Month: June 2024

Here is Hilbert looking professorial against a background of, um, scholarly books. Note that, as usual, he's in my red chair. In the late afternoon he likes to jump up on me when I'm sitting in it and demand belly rubs. But if I get up, he instantly claims the chair for himself and stretches himself out. Whaddayagonnado?

The Supreme Court ruled today that a "bump stock" does not convert a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun and is therefore legal. The key question is whether a rifle with a bump stock fires continuously or needs to be separately engaged for each round fired. As a result, the entire argument depends on a long and detailed exegesis of the phrase "single function of the trigger":

Bump firing is a balancing act. The shooter must maintain enough forward pressure to ensure that he will bump the trigger with sufficient force to engage it. But, if the shooter applies too much forward pressure, the rifle will not slide back far enough to allow the trigger to reset. The right balance produces a reciprocating motion that permits the shooter to repeatedly engage and release the trigger in rapid succession.

....According to ATF, all the shooter must do is keep his trigger finger stationary on the bump stock’s ledge and maintain constant forward pressure on the front grip to continue firing. The dissent offers similar reasoning.

This argument rests on the mistaken premise that there is a difference between a shooter flexing his finger to pull the trigger and a shooter pushing the firearm forward to bump the trigger against his stationary finger. ATF and the dissent seek to call the shooter’s initial trigger pull a “function of the trigger” while ignoring the subsequent “bumps” of the shooter’s finger against the trigger before every additional shot.

There's more along these lines. Much, much more. In fact, what strikes me about Clarence Thomas's majority opinion is that it's so lovingly crafted. I learned more about how a bump stock operates than in any news article I've ever read about it. It even includes diagrams showing how a semiautomatic trigger mechanism works!

It's pretty obvious that this is literally not a question of law at all. Is it a "single function of the trigger" if you merely keep the trigger depressed to fire multiple rounds but you have to rhythmically "bump" the rifle after every shot? What law is going to decide that?

Thomas's best argument, I think, has nothing to do with how a bump stock operates:

On more than 10 separate occasions over several administrations, ATF consistently concluded that rifles equipped with bump stocks cannot “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”

....ATF abruptly reversed course in response to a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. In October 2017, a gunman fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 more. The gunman equipped his weapons with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes. This tragedy created tremendous political pressure to outlaw bump stocks nationwide.

This is true. It's pretty obvious that ATF changed its rules for purely political reasons, not because it genuinely believed bump stocks turned rifles into machine guns.

In any case, what happened is the usual thing. Even though this case is based on statutory language, not constitutional issues; and even though it depends on a very delicate interpretation of a single phrase; and even though both sides essentially agree on the particulars—despite all that, the conservatives all voted one way and the liberals the other way. And by an amazing coincidence, all nine justices decided that this delicate statutory interpretation matched their ideological preferences. How about that?

Donald Trump says one of his recent speeches was rewritten by an AI program:

“I had a speech rewritten by AI out there, one of the top people,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna make a speech? Yeah?’ He goes, click, click, click, and like, 15 seconds later, he shows me my speech that’s written that’s great, so beautifully. I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.” Trump did not say at what event he had used the AI-generated speech.

He predicted that AI’s oratorical gifts could sound the death knell for speech writers, long a part of Washington’s political landscape. “One industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters,” he said. I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly, a matter of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary.”

Interesting if true. Unfortunately, this is Donald Trump we're dealing with, so maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Maybe he's lying, since he does that routinely. Maybe he's exaggerating, and it was just a single paragraph that was rewritten. Maybe it was just a sentence. Who knows? I sure haven't heard any recent speeches of his that sounded any different than his usual buffoonery.

Here's the latest meme on the right:

Sigh. Are you interested in a deep-in-the-weeds explanation of how crime is reported and summarized in the US? Sure, why not.

For many years the FBI used a crime-reporting system called SRS. But in 2016, after years of testing, they finally announced that they would switch to a substantially improved system called NIBRS by 2021. And they did. Not every police department was ready on time, but the participation level has been rising every year:

About 71% of all police department now submit crime data via NIBRS. Among the 15 largest cities, all are up and running—including New York City—except for Los Angeles and Jacksonville. Both will complete the transition later this year.

In addition, the FBI allows non-NIBRS agencies to report old-school SRS data, which is reformatted and then used to estimate crime in nonreporting cities. So the total agency coverage of the FBI's dataset is actually about 84%.

Now, the old SRS system had about 95% agency coverage, so the coverage of the current system is still lower than it used to be. However, as you might expect, the statisticians in the Department of Justice are keenly aware of this and spent years developing a set of sophisticated methods to estimate the full total. There are several issues they've had to address, and the biggest one is all those missing agencies. Here's how they do it:

To account for nonreporting agencies—those agencies which have not reported any information through NIBRS during the year—a statistical weight is applied to the reporting agencies. A statistical weight is a number allowing the reporting agencies to represent both themselves and some portion of the nonreporting agencies. Statistical weights are designed in such a way that reporting agencies represent nonreporting agencies who have similar agency characteristics, such as agency size and agency type.

Got that? If Peoria is missing,¹ they give a greater weight to a few similar neighboring cities in order to make up for it. The idea is that crime is likely to be nearly the same in places that are nearby and the same size, so you can use those places to create an estimate for the nonreporting city. Some of the estimates will be off, but if you do thousands of them it mostly evens out.

The upshot of all this is (a) participation is growing and nearly all big cities are now on board, and (b) the FBI's model accounts for missing cities and makes up for it. The NIBRS transition in 2021 was pretty messy, but since then the kinks have mostly been worked out and the current data is very reliable. Not perfect, but pretty good. If they say crime is down, then crime is down.

¹It's not. They are fully operational on NIBRS.

Over at National Review, Luther Ray Abel jokingly says that Illinois has the ugliest flag in creation. But:

The second-most-hideous ensign, the so-called Pride flag, deserves more consideration because of its actively chimeric nature. The multivarious sexual and racial political interests represented in its horizontal bar and leftward-marching chevron were recently unveiled at a NASA outpost in California. It’s the slippery slope playing out before our eyes, with the previous year’s model — no longer inclusive enough — moldering in a central California dump; a new symbol was affixed to the standard: a circle representing intersex individuals (those born with a combination of male and female genitalia).

....Everyone, no matter what resides in any individual’s trousers, can gaze upon the vexillological, scatological brilliance that is the Pride flag in its final form and say, “I am seen (even if I need binoculars to see which stripe or structure represents my reproductive and racial predilections in this 3×5 quadrangle of nyan-cat-produced accelerant).”

Yeah, the Pride flag has changed a bunch over the years. Early on it coalesced into the six-color rainbow that everyone is familiar with. Then it added brown and black stripes to represent people of color. Then it incorporated the black and brown with pink and blue in a set of chevrons pointing outward to represent the trans community. A couple of years ago it added a circle to represent intersex folks.

But there's no law that says which flag you have to use. The original version is still extremely widespread. So who cares?

The only reason I bring this up is to point out Abel's illustration of a common conservative trait: mockery of inclusiveness in any and all forms. I mean, I get that the ever-changing Pride flag might be fodder for some comedians, sort of like the ever-expanding acronym LGBTQIA+. But for those whose job isn't comedy, why the endless contempt? In one breath they'll tell you that of course they have nothing against gay—or intersex—people, and in the next that everything they do to represent themselves is ridiculous.

Mockery of absurd hypersensitivity is understandable. Criticism of people you actively dislike and/or disapprove of is understandable. Contempt for hypocrisy is understandable.

But don't pretend to be tolerant if you take literally every opportunity that comes your way to mock and denounce some group or another—and never take the opportunity to say anything good about them. Grow up.

The radiation treatments for my prostate cancer will begin on July 1 and continue every weekday through August 7. That's it. That's the update.

POSTSCRIPT: And I get tattoos! For real. A series of dots on my groin that help guide the radiation beam.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: My pre-treatment testosterone level is 375, right in the middle of the normal range of 221-716. Also, my latest PSA is down to 18.1.

Good news: Obamacare enrollments are up, much of it thanks to the work of independent agents. Bad news: those agents aren't always doing a great job. Andrew Sprung runs down the numbers for Obamacare applications submitted by agents:

• 16% lacked a Social Security number.
• 26% had data matching problems (income, immigration status, etc.).
• 17% of people qualifying for free CSR silver plans were instead steered toward low-quality bronze plans.

How do you forget a Social Security number? But at least that's easily fixed. The bigger problem is the number of poor people who qualify for Cost Sharing Reduction silver plans, which are cheap and high quality, being signed up instead for bronze plans with big deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. That's a tragedy for the people who can least afford it.

CSR has always been a bit of a problem. Not everyone knows about it, and it's not always obvious on the online enrollment forms. Maybe the feds need to make a new metal level between silver and gold and rename the whole program. Electrum plans?

This is a fennec fox at the Los Angeles Zoo peering suspiciously at me from safely behind some logs. Perhaps he would have viewed me with more favor if I'd had a tasty morsel of rodent to offer.

Europe measures inflation using something called HICP—the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices. This is measured a bit differently than CPI in the United States, but luckily the BLS calculates an unofficial HICP index for the US every month. This allows an apples-to-apples comparison of inflation in the US and Europe. Here it is:

It should surprise no one that inflation is pretty closely matched. In particular, our recent inflationary surge happened almost identically in Europe with a lag of a few months. This is why you shouldn't pay much attention to anyone who suggests there was some kind of unique American action that caused inflation. It was a worldwide phenomenon and that points in pretty much one direction: COVID.

It wasn't Joe Biden's stimulus. It wasn't greedy American companies. And it wasn't anything special about our response to COVID. It was supply constrictions caused by the pandemic combined with government actions to keep incomes stable. Reduced supply + stable demand = inflation. Simple.

The Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly yesterday to disapprove of in-vitro fertilization. The reason is that IVF procedures usually produce lots of fertilized eggs, only one or two of which are ever used. The rest are eventually destroyed.

What makes this maybe a little bit surprising is that among the rank and file, IVF is overwhelmingly supported. Here's a Pew survey from just last month:

Even among evangelical Protestants, IVF was supported 63%-9%. Everybody supports IVF.

Now, the delegates to the SBC convention are probably on the far edge of even Southern Baptists, so it's not surprising they might be somewhat more conservative on the question. And the SBC in general might be more conservative than "white evangelical Protestants" in general.

Still, going from overwhelmingly in favor in a survey to overwhelmingly opposed in a nonbinding vote—that means something. I'm just not sure what.