Quotulatiousness

December 22, 2012

The NRA tries fighting hysteria with even more hysteria

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Jacob Sullum on the tone-deaf response of the NRA to criticism arising from the Sandy Hook tragedy:

Not exactly the voice of calm reason. [NRA Executive Vice President Wayne] LaPierre evidently wants people to panic, as long as they stampede in the direction he prefers. Yet the fact remains that mass shootings of any kind, let alone mass shootings at schools, are rare events, and we should be cautious about making any major policy changes in an effort to reduce an already tiny risk. I don’t know what LaPierre means by “an active national database of the mentally ill,” and I’m not sure he does either. But since there is no indication that Adam Lanza was ever declared mentally incompetent or committed to a mental institution, such a database could prevent people like him from buying guns (leaving aside the fact that he used his mother’s weapons) only if the criteria for rejecting buyers are expanded to cover many people who pose no threat of violence (potentially including half the population, if a psychiatric diagnosis is all that’s required).

LaPierre wildly shoots at several other targets, including our allegedly lenient criminal justice system, which supposedly coddles “killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members”; “vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse“; and “blood-soaked slasher films like ‘American Psycho‘ and ‘Natural Born Killers‘” (which were released 12 and 18 years ago, respectively). There is some sense in there too (about the “assault weapon” bogeyman and the puzzling progessive aversion to armed self-defense), but it is drowned in the flood of foam flying off LaPierre’s lips. And while letting teachers or other staff members with concealed carry permits bring their guns to school seems like a better policy than advertising “gun-free zones” to armed lunatics, the National School Shield Emergency Response Program that LaPierre recommends, featuring “a protection plan for every school,” a potentially smothering “blanket of safety,” and congressional appropriations, including “whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school,” seems utterly disproportionate given the level of risk that children (yes, including my own) actually face when they go to school.

Last night I suggested that Piers Morgan’s televised faceoff with Larry Pratt “pretty accurately reflects the general tenor of the current gun control debate, with raw emotionalism and invective pitted against skepticism and an attempt at rational argument.” The NRA and Wayne LaPierre seem determined to prove me wrong.

December 20, 2012

“Japanese are smart. Chinese are smart. Americans are smart. Even Finns are smart. But Canadians? We tend to be plodders.”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

William Watson on a terrible psychological burden Canada has been labouring under for generations — the productivity gap — which does not actually appear to exist.

The good news just keeps pouring in. Last week we learned courtesy of a special report from TD Economics that median income in Canada had caught up with median income in the U.S. Never mind that the measure of income used was a little screwy: market income plus cash received from the government — basically all the goodies — with no accounting for taxes paid to the government. Most Canadians seemed tickled by the result anyway, as we always are when outperforming the Americans.

Now this week, just in time for Christmas, comes news that Canada’s productivity, far from having flatlined over the last 30 years, has actually been growing at a perfectly respectable pace that’s even comparable to American rates. It turns out we’re not nearly as incompetent as our official productivity numbers have been suggesting we are. We’ve just been calculating them wrong. In fact, it’s tempting to say our incompetence is mainly in the productivity section of Statistics Canada. Tempting maybe, but not fair. It’s Christmas, after all, and, besides, calculating productivity is like doing Sudoku for a living and there’s plenty of room for disagreement over what the data are saying.

[. . .]

StatCan’s estimates of our MFP have consistently suggested that as a people we aren’t at all clever. We may be lumberjacks. We may be OK. But doing more with less — or even more with the same — just hasn’t been our game. Japanese are smart. Chinese are smart. Americans are smart. Even Finns are smart. But Canadians? We tend to be plodders. Thus over the last half-century our business-sector MFP growth has averaged just 0.28% per year. By contrast, the Americans are used to rates a full percentage point higher. In 2010, they hit 3.4%! But now Diewert and Yu estimate that in fact over the last 50 years our MFP growth has averaged a perfectly respectable 1.03% per year. If you can add 1% a year to overall output without adding more and smarter people and machines to the mix — which of course you’re also allowed to do and we have been doing — your living standards will rise very nicely over time.

How can StatCan’s estimates have been so wrong? Diewert and Yu use quite different techniques at different stages of the calculation, but the main problem surrounds capital services. StatCan’s estimates of how much capital we use in production typically are much higher than Diewert and Yu’s. Partly the difference revolves around abstruse discussions about what internal rates of return to assume when trying to measure capital.

Borking, in retrospect

Filed under: Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Walter Olson on the historically nasty confirmation battle that kept Robert Bork off the US Supreme Court:

Of course the confirmation critique that makes it into every Bork obituary isn’t Heflin’s or Johnston’s. It’s Ted Kennedy’s blowhard caricature, intended for northern liberal consumption, of “Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution,” and so on.

Never in memory had a judicial nomination been fought in such language. Why?

As a constitutional law scholar, Bork had distinguished himself even among conservatives for his scathing critique of the Warren Court, which he accused essentially of having made up constitutional law as it went along.

To organized liberal groups, on whose behalf Kennedy was acting, this was the next thing to a declaration of war. Yet they couldn’t exactly come out and defend making up constitutional law as you went along as their own vision for the high court.

Instead, they served up a steady diet of vitriol and wild oversimplification, especially in TV ads and other messages delivered outside the confirmation hearings.

The Washington Post itself opposed Bork’s confirmation, yet nonetheless editorialized against the “intellectual vulgarization and personal savagery” to which some of his opponents had descended, “profoundly distorting the record and the nature of the man.”

December 19, 2012

Clever wording can’t take away an enumerated constitutional right

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

Megan McArdle on the pious hopes of those who hope to bring in draconian gun control regulation by abstruse and intricate verbal gymnastics:

Others are suggesting a de-facto ban, accomplished either through a huge tax, or a ban on ammunition. Oh, I’ve also seen calls to limit the amount of ammunition people can buy, but I don’t think those people have thought this through. For starters, the number of bullets used by a typical rampage shooter is about what a target shooter or hunter might go through in an afternoon or two of range practice. And most gun homicides are not rampage shootings; they have one or two victims, and a correspondingly small number of cartridges expended. Moreover, even a very strict per-purchase limit would permit people to accumulate ammunition over time.

No, the people who want to tax guns at 17,000%, or ban ammunition, or make cartridges cost $2,000 apiece, are the only ones hinting at something that might make a real dent in America’s unusually high rate of gun homicide. Except for one thing: you can’t do an end-run around an enumerated right with some sort of semantic game. Chief Justice John Roberts is not Rumplestiltskin; he is not bound by the universe to disappear if you can only find the correct secret word.

You cannot accomplish back-door censorship by taxing at 100% all profits of any news corporation named after a “carnivorous mammal of the dog family with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, proverbial for its cunning.” You cannot curtail the right to protest by requiring instant background checks and a 90-day waiting period on anyone who wants to assemble with 500 of their friends in a public area. Nor can you restrict the supply of ink used to print Korans. If you pass a law like that, the Supreme Court will say “nice try, guys” and void all the painstakingly constructed verbal origami that was supposed to make civil liberties infringement look like an innocent exercise of the taxing power.

Not all submarines are equal

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Strategy Page on the US Navy’s need to work with — and even consider buying — modern diesel-electric submarines:

The U.S. Navy continues to debate the issue of just how effective non-nuclear submarines would be in wartime, and whether the U.S. should buy some of these non-nuclear boats itself. This radical proposal is based on two compelling factors. First, the U.S. Navy may not get enough money to maintain a force of 40-50 SSNs (attack subs.) Second, the quietness of modern diesel-electric boats puts nuclear subs at a serious disadvantage, especially in coastal waters. With modern passive sensors, a submerged diesel-electric sub is often the best weapon for finding and destroying other diesel-electric boats. While the nuclear sub is the most effective high seas vessel, especially if you have worldwide responsibilities and these nukes would have to quickly move long distances to get to the troubled waters, the diesel electric boat, operating on batteries in coastal waters, is quieter and harder to find.

[. . .]

For much of the past decade the U.S. Navy has been trying to get an idea of just how bad the threat it. Thus from 2005 to 2007 the United States leased a Swedish sub (Sweden only has five subs in service), and its crew, to help American anti-submarine forces get a better idea of what they were up against. This Swedish boat was a “worst case” scenario, an approach that is preferred for training. The Gotland class Swedish subs involved are small (1,500 tons, 64.5 meters/200 feet long) and have a crew of only 25. The Gotland was based in San Diego, along with three dozen civilian technicians to help with maintenance.

For many years before the Gotland arrived, the U.S. Navy had trained against Australian diesel-electric subs, and often came out second. The Gotland has one advantage over the Australian boats, because of its AIP system (which allows it to stay under water, silently, for several weeks at a time). Thus the Gotland is something of a worst case in terms of what American surface ships and submarines might have to face in a future naval war. None of America’s most likely naval opponents (China, North Korea or Iran), have AIP boats yet, but they do have plenty of diesel-electric subs which, in the hands of skilled crews, can be pretty deadly.

The “digital divide” didn’t play out quite the way they thought

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Gregg Easterbrook‘s weekly NFL column, he often discusses non-football topics like this one:

A decade ago — perhaps as recently as five years ago — analysts and educators feared a “digital divide” in which the affluent have access to advancing electronics and the disadvantaged do not, granting the affluent yet another edge in life’s contest. But what if the reverse has happened?

[. . .]

That made this article striking, with research showing children from disadvantaged families now waste more time with video games and on the Internet than do children from affluent homes. Publicly subsidized programs to provide computers and Internet to the disadvantaged were rationalized as tools for education. How are they actually used? The article quotes Vicky Rideout, author of a study on the subject, saying, “Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment.”

Video games are a really tempting way to avoid studying. If they had been around when I was a teen, there’s no way I would have read so many books or spent three or four hours after school each day at the high school, doing extracurriculars and sports. I might instead have wasted my time with electronics.

Girls and women are taking over college admissions; 57 percent of undergraduate students at four-year colleges are female. There are many reasons, and surely one is that teen girls waste less time on video games than teen boys do. If disadvantaged teen boys are wasting more time than affluent teen boys, that makes the picture worse.

Conservative commentators often “harrumph” about rising living standards for the disadvantaged, many of whom now have air conditioning, laptops and other items once associated with affluence. It’s good that living standards are rising, and it’s good that the digital divide is disappearing. The spread of computers and Internet service into disadvantaged homes creates equity in access to the information and services available on the Web. But society needs to be aware of the downsides of electronics. Those computer and software gifts being opened this holiday season might, especially for teen boys, backfire.

December 18, 2012

The real reason it’s so hard to cut military spending

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

From the January issue of Reason, Veronique de Rugy explains how the system is set up to protect military spending from even the most determined spending cuts:

The Department of Defense, with its 2.3 million workers, is the single largest employer in the United States. The defense industry, which is the main private-sector recipient of defense dollars, directly or indirectly employs another 3 million people. This, in a nutshell, is why it’s so hard to cut government spending in general and military spending in particular.

The scope and reach of the government are far bigger than we think, explains John J. Dilulio of the National Academy of Public Administration in the Spring 2012 issue of National Affairs. It’s more than just the money Washington spends or the people it employs. It’s also the people in the private sector who live off that spending. It’s the nonprofit organizations paid to help administer government programs. It’s the contractors who run the programs, the contractors’ sub-contractors, and so on.

[. . .]

Even when military contractors’ profits have reached an all-time high, Congress seems committed to sheltering the companies from any budget cuts. Industry lobbying probably plays a role here. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. defense and aerospace lobby doled out $24 million to political campaigns and committees during the 2008 campaign cycle and spent nearly $60 million on lobbying in 2011. Lockheed Martin alone spent $15 million in 2011 on its lobbying efforts, plus $2 million in political contributions. Boeing spent $16 million on lobbying the same year.

In his seminal 1971 article “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” the Nobel-winning economist George Stigler noted that agencies eventually become captive of the very interest groups they were ostensibly designed to police. Writing regulation or even spending legislation requires in-depth industry knowledge, so federal agencies and lawmakers tend to hire directly from the very companies they must oversee or spend money on.

The reverse is true too. In order to gain better access to their regulators and government funds, companies hire lobbyists who used to work for Congress or government agencies. Of the 408 lobbyists employed by the military industry to apply pressure on Congress, 70 percent used to work on Capitol Hill.

QotD: Time to look at repeal

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Is America ready to repeal the first Amendment and regulate Hollywood and the video game industry? Free speech absolutists point to their peaceful enjoyment of action-packed Blockbuster movies where protagonists of those films are often portrayed slaying hundreds of people in simulated scenes of violence.

Yet, journalists are broadcasting America’s call for an end to the tragedies through the regulation of this so-called freedom that has already killed too many. “The debate is long overdue. The mass-killing perpetrated by America’s free-speech culture is our hottest story today,” said one network reporter. “Adam or Ryan Whats-His-Name was just another face. The real problem that must be addressed is America’s sick love affair with unsanctioned ideas and unfettered access to violent imagery.”

The founding fathers could not have imagined high-capacity mass-communications networks when they wrote the Constitution. Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, not a mass merchant of kill porn on iTunes. Indeed, in the age of quills and parchment, Thomas Jefferson could not have imagined tweeting, or using the cable news industry to launch into the superstardum of American’s celebrity culture overnight.

“I’m a free speech moderate,” said one New York Times reporter reflecting upon the recent tragedy, “I’m in the news business because of free-speech. But, I’m also here to make a difference. If, because of this overdue regulation, it becomes more difficult to speculate wildly about the identity of the shooter based on an intern’s cursory scan of social media, so be it.”

Stephen Taylor, “Time to look at repeal”, Stephen Taylor, 2012-12-17

December 16, 2012

The domestic terror: “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Anarchist Soccer Mom has a story to tell. It’s neither pleasant nor uplifting, but it needs to be told:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan — they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

[. . .]

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

[. . .]

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

H/T to Drew M. for the link.

Reactions to the Sandy Hook tragedy

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

In Reason, Nick Gillespie rounds up some of the worst reactions to the terrible event in Sandy Hook:

Horrific events such as the mass shooting at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School are terrible enough in showcasing the evil that men do.

But they also regularly bring out the worst in observers, commentators, and pundits who will never let a lack of knowledge or expertise stand in the way of making grand pronouncements.

Here’s a short tour of four of the least-helpful reactions to an attack that slaughtered more than two dozen Americans — most of them kids 10 years and younger. They come courtesy of a former presidential candidate (Mike Huckabee), an international media mogul (Rupert Murdoch), an Oscar-winning filmmaker (Michael Moore), and a famous crusading journalist (Geraldo Rivera).

Following that is a discussion of the reality of gun violence in America and what might actually address some of the issues in play.

December 15, 2012

Santa: Republican or Democrat?

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

December 14, 2012

40 years ago today, man last walked on the moon

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

At sp!ked, Patrick West notes an under-observed anniversary:

It is a fine testament to NASA’s Apollo programme that of all the world-shaking events in living memory, men landing on the moon is the only one that doesn’t involve death. As Andrew Smith, author of Moon Dust (2006), notes, everyone remembers where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated, Princess Diana died, or on 9/11. Most people, if they were alive at the time, also vividly recall when a man first walked on the moon on 20 July 1969.

Few, however, will remember what they were doing when the last man walked on the moon. That was 40 years ago today.

As he fired up the engines of Apollo 17‘s Lunar Module, Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, delivered a final message to the world: ‘America’s challenge has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind.’ On this date, many of us lament that we haven’t gone back to the moon. Others won’t, citing the vast expense of this Cold War sideshow, equivalent to roughly $130 billion in today’s money.

We certainly aren’t likely to return to the moon in such cynical and pessimistic times, of Mayan prophecies, omens of economic stagnation and environmental catastrophe, Frankie Boyle misanthropy and books called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?. In other words, everything the Apollo programme didn’t represent. America’s race to the moon may have been partly a means of getting one over the Soviets, but it also embodied the spirit of adventure and progress, as encapsulated by Neil Armstrong’s first words from the moon.

December 13, 2012

US Army study confirms what every NCO already knows

Filed under: Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

The US Army recently conducted a study on the effectiveness of their officer corps:

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced today the results of an Army-wide study on company and field-grade leadership, which showed Majors are far more dangerous to soldiers than Second Lieutenants.

“While this was something we suspected for a long time,” Odierno said, “this study confirms it and provides the scientific background so we can appropriately react.”

[. . .]

After several pie-chart-rich slides, Bond summarized, “While we all know 2LTs have no experience and practically no training to mitigate that, no one expects anything more than marginal performance from them and no one gives them any real responsibility. That rests with their platoon sergeants.”

“Majors, on the other hand,” Bond explained, “with around 10 years’ experience in the Army are expected to actually know something and can be given positions of pretty significant authority. With that authority, bosses expect these majors to perform. Unlike when they were lieutenants, these majors seriously think they can succeed without a senior NCO carrying the weight for them.”

Odierno admitted that this was a problem he has had his eye on for a while. “Remember I was there once. When I was a 2LT, I had a Platoon Sergeant looking after me. When I made major I was the battalion S3, Ops Officer, and suddenly the Battalion Commander had expectations. Fortunately they were low expectations. At least I didn’t lose two vehicles like the major in supply. Of course Dennis recovered and he’s the Commanding General at Army Material Command now. Our boss just kept reminding us we were really lucky he graded on a curve.”

H/T to John Donovan for the link.

December 12, 2012

What is driving the increasing price of higher education?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

H/T to Daniel J. Mitchell, who adds:

The first part of the video shows that a college degree has become more valuable, so it’s understandable that the relative price of higher education has risen.

But then, beginning at about 1:55, the video discusses the role of subsidies. Echoing points I’ve made in the past, the professor explains how subsidies have simply generated higher prices. In other words, colleges have captured all the benefits, not students.

Business Week recently published a story that provides some glaring example of how universities have wasted all the additional money. Here are some remarkable excerpts.

    “I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its 16 deans and 11 vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Ind., makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?” …Purdue is typical: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. “Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas. In a 2010 study, Greene found that from 1993 to 2007, spending on administration rose almost twice as fast as funding for research and teaching at 198 leading U.S. universities.

Do Republicans believe in federalism?

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

Jacob Sullum on the rising tide of liberalization at the state level — gay marriage and marijuana legalization — and whether the Republicans will support federalism in these cases:

Nationwide support for marijuana legalization, like nationwide support for gay marriage, has increased dramatically, although not quite as swiftly, rising from 12 percent in a 1969 Gallup poll to a record 50 percent last year. While support for legalization dipped a bit during the anti-pot backlash of the Just Say No era, it began rising again in the 1990s. Public Policy Polling recently put it at 58 percent, the highest level ever recorded.

[. . .]

Just as an individual’s attitude toward gay people depends to a large extent on how many he knows (or, more to the point, realizes he knows), his attitude toward pot smokers (in particular, his opinion about whether they should be treated like criminals) is apt to be influenced by his personal experience with them. Americans younger than 65, even if they have never smoked pot, probably know people who have, and that kind of firsthand knowledge provides an important reality check on the government’s anti-pot propaganda.

Another clear pattern in both of these areas: Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to oppose legalizing gay marriage and marijuana. Yet Republicans are also more likely to oppose federal interference with state policy choices. In light of DOMA’s disregard for state marriage laws and the Obama administration’s threats to prevent Colorado and Washington from allowing marijuana sales, now is put-up-or-shut-up time for the GOP’s avowed federalists.

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