Madonna keeps guns, and machine guns, in her act following Colorado

Defending the free speech of machine guns, two days after the Colorado shootings, is pretty tacky. Read the rest of this post...

GOP Senator: 100-round semi-automatic assault rifles is a freedom guaranteed in the Constitution

Here's the "hunting rifle" in use, via a YouTube video. Some hunting rifle.



Oh, and this "hunting rifle" was first built for the US military.  One assumes, to hunt bunny rabbits.

Via Raw Story, Tea Party favorite Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) enlightens us about the constitutional right to hunt with 100 round semi-automatic assault rifles:

“The left always uses the term ‘assault rifle,’ and they’re really talking about semi-automatic weapons that are used in hunting,” Johnson explained. “That’s what happens in Wisconsin. These are rifles that are used in hunting. Just the fact of the matter is this is really not an issue of guns. This is about sick people doing things you simply can’t prevent. It’s really an issue of freedom.”

“Does something that would limit magazines that can carry 100 rounds, would that infringe on the constitutional right?” Wallace wondered.

“I believe so,” Johnson insisted. “There are magazines — 30-round magazines — that are just common all over the place. You simply can’t keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals that want to do harm.”

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Paris blogging: Le Jardin de Luxembourg

Built by Marie de Medicis starting in 1611, the Luxembourg Gardens now house a wonderfully large public park and the French Senate. It also happens to be about two blocks from Chris and Joelle's place, so it's a nice place to walk around if you have nothing else to do.

Sunday was such a day.

Petanque is a popular game with men in France (one gets the sense that it's more popular with working class men), and it's fun - I played it once in Mali, of all places.  None of my friends play it. It's hard to miss the Petanque fields in the Jardin de Luxembourg.  The people watching the game are almost as much fun to watch as the players.

Another popular staple is in the center of the park - a big fountain where children push little sailboats back and forth, and chase the ducks, in this case an adorable duckling.

Another neat staple in the park around the mini horses for kids to ride.  This time around, it was kind of odd - the horses were all tied together, by themselves, in the middle of the park.  So, I started petting them.  Soon, others saw what I was doing and we got a nice little crowd of parents and kids petting the horses.  Only in Europe would no one worry about a lawsuit.

The horses were beautiful, especially as the sun started going down.

The other big thing to do in the garden is sit and people watch, or read.

I love the way the French manicure tress.

As you can see, it's quite a large garden.  One word of warning, stay on the pebble pathways, and not on the grass - it's a no-no and the cops will yell at you.

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Hansen on 3°C: Quarter to half of species on earth may die from global warming

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

I promised in this post to write about James Hansen's new paper "The New Climate Dice" (pdf) — which has been making the rounds (for example, here and here).

Hansen is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and is a lead — if not "the" lead — American voice on the dangers of impending climate change.

You really should read his paper. And yes, it has started, the climate catastrophe.

How can you tell we're passing the tipping point on climate change? The climate rubes in Texas have been switching from eager denial to eager seekage of Federal dollars to offset the disaster they caused. Watch as they double up on last year's request for Federal aid. Watch as they duke it out for control of not-enough water.

Later this week I'll quote from Bill McKibben's piece on the same subject. McKibben has called it "the most important thing I've written in many years."

Now Hansen, truly one of the bigs in this field. His new paper begins (my emphasis and paragraphing throughout):

"Climate dice", describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively "loaded" in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming.

Not just "global warming" — "rapid global warming." It's coming fast.

Let's pause. "Loaded dice" is not just a general metaphor. Hansen is saying something very specific.

The "chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology" (i.e., climate norms) refers to the odds of swings, or deviations, from the norm.

In other words, it's not statistically significant that one summer is hot, another cooler, another very hot, and so on — as long as the swings don't stray too far from the norms in too many cases.

Once wide swings from the norm become regular, something else is going on — the "norms" are being redefined. His metaphor for that is unloaded dice versus loaded dice — dice with weights in them that force certain numbers to come up far more often that statistics would dictate.

Note: Not more often; far more often — often enough that crooked gamblers can count on making money on the weighted outcomes. In other words, there's now a new norm.

He continues, saying what I just said, but in math-prettier language:

The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased.

An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology. [See below for definition.]

This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth's surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area.

We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were "caused" by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing climate change.

That's his first paragraph, his "executive summary." (See why I break it out for you? It's a paper, not a blog post.)

By the way, a "standard deviation" is a statistical measure of how much the data normally varies over a period of time. Three standard deviations is a lot of variance from what would normally occur.

The rest of his piece supports his conclusion. He adds:

The greatest barrier to public recognition of human-made climate change is the natural variability of climate. How can a person discern long-term climate change, given the notorious variability of local weather and climate from day to day and year to year?

This question assumes great practical importance, because of the need for the public to appreciate the significance of human-made global warming.

Actions to stem emissions of the gases that cause global warming are unlikely to approach what is needed until the public perceives that human-made climate change is underway and will have unacceptable consequences if effective actions are not taken to slow the climate change.

Early recognition of climate change is critical. Stabilizing climate with conditions resembling those of the Holocene, the world in which civilization developed, can only be achieved if rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions begins soon (1).

A perfectly reasonable problem — Assuming George "It's just summertime" Will is an honest questioner, how does one respond? Hansen's piece has the answer.

That takes you through his first three paragraphs. The rest is explanation and verification — the math et al. A great read, and not all that long (17 pp). I do recommend it.

For example, he talks about the importance of summertime, "the season when most biological productivity occurs." Hadn't thought of that, but it's true.

Then he lets loose with this whooper towards the end:

Although species migrate to stay within climate zones in which they can survive, continued climate shift at the rate of the past three decades is expected to take an enormous toll on planetary life. If global warming approaches 3°C by the end of the century, it is estimated that 21-52% of the species on Earth will be committed to extinction.

The piece is loaded with great charts (and fun statistics). I want to tease you with this graphic. Obviously the whole world isn't undergoing these anomalies, and the parts that are, are undergoing different anomalies than others.

But this caught my eye (ahem, Texas) from Fig 8 (click to big):

Fig. 8 (part). Jun-Jul-Aug and Dec-Jan-Feb temperature anomalies (°C) for area shown on the right.

Two standard deviations above the norm in 2011. And notice the trend; there's clearly more where that came from (and again, less water where that came from as well).

I'm willing to bet that the eagerly fooled in Texas (technical term: "Daddy-seeking climate rubes") will want us to pay for their mistake in following David Koch to the cleaners.

I'm also willing to let Texas secede ... retroactively. But maybe that's just me.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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GOP former state Senator blames victims for Aurora shooting

This is really unbelievable.

This guy, a former state senator from Arizona, wants to know why no one charged the gunman, with his four weapons shooting wildly.  Uh, because they were running for their lives?  He then invokes the famed Flight 93 from September 11.  Yeah, those guys on the plane were heroes, but they also had no way to escape other than charging the terrorist pilots.  In this case, the easiest escape, the safest escape, was the "Exit" door.

Then he trots out the old, they could have stopped it if they all had guns, canard.

Yeah, I suppose 500 people in a smokey movie theater could have opened fire at once.  That would have been interesting.  Hey, if the patrons simply had portable nukes they could have stopped the attack too.

Oh yeah...

Is this what gun nuts now believe, that whenever there's a crime we should all run at the gunman rather than get our butts out of there?  I suspect the police, who are actually experts on this kind of thing, would beg to differ.

Oh, and he's a Republican and a gun nut, of course. From ThinkProgress:

Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post: Romney lying about Obama

Lying for the Lord (google it). From the Washington Post's face checker:

In other words, this is an argument that Democrats have been making for decades, one that Republicans have every right to reject. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, understood fully that Obama was talking about roads and still thought his logic was faulty.

Romney, however, descends into silly season when he extrapolates Obama’s quote and says that means Obama believes Steve Jobs did not build Apple Computers.

Here’s what Obama said when Jobs passed away earlier this year: “By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the Internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.”

That sounds like Obama believes that Jobs really did build his company. He did not mention the roads to Cupertino.

The Pinocchio Test

Obama certainly could take from lessons from Warren or Roosevelt on how to frame this argument in a way that is less susceptible for quote-snipping. And Romney certainly could answer Obama’s argument by engaging in a serious discussion about whether the wealthy should pay much more in taxes as a matter of social good and equity. That would be grounds for an elevated, interesting and important debate.

But instead, by focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different — and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous. That’s not very original at all.

Three Pinocchios

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Why aren't we focused on the guns?

This morning I'd like to share a guest post about the Aurora shooting from Andrew Gumbel, who is not only the husband of AMERICAblog contributor and friend Naomi Seligman, but who also worked for more than twenty years as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian and the Independent.

Of particular interest to the Aurora shooting, Andrew has a new book out, "Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed--and Why It Still Matters." In the book he looks at law enforcement's actual success in preventing this kind of mass violence, and more generally, at the culture of violence, and guns, in America. (Here's a video of Andrew summarizing the book.)

For that reason, we though it might be interesting to have Andrew's perspective on the recent mass shooting in Colorado.  Here's Andrew's post:

Samuel Fuller, the maverick film director who served as an infantryman in World War II, once pointed out that there was no adequate way to convey the horrors of war to a movie audience, short of opening fire on the audience (seriously).

In "A Third Face," his fast-talking, no-nonsense memoir of "writing, fighting and filmmaking," Samuel Fuller bluntly observes that "there's no way you can portray war realistically, not in a movie or a book." In order to convey "the idea of real combat" to movie audiences, he says, "you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen."

But, he added acerbically: “The casualties in the theater would be bad for business.”

His throwaway line has now become stark reality – America’s capacity for generating real horror outstripping, once again, the imaginations of our poets and novelists and film-makers.

Just how bad for business will the Aurora shootings be? Will anyone now be able to sit in a darkened movie theater, defenseless and alone, and feel truly comfortable?

We will hear a lot of rash generalizations and overhasty conclusions over the coming hours and days, and no doubt one of them will be that this is the end of the road for the movies. They were the quintessential popular entertainment of the 20^th century, but now they are over; we’ll all have to stay home with our TVs and video games and streaming devices and stick our own popcorn in the microwave.

I doubt the consequences will be that extreme, or that rapid, but I do think that going to the multiplex will never be the same again – just as air travel has not been the same since 9/11. Business is bound to drop off, at least in the short term, and we’re bound to see some sort of beefed up security – whether that takes the form of metal detectors at the box-office turnstile, or some other deterrent.

That will add to what is already a long list of reasons why people no longer feel inclined to go to the movies – the crappy parade of comic-book adaptations, the expensive concessions, and, yes, the increasing array and quality of home-entertainment options.

We can also expect the movies themselves to be blamed for what happened. Hollywood, and the entertainment industry more generally, is a popular horse to flog whenever a mass shooting occurs – if only because that skirts the need to talk about the real central issue here, which is the alarming ease with which disturbed individuals can gain access to firearms and explosives.

The Columbine shootings were blamed on Marilyn Manson and video games, if not also The Basketball Diaries and Natural Born Killers. In the first hours of the Aurora coverage, people have already drawn comparisons with the gas mask apparently worn by James Holmes, the man named as the perpetrator, and the mask donned by Bane, the villain of The Dark Knight Rises. Now it may be – it’s way too soon to know – that Holmes was inspired by the comic-book character in some way; but that’s a very different issue from blaming the attack on the filmmakers, which I confidently predict will happen, if it has not happened already.

Why aren’t we focused instead on the guns? Even in an age of counterterrorism and Homeland Security, almost nobody wants to talk about the single biggest threat to our safety and well-being, which is the proliferation of firearms and explosives in the general population.

People like to cite the 2^nd Amendment, or fall back on a more visceral notion of American freedom, to justify the status quo. But the fact remains that without this country’s ludicrous gun laws and even more ludicrous enforcement mechanisms, tens of thousands of shooting incidents each year could be mitigated or avoided.

There seems to be a touching, almost naïve, belief that the vast majority of gun owners are not inclined to violence and would never do harm to their fellow countrymen. But that belief is challenged at every turn by stubborn reality. Without this country’s gun culture, there would have been no Oklahoma City bombing – a subject I know well because I just wrote a book about it. There would have been no Columbine, or Virginia Tech, and Gabby Giffords would still be an active member of Congress.

And yet the gun lobby rides triumphant and nothing ever changes. It’s hard to generate a debate without the topic boomeranging on itself, with pundits and lawmakers advocating more guns and conceal-carry permits so the self-appointed “good” Americans can take out the “bad” ones, based on their own split-second judgment.

How did that work out for Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman?

One of my favorite Sam Fuller movies is Shock Corridor, an eccentric indie flick from the 1960s in which America is reimagined as a lunatic asylum. Watching the news from Aurora, it’s clear that reality is, once again, proving just as strange as fiction.

Read the rest of this post...

Romney benefactor Sheldon Adelson and the Chinese mob

We've seen reports like this before (go here and read the paragraph starting "These days, Adelson's LVS").

But this one is quite recent, and includes additional documentation. From Think Progress (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

Things are getting awkward for Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who pledged to spend a “limitless” amount of money to get Mitt Romney elected.

Adelson’s latest woes stem from business practices surrounding his lucrative casino in Macau, the only Chinese city with legalized gambling.

The Macau operation has long been under scrutiny but a new in-depth investigation from ProPublica and PBS focused on allegations of improper, and perhaps in some cases illegal, business dealings by Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company in China.

While focusing on the possibility that Sands violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with a $700,000 payment to a Chinese associate, PBS also released documents that bolstered accusations of business ties between Adelson’s shop and Chinese organized crime figures.

The PBS report is here. There's more in the Think Progress article.

As you read, note that (a) the alleged ties are supported by documents; (b) tens of millions changed hands; (c) the men named are known to the U.S. government as Chinese mobsters; and (d) no one appears to be contesting the relationship.

PBS, first on the role of "junkets" in China:

William Weidner, president of Las Vegas Sands from 1995 to 2009, said he understood from the beginning that opening casinos in Macau meant dealing with “junkets” — companies that arrange gambling trips for high rollers.

Gambling is illegal in mainland China, as is the transfer of large sums of money to Macau. The junkets solve those problems, providing billions of dollars in credit to gamblers. When necessary, they [also] collect gambling debts, a critical function since China’s courts are not permitted to force losers to pay up.

Weidner said junkets are a natural result of China’s controls on the movement of money out of the country, channeling as much as $3 billion a month from the mainland to Macau.

“To Westerners, the junkets mean money laundering equated with organized crime or drugs,” he said. “In China where money is controlled, it’s part of doing business.”
Weidner resigned from the company after a bitter dispute with Adelson.

Now information on the ties between the Sands organization in Las Vegas and men with known mob ties. Note that "triad" is the term for "Chinese organized crime mob" according to PBS:

Nevada officials are now poring over records of transactions between junkets, Las Vegas Sands and other casinos licensed by the state, people familiar with the inquiry say. Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.

Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show. Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.

Another document says that a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary did business with Charles Heung, a well-known Hong Kong film producer who was identified as an office holder in the Sun Yee On triad in the same 1992 Senate report. Heung, who has repeatedly denied any involvement in organized crime, did not return phone calls.

No one, including the Sands, is commenting, but the documents and money transfers are factual.

Sheldon Adelson runs a casino in a town (Las Vegas) that forbids doing business with organized crime. Sheldon Adelson is a making a good deal of money from deals in China that have raised serious questions about what, if any, role organized crime may have played in them.  And Sheldon Adelson's money is helping Mitt Romney run for president.

For more on Adelson, his cash cow in Macao, and his problems with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, click here.

Stay tuned to this investigation. Remember, there are two — violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and violations of Nevada's anti-mobster laws.

This will be another interesting test of Rule of Law for those in the Big Boy Club.

Tick tick tick.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius Read the rest of this post...

Is it easier in America to buy a gun than French cheese?

Yes.  But.

The following graphic has been making its way around the Internet this weekend.

I was intrigued, but suspicious. I don't like to send things around, or post them on the blog, if something doesn't smell right (no pun intended, as we are talking about wonderfully stinky French cheese). So I did a little digging, and here's what I found.

The graphic is kinda right.

J'accuse!

It seems that, of all things, an outbreak of Typhoid in Canada in the early 1940s was linked to Cheddar cheese made from raw milk (call her, Typhoid Elsie). Fast forward to 1950, and the FDA decides to do something about the dangers of stinky French cheese, and bans the sale of any imported cheese from raw milk that is not aged for a minimum of 60 days (a ban on domestically-produced cheese was, reportedly, instituted a few years before that).  The thinking was/is that the curing process kills the bacteria (and recent research suggests that even that may not always work).

And so began America's cheese panic.

So, the cheeses in the graphic are not banned per se.  They're only banned if they're made with raw milk that hasn't been aged a minimum of 60 days.  And if they're made with pasteurized milk, they're fine.  Thus, newer French Brie cheese made with pasteurized milk can be sold in the US (even though it's reportedly less tasty than the "real" French version - and part of the lost flavor of some French cheeses comes from the fact that their peak flavor comes at a time "less" than 60 days).  Sadly, there's a section of the site I link that appears to note some exceptions to the rule, but the section isn't written in complete sentences, so it makes no sense.  So I did some more research...

What I found was that there seems to be another restriction, beyond the 60 day rule. This from an article in 2005:

According to John Sheehan of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in the 1980s both countries agreed that all soft cheeses from France would be made from pasteurized milk in plants certified by the French government. This followed the detection of the harmful listeria bacteria in some French Brie.

2005 was around the same time that the FDA cracked down on French cheese entering the US - previously they apparently had overlooked some of the "illegal" cheeses. Now they were cracking down even on some cheese aged over 60 days - possibly for legit reasons, possibly as retaliation for a trade dispute.

And there's talk of banning raw milk cheese all together:

But in recent months, two recalls involving e. coli in raw-milk cheese have brought that law into question: in November, at Bravo Farms, near Fresno, then in December, at Sally Jackson Cheese, in Washington State.

David Acheson, a former associate commissioner for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, says laboratory tests have suggested that e.coli O157, and possibly other microbes, as well, can survive the 60-day aging process.

“There’s real concern that the 60 days isn’t long enough,” he says.

On average, there are about 40 reported cases a year of people getting sick from raw-milk cheese, nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control. During a 15-year period between 1993 and 2008, two people died from those illnesses.

That's a small fraction of the outbreaks that have been traced back to ground beef, for example, and the number has stayed fairly constant. Still, the FDA says raw-milk cheese is a growing concern.

Two people died over fifteen years from eating raw milk cheese.  Significantly more died over that period from guns, about 450,000 people (that includes suicides, but hey, we don't let people intentionally kill themselves by eating French cheese, so why allow guns?).

In the end, I couldn't confirm that any of the cheeses listed in the graphic above are actually "banned" in the US, because there are versions of them - with pasteurized milk or aged over 60 days - that are permitted for several of them (I didn't check them all).  The graphic indicates, for example, that French roquefort (i.e., blue cheese) is not permitted into the US.  That's not true.  You can buy the French "President" brand blue cheese in the US - I  have.  The same goes for the graphic's mention of Camembert.  Obviously, the American versions are either pasteurized or aged over 60-days.

Now, the graphic would be correct if it got a little more specific and, say, added an asterisk noting that the original, "true," raw-milk-aged-under-60-day versions of these French cheeses are banned in the US.  Try this:

And that's our food science lesson for the day.  At least this explains why I have such a hard time finding a good tangy French chèvre at the market in the states. Read the rest of this post...