It completely snuck up on me, but Chicago Restaurant Week starts today! Yum! Of course, this is my first time as a vegetarian so we’ll see how well it goes.
For those of you not in the know, Restaurant Week is a week of semi-affordable fixed price menu items at over 250 of the Chicagoland area’s best restaurant (and the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company). It’s a great opportunity to try that really expensive restaurant that you always wanted to go to but can’t really afford.
It’s time to eat!
David Mamet has an article in Newsweek calling for a State with maximum guns. He starts out quoting Karl Marx so you know where this is going. And fast. It is chock full of gems like this:
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime.
I had forgotten how many cities of similar size as Chicago are in Texas, Florida, and Arizona. D.C. is certainly an outlier, but if you actually look at gun deaths by state, you get pretty much exactly what you’d expect. The States normally associated with gun right have the most gun deaths.
You should also read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “David Mamet and the Irrelevant Meaning of Actual Words” post. It has gems such as this:
The message one derives from this is that power gives you the privilege of lying. If you are big enough, if your name rings out far enough, you may make words mean whatever you want them to mean. I experience this as a kind of violence against language. If we can’t agree on the meaning of “is,” then we have no ability to talk. And if we have no ability to talk, we really are that much closer to guns.
That is why I have a man-crush on him. We, like David Mamet, are a people capable of massive intellectual laziness. It’s no wonder so many of us think we need guns.
One complaint you will often see from gun rights people is that there are many countries that have banned guns and their crime rates are much higher than in the United States. Often, Great Britain is used as an example. According to the “statistics”, Great Britain has a violent crime rate of 2,034 per 100,000 people while the U.S. has a violent crime rate of 466 per 100,000 people. Great Britain has banned all guns thus banning weapons doesn’t deter crime! Point. Set. Match.
This is what happens when people who don’t understand statistics use statistics. The problem here is that violent crime in the United States is measured much differently than it is in Great Britain. The U.S. only counts four crimes as violent: murder/manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Our friends across the pond, on the other hand, also count all sexual crimes, all minor assaults like bar fights, and even threats against a person. It’s no wonder Great Britain looks so violent.
The reality is that, since banning guns, Great Britain’s violent crime rate has plummeted (pdf). One might want to assume that the banning of guns is related to the drop in violent crime. One would be wrong. Violent crime has been steadily dropping in almost every first world country for well over a decade. There is absolutely no correlation between violent crime and guns.
The United States has, by far, the highest gun ownership rate in the world. We are also 10th in the world in the number of gun deaths. Many people would argue that, if guns were so dangerous, shouldn’t we be first? Look at that list. Almost every country above us has an active drug war going on. Drug wars, by the way, that are being fought because of our horrific drug laws here in the United States. You have to go down to 19th place, Switzerland, to find another country with an extremely stable government. It should come as no surprise that Switzerland has the third highest gun ownership rate.
Outside of leisurely pursuits, guns can only be used for one purpose: to kill a human being. And while it is true that murders and suicides will always happen, widespread ownership of guns makes it trivially easy to accomplish.
A post from Andrew Sullivan gets to the heart of a question that I have never understood. There are many Christians out there that think owning a gun for self-defense is compatible with Christianity. It’s as if they’ve never heard the phrase “turn the other cheek”.
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.
I don’t think the Bible could be any clearer that killing someone, even in self-defense, is wrong. And yet you have people who not only think guns and Christianity are compatible but that they are perfectly intertwined. That’s why we have an incredibly religious armed forces. I have news for you. You can kill in the name of your country. You can’t kill in the name of Jesus. That’s not how Christianity works.
Tom Harkin (D-IA) is retiring and will not seek reelection in 2014. This is good news for science. The Republicans get all the publicity for their wacky “scientific” theories and complete disassociation from reality, but you’d be hard pressed to find an individual who did more harm to actual people than Tom Harkin. He has used his position to promote the worst of “alternative” medicines. (You know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work? Medicine. – Tim Minchin) He also was a major backer of creating the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) within the NIH giving alternative medicine a undeserved prestige by associating it with an organization that does good science. He then was critical of the agency when it went on to disprove many of the “alternative” medicines that Harkin endorses.
So good riddance, Senator Harkin! Science will be much better off without you.
I love a good mocking of the college Greek system just as much as the next guy, but Gin and Tacos sure does it right. In the Greek system’s defense, what is actually being mocked is the parallels to Conservatism and the Greek system. Apparently, it turns out that organizations of mostly white males tend to be more conservative than others. Who’da thunk? It also turns out that fraternities feel persecuted because they never get as much credit for the good works they perform as they do for the sexual assaults or the binge drinking or the pledge week deaths. News flash, good doesn’t matter if you continue to do evil. But, but, but, tradition!
A Federal Appeals Court ruled on Friday that President Obama’s recess appointment of three National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) members was unconstitutional. If this is actually upheld, we will be declaring ourselves ungovernable.
Here’s some backstory. The NLRB is a five person panel that mediates unfair labor practices and conducts union elections. In order for the NLRB to make decisions, at least three board members must be in attendance. By the end of 2011, due to term expirations, there were only two members left on the board. Republicans filibustered the President’s three nominees effectively making the NLRB useless since it couldn’t call a quorum. Republicans, using a technicality, also refused to recess the Senate for the Christmas holidays which should prevent President Obama from making recess appointments. Despite that, Obama declared that the Senate was actually in recess and made three recess appointments to the NLRB. The NLRB now had the quorum it needed to conduct business and it has been doing so ever since. The Federal Appeals Court’s ruling said that Obama’s appointments were unconstitutional.
If the Appeals Court ruling stands, every decision the NLRB has made in the past year will be invalidated. Every case that was decided will have to be redone on top of all the new cases that come before the board. Assuming, of course, that Republicans will actually allow a vote for new board members. Which is suspect. This effectively makes unions useless. Which was probably the plan all along.
One of the major complaints that come from people who are in favor of cutting welfare is that the poor have too much stuff. After all, almost 100% of really poor people have a refrigerator.
It’s easy to make fun of idiotic attacks like that. Really easy. But, like all effective attacks, there is a sliver of truth to it. Poor people do have more stuff. Mostly, this is because the middle class has more stuff. And the middle class has more stuff because the cost of stuff really hasn’t gone up much even as the purchasing power of the middle class has stagnated. The middle class gets a new refrigerator and the poor get a still functioning old refrigerator for dirt cheap.
What is hidden in all of this is the one thing that we haven’t figured out how to recycle. Time. Specifically, family time. The total hours of time worked per family has increased steadily in the United States. As Paul Krugman points out, you may be tempted to say that is to be expected with more women joining the work force. Europe has pretty much the same employment rates as the U.S., though, and their total hours worked has dropped steadily.
So we now have a middle class that has slightly more stuff than they used to be able to have but at the expense of much less family time. You would think that the party that attempts to claim a monopoly on “family values” would want to address an issue as important as this.
(h/t Chris Clarke)
This is pretty awesome. Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?
This Scenes From A Multiverse comic is eerily familiar. It’s about evolution, but replace that with just about any other “contentious” scientific subject and you’ll find yourself in the same boat. People have a root level fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain thing works and yet they still choose to take a stand and build their world view around that misinformed opinion. We are, as a people, so afraid to simply say, “I don’t know enough about that to form an opinion”. Instead, we take the misinformed opinions of someone we mistakenly trust and use them as our own. That is, unfortunately, how reality works.