Damn, this is funny:
First ‘anti-stab’ knife to go on sale in Britain
The first “anti-stab” knife is to go on sale in Britain, designed to work as normal in the kitchen but to be ineffective as a weapon.
The knife has a rounded edge instead of a point and will snag on clothing and skin to make it more difficult to stab someone.
It was invented by industrial designer John Cornock, who was inspired by a documentary in which doctors advocated banning traditional knives.
No, seriously, this is not a joke. Here’s a bit from the company’s website:
In May 2005, my wife Liz watched a BBC TV news feature regarding a report produced by three UK doctors calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives. The report, written by Mike Beckett, Emma Hern and Will Glazebrook, cited long kitchen knives as the ‘weapon of choice in a high proportion of serious stabbings.’ The research they carried out in to the justification of a potentially lethal sharp point, led him to one conclusion – a ban was needed on all long pointed kitchen knives.
I wouldn’t advocate a complete ban though their observations made perfect sense – remove the lethal weapons from our kitchen drawers and you will undoubtedly witness a drop in serious knife injuries. However, this raises a pivotal question; what else do we use? Introducing an outright ban would create an immediate knee-jerk reaction, therefore the solution must be more considered.
Being keen home cooks, Liz and I considered how many times we needed a long pointed knife when preparing and serving a meal. After much thought, we realized that in the home, we could see virtually no justification for this type of knife point. Liz then gave me a completely novel idea – why not design a knife point which can be used for everyday cooking but without the dangerous long sharp point?
Wow. I wonder if they’ll outlaw files and sharpening stones, too.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Some weeks ago, I came across a reference to a TV show from my childhood I had almost completely forgotten about: The Invaders. I checked, and NetFlix had it, so I added it to my queue. This weekend the first disk arrived.
It starts with classic 1960s graphics and ‘dramatic’ music, something like a cross between The Avengers and The Fugitive.
Then you get this introduction (taken from Wikipedia):
The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.
And you’re off and running.
OK, a couple of things. The special effects are about on a par with the original special effects used in classic Star Trek (not the remastered version), which is to say “not great, but acceptable”. Except that introductory sequence, which makes the Moon look like a giant ball of mashed potatoes that has been lightly toasted. Seriously – it’s bad. And you can’t excuse that, since by the time the series was made, we’d already sent a number of probes around and onto the Moon, and it was well known what even the “dark side” of the Moon looked like.
Anyway, I’m just four episodes into the thing (I do intend to watch it all the way through), and I usually cut most TV shows a little slack at first, to find their footing and allow people to settle into their roles. But already the sense of paranoia is more sophisticated than I expected. It isn’t, as most of the comments I have seen about the show, just a rehash of Cold War paranoia a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers or other classic 1950s SF. Rather, it has elements of the counter-cultural distrust of government itself in it – the sort of thing which would come to play such a crucial role in The X Files almost thirty years later, and was considered ground-breaking then.
Looking for something old? You might want to give The Invaders a try.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Gardening, Government, Guns, Health, Society
I mentioned in passing a couple of times in the last week that I’d been busy. Part of it was routine management of the BBTI re-launch (we crossed 900,000 hits yesterday), part of it was also just getting a lot of conservation work done (which is going to be an ongoing theme for the coming weeks), but a big part of it was setting up a new forum for neighborhood associations here in Columbia.
This was something completely new to me – so I had a bit of a learning curve to get through. Which is fine, since it’s good to do something completely different now and then to keep things fresh. And little or nothing may come of it; I set it up because I think it is a necessary component for this kind of grass-roots organizing, but I long ago learned that you can’t force people to care about something, at least not enough to actually take action. But I also learned a long time ago that unless I stepped forward to do something I thought was necessary, it too often just wouldn’t get done.
And I think that is what amuses me about this whole thing. I didn’t know how to set up a forum. But I knew that the appropriate software was available to make the process relatively painless (true – and now having done it once I’d have no qualms about doing it again). There was a need, and no one else had yet filled that. So . . . I volunteered.
A small thing. And, like I said, nothing much may come of it. But this is the only way to make progress – to try things out. To plant a seed and try to help it grow, maybe even to grow with it.
And now I can turn my attention back to finishing the Caregiving book, with these two other projects more or less completed. Onward, and upward.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Babylon 5, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Guns, Privacy, Travel
I try and keep an open mind about things, avoiding falling into the trap of allowing others to define my reality as much as possible. Because sometimes if you define things for yourself you can turn what is ostensibly a limitation into an advantage.
And so it is that I find the following approach towards air travel to be . . . ingenious.
Only the first fifteen minutes or so are necessary to understand his approach, and for those who want just the gist of the matter here’s a summation from his website:
– Abstract –
Many of us attend cons and other events which involve the transportation of computers, photography equipment, or other expensive tech in our bags. If our destination if far-flung, often air travel is involved… this almost always means being separated from our luggage for extended periods of time and entrusting its care to a litany of individuals with questionable ethics and training.
After a particularly horrible episode of baggage pilferage and tool theft, I made the decision to never again fly with an unlocked bag. However, all “TSA compliant” locks tend to be rather awful and provide little to no real security. It was for this reason that I now choose to fly with firearms at all times. Federal law allows me (in fact, it REQUIRES me) to lock my luggage with proper padlocks and does not permit any airport staffer to open my bags once they have left my possession.
In this talk, I will summarize the relevant laws and policies concerning travel with firearms. It’s easier than you think, often adds little to no extra time to your schedule (indeed, it can EXPEDITE the check-in process sometimes), and is in my opinion the best way to prevent tampering and theft of bags during air travel.
Basically, it comes down to using a secure hard-sided case for all your valuable items, and including a firearm in that case. This requires a non-TSA-compliant lock, knowledge of the relevant laws (available on his website or from the TSA), and filling out the necessary paperwork when you check in for transporting a firearm (it doesn’t have to be a valuable firearm or even an actually functional one). Some additional hassle up front, but your possessions will be a lot more secure.
I’ve bitched before about the loss of privacy thanks to the TSA, and the loss of security that goes along with that. Using this tactic would at least address one aspect of the whole thing, and might be worth it in some situations. Hmm . . . I need to be making a flight back east this summer, maybe I’ll give this a try and see how it actually works out . . .
Jim Downey
*General Smits, Babylon 5 episode Point of No Return, which seemed very appropriate. Via THR. Cross posted to UTI.
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Humor, Nuclear weapons, NYT, Publishing, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Terrorism
Heh:
U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
* * *
Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.
“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”
Yeah, everyone knows where their local stockpile of enriched uranium is, right? I mean, really. I can’t see the problem here.
Jim Downey
*Sorry, I couldn’t resist the connection to Heinlein’s classic SF story “Blowups Happen” because of the topic and attitude.
Cross posted to UTI.
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Guns, Predictions, RKBA, Society, Violence
For reasons I’ll discuss sometime later, I was digging around in some of my old archive writings this afternoon. And I came across an essay which was intended to be a companion piece to an op-ed I had written for the St. Louis Post Dispatch about 16 years ago (they declined to run it). It’s curious to see how little my opinions have changed in the interim, but also how what I had to say then was somewhat predictive to how things have actually played out, here and elsewhere around the nation. For this reason, I thought I would share it here.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Concealed-Carry
Recently, I had a column here concerning the radical NRA leadership, and the danger that their attitude of ‘anything goes’ with weapons and ammunition poses to police, federal agents, and the average American. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that I favor legislative efforts to allow most people to carry a concealed firearm.
I do not see a contradiction here. What the NRA leadership is doing to demonize and discredit law enforcement makes us all less safe. Having more law-abiding citizens trained in the safe handling of firearms, and duly licensed to carry those firearm for self defense, would make us more safe. Sure, the ideal solution would be to rid society of all firearms, or at least all handguns. But that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, with a huge number of firearms already in private hands. Certainly, the criminals aren’t going to give up their weapons. And a crime-fearing public doesn’t want to relinquish their guns, though they rarely carry them in violation of current law.
A concealed-carry law would change the calculus of crime in a very fundamental way.
The calculus of crime is pretty straight-forward: people will turn to crime when they feel that the chances of reward are greater than the risks. Of course, how risk is estimated depends on what one has to lose. If a person has few options other than crime (either in reality or in perception), the threshold of acceptable risk is lower, and the incentive to turn to crime is greater.
There are a number of ways of affecting this equation. A strong moral incentive to not commit crime raises the level of risk. If you believe that you face a final judgement before an omniscient deity, you know that you cannot escape the consequences of committing a crime. Or if violating what you believe to be ‘right’ makes you uncomfortable, the rewards are diminished, and you are less inclined to resort to crime.
A greater probability of being caught and convicted by the criminal justice system likewise raises the threshold of risk. More police, wider law enforcement powers, and mandatory sentences are all efforts in this direction.
A high standard of living raises the threshold of risk (since the potential criminal has more to lose). Attempts to reduce poverty, provide job training, and give people opportunity and hope are based on this part of the equation.
Reducing the incentive also makes sense. This is one of the major premises behind arguments to legalize (and control and tax) some drugs. Legalization would greatly reduce the profit potential for dealers, and keep prices down for addicts, so that they wouldn’t have to turn to crime to support their habit.
These are all general, society-wide efforts. Businesses also tend to employ the same principles. Tighter inventory and accounting control reduce the threat of loss through employee theft and embezzelment, alarms and similar security systems are aimed at stopping burglary, and keeping a limited amount of cash on premises reduces the potential reward to a criminal.
Likewise, individuals apply the same understanding, whether we do so consciously or not. We are more nervous when we are carrying a large sum of cash, because we know that this increases the potential reward to a robber. We avoid dark alleys because this lowers the threshold of risk for the criminal, since there is less chance of that criminal being caught and convicted by the criminal justice system.
If concealed-carry laws were in effect, and a significant number of people availed themselves of such permits, this would also change the equation at both the individual and societal level. The threshold of risk to the criminal would rise. Instead of being relatively assured that a law-abiding (and hence unarmed) victim would be unable to respond to a threat of violence, the criminal would have to consider what the chances were that a likely victim would not only be armed, but trained in the proper use of a firearm.
Training would be the key. The military (and a number of states which already allow citizens to carry concealed firearms) have training regimens designed to teach people how to safely use and care for their weapons, when it is appropriate to use them, and what the ramifications of use are. Completing and passing such a training regimen, including periodic qualification on a shooting range, would be necessary to obtain a permit to carry.
And the weapon to be used would need to be licensed. A sample of that weapon’s unique ballistic profile could be put on file for future reference. Carrying a weapon not so licensed should be grounds for immediate revocation of the permit to carry. And there should be draconian punishments for carrying a weapon without the proper permit and training. Police should have broadened rights to search for a concealed weapon using hand-held metal detectors or other new scanning equipment.
What about crimes of passion? Wouldn’t adding more firearms, having them even more handy, increase the number of this variety of murders?
I don’t think so. There are already more than 100 million firearms in this country. Allowing people to carry a small fraction of that number would not increase the risk much. In fact, because of the requirement of training in the safe handling and proper use of concealed weapons, this risk might very well drop.
The experience in those states which have had concealed-carry laws on the books for a few years indicates that there are very few instances of improper use by citizens who hold such permits. And while it is difficult to establish the causal connection directly, the data also suggests that those states have experienced a drop in crime rates greater than the drop in the national average.
Lastly, allowing citizens who have a background clean of criminal activity and mental health problems to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon would do more than just change the calculus of crime. It would shift responsibility. The police really cannot protect us from predators. Often, the most they can do is be there after the fact, to help pick up the pieces of a shattered society, and to try and locate the perpetrators of a crime. A citizen who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon is empowered, with at least some greater control over his or her own fate in the face of crime. This is why many women have sought and obtained permits to carry in those states where such permits are legal.
A concealed-carry law would not be a panacea, any more than any of the other efforts to affect the calculus of crime have been a panacea. But a concealed-carry law could make a significant difference, and it is high time that we give our citizens the tools and training to protect themselves.
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Privacy, Reason, Society, Terrorism, Violence
A friend sent me this Wall Street Journal article yesterday:
White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs’
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
OK, that’s not the same thing as actually changing drug policy, but how you say something matters a lot. As Radly Balko says:
The drug war imagery started by Nixon, subdued by Carter, then ratcheted up again in the Reagan administration (and remaining basically level since) has had significant repercussions on the way drug policy is enforced, from policymakers on down to street-level cops. It’s war rhetoric that gave us the Pentagon giveaway program, where millions of pieces of surplus military equipment (such as tanks) have been transferred to local police departments. War imagery set the stage for the approximately 1,200 percent rise in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, and has fostered the militaristic, “us vs. them” mentality too prevalent in too many police departments today.
War implies a threat so existential, so dire to our way of life, that we citizens should be ready to sign over some of our basic rights, be expected to make significant sacrifices, and endure collateral damage in order to defeat it. Preventing people from getting high has never represented that sort of threat.
The “War on (Some) Drugs” was never really about controlling drug abuse. It was about controlling people, particularly those people who could be easily demonized to give politicians a nice boost amongst their white, middle-class base. It helped to cement the allegiance of local pols and police departments, who got lots of new toys to play with at no cost (local cost, that is), and gave them more power. It eroded our civil rights and constitutional freedoms, and helped to set the stage for further intrusions when the “War on Terror” came along.
Getting rid of the “War” rhetoric doesn’t solve the problems with abuse of authority, but it does help to redefine the relationship a bit. It is a necessary first step in reclaiming some of our freedoms. Let’s hope that it is the first of many.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Ballistics, Emergency, Flu, Government, Guns, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival
Couple minor things . . .
The Ballistics by the inch site has broken 700,000 hits. The related blog has been getting more hits than this one, but I think that is mostly due to our recently having completed the second sequence of tests and starting to talk a bit about that.
Looks like things are stabilizing for now with the H1N1 virus. This is good, even if it means less publicity for Communion of Dreams. Yeah, I know, I’m not nearly as cynical as I like to pretend – I would rather not have a global pandemic, even at the cost of a bit of fame. Oh well, at least I have reviewed my preparations for the coming Zombie Apocalypse.
I still keep spending too much time flinging rocks. Being obsessive-compulsive is sometimes a pain.
Maybe more later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Survival
. . . well, certainly not a babe (in either sense of the term):
Biden says avoid planes, subways; puts out clarifying statement
Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would not recommend taking any commercial flight or riding in a subway car “at this point” because swine flu virus can spread “in confined places.” A little more than one hour later, Biden rushed out a statement backing off.
“I would tell members of my family — and I have — I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said on NBC’s “Today” show.. “It’s not that it’s going to Mexico. It’s [that] you’re in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me. …
“So, from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation. If you’re out in the middle of a field when someone sneezes, that’s one thing. If you’re in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it’s a different thing.”
Biden has a small problem – he says what he is thinking. Which is dangerous for a pol, and it never ceases to amaze me that he has managed to get as far in politics as he has.
Anyway, it is revealing what he said, even if the White House made him backpeddle. And I think that it is probably fairly good advice at this point. I know that I would have serious second thoughts about doing much traveling on public conveyance at this point. But semi-hermit that I am, that’s pretty easy for me to say (and do).
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Government, Guns, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Weather
“Foraging?”
I chuckled. “Yeah.”
“But I thought you already had like 40,000 rounds of ammo,” said my friend.
“You exaggerate.”
“Yeah, but not by much.” He laughed. “So, what were you foraging for?”
“Oh, just decided to top off some of the usual supplies we have at home. You know how it is.”
He did. He too lives in the Midwest, where a winter storm or spring flood or summer tornado can leave you isolated without power or the ability to get out for upwards of a week. “So, you really think this is the start of a pandemic?”
“Probably not, but it is too soon to say. But even if it isn’t, there could be a panic, which could be almost as bad.”
“Yeah, good point.”
* * * * * * *
WHO says swine flu moving closer to pandemic
BERLIN – The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the swine flu outbreak is moving closer to becoming a pandemic, as the United States reported the first swine flu death outside of Mexico, and Germany and Austria became latest European nations hit by the disease.
In Geneva, WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji Fukuda told reporters that there was no evidence the virus was slowing down, moving the agency closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission.
* * * * * * *
“You know, this is all your fault,” said a different friend.
“What is?”
“The swine flu.”
“How do you figure?”
“I read your book. I know the backstory. This is how it starts, isn’t it?”
“Well, something like this, anyway.”
“So, what’s next?”
“Aliens.”
He laughed.
* * * * * * *
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 