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Showing posts from February, 2018

Liars, damn liars, and gun nuts.

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...or how figures lie, but liars sometimes don't figure too well. Someone yesterday tried to prove to me that gun bans don't reduce murder rates. They sent this link ... ...and something didn't look right. I've been looking at noisy data for nigh on 40 years, trying to see signal in the murk, and that spike in 2002 seemed really odd. Now I have family in the UK; I had more in 2002. I subscribe to the London Times. I go back and forward, though not as often as I'd like. And I was aware of nothing that might have caused a large number of homicides in 2002. So I did a little digging. And, remarkably, the spike in 2002 is the work of one man, a man you've probably never heard of, named Dr. Harold Shipman. Shipman was a general practitioner in the UK. He became a GP near Manchester (where I was born and lived the first eight years of my life). And then he started murdering people. He killed mostly older women, in order to steal their jewelry, or after having th...

Mach Zero

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Coby Mach, Lincoln's Sean Hannity wannabe, apparently found about UNL Nazi Dan Kleve the same way most of you did, by reading the Journal Star. And he has a sanctimonious little Facebook post up about it. Except, except...Mach has actively supported the campaign by Erdman, Halloran and Brewer against the UNL English department in general, and Gailey and Lawton in particular. That campaign, and particularly Erdman, has been a vehicle for threats of violence against Gailey and Lawton. In particular, Erdman's Facebook page has for months carried a comment suggesting... Someone visit these two on a dark night... It was still there this morning, more than 4 months after it was posted. Erdman has been told about it. He hasn't removed it, even though any Facebook account owner can remove any comment from their page. I posted a comment on Mach's Facebook page last night, pointing this out, in the context that even the establishment GOP has become quite tolerant o...