Another argument against registration

Registration of firearms of any kind cannot and should not be permitted, both due to its historical use in subsequent confiscations and because it is a clear violation of the Second Amendment, being a law that clearly hinders the right to bear arms.  However, there is now another powerful argument to use against registration, which is the way that anti-gun media organizations are making public the lists of registered gun owners:

A gossip site has taken the controversial decision to post the name of every licensed gun owner in New York City online as the debate over gun control rages on. Gawker posted the list of names, which is already publicly available, today. It follows the move by the Journal News to publish home addresses of gun permit owners in Westchester and Rockland counties last month.

No doubt Nick Denton, Gawker’s owner, will soon be cowering behind armed guards like the Journal News editor, Caryn A. McBride.  It is clear that at least some of these anti-gunners are looking for a war.  That they are dumb enough to seek one with a people who are clearly armed and more than willing to fight to defend their Second Amendment rights staggers the imagination.  I suspect, that like the Germans and the Japanese before them, they mistake the American people’s reluctance to fight for an unwillingness or an inability to do so.

I can’t help but notice that Denton, like Piers Morgan, is another Redcoat attempting to disarm the Americans.  Even after more than 200 years, they still haven’t learned.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? 

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… 

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough.” 
 – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 

UPDATE: It appears another map of gun owners has been published.

Rape, corrected

The predecessor of this corrected infographic has been going around, and remarkably, it appears that even card-carrying feminists have begun to realize that writing fantasy fiction about rape statistics is no longer going to convince anyone of anything anymore.  I’ve corrected this on the basis of actual empirical data, which has shown that between 41 and 50  percent of all reported rapes are false reports.  And by false reports, I mean the purported victim has recanted and admitted that the charge was false, either voluntarily or when faced with a polygraph test.  Furthermore, DNA evidence has been used to show that a statistically significant number of reported, charged, and convicted rapists are, in fact, innocent.  Consider this 2009 article in the Forensic Examiner:

Very little formal research has been conducted on the prevalence of false allegations of rape. One study looked at the 109 cases of forcible rape that were disposed of in one small midwestern town between 1978 and 1987 (Kanin, 1994). The given town was specifically selected for study because the police department used a uniquely objective and thorough protocol when investigating rape complaints. Among other procedural safeguards, officers did not have the discretion to drop rape investigations if they concluded the complaint was “suspect” or unfounded. Every rape accusation had to be thoroughly investigated and included offering a polygraph to both the accuser and the accused. Cases were only determined to be false if and when the accuser admitted that no rape occurred.

The researchers further investigated those cases that the police, through their investigation, had ultimately determined were “false” or fabricated. During the follow-up investigation, the complainants held fast to their assertion that their rape allegation had been true, despite being told they would face penalties for filing a false report. As a result, 41% of all of the forcible rape complaints were found to be false. To further this study, a similar analysis was conducted on all of the forcible rape complaints filed at two large midwestern public universities over a 3-year period. Here, where polygraphs were not offered as part of the investigatory procedure, it was found that 50% of the complaints were false.

Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be “proven” allegations either because the “overwhelming preponderance of the evidence” strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be “disproved” as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a “hoax” at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or “unresolved” rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a “proven” rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 “disproved” cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false.

The reality is that rape is a relatively uncommon crime in the United States; the one in five figures bandied about by feminists at candlelight vigils are pure and unmitigated fantasy.  Of course, it is not exactly a mystery why so many women are more than a little disposed to fantasize about rape.

It’s worse than that

It is belatedly dawning on everyone that not everyone should go to college:

Richard Meeusen, chairman, president and CEO of Racine Federated’s parent company, Badger Meter. “We have presidents and leaders who say every child should have the opportunity to go to college.

“Unfortunately, it sends the message to parents that if they don’t send their kids to college, they’re failing.”

“Now we’re saying, ‘Where are our electricians, auto mechanics, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) workers and CNC (computer numeric control) operators?’” Meeusen said.

He added, “We’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replace them with calculus.”

The problem isn’t that we’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replaced them with calculus.  It’s that we’ve ripped them out and replaced them with diversity classes that teach how Harriet Tubman won the civil war, “science” classes about outmoded evolutionary theory and nonexistent global warming, and “sex-ed” classes about Heather’s two mommies and Cho Fong’s two daddies.

What we’re seeing is nothing less than a complete divorce of education and academic accreditation.  All an academic degree now assures is that the individual has been extensively immersed in the expected ideological and socio-sexual propaganda.

Homeschool and social awkwardness

LH asks a serious question about socialization and homeschool:

My observations are this. Academically, homeschoolers are just pure genius. But the world does not work based on your grade point average. In the business world, it all also depends on who you know and how well you get along with people. And I’ve noticed that homeschooled adults–people in their twenties and thirties–often seem to struggle with the rest of the working world.

Now, I am asking for opinions on these observations. I’m not drawing a line in the sand, making any declarations against homeschooling, or anything like that. I’m looking for other people’s observations and testimonies that might prove hopeful.

I think it is a genuine issue.  I have observed the phenomenon on numerous occasions myself.  For example, at my eldest son’s first soccer practice with a new team, all of the other players sat down and listened to the coach when he started addressing them.  My son continued to stand, bouncing a ball, and was observably paying no attention to the coach.

Now, obviously I explained that his behavior was unacceptable after the practice and likely to lead to a lack of playing time.  But the fact that I had to explain this to him, when he had been playing soccer for years, was indicative of what can either be seen as a feature or a bug.  That is to say, he simply does not appear to feel any peer pressure.  The fact that everyone else is doing X not only does not instill in him any need to do X, he doesn’t appear to assign any significance to it whatsoever.

This isn’t necessarily the result of homeschooling, of course.  I am a socio-sexual Sigma and a lone wolf.  Spacebunny is also, by female standards, a lone wolf.  Both of us were public-schooled.  So, it should not be at all surprising that our son would tend to be highly independent regardless of how he was schooled, and yet, there is still a material difference between his perception of the significance of the behavior of others to him, and ours.

On the other hand, once a parent is aware of this lack of awareness, it is quite easily dealt with.  The incident at practice was two years ago.  It has not happened since; once the team begins to line up in front of the coach, he recognizes the signal and not infrequently is among the first to sit down and pay attention.  However, it appears to remain a conscious behavior and not an unconscious one.  I happen to think this will serve him well in time, as unlike the others, he has the option to go along with the crowd or not, as he consciously chooses.  Independence and auto-conformity are mutually exclusive; the parent who fears the occasional social awkwardness later in life would do well to consider what sort of problems are more likely to occur with an auto-conforming child.

However, the most significant testimony I have ever heard concerning socialization and homeschool was from the children’s pediatrician, who is a doctor of no little international repute.  We were the only homeschooling family in his practice at the start and he initially harbored some reservations about it.  However, after ten years, he mentioned that he was now fully supportive of it, in part because he had observed that our children were not only advanced intellectually, they were also the happiest children in his practice.

I think one should step back and consider what the working world presently is before concluding that those who struggle with it are somehow deficient.  What is natural or normal about spending 8-10 hours per day in a small grey cubicle, living like a rat in a cage and shuffling virtual papers while attempting to avoid conflict with various unproductive individuals of varying degrees of medication and reflexive hostility?  Considering how much the average worker has to modify his normal behavior just to avoid getting in trouble with HR these days, can one reasonably conclude that it is the homeschooled individual and not the increasingly outdated working world that is the problem?

The experts tell us that to succeed in the working world of tomorrow, it will be increasingly necessary to be independent, free of reliance upon the corporate patterns of the past, flexible, and agile.  To me, it sounds as if much of the “awkwardness” of the homeschooled individual in the eyes of the more conventionally schooled is akin to the strangeness of the mammal when viewed from the perspective of the dinosaur.

My suspicion is that the socially awkward homeschooler primarily represents a failure of the homeschooling parent to address socio-sexual issues with the child, and is little different from the tendency of most conventionally schooled men to be sexually awkward due to the maleducations they receive on the topic.  The fact that the homeschooled child is likely to automatically receive less socio-sexual education than the crude mindless one received by the conventionally schooled child does not mean that he is necessarily uneducable in the subject.

Fueling the death spiral

Glenn Reynolds notes that homeschools are putting one of America’s most enervating evils at risk, the public school:

For “notoriously inadequate” public school systems, as I argue in a new “Broadside” from Encounter Books, The K-12 Implosion, the risk is that the outflow of kids will turn from a trickle into a flood. At some point, it’s a death-spiral: As kids (often the best students) leave because schools are “notoriously inadequate,” the schools become even more notoriously inadequate, and funding — which is computed on a per-pupil basis — dries up. This, of course, encourages more parents to move their kids elsewhere, in a vicious cycle.

Does this mean the end of public education? No. But it does mean that the old model — which dates to the 19th Century, when schools were explicitly compared to factories — is at risk. Smarter educators will start thinking about how to update a 19th Century product to suit 21st Century realities. Less-smart educators will hunker down and fight change tooth and nail.
Who will win out in the end? Well, how many 19th Century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?

The risk is to be embraced with enthusiasm.  I’ve been arguing for years that the very concept of “school” is completely and utterly outdated.  It’s inefficient, ineffective, and intellectually crippling.  Although there are many ominous signs on the horizon, there are a few bright rays of light shining as well, and one of them is the continued rapid growth of parents deciding to homeschool their children.

Of austerity and contraction

Texas cuts spending, tax revenues go up:

In 2011, when it looked as if Texas was facing a multi-billion-dollar
budget deficit, the Texas Legislature cut spending, especially funding
for education, Bloomberg notes. However, partly because of the fracking
boom, revenues from the sale of oil and gas soared, bringing in
unexpected tax revenues. The jobless rate also declined sharply,
currently down to 6.2 percent. Revenue from sales taxes has increased as
well.

Meanwhile, California has lost over $1 billion in tax revenues in less than two months by increasing spending and tax rates:

After Proposition 30 passed on November 6, 2012, the State of California experienced a decline in the total state revenue for the month of November. California State Controller John Chiang reported that the total revenue for the month of November declined by $806.8 million, which is 10.8 percent below budget.

The State of California experienced a decline in its revenue as several of the high income earners have relocated to other states, and have also relocated their businesses out of state. This led to a decline in corporate and income tax revenues by more than $1 billion.

It’s 2013.  How is it possible that any government, at any level, is still using static revenue models?  At some point, inept ideology can only be described as willful idiocy.

A bestiary of hate

And why it is increasingly important to provide Amazon reviews for books you really like.

Now, some authors firmly believe you should never engage with a critic of your books.  They’ve got a sound basis for this belief, because most authors are sensitive little wallflowers who can’t bear criticism, so when they do respond to it, they tend to overdo it a little.  Or a lot.  The prime example, of course, being Laurell K. Hamilton, whose epic hissy fit was ironically more entertaining than any of the novels she inflicted upon the general public.  Her predecessor in the sexy corpse genre, Anne Rice, also provided another well-regarded classic in the annals of authorial peevishness, albeit one handicapped by the virtue of it showing at least some signs of the sanity entirely missing from Hamilton’s masterpiece.

Given that I have been the beneficiary of the constant attentions of various anklebiters and more substantive critics for some years now, I am considerably less upset than most writers when it comes to negative readers.  They’re bound to come, particularly when an author is as free with his own opinions as I am.  But that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to permit reader absurdities go unchallenged, particularly when they are putting them out there in public in an attempt to influence the decisions of potential readers to give my books a shot or not.  Also, given that I am a polemicist of some notoriety, I am more conscious than most of how some purported “reviews” are nothing more than polemics by other means.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion of every book.  Tastes and intellects differ considerably.  But no one has a right to not have their opinions mocked or criticized.  Now, most of those who have read and reviewed A THRONE OF BONES have expressed a generally favorable opinion of it; some have even written of it in a superlative manner.  Most consider it to have surpassed their expectations.  Not these three reviewers, however, who claim to have found literally nothing of merit in the novel:

THE DELICATE CHRISTIAN FLOWER

“I was looking forward to reading it. I was sorely disappointed to find
profanity, and vulgarity and a few other things I found objectionable.
If you are into Christian fiction, this is not the book for you.”

Translation: “All books with bad words are bad.  Don’t read them.”

My response: hey, at least her opinion is based on fact and is reasonably consistent, given that she also gives a glowing five-star review to a children’s Bible that leaves out that unimportant bit about Jesus’s death.

THE EVERYDAY ANKLEBITER

“This book is bad. So bad that I was moved to leave my first amazon
review and I couldn’t just put it down and move on to the next book in
my pile, I had to move on to something I already knew was exceptional,
like Tolkien. Since zero stars is not an option, I can at least take
some comfort in the fact that I had to give “A Throne of Bones” one star
in that it pushed me into something more worthwhile.”

Translation: “I hate the author, so I’ll just fling some imaginary crap and hope it sticks.”

My response: Trolls are going to troll and anklebiters are going to snap at ankles wherever they can.  Keep in mind this first-time “reviewer” appears to be the same guy who was dumb enough to claim, on this blog, that the novel was a structural imitation of Gibbon – whose work covered the imperial Roman period some 200 years after the Republican era I utilized – and a literary imitation of R. Scott Bakker.  The fact that the “reviewer” is a fan of Bakker’s who is still bitter about my failure to genuflect before Bakker in the nihilism debate is, no doubt, entirely unrelated to his review….

The strange thing about The Everyday Anklebiter is that he apparently has never stopped to think that there are thousands of readers of this blog who are perfectly able to do what he has done in purposefully tanking the ratings of authors they don’t like.  This sort of negative review isn’t merely abusive, it is dangerous to the entire review system, given its potential to start a reviews war.

If you have an Amazon account, I would encourage you to report this as abuse. I have already done so.  Personal vendettas belong on the blogs, they have no place on public book review sites.

THE OVER-HIS-HEAD GUY

“The author show no imagination. He basically just copies imperial Rome
at the time of the Roman Catholic church. Neither one of which I find
entertaining in a fantasy setting. If I wanted to read about Roman
Legions and the Church I’d buy a history book. I’ll get through it
eventually and maybe it will get better but if the first 20% is this bad
I can’t imagine how it’s going to redeem itself. Don’t waste your money
or your time. It’s the worst book I’ve ever read and I’ve read about
everything.”

Translation: tl;dr

My response: (laughs)  Imperial Rome copied at the time of the Roman Catholic Church… that pretty much says it all.  But it least it is an honest review, as clearly, if the idea of combining Rome and fantasy bores you, A THRONE OF BONES is almost surely the most boring book you could ever hope to read. 

No book is for everyone because we all have different tastes.  Some read fiction, some don’t.  Some love history, some find it tedious in the extreme.  But these reviews should help underline the importance of reviewing the books you like, especially those books you love.  So, later today, I’ll be posting a review of a book I recently read that I really liked, and which I would recommend reading.

Krugman the revisionist

Paul Krugman seems to think that if he keeps rewriting economic history, he’ll somehow retroactively change what actually took place:

It’s that time again: the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and affiliates, a sort of medieval fair that serves as a marketplace for bodies (newly minted Ph.D.’s in search of jobs), books and ideas. And this year, as in past meetings, there is one theme dominating discussion: the ongoing economic crisis.

This isn’t how things were supposed to be. If you had polled the economists attending this meeting three years ago, most of them would surely have predicted that by now we’d be talking about how the great slump ended, not why it still continues.

So what went wrong? The answer, mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas.

It’s tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove that economists don’t have the answers. But the truth is actually worse: in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political leaders — and all too many economists — chose to forget or ignore what they should have known.

Three years ago.  That would have been 2010… which was several months after I published The Return of the Great Depression, which explained that the issue was credit inflation, not insufficient demand.  Unlike all those economists, I also declared that we would be in the middle of an economic depression now, which is the case, even though few seem to consciously be aware of it due to the various statistical shenanigans.

And three years later, after Obama passed a BIGGER stimulus plan than the one for which Paul Krugman himself called for, Krugman is still trying to claim that the mainstream economists were not incorrect, while repeating his previous and incorrect diagnosis.

Race and guns: part 1

David Cole of the New York Times argues that young urban blacks pay the cost for the right to bear arms:

Gun rights defenders argue that gun laws don’t reduce violence, noting
that many cities with high gun violence already have strict gun laws.
But this ignores the ease with which urban residents can evade local
laws by obtaining guns from dealers outside their cities or states.
Effective gun regulation requires a nationally coordinated response. 
A cynic might propose resurrecting the Black Panthers to heighten white
anxiety as the swiftest route to breaking the logjam on gun reform. I
hope we are better than that. If the nation were to view the everyday
tragedies that befall young black and Latino men in the inner cities
with the same sympathy that it has shown for the Newtown victims, there
would be a groundswell of support not just for gun law reform, but for
much broader measures. 
If we are to reduce the inequitable costs of gun rights, it’s not enough
to tighten licensing requirements, expand background checks to private
gun sales or ban assault weapons. In addition to such national measures,
meaningful reform must include initiatives directed to where gun
violence is worst: the inner cities. Aggressive interventions by police
and social workers focused on gang gun violence, coupled with economic
investment, better schools and more after-school and job training
programs, are all necessary if we are to reduce the violence that gun
rights entail. 
To tweak the National Rifle Association’s refrain, “guns don’t kill
people; indifference to poverty kills people.” We can’t in good
conscience keep making young black men pay the cost of our right to bear
arms. 
However, Cole assumes a causation that simply is not supported by the facts at hand.  Below is a chart I prepared based on the state-by-state offense rates, per 100k population, comparing black homicide to non-black homicide.  The source was the commenter Silver’s comment on a recent Steve Sailer post, derived from a 2009 FBI report.  The average state homicide rate is 17.3 per 100k for the black population and 2.5 per 100k for the non-black population.

As Silver notes, the FBI information cannot be used to directly compare black and white homicide rates, since the non-black rate combines the white, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian rates.  I will attempt to sort out some of those rates in the next post on this subject, but even a casual glance will suffice to show that the states with the highest non-black homicide rates, the District of Columbia (9.1), Nevada (5.2), Arizona (4.4), and California (4.3) tends to coincide with higher levels of Hispanic population.

If Cole’s thesis was correct, we would have to find that gun ownership and poverty are vastly higher among the black population than among the other U.S. populations.  But this is clearly not the case with regards to gun ownership, since 44% of whites own guns compared to 27% of blacks, and the Hispanic poverty rate is 26.6%, nearly equal to the black poverty rate of 27.4%.  Therefore, we can not only refute his argument that gun rights entail violence by comparing international crime statistics, but also conclusively show that his “necessary” recommendations for reducing violence are unrelated to the causal problem at hand, and as a result, extremely unlikely to reduce it in any substantive manner.

Hesse and Spengler

Now, I could be completely off-base here, but in reading the following passage, I was left with the very distinct impression that reading Spengler very likely inspired, in some way, Hermann Hesse’s creation of the magnificent Glass Bead Game.

“Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and — what has perhaps been impossible hitherto — things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

“But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics,and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect….

“Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.”

I should be very interested to learn if Hesse ever happened to read Spengler prior to his writing Das Glaspernspiel.