Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Everyone believes they need to make big changes but the only big change you need is the change to your thinking.  Change your thinking and you will automatically change dozens of small things you do every day. That’s because action follows thinking.  Things to Think About in 2014: (1) Why?  Why am I doing things the way I am doing them? Why am I using that media? That message? Who suggested it? Am I testing it? (2) Think of each day as a gift. What you do with that gift is up to you. Will you waste it? Make it productive? Enjoy it? (3) Consider that who we are is determined mostly by our environment — until we become aware of this fact — then it’s up to us. (4) Remember that you can’t eliminate all mistakes, but you can stop repeating them. Are you repeating mistakes?  (5) Just because something has never been done doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Maybe you were meant to do it. (6) Share what you learn. Share the credit. Share the ...

The Justice and State departments  cite a year-old FBI investigation and a future criminal prosecution to block access to survivors of last year’s Benghazi terror attack. The Obama administration is "changing names" of the Benghazi survivors and "creating aliases" to keep them hidden from congressional investigators and the American people. Rep. Gowdy  said the administration is "dispersing them around the country" to keep them out of sight. CNN revealed there were "dozens" of CIA operatives on the ground in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the night of the deadly attack that killed four Americans. Meanwhile, the CIA is taking "unprecedented" steps to keep whatever it was doing in Benghazi a secret, according to reports. These Benghazi revelations come at the same time that the Obama administration has decided to start referring to the Benghazi and IRS scandals as "phony."

This is the kind of emotional rhetoric and propaganda promoted by the progressive liberal anti-gun movement: "Over 11,000 people died from guns this year, Over 200 were children. 2014 needs to be the year we put pressure on the House to represent our desires to tighten gun safety, background checks, penalties for unsecured weapons and limit weapons of war on the streets!" But let's dissect the facts, and remove the emotions from the equation, shall we? There are roughly 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States. Of those, around 60% are suicides. About 3% are accidental deaths (less than 1,000). About 34% of deaths (just over 11,000 in both 2010 and 2011) make up the remainder of gun deaths. Sometimes the 32,000 and 11,000 figures are used interchangeably by gun control advocates. Clearly, the 32,000 figure is a far more dramatic number and is often used for impact. These numbers are also regularly compared to other countries' gun statistics. But are they ...

There is no clearer demonstration of the differences in the two major political parties than their position on the minimum wage. Democrats generally are in favor of a higher minimum wage, Republican generally oppose it, although in recent times they have certainly caved. In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment. The law says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment. Remember that the minimum wage law does not provide any jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result. All demand curves are falling, and the demand for hiring labor is no exception. So laws that prohibit employment at any wage that is relevant to the market must result in outlawing employment and causing unemployment. If the minimum...

In an era in which the main battlefield against Israel is the campaign to delegitimize the very existence of the Jewish state it is important to challenge the false narratives that are being thrown into the public discourse and gradually being accepted, not by governments, but by a wider audience. The narrative tells of a dispossessed Palestine whose rights have been usurped by colonial invaders who have conquered their land through the Zionist enterprise. They are, in is claimed, made to suffer by the imposition of a European Holocaust which has left them paying the price. Driven out of their land by Jewish interlopers the remnants have been occupied and oppressed by a brutal ‘Nazi’-like regime. No country has a greater legitimacy, under international law, to exist than Israel. If Israel does not possess that legal right to sovereignty then no nation on earth can claim greater legitimacy than Israel. To fully understand this, one needs to understand the unfolding of modern histor...

In business, friendship, and in Love.

1) Observe their behavior. Look at the way they act. How do they treat others? Are they inconsiderate and/or rude? Are they quick to join in on gossip? Are they quick to judge people? Do they continuously concern themselves with what other people are doing? There's a difference between someone who wants to be helpful and someone who's just being nosy and wants something to gossip about. However, that alone is not enough to determine whether someone is trustworthy. Someone that seems to be involved in a lot of drama is someone that you need to be cautious of - there is a reason why they don't get along with so many people. 2) Listen to them, communication is important. When they talk to you, do they redirect their conversation towards other people - and if they do, are they saying negative things about them? If this person is telling you things about other people's private lives for the sake of having an "interesting conversation", you should take that into c...

Science tells us unequivocally that as soon as the first embryonic cell division takes place, we have a human life - separate and distinct from the mother. This is not a religious issue - it is one of biological scientific fact. Any biologist in the world can tell you that a mammal’s life begins when the sperm from the father unites with the egg from the mother.  This fact is very inconvenient for those who want to treat embryonic and fetal human beings as property. The real argument in the abortion debate is whether or not this human being is a "person," with all the legal rights and protections of  "personhood". Those who traffic in human tissue argue that he or she is not. This is the same argument used in the Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared that black Americans, though human, are not "persons" under the law. As long as "personhood" is denied to human beings in their embryonic and fetal stage...

There seems to be a bit of confusion from some commenters. This is not my programmning blog, although in the past I have posted technical content. This is my "everything" blog - I write about politics, science, psychology and other subjects here. If you want my programming blog, it is at peterbromberg.net  - there is only technical content there. Thanks!

A refusal to look abroad to see what systems actually work is the major failure of Obamacare. It was rammed down our throats from behind closed doors. Ill-conceived, politically motivated, you name it. For example: the Danish health care system is the nightmare of any anti-government free market believer: it's a tax-funded state-run universal health care system. Denmark provides "free" health care to all residents, funded through taxes. There is an optional private health care sector, but it is tiny compared with the vastly larger public system that is used by most of the population. Users pay for a few procedures, such as fertility treatments (from the third attempt onwards) and non-essential cosmetic surgery, as well as most of their own dental care and a portion of prescription medication. Apothecaries are privately owned, but doctor's visits and hospitalization, including tests, treatment, follow-up care, and some medication, are fully covered. The Danish health ...

So right now the Senate (and the House, which voted to approve) doesn't increase the dollar amount of the debt limit - all it does is suspend enforcement of it until February 7th, when the limits are supposed to go back into place and will have to be raised. What that does in the meantime is give Obama and the Democrats a blank check to accumulate as much new debt as they want until then. Essentially what has happened is our lawmakers have gotten away with allowing the country to rack up more debt and avoid the threat of default without actually voting for debt limit increase. We're in to 17 trillions of dollars in debt; what I'd like to know is, what are we going to do when we're in the hundreds of trillions of dollars? What's the number after that? What happens when we are so far into debt that we can't possibly repay in hundreds of years? Because at the rate we're going, our grandkids will be right in the middle of it. Have these spineless turds in W...

A Florida man is recovering from burns on up to 50 percent of his body after he reportedly set himself on fire while trying light a cross-burning decoration for Halloween. According to  Florida Today , Palm Bay police identified 50-year-old Ron Nielson as the man being treated for burns by Palm Bay Fire-Rescue crews on Tuesday evening. “He was conscious and alert but he had second-degree burns over 40 to 50 percent of his body, including his chest, arms, upper torso,” Palm Bay Police Department spokesperson Yvonne Martinez said. Palm Bay police described the incident as a “prank” that included using candles and gasoline to light a wooden cross along the side of his home. “It started as some kind of prank apparently and involved a wooden cross,” Martinez explained. “We don’t know if he was trying to light the cross or the candles but when he did, his clothes caught fire.” WFTV  reported  that Nielson had been drinking when the fire occurred. His wife tried to ...

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution. Seventy-seven were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October of 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of these and eight others, called “The Federalist” or, “The New Constitution”, was published in two volumes in 1788 by J. and A. McLean. The series' correct title is The Federalist; the title The Federalist Papers did not emerge until the twentieth century. Though the authors of The Federalist Papers foremost wished to influence the vote in favor of ratifying the Constitution, in Federalist No 1 they explicitly set that debate in broader political terms: It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question: whether societies of men are really capable or ...

Have a looky at the unusually large number of "BlueHeads" - people with no profile photo - making negative comments on my post. Most of them, when you look at their profiles, have never made a post and have little or no followers. Draw your own conclusions:

Well, I've finally relented and installed Windows 8.1 on one machine in the house. Frankly, I'm not in a big hurry to do it on the other two PC's I use, including my main development machine. First of all, if you are planning on upgrading to Windows 8.1, be aware of a couple of things:  1) You cannot upgrade directly from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. Microsoft has, in their infinite wisdom (at least for now) made that impossible. No, you have to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 first. Only then can you do ANOTHER upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.  2) On my bedroom laptop, which is a very fast HP quad core with 8 gigs of RAM, the total time involved ran into the 3+ hour range. Not fun at all!  3) On Windows 8.1 you will get back your "Start" button and menu, but it won't be what you think you were told. In order to get something that looks like the classic Windows 7 Start Menu and features, you'll need to download something like Classic Shell ....

When our great nation was started, Americans had a high degree of trust in their government. They felt that it genuinely represented the interests of the people. Government policy in developed countries is relatively stable and predictable, and, for the most part (at least relative to less developed countries), promises made are promises kept. Governments keep their promises despite the fact that policymakers face a well-known time-consistency problem. That is, it is seldom in the short-run best interest of a government to keep capital taxes low, honor its debt obligations, or inflate the currency only by the expected amount. Much of the theory on credible government policy concerns itself precisely with accounting for this ability of governments to make and keep promises. In these good scenarios, households trust the government and the government does not betray this trust because a deviation by the government causes a reversion to a worse equilibrium. Depending on your point of vi...

The Wall Street Journal reported that "The U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria, officials said, amid an expanding array of reprisal threats across the region." The date when our intelligence agencies intercepted the Iranian message on Iraq has not been publicly reported, but the Journal said that it was “intercepted in recent days.” So the timing fits: it seems probable that Obama became aware of the threats of retaliation that have been reported (and, perhaps, others that have not been made public) last week; most likely, late last week. Experts say that this is the reason why Obama suddenly changed his mind last Friday and decided to have Congress weigh in on the Syrian attack decision. It appears there was a possibility of major blowback, not just from an isolated terrorist or two but coordinated by Tehran itself. In the event of a significant ret...

The fair use defense to copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act . Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas. The Act gives four factors to be considered to determine whether a particular use is a fair use: the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, transformative or reproductive); the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity); the amount and substantiality ...

Cyrus Shepard reports on the Moz Blog that this year, for the first time, the  Moz Data Science Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings. They discovered that after Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, “the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.” In addition, Searchmetrics, another firm, used a slightly different methodology and found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated factor they studied.  They also make some recommendations about how to use Google+ to optimize SEO. Included in these are to follow great people, comment on posts, and share great content, making longer Google+ posts, as well as adding the  rel="author" meta tag to your website or blog. Another important factor is to post public.  Posts shared privately don't pass the same juice as publ...

  This subject comes up repeatedly, and because I have a number of liberal friends who challenge me on it from time to time, I thought it would be appropriate to summarize my views again. First and foremost, I do not base my pro-life stance on religion. I am about the most unreligious person you will ever meet. I'm not an atheist, but my beliefs in a Supreme Being certainly didn't come from attending church or synagogue. They came from science . Science - that is biomedical science - tells us that once the very first cell-division takes place in a fertilized ovum, it meets all the scientific qualifications for a developing human life. Period. You don't need to wait until it develops a heartbeat. In the very first hour, it's a developing human being completely distinct from the mother, with it's own DNA. Therefore, as caring human beings, we must provide it with the same protections and rights as any other human being. To me, this renders all these progressive li...

The insanity of American foreign policy is on display everywhere in the world. When you go to war against anyone, especially against extreme cultures and nations, you must bomb Dresden into smoking ruins, or you cannot win the war. You must drop The Bomb on Hiroshima, or the price will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Just as in a personal fight against an armed mugger, you must fight for your life and when your opponent goes down, make sure he stays down, by whatever means are necessary -- or you will simply die. In the struggle against Muslim extremism and against extremist cultures overseas, we have, instead, as Republicans, conservatives, Democrats and liberals, abandoned most of The Constitution and denied most of our own right and freedoms in the name of "security." When you go to war, there are some enemies who must be utterly destroyed. Americans no longer have the stomach to destroy their enemies. They no longer even have the stomach to fight for their own freedom....

None of the Founding Fathers were atheists. Most of the Founders were Deists, which is to say they thought the universe had a creator, but that he does not concern himself with the daily lives of humans, and does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or by sacred books. They spoke often of God, but this was not the God of the bible. They did not deny that there was a person called Jesus, and praised him for his benevolent teachings, but they flatly denied his divinity. If the U.S. was founded on the Christian religion, the Constitution would clearly say so -- but it does not. Nowhere does the Constitution say: "The United States is a Christian Nation", or anything even close to that. In fact, the words "Jesus Christ, Christianity, Bible, Creator, Divine, and God" are never mentioned in the Constitution -- not even once. When the Founders wrote the nation's Constitution, they specified that "no religious test shall ever be required as a...

  A new, peer reviewed study published in “Energy And Environment” comes to the conclusion that global temperatures have actually been dropping since 1986 .  This conclusion, at best, obliterates the claims that there is a global warming consensus. The  “Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend  –  1982-2006” study took satellite derived temperature data from 1986-2006 that was collected using a European satellite system which measures thermal infrared radiation (similar to those red to blue heat maps that weather.com uses.)  “The amazing finding of the present study is that we do not observe global warming in the period 1982-2006, but significant cooling. What could be the cause? The satellite data are from a reliable origin supported by the European meteorological community. Their accurate calibration has received due attention and efforts from Eumetsat. Our processing of these data has been simple and straight forward, involving only noon and midni...

Everyone has their own individual style on social media. Here is mine, in a nutshell, for whatever it may be worth to you: First, my life is an open book, so virtually everything I post is public. The other reason I do this is because I think I have a message to deliver, and I want to be able to broadcast it effectively to a large audience. For circle management, I really only have two main circles -- "friends" - which is where everyone goes initially, and "close friends", which is a circle you earn your way into. More on this in a bit. When somebody circles me (which happens anywhere between 10 and 20 times a day), if time permits, I check your profile. A complete profile, with a photo of a real person, and at least a couple of posts so I can figure you out, will generally get me to circle you back. To get into my "close friends" circle - which is the only one I am really interested in, because that is the only one of my circles that has the notificat...

Despite religious rhetoric to the contrary, morals, ethics and laws do not necessarily derive from the Bible. In a group, there are selective pressures that tend to keep people in line. If a member of your tribe is killing other members of your tribe, then the tribesmen will not trust him, and will either kill him, or force him to leave the tribe (banishment), thus making it very difficult for the murderer to pass his genetic/ideological values to the next generation. This is just an example, but there are many more. There is no need for God to sit at the ethical bar; society does that for us as an emergent property of living in large groups. Religion provides ethical laws given by someone else which are followed out of faith. There is nothing wrong with that. Organized religion can be a powerful force for good. One test of a good ethic is to switch the roles of the individuals and see if the situation is still fair. Another important realization is that there are many valid ways peop...

With the 1964 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation—predicted by Big Bang theorists in the 1940s—the Big Bang theory became the preeminent cosmological model. The question was no longer, did the universe have a beginning? The question became, how did it happen? As more and more astrophysicists focused their attention on what happened in the first few moments, months and years of the universe, some Christians became upset that the new theoretical models didn't match up with their interpretation of Genesis  ( the Jewish account of creation is similar). Just as many astrophysicists felt that the expanding universe theory was a ploy to inject religion into science, many Christians have come to feel that the Big Bang is an effort to undermine the biblical account of creation. Other Christians, however, feel that the Big Bang is indeed consistent with the Bible’s account and they welcome such compelling evidence for the creation of the universe. The Big Bang wasn't a ...

Where are the policies that will actually help Americans at the bottom regain the dignity of real, value-creating jobs, Mr. Obama? Again and again, you have offered a higher minimum wage as a solution. Yet as the overwhelming majority of economists have argued for decades, the minimum wage actually harms the poorest workers — those with the weakest grip on their jobs. Same with education: cheaper student loans aren't going to help the bottom quintile. Despite Pell Grants and other aid, only one in three children from the bottom quintile go to college—and just 11% graduate. You could go to bat for real education reforms that drive social and economic mobility, Mr. president. But you haven't. You won two elections with what seemed to be sincere promises to fight for people. That should include fighting for people at the bottom, even if the best policies for doing so contradict your progressive-liberal policy dogma. The American dream, which you so often mention in your speeche...

When I was in my 20's I suddenly became very interested in Israel. I should mention by way of preface that I am probably the most unobservant Jew you will ever meet - I think the last time I was inside a synagogue was when my friend's son died and I attended the funeral service; I was married to a Christian woman for 23 years and attended church with her. Israeli consulates here have what is called the "Aliyah" program - if you are Jewish (e.g., your mother is Jewish) they will welcome you to return to the ancestral homeland, usually to work on a Kibbutz. I had drifted, going to community college, having a lot of fun, learning to play jazz (flute and string bass), but I was unfulfilled. So off to Israel I went - to Kibbutz Na'an, south of Tel Aviv. It's a vibrant community of some 2000 plus residents that raises oranges and vegetables and also has a sprinkler factory that makes the Na'an lawn sprinklers that most everyone has seen. While there you spend ha...

Recently Townhall had an excellent article on this subject .  Liberals love to bring out the theory of “income inequality” to address every perceived problem in our culture – whether it’s global warming,  breast cancer,  riots in Sweden, France, or the disappearance of the arctic ice shelf – it’s “income inequality” that is the culprit. To sum it up: 1)  Income Inequality is “settled” science. 2)  The world will end if we don’t address it. 3)  Rich people and government types- our betters- agree on this. 4)  We must do something about it immediately. Sound familiar? There’s a problem though. Much of the hype about income inequality in the Western world is more about the changing dynamics of society and the make-up of households than it is about income. The Pew Trust recently released a report that shows that one of the prime movers behind income inequality isn’t income at all, but the growing number of single mother household, which have rocketed ...