Nobrainer’s Think Tank

About 20 months ago I posted my thoughts. on NBC’s To Catch a Predator series. Specifically, I opined:

• I find the “consultants” who spent long hours pretending to be teens in search of sex thoroughly frightening
• The problem isn’t so much the predators
• The problem is that some teenagers are actively looking for sex on the internet
• If the teenagers are looking for sex on the internet, they’re probably looking for it elsewhere, too
• Since the predators are sometimes driving hundreds of miles, it seems the real, actual opportunity to score with an adolescent is actually extremely scarce

Well, now the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham has released a study. They find, amongst other things:

• Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. “The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours,” Wolak said.
• Internet predators don’t hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance
• The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.
• Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.
• Only 5 percent of predators [meet their victims by posing online as other teens], according to the survey of investigators.

I’m so glad we have the hard hitting investigative journalists at NBC making things clear for us.

are in the mail.

I’ve got a shiny vote for the first serious presidential candidate who is actually committed to simplifying the tax code (i.e. removing all deductions). I am quite pleased to know that for 2008, I will probably spend more time planning for, calculating, and filing my income taxes than I will doing something I actually enjoy, such as golfing.

UPDATE: It’s not even the end of the business day and I’ve already realized that I missed the moving expenses deduction. I either need to hope that the mail hasn’t actually gone yet, or I need to start working on filing an amended return and admit that I am not nearly done yet and that I should really buy tax software, or hire a professional to babysit my taxes. Yay!

Earlier today, at Lowe’s in Charlottesville, I managed to crash the self-scan register.

And I’m not the only one who has encountered the issue (and taken a picture).

Or, at least, I don’t trust guys who look like this guy:

Lee trolled the Hamilton County jail Web site, looking for women. When he found one he wanted, Allen said, Lee would post her bond in exchange for sex.

Lee has been a registered sex offender since 2000, when he was convicted of corruption of a minor, but he has not yet been charged in the bond-for-sex case.

It dawned on me this morning that Obama should really lay off the radio commercials. While listening to another one of his commercials this morning, I realized that Mr. “I’m different”, Mr. Barack “Change” Obama sounds exactly the same as John Edwards but with the glaring absence of the phrases “mill worker” and “2 Americas.”

However, the cake for most horribly, God-awful commercial on the air (that I’ve witnessed) belongs to… well let me describe the commercial first. This TV commercial shows someone jumping out of an airplane. The voiceover tells us that the economy is in “freefall” before going on to tell us just how bad our lives are (somehow I hadn’t managed to notice that there was no roof over my head and that I hadn’t eaten in weeks). The commercial goes and goes without naming a candidate. It was so over-the-top that I figured it had to be parody and that the commercial would really be for some wacky morning radio show. I was wrong. The TV spot, it seems, was far too real, and actually belonged to our cake winner, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, who, as the commercial tells us in the end, is the only candidate who can “fix” the economy.

I don’t doubt that the Republican commercials are any better, but I just haven’t seen nor heard any of them yet. And I’ll part by posting my favorite picture of my least-favorite candidate, Mike Huckabee & family.

And just because I found it amusing:

Joe Klein, writing at Time, notes “something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism” he sees in Obama’s Super Tuesday speech.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said. “This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of you.”

That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

To be somewhat fair, for as much as I am disliking Obama’s campaign and positions, I can will give him credit for being far easier to stomach, at least thus far, than either John Kerry or Al Gore.