skyscraperMost mass shooters are white men… until you control for population size.

The Guardian has a pretty fantastic series on the gun problem in the US, and the difficulties that lay ahead of those that want to make headway via gun control.

The notion that the NRA stymies gun control with its deep war chest is still wrong.

Behold, the power of the AR-15.

I am not one to put on my commando gear and yell “BENGHAZIIIIIII!!!!” but the attempt to spread the blame of Benghazi to the preacher and the filmmaker despite knowing that it was a planned terrorist attack is probably the most shameful thing the Obama Administration did during its tenure.

Democrats, meanwhile, don’t know what caused Benghazi, but evidently think it’s something to do with Trump.

Amy Otto says that the problem with men is that they have too-easy access to boobs.

Just in case you were worried about subprime borrowers getting loans, the government is on top of it. What could go wrong?

Patrick clark looks at baseball stadia and their rather short lifespan. I’m genuinely quite stunned to see that a Sun Belt team is spending over $100m to buy Turner Field and then spend a lot more to transform it for their Sun Belt football team.

Some former FDA commissioners are arguing that the FDA should become an independent (cabinet-level) agency. My view on this is entirely outcome-based. What do they want to be doing that red tape won’t allow? What are they being required to do that they wouldn’t otherwise?

breakdancingonwaterAccording to one poll, enforcement of the law against unauthorized immigrants seems quite popular across races.

Animations of Kafka, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I still think Nielsen is nothing but a scam (Crackpot Theory #2), but the story behind the Mr Nielsen is interesting.

Yes, yes, let’s please find a way to turn polution into fuel!

How attention and social cues help us determine facial attractiveness.


Category: Newsroom

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25 Responses to Linkluster 2(2(100+2(10)+2))

  1. Michael Cain says:

    Re CO2 -> hydrocarbon fuel… Thermodynamics is not your friend here. You won’t get as much energy back out as you put into the reforming process. Assuming the output is synthetic gasoline (or methanol or something that can be burned in an engine designed for gasoline) you won’t get nearly as much energy back out. The CO2 also goes back into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned, plus any CO2 produced by the energy input. If the energy inputs are electricity, you would get a lot more miles-traveled by powering electric cars in a straight-forward fashion.

    The primary purpose of synthetic gasoline is political — to avoid forcing the voters to make large capital expenditures.

    • Oscar Gordon says:

      If your reforming plant is wind/solar/hydro/nuke powered, then it isn’t so bad, if you are producing fuel as a commodity to reduce the dependance upon pulling crude out of the ground (basically using it as a chemical battery).

      • Michael Cain says:

        “Isn’t so bad” can cover a lot of ground. For example…

        There are a number of well/mine-to-wheel systems analyses that tell us that, as a rough rule of thumb, for a given (suitable) hydrocarbon fuel source, burning it to produce electricity to power electric cars vs burning it in a small internal combustion engine to drive wheels directly gives electrics an advantage of about 2:1 in miles traveled. For practical purposes, inefficiencies in both chains balance and it comes down to thermal efficiency: 35% or so for power plants, 17.5% or so for gasoline engines.

        Assume 1.5:1 for whatever process splits CO2 and H2O plus reforming into the hydrocarbons — use that directly and you’re up to 3:1 advantage for simply generating electricity and powering electric powers. My own opinion is that I will live long enough that we will not be in the position to throw away a 3:1 advantage. At least not if we intend to go forward without baking the planet. So I’m an advocate of steadily going electric, and if you need the odd properties that hydrocarbon fuels provide — fast refueling, huge range — you clip the fifth-wheel fuel tank and gen set onto the back of the electric car and go.

        The big deal is financial capital. We can’t afford to go down the wrong path, then toss a trillion dollars of infrastructure. Reasonable people can disagree.

    • Oscar Gordon says:

      Now, here is a way to use pollution.

      http://www.gizmag.com/pig-manure-asphalt/44110

  2. greginak says:

    Ummm…so umpteenth Benghazi report ( okay just the 9th report) shows mistakes were made but all the BS conspiracy lies were well….BS. So now two pubs trot out pieces about all that smoke still there. It almost makes we want to donate money to Hillary.

    • trumwill says:

      I don’t believe there was a conspiracy to lie. It just came naturally.

      • greginak says:

        Stop trying to get me to donate money to Hillary.

        • trumwill says:

          Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi.

          (I want her to win. Remember?)

        • greginak says:

          My wallet is feeling really hot right now.

        • Oscar Gordon says:

          Get a room, you two…

    • kirk says:

      Notice how she blamed the internet for the Pulse nightclub shooting?

      She said, “You can’t put up a wall to keep out the internet”. Between that and Benghazi, I sense a trend.

      And hey, maybe next time Hillary gets somebody killed, you can volunteer to take the blame. It’ll save her staff from having to look around YouTube for a patsy.

  3. Oscar Gordon says:

    The AR-15 power – and yet, the bullet is so weak it can take up to 3 hits to down a soldier (hence the genesis of the 3 round burst), and most states won’t allow it to be used for hunting anything larger than a coyote, because it tends to wound without making a clean kill.

    I mean, you certainly don’t want to get hit with it, it is a supersonic rifle round, after all, but it is one of the weakest rifle rounds out there.

    • greginak says:

      I thought the three round burst was meant as a less ammo wasting mode then full auto. Troops were blowing off ammo to fast at full auto and inaccurately with M-16’s. Three rounds was more aimable and still put out rounds but more efficiently.

      • Oscar Gordon says:

        That was also part of the drive to develop the 3 round burst. But they found that a single hit, unless it nailed something vital, wasn’t enough to stop a combatant from shooting back. 2 or 3 would put them down, while not necessarily killing them (because wounded soldiers take 2 others out of the fight in order to pull the wounded guy back).

  4. Oscar Gordon says:

    The Guardian piece is very good.

    • kirk says:

      There were slightly fewer than 10,000 gun murders last year. The Guardian article apparently includes suicides and accidents in its toll, getting the number up to 30,000.

      Looks like a dishonest article to me.

  5. dexter says:

    Kirk, Suicide is murder.

    • kirk says:

      Yeah, writing “30,000 gun deaths” below a banner about a school shooting isn’t disingenuous.

  6. Michael Drew says:

    First comment of two.

    Why are conservative sites so incredibly loaded down with pop-ups? Obviously all kinds of media sites have them, but conservative sites don’t even seem to be trying to maintain a usable website, and that’s not what The Nation is like (though it’s not great). Eg. Daily Caller, Weekly Standard are basically unusable (granted my laptop is old and larded up with crap itself).

    • Michael Cain says:

      Firefox, uBlock Origin, preferences set to not allow popups, and Flash runs only if I give permission. I used to block scripts entirely, but had to give up on that because so many sites use Javascript to do layout on the fly. It’s a war, and if you don’t use the tools available to control what your browser downloads, you’ll get steamrollered. Of course, I’m a fanatic — with a couple of exceptions, every page that gets downloaded to my browser gets modified by my own code to enforce font and size choices.

      From time to time my wife asks me to open such-and-such a site because it’s so terrible. In almost every case, I get a completely different experience when I open it in my browser with a bunch of the individual items modified or suppressed.

  7. Michael Drew says:

    #2.

    I am not one to put on my commando gear and yell “BENGHAZIIIIIII!!!!” but the attempt to spread the blame of Benghazi to the preacher and the filmmaker despite knowing that it was a planned terrorist attack is probably the most shameful thing the Obama Administration did during its tenure.

    Obviously I’m not really looking to get into a discussion of all of the worst (and maybe “shameful” is a subtly different category) things the Obama administration has done, but this seems a bit idiosyncratic to me. Granted, they got it wrong, but above you admit there was no conspiracy. And the fact is that the Quran burning trend really did spark mass protest in the region at just that time. This was really pretty simply a misattribution of the cause to a real and concurrent phenomenon. What’s more, to this day it is not clear that those protests didn’t serve as at least a cover for and possibly a spark to the attack’s planning and execution. The line was held onto by some longer than it should have been (ahem, Susan Rice, what was in it for you to basically destroy your reputation as a competent government servant, which I think you are, in order to hold so strongly to this line, and go beyond approved talking points to do so?), and not disclaimed as clearly as it should have been. But the Democrats’ minority-report assessment to me seems reasonable – this was a fast-moving situation in which causes, events, and consequences were not at clear in real time – they weren’t even clear for months after the fact. The administration made a mistake in seeing a close relationship between the protests and the attack, but it really seems like a reasonable and genuine, even if politically convenient, mistake to have made. It would have taken a lot of detachment not to see the protests and the attack as totally unrelated, especially as even today it’s not clear they were. It was definitely not political communications or bureaucratic management at its best, but to say that it was the administration’s most shameful moment, well, I guess what I’d say is that that pays remarkable compliment to the administration’s average or even minimum level of overall honor and integrity.

    Which maybe is your purpose – I am continually surprised and impressed with your judgement, Mr. Truman.

    • Michael Drew says:

      …I actually more meant to ask why you feel this way than argue against it… but I failed. But feel free to answer that question if you want.

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