Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
When it comes to the Second Amendment and guns, it seems that President Obama can’t make anyone happy. Ever since Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, the NRA has screamed that Obama will be taking away the guns. This scare tactic continued when Obama defeated John McCain for the Presidency. Just what has Barack Obama done to make the NRA and gun owners frightened for their guns? The simple answer to this question is nothing. The head of the National Rifle Association, Mr. Wayne LaPierre actually admitted recently that Obama has done nothing to attack gun owner’s rights to bear arms, but claims Obama’s inaction against guns is actually a conspiracy to take away guns!! ‘ “[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment.” “But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” ‘ Raw Story
Now, before anyone thinks I am making this stuff up, the linked site includes a video clip wherein Mr. LaPierre verbalizes this alleged reverse conspiracy. Mr. LaPierre makes a point of throwing in the necessary names of alleged liberal co-conspirators to rev up his base. ‘ “Sotomayor, Kagan, Fast & Furious, the United Nations, executive orders. Those are the facts we face today… President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they’re going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners. Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don’t care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!” ‘
The lying, conniving Obama crowd as Mr. LaPierre labels them has not done anything to harm the Second Amendment rights that the NRA claims to be at risk. I was interested in the last few words of LaPierre’s quotation above. The phrase “kiss our Constitution” appears to lay claim that the NRA and its followers own the Constitution and its protections. I could have sworn that my law school Constitutional professors taught me that the Constitution protects all citizens, but maybe I heard them wrong. But, I digress.
As the Raw Story article suggests, President Obama has actually taken heat from his own supporters over his alleged conspiracy to not take away the guns. NPR Does Mr. LaPierre provide any evidence of this bizarre claim? None that I could find. Maybe you will have better luck than me in finding evidence of presidential actions to hide President Obama’s intentions and/or actions of stealing legal guns from their owners.
I have to admit that if you read the comments section of the NPR article that details how the Left is disappointed with Obama’s inaction on gun control, you will read almost nothing except gun owners claiming that Obama’s words of inaction are actually code words that the End is Near and the Sky is Falling for gun owners! Just what will it take gun owners to ask Mr. LaPierre for evidence of his wild claims? I, for one would love to hear his answer to that question. I understand that candidate and President Obama may have stayed away from the 2nd Amendment issues for political reasons, but where is the evidence of this alleged conspiracy? I would think Fox News would be sending Bill O’Reilly’s reporters all over the country to uncover such a heinous conspiracy.
If Mr. Obama has not written any executive orders or supported additional legislative steps to control or take away guns since he has become President, just what is the basis for these wild claims? I realize that the NRA has a financial interest in getting gun owners scared into buying more guns, but are there other, underlying reasons why the gun owners are frightened so easily, when the facts do not support the NRA’s claims?
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
Additional sources: Gun Owners of America; NRA-ILA; Pajamas Media;
Bron sez: “At this point would you want to be the guy that killed a bunch of fish and polluted a river? The market would crucify you.”
****************************************
Really? I worked on the Leaf River case in Mississippi where Georgia-Pacific dumped vast amounts of dioxin into the river, with predictable results. Remember who owns G-P? Waiting on them getting crucified, but not holding my breath.
Then there was the massive pollution when the North American Rayon warehouse caught fire a few years ago and the runoff polluted the Watauga River in east Tennessee, killing one of the best trout streams in North America.
And never mind the coal ash spill in Roane County, recently which polluted an entire waterway system..
Then there is the massive pollution of mountain streams caused by mountaintop removal. I am waiting for the locals to crucify the mine owners for the massive alkali runoff that changes potable water into poison.
sLARTI:
yes, ignorant consumers are a problem. But technology, the Internet, has gone a long way in eliminating ignorance. You could make the case that most people are not able to sort the massive amount of data available and take decisions based on confirmation bias.
Wall St really only has one function, to get money into the hands of people who are able to create wealth. The rest is window dressing and regulations make these guys go to extreme measures to get the money into competent hands.
Glass Steagall and other financial regulations distort that one function and create complexity where it is not required but is necessary to comply with the laws. I think you could make a case for the complex regulatory environment preventing consumers from understanding financial markets.
You have a company, you need money, I have money and need to invest it. If your idea is good then I lend you the money or take a risk anticipating X amount of return. That is all their is to it, it is my responsibility to determine if your idea is good. Why does the government need to be involved?
Back to pollution-
Your point is taken, pollution is also a local issue. If GP pollutes my favorite trout stream its only me and a relative handful of people who care. So maybe that is the only way to make them act properly. I would hope they [companies] would see the broader picture and not need to be bitch slapped to behave ethically.
Bitch slapping gives too much power to government.
D’oh! I guess that didn’t work…
Sorry raff, my bad… :blush:
Remember Slarts,
It was the teachers and unions and their pensions that brought the economy down in December 2007 when the recession officially started!
Bron,
When will you ever learn that it’s not the CV of the expert, it’s the merits of their argument? I think his argument is (or your/the reporter’s use of his words) is a straw man that doesn’t address the relevant merits of the stimulus, but I don’t have time to explain that to you right now… Also, he makes an assumption that injuring trade is always a bad thing – it’s not. If Glass-Stiegle were still injuring the financial markets, we probably wouldn’t have had the financial collapse. Just sayin’…
Bron
1, October 10, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Slarti:
I dont doubt you can create a useful model for seeing the effects of a pollution tax on business. I doubt it would be that hard for someone with that kind of background. Which is fine, for what if scenarios. But I dont think it should be used to make policy.
You don’t think that scientific research is a better way to set policy than our current method – that’s your right. I disagree. Strongly.
I think there are too many variables that are not necessarily fully understood to make it part of policy decisions. I think your model would lead to additional regulations because your model did not anticipate a negative effect which caused a ripple in space time.
You’re thinking of a model as a static thing (one makes a model and then moves on…). A static model is a dead model – you continually work to improve it and validate it against new empirical results. As I said above, it’s an iterative process.
That happens all the time, a regulation causes a problem which another regulation has to fix and so on and so on.
Yes, there are problems with the way we currently do things, but, regulation being necessary, I’m suggesting a better way to do things – a way in which regulations can be designed to react to unforeseen consequences so as to achieve the desired policy goal.
Pollution is bad but I think technology can solve that problem if markets are allowed to work. Look at the 20th century, from horse and buggy to space flight in about 60 years.
The markets disregards anything that doesn’t have a price (like the societal cost of pollution). As long as cost of an polluting (in terms of damage to the environment) exceeds the price of doing it (in terms of taxes, penalties, and public relations), there will be an arbitrage opportunity for those who choose to pollute.
Dolphin safe tuna, I would pay extra to save the dolphins so would most people. I would also pay a little more for paper to save my favorite trout stream and so would many other people.
At this point would you want to be the guy that killed a bunch of fish and polluted a river? The market would crucify you.
You’re making one critical assumption that completely guts your entire argument – perfect information. Many people would pay extra for dolphin-safe tuna, but most never explicitly make the calculation nor do they know the corporate policies of the companies that they are supporting with their purchases (especially in regards to undifferentiated products like gas or monopolies like the power company? *cough* Koch Industries *cough*).
I’ve noticed you arguing against more informed consumers from time to time – essentially advocating the massive arbitrage opportunities that the consumers’ ignorance (i.e. the lack of a truly free market) has provided to fuel corporate greed (these are not companies like Ford that produce something of value and provide jobs that let people afford it – these are companies generating massive profit in ways that put the original purpose of the system [stabilizing prices] at serious risk).
Slarti:
http://www.nysun.com/national/new-nobel-laureat-warned-against-stimulus-package/87512
“Toward the end of the Phillips Lecture, Professor Sargent also cites Walter Bagehot, who “said that what he called a ‘natural’ competitive banking system without a ‘central’ bank would be better…. ‘nothing can be more surely established by a larger experience than that a Government which interferes with any trade injures that trade. The best thing undeniably that a Government can do with the Money Market is to let it take care of itself.’””
Maybe Prof. Sargent is the anti-Krugman. I’ll see your Nobel Prize winner and raise you this one.
Sometimes it is nice to see ideas you hold be vindicated.
Slarti:
I dont doubt you can create a useful model for seeing the effects of a pollution tax on business. I doubt it would be that hard for someone with that kind of background. Which is fine, for what if scenarios. But I dont think it should be used to make policy.
I think there are too many variables that are not necessarily fully understood to make it part of policy decisions. I think your model would lead to additional regulations because your model did not anticipate a negative effect which caused a ripple in space time.
That happens all the time, a regulation causes a problem which another regulation has to fix and so on and so on.
Pollution is bad but I think technology can solve that problem if markets are allowed to work. Look at the 20th century, from horse and buggy to space flight in about 60 years.
Dolphin safe tuna, I would pay extra to save the dolphins so would most people. I would also pay a little more for paper to save my favorite trout stream and so would many other people.
At this point would you want to be the guy that killed a bunch of fish and polluted a river? The market would crucify you.
HenMan,
I’m a little annoyed with Bron for his reliance on straw men, but I’m not pissing on him either – and it’s more like a year and a half or two years that this discussion has been going on (if I recall correctly, it started on the thread hijacked by the 9/11 discussion).
Bron,
I can answer any of the issues that you raise, but I can’t answer all of them (at least not at once…). The most pressing seems to be your lack of understanding of the scope of a model – in other words, where a model is applicable. Newtonian physics is a good model, but that doesn’t mean it wont give you a completely bogus answer if you are using it on velocities near the speed of light. When you are building a model, you decide what parameters need to be accounted for and then determine if they are sufficient to give you the behavior that you’re interested in. There is an iterative and synergistic process by which improvements in the model lead to a better understanding of the subject of the model which enables further refinement in the model and so on. No, you can’t predict what Aunt Millie will do, but, if necessary, you can make a pretty good statistical model of what all of McDonald’s shareholders will do (McDonald’s, in particular, has the information necessary to do a great job of this…). Modeling complex systems requires identification of the factors (and their relative importance) that must be accounted for as well as management of those variables (so that one doesn’t end up flailing around in a 100-dimensional parameter space). Everyone who makes models knows (or should) that they can’t create a perfect map – the question is, can they create a useful map? I believe that I could create a useful map for investigating the effects of public policy (specifically, a pollution tax) on businesses.
HenMan:
I dont know about Slarti but I am not pissing on him. We have been having this discussion on and off for at least a year.
I think it is rather interesting and I am trying to learn something. I think Slarti has a point but I am not sure how you would go about implementing it without possibly causing more problems.
I also think he is wrong about a free market spinning out of control, there is already a mechanism in place to prevent that, it is called recession and if left alone and not “smoothed” out by the “elites” the market re-adjusts and comes out stronger. Recession is the “lion” which thins out the herd and culls the businesses which are miss using capital. Recession transfers capital to where it can be better used.
Slarti thinks humans should be in charge but I say they already are by the decisions they take as individuals. People like Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke cannot control the market. What you see now is their attempt failing. Had the markets been allowed to work in 2008 we would most likely be on our way to recovery. It would have been a real bitch but it would probably have lasted 6-18 months. There is historical evidence to support this contention.
I thought the pissing contest might be over by now. Sorry. I’ll just put my raincoat back on and depart. See you later. Bye.
Bron,
You said: “I dont see how you can model a full complex organism on a single cell[‘]s worth of information.”
Since every cell includes DNA, a “single cell’s worth of information” necessarily includes a blueprint for the entire organism. I was just answering what you said rather than what you meant. What you meant was wrong, too (as further evinced by your later comment), but I don’t have time to go into it now – maybe tomorrow.
Noah V:
that is an interesting take on things.
Slarti:
we arent talking about building another organism from a single cell. Dont they call that cloning? We are talking about using feedback as a method of controlling a system. If you test something on a single cell and it has an effect y, how do you know an entire complex organism will respond in the same way to your stimulus which created y?
You are taking the results out of the context of the larger organism.
I dont think you can do it accurately enough to get good data, I say again; too many variables to keep track of. It is easier to model an airplane in flight. At least air follows certain principles. A tip of the hat to Daniel for that knowledge. An economy follows certain principles as well such as supply and demand but there is also the human element which is far harder to predict. How are you going to model Aunt Milly wanting to sell half of her stock in McDonalds because she wants to send her favorite nephew to MIT to study modeling under Herr Doktor Professor Slartibartfart?
You cannot do it accurately.
By the way a highway map is based on a static system, at least relative to the frame of reference. Roads dont move and you can always call about the bridge if you have doubts.
The world isnt going to run out arable land anytime soon, all of the people in the world could fit quite nicely in the US and have room to spare. I’ll let you do the math on that. Make sure you keep New York, Singapore and Hong Kong in mind.
People who work for corporations do not check their morality at the door and decide to be neither moral nor immoral. People look out for themselves but most do not screw people over. They want a fair price for both parties. I dont know how many times people have told me they want to make money but they want it to be a win win situation for all parties involved. It only makes sense. You might want to do business with that person again. If you screw a person for a big one time profit you may miss an opportunity for a life time of profitable business dealings with that person.
Business is not about the immediate moment, it is not about a 1 week or 12 month time frame. It is about the far future. How you treat people today effects future profits. Future profits are another feedback mechanism. The mechanism is already in place for ethical behaviour, it just has to be released from the control of government regulation. Regulations distort markets which prevent proper pricing and long term planning. A regulated market is a distorted market. And you want to increase that distortion which, in my opinion, will make things worse not better.
You dont have control over the dumper right now either, you cannot levy a fine based on what someone intends to do. Do you think the threat of prison or civil penalties is any less deterring than the threat of an extra tax should the person get caught?
How about salubrious?
To come back to topic, we should apparently drop the concept of general welfare, because 51 of us will make 49 of us do something we don’t want to (like have George W Bush as President)?
The solution is apparently to buy a gun, live far from anybody, can our own green beans, make our own clothes, sell our goods at an open-air market, clean our own teeth, and agree that when two cars meet at a crossroads the better shot goes first.
Bron,
You: “Malthus hasnt been right yet and technology has raised humans out of our own filth and provided abundant food.”
Malthus is inevitably right so long as technology cannot increase the carrying capacity of the Earth at an exponential rate to match population growth (that’s what science says – Malthusian catastrophes are triggered by the population exceeding the effective carrying capacity* of a region).
* the effective carrying capacity of a region is the number of people it can support given existing inefficiencies in transportation and distribution – in general this is less that the carrying capacity which is the number of humans which can be supported by the region without taking transportation and distribution into account.
You: “Free countries dont make war on their neighbors, they trade with them. What good is a social contract if the rights of some individuals are violated by other individuals just because your group has 51 and my group has 49 or vice versa? Individuals make up society and when individual rights are protected society is protected.”
Great – a word salad straw man…
You: “I dont see how you can model a full complex organism on a single cells worth of information.”
Gee, you’re right – a single cell couldn’t possibly hold all of the information necessary to describe an entire organism… No… hold on… what’s this little balled up thing over here… hmm… DNA you say? All of the information necessary to describe an organism you say? Inside of every cell you say? Well, imagine that… another of Bron’s statements displays a profound ignorance.
You: “Furthermore how do you account for human behaviour in your model? […]”
What human behavior am I failing to account for and how does it effect my model? You don’t really have any substantive objections because you don’t have a clue how the modeling process works – you just don’t like the idea that the fact that your arguments have no merit could possibly be demonstrated scientifically.
A model is a map – no map shows all of the features of the territory. What is important is to understand what the map is telling you about the features that it does show. You can argue all you want about the highway map you just got being dangerously wrong because it doesn’t show the shoals and depths in the straits of Mackinaw, but if you disregard its notation that King Snyder sold the bridge and it’s been removed, then your planned trip to the UP isn’t going to turn out so well (and you’ll get some first hand information about the depth of the straits…). [Apologies for the Michigan metaphor – I love Michigan in the fall and I’m seriously in need of a word that means the opposite of homesick (as in a word to describe how happy I am that I am home…) ;-)]
As you point out, your scenario is already covered by the law – my proposal would add monetary penalties to the action that the person would be aware of up front – most likely destroying the “arbitrage” opportunity which you posit. On the other hand, you have no way of dealing with the industry which is dumping arsenic into the river right now (and in perfectly reasonable fashion, as well).
You: “You ought to start thinking about the possibility that most people are good and that the out of control businessman screwing the little guy, while it does happen, is more the figment of fertile imagination than reality.”
You are hopelessly naive as well as a tireless crafter of straw men. I assume that corporations will act in a way that they believe will maximize profits based on the available information and any constraints that are placed on them (obeying the law, etc.). Most individual people may be good, but most individual corporate persons are amoral – why would you expect them to be otherwise?
Slarti:
Malthus hasnt been right yet and technology has raised humans out of our own filth and provided abundant food.
Free countries dont make war on their neighbors, they trade with them.
What good is a social contract if the rights of some individuals are violated by other individuals just because your group has 51 and my group has 49 or vice versa? Individuals make up society and when individual rights are protected society is protected.
I dont see how you can model a full complex organism on a single cells worth of information. Furthermore how do you account for human behaviour in your model? What about the guy who has absolutely nothing to lose and decides to make a one time dump of pollution which will net him millions of dollars in profit? You cant control that, but you can track him down and arrest him and punish him. So why isnt the law good enough for controlling pollution? The laws we already have against harming other people, why do we need more control? More control leads to less freedom for everyone.
You ought to start thinking about the possibility that most people are good and that the out of control businessman screwing the little guy, while it does happen, is more the figment of fertile imagination than reality.
Bron said:
Slarti:
I wasnt trying to trip you up, I was asking questions and posting my thoughts on it. I am not a research scientist.
You came at me in my specialty (modeling) – I’m always going to have a strong response. It’s not my fault that my field is nigh universally applicable and I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.
But any how your response shows a political bias which was one of my points.
Making a statement about bias: cheap
Making a statement about bias with evidentiary support: apparently more than you can afford
Rebuilding your personal credibility: priceless – or is it “valueless” to you?
A couple of cells in a petri dish is a far cry from a complete organism.
Yeah, it isn’t like you can figure out much of importance about an organism by studying it’s cells… Oh wait – that’s complete and utter bullshit. You chose what you are modeling based on what you are trying to understand and the hypotheses you are trying to test. For virtually every choice there is something useful to model.
By the way, the market already has a feedback mechanism, it is called the price of something.
Okay, now follow along carefully, because your reasoning has repeatedly failed here…
If something DOSEN’T have a price (like dumping arsenic into a river), then the market ASSIGNS it a price of $0.00. CONVERSELY, if a price is ASSIGNED to such an item (by taxing every kilogram of arsenic dumped into a river, for instance), then the market will account for that in its pricing (of everything else). This is really simple economics that you seem completely unable to grasp.
“flailing around in a 100-dimensional parameter space”.
no I did not think I was clever for bringing it up, it is one of my questions on how you would handle that issue.
And what I wanted to make clear is that it was stupid to believe for a second that I couldn’t answer this question. I’ve spend a good bit of my time over the past two decades thinking about how to answer this question and I’ve come up with some very sophisticated answers (which will succeed or fail on their merits rather than anything I say about them, by the way. I’m not trying to prove anything here – all of my ideas are about to be tested in the real world…).
I hope your model works, you will make a bunch of money and help mankind. I would think you would get a Nobel Prize in economics for work like that.
It’s not something I’m working on right now – it’s something that I’ll probably do when and if I am in a position to influence public policy. My point was that it could be done, not that I am doing it. And I don’t think you will find many Nobel laureates who’s goal was to win the prize…
“A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman said.
Recent Noble prize winner in chemistry.
I think you should head Dr. Shectman’s advice.
It’s “heed”, by the way – your sentence puts me in mind of a soccer move… Actually, Dr. Shectman’s advice is pretty much 100% wrong in my case – I am certain that 100% of what I read in the vast majority of my textbooks is completely accurate. What’s more, I can PROVE it (which was the point of all of the books…). I believe that I can apply those mathematical principles to a wide range of disciplines (anything that can be quantified) – do you really think I’m wrong?
one final thought:
“Grey matter (or gray matter) is a major component of the central nervous system”
wiki
“Grey matter – closely packed neuron cell bodies form the grey matter of the brain. The grey matter includes regions of the brain involved in muscle control, sensory perceptions, such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions and speech.”
http://www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas/brainatlas_index.shtml
You may think I think I am being clever, but I think you think you are smarter than you really are because you dont think you can be wrong.
No, I am aware that since I’m willing and able to admit it when I’m wrong and adapt my arguments to account for new evidence that when I am wrong, I wont be wrong for long – it gives me a confidence that you are completely misinterpreting…
And that is another reason I dont think human beings can or should control the free actions and associations of hundreds of millions of people.
Their own personal internal bias.
The fact is that billions of people acting in their naive self-interest (as you would have) leads inevitably to some sort of Malthusian catastrophe. So you choose: death by plague, death by famine, death by pollution, death by war, or participation in a social contract. The best choice seems pretty clear to me…
Slarti:
I wasnt trying to trip you up, I was asking questions and posting my thoughts on it. I am not a research scientist.
But any how your response shows a political bias which was one of my points.
A couple of cells in a petri dish is a far cry from a complete organism.
By the way, the market already has a feedback mechanism, it is called the price of something.
“flailing around in a 100-dimensional parameter space”.
no I did not think I was clever for bringing it up, it is one of my questions on how you would handle that issue.
I hope your model works, you will make a bunch of money and help mankind. I would think you would get a Nobel Prize in economics for work like that.
“A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman said.
Recent Noble prize winner in chemistry.
I think you should head Dr. Shectman’s advice.
one final thought:
“Grey matter (or gray matter) is a major component of the central nervous system”
wiki
“Grey matter – closely packed neuron cell bodies form the grey matter of the brain. The grey matter includes regions of the brain involved in muscle control, sensory perceptions, such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions and speech.”
http://www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas/brainatlas_index.shtml
You may think I think I am being clever, but I think you think you are smarter than you really are because you dont think you can be wrong.
And that is another reason I dont think human beings can or should control the free actions and associations of hundreds of millions of people.
Their own personal internal bias.