An interesting idea

In Massachusetts, a bill has been submitted that would allow prison inmates to get up to a 12 month reduction in their sentence if they donate an organ.   Somehow it seems like a good idea to me, though you'd have your hands full making sure that the prisoner was in fact in a condition to survive the surgery without passing on jailhouse infections (jailhouse rape is endemic, sad to say, with accompanying STDs and more) to the recipient.

Especially compelling is the reality that if a prisoner donates a kidney, he simultaneously becomes a more vulnerable person--we have two kidneys in case one becomes damaged, but if you've only got one, brawling and crime becomes a less attractive option because....one is in a condition where one could quickly become the person on dialysis.

I don't expect that it would make a night and day difference in organ donations, since you've got to do a lot of screening and matching, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

What is really afoot

A pro-Putina TV host has suggested that the United States ought to be destroyed, and its territory replaced with a "strait" named after....Joseph Stalin. 

Now, call me weird if you like, that's fine, but while I get hyperbolic and over the top statements from citizens of countries that are at war, it's pretty telling that people are actually thinking of naming a geographical feature after the second worst genocidal dictator of history (after Mao).  Nobody but blithering idiots names a street after Hitler, after all, and it strikes me that the cult of Putin is showing itself for what any sane observer knows it really is; a bid for the revival of the old Soviet Union.

And in honor of that attempted revival...great memories of my childhood.

Murder for your 13th Amendment rights?

This article is an interesting take on the 13th Amendment;  more or less, that since an abortion ban would compel a woman to carry her baby to term, it amounts to involuntary servitude, and thus abortion must be allowed.  Lost in Judge Kollar-Kotelly's analysis is another little thing; does the state's requirement for parents to care for their children amount to slavery as well, and hence not just abortion, but homicide, is permissible for parents?

As much as parents might sometimes agree, I think our answer must be "no".  And shocker here; this judge is a Clinton appointee.  Folks, it does matter who you vote for, and if you vote for Democrats, this is the kind of thing you're supporting.

Why Ukraine Fights?

Putin's Chef Yevgeny Prigozhin is now bragging that he is turning recruits for his "Wagner Group" into "real cannibals".   Well, given Prigozhin's history of pretty nasty food safety violations, Wagner's current status as a haven for illness due to nonexistent sanitation, and Wagner's pattern of not providing luxuries like "food" to their soldiers, it all makes a lot of sense.  Might have something to do with why Russia is invading a major supplier of food to the world, eh?  The only thing hanging out there is whether they're using Monty Python's "Lifeboat" sketch as a training video.

Hopefully at some point in the future, to paraphrase the sketch, the Wagner Group and the Russian Army will get cannibalism mostly under control.  

What kind of war is this?

One thing that is very interesting about the war for Ukraine is that  Russia often "retaliates" against Ukraine when Ukraine advances, gets new weapons systems, and the like.  Now as a (very) amateur historian, it seems to me that Russia is telling us a lot about their objectives and motivations.  In an ordinary war, the parties relentlessly move to achieve strategic goals--we didn't wait for Hitler to make a shipment of Tiger tanks, for example, before we bombed his ball bearing plants.  We bombed the ball bearing plants so shipments of Tiger tanks and such would never arrive.

But Russia does, and it tells us that their goal is to get what they can by bullying, committing a lot of war crimes in the process.  Our response therefore ought to be to grant Ukraine the ability to give them a real war.  They'll back down soon enough, and hopefully giving Russia and Belarus the ability to do what Ukraine has started to do; eliminate the power of the old KGB/FSB.  Hopefully soon, Benito Putina will have his own "Lake Como" moment.

Putin delenda est!

And who's next?

First President Trump was caught with classified documents due to the work of the National Archives, and now not only President Biden, but also Vice President Pence have been found to have such documents at their homes.   To be honest, the latter two are the ones that bother me most, as the National Archives are supposed to have a checkout list like any other library, and they're supposed to track down when documents are not returned--but in these cases, it appears that they were not on the ball, to put it mildly.

The case with Biden is even worse, as there appears to be evidence that the boxes where the classified documents were found were...the subject of photographs found on Hunter Biden's laptop.  This raises the reality that if the FBI had been on the ball, a lot of this would have come out a lot earlier, like "when Biden was running his campaign from his basement."  Worse yet, why was it important for the 'ol crackhead to be taking pictures of the classified documents his dad had taken?  Perhaps important for Hunter's handlers in Russia and China?  

The question comes to mind; is there anybody in DC that takes national security seriously, at least above a sergeant's pay grade?  

Scientific illiteracy in government

....yet again, of course.  What's going on?  Well, the federal government, via the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is arguing that natural gas and propane stoves ought to be banned. Now to be sure, the burning of natural gas produces a certain amount of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides, as well (mercaptan burning) as sulfur oxides.  They are certainly pollutants, and for that reason, natural gas and propane stoves have been installed with ventilation hoods as far back as I can remember.  

So exactly what problem the CPSC wants to solve, beyond a lot of code noncompliance in cities run by Democrats, is beyond me.  It's also worth pointing out that carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides are produced by power plants that burn natural gas, and the Carnot efficiency of these plants is typically 35% or less--meaning that when you swap from a natural gas stove to an electric, you double or triple the amount of pollutants, even allowing for better heat transmission from an electric stove to your pans.  Oopsie.

But when you get down to it, the article indicates what's really at stake; since one can buy LNG or propane at small businesses all over the country, the CPSC wants to stop that and make us "sole sourced" with the nation's utilities--yes, the same ones that are telling us not to use too much electricity to avoid blackouts already.

It's worth noting as well that this is a camel's nose in the tent with regards to overall government regulation of the economy and our personal lives, because all kinds of things produce CO and nitrogen oxides in the home, including natural gas heat, natural gas or propane hot water heat, candles, wood stoves, grilling, barbequeing, and of course smoking.

Now this is funny

Apparently now exercise in an exercise in "white supremacy".   I guess somebody had better warn all those wonderful black athletes out there about this.  With this logic, Jesse Owens wasn't a hero who destroyed Adolf Hitler's attempts to portray Germans as a "master race", but rather someone working to further enshrine Jim Crow.  I'm guessing this would have come as something of a surprise to him, to put it mildly.

Really, one has to wonder whether progressives really believe the things they say, or whether they're really Klansmen in disguise trying to get black people killed by worsening an already horrific rate of cardiac disease and diabetes.  The more I see out of these guys, the more that second hypothesis makes sense.

File under "collusion"

Apparently officials at the Centers for Disease Control removed statistics on defensive firearm use from public view after pressure from the Brady Campaign/Handgun Control/Violence Policy Center.   But don't worry, public officials aren't in the pocket of leftist interest groups, except they are, just like with the Twitter censorship files.

In related news, Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg did the nation a favor by going on maternity leave (again) during tense negotiations for rail union contracts.  Ordinarily, I'd be in favor of him, say, actually being on the job during a tense time like this, but given the condition of the streets of South Bend, maybe it's better he was sipping port instead.

Interesting bit of smuggling

Five Russian nationals (and two emigres) have been charged with arms smuggling into Russia, including about 375 pounds (thousands of rounds) of  what appears to be .338 lapua and 6.5mm Creedmoor sniper ammunition.   Now granted, these are two of the best long range rounds out there, but it's also worth noting that Creedmoor and Lapua ballistics are actually fairly comparable to that of the 30.06, a round which Russia has had access to for 80 years.  It's also worth noting that the Lapua was developed in the 1980s, and the Creedmoor in 2007.  There is really no rocket science to effective long range rounds, so it's telling that Russia desires to import this.

I don't know exactly what is going on here, but reports like this, as well as those suggesting that Russia was starting to use 40 year old artillery ammunition (have they never heard of "FIFO" in the Russian Army, use the old stuff first?), suggests that Russia has been dealing with some serious issues that are only now coming up.

Wouldn't like to be a Russian soldier in Ukraine, to put it mildly, with this kind of record.

Genius in administration

Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, tasked in part with nagging the rest of us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to stop global warming, apparently is flying around in private jets.  As I've said more times than I care to count, I'll start taking global warming seriously when guys like Buttigieg do.  

Genius in legislation

Oregon's new gun control law apparently bans pretty much every weapon used by the police, and does not have an obvious exception for the police.   Oopsie.  Or maybe it's by intent to turn the whole state into a "Mad Max" kind of war zone?

No matter where you stand on guns and the Second Amendment,

...you've got to be scared at President Biden, who noted yesterday that he's trying to "limit the number of bullets in a cartridge."  Given that the number of bullets in a loaded cartridge is always 1, or possibly zero in the case of a "blank", the only thing that could be done by passing a law or regulation to "limit the number of bullets in a cartridge" would be to possibly ban shotgun shells, which are (along with other long guns like rifles) responsible for the fewest firearm murders, accidents, and suicides.

It's bad enough that our President does not apparently know what "shall not be infringed" means, but it's even worse that Biden doesn't even know basic terminology and facts about the debate.  If you want to reduce gun (and overdose) deaths, you stop allowing "big players" (including government) to bend markets to their whims, reduce barriers to effective mental health care, and finally you prosecute the "minor" gun crimes like straw purchases and illegal possession of a firearm.  

On the flip side, even if you completely banned assault weapons, and were completely effective and nobody substituted another weapon for an "assault weapon", you would save maybe a few hundred lives per year.  Let's go with what might work.

Brilliance in rhetoric

Putin's New Stalin's cook, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has "warned" the U.S. not to designate his "Wagner Group" as a terrorist organization because, apparently, organizations designated as terrorist organizations sometimes act like terrorist organizations.  Yes, I'm sure that it wasn't the desire to attack the U.S., but rather the shame at being called what they were and are, that inspired Al Qaida to attack the Twin Towers.

In related Stalinist news, Russian troops are being sent into battle with "stylish" uniforms (some designed by Raisa Gorbacheva, a.k.a. Mrs. Mikhail Gorbachev) and gear that is leading to.....Russian soldiers dying of hypothermia.  Writing as a guy who's camped at -20F while hunting (starting the day at about 0F), let's just say that it's not a good sign that Russian uniforms are not working when the nighttime mercury is getting to 20F in Kharkiv.  They have apparently taken lessons from the Wehrmacht instead of Tolstoy.  

(for reference, one of the blankets I used while camping at -20F was a Soviet surplus blanket....I'm guessing some of those poor guys would love to have that about right now)

Say what?

Navy spokesmen have admitted that none of the 18 midshipmen who asked for a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate received one, but that none of them are being denied a degree or a commission.  One has to wonder exactly what is meant by the requirement, then.  Perhaps they're just giving them horrible postings that are not desired?  Somehow I'm guessing that people are being "rather creative" in their public relations in Annapolis.

In other news, the U.S. is still in the World Cup, and Germany and Mexico are not.  Looks like the end times may be upon us.