Harassment on the rocks

Well, just to show that it's not only Hollywood that's had a problem with sexual harassment over the last couple of decades, Science has details of some harassment claims from Antarctica, going back about 20 years, though:

The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.

The article notes that other women complained about him too;  but he also has his defenders.

The details are pretty strange.  I'll leave the reader to read more for themselves about the sexual taunts, but this just sounds like very childish bullying:

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.

Controversy, please

I see that, for some reason, SBS ran two stories on Helen Dale launching her new book.  (Both sourced from AAP?)   One is about a Brisbane book store cancelling a book signing on slightly odd sounding grounds, and the other a more general one about how "hoax author braces for new controversy".

Given that the novel, which I gather from a piece about it in The Australian that appeared on the weekend, is an alternative history featuring Jesus and a Roman empire with technology (sort of Roman steampunk-ish, I think), it's a bit hard to imagine just why any controversy from such an eccentric sounding work can be expected. The article notes:

But Dale hopes readers take seriously her suggestion that in today's world Jesus, along with Islam's prophet Mohammed, would be viewed as terrorists under contemporary anti-terror laws, which she believes undermine civil liberties.

Actually, I think quite a lot of people wouldn't be too concerned about a modern Mohammed getting caught up in terrorist laws.  Apart from partaking in on the ground battles, he really had it in for critical poets, and was hardly one for free speech himself, to put it mildly.   Quite a different kettle of fish from Jesus's one bit of aggro in the Temple.


As I have mentioned before, alternative history fiction is a rather niche market (it certainly doesn't interest me, generally), and I just have this sneaking suspicion that Ms Dale would quite like some controversy, if it would help sales.   I find it hard to believe it will have a big market without it.

Still, I await reaction (from other than her odd, small, but strangely intense fan base) with interest.

When being half right is worse than being completely wrong

I remember years ago that I once posted a link at Catallaxy, in response to the increasingly foolish Rafe Champion, showing from part of one of the IPCC reports that it had always been acknowledged that there would be benefits to some parts of the globe from global warming, at least up to a point.   I think he pretty much ignored it.

It has thus long been a furphy from climate change fake skeptics that scientific and economic research into climate change has always ignored benefits.  The latest dimwit to grab that ball and run with it is Tony Abbott - to no one's surprise.   People knew he was lying opportunistically about believing in climate change when he was PM; the net effect of his speech is just further confirmation. 

However, there is a sense in which you can say Abbott is half right.    Journalists and others who are completely dismissive of global warming potentially having net benefits (at least, up to a certain level of warming) are wrong. 

But - he and the others in the cultural warrior/go for growth set make a much bigger mistake - they act as if either:

a. global warming will magically stop before the net detriments start to clearly outweigh the net benefits (ignoring, for the moment, the difficulty of accurately working that out equation with any precision - given that, for example, thousands of people with flooded homes in one part of the world may not feel all that cheered by the fact that some Russian farmers had a better crop of beetroot because of global warming); or

b. that stopping emissions and stopping further warming can done in an instant - when it clearly cannot.

Hence, the "catastrophists" may be making a misinterpretation of the what climate scientists and economists have said, but even so, it is not one that makes a change to sensible policy for the future benefit of the world.

Tony Abbott, Matt Ridley and all of their set of disingenuous twits, on the other hand, do want to set the world on the path of climate change destruction based on their mistakes and flim flam.

Their mistake is much, much more serious.

When self medication fails

Who knows, it may have flaws of some kind, but still, this study puts a bit of a hole in the argument that cannabis users (or at least, those with mental illness) just relax and chill out as a result of using it:

The research by Dr. Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC, psychiatrist at the Institut Philippe Pinel) and Dr. Stéphane Potvin (PhD, professor at the Université de Montréal), which studied 1,136 patients (from 18 to 40 years of age) with mental illnesses who had been seen five times during the year after discharge, took into account substance use and the onset of violent behaviour.

Previous research has already shown that a cannabis use disorder is associated with violent behaviour. According to this new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, users who reported at each follow-up visit that they continued to smoke cannabis presented an increased risk (+144%) of violent behaviour.

These results also confirm the detrimental role of chronic cannabis use in patients with mental illness. According to the principal researcher Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC): "an interesting feature of our results is that the association between persistent cannabis use and violence is stronger than that associated with alcohol or cocaine."

Persistent cannabis use should therefore be considered as an indicator of future violent behaviour in patients who leave a psychiatric hospital for follow-up in an outpatient clinic, although the researcher points out that this behaviour tends to fade with time.

"This decrease could be explained by better adherence to treatment (the patient becomes more involved in their treatment over time) and by better support from their entourage. Even though we observed that violent behaviour tended to decrease during follow-up periods, the association remained statistically significant," noted Dr. Dumais.

Don't let Freud near this

It was posted on Youtube in July, but I just found it via The Anomalist:



Japanese advertising executives do have a certain talent for making me want to watch an ad for its eccentricity quotient, at least.

Believe it when I see it

What's Nature.com going on about seasteading for?   They write:

But the Seasteading Institute and the new for-profit spin-off, Blue Frontiers, have racked up some real-world achievements in the past year. They signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia in January that lays the groundwork for the construction of their prototype. And they gained momentum from a conference of interested parties in Tahiti in May, which hundreds of people attended. The project's focus has shifted from building a libertarian oasis to hosting experiments in governance styles and showcasing a smorgasbord of sustainable technologies for, among other things, desalination, renewable energy and floating food-production. The shift has brought some gravitas to the undertaking, and some ecologists have taken interest in the possibilities of full-time floating laboratories.

They do go on to express grounds for skepticism,  but honestly, unless you're a scientist who wants to do human embryo or head transplant research out of reach of all ethics restrictions (and frankly, that's not something that should be welcomed),  I can't see any reason to believe that research on an isolated lab has any greater chance of ground breaking advancement than in your conventional labs. 

Message to monty

Those who do bother engaging with you show no goodwill, use cringeworthy attempts at dismissive humour instead of genuine debate or rebuttal, live in political/cultural fantasy worlds that are so ingrained they'll never be broken out of them, and often suffer psychological issues ranging from obvious immaturity to (I'm pretty sure) actual personality defects.  It is pointless trying to score points against people like that.

All points made before, but after watching some exchanges you have, I just feel compelled to make them again.

How principled of him

The Atlantic has an article up about Brexit regret, noting many things of interest.  

I note this claim re Murdoch:

“There’s no point in vilifying Bregretters,” Mike Galsworthy, a scientist who founded the prominent anti-Brexit groups Scientists for EU and Healthier in the EU, told me. “Bregretters do have to accept some responsibility for this mess we’re now in, but blame also clearly lies both with Cameron for calling a referendum in the first place, and the 40-year dominance of euroskeptic media,” including Brexit-friendly outlets like The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and, from Rupert Murdoch’s media portfolio, The Sun and The Sunday Times. “When Murdoch was asked why he was so anti-Europe he said: ‘That’s easy—when I go to Downing Street they do as I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice,’” Galsworthy told me.  These outlets are rife with Euromyths. (Perhaps the most legendary example is the bendy banana euromyth, which claimed that EU regulators banned imports into Britain of bananas that were bent out of shape. This turned out to be false—EU regulations simply stated that the pricing of bananas should be different according to their shape—but it may have had an impact on some people’s decisions to vote Leave, like the infamous Banana Lady.)

Sure, businessmen are often motivated by power and money;  but what's pretty sickening about Rupert is that to get his power, he trades in direct manipulation of the public.  

Zero G woes

Hey, there's a great extract out (in the Fairfax weekend magazine) from a book by astronaut Scott Kelly explaining how sick he felt after returning from a year on the International Space Station.   (As well as a bit of an account of his morning routine while in space.)  For example:

I had been on the station for a week, and was getting better at knowing where I was when I first woke up. If I had a headache, I knew it was because I had drifted too far from the vent blowing clean air at my face. I was often still disoriented about how my body was positioned: I would wake up convinced that I was upside down, because in the dark and without gravity, my inner ear took a random guess as to how my body was positioned in the small space. When I turned on a light, I had a sort of visual illusion that the room was rotating rapidly as it reoriented itself around me, though I knew it was actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.

The light in my crew quarters took a minute to warm up to full brightness. The space was just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag, two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko and my daughters, a few paperback books. I looked at my schedule for today. I clicked through new emails, stretched and yawned, then fished around in my toiletries bag, attached to the wall down by my left knee, for my toothpaste and toothbrush. I brushed, still in my sleeping bag, then swallowed the toothpaste and chased it with a sip of water out of a bag with a straw. There wasn't really a good way to spit in space.

It really doesn't make anything other than a short time in zero G sound much fun.

Sex in the news

*  Harvey Weinstein is surely a spectacular creep who sounds lucky to have avoided jail for indecent acts, but when anyone from the Right says "will he be treated by liberals like they treated Bill O'Reilly?  Hypocrites!"  it's at least right to note a couple of key differences:   Weinstein doesn't make a wealthy living out of telling America nightly (and in umpteen books) how conservatives values were being trashed in the nation and needed to be reinstated; and (unlike O'Reilly) he doesn't claim the women are all lying.   Still, yeah:  Democrats should be running away at a rapid pace from his money.

*  While just Googling for a link for the Weinstein story, I saw a link to this one about an American College that had a forthright practical suggestion as to how male students could avoid sexual assault problems.    The weirdest, dumbest thing is to see that whoever made that slide didn't think it would get back to Disney that they were using one of their characters to promote masturbation. 

*  This interview at Vox is with a guy who has made a documentary explaining that the internet, and tech heads who establish and run porn sites that provide copious free scenes out of other company's porn are making it extremely hard for the porn actors to make any sort of living out it anymore:

So a lot of people are making a lot less money and are working much, much longer hours to make that money. That’s happening a lot. Whereas the people in charge of PornHub are making so much money they don’t know what to do with it.

These tech people who’ve never set foot on a porn set in their lives, these optimizers and algorithm people and AB testers, these “respectable people” — they’re the ones who seem to be causing the most trouble [in] the lives of porn performers. 

I saw time and time again, people [in the porn industry] would have to move from pretty nice houses to much smaller houses. Porn performers have to go into escorting to pay the rent. More and more producers are going out of business. So in many ways it’s decimating the San Fernando Valley, but the tech people are doing very well....

Alexander Bisley

One of PornHub’s tech guys, exploiting performers’ work, boasted to you: “I’m not a piece of garbage, peddling smut.”

Jon Ronson

When I ask him about the people whose lives were being decimated as a result of the business practices, he went, “Ugh, okay. Their livelihood.” He talked like a tech utopian, somebody who thinks the tech world can do no wrong. A lot of tech people go out of their way to not think about the negative consequences. You shouldn’t not think about those insidious consequences.

Well, it's hard to know what to make of this.   I mean, on the one hand, who really wants to encourage anyone to get into the porn industry as a performer/producer?   Looking at it that way, the more unattractive it can be in remuneration, the less one would hope anyone ever thinks about getting into it.   On the other hand - surely it's wrong to dis-encourage something by more-or-less stealing income from them.  

The interview does explain one thing I never really understood before:

The volume of streaming sites and sharing methods makes it hard for porn companies, often strapped for resources, to fight piracy.

How Comey got it right

Trump has had a spectacularly bad week, what with the weird, weird optics of things like the Puerto Rico paper towel throwing, his utterly tone deaf attempts at a pep talk to officials there, the self promotion evident in his tweeted videos of his visit to Las Vegas, and his now disclosed fury at Tillerson not denying calling him a moron. 

It's been so obviously bad to all but cult followers like Steve Kates (honestly, how can any economics student at RMIT take him seriously?) that I haven't been bothered posting about each individual incident.

However, I thought this story from CNN about what was happening earlier this year when the FBI and intelligence agencies were looking into the Steele dossier was very instructive - it shows how government officials can reliably predict that Trump will be defensive and seek revenge if they present anything to him that he thinks hurts his image:

In the weeks before the US intelligence community published a January report detailing Russian meddling efforts in the 2016 election, top officials at the FBI, CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence discussed including parts of the Steele dossier in the official intelligence document, sources tell CNN.

The debate came in part because the FBI was concerned about being alone in shouldering the responsibility of briefing the incoming President about the allegations. FBI officials hopes that including the dossier allegations in the intelligence report would show the entire intelligence community speaking in one voice.

Then-FBI Director James Comey expressed concerns to his counterparts that if the FBI alone presented the dossier allegations, then the President-elect would view the information as an attempt by the FBI to hold leverage over him.

But the intelligence community had bigger concerns, sources tell CNN. The classified version of the report would be disseminated beyond then-President Barack Obama and the President-elect to other officials including members of Congress. And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed.

In the end, the decision was made that the FBI and Comey personally would brief the incoming President on the allegations. That briefing occurred January 6 in a one-on-one conversation following a broader intelligence briefing on Russian meddling provided to then-President-elect Trump and his key staff.

Trump later told The New York Times in July that he took Comey's briefing on the dossier to be an attempt to hold it as leverage over the new President.

"In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there," Trump said.

Exactly what Comey feared had come to pass.

Any intensely defensive, narcissistic ego at the top makes for extremely dysfunctional government - and to some extent I am put in mind of Kevin Rudd's nightmare of a government for the Ministers and public servants who had to work for him.  

A case could probably be made that Trump is like what you would get if you started with Rudd, but dropped the intelligence by 80% and cranked up the sexism and racism by 200%.    (OK, perhaps drop the empathy down 70%, too.) 

Before I stop posting only about gun control, I must recommend ....

...this chapter of the book Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire which has been published at Slate.

It's a pretty balanced, terrifically written condemnation of how paranoia and fantasy has led to the present state of gun control in the US.

Weasel words

Surely I can't be the only person who immediately thought that "should be the subject of additional regulations" (the NRA talking about bump stocks) is a very weasel word way of expressing support for what might ultimately amount to nothing much?    The "additional regulation" most people are looking for is a complete ban - why not say that?

At the same time, they also make it clear that they are still pushing for the national right to carry concealed weapons.   Yeah, way to make a country feel safe for a tourist...

On the matter of the typical Right wing arguments on gun control which I have been interested in discussing this week, Jason Wilson at The Guardian does a great round up of the matter (quoting things from the Right wing media this week.)  This one made me laugh:

Breitbart offered a defense of “bump stock” devices – which effectively convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns – disguised as an explainer. One of the “key facts” they offered was that banning them would be a “typical leftist war on the poor”.

 Update:  the WAPO notes the NRA's gall in trying to blame the Obama administration for not banning them:

 Expect to hear plenty of this talking point: that this was something the Obama administration allowed. The NRA is basically saying that it had nothing to do with these modifications in the first place, and it's actually Obama's fault. But the BATFE — more commonly known as ATF — actually decided that it couldn't regulate bump stocks because they were firearm parts and not firearms themselves.

Yes, and I bet the NRA was really, really concerned about that finding at the time!

Deserves recognition

I have been mentioning Diane Feinstein and her prescience in warning about rapid fire bump stocks, but I didn't realise she has a long history of trying to do the right thing in US gun control:

The California senator Dianne Feinstein, who authored the now expired 1994 ban on assault weapons, has pushed for nationwide legislation banning the sale of bump stocks and related devices. In 2013, in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed the lives of twenty schoolchildren and six adults, Feinstein proposed a prohibition on the accessories. Congress rejected it. On Wednesday afternoon, Feinstein again reintroduced a bill that would outlaw bump stocks and accessories designed to mimic a machine gun’s rate of fire.

Meanwhile, I see that, predictably, Tim Blair and other excuse makers for the American gun culture are mighty impressed with the article by Leah Libresco in which she claims that gun control policies she formally believed in crumbled away when she examined the evidence.

Her article, which I first saw in the Washington Post, was in fact more about her changing attitude to risk and regulation than anything objective about gun control.    Ironically, a statistical examination of gun deaths which leads to dismissing ideas intended to limit the carnage from a small subset of  gun fatalies seems to me quite akin to commentators telling the Right that statistically they have little to worry about from Muslim terrorism - and Tim Blair just loves to hear that line, doesn't he?

What common sense suggests, rather, is that you take practical steps that are proportionate and  reasonable in response to the possibility of similar attacks being repeated, regardless of the improbable statistics of any one person being killed that way.  I have no problem at all, for example, with pedestrian malls next to roads having bollards limiting vehicle access, given the spate of those attacks.   Similarly, increased airline security is an obvious response to 9/11 and we all feel safer for it.

No, her article (and she would know this) works as a salve to the "too hard to do anything" brigade, who should rightly be viewed with disgust.   Interestingly (I had never heard of her before) she is also known for moving from atheism to Catholicism as a result of going to university.  I don't know what brand of Catholic she is, but I would have to suspect it might be on the conservative side, given the wingnutty alignment they tend to have here and in the US. 

Update:   German Lopez wrote a good article The Research is Clear:  Gun Control Saves Lives, disputing  Libresco's claims about studies.  



  

The spectacular straw man

Ben Shapiro deploys the straw man against Jimmy Kimmel daring to speak out on gun control:

On Fox & Friends, Ben Shapiro denounced celebrities who have argued for gun control in the wake of the shooting, including Jimmy Kimmel. “I would never try to ban Jimmy Kimmel from talking on television—he should stop trying to ban me from owning a firearm,” he said. “[W]hen they say things like, ‘A little bit of common sense gun control would stop of all of this,’ that’s just a chimera; it’s not true. They’re making things up because this is all about the moral disapproval of people who own guns.”

No, you moron - Kimmel (and others) talking about gun control never, never claim ‘A little bit of common sense gun control would stop of all of this.’  

What Kimmel said was that it shouldn't be possible for a killer with guns to be able to kill and maim so many so quickly - a statement which allows for plenty of common sense discussion about sensible gun regulation as potentially making future gun attacks have less of a body count.  

Republicans never used to be this stupid - but Republican pundits certainly are.   But I should be careful, really, about how broadly I do cast aspersions, because polling asking the right questions at the right time can certainly indicate that Republican voters are open to tighter regulation.  Just over a year ago:  

A new CBS News poll of 1,001 random adults found that 57 percent of Americans now favor a nationwide ban on assault weapons, up from 44 percent in the last CBS poll on the issue from December 2015. In this week's poll, 38 percent of respondents oppose a ban, down from the 50 percent who opposed it in December. When split by political party, 78 percent of Democrats support an assault weapons ban, and only 18 percent oppose it. For Republicans, half of the respondents oppose the ban while about 45 percent are in favor of it. Independents are split on the issue, with about 47 percent supporting the ban and 45 percent opposing it. 

In the same poll, nearly 9 out of 10 Americans supported background checks as part of gun sales, with 89 percent backing a policy of universal background checks. This high number crossed party lines, with 97 percent of Democrats, 92 percent of Republicans, and 82 percent of independents backing universal background check policies. A large majority of gun owners, 82 percent, agree with these background checks as well.

 The true enemy of common sense are the Republican politicians, the NRA (foul, foul creatures), and the Right wing media punditry of Fox News and the wingnut crazies.

The tiniest sliver of light?

Hot Air has a couple of contributors who have already come out in support of Diane Feinstein's proposed bill to ban the bump stock device that appears to have been used (or intended to be used?) by the Las Vegas killer.

The article says some Republicans are asking why they weren't already banned.  God knows why they would, since as I noted yesterday, Feinstein was suggesting a ban years ago when they first got publicity.  How credible will it be for Republicans to run the line that it was Democrats' fault that it went nowhere?  

Of course, I am not going to hold my breath about this:  American gun lovers' paranoia will come to the fore with its usual BS arguments that there is no point in doing anything ever, because slippery slope and all that.   Like this, in the CSM:

Larry Pratt, emeritus director of Gun Owners of America in Springfield, Va., notes that the Las Vegas mass shooting “is a very unusual situation in many ways, because the bump-stock, this is the first time anybody has ever heard of it being used this way, so to say [banning the device] will solve our crime problems is a bit much.”

In his view, such a push would fit into what he sees as a familiar pattern, where gun control advocates ask for small concessions and then increase their demands – a slippery slope toward more regulations. “I’m not interested in the details about, ‘Oh, this is a particularly vulnerable point and we ought to address it’; no, what they are looking for is any way they can get momentum,” says Mr. Pratt.

“This whole thing with bump-fire stocks, I think it’s funny,” says Wickerham, because they are not a quality add-on. 

“But if this place turns into California [with its strict gun control laws],” he says, “I’m not going to complain; I’ll just leave.”

This whole shooting has the Right scrambling around to try to find the right narrative - first, they had to desperately hope that the killer was a Muslim, or a mad Lefty, because, you know, talking about gun regulation can be avoided if you can just bleat on about how it's all an ideology's fault. 

So instead (thus far) they've had to fall back onto the "pure evil" or "just insane" lines, with the shoulder shrug that you can't do much about that.   On the mental health matter, The Atlantic has an article today making important points:

While improving access to mental-health care might help lots of suffering Americans, researchers who study mass shootings doubt it would do much to curb tragedies like these. According to their work, the sorts of individuals who commit mass murder often are either not mentally ill or do not recognize themselves as such. Because they blame the outside world for their problems, mass murderers would likely resist therapies that ask them to look inside themselves or to change their behavior.

The connection between mental illness and mass shootings is weak, at best, because while mentally ill people can sometimes be a danger to themselves or others, very little violence is actually caused by mentally ill people. When the assailants are mentally ill, the anecdotes tend to overshadow the statistics. Both Jared Loughner, who shot and severely injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes, for example, had histories of mood disorders. But a study of convicted murderers in Indiana found that just 18 percent had a serious mental-illness diagnosis. Killers with severe mental illnesses, in that study, were actually less likely to target strangers or use guns as their weapon, and they were no more likely than the mentally healthy to have killed multiple people....

As Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has written, in a database of indiscriminate mass shootings—defined as those with four or more victims—compiled by the Stanford Geospatial Center, just 15 percent of the assailants had a psychotic disorder, and 11 percent had paranoid schizophrenia. (Other studies have come to a higher estimate, suggesting about 23 percent of mass killers are mentally ill.)

Certainly, getting those 15 or 23 percent into treatment might chip away at their pathological thinking—and thus their potential future acts of violence. But as Fox argues, linking psychopathic killers with the mental-health system is no easy task. After studying mass shooters for decades, he’s concluded that the killers have more mundane motivations: revenge, money, power, a sense of loyalty, and a desire to foment terror.

The wingnutty Right can't run credibly with the "if only someone in the crowd had a gun" line for this killing - although some are desperate enough to try it.  I'm sure I heard of a woman saying something along the lines of "if only another guest in a nearby room had a gun"    [And, obviously, could work out what was going on and knew how to break down a door.]   Truly, gun nutters like that just live in a fantasy land - and the rest of society pays for it.  

As for Australian wingnutty reactions - they've all been on their usual lines at Catallaxy, and it's a bit boring to repeat them.   Except for sad sack Tom, who seems to be a ex journo with a huge grudge against the industry as it presently is, made this declaration on Monday:

The second US Civil War is now underway.

 As I say, paranoia and the wingnutty Right go hand in hand.

Update:  just how dumb do most of these House Republicans sound?   

About bump stocks

It would appear likely that "bump stocks" were used to allow the rapid, virtually automatic, gun fire at Las Vegas.

There's a good article about them that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013.   And yes, a Democrat Senator warned about their danger.  You can watch a video of them in action here.

They are legal in the US.

But someone can kill 50 people in a car, so what's the point of doing anything, hey?

Update:  or - Freedom!   Having a device that's purely designed to achieve rapid fire with limited accuracy is just a bit of fun, and who wants to interfere with fun?  As this guy says at the end of an article at The Guardian:

“I got my fun out of it but the novelty kind of wore off,” Rich said. “It’s definitely not reliable as a self-defense method or anything else.”

He said on Monday night that he expected the devices would face intense scrutiny, and that some politicians would call to ban them, which he said would be regrettable.

“I don’t want to see anything banned because of the actions of one person,” he said. “That just doesn’t jive with my principles of freedom.”

Libertarians are the pits...

Update 2:  Here's another prediction - if testing of the guns used in the Las Vegas killings show that the bump stock ones weren't actually used, the argument will be "well, he didn't use them so why ban them?"   

The nonsense against common sense is unleashed again

This is by far the most frustrating thing after every mass shooting in the US - watching the nonsense arguments getting a run again by the gun lobby, and the Right generally (both conservatives and libertarians.)

In fact, it gets boring even posting about them, but honestly, as I keep saying, we've never seen the Right stupider - both conservative and libertarian.

Here's the arguments we're seeing, again:

*  if any of the guns were illegal - well, it's all about enforcing current laws better then, isn't it - there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  if all of the guns were legal and nothing was missed on background checks - well, there was no way of stopping this man or [implied but not often stated]  anything at all about how many he killed and how quickly,  and hence there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  people can kill scores at once by using trucks, cars or explosives - therefore what's the point in doing anything about gun laws?   [I find this just about the stupidest of all stupid arguments - why not just say "Everyone dies - what's the point of ever legislating to make anything in life safer - you're just delaying the inevitable?"] 

*  if the guy had mental health issues - then it's all about controlling the mentally ill better, because [again, implied but not often stated]  legal gun owners are never OK at the time they buy and then go nuts - the mentally ill are just obvious and if we can stop them getting guns we'll be OK  

*  most gun deaths in the US are not mass shootings, therefore there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.  [Even a casualty count of more than 500 isn't beating that one.  Perhaps a single incident of 1,000 might do the trick?]

*  a particular change to gun laws not directly related to the means of this most recent killing spree (say, correcting the loop hole on background checks on those who buy at gun shows) would not have stopped this most recent incident, so what's the point of pursuing such a law change now?    

The answer is a given - "there's no point in changing gun laws (unless it's to relax them, because gun owners are the Righteous protectors of the nation and their families)", and the arguments deployed don't need to make sense, as long as they end up at the same point.

The good thing about Jimmy Kimmel's emotional plea was not that it was not just a "do something" argument - it specifically noted that it's not just a case of the NRA and Republicans wanting to keep things as they are - they actively work to make access to guns easier, even with law changes which a majority of Democrats and Republican's don't actually support - and it should be scandalous. 

Gopnik goes there

Yes, I think any normal person hearing Trumps tweet of "warmest condolences" to the families of victims of the Las Vegas shooting must have thought "that's a very peculiar way of wording a condolence message".   Gopnik thinks it tells us something about Trump's personality:

President Trump, deprived from birth by some genetic accident of all natural human empathy—one should listen to a recently recovered tape of Trump, speaking to Howard Stern, in which he is actually boasting of his indifference to a man he thought was dying—speaks empathy as a foreign language and makes the kinds of mistakes we all make in a second language that we have barely mastered, placing adjectives in places that no native speaker ever would. Who sends warmest anything to the families of murder victims? Vice-President Mike Pence, who is not a sociopath, merely a Republican, knew that the right language is the language of bafflement, talking about “senseless violence” and the rest.

Pretty harsh, but I suspect it may be right.   He certainly doesn't seem to have the normal range of emotions.

Automatic fire

A pretty stunning revelation here about the number of automatic weapons held legally by Americans, all courtesy of the nutjobs of the NRA, largely:

New fully automatic weapons were banned completely for civilians—except manufacturers and gun dealers—the following year [1986] by an amendment to the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, also known as McClure-Volkmer. That law didn't solve the problem of semi-automatic conversions. And the bill as a whole contained pro-gun measures that won it support from the NRA, even though the organization denounced the automatic weapons amendment. In fact, then–NRA lobbying chief Wayne LaPierre was quoted in an article in the NRA newspaper Monitor as saying that repealing the automatic weapons ban would be “a top priority.” As detailed by the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann in the Huffington Post in 2013, that article announced that an evidently short-lived organization, the National Firearms Association, had been created specifically to repeal the machine gun ban and to “educate the public about automatic firearms.”

Machine guns made prior to the cutoff date in 1986 remain legal but highly expensive—typically running in the five figures—and are tracked closely and individually by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. According to the NRA, the state of Nevada, where the shooting occurred and where Paddock reportedly lived, does not impose any further restrictions on legally owned machine guns. There are reportedly around 193,000 pre-cutoff machine guns in legal ownership nationwide, and special events around the country offer gun enthusiasts space to celebrate and fire these weapons. In August 2016, the Atlantic’s John B. Fischer reported on the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot. “For two days in June, hundreds of people traveled to Wyandotte, Oklahoma, for the opportunity to fire nearly every species of automatic weapon from the past century,” he wrote. “There were UZIs and M16s, Barrett .50-caliber rifles, WWII-era belt-fed Brownings, and even a Minigun—a giant, chair-mounted cylindrical device powered by a car battery.”

Gun owners who want weapons capable of fully automatic fire can’t legally modify the internal components of their semi-automatic rifles to accomplish this. But they can buy legal accessories like the Slide Fire or the GatCrank that help shooters mimic automatic fire without altering a semi-automatic gun’s internal mechanisms.

Update:  Wired has an article talking about how easy it is to convert a semi automatic to a fully automatic.   I'm not sure that it's all that good an idea to publicise that at this ti,me, except that I suppose anyone who wants to do it already knows.