Brian Palmer over at Slate takes on a widely circulated myth that I hadn’t even heard of before, Baseball Bats and Hammers Do Not Kill More People Than Guns. Apparently, a lot of conservatives run around saying things like, “There are more people killed with baseball bats and hammers than are killed with guns.” This isn’t just said by idiot bloggers; this quote is from idiot Georgia congressman Paul Broun.

Let’s look at the stats first. In 2011, 8,583 people were murdered with guns in the United States. That same year, 496 people were bludgeoned to death. That’s roughly 20 times more people murdered with guns. And note: of those 496 murders, various objects were used including electric guitars. So Palmer asks the question: why are conservatives going around saying something that is patently false? (I know, I know: that’s what defines a conservative! But stay with me because this is fascinating.)

This all goes back to a specious argument that goes something like, “People get killed with baseball bats as well as guns; why not ban them both?!” This argument can be taken to ridiculous extremes: “Baseball bats kill people just like nuclear warheads; why not ban them both?!” But in 1993, an article in the Washington Times noted that, “baseball bats kill more people than AK-47s in at least one big city.” Here’s the thing: that’s not only specifically true; it is generally true. In 2011, the year where 496 people were bludgeoned to death, only 323 people were killed with rifles of all kinds and 356 were killed with shotguns.

So you can see how this went. From a true statement (AK-47s are used to kill people less often than baseball bats), you get message distortion. Before long, it is rifles are safer than bats. Then it is guns are safer than bats. I don’t know when hammers were thrown into the mix, but I bet it has something to do with Ann Rule. And let’s face it: this is how most “facts” that everyone knows are passed on.

This whole story highlights the fact that the real problem we face is handguns. But few people want to talk about this. Somehow, it seems natural to have a handgun in a home for protection. It seems to me that a shotgun is a better choice. It is less likely to be involved in accidents or suicides. (I’m especially concerned about guns and suicide.) But calling for an end to handguns seems to make people think of tyranny. I think if we offered a program where people could trade in their handguns for shotguns, it might do some good.

Regardless, as horrible as it must be to have some Al Capone wannabe kill you with a baseball bat, bludgeon murders are just not a major issue in this country. Unfortunately, even if we straightened out the likes of Paul Broun, it wouldn’t help. It seems that liberals are primarily interested in banning assault weapons. And in that case, baseball bats and hammers really are comparable problems. Anyone for a handgun ban?

I am really interested in education, but I find it very depressing to write about. It seems to me that it is all tail chasing that passes for educational reform. What’s more, most of it comes down to private companies trying to make a buck and politicians (in this case, the Democrats are almost as bad as the Republicans) helping them along. The recent scandal about the Tennessee Virtual Academy (TVA) is particularly illustrative, although not in the way that most people are reporting it.

TVA as its name implies is an online school. Basically, it is just a way to allow parents to more easily home school their children. But there are actual teachers who interact with the students and the parents. I have a problem with home schooling. It isn’t that I don’t think children can be home schooled well. I flatter myself that if I had children and I home schooled them, they would get stellar educations. (And they would hate it.) The problem is that most people who home school their kids don’t do it because they want their kids to be well educated; they do it because they want to “protect” their children from dangerous ideas like natural selection, quantum mechanics, and pretty much any post-Enlightenment thinking.

But if people are going to home school, I think the state should provide all the help it can. Unfortunately, TVA is not succeeding, at least on the terms that it was sold to lawmakers. According to Raw Story:

I don’t think much of tests, but that is pretty bad. But here’s the thing: that isn’t the story.

TVA is in the news because the vice principal sent out an email to teachers telling them to erase the failing grades from September and October. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Yes, it is probably just TVA trying to cover itself. But it must be at least in part them trying to make adjustments. What’s more, when I taught, all I cared about was how well the students understood the material at the end of the course. I made allowances for students who did poorly at the end, but I never penalized a student for doing poorly at the start; students who got As on the final, got As in the course.

Because of this story, now the poor test scores are getting some attention. I think this is backwards. But so be it. What’s important here is that companies like TVA (a for-profit public school) sell their services on the basis of test scores. Yet when they fail by the one metric that they and their political allies claim to care about, nothing happens. I think this is because this kind of educational “reform” and “innovation” is not about test scores and it most certainly isn’t about education or the betterment of children. It is about making profits and gutting public education. In this regard, the Republicans are far worse. But regardless of the motivation, the result of pretty much all educational reform is to divert public funds to private (for-profit) companies and weaken public education.

And that is the real story of the Tennessee Virtual Academy.

I don’t think you appreciated me enough. You see, I suffer to bring you stories here and man did I suffer last night! I listened to the entirety of Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever. Of course, the only reason I listened to it is because Nugent is such a nut. But I kept an open mind, because I don’t expect artists I like to necessarily be sane. In fact, some of them are downright evil. As you may remember, I praised Adolf Hitler’s artwork recently. So via YouTube, I listened to the whole of Cat Scratch Fever in order, mostly looking at Ted’s stupid 1970s mustache.

On Wikipedia, where I went to get the track list, I found that AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars (out of 5). I don’t hold to rock critics generally; their opinions of music seem to me almost random; they decide what mark they are going to give an album and then they justify it in the most pretentious way possible. But I’ve found that AllMusic is at least reasonable. And what’s more, I tend to agree with them about the arc of music careers; they are usually close in terms of what albums mark the high and low points of any given career. And in their opinion, Cat Scratch Fever is the high water mark of Nugent’s career.

The only song I remember hearing before is the title track. But it is hard to say because the album is shockingly generic. Even the title song barely breaks the water out of mediocrity. Again and again listening to the album I tried to imagine what was going on in popular music at that time. On the one hand, you had The Trammps’ amazing Disco Inferno. On the other, you had the Ramones’ glorious second album Leave Home. So it perhaps isn’t surprising that when it came to good ol’ fashioned rock, the bar was set pretty low.

What is remarkable about the album is how good the band is. These guys can play and yes, Ted Nugent really is an excellent guitarist. But for me, this works against the album. I like messy. I like out of control. And the Ted Nugent band sounds like a bunch of studio musicians—they are that good. So you have this mix of amateurish songwriting with top level but uninspired playing and producing. But I can see how people would have enjoyed this record at the time, especially as party music. And the band was doubtlessly fantastic live.

It’s weird, though. Ted Nugent is such a loose cannon. I thought his music would be wild. It makes me think that he really is what people like Bill O’Reilly always claim to be: just a character. Certainly, implying publicly that he was going to assassinate Obama if he were re-elected strikes me as pandering to an audience. I wonder how much of it is real. Regardless, Cat Scratch Fever is at best 90% product and 10% art. And I can’t image why anyone would be interested in listening to it today.

Afterword

The strongest track on the album is the unfortunately titled “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” As usual, the vocals are under mixed so you can’t easily make out the lyrics. (Smart producer!)

Matt Taibbi wrote an interesting article about civilian drone killings, At Least We’re Not Measles: Rationalizing Drone Attacks Hits New Low. The article generally is an attack on all those (including an embarrassing number of liberals) who have been apologizing for these attacks. In particular, he goes after Michael Kugelman, who argues that we shouldn’t worry about drone deaths because more people in Pakistan die each year from measles. Great argument, huh?

But late in the article, Taibbi gets to an issue that is very close to my heart: universal rights.

I read the entire Constitution of the United States recently. What I found was that there are a total of 22 references of “citizen.” And pretty much without exception, these references have to do with voting: who can be president, senator, representative, and who can vote for them. I bring this up because back a while, I heard some people talking about how only citizens have rights of Habeas Corpus. This is what the Constitution says about this in Article I Section 9: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You see: no “citizen” there. Conservatives like to claim that the Bill of Rights is just about citizens. It isn’t. This goes back to the Declaration of Independence (and further), where Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” That’s “all men” and not “all men who just happen to be born in a particular place.”

This is all about natural rights. Either these rights are universal, or they aren’t real. As a nation, we can’t run all over the world forcing other countries to treat their people by our standards of universal rights. But we also can’t deny those rights by running all over the world killing people without due process of law. Claiming that it is all okay because we are at war is just an apologia. We are always at war and so can always claim that. It is the same as claiming that we can kill anyone we want to because we are America. And if you scratch the surface of arguments like those of Michael Kugelman, that’s all that you’ll find.

This article was based in part on a prior article.

My sister directed me to this Liberals4America Facebook page: While you were busy bitching about a guy who bought a Snickers with food stamps, this was happening to your tax dollars!

What I find most disturbing about this is the guy bitching about the “abuse” of food stamps. In many cases, he’s a liberal, or at least liberal-leaning. But he’s the kind of guy that Republicans can get to vote for them. All they need is a candidate who says the magic words in the magic way—someone like Ronald Reagan or Marco Rubio. And this is the real problem that we face.

If we all stick together, we can do something about the most profitable company in the world not paying any taxes. But we can’t do a thing if conservatives manage to set us against each other. Sure, there are poor people who take advantage of the system. But they represent nothing compared to the rich people who take advantage of the system. That’s what we have to remember.

And there’s something else. Why do people think it is wrong to buy a Snickers with food stamps? We all enjoy junk food from time to time. Why is it that we expect the poor to lead ascetic lives? Isn’t there something wrong with all of us who want to punish people for the crime of being poor? Isn’t this just another example of assuming that poverty is the result of moral inadequacy? Shouldn’t the example of just about every rich person throughout history prove to us that this isn’t that case?

Let he who is without sin start the bitching!

Afterword

That tax refund of $156 million? That’s $5 per second. A common variation of this quotation is that in the time you were bitching, Exxon pocketed $9,000 of your taxes. That would be equivalent to a half hour of bitching. I wouldn’t doubt that the quote came from an annoyed liberal who had to listen to a friend complain for a half hour about this. I know people who will go on and on about this kind of thing. Kind of like complaining about a hangnail after your arm was just ripped off.

You gotta love this. You know the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)? It’s the act that sets up courts to make sure that secret wiretaps of suspected foreign agents were all above board—that law enforcement agencies weren’t going crazy just wiretapping everyone. You may remember that the Bush administration was very unhappy with it because it was getting in the way of keeping America safe the way the administration did right up to the morning of 11 September 2001.

Funny thing about the FISA courts. The government has made 38,093 requests from 1979 through 2011. In that time, the FISA courts have denied—Wait for it!—just 11 requests. In fact, before 2003, they never denied a request. Of the 11 rejections since then, 10 were during the Bush administration. To some extent, this understates how much the FISA courts do. Often the courts get the government to modify their requests. These are things like, “You want 39 wiretaps, but we’re only gonna give you 38!” So it is still pretty bad.

What is most remarkable about this is that during the Bush administration, 14,353 requests were made (38% of all requests). And note: this is a much higher request rate than either of the administrations surround it. I think this means that the Bush administration was just generally more interested in spying than in protecting anyone. Nonetheless, given the very large number of requests and the the very low number of denials (0.07%), what was the big deal the administration made of the FISA courts?

Regardless of all this, we ought to take note of just how feckless is “government oversight.” The fact is that all of the power players in the public and private sectors are inbred. They take care of there own and under most circumstances they don’t care at all about the little people like you and me. If you see the American Revolution as a war between the people and the aristocracy, then we lost that war. The aristocracy won. And silly us who think that one part of the aristocracy is going to protect us from another.

H/T Matt Taibbi