SPEAKING OF WOMEN AND GUNS, Wendy McElroy takes on another bogus public-health study on guns. I’m sorry, but these guys should either start looking at actual public health issues, like anthrax, AIDS, or smallpox, or they should just go out of business. The junk science coming out of the public health community has gotten more and more atrocious, and more and more obvious in its political biases, over the past couple of decades — and the result is that these guys won’t have credibility even when they’re telling the truth, and when we need to hear what they’re saying. Er, if such a time ever comes.

UPDATE: Say, it’s worth noting that one of the stars of “violence studies” is none other than Michael Bellesiles, who, as this article in Salon reports,

came up with the idea of violence studies four years ago, “over a bottle of wine” with Arthur Kellerman, head of emergency medicine at Emory’s medical school. As Bellesiles recalls, “We were having dinner one night and fantasizing about what a perfect program for undergraduates would look like.” . . . The 3-year-old Emory curriculum has become a model for other universities.

Bellesiles, it appears, has an active fantasy life. Kellerman, it’s worth noting, is the author of what might be regarded as the seminal fatuous and misleading public-health study on guns, a long-debunked piece that gave rise to to the oft repeated (but false) factoid that “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” Steven Milloy has a recent FoxNews piece that brings readers up to date on the many abuses of “public health research” in pursuit of a gun-control agenda.

UPDATE: Turns out Fritz Schranck was ahead of the curve in criticizing this study. I hadn’t seen his post until someone pointed it out — I don’t actually read all the weblogs every day, despite what it seems like (even, sometimes, to me).

ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, a lot more women are taking up shooting. Couple this with the growth of women interested in the militiary (which the Washington Post has covered recently) and I think you’ve got the beginnings of a major cultural shift. Hmm. Where have I heard that before?

SET THE WAYBACK MACHINE FOR SEPTEMBER: You can see the posts via my archives, of course, but if you go here you can see InstaPundit in all its pre-redesign, uh, splendor.

OKAY, as a parent I understand — better in some ways than non-parents — why deciding not to have kids is a reasonable thing. But those “childfree” list folks just seem like a bunch of wackos. As Katie Granju writes: “Please note that these people are not just folks who have decided not to have kids. They are also not people who simply prefer adult company and become annoyed when parents allow their children to bother other people in public places. They are people who HATE children and amuse themselves by spending their time posting disgusting, often-violent fantasies of what they would like to do to babies and kids on their newsgroup.” Well, that’s free speech. But so is calling them wackos.

THE POWER OF INSTAPUNDIT: Forget all the linkage stuff from Eric Olsen and Max Power. One permalink and Media Minded has to come out of retirement. Yes, it was part of the Vast Blogging Conspiracy. Buwhahaha!

BLAME AMERICA! Naturally, that’s been the first instinct of a lot of people writing about last week’s school shooting in Germany. But here’s a particularly dumb example by an American who used to live in East Germany. The problem, you see, is the absence of the “cradle to grave care and oversight” that the communist East German government provided.

Well, it was comprehensive. They even helped you along with the “grave” part, if you caused them any trouble, or tried to leave. And say what you will, the Stasi was damned good at “oversight.”

ANDREW HOFER has a bunch of links for those interested in the Scientific American / Bjorn Lomborg debate.

TV COMMERCIALS ARE OLD HAT: Now it’s campaign videogames. Jesse Ventura’s the pioneer, but I like the Al Gore one the best.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis has some political videogames of his own, though the Ari Fleischer game sounds a bit familiar.

NEWSPAPER EXCEPTIONALISM: They got an exemption from campaign-finance laws, now they want an exemption from telemarketing regulations. Newspapers: They think they’re better than you.

DESMOND TUTU UPDATE: Alex Bensky writes from Detroit:

Desmond Tutu was here some years ago. His speech was abundantly and fawningly covered by the local media. A substantial portion of it was the usual Israel-bashing, which I’m sorry to say went down well with the mostly black audience.

At the press conference following the speech a reporter did something quite outrageous and asked Tutu a hard question, namely why he was holding the Israelis to such a high standard. His response was that, “We expect more from the Jews because they have been opporessed.”

I did not notice, then or later, that he asked higher standards of his own people, even though Bishop Tutu’s stock in trade is that he represents oppressed people. I can’t imagine why he would take this approach.

Ah yes, the moral superiority that comes from oppression. It has not been empirically demonstrated, in South Africa or elsewhere.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has an interesting series of posts (it starts here) on the transition from non-zero-sum to zero-sum competitions. He manages to tie together everything from the Burgess Shales to World War III, but unaccountably fails to discuss the implications for weblogs, which are currently still in the non-zero-sum phase but which will transition out of it soon enough.

MICHAEL BARONE says it’s rope-a-dope, and it’s working:

But these predictions ring hollow. The complaints show the weakness, not the strength, of the Saudis and of the Near East Bureau of the State Department, which so often takes up their cause. The accounts of the Bush-Abdullah meeting are very strong evidence that the president ignored the leakers’ counsel and kept to his course of opposing Palestinian terrorism and supporting Israeli resistance to it. . . .

Also, Abdullah did not leave Texas in a huff, and it doesn’t seem likely he’ll call an Islamic summit. Militarily the Saudis have little leverage. Their own armed forces are derisory, and the United States has shown in its campaign against Afghanistan that it can proceed without using its bases in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. can do the same against Iraq. We have forces in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Turkey, and evidently have been transferring troops and facilities out of Saudi Arabia and into other countries. The bitterness of the Saudis’ complaints in the Times shows not that they are strong and we are at their mercy but that they are weak and we are positioned to do what we wish.

You hear from the State Department and various Arab sources that Israel’s attempts to stamp out the terrorist network in the West Bank will just produce more terrorism. But the real fear, among the Arabs at least, is that Israel’s tough response will prove as effective in the medium and long term as it has in the short term. The Arabs are afraid that the Palestinians are losing their terror war and that Israel will be able to go along living in peace, without pressure to make concessions to Palestinians.

One disturbing — though not surprising — quote in Barone’s column comes from a State Department Arabist who says “we’re getting hammered” by the Arabs over our policies. What he means by this is that Arab diplomats are acting unhappy. This suggests that the State Department thinks its role is to get people to say nice things to State Department officials.

The State Department’s role, of course, is to get other countries to do what we want, without the need for going to war. At least, not usually: the Marines, after all, used to be called “State Department Troops.” Would that we had a State Department that understood its role similarly today.

NOW THIS IS JUST PATHETIC. Get a grip on yourself, man!

MATTHEW HOY has, ahem, “obtained” an advance copy of the CAIR report on Muslim civil rights in America. He has his comments and excerpts on his site.

PRIORITIES: Okay, while some people are whinging about the color of other people’s husbands and wives, something far more serious has happened. Ur-blogger Robert X. Cringely says he has lost a son to SIDS. He has a post on it, and a request for help. Go there.

UPDATE: Reader Katherine Snyder sends this link to the SIDS Alliance homepage. She adds: “I lost my son Jamie to SIDS 16 years ago, and if it weren’t for the wonderful people at the SIDS Alliance here in my hometown, I would never have gotten through that terrible time.”

OKAY, OKAY: A couple more on the interracial marriage thing and then I’m quits with it for a while — it’s taking over the page! Reader Kevin Maguire quotes an earlier reader who wrote that interracial marriages are becoming the norm in Hawaii and California:

He’s right about California.

I’m an American with Irish roots married to a Mexican. My wife’s sister is married to a white Jewish guy. Among our friends we have:

– Mexican guy married to a Chinese woman

– Indian woman married to a white guy

– Filipina woman married to a Portugese white guy. One of her
sisters is married to a white guy with Irish roots; the other
is married to a Irish/American Indian dude.

– Filipina dating a white guy and a black guy. Her previous
boyfriend was Moroccan.

– Irish guy married to a Hawaiian woman

– an Italian guy married to a black woman

– a Puerto Rican guy married to a white woman

Reaching out to coworkers I find:

– white guy, Chinese wife

– Hawaiian girl partnered to a white girl

– black girl partnered to a white girl

– white guy, Japanese wife

– Japanese guy, white wife

Written down like that it sounds like a mini UN, but it’s just everyday life in Los Angeles. Finally, a friend of a friend is the future of the California Republican party. Check out the picture.

But it’s not just California: my sister is married to a Filipino guy (whose brother is married to another white girl), and my grad school roommate is a white Spaniard whose wife is a black lawyer soon to enter Jersey City politics.

Yes, you see rather a lot of it here in Knoxville, which is far from L.A. or Honolulu. Knoxville is much-beloved of market researchers because its demographics approximate those of the nation as a whole, and interracial couples are everywhere — not, as a previous writer suggested, just around the University campus. Reader Timothy Sheridon writes:

The comment “Intelligent people seldom marry outside their race because it makes very little sense to do so.” from your e-mailer, is one of the most bizarre statements I’ve seen in a while. My experience from working and living in the Citadel of Geekdom, Silicon Valley, is that interracial marriage of smart people is becoming, if not the norm, a norm. The last six marriage ceremonies I’ve been a guest at involved mixed couples. Most of the newlyweds had at least one spouse who was a engineer. The next marriage I’m scheduled to attend is for an interracial couple that are both engineers. Of all the typical attributes engineers may have, high intelligence is one that is rarely absent.

As an aside, I must give you credit from even touching this issue. I sure your e-mail firestorm has been interesting.

Yeah, interesting — and voluminous. I’m frankly surprised that this is such a hot-button issue.

Of course, one thing that changes are people’s definitions of what’s white and what’s not. Irish/Italian marriages were considered mixed marriages not long ago, and not long before that Irish and Italians weren’t really considered “white” at all. I wouldn’t count as “white” under the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute struck down by the Supreme Court in the wonderfully-named case of Loving v. Virginia, since I’m one-eighth Native American (there was an exception, I seem to recall, for “descendants of Pocahontas,” who were honorary white people by law, but that wouldn’t apply to me). Personally, it’s just no big deal to me.

The most disturbing email I’ve gotten — of which I haven’t posted any — suggests that people only marry across racial lines for exotic sex kicks. Having engaged in my share of miscegenation when I was single, I have to say that that was neither the motive nor (any more than usual) the result, and I have to worry deeply about the psyches of people who think otherwise. Interestingly, most of that email came from people who identified themselves (since it’s the Internet, I can’t tell, of course) as minority women. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t think it’s anything good. I suppose that such a motivation wouldn’t make for an especially good marriage. But, heck, people who marry purely for exotic sex kicks — and people do in all sorts of ways — aren’t likely to have a successful long-term relationship regardless.

One thing that is clear about interracial marriage, and even dating to a lesser degree, is that it totally screws up the worldview of those who want to divide things into an us-vs.-them dynamic. To me, that’s a good thing. But then I don’t obtain my living, or my self-esteem, by fomenting racial division.

Okay, enough on this. Back to our regularly scheduled program of snide remarks about Fritz Hollings and Michael Moore.

INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE UPDATE: Boy, the email’s just pouring in on this one. Charles Oliver responds to an earlier emailer:

The writer who said he can’t think of any famous couples consisting of a white man and a black woman has to be blind or he just refuses to see things that don’t fit his worldview.: David Bowie-Iman, Diahann Carroll-Vic Damone, Lena Horne-Lennie Hayton, William Cohen-Janet Langhart, Mariah Carey-Tommy Mottola, Robert DeNiro and every woman he’s has every dated, Naomi Campbell and most of the men she has dated. Matthew McCougnehey-Janet Jackson, Robin Givens-Svetozar Marinkovic, Roxie Roker-sy Krazitz (she was on The Jeffersons and they are the parents of Lenny Kravitz), Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson and Frank Langella, Diana Ross-Gene Simmons (I believe both of her husbands were white as well), Traci (first black on Baywatch) Bingham and her husband.

There’s certainly a lot more. Those are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head.

Yeah, though I have a few quibbles: David Bowie (as another reader noted) might plausibly be considered a “white alien” — and as for Mariah Carey, well, she’s black only by courtesy of a rather strict application of the “one drop” rule. Which brings me to a story:

My brother, who looks like a taller, skinnier version of me, was once asked by a Nigerian on a bus in Nigeria if he was black. Uh, no, my brother replied, looking surprised. Well, the Nigerian replied, we can’t tell — all these Americans come over here and say they’re black, but they look white to us.

MAX POWER tries to demonstrate the linkage-clout of InstaPundit with a comparison of traffic referred to him by mentions here, on Kausfiles, and at The American Prospect. InstaPundit wins overwhelmingly: 2000, to 30, to 15.

But what “Max” doesn’t mention is that my link said that his pseudonym “sounds like a porn star.” I’m willing to bet that neither Kaus nor TAP said anything quite so likely to make people click through.

THEY’RE NOT PEACE ACTIVISTS — they just want the Israelis to lose. That’s the gist of Chris Seamans’ post on an oped from a self-described peace activist.

MEGAN MCARDLE looks at number of guns versus amount of crime and even has cool graphics.

HERE COME THE CHRISTIAN BLOGGERS. I think he’s left out some, but I don’t tend to sort people that way so I’ll have to think a bit to see if I can remember who it is.

UPDATE: Well, there’s Amy Wellborn, for one.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH says that Desmond Tutu is an idiot for characterizing Israel’s positions as apartheid-like.

Tutu, in all honesty, was always overrated. What I see here is not so much idiocy, but the desperate desire of a guy who hasn’t gotten a lot of public approbation in a while, and wants it back. He’ll get it, too — though mostly from people whose approbation is nothing to wear with pride.

I’VE ALWAYS SAID that all the twaddle about “journalistic ethics” was just that. Now here’s proof.

I’M NOT A TEASE, any more than Richard Nixon was a crook. Hey, wait a minute. . . . Anyway, reader Steve Carroll sends this plaintive request on the topic of interracial marriage:

I’m anxious to see a selection of what your readers had to say about that interracial marriage post. You nailed it exactly, in my opinion. It especially drives me crazy to see references to “our women” from racial groups. Anyways, you teased that you would post more about the topic later. Just add my vote to those interested in seeing that.

Okay. Here are some samples of the email I got — not as much as I got about Scientific American, but far more than I’ve gotten defending Yasser Arafat. Reader John Chang wrote:

I don’t think there’s any sort of racist assumption on the part of Raspberry.

I think the dynamics of marriage between black women and men reflect the other dynamics that are currently in play in society. I won’t try to go into all the details here, but while black men are much more likely to marry non-blacks (and are often more desired by non-black women), black women are more likely to indicate a desire to marry black men. Conversely, non-black men will often place black women lower on their choice of dating prospects. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous, but this sort of stuff does take place. It’s very similar to the dynamics that take place within the Asian-American community, where the women are much more likely to marry whites than the
men (for whatever personal or cultural reason, which I choose not to delve into at this time).

Another reader who prefers to remain anonymous writes:

Intelligent people seldom marry outside their race because it makes very little sense to do so. The fact of the matter is that only a tiny minority of the population as a whole is in favor of interracial marriage and as a result discrimination is a big problem. Marrying someone who is obviously not of your race is like making the decision to devote your life to becoming a world renowned concert pianist and then taking a hatchet and hacking off your left pinky — it makes no sense given the current prevailing attitudes of all races.

The majority of people who marry outside their race do so, unfortunately, to make a statement; “look at me, I’m colorblind and I’m putting my marriage where my mouth is”. Most of these people are nitwits employed by universities who see racism everywhere.

The first part — about prejudice — may be true. But if this sort of consideration really determined matters of the heart, would anyone be gay? The second part, about “making a statement,” is just wrong. There were some marriages like this back when I was a kid, but the shock-value, or the PC-value, of interracial marriages is largely nil. Indeed, my experience is that as a white guy you’re as likely to get flak as praise for dating nonwhites — especially from nonwhites. Stuart Buck writes:

Maybe Raspberry’s is neither racist nor implying that black women are racist. He may just be realistic about the prospects of black women marrying white men. In my experience, black-white couples are overwhelmingly likely to involve a black man marrying a white woman. One web article claims that in 1990, black-white couples featured a white husband only 28% of the time. Think of famous couples or black men who date/marry white women: Clarence and Virginia Thomas, Sidney Poitier and his wife, Halle Berry’s parents, Mariah Carey’s parents, Edwin Moses, Kobe Bryant, Montel Williams, Wesley Snipes, O.J. Simpson — the list goes on and on. Whereas I simply can’t think of any famous white men married to or dating black women. There may be a few, but none come to mind.

As an empirical matter, this may be true. But if black women are failing to marry — and if, as William Raspberry says, this is a terrible thing for society — then should we simply accept these prejudices (for that’s what they are, really)? I’m not saying that we should force people to marry, of course, but Raspberry might tell these women that it’s better to marry a good man who’s not black than to stay single. Or maybe he doesn’t believe that. Which takes us back to my original question.

UPDATE: Reader Tom Gates writes:

The comment from the anonymous person who said that people marry outside their race doesn’t make sense, or to make a statement made me laugh because the person is displaying profound ignorance and/or stupidity.

I grew up in Hawaii, and the MAJORITY of marriages are inter-racial. I married my Japanese-American wife because she was beautiful, and I fell in love plain and simple. Pick your combo among the major ethnic groups (AJA, “haole” or Caucasian, Chinese, Hawaiian, other Pacific Islanders, etc.), and you’ll find most marry out their ethnic group. The only exception is the Chinese, and I can’t remember the University of Hawaii study which examined this. In California, the trend is like Hawaii.

Some practical problems that arise are when the Feds or your local school district attempt to pigeon-hole your child based on ethnicity, and the kids get to alternate ethnicity every year or so! I speak from experience, and it can lead to some funny discussions.

Yeah, if anything I would say there’s probably a mild built-in preference for “exoticity” (that is, difference) among a lot of people, which makes good evolutionary sense of course.

STILL MORE ON SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: A reader writes:

As a 30+ year subscriber to Scientific American, I think the decline can be explained in one sentence: The main articles used to be exclusively written by scientists about their field of expertise, but now most are written by journalists. They have gone from being a journal where scientists exchanged information on the state of the art to just another glossy magazine about science. In addition, the editorial slant has gotten more and more pronounced as they evolved from written by scientists to written by journalists. In the 70s, an article in SciAm was considered a major publication event in the career of an academic – an acknowledgement that you were at the top of the heap in your field.

And reader Larry Thacker serves up this historical nugget:

Your Scientific American post jogged my memory about a TV show I recently watched about airplanes or Boeing. The show mentioned the folks at Scientific American Magazine and their thoughts about the future of the airplane back in the early 1900’s. I can not remember the shows name, the cable channel, or the exact quote, but thanks to google I was able too find this small quote: “To affirm that the airplane is going to revolutionize the future is to be guilty of the wildest exaggeration …” –Scientific American Magazine, 1910

Yeah, that’s of a piece with their nanotech article from a few years back. To be fair, they’ve backtracked considerably on their nano-ridicule since then, in light of the response they got. I expect they’ll do the same thing here, though probably without admitting any errors along the way.

Reader Carl Raymond Crites was one of many noting that John Rennie (who responded to Lomborg and questioned his credentials) doesn’t have much in the way of scientific credentials himself. According to this interview in The Moment, “Mr. Rennie has a background in biology. He has worked in biological research, but he decided that he enjoyed explaining science more than doing research. Since then, he has worked in scientific publications, and he became editor-in- chief of Scientific American last year.” His sole degree appears to be a bachelor’s degree in biology from Yale. Crites notes:

My seventeen year old daughter is graduating from high school this month at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas at Denton TX. For two years part, of her curriculum has including working as a laboratory assistant to her physics professor, Dr. Duncan Weathers . Dr. Winters uses Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy for sputtering analysis. John Wong, of The Moment, could honestly say that Abigail has a background in mathematics and science and that she has worked in physics research.

As to the degeneration of Scientific American over the years, the comments of your readers Andy Freeman, Kevin Thompson, and George Zachar are absolutely on point. Interesting to me is that the decay began about two decades ago when John Rennie and some of his like-minded colleagues came on board the editorial staff. They included Timothy M. Beardsley, Marguerite Holloway, John Horgan, and Gary Stix. It was at about this time that the magazine began to feature fewer reports of research by bona fide scientists and engineers (e.g., Roman Aqueducts and the North Atlantic Current and the Ice Age) and instead the readers were treated to the distilled wisdom of the “science writers” such as Rennie, Stix, Holloway, et al. As your readers correctly point out, the magazine developed a “green” agenda and a markedly left wing bias to almost all the reporting. I can add little to the comments that your readers have made. For more than twenty years I read and saved every issue. I finally bailed out about ten years ago.

I would mention an interesting point made by Wong in the 1995 article in The Moment that I cited above. In response to Wong’s question as to who are the main readers of Scientific American, Rennie answered, “Surprisingly, only about 4% of the readers are research scientists.” It might be surprising to Rennie and his journalistic colleagues but it should not be to any of your readers who had formerly looked to the publication for objective information on scientific matters presented by credentialed scientists and engineers.

Not very impressive.