• Government,  Weirdness

    Keeping us safe

    This is something to bear in mind as recent events have brought gun control back onto the discussion list

    Phony fax gives prisoner almost 2 weeks of freedom
    Officials released a prisoner from a state facility after receiving a phony fax that ordered the man be freed, and didn’t catch the mistake for nearly two weeks.

    Timothy Rouse, 19, is charged with beating an elderly western Kentucky man and was at the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center in La Grange for a mental evaluation. He was released from that facility on April 6 after officials received the fake court order.

    It contained grammatical errors, was not typed on letterhead and was faxed from a local grocery store. The fax falsely claimed that the Kentucky Supreme Court “demanded” Rouse be released.

    Prison officials did not notice that the fax came from a grocery store because policies did not require checking the source of a faxed order, said Greg Taylor, the LaGrange facility’s director.

    “It’s not part of a routine check, but certainly, in hindsight, that would perhaps have caused somebody to ask a question,” he said. He added that misspellings on orders are common.

    The most damning part I suppose is that misspellings on Supreme Court “demands” are common.

    Even if strict gun control is theoretically possible and desirable, it’s got to be administered by someone. And guess who that someone is going to be?

  • Movies

    A movie to see

    Is the Asphault Jungle from 1950. It’s a good noir crime drama, with good acting by Sterling Hayden and a young Marilyn Monroe (playing a mistress, imagine).

    One hilarious moment is Hayden, is his classic tough guy growl, complaining that his bookie pointed out that he owed money, or in the slang of the time, “he boned me”. As in “He boned me in front of some guy I didn’t even know!”

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  • Far Right,  Fever Swamp,  Society

    A foppish post

    From National Review’s Mark Steyn. He makes the valid point that people in their 20s are not children, but the asinine part is

    They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

    It presumes that all of the victims were cowering in fear while they were shot. My initial thought is that since the fatality count is so high suggests that people were attempting to fight, and died trying. Furthermore, a gun-wielding attacker is qualitatively different from a knife-wielding attacker. If six men rush someone with a knife, it’s reasonable to expect, say two, of the six to die, but their side would prevail. Against a gun, it’s likely that all six would fall, and their side would lose (presuming a sufficient start distance). And suicidal attacks with no expectation of victory are a trademark of the Islamic extremists that Steyn usually rails against.

  • Iraq,  Society

    A curious ommission

    From this article in the NYT on attitudes on the Iraq war by age group, specifically

    Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

    “We’ve experienced more than the younger people. Older people are wiser. We’ve seen war and we know.”

    Anyway, it goes on like that. One thing that was not mentioned was the fact that the time horizons are quite different. Someone 65 is looking at an outer range of 30 years more of life, whereas someone age 25 is looking at 60 more years of life. It’s quite plausible that younger people might be more favorable to risky experiments with possible longer term benefits, the same way they like investing in risky stocks and mutual funds – to wit, they have more time to play with, so they can take more risks.

    I’m not saying this is the reason for the disparity, but it’s odd it wasn’t addressed.

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  • Biz,  Links,  Photography,  Solar Power,  Weirdness

    The old round up

    • Digital Camera crop factors
    • 20 things not to do when starting a business – I stayed away from most of them
    • More solar power
    • via Marginal Revolution

      The public’s opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled.

    • The worst school murders actually happened in 1927, though it did not involve shootings. It’s a horrifying story.
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