[A] Now that he is done with the annual chore, it’s the perfect time for Santa Claus to consider relocating to Alaska.
[B] It was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin that made me wonder if the tide really has turned against guns. It’s West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin that is making me think that maybe it hasn’t.
[C] Though it doesn’t tell us too much about what to do to prevent further incidents, I did appreciate this piece on how we should think about them on a social level.
[D] When I fear overreaction to high-profile incidents like Newtown, it’s not just gun control. I still haven’t gotten over the release of V for Vendetta being pushed off the fifth of November.
[E] Despite the reputation, the Tea Party has arguably done a better job of recruiting minorities than the Republican Party has. For all of the (legitimate!) talk about the Tea Party’s duds, it’s worth remembering that without them, Marco Rubio wouldn’t be a senator.
[F] During the Leaguecast on the GOP, the conversation took a strange turn with some Dubya-love. We’re not the only ones. GWB never got over 50% of any of the minority groups, but his elections and the failures sense demonstrate why it’s important to mitigate the margins.
[G] I’m pleased at the pushback that the New York Journal got on releasing the names and addresses of handgun permit owners.
[H] Theodore Dalrymple pokes holes at the notion that if only there’d been a psychiatrist, Newtown might have been prevented. Those that wish to redirect the conversation away from guns and towards “mental health” – and those that flat-out want this approached as a mental health issue – have an uphill climb on convincing me that there is actually something we can do on this avenue.
[I] There is a resurgence of Japanese Nationalism. Or maybe not. The LDP is back in charge of Japan and China may be okay with that.
[J] In Japan, they have vending machines that keep drinks cold while being shut down for 16 hours at a time. Presently, the overall power savings is about ten percent, but that still seems significant.
[K] Jon V Last writes about fertility decline, over in Japan, here, and elsewhere. Robots may not save us.
[L] This may be wishful thinking on Conn Carroll’s part, but maybe the emerging Democratic coalition is actually simply the Obama coalition.
[M] On the other hand, if the public is shying away from the advancement of traditional values, that does represent a more enduring problem for the GOP.
[N] Cyborgs rise!
[O] Can a community redevelopment agency get $100,000,000 by declaring downtown Memphis a condemnable slum?
[Q] Last week I linked to an article about how awesome Legos are. This week I link to an article about how awesome LEGO is.
[R] Wikipedia doesn’t need our money, so why does it keep asking us for more?
[S] I doubt this is an actual thing, but financial management as a criteria for mating only makes sense to me.
[T] Liberals like shows that mock conservatives. Conservatives like college football.
[U] For Microsoft, the case for firing Steve Ballmer. Included in the article is a link to this piece from 2011, which paints a pretty devastating picture.
[V] Donorschoose, a website dedicated to directing funds on education projects, has hired a data scientist.
[W] The global implications of shale. California’s history with it.
[Q] made me tear up…sniff
I know, right? Makes me not want to get knockoff brand Legos after all.
W — “They” tell me that shale oil can be extracted at a viable profit if oil sells for 130USD/bbl, and that the U.S. and Canada have enough shale to be the world’s largest exporters of oil for a century or more if the price can be sustained at that level for that period of time. Whether this is good for the environment is one thing — but it would obviously be fantastic for the North American economy: the rich would get even richer!
An online acquaintance who has managed drilling for small companies in the Texas/Louisiana Oil Patch for decades points out that both have a long successful history with fracking. Of course, he says, both of them regulate the snot out of it. In Texas, every gallon of fracking fluid has to be accounted for; the only allowed disposal is also the most expensive, namely injection into deep saline aquifers; every step of the drilling process has to be documented, and inspectors not only track the paperwork but visit onsite to verify (with the Texas Rangers — and not the baseball version — on call to shut you down the day there’s a discrepancy found); and if it ever comes down to you’ve messed up somehow and polluted things, you clean it up or go bankrupt trying. Occasionally he jokes that drillers were happy when operations moved far enough offshore that they were subject to federal rather than Texas regulation.
The problem with shale oil and gas is that wells have ridiculous decline rates. As a consequence, you can end up in Alice’s Red Queen situation where you have to keep running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Optimistic forecasts like one Citigroup issued recently assume that there are an essentially unlimited number of places to drill for shale oil and that drilling rates can be increased very substantially. Pessimistic forecasts assume that you can’t. Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser did a nice little write-up about the two sides recently.
Conservatives like college football.
Labor that has no rights and which it’s against the rules to pay? There’s a shock.
And students who aren’t brain-washed by liberal professors because they don’t actually attend classes.
[H] Theodore Dalrymple pokes holes at the notion that if only there’d been a psychiatrist, Newtown might have been prevented. Those that wish to redirect the conversation away from guns and towards “mental health” – and those that flat-out want this approached as a mental health issue – have an uphill climb on convincing me that there is actually something we can do on this avenue.
For me, anyway, it’s more along the lines that better mental health is going to produce a lot of ancillary benefits and not make anything much worse.
But no, I don’t think they will have much of a direct outcome on reducing spree killing events. You’re talking about something so incredibly rare (relatively speaking) that the false positive and false negative rates, plus the number of people who would be in the mental health system, means you’re still pretty unlikely to catch the next one in-system.
(I say that as someone who remembers that Reagan had support to shut down the state institutions in California because they were pretty bad)
[C] America’s periodic school shootings, I think, fill a similar psychological space for the Left as Islamic terror does for the Right. The horrific images and the unnerving out-of-a-clear-blue-sky nature of the attacks make them terrifying, out of all proportion to the absolute risks, and the political narrative of preventability and blame is easily framed: “fewer guns (for school shootings), or more, say, ethnic profiling of terror suspects (for terror attacks), would have prevented this tragedy”.
I think this is a true, and incredibly important, insight that partisans of both stripes would be well-advised to keep in mind when thinking about and discussing these topics with each other.