April links 2

Red flag laws for guns. Florida passed one after the Parkland shootings. Vermont just did because they had a very close brush with a school shooter arrested as he was planning his shooting spree. Indiana has had one for a while due to random shootings in a neighborhood.

Also, here is a resource on studies of efficacy for certain policies about guns.

Comey's nasty book. I'm not a fan of Comey, who seems mealy-mouthed to me. However, he had enough backbone to stand up to Trump, which not everyone has. His new book seems to have a lot of filler, some of it being creepy. However, he does reveal a non-surprise: Trump trying to spin the Russian hacking.

US/French/British strike on Syria. Interesting detail. How they faked out the Russian/Syria air defenses. A broader discussion. The US isn't striking hard because it needs to have room to ramp up if Syria continues chemical warfare.

History lesson about the end of the gold standard. One of the important moments of history. However, the US hadn't really kept to the gold standard anyway. Fiat currency has its problems, but the gold standard was simpler impossible to make work.

$21 Trillion missing. A Russian shill wrote that the Pentagon had lost $21 trillion. This was just a shill, so he didn't have any real thought in his comment. Consider this: $21 trillion is a huge amount of money that might have worldwide implications. Just imagine the US having double its current debt, but nobody cares. I pointed this out to the shill. He lamely replied "Well, it's from Forbes."

I have to look into this some more, but I've got to clear those tabs off my browser. So here's the dump: Michigan, missing money, truth in accounting, more Michigan,  maybe some details, Reuters. I don't have a link to the Forbes article because it wasn't particularly readable.

Image: acephalous.typepad.com