Daily Derp: Weekend Is Over Edition

Good news on the cancer front:

"Cancer cells have been programmed back to normal by scientists in a breakthrough which could lead to new treatments and even reverse tumour growth.

For the first time aggressive breast, lung and bladder cancer cells have been turned back into harmless benign cells by restoring the function which prevents them from multiplying excessively and forming dangerous growths.

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, US, said it was like applying the brakes to a speeding car."

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I found Obama's passionate but logical comments on the murder of two Virginia reporters to be excellent and worthy of a great leader.


Oh wait.

Sorry. That was in my dream. Obama, who has made it a habit to make sure he sticks his opinion on local matters where blacks are murdered, has been quiet after a deranged gay black man (with a flag of his own. Hey, progressives opened that Pandora's Box) went off on two young white - one female and the other male - Americans.

Not surprising really.

Oh well.

Notice how when Dylan Roof killed innocent Church goers the narrative jumped on the Confederate flag. After Vester Lee Flanagan's rampage, little is made of his race (naturally) and it's all about gun control.

Time to stop thinking along myopic narratives. Roof and Flanagan are one and the same. Looking at race, guns and flags only detracts from the fact they were disturbed human beings. Nothing more, nothing less.

Moving on...

***

Do guns cause violence?

If not "gun deaths," what about "firearm-related homicide"? This too is a nearly useless concept, because gun homicides and non-gun homicides interact with each other. Someone who can't get a gun may simply kill with a different weapon instead. (Even in gun-drenched America, about a third of murders are committed with no gun.) And someone who can get a gun might defend himself against an assailant who doesn't have one. So we should always focus first on total violence, not gun violence, even when we're looking for the effects of guns.

The simple correlation between gun ownership and violence often disappears entirely when you take this into account, as I've shown with data on both states in the U.S. and developed countries. This shows that guns are not a primary driver of differences in murder rates — whatever effect they have is drowned out in the data by things like demographic differences, culture, and so forth."

"...I'm not the only person to reach the conclusion that the role of guns in violence is rather subtle. One interesting example is the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. He's no fan of the NRA; he's from Canada, for God's sake. But in his book about the decline of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the discussion of "weaponry and disarmament" is practically a footnote — about one page in an 800-page tome, relegated to a section about the "forces that one might have thought would be important [in major trends in violence] ... but as best as I can tell turned not out to be." He doesn't even bother to "endorse the arguments for or against gun control," and he writes that "human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven," adding that "anyone who is equipped to hunt, harvest crops, chop firewood, or prepare salad has the means to damage a lot of human flesh." Similarly, in Ghettoside, her interesting exploration of black-on-black crime in LA, the journalist Jill Leovy writes — in an actual footnote — that "guns are not a root cause of black homicide." The criminologist Gary Kleck tends to be highly skeptical of claims that guns make a difference, on net, one way or the other.


In short, yes, it's possible that confining gun ownership to the people willing to jump through various government hoops might have some marginal effect on violence. But that effect will probably be so small as to be difficult to detect, and there may be no effect at all."

 He could have added the fact that if you remove gang related gun murders and America's murder rate 'normalizes' and is in-line with the rest of the developed West.

In addition, murder rates among blacks leads Hispanics and whites.

Violent crime rates without guns are actually highers in G7 countries (except Japan) than the USA.

The gun-control side simply don't consider the big picture. They just want to ban because less guns means less deaths by guns in their minds.

It's not necessarily the case as evidence shows.


*** 

Charles C. Cooke offers a rant about what it would entail to repeal the 2nd Amendment:

"...Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution."

Worth a look. Makes you realize how absurd the left is when it comes to gun control. We all know the end game is confiscation and they should stop lying about that.

***

Bunch of crazies run the University of Tennessee:

"The University of Tennessee has told its staff and students to stop calling each other 'he', 'she', 'him' and 'her' - and to start referring to one another with terms like 'xe', 'zir' and 'xyr' instead.

The Knoxville branch of the public university, which has 27,400 students, sent a memo round to its members filled with unusual new parts of speech to avoid referring to anybody's gender.

According to a gay rights official at the university, the new language regime will make the university 'welcoming and inclusive' and stop people feeling 'marginalized'."

I don't know what I would have done. I probably would have stuck to my guns and told the school to fuck off and not bother me with such absurd nonsense.

Fall of the West folks.

Fall of...you know the rest.

***

Legendary New York Islanders coach Al Arbour who led one of the all-time great dynasties in the early 1980s died Friday at the age of 82.

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Another legend has passed on. Former Philadelphia 76ers star Darryl Dawkins (aka Dr. Dunk and Chocolate Thunder) - who used to name all his dunks - died of a heart attack at the age of 58. He was traded to the New Jersey Nets in 1982 after losing in the finals to the LA Lakers. Without Dawkins, the Sixers won the following year against Lakers in a rematch. He also had stints with the Utah Jazz and Detroit Pistons.

***



Well, that was...awkward.

But she still has her apologists. Apparently this is a 'non-story' to some on the left.

I'll wait for the FBI investigation result.

*** 

I see Krugman is still an irresponsible, blabbering idiot:

"There’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that governments aren’t deep enough in debt."

Unbelievable.

No Paul. Debt isn't good. Not in the way you advocate for it.

Actually, it's evil the way you spin it.

Paul Krugman's problem (and God knows he's not the only one) is he thinks he's too smart for us who can read through his bull shit.

He knows how to construct his arguments with play word games that appear to have logical consistency even if it's based on false premises of academic economics.

If someone came up to you and said you're household finances are ailing because you're not in debt enough you'd tell that person to (justifiably) you know what. Fuck off, right?

So why do we tolerate it from 'sophisticated' top men? Why is it okay for governments to go into obscene debt enough of it to the point that repaying the debt is impossible (Think of the person who earns 30k a year but manages to rack up 100k of debt)?

The rules of microeconomics don't seem to apply on the macro level according to this line of thinking. In fact, people like Krooooogman will probably assert  individual debt is bad but public debt is good....because Keynes. Stated another way: Intellectuals say we (politicians) have to steal money from you for your own good.

It's outrageous as it is illogical. Everything gets flipped upside down. Mostly because, and this is just a guess on my part, the government is useless at business and economics and they have to spin their fuck ups in a positive way. This is, in a nutshell, Krugman's job. To be a good King's Man.

***

More on gun control: Good intentions end up as bad ideas.


***

Pro-government PenaBots look to silence Mexican activists.

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Family Budget Calculator (for U.S. residents).

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The question then becomes - how to convince Hispanics to drop their liberal loyalty (75% of them believe in big government. This is a discomforting statistic because one can interpret this as Hispanic tolerating socialists and dictators as South American countries like Venezuela have.)

It's crucial libertarian, conservative and classical liberal thought attempts to win the hearts and minds of such an influential voting block.

Via Skeptical Eye:




***

Uber hires people with criminal pasts they scream!

And? So what? If prison time is a way of paying one's debt to society then once this debt is served is it not assumed they're rehabilitated and have a right to earn a living? To deny them this basic right is immoral and inhumane.

I don't see what the problem here is. If anything, it's a good thing. Better that than them returning to a live of crime, no?

Beyond this, it would take an absolute idiot or dedicated statist (I know they're the same thing) to think Uber is a flash in the pan. The only way to crush it is to use the coercive force of the state through excessive regulation and other bureaucratic red tape designed to suffocate business.

***

Democrats can't shake their segragation habit. Why should they? They're good at it.

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More insanity on North American campuses:

"Please Report to Your Resident Assistant to Discuss Your Sexual Identity—It’s Mandatory! Thought Reform at the University of Delaware."

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Protesters: Stop harper from killing your grand children!

My option is someone who will kill my grand children or people who make such proclamations?

I know it's slim pickins' out there but this is ridiculous!

***

When the entire Democrat party was like Donald Trump.

"W]e must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years […], Washington talked tough but failed to act….[O]ur borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again."

Democrat party platform in 1996.

***

Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota.

Let's nationalize it!

***

When liberals were raging racists (and still are through their eugenic/racial based policies):

"Back home, ticker tape parades feted Owens in New York City and Cleveland. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came out to cheer him. Letters, phone calls, and telegrams streamed in from around the world to congratulate him. From one important man, however, no word of recognition ever came. As Owens later put it, “Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send a telegram.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leader of a major political party with deep roots in racism, couldn’t bring himself to utter a word of support, which may have been a factor in Owens’s decision to campaign for Republican Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election.  FDR invited all the white US Olympians to the White House, but not Jesse.

“It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close,” Owens once said about athletic competition. He could have taught FDR a few lessons in character, but the president never gave him the chance. Owens wouldn’t be invited to the White House for almost 20 years — not until Dwight Eisenhower named him “Ambassador of Sports” in 1955."
 
Oh look. A Republican did that in 1955.