More Math on Guns

Today's anti-gun front-page story at WaPo is titled, "Guns are found in US schools each day. The number is soaring." 

The number proves to be 1,150, almost all of them found by security without being fired. That's actually a tremendous success story about the way our schools have become safer by instituting security practices that effectively address a threat. A very good tale! If all beggars could tell such a good one, they might find me kinder.

There are over 128,000 schools in America, so this number also means that in 99.17% of American schools, no guns appeared -- and in the 0.83% where they did, they were mostly recovered without incident.

According to ATF data, there are 474 million guns in private hands in America, so that means that 99.9998% of American guns were not so involved, whereas only 0.0002% of those guns ended up in such (mostly successful) incidents.

Really, those numbers ought to be astonishing in exactly the opposite of the way the Post would like.

UPDATE: The ability to conceptualize numbers and scale is something gun control advocates often seem to actively work against. 

“The Massachusetts League of Women Voters supports HD.4607,” Art Desloges, speaking on behalf of the group, told the committee. “Statistically we have the lowest gun death rates nationwide, but gun violence archive reports 83 people killed by firearms in the Commonwealth through July of this year. We must get to zero. Even one person lost to gun violence is too many.”

The economic Law of Diminishing Returns suggests that getting from "the lowest in the nation" to "zero" will require approximately infinite effort. 

Here's a good round number, though: how about 100% opposition to this gun control law from the police? 

The state’s police chiefs do not support the Legislature’s efforts to strengthen Massachusetts gun laws — and it’s unanimous.

Mark Leahy, former chief of the Northboro Police Department and the executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, said his organization recently met and voted to come out against Bill HD.4607, or An Act modernizing firearm laws.

The bill simply won’t reduce crime, Leahy said.

“Earlier today our membership met. We ultimately polled our members concerning HD.4607 and the result was an unprecedented unanimous vote to not support this bill,” Leahy told the House Ways and Means Committee Tuesday.

Representing all 351 Bay State cities and towns and more than 100 university police departments, the law enforcement organization was joined by dozens of gun rights advocates and constitutionalists in opposing the gun control bill during a hearing held Tuesday.

How Fragile is America?

The prior post was about a report put together by The Wise in 2019. This was their definition of "fragility" as regards states.

Fragility

According to the Fragility Study Group, fragility can be defined as “the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government.” Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to disruptive shocks.

Now 2019 was before COVID, the 2020 "irregular" election, and a lot of other things. The US social contract has broken down a great deal. 

Our local pharmacy is in the front of a grocery store, so you end up sitting out in public while getting you flu shot. One of our older firefighters walked in while I was getting mine, and came over to talk to me for a moment. He said that this would be his first year in fifty years of not getting a flu shot, but, "I don't trust 'em anymore." That's a shame, because he's now of an age where the flu shot might actually save his life. You can put that to the whole cycle of saying things that weren't true about the COVID vaccine: it'll stop you from getting it, it'll stop the spread, it's "safe" and "effective" though it causes heart problems especially in young men and it doesn't actually work as promised. The second-order effects of all that lying by the highest levels of the government may never be overcome.

So too the effects of the sudden setting-aside of the social contract and constitutional order from that period. The most lasting effect of those set-asides is the result of the election, which was decided based on unconstitutional alterations of the method of voting by the executive without (as the constitution requires) consultation with the legislatures of the swing states involved. That changed everything, and nobody has forgotten it. Trust may, again, be impossible to restore. 

As for 'deficits of institutional capacity,' witness the Afghanistan withdrawal. That was the most trusted institution in the United States, the military, which has for decades stood right at the top of Gallup's Confidence in Institutions Poll. But also witness the loss of trust in the police, not only among those who sided with the George Floyd protests, but also among those who saw the police stand aside while rioters burned their cities because the police suddenly feared prosecution if they did their jobs.

Now look at just that middle bar from the graph below, on fragile states' relationship with extremisim:

Every part of that is true, right? You can each provide your own examples with only barely adjusted wording in a few cases: it's not that they've "failed to provide schools," but that they've provided schools in which sometimes no students can pass math proficiency exams. It's not only traditional religious authority that they've opposed and weakened -- it's intolerance and hate to oppose gay marriage or gay adoptions even in traditional churches in which there is a Biblical or Koranic definition of marriage, or to oppose provision of abortion even for an order of Nuns or in a Catholic hospital -- but it is certainly also those.

Pay attention to the log in one's eye, we are warned; but they walked right into it. Again, look at that list of Task Force members. They're the elites who had solid gold educations and careers, members of the Council of the Wise every one.

Failing Sun Tzu

The recent attack on Israel by Hamas and Iran gives us an occasion to review the failures of those whose job it was to prevent such things. They fail Sun Tzu's core dictum to "know thyself, and thy enemy." 

Consider, for example, the findings of this blue-ribbon panel called the "Task force on Extremism in Fragile States." It was published in February of 2019, so we can consider it a kind of five-year plan by the very people who got us into this mess (read the list of task force members), on the subject of how to get us out of it. 

It has three top-level recommendations, none of which survived contact with the bureaucracy. The main recommendation is to create an "initiative" to align all the various government authorities and agencies to address the problem. I have seen versions of this suggestion in high-powered 'how do we tackle extremism?' reports since the Defense Science Board report of 2004 that thought military strategic communications should be moved from the Pentagon to the Strategic Command in the hope of aligning various authorities and powers on psychological operations, information operations, public affairs, public diplomacy, etc., etc., in a way that would combat extremism.

Like everything else we've tried, after twenty years it hasn't worked. Reforming the ossified Federal government is beyond the strength of even the most well-respected, elite, tied-in-to-power clique. Neither did Congress undertake any of their priorities. It was, like all these panels, a complete waste of time and attention. The bureaucracy is too old, too stiff, and too unwilling to yield either money or power to allow itself to be reformed, or to accept a higher authority that would "align" it. Even where new bureaucracies are stood up on top of other ones -- Homeland Security, the ODNI -- the old bureaucracies maintain their independence and carry on as before. The top-level just generates paperwork.

As for Congress, it is not really interested in governing. Congressmen are interested in money, but actual governance they like to delegate to the executive branch.

This is failure to know thyself.

As for the enemy, there is also the usual problem of clarity of thought. The definitions of "extremism" and "fragility" are given in part III.

Extremism

As used by this Task Force, “extremism” refers to a wide range of absolutist and totalitarian ideologies. “Extremists” believe in and advocate for replacing existing political institutions with a new political order governed by a doctrine that denies individual liberty and equal rights to citizens of different religious, ethnic, cultural, or economic backgrounds. “Violent extremists” espouse, encourage, and perpetrate violence as they seek to create their extremist political order. Extremism is not unique to any one culture, religion, or geographic region....

Fragility

According to the Fragility Study Group, fragility can be defined as “the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government.” Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to disruptive shocks. Fragility also enables transnational crime, fuels humanitarian crises, and impedes trade and development.

Now the problem that they're really interested in they also name as "Salafi-jihadist," but they really want that last sentence: "Extremism is not unique to any one culture, religion, or geographic region." So instead of tackling what is already a very big problem, they elect to obscure it into a much larger category, which would require even more resources and moving parts to tackle. 

Along the way, they make a striking concession to relatively hard-right American critics like the Center for Security Policy (which the SPLC considers a hate group, a label they haven't yet followed the DOJ/ATF in wrongly assigning to the Hells Angels). It is only on the hard-right that one sees Islamic politics described as "totalitarian." In fact that description is understandable but incorrect: Islam's political philosophy is medieval, not a modern project like totalitarianism, and it only intends to assign totalizing power to God. Like totalitarian modern politics, Islamists like the Taliban or Iran do intend to encroach on what Westerners consider private matters -- sexuality, the appropriateness of music or art, and so forth. They do not imagine the kind of actual observation and control of all aspects of life that is coming into practice in the Chinese social credit system, or even in our own alliance between social media tech firms and the major government bureaucracies. They also envision a degree of tolerance -- coupled with submission, but tolerance -- for deviations from their ideas for those of certain protected minorities. Christians who pay the tax can worship more-or-less freely, and drink alcohol; Jews as well, at least until the end times. 

Meanwhile, the Task Force ends up excluding some other groups that I would think are more properly considered "extremists" or even "violent extremists." It was a violent anarchist who started World War I, for example, but he wouldn't qualify as an "extremist" under this definition because anarchists do not aspire to totalizing or absolutist control. The mobs that burned American cities the very year after this report came out would not have qualified as 'violent extremists' or, indeed, as extremists at all insofar as they were anarchists instead of Marxists. 

Look at this chart from page 20 for an example of lack of clarity:

Marxist totalitarians do not "cast secular governments as illegitimate," but in fact insist on secular government. They do not "use mosques" to "proselytize." They do not "propagate fundamentalist religious ideologies." By refusing to be clear about what they are even talking about, they end up lost in a fog of their own making.

Hamas is its own problem, not wisely roped in even to a discussion of "radical Islam" per se. It's unique, linked to the problem of Iran and Twelver radicalism but obviously distinct from it. It's unlike even the other radical Islamic groups opposing Israel. Trying to treat all of these as if they were symptoms of a bigger problem that's easier to name leads to ongoing lack of success at actually addressing the problem. 

This is failure to know thy enemy.

What Sun Tzu says about those who fail on both of those scores is that they will not know victory in a thousand battles. We've won a lot of gunfights, and even some things you might call "battles," like Second Fallujah or Third Mosul. We haven't won any part of the war.

I hope that Israel wins its war, but the honest truth is that they'll have a better chance if we don't try to help.

Surly Joe

I nearly always like cowboy songs, trucker songs, and biker songs. Here’s one of the former. 

Fall Color in the Mountains

It's just getting started here, still mostly green. If any of you are thinking of heading up to my mountains to see the show, here's a map that will help you plan the right dates for where you wanted to go.

Hardening the Society against Attacks

One step being taken in Israel is very wise and proper: arm the citizen militia.

“Any citizen who meets the detailed tests for carrying a private firearm due to self-defense and serving the security forces and is without a criminal or medical record will be required to undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical interview and will be able to receive permission to carry a firearm within a week,” Ben-Gvir said, according to a Google translation of the post. “(Self-defense tests: residence in an eligible settlement, rifle veterans 07 and above, officers in the rank of lieutenant and above and combatants in the rank of major and above in the IDF and the security forces, service in special units, firefighters, policemen, and workers and volunteers in the rescue forces).”

Eligible citizens who meet the criteria can now undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical one, and they can obtain permission to carry a firearm within a week. Any citizen who received a conditional permit to purchase a firearm in 2023 but did not purchase one can now buy a firearm without reapplying. Citizens who turned in their firearms over the previous six months, because they didn’t complete renewal training, can get their weapons back. The number of bullets that can be purchased by those with conditional permits has also been doubled. Gun-carry requirements will also be loosened.

The Second Amendment is already stronger than all of that put together, but it underlines and demonstrates the worth of a citizen militia in hardening a society against even coordinated violence.  

$100MM to fix EV Chargers in "Disadvantaged" Communities

Just out of curiosity, how many EVs can a 'disadvantaged' community afford? 

Furthermore, aren't these EV chargers nearly new just by nature of the technology? How quickly do they break? 

Happy Leif Erikson Day

The 9th of October celebrates the fearless explorer. 

Ready to Burn

All cleaned up.

It’s going to be 35 here tonight, heralding cold weather down the line. I took a wire brush to all the rust on the furnace. I reblacked it after I cleaned the iron. 

I also cleaned the inside with a shovel and a shop vac. I put a new gasket on the inside of the door. Then I went outside and opened and cleaned the chimney pipe, which is double-walled steel. 

No fire tonight, but we’re ready when the time comes. 

Israel at War

Some of my left-wing acquaintances have explained that the apparently unprovoked attack on Israel today was surely a false flag actually carried out by their own government. It’s a kind of backhanded compliment: the reputation of Mossad and the IDF is such that, though they despise the current government of Israel, they cannot accept that Israel would be caught by surprise. 

I have some friends in the IDF, to whom I wish victory. 

Another Hobbit Recipe

Pork pie.

I’ll probably make the honey cakes later this week. This afternoon, I made Bombur’s request from Bilbo’s kitchen. I rendered almost the same amount of lard pre-cooking the pork as I used to make the rye short crust. 

 

Lending Library

A neighbor enrolled my community in the Little Free Library program. Her husband built the kiosk, which she asked me to paint with local Rockport flora and fauna. The Big Tree was a requirement, of course, but I also found room for a whooping crane and a ruby-throated hummingbird.

Road Dog

That's the Barnyard Stompers at the nearby (well, two hours each way, but it's on a motorcycle) Bobarossa Saloon. 

Goodbye to the Tape

The USMC doesn't use tape, never has as far as I know. The Army does that, as a way of trying to ensure that soldiers whose BMI was out of line weren't "fatbodies." The new problem is that the kids just don't have any muscle at all under the fat. 

This whole thing has been a mistake, if you ask me. Back in the '80s and early '90s, before Clinton got in, Marines looked like the professional wrestlers they took as their inspiration. I remember a Gunnery Sergeant Zieck who could have given Hulk Hogan or Macho Man Randy Savage a run for their money. 

At some point they decided to adopt BMI-based metrics in order to help Marines look good standing guard when the new President walked by. How much Clinton himself had to do with that I don't know, but by the time I was in Iraq from 2007-9 the Marines were the tiniest people there except for the Filipino laundry women contractors (who were wonderful people and good workers, but not ideal combateers). The Marines now have an eating disorder problem in order to make weight.

Recently the USMC has adopted a policy of selection, training, and policy exemptions in order to build bigger, stronger Marines -- but only to carry the bodies of fallen Marines to their graves. They have also started creating waivers for Marines who excel in the physical fitness tests to be bigger than is otherwise allowed.

It takes mass to move mass. Even for the strongest will, F=ma. 

Imaginary Time

This is another popular explanation of just what the “imaginary” numbers are doing in the wave equation: they’re accounting for the difference, in spacetime, between the three spatial dimensions and the ‘fourth’ dimension of time. You really can treat it as a graphable dimension — we used to draw the graphs as an exercise in understanding special relativity— but the fourth dimension has different qualities than the first three. It turns out that the nature of the imaginary number aligns with these. 

I realize James doesn’t really like the connotations of “imaginary,” but it’s what they’re called. I didn’t make that up. You can call them something else.

Spotted-Tail Quoll

If you have not heard of this animal, that’s because it’s been considered extinct for well over a century. Until this Australian farmer caught one, that is. 

Around here they say the panthers that gave Panthertown its name and the red wolves that Wolf Mountain was named after are extinct. People keep reporting sitings, though. 

Appalachian Woman

Hate Crimes and HAMC

Likely most of you, not being from California, didn't hear about this incident. Fortunately, no one was killed; but the ATF jumped in on what was clearly a local matter and turned it into a Federal "hate crime." The intent seems to be to paint the motorcycle club as a version of the Klan, a ‘hate group’ in need of destruction. 

Sose the Ghost, as this fellow is called, is himself Latino and doesn't buy a word of that "hate crimes" talk. He spoke to one of the involved parties, as he details in this clip. 

Now, many of you probably won't like the aesthetics of this clip. Nevertheless, he makes some excellent points here -- including that the basic facts being alleged are demonstrably false. Many of his best points, I note, are aimed at understanding across cultural and racial divides. Some of them would be very surprising (perhaps even inconceivable, in The Princess Bride's terms) to many: that militias aren't per se hate groups, but are tied to a traditional Constitutional right; that the Confederate flag might be a symbol of heritage and home not only for white Southerners, but for black ones he has met and spoken to about it. 

Other times he's talking about human universals, such as how all peoples are likely to stand up and defend their women against strangers who are harassing them. This sort of talk is the opposite of the racial division that we are told we are supposed to expect.

Now we were talking recently about the misuse of RICO by the Feds, famously also against this particular motorcycle club; here we're seeing the misuse of 'hate crimes' legislation (if indeed there is any correct use of what is essentially a criminalization of thoughts allegedly thunk). As Sose points out towards the beginning in talking about the Proud Boys, the effect is to define whole parts of American politics out of bounds. Criminalizing them is a short step afterwards. 

Is this a reasonable way to think about our Federal law enforcement? Funny you should ask. 

“Sociopolitical developments — such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence — will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence,” the [FBI] report [establishing a new category of 'domestic terrorism'] stated.

Newsweek noted that each of the threats listed by federal authorities is closely associated with the MAGA Republicans who support Trump.

It's a short jump from painted-with-disapproval to criminal prosecution these days, whether for "hate crimes" or "domestic terror." One might reasonably defend those facing less than credible accusations in the hope of winning space for others disfavored by the powerful; perhaps even anyone who gains such disfavor. 

UPDATE: I remembered that the Hells Angels had a documentary made about them that released in 1983. There's a section where the filmmakers asked them directly about race relations. Language and general content warning for this entire film, but it's directly relevant.

       

Now that was forty years ago, and it leads with Sandy -- the New York City Charter President of the Hells Angels -- stating that while some members were prejudiced, he "believes deeply that you judge a man by his behavior, not his color." That's not a hate group, not when four decades ago they were choosing themselves leaders who were rejecting racial prejudice even among the often racially-charged violence of 70s/80s NYC. 

After some back and forth -- there's one of their lawyers, who says his initial impression was that they were a bunch of fascists 'but it's not true!' -- you actually see one of them wearing a t-shirt with a swastika and the words, "WHITE POWER." They ask him about why he's wearing it, and he says one of his brothers gave it to him, so he's going to wear it. Then they all have a big debate about what it actually means, and whether it should be "German power," but it's clear they're all drunk and probably high as well. Nobody has a speech prepared about white power or supremacy; even the worst guy they found is making excuses for it and laughing along with everybody else about having the guts to wear it in defiance of normal mores.

It's a pretty remarkable documentary, and this is the worst part of it. Most people would try to put forward the good and hide the bad about themselves; that's human nature. They seem to be willing to put it all out there, so you can judge for yourself how bad (and how good) they are. That part, at least, is praiseworthy.

That also happens to be the subject of my favorite line in the documentary, which comes from no less than Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia, who was performing at one of their events. Asked if he's scared of them, he affirms that he is. Asked why, he answers, "Because they're scary, man!" But then the goes on to explain how much he respects how honest they are about who and what they are, which includes being unwilling to put up with people acting like fools. 

Life Expectancy by American Class

If you use college as a rough proxy for social class in America -- which is indeed very rough, given how big the deltas are for those who went to Ivy League schools, ordinary public colleges, versus small regional state schools, versus community colleges that issue mostly near-vocational degrees in nursing or radiology and the like -- you get a picture in which those below the college class are really suffering.

It is this grim trend of shortening life expectancy among Americans without college degrees that explains why the U.S.'s mortality rate is a stark outlier among rich nations, far lower than countries such as Japan and Switzerland.... "It is the experience of those without college degrees that accounts for America’s failure."...

Case and Deaton note that they've found no precedent for this college divide in modern history except "in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union." 

There's a graph about two-thirds of the way through the piece that shows how big an outlier this is, the second of two graphs. 

What Evidence of Race?

As an aside, a co-blogger  at Instapundit made the following statement:

The American Anthropological Association now wants to pretend that there are not two biological sexes, which is even more appalling than the group’s earlier decision to pretend that there is no such thing as race (never mind the genomic evidence revealing five distinguishable races).

Is there such evidence? My understanding of the science is in accord with this National Academy paper. As far as I know, all attempts to define race or account for it scientifically have failed for all the hundreds of years it’s been attempted. 

This isn’t a matter of fashion, and therefore unlikely to be the result of cognitive bias, either. At one time all the Wise believed in race, and couldn’t account for it; now none of them do, and still can’t. In the early 20th Century the same people who advocated for Darwin also were committed to race theory; generations before aristocracy used it to explain their commitment to slavery as a sort of humanitarianism. Now scientists are mostly on the Left (social science up to 44-1 Dem/Rep), and they want to use race too, for “anti-racist” action. It’s still not definable. 

Is that understanding challenged by new evidence? I’m genuinely not aware of whatever this co-blogger is so confident in referencing.