"Castle doctrine" laws are a Very Good Idea that protects citizens who defend themselves from being second-guessed by civil and criminal courts after the fact. Since a peaceful person thrown into a dangerous situation doesn't have the time and leisure to reflect on levels of risk and legal complexities that the court enjoys, it's despicable for laws to make said peaceful person risk a life-ruining felony conviction when a criminal sustains the injuries that are and should be an inherent risk of his chosen profession.
Not everybody agrees. New Jersey Democratic State Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney comments on the possibility of a castle doctrine law in the Garden State:
"All residents must be able to protect themselves in their own home when they feel their life is in imminent danger, as our laws currently do," Sweeney said in an e-mailed statement.
"However, there is a difference between legitimate self-defense and shooting someone on the way out the door with your cell phone."
"Don't you understand?! We _have_ to put innocent people at terrible legal risk for defending themselves! A thief could get _killed_!"
Monday, October 25, 2010
Shifting mental gears
I read my share of gun blogs and my share of sex blogs. Which makes it a bit disorienting when the wrong type of blogger starts talking about the problems with oil-based lube.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Road trip!
fearsclave picked up a mild case of the memes this morning, and it turns out to be a strain I'm particularly vulnerable to:
Which five events in history would you choose to experience in person, and why?
Events? I dunno. But there are definitely some times and places in history I'd give a lot to see. This is off the top of my head, so no promises of historical accuracy.
- Alexandria. Freakin' Alexandria. The most cosmopolitan--and second largest--city in the Roman world, designed on an elegant plan reportedly by Alexander himself, filled to bursting with art and architecture looted from all over Egypt, the center of trade between the Roman and eastern worlds, and home to what must have been a riotous mix of cultures, with temples to every god imaginable and even one of the world's largest Jewish populations, after the destruction of Jerusalem. She was legendary even in her own time, and today there's nothing left above ground except but a single late Imperial pillar. I _ache_ to see the Mediterranean and Mareotic harbors with their unthinkably prosperous emporia, the Paneion on its man-made hill, the tomb of Alexander (the trip might need to be timed to before Augustus knocked his nose off), the palaces of the Ptolemies, the luxury island Marc Antony moped away his last days on... And I understand they had a nifty lighthouse and library, too.
- Tenochtitlan. The capital of the Aztec empire, built in the middle of a lake and reached by boat or by one of a few stone causeways. The Spanish conquistadors called it the City of Dreams, carefully build on a civilized grid, paved with polished flagstones, studded by enormous pyramid temples and peppered with markets selling goods from all over Mesoamerica. Though it's easy to think of the metalless Aztecs as primitive, they carefully administered their civilization and city, to the point of dividing the lake into fresh and saltwater sections. There was peerless and alien art and architecture shoulder to shoulder with viciously brutal subjugation of other cultures and human sacrifice. I can't begin to wrap my mind around how alien that place must have been to a European mind--a metropolitan center to a whole region-spanning civilization with no common roots for thousands of years back. After taking the city by force, Cortes had the entire island leveled. There is, for all practical purposes, nothing left. This is the second place I'd point my time machine.
- The Colosseum. But not, actually, during the Roman games. I want to visit the Flavian Amphitheater in the middle ages or Renaissance, when it was a neglected ruin on the outskirts of a much smaller Rome. In those days it was overgrown with plants; according to some, it included exotic foreign plants brought in on the animals killed in the games. Wandering alone through a place so quiet and thoroughly abandoned, but with such a visceral and inescapable connection with massive shouting crowds of people and a staggeringly complex civilization so long gone-- There's no way I'd pass it up.
- Rome in the first century. In part, this is just because it's an important time and place that's worth seeing. But I'm going to cheat a little and arrange to bring along a crew of historians to document the period. We're blessed to know as much as we do about Rome, but the long time and monastic filter have badly damaged our understanding of the time and people. We'd make a point of sticking our noses into the Mithraic mysteries. It was a foreign cult whose development and growth in popularity closely paralleled Christianity's, but which wasn't monotheistic. By some estimates, Christianity took the decisive lead practically by the flip of a coin. Had that race gone the other way, the ascendant Mithraists almost certainly wouldn't have rooted out and obliterated Rome's pagan tradition as the Christians did, and the world would be an unrecognizably different place. And for all that, we know very little about Mithraism. I'd love to change that.
- Along the same lines, a multi-year trip to Judea in the 20s and 30s, again with a documentary crew. Our understanding of who Jesus was and what he said and did is based, the best we can tell, on only two non-eyewitness sources (Mark and the Q source), plus what Luke was able to pick up through association with the apostles long after the fact. And from a skeptic's point of view, those sources are clearly contaminated with quite a bit of popular folklore and Greek and Levantine mythology. For one of the most influential human beings who's ever lived, that's a maddeningly sparse record. I would absolutely spend two decades in the backwaters of Galilee if it meant expanding the record.
Which five events in history would you choose to experience in person, and why?
Events? I dunno. But there are definitely some times and places in history I'd give a lot to see. This is off the top of my head, so no promises of historical accuracy.
- Alexandria. Freakin' Alexandria. The most cosmopolitan--and second largest--city in the Roman world, designed on an elegant plan reportedly by Alexander himself, filled to bursting with art and architecture looted from all over Egypt, the center of trade between the Roman and eastern worlds, and home to what must have been a riotous mix of cultures, with temples to every god imaginable and even one of the world's largest Jewish populations, after the destruction of Jerusalem. She was legendary even in her own time, and today there's nothing left above ground except but a single late Imperial pillar. I _ache_ to see the Mediterranean and Mareotic harbors with their unthinkably prosperous emporia, the Paneion on its man-made hill, the tomb of Alexander (the trip might need to be timed to before Augustus knocked his nose off), the palaces of the Ptolemies, the luxury island Marc Antony moped away his last days on... And I understand they had a nifty lighthouse and library, too.
- Tenochtitlan. The capital of the Aztec empire, built in the middle of a lake and reached by boat or by one of a few stone causeways. The Spanish conquistadors called it the City of Dreams, carefully build on a civilized grid, paved with polished flagstones, studded by enormous pyramid temples and peppered with markets selling goods from all over Mesoamerica. Though it's easy to think of the metalless Aztecs as primitive, they carefully administered their civilization and city, to the point of dividing the lake into fresh and saltwater sections. There was peerless and alien art and architecture shoulder to shoulder with viciously brutal subjugation of other cultures and human sacrifice. I can't begin to wrap my mind around how alien that place must have been to a European mind--a metropolitan center to a whole region-spanning civilization with no common roots for thousands of years back. After taking the city by force, Cortes had the entire island leveled. There is, for all practical purposes, nothing left. This is the second place I'd point my time machine.
- The Colosseum. But not, actually, during the Roman games. I want to visit the Flavian Amphitheater in the middle ages or Renaissance, when it was a neglected ruin on the outskirts of a much smaller Rome. In those days it was overgrown with plants; according to some, it included exotic foreign plants brought in on the animals killed in the games. Wandering alone through a place so quiet and thoroughly abandoned, but with such a visceral and inescapable connection with massive shouting crowds of people and a staggeringly complex civilization so long gone-- There's no way I'd pass it up.
- Rome in the first century. In part, this is just because it's an important time and place that's worth seeing. But I'm going to cheat a little and arrange to bring along a crew of historians to document the period. We're blessed to know as much as we do about Rome, but the long time and monastic filter have badly damaged our understanding of the time and people. We'd make a point of sticking our noses into the Mithraic mysteries. It was a foreign cult whose development and growth in popularity closely paralleled Christianity's, but which wasn't monotheistic. By some estimates, Christianity took the decisive lead practically by the flip of a coin. Had that race gone the other way, the ascendant Mithraists almost certainly wouldn't have rooted out and obliterated Rome's pagan tradition as the Christians did, and the world would be an unrecognizably different place. And for all that, we know very little about Mithraism. I'd love to change that.
- Along the same lines, a multi-year trip to Judea in the 20s and 30s, again with a documentary crew. Our understanding of who Jesus was and what he said and did is based, the best we can tell, on only two non-eyewitness sources (Mark and the Q source), plus what Luke was able to pick up through association with the apostles long after the fact. And from a skeptic's point of view, those sources are clearly contaminated with quite a bit of popular folklore and Greek and Levantine mythology. For one of the most influential human beings who's ever lived, that's a maddeningly sparse record. I would absolutely spend two decades in the backwaters of Galilee if it meant expanding the record.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
So what's the deal with paleo, anyway?
My buddy Jay sent along a Reuters article relevant to my paleo updates:
Starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater...
The findings may also upset fans of the Paleolithic diet, which follows earlier research that assumes early humans ate a meat-centered diet.
This handily illustrates one of the two problems with the core paleo philosophy that prevent me from really being a cheerleader for the diet. The idea is that humans evolved to make use of a diverse diet made up primarily of animals and plants (and insects, but that's one irrational food taboo I flatly refuse to breach), and that the neolithic shift to a simple diet based on grain carbohydrates and dairy products has increased our numbers while destroying our health.
Again, these assumptions have two big issues. The first is that it's highly debatable (and possibly unknowable at present) just how much humans have biologically adapted in the intervening tens of thousands of years to take advantage of the new diet. The second, as illustrated by the article, is that it's hard to be confident in what a paleolithic diet actually looked like in the first place. Was grain consumption common, or was it an anomaly confined to a few groups? Did the grains account for a huge portion of those groups' daily calories (as they do for most modern humans), or was it one small part of a diverse hunter-gatherer menu? I don't know that we can draw reliable conclusions at the moment.
So I'm keeping an open mind about what's causing my weight loss. At one end of the spectrum, it may be that grains and dairy are poisons that rapidly destroy our bodies and chain us to lives of ill health, as a couple of the fringe paleo gurus say. It may be that grains are a non-ideal food source that we, as highly adaptable omnivores, can deal with but are a poor basis for a diet--the attitude of some of my preferred paleo authorities. It's also possible that all the benefits I've seen have been a direct result of cutting out sugar and removing my ability to just grab a fast-food burger when I'm hungry.
Whatever it is, I'm losing weight very efficiently while eating as much as I want when I want, and feel much better than I ever had before, with almost no exercise. I'm neither weighed down with excess bodyweight and post-meal heaviness nor hungry and relying on willpower to resist overeating. I'm not on a meal clock--I can get all my daily calories in one big afternoon meal, or browse throughout the day, and neither bothers me. Whatever the deal is with paleo, it seems that my body really does have a functional system for telling me how much food I need and making good use of that food, but that system only works when I'm not eating grains or sugar both. It may be impossible to draw strong conclusions about the assumptions of paleo from the results, but I intend to stick with what's working.
Starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater...
The findings may also upset fans of the Paleolithic diet, which follows earlier research that assumes early humans ate a meat-centered diet.
This handily illustrates one of the two problems with the core paleo philosophy that prevent me from really being a cheerleader for the diet. The idea is that humans evolved to make use of a diverse diet made up primarily of animals and plants (and insects, but that's one irrational food taboo I flatly refuse to breach), and that the neolithic shift to a simple diet based on grain carbohydrates and dairy products has increased our numbers while destroying our health.
Again, these assumptions have two big issues. The first is that it's highly debatable (and possibly unknowable at present) just how much humans have biologically adapted in the intervening tens of thousands of years to take advantage of the new diet. The second, as illustrated by the article, is that it's hard to be confident in what a paleolithic diet actually looked like in the first place. Was grain consumption common, or was it an anomaly confined to a few groups? Did the grains account for a huge portion of those groups' daily calories (as they do for most modern humans), or was it one small part of a diverse hunter-gatherer menu? I don't know that we can draw reliable conclusions at the moment.
So I'm keeping an open mind about what's causing my weight loss. At one end of the spectrum, it may be that grains and dairy are poisons that rapidly destroy our bodies and chain us to lives of ill health, as a couple of the fringe paleo gurus say. It may be that grains are a non-ideal food source that we, as highly adaptable omnivores, can deal with but are a poor basis for a diet--the attitude of some of my preferred paleo authorities. It's also possible that all the benefits I've seen have been a direct result of cutting out sugar and removing my ability to just grab a fast-food burger when I'm hungry.
Whatever it is, I'm losing weight very efficiently while eating as much as I want when I want, and feel much better than I ever had before, with almost no exercise. I'm neither weighed down with excess bodyweight and post-meal heaviness nor hungry and relying on willpower to resist overeating. I'm not on a meal clock--I can get all my daily calories in one big afternoon meal, or browse throughout the day, and neither bothers me. Whatever the deal is with paleo, it seems that my body really does have a functional system for telling me how much food I need and making good use of that food, but that system only works when I'm not eating grains or sugar both. It may be impossible to draw strong conclusions about the assumptions of paleo from the results, but I intend to stick with what's working.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Monday paleo update
Down another four pounds, making fifteen pounds in the first month. Still haven't done any exercise to speak of.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Life in the crazy house
I don't know of a better way to sum up New Jersey's gun laws than this observation over at Ian Argent's place:
Also, note that the possession charge is much more serious (second-degree crime) than the assault charge (fourth degree); and can be punished much more harshly (5-10 years vs. 18 months).
In the Garden State, the law punishes merely possessing a gun more harshly than actually attempting to harm somebody with it.
Is it even remotely possible to pretend anymore that gun control is about public safety?
Also, note that the possession charge is much more serious (second-degree crime) than the assault charge (fourth degree); and can be punished much more harshly (5-10 years vs. 18 months).
In the Garden State, the law punishes merely possessing a gun more harshly than actually attempting to harm somebody with it.
Is it even remotely possible to pretend anymore that gun control is about public safety?
You don't help us at all!
Japanese TV is like Jackass, but without the inherent respect for human dignity:
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