From the L.A. Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/‘laexaminer’):

Family tensions and serious illness may have led the 56-year-old operator of the Zankou Chicken chain to fatally shoot his mother and sister in an upscale Glendale home before turning the gun on himself, police, family and friends said Wednesday.

What a tragedy; sadly a mundane one these days, in which a person, despondent or enraged, kills those close to them and then kills themselves (please spare me please the emails that he did it with a gun…it’s been a knife, fire, a tall building and poison in other cases that made the paper recently). But it hit me hard because like a lot of other Angelinos, Zankou Chicken means a lot to me.
In 1981, my Parisian-born then-wife and I moved back to Los Angeles from Chicago. I’d grown up here, hated it and fled the place at 16. She’d occasionally visited it with me and saw it, as only a well-bred Parisian can, as the emptiest most soulless place on earth.
Then one night, sometime in the next year, we went downtown to the then-thriving LA Theatre Center and saw their amazing production of ‘Jacques and His Master’, stopped at Zankou Chicken afterwards, and then went to Club 88 on Pico and saw X and Los Lobos in a room slightly larger than our living room at home.
Driving home at about 3, we looked at each other, laughed, and decided that living in L.A. might not be so bad after all. My sweetie and I met my brother in the Glendale store just a month ago, and it was as ambrosial as ever. So thank you, Iskenderian family, and please accept my very personal condolences.

Pat Summerall emails me:

Kevin Drum rounds up the evidence against libertarian “scholar” John Lott, a guy widely relied upon on by pundits on the right for evidence that gun control actually produces more crime. Seems Lott may have fabricated a survey he once did on defensive gun use. Is there more? Stay tuned. A more definitive takedown of Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime can be found here.
We just noticed that InstaPundit has been taking issue with Brent Kendall’s new Washington Monthly article, “License to Kill: How the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad get a sniper rifle.” First he decided the article was terrible, sight unseen, because the headline referred to Muhammed’s gun as a sniper rifle when it was actually an assault rifle. (Never blame a journalist for his headline — we don’t pick ’em.) Then he wrote that, according to Kendall “the gun and bullets are apparently responsible for the deaths, not Muhammad and Malvo, who in this report merely occupied a Chevrolet Caprice — an offense against automotive taste, perhaps, but no more.” Surely the professor can do better than that. Blame the person, not the gun, is a favored libertarian argument against gun control, but it’s silly. Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree simply would not have been possible had they not been able to illegally acquire a high-powered rifle. You can’t kill from two hundred yards with a hunting knife. You can’t strangle somebody from the trunk of a car.

Sigh.
I haven’t written much about l’affaire Bellesiles, for a variety of reasons, including some personal ones (hell, may as well acknowledge it…we have a Christmas card from his dad on the mantel). I’ve actually had some correspondence from Lott, although I’ve just scanned his work and the work that has grown up in opposition and support of his work.
But I’ll divert for a moment into the meta-politics here for a moment. Pat isn’t interested in having a dialog about gun control. There are some ‘tells’ that give it away pretty quickly…“scholar” John Lott…takedown of his work…it’s WWE time, folks.
And I’m not interested in being a luchador.
There are real issues around the murder rate in the United States. But since I don’t live in Peter Pan’s world where wishing and clapping my hands makes it so, the guns out there in the world will not simply disappear. Neither, I remind my shooting friends, will the regulation of the personal ownership and possession of guns. For the foreseeable future include figuring out how to live as safely as possible in a society where there are a whole lot of guns, and figure out how to do so while maintaining some semblance of individual rights.
The U.K. continues it’s crackdown, and to what effect? They police are so buried in crime they can’t even investigate property crimes any more.
And to Pat’s (and the original author’s) position on the D.C. shooters, I’ll suggest a few words in response:
Ted Bundy
John Wayne Gacy
Julio Gonzalez

So about this whole blogging thing.
I’m obviously addicted (as many of you have doubtless noticed, it’s this decade’s version of crack). It seems that a lot of bloggers go through the initial rush phase, then realize that it’s incredibly time- and energy- consuming, and that it somehow doesn’t allow them to quit their day jobs, so a lot of things suffer, and they come to a crisis.
In my case, it’s mostly sleep and my home life. I have a sleep deficit that would kill a bear; a list of household chores that’s growing geometrically, and a significant other who is thumbing the pages of Lysistrata while casting meaningful looks my way.
Plus, to be honest, I don’t feel like I’m doing as good a job blogging as I’d like to. I’m not thinking things through, or taking the time to do a little more research. I’ve been working on a piece on bureaucracy and another on democracy and neither is moving along too well.
I’d like to do fewer, better posts, interspersed with a bit of day-to-day fluff. But in reality, I’m not a significant enough figure to hold even the small audience I’ve got doing that, which means I’d lose the interactions via email and comments that mean a lot to me.
So here’s what I’d like to try.
Joe Katzman is moving his blog (currently Winds of Change, although I’m lobbying for a new name) to a group blog format, and has been kind enough to invite me to be the token liberal. I have a ton of respect for him, and am deeply honored that he’d ask me.
He and I see many things in much the same way: We are both concerned about finding a path through the Islamist hatred of the West; and we see technological changes as both presenting serious threats to us and opening new doors to promising futures.
He and some of the other contributors are more warlike than I am, a lot more conservative, and he’s a religious Jew and I’m neither. It may well be that the ‘inner liberal’ who has been hidden under my frustrated criticism of contemporary Democratic liberalism will be forced to come out, which I think would be kind of a good thing. Or I’ll get pulled to the Dark Side of conservatism, in which case, I trust that Ann and Kevin will undertake a quest and mount an expedition to come rescue me.
But I’d like to give it a try. I’ll do my first post for the new site sometime late next week, and will keep this site alive as an archive, possibly as a place to do one or two lightweight things, and as a place to come home to should I choose to do that.
I’m interested in people’s reactions; what do you think of this? To quote self-proclaimed non-pedophile Pete Townsend, I really want to know…

I haven’t published much of anything about Iraq, although I’ve written a bunch about it. Most of what I’ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is doubtless interesting, simply standing up and saying “I’m confused” seemed like a waste of my time and yours.
But I saw something the other day over at Oliver Willis’ place that made me sit up and think.
It was an article in Newsday, suggesting that members of the Administration have floated a plan to take and sell Iraqi oil to pay the costs of the invasion. ‘Spoils of war” they call it.
Now I don’t doubt that someone has floated this as a concept, but I’m also a little dubious about whether it has been adopted as U.S. policy. I Googled it, and find the same story – literally, the same story, by Knute Royce, republished in three places – Newsday, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Gulf News in the UAE. Googling Knute Royce I see that he’s apparently a two-time Pulitzer winner and the Washington D.C. correspondent for Newdsay, so he’s a credible guy. My jury’s out on this one.
But thinking about this brought some small clarity to my thoughts, and I realized just what we’re doing wrong.
There are (at least) two issues at stake in our approach to the Middle East.
The first is that we (the industrial West) have profited quite substantially from Middle Eastern oil; our trading partners there have profited as well, but the profits haven’t built economies and societies that offer much to the average person.
The second issue is that in no small part in response to the dysfunctional societies that have been built and maintained with our oil money, a culture has emerged which is virulently anti-Western; it combines the anti-Western Romantic intellectual strains that flowered in the 60’s and became intellectual commonplaces in the 90’s with traditions in Muslim history of conflict with the West.
The second issue, funded by the profits of the first issue, has emerged as a chronic, low-level war that has most dramatically shown itself on 9/11, but has cost thousands of lives over the last decade in less-dramatic attacks.
The second issue is a genuine threat to us, to our allies in the West, and to the people who are forced to live in religious dictatorships in Islamist countries (note that not all Islamic countries are religious dictatorships or post aggressive threats to the West).
The problem is in no small part of our (again, the West’s) making; we traded freedom for stability in the region in order to have secure and compliant trading partners. But having had a role in raising a psychopath doesn’t mean we should let ourselves be attacked by him as a way of assuaging our guilt.
We have a clear choice; we can fight to secure a supply of affordable oil, and to intimidate the other countries in the region into maintaining our supply of cheap oil; or we can fight to dismantle the social structures that our oil money and their dictators have created and attempt to free the people who have been forced to live hopeless, squalid lives.
There’s a bunch of issues collapsed into that paragraph that will require discussion and explanation…at a later time.
Right now, I want to focus on one thing; that if we’re going to do this, we need to do it for the right reasons, or at least for reasons that aren’t transparently wrong.
If we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:
1) We aren’t in it for the oil. Not in the short run, anyway. A prosperous, stable Middle East would doubtless want to sell and exploit their natural resources. We’d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made.
2) We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.
There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward isn’t.
We need to make a grand moral gesture to make it clear to the world that 1) isn’t the case. Personally, I think that it needs to come both from the American people and businesses, from our government.
I think the whole anti-SUV thing isn’t a bad place to start. It’s an incredibly powerful symbol to the rest of the world that we’re killing people in Iraq so we can buy Suburbans. I don’t believe it should be legislated, I don’t believe they should be banned, but I think that we should each examine what we’re willing to give up to play our part in changing the world so that 9/11 is an aberration.
I do think that on a national level, we should talk about moving toward taxing energy to encourage efficiency; there are a lot of arguments about this, but I’ll make a simple one: we can buy energy from outside our economy, or we can buy ingenuity and products that save it from within it. Which one leads to jobs?
I’m not one of the liberals who has a vision of essentially 19th Century village life as the way we all should live. That goal is of people who have an essentially abstemious belief set. I don’t believe that sacrifice and frugality are in themselves character-building or good moral values. I do believe that sacrifice in the name of a goal is a good thing, and that frugality in the name of building a better future are.
So if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:
1) We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
2) We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipleline, we won’t sell them to Japan)
3) We’re in this for the duration.
If we can’t answer all three as a solid “yes”, we shouldn’t go. If we can, we should.

Ambrose Bierce resurfaces after 100 years, calling himself The Flaming Moderate. A sample of a post you can’t miss:

Politics: In any governmental system, the majority of inhabitants get the government they deserve. There are no exceptions to this rule, but a great many corollaries. An example: Dictatorships are as democratic as constitutional republics, the method required to change the government is just different.

I’ve gotta update my blogroll…there’re a bunch of blogs I want to add…Oh!! hang on…

My future-stalking-object Jill Stewart has surfaced, with the center of her brain that produces smart vitriol fully intact!!
Check out her take on the budget crisis:

Elizabeth Hill, the state legislative analyst, who strives not to side with Democrats or Republicans, pointedly explained that corporations comprise only a small part of the roughly $70 billion tax revenue–roughly $6 billion.
That was a shock to some Assembly members. Hill noted, again rather pointedly, that “the top 5 percent of Californians pay 42 percent of the income taxes” and that just 10 percent pay 80 percent of income taxes. Furthermore, large numbers of millionaires and those making $100,000 or more have vanished. Some went broke, but others left for states that don’t make them carry as big of a load, like tax-free (and booming) Nevada.
The packed audience at the special hearing appeared stunned. The message was clear: There aren’t enough corporations and rich around to pour huge new tax dollars into state coffers and save us.
So what was the first act announced by the obviously bewildered Jenny Oropeza, a Long Beach Democrat who clearly is in over her head as chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Committee? I thought that perhaps Oropeza should announce the creation of a job-stimulus subcommittee or a budget-cutbacks task force.
Instead, she formed the Working Group on Revenue–a crew of Democrats now meeting in secret to figure out ways to tax corporations, the rich, the middle class, Internet sales, retail sales, wine sales, small-service businesses and anything else the group can think of.
I’m a Democrat who has had a snootful of stupidity from Democrats in recent years. Thinking that maybe I was being too judgmental, I called some leading Democratic thinkers to get their read on the message coming out of the Legislature.
Al Checchi, who ran against Davis five years ago and has been watching the debacle, told me, “They have thrown the money away, completely distorted the expenditures on public-sector things like huge employee pensions they cannot afford, and they will run deficits of $10 billion or more next year as well. They should stop worrying about finding new taxes that are barely going to address this and deal with the true cause: their incredible overspending.”
Not likely, considering a key member of the Working Group on Revenue is one of the most anti-middle-class, capitalist-loathing big spenders in higher public office in California, Jackie Goldberg of Los Angeles, who one legislative aide told me “has already taken control of the working group” even though she is not its chairperson. Goldberg is, officially, the Stupidest Well-Spoken Person I Know. She hatched policies that left a wake of misery in her Hollywood City Council district. My nickname for her–the Dominatrix of the Los Angeles City Council–should travel well now that she is pushing people around in Sacramento. This feminist used to corner the men in Los Angeles City Hall and cry like a baby to get her way.

Aaah. A drop of intelligent bitters in my afternoon soda water. Refreshing…now go read the whole thing!
I wondered why Layne was moving to Nevada!! Blogging must pay better than I thought…

I’m taking a break after reading page 398 of a 600 page, badly-written document, and glancing through the blogs.
Devra led me over to a new blog called LivingSmall (a name I suspiciously link to the ‘frugality porn’ I see practiced on the West Side of L.A.), which turns out to have a damn good post on eating meat, and the farming economy. She links to Wendell Barry, too, so I think I like Charlotte.

The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve eaten a factory farmed chicken, but it’s taken longer to wean myself from supermarket meat. Call it denial, call it convenience, I fudged that issue for a long time by claiming to myself that I don’t really eat that much meat anyway. Somehow though, I’ve hit the point of no return. I can’t buy meat in the supermarket any more (don’t even get me started about those terrifying five-pound tubes of ground beef that seem popular up here). It all looks sad to me now, and when I see those Hormel stickers slathered all over the pork case, I can’t help but feel implicated in the terrible lives not only of those factory pigs, but of those farmers who have been convinced to build factory pig sheds that they must know, deep in their souls, are just wrong (but the kids need clothes and the mortgage has to be paid, and it’s hard just to stay on the land), and for the workers in the abbatoirs and packing houses, all those Mexican immigrants who have migrated to central Iowa where they’re, as usual, doing the work none of us want to do. It just looks ugly to me, and I can’t buy it any more.

Hmmm. I’ve thought of ‘organic, free-range’ meat as an affectation…I need to think about that now.

Thinking about my comments below, I realized that Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch said it perfectly:
“You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”

I appended the Smoak family story below as an example of why we needed to think carefully about passing laws that make us all violators. It has generated a fair amount of traffic and comment, so I ought to make my stance on this specific incident more clear.
I’m typically a friend to cops; literally in may cases. I often train with them in firearms, first aid, and martial arts, and I’ve gotten to know a few pretty well.
So my reaction to this story is broken into three distinct parts.
First, I think the cops did a mediocre job, but my guess is that they don’t do a lot of felony stops there, and it’s not like they get sent to Bitchen Cop School on a small town’s budget. One broader issue is the fact that small town forces get grants for equipment to gear their troops up like the SWAT guys we see in the movies, then tickets to the movies are most of the training the town fathers spring for.
I wasn’t there, have only watched the (full-length) video and read the local accounts, etc. etc. But it certainly seems more than a few things could certainly have been done differently once the decision was made to make this a felony stop. But even in saying that, I’m second-guessing on very limited information. The reported laughter of the officer who shot the dog could have been the kind of laughter you get after you’ve been scared to death and had an adrenalin dump (it’s happened to me), or the cruel laughter of an asshole with a gun who’s just murdered a pet. I don’t know, but it’s going to be investigated to death and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it on Court TV for a while. I think the cops acted badly, but not necessarily criminally and will withhold judgment in favor of those who will study this incident harder than I will.
Second, the dumb but critically important fact is that any time guns come out, the potential for tragedy is there. As soon as this became a felony stop (where the responding police draw weapons in advance, and generally act as though the people being stopped are True Bad Guys), the door to a tragedy was opened. Officers have negligently (I never use the term ‘accidental discharge’ in talking about guns; it is a ‘negligent discharge’) shot the people they were handcuffing, or themselves, or their partners. The people who are stopped sometimes are uncompliant and do things which make the officers believe that a gun is being drawn. There are a million ways for this to end badly, and on the scale of those things, this one went poorly but not tragically.
The issue here is the overall police pattern of behavior that overuses felony stops and dynamic entries (the whole banging the door down in the middle of the night by SWAT teams thing). Because they are so inherently dangerous, their use needs to be judicious, and right now, it isn’t; this is from a mixture of legitimate ‘officer safety first’ strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It’s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.
But Andy and Barney managed to get stuff done, we should remember. And officer safety is most of all impacted by the respect and connection that the overall community has for the police. It’s certainly possible to make officers act in a way that makes every interaction with citizens less risky for the officer, but nonetheless raises the overall level of risk by creating a greater number of hostile interactions.
Finally, it raises the issue of communication between citizen/witnesses and the police. One of the most valuable skills a great police officer can have, I’ve been told, is the ability to stop, listen and figure out a situation, rather than constantly trying to make a situation fit into a preconceived pattern.
I wasn’t opposed to something like TIPS, if it was about teaching citizens what to look for, giving them someplace to communicate what they see, and having someone on the other end of the phone who knows how to listen.
It’s not clear whether any of those was present in this incident.
I like and respect cops. Most of them are great people who work damn hard to help keep me and mine safe at night. I appreciate what they do, and hate to see something like this that damages their profession so badly.