Category: Of Random Interest

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This is a fascinating interview. Several bits stood out to me. I mention two here:
“Joe Nocera at the Times runs a daily tally of gun killings. He’s not running a daily tally of how many people defend themselves with guns. For one thing we don’t know about it most of the time. David Hemenway at Harvard is very pro gun-control and he thinks it happens about 80,000 times a year. If that’s true, that means that guns are saving 10 times as many people as they’re killing.”

“We have this impulse in the U.S. to do something. We have no national church, so the only way we can express our public morality is to say there ought to be a law. It’s antithetical to the American can-do character to say there are certain things we just can’t do much about.”

For the record, I am not a “gun guy.”

What Liberals Need to Understand About ‘Gun Guys’

The author of a new book tries to reconcile his personal politics with his fondness for firearms.

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Fascinating. 3.5 percent of adult Americans identify at LGBT of one stripe or another, but the density is three times greater in the District of Columbia. In fact, D.C. has a density twice as great as the next entry on the list. I bet there’s an engrossing backstory which explains this distribution.

Groundbreaking Study Ranks States by LGBT Population

It isn’t even close. Ten percent of adult residents in Washington, D.C. identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, according to a groundbreaking new Gallup study that for the first time has e…

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Interesting article about the negative consequences of marijuana use by teens by a pro-pot author. Best line: “I disagree with the recreational use without the awareness that it is medicine and that you are self medicating, and from the standpoint of media glorifying it to teens in music, movies the internet, and television, without them having proper understanding of what it does.”

Staying_On_Topic comments on TIL that US teens smoke more Marijuana than Cigarettes

If you want to be educated on why drugs are illegal read this [The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread,…

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I am not sure whether Scott Adams would be awesome or horrible to know in real life. Either way, he’d be entertaining.

Dilbert comic strip for 02/08/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

The Official Dilbert Website featuring Scott Adams Dilbert strips, animation, mashups and more starring Dilbert, Dogbert, Wally, The Pointy Haired Boss, Alice, Asok, Dogbert’s New Ruling Class and mor…

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I don’t think I’ve seen this observation anywhere else: “…if it defies good sense to send teenaged girls off into the woods with heterosexual men, it likely defies good sense to send teenaged boys off with homosexual men. This is no aspersion against homosexuals, except insofar as they are men, and we know enough about men to understand that some of them find teenagers sexually attractive, and the older and more mature-looking these teenagers, the easier it becomes for seemingly decent men to violate them while pretending the act is consensual.”

Sand in the Gears » Blog Archive » Gays, Boy Scouts, and dogma

Slippery words • Home •. Gays, Boy Scouts, and dogma. February 4th, 2013 Posted in Policy and Politics. The Boy Scouts of America is considering an end to its prohibition against homosexual troop lead…