LOLtastic RT @PopSci: On the probability of aliens dressed as nuns visiting Las Vegas flip.it/yKpHo
bshirley
January 21, 2014
Category Archives: inthenews
bshirley
January 18, 2014
dental floss tycoon found after 15-year manhunt flip.it/LOysK
bshirley
January 17, 2014
TLDR #11 – RIP Vile Rat – awesome feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia
Mantle of Leadership
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Yesterday Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he is not running for reelection.
It was an announcement he was expecting to make after the legislative season, but was forced to make in this second special session because the Republicans tripped on their hubris trying to pass oppressive abortion laws at the last second of the first special session.
He needed to get this announcement made because all the other Republicans in Texas politics need to start shuffling for their job upgrades and needed to know his plans so they could make theirs.
Last week Perry announced he had something to announce. Since then, people have been speculating. Most Texas watchers supposed he would be doing as he did. It humored me that CNN reported in the other direction. Continue reading
Marriage Equality is a No Brainer
Today there are two very important cases being discussed at the US Supreme Court. Whether the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed under President Clinton is constitutional. It’s not, and Clinton has publicly said as much recently. And whether California’s Prop 8, which bans gay marriage, is discriminatory with be discussed as well.
It has long been my contention that the discussion of marriage equality for non heterosexual couples is largely hindered my nomenclature. The meaning of the word marriage is doing (at least) double duty. I propose we retire the word and replace it with two others: r-marriage and g-marriage. Or minimally, footnote our discussions to clarify what it is we are saying when we say “marriage”.
For millennia there has been r-marriage. Marriage within a religious context. It is sacred, and for many it is a bond before god that will not be broken until the death of one of the members.
For several hundred years we’ve been living under law that attempts to separate church and state. Despite that we have legally defined g-marriage, Government Marriage. This is something that requires government documents, and government fees, and when the relationship is terminated more government fees and documents, and perhaps facilitation by government judges.
There are hundreds of other rights conferred to people who are g-married. These rights have nothing to do with religion; they could mostly be boiled down to fiscal issues. These are the rights that are under debate.
No one is trying to change anything regarding r-marriage. Churches will not be forced to marry anyone they believe is unworthy before god to be married. No one!
I question whether the government should even acknowledge marriage. I would abolish it. But that’s a radical point of view. As mentioned, there are hundreds of laws referencing these 2-person bondings. Removing the g-marriage concept would effect all these historical laws. Indeed I wonder if the limit of the relationship to 2 people will continue in the distant future.
But there is no doubt the laws conferred by our secular legal system should not be confined by the moral codes of any religion. Accordingly, there is absolutely no reason to restrict g-marriage on r-marriage’s standards. Any two people should be able to marry under the eyes of our government, and under the eyes (or not) of any god they espouse.
When you hear people arguing about this issue, try to mentally flag when they’re using the word to mean one thing or the other.
One Unwanted Gun Gone is a Good Thing
The back and forth on gun safety regulation is going strong and I expect it to continue earnestly through January if not longer. I hope something come’s of it.
Today in an NBC article there was a 2008 quote from a representative of the New Speak named Independent Institute. NBC News describes them as “conservative”, which seem reasonable given the quote. The Institute itself claims to be non-partisan and says it “sponsors in-depth studies of critical social and economic issues”.
So, if the studies are in-depth, the quotes coming from their Research Director are a bit hyperbolic if not all out lies.
“It’s like trying to drain the Pacific with a bucket,” Alex Tabarrock of the conservative Independent Institute told USA Today in 2008. There are an estimated 310 million guns in the U.S. — about one for every U.S. resident.
I would certainly not accuse Mr. Tabarrock of being a scientist.
There are legitimate questions as to whether gun buy-backs are useful or successful. It depends greatly on how you would measure the success. It seems the same people that would say “if we get one criminal off the streets, we’re doing good” aren’t willing to extend that tenuous logic to “if we get one weapon of possible death off the street, we’re doing good.”
If we even accept the sisyphian challenge false dichotomy Mr. Tabarrock presents us with, one intimating that unless we remove every gun from circulation that gun crimes will not be diminished, we should look at the numbers he is trying to scare us with.
In the last week I’ve read newspaper articles that totaled over 5,000 guns purchased back from citizens. With 310M guns at large, we would have to have 61,000 such weeks, or less than 1200 years. Those are all rough numbers, but 1200 years is still a long time, and if that’s the point you’re trying to make, make it on that merit.
Now, the Pacific Ocean has 6.6 x 10^20 liters of water (1.7 x 10^20 gallons). If we’re equating buckets with the guns, and not one buy-back event, and we stipulate that a bucket is about a gallon. That would leave us with 3.4 x 10^16 weeks or 653,846,153,846,153 years to empty the Pacific Ocean. That’s 544,871,794,871 times longer than slowly, in an unorganized manner, buying back guns.
That’s a ridiculous comparison.
But the implied point is equally ridiculous. Buy back plans are not about appreciably reducing crime numbers. The point is, if there is any unwanted gun, we should get it out of circulation. All guns should be owned by responsible adults that handle and store them properly. In the same way that if you have used motor oil, we need to provide a safe place for you to dump it, if you no longer want to be responsible for maintaining your gun, we should make it easy for you to get rid of it. Responsibly.