Some thoughts on guns and the 'assault weapon ban' The more I think about it, the more I tend to think gun safety regulation should focus on the ammunition rather than the gun. Nb. it's a fairly thin distinction between a semi-automatic and an automatic weapon (thin enough in some cases to field modified)... in fact, the reality of the mechanism is that a semi-automatic is essentially a modified automatic -- an automatic with a governor. Both machine-guns and 'semi-automatics' are designed to make chambering the next round 'automatic,' the question then is whether the weapon defaults to firing round n+1 until a) you release the trigger or b) you run out of ammunition in the clip or belt. or whether it defaults to _not_ firing round n+1 until you pull the trigger again. nnb. pulling the trigger again is not necessarily that much more physically demanding than hitting the next key on a keyboard. How many letters per minute can you type? Given these mechanics, the question with a semi automatic is "when do you have to hit the carriage return?" (for those who remember mechanical typewriters). i.e. when do you need to put in a new magazine? And the answer is, depends on how big the magazine, and how small the bullet.... one of the things distinguishing these 5.56mm weapons is that the bullets/cartridges are small, about as small they come (allowing even smaller, 4.7mm caseless ammunition in "civilian" "semi" automatic weapons would be a very bad idea). As a result, you can pack more bullets into a reasonably small magazine. It is worth remembering that the assault weapon ban expire in 2004, not to be renewed. Now, as Paul will point out, the AWB covered semi-automatic firearms which require a trigger-pull each shot (though nothing more). Fully 'automatic' firearms -- weapons that could be termed machine-guns -- remain illegal. Of course, as we can see from Newtown, semi automatic weapons are quite sufficient to shoot large groups of people multiple times. This because, like a machine gun, they use some of the energy of each shot to rechamber the next one. At one point, I'd have been somewhat more persuaded by the argument that the AWB was silly because it simply focused on guns that 'looked nasty' or 'looked military.' One thing that distinguishes these assault weapoins is that they are designed to fire the smaller, lighter, more portable ammunition -- 5.56 or .223 cal... As we get more and more of these shooters who seem to have been living in their own 'army of one' fantasy-land, I'm increasingly convinced that the look of these guns may be a trigger for these b--- male fantasies: i.e. there's plenty of reason to ban them precisely for the reason that they a) don't particularly serve the intent of the 2nd amendment and b) seem particularly attractive to the true gun nuts.

Was it about Slavery?

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog has featured a fascinating ongoing examination of the Civil War and slavery. One of his most interesting tasks has been his thorough debunking of the idea that, for the South, 'it wasn't about slavery.'

Which, of course, raises the question: how much was slavery an issue for the North? Is it plausible that -- as some scholars have argued -- the North was fighting for "Union," with the issue of slavery a tactical afterthought.

That latter question is probably more complex -- not least because Lincoln's Republican electorate (not to mention the Northern Democrats) was an uneasy coalition between Free Soilers and Abolitionists.

But, as such, it was interesting to read snippets from Hiland Hall's inaugural address as he took the governorship of Vermont in 1858. (From Tyler Resch's biography of Hiland Hall )

(what follows are nested quotes; first Tyler Resch's commentary, then verbatim quotations from H.Hall's speech -- I'll try to get back to this post to reformat the quotes).

The rest of his address was given over to a passionate dissertation on
slavery, though he began gently:

The marked general feature of the national government
for several years past, has been its entire disregard and abandonment
of some of the most important principles, which were considered as
political axioms by the framers of the constitution, and acted upon as
such in the earlier and purer days of the government, and indeed down
to a very recent period. This has been more particularly manifested in
reference to the subject of slavery.

He picked up steam by lamenting that:

judges, of distinguished legal attainments, have often been . . .
found giving countenance to oppression and wrong by ingenious and
fanciful constructions, and that English liberty has been fixed upon its 44
present firm foundations, not by the aid of judicial efforts, but by
overcoming them.

More forcefully, he continued:

There is reason to hope that the extra-judicial opinions of
the majority of the judges in the Dred Scott case, contrary as they are
to the plain language of the constitution, to the facts of history, and to
the dictates of common humanity, will meet the fate which has
attended those of the judges in the parent country, and that liberty will
be eventually established in spite of them.

The extraordinary persevering exertions which, during
the past year, have been made by the chief magistrate of the nation to
prevent the people of Kansas from excluding slavery from their soil,
by imposing upon them a constitution which he well knew they
loathed and abhorred, furnishes new and alarming evidence of the
aggressive character of the slave power which controlled him, and
shows that the principles of justice and of popular sovereignty stand
no more in the way of its demands for political domination than do
those of the constitution. The near approach to success, by
congressional legislation, of this attempt to stifle the will of the great
majority of the people of Kansas, is calculated to excite strong distrust
in the continued success of our republican institutions; for if the
principle of right and justice, by the influence of government
patronage and party discipline, can be thus outraged and overcome,
our boasted democracy will be but another name for despotism.
It is, however, matter of just pride and congratulation,
that these efforts to impose a slave constitution on an unwilling
people, have as yet proved unsuccessful, and that the people of that
rich and growing territory, boldly defying the threats of executive
power and nobly spurning the offered bribes of government patronage
and lands, have, by an overwhelming majority, declared their love of
freedom and their abhorrence of slavery

The people of Vermont, mindful of the history of its early
settlers in their struggle against injustice and oppression from without,
have deeply sympathised in the extraordinary and protracted
sufferings of the people of Kansas in the cause of liberty and right,
and now greet them on the favorable prospect of a happy and
successful termination of their patriotic labors.

There was ample precedent for Hall's abolitionist message. The previous
governor, Ryland Fletcher of Proctorsville, had protested the evils of slavery
during his inaugural messages in 1856 and 1857, as had Governor Slade in 1845
and 1846. Governor Fletcher in two addresses compared the hardships suffered by
the Free State settlers in Kansas with those of the Vermont pioneers. Fletcher
expressed fear that the Dred Scott decision of March 6, 1857 left little hope that
"the spread of slavery will ever be stopped under our present form of government."

Later, Rodney V. Marsh, a State Representative from Brandon, Vt. would pass a bill authorizing the formation of a Committee to discuss Dredd Scott and the issue of slavery:

"

Marsh's Select Committee soon issued a report declaring that citizens of
Vermont and of the free states could be reduced to slavery with impunity and their
property could be destroyed without remedy, and that the Fugitive Slave Law of
1850 was unconstitutional. In late November the legislature adopted resolutions
presented by Marsh's committee guaranteeing the freedom of all persons in
Vermont and resolving that the Dred Scott decision had no warrant in the
Constitution or in the legislative or judicial history of the nation, and furthermore
that "these extra-judicial opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are a
dangerous usurpation of power and have no binding authority upon Vermont or the
people of the United States."

An ironic precursor to modern right wing fulminations about 'activist judges.'

As an interesting footnote, Hiland Hall would spend many of his later years as a historian of the state of Vermont. In that role he was a fervent retrospective advocate of secession -- Vermont's secession from New York and New Hampshire, that is.

In honor of Mr. Camping

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Zouaves and Darwin

In the American Civil War, I've always thought that the uniform of the Zouaves -- a flamboyant 'oriental' uniform worn by self-styled elite troops in the early war -- expressed much about the curious intellectual milieu in which Darwin wrote and in which the Civil War was fought. Ironically, even as Confederates debate whether African slaves could be soldiers and fight, their Zouave's uniforms paid homage -- presumably unwittingly -- to Algerians' fighting spirit and martial prowess. (One suspects they didn't think to wonder who the French were copying when they adopted the red bloomers and fezes.)

It's a neat illustration of a larger point about the evolution of European self-image and self- perception, of which Darwin was a significant part. Darwin wrote in the midst of a watershed period for Europeans' view of themselves and their place in the world, most particularly their growing acceptance of a view that history could be seen as a story of 'progress.'

A half-century later, Conrad would remind Europeans that 'this too was one of the dark places in the earth' -- among its other meanings a marker of the European sense that they had emerged from 'darkness' to enlightenment. (Heart of Darkness, whatever other meanings it carried, was also a fairly prophetic reminder of Europeans' ability to devolve into -- mechanized -- savagery).

A half-century to a century earlier, the Ottoman Empire would be a near-equal player in European power politics, with fairly fresh memories of the wars of religion, the Ottoman siege of Vienna, and a shadowier memory of threat/pressure from Islam and the 'East.' 'Progress' would have been an alien concept in a world that was extremely uncertain.

In short, Darwin writes at a very particular time, when 'guns, germs, and steel' had clearly shifted the balance of power fairly decisively toward Europeans, and when Europeans were increasingly aware of the fact.This is important because ideologies of 'white supremacy' become -- briefly -- plausible in a way they are not half a century before, say when Napoleon's army is starving and dying in Egypt, or when European coastal installations are mere-fingernail grip claims to territory in Africa or India.

Daniel Defoe's 1703 poem. From
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/10/-that-het-rsquo-rogeneous-thing-an-englishman/195126/

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

The whole wonderful thing:

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.


Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.

The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.

For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.

Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.

’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.

Kennan on the Tragedy of War

In the emotional world of an aroused democracy evil had always to be singular, never plural. To admit the complex and contradictory nature of error would be to admit the complex and contradictory nature of truth, as error's complement; and this was intolerable, for if there were two ways of looking at a thing, then the whole structure of war spirit fell to the ground, then the struggle had to be regarded as a tragedy, with muddled beginnings and probably a muddled end, rather than as a simple heroic encounter between good and evil; and it had to be fought, then, not in blind, righteous anger but rather in a spirit of sadness and humility at the fact that western man could involve himself in a predicament so unhappy, so tragic, so infinitely self-destructive.
-- George Frost Kennan, The Decision to Intervene, p.9.

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/wow-just-wow.html

On price elasticity of Oil demand.

Not surprisingly, relatively inelastic. This, of course, implies that oil prices change as a result of supply rather than demand... and respond to the actions of large suppliers.