Every time there’s a mass-shooting or -killing in America, which is roughly constantly these days, there is a groundswell of effort to claim the event as political leverage for or against some particular cause that those behind it attribute to…
No Jobs in January: A Glance at Seasonal Adjustment of Unemployment
I was curious to analyze the seasonal adjustment data after the last post I made about unemployment data and under-reporting from 2007-2013. Basically, seasonal adjustment follows a similar shape every year. Not the exact same shape, which is interesting, but…
Unemployment Reporting Gap Hits New High to Close 2013
Happy New Year, everyone. There haven’t been posts here for a long time, but that’s probably going to change again soon. Hopefully a lot of things will change soon. Regardless of which, a new milestone has been set: the all-time…
The Limits of Surveillance
The videos taken of apparent/alleged/possible/probable chemical-weapons attacks in Syria got me thinking. No one, at least as of this morning (I haven’t heard updates later in the day) seemed to know what to think of them. Are they trumped up…
The Problem of Being a Person
There is immense suffering in the world. Almost all of it is unnecessary. Preventable. Most of it is borne entirely of decisions that we, as human beings, make about other human beings. Problems of distribution, problems of belief in artificially…
Facial Recognition
It’s not often that someone like me is told to smile less. Today, I got a new New Jersey Driver’s License, proving that I have officially spent too long in this state. I remember actually looking at the September 2013…
What is Wrong with US?
In lieu of actual journalism, Facebook is pretty good. There are a fair number of people out there who are trying to keep things real and pay attention to things that are actually going on and they cobble together the…
Baseball and Society
There are days that I don’t know what this blog is supposed to be about. That’s okay. Life is like that too. People have divergent interests and the odds that all those interests line up with any given reader’s interests…
Legal Troubles
This is going to be a post about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. In other words, I may be part of the problem. But the problem is that there is a problem and ignoring perceptual reality in today’s society is…
No News is Very Bad News
I remember thinking in the summer of 2001 that the media’s obsession with the Chandra Levy case proved that the media was dead. There were those at the time, if memory serves, observing that the news’ insatiable focus on the…