The Numbers Don’t Lie

Except when they do. Why is Statista, using the FBI’s numbers, reporting that there were 21,504 murderers in the US in 2023, but also reporting that there were 17,713 murder victims? Or is this just statista skewing the numbers?

EDITED TO ADD

It’s Statista lying. The FBI crime report shows a total of 19,402 homicides for the entire country in 2023. Note that homicide is a blanket statement that includes murder as a subset. There cannot be more murders than there are homicides, therefore the true number of murders (and by extension, murderers) is less than 19,402.

Yes, I know that one murder can be carried out by more than one murderer, but these would seem to me to be statistical anomalies that would be more than balanced out by the cases where one murderer killed more than one person.

The Cold War is Over

The cold war ended more than 30 years ago. The propaganda channels of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia are relics of that era. On top of it, the pro-US propaganda network of Al-Hurra is the one for the mideast and northern Africa since it was established in 2003. Those networks have been costing the US taxpayer almost a billion dollars a year. Trump is trying to rid this country of the colossal wastes of money like this one.

Instead, the press would have us weeping over the loss of jobs for middle eastern journalists.

Alhurra was part of Washington’s effort to shape public opinion in the Arab world through balanced, independent journalism.

The old saying is “accept the king’s coin and you become the king’s man.” The issue here is that the king isn’t the President. It isn’t Congress. No, the king is the faceless bureaucrats who actually run the government.

The web of money runs wide and deep.

More Culture

Four students were injured in a school shooting in Dallas yesterday at Wilmer-Hutchins High School. It’s the second shooting in less than 12 months at this school. Here is what the MSM won’t mention: the school is 56% Black and 40% Hispanic, and of the 914 students, 675 (74%) were considered economically disadvantaged, while 26% of them don’t speak English, meaning that the student body has a significant illegal immigrant presence. There is a high likelihood of gang involvement. The school only has 18 white students.

Still, the MSM will make hay out of this being a “school shooting” even though this is clearly not the same kind of school shooting that we saw in Parkland or Nashville. The MSM is conflicted on this one, because even though the shooter isn’t a leftist tranny, he is probably a gang member, and it’s a coin toss if he is an illegal or not.

Police said the gun used in the shooting did not enter the building through “regular intake,” when the students enter the building in the morning through metal detectors and are subject to a bag search, proving once again that “gun free zones” don’t work.

OK, Karen

There is a woman in Michigan who is claiming that her neighbor, who lives 250 feet away and established his own shooting range, has made her go deaf with gunshots and T:annerite explosions.

I kind of felt bad for her until I saw this sentence:

LaRoe said she found a shell casing in her yard and points to a piece of tape over a small round hole in a window 

There is no way that a shell casing is going to be 100 yards from a shooting range. So I decided to do some math.

The Occupational and Health Administration says that any instant sound (as opposed to a continuous one) that is above 120 decibels can cause hearing loss. Thanks to the inverse square law, in order to damage her hearing from 250 feet away, the source sound would have to be somewhere around 180 decibels. That makes his shooting range even louder than a SpaceX launch, which varies between 145 and 161 decibels.

Hearing protection only reduces sound by about 15-30 db. If it was loud enough to deafen her from 100 yards away, the guy who owns the shooting range would be deaf as well, hearing protection or not.

She and the neighbors are trying to get Tannerite regulated like an explosive, claiming that it is no different than dynamite.

Bring Your Friends With You

The press is filled with stories of people protesting Trump’s policies. If you believe the reports in the MSM, you would have to think that Florida is taking a huge financial hit because Canadians are angry with the US President. The problem is that this take is complete fabricated nonsense. This article in money wise is a great example. In it, the writer claims that Canadians are leaving en masse because of skyrocketing costs brought about by Trump’s tariffs. The cost increases haven’t even happened yet, but even once they do it won’t be that large of a hit. If you read on down the article, you hit the money quote:

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports, 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, and 10% tariffs on other countries could raise consumer prices on everyday retail purchases such as food and beverage items and general merchandise, covering about a quarter of the total consumption basket, by 0.81% to 1.63%, assuming the costs are fully passed to the consumer.

So the tariffs will increase costs by up to 1.63%? That is a fraction of the increase in costs brought about by the Biden inflation. Any costs that are causing people to flee have been going on for years. The media is lying. Again.

The same exact website in January was making the claim that Florida’s insurance rates were skyrocketing because of climate change, and this was the cause for Canadians leaving. Proving that the press hates Trump even more than climate change, less than three weeks later the boogieman had changed and it was no longer climate change, but President Trump that was causing insurance to increase.

The real culprit happened in 2021 when the 12 story Surfside condo collapsed, killing 98 people. The condo wasn’t being maintained, and seawater intrusion had corroded the steel supports. In response, the state of Florida instituted regulations and inspections to require condo buildings be repaired and properly maintained- especially of the buildings are over 3 stories or located near the beach. Nearly 90% of the 1.6 million condos in Florida are more than 30 years old, and most haven’t been inspected or repaired in that time, because the condo associations don’t want to spend the money to do so.

The new law requires associations to have sufficient reserves to cover major repairs and to conduct a survey of reserves every decade. Because of the law, older condos are facing hefty increases to association payments to fund the reserves and repair costs. Condo owners went to Tallahassee and demanded that the state set aside tax dollars to pay for those repairs. Those increased repair and insurance costs are hitting condos hard.

In 2024, Canadians buying vacation homes accounted for 25% of all home sales in Florida. This means that wealthy northerners and Canadians, who are overwhelmingly the owners of beachside condos and were members of condo associations that were voting against paying the costs of properly maintaining the buildings are selling as the cost of owning second homes in Florida is too high, especially when you take the falling value of the Canadian dollar into account.

Real estate agent Gatien Salaun, who owns a waterfront condo in Miami Beach, said what appears to be a recent reduction in average sale prices is largely just buyers negotiating with sellers to eat some of the costs.

“They are simply asking for price reductions that are commensurate with that exact amount that they will have to pay over the next 20 years, 30 years in assessments,” Salaun said. “And the sellers are somewhat stuck in terms of negotiating with the buyer or just paying for the cost themselves.”

Still, the real estate prices in Florida are as high as they are because the weak US dollar (see the price of gold) caused people from other nations, especially Canadians, to buy up a lot of prime US real estate to use as vacation homes. Now that the costs are being realized, they want to sell and leave. Good. Take a friend with you.

To the mainstream media- we are done with your lies.

Experts

One of the things that kills me is that whenever anything hits the news, everyone on the Internet becomes an instant expert. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the use of force, medicine, fire suppression, or engineering. Whatever the big news article, the Internet has an easy solution, and since no one has implemented your solution, it must mean that there is a conspiracy of rich guys who are not doing it because reasons.

The fires in LA are no exception. The latest I have been seeing is:

  • how all of LA should be surrounded by a fire suppression sprinkler system that douses the buildings and surrounding countryside to ward off wildfires.
  • Buildings should all be built of the same materials as kilns or perhaps of bricks, so that houses won’t burn.
  • Neighborhoods should build their own reservoirs and hire their own fire departments to protect that specific neighborhood
  • Establish volunteer fire departments where people who live in a neighborhood could defend it

I can think of half a dozen reasons why each of those ideas would fail spectacularly. I am sure that my readers can as well. The easiest and most effective answers are the ones that won’t be used. Again, I use Florida’s wildland forestry system as an example. I spent more than 25 years as a firefighter, have a degree in fire science, and a hold a Red card as a certified Federal wildland firefighter, but I clearly don’t know as much as a Liberal Arts major who works at Starbucks and spends his time solving all of the world’s problems on social media.

Editorial Oversight

Blogs aren’t really news, because they don’t have editors to make sure that they are factually correct. The MSM is so much more factual, because they constantly fact check themselves, and no, the picture isn’t the problem.

The problem is that every single one of the five rifles is currently in use and is roughly a 5.56mm. No mention of the Mauser, or even the Mosin Nagant. More than 100 million copies of those weapons were made, and they have been used in virtually every armed conflict for about 100 years, including two world wars.