Tinotopia

I normally discount this sort of thing as a rare mistake or a story taken out-of-context. But stories like this (see here) seem to come out of the UK at least once a month.

There seems to be a lot of talk, following last week’s shooting at LAX, about ‘improving’ airport security, and how much of a pain in the ass this is going to be. Airports will have to be totally reconfigured, the DOT is saying, and passengers will have to wait yet in yet more, and longer, lines.

Yet taking any of this seriously requires that we ignore the facts of last week’s shootings: the bad guy only killed two people before being killed himself, by an El Al security officer.

I realize that that’s probably little solace to the two people killed, or to their families. But if this kind of swift and powerful reaction were to be expected, people wouldn’t go into airports intending to shoot up the place to begin with. Even if you’re a fanatic and plan to die in a hail of bullets, you’re going to think twice about the wisdom of sacrificing yourself in exchange for only getting off a few shots.

If the gun-control laws were changed to require every adult American to carry a gun at all times — and to know how to use that gun — you’d wind up with a lot fewer shooting deaths, possibly something approaching zero.

This only works, of course, if you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in society in general. I believe this myself, but I’m not so sure about the gun-control lobby.

Anyway, if every adult in an airport terminal, or in a McDonald’s, or in a high school, had a firearm close at hand, it’d be impossible for a would-be terrorist or mass murderer to shoot more than one or two people before himself being killed by a bystander. Sure, it’d still be possible to back yourself up into a corner and open up with a machine-gun, but that is not, in fact, what happens. I can’t think of a single case where the classic nut-with-gun scenario couldn’t have been brought to a quicker and happier resolution by a person with a .22.

That we’ve seen the value of a gun in the right place at the right time — and in the hands of someone on the side of civilization — at LAX recently has been conveniently ignored in all the media accounts I’ve seen.

In a story about the new U.S. farm subsidy bill on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday this weekend, we came across a stunning display of illogic. The story focuses on the fact that the majority of the subsidies — 70% — go to just 10% of farm owners, and that the primary beneficiaries of the subsidies are not small family farmers, but huge corporations. But all isn’t lost, however:

While small farms draw the littlest checks, they may depend on them more than their larger neighbors. That’s because some of the biggest, most efficient farms can produce crops so cheaply that they could weather low prices and stay profitable even with no subsidies at all.

And this “logic” is being used to justify the continuance and increase of subsidies.

So this is how they’re going to do it. Aha. (Warning: PDF)

I cannot adequately express the incandescent stupidity of this. The BBC quotes Bush as saying:

“As we seek to preserve human life, we must also preserve human dignity – and therefore we must prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts.” [...] The president said that anything short of a full ban would be unethical, and nearly impossible to enforce.

There are two problems with this line of thinking.

Everyone should read this article. Effectively it’s about how the Bush administration is weaseling out of considering Yassir Arafat a ‘terrorist’.

Bush said Monday that the Palestinian leader’s past as a peace negotiator exempts Arafat from the post-Sept. 11 U.S. policy that a country or entity that harbors terrorists will be dealt with as terrorists.

Under the post-September-11 doctine, Arafat clearly at least ‘harbors’ terrorists, because he doesn’t swiftly, loudly, and consistently denounce terrorists fighting for his cause, and he does not appear to move to arrest those under his authority who commit or plan acts of terror. That he’s won the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t enter into it. At worst, he’s a murderer; in the very best possibility, he’s an ineffectual figurehead of a leader who cannot make meaningful promises.

If Arafat has any kind of authority to negotiate for peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then he’s responsible for the recent bombings. If these bombers are not within his control, he’s not worth negotiating with. Either way, the path to peace in the region does not lead through Arafat.

Colin Powell put a little different spin on the same topic on CBS this morning, saying “It would not serve our purpose right now to brand him individually as a terrorist.” That’s a very different statement, and it hints at a strategy. I sure hope so.

Update: maybe this information will help the U.S. government to decide whether Arafat deserves an ‘exemption’.

The Florida DMV is attempting to recall a man’s personalized license plate — “ATHEIST” — on the ground that it is “obscene or objectionable”. Of course, they issued the thing in the first place, and have renewed it since 1986, so it can’t be too objectionable.

Anyway, some people who disagree with the sentiment have sent a petition to the DMV, and the DMV has ordered the man to send the plates back.

The St. Petersburg Times story quotes Kenneth Vickery, who owns the Florida plates “ALL4GOD” and “GOD4ALL” (he is associated with some sort of Holy Trinity of musketeers, one must assume), who thinks that the ATHEIST plate should be allowed, and who is concerned that the state could pull his plates on the same pretext. He’s a good man for thinking that, but somehow I don’t think it’s too likely.

Question: If your religion or faith is so fragile that someone’s license plate is potentially harmful to it, it’s not a very good religion or strong faith, is it?

John Law is cracking down on bullying in at least one county in Minnesota.

Prosecutor James Backstrom slides an edge of steel into his voice and lays out one of the toughest juvenile-justice policies in the nation: School bullies will go to jail.

I have no problem with this, providing it’s carried out properly. I doubt that it will be, or that it is already:

Some judges have been quick to put any kid who lashes out in jail. Others find reasons to excuse schoolyard fights – the kid was provoked, he’s under stress – and hand down more traditional sentences of community service or counseling. Prosecutors estimate that about a dozen bullies have done time behind bars so far.

It seems pretty simple to me. Commit assault and battery against another person, whether you’re 8 or 38 years old, and you get punished. A child isn’t likely to do a lot of damage to another child, and children don’t have a complete set of social skills, so they shouldn’t be punished as severely. Offenses — I mean actual offenses like larceny and assault, not drawing a picture of a gun — committed by children should be punished in some imitation of the adult punishment for the same offense; this is part of the socialization process.

Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom recently seems to be that, because children don’t yet have a full set of social skills, we’ve got to throw the book at them for everything. It’s a binary justice system: either you’re innocent and free, or you’re Jeffrey Dahmer. If you’re under eighteen in the U.S. today, there’s not much middle ground.

Kids are being expelled from school and in some cases prosecuted for infractions that cause no harm and threaten no potential harm to anyone, and nobody’s particularly surprised any more. My guess is that this move, while sane on its face, will only push that unfortunate trend further. Kids who spend a night or two in kiddie jail for assault will not get the right message, if their cellie is in for saying “bang, bang” while pointing at someone.

This article in the Telegraph discusses why bureaucracy is resulting in the movement of a larger part of the art market out of the EU, but I think it misses the main point.

At issue is the droit de suite, which basically establishes a statutory license fee on artwork. Every time a work of art is sold in some European countries (and, soon, anywhere in the EU), until a date 70 years after the artist’s death, a fee has to be paid to the artist or his heirs.

The Telegraph focuses on the fact that the EU’s procedures result in the sale of a work of art costing £40 in paperwork alone. That’s a problem, but not the big one. The big problem is that the EU dictates to artists the conditions under which their art may be sold.

There’s no reason an artist in the United States could not license a work of art to a buyer, with restrictions on the manner of subsequent resale, or with additional fees to be paid to the artist under certain conditions. All artists working in film and music do this, and some famous visual artists undoubtedly already do, as well.

But very few unheard-of artists do, for the simple reason that the market won’t bear it. Purchasing art by an unknown artist is, economically speaking, a risky transaction. The purchaser doesn’t want it made riskier still by a statutory fee that diminishes the value of the thing on the secondary market. The ‘strugling artist’, as the phrase goes, is going to sell his art for what he can get. That he is not now allowed to do so in the EU will not help Europe’s cultural decline.

The following two paragraphs show up in a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article about a visit G.W. Bush made to Minneapolis recently. While he was making a speech, protesters were gathered a couple of blocks away.

The protests produced one odd piece of street theater. A few demonstrators tossed pretzels into the air, mocking Bush’s awkward encounter with one in January as he watched a football game on TV. Minneapolis police arrested two of the pretzel wielders. When a police supervisor was asked what charges would be brought against the pair, he cracked, “It’s got to be a felony. You could have called it attempted murder.”

Never mind that you can get arrested for throwing pretzels in the air. It’s far worse that the police are arresting people, and then joking about charging them with crimes that they didn’t even come close to committing.

It I tell a joke about committing a crime, the FBI will come and charge me with making “terroristic threats”. If the police tell a joke about becoming even more authoritarian, well, I suppose we should all just laugh nervously, and hope that they actually are joking.

Incidentally, if you look up felony in the dictionary, you find this:

felony fel‧o‧ny Law 1. One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor. 2. Any of several crimes in early English law that were punishable by forfeiture of land or goods and by possible loss of life or a bodily part.

But, according to the police in Minnesota, throwing pretzels in the air has “got to be a felony”. Pretzel-throwing is more like, say, murder and rape, and other crimes more serious than kicking and punching people — after a car accident — for which Mike Tyson was charged with misdemeanor assault in Maryland in 1998.