Scott Adams's Blog, page 275

Measuring the Disenfranchised

There are still some things I don’t know how to Google. For example, I’d like to know which political groups are getting the LEAST of what they are demanding.

Obviously poor people get screwed under every scenario. But what about Latinos, African-Americans, LGBT folks, seniors, white males, and women? How are each of those groups doing in terms of getting what their majority wants in the political realm?

Can you fill in the blanks? All I need are the issues that a majority of any American demographic group favors but has so far been denied by the larger majority of voters or law-makers.

Feel free to add any other disenfranchised groups you think should be included.

Who are the big losers (other than the poor) in our political system?

Update: I’m seeing comments about gun ownership, middle class folks, and even top 1%ers, but those don’t count because you can change your membership in those situations. I’m talking about the cards you were dealt at birth, such as gender, ethnicity, etc.

Native Americans are also mentioned in the comments. But I don’t see reference to a particular issue that the majority in that demographic group favor, other than “give back the country.”

How Trump Can Solve Immigration

Donald Trump is in hot water lately for treating a writer with a joint disease the same way he treats everyone else. Most people, including me, felt Trump’s behavior was appalling. If Trump shakes off that controversy and goes on to win the presidency, he has some big campaign promises to keep about immigration. 

Let’s talk about that.

Is it possible to deport 11 million people, build a wall, and make Mexico pay for it? It might be. Regular readers of this blog know that I often suggest what I call the “bad version” of an idea to see if you can fix it. Today I want to see if you can imagine a way Trump keeps his campaign promises on immigration and makes everyone happy, including Latinos.

In a prior post I predicted that Trump has a “third-act” surprise on immigration. I don’t know what that surprise will be, so today is just an example of one way to go at it.

For starters, let’s say President Trump proposes a law to create temporary (for one year) Mexican embassies out of every United States Post Office. Nothing will change physically, and the business of the Post Office would continue as usual. The only difference is that an illegal immigrant can fill out a form in any Post Office to become temporarily legal while a path to citizenship gets worked out. In the meantime, we make sure everyone is at least paying taxes on earnings.

Under this model, an undocumented immigrant walks into a Post Office – which we count as deportation – and fills out a form to become a temporary legal resident. When the pre-American walks out of the Post Office, he or she is in the system and considered legal until a permanent status is determined.

So the answer to whether we can deport 11 million people is probably yes if we do it with brains instead of handcuffs. It could be as easy as making forms available in the Post Office. We already do that with tax forms, and the starting point here is to get everyone on the tax rolls, so it seems a natural path.

Let’s also assume that there are a variety of paths to citizenship. For example, if the applicant has been working and paying taxes for years, with no criminal record, he’s in. If he joins the military, he’s in. And so on.

But what about the illegal immigrants who don’t have jobs and fear they will not meet the requirements of citizenship? What would cause them to register with the system?

That’s where the wall comes in.

Trump already told us it would be “big, beautiful wall with a door.” Let’s imagine the beautiful door as more of an arch situation.

[Photo of St. Louis Arch and surrounding city]

Wait, no. That’s not big enough. We want something more like the 9th Wonder of the World. We want a gateway to Mexico that is a tourist attraction, like Las Vegas meets Mount Rushmore meets the Statue of Liberty. Restaurants, shopping, shows, entertainment, and more. We want our border states to beg for the right to host this gateway city because it will be a boon to tourism.

And you know what it would take to build something so impressive, and staff it in perpetuity?

Answer: Lots of workers

Donald Trump’s real estate development talent multiplied by the resources of the United States creates a lot of potential. But the government doesn’t want to be in the tourism business directly. So imagine that in this situation the United States is mostly a project manager and organizer for free enterprise. Let’s say the government buys all the land and leases it to hotels, casinos, and more. The landlord always makes the money, and that would be the United States.

And on the other side of the arch, in Mexico, the same sort of development happens. That’s how Mexico makes enough money (tourism, rental income) to “pay for the fence.” Assuming bond financing, both the U.S. and Mexico should make an eventual profit. And that money can go to fixing up the unimpressive parts of the border fence over time.

Now let’s say the United States offers a guaranteed job at the wall – with a path to citizenship – for anyone who relocates to work on it. This would be strictly optional. Moreover, any legal citizen would get the same offer of a job, just to keep things fair(ish).

How good would the jobs be? Suppose we assume the wall construction project is designed from scratch to be an amazing place to work. Bring the entire family. Food is great, healthcare is provided, and school too. Learn a trade for six months before starting work. And let’s say the entire environment is designed for English immersion training. Mix in the American unemployed who join the fun and you have an attractive community for work and play. With lots of soccer fields for fun.

And let’s say the economic burden for building this great environment is placed on the private businesses that want a piece of the hotel, restaurant, and gambling world to come. 

A side benefit of building this gateway city is that it will absorb a huge number of workers on the Mexican side that might have otherwise considered coming illegally to the United States. 

Now let’s keep thinking big about what this “wall” actually is. I can imagine a bullet train operating inside the wall, with shops and entertainment on each side, at least within the gateway city. I can imagine solar panels all along the top. I can imagine condos built into the wall. You can add more ideas. The point is that “wall” is thinking small. Think gateway city.

But let’s add one more twist to this idea to get the bad blood behind us and start treating Mexico like a good neighbor. Let’s make that archway to Mexico more of a Statue of Liberty situation – a permanent thank-you to Mexico – for the labor that helped make the United States great. Let’s turn it into a positive.

The gateway city would only protect a tiny part of the actual border, but it would generate permanent revenue to fund border control elsewhere.

I can also imagine designating large stretches of the border as drone and robot test sites for American businesses. I think we are within ten years of having full robotic border control (non-lethal). We should make the border regions available for private robot/drone businesses to test their solutions. We know we will someday need to contain the ISIS Caliphate borders, and this is good practice. The only requirement for testing on the Mexican border is that your robot has to operate on some common government communication network so no robot operates independently. 

None of this matters unless Trump convinces Latinos to vote for him. Would they vote for Trump if he made deportation a trip to the Post Office, offered to build a friendship arch to Mexico, provided good jobs and training plus English immersion to all?

And suppose he offered to do it at a profit for the United States?

As I said, this is the “bad version” of an immigration/wall plan. Does it have potential with some tweaking?

We used to think big. I miss that. I also miss the days when we showed who we were instead of talking about it. Immigration gives us a chance to decide who we want to be. I say let’s continue to be a nation of problem-solvers, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Note: Disqus locked me out again so I won’t be commenting until we find a way to replace Disqus.

Trump Trouble Report

According to the press, Donald Trump had a bad week. If the game we are playing is two-dimensional politics, they are 100% right.

But what if the game is three-dimensional politics? The third dimension is emotion and persuasion, not reason. Let’s see how Trump did in the third dimension.

Here I pause to remind new readers that I am reporting on Trump’s skills as a Master Persuader. I am not endorsing him, or anyone else. I am not smart enough to know who would be the best president. All the candidates look qualified to me, albeit in different ways. 

Trump’s notable “mistakes” this week – in the 2D realm of politics – are as follows:

1. Trump claims he saw “thousands” of Islamic celebrants in New Jersey on 9/11. The press has labelled that untrue. They are less unanimous on why he is making the claim. Is it a political lie with racial motives, a simple mistaken memory combined with his strategy of never apologizing, or something more along the lines of crazy? 

Also…

2. Trump mocked an enemy reporter who has a physical disability. In the video, Trump does a sarcastic physical impression of the man that is hilarious to anyone with a sick sense of humor but appalling to anyone who has the least bit of respect for humankind. Personally, I’m in that second group, and I advise you to pretend you’re in it too.

In the world of two-dimensional chess, either one of these recent “mistakes” would end a candidate’s chances. But as we have learned, Trump keeps using some sort of secret sauce to escape that fate, time and time again. Can he do it this time?

Here’s my analysis and prediction, using the Master Persuader filter that says all that matters is how our subconscious receives messages. Reason and logic are illusions in our decision-making. In the third dimension, where emotion is the music, Donald Trump is the orchestra conductor. Or he has been so far.

On Trump’s claims of “thousands” of Islamic celebrants in New Jersey on 9/11, your rational 2D political mind is shouting “Iiar!” But you probably also believe – based on the size of the population of the United States – that there were indeed thousands of Islamic observers spread out across the country who were a little bit happy to see America get kicked in the teeth. The details of Trump’s claim are unlikely to be exactly true – just like most of what you hear on the campaign trail – but in some statistical sense it sounds like it is probably true-ish. Realistically, thousands of people probably celebrate the wrong things every day. If you put 300 million people on the same landmass, you get thousands of examples of just about any offensive behavior you can think of. 

So Trump’s lie has the curious quality of registering as true, according to your general statistical sense of things. And you tell yourself this guy is probably going to be the strongest defense against that specific threat.

In summary, ISIS and the press have created an Islamic monster under the bed in the minds of the American public. Thanks to Trump’s enemies in the press, the public is spring-loaded to look for the strongest leader to oppose the strongest (perceived) threat which is ISIS. Advantage: Trump.

On Trump’s mocking of the reporter with a disability, that probably crossed the line of appropriate presidential behavior according to nearly every observer. But in one week you’ll remember that Trump is similarly unkind about the physicality of all the other candidates as well. He called Rubio sweaty, Rand Paul unattractive, and Fiorina stern-faced. And you will also remember that Trump is the recipient of more physical insults than any human in the history of the universe. 

Don’t believe me? I’m fairly sure his bad hairstyle is a side-effect of some balding and a combover. We can say we’re mocking his choice of hairstyle, but on some level we’re all making fun of his hair loss. I have been part of that mocking.

And we know that people with hair have more social and economic advantages than people with baldness. We don’t call unattractiveness a disability, but only because it would make things worse for that group, including me.

So here’s the interesting thing. Can you criticize Trump for mocking the reporter’s physical imperfection while simultaneously mocking Trump for hair loss? The press is telling us we should hate Trump for being so cruel. But your subconscious just told you that he is a lot like you – sort of an asshole. (Your mileage may vary. I’m speaking about the public in general.)

I don’t think Trump planned any of the problems of this week, by the way. None of this was a master strategy sort of thing. But my prediction is that he shakes it off because his "mistakes” live in the 2D world of politics and we only pretend to care about that dimension. Trump would not be dominating the Republican field if we did. And on the third dimension, Trump continued to dominate.

I predict that Trump’s poll numbers will stay strong, give or take some temporary dips.

I remind you that the Master Persuader filter is not intended replace whatever truth you have picked as your reality. I present it for entertainment and to see how well it predicts events compared to the 2D reporting everywhere else.

Update:

As a matter of record, the style of mocking Trump used on the reporter (including the hand gestures) has a long history in the mocker’s toolbox. I’ve been on the receiving end more than I should admit. It inspired this comic strip and at least one other with the “fuh fuh fuh” theme.

True story: Dilbert comics have been used in court cases to establish the date something was “common knowledge,” as in “The accused should have known by then that the Year 2000 bug was coming because it was even mentioned in a Dilbert comic…”

Worst Social Justice Organizer Ever

If you plan to organize an online protest, maybe you should not include proof you are wrong about everything in your opening message. 

Don’t we usually call the person who initiates the insults the fight-picker? Or does it work differently in other parts of the country?

Is the United States a Patriarchy or a Matriarchy? (Part 2)

Read Part 1, a prior post, before reading this.

The claim we explored yesterday is that there are substantially more women voters than men, and therefore women have more political power – in that limited sense – than men. (We’ll discuss the other forms of power later.)

Many of you had objections to the preliminary verdict. I will address your objections here and render an updated verdict. (All verdicts in the Rationality Engine are subject to change. Keep that in mind.)

I will address your objections individually in the form of claims.

Claim 1. Real political power is held by rich people and corporations who use money to control politicians. Most of the rich people are men.

Verdict: True. Money has a big impact on political results. But no evidence is presented that the men with money are pursuing objectives contrary to the interests of women. Corporations, for example, usually strive to be seen as family-friendly. So we would expect the money influence to be gender-positive whenever the influence can be noticed by the public, even if men are doing the dealing. It is smart business to be woman-friendly in 2015. It is bad business to do otherwise because women have enough power to take down any corporation that doesn’t play nice. 

I can be persuaded to change this verdict if you have examples showing that American corporations are successfully lobbying to pass laws (in the past three years) that women overwhelmingly do not support.

This link shows that men and women invest in stocks quite differently. Women pick different companies than men. That means the lobbyists are sometimes mostly working for men and sometimes less so. And of course any wealth that flows to a family unit becomes shared.

While the claim that rich people control politics is true, it is also true that corporations do not have the flexibility (nor should they) to pull any puppet strings that 51% of the public finds objectionable.

Claim 2. The people who provide the limited options upon which you vote have the real power. Most are men.

Verdict: True. But no claim has been made that those men serve themselves more than they serve the interests of women. When you eat at a restaurant, and you give your order to the server, you don’t say the server is in charge. The server is just writing down stuff and carrying food around for you. Likewise, the people who write laws, and the people who run for office, create options that will be friendly to the people who vote. And the people who actually vote are, by a substantial margin, women. (See prior post for stats.) 

Claim 4. Women often vote the way their husbands want them to vote. 

Verdict: Unknown. No data was offered for this hypothesis and it does not match my personal experience for present day. But in any case, women have the option of getting their research from any source they want. Trusting the opinion of a spouse is not the same as abdicating power.

Claim 5. Women do not vote as a bloc, so they have no “combined” power in any realistic sense.

Verdict: False. What we observe is that no laws are ever proposed in this country that would inspire women to vote as a bloc. That suggests that women either have soft power (influence) or that men are much nicer than all of recorded history would suggest.

Technically, women could vote as a bloc and win for sure if they chose to do so on some particular issue. Men (who actually vote) do not have that option because of numbers. The design of our system favors whoever has the most voters. But the reality – as many of you noted – is that any issue so important to women that they might vote for it as a bloc is almost certainly important enough for men to want the same thing for their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. 

So women have two sources of power in this scenario. One is that they can vote as a bloc and get anything they want because of their numbers. But this power is never exercised because women also have the power to influence men to vote for their legitimate interests. I can think of no realistic future issue where women would not have male voting power at least partly on their side.

By analogy, a loaded gun in your nightstand is power even if no one breaks into your house. If women never need to vote as a bloc, it suggests they influence men enough to never need that power.

But the gun is still in the nightstand. We assign value to insurance policies even if we never file a claim.

Claim 6. If someone influences you to vote a certain way, can it be said the power is with the puppet or the puppet-master? Most puppet-masters (the media for example) are men.

Verdict: Depends on your worldview.

If free will is real, we have the power to recognize what influences us and to use our reason to overcome bias, at least most of the time. We all know, for example, that FOX News and MSNBC will have opposing biases. We use our free will and reason to overcome those influences. Regular readers know I consider this worldview magical thinking. But I can’t support my view with hard data so I won’t use it for a verdict.

My personal worldview is what I call the Moist Robot idea. Under this way of thinking, we’re all just particles bumping around according to the laws of physics. What we think is our sense of reason is really nothing but rationalization after the fact, at least for the big decisions. Under this worldview, both the puppet and the puppet-master are puppets of physics. No one has any real power in this view.

No verdict can be rendered on a philosophical question about cause and effect and free will. But logically, if people can influence you, then it follows that the influencers themselves are being influenced by something else. We don’t know how far to chase that chain of influence. But if we follow the chain back to early childhood, mom is usually the biggest influence. And mom probably influenced her son to do right by women.

Claim 7: There are roughly equal numbers of adult men and women in the United States who are eligible to vote. The political power of your vote exists whether you decide to use it or not.

Verdict: True (but incomplete). We would also need to know gender differences in rates of incarceration, occupations that don’t provide time to vote, mental health, education, political interest, marital status, income, and more. My working assumption is that there is something structural in society that inhibits male voting. I am skeptical that so many men simply decide not to vote, but it could be the case. My guess is that more men than women are incapable of voting for one reason or another. For example, ten-times more men than women are incarcerated. That alone is about 10% of the voting gap.

Summary: As many of you noted, there are too many power variables to isolate any one of them. The biggest grey area is in the domain of influence. If I influence you to push a button, who had the power? I will discuss influence separately in another post.

But what we can say for sure is that in the narrow sense of voting, the law of the land accidentally gives more power to women because (for whatever reason) more of them vote in modern times. And a gun in the nightstand is power even if you haven’t yet used it.

Next up: Economic power. 

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Are you reading Top Tech Blog by Paul Worthington? It’s like seeing the future.

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If you hate my blog, you’ll really hate my book.

Is the United States a Patriarchy or a Matriarchy? (Part 1)

Today we start the Rationality Engine (invented in this blog) to see if the process can settle for us the question of whether the United States is a patriarchy or a matriarchy. 

Here we stipulate that the country has been a patriarchy from its founding until modern times. The claim we are testing is that the country has recently transformed from a patriarchy to a matriarchy.

Definitions:

Patriarchy: Men have the most power in society

Matriarchy: Women have the most power in society

We all agree that women had a bad deal throughout history. We also agree that modern men do not experience anything similar to the types of problems women have experienced through history. It’s not a competition about history. And if it were, men would lose. Let’s agree on that.

We also stipulate the obvious, that no two situations are alike. Your situation will not resemble the average. Nor will mine. So while anecdotes are useful for explaining ideas, they are not reasons, and they are not data. If I say the sky is blue, assume everyone understands there might be at least one cloud up there. It’s still basically blue-looking

Explanation of Bias

For those of you new to the Rationality Engine, phase one involves your host (me) confessing his biases so you can keep me honest. So here goes.

1. My views on gender match those of the most well-informed feminists. I’m a strong supporter of equal treatment. Society works best that way.

2. My career in banking ended when my boss told me the company asked her to stop promoting white men because there were already too many in upper management. (She told me this in direct language.)

3. My career at Pacific Bell ended when my boss told me the company asked him to stop promoting white men because there were already too many in upper management. (Again, he said this in direct language.)

Some folks are confused because in my books I confessed to being incompetent at my corporate jobs. That’s true. But I also had top performance reviews and oversized raises throughout that era because my bosses couldn’t tell the difference. To them, I was a rising star.

4. When my corporate careers stalled, I turned to cartooning and things worked out. Folks assume I am bitter because gender discrimination ended my corporate careers. I probably would be bitter if I were not typing this next to the fireplace in my mansion. Getting rich takes the sting out of a lot of things. 

5. I was once married, and delighted that I had the experience. My ex moved one block away (to stay near) and we are best friends. I love her more than ever. I’m healthy, single, rich and totally free to do what I want, whenever I want. My personal life is extraordinary. I mention this because there is speculation that I am a bitter Golem lashing out at a cruel world that won’t give me sex. The reality is that I live in California, and I don’t know any healthy single people here who can’t find plenty of sex. 

You should assume I have bias on this topic, as nearly anyone would. The test of the Rationality Engine is whether your scrutiny will suppress my bias. When you see it creeping in, call me out in the comments and I will try to correct.

Claims Phase

In this phase I present a series of claims and present my preliminary verdict on their validity. These are claims of fact, not a final verdict. Once you see my preliminary verdicts on the claims, you can critique them in the comments and I will adjust as needed. This is a living debate that is intended to improve over time. 

To keep things simple, I will focus on one area today: Political power

Claim: Women have the most political power in the United States because more women than men vote.

Preliminary Verdict: True. 

In the 2008 presidential election, according to CNN, 70 million women voted compared to only 61 million men. That’s enough of a difference to say women could control decisions in the United States if they collectively decided to do so, according to the rules of our Constitution.

In upcoming posts I will discuss gender differences in economics, job opportunities, family dynamics, and other power-related topics. But for today let’s focus on political power. Do you agree that women have enough of a majority to control political outcomes?

Remember, the past doesn’t count. Everyone agrees that the past was a patriarchy. We’re focusing on today.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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If you think my blog is terrible, you should see my book.

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If you have been following my Trump Persuasion Series, you will recognize what I did in this tweet and why. 

Now that I have your attention...

As expected, I got all the bottom-feeder traffic from Gawker and the rest of the Outragist sewer system streaming over to this blog today. So I think we’re ready for tomorrow’s topic, which will be the start of the Rationality Engine process to explore whether the United States is still a patriarchy or whether it has morphed into a matriarchy that pretends to be a patriarchy.

I’ve been asked to explain my views. And so I will, with your help.

And you thought Thanksgiving would be boring.

Feel free to seed the comments here with how you see the power structure in the United States in 2015. Who has the power in what domains? Here we will include the domains of money, careers, access to resources, political power, media control, social power, family power, and any other power.

But remember that the patriarchy/matriarchy question is about power, not insult. And it is not about who is happier or who has a better deal in life. Nor is it about who would switch sides if they could. It is only about who gets to decide the big questions.

So focus on power only. Who makes the decisions in each domain?

I don’t know how it will all shake out. Should be interesting.

How to Beat ISIS with a Hoax

How do you kill the ideas that motivate ISIS?

You can’t do it with reason. You can’t do it with force alone. But you might be able to do it with a hoax. I’ll explain.

In a prior post I explained why ridiculous rumors travel faster than truth, and the more ridiculous, the better. The simple explanation is that truth is usually boring. If you want people to be interested, you need a big lie. You need something so wrong that people think it must be right. The wrongness – the thing that makes the rumor clearly untrue – is the same thing that drives its telling and retelling. We are drawn to the wrongness of it.

Case in point, last week I compared the ISIS system – in which rape is used as a recruitment tool – to our civilized system of mutual consent. Predictably, that morphed into “cartoonist favors rape” and Twitter lost its shit. (It was a good weekend for my blog traffic.) Why did people believe I came out in favor of rape? They believed it because it is unbelievable. They tweet it because it is unbelievable. They get mad because they don’t want to live in a world with people who display such unbelievable behavior. Rarely do they stop to consider that unbelievable things are usually false. Our brains tell us exactly the opposite – that the story is so crazy it must be true.

So let’s use that phenomenon and a few more to design a Hoax Kill Shot for ISIS. We shall use the following facts and tools of influence in our design.

1. We will design the rumor to be unbelievable (to make it believable)

2. The hoax will quickly be detected, but it won’t matter.

3. Focus attention where we want it.

4. Over time, truth becomes whatever people hear the most.

5. 20% of any large group believes just about any damned thing.

6. Appeal to ego and emotion, not logic.

7. Visual imagery that you can’t get out of your head.

The hoax would take the form of a fake video of a meeting involving high-level ISIS leaders. I assume ISIS fighters do not know what the leaders of other units look like. And the video would not name the ISIS fighting unit, so it would be hard to verify its authenticity in a war zone.

The video would appear to be taken on a smartphone by one of the other ISIS leaders in a war-battered room somewhere in Syria. In the fake video, actors pretend to be ISIS leaders bragging about how they take advantage of the young, stupid recruits. The conversation might include various leaders saying such things as…

- Hahahaha! We send idiots to slaughter so we can enjoy their sisters and mothers. Only winners get to spread their genes.

- We are collaborating with Israel and have been since the start. There is a secret pact for land-sharing once Assad is defeated.

- Behind closed doors the leaders mock the suicide bombers as being both gullible and defective in some mental or physical sense. The leaders might say they select suicide bombers on these criteria plus the attractiveness of any wives and sisters the bomber leaves behind.

- The fake ISIS leaders would use an insulting word (in Arabic) to refer to their gullible cannon-fodder recruits and their even more defective suicide bomb volunteers. The insult needs to be engineered to have Trumplike stickiness.

- The leaders would brag about spiking the drugs that all ISIS fighters take before battle with some sort of sperm-killing chemical developed by Israel to prevent surviving fighters from someday procreating.

That’s the general idea. You want the recruits to doubt the sincerity of their leaders. Teens are good at doubting authority. That comes naturally, so it shouldn’t be hard to generate suspicion.

By now you are saying this hoax would be quickly uncovered, and you would be right. But it won’t matter. The goal is to convince about 20% of ISIS recruits that the video is true. And you can convince 20% of any group to believe any damned thing. All you need to do is try. 

Let’s say 80% of ISIS folks believe the video is fake. That still leave enough gullible people to cripple a movement. 20% is enough to keep the rumor alive and damage the reputation of the cause. Add bombing to the mix and you can realistically blunt 30-40% of the movement. That should be enough to reduce the problem from World War III to a major inconvenience.

The reason the hoax would work is that it causes the bad guys to focus on it. From day one, the bad guys would be debating whether it is real, and if not, who exactly made it. The point is to make them TALK about it, even if what they say is how fake it looks. We want their attention, not their reasoning skills. Over time, the things you focus on the most become the most important in your mind. 

It won’t matter that the vast majority of ISIS knows the video is fake. The rumors will take on their own life and start to acquire their own circumstantial evidence. For 20% of the bad guys, all they will know is that they heard something from somebody and now their personal observations are fitting that theory. Sure enough, they observe that the leaders are spreading their genetic material and the suicide bombers are not. There is just enough truth to the rumors to make them worthy of conversation.

That’s the basic idea. If you don’t believe we can dupe 20% of ISIS, keep in mind that 20% of the United States believes President Obama was not born in this country. And he has a birth certificate.

One assumes the CIA is already working hard on psychological operations. I’m just trying to help.

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If you think my blogging is terrible, you should see my books.

Pathetic Outragism

Today I learned from a stranger that my opinion on gender is based on who pays for the date. Because nothing else matters, apparently, according to this Outragist.

Sometimes I worry that all the smart people stopped trying.

Fire the Head of the DEA

I just signed the petition to fire DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg for not understanding that marijuana has legitimate medicinal use. That knowledge seems like the minimum qualification for the job. We can do better.

By the way, Trump says let the states decide on legalization. That’s the sort of opinion that breeds landslides.