Month: February 2018

Whose Children Are Getting Shot?

NOTE: THIS POST IS CURRENTLY INCOMPLETE (AS OF FEB. 28). I POSTED IT BEFORE FINISHING IT,  BUT I DID NOT WANT TO TAKE IT DOWN.  PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! 🙂

Mass school shootings – much less than half the story of gun deaths of children in the U.S.

As tragic as the most recent school shooting in Parkland was, the debate over assault weapons, bump stocks, and high capacity magazines is missing the much broader problem of gun deaths in the U.S.

Of course every possible effort should be made to stop mass school shootings. But the fact is that mass school shootings, on average, account for only 0.9% of child deaths by firearms in the U.S.

Here’s how it plays out in the U.S., for children 1-17 years old, by the numbers:
 –  child deaths by firearms, annually (2012-2014) : 1,297*
–  child deaths by suicide, annually: (2012-2014):  492
– child deaths by homicide, annually: (2012 – 2014) : 687
– child deaths by accident, annually: (2012 – 2014): 77
– child deaths by law enforcement, or undetermined,           annually:  2012-2014):  41
–  child deaths by mass school shootings, annually (2012-2017):  12**

Therefore, to figure out how and why all these kids are getting gunned down, we have to look elsewhere than mass school shootings.

Continue reading “Whose Children Are Getting Shot?”

What’s Missing in the Gun Debate – What Works and What Doesn’t

Bad assumptions: myths and mistaken intuition

Some of what you may believe about gun violence is probably wrong. I refer first to an op-ed that appeared in the October 6, 2017, Washington Post, entitled “Five myths about gun violence.”  Five Myths about Gun Violence

In case you are kept out of the Post by a paywall, the Five Myths are:
(1) Gun violence in the U.S. is at an all-time high. (The peak was almost twice as high in 1993.)
(2) Background checks save lives. (What seems intuitively obvious fails, partially as a result of an inconsistent system. Requirements for licensing of purchasers might turn this around, but these are lacking or seldom enforced.) 
(3) Mental illness is behind most gun violence (Research indicates that only about 4% of violence against others [presumably gun violence as a subset] is caused by symptoms of serious mental illnesses.)
(4) Right-to-carry laws decrease crime. (As of October 2017, no armed civilians had halted a mass shooting. “Unarmed civilians are more than 20 times as likely to end a mass shooting than are armed civilians.”)
(5) Mass shootings are random.

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Yes, There is a There There: Now, What to Do?

Trump Inaction on Russia: the Clincher

For a long time, some of us were willing to give Donald Trump the slim benefit of a doubt as to why he is actively trying to smother the three investigations (DOJ, House, and Senate) into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.  The benefit was to accept that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the charge against Russia because it would have cheapened his electoral victory.

As disgraceful as the vanity explanation was, at least it tended to let Trump off the hook for being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, or, more seriously, being compromised by involvements with Russian oligarchs and business interests and/or the Kremlin itself.

Now that he has, grudgingly, admitted that Russia did meddle in the elections, he has taken to excoriating Obama for not doing more to stop it. That has been the pathetic extent of his leverage against Moscow.

Continue reading “Yes, There is a There There: Now, What to Do?”

THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 4: Discovery of Oldest Spiral Galaxy

The fascination of origins—the very long view.

Curiosity about personal ancestry has made Ancestry DNA and 23andMe booming businesses.   Marketing has grown this kind of curiosity into a lucrative appetite.  Indications are that the customer base is doubling annually.

Curiosity about cosmic origins might be growing more slowly, but the explosion of new information about the early universe thrills a lot of folks, without much money changing hands.  To consider where we come from on the largest time scales has a calming effect in  this tempestuous, maddening, frightening, and tragic moment in human history. Launching one’s imagination into the vastness of space leaves behind much of the craziness of our political, social, and cultural (melo)dramas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This is a very long post, perhaps of little interest to those who don’t share my fascination with cosmic origins. I present a table of contents of the sections below as a guide to what’s in store.

  • Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy.
  • The unmiraculous miracle of gravitational lensing
  • Implications of the age of the earliest spiral galaxy
  • Galactic structure, supermassive black holes, and a question of timing
  • Primordial black holes to the rescue!
  • An aside on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies
  • More on spirals
  • A Family Tree of galaxies
  • THE END
Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy
The Pinwheel Spiral Galaxy, shown for aesthetic effect- not the “oldest”

Don’t we just love our spiral galaxies?!?  It’s not so much love, it’s more like being awestruck by ineffable beauty, combined with the knowledge that each typically contains hundreds of billions of stars spread out across distances up to hundreds of thousands of light years.  (Another plus is that we actually live in one.) I’ve cheated a bit here by picking a particularly gorgeous example, the Pinwheel Galaxy—a kind of canonical form of which all spirals are variations on a starry theme. (For a spectacular collection of spiral galaxy images, follow the link: glorious spirals in abundance .)

Continue reading “THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 4: Discovery of Oldest Spiral Galaxy”

Is It still a Man’s World? Exhibits B-G: Recognition of Women’s Excellence

More women prominently in the news in politics, STEM, and business

News Item: Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong represented North Korean leadership at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It was she who communicated to the South Korean government an invitation to highest-level talks in North Korean capital Pyongyang.

News Item: the School Community Council of Salt Lake City decided to rename Andrew Jackson Elementary School to Mary Jackson Elementary School. (A poll had shown the public heavily in favor of the change.) Note this took place in the heart of Mormon country.

  • President Andrew Jackson was infamous for his racism (e.g., chasing escaped black slaves into Spanish Florida) and genocidal persecution of Native Americans.
  • Mary Jackson is famous for  becoming NASA’s first female black engineer, whose career included 34 years at NASA, and authoring or co-authoring 12 technical papers for NASA. Her character is one of the stars of the book(s) and movie Hidden Figures, which celebrate the key role black women played  in the space race.

News Item: in Virginia state elections in 2017, women won 11 of the 14 seats picked up by Democrats.

Continue reading “Is It still a Man’s World? Exhibits B-G: Recognition of Women’s Excellence”

Is It Still a Man’s World? Exhibit A: John Kelly

John Kelly’s working assumption on Rob Porter: what’s the problem?

Months ago, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly guaranteed that he would eventually bring down upon himself the ire of feminists and pro-feminists, when he allowed wife-beater Rob Porter to continue working in the White House. He did this despite having been warned by the FBI that allegations of domestic abuse made Porter a target for blackmail, and therefore he should not be given a permanent security clearance.

If Kelly thought that he could keep the allegations against Porter permanently under wraps, then he is even more politically naive than he has already shown himself to be on several occasions.

However, I hesitate to attribute even to Kelly that level of political clumsiness. Rather—as we now know from Kelly’s fulsome praise of Porter even after Porter’s terrorizing two former wives had been made public—Kelly had taken the news from the FBI  with an attitude that boiled down to “so what?”   It seems very likely that Kelly did not consider Porter’s spousal abuse a disqualification for a position in the White House—after all, Donald Trump himself had bragged about assaulting women, and then gotten elected President of the United States.   And maybe, just maybe, the women were lying.

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Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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Freedom from Regulation: No Foul Lines

Give me liberty, or give me strangling regulation!

The self-contradictions in economic libertarianism are acknowledged even by libertarians.  Ron Paul himself has accepted that some constraints on pollution are necessary, to prevent polluters in one geographical area from inflicting harm on people in other geographical areas—acid rain, where smokestack emissions in one place inflict damage downwind, being a simple case in point.  Water pollution operates under a similar principle. Unregulated, uncontained pollution represents an “externalized cost”—there’s a cost paid not by the polluter but by the victims.  In general the victims—people, plants, animals—are indirectly injured, and each individual only by a tiny amount at any one time in any one place.  The damage is cumulative—little noticed in the moment, but with large consequences over long spans of time.

You’d think that externalized costs of many kinds would present difficulties in principle for most libertarians—coal plants release mercury into the atmosphere, causing damage to health outside the coal plant, for which coal plants should be held responsible.*  It’s part of libertarianism that everyone should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Ergo, to be consistent, individuals (to include  corporations, whom the Supreme Court has deemed to have the rights of individual citizens), should be no freer to spew toxic contaminants at the public, than to rob them at gunpoint.

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