Recent Comments

1. over 5 years ago on Steve Breen

   DagNabbit wrote, “Guns were banned in the UK and gun deaths decreased but homicides increased.”

   You make an ingenuous point. Although true on its bald surface, your claim omits context that completely changes the meaning. Statements below related to UK are based upon data reported by the Home Office.

   1. At less than 600 annually since 2000, the total number of all homicides in England and Wales is minuscule by US standards. With a combined population of about 60M, I calculate about 0.001% of that population have died by homicide each year. By comparison, that’s one fifth the US rate of 0.005% annually. Also, it’s roughly equivalent to homicide rates of other gun controlled countries. 2. Total UK rates of death by violence -including suicide-fell precipitately after handgun control in 1996. This appears contrary to your claim.3. The rises you refer to may be illusory, though it’s hard to say as you don’t cite a source. I found two possible sources in which the Home Office reported apparent increases in homicide rates. First, in the years after handgun control the HO changed how it defined ‘gun involved’ homicides. All deaths were counted when a gun was present, whether or not it was fired, a toy, an air powered pellet gun, or if the death was accidental. The broader definition forced up the homicide count, but total death rates of all causes not increase. Second, after forty years of decline, crime rates, including homicides, have recently been rising. However, it’s hard to see how gun control has failed if the first rise is after 40 years, especially if it accompanies an increase or overall crime.

   I believe your attempt to discredit gun control with UK data fails.

2. almost 6 years ago on Non Sequitur

   bob wrote, “The biggest foul-up was the democrats that forced banks to give loans to people who could never re-pay them. “Everyone should have a house”.”

   Since before the Revolution, Americans have expected that every family should have a house.

   Eisenhower’s GOP administration actually started making it possible with federal programs to help veterans buy homes.

   Regan and GOP worked toward increasing profits of large S&L’s and commercial banks by moving toward deregulation. That trend continued through Bush2.

   Clinton and DEM contributed laws and regulations removing the legal blocks isolating mortgage lenders from the commercial banks.

   Bush2 deregulated big time, despite DEM opposition. Oversight reductions allowed “banks too big to fail” to soup up their mortgage market strategies: lower restrictions on down payments, qualifying income, balloon payments, and variable interest loans.

   With hard-sell promotions,big firms went after lower income home buyers.

   Bush2 regulators let banks get out from under questionable mortgages by bundling them for sale on Wall Street. So banks made quick profits and recapitalized to do it again. Investment firms bought the bundles, collected as much as they could and foreclosed on mortgages that shouldn’t been made.

   The regulators also allowed banks to further under-capitalize by selling each other overnight debt/capital, a practice ripe for money laundering,arbitrage, inaccurate credit rating.

   The pyramid of cards collapsed in Bush2’s last years, causing the Great Recession. In early 2008, Obama’s Sec. Treas. Geithner championed the $700B bailout (TARP) of ‘banks too big to fail.’

   At Harvard Law in 2007, Elizabeth Warren published the effects on consumers and small businesses. She proposed what became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 Dodd-Frank. That also bill increased restrictions and regulatory oversight.

   Now, Trump/GOP is trying to rescind CFPB, Dodd-Frank, and Obama era regulations.

3. almost 6 years ago on Jim Morin

   Everyone needs to understand that Trump is an innate Fascist. Everything he says and everything he does have parallels in Mussolini and Franco of the 1930’s. Very quickly and suddenly, it can happen here, the same as in the liberal and educated countries of Italy and Spain.

   Our noninvolvement between now and November is the first thing that’s required, because November may be too late to start.

4. almost 6 years ago on Frazz

   Electronic media are best for immediate operation management, and data analysis, and intermediate storage. Hard copy is best for archival purposes

5. almost 6 years ago on Frazz

   Unless it was tweaked before printing.

6. almost 6 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   She must have taken a shine to the property.

7. almost 6 years ago on Nancy

   Lolsg missed the point. Cartoon characters are not actual people who need to play outside. They are an artist’s tools to make humorous observations about the life they see around themselves.

   With “Nancy,” Ms Jaimes is showing us the ironies of summer vacation, from eager anticipation to boredom. Some of the jokes have been around since I first saw them inside the wrapper of a piece of Bazooka bubblegum. Some just substitute today’s tech for kids’ obsession with TV in my day. And some, like the girls playing video games in different rooms are unique to today. Combined, they show that today’s tech keeps kids inside and isolated more than ever before. That’s pretty accurate, I’d say.

8. almost 6 years ago on Strange Brew

   And those marks correlate with the last alien’s crumpled antennae. The relationship engenders suspicions.

9. almost 6 years ago on Non Sequitur

   Iron Pounder wrote, “Back before you were born, there was a cover on Time magazine shouting about “The Coming Ice Age.” Made about as much sense as the current panic.”

   Pounder, don’t be silly. Popular news media have never done well at reporting science. They just don’t know how science actually works, so if they find a single scientist who has carved a publishable and controversial niche for himself, the media sensationalize it.

   Such a scientist may have made a breakthrough discovery. Such things happen, but most likely, he’s just trying to survive in a publish or perish environment.

   Don’t get me wrong. Miracles do happen on rare occasions. Most recently was when a previously unknown Spanish geological biologist discovered the gene slicing tool, CRISPR. It took years for him to be taken seriously. The point is, though, that the scientific process eventually milled the truth and CRISPR is now a thing.

   That CRISPR is a thing while the new ice age is not is an example of how science works. Everybody who tried to replicate CRISPR succeeded. Everybody who tried to find evidence of an ice age in process failed. That’s called Science.

   Sensationalizing a single, unconfirmed study is the opposite of science. At best, it’s just marketing magazines. At worst, it’s anti-intellectualism of the highest order.

   Truly literate people should know to look for the difference.

10. almost 6 years ago on Non Sequitur

    mwaurelius wrote, "Ah, but it isn’t called “global warming” anymore. These days it’s “climate change” because that is so much more wonderfully non-specific as to be all but impossible to disprove. . .’

    Mwaurelius’ rant continues spouting conspiracy theories and other conservative, denier blather.

    First, the term “climate change” is preferred now not because environmentalists are practicing Orwellian Newspeak, but because climate deniers did. The deniers coopted the term “global warming,” for which scientists hadn’t yet promulgated an agreed definition, by assigning ridiculous meanings to the term. The deniers’ broadly wielded their Newspeak term “global warming” to ridicule environmental concerns and denigrate climate scientists. . .just as you have in your comment.

    Thus, deniers morphed global warming into a meaningless phrase unsuitable for communicating actual science.

    So science did what science always does, it meticulously defined its own terminology. “Climate change” is now a part of the nomenclature. It’s connoted meaning and operational definitions, far from being so vague as to be unprovable, are easily available to anyone capable of using eight grade science knowledge. (The first bit of eighth grade science would be that no scientific idea is “provable.” The only requirement is that it is DIS provable, which is easier if it is measurable. That would be its operational definition. That’s how science works, you see.)

    I’ll give you a hint how to suspect that climate change may be happening. As simple meaning of the term requires a global focus, the operational definitions must measure global characteristics. This is made complex and difficult because hemispherical seasonal changes are opposite, weather is fine-grained and chaotic, etc. So it is highly unlikely that any single measure would be in harmony everywhere in the world. It would be very notable if that were ever to happen.

    With that in mind Google “record global heat wave.”