THIS is EXCELLENT
Farewell to the nation that lives the ideal
Go read.
Hat tip to Kathy Kinsley of On the Third Hand for the pointer.
Author: Kevin
If Not Now, When? If Not Silveira, Who?
Publicola does an excellent job in his dissertation on Dave Kopel’s recent National Review Online articles Secret Weapon: Some 2nd Amendment lawyers help the gun-ban side, and The Silveira Threat: How long will the Second Amendment live?. He makes the points I was thinking when I read the pieces.
Kopel makes a compelling argument for manipulating the system to achieve the (eventually, someday, maybe) goal of legally restoring the intent of the Second Amendment, and of the risk being taken by pursuing Silveira v. Lockyer before a hostile or at least intellectually dishonest Supreme Court. Yes, the risk that SCOTUS might finally come out and rule that the right to bear arms isn’t an individual right is real. In fact, I wouldn’t be all that surprised, given the level of Statism our government has reached. In fact, I believe that, should the Court declare that the Second Amendment is meaningless, it might (finally!) wake up the majority of gun owners and make them politically active.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Anyway, read Publicola’s peice. It’s worth your time.
Suuuuure it’s the Depleted Uranium
Via Clayton Cramer’s blog comes this New York Times story about intermarriage in Iraq. (Registration required.)
Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change
Iqbal Muhammad does not recall her first glimpse of her future husband, because they were both newborns at the time, but she remembers precisely when she knew he was the one. It was the afternoon her uncle walked over from his house next door and proposed that she marry his son Muhammad.
“I was a little surprised, but I knew right away it was a wise choice,” she said, recalling that afternoon nine years ago, when she and Muhammad were 22. “It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger.”
Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America. The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here, from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women’s status to creating a liberal democracy.”
Clayton comments:
We’ve heard a lot for several years from the leftist Hussein apologists about horrifying birth defects in Iraq, supposedly caused by use of depleted uranium shells during Gulf War I. I wonder: is the birth defect rate in Iraq unusually high because of too much in-breeding?
Good question. But if you’re interested in seeing some of the Depleted Uranium hysteria, try these sites:
Hell, just do a Google search on (Iraq “birth defects” “Depleted Uranium”)
Then go read the FACTS on Depleted Uranium, which is no more dangerous than lead, just denser.
Federation of American Scientists
Or, if you want it explained to you clearly, Steven Den Beste does a good job in this piece.
I noted several articles that claimed a significant increase in birth defects after the 1991 Gulf War. Two questions:
1) How do we know for sure that there really was an increase (totalitarian regimes tend to use whatever propaganda they can,) and
2) Aren’t some chemical weapons teratogenic?
But I think Clayton’s on to something.
What Clayton didn’t comment on was the last couple of paragraphs in the NYT story which illustrates the level of trust in Iraq.
Sheik Yousif and his sons said they put no faith in American promises of democracy — or any other promises, for that matter.
“Do you know why Saddam Hussein has not been captured?” asked Saleh, the oldest son of Sheik Yousif. “Because his own family will never turn him in, and no one else trusts the Americans to pay the reward.” Saleh dismissed the reports that Americans had given $30 million and safe passage out of Iraq to the informant who turned in Mr. Hussein’s sons.
“I assure you that never happened,” Saleh said. “The American soldiers brought out a camera and gave him the money in front of a witness, and then they took him toward the Turkish border. Near the border they killed him and buried him in a valley. They wanted the money for their own families.”
Culture clash. “We behave this way, so everybody behaves this way.”
We’ve got a long way to go over there.
National Ammo Day 2
Kim and Connie du Toit are cranking up National Ammo Day, but this year it’s actually National Ammo WEEK. Read about the idea here.
There are fifty days left until it begins. Save your pennies, and buy some ammo. Send a message.
Secondhand Lions
My wife and I went to see this film last Wednesday, but I wanted to wait until I had a chance to peruse the “critical” reviews before I opined myself. The critics were, as I suspected, critical. Most were pretty mild, objecting to Haley Joel Osmet’s performance (which I considered excellent) or script weakness (“…those who can’t teach, criticise.”) but some, unsurprisingly, were just WAY off the mark.
Warning: This contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film, STOP READING NOW
Consider, for example, Wesley Morris’s Boston Globe review:
The film reenacts these episodes as cartoonish cliffhangers, with a young Hub and Garth foiling anonymous but craven Moroccans. Written and directed by Tim McCanlies, “Secondhand Lions” is made from a child’s perspective, but its point of view has a glass eye. While handsome Americans come to the rescue of a beautiful Moroccan damsel, the Moroccan men are presented as swarthy caricatures of Arab danger.
That’s uncomfortably retrograde. Fine, the flashbacks are set in the silent era, but must the movie’s mind-set follow suit? Kids might not ask if all Arabs clean their teeth with machetes, but it’s a parent’s duty to inform them that given the option most would probably choose a toothbrush. The movie tries to clear things up with a conversation in the final minutes that involves Josh Lucas playing a grown-up Walter, but it’s the images that linger.
In your mind maybe. Uh, Wesley? The story is being told to a fifteen year-old boy. Those images are IN HIS HEAD. You expect anything other than cartoonish stereotypes? Wesley’s problem is that this piece isn’t PC enough for him.
Steven D. Greydanus of Decentfilms.com said this:
There’s a key scene in Lions in which Walter tells Uncle Hub that he doesn’t know what to believe any more and wants the truth. Here is Uncle Hub’s regrettably quotable response: “If you want to believe in something, then believe in it! Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it!” Uncle Hub then goes on to list some ideals he thinks are worth believing in whether they’re true or not: that honor and virtue, not money and power, are what really matter; that good always triumphs over evil; that true love never dies.
Now, the fact is that there is truth to all these propositions, depending on how they are understood. I can even appreciate, in a sense, someone like Uncle Hub having the will to recognize the value of these ideals despite not being in an epistemological position to affirm their truth.
Nevertheless, expressed this way, this is bogus sentimentality, not belief or faith — and this notion casts a long shadow over the rest of the film. Even a revelation that goes some way toward mitigating potentially problematic implications in this regard feels less than entirely earned, like more sentimentality on the part of the filmmaker. Like Hub, McCanlies’s heart is in the right place, but his head could use a little straightening out.
Earth to Greydanus: That was Hub explaining the “Hub Philosophy of Life,” not the Greydanus philosophy of life. I didn’t expect the man to be Plato, and the movie wasn’t about the “rightness” of the way Hub and Garth lead their lives.
The one thing I was surprised to see was no mass condemnation of the massive use of firearms in the film – especially the scene where Haley Joel Osmet’s character is in the cornfield with the lion, and Hub, Garth, four teenaged boys, and the despised relatives – including the children – all come out of the house armed to the teeth to “save” him.
Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the film but will admit that it was not as good as it might have been. Highly recommended, though. Especially if you’ve never gone fishing with a 12-gauge.
(Disclosure: I worked in a movie theater in high school, and ever since I’ve really enjoyed the movies and the big-screen theater experience. Consequently, I see probably thirty or so first-run movies a year, and go to enjoy them not criticise them.)
An Excellent Gift Idea
Dale Amon over at Samizdata posts about the recent interest in the close approach of Mars, and links to artist Kim Poor’s “University of Mars” t-shirt.
Kim’s art gallery is in Tucson, and I’ve got several prints from that gallery in my house.
The sad news is that Kim has a degenerative nerve disease that has progressed to the point that he can no longer paint.
If you care for art with a space theme at all, go visit his site. His gallery carries works by all the major artists in the genre. My collection includes Joe Tucciarone’s Chiron’s Passage and The Pegasus Nebula, Bob Eggleton’s, Blues for Neptune, Kim’s Jupiter from Io, a signed copy of Alan Bean’s Conrad, Gordon and Bean and a few others.
I also like to send his Christmas cards out, and that season is fast approaching.
Give it a look.
Last One for Tonight – The “F-Word”
Via The Everlasting Phelps, the Smoking Gun has an absolutely hilarious motion to dismiss that is a must read. The introduction to the piece begins:
Yes, five months remain in the year, but we’re ready to announce the winner of the prestigious 2003 Legal Document of the Year award. The below motion was filed earlier this month in connection with a criminal charge filed against a Colorado teenager. The boy’s troubles started when he was confronted at school by a vice principal who suspected that he had been smoking in the boys bathroom. When presented to the principal, the kid exploded, cursing the administrator with some variants of the “F” word. For his outburst, the boy was hit with a disorderly conduct rap, which was eventually amended to interfering with the staff, faculty, or students of an educational institutional. Faced with what he thought was a speech crime, Eric Vanatta, the teen’s public defender, drafted the below motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge. The District Court document is an amusing and profane look at the world’s favorite four-letter word, from its origins in 1500 to today’s frequent use of the term by Eminem, Chris Rock, and Lenny Kravitz.
Go read it. Damn, that’s funny!
Goodnight.
New Addition to the Blogroll
Anybody who writes lines like these:
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If someone doesn’t clean out or clean up the Ninth Circuit pretty soon, we are going to have a real honest-to-goodness constitutional crisis out of that court.
deserves to be read.
And get this: He’s a lawyer! Spoons has some competition.
Welcome to my blogroll, Phelps.
UPDATE: Ok, he’s not a lawyer. For some strange reason, I feel better.
Interesting Development in the Silveira Case
Regardless of how “dangerous” some feel it is, the Supreme Court has just issued a “Request for Response” to the State of California on why the Supreme Court should or should not hear the case. California previously waived the right of response, but now SCOTUS has (ahem) requested it to respond.
Which, in my mind anyway, means the possibility of SCOTUS granting cert. just went up.
I’m still not betting on which way they might decide. I don’t know how intellectually honest five of them might be.
How do they WRITE this Stuff With a Straight Face?
(From the Cincinnati Enquirer)
How many more Javontays must die?
Two school buses let children out in front of an apartment building on Linn Street. Across the street, in front of a dwelling bearing burglar bars and an electronic door gate, the bereft mother of a slain 7-year-old keened.
Javonna Williams’ eyes were dry. But her tears flowed through the words she shouted to the street, to no one in particular.
“They don’t know what they’ve done,” she said. “I was there. I saw his pain. He was in pain.”
Little Javontay died Monday night, police said, after a child playing with a gun in a Mount Airy townhouse shot him in the chest.
It was an accident, police believe, but it’s hard to piece together the facts.
People aren’t telling police everything, including who owned several guns police found at the apartment.
What is clear is a neighborhood is missing one friendly little boy who used to ride his bike and build imaginary forts in a store parking lot next to his home.
Kevin Milline, who owns the grocery store, said Javontay’s mother wouldn’t let him or his 3-year-old sister play in a neighborhood tot lot a block away, because drug dealers had taken it over.
“It’s too dangerous,” Milline said.
Javontay’s West End neighborhood has drug problems, as does the neighborhood he visited in Mount Airy. There have been shootings and assaults in both in recent months.
But carelessness, not drugs, killed Javontay. Some adult let kids find the guns.
How do we as a community reduce the chances of that happening again?
Gee, I don’t know. How about cracking down on the drug dealers? Or, sparing that, how about ending the “War on (some) Drugs” and taking the profitability out of the trade?
Our children are over-exposed to guns – even in low-crime neighborhoods. It is estimated that 40 percent of American households have firearms in them; 30 percent of those guns are unlocked and loaded, according to Common Sense About Kids And Guns, a national group.
A statistic that:
A) Ignores the fact that the percentage of American households with firearms in them hasn’t changed significantly for over fifty years (except, possibly to go down,) and
B) The total number of accidental deaths by firearm (not just rate per 100,000 population) has been declining ever since we started keeping records.
This is part of the “more guns equals more death” meme.
Nationally, 1,200 kids and teens die from gun accidents and suicides annually. Another 18,000 or more are injured.
As I’ve illustrated before, removing a method does not affect overall suicide rates. Australia has suffered a dramatic increase in teen suicide in the last few years. Method? Asphyxiation.
Here’s the facts on accidental firearm death for “kids and teens” up through 17 year-olds:
Year Deaths
2000 150
1999 158
1998 207
1997 247
1996 272
1995 330
1994 403
Shall I go on? And remember, during that time the number of guns in private hands has increased by over three million per year – about a third of which were handguns.
WE ARE “DOING SOMETHING.”
The problem is, the gun banners control forces define “DOING SOMETHING” as “passing new gun control laws.” Nothing else qualifies.
You won’t hear them talk about the dramatic decrease in accidental deaths. Instead, they will attach suicides to the total in order to keep the numbers as high (and emotion-grabbing) as possible.
Javontay’s case is unusual because he died in an inner-city neighborhood, said Dr. Rebeccah Brown, a pediatric surgeon and assistant director for the trauma unit at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“I don’t think of (accidental shootings) as being an inner-city problem. Usually it’s kids whose dads are hunters and who find the gun.”
Sweet freaking Jebus. No, Doctor, you don’t think of accidental shootings as being an inner-city problem because you’re overwhelmed by deliberate shootings. Accidental shootings – especially of small children – are quite rare everywhere.
In 10 years, Children’s has treated 127 gunshot wounds in children; most between the ages of 10 and 14.
And how many of them were deliberately inflicted as in, say, drive-bys? (Or are they going to redefine getting hit in a drive-by as an “accident?”)
“Chances are your children have been somewhere or played somewhere where there’s a firearm,” said Tracy Cook, executive director of ProKids, which helps abused kids.
The usual precautionary warnings – don’t mix kids with guns; lock up your weapon; keep ammunition separate – still apply, even with stolen guns, she said.
“Just because you purchase a gun illegally doesn’t mean you can’t put a lock on it. Who wants a kid to die?”
No one wanted Javontay to die.
Through family members, Javonna Williams declined to be interviewed for this column. As neighbors and relatives encircled her, she rocked back and forth.
If those who know something about this accident could only see her pain, I bet they’d give police the information they seek about the guns police found in the apartment Javontay visited.
And if the rest of us are realistic about the chances for more accidental shootings – we’d do whatever it takes to keep kids away from guns.
This is the mentality. Just pass another law. The people willing to steal or acquire a gun illegally will follow that one!
I am not often dumbstruck by the mental processes of the gun grabbers controllers, but this one floored me. I cannot fathom the “logic” here.
(Update: Kevin McGehee advises: “Don’t try to comprehend the logic of gun grabbers controllers. It’s like mud wrestling with a pig — you only wind up getting dirty, and the pig likes it.” I can’t help myself, Kevin. I’m an engineer – I’m unable to believe that some people are incapable of logic.)