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Two people out having fun with their friends were murdered yesterday in Texas because their rights, and their friends’ rights, to openly carry adequate firepower have been savaged. If good guys with guns, trained in using them, had been visibly on the scene, this never would have happened, right?
Author Archive
January 17th, 2013
Category: Diplomacy, Religion and Politics
Some jobs are challenging, and some are so hard it’s a wonder anyone can be found to take them on. Ambassador from Pakistan to anywhere, for example. At the moment, the US slot is held by Sherry Rehman, and representing her country in a positive way to anyone not clinically insane has just become even [...]
December 16th, 2012
Category: Education policy, Firearms, Politics and Leadership, Post-disaster reflections, Terrorism and its control
Let’s reflect on the two real lessons of the Battle of Newtown. First, the Second Amendment is not about hunting animals and punching paper, it’s about winning a war against the government, and here we have a man who didn’t whine about tyranny, or run and hide: he took up arms like a Real American, [...]
December 9th, 2012
Having shared some very snarky jibes on a UC listserv about the new UC ‘logo’ that Mark deplores, I’m now feeling some remorse. As a piece of graphic design, I think it’s not a success on its own or for its purpose. But it’s not a replacement for the seal, in fact the designer says [...]
November 8th, 2012
John Boehner has committed the house majority to accept new revenues under the “right conditions”. The California legislature has a 2/3 D majority in both houses, which means it can actually raise taxes, and the CA electorate that pulled the legs out from under its government a third of a century ago voted to increase [...]
October 29th, 2012
Matt Stoller thinks this would be a good time to vote for a third-party candidate. His case, approximately, comes in two parts. The first is a sheet of charges against Obama for bad things he did and good things he didn’t do in his first term (some of which are a little naïve about what [...]
October 19th, 2012
Climate stabilization is net cheap, so humanity should buy a lot of it. But it’s expensive gross: the costs are high. (No, Virginia, we will not all get richer than we are now conserving energy and making windmills. If low carbon methods were cheaper, we would be using them. We will just be a lot [...]
October 18th, 2012
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Economics, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Journalism (Online and Otherwise), Policy briefs, Wayward press
Two significant pieces of news today: Google’s earnings (and stock price) are down, and Newsweek has given up on a paper edition.The Newsweek story is only the latest step down a path to oblivion, as the digital edition cannot survive financially either and will close down in turn. This is happening because the business models [...]