In a recent post I looked at the theodicy expressed or implied by people as they sought to explain some “larger meaning” in hurricanes and other natural disasters. Theodicy is literally “the justice of God,” or figuratively the broader question of “Why do bad things (or good things) happen in this world?” That latter interpretation has come to include both… Read more »
Say you are playing a card came and someone hands you a shuffled deck of cards for you to examine, and while going through the deck you see three cards of the same value in a row in the deck, say, three kings. You likely say, “Whoa, this deck is not properly shuffled; the cards aren’t random.” But you may… Read more »
Debt financing is commonly called leverage for a good reason: The lever is one of the classic “six simple machines” we learned about in school. Using a long stick and a fulcrum, a lever trades distance moved for force, enabling the lifting of a heavy object, or, in a financial example, the purchase of a new car with little money… Read more »
Two horrible mass shootings in a short amount of time this past weekend in El Paso and Dayton have unleashed the normal bad arguments and excuses. This a quick post about how to parse the worst ideas from the better ones. It starts with an annoying but important earworm from Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the… Read more »
The refugee crisis on the southern U.S. border confirms to me how impotent religion is in addressing the most pressing social and moral problems of our day, taking a back seat to political ideology and innate human “fear of the other.” The current administration’s policies of child separation, indeterminate detention, and harsh detention conditions for people convicted of no crime… Read more »
In a prior post I looked at the “infinitesimal phenomenon” in gun violence occurrences, where the closer you look for “the one cause” of any gun event, the more it slips away. Yet, in aggregate and over time, the causes are clearly real. In this continuation, we’ll look at why gun violence statistics are so constant over time, or if… Read more »
Despite being an advocate for serious gun law reform, I do have to say that there is one approach from my fellow advocates that often fails upon examination, and the “2A” defenders like to make hay of it. A lot of media attention is directed at “one cause” propositions like “mental health” or particular registration laws. But upon examination of… Read more »
Whenever I review the updated numbers from the excellent Gun Violence Archive project, I am struck by the unrelenting “randomness with predictability,” in effect the cruelest of lotteries, that are the rates of gun violence casualties in the United States. You just don’t find any numbers like these anywhere else in the developed world. And note how little these per-day… Read more »
The Democratic Primary debates have begun and only one candidate, Elizabeth Warren, appears to be seriously talking about where to come up with the money to fund the many spending proposals on the table. By my count, this leaves 23 candidates who need a serious tax revenue plan, so please send this post to your favorite candidate. I can tell… Read more »
You can pick your numbers as to when it occurs, but the impending demographic changes in the United States under which white Americans become the numerical minority in the country may either strike fear in your heart or hope for societal improvements, depending on your ideology. Despite the headlines, however, the math and associated politics do not support as radical… Read more »