I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ben Carson was justifying the recent political execution of Nimr al-Nimr and 46 others in Saudi Arabia. According to him, this is all about our nuclear deal with Iran, which in his twisted brain makes it more likely that Saudi Arabia will get a nuclear weapon. This is what we expect from the tribalistic Republican Party. Saudi Arabia is an official ally, so of course whatever they do is great. Iran is an official enemy, so whatever they do is horrible. Carly Fiorina justified dismissing Iranian outrage because, “This is a regime that tortures citizens routinely, that thinks nothing of executions, that still holds four Americans in jail.” Yeah, those four Americans in jail really does make the Saudi Arabian executions just fine.

As Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani documented in The Intercept, After Executing Regime Critic, Saudi Arabia Fires Up American PR Machine. The only thing more predictable than the US government supporting anything done by official allies is that the “free” US press will push the official government line. Imagine how this story would have been covered if the countries had been reversed. There would not only be blanket outrage, there would be calls for war. Instead, we get Ben Carson saying that Saudi Arabia had to execute all these people because of our nuclear deal with Iran.

The main issue at hand is Nimr al-Nimr. He was a political activist in Saudi Arabia. He was a Shia Sheikh in a Sunni autocracy. He was put to death for “foreign meddling” and for “disobeying” the Saudi government. His actual crime was supporting mass political protests against the Saudi regime back in 2011. The court didn’t have to put him to death, but I’m sure that there was extreme political pressure on it to do so. Everywhere you go you hear people like Fahad Nazer say things like, “The primary message appears to be aimed at Saudi Arabia’s own militants, regardless of their sect…” Nazer used to be a political analyst for Washington Saudi Embassy — a fact not mentioned when he was quoted.

Of course the whole thing just shows what a farce the whole idea of terrorism is. Fang and Jilani quoted Sarah Lea Whitson of Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia’s terrorism law includes as acts of terrorism merely criticizing the government, merely criticizing the monarchy.” That’s really what the definition of terrorism is: doing anything that the government doesn’t like. I still stand by the honest definition of terrorism as acts designed to terrorize a population, but this definition used in Saudi Arabia is generally the one used by American media.

The US government has not condemned what Saudi Arabia has done, but only “expressed… concerns. At the same time, everywhere in the US it is ISIS all the time. We must close down the internet because of ISIS. We can’t allow refugees in the country because of ISIS. Screw the Constitution, we’re afraid of ISIS! Yet it has largely been Saudi money that built up ISIS. And Iran has been fighting ISIS since the beginning. But Saudi Arabia is our “friend.” And Iran is our enemy — as far as I can tell because we are still angry about the embassy attack in 1979.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continues to be a backward country. But they’ve got oil, so we just love them. If they got nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t blink an eye; our only concern would be that it would cause Iran to get nuclear weapons. Pretty much Saudi Arabia can do anything it wants because we’ve defined it as a Good Guy™. It is a horrible country. It commonly commits crimes against humanity. Still, we give them billions of dollars in aid and justify their crimes like the execution of Nimr al-Nimr.

Over at The Upshot, Neil Irwin wrote an interesting but very annoying article, How Is the Economy Doing? It May Depend on Your Party, and $1. It’s about how people’s opinions about the state of the economy are highly dependent upon who is in the White House. Ask a Republican right now and they will say it is terrible. Ask a Democrat back in 2005 and they would have said that it was terrible. But this is just a matter of political signaling — nothing more. Let’s start with the the the more general issue and then get into the details.

How the economy doing is doing not a concrete thing. If you asked me how the economy was doing, I would say so-so. Yet the unemployment rate is 5%! The unemployment rate was 4% at the beginning of 2000 and I would have said it was great. What’s the difference? Well, the employment-to-population rate for people between the ages 25-54 was roughly 82% in 2000 and it is barely over 77% today. That represents roughly 5 million people. There are a huge number of people who have given up. Claiming that Republicans are just being partisan when they say the economy is not doing well is questionable.

The crux of Irwin’s article has to do with recent studies that gave people cash when they got answers right. So whereas a Republican might normally say that unemployment is worse today than when Obama came into office, if you give him a buck for being right, he’ll correctly say that unemployment is lower. Now this is presented as good news for democracy and bad news for polling. This is nonsense.

What’s going on is that the partisans (Democrat or Republican) are signaling in the uncompensated case that they really don’t like the people in power. And why shouldn’t they?! We have the statistics on the unemployment rate. We don’t need to ask people what they they think it is; they can just surf over to the St Louis Fed and get whatever information they want. Do half of Republicans really think that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist? Not really. But they are signalling that they really really don’t like him. And that and not the state of the economy is what they are going to be voting based upon.

Similarly, we already know that polling is a highly questionable tool. Remember back in the 2012 presidential campaign? In the first debate, Obama didn’t shine. Romney came off pretty good. (I still thought he was an idiot, of course.) And his poll numbers surged. But as I wrote at the time, that wasn’t because Obama voters had switched over. It was because conservative voters who in the end were already going to vote for Romney suddenly felt confident enough to switch form “undecided” to “Romney.” If you look at the polls of the time, you will see that Romney’s numbers went up; Obama’s did not go down. What was going on was political signaling. Before, conservatives were signaling that they weren’t that keen on Romney.

Look at the unfortunate Eric Harwood. He’s totally wrong about the “billions and trillions of dollars” that we spend “illegal aliens” and refugees. But it wouldn’t matter if he knew the facts. For all I know, he does know the facts. But he’s just angry. He’s involved in an act of political signaling that those liberals don’t care about people like him and that conservatives like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump do. It’s not just politicians who engage in political theater.

So who cares that deep down most people know the facts. They don’t vote to save the world from global warming. They don’t vote to make sure that veterans get healthcare. Their votes are an act of political signaling that they are for the “right” kind of people. And in the case of working class conservatives, they’d better hope that they don’t get their way.

I remember when I sent out my first book to a publisher. I got a very positive letter back, but the publisher took exception to my referring to police officers as stupid. She pointed out that a lot of police officers read their books and that she knew a lot of them and they weren’t stupid. I ended up just writing a different book for her. And I didn’t argue the point. I had only written for small weekly newspapers and had not developed the charming pugnacious personality that is on display each day seen here at Frankly Curious. Plus, I really wanted to publish my first book.

There are a few points to note. First, I never wrote that police officers were stupid. I wrote that they “are not the brightest lights in the house and their lack of knowledge could act as a damning indictment of our educational system.” I went on to relate an example of an officer not knowing what the word “courtesy” as in “courtesy of the American Legion.” I don’t think that police officers are stupid and I never had. But compared to me, they are. Compared to most of the people I know they are. But that doesn’t make them bad at their jobs.

Indeed, courts have concluded that it is okay to not hire an officer because they are too smart. The truth is that police work is incredibly boring. There is a high attrition rate among them. Actual tests of police officers find that they are of average intelligence and that’s just fine with me. My problem with the police is that they tend to be bullies and tribalistic and self-impressed. What they should be is damned grateful that given their limited skills and abilities they have an easy job that pays really well. Instead, they go around acting like they couldn’t be replaced, which just isn’t the case at all.

I was very interested in a recent article at Vox by Dara Lind, Police Are Solving a Lot Fewer Murder Cases Than They Used To. But that’s not a great headline. What’s really going on is that since 1990, the murder rate has been cut roughly in half. Yet the percentage of these murders that ended in arrest (Not conviction!) has been flat at roughly 65%. So if you murder someone, you you have a one in three chance of never being arrested.

Lind presents this as the effect of people not trusting the police. Despite all our new technologies and all the super keen stuff you see on cop shows on television, most murderers are caught because someone saw the murder — or something else close enough. (This is also the reason that a lot of people go to prison for murders they didn’t commit, but we’ll leave that for another time.) People in high crime areas don’t trust the police because instead of helping, they murder people when called to deal with depressed teens. I don’t know. I suspect that people unwilling to talk to the police is a part of the problem. But it’s a very small part of the problem.

I think the issue is quite simple. Roughly two-thirds of murders are easy. A great many of them are something along the lines of things got out of control at a family gathering and son shot uncle. There is no investigation required. In one-third of the cases, it isn’t clear. It is not the case that, “They know who did it…” I’ve never met a police officer who didn’t claim to know that whoever he arrested was guilty. And even after DNA evidence exonerates someone, those same officers still “know” that the arrestee was guilty.

There are two critical things about the police that make them so bad at cracking cases: their middling intelligence and their general laziness. Have you ever watched one of those shows where some police officer cracks a case years later? First, those represent exceptions. Second, the “brilliant insight” that cracks the case are always obvious. For example, in one case, a guy murdered his wife and then left the air conditioner on at full blast to screw up the the determination of time of death. That’s pretty clever. But it took the officers forever to figure it out. It doesn’t take Monk to figure this stuff out — just someone with a strong work ethic and an IQ over 104.

Add to this that the police don’t really care. Most of the people who are murdered are poor. There’s no pressure on them to solve the cases. It’s certainly true that if the police didn’t act like such jerks and make everyone hate them, it would be easier to do their jobs. But it’s going to take a lot more than this to solve more murders. And I don’t see the police moving toward fixing their jerk problem.

My country ’tis of thee. That’s what I was taught in grammar school: our country. But there are are those so filled with privilege and hatred that they think the United States is whatever they say it is: their country ’tis of them. And the roving gang of terrorists who sport their pocket Constitutions and took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon yesterday should be captured, tried for treason, and spend the rest of their lives in a federal penitentiary.

The main men involved are Ammon and Ryan Bundy (sons of Cliven “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro” Bundy), Jon Ritzheimer, Blaine Cooper, and Ryan Payne. But they are only men in a biological sense. In the truest sense of the word, these are boys who want to play Revolutionary War. They like to pretend that they are living under tyranny. Rather than prison, they would be better punished by having to live the rest of their lives in Saudi Arabia.

And they aren’t locals. This isn’t their fight. They just rove the nation looking for fights to get into. And they are often unwelcome, as they are in this case. That’s one of the sad things about this. The Bundy Traitors are making this all about them. But the cause that underlies this is at least somewhat just.

Back in 2012, Dwight Hammond and his son Steven were found guilty of arson. They twice set fire to federal land. According to the Hammonds, they did this to stop invasive species from encroaching on their land. I don’t believe that. Not for a minute. But even if it were true, it is wrong. If I have a tree that is growing onto your land, that doesn’t give you the right to set my yard on fire.

But the Hammonds were found guilty and they were punished with one year in prison and $400,000 in restitution (which they paid). But then federal prosecutors found that they could apply the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and so now the Hammonds are supposed to spend up to five extra years in prison. I hate this nonsense. I hated when civil trials started being a big thing when criminal trials failed. There are all these squirrely ways to get around our justice system when we don’t think it works. The Hammonds did something wrong, they were punished, that should be the end of it.

Of course, the roving gang of terrorists isn’t really interested in this case. They just think that federal land should be theirs to use. The Hammond lawyer has been very clear that the Bundy boondoggle does not speak for his clients. And that’s understandable because the Hammonds are no doubt trying to extricate themselves from this legal issue; they aren’t trying to start the second Revolutionary War.

According to The Oregonian, the local people are mostly like me: they think that the Hammonds are getting a raw deal, but that the terrorists at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are extremists. Of course, no one is calling them terrorists because, you know, they are white. One of the terrorists is an ex-Marine who hates Muslims and posted a video that indicates he plans to die at this standoff.

I don’t want anyone to die in this. I want these terrorists caught, convicted of treason, and spending the rest of their lives in prison. And I hope that the Hammonds manage to get their sentences reduced, even if they aren’t the most sympathetic of people. At least they are Americans who respect what the country stands for.

So I finally got around to getting on the Obamacare exchange here, which is called Covered California. It was a remarkably easy thing to do. I think it took me about a half hour. And I make so much money that my monthly premiums for Kaiser Permanente are $1. It seemed like a joke. It reminds me of those idiots on Fox and Friends who were calling for everyone to have to pay at least something in income taxes so that they had “skin in the game.” (It was pretty clear that if this happened, they would only want more to the point where everyone payed the same amount — but that’s a topic for another time.)

A new feature of Covered California this year is dental insurance. I was able to sign up with Delta Dental for $13.95 per month. I picked it because when I managed a dental office, Delta of California was by far the best insurer. You may not know this but about 80% of managing a dental office is fighting with insurance companies. And Delta was very good about paying without a lot of fuss. And when I saw that the co-pay on root canals wae only $300, I was hooked. (Now if I can just find a regular dentist who is up for doing a couple of molar root canals, I’ll be set.)

I feel like I died and woke up in Canada. I’ve always been positive about Obamacare. But not like this. This seems to me very much like universal care. And I very much wish that I had had this back a decade ago when I almost died and ended up owing over a $100,000 in medical bills. But more than that, I’m just looking forward to going in and getting a physical and a checkup and starting the process of my dental triage.

But think about this. Obamacare is something that conservatives think is evil. But these are the same people who think that unions are evil. And that the minimum wage is evil. And that forcing employers to provide healthcare is evil. They are the big proponents of the “gig economy.” Well folks, I am the poster boy of the gig economy. I’m self-employed. I get money from a number of different sources. And if it weren’t for Obamacare, I’d be screwed. I’d be forced to join the Freelancers Union, which I have mixed feelings about politically and which is mostly just a for-profit insurance company that offers far more expensive insurance and (as far as I can tell) no dental.

It’s weird. The American conservative movement is mostly made up of a bunch of people with cushy jobs that are more like what people did in the 1950s with employer provided healthcare and retirement plans. In fact, I know people like this. My brother-in-law has a great union job, but has this attitude the young people are lazy. But it’s the young people who are out hustling to make a living. His father got him the job he has had for decades. All he has to do is show up and do his work, which is a great advantage compared to what people like me have to do in the modern economy.

So the fight against Obamacare continues on. But for the people of California it seems we are now living at least on the outskirts of civilizations. I could hardly ask for anything more. I feel very lucky indeed. It is like I died and woke up in Canada.