Mark Byron

Once Around The Front Page

A newly-popular rapper has some less-than-helpful comments about the US in his past. That shouldn't be that much of a surprise, since everyone from the Dixie Chicks on down were dissing the superpower side of the US in the mid-00s. Rappers are generally critters of the left, and when you throw in the semi-colonial relationship that the US has with South Korea, thus making the US an easy authority figure to rage against for Korean lefties, one could see where the path of least resistance for our young Psycho would be to dis Uncle Sam.

You expected him to do Lee Greenwood? It still doesn't make it right, but it at least makes it explainable. To top it off, Psy is back-peddling so well, the Lions might want to sign him to the practice squad.

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We've got some modest right-to-work legislation pending in Lansing. It doesn't go as far as the Wisconsin reforms that stripped public-sector workers from the right to bargain on wages; this just gives folks the right not to belong to a union and still work at a union-represented workplace. So, if Eileen gets hired in as a full-time paraeducator and is part of a workforce that is AFT-represented, she could opt not to pay dues and not be a part of the union.

That does create some free-riders who get the benefits of the strength-in-numbers effect of a union, but it also keeps unions from having a captive audience that has to make de-facto donations to the Democratic Party as part of their job; they can ask for the part of their dues that is political in nature back as part of current law, but there is a lot of comingling of union and political activity that would still be not refundable.

This would end the closed-shop, where you have to be a union member to work at a unionized facility. That hits the unions in their pocketbook, but is only un-democratic if you think that a majority should get to be able to browbeat a minority into going along and make them give money to questionable causes if a majority at work think its a good idea.

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Here's an interesting story out of Bay City (my mom's home town); they are looking to trim their fire department and cross-train some policemen as backup fire-fighters. That makes some intuitive sense, creating something of a generic first-responder who can do both police and fire functions, but it surely won't make the fireman's union happy.

If done sloppily, you can have an under-trained responce team for fires which could cost lives; if done well, you can have your combo-responders doing police functions until extra firemen are needed, rather than playing fetch with the Dalmatian mascot between runs.

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California's Prop 8 is heading to the Supreme Court, along with a companion case which questions DOMA and asks for a same-sex couple to be treated as such by the IRS, who has to treat them as single per DOMA. The latter creates some interesting headaches, where state law can treated them as married but the IRS needs to treat them as single; it creates a mess during tax time for such folks.

The Prop 8 case has some interesting implications for things outside of same-sex marriage; the district judge questioned the use of tradition as a valid reason for banning same-sex marriage, calling religious arguments irrational. If that part of the case is upheld, it creates an open season for a whole host of other laws that have some traditional roots.

 

When Instinct Does You Wrong

Odd football situation; team with the ball is up one and can run out the clock. Should the other team let them score, let them go up 8 (assuming a made PAT) and have a shot of getting a two-pointed touchdown to force overtime.

That's happened more than once; other less-score specific situation will have offences (or defences en route to a "pick six") pass up a score to down it inside the five and run out the clock; if they score, the other team gets the ball back and could win.

Arizona was on the wrong end of a 7-6 score against the Jets, and the idea of letting the Jets score hit Darnell Dockett the wrong way. He reportedly spat at a teammate during an argument over the merits of a matador defence; the team lighted his pocket book "six figures."

Folks are trained to compete and to do things well, but there are times where deliberately screwing up can be helpful; the case of the Georgia player in the SEC title game who caught a pass in the flat and was tacked at the 5 for the last play, since the Dawgs were out of time outs. He would have been better off dropping the pass and letting his team have a clean shot at the end zone. However, you don't drop passes if you can help it; the instict of catching a pass and making the best of the situation is too strong to easily turn off.

Intereceptions on a long fourth down pass are another instict area; they're better to knock it down and get the ball at the line of scrimmage, but they much more offen get the pick and lose 20-30 yards of field position. That's also a reason why QBs shouldn't be too afraid to chuck a long one into traffic on third down; if it gets picked off 35-40 yards down field, you've essentially replicated a short punt.

Sensible Gun Control and Sensibility

I don't think terms like "stupid" and "tragedy troll" help the conversation on Second Amendment rights. Bob Costas is sane, has an above-average IQ and doesn't appear to be the second coming of Mussolini.

Are there too many guns in the hands of young adults (especially football and basketball pros) at a higher risk of misusing them? Yes. That's the lion share of what Costas was lamenting.

The problem lies in what to do about that. Here's part of Costas' remix on the issue.

I never mentioned the Second Amendment. I never used the words gun control. People inferred that. Now do I believe we need more comprehensive and more sensible gun control legislation? Yes, I do. That doesn't mean repeal the Second Amendment. That doesn't mean a prohibition on somebody having a gun to protect their home and their family. It means sensible and more comprehensive gun control legislation.

As it turns out, they rightly inferred his left-of-center take on the issue. The problem with the Belcher case is that "sensible and more comprehensive gun control legislation" would have to tread deep into Second Amendment rights if you're going to stop Saturday's shooting. One guy. One garden-variety handgun. A reasonable amount of ammo.

Do we stop the ammo? That would make the right to bear arms meaningless if you don't have anything to fire. Could oversight of folks stocking up for a small civil war like the Batman theater shooter flag Belcher ahead of time? No. Limiting ammo purchases to a reasonable amount might stop Aurora, but not KC. It would also possibly flag recreational target shooters who practice an "unreasonable amount" from the persepctive of a gun control maven.

Do we stop the pistol? You toss self-defence out the window if you're restricted to long-guns.

Do we stop the guy from owning the gun in the first place? The answer there would be some sort of restrictive permit to carry a gun where you'd have to positively prove you weren't the type of angry person who is likely to misuse a gun.

Do you flag anyone going to a psychologist? Does the psychologist have a duty to pull the gun permits from anyone on the edgy side that might go off if things break the wrong way. If that's the case, you're going to severely discourage folks seeking help for emotional problems and tend to disproportionately pull licences from folks in stressful situations, like tough neighborhoods.

That starts running into 14th Amendment issues as well as 2nd, disarming poor minority communities, or at least the law-abiding members of said communities; the folks on the dark side will have their ways of getting their heaters.

Thus, there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to have kept a gun out of Mr. Belcher's hands, unless your idea of reasonable includes disarming most folks under psych care.

Such "sensible gun control" would trod on a large block of modern sensibilities, like the rights of minorities, the rights of folks with mild emotional problems and that pesky right to arm bears (if they call them "sportsmen" shouldn't the prey get a sporting chance to shoot back?).

How Do You Say "Boss Tweed" in Pashto?

Midland friend and Peanut Gallery regular Alan was ragging on Indian corruption on my post on the Indian navy moving out to protect its interest. From what I've heard and read, they've been making strides to clear out corruption by clearing out red tape that leads to corruption; if it takes forever through normal channels to get stuff done, a little greasing of the palms will get things fast-tracked. Also, Indian law often requires a majority stake go to Indian firms, so local businessmen have to be courted to be a foreign company's front man.

However, even though both Congress and BJP governments seemed to be moving in the right dirction, the perception of corruption is still there; a report fresh off the presses has Denmark, Finland and New Zealand heading up the list of least-corrupt countries. India was on the low end of the list, tying for 94th out of 176 countries listed; Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan share the boobie prize.

Just to touch the bases, Canada is 9th, the US 19th and the UK 17th. We've got some work to do here at home, but we try not to encourage corruption, at least direct profiteering from office; any government made of people will be somewhat corrupt based on the nature of the beast.

The Afghanistan score is not a good sign for the decade we've put in trying to improve things; one problem that was somewhat self-inflicted is that we used a lot of warlords as proxies in ousting the Taliban. The warlords were part of the reason the Taliban were doing as well as they did; they Taliban were Neanderthals, but honest ones, compared to the sleaze-bags that were running the place in the 90s.

We helped put the sleaze-bags back in power, and are paying for it both with a hard-to-break Taliban and the corruption noted in the survey. One upside is that it can't get much worse when two failed states are your partners in the outhouse basement.

Welcome to I-0A

If the old second tier was 1-AA and the big boys were 1-A, do we now need a new class for the SEC, a 1-No-A?

The coaching merry-go-round continues, with Sun Belt champ Arkansas State losing coach Gus Malzahn to Auburn; that's a definite upgrade in position. Malzahn was the OC for the national title team before heading west.

What isn't a clear upgrade is a power-conference champ's coach looking to jump ship for 1-0A; the Vols have a strong shot at getting Louisville coach Charlie Strong. Louisville is in the Big East, heading to the ACC.

Tennessee has a strong football tradition that has taken a nose-dive in the recent past, having Lame Kippen do a one-and-done, heading to USC just before the NCAA gumshoes came a-snooping, then having Derek Dooley go from being a Bulldog heir (his dad Vince was the vintage coach at Georgia) to a dog of a coach, lasting three years before getting the heave-ho just before the end of the season, going 15-21.

Do you leave a conference champ of a power conference (the 'ville is slated to move to the ACC before the Big East gets demoted to mid-major status once the new post-season framework sets in for 2014) to take on a rebuilding project in the SEC? We have Bielema saying yes to a comparable proposition to move from Wisconsin to Arkansas. It wouldn't be much of a stretch for Strong to make that move as well.

If he does, we can essentially bracket in the SEC champ in as the perennial one-seed in the football mini-playoff.

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A Bit of a Head Start

Interesting story on Kobe Bryant closing in on 30K points; he'd be the youngest to get there, partly due to his starting straight out of high school.

One of the guys on the list of quick to 30K was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; he was back in an era where college freshmen couldn't play varsity let alone in the NBA. UCLA's JV was able to beat the national-champ varsity team in Kareem's freshman year. Today, you'd pronounce UCLA's JV "Ken-tuck-ee."

Another guy on the list was Wilt Chamberlain; he spend what would have been his senior year of college with the Globetrotters back when you couldn't declare early. He'd have started a lot sooner had modern rules been in place.

Roses? Give Me Some Sugar, Baby!

When I saw Arkansas make a run at Les Miles, I thought it was a bit of a reach, taking someone from a perrenial top-10 school and asking them to get the Hogs up to that level from a meltdown year post-Petrino.

As it turns out, they didn't have to go much further down to get their coach-Brent Bielema, veteran Wisconsin coach, is heading down Fayetteville way. Bielema took over for Barry Alvarez and picked up right where Alvarez left off, finishing with three straight Big Ten titles, with the last one a bit lame, getting into the conference final with a 4-4 conference mark thanks to OSU and Penn State being on probation.

Still, I wouldn't have thought that Arkansas would be an upward move, unless the Big Ten is seen as a second banana to a omnipotent SEC and moving to a second-tier SEC school in a rebuilding cycle is better than being a first-tier Big Ten School. There are some on the sports pundocracy that would make that argument; I would expect someone like Colin Cowherd to make such an argument tomorrow.

We Need to Vote on the Constitution to Find Out What's in It

Interesting news out of Egypt, and it isn't the Drudge-leading headline of President Mursi having to bug out of the palace due to mobs. It's the quick turn-around planned for a vote on the recently-drafted proposed constitution; it's been slated for December 15th.

That gives less than two weeks to campaign for or against it, which means there essentially isn't any campaign. Even the warp-speed elections of Canada and the UK have more lead time after the writ is dropped. Two weeks is ludicrous speed; cue Dark Helmet.

That leaves little time for any organized campaigning and may turn into a referendum on Mursi in the absence of an informed look at what is in the constitution and time to hear countervailing arguments. As my title alludes to, it reminds me of how the Obamacare bill was rammed through the House; folks were voting more on the general concepts than on the details, since no one had time to read through the bill before passing it.

The same may well be true here; the left wing largely boycotted the constitutional convention, but if the Salafists are willing to go along with their less-strident MB cohorts, there might be a simple majority to ram-through a somewhat overly-Sharia'ed document.

Yeah, Goober Was From North Carolina

I didn't know that the "goober peas" of folk-song lore were those boiled peanuts that you see at roadside stands and convenience stores through the south.

Folks in a NC prison weren't all rejoicing, for they didn't appreciate how they boiled nuts there-

Prison officials in North Carolina are calling for a criminal investigation after inmates alleged correctional officers forced them to rub habanero hot sauce on their genitals, resulting in painful blisters.

 

Indian Cowboy Diplomacy

Here's a bracing pair of paragraphs-

India has declared itself ready to deploy naval vessels to the South China Sea to protect its oil-exploration interests there, a potential new escalation of tensions in a disputed area where fears of armed conflict have been growing steadily.

India's naval chief made the statement on Monday just as Vietnam's state oil and gas company, Petrovietnam, accused Chinese boats of sabotaging an exploration operation by cutting a seismic cable being towed behind a Vietnamese vessel.

India being able to project power into the Pacific? Yes, they have picked up the ability. At least one carrier, some boomer subs and Harriers to go with the carriers. Enough to give the Indians some bite that can be projected into the well-traveled South China Sea.

India is increasingly an economic power with a growing car industry and a world-class computer industry. As a trading power, keeping the sea lanes open to and from places like Korea and Japan is critical.

India and China have a border in common that has seen some conflict over the years, but the economic battle royale that is brewing in the SCS over islands that would give the owner economic rights to the seabed around it and the oil under the seabed. China and Japan are in the middle of saber-rattling over an island in-between them, and China might have unsheaved the saber against Vietnam; since the two had a war in the late 1970s, coming to blows again wouldn't be inconceivable.

Having India as a regional power has its advantages. Places like Vietnam and the Philippines that have a history with the US as an occupying power might be more inclined to accept the help of a fellow Asian country than to have the US butt in. Given that the Indians and the US are largely on the same page, this seems like a welcome development, but one that throws an extra wildcard factor into Asian geopolitics.

Lowering the Heat

Bob Costas stirred up a hornet's nest last night, citing an anti-gun-culture essay by Jason Whitlock regarding the Javon Belcher shootings of Saturday.

"Our current gun culture," Whitlock wrote, "ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead."

That is true, even if you are card-carrying NRA member.

However, this is more an indictment of modern youth culture than of the Second Amendement. If a sub-culture has a leaning towads violence, giving said folks guns will tend to do more harm than good. Self-defence is quick to turn into offense if you take offense at something.

Can you do violence without guns? Yes, but what's the last drive-by-knifing you heard of?

"Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions, and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows?"

"But here," wrote Jason Whitlock," is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."

I'll buy that. Could he have knifed his girlfriend and himself, or beat his girlfriend to a pulp then drove his car off a bridge? Yes, but both acts are harder to pull off than the simple pull of a trigger. A murder-suicide by knife in Wyoming last week is case in point that such things can happen, but they're far rarer than the lead-poisoning version.

He'd also have a shot to think better of it between swings or stabs than between trigger pulls.

Also, I didn't see any calls for repeal of the Second Amendment in either piece. It may have been assumed in the rhetoric, but one can be against the casual packing of heat and be supportive of folk's right to an armed self-defence.

You also have the right not to bear arms. If you might be temped to use it in anger in something other than self-defence, it would likely be a bad idea to have a gun handy.

I don't know Belcher's back-story. He might well have had a legit need to have a gun on him. However, something tipped him over the edge Saturday, and the edge was easier to go over with a gun handy.

 

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Tears of a Clown

Here's an interesting papal speech which is more important than it looks at first blush; it has the quirky starting point of a visit of a circus at the Vatican, but the Pope takes a serious tern in ministering to folks who are away from home most of the time-

Benedict acknowledged the sacrifices circus workers make to bring joy to young and old alike, traveling constantly and living on the margins of society. He noted they lack schools for their children or parish churches to call home. But he urged them to keep the faith.

That's a problem for migrant workers in any number of professions; you normally don't think of circus workers in that bucket.

"I hope that you can find, in the communities where you stay, people who are welcoming and available and able to care for your spiritual needs," Benedict said. He urged governments to better integrate itinerant entertainers in the social fabric.

That's a loaded prospect in modern-day Europe, since you likely have those "itinerant entertainers" coming from minority groups, especially the Roma. Treatment of Jews was the focal point of this anti-Jobbik party rally today in Hungary, but Roma-baiting is Jobbik's stock in trade; the nativist party is the #3 party in the Hungarian parliament.

There is a sadly-flourishing nativist niche in European politics. Greece's Golden Dawn nativists have been in the news during the ongoing financial fubar there and France's National Front typically runs a strong third in their elections, even coming in second a decade ago when the left was fragmented.

The main object of scorn varies from country to country; black Africans get Golden Dawn's ire, while French and Dutch nativists are focused on Muslims. However, none of the nativists seem to like the Roma, who are generally rootless by nature, having long since left their South Asian home turf to be fringe minorities in much of Europe.

Getting folks to respect and minister to "Gypsies, tramps and thieves" (to borrow from an old Cher song) that are the stereotypical carnies on the road runs counter to nature. That's why the Pope felt the need to point this out, although he should have been a bit more direct in pointing out the ethnic friction that might well be there between migrant carnies and the locals.

The US segment of the Peanut Gallery might take some of this to heart has we look at our own migrants; we're likely to see some push towards immigration reform next year as Republicans look to ignore the nativist wing of the party and opt to deal with illegals by legalizing them rather than making them outlaws.