There’s a myth that if we legalise a substance it would somehow take the illegality out of it.

Keith Hellawell, UK drug czar (quoted in the .sig of Todd Larason)

An interesting item from Larry Elder:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s website displays this oft-quoted “fact”: “The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.” Their website fails to mention that Dr. Arthur Kellermann, the “expert” who came up with that figure, later backpedaled after others discredited his studies for failing to follow standard scientific procedures. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Kellermann now concedes, “A gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired,” admitting that he failed to include such events in his original study. “Simply keeping a gun in the home,” Kellermann says, “may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed homeowner.” He adds, “It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide – i.e., in a limited number of cases, people may have acquired a gun in response to a specific threat.”

I wasn’t aware that Kellermann had retracted.

At Daily Kos there’s an “exhortation” (relayed by my old friend(s) Astraea) to the effect that the drowning of New Orleans has at last exposed Republican evil for all to see. As is customary in Progressive rants, corruption is equated with free trade, and the campaign for ever more invasive government both at home (papers please!) and abroad is equated with minarchism:

Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” This is what “starving the beast” looks like.

By expanding it every year?

I’ll shed no tears if either branch of the Biparty somehow manages, despite all the Bipartisan Incumbent Protection Acts of recent decades, to destroy itself and make room for some genuine opposition. But . . argh. Can someone who isn’t a libertarian understand how frustrating it is to see all manner of ills blamed on one’s pet policies when the opposite policies have in fact been in force?

Well, anyway. It has long been observed that a region of frequent hurricanes is not a good place for a city below sea-level. (The Netherlands don’t get hurricanes.) For generations the day of reckoning has been postponed, not by “willful neglect” but by massive intervention: to fight the Mississippi’s tendency to seek a new channel, to maintain the dikes levees, and to keep the price of flood insurance low so that people don’t look at their bills every year and say hm, maybe it would be smart to move to higher ground. If the powers that be had been flint-hearted enough to neglect New Orleans, it might already be a ghost town, with no one left to drown; but what politician could resist the plea to preserve a city of history and romance? It’s not as if they’re spending their own money.

Little news has reached me about the relief efforts; but I have heard that the authorities are obstructing private relief efforts in the name of keeping order — much as they did in Florida, after a hurricane whose name I’ve forgotten, during a Democratic Presidency. [Oops! Andrew was in 1992.] In this case they’re stopping unofficial vehicles because you might have in mind to spring some of the felons being held at the Superdome. Sicherheit über alles!

Meanwhile. Some entity called Castro Valley Moms has chartered a truck to take clothing and toiletries to Houston. (On Wednesday?!) I’ve bagged a bunch of garments that I never wear.

Marcia Blake has the right idea:

If every community in the U.S. sent JUST ONE BUS to retrieve “Katrina” refugees from the unspeakably inhuman warehouses where they are suffering, bringing them to our homes for shelter, we could stop the needless misery and deaths.

I kinda wish we hadn’t got rid of that sofa.

Roy Silvernail (Rant Central) muses on his addiction:

What would be intrinsically wrong with Nicotine Tic-Tacs?

I think it’s because they wouldn’t kill you.

Why “we” went to war, version 7 or so: Rummy says

You do not defeat Al Qaeda until you stabilize the Middle East, and that’s not possible as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.

(Cited, for other reasons, by Tom Parmenter (Desperado).)

Conservatives by definition have an exaggerated regard for stability, but this is a strange kind of stabilizing; things settle down sooner, in my experience, if kept away from explosions. Anyway, wasn’t Saddam’s state tolerably stable over the previous twenty years?

At Brainwash, Sara Hinson analyzes the frontier ethic represented by Mal Reynolds of Firefly.

(Only 33 days to go!)

Sometimes Pat Buchanan hits a bullseye.