Appeal to Authority

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I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. P.J. O’Rourke says End Them, Don’t Mend Them, and the article is accompanied by this image:

Some excerpts:

The Digest of Educational Statistics (read by Monday, there will be a quiz) says inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending increased by 49 percent from 1984 to 2004 and by more than 100 percent from 1970 to 2005.

Bell bottoms and Jerry Rubin hair versus piercings and tattoos—are kids getting smarter? No. National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test scores remained essentially the same from 1970 to 2004. SAT scores in 1970 averaged 537 in reading and 512 in math, and 38 years later the scores were 502 and 515. (More kids are taking SATs, but the nitwit factor can be discounted—scores below 400 have decreased slightly.) American College Testing (ACT) composite scores have increased only slightly from 20.6 (out of 36) in 1990 to 21.1 in 2008. And the extraordinary expense of the D.C. public school system produced a 2007 class of eighth graders in which, according to the NAEP, 12 percent of the students were at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent were at or above proficiency in math. Many of these young people are now entering the work force. Count your change in D.C.

The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average. Logic therefore dictates that National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade “at or above proficient” reading and math levels should average 50. This is true in only one of the 50 states. National averages are 29 and 31 percent. Either logic has nothing to do with public education or that NAEP test is a bear. Which I doubt.

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Massachusetts (fifth in spending per student) and Vermont (first) do lead the reading proficiency list with 43 and 42 percent respectively. But there’s not much to choose between that and 25th-biggest spender Montana’s 39 percent. Montana, in turn, is tied with third-most-expensive New Jersey. And the four states with 37 percent proficiencies on the NAEP are sixth-in-spending hyper-literate Connecticut, 19th-in-spending rube Minnesota, eighth-in-spending canny Yankee Maine, and 43rd-in-spending hayseed South Dakota.

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Looking at the bottom of the heap is just as confusing. Perhaps it’s possible to spend too little on public education, and 47th-ranked Mississippi is trying to prove it. The District of Columbia aside, Mississippi’s proficiency levels are the worst in the nation—17 percent in reading; 14 percent in math. However, the state that spends the least, Utah, slightly exceeds national averages. Meanwhile the second-worst state, New Mexico, is completely average in its school spending, ranked at 24. Tenth-in-spending Hawaii, with 20 percent in reading and 21 percent in math, is marginally inferior to 31st-in-spending California with 20 and 24 percent. And 49th-in-spending Arizona is a few points better than either.

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Here’s my proposal: Close all the public schools. Send the kids home. Fire the teachers. Sell the buildings. Raze the U.S. Department of Education, leaving not one brick standing upon another and plow the land where it stood with salt.

“Wait a minute,” the earnest liberal says, “we’ve got swell public schools here in Flourishing Heights. The kids take yoga. We just brought in a law school placement coordinator at the junior high. The gym has solar panels on the roof. Our Girls Ultimate Frisbee team is third in the state. The food in the cafeteria is locally grown. And the vending machines dispense carrots and kiwi juice.”

Close them anyway. I’ve got 11,749 reasons. Or, given the Cato report, call it 15,000. Abandon the schools. Gather the kids together in groups of 15.4. Sit them down at your house, or the Moose Lodge, or the VFW Hall or—gasp—a church. Multiply 15.4 by $15,000. That’s $231,000. Subtract a few grand for snacks and cleaning your carpet. What remains is a pay and benefit package of a quarter of a million dollars. Average 2008 public school classroom teacher salary: $51,391. For a quarter of a million dollars you could hire Aristotle. The kids wouldn’t have band practice, but they’d have Aristotle. (Incidentally this worked for Philip of Macedon. His son did very well.)

Money’s not the problem. P.J. has much more to say. Please, go read. We don’t need Aristotles, but we do need a bunch of E.D. Hirsch, Jr’s.

The Cream

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Sturgeon’s Law says that “90% of everything is crap.” It can be said that “crap is in the eye of the beholder,” but I’d agree that Sturgeon’s law is pretty much undeniable, especially when it comes to the Blogosphere. Technorati, for example, tracks well over 50 million blogs, and says that only about 4% of those are “professional” – the rest being run by people as a hobby rather than a business. Still, ten percent of a million is 100,000, so there’s a lot of good content out there.

But, as with everything, there are some far-edge-of-the-bell-curve extraordinary flawless gems.

Gerard Van der Leun’s American Digest is one of those. His blog has been at the top of my “True Excellence” blogroll since I first stumbled upon it several years ago. AD just turned seven, which is (as I’ve said) like 49 in blog years. Here’s an example of the reason Gerard’s site is one of the best in the ‘sphere: PUDDY: The Gift. Go read. Have some Kleenex handy. And read the comments, especially. All the way to the bottom.

Then go here and wish American Digest a happy birthday.

Blame Torchwood

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I know I owe one Überpost, but blame it on Torchwood. I’m almost through the series, and I can’t stop watching it, despite all the bad gun-handling and every Hollywood firearm cliché ever used.

Two episodes left!

Update: Holy sh!t.

Yup I Need a Small Base Sizer Die

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When I took the M25 to the range a couple of weeks ago, I noted that my handloads would NOT chamber. I thought I hadn’t sized them quite enough, as I didn’t have the rifle to test them in, nor a case gauge to measure them against.

That was not, no pun intended, the case. As the first commenter noted, the chamber on the M25 is cut smaller than SAAMI spec. The base of the reloads measure 0.470,” which is correct for a SAAMI-spec chamber. The base of the Black Hills commercial stuff I bought measures 0.464.” That .006″ is enough to make the difference between a round that will chamber and one that won’t. Unfortunately, my standard RCBS dies won’t size tighter than 0.470″ so I’m stuck. I need a small-base die, or I won’t be reloading for the M25.

Damn, and I was hoping they’d both shoot the same ammo. I should’ve known better.

Anyone out there familiar with RCBS’s small-base X-die? That looks like something I might buy.

I Really Have to Apologize

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I’m still working on my response to James Kelly, because – frankly – he deserves my best effort.

Don’t read into that something that isn’t there.

I’ve started and restarted the essay at least a half-dozen times, and during that period James has written not one, but two new pieces, as have others.

One piece I think everyone should read is by Nate of Guns and Bullets!, In conflicts of vision, temperament wins the day. Some of you will recognize yourselves there, I hope.

I have said more than once that we are often our own worst enemies, but that I understand the anger and frustration that results from what has been described as “a decades-long slow-motion hate crime” against gun owners. I have endeavored to avoid that here unless provoked first, and James has not provoked.

So I owe him an honest and thorough response. I find it interesting that when we started this exchange back in April of last year, James characterized it as :

. . . an utterly pointless discussion . . .

but he agreed to engage, and did so in a follow-up post, which was followed by 84 comments at the end of which he declared:

My position is now that the debate is closed at this site.

However, since then he has written an additional seven posts (to my, I believe, three) and he has remained civil in all of them. (A bit snarky, but civil.)

I have accepted that James and I have different first principles, and that our discussion on the topic of gun control will not (nor did I ever expect it to) convince either of us to change our position on the topic. The purpose remains to provide a forum for those looking for understanding to see the two sides presented as well as possible, with all warts and flaws exposed, so that they may decide for themselves.

I remain convinced, as does James, that my side of the argument is the most compelling. I’ve met very few people who have gone from being gun-rights supporters to gun control advocates, but many (like Nate and Weer’d Beard) who have been convinced by exposure to the facts that gun control – well, let Nate say it, since he did it so well:

I was turned from collectivism to individualism during several years’ worth of disastrous college experiences in communal living and unpleasant but forced interactions with a sociopathic collectivist. My faith in my new beliefs was further reinforced by enrollment in several economics courses, and when I landed a good job that earned me more money than my friends, I was dismayed by their jealousy and resentment. Then I bought my first gun, and things snowballed from there.

You could show me all the facts in the world that individualism and gun ownership make society unsafe and I still wouldn’t be convinced that human freedom is worth curtailing. Just as we tried bombarding Mr. Kelly with facts showing that his favored restrictions were the culprit of the UK’s rising crime wave, it didn’t make a difference to him. I can’t blame him for this because we all do the same.

In James’ latest piece, he asked:

One of the issues I raised with Kevin Baker’s Fan Club the other day in my ten question challenge was suicide, and whether restrictions on gun ownership wouldn’t be an effective way of making it harder for people to take their own lives. This (remarkably) is the only one of the ten questions that anyone has felt able to respond to so far, seventy-two hours into the challenge, and the response came from Kevin himself, in the form of a link to a long blog post he wrote on the subject in 2004. With characteristic theatricality, the post claims to establish indisputable proof that there is no problem whatever – despite this being an issue over which, on further investigation, it turns out there is significant academic dispute. However, when I thought about it some more, the question that really intrigued me was why Kevin would have gone to all the trouble of writing that post six years ago.

Because it’s people like Nate I want to reach. It’s for people like Nate that I started writing this blog seven years ago.

I’m not at all surprised that what James took from that piece was the (mistaken) belief that my intent was to prove “that there is no problem whatever.” It was not. It was to illustrate that the claims of the other side are not provable. That those claims do not stand up to investigation. That those simple, obvious, commonsense propositions aren’t so simple, obvious, or commonsense when examined against reality. That when you dig into the facts, it can cause honest, undecided, openminded people to reconsider their positions. To once again quote Colin Greenwood from that piece that James found “incomprehensible, logic-bending,” and “pseudo-scientific”:

At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory controls on the private ownership of firearms are irrelevant to the problem of armed crime; yet that is precisely what the evidence shows. Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a particular type of weapon.

The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is small, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. Controls have had serious effects on legitimate users of firearms, but there is no case, either in the history of this country or in the experience of other countries in which controls can be shown to have restricted the flow of weapons to criminals, or in any way reduced crime.

As James said in his opening piece, his arguments are honest, and come from “deeply-held principles.” Of this, I have no doubt. But I am used to being lied to by my opponents, and admit that this is the default reaction I have developed over the years. So my apologies, James, if I offended.

And my apologies to my readers (my “fan club” as James styles them) for once again delaying the next Überpost. James will, undoubtedly, find it “incomprehensible” and “logic-bending,” but I’m expecting that. I’m not writing it for him. I’m writing it for people like Nate who I hope will join us in the fight against those who wish to curtail human freedom in the name of making us feel safe.