Xlrq notes that North Carolaina’s laws against fornication and adultery favor gay sex. This is a pretty amusing chapter in the law of unintended consequences.
Month: August 2010
Quote of the Day
From Wretchard, founder of the Belmont Club:
All of us should know when we’re getting in over their heads. Really bright people know their limitations. Truly stupid people cannot imagine they have any because they surround themselves with courtiers, hangers-on, hacks, yes-men, PR consultants, clowns, carny barkers and jesters. Nothing is new in this. The Divine King was the “best and the brightest†concept of 250 years ago and was a crock even then. It’s so old it seems new.
I think this might touch on the root of a problem we’ve seen in Government, for sure, but that I’ve also seen much of in industry. I think it may be that these kinds of financial crisises create wonderful opportunity for titanic realignment. Last time, that didn’t work out too well for us. This time might very well be different. Maybe the new lesson is we don’t need a self-appointed elite quite so much as we thought.
Another Astroturfing Effort
Thirdpower notices another anti-gun group web site masquerading as an ordinary Joe. I think I noticed this one before too, but as usual, they engage in Reasoned Discourse by not allowing comments.
There is No Answer
The Inquirer is running an article on how difficult it is to spot workplace shooters, because 99.99% of people will never become workplace shooters. It’s actually not a bad article, and even acknowledges that there are legit reasons an employee might have a firearm in their vehicle, noting “Spotting a weapon in a company parking lot might not tell you much. There are many parts of the country, including Pennsylvania, where it is common for workers to stash a rifle in a pickup truck for deer hunting.” I’m glad workplace consultants are recognizing this.
The fact is, if someone is so unbalanced that they are willing to commit murder, there is no HR policy that’s going to make people safe.
Gun and Garden Denying NRA Ads?
I have no patience for people who enjoy rights that they leave to others to defend and promote, and this would seem to be the demographic “Gun and Garden” magazine is aiming for. I have no issue with the magazine not accepting political ads, but NRA does more than just politics. When I contacted someone at NRA to inquire about the nature of the ad, I was told it was an “NRA Give” ad, which solicits funds for the Foundation. The NRA Foundation funds educational and shooting sport programs and not political activity. For a gun magazine, even a lifestyle magazine, this should not be controversial. There are more ways to contribute to this issue than just politics, and it’s appalling to me that Gun and Garden doesn’t seem to want to give the time to day to those efforts either.
Gun Owners Challenge Lentz
Lentz was pushing his bill in Upper Darby, but ran into a good bit of opposition from gun owners.
In her testimony, Lt. Lisa King, commander of the Philadelphia Police gun-permit unit, said that there is no way to tell if those 3,100 have been denied a permit in Pennsylvania because Florida will not provide police with their names.
“I fundamentally have a problem, that Pennsylvania allows another state to dictate who can carry a concealed-carry permit here and not tell us the names,” said state Rep. Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery. “Whether you’re in the NRA or CeaseFire PA . . . we would all be better suited having Pennsylvania laws govern [here].”
So is Shapiro really coming out against reciprocity here? Because I can’t think of anything that’s going to piss us off more than that. I am one of the 3100 people, and I also have a PA LTC. I suspect that’s the case with the vast majority of this small number of people. As I said previously, if Philadelphia wants to have us push to remove all of its discretion in LTC issuance, it can feel free to push the Lentz bill. Otherwise we’re going to make the criteria completely objective, so that we can be sure that there is no room for the city to deny or revoke permits based on bogus criteria.
I am very glad Florida won’t turn over the names. I can guarantee they’ll appear in the Inquirer or Daily News if that happens. PA LTC’s are private, and there’s no reason to expect less from the State of Florida.
Congratulations Australia
After reading more than a few media sources in Australia use the term, I would like to congratulate our shooting friends down under for officially becoming a “gun lobby.” Welcome to the club. This means you’re getting somewhere. When they use terms like “powerful gun lobby” it means you’re really getting somewhere.
Righthaven Ruining Lives
He was startled to find that copying ONE newspaper article meant that Righthaven was expecting from the four figure to mid five figure range for a settlement. He tried to explain that at best, he might have something in the two figure area. (Like a lot of the bloggers that Righthaven is going against, this is a person who has NOTHING.) Now this poor guy has, like some others that I have talked to, decided to allow default judgment of $75,000 and go bankrupt.
This is highly unethical, even if true copyright infringement had taken place, because the amounts sought here are way out of proportion to the actual damages. Even if a suit has no merit, it takes serious money just to get it dismissed.
Former Senator Ted Stevens Dies in Plane Crash
By now everyone’s heard about the crash. I’d thought I’d give my complete and thoroughly amateur analysis of what happened with the flight that killed former Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens. Some have expressed surprise that Senator Stevens was in a plane crash previously, in which his first wife was killed. While aircraft disasters are not common anywhere else, they are as common as car crashes are to us if you’re talking about Alaska. Airline pilot is erroneously listed as one of the most dangerous professions. Being a commercial airline pilot is not really any more dangerous than most desk jobs. The numbers are skewed by the fact that being a bush pilot in Alaska is really dangerous. The planes are small, weather is fickle, and there’s a lot of things to run into at altitudes bush pilots generally fly at. The most common cause of aircraft fatalities in Alaska is controlled flight into terrain. This is technical speak for crashing into a friggin’ mountain. It’s easy to do in Alaska. Stevens’ plane didn’t crash into a mountain by Alaska standards; it crashed into hills. The plane was operating under Visual Flight Rules, and flew into bad weather around the Muklung Hills. The pilot tried to take the DeHavilland DHC-3T to a higher altitude to avoid the hilltops, but came up short and crashed into them.
You can see from this sectional chart, showing the ultimate destination at Dillingham, AK, and the Muklung Hills, that there’s definitely not much in the way of navigational beacons in this area. Dillingham is pretty much it, and it only provides a VOR and a localizer to find the runway. It does not provide for a glideslope beacon. This would not be an airport you’d want to fly into in foul weather. To give you some idea just how bad flying in Alaska is in these kinds of conditions, I fired up X-Plane with today’s weather conditions in that area. The time is about 2:00PM locally, and flying is a challenge, to put it mildly.
And the plane I chose is easier to fly than the amphibious plane Senator Stevens was on. It has a modern navigation and avionics system, and can climb at a considerably higher rate of speed, even though it’ll get tossed around in the weather a lot. You can see flying in Alaska under these kinds of conditions is hazardous even for professional pilots who know what they are doing. Newsweek, being the classy publication that it is, tries to hint that Senator Stevens engineered his own demise by not allowing regulators to have their way with Alaskan Aviation. While I’m sure the folks at Newsweek, who know nothing of aviation, would probably love to believe that the right kind of liberal bureaucrats in Washington can, of course, make flying in Alaska perfectly safe, the fact of the matter is that Alaska is dangerous country. The state motto really ought to be changed to “Alaska: It’ll F***ing kill you!” If the seas don’t get you, the skies and mountains will, and if you live through that, you better hope the rescue folks find you before the grizzlies or polar bears do. Senator Stevens lived to be 86, and died living the way Alaskans want to live. Newsweek can go to hell.
The Attraction of Reality TV
Before the Top Shot series, neither Bitter and I were watchers of reality TV. I don’t expect that to change, despite the fact that we both enjoy the show. But I understand better now what people like about reality TV. I think people can like it for different reasons, which is probably why the genre has been so successful. On one level, people can like it because people like heros and villains. Because everyone can choose different heros and villains, it provides people with something else humans enjoy doing: gossiping. On another level, people seem to enjoy living vicariously through their favoriate characters, as they struggle through the series. The level I think Bitter and I like it on is that it’s a pretty interesting social game, and the shooting aspect of Top Shot just provides a context we can more easily relate to and understand, more so than a series like Survivor would.
The problem with social games is they tend to be a little underhanded and dirty. Politics is really the great social game, and this is certainly true about politics. This also feeds the hero/villain aspect that many people find attractive. I’ve never been able to work up the same kind of animosity towards Adam Benson that a lot of other people did. He was merely playing what he thought would be a winning strategy. It got him far, but not to the end. His nemesis Caleb was also playing what he thought would be a winning strategy as well. Nothing wrong with that, I think, if you’re serious about winning.
So why are so many shooters upset with certain aspects of Top Shot? Probably because a lot of it violates our sense of good sportsmanship, and we’re used to thinking about shooting in that context. In a shooting competition we’d think someone behaving like Adam was a poor sport, and we’d expect that it would be the most highly skilled shooters that would come out on top. But Top Shot isn’t a shooting competition, but a social game — a political game — with guns. While I’ve no doubt many shooters would prefer to watch a pure shooting show, the variety of people Top Shot is appealing to is probably better for the movement, overall, than a shooting show not many people watch. As Caleb mentioned, “he didn’t call it an assault rifle, or a military rifle, or any of the terms you see the media slipping in to demonize these weapons. What did he call it? A semi-automatic sporting rifle.” And then people see the contestants use them in the same manner as any other rifle. You can’t pay for PR that good.
UPDATE: Maybe we can hope for a reality TV show one day that’s another type of social game. One that harkens back to an older, simpler time. Top Dueler?