Yes, they really do want to take your guns

Josh Marshall quoted at Jammie Wearing Fools

This is what we need on guns. Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start thinking way beyond things like closing the gun hole loophole. In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them.

The incessant push to disarm ordinary citizens in violation of their general right to self-defense and their specific, individual, enumerated right to keep and bear arms is a societal sickness, yes.

Climate models are broken

Borepatch links to a climate scientist with 6 degrees in applied mathematics who demonstrated that the climate models are overestimating the effect of CO2 by a factor of 10.

This is how science works.

About that settled science...

Judith Curry quoting an anonymous NASA scientist

About 7 years ago, I was at a small meeting of NASA-affiliated scientists and was told by our top manager that he was told by his NASA boss that we should not try to publish papers contrary to the current global warming claims, because he (the NASA boss) would then have a headache countering the “undesirable” publicity. I inferred from this that the real problem was the large amount of funds NASA obtains from claims of dire climate change, and that suggestions to the contrary threatened those.

I witnessed similar reluctance for scientists at other organizations to publicly criticize modeling they deemed sloppy because even if they themselves were not at the forefront, they also benefited from the great amount of funds made available. So, it is not just those funded by environmentalists or dirty energy companies who have conflicts, but indeed all receiving government funds based on the great societal consequences of dire warming. It is still dangerous for me to say such things since I am still funded entirely through NASA.

The core of the scientific method is falsification: your hypotheses must be falsifiable, and the goal of conducting experiments is not to confirm your hypothesis but to test the things likely to falsify your hypothesis.

Climate science is so riddled with politics that they are suppressing contrary evidence while accusing the other side of financial corruption. And not just suppressing it by trying to deny funding; they are trying to get the courts to step in:

Telegraph

Since it is now unlikely that the world will agree in Paris to a legally binding treaty to limit the rise in global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees C from pre-industrial levels, his theme was that it is now time for the courts to step in, to enforce this as worldwide law.

"The most important thing the courts could do," he said, was to hold a top-level "finding of fact", to settle these "scientific disputes" once and for all: so that it could then be made illegal for any government, corporation (or presumably individual scientist) ever to question the agreed "science" again. Furthermore, he went on, once "the scientific evidence" thus has the force of binding international law, it could be used to compel all governments to make "the emissions reductions that are needed", including the phasing out of fossil fuels, to halt global warming in its tracks.

... or simply yanking weathermen off the air for books they wrote and published questioning climate change.

This is not how science works. This is not how democracies work. The left has shifted to an openly totalitarian mindset.

Cruz asks DOJ to preserve IRS documents

Cruz Senate

Today, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch requesting that the Department of Justice (DOJ) preserve all Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents and information for investigation under the next administration. Sen. Cruz’s letter comes after the DOJ recently closed its investigation into improper targeting of conservative groups by the IRS.

I think this is a necessary move, but I also think it's incredibly naive to expect any significant results here. The DOJ has made its decision, and the nature of that decision means they are willing to participate in a coverup. They won't balk at destroying documents because they have already destroyed documents and declined to prosecute the destruction of documents by others. The documents that are actually relevant to what happened in the targeting itself appear to be long gone -- destroyed in a series of computer mishaps by Lerner and her colleagues, combined with a suspiciously well-timed decision to repurpose the room where the backup tapes were stored.

On the other hand, a clever -- or even just competent -- prosecutor might try talking to the people who were targeted and see what their records might reveal. But the idea of finding a smoking document in the FBI's archives after Obama leaves office is a faint hope at best.

Whenever Politico dangles a reasonable piece of bait...

... I look for the hook. In this case, they are dangling a piece that's actually pretty reasonable in addressing the Left's refusal to accept the 2nd Amendment. That's neither too surprising nor unreasonable; the piece is pretty good and it's not an election year, so Politico is in their "must-gain-credibility" mode. They'll spend all that credibility trying to influence the election in 2016, of course, and then start all over again. The cycle has in fact been noticed.

So where's the hook, aside from that?

Well, the person they cite prominently in the article as being "right on guns" is Ben Carson. And the only problem with that is that Carson has been notably wobbly on guns. He's proposed having different rules for guns in inner cities than rural areas, he's complained about "assault weapons", and he's generally demonstrated a degree of ignorance on the issue that is remarkable for someone running for the Republican party's presidential nomination.

He got slapped around a little bit and has since hired consultants to tell him what to say, but anyone who has been paying attention remembers that he started out wobbly on the issue and even if he now has a hard candy coating, his core is likely still soft and chewy. But if the Left likes Carson over Trump, they might well try to shore up Carson's support on the gun issue and hope to make the two competitive.

Ted Cruz questions Sierra Club president on global warming

Hat tip to Patterico.

Carson calls for IRS to revoke CAIR's tax-exempt status

He has some good arguments, pointing out that the IRS has been very aggressive in regulating conservative groups, that CAIR committed a clear violation of the rules for tax exempt groups by coming out in opposition of Carson's candidacy, and pointing out in an oh-by-the-way that the group allegedly didn't even bother to file taxes for three years in a row, for which it previously lost it's tax-exempt status. Obviously, that was only a temporary issue for the group.

I am somewhat reluctant to endorse the IRS cracking down on groups for engaging in political speech, but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if the IRS is ever going to be prevented from harassing political opponents of Democrats, the Democrats themselves have to feel the pressure and learn why it is inappropriate.

Besides, who are we kidding? Obama's IRS will never crack down on any leftie group, with the possibly exception of Hillary and her entourage.

IRS improperly withheld information from FOIA requests 12% of the time

Free Beacon

TITGA looked at a statistically valid sample of 65 FOIA requests for their review and found eight cases—or 12.3 percent—in which the IRS improperly withheld requested information. Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal government agencies must make records requested by the public available unless a specific exemption is given while providing an initial response to the request within 20 business days.

They also withheld a similar percentage of requests in a slightly different category, and delayed responding to 25% Corrupt from the top down.

Larry Correia fisks the New York Times so you don't have to

I wasn't going to link the fishwrap of record's article on how to be a metrosexual, because linking that sort of thing only encourages them, but I will cheerfully link Larry's response to it.

A proposed compromise where we still lose ground won't fly

New Jovian Thunderbolt

Remove references to serial numbers from the background check process. I've advocated about this before.

Now the NRA GAINS something in a compromise. Serial numbers are in the FFL log book, just like now, on gunstore sales. So the criminal investigation side doesn't gain or lose anything new. FFLs that perform the checks still get their fee for running it for a customer that wants to do an individual private sale. The gummint has a record that T-Bolt ran a check on himself on such and such a date, and, let's say, that permission slip is good for a month. T-Bolts long lost Uncle that sold him the gun can feel confident that T-Bolt is permitted to receive the boomstick.

T-Bolt is generally a pretty good guy, but he hasn't thought this one all the way through. Even if the serial number doesn't get called in to the Feds, if it's on the FFL paperwork it is still registration. And it is on that paperwork, it's just that they have a lot of trouble prosecuting you for not turning it in so long as you can say you bought it and sold it later. Giving up on universal background checks turns this toothless registration system into a real -- enforceable with criminal penalties -- registration system, and doesn't gain us anything.

We would be much better off going with a system that was first proposed (that I know of) by Joe of View from North Central Idaho. I've mentioned it a few times myself, and the beauty of it is that it eliminates any need for "universal background checks" by making them both unnecessary and easy. The basic idea is simple: you add a symbol to the identification cards (ie, drivers licenses) issued by the states. The symbol is a gun, either with or without a red circle and slash crossing it out. If you have just the gun, you can buy or sell a gun legally to anyone else with just the gun in your state (current law) or any other state (small legal change).

All you have to do is check that the ID has not expired and does not have the red slash, and your sale is legal. The state checks your background when it issues the license, and if your status changes, it confiscates your old license and issues a new one.

No phone call to the police. No risk of selling to a criminal. No need for a dealer charging a fee and keeping records of private sales. If you want to cover your ass a little, take a picture of the license and the symbol of the guy you sold to with your cell phone and the serial number of the gun in the background. Easy, simple, legal.

And the government has no idea who has what guns, or even whether you have a gun at all, because they check everyone when they issue the license, not on any gun-related event.

But wait... what about the criminals, they will just sell guns to each other without checking the symbol?

What do you think they are doing right now?

This is the only form of universal background check I will ever support, and I will cheerfully compromise to allow this form of universal background check if the antis are willing to give us back something big in return -- say, that pesky little 1986 amendment.

Hillary comes out against guns

Hillary Clinton

"I'm going to speak out, I'm going to do everything I can to rally people against this pernicious, corrupting influence of the NRA and we're going to do whatever we can." "And here again, the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get."

This is hardly a surprise, but it's always good to have proof to wave around for the election.

And you know what else is interesting? Hillary had private audio of her anti-gun statements leaked (see above); Obama himself is famous for his "bitter clingers" line delivered in a setting he thought was private.

I think a lot of these donor people that the left thinks agree with them on guns actually don't, they just aren't willing to say so publicly and lose friends..

Did Lois Lerner listen to your cell phone calls?

Ars Technica

The head of the Internal Revenue Service told a Senate committee on Tuesday that its stingrays are "only used in criminal investigations." The remarks came just one day after The Guardian revealed that the IRS had purchased the devices in 2009 and 2012.

We will probably never know, because her emails are gone and Koskinen ordered the backups destroyed. But I'm sure we are all confident that the IRS would never misuse such a capability to target its political opponents.

About that media bias that doesn't exist...

Reason quoting a Hillary Email

Madame Secretary, a very quick update. I just received confirmation from 60 Minutes that a piece on Julian Assange will air Sunday night. He will be the only person featured. We had made a number of suggestions for outside experts and former diplomats to interview to "balance" the piece. 60 Minutes assures me that they raised a number of questions and concerns we planted with them during the course of the interview. We will be prepared to respond to the narrative Assange presents during the program.

Not quoted, but there have been indications that the Clinton's plant people still loyal to them within various media organizations in order to help shape coverage. These people, though officially employed by the media organization (usually as a consultant or commentator or the like) are still loyal to the Clintons and work to spin and shape the news to their benefit. I'm sure it's not just the Clintons doing this, either. Hillary is just the one whose emails about it are being analyzed with a fine-toothed comb.

Hurricane Patricia

You know, when I first heard about Hurricane Patricia, I felt bad. I felt bad because I live in central Texas -- supposedly one of the areas hardest hit by the storm in the US, thanks to flooding -- and hadn't seen any rainfall heavier than a few scattered showers. No thunder, no lightning, not even anything to set your windshield wipers to high. A persistent drizzle, and occasionally scattered showers. When they announced it was going to hit Mexico, I thought that they were overhyping the hurricane because it was going to be their excuse for another flood of third-world "refugees" from Mexico into the US and we were supposed to feel sorry for them and let them in and give them citizenship and voting rights so they can elect Democrats. And maybe a bit of global warming scare tactics on the side.

I thought all that, and then I thought, "No, surely that's not it, it's just that the hurricane is doing all its damage in Mexico."

I was right on both counts.

None of this is meant to trivialize the actual victims of Hurricane Patricia.... if there are any.

Astroturf is not just about guns

Breitbart

Planned Parenthood paid some of its supporters who threw condoms at GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and at her supporters during an Iowa Hawkeye tailgate on Saturday.

See, this is how the left works. Government funds Planned Parenthood; Planned Parenthood funds protesters who attack politicians who seek to stop the flow of funds; the media presents the paid protesters as having some sort of moral authority and making the politician controversial and anti-woman; and the public are, in theory, convinced that Fiorina is somehow anti-woman or anti-health. Even though the whole thing is a Potemkin Village, the general public sees the media signaling and thinks that the protesters represent the opinion of a large segment of the ordinary population, and the herd instinct kicks in to shift public opinion.

FBI combined criminal, military, civil background check fingerprint data before OPM hack

Nobody Asked Me

Being a job seeker isn’t a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.

In other words, if you have ever been in the military, or been background checked for a job for the government, your fingerprints are not not only in government records, but in the hands of everyone (ie, the Chinese) who ever hacked those government records, and now will have the shiny new feature of being searched alongside the criminal fingerprint database when police check a crime scene.

More on Facebook suppressing free speech

Irons in the Fire

The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that "we need to do some work" on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. "Are you working on this?" Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.

Yet any action from Facebook is likely to stoke concerns about free speech. In the past, the social network has come under suspicion for suppressing or deleting posts and groups that advocate unpopular beliefs.

The internet presented revolutionary free speech technology because anyone could operate a web server or a mailing list from a small computer. It was not necessary to be AT&T, or own a newspaper or TV network to speak to a large audience. Internet protocols were designed to support this, with anyone being able to run servers publishing information or hosting email communication. Sites like google and facebook represent a degree of re-centralization of the internet that marginalizes third-party sites and reduces the amount of freedom, and free speech, on the Internet.

Water on Mars

Popular Mechanics

We finally have a firm answer to one of the biggest mysteries of Mars. Not only did the Red Planet have water in the past, but it has it right now, flowing in a briny mix that keeps it in a liquid state. This confirms decades of observations.

In case you haven't heard...

BREAKING: DOJ closes investigation of IRS targeting

CNN

The Justice Department notified members of Congress on Friday that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups.

There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter.

Warning, autoplay video at the link.

This is, of course, a completely foregone conclusion at a thoroughly corrupted Department of Injustice. It ignores the mountains of evidence based on actual treatment of applicants and the suspicious destruction of multiple computers and backups, not to mention Koskinen's foot-dragging attempts to obstruct justice.

UPDATE:

Washington Times

Investigators said none of the witnesses they interviewed believed Ms. Lerner acted out of political motives, and said that Ms. Lerner seemed to try to correct the inappropriate scrutiny once she “recognized that it was wrong.” got caught.

I may have made a small correction to the above.

Volkswagon caught faking results to pass emissions tests

Ars Technica

The Volkswagen scandal—selling 11 million diesel-engined cars designed to fool US emissions regulations—is moving into the "who knew what, and when" phase. Newspapers in Germany are reporting that Bosch (the company that supplies electronics to the auto industry) warned VW only to use the cheat mode internally back in 2007, and that a whistleblower tried to raise the alarm internally in 2011. These findings both emerged from an internal audit at VW in response to the scandal.

On the one hand, this is fraud, and that's wrong. On the other, the emissions regulations have been tightened to the point of absurdity and beyond. I can't really blame companies for recognizing this and responding to it. People do not respect laws that make no sense, and when they lose respect for the laws, they stop obeying them.

Hillary lies on Benghazi

We knew she was lying, of course. But now we have proof: Hillary sent an email to family blaming an Al-Qaeda-like group for the Benghazi attack minutes after publically blaming the youtube video.

Patterico has more video.

Not that any of the Democrats will likely care, but maybe some independents will.

Lying to the American people should be a career-ending error for a politician running for President. Instead, Hillary answers the questions by pitching her book.

Undisclosed Hillary emails to Petraeus

Ace of Spades

The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials said Friday, adding to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.

The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military's U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began before Clinton entered office and continued into her first days at the State Department. They largely pertained to personnel matters and don't appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said, but their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.

There are two important takeaways from this news.

First, it is now proven that Hillary did not turn over everything work-related as she claimed she had done. That's significant as a general indicator, but it's not in itself damaging. The damage will come from whatever specific emails were not turned over, if and when they are recovered.

Second, though, it gives us an idea what kind of emails Hillary declined to turn over. Remember, a lot of this is driven by Benghazi. Hillary had sudden medical problems that prevented her from testifying -- about Benghazi. Petraeus was prevented from testifying about Benghazi by his removal on charges of mishandling classified information. Hillary's emails were requested for the Benghazi investigation. And now communications with Petraeus are missing, which suggests that someone did a search for Petraeus in Hillary's email database and removed those emails from what was turned over.

We likely won't find out why from this set of emails. But there will be more.

FBI recovered Hillary's emails

Legal Insurrection

Two government sources revealed last night that the FBI has managed to recover personal and work-related emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. The sources say that the emails were “not hard” to recover, but did not elaborate as to whether this latest discovery included all 60,000 emails stored on the server.

This doesn't surprise me, really. I reported on the possibility months ago when I read the exact words of the letter Hillary sent the Benghazi committee stating she had deleted her emails. She, or rather her lawyers, said at the time that Hillary had configured either her email account or her server with a 60-day retention period for emails. Anything older than 60 days would be deleted automatically.

This policy was walking a tightrope between many thorny legal issues. First, it gives Hillary something to say to refute allegations of deliberately deleting embarrassing emails; she can say that she deleted them all via an automated process (see my article on the dark side of data retention policies) rather than a willful act that could be construed as a guilty conscience or an attempt to cover up some specific email.

It also covers her ass going forward -- anything older than 60 days is no longer in her possession, automatically.

But, if she wants to preserve the claim of not having anything to hide, it makes it very hard to explain why someone would subsequently wipe her server with serious information-security tools.

So Hillary's play here is to say she's deleted the emails, let everyone assume they have been wiped and there isn't any reason to go looking for them very hard, and hope no one actually goes looking. Obviously the FBI decided to call her bluff and go looking, something that undoubtedly is closely related to Obama wanting to push her out of the Democrat presidential primary.

All that said, we still don't really know the truth. For all we know, Hillary could have orchestrated a server swap that would result in the server having three sets of data: the current set of emails, the current emails plus those deleted by her expiration policy minus anything truly incriminating, and a (wiped) set of emails that once contained the really incriminating stuff.

I think it's unlikely Hillary is actually trying something like that, though. It's too hard to do that in a way that would stand up to a thorough investigation. Odds are she simply didn't do a thorough wipe for fear of looking guilty. If there's anything actually incriminating in those emails -- such as classified material -- that could result in Hillary actually being guilty.

Left is propagandizing to third graders in schools

Legal Insurrection

In a stunning development, Luvelle Brown, Superintendent of Schools, Ithaca (NY) City School District, has acknowledged that serious anti-Israel agitation took place when controversial Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi appeared with local anti-Israel activists before third graders, ending in a call to activism

Political advocacy of this sort does not belong in school, particularly not to a captive audience of third graders. It's deliberate indoctrination.

5th Amendment right not to disclose password

Ars Technica

The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination would be breached if two insider trading suspects were forced to turn over the passcodes of their locked mobile phones to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

This ruling sounds like it would trivially extend to computer passwords and passphrases for encryption keys used to protect messages or hard drives. It seems obvious that the 5th Amendment would block the police from forcing you to disclose your password to them, but I believe this is only the second such ruling in the US. (There may be others that did not reach the news I follow, or that I don't remember; but I am confident this is an unusual ruling).

It does appear to be limited to "personal thought processes" but excludes protection for "business records", meaning I presume that anything actually sent or received can be retrieved from the phone company.