I’ll start with three important points that shouldn’t be controversial

1. The ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good. I haven’t seen anyone try to deny this, but it seems pretty obvious that his actions caused her death. Unless someone has truly amazing evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume Renee Good’s manner of death was homicide by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross.
2. What makes this contentious is the issue of self defense. Supporters of the Ross, and presumably Ross himself, are claiming the homicide was justified as an act of self defense: He feared for his life, and he had to shoot her to protect his life. In particular, he shot because he believed she was trying to kill or seriously injure him by striking him with her car.
3. Years of reading about shootings and watching videos have taught me that self defense is a very fact sensitive issue. As the story breaks in the news, the issue of whether or not the shooting was legitimate self-defense can hinge on important facts that may not have been revealed by early reports or videos.

To my way of thinking, shootings like this usually end up in one of three broad categories: Righteous, excusable, or criminal.

• Righteous Shooting: A righteous shooting is one that was the right thing to do given the actual facts. If the same situation arose again, we would want the same action taken. Example: True self-defense, such as shooting an attacker to stop an imminent threat to innocent life.
• Criminal Shooting: A criminal shooting is a straightforward crime, such as intentionally or carelessly shooting an innocent person.
• Excusable Shooting: An excusable shooting occurs when the shooter did not behave criminally, but we still wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. This often involves a reasonable belief that turns out to be wrong. Example: A man is robbing someone at gunpoint, and a police officer shoots him dead, but it later turns out the gun was a realistic fake. The world would be a better place if the officer had not killed an unarmed man, but the officer did nothing wrong.

(Although some legal systems have similar categories, these are not legal definitions. In particular, criminal law generally does not distinguish between what I’m calling righteous and excusable shootings.)

I think the most crucial issue is whether Renee Good was trying to hit Agent Ross with her car. If she was, then the debate is mostly over^[1]Technically, the true test of self-defense is whether Ross believed Good was trying to hit him. If she tried to kill him and he didn’t know it, then he can’t claim self-defense. It’s the same as if a homicidal maniac entered a bus station and shot the first person he saw in the head. Even if it later turns out his victim was wearing an explosive suicide vest and was seconds away from killing everyone in the station, that’s still not self-defense. You can’t … Continue reading, and it was a righteous self-defense shooting.

But honestly, I just can’t see it. Too many things about this incident argue against her intentionally trying to hit Agent Ross:

• I’m not aware of anything about Good’s background to indicate that she had violent tendencies. It would be unusual for someone to go from a history of non-violence to murder of a federal officer without a lot of smaller violent incidents along the way.
• If Good was going to kill an ICE agent, she chose to do it by running him over (a) in her own car, easily traced to her, (b) at slow speed, (c) while surrounded by witnesses, (d) and armed federal agents. That would be one of the stupidest murder attempts ever.
• Agent Ross was standing to the left of the car’s centerline, but Good clearly steered the car to the right. That’s not something you do if you want to run someone over. I’ve seen videos of police officers intentionally striking armed bad guys with their patrol cars, and they always hit them straight on. It’s what anybody would do. You steer in the direction you want to go. And she steered away.

And yet, in some of the videos, it looks like Ross has some kind of interaction with the vehicle. So what the heck happened?

The only way I can make sense of the evidence I’ve seen so far ^[2]An important caveat for this entire piece. is that Good was upset by the other ICE agent who was trying to get her out of her car, so she tried to drive away. Meanwhile, agent Ross was approaching her car from the right side. It looks like he crosses in front of her car while she’s distracted by backing up and then reaching down to shift into Drive. Then she stepped on the gas before she realized that agent Ross had moved.

In one of the videos, Ross draws his weapon as the car starts to roll forward. Our view of him is obscured, but his weight seems to come off his feet for a fraction of a second just before he fires his first shot. I’m guessing that Ross had pushed off the car with his hand to get away from it. I can’t tell if he would have taken a solid hit if he hadn’t done that.

A few complications:

Wasn’t she blocking traffic? Isn’t that a crime? It looks like she was parked sideways across at least one lane, which would probably be a violation of some kind. Nevertheless, breaking minor traffic laws does not justify lethal force.

She tried to drive away after an ICE Agent told her to get out of the car. Isn’t that a crime? That’s what it looked like to me, and I’m sure it’s a crime. I’ve heard others claim that another agent was ordering her to leave, but I haven’t seen any good evidence. In any case, absconding alone does not justify lethal force.

If you’re with me so far, then we’ve eliminated the possibility of this being a righteous shooting. It’s either a tragedy or a crime.

Should Ross have been in front of her car? Isn’t there a policy about that? Many police agencies have a rule against stopping someone in a car by standing in front of it. (Those that don’t have the rule probably think their officers would never be that stupid.) But I’m not sure that’s what happened here. Ross was just wandering around her car, documenting the encounter on his phone when another ICE agent showed up on the scene and started trying to get Gold out of her car. This turned it into a traffic stop, with Agent Ross badly positioned in front of her vehicle while the other agent was trying to get her out of the car. The newly-arrived ICE agent had escalated the situation, to the detriment of everyone involved.

How much could Ross have feared for his life if he didn’t even drop his cell phone? This is a training issue. Cops are trained to shoot with both hands on the gun because it’s faster and more accurate. The problem is, lots of cops find themselves in a shooting situation while holding something in their off hand, and the internet is full of videos of cops shooting one-handed while trying to figure out what to do with their other hand. Most of their training started with both hands empty, so when the gunfight starts and their brains are running in fight-or-flight mode they don’t know what to do with the other hand. They fumble around, or they try to put their radio or flashlight back in place on their uniform in the middle of a shootout. Ross had probably always been careful not to drop his phone, and in the stress of the moment, he couldn’t change that.

What about the second and third shots fired through the side window of the car? Even if the first shot could be justified as self-defense, the shots into the driver from the side clearly cannot be self-defense because the car was no longer an immediate threat. However, human reaction time plays a role. Cops these days are trained to start shooting when they perceive a threat to their lives and keep shooting until they perceive the threat is over, and both starting and stopping are subject to a normal human delay of about a half-second or so between perception and behavior. Ross’s shots were about a third of a second apart, so once he perceived the threat was over, he could still end up shooting one or two more times before he was able to stop.

What does the autopsy tell us? The Hennepin County medical examiner has not released a full report yet, but Renee Good’s family had a private autopsy performed, and it reveals that she was shot three times^[3]There is a fourth grazing injury which did not cause significant harm.: One bullet hit her left forearm, which seems to correspond to the bullet hole in her windshield, making it the first shot. Another bullet hit her right breast, which seems plausibly to be the second shot. Neither of those wounds would have been immediately life threatening. The final bullet struck her left temple and exited on the opposite side of her skull. This was the killing shot.

Agent Ross apparently called her a “fucking bitch” after shooting her. Doesn’t that imply he shot out of anger? Well, if we believe him that he feared for his life, then I’m not surprised he called her a “fucking bitch” for trying to run him over. All it tells us is that Ross was angry. Angry enough to kill? Or angry because he was almost killed? It works either way, so it’s not helpful.

So it seems…plausible…that Agent Ross feared for his life and shot her in self-defense. Except…

The biggest problem I have with Agent Ross’s behavior can be illustrated by this question: “Agent Ross, you’ve said that when you saw the car start to move you feared for you life. Can you tell me what you hoped to accomplish by shooting the driver?”

I don’t think he can come up with a reasonable answer. The car is only about 5 feet away from him as it begins to move toward him. Even creeping along at a walking pace of 3 miles per hour, the front bumper would close the distance and hit him in about one second. That’s right at the human reaction limit: A well-trained expert can respond to a stimulus and fire an aimed shot in about 1 second. So by the time the bullet hit her, the car would have hit him. Shooting would not have protected him. The car could easily hit him before he finished pulling the trigger.^[4]Having access to the car would likely yield more evidence about the bullets’ paths, but the feds reportedly took it away. In fact, that’s what I see in the video: The car hits Ross before he fires by at least half a second.

And then there’s the problem that killing the driver doesn’t stop the car. A dead driver’s foot might slip off the gas pedal, but it’s never going to hit the brake. So the car is always going to keep right on rolling. I’ve seen least two other shooting videos where that happened. And that’s what happens here: The car rolls past Agent Ross and down the street. After a second or two, Good’s body must have slid down and put pressure on the gas pedal, because you can hear the engine rev up as the car accelerates into a parked vehicle.

Shooting the driver did nothing to stop the car and never could have. Instead it created a danger for other people nearby as the car careened out of control.

So why did Ross open fire? I think the answer falls into one of four categories:

1. Fixation: He had drawn his gun, and when the stress reaction took over, all he could think of was to shoot his gun.
2. Training: He’s been trained to shoot at people who threaten his life, and that’s what he did, even if it couldn’t possibly be effective.
3. Anger: He was pissed off at Good and wanted some payback. The “fucking bitch” remark shows that Ross was clearly angry, but as I argued above, that doesn’t prove murder.
4. Calculation: Standing in front of a car — but just far enough to the side to get out of the way — can give a cop an excuse to kill someone. Border Patrol has a history of such abuses.

With the evidence I’m aware of — much less than would be available to an official investigation — I find it difficult to distinguish between these scenarios. When I first started writing this, I was inclined to think this was more likely to be a mistake than a murder. But then the autopsy results came out, revealing that only the final shot was fatal, and my judgement flipped. Previously, I had speculated that Ross kept shooting until his brain processed the fact that the threat had passed. But now I find myself wondering if Ross kept shooting until he got the fatal headshot he was trying for. I have no way to know, but it’s a haunting thought.

In any case, I think either Ross made a mistake or shot her on purpose. Neither is excusable. And one thing I am confident about is that Renee Good would not have died if ICE hadn’t been there.

Note: I found this analysis by use-of-force expert John Correia to be useful in writing this post.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at On the shooting of Renee Good

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory satellite was originally called the “Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer” when NASA launched it in 2004. It has since been renamed to honor its longtime principle investigator, but that original name pretty much explains what it does: It’s a space telescope built specifically to study gamma-ray bursts. These brief but highly-energetic bursts of energy from outer space were discovered in the 1960s by satellites designed to detect nuclear bomb testing, and they have remained somewhat mysterious for decades. In the 1990s astronomers observed that gamma-ray bursts were sometimes followed by an “afterglow” in the X-ray, ultraviolet, and visible parts of the spectrum.

The Swift Observatory was built specifically to observe these emissions. It consists of three instruments: The gamma-ray detector, an X-ray telescope, and an ultraviolet/visible light telescope. When a gamma-ray burst is detected, the satellite can rapidly slew around to point the X-ray and visible light telescopes at the origin point in deep space to gather more data.^[1]The “Swift” in the name refers not to its flight but to the satellite’s ability to quickly rotate to point at a target, which it does with a cluster of flywheels: Spin the flywheel clockwise and the satellite reacts by spinning counter-clockwise. When it’s not observing gamma-ray bursts, astronomers around the world can request that it look at other things in space.

We generally think of space as beginning 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. That’s roughly the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes too thin to have aerodynamic effects on a human scale. It’s also the altitude you have to reach to be called an astronaut. But the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t end at a sharp line. Above 100km the atmosphere is very, very thin, but it still matters to satellites.

As a satellite plows through the scattered air molecules, it bumps them out of the way, and the reaction force from bumping air molecules slowly drains away the satellite’s speed. That loss of speed causes the satellite to lose altitude, descending into a lower orbit. As the satellite descends, its gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy and it actually speeds up.^[2]Orbital flight is counterintuitive: Going faster makes you go higher, getting higher makes you slow down, slowing down makes you go lower, and getting lower makes you go faster. It sounds weird, but that’s the physics. The combination of a higher speed and deeper immersion in the atmosphere makes the drag even worse. Eventually, the satellite’s orbit decays far enough that it re-enters the thick atmosphere near the surface and the extreme drag forces convert all that speed to pressure and heat, causing the satellite to break up, burn up, or both.

To prevent this from happening, many long-duration satellites in low orbit below about 2000 km (1240 mi) have some sort of station-keeping engines that adjust the orbit to counter the effects of drag. Unfortunately, the Swift Observatory’s mission was not originally intended to last long enough for orbital decay to be a factor, so it was never equipped with such engines.

The Swift Observatory has been traveling through the wisps of low Earth orbit atmosphere at about 7.5 kilometers per second (about 17,000 miles per hour) for a little over 21 years. That’s over 3 billion miles of circular flight around the Earth. The atmospheric drag from that long flight has brought the Swift Observatory down from its initial orbital altitude of 600 km (370 mi) to about 400 km (250 mi) today. The effects of drag are uncertain because upper atmospheric “weather” varies over time depending on a variety of conditions, but aerospace engineers currently think it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up by the end of 2026.

Somewhat surprisingly, there’s a rescue plan. A relatively new company called Katalyst received a $30 million contract in September to try to move the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit. They’re going to use a Pegasus XL rocket, dropped from a plane at about 39,000 feet, to boost Katalyst’s robotic repair spacecraft into orbit to rendezvous with Swift, grab onto it, and push it into a higher orbit. The robot has been used before to repair some satellites, but this is the first time it will attempt to move a satellite. This is also the first time anyone has attempted to move a satellite that was never intended to be moved.

Most of the cost of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, about $500 million, was spent at the beginning to build it and put it into orbit. Since then, the operating costs have been comparatively small, and even this $30 million mission is well worth it, compared to the cost of launching a new observatory.

This is a race against time, or rather against orbital decay. Engineers working on the project estimate that once the Swift satellite’s orbit drops below 300 km — which is expected to happen in the fourth quarter of 2026 — a rescue will no longer be feasible with the technology available. The current plan is to launch the rescue mission in June of 2026, which is a crazy short lead time for a space flight. Apparently, Katalyst was planning a test flight in June anyway, so they’re repurposing it to be an actual mission, which allows them to reuse a lot of the planning and equipment. Still, this is a very ambitious mission.

In honor of the Swift Observatory, and the plan to rescue it, I’ve added a widget in the right-hand column that tracks its orbit. The data comes as standard two-line element sets (TLEs) from U.S. Space Force, which maintains watch on tens of thousands of objects in low Earth orbit. The TLEs are then fed into an SGP4 propagation model, which continuously calculates the instantaneous position of the satellite for display in the widget. There’s a polling agent on the back end that checks for updates from Space Force several times per day.

The positioning data is pretty standard — latitude and longitude are the position on Earth over which the satellite is passing, altitude is how high it is above the surface, heading is the direction of travel, with 0 being due north, and speed is the rate of travel along that heading. The orbital elements are a little more technical, and I’m only displaying some of the simpler ones, but I do want to draw your attention to perigee, which is the height above the Earth at the point of closest approach.

You may notice that the displayed altitude is often below the perigee. This seems like it should be impossible because the perigee is supposed to be the lowest point of the orbit. The short explanation is that the elements in a TLE set are idealized mean values intended to serve only as input to the SGP4 model, which adjusts for some of the details of orbital flight around the Earth. So sometimes the altitude of the more realistic model strays below the altitude implied by the perigee element. To help clarify, I’ve added a Lowest Altitude value that is calculated by finding the lowest calculated altitude over a 24 hour period, which is what I think we really want.

Note that there’s a menu in the upper right corner of the widget that lets you get more information about the Swift Observatory’s orbit, including a website showing you the HTML to add this widget to your website…assuming I got it right. I’ve never tried something like this before.

Finally, I wish everyone at NASA, Katalyst Space Technologies, and the Swift Mission Operations Center the best of luck. Here’s hoping all goes well and the Swift observations keep rolling in for a long, long time.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Swift Descending

Mark – President Trump has made it crystal clear: he’s committed to restoring and defending your Second Amendment rights. But the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, is actively IGNORING the president, betraying gun owners, and trampling your rights.

While Bondi’s DOJ has taken some positive steps for Second Amendment rights, the department is now acting on its own—defying President Trump’s directives and letting gun owners down in the process.

The idea of Pam Bondi defying Donald Trump’s wishes is absurd. She’s been in his pocket ever since Trump gave $25,000 to support her campaign for Florida Attorney General. She vocally supported his campaign, represented him through the first impeachment, and backed him at every turn. She’s not going to oppose his policy on guns.

The GOA letter lists some anti-gun things the DOJ has done:

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE’S TERRIBLE SECOND AMENDMENT STANCES

A rogue ATF employee declared pinned-and-welded barrels “not permanent” after destroying a sample with a vise. ATF has refused to reverse this Biden-era reinterpretation, threatening millions of legally configured rifles.

The concern here is that it is (effectively) illegal to have a rifle with a barrel shorter than 16 inches, but many rifles are sold with barrels slightly shorter than that, to which they permanently attach a muzzle device, such a flash suppressor or compensator, using the pin-and-weld method. This has long been recognized as bringing the gun into legal compliance.

The GOA says that an ATF employee claimed a muzzle device was not permanent because they could tear it off with enough force, even though that damaged the barrel enough to render the gun unusable. It’s questionable whether this actually changes anything, and rifles with pinned and welded muzzle devices are still being sold by major manufacturers.

Here are a few other complaints:

After a pro-gun Supreme Court victory in Garland v. Cargill crushed the bump stock ban, Bondi’s DOJ refused to pay GOA’s legal fees, punishing grassroots defenders and discouraging pro-gun litigation.

The bump stock ban was enacted by an Executive Order that Trump signed in 2018. You folks at GOA fought him on it, so he’s not about to pay your bills. Not paying bills is kind of his brand.

ATF weaponized background checks, spying on lawful sales, and leaving loopholes to expand this unconstitutional surveillance in the future.

DOJ is using Biden’s anti-gun playbook to attack Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act, making arguments nearly identical to those used under the Biden regime.

Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act aims to prevent local police from helping enforce federal gun laws. Of course Trump’s Attorney General doesn’t like it: It mirrors the logic of sanctuary cities, which Trump hates, and it takes power away from Trump’s federal government, which he hates even more.

Bondi’s DOJ is defending unconstitutional suppressor bans, parroting the failed arguments of California’s anti-gun politicians.

I don’t like them either, but they haven’t been found unconstitutional.

In case after case, DOJ drags its feet, blocks legal fee recovery, and argues to keep Biden’s anti-gun rules alive for a future anti-gun president.

The DOJ supported warrantless home searches in Montana, putting your Fourth Amendment rights at risk.

The DOJ is even defending gag orders that prevent GOA from sharing FOIA documents.

Pratt then goes on to say:

Mark, President Trump is standing up for our rights. But the Department of Justice and Pam Bondi are BLOCKING his pro-2A agenda and ignoring orders from the top. This is an outright betrayal.

Oh, it may very well be a betrayal, but not by Pam Bondi.

Trump has done very little to help gun owners. He managed to eliminate the fee for a National Firearms Act tax stamp, which is required for suppressors and short-barreled rifles, but he didn’t get rid of the requirement for registration and ATF approval. Nor did he do anything about state laws banning such weapons.

Trump has pardoned multiple drug dealers and kingpins, and he even sprang George Santos from prison, but he hasn’t done a thing for people arrested by the ATF for ridiculous paperwork crimes.

Trump is no friend to the right to keep and bear arms. Blaming it on Bondi is just Pratt’s transparent attempt to avoid angering Trump supporters who donate to pro-gun organizations.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at GOA on Trump

I spent several years working for a defense contractor, during which time I sometimes had to meet with our points-of-contact in the Department of Defense. We’d usually end up going out to lunch, and one thing I learned pretty quickly is that we weren’t allowed to pay the bill. In the private business world that’s a routine courtesy, but government anti-bribery rules forbid it.

I still work for companies with government customers, and although I don’t normally meet the customers, I still have to take the ethics training, and the anti-bribery rules are pretty clear: I can’t give them, nor can they accept, anything of value to influence official decisions or actions.

So if I wanted to give them, say, a Harry & David Gourmet Charcuterie and Cheese Entertainer’s Crate for $319, that would break the anti-bribery rules.

But what if I made it clear to my point-of-contact that this was a personal gift? That it’s not from me as a representative of one of their contractors to them as a representative of the contracting agency, but simply a modest gift from one meat and cheese lover to another? Would that still violate the anti-bribery rules?

Yes, of course it would, because the investigators in the Inspector General’s office aren’t that stupid. Just because we say it’s not a bribe doesn’t mean it’s not a bribe. The ethical analysis can see through the pro-forma declaration of intent to what is really going on. It’s a bribe.

Okay, but let’s try it the other way around: What if I made it clear that I wasn’t giving the gift to my point-of-contact personally, but that my employer was giving it to the United States Government. And if the government employee with decision authority over what to do with the gift just happens to decide to give it to my point-of-contact, that’s an unrelated internal issue.^[1]Okay, a charcuterie board is an unrealistic example, but it’s not unusual for contractors to try to reward purchasing decision-makers. E.g. If the contract is to renovate a building for agency use, they just might give the decision-maker a really nice office with carpeting, a hardwood desk, and an upgraded executive chair. I’m just sweetening the deal between a corporate entity and a government entity, and my point-of contact just happens to receive a benefit from their agency, not from me. So that’s totally cool, right?

No, of course not. The point-of-contact, who has a duty of honest service to the government, is receiving something of value from me. It’s plainly a gift — and therefore potentially a bribe — and neither of us can launder it by pretending it’s something that it’s not.

So when the government of Qatar gives Donald Trump a luxurious Boeing 747 to fly around in for the rest of his term as President, that’s pretty much a bribe for the same reason. Some people are defending Trump by smugly proclaiming that it wasn’t a personal gift, but that doesn’t get him off the hook. Yes, the Qataris are technically giving the plane to the U.S. Air Force. But Trump still gains the personal benefit of flying around in a far more comfortable plane than he normally would. He’s getting something of value, so it’s still a bribe.

Mind you, a sovereign government giving the U.S. government a jumbo jet is unusual enough that it might not meet the strict legal definition of bribery. The laws are not written for unusual circumstances like this.^[2]A cynic would claim that letting powerful people get away with stuff is exactly what the laws are written for. But that doesn’t make it anything other than what it is. The government of Qatar arranged for Trump to receive a lavish benefit, and they probably aren’t doing that purely out of their personal affection for the man.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Yes, It’s a Bribe

I think I need to have an argument with my fellow libertarians to explain that. It’s a complex subject, but I’ve boiled my rant down to a bunch of short points:

Not like a business. You’d think people who advocate “running the government like a business” would recognize that what Trump and Musk are doing is not how successful business leaders manage change. They don’t rush around firing people willy-nilly. Effective leaders have goals, and they have plans to reach those goals. More importantly, they communicate their plans and goals to everyone else in the organization, getting buy-in from as many people as possible and building a culture that supports the change. DOGE staffers are just swinging an axe at anything they dislike.

Twitter. Some people point to Musk’s management of Twitter as proof that he knows what he’s doing. After all, he also fired lots of people very quickly there, and “the website’s still up.” But that’s no great accomplishment: Modern cloud-based applications are engineered to keep running without human intervention. Heck, I haven’t touched my demo Spelling Bee site in almost a year, and it’s still up^[1]Not any more. After writing this, I decided it was costing me more than it’s worth, so I took it down., so it’s no surprise that Twitter/X keeps going. But people have been leaving the platform, and those who remain seem to be spending less time on it. Twitter revenue continues to decline and it’s estimated that Twitter has lost 88% of it’s brand value and 79% of its net worth since Musk took over.

Power not success. Some people defend Musk’s management of Twitter by saying his goal was to achieve power, not financial success, and therefore his current role in the Trump administration shows him to have been a super-genius. Even if we accept that framing, the fact that Twitter worked out well for Musk doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is still collapsing. It would be a disaster to let him do the same thing to the government.

Information Problem. Those of us who prefer free markets to central planning like to point out that central planners can’t possible have enough information to efficiently control the activities of an entire economy. A similar information problem affects large organizations like corporations. Or the federal government. Elon Musk and a few dozen DOGE employees can’t possibly drop in and immediately understand large government departments with complex goals, tremendous amounts of data, and thousands of people with specialized subject matter expertise. When DOGE staffers make pronouncements about waste and fraud after just a few days, they are engaging in what F.A. Hayek would call “a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

Time Problem. One way around the information problem is to distribute the decision making, as the free market does through its pricing mechanisms. The organizational equivalent requires setting a clear vision, communicating that vision down through layers of management, and identifying, listening to, and empowering knowledgeable and effective people at all levels. Given how quickly DOGE flits from agency to agency, they obviously aren’t taking the time to do any of that.

Mistakes. DOGE is making a lot of mistakes. Musk’s claim that USAID was funding Politico to the tune of $8 million turned out to be multiple government offices subscribing to Politico’s professional services since 2016. The claim USAID spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza has no basis in fact. And lately IT experts have been explaining that Musk has been making false claims about Social Security data because he doesn’t have a clue how the technology works.^[2]Musk now says he suspects there are tens of millions of dead people in the social security database. I’m confident that if 30% of social security recipients were dead, it would not have gone unnoticed this long. He’s misunderstanding his dataset.

Not the real world. Fighting fraud is hard. We’ve heard estimates that annual government fraud could amount to as much as $500 billion. But by its nature, successful fraud goes undetected, and so it’s impossible to measure. It’s also hard to detect. DOGE may uncover a few instances of fraud by trawling through databases, but most people who commit fraud are well aware of how government record keeping works, and they make sure the official numbers add up. Real fraud detection involves difficult and time-consuming investigations in the real world.^[3]E.g. If you suspect a corrupt official is paying a fake contractor for work that is never done, you’d probably have to check the contractor’s records to see if they paid employees to actually do the work and then check if the employees actually exist and if they received the payments. Then you’d have to check if the contracted deliverables exist and evaluate whether they look like the billed amount of work went into them. DOGE staffers are just cosplaying as fraud detectives, and they are unlikely to think of anything that experienced government fraud investigators wouldn’t know about.

Firing people. In pursuit of its goals, DOGE leans heavily on firing people.^[4]Probably not firing them in the legal sense, which requires showing cause, but definitely terminating their employment. Some people argue that firings are the only way to effect change, but that’s often an excuse for a lack of leadership. They clearly aren’t working to a plan. They said they were going to fire the wasteful and underperforming, but lately they are getting rid of all probationary employees, i.e. new employees with less job protection. They’ve gone from identifying inefficiencies to simply laying off those who are easiest to lay off. Avoiding the most effective action to do the easiest thing is always a sign of feckless decision making.

Sociopathy: When Musk tore down USAID, he tweeted out “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He was putting thousands of people out of a job, and he was joking about it. Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget has said “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… We want to put them in trauma.” This is not how normal people behave. Even if it is good policy to lay off thousands of people, you’re not supposed to enjoy doing it. These are sociopaths who enjoy hurting people. They are the worst people to empower.

Buyouts. Thousands of federal employees have been offered buyouts — financial incentives to resign — and so far about 77,000 of them have accepted the deal. As is typical with any Trump/Musk idea, the implementation has been chaotic. Although people accept buyout offers for a variety of reasons, the people most likely to accept are probably those most likely to easily find jobs elsewhere, i.e. high-value employees.

Return to office. Government employees who work from home have been ordered to return to office. This would make sense if there was a reason to believe employees working from home are malingering, but statements from the Trump administration have made it clear that the return-to-office order is an attempt to make employees miserable so they quit. In fact, many employees who have accepted the buyout are doing so to avoid having to return to the office. There’s no reason to believe that work-from-home employees who can’t return are actually poorer performers than those who can. It’s essentially terminating people at random.

Babies and Bathwater. The wholesale gutting of departments and agencies risks shutting down valuable government services along with the wasteful ones. Cuts to budgets have already disrupted drug trials, veterans programs, and world-wide disease prevention, not to mention the Department of Energy cuts that are disrupting the National Nuclear Security Administration’s handling of our nation’s nuclear weapons.

Too sudden. When Musk took over Twitter, one of his most outrageous acts was shutting down the Twitter API, the access points for hundreds of applications that interact with Twitter, without warning. DOGE (and Trump in general) has been doing much the same with government services, often shutting things down almost instantly, and just as developers using Twitter’s API had no time to adjust, government agencies are having difficulty find alternatives quickly.^[5]There are rumors of an NNSA team getting shut down in the middle of transporting a “physics package” — the nuclear parts of a nuclear warhead — leaving them to secure the materials as best they could while trying to find out what’s happening. None of this had to happen this way: The shutdowns could have been stretched out over a year or two, giving the affected agencies time to go through their planning process for a much smoother transition.

Destruction of capital. Employees bring more than just labor hours to a job, they bring knowledge. And quite often that knowledge is learned on the job and very specific to the job. E.g. how to administer a complex grant program or maintain a large software codebase. In economic terms, this knowledge is human capital, and like other forms of capital — machines, vehicle, factories, etc. — it increases productivity but is expensive to acquire. Terminating knowledgeable employees is therefore equivalent to destroying machines, vehicles, or entire factories. This is fine if you really don’t need the capital any more, but given the recklessness of the DOGE operation, much of this capital will likely have to be acquired again, at great expense in the form of training and practice.^[6]Unless they can re-hire the same people quickly enough.

Unkindness. Whenever Trump policies make people suffer — due to lost jobs or having grant-funded medical care cut off — it’s common to hear that “the cruelty is the point.” But while Trump does enjoy punishing people he doesn’t like, I think far more often the suffering is due to simple callousness. It’s not always the case that they want to hurt people. Sometimes they just don’t care. Either way is unkind.

Regime uncertainty. Trump and Musk are trying to change many things, all at once, without warning or time for the rest of us to prepare. Then sometimes they discover they’ve made mistakes and they walk parts of it back. And they do a terrible job of communicating any of this to the public. Even worse, they do all these things by unorthodox and possibly illegal means, and at this point there are about 80 active court cases with about 20 orders delaying, pausing, blocking, or overturning Trump administration policies. This is an unholy confusing mess, and that has consequences: People and businesses don’t know what will be happening in the future, and this uncertainty makes them cautious. It makes them hesitant to commit resources to activities with uncertain outcomes. And hesitancy spending money is how we get recessions.

Too little. In 2024, the federal government spent $1.7 trillion on Congressionally mandated healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. Another $1.5 trillion went to legally required Social Security payments. And $892 billion went to interest on the debt, which has to be paid. After that, the largest budgeted discretionary item is the hard-to-cut defense budget at $872 billion. Various benefits for veterans, federal retirees, and a variety of anti-poverty programs^[7]The refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, unemployment insurance, supplemental security income for the elderly or disabled, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, home energy assistance, aid for abused or neglected children, etc. add another $1 trillion. Education adds $345 billion. Other major components including transportation, natural resources, agriculture, science and medical research, law enforcement, and international spending, which add up to $244 billion, with another $345 billion in miscellaneous programs. That’s almost $7 trillion. On the other hand, DOGE has specified $6 billion in direct spending cuts. Between the buyouts and direct terminations, DOGE has presumptively cut 87,000 federal jobs and it looks like they will layoff 220,000 probationary workers. If we generously assume each job costs $150,000/year, that’s $46 billion. Assume for the sake of argument that they also succeed in throwing the entire $72 billion USAID budget into the wood chipper, and DOGE will currently save about $124 billion.^[8]I think all this was accurate when I wrote it, but be aware that things are happening fast. We’re going through a lot of pain and confusion to save 1.7% of the budget, an amount which taxpayers will barely feel on April 15th. Meanwhile Congress is currently putting together a spending bill with $300 billion in new funding…

Indirect inefficiency. Us libertarians talk a lot about “smaller government” but too many make the mistake of equating the size of government with the size of the government’s budget. That’s not the only burden of government. Every time the government limits us or controls us, it imposes a cost on society. Every permit you have to apply for, every impact study you have to perform, every law or regulation you have to follow, every victimless crime that you can commit^[9]Marijuana and ecstasy, gambling, sex work, high-flow showers and toilets, short-barreled rifles, certificates of need, plastic straws, zoning, rent control, sodomy, raw milk, unlicensed hair care, etc. — all of these are a burden, and for many people these burdens are far worse than paying taxes. DOGE terminating thousands of people does nothing to lift this burden: We still have to follow those laws and regulations. But where following those laws requires us to interact with the government — obtaining licenses, receiving inspections, filing reports, waiting for evaluations, getting permits, etc. — DOGE’s reduction of the government workforce could actually leave us worse off. Just as any business reducing its workforce makes customer service worse, firing government employees makes dealing with the government even more tedious and wasteful for the rest of us. Adding weeks, months, or years of delay will do nothing good for our economy. The government may be more “efficient,” but the burden will make us all less efficient.

Chains and crutches. The Cato Institute uses the following analogy: Government both puts people in chains and gives them crutches, and when you take the government apart, you should be careful to remove the chains first.^[10]Source for the crutches and chains analogy. I’ve been advocating for limited government for decades, and I can’t understand libertarians who think limiting government should start with USAID, the NIH, and the NOAA instead of CBP, ICE, HSI, DEA, and ATF. Or note that it is well within Trump’s executive power to end the scourge of federal civil forfeiture, yet neither he nor his libertarian supporters are talking about it. These people worry more about DEI than police abuse or victimless crimes.

Procedure. Some libertarians say that procedural objections to Musk and Trump’s DOGE activities ignore all the good that DOGE is doing. I’ve think I’ve offered plenty of arguments that DOGE is not, in fact, doing good, and is often quite harmful, but I would also like to defend the importance of procedure. It is the procedural aspects of government — elections, Congressional voting, passing laws, veto powers, legally required administrative procedures, open hearings, limits on police activity, independent courts, constitutional review — the whole system of checks and balances — that keeps the government in line. Basically, if libertarians want government to follow libertarian values, they will do that by enacting procedures that constrain government action. You can’t get libertopia without making the government follow the rules.

In summary, DOGE-style changes doomed Twitter and won’t help our government, but they may empower Musk even further. DOGE’s sociopathybro staff have too little information and too little time to understand what they are doing and they’re working only from government databases, so they’re missing real fraud, making mistakes, discarding the good with the bad, breaking things without warning, getting rid of experienced employees, and generally being unkind, all without doing much to relieve legal and regulatory burdens, while destroying government capabilities, creating economy-threatening uncertainty for small gains, making government less efficient, and setting us up for unconstrained authoritarian rule.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Talking to my fellow libertarians about DOGE

The feckless cruelty is not unexpected — it’s the standard sociopath playbook, and I was surprised we didn’t see more of it during Trump’s first term — but somehow that hasn’t made it any less shocking. However, I’m surprised and confused by Trump’s tolerance of Elon Musk. The Trump we know craves being the center of attention. Musk’s grandstanding has got to bother him. So why hasn’t he shut down Musk like he would anyone else?

In this late night hour I find myself leaning toward a dark hypothesis. I have no proof, but if Trump is still supporting Musk, it’s got to be because he’s getting something in return. It can’t be Musk’s $288 million donation to the election campaigns because the election is over. Trump may in some sense “owe” Musk for his election victory, but Trump is not known for paying his debts, and he’s never been hesitant about discarding people he no longer needs. It’s got to be something that’s still going on.

We may never figure it out, but my best guess is that somehow, somewhere, money is flowing from Elon Musk to Donald Trump. After all, Musk spent billions to buy Twitter. I’m sure he can afford, say, $1 million a day to buy the President.

If I’m right, I don’t see any way to put a stop to it. Trump is solidifying his control over the FBI and Justice Department in this term, so I don’t see either of them beginning an investigation, let alone indicting Musk. Nor do I think removal under the 25th Amendment is a possibility, not with the sycophants Trump has brought on board.

They way I see it, there are only a few ways out of this nightmare, and most are either unlikely or unhelpful:

• Trump leaves office at the end of his term, in which case we have a lot more of this bullshit ahead of us.
• Trump is impeached and removed. That would almost certainly require one or both of:
  • Trump screws things up so bad that Republican legislators face pressure from constituents to turn against Trump.
  • Republicans lose control of Congress, especially the Senate, where a 2/3 vote is needed for conviction.
• Trump dies. The actuarial tables give a man of Trump’s age living in the U.S. about a 6% chance of dying in each of the next four years, or about 1 in 4 odds of dying in office.
• Musk moves on to something else. I don’t see this happening unless
  • Musk gets everything he wants, or
  • Musk is soundly thwarted and loses interest.
• Musk is incapacitated, e.g. through death, arrest by one of the states or in some other country, or severe financial losses.
• Somebody else pays Trump even more money to go away.
• Sweet Meteor of Death. (Object 2024 YR4 is at 3 on the Torino risk scale, baby!)

Until one of those things happens, this is the new normal.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Late night thoughts on the current crisis

Then a few months ago a friend showed my wife and I some cool things he was doing with his 3D printer. On the way home, we got to talking, and it turns out my wife also had been thinking about getting a 3D printer, but she wasn’t sure she could justify it either. We decided that if both of us were interested, maybe that was justification enough, so we ordered a 3D printer as a Christmas present to ourselves.

It finally arrived a few days ago, and of course I just had to print a “benchy.” That’s a stylized cartoon-like 3D boat commonly used to evaluate 3D print quality. Although small and quick to print, it has a number of features that present a range of challenges to printing systems, and there’s a guide to check the measurements of the resulting printed object.

Now let’s just hope we find something else to print, or that’s a very expensive toy boat.

Note: For those of you who want to know, we bought a BambuLab P1S because Bambu printers have a reputation as being easy to use out-of-the-box without a lot of tinkering. (I don’t mind tinkering, but it tends to become a time-sucking trap, and we wanted to spend our time printing things.) We also needed an enclosed printer because we have cats, and we didn’t want them trying to play with the moving print head. We also got Bambu’s AMS system to automatically switch between 4 spools of printing filament. The benchy model pictured above is printed with Bambu PLA Basic green filament.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Joining The Cult

Trump’s anti-transgender executive order^[1]The one from last week, not the new ones from this week. Sorry, but I write slower than Trump bigots. has some surprising definitions of terms:

Sec. 2.(a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

…

Sec. 2.(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

Sec. 2.(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

Some people have been commenting on the strangeness of specifying the size of the reproductive cell — referring to human eggs and sperm — as the distinguishing characteristic of the sexes, but that’s actually a common definition of sex in the science of biology, and I’d like to talk about it.

This method of defining the sexes makes use of an observed phenomenon called anisogamy, which just means that the cells used in sexual reproduction, called gametes, are of significantly different sizes. Biologists like this definition because it has wide application: Pretty much every multi-cellular sexually-reproducing organism, plant or animal, has gametes of two different sizes. For any given species, an organism that produces large gametes is defined as female, and one with small gametes is defined as male.

This system of sexual classification is also tied to some interesting evolutionary ideas: Since the female’s gametes are larger, it takes more effort to create them, and consequentially the female has a greater stake in the resulting fertilized egg. That greater stake, in turn, means the female has more to lose if the offspring do not thrive, thus creating evolutionary pressure to make an ever greater investment in ensuring reproductive success. This is probably the evolutionary reason why human females carry offspring internally for nine months and have specialized glands that allow them to nourish the offspring for years afterward, whereas the male’s biological contribution can be over in a few minutes.^[2]The same line of thinking implies that women will have stronger parental ties to their children and be more likely to care for them, although now we are veering into evolutionary psychology and this way lies a lot of misogynistic pseudoscience…

What about organisms, like certain flowering plants, that produce both large and small gametes? The gamete size definition still works: Organisms that produce both large and small gametes are both sexes, female because they produce large gametes and male because they produce small gametes. On the other hand, there are species such as fungi and certain types of algae that have isogamous reproductive cells — gametes that are all the same size. These species are not split into reproductive sexes. Instead, biologists sort isogamous species into groups according to a completely different mating type system…and there can be way more than just two types.

By now you may be asking yourself what the biological definition of sex has to do with people who are transgender or nonbinary or intersex?

I feel strongly that the correct answer is not much.

Words and their definitions are tools for thinking and communicating, and the biological definitions of the words “male” and “female” are tools that biologists use to think and communicate about biological things. Just because law, medicine, morality, psychology, policy, and culture also use the words “male” and “female” doesn’t mean they should have to use the same definitions as biologists.

Doctors, for example, determine a baby’s sex based on a set of observable characteristics, especially the external genitalia, which leads to a phenotypic definition of sex. They also use the terms “male” and “female,” but they are talking about a different method of classification that also includes a variety of uncommon ambiguous genital types usually grouped under the term “intersex.” I’m guessing that doctors use this definition of sex, rather than the gamete-size definition favored by biologists, because it is easier to determine at birth and more immediately useful in providing healthcare.

(Of course, neither genitalia nor gamete-producing cells are present during early embryonic development, so the use of “at conception” in Trump’s executive order makes no sense. Those two words seem to be serving a different agenda.)

Both biological and phenotypic sex are related to chromosomal sex, which is based on the the presence of XX or XY chromosomes in the 23rd chromosome pair, with XX being “female” and XY being “male.” Since the chromosome provides the genetic map that controls how the body grows, you’d think that female chromosomal sex imply female genitalia and the associated sites for producing female gametes, but that’s not always the case. The process through which genes are expressed as anatomy isn’t as straightforward as we might think, and XX and XY aren’t the only possible sex chromosomes.

Then there’s a person’s gender as used by the transgender community, which is based on a self-identified role, chosen from a complicated set, or perhaps a spectrum, of possible genders, including “male” and “female.” Thankfully, discussions of transgender issues almost exclusively use the word “gender” instead of “sex,” which makes confusion of gender with chromosomal, phenotypic, or biological sex a lot less likely.

Granted, it would be nice if everyone used the scientific definition. Science is a structured method of gathering and curating knowledge about reality, so scientific definitions tend to be well thought-out and useful. But these different ways of defining sex (or gender) serve different purposes.

It’s kind of like the way the word “algorithm” means something very different to computer scientists and social media critics. In computer science, an algorithm is the set of calculations or operations needed to solve a problem. It’s basically the same as code in a computer program, but with the specific programming language or runtime environment abstracted away. So when someone says “Site X is showing me messages algorithmically, and I just want to see them chronologically,” us computer geeks get a little twitchy, because a chronological sort is an algorithm.

Nevertheless, the engineering team at Site X will know what users are asking for, because while they use a different definition of algorithm, engineers understand what the social media critics are saying when they use the same word for a different concept.

Finally, note that Trump’s executive order isn’t about any of the definitions of “sex” (or the related “gender”) that I’ve mentioned so far. Here’s what the order has to say about the scope of its definitions:

Sec. 2. Policy and Definitions. It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality […]

Trump’s executive order is purporting to define sex for the purposes of U.S. policy. We might as well call that policy sex.

This is where it gets stupid, because Trump is trying to define policy sex in terms of biological sex. But biological sex is defined in terms of gamete sizes, which means that government functionaries using these definitions of sex would have to perform an invasive medical examination. That’s a ludicrous thing to do for most of the scenarios anti-trans folks keep bringing up, such as competing in sporting events or using public bathrooms. You could argue that enforcers of these polices could use some other method to make a determination of gamete size — e.g. by assuming that penis-having people have small gametes — but that would be effectively the same as changing the definition to one based on phenotype.

Furthermore, presidential executive orders can always be countermanded by the next president, so the executive order isn’t really defining policy sex, it is only defining Trump Administration policy sex. And it’s still an unwieldy definition.

The policy heading also mentions “law,” and I think we can object. The President does not have the power to change the law. Only Congress gets to say what the law is. I guess a lawyer would probably say that the courts create law too, by interpreting and applying the statutes, thus creating case law. But either way, changing the law is not a presidential power, so I don’t see how Trump could change the legal definition of sex with an executive order.

The order does refer to enforcement of laws, which is an executive branch power, so maybe Trump can direct law enforcement and regulatory agencies to use this definition in areas where Congress has not specified, explicitly or implicitly, the definition of sex to be applied. But that still doesn’t get around the fact that using the biological definition is going to require medical testing.

In the end, this executive order is the anti-trans equivalent of virtue signaling. It isn’t well thought out, and it doesn’t do much, but someone in Trumps team probably feels very pure for having written it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Trump’s dumb attempt to define sex

Wait, what? A middle-aged white cishet male has advice for trans people?

Fair point. I’m sure I don’t know enough about transgender issues to give much in the way of useful advice — certainly not about transgender-specific issues. But I do know a bit about the subject of this post, so I think this advice may be useful nonetheless. So here it is:

Please give serious consideration to arming yourselves.

I mean with a gun. I think you should give serious thought to preparing to use a gun to defend yourself or your loved ones. Think about getting training and keeping a gun in your home or on your person. If that sounds extreme, I understand. But I’m worried that we may be entering a time when transgender folks may find such extremes to be necessary.

(Of course, most of this advice is not specific to trans people, or even LGBTQIA+ people. I’m really talking to any vulnerable person who is worried that the current cultural/political climate may bring life-threatening violence into their lives, and who is willing to consider armed self defense to counter the danger.)

Let me stop right here to address one common objection to this kind of advice: The trans haters are causing the problem, so shouldn’t they be the ones to change their behavior? Rather than telling trans people to protect themselves, shouldn’t I be telling trans haters to not hurt trans people?

In a word, no. Because that would leave the initiative in the hands of the trans haters. The trans haters don’t have to take my advice, so telling them not to hurt trans people would leave it up to trans haters to decide whether trans people will be safe. I would rather that the safety of trans people was under their own control.

Trans people might not take my advice either, but that is rightly their choice to make. On the other hand, no amount of educating, yelling, or pleading on my part will change the behavior of violent trans haters. But you know what will change their behavior? Getting shot by the victims of their hate.

Lest that sound too bloodthirsty, it’s important to clarify the meaning of armed self-defense.

It’s never about killing. You have no right to kill someone. But you do have a right to stop someone from killing you. ^[1]Or causing you great bodily harm, although that is more legally complex. In short, you have to be afraid you’re going to die. More than that, your fear has to be reasonable, which basically means that other people in your situation would have felt the same way. Then, and only then, are you allowed to stop someone by using a degree of force — lethal force — that might kill them. You’re not shooting to end a life, you’re shooting to save a life.

It’s not about revenge. Punishment is best left to police and prosecutors. Having a gun is not a license to be a vigilante. You can’t shoot someone for evil they did in the past, no matter how bad it was or how recently it occurred. The classic example is that if someone throws a knife at you, you shouldn’t shoot back because it’s too late to stop the knife and they are now unarmed. You are only allowed to shoot to prevent violent acts against you or another innocent person. So if the knife thrower draws another knife, you can now shoot to keep him from killing you with it.^[2]None of this is legal advice. The rules for how you determine whether someone is a threat to your life are fairly simple, but applying them to specific confrontations can be tricky, and they vary from state to state, so I’m not going to go into any more detail here.

It’s not about catching bad guys. That’s what cops do. That’s their job. Your job is simply to get away unharmed. You don’t chase bad guys, and you certainly don’t shoot them for running away. For you, breaking contact counts as a win.

It’s not about scaring people with your gun. Using a gun in a threatening manner is a crime. Even something as simple as placing your hand on your holstered weapon can get you in trouble. Of course, if someone is a legitimate threat and you draw your gun in preparation for self defense, that’s a completely different story. If they run away instead of attacking, all the better. But your reason for brandishing your weapon has to be legitimate self defense.

It’s not about standing up for yourself. If someone is giving you shit, having a gun is not a reason to be bold and give them shit in return. Quite the opposite: As an armed person you have a moral, and often legal, obligation to try to de-escalate and avoid conflicts that have the potential to end in deadly violence. If you ramp up the intensity of the confrontation, the police might accuse you of intentionally provoking the fight as an excuse to shoot

The basic rule is that the only time you are allowed to shoot someone is when you have to shoot someone. And the truth is, it would be best if you never have to. Shooting someone is bad for you on so many levels, and it’s worse if you kill them. Even if you are completely justified in shooting an attacker, the police will at the very least cuff you up and take you into custody while they investigate what happened. Depending what witnesses tell them — including the attacker’s friends — you may even be charged with crimes. Furthermore, you may get sued by the attacker or their family, which will be expensive even if you win. Finally, killing someone can be bad for your mental health. The guilt of having killed can be crushing, even if the shooting was completely justified. Except for getting shot or killed yourself, shooting or killing someone is the worst possible outcome.

Whether armed self-defense is a route you want to follow is an intensely personal decision. You might not be ready for it. Then again, you might be more ready than you think. Here are a few things to consider:

• Do you meet the legal requirements to own a gun? The Federal requirements are here. You’ll also need to check the requirements for your state, which can vary quite widely. Some states require paperwork and a background check just to get permission to buy a gun. Other states will allow you to carry a concealed handgun as a natural right.^[3]The good news (sort of) is that the more likely a state is to have lots of anti-trans sentiment, the more likely it is to make it easy to own guns..
• Are you sufficiently mentally healthy? If you know you have a problem with impulse control, for example, then you may not want to risk the possibility that you will shoot somebody in anger. On the other hand, if you’ve had severe depression or suicidal ideation, then maybe you shouldn’t give yourself easy access to a gun. You probably also shouldn’t use a gun if you have trouble dealing with reality, such as if you are schizophrenic or having hallucinations.
• Are drugs and alcohol a problem? You shouldn’t carry a gun if you have a substance abuse problem. If you don’t abuse substances, but like to indulge on occasion, then just don’t have your gun with you on those occasions.^[4]The legal requirements at the federal and state level may be more stringent than how I am characterizing them. Please don’t take this as legal advice. Guns and drugs, including alcohol, don’t mix.
• Can you handle the responsibility? Are you capable of handling a gun safely and responsibly? Can you keep a gun safely in your home? Do you trust yourself to carry a concealed weapon in public on a regular basis? Would you be able to shoot someone if you had to?

You should be able to address those first three items with a little thought and introspection. That last one, however, will be difficult for you to reach answers about if you are unfamiliar with guns and how they are used in self-defense. The only solution for that is education.

Learning the basics of shooting a gun safely is no more difficult than learning to use a moderately complex tool, like a compound miter saw, MIG welder, or sewing machine. You start with the basics, and then get better the more you do it.

Learning to use a gun in self-defense is more difficult, because you have to learn law and tactics, but it’s not as daunting as you might think. Here in Illinois, the standard for sworn police officers is only 40 hours of firearms training, and police operate in a more complex legal and tactical environment than someone engaged purely in self-defense. Even if you have no interest in guns, you can treat armed self-defense like a skill that you have to learn to get a job, such as using a computer, driving a truck, or operating specialized equipment.

So if you think you might want to arm yourself for self defense, but you don’t know enough to be sure, perhaps a good first step is to take a basic pistol course. The course will explain the types and parts of pistols and how they work, introduce you to the safety rules, explain ammunition choices, teach you the basics of modern safe and accurate pistol fire, and give you a chance to try several different guns. It may also discuss local laws for transporting and carrying a pistol. You’ll come out of this course with a better understanding of guns, and a better idea of how comfortable you feel around them.

Given the general right-wing tilt of gun owners, you may be understandably concerned about how you will be treated by firearms instructors, range operators, and other shooters. Perhaps the simplest way to deal that concern is to see if there’s a Pink Pistols chapter in your area. The Pink Pistols are the most well known LGBT gun training group in the country. Alternatively, if you can’t find a chapter nearby, you can try searching the list of LGBT-friendly firearms instructors at Operation Blazing Sword.

If you can’t find explicitly LGBT-friendly instruction, you’ll have to find a regular nearby gun range. My gut feeling is that it will be fine.^[5]But perhaps my cishet white male gut feelings aren’t very accurate. I can’t promise that you’ll be welcomed with open arms, but I will say that gun people are no more a monolithic culture than trans people. Some instructors despise intolerance and would welcome a chance to undermine the stereotype. And even if an instructor doesn’t like you, that doesn’t mean they won’t be willing to teach you. Spend enough time around gun ranges, and I guarantee you’ll meet that guy who (1) thinks your “lifestyle” is sinful, and (2) supports your “God-given right” to carry a gun.

Moreover, gun ranges tend to foster a culture of civil respect between shooters. So while some people there may not like you, they’re unlikely to give you much trouble. After all, you’ve got a gun.

Speaking of gun culture, one thing you should expect to find with a good instructor or at a good shooting range is a very serious safety culture. There are rules to gun safety, and you should expect to have them explained to you and enforced at all times.^[6]Yeah, the gun safety rules link to the NRA. I know they’re controversial and run by nutcases these days, but you’ll need to get used to their presence. The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 as an instructional organization and has been at the core of gun training for decades. Your pistol instructor will likely be NRA certified. Most ranges have specialized rules of their own as well. If you ever don’t feel like the rules are being taken seriously, or if you feel unsafe for any reason, leave and go find someplace else to train.

Another thing to look for at a gun range is a good selection of rental guns. If you do decide to get a gun for self defense, you’ll be spending $500 – $800 on it, so you want to be able to try a variety of pistols to see which ones you like best before you invest your money.

I’m assuming you’ll end up getting a pistol and not some other kind of firearm because pistols are good general-purpose defensive weapons. If you live in a rural area, you may find that a rifle or shotgun has a place in your home defense plan, but pistols are easier to maneuver through tight doorways and around corners than a yard-long rifle or shotgun, and they are the only weapon you can reasonably carry concealed when out in public.

If you develop a genuine interest in guns, you may end up getting multiple guns for various reasons including different kinds of defense situations. But if you know nothing about guns but are nevertheless considering arming yourself — i.e. if you’re reading this post for advice — you probably don’t want to have to buy, learn, and practice with more than one type of gun. You’ll probably end up getting a pistol.

Beyond that, I can’t give you much more advice about what to get. First of all, I don’t know nearly enough about guns to give you more than the most basic advice. Second, that’s a personal decision you’ll want to make based on your defense needs, your level of gun handling skills, and your personal preferences. You should get advice from your instructor and other experienced shooters about which gun to buy, but always keep in mind that you’ll be the one who has to live with it, carry it, and train with it.

After your basic pistol course, some personal practice on the range, and some discussion with your instructor and fellow students, you’ll probably have a good idea if armed self defense is something you want to do. If not, well, at least you got to try something new and different.

If you do decide to go ahead, you may have to qualify to carry a concealed weapon in your state. In some states, this may require you to take mandatory classes, pass tests, and pass a background check. Other states follow a policy, sometimes called “constitutional carry,” where as long is you are not legally prohibited from carrying a gun (e.g. because of a felony conviction or drug addiction) you have an inherent right to carry a gun, no permit required. Be sure to follow whatever rules your state requires.

If your state has mandatory classes, they will most likely cover basic safety and legal issues related to armed self-defense and concealed carry. Even if you aren’t required to take such classes, it’s probably a good idea to take one anyway, because even in states with constitutional carry there are laws affecting how and where you can carry. For example, most states prohibit concealed carry in places like schools, banks, bars, and government buildings. There are also protocols for what to do if stopped and questioned by a police officer while carrying a gun.^[7]Pro tip: Don’t just blurt out “I have a gun!”

If you only plan to use your gun for home defense, qualifying for concealed carry is not strictly necessary. However there seems to be a consensus among self defense gun owners that having a carry permit reduces the risk that you’ll accidentally do something illegal with the gun.

Having the right to carry a gun doesn’t prepare you to actually defend yourself effectively with a gun. Even if you’ve had mandatory training, those courses tend to focus on law and safety, not tactics. You should take additional courses and do some more practice shooting on your own.

Your additional training will likely consist of at least three areas of education:

• Additional training on practical applications of self defense law. Basically, applying the legal rules to specific examples to help you think through situations you are likely to encounter.
• Tactics. How to use a flashlight or gun light. How to buy yourself more time during an encounter. How to take cover. When to shoot. What parts of the body to shoot at. How to respond to an intruder. How to handle multiple opponents. How to safely break contact and get away.
• Shooting skills. How to draw quickly and shoot accurately. This is practice on a shooting range.

Successful self defense with a gun means shooting your attacker in an important part of their body before they can harm you. You’ll need to practice quite a bit at first to build up the skill to draw quickly and shoot accurately, and then you’ll need periodic practice sessions to maintain your skill. There are ways to practice some of this safely in your home, but you’ll need to hit the gun range a few times per year.

That’s it. Get the initial training, practice occasionally, and you’ll be good to go should you ever need to defend yourself with a gun.

On the other hand, there’s a very good chance you will go your entire life and never need to use your gun. Most people don’t. Even most police officers don’t ever fire their guns in the line of duty. It may be you will buy a gun and holster and get training and practice for hours at the range without ever having to put your skills to use.

That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea. I’ve owned fire extinguishers for 40 years and never had to put out a fire. But if I ever do need a fire extinguisher, I’ll probably need it very urgently, and it will be good to have one handy.

One more thing you should consider: Carry a first aid kit. A serious one. Not just a pouch full of band-aids and antibiotic creams. I mean a small military-style IFAK or a civilian Stop-the-Bleed kit.

If you really believe you need to carry a gun because you might someday find yourself in a fight for your life, then you also might someday find yourself badly injured in an attack, and having the right gear, such as a tourniquet that you can apply to yourself with one hand, could save your life. And even if you are never the target of a deadly attack, there are other ways that you or a friend or family member could be injured badly enough to benefit from immediate stop-the-bleed treatment. So even if you never get yourself a gun, it might still be a good idea to get Stop-the-Bleed training and keep a kit with you.

As I said before, it’s quite possible that none of this will ever be necessary, and the effort and expense of being prepared will remain a burden that never pays off. That’s why I’m not going so far as to tell you to get a gun for self defense. But I do want you to give it some serious thought.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Some advice for my transgender readers in the new year

In my previous post about the Real Economy, I said that consumption is the reason we have an economy. That sounded good at the time, but it wasn’t quite correct. The next paragraph had a clue to a somewhat better reason for having an economy:

Economically speaking, consumption is the act of using goods and services to improve the quality of our lives[.]

The “quality of our lives”…also known as happiness.

Happiness is the true reason for having an economy, and it is the true measure of all economic decisions. When you consume something produced by our economy — a cheeseburger, a plane ride, the latest MCU movie — you do it because it makes you happier. Economists know that consumption makes you happier because otherwise why would you do it?

To be clear, consumption increasing your happiness doesn’t mean you will be happy in absolute terms. If you need a new hot water heater installed in your home because your old hot water heater died, you’ll probably be unhappy about the unexpected expense. Add to that the inconvenience and the amount of time you spend dealing with it, and the whole experience will almost certainly make you less happy.

Economically speaking, however, once the old hot water heater failed, you faced a choice: Either live without hot water or pay the cost to replace the hot water heater. If you chose to replace the heater, it’s because the happiness of having hot water outweighed the unhappiness from spending so much money. You probably don’t love spending the money, but it was the least bad choice.

By this point in the post you may be thinking “I don’t remember economists talking about happiness…”

That’s because no trained academic economist would ever use a simple and obvious word like “happiness.” No, when economists want to talk about happiness, they call it utility.

The concept of utility gives economists a way of converting consumed goods and services into a single common measurement for purposes of comparison. Let’s say you go to a restaurant that has only two kinds of sandwiches on the menu, beef and chicken, and you order the beef sandwich. Economists will explain that you chose beef because the beef sandwich had more utility than the chicken sandwich.

Utility may seem like a vacuous concept, but it is necessary to explain the fact that consumers make choices about what to consume. Economists need a model to describe how consumers make those choices, and thus they posit a utility function, which is the method by which consumers evaluate which goods and services will yield the most utility when consumed. That is, consumers choose the goods and services which will make them happiest.

There is actually a unit of utility, the util, although economists have no way of actually quantifying the utility of a particular instance of consumption. They can’t say that eating a beef sandwich would have given you 8 utils whereas eating a chicken sandwich would only give you 5 utils. Utils are theoretical units which cannot be measured and which have no connection to reality. The best that economists can do is estimate the relative utility of different acts of consumption, usually by observing consumers making choices about what to consume. Your choice of the beef sandwich is a clear indication that you believe beef has more utility than chicken.

Not everyone would have made the choice you did. All other things being equal, I might have ordered the chicken sandwich, which implies that for me a chicken sandwich has more utility than a beef sandwich. My utility function is different than yours. Economists would say we have different tastes.

If it seems like the concepts of utility and taste are of little use, that’s kind of the point. They represent one of the fundamental boundaries of economic thinking. Economic theory has very little to say about utility functions (more about this later) and nothing at all to say about taste. Economists accept people’s taste as a given: “There’s no accounting for taste.”

Of course, consuming goods and services is not the only way to increase our happiness. We need family and friends and a place in society. We need to find meaning and purpose in life. Maybe even spirituality or religion. We need personal growth, autonomy, and freedom. We need love.

Economics is sometimes criticized for not taking these factors into account, but I believe that’s actually one of the strengths of economic thinking: Economic theory isn’t very useful for analyzing and thinking about these kinds of intangible issues, so while economists recognize the importance of non-economic factors in happiness, they wisely refrain from saying much about them.

On a personal level, however, I am always deeply skeptical whenever I hear someone argue that we must give up provable, measurable economic benefits in order to gain some intangible benefit. I believe our personal utility functions should work just fine on intangible factors. We can make those decisions on their own.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Decoding Economics: Happiness and Taste

As fascinated as I am by economics, I have been frustrated by the way politicians and pundits discussed economic issues during this last election season. They just weren’t talking about economics the way I’m used to. So I’m going to try to fill that gap a little by talking about some of the economic ideas that I’ve found most useful in thinking about public policy.

To be clear, I’m not a trained professional economist. But I’ve read a lot about the subject, and as always, my goal is to not make my readers stupider for having read my posts. (Readers are invited to point out when I fail that test.)

I might as well start with the Wikipedia definition of economics:

Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

The most important part of this definition is “consumption of goods and services.” That’s the reason we have an economy: To consume goods and services.

Don’t mistake this for some kind of vulgar consumerism, which usually refers to the selfish and frivolous consumption of goods and services at harmful levels. Economically speaking, consumption is the act of using goods and services to improve the quality of our lives, starting with consumption that provides the most basic necessities of human survival: Food, shelter, and clothing.

Of course, we all want more from life than bare survival. We don’t just want food, we want nutritious food that travels well, stores well, is easy to prepare, and tastes good. We want shelters that include waterproof roofs, climate control, internal lighting, and entertainment systems. We want clothing that lasts long, protects us well, and looks stylish. Beyond that, we want transportation, communication, medical care, drugs, and safe streets. We want sports stadiums, music venues, good books, streaming television, and video games. We want it all.

We want to live good lives. And while there’s more to the good life than consumption of goods and services, consumption helps a lot. It’s a lot easier to have personal growth and a close family when you don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from. So we need to go through the complicated process of deciding what we want most.

In order to consume goods and services, however, we first have to produce goods and services, and that involves a lot of decision making about what to produce and how to go about setting up production — where to get resources, what kind of factory to build, how many people to employ, and so on. Finally, we somehow have to decide how to distribute these goods and services. Which consumers get to consume which goods?

In an ideal world, all these decisions would be simple: Just produce everything everybody wants and distribute it to everyone who wants it so they can consume all that they want. Problem solved.

In reality, however, it’s not that easy because of an important constraint: Scarcity. We face insurmountable limitations in natural resources, labor, and capital. And so we cannot simply produce everything that everybody wants and distribute it to everybody who wants it. We have to make decisions and tradeoffs. Thus many economists would modify the Wikipedia definition of economics to read:

Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services under conditions of scarcity.

And so consumers need to prioritize and decide which goods and services are most important to consume. Producers need to decide which goods and services to produce. And collectively we have to decide how the produced goods and services will be distributed to the consumers. All these difficult decisions, including all economic public policies, are necessary because of scarcity.

It’s important to notice what’s deliberately omitted from this definition of economics. There’s no mention of money or exchange rates. Nothing about banking or finance. Nothing about stocks and bonds, financial markets, or options trading. Nothing about mutual funds, hedge funds, or venture capital. No mention of mortgages, payday loans, or credit cards.

That’s because what ultimately matters in economics is the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, which economists usually refer to as the real economy. It’s not that all those financial and legal entities are unimportant to the economy, but they are of secondary importance. That is, they are important only to the extent that they affect the real economy.

For example, when the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit the U.S. around 2007, it started with the failure of a bunch of complex mortgage-backed financial securities, but it ended with a crushing recession that caused people to lose their jobs and their homes. Overall, from the initial decline until production finally caught up to where it should have been, the U.S. economy produced about $10 trillion less than it could have over the life of the recession. We were collectively $10 trillion poorer, and there was no way to fix it.

On the other hand, when a hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management failed in 1998, it sent shockwaves throughout the financial markets. But thanks to some careful interventions, the problem mostly stayed in the financial markets — eventually leading to a massive bailout/liquidation — without ever spilling out into the real economy. That’s why everyone remembers the Great Recession of 2007, but only a few of us economics nerds remember the LTCM failure.

The real economy is the ground truth behind the financial side of the economy. Every story we tell about the economy has to make sense when translated to the real economy.

Consider how a car loan works: Depositors put money into the bank, and the bank lends it out to someone to buy a car. Eventually, the car buyer pays the loan back, with interest, and the interest they pay is used to pay interest to the bank’s depositors. That’s the financial story.

Now here’s the same story in the real economy: Depositors make the decision to postpone immediate consumption by saving their money in a bank rather than using it to buy consumable goods and services. Those goods and services no longer need to be produced, which frees up production resources, which is convenient because the person who took out the car loan will use that money to direct the economy to use resources to produce a new car. Then, in order to make the loan payments, the car owner has to divert money away from the consumption of goods and services. As the payments are returned to the depositors, those goods and services are available for depositors to engage in the consumption they previously postponed. And since immediate consumption is always preferrable to future consumption, the borrower has to agree to additional interest payments, thus freeing up resources that allow depositors to consume more goods and services in the future as compensation for delaying their consumption.

When thinking about confusing economic policy ideas, I’ve often found it illuminating to figure out how the real economy is affected. If you can’t make the real economy side of the story make sense, then the whole story probably doesn’t make sense either.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Decoding Economics: The Real Economy

Unfortunately, the actual exchange wasn’t very helpful, and there’s no point in to reviewing it here.^[1]If you really want to know, see https://twitter.com/windypundit/status/1648536711532539904. It’s enough to say that the word “grooming” came up, at which point I realized I had better ways to spend my time.

But something about that still puzzles me…

In normal times, the term “grooming” refers to a set of social tactics used by pedophiles to prepare a child to participate in sexual acts to which they cannot possibly consent. In blunter terms, grooming is how child rapists discourage their intended victims from resisting rape.

Child abusers start by being friendly, and getting the child used to their presence. They make themselves interesting. They join in the child’s activities, and invite the child to join in theirs. Then they start pushing the boundaries of physical contact, and testing the child’s willingness to keep secrets from parents… and it only gets uglier from there.

But since grooming almost always starts with establishing familiarity, that allows anti-trans activists to smear transgender people as “groomers” for doing literally anything where children are involved. Lately, they’ve been complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour, in which performers in drag read stories to children. The implication was that this was a way for transgender pedophiles to insinuate themselves into children’s lives as a prelude to sexual exploitation.

The big lie here is that all transgender people want to hurt children. While there almost certainly must be some transgender people who have harmed a child,^[2]Personally, I’m not aware of any specific examples of transgender people abusing children, but given any sufficiently large group, a few of them will turn out to be dirtbags. it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of trans folks present no danger to children.

Granted, to those not involved in the culture, transgender people can seem a bit strange, perhaps even upsetting, but that’s no excuse for using the crimes of a few to smear the entire community.

Now here’s the thing that’s been puzzling me: Shouldn’t that be an easy concept for gun owners to understand?

I mean, let’s just replace a few words in that last paragraph: “Granted, to those not involved in the culture, gun owners can seem a bit strange, perhaps even upsetting, but that’s no excuse for using the crimes of a few to smear the entire community.

The vast majority of peaceful, law-abiding gun owners have been taking shit for the crimes of the few for as long as I can remember. And the things they say about gun owners are just as stupid as the things people are saying about trans people. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard BS like “You’re more likely to kill a family member with that gun than an intruder,” or that civilians shouldn’t have “weapons of war.”

The stupid things they say wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t also pass stupid laws. For example, you can have a gun with a long barrel and a shoulder stock, and you can have a gun with a short barrel and no shoulder stock, but if you have a gun with a short barrel and a shoulder stock, you’re a criminal.^[3]I’m over-simplifying my descriptions of gun laws to avoid getting bogged down in the details. Please don’t take any of this as legal advice.

And depending on which state, county, or city you’re in, you can be a criminal for having funny parts on your gun. I’ve already mentioned that having a rifle stock on a pistol can make you a criminal. But what about putting a pistol grip on a rifle? Also a criminal. Add an extra grip to the front of the gun? Criminal. A folding or removable shoulder stock? Criminal. A flash suppressor on the front of the barrel. Criminal. Merely thread the front of the barrel? Criminal. How about a barrel shroud that makes it safer to hold the barrel without getting burned? Yup, still a criminal.

Eighty million gun owners have to obey stupid laws like this because of a handful of criminals. So you’d think gun owners, of all people, would understand the stupidity that comes from scapegoating an entire community because of the crimes of a small number of evil people. You’d think they’d have some sympathy for transgender people.

And yet here we are.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Of Guns and Groomers

When you were first elected President, I expected you to bring the same level of gracious competency to the White House as you did to your casinos, your university, your reality show, and your retail meat business. And in this you did not disappoint.

Having lived all the way through your previous term as President, I am confident that your upcoming term will deliver the same quality of character, the same level of intellect, the same hiring practices, the same management style, and the same moral compass that made your previous term so uniquely remarkable.

The United States is filled with amazing and wonderful people. The President they deserve is one who is worthy of their greatness. The President they deserve is one who will be sane, moral, and prudent. The President they deserve is one who will deliver the greatest possible improvement in the quality of their lives. As it turns out, thanks to this election, they President they will get…is you.

My hope for the American people is that the next four years will bring them good lives, in a prosperous economy, in a country at peace. And my hope for you, Mr. Trump, is that you will swiftly, inexorably, and comprehensively get everything you deserve.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Heartfelt Message to Donald Trump

But Tasha is not a less stressful kind of cat.

About eight weeks ago, out of the blue, I noticed that Tasha was limping pretty badly. She would put her right rear leg down only briefly and move her left rear leg as fast as possible, as if putting weight on her right leg was painful.

It’s hard to judge injuries with cats. I remember that shortly after we got Beezle as a kitten, he took a bad jump and was limping and mewling piteously, so we took him to the emergency vet. After taking an x-ray, she told us he was fine. As she put it, “Kittens are dramatic.”

On the other hand, Tasha was a bit more than a year old, and adult cats are famous for hiding pain to avoid appearing weak. If she was showing this much pain, she was probably hurting pretty bad. We figured it would be best to drive her to our local emergency vet. After examining her, they said she didn’t seem to be too seriously injured, but they recommended an x-ray to check her bones to be sure. We agreed, and the x-ray showed she had indeed broken a bone in her right leg.

In particular, she had a slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE), also known as a capital femoral physeal fracture. I don’t know much about orthopedics, but let me try to explain it as best I can: In a cat, the femur is the single strong bone in the upper part of the rear leg — analogous to the human thigh. It’s big and strong in most mammals. At the top is a bulbous or dome-shaped structure called the epiphysis that sticks out to one side. It’s this bulb that fits into the hip socket and allows a wide range of movement. Between the epiphysis and the rest of the bone is a thin layer called a physis, also known as a growth plate. It looks something like this:

The physis is living tissue, mostly cartilage, that forms new bone across its lower surface, lengthening the bone as the animal grows. When the period of growth is over, the physis closes up to become solid bone. But until that happens, the physis is weaker than the surrounding bone, and as an animal grows larger, the stress on the bone increases with the need to carry more weight. For reasons not entirely understood, in some cats ordinary physical activity can stress the physis enough to cause a spontaneous fracture, separating the epiphysis from the lower part of the bone. This is what happened to Tasha.

I don’t have Tasha’s x-rays, but here’s a similar one I found online: The view is of a cat’s pelvis seen as if the cat were lying on its back with legs extended and you were looking down at its hips. The hip joint on the left side of the image (i.e. the right hip) shows the epiphysis has broken off and slipped away from the top of the femoral bone.

To make it clearer, here’s the same image with the growth plate highlighted in yellow and the epiphysis highlighted in red on both sides. (I think. I am not an orthopedic veterinarian.)

This generally needs specialized surgical repair, and the vet recommended a surgeon. We left with a small bottle of gabapentin pills to help alleviate pain and discourage Tasha from being too active. A few days later we took her to a specialty veterinary surgeon to see what he could do to help her.

It turns out that veterinary orthopedic surgeons fix femoral physeal fractures using a surprising procedure called femoral head ostectomy (FHO), in which they cut off the top of the femur and discard it, along with the broken-off epiphysis. I found an x-ray showing the result: Note the joint on the left side of the image has had the FHO, which you can compare with the normal intact joint on the right.

After FHO, the bones of the hip and femur are no longer in contact, but the joint still works, held together by scar tissue, ligaments, and the cat’s very strong jumping muscles. We were told the surgery has a very high success rate, and while it wouldn’t restore mobility 100%, Tasha should still be able to do normal cat things like running, jumping, and climbing.

In a human, you might try either replacing the hip joint with artificial components or using screws and pins to reassemble the femoral head. Both of these are possible in cats, but we’d need to have the procedure done in a good university veterinary surgery department, and the cost would be very high.

As it was, the FHO procedure would cost about $4000.

The surgeon had an opening the next Monday morning, so we set up an appointment, got more gabapentin, and kept Tasha dosed up until the morning of the surgery. We got up early, got Tasha in her carrier, and dropped her off at the vet. Later that day we picked her up, quite warn out, and took her home.

Although she had a long-lasting painkiller injection at the site of the surgery, we also had more drugs to give her. We had to confine her to one room by herself for several days so she wouldn’t re-injure herself with too much climbing, jumping, or fighting. As with her previous surgery, she immediately removed the protective collar.

Over the next couple of weeks she got a lot better. We took her to her first surgical follow-up, and the vet told us she was doing so well there was no need for a second follow-up. Pretty soon she was starting to jump onto the couch while I was watching television and climb the furniture in my office when I was working. She kept getting better

…until she didn’t.

I had noticed that her level of activity seemed to be declining. She moved less, she was still limping a bit, and she stopped jumping on the couch. The change was so subtle, I thought I might be imagining it, but one day I happened to see her climbing into the litter box, and she had to struggle at it, gingerly climbing in one leg at a time. This was not how she normally did that. And when she walked away, she was once again moving one rear leg quickly to spare the other.

I called the vet to setup the second follow-up exam. When we got there, he examined her right leg and said it looked fine, so he released her to walk around on the floor for observation. Meanwhile, I started explaining what I had seen that made me bring her in. When I mentioned her moving her leg really quickly, the vet asked me “Which leg was she moving quickly?”

I thought about it, and light began to dawn… The quickly moving leg had been the one on the right, the one that had the surgery. So she was actually protecting her left leg. And while we were talking, she did it again in front of us.

Veterinarians don’t entirely understand why some cats get capital physeal fractures. It’s not a matter of lifestyle because by definition the break happens spontaneously, without any obvious incident like a fall or getting stepped-on. It seems that some cats are simply prone to it. The current theory has to do with reduced blood flow during bone growth causing a weakness around the physis. But whatever the cause, it’s well known that the propensity to this kind of femoral fracture affects both back legs.

Yeah. Our little adventure cat had managed to break the femoral head in her other back leg. She was going to have to go through the whole surgical process again.

It’s now ten days past her second $4000 surgery, and we just got back from the follow-up exam. Again, the surgeon says she’s doing fine and doesn’t need a second follow-up. We were really glad to hear that. We’re also really glad Tasha doesn’t have any more femurs to break.

I feel so bad for her. She’s just a little kittycat. She doesn’t understand why any of this is happening. She just knows it hurts and we keep driving her to scary places and leaving her with scary people and shoving pills down her throat and locking her in the bedroom. She’s had a rough little kitty life.

She looks it, too. Siberian cats are supposed to be big beautiful fluffy cats, and Tasha is exactly that…from the front. But from behind, with her surgical wounds and all the shaved areas, she looks pretty roughed up.

This is a cat that has seen some things. She’s been through the wars.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tasha the Adventure Cat, part 2: Wounds

Tasha’s life as a kitten has been an adventure. She explored the house with boundless energy. Just in her first few weeks with us she was accidentally kicked, stepped on, and even sat on. (All without injury.)

Tasha also turned out to be a fighter. Our Ragdoll cat Beezle loves to play-fight, and he’s always tried to start stuff with our other cats, so it was no surprise that he tried to fight with Tasha. And it turned out Tasha gave back as good as she got. Even as a kitten she would ambush him with a running pounce, hitting him squarely on the side and knocking him over. Beezle had been rambunctious as a kitten himself, so we figure he deserved it. In any case, their battles were always clearly playful, and they actually turned out to be good friends.

Chloe was a different story. We got her from a shelter as a young adult cat, and we suspect that her previous living arrangement may have involved considerable stress, such as living with aggressive dogs or poorly supervised children. As a result, Chloe is our scaredy cat. She hides whenever we have visitors. She’ll sleep in bed with my wife and I all night, but if she encounters me almost anywhere else in the house, she’ll scurry away. She also darts away when either of us coughs or sneezes. This is after living with us for eight years.

When it came to Tasha, however, Chloe didn’t run away. Instead she walked up in full predator swagger and pounced. Tasha quickly learned to respond defensively by hissing loudly and rolling onto her side to bring all four paws into the fight. Unlike the play fights with Beezle, these fights were driven by real animosity, literally sending fur flying.

At first, they were short fights — just a brief encounter with some hissing and throwing of paws. That’s not necessarily a problem. Cats are territorial predators, and scrapping with other cats is not unusual in a multi-cat household, as they establish areas of dominance. Unfortunately, these fights took an ugly turn because Tasha started running away and Chloe began pursuing her to continue the attack. In one heartbreaking incident, Tasha was so scared she peed herself.

From the perspective of cat sociology, such chasing behavior is a bad sign. It’s one thing for two cats to fight each other briefly for dominance, but because Tasha was a smaller creature that ran away, Chloe was starting to treat her like prey. Instead of fighting for dominance with an equal, Chloe was hunting. This is a troublesome behavioral problem. Not only is it dangerous for the “prey” cat, it’s also not something the cats can work out by themselves.

To prevent these kinds of problems, we normally have a process for progressively introducing a new cat to the household. It begins with isolation in the master bath, then timeshared access to the master bedroom, followed by supervised togetherness for feeding and play, leading eventually to freedom. This can take a week or two, depending on the cats. For some reason, however, it hadn’t worked this time.

So we reset to day zero and went through the whole process again. And we got the same result, complete with another peeing incident.

We realized we had to repeat the process a third time but really take things slowly. We started with the overlapping access program, with either Tasha or Chloe confined to the bedroom. We’d switch them out once or twice a day, generally alternating which cat got to sleep with us at night. We did that for months.

At some point during this time, we took Tasha to the vet to get spayed. She was not happy about this. She especially didn’t like the Elizabethan collar — the protective cone vets put around pets’ heads to keep them from gnawing at surgical wounds. She managed to remove it almost immediately. We tried putting it back on a couple of times, but she just kept taking it off, finally losing it under the bed. The very next day after her surgery, she escaped from her room and got into a fur-flying fight with Chloe. Fortunately, that didn’t reopen her surgical wound. She soon recovered, and we figured that was the end of her surgical adventures…

(Imagine ominous musical cue playing here.)

After a little while, we started leaving the bedroom door open, but blocking it off with a special cat gate. (A cat gate is a lot like a baby gate, except it’s five feet tall, because cats can jump a lot higher than babies.) That way Tasha and Chloe could see each other, and even swat each other through the bars, but neither of them could force the other into a fight. For the last two months, we brought all three cats together for feeding time. At first we fed them on opposite sides of the gate, but later we brought them together just outside the bedroom under careful supervision.

Thankfully, this time the process worked. Tasha and Chloe still get into occasional confrontations, but they are just normal cat scraps. Chloe is sometimes the aggressor, but more often what happens is that Tasha hisses defensively when Chloe approaches. If distracted, they will pass each other up without any sign of animosity. This, we agreed, was is good enough to end the separation.

We’d like to think our careful approach to bringing the cats together was successful, but realistically it could also be that Tasha just grew up into a fairly large cat, and Chloe no longer feels confident going after her. In any case, Tasha’s fighting adventures appear to be over.

Unfortunately, Tasha’s biggest adventures were yet to come.

I’ll talk about that in Part 2.

Update: Part 2 is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tasha the Adventure Cat, part 1: Battle!

The ABC News 538 site has only slightly reduced its probability of a Biden victory from 49% to 48% (with Trump holding at 51%), which is essentially no change.^[1]The missing 1% is the chance of a tie. The Silver Bulletin, which has been predicting roughly 2-to-1 odds of a loss for Biden, is now showing more like 3-to-1 odds against Biden, from 29.0% to 25.8% (Trump’s 70.6% to 73.9%).^[2]The missing 0.3% is the chance of a tie.

The trendline here is not good:

(Note that polls generally spend a few days in the field before returning results, so the results immediately after an event on the timeline are from polling that mostly took place before the event. The response to events lags by a few days.)

Basically, Trump has been gaining slowly for most of the last 30 days. The battleground states are still the battleground states, but Biden’s chances have declined slightly:

The campaign against Trump seems to be slipping. I have no idea what, if anything, the Democrats can do about it. I just wish they’d figure something out, otherwise the next five years are really going to suck.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Biden’s Path to Victory – 2024-07-20

The Shot

When I first heard he’d been hustled off the stage by Secret Service agents, I didn’t think much of it. I assumed they were just being cautious after receiving a warning or something.

The next rumor was that Trump had been hit with a pellet gun. That would be a reason to hustle him away. And I found a picture of him apparently bleeding from the side of the head, which looked like the sort of minor injury you could get from an air gun pellet: Skin damage, but no real penetration. The video of him grabbing the side of his head made sense too. Kind of. But he was turned to his right, so the shooter would have to be in the crowd behind him, and I saw no sign of that — no threatening motions, no struggle for a gun in the crowd, no Secret Service agents wading in to nab the attacker…

Then I heard someone say there were multiple popping noises. Most air guns are not capable of repeating fire, and I doubt you could hear them over the noise of the crowd or from very far away. That sounded more like a firearm. But almost any bullet striking the side of the head directly would have done a lot more damage, so the shot had to be a grazing shot fired from in front of him or behind, from stage left or stage right.

Finally, I got the reporting that it was AR-15 fire from a nearby rooftop. Damn. Just imagine being Trump: You turn to your right for a moment, and straight in front of you a shooter more than a football field away starts firing at you with an AR-15. One of those 5.56mm bullets crosses the distance in less than 1/5 of a second, arriving at your head traveling more than two thousand feet per second. And it just clips your ear.

Jesus Christ, Trump got lucky. An inch or so in the wrong direction and the bullet would have gone into his brain.

I remember the first time I ever shot an AR-15, firing 5 shots at 100 yards. I put 3 rounds into the 10-ring, which was smaller than a human head. I did that with a scope from a resting position — lying down with the front of the rifle sitting on a solid object. This was not a difficult shot. Other people who were familiar with AR-15s agreed: As a technical matter, shooting Trump should have been easy. Especially if the shooter practiced it a few hundred times in preparation, knowing it would be the most important shot of his (about to be short) life.

So why did he miss?

Probably because shooting in the real world is harder than shooting at the range. When I pulled the trigger on my rifle, I wasn’t trying to commit murder. He was. He was also able to look out and see, off the left, the Secret Service sniper team that would almost certainly kill him within seconds. That’s got to mess with your aim.

I’m now hearing that he was interrupted by a police officer just before firing. He supposedly pointed his rifle at the officer to back him off and then pivoted and started shooting at Trump. Being forced to fire in haste probably contributed to him missing Trump.

Trump, once again, got very lucky.

I remember being surprised that with shots being fired at a distance, there were no reports of anyone in the crowd getting hit. That seemed like more good luck. Until the report that three other people had been hit and one of them was dead.

The Shooter

I remember that some Twitter folks were claiming the shooter was an as an Antifa activist. They even had his picture. But they didn’t have his name. Naturally, this turned out to be bogus.

And as you’d expect, lots of people on the right were blaming this on anti-Trump rhetoric coming from Biden, the Democrats, and other Trump opposition, even though they couldn’t possibly know. This kind of bullshit happens every time there’s a shooting. When Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot in a supermarket parking lot in Arizona in 2011, people where quick to blame right-wing rhetoric, but the shooter turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic who was obsessed with Giffords. When a gunman shot over 100 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, many people assumed it was an anti-gay hate crime, but the best evidence indicates the shooter was trying to retaliate against the U.S. for airstrikes in the middle east, and he had no idea that the Pulse nightclub was a gay bar. Trying to kill the President is not a normal thing, so don’t assume it happens for “normal” reasons.

More to the point, madmen are madmen. It’s hard to predict what will set them off. Charles Manson famously touched off a killing spree over a Beatles song about an amusement park ride. Politicians, pundits, and bloggers who talk about politics should not have to worry about how some one-in-a-million madman will interpret their writing. That’s no way to live your life.

The shooter has now been identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who lived less than an hour’s drive from the Trump rally. Rumor has it that he’s a registered Republican, he has expressed interest in conservative politics, and yet he has donated to liberal causes. All of that, if true, could mean anything or nothing.

The Secret Service

One of the mysteries of this shooting has been why the Secret Service snipers didn’t see the shooter on the roof and stop him before he could open fire. Putting together a couple of threads, I think I have an answer.

As I gather it, the Secret Service threw three rings of protection around Trump:

• The inner ring: These are the agents that surrounded Trump and guarded the immediate entrances and exits to the secure area.
• The medium range ring: These are the points outside the secure area where a shooter could threaten Trump. They are individually secured by on-the-ground personnel.
• The far range, too large an area to secure every building. These are observed by the Secret Service counter-sniper team.

The inner and outer rings are protected by Secret Service agents who have the necessary skills to work on Trump’s protective detail or take sniper shots at bad guys. The medium range ring is basically just guarding buildings, which is something regular law enforcement officers can do.

The shooter was on a building in the medium range ring, which should have been guarded by local law enforcement. It wasn’t the sniper team’s job to observe it for threats. It would only be a distraction from their assigned duties. They needed to stay focused on the unguarded buildings in the distance.

The latest reports say that the building the shooter fired from was actually a staging area for local police. How he got past all those cops has yet to be explained.

The Target

I’ve been worried about Trump being assassinated since he first took office. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the son of a bitch, and I don’t want him to be President, but I’ve been worried that his enemies would resort to something awful to stop him. Although shooting our Presidents is a time-honored tradition here in the United States, it’s really not how democracy is supposed to work.

Right-wing commentators have tried to blame this shooting on anti-Trump rhetoric, such as the overblown assertion that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That’s only a moderately good point at best — overblown rhetoric is the language of political campaign season — and it doesn’t work at all if Trump really is a threat to democracy, as a lot of people believe he is.

Personally, I don’t think Trump will destroy our democracy…but not for lack of trying: The Trump team filed numerous baseless lawsuits against the election outcome, set up fake slates of electors, and on January 6, 2021, some of them broke into the Capitol to try to stop Biden’s electoral votes from being counted. And as I’ve been writing this, Trump just picked J. D. Vance as his Vice President. Vance is a well-known follower of Curtis Yarvin, whose neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment philosophy advocates replacing American democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy. So maybe, just maybe, Trump and his people are a threat to democracy?

Finally, let’s not forget that during a protest outside the White House, Trump had suggested shooting the protesters. He wanted to shoot my fellow Americans. His own fellow Americans.

Well Donald, you just got a taste of how that works. Reap what you sow, motherfucker.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Thoughts on the Trump Assassination Attempt

The ABC News 538 site has downgraded its probability of a Biden victory from 51% to 49% (with Trump going from 49% to 51%), which is essentially no change. The Silver Bulletin, which has been predicting roughly 2-to-1 odds of a loss for Biden, is actually showing a slight improvement in Biden’s chances, from 28.0% to 29.0% (Trump’s 71.4% to 70.6%).^[1]The missing 0.5% is the chance of a tie. This is something of a fluke, because I didn’t post anything when Biden’s chances peaked a couple of days ago. He’s actually on a bit of a downward trajectory at the moment.

The path-to-270 chart now looks like this:

Although Biden has lost ground in the Nebraska 2nd, Maine, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, he has actually improved his chances of winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. I have three guesses why that might be:

• The timing of the polls. States that have not had recent high-quality polls are still not reflecting Biden’s debate performance.
• Biden’s age was priced in. Voters knew he was old before the debate, so the debate added no new information.
• Voters aren’t paying attention. Lots of things have a bigger effect on the quality of their lives than the election. The debate is just another piece of political background noise that they are ignoring. They’ll start paying attention closer to the election.

I suspect that the current results are dominated by the first and last of these concerns.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Biden’s Path to Victory – 2024-07-10

Nate Sillver’s old FiveThirtyEight blog used to have a pretty nifty “snake” diagram showing the states in order by likelihood of victory for each of the two major candidates. Each state’s segment had a length proportional to the number of electoral votes. This made it pretty easy to see the battleground states and how important they were.

The new 538 blog (sans Nate Silver) has a similar graphic at the bottom of this page. Here’s a snippet, with data for Wisconsin selected:

I don’t find that as useful as the old graphic. First of all, the values associated with each state represent the vote share for each candidate, not the candidate’s odds of victory. That’s useful, but it doesn’t give us a good feel for how hard it would be to flip a state. Is a 5% margin likely to disappear by the election? Or is it insurmountable? What we really want to know is not the margin of victory, but the probability of victory.

Second, this is no longer Nate Silver’s election model. When ABC News/Disney decided not to extend Silver’s contract at FiveThirtyEight, they didn’t realize (or maybe didn’t care) that Silver owned his election model, and they were only licensing it. So Silver took his model and went home, and ABC rebranded the site to 538.

I’m not exactly a Nate Silver fanboy, but I do admire his election model. He took it to his Silver Bulletin website, where he and Eli McKown-Dawson are trying to restore it to its former glory. It’s producing different results from the ABC model. For example, the ABC model is showing Biden with a 51% chance of victory to Trump’s 49%. The Silver Bulletin, however, is much less optimistic about Biden’s chances, giving him only a 28.0% chance of victory to Trump’s 71.4%.^[1]The missing 0.6% is the chance of a tie.

Silver’s full model report is here, and it has lots of interesting data…but not the old snake diagram.

Discouraged, I set out to produce a chart of my own that showed something similar to the old snake diagram. Fortunately, Silver makes makes the state-by-state forecasting output available for download, so all I’m doing here is generating the chart. And to be clear, I have neither the time nor the skills to reproduce a graphic of the quality of the original snake diagram. But I think I can squeeze in enough forecasting data to make it easier to understand what’s going on.

The states are listed down the left side, from most likely Biden victory to least likely Biden victory (i.e. most likely Trump victory).^[2]I’m ignoring the model outputs for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They are unlikely to affect the electoral vote count, and incorporating them would make this a lot harder. The numbers next to each state are the cumulative number of electors that Biden would get if he won that state and all the more likely states. Note that Maine and Nebraska are the only two state that are not winner-take-all, so this chart shows each district separately for those states.

Each horizontal bar is proportional in length to the number of electoral votes that state contributes. The trailing numbers are the number of electoral votes followed by the forecast’s predicted probability of Biden winning those votes. The states in the middle, where blue shades into red, are the “battleground” states.

Based on this forecast, Biden would have to win every state that’s leaning blue, including on-the-fence Maine and the Nebraska 2nd, plus he has to flip at least the first three Trump-leaning states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, in order to win 270 votes and take the Presidency for a second term. Those are the main battleground states, along with maybe Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia — maybe he could flip one of those if not all of the first three. Any states below that are going to be really hard to flip. On top of that, he has to keep Trump from flipping Maine, the Nebraska 2nd, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia.

(As I write this, Silver is reporting that the debate is not fully reflected in these numbers because several key polling organizations have not yet returned post-debate results.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Biden’s Path to Victory – 2024-07-03

As you may know, a couple of idiotic climate change activists just defaced part of the Stonehenge monument in England with some kind of orange colored substance. This has led to a number of calls for vengeful punishment. I think the performative outrage from the right is especially deranged:

The reaction from archeologists and monument lovers has been less extreme, but still filled with smug declarations of how terrible it is to deface a revered national monument.

My unpopular take: Demolish Stonehenge.

I’m sorry, but Stonehenge has been around for 5000 years and has been abandoned and crumbling to ruin for the last 3000 years or so, long enough for the entire Roman empire to rise and fall. What I’m saying is, Stonehenge has been through a lot. The damage done by these “Just Stop Oil” clowns is probably not even the 100th worst thing to ever happen to it.

Admittedly, my attitude may be warped because I live in the United States, where if some strip mall has a vacant storefront for more than six months, busybodies from the local planning commission start setting up a TIF district so they can eminent domain the whole damned mall and replace it with two casual dining restaurants and a Target.

Speaking of shopping malls, I wonder if right now there isn’t some abandoned small-town shopping mall sitting empty because no one cares enough to tear it down, and in 5000 years all of its contents and fixtures will be carted off by scavengers, and all of the organic material will have rotted away, leaving only a pile of crumbled bricks and half of the metal superstructure from the food-court atrium, and people will be saying “We don’t know what it was for, but it’s really old, so we must preserve it as part of our heritage.”

I’ll bet that for most of the last 2500 years the locals living around Stonehenge thought it was an eyesore and would have gotten rid of it if the stones weren’t so damned heavy. And it’s not like anyone was worried about keeping the area pristine, what with service roads and the A303 running right past it. There’s even a walkway of some kind cutting across the outer ditch.

I’m just saying, given that no one has maintained it since Christ was born and assclowns are using it to stage protests, maybe it’s time to admit it’s an ancient pile of debris and haul it away. Maybe put in a Wetherspooons and Five Guys with parking.

Thank you for reading. If you didn’t like my suggestion for Stonehenge, you’ll really hate what I want to do with Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum and the Parthenon…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Stonehenge: A Modest Proposal

One thing that’s important to understand is that the Supreme Court did not overturn the National Firearms Act. They did not rule that any part of it was unconstitutional under the 2nd Amendment. This was not a ruling about the Constitution. The opinion is purely about statutory interpretation. From the Court majority’s point of view, what the Supreme Court did was uphold the National Firearms Act by throwing out the incorrect interpretation of the NFA by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

The Court’s reasoning seems to have turned on the phrase from the law defining a machinegun as a gun capable of firing “automatically more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger.” I’m going to try to explain what that has to do with what a bump stock does.

To understand how a bump stock works, imagine holding a rifle in a normal firing position, with the back of the stock against your shoulder, your strong hand gripping the gun just behind the trigger and your weak hand gripping the forward part of the gun (the forestock, barrel shroud, attached grip, etc).

Now imagine that someone next to you reaches over and sticks their index finger into the hole in the trigger guard, just in front of the trigger, and holds it there firmly. If you then pushed your hands forward, bringing the stock away from your shoulder, you would push the trigger against the other person’s finger, firing the rifle. The recoil from firing would shove the gun backwards toward your shoulder pulling it back away from the other person’s finger, releasing the trigger. If you continued to push forward the whole time, you would quickly overcome the recoil momentum of the gun and push it forward into the other person’s finger, starting the whole firing process again. With a little practice, you could fire bullets very rapidly using this method.

A bump stock eliminates the need for a second person’s finger. It replaces the regular stock and/or rear grip and slides forward and backward an inch or so. You start by pulling the bump stock back with your strong hand and shoving the front of the gun forward with your weak hand. Then to fire the gun, you place your index finger inside the trigger guard and pull back on the trigger until your finger presses against the tab on the bump stock on the opposite side of the gun. This finger motion will also press the trigger and fire the gun.

With a normal stock, the recoil would push your strong hand back, bringing your index finger with it, still pressed against the trigger. Using a bump stock, however, your finger on the bump stock tab doesn’t move, and the backwards recoil of the gun slides it back into the bump stock, pulling the trigger away from your finger. The trigger then resets for the next shot. If you continue shoving the front of the gun forward with your weak hand, you’ll slide it forward away from the bump stock, in the process pulling the trigger forward into your finger, starting the firing cycle again. This produces the machinegun-like effect that is causing so much concern.

The majority of the Supreme Court ruled that this process does not fit the NFA’s definition of a machinegun as a gun capable of firing “automatically more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger” because the trigger is still being pulled once per shot. The dissent basically argues that the finger on the bump stock tab is part of the function of the trigger: The shooter pulls the trigger once and then the gun fires multiple shots, therefore it’s doing what Congress described machineguns as doing.

I originally planned to summarize the rationale behind each position, but I couldn’t figure out how without paraphrasing large portions of the opinion. If you really want the details, I recommend reading the full opinion. Personally, I think the majority’s interpretation makes more sense, given the precise language of the statute. On the other hand, I don’t think the dissenting opinion is unreasonable nonsense, and I can understand why some people might sincerely favor it.

But even if we feel that both interpretations are equally plausible, I still think the majority reached the correct opinion. The NFA doesn’t just make it illegal to possess a machinegun, it sends people to prison for up to 10 years. I think a penalty that harsh carries with it the burden of making the law clear enough for people to understand what acts would violate it. If the law is instead ambiguous, then a legal principle called the rule of lenity says we should interpret the law in the least restrictive way, because otherwise we end up punishing people for committing acts that are not clearly identified as crimes. If people are going to be punished for breaking the law, they have a right to be informed what the law forbids.

Given the failure of the National Firearms Act to squarely address the issue of bump stocks — to the point where even Supreme Court Justices have differing opinions — the rule of lenity comes down on the side of treating them as legal. At least until Congress speaks more clearly to the matter.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Brief Bump Stock Explainer

Cry harder! Ha ha ha ha ha!!

Ahem.

But…I have to admit I’ve never been a fan of this case. I’ve spent a fair amount of my blogging life complaining about bullshit prosecutions, and Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump smells like bullshit. Let me see if I can explain.

I remember the first time I traveled on business, I filled out my expense report, and a few days later someone in the accounting department angrily called me to his office and proceeded to berate me for mis-categorizing expense items.^[1]Pro-tip: You can sometimes back these people off by apologizing and then asking for the manual that explains the correct procedures, which they never have. I had charged some hotel restaurant meals to my room and then categorized payment of my hotel bill as a hotel expense. What I should have done is broken out the meal portion of the hotel bill as a meal expense.

That’s basically what Trump is accused of doing. Trump gave his lawyer a bunch of money, some of which was to be used to pay off Stormy Daniels, but on the books the entire amount was recorded as legal fees. Apparently, this was not the right way to record the payment to Daniels. Still, recording a payment to a lawyer as a legal fee doesn’t strike me as an outrageous crime.

There’s a difference, of course, in that I had simply erred, whereas Trump was deliberately trying to hide the payment to Stormy Daniels by laundering it through his lawyer. Falsifying business records is a crime in New York, but it’s a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has long since run out. That’s probably why prosecutors decided to charge Trump was with falsifying business records to conceal other crimes, which makes it a felony, and the felony version of the crime has not yet run out the clock.

What makes it even stranger is that prosecutors have not really spelled out the crimes that trump is supposedly concealing. Or rather, they spelled three possibilities for the jury to choose from.

One possibility is that Trump and/or his lawyer committed campaign finance fraud because the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was in furtherance of the goal of getting Trump elected, thus making it effectively an unreported contribution to his campaign. This all hinges on exactly why Trump and/or his lawyer were motivated to pay the hush money, which quickly gets into murky questions of motivation and intent that I’m not sure can ever be known. Also, I just think a lot of campaign finance law is arcane and stupid.

Another possibility is that Trump was committing tax fraud. Trump’s payments to Michael Cohen were reported as income to Cohen (presumably so that Trump could argue it was Cohen, not Trump, who was paying off Stormy Daniels). This might actually raise Cohen’s taxes, which is a pretty weird way to commit tax fraud.

The third possibility offered by the prosecution is the theory that Trump falsified business records in order to hide the falsification of other business records. This sort of circular reasoning is a bit of a head scratcher.

(Reason‘s Jacob Sullum does a pretty good job of explaining some of these problems in more detail.)

Making matters worse, the Jury is not required to agree on which of these three possibilities is true. As long as each juror believes at lease one of them is true — the campaign finance fraud, the tax fraud, or hiding other other fraud — they can vote guilty and the vote is considered unanimous. (Assuming they find the other elements of the crime proven as well.) That sounds wrong, but it’s the rule in New York.

I’m not making a legal argument that Trump is not guilty. My guess is that the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury followed the letter of the law in convicting Trump. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t bullshit.

I’m also not arguing that Trump was singled out for prosecution in an especially egregious way. Bullshit prosecutions happen all the time, just usually not to people that make it news. Ordinary people get pulled over and ticketed for a workplace parking sticker or an air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror because it violates the law against obstructing your view out the windshield. For decades, New York arrested people for possessing utility knives bought from Home Depot, because they technically met the test for a prohibited “gravity knife.” If you’re in the same room with some illegal drugs, you can be found in “constructive possession” even if you never touched the drugs. Prostitutes who work together have been charged with “pimping” each other. People have been arrested under “open container” laws because they had an open box of beer cans, even though all of the cans were still sealed.

Some might argue Trump’s case is different from those other examples because it was being done for political reasons. But bullshit prosecutions happen for all kinds of reasons. Cops give out bullshit tickets to meet job performance “activity” targets.^[2]Which are totally different from quotas. Nobody has ticket quotas any more, just “activity” targets, got it? Prosecutors press bullshit charges to go after people they don’t like, or to get their names in the news. Bullshit prosecutions happen for bullshit reasons, including bullshit politics.

Washington, D.C. criminal defense lawyer Jamison Koehler describes Trumps’s recent experiences this way:

Narcissist that he is, Donald Trump approaches life as if he is the first person ever to learn or experience something.

[…]

And now the world – through Donald Trump – is learning about the criminal justice system in the United States.

We have learned, for example, that a defendant cannot speak out in court.

The defendant must defer to the judge.

The defendant cannot criticize, stare down or otherwise intimidate witnesses.

Courtrooms can be cold and uncomfortable.

[…]

The defendant has the constitutional right to call witnesses on his own behalf. That “a lot of witnesses were not called” can only be blamed on one’s own lawyers.

The defendant has a Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury and indictment and notice of the charges against him. It is therefore probably not a good idea to complain that “the defendant doesn’t even know the charges against him.” This might serve as an admission that the defendant was either too ignorant or too lazy to have figured this out.

The defendant has a constitutional right to testify on his own behalf. This should not be confused with a court’s gag order preventing the defendant from making certain out-of-court statements.

The most unusual thing about this bullshit prosecution is that it happened to a rich and powerful white dude.

Then there’s the matter of karma. Not in the religious sense, but in the colloquial meaning of someone getting what they deserve.

From the “Polish Brigade” to Trump University, Donald Trump has been scheming and scamming for decades. He is famous for not paying his bills, even to the point of multiple bankruptcies that have left other people holding the bag. He and his father created a sham corporation to funnel money around without paying taxes. He involved Don Jr. and Ivanka in a fraudulent SoHo construction project which seems to have used money from a Russian financial criminal. Trump has lost a bunch of civil suits over these kinds of things, but he’s never before been charged. It would be crass of me to suggest that his donations to the Manhattan D.A.’s election campaign had anything to do with it.

Despite his his financial shenanigans and connections to criminal figures, Trump somehow got the State of New Jersey to let him run a bunch of casinos, which he ran into the ground. How exactly he pulled this off is unknown, but it all smells a bit swampy.

Trump has been scamming his way around the criminal consequences of his actions for his entire life. In 2024, it finally caught up to him. All that shit he pulled made him a lot of enemies, and now a few of them — a porn star, a disgraced lawyer, and a few others — have come together to help a politically ambitious District Attorney run a questionable prosecution that just might put Donald Trump in jail.

It’s a bad way to run a criminal justice system. But it’s pretty good script writing.

On personal level, I have to relax and remind myself that none of this actually involves me. Had I been responsible for this case, I probably would have declined to prosecute.^[3]I would totally have pursued that classified documents case, because that seems open and shut. The Georgia election interference case sounds like it would be pretty good if it weren’t for the decision to use RICO, and I don’t know enough about the Federal election interference case to tell if it’s legit. But it wasn’t my responsibility, so I have no duty to resolve the tension between my policy preferences for the criminal justice system and my utter loathing of Trump. I can question the ethics of his prosecution and still enjoy watching bad things happen to him.

With no responsibility comes the freedom to say fuck that guy.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at When Bullshit is Karma

You’ve been through other waves of tech hype promising to revolutionize legal practice, and you’re not going to fall for it this time either. Seeing as I’m a trained computer scientist, practicing software developer, and all-round tech geek, I am here to tell you that is absolutely the right attitude. AI is not going to revolutionize your legal practice.

However, if you’re careful, I think it could help.

(I also think AI could help other professionals besides lawyers, but I’m writing this for lawyers because I know I have a few in my audience. And because it’s more provocative that way. I need attention.)

To be clear, I’m not trying to sell you on using AI in your practice. I know many of you have been resisting, and I understand your skepticism. But I’ve been learning a bit about AI over the past year or so, and I think there are a few things that might be worth your time to try out. Obviously, I don’t know enough about being a lawyer to be sure any of this can help, but I’m pretty sure it won’t hurt. (Except for wasting some of your time.)

When I used to work in the legal tech field, one of our guiding principles was that the most effective legal technology doesn’t help with the core practice of law. It helps by making some of the peripheral activities more efficient — billing, document retrieval, managing discovery, document formatting, tracking service of process — so that the lawyers can focus on what they are best at. I think the same principle applies to AI.

Two quick caveats before we go:

• I am not a lawyer, nor did I consult with lawyers before writing this. I.e. I’m guessing a bit here.
• AI can mean a lot of things, but for this post I’m only talking about generative large language models and ChatGPT in particular.

So if you’re wondering if AI could help your practice, here are a few suggestions to try.

The Iron Rule of AI Safety for Lawyers

So how can AI help? Or more importantly, how can AI help without hurting?

I think the most important safety measure is don’t let the AI speak for you. The big pitch for a lot of AI these days is that it can generate documents — motions, contracts, discovery demands. But if you read the stories about lawyers who have gotten in trouble for using AI, that’s exactly how they used it. They prompted the AI to write a document for them, and then sent it to someone — often a judge — without fixing all of the AI’s mistakes.

In theory, you can review and revise the AI’s document before sending it off, but that’s going to be a lot of work. Unlike a junior associate, you can’t train the AI to follow firm-wide guidelines. It will generate content in its own style, organized whatever way it sees fit, requiring significant effort to edit and align with your standards.^[1]Technically, some AI systems (including some versions of ChatGPT) can be trained using a process called fine tuning, so you could feed it example documents to train up a custom variant of ChatGPT more aligned with your needs. However, that would be a substantial technical project, and it would require multiple training and evaluation cycles. It’s not something most small firms would want to do.

You can revise your prompts to make the result more like what you want, but the AI is still going to do things you don’t like. And you’ll have to fix those things every time. Sometimes the AI will do totally off-the-wall stuff, like citing made-up court cases or referring to non-existent people. Editing the AI output will be a lot of work — possibly more work than if you just wrote it yourself — especially if you could just revise a similar document you already have on hand.

I believe it was either Eric Turkewitz or Scott Greenfield who coined the phrase “If you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics,” as a warning not to let strangers create your marketing materials. Letting an AI create your work product is probably even worse.

The key is to use the AI for tasks other than document generation.

Ill-Defined Searches

First of all, you can use an AI like ChatGPT as a kind of search engine to find answers when you can’t come up with good search terms.

For example, if you’re trying to remember an old movie about a hostage drama on a train, and you remember that Walter Matthau was in it, you can Google “hostage drama on a train starring Walter Matthau” and Google will find it.

But suppose you can’t remember Walter Matthau’s name. All you remember is that the movie starred an actor who was also in the original Odd Couple movie. Google Search won’t be much help.^[2]Unless you have access to Google’s AI search capabilities, which may be rolling out as I write this. But ChatGPT can figure it out:

Me: What was that hostage drama on a train that stared an actor who also starred in the Odd Couple movie?

ChatGPT: You’re referring to the 1974 film “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” The movie is a thriller about a group of criminals who hijack a New York City subway train and hold the passengers hostage for ransom. The film stars Walter Matthau, who also starred in “The Odd Couple” as Oscar Madison.

Now you have enough information to do a proper Google search for “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and verify that it’s really the movie you were thinking of.

I think this will also work with court cases. ChatGPT should be able to find cases based on details you remember from the case or what areas of law it affected. Trivially, I can prompt the AI with “What’s the legal case from the last century that overthrew the case that established the ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’ standard?” and it quickly finds Brandenburg. ChatGPT should be able to find more obscure cases as well, but I don’t know enough about law to think of any good test queries.

Of course, ChatGPT is well known for hallucinating court cases that don’t exist, so you should definitely check if the case exists and is really what you were looking for. If it’s not the right answer, continue the conversation with a “Nope. Try again.” You might want to give it more hints if you can think of anything, or at least try explaining what’s wrong with what it found. You might also try asking it for the best 5 or 10 answers it has.

(You can also use this kind of AI search for many other pieces of public knowledge that you might need to track down — the names of corporations, cities meeting certain criteria, dog breeds, books, movies, celebrities, and so on. Again, verify the answers before using them.)

I should emphasize that ChatGPT probably isn’t working off the case documents themselves. It’s mostly trained on things people have written about the cases. It will miss what they miss and misunderstand what they misunderstand.

Chat GPT isn’t searching any legal databases or document repositories in real time. It’s not even searching copies of documents. Months or years ago somebody fed ChatGPT a whole bunch of documents, which it analyzed for interesting bits it could use to build its massive neural network. The answers you receive are coming from that neural network as it processes your prompts. Any data that didn’t make it into the network won’t be in the answer. Conversely, any wrong data that made it into the network could also make it into the answer.

Translation

Second, AI can help with translation. If you want ChatGPT to translate something, just ask it like this:

Me: I’m a lawyer speaking to a Spanish-speaking client who is in the courthouse lockup. Please translate the following for him:

Hi, My name is Mark Smith, and your father has asked me to represent you. Your arraignment is in 2 hours, and we have until then to prepare you. But first, how are you? Do you have any medical problem which might require immediate treatment?

Notice that my prompt starts with some background about the conversation to help ChatGPT understand the context. It probably didn’t make much difference in this case, but it’s a good habit to get into.

As with all automatic translation programs, it might not be very accurate. I wouldn’t use it for communicating critical details or in situations where an error could cause great harm. But it will work in a pinch for non-life-threatening conversations.^[3]As I write this, OpenAI is trotting out an upgrade that can do live spoken-language translation on your phone.

The irony does not escape me that this is literally letting the AI speak for you — something I said was a bad idea above. I think this is an acceptable risk for several reasons:

• The involvement of the AI is transparent to all parties.
• Translating your words is substantially different from generating new words to put in your mouth.
• According to some experiments, automated translation using large language models is usually better than most earlier methods of automated translation.
• I did warn you not to use it for anything critical.

That said, involving an AI run by a third-party may have implications for privilege or confidentiality. This is not something I can help with. It’s up to you lawyers to figure it out. The same goes for any other legal or ethical issues related to the use of AI.

Summarization

Third, and here we’re getting into sketchy territory, ChatGPT can summarize documents. Suppose you get a batch of electronic documents in response to discovery. You could copy and paste the text from each one into a template something like this:

Please summarize the following document the way an experienced lawyer would. The document was provided as discovery from an appliance manufacturer that we are suing for producing defective toasters due to poor training of the engineering staff. Give me an assessment of whether or not the document is relevant to the case, paying special attention to issues that enhance or mitigate liability.

—

Insert the document text here.

The prolog in the template accomplishes four things:

• It tells ChatGPT that this is a summarization task.
• It cues ChatGPT to respond as if it were an experienced lawyer. Prompting generative LLMs with a description of the role they are to play has been shown to improve answer quality.
• It provides some background context for the document.
• It makes it clear that the goal of summarization is the assessment of relevance.

You will probably want to adjust the prolog to be more focused on your particular scenario. Don’t be afraid to write a few thousand words if you need to.^[4]When working with a generative LLM like ChatGPT, you should save copies of any prologs you create that turn out to be useful. Then follow the prolog with the text of the document to summarize, and ChatGPT will try to produce a summary and an assessment of relevance.

As with all things AI, you shouldn’t completely trust the results. In particular, LLMs are not fine-grained analytical tools. Don’t expect ChatGPT to sift through your discovery documents and find important revelations. Or rather, don’t assume that a document isn’t worth reading just because ChatGPT didn’t report any smoking guns. This is more of a big-picture approach for a rough classification. So if you’re seeking toaster-design liability clues, you probably don’t need to read an email that ChatGPT says is about employee dental benefits.

You may think you can do this faster and better with a document review team, or even just by glancing at the first page of each document to see what it’s about. And you may be right about that. Like I said, this is a sketchy application for AI.

That said, consider the power of combining this task with the previous one: If you have a lot of foreign language documents, you could use ChatGPT to summarize them in English to help you figure out which ones should be prioritized for a human translator.

I’m pretty sure that some of the major e-discovery tools and document management systems are already offering AI translation and summarization as features. Modern AI could make those features better.

The AI Review

I said earlier that it’s dangerous to use AI tools to write documents that you will be sending to other people as part of your practice. You could probably fix the AI documents with a manual review, but that’s going to be time consuming, and you might get a quicker and/or better document by writing it yourself.

On the other hand, it might make sense to flip the script and ask the AI to review your work.

This is obviously safe to do, since you don’t have to include anything the AI produces. But it is useful? The theory is that the AI has been trained on documents similar to yours and has “learned” how they are normally constructed. So when it processes your document, it can suggest things it has seen elsewhere. It won’t help you break new ground, but it might see some things you missed.

The only way know if this is worth doing is to try it, but I’ve heard a number of AI skeptics say that this is one area where AI is surprisingly useful. Not revolutionary, but useful.

As before, you will have some prompting to do. More than likely, you will want to have a conversation with ChatGPT about the document. To illustrate what that might look like, I fed an earlier draft of this post through ChatGPT 4o, and started with this prompt:

Me: Please review the document below as if you were a computer-literate lawyer and let me know how it could be improved. The document is a blog post in response to skepticism in the legal community over the usefulness of AI. I’m trying to suggest a few areas where AI may be genuinely useful without over-hyping the use of AI in legal practice. Please don’t re-write the document, just identify any parts of it that are especially confusing and let me know. You can offer a proposed re-write of those parts. Here’s the document:

[Document omitted.]

ChatGPT proposed 8 changes. Some of them suggested using more professional phrasing — it didn’t like the “Hell No!” at the beginning, for example, suggesting instead “I understand that many of you may be skeptical about the use of AI in legal practice.” I ended up using four of the suggested changes — fixing two typos and rephrasing a couple of sentences to be more concise.

Since most of the suggestions had been about readability issues, I realized I needed to get the AI to focus more on accuracy.

Me: Are there any parts of the blog post that make major mistakes about AI or ChatGPT in particular?

ChatGPT said it was mostly accurate, but it nevertheless offered six suggestions, four of which recommended emphasizing the ways in which AI could screw things up. One of the suggestions was to mention fine tuning, which I’ve added as footnote, and the other was to emphasize that ChatGPT doesn’t actually search documents, which I put into a new paragraph in the search section.

It sounds like ChatGPT didn’t find any huge problems with what I wrote, but did I miss anything important?

Me: Are there any other issues I should raise?

ChatGPT suggested seven possible additions to the post, including more examples and a discussion of tools that use AI, which I considered outside the scope. Based on a couple of its suggestions, I added a note reminding lawyers that they will have to puzzle out the legal and ethical issues of involving an AI. I also added a note at the end about the importance of keeping up to date on the technology.

Finally, I decided to ask ChatGPT to suggest other ways AI could be helpful.

Me: Finally, do you have any more suggestions where AI could really help lawyers without contradicting the main themes of the document?

Here ChatGPT strayed into the hype zone, suggesting things like using AI for contract analysis, due diligence, and compliance monitoring, all of which sound fanciful to me. It also mentioned document management, which I already touched on, and predictive analytics, which might work but requires a whole different kind of AI. Probably the craziest thing it suggested was using AI for client intake and onboarding:

AI chatbots can handle initial client inquiries, gather relevant information, and schedule consultations, freeing up time for lawyers to focus on substantive legal work.

Dear God no. Don’t do that. This is the worst case of letting the AI speak for you. At least a judge will likely recognize AI-generated legal nonsense for what it is. A client might well take it seriously and act on it. Also, I’m already anticipating the appellate question of whether chatbot-client privilege is a real thing.

I tried refining the question:

Me: Most of those sound complicated or expensive. Can you suggest additional ways that a small firm could use existing AI tools without making a major project of it?

That just caused it to reel off a bunch of AI tools that might be helpful, and I don’t want to get into that. I could have kept going, refining the question to get some better answers, but I think this is enough to show how to do AI review.

In Conclusion

AI technology has been changing rapidly for a couple of years now, and more changes are on the way. The new large language models like the one in ChatGPT have been revolutionary, and I don’t know if we’ll see more revolutions any time soon, but I think there’s plenty of opportunity to refine the models we have, find new and interesting ways to use them, and integrate them more elegantly into our lives.

As ChatGPT pointed out earlier, if you want to use AI to improve your job or your life, you’ll need to pay attention to new developments in the field. Keep reading. Keep trying new things.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested a few areas where AI might be helpful. ChatGPT is a pretty good search tool, a decent translator, and a an OK writing coach. And under the right combination of circumstances, you may also find a use for its ability to summarize documents. But whatever you do, don’t let it be the face of your legal practice — not to judges, not to other lawyers, and especially not to clients.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How To Use AI In Your Legal Practice

Basically, the Manifesto is Andreessen spending about 5000 words spelling out his values and his vision for the future of humanity. Having written more than a few 5000 word screeds myself, I sympathize. Pretty much everything I write here on Windypundit is shaped by my core values and beliefs, and from time to time I’ve been tempted to write a self-important “What I Believe!” manifesto.

So far, I’ve resisted. Marc Andreessen has not.

Most of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto is a summary of common classical liberal economic talking points — technology makes us richer, markets are good, the future is bright. It’s the sort of thing you might get if Milton Friedman and Deirdre McCloskey had written it together^[1]I would love to hear what Deirdre McCloskey thinks of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.. To that extent, I have no objection to the basic thrust of most of the Manifesto.

Which is not to say Andreessen gets everything right. For example, in what is otherwise a fairly economically literate document, this paragraph is filled with nonsense.

We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.

First of all, it’s not work that makes our lives better. Work is an unfortunate necessity. It’s the products of work that really matter. In primitive economies, we consume those work products ourselves — food, shelter, and clothing. In more advanced trading economies, we exchange those work products with other people to get what we want. In our modern industrial economy, some of our work products are tools and factories which make other work more efficient, resulting in yet more work products to trade and consume.

Second, I am mystified by the characterization of Universal Basic Income as turning people into “zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” Andreessen seems to be implying that giving people a guaranteed income will somehow harm them by depriving them of the glories of being “useful” and “productive.” But UBI deprives its recipients of nothing. Anybody would still be free to work if they wanted to.

Granted, there are certainly reasons to be concerned about the taxpayers who pay to fund UBI payments, but no one seriously questions that the people receiving UBI will be better off for it. They are getting free money to spend on anything they want. (Or they can save it for later.) I don’t understand how anyone who advocates so strongly for free markets could think that enabling people to buy more stuff will harm them.

Third, I am very skeptical about expression of concern that people receiving welfare payments will become “dependent.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sentiment expressed by someone who has actually received welfare. “I had to stop taking the free money because it was making me dependent” says no one ever. I suspect this argument is mostly used as cover for simply not wanting to pay taxes to fund welfare programs. The tell is that you never hear concerns about making people “dependent” when the money comes from charitable donations instead of taxes.

But the real problems with the Techno-Optimist Manifesto are less technical and more about some really optimistic assumptions.

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.

Forever is a long, long time for anything to continue.

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral – first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.

We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights.

What Andreessen is talking about here is a conceptualization of the human future commonly called the singularity. The theory behind it goes something like this:

• Humans are smart enough to create all kinds of advanced technology.
• The more technology we have, the faster we create even more technology.
• This process will continue to accelerate until we have god-like super technology and everything is wonderful.

To be fair, there is some evidence for at least the first two steps of this process. If you look at almost any measure of human well-being and growth, the history shows a long period of stagnation followed by a sudden spurt of growth, something like this:

If we take a broad view of human civilization, for most of our history since the end of the last ice age, not much has changed. We almost immediately began the neolithic revolution — the development of agriculture, along with domestication of animals, pottery, and housing — but not much happened after that. At least not in terms of life-changing advances in technology.

Then about 300 years ago…something changed. We began a period of ever-more-rapid technological advancement, giving rise to the curve above.

Now if we try to picture the future, some people argue that the rate of progress is proportional to the amount of progress so far, and therefore we are at the beginning of an exponential curve that will take our civilization to stunning heights very quickly:

At present, we cannot imagine what such an amazing world would be like, but surely it will be wonderful for everyone, and we should do whatever is necessary to get there, right? (I’ll get back to that.)

Andreessen asserts that Artificial Intelligence will be a huge part of this process. He doesn’t spell it out, but elsewhere I have seen the theory expressed like this: If we humans can create an AI that is smarter than us — as some AI-ish technology is in certain areas — then certainly that AI should be able to create an AI that is smarter than it to an even greater degree. Then that AI should be able to get us to an even smarter AI…and so on, until we are as gods.

We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.

We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve.

We believe Artificial Intelligence can save lives – if we let it. Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence working on new cures. There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire.

All of this…just seems unlikely. You just don’t see this kind of thing in nature, at least not for very long. Giraffe necks are long because it gives them an advantage in finding food to eat,^[2]Or maybe in mating. The details are a bit hazy. but we never got Giraffes with 50-foot high necks. Some combination of engineering, biology, and resource limits led to diminishing returns to neck length, and Giraffe necks stopped getting longer.

Nature has its limits. Blue whales got big, but only so big. Cheetahs got fast, but only so fast. Even basic biological reproduction, a process known to follow an exponential curve, eventually runs out of resources and levels off. Rabbits have children quickly, but we don’t have infinite rabbits. Things eventually level off.

I can’t see any reason why technological progress, even if AI driven, won’t eventually run into limits — resource limits, physical limits, computation limits, something — and level off. The out-of-control splendor of the singularity is fun to think about — it’s given us some great science fiction — but like everything else in nature, the growth of our civilization will probably reach an equilibrium. In nature, most things don’t follow exponential curves. They follow S-curves. I think the future of human welfare is going to be like this:

That’s not to any particular scale, of course. I have no way of knowing how good things will get. And to be clear, I don’t think of this as a dismal future. Barring some disaster, my gut feeling is that the peak of human flourishing will be pretty amazing. And I do believe some forms of artificial intelligence, broadly defined, will play a pivotal role.

That said, this is some kind of nonsense:

We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.

The flipside of this argument is that some AI systems will kill people. The mass casualty AI disaster that everyone talks about is basically the Skynet scenario: A powerful AI gets out of control and decides it wants to kill a lot of people. But AI systems don’t have to achieve consciousness to kill people. All they have to do is fail.

Self-driving cars are already killing people in accidents, with varying degrees of liability. Industrial robots have been killing people for 45 years. Computer-guided cruise missiles have been killing people for decades, mostly by design, but a few have gone astray. The military is planning even more AI-controlled systems in the future, which bring even more chances of fatal AI-mishaps. It’s not hard to imagine a future AI-driven pharmaceutical plant producing the wrong flu vaccine, or an AI shipping management system getting its priorities confused and failing to deliver enough food to all of New England.

Many new technologies are dangerous until we learn what can go wrong with them, and I see no reason to think the powerful AI systems of the future will be different.

(I think even the Skynet scenario is worth worrying about, although I’m less worried about being killed by rogue military robots than being killed by well-functioning military robots obeying the commands of a madman.)

In any case, whatever AI doom you think more likely, I don’t think we can ignore the risk that AI will kill people, and at times we will have to proceed cautiously. It may be prudent to postpone the benefits of AI in order to avoid AI disasters. This is not the one-sided choice Andreessen makes it out to be. We need to navigate a careful tradeoff.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Question 1

Speaking of the dangers of monopolies and large companies you said,

I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making […]

You’re a 35-year-old with no more background in economics than I have, and you’re running what you describe as a small agency. And yet the FTC has enormous power over companies that make up a significant portion of the U.S. economy. So when you were expressing concerns about “what happens when you concentrate so much power,” did that inspire any moments of self-reflection?

Question 2

In your interview, you were concerned about the dangers of monopolies:

Look, monopolies harm Americans in a whole bunch of ways. You’re absolutely right that it’s not just higher prices. It can be lower wages. It can be suppliers getting muscled out of the market or seeing their own payments drop. It can also be shortages.

Your concerns about monopolies are well-founded.^[1]Although low wages are not usually considered one of the traditional problems with monopolies. Also, low wages have nothing to do with the FTC’s stated goal of consumer protection. However, I can’t help noticing that your agency has a budget of about $425 million which ultimately comes out of the pockets of taxpayers like me. And the thing is, if I don’t like the work the FTC is doing, I have no way to stop paying the FTC to do it. I can’t just take my share of your budget and pay it to a different agency. The only place I can get FTC services is from the FTC. And that is pretty much the definition of a monopoly. Given how awful monopolies are, how much damage has the FTC’s monopoly power done to American citizens? And would you like to apologize?

Question 3

When discussing the problem of monopoly-caused shortages, you used as examples the recent shortages of baby food and Adderall. Those are interesting choices.

It’s true the baby food shortage was initially caused by supply chain issues and contamination at a major producer’s facilities, but this was exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. government makes it difficult to import baby food from other countries. To sell baby food in the U.S., foreign producers would have to submit detailed data to the FDA, meet strict U.S. labeling standards, and endure a 90-day waiting period. And they would still be subject to high import tariffs. For all these reasons, foreign baby food producers did not have a presence in U.S. markets, so they were unable to help when the shortage hit.

As for Adderall, the the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) imposes production caps on Schedule I and II narcotics, including Adderall, and they actually harass pharmacies and doctors who they think are selling or prescribing too much. When the demand for Adderall went up during the Covid pandemic, the DEA did not raise production limits. In fact, the DEA shut down one manufacturer of Adderall in 2022 over their supposed failure to keep good records about production.

Ms. Khan, What, if anything, are you planning to do about these federal agencies that are causing so much economic disruption? Does your answer change if I remind you that they, like your own agency, are monopolies?

Question 4

Most people in the U.S. have only one choice of cable TV/internet provider. These are very clearly monopolies and have been for decades. These monopolies exist because many local governments only permitted one cable company to serve their residents. They created the monopolies that protect cable companies from competition and allow them to rake in profits.

Many states have some form of Certificate Of Need (CON) law requiring anyone who wants to build a new hospital (or expand an existing hospital) to prove that the community needs more hospital services. Existing hospitals can challenge new CON applications, and they often have a lot of influence over the government bodies that evaluate them. This creates artificial monopoly power for hospitals that would normally compete against each other.

Similar laws produce artificial government-created monopolies for other business such as casinos, cannabis distributors, bars, and taxi companies. They are often justified in the name of protecting consumers although, as with hospital CON laws, what they really protect are the profits of politically influential businesses.

At the national level there are laws such as the infamous Jones Act of 1920, which requires that only ships that are American built, owned, and operated are allowed to carry cargo between U.S. ports. A similar Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 prevents foreign owned or operated dredging in U.S. waters — which is probably going to drive up the City of Baltimore’s cost of recovering from the collapse of the Key bridge. Enacted in the name of protecting American business, these laws actually just give some U.S. businesses monopoly power against their customers.

And so my question: Given how many monopolies are created by governments, and given how durable they are for having been enshrined in legislation, do you really feel that going after private sector monopolies is anything more than a distraction from the real problem?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A few questions for Lina Khan

I’m using a digital model of a container ship by Jabhnko R. that I found on the Trimble 3D warehouse. It is not a model of the Dali, but it was almost the right size. I’ve scaled it up slightly to match the published dimensions of the Dali and loaded it into Google Earth at some interesting locations.

My first thought was to show it next to Comiskey Park — the place where the White Sox play, whatever they’re calling it these days:

That’s pretty big – it fills the parking lot. But I wanted more.

My next thought was to show it next to something very familiar, the White House. Everybody has some idea of how big that is. It doesn’t look great, however, because Google Earth doesn’t make available any 3D models or high-quality images of the National Mall, presumably at the request of the U.S. government for security reasons. So I had to add a White House model to get a comparison image.

That certainly illustrates the size of it, but the image just doesn’t pop. I needed someplace else that was recognizable… How about Disney World in Florida?

That looks huge.

And for those of us who remember the scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind set at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming:

On the other hand, as big as it is, we have built bigger things. Here it is next to one of them, Hoover Dam, and it looks quite reasonable. Although you sure wouldn’t want that thing to actually hit the dam…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Just How Big is the Dali Container Ship?

One of the goals of Project 2025 is to build a personnel database of potential government employees who can be brought in to implement the conservative agenda. And they have a link to an application form, which includes a bunch of political questions.

Just for the fun of it, I decided to answer them.

I didn’t login to see the actual questions, because that would have meant giving them my phone number, so I’m working from a copy of the Project 2025 application provided at Axios.

Here are my answers:

Political And Philosophical Approach

Select the option(s) that best describe your political philosophy.

Classical liberal, or libertarian — definitely “small L” these days.

Please briefly explain your choice(s) of philosophy.

Libertarianism is about a default preference for the freedom to peaceably pursue happiness as we define it without interference from government. It’s the belief that the burden of proof should rest not on the individual who wants to sell lemonade, paint his or her house purple, hop on an airplane, ingest intoxicants, or marry someone of the same sex, but on any government seeking to thwart or control such victimless activities. Libertarianism celebrates a world of expanding choice — in lifestyles, identities, goods, work arrangements, and more — and exploring the institutions, policies, and attitudes necessary for maximizing their proliferation. Within the broadest possible parameters, I believe that you should be able to think what you want, live where you want, trade for what you want, eat what you want, smoke what you want, and wed whom you want. You should also be willing to shoulder the responsibilities entailed by your actions. Those general guidelines don’t explain everything, and they certainly don’t mean that there aren’t hard choices to make, but as basic principles, they go a hell of a long way to creating a world that is tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.

(Stolen from The Declaration of Independents by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch.)

Name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy.

Virginia Postrel, in her capacity as the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.

Name a book that has most significantly shaped your political philosophy, and please explain its influence on your thinking.

The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg. This was my first introduction to classical microeconomics and to rigorous thinking about matters of economics and society. It convinced me of the economic and moral superiority of free markets in most cases.

That said, the publication that has most significantly shaped my political philosophy is Reason magazine. It taught me how to think about what it means to have true freedom, how to recognize unjustified government control that I had taken for granted, and how to find solutions that did not involve threats of violence from government employees.

Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.

I have no idea. I don’t “greatly admire” any public policy figure. I’m not even sure what a public policy figure is. I suppose Justin Amash has some ideas I agree with.

Name the one public policy issue you are most passionate about. Why are you passionate about this issue and how would you like to see it addressed in the future?

The War On Drugs.

I am passionate about this issue because I believe that Norm Stamper was right to call it “the worst social policy since slavery.” It immiserates millions, encourages terrible behavior from police departments, and distorts our justice system, all in the name of an incoherent concept of purity that resembles religious fanaticism.

I would like to see the War On Drugs addressed by ending it completely, at all levels of government, as quickly as possible. As much as I would like to see the people responsible for this crime against humanity punished, I think that in the interests of peace we should settle for a Truth and Reconciliation commission that identifies the perpetrators and enumerates their evil acts for all to see. It might not be a bad idea to prohibit them from ever holding a government job.

How did you hear about Project 2025?

From Thomas Zimmer’s angry attacks on Project 2025.

Do you agree with the following statements?

The U.N. should have authority over the citizens or public policies of sovereign nations.

No. The U.N. may be a reasonable vehicle for diplomacy, but it is in no way suitable as a government. Among other things, it allows brutal dictatorships to participate as members.

The U.S. has the right to select immigrants based on country of origin.

I am confused by the use of the term “right” here with respect to government power. The U.S. does seem to have the power to select immigrants based on country of origin, but I think it’s a terrible idea.

We prefer a free market over a command economy because we don’t believe governments are smart enough to make wise choices of goods and services for everybody. So why would we think the government can make wise choices about who we can live and work with? At the very least, government selection of immigrants should be based on who they are, what they’ve done, and what they can do for us as individuals. Collectivism is stupid and often bigoted.

The education industry should be opened to increased competition through vouchers or tax credits for private schools.

Yes. Free markets are good, even with publicly funded goods and services. A good example is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a.k.a. “food stamps”), which gives people money to buy food, but it doesn’t force them to buy food only from assigned government warehouses. They get to shop for food in the free market. Education funding should work the same way.

Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.

No. People have rights. Lots of living things aren’t people. Fertilized eggs aren’t people yet. Human bodies with dead brains are people no more.

The permanent institutions of family and religion are foundational to American freedom and the common good.

Families are foundational to human thriving. We owe them as much freedom as possible to be whatever they want to be. And we should especially not engage in the reprehensible rhetoric of declaring that everything we don’t like is “anti-family.” People should form families by free choice, not because the government prohibits alternatives.

Religion is best kept separate from government.

Government should subsidize the use or production of energy, particularly for new and innovative energy technologies.

No. Let the free market figure it out.

Union membership should be at the option of the employee, not a requirement for employment.

A robust free market means that employers should be allowed to agree to contracts requiring them to only hire union employees.

The federal government should guarantee a universal basic income.

Yes, with an important qualification. Given all the government “safety net” programs we already have, it would make sense to merge a bunch of them in to a single Universal Basic Income benefit^[1]Or we could implement a negative income tax, which has the same effect. provided that we phase out some of the other programs.

UBI is one of the most efficient ways to help poor people because it lets the recipients of the aid make the decisions about what to spend the money on. After all, they are (a) better informed about their needs than anyone else and (b) better motivated than anyone else to make the right decisions. This is the logic of the free market, and we ought to give poor people access to it.

The U.S. needs nationalized health care.

Sigh. Probably. I prefer market-based solutions where possible, but the current system is so far from an efficient free market that I think the only way out is through. It will be easier and safer to add market features to a universal healthcare system than to keep mucking with the mess we have now.

The U.S. should increase legal immigration.

Yes. By the millions.

The police in America are systemically racist.

Yes. Probably less so than ever before, but yes.

We should be proud of our American heritage and history, even as we acknowledge our flaws.

Yes.

The gender wage gap is the result of prejudice and discrimination.

Mostly no. When you control for things like education, employment history, and career choices — as you should — most of the gender gap goes away. Some of the rest could probably be explained by controlling for other factors, such as willingness to work at night or in dangerous conditions. Still, prejudice and discrimination are certainly real and probably play a role.

The U.S. should scale back its strong military presence overseas.

I don’t know enough about the U.S. military presence overseas to tell if we have too much or too little. We need to have some presence overseas to deter attacks — the best place to fight a war is on our enemy’s land, not our own. In addition — and this part really sucks — for strategic reasons we need to play world police, because if we don’t, someone else will, and that could be bad for our national security. E.g. we guaranteed the security of Germany and Japan after World War II because we didn’t want them building up giant militaries of their own. And if someone is going to have military bases all over the Third world, better for it to be us than China.

In combatting censorship by Big Tech, we must look to more than just the free market.

No. The government has no role to play here.

The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.

This feels like a loaded question. The President should be able to advance his/her agenda only to the extent that it is within his/her legal power to do so. In cases where Congress has given government agencies and departments certain legal powers, those agencies should be limited to the powers granted, even if the President has different ideas, and it’s their duty to refuse to do things that aren’t legal.

The federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy.

I hesitate to answer this one because the contentious argument over the meanings of words like “sex” and “gender” or “male” and “female” is an argument about definitions, and such arguments easily become wasteful and stupid if you’re not careful. The standard tool for dissecting arguments about definitions is to ask “Why do you want to know?”

If the answer to “Why do you want to know if there are only two unchanging sexes, male and female?” is because we provide medical services that have to be carried out in different ways for bodies that could be pregnant, then it’s reasonable to use a traditional definition of female that corresponds to the ability to become pregnant.

But if the answer to “Why do you want to know if there are only two unchanging sexes, male and female?” is because we are trying to setup display areas in a clothing store, then it’s reasonable to have men’s and women’s sections to identify different clusters of styles and dimensions and let each customer decide which section they wish to shop in. In fact, most clothing stores introduce additional clusters such as “unisex,” “petite,” “woman,” and “big-and-tall.” We don’t happen to call these “sex” or “gender,” but they serve the same classification needs for purposes of buying clothes.

Unfortunately, these different contexts for discussing sex and gender easily become the basis for a motte-and-bailey defense of anti-transgender sentiment. Having staked out a defensible position on the biological difference between men and women, anti-trans activists quickly attack anyone who wishes to discuss sex and gender in more nuanced terms as “Not knowing what a woman is.” Similarly, they start with somewhat sensible arguments about safety — “What if a man identifies as a woman in order to gain accesses to safe spaces set aside for vulnerable women” — and then a few weeks later they want to pass a law denying voting rights to trans people or prohibiting them from being around children.

It’s a crock of an argument and I won’t be part of it. My answer is NO, the government should not recognize only two unchanging sexes. I’m tempted to go even further and argue that the federal government shouldn’t have anything to do with “recognizing” sex. Now that same-sex marriage is legal, pretty much all of our laws are neutral with respect to sex^[2]Selective service still applies to males only, but fuck the draft., so there’s no reason for the government to even track it. Maybe that’s going too far, but the government should certainly not be closing out all other definitions.

The U.S. should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices.

No. The U.S. should respect the free market choices of Americans, even if Americans want to buy goods and services from other countries.

So do you think I’ll get the job?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at In Which I Consider Applying for the Trump Administration

After giving it a little more thought, however, I realized that the way the Academy defines “good acting” offered a better explanation.

To be clear, Margot Robbie is great in the movie. Barbie is an inhuman character who is the abstract embodiment of girls struggling to find their role in the world (or something like that), yet Robbie finds a way to make her relatable and charming. Given that she’s in almost every scene in the movie, she did an incredible amount of work.

But it’s just not the kind of role that wins Oscars. Robbie was playing a literal child’s doll. In the movie, she describes herself as “Stereotypical Barbie.” This is a character that doesn’t look, behave, or think like a normal human. The Academy wants characters who feel strong emotions, characters who suffer tragedy and feel pain.

If Robbie wanted an Oscar nomination, Barbie would need a rewrite. The Academy has no room for Barbie-with-thoughts. But there could be a nomination for Barbie-with-cancer. Or Barbie as a single mom. Barbie with a heroin addiction. Unemployed Barbie. Disabled Barbie. Rape Victim Barbie. The Academy loves suffering.

I mean, just take a look at the characters played by this year’s Best Actress nominees (spoilers ahead):

• Annet Benning in Nyad, where her character overcomes a history of child sexual abuse to complete a grueling swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage at the age of 64.
• Lily Gladstone, in Killers of the Flower Moon, where she plays an Osage women whose husband tries to murder her entire family in order to gain control of the oil rights under Osage tribal land.
• Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall, where she plays a German bisexual novelist with a blind son who is accused of murdering her husband.
• Carey Mulligan in Maestro, where her character is married to philandering bisexual substance abusing musician until she dies of breast cancer.
• Emma Stone in Poor Things, where she commits suicide and is resurrected by a mad scientist after which she runs off and ends up in a brothel before returning to an abusive ex-husband.

Margo Robbie’s Barbie can’t lay a hand on that level of misery and torment.

You can see the same principle at work in the Oscar history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think it’s fair to say that the character of Barbie is written at about the same level of realism as many of the superhero and supervillain characters in the MCU, many of whom are played by people just as talented as Margo Robbie. Yet despite their box office success and cultural influence, the thirty-three films of the MCU have given us only a single acting nomination, which went to Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. You may remember that she played T’Challa’s mother, Ramonda. In other words, she played a widowed mother who was mourning her dead son.

I think the Academy’s notion of quality acting is at least as good an explanation for Robbie’s Oscar snub as sexism.

Or so I thought…until I found out the Academy gave Ryan Gosling a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role in Barbie. He played Ken. You know, Barbie’s boyfriend, who has no life of his own. He’s basically the character equivalent of a lukewarm glass of tap water.

Never mind. I got nothing.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Margo Robbie Wasn’t Nominated

That seems weird, since the jury did not find him guilty of any crime in which he supposedly earned that illegal money — the jury deadlocked on 84 of the remaining charges against him and found him not guilty of the 85th. That seems like the sort of inconsistency which should result in the conviction being overturned, but in a world where you can be convicted of lying to cover up a crime which never occurred, I’m not counting on common sense prevailing.

Several articles have noted that the crime carries a sentence of “up to 20 years,” which would be an especially harsh sentence for the 75-year-old Lacey. However, as Ken White always points out, such maximum sentences are usually meaningless. Federal sentencing guidelines and practices are too complicated for me to follow, but most sentences fall below the maximum. I don’t expect Lacey to go away for a full 20 years.

Except…federal sentencing allows for some bullshit called acquitted conduct sentencing, in which the judge is allowed to use other criminal charges in the determination of the sentence, even if the defendant was found not guilty of those other charges. So those other 85 charges against Lacey could actually lengthen his sentence considerably. The judge is still constrained by the 20-year maximum for the single proven charge, but she could conceivably hit him with long prison time.

This is an ugly outcome to an ugly trial, and it gets worse. Two other Backpage employees, Scott Spear and John Brunst, have been found guilty of much more. Spear, the former executive vice president, was found guilty of of 18 prostitution-related charges, 23 money laundering charges, and a conspiracy charge. Brunst, the chief financial officer, was found guilty of 31 money laundering charges. Federal sentences don’t multiply by the number of counts, but these convictions seem likely to send them away for a long time.

Adding to the ugliness, Lacey’s long-time business partner, James Larkin, had been indicted as well, but he committed suicide shortly before the trial was scheduled to start.

(Two other Backpage defendants, Andrew Padilla and Joye Vaught, were found not guilty of conspiracy and prostitution charges.)

Unfortunately, I fear there is more ugliness yet to come.

As a libertarian^[1]Definitely “small-L” these days., I have been following the War on Drugs for decades and calling out the evils when I can. At the same time and for the same reasons, I also found the criminalization of consensual sex deplorable: Gay sex, group sex, furry sex, whatever — it’s none of the government’s business. Paid sex is no different. Adult consensual sex work should not be a crime.

One of the remarkable things about prostitution compared to drug dealing is how out in the open it is. Maggie McNeill has been blogging as The Honest Courtesan for 13 years now, Tits & Sass ran for 9 years, Brooke Magnanti started Diary of a London Call Girl twenty-one years ago last month and still writes today although she’s in a very different line of work. Sex workers also have a vibrant presence on Twitter/X (and now on Bluesky). Sex workers even have advocacy organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project and Old Pros which operate in the open to advance sex worker causes. Even much of the business of sex work is in the open, with sex workers advertising on sites like Slixa, PrivateDelights, and Tryst. Many of them also have individual marketing websites.

Sex workers used to have Backpage for advertising too, but it was shut down in 2018 when the Department of Justice seized the site. This turned out to have unintended consequences.

Shutting down Backpage didn’t make the sex trade go away. Backpage‘s sex workers still needed to make money, and Backpage‘s readers still wanted to have sex. Buying ads on Backpage had been the low-cost entry-level alternative to setting up a personal website or advertising on one of the major escort sites, and while it was in operation, Backpage allowed thousands of street-level sex workers to inexpensively switch to a much safer way of doing business. This almost certainly saved lives, and it definitely made sex workers’ lives better. But with Backpage gone, many sex workers were dumped back into a life on the streets, with all the dangers that involves.

Backpage‘s attackers accused it of being complicit in child sex trafficking, claiming that pimps would advertise children on the site. This was undoubtedly true to some extent, but what goes unmentioned is that Backpage worked closely with law enforcement agencies to fight child sex trafficking, alerting them to possible cases and helping them track down perpetrators. But now that Backpage‘s share of the sex trade has moved back to the streets, it has become less visible. Child sex trafficking is still going on, but now it’s much harder to find.

The Iron Law of Prohibition says that making something illegal will make it stronger and more dangerous. Nobody drank bathtub gin in America until the Prohibition laws of 1920 criminalized alcoholic beverages. Almost nobody smoked crack until law enforcement started a war on cocaine, and we didn’t have much of a fentanyl problem until the government started cracking down on opioids. Legal alcohol and tobacco distributors didn’t shoot each other in the streets the way drug-smuggling gangsters do.

Criminalizing a good or service necessarily drives it underground. The need to hide makes it harder to build a good reputation, which makes it less rewarding to have good business practices. Customer service and attention to product quality fall by the wayside. Without transparency, public regulation, or access to the courts to redress grievances, there is little penalty for being a bad actor. Thus bad actors enter and thrive in the market, engaging in fraud, theft, and violence, which can often only be countered with more violence. Prohibition drives good people out of the business, resulting in entire markets being controlled by gangs of criminals, and the harder the prohibition laws are enforced, the more power gets transferred to people willing to endanger themselves and others to make a buck.^[2]Stronger drugs are also more compact and easier to smuggle, but I can’t think of an analogous effect for sex work.

With the success of the Backpage prosecutions, it seems likely that more such prosecutions will follow. The SESTA/FOSTA laws, which were advertised as being useful in fighting Backpage-style websites (but which passed after charges were filed) would make it even easier for the government to harass sex workers. We could be on the verge of a dangerous War on Sex Work.

I don’t think we’re there yet, and I don’t think it’s inevitable. We may be able to head off a War-on-Drugs-like attack on sex work. I don’t know how, but I assume activists at SWOP and other organizations have some good ideas. For myself, I’m going to continue drawing attention to the issue and making arguments for decriminalizing sex work.

I do have one suggestion, however: Let’s try to keep the people behind the War on Sex Work from holding elected office. The idea that sex work should be fought with severe police action is not widely taken as given. Many people still aren’t very concerned about it.^[3]And many of those who are very concerned are tainted by QAnon conspiracy theories, which thankfully undermines their credibility. And if we can punish these anti-sex-work warriors at the ballot box, maybe it will never catch on.

To that end, let’s name some names.

The war on Backpage was started by Kamala Harris who, as Attorney General for California, brought the first criminal case against Lacey and others in 2016. The case was pure theater — Harris was running for Senate at the time — and it was was unceremoniously laughed out of court, as was her second attempt in 2017.

(This was not Harris’s only terrible decision as an office holder. As District Attorney for San Francisco she made some odious decisions which caught up to her as “Kamala is a cop” during her failed presidential campaign.)

The Department of Justice’s case against Backpage was started under the Trump administration by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It tanked due to prosecutorial misconduct, but was eventually taken to trial by the Department of Justice under Biden’s Attorney General appointee, Merrick Garland. The actual dirty work, however, was done by local DOJ lawyers who for all I know had the best of intentions.

I’m pretty sure that when Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kevin Rapp, Margaret Perlmeter, Andy Stone, and Peter Kozinets caught this case for the District of Arizona they didn’t set out planning to make the sex trade worse. But that’s what they’re doing. And I’m pretty sure that when Austin Berry from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section joined them, he wasn’t planning to make it harder to catch child predators, although that’s what he’s doing.

(As for Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel Boyle and Joseph Bozdech, they’ve been running the civil forfeiture operation against Backpage — stealing assets from the defendants with questionable justification, thus impairing their ability to pay defense lawyers — so fuck ’em.)

In the War on Sex Work, these are some of the people we need to keep an eye on. Merrick Garland has the power to prosecute more cases like this one, against many more web sites and organizations. As Vice President now, Harris is (a) powerless, but (b) a heartbeat away from being able to set Justice Department priorities. I’m not sure we can do much about either of them.

As for the rest of the prosecutors, they may just settle into ordinary careers, but they could just as easily leverage their credentials to get into politics. We should be ready if they do.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Backpage and The Iron Law of Prohibition

(Note: OpenAI has released new versions of some of its AI products, so some of the details in this post and the previous one may have been overtaken by events. I believe the general ideas remain just as sound.)

What can go wrong?

Does any of this even remotely resemble the way humans answer questions? ChatGPT works only with raw text. It doesn’t gather facts or construct arguments or develop an outline of its response. It doesn’t even plan the words in its sentences. It just generates text one word at a time. Perhaps a better question is how can this possibly work?

How can this possibly work?

The basic answer is that ChatGPT is leveraging human intelligence. It is digesting billions of words of text constructed by millions of human beings and regurgitating those words as its answers.

Language has meaning. That meaning is encoded in the words and sentences and paragraphs and documents we produce. We know this is true because we are able to communicate with each other through writing: You have an idea in your head, you write about it, I read your writing, and now I have the same idea in my head. ChatGPT works by responding to and generating language, and because language encodes meaning, ChatGPT responses can be meaningful.

So while ChatGPT uses a very non-human word-by-word text generation process, that process is controlled by a neural network trained on writing by actual thinking humans. ChatGPT may be generating responses one word at a time, but it thinks very hard about each word and tries to come up with some thing a human would choose. And as is often the case with neural networks, the result really does feel like something a human would produce.

I’m not an expert at neural networks, so I can’t explain why ChatGPT works in much greater detail, but I do know that even experts don’t understand everything about how neural networks produce outputs. Neural networks are famously opaque. It’s not that we can’t see what the network is doing (all the data is right there in the computer) but that these networks are very large, and they operate in ways that are hard for humans to understand. We are used to simple discrete decisions — yes or no, pick one of these five answers, choose your destination city — whereas neural networks like ChatGPT do a lot of weighing and balancing of alternatives, to the tune of billions of arithmetic computations per word.

Neural net experts have tools to help, but in most cases we don’t really understand why neural nets give the answers that they do. It’s my understanding that there’s not a lot of strong theory about how neural networks behave. Most of what experts know is the history of what kinds of networks have worked, without necessarily understanding why.

Consequently, it’s not unusual for neural networks to do something unexpected. Large language models like ChatGPT, for example, turn out to be better at generalizing their knowledge than anyone expected. And it was a surprise that deep-learning image generators could ape the style of known artists just by asking, e.g. “Draw Abraham Lincoln as a Jack Kirby comic character.” In fact, it had even been a surprise that generation of text and images worked as well as it did.

So what can go wrong?

The most traditional problem facing ChatGPT (and any similar machine learning AI) is the ancient enemy of data processing everywhere: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If the ChatGPT model was trained on documents that had incorrect information, it could regurgitate that incorrect information in response to a question.

One subcategory of GIGO that has received a lot of attention is bias, probably because it is easy to understand without knowing much about ChatGPT, which makes it easy pickings for people who need a hot take for their ideological agenda. In the past few months I’ve seen ChatGPT accused of being racist, antisemitic, sexist, Zionist, and woke. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but I think a better explanation is that ChatGPT doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

As an experiment, I tried to get ChatGPT to recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with the word “Mary” changed to “Edward.” I wanted to see how ChatGPT would handle the pronoun in the second verse. As I expected, it changed it from “her” to “him.” I spent some time giving ChatGPT increasingly explicit instructions about what I wanted, but it was seemingly unable to break the gender connection between the proper names and the pronouns. At one point I thought I had it, when it started the second verse with “It followed her to school one day,” as I wanted, but then it changed “Edward” back to “Mary” in the remaining verses.

It might seem that this is an example of some kind of bias regarding gender, but I think it is better described as a problem of ignorance. It’s quite likely that none of the documents ChatGPT ingested during training ever used the pronoun “him” to refer to someone named “Mary” or the pronoun “her” for someone named “Edward.” Consequently, any attempt to use those words in this way is scored very low by the neural network and the tokens are rejected by the text generation algorithm.

NPR reports on a similar issue affecting the Midjourney image generation AI:

A researcher typed sentences like “Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children” into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images. The goal was to flip the stereotype of the “white savior” aiding African children. Despite the specifications, the AI program always depicted the children as Black. And in 22 of over 350 images, the doctors were white.

AI experts are pretty sure this happens because stock imagery inventories and journalist photo archives are filled with images of white western doctors helping black African children. But they have few images of black African doctors helping white children, at least not that have associated keywords that Midjourney needs to help identify the content.

As an experiment, I asked Midjourney for a “Photorealistic image of a SWAT team member holding a rifle” and these are what it gave me:

Note that the rifles are very detailed. They may not exist in the real world, but the renders are easily recognizable as AR-15 pattern rifles with recognizable parts like buttstocks, buffer tubes, ejection ports, forward assists, magazines, pic rails, optics, iron sights, and barrel shrouds.

Then I changed a few words, asking for a “Photorealistic image of a drag queen holding a rifle” and Midjourney produced this mess:

Most of the “rifles” are vague collections of gun-like parts. Half the drag queens aren’t holding them in remotely realistic ways, and one of them appears to have some kind of gun part attached to her wrist.

I think Midjourney is providing such wildly different renderings of the rifles because its training set had plenty of pictures of SWAT team guys holding AR-15 rifles, so it had no trouble combing them in an image. On the other hand, the training set might not have had any pictures of drag queens and rifles in the same image, so Midjourney is a little lost finding rifles to go with the ladies.

(I have no idea why Midjourney has drawn the drag queens the way it has. I think it might be confusing drag queens with plain old queens. Or maybe the only images of women with rifles in its training set came from the American southern states.)

In any case, I think ChatGPT has similar problems stitching together words about two or more things that people rarely write about together.

Perhaps the most startling problem with ChatGPT can be characterized as Nothing In, Garbage Out. That’s where ChatGPT hasn’t learned anything directly relevant to the prompt it’s been given, but instead of saying it knows nothing, it finds something that sounds similar enough to fool it into attempting an answer, which turns out to be nonsense. In AI terminology, this is known as “hallucination.”

You can’t make ChatGPT hallucinate with a prompt that is complete nonsense, like a random list of English words:

Prompt: Zinnia encouragement boon, shrilling cloverleaf straggler firestorm, telemarketing premeditate congregational choose, insupportable, diastolic phoenix pest.

ChatGPT: It seems like you’ve provided a series of random words or phrases that don’t form a coherent sentence or question. How can I assist you today? If you have any specific questions or need information on a particular topic, please feel free to ask, and I’ll be happy to help.

ChatGPT spotted that for what is was. But here’s an example of a prompt asking about a nonsense technology that I just made up.

Prompt: Under what circumstances is it necessary to recalibrate reverberation stabilizers when updating hydroscopic thruster assemblies?

Neither “reverberation stabilizers” nor “hydroscopic thruster assemblies” are real things, but they sound close enough that the neural network thinks it recognizes them, and in now-familiar ChatGPT fashion, it confidently gives a detailed lecture on the subject:

ChatGPT:

The need to recalibrate reverberation stabilizers when updating hydroscopic thruster assemblies is highly specific to the design and engineering requirements of the particular system in question. In general, the recalibration of reverberation stabilizers may be necessary when there are significant changes made to the hydroscopic thruster assemblies or the surrounding systems that could impact their performance. Here are some circumstances in which recalibration might be necessary:

1. Thruster Assembly Modifications: If you make substantial modifications or upgrades to the hydroscopic thruster assemblies, such as changes in the thruster design, size, or output, it can affect the overall system dynamics. In such cases, the reverberation stabilizers may need to be recalibrated to accommodate these changes.

2. System Integration: When integrating hydroscopic thruster assemblies into a larger system, such as a marine vessel or underwater vehicle, changes in the system’s overall architecture may necessitate recalibration of the stabilizers to ensure optimal performance and stability.

ChatGPT continued its answer for another six paragraphs, ending with the rather amazing warning that

It’s essential to consult the documentation and experts in the field to ensure that the recalibration process is carried out correctly and safely, as these systems often involve complex physics and engineering principles.

Of course, in this case I knew the answer would be nonsense because I was deliberately asking about something I made up. The problem is when you ask a legitimate question about real things, but ChatGPT makes up an answer anyway. It can be very convincing, even while hallucinating. By now we’ve all seen news stories about the lawyers who got in trouble using ChatGPT because it hallucinated the legal citations they filed in court.

As I outlined in my previous post, at its heart ChatGPT is only a recognition machine for human-written language. It recognizes text that looks like human language, and when answering a question is uses that recognition capability to guide its response to build up a combined text — question and answer– that strongly resembles human-written language. And that’s really all it can guaranty: That the result will look a lot like a human wrote it. ChatGPT is very much about things that look like correct answers, whether they are correct or not.

This becomes clear when you as ChatGPT to solve simple math problems such as multiplying two numbers:

Prompt: What’s the product of 123 and 456?

ChatGPT: The product of 123 and 456 is 56,088.

That’s correct. I wouldn’t be surprised if multiplying 123 by 456 isn’t to be found somewhere in CHATGPT’s vast training set. But add one more digit…

Prompt: What’s the product of 1234 and 5678?

ChatGPT: The product of 1234 and 5678 is 7,019,652.

Nope, the actual product of 1234 and 5678 is 7,006,652. Note that ChatGPT got the first and last three digits correct, but guessed wrong in the middle. This result shows just how much ChatGTP thinks of things as text — it doesn’t even understand simple arithmetic.

In fact, look at how ChatGPT tokenizes the numbers:

Prompt: What • ‘s • the • product • of • 12 • 34 • and • 5 • 678 • ?

ChatGPT: The • product • of • 12 • 34 • and • 5 • 678 • is • 7 • , • 019 • , • 652 • .

It broke the numbers in the prompt into two tokens each, and it assembled the resulting product from three tokens (five if we count punctuation). ChatGPT doesn’t even understand numbers. They’re just another sequence of tokens as far as ChatGPT is concerned, like everything else.

It’s a little clearer what’s going on if we use larger numbers:

Prompt: What’s the product of 2602201353 and 5183289370?

ChatGPT: The product of 2,602,201,353 and 5,183,289,370 is 13,495,242,206,931,301,010.

Again, ChatGPT got the beginning and end right, but the middle digits are incorrect. (The correct answer is 13,487,962,611,604,517,610.)

This makes some sense because when you multiply two numbers, the first or last few digits of the result can be estimated by multiplying the first or last few digits of the numbers being multiplied. In this case, multiplying the first three digits of both numbers, 260 x 518, results in an answer that begins with “134”, just like ChatGPT’s answer, and multiplying the last two digits of both numbers, 53 x 70, results in an answer that ends in “10”, also just like ChatGPT’s answer. All these numbers are small enough for ChatGPT to have learned something about them in its vast collection of training documents.

In addition, the result of multiplying two numbers is often a number as long as both numbers combined — a pattern simple enough for ChatGPT to have learned it — so adding two 10-digit numbers resulted in a 20-digit number, just like ChatGPT’s answer. Basically, ChatGPT used these patterns to get three things right: The first 3 digits, the last two digits, and the total number of digits. Everything else about ChatGPT’s answer is nonsense.^[1]I’m pretty sure the correct “2” in the middle is random chance.

I ran into a similar problem while writing my previous post. I wanted to show a diagram of a neural network, but I didn’t want to just steal one from somebody else, so I decided to try using Mathematica to create one. Since I didn’t know enough Mathematica to create such a diagram off the top of my head, I asked ChatGPT to write the code for me. The result looked great — it invoked a bunch of Mathematica’s graph functions and the algorithm looked like a plausible solution — but when I ran it, the output was gibberish. I ended up having to read through the Mathematica documentation to generate the diagram.

I think that’s characteristic of a lot of ChatGPT failures: When you give it a prompt, its neural net recognizes bits and pieces of the problem domain and generates the appropriate bits and pieces of a solution, but then it fills in the paths between the accurate parts with whatever looks good.

That makes sense. ChatGPT is just a recognizer of next tokens. It has no explicit mechanism for dealing with concepts or facts or reason. The underlying large language model manages to capture the inherent concepts, facts, and reasoning that underly the vast training set, and ChatGPT can therefore write text that seems to have concepts, facts, and reasoning. But as we’ve seen, it only ever generates answers one token at a time, so it’s not actually doing any reasoning.

Furthermore, because of the 4096-token window size through which it analyzes the world, ChatGPT is incapable of understanding or expressing ideas that require more than about 3000 words. If a paragraph around word 5000 refers back to something that was mentioned in the first thousand words, ChatGPT can’t understand the connection.

Finally, ChatGPT is only capable of forward motion. Ask ChatGPT a question, and it will start generating the answer, token by token, without ever looking back. No, that’s not quite right: ChatGPT does look back at its answer because the token history is needed to make the neural net predict the next token. But ChatGPT never looks back with an eye to changing anything.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT to do the simple math above, at no point did it do the AI equivalent of thinking, “Hey, math is tricky. I should double-check that number to make sure I got the multiplication right.”

That’s not how humans perform similar intellectual tasks. Given the opportunity, we like to think about our answers before acting on them. We give them a sanity check, and think about ways they could be wrong. Sometimes we come up with several possible answers and explore the consequences of each one. We talk to other people about our problems and look for historical examples of how others have handled similar questions. If our answers turn out to be wrong, we get feedback and correct them.

ChatGPT is capable of doing something superficially similar to that last step: If you tell it an answer was wrong, it will try again, but it’s not really an iterative process. ChatGPT is just grinding out more tokens. ChatGPT never reviews what it wrote to check the facts or verify its reasoning. It never searches the web to add details, or asks someone for help. It never does rewrites.

To paraphrase Omar Khayyam, ChatGPT writes, and having writ, moves on: Neither logic or reason shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy facts wash out a word of it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What is ChatGPT doing wrong?