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Hanx! ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©

Roy Edroso once again confronts the banality* that is Glenn Reynolds:

ANNALS OF GLIBERTARIANISM PART 439,062.

The Perfesser approaches gun rights from the back end:

I HEARD NEAL BOORTZ holding forth on the Omaha mall shooting this morning on the way to work, and I realized I haven’t posted on it. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before. But it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free. There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.

Perhaps we need legislation. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

Whoahwhoahwhoah, hang on one second here. That’s quite stupid indeed, but in order truly to savor what Perfesser Bluetooth is trying to get away with in this rare paragraph-length disquisition, we need to keep the links intact. Here’s that post again:

I HEARD NEAL BOORTZ holding forth on the Omaha mall shooting this morning on the way to work, and I realized I haven’t posted on it. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before. But it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free. There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.

Yes indeed, Reynolds is backing up his latest more-guns-equals-less-crime piety by linking to a 1999 paper by John Lott, the Internet laughingstock and multiply-exposed fraud whose case Reynolds knows in great detail via the Great John Lott Controversy of 2002-’03, prominently featuring one Glenn Reynolds.
Here’s Tim Lambert with a contemporaneous wrapup:

John Lott’s unethical conduct

John Lott is embroiled in several controversial affairs:

* he almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data
* he presented results purporting to show that “more guns” led to “less crime” when those results were the product of coding errors
* he pretended to be a woman called “Mary Rosh” on the internet in order to praise his own research and accuse his critics of fraud.
* he probably was the person who anonymously accused Steve Levitt of being “rabidly antigun” [to Glenn Reynolds, as published in a National Review piece by Reynolds]

Above: John Lott (r)

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And other exploits as well. (The list becomes quite impressive as it unfolds over time). In 2006, Lott also sued Levitt, the author of Freakanomics, in a nuisance action alleging some theretofore-unimagined variety of academic defamation (i.e., the harm caused to an academic when another academic criticizes him publicly). The case is ongoing.

Here’s Lott’s latest book. Some of the five-star reviewers seem to be right-wing bloggers of note (hi, XLRQ!), while for all anyone knows, some may be Lott himself, resuming his practice of running up his Amazon and Barnes and Noble ratings by posting reviews under false names.

…And posting negative reviews of other people’s books using the same technique. Via Tim Lambert once again, here’s Lott, incognito, reviewing a book by colleague Gary Kleck:

Targeting Guns
by Gary Kleck

NOT ANYWHERE AS GOOD AS LOTT, June 13, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Philadelphia, PA

[…]

As to the previous review that Kleck somehow alone in understooding that higher crime rates can cause increased gun ownership, my advice is that he actually read Lott and see how one is supposed to take this into account correctly. By the way, once one does this and takes into account the other factors that influence crime, Lott is correct: More Guns mean Less Crime.

Personally, I also don’t understand Kleck’s criticizisms of Lott’s work. In a sentence he guesses that something else might exist which could explain away why concealed handgun laws reduce crime, but then he fails to even hazard what else should be accounted for.

Plus, just for laughs before we move on, here’s Roger Schlafly of the Conservapedia Schlaflys, taking a break from scrubbing the Wikipedia entries on his family and their projects by helping to scrub Lott’s entry, circa three weeks ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

The CIA’s destroyed interrogation videos, what the Dems knew, and when

• The CIA’s destruction of secret torture videos proves once and for all that the Democrats are pro-torture.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Just an added note: this is a pretty neat little act of contortion on Stalkin’ Malkin’s part. She begins by arguing that the New York Times has conspired to influence the torture debate by publishing articles demonstrating how the government has concealed its torture program (and yes, writing those words is extraordinarily depressing). She then wags her finger at the DEMONKKKrats who want to explicitly ban practices such as waterboarding — practices that, by any sane definition, are torture. Then she pulls off her coup de grâce: She flips the entire argument around and blames the Democrats for not doing enough to hold the CIA accountable for destroying evidence of torture! It’s an impressive feat, especially when you consider that Michelle and pals have already transformed down-is-the-new-up-ism into an art form. Well played.

Needless to say, St. Peggy thinks that St. Mitt’s speech was even better than getting a Grey Goose martini buzz on while listening to the fifty thousand shrieking angelic voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Little Drummer Boy” accompanied by what sounds like the Xavier Cougat Orchestra playing Ravel’s “Bolero.” Or while listening to Donny and Marie singing “Make the World Go Away.”

Which reminds Peggy of something she’s been meaning to say for a long time:

I’d rather be governed by Donny and Marie than the Washington establishment.

As usual Peggy can’t write a column without saying something that makes her sound like some drunk you get stuck sitting next to on an 11-hour flight.

Nor could she write a column on someone with a Reaganesque pompadour without the obligatory swoon:

Who is that handsome man saying those nice things?

Nor without writing a sentence that makes absolutely no sense:

His text was warmly cool.

And I suppose you could say that Peggy’s writing style is intelligently moronic. Perhaps it could be called obtusely transparent. No, soberly intoxicated is the phrase I was searching for.

Since the most important thing in any kind of crisis is targeting the sufferers and making sure that none of them escapes the full penalty of the personal bad decisions that, ipso facto, lie at the root of the crisis — such as the Frost family and their decision to injure their children in a car accident — ol’ Michelle has noticed the housing market collapsing, and has gotten busy stomping on fingers:

Hillary/Bushcare for Housing: “Comprehensive work out plan;” Update: How about the Suck It Up plan?
By Michelle Malkin
December 6, 2007 10:09 AM

[…]

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is blubbering platitudes about home ownership and the American Dream. Tell that to all the responsible taxpayers who chose not to take on risky subprime mortgages and who chose not to overextend themselves and who aren’t getting any breaks or rewards.

Platitudes like these, that is. And there’s been plenty of wise counsel along the way.

Via TPM Café , we find that the Freepers have something to say about the whole thing as well:

It is time for the greedy and the stupid to suffer. I’ll be right their to cash them out of their debt and take their property for a HUGE discount.

Bankruptcy laws were changed just on time!

Exactly. Now people will have to pay what they owe.

I have a friend that did just that when property prices collapsed in the late 80’s here in Austin. Bought Condo’s with his credit cards.

He’s a rich man.

AS they say in the stock market, Bulls get fat, bears get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

And naturally, it doesn’t get better from there:
Read the rest of this entry »

Above: Has a bucket

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Just how much of an idiot do you need to have made of yourself to merit a dressing down from one of the Sadly’s favorite whipping boys, Warner Todd Huston?

Up until now, that’s been a rhetorical question, mostly because no one thought that level of idiocy was even possible — it’s a mythical quantity of idiocy, something like absolute zero Kelvin. We just all pretty much assumed that, although we could theorize about what such idiocy might look like, we’d never actually see it.

Alas, we have once again misunderestimated David Horowitz.

Upcoming: ‘The Nude Bomb’

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If you haven’t heard by now, the right-wing blogosphere is all in a tizzy over the fact that some of the questions in the last Republican Youtube debate have come from supporters of various Democratic candidates. The shrieks of rage have been growing ever louder, until, as is usual in these particular situations, it becomes a self-feeding cycle of hate, a ragegasm that only culminates when the circling jackals have found just the target to latch onto. Last time around, it was twelve year old Graeme Frost. This time, it appears as though the preferred game was setting up to be the gay General, Keith Kerr, who had the temerity to ask tough questions about the Republican party and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. (Incidentally, did you ever notice how their preferred targets always seem to be the more vulnerable members of society? You know, people like little kids and hated sexual minorities. Can’t help but wonder if that has anything to do with why their ilk is always fighting the enemy over here, instead of over there – vulnerable domestic “enemies” don’t shoot back the way real live enemy forces do.)

Horowitz received an unsolicited email claiming that Kerr was “not a real General”, and apparently proceeded to publish it on his website without even the most rudimentary fact-checking. This was all it took for the carrion beetles of the Internet, the Freepers, to spring into action, trying to track down Kerr’s home phone number, address — anything at all they could find to try to do to this serviceman what they did to Graeme Frost the last time around (remember, the personal information on Frost was dug up in the first place by a Freeper goon).

The jackals were circling, waiting for the signal from a leader to pounce upon this Not Real General, when out comes the clarion call of reason from — wait. From Warner Todd Huston? Seriously?

Seriously.

A case where MSM bias… ISN’T

[…]

Now, here is the thing folks. Kerr is rightfully called a general despite that his official Federal rank was never higher than a Colonel. It is true that he was not a General in the U.S. Army, it is true that his rank of general is only a State rank, and it might be true that he cannot officially wear his state rank of general outside the state of California. But, again, he is still a general.

[…]

Now, outrage is a good and necessary thing. It helps us direct and marshal our forces to resist an enemy. But when we use our outrage it must be for real and legitimate reasons lest we become like our enemy. So, I would like to warn everyone that calling Keith Kerr a colonel only makes us look small and not very informed. There is no conspiracy here. Let this one go.

Will a shot across the bow from one of their own be enough to call off the jackals? [Gavin adds: Or contrarily, will a word to the wise put the flying monkeys in the catbird seat?] Once they’ve got a victim in their sights, they can be difficult to distract, even with an extra large bag of Cheetos, so it’s too soon to say. Anyone want to make a wager on just how idiotic they’re willing to look in pursuit of a target?

Hey, fellow SadlyNauts!

I’m going back to my beloved Chicago for the weekend, so I will have nothing to say until Monday. (But oh, Monday! What an exciting special secret announcement I will have for you all then! Hint: it involves me trying to think of things that will make Michelle Malkin go all cross-eyed with rage.) However, I feel I should leave you with something utterly inconsequential so that while I’m gone, you will remember me, and think “Oh, right, that’s the guy who I don’t like very much.”

As some of you may know, in my other life, the one where I don’t spend most of my time laughing at James Lileks’ bald spot, I am a professional freelance writer, specializing in film and music criticism. And because I know that you, the loyal S,N! readers, will care about this so goddamn much, I am presenting you with a sneak preview of my picks for the top ten albums of 2007, which will be appearing later this year in expanded form in a number of magazines you won’t read.

1. Earthless, Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky

The best metal album of the year? The best rock music of the year. A criminally underheard San Diego doom outfit delivers three songs of absolutely stunning raw rock ‘n’ roll power and never lets up.

2. UGK, UGK (Underground Kingz)

Proving conventional wisdom wrong, the Texas-based duo makes a barn-burner of a comeback with a rap double album that doesn’t fall apart. Sadly, with Pimp C’s death, probably the last UGK record.

3. M.I.A., Kala

With the Hater Brigade salivating to see her fall, M.I.A. bucks the sophomore slump with a whirling postmodern blend of sounds, styles and beats, bringing fun back to pop music along with smarts.
Read the rest of this entry »

Democrats Desperately Seeking Surrender
—Ace

It’s what they do. It’s all they do. And they absolutely will not stop until the victory is dead.

Democrats! Democrats! Thy hateful name is as a blister upon the tongue! In the very hour of this, our hard-waged victory in Iraq, the honor of America is fouled, is begrimed, the flag of our fathers is tramped through mud and offal, by the plot of military surrender — an order to lay down arms and submit to the enemy — hatched by the Democrat parasite within. O! white flags, O! grim and deadly marches, as our bravest sons and daughters are interred bodily in prison camps, their lives to be forfeit at the pleasure of the cruel Musselman. This, my readers, is the thunderous outrage of military surrender, which word I use in careful measure. Or strictly, I guess I mean ‘a disputed claim that the Pentagon will have to lay off a number of non-crucial civilian DoD employees, if Bush carries through on his threat to veto the Defense Appropriations Bill.’*

…As well he should! God-damn those Democrats and their making-the-President-veto-things! The physical destruction of the troops may already have begun — crematoria may already blacken the Iraqi sky with the horror of 150,000 American mothers, as the wholesale, mechanized slaughter of our naked, helpless troops intensifies toward total annihilation, and you-know-what, and so on. [coughs]

Uh, I refer the reader to the ever-reliable Mr. Jules Crittenden — employed through some affirmative-action program for grandiloquent crackpots at the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald — who has chosen to misunderstand this story in order to inflame his stupid-headed readers in a way congenial to my own such purpose. Crittenden carries with him the smell of Kipling and roasting pork, and when drunk, sings ‘Rise O Voices of Rhodesia.’ Though not yet an old man, an astringency of spite has consumed his recent years. When he blows his top, the dog and cat run under the couch. I would be pleased to call him friend if I felt better about leaving my apartment when people are watching. We would talk of the depravity of liberalism and maybe smoke cigars or play poker at a baize-covered table. I would offer him a beer and he would say “Yes, by damn, I want one,” and then we will be drinking some beers there.

But I suppose it’s working. General Gates, fearful of Harry Reid’s Sith powers, is in fact withdrawing troops.

When they said there would be a surge, I went yay. When they said the surge was peaking, I went super-yay. By thunder, what be this post-peak perfidy toward decrease, toward abatement? Is not a surge a thing forever? ‘Tours of duty,’ the criminals whine. Blame is due.

Dance for my pleasure, thou lazies!

And Gallup finds that four in ten Americans now say the surge is working, up from 22% in July.

Or up five whole percent since mid-September. Mortification has stopped me from proclaiming new, historic Wall Street booms based on Yahoo graphs of a single day’s spike of trading, but the project carries on in spirit. Did you know that the price of gold is falling precipitously, according to market data from 1980 to the present? In the 1920s, a quart of milk cost five cents, proving that we are all, in these Bush years, as Jazz-age millionaires.

Bonus comment:

Polls, along with the MSM spinning and lying by omission, are tools for minority leftist elites to browbeat the majority into thinking that their traditional beliefs have become marginalized.

Agreed, and the other way around too. God, I hate the leftists with their hate. The weak and artificial minority of them is as a human tide unto the few who can see, thronged as we are among their eyeless multitudes with their goddamned rarefied elitism.

I mock their mocking of me.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

* Correction: Not even the appropriations bill, but the annual ’emergency’ supplemental, for unforeseen expenses such as the surprise, off-budget $196 billion that no one predicted would be needed in 2008 to fund the normally cost-free ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Hanx! md 20/400]

Ugh:

Harried homeowners seeking mortgage relief from a new Bush administration hotline Thursday had to contend with a bit of temporary misdirection from the president himself.

As he announced his plan to ease the mortgage crisis for consumers, President Bush accidentally gave out the wrong phone number for the new “Hope Now Hotline” set up by his administration.

Wait. It does indeed get better:

UPDATE: Anyone who dialed 1-800-995-HOPE did not reach the mortgage hotline but instead contacted the Freedom Christian Academy — a Texas-based group that provides Christian education home schooling material.

Next week, Bush will give out his administration’s hotline to help needy families pay their heating bills: 1-800-JEEEEEEE-SUS-AAAAAH!

(via)

They’re Here [Jonah Goldberg]

The final, real, copies of the book were just dropped off on my doorstep. I guess there’s no turning back now.

12/05 10:14 AM

There was one last-minute change of title:

But Jonah is preparing to face a brand-new phase of his career:

As the author of a respected best-seller on American politics:

[Hanx! Instaputz; cover art hiked from Grace Nearing and Heywood J.]

Bradrocket adds: OMGOMGOMGOMG HE FINALLY FINISHED IT!!! I hope “Heroes and Villains” makes the final cut, not to mention the wacky-ass thing where he wore a fire helmet in the studio!!