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Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiania, seemed like a righteous man who might set his state back on the path to sanity and self reliance.

Unfortunately, he turns out to be a religious whacko, prepared to impose his superstitions on the children of his state.

Jindal ignored those calling for a veto and this week signed the law that will allow local school boards to approve supplemental materials for public school science classes as they discuss evolution, cloning and global warming.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have the power to prohibit materials, though the bill does not spell out how state officials should go about policing local instructional practices.… Critics call it a back-door attempt to replay old battles about including biblical creationism or intelligent design in science curricula, a point defenders reject based on a clause that the law “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine … or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.”

No good, Bobby. No good.

No VP slot for you, ever.

My results for this quiz on commonly confused words?

I’m an English Genius! I got 100 percent!

This test was too easy. Everyone with a high school diploma should be able to ace this.

There was exactly one question where I had to think for a few seconds about which word to choose.

I hesitated over another question involving punctuation, rather than spelling, because I didn’t understand at first that that’s what was being asked for, and then because I had trouble visually distinguishing between the two marks in question.

The graphs at the results page are all heavily skewed towards high scores, even on the Expert section. I’d like to see something more like a two-tailed bell curve. On the other hand, it looks like the sample size is relatively small, so far, and I expect that only people who care about grammar and vocabulary at all will bother to take the quiz.

[Ahem. This post has been up for, oh, two minutes, and I've already corrected four or five errors.]

Via McQ at Q and O, the most frightening set of charts I’ve ever seen. [The narration text is on the left, with a Mute button above it if you don't have the patience to listen to it.]

Ross Perot, “the hand grenade with a bad haircut”, as McQ puts it, presents a lesson on “Suicidal Spending”, explaining what the Federal budget numbers and projections mean, and it’s bad, very. Almost all of the bad news comes from “non-discretionary spending”, that is, “entitlements” the government is required to pay out to its dependents. Most of those are Social Security, welfare, and health care, and of those, the one that’s steaming out of control is health care.

Let me emphasize: It’s not the Bushitler’s War of Lies that’s exploding the national debt. Nor is it his Tax Cuts for the Weatlhy Not Poor.

It’s us Baby Boomer hippies, and our insatiable and insane desire to put our retirement and health care in the hands of a government we don’t trust to tell us whether or not we should smoke a joint.

I’m a Boomer, ashamed of and, increasingly, frightened by that status. My Generation is responsible for reducing us to a nation of superstitious cowards, traitors, and freeloaders. As Perot’s presentation shows, the ratio of workers to retirees is falling; the pyramid scheme is cratering. Further, the public education system, the one created, operated, and managed by My Generation, is turning out bleating sheep, not productive citizens, with zero ability or desire to take care of themselves, much less their parents and uncles and aunts.

Worse, the increasing willingness of the government to tax and flat out confiscate private property means that even capitalist pigs who, unlike me, have engaged in the oppresive fascist practice of prudent financial planning, will fare no better. Their bank accounts and trust funds will be socialized to feed the restless flock.

At this point, I’m no longer worried about whether I’ll be able to retire on Social Security and Medicare. I know that’s a rapidly evaporating pipe dream.

I’m worried about having to listen to “When I’m Sixty Four” blaring through the Golden Oldies Rest Camp loudspeakers when I’m led off to take The Shower.

The author of University Diaries, UD, will be going to a gun show, and plans to contact someone about a trip to the range.

She compares two extreme viewpoints there.

First Amitai Etzioni, a GW sociologist:

If one holds, as most studies do, that guns provide more danger than protection, and notes that other democratic societies greatly limit private gun ownership, one is naturally troubled by the threat that the new scholarship may help to overturn a strong and long-established endorsement of gun control laws by the Supreme Court. With so much at stake, should scholars refrain from conducting studies that might have grave unsettling social consequences?
… Would my colleagues put on their web site a study that demonstrating how to make the Ebola virus in a kitchen sink? Would they publish ways to make nerve gas in one’s basement? As I see it, when the results of a publication may well be fatal on a large scale, great weight should be given to social prudence.
… [M]y good colleagues in law schools [should] consider whether they should devote themselves to an academic pursuit other than undermining the Supreme Court rulings that have rendered gun control possible and legitimate…

To her credit, UD:

…finds Etzioni’s analogies — an individual in possession of a gun is a deadly virus, a nerve gas — as well as his aristocratic conviction that the possibly correct reading of one of our nation’s more important documents ought to be kept from ordinary American citizens, pretty stunning.

Stunning indeed, not least because Etzioni is comparing Second Amendment scholarship, not guns, to Ebola and nerve gas. We’ll assume ignorance, not malice, to be behind his comments about “most studies” and “a strong and long-established endorsement of gun control laws by the Supreme Court”.

Second, she cites GW law professor Robert J. Cottrel, who says:

[A] society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them…. [I]t is unwise to place the means of protection totally in the hands of the state….

[T]he ultimate civil right is the right to defend one’s own life…. [W]ithout that right all other rights are meaningless.

Both of these quotes are from NRA websites; UD is not relying on one sided sources. She is honestly and thoroughly investigating guns and the Right to Keep and Bear.

Whatever conclusions she comes to, whether she elects to become a gun owner or not, she will have honestly earned her opinion, and I for one will respectfully listen to whatever she has to say.

[Series note]

I didn’t realize this was going to turn into a series. I’ve retitled the posts so far, but have left their URLs untouched so as not to break any existing links. Note that my numbers are not consistent with UD’s.

Posts in this series:

Prof Meets Gun 4: UD Visiting Gun Show, Range (this post)

Prof Meets Gun 3: On Scholars Visiting Gun Ranges

Prof Meets Gun 2: Gun Range Visit & Gun Answers

Prof Meets Gun 1

The author of University Diaries, over at Inside Higher Ed, liked my description of Dad’s walking stick, but apparently she still hasn’t  made up her mind as to whether or not to go to the range and learn how to shoot, so I’ve prodded her again:

This shouldn’t be a hard decision, We’re not talking about going on a SWAT raid, or fighting terrorists, or hunting Bambi, or robbing a bank, or assassinating politicians.

We’re not talking about buying anything, not a philosophy, or a gun or, given the offers you’ve had, even so much as a bullet.

We’re talking about learning to use a hammer, or an axe, or a power saw, just enough to see what it’s like.

We’re talking about going to a carefully controlled environment, getting a few minutes of usage and safety instruction, and using a tool to punch holes in pieces of paper that happen to be 5-10 yards away.

We’re talking about finding out for yourself, something any scholar should be willing and eager to do.

Do you think you won’t be able to learn? Ignorant backwoods rednecks learn to do it quite well. You have a college degree, proof of your learning ability. It’s not math, or quantum physics, or neuroanatomy. It’s not professional basketball, or flying, or ballet. It’s not magic. You’ll do fine. (I have a niece who scorns as “stupid” arithmetic problems she can’t figure out. That’s not what you’re doing, is it?)

Are you afraid? You have likely done far riskier things in your life: driven in cars, cooked with stoves, married a man….

Is this a moral struggle? Why should anyone remotely criticize you over it? Why is this even an issue? Deciding to own a firearm is one thing. Deciding which one to own is admittedly very confusing, even for experts (which is partly why so many experts have so many guns). Deciding you’re willing to use it against another human being, now that’s a very hard question, eminently worth pondering over, at length, with much reading and discussion.

But simply borrowing one and trying it out? pfft.

Go to the range. Ask questions. Use a tool. Learn.

Be free.

(That comment is still awaiting moderation.) It’s up now.

[Series note]

I didn’t realize this was going to turn into a series. I’ve retitled the posts so far, but have left their URLs untouched so as not to break any existing links. Note that my numbers are not consistent with UD’s.

Posts in this series:

Prof Meets Gun 4: UD Visiting Gun Show, Range

Prof Meets Gun 3: On Scholars Visiting Gun Ranges (This post)

Prof Meets Gun 2: Gun Range Visit & Gun Answers

Prof Meets Gun 1

Bad Astronomy points theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking very rightly ripping British politicians for eviscerating the science budget. It’s a great article, well worth reading, but Hawking doesn’t get the good quote. That comes at the end of the article, and is from Brian Cox, of the Large Hadron Collider project:

The notion that scientists will make a more valuable contribution to the economic and social wellbeing of the world if their research is closely directed by politicians is the most astonishing piece of nonsense I have had the misfortune to come across in a long time.

["Very Scientific"?]

A couple of days ago I pointed at UD, an academic who was planning to visit a gun range to, you know, actually get some actual facts, rather than just go with the antis told her.

Here UD comments on her experience.

Two things: first, she’s having to deal with the obligatory canard that wanting to shoot guns is all about penis envy.

Second, she’s asking her readers for advice on whether or not she try shooting herself. She gets some very good, very positive answeres.

Five people, four of them local, have offered to take [UD] shooting at a range.

Before she talks about that, she wants to thank all the gunnies (This is one of many new words UD has learned; and here’s a new phrase, courtesy of one of the readers of her other blog: freaking the mundanes. Which in this case refers, I guess, to UD freaking out gun control people.) who’ve written comments here or who’ve emailed her to express appreciation for her willingness to get closer to guns rather than, as she’s done before this, rail against them at a distance. She’s been delighted by the helpfulness, courtliness, and humor of many of these responses.

Almost every single person I’ve ever seen or heard says exactly the same thing about their first contact with gunnies. As Heinlein says, “An armed society is a polite society.”

No one advises her not to shoot, except for one clown who warns her that she might end up as the president of the NRA (a ha-ha-only-serious comment if there ever was one). The anti-freedom crowd has zero presence in this discussion.

My answer on both points:

You should go shooting exactly because you “have reservations”.

Face your fears. Resist peer pressure. Take command of your life.

If you can get about without a minder, you can handle a gun safely. For inspiration, watch this girl go through a tactical shooting exercise. If she can do it, so can you.

Since you’re fending off attacks by your peers on the “necessary and boring” sexualization of guns, let me provide you with my standard response to charges of “penis envy”:

My father owns a walking-stick made from a bull’s penis stretched over an iron rod. He is the only person I know who can, heh heh, beat off an attacker with his penis.

I admit that my own, personal penis is pitifully inadequate for self-defense purposes.

Clearly, women should be left defenseless, since they are anatomically unsuited for it. Plus, it makes them so much easier to subdue.

It’s also true that the elderly and handicapped do not deserve the right to self-defense, since their wang-fu will likely be inadequate for a variety of reasons. We don’t need such human rubbish, anyway.

And I admit, I’ve always found it disturbing that we must publicly brand our police and military as puny weaklings by issuing them handguns and rifles.

Go to the range. You’ll have fun.

Welcome to freedom.

By the way, from comments there, in one of the comments I found this excellent article with links to sources rebutting most of the gun control propaganda. It’s an absolute gold mine. Strongly recommended.

[Series note]

I didn’t realize this was going to turn into a series. I’ve retitled the posts so far, but have left their URLs untouched so as not to break any existing links. Note that my numbers are not consistent with UD’s.

Posts in this series:

Prof Meets Gun 4: UD Visiting Gun Show, Range

Prof Meets Gun 3: On Scholars Visiting Gun Ranges

Prof Meets Gun 2: Gun Range Visit & Gun Answers (This post)

Prof Meets Gun 1

I hate the metric system. It’s every bit as arbitrary as the Imperial system, plus it has inconvenient sizes.  Yeah, sure, a liter of water is a kilogram–but a pint of water is a pound. The Fahrenheit scale brackets normal weather between zero and a hundred. Twelve divides so conveniently in so many different ways — halves thirds fourths sixths — we have a special word for it: dozen.

And contrary to Euro propaganda, the metric system isn’t all that tailored to scientific pursuits, either. In the SI system, fundamental constants have weird, complicated units, like Planck’s Constant being equal to

instead of something reasonable, like oh, say, 2 pi.

All of this is by way of introducing the Postmetric Fables, “Stories Told in Human Scale Units”, which I ran across back in the early days of the web. These are hard little pieces, jawbreakers of the brain, but immensely rewarding of slow reading and careful thought. You can learn a lot about the way the universe works by trying to figure these out.

Here, for instance, is “Planet Hopping and Rumpus”:

In a dream, you and your friends are planet-hopping — you visit a series of small planets and whenever you arrive it always happens that the people there are celebrating their planet’s new year. For them, the new year celebration is a birthday party for the planet: the beginning of a new circle around its star. They light bonfires, put on displays of fireworks, and all go into orbit — a kind of mass helter-skelter horizontal sky-diving in all directions.

In going from planet to planet you discover that on all of them speed is measured in cents (in Earth terms about a hundredth of a mile a minute). Not only that, but they all use the same measure of force, which they call a “ton”. In Earth terms it’s about 2700 pounds,. They have a saying that if surface speed on a planet is a cent then the planet weighs tenthousand tons.

One of the first things to do upon arrival at a small planet, after checking in at the hotel, is to discover the surface orbit speed, the skimspeed — where your path curving around the planet just matches falling. Since it takes no effort, this is the speed you and everybody else will be traveling. Never exceed the skimspeed unless you wish to leave the surface, which after all is where the party is. Ten cents wouldn’t be at all unusual for skimspeed on a small planet.

Rumpus is tumult, according to Webster’s: “a disorderly agitation or milling about”. Experience shows that rumpus grows disproportionately with speed. In a milling crowd, whether of convention-delegates, dancers, bumper-cars or celebrants, if you double everyone’s speed you may get considerably more than twice the commotion. In some cases doubling the speed might increase the rumpus by as much as sixteen-fold. We can define a rumpus quantity that does increase exactly sixteen-fold when speed is doubled, simply by making rumpus the fourth power of speed. You obtain it by squaring the speed twice — a square square cent is a quartic cent.

If the skimspeed on a planet is 3 cents, then its rumpus is 81 quartic cents, which is a considerable amount of rumpus.

The local people say that a planet’s rumpus is proportional to how much it weighs. (They mean weight as measured in the planet’s own surface gravity — in other words the planet’s idea of what it would weigh.) They say that heavy planets have a big rumpus, and that for each extra quartic cent of rumpus you can count on an extra tenthousand tons of weight. If the skimspeed on a planet is 3 cents, they say, then the planet is sure to weigh 81 times tenthousand tons.

And I love the names of the units: “Skimspeed”. “Rumpus”. “Rush”. “Pony”. “Bone”.

There’s more here.

I don’t really care if you read any of this. I’m mostly making note of it so I can find it when I need a bit of mental exercise.

An pro-gun-control English professor is off to the range, specifically to educate herself about guns.

Good for her; I’m looking forward to her reports.

I hope she can also get her husband to go, eventually.

[Series note]

I didn’t realize this was going to turn into a series. I’ve retitled the posts so far, but have left their URLs untouched so as not to break any existing links. Note that my numbers are not consistent with UD’s.

Posts in this series:

Prof Meets Gun 4: UD Visiting Gun Show, Range

Prof Meets Gun 3: On Scholars Visiting Gun Ranges

Prof Meets Gun 2: Gun Range Visit & Gun Answers

Prof Meets Gun 1 (This post)

Cultural self-perpetuation is on my mind today. I’ve posted before on this Civics Literacy Quiz, which was given to freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. By and large, they failed miserably, with the Ivy League students doing the worst. (I scored 55 out of 60, an A-.)

The QOTD post below, “I’ve heard of that,” links to a brief introduction to the problem.

Now go over to Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and read the long version. I’m not even going to bother to quote from it. It is infinitely worth your time, particularly you home schoolers out there, who are facing state execution, because you are doing the job that state teachers are specifically trying to eradicate: turning your kids into functional, literate citizens. (Hi, Chanda!)

Oh, OK, fine then, fine. Here’s your quote:

I am of the carefully considered opinion that both our media and our educational system have been largely taken over by people who are acolytes of the Holy Grail that Socialism promised, and who put themselves in those positions in the belief that it is up to them to help create the New Men that Socialism cannot succeed without. Our schools, especially, have become centers for the teaching of collectivism, “identity politics,” and for want of a better term, “rage against the machine.”

And to some extent, it has worked.

To a larger extent, it has not.

What has resulted are the unintended consequences of declining standards, high dropout rates, functional illiteracy and innumeracy, almost no general knowledge of geography, history, or civics, and nearly complete ignorance of science - both general and applied.

Schools should be the foundry through which the raw material of our youth is run, coming out the other end with strong and tempered minds well prepared for the world. The ore hasn’t changed, but the ratio of dross to valuable product has grown precipitously.

OK, I gave you the quote. Now do your share and read the whole thing, where Baker backs it up with statistics, with quotes, with news articles, with cold hard logic.

Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves.