A few months ago I did a phone interview with Sarah Scoles. She finally wrote the piece based in part on it, over at The Atlantic. (Note, Apollo 1 astros died of asphyxiation, not from the fire itself, Columbia happened 17 years after Challenger, not 36, and it was the co-pilot who died on the VG test flight. I’ll blame her editor, since she clearly gets the last two right later in the piece. I assume they’ll fix it at least on line.)
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Collapse Of Cubism
This is from last week, but Lileks nicely filets, in his own inimitable fashion, some absurd social commentary on delivered unprepared meals.
Bump Stocks
They’re not worth banning, but no one really cares about them that much:
Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”
Hard cases make for bad law.
Must Pack Heat
A lot of idiots claim that the NRA wants everyone to be armed. They’ve never advocated that, as far as I know, but there is a case to be made for it.
[Update a while later]
It’s not new, but Glenn Reynolds co-wrote a paper on this a while ago.
Bonobos
Everything you know about them is wrong.
This reminds me of how the Samoans created a lot of cultural mythology by pulling Margaret Mead’s leg.
Gun Control
A message to the Left: Six reasons your “right-wing” friends aren’t coming around to your “arguments.”
The Bells Of Barcelona
Catalonia, to be sure, has trampled on the Spanish Constitution. But constitutions depend on the consent of the governed, and Catalonia refuses to be governed by Madrid. Rajoy now faces a political crisis without a clear solution. His minority government depends on the support of a Basque regional party, and the Basques are sympathetic to the Catalans. The governor of the Basque Autonomous Region proposed yesterday that Madrid adopt a British or Canadian solution, allowing the Catalans to vote on secession as did the Scots in 2014. The difference, of course, is that the Scots depend on British subsidies and voted to stay, while the Catalans subsidize the rest of Spain and would vote to leave. The Basques well might follow.
This is an existential crisis for the Spanish state, for reasons I laid out on Sept. 30. Spain is at the cusp of a steep rise in the proportion of elderly dependents (from 25% of the economically-active population to an insupportable 50% by 2050). The question comes down to who will be eaten first in the lifeboat: with the lowest fertility rate of any large European country, Spain cannot support its elderly, and the Catalans want to maintain themselves first.
There is a great deal of speculation about the possible knock-on effects in the rest of Europe. Catalonia is a singularity. The notionally separatist Lombard League has no stomach for a real fight, and no ambitions to create an independent country, as the League-affiliated Mayor of Bergamo explained in an interview yesterday. The Lombards merely want to keep a higher proportion of their tax revenue. The Italian regionalists are playing comedy, while the Catalans are enacting a tragedy: They perceive this moment as one of existential import for their future existence, and will not back down.
The first response of the rest of Europe, to be sure, will be to ask the Catalans as well as the Rajoy government to put the genie back into the bottle. We are well past that point. After demonstrating that mass civil disobedience could defeat the heavy-handed efforts of the national government to suppress them, the Catalans will not turn back. Nor should they. Europe’s infertility leaves the more productive regions of Europe with the choice of impugning their own future by picking up the retirement bill for the continent’s dead beats, or going their own way.
Something that cannot continue will eventually stop.
Evergreen State
An update on the madness there, and thoughts about the Left’s true war on science.
[Update a while later]
“First they came for the biologists.” [Paywalled, unfortunately]
The Vegas Massacre
Yes, based at least on initial reports, it does appear to be very, very strange.
[Update later afternoon]
The Vegas shooting and the attack of the carrion crows.
Every.Single.Time.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence.
And Nick Gillespie says that this is the time to defend the Second Amendment and less-strict gun control. Because gun control is not, and has never been, the solution.
I have a crazy idea that if you’re going to propose a policy or law in response to a tragic event, you should have to explain how it would have actually prevented that event. Everything this guy did and used was already illegal, as far as I can tell.