Convicted of Being a Bad Shot

Here we go again. A white guy in Florida starts hassling a black kid, then pulls a gun and shoots him dead. And the jury somehow can't convict the guy of murder.

Michael Dunn pulled into a gas station in 2012, where some kids were parked playing loud music. He told them to turn it down, and apparently they complied, but Dunn shot the victim, Jordan Davis, anyway. Davis died almost immediately. As the kids' car pulled away Dunn pumped several more shots into it.

Dunn was convicted of attempted murder of the other kids in the car, but the jury deadlocked on the murder charge.

Apparently the only real crime in Florida is being a bad shot.

One of the jurors said that the final vote was 9-3 to convict on the murder charge, but three jurors were convinced that Dunn felt he was in danger.

The juror explained that jurors got a glimpse into Dunn’s ego when he said he asked people to turn down their music several times before in his hometown. Valerie told "Nightline" that Dunn’s insistence during his testimony that he was in danger was an important moment in the trial.

So, this jerk goes around town hassling people playing music, secure in the knowledge that if anyone gives him any lip he can just shoot them, then say that he thought he saw a gun and was afraid for his life.

Florida's stand your ground law is custom made for letting people get away with murder. All the "evidence" you need is the ability to give weepy fear-laden testimony to a gullible jury.


Personal responsibility is supposed to be the hallmark of conservative jurisprudence. Stand your ground laws let liars and bullies get away with murder. Maybe Florida should just bite the bullet and institute the death penalty for texting in movie theaters, playing loud music and walking down the street in hoodies.

It looks like Dunn will go to prison for decades, which is a life sentence for the middle-aged man. But you gotta ask: if he had killed all four kids and the car never moved, would those three jurors would have thought him not guilty of any crime at all?

How can not killing three kids be a greater crime than killing one?

The UN Report on North Korea

The United Nations has released a scathing report of the situation inside of North Korea and I say this long overdue. I am so thoroughly disgusted by this that I can hardly write to be honest with all of you.

Some of the key points:

Arbitrary detention, torture, executions and prison camps

The police and security forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government and to the ideology underpinning it. The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable. Impunity reigns.

Violations of freedom of thought, expression and religion

The state operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience to the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.

Discrimination

It is a rigidly stratified society with entrenched patterns of discrimination... Discrimination is rooted in the songbun system, which classifies people on the basis of state-assigned social class and birth, and also includes consideration of political opinions and religion. Songbun intersects with gender-based discrimination, which is equally pervasive.

Abductions and enforced disappearances from other countries

Since 1950, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has engaged in the systematic abduction, denial of repatriation and subsequent enforced disappearance of persons from other countries on a large scale and as a matter of state policy.

Violations of the freedom of movement and residence

The state decides where citizens must live and work, violating their freedom of choice... This has created a socioeconomically and physically segregated society, where people considered politically loyal to the leadership can live and work in favourable locations, whereas families of persons who are considered politically suspect are relegated to marginalised areas.

Violations of the right to food and related aspects of the right to life

The state has used food as a means of control over the population. It has prioritised those whom the authorities believe to be crucial to maintaining the regime over those deemed expendable.

Essentially, nothing that we did not already know. So what can we do about it?

At first glance, the answer seems like nothing, given that China's feathers will be ruffled and the American voter is very weary of war. North Korea doesn't seem to want to advance beyond her current borders and obviously has a vested interest in keeping their little concentration camp of a country intact. Yet the human rights violations demand action. Perhaps we could ramp up our covert activity in the country and get a more clear assessment of what it would take to take out the people that are engaging in these actions.

Clearly, this is one of the greatest humanitarian crises we have faced since World War II. It's been going on a long time and it needs to stop...by force, if necessary.

Chucking Gun Background Checks Means More Murders

Speaking of the debate on gun control...

A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research provides evidence that background checks help reduce the murder rate:

The 2007 repeal of a Missouri law that required background checks and licenses for all handgun owners appears to be associated with a significant increase in murders there, a new study finds.

The law’s repeal was correlated with a 23 percent spike in firearm homicide rates, or an additional 55 to 63 murders annually from 2008 to 2012, according to the study conducted by researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and to be published in the Journal of Urban Health.

“This study provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and the study’s lead author, said in a news release. “There is strong evidence to support the idea that the repeal of Missouri’s handgun purchaser licensing law contributed to dozens of additional murders in Missouri each year since the law was changed.”

The spike in murders only held for those committed with a gun and was consistent throughout the state. Neither Missouri’s border states nor the nation as a whole saw similar increases.

Eliminating the background check essentially makes it legal for criminals to buy guns. And when you make it legal for criminals to buy guns, criminals shoot more people.

Simple math, really.

A Feller Can Dream, Can't He?

Check out this debate regarding gun control over at debate.org.

Wow.

So, that's how civilized people conduct themselves. No wonder none of my regular commenters have accepted my challenge to debate in that forum. How could they possibly do it?:)

"Bridgegate Has Become MSNBC's Benghazi."

So sayeth Bill Maher is a recent blog post and he's absolutely right. MSNBC has officially become the Fox News of the Left and it really sucks. I used to DVR Morning Joe and watch it if I had time later in the night but they just can't lay off Christie. Again, so what? How is what he did any different than what Lyndon Johnson used to do? Add in Mika Brzezinski's tar and feathering of Woody Allen (which is completely devoid of fact, mind you) and we are really only left with Al Jazeera America...still the most honest and best reporting out there.

They don't tell Americans what we want to hear. They tell us what we need to hear. Check out their YouTube feed for what their content is like and why it is superior.

When Not Seeing Leads to Believing

Humans have always searched for explanations for the unknown. When we can't see a rational cause for something, we inevitably conclude that there's some kind of mystical, supernatural force at work.

Even Albert Einstein did this, in a manner of speaking, when he added the cosmological constant to his theory of general relativity in order to achieve a static universe, which was the accepted theory at the time. Einstein later called this his "greatest blunder."

More recently astrophysicists came up with something called dark matter to explain the "missing mass problem": astronomers cannot find enough mass with telescopes to account for the gravitational effects they observe in the galaxies around us.

Galaxy and its halo

By the 1930s astronomers had found that nearby galaxies were rotating faster than could be explained by the estimates of the masses of their visible components (stars and gas clouds): there had to be some kind of invisible matter providing most of the mass that held these galaxies together. Even accounting for the black holes that we know are at the center of most galaxies, there still wasn't enough mass.

Current theory postulates that most dark matter is some kind of special "nonbaryonic" matter, hypothetical axion particles completely unlike mundane protons, neutrons and electrons. However, the theory does grant that a small portion of the missing mass is regular "baryonic" matter, residing in massive compact halo objects.

They also came up with something called dark energy to explain why the universe keeps expanding faster and faster. Dark energy is sort of like antigravity, an idea that raises a lot of hackles. One current theory goes into great detail, calculating that the universe is composed of 4.9% regular matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.4% dark energy.

This is the mirror image of seeing is believing: not seeing mundane physical matter led scientists to believe in the existence of strange and esoteric dark matter.

I admit to being skeptical about dark matter (and dark energy). It smacks of the sort of mystical answer that I distrust: we can't see the missing mass, so that must mean there's something special and weird going on. I've always thought that the simpler Occam explanation is that we just can't see the missing mass because it's dark out there. Dim red dwarf stars, brown dwarfs (starlike objects too small to emit visible light) and cold dust clouds are essentially invisible to our telescopes, or the masses of galactic core black holes could be underestimated, or there could be smaller undetected "loner" black holes orbiting in the galactic periphery.

Well, now it turns out that someone may have found that missing mass, in exactly the place we should have expected it. This discovery has the potential to completely upend decades of theoretical astrophysics.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Jessica Werk and her team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used light from quasars to detect haloes of cold gas around galaxies ("cold" is relative: the gas is at 10,000 degrees Celsius). The gas previously observed in galactic haloes is about 1 million degrees -- at that temperature the gas emits photons and can be detected by our optical and radio telescopes.

The cold gas clouds absorb some of the quasar's light as it passes through, allowing Werk's team to detect traces of carbon, silicon magnesium and hydrogen. They calculated that there may be 10 to 100 times the amount of cold gas than astronomers previously thought existed, potentially making up all of the missing mass.

If these observations hold up and the cold gas haloes do account for all the missing mass, that doesn't mean the scientists who theorized about dark matter were wrong to do so. They were working with the best data they had, and some aspects of the theory could still be true. And this finding still doesn't explain why the universe's expansion seems to be accelerating (though that could be another observational inadequacy).

The biggest mistake we can make in science is assuming that our observations are complete, that the beliefs we have now are final and can't possibly be changed. Even with the best tools and techniques at their disposal, scientists could not detect the missing mass. So, rather than just assume it was there -- which would definitely have been wrong -- scientists sought out other explanations. And those explanations led them into really esoteric places.

Following that path wasn't wrong: it's what scientists are supposed to do. But once we have the new data, and we have reverified that data several times to ensure that we aren't being misled this time too, we have to go back and revisit and revise everything, and chuck out the theories that don't support the facts.

That's the process of science: going back, testing our assumptions, making the same observations again and again, in new and different ways and from different directions. Making sure that we get the same results, or if we don't get the same results, understanding why we didn't, maybe correcting our experimental methods, or possibly stumbling upon another secret of the universe.

When we do, we often find we no longer need supernatural explanations to explain what we see -- or don't see.

President's Day Good Words #13

"Citizenship demands a sense of common purpose; participation in the hard work of self-government; an obligation to serve to our communities."

(Barack Obama, Sixth State of the Union Address delivered on January 28, 2014 during a joint session of the United States Congress)

President's Day Good Words #12

"Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

(Bill Clinton, First inaugural address, Washington, D.C. January 20, 1993)

President's Day Good Words #11

"We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that's crazy. It's time we stopped it."

(Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Northside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, June 6, 1985)

President's Day Good Words #10

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

(Jimmy Carter, "Malaise Speech," July 15, 1979)

President's Day Good Words #9

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

(John F Kennedy, American University Speech, June 10, 1963)

President's Day Good Words #8

"I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the Government of the United States, but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the Government of the United States, holding a Government job. They are entirely different things. I am not worried about this country ever going Communist. We have too much sense for that. "

(Harry Truman, Responding to a question at his press conference (February 28, 1947); reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1947, p. 191) 

President's Day Good Words #7

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. 

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. 

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. 

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. 

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation."

(Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Four Freedoms Speech, January 6, 1941)

Presidents Day Good Words #6

"The government is us; we are the government, you and I." 

(Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at Asheville, North Carolina, 9 September 1902)

Presidents Day Good Words #5

"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being able to read the Scriptures, and other works both of a religious and moral nature, for themselves."

(Abraham Lincoln, Address Delivered in Candidacy for the State Legislature, 9 March 1832)

A Global Science Experiment

The physics of climate change can be complicated to figure out because of all the different systems on earth: we know that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide increase global temperatures by trapping heat from the sun, but how does that interact with the ocean, the plants, and so on? How do scientists validate their models when they predict that temperatures will rise when the CO2 level goes up, and so will sea levels?

The answer's pretty simple: historical data. From the Times:

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

The concentration of CO2 is currently at about 400 parts per million. Before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration was 270 to 280 ppm. In just a few hundred years humanity has burned enough wood, gas, coal and oil to overpower all the natural CO2-absorbing mechanisms. We burn more than 20 billion tons of fossil fuels each year, and only half of that crap is absorbed naturally; the rest is still floating around in the air.

People frequently argue that people are "too small and insignificant" to change the planet's environment: but without even trying, we puny humans have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide across the entire globe by more than two-fifths in the time since the Declaration of Independence was signed.

If we continue on our current path, with China, India and other undeveloped countries increasing their use of fossil fuels as well, by 2100 we will increase CO2 levels to 900 ppm, more than three times the preindustrial level.

Some argue that historically, high CO2 levels were just a symptom of a warmer planet, and not the cause. We do know that there are cascading effects from a warming planet: CO2 and methane are escaping as the permafrost melts in the frozen tundra in Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon. But we also know the physics: as CO2 and methane levels increase, the greenhouse effect causes higher temperatures.

Once the temperature starts spiraling upward, it doesn't really matter what is cause and what is effect: adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is like throwing gasoline on a fire. If global warming isn't ultimately "our fault," it's especially important that we don't exacerbate the problem by tripling CO2 concentrations.

Do we really want to conduct an irreversible global science experiment to see who's right?

Presidents Day Good Words #4

"Religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

(James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, 10 July 1822)