“MOST GUNS ARE SEMIAUTOMATIC:” Mickey Kaus explains firearms technology to a bemused Robert Wright, on Bloggingheads TV.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh similarly educates the editors of The Economist, who appear in great need of education. Really, if The Economist is going to opine on this sort of thing, its writers need to know something on the subject.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rahm Emanuel needs educating too.

MORE CRITICISM OF NBC, this time from Harry Shearer at The Huffington Post:

Not so easy is the answer to the question: what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho’s self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho’s pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from–in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it’s easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live.

Create bad incentives, get bad behavior. Meanwhile, some thoughts from Dave Cullen in Slate.

BOINGBOING BANNED IN BOSTON: This is the best argument against municipal wi-fi systems — they’re sure to be run by idiots who can’t resist meddling and censoring.

ED CONE WANTS JUSTICE for fired Duke Lacrosse coach Mike Pressler.

He’s owed a lot of apologies. And more than that.

CLAYTON CRAMER IS STILL TOURING in support of his book, Armed America, and Eric Scheie attended one of his appearances and — of course — blogged about it.

SPYING FOR IRAN? “A former engineer at the nation’s largest nuclear power plant has been charged with taking computer access codes and software to Iran and using it to download details of plant control rooms and reactors, authorities said.” Ed Morrissey has further thoughts.

THE COLOR OF MONEY: Colbert King charges Hillary Clinton with Hip-Hop hypocrisy.

CHINA JUNKS SPACE DEBRIS MEETING:

China has canceled the hosting of the 25th meeting of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC).

The China National Space Administration was slated to host the IADC April 23-26 at the China Academy of Space Technology in Beijing.

The IADC is a confab of countries that, in a governmental forum, discusses worldwide coordination of activities related to issues of human-made and natural debris in space.

On January 11, China created the largest debris cloud of satellite fragments in Earth orbit after they destroyed their own weather satellite in an anti-satellite test.

The April issue of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News labels the Chinese ASAT test as creating the most severe orbital debris cloud in history.

I guess they figured nobody was going to say anything good about them anyway . . . .

FROM IRAQI BLOGGER ALAA, a mixed assessment of U.S. security strategy. “However, between the extreme course of total withdrawal and the present detailed involvement with daily operations; there is a middle way that few are talking about. Complete abandon and retreat by the Americans would indeed constitute defeat and a victory for the enemy, and would turn the tables completely and ignite a larger conflagration in the region. On the other hand the level of involvement of American and other allied foreign troops with detailed street to street policing, house searches etc. etc. should not continue indefinitely. . . . What must be realized is that as long as the U.S. is strategically present, the enemy has no hope of achieving any of his objectives. This enemy knows this only too well; and his prime objective is to bring about this withdrawal and retreat by all means. He pins his hopes on the internal situation in the U.S., and this is his most potent weapon. Therefore most of his actions and attacks are basically publicity stunts aimed primarily at the MSM and American and western public opinion.”

STUDENTS REMEMBER Professor Librescu.

TECH ADVICE BLEG: Anybody out there own this Panasonic HD camcorder? It looks pretty sweet, and the Popular Mechanics folks like it, but what’s it like in actual long-term use? We’ve got some video projects in mind for this summer, and I’m wondering whether to upgrade. The one we have now works quite well, but it’s bulkier, tape-based (so capture has to take place in real time) and not HD. My sense is that waiting a while makes sense, but I’m not sure. Advice from those who haven’t waited would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Andrew Marcus emails:

Glenn- I saw the “pro” version of this camera at NAB and was blown away! I haven’t had time to check out the differences between the consumer version and the “pro” version, but if they are similar enough, it is a winner. I’ll do more research later today and let you know.

Hmm. The descriptions look pretty similar. This review says: “The big difference – a portable 40GB hard drive that can store the contents of the SD cards and a color space more closely matched to their pro camcorders.” Software seems not quite ready, though.

BLOGGER AND PODCASTER MAGAZINE is a new magazine for, er, bloggers and podcasters. Looks pretty interesting to me — but then, I’m surely at the core of its target market.

LIEBERMAN ON HARRY REID: “We should not surrender in the face of barbarism.”

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED: A look at the 1957 Far Rockaway High School Rifle Team. It’s certainly a sign of how New York has changed, and not for the better.

Meanwhile, in 2007 Yale is banning fake weapons on stage. And to think that universities hold themselves out as bastions of critical thinking where people can make fine distinctions . . . .

As Sigmund Freud said: “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”

Or intellectual maturity, anyway. It’s certainly evidence for Robert Epstein’s thesis.

UPDATE: Perhaps the Yale cast should show up in this apparel.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh: “Do Yale students have a hard time telling theater from reality? Are they so emotionally fragile that they would be traumatized by seeing a realistic sword on stage?”

I think that’s the Yale administrators. It’s all about the unwillingness to face reality and its consequences.

MORE: Reader Ryan Robinson notes something fishy at Wikiquote:

Just wanted to point this out…

At some point since you posted the Sigmund Freud quote “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity”, somebody went on to wikiquote.org and edited the page. They have that quote now marked as O“Misattributed”. Whoever edited the page says that they searched Google Print, but apparently they neglected to note that the version they searched is NOT the complete text of Freud’s work. Perhaps someone with access to a library can confirm or deny that quote.

Interesting how quickly the wikiquote page was modified… Also interesting that they *speculatively* attribute the quote to an opponent of gun control.

This is why wikis suck. That quote has been there for years — then I link it and it vanishes. I think the quote’s real — at least I’ve seen it elsewhere before. But either the quote was bogus when I linked it — which means that wikiquote sucks — or the quote was real and has been deleted/marked as misattributed for political reasons — which means that wikiquote sucks. And there’s no obvious indication that it’s changed since I cited it. Which means that wikiquote sucks.

STILL MORE: The Freud quote reappeared, but is now back to “misattributed” on Wiikiquote. Here’s a suggestion that it isn’t accurate from another source. What I hate is that it’s very hard for readers to tell when I’ve linked to Wikiquote what it looked like when I established the link.

MORE STILL: I went to the library to look the Freud reference up myself. The quote above doesn’t appear on p. 33 as cited. Instead, there is what’s seen below, which appears right after an account of a dream in which a woman tries to unsheathe a dagger to kill herself, only to awaken and find she’s tugging on her husband’s penis:

This is consistent with the (currrent) WikiQuote version, saying that the Freud quote is actually quoting Kates’ commentary on what Freud might think, rather than what Freud actually said.

Which doesn’t make Yale look any less dumb. Any speculation on the sexual underpinnings of Yale’s policy regarding swords on stage will be left as an exercise for the reader. . . .

JONAH GOLDBERG looks at “emotional vampirism” in the press.

A FORMER MISS AMERICA confronts some thieves:

Ramey, who won the elite beauty crown in 1944, confronted one of the three robbers on her farm in Waynesburg, Ky., about 140 miles south of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

“He was probably wetting his pants,” said Ramey, who balanced on her walking stick as she pulled out a snub-nosed .38-caliber handgun.

More here.

UPDATE: She’s picked up a new fan!

40 THINGS THAT ONLY HAPPEN IN THE MOVIES: Well, 39, anyway.

JOHN SCALZI EXPLAINS why blogs are egocentric.

Except when they’re phony!

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: “Strange that those who call themselves ‘progressives’ haven’t been able to progress much since 1968, don’t you think?”

OUCH: Rutgers team skips Clinton meeting.

I HAVEN’T BEEN FOLLOWING THE WOLFOWITZ / WORLD BANK STORY very closely, but a reader sends this defense of Wolfowitz by Ruth Wedgwood that I had missed: “The most amazing thing is that all the facts were reviewed for a second time by the World Bank ethics committee last year, and again it found nothing wrong. The chairman of the ethics committee pronounced in a Feb. 28, 2006, letter that ‘the ethics committee decided that the allegations … do not appear to pose ethical issues.’ It is hard to square the record with the entertaining claim that the World Bank’s president somehow concocted a do-nothing job for his girlfriend. It’s a bum rap, and one that women professionals in dual-career families might worry about.”

UPDATE: There’s also this piece from today.

THEY’RE LOOKING FOR A CO-MANAGING EDITOR at Global Voices.

REAL TIME INVESTIGATIONS at the Sunlight Foundation.

KATHY SIERRA ON NPR ON BLOG COMMENTS AND CIVILITY: Makes me glad I don’t have comments. Especially this: “Jacquelyn Schlesier is a full-time moderator for Chowhound, a food discussion Web site. She says keeping things civil is a lot of work. She spends as many as 12 hours a day reading through posts and deleting anything offensive, abusive or off-topic. It’s a food blog. How bad can things get? Really bad, Schlesier says, especially with some topics.”

People just tend to get nasty on the Web; the subject at hand, whatever it happens to be, isn’t so much a provocation as an opportunity.

Also, some wise thoughts on comment moderation by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, including this indisputable truth: “Furthermore, the kind of jerks who post comments that need to be deleted will infallibly cry ‘censorship!’ when it happens. . . . Anonymous nastiness is easy to write, and will always find an appreciative audience. I don’t care. It’s not a manifestation of the free and open discourse of the internet; it’s a thing that destroys that discourse.” Read the whole thing.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON looks at colleges.