February 2005 Archives

Watching CNN recently - was it last weekend? - I saw a sublimely ridiculous segment on the dangers of a commercially available .50 cal rifle. The reporter noted that the gun is illegal in California but that one could buy the gun from a private seller without even going through a background check. So this reporter gets online and finds a site featuring classified ads for firearms, and finds someone in Houston selling the gun. He flies to Houston, buys the gun with cash, and flies back home with it.

He then takes it to a firing range, camera in tow, and proceeds to demonstrate how dangerous the gun is by shooting it at a salvaged airliner emergency exit door. Of course, the bullet passes cleanly through the door, as I imagine just about any rifle bullet would. Then he places a steel plate behind the door, and a round punctures both. Read here for a more detailed look at the segment.

All this is to suggest that terrorists could purchase the .50 cal rifle, plant themselves at the end of a runway, and take out an airliner on approach. Even a novice shooter like me knows what bunk that is. The reporter remarks on the weight of the rifle as he hefts in on camera. It's a bolt action gun, and the ammunition is rather large. I can't imagine that a shooter could get many rounds off as an jet passes close overhead, and trying to hit a fast moving target with that thing would be pretty tough. You would have to have a pivot mount of some kind, probably on the back of a truck, to have much chance of hitting an aircraft. The shooter in that situation would be easy to spot.

Not to mention that even if you hit the airplane, you wouldn't likely do any serious damage. A jetliner can withstand a small puncture fairly easily, especially at low altitude. All this adds up to this weapon being a very unlikely choice for a terrorist, at least for attempting to down an airliner. The CNN piece was designed to scare gullible people, and it had me rolling my eyes as I watched.

What has happened since then has been a joy to watch. If you read the gun blogs you know what I'm talking about. It seems that CNN and its reporter violated one or more federal gun control laws - felonies - as they made the story. The feds have been notified. Normally I'd rather not see a person be prosecuted for violating one of the set of labarynthine federal gun laws. It's too easy for a gun purchaser or seller to commit a felony without even realizing it, and without any criminal intent. It looks like the folks at CNN may be realizing this now.

But they have generally been in favor of more gun control, and this story is one example of the bias they will inject into their reporting in order to advance an anti-gun agenda. So if they get in serious trouble via laws that they support, well, that really is justice.

Will Wilkinson on American 'liberals:'

"The American Society for the Preservation of Historic Welfare Programs."

Longtime Denver Libertarian activist David Aitken has started a blog. Good move.

Radley Balko is reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and quotes Phillis Schlafly today saying some outrageous things, including,

"The majority of people getting a degree at the University of Texas are illegal aliens."

That's so stupid that I can believe she misspoke, was misquoted, or is too roaring drunk to know what she was saying.

Radley writes, "I'm almost certain most of her [speech] is outright bullshit, but I don't have time to research it at the moment."

I have the a spare two minutes, so I found ethnicity statistics for the student body at UT.

2003-2004 school year by percentage.

White 60.6
American Indian 0.4
African American 3.6
Asian American 17.0
Hispanic 14.3
Foreign 3.5

So over 60% of the students are white. So unless she's talking about some mass illegal immigration from the Ukraine then it's safe to assume she's off her rocker. I suspect her other statements are similarly easy to debunk but my two minutes are up.

The indispensable Pete Guither reports from the Illinois Legislature on the debate over a medical marijuana bill being considered there.

It's astonishing how the anti-drug advocates repeatedly resort to misinformation when arguing their side. Federal Drug Czar John Walters makes an appearance - money quote - He then said he was not here to "improperly influence legislation."

Also, check out this profile of medical marijuana user Irvin Rosenfeld, who's been using for twenty-plus years.

Irv's a real dynamo. He's a successful stockbroker working in a fast-paced industry while smoking marijuana every day. He's an outstanding public speaker, and the entire room is drawn to him. He's a terrific asset to the medical marijuana movement -- not only as a good speaker, but because in the end, when the drug warriors claim that medical marijuana is dangerous, Irv stands in front of them proudly and strongly and demands:

"Explain me!"

I just heard the news - Babe Lind died on Monday. He was a friend and mentor of mine.

David Kopel, The Klan's Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South

In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, "took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood."

The same dynamic existed throughout the South. Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods.

RTWT.

Where is Glenn Reynold's hand?

To skip out of work for a while today. The US opens World Cup final round qualifying with a game against Trinidad and Tobago. Yes, both of them, wiseguy.

ESPN2, 12:30 Mountain.

Update Strong US showing on the road. Casey Keller comes up big, but the team looks tired and gives up a late goal. A few tense moments at the end but the US wins 2-1.

Government designations aside, would you consider Superbowl Sunday to be a holiday? My impression of most native US citizens is that if they work on Sundays, they would like to have this day off to relax and watch the game. Many do take the day off.

I would say yes, and note that we certainly don't need anyone to create holidays for us. They will develop naturally on their own.

Whereupon I attempt to write something coherent using the parameters described here.

Russell Roberts points out the obvious - preserving Social Security is a conservative policy. Not to mention, why would you want to?

Iran's Ayatolla Ali Khamenei still wants Salman Rushdie dead.

Oliver Willis says all the black people supporting Bush are paid for.

According to Linda Seebach, the National Conference of Editorial Writers are asking these questions of their members:

How do you screen columnists and editorial cartoonists?
Do you have an ethics policy?
What policy do you follow if contracted columnists/cartoonists violate standard journalism ethics (regardless of where you have an individual ethics policy)?
Do you have a fact-checking process for columnists? How does it work?
When editorial writers or editors find a factual error in a column or cartoon, what effective means can be used to communicate that error and have a correction made?

Since Linda is on the editorial board of one of our local papers I wonder what their answers will be?

Via Instapundit.

A few days ago I made some throw-away remarks about Ward Churchill, the Colorado University professor of questionable character.

Well, I thought the post was unimportant, but Google disagreed. I've seen almost five thousand readers here to read on the subject as of this hour. And boy, did they leave comments. Not the usual thoughtful comments I read here, no. Mostly vitriol and bigotry. So I thought I should respond in the comments there, and reproduce it here.

I've seen quite a collection of questionable logic in this series of posts. My original post about Prof. Churchill was brief, as the error of his statement is obvious to anyone with a smidgen of ethical sense. But since we've seen a number of similarly misguided souls spouting ignorance on this page I think I'll set about to state the obvious, and here it is:

Each individual in those towers is responsible for his or her own actions. None of them bombed anyone, none of them are murderers. If you want to argue otherwise you'd better have extensive and persuasive documentation of specific crimes. NY being a Democratic stronghold, many or most of them would have voted for anti-war candidates had they survived 9-11. You may believe this country has perpetrated atrocities around the world, but slaughtering thousands in the WTC is a depraved and indefensible act. Churchill went ahead and defended the act anyway. And no, he wasn't taken out of context. His writings have been quoted at length both here and elsewhere.

Furthermore, (and this next bit is sure to grate on the commenters here) most of the businesses in the WTC were financial. Churchill thinks this makes the victims especially culpable, but the last decade or so of more liberal global trade policy has increased wealth in nations around the world. WTC workers were part of this process. The truth is exactly opposite of what Churchill argues.

I will also assert that Americans are people of general good will toward other countries. We'd like to see prosperity and peace around the globe. This is true of most of our political leaders as well. They have made errors in judgement - some of them egregious and disastrous - but both Republicans and Democrats are usually looking for positive outcomes from foreign policy decisions, and if you don't understand that you really don't understand this country. This isn't to say there aren't criminals and evil people here, and as a libertarian, I think even our well intentioned policies are usually stupid and counterproductive.

Ward Churchill doesn't understand any of that, nor do many of these commenters.

Laurent Garnier:

I am very sorry to have to cancel my forthcoming tour in the United States. I have decided to cancel further to what I consider to be completely unreasonable demands from the US Embassy in France in order to renew my working visa.

In order to obtain this new visa, the rules have once again changed since November 2004 and I would now have to not only fill in an exceedingly probing application form, but also be interviewed by a member of the Embassy staff, and provide proof of ownership of my house, details of my bank account, my mobile phone records, personal information on all my family members and more. I consider these demands to be a complete violation of my privacy and my civil liberties and I refuse to comply.

I am horrified by these new regulations and feel really sad that this is what some call freedom and democracy.

It has now become almost impossible for an artist to come and perform in the United States. And until this new legislation changes I will unfortunately refuse to comply with this nonsense.

Thank you for your understanding.

Laurent Garnier

Well sure, Laurent is French, but still...

h/t Boing Boing.

Today is Ayn Rand's 100th. Bryan Caplan promises

So tune in to my next three posts and see if I can't give you a good reason to raise your glass to a precocious, wide-eyed girl born in Czarist Russia a hundred years ago today.

My biggest beef with Rand and her later adherents is the association with libertarianism -although Rand distanced herself from the term. Randians faults become libertarianism's faults in the minds of some critics.

Check back here later.

Sometimes it's just nice to see it on a graph. It seems obvious, as we know that government doesn't produce efficiently, so the smaller government is the better the economy works.

When the economy produces more wealth, well, that's a good thing, no? Less poverty and associated misery? As Patri Friedman writes, "... our mission should not be to argue the left away from their ends, but educate them away from their means."