Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Intrinsically Marxist Nature Of Gun Control

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I was going to write a piece on this theme, but (recovering Leftist) David Mamet does it much better than I could hope to:

Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.

Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.

But President Obama, it seems, does.

He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family protection, around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He, evidently, feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of course, he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.

For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun ownership based on its assessment of needs.

…The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Yes.

Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Hazards Of Scientific Research

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A plane has gone down with three on board in Antarctica.

How could they have let them fly in that kind of weather? NASA would never have taken such a risk, because space research is much less important than Antarctic research.

[Update a few minutes later]

So, if they don’t survive, will Antarctic researchers shut down all operations until they’ve had a national commission investigate it, perhaps for years? That’s what NASA/Congress would do.

In my book, I go through the litany of the number of problems they’ve had at Scott-Amundsen Station, and conclude:

…despite all of these problems, one of them fatal (and Nielsen might have lived longer had she gotten better treatment sooner) there has never been a call by anyone to spend billions of dollars on a unique specialized emergency vehicle to provide 24/7/365 access to and from the Antarctic station, though given sufficient resources some clever engineers could probably come up with such a thing. And unlike NASA, the National Science Foundation has (sensibly) never gotten those kinds of resources. Because we recognize that sometimes research is worth taking risks for, and that the lives of the researchers do not have infinite value, or even billions of dollars worth of value. Except, inexplicably, when it comes to space research.

I may add this incident to the book.