Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Olympics Make No Sense

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I don’t get anything about what I’ve been watching for the last few days. Maybe for the past few Olympics. Things were simpler when I was a kid, when the Olympics were nothing more than the Cold War in athletic form. It seemed to matter then; I seemed to care. But every passing of the torch leaves me sitting in blinking bemusement on my couch, asking a series of snarky questions that all amount to “what the hell is going on?”

So am I drunk, or did I actually watch the Queen of England pretend to parachute from a plane with the actor who plays James Bond? And is it no more than a sign of creeping age that I can not help but wonder if her father was even asked to do anything remotely theatrical at the last London Olympics in ’48?

And could Danny Boyle really come up with no better way to illustrate the change from an industrial to a digital Britain than an ersatz After-School Special set to every last hit song from the 1960′s forward, the message of which seemed to be that cell phones lead to house party sex? And why did the one song NBC had to cut off for station identification have to be “Pretty Vacant”, which would seem to be the theme of the whole exercise?

But more important, do we really need all of that to interest us in the Olympics? Must every opening ceremony be a three-hour multimedia infomercial for the host country? Can’t they just run the torch in and make with the volleyball?

Of course, if everything just started with the Parade of Nations, I’d still find myself crabbing about, of all things, clothes. I don’t know why the Russian team was wearing cowboy hats and the American team was wearing berets. I don’t know who told the German team that they looked good dressed as Teletubbies. I don’t know why the British team went with the Gay Astronaut look. All I know is that the dishdashas worn by Arab athletes looked stately and dignified by comparison. Clearly the terrorists’ mind control experiments are a success.

And then, two weeks of gymnastics, the figure skating of the Summer games. Every four years I have to re-learn the difference between a lutz and a salchow, and every four years I feel the compulsion to yell at a group of teenage tumblers regarding their failure to Stick The Landing. Meanwhile, a 33-year-old skeet shooter from El Monte, CA, just became the first American athlete to win five individual medals in five consecutive Olympics. They couldn’t show that instead of the Men’s Semifinal Qualifying Non-medal Heat?

For more on the inherent creepiness of girls’ women’s gymnastics, see Stacy McCain.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to shout “USA! USA!” louder, so I can avoid the quadrennial complaint about the lack of javelin and fencing coverage.

Micheal Moore and the Musket Fallacy

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In 1789, the best available military technology was the musket. It was a cumbersome weapon by today’s standards, and had an involved process to load and fire.

However, it was not quite as slow to load as it would appear to modern eyes. A trained soldier, commiting the steps of the process to muscle memory, could be quite a quick shot.

This weapon is the Brown Bess Musket, the standard British infantry weapon for centuries. It had an effective range of about 50 yards, hence the need for volleyed fire. Rifled muskets could be much more accurate at longer distances, but they were comparatively rare until industrialization, and they did not come equipped with a bayonet, which was needful to fight at close distances. So this was the best available military technology of the day.

In writing the Second Amendment, the Founders certainly had in mind that citizens should own what was the best available military technology. That was the whole point of the Second Amendment: that the citizens should be armed, that they may defend their liberty from the grasping state, as the Founders had done themselves.

So Michael Moore is wrong: if James Madison looked into a crystal ball and saw an AK-47 in the hands of a citizen, he would only ask whether the weapon was comparable to that of the US Army. This technology fallacy that gun-control advocates offer relies upon two incorrect premises:

  1. The weapons of the 18th century were not that dangerous, indeed comical in their rate of fire.
  2. The Founders did not intend that citizens should be well-armed, only sort-of armed.

Both of these proceed from ignorance about 18th century warfare.

Background/Update on the Vi Ripken Story

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Police are still looking for the guy, who seems to have abducted Ripken, drove around with her for a few hours, and then let her go:

…investigators are trying to answer the main question and are hoping that surveillance cameras at a Baltimore County Royal Farms and a Diner will provide them with clues.

The suspect got gas and food at the station as he drove around for hours with this woman who is a pillar in her small community.

Now the suspect is still at large in this case and Aberdeen police say he should be considered armed and dangerous.

They’re getting help from the feds and police agencies around the state.

Curiouser and curioser.

Cal Ripken’s Mother Kidnapped, Found.

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Now this is just odd.

ABERDEEN, Md. – Vi Ripken, the mother of Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken, Jr., was kidnapped at gunpoint Tuesday morning, according to the family.

She was found in Aberdeen, evaluated on the scene and refused medical treatment.

She is now home with family.

So either these are the worst kidnappers ever, or the ransom got paid lickety-split. The family statement leads me to the latter view.

The Strange Birth of New York’s Gun Laws

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Ernst Schrieber, commenting in the Protein wisdom post linked earlier, offers this New York Post article:

In 1911 — in the wake of a notorious Gramercy Park blueblood murder-suicide — Sullivan sponsored the Sullivan Act, which mandated police-issued licenses for handguns and made it a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon.

This was the heyday of the pre-Prohibition gangs, roving bands of violent toughs who terrorized ethnic neighborhoods and often fought pitched battles with police. In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them asshtarkers(sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control.

The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

In fact, he gave the game away during the debate on the bill, which flew through Albany: “I want to make it so the young thugs in my district will get three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in the electric chair a year from now.”

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results.

What is done by politicians is done for political reasons to achieve a political end. Anyone who believes that they are motivated by the desire to effect change in society is quixotically naive.

 

Amanda Marcotte Don’t Know Much About History….UPDATED with More Gob-Smackedness

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Twitter is not for the slow of wit, nor for the rushed to judgement…

It was desegregation that caused white America to believe that the government had stopped “protecting” them, and so they needed guns.

The mind scarcely has the courage to boggle.

Presumably white Americans slaughtered the Indians with racially-insensitive discourse. And that business at the O.K. Corral? Involved some brutal Dodgeball hits, and unfortunately inspired the St. Valentine’s Day Snowball Fight.

UPDATE: Stacy McCain, who’s long been one of Marcotte’s most impassioned fans, egregiously and patriarchally points out that the Bill of Rights precedes the Civil Rights Movement.

Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom makes the same point, and delineates a growing meme in the left-o-sphere that James Holmes was acting out of White Male Privilege.

Which means that if any of this weekend’s gunmen in Chicago turn out to be non-white (and mind you, I’m saying IF), that makes them heroic defenders of the marginalized. Like Ice-T.

Playing with My New Toy

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Today, as one of the perks of my job, I got an iPad. I’m still playing around with it, but one of the first apps downloaded was WordPress. So far it seems designed for your more utterly dashed-off tripe, so this may not be the best thing to ever happen to andrewjpatrick.com. However, I can now take and post pictures with the same device.

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