Vox Popoli

Here’s a link to that Libertarian Politics Live podcast in case you’re interested in listening to it. If it strikes you that I’m a bit slow, note that I was operating on something like four hours of sleep distributed over two nights at the time.

Combining book-writing mode with WoW is a bad, bad combination. But fortunately, amaretto-laced cappucino is the antidote and I just so happen to possess all the necessary ingredients in copious quantity.

One could reach a reasonable conclusion about the intelligence of Democrats and Republicans here:

Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot — with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

So, because Democrats watch Jon Stewart and Republicans watch Fox News, this means that Democrats are smarter than Republicans. QED.

Not so fast….

Men scored higher than women, and older Americans did better than younger, on average. Democrats and Republicans were about equally represented in the most knowledgeable group but there were more Democrats in the least aware group.

Remember, most people are idiots. So, since Fox News has loads more viewers than Comedy Central, a higher percentage of them are largely clueless… to say nothing of the fact that Fox News spends more time reporting on celebrity spawn and school shootings than it does on American politics.

Although I have no doubt that all those Media Matters Stasi are contributing to dragging the average down as well.

Regardless, I think it’s worth pointing out that knowing who the vice-president is does not qualify one as knowledgeable, it just indicates that you’re not quite as sublimely ignorant as my Viszla.

JD is either a wit or inadvertantly entertaining:

I must say that the arrogance throughout this blog is starting to become obnoxious.

Starting? Where have you been since 2003?

A few basic blog truths:

1. Most people are idiots who have no idea why they believe what they believe. This doesn’t make them any less valuable in the eyes of God, this doesn’t make them any less responsible for their own actions and this doesn’t give anyone else the right to make their decisions, however suboptimal, for them. It does, however, mean that there is no reason to pay any serious attention to what the vast majority of people say or claim to “think”.

2. Unless and until you prove otherwise, “most people” includes you.

3. Everyone is incorrect from time to time. This includes Internet Superintelligences, we’re just incorrect far less often than is normally the case. This isn’t merely because we are multiple standard deviations north of the norm, but because over the last six years, tens of thousands of attempts to find the flaws in our arguments have been made. Unless you have put yours through a similar refinement process, your kung fu is likely to be weak by comparison.

4. False modesty is an insult to all of the parties involved. And many a modest man has much to be modest about.

5. There is nothing arrogant about being correct. Nor is it arrogant to be conscious of the fact that you are correct. It is, admittedly, arrogant to expect others to be conscious of the high probability that you are going to be correct.

6. A dedication to avoiding issues of known ignorance is often confused with an assertion of universal knowledge. The two should not be confused.

7. This blog exists only for my own amusement. Any entertainment, enlightenment or edification that it might happen to provide anyone else is a happy, but accidental byproduct. If you derive insufficient value from this blog, there are thousands of other similar blogs that may provide you with more of what you are seeking and I wish you success in your quest to find it.

I’ve had a few thoughts about the general cowardice of the thin blue line before, but Crispy clarifies the reality rather nicely:

When I watch TV with some of my friends, we are amazed with how fearful “SWAT” teams react to situations. Let’s put this in perspective. These guys are wearing more body armor than American soldiers who are down range, they have bullet proof shields & a greater array of weapon systems than most Army infantry platoons. They are only facing one person, in most situations, and how do they react?

They don’t. They wait for hours upon hours and fearfully stand behind trees and become distraught when they find out the suspect has a bow & arrow with hunting tips inside the house because “that sort of thing can tear straight through our body armor”.

Now, in fairness, the very last thing you want is a gung ho police force. There’s a reason that police historically make very bad soldiers and soldiers make even worse police. So this, shall we say, reluctance to engage and put themselves at risk is not entirely bad.

But the complete inability of the overrated SWAT teams – who despite their faux militarization are apparently good for little more than scaring crack whores and killing innocent and unarmed people in bed late at night – to even begin responding substantively to situations when there’s nothing but a crazy kid with a pair of pop guns, really borders on the absurd.

And these are the very people you hope are going to defend you because you can’t bother to defend yourself? Good luck with that.

It’s just a first step. But it’s a step:

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long- awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority. It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how—not whether—to perform an abortion.

Congratulations, Republicans. After 34 years, they have finally made a single step towards ending the national atrocity. This should prove the final nail in the coffin of the Giuliani candidacy, unfortunately, it will almost surely be undone in 2009 when the three-headed Democratic beast rules the roost.

Blogometer offers evidence:

If you were expecting for the netroots to join more traditional Dem calls for increased gun control following the tragedy in Blacksburg, VA, don’t hold your breath. At deadline, none of the top five netroots sites (Daily Kos, Eschaton, TPM, AMERICAblog, and MyDD) have called for any changes to gun laws (CLARIFICATION: AMERICAblog does ask for a ‘revisit’ of guntrol but nothing specific). And don’t expect them to either. The VA Tech shootings are serving as an albeit tragic marker in demonstrating just how different Dems are in ’07 than they were in ’99.

I’ve found it tremendously interesting how the few attempted sallies on the part of the mainstream media and left-leaning politicians have appeared quite half-hearted; despite the very weighted question on an ABC News online poll, the pro-gun position was winning 2-1 over the anti-gun one on the very evening of the VTU shootings.

While the war will never be over, the battle has clearly been won. It’s worth celebrating, as it’s one of the few battles that has ended well for freedom in America.

The problem is that one reason they’ve given up is that those who are hell-bent on disarming the American people are doing an end run; they’ve only abandoned the issue as a national one because they intend to revisit it as an international one, using the NAU treaties to circumvent the Bill of Rights.

And now we know why it took so long for them to release the VTU killer’s name. From Atlas Shrugs:

No one is talking about the “Ismail Ax” fact.. I mean no one. No TV, little print. I just watched the whole press conference and not one, not one, reporter asked about it. They asked about everything from soup to nuts (down to the class scheduling going forward) but not one query about Ismail AX. Am I nuts? The man had Ismail Ax written in red on his arm. Is that not deserving of some investigation or question?

In fairness to the police, one can understand a certain amount of confusion inherent in discovering an obviously Islamic reference on a young Asian guy. But that doesn’t excuse the attempt to downplay this on the part of those reporting the story.

That being said, I have little doubt that Cho was no more a Muslim than Klebold and Harris were National Socialists, the swastikas all over their notebooks notwithstanding. For the younger generation, jihadists are the new Darth Vader, in much the same way that Spetsnaz commandos or US postal workers represented the ultimate in lethal danger for my generation.

On his experience as a part-time father:

Tonight Mr. Blankenhorn will be in D.C. and I have the pleasure of joining him for dinner. I want to tell him how much I appreciate his book, and how he is absolutely wrong. I want to tell him that the base isn’t always lost and that the linkage is not always shattered. I want to tell him that it is possible to be a “good-enough father” because I am one, I am good-enough.

But it isn’t true. As much as I would like to believe otherwise, his book was devastatingly prescient about my own experience as a “visiting father.” Over the past twelve years I’ve learned being a part-time dad is not enough. Our children always need more.

That is why I want to address a specific, narrow audience with the rest of this post. I want to address those fathers who are on the verge of leaving their families.

I hope a few of the women who are contemplating removing the father from their children’s lives will consider his words as well. I wish more parents would understand that once you have a child, your life must cease to revolve around you, your wishes and even your needs.

Since I am a scientist, I cannot help but observe the following:

More than one year before today’s unprecedented shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, the state’s General Assembly quashed a bill that would have given qualified college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus.

At the time, Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said he was happy to hear of the bill’s defeat, according to the Roanoke Times.

“I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus,” the Virginia Tech spokesman said.

Hypothesis: banning legal guns from campus will make the campus safer
Observed Evidence: 60 shooting victims, 32 fatal
Conclusion: hypothesis fails

In fairness to Mr. Hincker, he only said that parents, students, faculty and visitors would “feel safe on campus”, he didn’t promise anything about their actual safety. I have no doubt that they felt very safe indeed, until, of course, they didn’t.

I have never understood why so many otherwise intelligent individuals have such a difficult time understanding the fact that, by definition, criminals pay no attention to the laws.

Bane, in his inimitable manner, pretty much sums up what a lot of people are thinking about the tragedy de la semaine: The news was blabberficating on the day’s latest school massacre, and I said to the wife something along the lines of ‘shit, they blow twice that amount up in Baghdad every day’, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t give a shit.

About any of the dead. In either place. You know what to do to stop it, and you don’t. So, you know what? Fuck you. Die. I have no further concern over your suicides, except as they amuse my admittedly black sense of humor.

The truth is that very few people unrelated to the victims actually care much about any of this, their unconvincing protestations of deep personal grief notwithstanding. The whole thing is little more than the TV media marketing violence porn in real time; the wall-to-wall coverage serves no purpose except to encourage the next lunatic immigrant/goth/SJS to go for a new high score.

You know what to do to stop it. And you don’t.

Rush Limbaugh finally notices what I’ve been predicting for ages now:

Everybody says, “Well, what about Obama? What about Obama?” Folks. I know there are stories out there how the Clintons are worried about Obama and not just on this fundraising stuff, but his “godlike status to the godless” and so forth. If you’re the Clinton machine, and your single competitor is somebody with less than two years experience in these foxholes, do you really think they are worried about Barack Obama? If you have fallen for the notion that the Clinton machine is sort of upside down and discombobulated and doesn’t quite know what’s going on here, you are falling for more myths from the media, which is designed to make it look like she has real competition so that she can overcome obstacles rather than be this candidate of inevitability — which she is. So she’s trying to make it look like she’s got a serious challenge and she’s up to it, and she can handle it. But I’m telling you, I know the Clinton machine. If you think they are seriously worried about somebody with as little experience as Obama has in these kinds of things, then you’re falling for it.

You’re being sucked in for all this. There is an 80% chance this woman is going to be next president, as things sit here today.

Only 80 percent? Given what I’ve seen out of the fiasco known as the Republican nominating process, I’d say it’s more like 95 percent. Obama is nothing but a sacrificial lamb meant to make the Democratic nomination look competitive, perhaps he’ll be given the vice-presidency as a reward.

Benito Giuliani not only can’t beat the Lizard Queen, he can’t even win the Republican nomination. As always, the self-styled pragmatists have it backwards, failing to understand that you can only win over the moderate independents by rejecting them. Call it the Political Vaccuum Principle – because moderate independents don’t have a commitment to any ideological principles, they will usually fall in line with those who do. That’s why Reagan and FDR won landslides based in part upon the votes of those who really didn’t agree with them.

And that is why Ms Rodham is more likely to win in a Reaganesque landslide than to lose in 2008.