November 5, 2017

Jim Cavanaugh just now on MSNBC, concerning today's church shooting in Texas:

"They (churches) are the target of evil because they do so much good."

Who wants to bet against my guess that the murderer will turn out to be very religious?

November 5, 2017

Why Bruce Levell is wrong when he says anonymous sources should be ignored

On MSNBC, Trump supporter Bruce Levell just blew off unidentified sources wholesale, implying that they should be summarily ignored.

That's wrong.

If a reputable news source reports information from an unidentified source, that doesn't mean that they don't know where the information came from, it only means that they're keep the identity confidential to protect and maintain a source they value. It doesn't really matter who the source is, it only matters that the trusted news source implicitly vouches for that source, and they know that if the report proves false then the reputation of the news source will be damaged.

It doesn't matter who the source is because you wouldn't know whether that source was trustworthy anyway. What you do know is whether the news source reporting the information is trustworthy, and that's what matters.

November 5, 2017

What will it be like for Trump supporters after Trump is gone and this nightmare is all over with?

I predict it'll be like watching old Star Trek re-runs and suddenly realizing what a terrible actor William Shatner was.

November 4, 2017

Trump calls sentence a disgrace. Meanwhile, thousands of sentences call Trump a disgrace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/us/bowe-bergdahl-sentence.html

November 2, 2017

Hilarious Video by MSNBC: Trump's Habitual Attempts to Cover Up His Teleprompter Reading Impairment

In case you missed this, Trump tries to cover for his teleprompter misreadings by clumsily amending his sentences on the fly, but the result generally makes no sense, and for those paying close attention it makes him look like more of an incoherent idiot than if he'd just correct himself like a normal person would. For example:

"Our hope is a word... and world, of proud, independent nations."

Chris Hayes explains during the first minute, then examples follow.

October 31, 2017

Another cryptic Trump tweet: "NOT IN THE U.S.A.!" (What?)

"In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!"

October 31, 2017

I wonder if "Fake News weak!" was supposed to be "Fake News week!"

I wonder if "Fake News weak!" means "Fake News week!"

Trump's latest tweet:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

October 29, 2017

Christie: Mueller's targets should be concerned

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/29/politics/chris-christie-robert-mueller-cnntv/index.html

October 27, 2017

Help! Does anyone know what "15 times less energy" means?

Here's a paragraph from a CNN article posted today about sugar and cancer:

I can't figure out what that means. It seems to me that if something produces one unit of energy then something that produces 15 times less energy produces 14 units of negative energy, whatever that is.

October 24, 2017

Ari Melber just echoed a point I made last Friday about police cameras.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029733070

For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras.

This test completely misses the point. We all know that there are corrupt police officers, but the purpose of body cameras shouldn't be to somehow transform them into law-abiding, civil rights-respecting, enforcers of the law, it should be to catch them in the act, prosecute them, and convict them. With that in mind the fact that these officers aren't dissuaded by body cameras could actually be good news. It should make it easier to catch them and deal with them.

Maybe the reason the cameras don't seem to make a difference is that those corrupt officers know they'll get away with what they do, camera or no camera. Prosecutors won't prosecute them, juries won't convict them, and above all, they have the backing of our nation's president.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html