So educated - so dumb

Low vaccination rates in Silicon Valley. [Link]

The scientists, technologists, and engineers who populate Silicon Valley and the California Bay Area deserve their reputation as innovators, building entire new economies on the strength of brains and imagination. But some of these people don’t seem to be vaccinating their children.

A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases. At least, that’s according to a giant database from the California Department of Public Health, which tracks the vaccination rates at day care facilities and preschools in the state. We selected more than 20 large technology and health companies in the Bay Area and researched their day care offerings. Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data.

Someone needs to look in the mirror

The author of It’s Okay To Hate Republicans. [Link]

A University of Michigan department chairwoman has published an article titled, “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans,” which will probably make all of her conservative students feel really comfortable and totally certain that they’re being graded fairly. 

“I hate Republicans,” communications department chairwoman and professor Susan J. Douglas boldly declares in the opening of the piece. “I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’”

She writes that although the fact that her “tendency is to blame the Republicans . . . may seem biased,” historical and psychological research back her up, and so it’s basically actually a fact that Republicans are bad!

Douglas said that in the 1970s she did work for a Republican, Rhode Island’s senate minority leader Fred Lippitt, but she hates them all now because Lippitt was a “brand of Republican” who no longer exists in that he was “fiscally conservative but progressive about women’s rights, racial justice and environmental preservation.” 

Republicans now, she writes, are focused on the “determined vilification” of others, and have “crafted a political identity that rests on a complete repudiation of the idea that the opposing party and its followers have any legitimacy at all.”

(Apparently, the irony of this accusation given the content of her own article was lost on her.)

Out of the frying pan

Wow, everyone blames the President for the VA scandal.

How can we divert attention and get this off the front page?

I know! We'll trade terrorists for a POW! That will work great!

Ms. Rice. In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows. That bit about serving with “honor and distinction” is the sort of perfunctory catch-phrase politicians briefly don as electoral armor. (“At this point in your speech, ma’am, devote one sentence to how much you honor the troops.”)

I actually believe that Ms. Rice was kind of sincere, in her spectacularly oblivious way. In the best Manchurian Candidate manner, she said what she had been programmed to say by her political culture, then she was blindsided by the firestorm she ignited by scratching two flinty words together. At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.

The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

But compassion, please! The president and all the president’s men and women are not alone. Our media elite — where it’s a rare bird who bothered to serve in uniform — instantly became experts on military justice. Of earnest mien and blithe assumption, one talking head after another announced that “we always try to rescue our troops, even deserters.”

Uh, no. “Save the deserter” is a recent battle cry of the politically indoctrinated brass. For much of our history, we did make some efforts to track down deserters in wartime. Then we shot or hanged them. Or, if we were in good spirits, we merely used a branding iron to burn a large D into their cheeks or foreheads. Even as we grew more enlightened, desertion brought serious time in a military prison. At hard labor.

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

Following the policy is more important than using common sense

No one is allowed to have judgement anymore, no matter how stupid it is. [Link]

A ninth-grader says she has frostbite after standing outside for 10 minutes in a wet bathing suit during a fire alarm.

It happened around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday at Como Park High School in St. Paul. Fourteen-year-old Kayona Hagen-Tietz says she was in the school’s pool when the fire alarm went off.

While other students had gotten out earlier and were able to put on dry clothes, Hagen-Tietz said she was rushed out with just her towel.

On Wednesday morning, the temperature was 5 below, and the wind chill was 25 below.

“So the alarm went off, and I thought it was like just a drill, like: Do I  have to go outside?” Hagen-Tietz said. “And then he was like no, we usually don’t have fake ones in the winter.”

Hagen-Tietz says she and the another student were rushed out by the teacher. Her classmate had clothes by the pool, hers were in her locker. So she grabber her towel and went outside.

“As soon as they’d seen her outside in her swimsuit, soaking wet and barefoot, they should have done something,” said Eva Tietz, Hagen-Tietz’s mother.

A teacher eventually gave Hagen-Tietz a jacket, and one of her friends gave her a sweatshirt to wrap around her feet.

But due to school policy, she wasn’t allowed to sit in a faculty-member’s car.

“We kind of huddled up and made a circle around me, and the other kids who were cold,” Hagen-Tietz said.

Eventually, a teacher did get permission to allow Hagen-Tietz and her classmate to sit inside her car.

But by that time Hagen-Tietz had already stood barefoot and wet for 10 minutes in some of the coldest conditions of the year.

Hagen-Tietz mom then picked her up and took her to the doctor, who determined she has frostbite on her feet.

If you don't like your account, you can't change it

Healthcare.gov in action (inaction). [Link]

The Obama administration has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working. In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.
But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov. The attorneys, who have been trying to exert leverage quietly behind the scenes, did not provide the letter to The Post but confirmed that they had sent it.
A CMS spokesman, Aaron Albright, said, “We are working to fully implement the appeals system.”
Three knowledgeable individuals, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions, said it is unclear when the appeals process will become available. So far, it is not among the top priorities for completing parts of the federal insurance exchange’s computer system that still do not work. Those include an electronic payment system for insurers, the computerized exchange of enrollment information with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust people’s coverage to accommodate new babies and other major changes in life circumstance.
The exchange is supposed to allow consumers who want to file appeals to do so by computer, phone or mail. But only mail is available. The roughly 22,000 people who have appealed to date have filled out a seven-page form and mailed it to a federal contractor’s office in Kentucky, where the forms are scanned and then transferred to a computer system at CMS. For now, that is where the process stops. The part of the computer system that would allow agency workers to read and handle appeals has not been built, according to individuals familiar with the situation.

Why didn't anyone tell me?

According to Iranian news agency, US controlled by aliens. [Link]

Iran's semi-official news outlets have something of a reputation for taking conspiracy theorism to the next level. They've written on Israel's secret plans to annex Iraq, theconspiracy by Western media to fabricate quotes by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani condemning the Holocaust and the secret Jewishness of the British royal family. You may notice a certain theme here.

On Sunday, the hard-line semi-official Fars News dropped one of its biggest bombshells yet: The United States government has been secretly run by a "shadow government" of space aliens since 1945. Yes, space aliens. The alien government is based out of Nevada and had previously run Nazi Germany. It adds, for timeliness, that the controversial NSA programs are actually a tool for the aliens to hide their presence on Earth and their secret agenda for global domination. This is all asserted as incontrovertible fact with no caveats.

There are so many wonderful details here. As proof that aliens were secretly behind the Nazis, the report explains that Germany built hundreds of submarines toward the end of the war, far more than would have been possible with mere human technology. It does not explain why aliens with access to interstellar travel built subs that were so grossly incapable against the British navy, or why all-powerful extraterrestrials were unable to help the Nazis resist an invasion by Allied forces that are mere cavemen relative to their own technology. So far, these are pretty unimpressive aliens.

In any case, after losing the war, the aliens apparently installed themselves as the secret force behind the United States government. President Obama is said to be a tool of the aliens, though anti-alien factions within the U.S. government are fighting to topple him. Their present aim is to install a global surveillance system that will, somehow, allow them to finally impose a one-world government and enslave humanity.

The best part to all this, to me, is the sourcing. Fars News takes us through a veritable hall-of-mirrors of sources "confirming" their scoop. The progenitor of it all, of course, is ostensibly NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has waited until now to reveal that the real reason for all those NSA programs is aliens. As best I can tell, Fars claims that Snowden gave this information to Russia's Federal Security Service  (FSB). They also say it was independently confirmed by former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer. (Hellyer, who is 90, does indeed argue that aliens have visited Earth many times, though I haven't seen him comment on this particular story.) The FSB, they say, put all this information down in a secret report, which was inexplicably obtained by the ultra-fringe conspiracy theory Web site, Whatdoesitmean.com.

Our problems are too much legislative oversight, that pesky first amendment and that the President doesn't have enough power.

When I hear stuff like this, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

First up, the Wall street Journal. [Link]

It's no surprise that the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal would be apologists for the surveillance state, but even they have reached new depths in discussing the recommendations to President Obama from his NSA review panel/task force. As we had already pointed out, the actual recommended changes appear to be entirely cosmetic, and yet the WSJ seems to think that the NSA should have free rein to spy on anyone and everything. It's as if the WSJ editorial board has never heard of the 4th Amendment, and has simply no clue how much damage the NSA has done to the US economy. You would think, given the WSJ's reputation as being pro-big business, that it would concern them that businesses appear to be losing a ton of money overseas as people don't want to do business with American companies any more over the NSA revelations. 

Next, NSA officials annoyed by that pesky First Amendment. [Link]

But, perhaps the most tone deaf of all, was the statement from one NSA official suggesting that it's time to reform the First Amendment, because he's not at all happy about how reporters have covered the NSA recently. As Drezner notes, he's not sure if it's a joke or not, but it really doesn't matter. That seems like something you should not joke about if you're an NSA person, given everything that's going on.

The NSA's attitude toward the press is, well, disturbing. There were repeated complaints about the ways in which recent reportage of the NSA was warped or lacking context. To be fair, this kind of griping is a staple of officials across the entire federal government. Some of the NSA folks went further, however. One official accused some media outlets of "intentionally misleading the American people," which is a pretty serious accusation. This official also hoped that the Obama administration would crack down on these reporters, saying, "I have some reforms for the First Amendment."

It seems that the public might have some reforms for the intelligence community as well. And those would actually be constitutional, unlike what that particular NSA officials had in mind for free speech and the press. There's even more in the Drezner piece that is well worth reading, including the how the NSA was unable to properly manage his own personal information which he had to send them in order to get his pass to come for a visit...

And finally, the worst Op-ed of the year explaining why the President should get more power. [Link]

It might strike you as counterintuitive to imagine that a president with a drone fleet, a “kill list,” dragnet databases of Americans' personal information and increasingly arbitrary authority over health care's one-sixth of the U.S. economy has too little power—but that's how you know you're in the presence of an original thinker.

Luckily, there's “a way out”: “Make the executive branch more powerful.” What that would mean for entitlements and tax reform isn't at all clear, but Brooks follows that prescription with this spit-take-inducing sentence: “This is a good moment to advocate greater executive branch power because we've just seen a monumental example of executive branch incompetence: the botched Obamacare rollout.” We suffer from “reform stagnation,” Brooks laments. It's too hard to push through “immigration reform, tax reform, entitlement reform and gun legislation” via the archaic "Schoolhouse Rock!" method outlined in Article I of the Constitution.

That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!

The launch code for U.S. nukes was 00000000 for twenty years. [Link]

Remember all those cold war movies where nuclear missile crews are frantically dialing in the secret codes sent by the White House to launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles? Well, for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode to enable their warheads: 00000000.

That fact, originally revealed in a column in 2004 by then-president of the Center for Defense Information Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former US Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos, was alsomentioned in a paper by Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University who teaches security architecture. Both of these sources were cited this week in an article on the site Today I Found Out written by  Karl Smallwood, as well as in an article in the UK's Daily Mail.

The codes, known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), were supposed to prevent the use of nuclear weapons—and the nuclear weapons under joint control with NATO countries in particular—without the authorization of the president of the United States. The need for such controls became clear during the 1963-1964 Cyprus crisis, when NATO members Turkey and Greece were reportedly seeking control of NATO nuclear weapons—to use on each other.

At least that's the way it was supposed to work, following an executive order from President John F. Kennedy. But at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, more than half of the missiles in Europe, including those in Turkey, lacked PAL controls. And while Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara directly oversaw the installation of PALs on the US-based ICBM arsenal, US Strategic Command generals almost immediately had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000 to ensure that the missiles were ready for use regardless of whether the president was available to give authorization.

Dr. Blair stated that that the not-so-secret code was hardly a secret from the crews manning the silos. "Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel," Blair noted.

Geeks for Monarchy

More like idiots. I would bet that all of those calling for a return to monarchies expects to be on top and not at the bottom. [Link]

Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution.

Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.

You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas, and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.

Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.

Once more, reality bests The Onion

No fun allowed. [Link]

Recess itself is still allowed, for now, but it appears that students will have to spend it standing quietly in one place:

As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

* * *

“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.

But the students will have no such option anymore. They were just informed that during recess, football is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.

According to a press release on the school district's website, the reason it has nerfed recess is because a construction project has limited the space available for recess. "With children in such close proximity to each other," the statement says, "it is not safe for them to be engaged in unstructured play with hardballs.... Absent the confined space within which recess must temporarily be held, such restrictions would not be necessary." 

And

Back in the land of the free and the home of the constantly terrified, a school in Arizona recently took steps to keep an armed man off its property. That'd be fine except that he was a police officer. Scott Urkov dropped his kid off at elementary school on his way to work, prompting calls from "some parents who were concerned about the fact that there was a fully armed officer on campus." Huh? Level-headed school officials then did the reasonable thing by calling the officer and asking him not to wear his uniform and gun to school again. Wait, what?

The officer said he had been advised by the department not to comment, but that was after he posted "Are you freaking kidding me?" on his Facebook page.

Takedown

When I read the original article, I was dumbstruck. This takedown made me feel much better. [Link]

I took a break from working on Monster Hunter Nemesis to check Facebook, and of course I found a link to something so astoundingly dumb that it demanded an immediate fisking. It is such a jaw dropping level of stupid that my first thought was that it was a brilliant piece of satire by a free market libertarian who really hates collective do gooders, but the article is from Slate, and I don’t think anybody over there is clever enough to pull off something like that.

The article itself is your typical white guilt liberal pontificating on topics they don’t quite grasp and lecturing everyone about how to live in a manner that best assuages their white liberal guilt.  This article is dumb, even by Slate standards, and that is saying something, but there is some value to be taken from it as it is an excellent look into the thought process of ass kissing statists. If it was satire by somebody who has run into all of these same arguments before (I’ve seen all of these points pop up in various school choice arguments, only I’ve never seen them bundled so completely) then high five. Good work. If this author actually believes this tripe, then I’m amazed she figured out how to turn on her computer to type it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

As usual the original article is in italics. My comments are in bold.

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person

A Manifesto

No kidding. It is actually subtitled “A Manifesto”. We’re off to a great start.

By Allison Benedikt

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—

Wait… Are we talking actual bad murderer bad, or murderers that liberals have the hots for bad, like Che Guevara? Or murderers that liberals don’t like to own up to like Kermit Gosnell bad? Because you know, liberals are into nuance and stuff.

but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.

So using a lot of unnecessary hyphens bad.

So, pretty bad.

Apparently. But please, Allison, educate us poor knuckle draggers why we should put the future of failing liberal institutions based on outdated philosophies dating back to the industrial revolution over the welfare of our children.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental.

Well you’re a liberal, so that goes without saying.

But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.

And I can’t wait to hear how you figured this part out. Especially since everybody is always whining about overcrowded classrooms, so when a kid gets pulled out and sent to private school, you just freed up more public school resources, and *gasp* the parent paying for private school is still paying taxes which pay for the dumpy public school… but hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.

This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Wait… Let me get this right… I need to needlessly screw up my children and grandchildren’s chances in the hope that maybe, just maybe, our shitty public schools might be decent in forty or fifty years. And this is the high note she picked to open her essay with. Holy shit.

Yes, comrades, sacrifice your offspring for the common good… Sure, that sounds bug nuts to most parents who don’t routinely put cigarette butts out on their children’s skin, but don’t worry, folks. Allison is just getting warmed up.

The original article made me think of this quote from Billy Madison:

Mr. Madison, what you've just said;... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul...

Most Smartest Diplomat Ever

Obama being like Carter was a best case scenario. [Link]

In full outrage mode, America’s most famous windsurfer [John Kerry] castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to “peaceful protests.” Apparently, “peaceful” means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches.

The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government’s response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance — using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists).

Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?With its blundering, fickle, late-in-the-day support for whoever appeared to be gaining the upper hand, the Obama administration has managed the remarkable feat of alienating every faction in Egypt. And it’s a sorry day when an American administration abets religious totalitarianism, as this White House did when the “democratically elected” Morsi regime tried to Islamize Egypt’s government and society for keeps.

There was, indeed, a coup. But not all coups involve tanks. The real coup came after Egypt’s premature, badly flawed election, when Morsi and the Brotherhood excluded all non-Brothers from the political process; curtailed media freedoms and jailed journalists; attacked Christians; and rushed toward an Islamist state that the majority of Egyptians did not want.

Today Barack Obama doubled down on his support for the Muslim Brotherhood by canceling joint military exercises with Egypt that were scheduled for next month. Obama gave a brief, petulant press conference before heading out for another round of golf on Martha’s Vineyard:

“The United States strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by Egypt’s interim government and security forces,” Obama said on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, where he is on vacation.

“We deplore violence against civilians. We support universal rights essential to human dignity, including the right to peaceful protest,” he said….

Obama said the state of emergency should be lifted in Egypt and a process of national reconciliation started.

“While we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” Obama said.

To say that Obama’s foreign policy is in tatters would be giving it too much credit, as he implicitly admitted today:

Obama, who departed for a game of golf shortly after making his statement, vented frustration that both sides in the Egyptian conflict were blaming the United States for the turmoil in the country since the military ousted Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, on July 3.

Nice going, Barry! Angering everyone in sight is a uniquely inept foreign policy achievement, for which your first term Secretary of State deserves almost equal blame.

Fake Kidnapping Service

What the hell is wrong with people that this exists? [Link]

Romeo slapped me hard across the face, much harder than I had been slapped all night. Then he shocked me with a stun gun. Then Cody doused me with cold water, which was the worst part by far. When you get hit with a stun gun, it lasts a second. When someone throws cold water on you, it makes you miserable for hours. I hadn't thought about cold water before this. I had thought about guns and billy clubs and knives. It never occurred to me how desperately I would want to stay dry. Now I would have gladly taken another jolt from the stun gun in exchange for a fresh T-shirt.

"I know this was originally meant to be a fake kidnapping," the voice said.

That's right.

"And I know that you guys did your homework on me, and that you know I went to prison for a while."

I do know that.

"But there are other things about me that you don't know, Drew. And the reason you don't know them is because you never asked."

Oh shit.

That was the moment it felt real. That was the moment I was paying for.

Dumbass.

Is it too much to ask that politicians know at least a little of that which they speak?

Yes, yes it is. [Link]

Either (a) O’s referring to a different shooting, which I doubt, (b) I missed a major update to the Newtown story, (c) he knows something we don’t, or (d) he has roughly the same mastery of gun fundamentals as magazine expert Diana DeGette. From last night’s DCCC fundraiser in San Francisco:

Now, over the next couple of months, we’ve got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon — by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

Adam Lanza had an honest-to-goodness machine gun on him, not a Bushmaster semiautomatic? That’s … an important detail, but I haven’t heard it mentioned once in the news coverage I’ve seen about Sandy Hook. (Then again, it’s not unusual for the media to overlook certain facts on this topic.) According to every report I’ve seen, including the Hartford Courant’s story just this morning about Connecticut’s new gun law, Lanza carried an AR-15. If O thinks a fully automatic rifle was used — which would explain his recent refrain about “weapons of war” — why is he targeting semiautomatics? And why isn’t Piers Morgan talking about this every night as proof of how easy it is for nuts to get hold of guns that even most soldiers aren’t allowed to carry anymore?

That wasn’t the only bon mot last night. The Standard noticed this one from the same fundraiser:

Look, my intention here is to try to get as much done with the Republican Party over the next two years as I can, because we can’t have perpetual campaigns. And so I mean what I say. I am looking to find areas of common ground with Republicans every single day. I want to make sure that we’re working together to stabilize our finances. And I think actually that we can come up with a fiscal deal that instead of lurching from crisis to crisis every three months, we lay the groundwork for long-term growth — controlling our deficits, controlling our debt, but also making sure we can invest in our future. I want to get an immigration deal done. I want to find some common-sense gun safety legislation that we can get done. And I do believe that there are well-meaning Republicans out there who care about their kids just as passionately as we do.

Not all Republicans, mind you. Probably not even most. But the ones willing to vote for Obama’s agenda? Yeah, we can probably give them the benefit of the doubt on whether they love their kids as much as liberals. There’s no hard proof that they’re out there — it’s a matter of “belief” — but he’s staying optimistic. You can always count on O to be a bit more candid about his contempt for his opponents when he’s talking to a group of rich liberals.

For someone who believes he is better than anyone else at their own job, he should do at least a little research. Unless these are deliberate misstatements designed to demonize lawful gun owners?

If only we were that competent

Russians think we are wrecking the world on purpose. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity - or incompetence. [Link]

“In Russia, most analysts, politicians and ordinary citizens believe in the unlimited might of America, and thus reject the notion that the US has made, and continues to make, mistakes in the [Middle East]. Instead, they assume it’s all a part of a complex plan to restructure the world and to spread global domination,” writes Fyodor Lukyanov on theAl Monitor website today. Lukyanov, who chairs Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, laments what he derides as a “conspiracy theory.” Nonetheless, he reports, President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite think that the United States is spreading chaos as part of a diabolical plot for world domination:

From Russian leadership’s point of view, the Iraq War now looks like the beginning of the accelerated destruction of regional and global stability, undermining the last principles of sustainable world order. Everything that’s happened since — including flirting with Islamists during the Arab Spring, U.S. policies in Libya and its current policies in Syria — serve as evidence of strategic insanity that has taken over the last remaining superpower.

Russia’s persistence on the Syrian issue is the product of this perception. The issue is not sympathy for Syria’s dictator, nor commercial interests, nor naval bases in Tartus. Moscow is certain that if continued crushing of secular authoritarian regimes is allowed because America and the West support “democracy,” it will lead to such destabilization that will overwhelm all, including Russia. It’s therefore necessary for Russia to resist, especially as the West and the United States themselves experience increasing doubts.

It’s instructive to view ourselves through a Russian mirror. The term “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them,” I wrote in 2008 under the title “Americans play monopoly, Russians chess.” Russians have dominated chess most of the past century, for good reason: it is the ultimate exercise in paranoia. All the pieces on the board are guided by a single combative mind, and every move is significant. In the real world, human beings flail and blunder. For Russian officials who climbed the greasy pole in the intelligence services, mistakes are unthinkable, for those who made mistakes are long since buried.

From a paranoid perspective, it certainly might look as if Washington planned to unleash chaos. The wave of instability spreading through the Middle East from Syria is the direct result of American actions. 

More school idiocy

Teacher and Administrator control. [Link]

I’m going to be blunt: in a school where the doors aren’t bullet – or strong kick – proof, locking the kids in the class just ensures if THERE IS a gunman, he can systematically go down the row of classrooms, kick the door, shoot everyone.  Reload.  Next classroom…  Or throw a grenade in the there.  Or…

In fact, I can’t conceive of a single circumstance in which locking the kids in, and keeping them all like sitting ducks in a group will keep them safe.

This is when I realized the system had gone nuts.

A)    NOTHING in their plan prevented an attack like Columbine’s.  In fact it could be said to facilitate that type of attack.

B)    It allowed teachers to self-dramatize as protectors, even though most of them weren’t armed; couldn’t have shot a lame rat in a barrel; would have wet themselves at the sight of a gun; and would never think of doing those things that could/should be done to prevent an actual massacre.  You know – throw books/desks/water/vase, then make a desperate rush at the gunman while he’s confused.

And that in a nutshell is where we’ve got.  Because of some well-publicized massacres and because the emphasis is put on guns (Columbine involved bombs also, which fortunately failed to go off, and the worst school massacre in the US – unless I misremember – involved bombs only) this allows the bureaucratic mind to go … stupid.

Instead of genuinely trying to prevent casualties in the case someone with evil intentions comes into the school, they try to control THE STUDENTS.  This is the equivalent of keeping everyone safe by preventing them from running with scissors, even if the scissors are desperately needed to cut a noose that’s strangling someone.

Keeping the students locked in classrooms does nothing but make it easier to identify the bodies.  Oh, yeah, it also allows the school to say “We did everything we could.  Ms. So and So died for her students.”

And

Then there’s the fact that these people have decided guns are what causes the deaths.  Only guns.  Not anything else.

This means that the kid who chews a poptart into the shape of a gun MUST be suspended; that the kid who wears a Marine Corps t-shirt to school is threatened with suspension that the student who disarms a gunman gets suspended and thatsinging the Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s theme song on your cell phone message can get you arrested.

This is not only insane, but counterproductive, and it comes totally from “bureaucratic mind and procedure.”

Note in the last article that they said everyone did what they were supposed to: so, mishearing lyrics, then arresting an innocent student, disrupting classes in the entire district and messing up people’s schedules is what the rules are DESIGNED to do?

Good to know.

Note that if the student had recorded a song – his or another – about shooting people after school, it still would not be evidence of anything, not even a vague intention to do so.

This is the type of thinking that had a teacher FROM A SCHOOL MY SON NO LONGER ATTENDED call us because “a concerned student” had called HER because my son was posting blues lyrics on his face book page and one of them referenced suicide.  The teacher called us DURING SUMMER.  And tried to bully us into taking the boy (who when the call came was goofing around with us on the subject of going out to play mini-golf) to a psychiatrist.  BECAUSE HE QUOTED BLUES LYRICS, which he identified as blues lyrics, and was posting then analyzing in relation to the themes of blues.

Even when we pointed the context to the teacher, she insisted it was her “duty” to make us take our son to a psychiatrist.  Because someone willfully misunderstood him.

I think it was NOT her duty, but her pleasure, to stick her nose in everyone’s business.  And I think these rules ONLY encourage sticking their noses in everyone’s business.  Instead of stopping potentially homicidal students (or people from outside) who, usually, are more careful about not giving themselves away, they only encourage teachers and schools to persecute kids (or parents) who are odd, who deviate from the norm, who behave in quirky or unusual (but completely harmless) ways.

They also encourage beating back any student disposed to fighting back or self defense.

In other words, all of these are tools for enforcing conformity.

Zero Tolerance Idiocy - Pastry edition

Kid gets suspended for eating his pastry into the shape of a gun. Moronic.

Level II Moronic: counselling available for those troubled by the pastry incident. [Link]

The elementary school that was the scene of Josh's brutally harmless rampage sent students home Friday with a letter describing the incident as if it had actually been serious:

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the ... Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org....

If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Pretty sure that if your children are "troubled" by another kid biting a pastry into something that looks sort of like a gun and waving said pastry around, you have already failed as a parent.

Do school administrators keep a straight face when handing out pastry based suspensions? Do they feel embarrassed by abdicating any sense of judgement to rigid enforcement of rules to the point of absurdity?

Waiting period for laws

This is a good idea that will not happen. Remember the "most open administration ever", and by open, I mean the exact opposite, said it would do the same thing - and then, not surprisingly, didn't. [Link]

After every tragedy, legislation gets rushed through that’s typically just a bunch of stuff that various folks had long wanted all along, but couldn’t pass before. Then it’s hustled through as a “solution” to the tragedy, even though close inspection usually reveals that the changes wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy, and don’t even have much to do with it.

The goal, thus, is to prevent close inspection through a combination of heavy-handed legislative techniques and bullying rhetoric: If you don’t want to pass our bill without reading it, you must hate the children.

Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of lousy legislation this way — the Patriot Act, for example, about which I wrote a column something like this one back in 2001. We’ve gotten it because politicians like to manipulate voters and avoid scrutiny.

But why let them?

I’d like to propose a “waiting period” for legislation. No bill should be voted on without hearings, debate and a final text that’s available online for at least a week. (A month would be better. How many bills really couldn’t wait a month?)

And if the bill is advertised as addressing a “tragedy” or named after a dead child, this period should double.

After all, people want waiting periods for guns. Yet, statistically, the percentage of guns involved in crimes is much lower than the percentage of politicians involved in crimes.

Seriously, legislation is supposed to be a deliberative process. When they don’t want to deliberate, it’s because they’re hiding something. And they’re hiding it because they don’t want you to know about it.

I’d also add another provision: Anytime a “tragedy” bill has to be amended because slipshod legislating led to flaws, the bill to fix it must list the names of those who voted for the original, in bold type, at the beginning under the heading “IDIOTS WHO DIDN’T READ THE BILL OR THINK ABOUT IT BEFORE VOTING.”

Brain Dead Idiot

Ok, people. The zombie apocalypse is a stand-in for any general civilization destroying catastrophe. IT IS NOT REAL. [Link]

The Walking Dead? Try the walking stupid.

That might be at least one way to explain Jared Gurman, the 26-year-old Long Island man accused of blasting his girlfriend in the back with a .22-caliber rifle following an inexplicable argument over the hit show "The Walking Dead," according to authorities.

Gurman allegedly shot his 27-year-old girlfriend, Jessica Gelderman, outside his Williston Park home, according to CBS 2 News.

So what was the pivotal plot point in the show that led to the shooting? The couple got into a heated argument over whether a zombie apocalypse was actually possible, NBC 4 New York reports.

“He felt very adamant there could be a military mishap that would result in some sort of virus being released that could cause terrible things to happen,” Detective Lt. Raymond Cote said a news conference. “She felt it was ridiculous. He’s passionate about it. And it escalated from there.”

Fuckwit.

Bipartisan anti-science from Congress

Vaccines save lives and DO NOT cause Autism. Science has proven this, but we still had to have hearings on it. [Link]

Let me be clear right off the bat: Vaccines don’t cause autism.

It’s really that simple. We know they don’t. There have been extensive studies comparing groups of children who have been vaccinated with, say, the measles, mumps, and rublella (MMR) vaccine versus those who have not, and it’s very clear that there is no elevated rate of autism in the vaccinated children.

This simple truth is denied vigorously and vociferously by antivaxxers (those who oppose, usually rabidly, the use of vaccinations that prevent diseases), but they may as well deny the Earth is round and the sky is blue. It’s rock solid fact. They try to blame mercury in vaccines, but we knowthat mercury has nothing to do with autism; whenthimerosal (a mercury compound) was removed from  vaccines there was absolutely no change in the increase in autism rates.

I could go on and on. Virtually every claim made by antivaxxers is wrong. And this is a critically important issue; vaccines have literally saved hundreds of millions of lives. They save infants from potentially fatal but preventable diseases like pertussis and the flu.

So why did Congress hold hearings this week promoting crackpot antivax views?