Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

Armed Bystander Shoots Attacker, Saves Cop

Officer Brian Harrision was escorting a funeral procession Friday when he pulled Temple over and wrote him a ticket for breaking into the procession.  According to Phares, that's when Temple attacked Harrison.  Police say Perry Stevens was walking outside of the Auto Zone on Greenwell Springs Road when he heard Harrison yelling for help.  Harrison was reportedly on his back with Temple on top of him.  That's when Stevens went to his car and grabbed his .45 caliber pistol. 

According to Col. Greg Phares, "[Mr. Stevens] orders Mr. Temple to stop and get off the officer.  The verbal commands are ignored and Mr. Stevens fires four shots, all of which struck Mr. Temple."

Perry Stevens fired four shots into Temple's torso.  Officer Harrison had already fired one shot into Temple's abdomen.  With Temple still struggling with the officer, Perry continued to advance toward the scuffle.

"He again orders Mr. Temple to stop what he was doing and get off the officer.  Those commands are ignored and he fires a fifth shot and that hits his head.  The incident is over with, and as you know, Mr. Temple is dead."

Police are calling the shooting death justified.  Perry Stevens has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

via Bystander Fired Deadly Shot, Not Officer - WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports.


How to Step Away (A Neil Armstrong Obituary)

The effort to put a man on the moon was everything the counterculture 60s repudiated: technology, military skill, national pride, American optimism, the sense that the Frontier has to be conquered so we can find a new one, and go there too. Neil Armstrong offered in jest to be the first man to walk on Mars, as well. Buzz Aldrin has been pushing  a Mars jaunt for years. If the space program had kept up its pace and sent a team to Mars in the 90s, of course they wouldn’t have sent Neil and Buzz, but if they had, you can imagine Neil Armstrong holding the door for his co-pilot. I’ve had mine. You first.

He seemed like that sort of man.

Emphasis in original. Via How to Step Away - Ricochet.com.


Regarding Akin, A Legitimate Question

Nailing someone for using the term ‘legitimate rape’ when there is a distinct difference between a forced, violent, random, stranger-perpetrated rape and one in which the involved woman is sometimes not even sure herself whether or not a rape occurred is pure political gamesmanship.  And it’s a confusion which has been created through the use of fuzzy terminology that is for some reason off limits for discussion.

(As a pre-emptive note: Those of you who know me know I care little for the Republican party, and it is both stupid *and* wrong to suspect me of sympathizing with actual violent offenders, and additionally so to accuse me of wanting to disparage or deny the rights of any person to control over his or her own body. So spare me any faux outrage. Comments will be policed accordingly.) Via A Legitimate Question « Gucci Little Piggy.


If You Were *Un*successful, You Didn't Do That On Your Own

Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure.  There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive.  Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them.  If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own.  Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state.

via CARPE DIEM: Great Moments in Government Regulation: How City Regulations Killed a Dream in Chattanooga.


Everything You Think You Know About Sword Fighting Is Wrong

It's not as if the multitude of disparate opinions and diverse (often mutually exclusive) views about sword fighting out there are all somehow a small part of a larger truth or even anywhere near an emerging consensus. It's more like they represent a near infinite collection of ignorance, faulty cliches, erroneous assumptions, and sheer fantasy mixed with a little actual wisdom.

...

Edged weapons are not pretend lightsabers. They're not springy toys or padded sticks. They were lethal tools for dealing death and violence. For such skills, very often the truth is not "somewhere in between" differing views but is a matter of either being right or wrong on the essentials. For in life or death combat, doing something wrong will get you killed. History is often about the big picture, but ultimately insight into it comes down to knowing what individuals actually did. And the reality of sword fighting is far richer and far more fascinating than our much beloved modern fantasy imagines. That's why sword fighting is not what you believe it is.

Emphasis mine; it's a sentiment I've been trying to put into words (reagrding other topics) for a while now. The whole article is fascinating. Via Swordfighting: Not What You Think It Is.


Child Porn, Coke Smuggling: Hundreds of DHS Employees Arrested Last Year

Border Patrol agents smuggling weed and coke. Immigration agents forging documents and robbing drug dealers. TSA employees caught with child porn. Those are just a few of the crimes perpetrated by Department of Homeland Security employees in just the past year.

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security nearly a decade ago, the agency’s inspector general has been tasked with uncovering corruption, waste and criminality within its own ranks. The IG has had his hands full.

According to a newly released DHS inspector general’s summary of its significant investigations, 318 DHS employees and contractors were arrested in 2011 (.pdf). That’s about one arrest per weekday of the men and women who are supposed to be keeping the country safe. The report lets us not only see how corrupt some agents tasked with protecting the homeland can be, it also gives us a scale of the problem. In short: There are a lot of dirty immigration and border officers.

This confirms my priors. I wonder, how does it compare to other Federal bureaucracies, especially those charged with policing and security? Via Child Porn, Coke Smuggling: Hundreds of DHS Employees Arrested Last Year | Danger Room | Wired.com.


Hate Crime Hoax From A Lesbian Woman

My instincts on this story out of Lincoln, Nebraska have panned out.  A lesbian woman falsely claimed that three men attacked her, cut bigoted words into her skin, and lit her house on fire.  Vigils were held; PayPal accounts were set up; outrage was expressed.  But the first giveaway is this:  what would motivate three men to attack a lesbian woman in such a way?  Even homophobic men don’t typically hate lesbians so strongly.  People who are so angry that they would actually carve something in a person’s body are also not likely to leave any loose ends.

(Addendum:  Just for fun, Gawker reports on this too. Comments there should be fun as someone there quickly pointed out that anyone who felt that the case was a hoax when the story was initially reported last month were summarily shouted down. ...)

My question: Why the *hell* did she do it? Malice so strong that she had to harm herself to give it voice? Via Another Hate Crime Hoax « Gucci Little Piggy.



Another robbery foiled by a little old lady

You folks who think people should find ways to defend themselves that don't involve guns -- what about little old ladies?

An 87 year old lady persuaded two armed robbers to leave her house when they broke in at 3 AM. And by “persuaded” I mean that she showed them the handgun she was going to shoot them with if they didn’t exit the premises immediately.

Via Another robbery foiled by a little old lady - An NC Gun Blog.


Why don’t people like markets?

Market process are unloved for many reasons.

One of them, obviously, is that market processes are not visible. Going through our everyday tasks, we fail to notice how millions of voluntary transactions resulted in precisely these goods and services being available to us when and where we want them at a price that makes them affordable. That is of course a point that Adam Smith and others made long ago, but could be made more forcefully if we understood the limits and susceptibilities of human imagination. In a powerful essay, 19th century free-trader Frédéric Bastiat noted that the economic process comprises ‘what is seen’ and ‘what is unseen’. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.

Another plausible factor is that markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty. Even though it is likely that whoever makes something that others want will earn income, it is not clear who these others will be, how much they will need what you make or when you will run into them. Like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty. (Note, however, that market uncertainty creates a niche for market-uncertainty insurance, which itself is all the more efficient as it is driven by demand).

Finally, humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors. This may be why there is a strong correlation between being scared of markets and being in favour of state interventions in the economy. One of the most widespread political assumptions in modern industrial societies is that “the government should do something about x”, where x can be any social or economic problem. Why do people trust the state? The state (in people's intuitions, not in actual fact) has all the trappings of an agent.  It is supposed to have knowledge, memories, intentions, strategies, etc. Now it may be that people are vastly more comfortable trusting an agent to provide help or impose sanctions, than they would trust an impersonal, distributed and largely invisible process. That would be mostly a question of intuitive psychology (highly salient in our reasonings about social processes) versus population thinking (highly unintuitive, difficult to acquire and engage in without sustained effort).

Read the whole thing. All emphasis mine. It occurs to me that you can replace "markets" with "evolution" and strike many of the same chords, but with a different audience. Via Why don’t people like markets?.