Author: Randy

Should Kavanaugh’s high school past be an issue?

You know how everyone says that you never quite leave high school? Have you ever been to your high school reunion and came away amazed at how little the people you knew 20, 30, 40 years ago haven’t changed all that much?

That aside, I believe that there are some positions in our society that require candidates who have lived unimpeachable lives. There are only nine seats on the Supreme Court, so finding nine individuals out of 330 million citizens who are not only qualified but worthy of the position should not be such a big deal.

For the record, I believe the woman. I believe that she had a violent sexual encounter with Kavanaugh. On balance, she will gain nothing from this. She just ruined her life by entrusting Feinstein’s office with these revelations. She’s going to be that guy who caught the foul ball at the Cubs playoff game. She will never get away from this.

Had she reported him the next day and he was found guilty, you would not likely see him sitting in any Senate hearing room today. You might see him toiling away as a law clerk far away from Washington or chasing ambulances in Kalamazoo. With his smarts and connections, he would have lead a prosperous life in obscurity.

Instead, he went on to have an illustrious and distinguished career working at the highest levels. To deprive him of a seat on the Supreme Court would hardly punish him or us in any material way, but his experience serves as a cautionary tale for any aspiring jurist or anyone else seeking a position at the highest levels. Lead an unimpeachable life.

Someone who made up facts in a college newspaper story doesn’t get to be editor of the New York Times, who murdered dogs does not deserve to be a quarterback in the NFL, and who boasts about groping women on national TV shouldn’t be president.

Character matters — probably today more than ever — and integrity is formed and solidified in high school.

(Originally answered at Quora.com)

I don’t follow you

Please don’t be offended, but I probably don’t follow your posts. I bring this up because in the midst of yet-another politically oriented Facebook dust-up, a friend of mine — someone who I consider an actual friend, i.e., someone who I actually know and met and shared many beers with — indignantly deduced that I no longer follow him. He called me a “dick”, to be precise.

I’ve unfollowed most of my 380 or so “friends” not because I don’t care, but simply to turn down the noise. In a sense, I did it because I want to continue to care. I’m always happy to engage with friends via personal messages or get together in real life, but do I want a steady diet of things that annoy me? No, and neither do you.

Back a couple of years ago or so, Facebook gave us an alternative to the “Un-Friending” with a new passive-aggressive feature that allowed us to simply stop posts from appearing in your feed. “Genius,” I thought. “A near-perfect reflection of real life.”

This particular friend has an even more acerbic wit than mine, and he usually expresses his political opinions with more venom. Sadly, I disagree with most of them as I do his rather extreme dislike of anything-Apple. A former college and community-radio rock DJ, this friend has an entertaining punk sensibility, which I enjoy, but he pulls no punches about the music he doesn’t like — some of which I do.

Though not all of his Facebook posts centered on these topics, many of them do, and I suppose I could be a big boy and just shrug it off as the rantings of a fellow frustrated media mogul wannabe, but at my age, when I have the ability to rid myself of annoyances, I just do.

And I’m sure you do as well. Of course, if you have unfollowed me, you aren’t reading this, but I don’t take that as a slight. I know I express some pretty unpopular opinions. To my conservative friends, you probably bristle at my distaste for your particular brand of flag-waving patriotism.

To my liberal friends, you probably believe my libertarian leanings make me some kind of anti-social outlier.

I think the fact that I can simultaneously piss off both sides of the political spectrum with one short post only proves my stances are devoid of hypocrisy. When everyone disagrees with me, that’s when I know I’m right.

I will not let Facebook arbitrate the value of my real-life friendships.

Facebook bandies the word “friend” around like Walmart uses “associates.” They strip the words of their true meaning.

If I call you a friend, that means you do indeed hold a special place in my life. It means that when you call me, I will pick up the phone. When you write me, I will reply. When you ask for advice, I will spend time researching my answer for you. If you travel to my area, I will ask you to stop in for a visit.

What it doesn’t mean is that I’m necessarily going sit in my kitchen and listen to your political rants or feign interest when you whip out endless photos of your vacations, affirmation memes, pets, dinners, or kids. If I ask to see them, then sure.

But I’m more likely to talk to you about your life and listen to any good story you’d like to share. And when you go, I hope to have a good memory and an expectation to see you again before long.

I became a publisher because I couldn’t find enough information on a favorite topic. I wanted to gather an audience of others who wanted the same information, and I had to work to make my magazine interesting to build that audience.

Who do I follow? Simply put, I follow people adept with this particular media to entertain and inform, but I appreciate anyone who shares original and reasonable ideas.

But if you don’t care what I think, that’s fine too.

No such thing as a legal gun in California

Use a gun to defend your family from a home invasion where the 3 thugs kicking in the door and start shooting at you, be ready to be arrested and have your house searched for firearms. They will file every firearm violation against you they can. You will be told you should have called 911 and wait for the police to respond.

www.quora.com/Why-don-t-the-majority-of-US-states-have-gun-licensing-laws-like-California-Why-is-the-US-so-behind-in-gun-control-Even-the-poorest-countries-have-them/answer/Jerry-Myers-2

Lies, damn lies, and liberal gun statistics

I have a dear friend with whom I have a ten-plus-year string of lengthy, well-thought-out email exchange going. Sometimes we simply write about events related to our own lives, but more often than not, we take on the major issues of the day. Most of the time, we share outlooks, but sometimes not. We refer to our current president as “45”, and we both consider him with equal repugnance. Though he considers himself a died-in-the-wool liberal, much of the time his stances sound like pure libertarianism to me. He’d never admit it, however.

The most recent exchange covered the NPR report citing the fallacy of the Government’s school shooting statistics:

Liberal do-gooders have been demonstrating about the whopping 235 school shootings on record in USA, according to a Dept of Education report.

Based on this, protestors make their foamcore placards and go on marches screaming this outrageous statistic as gospel. This leads to more NRA / 2nd Amendment arguments. Which leads to the Dept. of Education making plans to take education $ away from kids to finance arming teachers. A vicious circle, all based on gross misinformation.

Enter NPR. They decided to just call the 235 schools that had listed at least 1 school shooting. Surprise, surprise. Wrong wrong wrong. The total number is not 235. The actual number is closer to…

…11. Ooops.

My response:

I already knew that the liberal party line on the number was wrong. I like to think that whenever I hear these numbers, no matter their source, I become immediately skeptical.

The verifiable stat I like to cite is that my daughter will be hit by a car walking the 300 yards to school thousands of years before some shooter guns her down in her classroom. Kids that ride in cars with their parents are on death’s doorstep compared to the risk of getting shot in school. Hell, more kids die in high school athletic programs than get killed by guns.

Instead of making our sidewalks and streets as safe as possible, the school spends thousands of dollars on check-in systems. They stage shooter drills, watched on by an array of security cameras, and testing special locks while sending teachers to training sessions to deal with a problem that will never happen in Jenkintown.

Never mind the trust factor, these fake stats compel us to spend money better spent elsewhere. There’s a huge new industry of school safety that has sprung up around this hysteria, and you cannot reason with the mothers (yes, it’s almost universally the mothers) of these kids. They don’t care about the reality of the matter. No expense should be spared protecting little Skye and little Justin.

But as far as these marches and stats and demonstrations, I’m not swayed one bit. Yes, there are 300 million guns in this country, but the vast majority of them are in law abiding hands.

I know gun owners. They are about the most serious people I’ve ever met. I could give a rats ass how many they have or what type they own, because I know they are not part of the problem. Pennsylvania is a pretty free state when it comes to gun ownership, and your “progressive” types would have us think that it’s a powder keg here or a major bloodbath waiting to happen. Simply not the case. Never has been. Most of the people shot here are in the cities and are gunned down with an illegal hand-gun.

There will, however, be a blood bath if you try to take them away. I’m certain of that.

I’m a big believer of putting gun safety back on school curriculums. You typically fear the unknown, and this fear leads to hysteria and those crazy and dangerous stats that you have just cited. I have great disgust for people who take a position on an policy based only on the words of the opponents or the supporter. Most (although not all) gun-control advocates have never held a gun — maybe never saw one outside of a cop’s holster — must less fired one.

And no, I also do not give a shit about what other countries do. I don’t care about Canada or Australia or how England does it. The worst of the gun violence exists in our major cities — all Democratically controlled — and all with the strictest possible gun control laws. You remove those cities from the totals, and your averages drop to equal or below the rest of the Western world. Outside of the cities, the remainder of this country’s landmass is awash in guns, and the people who live in those areas are more likely to die by slipping in the shower than they are to be shot in anger by a law abiding citizen.

Welcome to Bernie Sanders’s America

Venezuelan professionals are abandoning hospitals and universities to scrounge livings as street vendors in Peru and janitors in Ecuador. Here in Trinidad and Tobago — a petroleum-producing Caribbean nation off Venezuela’s northern coast — Venezuelan lawyers are working as day laborers and sex workers. A former well-to-do bureaucrat who once spent a summer eating traditional shark sandwiches and drinking whisky on Trinidad’s Maracas Bay is now working as a maid.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/07/27/feature/as-venezuela-crumbles-its-fleeing-citizens-are-becoming-latin-americas-new-underclass/

You do NOT separate kids from parents. Period. 

The policy so far has pushed shelters to their capacity. Trump administration officials are making preparations to hold immigrant children on military bases. On Thursday, the Trump administration said it will house children in tents in the desert outside El Paso. “The really basic, foundational needs of having trust in adults as a young child was not being met. That contradicts everything we know that the kids need to build their health,” said Dr Kraft after her visit to the Texas shelter.

Source: ‘America is better than this’: What a doctor saw in a Texas shelter for migrant children | The Independent

I don’t give a damn what it says in the Bible. You do not make kids suffer, not if you can help it. Ever.

This is not my country. My America does not do this.

What these two incidents prove is that crazy people who want to kill will do so with or without a gun and with or without permission from the state to have said gun. However, only one of these incidents was brought to an end with lives saved—and that was solely due to the fact that Americans refuse to give up their right to own and carry guns.

Source: As Disarmed Canadians Rocked by Bombing, Armed American Citizen Stops Mass Shooting

People hell-bent on killing will find a way.

As Disarmed Canadians Rocked by Bombing, Armed American Citizen Stops Mass Shooting

Millennials flunk Freedom 101

Lack of general economic education seems to be one the factors in Millennial ambivalence towards entrepreneurship and capitalism.
— Read on fee.org/articles/millennials-dig-entrepreneurship-but-dislike-capitalism/

In my experience, most of my teachers from high school on up, especially in Econ, tended to lean left — sometimes heavily so. I’m the face of that, it’s amazing I was able to discern the truth.

You Can’t Deny that Venezuela is a Socialist Calamity – Foundation for Economic Education

This humanitarian disaster has raised the question of who or what to blame. That question puts self-proclaimed socialists and their progressive sympathizers in a difficult spot. After all, one can easily find lots of examples (from Michael Moore to Bernie Sanders) of people on the left praising or endorsing Chavez’s economic policies. So what can people who took that position say in the face of this disaster? And what can the defenders of free enterprise say as well?
— Read on fee.org/articles/you-cant-deny-that-venezuela-is-a-socialist-calamity/

This is what Bernie Sanders wants for us. This is government control.

The kids are not quite right

What explains this generational divergence? The first factor is that young adults may take for granted the bounty capitalism has bestowed, from cellphones to inexpensive air travel to an endless array of food and beverage options. They can’t remember the time when those things didn’t exist.

Why does socialism hang around like fruit flies in an otherwise clean kitchen? Because people like free stuff and hate the rich.

From Reason Magazine. Read more.