Sleepless in Midland

Hats off to James Gerety, Domino's Pizza franchisee who supplied Airsho volunteers with a free pizza lunch

Imagine this. You're a CAF Airsho 2015 volunteer. You're standing in a maddening drizzle on a Saturday. Or maybe you're standing in the hot sun on a Sunday. But you're working. You're tired. You're ticked off at the CAF for holding the air show in the wrong season. You're feeling slighted because the CAF bosses decided to abandon Midland, Texas, for life in the big city, and taking the coffee machine with them to boot. You're thinking about all the air show accidents in the news and wondering why you signed that annoying release. You're wondering why the Hell you are doing all this without pay. Your blood sugar is bouncing off zero, and you're starving.

Then along comes a man to save the day. He's a man with a mission to feed the hungry volunteers. Jim Gerety is a Midland, Texas, Domino's Pizza franchise owner. And he took it on himself to make sure every volunteer at Airsho 2015 got some pizza at Gerety's own expense.

Now there's an unsung hero for the pages of the morning paper.

BTW, how do I know all this? Because I was a volunteer who took advantage of Mr. Gerety's generosity.

And it was delicious! Who says there's no free lunch? Thanks, man!

Where is Mike Conaway on the anchor baby issue these days?

Early on in Texas District 11's Representative Mike Conaway's political career one of his pet issues, as told to audiences at speaking engagements, was the problem of anchor babies. And in fact, in 2009 he co-sponsored, H.R.1868, The Birthright Citizenship Act, which sought to clarify the 14th amendment. But the bill died.

The issue has risen from the ashes, thanks to Donald Trump and others. Steve King currently has a bill in the works, The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2015. Govtrack.us gives that one about as much chance as the previous one.

Nevertheless, Representative Conaway's website has gone silent on the birthright issue. It must be tough for an establishment Republican to watch Donald Trump steal his issue.

Celebrating the anniversary -- Democrats certainly didn't let the crisis of Katrina go to waste

One doesn't have to look far in the media these day to see a celebration of the ten year anniversary of the hurricane Katrina. Is it going to far to say that hurricane was some sort of Democrat party high water mark?

Those of us with Democrat friends had to endure countless taunts about incompetence coupled with meaness directed at anyone who tried to defend the Bush administration. It should have been obvious to anyone that the incompetence was on the state and local level. The blame rests on Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin. But that point got lost in the shuffle of horror stories from New Orleans and the rage that developed among cable news watchers.

So it's nice to see this article from former FEMA director Michael Brown: Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina in which he laid out the facts about the events leading up to the hurricane landfall, how Blanco and Nagin declined to do the things necessary to head off a disaster, and how Brown got the blame. There's much more there, so read the whole thing if you don't have too much emotion invested in the media narrative.

Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed. But it certainly didn't hurt Democrats to have a media willing to help them score a big win.

Did killer Vester Lee Flanagan work in Midland?

This is a shocker. Dailycaller.com says this:

His LinkedIn profile also shows entries for jobs at KMID in Midland/Odessa, Texas ...

Link: Here’s What We Know About Vester Lee Flanagan.

From KMID: "Local Big 2 has confirmed with two former employees that Vester Lee Flanagan, also known as Bryce Williams, was previously employed at KMID for a short time in 1995."

Anchor Baby born in U.S. every 93 seconds

While politicians flounder over whether the phrase "anchor baby" is politically correct enough for the electorate, it might be worthwhile to note this observation at Breitbart.com, Anchor Baby Delivered Every 93 Seconds.

Democrats are quick to contend that the anchor baby phenomenon doesn't really exist. So if true, that one every minute and a half is an astonishing claim.

So let's look at the source of the number. Breitbart.com cites a Pew research article which cites research which contends that 340,000 babies were born to illegal immigrants in 2008. If we divide that number into the number of seconds in a year, 31,536,000, we do indeed get 92.75 seconds per baby.

But that was way back in 2008, before Obama took over border control. Common sense and memory of the border surge headlines should convince us that the illegal immigrant birth rate is much higher now than it was then.

Meanwhile, in spite of reporters' gotcha lines of inquiry, "anchor baby" still resides off the list of banned words, at least for now.

Government goes the wrong way on e-cigarettes

Last week we talked about how the British Royal Society for Public Health is calling for greater use of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. But the U.S. government seems to be taking a different tact. The goal they seek is to extinguish tobacco use for good. And e-cigarettes do not play a role.

Dailycaller.com calls our attention to the way the U.S. National Institutes of Health uses grants to influence the outcome of the research they fund, and in particular, research into tobacco use. See Government Grant Funding Corrupts Tobacco Research, Holds Back Scientific Inquiry. The point of the article is that the government wants a particular outcome of the research projects it funds, and with so much money at stake, the universities seeking the grants are too willing to comply.

The author, Jesse Hathaway, says this:

Every year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doles out $623 million to more than 1,000 university researchers interested in advancing its stated goal of “a world free of tobacco use.” In one such solicitation for researchers willing to fit facts to dogma, NIH set aside $10 million for eight to 10 studies, provided those studies proved useful in helping the government “develop effective ways to limit the spread and promote cessation of smokeless tobacco use.”

Studies show smokeless tobacco is much less harmful than smoking, and hence it should be part of any harm-reduction strategy governments would pursue. That is the very opposite of what the NIH is doing.

Emphasis added.

It's a shame that the U.S. government has to be such a corrupting influence on science. The Brits got this one right.

Here's what's wrong with farm subsidies

Revenue insurance with the government paying most of the premium. Now that's a sweet deal. Wouldn't oil producers like to have insurance that would replace lost revenue due to the plunge in the price of oil? That's not likely to happen for the oil industry, but for farmers it's easy. The government provides revenue insurance for farmers based on the highest price reached during the season.

Farm subsidies are basically wealth transfers. And many politicians garner favor among special interests with promises of more such transfers.

I've written about farm subsidies before, and since those programs are so ingrained in our government it's easy to get complacent about them. So it's nice to see someone as influential as Helen Fessenden, staff writer for Econ Focus, the economics magazine of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, address them in The Crop Insurance Boom. Here are some excerpts:

Critics of crop insurance subsidies, however, point to the fact that the program is still a transfer from taxpayers to farmers and private insurance companies, and as constructed, it is more income support than classic insurance. The government covers about 60 percent of the cost of farmers' insurance premiums as well as 100 percent of administrative and operating costs for insurers, which means farmers can sign up for policies that provide payouts far more generous than reflected by their out-of-pocket cost. ...

"The paradox is that crop insurance may be intended as risk management for farmers, but it actually encourages more risk-taking," said Vincent Smith, agricultural economist at Montana State University. "It's a transfer of risk away from the insurance firms and the farmers." ...

One of the program's most controversial aspects is the policy design. For most crops, farmers have an array of plans to choose from, but the most dominant is an option called revenue protection. Under one of the most popular revenue-protection plans, a farmer can purchase a policy to insure yield losses or revenue losses on certain crops, but he bases that coverage on the highest price of the season. If a low yield drives up the price of a crop from spring to harvest, the farmer is indemnified for lower yields at the higher harvest-time price; if the price falls over the course of the season due to overproduction, the farmer may use the higher springtime baseline when calculating compensation. Either way, this option maximizes the payout from the insurer. Revenue protection contrasts with yield protection, in which a farmer is protected against harvest-time losses in yield, say, in the case of drought; those payouts are pegged to the price projected at springtime. In 2014, about 75 percent of policies were revenue protection, compared with only 13 percent that were yield protection.

By the way, the government pays for 60% of the insurance premium -- a nice freebie for those on the receiving end. The oil industry has been targeted by Democrats for as long as most of us have been around. And not long ago there was the cry that oil industry subsidies should be cut. Well, there aren't any oil industry subsidies in spite of the losses and layoffs following the price crash. If anyone is serious about cutting subsidies they need to go for the farm bill.

There is nothing more heartwarming than seeing an immigrant embrace the American dream -- too bad they are discouraged from doing so

A few years ago I read a touching account of a gentleman in New York who took his family to see the Statue of Liberty. And he took along a co-worker who happened to be a recent immigrant. When they got to the island, the immigrant knelt down and kissed the ground then explained how grateful he was to be in this great country and how much he dreamed of being an American. The gentleman's children were stunned.

That story came to mind today after reading America the Place vs America the Idea by Dan Joppich. He describes the plight of the immigrants who risk their lives in leaky boats to migrate to Greece. They are leaving one broken country for another. Why?

Mr. Joppich asks some provocative questions:

Do these mostly unskilled, uneducated Muslims go to Greece or Europe hoping to someday become Greeks or Europeans? Do they wish to embrace Western culture and raise their children in a Western society? Or are they just looking for handouts like the ones that Greece already provides to over 70% of its population?

Do Central Americans, Mexicans, and Muslims come to America because they want to become Americans? Do they wish to embrace American culture and raise their children in an American society better than the one they left, or do they come here hoping to create Somalia in America? Do they raise the Mexican flag on American soil and force schools in their adoptive communities to cover symbols of America because they might be offensive to some of them? Do the predominantly unskilled and uneducated immigrants bring unemployment and the vices that accompany it like drugs, violence, crime, homelessness, dependency, etc? ...

Are the immigrants to America crossing the southern border illegally, doing so because they want to be Americans, or are they just looking for free stuff promised by Obama for themselves and their children? Do the Muslims in Minnesota long to be Americans and live the American dream, or do they dream of returning to the Middle East and fighting the western Satan when they realize they can’t make America more like the Middle East?

Unfortunately, too many Americans try to discourage assimilation. So we hear accusations of racism when an American complains of hearing only Spanish in a Wal-Mart. It's not racism. It's nostalgia for the days when immigrants embraced American ideals instead of wanting to recreate the society, culture, and system of government they left behind.

Oh, by the way. Everyone knows that in America you may be able to get a free Obamaphone. But did you know that if you live in Mexico the government will give you a free TV set?

Biden met with Liz Warren -- Hmm, I wonder what they talked about

As a political prognosticator, I'm not very good. I was sure that Elizabeth Warren would not only run for president but get the Democrat nomination hands down. So far, that's looking like a bad bet.

In any event, it was interesting to read that Joe Biden met with Warren the other day, no doubt to talk about Joe's possible entry into the contest. There was news a few months ago about Hillary Clinton meeting with Warren, too. So maybe Warren is the go-to-gal for endorsements. Or maybe they just wanted to make sure Warren isn't going to jump in at the last minute and sweep the floor with all the other contenders.

Anyway, the Democrat's show certainly isn't as entertaining as the Republican contest. So we have to find highlights where we can.

Conservatives and progressives respond differently to disgusting images

This article from last year sprang to mind while thinking about progressives' indifference to the videos about Planned Parenthood's atrocities, Liberal or conservative? Brain responses to disgusting images help reveal political leanings. From the article:

In a brain scanner, participants were shown disgusting images, such as dirty toilets or mutilated carcasses, mixed with neutral and pleasant images, such as landscapes and babies.

Afterward, the subjects took a standard political ideology inventory, answering questions about how often they discuss politics and whether they agreed or disagreed with hot-button topics such as school prayer and gay marriage.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute — in collaboration with researchers from University College London, Rice University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Yale University — recorded brain activity of the subjects responding to the images.

Responses to disgusting images could predict, with 95 percent to 98 percent accuracy, how a person would answer questions on the political survey. ...

Conservatives tend to have more magnified responses to disgusting images, but scientists don’t know exactly why, Montague said.

Read the rest of the article for some theories about why that is.

This helps to understand why progressives seemed so unconcerned about the atrocities committed by Kermit Gosnell and how disinterested they are now in the revelations exposed by the videos of the Planned Parenthood personnel. They conjure up a mental image, then yawn.

In any event, it's nice to see a psychology study that doesn't simply try to reinforce the left's desire to brand those who disagree with them as having a mental disorder.

Does anyone really believe that the current Supreme Court would go along with the anti-anchor baby interpretation of the 14th amendment?

Representative Steve King, R-Iowa, makes a rational interpretation of the *14th amendment and has proposed legislation to establish policy based on that interpretation. See Ending Birthright Citizenship Does Not Require A Constitutional Amendment. He makes four basic points:

The keys to understanding Birthright Citizenship:

The plain meaning of the 14th Amendment means that one must BOTH be born in United States AND be subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Since there are two explicit requirements, they both cannot be met by simply being born on U.S. soil.

The history of the drafting of the 14th Amendment makes clear that the language “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant a citizen could not owe allegiance to any other foreign power. This excludes illegal immigrants who are in defiance of U.S. jurisdiction and are citizens of a foreign power.

The Supreme Court has never held that the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States are automatically citizens.

Because the Supreme Court has not interpreted the Constitution to mandate automatic birthright citizenship, the Congress can pass a law to correct the current misguided and incorrect policy of automatically granting citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

Ann Coulter also makes a strong case for the theory. That link goes to a 2010 article, and she hasn't backed down.

But we all know that if anyone attempts to implement that position, or if Steve King's legislation goes into law, it will end up at the Supreme Court. Does anyone really believe that the five of the current Supreme Court justices would go along with that? It isn't conceivable.

*All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Update: Click links for arguments for and against the birthright citizenship interpretation. Via Cato.org.

Mr. President and Congress, Please replace Obamacare with Scott Walker's plan

Scott Walker laid out his health care insurance plan that would replace Obamacare should congress and a president decide to repeal Obamacare. It appears to be a good, easy to understand, plan. Jonathan Gruber, eat your heart out.

There was that thing, that one thing. It was the impetus for the radical transformation of the health care system as it existed. It was the unavailability of medical insurance for people with preexisting conditions. The state of Texas and other states had health insurance pools for those people. But that option went away once Obamacare came into being. The problem would have been a simple one to fix. Instead we got an unpopular law crammed down our throats by a power hungry administration bent on making as many people as possible dependent on government.

Walker's plan, described at nationalreview.com, would retain employer based coverage. But for those without employer insurance it would provide tax credits to buy insurance on the open market.

What about that one thing, preexisting conditions? Walker says this:

No individual should fear being denied coverage, or face huge premium spikes when they get sick and then try to change jobs or insurance plans. My plan would address these concerns. It would make additional reforms to insurance coverage laws to ensure individuals with pre-existing conditions would be protected, not only when moving from employer-based plans to the individual market, but also when switching between plans. This would make insurance coverage more portable, permitting individuals to own their coverage, regardless of how or where they purchase it. Provided individuals maintain continuous, creditable coverage, no one would see their premiums jump because of a health issue or be shut out of access to affordable health insurance because of a new diagnosis or a pre-existing medical condition. Newborns, as well as young adults leaving their parents’ insurance plans and buying their own, would have these same protections.

So simple. If only Democrats had focused on solving the problem instead of trying to fundamentally transform America.

Black jobs matter -- Donald Trump's immigration plan, if implemented, might help African American entry level job seekers

Donald Trump has been heaped with criticism from the left and right. And one of the complaints was that his proposals were heavy on platitudes and light on substance. So it's educational to look at his recently released Immigration Plan.

One noteworthy aspect addresses a subject that doesn't get much attention -- the high unemployment rate among African American youths. Some of that might be cultural -- we've all heard the claims that African Americans discourage each other from being studious in school because they would be acting white. Maybe that's urban legend. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate among young black youths is high.

Traditionally, entry level and manual labor jobs were the first career stepping stones for many black Americans. But that changed, and most likely the cause is the 1.7 million immigrant surge since 2014 bringing the total number of illegal immigrants to 42.1 million. "The 42.1 million tabulated by Census in the second quarter represent over 13 percent of the U.S. population, the biggest percentage in 105 years."

Here's Donald Trump:

The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans – including immigrants themselves and their children – to earn a middle class wage. Nearly half of all immigrants and their US-born children currently live in or near poverty, including more than 60 percent of Hispanic immigrants. Every year, we voluntarily admit another 2 million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers in order to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities’ rise into the middle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.

Economists claim that immigration is good for an economy because it adds more consumers into the system. But if the immigrants are unskilled workers and they put someone out of work, then the net result is it adds more government dependents.

 

News media laments fact that doctors aren't on board with socialized medicine

President Obama and his accomplices in the House and Senate performed a major transformation of the nation's health care with the unpopular Obamacare law.

There's still hope that a newly elected president can get it repealed. Yes, that means they'll have to replace that tiny portion that attempted to correct some of the problems with the old system. But it would have to be an improvement.

What brings this to mind today is an infuriating opinion piece on the front page of the print edition of the Midland Reporter-Telegram titled "Doctors must bend a little to help fix a broken health care system."

So it's up to doctors to fix a system broken by the government. Doctors probably hate socialism as much as the rest of us. The government dictates they they must work in an environment where prices are fixed at a rate that is too low. But here's what must really hurt. They get condemned for complaining about it and are told that the problem is theirs to fix.

BTW, here's a suggestion to the morning paper. If it's the people you want to help, you could conduct a survey of local practitioners. With more and more people dumped into Medicaid by Obamacare, the morning paper might provide a service by conducting a survey among local doctors and tell its readers which ones, if any, will accept new Medicaid patients.

Related: Medicaid: A Fifty-Year-Old Flimflam.

Will the Castro brothers detain their dissidents at Gitmo once it's turned over to Cuba?

As far back as 2009 Obama was working on plans to shut down the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. In the meantime, Obama has been busy releasing or relocating those individuals detained by the Bush administration as threats against the nation's security. Whether they are still threats, we don't really know. Most of us aren't willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But what do we know? We weren't mentored by Frank Marshall Davis and preached to by Jeremiah Wright.

As for the base at Guantanamo, if Obama has his way, it may end up in the hands of the Cuban government.

The media made a big deal about Cuba's recent release of political prisoners. But they are probably still under Cuban surveillance. And we could only speculate whether they or other dissidents will eventually end up back behind bars.

But what bars? That neat facility at Guantanamo may not have outlived its usefulness after all. It will certainly be ironic for most of us if the Castro brothers used it to house their dissidents and political prisoners. I shudder to think what might take place in the old water-boarding room. But Obamafiles can rest easy knowing that news of such may never leak out.

State of South Dakota makes giant stride toward solving drunk driving problem with 24/7 Sobriety program

Swift and certain -- that's a criminal justice theory about punishment as a way of deterring future crime. It's a component of a successful 10 year old program in South Dakota which aims to curtail drunk driving.

Dr. Keith Humphreys tells us about it in A Simple Fix for Drunken Driving. And it is simple. Instead of trying to stop a drunk from driving, which is what most programs attempt to do, stop him/her from drinking.

They accomplish this with twice a day breathalyzer tests. Stay sober - confirmed with tests -- or spend a night or two in jail. A swift and certain punishment which most of the offenders seek to avoid.

However, the program hasn't caught on in other jurisdictions as quickly as one might assume. Dr. Humphreys suggests that one of the reasons why is because there is resistance from addiction professionals, which, by the way, aren't necessary for such programs to work.

British health service says e-cigarettes are good smoking substitute

Here's another win for e-cigarettes. The Royal Society for Public Health is calling for greater use of e-cigarettes by smoking cessation programs. The study is titled Stopping smoking by using other sources of nicotine. And it says that nicotine by itself isn't that harmful. It's smoking that's so deadly.

Hence, the use of e-cigarettes is a good substitute and can help a smoker kick the smoking habit.

Note: I found this item at Daily Caller in an article titled Big Win For E-Cigarettes: Study Says Nicotine No More Dangerous Than Coffee by Guy Bentley. Is that a misleading headline? The study itself says absolutely nothing about coffee, so you be the judge.

How long before those wireless thermostats get hacked?

I was in a house the other day that had a newly installed wireless thermostat controlling the indoor temperature. It was a hot day, but it was very cool inside the home. And the wireless feature allowed the thermostat to be installed at a location that didn't already have wires running up and down the wall.

What could go wrong? Well, that one was a standard wireless unit without a wi-fi connection. So it probably could not be easily manipulated by an unauthorized operator. But some of the new wireless thermostats do have true wireless capabilities with a wi-fi feature. Now there's trouble waiting to happen.

Hardly a week goes by without a headline about some connected thing getting hacked. The other day it was about some hackers manipulating a jeep. More recently we learned that Mideastern hackers have learned how to take control of servers at retail gasoline station networks.

Contemplating the problems that could accompany the internet of things brings to mind the old Twilight Zone episode about a homeowner facing a violent rebellion by all of the electronic gadgets in the house.

So it's somewhat satisfying to see this item at Naked Security: The NSA is funding a 'safer' Internet of Things. Here's an excerpt:

The architecture, which UAH will begin to work on in a few days, is called Dielectric.

Dr. David Coe, the principal investigator and an electrical and computer engineering researcher, said that the aim is to incorporate cybersecurity into the product design phase:

While finding flaws and repairing them will continue to be an important focus in cybersecurity research, this proposal focuses on an architectural approach to building security into the system at the outset.

The research will tie together multiple disciplines at the university: faculty members will be coming from the electrical and computing department and the computer science department, bringing expertise in cybersecurity, embedded systems, hardware-software co-design, secure processing, and automotive systems.

Lisa Vaas, the Naked Security author, is a little bit skeptical that NSA would behave. But given that doubt, she agrees that it's good that someone is looking to do something about this potential for mayhem.

Meanwhile, back to those thermostats. If there's a war with one of the international bad boys, our enemies will probably have our own missiles redirected toward out own cities, so in the whole scheme of things a malfunctioning thermostat doesn't seem fatal.

Good news for early risers -- meteor shower maximum tomorrow morning (8-13-2015)

If you're sleepless in the wee hours of Thursday, August 13, 2015, here's something to watch instead of that dreary, motionless, blank of a ceiling. Click Kick Back, Look Up, We’re In For a GREAT Perseid Meteor Shower for details. Excerpt:

Every year in mid-August, Earth plows headlong into the debris left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Slamming into our atmosphere at 130,000 mph, the crumbles flash to light as the Perseid meteor shower. One of the world’s most beloved cosmic spectacles, this year’s show promises to be a real crowd pleaser.

Not only will the Moon be absent, but the shower maximum happens around 3 a.m. CDT (8 UT) August 13 — early morning hours across North America when the Perseid radiant is highest. How many meteors will you see? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-100 meteors per hour. As always, the darker and less light polluted your observing site, the more zips and zaps you’ll see.

That may be only one or two a minute on average. But some can be quite spectacular. Hey, what are ya gonna do otherwise, sleep?

Google restructures business, divides interests, remains dangerous

Google announced yesterday that it assigned various of its business interests to specific companies under the Google umbrella and calling it Alphabet. While that may be good for their business, the traditional Google service -- the search engine -- is still the information parasite it has been.

Among other things, the information Google collects from users is used to facilitate confirmation bias, or as Emma Reynolds calls it, "filter bubble.” See How Google distorts your view of the world. Excerpt:

MANY charges have been levelled at Google. It steals your information, violates copyright, allows access to dangerous and illegal material and prioritises its own sites while crushing any competition.

But perhaps the most troubling accusation about the search giant is that it distorts our view of the world, giving us a fatally flawed idea of what is going on around us.

This problem is known as the “filter bubble”: as Google learns from your searches and makes its results increasingly personalised and tailored to you, you stop seeing anything else.

On the one hand, that helps you to get exactly the results you are looking for, but on the downside, you stop encountering the ways other people see and interact with the world.

It gets worse.

Another scary thought is that Google, a multibillion-dollar corporation after all, is free to manipulate results based on its own rating of different websites.

Much worse. See Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency. In short:

In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”

That word "accidentally" should probably be replaced with "intentionally."

Sigh. I miss the good old days when we feared that Microsoft was gonna eat the world.

Blue Lives Matter

All lives matter, no matter how un-PC it is to say, as witnessed by Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders.

Which brings us to Blue Lives Matter, an organization started last year following the ambushing of two NYC police officers in what appeared to be retaliation for one or more of the incidents between police and African Americans that dominated the news at the time. The organization seems to be doing quite well.

And yesterday the Staten Island Yankees, a New York Yankees affiliate, hosted a Blue Lives Matter event at a game with the Brooklyn Cyclones. Good for them. But of course they came in for a predictable round of criticism.

Some of the protesters probably feel they have a legitimate gripe. But after revelations about the protesters-for-hire at the Ferguson riots, one has to wonder to what extent the protesters are going to serve as a political tool in the upcoming presidential campaigns.

As for police, the ones on the street have a dangerous job, and we need to appreciate that. Most of us probably have a love/hate relationship with the police. We love to know they are there if we need them. Unfortunately, they serve at the behest of politicians.  And sometimes it seems as if the laws they're enforcing are intended to raise municipal revenue rather than make us safer.

That bias free language guide the University of New Hampshire tried to foist on us was right about one of those words

Most of us ridiculed the bias free language guide the University of New Hampshire's advocacy-groups produced and which was posted on the UNH website. It has since been removed, and a casual search didn't pull it up.

However, there have been articles about it. See Everything Is Problematic, University Guide Explains and University of NH: Don't Use Words Like 'Rich,' 'American', for example.

While I like to poke fun at the politically correct as much as the next blogger, there's one word I can agree with them about. It's "American." They would replace it with U.S. citizen or resident of the U.S. Now that makes sense.

America has two continents -- North America and South America. Central America gets counted as North America. There are 24 countries in North America -- including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

So to call someone an "American" really doesn't tell us much.

Does that make me unAmerican?.

Carly Fiorina knocks it out of the ball park, again

I'm probably not the only conservative who was thrilled to hear that Carly Fiorina got such a tremendous response to her delivery at the second tier Republican Primary debate on Thursday. She's a talent worth watching.

She did it again the very next day. It was the Redstate Gathering 2015 at which she spoke for ten or so minutes then answered questions. Watch and listen at this Youtube link.

Democrats seem to have a problem with smart, strong, women who aren't Democrats. And the media are so consumed with Donald Trump that they haven't yet started demonizing her. Once they do, I think Fiorina will handle it quite admirably.

How a politician looks in newspaper photos influences poll numbers

I was just rereading an article from about a year ago titled Is a Picture Worth 1,000 Polls? In it Virginia Postrel tells us that positive images of politicians precede good poll numbers.

Researchers showed volunteers numerous photos of the same person and had them pick the images that conveyed competence. Here's an excerpt:

Using this information, the researchers created a mathematical model mapping the relationship between the photos' syntactical attributes and their inferred intents. "One can say, for example," they write, "perception of competence arises from combination of facial displays (smile), gestures (hand wave, hand shake), and scene context (large-crowd)." With that information, they could give the computer a new photo of a politician to analyze, looking only at its syntactical attributes, and rank for its likely effect.

That's how they found the relation between news photos and poll results. They crawled news articles that mentioned Obama between January 2008 through September 2013 in the four sources -- two domestic and two British -- and collected about 50,000 photos of him. They then analyzed the photos for their syntactical attributes and the implied "favorable" effect and compared the patterns against aggregate poll results.

So a photo in the New York Times or Washington Post of a politician in the right pose can bump up their poll numbers. I'm sure we all remember the photos of Obama from the campaign seasons which showed him in the most favorable light. The one with the halo around his head probably really left an impression on the low information voter.

Fast forward to today, and let's see what images they're showing these days.

These are from the Washington Post. The one on the left shows a rather dejected looking Obama after a speech about the Iran deal. The one on the right shows a poster of Obama with a "$5.00 off any sweatshirt" sticker on it. Neither photo is particularly flattering. According to the theory, these photos may portend low poll numbers.

Contrast those with this one of Hillary Clinton. Oh my, how confident she looks. She was polling at about 51% unfavorable as of a couple of weeks ago. So maybe she's about to get a boost.

In any event, the look of a politician in a newspaper photo tells us a lot about what the newspaper people want us to think.

Interesting theory contends Ross Perot's 3rd party run wasn't responsible for GHWB's defeat in 1992

All the noise about Donald Trump's threat to run for president as a third party candidate caused Bill Pascoe to reflect on recent history of 3rd party runs. The conventional wisdom told us that if Ross Perot had not run for president in 1992 on a third party ticket then George H. W. Bush would have won.

However, Mr. Pascoe disagrees. See The Bushioisie Is Wrong: Ross Perot Didn’t ‘Cost’ G.H.W. Bush the White House in 1992.

He crunched the pre-election polling results and demonstrates that Bill Clinton led the whole time, but his lead started shrinking when Perot entered the race. Bush's poll numbers stayed about the same. Pascoe comes to this:

In other words, to the extent voters left Bush and Clinton for Perot, those who left Clinton for Perot outnumbered those who left Bush for Perot by more than 4-to-1.

Interesting theory, and he could be right. But this might have limited application to a Trump independent candidacy. Hillary will get about 40% of the vote without even getting out of bed. If there's an establishment type Republican candidate, he'll have the most to lose.

Bank robberies - FBI stats for 2014

I've written about bank robberies from time to time at this blog, probably because of misspent childhood watching old westerns and gangster movies in which a bank robbery got the whole thing rolling. The bad guys usually got caught, so the lesson was a wholesome one.  It took.  I've never robbed a bank.

These days robbing banks the old fashioned way -- standing at a teller window demanding cash -- is such a poor career choice. The retirement plan really stinks.

What brings this to the surface today is a Youtube video titled When to Rob a Bank, with Freakonomics’ Stephen J. Dubner. I suppose it's an introduction to an instruction if you want to rob a bank with Stephen J. Dubner. But he's only going by what's gone on before. For example he says the most popular day for bank robberies is Friday. That's consistent with the FBI bank robbery stats for 2014.

The stats go on to detail that in addition to Friday being the most popular day, the most popular M.O. is a robbery at a branch office, in a commercial district, in a metropolitan area, in California, with an oral or written demand, made at the counter, with a weapon threatened, between 9 and 11a.m.

As noted above, the retirement plan isn't so hot. However, there is free room and board plus health care and maybe dental.

Grand Ayatollah's book says destruction of Israel is based on well-established Islamic principles, not antisemitism

Well okay. Glad he cleared that up.

Nevertheless, his new book, described at Gatestoneinstitute.org at The Ayatollah's Plan for Israel and Palestine lays out some of the points. Basically, Israel is still target number one. Maybe this is supposed to make him seem noble, but if this analysis can be believed, he doesn't intend to level Israel into a mass of radiated rubble. He merely wants to use a nuclear threat to discourage a preemptive strike.

Instead he wants the daily threat of death to demoralize Israelis and encourage emigration to the U.S. and Europe. Here's an excerpt from the Gatestone article:

In Khamenei's analysis, once the cost of staying in Israel has become too high for many Jews, Western powers, notably the U.S., which has supported the Jewish state for decades, might decide that the cost of doing so is higher than possible benefits.

Thanks to President Obama, the U.S. has already distanced itself from Israel to a degree unimaginable a decade ago.

Khamenei counts on what he sees as "Israel fatigue." The international community would start looking for what he calls "a practical and logical mechanism" to end the old conflict.

Will this plan come to pass? We'll have to wait and see. The next U.S. president might not be as indifferent toward Israel as the current one. Then again, it's almost inevitable that Iran will have a nuclear weapon as a result of Obama's style of diplomacy.

Via a Investor's Business Daily editorial which compared the Ayatollah's book to another notorious manifesto, Mein Kampf.

If U.S. can't even get Hillary's emails, how is it ever going to get facts about Iran's nuclear activities?

Obama's Department of Justice cracked down on General Petraeus for sharing classified documents with an unauthorized person. But the DOJ is dragging its feet on any investigation of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information. Maybe her problems could get worse.

But it appears as if, in Obama's estimation, Hillary is too big to fail. And if she's elected president then the problem will magically disappear. In any event, Hillary Clinton has the equivalent of a cloak of invisibility regarding her classified info malpractice.

We might say the same thing about Iran. They played John Kerry very well and will get a boat load of money for it. And they extracted 2 secret side deals on top of that which will probably be as ineffective as the deal with Bashar al-Assad.

If the powers that be in the U.S. are afraid to go after Hillary Clinton, then Iran is free to do as it pleases.

Milton Friedman was right then, right now

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., introduced the a bill called the VA Accountability Act which would allow the Department of Veterans Administration to fire employees without a right of appeal. Seems like good thing for veterans given that no one at the VA has been held accountable for their mistreatment of the people they're obligated to serve.

But no. President Obama threatened to veto the bill. Obama has gone from community organizer to union representative, protecting jobs of of the least competent bureaucrats.

In any event, this is a good point to recall some of Milton Friedman's memorable quotes, some of which are dutifully repeated in 22 Quotes to Celebrate Milton Friedman Day. Here are a few from the list applicable to the VA situation, to wit:

1. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

3. “Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

4. “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

5. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

12. “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”

13. “The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer—a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well.”

Those are just a few. Read all 22 for a reminder on just how brilliant Milton Friedman was when he presented in simple language principles that seem obvious after they're stated.

Prime Minister David Cameron plans to address Islamic extremism

The other day David Cameron gave a speech in *Birmingham, UK, in which he described how he planned to combat Islamic radicalism in Britain. (Transcript.)

He laid out the four problems he hopes to address. Here's a thumbnail.

1st -- Radical Islam is energizing to young people. PM Cameron would counter that by doing a better job of teaching British values.

2nd -- Violent extremists didn't start that way. They developed into it after being radicalized to the ways of extremists. Cameron would get tough with the non-violent extremists to stop them before they do harm.

3rd -- Moderate voices are being drowned out by the extremists. Cameron intends to actively encourage the moderate voices.

4th -- There are people born and raised in the country who don’t really identify with Britain and who feel no attachment to other people there. Here Cameron has ordered a review "of how to boost opportunity and integration in these communities and bring Britain together as one nation." There he hopes to desegregate schools and communities. This is likely to be a tough one, although Cameron hopes the National Citizen Service program will help.

Let's wish them the very best of luck.  Here in the USA we have our own enclaves of unassimilated people.

*You'll recall that Birmingham was the location of a scandal last year involving Muslim men accused of grooming young girls to become rape victims.