Archive for February 5th, 2013

TMQ Watch: February 5, 2013.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Bridges, Clippings, Geek, NFL, Roads, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Over The Hump to La Tuna.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

A long time ago, I noted the scandal over the Santa Monica sushi restaurant, “The Hump”, which closed after it was discovered they were serving whale sushi.

A few days ago, Typhoon Restaurant Inc. (“The Hump”‘s parent company), chef Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, and chef Susumu Ueda were indicted on federal charges. Specifically, “nine counts of conspiracy to import and sell whale meat from 2007 to 2010, a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

Quoth the LAT:

Yamamoto could face up to 67 years in federal prison and Ueda would served up to 10 years if convicted.

Other sources reported other possible sentences, like 77 years and even “life in prison”.

So? Well, beyond the followup aspect, Ken over at Popehat has the kind of brilliant post that only Ken can write, using this indictment to explain how sentencing in the federal system actually works.

Those numbers bear no relation to reality.

I encourage you to go read the whole post, as it shines a huge frigging spotlight on a little understood area of federal law. Cutting to the chase, Ken (who has worked both as a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney; he’s a for-real lawyer, not just someone with an Internet GED in law like me) figures that the defendants are probably looking at 24 to 30 months, and that’s if their lawyers can’t make a good argument to the judge that they should serve less time.

Lessons:
1. Maximum sentences have very little relation to actual sentences in federal law. When the government quotes the maximum sentence, they are trying to scare you. When the press quotes it, they are uninformed or lazy. Exercise skepticism. Resist emotional appeals to “how is this sentence reasonable when murderers get less?”

(FCI La Tuna.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | 1 Comment »

40% followup.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

Previously on WCD, we talked a little about the “40% of all gun sales are done without background checks” figure.

Ted Cruz has pointed out some of the same holes we discussed in those figures, and “Politifact Texas” decided they’d fact check him.

What did they find?

The 40 percent figure originated in a 1997 National Institute of Justice study by researchers Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, who examined data from a 1994 telephone survey about gun ownership taken months after the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 took effect, mandating background checks of individuals buying guns at gun shops.

The law doesn’t apply to private sellers at gun shows, flea markets or people who post firearms for sale on the Internet.

What Politifact means by “people who post firearms for sale on the Internet” is unclear. If they mean people who sell to other people locally, that’s quasi-true. If a firearm – any firearm, rifle, pistol, or shotgun – is being shipped rather than sold face to face, the gun has to be shipped from a licensed dealer to a licensed dealer, and the receiving dealer has to do a background check before turning over the firearm.

Of the 2,568 households surveyed, only 251 people answered the question about the origin of their gun.
In those answers, Cook and Ludwig found that 35.7 percent of respondents reported obtaining their gun from somewhere other than a licensed dealer. (That has been rounded up to 40 percent.)

Rounding does not work that way!

When the Washington Post’s fact-checking project, the Fact Checker, asked Ludwig to revisit the data, the newspaper said, results suggested that purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent, not 40 percent.

By the way, Politifact also quotes the Post as pointing out the small sample size means there’s a large margin of error: “plus or minus six percentage points”. So it could be anywhere from 8% to 28%. And by the way…

“…the survey was taken in late 1994, eight months after the Brady law went into effect, and the questions were asked about gun purchases in the previous two years. So some of the answers concerned gun purchases that took place in a pre-Brady environment.”

And more:

For his part, Cook, the other study author, told us he has no idea whether the 40 percent figure remains reliable. “This survey was done almost 20 years ago. … It’s clear there are a lot of transactions that are not through dealers,” Cook said. “How many, we’re not really clear on it. … We would say it’s a very old number.”
Other scholars had similar views.
“I don’t see how anyone could know that number,” said James Jacobs, Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University School of Law.

More:

The surveys took place after the law took effect, Cook said, but it’s correct that the vast majority of gun acquisitions identified by respondents took place before then, given that respondents were asked to focus on guns acquired within two years, meaning 1992 and 1993.

And there were 18 states that required background checks prior to Brady. But:

Even so, Cook told us, he and Ludwig did not use information on individual states in doing their analysis. He emailed that “the survey provides an accurate representation of the nation as a whole but not of individual states.” Also, he stressed, the survey had no questions about whether there had been a background check and respondents also weren’t asked the states where they had acquired their guns. He agreed there is “no way to reach any conclusions about background checks for any of the transactions that are reported in the survey.”

So, summing up: the figure was never 40%, but 36% (see, that’s how rounding works), and is probably closer to 20% before the margin of error kicks in, which could make the actual figure anywhere from 8% to 22%. And the survey was conducted in a pre-Brady environment. And the researchers themselves say (again I quote) there is “no way to reach any conclusions about background checks for any of the transactions that are reported in the survey”.

PolitiFact’s rating: “Half True”. I see nothing in their summary that refutes anything Ted Cruz said, or that justifies the “half true” rating.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Media | 1 Comment »

2^57,885,161 – 1

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

I think everyone knows I geek out over pi, and the calculation thereof.

I’m not sure that folks know that I also geek out over prime numbers, primality testing, and the calculation of large prime numbers.

But I do. And we have a new largest known prime.

Posted in Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Random notes: February 5, 2013.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

In Idaho’s graceful, striated-marble Capitol, home to one of the more ardent and adamant state legislatures in the nation in standing up for the Second Amendment, lawmakers from both parties say that a torrent of public passion, even panic, about new proposed federal gun rules is pushing in only one direction: toward more guns, not fewer.

Hurrah Idaho!

First, they came for the owners of modern sporting rifles, and I didn’t speak out because I hate guns and want everyone to live in peace and harmony. Then they came to shut down the raves…

A concert company featured in a Times report Sunday detailing the drug-related deaths of 14 people who attended raves denounced the story in an online statement and took to social media to urge fans to speak out.

More:

Many of the concerts were staged with the blessing of local governments hungry for the revenue they brought in.
James Penman, the San Bernardino city attorney, said economics should never be a justification for raves. He long has urged officials to disallow the events at the National Orange Show Events Center there. Coroners’ reports show that two people have fatally overdosed at National Orange Show raves.
“The city should have zero tolerance for any activity where drugs are an integral part,” Penman said. “A rave without drugs is like a rodeo without horses. They don’t happen.”

Yesterday’s update from the Bell trial: Craig Rhudy of the “L.A. County district attorney’s office’s public integrity division” is on the stand now. So far, he’s testified that “former council members drew most of their nearly $100,000 salaries from panels that seldom met.”

Rhudy has charts.

The chart for 2006, for instance, showed that out of 20 City Council meetings, the Solid Waste and Recycling Authority met just once; the Community Housing and Public Finance Authorities each met five times, and the Surplus Property Authority had four meetings.
All of the defendants, except [Luis] Artiga, who was appointed in 2008, were paid $12,857 for each authority served in 2006.

In 2007, the Finance Authority met once, while the Housing Authority met twice. “By 2009, in spite of the fact that the panels continued to meet only sporadically, the pay for serving on each had jumped to $18,368, according to Rhudy’s chart.” In 2010, the Housing Authority was the only one that had a meeting.

And why does this matter? “In total, the defendants drew more than $1.3 million of their salaries from the authorities in question, Rhudy confirmed.”

I missed noting this over the weekend, but the LAT also ran a story on the “mountain of lawsuits” Bell is dealing with.

Former city leaders are suing the city. Bell is suing the former leaders. The city is suing its former lawyers. A European bank is suing Bell.

And the SEC and IRS are both investigating Bell’s bond sales. Here’s a great story:

Bell’s biggest concern is a lawsuit filed by Dexia Credit Local, part of a European banking group, over the city’s default on $35 million in bonds. The case involves 25 acres of undeveloped land near the 710 Freeway that Bell bought from the federal government with plans to lease it to a railroad.
Dexia bought all the lease revenue bonds the city issued to pay for the deal, which came to more than twice the city’s annual budget.
The deal went bad when an environmental group sued, arguing the city had failed to conduct the required environmental review. The judge agreed. Unable to lease the property — now worth far less than the bonds — Bell had no income to pay back Dexia.

The Richard III story has been reported everywhere, but I want to throw in a link to the Richard III Society, another group that deserves your support. And if you haven’t read it, I commend to your attention Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns, History, Law, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

Today’s Austin quasi-gun show update.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

I have written previously about the activities of the Austin Public Safety Commission, an appointed “advisory body to the city council on all budgetary and policy matters concerning public safety, including matters related to the Austin Police Department, the Austin Fire Department, and the Austin/Travis County Emergency Medical Services Department.”

The Public Safety Commission, it should be noted, is different from the Greater Austin Crime Commission, which has engaged in gun buybacks in the past.

I call that point out because the Public Safety Commission issued a series of “recommendations” to the city council yesterday. As reported in the Statesman, APSC recommends:

  1. “banning the leasing of government-owned facilities to gun shows”.
  2. “vendors at such shows to conduct background screenings”. This doesn’t make a lot of sense: we’re going to ban gun shows on public property, but we’re going to require vendors to conduct background screenings at the gun shows we’ve banned? I don’t believe the city can require vendors to conduct background checks at gun shows on private property; I think this is superseded by state preemption law.
  3. “…enforcing a state law prohibiting the carrying of firearms — except by those with concealed hand gun permits — in public parks, public meetings of government bodies, non-firearm related events at schools, colleges or professional events and political rallies, parades and meetings.” Wow, that’s a daring recommendation, guys. Enforce existing law.
  4. Instruct the “Austin City Council, Travis County Commissioner’s Court and Austin Community College and Austin Independent School District boards of trustees” to “divest ownership in any companies that manufacture and sell assault weapons or high capacity magazines to the public”.
  5. “Direct the Austin Police Department and Travis County Sheriff’s Office to study gun buy-back programs and come back with recommendations.” Oh, boy, I hope they do. As you may have noted at the link above, the last gun buy-back turned into a gun show. If they have another buy-back, I’d love to take a shot at picking up some more nice older Smiths.
  6. “Collect data on guns used in crimes”. I’m not sure from the context of the Statesman article what this means. I was listening to KLBJ-AM briefly last night, and caught part of a story on the commission recommendations; apparently, what they’re looking for is information about where crime guns come from. Are they stolen, legally purchased, bought at gun shows, etc.?

It is perhaps also worth noting that former mayor Will Wynn and current mayor Lee Leffingwell are members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and that Wynn is one of the members of that group who has been convicted of a criminal offense.

The more I hear out of these people, the better a recall election sounds.

Posted in Austin, Clippings, Guns, Law, Politics, Travis County | Comments Closed