Amerika

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter

  In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

  On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

  500 to Medical errors
  300 to the Flu
  250 to Suicide
  200 to Car Accidents
  40 to Homicide via Handgun

  Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

  I’ve often ripped on NdGT. Here I offer nothing but respect. Leave it to a guy who does mathematics on systems that are so far beyond the normal scale that you can consider an error figure of several thousand miles or years a pretty darn good guess to put life’s events in a deeper perspective. People who are yelling at him for breaking up the two minute hate now will be thanking him later. Maybe knowing about stars doesn’t make you a decent human, but it teaches you a level of patient ratiocination more typical of the universe than the Twitterverse.

• Which party has the better plan to fix Social Security?

  Given what I just posted above, the only answer I can give here is “no.” What the GOP suggests involves just doing simple math. You want to only pay out a certain benefit, so you keep upping the age and screwing people out of payouts until the books get closer to balancing. It’s what insurance companies that can’t get regulatory permission to raise rates do. They just reduce the likelihood that they’ll have to pay out to avoid bankruptcy. Not bad if you pay in to SS, sucks if you’re expecting to cash back out.

  The Dem plan, like the Dem Party; is all about optics. Tax SS above a certain donut hole and you’ve just started taxing most of Nancy Pelosi’s rolodex. They put it out there to be “fair.” Gotta make the rich pay. If Mitch McConnell put that idea on the Senate Floor tomorrow out of spite, Bernie Sanders would take one look at what it would do to him personally and lead the filibuster athwart. It would about as popular in San Fekecisco or West Hollyorc as the reduced SALT deduction.

  But let’s just fly away to Fiscal Nunca-Nunca Land. Let’s suppose you combine the two so that we can pay twice the premium and insure fewer people. The numbers still wouldn’t work because it takes money away from the families that are supposed have all the kids that will one day pay the premiums. Well, fewer people have kids, fewer old grumps kick the bucket. The viscous cycle continues. SS is again on the verge of going where bad socialism goes when it dies in the ditch.

  There is no answer to this conundrum except lower the cost of family formation and making the world less toxic for children. You then suck it up twenty years until that cohort can fork over some taxes. At that point we can haz Socialist Security. So ask your self a question. Would you like to be stuck raising three kids in Filthadelphia? If your answer to that is “no”, then that should also be your answer as to which party has a better plan to save Social Security.

• Barack Obama on Twitter

  So the USSA leads the whole world in mass shootings until you start counting all the people who do things like shoot other people without posting a cool manifesto first. Therefore all websites Barack Obama doesn’t like cause mass shootings. All of them. Even this one. Heck, the DrudgeReport causes mass shootings. It posts news stories that leftists don’t get to edit first.

• Cory Booker Demands All Trump Rallies be Cancelled, ‘Breeding Ground For Racism’

  I hate you, Cory Booker. Here I was quoting satire from The Babylon Bee. They found out why we have mass shootings. You saw the potential campaign issue here and said “Hold my mineral spritzer!*”

  Cory knows why we have !RACISM!. It happens when more than six or seven of your political opponents gather at a rally. They summon the !RACISM! devil with their ouiji board. Capt. Howdy appears and starts looking for some nappy-head Rodney King knee-grow to just rage on with a nightstick. So the obvious cure to !RACISM! is to abolish all free speech for your political opponents. Here’s how Cory done won his Fields Medal.

  Democrat Senator and 2020 hopeful Cory Booker (NJ) demanded Trump’s Manchester rally next week and all future rallies be cancelled. According to Cory Booker, President Trump and his supporters should not have 1st Amendment rights. “[T]hese rallies serve as a breeding ground for racism and bigotry that inspire white nationalist attacks like the one in El Paso on Saturday,” Cory Booker said in a statement.
  “They are despicable and have no place in New Hampshire, or anywhere in our country. That’s why Trump must cancel this rally.”

  *- If he were even plausibly heterosexual it would have been his beer.

• 51% of Mass Shooters in 2019 Were Black: Only 29% Were White

  Looking at the data from the Mass Shooting Tracker, widely utilized by the media, as of this writing, of the 72 mass shooters, perpetrators in shootings that killed or wounded 4 or more people, whose race is known, 21 were white, 37 were black, 8 were Latino, and 6 were members of other groups. 51% of mass shooters in 2019 were black, 29% were white, and 11% were Latino. Three mass shooters were Asian, two were American Indian and one was Arab….White people make up 61% of the country’s population, followed by Hispanics at 17.8%, and African-Americans at 12.7%. In that context, white people are actually dramatically underrepresented among mass shooters, as are Latinos, while African-Americans are highly overrepresented.

  Several things stick out here. There is no clear and fast definition of a mass shooting. Some say 8, some say four. Maybe it really is just any garish and horrible murder that makes it more likely that you will vote for !ME! But since Cory Booker makes convenient use of mass shootings to help him earn his living, I’ll be a dedicated amatuer at this and play along with at least 4. Here goes the racism, folks.

  White people can’t seem to shoot much better than they jump. 61% of the population and only 29% of the mass shooters? Oy gevalt, Shiksas. African-Amerikans are 12% of the population and make up 51% of the mass shooter honor roll. You’d have to go visit an NBA club house or the Playboy Jazz Poll to find a greater over-representation of blacks in any chosen avocation. And Latino’s, sheeeeet! 11% of the pop and only 17% of the bang… They do much better work in El Salvador. It’s like Ann Coulter told us. They aren’t sending their best.

• REPORT: Of The 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters 26 Have One Thing In Common – Absentee Fathers

  This seems like a far more prevalent factor than what the media discusses. More prevalent than race. More prevalent than ideology. More prevalent than FPS gaming or heavy metal poisoning. Kill the family and the boy will grow up with a will to vengeance.

  Venker goes on to explain that of CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History, only one was raised by his biological father since childhood. “Indeed, there is a direct correlation between boys who grow up with absent fathers and boys who drop out of school, who drink, who do drugs, who become delinquent and who wind up in prison,” she writes. “And who kill their classmates.” This problem can’t be solved by any policy, or any sort of gun control. It is time to have a serious discussion about the degradation of our cultural norms.

• Impending Defeat for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

  Well darn. It’s not just the stock market. Reason Magazine tells us that Pestilence, war, famine, and death are all on the decline. That’s not helping my Bitcoin Portfolio gain… And it gets rougher on the bears.

  In Christian tradition, the four horsemen of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death usher in the apocalypse. Compared to 100 years ago, deaths from infectious diseases are way down; wars are rarer and kill fewer people; and malnutrition has steeply declined. Death itself is in retreat, and the apocalypse has never looked further away.

  That and The Sweet Meteor of Death shanked it like a Buffalo Bills Place-Kicker in The Super Bowl. It’s like we’ll live until we get royally sick of eachother. Maybe that’s another cause of mass shootings.

• The Costs of Reliability

  A question that used to puzzle me is “Why can people be so much better at doing a thing for fun, or to help their friends and family, than they are at doing the exact same thing as a job?” I’ve seen it in myself and I’ve seen it in others. People can be hugely more productive, creative, intelligent, and efficient on just-for-fun stuff than they are at work.

  It all goes to you know where when the person thinks of it as work. When it feels less like a job, you get it less wrong. Abolish jobs and people will do what they need to do. They will do it to a higher standard out of self-love.
  

• Leftist ‘Intellectual’ Calls For ‘Eradicating’ Trump Supporters

  Yeah, it’s totally figurative speech when the left does it.

  Aslan, however, clearly called for eradicating people. He laid out his belief that Trump supporters are universally racist and that “this racist scourge must be eradicated.” How is that not a threat? (Frankly, for a guy who has eaten human brains, you’d think he’d at least have some.) For the record, Aslan has been remarkably silent on the Dayton killer, an avowed Leftist who once commented that all Nazis must die. There’s no mention of him at all on Aslan’s Twitter feed from what I could tell.

  So any logical 2nd Amendment supporter responds as follows:

  These are the same people who expect us to give up our guns. Doing so won’t make them stop calling for our “eradication” or anything of the sort, so just why should we? If people are clearly saying they want to “eradicate” people who share my political views and me, I’m holding onto my guns. I’m holding onto my AR-15s and higher capacity magazines and anything else I can get my hands on. I’m holding onto anything and everything I can so that if they decide to do more than talk, I’ll have the means to do more than talk as well. I’d rather it never come to that, but if people like Aslan are going to make comments like that, I’m not taking the chance someone won’t follow through on his threats.

• Joaquin Castro doubles down amid backlash over tweeting names of Trump donors

  His tweet contained a graphic titled “Who’s funding Trump?” and listed the names of 44 people who purportedly contributed the maximum amount allowed by campaign finance laws. Their occupations, which, like donor names, are public record, were also listed. Close to a dozen of the donors shown are retirees. “Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” Castro wrote, naming local businesses whose owners were on the list. “Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”

  This particular act may not provide causus bellum. Yet inevitably, someone will dox a political foe. That foe will be shot. Vendetta will be declared on the doxxer and it will be on. If tit-for-tat ensues, vendetta becomes fued. If large factions align to each fueding party, civil conflict is joined. The man who did this sits in Congress. That puts all of the badness I just described above foresquare on the table.

• Basketball Player Uses Girlfriend’s Urine to Fake Drug Test, Finds Out He’s Pregnant

  What to say…. Sad story. I’m sure the coach will cut him if he doesn’t abort. They aren’t really big on maternity leave in those predominantly male spaces.

And just to experience someone doing anything really well, I close with this.

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