Victimizing students

Add this to the student loan debt debacle. In fact, it's another facet of that crime because the debt is partly a consequence of students buying these required textbooks with their loan money.

By the 812% (!) multiplier shown below, a required textbook that cost $25.00 in 1978 would cost just over $200.00 today. You can argue that today's textbooks are much better than they were back then, but c'mon.  Some fields, like biology, have been advancing dramatically, and those require frequent up-dating.  But plenty of courses in math, history, literature, art, foreign languages, and many other fields could still be taught just fine from 1978 textbooks, and nearly all from 2010 textbooks.

What's going on here is a constant introduction of new editions of textbooks to protect the flow of profits against what's become a very efficient used book market:  A new textbook has about two years before the selling of used copies kills its sales. Smarter students have figured out that the new $200 edition is almost the same as the previous edition they can buy on Amazon for $20 or even less, so that's what they do.  Web-based required assignments and materials, which require a new-book access code, are a common way publishers encourage students to buy the new edition.

Byron

RIP Charles Durning

"Greatest Generation," no doubt.  After winning a horrific two-front war that created American military cemeteries all over the world, the survivors only wanted to get home, build their families, and go to work -- and that's what they did. Their efforts built the legacy that we're busy pissing down the rathole of ever-growing unfunded entitlement spending and an explosive growth of do-everything government in general. 

We have selfishly saddled those who follow us, some of them just now being born, with massive crushing debt and a diminished future.  It's shameful. We cannot even claim ignorance, because any fool could see what was happening, is happening. Our legacy will be the many sacrifices our children and grandchildren will face to clean up the mess we are dumping on them.

Our generation, too, eventually will acquire a well-deserved nickname, but it won't be one to be proud of.

Merry Cliffmas to all,

Byron

national debt

This one's really fun:  What does the U.S. national debt look like?

See it here:  U.S. National Debt in $100 bills

Pretty impressive, but badly out of date because that was in 2009 when the debt was only about $11 trillion.

Instead of the approximately $11,000,000,000,000 pictured at the link above, the U.S. national debt is now, after 4 years of Obama and a spendthrift Congress, nearly $16,400,000,000,000.

See it here (refresh to watch it grow):   U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK

The growth rate of the debt averages about $3.84 billion per day, which is about $160 million per hour, or $2,670,000 per minute.

But, hey, it's OK, because a large and increasing chunk of it is borrowed!  And, anyway, it's not our problem -- it's for our kids and grandkids (and maybe the grandkids' kids) to deal with!  Legacy!

Merry Christmas!  Whoopee!

Byron

Violence and Mental Illness

Brahna Wilczynski forwards some thoughts (below) about mental illness and violent behavior.  As context, recall that when Pres. Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt in 1981, the shooter, John Hinckley, was expeditiously placed in St. Elizabeth's where I believe he resides to this day. The more difficult problem is how to deal with the mentally ill who are judged to have a propensity to violence, but who have so far broken no law and committed no crime.  The vagaries of psychiatric diagnosis are well known, and civil liberties advocates stand ready to seek court orders to have institutionalized mental patients released where possible.

Yet, a passerby was stabbed to death a few years ago on Central Avenue in the entertainment heart of Albuquerque, near the historic Kimo Theater, by a discharged mental patient who was living on the street and off his meds. The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary was considered strange by some who knew him -- but people have a right to be strange, and he apparently had done nothing that would have justified institutionalizing him or forcing him to undertake a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs.  What, exactly, could have been done differently, and under what authority? Not wishing to recapitulate anything resembling the Soviet mental health movement, we face a very sticky wicket here.

Byron

U.S. Congresswoman Gabby Gifford was shot less than two years ago in Tucson,  Arizona;  six others died.  Now, it’s an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut; twenty-five and six year-olds were shot to death. 

Once again the media rushes to link violence with mental illness.  The media seems to be reinforcing a common misunderstanding regarding mental illness and thereby further stigmatizing those afflicted with mental illness and their families.  In 2006, 60% of respondents in a national survey thought that all people with schizophrenia were likely to be violent.   This perception does not match up with some facts. 

     * A  study  in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  neighborhood found that mentally ill people were not                                                                                         
       necessarily more violent than the general population. 

     * Lack of mental health care increases the risk of violent behavior.

     *Most people with schizophrenia who took anti-psychotic medication as prescribed were less
       likely to be violent than those who did not. 

     * Drug abuse is a more likely cause of violent behavior than mental illness.  However, people                 
        diagnosed with schizophrenia and drug abuse are 5 times more likely to be violent than 
        schizophrenics who do not abuse drugs. 

As we grieve and search for answers to these massacres by mentally ill people, we must struggle with this question:  In a democratic society, which is of greater value,  individual civil liberties or public safety?

Various approaches have been argued in public debate. That the mentally ill should not have access to firearms seems to be universally accepted, but it becomes more difficult after that.  One proposal would force a person with schizophrenia to take medication as an out-patient against his/her will.  Another is long-term commitment/hospitalization for any mentally ill person who has demonstrated a potential for violence.  

However the  question of individual liberty vs. public safety is resolved, it is clear that any strategy for prevention must be multi-pronged; and it must include improving our mental health services for both children and adults. 

Read it and weep

After all the blather about guns, the genuine problem is illustrated here.  That said, the ACLU's concern is a valid one. There is no simple answer to deciding what would be "enough evidence" to justify the state institutionalizing or medicating someone against his will, when he has not yet committed a crime. The obvious intermediate step would be a restraining order restricting the individuals's movements and prohibiting him from possessing or being in control any lethal weapon -- but in this case the shooter's own mother failed to do that and ended up dead herself.

As the initial shock and furor recedes, most people are going to recognize that there are no easy answers to be found. If there were, we'd have found them long before now.  A determined killer will sometimes find a way; all that can be done then is to minimize the damage by stopping him at the earliest possible moment. Step #1 should be to invoke plain common sense and recognize that mass shootings are being enabled by the folly of the "gun-free zones."

Gun control follies

FRUITS OF BRITAIN’S GUN POLICY: Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade.
Related: BBC: Handgun crime ‘up’ despite ban. “A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned.”

(Above via Instapundit)

Unfortunately, actual empirical evidence on these matters, of which there is plenty, is the very last thing the anti-gun crowd is interested in.
The self-ordained "smart ones" operating, as usual, on pure symbolism and emotion. It should be embarrassing.

Notice that there has been little or no mention of the 2011 mass shooting in Norway where a fanatic used a gun to methodically murder 69 teenagers and seriously wound 55 more, over a period of an hour and a half.  He took his sweet time, and he did a damned thorough job. There are two things to stress about that event: (And the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, which was parallel in all important respects.)

(1)  It occurred in yet another idiotic "gun-free zone" -- AKA an identified, demarcated area that serves up victims as defenseless sitting ducks:  He was able to do what he did, and do it so methodically, because the law guaranteed that nobody else had access to a gun that could have been used to stop him.  The "gun-free zone" -- a triumph of emotion and idealist fantasy over rational thought -- may be the single stupidest idea that has ever occurred to the mind of man, bar none. In a rational world, perpetrators of "gun-free zones" would be prosecuted as accessories.

Mass shooters may be crazy, but they aren't irrational, as the equipping and planning that go into these attacks demonstrates. Imagine yourself as such a person, and that you have come to believe that a Golden Age of world peace and racial harmony depends on you going into a movie theater and shooting as many people as possible. Imagine that you have a choice between a theater that allows concealed carry and a theater that declares itself a "gun-free zone." Which would you choose as the place to carry out your mission?

Critics claim that there are few incidents of ordinary citizens using a gun to stop a mass shooter.  Yes, but there are few mass shootings to begin with. And there is no way to count the number of wannabe shooters who were deterred because there was no guaranteed "gun-free zone" available to them. Said another way, if we made all places of public assembly "gun-free zones," would we expect the number of shootings to go down, or to go up? If you think the number would go down, please go have your head examined.

(2)  Gun control laws in Norway are vastly more rigorous than anything that will ever see a glimmer of possible passage in the U.S.  The lesson there is entirely lost, of course, on the anti-gun lobby where glandular reactions substitute for thinking.

Ideally, we would be able to keep guns out of the hands of the deranged and mentally unstable, and a better job of doing that should be a priority demand. But in a free society there are necessarily limits to the controls that can be placed on someone who has, so far, committed no crime. As a result, these horrible events will never be entirely prevented. The obvious implication of that unfortunate fact, it seems to me, is that we must not -- and have no moral right to -- unnecessarily restrict the right of law-abiding individuals to protect themselves, their families, and other innocents. The "gun-free zone" idea is mindless and wrong on every score and at every level.

Byron

GOP follies

As Republicans ponder 2012 defeat, party’s philosophy hangs in the balance

Rant mode: On

Coulter is right, as usual.  It's past time for the GOP to get serious and kick the goober-pandering wack-jobs overboard.  The Tea Party's economic message has wide appeal, and it is compatible with and supportive of the less intrusive government agenda of the center-libertarians.  A synergistic coalition.  But it's all diluted, contradicted, and drowned out by the Back-to-the-Bible literalist ignoramuses who poison the whole campaign with their fundamentalist nonsense. That stuff belongs in the revival tents, far away from the national political arena.  Every recent GOP national campaign has been ruined by these people -- as the media joyfully focus for days on their every lunatic outburst -- and the problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

The Democrats have their own screwball wing on the far left, of course, but they get a pass or a cover-up from the media. The GOP has no such luxury. It's time to clean house and stop chasing the know-nothing vote.  Maybe the withdrawal of party funding from super-idiot Todd Akins in Missouri -- it took a rare form of reverse genius to not win that Senate seat from McCaskill, but Akins, who even looks like a nut, is gifted in that respect and was well up to the task -- is a sign of things to come, although I fear that's too much to hope for.

Many will disagree, but among the things I'd do if I could be King of the GOP for a day would be to (1) Explicitly recognize Roe v. Wade as a thoughtful, reasonable and defensible response to a very difficult issue; (2) Adopt Bill Clinton's position that the push on abortion should be to make it Safe, Legal, and Rare; (3) Advocate Bobby Jindal's proposal the birth control pills be sold OTC; and (4) Propose a study to see if there is any good reason why morning-after pills should not be sold in vending machines the same way condoms are. Not only do I think those are the correct policy positions, I think they'd attract many more votes from women and the young than they'd lose from the religious right.

Rant mode: Off

Byron

The price of folly

"Gun free zones" are premised on a fantasy.

People don't stop killers. People with guns do

Why don't we just "ban" rape and murder?  Why not "ban" crystal meth and crack cocaine?  Because we recognize such fantasy "bans" to be insultingly unserious.

But at least those "bans" could qualify as harmless symbolic acts, expressions of community outrage.

Gun-free zones that "ban" guns, by contrast, are also symbolic acts but ones that put innocent people in jeopardy.  No authority should have the right to do that.

Byron

Where is he?

Father of Marine jailed in Mexico for antique gun recounts extortion call from notorious prison...

This case is beyond outrageous.

Where the hell is Eric Holder, our Attorney General?  If Holder is too busy defending Black Panthers, etc., then why hasn't Obama picked up the phone and placed a call to the newly-elected President of Mexico?

What may be going on here is Mexico taking some revenge for Fast & Furious, the stupid Obama/Holder fiasco that got lots of Mexicans murdered with American guns.  In that case, the last thing either man wants to do is make a call to Mexico and end up having to answer questions about how the F&F investigation is progressing, and how many indictments have been handed down.

Or, alternatively, it may be that this poor guy's Commander-in-Chief simply does not care.

I don't know which is worse, or whether that even matters.

Byron

The Feeding Frenzy

Creating a monstrously expensive, ever-expanding legislative/regulatory boondoggle of the first order could not be easier:  Just set out a trough full of Other People's Money and then stand back.  ObamaCare is the perfect example.

Obamacare Jumps the Shark in its Premiere

Ha!  That's very funny.  What politicians actually want to figure out, of course, is how to get more time at the trough for the special interests that fund their campaigns.  How much will the chiropractors pay to get included under ObamaCare?  How much will the acupuncturists pony up?  The grief counselors?  The exercise consultants?  The herbal healers?  The hypno-therapists?  The line goes out the door and down the hall.

The roster of Healthcare Providers is suddenly endless, all willing to pay for the ObamaCare stamp of approval, guaranteeing access to the mother lode of taxpayer money as a matter of law, now and forever, amen.  Hallelujah!

The alternative, a genuine MARKET (gasp!) in health care, allowing services and products to be rationally priced, is anathema in Congress. Markets don't provide nearly enough opportunities for lucrative insider dealing, highly-paid lobbying jobs after you leave Congress, and myriad other forms of graft.

Byron