Natural 20

If you can’t play Dungeons & Dragons yourself, this is the next best thing.

Although actually, I didn’t find it that amusing, but maybe it gets better as the series goes on?

$575 million program to increase teacher effectiveness, total failure

https://www.the74million.org/study-multi-year-gates-experiment-to-improve-teacher-effectiveness-spent-575-million-didnt-make-an-impact/
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2242.html

With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate in the Intensive Partnerships initiative.

This demonstrates, yet again, that there’s no amount of money that can be spent on schools that will make kids smarter.

The liberal hypothesis, that bad outcomes for blacks and other minorities (but not for Asians) are at least partially because of bad schools, is false.

Jarrod Ramos fallout

This is dying down and I predict we will barely hear about this story after today.

The left was gearing up to go into a full week of massive outrage based on their totally wrong assumption that the shooter was some sort of right-wing type.

Of course, we see not a single apology from any leftist for jumping to wrong conclusions.

On the other hand, I apologize for leaving out from my list of 5 possibilities that actual correct 6th possibility: some guy with a local grudge, who’s “crazy” only in a colloquial way and not in a clinical way.

Even though Ramos appears to be half Hispanic, that is irrelevant to this particular episode. Ramos apparently considered himself to be white and not a minority, he looks pretty white. Without his weird facial hair, you wouldn’t be able to tell that he is something other than white. On the other hand, being Hispanic clashes with the liberal narrative of mass shooters being angry Trump-supporting white guys.

It is reported that Ramos stalked an ex-girlfriend, which would mean he’s not quite an incel. On the other hand, I think that may be incorrect, and the women he stalked was merely someone he had unrequited feelings for.

In the article, the woman said that Ramos had reached out to her on Facebook to say that she had been the only person who had been kind to him in school. Feeling that he might be experiencing some problems, the woman had encouraged him to seek counseling. That set off months of emails in which he alternatively asked for help and was nasty to her, she said. He called her vulgar names and even told her to kill herself, the woman told the paper.

She doesn’t really sound like a girlfriend, just some girl who wasn’t as cruel to him as everyone else at his high school. So maybe, “incel” would be a good description for Ramos.

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Neither liberals nor conservatives seem to understand the phenomenon of white Hispanics, people who are theoretically Hispanic but think of themselves as white and look white (but may take advantage of being “Hispanic” when applying to college, because they would be stupid not to take advantage of it).

Jarrod Ramos

That’s the guy who did it.

The shooting appears to be a local grudge, Ramos sued the paper in 2011 and lost, it has nothing to do with Ramos being a Trump supporter.

It should also be pointed out that the name sounds Hispanic, but it’s hard to tell from the photo if he’s Latino or white.

Will stupid libtards who blamed Trump apologize? Nope, not likely. Liberals never apologize for being wrong, never admit they are ever wrong, they just move on to the next outrage.

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This is his Twitter feeed!!!! Better look quickly before it disappears. https://twitter.com/erichartleyfrnd?lang=en

I can’t find anything in there about his politics, he’s just obsessed with suing people.

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Ah here’s something: the complete mugshot that is circulating, he’s listed as “WHITE NON-HISPANIC.” Not Hispanic after all.

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Notice that he hasn’t tweeted anything for two years, than suddenly, earlier today, one last tweet. Somehow this mass shooting is revenge against the judge (Charles Moylan) who ruled against him. It has nothing to do with Trump or politics.

This guy is just some crazy guy obsessed with this newspaper doing him wrong. The photo on his twitter feed is not Ramos, it’s the reporter that he sued.

Mass shooting at Maryland newspaper

1. Beta-male rage?
2. Disgruntled employee?
3. Right-wing nut pissed off at all of the Trump hate?
4. Islamic terrorism? (It happened in France.)
5. Some guy with schizophrenia?

UPDATE

Suspect is a white male in his 20s without identification and who won’t tell police his identity. This is new! (But “white” could mean a lot of things. Once upon a time, the media thought George Zimmerman was white.)

UPDATE 2

SJWs and libtards on Twitter have already been busy blaming Trump and conservatives for the shooting, without knowing any facts at all.

UPDATE 3

5 dead, “several” others “gravely” injured.

UPDATE 7:07 PM

The only additional fact I can find is that the shooter shaved off his fingerprints, so law enforcement is unable to identify him by his fingerprints.

I don’t understand the stupidity of law enforcement here. Why not release his picture, he’d then be identified pretty quickly.

BIG UPDATE

BREAKING / NBC News: A 39 year old white male has been positively identified through the use of facial recognition software as the shooter at a newspaper in Annapolis, authorities say.

A court authorized search of the suspect’s home is underway. Reported with @jonathan4ny

Negative partisanship

http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity-personal-politics-views-of-trump/8_04/

43% of Republican and “Lean Republican” voters vote Republican not because they are “for what the Republican Party represents” but because they are “against what the Democratic Party represents.”

How I would put it is that there’s this big class of voters out there that hate the out-of-control SJWism of Democrats, but at the same time they don’t get very enthused about the main Republican platform of outlawing abortion and giving tax cuts to the rich.

It’s these voters who Trump won, and the mainstream Republican Party is still pretty clueless. They wish Trumpism would go away and they can return to talking about abortion and more tax cuts.

Knockout game in the Bronx

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Bronx-NYC-Man-Punched-Knockout-Robbery-Pictures-486792521.html

Video shows two muscular Hispanics walk up to a skinny white guy and punch him the face, knocking him out with a single punch and fracturing his skull. Then they are caught on camera smiling and high-fiving each other.

Afterwards, other people in the area casually steal his wallet and smartphone.

Abortion will never be left up to the states

I see this over and over again in the comments, that a repeal of Roe v. Wade “only” means abortion will then be left up to the states.

This is totally deceptive. Abortion is too important for Congress to ever leave this up to the states. If Democrats control Congress (which they don’t) they would enforce mandatory access to abortion, and if Republicans control Congress (which they do), they would face some pretty strong pressure from the anti-abortion Right to make abortion illegal everywhere.

There is no way, in the long run, or even the medium run, that this issue would be left to the states to decide.

As I said in the comments, I’m not sure that the conservatives on the court want to repeal Roe v. Wade. But if they do, it would be bad for America if abortions become illegal; abortions are keeping the population of people with less desirable genetics in check. This is because women with high IQ and high future-time orientation rarely get accidentally pregnant in the first place. Rightists have this dumb idea that Juno is the typical person getting an abortion, and that’s a completely fake narrative. The most typical women who gets an abortion is an unmarried black woman who collects welfare and already has at least one kid.

I previously pointed out that poor black women have a twelve-times higher abortion rate than middle-class white women

Public sector unions

Public sector unions are a scourge on the public. Unlike private businesses, the government has shown that it is unable to bargain against unions and wind sup getting ripped off to the detriment of taxpayers whose taxes have to increase to pay the inflated wages and retirement benefits.

So if the Supreme Court has weakened public sector unions with its ruling that requiring a government employee to be a union member and pay dues (which then get donated to Democratic political candidates) in order to obtain or keep their job violates their First Amendment rights, then the end result is beneficial for the voters and taxpayers who aren’t in public sector unions.

I feel differently about private sector unions, but this ruling has nothing to do with them.

Mary Ann vs. Ginger

I mentioned this in a voice chat with two college-aged gamers, and they had no clue what I was talking about.

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Back in the 1960s, a billionaire couple on vacation would take a sightseeing cruise with a prole farm girl and a middle-class college professor. That wouldn’t happen today, they would do something too expensive for regular people to participate in.