Rereading With Love: The Wheel of Time, Ten Years Later (Part I)

When I was in middle and high school, my favorite books were Robert Jordan’s old-school epic fantasy, the Wheel of Time. Before it was over, there were 14 books (three published after Jordan’s death), a prequel and a companion book. The series is about a reborn savior who comes of age and leads the world in a struggle against the Dark One, as with many fantasy books, and I just loved it. What do you want. I own all but the last book and read the series (the books are often around 1,000 pages) at least five times, but I hadn’t reread it in half a decade and hadn’t touched any of them since A Memory of Light capped the quattuordecology in 2013.

At a used bookstore the other month, I spotted a copy of The Shadow Rising (book #4), which had always been my favorite. I bought it on a whim, took it home, and re-re-reread it. Several things that I never or barely noticed a decade ago jumped out at me repeatedly in the book, so I wrote ‘em up below. Briefly: the prose is incredibly florid, the world is so complicated that Jordan spends half his time explaining what came before, the book is incredibly long, everyone has the emotional sensitivity of a Martian, everyone is constantly surprised by everything, and the way women are portrayed is not nearly as progressive as I thought it was.

Quick Glossary

Rand: The basically messiah, super-magic user, and central character. Is also ta’veren, meaning he has plot powers.

Mat: His buddy. Also ta’veren.
Perrin: His other buddy. Also ta’veren. Dating Faile.

Faile: Noblewoman in secret searching for adventure. Dating Perrin.
Berelain: Queen of tiny country. Pursuing Perrin.

Moiraine: A magic user who found Rand before he was known to be the messiah.

Aviendha: an Aiel (basically super-Bedouin) who tutors/hates/will eventually love Rand.

Elayne: Future queen, current magic user, has the hots for Rand.

Egwene: Magic user, has Dreaming superpowers, used to be with Rand but now ain’t.

Nynaeve: Magic user. Angry a lot.

Min: Also in love with Rand.

Thom: Rand’s advisor.

Siuan Sanche: Head of the female magic users.

Lanfear: Rand’s evil ex from a past life. Shut up.

MAJOR SECTION I: How the Book Works

The Prose

Robert Jordan LOVED descriptions. Oh my God. I confess I used to skim these, but this time I made a conscious effort to read each paragraph carefully and take in its meaning. Doing this, I noticed for the first time just how much description is really in here. Take for example Rand’s bedchamber in the Stone of Tear, a fortress he conquered at the end of Book Three.

“Callandor sat undisturbed, a sword seemingly of glass, hilt and blade, on a stand as tall as a man and just as wide, the wood ornately carved and gilded and set with precious tones. The furnishings, too, were all gilded and begemmed, bed and chairs and benches, wardrobes and chests and washstand. The pitcher and bowl were golden Sea Folk porcelain, as thin as leaves. The broad Tarabon carpet, in scrolls of scarlet and gold and blue, could have fed an entire village for months. Almost every flat surface held more delicate Sea Folk porcelain, or else goblets and bowls and ornaments worked with silver, and silver chased with gold. On the broad marble mantel over the fireplace, two silver wolves with ruby eyes tried to pull down a golden stag a good three feet tall. Draperies of scarlet silk embroidered with eagles in thread-of-gold hung at the narrow windows, stirring slightly in a failing wind. Books lay wherever there was room, leather-bound, wood-bound, some tattered and still dusty from the deepest shelves of the Stone’s library.”

 The whole scene is like this, rich long paragraphs of description, reaction, or internal monologue that are broken up only occasionally by rather stilted dialogue. There’s more conversation as the book goes on (this is only 76 pages in), but when he’s introducing the world, Jordan lays it on thick. He moves majestically over the Aiel Waste (desert) or the lush Tairen countryside, peppering his characters’ observations of the scenery with political observations, internal musings, and peoples’ actions that splash the landscape with color. Just read this:

“One night lions killed two of the Shaido packhorses, roaring in the darkness as they were driven from their prey to vanish in the gullies. A wagon driver disturbed a small brown snake as they were making camp the fourth evening. A two-step, Aviendha called it later, and it proved its name. The fellow screamed and tried to run for the wagons despite seeing Moiraine hurrying towards him; he fell on his face at his second stride, dead before the Aes Sedai could dismount from her white mare. Aviendha listed venomous snakes, spiders and lizards. Poisonous lizards! Once she found one for him [Rand], two feet long and thick, with yellow stripes running down its brown scales. Casually pinning it under a soft-booted foot, she drove her knife into the thing’s wide head, then held it up where he could see the clear, oily fluid oozing over sharp bony ridges in its mouth. A gara, she explained, could bite through a boot; it could also kill a bull. Others were worse, of course. The gara was slow, and not really dangerous unless you were stupid enough to step on it. When she flung the huge lizard off her blade, the yellow and bronze faded right into the cracked clay. Oh, yes. Just do not be stupid enough to step on it.

That is never going to be relevant in the entire rest of the series, but Jordan doesn’t care; he’s not about narrative streamlining. He’s building a big sprawling open world with lots of raggedy edges.

The Complexity

Let me sum up just the world. Never mind the history, never mind the politics by the time of Shadow, never mind how magic works, etc. I’ll just list all the major groups at the start of the series.

On the main continent where everything happens, there are these nations: Saldaea, Arafel, Kandor, Shienar (these four are called the Blightborder), Cairhien, Andor, Arad Doman, Tarabon, Amadicia, Murandy, Altara, Illian, and Tear. (I named those from memory and thought I got ‘em all, but left out li’l old Ghealdan and irrelevant Mayene. I’m a bad fan.) There are also unincorporated territories or cities, such as Almoth Plain or Far Madding. Cairhien and Shienar abut a mountain range that separates the main continent from the Aiel Waste, which has thirteen clans of Aiel, a desert people. That’s to the east. To the south is the sea, which is populated by the Sea Folk, dusky traders of great renown. To the north is the Blight, the abode of evil where no humans live. To the west is the Aryth Ocean, on the other side of which is an empire called Seanchan, who will invade the mainland in Book 2. On the other side of the Aiel Waste is Shaara, an entirely different continent about which little is known but trade is conducted.

Oh, you thought we were done? Various groups and societies operate within the main continent. Female magic users band together in a group called the Aes Sedai, which acts as a guiding hand for the rest of the world and is country-independent; they’re run from the White Tower in the city of Tar Valon. Amadicia is run by the Whitecloaks/Children of the Light, an ascetic society dedicated to hunting down Darkfriends, which are exactly what they sound like and pretty much everywhere. Tinkers, peaceful nomads, wander through the world in their caravans in search of the song that will bring about a new age. Ogier, a nonhuman race, keep to their homes (called stedding) and interact only occasionally with humans. Creatures of evil called Trollocs and Myrddraal exist, although they’re not usually seen below the Blight.

There are traveling entertainers called gleemen, firework-makers called Illuminators, traders and peddlers galore, and of course nobles in every nation who try to gain influence, money, or power. We can’t forget the Forsaken, the Dark One’s thirteen hand-picked evil emissaries, who are all loose in the world (mostly in disguise) and scheming various schemes to advance their own causes. And I’m not even counting the groups that are created or become relevant during the series, such as the Shaido Aiel, the Black Tower, the Kin, the Two Rivers, the Band of the Red Hand, the Dragonsworn…

Every single one of these things will become relevant during the series. With the exceptions of Arafel, Kandor and Shaara, there will be major plotlines that take place in every nation and with every group, and even those three are connected to cross-national plotlines. What I’m trying to say is that this is a complicated place. And so even at the tender age of Book 4, the first 200-300 pages of Shadow are riddled with explanations, because they have to be! You can’t go three pages without tripping over a long expository paragraph because there’s so damn much to expose.

I think in later books Jordan kind of throws up his hands and says, the hell with new readers, this is unmanageable, because I don’t remember there being as much description of the basic elements of the world in the last seven books as there is in, say, Shadow. But it’s shocking to read again, especially since I skipped the first three books and haven’t been introduced to all this stuff gradually over the previous 3,000 pages. The first 200-300 pages of Shadow are like a master class; even though a lot of it won’t be relevant to the rest of Shadow, he wants you to get a feel for the world and its history. Did I mention that I didn’t mention the history at all, and there’s over 3,000 years of it? Oh, man, I didn’t mention the World of Dreams, or the wolves, or the snake-people and fox-people, or…)

The Length

So between the description and the exposition, you can see how these things balloon. We’re 350 pages in before the main characters all go on their separate expeditions from the place where they started the book, which is stunning to reread, especially since a lot of that 350 pages is various characters wondering what’s about to happen next. The main characters also spend a lot of time internally weighing their options, making comparisons, expressing wonderment or bafflement (we’ll get to this), or simply observing the world.

There are four main plotlines. Rand goes to the Aiel Waste to prove himself as king of them in fulfillment of prophecy, Mat seeks answers to life’s persistent questions, such as “Who ate my memories?”, Perrin goes back to their home to deal with a Trolloc/Whitecloak invasion, and Elayne and Nynaeve go to Tarabon to snuff out a plot against Rand. There are other storylines that get a few chapters each, such as a civil war in the White Tower or Egwene honing her Dreaming talents, but those are the main ones. Some, like Rand or Perrin, are told almost totally from Rand’s perspective, but we get Rand’s thoughts on Mat and vice versa as well as Mat’s own story, and we get six or seven perspectives on the Tarabon storyline. It’s all very nicely balanced; Rand’s story is the most prominent, and Elayne/Nynaeve gets more time as the book goes on, but it never feels like one storyline is overwhelming any other.

It’s just that there are so many storylines and sub-storylines. Take Perrin’s story. He’s learning his power to talk to wolves and enter the World of Dreams, he’s growing from a simple blacksmith into a savvy leader of men, his people are organizing themselves as a military force, he’s trying to avoid being manipulated by Aes Sedai, he’s fighting with the woman he loves and later marries in Shadow, and so on. (All of this happens in Shadow alone.) And all of this interacts with the stories of people like Aram, the Tinker who renounces their nonviolent beliefs for Perrin, Aiel traveling companions Gaul and Chiad, and the Whitecloak commander and his evil advisor, both of whom Perrin has a history with. Now scale this out to Rand and Mat and Elayne and Egwene and Nynaeve, and all the people they know. And then imagine all the new characters and major storylines that will be introduced or expanded upon in the subsequent ten books. 

One of the core principles of the Wheel of Time universe is the Pattern, the semi-mystical/semi-real sum of all human decisions that binds everyone together in its fabric. You can see that in Jordan’s writing. Everything’s connected, and everyone has to take everyone else and their beliefs into account before doing anything, so every step in everyone’s story is taken very deliberately and with much internal reflection. All of these stories progress together, even the ones that are only hinted at and whose specifics must be guessed. And that makes even Shadow, which by Wheel of Time standards is a very fast-moving book (see the virtually plot-movement-free Crossroads of Twilight), stretch out to a thousand pages because you’re not just dealing with a single plotline, you’re dealing with several major ones and dozens of smaller ones that all hook together.

Speaking of length, we’re 2,100 words in, so come back tomorrow for the other three things! If you care!

Scott Walker's "We Acted" On Police Reform in Wisconsin

Since 'Governor' Walker is known for his courage and boldness in speaking out on topics in the national interest, he doesn't come right out and say a damn thing in his op-ed on some outlet I've never heard of, Hot Air, on policemen being shot in the US. He's going to unite America, thinks policemen should not be shot, and other controversial statements. (He does strongly imply, though not say, that Obama is the reason for anti-police rhetoric that leads to police deaths). 

But he does say one thing of interest: 

"In Wisconsin we acted to protect both police officers and citizens through a first-in-the-nation law that requires an independent investigation when a suspect dies in police custody."

Funny, it almost sounds like he's taking credit for that. "We acted." Surely he is among the "we"?

UPDATE: On September 13, Walker said "I’m proud to say I'm the only governor in America, the first one and I believe the only one today, who signed a law that says there needs to be an independent investigation any time there's a death of someone in police custody." Source

Yet according to Michael Bell, the man who advocated tirelessly for the bill (Assembly Bill 409/Senate Bill 348) after his handcuffed son was murdered by police officers in Kenosha, Walker initially wasn't interested in his idea that maybe the police force shouldn't be investigating itself when it mighta done something wrong. 

"In the beginning, I contacted the governor’s office, the attorney general and the U.S. attorney for Wisconsin. They didn’t even return my phone calls or letters," he wrote in 2014.

According to the AP, Walker's Attorney General (J.B. Van Hollen) was initially opposed to the bill when it was introduced in late 2013, calling it "unnecessary, unworkable and an expansion of government's already too burdensome bureaucracy".

What did Walker think? Well, it's really difficult to say. Reading the Journal Sentinel articles about the bill from that time period, Walker isn't quoted in any of them. He seems not to have spoken out or taken any kind of public position on the bill (because he's unintimidated). Even in articles about the bill being actually signed, by him, he isn't quoted. 

He certainly didn't speak out in favor of the bill. 

I can't find the voting records (which pisses me off), but it seems clear that the bill passed the Senate and the Assembly with pretty wide support. Yet I'm unable to find Walker going on record about it during the legislative process.

Walker signed 55 bills the day he signed Assembly Bill 409/Senate Bill 348, so the press release from that day contains only a paragraph on the police review bill. Searches for "police" in his press release page turn up only visits to law enforcement memorials and things of that nature. A search for "police" under his "Government Reform" category yields only a reference to the 2011 'Budget Repair Bill'. And his Facebook page doesn't have any posts between 4/7/14 and 5/2/14. 

So we can't say for certain whether he approved of or disapproved of it, although it's reasonable to wonder if his view is the same as that of his attorney general (who is elected separately). 

But he absolutely did not speak out in favor of it, unless it's somehow escaping my analysis. Walker is generally pretty far to the right on criminal justice issues, supporting bills that reduced parole for Wisconsin prisoners, not pardoning any Wisconsinites in five years as governor, and spending more money on corrections than on the UW system.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to scoff when Walker says that "we", including himself, established an independent police review agency. He didn't say a word or do a damn thing that I can find in its support. According to Bell, he wasn't interested at all, at least when Bell proposed the idea. 

Yet here he is, lapping up the credit for it. 

What a wonderful display of leadership. 

Crush the Enemy!! A Glimpse of American Fast Carrier Leadership in the Pacific War

Charles Pownall was not a bad carrier admiral. In James H. Belote and William M. Belote’s Titans of the Seas, he appears as a solid administrator and a tactically sound but overly cautious commander, who commanded the main American carrier task force in the Pacific WWII Theater--Task Force 50--for a short time. With the awesome power of six heavy and five light aircraft carriers under his tactical command to defend amphibious landings on Betio (Tarawa) and Makin islands in the Gilbert Islands, he did so adequately. The subsequent raid on Kwajalain with a six-carrier task force cost him his job.

Pownall did not lose a battle; he merely did not win one. He saw the carriers as raiders, which they had been on both sides until that point in the war. Their job was to get in, drop bombs and torpedoes, and get out before the land-based air counterattacked.

In the words of the Belotes:

“The Air Plan devised by Pownall was the product of a cautious nature and defensive-mindedness. In it Pownall specified that the Cowpens and Belleau Wood [light carriers] air groups should be reserved entirely for defense. In addition the plan withheld nearly a third of the embarked Hellcats on the big carriers for CAP [Combat Air Patrol]… The Task Force, he thought, would not achieve surprise and probably would be attacked. Therefore, ‘We will plan for the worst and hope for the breaks’. “ (246)

The first American air strike was inconclusive, destroying 32 Zeros (fighters) and 9 Bettys (bombers) and damaging 20 more aircraft, but the runways were left intact and plenty of planes remained. Pownall cancelled a planned second strike and hit one of two secondary targets instead. The Americans got away at the price of a torpedo hit on one carrier.

Pownall’s losses were moderate and his results equally so, but in the philosophy of a world war, cautious, moderate men are not winners. He was canned after the battle for “his apparent predilection for seeing the dangers inherent in a carrier strike rather than the opportunities”. (249) He was replaced by Marc A. Mitscher.

Mitscher was a winning admiral, a “pilot’s admiral”, a man who believed that the best way to win battles and keep one’s ships safe was to destroy the enemy. “To him carriers were primarily offensive weapons, and he believed in neutralizing enemy planes by making sure they never left the ground. Command of the air as a prelude to bombing strikes was to Mitscher as sound a principle as command of the sea to an amphibious landing.”

Mitscher’s first carrier raid for the next invasions in the Gilberts was devastating. He planned to hit three airfields simultaneously, making significant tactical changes as well. “A fighter sweep would strafe first, bombers would then shatter the fields, and standing fighter patrols would continue to orbit and strafe until every last grounded airplane had been destroyed.” (252) That way, the carriers wouldn’t have to run away; they could seize control of the airspace and hold it! This was done, and the Americans maintained absolute air supremacy for the remainder of the invasion. A similar plan worked soon afterwards in a devastating raid on Japanese base Truk, destroying over 150 planes on the ground. After the task force had “shattered aerial resistance” (262), Mitscher’s planes wrecked what shipping and warships remained in the bay.

Mitscher would continue in command of the fast carrier force right through to the end of the war. The outstanding record compiled by his pilots and crews has to be attributed in some part to increasingly superior American tactics, weaponry, training, and numbers, but some credit must go to the man. Commanding the same carrier task force with largely the same people in it just a few months after Pownall, Mitscher got far more out of it. If Pownall was a shield, Mitscher was a sword; instead of merely defending, he crushed the enemy! This is why Pownall is forgotten today and Mitscher is one of the great American admirals’ names in the Pacific War.

We don’t remember the timid generals or the conservative ones, except when listing the minor players that passed before the great men entered the scene. Having just reread the first book in Bruce Catton’s The Army of the Potomac trilogy, Mr. Lincoln’s Army, one cannot help but think of George McClellan, who always demanded more men and additional surety. Robert E. Lee was bold, daring, willing to do outrageous things when necessary with ragged, footsore soldiers, and beat the stuffing out of McClellan’s well-shod troops everywhere but at Antietam because he had a penthouse suite in McClellan’s head, just as the threat of Japanese retaliation occupied Pownall.

You need aggressiveness to win wars; not mindless violence, but controlled violence, for a purpose (to quote Robert Heinlein). Bull Halsey, George Patton, Troy Middleton—the list goes on. Catton wrote a long ode to the Confederate generals that is worth quoting from:

“There was a crippling deficiency in the [Army of the Potomac] command… a lack of the hard, grim, remorseless, driving spirit that must be on tap if wars are to be won.” (200) Later, he calls it “the indefinable something which can best be summed up as a positive taste for fighting” (203) and “the driving, slashing, fighting type of general” (206). Mitscher was aggressive with purpose and brought out the best in his subordinates, say the Belotes, even though he was the quietest and least bullheaded of men. Having this type of general does not guarantee final victory—the decorated list of strong, creative Confederate generals is proof enough of that—but a lack of it all but guarantees defeat.

I’m currently studying Thomas E. Ricks’s massive but very readable The Generals: American Military Command from WWII to Today. It tells the story of how in the prewar and WWII years, George Marshall canned or transferred dozens of generals and hundreds of lesser officers not because they were corrupt, stupid, or lost battles, but simply because they were more Pownall than Mitscher, more McClellan than Lee. I’m only in the WWII section (75 pages in), and it promises to be depressing—as the years and wars slope towards the present, apparently the US Army grows less and less willing to can the middle-management generals in favor of bringing fighters to high command. There may be another post on this topic when I’m done.

Senator Rubio on the NSA

Dear Senator Rubio,

If not now, when?

That is the question that immediately comes to mind upon reading the headline of your May 10^th op-ed in USA Today, which is “Sen. Rubio: Now’s no time to end NSA program”. You go on to assert that we now face “a greater threat of terrorist attack than any time” since 9/11/01, to claim that tools including the NSA’s illegal bulk metadata collection program have been “a major contributor” to our success in not suffering a major attack in the U.S. over the last 14 years, and to call for the renewal of the program as it currently stands.

Senator, although you allude to “recent court rulings”—i.e. the three-judge appeals court of the federal Second Circuit Court unanimously finding the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program illegal a few days ago—I’m not sure you fully appreciate their meaning. At the end of your op-end, you urge Congress to renew the program as it stands, but do not acknowledge that those judges found the current program illegal under the Patriot Act as it stands right now. You rejoice that at least it was not found unconstitutional, but obscure the fact that the judges declined to rule on its constitutionality because the violation of the Act itself was so blatant.

Think about what that means, Senator; even under the extraordinarily open and embracing aegis of the Patriot Act, this program went too far. It went so far that it wasn’t even necessary to rule on its constitutionality to judge it illegal. It goes far beyond what even its primary author wanted. And according to no less an authority than former NSA director Keith Alexander, the program is responsible for stopping only one or two threats since it was enacted, which is down from the over 50 he originally claimed.

Although you point to FISA court opinions that repeatedly affirm the program’s constitutionality, let me remind you that that is a court where the rulings are secret unless they are declassified, at which witnesses for the defense are not permitted to argue and where the public has no voice. Only the government is allowed to present its case. The court approved 1,816 government applications in 2012, modified 40 and denied none. Does that seem like a good environment in which to find something unconstitutional?

Moreover, the FISA court ruled in 2011 that the NSA had illegally collected domestic communications for three solid years, and found the program unconstitutional unless changes were made. From 2011 to 2012, the NSA violated privacy rules at least 2,776 times. Most of those happened by accident, but the NSA can use data that was inadvertently collected, according to the FISA court. NSA officers have spied on their love interests, and not even your colleague, Senator Grassley, has been able to obtain an accounting of how they were punished. Oh, and the GCHQ, Britain’s spy agency with whom we work, is perfectly aware of how to obtain personally identifiable information from metadata. So are we, and at least during the program’s years of secrecy, we did it all the time.

As for email accounts and credit card companies, Senator, there is a crucial difference between the NSA’s bulk collection and a private company’s: You give your data to the company by choice, and by law, you are allowed to opt out.

Senator, the world will always be dangerous, and there will always be people calling it more dangerous than it was at a previous time. There will never be a point—I think we know this after fourteen years of war—where the U.S. will be free of the specter of terrorism. There will always be some reason for people like yourself to call for surveillance in the name of security. So I ask you, Senator, sincerely: if now is not the proper time to stop, then when will ever be?

Defensive Gun Use in Politico Magazine: What to Believe

Recently, two authors--Evan DeFillipis and Devin Hughes--published an article in Politico Magazine criticizing a two-decade-old study by Gary Kleck and Marc Getz. Kleck just published a response. (The remainder of this post assumes you've read both.)
Let's look at what DeFillipis and Hughes said and what Kleck said in response. 

D & H: 

"In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year."

Kleck does not refute this. 

When presented with a list of reasons why his survey respondents might have had reason to exaggerate the number of times they used guns in self-defense--social desirability bias, awareness of the political context of the questions, and "telescoping"--Kleck does not refute any of these things, either. He doesn't say they don't matter; he doesn't argue against them, or even address them. 

His approach is, instead, to criticize DeFillipis and Hughes's credentials, say he's heard all of this before, question their motives, and pooh-pooh the very idea of criticism. 

His sole argument against DeFillipis and Hughes is this: "The authors’ discussion of possible flaws in survey estimates of DGU frequency is conspicuously one-sided, addressing only supposed flaws that could make the estimates too high—but none that could make the estimates too low."

In other words, 'It may be wrong one way, but it could be wrong the other way, too!'

He also makes numerous claims about supporting evidence, mentioning the "well-documented failure of many survey respondents to report criminal victimization, gun ownership or their own crimes" and saying "at least 18 national surveys have confirmed that DGUs are very common", but unlike DeFillipis and Hughes, he does not include specific results from other surveys that corroborate his beliefs, or include links to his supporting evidence. This is not persuasive. 

Finally, he postulates that DGUs would be underreported instead of overreported, because survey respondents could be admitting to criminal activity, and people are unlikely to report their own crimes. 

This seems to me to be nonsense, because Kleck and Geis conducted a presumably anonymous phone survey to get their results in the first place. They didn't ask people to march down to the local police precinct and confess. There would be no consequences for someone saying they used their gun in self-defense, even if it was illegal. 

Obviously, we're now getting into the heads of the survey respondents, and asking whether the biases DeFillipis and Hughes pointed out would have outweighed the tendency not to report a crime. But again, it's telling that DeFillipis and Hughes point to well-understood biases that have been confirmed by studies from other organizations. Kleck does not back up anything he says with links or the names of other organizations who have conducted studies to corroborate him. 

Ultimately, however, the question is whether a sample of 66 'yes' results out of 5,000 people can be fairly extrapolated to the whole country, what those unnamed eighteen studies Kleck said confirmed his results actually said, and what to make of the Arizona study, the NCVS data, and the Gun Violence Archive data in DeFillipis and Hughes's column that all provide reason not to accept Kleck's numbers at face value. 

On the face of it, there is much more reason to believe DeFillipis and Hughes--who seem to have made considerable efforts to survey the state of research in the field of defensive gun violence and account for biases--than to believe Kleck, who does not back up what he says with supporting evidence or other organizations, and who spends much more time bad-mouthing his critics than he does actually refuting what they have to say. 

Letter to Christian Schneider

Dear Christian Schneider, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Columnist,

It seems to have escaped you, in your haste to pooh-pooh the New York Times’ coverage of Walker’s attempt to rewrite the century-old Wisconsin Idea, that Walker did not make a drafting error; he made a deliberate attempt to change the University of Wisconsin’s mission from “the search for truth” to “workforce development”. This has been covered in detail by the Journal Sentinel. It is hard to see how you could continue to refer to that as a drafting error without a heavy dose of sarcasm. (Either that, or Walker has shockingly little control over his staff!)

It’s also rather telling that you seem to admire Walker’s straightforwardness (“actually practices the conservatism he preaches”, yet you mention two incidents in which he completely failed to own his beliefs. The clumsy attribution of his intent re: the Wisconsin Idea to a drafting error was one. Declining to answer whether he believed in evolution was another. And despite being on the stage at one of the world’s most respected foreign policy think tanks, he declined to answer any foreign-policy questions of consequence. That doesn’t bother you at all? (Also, you called the evolution question a ‘political question’, which puzzled me. There are questions asked of a presidential candidate that are not political?)

This is a pattern for Walker; he declined repeatedly to state his beliefs on the issue of Wisconsin’s since-overturned gay marriage ban, although he continued to order his attorney general to defend it in court. That is not very forthright behavior, nor is it in line with the image he attempts to promote. It is simply the behavior of someone who is unabashedly seeking higher office and attempting to make himself seem more electable by emitting nothing but anodyne bromides and misleading or false information. You lament liberals’ potshots on the aforementioned social issues and for taking shots at Walker’s status as a college dropout. Very well; let us examine his real qualifications.

Walker falsely claimed during his reelection campaign that he had given the state a $535M surplus instead of a $1.8B deficit, which was measured as such using the same methods that resulted in the $3.6B budget deficit he hammered Jim Doyle for after taking office. But now that that method of calculating the budget is inconvenient for him, he repudiates it entirely. He cherry-picks the numbers to make himself look good, and he is wrong, and he doesn’t appear to care. He has demonstrated that he has no considered opinions on US foreign policy in an issue as important as Syria. In seeking to validate his stance on unions as a foreign-policy issue, he made up Soviet documents that never existed.

His much-touted jobs agency has not only failed to hit its job-creation marks, but has done everything wrong that a job-creation agency can do. Per Reuters: “State legislative audits have found that WEDC has mismanaged taxpayer funds and handed out awards to companies that should not have been eligible for them. The agency also didn't follow up to ensure that jobs were actually being created and failed to track whether businesses were paying their loans back on time, according to reviews in 2012 and 2013. Lassa said the agency had improved its performance somewhat since then.” (You didn’t mention this one in your roundup of recent Walker coverage. Perhaps it hit too close to home.)

He has declined hundreds of millions of federal dollars in money to build a high-speed rail line and to expand public health care in Wisconsin. And he just kicked $108M in loan payments down the road, just like Jim Doyle did… which will hurt more in the long run, as any responsible fiscal conservative will tell you. By declining federal money, kicking debt down the road, setting up a shell of a job-creation agency, and now attempting to gut the UW-Madison system—which will be bad for state business as well as state education—he is attempting to make himself look good for primary voters at the expense of the state that is unfortunate enough to host him.

I’m glad you’ve noticed that liberals are angry about what Walker is doing to Wisconsin.

Why aren’t you?

Biking in New Orleans

Two things before we start. One: I’m completely unharmed, for friends and family reading this. Two: There is no hyperbole in this post.

I just started work at an IT consulting company in downtown New Orleans, about three miles down St. Charles Avenue from where I live. Since it was 50 degrees a few mornings ago, I decided to bike to work.

The first major intersection between my house and downtown is Napoleon Avenue. Around that area, St. Charles has a boulevard where the streetcar runs, one lane of traffic and a curb lane. Bike lanes run from approximately Octavia Avenue all the way west to the riverbend, but there are no bike lanes going east (downtown) from where I live. Because of this, I usually stay fairly close to the parked cars in the curb lane.

I waited for the light to change and crossed Napoleon Avenue, getting up to speed as I did so. There was a bright blue car, possibly a minivan, possibly a sedan, sitting on the curb about 20-30 feet past the intersection. As my front wheel passed the car’s left rear wheel, I saw the driver’s door begin to open, perhaps five or six inches outward, directly in front of me. 

What happened next was pure instinct; the thinking part of my brain was not involved. I had less than a second to react. I yanked on the handlebars as hard as I ever have. The bike slewed crazily to the left and out into the middle of the driving lane. I cleared the edge of the car door by no more than two or three inches. Thankfully, the car coming through the intersection behind me either threw on the brakes or was already pretty far behind me, because I was not hit.

Less than a second.

At this point, I started thinking again. My bike has road tires, which are not built to grip the road during violent 45-degree turns, and it was wobbling like crazy and still going at a pretty high speed. I’m going to crash in the middle of the street, I thought, imagined myself falling, and started preparing to take the blow on my forearms.

Again, my body had other ideas. Without orders from the top, I slammed both my forearms down on the handlebars, which were weaving back and forth. That stabilized them, the bike stopped weaving, and I began to guide it back towards the curb lane. I turned around and looked back during this process and heard a woman shout “Sorry!” This all took place in a second or two but seemed much longer.

As I got back out of the driving lane, I shouted “Jesus! Fuck! Christ!” On “Christ”, the car behind me—a white SUV—pulled alongside me, and the man inside hollered “Are you okay?” I said something reassuring, I don’t remember what, and he drove off.

That was the end of it. I wasn’t hurt. I stopped a few blocks later to adjust my clothing and whatnot, but that was it. I missed it entirely. I went to work, did work things, and eventually got out of work. 

Around 5:35 that evening, I was biking home on St. Charles, having just passed Lee Circle and passed under the freeway bridge. Again, I was biking fairly close to the parked cars. I was wearing grey pants and a dark green sweatshirt. I had my red taillight and white headlight on, although they were not flashing so that any idiot could see them. Apparently that’s necessary here.

I never saw the black sedan until it pulled up alongside me. Its lights were on, and so was its turn signal. It began to turn directly into my path. I have no reason to believe he saw me.

This time was different. Instead of an instant of pure reflex and a violent change, everything seemed to be happening in pleasant slow motion. I pulled back on the brakes, again instinctively, but I had time to lazily contemplate the movement of the car. It didn’t register that I was about to hit it. It was moving ponderously into my path, and I remember thinking that the driver was cutting it pretty fine.

I was lucky again. We were in the middle of a block. Instead of turning onto a street, he turned into a driveway that happened to have a gate. That meant he was slowing down almost as much as I was. The angles kept changing as we raced to the bottom.

Because of this, instead of hitting him at full speed, I only nudged his right rear door with my left handlebar as he finished cutting me off. We came to a stop.

I was too disgusted to say or do anything. I remember being completely unsurprised that this had happened again. There was no noise from the car, so I pulled off the sock that served me as a glove, gave a big smile and a sardonic thumbs-up, and got back on the bike, shaking from the waist down.

I can think of three possible explanations for me not hitting the first car. Either the driver paused in the middle of opening the door, or she realized what was happening and pulled it back in a split second, or I simply dodged it entirely. Whatever it was, that was one of the most amazing things I have ever done. I have no doubt that if I’d been just a touch slower to recognize and react to what was happening, I would have smashed into the car door and suffered serious injury. The same goes for the second car. If I hadn’t recognized what was happening and slowed down, I would have plowed into its side at a considerable speed.

I’m very glad I can do that. I hope it does not prove necessary on every single commute. Who needs coffee when you have a heart attack?