Hit The Russian Parts!

Rule of Law Matters?

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, speaking on Jeb Bush's recent remarks on immigration, said the following.

We’re a nation of immigrants, we need to celebrate that, but at the same time, rule of law matters.

Oh, really? Does that include the 16th amendment to the Constitution? Or are we going to stomp our feet and complain like a grump eight year old about force and fruits of labor?

Perhaps they should ignore reality (something they do so well) keep pretending that President Obama won't enforce immigration laws in a thinly veiled attempt to mask their own prejudice.

Kentucky Cuts Uninsured By 40%

The Affordable Care Act has cut Kentucky's uninsured population by more than 40 percent, signing up roughly 360,000 residents since enrollment opened up on Oct. 1. Some 75 percent of them -- 270,000 -- were previously uninsured. That means Kentucky's uninsured population of 640,000 has come down by 42 percent.

And the Democrats want to run away from this? I think we are going to see a whole lot of about faces over the next few months when candidates realize just how many voters are better off as a result of the ACA.

Dying Obamacare Memes?

Yep. Pretty much. 

Keeping Your Doctor?

The Fort Hood Shooter Was Just Another Gun-Toting Hothead

Investigators now believe that the most recent shooting at Fort Hood was not due to mental illness, but rather an argument over the denial of leave requested by the shooter, Ivan Lopez.

That makes this shooting no different than the run-of-the-mill gun violence on the streets and in our homes. One person feels aggrieved and seeks to even the score with a gun. Some will still argue that PTSD or mental illness had a role, but since such shootings are so common among people who have no record of either condition, no such case can be made.

The real problem is that people like Lopez believe that violence is their first recourse whenever they feel angry or threatened. In other words, this guy was just a hothead with easy access to guns.

The NRA will probably try to spin Lopez as a man who was pushed to the brink by an unreasonable military bureaucracy that wouldn't give him enough time to attend to his mother's death. But it is the attitude that shooting people is a perfectly reasonable thing to do that's the cause of these deaths. The attitude espoused by the NRA.

In other words, Lopez was simply cut from the cloth as George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn.

Stupid People Want to Start a War with Russia

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?

The Art of Photography

Jeb Bush Pwns Anti-Immigration Mouth Foamers

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:)

Welfare King and Queen Update

Colin and Andrea Chisholm, the welfare king and queen, were arrested in Florida after they were deported from the Bahamas.

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.

Justice may be served after all.

A Brief History of Discrimination

A Question For Reflection

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?

Chris Rock On Minimum Wage

Gay Germs!

Leadership On Gun Safety

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.

The American Bro

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.

Far too many young men like this out there...

The Second Fort Hood Shooting

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 CIA Program That Started with a Dead Ox

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 more amazing, some of the individual participants are 30% better than the CIA at doing the CIA's job. How do they do it? Elaine Rich, a sixty-something pharmacist, says, "Usually I just do a Google search."

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.

By the way, if you're interested the Good Judgment Project is accepting applications!

The Most Boring Spectator Sport. Ever.

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.