1.3 Trillion Things To Think About On A Sunday Morning

                The last budget Congress sent Obama contained “only” a 500 billion dollar deficit. A Republican controlled Congress just sent a Republican president a budget containing a trillion dollar deficit.

                And he signed it.

                I may be ready to take the next space shuttle to Mars.

                After signing the bill, President Trump said “There’s nobody more disappointed than me.”  I don’t know about that.

                If you see Democrats walking into walls today, or crossing the street against a red light with traffic squealing around them, or sitting at stop lights long after they’ve turned green it’s because they are in some sort of apoplectic shock that they got their way against all logical odds.  I figure Democrats must be even more confused than conservatives. They just got a budget that seems to fund everything from Planned Parenthood to grants to study the average length of tails on spider monkeys and they got it from a government controlled by the opposition and headed by a guy they hate more than Satan.

                There might be a line to catch that space shuttle.

                I knew on Wednesday something was wrong when I heard Chuck Schumer say this was a good bill and Nancy Pelosi put her Legos down long enough to agree with him and draw some pretty butterfly pictures with sidewalk chalk.

Then I saw an interview with Paul Ryan in which he agreed with them (which is not as big a shock as you might think unless you share my high level of disregard for spineless Paul Ryan) and tried to tell Americans that a $1.6 billion appropriation for a wall on our southern border was almost the same thing as the $25 billion the president asked for because we were only talking about a six-month budget.

Paul Ryan sucks.

A friend sent me an article this week by Dr. Charles Krauthammer who has been out of circulation most of this year for some surgery. Krauthammer has been a fairly outspoken critic of President Trump and has previously made his dislike for him very clear.

But in his article Krauthammer highlights his recognition of Trump as neither a Democrat or a Republican. He doesn’t even think Trump sees himself as a conservative and that he doesn’t see problems or issues as either liberal or conservative. He only sees them as problems that need to be fixed.

Krauthammer recognizes Trump as a pragmatist, simply practical and focused on reaching a goal in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner without emotional distraction. Certainly he is unencumbered by the ideology of either party which has all but stood the Washington establishment on its ear and made him enemies in both camps because his approach is a devastating threat to the status quo (which is precisely why we voted for him, Doctor).

I agree with Krauthammer on Trump’s pragmatism. He doesn’t see immigration as a partisan issue he sees it as a threat to the security and safety of Americans. He doesn’t see the economy as red v. blue, he sees that we need jobs and growth for America to prosper. He doesn’t see “delicate trade negotiations” as apologetic, balance-of-power issues, he sees them as we need to reset agreements so America gets as good as it gives because that’s how a pragmatist does business.

So when he says “We had no choice but to fund our military,” I think he is saying that that consideration outweighs all the pork belly fat to fund every program every legislator from both sides could get slipped into the 2232-page document 15 hours before the vote. I think he figures to deal with that BS later.

And I happen to agree that an undefeatable military should be one of our very top priorities and is a key to maintaining some semblance of world peace.

In 1790 in the first address of the U.S. Congress ever, George Washington said, “To be prepared for war is the most effective means of preserving peace.” Those words are as true today as they were then.

So half--$654.6 billion—of that monstrous $1.3 trillion budget is to fund the military, including raises for one of this nation’s most valuable assets—its military personnel. Most accounts say that is the largest military budget in history and I say it is long overdue to begin to repair the devastation to this nation’s strength under Obama.

Ok, as distasteful as it is, if that’s what he was doing I can see Trump’s logic in securing the funding he wanted for what I think at the moment may be his true #1 priority. I don’t agree with everything Spineless Paul Ryan and Something-Else-Less Mitch McConnell gave away to get it but if I were in charge the government would be shut down and we’d be fighting and filibustering until the 32^nd of June trying to reach a compromise that made me happy.

Oh, and somebody explain to me how defending the situation of the DACA kids has now become a Republican cause that the Democrats have completely lost interest in because they don’t need to use 800,000 kids plus another million illegals at the moment to accomplish their objectives. Not when they have Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to do it for them.

I’ll send you a post card from Mars. Or maybe I’ll just get up and go to work tomorrow. I haven’t decided yet.

When Evil Shows Up For Work

                As a concerned citizen and nonprofessional writer of what seems to be troubling our nation—but mostly me—from week to week, I have to say that the current concern over mass shootings has captured this nation’s attention more thoroughly than anything else except the fact Donald Trump is President, which is the background music for all decisions, actions, protests, hatred, burnings, lootings, parades, murders of cops,  issues and actions by the left.

                And I think it’s a good and obvious thing that we’ve become obsessed with finding a solution to school and other mass shootings. Regardless of whether you include a blessing or a death-wish for President Trump in your newsreel to God, or whatever you might believe in at night I think we are all mortified by the specter of some horrific, emotionally-damaged, two-legged animal walking through our schools slaughtering defenseless children in any quantity, be it three or 17. Oh, and with an AR-15, of course, even though other weapons were used more often, but the current narrative is the current narrative, right Anderson?

                The image is so horrible and the instinct to protect our young so overwhelming that we are even willing to overlook the fact that mass shootings, in particular mass school shootings, are not statistically significant in terms of the number of annual homicides by gunfire in this country alone—and we only rank 112^th globally in gun-related deaths annually (sorry to use a fact on my liberal friends).

                For those of you who didn’t just race to the nearest park to hold hands and howl at the sky because you are out of big-people words, let me just say that I am no different. These slayings of innocent children trouble me a lot more than most of the other homicides committed every year.

                On any given weekend in Chicago as many as 50 young black men will murder 50 other young black men with guns and for some reason that doesn’t interest the lamestream media or capture the nation’s attention at all. Not in the context of the comparatively small number of black men shot by police, mostly justifiably, but not all; and certainly not in the context of a case of a heavily armed, twisted soul “wading through bodies” (a little dramatic but it’s a term I read in some op-ed this week) murdering unarmed and innocent students and their teachers in schools.

                It shouldn’t be any surprise to me that the media and their sheeple want to hold President Trump responsible because any chance to hate President Trump for the left is, well, a chance to hate President Trump. Blind hatred is a weird thing. It seems completely incomprehensible to me that no journalist has been able to do a little simple math and point out that in fact, more mass shooting deaths by the current definition (that is, not counting war casualties) occurred on Barack Obama’s watch than all other president’s in history combined.

                Yup. Three hundred and eleven souls massacred during his presidency in what we call mass shootings (still a small number out of the roughly 64,000 homicides that occurred in the same time frame, but we’ve already established the horror of wantonly slain innocents). And I do not blame Obama for it anymore than the left should blame Trump for the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which they will continue to do whether it makes sense or not.

                At least I could make a case that Obama’s race-baiting made a significant contribution to the overall number of homicides during his Reich, but I will save that for a discussion of the fun we live with that IS the Obama Legacy.

                And the left still wants to blame the NRA. Ok, it’s a free country (in no small part because of the NRA, but let’s set that aside for a moment). “No one needs an assault rifle.” “You don’t hunt deer with an AR-15.” “Donald Trump is owned by the NRA.” (What? Because with $4 billion in the bank he has to listen to anyone else’s money? Sure.)

                I do not belong to the NRA anymore than I belong to the LGBT&Q but I support the right of both of them to exist, just as I support the right of people frustrated by the murder of children in schools to lash out at the NRA because they have to be mad at someone.

                Do large lobbying organizations who make huge campaign contributions either directly or through their memberships have too much power and control in Washington? You bet. Is the NRA one of those? You bet. So is The American Federation of Teachers, The ACLU, the oil and gas lobby, the insurance lobby, the transportation lobby and the good old boys from the Silicon Valley. (And Uranium One?)

                It’s a system that is out of control but has been generations in its evolution and even Donald Trump may not be able to overcome the billions upon billions of dollars at stake in the corrupt cesspool that is our government though I will give him credit for being one of the only presidents who has tried. (Oh yes he has, you rage-blind haters.)

                For the sake of argument—which costs no one anything—let’s let the left have their gun ban hypothetically. In our imaginations let’s let them send their Hitler-like storm troopers out (they hate that analogy because the truth hurts and they would rather believe the right are the Nazi’s even though we’ve made it pretty clear we reject socialism) to collect all of our guns the way Hitler, Mao, Lenin, and Pol-pot did before they slaughtered millions in the name of “progressive thought.”

                So there we would be in our gun free society with a unicorn in every yard and rainbows on every corner and none of the law-abiding citizens who voluntary complied with the New World Order and gave up their firearms would have any guns with which to kill anybody.

                Which is where I see the first problem. Because the non-law-abiding citizens who hadn’t given their guns up would now have an entire nation as a “gun-free zone” and be free to murder and pillage as the mood struck them and “wading through bodies” might not be just an overly dramatic metaphor anymore. Not to mention the threat of our ability to form a citizen militia to keep our government in check in the likely scenario that at some point we might put another power-hungry racist like Obama back in the White House and have no way to defend ourselves.

                But I keep coming back to the same conclusion I come to every time I think or write about this issue because it’s the only one that makes sense to me. We are welcome to try but I don’t think we can pass enough laws to abolish evil.

                Allow me to alienate my friends on the right as well, but I don’t care one way or the other if we do outlaw AR-15’s. Go ahead. There are still plenty of other weapons available (plus the AR-15’s that would still be in black market circulation) to allow evil people to kill innocent people. And the only way I know of to assuredly stop evil when it shows up for work is to put a bullet in its head.

                This week in a “Special” to the Washington Post, Helaine Olen, who blames the NRA for mentally ill shooters apparently, claimed that “the U.S. has more gun violence than any other First World country.” A statement that can only be true if the writer has the license to define for their own purposes which nations shall constitute The First World. Convenient for making a point that isn’t true but I am pretty sure Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands would resent giving up their First World status and becoming mere shitholes on Olen’s custom made globe.

                Even if the U.S. were to lead in all the awful statistics the left wished we led in, I think it would have more to do with a lot of other issues that go way beyond gun ownership and have more to do with the loss of a national moral compass, crippled nuclear families, digital depression, identity politics, the new definition of diversity, and so many other issues from which I fear we will never recover.

                This much I believe with all my heart: Blame the NRA ‘til the sixth Tuesday in July but the blood of the next batch of innocents at a school shooting is on the hands of the left if we do not take down the “gun free zone” targets and arm through a paid or voluntary system a few competent individuals who can protect our children and our grandchildren when evil kicks down the door.

                The End.

Thanks Officers. No Thanks Talk Show Host.

                So I am departing the national media scene this week—mostly—because neither Fox News or CNN needs my advice as much as I wish they did. Instead I want to address a topic a little more personal to me because when I heard what I heard I nearly drove my car off the road screaming at my radio.

                Anyone who reads my blog regularly (God bless you) or even occasionally knows that my son is a police officer. A fact about which I am extremely proud and terrified every single day.

                So when I heard a caller to a popular afternoon talk radio show in Denver call in as the discussion wound around the potential resignation, or not, of Denver’s mayor for flirting with a female cop via email make the following statement: “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag,” I was outraged.

                But I didn’t have my meltdown until I heard the talk show host—whom I have grown to really enjoy most of the time—try and handle the caller gently and empathetically instead of ripping her head off for making such a patently ridiculous, stupid, biased and out-of-line statement. Talk like that is not only stupid it is not helpful and is actually dangerous to the well-being of law enforcement officers in a political climate still in the throes of trying to shake the Obama Legacy of racial division which includes cop-hating.

                After said talk show host finished drying the caller’s tears she seemed a little remorseful for not standing up for officers in the face of such extreme willful ignorance and mentioned the death of Jessica Hernandez as a result of an officer-involved shooting after the 17-year-old girl who had been out smoking pot all night with her pals in a car they had stolen aimed that car at two police officers who confronted her and drove all 4,000 lbs. of it at them like a weapon in a tight alley where the cops had limited options for dealing with the threat. She did ram one of the officers breaking his leg. She was shot three times and died.

                Tragic for sure. But completely justified according to the Denver Police Department Review Board and anyone with any common sense or parenting skills.  And DPD still paid the young lady’s family $999,999, money being all the family was looking for according to Jessica’s own cousin immediately after the shooting. (See my blog from 4/16/17, “The Million Dollar Question.”)

                The host allowed that while that shooting may have been controversial, the cops were probably justified in their response.  She didn’t say it while being confronted by Ms. Body Bag, but at least she finally got around to saying it.

                I know how liberals and the media, in general, hate, ignore and have no use for the facts, but let’s take a needless moment to deconstruct an asinine statement like “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag.” How smart does one have to be to recognize the hyperbole in that statement?

                And yet the talk show host let her get away with it. Shameful.

                There was no public information officer available when I called the DPD but the duty officer I spoke with at length was extremely confident that already this year (in then 69 days) the DPD had been called to close to 100,000 incidents. That seems high to me but let’s say the officer was engaging in a little hyperbole of his own and the number is half that, or even a quarter. I think 25,000 officer-involved incidents has a better chance of being on the low side than 100,000 does of being on the high side.

                So let’s pretend we’re CNN for a moment and run with 25,000 incidents as if it were a fact instead of merely an educated conservative guess. According to a timeline created by The Denver Post (a medium with its own well-documented anti-police history) there have been 16 officer-involved shootings in the entire state of Colorado in 2018 through the seventh of March, three of which involved Denver police officers specifically.

                Let me do the math for you, three incidents out of 25,000 supposed calls is .012%. That is a long way from one body bag per call (and they didn’t all end in death) and no one should be allowed to make a kick-me-in-the-head stupid statement like that and not get called out for it.

                On January 26, a DPD officer shot and wounded (in the left hand) a juvenile charged with first degree assault on a police officer and robbery for pointing a handgun at said officer when confronted.

                The DPD, in fact, managed not to kill anyone this year until February 6 when after 45 minutes of attempted negotiation with a man barricaded in a bedroom at his mother’s house where he had been threatening his mother with a “large butcher knife,” the man exited the bedroom and rushed at four officers brandishing the knife.

                Then on the 13^th of February a 22-year veteran of the DPD shot and killed a man as that man simultaneously shot his 86-year old father in the head over an apparent disagreement. Apparently.

                In the same time frame—statewide—two law enforcement officers were killed and three wounded (I could’ve sworn there were three officers killed this year but the Post says no) by bad guys as the officers were trying to keep us safe from armed criminals by enforcing the law.

                I am not a police officer but I pray to God that if anyone ever points a gun at my son, or rushes him with a knife or aims a car at him and accelerates as if it were a weapon that he empties his .45 into their bouncing and jerking corpse.

                I hate cop haters. As a society we cannot ask police officers to enforce our laws and do the things we are afraid, unwilling or just hesitant to do and then find fault with them for defending their own lives when they are placed in jeopardy keeping us safe. They have families they'd like to go home to when their shift is over too.

                Save the “one bad exception proves the rule” argument for your next liberal “ain’t it awful” whine and cheese gathering. Yes there are bad cops. Trigger happy cops should get the same treatment trigger happy criminals should get. Every cop I personally know thinks that.

                And allowing people to call talk radio and broadcast to however many thousands of people are listening a comment like, “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag,” without taking them to task for it is contributing to the level of danger those guys face every day because for every hysterical nut job willing to make that call there is one in the audience listening and they might have a gun.

                Things are dangerous enough for police in the wake of now citizen Obama’s hateful and fomenting words helping create and perpetuate the myth that our nation has militarized a band of irresponsible troglodytes that awake every morning hoping that today is the day they get to kill a young black male, or failing that at least someone.

                When you lay your head down on the pillow at night and sleep soundly because you don’t have to worry about an unpoliced populace of evil maniacs breaking into your house to steal your stuff or your life or to rape your daughter, maybe it wouldn’t be too much to ask that you remember because of whom that is possible.

Good, Evil and Statistics

                “Two things can be true at once: guns can be used for evil and guns can be used for good.” –Colion Noir, recently.

                It seems this nation is at a new “crossroads” every week or so. That may be overly dramatic and naïve but there’s no doubt the new hot topic at the water cooler is gun control. Or not.

                One side clamors for an outright ban of all firearms at the extreme to more gun control laws on the more moderate end of the “It’s the gun’s fault,” argument. The other side wants to put hand guns in their kid’s lunchboxes at the extreme and they want more armed presence and protection in general and at schools in particular at their more moderate end.

                One side is quick to want to abandon the Second Amendment of the Constitution and the other side wants rocket launchers on their patios. And neither side seems willing to listen to the other side, which is nothing new in the last nine years or so of political discussions.

                But we should.

                I am so sick of pie charts, bar charts and adjusted data that I could scream. You should only draw conclusions using facts but it can be awfully confusing even discerning what the facts are and as usual, you can’t rely on today’s media for much help with the truth.

                Two weeks ago I tried to research existing gun laws and discovered that there are literally thousands of them. That is partially due to the fact that most gun regulations are left up to individual states and the duplication of some of the basics is overwhelming. Oh sure, there are federal gun laws that override everything but there are some states that allow local municipalities to override state gun laws and that really compounds the number of regulations.

                My conclusion is that we already have plenty of gun laws. What we may have is an enforcement problem, and good luck with that. Start at the top with murder is illegal and we have people willing to overlook that one a few thousand times every year.

                Enter the pie charts. The U.S. has 88.8 guns per 100 people. Far more than second place so obviously that’s the problem, right? If you cherry pick your data you can find 71 other “developed” countries with a lower per capita gun murder rate that the United States.

                If you don’t want to offend an awful lot of countries who didn’t realize they were shitholes instead of developed nations by cherry picking your control group there are actually 111 other countries that have higher gun homicide rates than the U.S.

                We do have a lot of guns. I have friends who need more than one gun safe. I have more friends who don’t own a single gun. Anecdotally, gun owners seem to be split about 50/50 conservative or liberal either way. Lots of my liberal pals own a dozen firearms and get real quiet when the “ban the NRA” conversations start.

                Fact, I think: only 34-39% of U.S. households account for 100% of gun ownership. That’s a range from Forbes Magazine, The Guardian and the F.B.I.

                Here’s another interesting statistic if you want to keep pulling out your bar graphs: in national gun-related homicides per million guns, Taiwan is #1 at 177. The oft cited, peaceful, gun-controlled Nederlands has 108.

                The U.S. has 34, lower than Italy, Ireland and Belgium, among others.

                Please, I am not trying to say guns are not used for nefarious and deadly purposes. C’mon. That’s why we conservatives need to shut up for a minute and listen to those on the left. Their concerns are real. Their feelings are genuine. The same people who wore uniforms died for them to have their crazy liberal opinions just like we are entitled to our conservative thoughts.

                Besides, I suppose there is always the chance they will have a good idea. But if they do they need to be louder than the media and the politicians they constantly let speak for them because those idiots can’t seem to do anything but parrot the same old lines.

                Plus, you know what, the people on the left need to listen to us as well because this Mexican standoff over the second amendment isn’t saving the lives of kids at schools when active shooters show up. We are never going to give up all of our guns and I have the distinct impression that like Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, the left is never going to stop asking us to.

                I love doing research, partly because there is so much information out there at a keystroke and partly because some of it is so astoundingly inaccurate it can be amusing. I found a Vox video asserting all the facts worth knowing about the “obvious and undeniable gun problem in America.” They didn’t cite their sources but they claimed 130 “mass shootings” in the U.S. from 2000-2013.

                I was shocked because my own research using multiple sources turned up 30 mass shootings from 1999-current. Trying to find where Vox got their info I turned up another timeline that had the count at 32 since 2000. Close enough for government work and amateur blogs.

                I did finally stumble on a September 24, 2014 NYT article claiming the F.B.I. statistic of 160 “mass shootings” involving active shooters in confined and populated areas between 2000 and 2013. Of course, I also found the NYT retraction on page A19 on October 14, 2014 (the only way to read the NYT is to google “retractions {subject matter} after you read anything those creative writers print) in which they clarified that the actual FBI statistic cited “active shooter incidents,” not “mass shootings.” An active shooter incident is any situation where shooting is in progress when law enforcement is contacted.

                Sort of different a little bit, but I figure Vox must’ve gotten their info similarly confused.

                Vox had other statistics on guns and homicides that they failed to attribute so I kept digging and found that most of their info was based on an early 1990’s study by Hemeway and Miller and then applied to and mixed with incidents in the 21^st century.  There is a Forbes article (Google it yourself, I can’t do everything for you) discrediting the Hemeway-Miller study as being based on a great deal of conjecture because the gun ownership data they claimed was not available at the time of the study.

                Forbes also put forth an updated correlation of the Hemeway-Miller study using actual gun-ownership data that says 92% of gun homicides cannot be explained simply by gun availability, although it does seem rather self-explanatory that at the moment of each gun homicide a gun was available.  Statistics, eh?             

                Here’s another fun thing to think about while you’re picking the lint out of your navel: according to The National Research Council the United States does lead most nations annually in the rate of non-gun homicides. Google the FBI stats on murders by knives and hammers if you want to lay awake nights. 

                If we’re going to have a discussion then let’s be honest and use real facts, and for goodness sakes, listen to each other even if it makes your blood boil. Don’t tell me how swell things are in Australia and Norway and we won’t tell you how great they are in Switzerland or Israel.

                The mass shootings I care about stopping the most are the ones occurring here in the U.S. of A. I don’t know what’s going on for sure in other countries cultures. I can barely understand what is going on in this one most of the time.

                Here’s one last set of statistics: In 2011 according to something I saw last week that I forgot to document (sorry if you dispute it) we passed the tipping point in the U.S. wherein over 50% of the country officially had cell phones. I can only imagine what the percentage is today.

Cell phones are great for a lot of stuff. Not so great for other stuff.  I don’t know if anyone knows the number but a huge percentage of us are addicted to social media on our phones.  Fun stuff. Also a terrific platform making it impossible to escape bullying, political vitriol, gossip, rumors, lies, truths you’d have been better off not knowing and other subtle and not-so-subtle stressors.

For those of you who follow my stuff, two weeks ago I documented (assuming my mass shooting timeline is right because I believe it) 30 mass shootings in the last 19 years corresponding to the introduction of violent video games with five mass shootings in the previous 50 years. Of those 30 21^st century (for the most part) shootings 23 of them occurred after the 2011 cell phone majority threshold. Twenty three. Seven years.

Not sure how many cell phones or what social media platforms there are in Australia or Norway but sure, we can keep blaming guns and only guns because cell phones don’t kill people, people kill…hey wait a minute.

But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

So if the left would please listen to the right for just a second because, believe it or not, our opinions count too even though we don’t wear pink hats with kitty ears on them or watch as much CNN, we don’t think any number of laws will solve “America’s gun problem,” mostly because we don’t think there’s a gun problem no matter how mad that makes the left.

Our solution tends more toward preparedness in lieu of changing reality. Start with taking down those ridiculous “gun free zone” targets. Yes indeed, we are in favor of fewer school nutritionists and extra vice principals and administrators and instead put a few armed retired military or police officers on every high school campus in America and put up signs that let the Dylan’s, Klebold’s and Cruz’s of the world know that if they come in the door with a gun they are likely to leave on a stretcher.

If there are teachers who wish to undergo training and carry or safe a weapon in their classrooms, please, let them.  Way more effective than a can of corn or a thrown book at stopping a sick kid with a gun.

And oh my goodness, save the “it’s not a Hollywood movie, what about kids in the crossfire,” argument for when you lefties are hanging out on your own talking about how crazy we conservatives are. At least there would be bullets flying in the general direction of the crazy bastard shooting up your local high school. Don’t spill your wine.

I raised ultra-fine kids too and I have a grandchild and more coming some day and that is my belief as a patriarch in my little tribe and whether you like it or not I am entitled to my opinion.