There’s no reason for you to be aware of any of this. But Thursday is my birthday, so it’s something I’ve unfortunately come to know. It first became apparent about 20 years ago.

The few days every year between April 14th and 21st are the darkest days on the calendar. Evil people, every couple of years, for whatever reasons, do unspeakable things this week. Hundreds and hundreds of Americans have died previously on these few days. It’s like a gauntlet of hell. Tell me, why can’t you murderous lunatics keep it together around my birthday? Why must you continue turn it into a coast-to-coast wake? I’ve only been trying to have a bit of lighthearted fun here. But thanks to you, no doing.

• April 19th, 1993: The Waco siege ends.

50 days after an initial gun battle, FBI agents once again move on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A fire results, consuming the building and the cult. 76 people die, including 25 children.

• April 19, 1995: The Oklahoma City bombing.

The Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City is blown up by a large truck bomb assembled by Timothy McVeigh. 168 people die, including 19 children age six or younger. 500 more are injured.

• April 20, 1999: The Columbine High School shootings.

Armed with 9mm weapons, shotguns and improvised bombs, Eric Harris and Dylan Kleebeold attack their classmates at Columbine High in Colorado, shooting 33 and killing 12. As police descend upon them, they committ suicide.

• April 16, 2007: The Virginia Tech massacre.

Armed with a 9mm and 400 rounds of hollow point ammunition, Seung Hui Cho marched from classroom to classroom at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, shooting 49 students, killing 35 of them. He later committed suicide. It remains the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

• April 15, 2013: The Boston Marathon bombings.

Two bombs explode 12 seconds apart near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Patriot’s Day. Three are killed and 150 more are wounded, including several people who suffer amputations.

I wish I could lie to you about this fact: I lived in dread that something would happen this year. When nothing evil goes down for a couple years, the tension begins to creep up on me. I figured it would be the North Korea/April 15 thing, but it was far worse. And I’m not superstitious in the least, it’s just that the horrors have happened so many times in the past that I expect them to happen again. There’s something at work in the world beyond my ken, and that’s just the way it goes. For my part I’m guessing the crazy gets wound up over Winter, maybe with spiraling cabin fever. The sun comes out and, next thing you know, it’s another bloodstained shot to the gut.

If you expand the event field a bit, unfortunately, there are more:

• April 3, 2009: The Binghamton immigration center shootings.

Jiverly Wong barricades the back door of the American Civic Association of Binghamton, New York. Then he enters the front door and shoots virtually everybody he sees, killing 13 and wounding four, before killing himself.

• April 2, 2012: The Oikos University shootings.

One L. Goh orders nursing students at a Korean Christian college, Oikos University, to line up in front of the class. He shoots 10 of them with his .45 caliber handgun, killing seven.

And then there’s this: April 5th, 1994, Kurt Cobain commits suicide. He pulls his driver’s license from his wallet and stabs it into the dirt of a nearby flowerpot. Then he places the end of a 20 gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

That one stayed with me for months. Why it is that nothing, incidentally, ever seems to happen between April fifth and fifteenth, you tell me. I’m only begging to get through the week without any more headlines. A cupcake and a fresh Coke would be nice also, thanks.

ADD: Sigh. April 17, 2013: West Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion.

• A fertilizer plant situated about 18 miles north of Waco, Texas, suffers a chronic fire that can not be extinguished before the nitrogenous chemicals ignite, sending the facility up like a small atomic bomb. A local television station, KWTX, reports — and I am pulling for New-York-Post quality journalism here — 60 to 70 people die in the explosion.

The former New York mayor has gone and died.

“Of course, the vast majority of Muslims — there are a billion four hundred million — are not terrorists. But there are hundreds of millions who are. They want to kill every Christian, every Jew, every Hindu who won’t convert.”

Good riddance.

Lessons learned. Roxanne Rubin was a loyal Republican who worked on the Las Vegas strip. And she hated the way Democrats got away with cheating the voting system.

“This has always been an issue with me. I just feel the system is flawed,” she told the AP Thursday. “If we’re showing ID for everything else, why wouldn’t we show our ID in order to vote?”

So last November, she decided she’d do something about it. She would vote twice. That would show everybody.

Rubin voted at the Anthem Community Center in Henderson. Later that day, she appeared at a Las Vegas polling station at 9725 S. Eastern Ave., and attempted to vote a second time.

A records search showed she already voted, but Rubin insisted she had not and should be allowed to cast a ballot. Poll workers did not allow it . .

Nevada has no voter ID law — other than for first-time voters who didn’t show ID when they registered to vote — and she was caught anyway . .

Rubin’s deal requires her to pay $2,481 to the state in restitution, complete 100 hours of community service, stay out of trouble and complete an impulse control course.

Elsewhere, in the realm of the famous, a former U.S. Treasurer has had enough.

. . Bay Buchanan, a top Mitt Romney lieutenant who’s been involved in politics ever since serving as treasurer of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, saw last November’s loss as a signal to get out of presidential politics.

“It was so tough. It was brutal,” she said of the loss to President Obama. “I think it’s the toughest because we really expected to win it,” added Buchanan, a former Treasurer of the United States who also ran her brother Pat’s three campaigns for president.

“I thought to myself in November, I have another career in me,” Buchanan said. So two days after the election, she started an online real estate course and now has her sales license and a firm: McEnearney Associates Inc. in McLean, Va.

Is there some lesson in common here? Propaganda is famously unreliable, that’s a good one. It matters what you name your daughters, maybe. ‘Bay’ and ‘Roxanne’ come with some risks.

Polyester manufacturer Sen. Ron Johnson harbored himself a real whopping hard-on for Benghazi. [Libyan Tom Jones jokes here.] And boy did he get the chance of a nutter’s lifetime yesterday: The dissembler, the coward, the Clinton!, Hillary finally deigned to show up before him and weasel out of the truth.

If she figured the hearing would be a cakewalk, the Senior Senator would destroy the idea. Because the Benghazi charade was about to be exposed by a simple Ron Johnson fact: You could have made a phone call. The Secretary of State could simply have talked to anybody near the tragedy and cleared the whole thing up. Fairly obvious! Ring up that payphone hanging on the compound wall and say “This is Hillary Clinton. Now tell me what happened.” Done.

Forget all the CIA spooks and intelligence nerds and khaki security rangers and the careful way in which an entire government labels someone a “terrorist” though you well know this has life-and-death consequences and why not leave it all up to some random civilian? Hmm?

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” she said. “Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this. The fact is that people were trying, in real time, to get to the best information.”

The Senator then yields his inquiry like the pig who bit the porcupine. That wasn’t fun.

And then he runs right to the press. Because everybody in America, and soon to be everyone with an internet, has seen him get his sorry butt kicked from here to the moon. Things didn’t go as planned for you, did they Senator? Your comments?

“I think she just decided before she was going to describe emotionally the four dead Americans, the heroes, and use that as her trump card to get out of the questions,” Johnson told BuzzFeed after the Senate hearing. “It was a good way of getting out of really having to respond to me.”

Translation: She beat me like the better man she is. Ouch.

Monday afternoon in The Atlantic. They run a gushing piece on the Church of Scientology’s bizarre and, if we’re to believe first-hand accounts, frequently unhinged leader David Miscavige. What a year he’s had. What a year for the Church of Scientology too.

Quote:

2012 was a milestone year for Scientology, with the religion expanding to more than 10,000 Churches, Missions and affiliated groups, spanning 167 nations–figures that represent a growth rate 20 times that of a decade ago.

The driving force behind this unparalleled era of growth is David Miscavige, ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion. Mr. Miscavige is unrelenting in his work for millions of parishioners and the cities served by Scientology Churches. He has led a renaissance for the religion itself, while driving worldwide programs to serve communities through Church-sponsored social and humanitarian initiatives.

What follow are amazing accomplishments, and a series of spectacular photos showing Scientologists by the hundreds and thousands rejoicing in locations across the globe: Washington D.C., Tel Aviv, Hamburg. The wide-eyed kudos and congratulations pour in from The Atlantic’s readership:

That’s when The Atlantic realizes. This does not look good.

We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.

Oh well fellas, nice try. Here’s the cache.

What color are the ginger ponies in your world?

John Boehner looks bad, though to many in Washington he’s a sympathetic figure because they know how much he wanted a historic agreement on the great issue of his time. Some say he would have been happy to crown his career with it, and if that meant losing a job, well, a short-term loss is worth a long-term crown. Mr. Obama couldn’t even make a deal with a man like that, even when it would have made the president look good.

Johnny twied, but Bawack was mean. Aww. Let someone remind Peggers that the Speaker walked away from bargaining in order to accessorize his ‘Plan B’ truncheon with poison spikes and accordingly wave it at the President. The bill raised the highest tax threshold to a million dollars, threw the estate taxes back to the Bush era, and retained the miniscule rates on dividends and capital gains. Meanwhile it let expire the Child Tax and American Opportunity Tax Credits. Net result: Millionaires got a $118,000 tax break, the working poor got a $1,000 tax increase.

It was everything a Republican guerrilla could want. And Boehner’s people pissed on it. Had any survived, a single ‘Plan B’ provision would have caused the President to veto whatever bill came his way. But Boehner couldn’t get his own terrorists to carry the dynamite. The legislation wasn’t bad enough. Not nearly destructive enough. Though it favored the rich over the poor by hundreds of billions of dollars, it was too liberal. Give us something really despicable, they said, something we can get behind. The Speaker quickly adjourned the House and flew home. Oh Peggy the President has lost his mind.

It seems like months ago, but it was only days. Really only hours. On the Big Day, candidate Mitt Romney was asked about his chances.

This is the sign of a confident man on election night: Mitt Romney says he has written only one speech for tonight. It’s a victory speech. And it’s 1,118 words long.

Romney told reporters on his plane today that “intellectually” he’s felt he’s won the race for a while . .

“I am very pleased. I feel we have put it all on the field. We left nothing in the locker room,” Romney said.

At the time I felt this was something he had to say. His supporters needed the boost. He’d had a good first debate and the polls had shifted his way slightly. But the days and debates went past and darned if the numbers didn’t shift back to where they started. He’d needed to change the contest in the swing states drastically to change his fate, and he hadn’t done it. But it was bold of him to act bold in a nice way, if fantastical.

The returns came in, and just as Nate Silver had predicted, Romney having no better than 1 chance in 11 of surviving, the election wasn’t close. And the Romney camp could not have been more STUNNED. Knocked completely sideways.

And they wouldn’t concede the contest. They didn’t believe the numbers. Don’t you buy what Fox News just told you about Ohio, Karl Rove lectured. Then even if Ohio magically flipped it didn’t matter, the election was lost far past that. And so Mitt Romney, the sure winner, had to ask the networks for time to cobble together a concession speech. The nightmare.

For contrast, look at what the pollsters had said all along. I mean the real data crunchers, not the Rasmussens of the cocktail party circuit. Nothing about Tuesday could be called surprising.

Two university-based pollsters joined Silver in correctly predicting Obama’s win, and one of them will be dead-on about the electoral vote tally.

Drew Linzer, an assistant professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta and a former pollster based in California, predicted yesterday morning on the website votamatic.org that Obama would end the race with 332 electoral votes and Romney 206.

Of [Nate] Silver, Linzer wrote in that post, “his most likely outcome is still Obama 332, followed by 303 and 347, just like me.” Linzer also wrote that his model for votamatic.org had been predicting since June the Obama win with 332 electoral votes.

Since June. More than four months ago. Linzer had predicted the outcome, and very little had occurred to change things since then.

Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor of neuroscience, posted his final prediction — that Obama would likely receive 303 electoral votes to Romney’s 235 — on the school’s election blog at 2 p.m. yesterday. He reduced Obama’s total from 332 based on late polls yesterday.

Sam had perhaps missed only Florida (and Florida’s still too close for an official call). It seems that using numbers to make accurate predictions is possible. When you’ve got the right person, or the right method, reality can be assessed. The question remains: Why didn’t Republicans bother? They didn’t seem to care.

Then they got hit by a train.

. . how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.

“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.”

There was no Romney tsunami in the country that only our people knew about? I thought we had a handle on that.

“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.”

We thought people who answered Public Policy Polling questionnaires would later come to their senses. Our message would kick in as they drove to the polls, we figured. That’s politics, right?

“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”

Welcome back to reality. You’ve spent the whole election season shrugging it off. You said Nate Silver was from the New York Times, CBS and NBC were liberals, and the polling firms were skewing the samples. Everybody was also picking on you, all the time. And statistics were not necessarily a good way of doing things. Though you’ve painfully lost, Jonah Goldberg is here to reaffirm you:

The truth is that any statistician can build a model. They do it all the time. They make assumptions about the electorate, assign weights to polls and economic indicators, etc., and then they wait for the sausage to come out. No doubt some models are better than others, and some models are simply better for a while and then regress to the mean. But ultimately, the numbers are dependent on the values you place in them. As the computer programmers like to say, garbage in, garbage out.

Sausage and garbage. These are numbers.

Don’t get me wrong; I do understand that math can be ironclad. We know the decay rates of isotopes, how fast things will fall in a vacuum, what compounded interest rates will yield, and all that.

But I like to think that people are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched.

Everybody knows Global Warming is a lie, incidentally.

Big giant Christian blogsite Renew America. Obama is Kenyan, abortion destroys the nation, Founding Fathers do weep over their Bibles. It’s a fairly dramatic place, blog-wise. Lots of giant things to read about and take away from there, dreadful things either sneaking up on the unwary Christian or wiping the United States right out.

Take Mormonism, apparently. The President of RA is a former Mormon, and his name is Stephen Stone. Stephen keeps a number of links pinned at the top of the front page for you to read about the evils of his former church. Those people are a horrible and authoritative (?) bunch, he thinks.

I was wondering if Renew America were ever going to take a formal stand on the Mitt Romney candidacy. Now they have. Stephen has recently gotten the Alan Keyes’ bat signal to waylay, in a Christian way, mind you, candidate Mormon Mitt Romney.

In view of the public record, the election features the most powerful communist in the world — Barack Hussein Obama (who, as the name betrays, also happens to be the world’s most powerful exponent of Islam), someone clearly intent on dismantling our republic from top to bottom; and the most liberal Republican nominee ever, a pragmatic lawyer and “venture capitalist” with little discernible moral core — responsible as governor of Massachusetts for introducing same-sex marriage into the United States by executive edict, for introducing socialized medicine through a state healthcare plan upon which Obama modeled his monopolistic “Obamacare”; and for perpetuating the legacy of Roe v. Wade through his policies as governor, even after claiming to be pro-life — in other words, a “conservative” imposter, Mitt Romney.

Romney isn’t officially conservative enough for Stephen, or Alan. Okay. Anything else?

We might well say that voting for evil — even if perceived as a lesser one — is what got us as a country into our current predicament, with two unrepresentative parties leading us toward the brink of destruction. We need to cast off such self-defeating behavior and resolve only to vote for that which is, of itself, meritorious, truth-based, and constitutional.

That precludes voting for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

So Mitt is evil and you can’t vote for him. Thank you Renew America for stabbing the one remaining Republican candidate right in the neck. Cheers.

Guitar player you used to see at 3:13 a.m. on Headbangers Ball a quarter century ago:

“Back in my country, my president [barf sign], he’s trying to pass a gun ban, so he’s staging all of these murders, like the ‘Fast And Furious’ thing down at the border, and Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there. And now the, um, beautiful people at the Sikh temple.”

“God. Was talking to J.D. our promoter here tonight, what a great guy. I was saying, you know, I don’t know where I’m going to live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America. And he said ‘Move down here to Singapore.’”

. . Singapore society is highly regulated through the criminalization of many activities which are considered as fairly harmless in other countries. These include failing to flush toilets after use, littering, jaywalking, the possession of pornography, the sale of chewing gum, and sexual activity; such as oral and anal sex between men.

And if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, you get the gallows. Just a heads up for a famous foreigner-drug addict who could end up before a magistrate. Try playing to the judge’s sympathies by flashing him the *Mustaine* eyes: