The headline to this story is mistitled. It should instead read “Most Americans Ignorant Of The Facts About Bullet ‘Fingerprinting’.”

It says that most Americans believe that bullet fingerprinting would solve the shooting spree in Tidewater country.

So what? What are we to make of this? What is the point? Scientific subjects, and matters of fact, are not fit topics for opinion polls. The public, in its hysteria and lack of knowlege, may have such an opinion, but there’s no basis for it, and it shouldn’t be used as a basis for public policy.

Here’s a NASA employee who isn’t impressed with the new NASA Information Technology czar.

Apparently, Mr. Strassmann recently took a tour of the Information Technology aspects of NASA and described it as like “an archaeological expedition”; not an entirely flattering remark, but perhaps he said it to a crowd of employees summoned to a parking lot somewhere, which would bring it up to NASA’s standards. One thing Mr. Strassmann might want to educate himself on is the small budget issues that have been eating NASA alive for the last few years: it is something of a challenge to revamp a center’s computing strategy while the space station is moaning “Feed Me!” Also, he might interrupt his chanting of “One NASA, Good NASA” long enough to notice that NASA is, in fact, quite diverse, with quite diverse computing needs.

We range from the people at the Cape who fill the tanks with fuel and push the big red button to the folks in Cleveland who are trying to figure out how to get the blue light to come out of the warp nacelles. The same dumb terminal fiber-coupled to his new computing center at Marshall is not going to meet all those needs. And finally, I have to wonder just who Mr. Strassmann visited on his archaeological expedition. I can state for a fact that he didn?t visit me: if he can look at what I am doing and see it as fossilized footprints in the creek bed of computing, then one of us has our plug out of the wall, and it is not me.

Iain Murray, in drug-warrior mode, is upset at Reason magazine for saying that a family whose house was torched by a drug dealer whom they’d been trying to get out of the neighborhood were more casualties of the drug war. He compares the drug dealer to the sniper, and accuses Reason of a double standard because in the case of the former, they say that the sniper is solely responsible, whereas in the case of the latter, they pin part of the blame on drug policy.

I don’t see the double standard, because the two cases are different. There’s no discernable policy that caused the sniper to snipe (at least not based on evidence seen to date), but clearly, if drugs were legal, it’s unlikely that that particular person would even be a dealer, since he’d probably be off engaged in some more lucrative (illegal) activity. The dealer has a reason for his action (though not an excuse or justification) that stems from the brutal incentives put in place by drug laws. At least it can be said of him that there is a rational (albeit evil) purpose to his targeting those individuals. The sniper is killing people randomly. There is a difference.

But in the comments section, some related issues came up. Iain claims that there’s no problem with outlawing drugs, because “society wants it.” I disagreed, stating that I thought that most or all federal drug laws are unconstitutional under (among other things), the Tenth Amendment.

The reason that we have the Bill of Rights is to protect us from things that society may “want,” like rounding up people of a certain ethnicity and interning them, or silencing a group of people with a certain point of view. The “interest of society” is not sufficient to deprive people of their rights, and while I have no desire to do so, I have trouble seeing how I don’t have an intrinsic right to burn vegetation and suck it into my lungs. They’re my lungs. If I go out and commit some actual crime as a result, then justice should be served, but the simple act of ingesting a substance is not, or at least, should not be, a crime.

One of the problems with federalizing this (and indeed, in federalizing many crimes, as currently seems to be the trend, unless we can get a Supreme Court that will roll back this overreach) is that there’s no way to do any social experiments.

The drug warriors take it as a given that drug laws minimize drug use and harm, purely on a theoretical basis, since there’s little empirical evidence to support it. There is an assumption behind them that drug laws suppress drug use, and that absent them, many more would take drugs. They may be right, but it’s difficult to know, because we dont have any labs in which to test the proposition in any kind of controlled way.

One of the beauties of the original concept of federalism was that the states would serve as such social laboratories, and could try different policies in accordance to their culture and the will of their own people. It probably is constitutional for a state to regulate (and even outlaw) drugs–the liquor and tobacco example provides plenty of precedent.

But because Washington has taken away the prerogative, we have no opportunity to do such experiments, and see what really is the best solution to this pressing social problem. Regardless of their opinions on the effectiveness and justice of drug prohibition, self-identified conservatives should be concerned by the fact that, as in many other policies, we have an overbearing government in Washington that has decided that one size fits all.

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).

There’s now no question that this is terrorism. The only question is the nature and purpose of the terrorist(s).

Even in the midst of the shootings in the DC area, the gun prohibitionists are admitting that their movement is on the ropes. And Michael Moore’s incoherent propaganda isn’t going to help.

Great news (though the article contains the usual misinterpretation of Miller–the Supremes did not rule that the Second Amendment pertained only in the context of militias).

The Daily Cal has retracted this story, which originally reported that some Berkeley professors were claiming that the US may have carried out the Bali bombing.

The professors in question are justified to be concerned with such a false accusation on the part of the campus paper, but they should be even more concerned about the fact that it seemed like a perfectly credible story. They should be asking themselves why.

Dealing with that problem is going to require a lot more work than was getting a simple retraction.

Mona Charen talks about Bill Clinton’s other legacy, growing more clear by the day.

I’m on the phone with a bank. I have two credit card accounts with them. I’ve got one of them registered for on line banking and bill paying. The other one needs to be paid. Today.

There’s no way that I can see on the web site to register the other one, at least with the same user name.

I call the help number. I have to call three times, each time repeating my sixteen digit credit card number, each time having them verify all of my vital information, each time telling me that they can’t help but that they’ll transfer me to someone who can. The first two times, this results in a long hold period, and then a dial tone as the line is dropped.

The third time is the charm.

I talk to the young woman on the other end, and explain that I’d like to pay both of my cards on line. She says she’ll have to go talk to someone else.

She comes back in a few minutes, and informs me that we can register my other card, but first we have to cancel the first one.

???

“I don’t want to cancel the one that I’ve already successfully registered. I want to have them both registered.”

She says, “That’s the only way to do it.” She says this as though it’s perfectly reasonable. As though no one in their right mind would want to be able to make an on-line payment of their bills on more than one card, or would mind continually cancelling and reregistering the credit cards twice a month in order to do so.

I finally persuade her that this is not exactly a customer-friendly policy, and she goes off to talk to them again.

This is yet to be resolved, but I’m simply amazed at how stultifyingly dumb the designers of some on-line commerce sites can be.