Fractal Commentary

I have some bad news for you all- we live in interesting times.  For those of you nodding at your screen and saying, “Duh”, allow me to remind you that the phrase “may you live in interesting times” is a traditional Chinese curse.

Dual Tragedy

Neil Armstrong died this past weekend at the age of 82. Assuming there are some readers of my intermittent tripe who don’t know anything that may have happened before disco, Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon. From all accounts, he was generally self-effacing and a genuinely good person, and there are damned few people like that. That makes his death a tragedy- irrespective of his fame. The other tragedy is the fact that America has actively retreated from the literal heights reached by the Apollo program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This is not to say that good science and engineering is no longer being accomplished. ar from it. Curiosity was successfully dropped onto the surface of Mars, the Russians have managed to work past their launch vehicle issues and successfully deliver supplies to the ISS, a private US company managed to do the same thing, the European Space Agency has launched a series of exceptional satellites for peering into the dim past of the Universe, CERN has very probably identified a Higgs particle, etc. The tragic bit is the fact that we are unable to repeat a forty-year-old scientific and engineering achievement today. NASA says we won’t be capable of sending humans back to the moon for at least thirty years. There will almost certainly be Chinese and possibly Russian manned missions to Luna long before Americans can return there.

We could really use a few more humans like Neil Armstrong and his Apollo teammates these days.

Alarums and Excursions

A disgruntled former employee’s poor decision-making skills were widely splashed across the headlines in New York city last week as yet another example of a mass shooting. The usual suspects quickly leaped in to denounce America’s gun culture, lament the senseless tragedy- and coincidentally put forward their own pet theories and solutions to take political advantage of the situation. Almost as horrible as the shooting itself, in my opinion.

Alas for the “American Gun Culture” narrative, it turns out that the Bad Guy only shot one of the victims of the “mass shooting”. The remaining people wounded or killed were all shot by two police officers trying to take down the original gunman. That’s right, two of “New York’s finest” blasted out sixteen rounds at the Bad Guy from about eight feet away and missed more than half their shots. Nine completely innocent bystanders were wounded by the wild shooting- three of them critically. The cops did manage to kill the Bad Guy, if that’s any consolation. It certainly doesn’t make me feel any better about the competence of US police forces in general and NYPD in particular.

Basic firearms safety rules, for those of you who haven’t learned them yet: 1- Always assume any firearm is loaded until you have personally verified it. Even if it is not loaded, treat every firearm as if it was- ALL THE TIME. 2- Never point any firearm at anything you do not wish to immediately shoot. 3- Know your target and what is beyond it. Even if you are Wyatt Earp reborn and never miss, modern firearms are very likely to over-penetrate- especially at the literal spitting distance of most gunfights. Anything on the other side of your target is likely to get shot as well as the target. 4- Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. “Ready to shoot” means that you have a valid target, you have properly aimed at that target, and you know where the bullet will go past (or through) the target once you shoot. Until ALL of these requirements have been met, keep your booger-hook off the bang-switch. These are universal firearms handling rules, but somehow “New York’s finest” managed to forget them. Yes, they were under pretty serious stress, but that would not have been a legal excuse for non-police under identical circumstances. We expect our police to be trained to handle such crises.

For a period of perhaps thirty hours, the usual suspects took to the airwaves and internet to proffer their own politically-derived solutions to the “gun problem”. Far too many of those who try to prevent erosion of the rights of civilian firearm ownership immediately jumped into the fray by claiming that the gunman could have been stopped sooner if only more civilians had been permitted to carry firearms in the historically gun-averse city. I am philosophically opposed to New York’s traditional hostility for civilian firearm ownership, but: (A) I do not live in New York, so it’s not my business; and (B) they’re objectively wrong. Given the notoriously poor marksmanship of the rank-and-file NYPD and their demonstrated equally poor target acquisition skills, I’m reasonably certain that the number of dead and wounded would probably be much higher if civilians on the scene had tried to use their own weapons to stop the original shooter. The NYPD would likely have ventilated half the city trying to put down what they would doubtless see as multiple shooters.

On the other hand, those who are hostile to civilian firearms ownership were ever so quick to put forth a bewildering number of legislative restrictions on civilian rights to keep and bear arms. There were the usual idiotic suggestions that all would-be gun owners be required to undergo rigorous psychiatric screenings, limiting the number of firearms any one person was permitted to own, mandating training and licensing of all gun owners before allowing possession, etc. The typical knee-jerk attempts to keep firearms out of the hands of “undesirables”. The problem is that none of those measures would have prevented the most recent shooting, nor would they have prevented Columbine or Virginia Tech. The people who advocate restricting firearms to police and military personnel are also having trouble with the fact that all but one of the people killed and wounded in New York were shot by the supposedly well-trained police.

Once it became clear that NYPD had caused all but one of the casualties at the Empire State building, the story disappeared rapidly from the headlines.

Zen and the Cartoonist

If you haven’t already found it, please point your web browser to Zen Pencils. The artist takes quotes from literary or otherwise notable public figures and draws inspirational cartoons around those quotes. There are several strips which will probably make you think.

Speaking of Cartoons

I note that Jen Breeden from The Devil’s Panties (one of the webcomics I read regularly) is trying an experiment at getting rid of advertisements. She is basically extorting money from her readers with the threat of allowing the ads to return. All seriousness aside, Jen asks her readers to donate money to defray the site’s operating expenses. As long as the donations exceed the cost of keeping her site running, she keeps the comic ad-free for the next month. Good for her. It seems to have been working so far. Please give her some money if you like her work.

That’s all for now. I shall withdraw until such time as some new public iniquity arises to wake me from my torpor and return to vent my spleen all over the internet. Given that this is an election year, it’s good odds that time might be measured in hours rather than days, but I’ll do my best to resist the temptation to wallow in the politics.

Current status: Annoyed

Current music: Mandelbrot Set by Jonathan Coulton

Old White Guy Syndrome

I have been trying to stay out of the political shitstorm sweeping the US these days. I really have. Even to the point of not posting for weeks on end lest I start ranting about the industrial-strength idiocy which passes for political dialogue in the US. This bit, however, sent me over the edge.

It seems there is an OWG running for US Senate in Missouri who publicly “misspoke” this afternoon. Many of you may be asking why this would piss me off- politicians mis-speak all the time. It happens so often, in fact, that anyone using the words, “I misspoke”, can be reasonably interpreted as actually saying, “Oh, crap! There were cameras running when I said that shit?” This particular OWG turns out to be a current US Congressman from Missouri named Todd Akin. You may remember Representative Akin from his 2011 co-sponsorship of a bill restricting access to abortion by anyone receiving tax benefits from the federal government- including tax-exempt health savings accounts. Buried in the bill’s text were some interesting mental contortions on defining “rape”. This bill died a lonely death in committee, but that didn’t seem to break Congressmoron Akin of his antediluvian thought processes.

Once upon a time, it was commonly thought that women could only conceive a child if she had an orgasm. Using this logic, any woman who had been raped but still conceived must have enjoyed her attack, and therefore had not really been raped. This incomprehensibly stupid notion had a stake put through its heart back in the 1700s by some actual medical science, but Representative Akin seems to think it’s still in play.

During an interview published Sunday, Congressman Akin claimed that women who were “legitimately raped” had some sort of secret, super-ninja woman-magic which would prevent them from getting pregnant. It is his belief, therefore, that any woman who gets pregnant as a result of rape was not “really raped”, and should not have the option of terminating the pregnancy.

What. The. Actual. Fuck?

How does this chronically-stupid waste of resources get to decide what constitutes “legitimate” rape? Worse, why does this OWG seem to think he can get away with using 18th century thinking in a 21st century political interview? What exactly is this shit-for-brains a “representative” of anyway? Do the people in his district actually agree with this horrible example of humanity? How can any allegedly rational human in 21st century America still believe this superstitious twaddle, let alone allow such verbal diarrhea to bubble forth from his mouth? Even more incomprehensibly, how can this sort of raving imbecile be considered a viable candidate for Federal office? By the way, this prehistoric jack-ass is a ranking member of the House Science Committee. Think about that, and weep for the future of our country.

Once the media began sinking their collective teeth into Congressman Neanderthal’s comments, he made a very lame attempt at walking his comments back. If you read the actual text of his “I misspoke” explanation, you’ll note that he doesn’t actually deny that his comments reflect his actual beliefs. On the contrary, he tries to express his “empathy” for raped and abused women, then digresses rapidly into vague platitudes about protecting the vulnerable and helpless, and follows the whole thing up with an attempted deflection to the economy. That doesn’t even rate a “nice try” on the Misspoke-o-meter.

Here’s hoping that the voters in Missouri emphatically kick this unrepentant misogynist to the curb. Anyone in a modern democratic society who clings to such antiquated beliefs long since disproven by science deserves nothing but ridicule and derision.

Current status: Shocked and dismayed

Current music: Chuck Al Hashib by Pain