Supreme Court and Gun Laws

McQ at QandO is discussing recent Supreme Court decisions. The case I want to draw attention to is the refusal to dismiss a case holding a set of gun manufacturers liable for the shooting death of a Postal Service letter carrier. McQ points out, look at the chain of custody of the gun:

...the gun Furrow used to kill Ileto was originally sold to the police department in Cosmopolis, Wash. ... According to court records, the department sold the weapon to a gun shop in exchange for a different model. The shop sold it to a gun collector who is alleged to have sold it to Furrow, an ex-convict prohibited from purchasing weapons, at a gun show in Spokane, Wash.

So the manufacturers great crime is selling firearms to the police.

What is so annoying about this is that there have been a slew of these cases in the past decade. It is a vain attempt to sue the firearms industry into submission. Vain because most of these cases are dismissed and the rest go for the gun company at trial. To date they have won one case out of at least a hundred. So looks like this one goes to trial, where the gun companies will almost certainly win.

Concealed Carry Rates

I found the statistics here interesting. Its a list of the percentage of a state's population that has a concealed carry permit. The top three states by percentage are South Dakota, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Connecticut and Washington round out the top five. Texas, popular conception to the contrary, is in the lower half of the list.

Journalism and Fundamentalism

GetReligion is covering a article written by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times. She does an excellent job talking about what really constitutes religious "fundamentalism."

The article requires registration at the NYT site. But if you don't want to do that. Open a google window and paste one of the following URLs into the search box (use the correct page).

Page 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/weekinreview/09good.html

Page 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/weekinreview/09good.html?pagewanted=2

The NYT doesn't put the login screen up for people coming in from search engines. So this technique will get around it, if you already know where you are going. Don't know if it helps with other sites or not.

Church Membership

Messy Christian is writing about church membership. Messy has had a rough time with churches lately so she's a little gun shy.

My thoughts on the matter are also mixed. I've been attending the same church since I was in high school. I am not a member and check "regular attender" on the pad of paper that circulates every week in the service. This status hasn't stopped me from being an usher, small group leader, and on the singles group leadership team. I tithe or come close most months.

Why aren't I a member of the church? Well I was baptized as an adult, but by sprinkling. I was not emersed as my church requires. I have no desire to get baptized again in order to qualify. I've thought about sucking it up, but I'm feeling stubborn right now. A water distribution methodology seems a silly thing for them to draw a line in the sand over. But hey it may be a clue that my doctrine might not be my church's doctrine. A funny thing to worry about after I've been leading a bible study there for over a year.

Joining a church is about throwing your lot in with a body of christians. I'm fine with that. I've already been doing the work of a member for quite some time. I suppose my bigger worry is that they will throw their lot in with me as well. It's especially worrying since I will shortly be getting engaged to a lovely Jewish girl. Not much chance of us getting married in my church (although we have no desire to do that anyway). If I'm lucky one of my ministers would agree to perform my part of the wedding. If not there is always a Justice of the Peace I suppose.

HOV Lanes

Todd Zywicki is posting about HOV lanes over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Zywicki suggests that these lanes should simply have higher tolls and anyone should be able to ride them.

I think that High Occupancy Vehicle lanes are about the smartest innovation in traffic management in the last twenty years. Then someone decided to let anyone with a hybrid car ride in them. That person should be shot. Or beaten. Better yet, beaten then shot. Being shot then beaten would probably be counter productive.

The whole point behind HOV is that putting multiple people in a car increases the population density on the highway while reducing the vehicle traffic density. The great thing is that these effects reinforce each other synergisticly. Lowering the traffic density means that while the regular lanes have ground to a halt because of over-capacity, the HOV lanes are still moving steadily. So if you look at the number of people moving down a stretch of highway in a minute, the HOV beats the regular lanes by an even wider margin.

Then some idiot decided they should promote hybrid cars by letting them use the HOV lanes. Now we have a ton of people driving hybrids in order to use the HOV lanes without picking up slugs. This means that the population density is dropping and the traffic density is rising. Everything hits capacity again and HOV grinds to a halt just like the regular lanes. All HOV gets you is more people in your car (or not) to share in your discomfort. The last time I went through DC this was the case south on 395.

What's worse it isn't even smart from the ecological perspective. Hybrid cars get around twice the highway mileage of a typical commuter (50-60mpg compared to 20-35ish). But the hybrids will probably only contain the driver, while the standard cars will have 3 or 4 people in them. So per commuter, the standard cars will pollute less. Since the number of commuters will remain relatively constant, pushing hybrids actually increases commuter air pollution. Idiots...

Armstrong Williams

Well here is a big story breaking across the blogosphere. If you have been living under a rock, Armstrong Williams accepted money from the Department of Education to publically back the No Child Left Behind act using his TV show and Column. Instapundit, Jeff Jarvis, Q and O, and Left2Right should represent a good overview of coverage.

Lots has been written. Just a few thoughts on the coverage:

• Is it just me or can you basically pinpoint someones political affiliation by looking at who the scandal is attributed to? If this scandal is mostly attributed to "the Bush administration" its a liberal. If Williams and the Department of Education are being railed at: conservative. Note I am not blaming Bush directly or indirectly, so draw the proper conclusions.
• What makes this case more prominent than some in the past is that Williams was explicitly paid for airtime. This is not a case of "hey we agree, let me contribute to you financially or purchase some ads." This was a business arrangement. Its partisan payola.
• Williams was a partisan commentator not a true "unbiased" journalist. Thankfully the blogosphere is drawing the proper conclusions of "hey we're all partisan hacks too, how long before some of us get offers?" Note that several bloggers have already been on the payroll of partisan organisations (DailyKos was criticised for accepting DNC money last year, Atrios turned out to be paid by a thinktank). The money floating around the blogosphere has been of the "you pat my ideological back, I'll pat yours" persuasion, not direct payment for a given amount of coverage.
• People are wondering about journalistic ethics in general. This is a good thing since of the professions of public interest, journalists have very little in the way of hard professional standards. There are lots of soft suggestions about them from journalist organizations, but there isn't a licensing body that can really make standards stick. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and others do not get off so lightly.

The Geek Heirarchy

I saw this chart of the geek heirarchy on Penny Arcade. A few things that seem to have been left out of even the unabridged chart are cosplayers and collectable card gamers.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

GetReligion has two posts up about how a good God could allow a natural disaster like the South Asian tsunamis. They are here and here.

Long story short, my answer comes down Romans. There is none of us righteous, not even one. If you measure us against each other perhaps some are more righteous than others. But when you measure us against the absolute yardstick of God righteousness, not a single one of us will measure up. And so all of us are condemned to physical death and eventually stand before our Maker.

Does the method he uses to bring you into his presence really matter? The time of his choosing? At some point you might as well ask "If there is a good and loving God, why aren't we all immortal?" It may be a bit of straw man, but only a bit of one.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because there are no good people in the absolute sense. A better question is "why do good things happen to bad people?" The answer is because God still loves us despite the pain we give him.

Birth Control and STD rates

Eugene Volokh is posting that over then counter use of Plan B, the morning after pill, has no effect on STD rates compared to prescription and clinic use of the same pill. So it probably does not increase the likelihood the woman will have unprotected sex. On the other hand it also had no effect on pregnancy rates compared to prescription use of Plan B.

However some other birth control methods may increase STD rates. Hog on Ice has a rather irreverent column on Depo Provera. DP has STD rates that are 3 times other methods like the pill. Some have postulated that this is because DP only requires the user to get shots 4 times a year and so it caters to a less responsible clientele.

STD rates are shooting up. People seem to be incorrectly equating birth control with safe sex. Most methods of contraception offer little STD protection. Just because you won't get pregnant does not mean you will not suffer other consequences.

I'm basically an abstinence and monogamy guy though so don't look to me for advice about how to cavort without consequences.

Thoughts on Iraq

Matthew Yglesias has thoughts on the grand strategy of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I find his analysis lacking on several levels. Here are some quotes:

1. Eliminating the Afghan sanctuary cut down on al-Qaeda recruitment because despite the continuing appeal of the al-Qaeda ideology, people who wanted to sign up didn't know where to go.
2. By invading Iraq and then botching the aftermath, we've created a new location for would-be jihadis to travel to in order to join the war.
3. Thus, we're creating some number of new anti-American warriors.
4. Right now, those warriors aren't killing people in America because they're in Iraq.
5. But at some point, some of them will leave Iraq, and start launching attacks in the United States, Europe, and other countries.

I have problems with concepts 2 and 3.

It does not follow that they would not have established training areas somewhere else if we had not invaded Iraq. Libya, Hussien's Iraq, and Somalia are all potential locations. They did not congregate in Afghanistan so they could fight there. All they needed was a friendly regime.

Our containment of Iraq by having bases in Saudi Arabia were the offense that began really empowering this stage of Bin Laden's growth in the first place. So they would also be creating new warriors if we hadn't gone to Iraq. The question is, after attrition from contact with US forces, are they still posting a net gain in followers?

To answer this question we have to look at this Yglesias statement:

The vast majority of insurgents are, by all accounts, native-born Iraqis.

All accounts I have seen say otherwise. The only numbers I have seen say that 10% combatants are known Iraqis, 20% of are Saudi, 15% are Syrian, 10% are other, and a whopping 45% are of unknown nationality. Which means that the Iraqis might be a simple majority in the insurgency depending how many of the unknowns are actually Iraqi nationals. They are certainly not a vast majority.

So what we are doing over there is killing a lot of foriegn terrorists from all over the Middle East and Africa. This may explain the change in rhetoric from Osama bin Laden prior to the last election. They are suffering highly asymmetric losses and this is a good thing.

His last two points have merit however. We cannot count on the insurgents being foolish forever. Our great advantage is that they do not have the sort of command structure that leads to a lot of foresight, complex operations, or advanced planning. Part of our actions in Afghanistan was to substantially cripple these capabilities. But when Iraq is over, we should be preparing for them to turn their eyes toward us again once they have rebuilt their forces.

IT Whining

I have an intense dislike for my IT management at work. I won't talk about work much, but suffice it to say I'm making an exception. The current brainstorm is the IT Online Helpdesk. Thats great except these are the three most common problems I have with my computer:

• The network is down.
• The email server is down.
• My computer is down.

You will notice that in all of these situations, an online help desk is no help to me. (The help desk requires me to login with my username and password from email, so the two systems are probably linked). This is why I have the phone numbers of everyone in the IT department pinned to the wall of my cubicle.

Gift to Self

Usually around this time I celebrate the season by giving myself something. After all, I've bought my family and loved ones presents so why not something for me? Previous idolatrous contrabutions to the temple of self have been a performance intake for my car and a longsword.

My ideas for this year are:

• Another sword. I'm thinking either a katana or a gladius. If it's a katana I can do cutting with it just like my longsword. If it's a gladius I use it to demonstrate "the sword of the spirit" from Ephesians.
• Guns. I have a lot of guns on my want list currently. Some thoughts include the Bersa thunder in either 22lr or .380, a 22lr rifle like the CZ 452, a 22lr pistol like the Browning Buckmark, or an AR-15.
• Car parts are also a possibility like a new performance exhaust for my Mazda.

Anyone with other ideas may express them freely in the comments.

Corporate Welfare from Left2Right

Left2Right is a website run by liberals trying to build concensus across the partisan divide. Its an admirable mission. Sometimes they do pretty well, sometimes not. This is a bad one.

Steve Shiffrin is talking about corporate welfare. I know of no conservative who uses that term by the way. He has the following to say:

Almost ten years ago, the Boston Globe estimated that $150 billion in the form of subsidies and tax breaks was funneled to American companies.

And...

It was greater than the program aiding families with dependent children, student aid, housing, food and nutrition, and all direct public assistance taken together (excluding Social Security and medical care).

The first thing the wise reader will note is that they are comparing apples to oranges. Their initial corporate figure is made up of "subsidies" (money paid out) and tax "breaks" (money never paid in the first place). They compare this with financial aid programs which only include subsidies and no breaks. So amazingly the second figure is smaller! To quote Homer Simpson, "If you can't tell I'm being sarcastic!"

This doesn't even touch on something more important. A lot of those tax "breaks" aren't. They are accounting practices like depreciation of capital expendatures. Similarly lots of those subsidies are things that liberals traditionally support, like keeping family farms in business or ensuring that there is always milk and bread on store shelves despite market forces favoring scarcity. The market is a pretty ruthless thing when you get down to it.

So this one was definitely a miss for Left2Right.

Force for Good

The US Navy has some amazing capabilities. Michelle Malkin is covering how they are being used for disaster relief in her column.

A friend of mine is a naval officer training to be a pediatrian. The Navy maintains these folks not only to care for families on naval bases and populate VA hospitals, but also to act as goodwill ambassadors in times like these. Some of the most effected by the tsunami are children after all. I don't know if Josh is being deployed or not, I don't think he is done his training yet.

One knit to pick, Jan Egelund is a UN official who said something stupid about the US being stingy. He has since repudiated it and apologized. Lets give the man a break.

Aging

Michael Dean has a post on aging over at his site. Michael and his wife are on the cusp of rolling over from 26 (mid-twenties) to 27 (late twenties). He and a friend are pontificating on youthfulness. Like a good engineer he even has a diagram.

There is just one thing I disagree with though. The peak of youthfulness on their diagram is 23-24. This seems wrong to me. The peak of youthfulness is your 25th birthday, especially for men. At 16 you can drive, at 18 you can vote, at 21 you can drink, at 25 your auto insurance rates plummet. I can't think of anything good that happens after 25 that is inherently age triggered.

Ok there are two things. His use of pink for Paul's dialogue was didn't have enough contrast and was giving my eyes fits, but highlighting the text in my browser fixed it.

Delaware in the Blogosphere

Eugene Volokh mentioned Delaware, my home state. Unfortunately it's in the context of age of consent laws. It's better than getting mentioned because of a horrible refinery accident or lending laws that benefit usurerscredit card companies.

Evidentally age of consent in Delaware is 16 unless you are over 30, when it jumps up to 18. What happens if you are 29 and start consensually schtupping a 16 year old? Disgusting as that is, when you turn 30 she will still be 17 and you will be facing potential jail time.

Not something I have to worry about anyway, since Amybear is over 21. I'm not going to be more specific than that because at some point she might not want her age written down and associated with a date in history. Best to plan ahead with that.

Also, am I the only one to find overfamiliarity with state age of consent laws icky?

Writing on the Internet

Instapundit has remarked on the inability of the media to get stories about blog and blogging right. One of the problems is that they can't tell a blog and a bulletin board apart.

To be fair, the dividing line is a bit grayer than it used to be. Kuro5hin is a discussion forum. It is powered by a codebase called Scoop. DailyKos is a blog. I believe it uses a variant of the same software. Slashdot could be a discussion forum, but it could also be described as a group meta-blog.

The difference between a blog with a large number of comments/commenters and a discussion forum often gets pretty miniscule. There are clear-cut cases of either/or, but there are also gray areas where both apply.

UPDATE: Slashdot is picking up the 58% growth in blog readership story. Some of the comments are interesting and relate to blogging and specifically what defines a blog, others are worthless. As with all Slashdot comments, set the threshold around 3 and rank them by score. You will get the cream without the crap.

Academic Hornswoggling

Jim Lindgren is talking about Michael Bellesiles over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Bellesiles published a book entitled Arming American several years ago. It was greeted with a lot of acclaim mostly because it questioned long held beliefs about the American gun culture. Bellesiles basically stated that firearm ownership culture never had broad popular roots. Instead he claimed that the gun culture has always been a niche phenomenon.

The book won at least one major award in its field because academics these days love books that completely rewrite history especially in the favor of more liberal modern (in both the temporaly and philosophical sense of the word) ideology. The only problem is that much of the work was a complete fraud. Many of the records Bellesiles sited had been destroyed in a fire over a hundred years ago. The records were a complete fabrication. Unfortunately for Bellesiles, several people knew this and brought it to light. His awards were revoked and I believe he may have been asked to step down from his position at Emory. Of course, some liberal think tank is still publishing his book for political reasons because "its need to be read" lies or not.

Long story short, I expect to see this sort of thing happen much more. There is a lot of pressure in academia for groundbreaking scholarship thanks to the prevailing liberal "give me something new" mindset. It is how you make your reputation as a young professor. This is especially a problem in history and the classical fields, where the subjects for new study are somewhat more limited than the hard sciences.

The real problem is that at the rate new scholarship is coming out, no one is bothering to check it anymore. I've written in a scholarly journal or two, but I doubt anyone ever bothered to read my sources. Granted I worked in a hard science and the principles cited are well known, but you see my point. Comments on journal publications tend to be of the "you need more references" type, not the "I checked your references and they don't exist." Checking references and reanalysing data is fairly rare and in some fields asking for raw data is considered an insult.

Incidentally this is why I don't think I could ever turn off trackbacks on this blog. I want other people to be able to check my work.

The Trip Back

I'm home, but I'm playing catch-up after a week away. Blogging may be light until I get back on my feet.

The trip up from Sarasota on Delta was uneventful. I left Sarasota on time and arrived in Atlanta earlier than expected. With only a personal item and carry-on to my name, making my connection was easy even if it mean traversing a fair part of the massive Atlanta/Hartsfield airport. My only regret is that I didn't have the spare time to get a nice glass of sweet tea like in Charlotte. I'd had plenty to time in Charlotte. Given the situation I prefer the Atlanta experience.

I got in at Philadelphia on time. After a week in clean pastel Florida, Philly was filthy but warmer than expected. Meeting my parents was more problematic. Once we did get together, my brother met us for dinner at a nice chinese buffet. Then I picked up my car at their house and went home.

I've decided that the next time I have to fly will be from BWI and will not involve my parents. I love them, but their house is not my home and I would much rather have skipped the family dinner and cut straight to settling in at my apartment.

On a completely different topic: "its" or "it's" which is the contraction and which is the possessive? Its (It's?) one of those grammatical rules I have long neglected and, now that I'm writing here fairly regularly, not knowing has severely annoyed the perfectionist in me.

The Trip Down

Well I'm going back to the frozen north tomorrow, so I suppose I should write that piece about my eventful trip down. Hopefully getting back will be easier than getting to Sarasota was.

I'm sure the blogosphere has been as abuzz as the mainstream media about the troubles of travelling after Christmas. I can tell you as someone stuck in the system that it was every bit as horrible as people are saying.

I flew out of Philadelphia on US Airways. I was in the eye of the storm, but I knew that would be the case anyway, so I opted for the wise choice of a large personal item (a backpack) and a large foldover carry-on bag. People were amazed at the size of my carry-on, but I got to my destination with all my stuff so it served its purpose.

My original flight plan was Philly with a short layover in Charlotte then on to Sarasota. My flight out of Philly had us sitting at the gate for an hour and half. The only good thing to come out of this was that I got to know a few other people on the flight. We made up a little time on the way to Charlotte, but I still arrived after my connection had left.

This sent me to the ticket counter so that the airlines could find me a new flight out. That was when the horror of my situation started to sink in. It took them over thirty minutes to tell me there was no way to get me to Sarasota without me spending two days in a Charlotte hotel. That was not what I signed up for. Tampa is within driving distance of Sarasota, so I asked if they could work through the larger airport there. They did more typing. I gave some serious consideration to flying back to Philly. More typing and finally I had tickets to Tampa via Jacksonville, Fl. Still going South, better than nothing.

I consoled myself with some sweet tea in the Charlotte airport. Thank God for the south and sweet tea.

A ninety minute delay and a short hop, I'm running between terminals in the Jacksonville airport. Let me say that Jacksonville is very very proud of hosting the Super Bowl this year. It was on every resident's lips. I get to my gate and find it surprisingly devoid of people. My puddlejumper was down for maintenance trouble. Off to the Charlotte Clarion for a night away from my loved ones.

A free night and meal at the Clarion later and I'm winging my way on a prop-driven commuter to Tampa.

Let me say that this whole trip new insight into the strange comraderie that develops in airports. Like soldiers stuck in foxholes not of our own devising, we were fighting pitched battle against our airline opponents. In Charlotte I met a nice family of valiantly trying to get to Jacksonville. They had started the day in Albany, NY and were on their fourth connection of the day. Each one had faced such delays that the couple and their three boys were also on their third standby list of the day. They were told by the airline that they would be stuck there for two days and that things were so bad, all the rental cars at the airport had been rented out. Their story was not unusual. I was actually in the healthy middle of the airtravel bell curve.

If there is one thing this whole thing taught me it was that I really need to get a cell phone. Trotting between payphones working my Walmart calling card for all its worth was emotionally taxing. One of my fellow travellers let me borrow his for a few minutes. Thanks buddy. If I ever need a shrink in Charlotte I'll look you up.

Tomorrow I fly home, but I'm going Delta so here's hoping things will be better.