Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

California’s New HIV Law

I’ve stated a number of times that in my opinion, the one positive thing you can say about Democrats is that they usually are marginally less offensive than Republicans. But this is is really, really bad: Starting January 1, 2018, it will no longer be a major crime in California to knowingly expose a sexual […]

Freedom of Speech

I am not a libertarian nor am I a member of the ACLU, but I generally agree with them on the importance of free speech. This, I believe, is a real and growing problem on college campuses: Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement crashed an event at the College of William & Mary, […]

Genes, Violence, and Testing

The abstract of an article in Molecular Psychiatry entitled Genetic background of extreme violent behavior reads as follows: In developed countries, the majority of all violent crime is committed by a small group of antisocial recidivistic offenders, but no genes have been shown to contribute to recidivistic violent offending or severe violent behavior, such as […]

People Killed by Police, 2016

As a follow up to my post on homicides in 2016, I decided to combine homicide data from the FBI with figures from the police shooting database from the Washington Post. The only difficulty is that the FBI classifies people as being from Black, White, Other, or Unknown races, whereas the Washington Post breaks out […]

2016 Homicides

The FBI just released data on homicides for 2016. In light of the various protests by the BLM and now football players, I thought I’d provide a a graph.  It breaks out population, homicide perpetrators and homicide victims by race. (click to embiggen) Note… the number of offenders exceeds the number of victims. This is […]

Self-Driving Cars

Being a parent of a child under 16 means trying to figure out ways to get said child from here to there, say from school to home, and from home to after school activities, and then back. There is often a fair amount of juggling involved – one or more, er, “caregivers” are typically involved […]

Habit Formation

There’s a fascinating but barely-accessible-to-a-non-neurologist article about habit formation. Here is a pretty good summary, albeit with an un-helpful title: A single kind of neuron deep within the brain serves as a “master controller” of habits, new research in mice indicates. Some habits are helpful, such as automatically washing your hands before a meal or […]

Justice Denied

From the Daily Mirror: None of the 400 citizens returning here after fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have been charged with war crimes. Yet the Council of Europe’s legal affairs committee recently ruled membership of the terror group, also known as Daesh, is enough for prosecution at the Hague’s International Criminal Court. […]