Recently commenter “Christopher” recommended this 2004 article by the Claremont Institute. It’s about allegations that the GOP purposely appeals to racism, and that racism is somehow inherent in conservatism.
Well worth reading.
The Newtown massacre, gun control, mental illness
As could be very reliably predicted, the forces of gun control have now fastened on the Newtown school shooting and bent it to their purpose, despite the fact that the details as we know them so far argue against it. But why would that stop them? An agenda is an agenda.
The guns the shooter used were legally purchased by his mother. Perhaps she failed to store them properly (there are laws about that, too, but it’s hard to oversee activity in a private home). Perhaps the guns were stored well and the perpetrator was very clever at gaining access to them. At any rate, I fail to see how anything other than the total banning of guns in the US would logically follow from this particular crime—and of course that would be an absurdity, since guns are always obtainable, especially by criminals, and only law-abiding citizens would be deprived of them.
If anything, this massacre should be the impetus for thinking how better to protect schools—which tend to be “gun-free” zones where murderers know they can come and fire away mostly unmolested. The Sandy Hook Elementary School (the actual name of the Newtown school that was attacked yesterday) had a recently installed security system that required visitors to be identified and buzzed in. Sounds good, no? Well, “investigators have determined Lanza forced his way into the school and was not let inside by anyone.”
So much for that.
People have also called for the preventive detention of the mentally ill. Well, there are an awful lot of mentally ill people in this country, and the vast majority are not the least bit dangerous; are we prepared to detain them all? Or do you trust the mental health professionals to predict which people will be violent and which not? I don’t. Every now and then we can tell, but that’s rare, and mostly hindsight.
To me the only answer that makes sense (and it won’t prevent all these incidents by any means) is to have armed guards at schools, or to allow properly trained and screened teachers to be armed. This has its own difficulties, too; for example, if an armed teacher is surprised and shot by an intruder with a gun, the perpetrator will steal the weapon and be even better-armed. And that’s only one of many bad possibilities; it’s not clear whether the net result of arming teachers would be good or not. I’ve known a lot of unbalanced teachers in my day.
The reality is that this sort of incident is very difficult to predict and very difficult to prevent, and that no solution is a perfect one. The very best one may be armed guards rather than armed teachers, but I’m not sure; who screens the guards? (I’d take a look at how Israel does it, but I’m having trouble finding reliable confirmation of my belief that they regularly have armed guards at schools, although I strongly suspect they have a good system.)
One interesting fact to ponder is that worst mass murders in US history have all involved explosives of one sort of other: the 9/11 terrorists used the incendiary power of jet fuel, set off by the planes colliding with the building; Oklahoma City involved a powerful bomb; and the worst school mass murder in US history was perpetrated in 1927 by a killer who used the fairly ordinary explosives of his era, purchased over time and in small amounts so as to not arouse suspicion.
These are very determined people.
One more question: why children as targets here? I know nothing about Adam Lanza’s psyche (initial reports being notoriously unreliable, I’ll wait to hear more), but in general children are chosen for the very reason that they are innocent and arouse our deepest protective feelings. What could be more cruel and more offensive than to kill a bunch of them? What could arouse more sorrow and rage and feelings of impotence? If a perpetrator wants to inflict maximum damage and grief, they are obvious targets—in addition to being relatively safe ones, because they are not armed (nor are their teachers) and cannot fight back.
The motive is ordinarily anger—but not usually at the children themselves, except that they are objects of love and affection and perhaps the perpetrator sees himself as not being equally loved. The anger is often at someone else: parents, spouse, siblings, the world—or, in the case of the Pied Piper, town leaders who had promised him a certain payment for ridding the city of rats, and then reneged on the deal. What did he do? Took away their children.
[ADDENDUM: The m.o. of the murderer as described here reminds me a bit of the killing method of Breivik, who targeted older children but children nonetheless, and gunned them down systematically and remorselessly.
The article also contains somewhat conflicting information about Lanza’s prior mental health:
The gunman’s aunt Marsha Lanza, of Crystal Lake, Ill., said her nephew was raised by kind, nurturing parents who would not have hesitated to seek mental help for him if he needed it.
“Nancy wasn’t one to deny reality,” Marsha Lanza said, adding her husband had seen Adam as recently as June and recalled nothing out of the ordinary.
Catherine Urso, of Newtown, said her college-age son knew the killer. “He just said he was very thin, very remote and was one of the goths,” she said.
Lanza attended Newtown High School, and several news clippings from recent years mention his name among the honor roll students.
Joshua Milas, who graduated from Newtown High in 2009 and belonged to the school technology club with him, said that Lanza was generally a happy person but that he hadn’t seen him in a few years.
“We would hang out, and he was a good kid. He was smart,” Joshua Milas said. “He was probably one of the smartest kids I know. He was probably a genius.”]
More on the Newtown massacre
More facts are emerging:
The shooter was 20-year-old Adam Lanza. He also killed his mother Nancy Lanza, with whom he lived and who worked as an aide at the school, before he went there to begin his murderous rampage. Neighbors described the shooter as “‘odd’ and displaying characteristics associated with mental illness.”
The death toll at the school now is said to number 26 (20 of them children), plus the killer as well as the previous victim (his mother) in the family residence.
The weapons have been described as two semi-automatic pistols and an automatic rifle, but the latter weapon was left in the car and not used.
According to some children in the school who survived, “the shooter didn’t utter a word.”
Tales of heroism will emerge as time goes on, but for the moment we have this:
[A teacher named Varga] said someone turned on the public address system so that “you could hear people in the office. You could hear the hysteria that was going on. I think whoever did that saved a lot of people. Everyone in the school was listening to the terror that was transpiring.”
Also, a custodian went running around, warning people there was a gunman in the school, Varga said.
What indescribable suffering for the parents, the children, the teachers, the community—and also the family of the shooter (see this).
As for President Obama’s comments on the killings, I see no reason to believe his emotion wasn’t genuine (as some have suggested in the comments section of another thread). He’s a father of young children, and for any parent this sort of grief and loss is hard to even contemplate, and can feel almost overwhelming.
UPDATE: Here’s a harrowing but excellent interview with a first grade teacher at the school (yeah, I know the interviewer is Diane Sawyer, but it’s well worth watching):
Susan Rice, martyr
Rice regretfully withdraws her name from contention for Secretary of State, having been foully and unfairly wronged by the evil, racist, misogynist Republicans.
Ace has already written pretty much what I have to say on the matter.
And now that John Kerry is the top contender, I’ll recycle this, which I wrote exactly a month ago, when his name was up for Secretary of Defense:
If true, this would be another example of what a keen sense of humor Obama has. For what better way to enrage the majority of conservative men who served in Vietnam long ago? They harbor enormous resentment toward Kerry for his Winter Soldier hearings (perceived by many to be based on exaggerations and outright lies), accusations of widespread American war crimes, and communicating with the enemy as some sort of self-nominated unofficial ambassador in Paris.
That Obama guy, he’s a real stitch.
One unexpected consequence of a Kerry appointment, however, would be that in the election to fill his senate seat, Scott Brown would probably get another shot at becoming a senator from Massachusetts, this time alongside his new colleague, Elizabeth Warren.
Happy Chanukah!
Chanukah began last Saturday night, but since it has eight days I still get a chance to wish you a happy one—for two more days, anyway.
The words of this Chanukah song in Yiddish—written in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I posted it anyway because I think it’s beautiful:
The lyrics, as translated by Theodore Bikel:
O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.
Remember: written in 1924.
Bikel translated it that way in order to make the rhymes come out. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be:
Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?
Indeed.
First reports on Connecticut school shooting
In another dreadful, outrageous, vile act of violence, a shooter (now dead) opened fire at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, about halfway between Hartford and New York City.
There have been extremely conflicting and shifting reports on the number of people killed, but as time has gone on the number reported dead has risen. Right now the NY Times says eighteen children were killed, with other fatalities as well. US News reports eighteen children and eight adults dead.
These figures will probably change. But it’s fairly clear that loss of life was profound in this horrific crime.
Other things are clear, too. One is that this will renew calls for more and more gun control. Another is that perpetrators will always be able to get guns. A third is that it doesn’t take guns if a person wants to do this sort of thing: the worst mass killing of schoolchildren in the US occurred in 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, and involved bombs.
You may never have heard of it before (perhaps because it doesn’t serve the anti-gun lobby), but here are the basic facts:
he Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927, which killed 38 elementary school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself; at least 58 people were injured. Most of the victims were children in the second to sixth grades (7”“14 years of age attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history and the fourth-deadliest massacre in U.S. history, behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mountain Meadows massacre and 9/11.
The bomber was school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, 55, who was enraged about a property tax levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack…On the morning of May 18, Kehoe murdered his wife by beating her to death, then set his farm buildings afire. As fire fighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, killing many schoolchildren. He used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle with his Winchester rifle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others. During rescue efforts searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school’s south wing. Kehoe apparently had intended to blow up and destroy the whole school.
Shades of Columbine, where the perpetrators had rigged the school with bombs that in their case failed to go off, but which were intended to kill plenty more. This destructive nihilistic impulse seems to be behind many of these killings. We may learn in the present incident that the shooter had some connection to the school, some special beef. Or it may be a random act by a stranger.
Either way—bombs or guns, random or targeted—all are evil acts.
[NOTE: I’ll be curious to learn whether the school had metal detectors, and whether it had a policy of locking its doors or not.]
Yep, we did have to pass the bill to learn what’s in it
And even though the liberal senators already knew what was in it, some of them are finding it not to their liking.
Boo hoo.
An epic rant by Rush Limbaugh.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas—at Amazon
Not too many shopping days left, are there?
Getting a mite panicked about your gift-giving?
Don’t despair; neo-neocon (and Amazon) are here to help you out. Just use my handy-dandy portal, or this.
Amazon sent me a promotional email recommending books “for her.” I think it’s instructive to take a look at what Amazon thinks women like to read (and believe me, the folks at Amazon know these things; they must crunch the numbers all the time). Mostly novels, novels, and more novels, mostly by authors I’ve never heard of, and a few memoirs and biographies and books on entertaining thrown in.
What does Amazon think you should buy “for him”? More to my taste, actually—at least, the history and biography part (it’s Lincoln, Lincoln, and more Lincoln). Not so much the bios of rock stars (what’s up with so many bios of rock stars?). As for the memoir by the knuckleballer, well, I once read Jim Bouton’s memoir, so there.
My general book, CD, and DVD recommendations are in the widgets on the right sidebar. But I’ll add a few other suggestions:
(1) the original sleep sound machine, and still champion
(2) if you like club soda (like I do), and are tired of hauling the bottles back and forth, this is a handy gadget
(3) This, or really any book of short stories by John Updike
(4) these previous suggestion of mine: this and this
And a heartfelt “thank you” to all who’ve already ordered from Amazon through my blog—much appreciated!
Racism is only racism…
…when it’s perpetrated by Republicans (or pretend Republicans). Or when it consists solely of (quelle horreur!) criticism of Obama or Susan Rice.
When it’s at the hands of union thugs—well then, it’s crickets chirping.
More lies and lying liars
DrewM. at Ace’s takes on that “Lie of the Year” Romney supposedly told, and why it wasn’t actually a lie, much less “of the Year.”
That PolitiFact piece naming Romney’s ad the Lie of the Year was the featured story when I went to my Yahoo email last night, by the way. How many people do you think it reached?
And although Ace’s blog is very popular and gets excellent traffic (for a blog), how many people do you think that refutation of PolitiFact’s claim reached? No contest, right?
So PolitiFact’s “facts” get more than halfway around the world, and become truths in people’s minds: Romney=Liar.
Is Christie a big fat liar?
When asked by Barbara Walters why he’s so overweight, Christie answered, “If I could figure that out, I’d fix it.” Althouse comments:
Then he says it doesn’t mean he’s not capable of serving as President. But, come on, when you’re President, all the world’s problems are yours, and you’d better be good at figuring out what’s wrong. These problems are much more complicated than why he’s fat! He not just a bit chubby. He’s very fat. Whatever the subtleties of why people get fat, a good percentage of what he’s carting around has got to be from just plain gorging himself. How can he sit there with a straight, sincere face and say “If I could figure out why, I’d fix it”? At least we have video showing us how he looks when he’s lying.
Christie may be big, and there’s no doubt he’s fat, but the jury’s out on whether or not he’s a liar, and my guess is that he’s not (at least, not on this point). “Whatever the subtleties of why people get fat,” a good percentage is not necessarily or invariably “from just plain gorging” themselves—unless you define “gorging” as anything over the amount they need to sustain a supposedly normal weight, which in the case of many (not all, but many) fat people can be a surprisingly low amount of food.
Yes indeed, in a very narrow (pun intended) sense, fat people do take in more than they burn. But why? And how much is that? I know quite a few fat people who eat no more and are not less active than the thin people I know. I’ve lived with thin roommates who cannot put on weight no matter how much they eat, which is already quite a bit. I’ve lived with heavy roommates who eat 1200 calories a day and can barely lose weight.
Of course, there are fat people who eat a lot more than average. They’re the people you see featured on TV programs where you can watch them having twenty hamburgers at a sitting. I have no idea whether Christie is one of them, but I tend to doubt it, especially with his schedule. Short of that type of true gorging situation, the “subtleties of why people get fat,” as Althouse puts it, are not only subtle but also poorly understood (although we’re learning more all the time), complex, and powerful factors for most people in their own personal fat-thin equation.
I’ve already written about my own efforts in this direction. I’ll recap by saying I’m not fat. But, like so many women, I’d like to lose ten or fifteen pounds to look my best. But to lose that weight it takes cutting back to ridiculously low levels of food intake (and in case you’re going to suggest I go on a lo-carb or paleo or other diet of that type—I have, many times, and they don’t work for me, and I find them singularly unpleasant as well, and I’ve written about it before). I’ve also noticed that if I eat a lot I’m only about seven pounds or so heavier than if I eat very little. My range seems to be very narrow, because my body seems to defend a certain weight quite tenaciously. And that was even true when I was young. When I was a dancer, I had to keep my intake to around 1000 calories a day, day after day, despite intense exercise, to achieve anywhere near the requisite thinness.
If you want to read some interesting articles on current theories about weight gain and the “why” of it, take a look at this. Also see this:
Like many other medical conditions, obesity is the result of an interplay between genetic and environmental factors. Polymorphisms in various genes controlling appetite and metabolism predispose to obesity under certain dietary conditions. The percentage of obesity that can be attributed to genetics varies widely, depending on the population examined, from 6% to 85%. As of 2006, more than 41 sites on the human genome have been linked to the development of obesity when a favorable environment is present….Numerous studies of laboratory rodents provide strong evidence that genetics plays an important role in obesity.
And then there’s this:
As well as this:
When the body needs food, rising levels of the hormone ghrelin, produced in the upper stomach and pancreas, signal the brain and trigger a desire to eat. At the end of a meal, specialized endocrine cells in the wall of the small intestine release other hormones (like cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide-1, and oxyntomodulin) that signal satiation. In obese individuals these signaling networks malfunctioned, Laferré¨re [an endocrinologist specializing in obestiy] knew, leaving them perpetually hungry.
“Perpetually hungry.” Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
And those are just a few random articles written for popular consumption. I could go on and on and on, and include the scientific literature as well. But I think the point is clear, which is that the “why” of obesity is not clear, for many if not most people suffering from it.
The shrinking milk market
Apparently you do outgrow your need for milk; sales of milk in this country have been plummeting.
Well, you may or may not outgrow your need for it, but a lot of people outgrow their ability to digest it without a lot of discomfort. According to the article, one of the reasons for the milk sales decline is that the population has a lower percentage of children in it. I would add that it may also be that because of changing demographics, a growing percentage of children are lactose intolerant.
Lactose intolerance develops after the age of weaning in the majority of people worldwide. In fact, the ability to digest milk as an adult without experiencing any negative symptoms (gas, bloating, etc.) is the exception rather than the rule:
The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from 5% in northern Europe through 71% for Sicily to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries. This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase persistant individuals in cultures that rely on dairy products. While it was first thought that this would mean that populations in Europe, India, and Africa had high frequencies of lactase persistence because of a particular mutation, it has now been shown that lactase persistence is caused by several independently occurring mutations.
As for me—well, I detest milk, and have ever since I was a very small child. You’d have to hold a gun to my head to get me to drink it. At some point in early adulthood, a somewhat sadistic doctor ordered a test during which I had to drink twelve ounces of lactose (milk sugar, the stuff lactose intolerant people can’t digest) on an empty stomach, and he then measured my rise in blood sugar afterward for several hours. There was no rise at all, meaning that I’m one of those people who lacks all ability to digest lactose (some people have a partial inability).
I will spare you a description of how I felt during the hours after I swilled down that abominable stuff. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.
So, are you a milk drinker?