Elizabeth Warren is running for President.  Her Twitter handle is no longer @ElizabethForMA, she changed it to @ewarren.

She launched one of those perspective videos that signals she’s running without coming right out and saying it.

From the beginning the video is shit.  She was born in 1949, so when she was a kid, it was the early 1960’s.  A time in which most of the world was just coming out of recovery from WWII or was under the thumb of Soviet or Maoist communism.  GM was the largest private employer in the world.  Houses cost a smaller percentage of income than they do today.  There were no cell phone data plans, internet, or central air to pay for either.

The point is, it was a different world, and just because her mom could help raise a family on minimum wage 50 years ago, doesn’t mean that is economically viable today.

Then the video dives right into the fallacy of zero-sum economics.  There is no pie.

She can go on and on showing Republicans and saying how they are corrupt and ruined the economy, but she an Obama bailed out the banks and refused to prosecute a single bank executive.  So…. bullshit.

But what really got me was one graphic she posted that told me everything I need to know.

This was presented right after she talked about some people cutting themselves a bigger piece of pie.

This is 100% a ploy to generate votes on racial animus and grievance politics.

She is trying to appeal to angry minorities and Liberal “white allies” who love to get offended on minorities’ behalf and have the affluence and influence to protect themselves from the redistributive policies they back.

This is a confiscatory policy aimed  at white Middle Americans who can’t hire accountants to hide money in St. Croix.

This is the coalition Warren is trying to build from a resentful underclass and elite professional class.  No unlike the groups that made up the Red Army during the Russian Revolution.  She is not going to help the middle class.  She is going to have the elite hold it down and let the underclass eat it.

Elizabeth Warren is running on the promise of making you suffer.  God help us of she’s elected.

Creep touches 4-year-old girl on subway

A stranger touched a 4-year-old girl’s buttocks on a Manhattan-bound subway while the child was sitting next to her mother, police said Friday.

The tot and her 33-year-old mom were seated inside a southbound No. 4 train on Thursday around 11:24 p.m. when the man boarded the train at Jerome Avenue and West 183rd Street in the Bronx, police said.

The straphanger sat down on the left side of the girl and placed his right hand under her buttocks, cops said.

I really hate public transportation.

When the child’s mom noticed what was going on, she confronted the creep — who responded by threatening to shoot her, police said.

In most of the states I’ve lived it, if you grab a child’s butt and then threaten to shoot the mom, those will be the last words you ever say.

The woman and her daughter moved away from the stranger, and the mom took a picture of him with her cellphone, cops said.

And in a city of 8 million people, what are the chances he’ll ever get caught?  If he does, how will he be punished?  He looks homeless to me so… they’ll put him back on the streets with a social worker to make him comfortable at the taxpayer’s expense.

I may be a Flyover Country bumpkin, but it seems to me that a mom with a CCW turning a child molester into a chalk outline is the better outcome.

Then again, homeless perverts who ruin the quality of life of tax payers are not considered local flavor who add to the diversity of the community where I live.

The residents of New York City should lose their franchise, i.e., no resident of New York City should have the right to vote in a Federal election and New York lose the electoral college votes associated with the City of New York.

Why?

Because those people are too stupid, wasteful, and corrupt to be trusted to vote in for Federal offices.

From the New York Post:

NYC’s deer sterilization boss is making the big bucks

They’re bagging big bucks in Staten Island – and some deer, too.

The wildlife ecologist running Mayor de Blasio’s deer-vasectomy project raked in more than $603,000 in the first two years of the budget-busting program.

They are performing vasectomies on Deer to control the population?  How is that supposed to work exactly?  It’s not like deer are monogamous.  And what is the point of sending out a fixed male?  It will still consume resources until it dies of natural causes.  And why a vasectomy over gelding, which farmers have been doing since time immemorial?

Dr. Anthony DeNicola, founder of the nonprofit White Buffalo Inc., was paid up to $2,500 a day for 250 days of project management and field sterilization work during the 2016/17 and 2017/18 seasons, according to city budget documents reviewed by The Post.

DeNicola’s wife Vickie was a staff member during the project’s first season, shooting bucks with tranquilizer guns and wrangling the dazed animals, the Staten Island Advance reported. That role paid $1,600 a day for 150 days of work – a total of $240,000 for a job that typically pays just $29,968 a year, according to Ziprecruiter.com.

I’m beginning to suspect that Dr. Anthony DeNicola is buddy-buddy with de Blasio.

The company flew in veterinarian Dr. Steve Timm from Wisconsin for a 15-day stint in 2016 to train other vets to do the vasectomy procedure at a cost of $26,250, paying him $1,750 a day. That’s about four times the going rate for a wildlife veterinarian, according to Glassdoor.com.

Since then, the project’s vets have been earning between $1,050 and $1,700 daily.

My corrupt-o-meter is pegging the top.

So far the city has given 1,456 randy bucks the snip at a cost of $2,652.95 per animal under the terms of White Buffalo’s no-bid emergency contract.

My corrupt-o-meter just overloaded.

A second round of budget increases in July brought the total cost of the three-year program to $4.1 million, up from its original budget of $3.3 million — because the contractor found more deer roaming the borough than he’d expected.

Of course he did.

DeNicola estimated the herd size at 1,884 last spring, which the Parks Department touted as an 8 percent drop from the previous year.

De Blasio’s scheme to curb deer on Staten Island is way over budget
“We expect the population will continue to decrease once we complete our third year and reach our ultimate goal of sterilizing 98 percent of bucks,” said department spokeswoman Meghan Lalor.
But naturalist Kip Adams of Quality Deer Management Association cast doubt on that number.

“If there are 1,400 males there to be sterilized, there are definitely more than 1,800 deer altogether,” Adams said. “You’ll always have at least as many females as males, and most likely more.”  And Staten Islanders insist they’re spotting more deer than ever.

Have they considered that the plan isn’t working?

Oh wait, this is New York City on a no-bid contract.  Of course it’s not working, it’s not supposed to work.  That way they will continue to get a bigger budget and more money to do this forever.

The city’s project is the first-ever attempt to rein in growing herds of white-tailed deer by sterilizing only males. Details of its costs were first reported by the Advance.

Out-of-control deer populations cause deadly traffic accidents, spread tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease, and eat forest ecosystems down to the ground.

This year, deer caused 69 car crashes in Staten Island through Nov. 3, according to the NYPD. That’s on track to match the 99 deer-involved collisions in 2017 — and a steep increase from the 31 accidents blamed on deer in 2015.

Is this more or less bad than de Blasio’s needle drop box program which turned NYC parks into heroin shooting galleries?

Meanwhile, other states have begun to outlaw deer sterilization entirely, condemning the procedure as inhumane.

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a bill Dec. 19 to outlaw a White Buffalo doe-sterilization project in Ann Arbor.

Because Snyder realized it’s a bullshit scam that doesn’t work?

“It’s a cruel way to deal with animals because of the stress of the tranquilization process,” bill sponsor Rep. Triston Cole told the Detroit Free Press.

Because the stress of being tranquilized and given a vasectomy is more than being hit with a 1 oz rifled slug?  That’s some touchy-feely bullshit to sell the bill to the people in the Blue areas of Michigan.

Cole and Snyder are both Republicans from Michigan, they know the way to deal with deer populations is hunting.  You don’t pay some schmuck to tie the buck’s tubes at a cost of 5 to 10 times what a vet charges to spay a dog.  You sell a few more buck and doe tags.

This situation in NYC is no different than what Miguel pointed out with the issuance of gun permits in the city earlier this year.  When the goverment restricts something tightly, it becomes a breeding ground for corruption.

Getting a gun permit requires the police to approve it on a case by case basis, so bribery becomes the norm for anyone to get a permit.

NYC is one of two blacked out areas where any hunting of any kind is totally banned.  The other is the area around Buffalo.

Because no hunting is allowed, the restriction breeds corruption for services to thin out the nuisance deer population.

Of course, there will never be hunting in New York City.  You couldn’t ever impose enough safety restrictions to get the Democrats to sign off on it.  So the deer issue will always be corrupt, no matter how they decide to handle it.

I understand that, I know it will never change, it is part of the culture of New York City.

I just don’t want that culture spreading to the rest of the US so they should lose their franchise.

Call me suspicious, but I don’t think there is nothing wrong with the fridge itself but with something left in the freezer.

Stolen from Rick R.

So I saw this going around the Internet.  It originally dates back to February, but I guess it was recently “discovered” so that it just started making its way around.  It even has a Reddit page.

There is a lot to break down here.

First:

I love Hanlon’s Razor.  It is an aphorism that states “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.”

There needs to be one for situations like that states “never attribute to racism what can adequately be explained by thoughtlessness.”

That Wohl didn’t consider Japanese internment, isn’t prima facie evidence of racism or white supremacy.

Considering that Wohl is Jewish, he may have been thinking of a place like Auschwitz when he made his statement.  As awful as Japanese interment was, that pales in comparison to the enormity of what the Nazis did to the Jews.  If that was his perspective, not including Japanese internment isn’t a racist or white supremacist act.

Accusing him of such doesn’t start a dialog that allows the topic to be explored to a mutually edifying result, it only creates combativeness.

Second:

This is why I hate Twitter.  This is a perfect example of “Dunking Culture,” for lack of a better thing to call it.  Even Slate agrees “Dunking” Is Delicious Sport,
But it might be making Twitter even more terrible.

Rather than having a discussion for (once again) a mutually edifying result, the goal is to generate likes and re-tweets by stating something that makes the other person seem foolish.  Whether or not your statement isn’t equally inaccurate, is beside the point.  You dunk, you win, everyone else is worse off because 140 characters of snark isn’t edifying.

Third:

They are both right and both wrong and I can’t tell what the point of the response is.

If you go into the Twitter thread and read the replies, there are a lot celebrating the dunking, a lot calling Wohl stupid or racist, a few making vaguely anti-Semitic statements about Wohl, but none that I can see exploring this topic.

If, we go with my previous supposition, that Wohl, as an American Jew is thinking about contraction camps the way American Jews think about such things, , i.e., the Holocaust and possibly Soviet Gulags (if like me, you have Russian Jewish blood too), than he is factually correct.

The United States Government has never systematically rounded up, put into camps, and exterminated millions of United States citizens.

The Holocaust wiped out half of Europe’s Jews, roughly 6,000,000 people, in six years.  It was mechanized slaughter of unprecedented scale.   The Nazis killed another 5 million people as political dissidents or undesirables, bringing their body count to almost 11 million civilians total.

Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians to death and murdered another 10 million Soviet citizens, either by execution or being worked to death, in Gulags in Siberia.

Total Japanese internment was 117,000 people.  During that time 1,862 people died during interment, mostly from old age or natural causes.

Korematsu is perhaps one of the most evil decisions made by any group of jurists in the 20th century, but it isn’t in any way tantamount to Wannsee Conference.

The Trail of Tears was one of the worst human rights violations (by modern standards) in American History.  Roughly 4,000 Indians died while being forcibly relocated.  The Soviets did that to pave one road.  The commander of Auschwitz would have called 4,000 dead a slow day of work.

I am not justifying Japanese internment in any way, or attempting to white wash it.  Likewise with the mistreatment of the Native Americans.  However, rational people can quantify evil and by both intent – relocation vs. extermination – and body count – thousands vs. millions – what happened in the United States is no where near what has done in Europe.

This seems like a good time to point out that FDR who signed Executive Order 9066, and Andrew Jackson who led the Trail of Tears were both Democrats.

Slavery and slave catchers are a more difficult to square against the Wohl tweet because that was private enterprise, not government.

Private prisons also difficult to square against the Wohl tweet because that is goverment contract work.  You can dislike the idea of a company profiting off imprisonment, but if the Iron Law of Bureaucracy has taught us anything, letting goverment employees and bureaucrats run a prison isn’t going to improve anything, and will probably make it worse.  We can have a much longer discussion of prison reform later, but the hatred of private prisons is nothing more than than the myopia of people who think that goverment bureaucracies are the fix for everything, and don’t realize how bureaucracies are generally the problem.

All that said, Mr. Rashid’s grander point – that the US government has engaged in human rights violations of ethnic minorities – is accurate.

Both Mr. Wohl and Mr. Rashid are right within a certain framework, and both are wrong in certain ways as well.

One of the issues I have with Mr. Rashid’s dunk is that I don’t think he has talked to many gun rights activists.  His Twitter feed shows that he is on the political Left.

Most, if not all, the ones I know – myself and Miguel included – have cited Japanese interment and the Trail of Tears as justifications for the Second Amendment.

Mr. Rashid has seemed to concede a point often made my the Left that “the Second Amendment only applies to white people.”  Again, this isn’t something that actual Second Amendment proponents believe.

I remember that had FDR lived through WWII, he would have had us Jews relocated under his M Project, so I support the rights of all people to defend themselves from goverment tyranny.

The fact that groups in the past have not been sufficiently able to defend themselves only justifies giving them more access to the tools of self defense.

But rather than have a discussion about gun rights for minority defense, someone decided to dunk and accuse racism instead and the thought termination began.