No need for smoke signals from Rupert

Gee, Rupert Murdoch going on Twitter has sure made it easy for his editors to know which way to slant their coverage, hasn't it?  No more second guessing what will please him.  

Of course, the highly slanted coverage of global warming/climate change over the last few years in the likes of The Australian and on Fox News indicated that he had personally gone cool (ha ha) on the topic, after being a "believer" in the need for global action on emissions.  He professed to having left skepticism behind in 2006. 

So how's Rupert feel about  it now?  Well, we learned in 2011 that Fox News was explicitly under management directions to pooh-pooh climate change:

"[Journalists should] refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

but that's not directly from Rupert, and it may well be (in fact, it's likely) that he is cynical enough to just let his more right wing outlets make money by pandering to beliefs he personally doesn't share. 

But some of the latest Twits from Rupert directly show his mindset:

  

Funnily enough, Rupert, what happened to global warming in January was that the global figure, according to the UAH satellite record which skeptics usually say they trust most, showed a sudden leap upwards from December:

And who eyeballing that graph can really come away with confidence that there's a halt to global warming going on when you look at the 20 or 30 year history?

Rupert needs to read more sources other than his own papers and the Wall Street Journal.  Probably needs to retire, too.

Tea or coffee?

I quite liked Richard Glover's column this morning, which starts as follows:

The popularity of tea in the 17th century, I read this week, was a crucial factor in the expansion of the slave trade. This made me feel guilty about my early-morning ritual - properly brewed tea sipped in bed while reading the newspaper and picking nits from my partner's hair.

In truth, I shouldn't feel too bad because I don't take sugar. The sugar, you understand, was the problem; the popularity of tea brought a surge in demand for a sweetener, which created the need for vastly expanded sugar plantations, which in turn led to a boom in the slave trade.

Coffee, meanwhile, is said to have had a much more noble impact on history. I remember a book from a few years ago in which the writer Tom Standage argued that coffee led to the Enlightenment.

Here's his theory: once coffee arrived in Europe, coffee shops started taking over from pubs as the place where people would meet and talk which meant people were no longer completely pissed when they tried to strike up a conversation. All over Europe, people suddenly started making sense instead of just sounding like your Uncle Terry midway through lunch on Christmas Day. Sober for the first time in six centuries, they rapidly came up with the idea of rational thought.

It's a tough comparison for those of us who prefer a nice cup of tea: on one hand you have Jean-Jacques Rousseau knocking back an espresso while inventing universal education; on the other, a bunch of tea-desperate Poms waving off a fleet of miasmic slave hulks in order to summon up their next sugary hit.

I'm not sure what the reference to nits in his wife's hair is in there for, though.  Ignore that, and the rest is very witty.

For Bob and Gina

Lenore Taylor does a good job looking at the politics and improbabilities of the Coaltion's leaked discussion paper about developing Northern Australia:

Several ideas in the developing northern Australia discussion paper were ditched by Abbott almost as soon as they saw the light of day - including different taxation zones (which he conceded was likely to be unconstitutional, the same reason John Howard and Peter Costello rejected it on every one of the many, many occasions it was raised by the Nationals during the Coalition's last term) and the idea of cutting the aid budget by $800 million to pay for new medical facilities in the north.

The Coalition also immediately jettisoned the proposed ''first term initiative'' of moving federal departments to northern Australia. As the government quickly pointed out, many public servants responsible for policy delivery already lived outside Canberra. Presumably the ones advising future Coalition ministers would need to stay within earshot in the national capital.

And since the Coalition is planning major savings from cuts to the public service and sweeping changes to the way it does things, spending money moving people and departments around the country could run a little bit counter to the plan.

If these ideas were so obviously out of the question, it is unclear why they were included in a document sent by the opposition finance spokesman to premiers just last month, and included on the list of things the Coalition ''proposes to do'' in its first term.

She goes on to note that Federal politicians come up with these grand "let's decentralise"plans every decade or so; they never go far, as people tend to want to live where they want to live.

 

But as Lenore notes:

It is clear, however, that the ''visionary'' document aligns almost exactly with the manifesto of the mining magnate Gina Rinehart and others who have formed a lobby group called Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision.

Erk.  I'm kind of allergic to "vision" in politics.  We can safely assume that Bob Katter would similarly be excited by any discussion of the North. 

And look who else is in on low wages and immigrants for the North: 

The director of the ''north Australia'' project at the Institute of Public Affairs, Dominic Talimanidis, says addressing labour shortages and ''heavily inflated wages costs'' is crucial for northern Australia to ''reach its full potential''.

I have often wondered if Gina is a financial supporter of the IPA.  Their crooked views on climate change certainly align with hers.  But who would know. 

Sounds persuasive...

Here's Paul Krugman, sounding pretty reasonable, if you ask me:

Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing. 

Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity. 

One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect. 

Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force. 

The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact. 

But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming. Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders. 

Still, even if we should put off spending cuts for now, wouldn’t it be a good thing if our politicians could simultaneously agree on a long-term fiscal plan? Indeed, it would. It would also be a good thing if we had peace on earth and universal marital fidelity. In the real world, Republican senators are saying that the situation is desperate — but not desperate enough to justify even a penny in additional taxes. Do these sound like men ready and willing to reach a grand fiscal bargain?

Realistically, we’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.

So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Agreed

Groundhog Day: the perfect comedy, for ever | Film | The Guardian

Oh look:  a whole bunch of people think Groundhog Day is just about a perfect film.

I am inclined to agree.  I love it too.

Prime number humour

Largest Prime Number Discovered; People Excited By Prime-Number News Still AWOL | Vanity Fair

The most interesting thing about the story is how odd it sounds to say that numbers are "discovered".   Yes, there's a whole Platonic world of new and exciting, um, mental things out there just waiting to be found.

This seems very unfair....

'Light' sodas may hike diabetes risk: study

Surprise, surprise

Bruce Willis speaks against new gun laws, says movies not to blame for violence | News.com.au

Hardly a surprise.

I get the feeling no one likes Willis much any more, do they?  The last talk show interview I remember with him many years ago indicated he was extremely disillusioned, perhaps bitter, about relationships after his break up with Demi Moore. 

Caution from Ray

U.S. shale oil: Are we headed to a new era of oil abundance? - Slate Magazine

Ray Pierrehumbert doesn't usually turn up at Slate (I see him via Real Climate, though), but here he is suggesting caution about America's newly recoverable oil and natural gas.   This paragraph is worth remembering:

 The flaws in the abundance narrative for fracked natural gas are much the same as for tight oil, so I won't belabor the point. Certainly, the current natural gas glut has played a welcome role in the reduced growth rate of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and the climate benefits of switching from coal to natural gas are abundantly clear. But gas, too, is in a Red Queen's race, and it can't be counted on to last out the next few decades, let alone the century of abundance predicted by some boosters. Temporarily cheap and abundant gas buys us some respite—which we should be using to put decarbonized energy systems in place. It will only do us good if we use this transitional period wisely. We won't be much better off in the long run if cheap gas only succeeds in killing off the nascent renewables industry and the development of next-generation nuclear power.

 All sounds very sensible to me.

Tofu at home

My wife made tofu at home this week.  I didn't see the process, but it's a lot simpler than I had assumed. 

I'm not the world's biggest tofu fan, but having it served cold this way in summer is very nice as part of a bigger meal.

Blogroll clean up

Time for some more fiddling with the blogroll.

I find I have a large number of Right wing blogs, being a legacy from the days when the Right was making sense.   Now, there's always value in keeping track on what the Wrong are saying and doing, but I really need to balance this up with moderate Right voices (which basically means "ones who stayed sensible while the rest went all Tea Party".)  But commentators who fit into that category are pretty hard to find. 

David Frum fits the bill, I think.   (I like his recent post "Murdered Over Dog Crap" - about a Dallas shooting in which an argument between apartment owners over dog poop seems to have turned into a a double hand gun homicide.  As Frum sums up:

When gun proponents talk about "defensive gun use," they invite us to imagine confrontations where one party is wholly blameless and the other party is murderously aggressive. Gayle Trotter conjured up just such a scenario in her imaginative testimony to Congress: mother alone at home with her babies; three or four or five bad men break into the house; what can she do other than mow them down with her AR-15? In real life, however, defensive gun use typically originates in confrontations to which both parties contributed - and in which the difference between aggressor and self-defender depends largely on the story told by the party who happens to survive.

Unless you run a home meth lab, you are exceedingly unlikely to face a home invasion by armed intruders. In order to defend against wildly remote contingencies, Americans are instead arming themselves to turn disputes over dog crap into lethal duels.

Yep, he's going on the roll.)

But who else?  Andrew Sullivan's blog I find a bit dull and, of course, too interested in gay rights.  Besides which, he did go absolutely bonkers over Sarah Palin and the imagined fake pregnancy.   Despite his concerns about the current Republicans, I deem him "not blogworthy".

So, readers are invited to tell me of any other politically moderate commentator who has his or her own site which I should note.

As for economics, I get the feeling I should expand a little on the black and white dichotomy of Quiggin and Davidson (the former doesn't post enough, and the latter far too much.)  Harry Clarke sits somewhere in the middle, but I am inclined to add Crooked Timber even though I only know Quiggin on the list of contributors.  Mark Thoma seems OK, and of course I would add Krugman if it wasn't for the New York Times annoying limited paywall.

As for other changes:  goodbye Zoe Brain, who only blogs about transexuals since he became one years ago; Washington Times I looked at about once a year; David Appel on climate change is in; so is The Old Foodie for looking at food in history and Wonders and Marvels for odd and interesting historical stuff; Japundit seems pretty defunct and is gone but Asahi Shimbun has a new Japan and Asia site; and I need new Japanese blogs. Oh yeah, io9 is in too.  As is 1735099, a person who (it seems) has also wisely given up on Catallaxy.

A few other sites I haven't looked at for ages are gone too. 

Climate change as a communist plot

China flags peak in coal usage

China’s decade-long boom in coal-driven heavy industry is about to end as the leadership shifts priorities towards energy conservation, say officials and policy advisers.

The advisers predict China’s coal consumption will peak at only a fraction above current levels after the State Council, or cabinet, last week set an ambitious new total energy use target for the five-year plan ending 2015.

“Coal consumption will peak below 4 billion tonnes,” Jiang Kejun, who led the modelling team that advised the State Council on energy use scenarios, told Fairfax Media.

“It’s time to make change,” said Dr Jiang, who is director of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). “There’s no market for further development of energy-intensive industry.”

The imminent stabilisation of coal usage, if broadly achieved, would mark a stunning turn-around for a nation that is estimated to have burned 3.9 billion tonnes last year, which is nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.

It's not clear from the article to what extent climate change concerns might be a factor behind the decision, but it would seem it must be figuring there somewhere:

Pan Jiahua, who heads a team of climate change economists at China's leading think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Fairfax Media that the State Council’s endorsement of the energy target had the effect of elevating it into a “political requirement”.

He said officials in local governments and state-owned enterprises would now be judged partly on their ability to meet energy targets while a long list of green slogans, incentives and policies were translating into concrete measures.

Professor Pan said energy security remained the primary motivation behind the measures but last month’s record pollution readings in North China had contributed to the hardening of political will.
“Chinese people have done enough tolerating such bad air,” he said.

Wonders and Marvels missed, until now

From somewhere or other on the web, I recently found a link to the esoteric history blog Wonders and Marvels, which describes itself as "A community of curious minds who love history, its odd stories and good reads".

It lives up to that description: it's a great read, and regularly updated too.  How have I not known about it for so long?

Here is one example:  a post about whether the excessive swearing in Deadwood was historically accurate.  The writer, who loved the show, notes that it had the feel of the West down pat, but the swearing was not accurate.  Amusingly, she writes:

It is hard for us today to imagine the shock value of words like damn and hell a century ago. Many contemporaries of Twain censored themselves thus: d—n, dang, dam, dadburn, blank, even text-messagey acronyms like D.O.G. (danged old galoot).

In an illuminating essay entitled Deadwood and the English Language, Brad Benz quotes Nunberg (again) who writes that if the characters in Deadwood had sworn in a manner authentic to the period, they’d sound like Yosemite Sam. This is surely why Milch took the decision to sacrifice historical accuracy on the altar of dramatic license in this one aspect, in order to give us a sense of the barely subdued violence and rebelliousness of the people of Deadwood. I reckoned this meant that today’s F-word was equivalent to olden days’ D-word.

 And further: 

In the foreword of his book The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower writes that the word f–k wasn’t even printed in the United States until 1926 in a WWI diary. Even then, it was not used as an expletive but rather in its verbal sense, for the act of intercourse.

The only instances of the F-word I have found from the 1860’s are in the Journals of Alfred Doten, where he uses the word in the verbal sense written in a code of his own devising. (The word appears as vcuk, not very opaque.) Doten and Twain were colleagues moving in exactly the same circles, so Twain must have known it. But Doten’s usage confirms that the F-word was NOT used as a swear word back then.

Well, that's odd then.  Certainly by World War 2, at least amongst the British, it seems it was in common use as a swear word.  (I cite Spike Milligan's autobiographies as authority for that.)  I guess I would have to read the book lined above to find out how it came into common use.

Anyway,  there you go:  I can object to the swearing in Deadwood not just on aesthetic grounds, but on the basis that it is historically inaccurate.    Stupid writers.

Lapierre explains

The NRA’s pathetic excuses for opposing universal background checks. - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise that NRA's Lapierre used to support compulsory criminal background checks for gun shows - 14 years ago.  Now, they oppose it.  That makes sense?  No.

Bernard's right

Media coverage of Gillard election date | Crikey

Bernard Keane complains (as did Barrie Cassidy on Insiders on the weekend) that journalists seizing on the announcement of an election date as if it means this is an immediate election campaign are just nonsensical:

...many journalists just don’t seem to have been able to process what has happened regarding the election date. They are convinced we are now in an election campaign — a “record-breaking seven-month election campaign” as The Australian described it this morning or “a marathon 227-day campaign for both leaders” as another Australian columnist called it. That’s by no means News Ltd bias — an ABC journalist declared Australia “set for its longest federal election campaign on record”; it was an “extended election campaign”, Fairfax journalists said. Others settled, a little less disingenuously, for the term “unofficial election campaign”. 

That misconception might be understandable for the UK Telegraph but not for local hacks. One journalist asked the PM on Saturday about a “sort-of faux caretaker principle that applies because of the announcement of the election date so far in advance” (public servants, of course, would love nothing more than to spend the next eight months doing nothing but tweaking their election briefs and surfing the internet).
 
But you can see the appeal: framing everything through an “election campaign” prism makes journalism easier. Election coverage is, at least the way it is normally done now, easier than regular coverage, because it focuses exclusively on politics — who’s up, who’s down, who’s stumbled, who’s made a gaffe, what do the polls say, who has strayed off-message, who will win. It’s an excuse to abandon content in favour of race-calling.

Framing everything within an election narrative means anything unexpected, or unusual, that doesn’t fit the narrative, either gets ignored (the PM’s speech) or treated, reflexively, as a stumble/gaffe/debacle/disaster. Thus the government was said to be in “chaos”, and “disarray”, suffering “body blows”, because two long-planned resignations were announced on the weekend (Nicola Roxon a “body blow”? Really?).

A very dubious claim

Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason - opinion - 04 February 2013 - New Scientist

I haven't heard of the pair who wrote this opinion piece for New Scientist, but I reckon they're numbskulls.

First they start with a story of a minor but ineffectual environmental program by Democrats (biodegradable utensils for the cafeteria in Congress), then they acknowledge the anti-science credentials of the Right (climate change, stem cell research, creationism).

They then make this claim:

Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.

We have all heard about the Republican war on science; we want to draw attention to the progressive war on reason.....

For example, progressive activists have championed the anti-vaccine movement, confusing parents and causing a public health disaster. They have campaigned against animal research even when it remains necessary, in some cases committing violence against scientists. Instead of embracing technological progress, such as genetically modified crops, progressives have spread fear and misinformation. They have waged war against academics who question their ideology, and they are opposed to sensible reforms in science education.

This is a big, big stretch.   In fact, it's ridiculous.  The anti-vaccine movement is minuscule compared to the number of people on the Right who think climate change is a socialist conspiracy.  Of course anti-vaccine people are a danger to themselves and others, but the harm they can realistically cause society overall (given that I doubt they have really convinced substantial numbers of the dangers of vaccines) is nothing compared to the potential dangers of climate change. 

Animal research?   Seriously, just how big a crisis is it for science that activists push for more and more alternatives to animal testing?   There's an association in America just about Laboratory Animal Science which claims a membership of 12,000, and I recently noted that in New York tens of thousands of lab mice and rats drowned in a university basement when the former hurricane hit.  Sounds like animal testing is under real threat - not.

GM food?   Human biology at the molecular and genetic level, and the imprecise way genes are inserted into food (and from sources which would not arise naturally) make caution about GM reasonable.  The benefits from it are also likely oversold, I reckon (same as with stem cell research, and for similar reasons - it is hard to fully understand what at going on at the cellular level).  

I am not totally against GM research, particularly if it is for increasing the nutritional value of some foods.  But there are clear signs that some major GM work is not well thought through and has economic motives which don't necessarily coincide with environmental health.  The best example - the weed war which was pretty obviously going to be the likely outcome of Roundup tolerant crops.  Recent stories on that are here and here.

I see that these guys have a book to sell on the topic of lefties and anti science.  No wonder they are exaggerating.

A harder rain is gonna fall...

Increases in extreme rainfall linked to global warming

In the most comprehensive review of changes to extreme rainfall ever undertaken, researchers evaluated the association between extreme rainfall and atmospheric temperatures at more than 8000 weather gauging stations around the world.

Lead author Dr Seth Westra said, "The results are that rainfall extremes are increasing on average globally. They show that there is a 7% increase in extreme rainfall intensity for every degree increase in global atmospheric temperature. "Assuming an increase in global average temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, this could mean very substantial increases in rainfall intensity as a result of climate change."

Dr Westra, a Senior Lecturer with the University of Adelaide's School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering" and member of the Environment Institute, said trends in rainfall extremes were examined over the period from 1900 to 2009 to determine whether they were becoming more intense or occurring more frequently. "The results show that rainfall extremes were increasing over this period, and appear to be linked to the increase in global temperature of nearly a degree which also took place over this time.

So, it seems the impression I've been getting from recent media accounts of rainfall extremes is correct.

Good to know.

Ross explains

Why voters believe the economy is in trouble

I think Ross Gittins' explanation here of the difference between perceptions and reality regarding the Australian economy is accurate.

The other huge perception issue that Labor faces is that the Gillard government has been in continual crisis due to its narrow numbers in Parliament.  In fact, it seems to me that it is only on the asylum seeker issue that it has not been able to achieve what it wanted to legislatively.

Of course, the one perception issue on which people are right is that New South Wales Labor had been rotten for years.  I don't really see why Federal Labor should be punished for that*, but everyone expects they will.

*  just as I don't see that the Federal Liberal Party necessarily deserves to suffer for the Queensland LNP being a dysfunctional wreck for much of the last 10 years, although admittedly not in a way which has financially profited members... 

Dramatic irony and the pro gun lobbyists

OK, I'll admit it:  I'm one of those who is aware that people are supposed to use "irony" incorrectly all the time, but have trouble remembering its proper meaning.  Checking on the web, though, I see this sub-category for its use:

dramatic irony

noun

irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.

and that seems a good description for what is going on in the gun control debate every time I read about a perfectly law abiding gun owner who is killed by someone in their family (or of their acquaintance) with a legal gun.

The Sandy Hook killings - Mom killed by her son using her rifles, before going on his school shooting spree.  The family in New Mexico killed by their 15 year old son/brother, all with the weapons his parents legally owned.  (And it seems he had intentions of a bigger killing spree, as with Sandy Hook.)  The latest news on the weekend:  relatively famous military sniper Chris Kyle shot on a rifle range by someone he obviously trusted enough to be handling a rifle near him.

Now, not all ex-military figures are against tighter civilian gun control.  But what were Chris Kyle's views?  As shown on this recent interview, it seems he pretty much accepted the right wing/NRA meme machine on gun control right down the line, even to the point of talking about how much more crime is in Australia because of the John Howard gun laws (yeah, sure) and suggesting that everyone having a 30 round magazine is quite reasonable and if they seek to stop that, well, that's just the slippery slope and soon they'll be disarming Americans entirely.  He may have done his military job well, but when it comes to civilian policy, he had no insights of value.

Here's the thing:  the pro-gun lobby in the US up on the stage just don't seem to "get" the fact that the audience (well, the sensible part of it at least) is in on:  when it comes to the big picture, they are actually making their lives more dangerous by being around guns all the time.   This seems to be so well established in the US and yet is completely ignored every time the NRA and gun loving right wing blogs run some story of how a brave law abiding citizen blew away a home intruder.  Never - and I mean never - do they go on to mention the other side of the ledger:  the number of law abiding citizens who were killed or threatened by someone in the family when a dispute escalated because of the availability of guns.  Nor the amount of accidental shootings in homes and suicides.

Mother Jones  has been collecting some counterpoints to the NRA arguments, and I'll copy some of them here: 

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer. Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental death by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer. Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer. Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Now, if it was only the gun loving folk who were getting killed by virtue of their being unaware of this (or, more likely, having heard of such studies but refusing to believe them), well that would simply be a case of shaking one's head at their foolishness.

The trouble is, of course, that legal guns go on to kill other people too.  People who don't have a choice.  Like at Sandy Hook.

UPDATE:   Slates notes that maybe - just maybe - the NRA is starting to lose ground when its creepy leader is getting hostile interviews on Fox News:

If the National Rifle Association can’t even count on Fox News for a friendly interview, does that mean there's been a shift in the debate? On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace interviewed National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre and wasn’t shy about calling him out on his arguments. The interview got particularly heated when Wallace brought up the controversial advertisement that criticized President Obama for providing armed security for his daughters but opposing armed guards in all schools, reports Talking Points Memo. (Video after the jump.)

"They also face a threat that most children do not face," Wallace said of Obama's daughters.

"Tell that to the people in Newtown," LaPierre responded.

"You really think that the president's children are the same kind of target as every other school child in America?" Wallace said. "That's ridiculous and you know it, sir."

Hope for some of my readers yet...maybe

The Tablet - Review: The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology

There's quite a good summary of the controversy within the modern Catholic Church regarding its view of the potential for salvation for those outside of the faith.  It starts:

For most of history, Christians thought that the vast majority of people would go to hell. The gate of Heaven is narrow. In the twentieth century, hell fell into disrepute. Christians, including many Catholics, began to think that most people will be saved. God is merciful and loving. Dante would have turned in his grave. He knew who was going to hell and even to which region in hell.

Vatican II does not contain a single reference to hell even when speaking of eschatology. Karl Rahner claimed that the most significant teaching of the council was its “salvation optimism”. Lumen Gentium (LG), the council’s decree on the Church, was the key. It overturned centuries of salvation pessimism: all non-Catholics (which included other Christians, religious non-Christians and non-religious groups such as atheists) could be saved if they were ignorant of the Gospel and they sought God, or the truth, in their conscience. This was a dramatic development of doctrine. Some protested that it was actually discontinuous with previous teachings – and a minority claimed the council invalid. Others have sought to balance this emphasis with what critics have called a neo-Augustinian theology, foreign to the council. The debate continues.  

 This line further down caught my eye:

Bullivant, who teaches theology at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London, charts atheism’s complexities and types. He claims that the doctrine of invincible ignorance came into full play at the council and finally allowed the Church positively to appraise certain forms of atheism, when before it could only condemn them.

 Heh.  I didn't realise the Church had developed a special doctrine to describe the Catallaxy blog.

One of the books reviewed in the post argues that the LG decree has been read too often without its qualifications:

They ignore the first chapter of Romans, which is pessimistic. They ignore the footnote referring to Aquinas, which indicates that this salvation is only a “possibility”, not a reality. LG 16 ends with the necessity of missionary work and paragraph 17 develops that theme as an introduction to the decree on missionary activity, Ad Gentes.

That “rather often” suggests a salvation pessimism that was accepted by the Fathers and is not part of a neo-Augustinian plot after the council. 

 It seems to me that a large part of the problem here is that (as far as I know) the Catholic Church has no detailed position regarding what goes after death.   (With good reason, too, given the paucity of detail on the matter in all of the Bible.)  If you assume that most people go to Purgatory, and from there retain the possibility of changing and accepting things they have rejected in life, then that allows a way for ultimate salvation of nearly everyone, doesn't it?   I wonder what atheists would do in Purgatory:  keep interpreting the apparent evidence of their after-death survival in a science fiction way, perhaps?