That time the Biden campaign let 100 thousand people die

March 12, 2021

Joe Biden is getting grief for claiming credit for the covid vaccines that were the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s covid response. That grief is well deserved, but it’s actually far worse than that. Biden’s campaign actively and deliberately inhibited the vaccines’ rollout. Without their actions, the vaccines would probably have been rolled out at least a month earlier, which would have saved over 100 thousand lives.

I have the receipts:

  • On September 2, 2020, the Trump administration notified public health officials that they should prepare for vaccine distribution as early as late October.
  • This panicked Democrats, who based their entire campaign on Trump’s ineffective response to covid. They feared that a big success in Operation Warp Speed would vindicate his response and give him the boost he needed to win re-election. (And, given how the election turned out, it’s nearly certain that it would have.)
  • On September 5 (three days later), Kamala Harris tells the world they should not trust Trump’s vaccine. She makes it explicitly political, saying “he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he has been a leader.” The campaign’s surrogates and the press (but I repeat myself) quickly follow suit. The threat is clear: put this vaccine out before the election, and we will destroy it.
  • On September 8 (three days after that), vaccine makers issue a pledge to put science first and to release only a safe vaccine. (Basically, pledging to do just what they’re already doing.) This fails to settle the furor, because the matter isn’t actually about safety; it’s about there being no announcement before election day.
  • On September 25, several “leading researchers and bioethicists” send an open letter to Pfizer, urging them to delay their vaccine. If you look up the signers, they are all Democrat donors. (Full disclosure: I only bothered to look up the first ten names.)
  • On October 9 the FDA alters its standard for how many positive cases the vaccine’s testers must see before they open their results. “This guidance ensures that no COVID-19 vaccine is likely to be approved before the US presidential election.” (The linked article doesn’t give much detail on the new standard, but we’ll come to that.)

    ASIDE: A lot of Republicans have given the FDA a lot of grief over this decision, but I don’t actually think it was wrong, given the Democratic extortion. If we want to get to herd immunity, it is essential that Americans trust the vaccine enough to get it. Far too many people distrust vaccines already, and we cannot afford to lose the rest of the left half of the country. That is exactly what the Biden campaign and its surrogates were not-very-subtly threatening to bring about.
  • On November 9 (less than a week after election day), Pfizer announces its results, and they are astonishingly good. Also in the press release, Pfizer mentioned the FDA’s moving targets. The issue was the number of positive covid cases they needed to see in testing before they could break the seal on their results and see what proportion of the positive cases were from the study’s placebo arm. (Almost all of them, it turned out.) More positive cases means less likelihood that good results were just random chance.
  • Originally the number was 32. But after “discussion with the FDA” the vaccine companies “elected” to increase the number from 32 to 62, roughly doubling the length of the test.
  • But in fact, they didn’t open the study at 62 either. By the time they opened it, the number had reached 94. The press release doesn’t say why; it just blandly reports the fact. But we learn why soon enough.

The New York Times ran a very informative story on the vaccines’ development. Among many other interesting details, it contained the smoking gun:

Pfizer decided it should drop that first benchmark [32 positive cases] and asked the F.D.A. to approve a new protocol on Oct. 29, effectively dashing Mr. Trump’s hopes of an announcement before Election Day.

The company also stopped processing test results from trial participants while it worked with the F.D.A. Protocol changes are discouraged once data is available, and Pfizer did not want to cross the benchmark before it got verbal approval to drop it. That approval came on Nov. 3, Election Day, or the day after.

[Emphasis mine.]

Pfizer didn’t look at the results even when the count reached the new benchmark of 62 because the FDA wouldn’t give them permission. The FDA finally gave them permission on election day or the day after. The notion that this was not a political decision defies all credulity.

So what was the consequence of this delay? Just because Trump said there could be a vaccine in October doesn’t mean it’s true. But let’s run the numbers. It took 99 days from the beginning of phase 3 trials (July 27) to get to 94 cases. To get to 32 cases would have taken until about the end of August (the infection rate was pretty flat at the time). A big company doesn’t move on a dime, so let’s give them a week to open the results, so September 5. In the history that actually happened, it took 40 or 41 days to begin vaccinations (December 14) after the results were opened, so in our alternate history vaccinations would have begun around October 16. So it appears that Trump’s estimate of “mid-October” was spot on.

When we started vaccinating in mid-December, it took until the end of January until the death rate was falling convincingly. So let’s call that a month-and-a-half. That means that in our alternate history the death rate is falling convincingly by the end of November. The two worst months of the covid epidemic in America were January 2021 (95 thousand) and December 2020 (65 thousand).

That’s 160 thousand lives lost to covid in December and January. If just two-thirds of those could have been saved (a conservative estimate, given how quickly the death rate was falling at the end of January), that’s over a hundred thousand lives lost as a result of the vaccine delays instigated by the Biden campaign.

WallStreetBets explained

January 28, 2021

TL;DR version: It’s hard not to laugh at a bunch of internet randos taking down hedge funds, but you should try. What’s happening is not good.

Less TL;DR version: When you buy Gamestop (etc.) at the say-so of WallStreetBets, you are giving your money to WallStreetBets’s founders and their friends, in the hope that in so doing you might be hurting some billionaires. As odd as it may sound to non-economists, those billionaires are actually providing a valuable service.

What’s going on:

One of the things you can do in the stock market is sell short, which is a way to bet that a stock’s price will fall. The way it works is you borrow the stock from someone else, and then sell it. This leaves you owning a negative number of shares. If the stock’s price goes up, you lose money, because you have to buy back the shares you owe at a higher price than you sold them at. But if the stock’s price goes down, you make money, because you can buy back in at a lower price.

It turns out that the people doing this are providing a valuable service, and we should be glad they’re doing it. I’ll come back to that later.

Now, the mechanics of how this works are important. The system is designed to prevent the following scenario: I borrow a thousand shares of Amazon and sell them. If the price goes down, I make money and buy a mansion. If the price goes up, I lose a lot of money, declare bankruptcy, and my creditors take the loss. To prevent me from doing this, I can only hold a short position as long as I have sufficient assets (called margin) in my brokerage account to cover my losses. If my losses exceed my margin, the broker demands that I deposit more money. (This is called a margin call.) If I cannot do it right away, the broker liquidates my assets to buy back the stock I borrowed.

Now, when I sell short, often the price doesn’t fall right away, even if I’m right that the stock is overvalued. Other investors might see things differently and keep investing in the stock, driving up the price. I still win, provided I can hold my short position long enough for the fundamentals to win out. But for me to do that, I have to have enough margin to ride out any temporary price increases. That’s why selling short is really only for the very rich. Without a lot of margin, you could be right and still lose because you get wiped out by a margin call before the price falls. The biggest players in this business are hedge funds.

That’s where WallStreetBets, a Reddit group, comes in. What they are doing is urging individuals to buy Gamestop, a surely overvalued stock that hedge funds are betting against. (Actually, they are urging people to buy call options, but that just complicates the story without really changing it.) This results in the price going up. The people who got in early — the founders of WallStreetBets and their friends — make out like a bandit. The people who got in later lose. That’s most of them; it’s a lot like a Ponzi scheme that way.

But the wrinkle here is: the losers don’t care, because they’re only in it to hurt the hedge funds. If they can drive the price high enough, the hedge fund gets wiped out by a margin call.

Now, ordinarily what WallStreetBets is doing would be an illegal pump-and-dump scam. But in this case it might be legal, because they aren’t actually pretending that Gamestop is a good investment. They are completely open about how they’re doing it just for yuks. If they get rich in the process, they’re fine with that.

Anyway, it worked. Melvin Capital was forced to close out its short position in Gamestop, taking a loss that is currently undisclosed but certainly in the billions. Melvin didn’t go under because it was rescued by other hedge funds.

Why it’s bad:

First of all, it’s morally wrong to spend your money purely to hurt someone else, even if that person is a billionaire. But let’s set that aside. Instead, I want to look at the service that hedge funds are doing us.

One of the greatest inventions in human history is the joint stock company. (In the United States today they exist as corporations.) It makes it enormously easier to start a business venture, because one can raise the capital from a lot of different people, each of whom has little risk, rather than all of it from a small number of very wealthy persons, all of whom are betting their fortune. It is one of the main reasons we have the bustling economy we have today.

But in order for the economy to allocate resources efficiently, we need stock prices to reflect companies’ true value. If Gamestop is over-valued, resources go into maintaining or even expanding Gamestop’s operations, when those resources ought to be going elsewhere. Inefficient resource use hurts our economy, which ultimately hurts employment and wages.

Stock prices are determined by investors, and, yes, speculators. If I see that a stock is underpriced, I buy it. If enough people see it the same way, the price goes up. The increase in the value of my investment is the payment I get for risking my money to assist the efficient functioning of capital markets.

The other direction is not as easy. If I see that a stock is overpriced, I can sell it, provided I already own it. But if I don’t already own it, how can I turn a profit on the research I did that determined it was overpriced? By short selling. Again, if enough people see it the way way, the price goes down. The increase in the value of my negative investment is my payment.

But there’s an important asymmetry between long and short positions. With a long position (buying stock), the most I can lose is 100% of my investment, because the price cannot fall below zero. With a short position, my potential losses are unlimited, because there’s no cap on how high the price can go. Thus, selling short is extremely risky. It is only going to be practiced by people who can afford to lose a lot of money.

What WallStreetBets is doing is making short selling much, much riskier. You no longer have to worry only about good-faith investors and speculators, but about vandals who are willing to throw money away just to hurt you.

You don’t care about the poor billionaires? I get it. But what you should care about the health of our economy. One of the things a healthy economy relies on is (mostly) efficient capital markets. And the way we get efficient capital markets is people (yes, mostly rich people) betting their own money whenever they see an inefficiency. If short selling goes away because it’s too dangerous, that ultimately hurts all of us.

In the short term there’s another serious risk. Even if short selling is too risky now, hedge funds have a lot of short positions already. They can’t just close them out, because doing so would just be preemptively taking the damage that WallStreetBets wants to do to them. If a lot of hedge funds start failing, that could spark another financial crisis. We saw how well the last one went, and this time the economy is already reeling from the covid lockdowns.

The speech not given

January 8, 2021

This is what Trump should have said, back in November:

There is much about this past election and its reported results that is profoundly suspicious. We believe that fraud was a significant factor in the outcome and it likely changed the election’s result. However, suspicion is not proof. It is the nature of an anonymous election that it is very hard to validate its results after the fact. We have not been able to find proof that votes were fraudulently cast or fraudulently counted in sufficient quantity to change the result of the election. Therefore, unfortunately, Joe Biden has prevailed in this election, and he will be inaugurated on January 20.

I share your frustration and disappointment at this outcome. We came tantalizingly close. The polls projected that we would lose by a landslide, but in the end the election was decided by just 40 thousand votes in four states. But it is now over, and our primary concern now must be to ensure an orderly transition of power and continuity of government. We will not obstruct the transition process, nor will we take any steps to sabotage the incoming administration. Neither will I endorse any objection to the counting of electoral votes, as has been the opposing party’s practice in recent decades.

Moving forward, I call on Mr. Biden and the new Congress to enact legislation to create uniform nationwide standards to prevent fraud in federal elections. Future presidents deserve to come into office without the cloud of suspicion created by this past election.

May God bless America, etc.

We all would all be in a much better place had he gone this route, and indeed Trump himself would be in a better place. But I suppose the fable of the scorpion and the frog applies.

1984 was not intended as an instruction manual

October 14, 2020

Unfortunately, we now live in a world in which you cannot trust the dictionary. For some time the Merriam-Webster dictionary has been giving alarming signs of increasing wokeness in its snarky social-media profile (case in point), but yesterday they took a significant new step toward Newspeak.

In her confirmation hearing, Amy Coney Barrett referred to “sexual preference” (not discriminating on the basis of), and we learned that the term is now forbidden. The politically correct term, we are told is “sexual orientation.” Many people who had not been tracking the politically-correct lexicon day-by-day were unaware of the change:

(Video by the Washington Free Beacon.)

Within the day, there was unanimity on the left about how offensive the term was. Politicians were lecturing Judge Barrett about it.

Enter the dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary had “sexual preference” as one sense of the word “preference”.

5 : ORIENTATION sense 2b // sexual preference

That put it out of step with Democrat messaging, so they changed the definition to:

5 offensive, see usage paragraph below : ORIENTATION sense 2b // sexual preference

If you visit the Wayback Machine, you see that the last time they crawled the page (September 28), the the old definition was still in place. We cannot say for absolute certain that this change was made on October 13, but some change was made on October 13:

Last Updated 12 Oct 2020

It seems extremely unlikely to be coincidence. In any case, they have not denied it. Nor indeed, have they made any comment on the controversy at all.

So we now live in a world in which the publishers of the dictionary give same-day service editing its definitions to fit the Democrat narrative. This is right out of 1984.

POSTSCRIPT: Merriam-Webster’s word of the day yesterday was an ironic choice, given what they had just done:

(Via Steve Krakauer.)

UPDATE: Dictionary.com is getting in on the act too.

Vote for the jerk; it’s important

October 12, 2020

I was “never Trump” in 2016. Trump seemed to know hardly anything, least of all what it means to be a conservative. As Brit Hume put it, he put less preparation into running for president than most people put into buying a sofa. The things he said sounded very much like a bizarre liberal parody of conservatism, as if he learned what it means to be a conservative from reading the New York Times. (I still suspect this is the truth.)

I was convinced that if he won, he would be a national embarrassment and do a terrible job. I was half right. My aim here is to discuss Trump’s record issue-by-issue, and make the case that he deserves re-election.

Character: We’ll start with the bad one. Yes, he is a boor and a national embarrassment. The tweets are awful. I cringe every time he opens his mouth. His personal conduct is deplorable. It is true that Joe Biden is also a bad guy (indeed, the only decent human among the four candidates is Mike Pence), but probably not to the same degree. In any case, Biden at least pretends, while Trump seems to relish his outrageous behavior. Nevertheless, this is just one issue, and there are much weightier matters at stake.

The courts: He has appointed great judges who respect the Constitution, and they have been sorely needed. I doubt that he has had much involvement in the process, but who cares? Biden, if elected, will attempt to stack the Supreme Court, not only putting progressive activists onto the court, but destroying the respectability of the court as an institution.

ISIS: It’s easy to forget this since it was so early in his administration. Under Obama’s neglect, ISIS grew for years. At its worst, it was striking targets in the US. On coming into office, Trump destroyed ISIS in a matter of months, with zero US casualties.

The economy: Before covid lockdowns brought the economy to its knees, we had arguably the strongest economy in US history. We had indisputably the best economy for minorities in US history. Deregulation and tax reform had a lot to do with that. When we finally get to rebuild our economy post-covid, they will work again.

Covid: Yes, there were missteps. But Trump got the two most important things right. First, he focused on getting a vaccine developed and deployed, quickly and safely. We will see if he succeeded soon, but indications are good. (Alas, hopes that a vaccine might be ready before the election were recently dashed by a politically motivated rule change by the FDA to slow emergency authorizations.) Second, and more importantly, he kept the federal government in its lane. Under our Constitution, it’s the states’ role to take the lead, and the federal governments role to assist. It’s extremely clear that any Democrat (and probably most Republicans) would have jumped at the opportunity to seize power that does not belong to the federal government. Indeed, Joe Biden promises to do exactly that on his first day in office. Some day covid will be a painful memory, but the powers seized today will never be relinquished.

Much has been made of how Trump “downplayed” the virus, but he wasn’t wrong to keep covid in perspective:
Monthly deaths per million since 1900

(Chart made by VoidSurf.)

Law and order: Trump has taken steps, within the limits imposed by our federal system, to restore order to our cities. On the other hand, Democrats have sought to extend the riots. They have consistently dropped charges against rioters arrested by the police. Kamala Harris personally raised money to bail rioters out jail. They have tied the hands of police, and in some cases have even sought to defund the police. With their allies in the press, they have pushed the absurd narrative that the riots are “mostly peaceful.” As a result, crime is soaring.

Biden has been unable to condemn any of this with any clarity. He says that Antifa is “just an idea.” And he has made remarks that seem to support redirecting police funding to social services, although the media has made great efforts to clean up the remarks.

Embassy in Israel: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush promised to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but they both broke that promise. Since 1995, presidents have been signing a waiver every six months delaying the legally required embassy move. Trump finally kept the promise. The foreign policy elite predicted that doing so would result in widespread violence from the “Arab street.” In fact, quite the opposite happened.

The Abraham Accords: The treaty normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain is the first real step toward middle east peace in many years. The importance is not so much the agreement itself, since there was already peace between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, but the signal it sends that the other Arab nations are no longer willing to put up with the nonsense of the factions ruling the Palestinians. If the Palestinians continue their intransigence, the other Arabs will go ahead without them and they will be isolated.

Of course, the UAE and Bahrain are not big players. The real promise is Saudi Arabia. The Saudis haven’t joined yet, but Bahrain (closely aligned with Saudi Arabia) joining is a signal that the Saudis are considering it. The Saudis agreeing to allow overflights is another important sign. And the public statements of Prince Bandar are yet another. If Trump is re-elected, there is a good chance the Saudis will join. But the Democrats don’t support the Accords. If Biden is elected, I doubt he will actually repudiate the Accords, but they will be dead as an agenda. No energy will be put into extending them.

Due process: In April 2011, the Obama administration issued its infamous “dear colleague” letter, which ordered colleges to deny due process to any students accused of sexual assault. The Obama administration bypassed the usual process of regulatory rule-making, and was unable to give any convincing legal justification for its order. Most colleges complied anyway, and for years students were denied due process. Horror stories abound. Fixing the problem has been one of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s priorities. Moreover, she fixed it properly, going through the normal rule-making process. Unfortunately, that takes time and they way the timing has worked out, a Biden administration might be able to reverse the process, returning us to kangaroo courts in which accused students are unable to defend themselves, or even be told what they are accused of.

Iran: Weakness invites aggression. Iran violated international law when it captured 10 Navy sailors who had wandered into Iranian waters due to a navigational error, and its outrageous, illegal treatment of those sailor upon capturing them was even worse. The Obama administration meekly thanked Iran for treating our sailors well (!). In negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran, Obama made it clear from the outset that he had to have a deal, no matter what, and Iran responded in exactly the manner one would expect. Obama got his deal, an unenforceable promise not to develop nuclear weapons for a while, and in exchange we were taken to the cleaners. In addition to accepting the abduction of our sailors, Obama spiked an investigation into Hezbollah trafficking drugs into Europe and the United States, lifted sanctions on Iran, allowed Iran to import sensitive equipment, and, most astonishingly, shipped Iran almost $2 billion in cash. (The claims that we owed them the money are untrue. Indeed, the payment was illegal: a law signed in 2000 by Bill Clinton prohibited it.)

Much of the damage could not be undone; certainly Trump could not claw back the money. But Trump has stopped presenting weakness, and has begun the process of reestablishing sanctions. Trump approved the killing of Iran’s terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani, who had boldly crossed the border into Iraq to organize attacks against our allies. The Democrats flipped out at this, saying that it would certainly lead to war. Of course, nothing like that happened. On the contrary, with an indispensable terror leader removed, things have been much quieter. Trump has also offered moral support for Iranian dissidents, which Obama pointedly refused to do.

Huawei: The Trump administration led the effort to have Chinese chips banned from use in 5G networks because of security concerns. That effort has been successful with several of our closest allies, including the UK, Australia, and Japan.

The environment: Trump will not ban fracking or push the “green new deal”, both of which Biden and Harris have both pledged to do. Fracking has finally made us energy independent, and in fact has helped the environment greatly, by making it possible to move industry from coal to natural gas. The “green new deal” is communism painted green. It would be an utter catastrophe to everyone except the nomenklatura that it would empower.

Nonsense: No, Trump didn’t call white supremacists “very fine people.” He has condemned white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK many times. He didn’t say covid was a hoax. He didn’t say that Mexicans are all murderers and rapists. He didn’t say immigrants are animals. And on and on. Certainly he has said some awful things, but the quotes that seem most appalling are misconstrued beyond all recognition.

Donald Trump is not senile. Joe Biden is.

Please tell me about the norms

October 12, 2020

Fun fact: The very first time the newly formed Democratic Party received a Supreme Court nomination, in 1828, they refused to vote on it, so that Andrew Jackson could make an appointment the following year.

Another fun fact: The very first time a Democratic president had a Supreme Court vacancy in the final year of his term, in 1841, the Democratic Senate confirmed the appointment. They confirmed the nomination four days after it was made, on the second-to-last day of the lame-duck session that took place after they lost the election.

The Smithsonian on “whiteness”

July 15, 2020

At first glance, I seriously thought this was white nationalist propaganda, claiming that all the best ideas and attitudes are white:


Alas, it’s from a critique of “whiteness” by the Smithsonian Institution! According to it, the ideas and attitudes that are exclusively white include: individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family, science, objectivity, rational thinking, classical antiquity, the work ethic, Christianity, respect for authority, planning for the future, delayed gratification, showing up on time, viewing time as precious, steak, English common law, the notion that justice should consider intent, trying to solve problems, making decisions, democracy, using correct grammar, and politeness.

No. Good ideas and attitudes do not belong to any specific race, no matter what the racists on the right or the left might say.

(Via Byron York.)

Everything is great as long as the cities burn

July 10, 2020










(Via Daily Wire.)

A play in one act

July 18, 2018

Time traveller from 1939: So this is 2018! How are things going?

Social justice warrior: Unfortunately, we have a big problem with fascism.

TT: Oh dear. What’s going on?

SJW: The judgements of the organs of the state must be accepted without question!

SJW: Speakers we disapprove of must be silenced, by force if necessary!

SJW: The president must set aside the law and do what’s right!

SJW: A supreme court that might rule contrary to our wishes is illegitimate and should be abolished!

SJW: Only the state should have access to weapons!

TT: You’re right, you do have a problem with fascism.

There is no substitute for free speech

April 7, 2018

I saw this article this morning:










No Denmark without Danes

March 2, 2018

Megan McArdle has an amazing article about the political culture of Denmark, and its implications for ours. It’s well worth reading in its entirety.

Wanted: one moral compass

February 24, 2018

(This is more stream-of-consciousness than my usual essay. Sorry about that.)

The facts

We now know many things about the February 14 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. We know that a former student (I won’t be using his name) who had been expelled from the school, went in with a rifle and murdered 17 students.

We know that the shooter talked about shooting up a school all the time. He would introduce himself saying “Hi, I’m Nick. I’m a school shooter.” After another mass shooting he bragged “Man I can do so much better.” And we know that his threats were relayed to local police and the FBI on numerous occasions, but no action was taken. Some of the warnings were quite explicit. We know that the police were called to the shooter’s home on numerous occasions, but, as far as we know, no action was taken. (CNN has reported that this happened on 39 occasions, but the Broward Country sheriff’s office says it was only 23 times.)

We know that the sheriff’s office had a deputy stationed at the school. The deputy, Scot Peterson, ran to the building where he heard the shooting, and then waited outside while the shooting continued. The Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel, offered Peterson up as a sacrificial lamb, but the problem went beyond Peterson.

We know that, in addition to Peterson, three other Broward County sheriff’s deputies responded to the school. None of them went in. All four waited outside, taking cover behind their cars. (Sheriff Israel had previously claimed otherwise, but that turned out not to be true.) Nor did they even prevent the shooter from escaping. They might as well not even have shown up at all.

The first officers to enter the building were police from a neighboring municipality, Coral Springs, who responded even though the school was out of their jurisdiction. They reportedly were disgusted with the Broward County deputies cowering outside. But it appears that by that time, the shooter had already escaped. He was eventually captured by an alert police officer in another municipality.

We also know that a Sheriff Israel had a reputation for hiring political cronies to staff his force, and liked to reply to critics by saying “lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” And we know that the same Deputy Peterson had earlier refused to share information about a previous incident involving the shooter with the Florida Department of Children and Families. The reason he would refuse to cooperate with them has not been revealed, but it must be.

The rant

With all these facts known, who do the left/media blame for the massacre? The shooter himself? The FBI or various local police who ignored the warnings? The deputies who cowered outside the school, or the political sheriff who was responsible for their recruiting and training?

Of course not. The true culprit was the NRA.

The NRA, who had nothing whatsoever to do with it, that’s who the leftists and the media (but I repeat myself) think are to blame.

What in the hell is wrong with these people?

While they blame the NRA, they make excuses for the cowardly deputies. A guy with a rifle is just too scary, you can’t expect them to take him on. For example, an editor at the Los Angeles Times wrote “not every has, or should be expected to have, the guts to face a maniac with an AR-15.” It was their job!

ASIDE: While they excuse the useless cops and blame the NRA, let’s not forget the barefoot, civilian plumber from Sutherland Springs who engaged a shooter who was armed with a rifle and wearing body armor. That man was an NRA instructor.

But the worst take on the cowardly cops was from CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who wrote:

What happened in Parkland is proof that a good guy with a gun doesn’t always stop a bad guy with a gun

(CNBC’s John Harwood made the same point.) Clearly Cillizza and Harwood don’t actually understand the “good guy with a gun argument” so let me spell it out: If there is a bad guy with a gun, you want there also to be a good guy with a gun to stop him. The police can’t always be there, so citizens should be armed. The cowardly deputies are a confirmation of the the argument, not a refutation. Even if the cops are there, they might not do anything.

A related idiocy was from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who said it is useless for a handgun wielder to confront a AR-15 wielder, since AR-15 bullets travel faster. I guess a man armed with a laser will be invincible.

To go along with the idiocy were the outright lies. Everytown for Gun Safety — the deceptively-named gun-control advocacy group funded by billionaire Mike Bloomberg — claimed that there have been 18 school shootings so far in 2018. This isn’t remotely true. (To come up with this number, they have to count nonsense like a window being shot out by a bb gun.) Many media outlets pointed out this it wasn’t true, but not all. The always-execrable New York Daily News cited it without reservation. So did Jeff Greenfield, a long-time political analyst for various networks. (He later deleted the tweet.) Various politicians including Bernie Sanders and Bill DeBlasio cited it as well. ABC couldn’t pass it up either, but did point in the 4th paragraph that it was disputed. Finally, in CNN’s town hall they took a question that cited the bogus statistic; the event’s moderator, Jake Tapper, didn’t point out that it was false, nor did he give anyone else a chance to do so.

The CNN town hall brings me to the main point of this rant, the shameless politicization of this crime. The gun-control movement is clearly frustrated that mass shootings have failed to move to move public opinion on gun control. The reason for this is they have never rebutted the common-sense logic: If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns. There are other important arguments for gun-rights as well, but that one suffices.

The only way they can get their gun bans is to have them enacted when the public is emotional, and not thinking rationally. That is why they always bristle at the suggestion that we should wait to consider gun-control measures until we can do so with a clear head.

But even so, it hasn’t been working. Worse — from the anti-gun perspective, but also from the sensible perspective — we are getting accustomed to mass shootings, so they don’t create the same level of emotion as they used to. Something must be done to increase the emotional temperature.

Hence, the Parkland kids. To be clear, I don’t blame the kids. Being from Broward Country, they have surely be taught to view the world from a liberal perspective, and they survived a horribly traumatic experience. Their feelings are genuine. But making those kids the face of the gun-control movement is shameless emotional blackmail of the crassest sort.

They tell us — with a straight face — that these kids have a special wisdom we have to listen to. No. They are children. There is a reason that juvenile and sophomoric are synonyms. And this especially applies to high schoolers, who tend to think they know everything, when in fact they know very little. And everyone knows it. Yes, the bull curve is wide, and some children are wise, but you identify those special children by their wisdom. To assume they are wise simply because they are children is simply insane.

As I said, everyone knows this. Including the people who are pretending that these kids are Charles Wallace Murray because the kids are speaking from the worldview with which they were indoctrinated.

The game plan is clear: Put forward the kids. Some internet crazies will attack them. You publicize the crazies and the public recoils in horror. Then, you tar anyone who disagrees with the kids as the same as the crazies. That is, exactly this: You start with crazies like Alex Jones, and then sliiiiide into Ben Shapiro, The Federalist, and National Review. By the end, you’re supposed to condemn supposedly outrageous statements like:


In case that seems nothing more than common sense, then comes the emotional punch: “Even, it seems, teens who have recently been shot at by a mass murderer.” You aren’t supposed to notice that this is a complete non sequitur.

Then there’s this:

Another approach was to find individual survivors of this massacre who did not happen to support the call from a large number of their classmates for gun control. The Daily Wire managed to find a pro-gun Marjory Stoneman student who accused the media of “politicizing” the massacre to talk about gun control.

Wait a second, you’re not supposed to have your own kids rebut ours! See, it’s not all the kids who have special wisdom, just the ones who agree with us!

That brings us to CNN’s travesty of a town hall. You can find a transcript here, but the transcript with its “(BOOING)” and “(APPLAUSE)” doesn’t capture the sense of the event. It resembled nothing more than one of Red China’s struggle sessions in which an audience would watch and jeer while the party abused a victim until he confessed his crimes against the people.

It was obviously a set-up from the beginning. The host, Jake Tapper, used to be the spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc. — not that CNN disclosed that fact — where he was known for insights such as this:

[Charleton Heston’s] interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is unique to him and his organization and has never been upheld in court.

(That was before Heller v. DC, so the latter part was true at the time, but only a true ideologue would try to claim that it is unique to the NRA to believe that the Second Amendment protects gun rights.)

The questions were all approved in advance. (Despite the he-said/she-said about the correspondence between the producers and possible participants, this point is not in dispute.) And this was the sort of insightful question they approved:



So, I had a question for Ms. Loesch but she’s not here yet. So for her and the NRA — she’s probably watching — and all of you puppet politicians that they are backing. Was the blood of my classmates and my teachers worth your blood money?

The government failed them at every level, but a civil-rights organization with no involvement whatsoever, one that wants to give your teachers the means to defend you, they are the ones with blood on their hands!

Rubio and Loesch were courageous going in there, and generally acquitted themselves pretty well. Rubio orchestrated this revealing moment:

RUBIO: … Now on the issue that you’ve raised about the background checks, relate directly to what you said about the — about the assault weapons ban. It’s not the loopholes. It’s the problem that once you start looking at how easy it is to get around it, you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that’s sold in the U.S.

(APPLAUSE) [this is an understatement]

RUBIO: Fair enough. Fair enough, that — that is a valid position to hold, but my colleagues do not support banning every semi-automatic rifle sold in America.

This is how far out of the mainstream the audience CNN assembled was. It’s not about “assault weapons,” it’s about banning every semi-automatic rifle in America.

Bottom line

Rant over. Let me wrap up with the bottom line. We are not going to ban guns in America. It isn’t going to happen. You are welcome to try; if you want to try, go ahead and get started.

But if not, please stop wasting our time with these proposals that sound superficially reasonable, but are extremely broad or nonsensical when you look at them closely. Stop telling us you want to ban assault weapons, when you actually want to ban all semi-automatic weapons. Stop saying you want to expand background checks, when your policy would actually make it illegal to fire any gun you don’t personally own. Stop saying you want to want to keep terrorists from buying guns, when your policy would actually give bureaucrats the power to block anyone from buying a gun without any probable cause at all. Stop saying you want to ban bump stocks, when a rubber band can serve as a bump stock

If you’re going to try to ban all guns, let’s get started on that fight. But if not, can we please try to do something about the problem? Something that could actually be enacted?

I’ve been told that I’m immoral because I don’t care if children die. This is offensive. Because I disagree about your preferred policy response does not mean I don’t care about the problem. I could just as well say that gun-control advocates don’t care about our children because they want to lock them into “gun-free” hunting preserves for psychos. But that would be unfair.

If we’re going to keep this on a partisan basis, then I’ll be pushing to end gun-free zones. They are idiotic, and history shows that mass shooters seek them out.

But there’s an alternative. We could look for other ways to address the problem that don’t involve expanding or restricting gun rights. We could look for a consensus approach. Personally, I think it would help enormously if we placed public pressure on the media to stop making mass murderers into celebrities. I’m sure there are other things we could try too.

Alas, that’s not what I’m seeing. When I tried to start such a dialogue among by Facebook friends, I had only one person join in.  For the rest, I gather it’s gun control or nothing. And that strikes me as lamentable.

Net neutrality, explained

December 16, 2017

With the recent FCC action on net neutrality, a lot of people are worked up, but almost no one seems to know what it actually means. Here is what it is all about:

The Internet is a protocol for delivering small packets of data over a wide-area network. An important property of the internet protocol (for present purposes it is the most important property) is that packet delivery is best-effort. That means that internet routers will attempt to deliver every packet, but there are no promises. If a router gets overloaded, some packets will be dropped (i.e., not delivered).

The key question is this: when packets have to be dropped, how do you pick which ones? Historically, internet routers have generally chosen the packets to drop arbitrarily.

But for many applications, this is not actually what you want. For example, in streaming video (nearly 80% of all internet traffic) some frames are more important than others. Some frames are keyframes (which give the entire picture), while most frames only describe the differences from the previous frame. If you miss a regular frame, there is some degradation in the picture, but if you miss a keyframe, you have no picture until the next keyframe arrives. Consequently, it would be best if internet routers preferred keyframes to other frames. More generally, there is an area of research called quality of service, which seeks to enable applications that require a certain amount of reliable bandwidth, and typically does so by identifying and reserving network resources.

So what is network neutrality? Network neutrality is the principle that says that routers must not distinguish between packets when deciding which ones to drop.

As a technical matter, network neutrality would tie the hands of networking innovators by prohibiting any routing strategy that intelligently chooses which packets to favor. One can improve the network by adding more hardware, but not by using the hardware one already has more efficiently. (Note: some dispute this. I will return to this point later.)

So why do some people want network neutrality? There is concern about a certain sort of network management practice that ISPs might adopt. To explain this, it’s helpful to know a few statistics.

Over three-quarters of the internet traffic in North America is from video streaming. Netflix alone accounts for over a third of internet traffic. YouTube (owned Google) accounts for another sixth. (Figures from December 2015.) This creates a tension between ISPs and content providers. The latter’s business strategy requires that they consume a brobdingnagian amount of network bandwidth, while the former are concerned that the content providers will overwhelm their networks.

Thus, the content providers are concerned that the ISPs will throttle back their content, or that the ISPs will demand that they help pay for it. And, in fact, on a few occasions, ISPs actually did something like this.

Back in 2007, when the concern was peer-to-peer file-sharing (mostly music and video), rather than video streaming, Comcast throttled back certain file-sharing protocols. On the face of it, one could argue it was reasonable, but, being Comcast, they did it in a super-sleazy way. Rather than announce they were doing it, they just did it secretly. People noticed, made a fuss, and Comcast stopped doing it. (Ironically, Comcast is now trying to position themselves as big supporters of network neutrality, while they literally did exactly the thing that net neutrality advocates are trying to prevent.)

Nevertheless, the Comcast incident is instructive, because it was corrected by the free market without any government intervention at all. The customers noticed, the customers complained, and Comcast stopped. Years later, AT&T blocked its customers from using Facetime on iPhones, and they too stopped after public outcry.

That’s the technical background. At this point it gets political. Google (which owns YouTube) made a big push for net neutrality, and it became a cause celebre on the left.

In 2010 the FCC announced its rules governing internet routing and they were quite bad for innovation. (You can find the relevant rules on pages 17944-17956 here, but the summary in the draft rules is much more accessible.) They were full of lip service about freedom to innovate, but they never defined the key terms of “nondiscrimination” and “reasonable network management.” (The final rules improved the draft rules by giving a non-circular definition of “reasonable network management,” but they defined it (¶82) in terms of “legitimate network management purposes” which they did not define.) They specifically say (¶83) that “reasonable network management” will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Consequently, if you want to stay out of trouble, you have to go to the FCC for permission to do anything.

At this point, there is one more important element. The FCC actually had no legal authority to regulate the internet, and when they tried to do it anyway, they lost in court. But, never ones to allow something like that to stop them, the Obama administration reclassified the internet from an information service (which they have no power to regulate) to a telecommunications service (which they do).

A telecommunications service is a service that transmits information without change in its form or content. An information service is a service for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications. (Via Ars Technica.) The sticky thing is the internet is pretty clearly both of these. Some applications are more like an information service: the web, search engines, social media, video streaming, file sharing, cloud drives; while other applications are more like telecommunications: email, instant messaging, voice over IP, online gaming, remote login. Certainly the vast majority of traffic is in the first category, but a case can be made for either.

It is harder to make a case to reclassify the internet as telecommunications service when it is already classified as an information service, particularly since most internet usage is moving in the opposite direction. But, when the matter went to the Court of Appeals, only one of the three judges was bothered by that. The other two applied the Chevron principle which requires that judges defer to administrative agencies unless their decisions are clearly wrong. (It’s a terrible principle, but that’s another topic entirely.) As it happens, the 2-1 decision was Democratic appointees versus a Republican appointee, which emphasizes how political the matter has become.

Anyway, the reclassification allowed the FCC to regulate the internet (or, more precisely, home access to the internet). Another effect was to erase all of the FTC’s internet privacy rules. Instead, FCC crafted its own rules, but the FCC is not an agency with experience with consumer privacy protection, so the result was, as the FTC put it, “not optimal.” Moreover, there were other pernicious effects that had not fully played out yet.

At this point, net neutrality has become a proxy battle between progressives and conservatives. Conservatives oppose net neutrality because they generally oppose regulation, but especially because they don’t want to set the precedent that the government can regulate the internet. Net neutrality may be well-intentioned (if ill-conceived), but they worry that net neutrality will be just the beginning. Hillary Clinton’s statement that net neutrality is “a foot in the door” plays into that concern.

Now the FCC has re-reclassified the internet as an information service again, as it was until 2015. This makes the FCC’s net neutrality regulation null and void. So what happens now? In the near term, nothing at all. The internet survived without net neutrality until 2015, with very few abuses and nearly all of those quickly corrected by the free market. If an ISP ever tried to block an internet content provider that didn’t pay the ISP (a standard scenario in net neutrality’s parade of potential horribles), they would immediately face the wrath of their consumers, and have to reverse themselves. They know it, so they won’t even try.

In the longer term, it’s hard to say. The business model of Netflix and others, who soak up most of the internet’s bandwidth without paying anything for the infrastructure that makes it possible, may turn out to be unsustainable. If so, something will have to change. The same would have been true with net neutrality. But this is a technical problem, and the repeal of net neutrality means that networking researchers can develop a technical solution. Were net neutrality in play, technical solutions would be banned, so the solution would have to be political. That would mean that rent-seeking, not innovation, would be the future of the internet, and we would all be the worse for it.

UPDATE: Added the AT&T-Facetime affair to the preceding discussion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The discussion above focuses on policies for choosing packets to drop, but there’s another aspect of network neutrality that I left out: concern that ISPs might block certain services entirely. This too happened once: a small phone company blocked voice over IP in an effort to force customers to pay for phone service. This case runs against my general thesis, because it was the (Bush-era) FCC, not the market, that put a stop to it. (Oddly, the FCC was able to do it at a time when it had no regulatory authority over ISPs at all, which says something about the intimidation powers of federal regulators.) Nevertheless, this is a baldly anti-competitive practice and I think the FTC has the power to address it under existing antitrust rules.

(Previous post.)

A brief history of recent US involvement in Iraq

December 16, 2017

We are just short of the 11th anniversary of President Bush announcing the surge. Iraq long ago faded from the headlines, but it’s been an eventful year, culminating last month with Iraq reclaiming its last piece of ISIS-held territory. It seems like a good time to look back at how the Islamists in Iraq were defeated, re-constituted, and re-defeated:

  • January 2007: President Bush announces surge.
  • January 2007: Barack Obama opposes surge, says it will make matters worse.
  • June 2007: Insurgent attacks peak at 1800 per week.
  • September 2007: General Petraeus reports to Congress that the surge is working. Democrats accuse him of lying.
  • October 2008: Insurgent attacks fall below 400 per week.
  • January 2009: President Obama takes office.
  • November 2009: Insurgent attacks fall below 200 per week.
  • February 2010: Obama administration claims credit for Iraq.
  • December 2011: President Obama withdraws all US troops from Iraq, having made no attempt to negotiate a new status of forces agreement.
  • August 2013: President Obama refuses to act on Iraqi requests for air strikes against ISIS.
  • January 2014: President Obama likens ISIS to a “J.V. team.”
  • May 2014: First ISIS attack outside the Middle East.
  • June 2014: ISIS takes Mosul.
  • June 2014: President Obama sends US troops back into Iraq.
  • October 2014: The New York Times reports on thousands of Saddam-era chemical weapons found in Iraq. Bizarrely, it accuses the Bush administration of covering them up.
  • October 2014: First ISIS attack in the United States injures 3.
  • June 2016: Orlando nightclub attack kills 49.
  • July 2016: Nice truck attack kills 86.
  • August 2016: Obama again fails to bomb ISIS convoy.
  • January 2017: President Trump takes office.
  • May 2017: Secretary Mattis announces new strategy and rules of engagement.
  • July 2017: ISIS defeated in Mosul.
  • October 2017: ISIS defeated in Raqqa, its supposed capital.
  • November 2017: Iraq reclaims its last ISIS-occupied territory.

UPDATE: This is timely.

On thoughts and prayers

November 9, 2017






“Well regulated”

October 24, 2017

The Second Amendment reads:














Bump fire

October 5, 2017

Bump fire is all over the news this week, with reports that the Las Vegas shooter had several bump-fire stocks in his arsenal. Predictably, gun-control advocates are calling for bump-fire stocks to be banned, but, more surprisingly, gun-rights supporters are not putting up the same kind of fight they usually do. Let’s talk about why that is.

First, what is bump fire? Bump fire is a technique for pulling the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle more quickly. The idea is you let go of the rifle with the trigger hand, and push forward with the non-trigger hand. When you pull the trigger, the recoil causes the rifle to bounce against the forward pressure of the non-trigger hand. The upshot is the entire rifle bounces forward and backward while the trigger finger remains still, causing the trigger to be pulled very quickly.

You can buy a stock that makes bump fire easier to do. Bump-fire stocks containing springs are illegal under ATF regulations, but you can get a special stock that makes it easier to hold a rifle in the awkward way that bump fire requires. You can also construct a bump-fire stock from a rubber band and some other household objects.

A bump-fire stock does not make a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon. The weapon still fires only one round per trigger pull. It also does not make a semi-automatic weapon into the functional equivalent of an automatic weapon. Bump fire — with the rifle literally bouncing around in your hands — is incredibly inaccurate.

We don’t know for sure that the Las Vegas shooter used a bump-fire stock in the shooting, we only know that he had several in his arsenal. But many people, myself included, suspected that he might have been bump firing, based on the sound.

So what are the arguments for and against banning bump-fire stocks? For:

  1. Bump fire has no purpose in either self-defense or hunting. Its only legitimate use is recreational. (Yee haw, look at all the bullets!)
  2. We might be able to strike a compromise in which we exchange bump-fire stocks for something harmless that we really want, like suppressors.
  3. With the rifle bouncing around, bump fire isn’t safe.
  4. Many serious gun aficionados look at bump fire as a tacky, low-class pastime.


  1. Sure, many serious gun aficionados look at bump fire as a tacky, low-class pastime, but we should not allow the gun-control advocates to use bump fire as a wedge to divide the gun-rights community.
  2. Bump fire is safer with a bump-fire stock than with a jury rig.
  3. The slippery slope: Gun control advocates want to ban all firearms. If they get anything, they will just move on to the next thing. Give them nothing.
  4. It’s nearly impossible to define what a bump stock is. You can get the same effect from a rubber band. Vague laws create opportunity for mischief.

For my part, the most telling arguments are #2 for and #4 against. Ordinarily I would agree with the slippery slope argument, but if we got something in exchange, that would mitigate it. Whether I could support a ban would depend a lot on the precise wording.

POSTSCRIPT: Alas, it might be hard to strike the compromise, because the gun-control people would have to admit that they’ve been lying about suppressors.

UPDATE: I guess the other reason to oppose banning bump fire stocks is the gun banners do not operate in good faith, and once they come forward with their ban, it will turn out also to cover a lot of other things that do matter. And that seems to be exactly what has happened.

Thoughts on mass murder

October 5, 2017

I was asked on Facebook if I had any thoughts on how to address the problem of mass shootings. This is what I said, pretty much off-the-cuff. I might update this at some point to give it more polish.

The sad truth is in an open society, with high population density, mass murder is easy. You can do it with guns; you can do it with trucks; you can do it with bombs; you can do it with hijacked airplanes; you can do it with poison; you can do it with a computer virus. You can do it using means that no one has thought of yet. Trying to keep killers from obtaining the means to kill just seems impossible to me.

I think the focus has to be on the perpetrators, not their tools. There are different sorts of mass murderer, and each sort demands a different strategy. On the one hand, there are terrorists (9/11, Boston Marathon, Orlando). Then you have random psychos (Aurora, Sandy Hook). Then you have people suffering from brain tumors or adverse drug reactions (University of Texas). (I suspect that when we figure out Stephen Paddock, we’re going to find he was in the third category.)

We fight terrorists by attacking their organization and their funding, by destroying their safe havens, and by intelligence work. We’re doing that.

The random psychos kill for the glory of it. They are basically all copy-cat killers. We need to stop giving them glory. Don’t release their name. Don’t release their picture. Get the whole story out of the news after a few days. We can’t force the media to do this because we treasure free speech, but maybe they can be shamed into doing the right thing.

The brain-tumor people are tough. They don’t kill for glory, they kill because something in their brain is broken. But unlike most mentally ill persons, they have the capacity for meticulous planning. Functionally they are like terrorists. I’m not sure what the solution is in this case, but it probably has something to do with public health.

There are also steps you can take to reduce your chance of becoming a victim. That doesn’t prevent the mass murder (most people prefer to live their lives unaware of the dangers around them), but you can make yourself less likely to be part of it.

Debunking Vox’s latest gun-control article

October 3, 2017

In the aftermath of the horrific shooting in Las Vegas, the opportunistic ghouls of gun control quickly emerged to exploit the incident. A lot of people are passing around an “explainer” from Vox.com entitled Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts. It contains a few valid facts, but most of it is misleading or outright false. I didn’t find a rebuttal on-line, so I thought I would do it myself.

I’ll go through it point by point:

Point #1 (misleading):


The chart shows “homicides by firearm per 1 million people” for 14 countries, and shows the United States as an outlier, dramatically worse than the second worst country on the chart. There are two big problems with this chart: First, it focuses on “firearm homicides.” Who cares? Are people murdered using a gun more dead than if a different weapon were used? If you just look at homicides, the numbers change dramatically. For instance, the second worst country on the chart (Switzerland) actually has a much lower murder rate than the best one (Australia).

Second, they are cherry-picking the countries. This is a consistent pattern throughout this article (and others like it). There are countless statistics one can draw from the data, so it’s not hard to quote statistics to support any hypothesis. One needs to look at whether the quoted statistics are natural ones. In this case, one should ask, why choose these particular countries? In fact, there are many countries with a worse murder rate than the United States, and some of them are developed nations. (Russia and Brazil are much worse.)

In fact, the US does have one of the highest murder rates among developed nations. It certainly is a problem. But the chart exaggerates.

Point #2 (true):


In fact, American civilians have more guns than the militaries and police forces of the rest of the world put together.

Point #3 (false):

There have been more than 1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook

Simply untrue. The standard definition of a mass shooting is four or more people killed, in a public place, while not committing a crime, and excluding war. (This definition was employed by the FBI until Obama tinkered with it in 2013.) By that measure, this number is orders of magnitude too high. Even Mother Jones makes this point.

To get numbers like this, some people have deliberately lowered the threshold to include four or more people killed or injured, including criminals. That generates big numbers to be sure, but it’s plainly dishonest to pass off gang wars, and incidents in which no one was killed, as if they were incidents like Sandy Hook.

Point #4 (false):


See above.

Point #5 (misleading):

States with more guns have more gun deaths

This one is very popular; I’ve seen it all over the internet the last couple of days. But note the careful wording: “gun deaths” not “gun homicides.” In fact, this statistic is entirely about suicides. If you remove suicides from the count, the correlation entirely disappears:

Also, recall point #1; people killed by other weapons are just as dead as people killed by guns. There’s no reason to exclude non-gun murders, other than to skew the numbers.

Also, their chart isn’t even honest in its own terms: they omit the District of Columbia which has the nation’s strictest gun laws and worst murder rate. If they put DC on the chart, they would have to resize the Y-axis to make room for it.

Point #5 goes on to say this:

And it’s not just one study. “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

They are quoting the book accurately. But when you follow the link, the book does not cite a single one of the “wide array” of studies. It just makes a bald assertion. On the other hand, there is considerable scholarship to the contrary.

Point #6 (misleading):


This one hits nearly every misleading point. It uses gun deaths, rather than gun murders or overall murders. And the choice of countries is odd. If you follow the link, you find that the countries are supposedly selected by high scores (greater than 0.79) on the Human Development Index. But the choice of countries doesn’t match the linked data, it leaves out countries (Russia and Uruguay) that would completely spoil the picture.

Point #7 (misleading):

States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths

Once again they use gun deaths rather than gun murders or overall murders. Plus, their proxy for tight gun control laws is this: “States with at least 1 Firearm Law Designed to Protect Children in Place.” So, gun locks? Come on. This is obviously a cherry-picked criterion.

In fact, the cities that have the very highest murder rates (e.g., Chicago) are in states with very strict gun control. And states that have loosened their gun laws have not seen any increase in the murder rate.

Point #8 (true):


Point #9 (true):

Most gun deaths are suicides

Point #10 (dubious):

The states with the most guns report the most suicides

I don’t know the statistics, and I don’t have time to look them up, but it’s very suspicious that they use a 5-year window, 12 years ago. This smells like cherry-picking.

Point #11 (obvious):

Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily

Point #12 (chart does not support headline):

Programs that limit access to guns have decreased suicides

It’s believable that there could be some low-order effect here, but the chart doesn’t show one at all. The chart shows that the suicide rate was already steadily falling when Australia instituted its gun confiscation program, and it continued falling.

UPDATE: The article also cites a study of the Australian gun confiscation program that found (page 532) that it did result in a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides. But the study did not find a statistically significant drop in the overall suicide rate. Quite the contrary. They found a small decrease in the overall suicide rate, but the p-value is a staggering 95.6%, meaning that the decrease is almost certainly due to random chance. So, once again, there’s something here only if suicide-by-gun is somehow worse than suicide by some other means. Moreover, the headline claims a decrease in overall suicides, which is flatly unsupported by the study.

Point #13 (irrelevant):


Let’s assume this statistic is true. I fail to see why relevance it has to gun policy. Moreover, just on its own terms, I have no benchmark to judge whether this is a lot.

Point #14 (dubious):


They are comparing the 8 states with the least guns with the 23 states with the most guns. 8 and 23. Those are very strange numbers to focus on; this is obviously a cherry-picked statistic.

Point #15 (true):

Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early ’90s

Point #16 (true):


Point #17 (misleading):

But specific gun control policies are fairly popular

Yes, when posed using terminology tested on focus groups by gun control advocates, they are fairly popular. But, support plummets once people learn what is really being proposed:

  • “Preventing the mentally ill from purchasing guns” is pretty popular. But once people find out that “mentally ill” means nothing more than “has someone handling their finances,” they realize they’ve been had.
  • “Barring gun purchases from people on no-fly or watch lists” is pretty popular, but “a bureaucrat can suspend your right to buy guns, and they don’t even have to suspect that you’re a terrorist, and in fact they don’t even have to tell you you’re on the list, and you have no legal right to contest being on the list, and even if you get off the list you still can’t buy a gun for years” is much less popular.
  • “Background checks for private sales and at gun shows” is pretty popular. That disappears when people find out “background checks for private sales” means you cannot borrow or rent a gun, so there’s no practical way to try a gun out before you buy it. Also, the so-called gun-show loophole is a complete myth.
  • “Banning high-capacity magazines” is somewhat popular, at least among people who don’t know anything about guns. But then people find out that “high-capacity” actually means regular capacity.

UPDATE: John Lott has a thorough debunking.

The denouncements

August 16, 2017



The tragedy of Venezuela

August 2, 2017

Dedicated to all the socialists who have defended Chavism (some on this very site):

Venezuela had been a rising nation, buoyed by the world’s largest oil reserves, but by the time I arrived, even high global oil prices couldn’t keep shortages and rapid inflation at bay. . .


There was no war or natural disaster. Just ruinous mismanagement that turned the collapse of prices for the country’s oil in 2015 into a national catastrophe.

POSTSCRIPT: I do have to point out that she contradicts herself between the first and last line. The fall in oil prices hastened Venezuela’s collapse, but it wasn’t the cause, as she recognizes in the first line. Today, the price of oil hardly matters, as Venezuela is mostly incapable of producing oil any more.

Why Democrats are upset about Garland

March 20, 2017






I can understand why they didn’t like it.

Next on the chopping block

January 14, 2017



A campus dialogue

December 21, 2016

I firmly believe in free speech.

So do I.


You can’t say that! That’s Islamophobic!

You just said you believe in free speech.



Transphobic hate speech! I am feeling so triggered right now.


Israel?! Defending genocide is not free speech!






There will be riots.

Riots? Who’s going to riot?

We are.


Stop repeating fake news.

Fake news?



Fake news! Snopes!


No, the mainstream media is reliable.


Cool, I look forward to seeing it.








Why are you so opposed to free speech?

Quantitatively assessing honesty

December 3, 2016





I’ve got your authentication right here

October 25, 2016










        d=gmail.com; s=20120113;







A misleading fact-check

September 30, 2016







































































Snopes can no longer be trusted

July 27, 2016














Next they have four crowd images:

























UPDATE: They’ve added this paragraph to the original story:




UPDATE: Snopes also wrote this in their second post:








Iran deal is illegal

October 9, 2015




Fact-checking is dead

September 29, 2015







(Via Ace.)

Movies that don’t exist

September 29, 2015


No, Luke, I am your father!


Alas, that movie doesn’t exist.


It’s true. No such movie exists with that scene.



No. I am your father.





















(Previous post.)



September 28, 2015

Barack Obama clearly has no idea what motivates Iran’s rulers:

Chanting death to America does not create jobs.



What was an excusable error in 1993 is sheer idiocy now.

Your lips are moving again

September 25, 2015





September 25, 2015


(Via Instapundit.)

Your lips are moving again

September 25, 2015

Believe literally nothing this woman ever says:






September 21, 2015




(Via Instapundit.)

Things liberals believe

September 21, 2015


Of course they did

September 18, 2015



Smart diplomacy

September 18, 2015



Donald Trump is bad at business

September 18, 2015




Fact-checking is hard, I guess

September 18, 2015





and again:











Chutzpah, thy name is Hillary!

September 4, 2015




But just this one time only.







UPDATE: Wow, the White House spokesman said this:


He really did say that. Unbelievable.

Sure, why not

August 8, 2015


Feel good story of the day

August 6, 2015


Saudi Arabia may go broke before the US oil industry buckles


POSTSCRIPT: This chart is really interesting:


Wow, how badly is Venezuela run?

Believe nothing this woman says, ever

July 30, 2015




But now it gets worse:






(Previous post.)

Emergency dispatcher leaves teen to die

July 29, 2015



Hillary Clinton withholding Libya emails

July 29, 2015

Fox News reports:





Hillary Clinton lies over and over and over again

July 24, 2015





But never mind, because this story too was a lie:






July 23, 2015

Hillary Clinton really did say this today:



(Via Ace.)

John Kerry really is an idiot

July 20, 2015






UPDATE: National Security Adviser Susan Rice contradicts Kerry:


The past ain’t what it used to be

July 20, 2015




Did they lie then, or are they lying today?

Obama administration threatens reporter with arrest for attending press conference

June 29, 2015

The Washington Free Beacon reports:







(Via Instapundit.)

Naturally not those chemical weapons

June 29, 2015






(Via Morning Jolt.)

Michigan v. EPA

June 29, 2015



Liars for “gun safety”

June 29, 2015







(Via Hot Air.)

Bypass the Supreme Court?

June 28, 2015

So, I saw this cross my Twitter feed:










ACLU, you are dead to me

June 27, 2015




(a) In general

(b) Exception



Okay, but what about discrimination? The ACLU opines:










Court rules against IRS in targeting case

June 27, 2015










Another university lists banned ideas

June 27, 2015


The same-sex marriage decision

June 27, 2015







Rule of law, RIP

June 25, 2015






Ban that old symbol of racism

June 24, 2015






UPDATE: Indeed.

FBI retracts bogus mass shooting study

June 23, 2015






Contempt of court

June 23, 2015








University of California lists banned ideas

June 23, 2015




The university stood by the use of the guides.







You’ll take my crowbar from my cold, dead hands

June 23, 2015


Why do bad things happen to good bureaucrats?

June 23, 2015







  1. (The title) First Latina appointment
  2. First latina appointment; diversity and inclusion
  3. Workforce that reflects the population
  4. Diversity
  5. Political connections
  6. Political connections
  7. Trite meaningless praise, plus diversity


Except that it did matter. Oops.




US now okay with negotiating with terrorists

June 23, 2015

It’s an official change in US government policy:




The mask comes off

January 28, 2015


That’s why incidents such as this are so instructive:





(Via PJ Tatler.)

Iran lies, Obama hides

December 10, 2014













Privacy protects anti-privacy

December 4, 2014





(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)


November 27, 2014


(Via Instapundit.)

A new IRS scandal

November 25, 2014


(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

Hagel sacked

November 24, 2014

Surprise, surprise:





UPDATE: This is really telling:




(Via Instapundit.)

L’etat, c’est moi

November 21, 2014


Barack Obama: Screw that!



Maryland buys environmentalist sermons

November 19, 2014

The Washington Post reports:





But then there’s this:




(Via Instapundit.)

Say it ain’t so!

November 19, 2014

What? Obama outright lied about Obamacare? Astonishing:










November 19, 2014

(Via Hot Air.)

“Naked power grab”

November 13, 2014








(Via Althouse.)


November 12, 2014

The NYT reports:




(Via Instapundit.)

Don’t you dare return a not guilty verdict

November 7, 2014

The latest incident in the Obama administration’s war on due process:


Princeton’s offenses:

  • Treating the accused as innocent until proven guilty.
  • Prohibiting double-jeopardy.
  • Informing the accused of the charges against him.
  • Allowing the accused to call witnesses.
  • Allowing the accused to have legal representation.





(Via Instapundit.)

Subpoena, schmubpoena

November 7, 2014



It’s almost like the IRS doesn’t want to find those emails.

(Previous post.)

The “I won” president

November 5, 2014

The prez speaks:



(Via Althouse.)

The costs of war, and avoiding war

November 5, 2014



There’s nothing pricier than entitlements.




November 4, 2014


Dithering kills

November 3, 2014

Fox News reports:




(Emphasis mine.)


Postman dumps Republican mail

November 3, 2014

The Blaze reports:




Of course it wasn’t partisan; it never is.

(Via Instapundit.)

Democrats against motherhood

November 1, 2014




NYT: Bush covered up WMD finds

November 1, 2014
















and, just to be totally clear:









An unintentional revelation

November 1, 2014


(Via Instapundit.)

Oh, only 180

October 31, 2014





(Via Ace.)

Smart diplomacy

October 29, 2014





And this:



And this:



And finally this:






Stupid [expletive] indeed.







October 29, 2014

The IRS is stealing people’s money with no justification:






These people are thieves, plain and simple.

(Via Hot Air.)

Robert Kennedy Jr.: imprison my opponents

September 23, 2014



Fisking the president

September 22, 2014













No religion condones the killing of innocents.
















I’m sure ISIS is shaking in fear of UN action.



So this is our strategy.



















Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades. . .










You keep using that word

September 17, 2014





(Via Instapundit.)

How we got here

September 12, 2014







Rationing kills

September 11, 2014

Yes, Virginia, health care rationing does kill people:





$#*! my president says

September 11, 2014








(Via Instapundit.)

Funny but sad

September 10, 2014

Jim Treacher:

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“ISIL who?”

(Via Instapundit.)