Carly's Big Military

Why do Carly and friends keep talking about growing our military? Our military is already roughly 4x bigger than Russia's. Why would being 6x or 10x make any difference to Putin? He doesn't have to go head to head so far because he nibbles at the corners. The size thing is not logical, Carly. Your HP calculator needs batteries.

If we went to war directly against Russian troops, we will have roughly a 3 to 1 kill ratio. That sounds good until you realize that Russia has traditionally thrown people at war and thus we may have to lose a half million on our side for them to start to care. Dictators don't give a [bleep] about death of their subjects.

Same with China; they'll throw people at the problem and a lot of Americans will lose their life. More machines won't change the balance that much, and trigger an arms race anyhow.

All else being equal, a bigger military is better, but it won't noticeably change our relationship with Russia or China because death worries non-democracies much less.

Rick Perry Leaves the Presidential Race

Rick Perry forgot which race he dropped out of.  "Uh, Governor? Senator? VP? NASCAR? Human?"

That's too bad, he has high standards; he reminded the crowd how he's the only candidate to follow all 9 commandments.

I had a dream a Palin/Perry ticket won the 2016 election. They were last seen in the Oval Office arguing over which assistant the red button rang up.

"Daddy!"

Daddy!

Conservative Reacts to 2 Supreme Court Rulings

ACA? Marriage equality? 

Git...me...my...
Maalox

Rachel Dolezal Case, "Race" Means Nothing

"Race" means almost nothing scientifically. Race is a social construct, not a scientific one. All humans are mutts. There may be genetic tendencies revolving around the frequency of certain genes for a given region, but the variations all blur into each other and don't respect borders.

And what does "African American" mean exactly? We are all from Africa if you go back far enough.  A history of slavery has been suggested as a way to identify "black," but the ancestry and migration records of many slaves are lost to antiquity. There may be records that can prove one is related to a slave, but that's not the same as being related to somebody of African origins. Not all slaves were from Africa. Thus, there is no clean, fair, and reliable measurement for "black" or any other race.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in

GOP candidates hit the talk-show circuit.

Kudos to 2 Republicans Who are Sane on STEM and Visa Worker Bull-Stuff

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) have been fighting the good fight of exposing the "shortage" BS surrounding STEM workers (Science, Tech., Eng. & Math) in which many companies claim there is a "shortage" in order to rent more visa workers from other countries. It's an issue I've often written about.

In short, businesses lobby for more STEM visa workers, typically under the H-1B and L-1 visa programs, because such visa workers are more abuse-able due the practical circumstances they are in, because they are typically under-payed for the type of work they do, and because having the world to choose from means companies are less likely to have to train a citizen on a specific set of tools that the company happens to be using.

The STEM lie was exposed recently as Microsoft was caught hiring visa works AND laying off large counts of citizen technology workers at the same time after a slump in sales. They didn't want to bother to re-train many of their very own employees on different technologies, despite having reasonably close experience, choosing new visa workers instead. 

For example, rather than re-training PC programmers on mobile device programming (tablets and smart-phones), they let go long-time PC programmers and rented new mobile programmers under visa programs. That's not "shortage", that's cherry-picking for free. Their excuses were laughable and disturbing at the same time, revealing an almost psychopath view of the world.