I'm always rather cynical about poll results, but this one was pretty funny: the less people know about where Ukraine is, the more they want to start a war with Russia.
On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.
I wonder how it correlates with how much Fox News they watch?
Well, there went every anti immigration reform argument down in flames. Very impressive, Mr. Bush...four words I thought I would never say. This will be a real test to see how the Republican base responds which is exactly why he did it:)
They received hundreds of thousands of dollars in food stamps and welfare benefits in Florida and Minnesota, while living in an expensive lakefront home in Minnesota. They had $3 million in the bank and an 83-foot yacht.
Colin Chisholm is still listed as CEO and founder of TCN Networks. It's not clear what the company does, but the website is only half done. The "Social Responsibility" bullet point on the Philosophy page is rather ironic.
As is usually the case on Sunday, I'm feeling reflective and have a question for my readers. Consider for a moment that you are president of the United States. Would you implement a policy that would likely solve a problem in our country if it was something you didn't like and, more importantly, was in conflict with your ideology?
My answer is yes. Being the president means you have to choose between something that is bad, awful and horrible. There are no good choices and I still contend that one cannot truly be a "good" president. You are either average, bad, or awful and that's entirely due to the broken down nature of reality. Our country is generally a mess and, in the final analysis, it's merely about damage control.
I realize this sounds pessimistic but I prefer to look at it as more realistic. I still maintain optimism through whatever comes our way because the other key element of our country is the devotion to Lockian principles of inherent liberty and freedom. From this springs innovation and prosperity. Despite our darker days and persistent problems, we somehow manage to rise to challenges and overcome them.
So, would you do what it took to overcome those challenges?
Gander Mountain is a great example of the kind of leadership we need on gun safety from the private sector of our country. Given how many deaths occur reach year due to irresponsible adults, the idea of a gun lock giveaway is a welcome solution.
“When you start reading about them and you see that so many of them involve someone just leaving the firearm out and the wrong person gets it in their hand and it usually involves a child,” he said. “And if it was just either locked up in a safe or it was in a biometric safe in the case of a handgun or a trigger lock these accidents are all preventable,” said Steve Uline, Gander Mountain’s vice president for marketing.
This year they are adding hardware to the cause.
Gander Mountain, which has 133 locations in 25 states, is giving away 50,000 gun locks until Sunday, April 6. The gun locks the company is giving away bar access to the gun’s trigger.
Uline said the cost of gun locks, which start at $10, isn’t prohibitive considering most gun owners spend thousands on their guns. But gun owners fall into the mentality that accidents or tragedies won’t happen to them.
“We felt that we were in a position to raise awareness to cut down on these accidents,” Uline said.
Way to go, Gander Mountain!
That's not all they are doing. They have also done admirable work raising firearm security awareness over the past year through social media and advertising; its leadership’s willingness to engage in a touchy debate is commendable. The retailer’s position — with rights come responsibilities — is something everyone should be able to agree on and, more important, act on.
This piece by John Saward is simply a masterpiece. His details of the modern American male are dead on right. Example...
Being flagrantly offensive, irritating people, making noise, commanding an audience—this is what fuels him; this is his required voltage. He is on the phone with someone named Ryan or Tyler or Kyle; he is saying “cunt” or “nigger” or “slut” out loud, then half-apologizing to no one in particular. "I GOT NO FILTER, BRO." He tilts his head and neck back, cackling at the ceiling, electrified by the degree to which he does not give a fuck, by this ability to appall other people, to make your mouth hang wide open like you were witnessing a wildfire. He is not saying words now but just grunting and ejecting "YOOOO" and "DUDE" in varying cadences, asking Ryan or Tyler or Kyle when they are getting there, what they brought, if they are pumped. He is pushing it to the limit, going hard, pouring Jäger into a plastic cup, making the conductor wait. All he can hear is his brain-engine humming, the bolts coming loose, people chanting his name. He is a renegade, he is looking women in the eyes for a period of time that blew past bold and is bordering on restraining order, but maybe this turns her on, he thinks; maybe he is dangerous, maybe he is going to walk over to her right now. He is alive to a degree that you will never be capable of, and he is scaring all the inhabitants of the universe back into their homes.
The silence from the Gun Cult after the SECOND Fort Hood shooting has been deafening and it's now clear why.
Military personnel who are not police officers are not allowed to carry privately owned weapons on Army bases. Soldiers on post must register their firearms, which Army officials said Specialist Lopez failed to do with the handgun he used in the attack. Fort Hood’s rules rely in large part on the honor system, and require all personnel bringing a privately owned firearm onto the base in a vehicle to declare that they are doing so and state why.
So, the idea of less regulation doesn't seem to be working well at all. In addition, this is yet another example of how the gun free zone lie is completely FUBAR. Obviously, there are plenty of guns on the base and no one is really checking for weapons. It is Texas, after all, so one would think this would deter psychos, right?
But it didn't and Specialist Ivan Antonio Lopez, 34, killed three people and wounded 16 others at Fort Hood before taking his own life on Wednesday. Lopez was being treated for mental health issues and was on SSRI medications. Ironically, he bought the gun that he used at the same gun store where Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan bought his weapon. He passed the background check just fine.
Once again, we are left with a clear illustration of how just how poorly our nation is dealing with the issue of mental health. Politico has an interesting piece about how the conversation about these incidents should shift from gun control to threat detection. I completely agree. If someone voluntarily submits themselves for psychiatric treatment, especially if they are suffering from PTSD and in the military, they should lose their ability to obtain a firearm.
Consider this horrible statistic: 22 veterans kill themselves every day. That's right around one death an hour. Clearly, we are not doing enough to help the mental health of our veterans. This is indeed a difficult task considering we have been at war for the last 13 years.
Mental health in our nation as a whole needs to be vastly improved. We have to begin by removing the stigma associated with it and encourage everyone to see a therapist on a regular basis. I have no doubt that if gains were made in this area, we would see less gun violence, especially in the arena of spree shootings.
The wisdom of crowds is a concept that arose in 1906, when British statistitian Francis Galton observed a competition at a fair where 800 people guessed the weight of a dead ox. No one got the right answer, but when he tallied all the guesses he was shocked to learn that the average — or maybe it's the median — was 1,197 lbs, just one pound short of the actual weight.
This is also how colonies of bees and ants appear to do quite intelligent things even though each individual insect is totally oblivious.
A few years ago the CIA started a program to use Galton's finding. "The Company" is infamous for weird and sinister programs. For example, MK Ultra, where they tried to use drugs like LSD to produce "Manchurian Candidates." Or Remote Viewing, where they had psychics using ESP and clairvoyance to spy on the Russians. Or waterboarding, where they tortured prisoners with simulated drowning, a tactic used by the Spanish and Flemish Inquisitions, the Gestapo and WWII Japanese war criminals, who were hanged for torturing Americans.
The program that came from the dead ox is not so sinister. Called the Good Judgment Project, it attempts to use the wisdom of the crowd to forecast world events. It's been running for three years now.
It consists of 3,000 ordinary people who answer questions on a website to estimate probabilities of future events. The astonishing thing is, this program is better at making forecasts than the professional CIA analysts who have access to classified documents.
Even though that may sound impressive, it really isn't. The CIA -- and organizations in general -- are notorious for groupthink. They know what answers their bosses want to hear, because their bosses have already decided what they want to do, and they just want ammunition to back up the decision they've already made. This was especially true of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war.
But there are less sinister reasons why a group of 3,000 folks from across the country might be better at doing this than the CIA.
First, they have no skin in the game, while the CIA is responsible for the safety of the American people. If a CIA analyst misses something a lot of people may die. Analysts feel that pressure, and will tend to perceive potential threats to be greater than they actually are. Also, the number of analysts devoted to each area at CIA is fairly small, and they all talk to and influence each other. It's only natural that they would drift toward a consensus, and all too often consensus is driven not by mutual agreement but by whoever shouts the loudest.
Sometimes there is just too much detail. With all those classified documents, analysts can get bogged down in minutiae that are much less important than they might seem. They can't see the forest for the trees.
Finally, no one cares if a CIA section predicts 10 doomsdays an hour and none of them ever happens, but everyone will be all over them if four guys die in an embassy attack that they failed to predict.
There was once a wildly popular professional sport that is even more boring than football and NASCAR: pedestrianism. In the 1870s and 1880s huge crowds gathered to watch men walk around in circles 24 hours a day:
[For] six-day walking matches, the rules were pretty simple. They would just map out a dirt track on the floor of an arena — many of the matches took place at the first Madison Square Garden in New York — and the lap was about 1/7th or 1/8th of a mile. And you could only walk six days because public amusements were prohibited on Sundays. So beginning right after midnight on Sunday night/Monday morning, the walkers would set off and they would just keep walking until right up until midnight the following Saturday.
In an interview on NPR author Matthew Algeo talks about his book, Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America's Favorite Spectator Sport. Some highlights: it started when Edward Payson Weston lost a bet on the 1860 presidential election and had to walk from Boston to Washington for the inauguration; African-Americans were able to compete; trainers (incredibly, they had them) recommended their pedestrians drink champagne, because it was thought to be a stimulant. There were also gambling and drug scandals.
With the invention of the safety bicycle pedestrianism died out; bicycle races were much more interesting because — you guessed it — the crashes were much more spectacular, especially after six days of sleepless pedaling.
Liberals are running around today with their hair on fire after yesterday'sSCOTUS rulingon campaign contributions. The "end is nigh" because there is (gasp!) money in politics. I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked to find out the gambling is going on in this establishment!! Well, I have a few words for my friends on the left who think life, as we know it, is over.
Pay attention to the nuance of this case. If you read the SCOTUS blog link, you can see that there is more transparency now. There is also a larger playing field for individuals, not just mega donors, to get in the game. If liberals really want to have an effect on this issue, they need to push for transparency. Anyone who donates in whatever amount has to be disclosed in the most transparent way.
Consider as well how much money was spent to defeat the president and how it all amounted to zilch. Money isn't as much of a factor as you think given other influences in politics today. Look at the example of social media. Facebook and Twitter are free, right? Anyone can post a video on YouTube. This is what people look at these days and they are more of an influence on votes than millions of dollars of donations. Honestly, the mouth foamers about this law don't understand the digital generation.
This ruling also puts more power back in the hands of the parties and out of the hands of the mega donors. I predict we will see the decline of the Super Pac as a result of this decision.
So, liberals, chill the fuck out! Money has always been in politics and it always will. If you try to ban it, somehow it will find a way to spread around. Keep it out in the open and remove all limits and watch how its effect diminishes.
One of the reasons the Founding Fathers broke from Europe was the arrogance and corruption inherent in the hereditary ruling class of kings and noblemen. The wealth and influence of men like the Koch brothers -- hereditary oil barons -- and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson makes them the nobility of today.
These people expect everyone to treat them like royalty, pay them fealty and kiss their feet. Just last week Chris Christie and other Republican presidential hopefuls paid obeisance to Sheldon Adelson. During his paean to a foreign country in Las Vegas Christie made a catastrophic blunder by calling the Palestinian terroritories that Israel seized from Syria, Egypt and Jordan in 1967 and is still occupying "the Occupied Territories." When Christie was told of Adelson's displeasure he apologized instantly.
Adelson is essentially an agent of the Israeli government, spending his billions to get the United States to kowtow to Israeli politicians, regardless of what the best interests of the American people might be.
Did the Founding Fathers really write a Constitution that equates foreign princes like Sheldon Adelson using their wealth to buy elections across the United States to free speech?
Sarah Palin recently called Paul Ryan's latest budget "a joke" saying "it is STILL not seeing the problem; it STILL is not proposing reining in wasteful government overspending TODAY, instead of speculating years out that some future Congress and White House may possibly, hopefully, eh-who-knows, take responsibility for today’s budgetary selfishness and shortsightedness to do so."
“THIS is the definition of insanity,” she continued.
Fine. Where do you propose cuts?
“You’d think one who is representing the mighty Badgers, who made it to the Final Four based on sacrificial work ethic and discipline that obviously pays off in the end, … would understand that future success depends on hard work and sacrifices,” Palin said.
Again, where exactly do you propose cuts?
There is plenty to cut, Palin argued, as “every omnibus bill is loaded with pork and kickbacks.”
Be specific. How much? What would happen as a result of the cuts?
“As my Dad would say after these April Fool’s announcements, ‘This would kill a lesser man.’ This out-of-control debt is killing our economic future,” Palin wrote.
How exactly?
Sarah Palin is a great example of how all conservatives have these days is criticism...even of their own party! They don't offer anything but strident language and hollow (and really, really played) talking points that appeal to fear. Considering our massive wealth and assets, the debt is a phantom menace and she is simply lying about our economic future.
Of course, she (and any other conservatives) are welcome to prove me wrong with substantive plans of their own:)
The president has a good couple of days and the photo above shows that there is a spring in his step (even if he is a White Sox fan). Big Papi and 44...nice!
The bottom line is, the Hispanic community, the Latino community is not going to hear us until we get beyond that issue. They’re not going to care whether we go to the same church, or have the same values, or believe in the same kind of future of our country until we get beyond that. Showing up helps, but you got to show up and you got to say something, and it has to be different from what we’ve been saying.
