law abiding) deprived the use of them." Thomas Paine.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"To disarm the people (is) the best and most effectual way to enslave them..." George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184 B.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined...The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.: Patrick Henry.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787 1788).

"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86 87.

"...the people have a right to keep and bear arms." Patrick Henry and George Mason, Elliot, Debates at 185.

"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well-regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).

"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"The militia of the United States consists of all able bodied males at least 17 years of age..." Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code. (see http: //www4.law.cornel 1.edu/uscode/)

"The people are nor to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government,.." Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28) .

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1989 at col. 1.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America." gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe, the supreme power in America cannot be enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and Constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. Noah Webster, “An Experiment of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution” (Philadelphia 1787)

"They that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts (only) as they are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781 1785).

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425 426.

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." Thomas Jefferson.

"(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." James Madison.

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual

discretion... in private self-defense..." John Adams, A defense of the

Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has FULL GUN REGISTRATION! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" by Hitler, 1935 WHO WAS A SOCIALIST HIMSELF!

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts (only) as they are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781 1785).

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed." Thomas Jefferson.

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

"The Aim of an Argument ... should not be victory, but progress." Joseph Joubert (1754 1824)

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Seneca the Younger

"It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities." H. L. Mencken

Dictionary definition of NAZI:

Have you looked up NAZI in a dictionary?

1. A member or the National Socialist Germany Workers' Party, which in 1933, UNDER Adolph Hitler, SEIZED political CONTROL of Germany. 2. A person who holds similar views elsewhere.

Have you looked up SOCIALISM in a dictionary?

1 A theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and CONTROL of industry, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole. 2. Procedure or practice in accordance with this theory. 3. (In Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism.

“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?” Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning can be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.” Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 (1957) [Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823].

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventative but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.” Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774 1776, quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment, 1764.

Statements from tapes that Martin Borman made of some of the pleasant dinner conversations he had been privy to:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941 44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425 426.

There are probably 35 or more cases in which a SCOTUS justice mentions the RKBA by quoting the Amendment, and in the vast majority of them they only quote the second, actionable clause. (If anybody wants, I can give you the case cites later) Still, I have never ignored the militia preamble. I believe that when we try to understand it we should accept this advice:

“My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth right of an American ....[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.” Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.” Noah Webster, "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution" (1787) in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (P. Ford, 1888) .

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . .” Samuel Adams, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86 87 (February 6, 1788).

“It has been asserted by the most respectable writers upon government, that a well regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.” John DeWitt, The Anti Federalist Papers, p. 75 (M. Borden ed. 1965)

“Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state. . .the end of the social compact is defeated. . . .No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for defense of the state. . . .Such a well-regulated militia, composed of freeholders, citizens and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen” M. T. Cicero (a pseudonym), Charleston State Gazette, September 8, 1788

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. . . the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia. . .and include. . .all men capable of bearing arms. . . . But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia. . . .[ of the select militia] These Corps, not much unlike regular troops, well ever produce an inattention to the general militia. . .whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.” Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, p. 169 170 (1788)

Last Monday, a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respected personal liberty. . . William Grayson, 3 Patrick Henry, p. 391 (1951) [letter from Grayson to Henry, June 12, 1789]. [remember, it was Henry who complained of the Constitution without a RKBA in this fashion: “My great objection to this Government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of waging war against tyrants”]

The SCOUTS has weighed in on the definition of “the militia” in these cases:

“The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of the Colonies and the States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time” U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).

“It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as the States, and, in view of this prerogative of the general government. . .the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms. . .[B]ut, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration [prohibiting mass marches by armed men without obtaining a permit] do not have this effect.” Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 267 (1886).

Regarding the Second Amendment, does the spirit of the debates indicates whether the RKBA was intended to be an individual or a collective state’s right?

“Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments. . . .It contains a bill of rights [including] . . . .the right to keep and bear arms.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 52 53 (1854) [Letter to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789].

“The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.” Fisher Ames, 1 Works of Fisher Ames, pp. 53 54 (1854) [Letter to F. I. Minoe, June 12, 1789].

How was the RKBA sold to the public? Consider Madison’s good friend, Tench Coxe, who wrote a widely distributed pamphlet explaining the liberties in the Bill of Rights to aid Madison’s push for endorsement of them:

“As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.” Tench Coxe, Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Published under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

Therefore, here is how I (not me, the poster, but another's comment) read the Second Amendment: (I left it in because of the quotes.)

1. Whereas maintaining a standing army is dangerous to liberty, a well-regulated militia, composed of all citizens capable of bearing their private arms, is the best method to provide for the security of a FREE state (i.e. A state in which the people need not fear the ambitions of their own government); AND

2. That every citizen has the right to keep and bear private arms; for this right provides the citizen with the ability to defend his life, his liberty, and his property from the "tyranny of irritated ministers" as well as providing him with the means to "discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe." (citing The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and Thomas Paine, respectively)

The militia clause is not a limitation, but a preamble which states the universally held principle that "standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty." (from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia)

Notable Quotes

1.

The following quotes are taken from several sources. They provide some

guidance for interpretation of the Constitution.

"It is every Americans' right and obligation to read and interpret the

Constitution for himself."

Thomas Jefferson

"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the

time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested

in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out

of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in

which it was passed."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The

Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution.

Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."

Thomas Jefferson to W, Nicholas, 1803.

"The true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law, is

the intention of the law givers. This is most safely gathered from the

words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances, provided they

do not contradict the express words of the law."

Thomas Jefferson to A. Gallatin, 1808.

"I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is

found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make

our powers boundless."

Thomas Jefferson to W. Nicholas, 1803.

"The particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States

confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all

written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void;

and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that

instrument."

John Marshall: Opinion as Chief Justice in Marbury vs. Madison, 1802

"[E]very act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the

commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act,

therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this,

would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that

the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people

are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of

powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what

they forbid."

Alexander Hamilton

"... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is

wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts

they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is

lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what

country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from

time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let

them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon

and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The

tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of

patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Richard Henry Lee, Senator, First Congress, Additional Letters

from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.

"Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the

people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an

army upon their ruins."

Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate

over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17,

1789.

"... the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and

bear their private arms."

Tench Coxe in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the

Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the

Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 col. 1.

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people

always possess arms..."

Richard Henry Lee, 1788, Member of the First U.S. Senate.

"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize

Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of

conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are

peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms..."

Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at 86-87 (Peirce & Hale, eds.,

Boston, 1850. 2, col. 2.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless

minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

Samuel Adams

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA

ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve

the state."

Heinrich Himmler.

"The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the

active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base

enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest.

There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are

forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is

inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!"

Patrick Henry, in his famous "The War Inevitable" speech, March,

1775.

"It is in vain, Sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace,

Peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale

that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of

resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we

here idle? What is it that Gentlemen want? What would they have? Is life

so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains

and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may

take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Patrick Henry, in his famous "The War Inevitable" speech, March,

1775.

"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I

advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives

boldness, enterprise, and independence Games played with the ball, and

others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no

character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion

of your walk."

Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, 318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967)

"That the Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to

infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or

to prevent "the people" of the United States who are peaceable citizens

from keeping their own arms..."

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never in nothing,

great or small, large or petty never give in except to convictions of

honor and good sense."

Winston Spencer Churchill, address at Harrow School, October 29, 1941.

"Never turn your back on a threatened danger and try to run away from

it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it

promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.

Never run away from anything. Never!"

Winston Churchill

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine.

Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless

one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly ... it must

confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to

guard and defend it."

Daniel Webster

"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which

it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000

years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the

American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the

world."

Daniel Webster

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do

nothing."

Edmund Burke

"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time

that men have died to win them."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I

say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

Oliver Cromwell, "Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth",

upon dissolving Parliament

"Whenever people ... entrust the defense of their country to a regular,

standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will

remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens..."

"A Framer", in the Independent Gazetteer, 1791

"We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts

not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert

the Constitution."

Abraham Lincoln

"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army

pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and

gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional

privilege."

Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against

arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now

appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be

always possible."

Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minnesota)

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look

upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."

Mahatma Gandhi

"The one weapon every man, soldier, sailor, or airman should be able to

use effectively is the rifle. It is always his weapon of personal safety

in an emergency, and for many it is the primary weapon of offense and

defense. Expertness in its use cannot be overemphasized."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Before God I swear this is my creed: my rifle and myself are the

defenders of our country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the

saviors of my life. So be it until victory is America's and there is no

enemy, but peace!!

From "My Rifle", by Major General W.H. Rupertus, USMC.

"The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation."

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United 'States (1856-1924).

"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but

with tyrants, I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they

will certainly be lost."

William Lloyd Garrison

"...to disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave

them..."

George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they

are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America

cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole of the people

are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular

troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."

Noah Webster, "An Examination into the leading Principles of the

Federal Constitution." in Paul Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the

Constitution of the United States , at 56 (New York, 1888).

"... if raised, whether they could subdue a Nation of freemen, who know

how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?"

Delegate Sedgewick, during the Massachusetts Convention,

rhetorically asking if an oppressive standing army could prevail

... Johnathon Elliot, ed., Debates in the Several State Conventions

on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Vol. 2 at 97 (2d ed.,

1888).

"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over

the people of almost every other nation ... notwithstanding the

military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are

carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are

afraid to trust the people with arms."

James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, in Federalist Paper

No. 46, at 243-244.

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them,

may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be

occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to

the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the

article in their right to keep and bear private arms."

Tench Coxe, in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to

the Federal Constitution." under the pseudonym, "A Pennsylvanian"

in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 Col. 1.

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the

other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the

plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.

The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of

arms, for all the world would be alike; but since some will not, others

dare not lay them aside...Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the

world deprived the use of them..."

Thomas Paine, I Writings of Thomas Paine at 56 (1894).

"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation

that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the

difference between having our arms in possession and under our

direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our

defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they

be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own

hands?"

Patrick Henry, 3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State

Conventions 45, 2d Ed. Philadelphia, 1836.

"The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone."

James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, in Federalist Paper

No. 46.

"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the

people at large or considered as individuals ... It establishes some

rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no

majority has the right to deprive them of."

Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7,

1789.

"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS,

SA and Stahlhelm give every responsible opportunity of campaigning with

them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above-named

organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ...

must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."

SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933.

"There are going to be situations where people are going to go without

assistance. That's just the facts of life."

LA Police Chief Darryl Gates

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States)

assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise

it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times

armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of

religion, freedom of property, and freedom of press."

Thomas Jefferson

"Enlighten people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and

mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

Thomas Jefferson

Apocryphal Quotes

The following are often quoted but dubious:

"This Year Will Go Down In History. For The First Time, A Civilized

Nation Has Full Gun Registration! Our Streets Will Be Safer, Our Police

More Efficient, And The World Will Follow Our Lead Into The Future!"

Adolph Hitler 1935 'Berlin Daily' (Loose English Translation)

April 15th, 1935 Page 3 Article 2 by Einleitung Von Eberhard

Beckmann "Abschied vom Hessenland!"

Refuted at http://www.guncite.com/gcbogus.html

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear

arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in

government."

Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

"The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil

interference they deserve a place of honor with all that is good."

George Washington

"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like

fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master".

George Washington

Refuted at http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndbog.html

Ancient Quotes

The following are from ancient philosophers who can inspire our times:

"We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been.".

â” Solon, author of the Constitution of Athens, 594 B.C.

"More law, less justice."

â” Cicero, De Officiis, 44 B.C.

"So far as the Civil Law is concerned, slaves are not considered persons, but this is not the case according to natural law, because natural law regards all men as equal."

"The precepts of the law are the following: to live honorably, to injure no one, to give to every one his due."

â” Ulpian, Roman jurist, ~222 CE

Quotable Quotes on Gun Control

- A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

- All we ask for is registration, just like we do for cars.--Charles Schumer

- I stand in support of this common sense legislation to license everyone who wishes to purchase a gun...I also believe that every new handgun sale or transfer should be registered in a national registry --Hillary Clinton

- If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun. -- The Dalai Lama

- The Constitution of the United States of America clearly affirms the right of every American citizen to bear arms. And as Americans, we will not give up a single right guaranteed under the Constitution. -- Malcolm X

- If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves. — Stalin

- After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. -- William Burroughs

- On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. — Mussolini

- US Senator, If I could have banned them all -'Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns'- I would have!-Diane Feinstein

- Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.—Ghandi

- I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams' guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead. -- Walter Williams

- I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturer's lobby.--Barrack Obama

- Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates.-- Lieutenant Lowell Duckett, Special Assistant to DC Police Chief; President, Black Police Caucus

- You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.--Japanese WWII Admiral Yamamoto

- All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.--Mao Tse Tung

- The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them.--Hillary Clinton

- By calling attention to 'a well-regulated militia, ''the security of the nation,' and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy...--JFK

Famous quote:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."

— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

But that's not quite enough. Let's go for a few more:

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves,... all men capable of bearing arms;..."

— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."

— Tench Coxe, 1788.

If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did not resist.

— Edward Livingston

How about this from a former SOVIET prisoner in a gulag:

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

“...For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing of concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former be unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise. But it should not be forgotten, that it is not only a part of the right that is secured by the constitution; it is the right entire and complete, as it existed at the adoption of the constitution; and if any portion of that right be impaired, immaterial how small the part may be, and immaterial the order of time at which it be done, it is equally forbidden by the constitution....”--Bliss vs. Commonwealth,[12 Ky.(2 Litt.) 90, at 92, and 93, 13 Am. Dec. 251 (1822)]

"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."-- Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.

"The congress of the United States possesses no power to regulate, or interfere with the domestic concerns, or police of any state: it belongs not to them to establish any rules respecting the rights of property; nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people; or of peaceable assemblies by them, for any purposes whatsoever, and in any number, whenever they may see occasion."

- ST. GEORGE TUCKER'S BLACKSTONE,(Mr. Tucker was AT the Constitutional Convention).

"In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed the people. They can rely upon nothing but standing armies of mercenary troops for the support of their power. But the people of this country have arms in their hands; they are not destitute of military knowledge; every citizen is required by law to be a soldier; we are marshaled into companies, regiments, and brigades for the defence of our country. This is a circumstance which increases the power and consequence of the people; and enables them to defend their rights and privileges against every invader."-- "the Republican", Jan. 7, 1788, Connecticut Courant (Hartford Newspaper).

"17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, INCLUDING the body of the people capable of bearing arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that the militia shall not be subject to martial law, except in time of war, rebellion, or insurrection; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and ought not to be kept up, except in eases of necessity; and that at all times, the military should be under strict subordination to the civil power....18th. That any person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms ought to be exempted..."

- Page 160 - Journal of The Senate, Ratification of the constitution by the convention of the state of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations.(Rhode-Island,Newport, June 9, 1790).

Famous quote:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."

— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on

Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

But that's not quite enough. Let's go for a few more:

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves,... all men capable of bearing arms;..."

— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."

— Tench Coxe, 1788.

If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did not resist.

— Edward Livingston

How about this from a former SOVIET prisoner in a gulag:

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the WHOLE BODY of PEOPLE always POSSESS ARMS, and be taught alike especially when young, how to use them." (Richard Henry Lee, Walter Bennett, ed., Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican, at 21,22,124 [Univ. of Alabama Press,1975])

"The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order. I hope in God this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."-- Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 13, 1787 letter to William S. Smith.

"The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by ANY rule of construction be conceived to give to Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both." - William Rawle, A View of the Constitution, 125-6 (2nd ed. 1829).(Appointed by President George Washington as U.S. District Attorney for Pennsylvania in 1791).

"Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal [or state] laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislation has power to abridge or destroy them...."- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765–1769.

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government...."

"....This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty....The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."

"...In America we may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty..."

- St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries,(1803).

"Also, the conditions and circumstances of the period require a finding that while the stated purpose of the right to arms was to secure a well-regulated militia, the right to self-defense was assumed by the Framers."-- Chief Justice John Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court.[As quoted in Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 251 (1846); State v. Dawson, 272 N.C. 535, 159 S.E.2d 1, 9 (1968).]

"From among the rights retained by our policy, we have selected those of self defence or bearing arms, of conscience, and of free inquiry, for two purposes; one, to shew the vast superiority of our policy, in being able to keep natural rights necessary for liberty and happiness, out of the hands of governments; the other, to shew that this ability is the effect of its principles, and beyond the reach of Mr. Adams’s system, or of any other, unable to reserve to the people, and to withhold from governments, a variety of rights."-- John Taylor, Revolutionary Soldier and U.S. Senator,(1792 – 94, 1803, 1822 – 24).[An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States: Section the Sixth; THE GOOD MORAL PRINCIPLES OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES,(1814).]

"The right of self-defence never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals."-- President James Monroe, Nov. 16, 1818 message to the U.S. House and Senate.[Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, November 17th, 1818.]

"No, surely, No! they meant to drive us into what they termed rebellion, that they might be furnished with a pretext to disarm and then strip us of the rights and privileges of Englishmen and Citizens."--George Washington, March 1, 1778 letter to Bryan Fairfax, Valley forge.

“To take from the people the right of bearing arms, and put their weapons of defence in the hands of a standing army, would be scarcely more dangerous to their liberties, than to permit the Government to accumulate immense amounts of treasure beyond the supplies necessary to its legitimate wants. Such a treasure would doubtless be employed at some time, as it has been in other countries, when opportunity tempted ambition.”-- President Andrew Jackson, Message to U.S. House and Senate of Dec. 5, 1836.[Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 1789-1873. TUESDAY, December 6, 1836.]

"That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment to use arms in defense of so valuable a blessing [as liberty], on which all the good and evil of life depends; is clearly my opinion; yet Arms...should be the last resort."-- George Washington, 1789 letter to George Mason.[The True George Washington, 10th Ed. By Paul Leicester Ford.]

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government ... The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms..."-- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #28.

""The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta! And Lexington, Concord, Camden, River Raisin, Sandusky, and the laurel-crowned field of New Orleans, plead eloquently for this interpretation!"--Chief Justice Collier, Nunn v. State, 1 Ga.(1 Kel.) 243 (1846).

Have you seen this information I found? What do you think of it?

U.S. Federal Gun Control Legislation, 1968 - present

All Federal gun control legislation in the United States has been written, introduced, and sponsored or co-sponsored by Jewish Congressmen and Jewish Senators.

Emanuel Celler, Democratic Representative from New York(1923 - 1973)

Howard Metzenbaum, Democratic Senator from Ohio(1974, 1976 - 1995)

Herb Kohl, Democratic Senator from Wisconsin(1989 - present)

Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York(1999 - present), Democratic Represenative from New York(1981-1999)

Dianne Feinstein, Democratic Senator from California(1992 - present)

Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania(1981 - present)

Frank Lautenberg, Democratic Senator from New Jersey(1982 - 2001, 2003 - present)

Barbara Boxer, Democratic Senator from California(1993 - present), Democratic Representative from California(1983 - 1993)

Carl Levin, Democratic Senator from Michigan(1979 - present)

1968: The Gun Control Act of 1968 comes from Representative Emanuel Celler’s House bill H.R. 17735. It expands legislation already attempted by the non-Jewish Sen. Thomas Dodd. America’s biggest and most far-reaching gun law came from a Jew.

1988: Senate bill S. 1523 is sponsored by Senator Howard Metzenbaum. It proposes legislation turning every violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968 into a RICO predicate offense, allowing a gun owner to be charged with federal racketeering offenses.

1988: Senator Metzenbaum co-sponsors a bill — S. 2180 — to ban, or limit/restrict, so-called “plastic guns.”

1990: Senator Herbert Kohl introduces bill S.2070, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which bans gun possession in a school zone. The law will later be struck down in court as unconstitutional.

1993: Senate bill S.653 is sponsored by Senator Howard Metzenbaum. It bans specific semiautomatic rifles, but also gives the Secretary of the Treasury the power to add any semiautomatic firearm to the list at a later date.

February, 1994: The Brady Law, which requires waiting periods to buy handguns, becomes effective. Senator Metzenbaum wrote the Brady Bill. Metzenbaum sponsored the bill in the Senate. The sponsor of the bill in the House was Rep. Charles Schumer.

1994: Senator Metzenbaum introduces S.1878, the Gun Violence Prevention Act of 1994, aka “Brady II.” Representative Schumer sponsored “Brady II” sister legislation [H.R. 1321] in the U.S. House of Representatives.

September, 1994: The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 goes into effect, including a provision that bans the manufacture and possession of semiautomatic rifles described as “assault weapons.” [Note: true assault weapons are fully automatic, not semiautomatic]. That gun-ban provision was authored in the Senate by Senator Dianne Feinstein and authored in the House by Congressman Schumer.

1995: Senators Kohl, Specter, Feinstein, Lautenberg and others introduce the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1995, an amended version of the 1990 school-zone law which was struck down in court as being unconstitutional.

September, 1996: The Lautenberg Domestic Confiscation provision becomes law. It is part of a larger omnibus appropriations bill. It was sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg. It bans people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from ever owning a gun.

1997: Senate bill S. 54, the Federal Gang Violence Act of 1997, proposes much harsher sentences for people violating minor gun laws, including mandatory prison sentences and forfeiture of property. It was introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Hatch, among others. It returns the idea of turning every violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968 into a RICO predicate offense.

January, 1999: Senator Barbara Boxer introduces bill S.193, the American Handgun Standards Act of 1999.

January, 1999: Senator Kohl introduces bill S.149, the Child Safety Lock Act of 1999. It would require a child safety lock in connection with transfer of a handgun.

February,1999: Senator Frank Lautenberg introduces bill S.407, the Stop Gun Trafficking Act of 1999.

February, 1999: Senator Lautenberg introduces S.443, the Gun Show Accountability Act of 1999.

March, 1999: Senator Lautenberg introduces bill S.560, the Gun Industry Accountability Act of 1999.

March, 1999: Senator Feinstein introduces bill S.594, the Large Capacity Ammunition Magazine Import Ban Act of 1999.

May, 2000: Senate bill S. 2515, Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2000, is submitted by Senators Feinstein, Boxer, Lautenberg, and Schumer. It is a plan for a national firearms licensing system.

January, 2001: Senate bill S.25, Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2001, is sponsored by Senators Feinstein, Schumer, and Boxer. It is a nation-wide gun registration plan [apparently there were two versions of that Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act bill].

May, 2003: Senators Feinstein, Schumer, Boxer and others introduce legislation that would reauthorize the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, and, close a loophole in the law that allows large-capacity ammunition magazines to be imported into the U.S. The ban expired in September, 2004.

October, 2003: Senators Feinstein, Lautenberg, Levin, and Schumer co-sponsor bill S.1774, designed to stop the sunset [ending] of the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988.

March, 2005: Senator Lautenberg introduces bill S.645, “to reinstate the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act,” in other words, to reinstate the 1994 assault-rifle ban [also known as the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”] which expired in late 2004.

March, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill S.620, “to reinstate the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act,” in other words, to reinstate the 1994 assault-rifle ban [also known as the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”] which expired in late 2004.

July, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill SA1621 - Fifty-Caliber Sniper Weapons. This amendment would convert all .50 BMG firearms to NFA weapons.

July, 2005: Senator Feinstein introduces bill SA1622 - Fifty-Caliber Exclusion to S.397. This amendment would modify SB397 to allow suits when the firearm involved was a .50 caliber weapon.

July, 2005: Senator Boxer introduces bill SA1633 - BATFE Safety Standards SA1633 - BATFE Safety Standards. This amendment allows law suits to continue/be brought if the product did not meet the safety standards as defined by the BATFE.

July, 2005: Senator Boxer introduces bill SA1634 - ‘Sporting Use’ on Domestic Handguns. Applying ’sporting use’ clause requirements to domestic handguns could, almost completely, dry up the handgun

The Nintendo Switch subreddit did a bunch of speech suppression re Blizzard's Hong Kong crap after Blizzard cancelled a Switch-related event:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/dieq3a/statement_from_the_rnintendoswitch_mod_team/

They admit they screwed up but no moderators will be removed from the mod team. And read this excuse:

> Since most of our moderators are located in the US, we have very little moderator coverage overnight, and so we were overwhelmed with trying to moderate the discussion and keep it from getting out of control.

If only we had more moderators to block stuff, we wouldn't have blocked too much stuff. (They mean it's too hard to block only the bad stuff, so they just blocked indiscriminately to save time, due to lack of manpower. Still a pretty sad excuse. Wouldn't a poorly moderated discussion be better than nothing? How is no content better than wild or chaotic content?)

#12320 LuL curi beleives in IQ

#13888 Use speed control addons and that way you can see it in less than 30 mins.

#13890 There's a summary in the description of the video.

> Based on the video title, description and style, and quick skimming,

That is no way to evaluate an argument or data.

#13896 Why are you trolling my blog?

#13898

> #13897 Calling people out on their bull shit, anti-rational, anti- fact attitudes is not trolling. Why do you think this is trolling?

> You accused another user of trolling a while back for criticizing your methods. I don't think you understand what trolling means.

you haven't provided Elliot any criticisms. a criticism is an explanation of a flaw in an idea. you have not provided any explanations of any flaws in any ideas. if you think you have done that, that means we have a disagreement. so consider escalating things by using Elliot's path forward policy. http://curi.us/2068-my-paths-forward-policy

if you want to persuade Elliot that he's wrong about this, then you should respect Elliot enough to follow his path's forward policy. if you're not interested in following his paths forward policy, while continuing to tell Elliot that he's wrong on his blog, then you are trolling.

#13900 Posts here a ton but won't read an article by ET. But demands other people watch an hour video...

> ... He can either explain himself and be rational...

curi did explain himself. You quoted his explanations and you trolled him (#13894 and #13896). Then curi called you out for trolling. Then you denied that what you did was trolling (#13898). Then I contradicted you on that and explained what you could do instead to make progress with curi on your disagreement (paths forward) (#13899). That's when you implied that curi didn't explain himself (see quoted text from #13900).

Lying NYT stealth-edits Hillary Tulsi-Gabbard-Russia smear, changing Russia to Republicans.

https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456

https://kotaku.com/as-games-done-quick-gets-bigger-so-do-its-controversie-1791393815

The no deadnaming stuff is nasty. I personally spent many hours watching Cosmo speedruns. I thought of him as Cosmo. I stopped watching Cosmo *before* he transitioned to Narcissa (because he played smash 4 casually instead of speedrunning). So while I've heard about the change a little, I've barely seen it, it's not something I've given much thought to. It's never gotten the attention to become habitual for me. So I still associated those streams by Cosmo with Cosmo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Z4Jd0AtfI

> Return the power to the workers and separate your boss from their teeth.

Quote from the video description and also he says something similar at the end of the video and explains an anecdote about it in the middle.

The whole thing is delivered in the tone of a good-willed reformer, but he's a a mean-spirited bastard who wants men to be harmed.

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1189696543802064896

Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey writes:

> We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵

Wow. Evil. This creates a system of social status, favors, pull, reputation, caste, etc. It entrenches people in place and reduces upward mobility. It prevents people putting their money where their mouth is and makes them rely on friends in high places. Read *Atlas Shrugged*.

#14048 You haven't given reasons nor any way for me to learn that you're right and change my mind. You also haven't requested a debate. What's the point?

For what purpose did you make an assertion contradicting me about it?

Went on Blizzcon OWWC twitch chat and that's the first stuff I saw. What it means is moderators are trying to stop people from saying Free Hong Kong. So people are saying variations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwOZw-lVpo

I'm not a fan of the Veritas videos where they harass people on the street for comment in person. I think they're trying to concretize for their audience what "no comment" means more with footage of people actually refusing to answer questions. But I don't like non-consensual IRL interaction aspect.

#14119 Yup it is awful. Millions of lives being harmed by so called enviromentalists.

#14131 https://curi.us/1804-donald-trump-is-a-protectionist

#14139 http://curi.us/1922-donald-trump-is-a-moderate

https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again

> Police Have No Duty To Protect You, Federal Court Affirms Yet Again

https://nypost.com/2020/02/14/team-trump-just-called-a-halt-to-the-obama-era-war-on-american-suburbs/

> Team Trump just called a halt to the Obama-era war on American suburbs

> During the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to install Washington bureaucrats as the decision makers for how communities across all 50 states should grow. Using an obscure rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, HUD sought to remake America’s cities, towns and villages by forcing any community that was getting federal funds to meet racial quotas.

> Single-family homes on quarter-acre lots were deemed potentially “racist” — supposedly because minority members might not be able to afford them.

The NYT smeared people as racist (all the crying wolf makes it hard to criticize real racism, btw). Things are better now with Trump.

https://mises.org/library/13-illustrations-benevolence-capitalism

> 13 Illustrations of the Benevolence of Capitalism

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1158664006669758464

> On the morning of 9/11, I thought, "The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original disaster." 10x was a comic underestimate. The "overreactionaries" (Caplan's term) are a vast threat in both political parties. Count me among those who think this must be said.

Yudkowsky sux.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/11/vaccines-drug-makers/

> Who will answer the call in the next outbreak? Drug makers feel burned by string of vaccine pleas

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804/

> The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven by Hope

> “We might as well go down fighting.”

> This is our last chance, they said very matter-of-factly. If we stand down, nothing will stand between us and mainland China, they said. They talked about Xinjiang, and what China had done to the Uighur minority. I’ve heard about the fate of the Uighurs from so many protesters over the months. China may have wanted to make an example out of the region, but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the world will ignore it.

> https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1158664006669758464

>> On the morning of 9/11, I thought, "The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original disaster." 10x was a comic underestimate. The "overreactionaries" (Caplan's term) are a vast threat in both political parties. Count me among those who think this must be said.

> Yudkowsky sux.

Indeed. What overreaction? We didn't eg shut down the border. In fact, we've admitted tons of Muslims since 9/11. Open borders has even gotten more popular, and open borders would lead to even more deaths caused by terrorists.

I guess he means the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but those weren't overreactions per se so much as misconceived in some ways and badly executed in practice. Maybe if we'd vaporized Afghanistan with nukes you could have called that an overreaction.

Re: admitting Muslims see:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/1-6-million-immigrants-predominantly-muslim-countries-since-9-11/

Soviet commies destroyed half of the Aral sea, destroyed the livelihoods of fishermen and created a desolate wasteland around the sea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEIt4OojA3Y

God damn those are some high taxes Bernie wants. Earn $7.2 million from your startup sale, keep $2.2 million (30%).

I broadly don't recommend following parochial, short-term politics much but this vid is pretty good and is watchable while being mostly out of the loop.

Nevada Debate: The Fall Of Bloomberg

the left basically wants you imprisoned if you use the "wrong" pronoun but then they write stuff like:

> the far-right, anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson.

the left are unreasonable people who demand immediate conformity to non-standard, contrary-to-established-practice gender pronoun stuff, but then refuse to respect standard things like professional names. they are hypocrites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September applies to immigration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

> Of course, there is also an element of fear, even apprehension, in such demonic generalization, a result of segregation from and ignorance about the physical world. Barack Obama, who once complained about the price of arugula and either had never heard or never spoken the word “corpsman,” knew that he knew nothing about farming or guns or clinging working people. Did he realize that his food, his safety, the maintenance of his home and car depended on others who could do things to keep his world viable that he not only could not do but also could not even imagine? Ask Obama and his class to replace a 30-amp breaker, or prune a peach tree, or drive a semi, and one could see that he assumes others who are supposedly less gifted provide his power, food, and consumer goods, using skills he lacks.

> Ditto Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg claims he could teach anyone on an Oxford stage how to be a farmer. But he knows that he has no knowledge of farming, ancient or modern, and has no detailed notion of where or how his fruits, vegetables, grains, and choice cuts arrive at his various estates and hence his table. He may even sense that while the world could do without Bloomberg News, it could not survive without skilled farmers. So he is a bit edgy when he thinks about the physical world of muscle that allows him to be Mike Bloomberg, multibillionaire Socratic dunce.

> We need to move beyond the idea that the elite caricature the deplorables because they are insensitive and arrogant. True, they are, but they also do it because they are insecure — and terribly afraid of those they don’t like, but also sense they desperately need.

https://twitter.com/MichaelCoudrey/status/1233928266764828672

> EXPLICIT WARNING Warning sign:

> Look at the homeless epidemic in Los Angeles due to failed liberal policies, high taxes, and high crime.

> Police are now demanding citizens allow homeless people to camp on their private property, threatening this man with arrest if he moves them.

The tweet includes a video about some homeless people trespassing in a guy's front yard, past a tall gate. They had a tent and a bunch of crap, and made noise all night. He called the cops who did nothing about the trespassing and warned him that they'd put him (the home owner) in jail if he moved their stuff out of his yard.

people think e.g. that ads make people buy stuff they don't need

the basic purpose of advertising is to inform/educate consumers about products

people ignore this and act like advertising is unnecessary or inherently evil

they think it's creating fake demand and that tons of products don't improve people's lives and people just buy stuff cuz they are gullible

the reason some ads are low on facts is because many consumers don't care about facts. this is not a fault of the people who make ads, who broadly do not dictate taste or fight with their customers, they try to pander to consumers.

if some people are low brow – as reality TV also demonstrates – this is not a fault of advertising (or of reality TV)

#15714 Here's a tangentially-related quote by Mises on another fallacy about advertising.

Mises, *Human Action*, Part Four: Chapter XV: The Market: 13. Business Propaganda:

> It is a widespread fallacy that skillful advertising can talk the consumers into buying everything that the advertiser wants them to buy. The consumer is, according to this legend, simply defenseless against "high-pressure" advertising. If this were true, success or failure in business would on the mode of advertising only. However, nobody believes that any kind of advertising would have succeeded in making the candlemakers hold the field against the electric bulb, the horsedrivers against the motorcars, the goose quill against the steel pen and later against the fountain pen. But whoever admits this implies that the quality of the commodity advertised is instrumental in bringing about the success of an advertising campaign. Then there is no reason to maintain that advertising is a method of cheating the gullible public.

https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1238225503883943937

https://pridelegal.com/california-hiv-laws/

California legalized having sex with people without first disclosing that you have HIV.

The article, to give you a taste, complains that prostitutes are still required to disclose HIV before having paid sex.

The article is *really, really awful* in many ways. It'd be a good target for close reading and detailed analysis.

https://twitter.com/AmySwearer/status/1240025177527853057

> What is the role of government in situations like we have now with covid-19 and why?

Protect people. Defend people's lives and rights.

That means things like closing borders and, yes, locking lots of stuff down. Going about life as usual will kill many millions worldwide. People trying to do that are killing others and must be stopped.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPiZSF1Pi0M

>> Tucker: What will higher education look like after coronavirus?

> People may realize unis are a rip off and online education is way more cheap/efficient.

https://nyulocal.com/an-open-letter-to-tisch-dean-allyson-green-please-stop-72785d5a86c1

Thought this article was interesting. Basically art students think remote learning can't work for their art stuff and want a partial refund, and the university said nah and communicated in a very poor manner. Sharing most of article below:

> Over the past week or so, the student body of Tisch (particularly the Drama students) has engaged in a back and forth with the administration regarding tuition and Zoom classes. Aggrieved students argue that remote classes cannot possibly serve as an adequate replacement for classes that necessitate a physical presence in the room (like acting classes, or dance classes, or film projects, or etcetera), and there have been various calls for a partial refund of tuition, including a Change.org petition that at publication had approximately 1,700 signatures, and calls to strike by sitting out of virtual classes.

> In turn, Tisch administration has responded with a number of emails stating categorically that no tuition will be refunded, and explanations of varying degrees of empathy and detail as to why that is. In the most recent email, in addition to doubling down on the message “we are not refunding your tuition,” Dean Allyson Green included a Vimeo link to a two minute and 16 second video in which the self-described choreographer and visual artist awkwardly dances and lip-syncs to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”

> We here at NYU Local would just like to say: what the fuck is this.

> I mean,

> Allyson.

> What the fuck.

> We get it. You’re stressed. It’s a stressful time. People are mad, a lot of them at you. But what the fuck are you doing???

> We get that the financials of a private university are complicated. We get that you can’t just wave a wand and give people their tuition. It might even be the case that those students are in the wrong. Let’s talk about it! But even if they are, how could you possibly think this would do anything but piss everyone off. Like, did you think about this for even a second?

> The video is not cute. It’s uncomfortable to watch, it goes on for too long, you end it by staring at the camera for a good eight seconds, none of it is working in the way you think it’s working. Maybe you’re a dancer, and the way you work through stress is by dancing, but the number of steps between that and filming and uploading this video to the internet is SIMPLY TOO MANY. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!

You know who's really racist, particularly against Africans with black skin? Not Trump voters. China or at least the Chinese Communist Party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsnHUrpD__E

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1259243935165149194

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1259554649608077313

:(

Seems like a reasonable view to me. Looks rather bad but not for the first time, so not all hopeless.

Broadly I see Western Europe as having similar problems as the US, but they started earlier and are much further down the road of self-destruction.

Asmongold (gamer streamer who does lots of YT vid commentary and talks with his tens of thousands of live viewers) has pretty reasonable, moderate takes on lots of issues. And he thinks and expresses them in reasonably simple terms without some fancy, overreaching philosophy bullshit.

Here are his decent opinions on the recent riots and George Floyd stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr806kQ9aO8

Some info about how racist China is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Knd_5rVfY

> China is Using George Floyd Protests for Propaganda

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/1274445663288168448

https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1275892961360805888

> The California legislature has now voted to strike these words from our state

constitution:

> “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

> I’m speechless.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-hotel-motel-plan-for-homeless

according to this article, San Francisco is:

1) housing homeless in fancy hotels

2) lying that the homeless are "front line workers" to do this

3) spending taxpayer money to buy them pot and alcohol

4) lying about where the money for the pot and alcohol is coming from (or they were, at least initially)

5) making city workers and hotel workers sign NDAs that prevent them from discussing what they're seeing

Lots of MeToo type accusations have been happening in gamer scenes recently.

Leffen's response to the general issue (he's not accused nor accuser): Regarding the recent allegations within the Smash/FGC Community.

I took some notes on what he said while I watched it

1) be rly biased in favor of believing victims

2) leffen has been physically abused as a minor in smash scene, and lots of adults were there and did nothing. like being slapped in face in public multiple times. (not sexual). so this gives him more sympathy and perspective that there are victims, esp young ppl

3) leffen has been a jerk verbally and he thinks that’s related to bad culture and he needs to do better. (that’s mostly old stuff. he got banned from smash in sweden for like a year for flaming ppl. that was 2013)

4) stop e.g. drinking alcohol in front of minors, lots of little things contribute to atmosphere that encourages sexual harassment

5) this isn’t a bad week where things went wrong. it’s a good week to get these villains out of community. this is progress to deal with problem that already existed for years.

6) ppl with audiences need to speak out

7) most ppl are good ppl. the problem is a few creeps + a lot of passivity.

I think this quote from *The Fountainhead* partially explains what happened to American society re: corruption by the left.

> So you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1281616586273468416

wonderful.

https://www.stopk12indoctrination.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Qc44V-Kks

> 13 Tons of Human Hair Shipped From China | Uyghur Persecution with Nury Turkel

The hair is taken by force and sold. Uyghur women are also raped.

https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1283784586737090561

Epstein didn't kill himself.

https://vdare.com/articles/ann-coulter-dems-are-the-party-of-antifa

Ann talks about violence going on in our cities and why Trump is sending - and should be sending - federal agents in

VDH article on why current left wing political stuff is more dangerous than 1960s https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/anarchists-todays-revolution-differ-60s-protesters-victor-davis-hanson

wtf @ using cali prisoners for forced labor

Upper Echelon Gamers takes on BLM and Marxism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7T1HbMwX4

He usually avoids stuff that'll definitely get the video demonetized.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-internment-camps-xinjiang-uighurs-muslims

#17816 While I think there's a real point here, that tweeter is dumb. "To my knowledge" he says, without attempting to get any knowledge.

#17826 What have you done to objectively test:

- your ability to understand, learn from or judge articles like that?

- the ability of articles like that to improve your life?

- the ability of articles like that to accomplish some useful political purpose?

#17828 Then why read that article? And why make a claim like "the best political article I've read in the last few years"?

#17830 Why don't you stick to doing things that you have some explicit ability to judge as good or bad ideas?

#17831 Here are some rough thoughts:

I don't understand what it means to have some explicit ability to judge things as good or bad ideas. I don't even know what an inexplicit ability would be. I don't know what objective tests would look like. I'm not sure if I could give you any examples of things I do that fall into the category of things I would stick to if I followed your proposed criterion. And maybe this question doesn't make sense, but: could I be getting OK results in some areas even without having that explicit ability?

Given that I don't understand it well, using your proposed criterion to change what I do now doesn't seem like a good idea.

#17835 The amount of time I spend on philosophy is currently pretty limited. I have an ongoing project to spend more time on learning philosophy. I have not yet succeeded at that project. For privacy reasons, I don't want to say more about that project here.

Even if I succeed at spending more time on learning philosophy, I don't know yet which activity the additional time would come from. It might not come from reading about and thinking about politics (at least not until I learn enough to judge for myself that I should spend less time on that stuff). It might come from reading fiction or from playing sudoku-like puzzle games or from other stuff.

>> It might not come from reading about and thinking about politics (at least not until I learn enough to judge for myself that I should spend less time on that stuff).

> I was just telling you why doing politics now doesn't make sense. You apparently don't agree but haven't said what part of it you don't understand or what is in the way of you judging that for yourself.

I thought I said some stuff about this in #17833. For example, I thought your reasoning involved explicit abilities and I don't know what an inexplicit ability would be. Overall, what you wrote in #17827 and #17831 sounds advanced to me, not like stuff that I am relatively close to grasping and acting on.

> Or if you can't judge for yourself whether it's ok to spend time on politics cuz thinking is too hard, then you should prioritize changing that over politics.

I think that line of thinking would apply to a lot of things I do, not just politics. And I'm not prepared to stop doing a lot of things I do and redirect all that time to learning philosophy. What I am prepared to do, which is in accordance with my current level of understanding, is to gradually try to spend more time on philosophy.

#17841

> I don't understand why your response is ignoring #17835

Which response? My #17836 was meant to be a reply to your #17835, which I took as a suggestion that my time would be better spent time on learning philosophy instead of reading political articles.

>> And I'm not prepared to stop doing a lot of things I do

> why?

Here are a few reasons:

1. I think I enjoy the things I do.

2. Stopping doing a lot of things seems like a big change, whereas spending more time on philosophy is a gradual change. In general, I prefer to avoid big changes.

> Which response?

I don't understand. I used a quote to indicate which.

Peter Brimelow, Trump Strongest In Rasmussen Poll—But His White Share Is Disgracefully Low (VDARE, 2020-09-22) :

> Steve Sailer has calculated that, without any patriotic immigration reform at all, the GOP/GAP (Generic American Party) could still win nationally as late as 2050 simply by driving its white share up to 70%—which it already achieves in several Southern states.

Interesting. However, according to Steve Sailer (first link in the paragraph above), getting 70% of the white vote isn't enough — white voter turnout would also have to return "to the level seen in 1992 (during Ross Perot's insurgent run)". 67% of eligible non-Hispanic whites voted in 1992, compared with 64% in 2016 (source).

Getting 70% of the white vote does seem like a bigger challenge than getting white voter turnout to 67%. Only 54% of whites voted for Trump in 2016, and Trump's 2016 campaign emphasized immigration much more than his 2020 campaign.

#18129

> What does it mean to try to persuade whites?

Sailer refers to getting X% of the white vote. Are you asking what it means to "persuade whites" to vote for some candidate?

> What ideas will persuade whites but won't persuade blacks or asians?

According to Pew:

> Roughly a third of white adults (34%) say the U.S. has not gone far enough when it comes to giving black people equal rights... By comparison, 80% of black adults say the country hasn’t gone far enough to ensure equal rights.

Consider an argument that uses the idea that "the U.S. has not gone far enough when it comes to giving black people equal rights" as a premise. Such an argument will more easily persuade people who already agree with that premise than it will people who disagree with it. In America today, to a much larger percentage of blacks than whites agree with that premise. So, all other things being equal, it should be easier to persuade blacks than whites with such arguments.

#18131

> Do you believe that melanin causes different reactions to arguments?

No.

> Or, contrary to FI and BoI, that explanationless correlation arguments are great and there's no need to understand causal reality?

No.

> And that skin color correlations are particularly good things to focus on in general, or in today's political climate?

Race is more than "skin color", but I think I get what you mean by that term.

However, I don't know what you mean by "focus on". Does my comment #18128 count as "focus[ing] on" race? Does citing FBI crime statistics count? Or are you referring more to what organizations like VDARE or Amren do? Or something else?

House of Sunny podcast mentioned Tim Pool is a leftist. I've seen some of his recent vids and found that claim surprising. I googled and saw he has an entry on what I understand to be a leftist hate site:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tim_Pool

My emphasis:

> Tim Pool (1986–) is a *right-wing conservative* American YouTube commentator and former *Vice News* reporter who describes himself as a *"social liberal" and "left-libertarian" who "support(ed) Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard"*.[3] Despite this, his content is composed almost exclusively of rebuttal-free alt-right talking points. He is basically one of those "centrists" who somehow always agree with the American Right on most if not all issues. Pool first gained notoriety reporting from the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Since when does Vice hire right wing conservatives? Since when are left-libertarian Bernie fans "conservative"?

Sunny was saying that some leftists are having conversations with the right and the hard left wants to censor that too... Examples were Joe Rogan, the Weinsteins, and Tim Pool. Maybe some other IDW type person was mentioned.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/trump-and-biden-face-tumultuous-debate-joseph-klein/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGjZkJpgFKU

Rucka does Objectivist criticism of Ted Cruz. Some decent points.

In January 2017, Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Britain's *Vote Leave* campaign, wrote:

> Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They [most of the Members of Parliament that *Vote Leave* dealt with] did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbozDBM67lY

> I was voting for Biden but this changed my mind to Trump

It's a black guy talking primarily about racial issues. 12min

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5ih7nqEoc4

> Timcast IRL - James O'Keefe In Studio With BREAKING Expose On Google Election Interference

Tim Pool and James O'Keefe (of Project Veritas) talk for over 2 hours on Oct 19, 2020.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBY4ig7SPm8

> A business partner has come out and exposed the Biden corruption.

Trump is bringing the biz partner to the debate tonight :)

https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1319722604291346432

> progressive diversity and inclusion seminar (separate but equal, of course!) from King County library in Washington State (October 2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SOuZhc22r0

> Democrats Massive Failure Shocks MSNBC, Calling Biden a "One-Off" As Dems Get CRUSHED Nationwide

I like watching some of Tim Pool's election coverage. I've noticed I tend to like people who used to be further left and moved more to the right (more than people who were always right wing). Partly it's because they tend not to be very religious. Trump is actually another example who used to be further left than he is now. David Horowitz and Upper Echelon Gaming are more examples.

Richard Pilger resigned apparently

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dojs-election-crimes-director-resigns-after-barr-authorizes-election-fraud-investigation/ar-BB1aRb83?ocid=uxbndlbing

Biden video from a few years ago where he talks about wanting "an unrelenting stream of immigration. Nonstop. Nonstop." and of relatively fewer whites in America being a good thing https://www.bitchute.com/video/u8zTYvZCGtJp/

Bellwether Counties Went Overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020, *The Epoch Times* (2020-11-15):

> Over the past nearly 40 years, presidential elections have observed an intriguing phenomenon: 19 counties in the nation have always voted for the winner, be it Republican or Democrat. They’ve been dubbed “bellwether counties” and until this year, no president since at least Ronald Reagan has missed even one.

> In 2020, all but one of the bellwethers picked President Donald Trump by a margin of some 16 points on average. Only one, Clallam County in Washington, went for former Vice President Joe Biden and only by about a 3 point margin.

> Bellwethers aren’t a crystal ball—their streak was expected to end sooner or later. But what would be striking is for it to end so radically.

Twitter user @drummergirl68 put together a doc with some graphs of election data (with sources at the end). The doc contrasts what happened in Georgia with some supposedly fair elections. I didn't check out out too carefully, but, at first glance, it does kinda look like the Georgia election results were made to fit a linear trend that ends with Biden barely ahead.

#18705 #18706 This is the sort of non-rebuttal we're gonna get:

https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election

4 paragraphs of assertions which then get turned into MSM articles which are used as wikipedia sources to say that doubting Dominion voting security is a "hoax"

https://americanmind.org/features/get-ready-for-a-fight/are-we-sure-about-all-those-mail-in-ballots/ (2020-11-10):

Says mail-in ballot rejection rates are implausibly low this election compared to past elections. Asks:

> Are we completely certain that “all” of these mail-in ballots across the battleground states, which have disproportionately gone to Biden due to the very simple fact that the Democrats heavily campaigned on a mass mail-in voting platform, are legitimate? Are we completely sure that each and every mail-in ballot that has been cast for Biden has, in fact, been in legal compliance with the relevant rules and regulations of that specific voting jurisdiction?

> There may well be innocent explanations for all of this. But it would be far too easy to imagine one-party Democratic machine jurisdictions padding the vote tally for their candidate by mass non-disqualification of mail-in ballots that would otherwise merit closer scrutiny. Why is no one on the Right bringing up this exceedingly straightforward point?

https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1329595108078063619?s=20 (tweet has embedded video of a clip from the 2020-11-19 episode of *Tucker Carlson Tonight*)

On *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, Tucker Carlson says Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell was invited to come on the show and discuss her claims about massive voting machine fraud. (She made these claims in a press conference today as well as earlier.) He says he would have allowed her to talk every night for a week on his show without interruption, but she declined and asked his show to stop contacting her. He said he reached out to other people in contact with the Trump campaign's legal team, and they also said she hadn't given them any evidence.

In today's press conference, Jenna Ellis, another Trump campaign lawyer, said that they were simply laying out their case and not trying to offer evidence for everything up front.

#18752 https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/1329812530970169344?s=21 :

> As long as Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, he can't be fully trusted. Be suspicious of anyone who is getting rich from the establishment.

https://wqth.wordpress.com/2020/11/21/how-pdjt-will-win-a-second-term/

I liked this article explaining Trump’s strategy for winning a second term. It goes into detail on a theory put forth by Alan Dershowitz.

> At the last update of our data, on Sunday night, in Pennsylvania as a whole, Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s, roughly 1/9 as large.

Typo..? 2.3% is not roughly 1/9

Read the sentence again. It said 2.3% as large as Trump’s vote, not 2.3% as large as the total vote. It also presents the second as a restatement of the first.

> Jorgensen’s support was 2.3% as large as Trump’s

I don't understand what is going wrong for you. You know what a percentage is. This says if Trump got 100 votes, Jorgensen got 2.3 votes.

> The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

834 is not around 20% of 3331. It's around 25% as much as 3331 is.

Their gross incompetence at arithmetic (as well as the previous error I pointed out) casts doubt on the quality of their statistical analysis of the election. And I haven't even read the article, just a couple little excerpts, to find these errors.

This doesn't mean their conclusion or main point is wrong, but with "experts" like these being promoted as doing some of the best analysis to find fraud ... jfc what a sad world :(

> They are looking at the ratio J/(J+T),

Why would one look at that? And that isn't what they say they're looking at.

#18780 I agree they worded it incorrectly. I didn't notice that until you quoted the first part of the sentence alone (without the 1/9 part).

#18784

When they refer to "support" throughout the paper, I think they mean the fraction of votes under consideration that went to a particular candidate, e.g.:

> a large batch of 90,022 mail/absentee votes get added that has over 95% support for Biden

> The Libertarian candidate Jorgensen enjoys 20.02% as much support (834 votes) as the Republican (3,331).

Here, the only simple way to get 20.02% is 834/(834+3331).

> it has a ratio of support for Jorgenson relative to Trump (20%) that is higher than virtually every county in America

Earlier, I wrote:

>> They are looking at the ratio J/(J+T),

curi asked:

> Why would one look at that?

Because unusual values for it can be a sign of fraud. In their terms, J/(J+T) refers to Jorgensen's "support" in a hypothetical two-way race between Jorgensen and Trump. They have calculated it for lots of areas across the country, and they think that the value of 20% for it in Montgomery County, PA, is unusual.

> And that isn't what they say they're looking at.

I agree. At least two sentences are worded as if they are looking at J/T.

> Here, the only simple way to get 20.02% is 834/(834+3331).

You're trying to make the numbers work out right instead of thinking about concepts.

I can do that too. I already knew where 20% came from. *But it's dead wrong* in relation to the words written.

And that method is terrible for understanding stuff.

>> Why would one look at that?

> Because unusual values for it can be a sign of fraud.

You're making a positive argument. Convert it to a negative argument and see how it works.

> Sadly I don't think that's true. It's a nice ideal that some people pay lip service to, but I don't think it's what many people actually do. See e.g. Feynman's experience in a rocketry related investigation (o-ring story).

Yeah okay, I can see how I would have made that mistake, esp b/c I was thinking about some of SpaceX's recent failures where I paid attention to the community discussion during the investigation. On one hand I think private companies have less inventive to lie like the NASA guy, and OTOH I'm probs biased b/c of how I paid attention to it at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4 - Richard Feynman debunks NASA

Feynman really was a great thinker. IMO he was quite a bit more polite in that clip than he needed to be, too.

#18795 I've dialed back my view of SpaceX and Musk over the past few years, in large part b/c of things you've said I don't know how to answer. ATM taking a 'need to learn more, there are some issues' approach.

I changed my mind about SpaceX vs Blue Origin last year when this happened https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-unveils-lunar-lander/

SpaceX and BO had conferences around the same time, and Musk was talking about starship and mars, and bezos was talking about the moon and *space habitats*. I think Bezos has much better ideas about this than Musk, but Musk has captured ppls imaginations w/ mars. Ppl don't seem to care that big planetary colonies don't make sense (they'll eventually get big, but most ppl will live between/around planets, not on them).

> I paid attention to the community discussion during the investigation

Do you have an example of discussion you think is particularly good and fits your description about thorough investigation? Source? Link?

#18799 Correction: My second reason to prefer J/(J+T) over J/T doesn’t stand on its own. It should have been part of the first reason (if it were even listed at all). This is because, when there are only two candidates, it’s trivial to calculate the value for one candidate given the value for the other using either of the two alternatives, so the fact that the values of the first alternative add to 100% provides no benefit in that case. And since J/T doesn’t generalize to races with 3 or more candidates, the second reason doesn’t apply to it.

#18798

> Do you have an example of discussion you think is particularly good and fits your description about thorough investigation? Source? Link?

No, definitely in the FI sense of 'good discussion', and maybe not in a lay sense either. I had a bit of a look.

I think this is what happened leading up to me saying the example:

- I had some positive beliefs about ppl in the rocket industry.

- The COPV thing happened and there was a lot of speculation.

- Ppl talked about procedures and fault-trees and all kinds of things.

- There was a narrative akin to what I put in #18789

- A highly technical explanation came out (Jan 2nd 2017) which confirmed the narrative

- I didn't question it or realise that it wasn't a good argument / evidence / etc.

Here's an extract from the Jan 2 statement (linked) showing what I mean about the narrative:

> The accident investigation team worked systematically through an extensive fault tree analysis and concluded that one of the three composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the second stage liquid oxygen (LOX) tank failed.

I still think there are qualitative differences between rocketry postmortems and electoral fraud stuff, but I overstated it in the example.

#18812 When we compare Trump's votes to Biden's we commonly do it in a different way: Trump won that state by +5

Direct ratios between two things are common. When we say Trump got 51% of the vote, we're directly comparing T to V (V = total vote).

If we compared Trump to a minor candidate, saying he won but +49 would tell us it's not close, but maybe not be that useful or specific. Did the minor candidate get 0% or 10% or something in between? idk.

A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did. That's good for some purposes.

But we don't say Trump got 1.2x as many votes as Biden. We got with +5 instead.

>> A common comparison would be Trump got 15x more votes than J did.

> Why do you say this kind of comparison is common?

I didn't. You dropped the "If" statement that qualified it, as well as the qualifier after it.

Minor correction: I wrote:

> Now here's the question I asked about [2] in #18825:

The text "about [2]" shouldn't be there.

Here's how the mistake happened. I originally put some numbers in the text I quoted from #18818 to make it easier to refer to individual statements. Later, I realized I didn't need the statement numbers, but I forgot to take that one out.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/23/5-more-ways-joe-biden-magically-outperformed-election-norms/ (Nov 23, 2020)

Article points out some things about Biden’s supposed victory that the establishment media has been incurious about. It mentions some points I wasn’t aware of, including:

> Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.

> First, no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost re-election. Second, President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama).

The article summarizes with:

> Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.

Back in 2006, CNN was home to Lou Dobbs Tonight, a conservative news show that has aired on Fox Business since 2009. In one episode (YouTube video: https://youtu.be/RvYSuJwXp9Q ), Dobbs covered voting machine fraud:

> Lou Dobbs: "A firm owned by Venezuela could be allowed to take over one of this country's top voting machine firms. Critics of the deal say our nation's very democracy is now for sale without anyone doing a thing about it.... The U.S. company that makes the [voting] machines, Sequoia, was bought in 2005 by Smartmatic, a private company primarily owned by Venezuelan businessmen."

Here's evidence that the video isn't entirely a forgery (since the only copy I could find was uploaded to YouTube recently) https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2006/06/19/sequoias-ownership-raises-new-concerns/ :

> Politicians in the Windy City and CNN newsman Lou Dobbs suggested recently that the federal government was derelict in not having investigated Sequoia and its acquisition last year by Smartmatic, a Boca Raton, Fla., firm largely owned by Venezuelan businessmen.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1328908377959714817.html :

> Three of the Democrat justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that ruled against Trump were elected in 2015 on the back of record campaign spending that led directly back to Democracy Alliance, a group founded by George Soros.

Twitter thread claims, among other things, that 3 of the 5-2 progressive majority on the PA State Supreme Court were elected† with the help of significant funding from Democracy Alliance, a group founded by George Soros. If true, this is discoverthenetworks-level research, but I didn't see it mentioned on DTN's Democracy Alliance page.

† PA judges are elected, not appointed.

Daniel Horowitz, New analysis shows Biden winning nearly impossible margins on mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, *The Blaze* (Nov 30, 2020):

> Yes, mail-ins overwhelmingly skewed Democrat, like Election Day votes skewed Republican, but they were not all from Democrats. We know that 64.7% of those votes were from registered Democrats, 23.7% from Republicans, and 11.6% from nonpartisan or other party voters.

> What does this mean in simple arithmetic? … had Biden won 95% of returned Democrat mail-in votes, 21% of returned Republican votes, and 80% of returned independent votes, he would still have come up short of his margin of victory reported in the unofficial tally.

In the final paragraph, Horowitz writes:

> The suggestion that we should somehow move on from this is a greater threat to democracy than anything in our history.

https://rairfoundation.com/germany-syrian-migrant-stabs-afd-politician-prosecutor-immediately-sets-him-free-video/ (Germany, Nov 26, 2020):

> As with many criminal migrant, the Syrian is already known to the police. Instead of authorities holding the dangerous migrant, the Karlsruhe Prosecutor’s Office set him free. The migrant was released from police custody around the same time that Arpaschi awoke from anesthesia after his emergency surgery.

Video of Jess Morgan, a truck driver who is a USPS subcontractor, talking about a truck full of ballots disappearing in PA: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333875814585282567

Summary of Morgan's testimony from the Washington Examiner :

> In the most extraordinary report, a U.S. Postal Service contractor said his trailer full of 144,000-288,000 completed mail-in ballots, which he drove between New York and Pennsylvania, disappeared after he delivered it to a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, depot.

Some really damning testimony in today's election fraud hearings in Michigan. Multiple witnesses saying the people operating the vote tabulating machines would scan the same batch of ballots multiple times, e.g., the witness starting at 7:36 pm ET and the pair of witnesses (they testified together) starting at 8:08 pm ET.

Some other highlights:

- 8:14 pm ET: Indian woman says she was a watcher in Detroit during the tabulation. She was trained both by the GOP and by some "voter integrity center" (?, not an exact quote). When she wore her GOP badge the other workers immediately started agitating, telling her to step 6 feet away, and threatening her with removal. She came back later with her non-partisan badge from the voter integrity center and everyone was very nice no matter how close she got, because they thought she was a Dem (due to being Indian and woman).

- 8:18 pm ET: Guy witnessed multiple occasions of theft of duplicate ballots at the TCS center where ballots were being processed.

- 8:21 pm ET: There was nothing done about challenged ballots, and no recording made. He witnessed people filling in Democrat straight ticket when it wasn't. He witnessed them making duplicates of duplicates and feeding them through the machines (apparently). He asked why, and was told "unknown reason". This witness also says the rescanned the same ballots multiple times.

- 8:23 pm ET: He left and wasn't allowed back in because of "covid capacity". He says, "Mind you, the entire room was slammed. It looked like the NY stock exchange on its busiest day. It was ... pure discrimination."

- 8:24 pm ET: Lady says mail-in ballots were in sequence. "2222 cannot have 2223 after it" because they were mailed in (which should randomize things). She asked supervisor, and there was not even a date on the envelopes. It said Nov-0-2020 (yes, zero). She asked about it and they said, you're not letting us do our job, you're disturbing us. The sequenced ballots were all from the same area, signature were all alike. None of the voters on those sequenced mail-in ballots matched anyone in the poll book or in the electronic system. They had to be entered manually.

- 8:32 pm ET: Guy talks about problems with challenging: "I challenge you for filling in the Democrat straight ticket. Can I challenge that?" "No, that's not a challenge [and they push it straight through]"

- 8:39 pm ET: "I was responsible for standing in the middle of the room by the duplicate table. An employee would come up to the table and need a duplicate ballot, say there was a coffee stain on the ballot. They would grab a ballot, and my responsibility was to follow them to their table, to be their challenger, to observe over it. The duplicate theft started at the beginning of the night, roughly 10 pm. They would grab 3-4. The number I saw in the first shift, over half a dozen. Second shift, roughly the same. But you also have to consider that the third shift from 6am to 2pm the next day, and also the 1am shift, the table was guarded less, and we have less people [watching], so there's more opportunity for theft."

- 8:50 pm ET: Colonel says there were 6 MI precincts with over 120% turnout.

- 8:56 pm ET: 17,327 MI voters also had a corresponding obituary.

- 9:18 pm ET: SGO/Smartmatic/Dominion share a physical address at a small building in Barbados. "[Dominion] is designed to be inaccurate.... If an individual or a team of individual had a malign purpose, this would be the tool that I would want to use."

- 9:34 pm ET: Chair of Wayne County Board of Canvassers says when they were "canvassing" ballots, the total number of votes wasn't matching up with the voter rolls. She says someone dropped off a huge container of new voter rolls right before certification, which made most of them match. She says, "We did not get a corrected statement of voters until 13 days after the election." That seems sketchy.

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1334569329334083586?s=20

> WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes

Pallets Full Of Ballots”: Voter’s Song About Democrats Stealing Election Goes Viral (Nov 8, 2020):

> A catchy song about the Democrats’ election fraud by concerned voter Austin Forman has gone viral as votes continue to be counted in several battleground states.

> The song, called “Pallets Full Of Ballots”, has amassed nearly a quarter million views on Twitter and over 150,000 on YouTube in just a few days.

Pretty catchy song. The article gives the lyrics.

#18957 Can you provide a short summary which explains how the video of pulling ballots out from under a table after getting rid of the Republican observers and media is consistent with normal procedure? I don't want to watch an hour video to find out what the main idea is.

> Every time another small business goes under, Scott gets richer from her Amazon shares.

From: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/woke-housewives-silicon-valley-daniel-greenfield/

That's kind of in the same vein as "Pharmaceutical companies profit from people getting sick." Pharma companies don't actually make money from people getting sick but from providing people medicine that helps alleviate the sickness.

Likewise, Amazon makes money (and makes Amazon's shareholders money) by providing customers value, not by ruining small businesses. Small businesses that can't compete with Amazon may get pushed out. OTOH, lots of small businesses rely on and use Amazon for their business.

I don't like the woke people Greenfield is criticizing in the article. That said, the bit I quoted seemed like a nasty bit of anti-capitalism worthy of some criticism.

#18962

On the other hand:

"Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron refuted those claims on Friday, saying in a public meeting that no observers were ever told to leave the facility."

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/surveillance-tape-breeds-false-fraud-231314467.html

#18964

So there is no misunderstanding, I am not arguing that voter fraud did not occur. I don't know if it did or didn't. I don't think the evidence, as it has been presented, is clear either way. My goal was to warn about jumping to conclusions from the video.

#18966 Agree about a thorough investigation and that people who certified the votes are dishonest.

The comment I initially responded to (#18952) was:

> Longer video of GA suitcases full of ballots, makes it look even worse. JustinCEO writes:

>> you see that they did a fake wind-down while the election observers were still there and waited till the coast was clear before doing their suitcases-full-of ballots shenanigans

At face value, it seemed to me this required a warning. If I was wrong about that, OK.

I didn't know Scott Adams is a left-wing source. He is a Trump supporter yes?

I'm not very familiar with Scott Adams but him saying some sorta pro Trump thing in the past does ring a bell. I watched a little of the video before commenting and got a leftist tribalist impression. I went back and watched a few seconds and he's saying what sounds to me like idiotic leftist talking points that totally ignore/deny reality and don't attempt to truth seek, and are so low quality it's hard to imagine someone unbiased finding them persuasive. Or he's really ignorant – which would also explain believing that stuff – and dishonestly presenting himself as a knowledgeable, informed person.

He says no one was told to leave and it's just a misunderstanding. His answer to sworn testimony is basically "the Republicans were probably just confused". Maybe. That's not impossible. But why would you think that? How is that a debunking? Why is that the right conclusion to draw? You can throw maybes at anything if you want to make excuses for it but using a highly condescending tone (in what strikes me as a typical leftist cultural style) and saying "maybe" is not an argument to reach a particular conclusion.

He goes on to say (around 13m) that keeping ballots under the table is normal. No it's not. That is not a secure place. Ballots are supposed to have chain of custody and not just be left lying around where anyone could grab them or tamper with them. And the other ballots were not being stored under the other tables. He doesn't address this at all.

Did he actually listen to some of the hearings? I get the impression that he has less information than I do, but is presenting himself as knowing what he's talking about.

I watched some hearings so I heard about things like procedures for keeping ballots safe that were supposed to be used. You don't just leave them lying around undersupervised. That is not ok. Similarly if you watched the hearing related to this video people were asking about where other ballots were coming from and why these particular ones were treated differently. SA doesn't try to address that. My impression is he hasn't actually watched the hearing with the presentation of the video, he just watched some clip of the video posted elsewhere and then is acting like an expert thought leader without warning people he isn't even paying attention to the available info.

Around 20min he says he's pro Trump/fraud biased, is very condescending to his audience more, and also says when he first saw the video he laughed out loud and assumed fake. He also admits the video could easily be bad and he hasn't refuted it – but then says the video is fake in his YT title and says he debunked it in his YT description.

He's vague about why his first reaction was to disbelieve the video but he seems to suggest it's because he doesn't expect smoking gun evidence to exist. So his reaction is all about his general calibration to reality and sense of life. I think he's a leftist who managed to use conscious thought to override his leftism in some places, but he still has a lot of leftist intuitions.

I Binged to try to check his history to see if he's from the left (if not I'm wrong in some way) and saw this:

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/10/02/scott-adams-disavows-trump-in-emotional-rant-quickly-reverses-course-after-tsunami-of-dem-hate-979658/

> Scott Adams disavows Trump in emotional rant, quickly reverses course after tsunami of Dem hate

Oct 2, 2020

That fits someone with leftist intuitions just below the surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Politics

> Adams has often commented on political matters, although in 2016 he wrote on his blog "I don't vote and I am not a member of a political party."[36] In 2007, he suggested that Michael Bloomberg would make a good presidential candidate.[37] Before the 2008 presidential election he said, "On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff",[38] but said in December 2011 that, if he were president, he would do whatever Bill Clinton advised him to do because that "would lead to policies that are a sensible middle ground".[39] On October 17, 2012, he wrote "while I don't agree with Romney's positions on most topics, I'm endorsing him for president".[40] In a blog post from September 2017, Adams described himself as being "left of Bernie, but with a preference for plans that can work".[41]

Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, left of Bernie in spirit (but wants something practical), some sort of partial libertarian but also thinks some libertarianism is crazy. Yeah this guy is a socialist sympathizer with leftist intuitions, and apparently he sometimes he uses conscious reason to get some things right, and that's great, but making excuses for the GA fraud video is not one of those times. His vibe and style, combined with the bad content in this case, are not going to change the minds of any right tribalists. I do appreciate that he's apparently trying to think for himself some, with mixed results, instead of just being a total puppet.

Thanks for that review of Scott Adams. I see that Trump has retweeted him on a number of occasions and they have met in person. So seems to carry a bit of influence with the president.

As of today, he has done 1208 daily podcasts of about 1 hour on politics etc. I'm kinda impressed he has done so many. I see that he often responds to questions live on air. That seems good.

Just listening to his latest where he talks more about the GA fraud video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1srnyUIZR74

Wow I just skimmed a bit of Adams #1208 and he says his base expectation, in advance, was that 95% of the fraud claims would be false.

I do not agree.

There's massive pressure not to come forward. People get harassed by antifa for speaking up. People get fired. Witnesses in hearings have talked about having to move to a new home, get a new phone number, etc., due to major harassment. And how they can no longer get work. And how they lost some of their not only friends but family. One lady talked about that a bunch. Most don't get that off topic but it's a problem for others. Another one who had some sort of official Republican position mentioned substantial harassment from antifa.

Anyway in that kinda context, where reporting problems is so suppressed, I would not expect 95% of people reporting problems to be lying in order to try to help Trump but at such personal risk/cost.

Also I don't think 5% truth rate makes any sense with sworn affidavits where you can get in serious trouble for lying. And you aren't going to be protected b/c the ppl deciding whether to prosecute are a bunch of deep state leftists (and some deep state establishment republicans mixed in). Even if Trump wins you very well might still get prosecuted if you lied and maybe even if you told the truth. If Biden wins your chances of prosecution go up even more.

Even with leftists saying anti-trump stuff and expecting the govt to have their back a fair amount, i still wouldn't expect even close to 95% lying in sworn affidavits (Adams didn't specify these though and I think had in mind just general stuff that ppl tweet or claim anywhere, so yeah if you go find news on facebook instead of from hearings then i guess you'll run into a MUCH higher fake news rate – hard for me to say how high since i don't use FB. otoh if u look at stuff from actual news sources, even biased right wing ones, i don't think they are gonna be wrong 95% of the time or even report stuff as maybes and 95% of those turn out wrong).

again i see here a major sense of life, pov and calibration difference about what kinda world we think we live in. or to some extent what kinda news sources we use and how much bullshit they include.

i think the suppression is so strong that tons of true claims are being suppressed, and that same suppression also works on a ton of false claims and keeps the false rate a lot lower than Adams thinks.

Adams presents it like maybe a few major claims will turn out true, and that's a huge deal and enough to change the election, but most will be false. it sounds kinda like he doesn't think fraud was rampant. some fraud happened and it mattered, but he doesn't think there were tons of small frauds all over the place to report. whereas i think there was ABSOLUTELY TONS of small cheating, in addition to a few big cases, which makes it so that tons of ppl can report problems and be right.

#18974 Did you watch the part of the video I'm talking about and think I misunderstood what he said/meant about the 95% of fraud/problem claims will turn out to be false? Or are you just saying he said other things elsewhere?

I didn't watch the whole video. I missed context before and after. So I could have gotten something wrong. But him saying something different in another video is a different kinda issue.

Oh - Adams thinks people preoccupied with fraud allegations are getting misdirected. He says the real problem is that bullies chased out witnesses in the key cities and that is enough to invalidate the election, fraud or no fraud. Good point I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_72rtHyIehM

Trump speech starts around 3h52m. I watched some:

he says the wall is great and almost done. i think i would have heard if he actually built it

he gave us the biggest tax cut in history of country. i'm very doubtful

InfoWars is pretty right-wing. They routinely get called white supremacists. They have used authorize.net plus some merchant processor (I don't know which) to process credit cards in their online store since at least 2018.

If someone wants to run a site with content that groups with power in the U.S. disapprove of, as long as the site's content isn't edgier than InfoWars, a workable solution may exist. For now, at least.

#18982 Speaking of people who initially aligned themselves with the leftstream media's lies about the Covington kids, Ben Shapiro retweeted someone who wrote: "I stand with #NathanPhillips, Elder of the Omaha Nation" (retyped from an image of the now-deleted tweet).

#1898

> (can't find timestamp): Trump, almost in passing, says he doesn't want to have to run in 2024.

Found it with the help of Breitbart:

> 8:50 PM: Trump asks supporters to vote in the runoff to show the radical left that they don’t surrender. Trump talks about winning back the White House in 2024 and says hopefully he won’t have to be a candidate again.

Here's my transcript of what Trump said about 2024, plus a bit leading up to it. It starts at 8:49 PM ET:

>> And right now we have to get out to vote for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to show the Radical Left that we will never surrender. We will only win. We're going to win. We always win. Somehow, we find a way to win.* Now is not the time to retreat. Now is the time to fight harder than ever before.

>> So don't listen to my friends! Just go out. And you know what they're saying, they're saying, "We want you to fix the system." We're going to fix the system. But the system will be fixed when these people get in. They'll get in, and we'll fix the system. Because we're all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims, every one of you.

>> The next great victory for our movement begins right here on January 5. And then we are going to win back the White House. We're going to win it back. And we're going to take back the House in 2022. And then in 2024 – and hopefully, I won't have to be a candidate – we're going to win back the White House again. A friend of mine said, "Oh, don't worry about it, sir, you're way up in the polls. You'll win in 2024." I said, "I don't want to wait 'til 2024, I want to go back 3 weeks."

#18982 Ugh re the Twitter behavior. Reminds me of Taleb. And ugh re the leftist intuitions re Covington Catholic event.

#18983 Shapiro is awful. I don't know how more people don't see it. He previously tweeted against Roseanne (and, in a comparable case, in favor of a leftist) and did something to alienate or betray David Horowitz (Shapiro used to run Truth Revolt for Horowitz).

There will be no "Biden administration" Americans of principle will not and cannot allow that to happen.

Yes, it is war. And what happens in the next month will determine whether it becomes a hot war or not.

#19041 What sorta stuff do you have in mind? Getting out of the big cities? Food prep? Guns/defense?

Fox News’ Murdochs Backed Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton

> Soros, apparently, is not the only topic of discussion barred from Fox’s airwaves. Long-time Fox contributor Dick Morris stated that “Fox always tried to tell [him] never to criticize China when you’re on our air. [He couldn’t] believe the censorship that goes on [there].”

#19041 Another factor to consider is weather. It's harder to get people to do stuff outside when it's cold, and that includes riots. Most of the country is cold now and will be for the next few months. That is a near term bright spot if the system declares Trump the winner.

So another possibility if Trump wins is relatively contained demonstrations and violence in the near term, followed by some perfunctory system-oriented actions like court cases or legislative initiatives by the Democrats. The nominal purpose of these will be to give the system one last chance to reverse the election and enact the "will of the people". The actual purpose will be to run out the clock until the weather gets warm again and more conducive to widespread riots. At that time, an excuse will be found to touch them off again.

#19109 Article from December, 2020, showing how the Left promoted the new definition of 'court-packing', even before dictionary.com added it: https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/dems-and-media-redefine-court-packing-to-mean-opposite-of-what-it-really-means-to-help-biden-out-of-jam/

#19115 Reclaim the Net tweeted:

> This threat from Michigan Democratic State Representative Cynthia Johnson on Facebook Live is far worse than anything others have been banned from social media platforms for saying.

Reclaim the Net also says that Rep. Johnson has not been banned.

Hey curi, how about some thoughts on the current situation in America now that the Ellsworth Tooheys of this world have got us by the short and curlies? You're smart and should be helping give some direction in this.

#19129 If the globalists/communists/hard left can steal this election, what's to stop them from implementing their agenda ASAP once Biden takes office? I'm concerned that once this group gets power, they will take steps that will make it very difficult to ever get America back to a "land of the free", e.g.:

- amnesty for ~30 million illegal aliens, affording a permanent (?) Dem majority in state and federal elections

- open borders and mass refugee migration here

- institutionalize election fraud even more than it is now

- two new Dem states, assuring a permanent (?) Dem majority in the Senate

- pack Supreme Court if necessary

Would it be wise to leave the country if Biden is elected? Is there anywhere else to go that won't fall in short order once the U.S. falls?

Maybe it'd make sense to try to live in a place with good, armed, patriotic Christian Americans. And make friends with them as best one can. Even if the institutions and elected officials are shit, maybe somehow something good can happen.

#19134 A major problem or opportunity (depending on how you look at it) is that leftist / authoritarian policy in the US is commonly obfuscated compared to what it is elsewhere. Straightforward leftism is usually a loser with the American public, so the left achieves its goals by hiding them here to a large degree.

I saw this repeatedly in comparing US to NZ. In actual practice the amount of leftist policy is not very different between the two countries. But the leftist policy in NZ is far more open and notorious than in the US.

The problem with the US left's subterfuge is it makes the impact of leftism even worse for most people. It makes the government harder to understand and deal with. A good example is health care. I would prefer an actually free, capitalist health care system. Neither the US or NZ has that.

The US has a byzantine mess of insurance companies, plans, subsidies, rules, government provision, billing and reimbursement, income thresholds, price controls, tax credits and deductions, workarounds, special programs, etc. to maintain the fiction of a largely free system of private actors with just some government "help" when the reality is the government controls almost everything - either because they are the ultimate payor or because they exercise substantial control by way of policy carrots and sticks.

In NZ they just outright say everybody gets a basic level of health care from the government for free. If you want more/better than the government's health care you can pay for health care privately, either as you need it or with a private insurance plan (both are widely available and far cheaper than in the US). If you can't afford it or don't want to pay it too bad, just use the government system.

If I can't have freedom, then in practice the NZ system is far more consumer friendly for all but a tiny minority of people with rare and severe health conditions. It's easy to navigate a system like NZ's, know what your costs will be, there's little paperwork, and your choices are not tied to ex: your age, if you make too much or too little income, and whether you're self-employed or subject to an employer's choice of insurance company golf partners.

IMO covert leftist meddling has made US health care worse for most people than (a particular type of) outright socialized medicine, while convincing them that the pain is caused by the market.

The opportunity in this situation is persuasion. The US public is still far more persuadable that ex: health care is a personal choice not a right, and government intervention makes it worse not better. NZ culture (and most other places AFAIK) has thoroughly internalized the left's idea of health care as a human right and government as its guarantor.

Insurers balk at covering Portland businesses; brokers say downtown upheaval has made carriers wary, *The Oregonian* (2020-12-12):

> …brokers say insurance companies have become particularly wary about covering Portland businesses, especially those downtown, as ongoing protests have given the city a reputation for upheaval and led to a spike in vandalism and destruction…

> Insurers’ apparent reluctance to cover Portland businesses is another indication of how severely this year’s turbulence has affected the city and its image.

> Jessica Getman, president of Brown & Brown Insurance Northwest, said that some insurance carriers have placed moratoriums on issuing new commercial insurance policies or increasing coverage for existing customers in downtown Portland, creating a barrier for anyone trying to open a new business.

> Barb Schimmel, a senior sales executive at WSC Insurance, … recently received a notice from an insurance carrier saying they would not offer a new policy to a business they did not already insure or offer increased coverage to a business they currently insure if it operated “within 5 miles of active riots/looting.”

Tim Pool: AZ County DEFIED Subpoenas Demanding Vote Machines, Its Political WAR And Dems Are NOT Playing Fair

The new covid 19 stimulus bill has more pork than a sausage factory:

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2020/12/21/they-hate-you-coronavirus-stimulus-bill-includes-no-less-than-10-million-for-gender-programs-in-pakistan/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/mathematician-bobby-piton-finds-500000-unique-last-names-pennsylvania-sophisticated-state-actor-able-optimize-desired-outcome/

> Mathematician Bobby Piton Finds More Than 500,000 Unique Last Names in Pennsylvania: ‘Sophisticated State Actor Was Able to Optimize Desired Outcome’

In Penn, common last names like "Smith" or "Johnson" were voted tens of thousands of times fewer than they statistically should be based on the total number of votes.

Half of all last names that voted in Penn only had one single vote for that last name (no one else in the family voted). That sounds too high and suggests a bunch of fake names. Some comparison with other states and other elections would be needed though. This article doesn't have enough info to make the full case.

Ukraine press conference saying Biden is corrupt and took a lot of money from their country:

https://twitter.com/BernardKerik/status/1343669283973427201

A different take on election fraud:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis

Roughly: Election fraud is normal and expected in the US, and if you lose at the election fraud game it show your team was weak.

It also has some good links to background info. E.g. Did Liberal Justices Invent the Standing Doctrine? An Empirical Study of the Evolution of Standing, 1921-2006*

I don't agree that might makes right, but I did agree with a fair amount of his comments. His view of *the current state of reality* has similarities with mine.

The brief, unusual comments on Popper are unconvincing and under-explained.

Here's an exaggeration with perhaps a good point to it:

> Actually he [Trump was orders of magnitude from mattering. 99.9% of “his” employees in the “executive branch” did exactly what they would have done “under” Mrs. Clinton. All he had done by winning the election was to come one step closer to mattering.

> But that was one step too close. How could power keep Trump from coming another step closer? By convincing him that he was already there, and already mattered. Since this was what they wanted to hear, this wasn't hard. Psychological warfare is a brutal art [...]

https://twitter.com/hyperboriankiwi/status/1343966761838927872

Trump's speech on election fraud:

https://youtu.be/d399gk-73J8?t=88

It's from a week ago. Apparently every major TV network refused to show this short speech.

https://trumptrainnews.com/2020/12/30/pence-does-not-join-lawmakers-in-eleventh-hour-plan-to-overturn-election/

Looks like Pence won't help Trump with the election.

> A different take on election fraud:

> https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis

[snip]

> The brief, unusual comments on Popper are unconvincing and under-explained.

For what it's worth, Yarvin's got more on Popper here:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime

And here:

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/

There's also other stuff. Doesn't look that great.

He's got an article by David Stove in his archives:

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/archive/stove/

He seems to like it even though it badly misrepresents Popper.

He's also ok with induction but not with Bayesianism:

https://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/a-reservationist-epistemology/

> A reservationist [eg, Yarvin] has no objection to formal deductive and inductive reasoning, ...

He's been involved with the overcoming-bias/lesswrong community. EY doesn't like him:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s

> #19319

> I think EY (and most of his community) is too left and too mainstream/establishment/bluepill to like Moldbug.

Ya and fyi Moldbug claims to have first popularized the redpill/bluepill metaphor, having taken it from the Wachowskis.

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1345768908477722626

> The Big Lie - and a Republican is spreading it. These allegations were never adjudicated. The corrupt courts just refused to hear them. Shame on Toomey and whomever this sucker is.

Horowitz is right. This is a key piece of info: the courts didn't rule against Trump, they refused to consider his evidence or arguments in the first place (for reasons like standing or the lawsuit being too early or too late).

https://twitter.com/horowitz39/status/1345758405416243200

> Voice of the criminals. No answer to the massive evidence of voter fraud, the greatest political crime ever committed against our country - just lay down your arms and surrender to the totalitarian racists who are in control.

The CritRats have no answer to the massive evidence of Andy B's cyberstalking and harassment. Kinda similar.

https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2021/01/04/election-crisis-and-biden-prompt-iran-to-test-for-american-weakness-threat-against-trump-and-talk-of-provoking-war/

> Election crisis and Biden prompt Iran to test for American weakness

Geller Report: Evidence China Was Colluding with the Bidens and Providing Information on How to Defeat President Trump in the 2020 Election

Breitbart coverage of the fight in DC:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/06/live-updates-u-s-capitol-descends-into-chaos-on-day-of-electoral-college-certification/

Trump video asking the protestors to go home peacefully:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346928882595885058

Mark Levin video: A Constitutional Crisis

Main point: the constitution says the state legislators decide how their state runs presidential elections, but people (e.g. governors and courts) just plain decided to do other stuff, contrary to what the legislators decided. These are public facts that aren't under dispute.

https://twitter.com/WokeCapital/status/1347164526110789634

> Trump put out a video telling the protesters to go home. Gets a comms cut, Twitter and Facebook timeout.

> Did any prominent democrat tell the BLM rioters to stop burning shit down, or did they pour gas on it.

> There was a coup alright, it's just not the one being reported.

Response https://twitter.com/rorufufufu/status/1347164856013750275

#19397 Greenfield wrote:

> One photo showed Nick Fuentes, the alt-right Groyper leader whose antisemitic group had previously shut down a Turning Point USA event by booing Donald Trump Jr. off the stage, and Tim ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet, a former Black Lives Matter supporter and BuzzFeed employee, who has a history of going back and forth between the alt-right and the Left.

Fuentes tweeted (RT’d by Michelle Malkin) that he never entered the capitol:

> Many journalists are falsely claiming that I was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with Baked Alaska— this is fake news! I did not enter the Capitol building. I was outside on the lawn wearing a completely different outfit. DEFAMATION!

#19402

> Conservative lawyer Lin Wood was among those who noticed and retweeted a post showing a familiar face at a June BLM rally in Arizona.

This guy is known as the "QAnon Shaman". He denies he is antifa. https://www.newsweek.com/qshaman-washington-antifa-protest-qanon-1559599

(Also, the photo that Lin Wood RT'd cuts off the guy's sign which features Q.)

> The day’s biggest confirmation came from a Washington Times report that facial-recognition firm XRVision had verified the presence of two Philadelphia Antifa members at the scene.

> In addition to the Viking-clad man, an accomplice notably had a tattoo of a hammer and sickle, the Times reported.

I don't believe those two are Antifa. The photo of them that was shared said "phillyantifa.org" but that was because it was phillyantifa.org's photo, and phillyantifa.org was accusing the two of being white supremacists. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1346981505982074883?s=20

#19404

> it was phillyantifa.org's photo

Or rather, a photo obtained by phillyantifa.org.

First Inventory of Damage to U.S. Capitol Building Released, *NYT* (2021-01-08):

> The damage was largely limited to broken glass, busted doors and graffiti, the report said.

Tim Pool video: Pentagon Officials Say Pelosi Asked Them To Stage A Military Coup Against President Trump

https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347970317302591490

> 9. If you replace "Trump" with "Navalny" in today's discussion, you will get an 80% accurate Kremlin's answer as to why my name can't be mentioned on Russian TV and I shouldn't be allowed to participate in any elections.

More above and below at the link.

Navalny was nominated for the nobel peace prize in 2020 and has been praised by Western mainstream media for standing up to Putin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny He has been poisoned, apparently by the Russian govt.

https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1348115530654347266?s=20

> NEW FOOTAGE: a long, disciplined line of men in body armor moves as a unit up the #CapitolBuilding steps.

There were a fair number of people in paramilitary gear with helmets and body armor at the forefront of storming the Capitol. Most of the people who were fighting the police, scaling walls, etc. looked like normal Trump rally participants, but there were also these paramilitary types who stand out. More examples: https://twitter.com/WienerNeeda/status/1348139407426031617 https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1346972919503724547

A few replies from the thread below.

https://twitter.com/j_nanma/status/1348147031982956544 :

> "Normal" protesters do not arrive with full equipment, like zip ties, body armor, scaling gear etc., these people were ready and trained

https://twitter.com/OutragedAtTrump/status/1348117822187081728 :

> It's like out of all the people there 90% were National Lampoon's cousin Eddie, and 10% were some kind of trained armed group of paramilitary terrorists.

https://twitter.com/Yoder_Esqq/status/1348084508789239810

https://twitter.com/rmconservative/status/1348434358630289410 :

> The Left brilliantly institutionalizes violence to such a point that it is no longer news when they act violently every single day, which enables them to get away with it.

#19488 I don't recall any prominent Democrats – or anyone at all – being cancelled for that...

John Ziegler, Trump’s Ban from Social Media is Further Evidence America is Destined to Split Up, *Mediaite* (Jan 11th, 2021, 11:28 am):

> But the most concerning element of Trump’s social media ban may be what it says about where we are evolving as a society, and as a nation. In short, we are very rapidly headed towards a situation where we are no longer even remotely living in one unified nation, but rather literally different universes based upon our political beliefs (or, even more absurdly, our view of Donald Trump).

> Twitter and other social media giants have now made it exceedingly clear that they view Republicans, at best, as second-class citizens and many of them, either by choice or because they have been banned, are going elsewhere.... Now... their alternative destination, Parler, has been essentially kicked off the Internet by yet another super-woke “Big Tech” giant, Amazon.

> While Donald Trump clearly lost the election, he had more Americans vote for him to be reelected than any incumbent president in our history. He is obviously not some fringe character we can pretend is only supported by overtly crazy people.

> When at least 46% of our nation just voted for a president who is now no longer even allowed to fully participate in the public dialogue, and they understandably feel that they need to even further isolate themselves from what currently passes for the “national dialogue,” we are no longer even a marginally “united” nation. Forget about ever being on the same page, we are no longer even reading from the same book, and are living in at least two different realities that have almost nothing in common with one another.

> The foundation of our union will very soon be eroded to the point where circumstances could cause it to finally crumble in ways we never thought imaginable. After what has happened over the last week, and looks like could easily occur in the next one, all within a pandemic which has greatly divided the way we are governed, it is unfortunately no longer a question of if this will happen, but when.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=405676577355023

Canary Mission exposing both left and right wing anti-semites.

Peter Navarro has released volume 3 (pdf) of his investigation into fraud and irregularities in the 2020 general election. Titled "Yes, President Trump Won", it argues that there were over 3 million possibly illegal votes across the 6 battleground states where Biden's total "victory" margin was less than 313,000, a factor of about 10x.

#19605 Reminds me of https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/27/21271611/youtube-deletes-comments-critical-china-communist-party-fixed

Tim Pool video: Germany To Send COVID Quarantine Breakers To Detainment Camps, Hundreds ARRESTED In Lockdown Riots

Angelo Codevilla, Clarity in Trump’s Wake, *American Greatness* (January 19, 2021)

I thought this was an excellent essay. Some quotes from it are below.

On a failing of Trump's:

> “Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite”

> Applying this observation to candidate Trump’s hyperbole suggested that President Trump might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the most self-destructive of habits, combining “the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.” And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’ plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated with their illegalities. 

> Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.

—

> Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.

I like how he calls hate the "intersectionality" that binds the left together.

—

> Because each and every part of the ruling coalition’s sense of what may assuage its grievances evolves without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It is also inherently destructive of oligarchy.

—

> It is more important to keep in mind that, in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits that crimes have been committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial, prosecutorial, or legislative investigations. But for the first time in America, the ruling class dismissed them with: “You have no proof!” A judge (the sister of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) ruled that even when someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address is still a lawful basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of crime is impossible with such judges and without testimony under oath, or powers of subpoena.

—

> Just as important, Republicans in general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the executive actions and consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were being perpetrated in key states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional violations were undeniable.

> Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.

——

> The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference. Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed approach to governing.

> The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.

https://twitter.com/drethelin/status/1355328917947764736

Bezos-Owned Amazon Opposes Mail-In Voting For Union Election, *Daily Caller* (2021-01-23) :

> Online retail giant Amazon opposed mail-in voting for a union election, according to a filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

> Amazon’s position on mail-in voting conflicts with that of the Washington Post editorial board’s position on mail-in voting. Both companies are owned by Jeff Bezos...

> In a petition filed with the NLRB on Jan. 21, Amazon argued that mail-in voting would decrease turnout and create security concerns in a unionization election at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

> Amazon argued in the petition, uploaded by The Verge, that “concerns about election security run particularly high” due to the use of “an unreliable electronic signature platform.”

In the TMS Live Stream with Matt Bracken - 3PM EST SUNDAY January 24th 2020, Matt Bracken said:

> It's so ironic because Amazon, which did everything they could to stop Trump and elect Biden, they want to have only in-person voting. They said if it's mail-in voting, it's too susceptible to fraud. Where were you last year?

> I think they should send a ballot to every address of everybody that ever worked for Amazon in the history of Amazon. And if they lived two or three houses, send a ballot to all of them.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its-warehouse-workers-into-brutal-megacycle-shifts

> On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Chicago were presented with a baffling choice: sign up for a ten-and-a-half-hour graveyard shift, or lose your job.

>

> Management informed workers that their warehouse, known as DCH1, would be shut down, and they were being offered a shift that runs from 1:20am to 11:50am, which is known as "megacycle," at a new Chicago warehouse.

...

> "There’s been a trend since the 70s of warehouse employers consolidating to longer shifts with few workers," said Jamie McCallum, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College and the author of Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream. "In recent decades, the fixed cost per worker has gone up significantly, particularly healthcare, so it makes sense to hire fewer employees."

#19853 thx for sharing the quote

Bank of America spying on Americans, secretly turning over customer data to FBI:

Tucker Carlson video

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

Good article. Worrying situation. The dems literally have thousands of troops occupying DC.

#19864 FPM is now covering the story:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/anti-trump-election-conspiracy-goes-public-matthew-vadum/

> The Anti-Trump Election Conspiracy Goes Public

> Time magazine provides a full confession.

David Horowitz tweets:

> Here's how stupid Republicans are. https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/10/kevin-cramer-donald-trump-stephanie-ruhle-hallie-jackson-impeachment-trial/

> The actual reason Democrats are lynching Trump again is they are afraid no Democrat could beat him in 2024. In other words, this is the Democrats' war to rig an election they can win only by stealing.

The Daily Caller article title is:

> Republican Senator Says Democrats Should Hope Trump Can Run Again To ‘Better’ Their Chances

I listened to "Trump Legal Team Presents CLEAR Evidence of Fraud Before Georgia Senate Committee 12/3/20" and took notes on everything I found interesting.

00:02:17: Georgia hearing opens up with a Christian prayer. Pretty cool.

00:10:45: Trump attorney starts listing the number of people who voted in different illegal categories.

00:13:56: Jackie Apic (sp?) starts presenting video evidence of the suitcases full of ballots. First she's talking about how you can see that the GOP observers weren't actually allowed to observe.

00:56:09: The witness says that Biden over-performed (compared to what?) by 5% or something in counties that used Dominion voting machines compared to counties that used other machines. But I think that could be partly explained by the fact that Democrats love Dominion, and conservative states like Texas won't use it. So yes, it's shitty that Democrats use Dominion, but that might not be evidence that there's a causative relation between using Dominion and over-performance by Biden. It could be a third factor that's causing that correlation.

00:58:07: He gives specific figures for the rejection rate and vast numbers of absentee ballots. He's basically going to calculate what effect it would have on the election if the true rejection rate were applied.

00:59:06: Basically, I think like 200,000 mail-in ballots never had a date recorded when they were returned, and yet votes were recorded for those ballots, even though they were never returned from the voter to the vote counters. And 96,000 of those remain. And prior to this timestamp he talks about votes being illegally altered.

00:59:45: The witness says it's very easy in the Dominion system to assign a voter to a mail-in ballot. So whether or not this person actually filled in that ballot, you can just sort of link them in. I wonder if they went through the polls, found people who hadn't voted, and assigned them to mail-in ballots.

01:33:57: The colonel says we have voice recordings of orders being placed for ballots for other states to be printed in China. He says there are indications that there were fake ballots printed up and pre-positioned for injection into the voting systems.

01:47:22: The lady talks about the pristine ballots. Some of them weren't aligned correctly, like the printer printed it diagonally or something, but they were all pristine. She says there were 110 ballots in one box instead of the usual 100.

01:50:14: The Georgia lady came back the next day, I'm guessing she reported an issue with the ballots the previous day. She and the rest of the people at her table were given only 60 ballots all day, while the tables around them had like thousands of ballots to process. They were told to go home at 10:00am. I guess they came in at 7am.

01:51:33: She says, we were there the night before, there were pallets of ballots to be counted, and when we got there the next day, they were non-existent.

01:51:44: She points out how extraordinary it is that they were asked to sign up for a 5-day consecutive period from like 7am to 7pm, some huge block, and then to be told to go home early on the second day.

01:53:28: She says why would 98 ballots have this identical filling in of that first little eclipse, all for Biden?

01:55:22: We already went through 6 boxes of ballots, these were totally different and not explainable by any normal duplication process. This is a lady with 20 years of experience in, I guess, counting votes in elections.

02:02:03: I guess dominion connects over the internet to fix issues with ipads being used as poll books. A legislator asks about this, saing, I thought the Dominion machines weren't connected to the internet? But this wasn't a voting machine, it looks like. It wasn't anything that counts votes. Then she says that they fixed the ballot marking devices at the same time. So *those* are connected to the internet.

02:06:27: She got a batch of 110 ballots that were 2 for Trump, 1 for Jorgensen, and the rest were for Joe Biden. She says that the source of those messed-up ballots was State Farm Arena.

02:07:43: She's been a *poll manager* for over 20 years.

02:18:14: Bridget Thorne was a contractor for Dominion, printing test ballots from 8am-5pm, and apparently she was the only one who was spoiling the ballots if they weren't used. These are real ballots, and no one else had any training about how it was supposed to work or anything. [She was fired on Dec 16]

02:19:15: She raised the issue [of unspoiled test ballots], and they were told, hey, you know, it's fine, they don't need to be spoiling anything. And she said, maybe they were Dominion workers, who were replacing the Fulton County workers, who had a COVID outbreak.

02:20:33: There were all of these suitcases full of ballots in the Dominion area where they were printing test ballots. And as far as she knows, she was the only one spoiling them. So they were unspoiled, and there was like no security. Anyone could have just driven in and taken them. And she said one woman even did just drive in and got kicked out later. Absolutely horrific.

02:24:38: There was no real chain of custody for the sample ballots, no way to show that they were returned or spoiled. Anyone could have done anything with them. There could be a lot of bad paper ballots around. This may warrant listening to again.

02:25:39: She attended a Board of Elections meeting to report the issue, having tried to report it up the chain numerous other times and heard nothing back, and she was *muted* 15 seconds into her presentation.

02:26:06: In Fulton County, they had ACLU clerks to process absentee ballots in every location. She says those clerks weren't trained well. Her clerk wasn't trained to take a deposition for an absentee ballot.

02:35:02: She was working with Dominion in this warehouse to print test ballots and test scanners. And she would always leave, thinking there was nothing to be done, but there would always be people staying, doing more, until like 2am. And these people just had complete access to print actual ballots with no meaningful chain of custody.

02:37:00: The ACLU clerks weren't trained to take an affidavit before they cleared the absentee ballot, which is kind of a huge SNAFU in her opinion.

02:41:21: One vote counting station reported 10,707 votes for Biden, and, I think, 13 for Trump.

02:43:36: The actual amount for Biden was like 1,081 not 10-thousand-something as they originally put in.

03:02:18: Lady goes to work as a poll worker/watcher (I forget which). It's freezing cold. Someone turned off the natural gas to the building overnight. The machines were not kept in a climate controlled environment. There's no chain of custody for those machines. Anyone could have come in and done something to them, or they might have been messed up by the cold. What a clown show.

03:04:26: One of the workers was walking around taking coffee orders on the special paper that's only supposed to be used for printing ballots. JFC. Anyone could just go grab that paper and print off whatever ballots they want to print.

03:13:59: Basically, her precinct had to send the ballots that were scanned, they get put into a bag, they were supposed to in a locked ballot bag with chain of custody forms, but they didn't have the right stuff to do that. She waited, forced them to bring the locks, but they still didn't have the chain of custody forms. The other worker just took the ballots away anyway. And when they went to do the recount, they were in boxes, not in the special bags, so she has no idea what happened to those ballots in between.

[missed timestamp] If you have a urine sample with no chain of custody, it gets thrown out. Some of the votes had less chain of custody than a urine sample.

03:58:19: Some Zuckerberg foundation dumped a bunch of money into Georgia unevenly. They really pumped it into the places that ended up having the most Democrat boost for Biden. It's the type of foundation that's actually helping run the *election infrastructure*, and of course the owners of that nonprofit are hard left.

04:13:42: Good point: If we just updated the NCOA change of address form that people file with the post office to have a checkbox of whether it's a temporary or permanent move, that would solve a lot of problems. There's an MVMA (motor voter) law (federal?) that somehow prevents Secretaries of States from cleaning up their voter roles enough. The only time he's ever seen someone removed is when they swear in front of a judge that they moved and that the move was permanent.

04:15:52: There's a 14th Amendment (equal protection) issue around these people who move within state. If you follow the law and odn't vote, you don't get counted, but if you break it and do vote, your vote is counted. So we're enabling the cheaters to vote.

04:16:47: The NCOA database is publicly available. So people could have moved away from Georgia, but since it's public, other people can track them down and get them to say that their move was only temporary, and then they can still vote in Georgia.

04:40:49: Constitutional lawyer absolutely destroys a Democrat legislator who's trying to argue with him.

#19938 using the military in civilian life more and involving them with transfer of democratic power is extremely dangerous and rationalist. look into some military dictatorships and coups, and problems other countries have had.

The New York Times lies more than you think they do:

https://www.revolver.news/2021/02/maga-blood-libel-why-are-they-hiding-the-medical-report/

via a thread:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359865412863819779

Democrat impeachers lie too:

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/impeachment-blunder-author-tweet-introduced-trial-says-it-was