James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

Sigh...

I wonder where they got that 95% figure? And when you say "cut off weapon sales", do you mean illegal sales of illegal weapons, or a more draconian ban?

One of the things I got drummed into my head working as a program manager at the health department, working with county and tribal health councils all over the state, is that if you really want to solve a problem, your strategy needs to be based on evidence, not on emotion or gut hunches. Passion is good, but if it isn't channeled into informed action rather than impulsive flailing, it's ineffective. There are no data showing that banning guns actually reduces gun crime, no matter how appealing it is intuitively.

One of the points reported over and over is that the drug gangs have more firepower than the Mexican police and military trying to estore order, and that the gangs are using machine guns, grenades, and other military weapons. They aren't getting those from any legal source in the U.S., and people who are selling illegal weapons to illegal buyers won't be stopped by further restrictions on legal sales of legal guns to legal buyers.

Part of what we need to do is to identify the people selling the guns to the gangs, whichever side of the border they're on, and lock them up - I believe life without parole would be appropriate. I'd also favor btrengthening sentencing enhancements for use of a gun (or other weapon) in any crime, and establishing very strict penalties for buyers as well as sellers in illegal gun sales. It just doesn't make sense to penalize the people who are obeying the law for the actions of those who aren't and don't choose to comply with the penalties.

Even if you could ensure that starting tomorrow not one legal gun sale took place anywhere in the U.S., the illegal sales would go on; there are tens of millions of guns already in circulation in this country.

The solution is not to try to prevent anyone having the power to commit a crime with a gun. That is impossible. The solution is to hold anyone who commits a crime involving a gun strictly accountable - illegally selling them, illegally buying them, or using them in crimes against others.

Mexico has much more restrictive gun laws than most of the U.S. The net effect of that is that the only people with guns are the government and the criminals who aren't concerned with those laws. The story is the same in Britain, and U.S. jurisdictions that have passed the most restrictive gun laws have also seen their rates of gun crimes climb dramatically. Predators prefer defenseless victims. As a further demonstration of that, note that when someone goes on a mass murder spree in the U.S., they generally pick a place to do it where it's illegal to carry a gun, so they know that unless there's a criminal among their victims, they won't have to worry about anyone carrying a concealed gun shooting back.

The idea of demand reduction makes the most sense - I agree with you on that, Will; if we legalized and regulated the drugs that are fueling the gangs' profits, we'd take away their biggest source of power.

And that's all I'm going to say on this. I'm done. In the previous discussion, no one came up with any facts to show that banning gun ownership makes communities safer; all people could do was to keep saying that gun crimes are terrible - true - and that if criminals didn't have guns, they couldn't commit gun crimes - also true; but to proceed from there to the idea that we should ban legal gun sales requires a tacit assumption that banning legal gun sales would result in criminals not having guns, and that part doesn't hold water. Logic isn't a part of it - it's emotion-based, and I've found that trying to argue with facts against emotion is a waste of time. It's like trying to convince a fundamentalist that evolution is real and the planet is more than a few thousand years old - it's just a waste of time and energy. So, as I said, I'm done. Signing off - I'm tired of this.

Last year my wife and I took Amtrak to and from LA on a vacation - we got a "roomette", i.e. a sleeper compartment, and it was great. Relaxing, great views - the compartments are on the upper level of a two-story car, and one whole side of the compartment is a window - and the food was excellent too. We pulled out of Albuquerque shortly before suppertime, and got into LA just after breakfast the next day. I'd love to do it again, but as Jim notes it seems to get pricier every day. Sometimes the routing is screwy too - we looked at Amtrak for the vacation we're planning to Atlanta, but the only route it offers from New Mexico to Georgia goes by way of Chicago and DC - going around three sides of a rectangle, basically.
If the market for rail travel grew, though, I would hope that competition and economies of scale would make train travel cheaper again.

Yeah, I just dumped three cups of whole wheat flour and a cup of wheat gluten into the bread machine; my wife and I do a fair amount of baking (she doesn't use the lazy approach with the bread machine like I do) and eat a lot of additional baked goods - I've noticed the price of all those things rising faster than inflation for years now.

Where competition for farm products between food and fuel would do the most damage would be with people struggling to get by, though, either here in the US or in third world countries. Especially with droughts making farmland unuseable or more marginal in Africa, southwest Asia, etc., and overpopulation showing no signs of slowing down in some of the same places, it would add another dimension of squeezing to factors that are already driving scarcity up.

I'm seeing stories about research into using algae as an ethanol source, too - going large-scale with algae-based ethanol production would not only use a source that is negligible at most as a food resource (I've only seen it eaten as a diet supplement), it would help slow down climate change; algae are one of the ecosystem's main ways of recycling atmospheric CO2 back into oxygen and carbon. Algae can be used to make biodiesel for the vast fleet of diesel engines that are going to be around for decades regardless of what happens with ethanol, too.

Last story I heard about ethanol pretty much reinforced your original point, Will - by the time they factor in the petroleum products used to make the fertilizer, run the farm equipment, and truck the corn to where it's processed, ethanol is either a slight negative or pretty much a wash. It sounds more like a complicated subsidy program for corn farmers than anything else to me. I prefer the idea of using plants that people don't eat and that grow, without fertilizers or irrigation, in places where people don't grow food crops. That's one of the main selling points on switchgrass from what I've read.

Re climate change, the book "Six Degrees" by Mark Lynas is interesting and disturbing. He collected data from a number of sources and explained their best estimates of how life on Earth, human and other, will be affected if the global average temperature rises by one degree centigrade; then by another degree; and so on, up to the high-end estimate some scientists have made that if current trends continue and we don't work to change them, the planet could be six degrees centigrade warmer by 2100. He concluded that a rise of one to two degrees is inevitable and could be coped with, but six degrees would result in a mass extinction on the scale of the Permian extinction 250 million years ago that killed well over 90% of the species then living on the planet. A two-hour documentary based on the book was on TV (Science Channel, I think) last year.

Mythbusters tested the "beer goggles" idea by having three of them (two men, one woman) each look at and rate a bunch of pictures of members of the opposite sex on attractiveness sober; then another bunch that had averaged out the same with a control group, after they had some alcohol in their systems, but just enough to be kind of tipsy; and then again when they were over the legal limit for DWI. Results varied. It was interesting.

Two "dumb people" jokes with similar themes in other settings:
A person who had bought a sports car brought it back to the dealer complaining that it wouldn't go faster than 30 mph. The service department asked for a description of the problem, but couldn't figure it out from what the customer told them, so one of the mechanics offered to take a test drive with the customer so they could point out what was happening. They got in, the mechanic started the car and pulled out of the lot onto the street. Merging into traffic, when the engine reached about 4000 rpm the mechanic hit the clutch pedal and shifted into second gear, then accelerated. The customer pointed at the stick shift and yelled, "WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?"

A man came to a lumber camp and asked for a job, saying he'd worked as a lumberjack many years ago and thought he could still do the work. He looked to be in pretty good shape and they needed help, so they took him. On his first day his boss drove him to a spot in the woods, gave him his chainsaw, showed him the boundaries within which he was supposed to work, and told him his quota for the day was 15 trees.
That night the new man came dragging into camp, looking more exhausted than they'd ever seen anyone look. The boss asked him, "Did you get your 15 trees?"
Sheepishly, the new man said, "No, I was only able to get two of them cut down."
The boss shook his head and told him that wasn't going to be good enough, but he'd give him a few days to get up to speed since he was out of practice.
Next day, same story - he managed to cut down three trees, but nowhere near his quota of 15.
The boss thought the guy looked strong enough that he shouldn't have a problem, so he decided to go with him the next day and see whether he could figure out what the problem was. They got to the patch of woods assigned to the new guy, and the boss said, "Okay, I'll do the first one so you can watch, then you do one while I watch and I'll see if I can give you some pointers."
With that he pulled the cord and started the chainsaw. The new guy jumped back about three feet with his eyes bugged out, pointed at the saw, and yelled "WHAT'S THAT NOISE?"

A large infrastructure project, or projects, on the scale of the interstate highway system would be a big help. We have enough rundown highways, bridges, etc., that it would be worthwhile putting people to work repairing and improving them, and we would benefit from a large upgrade in the power grid, too, both in terms of improving what's in place and expanding wind and solar generation and feeding that into the system.

Same here - Guns, Germs, and Steel was very good, and we have Collapse but I haven't read it yet.
For looking at the "germs" part, an old but excellent book is 'Plagues and Peoples' by William McNeill, and Barbara Tuchman vividly portrayed the impact of a combination of climate change - the "little ice age" - and epidemics, in her book "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century."

Iceland is another country that could be in better than average shape (if they hadn't just gone broke) to set up infrastructure for electric cars. They generate a very large share of their power from geothermal sources; the island is extremely volcanically active. They certainly have more of that source of energy available to use.

I think the most relaxing vacation I've ever had was a few years ago when we spent eight days at Big Bend in Texas, up in the Chisos - we put up our tent, hung hammocks on the poles of the little shade structure, and aside from going for some leisurely hikes and driving around the park one day, we spent the whole time lying in the hammocks reading and dozing. It was great.

The '73 oil embargo hit the month after I got my driver's license. I took it personally - that old "everything good turns to crap when I get there" thing.

That may work out, but I'm not confident - if the city keeps growing, competition from other communities for water keeps growing, and the drought lasts and deepens as a lot of climate scientists expect, it may get pretty tight in another decade or two. I hope not, but don't want to count on them to be wrong.

We end up borrowing my brother's truck three or four times a year, and if we had our own we'd use it more often than that; since I quit the day job I've only been putting gas in the Corolla about once a month, so I don't think the number of miles I drive would cost that much more even though the Tacoma would only get a bit better than half the mileage. With a shell on the back we could camp in it, too, which would be nice.

I don't know, haven't heard anyone talking about it. Most of my conversations are with my wife, my brother and my kids; none of them are in a position to need it, thankfully.

I suspect that in this country, "KBE" after his name would confuse more people than it would impress.

My brother just had to have a big dying cottonwood taken out of his back yard; the power utility was concerned because if part of it fell one way it would have taken down a high voltage line, and Bill was concerned because if another part fell the other way it would have given him three or four new skylights. One piece did end up punching a hole in his living room ceiling while they cut it up, but he was about to get the roof redone anyway so he figured that was almost no additional work to fix.

I'm wondering what this part of Albuquerque will look like in a few decades if the water supply continues to dwindle. There are a lot of mature trees, probably an average of at least one to two per house, and most of them are types that will die if people stop watering lawns and go to xeriscaped yards. We had two old trees taken out when we got this place, one diseased and one dead; we wanted to put something in, but something that wouldn't need water beyond what it got naturally, so we put a desert willow in the front yard. In about four years it's really taken off.

It still seems to be an infant technology. The source end will be more benign to the environment when a major part of our electrical power generation system is weaned off fossil fuels, probably to a combination of wind, solar, nuclear (it can be done safely - the Navy has been operating reactors on ships for decades and hasn't had a single accident; they screen and train people right, and they set up very careful procedures - geothermal, and tidal. It will be more helpful on the car owner's end when battery technology improves further so the batteries last longer, hold a longer charge, and yield enough power for high-demand vehicles like trucks. The people working on battery technology have made huge progress already, and I hope they're able to further improve them to the point needed. It seems a reasonable prospect, thinking of the change in other technologies - cell phones have gone from the size and weight of bricks to not much more than a very thick credit card; similar changes have taken place in TVs and two-way radios, engine technology, computers of course, and various other fields.

We're looking at a solution to the 4x4 question similar to what Will suggested. My wife drives all over town in her job, so we plan on keeping her car, a Civic, but I don't drive much anymore since I work at home and our daughter and grandkids moved out of state, so we're thinking about trading my Corolla in for a 4x4 Tacoma for the times a truck would come in handy.

Will, I did read the Wikipedia entry to the end, and everything seems to say that the correct term for the political party is the Democratic Party and that Democrat Party is not only a stupid Republican word trick, it's not correct as a term for the party, only for a member of that party. It apparently saw a fair amount of useage by the Republicans in the 1950s, then wasn't heard much until they revived it in the Delay era. The only use of it that I've heard has been pejorative in tone without an exception that I can think of. What did I miss in that entry that said it was neither correct nor incorrect?

I'm an author too, and I also try to use language with precision, so I appreciate correction when I'm mistaken. I didn't see what you saw in that entry, it seems, but I may have simply overlooked it.

When I visited Gettysburg, I found out that the battlefield is much more overgrown with trees now - a lot of it was farmland in 1863, so it was easier to see more of it from one place. Being stationed on the east coast was my first experience of living in a place where trees just grew - in the parts of New Mexico where I've lived, most trees need to be somewhat pampered, except for desert species that are spread fairly thinly. I got an odd look when I asked my landlady in Virginia who planted all those trees.

Steam cars (Stanley Steamers, others) looked like they might take off early in the industry, too. Also, petroleum as a fuel wasn't a given; when Rudolph Diesel invented his engine, he ran it on peanut oil. Biodiesel is still/again around and is growing in popularity now.

Saw a news story yesterday mentioning that BMW built and leased a small number of electric Mini Coopers in 2008, using them to gather data in preparation for a larger manufacturing and rollout project.

I thought the Smart Car looked intriguing until I found out its mileage is only about 4 mpg better than what I can get in my Corolla if I set the cruise at 60 - with the Smart Car having nowhere near the crash protection, room for two people instead of five, and almost no room for luggage or groceries compared to the pretty good-sized trunk in my car.

When we lived in 29 Palms, our back yard was enclosed by a six-foot chain link fence that extended below ground level; that kept the coyotes out so we didn't have to worry about them killing our two dogs. One of our dogs was a good-sized lab/pit mix and could probably have defended himself against one coyote, anyway, but the other was much smaller and would have been easy for them to kill. And when they go after dogs, they tend to do it in small packs and gang up on them.

I've always thought that "Democrat Party" thing was a stunt Tom Delay came up with so he wouldn't have to use the word "democratic" about his opponents. The party still calls itself the Democratic Party, right? So that "Democrat Party" term is Republican-speak rather than a proper term. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat... - the term the entry used for it was 'epithet', and it specified that it was intended as an insult.

I'm not a fan of the Democratic Party in particular, but "Democrat Party' strikes me as about on a par with "Republikan' or something like that.

It must have been moving fairly slowly. Given the mass of a train, if it was moving at speed even a brontosaurus wouldn't suddenly stop it. I could see an animal the size of an elephant causing a derailment, but not an abrupt stop at speed. After all, being made of denser material than a living body, a loaded truck would usually weigh more than an elephant, but if a train at speed hits a truck on the tracks, the truck disintegrates and the train keeps going.

I, too, have always thought that electrocuting that elephant was cruel and barbaric. Edison's behavior during that whole DC vs. AC issue was pretty ugly, a stain on his name. Beyond the pointless killing of the elephant, a true scientist respects the data and when he/she is wrong, admits it. Not that there aren't plenty of other scientists whose egos lead them to doggedly defend views that have been shown unlikely or false.

Hmmm! Seems as if those red foxes must be competing with the coyotes for the same ecological niche. Maybe there's enough around to eat for both of them.

I've lived places where I've had to go to some lengths to keep my pets safe from coyotes (like 29 Palms, Camp Pendleton, and Yuma), and I understand the problems farmers and ranchers have with them, but I still admire coyotes - they're so smart and adaptable. When I saw a news story about coyotes showing up in New York City, I couldn't help thinking, "good for them..."

I wonder whether foxes and coyotes can interbreed the way dogs and wolves can (or various big cats, or brown bears and polar bears)?