Great Words

From a recent comment thread on Quora...

Thanks Mark, I worked out pretty quickly that it was a waste of time...pedantic, semantic arguments seem to the weapon of choice ( pun intended ) for Kevin. I just find it odd, that there are people out there that see nothing wrong with innocent bystanders dying, so others can exercise their right to own and carry a gun.... Thanks again...

Pedantic, semantic arguments combined with wacky ideological nonsense pretty much sums up today's conservative. Of course, that's the result of a baseline of insecurity and inferiority hence the need to "win" all the time:)

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Eight)

Here is the last question culled by 538 from GSS data in our continuing series on racism and political parties.

I'm not terribly impressed by the question as the word "close" is pretty ambiguous although I am glad to see the numbers lower than some of the other questions. Note that there is still an uptick after the president was elected and that more Republicans rate themselves as not being close to black people.

The Populist President

My first reaction to the speech tonight was this...who won the election again last November? :)

Obviously, the president and the Democrats know that they stole the honeymoon from the Republicans and are sitting pretty right now. The president realizes that there is a missing story from last year's election and so they are going to shift left and pull the country with them. He's got the poll numbers now (and Congress sure as shit does not) to throw his weight around a little more and you could really tell from his body language tonight as well as his speech. Barack Obama is finally at a point where he has absolutely nothing to lose and, man oh man, did the Republicans look uptight and grumpy about it all night during the speech.

A few highlights...

America, for all that we’ve endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back; for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.

Yes it is..in a large part, thanks to him which is why conservatives hate him so much. He has been successful.

We believed we could prepare our kids for a more competitive world. And today, our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record. Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high. And more Americans finish college than ever before.

So much for "Department of Our Collapsing Schools"

So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don't get in the way. We can't slow down businesses or put our economy at risk with government shutdowns or fiscal showdowns. We can't put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or refighting past battles on immigration when we've got a system to fix. And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, it will earn my veto.

Yes, the verdict is clear. Conservative economic ideology has failed. Time to leave it behind forever.

21st century businesses need 21st century infrastructure -- modern ports, stronger bridges, faster trains and the fastest internet. Democrats and Republicans used to agree on this. So let's set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline. Let's pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than thirty times as many jobs per year, and make this country stronger for decades to come.

I think the Keystone Pipeline is a great metaphor for Republican policies...rigid and out of step with a dynamic world.

I've heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they're not scientists; that we don't have enough information to act. Well, I'm not a scientist, either. But you know what -- I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we'll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

We should also not act like little insecure babies who don't like it when there are other people out there who are smarter and more accomplished than we are. Having more intelligence than someone shouldn't be a prerequisite for attacks from paranoid morons living in their parents basement.

Of course, the main takeaway from this speech is going to be the middle class tax cuts paid for by tax increases on the wealthy. Clearly, that's when GOP members in the audience lost a little in their shorts. How dare President Uppity try to take back the middle class white vote?

It's going to be a fun two years, folks!

Some First-Hand Experiences

I'd like to expand on Mark's post because I have direct personal experience with this kind of racism. I'll be the first to say that anecdotes, like way too many surveys, are meaningless, but since Fox News relies exclusively on anecdotes to buttress every "news" story they air, I figure it's my turn.

When my fourth sister announced that she was marrying a Latino Texan my father disowned her. Then he disowned my third sister for helping her put on the wedding. I had to walk my sister down the aisle because my father refused.

There was nothing wrong with this guy. They met in the Army Reserves. They've got two kids and have been married for 20 years now. He has a decent job locating fiber optic cables buried underground.

Whites seem to have a racial predisposition to getting diseases that put them on disability...

My father approved of my second sister for years. She married a fine, upstanding, right-wing racist just like my dad. She married this kind of guy three times. And now she's been divorced three times. Oddly, it turns out that intolerant white, gun-loving, right-wing conservatives make terrible husbands. They all turned out to be bums, with any number of excuses for why they can't be bothered to work, from "my head hurts," to alcoholism, to multiple sclerosis (not that guy's fault, of course, but whites have this racial predisposition to getting diseases that always seem to put them on disability...).

My third sister's husband was the same: another gun-loving conservative alcoholic who can't keep a job. Is it just my sisters' poor taste in men, or is something wrong with white guys?

But then my second sister got in the doghouse with my dad because her oldest daughter got pregnant and married a Latino guy.

Yes, you can find racists everywhere. Yes, there are blacks who -- after having been treated like animals for centuries by white slave owners, were then harassed for another century and a half by post-bellum Southerners who falsely imprisoned them, beat them, lynched them, prevented them from voting, made them sit at the back of the bus, didn't let them use rest rooms and drinking fountains, segregated them into poverty-stricken ghettos, sent them to terrible schools, and to this day send cops into their neighborhoods to single them out for harassment on minor traffic violations and shoot them for walking in the street -- bear resentment against whites. I can't figure out why.

And, yeah, many Chinese and Filipino and Japanese and English and Irish and Norwegian American parents are opposed to their children marrying outside their ethnic group. But this is not always racism: frequently, it's tribalism.

Is it racist to fear that your culture will die out because your children marry outside your ethnic group?

It's not surprising that some Chinese parents don't want their kids marrying Anglos because they're afraid they'll stop speaking Chinese, they'll abandon Chinese customs, and their grandkids won't look like them.

Children are the only real form of immortality there is. The people some commenters say are racist may just be people who think that if their grandkids don't look like them, it will be the end of their line. Their culture -- their "kind" -- will die out. Now, I'll grant it's a silly notion -- their DNA is still there, they can still wield cultural, social and moral influence over their grandkids (as long as they don't foolishly disown them).

In fact, the entire idea of race is false: there are blood types and tissue types, not racial types. Africans can donate blood and organs to Scandinavians, and all humans can cross-fertilize (to the chagrin of the racists). "Racial" differences are minute evolutionary changes that have crept in over the last few tens of thousands of years. Race is purely a function of geography, not biology.

But the fear of losing ethnic, cultural and linguistic connections with their descendants is understandable.

More to the point, this is exactly the same thing that the Republicans are talking about when they speak of "taking back America." Why is it racist for Filipino Americans to want to perpetuate their culture and ethnic appearance, but not racist for Republicans to want to "take back America?"

When Republicans say the United States is a Christian nation, they're saying that non-Christians are unwelcome.

When Republicans say the United States is a Christian nation, they're saying that non-Christians are unwelcome (although Republicans currently favor Jews for political reasons, this has not always been the case). And since religion and ethnicity are tightly linked, it's an inherently racist proposition.

And here is the core difference between the Democratic and the Republican Parties. The Republican Party welcomes the reactionaries and racists who want to maintain racial, religious and cultural purity. They adopt political platforms to move this agenda forward and actively devise electoral strategies to garner the support of and motivate racists.

Individual Democrats might have racial and tribal prejudices, but the party does not.

Republicans these days don't make their racism explicit. They couch it in terms like "take back America," "Christian nation," "states rights," "welfare queens," and low taxes. But everyone who knows the code knows what's really going on.

Now, Republicans will welcome blacks, Latinos and Asians into their party, just as long as they toe the line and give up everything that makes them different: speak English only, adopt one of two related monotheistic religions, abandon their parent's culture, abhor the "gay lifestyle," constantly mouth Old Testament paternalisms, adopt a vindictive, suspicious and fearful mindset, watch Fox News, badmouth Obama and Obamacare, drive the right kind of car (pickup truck, Hummer or anything that gets less than 15 mpg), constantly screech for the blood of Muslims, denounce climate change as a hoax, genuflect every time St. Ronald is mentioned, etc.

For a political party that prides itself on rugged individualism, the degree of rigid uniformity required to be a Republican is staggering.

The Republican Party is not a political party: it's a conservative Christian tribe. And you have to adopt all the trappings of the tribe or you're not welcome.

Republicans defend themselves against the racism charge by pointing at Herman Cain and Bobby Jindal. But seriously, if Jindal was still a Hindu, do you think he'd be the Republican governor of Louisiana today?

In the end, tribalism is just as evil and destructive as racism.  It encourages the same sorts of violence and hatred that skin color does. Just ask the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, or the soccer hooligans in England.

Or Cardinals and 49ers fans.

The Maturity Level Of The Gun Cult

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Seven)

At a recent holiday gathering, my father in law, a lifelong Democrat and strong supporter of the president, said that he had nothing against black people. He just didn't want my daughter dating or marrying one.

This sort of attitude is illustrated in the graphic below.

Though the numbers are trending downward, they are still far too high for this day and age. No doubt, this is true for both parties. I think the flatline for the Democrats likely represents the age cohort in which my father in law belongs.

Yet it still is important to note that there still are more Republicans than Democrats who opposed interracial marriage. Again, I think this is due to older people simply being more conservative than liberal as well as more conservatives being from the South.

Good Words

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love, 1963.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Six)

One of the great lies that has been spread over the years about black people is that they are less intelligent than white people. Or, in the case of this question, they are more unintelligent than intelligent.

White Republicans track pretty even since the early 90s with the GOP being slightly more of the belief that blacks are more unintelligent than intelligent. After the election of 2008, the GOP even sunk lower than the Democrats but rose above them again by 2012. The trend is still downward for the Democrats.

I find it pretty distressing that there are even this many people that think this. 15 percent of our white population? Really?

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Five)

Our series on racism in political parties takes a positive turn today with this question.

One caveat here is that GSS did not ask this question between 1998 and 2006, hence the smoothness during that time. Yet we still see a drop when the question gets asked again and that is very good news indeed.

Progress!

The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Use

Politico has a piece up about the myth of defensive gun ownership that is certain to cause many mouths to foam and bowels to be blown. Here are a few choice pulls...

What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States. 

Check. My brother in law assures me that his children are much more safe in his house because there are many guns there. When I ask him who is more likely to have an accident with a gun, his kids or my kids (living in a house with zero guns), he says, with a straight face, my kids. You really have to love the Gun Cult:)

In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year.

Did they, now? Now I understand why the Right is so paranoid about data. They are simply projecting the fact that they manipulate data on to the rest of us. What a complete load of bullshit. Not everyone in American owns a gun so to extrapolate to the entire population is terribly flawed. Worse, the fact that the NRA humps this "fact" all the time without mentioning the amount of accidents that occur with those same gun owners honestly creates a make believe land where guns are always good, forever and ever, amen.

Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data, further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are absurd. The archive found that for all of 2014 there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive guns uses, meaning a police report was filed. This total includes all outcomes and types of defensive uses with a police report—a far cry from the millions that Kleck and Getz estimated.

I've never heard of the Gun Violence Archive but I can bet that the words "non-partisan" are nearly certain to elicit shrieks of disapproval and chest thumping from the Gun Cult. This is especially true when you see something like this.

So, really, it's far less than 2 million defensive uses a year. The Politico piece also notes that Kleck himself admitted that "defensive gun use" is a relative term. 36 to 64 percent of the defensive gun use was illegal? Wow. And when you compare it to the other statistics like accidental shootings, murders, and injuries, the necessity of defensive gun use is exposed to be one of the greatest lies ever believed by the American people. As the article concludes...

But the evidence clearly shows that our lax gun laws and increased gun ownership, spurred on by this myth, do not help “good guys with guns” defend themselves, their families or our society. Instead, they are aiding and abetting criminals by providing them with more guns, with 200,000 already stolen on an annual basis. And more guns means more homicides. More suicides. More dead men, women and children. Not fewer. 

Yep.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Four)

Next up in our series on racism within the GOP is this question.

An interesting question to say the least. It is indeed heartening to see the trend moving downward for both parties but note the uptick (again) right after the president gets elected. It's much sharper with Republicans. I'll be interested to see the data from the last two years.

The Pope Sides with Terrorists on Charlie Hebdo?

While en route to the Philippines the pope talked about the massacre in Paris. And he really screwed the pooch on this one:

The Pope also condemned the Paris violence. “One cannot offend, make war, kill in the name of one’s own religion, that is, in the name of God,” Francis said. “To kill in the name of God is an aberration.

He broke it down in everyday terms, something that is coming to be known as classic Francis teaching style. “If [a close friend] says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose,” he explained. “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith.”

The pope is trying to have it both ways: first he condemns Islamic terrorists, and then he condones physical violence as retaliation for verbal insults. He believes that if someone says something sufficiently demeaning you have the right to retaliate physically.

This mindset is exactly why mass mayhem ruled Europe for centuries during the slaughters between Catholics and Protestants over disagreements on religious dogma -- nonsense like transubstantiation, for God's sake -- in what we would today call religious terrorism.

Is the pope really this oblivious? Violence begets more violence.

Is the pope really this oblivious to the ways of the world? When Joe calls Mike's mom a slut, and Mike punches Joe out, it doesn't end there. Joe punches Mike back. Then Mike picks up a bottle and smashes it over Joe's head. Then Joe hits Mike with a chair. Then Mike tackles Joe, throwing him to the floor and cracking his skull open. Then Mike goes to jail for killing Joe.

Violence begets more violence.Wasn't it Jesus who advocated turning the other cheek when someone smites you? Now the pope says it's okay to strike first?

Is the pope endorsing duels? Medieval trial by combat? The idea that might makes right? Or is he simply trying to understand and explain the reactions of unsophisticated brutes to insults, which is extremely insulting in and of itself?

In any case, what difference do insults make? If Mike's mom is a slut then it's a true statement and therefore not actionable. If she isn't, then Joe is a liar and scumbag and unworthy of response. Or, if the charges are public and sufficiently slanderous, Mike can take Joe to court.

The entire business of proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam is to demean other religions.

Now, on a larger scale, the entire business of proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam is to promote themselves, and to demonstrate their superiority over other religions. This inevitably means that other religions must be cast as inferior, and their basic tenets and practices must be derided as false and risible.

Christianity's official positions on Mohammed have ranged from him being a liar, a warlord, a polygamist, a false prophet and according to Luther, "a devil and first-born child of Satan." How much more insulting can you get?

Whenever another religion disagrees with yours on matters of theology, it is insulting your faith and demeaning your beliefs. It doesn't matter whether they use angry four-letter words or euphemisms couched in civility.

Because, truly, what's the difference between saying that A) Mary, the mother of the Church, was not a virgin her entire life, and B) Joseph and Mary fucked like minks? Why will A get a throat clearing, and B elicit a papal punch in the face?

Popes during the Reformation orchestrated religious wars and the deaths of thousands in Europe for centuries. They executed thousands of people simply for denying abstruse points of theology. In the Middle Ages popes demanded Christians go to the Holy Land and slaughter thousands of Muslims because their religious beliefs insulted the Lord.

And this nonsense isn't over. Some sects of Islam consider the very existence of other sects to be an affront to their religion. This is why the Sunni/Shia schism in Iraq is so bad -- the Saudi/Al Qaeda branch of Sunni Islam is determined to kill all Shiites, apparently by blowing up one mosque at a time.

So listen up, Francis. If you condone beating people up for calling your mom a slut, then you condone beating gays for insulting God's laws, then you condone the murder of doctors who disagree with Catholic dogma, then you condone terrorists that slaughter cartoonists who defame the image of the one true prophet of Allah.

You can't have it both ways. Once you condone physical violence as retribution for mere words, ideas or pictures, you endorse all-out war. Because physical violence always escalates. The bigger the insult, the more violent the retaliation.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Three)

Next up in our examination of racism within the Republican party is this.

These numbers are fairly shocking for both parties. The Democrats seem to have leveled off but that humber is still too high. And, as I have been saying right along, the Republicans have a serious problem with racism against black people. Combine this graphic with my previous two graphics and it's just plain awful. In addition, note the spike when President Obama took office.

Honestly, there's not really anything positive to take away from this question.

The Death of Email?

I just went through the arduous process of changing my email addresses. It took several hours to go through all the websites I use and test that everything still works. It was a lot more work for me than most people because I had to change both my personal email as well as several business emails, and change some software that uses them.

I had to do this because my old email addresses have become useless. I get hundreds of emails a day, and 99.9% of them are spam. Real email messages are then lost in that sea of crap.

Why did I have to do this? Hackers have attacked several major websites in recent months, stealing hundreds of millions of credit cards and email addresses. Spammers also scour web pages across the Internet, harvesting any email addresses they find.

Spam is the perfect example of a libertarian paradise where there are no government controls on business.

But changing my email address won't solve this problem for very long. It's only a matter of time before more websites get hacked, or the address books of the people I correspond with get ripped off. Or one of the websites I gave my email address to sells it to spammers. And then these new email addresses will become useless.

The act of creating new email addresses means I have to give them to other people, from whom spammers will ultimately take them, therefore defeating the entire purpose of creating the new emails in the first place.

Email is essentially a completely open and free market, without no central controls. If you want an idea of what life would be like in a libertarian paradise with no government controls on what business can do, spam is the perfect example.

The Tragedy of the Commons
The current state of email is the tragedy of the commons on steroids. This is an economic theory, first postulated by William Forster Lloyd and reiterated by Garret Hardin, which states that people acting independently and rationally in self-interest ultimately behave contrary to the best interests of the group.

Originally the "commons" was the actual common village green in an English village, which was shared among villagers. Everyone could pasture their cows and sheep there, which of course led to overgrazing that quickly turned the village green into a barren pit of mud.

The metaphor extends to all resources held in common, such as:

• The ocean, which is being overfished and polluted by dumping and toxic runoff.
• The atmosphere, which is used as a dumping ground for automobile exhaust, coal-burning power plants and industrial pollution.
• The freeway system, which gets overcrowded at rush hour, making it useless for everyone.
• The stock market, which can be manipulated by insider trading, high-frequency computer trading and hedge fund rumor-mongers for personal gain while trashing market value for everyone else.
• The financial system, which was nearly brought down in 2008 through bad lending practices by individuals increasing their personal gain at everyone else's loss.
• The telephone system, which is exploited by con men and phony charities, like those calls from Apogee Retail begging for used clothing in the name of real charities, to which they give nothing.

The percentage of spam in email has fluctuated over time. It has been estimated to be anywhere from 68% to 90% of all email in recent years. I can't find reliable current stats, but my personal experience is that there has been a significant uptick in spam in recent months after a significant drop last year.

Spam filters help, but are no panacea. Real emails get lost when they're falsely flagged as spam, or when mailboxes get filled. And spammers are getting better at making spam look like more like real email that gets past the filters.

Another way to deal with spam is to simply reject any email you get from an address you don't recognize. That might work for individuals, but it doesn't work for businesses that need to accept queries from customers. To avoid having to deal with spam, those businesses instead turn to web forms (which have those annoying captchas to prevent spammers from sending spam through web interfaces).

Then there are the economic costs: worldwide millions of man-hours are wasted each day simply by people having to spend time weeding out and deleting spam.

If 60-90% of email is spam, that means that 60-90% of the network capacity, the server horsepower, and the very electricity that powers all the Internet infrastructure devoted to handling email is being wasted.

That adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Which means people are just going to start giving up on email. And many of them already have: lots of people send texts, or use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other texting apps on their smart phones in preference to email.

So, the Internet had better come up with a real solution for spam, or email is going to go the way of snail mail.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Two)

Our next graphic has just as much to do with anti-government sentiment as it does with anti-black sentiment.

I think the anti-government sentiment and the fact that a black man got elected president in 2008 explain the rise on the Republican side. This question seemed to be trending downward for both parties but there was an uptick after the 2008 election. Thankfully, the Democrats are down to the single digits now.

The Republicans, however, clearly have their work cut out for them. If a third of their party believes that too much money is spent on improving the conditions of blacks, they do not have a grasp of history. Let's review

400 years of slavery
100 years of Jim Crow
50 years since the Civil Rights Act passed.
20 years (maybe) of white people being less crazy and a little more nice.

The whole "get over it" meme doesn't really work when you consider the depth of devastation done to black people in this country over time. This is where an anti-government type like Rand Paul could capture the black vote. It was the federal government that allowed slavery for how many years?

Let's also remember this piece from a while back. The biggest recipients of welfare?

The South.

Robbing A Gun Store

I've been assured by the Gun Cult that no one would ever consider robbing a gun store least of criminals. They would be deterred by the mere presence of that which is to be worshiped while gently fondling one's penis!

Well, there goes another bullshit lie.

Much of downtown Shawnee went into lockdown in the minutes following the attempted robbery and shootout at a gun shop there on Friday.

So, if there were schools full of guns and armed people like this gun shop then it would really make any difference.

When are we going to stop listening to these people?

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part One)

A recent post on race elicited several highly defensive and steeped in denial remarks from two of the five people who actually read comments. As is usually the case with conservatives like these gentlemen, they quickly redirected the conversation to me, issuing imperial declarations originating from an unfortunately deep insecurity and an inability to admit fault.

I did take away one thing from their feedback, though, and that's the fact that a more detailed examination of just how exactly Republicans are more racist than Democrats was required. For the next few days, we're going to be taking a look at polling done by a few different outfits on this issue. The main ones are going to be the General Social Survey and Nate Silver's 538 site but before we take a look at the first question, let's examine a fundamental fact about Republican party strength. Take a look at this map.

131 electoral votes come from the Old South and you'll note that today these are solid red states through and through. In the 2012 election, the popular vote in these 12 states was roughly 18 million people which is just shy of a third of the Republican votes in that election. Suffice to say that the South represents a substantial portion of the GOP base.

Given these facts, it's not surprising we see data like this.

A couple of interesting things to note. There are still plenty of white Democrats who have a problem with race. Sadly, some are in my family and, again not surprising, they are from the South. I also think it's interesting to note the uptick after Barack Obama got elected. Conservatives like to downplay the president's race but that's like my 12 year old son trying to downplay his black teeth when I ask him if he got into the Oreo cookies.

The positive to this graphic is that the trend is downward. Much of this has to do with old, white people dying off and taking their bullshit with them. Most people under the age of 40 don't have the same views on race as people over 40 do. Go even younger and it gets even better. We can thank our education system and its commitment to diversity and sensitivity on race for that sea change:)

So, it's clear from this graphic that more Republicans than Democrats think that black people are more lazy than hard working which is a classic racial stereotype. Given that a substantial portion of the GOP base is from the South, this myth about black people is likely more prevalent in those 12 states and drives the number higher for Republicans.

(Postscript: I suspect that this post and the ones on race that follow are going to cause a few bowels to be blown. I'm going to request that when commenting on this and future posts in this series, please offer a counter argument (if you disagree) that is based in reason and leaves me out of it.  I won't ban or delete any comments that are Markadelphia obsessed as they essentially illustrate avoidance and denial of reality thus leading to confirmation of my assertions here. But I at least wanted to offer my usual five commenters the chance to really focus on the evidence presented here and post a true counter argument complete with their own assertions. 

After all, they repeatedly claim that they are superior to me in several ways. Now's their chance to prove this to be true:))

You Are Not President

Uh...Michele?

You aren't president and this is not the result of anything you did.

I'm completely shocked that a conservative doesn't understand fundamental economics.

All Economic Signs Good!

Yesterday's paper had a great piece on how well the economy is doing here in Minnesota and in the rest of the country. Check out this interactive graphic that illustrates the five key indicators (jobs, unemployment, consumer sentiment, gas prices, and GDP) clearly showing just how much our economy has improved during the Obama years.

Any retractions out there yet?

Why Globalization Is A Rising Tide That Lifts All Boats

The video below shows exactly why globalization and capitalism are indeed very good things. Take a look at how the bubbles, even in underdeveloped countries, rise over 200 years. Rosling's stuff is amazing and I highly encourage all of you to check out his interactive graphic where you can track the progress of each country, crunch the data, and be a complete social studies nerd like myself.



Despite what the apocalyptics on both the left and the right tell you, our world is improving every day.