Correction: Yikes. The stats were Richard Florida's, not Klein's. Klein just parroted them.
Original post below.
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Last week, Geoff of The Chart™ fame, over at Innocent Bystanders took Ezra Klein to task for his misleading stats on gun crime, here.

You will especially like the part where Geoff helpfully points out that trigger locks are maybe not so helpful for preventing most suicides and homicides, which Klein's 'analysis' would absolutely imply.

Either Klein cannot properly construct a statistical analysis, or he is integrity-challenged and actively trying to deceive his readers.

Geoff follows up this week with an item from The Washington Times that examines the correlation between gun laws and gun crimes.

Follow the link-through to the WT. It may not be all that you think.

One bit that I found surprising was the statement that poor folks who live in crappy neighborhoods benefit the most from the enhanced personal safety provided by gun ownership. I wasn't surprised by the fact -I have known this since I used to live in a crappy 'hood. I was surprised to see that fact published, in English, in an American newspaper.

If you claim to care about poor people trapped in dangerous neighborhoods, then tightening gun restrictions is the last thing you should do. And pricing ammunition or guns out of the reach of the poor is bad practice as well.

And yet, most urban mayors think that loosening gun restrictions is for the country folk, and not for themselves.

Think again, guys.

Posted by: LauraW at 07:38 AM | Comments (311)
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He talks for about an hour. It's fantastic, a must-watch. Unfortunately, I can't embed the video. Here it is.

Added: Here is the live stream.

Added 2: I found a snippet, just one question and answer. It's embedded below the fold. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:44 AM | Comments (194)
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Up all night with the kid early morning edition.

Enjoy while I caffeinate heavily.

Posted by: andy at 02:49 AM | Comments (446)
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Former Senator Scott Brown leads an unnamed Democrat by 8 points and the only official Democratic contender,Ed Markey, by a whopping 53-31 in the upcoming special election per the latest MassInc poll. While the state is overwhelmingly Democratic, he has solid favorability ratings and is, with potentially stronger Democratic contenders turning down the chance, the current favorite in a special election which would be far less Democratic than the November result where he lost to Elizabeth Warren by 7 points. Besides the Virginia Governor's race, perhaps the only race really worth watching this year.

For full disclosure, MassInc's final poll gave Warren a 6-point edge, missing the final margin by a single point.

Posted by: CAC at 04:43 PM | Comments (99)
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Yeah.

Obama's something, huh?

Howard Archer, economist at IHS Global Insight, described the situation as “dire” and added: “We believe the economy is essentially flat at the moment. We suspect that GDP will not return to the level seen in the first quarter of 2008 until the first half of 2015 – a gap of seven years.”

Obama's next excuse will be that Europe plunged us into deeper recession.

But one could also say that his failure to create the conditions for good growth in the US has exacerbated the global recession, and caused Europe to fall into recession.

But we won't hear that over here. It'll just be more Japanese earthquakes and ATMs.

Your Mouth

I would apologize for the mess I seem to have made but it was the Tsunami's fault.

More: England's trying slow-motion weak-form austerity. It's neither sparing the country pain, nor getting the pain over with so that the healing can begin.

Posted by: Ace at 04:16 PM | Comments (145)
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I actually always thought this was a bad move by Fox. Well, Sarah Palin was fine enough, as she was a commentator, but Mike Huckabee.... having his own show?

It's pretty hard to claim you're not a partisan political organization when Sunday at 8pm primetime show is Huckabee.

It's not separating the news function from advocacy sufficiently.

Eh, I suppose CNN and MSNBC do it too... but then I always take that as proof of their liberal leanings. But then, as I take CNN's fascination with Elliot Spitzer and MSNBC's fascination with Al Sharpton as signs of their naked partisan affiliation, I have to apply the same rule to Fox.

At any rate, she's leaving now that her three-year contract is up. Allah speculates she might go to Glenn Beck's nascent network; others think maybe she'll run for Senate.

Posted by: Ace at 03:09 PM | Comments (426)
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I don't buy the premise, but it's still interesting.

I thought this was an interesting (even if obvious, now that I read it) explanation by which vocabulary is gained unconsciously:

If vocabulary is related to achieved intelligence and to economic success, our schools need to figure out how to encourage vocabulary growth. They should understand, for starters, that word-learning occurs slowly and through a largely unconscious process. Consider the word “excrescence.” Few know the word; fewer still encounter it in their everyday lives. Maybe you do know it, but imagine that you don’t.

Now suppose I gave it to you in a sentence: “To calculate fuel efficiency, the aerospace engineers needed an accurate estimation of excrescence drag caused by the shape of the plane’s cabin.” That single exposure to the word is probably insufficient for you to grasp its meaning, though if you know something about aerospace engineering, you’ll be likelier to make a good approximation. Here’s an encounter in another context: “Excrescences on the valves of the heart have been known to cause a stroke.” Perhaps now you have a vague understanding of the word. A third meaningful encounter will allow you to check your understanding or refine your sense of the meaning: “The wart, a small excrescence on his skin, had made Jeremy self-conscious for years.” By now, you probably have a pretty solid understanding of the word, and one more encounter in a familiar context should verify your understanding: “At the far end of the meadow was what, at first glance, I thought a huge domed building, and then saw was an excrescence from the cliff itself.”

You’ve probably figured out that the word “excrescence” means “an outgrowth.” That’s an accelerated, artificial example of how word-learning occurs. The sense of a word that a listener or reader gains from multiple exposures to it isn’t a fixed and definite meaning but rather a system of meaning possibilities that get narrowed down through context on each occasion. As Miller showed, knowledge of a word is a memory residue of several meaningful encounters with the word in diverse contexts. We retain bits of those past contexts in memory as part of the word’s meaning-potential. Almost all the word meanings that we know are acquired indirectly by intuitively guessing new meanings as we get the overall gist of what we’re hearing or reading.

I would generally agree with a lot of his basic notion -- he argues, as many reformers do, that the great bulk of the educational "reforms" of the 60s and 70s were in fact monstrous disasters and that true reform can be had by returning to the pedagogies that worked.

On vocabulary, specifically, though, I'm thinking this: Is a high vocabulary an cause of a high IQ or an effect of it?

Or, let's take "IQ" out of the statement for a minute. Let's talk about reading. People who read a lot of books -- kids who read a lot of books, especially books that are a bit beyond them (that is, they're always reaching for the next level up) -- are going to accumulate vocabulary via the process Hirsch explains above.

Further, the process he explains -- which involves recalling previous instances of a word's use and then making educated guesses about its likely meaning -- is itself an aspect of intelligence, and people who are better at that will tend, overall, to just be smarter at people who aren't as good at it.

After all (echoing an argument I just saw in the comments!), intelligence, broadly defined, is recalling previous experience or example and extrapolating from them and teasing out conclusions and different, new information.

So, while the basic thrust of what he's writing about seems level-headed enough, I don't know if it's the right idea to focus on vocabulary specifically, which might just be an artifact of the real generators of intelligence, which is a desire to consume information (via reading) and an active mind that likes making educated guesses.

Incidentally, I think vocabulary maybe got a bad rap because of words like "excresence." I've been learning a bit of vocabulary lately, because the Kindle makes it very easy to look things up, and I'm finding that I divide new vocabulary into exciting words and bullshit words.

Bullshit words are words like "excresence" which in my mind are the "five-dollar words" people knock. If the word means "outgrowth," then why not say "outgrowth"? You can't even mark a victory for excresence in terms of poetry -- "outgrowth" seems more poetical than excresence.

These words are duplicative of better-known words and hence, to me, aren't all that useful. Once in a while a five-dollar word, which really says nothing more than the $0.05 variety, wins out on poetry, as with (I think) "coruscating," but a lot of these words that no one uses? There's a reason no one uses them. They add nothing and they're sort of ugly.

On the other hand, there are lots and lots of very specialized words for which there aren't any duplicative vocabulary for. That is, the word is not just a different word for a concept you already understand (as "excresence" is simply an alternate word for the already-understood concept of "outgrowth") but in fact introduces an entirely new concept or a very specific thing you weren't aware of.

Here's one I learned a couple of months ago: Velleity. (This is probably known to people who study religion, but it was a word I'd never even heard before.)

Velleity has been defined[by whom?] primarily as "the lowest degree of desire or volition, with no effort to act". Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, described "[t]his connoisseuse of 'splendid weaknesses', run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope".

The marketer Matt Bailey described it as "a desire to see something done, but not enough desire to make it happen".

The Times used 'velleity' in the sense of "a slight wish not followed by any effort to obtain" an outcome." Author Howard Jacobson called it "the feeblest and most unanticipated of anticipations..."

Several prominent writers, philosophers, and psychologists have discussed the usefulness of the concept of "velleity".

Bill Bryson uses velleity as a perfect example of "words [that] deserve to be better known." He argues rhetorically, "Doesn't that seem a useful term?

The minute I looked that up I realized that the concept of a "velleity" is ever-present in politics -- there are a lot of things the public says they want but, in reality, doesn't care about -- and yet I had no actual word to express this.

Well, I had ten words for it, but not a word.

Other neat words -- to me, exciting words -- are words that invoke a place or a time. Words like burnoose. The very fact that you're talking about a "burnoose" (a cloak and hood favored by medieval Arabs) puts you in a mindset you wouldn't be in with just "cloak and hood."

I got turned off to vocabulary, myself, by the SAT world-building lists. They tend to be very heavy on words like "excresence" -- duplicative vocabulary that instantly makes me think "Why not just say outgrowth?" -- and very light on the highly-particularized sort of evocative words like "burnoose."

Vocabulary lists tend to favor words like "excresence" you could, theoretically, use in everyday conversation. After all, you'll have far more opportunity to invoke the concept of "an outgrowth" than a "hood and cloak favored by medieval Arabs."

But the first word adds nothing to your picture of the world, but the latter one does.

And you kind of sound like a dick saying the first one.

When burnoose is the right word, you actually gain something as far as clarity and evocation from writing "burnoose;" but you almost never really have good cause to write "excresence." Burnoose is the right word in a tiny number of occasions; "excresence" never is. "Outgrowth" would be the correct word. Anytime you'd use "excresence," you should probably just go ahead and write "outgrowth."

The best vocabulary doesn't give you another word to say the same thing -- it gives you a word without which you couldn't express yourself properly at all. It doesn't just stick a new synonym in your head; it introduces an idea that you probably weren't even aware of.

So up with that sort of vocabulary, sure, but please save me from the "excresences."

Posted by: Ace at 02:31 PM | Comments (274)
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Funny stuff, swiped from @rdbrewer4's huge funny-video dump in the sidebar.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:52 PM | Comments (75)
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Yeah, obvious.

That'll be $0.99.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (106)
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Steven King wants you to pay $0.99 on Amazon to read his scary-novel (see what I did there?) thoughts on gun control.

He concludes with what he calls “a trio of reasonable measures to curb gun violence”:

1. Comprehensive and universal background checks.

2. Ban the sale of clips and magazines containing more than ten rounds.

3. Ban the sale of assault weapons such as the Bushmaster and the AR-15.

I heard that from Dianne Feinstein and she didn't charge me a buck, neither.

I have a completely-obvious observation but I bothered to write it up anyway. If Steven King is going to write obvious things, and charge a buck for the job, then I can write extremely obvious things and give them away for free.

The measures being proposed are so obviously inadequate to accomplish what they purport to accomplish that a gun-righter could almost say, "Sure, let baby have his bottle, if you want these cosmetic, symbolic, futile actions to convince yourself you're a Good Person, and then you'll shut up about it, fine."

But a guns-righter can't say that. Because he realizes something: These proposed measures are in fact so obviously inadequate to accomplish what they purport to accomplish that that must not be the reason they are offered at all.

Because these measures would accomplish nothing directly, one must then wonder why they would be advanced at all; and of course the immediate realization is that they are advanced to accustom people to the ritual of giving up this and that freedom in response to some new Moral Panic.

That is, the only way we could really see gun-control benefits would be to implement an England-style complete ban.

Even there, there are still gun murders, and lots more murders with knives and pipe-wrenches! But still, that sort of complete ban would have an effect on gun violence (even if the major effect is to increase non-gun-violence).

But they cannot agitate for that, for the public would not hear of it; so instead they push measures which are deliberately calculated to be perfectly useless for attaining their stated goal, but in fact are quite useful for attaining their unstated goal, which is to say, conditioning the public to give up gun rights on a piecemeal, this-one-and-then-that-one basis such that that which cannot be accomplished in one great step can be accomplished in 40 or 100 smaller ones.

And hence the shouting, because we are, in fact, not talking about these measures in reality; we are on both sides really talking about the intended endgame of complete disarmament of the public.

If we were talking about achieving the goal of reducing the number of people killed by guns, why on earth would a gun-control advocate be extolling the shotgun as a more efficient and deadly person-killing weapon than an AR-15?

Suddenly the high lethality of the shotgun is a reason to endorse it and the relatively lesser lethality of the AR-15 is the reason to ban it?

What?

Again, this makes no sense as the measure is completely disjoined from its alleged object. If shotguns are more deadly killing machines, and we want to reduce deaths-by-guns, then we should outlaw those.

But of course that's not what we're doing. We're just picking out some guns that are currently in the news and look kinda-scary and pushing to outlaw those because those are the only ones the public would agree to ban.

And it's the "public agrees to ban" which is the important consideration, not the stated purpose of "reducing gun deaths" which is important.

The latter isn't even considered... except in the long view.

Obvious enough, I guess.

I should sell this shit on Amazon.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (233)
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