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June 30, 2008

Reality Check: legal handguns & collateral damage

2000 data from the NYPD found that officers involved in actual on-the-job shootings hit their target less than 16% of the time. And they train regularly at shooting ranges. How much worse would it be among the average gun owner who shoots their weapons much less often?

Additionally, an FBI study found a .223 Remington from a rifle had less chance of over-penetration than a 9mm Luger handgun round. Meaning that even if the handgun bullet finds it's intended target it's more likely, with some, but not all, calibers, to pass through and strike something else.

Last but not least, handgun accuracy is notoriously less than that of rifles even when the weapon is being handled by a bonafide marksman.

As I have stated elsewhere, I fully support the individual's right to own and bear non-handgun firearms.

My question is: Where, in your view, does your apparent right to own and bear that subset of arms known as a handgun butt into my right to not be wounded or killed by stray bullets?

Posted by Kevin at 11:00 AM |

Don't Confuse Them with the Facts

Eli Saslow has written an excellent piece at MSNBC that looks at the rumor mill surrounding Barack Obama and its impact on voters' opinions in one town in Ohio. I have been on the receiving end of numerous chain emails about Obama, including all sorts of unfounded personal smears such as that he is a Muslim Manchurian candidate - and all from dear friends and family members, most of whom are "Christian." Saslow takes the reader on a visit to one patriotic town and shows why Obama is facing an uphill battle, even among many Democrats. I think the reason can be found in this paragraph from his report:

Gerri Kish, a 66-year-old born in Hawaii, read both of Obama's autobiographies. She has close friends, she said, who still refuse to believe her when she swears Obama is Christian. Then she hands them the books, and they refuse to read them. "They just want believe what they believe," she said. "Nothing gets through to them."

As I have written here several times before, this is a matter of willful ignorance. It is idiotic, fearful, and downright shameful. Many wonderful people whom I love have fallen for the nonsense spewed by the rumor mill in this election and simply will not be dissuaded. It is truly disappointing to me to learn at the ripe old age of 44 that my parents' generation does not wish to engage the brain power and personal initiative required to think logically and, therefore, is easily manipulated by this shrewd, unAmerican, hate-filled, racist propaganda campaign by power-hungry blood-suckers. It absolutely disgusts me. That is not to say I am 100% sold on an Obama presidency; I disagree with him on many issues and lean his way more out of hope for honest and inspired leadership than anything else.

So let me turn your attention to another editorial, this one about the character of John McCain. And I will state that as much as I have disagreed with McCain, particularly his evolution from a "maverick" to a right-wing Republican, I can still see much to be admired in his character. I think it is a travesty that this contest has descended into an ugly choice for many between two "evils" when we could actually be making a choice between two good men, either of whom could make us proud of our country. But I suppose that wouldn't be nearly as dramatic, would it?

Posted by Becky at 09:30 AM |

June 27, 2008

Morality Turning the Religious Toward the Left

Macleans has a tantalizing article today about the indications that America's Christians are increasingly turning away from the "Religious Right" (GOP) and toward the more moral left. No need for me to analyze it here, but this excerpt leapt off the page for me because addresses two key points that are largely why I have wondered in awe at the continued support of Christians for the Bush Administration:

"Evangelicals are waking up to the idea that abortion is not the only moral issue. I've heard a lot of evangelicals say that whether we've had a Bush or a Clinton in the office, we've had not much change on the issue of abortion, but we've had an immoral approach to war — and I'm ready for that to stop," says Stephen Mansfield, a conservative evangelical writer who authored the bestselling spiritual biography of the current President, The Faith of George W. Bush. "The average evangelical does not see the Bush administration carrying out a Christian policy on the issue of torture. The idea you would torture a body made in the image of God is abhorrent."

The article also gives credit to Obama's willingness to speak frankly about his religious views in comparison with McCain's awkwardness in the subject. It is well worth the read and full of juicy tidbits. Like this one:

... Douglas Kmiec, a former assistant attorney general under the Reagan administration who crafted Reagan's anti-abortion policies. Kmiec is a well-known pro-life conservative Roman Catholic who endorsed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney during the Republican primary contest, but now backs Obama.

The shift is not tremendously large, but may be large enough to swing a few percentage points of the Christian voter Obama's way.

Posted by Becky at 01:36 PM |

June 26, 2008

Gun rights - y'all are nuts

I'm sure everyone has heard about the SCOTUS ruling lifting the Washington D.C. ban on handguns. I disagree with it. In fact, I find Justice Scalia's opinion intellectually vacuous. But I also disagree with D.C's law requiring that rifles and shotguns, while legal to keep, had to be disassembled.

Striking the requirement that rifles and shotguns be disassembled would have met Scalia's claims of a "historical narrative" supporting an individual's right to bear arms since both rifles and shotguns are, by definition, "arms." Which goes to the heart of why his opinion is intellectually vacuous - he treats handguns as necessary to meeting the definition of "arms" without actually coming out and saying so in so many words.

Scalia also argued that handguns are the preferred weapon for self-defense because they allow one to hold the gun with one hand and dial with the other. Setting aside the inherent dangers of holding one's finger on the trigger of a loaded weapon while diverting attention elsewhere (violation of fundamental gun safety guidelines)... I've shot plenty of rifles and shotguns and they are no more difficult to hold with one hand than a handgun is. So that part of his opinion doesn't hold any water IMHO.

I've long supported (and still do) both the limitation/prohibition on handgun ownership AND the individual's right to own and bear rifles and shotguns. Heck, I'd be perfectly fine with us going back to rifle racks in the back windows of vehicles. Just put 'em out there where I can see them and thus make INFORMED decisions based on that knowledge.

We need look no further than the recent shooting deaths of half a dozen people at that Kentucky plastics plant to see why I hold the views that I do.

The shooter apparently pulled a handgun on his supervisor as he was being escorted out of the facility and shot the supervisor dead. It seems pretty obvious that the supervisor didn't know the guy had a handgun on him because they are so easily hidden. Which is why I favor handgun restrictions.

As long as I have a reasonable opportunity to discover for myself that you are packing heat... then I'm okay with it. You have a right to defend yourself and I have a right to defend myself with the knowledge that you've got a gun.

Posted by Kevin at 12:47 PM |

What Obama really thinks of Smith

Posted by Kevin at 08:18 AM |

June 25, 2008

What Took Her So Long?

Today, Queen Elizabeth II revoked Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's knighthood. And all I could think was why did she wait until now?

Mugabe was made an honorary knight in Britain in 1994. Sure, at that time we had not yet seen the full measure of his evil, but it is surprising to me that the Queen would bestow any honor on him when we already had seen so much evil.

More than 20,000 Ndebele civilians were killed by Mugabe's North-Korean trained 5th Brigade during the "Gukurahundi" (which translates to "the early rain that washes away the chaff") beginning in 1982. I was in Zimbabwe in the middle of Ndebele territory at the time. His soldiers were terrorizing the people - wrapping them in thatch and burning them alive, among other horrors.

That was twelve years before the good Queen knighted Mugabe.

She allowed him to retain his knighthood despite his country's collapse into hell. Since 1995 - one year after his knighthood - we have known Zimbabweans' life expectancy was dropping spectacularly. Today, Zimbabweans have the lowest life expectancy of any nation - 37 years for men and 34 for women.

The Queen also allowed Mugabe to retain his knighthood despite his leading the country into such massive extremes of hyperinflation as to outrank everyone else in the world - it is right now at 100,000%.

His country used to be the bread basket of Africa, but now a third of its population relies on food aid to keep from starving to death. Apparently, this didn't bother the Queen, either.

It seems what troubles her is that Morgan Tsvangirai has dropped out of the Presidential race because after years of arrests and torture himself, not to mention assassination attempts and assassinations of those around him, none of which deterred him from pressing forward in his effort to save his country, he decided he could not enter the presidency at the price of further brutalization and murder of his fellow Zimbabweans at the direction of Mugabe. Without Tsvangirai in the race, the killing can end, at least for now.

Maybe that's the whole problem. Mugabe took things a little too far for the rest of the world to stomach and now the slow decimation of a nation of black people is over. We can't be having that, can we?

Posted by Becky at 04:43 PM |

June 23, 2008

Nuclear power as a stopgap to geothermal power

I started to dig into what John McCain's energy policy is vis-a-vis renewable energy. But then I realized that his policy tomorrow may not be the same as it is today or the same as it'll be the day after tomorrow. He has recently called for building 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. But as I say, that's subject to change on a day-by-day basis.

A couple days ago, during a meeting with Governors, Barak Obama noted that nuclear power doesn't emit greenhouse gases and thus is worth devoting research dollars to. However he noted, "I don't think that nuclear power is a panacea."

An increasing number of environmentalists are calling for the nuclear option as a means of avoiding the impending global warming crisis. but only as a medium-term measure rather than as a long-term solution. James Lovelock (author of Gaia Hypothesis) and Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, are at the forefront of them.

Ausebel explains,

"As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature," he wrote. "To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

For example, it would have required windfarms covering 301,000 square miles to have met the round-the-clock American electricity demands in 2005. By 2030 our electricity demands are expected to increase by 50%.

Which brings me to The Great Forgotten Clean-Energy Source: Geothermal

If we could extract all the geothermal energy that exists underneath the United States to a depth of two miles, it would supply America’s power demands (at the current rate of usage) for the next 30,000 years.

Geothermal is considered to be decades away from being able to make a significant contribution to our electricity needs. But the reason is more financial than technical. As MIT chemical engineering professor Jefferson Tester says, "It's not as if we don't know how to drill holes and fracture rocks. But we have to demonstrate EGS on a scale that would be useful for commercial enterprise." Another part of the problem is that hunting for good candidate sites for geothermal requires the exact same skilled geologists who the Big Boys are employing hunting for more petroleum sources because that's where the big money is at... currently. Which makes it that much more difficult for the geothermal wildcatters who are currently at the forefront of the business in this country to secure the necessary talent.

Doug Glaspey, chief operating officer of U.S. Geothermal, an Idaho-based company that just finished building a 13-megawatt geothermal electrical plant in southern Idaho, says that it currently costs up to $4 million per megawatt to build a geothermal plant. The 2005 electicity demand was roughly 4 trillion megawatt hours. So the financial costs of actually building geothermal facilities are obviously daunting too. But that's largely because so little research has been put into it. Much of our technology dates back to the oil prices were sky high - the 1970s.

The bad news: "The United States alone pumped the equivalent of nearly 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005. More than 2 billion tons of that came from electricity generation."

The good news: Obama has pledged to plow $150 billion over the next 10 years into clean/cleaner energy and to double R&D funding for the same.

I know that this is heresy in some circles but I think that Lovelock and Ausebel make a lot of sense.

Posted by Kevin at 09:01 AM |

June 22, 2008

OK, Here's Why I've Come to Hate Fox News

Classic example of Fox News bias:

We have heard endlessly from Fox News about the whole "Michelle Obama said she wasn't proud of America" red herring. And how Barack Obama's "spiritual advisor" said "God damn America." And how Barack Obama didn't place his hand over his heart for the National Anthem.

Did the oh-so-patriotic Fox News tell you about John McCain's statement that he "didn't really love America"? No, of course not. It would be so easy to take the statement out of context and turn it into something explosive, as Fox News has done in all three examples above. But their extreme bias only runs one way.

So not only did Fox News not tell its readers about McCain's statement, they went so far as to completely delete the statement from a transcript of the interview in which he said it (the bold portion is the deleted portion)!

HANNITY: You spent two years of this five-and-a-half-year period in solitary confinement. What does that do to a person, to spend that much time in solitary confinement?

MCCAIN: I think it makes you a better person. Obviously, it makes you love America. I really didn't love America until I was deprived of her company.

Oh. My. God.

How long will all those patriotic, honest, American-values Republicans who listen to Fox News continue to allow themselves to be manipulated like this? Sadly, I think the answer is for fricking ever.

Posted by Becky at 07:24 PM |

June 18, 2008

Michael Totten - relinking after a long hiatus

We'd linked to Michael Totten back in the first year or so of PK. He's another one of those "centrists" that I was so fond of for a long time and who used to comment at a long-time favorite blog of mine - Centerfield. Totten also lives here in Portland.

But Totten had been supportive of the Iraq War from the beginning and out of disgust I delinked his blog. No great loss to him I suppose since he gets tons more traffic than we do here. But I also stopped commenting on his blog.

So anyway I was surfing links earlier today and found myself at Totten's blog where I read what has to be one of the very best articles I've ever read on the Balkans that I've ever read. It's really long. But it's got some great photos and maps and is exceptionally well written.

I still don't agree with Totten on everything. But he's a gifted writer who throws a lot of solid information at you in the process of writing his posts and essays.

Posted by Kevin at 08:51 PM |

Iowa Flood and the Police State

See the nice police officers displaying their willingness to employ deadly force if needed, to prevent homeowners from returning to their flooded homes in Iowa. It's all to protect the public, of course.

Posted by Becky at 11:41 AM |

Your tax dollars at work - Israeli settler violence

Also from the Brits comes a bit of news that we never seem to hear about over on this side of the pond - violence by Jewish settlers in Palestine.

Police have arrested two Israeli settlers on suspicion of assaulting Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank, after the incident was captured on video by a human rights group.

Footage of the attack, which was first aired publicly last week, shows four men beating an elderly shepherd and his wife with long wooden batons.

The 58 year old wife spent three days in a hospital with a broken arm and a fractured cheek bone following the assault.

Sadly, this was not exactly an isolated incident. Settler violence has been documented many times over the recent years. But our brave (sic) MSM apparently don't deem it newsworthy to an American population which indirectly underwrites Israel's settler policies with billions of taxpayer dollars annually.

Posted by Kevin at 08:08 AM |

Bio-Crude Oil from bugs

A piece from last weekend about genetically modified bugs which eat waste and excrete nearly fuel-tank-ready fuel facinates me. The technology is still in the R&D stage, but just barely.

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

I seriously doubt that this technology could literally replace crude oil just because of the vast quantities of waste that would be required to feed the bugs and the sheer size of the equipment needed to make it.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

But it seems to me that most commercial farmers, as opposed to subsistance farming, could easily use this technology to become fuel self-sufficient. The current laboratory set-up takes up about 40 square feet of floor space and produces about one barrel of fuel per week.

Best of all, this "Oil 2.0" is carbon negative because it emits less carbon than was sucked from the atmosphere to produce the waste it is made from.

Posted by Kevin at 07:33 AM |

June 12, 2008

My dream ticket: Obama/Graham

Former Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) compliments Barack Obama in several key ways.

As Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the Bush/Cheney cabal were beating the drums of warn Sen. Graham was not only as "in the loop" as anyone on The Hill, but he was unconvinced and wasn't shy about saying so. Which lends his "no" vote on the Iraq authorization that much more compelling.

We all know that Florida is a key electoral state in any presidential election. By all accounts Sen. Graham remains very popular in Florida. Indeed, prior to dropping out of the 2004 Presidential Primary race he had never lost an election - technically he still hasn't. Whereas Obama is struggling against McCain in recent polling, trailing McCain 40% to 47%.

As Sen. John McCain continues to try to paint Obama as naive and inexperienced on national security, Graham would put an emphatic exclamation point on McCain's own apparent national security naivety since he voted for authorization and has been running as a war hawk.

Also, between Jeff Merkley's solid creds on WMD & foreign policy and Gordon Smith's unstinting support for McCain's bid to provide us with a 3rd Bush term, an Obama/Graham ticket would also provide great coattails for Merkley's bid to send Smith back to Pendleton.

Posted by Kevin at 10:34 AM |

June 06, 2008

Gender Politics Wars

Lont-time readers know that few things push my buttons like the periodic gender wars. The latest installment comes entitled Paradigm Shifts and paying for sex. (via Alas, a blog)

Instead of the Swedish model, tricking men could be licensed and be made to openly register with governments in countries where they use prostitutes. We could implement a 5-hour course in responsible prostitute-use similar to responsible driver or gun permit courses. We could make STD checks mandatory for every would-be john and maintain a website where men who use prostitutes can be listed so wives can know if the family food money, and her trust, is being misspent. As Eliot Spitzer just dramatically demonstrated, the Gordian Knot of prostitution is cut when johns lose their anonymity.

We need to unstick from the idea that men’s desire for sex is an immovable force of nature so uncontrollable that all we can do is “fix” prostituted women to withstand the frequent violence johns inflict. Battered wives know there’s no such thing as cooking dinner good enough to avoid getting punched or keeping the house clean enough to appease a violent man. Men’s violence is not about prostituted girls, good meals, or clean houses, it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing prostitutes or any women. We still live in a world where the dominant paradigm blames battered women for not leaving instead of blaming men for the violence they commit.

Let's take these two paragraphs in reverse order.

First of all, battering sexual partners isn't about sex - it's about control. The same is generally true of any violence associated, however loosely, with sex. A famous example would be Amy "Long Island Lolita" Fisher who tried to murder the wife of her sexual partner. That wasn't about sex - it was about control.

Secondly, when it comes to broken trust involving sexual infidelity men hardly have the market cornered. A 2005 study revealed that, Surprise! 1 in 25 Dads not the real father.

Prostitution is merely a more formalized version of what has been going on for millennia and continues to go on right now between men and women. Many men use women and many women use men. It's typically done in different ways but that doesn't change the fact that it's two sides of the same coin.

In very general Darwinian terms, men are driven by the desire to find a genetically superior mate with whom to pass on his own genetics, and women are driven by the desire to find a mate who can provide and maintain an environment which allows her and her offspring to thrive.

Does anyone seriously believe that Anna Nicole Smith had sex with billionaire J. Howard Marshall, 63 years her senior, because she found him sexually attractive? Doesn't it make a great deal more sense that, despite her protests to the contrary, she essentially prostituted herself in return for the material rewards which he lavished upon her?

A fascinating 2004 German study found that BMW drivers get laid more often than Porsche drivers. I remember mentioning it to my Significant Other. She pondered it for a few seconds and replied that it made sense to her. It seems that Porsche drivers are more likely to be perceived as either playboys or men in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and thus not ideal sexual mates in the eyes of many women. BMW's apparently project a more business-like, ambitious image which is generally more appealing to some women.

None of which has anything more to do with the causes contributing to the battering of women than prostitution does. But then that is the nature of gender wars - they're, IMHO, usually nothing more than an excuse to vent a priori resentments.

Posted by Kevin at 01:10 PM |

Don't Forget How Sizemore Got to this Point

Our Oregon, a group that has for a long time taken a no-holds-barred stance in its efforts to stop Bill Sizemore, is complaining that he, through his agent, Tim Trickey, is continuing to circulate petitions on initiatives that the Secretary of State ordered off the streets.

Tim Trickey, head of a company that gathers citizen signatures for conservative initiatives, confirmed Wednesday that his employees continue to circulate petitions seeking to put the two initiatives on the November general election ballot. He said the state ban on gathering signatures is an unconstitutional infringement of the sponsors' free speech rights.

"To stop circulating a petition with so little time left is effectively killing the petition," Trickey said. "I believe that is their intention."

Under a new state law, six months after an initiative is certified for signature gathering, the sponsor is told to submit payroll and other records to the Elections Division, the attorney general or the Bureau of Labor and Industries. The sponsor then has 10 days to comply with the law or stop gathering signatures. ...

The sponsors of Initiative Petitions 51 and 53, which are being challenged by Our Oregon, submitted records to the Elections Division, and the ban on their gathering of signatures was lifted March 27. But Elections Division officials said they later concluded that the records submitted were insufficient, and the ban was reimposed May 9. It remains in effect.

I wrote about this back in early February (Stubborn Sizemore Threatens to Sue Some More"), as did Blue Oregon. In both of these posts, the comment sections offer a fairly detailed discussion between several parties - including myself, Rob Kremer, and Bill Sizemore - of the particulars involved as we knew them at the time. They also quote the explanation given by the Secretary of State.

I don't know that the public will ever be provided with the specific details on why the accounts submitted were deemed insufficient. Absent that, I still suspect what I concluded at the time:

I'm simply inclined to believe at this point that we have a sloppy and stubborn activist on one side and a partisan who dislikes him on the other, and both are costing everyone else money and their rights.

If Bill Bradbury wishes to put this mess to rest, then he should provide some details about specifically what was submitted to him and specifically why it was insufficient, as well as an explanation that would assuage concerns that he is simply being subjective in his application of the law and rules and thereby using the power of his office to impede or curtail the speech of his political foes.

Posted by Becky at 10:14 AM |

June 05, 2008

To be (a Dem) or not to be, that is the question

Now that the Oregon Primary is over I'm curious as to how many of the record surge of new Dem registrants plan to remain Democrats?

Hotly contested Dem presidential and Senate contests provided lots of impetus for left-leaning NAVs, Republicans and various minor party members to re-register as Dems so that they could help choose the nominees. But now that it's done, what now?

What do you plan to do? Why?

Posted by Kevin at 07:51 AM |