Good Words

"At this time we see a resurgence of the far right within the Republican Party because the base -- a small minority of the American population, mostly concentrated in the south -- is becoming hysterical now that they think the end is nigh. They seem to believe that if what they're doing isn't working, screaming louder will win them more elections. They will never go away, but as older southern voters motivated by fear and paranoia die they will become less and less influential." 

(Nikto, 21 February 2014)

The Gap Closes The Gap

It looks like retail clothing firm The Gap has joined Costco and other businesses in economic intelligence. Hmm...pay people more money...they spend more money in the economy...businesses hire more people and earn more profit...weird how that works:)

No Pendulum and No Coming Out of Nowhere

Last Saturday I had the honor and pleasure of catching a film with former commenter and all around great guy, Last in Line. We went out for meat loaf afterwards and, as is usually the case, the discussion turned to politics. He wondered if I had any complaints about the president other than my main one (military assaults up on his watch). I told him I really didn't. Considering the choices that he has made, what better ones were there? I remained convinced that presidents have to choose the best worst choice because the problems they have to deal with are so awful and convoluted that no human can actually fix them. The president has done his best considering what he was handed 5 years ago.

Our conversation turned to 2016 and the election. Last gave his usual line, seen many times in comments, about the pendulum going back and forth and that some candidate, likely a conservative governor, would come out of nowhere, be the nominee for the GOP, and win because everyone hates Obama. I tried to explain to him that Republicans haven't gotten over 300 electoral votes since 1988 but he was having none of it. We moved on to talk about other topics but something stuck in my mind about his mindset that was inherently flawed and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. After some reflection, I figured it out.

Aside from the obvious fact that the pendulum has not really been moving much in the GOP's direction for quite some time, the advent of social media and how we get our political news (via the internet) makes it virtually impossible for a candidate to "come out of nowhere." This technology has led us to elections that run year round as opposed to every four years. There are no unknowns in politics any longer. All of the names being bandied about for the 2016 nomination likely contain the eventual nominee. Each one has massive flaws and can't win a national election if Hillary Clinton is the nominee. She will win all the states Barack Obama won in 2008 and at least two red states. Period. If she decides not to run, the GOP might have a shot but if they nominate Ted Cruz or another hard right candidate, forget it. The GOP is a dying party. Gerrymandering will keep them alive for the next couple elections in Congress but unless they change, that's it.

And I wouldn't be too sure about the "everyone hates Obama" meme. Yesterday, conservative polling outfit Rasmussen had him at a 50-49 approval rating. It could be just statistical noise but they have had him above 45 for quite some time now. Perhaps we need to stop listening to "the experts in the liberal media" and realize that a good chuck of those who disapprove of the president are liberal and will never vote for a conservative. This simple fact should guide Democrats in 2014, 2016 and beyond.

Guns In Bars and Churches

Georgia House votes to allow weapons in bars, churches.

Well, I'm sure this will work out well...

Please Notice Us!!

Sarah Palin backs Greg Abbott 

“If he is good enough for Ted Nugent, he is good enough for me!” Palin wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday.

Wow. They must really be getting insecure these days and in desperate need of attention:)

Convicted of Being a Bad Shot

Here we go again. A white guy in Florida starts hassling a black kid, then pulls a gun and shoots him dead. And the jury somehow can't convict the guy of murder.

Michael Dunn pulled into a gas station in 2012, where some kids were parked playing loud music. He told them to turn it down, and apparently they complied, but Dunn shot the victim, Jordan Davis, anyway. Davis died almost immediately. As the kids' car pulled away Dunn pumped several more shots into it.

Dunn was convicted of attempted murder of the other kids in the car, but the jury deadlocked on the murder charge.

Apparently the only real crime in Florida is being a bad shot.

One of the jurors said that the final vote was 9-3 to convict on the murder charge, but three jurors were convinced that Dunn felt he was in danger.

The juror explained that jurors got a glimpse into Dunn’s ego when he said he asked people to turn down their music several times before in his hometown. Valerie told "Nightline" that Dunn’s insistence during his testimony that he was in danger was an important moment in the trial.

So, this jerk goes around town hassling people playing music, secure in the knowledge that if anyone gives him any lip he can just shoot them, then say that he thought he saw a gun and was afraid for his life.

Florida's stand your ground law is custom made for letting people get away with murder. All the "evidence" you need is the ability to give weepy fear-laden testimony to a gullible jury.


Personal responsibility is supposed to be the hallmark of conservative jurisprudence. Stand your ground laws let liars and bullies get away with murder. Maybe Florida should just bite the bullet and institute the death penalty for texting in movie theaters, playing loud music and walking down the street in hoodies.

It looks like Dunn will go to prison for decades, which is a life sentence for the middle-aged man. But you gotta ask: if he had killed all four kids and the car never moved, would those three jurors would have thought him not guilty of any crime at all?

How can not killing three kids be a greater crime than killing one?

The UN Report on North Korea

The United Nations has released a scathing report of the situation inside of North Korea and I say this long overdue. I am so thoroughly disgusted by this that I can hardly write to be honest with all of you.

Some of the key points:

Arbitrary detention, torture, executions and prison camps

The police and security forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government and to the ideology underpinning it. The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable. Impunity reigns.

Violations of freedom of thought, expression and religion

The state operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience to the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.

Discrimination

It is a rigidly stratified society with entrenched patterns of discrimination... Discrimination is rooted in the songbun system, which classifies people on the basis of state-assigned social class and birth, and also includes consideration of political opinions and religion. Songbun intersects with gender-based discrimination, which is equally pervasive.

Abductions and enforced disappearances from other countries

Since 1950, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has engaged in the systematic abduction, denial of repatriation and subsequent enforced disappearance of persons from other countries on a large scale and as a matter of state policy.

Violations of the freedom of movement and residence

The state decides where citizens must live and work, violating their freedom of choice... This has created a socioeconomically and physically segregated society, where people considered politically loyal to the leadership can live and work in favourable locations, whereas families of persons who are considered politically suspect are relegated to marginalised areas.

Violations of the right to food and related aspects of the right to life

The state has used food as a means of control over the population. It has prioritised those whom the authorities believe to be crucial to maintaining the regime over those deemed expendable.

Essentially, nothing that we did not already know. So what can we do about it?

At first glance, the answer seems like nothing, given that China's feathers will be ruffled and the American voter is very weary of war. North Korea doesn't seem to want to advance beyond her current borders and obviously has a vested interest in keeping their little concentration camp of a country intact. Yet the human rights violations demand action. Perhaps we could ramp up our covert activity in the country and get a more clear assessment of what it would take to take out the people that are engaging in these actions.

Clearly, this is one of the greatest humanitarian crises we have faced since World War II. It's been going on a long time and it needs to stop...by force, if necessary.

Chucking Gun Background Checks Means More Murders

Speaking of the debate on gun control...

A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research provides evidence that background checks help reduce the murder rate:

The 2007 repeal of a Missouri law that required background checks and licenses for all handgun owners appears to be associated with a significant increase in murders there, a new study finds.

The law’s repeal was correlated with a 23 percent spike in firearm homicide rates, or an additional 55 to 63 murders annually from 2008 to 2012, according to the study conducted by researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and to be published in the Journal of Urban Health.

“This study provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and the study’s lead author, said in a news release. “There is strong evidence to support the idea that the repeal of Missouri’s handgun purchaser licensing law contributed to dozens of additional murders in Missouri each year since the law was changed.”

The spike in murders only held for those committed with a gun and was consistent throughout the state. Neither Missouri’s border states nor the nation as a whole saw similar increases.

Eliminating the background check essentially makes it legal for criminals to buy guns. And when you make it legal for criminals to buy guns, criminals shoot more people.

Simple math, really.

A Feller Can Dream, Can't He?

Check out this debate regarding gun control over at debate.org.

Wow.

So, that's how civilized people conduct themselves. No wonder none of my regular commenters have accepted my challenge to debate in that forum. How could they possibly do it?:)

"Bridgegate Has Become MSNBC's Benghazi."

So sayeth Bill Maher is a recent blog post and he's absolutely right. MSNBC has officially become the Fox News of the Left and it really sucks. I used to DVR Morning Joe and watch it if I had time later in the night but they just can't lay off Christie. Again, so what? How is what he did any different than what Lyndon Johnson used to do? Add in Mika Brzezinski's tar and feathering of Woody Allen (which is completely devoid of fact, mind you) and we are really only left with Al Jazeera America...still the most honest and best reporting out there.

They don't tell Americans what we want to hear. They tell us what we need to hear. Check out their YouTube feed for what their content is like and why it is superior.

When Not Seeing Leads to Believing

Humans have always searched for explanations for the unknown. When we can't see a rational cause for something, we inevitably conclude that there's some kind of mystical, supernatural force at work.

Even Albert Einstein did this, in a manner of speaking, when he added the cosmological constant to his theory of general relativity in order to achieve a static universe, which was the accepted theory at the time. Einstein later called this his "greatest blunder."

More recently astrophysicists came up with something called dark matter to explain the "missing mass problem": astronomers cannot find enough mass with telescopes to account for the gravitational effects they observe in the galaxies around us.

Galaxy and its halo

By the 1930s astronomers had found that nearby galaxies were rotating faster than could be explained by the estimates of the masses of their visible components (stars and gas clouds): there had to be some kind of invisible matter providing most of the mass that held these galaxies together. Even accounting for the black holes that we know are at the center of most galaxies, there still wasn't enough mass.

Current theory postulates that most dark matter is some kind of special "nonbaryonic" matter, hypothetical axion particles completely unlike mundane protons, neutrons and electrons. However, the theory does grant that a small portion of the missing mass is regular "baryonic" matter, residing in massive compact halo objects.

They also came up with something called dark energy to explain why the universe keeps expanding faster and faster. Dark energy is sort of like antigravity, an idea that raises a lot of hackles. One current theory goes into great detail, calculating that the universe is composed of 4.9% regular matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.4% dark energy.

This is the mirror image of seeing is believing: not seeing mundane physical matter led scientists to believe in the existence of strange and esoteric dark matter.

I admit to being skeptical about dark matter (and dark energy). It smacks of the sort of mystical answer that I distrust: we can't see the missing mass, so that must mean there's something special and weird going on. I've always thought that the simpler Occam explanation is that we just can't see the missing mass because it's dark out there. Dim red dwarf stars, brown dwarfs (starlike objects too small to emit visible light) and cold dust clouds are essentially invisible to our telescopes, or the masses of galactic core black holes could be underestimated, or there could be smaller undetected "loner" black holes orbiting in the galactic periphery.

Well, now it turns out that someone may have found that missing mass, in exactly the place we should have expected it. This discovery has the potential to completely upend decades of theoretical astrophysics.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Jessica Werk and her team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used light from quasars to detect haloes of cold gas around galaxies ("cold" is relative: the gas is at 10,000 degrees Celsius). The gas previously observed in galactic haloes is about 1 million degrees -- at that temperature the gas emits photons and can be detected by our optical and radio telescopes.

The cold gas clouds absorb some of the quasar's light as it passes through, allowing Werk's team to detect traces of carbon, silicon magnesium and hydrogen. They calculated that there may be 10 to 100 times the amount of cold gas than astronomers previously thought existed, potentially making up all of the missing mass.

If these observations hold up and the cold gas haloes do account for all the missing mass, that doesn't mean the scientists who theorized about dark matter were wrong to do so. They were working with the best data they had, and some aspects of the theory could still be true. And this finding still doesn't explain why the universe's expansion seems to be accelerating (though that could be another observational inadequacy).

The biggest mistake we can make in science is assuming that our observations are complete, that the beliefs we have now are final and can't possibly be changed. Even with the best tools and techniques at their disposal, scientists could not detect the missing mass. So, rather than just assume it was there -- which would definitely have been wrong -- scientists sought out other explanations. And those explanations led them into really esoteric places.

Following that path wasn't wrong: it's what scientists are supposed to do. But once we have the new data, and we have reverified that data several times to ensure that we aren't being misled this time too, we have to go back and revisit and revise everything, and chuck out the theories that don't support the facts.

That's the process of science: going back, testing our assumptions, making the same observations again and again, in new and different ways and from different directions. Making sure that we get the same results, or if we don't get the same results, understanding why we didn't, maybe correcting our experimental methods, or possibly stumbling upon another secret of the universe.

When we do, we often find we no longer need supernatural explanations to explain what we see -- or don't see.

President's Day Good Words #13

"Citizenship demands a sense of common purpose; participation in the hard work of self-government; an obligation to serve to our communities."

(Barack Obama, Sixth State of the Union Address delivered on January 28, 2014 during a joint session of the United States Congress)

President's Day Good Words #12

"Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

(Bill Clinton, First inaugural address, Washington, D.C. January 20, 1993)

President's Day Good Words #11

"We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that's crazy. It's time we stopped it."

(Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Northside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, June 6, 1985)

President's Day Good Words #10

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

(Jimmy Carter, "Malaise Speech," July 15, 1979)