Right to Life

If Las Vegas doesn't cause you to question unchecked gun rights, what will?

Conservatives gaze at enemies and insist the Constitution assures our right to bear arms, because it's "a way that the weak can protect themselves against the strong."

Liberals gaze at young people's corpses and insist the Constitution assures "our right to a happy life."

There seems to be no room in conservatives' minds for equality, fairness, reasonableness, or real-life experience; there's room only for the endless fairy tale of "the weak" vanquishing "the strong."

In Stephen Paddock, they've found their perfect spokesman.

In defense of fairness, philosopher John Rawls once asked students to imagine themselves behind a "veil of ignorance."

Forget, for a moment, your personal situation (your wants and needs; your race and sex; your religion and education; your social and economic class; and so forth).

Then ask yourself: Without those privileges (or disadvantages), what kind of world would you want to be born into?

You'd be forced to conclude you want a world governed by fairness, where everyone is equal—and deserves equally to live.

Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.

Price of Freedom

The phrase "the price of freedom" used to be reserved for reference to war dead.

Bill O'Reilly has co-opted it for a new purpose.

America has lost its way.

The Under Toad

This post originally appeared December 19, 2012. My opinion has only grown stronger in the intervening five years. 

I met Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson at a conference once.

It was 1972. The country was deep in the throes of a Presidential election.

Four months earlier, segregationist and gun-loving Alabama Governor George Wallace had lost his bid for the Presidency thanks to a would-be assassin.

I asked Dr. Thompson whether he thought Wallace might change his stance on gun control after being shot five times in the chest and stomach.

"I don't know," Thompson snarled. "But I do know this. Everyone should carry a gun. We all should carry guns. The streets would be a lot safer. America would be a better place."

Thirty-three years later, depressed and deathly ill, Hunter Thompson blew off the top of his head with a shotgun.

I don't understand the pleasure of gun ownership. I don't understand the thrill of hunting animals. But a lot of people I know and admire enjoy both those things.

As a parent, however, I understand how fear and loathing due to the loss of a child could exceed any imaginable sorrow.

In his novel The World According to Garp, John Irving famously described the brutal workings of the "Under Toad," code-words for "the forces that disrupt human life and sometimes destroy it." The life of a child, in particular.

The Under Toad visited Newtown, Connecticut, last week.

Several parents will never feel sorrow-less again.

Should You Worry about GDPR?

The roll-out of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe next May will be spotty.

Like most government crackdowns, GDPR—mandating that marketers protect consumers' privacy and data—will be rigorously enforced in northern nations, lazily enforced in southern ones.

But if you do a lot of business up north, you should take steps now to comply. Experts recommend you:

• Appoint a "data czar" to police your marketing activities
• Get a third-party checkup of your data's health
• Segregate lists affected by GDPR, so you can treat them differently
• Confirm your suppliers will be compliant by May
• Sign up for "ready-made" solutions, if you're still worried

Unlike many current consumer protection laws, GDPR is tough. 

Screw up, and you could face fines in the millions.

GDPR disallows, for example, "soft" opt-ins, so you'll have to dump lists that aren't rigidly permission-based. It also grants the "Right to Be Forgotten," so you'll have to delete old web posts anyone could reasonably claim are inaccurate or defamatory. And it punishes marketers who make it at all troublesome for consumers to opt out of their lists.