Refusing to Research

A few years ago, a Facebook acquaintance posted an article stating that President Obama had failed to give a Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery three years running, and that he was the first president in modern history to do so. The acquaintance stated he didn't need to "research" it (quotes his) because he knew it was true.

One thing struck as wrong, immediately. After observing politicians for a lifetime, including six as a super-volunteer where I could get to know a few and observe them at close range, it struck me as unlikely that any politician, no matter what his character, would risk alienating every veteran in America by skipping a memorial day appearance at Arlington. Whatever one's character, one does not get within spitting distance of the White House by being politically stupid.

But how to confirm or refute? I quickly found that Snopes.com had an article on this claim from 2010. That told me the claim's been floating around a while, but Snopes is not a primary source. An even better place to look would be whitehouse.gov, where they publish not only the President's public schedule, but the text of every public statement. Under May 28, 2012 I found the text of one speech given by President Barack Hussein Obama at Arlington National Cemetery. I guess you could claim he posted a speech he didn't actually make. Now, you're just being silly. Republicans would certainly have made hay of such a thing. As I said, one does not get within spitting distance of the White House by being politically stupid.

I'm Tired of the Welfare Discussion

"People can't stay on the government dole forever."

Agreed. But everyone who says this thinks that's possible now. People look at me in stunned disbelief when I say it's not. (It's not, under federal law. We'll get to that shortly.) The response usually goes, "then why is it still an issue of public debate?" The obvious answer, I think, is that politicians gain support from beating that dead horse. And a dead horse it is. The proof is easy enough to find. Two minutes of internet searching lead me to the actual text of the current national welfare law, which has been in place since 1996. Provisions of this law include the requirement that recipients must acquire some kind of employment within two years of starting on assistance, even if said employment doesn't cover all expenses, and a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid from the Federal budget.

Yet everyone I argue about this with seems to know someone or have heard about some someone who plans to live on the government for the rest of their life. Here-say is notoriously unreliable, so I can safely ignore the later. (While researching this, I found a study from 2003 suggesting that 37% of all welfare recipients and three quarters of Spanish speaking recipients don't know there are lifetime caps. That doesn't surprise me, and I expect the numbers are still high thirteen years later. If there's any truth to the hear-say, this is why.)

Is it possible to live a lifetime on state benefits? Last year I wrote two posts called "You Can't Get There from Here" about my frustration with finding certain kinds of information online. I could write part III on this question. I've so far been unable to find a source that I'd feel comfortable citing in a real debate. (There wouldn't be one primary source on this. There would be fifty primary sources. If I had a spare week, I could look for them.) Ehow.com has a list broken down by time limits. I present them with the caveat that I don't know accurate they are. If Ehow's information is correct, only four states have no lifetime limits. The other 46 have limits with exceptions.

Militias or Personal Arms?

This post is just a footnote to the latest round of gun debates touched off by the recent murders at Umpqua Community College, near Roseburg, Oregan. I don't believe I can add anything to the debate without considerable research. I've long been interested in the history of the second amendment. That's what this post is about.

The story starts with confusion and a question. Why's the second amendment so weirdly written? Don't tell me you've never noticed. Have a look:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Groups like to chop this up for various political reasons, but that's the whole thing as it's written in the second amendment. It's oddly written. The odd wording makes it ambiguous. Does it enshrine a personal right or the right of states to maintain militias? (Incidentally, I have questions about grammar and usage in that amendment. I'm researching them and hope to publish about that sometime in the future.)

An avenue of investigation was suggested by a comment in one of Steven Pinker's books. Vague lines in legal documents are often the result of parties who can't agree. They write language that either side can interpret as they wish, with the hopes that a real consensus can be reached later. If this were the case with the second amendment, where could I find material relevant to the theory? I looked at writings published about the constitution at the it was created.

Pennsylvania ratified the constitution on December 12, 1787 by a vote of 46 to 23. Nearly a week later, 21 of the dissenters published in several newspapers a position paper titled, "The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents." It contains two relevant statements.

First...

"That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence (sic) of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals."

and...

"That the power of organizing, arming and disciplining the militia (the manner of disciplining the militia to be prescribed by Congress) remain with the individual states."

So there it is. At least some of our founders wanted to enshrine both an individual right to bear arms and a state's right to organize militias.

Early the following summer, Virginia proposed a bill of rights. Their paper contains this line:

"The people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated Militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper, natural and safe defence (sic) of a free State."

(I wasn't able to find an online version of this document; however, it is available in this book by Signet Classic.)

Though it's better worded than our second amendment the Virginia language, had it been adopted, would likely have suffered from the same disagreement as our second amendment. Does it assert an Individual right, or only put the militias under the control of the states?

Both interpretations would agree with the dissenters in Pennsylvania. Why then is that position, whatever it was, not stated more explicitly in the bill of rights? Clearly there's more to this story than I've learned so far.

A friend guessed at a piece of the puzzle that my gut tells me is right on the mark. If the Virginia proposal excluded an individual right, there's a historically plausible reason. The powers in Virginia, and all southern states for that matter, probably didn't want firearms laying around, arms that might land in the hands of slaves.

You Can't Get There from Here, Part II

It takes me a while to write one of these posts. If I published what came off the top of my head, it would be easy. I want to make sure I can back up anything I say and that takes time.  That path was my choice, so I'm not complaining.

There is a bramble in the path that I will complain about: access to research. Here's a case in point. The American Journal of Public Health released a study on Friday reporting a link between areas of high gun ownership and police deaths. Even before it's out, it's a political football. I want to evaluate it for myself. I don't want to read any of the million opinion pieces saying why it's a good study or why it's a bad study. I want to see the study.

In particular, I want to see the data. One site has helpfully provided a graph of the data. But I don't know anything about this site. Statistics aren't necessarily lies as the popular meme started by Benjamin Disraeli would have it. They're forms of communication. They can be lies or they can be the truth. This news site is new to me. I don't know if they've reproduced this graph straight out of the study or if they've shaded it in some way. If I could see the data, I could reproduce the graph, including the regression line. It's easy to do in Google Spreadsheets or Microsoft Outlook. Reproducing it would allow me to figure out what if anything they had done to shade it. 

Can I get to the study or any of its data? If I follow one of the many links to the study, I get this, a request for money (top image):

This is actually an improvement over what I would have gotten five or ten years ago. News sites wouldn't link to studies. Often they wouldn't even provide the name of the paper. If I wanted to find it, I'd need to search through a dozen articles, hoping someone would provide the study's name. Or I'd need to search on the study's subject along with the organization that published it. 

This particular site wants $22 just for the article. That's a bargain. I've seen sites that want north of $30 per paper.

So, I can view the opinions of thousands, even tens of thousands of blowhards for free, but I have to pay to see the work of people who do real research? "But!", I can hear you asking, "you're not a an expert in this field. You're not qualified to judge the veracity of the research." But I know people who are. I could ask them to fact check my posts. Better yet, I could ask them to write a piece for my blog. 

We live in an era that is increasingly anti-science. While bloviators proliferate, the way research is published hamstrings the voices of knowledgeable people. What if all qualified professionals could view this study for free? We'd potentially have an army of qualified debaters for every comment thread, every family gathering, every city council meeting. That's not to say we would have this in every case. But it would be better than what we've got.

You Can't Get There From Here

A few days after posting History On Line more items showed up in my news reader describing online archives of various flavors. I started thinking about problems I've had with other online archives. Rather than explain it, I'm going to ask you to do it.

Let's start with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive, a web site containing images of the scrolls put up by he Israeli Antiquities Authority.  Go to the archive and search on the "The Damascus Document".  Let's pretend you can actually read the text on the photos of these ancient documents. Why? Because the relevant portion of this discussion isn't nearly as cool as Dead Sea Scrolls.  I"ll get to that in a minute.

Now go to Google and search for "Dead Sea Scrolls."  Notice that the archive we just looked at is the second result, right under the Wikipedia article on the same.

Finally, do a Google search for "The Damascus Document."  Notice what you didn't find.  The Israeli archive is nowhere to be seen.  I clicked through five pages of search results and never found the Israeli archive.  I don't know if Google's results are the same at all times and all places, so your results may vary. I think my results demonstrate the point.

I put a premium on source materials. I hope I don't need to explain why. Even in the age of Google, you may not find source materials unless you can guess what web site might have it. This problem isn't confined to databases of ancient history.  More often than I'd like, finding the right answer to something means finding the right database.

Let me give you some every day examples. Who owns the derelict property down the street? Turns out, it's owned by a paper corporation.  Who really owns the paper corporation? Can I do a background check on someone without paying for it? Maybe. Do you have time to find all the databases you need to check in all fifty states, then check all those databases individually? (On reflection, this last example might be a good thing. It keeps casual snoopers from poking around my records.)

The phenomenon I demonstrated with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive is one I first observed while searching property records and doing background checks. To find what I was looking for I had to first find the correct database.  Expand this to anything you want to learn or prove.  Want to show, for example, the religious beliefs of the founding fathers? You need their actualy writings.  An article by a historian, or worse, a blow-hard pundit isn't enough. 

What would be nice would be to search engine that find repositories rather than text strings.

The State's Right to What?

"What was the civil war about?"

"It was about state's rights."

"The state's right to do what?"

"..."

"I'm sorry. What was that?"

"..."

"You don't have an answer?"

My hypothetical debate opponent is now trying to conjure an answer. Try using this line of argument yourself to see how many people can give you an answer.

The state's right to do what? It's the obvious next question. If southern states were willing to go to war over state's rights, there must have been specific rights at issue, something that set them off, something they felt the Federal government was taking away from them.

Even as silence drains the room of energy, I'll bet everyone is thinking the same answer: slavery. It's not too hard to find support for that thought. Try this on:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

This also turns out to be problematic for the state's rights argument. More about that in a moment.

The quote is from the confederate constitution, specifically, Section 9, Article 4. It lays bare something the state's rights argument deftly avoids. The existence of the Confederate States of America meant the continuation of slavery. Once the blood of northern youths was spilled in opposition, any victory that excluded abolition was a hollow victory.

But why is this problematic for the state's rights view? I have to thank historian James Loewen in his recent Salon interview for drawing my attention to this. The confederacy denied its own states the right to decide against slavery.

Adam Savage Meets the Martian

If you haven't heard of Andy Weir's novel "The Martian". This hard science fiction novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars has impressed even NASA astronauts and JPL engineers with its technical accuracy. Besides that, it's just an engaging read. If you like to read books before their movie adaptations, you only have until October 2.

Courtesy of tested.com, Adam Savage brings us an hour-long interview with Andy Weir. Savage's gift of gab combines with his interest space exploration and a genuine love of the book to make for a good interview.