Category Archives: Uncategorized

Obama's Incompleteness

Wiki on Gödel's incompleteness theorems:

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.

Federal judge Colleen McMahon on US "targeted killings":

I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

href

(no, don't bother telling me i'm abusing Gödel. i already know)

Favorite records of 2012

An acceptable year. Here are my three favorite new records.

1. Gentleman Jesse - Leaving Atlanta
2. Alabama Shakes - Boys And Girls
3. Divine Fits - A Thing Called Divine Fits

Interestingly, each of these sounds like it could've been made decades ago. The 70s, 60s and 80s, respectively. That's what I hear in almost every record I've bought this year, actually. And what doesn't sound old, I haven't really liked. I'm old too, I guess.

Anyway, check out those records. Good stuff.

You?

Mental Health, Culture, Guns

It seems to me that people who say that all we need to do is tighten the regulations so that the mentally ill don't get hold of a gun, end of story, are ignoring the real problem.

Wiki:

In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[4] There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.[5] The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[6] with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.[7]

Add up the accidental, the intentional, fatal and non-fatal and there are roughly 100,000 shootings in the US every year: 270 shootings every day, 80 of them are fatal, 30 of them are murders. High-profile mass-murders make for big headlines, but even this latest atrocity just bumped the yearly number by less than a day's standard allotment of gun murders. But the one-at-a-time killings that account for the vast majority of shootings? They're just things you hear about on local news, maybe. They're every-day background noise. If that. But there are a lot of them. And they aren't all the work of the mentally ill.

So, when I hear a gun supporter going on about how all we need to do is find a way to keep guns in the hands of sane people, I know I'm hearing someone who either doesn't know the statistics or who doesn't want anyone else to know about the statistics. Because it's not the crazy people, it's everyone; everyone and his gun. Too many guns. Too many overly-lethal guns. Too easy to get and too easy to use.