The World of Comedy Has Suffered a Serious Loss

Just in case you missed it...the longest 8 minutes and 40 seconds imaginable.

Anyone who can watch this until the end is either a martyr or...well, a masochist.

The Second Amendment

As passed by the Congress:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I marvel at how people think they can construe this amendment, in either version, to believe that it authorizes individuals to have and use guns to protect themselves against the tyranny of their own government, the very government that the constitution was in the process of creating.

I have deliberately inserted the word "use" because people have cited their need to be armed against the tyranny of the Obama administration, as if we are living in the dystopia that the founders feared. Really? Are you quite sure of that? Of course, the most reasonable of them would argue, we're not going to start an armed rebellion. We're "just sayin'."

One could ostensibly make a case that the second version, in which the word "state" is not capitalized, refers to the "free state" of the individual citizens, some sort of natural condition. That interpretation is impossible with the original version passed by Congress, which refers to the security of a free State (Nation). And the capitalized Militia in that original version also makes it clear the reference was to an armed citizenry defending the new nation.

Consider the second version. To assume that the founders were granting citizens the right to take up arms against the very government they were creating, without once using the word "tyranny" and without certainly without defining it, is to assume they were idiots. Apparently all that is needed, using this interpretation, is a strong sense of outrage, and a gun, and you can be another defender of liberty like Timothy McVeigh.

It is much more logical, considering the military weakness of the new nation relative to the European powers,  that the founders were more concerned with a citizen Militia to defend the country they were creating than they they were with establishing a right for individuals to overthrow its government from within.

Consider the immensity of our tyrannical government's firepower nowadays. It becomes clear that the 2nd amendment, interpreted thusly, must also grant individuals the right to much more sophisticated military weaponry than a mere AR-47, that is if the well-regulated foes of tyranny are to have any chance at all. I mean, surely the constitution guarantees a fair fight.

The best solution would be to void the 2nd amendment altogether because it would appear to have not been properly ratified. If the version passed by Congress is not the same as that ratified by the states, then the constitutional requirement for amending the constitution would appear to have not been met.

Where Our Values Are

My friend, Fred, sent me this map with the disclaimer that he couldn´t verify it´s validity, but he thought it felt right, and so do I.

I still can´t say with certainty that it is accurate, but I can at least give you a link to the Deadspin.com website where it seems to have come from. I know nothing about this site or about the apparent researcher and author of the accompanying article, Reuben Fischer-Baum.

The only thing I can be sure of is that it has a high truthiness quotient.

How Long Has This Been Around?

Am I naive to be surprised to find this in the user manual of my cell phone?

Make fake calls
You can simulate an incoming call when you want to get
out of meetings or unwanted conversations.
To activate the fake call feature
In Menu mode, select Settings → Applications → Call
→ Fake call → Fake call hot key.
To make a fake call
• In Idle mode, press and hold the Navigation key
down

Gawd, I Love the Onion

SUGAR LAND, TX—Shortly after reports surfaced today that the Boy Scouts of America had voted to lift its ban on gay youths, local homosexual child Max Lovell, 14, told reporters that he was looking forward to joining the organization and finally being ridiculed for another thing. “This is great. I get made fun of every day for being gay, but now I’ll be called a dork, too,” said the enthusiastic Lovell, who is routinely taunted for being homosexual but will now endure everything from light ribbing to vicious name-calling based on his affiliation with the outdoor-preparedness youth group. “It’s perfect because I’ve been looking for a second thing to get mocked for, and Boy Scouts seems like a great fit. I think it’ll really open me up to a whole new batch of cutting insults.” Lovell added that he also “can’t wait” to see what his peers will do when he joins the eighth-grade marching band in the fall.

21st Century Marriage Counseling

The Daily Gun Report

I really like what blogger Joe Nocera is doing with his daily updates about gun violence.

As of last Friday, over 4,150 people have died from gunfire since Newton. Remind me, how many people died on 9/11?

Every day Nocera prints reports from newspapers around the country on the previous day's shootings (or sometimes there is a 2-day lag) , both fatal and non-fatal. Here are a couple of examples:

A woman was shot and killed in Shively, Ky., Thursday night. Police were called to a home on a report of a domestic dispute and found the woman dead. The shooter left the home in a vehicle..

A 50-year-old man was shot multiple times Tuesday night and critically wounded during a fight inside his Rochester, N.Y., residence. Ronald Britt, 50, suffered life-threatening injuries when he was shot several times in the upper body. Officers said it appeared that Britt and another man were arguing when the fight escalated. The shooter ran from the scene.

He also reports on other gun-related developments:

 Yesterday, Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, signed a bill that made the state’s gun laws among the strictest in the nation. Under the new legislation, anyone buying a handgun will have to submit fingerprints to obtain a license. The bill also bans 45 types of assault weapons; gun magazines will be limited to 10 bullets; gun ownership by people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility will be banned; and police will be able to suspend the licenses of gun dealers who fail to comply with record-keeping obligations.

It’s a far cry from the town of Nelson, Ga., which recently passed a law requiring gun ownership. The April 1 ordinance requires every head of household in the town of 1,300 to have a gun and ammunition, but there are exceptions: the law exempts anyone who opposes gun ownership or has certain disabilities.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a federal lawsuit against the town, which is 50 miles north of Atlanta, claiming the law is unconstitutional. City leaders have said the law was mostly symbolic and isn’t being enforced.According to the Associated Press, the law’s supporters said they wanted to make a statement about gun rights at a time when the president was seeking restrictions in the wake of the Newtown massacre.

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has vowed to sue the state of Maryland to get its eminently sensible law declared unconstitutional. Not exactly a surprise.

Or this:

Did you know that the gun lobby doesn’t want you discussing handgun safety with your doctor? In June 2011, Florida governor Rick Scott signed a bill that made it the first state in the nation to prohibit doctors from asking patients if they own guns. Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia all introduced “physician gag law” bills that would restrict physician firearm counseling.

Chris Rock on Bullet Control

I've had some trouble in the past trying to post YouTube videos, but hope springs eternal....

Gun Safety, Part 2

If gun violence were recognized as a serious public health issue, some of the things we might see could include laws requiring the manufacture of safer guns and use of other safety-related features, better laws regarding the registration and tracking of guns, laws related to parental responsibility, and the systematic collection of data related to gun ownership and usage.

I don't know much at all about guns, but one doesn't need to know the difference between a magazine and a clip to discuss gun violence any more than one needs to know how to drive a stick shift to talk about auto safety. I do know the technology already exists to make guns that recognize their owner's fingerprints and won't fire for anyone else. And I'm quite sure technologies exist that would prevent the I-didn't-know-it-was-loaded scenarios. We're an inventive people. If their were a national recognition of the need for safer guns, and a commitment to addressing the need, there would be no shortage of imaginative new technologies.

I can hear the arguments already that this would make guns too costly, but there is no part of the constitution that guarantees citizens the right to a cheap gun or that guarantees a certain profit margin for the gun makers. Public safety trumps both issues. When the American public became interested in automobile safety issues, the industry quit fighting the trend and began making and marketing safer cars. The same would happen with gun manufacturers when people began to demand safety features.

Clearly this is an issue on which there is a lot of emotion, not at all helped by a poorly-worded, ambiguous 2nd amendment. Ignorance doesn't help matters either. I still find it almost impossible to believe that a Rasmussen poll in January found that 65% of people in the U.S. believe people have a constitutional right to own a gun to safeguard their freedoms and to protect themselves against tyranny. Of the others, only 17% outright disagreed with that notion and 18% just weren't quite sure. Among gun owners, not surprisingly, the percentage who believe that it's all about preventing tyranny was 72%.

As long as people have this misconception it is probably natural that a sizable number of them think any attempt to study gun ownership or usage patterns, to require background checks, to track ownership, to limit the capabilities of the weapons or magazines, to make changes in the definition of what is a legal weapon etc. is the first step in the government's plan to come after their guns.

I have news for them. When us gun-hating pinko fags control the government and decide to take drastic action, we're not going to come for anybody's guns, even after we set up that national registry for the purpose of identifying the evil gun owners.  Confiscation is too complicated a procedure, not to mention dangerous to all parties, No, we're just going to the retailers and manufacturers and take possission of all the bullets. So, gun owners, quit worrying about that national registry. It's all about safety and tracking ownership. We can effectively disarm you without it.

One common mantra is that any effort at what I will call for the sake of convenience "gun control," is only going to affect legal gun owners, while the "real" problem is illegal gun owners. This ignores the fact that virtually every legal activity is regulated, controlled or limited in some respect, and that gun control laws already exist, and have always existed (Tombstone, Arizona had a check-your-gun law which was the ostensible reason for the OK corral gunfight). It also ignores the fact that the business of making laws is a constant redefinition of what is legal and what isn't.

Once you accept that gun violence is an issue of public health/safety and that it is appropriate to try to reduce the violence, the discussion enters another realm.

Look for example at what are generally called assault weapons and multi-round magazines. The argument against them, from a public safety perspective, is that there is no demonstrable need for civilians to have what are essentially military weapons, or thirty rounds literally at their fingertips. Also it is a combination whose potential for wreaking havoc has been demonstrated many times, so ban them or make them available only within organized gun clubs.

Opponents of course argue thier supposed 2nd amendment rights to an AR-47, but just in case people might find that a bit weak, they also try to argue that attempts to ban them are useless. Why? Because any semi-automatic weapon can easily be transformed into a fully automatic weapon, which transformation should also be made illegal, by the way.

The argument seems to be that, because we can't make a perfectly effective law, we shouldn't make any law at all. But I truly believe many people who assert this are arguing backward, starting with a belief that we should not make a law, and justifying that belief with the argument that we can't make a workable law.

In reality, almost all of our laws are petty easily violated. That is why we have police forces, and why statutes provide penalties for those who don't obey them. Murder is as easy as pulling a trigger, which is much simpler than converting a weapon to full auto. Why then have laws against murder, if they are so easily broken? A good many, if not the majority, of our laws depend primarily upon the private honesty of citizens, which isn't perfect.

I'll wager that the first mandatory seat belt laws were opposed by some people who claimed the laws would be unenforceable, and people would/could violate them with impunity. Still today they are almost universally obeyed

We have laws today that prevent the use of silencers on guns. People who are determined to break those laws can do so, but as far as I know it is generally the laws are generally obeyed. I suggest you do a Google search for "how to make a silencer." Do the 9,180,000 results mean we should do away with the laws that make silencers illegal?

Should we halt attempts to place limitations on fully automatic weapons because a similar Google search for "how to convert a semi-auto to a full auto" yields 1,930,000 hits?

Nobody needs a fully automatic weapon to protect himself or his family. When I look at the propaganda on the internet, the assault rifle crowd almost all seem to arguing from the position of needing these weapons to protect their rights against an assault by a tyrannical government, and I'm sorry, but that is just plain bogus.

Now one objection might be that we don't have enough evidence about automatic weapons to ban them, e.g. how they are used, who uses them, where they are bought, why people say they own them, or any other question you can think of. And that is true, because gun data is not being collected. But, from a public safety standpoint, do we need research to show these weapons at large in society make us less, rather than more, safe? States imposed speed limits without waiting for research showing that limits save lives. If research someday shows that the country would be a better place with more fully automatic weapons, we can always return to the issue and legalize them.

Public health and safety campaigns generally involve education. The first education campaign should be about the 2nd amendment...what it says, including both sides of the controversy, and more importantly what it doesn't say.

Those Hot Latin Lovers

This apartment building is about two blocks from where Heitor and I lived before moving to where we are now. We got our first cat, Malu, from a lady who lives in the building.

A Safer Place

I suppose everyone else has already seen this since the story is already a year old, but it´s new to me.

According to Der Spiegel, police in Germany fired 85 bullets against people in all of 2011, and 49 of those were warning shots. A total of 6 people were killed by police bullets.

In the same year, police in NYC fired 84 bullets at one suspect and police in LA fired 90 times at an unarmed fleeing suspect.

It's a Public Health Issue

From 1920 through 1989, an average of 21.7 people died in U.S. traffic accidents per 100,000 of population.

From 1990 through the first 9 months of 2012, the average was 15.9.

Since 2000, the number is 13.4. For the last three years (counting the partial year 2012), the number has remained below 11.

This decline has been the result of a number of factors, but the overarching reason that encompasses all of them is that the nation began looking at traffic fatalities as a serious public health issue that needed to be addressed.

Part of the improved safety record resulted from technological improvements, safer cars, some mandated and some not. I'm not a car enthusiast, but off the top of my head, I can think of seat belts, air bags, strategic reinforcements of the car so as to reduce the effects of various types of collisions, and no doubt many more important design improvements I know nothing about.

Another part of the effort involved successful educational efforts that brought about behavioral changes in the population. Anyone my age remembers people who refused to let the government tell them they had to wear seat belts, by gawd. These people didn't want to know anything about statistics; they had their opinion. But they came around, or died off. As evidence that automobile and driver safety was considered a public health issue, people my generation will remember when doctors began asking if you used your seat belt.

Another important result of the educational efforts has been a seismic change in the national attitude toward drinking and driving, much of it due to the educational work of MADD.

The decline in smoking in the U.S. has perhaps been less dramatic, perhaps not. Smoking rates in the U.S. are about half of what they were in the mid-1960s, and I don't know what the current data shows, but the last I saw, the rate of teens taking up smoking was decreasing. Not much of this improvement can be said to result from technological changes, government-mandated or otherwise, although there may have been some mandates regarding the levels of tar and nicotine. Mostly it has resulted from government-enforced behavioral changes (limiting smoking in public places) and educational efforts. Once again, as with seat belts, behavioral changes that result from government mandates don't come without some resistance. We all knew people who thought their god-given right to smoke superseded everyone else's right to breathe smoke-free air. Perhaps there are a few of them still around, but they're rare these days.

The current elephant in the room as regards public health issue, is gun violence. A friend, in a recent blog post, cited Justice Department data which shows that gun violence and the number of gun-related homicides has actually gone down in the last 20 years, even though, if you are murdered, odds are it will be by someone using a gun. While that reduction may surprise many people, what should alarm us is that we have no idea why it has happened.

Part of the answer may involve the aging of the population. Another part probably relates to policing procedures which have contributed to a decrease in crime overall, and not just violent crime. A recent New Yorker article that I'm not going to hunt for at the moment looked at the reduction in crime in New York City since the 1980s. One of the biggest factors identified was the police application of the broken-window theory.

But the point is that we don't have any idea why gun violence is down over the last two decades beyond the fact that it mirrors a general decrease in crime. The CDC began treating gun violence as a public health issue sometime in the 1980s, at least to the point of collecting research data. In the mid 1990s, the NRA used its political leverage to see to it that the CDC's budget was cut by exactly the amount of money it was spending on gun violence research.

Apparently for the following few years, some private foundations stepped up to fill the funding gap, but that has almost all fallen away. One of the principle researchers in the field now discourages his graduate students from doing gun research, because it is a dead end that will only lead to frustrations.

One supreme irony, or example of chutzpah, is that when anyone cites research findings from the time when the CDC was still involved, the gun lobby routinely dismisses it derisively as “old data” and, therefore, worthless. (Or to use one of my favorite Archie Bunker-isms, ipso fatso worthless.)

I'm just thankful the founding fathers didn't write cars and tobacco into the Bill of Rights.

A Bipartisan Disaster

The measure of a civilization is how it treats its: (animals), (prisoners), (weakest members).

There are any number of variations on this/these quotations and none of them are attributable. Probably they all have their origin in the bible. Google Search says Matthew 25:41-46. (Where was that damned family bible when I needed it?)

At first blush, it might seem that Americans are at least doing pretty well by animals, but then one remembers that there is a lot more to the animal world than the Fido and Fluffy who we take to be groomed once a month. We prefer not to think about where our food comes from and the conditions under which it is raised, and we definitely don't want to know what goes on at the city pound.

It is not an unnatural transition from the pound to our prison system...or, in our god-blessed federal system, our 51 state and federal prison systems. Whenever I've allowed the reality of the new supermax prisons to percolate up into my consciousness, I have been appalled by the concept. But generally I've managed to avoid thinking about them. They worked their way back up into my awareness with the new discussions about closing Guantanamo. If it were closed tomorrow, it is certain that a number of the detainees (what a sanitary word) there would be transferred to one of the supermax sites.

No less a bleeding heart liberal than George Will recognizes:

...tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

 America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Now, in the May 4 issue of Mother Jones there is a long story by Shane Bauer, a journalist who along with two friends was hiking on the Irani / Iraqi border in 2009 when they were all arrested and imprisoned in Iran, where Bauer spent 26 months in prison, 4 of them in solitary confinement. The story is entitled "I Thought Solitary Confinement in Iran Was Bad -- Then I Went Inside America's Prisons." Now there is a comparison to make us all proud.

It is a long article and an appalling story that outlines, among other things, the inherent racism of the system, the unlimited power of prison officials and the joke of prisoners thinking they still have constitutional rights. It also addresses the increasing body of research that shows the negative, personality-destroying effects of solitary confinement for even relatively short periods.

Will writes of "protracted" solitary confinement, but that word doesn't do justice to what thousands of prisoners are undergoing: solitary confinement for 10, 20 and even 40 years in one Louisiana case.  An even worse aspect of this sorry story is that many, if not most, of the people in solitary are there on an indeterminate basis with no end date in sight. Only seventeen states told Bauer that they do not put people in solitary indeterminately.

If you can't get upset at the abuse of human beings, how about at the Orwellian misuse of the English language? According to Bauer, no state officially uses the term "solitary." Instead they have "single-celled segregation." And the official name of the California prison system is still the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation."

Employee Rights

Here is a little news story that probably didn't get much notice. To steal someone else's phrase, employees have rights, but not the right to know they have rights.

In 2011, the National Labor Relations Board issued a rule that employers had to post an informational notice in the workplace declaring essentially that workers have the right to join together to seek better pay and working conditions, with or without a union, that it is illegal to punish workers for trying to form a union, and that it is also illegal for unions to coerce employees to support a union. The notice also declares that, in unionized workplaces, the law requires both sides to bargain in good faith.

The good old dependable U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups filed a suit in federal court to prohibit implementation of this NLRB rule, and yesterday the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia ruled in their favor, saying that the NLRB requirement to post this information violated the employers' rights of free speech!! As someone else wrote, let's hope business groups don't take a dislike to clearly marked Exit signs.

The appeals court in DC is the court that has had four vacancies, and senate republicans are refusing to let any of Obama's nominees come up for a vote.  In fact, instead of acting on the nominees, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have announced their intention to introduce legislation that would reduce the number of seats on the DC appeals court from 11 to 8. Proposing an even number of judges is an indication of how bright they are.

Bringing Out the Best

Perhaps I am just a negative person. I do try, when I remember, to "always look on the bwight side of life," sometimes even mentally singing that Monty Python song, but still I think I would describe my world view as "cautiously pessimistic."

At any rate, I am feeling very much the contrarian recently. After pondering the matter for a few days, I think what I react negatively to is jingoistic optimism. You know the proclamations in the print and broadcast media about how disasters like 9/11 or the Boston bombing, although I am loathe to equate them, bring out "the best" in people. And, of course, they absolutely do to a certain extent. But they also bring out all of our crazy cousins we'd like to keep in the closet. The activities of the first group are reported and a national goodness is generalized from them. The activities of the second are reported as aberrations.

After 9/11 people all  over the country forgot their long-held antipathies; in solidarity, everyone was a New Yorker. People from all over the country flocked to NYC to contribute whatever assistance they could. Similarly, after the Boston bombings, we read of runners who, instead of stopping at the finish line, continued  on for another two miles to the closest hospital in order to give blood. And Facebook patrons all over the country kept Boston "in our prayers," for crissakes.

On the flip side, within hours of 9/11 strangers whose only fault was that they looked different were assaulted all around the country, even if they were Hindus or Sikhs who were second generation Americans. More importantly, the sense of community, that "we are all New Yorkers," had a really short shelf life. Witness the legislative difficulties a couple of years ago in getting governmental assistance to the first responders who are now suffering life-threatening illnesses, if they haven't already died, that are almost certainly related to the atmosphere that existed at ground zero during those first hours and days.

There is a story in the NY Times about the fact that the dead brother from the Boston bombings hasn't been buried yet because the family can't find a cemetery to accept his body. The funeral home that has the body is being picketed by people with signs such as “Bury this terrorist on US soil and we will unbury him.”

My point is this: the laudable and the detestable are both part of the national character. To pretend that one is more definitive of who we are than the other is phony.

And don't get me started on how much you love Christmas because it brings out the best in people. I'm prepared to match your evidence item by item.

Half the Sky

Just finished the book Half the Sky that I posted a quote from earlier.  The book is not about statistics, but I will cite a few.

As many infant girls die unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen.

In India, a "bride burning"--to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry--takes place approximately every two hours.

All told, girls in India from one to five years of age are 50% more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.

But, to repeat, the book in not just a repetition of mind-numbing statistics. It is a fascinating series of vignettes about women and girls around the world that the authors have encountered in their travels in Africa and Asia. Aside from the topics hinted at above, the authors look at sex slavery, genital mutilation, maternal health, economic deprivation and other topics. Most of the stories are about successes, but not all.

One reason the authors have structured the book as they have is because there is evidence that it works. In an experiment, people were asked to donate to a fund to fight cancer.

One group was told that the money would be used to save the life of one child, while another group was told it would save the lives of eight children. People contributed almost twice as much to save the life of one child as to save eight. Social psychologists argue that....this reflects the way our consciences and ethical systems are based on individual stories and are distinct from the parts of our brains concerned with logic and rationality. Indeed, when subjects in experiments are first asked to solve math problems, thus putting in play the parts of the brain that govern logic, afterward they are less generous to the needy.

I almost dare you to read this book and not decide to get involved in some small way. Kristof and WuDunn may be bleeding heart liberals, but they are not naive. They talk in the book about the kinds of aid that achieve results and those which don't; they approach the question with the open minds of scientists. And they end the book with a list of organizations that they feel comfortable recommending. And there are not many people whom I've never met that I trust as implicitly as I do Nicholas Kristof.

Jeez, Can We Not Lose Our Heads Here?

I didn't believe it when I first heard it, but I guess it's true. The Justice Department has charged the surviving brother in the Boston bombing with use of a weapon of mass destruction.

If his pressure cooker bomb was a weapon of mass destruction, then George W. Bush was right, and we found plenty of WMD in Iraq!

In fact the Justice Department has filed two charges against this guy: "use of a weapon of mass destruction" and "malicious destruction of property resulting in death."  If you think about it, those two charges are really a ridiculous pairing. If one were really guilty of charge number one, would it be necessary to even consider charge number two?

This Is What Happens When We Quit Teaching Civics

Do you know that 65% of Americans think they have a constitutional right to own a gun as a protection against government tyranny?  Among those who have a gun in their family, the number goes up to 72%.

Even someone as supposedly mainstream as a U.S. Senator believes this to be true. Earlier this year, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said "The 2nd Amendment wasn't written so you can go hunting. It was to create a force to balance a tyrannical force here," by which I guess he meant Washington D.C.

Could anything be more absurd? First, we have a Supreme Court which chooses to jettison the "well-regulated militia" phrase from the 2nd Amendment. Now we have an apparent majority of people who think they have a constitutional right of rebellion against the same government created by that constitution. That was tried once; it was called the Civil War. Don't forget, that was a war against governmental tyranny too. Just sayin'.