Lousy Views

And another slam on flying, this time from former Queen guitarist Brian May:

“Travelling on planes has for years been something I have had to do, as part of my job,” explains May. “As I fly today with British Airways, I wonder if I am the only person left in the world who likes to relax in a comfortable seat and dreamily turn my head to the window and get lost in the ever-changing wonders of the planet as they drift by? I wonder this because I’m not aware of anyone except me complaining about the new way the seats are configured in BA First Class.”
May wails about the seating changes: “I hate it. It costs an arm and a leg to travel this way and I feel that we no longer get our money’s worth. In the old days you sat right next to the window and the view was wide and spectacular. Now they sit you about three feet from the window and so low down all you can see from your seat is a small patch of sky. It’s boring — frustrating.”

Believe it or not, he has a point. It does cost an arm and a leg to fly First Class (on any airline), and because a First Class ticket is also the most profitable sale an airline can make, it behooves them to look after their best customers — and clearly they aren’t, in this case anyway. And FFS: he’s Brian May of Queen; nobody ever played like he did, nobody ever sounded as good as he does, and nobody ever will unless it’s to copy him. If anyone has earned the right to complain about shitty service, he has.

Let’s not indulge in the Brit Wealth Envy thing and call him a pampered rich pussy, because the plain fact is that May works unbelievably hard. Because he’s one of the most sought-after lead guitarists in rock music, despite his age, recording sessions, concerts  and appearances take place all over the world for him — London one day, New York the next, Melbourne three days later, back to London after that, then on to Tokyo, ad infinitum — which means that he logs well over two hundred thousand miles a year flying from gig to gig. There is no way he could possibly do this in Economy (a.k.a. steerage), and anyone who’s ever flown just a quarter of what he has will not begrudge him his seat in First Class, because without that, and with his sheer volume of work, his job is frankly not doable.

And let’s be honest about this: he’s sixty-nine years old, and 6’2″ tall. He needs a comfortable seat, because after 10,000 miles in the torture device known as an Economy-class seat, he’d have to be carried off the plane straight into a hospital for traction to straighten out his back. Then, after doing his job, he’d have to do Economy all over again two days later? Please.

Of course the DM journalists have a go at him because they’re a bunch of Bolshie peasants whose total experience in commercial flying is Ryanair to Magaluf once a year at a cost of £45 (compared to May’s ticket price of about £15,000).

The hell with them. I’m on May’s side as much for that as for the fact that I bloody hate the airline companies. All of them. Bastards. [10,000-word rant deleted]

Feel free to add your own airline horror stories in Comments.

 

Quote Of The Day

From some unknown British woman, screaming at a random Muslim guy:

“Do you wanna know why I’m being racist? In my own country? Because it’s your race that’s blowing up our fucking nation!”

You know, in a strange way, she makes perfect sense. Look, I know that “Muslim” is not a race — but it’s the Muzzies (and liberal asswipes) who’ve turned it into a racial issue, instead of a religious and/or cultural one. Every time a Muslim screams “racism” when in fact someone is taking issue with their fucking 9th-century death cult, they’re leaving themselves open to shit like this.

And as for the Muslim feeling unsafe in his own country:  how exactly do you think British Anglos (for want of a better term) feel, when children get blown up at a pop concert and pedestrians get stabbed outside the Houses of Parliament by Muslim fuckheads? (And they are, most definitely, Muslims, by the way, despite attempts at whitewashing by the liberal media.) Do you think they feel safe?  And yes: when you set yourselves up in little Muslim-only ghettoes and neighborhoods where non-Muslim women feel threatened just for wearing a minskirt, when Muslim men set up entire pedophile clubs “because these are infidel girls, so it’s okay”, then how the fuck do you think people are going to treat you? Like one of their own?

Given what Islam has wrought in Britain over the past twenty years, let me tell you:  I’m on this woman’s side more than I am on the random Muslim’s.

Object Lesson #2

And, children, this is why you need to carry your handgun with you at all times:

Several shots were fired at a truck flying a “Make America Great Again” flag and an American flag on a highway in Indianapolis Tuesday afternoon, Fox 59 reported. Luckily, no one was hurt in the incident, which looks like a possible case of left-wing terrorism.
Indiana State Police say a newer white 4-door Chevrolet Malibu with a Louisiana plate pulled up next to the pickup truck. A black male passenger held a handgun out of the window and fired several shots at the pro-Trump truck. Police say no one was in injured in the incident. The driver of the Malibu was described as a black male around the age of 23. The passenger was described as a light skinned black male with a sleeve tattoo on his right arm.

Somebody tell me if the shooter was some random White asshole and the target a Black woman with a Hillary! bumper sticker, that the media reaction would have been somewhat different. On second thoughts, don’t bother. We all know the answer to that one.

But seriously: this violence by the Left can only be addressed by a violent reaction, i.e. the intended target returning fire. Hence the need to have a gun with you at all times.

Just remember that we didn’t start this foolishness. But if we’re confronted with it, like in the above scenario, we are damn sure going to finish it — if, that is, we’re prepared for it.

Carry your gun. All the time.


Update: from Longtime Reader GMC70 in Comments, thoughts which really deserve to be part of this post:

Just remember to learn the law of self-defense in your jurisdiction, and apply it correctly.
And as an attorney, I’ll throw in gratis my recommendations should you ever have to use that weapon to defend life:
1) make sure YOU (or someone at your direction) call 911, and request assistance.  Too often, the “victim” is simply the 1st person to call 911. State to the operator (it’s recorded, remember) that “I was forced to fire my weapon to defend myself” or words to that effect as appropriate.  DO NOT elaborate or go into detail with the operator.  And make sure that if an ambulance is appropriate, you notify them of that.
2) when law enforcement arrives, DO NOT have your gun in your hand unless absolutely necessary; you do not want to be mistaken for the BG.  Acknowledge the obvious – your rounds are in the goblin, and say, again, “I was forced to defend myself (or another) with my weapon,” as appropriate.  STOP THERE.  Do not elaborate.  For God’s sake DO NOT – EVER – LIE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT.  You can refuse to talk, but you cannot lie.  And it will not help you, in the long run.  There are too many ways for lies to be discovered for what they are.
3) note witnesses, and make sure their names and addresses are recorded.  If necessary, do this yourself; you may not be able to rely on law enforcement to do it.
4) At some point you are likely to be asked to make a detailed statement.  POLITELY DECLINE TO DO SO.  Personally, my statement will  “officer, I’m rattled by this experience and I need to collect my thoughts (or get checked out by medical, if the circumstances warrant) and clear my head before I make a statement.”   They may arrest you – let them.  DO NOT MAKE ANY STATEMENTS WITHOUT CONSULTING AN EXPERIENCED AND QUALIFIED ATTORNEY.   At this point, LEOs may not be your friends.  If they’re good officers, they’ll understand; if they’re not, making a statement may not help you, and could hurt you.  DO NOT hurt yourself by making statements without collecting your thoughts and carefully considering the impact of the statements.  Remember – as a general rule, when an officer takes a suspect into a room for questioning (and at this point, you’re a suspect), he’s not there to get the facts.  He’s there to get a confession.  And confession and truth (or facts) are not necessarily the same thing.
5) After consulting with an attorney, and considering what is in your best interests, you may submit a statement and/or submit to questions – with your attorney present.  And how you proceed from there should be in full consultation with a qualified attorney.
Remember – trials are not about truth, they are about the perception of truth.  The only “truth” that matters, at that point, is what those 12 people in the jury box decide is the truth.  Do not give the State ammunition to prosecute you.  And some prosecutors may want to prosecute you just for the principle of the thing – I’ve seen it.

Here’s to hoping you’ll never need that advice.

Teaching, My Ass

Aaugh! as Charlie Brown used to say. If you haven’t taken yer blood-pressure meds yet, you may want to pop them before reading any further. This takes the bloody cake.

Penn State York is now offering a week-long “Social Justice and Education” course to teach educators, counselors, and social workers to employ a “culturally responsive lens” in the classroom.
According to the university’s website, the course will be taught by Kathy Roy, associate professor of literacy education at Penn State Harrisburg and coordinator of the literary education program, and will focus on training educators to be “culturally responsive” toward their students.

The school notes that Roy’s academic experience is “grounded in social justice frameworks,” saying her research primarily “examines the classroom and community experiences of new and existing refugee and immigrant populations in the U.S., focusing particularly on the intersections of race, culture, language, and other markers of identity.”

I think that “associate professor of literacy education” means that she teaches people how to read, but maybe I’m just being too literal and stuff. Note too the sex of the “educators” who will be foisting this utter bullshit on the delicate flowers known as “students” as per this priceless finale:

Francine Baker, coordinator of the master of education in Teaching and Curriculum at Penn State York, said the course will provide useful tools and techniques to “maximize the learning experience” in the classroom.
“Every day, every teacher makes multiple decisions that impact social justice and equity in their classroom, school, and thus the community-at-large,” Baker explained. “Every student comes with their own story, beliefs, values and ideas. The summer institute at Penn State offers educators the research and strategies to support and expand educational practices that connect students and maximize the learning experience.”
Baker also maintained that the course will allow educators to “design activities to directly embed in their curricular area, classroom and school, while earning three graduate credits or Act 48 hours.

Good, so the educators will receive bribes (“credits”) for perpetrating this insanity, which is cloaked in meaningless jargon such as “maximize the learning experience“. And this part, “intersections of race, culture, language, and other markers of identity” makes me want to have intersectional intercourse with their mothers. And excuse me, but since when was it a goal of tertiary education to “connect students“?

And if all that doesn’t take the cake, this surely will: [RELATED: University to host ‘social justice summer camp’]

Follow that link at your peril. That whirring sound is that of Plato and Socrates (and anyone who ever taught students prior to 1970) spinning in their graves.

New motto for this particular college: “Penn State York: a place to keep hidden from your children.” Or if we want to go all Classical (I know, Irony Alert):

Non Attendendum.

Traitorous Bastards

Via Insty comes this article, which sums up the entire Democrat villainy quite succinctly:

Trump’s enemies—including his former Democratic opponent—fancy themselves part of a “resistance.” Leave aside the nauseating presumption of that rubric, as if they were freedom fighters struggling against a totalitarian threat.  In truth, what they are “resisting” is the result of a free and open democratic election and the rule of law.

Here’s my immediate thought:

But perhaps I’m being a little hasty, a little precipitous in my judgement of these pricks. Feel free to contradict or chide me in Comments.

Prediction Mathematics

Before I go any further into this topic, I want all the other (and more-qualified-than-I) statisticians out there please to hold off on quibbles about minutiae, because this is a fairly simplistic overview, not an academic treatise about the topic. For the record, however, let me remind everybody that I was involved in designing predictive algorithms in my past life as a consultant in the supermarket industry, and my specialty was assessing and assigning the different weighting factors involved in predicting incremental sales created by price- and other kinds of promotions. I didn’t design the algorithms — that was the job of some seriously-brainy boffins from MIT, University of Chicago and Northwestern — but I did advise them on the above, and the results were predictive algorithms that generated forecasts which were generally between 95% and 97% accurate.

What prompted this post was this article, which I urge  you to read before continuing, because otherwise what I’m going to say may not make sense.

Here’s a quick thumbnail sketch as to how all this works — and I’m not going to use the supermarket business because even I fall asleep because of its mind-numbing boredom. Let’s make it more current, more contemporaneous.

Say we want to establish the likelihood of someone becoming a terrorist who wants to blow a bunch of innocent people up in a suicide attack. Note the terms of the discussion carefully, because they are important.

  • “Terrorist” = somebody who wants to terrorize the population at large
  • “Innocent people” = people who are not actively inimical to the terrorist’s philosophy, group or society
  • “Suicide” = someone who knows that he will perish in the attack.

Note that this predictive algorithm is not going to identify Timothy McVeigh, for example, because while some innocent people were killed in his Oklahoma City attack, the bomb he created was specifically targeted at an IRS building as opposed to, say, a Pink Floyd concert. Likewise, McVeigh made careful plans to avoid being killed in the bomb blast, and his attack was probably designed to create fear among government employees. (Yes, of course he was a terrorist, just not the kind we’re trying to predict below.)

So how does one establish an algorithm to foresee (and, one hopes, guard against) a terrorist attack such as described in the brief? One looks at history (without which all predictions are called “guesswork”) and looks at the profiles of all other people who have perpetrated such crimes in the past, and not the distant past either, because time has a way of making predictive algorithms irrelevant as circumstances change. From that, we can deduce the following contemporary factors:

  • religious fanaticism
  • age
  • sex
  • exposure to radical philosophy
  • societal alienation
  • socio-economic status

That’s not a comprehensive list by any means, but it will give you an idea of what’s involved. What this algorithm is supposed to do is drill down through the total population of a defined universe (a country, an area, the entire world) to identify a potential terrorist as defined above. So here we go, and let’s build a set of simple parameters for our algorithm from some of the above factors, starting with the easiest one first.

  • Socio-economic status:
    We can eliminate the upper echelons of society from any inspection. Saudi or Swedish princes and billionaire oil oligarchs don’t blow themselves up in Parisian shopping malls, or at least none have so far. Almost exclusively, terrorists have come from middle-class origins and the unemployed- or low-wage scale segments. These are micro-weightings, i.e. applied within the criterion itself. Using a scale of 1-100, we can estimate that upper-class: 0.5; middle-class: 40; low-wage: 50; unemployed: 65. (Note that they don’t have to add up to 100 collectively; we’re establishing a risk factor for each group.)
    The more interesting question is: how important is socio-economic status as a predictive factor compared to, say, religion? Probably not as much; but how much less important? This is a macro-weighting, which is applied across all the identified criteria. For the sake of argument, let’s assign the socio-economic factor a weighting of, say, 35 overall.
  • Societal alienation:
    Immigrant or native-born? Immigrants or, as we used to call them, “strangers in town” or “newcomers” may feel that they’re not part of the new society in which they find themselves — especially if that society is radically different from the one they left. Newcomers also have fewer “roots” in that society, which makes anti-social activity less problematic for their conscience. If the newcomers are also part of an ethnic group which sets themselves apart from the mainstream of their adopted society — a combination of socially, philosophically or physically — this will add to their feelings of alienation. The second determinant, native-born, is probably less important, although if they are members of a “set-apart” group, that micro-weighting needs to be adjusted upwards, and especially if they have constant contact with newcomers. Once again, we can assign micro-weightings of 60 and 45 respectively.
    For the macro-weighting, we can ask how important alienation is, compared to socio-economic status? Probably a lot more, but once again, how much more? — which is the weighting decision. More than socio-economic’s 35? Definitely — more like 60, almost twice as likely.
  • Age:
    Most terrorists are young — under the age of forty. While an age of, say, sixty-five is not a disqualifying criterion, it certainly suggests a far smaller weighting than someone who is in their twenties (which group has supplied the far-greater proportion of terrorists than sexagenarians). We can assign weightings by specific age groups (e.g. 12-16, 17-25, 26-30 and so on), but to keep things simple, we’ll give the under-40s a cumulative micro-weighting of 90, and the over-40s a score of 5.
    As a macro-weighting, age is one of the principle determinants of likely terrorists, and incidentally of most major criminal activity in general (check the distribution curve of ages among prison inmates and known terrorists to verify this statement). Let’s give this group a score of 50 — less than socio-economic status, but not much less.
  • Religious fanaticism:
    Almost all religions engender fanaticism in one way or another, but in recent times (remember the “recent history” issue), Islam has produced by far the greater number, and has caused by far the greatest number of terrorist-inspired incidents, which have killed by far the greatest number of innocent people. (Note that Nazi fanatics killed far more innocent people in the past two hundred-odd years, but in the past two decades have killed almost none — hence the recency determinant.) At the moment, therefore, an adherent of Islam would need to get a far greater micro-weighting than, say, a Nazi, Christian or Buddhist.
    As a macro-weighting (applied against the total population), Islam is probably the single most important determinant — and if one were to apply a weighting factor along that scale of 1-100, one could easily assign a contemporary weighting of 95 or even higher.

Of course, anyone suggesting weightings such as the above is going to be accused of “profiling” by the moral relativists, SJWs, ACLU, SPLC and suchlike Useful Idiots, but I should point out that on that basis, no courts should use the COMPAS system at all.

What should be fairly obvious to anyone is that while the overall algorithm design can be a proprietary affair, the weighting factors within the algorithms need to be subject to the closest scrutiny and debate possible. I should also point out that a lack of such analysis has enabled the scam known as global warming / -cooling / climate change to be accepted by the gullible and ignorant, but we can talk about that another time.

Suffice it to say that the more daylight involved, and most certainly the daylight within the group building and implementing the forecast criteria — statisticians, intelligence services, law enforcement and the judicial system, the more accurate the algorithms will become. Most important, however, is the fact that the predictive algorithms will engender a higher degree of trust in the population.