Scott Adams is Mr Common Sense.

I’m pro-gun, but mostly for selfish reasons. Some people (such as celebrities) are probably safer with defensive weapons nearby. But I acknowledge the reality that guns make people less safe in other situations. No two situations are alike. That’s partly why the issue can never be fully resolved. Both sides pretend they are arguing on principle, but neither side is. Both sides are arguing from their personal risk profiles, and those are simply different. Our risk profiles will never be the same across the entire population, so we will never agree on gun control.

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Many pro-gun people in the debate seem to be confused about the purpose of laws in general. Laws are not designed to eliminate crime. Laws are designed to reduce crime. The most motivated criminals will always find a way, and law-abiding citizens will avoid causing trouble in the first place. Laws are only for the people in the middle who might – under certain situations – commit a crime. Any friction you introduce to that crowd has a statistical chance of making a difference.

Humans are lazy and stupid, on average. If you make something 20% harder to do, a lot of humans will pass. It doesn’t matter what topic you are discussing; if you introduce friction, fewer people do it. With that in mind, let’s look at the least-rational gun control arguments I am seeing lately.

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Not a headline that you see every day.

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Meal kits, like Blue Apron, have always stood for the family lives of our fantasies

This brought home to me that I am probably not the target demographic of these services, since neither my parents nor myself were ever divorced. Nor is it important to me that dinner represent a new and exciting culinary discovery; those who know me well know also that ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ aren’t part of my personality.

In its evocation of a family dinner table with no past and no future — having no leftovers is one of the key advertising promises of these services — meal-kit delivery services promise that, with the help of e-commerce, traditional family life can continue undisturbed even as the underlying structures that produced the family as we know it are undergoing extreme disruption. If becoming an adult is learning to parent yourself, meal-kit delivery imagines that parent at sea in the overwhelming churn of an unmoored and unrecognizable life.

That’s more angst than I really need in a meal. I enjoy cooking the things that I know how to cook, and I’d really like to be a great cook but am constitutionally unable to put in the time and effort to become one. And nobody in 1950s Indiana ate food that originated in a foreign country, except maybe Italian on Friday night because you could get spaghetti sauce without meat. (My mother gave us Chop Suey once. From a can. It didn’t end well.)

Lileks has his unique take here.

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Unlike swans, ospreys, coyotes, and termites, the primates known as Homo sapiens do not generally mate for life. While some of us naked apes may find one partner and stay with them forever, never straying, history tells us that it has not been the norm for our species. Nevertheless, marriage, a social technology, has sprung up in most societies and on every inhabited continent.

For the majority of its existence, marriage has been a worldly matter, having to do with the transfer of property, the creation and support of children, the tracking of bloodlines, and the control of women. For these reasons, it was usually a man-woman affair, regardless of a society’s feelings toward homosexuality. But although there have been marriages throughout most of human civilization, this does not mean that there were weddings. There are, for example, no weddings in the Bible. Marriages were made official through the signing of a contract or some other means of formalized agreement, but a marriage was not generally considered to be a spiritual or even romantic occasion. And because there were no weddings, for a long time there could be no true wedding dresses, either.

Well, really, there weren’t any real weddings before Vogue.

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It is a logical and factual error to apply the collective “we” to Americans, except when referring generally to the citizens of the United States. Other instances of “we” (e.g., “we” won World War II, “we” elected Barack Obama) are fatuous and presumptuous. In the first instance, only a small fraction of Americans still living had a hand in the winning of World War II. In the second instance, Barack Obama was elected by amassing the votes of fewer than 25 percent of the number of Americans living in 2008 and 2012. “We the People” — that stirring phrase from the Constitution’s preamble — was never more hollow than it is today.

You will have heard me castigate (can’t say ‘denigrate’ these days) this as the Aggregation Fallacy.

Further, the logical and factual error supports the unwarranted view that the growth of government somehow reflects a “national will” or consensus of Americans. Thus, appearances to the contrary (e.g., the adoption and expansion of national “social insurance” schemes, the proliferation of cabinet departments, the growth of the administrative state) a sizable fraction of Americans (perhaps a majority) did not want government to grow to its present size and degree of intrusiveness. And a sizable fraction (perhaps a majority) would still prefer that it shrink in both dimensions. In fact, The growth of government is an artifact of formal and informal arrangements that, in effect, flout the wishes of many (most?) Americans. The growth of government was not and is not the will of “we Americans,” “Americans on the whole,” “Americans in the aggregate,” or any other mythical consensus.

Precisely so.

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The morning after a gunman murdered nearly 60 people in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton tweeted that “we can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.” The former Democratic presidential nominee’s commitment to putting politics aside was gone in an instant, and her implicit claim that she knows how to “stop this from happening again” was equally empty.

Gun controllers like Clinton habitually seize upon mass shootings as evidence in favor of the policies they have always supported. But there is rarely any logical connection between the two, because in this debate showing you are on the right side is more important than persuading anyone.

The Other McCaine clears the air.

Between 2014 and 2016, the nationwide homicide rate has increased more than 20%, and the 3.4% increase in the US violent crime rate from 2015 to 2016 was the largest single-year increase in 25 years, the Justice Department said.

A major factor in this increase was the anti-police rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most of the additional victims were black.

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Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks.
In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.

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Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities—what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?—drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. There have now been four in as many years.

Uh-oh.

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artin Luther’s Protestant Reformation turns 500 at the end of this month, and I honestly think he would have been surprised to see it last this long, not so much because his initial project of reforming the Church of Rome would have been realized by now but rather because he was under the impression that the world was probably ending soon. Well, here we are, and it’s 2017. A lot has happened in Protestantism’s five centuries.

Most people look at the Reformation from either a Roman Catholic perspective or a Protestant perspective.

There is a reason that there has never been a ‘reformation’ in Orthodoxy. Most of the issues that Protestants raised are areas in which the Roman church departed from Orthodoxy. Sale of indulgences can’t happen in a Church that doesn’t believe in Purgatory, for example.

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Well, not really. They’re looking at skin color, not ‘race’ per se.

Now map this against Muslim terrorist incidents. Notice the correlation?

ZMan casts aspersions.

The reason that Buckley Conservatism completely failed to halt the advance of Progressivism is that the Buckleyites eventually came to accept the moral framework of the Left. Libertarians have gone down the same road, embracing the morality of Progressives, while trying to find a way to carve out a place for individual liberty within that moral framework. It’s why the differences between libertarianism and what passes for conservatism are trivial now. They both operate in the same narrow space.

Wrangling over the permutations and combinations of difference between ‘traditionalists’ (conservatives) and libertarians was the chief occupation of the Party of the Right during my undergraduate years at Yale.

A good way to illustrate this is with this interview Carl Benjamin conducted with Jared Taylor. Benjamin is a British provocateur who goes by the handle Sargon of Akkad on social media. He describes himself as a liberal, but to Americans that should be understood as libertarian. His views are consistent with what you see from the Reason Magazine types. That means he embraces the libertine social polices of the Progressives, but he likes getting cheap stuff from Amazon without paying sales tax.

And a better description of ‘libertarian’ I’ve never seen.

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Stereotypes exist because of reasons; they don’t just fall out of the sky like snowflakes.

Of course a stereotype doesn’t tell you anything factual about particular individuals — it tells you likelihoods and probabilities about groups. But if you meet an individual you don’t know from a group with which you don’t have a lot of contact, you have to play the odds for your own safety’s sake … and the odds are that betting according to the stereotype is the safe play.

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Trump is undoubtedly to blame.

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Sounds to me as if Trump won this one.

Freeberg lays out some inconvenient truth.

The term “peaceful protest” is way overused lately. If you’re blocking me on my way to work or some other errand, your protest is not peaceful because you’re interfering in the activities of other people who have nothing to do with the subject of your protest, people who’ve done nothing to you. There is a myth floating around that this is a necessary ingredient, that the protester’s job is to see to it people are forced to pay attention, deprived of the option to ignore. That’s false. Force is force. Initiating force is not peaceful.

Preach it, brother.

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No, they don’t care about Puerto Ricans because they are effectively foreigners — different language and culture. They’d feel the same about Filipinos, and did back when the Philippines were a U.S. dependency.

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That explains a lot.

Paul Rahe looks the situation over.

I will say this for Donald Trump. He really knows how to hit a nerve. He has an instinctive understanding of wrongs swept under the carpet and of how to get those who perpetrate those wrongs to rise up and do themselves harm.

I do not personally much like his way of going about things. Schoolboy taunts seem to me childish and unpresidential, and they can be counter-effective. But let’s face it: with this weapon, he made mincemeat of his Republican opponents, and he defeated Hillary Clinton. He knows something that those of us who are more conventional do not quite get.

Scott Adams has been teaching this almost daily for about a year.

Every once in a while, however, I get a glimpse of what Trump is up to, and then I really am impressed. His attack on the NFL could not be more timely.

I knew Paul at Yale in the mid-70s. He is scary smart and very sound on political questions.

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The backlash continues….

Steelers Fans Burn Their Team Gear

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Thus the NFL ‘protest’ is explained.

My younger brother played football in High School and has been a pinko ever since, so I’m fully prepared to believe that even holding a football is enough to cause brain damage.

And, of course, the Usual Suspects in the DemLegHump media are engaged in a massive effort to link Trump with the flag and the National Anthem in the minds of the American people.  Not their brightest move….

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A cloud upon the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand…. (1 Kings 18:43)

Shortly followed by Luke 12:54. “Then Jesus said to the crowds, “As soon as you see a cloud rising in the west, you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and that is what happens.”

Hope the NFL players have their umbrellas with them.

Jerome Lucille points out some inconvenient truth.

Once upon a time, mass transit was the technocrat’s preferred method for prying people out of their wasteful, dangerous cars. If only we could subsidize the right combination of buses, trolleys, jitneys, light rail, monorail, and bullet trains—the thinking went—all our problems would be solved. To save the planet, “public transportation should be favored over private automobiles, and the cars heavily taxed,” wrote Hugh McDonald of New York City College of Technology in a 2014 book on environmental philosophy. That view is shared by a number of other scholars and policy makers who hope to eliminate traffic deaths, largely by getting rid of cars.

But now there’s a new kid on the block: self-driving cars. The trouble is that neither of these approaches takes into account the reality that almost 20 percent of the population of the United States live in the low-population rural areas that make up the majority of the country’s land mass, and they’re not about to trade in the F-150 for a newfangled robot chariot.

Automobiles mean freedom — freedom to go from where we are to where we want to be at a time and pace of our own choosing. Those Who Know How To Live Our Lives Better Than We Do (Socialists, Communists, Environmentalists, and other varieties of Democrat) don’t like this freedom; they’d much rather we Do It Their Way. They pretty it up with cool-sounding words, but that’s the bottom line.

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This general phenomenon of intense critical hostility to Tolkien in the face of his undeniable popularity is open enough; however, the reasons for it often remain unexpressed, hints and sneers rather than statements. Several attempts have been made to explain this deep and seemingly compulsive antipathy. This is the first of two linked posts that deal, firstly, with Tolkien’s critics and, secondly, with his legacy in the form of his many admirers and emulators.

Pat Sajak brings the heat.

I’m not much of a joiner. Besides, any club that would have me as a member obviously has standards too high for me to live up to. But I am excited about my first meeting tonight with the “Monitor Twitter and Facebook Looking for Anyone Who Says Something Positive or Evenhanded About Donald Trump So We Can Bully and Harass Them on Social Media and Recreational Drugs Club.”

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There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

The tests that a chaotic world throws at human beings is never equal or balanced in measure to our strengths to pass them. Equality, in the terms that egalitarian equalists are comfortable in defining it, implies that that every individual is equally matched in both value and utility within a totality of random challenges. Aside from this being patently false, it also demerits both strengths and weaknesses when that individual succeeds or fails at a particular challenge as a result of their individual character.

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Not much of a witch, if she can’t spell her way out.

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Yeah, it’s a cheap shot, but it’s still a shot.

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The Democrat Party, on the other hand, brokers green cards for poor foreigners.

Which would you rather have in your country?

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During the anxiety-ridden 19th and 20th centuries in particular, Chinese reformers of multiple political persuasions engaged in thoroughgoing critical reevaluations of Chinese civilization in an attempt to diagnose the cause of China’s woes, and to identify which aspects of Chinese culture would need to be transformed to ensure their country’s transition into a new global order intact. Targets of criticism included Confucianism, government institutions, and the patriarchal family unit, among many others.

For a small but vocal group of Chinese modernizers, some of the most impassioned criticism was trained on the Chinese language. Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, famously called for a “literary revolution” to overthrow the “ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy,” and to promote the “plain, expressive literature of the people!” “In order to abolish Confucian thought,” the linguist Qian Xuantong (1887-1939) wrote, “first we must abolish Chinese characters. And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking, the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.” The celebrated writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) was yet another member of this anti-character chorus. “Chinese characters,” he argued, “constitute a tubercle on the body of China’s poor and laboring masses, inside of which the bacteria collect. If one does not clear them out, then one will die. If Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish.” For these reformers, abolishing characters would constitute a foundational act of Chinese modernity, unmooring China from its immense and anchoring past.

Actually, the problem seems to be the ideographic writing system rather than the language itself.

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WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.