The Second Amendment

It’s trite, but I believe in our right to arm bears. Claws and teeth are insufficient in a modern age. Laughs aside, I would want a Taurus 454 “Raging Bull” in my hand if I were being pursued by an enraged Grizzly. The goal would be stopping power because I can’t run at all and nobody can run faster than an enraged grizzly. Everybody that has been pursued by an enraged grizzly raise your hand. OK, we have now identified the tiny percentage of people Charles Darwin spoke about. In the 21^st century if you are doing something that irritates grizzly bears the gene pool might be better off without your contribution. I concede, though, that a tiny percent of the tiny percent of you that would find yourself in that situation may have a legitimate purpose to be in a situation that a grizzly would find unwelcome. You should probably be packing.

I understand the passion of the NRA to see the second amendment as a grail just short of life itself. What I don’t understand is why the NRA stops at the “assault rifle”. As anybody who has ever gone hunting knows, you can’t beat the M4A1 when you are surprised by a whole herd of deer that need to reach the pinnacle of their mortal purpose, having their heads mounted on a wall (in this day and age I don’t want to offend vegans with the idea that meat might be good for you or that they may be legitimate reasons to eat Bambi). Of course I know that you will never see a herd of dear with 5-point racks. Bucks insist on being the only “man” in the herd.

But what about the times only an FN SCAR CQC with its mounted FN40L-GL is enough? The grenade launcher is a part of this gun, so doesn’t the NRA insist on the right to buy these? Most of this rifle is, well, rifle. And you still can’t beat a FIM-92 for those times when some criminally minded airliner may have chosen your house as its destination. At 33 and a half pounds it looks just like a big rifle. Then there’s the StunRay whose manufacturers say “… will blind you into submission” with a light flash 10 times more intense than an aircraft landing light (all from a 75 watt bulb!) that overwhelms your visual cortex causing complete paralysis of the body at a distance that a Taser just envies. There’s also the “hard sound rifle” which has given me a healthier respect for my headphones. I can’t confirm it as real, but has a loyal following with HALO players. And all of these are just considered “small bore weapons” by NATO. Everybody knows that no group is complete without the venerable, reliable M2. Any Humvee (American Motors last gasp?) worth riding in has its M2HB or its baby sister the M240G. Yes the SAW is just a small bore gun, but when you need to shoot somebody 740 times in a minute (just under 13 times per second) it’s hard to beat [note: most gunners don’t exceed 100 rpm for prolonged use or the barrel becomes a little soft]. Of course, the Marines now want something with a little more accuracy.

Why doesn’t the “right to bear arms” extend to the Howitzer? Some of the best performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture have included the M198. And then there’s the world of smooth bore cannon. The Army realized early on that a 105mm round couldn’t do what a 120mm could from an Abrams tank. After all, it’s a  Chrysler. The original minivan is a Chrysler. Why can’t I have a 120mm RheinMetall on my Voyager? Anyone who has ever baked a pie knows how much more mass each millimeter gives you (for reference an 8” cake pan (assuming 1.5” inches high) gives you six cups while a 9” (same height) gives you 8 cups). Step up to a 10” and you’ve got almost 13 cups. Now instead of cake batter toss some high explosive and depleted uranium in there and watch the walls tumble down).

The point of this silliness is the same with all my friends in the NRA, and I have many friends carrying NRA cards. Except for the perspective terrorists, everybody will agree that the “right to bear arms” ends somewhere. In 1805 the standard musket in capable hands had a one in three chance of hitting a man-size target at 100 yards. This is the reason that you lined up as many musketeers as you could in a line. If you had 60 firing effectively you might bring down 20 of the enemy. The state of the art Baker Rifle, a flintlock, doubled that to 200 yards and Rifleman Thomas Plunkett is thought to have shot a French general at as much as 600 yards. With the improvement came a compromise. A skilled musketeer could get off 4 rounds in a minute while the time required to load and fire a Baker with its bullet in oiled leather (or more commonly linen) reduced the rate of fire to two rounds per minute.

Facts would indicate that for most Americans, the limit for the right to bear arms is in the neighborhood of what are characterized as “assault rifles”. I say this because it took most Americans agreeing with this idea for their representatives to ban them in 1994 (but only if that ban had a shelf life of 10 years). That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider the “Brady” camp has a budget of about $7 million/year while the NRA admits to between $100 and $300 million. They also seem to be able raise another $200 million with a toaster (I am not kidding). The problem is that whenever the characteristics of an assault rifle are defined someone can make some minor alteration (which can usually be unmade in seconds) to disqualify it.

I sincerely believe that if you took General Washington or President Jefferson and gave him an AK-47, the most prolific, most reputable, most reliable, most destructive bang for the buck they would say, “We had no idea people would want weapons of mass destruction in their closet. We were thinking muskets. You know a one in three chance at 100 yards maybe four times a minute.” FYI – An AK-47 on burst can fire 400 rounds per minute (600 rounds cycling rate). Yes, that is 100 times as many shots as the Founding Fathers had ever imagined. It is considered “inaccurate” by today’s standards because the stamped models only produce a 4” to 6” reliable target at 300 yards. Marksmen set its effective rate at up to 800 yards.

My point is that almost everyone recognizes that there is a limit, some limit somewhere defined as “the right to bear arms”. This is the crux of the argument about “constitutionality”. Once we admit that there is a limit to our right to the weapon, we have accepted that it is constitutional to set limitations on the right to bear arms without “infringing” on that right. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of “infringe” is “to transgress or exceed the limits of” indicating that limits must first be established for infringement to incur.

There are estimated to be more than 300 million guns in circulation in the United States. A law making it a criminal offense to possess a gun would be about as enforceable as Prohibition. At the same time, a law restricting the sale of firearms would lend itself to reducing the availability of guns to criminals. The existence of guns could not accomplished completely, maybe not even effectively for years, decades or even centuries. The question is not “how much good would regulating firearms accomplish” but simply if regulating firearms would result in a benefit to the majority of citizens.

We frequently compare ourselves to Canada. We eat the same food, drive the same cars, speak mostly the same language and share a lot of our heritage. Canada has its share of deaths by GSW. Most of these are suicides. In the US 45% of gunshot deaths are homicide while only 32% are suicides. In terms of lives taken there is an obvious and proportionate correlation with the availability of firearms. There is also a correlation in the reduction of GSW with the increased control of firearms since 1991 in Canada, a 65% reduction. Obviously the number and percentage of lives destroyed by guns is much higher in the US.

A more appealing way to look at this might be the cost of gun violence. Who would not be willing to pay a little less tax? In 1991 GSW cost Canadians $6.6 billion. A similar study in 1992 showed the cost to Americans as $126 billion. I would be willing to promote a provision that gun ownership continue to be regulated as it is presently as long as all the costs related to GSW is paid by gun owners.

For those of you who reacted to the shooting of five and six year olds by creating more wealth for the makers and sellers of guns all I can hope is that you are not my next door neighbor. How sad it would be to live next to somebody who would rather shoot me than share a loaf of bread. . I assure you that you won’t have to hold a gun to my head to get half of my last loaf. How I would hate to survive in a world where the only reason I’m alive is because I shot you and my neighbors.

The gun lobby will tap into the lowest form of human manipulation to sell assault weapons. I don’t know a single gun control advocate who would find relevance or redemption in [NSFW] something like this, but it was one of the highest hits on “second amendment rights”. I think even the men of the world like General Washington and President Jefferson would be disgusted that their prayerful hours work is associated today with such an image. I hope I don’t know anyone who would pay $21.99 to own it.

Hiroshima

For the last several weeks I have been reading book after book about the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't know why I do this. I become frustrated, depressed and distraught when I read the details about the horrors of war, but since my earliest memories I have not been able to turn away from pictures and words of war while at the same time fearing such a horrible waste of humanity.

Some of the books concentrated strictly on the science, the physics of what happens when a small fraction of nuclear material is brought to critical mass. Some discussed the human and social tragedy that were direct results of the bombs, but did so dispassionately; strictly an empirical representation of death, disease and trauma. Many authors stated clearly in their introduction that their introduction that they were not going to address the morality or immorality of the bombs or try to assign blame. One, however, asserted that the whole question of blame is useless moving the argument from the citizens of opposed countries to the economic and social practices of those countries that brought people to put on uniforms and attempt to kill those who dressed differently. Eventually it all seemed to devolve to the point where one individual was trying to kill another because they would try to kill him.

I've mentioned before that I don't believe in the concept of innocent civilian bystanders. We choose to honor and support our executive and nation or we oppose it. If we pay our taxes and accept conscription we enable war. Weapons are rarely built by soldiers, they are built by citizens and every citizen from the school teacher who taught that employee math to the grocer who sold them breakfast is involved. The rations are grown by farmers and the money to pay for it all financed by bankers. Every one participates in the process, partly because of allegiance and patriotism and partly because of the need to pay for the necessities of life.

Some of the books were written specifically to address the morality of waging war with atomic weapons. This begs the question, "Is there a moral way to wage war?" This is where our irrationality stands up screaming. How is dying from a metal fragment through the chest more moral than dying from every cell of the body vaporizing? How can it be more noble to take a life with a rifle or a bayonet than it is with a Predator and a Hellfire missile? What we call "collateral damage" is killing the people who feed the soldiers, make their weapons, bring them information and generally enable war. How is killing as many people as you can in smaller batches preferable to killing them in one huge cataclysm?

To assert that there is a "immoral" way to wage war relies on the premise that there is a "moral" way to do it. War is about greed. Greed is always the primary cause. Someone wants something someone else has, which in the end all boils down to agency. Someone wants to impose their will on someone else in a way that will give them what they want. Any action, any method used is moral to protect and defend the exercise of agency. If we accept that "...all men are created equal..." this is the place where equality exists: We are all endowed by the Creator with the right to make our own decisions and choose for ourselves what we do with our resources.

There is no way to morally take away the agency of another. Efforts to explain it in terms of territory, money and resources are the details we use to obfuscate the motivation of the instigator to impose their will.

Witch Hunting

I ran errands today. Had to do a snow tire change over and spent 31/2 hours at Discount Tire. I got there at 7:50. There were 11 people in front of me and 10 people behind me. This is only meaningful because they had Fox news on in the waiting area. At some point I heard the commentator say, "I think it's time for the attorneys to get involved in the power outage aftermath of hurricane Sandy." Huh? I immediately thought of attorneys in $1,000 suits delivering a summons to St. Peter naming God as the defendant in suit demonstrating their clients losing precious profits due to how the storm destroyed the power grid and the order of steps taken to fix it. I realized that what they really are going to do is sue the power companies for their loss of profit while waiting for the power to be restored.

Despite most peoples understanding, witch hunting did not become popular until the late 15th century when everyone was suitably Catholic enough to know that drought, disease, pestilence and poor harvests had to be caused be the demons in their midst; He would never allow His pious Catholics to suffer, so it had to be the spells of witches; Especially because these women seemed to possess knowledge on how to treat and frequently beat the diseases. Sure enough after they had found and burned enough of them, the good times came back, testimony to the efficacy of the inquisition.

Litigation is the modern form of witch hunting. When something impinges on ones greed it has to be somebody's fault and if you file enough law suits the "guilty" will settle to avoid further costs. It’s easy to profile the guilty, they are the ones with more money than you, so they had to get money that should have been yours. This gives them a self-deceptive feeling of control over the silly whims of a God that doesn't seem to understand how important it is for rich people to get richer. He doesn't even seem to care if the poor people get richer, but they can't afford attorneys.

The greatest flaw of a "corporation" is it isolates the stupid and their money from their stupidity. Partnerships and a sole proprietorship created a balance that when somebody was sufficiently stupid, they lost their capital and couldn't afford to be stupid any more. The corporation not only allows them to protect their money when they're stupid, it allows them to be stupid with someone else's money. The joke about socialism is that "eventually you run out of other peoples' money". The flaw in a capitalistic system based on the corporation is that you never seem to run out of stupider people that will let you lose their money in your stupid attempt to get rich. Greed is very effective in lowering the IQ of any population.

An important note: Stupid does not mean you did something that wasn't financially productive although that applies; it usually means you took someone else's money in a way that was not sufficiently complex to be able to keep the money you took. As for investors, you got to spend their money while you were losing yours, usually to at least a 10 to 1 ratio.

Global Warming or Menopausal Hot Flashes

What we have come to call “Global Warming” may indeed be simply terrestrial menopause.

Our planet, exhausted after having raised homo sapiens from its first Cartesian awareness, through a childhood of prehistoric innocence, an adolescence of legend, scripture and modern industry has seen her offspring enter adulthood where we no longer live in close contact with our mother. Through our greed we barely notice her fertile decline and her finite resources and energy disappear.

As adults we try to exploit everything we have learned throughout our youth to realize our success, our pleasure and our lust. We suspect she shares our pride in having accomplished so much. Even as she now succumbs to the ravages of aging, she offers us whatever she has left, and we accept it with enthusiasm. We wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful.

As her children, we are arranging her post-menopausal, elder care even as her fertility dwindles alarmingly. We hope desperately that our plan for her golden years will be sufficient. We build it with hopeful diatribe. We resolve to change our behavior and honor her by legislating sanctions for those things that accelerate her decay, but try to rationalize our way out of neglect. We reason that by throwing money at her problems, levying fines for those things that corrupt and destroy her, we are buying her more time. We know she'll be happier in a nursing home than she would be as part of our busy household.

She still takes our calls if we will make them. Those are becoming less frequent. At least we always check in on Earth Day. Mostly she becomes more alone and more lonely as our lives are too busy addressing our own needs and our wants to deal with her geriatric decline.

One thing is certain; we won’t miss her when she’s gone for this is one relationship where the child will die long before the mother. She will "find herself" and go on to a new existence with a different persona. I wonder if she'll miss us.

Memories and Emotions

This morning I had set up a "smart" playlist from my "acoustic" directory. Just random songs from different artists from Carol King to The Best of MTV Unplugged. An old protest song from the 70's came on from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young "4 Way Street" album "Ohio". I still marvel at the power music has to generate emotion and recall events from our past. I was a whole 13 years old when it happened. I recall being absolutely shocked that something like that could happen in America and I remember being tragically sad. I could not have understood all the philosophical, economic and political elements at the age of 13, but I remember hiding in my room because I was crying and didn't want to be teased.
As I grew older, I recognized that emotions created by the even covered a large spectrum of human feeling. A lot of people were angry. That seemed to be the most common. I remember that because I became very cautious and afraid. I was afraid of angry people, I couldn't predict their behavior. Anger is still the emotion that causes immense distress for me, whether it be my own or someone else's.

The real coincidence is that yesterday I was talking with a friend and we were discussing the differences between Kent State and Tienanmen Square. The more we tried to contrast them, the more we found similarities:

• Both were instances when the country's military was used against unarmed civilian citizens
• Both were the result of protest rallies
• Both countries justified their action because the protest demonstration was illegal
• Both included in their list of casualties spectators and passers by who just happened to be in the wrong place at the time
• Members of both military forces fired over the heads of the crowd to avoid killing a protester
• Both countries were under the control of a minority who considered themselves elite and above the law
• Both claimed it was none of the world's business what happened in their "internal affairs"

and fortunately:

• Both of them created a situation where the government was forced to evolve into a more democratic, representative authority

There are differences in the number of people killed: in Ohio it was exactly 4, in China the estimate ranges from 200 (PRC Government) to 3000 (Red Cross). The acceptable number for something like this is ZERO. I don't care if you're a hooligan in Boston or screaming communist in Ohio or even a jihadist throwing stones in your neighborhood in Babylon, the killing of unarmed civilians by military is not acceptable. Even in those few examples I find myself agreeing with some of the principled beliefs of both parties and sympathy for both sides of the battle. Significant differences create this result. The National Guard was not allowed access to tanks and the eight round M1Garand is no match for an AK47with a 30 round magazine.

When I was young, I was fortunate to have a big sister who would beat up anybody who picked on me. I discovered I was incapable of physical violence no matter the consequence, and if it hadn't been for Karen the consequences would have been much greater. But I knew something that prevented many a fight from ever taking place: Don't be in the same place as your antagonist! I also learned this was easy to accomplish without great effort or making it obvious you were avoiding conflict. Another think I learned is that if you are faced with a situation that is likely to turn out bad, run away! This has worked for me from the playground to a first date that was going someplace I didn't want to go.

We could argue the positions of protagonists and antagonists in these situations, but I don't believe any point of view ends with "we better shoot at these civilians" as a successful solution. For one thing, a lot of your friends get angry with you when you shoot their neighbors whether you like them or not.

We live in a great country. It is a country that has done many, many wonderful things that have benefited the world. America has even done things when there was no tangible benefit to us. Sincere leaders have chosen to do the right thing just because their hearts have led them to the right action.

The secret to becoming a better country is to learn our weaknesses, admit our faults and take the often painful steps to correct them. As I watch another political battle for the White House taking place, we are so busy advertising what the others are doing wrong that we have no resources left to discover what we are doing wrong which leaves us powerless to correct it. The consequence is that we can't even be sure of what we are doing right. We continue to amplify and justify the differences and don't seem to acknowledge where we agree. We are, it appears, becoming more and more subject to extinction.

Think Out Loud

There was a time when people believed that knowledge and discovery should be shared. Two companies that had pioneered technology, IBM and Bell Labs, had thousands of patents to their name. Included were things like transistors (those are the elements of a CPU or any solid state physics) and LASER (called MASER originally). They shared all existing patents issued through January 14, 1956 for FREE. Unlimited licenses to anyone and everyone. All future patents they agreed to share for a pittance of cost.

There is a philosophy that nothing is really invented, it is just discovered. Bell Labs didn't invent the solar cell, they just discovered that light hitting a silicon sandwich hit a natural n p n layer and released a flow of electrons (they'd already done that with selenium, but selenium was expensive and didn't generate much electricity). William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain claimed that had they not DISCOVERED the transistor in 1947, somebody else would have because several teams were working on the same semi-conductor physics at that time. The patent idea is sort of like the Puritans saying "We saw Cape Cod first so it belongs to us" to the Italians while the Native Americans are saying "We've been here forever." Both the Native Americans and Italians ended up paying money to Puritans to occupy Cape Cod.

A company's wealth came from innovation. Innovation was defined as "working with a new discovery to create products that were in daily use". Microsoft copied ideas and software from IBM and innovated MS-DOS which they got from Digital Research. Apple copied IBM, Microsoft and XEROX to innovate the Mac. Microsoft copied Apple and IBM and got Windows NT. History is littered with errors of who thought of something first.

Creation isn't making something from nothing; creation is organizing things in a way that is novel and different. How you implement that is innovation and if you do it well it doesn't matter if someone else copies your "invention" as long as you implement it better than anyone else.

Apple didn't invent home computing. Google didn't invent the internet. I have yet to see a media company create anything, they just try to control the source of media. In the past they earned money by innovating and facilitating the dispersion of that media through capture and play technologies. Now their function is to PREVENT the dispersion of that media unless they get paid for it.

If we allow things to continue on their current course, the big companies will hold copyrights and patents on everything that creates a sound and anything that manages a photon. We will have to pay a license fee to think out loud.

Having It All

They who believe they have it all probably have nothing worth having AT all.

This post was triggered by an article  that appeared in the July 2012 edition of The Atlantic titled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All".

Ms. Slaughter is absolutely right in her observation. And any feminist or chauvinist who teaches otherwise is doing their student a disservice. If you set unattainable expectations, you are destroying a spirit.

The great realization everyone needs to arrive at is that NOBODY can have it all. It just isn't possible. There is not enough time.As a man I gave up the opportunity to be with my children and worked very hard to "provide" which means bring an income to the household. I (mistakenly) believed that generating more income and providing more opportunity was better for my wife and children than providing more of my time. The results are obvious. I still struggle to change a diaper on a grandchild. I don't know nearly as many "inside jokes" with my children as my wife does. But I have a long list of exceptional people I worked with that I really never care to see ever again. Most of them, like me worked 15 hour days six plus days a week. The reality for a successful entrepreneur or executive who prefers a glass floor to ceiling is that you are always, always, always at work. Everything you do impacts in some way your work and you try to evaluate that impact before choosing to do it. 

I believe this is what Ms Slaughter intends by her observation that women think about what is going on with those incredible humans we have stewardship over all the time. The point of view is not how family affects their work, but how work might affect their family. For instance, Lauren has a concert at school at 10 on Wednesday. I think, "I hope I can schedule so-and-so later so I can be there or I may have to tell Lauren that I won't be able to come to this concert". My wife's perception would be "I have to be at the concert at 10 so I'll do so-and-so later, OR, IF NEED BE, DECLINE TO DO IT AND GIVE UP THAT INCOME".

One comment that may be misleading is the observation that "all the men on the Supreme Court are family men while only one of the women has a family". Trust me, these men do not "have a family" in the way their wive's have a family. Ask the "brethren" how many times they had an intimate moment while changing a diaper. How many bath games do they know? How many skinned knees did they bandage? How many tears did they dry? If they are anything like the men I worked with, they may actually be able to answer this question. Do you think most mothers, even career mothers could even provide a ballpark guess? Of course, this is changing with smartphone apps that journal every diaper, meal, nap or event, but that's for the future.

When my children visited a few weeks ago I considered it the ultimate compliment when they left their sons in my care for the better part of a day. I did not have an agenda for the day. There was no list of tasks, goals and milestones to guide our time together. I admit I faced the day with a bit of anxiety about what I would do. It probably took a big step of faith for my children to leave their children with me (probably more faith in their children being able to keep granddaddy out of trouble than the inverse). I must say we had a ball not accomplishing any goals, completing any tasks or celebrating any milestones. It also challenged me physically, intellectually and emotionally to be able to keep up with them and when possible, a little ahead. Anyone who thinks that raising children is easy and mind numbing just try to explain why pink isn't blue to a three year old. Convince the one year old that the apple sauce should go down, not out.

As to my choice to dedicate so much of time to my career instead of being in attendance at home, I want a do over.