Another neat infographic from Compound Interest. Click to see the full version.
When Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics, he did so primarily to support some logical puzzles within his own fiction. Still, there's something reasonable enough in this invention that it seems a fair litmus test for any technology:
1) It shouldn't injure anyone, or let someone be injured if it can be prevented.
2) It should work as directed, unless that would injure someone.
3) It shouldn't break, unless someone breaks it, or unless the only way to keep someone from being injured is to stop working.
You can see those laws at play in the design of devices as elaborate as self-driving cars and as everyday as a lawn mower. But there are some items where they just don't seem to apply...
Frank Bruni and guns on campus.
Across the country, there’s so much concern for college students’ emotional safety that some schools add “trigger warnings” to novels and other texts. But in Texas, there’s so little concern for college students’ physical safety that concealed firearms will be permitted in classrooms at public universities like the state flagship here.
This wasn’t the doing or desire of administrators and faculty at the University of Texas — most of whom, it seems, are horrified — but of conservative Texas lawmakers on a tireless mission to loosen gun restrictions whenever, however and wherever they can.
To be or not to be armed in Shakespeare class? Your choice!
Guns in dorms? Just the ticket for a good night’s sleep!
It gets better, by which I mean more surreal: The law, which was passed four months ago, will take effect on Aug. 1, 2016. That’s 50 years to the day since one of the first and most infamous mass shootings at an American school, the beginning of a bloody tape loop. It happened right here, at the University of Texas at Austin, where an engineering student climbed to the top of the iconic tower in the center of campus and, for an agonizing hour and a half, sprayed the surrounding area with bullets, killing 14 people and injuring more than 30.
Bruni clearly doesn't understand the Three Laws of Gun Talk. 1) The aftermath of gun violence isn't the right time to talk about gun violence. 2) There is no right time to talk about gun violence. and 3) The only solution to emotionally-unstable people firing wildly into crows of terrified and confused people, is terrified and confused people firing wildly. One thing that makes Bruni's article worth reading in full: an explanation of how the conservative Texas legislature used this bill not just as a means to extend "guns, guns everywhere" thinking, but as a direct and deliberate attack on public education.
All right. I'm supposed to let the pundits do most of the talking. So come on in...
Ruth Marcus wonders if there's any limit to how many times we're willing to watch our children slaughtered without taking action.
A confession: When the news of Thursday’s mass shooting in Oregon broke, it did not occur to me to write about it.
I was thinking about Planned Parenthood and Benghazi; about Bernie Sanders’s fundraising and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails; about Vladimir Putin and Syria. Another shooting is tragic and enraging, but what is left to say? What is the point of saying anything when it will change no minds? ...
Then the president’s grim words shamed me into writing.
“Somehow this has become routine,” he noted, bristling with anger and frustration as he made his 15th such remarks. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”
You have to wonder how this is taken overseas. Not overseas as in "what do reasonable people living in Otherland think of this insanity." No. Overseas as in "why should a terrorist living in Otherland worry about what we'll do to stop him from killing people over there when we won't even lift a finger to save our own kids."
Nicholas Kristof is tired of crying over gun massacres.
We’ve mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief. It’s time for a new approach to gun violence. ...
We’re angry, but we also need to be smart. And frankly, liberal efforts, such as the assault weapons ban, were poorly designed and saved few lives, while brazen talk about banning guns just sparked a backlash that empowered the National Rifle Association.
What we need is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model we use to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from swimming pools to cigarettes. We’re not going to eliminate guns in America, so we need to figure out how to coexist with them.
Kristof's argument is that we ought to put a little Three Laws thinking into guns.
...cars exemplify the public health approach we need to apply to guns. We don’t ban cars, but we do require driver’s licenses, seatbelts, airbags, padded dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. And we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate by 95 percent. ... A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.
And... no. Nope. Look, all those things should happen, but... I'm not often in absolute disagreement with Kristof, but I think he's wrong here. Wrong and wrong-headed.
First off, developing any strategy in the form of "if we do X, there may be a backlash so we better not do X" is handing victory to your opponent before you make your first move. It's ceding the game before you step onto the field. Not only that, it's not how public opinion works.
You may hate that the Overton Window works, but it does. You don't move the needle by making reasoned middle ground arguments. That's why we, think God, don't have a federal Domestic Partnership law sitting alongside a strengthened Defense of Marriage Act. You win by running for the end zone, and not stopping when you get there.
In this fight you have one side arguing in favor of putting guns in churches, guns on college campuses, guns in movie theaters, guns in elementary schools. Arguing that it's okay to give an Uzi to a 9 year old. Actively creating cute guns designed to be presents for children. Arguing against laws to keep guns from criminals, laws to keep criminals from guns, and laws to understand how many people are killed by guns. All the while screaming that they're in danger from a bunch of finger-prying gun grabbers. You have people on the floor of the House mouthing off about schemes to use our own military to enforce a non-existent UN ban on guns and government efforts to horde all the bullets.
Meanwhile, the other side has been having a discussion about the precise nature of background checks, the reasonable size of magazines, and what kind of design makes a rifle look mean. Does it surprise you where the Window keeps moving? The assault weapons ban did not fail because it went too far. And... shutting up now.
Paul Theroux and the sometimes not-so-generous nature of Big Philanthropy.
Every so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico.
Buried in a long story about corruption in China in The New York Times a couple of months ago was the astonishing fact that the era of “supercharged growth” over the past several decades had the effect of “lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty.” From handouts? From Habitat for Humanity? From the Clinton Global Initiative?
No, oddly enough, China has been enriched by American-supplied jobs...
When Mr. Cook of Apple said he was going to hand over his entire fortune to charity, he was greatly praised by most people, but not by me. It so happened that at that time I was traveling up and down Tim Cook’s home state of Alabama, and all I saw were desolate towns and hollowed-out economies, where jobs had been lost to outsourcing, and education had been defunded by shortsighted politicians.
Theroux's piece is an indictment of an aspect of globalization where men — and they're almost all men — who've made a fortune destroying American communities, then received praise for offering to trickle a bit of their wealth back onto the people they impoverished.
The New York Times praises Bernie's decidedly non-Big Money fundraising.
In a fund-raising shocker, supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have given an impressive $26 million-plus in small-dollar donations in the last three months, putting his funding at the pace of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s formidable machine. ...
Mr. Sanders has made a campaign theme of skewering the big-dollar, “super PAC” machinery of modern politics, and his donors clearly are responding. He reported 1.3 million online contributions from 650,000 different donors, running ahead of the Obama campaign’s 2008 record for small-dollar gifts. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign reported 250,000 donors three months ago but no new total for the latest quarter. ....
An opinion poll this month by Bloomberg Politics shows that a stunning 78 percent of the public favors overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which has unleashed unlimited amounts of cash on political races, much of it coming from undisclosed sources.
You can campaign on redeeming the system, but if you actually
walk the walk while making those promises, people will notice.
The New York TImes keeps up the drumbeat for reform of prison sentences.
The sentencing reform bill introduced in the Senate on Thursday falls far short of what is needed, but it is a crucial first step on the long path toward unwinding the federal government’s decades-long reliance on prisons as the answer to every ill. ...
Among the most significant are those that would reduce mandatory-minimum sentences for many drug crimes. These sentences are jaw-droppingly long — from five years for a first offense up to life without parole for a third. The new bill would cut the life sentence to a 25-year minimum, and would cut the 20-year sentence for a second offense to 15 years. ...
There is still a long way to go. Four decades of extreme sentencing policies have deadened the public’s sensitivity to what five years behind bars means, let alone 25 or more. Many people assumed that those serving long sentences must, by definition, be the worst offenders.
If you've been unlucky enough to have contact with the "justice system." one of the most shocking aspects is a rude awakening about the unreal relationship between severity of the crime and the length of mandated sentences. The other is an understanding of how the relationship between judges and attorneys is far more shaped by backrooms, BBQs, and campaign funds than anything that happens in the courtroom.
Carl Hiaasen has a specific example of sentencing gone wild.
The travesty imprisonment of Orville "Lee" Wollard will continue, with the blessing of Gov. Rick Scott. Last week, Scott cast the decisive vote to keep Wollard locked up for firing a warning shot after being attacked in his home by his daughter’s boyfriend. Police said the boyfriend ripped the surgical stitches from Wollard’s abdomen.
The 60-year-old first-time offender has already served about seven years of a mandatory 20-year term. A Polk County jury had convicted him of shooting into a dwelling and aggravated assault with a firearm.
Big mandatory minimum sentences on using a gun "in commission of a crime" were part of the package put forward by the firearms industry. So were "stand your ground" laws. How to get around that conflict?
...state legislators last year cited Wollard’s case among others when they rewrote and expanded the controversial “stand your ground” statutes. No longer can a person be arrested for firing a warning shot if he or she feels threatened by use of force.
Well, wheh. I thought for a second there they might rethink the "it's okay to shoot people who look cross-eyed at you" part of the law. Or wait. No I didn't.
Scott, who signed the reform legislation, had a chance to do the right thing and stand up for Wollard. Instead, he sided with the staff of the clemency board and Wollard’s two-faced prosecutor, Hill.
Least surprising thing about this: Rick Scott did something petty and stupid.
Leonard Pitts looks to improve something that affects all police shootings: a miserable system of investigating police shootings.
... as we approach the first anniversary of the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice with no one yet held accountable ... it strains credulity to believe it takes the better part of a year — and counting — to decide whether to prosecute Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann, especially given the surveillance video that shows Loehmann shooting the boy, who had been holding a realistic-looking toy gun, within two seconds after the patrol car skids to a stop in front of him.
Would the decision on prosecution proceed at such a leisurely pace had it been Loehmann who was shot? Would the prosecutor be agonizing like Hamlet almost a year later?
You know the answer as well as I do.
The impulse to cut cops some slack — “Hey, he was only doing his job” — is understandable. It is also wrong and, more to the point, shortsighted.
District attorneys don't just work with the police every day, they're utterly dependent on the police to do their job. To believe they would do anything that damaged that relationship is expecting, um, expecting... I believe that would be justice. I'm not sure I've met a district attorney outside of fiction up to that challenge.
Ross Douthat whips off his tweed jacket and Eton shirt to discuss conservatives' favorite despot.
Is Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria a geopolitical masterstroke? Is he filling a regional vacuum, creating a new Baghdad-Tehran-Damascus-Moscow axis, demonstrating the impotence of American foreign policy? Is his strategy of provocation putting NATO on the ropes?
Douthat's columns have become as predictable as an episode of Mannix. For one third of the piece, deliever an apparently reasonable argument.
... is Putin actually acting out of weakness, trying to save a deteriorating position? Is his Middle Eastern gambit, like his Ukrainian intervention, a flailing, foredoomed to regain ground that Russia has lost of late? ...
If success means a more prosperous Russia with an array of client states, a solid domestic foundation for Putin’s regime, and Russia’s re-emergence as an attractive civilizational rival to the liberal democratic West (a recurring fantasy of Putinists), then there isn’t anything particularly impressive about the Russian leader’s record. ...
You can argue that he’s been playing a bad hand well, but his cards still look considerably worse than they did when oil prices were higher, or after his splendid little war with Georgia in 2008.
But of course, that's not the conclusion Douthat draws. With Great Conservative Insight comes great responsibility to tell the rest of us what's
really happening.
But suppose we judge Putin’s maneuvers by a different standard: Not whether they’re delivering ever-greater-influence to Moscow, but whether they’re weakening the Pax Americana and the major institutions (NATO, the E.U.) of the post-Cold War West.
You'll not be surprised to find out that Putin is a Deep Thinker. He's not pissing in all directions because he's a cluesless egotistical despot — a Russian Trump with better hair. Nope, Putin is playing the long game of weakening American power as a prelude to rebuilding a Stronk Soviet. Okay Ross, put your shirt back on. Please. Oh, and for those playing along at home, the Douthat Thumbs His Thesaurus Word of the Week is "Foredoomed."
Peter Wehner argues that there's plenty of good candidates in the GOP presidential marching band.
If you are looking for evidence of the deep antipathy that exists in the Republican Party toward politicians, consider that the three candidates leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination — Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — have zero years of governing experience among them.
In fact, for many Republican voters, governing experience appears to be downright disqualifying, even if you are highly accomplished, even if you have been a governor who is not complicit in any of the failures and dysfunction of Washington.
I'm wondering who this Republican governor with a record of success and non-adherence to failed GOP policies would be. Anyway...
...by 2012, President Obama was viewed by Republicans as a complete failure whose repudiation was inevitable. The fact that he easily won re-election, with 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, was a huge psychological blow to Republicans, much like the one Democrats experienced in 1984, when Ronald Reagan — despised by many liberals — won re-election in a landslide.
The way this has worked itself out is in rage directed at Republican lawmakers.
Rage against the machine, Republicans! Rage! In fact, this would be an excellent time to sit on the sidelines in a righteous funk. Work on that.
Dana Milbank prepares to open wide...
I never expected to write these words, but I miss Mitt Romney.
On Wednesday, the day the front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was in New Hampshire alleging that Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives may actually be clandestine terrorists, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee was in Washington, talking sense.
“Donald Trump will not be the nominee,” Romney told a group of business-school students at Georgetown University. And why won’t Trump, who, when he isn’t besmirching Syrian refugees as terrorists, is maligning Mexican immigrants as rapists, get the nod? Because, Romney said, “when all is said and done, the American people usually do the right thing.”
Hang on a second. There's a more-than-slight issue with what Romeny just said. American people
does not equal Republican primary voters. In fact, when it comes to not doing the right thing, Republican primary voters have an unmatched record.
Romney is right. In fact, I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches the nomination I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post. I have this confidence for the same reason Romney does: Americans are better than Trump.
Can we lay out some rules for this now? No ketchup. No water for at least five minutes. No...
Kathleen Parker greets the new Republican leadership.
The lead to this column is a deep, guttural groan that originates in the throat and expands into the lungs before collapsing in the pit of the stomach.
How do you spell hmmmgrrrungh ?
What else is there to say about House Republicans’ inability to get something right? And I say this with compassion, I really do. Because seriously? It’s over. Done. Kaput. With Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) recent response to the simplest question about GOP accomplishments in Congress — from Sean Hannity, the friendliest interviewer a GOPer could hope for — the future may as well be called Democrat.
Thank you. Let's move on. Parker has more to say about how McCarthy's openly truthful revelation of how Republicans have no interest in the legislature beyond using it as a tool to smite the Clintons hurts the party, but I want to end of that sentence.
George Will's piece today is a pretty apolitical defense of science. The kind of thing that almost makes me want to link to him. But no. I'm not falling for that trap.