reddit Gallery CCXXXV -- Halloween

Another excursion into the world of reddit Pictures. See: reddit Pics for sources.  Do yourself a favor and click on pictures to enlarge them.  Enjoy!

Halloween in Ireland

This Year;s Pumpkin Carving

Cheshire Cat

Jack o Lantern

Man in Mask

School Shootings

Liberals seem to have but three solutions to damp down gun violence at schools ... universal background checks, compulsory gun registrations and the outlawing of "assault" rifles with large magazines ... as if the gun commits these heinous crimes. All of these constraints would, in my opinion, do little to stop the rash of school shootings we have recently experienced ... and they would do absolutely nothing to retard the criminals and gang bangers from their wild-west mayhem.

The solution to the rash of urban drive-by shootings would be to start or reinstate stop and frisk ... and the discouraging of the "Black Lives Matter" anti-police movement.

But insofar as fixing the school shooting plague our society needs to focus on the shooter ... and this requires a trade-off between individual liberty and societal good. Thus, I have the following suggestions:

- Relax the HIPAA rules that prohibit mental health workers from reporting incidents of patients who have indicated that they want to kill others. This reporting could be done through a panel of mental-health experts who would review the evidence and decide if it met a threshold of sufficient danger that required further action. If so, then the proper authorities would be notified.

- All American social-media systems should be required to have filters in place that identify individuals who issue radical anti-social threats on their postings ... and then provide information to help law enforcement zero in on these possible killers.

- Existing gun registration systems should be scanned to identify individuals or relatives of individuals who are buying large quantities of guns and ammunition in a short period of time.

- School administrators should be asked to place in a database public data on possible nut cases under their authority ... excluding any information which had not been collected under strict formal disciplinary procedures.

A data mining system should then be constructed that melds the information from these four filters to rank threat levels for possible school shooters ... who then would be interviewed further to determine exactly how dangerous they are ... and incarcerated if necessary. Thus, authorities might proactively reduce or eliminate these school-shooting threats.
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Juxtaposition LVIII

Arab Immigrants in Slovenia

Aemy Ants

Am I Wrong?

According to Hillary Clinton's sworn testimony at last week's Benghazi hearings, Chris Stevens did not have her private e-mail address so that he might send a plea for extra security directly to her. However, it was also revealed during her testimony that Sid Blumenthal had sent Hillary e-mails to this same address that contained certain intelligence on Libya that Hillary then forwarded to Chris Stevens for comment. How in Lucifer's name could Chris Stevens reply with any comments to Hillary if he didn't have her return private e-mail address?

We all know how e-mail systems work. Apparently, Hillary Clinton has perjured herself again for the umpteenth time.

Am I wrong?

A Tale of Two Parties

The two party system in the United States is a sham. The Democrat party is no longer recognizable as the home of Sam Nunn, Herbert Humphrey, Barbara Jordan and JFK. This party, under the leadership of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid has successfully moved far left and is about to take this turn even wider. This party no longer wishes the United States to be the leader on the world stage (a stance once called isolationism) and has alienated many allies. It no longer wants a strong military ... witness our president's recent veto of the military appropriation legislation. It wants open borders with very loose enforcement of immigration laws. It is anti-capitalistic ... except for Mom and Pop capitalism ... according to Hillary Clinton in the recent Democrat presidential debate ... and crony capitalism ... according to our president. It favors single-payer health care. It desires European-style nanny-state Socialism with very high taxes funding an ever-growing welfare state. It tolerates repressive Communist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and China. It has fully swallowed the myth of global warming as a way of expanding the reach of government. It embraces political mendacity ... now dismissed as "spin." It abets the Black Lives Matter movement ... clearly an anti law enforcement cabal.

The Republican Party, under the leadership of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, is effectively Democrat-light ... a bunch of prancing eunuchs. It only offers token resistance to all the excesses of the galloping Left. It lives in dread of the slings and arrows of the main-stream media (clearly an arm of the Democrat party). It can only give lip service to resisting the tax and spend policies of our fifth-column politicians ... in fact often adding its own precious ornaments to frequent congressional Christmas-tree legislation. It is a party that has lost its way after Ronald Reagan showed it how powerful conservative policies could produce domestic economic growth and international hegemony. Somehow, these lessons were submerged by their own success. Now, some on the Right have realized this backsliding and are trying to restore the idealism that wrought these national benefits. However, the old-time Republican establishment is resisting such a revitalization ... and would prefer the comfort of the current status quo.

Enter Donald Trump who has sensed the frustration of the conservative class in this country and has the communication skills to convince many of them that he can champion the roll-back of the Democrats' excesses. Whether he can or not seems unimportant to his acolytes as they see the demise of our national identity and are willing to grasp any avenue out of  this perdition.

Pants-Suited Piranha

Hillary Clinton has had a very good week and a day. It all started with Bernie Sanders falling on his sword over Hillary's e-mail server problem in the first Democrat  debate. (I wonder what his reward has been promised for this bit of generosity ... Secretary of Labor?) ... and it ended yesterday when Joe Biden dropped out of contention for the Democrat nomination. (Here in Boston radio commentator, Howie Carr, wondered what racehorse gave its life and it's head to be found in Biden's bed.)

And today the pant-suited piranha goes in front of the House committee investigating the Benghazi murders to testify about her role in this sleazy matter. I am certain that any incriminating information that this committee has gathered has been fed to her by the committee's Democrats so that Hilary now has well-rehearsed answers.

And if anyone believes that the Obama administration's  FBI investigation into the Clinton e-mail server issue has not already been compromised by the Clinton Foundation political juggernaut, they have not been awake for these last seven years. Yes, it seems that the whole rationale for Hillary becoming our 45th president is her gender and our uninformed electorate might just buy into this bit of pop-culture inanity.

Nurses

Right before I recently went into the hospital, Joy Behar (Joyless Blowhard) made some disparaging comments about the nursing (non)profession on "The View" ... see: Breitbart Story. After an understandable outrage, she and her cackling brood had to retract these comments on a following day's show. However, witnesses profess that, even after this small backtracking, these hens continued their smearing during the show's commercial breaks. How very lowlife!

And I can attest by my recent medical experiences that nurses, nurses aides, orderlies, etc. play vital roles in the health-care field. Doctors, like quarterbacks, tend to grab all the headlines. But it is these Florence Nightingale stalwarts who really do the healing ... just like the linemen win or lose football games.

May I suggest that grandstanding on afternoon television with inane banter is the true non-profession?

Truth

"Truth is beauty and beauty, truth."  -- Keats

(This blog entry is only tangentially related to the Rathergate movie, Truth.)

Truth is an elusive elfin sprite. She is a Tinker Bell caught in a typhoon of ignorance, self-serving mendacity, superstition and media obfuscation. And often when this genie is captured in a bottle, she turns to dust with new information. This is because truth in one narrow context may not hold in a broader milieu. For instance while "turn the other cheek" may be fine for the individual, it may not be the best policy for a nation. But universal truth-telling is essential for truly successful governance ... and it is a very rare commodity these days in Washington.

Thus I am currently inclined to use veracity as a yardstick to measure our roster of candidates for president ... and, to me, the greatest truth tellers are Jim Webb, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Marco Rubio. Donald Trump might make the list if he constantly didn't engage of puerile put-downs of his Republican rivals. Guess who is on the bottom rung of this believability ladder ranking.among this bunch of wannabes? And, surprisingly, the one who captures my heart and my brain on the top rung is Dr. Carson ... for no other reason than he is willing to tell truths that go against the media meme ... and not back down when challenged.

Yes, my current favorite, if elected president, would find himself in a hornet's nest of backbenchers and backstabbers. But somehow I feel that he, like Abraham Lincoln, has the perspicacity to surround himself with learned deputies who would help him through the gauntlet of incompetence that is Washington.

In fact, if Ben Carson were lucky enough to make it as the Republican candidate, I would suggest he choose as his campaign's motto ... "The Truth Teller."