Because it's Halloween: Kittens and Pumpkins

Okay, so they're a bit big.

Lunch and a Book

Today's errands took me to Broadripple and I stopped by Boogie Burger for lunch.

The place is a bit twee (I can only imagine what it was like at it's old location), but the food is quite, quite good. Worth the price (which is quite modest) and the wait (which was short).

Tam is right, the place was full and the burgers are that good.

If you want some burgers, fries, or shakes, that's the place.

While there I read some more of Larry Correia's Hard Magic. I wasn't too keen on Monster Hunter, mostly because I found the characters a bit flat and the villains motivations meh. There was also the tacked on romance that required some headbangingly questionable moves on the part of a woman who just had her soft-of-but-not-yet exboyfriend kidnapped.

However, Hard Magic has deeper characterization overall, and enough gun-porn and historical fanboy squee to make it quite fun to read.

Not Science.

When you have to constantly "recalibrate" your model to get it to predict existing behavior you're not doing science or even understanding the underlying mechanism of the phenomena you're tyring to model. No, you're simply engaging in the type of thinking that if you make the bamboo plane a little bit bigger it'll attract John Frum and his silver eagles.

Poor modeling, it's not just for Global Warming anymore.

The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward--and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the "reality" originally generated by the perfect model. Calibration--a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance--had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. "As far as I can tell, you'd have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated," says Carter.

That financial models are plagued by calibration problems is no surprise to Wilmott--he notes that it has become routine for modelers in finance to simply keep recalibrating their models over and over again as the models continue to turn out bad predictions. "When you have to keep recalibrating a model, something is wrong with it," he says. "If you had to readjust the constant in Newton's law of gravity every time you got out of bed in the morning in order for it to agree with your scale, it wouldn't be much of a law But in finance they just keep on recalibrating and pretending that the models work."

And why yes, these are the exact same models that the political class uses to justify how they can run all the businesses in a country better than those that actually own and work in said companies.

Well, they use these models when they're not guided by their keen sense of social justice.

Via the Instapundit.

Update: Oh and also from Prof. Reynolds is this little article. For liberals, income inequality is the new global warming.

Well, Science says we have to do what our political masters tell us to.

We're protesting how the wealthy hurt the downtrodden... but first we'll kick these mooching hobos outta the camp.

Via Weer'd, DaddyBear has a great rant on the lack of perspective many have:

My point is that I'm tired of hearing people whine. If I had the power, I'd take each and every one of these class-baiting twits to the real world and let them see what poverty really looks like. I'd show them people who come from huts made out of garbage who are working their tails off to get out of that hut. I'd show them women who have to carry weapons every day, not so they don't have their purse stolen, but so that they're not kidnapped and raped. I'd show them graveyards full of the people who tried to make things better, but were rewarded with a bullet in the head for their trouble.

Then I'd show them the poorest of the poor here in America, a place that gives away free food, shelter, clothing, education, medical help, and just about anything else a person needs in order to not only stay alive, but to thrive and become a producing member of society if they would only care enough to do it.

Then, I would dare them to try to say that even the 'poor' in America aren't doing pretty good. I'd dare them to show me the thousands of children who are dieing of diseases that can be cured with a dollar's worth of medicine. I'd dare them to show me the millions of children who aren't going to school because they have to work as hard as an adult to stay alive. I'd dare them to show me the graves of the people who die from mal-nourishment in America.

Then I'd laugh in their face as they try to come up with examples, because there aren't any. Generations of Americans have bled into our soil so that these problems stayed away, and we continue to do so now.

If we don't wake up, we are going to lose the ethics of hard work, self-reliance, and ingenuity that have been all that has kept us from sliding back into the morasse that our fore-fathers sailed across oceans to get away from. Our ancestors didn't come over in steerage or worse so that their grandchildren could demand that others take care of them, and they would be ashamed if they saw how this movement is acting.

Read the rest.

This fits with Ace's post talking about how the "99%ers" and "Occupiers" are dealing with the less fortunate right here in America.

Here's the opener:

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

Yeah, what right do the homeless and prisoners have to represent themselves as society's downtrodden. Impostors! They're not oppressed like the college graduates with too much debt from pricey private colleges!

...

Amazing... they don't want to share their own stuff with people they don't have any particular common bonds with. And they're resentful of Other people coming in and acting like they have the right to take their stuff.

Hilariously, they're also getting angry that these "derelicts" are trespassing on their encampments. My, more property rights? Well they've also started setting up their own security and police. It's like a little hothouse primative society. Emphasis on hothouse, because it only exists due to the warm bubble being provided by external forces.

So there you go, they scream and demand that someone else pay for their mistakes and pay to keep them in a lifestyle they think they deserve, but when someone from the "outside" comes to take what they've got?

Such generous and open-minded people. No wonder they feel that charity is only moral if it's forced at gunpoint.

Real Progress (26%)

Twenty years makes a big difference. Record low, just 26% favor a ban of handguns in the US. Overall support for Gun Control is down... everywhere and in every segment of the population.

If you think that’s dramatic, take a look at what happened to the demographics on this question. Guess which demos saw the biggest drop in support for stricter gun-control laws? If you guessed the Midwest, well, score a point for you; support in the heartland dropped 35 points, from 72% in 1991 to 37%. Midwesterners used to be the second-most supportive of gun control by region but now are the most opposed, even beating the South at 40%. Aaaaaaaand if you guessed Republicans, score another point. Two-thirds of Republicans in 1991 wanted more gun control, but it’s down to 31% today. Independents dropped nearly as much, from 65% to 38%.

In fact, only four demographics show a majority still favoring gun control: women (50%, down 26 points), the East (54%, down 23 points), those with no guns in the household (57%, down 21 points), and … Democrats, down just 10 points to 64%. That may not seem like much, but that’s still slightly lower than Republicans in 1991

This dovetails with the increasing number of Shall Issue and Constitutional Carry States.

Plus a bonus video at the end that is equal parts hilarious and cautionary.

The overall trend from 1959 is also very encouraging, but care has to be taken. Nothing is irreversible. Heaven forbid that this is all undone in the next twenty years.

That being said, we are winning, and we are winning by pushing back ignorance and because the truth and natural rights are on our side. More and more people are exposed to handguns to "evil black rifles" to people lawfully carrying sidearms.

And against this the Anti's become more shrill and idiotic and dated.

That's not to say that there haven't been setbacks or there isn't a lot of work to go.

For example, Weer'd talks about a proposed National CCW reciprocity bill and shows just how corrupt and illogical May issue is.

But as a Massachusetts resident I’ve seen what HR 822 will do first hand. First give a quick skim of this list, when I first moved here I lived in Medford Massachusetts where they do not issue carry permits to anybody who isn’t politically connected. Period, full stop. Unless you can hurt the chief of police politically, your rights don’t exist.

Now fast forward to today, I live in one of them “Green” towns where the permits are “Shall Issue” (BTW this is how “May Issue” states work anyway. Its not like my character changed, simply the town will issue you a permit, or it won’t there is no “Discretion” involved), Now I can carry EVERYWHERE in the state. I can, and regularly DO carry in Boston, I carry in Cambridge, I carry in my old neighborhood of Medford. You see while the permits are issued by the town police, the permit is a STATE document. Meaning if its good in my town, its good in every Massachusetts town.

Lovely ain't it?

"Remember when tea party rally were shut down by force because of sanitation issues? Good times, good times."

Ace of Spades looks back.

And remember when the Teabaggers threw paint at the cops at got teargassed and shot with rubber bullets. Those were the days.

And speaking of insane claims... Jay G tears into Elizabeth Warren

Because policemen are just too damn heavy...

Title from this list.

So the Vice President goes off on people that don't want to have the Feds bail out the states for a couple years, yet again.

What I find intersting here is not so much that Biden is using the threat of rape and death to justify more education spending (he talks alot about police in a bill that is an 86% teacher's union sop), but that he thinks that if you call the police the goblins and rapists will obliginly wait until the fuzz arrive.

“Well let me tell you, it’s not temporary when that 911 call comes in and a woman’s being raped if a cop shows up in time to prevent the rape,” he continued. “It’s not temporary to that woman.

“It’s not temporary to the guy whose store is being held up and a gun is being pointed to his head,” he continued, “if a cop shows up and he’s not killed, that’s not temporary to that store owner.

That right, there's the only-ones collectivist attitude. The citizen shouldn't defend herself, no she should call the police and quietly wait for them to arrive... provided she's paid enough.

Ahhh, extortion. And like any protection racket, the police are under no obligation to acutally -you know- protect you.

Course the idea that the "Police will always get there in time to save you" is a fallacy so absurd that even university officials are admitting it. Not that that is enough for them to advocate effective self-defense tools.

And here's another example of the "Call the Authorities" crowd. Nicholas Kristof of The NY Times must think he's pretty clever for declaring that without Obama's new education bill there won't be enough police to protect John Bohner from rampaging tigers. Yes, really. Reminds me of the Bear Patrol from that old Simpsons episode.

Oh, and the added bonus of refusing an increase (nearly 9/10 of wich doesn't go to police) being magically transformed into "cutbacks".

Speaking of all that "education" money. What does it do? Well...

Public-school staff hires have significantly outpaced student enrollment in recent decades. Since 1970, public-school staffs have increased by 83 percent. Over the same time period, student enrollment rose just 7 percent.

Meanwhile, the teacher “share” of staff positions has declined dramatically. In 1950, teachers constituted more than 70 percent of school staff. By 2006, that figure had declined to just 51 percent. Fifty years ago, there were 2.36 teachers for every non-teacher on the employment rolls of public school districts; today, the ratio is closer to one-to-one.

Clearly, it's all for the children, and if you don't agree then you're on the side of the convenience-store-robbing, rape-tigers.