Actually, this isn’t my only thought on the subject, but it’s the only one that I feel like posting, as my remaining thoughts are conflicted, given my longstanding general support of Second Amendment rights (although I don’t rise nearly to the belief, widespread though it seems to be, that the Second enshrines the most important of all rights by a towering margin — in fact, I’m not even convinced that the Second Amendment even says what most people think it says) and my equally longstanding squeamishness when it comes to guns (in short, I’ve never fired one, never held one, and want no part of either).
But anyway, whenever something like this happens, one meme that pops up a lot is the “If someone in that theater, just one person, was packing a gun, this awful thing might not have happened.” Whenever I read that, I don’t hear it as an argument for more people toting guns. What I hear is this: “If I had been in that theater with my gun, you can bet that I would have taken that guy down!”
Which is, of course, complete nonsense. From everything I’ve ever read and learned about these things, this stuff is hard. It’s hard even for military sharpshooters to do their job, even with tons of training that Joe Blow Sittin’-in-a-dark-theater-with-a-9mm-in-his-pants almost certainly does not have. I would wager that, of all the people in this country with legal carry-and-conceal permits, the percent of those who would be able to do something with their gun in that situation other than just contribute to the chaos with more bullets flying around is vanishingly small.
One lunatic blasting away is bad enough. Throw in a few pseudo-Rambo’s? Ugh.
This is a repost from July 4, one year ago today. Happy birthday, America!
Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed, All the guys present
PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
That’s the old Bethlehem Steel headquarters building in Buffalo. It’s quite an attractive structure. The problem is that it’s been unoccupied for more than thirty years. And what’s more, it’s not exactly in a great location.
That’s the building, way up in the upper right hand corner. Note that it’s not surrounded by a larger business district or neighborhood; no, this building basically sits on an enormous brownfield that takes up a huge portion of the Buffalo and Lackawanna waterfronts. Bethlehem Steel closed up shop here more than three decades ago, and this building has been empty, unused, and unmaintained in all that time. Now, the city of Lackwanna wants to demolish it.
Enter…as always…the Preservationists.
Here in Buffalo-Niagara, we have a large and vocal contingent of people who are awfully well-meaning, but their main goal seems to be to mobilize anew each time some old building is ‘threatened’. The refrain always comes: Save the building, it’s a part of our heritage, re-use it, et cetera. The odd thing is that this ‘mobilize for the newly threatened building’ approach seems to be the main way of operating; you don’t hear much about pursuing public policies that might make preservation preferable to demolition.
The main problem is that all this preserving ends up contributing to the already uphill battle this region tends to face every time it courts a new business or entertains the growth of an old one, and for me, it’s come to the point where the mobilization of the preservationists just makes me wince every single time. The last few years, my family and I have taken brief trips to other cities in the spring, and it’s always eye-popping to me to see the degree to which other cities are rebuilding and reenergizing and reinventing, even in this economy. But not us. Not Buffalo. Here, we treat every building as though it’s the very place in which George Washington took the oath of office while baptizing Abraham Lincoln and punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw. So much of the ‘historical significance’ seems to often boil down to ‘A successful business stood here for a long time before it either died or went away and nobody since then has had enough money to do something with this building so here it sits, beloved for simply existing.’
Here’s a good example of the foolishness that the preservation instinct around here can lead to. This is the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building in downtown Buffalo. It was erected just a few years ago.
See that odd-looking stone facade at the front of the building? For many years, this entire lot was completely vacant, except for that facade. That was it. Just the facade, no building behind it: a stone facade and a big empty lot, right at downtown’s front door. So when local health insurance company Blue Cross-Blue Shield bought the lot and built their building there, they for some unfathomable reason incorporated that facade into their building in a way that doesn’t ‘incorporate’ at all — it just basically duct-tapes the facade to the building. Every time I drive by there, I think, “That is one of the dumbest looking buildings anywhere.”
Are there great old buildings worth keeping in Buffalo? Sure…but I’m sick of the way we go about it. Just as I’m generally sick of the way Buffalo goes about everything. While other cities rebuild and grow and keep a little bit of heritage while they move into the century we’re living in, Buffalo remains the cruddy hovel in a Monty Python sketch.
Which brings me to this. It’s to be sung to the tune of…well, any Monty Python fan ought to be able to figure it out.
We’ve got tons of old buildings in Buffalo,
Brick buildings, stone buildings and more;
And almost all of those buildings were
built back in days of yore!
Yup, we got lots of old places,
they’ve been empty since before you were born,
but we still think that they’re pretty awesome,
like empty towers once full of corn!
It might bug you that they are crumbling,
and you might want to build something new,
but don’t even think about demo,
‘cause if you try it we’ll sue!
Be-cause….
Every brick is sacred,
Every building’s grand;
We’ll fight to keep them standing,
‘Til they turn to sand!
We love old Greek ruins,
crumbling on fields brown;
And we want that look for
our aging, rusting town!
Let Milwaukee build things;
Pittsburgh, itself renew;
We’ll stick with closed fact’ries,
And warehouses too.
Shuttered buildings thrill us,
new ones make us mad!
Though they’re forever empty,
the old ones make us glad!
So stop the demolitions;
our plan, we must endorse!
Though soon, no one will live here,
And things will take their course.
Every building’s sacred,
and hist’ry makes them great;
And if you try to wreck one,
we’ll all be quite irate!
(Apologies to Cleese, Chapman, Gillian, Jones, Palin, and Idle.)
I really need to watch TED talks more often. Here, science fiction author Robert Reid delves a little into the mathematical claims of the movie and music industries when they rail against piracy.
I always love when big numbers are thrown about, and no one questions them at all. I remember the Direct Marketing Association’s fierce opposition to the Federal Do Not Call List, on the basis that it would cost the economy something like two million jobs. A job hit of that magnitude, at once, would be an economic calamity of historic proportions, but that number just sat out there. Weird, huh?
Yeah, that’s pretty blunt, but there it is: I can’t stand casinos. I don’t understand the appeal at all. I mean, I understand once I find myself inside one. It’s hard to resist all those flashing lights and cheering people and the way the casinos make you go up and down and in and out in an effort to make you forget the existence of an outside world; all the better to put you in the mood to lose your money. But in general, I have no desire to spend time in a casino, I never consider going to one when I’m looking for something to do, and I’m totally baffled by people I know who love to spend entire weekends at “the casino”. It’s just something I don’t get.
But casinos can be awesome settings for amazingly cool stories, can’t they, and not just fictional stories. Check out this amazing tale of a guy who took three different Atlantic City casinos for $16,000,000. And he did it straight-up. No card-counting here (although to be honest, I’m not sure why card-counting is considered ‘cheating’, unless ‘cheating’ is defined as ‘doing anything whatsoever to increase one’s odds over the house’s’): he beat them fair and square, and fascinatingly, the casinos practically invited him to do it.
As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.
He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray.
The house’s hand showed an upturned five. Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. He was allowed to double down—to double his bet—on any hand, so when he was dealt a three on the first of his hands, he doubled his bet on that one, to $200,000. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. When he was dealt a three and a two on the next two hands, he says, he doubled down on those, for a total wager of $800,000.
It was the dealer’s turn. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. Johnson called the game—in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. Johnson won all four hands.
Johnson didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even pause. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. He was just getting started.
I wonder if even half of the conservative bloggers who are aghast and dismayed at the number of tweets celebrating Breitbart’s death called for the same kind of respect for the dead they’re calling for now when Ted Kennedy died. I know Breitbart wasn’t. He was on Twitter showing the same lack of decorum and being the same kind of asshat conservatives are whining about right now.
I’m not celebrating the death of Andrew Breitbart, but I’m not going to miss this guy, either. I didn’t know him personally, and I’m sorry that people who did and who liked and loved him lost someone they were close to. He leaves a wife and kids behind, and that’s tragic.
But he also leaves behind a legacy of public hatred. He leaves behind a Twitter page that is 8% conservative talking points, 2% chortling with glee over the pain of Occupy protesters, and 90% answering every hate tweet he gets with more hate. Andrew Breitbart created a lot of hate in this world: his legacy is insults, divisiveness, anger, lies, and hypocrisy.
So I’m not going to mourn the guy. I’m not even going to feel bad that he’s dead. I’m not going to say that the world is smaller because we lost an important conservative voice and all that nonsense, because I never considered him an important conservative voice, just a loud one. One who made it his life’s work to destroy progressives, misrepresent them, ridicule them into silence, and call them terrorists. If you’re a progressive or a liberal, how losing that is something to mourn, I don’t know.
I couldn’t agree more. I see no reason to eulogize Andrew Breitbart. If I’m loath to claim that the world is better without him, I certainly don’t see that the world was a better place with him.
Would I be able to write this blog in a world where the Internet is governed by SOPA? I honestly don’t know. I strongly suspect that I would, but it would be a lot less interesting. I also strongly suspect that a good many posts here wouldn’t be possible, and that a good many things I’ve done in this space would result in this blog being ‘blacked out’ because of dreaded ‘piracy’.
Stop this bill. The Web is too important to be hobbled in this way. We’ve already burned the Library of Alexandria once. Let’s not do anything like that again!
Joe Paterno, in the midst of treatments for lung cancer, made his first public statements since being fired after 46 seasons at Penn State, telling The Washington Post he did not know how to deal with the situation when he received a report that his former defensive coordinator was accused of abusing a boy in the shower at the Penn State football facility.
“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” he told The Post in an extensive interview at his home in State College, Pa. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”
…
Paterno said that until assistant coach Mike McQueary, in 2002, approached him, he had “no inkling” of a possible dark side to Sandusky, according to The Post.
“He (McQueary) told me what he saw, and I said, what? He said it, well, looked like inappropriate, or fondling, I’m not quite sure exactly how he put it. I said you did what you had to do. It’s my job now to figure out what we want to do,” Paterno told The Post.
“So I sat around. It was a Saturday. Waited till Sunday because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. And then I called my superiors and I said, ‘Hey, we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ Cause I didn’t know, you know. We never had, until that point, 58 years I think, I had never had to deal with something like that. And I didn’t feel adequate.”
Paterno affirmed reports that McQueary was not specific in describing what he allegedly saw, and he told The Post that even if he did, “I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
I cannot believe this. Once again it’s “I just punted it upstairs”. He didn’t know what to do? Is there anyone out there who thinks that this is really that hard a question? He “was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the University procedure was“? Is he kidding? He was Joe F***ing Paterno. I’m willing to bet that even if he somehow screwed up some PSU ‘special procedure for reporting crimes‘, nobody — not one person — would have complained or called him on it. He would not have gotten in trouble in any way. Why?
Because he was Joe F***ing Paterno, that’s why.
We’re talking about a man who was (and, in some camps, continues to be) worshiped for some inexplicable reason. Does anyone think for one second that Paterno would have received even so much as a mildly-stern talking-to had he somehow “broken PSU procedure” in the course of reporting a possible felony committed against a child?
I have to admit, folks, that I am entirely simpatico with the things that motivate the “Occupy” folks. I loathe the corporatization of America, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society, the notion that this concentration is a good thing that will one day lead to prosperity for everybody, the notion that increasing taxes on this crowd one penny in the hopes of making certain aspects of life easier for the rest of us somehow represents a deeply immoral encroachment upon some perverted definition of ‘freedom’, and all the Ayn Rand bullshit that has led to this.
What I simply don’t understand is how spending week upon week camping in the middle of a city is going to somehow translate into any kind of societal change or shift in public policy. Can someone connect these dots for me, please?
(And lest anyone misread this, I’m questioning the Occupy movement’s goals and strategies here, and not endorsing the rather terrifying police actions against them. I’m very much disturbed by the idea that municipal police forces are morphing into municipal armed forces.)
[Interim PSU President] Erickson closed the commercial by declaring, “We are Penn State.” Supporters of Penn State have used this phrase for decades, commencing at a time when the words reflected well on the college. How can the phrase be appropriate here, if Penn State acted dishonorably?
In recent years the “we are” formulation is best known from “We are Marshall” and “We are Columbine.” In neither case, the 1970 Marshall plane crash nor the 1999 Columbine mass murder, was there any moral failing on the part of authority at either school. By contrast, at Penn State several people in high authority stand accused of criminality and substantial moral failings.
For the college’s interim president to say “We are Penn State” expropriates a noble expression in order to suggest that the Penn State of today deserves the kind of empathy accorded to Marshall and Columbine, or to Penn State when it opposed segregation. Unless it is shown the Penn State charges are false, and the school’s own interim president appears to believe the charges are true, Penn State has no business wrapping itself in the language of nobility. If the charges are true, “We are Penn State” should be replaced with “We are ashamed to be Penn State.”
I’ve been troubled by the solidarity PSU folks are showing throughout this whole thing. On the one hand, it’s got to be traumatic to have your school thrust into this kind of spotlight, and it’s got to be even tougher at a place like PSU, which seems to be one of those schools that inspires a larger than usual amount of pride in the people who go there. And there really is the truth that you can’t really hold any of this against, say, some junior who is majoring in architecture.
But here’s the thing. First, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Things like this always do. We haven’t heard everything, and it’s going to get a lot uglier. There’s an extent to which the whole “college is a world in itself” thing is good, but it really tends to go too far, and this whole affair is a result of that mindset.
And secondly, nothing happened TO PSU. Penn State has zero claim to victimhood here; or rather, if it does, it is of such order of magnitude less than the actual victims of Sandusky’s alleged sexual assaults that it’s as if we took time from prosecuting a murder to feel sorry for the guy whose front lawn got chewed up when the murder suspect drove across it.
Some folks are taking the “Oh come on, you don’t know what you would have done” tack here, but I find that entirely unconvincing, on several levels. First, I have a pretty good idea what I would do if I walked into a shower and saw what was going on. Second, even if that’s true and there’s an actual strong chance I’d cover it up too, what does that say? Is this whole collegiate-omerta thing supposed to be a good thing now? Are we really to believe that this is an actual mitigating circumstance? “I would have done the right thing, but….” still reduces in the end to “I didn’t do the right thing.”
It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State. It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all. All of these considerations are trivial by comparison to what went on in and around the Penn State football program.
(Those people who will pass this off as an overreaction would do well to remember that the Roman Catholic Church is reckoned to be a far more durable institution than even Penn State University is, and the Church has spent the past decade or so selling off its various franchise properties all over the world to pay off the tsunami of civil judgments resulting from the raping of children, a cascade that shows no signs of abating anytime soon.)
There will now be a decade or more of criminal trials, and perhaps a quarter-century or more of civil actions, as a result of what went on at Penn State. These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about “closure” or about “moving on.” And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university “heal.” (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.) This wound should be left open and gaping and raw until the very last of the children that Jerry Sandusky is accused of raping somehow gets whatever modicum of peace and retribution can possibly be granted to him. This wound should be left open and gaping and raw in the bright sunlight where everybody can see it, for years and years and years, until the raped children themselves decide that justice has been done. When they’re done healing — if they’re ever done healing — then they and their families can give Penn State permission to start.
If that blights Joe Paterno’s declining years, that’s too bad. If that takes a chunk out of the endowment, hold a damn bake sale. If that means that Penn State spends some time being known as the university where a child got raped, that’s what happens when you’re a university where a child got raped. Any sympathy for this institution went down the drain in the shower room in the Lasch Building. There’s nothing that can happen to the university, or to the people sunk up to their eyeballs in this incredible moral quagmire, that’s worse than what happened to the children who got raped at Penn State. Good Lord, people, get up off your knees and get over yourselves.
