Saturday, October 31, 2009

Dresden

I was in Dresden, Germany, this past week. One evening we went on a walking tour of historical Dresden. For those who don't know, Dresden was subject to some heavy bombing towards the end of the war. I'd been vaguely aware of this historical fact (the phrase "firebombing of Dresden" was familiar before going there), but I was unaware of (or had forgotten) the details.

One of the details that was mentioned was that parts of Dresden reached 1500 degrees Celsius or so during the resulting firestorm. Being more familiar with the Fahrenheit system, I started to do the conversion, 9/5 C + 32. As soon as that formula popped into my head, I started laughing to myself about the absurdity of adding 32. At 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, that extra 32 degrees just won't make a big difference.

Blog backlog

A couple of days without a decent Internet connection and the blog reading sure does pile up. Well over 200 things to read in the blogs I regularly read, plus another 500 or so in blogs I have in my RSS list but don't actively read.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

German food

Dinner last night here in Germany: breaded pork cutlet wrapped around ham and cheese. Now if only they'd wrapped it in bacon, I would have been in heaven.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Heading to Germany

In a few hours, I'll be on a plane to Germany to attend a small conference there. This will likely be a light blogging week, although you can never really predict these things in advance. There could be drastic seismic shifts in the political landscape that require my particular insight while I'm gone. Similarly, the week could see the release of some viral video including cute kittens. In either case, I'll do my best to meet my responsibilities as a blogger.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Sunday morning shooting

This morning's shooting wasn't quite as good as yesterday's. I shot a 339-3X and a 337-3X. A little bit disappointing, but not unreasonably poor. It's still better than I've shot for the record so far, and it's not significantly worse than I shot yesterday. My in-the-black percentage was 85%.

I was sitting and scoring my targets after I got home, and my son wanted to know what I was doing. He's five years old, and my wife isn't quite ready to let him in on the specifics of my hobby. (Remember, this is New Jersey, not some place reasonable.) So I told him I was scoring. I did explain to him how you count up the points, and I pointed out which holes counted as X's. He said he wanted to play that game, so I drew him a target on a piece of paper with the rings marked 10 down to 6. He took a pen and dropped it on the paper, scoring the marks where the pen hit.

I was more than a little pleased when he came running in to the other room in a few minutes saying, "Dad, Dad, I got a 6X!"

It occurs to me, though, that my wife's reticence about exposing our kids to the shooting sports might actually play in my favor. I'd been counting on making the activity something special to do with dad and hoping to hook the kids that way. But given that my wife's turned it into something mysterious, they might be more interested in it than they otherwise would have been. I knew someone a few years ago who loves going to museums based mostly on the fact that, when she was younger, her parents had made trips to museums without the kids because it was something that adults do. Maybe my wife can unintentionally work that same magic with my kids and shooting.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Morning shooting

This morning's shooting went very well. Actually, it went a little bit too well, 'cause I started getting cocky and stopped focusing so hard, and my later scores showed it.

My first few shots seemed effortless. I had a perfect sight picture, and I hit a string of 9's with a few 10's mixed in. My first target was an 89-1X, and my second target was a 91-1X. (The first time I've broken 90.) This is where I started getting cocky, 'cause my next two targets were an 84 and an 85. Still, my total was 349-2x, which is the best I've shot so far.

I didn't do quite as well on the second string -- 88, 85-1X, 88-1X, and 85-1X, for a total of 346-3X. Still, it's the second best I've shot so far, which demonstrates that I can be reasonably consistent. And it gives me reason to believe that I can be consistently shooting in the 350's in a few months.

I wonder if I need to start using better ammo. I've been shooting Armscor stuff, and I've been happy with it. But I did notice a couple of my "dropped" shots (6's and 7's) seemed to correspond to a crack that didn't sound quite the same as the others -- more a thump than a crack. It's possible the powder charge in those two wasn't quite up to snuff.

Oh, and my stats: 3/40 outside the black in the first string and 9/40 outside the black in the second. So I'm up to an 88.75% in-the-black hit rate (from an 82.5% last time.) Still shooting for 100%, but doing better.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Straining at gnats

Over at Clayton Cramer's blog, there's a link to an article about a Hebrew University paper (how's that for indirection?) that concluded that "the lack of organized military rape [of Palestinian women by the IDF] is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."

Surely it can't be because the Israeli soldiers are basically decent, moral people, could it? Surely not.

Bah.

Have they read the Constitution?

I ran across this today (h/t to Robb Allen):

CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes I am.”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter.

Maybe she didn't want to answer the question because she couldn't. Which made me wonder if she's ever actually read the Constitution. Which made me wonder how many sitting senators or representatives have read it. I know that Steny Hoyer has been spouting the "general welfare" crap, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone on his staff told him he needed at least some answer to the Constitution question. And, as James Madison indicated, that's not the correct answer.

I wonder if we need an entrance exam for the U.S. Congress to guarantee that the members understand the Constitution and the oath they're taking to uphold it.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The current state of education

Even if I didn't currently have small children whose proper education is one of my main concerns, reading this would just depress the hell out of me.

Given my current state, it scares the bejeezus out of me.

That's one

I remember hearing this joke many years ago:

Once upon a time, an older farmer took a young woman as his bride. On the way home from the courthouse, the mule pulling their cart stopped and sat down. The farmer said, "That's one", got out of the cart and smacked the mule enough that the mule started moving again. A second time, the mule stopped. The farmer said, "That's two", got down from the cart and got the mule moving again. The mule stopped a third time. The farmer said, "That's three", got his shotgun and shot the mule.

The farmer's young bride asked him, "Was it really necessary to shoot the mule?" The farmer said, "That's one."

The couple has a long and peaceful life together.

For some reason this joke came to mind while I was reading this today about the White House's war on Fox News.

(H/T to Robert Langham.)

So there!

Wow, and I thought my children were pretty childish. Democrats have actually locked their Republican colleagues out of the main House Oversight and Government Reform committee chamber.

(H/T to Bruce.)

Growing up, I had this illusion that adults acted like adults, that children eventually outgrew their childishness and started behaving reasonably. This is just the last in a long string of illusion-shattering incidents.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Why I'm writing this blog

The impetus for starting this blog was because I'd snapped. I'd had enough of my liberal friends on Facebook posting stupid health care reform memes. I wanted to add another voice to the chorus of people calling for reason in our government, calling for our elected officials to actually respect the oath they took to uphold the Constitution.

I also wanted to create another gun-centric (hoplocentric?) blog. This rational falls under my desire to promote responsible gun ownership, as much the ownership part as the responsible part. I wanted to be yet another perfectly normal person who owns guns. Even though this wasn't what I was thinking originally, I want to portray my participation in shooting competition as something every bit as normal as my neighbor's golfing or bowling.

I'm not quite the gun nut that, say, Caleb or Jay G. are. I would certainly tend that way, but I've got too much other stuff on my plate to really devote myself to it. I'd imagined that I would write more about guns, but maybe it's actually a good thing that I don't. Maybe just portraying myself as a normal person who happens to have guns as his hobby is good for the blogosphere. (Although I do have my own version of the how-do-you-know-you're-a-gun-nut joke: you find yourself maintaining perfect trigger discipline ... on that bottle of Windex.)

I'd also imagined myself being a bit more political, but I'm more interested in political philosophy than the day-to-day political sniping. So aside from the occasional post rehashing something that someone else has probably done a better job of expressing elsewhere, there hasn't been as much of that as I'd imagined.

What has surprised me, though, is that I've managed to keep this up for some 80-some posts now. I'd thought that I would surely peter out before now. Not that I won't eventually run out of things to say, but I haven't hit that wall yet.

Tonight's shooting

Tonight was our club's weekly light rifle match. I got back last week's scored targets. 331, exactly the same as the week before. I'd thought it was a 315, but that was my rough estimate based on a misunderstanding of scoring. And actually, it wasn't exactly the same as the previous week. This one was a 331/1X. Marginally better.

Tonight's shooting was ... well, there were no dropped shots like last week. I didn't write down my scores, but I'm guessing somewhere between 320 and 330. I'll be really surprised if I break 330. I kept most of them in the black, and I even had a couple of 10's, but I had a few too many 7's. Oh, well, we'll see what the official score is next week. Well, in two weeks, since I'll be in Germany this time next week.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Bill Whittle and the PATRIOT Act

I'm a big fan of Bill Whittle. I love watching his Afterburner segments on PJTV. Every time I listen to him, I feel like following him into battle. Or at least voting for him.

He recently posted some thoughts on the PATRIOT act on his blog. I've discovered that I don't agree with him on everything.

Actually, there are things in this blog entry that I do agree with. I think he gets the analysis of the conflicting sets of irreducible core beliefs right. Compromise with Muslim extremists is impossible because there are certain core beliefs on which we disagree. We believe in liberty, and on that point there is (or should be) no compromise. They don't, and on that point, they are unwilling to compromise.

OTOH, he argues that the PATRIOT act is a good thing. He makes two points in defense of this argument: that use of those powers has prevented several attacks similar to the 9/11 bombing; and that, to date, the rights of no US citizen have been infringed by use of these powers. I have no ability to confirm the first, but that's not the argument I take issue with.

The problem I have with the PATRIOT Act is that it is open to abuse. That no rights have yet been infringed relies solely on the intent of those men using these powers. There is nothing about these powers that would prevent them from being used against US citizens. We need only have in office a president who worries about reaction to his policies from certain "fringe elements" before we start seeing abuses of this power.

In this country, we're ruled by laws, not by men. Unfortunately, it's men who execute the laws of our nation, and this is a law that relies too much on the goodness of men.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Fairness

Sometime last year, my wife asked me how I would handle a certain situation when it came up with our kids. I don't remember the exact situation, but my response was that I'd try to handle it as fairly as possible. She asked me why, given that I'd often said that nothing in life is fair. I couldn't really think of an answer at the time. The best I could come up with in my own mind was wanting my kids not to resent me for appearing to favor one of them.

Another good reason occurred to me today. I want my kids growing up with a sense of fairness so that they'll object to unfairness when they see it later in life. (Note that I'm not talking about fairness in the equality-of-outcome sense or even the equality-of-opportunity sense. I'm talking about fairness in the I-got-less-than-I-earned/he-got-more-than-he-earned sense. Or, even better, the I-got-more-than-I-earned/he-got-less-than-he-earned sense.)

Weekend shooting

The shooting this weekend wasn't too bad. Instead of shooting the A-17 target, as I've been doing for a while, I shot the A-32 target to practice for our club's light rifle competition. The course of fire is 40 shots, 10 each on 4 targets, for a possible 400 points. My score for the first week was 331. My goal is to be consistently above 360.

Saturday morning was my best shooting. I shot 3x87 and an 81, for a total of 342. Certainly an improvement. I didn't shoot quite as well this morning. I shot the course of fire twice for a 326 and a 322. The low score on each of those reflects the one dropped shot for each. (Well, I should probably say "misses". I'm starting to think of 7's as dropped shots.) Had each of those been hits in the 6 ring, I would have a 342 and a 338. As it is, I had 13 10's out of those 80 shots this morning. Certainly not world class, but my focus is definitely getting better.

Because it occurred to me to think of it, and because I made the comment above about considering 7's as dropped shots, I counted my shots that hit outside the black: 7/40 Saturday morning, 14/80 Sunday morning. Consistent, at least. I'm hitting 82.5% in the black.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Prescience

I read this entry ("Repeating the Mistakes of the Mortgage Crisis") yesterday on the Volokh Conspiracy. It included this sentence:

Wallison also presciently warned of the possible dangers [of government subsidization of risky mortgages for people who were unlikely to be able to pay them back if real estate prices fell] back in 2005.
What's interesting is that I recently read something similarly[1] prescient:

Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to "buy" houses that they cannot really afford.
The quote is from Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt, originally published in 1946.


[1] Note that I'm not saying that they say or address exactly the same thing, just that they're both prescient.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Feminism

I was just reading the bio over at Politics, Guns, and Beer, which contains this statement:

I’m now exercising real feminism by choosing to stay home with my daughter.

This reminded me of the absolute disgust I have for feminism. Not the feminism mentioned above, but the type of feminism that states that a woman has no value in society unless she has a career.

My wife worked before we had our kids. She had a very successful career, the most tangible measure of which was the fact that they doubled her salary over the five years she worked that job. She stopped working shortly before we had our first kid. We planned on having two kids, and she was going to stay home with them, at least in the early years. We had twins on our second go 'round, so she's ended up staying home longer than expected.

My wife has done an excellent job raising our kids. She frequently gets comments from strangers on how well-behaved our kids are in public (even though we know what sort of hellions they are at home.) The extended trips we've had them on have gone much better than expected -- no embarassing meltdowns, no bratty behavior, etc. They're behaving well in pre-school and kindergarten.

Despite all of this, she feels like she's wasting her time. She doesn't think she's actually accomplishing anything unless she's employed somewhere. She's been so fully indoctrinated with this pseudo-feminist bullcrap that she'll just never be happy being "just" a homemaker.

Bacon

A couple of years ago, I worked for a London-based financial firm with an office in New York. One of the people I worked fairly closely with was British, even though she was working here in New York.

One day a group of us were eating lunch at a diner that served breakfast all day. Someone ordered pancakes and sausage, which prompted a conversation about that particular combination of savory and sweet. She hadn't grown up eating sausage with something slathered in Syrup, and she'd never really gotten used to the idea.

I asked her, "Well, if you didn't eat sausage with pancakes, what did you eat sausage with?"

"Bacon!"

Had I not been married, I might have dropped on one knee at that instant.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Woohoo!

I hit a milestone tonight -- ten consecutive pull-ups. I'd previously gotten up to nine, but I just couldn't get that tenth one out. I'd dropped down to doing sets of three with a minimal (five second or so) rest between sets, and I'd been able to get up to five of those and then another group (superset?) of five of those after a couple of minutes, so it's not as if I couldn't squeeze out 30 or so in a single workout. It's just getting up to the magical ten that was elusive.

(Okay, so that's pretty pathetic for those people who are serious about working out, but I'm trying to fit just some basic strength exercises into my schedule.)

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

This week's (and last week's) light rifle

I just got back from this week's light rifle competition. I got last week's targets back. I shot a 331/400. Not absolutely abysmal for a beginner. Not exactly where I want to be, which is above 360.

And this week's shooting isn't getting me any nearer. I shot 89 on my last target, which is close to where I want to be. Unfortunately, that was the best of the lot, and the shot I dropped on one target really hurts. My (unofficial) total was 315. I need lots more practice.

One of the guys shooting made comments as to how he was really struggling on his first two targets. Of course, for him "really struggling" meant that he had to work really hard to get the 96 and 97 on those two targets.

Tax refunds and 401k's

Marko has a blog entry today with the title, "i’m not holding my breath for tax refund checks." I saw the title and was expecting something a little bit different from what I read.

Given that some states deferred tax refunds last year, I'm a bit nervous. Even though I know it's not an optimal use of my money to give the government an interest-free loan, I've always been one to over-withhold taxes and get back a refund. I prefer that to playing the game of trying to come out perfectly even at the end of the year. Having already paid taxes all year long, I feel a bit resentful writing yet another check in April.

I wonder at what point the federal government is going to decide they can just not pay out these refunds because they need the money. Certainly, it's a short-sighted strategy, as people would immediately adjust by changing their withholding. And most likely, people would go a bit overboard in these adjustments, which could have a bit of an impact on federal revenues.

So it's far more likely they would simply delay the refunds. The question is, how long would they delay them? I guess we'll just have to wait and see, assuming they go this route at all.

These thoughts remind me of something that occurred to me some years ago when I started my first job and first started thinking about starting a 401k. At the time I wondered how long it would be before the federal government decided to nationalize 401k's. Of course, that would probably led to some pretty serious riots, so it's pretty unlikely. (Not that other states haven't done the same.)

How much would they stand to gain if they decided to do so, however? There were about $2.7 trillion in 401k assets in 2007, so it's not an inconsiderable sum. It would certainly be an attractive target.

Columbus on trial

I know this isn't the first time this has happened, but I find it a bit sickening:

In McDonald, Pa., 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, fourth-grade students at Fort Cherry Elementary put Columbus on trial this year — charging him with misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery. They found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

"In their own verbiage, he was a bad guy," teacher Laurie Crawford said.

I find this sort of nihilistic behavior disgusting. Sure, Columbus was no saint. But this behavior seems to serve no other purpose than to tear down historical figures in order to rewrite history to match socialist ideals. It all feels so 1984-like, right down to the "freedom is slavery"-style confusion of ideas:

"Heroism and villainy are just two sides of the same coin."


Feh. All the more reason to homeschool my kids.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Huh?

The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal — but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.

Zero-tolerance laws are just stupid. But the above is just -- well, I can't even think of the appropriate word. I mean, my God, if the knife is an evil object, then it's an evil object. Cutting the cake with it and then punishing the little girl? "Why, thank you for defending me against that rapist, sir, but now I'm going to have to call the police to report that you've been waving a gun around."

(Hat tip to Dave Hardy.)

Migraines

I don't get migraines frequently, but I do get them. I'd put the frequency at about one every two years. Of course, I don't really give a rat's ass about the frequency when I have one. Like I do right now.

Guh.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Weekend shooting

This weekend's shooting wasn't that great. Well, okay, it sucked outright.

After picking up some tips earlier this week, I was excited to spend more time trying them out. I tried them out last night and this morning, with disastrous results.

To be honest, though, I'm comparing my performance to my expectations. Given that I was trying out new techniques, I should have expected my performance to be worse initially. It was, and I managed to get better as I shot more.

I was also shooting the A-17 target, which has a smaller scoring circle than the A-32 target used in light rifle competition. I threw up an A-32 and shot an 89, better than I did in competition last week, so that was a nice confidence booster. I'd been hoping to shoot in the 70's, though, on the A-17, and the best I did was a 65.

Oh, well, at least I know what I need to work on. Trigger control seems to be my bane right now.

Schooling and opportunity cost

Economics in One Lesson has been on the list of books I want to read for a few years, but I've only recently started reading it. I don't think I've seen the phrase "opportunity cost" yet, but the idea is coming up frequently. For example, when the merchant has to spend money to replace his broken window, he may have been planning on using that money to buy a new suit. Instead of ending up with an unbroken window and a new suit, and being out $250, the merchant ends up with an unbroken window, out $250, and lacking a new suit. The new suit is the opportunity cost. (Although I may be technically incorrect in that, given that the strict definition of opportunity cost probably involves a choice being made. In the broken window fallacy, there is no choice -- the merchant must replace the broken window.)

In any case, my wife and I were discussing schooling the other night, and it occurred to me to do a partial opportunity-cost analysis of the situation (to put it in high-falutin' terms.) Basically, the thought I had was this: if the school is spending time indoctrinating my kid, that's time the school isn't spending teaching my kid something useful. So there the opportunity cost is the useful material that my kid isn't learning at school.

But it gets worse. Consider the case in which I feel that the school isn't fully educating my child and that I can supplement his education with informal homeschooling. If the school is spending time indoctrinating my child, I have to spend time fixing that indoctrination. Thus I'm forced to make the decision as to how to spend my time -- fixing the indoctrination or providing additional education. In this case, it's likely that the supplemental education would be the opportunity cost. And in this case, the opportunity cost is twice as big as in the case above: there's useful education he's not getting at school, and there's useful supplemental education he's not getting at home.

Guh.

Schooling

I have three small children. The oldest has just started kindergarten. My wife and I are both fairly libertarian, and we're concerned about the type of indoctrination we expect our children to receive in public schools. I've actually already seen that he's getting some indoctrination. Apparently my son saw a puppet show based on the Wizard of Oz in which the bad witch was throwing garbage everywhere. This isn't necessarily indoctrination I disagree with, but it is indoctrination.

We're also a little bit concerned about what our kids will be learning in school. I'm a firm believer in the three R's. I also think that memorization is an excellent intellectual exercise for children, a good way to develop mental discipline. We live in a good school district, so we shouldn't really have to worry about the academic side. It is awfully friggin' expensive, though.

So we have a few options. We can leave them in public schools and supplement their education in the areas we feel they're lacking. We would also have to spend a fair amount of time correcting the indoctrination they'd be getting through the schools. Alternately, we could find a private school we like and pay for them to go there. This option is less feasible, 'cause it's also pretty friggin' expensive, especially on top of the property taxes we currently pay. It would almost certainly involve moving somewhere cheaper (while somehow miraculously maintaining my current income.) The third option is homeschooling of some sort.

Homeschooling appeals to me. The kids would be getting indoctrination, but at least it would be our indoctrination. I'm more than willing to admit that that is one of the appeals. My libertarian philosophy is morally superior to socialist (or any type of statist) philosophy, and that's the philosophy I want my kids to have.

There's also the appeal that my kids would be learning at their own pace and wouldn't be held back by other kids. (Conversely, my kids wouldn't be holding anybody else back, if that turns out to be the case.)

Of course, homeschooling has its costs. My wife is currently staying home with the kids, but she wants to go back to work at some point. She certainly doesn't want to be the one to stay home and teach the kids. Theoretically, I could get some job where I'm able to work odd hours from home, and I could spend daytime schooling the kids and evening/night-time hours working. That would be a pretty extreme lifestyle, though, and I'd probably get burnt out pretty quickly.

Guh. The realistic option is putting the kids in public school.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Paul Revere Hospital

I just went looking, and I didn't get any hits on Google for hospitals named after Paul Revere.

It's not surprising, though. If you were a hospital, would you want to be associated with the phrase, "Hardly a man is now alive"?

(Thank you! I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitress.)

Friday, October 9, 2009

Interesting hypothetical

I can't remember the circumstances under which I had this thought, but at some point in the last year or so, I posed myself this question: If I could have the privilege to own any gun I wanted, including any NFA firearm, but everyone else had t put up with New Jersey-style restrictions on gun ownership, would I be interested? I'm happy to say that my reaction was an instant and visceral, "Hell, no!"

My first thought was for the single mother living in a bad neighborhood who wouldn't have access to reasonable means of self-defense. (And I have to admit to having a streak of bleeding heart in me, but fortunately I've wrapped it up in lots of libertarian philosophy.) I wouldn't want to have this right that others couldn't also have.

Thinking about it further, I realized the rational basis for my rejection of the scenario: Privileges are just that, and they can be taken away as easily as they are given. Rights are inherent (or inalienable, if you will), thus they can't be taken away. (Although that's certainly more ideal than practical.) The only way to guarantee my ability to have a gun is to guarantee that gun ownership is viewed as a right.

And as I was thinking about this tonight, the converse occurred to me: If I could guarantee that everyone else could have reasonable access to guns (Texas reasonable, not New Jersey reasonable), would I be willing to forego that right for myself? Hmm. While it might be nice to think that I'd be that altruistic given the opportunity, I don't know that I'm that good. It would really depend on the alternative -- whether it were the status quo or the other extreme.

But even still,

Shattered illusions

It's funny how things take on a different significance when you're a kid. I remember thinking of some things as being really big deals. The Guinness Book of World Records, for example. I remember thinking that setting a world record meant that you had done something of significance. Later, of course, I discovered that you could pretty much declare your own category, and as long as you could convince Guinness it was worth putting in the book, it was a valid category.

It was the same thing with the Olympics. They were a pretty big deal when I was a kid, or at least it seemed that they were. But given that the Olympic committee recognizes ballroom dancing as a competitive sport, it's lost a bit of its luster. (Note that it's not an Olympic sport yet, but apparently the application hasn't yet been rejected, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

And the same with the Nobel prizes. I remember thinking that these were a really big deal. But I think they've jumped the shark. I mean, Jimmy Carter was bad enough, and appeared to be as much a dig at Bush as anything else. But at least the committee had something to point to with the whole Israel-Egypt peace thingy. (Even though his work to get North Korea to give up their nuclear ambitions came to naught.) This current recipient has done absolutely nothing that would merit a peace prize.

Thinking about it a bit more, though, I shouldn't really say that they've jumped the shark. They did that years ago. I thought they made a good choice with Muhammad Yunus. He was actually doing useful work for peace by improving the economic situation for the poor with microloans. But they jumped the shark long ago. I mean, my God, Yasser Arafat won the Noble peace prize? Not only a terrorist, but a corrupt terrorist who was funneling billions into his own accounts from aid meant for the people he was supposed to be helping.

Feh.

Jaw-dropping WTF

I'm not normally one for profanity, at least not in a public forum, but WHAT THE FUCK? The first news item I see is this one. You've just got to be fucking kidding me. And for "creating a new climate in international politics"? We haven't even seen the fallout yet from this new climate he's created.

I think I'll go be sick now.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Doctors under socialized medicine

I work with a guy whom I shall call Mike the Mad Russian. Mike grew up under the Soviet Union (until high-school age), so he has some insight into how things worked there.

We were discussing socialized medicine the other day. I made the comment that fewer people would want to be doctors if the US moves to socialized medicine. He replied that that wasn't true, that enough people still wanted to be a doctor in the Soviet Union that there was a lot of competition for those educational slots. Stumped I was, until it occurred to me what the flaw in his counterexample was.

In the Soviet Union, every job was socialized. Being a doctor probably brought with it certain liberties that other jobs didn't, even though there were higher-paying jobs. In the US, if medicine is socialized, there will still be other jobs open that won't be socialized. There will still be incentives for people who might otherwise have been doctors to go off and do other things.

(Of course, someone is about to come along and point out the flaw in my counterargument. But, hel, if you never make mistakes, you never learn anything.)

Credit card debt

Back in the mid-90's, I was finishing up my master's degree and got a full-time position at the University. I wasn't planning on being there long, as I had plans to go on to work on my Ph.D. elsewhere. I had a sizeable amount of credit card debt (well over $10,000), the result of a few years of fiscal imprudence. It occurred to me one day that I'd be a lot better off in grad school if I were debt-free, so I started paying it off. Luckily, I hadn't yet adjusted to the significant jump in my income, so I started sending over half my take-home to the banks every month to pay off my debt. After about a year or so of this, I was debt-free.

So, let's see, my debt was a fraction of my income. A significant fraction, but a fraction less than 1. And I spent a frugal year paying it off. Over at The Smallest Minority, Kevin gives some facts (hidden a bit in the article, as it's not the main point) about the size of the national debt (over $14 trillion) and the size of the federal income (about $2.5 trillion.) The debt is six times the take of the federal government.

So, let's see, if my debt-to-income ratio had been the same as the federal government's, I would have owed well over $200,000 rather than a "measly" $10,000. All else being equal, it would have taken me 20 years to pay off that debt. Except, of course, that all else wouldn't have been equal. A significant portion of what I was paying every month went to pay down the principal. At $200,000, I would mostly have been paying interest. (I haven't done the math, but I'd be interested to figure out if my payments would even have covered the interest. At current mortgage rates, it would have, but I was paying credit card rates.)

All this debt is pretty friggin' frightening.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The times they done changed

Last night, the guy shooting next to me had some sort of Mossberg bolt-action .22. Before we got started, he mentioned that he'd gotten it when he was a kid using S&H green stamps[1]. He walked into the store, gave them his book of green stamps, and walked out with a rifle. No background check, no concern that he was a minor, nothing.

This reminded me of the Andy Griffith Show episode where Opie tries to win something at the carnival using his shooting prowess. Here's a 10-year-old-or-so kid being handed a gun with lots of other people walking around, shooting targets, and handing the gun back to the adult. Nowadays, a 10-year-old with a gun on TV is fodder for after-school-special-quality morality plays about the evils of firearms.

[1] Boy, that took me back. I remember being a kid going to the grocery store with my mother and getting the sheets of green stamps and then later licking them and pasting them into the little booklets. I have no idea what we ever got with them, but I remember having them.

The Great Gun Hiatus

I've mentioned before that I owned no guns from 1998-2008. The reason I got rid of everything is because I was going to grad school in New Jersey. I knew enough about New Jersey to know that I didn't want to go through the hassle of proving that I was worthy of owning guns, and I decided to just do without. (Not to mention that, as a grad student, I wasn't going to have a lot of time to go shooting even if I could find someplace to shoot.)

I hadn't planned on sticking around New Jersey after grad school, but I was also planning on actually finishing my Ph.D., and we see how well that worked out. In retrospect, it was frighteningly easy to get out of the lifestyle. And this is what the gun control folks (or statists in general) rely on. They're essentially sniping the people who don't want to put up with the hassle, and as they thin out the herd, they change popular culture. People stop viewing guns as everyday objects and start seeing them as things that only police, military, and homegrown terrorists have.

At my local gun club, they open every monthly meeting by welcoming any guests and asking them to introduce themselves and say a little bit about what brought them there. At the first meeting I attended, I expressed my reason for coming thusly: "I'm here because I'm looking for someplace to shoot. I also believe it's part of my civic duty to promote responsible gun ownership." What's unfortunate about summing things up in that latter sentence is that one might naturally assume that the emphasis is on "responsible". The emphasis was actually on the "gun ownership" part. I want more people to own guns, or at least know reasonable people who own guns and don't see anything peculiar in it. I can't go head-to-head with Michael Bloomberg, but I can do my small part.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

First competition

So I just got back from my first light rifle competition, which was my first real competition of any kind. My wife could tell I had fun by the smile on my face when I came home. It was something very similar to that new-shooter smile you see on people.

I certainly didn't shoot spectacularly, but I'm guessing it was a good first-time score. For four targets, I shot something like a 79/100, an 83, an 85, and an 86. No dropped shots, and a couple of 10's.

What probably had me most excited was the tips I received on stance before shooting. I could feel the difference the changes in my stance made. I'd also looked up the Appleseed-suggested six steps of firing a shot (based on a suggestion in a comment on one of my blog entries), and I was trying some of those steps, specifically the two trigger-centric steps.

Unfortunately, I was doing what you're not supposed to do, trying out new things in competition. But I think what gave me the big grin was seeing how well it had worked and looking forward to practicing these things come this weekend.

Trains

I have to admit being a fan of commuting by train, although I need to qualify that. I live in New Jersey and work in New York, so the train is the least unpleasant of my options. (The most pleasant of my options would be to have a job where I could work from home and get the hell out of Jersey.)

A train commute offers some conveniences, like the ability to work on a laptop or read a book. But though I like the conveniences, you occasionally get days like today. Commuter trains tend to work reasonably well when they're on time, but things go go hell when there are problems. My scheduled 7:03 didn't arrive at the scheduled 7:03. Around 7:08, there was an announcement that that train was cancelled due to mechanical problems, although they were going to stop that train at my station to discharge its current passengers.

That meant my chances of making it on the 7:12 were close to zero. For the 7:28, they were 50% at best, which left me a 50% chance of getting to work around 9:30, having left the house before 7:00. I decided to bag it and work from home. Which only works because I have the freedom to do so.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Repealing the 17th amendment

Interesting op-ed on filling vacant seats, but really about the 17th amendment. (Note that the text I've written here is really similar to Todd Zywicki's blog entry on the Volokh Conspiracy. They're both short texts, and I'm linking to the original, so hopefully nobody's going to accuse me of plagiarism. ;-)

My thoughts on the matter can be summed up by this comment on the thread:

The Constitution established a federal–not a national–government. The states were understood as sovereign entities that had ceded only specific powers to the feds. Having senators chosen by state legislatures was part of the system of checks and balances. Senators would have much more of an interest in defending the powers of their state government from federal encroachment.

There's actually more to that comment that I also agree with, but this is the crux of the argument.

Potential

I can't remember where I saw the comment, else I'd link to it. It was most likely a comment on The Smallest Minority, but I can't find it in the limited amount of searching I've done. The comment was related to the Castle Doctrine, and it went something like this: "In Australia, we place a higher premium on human potential, so we don't see defense of a television set as being something worth shooting someone over."

The comment got me thinking about high school physics. I remember that Eureka moment when I got it: the potential energy the brick has 100 meters above the ground equals the kinetic energy the brick has when it hits the ground. You just set the two formulas equal and solve for the mass of the brick or its velocity when it hits the ground.

The corollary to this is that, at any point in the brick's descent, the sum of its remaining potential energy and the kinetic energy it has gained so far is also equal to the potential energy it started with. You can calculate its velocity after it's fallen 50 meters based on this or do other nifty things.

So what do bricks have to do with the above-referenced Australian? Well, human potential is analogous to the potential energy that brick has. (The fact that both phrases include the word "potential" is a good hint here.) At birth, a person has potential, and at death, he has expended that potential. The sum total of his life is a measure of the achievement of that potential.[1]

And this is where I have problems with the Australian's comment. Property represents the achievement of human potential in the same way that kinetic energy represents the achievement of potential energy. At some point, some person had the potential to work a number of hours necessary to generate the income necessary to pay for that television set. Its theft is not merely the theft of some petty little thing, it's the theft of the achievement of one human's potential. This equates to the theft of that human's potential.

[1] Okay, the analogy falls apart a bit. The brick cannot fail to achieve its full potential, but humans can certainly do so.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

This weekend's shooting

As I'd mentioned before, I took my wife shooting Friday night. That was actually the first time I'd shot pistol in a few months. Given my fairly tight schedule and current obsession with working on my rifle marksmanship skills, I've been completely ignoring the pistol. I'd like to participate in some of my club's pistol competitions. But then again, my commitment to see my kids as many evenings as possible makes that a bit difficult. I'm already committing to one night a week for the light rifle competition, and my monthly club meeting and monthly technical group meeting eat up some other nights during the week. As the kids get a little bit older (and my wife frees up from her 24/7-minus-whatever-relief-I-give-her daycare schedule), I'll probably feel more comfortable with doing more of these competitions.

But I meant to talk about shooting. Saturday morning's shooting wasn't too bad. Of five strings, I shot above 70 on two and would have shot above 70 on the other three if not for the one dropped shot per string. For the moment, I'm just concentrating on getting each shot in the black, which will, statistically speaking, essentially guarantee me a 70. I'm making progress, as I was shooting mid-50's a few weeks ago. I think 80's are certainly within my reach, but I'll likely need some help to do better than that. (Yeah, some people consider an 8 to be a dropped shot, but they've been doing this a lot longer than the few months I've been at it.)

This morning's shooting was abysmal. I replaced the hammer and sear in my primary 10/22 last night. I also installed an extended bolt handle. I want to think I dry-fired it at least once after installing it, but this morning, when I pulled the trigger, nothing. Not the it-went-click-instead-of-boom kind of nothing, just plain nothing. No release whatsoever. I made a quick trip home to grab a couple of brass punches and a screwdriver, disassembled and reassembled, and things started working. However, on my ninth shot, I got a failure-to-eject. The case was halfway out of the chamber, but instead of locking the bolt back and manually ejecting, I figured I'd let the rifle's ejector do the work. Close bolt, pull it back, and now the case is firmly seated in the chamber, with no possibility of manually ejecting it. Of course, I didn't have a cleaning rod on me, so that put an end to my morning's shooting. Guh.

Fortunately, my wife has offered to put the kids down, so I'm going to give it another try this evening. I'll be taking a cleaning rod, and for pure paranoia's sake, I'm taking the trigger group from my secondary 10/22, as well as the tools to install it. The first evening of my club's light rifle competition is Tuesday, so I want to make sure I have a working rifle.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

A Bug's Life

I watched A Bug's Life with the kids today. (For those who haven't seen it, it's basically a retelling of The Seven Samurai using the fable of the ant and the grasshopper as a basis.) It's interesting watching this through the eyes of a gun nut/libertarian, especially in light of the recent socialized medicine brouhaha.

First off, given that that the ants outnumber the grasshoppers 100-to-1, if they weren't such a friggin' pacifist society, if any one of them actually owned a reasonable weapon, the whole grasshopper problem could have been nipped in the bud pretty quickly.

But this quote also struck me as being especially relevant: "It's not about the food, it's about keeping the ants in line." Yeah, it's not really about providing health care to every last person in the country, it's about taking control of 1/6th of our economy.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Shooting with the wife

I used to go shooting with my wife (well, at the time, she was my girlfriend) back before the Great Gun Hiatus (1998-2008.) She didn't go shooting with me every time I went, but she probably came with me once or twice a month. And she certainly wasn't the gun nut I was, but she definitely enjoyed it.

She'd arranged to have a babysitter tonight so we could go out to dinner, but forgot about it until the sitter showed up just as we were finishing eating. So instead of going out for dinner, we went shooting. It was the first time for her in over ten years, and she did pretty well. We were shooting a .22 pistol, so there wasn't that much recoil or noise, but she wasn't flinching at all. Her consistency was pretty good -- she was shooting very consistently in the lower left quadrant of the target.

She's looking forward to going more often.

Chicago at the bat

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Chicago -- mighty Daley has struck out.

Annoying

Guh. There's nothing quite so annoying as having the alarm set for 6:45 and being woken up by your three-year-old at 5:45. Damn kids. (Okay, damn kids that I love dearly, even at 5:45 AM.)

Speaking of sleep, I have twins. What do the two have in common? Well, in the first few months after the twins were born, the two appeared to be mutually exclusive. If you want to know what stress is, try feeding one twin while the other is crying to be fed when you're a few weeks' short of sleep and trying to keep everyone quiet so your wife can get a few hours of sleep in the other room.

My wife had stopped working when we had kids, so I was the one who had to get up in the morning to go to work. She tried for a week or so to handle the night shift on her own, but that simply resulted in her not getting any sleep for a week or so. After that, I started getting up at 3AM so she could maybe get a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep before I left for work. This made things a little better, but after about a month of this, we broke down and got someone to come in to do the night shift. It was really frigging expensive, but we were pretty desperate at that point.

As an example of how desperate we were: my wife is quintessential mama bear, very protective of her children. Under normal circumstances, she would have needed a lot of time to develop the trust in someone necessary to leave her children in their care. The first night we had a night nurse, my wife was in bed about five minutes after the doorbell rang.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Overpaid celebrities

Yeah, I found it pretty ironic, too, that a bunch of people making more than the average insurance company executive were calling them greedy.