Fisking Huckabee on the Bath MI Disaster

A post from Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate and late Conservative rock star, is making the rounds on Facebook:

Michael Tremoglie on the Italian website, Academia Res Publica, offers some food for thought about the Sandy Hook school shooting. He writes that the worst school killing in history wasn’t committed by a disaffected teenager, didn’t involve a gun, and happened before there was violent entertainment and before God was taken out of schools. In 1927 in Bath, Michigan, a middle-aged farmer blew up a schoolhouse, then detonated a car bomb. He killed 38 kids and six adults, and nobody ever figured out why.

Tremoglie notes that the only scholarly study of mass school killings was published by an Ohio sociology professor in 2007. It found that there is no holistic approach to investigating school killings, where interdisciplinary experts examine every possible angle and share their knowledge. Instead, different groups quickly seize on the tragedy to advance whatever angle they already believe. Liberals blame lax gun control laws. Conservatives blame violent media. Mental health groups say it shows the need for more funding. And so on. The study suggested that until we start investigating these tragedies the way we do other disasters, where experts from many different fields work together to discover the truth, we may never learn what really causes them or how to prevent them from happening again.

So much of this is untrue, it's pathetic.

The bombing was the work of a "farmer." Well, EVERYONE in Bath, Michigan at the time was a "farmer." But the bomber was also the former school district treasurer, a person known for being difficult, impatient and violent. He was bitter over his loss in a recent school board election, and was also facing foreclosure, and his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He had stopped working his farm, tried to give his horses away to a neighbor. He planted the explosives months before the event, and blew his own house up.

Mike Huckabee can't figure out why Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath school building. I can't figure out why anyone should listen to Mike Huckabee about anything.

The FBI has a very clear set of profiles for mass killers. The problem isn't that we need more investigations. The problem, clearly, is that we've created a culture where there's a prevailing abhorrence of guns and gun owners, and where people are unprepared to protect themselves. We've seeded the landscape with "gun-free zones" that are nothing more than target-rich environments for potential shooters. Paradoxically, we've simultaneously conditioned a generation of disaffected young men into numbness regarding gun violence via video games and movies. And to top it off, we've created a media system that sensationalizes the relatively rare mass killing incidents while largely ignoring murder rates in poor and minority communities.

There have been 76 people killed in mass-shooting incidents within the past 10 years. There were more than 440 school-aged children killed in Chicago in the past year. I submit that if we want to do something to protect children, we would be further ahead forcibly relocating the population of the greater Chicago area than we will either by more gun control or by putting police in schools.

Thoughts on the Newtown Massacre

The "elephant in the room" in the discussion of recent mass-killing events is how existing gun regulation and cultural mores have created pockets where there are concentrated numbers of potential victims. Once a person has decided, for whatever unfathomable reason, to kill a bunch of people in a public spectacle, the obvious best places to do it are where they are most assured of not encountering armed resistance: schools, malls, theaters, or anyplace else with highly publicized bans on gun possession. These events decidedly do not occur at places where one encounters ordinary citizens with guns on their person: firing ranges, police stations, hunting clubs or gun shows. We have concentrated the most vulnerable members of our society in places where they can easily be victimized, and then systematically disarmed the people charged with protecting and defending them.

After pilots were targeted by the 9/11 terrorists, a number of airlines changed their policies to again allow pilots to carry side arms. Now we hear a cry for a police presence in schools. Well, we don't need armed guards in schools. We need to allow legitimate, responsible gun owners to carry their weapons in defense of themselves and their communities. That's what the Second Amendment is about. That's what we've spent the past 50 years systematically thwarting with gun regulations and enculturated squeamishness about gun ownership. Meanwhile, paradoxically, much of our popular culture glamorizes and cartoonifies gun violence in ways that, while not clearly causative of gun violence, certainly desensitize some of us to the horrific damage that guns can do.

20 children are dead because some decided to be evil and nobody was able to shoot back and stop him. A bitter harvest indeed.

Reflections on Retiring Politicians

If you want to know what's wrong with America, consider this: Only 1 out of 3 eligible voters bothered to vote in the last election.

Judging from the results, its pretty clear that a little over 1/6th of America thinks that the Tea Party is a racist elitist secession movement, thanks to the lies told by political hacks on MSNBC.

Meanwhile, a little less than 1/6th of America think Barack Obama is a closet-muslim communist straight out of the Manchurian Candidate who wants to radically change the social and political structure of the country, thanks to the lies told by the political hacks at FOX News.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, the guy who basically ran on a platform that the government should leave us alone and keep its hands off our stuff was able to draw only 1% of the vote.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the only person on either side of the political spectrum who had the guts to point out that the country is working with a fraudulent central banking system - and that the credit card bills from the past 25 years of military adventure expeditions are piling up for our children to pay, while the world continues to despise us despite our constant assertion that we are the good guys - just left town after been marginalized out of the political process for more than 30 years.

Meanwhile, his son is the only person in congress to stand athwart the stream of history and yell "stop" at the relentless erosion of civil liberties that the executive branch pursues in the euphemistic name of "homeland security." (Excuse me, but the Founders had a plan for "homeland security". It's called the Second Amendment.)

I don't know where people who think Gary Johnson and Ron Paul are onto something are supposed to go after the 2012 elections, but as soon as it becomes clear, we all better go there and forget about the one-party Republicrat Democan system, because as the stream of nonsense we're hearing from Barry and John and company about the "fiscal cliff" (by the way, what ever that is, we went over it a long time ago) isn't going to amount to a hill of beans when the rest of the world figures out that our money isn't worth the paper we high-speed print it on.

Obama's Foreign Policy: A Catalog of Successes

In this post, I will list all the ways that Obama administration has succeeded with respect to foreign policy.

A highly offensive post on reproductive freedom

I have little desire to argue over the morality of abortion, or the legality of laws allowing, preventing or allowing it. Nor do I wish to discuss the viability of a fetus at various stages of pregnancy, or to argue whether a developing fetus has the same rights to protection as a person would. Those, in my view are arguments that may be impossible to resolve in public discourse within a pluralistic society.

Rather, I would like to talk briefly about fatherhood.

I have, several times recently, encountered persons both male and female who attempted to advance the argument that a representative governing body consisting primarily of males has no business discussing abortion. This is an absurd contention, reflecting a lack of serious thinking about the issue. It saddens me that we as a culture have devolved so much intellectually that such a position is taken seriously.

There are few reported cases of human pregnancy that did not involve sperm cells from a human male, and all of those are suspect on empirical grounds. It is safe, therefore, to say that no human pregnancy occurs without the involvement of a male human. The idea that being male precludes me from having an opinion on abortion is as offensive as the idea that the color of a person's skin, their religious affiliation, or their country of origin should determine the extent to which the law recognizes their full rights as humans.

I have this to say to any women who argues that there is no basis for men to have a say in the regulation of abortion:

Suppose you and I agree to have sexual intercourse, and that as a result of this act, you become pregnant.

If you decide to terminate the pregnancy, because you can chose to have an abortion without my knowledge or consent, I will not become a father. I have no choice.

If you decide not to terminate your pregnancy, and you carry the child to term, under the law, I have an obligation to support the child. I can be compelled to pay, under the threat of imprisonment. I have this obligation even if it was my wish that you terminate the pregnancy before the child was born. I have no choice.

The next time you describe yourself as "pro-choice", remember that you are in fact, favoring a position that takes a choice away from another adult person.

I believe that the federal government should have no role in the decision of whether a pregnancy is carried to term. But I will never be "pro-choice" as long as the choice is only available to one half of the contributors of genetic material to a potential human being.

The Fallacy of Net Neutrality: Thomas Hazlett on the FCC & Consumer Protection

I'm tired of explaining why Net Neutrality is a bad thing to people who insist that it's a good thing. Watch this.

The Fallacy of Net Neutrality: Thomas Hazlett on the FCC & Consumer Protection

I sit here in a snowstorm. My house has been without power for 10 days because of the hurricane. i'm checking my text messages for anything from missing friends with houses closer to the surge-hit areas in Monmouth county. I'm wondering if I'll find someplace tomorrow to get enough gas to make it to work. I'm hoping and praying that the trucks I hear driving by outside are coming to fix the downed poles on my street. And I'm reading some comments on a major conservative blog on how Chris Christie's comments about Obama's help with relief efforts make him "dead" to mainstream republicans.

I am sorely vexed. 

Chris Christie didn't cost Romney the election, nor did he win the election for Obama. Chris Christie did what he always does: his job. He's the governor. Half his state looks like New Orleans after Katrina. He's putting his energy, efforts and yes, his political clout into the effort to help the people who elected him, and the people he represents. 

Chris Christie isn't dead. The Republican party is dead. Christie is just fine. The best the GOP could come up with, faced with a president so weak on fiscal policy and foreign affairs that a WET PAPER BAG (of which we currently have plenty, here in NJ) could have beaten him, was Mitt Romney. 

Seriously? The best and brightest of the GOP is a somewhat-left-of-sort-of center former governor from a liberal New England state with a track record that has more switches than Penn Station, a horrible personality deficit that he struggled mightily (and, frankly, admirably during the debates) to overcome, and - on the issues where Obama was weakest - policy positions that were largely indistinguishable from the past 12 years. He had great business experience, but he had absolutely no conservative credentials whatsoever. He certainly displayed no serious limited-government impulses beyond the again vague promise to stop government interference in business that - correctly or not - was widely perceived as code-speak for still more crony capitalism. 

Seriously? Mitt Romney essentially ran on the "I'll do things vaguely different from Barak Obama, but not touch YOUR entitlements and somehow miraculously put you back to work" platform. He made smart moves with the debates, and a brilliant VP choice (who, somehow, mysteriously vanished during the last month of the campaign, yet managed to emerge victorious in his own congressional re-election run - talk about hedging your bets!) He performed admirably in the polls. 

But Romney didn't win, because he lost states he needed to win. And he didn't lose those states because of a picture of Stan and Ollie embracing on a washed-out beach. He lost them because, yet again, the GOP has produced a candidate that is so undifferentiated that, other than indistinct promises to "repeal Obamacare" and insincere-seeming nods to a few social issues, I cannot find within my mind any clear idea of how a Romney presidency would be substantively distinguished from Obama's.

I don't know what the next four years will bring. I'm not likely to vote for the next GOP presidential candidate. But I do know this: if the future of the GOP looks like Mitt Romney, it's dead. And if there's no place for Chris Christie in that party because he did his job as governor of a state that suffered an unprecedented natural disaster, then that's a good thing, because Christie is the kind of guy who I believe will find a place in national politics, and wherever he ends up, I'm far more likely to give them my vote than I will the party of Mitt the Undistinguishable.

I don't like everything Christie does. His position on guns is horrible (It's understandable, seeing that he is both a former prosecutor and a governor of a gun-hostile blue state, but it's not excusable.) His position of drug prohibition perpetuates the government-sanctioned thuggery of professional law enforcement. But, on balance, he's a good governor, considering the recent history of that position in New Jersey. 

Facebook doesn't want you to know that the Obama campaign follows porn sites

http://twitchy.com/2012/10/06/facebook-blocks-twitchy-from-posting-for-24-hours-threatens-permanent-ban/

Dear Tim Cook

Dear Tim Cook,

Thanks for letting me know that you're going to cut my iCloud storage back by 20GB.

As you recall, Apple gave me the extra 20GB because you guys decided to cancel MobileMe right after I had renewed it (on the family plan) for $99. Instead of giving me the service I had paid for, you gave extra space in this new service. You also gave me a hellish labyrinth of confusing sync options. You also gave me an online "backup" for my iOS devices, which I apparently need because syncing an iOS device with iTunes has become so utterly baffling to me (a veteran IT careerist with 30 years experience) that I haven't had a successful sync in a year.

Most of the storage I'm using in iCloud seems to be consumed by these backups. In fact, once you downgrade me to the usual free 5GB of iCloud, I will immediately be unable to back up one of either my iPad 2 or my iPhone 4 without upgrading my storage. I have no idea what will happen to my photo stream, which is now the only way I can manage to get pictures from my phone to my desktop consistently.

Notice too that I don't have the latest and greatest devices. I've not upgraded my iOS gadgets, nor have I upgraded my 2008-vintage Macbook Pro. I have put Mountain Lion on some of my home devices, but I have at least two that are still running OS X 10.5, because they need to run old PPC programs that I can't afford to upgrade.

I'm really writing you to say that I've detected a shift in Apple. Back in 2004, when I finally switched to Mac, Apple was making high-quality products that lasted a long time, and gave me a professional edge. Upgrades were simple, straightforward, annual events that didn't leave me unable to work. I was able to multi-task; at one point, I was regularly running high-end DJ software AND a 3D virtual world client at the same time, with no ill results.

Now, OS X seems oriented toward task-switching instead of multitasking. OS Upgrades are painful, and frequently result in a number of older programs that simply won't work. My iPhone 4 is great for just about everything but being a phone. On my iPad, I could lose everything except the Kindle and Evernote apps, and not notice it.

The shift is this: Apple used to make my life easier. Now you make it harder, and you want more money.

I'm seriously considering giving up my phone entirely. I don't agree with the perception that being reachable and interruptible 24//7 is a virtue. I want a phone that's smarter about handling calls for me, not one that forces me to decide how to handle them. Here's a clue: if my phone is moving faster than 5 miles an hour, don't even let it ring. Send my calls to voicemail. I'm driving. Leave me the heck alone.

As far as my iPad goes, it's been useful primarily as an ebook reader. Innovations such as retina displays are not enough to get me to upgrade. Frankly, I'm ready to try a Kindle or a Nook; the experience seems better.

Notice that, Tim. An avid Apple fan just said that your competitors' devices are more compelling.

My laptop is reaching the point where an upgrade is in order. What are my choices? The Air is not a good platform for gaming, which is most of my non-work use of a laptop. The new Pro is way too expensive. The Macbook hasn't been upgraded. And frankly, I probably don't need a laptop all that much.

Maybe it's just the economy. Maybe I'm getting old. But things aren't the same between us, not like when Steve was in charge. I don't know how to fix it, or even if Apple cares about people like me anymore. But I thought I should write.

Nicholson's Laws

First Law: Whenever anyone says, "We must do something," they are lying. If we must do something, we are doing it. If we aren't doing it, then "must do" doesn't apply.

Second Law: The only time there is anything to eat in the house is when you are unpacking from a grocery trip. As soon as you are done unpacking, there is nothing to eat. (This also applies to beer, clean laundry, etc.)

Third Law: Ignorance of history is the root of all manner of evil.
Corollary: Humanity exists largely in a historical vacuum.

Fourth Law: All explanations of how the Internet was invented are wrong.

Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it

h/t reason.com, this via Drug War Memes

Be Very Angry About This

Graphic by www.accountingdegree.net

Why political discourse is hard

In America today, the main substantive argument between the left and the right is over where the force and authority of government should be applied to compel others to do what they want; in terms of tactics, the two sides are identical. Both sides defend their desires with presumption of their own moral superiority; then, when each runs into logic and evidence that refute their positions, they refuse to engage in real debate, because if it turns out that they are wrong, they must admit that they are also evil.

Government is neither the embodiment of all evil, or the only instrument of good. Government is a tool; a powerful, potentially dangerous tool, like a firearm. It should be used carefully and with consideration of its power, and its vast potential to do amazing things, both good and evil. It should be employed with the consent of the governed - real, informed consent, which is actually very hard to do, as opposed to the kind of manufactured consent that the political, financial, corporate and media interests use to manipulate the political process to their own ends.

Both sides fall victim of their own brand of totalitarian thinking. All serious problems require a government response, unless that response interferes with one's own desires. No one ever questions, "should the government do this?" We see this play out in all of the issues that dot the political landscape. The left vilifies the right for its alleged heartlessness with respect to the poor, because the right refuses to accept the assumption that it is the proper role of government to solve the problems of the poor. On the other hand, the right condemns the left, because the left insists that the conflict between reproductive freedom and the protection of a developing fetus be left to those directly involved, rather than dictated by government policy.

I describe myself as a libertarian. I am not a conservative, nor am I a liberal. I will at times infuriate those of you on the left, because I will side with conservatives when I believe their position is consistent with maximizing individual liberty and restraining the power of government. I will infuriate those of you on the right when I side with liberals for the same reason. And I will continue to be angered, sadden and disheartened by both sides for their respective failure to abandon their largely emotional, non-rational presumptions that theirs is the only morally defensible position. Politics has descended to name-calling and stone-throwing. That doesn't work on the Left Bank, and it isn't working in Washington, or on social networks. Both sides claim to represent the will of the people, but the truth is, neither can do more that temporarily tip the scales in their own favor for an election cycle or two.

I am terribly frightened by the parallels to early 20th century thinking that I see on both the left and the right. I do not know the answer to all the problems that this country faces, but I am committed in principle to the idea that most of our problems neither can nor should be solved at the point of a gun. Both the left and the right need to face the truth that by insisting that every disagreement between them be resolved by some government action, they are essentially saying, "I want to use guns to get my way."

I really don't like being bullied that way.