…of Seraphic Secret tells the tale of how he become a gun owner.
[Hat tip: commenter “IGotBupkis.”
And by the way, as a public service to those of you who don’t know the meaning of the word bupkis, it means—well, it means this.]
Amazon. Christmas. Neo-neocon.
There’s still plenty of time to order from Amazon!
And a great big “thank-you” to all who’ve done so through neo-neocon, and all who are about to do so.
A few more suggestions:
Out of ideas? Get an Amazon gift card.
And here are two books I can vouch for, because I own them and love them. They’re coffee-table type art books, but somewhat smaller and significantly less expensive. And yet the quality of the reproductions is excellent for the price, and the choice of paintings is varied (in painter, era, and mood), sometimes surprising, and always satisfying. A good gift for New England and/or Maine aficionados and/or dreamers, or just about anyone who loves beauty.
The first is Carl Little and Arnold Skolnick’s Paintings of New England.
The second is The Art of Maine in Winter, compiled by the same authors. This one is especially well-suited for gift-giving at this time of year, I think, and some of the paintings are very mysterious and subtle.
I assume that the other books in the series are equally good, although I’ve not seen them. One is entitled Paintings of Maine.
Another is Art of the Maine Islands.
A third is The Art of Monhegan Island.
Edward Hopper’s New England is more specialized, since it features a single artist, but if you have an Edward Hopper fan on your gift list, it could be perfect.
[NOTE: Don’t be concerned because only some of them are available from Amazon, and others come through Amazon but are from other sellers. It’s my impression that both categories still qualify under the program.]
[ADDENDUM: I want to call your attention to the fact that our very own commenter “Sgt Mom” is an author whose books are sold through Amazon (and also available there on Kindle). So if you want to benefit both neo-neocon and a member of the commenting community here—and yourself and/or your gift recipients, of course—take a look at Sgt. Mom’s Amazon page. In the comments section to this post she writes:
I have a number of volumes of historical fiction out there, all of them carefully researched, and which honor American values of decency, patriotism, hard work and a belief in the future: To Truckee’s Trail is about a pioneer wagon train party attempting to cross the High Sierras in winter, The Adelsverein Trilogy concerns the German settlements in Texas (Yes, there was a big venture in Germany in the 1840s to bring over farmers and craftsmen to fill up a huge land grant ”“ hardly anyone outside of Texas knows about this ) and Daughter of Texas/Deep in the heart is about the early days in Texas, through the eyes of a woman settler.
Thanks ”“ and Merry Christmas!]
And then there’s the obligatory “the Second Amendment is outdated” editorial
And here’s a rebuttal.
This is a good opportunity for me to recommend that you read this law review article from 1994 about “assault weapons” and “semi-automatic” ones and how they do and/or do not differ from other firearms. I’m no gun expert—au contraire—so the technicalities (and any errors or outdated facts) elude me, but it seems to be making some excellent, and usually poorly understood, points.
I also recommend this piece by John Hinderaker on the MSM’s abysmally inaccurate coverage of the Newtown shootings.
[NOTE: I had never heard of the author of the law review article, David Kopel, before, but when I Googled him I found he’s got an interesting list of publications.]
President Obama…
…seems to be intent on expanding his program of spiteful appointments.
My favorite line:
As he sees it, to paraphrase Jim Baker, “F#&k the Jews, they voted for us anyway.”
Yes. And I don’t think that Hagel’s appointment as Secretary of Defense would wake them up, either. Jews constitute a very small percentage of the US population, and although they’re vocal and active in the Democrat Party, and also big donors to it, I think Obama is absolutely correct in calculating that his anti-Israel stance won’t hurt him much with them. After all, where are they going to go? To the evil Republicans?
Let me just say that the majority of the Jews I know who support the Democratic Party (which is almost all of the Jews I know) are secular (“cultural” Jews) and not especially committed to the survival of Israel. Jews who happen to be both liberal and supportive of Israel do face a potential dilemma here, though, one that they didn’t face fifty years ago, when it was okay for liberals to like Israel. But my guess is that most of them will resolve their dilemma by deciding in favor of Obama and liberalism, because it’s much easier to believe that his anti-Israel stance is just false smear tactics cooked up by the right than to abandon the Democratic Party, which for so many people on the left has taken on the aspect of a religion-substitute.
[NOTE: If you’re interested in knowing more details of Hagel’s anti-Israel stances, please see this and also these posts.]
The fiscal cliff negotiations ad nauseam
I’ve not reported on those interminable fiscal cliff negotiations for a while, have I? I’m leaving it to others for the moment.
Why? It’s one of those post-election nightmares that was easy to foresee, and seems like a losing proposition, especially with Boehner in there. I have seen very little about him throughout his entire tenure that would earn my confidence; I’m sorry to say he seems like a mediocrity at best. It’s a terrible thing to have him as negotiator for the GOP (note I didn’t say for conservatives), kind of like a slow-motion train wreck that’s going at about 5 miles an hour and yet can wreak a great deal of damage.
Another reason I find it hard to report on this is that the ins and outs are a sort of theater (although not an entertaining one) that only really matter at the climax: what will the final agreement be? My guess: not at all good.
So if you have a stronger stomach than I, feel free to talk about all of this here.
[ADDENDUM: Steven Hayward of Powerline defends Boehner. Interesting. He may even be correct.]
Randall Collins: what’s going on with the rampage killer?
Quite a few people here have recommended reading this piece by University of Pennsylvania professor Randall Collins on the psychology of rampage killers. Written before the Newtown murders, it says a lot that seems correct in describing the inner life of a typical such killer when he decides to go about his horrible business and then begins to execute his plans.
I disagree, though, with some of the author’s contentions, in particular the part about such killers having trouble facing people and murdering them. I don’t doubt that some killers do have that difficulty to overcome, but it appears that other killers (especially the more psychopathic among them) have no such difficulty at all. The rampage murderer example Collins goes into most detail about, Michael Carneal, was younger than most (14) and appears to have been less hardened a character than many of the others, and more easily stopped by the sort of domination that Collins describes (read the piece to understand what I mean).
If Adam Lanza was a psychopath, he had hid it well (as some do). Lanza is reported to have worn a mask while performing the killing, however, which does create a small amount of the emotional distance that Collins describes as being necessary in order for most rampage killers to overcome the emotional hesitation that can occur if they look their victims in the face. I think, however, that Lanza’s choice of victim (mostly extremely young children) indicates he may have had no such reluctance to overcome. We may never know, of course, unless authorities manage to reconstruct his computer’s hard drive after he tried to destroy it (that destruction is also unusual, because most of these killers want the world to hear their message of hate and/or pain and the “why” of the subsequent destruction they wreaked).
I also disagree with the part of Collins’ piece where he indicates that the Columbine bombs were secondary; actually, they were a huge part of the plan but they fizzled because the bombmakers made errors, not because they were only interested in firearms. And by the way, Harris seems to have been an excellent example of the sort of psychopath who apparently has no difficulty facing his victims:
[Psychopathy] begins to explain Harris’ unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable…None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn’t grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn’t quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.
And note this, about bombing vs. shooting for the Columbine murderers:
…[T]he killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.” Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were after””Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term””they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.
Lanza probably wasn’t planning to do anywhere near the same damage in terms of numbers (at least it doesn’t appear that way), but he was gunning (literally) for something extraordinary in terms of grief and revulsion, through his choice of the most sympathetic victims possible. It’s hard to avoid the idea that he wanted the entire world to reel back in horror at him.
Tango: by a horse’s head
[NOTE: I’ve decided to every now and then republish an old post, especially one involving the arts rather than politics. Here’s one that first appeared in August of 2008.]
You may recall my disastrous efforts to learn to tango, chronicled here. But I still enjoy the dance as spectator, and the other evening I had the good fortune to attend a thrilling tango performance.
Which made me think of one of my favorite movie scenes (for those of you unfamiliar with “Scent of a Woman,” in this clip Al Pacino is supposed to be blind, and to have managed to persuade a lovely young woman to allow him to teach her to tango):
From my previous tango experiences, I will say that either the Pacino character is the best leader on earth or else this is not this lady’s first tango. Perhaps both.
But why quibble when it’s so much fun? It’s partly the music that sends us—especially the exhilarating crescendo that begins at 00:53 and repeats later at 1:56. Note also her slowly dawning delight, and the joy of the featured viewer, a young man who has been assigned the challenging task of “minding” Pacino to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. Fat chance.
The song’s title in the You Tube comments is identified as “Por Una Cabeza,” which my recollection of high school Spanish tells me means something like “for a head” or “through a head.”
Odd. Neither translation seems to lend itself to romance—even of the tragic/demented/destructive tango variety. “For a Face,” perhaps—but “For a Head?”
And so, being the inveterate researcher that I am, I looked up the lyrics to the song and found to my surprise that the phrase refers to horse races, and the title can be translated roughly as “By a Head.”
Here’s a translation of the first stanza:
Losing by a head of a noble horse
who slackens just down the stretch
and when it comes back it seems to say:
don’t forget brother,
You know, you shouldn’t bet.
Of course, being a tango, the song isn’t really about horse races; it quickly segues into being about love. The metaphor is that the hero keeps losing in love, just by a bit (“a head”), and knows he should stop betting—both on horses and on love. But of course he also knows, and we know, that he will continue to risk all:
Many deceptions, losing by a head…
I swore a thousand times not to insist again
but if a look sways me on passing by
her lips of fire, I want to kiss once more.
Enough of race tracks, no more gambling,
a photo-finish I’m not watching again,
but if a pony looks like a sure thing on Sunday,
I’ll bet everything again, what can I do?
The song was written by Carlos Gardel, a man I’d never heard of before but probably should have. Gardel, considered to be “The King of Tango,” was an Argentine (perhaps born elsewhere; several countries vie for the honor) famous throughout the great capitals of the world during the 1920s and 1930s until his untimely death in a 1935 plane crash. He made a number of films for Paramount that showcase his singing, and the following vignette may be of interest to those interested in political trivia:
In 1915 Carlos Gardel was supposedly wounded after being shot by Che Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, as a result of a bar room brawl in the belle epoque Palais de Glace in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires, although different versions assert that he was shot in the chest or in the leg, yet another variation holds that it was not Che’s father but rather Roberto Guevara, a high-class boy often involved in quarrels.
The “Por Una Cabeza” featured in “Scent of a Woman” is hyper-romantic, with its sobbing, throbbing violins and the schmaltzy situation of the blind older guy dancing with the fawn-like young woman—a scenario Pacino somehow pulls off with great charm and believability. But Gardel’s original is quite different, a world-weary but forceful paean to the resurgence of passion and the urge to try again.
Gardel looks here for all the world like he’s escaped from the cast of “Guys and Dolls,” about to sing a combination of “Fugue for Tinhorns” and “Luck Be a Lady.” And as the number gets going, it morphs (at 1:37) into a Grade-B version of the Ascot scene in “My Fair Lady”—minus the Cecil Beaton costumes:
Note at 2:29 when Gardel sighs and says “Como siempre,” (“as always”), tearing up his ticket in resignation at his loss. A nice touch.
I have to say I much prefer the “Scent of a Woman” version. Gardel’s vibrato has that old-fashioned 1920’s-1930’s wobble that doesn’t speak to me much. Styles in music and singing change, and it’s almost impossible to hear him in the same way that his contemporaries did.
But the song remains a masterpiece.
[UPDATE: Funny thing, but in the over four years since I wrote this post, my tastes must have changed, because on listening to Gardel’s version this time, I must say that I liked it very much.]
Mike Dukakis, placeholder
The liberal press is like that old joke
You know, the one about the Jewish mother and the ties?
It goes like this: a Jewish mother gives her son two ties for his birthday. He goes upstairs, gets dressed, puts one on, and comes down, beaming, to show it to her. She looks him up and down and asks, “So, what’s wrong with the other tie?”
BenK at Ace’s jibes that, if current House member Tim Scott—who would then become the only current black senator—is appointed by Nikki Haley to fill DeMint’s senate seat, the headlines will scream, “Southern Governor Removes Black Man From The House of Representatives.”
And sure enough, as BenK also points out, right on schedule NBC’s Luke Russert tweets, “With Scott going to the Senate and Allen West losing, the 113th Congress will see no African-American Republicans in the House.”
I have to defend Russert (who, by the way, is Tim Russert’s son) a little bit, though. It turns out that since May of 2009 he’s been an NBC News correspondent covering the House of Representatives. So it makes sense the House would be his focus.
I still like that joke.
Let’s talk while we wile away the time
So folks, is it “while away the time” or “wile away the time”?
I had to look it up, and when I did I was surprised to find that although both are used, the more proper spelling is “while” (even though in the title of this post I used the other way of writing it, in order to get both spellings in):
The OED has instances of while away going back to the early 18th century. The phrase employs a now archaic sense of while—namely, to fill up the time…[B]ecause we’re not used to seeing while used as a verb, it’s easy to assume that wile away is the correct phrase.
It sure is. In fact, I always have. Instead:
But wile is mainly a noun””meaning (1) trickery, cunning; (2) a disarming or seductive manner; (3) or a trick intended to deceive””and it’s occasionally used as a verb meaning to influence by wile. None of these definitions has anything to do with idly passing time, so wile away doesn’t make logical sense.
So now I know.
And now you know.
And if you’re interested in other burning questions such as crummy vs.crumby, or log in vs. login, see this and this.
Gun-free zones, gun ownership, and murder
I’ve never understood the point of gun-free zones, and of advertising them too. What are they other than an invitation to a shooter to take aim at a bunch of sitting ducks—or in the case of children, sitting ducklings?
I’m not a gun aficionado myself, but I support second amendment rights, with the usual safeguards to make it at least more difficult for the mentally ill or those with a violent record to obtain guns, and to attempt to assure their proper and safe storage. I know, of course, that anyone who wants to get them can get them, sooner or later, by hook or by crook—by bribing or convincing others to buy them for them or by stealing them (as I assume Lanza did from his mother), and that some people can get careless with storage in their homes.
And I’m not in favor of a bunch of children packing heat in a schoolroom, of course; that would be absurd.
But the knowledge that there are no guns at all in a school environment can only act as a siren song to a certain type of (fortunately rare) mind. Israel knows this, as do terrorists, who often target children. Israel is a country with a lot of guards and a lot of guns, but it is also a country with a very low murder rate outside of terrorism.
Israel is not the US; the US has special demographic and historic circumstances that give it a higher murder rate. But it’s not all that high—in fact, not quite as high as it’s cracked up to be, at least in comparison to other countries.
The ideal comparison isn’t actually between countries, because countries are so different in other ways, and those ways impact upon the murder rate so greatly that the best measure of the effect of a gun-control law is probably a country before and after that law is passed. And even that doesn’t tell you as much as you might think it does, because crime rates fluctuate over time based on other factors, many of them poorly understood.
But here’s a fascinating chart giving gun ownership statistics the world round as well as murder statistics (by firearm, and by firearm as a percentage of total murders) in each country. You can see that the US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, and a higher murder rate than most western European and other Western countries (which are also more homogeneous demographically than the US, as well as having different cultures and traditions), but that several of those countries (Switzerland, for example) have high rates of gun ownership and low rates of murder. You will also note that some countries, such as Australia, have high gun ownership rates but low rates of murder and that a low percentage of its murders are committed by firearm (unlike Switzerland, in which a high percentage of its relatively few murders are by firearm).
One caveat is that the rates of gun ownership are given as the number of guns per 100 people, and of course if each gun owner in a country tends to own a lot of weapons, that will skew the results higher but doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of people who actually own guns. In Switzerland the number is about 46, and in the US it’s approximately 89, the highest in the world (and by the way, you can see what a strange statistic it is, because I don’t think anyone believes that 89% of the US population is armed; it must reflect multiple-gun ownership).
But the US murder rate is by no means the highest in the world. And some of those that are very much higher (Belize, for example) have very low rates of gun ownership.
It’s a confusing picture, although I’m sure the number-crunchers can do better than I at making sense out of it. Or at least try. I haven’t the time right now to study it in depth; I’ll leave that to you.
But before I finish this post I’d like to draw your attention to the US statistics for firearms and murder as reported by the FBI. The year is 2009, the most recent one for which I can find a full report.
Looking at the murder rates from 2005-2009 categorized by weapon, you’ll see that, roughly, from year to year, about 2/3 of murders in US are committed with some sort of firearm, the vast majority of them handguns. And see how remarkably similar the stats are for the different regions of the US, too; I would have expected more regional variation.
Here’s a chart with a great deal of data in it. You can see that many more men are murdered than women (about 77% men) in the US. They constitute 81% of the felony victims who are murdered in the course of the commission of a separate felony by the perp (for example, robbery, or rape—and rape of course features more women murdered: 24 to 0, or 100%, so the absolute number of such deaths is quite low). Males constitute 73% of murder victims who are not killed in the course of the killer’s committing a separate felony (for example, in love triangles, bar brawls, and gang fights).
And what of mass public murders, the sort of crime that has occasioned this entire discussion today? They are exceptionally rare even in the US, accounting for less than one tenth of one percent of all murders. They engender tremendous horror, however, and can be used by anti-gun forces playing on that fear to further their agenda.
For Christmas: lebkuchen
Enough of this sorrow and pain—now for something completely different, something for the holidays.
Those of you who’ve read this blog for a long time are probably familiar with the following old family recipe, which I’ve posted here before. But here it is again for anyone who may have missed it. The recipe was brought over from Germany with my ancestors sometime in the mid-1800s, and when I was growing up it was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.
The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.
Flora’s Lebkuchen:
(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)
1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice
Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).
Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.
Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.
Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.
Grease and flour two 9X9 cake pans. Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.
Meanwhile, make the frosting.
Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not usually correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.
Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).
I have no powers of resistance for this particular treat.