Dinosaur Recommended Reading

I've been saying that humans' opinions are often a toxic mix of emotion and reasoning since the mid-Jurassic, but would just like to pass along this link to an article in Mother Jones magazine: Behind the Mayan Apocalypse: The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science.  It makes the case very well, citing the well-known psychologist Leon Festinger and others.  If you've ever been puzzled why confronting people with the facts about something either doesn't work or merely produces an intensified stream of rhetoric defending a position that's clearly false, this article explains why.  Of course, there are philosophical antecedents to the notion: Plato's parable of the cave in The Republic, Nietzsche's "Of Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense," and so forth, but the above offers plenty of information of the modern sort.

A DAY IN THE LIFE (AND DEATH) AMERICA

Please return to my sister's post (immediately below) after scanning these headlines under the fold:

The NRA: A Predictable Response

Today the National Rifle Association (NRA) finally broke its silence about the massacre of innocents and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president rejected the idea of stronger gun legislation in favor of placing "...armed police officers in every single school in this nation." LaPierre goes on to declare, "Innocent lives might have been spared, if armed security was present at Sandy Hook. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." (Rachel Rose Hartman, NRA Newtown Response, Yahoo News)

LaPierre and the NRA are irrational and dangerous.The difference between a good guy with a gun and a bad guy with a gun is indistinguishable until they shoot someone. Mass shooters are typically people who decide on a particular day to murder a lot of people. If they had been a "bad guy" and made a practice of shooting large groups of people, I seriously doubt that they would still be allowed to wander about with a gun. The NRA's position makes no sense to anyone capable of rational thought.

The problem lies with the number of guns owned in America, the type of weapons, and the type of ammo. Even a good guy can have a bad day and the last thing that we need are a bunch of armed people patrolling the halls of our schools unless the NRA can come up with a fool proof test to determine who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.

The NRA also tries to shift the focus to violent movies and video games. The problem is that numerous studies have concluded that exposure to such material is not the causative factor in American gun violence.

A Facebook friend argues that it isn't about the tool used by the perpetrator of mass violence, but about our "social celebration of violence as an answer to problems and as a way to fame."

I agree that we need to deal with our culture of violence, but the tools do make a difference. In addition, when data of other types of crimes is compared with crime rates of other cultures, the U.S. doesn't appear to be any more violent than other developed countries except in the area of gun violence.

We are not a more violent nation, if we look at overall crime rates. It is only in the area of gun violence that the U.S. drastically exceeds other nations. (National Vital Statistics Report, CDC, October 2012)

While we kill 11,000 to 12,000 of our fellow citizens each year with guns; England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year -- 3% of our rate per 100,000 people. The U.S. has more gun-related killings than any other developed country. (Max Fisher, WorldViews, 12/14/12 Washington Post).

Changing cultural norms takes an inordinate amount of time and in the meanwhile, this nation has a murder by gun rate that far exceeds that of comparable developed nations.

A single person with a semi-automatic gun with a magazine capable of rapidly firing multiple rounds is bound to have a higher kill count than someone with a shovel. Lanza killed 26 people in approximately 10 minutes. This pretext that tools don't matter is dangerous and nonsensical. Who would you rather face--a person armed with a shovel or a person armed with a glock?

The countries that have enacted stringent gun controls have seriously lowered their rates of death by gun violence

The NRA offers a ludicrous solution--let's arm the good people to fight the bad people, as if good people and bad people are separate species. Anyone has the potential to commit an act of violence and we don't know that they are a "bad person" until they do so. Some of those "good people" that the NRA would arm may get pissed off one day and become a bad person with a gun.

We have to stop coming up with overly simplistic solutions based on fallacies about human nature. There is no such thing as a criminal until a person commits a crime. We have more people in prison proportionate to our population than any other country. I'm not worried about criminals running around with guns. It's those law abiding citizens, armed to the teeth that worry me. Up until last Friday, Adam Lanza wasn't a criminal.

The CDC has gun death stats for 2011.

End of the World!

CQ CQ CQ de KI4GTH CQ CQ CQ K 

Over and over with my old Bencher iambic paddles, I kept calling CQ only to hear the hiss of interstellar noise and distant lightning crashes. Dahdidahdit dahdahdidah: CQ CQ CQ on 40 and 20 and 18 meters. . . and never a response. Not a blip on the panadapter, not a trace on the waterfall. I'm the last man on Earth, or at least the last one with a radio. 

Slowly I notice that the noise sounds a lot like wind in the palm trees and mangroves and the beeping of the timer on the coffee pot down in the kitchen where my wife is making breakfast has woken me up.

The  History Channel has been running apocalyptic nonsense for the last 48 hours non stop. Mayans, Hopi, John of Patmos and Nostradumbass. End times without end.  Now maybe it'll stop and they'll have to dredge up more old legends and manuscripts and reports of signs and portents like they've been swooning over with every forest fire, earthquake, food shortage flood and epidemic --  like the ones that have been occurring since a billion years before anyone or any thing took notice.

Of course it's only 66 outside and it's been very rainy for December. . . (queue the doomsday music please. . .)

END OF THE WORLD

I started writing a short post to commemorate this day, but then the strangest thing happened ...

Maybe now

Maybe now's the time.  The NRA has taken a serious body blow and in general, the American public is losing faith in the extremists of the GOP and its ability to solve our problems.  A CNN poll shows that a majority, albeit a small one, thinks the GOP is too extreme and I don't think we need a poll to show that the National Rifle Association, its frequent unindicted conspirator, is aware that it has blood on its hands. The nation's largest and loudest gun  lobby all but turned out the lights and pulled down the shades for 4 days after the Newtown incident and had nothing to say as 300 protesters arrived at their headquarters on Monday.

They have scheduled a news conference for Tomorrow, Friday the 21st and have announced that:

"The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."

Wouldn't that be nice, but while that remains to be seen, I'm given to wonder if the changes they propose and proposed by others will be meaningful as well, or as is often the case, haphazard, oblivious  to facts and doomed to be ineffective at best.  What I'm hearing and reading rather confirms my worries. My incompletely documented opinion is that most bans aren't effective because they weren't designed to be. Ineffective by design and ineffective because they're unenforceable, many make things worse. Looking at the Volstead act and our "war on drugs" I see massive increases in crime and harmless people having their lives ruined. If a ban is what we hang our hopes on, a ban without further characteristics, we'll be as successful as Reagan's "just say no" billboards or Ford's "WIN" buttons were.  If we refuse to recognize the primary goal that no weapons at all should be inside an elementary school, we'll get bogged down with descriptions and characteristics that most of us are painfully incompetent to handle. If we let the discussion revolve about ballistics and rates of fire, around plastic gunstocks over wood or barrel length; over gas or recoil operated actions and magazine capacity, we're going to pass more nonsense and walk away dumb and happy until some other crazy bastard pulls another trigger, or God help us, lights a fuse or opens a canister of ricin.

Diminishing the influence of  the powerful, fear mongering  NRA, at long last, will not be all that we need if we truly want to protect our schools ( or theaters and shopping malls for that matter) unless we shed some of the self-righteousness we sometimes share with them and take an honest look at our own "meaningful contributions."  Do we share that "more of the same stuff that didn't work" and that "we didn't think of it so it's no good" attitude?  Do we steadfastly repeat party lines and refuse to consider inconvenient and contradictory facts as the economic extremists at the Tea Party do?  Do we draft laws that will address other forms of mayhem we haven't thought of yet or do we, as Generals are accused of doing, fight the previous war?

Times have changed.  When my parents were in elementary school one could buy a Thompson submachine gun, the infamous Chicago typewriter, at the local hardware store, but there wasn't much demand except from the gangs and the company would have failed if the Army didn't buy some. As far as I know, nobody was shooting up schools with real, honest-to-Thompson assault weapons. Now they're illegal, although many don't yet know it or admit it, but demand for things that look like them is soaring.  I can ask why we are different now, but I can't answer the question.  I just have to accept that we are.

Congressional gun rights supporters are suddenly willing to talk gun control.  So will it be substantive gun control or will congress pull off another fast one giving us some paper that they call gun control but is designed to do nothing?  Will we fall for the usual sophistry and sleight of hand a longer waiting period or another toothless ban?  Will we make a fuss about gun shows despite knowing that the guns used in these sprees were bought at licensed gun shops?  Will we continue to create straw men and indulge our fantasies and stereotypes?  Face it; for 50 years we've refused to face it and have enthusiastically  and fatuously blown it. Let's not blow it again.

So maybe it's the time and the season.  It's surely not the time to do nothing or reprise our failures. I hope we can do it right. I hope to hell we can avoid the extremist and not always useful language we're hearing from so many sources.  I hope we can address the question of why current policies have fostered or allowed a real reduction in aggravated crimes yet haven't had sufficient effect on "Amok" crimes; suicide-by-cop crimes where the deranged perpetrator isn't concerned with remaining alive or was seeking to die in the process. This isn't time for shouting and screaming, wailing and mourning or for listening to hysterics. It may be time to listen to people who are used to dealing with suicide  bombers and terrorists -- who are weapons experts, security experts and perhaps even psychologists  -- and tune out the scared and angry amateurs like you and me.

The place where optimism most flourishes...

The Republican party has been sinking slowly into the depths of madness for almost 40 years now.

An argument can be made that the problem began with Ronald Reagan, but if you look back at Nixon and his hatred of the "elite, East Coast liberals of the media," you can see where the Fox "News" mantra about "liberal media destroying the country" began.

(Plus, Nixon was a paranoid totalitarian who kept an enemies list and had a racist side he tried to keep hidden. He'd fit right into the new Republican Party.)

Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, the GOP had an open money-faucet flowing into the election. And despite that, the Republicans took a magnificent electoral pummeling. You would think that this might have caused Republicans to look into their souls, and perhaps reevaluate their priorities. Instead, they've decided to double down on the crazy.

You see, in the theory that "we can't afford to lose a single vote," the GOP embraced people who should be shunned by any reasonable human: conspiracy theorists, racists, and all the worst examples of the darkness and pettiness that creeps into the fringes of society. And for a number of reasons, those people have moved into the leadership of the party, and make up the public face of the GOP. Now, the entire party can be broken down into four types of people: the lunatics, the con-men, the marks, and the Old Guard.

You have the lunatics: they don't just spread the lies - they believe them, down to the depths of their souls. In essence, they're just marks or rubes, with a little more charisma and no fear of public speaking. People like Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert.

In days past, they might have been found on streetcorners with bullhorns, and people walking past, looking the other way. Now, they're elected to office, or given TV shows.

Then you have the known liars, who see the truth as something that needs to be to be bent to match their political agenda: Rush Limbaugh; the late, unmourned Andrew Breitbart; Karl Rove; and now, Mitt Romney. People who will lie, and then double-down on those lies, without compunction or shame.

(Please note: this is by no means an exhaustive list; not even scratching the surface. Just four of the biggies off the top of my head.)

And then you have the hapless rubes who believe them: the Teabaggers, the Fox "News" viewers; the easily-deluded fools who desperately cling to any idea that fits their preconceived world views, because it's so much easier than actually thinking.

And finally, you have the Old Guard. People like my father, who bought into the Republican line back when they had some shred of morality left to them, and haven't looked closely at the people who now make up the party. It's not clear whether they're a minority, or simply not loud enough to be heard over the din of the lunatics and criminals, but they don't seem to have any interest in being visible.

And it doesn't matter if the lies are easily debunked: the Republicans want to believe them, so little things like "facts" and "truth" get ignored for weak twistings of logic, and occasionally for simple repetition of the same lie, over and over again.

It doesn't matter how many birth certificates you release, the birthers will just keep on going.

Former Ron Paul staffer Eric Dondero has declared that he's "soured on electoral politics" and is now promoting "outright revolt." Of course, his definition of "revolt" is pretty much just to be a dick to anyone who doesn't express rage and hatred for the duly-elected President of the United States.

Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.

Do you work for someone who voted for Obama? Quit your job. Co-workers who voted for Obama. Simply don't talk to them in the workplace, unless your boss instructs you too for work-related only purposes. Have clients who voted Democrat? Call them up this morning and tell them to take their business elsewhere.

So, yeah. He's going to have a lot of friends.

But the right wing refuses to accept the simple fact that they were beaten by Obama fair and square. Exit polls clearly showed that Obama destroyed Romney on the issues, but what is the chant we hear from the right? "He ran a negative campaign!" Or, to put it another way:

What they won't say is that President Obama won a mandate for his vision, or that the GOP has veered too far right in its outlook.

"The president won the election. But I think it wasn't on the issues," Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said Thursday at the annual Republican Governors Assn. conference. "He ran a heck of a good grass-roots organization and was able to basically convince enough people that they couldn't trust Gov. Romney."

Face it. The truth is, Obama didn't have to work to make Mitt Romney seem unlikable. The person doing that job was Mitt Romney.

Another theme that's being repeated over and over is "Obama cheated!" (Because, you know, hundreds of repeated attempts at voter suppression by the right don't mean anything at all! Hey, if you didn't win, it must not have been cheating!)

The head of the Republican Party in Maine, Charlie Webster claimed that blacks were bussed in to steal the election.

"In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day," he said. "Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in (these) towns knows anyone who's black. How did that happen? I don't know. We're going to find out."

"I don't know any blacks! They must not exist!"

Sorry, Charlie. There are over 17,000 blacks in Maine, and the state went for Obama by a margin of 108,000 votes. I'd say that a few white people probably voted for Obama too. Whaddya think, Charlie?

And things are only getting worse. From the woman in Phoenix, in despair because Romney lost, who ran her husband down with a car (not because he voted for Obama, but because he didn't vote at all), to the paranoid separatists building an armed compound in Idaho (where you can get a good-paying job making guns).

From the man who murdered his family, and then killed himself, because he was afraid of a second Obama term, to the porn-stached Joseph Farah, who once claimed that Obama's reelection would lead to conservatives being "hunted down like dogs," and is now saying we should boycott the U.S. military because Obama's in charge.

The right wing is insane. And they're not getting any saner.

Keep the “Sea” in “Seasons Greetings"

Dammit! They are doing it again. Those landlubber, blubbering Byzantines are waging their annual war against “Seasons Greetings!”  Hark the herald cephalopod hath exacted sweet revenge upon them.  And torn them asunder with hellfire, fish guts, and Octopus Ink!  Here’s how I did it:

Att: Mr. Bob Fishhead, Property Manager

Dear Mr. Fishhead, 

Please find a photograph attached to this email illustrative of what I believe to be inappropriate signage in violation of community bylaws, provision 13.41 (page 24 of 146). What I find offensive about this signage is NOT the religious content, but an implied message that says:

The owner of this sign is above the bylaws of the community.

Please note what this sign is not: It is not a Christmas decoration that says: "Peace on Earth" or "Merry Christmas." I have no objections to a holiday greeting, Christmas lights, or tacky figurines within the boundaries of their own property. However, I do object to a partisan message masquerading as a holiday greeting - in an accusatory tone that members of this community, such as myself, find offensive. This is a polemic - not a message in keeping with the spirit of season.  I want it removed.

Postscript: Within hours after I sent the above missive, a somber Scomber scombrus (aka Holy Mackerel) removed the offending sign.  Score one for the Sea Team!

What's wrong with us?

This is what I'm going to say about this and this is all I'm going to say. We have a lot of firearms in the USA. We always have had. For a few, hunting for food or furs or hides and protection from wild animals makes them necessary. For many, protecting the hen house, the livestock, the crops, might require a firearm.  For some a firearm is something you shoot at paper targets or clay pigeons with at the country club. For others, it puts meat on the table and for some, they can be relics of history prized for craftsmanship or beauty or historical value. For many, living in a violent and dangerous area, people who have to transport valuables, people who are a target for criminals for many reasons;  having a gun is peace of mind.  For such people, being associated with psychotics and terrorists and hit-men and bandits and deranged murderers is offensive and worthy of scornful denunciation. And don't we hear a lot of it?

We have a lot of people in this country who cannot conceive that any of the above will own one for any justifiable reason or that firearms exist for any other reason but to kill someone, and so these horrifying and otherwise useless pieces of metal must be made to disappear and right now and at all cost. If you don't agree with that, words will be placed in your mouth that prove how deranged you are so don't even try to explain. Many of those people, and  they are in the minority, refuse to discuss what needs to be done to protect us all from crime and the grotesque results of a madman with a gun or a bomb unless and only unless there's a prior agreement to reduce or eliminate or severely curtail the right to own one. For them it's guns and guns alone that explain the needless death of innocents and the notion that the murderer is more guilty than his weapon is offensive and well worthy of scorn and mockery. It's all about guns, guns, guns and guns alone and don't we hear a lot about it?

Welcome to American fear, American extremism and American intransigence. Neither side will talk to the other with the intent to understand, just as with so many things America concerns itself with. Neither side will brook any discussion of the complexity of human behavior and motivation, the cost of reducing risk, the efficacy of anything that has already been tried or proposed, the "other side" certainly being so far into a delusional state or simply so committed to brutality and mayhem that there is no middle ground between "we must trust the people" and "it's too dangerous ever to trust the people" and no point to looking for it.

What will never be discussed is the very reason discussion is futile. That reason is us.  What we don't want to talk about and what we cover up and distract from with epithets like Libtard or gun nut, with shibboleths like the NRA or the Brady Bunch or the Gungrabbers or the Gun Culture or even made up discussions is that it just may be that the enemy is not some piece of metal and explosive, some nefarious group of bogeymen, but something to do with who and what we Americans are and why we seem to be different, so angry, so afraid, so filled with self pity and lack of compassion.  It just may have something to do with the reason Switzerland with a widespread love of shooting and hunting; Switzerland where there are 46 guns per hundred residents has virtually no gun crime, nobody shooting up the schools and movie theaters -- and the US with about twice as many has vastly more than twice as much. What causes that difference is something we need to talk about.  Without doing that, all we will hear are rationalizations of prejudice and peremptory proclamations of belief  --  but that's up to you the people, because I'm too disgusted to give a damn any more. I'm not even going to read the comments.

Random thoughts on a school shooting

Since Adam Lanza shot 27 people in a Connecticut school, I've been having a number of conversations over the last several days, primarily on Facebook and in what we laughingly call "real life." (I have yet to work up the interest in trolling right-wing blogs, though. Not sure why - perhaps the open futility of logic in this case.)

It's surprising how often I've been hearing the same tropes, too.

You know, if one of those teachers had owned a gun, none of this would have happened!
Actually, one of them owned several guns. Her son used them to kill her, and 26 other people.

And in fact, if you review the data (and this analysis is slightly flawed, but data is data), of the 17 mass shootings he analyzed, 11 were, in fact, stopped by civilians. But only in one of them was the shooter gunned down by someone carrying a weapon (one other was wounded by a civilian with a firearm, but he escaped, and later shot himself). The most common endings for these situations is a gunman shooting himself, or getting tackled by unarmed civilians; police killing the gunman actually came in third.

In fact, the most common ending for armed civilians entering the fray? Increased confusion, more collateral damage, and more wounded bystanders. So, once again, the "conventional wisdom" turns out to be completely inaccurate.

Students were killed because liberals ended prayer in school!
Or any of a thousand variations on a theme. Really, there's only one answer to statements like that.

(On a side note and something of a non sequiter, Westboro Baptist Church announced their intention to picket the funerals of the children. And within hours, the hacker group Anonymous released the contact information of many of the more public members, so you can contact them and tell them how you feel. Just thought I'd mention.)

There've been a few new tropes of late, though. I had the following exchange after tossing out a simple picture like this:

Guy: I would only point out that they should be focusing on the societal issues that causes this piece of dirt to think this was a viable option.

Me: And one of the societal issues? The easy availability of guns. How is it that every other 1st world country can handle this problem but us? Why are we down with the 3rd world countries in per capita gun deaths?

Girl: It's been said many times before: guns don't kill people, crazy idiots with guns kill people

Me: Guns don't kill people. People kill people. By throwing bullets at each other.

Still me: 27 children. Dead. I'm just saying.

Guy: Lol at your wikipedia reference. it would be a little more believable if the dates the data was cherry picked from matched and if the US didn't have three years of data to every others one year (exception being Argentina)

Still the guy: and yes 27 people killed is a horrible tragedy. Maybe we should spend some time grieving first and then discussing why it happened at a more appropriate time.

Me: Huh. Interesting theory. Ignoring your wish to get all the data from a source that doesn't exist, there have been 4 mass shootings this year alone. There have been two a year for the last 3 decades. If we followed your advice and waited until an appropriate time, it's a discussion that would never happen. So, since we obviously need it, when do you suggest? And how many people need to die before we do?

Please note the two newest tropes on display up there:

We should take care of the societal issues that cause the problems, not the problems themselves.

and

Now is not the time to talk about this. There should be time to mourn. We should wait until emotions aren't running as high.

I believe Jon Stewart pointed out the problems with that last point.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

So in the end, there are no new arguments. Just the same ones, louder.