Pun Salad

■ We've had a few good days in a row with our Proverbs. Will 28:25 be dreamy, or a dud?

The greedy stir up conflict, but those who trust in the LORD will prosper.

Pun Salad says: this is probably not the best financial advice you will hear today. But (funny thing) if you Google How to prosper, a lot of the top links are God/Bible based. Just sayin'.

■ Ashe Schow asks: Why Is It So Impossible for the Media to Be Honest About Guns? Case in point: the recent public debate about "silencers". She catalogs a litany of misinformation and disinformation from our Trusted Media on the issue. Her modest proposal:

After the 2016 election, the Decision Desk’s John Ekdahl asked journalists if they knew anyone who owned a pickup truck. I think it’s time to ask journalists if they know anyone who owns a gun (or have ever even spoken to someone who does or who uses one regularly).

Ms. Schow also recommends Sean Davis's work at the Federalist: 7 Gun Control Myths That Just Won’t Die. For those of you who like to arm themselves for battle in the court of public opinion, that's a link you should open-carry.

■ At Cato, Daniel J. Mitchell shares Six Sobering Charts about America’s Grim Future from CBO’s New Report on the Long-Run Fiscal Outlook. Unfortunately, I'm already sober, so it's just depressing.

I sometimes feel like a broken record about entitlement programs. How many times, after all, can I point out that America is on a path to become a decrepit European-style welfare state because of a combination of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlement programs?

But I can’t help myself. I feel like I’m watching a surreal version of Titanic where the captain and crew know in advance that the ship will hit the iceberg, yet they’re still allowing passengers to board and still planning the same route. And in this dystopian version of the movie, the tickets actually warn the passengers that tragedy will strike, but most of them don’t bother to read the fine print because they are distracted by the promise of fancy buffets and free drinks.

People not taking this seriously, however, include (1) all Congressional Democrats; (2) nearly all Congressional Republicans; (3) Donald J. Trump.

■ So far the most honest response I've seen to the feminist outrage about VP Pence's dining rules is from Glenn Reynolds: Feminists Wage War on Men, Then Blame Men For Results. And it's a one-liner:

So you drastically expand the definition of “sexual harassment,” and then promote an ethic that says that all accusations must be believed, and then you’re shocked that workplace men don’t want to hang out with women? How stupid are you?

I assume that last question is rhetorical, but if not, here you go.

■ My Google News Alert for LFOD took me to a Union Leader [Wednesday] story about an apparent Manchester homicide early Tuesday morning. The story invites us to connect the dots: a ruckus is heard at the scene "between 2 and 2:30 a.m.". A man in a hoodie leaves the house. And then:

At 2:39 a.m. Tuesday, the 534 Douglas St. building owner’s son, Jordan Gamache, 34, added this post to his Facebook page: “LIVE FREE OR DIE.”

I predict an arrest shortly, although I've been wrong about such things before.

■ If you want to get an early start on tomorrow's festivities, I recommend a paper from Eve Armstrong, who works at the BioCircuits Institute at UCSD: A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997. From the abstract:

We use a feed-forward artificial neural network with back-propagation through a single hidden layer to predict Barry Cottonfield’s likely reply to this author’s invitation to the “Once Upon a Daydream“ junior prom at the Conard High School gymnasium back in 1997. To examine the network’s ability to generalize to such a situation beyond specific training scenarios, we use a L2 regularization term in the cost function and examine performance over a range of regularization strengths. In addition, we examine the nonsensical decision-making strategies that emerge in Barry at times when he has recently engaged in a fight with his annoying kid sister Janice. To simulate Barry’s inability to learn efficiently from large mistakes (an observation well documented by his algebra teacher during sophomore year), we choose a simple quadratic form for the cost function, so that the weight update magnitude is not necessary correlated with the magnitude of output error.

It is a classic. By the time you get to "restraining order" you will be hooked.