The Silent Knight- In a fight to the death with "conventional" wisdom

The Problem With Pendulums

Don’t get me wrong! There is a place for pendulums, but only because their imperfections are so predictable.

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Wikipedia has an article^D that gives more information about pendulums than most readers would like, including the math, history, and problems perfecting them. For a shorter version focusing mostly on the math, see The Department of Physics & Astronomy website at Georgia State University.

Pendulums try very hard to be in the right place at the right time, but they are dismal failures. The only time they rest or stop moving for even a moment is when they are as far from perfect as they can possibly get. They spend less time at their desired destination than they spend anywhere else on their route, and during that nanosecond of success, they are moving their fastest toward another extreme position. Why is that?

Pendulums cannot think. Pendulums cannot predict, they cannot anticipate. They cannot see the consequences of their own actions. Pendulums can’t even tell that they’ve been to their desired destination until they see it in the rear view mirror. They only react. And as a result, they are doomed to a life of constant searching, continually bouncing frantically from one radical position to another. Welcome to the real world. People who practice similar policies WILL suffer similar fates. And welcome to politics.

Any questions?

“These Are A Few Of My Favorite . . .” Songs

We have a lighter topic today – music. I’ve recently made changes in my list of favorite songs, so I’ll talk about some of them. Then I’ll grapple with a pattern I’ve noticed as people get older.

The List

Holding my number one spot for decades now has been Barbra Streisand’s version of “People”^{lyrics, video}. It was created in 1964 for the Broadway musical “Funny Girl”. I’m not actually sure I qualify as the type of person in the song, but when I see those people together, I feel what could be envy.
Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now”^{lyrics, video}, which she recorded on her 1969 album “Clouds”, just moved up the charts to the number two spot. Maybe a year ago, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”^{lyrics, video} from their 1979 rock opera “The Wall” held that spot. As a teacher, I could just imagine my whole class singing “We don’t need no education” in unison as I enter the room. It just struck me as a bit funny. Since that song became the Republican’s unofficial theme song, I find it more depressing than funny.

I’ve always liked “Both Sides, Now”. Similar to the story of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”, it shows how a change in perspective can enrich your life – or not.

Next is “Climb Every Mountain”^{lyrics, video}, which Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for their 1959 musical “The Sound of Music”. I’m partial to the version that was dubbed by Margery MacKay in the 1965 movie starring Julie Andrews. Actually, I liked the whole movie, especially the songs Julie sang, like the title song^video and even the song that inspired the title of this post, “My Favorite Things”^video.
Although the beat goes on, today’s last list entry is number four: “Hotel California”^{lyrics, video}. This one, unlike the others, shot toward the top of my chart immediately after it was released as the title track from an Eagles’ album in late 1976 (even though by then I had already left the state). I really enjoy the symbolism, and like many, recognize it as an allegory about hedonism and greed. Other great songs on that album include “New Kid In Town”^video and “Life In The Fast Lane”^video.

While the top spots on my list are fairly stable, as one goes down the list a song’s ranking starts to depend more on my mood. Looking down the list, you will see newer songs from artists like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga working their way up, as well as other classics like “The Sound of Silence”^video by (Paul) Simon & (Art) Garfunkel. (I heard this song before watching the 1967 film “The Graduate”, but the two together made an impression on me. That song remained near the top of my list for quite a while). My favorite country singers are probably Kenny Rogers (my favorites being “The Gambler”^video and “Coward of the County”^video) and then Garth Brooks. I prefer my classical music to be lively, like Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”^{full, finale}, which some of you may remember from “The Lone Ranger”, and “1812 Overture”^{full, finale}.

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The full title is “The Year 1812, festival overture in E♭ major, Op. 49”. Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote it in 1880 to commemorate Russia’s defense against Napoleon’s invading army (any resemblance to the War of 1812 between the British and the new United States of America is purely coincidental). More recently, the song was used in commercials for Quaker Oats Puffed Wheat, among other things.

I have also long been a sucker for Christmas music. I could enjoy these songs in June. Probably my earliest favorite, first sung the Christmas Eve of 1818 in Austria (I wasn’t actually around, then), was “Silent Night”^video (surprise, surprise). That was unseated for a short time by “The First Noel”^video. Now they both compete with a host of other examples of the genre (with “Joy To The World”^video usually having a slight lead).

Observations

As a youngster, I noticed that people of all ages seem to restrict their musical listening to those songs that were popular when they were in their teens. At the time, I postulated that once the music retention area of the brain ‘hardens’, about the time one reaches adulthood, it is impossible to retain or appreciate new songs. Now that I’ve seen this phenomenon “from both sides now”, I’ve reworked my theory. For me, one change that has occurred over the years is that I just don’t (have the opportunity to?) listen to as much music as I used to. When I’m wrapped in thought, I prefer the sounds of silence. And when I am around others, they rely on their old favorite, but limited sources. This ties in with my earlier discussions How Large Is Your Universe and How We Lose Our Grip On Reality and could be considered a sign of decay. But it doesn’t have to happen. If one were to diversify their sources, as suggested, they would know that there is very good music being produced every day, just as it was when they were young. But then they would have to find something else to complain about.

My Last Thoughts On Our Last Election

Well, the people have spoken! And I’m really disappointed. I’ve previously expressed my displeasure with some of Mr. Trump’s positions and rhetoric^{B1, B2, B3}, but my main complaint has always been his severe lack of maturity, his complete disregard for the truth,

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as read in the International Business Times.

and his extremely low ethical standards. That allows him to push the buttons of idiots and fan the flames of bigotry for his own personal gain, which he regularly puts ahead of whatever action might be better for the good of the country. Trying to understand why he was so popular, I listened to a lot of people, but found their arguments lacking in both fact

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For an article on the pervasiveness^D of fake news, see Fake news: How a partying Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies. For a discussion of the truth in “news” and even Ben Franklin’s words on the subject, see Fair Play in a Fact-Challenged Political Landscape. This is why my blog post How We Lose Our Grip On Reality was important. The sad part for me was that some of the claims cited as justification of a Trump fanatic’s position were too blatantly false to need any rigorous fact-checking effort.

and logic. Examples include those who insisted Clinton just couldn’t be trusted (in light of the above). And there’s the gentleman who praised Trump’s lack of political experience and then 30 seconds later bashed Obama for the same characteristic. It makes me wonder if my concerns for “Falling Into A Negative Spiral” have all come true.

But you won’t find me out protesting, because I don’t see the point to it. I understood the rules before the election (See Article II and the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States). I thought they were as good as you’re likely to find anywhere.

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There is that one question about the fairness of the Electoral College and whether it has outlived its usefulness (which in today’s world I believe it has). But because in all cases where the Electoral College differed from the popular vote, the Democratic (or pre-Democratic) candidate lost the election^A as they appear to have done this year, I don’t see any serious efforts to change that process any time soon.

Some argue that the Electoral College was intended to favor smaller states. Certainly our founders pondered the issue of individual power vs. state power. That’s why the Senate gives states equality while the House of Representative tips the scale toward the individual. Personally, I like the notion of ‘one person, one vote’ without taking a penalty if you can actually wave to your neighbor from the front porch.

The news that many of the protesters didn’t vote was also disturbing. I’ve long maintained that if you don’t vote you waive all rights to complain about the election for the next four years.

A Growing Frustration

It has been said that Mr. Trump was able to tap into America’s growing frustration with the gridlock in Washington. I can definitely understand such a frustration. The problem is that for a majority of Americans, that frustration was self-inflicted. I’m talking about the majority who four years ago voted for candidates specifically because those candidates promised to rip the word “compromise” from their dictionary and vehemently oppose every move the opposition makes (even if it was originally their idea).

As one might expect, their candidates had some success. Now this majority is complaining that nothing gets done in Washington. Really? To me, that is strong evidence of the negative spiral I was concerned about.

I predict in four years these short-sighted people with shorter memories will be even more frustrated. They will make even more desperate decisions, speeding the downward spiral even more. To see a discussion of one type of desperate decision-making and how to stop it, see my recent post When Sailors Should Split Tacks. Sadly enough, like the skipper in that post, these people are incapable of recognizing their faulty logic or seeing their own part in this mess. But as long as they have someone else to blame for their problems, I don’t expect to see much growth.

I’ve always liked to believe that whatever the results of an election, the people got what they deserve. But the truth is that the minority gets to suffer right alongside everyone else. Those who took the right steps to make America great over the last decade also have reason to be frustrated. Their frustration will be greater in another four years also, but they know that just waiting for others to mature won’t get the change they are looking for. That knowledge alone does not make the frustration any less. But they have to be mature enough to deal with it while they bide their time waiting for the next opportunity for improvement.

Wait And See

So that is what I’m doing. Mr. Trump isn’t President yet so there is really nothing yet to complain about. His lack of truthfulness, that characteristic that was the most bothersome during the campaign, is now the one thing that gives me the most hope in a strange way. If he only screws up one out of twelve of the things he promised to screw up, we should probably consider ourselves lucky.

Just hours after the election Mr. Trump praised Mrs. Clinton for her many virtues. This was 180 degrees off from everything he had said before then. (English translation: “I’ve been feeding you all a line of cr@_ all this time. Thanks for your vote”). How many of his promises has he already walked away from, just weeks after the election? There is the distinct possibility that some things could actually turn out reasonably well. But there is still plenty of damage that can be done.

We need to bide our time and look for opportunities for growth. To break the spiral, one thing I’d like to see is a strong, long-term commitment to education – an education that includes and even emphasizes critical thinking skills. And as always, I’ll be doing my part to put things into perspective and combat “conventional” wisdom while promoting uncommon sense. Thank you for listening.

When Sailors Should Split Tacks

American inventor Thomas Edison once said “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”^A. From my experience, when you are competing, whether for business or pleasure, or trying to solve a problem, or just trying to get something done, you can usually do pretty well without that stroke of genius if during the remaining 99% of the time you can just keep from screwing up.

A Sailing Example

One summer I had the opportunity to race sailboats by donating the perspiration needed to handle the sails. Since sailboats can’t sail directly into the wind, which is often exactly where you need to go, you must regularly choose which side of the wind is best, or which side of the course is best, or . . . the bottom line is that in sailboat racing, as in life, there are plenty of decision-making opportunities.

If we happened to get behind early in the race, by the time we got to a point that needed a decision, our competition had already gotten to that point and had already made their decision. Our skipper, reasoning that we would never catch up if we did everything our competition had done, invariably would make the opposite choice at that point (hence, splitting tacks, or sailing on the opposite side of the wind as our competition). More often than not we would get further behind. As it turned out, we didn’t win many races that summer. Now I will use just a little math to show you why not.

The Math

Without divine intervention or that long-awaited flash of inspiration, after a short time the leaders in this race will be the ones that make more correct moment-by-moment decisions. When our skipper got to his decision point, it is reasonable to assume that the competition ahead of him is batting above 500^D and already chose the short path. If the current leader has a success rate of, say 70%, then by blindly taking the other path, our skipper was limiting his success rate to 30%. This is NOT a winning strategy.

The more prudent leader would have chosen his battles; he would have evaluated every decision independently – more often than not this means he would have made the same choice as his competitor (assuming his own success rate is high enough to be competitive – certainly higher than 50%) – and he would bide his time while waiting for the competition to make their mistake. When his own evaluation led him to a different decision, he would quickly recheck his work (out of respect for his competitor’s 70% success rate) and then he would pounce.

A Non-sailing Example – Rush Hour Traffic

“Rush Hour”, referring to those busy couple of hours in the morning and another couple of hours in the afternoon when everybody is commuting to or from work at the same time and traffic is congested (as opposed to that time of day when Rush Limbaugh is delivering his political commentary), implies an urban environment, which implies a larger grid of streets and thus a richness of decision-making opportunities not completely unlike a fleet of sailboats tacking upwind, but familiar to a much larger segment of the population.

Many of you may have carpooled with somebody with the mentality of the skipper described above: either there is some sort of accident or s/he misjudged traffic again and finds him/herself behind schedule and facing the growing possibility that they will be late for work. Lacking patience or maturity, they assume the traffic must be better on one of the many alternative routes and blindly makes a turn (tacks) at the next intersection. When they discover that this path is also blocked, they immediately move to Plan C, then D, and so forth. Each maneuver has a small cost, which rapidly adds up, and then the path actually starts to get longer and they continue to dig themselves a deeper and deeper hole (oops, that’s not a sailing reference). The math is similar to that above.

To mix metaphors even more, compare this to the hitter swinging too hard for a home run. The problem is that in this game, after each errant swing the outfield fence is moved ten yards further away. Although still mathematically possible (at first), the odds of that game-winning home run drop with every swing. Those are the perils of panicking, shutting off your brain, closing your eyes, and trying to slug your way out of your problems.

The Moral

As you might have guessed, this article is not really about sailing, or traffic, or baseball. Blindly splitting tacks is a tactic of desperation. Desperation is often a result of one’s fears getting the best of them and may be one of the consequences of ignorance. It is never expedient to shut off your brain to save time (by the same token, except for specially trained pilots in specially designed aircraft, no self-respecting pilot would willingly turn off an airplane’s engines while still in the air), yet people try it every day. This is what happens when you panic. So get a grip! Just as in the sailing example, the prudent driver would carefully evaluate every decision (the more you practice, the easier it gets) instead of assuming the worst, bide your time, and make your bold move only when the conditions are right.

How We Lose Our Grip On Reality

After learning how to SCUBA dive while in high school years ago, my friends and I did most of our diving from the beach. The geography was fairly simple; from the beach the bottom had a gentle slope until reaching the (non-coral) reef of interest at a depth of around 30 feet a couple hundred yards offshore. Water visibility was typically 15 to 25 feet offshore, but could be less than five feet in the surf zone. After moving as fast as possible through the surf zone, we would regroup, sink to the bottom, and rely on our compass, backed up by our depth gauge, to find the most direct path (perpendicular to the beach) to our destination. Our depth gauge was supported by physical clues of our depth, like light intensity and even the spectrum of colors available.

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Of course light intensity drops steadily as one goes deeper, but also the colors disappear with depth, starting with the longer wavelengths (red)^A.

At the end of the dive we would return straight to the surface, which would put us still a few hundred yards from the beach. We would inflate our life vests, as they were called back then,

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They are now known as BCDs.^D.

roll over on our backs, and leisurely swim back to the beach as we caught our breath. It was quite common on this return trip to look back past your fins and either see the beach behind you, or see one of your friends swimming out to sea.

But you don’t need to be a diver to see how poorly we maintain a straight and narrow path.

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Any resemblance to Matthew 7:13 & 14^D is purely coincidental. 😉

To do your own experiment, start in the middle of a large field, put a blindfold on and walk in a “straight” line, dropping numbered markers or flags or let out a rope as you walk (the last time I heard of anyone relying on the bread crumb trick, it didn’t turn out well^A.) You should be able to take the blindfold off in less than a minute, look back at your path, and be happy nobody was watching. The moral of this story is that without regular “reality checks”, one won’t be taking the shortest path to your destination, and probably shouldn’t expect to get there at all. And so it is with life.

How To Maintain Your Grip On Reality

Make regular observations

Every nautical chart will tell you that “The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation …”, which clearly means the same as that seventeenth-century proverb “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. Failing to make regular observations is the simplest way to lose touch with reality.

Verify all information – “Google, don’t gossip”

If you don’t know the position or the reliability of the source, you can’t depend on it to find or even describe your own position.

Apply the same standards to all information

Don’t get all of your news from one source. Expect all sources to have some bias (that may not be clear). Politically, this means that you should not get more than 30% of your information from Rush Limbaugh or any lesser-known celebrity (regardless of political affiliation). Your sources should come from all around your horizon,

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Landmarks that are near each other may have similar positional biases, which will translate into errors in your own position estimate because using them will cause the errors to accumulate and negate any averaging or cancelling effect that you were hoping to get from independent sources.

and you should not treat the information that comes from one side of your vessel different from the information on the other side. Again, politically, you can’t demand higher standards from the other candidates than you expect from your favorite. This just exposes you as a bigot looking for excuses.

Don’t Throw Out Information Just Because It’s Unexpected Or Inconvenient

I’ve already discussed this in “How Large Is Your Universe”. If you are doing this, stop calling yourself a scientist and expect others to call you a bigot. We’ve all seen bosses who surround themselves with sycophants^D (ass kissers) and ultimately drive their Rolls-Royce off Reality Road into a ditch (Not surprisingly, none of their entourage^D helps pull them out.) When scientists, whose job it is to describe reality, run across information that doesn’t support their theory they are forced to change their theory. Of course there are the occasional outliers,

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For a simple explanation of outliers, see the “Math Is Fun” website. The last paragraph of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.) website discusses how to handle outliers.

which need to be handled carefully. One clue to how far you’ve wandered from reality is the number of outliers you have to throw away.

And that is pretty much it. It is simple enough, but requires constant effort. If you think I left anything out, let me know. Other comments are welcome and appreciated. Now go apply this to your life. Thanks for listening.

A Spokesperson For Hillary Clinton

I think Secretary Clinton could find somebody like Clara Peller (August 4, 1902 – August 11, 1987)^A to go to all of Donald Trump’s events. She could have been in the front row at the last debate, and then whenever Mr. Trump failed to answer a question (which I believe was every time except the last question (I’ll leave the fact-checking to somebody else – I don’t think I could sit through that debate one more time)), or when Mr. Trump interrupted Ms. Clinton (which only happened 18 times, down from the 51 times he interrupted her in the first debate^A), this Peller doppelgänger^D would interrupt Mr. Trump with her signature line, “Where’s the beef?” I don’t believe Donald would even realize that she is questioning the lack of substance in his conversation or in his Presidential policies; with his adolescent “locker room” mentality, Mr. Trump would assume this old woman was referring to one of his male body parts, and he would feel deeply offended. And then as Mr. Trump walked by at the end of the event, this lady could assume an open, gropeable stance, with her arms outstretched, and maybe her lips all puckered up and ready. She could wind up becoming Donald’s worst nightmare.

For Trump’s other events, you would probably need a corps of such old lady hecklers, because each one would find herself uninvited after her first appearance. In fact, they would probably need to go in groups or be escorted, because Donald’s rabid fans would not be above “taking them out”. Donald himself is more likely to launch into a tirade, followed up at three o’clock the next morning with a volley of angry tweets.

Mrs. Clinton would probably take the advice of Michelle Obama, rather than mine. I understand. I’ve never believed that the victor in a race to the bottom could really be called a winner, anyway (What was the prize for the first man to get to Hell?). But a representative like Clara could put Donald Trump’s tactics into better perspective, and would be entertaining.

Simple English: The Problem With The “If” Statement

You are probably very proud of your grasp of English (unless you live in South Florida, in which case you may not give a damn). And yet I have seen plenty of people whose lack of understanding about basic structures like the “If” statement

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The next article in this series will discuss how misunderstandings about the conjunction “or” have caused so much trouble.

cause them to make terrible assumptions.

An Example

Suppose a young child is misbehaving to the point that the caregiving parent decrees “If you don’t knock that off, I’m going to paddle you” (This is an old example; I’m sure nobody would ever actually do that today 😉 ). As young children have been known to do, for whatever reason, the child continues with its behavior. The parent repeats the statement, with added emphasis. Nothing changes. The parent soon throws their hands up and says “wait until (your other parent) gets home”.

The parent’s first decree, like all “if” statements, had two parts; a condition and a consequence (joined by the conjunction “if”), with the understanding that if the condition is true, then the consequence will occur. It’s simple enough that even a young child can understand it. If the condition is met and the consequence is not accomplished, then the statement would be considered false. In short, the child knew that the parent was lying.

Now suppose the non-caregiving parent comes home, sees the objectionable behavior, makes a similar decree, and then the first parent points out that they had already made that decree to no avail. The child, for whatever reason, stops the objectionable behavior. To everybody’s surprise, the second parent paddles the child. Although the child and many of you listeners may think bad thoughts about this parent, one thing you can’t call him/her is a liar.

The Problem

As you can see here, the problem with the “if” statement is that is incomplete in the sense that it only addresses what happens when the condition is true, remaining completely silent to the possibility that the condition could be false. This allows most people to make the assumption that if the condition is false, the opposite of the consequence must occur. As the young child in our example learned, that assumption would be a mistake.

The Solution

Don’t make stupid assumptions. As your lawyer would tell you, get it in writing. In the above example, since the second parent didn’t make any promises about what would happen if the behavior did stop, s/he can’t be accused of lying. If this example bothers you, I’m sure the second parent told the child afterward that the paddling was for not obeying the first parent, in which case we would be unable to judge the truthfulness of their claim until after the right set of conditions are met following some later episode of misbehavior (guesstimating any change in likelihood of that future misbehavior based on recent events will be left as an exercise for the reader). To lawyers, mathematicians, and the like, the parent’s explanation doesn’t matter to this case and is unnecessary.

P.S.

Logicians have named operators (or functions) fulfilling all sixteen patterns of truthfulness or falsehood of expressions based on the truthfulness or falsity of two variables, such as the condition and consequence of the “if” statement described above. Engineers call the statement that yields the results you thought the “if” statement provided the “exclusive nor” function, “nor” being short for not or, meaning “giving the opposite results than the ‘or’ function”. Some refer to it as logical equality. In English, it would be represented by a sentence including the phrase “If, and only if”, such as “I will ground you for the rest of your life if, and only if, you do not stop screaming this very second”. If that type of statement had been the norm in this household, the non-caregiving parent, upon hearing the lack of results achieved by the other parent, was still free to add other (most likely “or”) clauses (to be discussed in a later article) to his/her decree. If you are now totally confused, please do not sign any document containing more than six words before consulting an attorney, or at least a mathematician. On second thought, in cases like this, I would stick with the lawyer.

Save Your Birthday – Vote For Clinton

When I was growing up, birth was considered a significant event. When a girl got pregnant, it wasn’t assumed that the fetus would have a normal, uneventful life as it grew, got an education and a good job, got married, created their own group of fetuses, contributed to society for several decades, and then had a long, fulfilling retirement. In fact, for two of the three parties involved in the process, birth can be very traumatic. According to one article^A, 60 to 80% of all naturally conceived embryos never make that milestone. And of those who did make it, I don’t know of a single one of you that didn’t do a lot of crying about it. Similarly, in 2017 about 295,000 women died during pregnancy or childbirth^A. In the United States, 18.5 women die for every 100,000 births^A. That is twice the rate of Saudi Arabia, three times that of the United Kingdom, and (strangely enough) 250% as many as died in this country in 1987 (yes, the problem is actually getting worse here). In my mind, this is something we should be concerned about.

And then there’s the dad (or shall we say “sperm donor”). Of the two events, the conception is the only one he has to show up for, and for many (mostly Republican) men in Congress, it is apparently the only one that has any meaning – probably the only one he brags about or bothers to put on his calendar (and to save time and space, I’m guessing he doesn’t even bother to jot down the mother’s name). Some legislators have tried to pass laws making the mother personally responsible for everything that happens after that point. I’m surprised that they haven’t passed a law replacing your birth date with the date of conception on your driver’s license and all other official documents (Oops! sorry, my bad; it just occurred to me that the reason they haven’t done that yet is probably only because they haven’t thought of it. The good news is that nobody reads this blog anyway, so we are probably safe for now).

Call To Action?

If you are proud of your birthday, well actually the picture doesn’t look that rosy. The nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, allowing women the right to vote, was ratified 96 years ago and what a waste of time that was. Their major failures during my lifetime have been the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.), the Hyde Amendment^D – which says the government can only spend money on men’s health issues, not women’s (OK, I’m paraphrasing (maybe even exaggerating) here), and most recently any law that says women will get the same pay as men for the same work. Are my biases causing me to miss anything? Help me out, because I can’t think of a single success they can point to (if you remind me of such a success, I will publish it). I’m really afraid that until women finally grow the balls to exercise their rights, we are all screwed. Is that how you see it? Back in the late 1970’s I had a notion that the National Organization for Women (N.O.W. – which is now 50 years old) was apparently not the right group to lead the charge on the E.R.A. My thinking was that maybe a men’s group with a name like “Fathers Without Sons” (or something with a nicer acronym) would be required to really get the balls rolling. Is that really what’s needed to protect us? Somebody please step up to the plate. In the mean time, the rest of you could start small with a vote for Senator Clinton for President next time you get a chance. Thank you.

A Better Plan For Controlling Gun Violence?

Well, here we are again with another mass shooting in America^A, this time in Orlando, Florida. This is the first such catastrophe since my last post on the subject^A six months ago, which followed a string of almost one mass shooting a month over the six month period before that. And still no solution. I saw a clever suggestion on Facebook, where some gentleman invoked the same rhetoric that Donald Trump used in his plan to ban all Muslims to call for a ban on all assault weapons and weapons of mass destruction only until the United States was able to get a handle on dealing with crazy people and began educating our children again (which were cited in that Facebook discussion as reasons for the rampage). Strangely enough, this idea didn’t seem to be as popular as Trump’s. We’ve also seen the difficulty in passing a law preventing people on the “No Fly” list from getting a gun^A – something that most people consider sensible.

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The Atlantic has a nice article^A explaining how that idea has made hypocrites out of both political parties.

Based on the comments and arguments I’ve read on this issue, I’ve come up with what may be the only workable solution.

Plan B

Since we will apparently never agree to restrict the ownership of firearms in any way (even though we have no problem regulating less dangerous products), we need to institute some sort of bag limits. I am in favor of lifetime limits rather than seasonal limits. There is still some debate on whether the limit on family members should be higher or lower than the limit on innocent strangers (the definition of “innocent” can be worked out later if it is even relevant to this discussion). To get the ball rolling, I’ll throw out a few numbers that we can iron out in the comment section. I propose a lifetime limit of one adult white male per person (some restrictions may apply) regardless of the number of guns owned. Since up to now, damages for such offenses typically considered the earning power of the victim (which never seemed right to me), the bag limit for females should be about 1.5 (I’m not quite sure how to deal with round-off error; maybe we could start at two, but drop the limit to one if you’ve already met your male limit). The limit on Muslims would, of course, be three (we need to keep the limit for any one incident below four so we don’t trigger the commonly used definition of a mass shooting, and can therefore look better than the French). Since Jews are still the most persecuted religious group in America^A, we’ll set their limit at two. As usual, there will be no limit on black males, except for overzealous law enforcement agencies.

If we follow this plan, the mass-shooting statistics are guaranteed to go down. But if the overall gun violence statistics increase intolerably we could either go to a lottery system or increase the permit fees. (As the fees for especially popular groups start to increase, we may need to find a way to control poaching. We can worry about that later.) Both of these solutions have been successful with other game. If the fees are high enough, we could lower other taxes. I would start with the taxes devoted to education, since I suspect that those most likely to object to this plan may have some level of intelligence. We could export the catch to China and convince them it’s more humane than the dog meat they are now using. If we corner the market for this resource, that too would increase tax revenue.

Did I forget anything? I realize that this solution may not pass the test for political correctness, but based on some of the feedback I saw in the Facebook discussion, that alone could make the plan more attractive to some people.

What do you think? If you have a more workable plan, let’s hear it. If, on the other hand, your plan depends on Hell freezing over, you might as well keep it to yourself.

A Better Way To Handle The Harambe Incident

For those who haven’t heard about the gorilla named Harambe that was shot ten minutes after a toddler fell into his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo around 4 pm on Saturday, May 28, 2016, here is as good a source as any: Gorilla killed after 4-year-old falls into zoo enclosure. Apparently, authorities had both a tranquilizer gun and a rifle at their disposal, and chose the rifle to fatally shoot the gorilla even though the boy hadn’t yet been seriously injured because they were afraid that the tranquilizer wouldn’t act fast enough. They didn’t have to make that call. Here’s a better way.

Take both the tranquilizer and the rifle. The same person should not operate both.
Have other staff members make themselves immediately ready to rescue the child.
When both weapons are ready, shoot the gorilla with the tranquilizer.
Have the person with the rifle continuously evaluate the threat posed by the gorilla. If bodily harm from the gorilla is not immediately forthcoming, do not shoot.
If the parents get hysterical while you are evaluating the situation and behave in such a way as to adversely affect the behavior of the gorilla or the judgement of the zoo staff, shoot the parents. (So as not to make the same mistake as the Cincinnati Zoo staff did Saturday, I guess I should mention that you could use the tranquilizer gun for this if you had the forethought to bring the correct dose – even though at this point it wouldn’t be my weapon of choice. If you don’t have the correct dose, just pray that the staff isn’t acting under the same level of panic or incompetence as they exhibited with Harambe.)
Rescue the child as soon as practicable.

Although (admittedly based on limited information) I did not think the boy was in danger, and not all witnesses in Cincinnati felt the danger^A, those opinions don’t matter to the success of this plan. Since using the tranquilizer doesn’t prevent the use of the rifle, this plan could not have turned out worse for the child than the plan executed, and most likely would have turned out much better for all concerned. The zoo simply threw away options prematurely based solely on their worse fears instead of facts – that sounds like panic to me, and it sounds very unprofessional. If you feel differently, feel free to comment. If you see a reason that this plan would not work, feel free to comment.