Crimes in Virginia bars drops in the wake of liberalizing concealed carry in restaurants, says the Richmond Times-Dispatch. How many times does this have to happen before our opponents concede their ridiculous hysteria over this, and other concealed carry related topics is completely overblown? But they won’t. It would destroy their fragile world view, where law-abiding people with guns is a great danger. No, they will take the single case mentioned here:
One of the few unambiguous cases of a concealed-gun permit holder breaking the law occurred on July 28, 2010 — 27 days after the law became active — at a deli in York County. In that case, a patron who had been drinking heavily with a gun concealed in his pocket allegedly sexually harassed a female waitress and, at one point, placed his hand over his hidden gun so the waitress could see its outline.
After making a comment the waitress construed as a threat, the man left but was stopped a short time later by police. They recovered a .380-caliber pistol from his pants pocket and charged him with driving under the influence, brandishing a firearm and carrying a concealed weapon.
To which they’ll respond: “See, we told you!” They’ve turned into hucksters; people peddling random news stories as proof there’s an aggregate problem, no matter what the actual statistics seem to bear out. The truth is, if the media is covering it, that suggests it’s not a common occurrence to begin with. They will keep up the chicken little routine, and keep being proven wrong again, again, and again. They will keep trying to make those of us who are responsible people responsible for the actions of the irresponsible. This is who they are.
A commenter notes that with no market for scrap fiber, it might be another justification for AT&T to finally bite the bullet and invest in fiber to the home. I occasionally like to plug the keywords “electrocution” and “copper” into Google News to see if copper thieves have gotten any smarter about also trying to steal live electrical wire. The answer has continually been no.
That’s pretty funny. I had a co-worker from the former Soviet Union, who noted after the collapse of the Soviet government, it wasn’t uncommon for whole areas to wake up to no phone or electricity, because someone had come in the middle of the night and stolen all the copper wire to the neighborhood. Glad to see Obama is bringing us all the same joys of societal decay.
Kevin Baker helps clear up a number of misconceptions, and it gets to something I’ve been talking about with Bitter as the riots raged on. Britons do not have access to handguns and semi-automatic firearms, but they do have access, and not terribly difficult access, to shotguns. I would not feel badly armed with a traditional English side-by-side and plenty of buckshot, even in a riot. The problem isn’t that British society has been disarmed by some evil, malevolent force; it chose to disarm itself, and that is the greater problem. You could bring the very same self-defense laws for England and Wales here to the Untied States, and not much would change; juries are still going to acquit people who defend themselves, no matter what the law says.
I’ve been interested to see whether this causes any kind of sea change in British attitudes toward self-defense and weapons generally. I don’t expect the British to ever have the same type of outlook toward this subject as Americans, but a key thing to watch is whether the police are inundated with applications for shotgun certificates and  firearms certificates. If that’s the case, that will be good evidence that these riots were a wake-up call to the British people, and attitudes may be changing.
The Battle Swarm Blog recently asked Clayton Cramer to respond to Prof. Adam Winkler’s article “The Secret History of Guns,” and got a response. I recommend reading both. Professor Winkler is not a person I’d classify as part of our movement, but he’s made some useful contributions to the debate. I’d classify him as a moderate. Clayton Cramer has been citied in a number of Second Amendment cases, including Heller, McDonald, and Ezell.
It seems to me that Senate President Joe Scarnati really shouldn’t bother putting an R after his name. I’m no self-proclaimed party purist, but generally members of the GOP fall into at least one of a couple of groups – those who support free markets or those who are socially conservative. Sometimes it’s a mix of both, but usually you find the overwhelming majority of Republicans fall into at least one of those categories.
So I’m really confused by Scarnati’s opposition to privatizing the PLCB, our wine monopoly overlords who like to overcharge and give us shitty selection. His concerns, as far as I’ve seen, really seem to be rooted in the fact that his district is rural and would have even less of a selection than they do now – so the rest of Pennsylvania’s 12.7 million citizens must suffer to make his district happy.
So really, he wants to keep the system so that taxpayers can subsidize his the alcohol consumption of his family & neighbors. That seems to go against both the free market & social conservative ideas that are common in the GOP.
David S. Fallis, Cheryl W. Thompson, James Grimaldi and Horwitz. Leen said that he and the reporters who wrote the Southwest border part of that series, Grimaldi and Horwitz, never heard of, or had even an inkling of, the top-secret Fast and Furious effort until indictments in the case were announced in late January in Phoenix by U.S. attorneys and the ATF.
It’s funny, I had heard about it by then, and had been hearing about it for several weeks when that expose came out. Here’s a handy timeline of how this story came about. The fact is, the Posts’ reporting on Fast and Furious has been abysmal, they should be ashamed, and it’s never been more obvious to me they are in the tank for the Administration. The fact that they feel they need to respond to critics is probably the best indication of all that we have a point.
That seems rather insane for the mayor of a city that sucks down electricity like it’s going out of style. Gotham consumes about 50 million megawatt-hours of electricity per year. However, if you dive deeper into the facts surrounding electricity and New York, you’ll find out why Bloomberg, being the class A asshole that he is, feels he can lecture the rest of the country on energy. The facts make it easy for Bloomberg to bad mouth coal, but it displays a profound lack of understanding on his part on the energy mix in various parts of the country, and why things are that way.
First, it helps to understand a bit about electricity, how it’s generated, and how it’s transmitted. If there’s one thing that’s universally true about the hippy subspecies belief system, is that if you protest and believe hard enough, we can derive all our power from one hundred percent green unicorn farts. The truth is a bit more complicated. In an electrical distribution system, supply must always equal demand. When supply does not always equal demand Very Bad ThingsTM happen. In order to make sure this is the case, engineers conceptually divide power generation between base power, and peaking power. Â Base power is roughly the power required when demand is relatively normal. It’s usually generated either by large coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric power plants, depending on what part of the country you’re in. These plants tend to be quite large and efficient, as they will usually operate at, or very close to their overall capacity. When electricity demand exceeds the power demand that can be supplied by base generation, power companies start firing up peaking stations. These are generally smaller, less efficient plants that are powered by petroleum, or more often these days, natural gas. Peaking stations tend to be located much closer to communities that are actually consuming the power being generated.
So where does solar and wind, the favorite source of power for hippies, fit in? Well, it can provide power when it’s available. It can help carry the load of the overall system when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, but because it can’t provide reliable power, it’s utterly useless as a means of providing either base power or peaking power. It can only act as a supplement to the existing power system, and not as a replacement. It can’t even be a significant percentage of power, due to the unreliability of it. The hippy vision, when applied to reality, is an electricity system when you have it available sometimes. We have no way of storing the kind of power a city like New York demands for times when wind and sun aren’t in a mood to give us power. The only remedy in that case is shutting electric consumers off until demand equals supply.
Due to where New York City is located, and due to the fact that New York generates enough wealth to afford sky high electric utility rates, it depends very little on coal as a source of power. Compared to about half for the rest of the country, New York generates less than one fifth its power from coal based plants. New York State also generates far more base power with natural gas than many other energy markets, thanks largely to all of those fracking gas fields in Pennsylvania and Western New York.
But this is largely luck. Hydroelectric power isn’t available in every market. Nuclear power plants are horrendously expensive, and can only be located near significant sources of cooling water. Natural gas is not plentiful and cheap in every energy market. In contrast, coal can be shipped in huge quantities by rail, and used just about anywhere. For parts of the country that are not lucky enough to be located near large pockets of natural gas, near hydroelectric dams, or near major oil pipelines, the only viable alternative to coal is nuclear power, and the greens hate that too. Not to mention that it’s really expensive to build nuclear plants. I’d like to see if folks in Albuquerque, New Mexico would feel OK paying New York and Chicago prices for their electricity.
There is no alternative universe where electricity plants that run off green unicorn farts can provide our energy needs. Demagogues like Bloomberg do not understand the practicalities of electric generation and distribution. He does not understand his city’s power mix is largely an accident of geology. All he knows is his city only uses about 15% coal, so everyone else should too. The message from Main Street USA should be to tell Mayor Bloomberg to go back to New York City, and stop lecturing the rest of country on topics he knows nothing about, and are none of his damned business anyway.
I have a different take from Bitter over the food police story. I’m generally pretty understanding of the nanny state taken way too far, especially when it comes to small businesses having to comply. But when you’re in the dairy business, and your complaint is a pasteurizer is really expensive, and you think you shouldn’t have to buy one, my sympathy drops off considerably.
To me this isn’t that different than the people who like raw milk, and the controversy surrounding its distribution. Many libertarians believe this is an example of government overreach. I agree it’s an example of federal overreach. If farmer John is quietly selling the unpasteurized teat squeezings from Bessy the Cow out the back of the barn to some local raw milkers, I’m not sure why the USDA or FDA needs to poke their noses in; it’s a job for state and local health authorities. But in the case of this “artisan” ice cream maker, we’re dealing with state public health regulators.
And this is actual public health, not the fake public health that gets authorities involved in gun control and health insurance. Pasteurization is meant to stop communicable diseases, like typhoid and listeria. There’s a reason pretty much everyone knows who Louis Pasteur is, because pasteurization was one of the great public health achievements of modern times. I think people who want to abandon that principle are, to put it mildly, nuts.
That’s said, there has to be some sphere of freedom for people selling food. I don’t want to see public health authorities cracking down on bake sales, flea markets, church pot lucks, and the like. Much like how home brewing is regulated, there ought to be a certain scale that needs to be reached before the man takes notice. Because these measures a bit like vaccination, in that you can have a small group of people free ride on the immunity of others, a small scale operation isn’t likely to have much of an impact on public health. So if you’re making a product and selling small quantities at your stand at a farmers’ market, or in your store, great. When you’re selling your product at Whole Foods, it’s time to accept you’re in the big time and buy a friggin pasteurizer.
Based on the tone of this article, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel sorry for those engaged in “Chicago’s rich and beloved artisanal ice cream scene.” Instead, I’m rolling my eyes and telling them to cry my a freakin’ river. Sympathy is the last thing these folks get from me in this case.
Apparently, the darling of this “artisanal ice cream scene” is in trouble with authorities for operating without the correct licenses and distributing her products to supermarkets without following basic food safety guidelines set by the state. Instead of thanking her lucky stars they don’t appear to be going after her with massive fines for said operations, she’s crying to the media that she shouldn’t have to follow these food safety regulations that also apply to “massive creameries,” aka her competition.
She laments that she is being asked to test for bacteria, use a pasteurizer, meet state mandates for labeling of what’s in her food products, and get the licenses that all businesses in her field are required to have. The article leans toward demanding an exemption for small makers who are selling the same way those evil “massive creameries” sell. Except what happens when people end up sick from this artisanal ice cream? Will the people who demand more regulations when it happens be willing to turn a blind eye because it’s a small producer who willing ignored the law?
The story does raise some reasonable issues that most people can sympathize with, like the fact that you can’t possibly wash a strawberry enough to bring it in line with bacteria tests without seriously degrading it. But the maker only wants the exemption for herself so she can use “fresh organic cream blended with local and often organic produce like basil and strawberries she picks herself.” She doesn’t raise the fact that maybe it’s a problem when no ice cream maker can use strawberries that any sane person would consider “clean” enough to eat.
In an ideal world that embraces the compromise of real world politics, she would be free to continue to sell her products however she sees fit to make them as long as there is some kind of label that clearly states she isn’t honoring state food safety guidelines. Until that ideal world happens, I say good for the regulators for making a damn fine point: “Indeed, IDPH confirmed that these small operations are governed by the very same rules that apply to billion dollar ice cream companies.”
If changes to the regulations apply to one, they should apply to all. (via Ian Argent)
So says the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The insurance industry was only too happy to collude with the Democrats to turn health care delivery into a government operated cartel, provided everyone was forced to buy their wildly expensive product. Now that it’s appearing more likely that could very well be off the table, I’m going to bet the health insurers lobby up to get Obamacare repealed right quick once he leaves office.
