"This is your captain speaking"

"Hi folks, good afternoon from the flight deck and welcome aboard AirTrump flight 2017, nonstop service to 2021 and/or 1951, depending on your point of view."

Okay Dr. Carson (and everyone else who's been posting this recently), here's the thing: you're not wrong, but we could have avoided this ever being an issue in the first place. I hope Donald Trump is the greatest president we've ever had. I hope he becomes all things to all people and America enters a new golden age of prosperity. I have severe doubts any of that will occur, but I desperately want Donald Trump not to fail, because, as this meme indicates, his failure will only take us all down in flames with him.

But if we stick with this terrible airplane metaphor, let's step backwards in time a bit. We've all boarded the plane and the cabin door is closed. This particular airline allows its passengers to choose its pilot and co-pilot (they're a team you see). There are two options presented to you. Okay, technically, depending which row of the plane you're sitting in, you may have multiple pilot choices, but only two of them are from well-recognized pilot organizations, so everyone just sort of generally agrees, for better or worse, that one of them will fly this plane. Option A is a pilot with decades of flight experience in multiple areas of commercial aviation, but she's kind of a nerd, comes off as a bit too assured of her own victory, and no one really likes her that much. Option B has never flown a commercial jet before, but he's certain he's going to be great at it because he owns a fleet of limos and was on a mediocre TV show for a while, even though he doesn't know any of the pilot lingo, has never paid his pilot's union dues, can't tell the difference between the lavatory and cockpit doors, and seems to think that his whims negate the existing air traffic control infrastructure. Also, he promises not to let foreign people on the plane (even though they're already there), might try to join the mile high club with all the women on board (whether they're interested or not), makes fun of the guy in the wheelchair who needs assistance getting on board, elbows his way past a uniformed service member, and shouts over anyone who questions whether he's even qualified to or capable of flying a plane.

Everyone on the plane is given the option to vote (vast oversimplification here, just bear with me). About half of them just decide not to bother, I mean, really, they'd have to get up out of their seat and walk down the narrow aisle to drop a name in a hat, and who wants to deal with all that hassle? Everyone kind of just assumes that the experienced pilot is going to fly the plane anyway, so a few people vote for the other guy because they think it's funny, or because they don't like the middle eastern guy in the seat next to them, or maybe they just really really don't like the other lady. So somehow, more passengers decided to pick pilot B fly the plane. Or, more specifically, because of a quirk of the voting system, more rows of passengers, regardless of the number of people in them who actually voted, picked pilot B, even though, curiously, more individual people picked pilot A, they just all happened to be clustered together in a most densely populated rows. Either way, I have no idea why anyone would deliberately vote for a pilot who's never flown anything like a plane before, but I'm willing to listen to your rationale!

If you've ever complained that your flight costs too much, the schedules are inconvenient, planes don't fly to the destination you really want to go to, security is too rigid and/or too lax, your seat is too small, what used to be a free meal now costs $5 for a box of junk food, or that there's a screaming baby on your flight, your pilot has little to no control over these things! Sure, he can crash the plane into the ground in an inferno of bad decisions, but his ability to control all aspects of your flight experience is pretty limited. You need to talk to the aircraft engineers, TSA personnel, airline agents, etc, and if they won't listen, replace them with someone who will instead of just throwing your hands in the air and complaining and/or settling for your predicament. (In case my metaphor has gotten a bit too strained, what I'm trying to say is that the president's ability to effect positive change on your life is fairly small without the cooperation of congress, and even your local government. Sure, the president may be the most powerful single person in the government, and his actions or inactions can have very real and very serious consequences, but most substantive change has to come from the legislative branch. Despite a very low approval rating for congress, We The People keep electing the same representatives that make us so irritated in the first place. Quick, someone find me the non-canonical definition of insanity.)

All that said, normally, I'd like to think that the support structure of the airline system does a lot to prevent a pilot from crashing. There's a co-pilot for a reason, as well as built-in safety systems, independent maintenance crews, etc. But the other strange thing about this metaphorical airline is that after choosing a pilot, the pilot gets to pick a lot of his own support people. And if all of those support people also have no idea what they're doing, or are actively trying to defeat the safety systems, the plane probably still won't crash, but it's likely to be a very uncomfortable and turbulent flight. But what about the aforementioned co-pilot? Surely he could save the day! Yes, co-pilot Pence is certainly a more qualified pilot than captain Trump, though how much Trump might relinquish any amount of control is anyone's guess. And then there's the fact that this particular co-pilot is more interested in flying backwards in time than to our planned destination. Less "crash and burn", more "separate but equal." I guess what I'm saying is, pick your poison carefully. I certainly hope AirTrump doesn't crash, but skimming the safety pamphlet section on bracing for impact seems like it might be prudent. Good luck America!

Election 2016 (work in progress)

Caveat
This is an unfinished work in progress.

Convention Summary
For those who didn't watch them, here's my takeaway from the RNC and DNC the past two weeks:
RNC: FEAR. Our country used to be great, and only Trump can fix it (but won't reveal how).
DNC: HOPE. Our country is great, but we can make it even better, together.
Ignoring candidates and party platforms and any actual policy for a minute, this feels like it ought to be a Democratic landslide election.  Even if you're tired of Obama's hope-flavored kool-aid, and even if you think our country is worse off than it was 8 years ago (although, prove it with some data, if you please), there's something to be said for optimists in terms of their ability to inspire action and at least attempt improvement.  Pessimists are much too content wallowing in their own misery to attempt to improve the situation.

Learning From History
When has it ever turned out that marginalizing and persecuting a group of people was the right thing to do, in retrospect?  Scapegoating an entire group of people based on their heritage, gender, religion, etc is a time-honored political tradition, but it's also one that has always made us look back with shame.  Irish weren't the problem, neither were Italians, Poles, blacks, women, Jews, Japanese, and I'm only talking about the United States' long history of persecution.  The current demonizing of Muslims, Mexicans, and the LGBT community doesn't seem any more likely to work out in our favor over the long run.

But She's a Woman!
If you refuse to vote for Clinton because she's a woman, you have to be willing to accept that there are people who will vote for her ONLY because she's a woman, and that their reasons are therefore just as valid as yours.  Both sides are blindly sexist, but at the very least, let's not be hypocritical while we're at it.  There are plenty of other countries who have had female leaders at the national level, and the earth hasn't fractured to swallow those nations whole, so there's no reason to think a woman can't lead a country like the United States.  There's been a lot of talk about the positive message Clinton's nomination sends to our daughters, and some ugly hand-wringing over our "forgotten" sons who will somehow be left out of the new world order.  Who will our sons look up to?  What message are we giving them?  Um, I don't know, maybe try one of the previous 43 male presidents (Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, remember?).  Or, your gender doesn't decide what job you can do.

Political Families
If you're anti-Clinton because Bill was already President, I get it, but if having a family member be President disqualified you from also serving, can we go back and retroactively unelect George W. Bush, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Quincy Adams?  I realize sons and cousins/in-laws aren't the same thing as spouses, but family ties are family ties.

To Err is Human
We all make mistakes.  Some of us certainly make bigger, costlier, and more public mistakes than others, so trying to compare mistakes is a fool's errand.  What really matters is how we respond to our mistakes, what we learn from them, and whether or not we repeat them.

Third Parties
If ever there was a year for a third party revolt, it might be this year.  Both Trump and Clinton are tremendously disliked, and sometime since 2012, Gary Johnson developed a sense of humor.  He's a likable enough guy and has some bona fide governing experience.  I think the fundamental Libertarian message of "don't tell people how to live their lives and keep your hands off our money" would probably appeal to more people if they were aware of it.

Al Gore 2.0?
No one questions Hillary's intelligence and work ethic.  Even Republicans admit she was a great Senator.  She's shown a lifelong passion for a couple issues, such as universal health care and childhood education.  My biggest concern here is that she's a doer and not necessarily a leader, somewhat like Al Gore, who was tremendously passionate about climate change and technology, but lacked the drive to lead on other issues.  There was a great line in the TV show Commander in Chief (not at all coincidentally about the first female president) where Donald Sutherland's (in his slimiest pre-Hunger Games politician role) speaker of the house asks Geena Davis's vice president why she wants to be president.  When she hestitates for a second, he pounces with something like "if it's not because you want the power, you don't want it badly enough."  Ever since Bill's presidency, Hillary's made no secret that she wants to be president, I just question if she wants it for the right reasons and whether she has the fire and ambition to lead the entire country on multiple high-level policy issues simultaneously instead of being able to drill down and focus on the nitty-gritty of just one or two.

Are You Being Sarcastic, Dude?
I don't even know anymore.  If no one knows when you're joking and when you're being earnest, is it your problem of theirs?  If you're a billionaire businessman, the answer is probably that it doesn't even matter because you can buy your way out of whatever you want.  If you're the leader of a major nation, it's everyone's problem.  Trump has said his quip about asking Russia to hack Hillary's email was sarcasm, and his previous quote about shooting someone on 5th Avenue was equally not meant to be serious, but at what point does his inability to help us differentiate in the moment become a major problem?  International politics requires tact and discretion, two things which Trumps seems to not only abhor, but is perhaps incapable of.

Gun Control - Better is the Expensive Enemy of Good Enough

Foreword
I've written and re-written, edited, posted, deleted, reworded, scrapped, and re-written again this post so many times in the past year (basically, every time there's been a mass shooting, a police killing, or some other senseless act of well-publicized violence) that I can't honestly remember when it first started. But with 538 launching their coverage on gun deaths this week, I decided I follow my own advice and finally post my own ideas; there's always room for improvement, but we've got to start somewhere.

Disclosures

• I'm a 35 year-old white man, a husband, and a father.
• I'm not a historian, lawyer, or a Constitutional scholar, and last time I seriously studied anything US government related was my senior year of high school.
• I've been a card-carrying ACLU member since 2004.
• I tend to vote Libertarian, though I don't consider myself to necessarily be one.
• I have never owned a gun, nor do I ever plan to.
• In Boy Scouts, I earned my riflery merit badge, but fell short of the accuracy requirements for shotgun shooting.  For what it's worth, I also earned my archery merit badge.
• The last time I fired a gun was probably 18+ years ago.
• As an engineer I find the technology behind guns fascinating.
• I drive past the NRA's headquarters nearly every day.

Better is the Expensive Enemy of Good Enough
This old engineering adage basically means that something doesn't have to be perfect in order to be ready for general usage.  If you spend the time to make something 100% perfect, you'll either never get the product out the door, or the development and production costs will make it a nonstarter for the consumer.  When it comes to the gun control debate, I feel like no amount of laws (or lack thereof) will ever make everyone happy, or even a large enough majority happy.  Everyone wants a perfect blend of freedom and safety, which I suppose might actually exist, but it might take us years to find it.  And since there's not an immediately obvious answer, every time a mass shooting occurs, everyone sort of hems and haws for a while, agrees that it's terrible, but nothing ever gets done because there's no perfect solution.  How about we find a good enough imperfect solution that we can take action on right away?  Balance the risks against the costs and move forward.  If we can't please all the people all the time, I'm more than willing to do the opposite - make everybody equally unhappy.  In other words, compromise.  I know, I know, in today's political climate, that might be the ultimate sin.  I have a suggested solution, but first I'd like to address how we got here in the first place.

The Second Amendment

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Pretty straightforward, right?  My understanding of the current legal interpretation of this brief clause is that no laws may be passed (local or Federal) which prohibit private ownership and carrying of weapons.  The militia part has been interpreted to be something of a justification for the second part, not a limiting factor.  So there you have it - no entity in the United States can pass a law that restricts how you can own or carry a weapon.  Except that's not at all true.  There are plenty of laws (or court interpretations thereof) on the books that already do this, so there's really no reason we can't pass other laws to achieve a balance between safety and freedom.  Other constitutional rights have been limited in ways that most people deem reasonable (ie, yelling fire in a crowded theater).  If you concur that an average citizen shouldn't have access (financial means notwithstanding) to an Apache   attack helicopter, or an F-16 fighter jet armed with Sidewinder missiles, or a dozen bazookas, then you have already accepted that the second amendment has practical limitations, and now we're just haggling over price.  Furthermore, a constitutional amendment, by definition, is a change to an existing document, so there's no legal reason we couldn't alter or repeal the second amendment itself to suit whatever plan we came up with.  Yes, there are processes to be followed, but there's nothing actually preventing it (see amendments 18 and 21).

Protection From What?
If an armed citizenry is necessary to security, what are we securing ourselves against?
An external force?  We have the largest, best-trained standing army in the world.  Are you delusional enough to think your handgun is going to be of any use to the overall war effort if a foreign entity invades America?  Our armed forces would much rather you enlist and use their superior technology to assist at that point.
An internal force?  Protection against government overreach is a realistic concern, but no amount of guns you could ever own is every going to seriously deter our government from just blowing you to smithereens if they really had to.  PR fallout of strikes against US citizens notwithstanding, your gun(s) won't stop a drone strike, a tank, or a squad of determined Navy Seals.
Random acts of violence?  I'm sure there is some evidence, at least anecdotally, that carrying a weapon has deterred would-be assailants.  Likewise for home invasions/burglaries.  I'm also sure there are cases where the presence of a victim's gun left someone dead (either criminal or victim) when it might otherwise have only resulted in theft.  By all means, I agree that you have the right to protect yourself, your family, and your property.  But I contend that you don't need an assault rifle to do that.  What you really need is proper training and routine practice with your firearm to ensure that if you ever do have to use it for self-defense, you'll be prepared and able to do so without putting yourself or others at greater risk.

Guns Don't Kill People - People Kill People
100% true, unless perhaps you give a monkey a gun with the safety off.  I'd like to break this into 2 arguments.  1)  To be more technically correct, bullets are what kill people, when fired from guns, by people.  Guns without bullets are really no more dangerous than clubs.  People kill people, and we've been doing so since long before guns existed.  Guns just make it a lot easier.  Certainly you could kill someone with a chainsaw, a knife, a baseball bat, etc.  A gun is just another tool, except that those other tools all have a primary purpose that isn't killing something.  A gun is designed to do one thing - to kill or severely injure, presumably from a safe distance.  You wouldn't use a gun to cut down a tree, even if you could, because there's a better tool out there.  Likewise, if your intent is to kill someone, a gun is your best tool.
2)  People kill people.  Ostensibly "normal" people never intend to kill anyone.  I'm willing to concede that most gun owners are great citizens and use the best safety practices with their weapons.  It's at the fringes where things tend to go wrong.  So the question becomes how to protect the average gun owner's rights, while keeping guns away from those intent on causing others harm and preventing tragedy.

When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Own Guns
Is it really such a bad idea to exist knowing that if you ever see someone with a gun who isn't a law enforcement officer, they are, by definition, a "bad guy" (discounting that police can potentially be "bad guys" sometimes)?  This also acknowledges that just because something is illegal doesn't mean it won't occur.  If we were to ban guns, people would still get their hands on them.  Short of all guns suddenly ceasing to exist and somehow being impossible to recreate, you'll never be able to stop every shooting from occurring.  The goal then is to limit the risk.

...From My Cold Dead Hands
It's important to recognize that even if we could ban the sale and manufacture of guns, no amount of effort is ever going to reclaim every single gun out there.  And as I alluded to before, since guns are impotent without bullets, banning bullets will just make those with guns learn how to manufacture their own.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  If you can't uninvent guns and you can't prevent the manufacture of bullets, you're left with only the choice of risk reduction and damage mitigation.

Other Considerations
Mass shootings aren't the only cause of gun-related deaths.  They are just the most publicized.  There's also homicides, accidental shootings, suicides, and probably some other instances I haven't thought of.  Any new gun laws must address all aspects of gun-related deaths, not just one type.

A Proposed Solution
So if we can't realistically take away guns and we can't realistically take away bullets, that just leaves us with regulating their usage.  If we, collectively, decide that having guns is a right, we have to also collectively be willing to shoulder the responsibility that comes with that.
1)  Get the insurance industry involved.  If anyone can match the lobbying power of the gun activists, it's the insurance world (see: ObamaCare).  New law: you can own any weapon you want, but you also have to carry liability insurance.  No one is better at putting a price on human life than insurance actuaries.  You want an AR-15, fine, but your insurance rates are going to be triple what your neighbor's rates are for a shotgun.  You shoot someone - insurance pays for medical bills plus damages, and your rates go through the roof.  You get caught with a weapon and can't produce proof of insurance?  Gun confiscated, escalating fines, and jail time for repeat offenders.  Uninsured (or unidentified) person shoots someone - all insurance companies pay medical and damages to victims, which will raise overall rates for everyone else.  I'm not legally prohibiting you from owning whatever weapon you want, I'm just incentivizing you to own the fewest and least powerful guns you think you actually need.  A Ferrari costs more than a Kia (both to own and insure), this follows the same logic.  Let the insurance companies come up with other incentives to reduce your premiums (ie, installing gun safes, attending certified training sessions, etc).  You know how you can get life insurance for a given cost without a health exam, but if you consent to an invasive series of questions and tests, your premiums go way down?  Let's do the same with gun insurance.  You buy a gun and want it insured right away, fine, you pay a lot for the privilege.  You want lower premiums, agree to more invasive background checks and routine pyschoanalysis.
2)  If you think the NRA is part of the problem, make them part of the solution.  Anyone shot by an NRA member for any reason other than self-defense can now sue the NRA for damages.  This will either bankrupt the NRA, force it to enact stricter membership requirements (either of which will reduce its out-sized political influence), or expand its membership to defray the costs in conjunction with additional training and safety programs for it's own protection.

Welcome

Welcome to My Two Vents.  From time to time, I get angry about something and need a place to vent about it in a format that doesn't fit Twitter's 140 character limit or just doesn't seem appropriate for Facebook.  Sometimes I have ideas for solutions to whatever the problem is, sometimes I just have questions.  Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all my views are my own, and may not reflect those of my family, friends, employer, pets, or other organizations I am affiliated with.  I may or may not have done enough research to justify any claims I make, but I'd like to think that any propositions I make come from a place of rationality, rather than emotional response, though this may not always be the case.  I welcome your input, on the condition that any criticism be constructive, or at least corrective.