[Guns; Crime] Proportional or inverse proportional.

A piece on what happens when lawful gun ownership is introduced and subsequently banned from a society.

There are few gun free societies in the world today. However, if we
look back in history to the time before the invention of firearms, we
can judge for ourselves whether those societies were tranquil and
safe. Remarkably good homicide data is available for England,
beginning in the 1200’s. Those data indicate a pre-gun homicide rate
in England of roughly 20 per 100,000 [roughly four times greater than
the U.S. today]

...

The introduction of the flintlock coincided with the largest decline
in homicide in English history. The homicide rate plunged to 6 per
100K in the 1600’s. The English homicide rate continued to decline
slowly and steadily until well into the 20th century. For example, in
1900 the homicide rate was 0.96 per 100K.



....

According to the more guns more crime hypothesis, all this restriction
of civilian guns should have resulted in England enjoying lower and
lower rates of violent crime. Unfortunately, the facts reveal a
pattern that is almost opposite. [as of 2000 England had twice the
violent crime rate of the U.S.]

So over a hundred years of banning guns (that really kicked off in the
last fifty), the UK went from roughly 1/100k to roughly 10/100k. Yup
violent crime went up 10 times per capita in the UK.

But now they don't have to worry about the serfs having those dangerous arms.


Hat tip Says Uncle

Meh... Science does not work that way

Been feeling sick with sinus stuff the last couple days.

The heat's not helping.

In more "positive" news there's this.

Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says - although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.

Great.... that's now how science works.

Ace explains:

By all means, let's get some more of that "modeling" going on supercomputers because everyone knows that supercomputers are smart and don't, say, just regurgitate your starting assumptions back to you.

Yeah... the problem with climate modeling is that we've only got one earth, and one set of data (which itself can be riddled with errors)

Feh. Phrenology had more experimentalism. Phrenologists could study lots of skulls and map all sorts of behaviours. Granted it was all bunk, but it was verrifiable as bunk.

Climate science is like living in Iowahawk's world: Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry

And they wonder why the raw data is so important?

Raw data is what counts.

I wonder why people sare skeptical about this global warming stuff?

Together the two institutions show temperature maps for northern Lake Michigan registering an absurd 430 degrees Fahrenheit -yes, you read it right –that’s four hundred and thirty degrees-and this is by no means the highest temperature recorded on the charts.

In the heated debate about Earth’s ever-changing climate you certainly don’t need to be scientist to figure out that the Great Lakes would have boiled away at a mere 212 degrees so something has seriously gone awry inside this well-funded program.

...


But our intrepid anonymous whistleblower wasn’t done yet. He pointed out that Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, really got cooking this July 4th around 9:59AM, according to NOAA and Coast Watch. It was there, at the bottom left row of the temperature data points, that the records reveal on that day a phenomenally furnace-like 600 degrees Fahrenheit. (Click here if CoastWatch link does not work or disappears)

Further analysis of the web pages shows that the incredibly wide temperature swings were occurring in remarkably short 10-hour periods-and sometimes in less than 5 hours. Strangely, none of the 250 citizens of the 78 families living in the village appeared to notice this apocalyptic heatwave during their holiday festivities.

But asside fromt that you can trust the numbers.

Don't worry your pretty-little-head about it.

Doomed.

If you take away math you take away critical analysis and quantatitative evaluation.


Today's students are weaker than ever in Math.

Handy that.

The Pantry Proof.

Staghounds shows why Statism doesn't work.

In short, have you never run out of a household item? Has a statist? If you can't run a command-economy of one, what makes you think you can run someone else's life? A whole country?


Via Roberta X
Roberta also talks on how even the military goofs on command economy and what that implies:

And that's Our Military, who have gone in for stats and analysis and planing in a big way, and who issue standardized everything to more-or-less standardized fighting men and women, most of them operating in known places under known conditions: if they still have trouble getting it right even playing with loaded dice in a generally-predictable environment, how much more difficult is the task for a non=-uniform population? (And a lot of that fine .mil surplus one buys is the other side of central planning; not only do they run you outta bumfodder, you end up with a jillion extra tortoise forks and eventually have to sell 'em as scrap, back into the....drumroll...uncontrolled market).

Emphasis added.

Even in the best case, the smart set can't run things.

I suppose the desire for Statism comes from the desire to control others, the desire to "help" others see these quotes, and the desire to be "helped".

If someone can't run their own life, if they can't stay out of debt, if they can't be frugal, if they can't be genrous, if they can't be responsible, if they can't be healthy well... why not look to some paternal figure to do all that stuff for them.


Statism depends on the idea that the "smart" people can run things and run them better than an uncontrolled market, country, society.

And that's not even talking about the unintended (and intended) consequences of adding a 2000 page bloated law that was not even read by the legislators voting on it, and not comprehended by the controllers that wrote it.


Related to today's Moring Jolt. Sorry subscription only. Jim Geraghty cites a WSJ piece by Will McGurn.

As the controversy over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero escalates, we have had many secular sermons on the need to recognize that the vast majority of Muslims should not be confused with the terrorists. No argument there. But how much more fruitful our own debates might be if the Judge Walkers, Mayor Bloombergs and Speaker Pelosis could extend that same presumption of decency to the American people.

Geraghty comments:

I think McGurn expects them to do something they're not quite capable of doing. The elites in question don't choose not to extend the presumption of decency; their uncharity -- believing that non-elite Californians are homophobic, that Arizonans are xenophobic, that New Yorkers are bigots, that health-care opponents are Nazis, etc. -- is at the heart of their worldview. If the masses could make their own good judgments, they wouldn't need the elites to steer them.

Indeed. Sheep need to be lead, curs need to be corrected. The common rabble have to be worse than the elite, otherwise why are they being ruled?

Feedback Controls.

Strategypage on trouble brewing in China. In short corruption breeds unrest, unrest breeds revolution.


Here's what happens when there's endemic corruption and a total lack of trust.

The corruption is everywhere. University degrees, and other education credentials, for example, cannot be taken at face value. There's simply too much cheating. So employers have to carefully examine job candidates. This often includes administering lots of tests, and making sure there is no cheating, or that the test monitors are not bribed. In effect, the most honest aspect of the country is business. You can't run any kind of profitable company without a fair degree of
honesty and dependability. There is cheating going on (like the contaminated baby formula that actually killed a few babies), but that sort of thing puts you out of business (and got some of the baby food executives executed). Thus market pressures keep a lot of Chinese honest, but not so government officials.

Emphasis added.

Funny that. The only way you can ensure quality is by giving the "consumers" a method of choosing to forgo paying for the service. If the provider's funds are cut off then they cannot continue.

This is what is so troubling about government bailouts of banks, automakers, and newspapers. It makes them immune to customer power, and beholden to governmental power. The feedback system of quality being ensured by customer buy-out fails, and is replaced by a feedback system of pleasing governmental paymasters. This way they'll get money from the the public (via taxes), no mater what they produce.

"Whoever pays the piper chooses the tune." When you bailout a company, they stop selling products and airtime, and start selling governmental-approval. They make money by towing Policy, whether by donating to the "right" causes or producing the "right" products.

Profits be damned, because they're not making their money by moving product, they're making their money by ensuring the tap from Uncle Sugar doesn't run dry.

Another example of how the feedback system is subverted.

With military equipment, lax standards are an even greater problem. That's because military equipment doesn't really get put to the test unless there's a war, and China has not been at war since 1979 (where outnumbered, but experienced, Vietnamese troops beat the crap out of
the Chinese invaders). So second rate military equipment is all the rage. Manufacturers make more money, a lot of which is used to bribe purchasing officers to buy the flawed gear. The Chinese leadership, or most of them, are aware of this, and this leads them to make military
threats, with the realization that actual military action could be disastrous for China. The best stuff is often exported, because foreign users are less likely to tolerate shoddy standards, and will not order more stuff.

Emphasis added.

Here's a prime example of what happens when the government becomes your customer. This is especially acute on military procurement, as the product can only be purchased by government. Hence bloated programs, schedule slip, and feature creep. As we've seen the only way out is if the Defense Contractor can sell to a different nation-state, one that can choose where they buy their weapons. This requires the approval of the host nation, but one can see how consumer choice is what ensures quality.

The ability of a customer to take their money elsewhere is what forces a company to fight for that money. Take that away, and they've got no reason to maintain quality or service, because they'll get your money anyway.

But don't worry, making healthcare a government procurement program will be different. They'll get it right this time.

Two Americas?

John at Powerline looks into the real faultline in America today.

Note that all we are talking about here is reducing the rate at which the pensions of retired public employees will increase. This at a time when private sector employees are being laid off, seeing their salaries cut, and their investments have declined in value.

The injustice is obvious. Yet the retired or soon to be retired public employees have a point: the law of contract. They took their jobs and worked for years or decades in reliance on promises by taxpayers (in effect) to, among other things, fund lavish pensions. Forever. Public employees all across America will sue to force taxpayers to make good on those obligations. The result could be significant demographic shifts, as taxpayers flee jurisdictions that have massive liabilities to former government workers. The result, presumably, will be municipal, county and state bankruptcy.


I suspect that this is one of those fundamental societal divides that cannot be reconciled by applying conventional legal principles. My guess is that new legal doctrines will be developed to mediate between the legitimate but unrealistic claims of public retirees and the fiscal reality that the private sector is not rich enough to continue supporting those retirees in the style to which they are accustomed. But the struggle will not be an easy one. There will be many winners and losers along the way. For a decade or two to come, the division between public and private employees--in particular, retirees--will be one of the principal fault lines of our political life.

Wild ride.


And here's Roberta X on some of the "Fixes" the political class are coming up with.

Because the goobers at the wheel have decided that making the public sector even bigger is the solution to our economic woes.