Free Republic

I believe I've read that there is something magical about a 42% threshold in an election/poll. Can someone clarify why that number is so important? Does or have to do with inevitability?

Shortly after news broke of a shooting in San Bernardino (which we now know was a terrorist attack), Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit were abuzz that the events of December 2, 2015 were the "355th mass shooting" of 2015. Obviously, this was a concerning statistic--if it were actually true.It turns out it wasn't, and even figures on the left agree. There's been nowhere near 355 mass shootings in 2015, and according to Mother Jones editor Mark Folman, there have been exactly four. At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than...

This week's mass shooting in San Bernandino, which killed 14 innocents and wounded another 21, seems sadly routine. We've had so many of these incidents in recent years that they flow together. And yet, as Max Ehrenfreund notes at the Washington Post, we've actually had a "massive decline" in gun violence over the last two decades. (snip) Regardless, the difference between perception and reality here is stark. Mass shootings of strangers are, quite naturally, scarier and more attention-grabbing than ordinary homicides involving people known to the shooter. They make national news and spark debates over the state of our society...

The definition of a serial killer is, “A person who murders three or more people, usually due to abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break (a “cooling off period”) between them.” Serial killers may be overwhelmingly male and most likely to be either black or white, but is there a connection for these men between their tendencies and their sexual behavior? Most serial killers are seeking out a thrill. But from where does their blood lust stem? Radford University keeps a database of statistics surrounding serial killers; age, race,...

One of the many painful signs of the mindlessness of our times was a recent section of the Wall Street Journal, built around the theme "What's Holding Women Back in the Workplace?" Whenever some group is not equally represented in some institution or activity, the automatic response in some quarters is to assume that someone has prevented equality of outcomes. This preconception of equal outcomes requires not one speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary. Even in activities where individual performances are what determine outcomes, and those performances are easily measured objectively, there is seldom anything...

Tyler Vigan of the Harvard Law School highlights his new book, “Spurious Correlations,” which invites us to take a critical view of statistical correlations. Just because the divorce rate in Maine correlates with per capita consumption of margarine does not mean that we should cut back!

Let’s look at a few numbers. You haven’t seen them in the New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, or the Miami Herald, nor have they been featured on NBC Nightly news or CNN. So, the average American is blissfully unaware of them. Between 2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%. During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump deserves credit for forcing all 17 Republican candidates to talk about the social costs of illegal immigration, but it is not “Trump’s issue.” We will be making a fatal mistake if we let the media discuss it that way. Think of illegal immigration this way: If the liberal media can keep illegal alien crime out of the “kitchen table debate,” they can keep any issue out of the debate. And they will if they can get away with it. For those reasons, illegal immigration is much more than an issue of public policy; it is...

Wisconsin last month recorded the second lowest number of traffic deaths in July since the 1930s.

[caption id="attachment_1490" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Image source: Stanford University[/caption] I was recently chided by an editor when he asked me my opinion on one of my stories.  I told him how The Washington Post reported it: “WaPo went with ‘shocking’,” I emailed. My phone immediately rang. “I don’t care what WaPo went with,” he said in an animated voice. “Listen, those people are just the same as you and me. “I’ve been in those newsrooms.  Do you think they’re any better because they work at the New York Times or The Washington Post?” he drilled into me. It was a good...

Wishing it was true doesn't make it true--it makes you a chump who fell for the con. Once upon a time in America, no adult could survive without possessing a finely tuned BS detector. Herman Melville masterfully captured America's fascination with cons and con artists in his 1857 classic The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in The Con in Confidence (October 4, 2006). An essential component of the American ethos is: don't be a chump. Don't fall for the con. And if you do, it's your own fault. The Wild West wasn't just thieves shooting people in the back (your classic "gunfight" in the real West)--it...

Since Colorado voters legalized pot in 2012, prohibition supporters have warned that recreational marijuana will lead to a scourge of “drugged divers” on the state’s roads. They often point out that when the state legalized medical marijuana in 2001, there was a surge in drivers found to have smoked pot. ...]

The U.S. Department of Justice administers two statistical programs to measure the magnitude, nature, and impact of crime in the nation: the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) -- FBIThe federal crime statistics in a table below are a rebuttal to the race-grievance industry, Obama-Holder demagogues, and MSM employees lies that crime is almost entirely white police, white neighborhood watch, and whites in general violence against Black Americans. The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) have long made it publicly known -- if only the lies weren't so...

A Wichita State University mathematician sued the top Kansas election official Wednesday, seeking paper tapes from electronic voting machines in an effort to explain statistical anomalies favoring Republicans in counts coming from large precincts across the country. Beth Clarkson, chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, filed the open records lawsuit in Sedgwick County District Court as part of her personal quest to find the answer to an unexplained pattern that transcends elections and states. The lawsuit was amended Wednesday to name Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman. Clarkson, a certified...

Who Are the Atheists? [excerpts] For reporting purposes at Barna, we often combine atheists and agnostics into one group, which we call skeptics. Skeptics either do not believe God exists (atheists) or are not sure God exists, but are open to the possibility (agnostics). Skeptics represent one-quarter of all unchurched adults (25%). Nearly one-third of skeptics have never attended a Christian church service in their lives (31%). That’s nearly double the proportion of “virgin unchurched” who are not skeptics (17%)... Five Demographic Shifts among Skeptics They are younger. Skeptics today are, on average, younger than in the past. Twenty years...

Rising stock prices and home values pushed the net worth of U.S. households higher in the fourth quarter, a reassuring sign for the outlook for consumer spending. The increase added $1.52 trillion to the total wealth of American families, putting it at $82.91 trillion, a report by the Federal Reserve showed on Thursday. The increase in net wealth was the largest since the fourth quarter of 2013. While U.S. consumers have appeared somewhat shy in their spending habits in recent months, Thursday's data suggests their strengthening financial footing could help convince them to open their wallets more.

As the chart ... shows, Catholicism is the most common religious tradition in 17 states, while white evangelical Protestants are first in 15 states, mostly in the South. The religiously unaffiliated are the most common religious group in 13 states, mostly in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast. Three states are outliers: Utah, which is 56 percent Mormon, the largest percentage of one single religious tradition, and Iowa and North Dakota, where white mainline Protestants are the dominant religious tradition.

Government was "misrepresenting RCMP firearms statistics by overstating the number of firearms involved in violent crimes." By using an over-inclusive definition, Statistics Canada has exaggerated the number of violent crimes that involve guns. The result is that gun violence appears to be four times more frequent than it really is. In 2013 (the most recent year statistics are available) Statistics Canada reports that there were 5,027 “firearms-related” incidents out of 263,054 violent crimes (i.e., 2% of violent crimes). Clearly, gun violence isn’t prevalent. But even that small share exaggerates the frequency that a gun was actually used to commit a...

  Smoking cannabis can lead to manic behaviour: Hyperactivity, aggression and delusion are all strongly linked with the drug, researchers warn