Black Friday Meltdown

Here's a great example of a gripe that liberals have that I just don't get.



This is evidence of the "End Times?" Like my colleagues on the right, emotions are causing memory loss. I can think of...oh, I don't know...EIGHT ZILLION examples in history where we have been much worse off than today. The Civil War comes to mind as does the Spanish flu epidemic. Compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands to some excited shoppers. And you really think this show our country is on the downswing? If anything, it shows that free markets really do work!

Sadly, it shows that the far left and the far right have so much in common that they start to sound like each other after awhile. Their irrational fear, anger and hate has to be validated and this line of thought always ends with THE APOCALYPSE.

Look out!

Good Words

"There is a natural human tendency to believe that any major development, no matter how long before an election, will be the last important influence on said election. This theory is fine in the last days before an election, but with almost a year to go, it is pretty unlikely that the national political situation will suddenly become static for well over 300 days." (Charlie Cook)

Anyone that tells you they know for certain what the outcome of the 2014 election is going to be is simply engaging in wishful thinking...

The Hunger Games Effect

Gun advocates often talk about the positive effects of instructing kids in the use of firearms. It provides many teachable moments, including close attention to safety, dedication to discipline, self-control and self-reliance. Hunting with rifles gives you a chance to get outdoors in the fresh air, bond with family and friends, maintain a connection to traditions from the past, and so on.

But all of that is doubly true for archery.

I got to thinking about this after seeing a story at Minnesota Public Radio about the huge boom in archery among girls since the Hunger Games books and movies have become so popular. The heroine of the Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, famous for using a bow. Bows (albeit crossbows) have also been appearing in recent TV shows, including Revolution and The Walking Dead.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is also taking advantage of the opening of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire:

To further promote participation in archery, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is advertising its archery programs during the movie’s premier. The static, 15-second advertisement depicts a female archer along with the slogan: "Get in the game – explore your passion for archery."

Appearing in select Colorado theaters Nov. 15-28, the ad also includes a QR code and link, which sends movie audiences to a resource webpage. The webpage features CPW's archery programs, an interactive map of shooting ranges, videos and a summary of partnering organizations that offer archery or bowhunting programs in Colorado.

When I was a kid my dad sometimes hunted deer during the bow season. In some states the bow season is a lot longer, so bow hunters get more opportunities. A bow always seemed more sporting than a rifle to me; a rifle hunter is more of a sniper than a sportsman. A bowman also has to be pretty damn good: if your first shot misses, you're not likely to get a second one. And because arrows aren't as cheap as bullets, bow hunters are less likely to shoot at any random motion in the woods.

In many ways bow hunting is safer than rifle hunting. Since the inherent range of a bow is much shorter than a rifle, and wind and foliage affect the flight of arrow more than a bullet, you have to be a lot closer to your target. That means you're more likely to be able to clearly see your target and less likely to shoot something other than a deer. The maximum range of an arrow is much shorter than a bullet, so your misses are also much less likely to hit innocent bystanders. It's nearly impossible to accidentally shoot yourself or a friend because you aren't tramping through the woods with a loaded weapon: you only nock the arrow when your target is in sight. Rifle hunting accidents are tragically common [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. The most likely injury bow hunters suffer is probably falling from a tree stand.

A bow doesn't destroy your hearing either.

A lot of hunters use both bows and rifles. Some people ask which is better. Rifle hunting is easier and faster. But the main difference is the relationship between the hunter and nature: bow hunting is more like fishing. It's quiet, placid, idyllic, contemplative: the forest is filled with natural sounds; bow hunters strike in silence.

Rifles are intrusive and loud. When my wife owned a horse she hated riding during rifle season because of the constant barrage of rifle fire. The noise unnerved her mount, making him skittish. And she was always afraid of some nitwit mistaking her gray gelding for a deer (which happens distressingly frequently), or getting hit by stray shot from half a mile away (which also happens: 1, 2).

Sure, rifle hunting requires skill, and I don't think it's wrong: we've killed so many wolves that a hunting season is necessary to keep the deer population in check. The other men in my family do it all the time. But bow hunting seems like another magnitude of difficulty greater, a much better test of your skills than pointing and pulling a trigger at a range of two or three hundred yards. I can see the attraction of bow hunting: killing the animal isn't the real goal, the act of the hunt is what matters.

It makes me wonder how much of the rugged woodsman talk that some gun advocates spout is bluster to cover the fact that they just like things that go boom.

The Entertainer Makes No Sense

It's been awhile since we heard from entertainer Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, I know there is still a group of frightened old men that listen to him every day but what I'm talking about is Rush saying something profoundly moronic with the purpose of getting noticed outside of the bubble. The media then proceeds to act "outraged" at what he said in order to bring in some viewers from inside the bubble. It's a win for him and a win for the "liberal" media.

His latest remark (The Pope is a Marxist) makes no sense to me, though. The Catholic Church can do whatever it wants with its money and mission. If they want to help feed the poor and heal the sick through the redistribution of their wealth, shouldn't they be left alone to do so? If the worry is that the Pope will somehow convince the leaders of the world to adopt Marxism as their government framework, that's just plain silly given how globalization is already out of the bag. There are free markets everywhere and prosperity is rising all over the world so, in some ways, the Pope is just wrong.

Perhaps Rush simply doesn't understand what Marxism is or, more likely, has no clue whatsoever that Jesus Christ espoused in the Bible. Material wealth mattered not to Christ and he encouraged people to help those less fortunate through the church. Being strong in spirit and believing in God where far more important to Jesus. That was the whole part about not being able to worship God and money at the same time. In fact, the Bible vilifies the wealthy and insists that the true path to God lies in serving the poor and healing the sick.

So what the fuck is Rush talking about?

Another Member of the 1% As Mythbuster

Henry Blodget is co-founder, CEO and Editor-In Chief of Business Insider, one of the fastest-growing business and tech news sites in the world. Business Insider's investors include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions. The site has 25+ million visitors a month. A former top-ranked Wall Street analyst, Henry is also the host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a digital video show viewed by several million people a month.

His recent piece on his site explains exactly why rich people don't create jobs, echoing Nick Hanauer who is mentioned in the article. Healthy economic systems nurture job growth. This photo shows just how unhealthy our economy is right now.

The bottom 90 percent (the blue color in the graph) are customers and if their wealth is stagnate, our economy doesn't work the way it should.

The company's customers buy the company's products. This, in turn, channels money to the company and allows the the company to hire employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If the company's customers and potential customers go broke, the demand for the company's products will collapse. And the company's jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneurs or investors do.

Now, again, entrepreneurs are an important part of the company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company's customers' ability and willingness to pay for the company's products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that "rich entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

Wealthy people like Mr. Blodget are realizing that they need to actively support change otherwise there won't an economy in which they can enjoy their riches.

Calling Iran's Bluff on Nuclear Power

A lot of pundits have been trumpeting nuclear power as the solution to our climate change woes, despite the ongoing nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. Politico has an article that explains the reason why it's hard: nuclear waste.

The United States has no long-term nuclear waste storage facility. There was supposed to be one at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that has been torpedoed by locals who don't want the nation's nuclear waste in their backyard. Who can blame them? No one else is stepping up, including states like Georgia, where the first two new nuclear power plants in over 30 years are under construction.

Nuclear plants have been storing the waste in pools in their reactors or in "dry casks" on-site, risking a Fukushima-type disaster in hundreds of locations across the United States. However, they're still paying a fee on nuclear power that was supposed to finance the storage facility, which was supposed to have opened 15 years ago. It didn't, and probably never will, so the utilities are suing the DOE.

The cost of having no storage facility is listed variously at $38 billion, $50 billion or $65 billion, depending on who you listen to and when you're talking about. The federal government has been spending a couple of billion dollars a year to settle claims with utilities.

The problem is that we will never have one single safe place to store nuclear waste. No state will ever allow it. Some geniuses have tried to create "temporary" radioactive waste storage sites on poverty-stricken Indian reservations to get around Congress and state legislatures, taking advantage of tribal sovereignty. But this failed when the Department of the Interior denied the company, Private Fuel Storage, a right of way to transport radioactive waste.

Talk of more American nukes is going on at the same time that conservatives in the United States and the prime minister of Israel are actively calling for military action against Iran to kill its nuclear program. Those same people are blasting the Obama administration's attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution.

Iran claims it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons; they say they simply need nuclear power to generate electricity. They currently use a lot of oil for power generation, but that really hurts their trade balance because they can't sell the oil they burn to produce electricity. But when Iran finally gets their nuclear power plants up and running, who's going to take the radioactive waste they produce? We certainly can't let Iran keep it. And we don't want it either. Where's it gonna go?

Iran is a sunny and mountainous country. That means it's a prime candidate for solar and wind power. Some countries want to encourage this: the EU doesn't impose sanctions on renewable energy equipment destined for Iran, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Iran also has good potential for geothermal power generation.

Conservatives in the United States have been actively sabotaging development of solar and wind power in the US, while touting the benefits of nuclear power. These same conservatives are ready to go to war with Iran to stop them from opening nuclear reactors like the ones we're building in Georgia. Because they know Iran's real intent is to build a nuclear bomb -- which I admit may be true.

So we should call Iran's nuclear bluff: let's start a Manhattan Project for renewable energy to help countries like Iran develop their solar, wind and geothermal potential, as well as storage systems for the power generated by intermittent renewable sources. Then they'll have no legitimate reason to refine uranium for nuclear power plants, which could also be used in nuclear weapons.

Coincidentally, we can use those same renewable energy systems in the United States, where sun and wind are plentiful in many parts of the country. If we lead by example we'll also have a much better chance of convincing Iran of our noble intentions.

As the developing world slowly rises out of poverty they're going to need electricity. Countries like China and India are already killing their own citizens with noxious clouds of smoke from coal-fired power plants (it's gotten so bad they're even banning barbecue grills). In the near future, more developing nations are going to start competing with us for oil and natural gas. If we set the nuclear precedent with Iran, they'll also want uranium, with all the attendant doom that engenders.

No matter how much we frack, there simply isn't enough oil and gas in the ground to satisfy the demand as the most populous countries in the world come to expect the energy-dense standard of living we enjoy in the United States.

Renewable energy isn't just good for our environment: it could ratchet down international tension and reduce the chance of war. Most third-world countries have abundant local renewable energy resources, including geothermal, OTEC, solar and wind power, and maybe even hydrogen production. By developing these energy sources, we will reduce global demand for oil and gas, reducing the possibility of war (and incidentally leaving us with more oil and gas).

The war in Iraq cost us a trillion dollars, and will continue to cost us billions in the future as we deal with the medical and psychological wounds inflicted on veterans. Invading Iran would cost just as much, if not more since it has twice the population of Iraq. Even if we delude ourselves into limiting the attack to an American-backed Israeli "tactical" strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, it's hard to believe Iran's surrogates would not initiate a campaign of terrorist attacks against Western targets across the world. Which we would eventually have to respond to with force on the level of Afghanistan or Iraq.

We should be working to give Iran what it needs, not what it wants. They need renewable energy, not nuclear power. We should be spending a few hundred billion dollars over the next few years on renewable energy research, which we could then sell to Iran and other third-world countries, ultimately recouping our investment.

Most wars are over resources -- land, minerals, water and energy. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor because the United States had embargoed Japan's oil supply, and they wanted to capture oil resources in the Dutch East Indies.

Investing in renewable energy sources and intermittent energy storage will save us trillions of dollars in military expenditures over the long haul. And that's not even considering the savings from preventing the inevitable wars that will result from widespread starvation, drought and flooding brought on by climate change. Which will be a whole lot less likely if start developing renewable energy resources before the oil runs out.

Anti Woman Myths

Here's a very well researched piece on how many anti-woman myths are still around today. A great example...

During the Dark Ages, and ever since then, women were considered property: They were defined by their relationships to men (flipping the ancient matrilineal code on its head). Their father, husband or even brother could make demands of her and she was bound to obey. Most marriages were arranged, even in the lower classes. A wife had no separate legal status apart from her being married to her husband. Women, with few exceptions, could not participate in public life, politics or the justice system (unless she was the accused). A woman was pretty much expected to stay at home, keep house and have kids. Especially the latter, as the interpretation of Genesis 3:16 (and other parts of that book) was that women were compelled to have as many children as they could, even at the cost of her or the children’s welfare. This is still the way some men feel.

Any time I hear dire predictions about 2014, I usually refer people to stuff like this. It's very hard for the nutballs to hide on women's issues.

Greek V Hebrew

I'm not sure how this article ended up in my "To Post" file but it is an interesting exposition on the Greek versus the Hebrew view of man rooted in justification by faith alone. I don't agree with everything contained in the piece but it's a worth a full and studied read as he offers excellent historical and spiritual insight to the classical world collision with the dawn of Christianity. The conclusion?

The Greek view is that "God" can be known only by the flight of the soul from the world and history; the Hebrew view is that God can be known because he invades history to meet men in historical experience.

Very interesting.

My favorite line is this...

The unifying element in New Testament theology is the fact of the divine visitation of men in the person and mission of Jesus Christ; diversity exists in the progressive unfolding of the meaning of this divine visitation and in the various ways the one revelatory, redeeming event is capable of being interpreted.

Various ways indeed:)

Then What?

Brian Beutler reveals a very interesting conundrum for right wing extremists in his latest piece over at Salon.com. When Healthcare.gov actually starts working, GOP will have to choose between politics or their constituents' health. With the bugs being ironed out at healthcare.gov, Beutler points out what the future holds.

A working site that can service nearly a million people a day destroys that excuse. Some conservative groups have been craven and reckless enough to actively discourage people from enrolling in Affordable Care Act coverage. Elected Republicans have generally used their influence more subtly, by drawing attention to the hassles and supposed dangers of using Healthcare.gov. Manipulation vs. direct appeal. They’ve also maligned an administrative solution President Obama devised that will allow carriers in some states to reissue canceled policies.

But the real fix for 70 percent (or so) of people whose policies have been canceled is to get new, subsidized coverage through exchanges, or to enroll in Medicaid. Once Healthcare.gov is working at high capacity, they’ll owe people with canceled coverage more than just the play-acting they’ve offered for the past month. Democrats will be helping these people find such coverage. Will Republicans?

No, they won't. And that's why I say we should take Reince Preibus's advice: Stamp the ACA right to our foreheads and run proudly on it in 2014. That's exactly what I would do if I was up for reelection next year.

More Regulation, Less Gun Deaths

Boston Children's Hospital and JAMA Internal Medicine recently conducted a study that shows that there is an association between more regulations and less gun deaths in states in terms of mortality rate per 100,000 people. Here is their map with fatalities over a four year period.

Take a look at the states that have the weakest legislative strength and then compare to the mortality rates. This is for overall as well as for suicides and homicides individually. See a pattern? Policymic.com offers an excellent summary of the study if you don't want to wade through all the data from the link above.

Of course, further studies are needed to clarify the cause and effect relationship between these two variables but there is a connection which is not what the Gun Cult would have us believe.

Minnesota Wins!

If you want a good barometer on how what sort of government policies work the best, compare the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. That's what this recent piece in the New York Times did and the results speak for themselves. In 2010, voters in each state chose a specific path to improve their economic conditions. Minnesotans chose Democrats to run their state and Wisconsin chose Republicans. Minnesota's unemployment rate was at 6.7 percent and Wisconsin's was at 7.1 percent.

As the article notes, a month after Mr. Walker’s inauguration in January 2011, he catapulted himself to the front ranks of national conservative leaders with attacks on the collective bargaining rights of Civil Service unions and sharp reductions in taxes and spending. Once Mr. Dayton teamed up with a Democratic Legislature in 2012, Minnesota adopted some of the most progressive policies in the country.Minnesota raised taxes by $2.1 billion, the largest increase in recent state history. Democrats introduced the fourth highest income tax bracket in the country and targeted the top 1 percent of earners to pay 62 percent of the new taxes, according to the Department of Revenue.

The result?

Today, Minnesota is essentially at full employment at 4.8 percent while Wisconsin's unemployment rate stands at 6.5 percent. Wisconsin lags behind Minnesota in job creation and economic growth. Wisconsin ranks 34th for job growth. According to Forbes’s annual list of best states for business, Wisconsin continues to rank in the bottom half. Along with California, Minnesota is the fifth fastest growing state economy, with private-sector job growth exceeding pre-recession levels. Forbes rates Minnesota as the eighth best state for business.

So, why is it working in Minnesota?

Higher taxes and economic growth in Minnesota have attracted a surprisingly broad coalition. Businesses complain about taxes, but many cheered Mr. Dayton’s investments in the Mayo Clinic, the new Vikings stadium, the Mall of America and 3M headquarters. The lion’s share of Minnesota’s new tax revenue was sunk into human capital. While the state’s Constitution required that half of the new revenue balance the budget in 2013, Mr. Dayton invested 71 percent of the remaining funds in K-12 schools and higher education as well as a pair of firsts: all-day kindergarten and wider access to early childhood education. Minnesota was one of the few states that raised education spending under the cloud of the Great Recession.

Why is not working in Wisconsin?

Mr. Walker’s strategy limited Wisconsin’s ability to invest in infrastructure that would have catalyzed private-sector expansion, and he cut state funding of K-12 schools by more than 15 percent. Per student, this was the seventh sharpest decline in the country.

I'm pretty optimistic about the state in which I grew up, however. The numbers speak for themselves and, if the Democrats put up a good candidate, Walker will be gone and left to pursue his dreams of 2016.

Perfect After Yesterday

Thankful For Social Media

What am I thankful for today? Social media. Why?

Remember back about 20 years ago when cigarettes were generally accepted? Many of my friends smoked and, while people knew it was bad for them, they still did it without much of a social stigma.

But now there is a pretty big stigma and people that smoke are generally thought of as white trash and really pretty dumb. Sure, there were laws passed on cigarettes and higher taxes but the pushing out of normality regarding cigarettes was generally a cultural shift. Everyone goes outside, even in their own homes, to smoke. People that smoked were generally older and some of them died. Younger people either quite or didn't pick up the habit. In short, we grew out of it. And that's exactly what's going to happen in the next twenty years with guns.

In fact, with social media like Facebook and Twitter, it's going to happen much sooner. We are going to grow out of Gun Cult thinking and into a more rational approach to the (very much limited) 2nd amendment. The recent revelations about Adam Lanza show that we don't have a choice. The annual culling of our citizens is going to stop and it will be because of the new media.

Thanks, new media!

Good Words

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”. (Pope Francis, EVANGELII GAUDIUM, November 2013)

Perfect for Thanksgiving Day. Not so perfect if you are conservative. Cue the ad hom and other assorted logical fallacies.

So That's What Happened To James O'Keefe

I haven't heard much lately from James O'Keefe these days except the begging for money to continue his "truth seeking" and here's why. Boy, conservatives really pick some winners with which to hitch their wagons! The rape barn story has been out for awhile but this is the first I've heard of it. Seems like a similar MO to the CNN dildo boat story.

I'm looking forward to his next big expose!

That Old Time Corporate Religion

The United States Supreme Court has decided to hear two cases about corporations who don't want to pay for their employees' birth control:

The lead plaintiff before the court is Hobby Lobby, a chain of more than 500 arts and crafts stores with more than 13,000 employees. The owners are conservative Christians who object to some forms of birth control and contend that the mandate thus abridges their religious rights in violation of both the Constitution and federal law.

Their argument is basically that corporations are people and have religious rights. The entire argument is specious: can the corporation go to church? Take communion? Be baptized? Get married? Have souls? Go to heaven?

The idea that a corporation is a person is sheer nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions that exist only on paper. People are born, not incorporated in Delaware. If you're a believer, you believe that God created you. Corporations are completely secular creations of government, granted their existence by an act of Congress. Corporations aren't even in the Constitution. They certainly aren't in the Bible.

Unlike people, corporations can be bought and sold, which means that Hobby Lobby's "deeply held religious beliefs" could go completely out the window if the owners decided to sell the business or died in a car accident. The sheer ridiculousness of corporate religion becomes apparent when you consider publicly held corporations like Exxon or GM.

The purpose of corporate entities is to allow individuals to evade personal legal and financial responsibility for the actions of the corporation, on the theory that they can take financial risks that will benefit the economy at large while protecting their families' future. For example, corporations can declare bankruptcy and that fact will not appear on the personal credit reports of the corporate officers who made the decisions that caused the bankruptcy.

The provisions of the ACA apply to the corporation, not to the owners of Hobby Lobby. Those provisions may violate the religious beliefs of the owners, but they are not the corporation: it is an entity independent of them, which they can sell and divest themselves of any responsibility. If Hobby Lobby is claiming  that the corporation is just an extension of themselves, then their business is not a corporation, but rather a partnership. In other words, they have willfully made incorrect corporate filings.

So, if the owners of Hobby Lobby want the legal and financial shield against personal liability that incorporation provides, they need to accept all the secular responsibilities that running a legal entity created by government entails. Otherwise, they should acknowledge that they're just a partnership and accept full personal responsibility for all legal and financial liabilities of the company.

Corporations should not even have the legal standing to make the argument about the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court should rule that if Hobby Lobby doesn't want to pay for birth control coverage, it should reorganize as a partnership and file another lawsuit.

Stopping there would just kick the can down the road, though. The Supreme Court should also decide that companies -- partnerships or corporations -- can't pick and choose what laws they obey based on the prejudices of their owners. Today, Hobby Lobby doesn't want to pay for birth control coverage. Tomorrow, a Jew or Hindu won't want to cover drugs that contain stearic acid (made from pig or cow fat), or Jehovah's Witness won't want to cover blood transfusions, or a Christian Scientist won't want to cover any medical care.

If Hobby Lobby prevails in the Supreme Court, what's next? Will they come back and argue that they have the right to fire employees who use birth control, because they don't want their money (the wages they pay employees) to be used to violate their religious beliefs? Will they then claim that they can only hire Christians, because they don't want their money to pay for synagogues and mosques?

We already settled these questions of employment law decades ago. The argument over the birth control mandate is just another variation on the same theme of hiring blacks and Jews, with the ultimate goal of overturning those laws and going back to the bad old days when employers could force employees to do anything they wanted.

The Zimmerman Arsenal

Seminole County deputies have found quite the gun collection in George Zimmerman's home: five guns and more than 100 rounds of ammunition. The guns included the high-capacity, high-tech 12-gauge shotgun that he used to threaten his girlfriend, according to her statement. The also found a semi-automatic assault rifle and three handguns.

I wonder what he was preparing for?

Voices In My Head