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I’m opposed to allowing private citizens to carry guns in public unless they are hunting on public land. The 2 nd  amendment explicitly links “bearing arms” (nobody “bears arms” into a 7-11) to membership in a well regulated militia, Antonin Scalia notwithstanding. If you believe you need a gun to protect yourself in your own home, fine. I’m also opposed to concealed carry. If we’re going to allow people to carry, it should be conspicuous carry. All civilian firearms should be orange, the same orange as a hunter’s vest, so I can spot them from a distance and avoid the company of ammosexual amateurs. Alex Pretti was packing legally. He had a concealed carry license. He was the proverbial “good guy with a gun.” But he was murdered by the government, giving the lie to the juvenile notion that guns in the hands of civilians will stop government oppression.  The NRA and other gun manufacturer lobby organizations have long defended the proliferation of deadly force under the control...

It looks like senators who voted to end the last shutdown are lining up for another government shutdown on 30 January unless DHS funding is stripped from the minibus bill, or unless major changes in ICE practices are codified in law. Stripping funding is meaningless: “ . . . if the government or DHS shuts down, ICE will keep running. That’s because of an unprecedented $75 billion boost in funding the agency received from Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill that Republicans passed unilaterally last year.” What are Democrats doing? “Democrats who oppose the funding bill include several centrists who voted to end last year’s government shutdown, the longest in history. “The abuses of power we are seeing from ICE in Minneapolis and across the country are un-American and cannot be normalized,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), one of eight Senate  Democrats  who sided with  Republicans  in reopening the federal government in November, said in a statement on Saturday. “No one wa...

If you look up the word “eccentric” in the dictionary, you’ll see an image of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Not just because he performed sitting on a sawed-off chair with his eyes nearly level with the keyboard and with a flat-fingered style. Not just because, like Keith Jarrett, he would sometimes vocalize while playing. No, it was mainly because of his iconoclastic interpretations. I have his notorious 1956 recording of the Goldberg Variations. I’m not sufficiently versed in Bach performance style to critique the recording, but it has certainly elicited strong reactions among the Bach performance critics. I also have Keith Jarrett’s harpsichord recording. I like them both for different reasons. I’ve owned an LP recording of Book 1 by Anthony Newman and Book 2 by Wanda Landowska. Both are harpsichord performances. Of the two recordings, the Landowska is by far the most eccentric—not only because of her decidedly romantic stylings, but because it’s performed on a Pleyel instrument...

ICE murdered an ICU nurse in cold blood. I would love to see ICE completely defunded and disbanded. Do we need immigration and customs enforcement? Sure. But this program isn’t doing that. It’s simply being used by the Trump Administration as a provocation to justify martial law. At the end of January 2026, the only lever of power Democrats have against the lawless Trump administration is the budget. But even if it were possible to line item veto the ICE budget, it would make no difference. “ Top Democratic appropriators who will support the package argue that a shutdown triggered by opposition to ICE would not actually stop ICE operations, but would instead hurt other agencies and programs funded under the DHS bill, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Disaster Relief Fund, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and more.   “ICE received $75 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In the event of a lapse in funding, ICE w...

My dad, an MIT-trained chemical engineer, was a practical man. He was scornful of efforts to rescue cats out of trees. His response was: “Look around; how many cat skeletons do you see in trees.” Setting aside the merits of the cat rescue argument, the larger point is to use critical thinking to assess whether ambient reality justifies your fears. In the case of vaccine safety conspiracy theories—vaccines kill or cause RFK Jr voice—the fact is that billions of humans all over the planet have been vaccinated. So where are the bodies? How come everybody I meet—including me—doesn’t have the creaky RFK Jr voice? Look, vaccines ± thimerosal and ± aluminum adjuvants have been given to billions of humans by now. Hundreds of millions of pregnant women have taken acetaminophen during pregnancy. If these things cause autism, everybody you know, including you, would be autistic. Can I “prove” that vaccines *can’t* cause autism or JFK Jr voice? No, I can’t. But that’s the wrong question.  (a) ...

RFK Jr sounds weird. I don’t mean his ideas about vaccines and contagious disease. I mean that when he vocalizes, it sounds . . . creaky. RFK Jr has a condition called “spasmodic dysphonia.” It’s known to have a genetic component. But this is RFK Jr, so of course he blames vaccines. “In an interview with the outlet, Kennedy said he took annual flu shots until the mid-1990s, then stopped in 2005 "when I began looking at the side effects."   "I was preparing litigation against some of the flu shots several years ago and one of the entries that was listed on a lot of them was spasmodic dysphonia, which is an injury I have to my voice. That's why my voice is so screwed up," Kennedy said.   "That turns out to be a vaccine injury," he continued. "Do I know it was caused by the annual flu shot? I have no idea."   “When pressed by the interviewer, who asked if he suspected it was caused by the vaccine, he said it's "a possibility."   ...