Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs bill banning undetectable 3D-printed guns

https://www.syracuse.com/politics/2019/0...-guns.html

I hate war. So often it is needless destruction and pain, one empire, dynasty or nation fighting another; wars over boundaries of one group against another, for resources, etc. I am against those kinds of wars.

But these days, I notice something. I support and like the people-power risings that have happened all over the world increasingly since people power was invented at Berkeley in 1964, or perhaps by Gandhi in the 1920s and 30s in India. These risings powered the sixties/seventies peace, ecology and civil rights/black power and other ethnic and gender movements. From there they spread to the anti-aparteid movement in South Africa, and then the risings that toppled western backed tyrannies in the mid/late 1980s and the communist tyrannies in 1989. More such risings happened in Eastern Europe in 1997, in the enormous anti-Iraq war demonstrations in Feb.2003; and then from Iran in 2009 the people-power spread to Tunisia in late 2010 and all across North Africa and the Middle East starting in 2011. From there the number and places of these risings is almost too hard to count; in Georgia, Ukraine and Russia, in Brazil and other Latin American places, in Turkey, in Iraq and Lebanon, in Thailand, in Tajikistan and Belarus, to Hong Kong and north-western China, and frequently in the USA-- especially in the Trump era, and now to Burma, and to Russia again.

What happens to these risings? Most of them are crushed and result in more tyranny. Syria was an especially grotesque example, and the refugees this uprising and its brutal repression caused also led to nationalist reactionary movements in Europe, including Brexit and the election of Boris Johnson. Tyranny has accelerated everywhere, and is now as dominant a form of government as it ever was in the 1930s or in the age of kings, caesaro-papism or imperialism.

What occurs to me is this: why should the state have a monopoly of the weapons and the arms which they use to impose the will of a few tyrants over what their people clearly want: freedom and democracy?

So, shouldn't freer nations supply weapons to freedom-loving citizens of these tyrannies who are rising up and getting crushed, and who organize armed resistance and ask for assistance? These are revolutionary wars. Wars to defend the people against their tyrant. Bloody, perhaps futile; perhaps turning into proxy wars; but maybe justified, and the only hope citizens have to attain freedom? A freedom that admittedly can be lost again, or which the citizens can themselves vote to lose again, as citizens of Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Brazil (and almost in the USA in 2016) recently did, for example? The new boss being the same as the old boss? But could this be the only way in which progress can happen again? (and, of course, it also depends on us knowing what progress is, which many Americans (i.e. Trump followers) do not know these days, or didn't know in the sixties either)

Or should we continue to place our hopes in non-violent demonstrations or civil disobedience, general strikes, etc, in which millions upon millions of people put their bodies on the line, and put them against the levers and the gears of the tyrannical machine run by a few tyrants in order to make it stop, as Mario Savio said at Berkeley in 1964? Put our hopes in that, and hope that it could still work, even though right now it has resulted in failure after failure?

I'm wondering, right now. Must freedom always be attained with blood? The cost of freedom is high, but Americans have always paid it, said JFK.

Government Of Politicians, By Politicians And For Politicians

https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/21/hart-...liticians/

Gun control first for Biden executive orders

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...r-BB1bMpYO

Senator pushes for gun rental background checks

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...r-BB1dkMKv

Biden’s regulation costs outweigh likely benefits 

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/...story.html

Biden ramps up US refugee admissions to 125,000 per year

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-ramps-us-re...11519.html

Rep. Dan Crenshaw irks both the left and right with gun comments

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politic...287697.php

Lately I've found myself pulled into the general orbit of an online - game? Fandom? Oral tradition? MMO tabletop roleplaying game? Cultural event? - called Blaseball. It's a high speed (ten games per hour) baseball idle game/betting simulator by a tiny indie game studio, where characters get randomly generated names like Jaylen Hotdogfingers or Axel Trololol, and people playing the game on the website can vote to change the rules of the game.

It looked innocuous enough until the fans voted to open the Forbidden Book, which turned Blaseball into a game where these characters can get randomly incinerated by rogue umpires, trapped inside giant peanut shells, and/or mind-controlled by a god who once took over the website and turned it into a JRPG-esque boss battle.

Oh, and that was only the first era.

What particularly piqued my interest is that every Blaseball team has a subsection of the official chat server all to itself, and one of the teams is called the New York Millenials. This team's fans, the Mills (as they call themselves), have arranged themselves around a team where the logo is literally a smartphone emoji on a millenial-pink background and the slogan is "Youth Will Save Us." In a feat of continuous mass-scale improv, they have interpreted their team as living in a walkup apartment they all have to rent, arguing about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher. Also apparently their stadium is called Battin' Island?

It's... reclamatory, is the sense I get from it. Aside from loving writing and roleplaying their team (because the fans of every Blaseball team do that), Mills fans continuously make jokes about avocado toast and selfies, and gleefully call themselves the gayest team in Blaseball. If they're going to get blamed for the disintegration of the world, and since they can't do anything about it from their positions, they may as well make animated gifs of Rome burning. Laugh so that we may not cry, and all that.

Anyway - Blaseball will be returning either late this month or early next month, so now's a good time to sign up for the website, and explore the fanmade wiki for some incredibly detailed lore.  (My only real tip is that the geographic locations of the teams are basically irrelevant and you should just pick based on the part of the name that isn't a location.)

So many posts on the front page about approval rating polls. 

Guys post-Trump approval ratings are really just a reflection of partisanship (given the polarization) and have limited utility in providing efficacy information of any particular event or person.  

Also, this far out from elections they are even more meaningless.  

I feel like elections train people to monitor numbers and polls, then they just keep doing it after the election even though actual MOVES in the Senate and words spoken are much more important to follow.