Considering that a functional example of a democracy is two wolfs and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch, I’m more interested in retaining and strengthening the republic bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers.
While Staten Island was the only borough in New York City to vote for Trump in 2020, the rest of the cities mentioned in USA Today’s article all—including El Paso and Eagle Pass, Texas—voted decisively for Biden.
They’re getting what they voted for. Good and hard.
I’ve provided an editorial correction to a Politico headline.
President Joe Biden will formally announce the new office Friday during a Rose Garden event where several advocates and lawmakers have been invited to attend.
Harris, who has played a leading role in gun safety policy, will oversee the office, according to a White House statement. Longtime Biden aide Stefanie Feldman, who has worked on gun policy for more than a decade, will serve as its director.
“The new Office of Gun Violence Prevention will play a critical role in implementing President Biden’s and my efforts to reduce violence to the fullest extent under the law, while also engaging and encouraging Congressional leaders, state and local leaders, and advocates to come together to build upon the meaningful progress that we have made to save lives,” the vice president said in a statement.
“Our promise to the American people is this: we will not stop working to end the epidemic of gun violence in every community, because we do not have a moment, nor a life to spare,” she said.
Greg Jackson, executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, will report to Feldman as deputy directors of the new office.
For years, gun groups have pleaded with Biden to take this action, which advocates see as a concrete step forward as gun safety legislation remains stalled in Congress. Activists have argued that such an office will help the administration coordinate on gun policy issues across the federal government, while also allowing the White House to show leadership on the issue.
I suspect Harris will be as effective in this role as she has been as Border Czarina.
New Mexico Governor Grisham is following the traditional Democrat playbook and engaging in massive resistance to the federal court’s injunction prohibiting her from enforcing or attempting to enforce her facially unconstitutional ban on the carrying of firearms in Albuquerque and Bernadillo County. She announced that she is amending her executive order so that is only applies to parks and playgrounds.
However, the judge’s order states—
In addition, Defendants are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (4) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s ‘Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures’ to the extent it imposes additional restrictions on the carrying or possession of firearms that were not already in place prior to its issuance.
Because the ban on carrying in parks and playground did not exist prior to the issuance of the executive order, reinstating it appears to be an explicit violation of the injunction.
Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
—Bernard Baruch
The trouble with democracy is that 50 percent of the voters are below average.
—Jeff Cooper
We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.
—James Madison
The LA Unified School District announces a new K-5 program—
Sodom and Gomorrah were unavailable for comment.
Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.
—Calvin Coolidge
The NY Post reports that 82% of NYers call migrant influx a serious problem, 58% want to stop the flow. IIRC, the people in NY have consistently elected and reelected politicians who declared the city to be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. They are now getting what they voted for—good and hard.
H. L. Mencken smiles.
The College Fix has a report up headlined Feds paid $300,000 to study why white, male physicists don’t fight racism, sexism in STEM. (H/T, Instapundit).
White, cis, male physicists with “good intentions” aren’t doing enough to fight the racism and sexism from which they benefit, argued two education researchers in a recently published article in the International Journal of STEM Education.
…
According to their article, the primary means by which these white male physicists illustrate their inaction include: asserting that inequity is something physically distant from them, blaming inequity on larger societal or cultural factors over which they have no control such as the K-12 education system or women choosing motherhood over physics careers, and appealing to their own discomfort with or inadequacy in directly addressing racism and sexism.
…
“Ending racism requires white people to change. Ending sexism requires men to change,” the authors wrote. “The progressive white men we interviewed are essential to change.”
Nonsense!
What about fields where men are discriminated against because of their sex?
Let’s look at some real world facts.
Men as a whole and women as a whole have the same average intelligence. If we take 1,000 randomly selected men and 1,000 random selected women out of the general population, the average of their IQ scores will be the same. However, the men’s scores will vary over a greater range than the women’s. This means that we will find more men at the low end of the scores. Roughly 2.7 % of the men will score below 70, but only about 1.9 % of the women will have scores that low.
The effect on the very high end of the scale is even more pronounced.
The GRE is essentially an IQ test for a group of people (college students, mostly) who have above average IQs. Recent data for the GRE shows that Physics and Astronomy majors have the highest scores. Their standard score compared to all GRE takers was 139. If the tighter range of variability of intelligence for women applies to GRE takers, then only one in 52 women would score that high, but one in 38 men would. About 88 % of the Physics and Astronomy major who take the GRE are male; that’s a M/F ratio greater than 7:1. If the selection were based on IQ alone, the ratio should be less than 2:1.
At the other end of the GRE, Early Childhood Education majors have a standard score of 68. Again, if the tighter range of variability of intelligence for women applies to GRE takers, then only one in 51 women would score that low, but one in 37 men would. 97 % of Early Childhood Eduction majors who take the GRE are female; that’s a F/M ratio over 30:1. If the selection were based on IQ alone, the ratio should be less than 2:1.
Now, it may be that men are being actively discriminated against in Early Childhood Education programs and women discriminated against in Physics and Astronomy. Or it may be that men and women who are free to choose tend to choose careers related to the sex-based roles that have maximized the survival of our species. Or there may be multiple other reasons things are as they are.
The social policy of Scandinavian countries has tended to promote the ability of men and women to freely choose careers, and in those countries men and women are even more likely to seek careers that the authors of the paper referenced above would deem to be sexually stereotyped. In the Nordic countries the M/F ratio for engineers and F/M ratio for nurse are both higher than the average for the rest of the developed world.
The Real World experiment on sexxxxxism and career choice has already been run. We appear to have wasted $ 300,000 of taxpayer money.
I will note one other fact. While the standard score for all GRE takers is (by definition) 100, the standard score for Sociology majors is 88.
The NY Times reports that a senior FBI official responsible for part of the Russia Collusion Hoax investigation has pleaded guilty to colluding with Russians himself.
The former head of counterintelligence for the F.B.I. in New York pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to a single reduced charge of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and laundering payments from a prominent Russian oligarch.
The plea by the former agent, Charles F. McGonigal, represented a remarkable turn for a man who once occupied one of the most sensitive and trusted positions in the American intelligence community, placing him among the highest-ranking F.B.I. officials ever to be convicted of a crime.
Hmmmm.
Fox News is reporting Illinois Gov. Pritzker has signed a law banning firearms advertising that “officials” believe appeals to children. The law, which also applies to ads aimed at militants or others who might later use the weapons illegally, allows for lawsuits against firearms manufacturers or distributors.
I remember seeing this ad in Boy’s Life back in the early ’60s.
Once upon a time, boys were trusted with firearms. My father protected his family’s livestock from feral dogs with a .30/06 while he was in his teens. I dispatched varmints with a .22.
BTW, I still have my Nylon 66.
It’s provided decades of plinking pleasure and put small game on my dinner table.
The Governor of Massachusetts is asking the state’s residents to open their homes to illegal immigrants because the state’s shelters are almost full. Fox 25 reports,
The governor said anywhere between 10 to 30 migrant families a day are coming into Massachusetts.
The “crisis” is driven in part by Massachusetts being the only state with a “right-to-shelter” law, and Governor Healey says close to 5,600 families are currently housed in the state’s emergency shelter system.
Del Rio, El Paso, and McAllen were unavailable for comment.
In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
When I load magazines, I don’t usually leave a submachine gun pointed at my crotch.
BTW, that submachine gun appears to be a German MP40 from WW2, an interesting weapon for the ATF to have on hand.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
—Thomas Sowell
WalletHub has compared more than 180 U. S. cities across 39 key metrics using data ranging from average weekly work hours to the unemployment rate to divorce and suicide rates. Here are their ten most stressed cities for 2023. I’ve added a column showing the political party of each city’s mayor.
Of course, correlation does not prove causation, but there does seem to be more representation of one party that one would expect if the data were purely random.
The problem is that agencies sometimes lose sight of common sense as they create regulations.
—Fred Thompson
No black single mothers were available for comment.
The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.
—John Adams
Karine Jean-Pierre was unavailable for comment.
A choice taken under duress is no choice at all. Those who took the one of the Covid vaccines in order to keep their jobs were offered such a choice.
You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.
—Joseph Stalin