Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).

Other blogs you may enjoy: Permagringirl instapundit.com The Volokh Conspiracy

Email me at my first name, the at symbol, then my domain, which is first name, last name, .com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet!

 
I Finally Know a Movie Producer!

My friend Paul Elliott is co-producer of Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary opening in November about the studio musicians that made the "Motown Sound." You can find details about the release here.

I wouldn't say that I am a big crazed fan of Motown, but I do own a Diana Ross album or two, and it's hard for me to listen to Motown songs like "Bernadette," "My Girl," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" without a sense of what we have lost as a culture in the degradation that is much of modern popular music. These were beautiful songs of love filled with innocence from an era when blacks were trying hard to be accepted into white society--and racism permeated white America.

At the same time, Motown was producing the songs of great social significance. "Poppa Was a Rolling Stone" addresses the most serious social pathology of the ghetto, because it underlies many of the others: the father who failed in his responsibilities to marital fidelity and to work.

Documentaries are not normally a path to wealth and fortune, but the music alone might be enough to drag in an audience. If you are a Motown fan, give my friend Paul a break, and go see his movie! This is an order!
posted by Clayton at 1:45 PM

 
This Made Me Laugh Out Loud...

Instapundit pointed me to this item about strange stimuli and their effects on idiots.
posted by Clayton at 6:15 PM

 
The September Ideas on Liberty has my article, "Michael Bellesiles and Guns in the Early Republic." This is an article in which I examine Bellesiles's claim that "eighty travel accounts written in America from 1750 to 1860 indicate that the travelers did not notice that they were surrounded by guns and violence."

Unfortunately, it's not up on their website yet--I'm not quite sure how it will be before it is. In the meantime, I can at least bask in the glow of demonstrating the Professor Bellesiles's reading problem is, shall we say, rather severe. (Or is that glow Professor Bellesiles's reputation going up in smoke?)
posted by Clayton at 5:39 PM

 
Wild Paranoid Conspiracy Theory?

The claim of a connection between the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the Iraqi intelligence services keeps moving up the ladder into more and more respectable news sources. This article, which also discusses the suggestive connection between the 1993 WTC bombing and the Iraqi government, is in the Wall Street Journal.

I've been troubled by McVeigh's trial for a long time. It was good that McVeigh finally confessed before his execution, because the government's case against him was so weak that I would have been unable to convict. They barely had a preponderance of evidence to support their claims.

So, if there was reason to suspect a connection with the Iraqis, why would our government have allowed Iraq to have avoided blame? In the case of the 1993 WTC bombing, it made the conviction easier to get; in the case of McVeigh, the Clinton Administration would have much preferred a right-wing American born gun nut to something that would have required us to take real military action against Saddam Hussein.
posted by Clayton at 3:50 PM

 
Living in Boise: The Time Machine

Yesterday was Back To School Night at my son's high school, and when I compare the experience to California, I am so surprised and pleased I am by the differences. It's like going back 30 years or more.

The principal gave a nice little speech, but first, the high school's choir sang "The Star Spangled Banner," and we all sang "God Bless America." I looked around, and everywhere I looked were sincere faces; when the football team came in from practice, we could hear them hushing up their more boisterous teammates so as not to interrupt the national anthem.

The principal showed with pride what the last two graduating classes had bought for the school. A switch was thrown, and lowered from the ceiling of the gym was an American flag at least 10 feet on the shorter dimension.

What is the name of the Centennial High team? "The Patriots." Unlike schools back East, which have used the wonders of paint and airbrush to make gentler, unarmed representations of the Minutemen, everywhere you go in Centennial High, you see a painting of a Minuteman, holding a flintlock. Okay, I've spent too much time studying the subject of late, so I have to carp that the flintlock in question isn't really properly proportioned for either a Brown Bess or a Charleville musket; the lockwork is too large; you should be able to see the flint. But there is no shame about America's past here.

My son's American history class has one entire wall painted as a waving flag. The teacher told us that the district ordered fresh paint everywhere, but the painting contractor looked at this splendid piece of patriotic art done by a previous class, and said that he would simply not cover it over; they would have to get someone else to do that.

What did I hear from several of my son's teachers? "The kids are well behaved and are taking classes seriously."

I am so glad we left Sonoma County, California. (Yes, that's the county just north of John Walker Lindh's home, and that is no coincidence.)
posted by Clayton at 3:27 PM

 
He Who Lives By The Suicide Bomb Dies By It

This news story tells of a house blowing up in Gaza. Apparently, the suicide bombers aren't completely competent at the art.

I am reminded of the story of the brownstone in New York City that blew up in the 1970s, killing the Weather Underground bombmaker. Apparently, he didn't realize that smoking while assembling bombs is not consider a "best practice."
posted by Clayton at 9:57 AM

 
New Moon

This is really cool! Instapundit pointed me to this. We have another satellite around Earth--apparently natural, and apparently recently captured.

Much uncertainty surrounds the mysterious object, designated J002E3. It could be a passing chunk of rock captured by the Earth's gravity, or it could be a discarded rocket casing coming back to our region of space.

It was discovered by Bill Yeung, from his observatory in Arizona, US, and reported as a passing Near-Earth Object.

It was soon realised, however, that far from passing us, it was in fact in a 50-day orbit around the Earth.

If I've done the math on this correctly, it averages about 360,000 miles from Earth.

I will tell you, however, that my understanding from studying this subject many years ago, is that celestial mechanics (that is what you call a person who studies celestial mechanics, right?) were of the opinion that asteroids can't be captured by a planet without either collision or friction against the atmosphere--that the velocity inbound would otherwise guarantee an exit.

It appears that this is a true satellite, unlike the bizarre orbit of Cruithne, a near-Earth asteroid discovered some years ago. Visit here for a discussion of Cruithne's orbit, or this neat page with applets showing the orbit relationship with Earth.
posted by Clayton at 7:45 AM

 
It Isn't Just Bush Kids In Over Their Heads...

Al Gore III, 19, had a little run-in involving drunk driving. I'm not gloating, or drawing any conclusions about what sort of parents Al and Tipper are--just if you see anyone trying to make political hay of the difficulties that some of the Bush girls are having, remind them that this tragedy of alcohol abuse seems bipartisan.
posted by Clayton at 7:21 AM

 
"The Marching Morons"

Back in 1951, Galaxy published a short story by C.M. Kornbluth titled "The Marching Morons." Set just a little ways into the future, it was a cautionary tale about smart people limiting their reproduction while stupid people breed like rabbits. When I first read it in the 1970s, it was amusing, but seemed an unlikely future. Every once in a while, I see something that scares me into wondering if we aren't getting there, after all.

This evening, Gateway Computer had a TV ad for their new PC that looks rather like the iMac. In this commercial, Gateway's PC bounces between the iMacs, swiveling, etc. There, in small print, "Base and monitor movement simulated."

Who, exactly, do Gateway's legal beagles think they are selling to? Small children? Mental defectives? Other lawyers? What next? Perhaps movie previews will contain small print warning, "Not literally accurate."
posted by Clayton at 5:37 PM

 
This Is Far More Troubling...

Instapundit.com is inclined to disbelieve the story but wants to know more. What's the story? It claims that at least some Muslims in the New York City area knew in advance about the attack on the WTC. The story originally appeared in October of 2001, in the Journal-News of Westchester, N.Y. It has also been carried in somewhat different form by MSNBC last year.

So who is the reporter who broke the story? He worked for the Globe (hardly an impressive claim), but seems to have showed contrition for that. A search using Google showed quite a number of plausible sounding news stories by him in various respectable publications.

I can see why the mainstream media are doing their best to keep this under wraps. If, indeed, there was advance knowledge of the attack in the New York City Muslim community, then something like treason is involved. If this is all a big misunderstanding, then this better get resolved as well. Of course, our government may be keeping it quiet to avoid creating a monolithic Islamic coalition against the United States, as might well happen if we reacted to this along the lines of the Japanese internment of World War II. (The difference being that Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens in the continental U.S. didn't do anything like what is alleged by these articles.)
posted by Clayton at 2:22 PM

 
This Is Really Troubling...

I was wandering around the net, looking for a gun belt, and I ran into a very disturbing web page titled, "The Railroading of My Son Larry." My first reaction was, "Loons." The article was poorly organized and written, and unsurprisingly, no parent wants to believe that their child is a monster.

But then I read the five part series that appeared in Wired magazine, starting with this article, and now I am very disturbed. To put it bluntly, files on a computer are among the easiest items to fudge, change date stamps, etc. Once a computer ends up in the hands of the prosecutors, you are pretty much dependent on their honesty and competence for what happens to that computer--and in this case, it would appear that Mr. Stupid and Mr. Dishonest got together to frame Larry Benedict. At a minimum, no jury with a lick of sense would convict in such a case. (Well, they might convict the prosecutor.)

Of course, no jury will need to convict in this case. After six years, $200,000 in legal bills, loss of his job and his wife, Mr. Benedict went ahead and pleaded no contest in exchange for a promise of a light sentence--which promise was apparently not kept by the prosecutors.

Prosecutions for child pornography are a very good thing, assuming that you have a strong case. This case smells so bad that the prosecutors should have dropped it.

For a very long time, I have been uncomfortable with plea bargains. If someone is really guilty, take it to trial. Putting an innocent person in a position where they have to decide whether to risk 20 years in prison if they plead innocent, or six months in jail by pleading guilty to a crime that they didn't commit, forces an immoral choice. Why? Because it asks an innocent person to lie to the court by pleading guilty.
posted by Clayton at 1:28 PM

 
More Evidence That Morons Run Too Many Universities

A certain university has decided that their team mascot, a cartoon character dressed as a cowboy, shouldn't have six-guns and holsters because of the bad model that this presents for children. Which left-leaning, reality detached school do you think it is? Harvard? Stanford? Yale? University of Texas? Nope. University of Arizona.

Fortunately, the student newspaper is a bit more in touch with reality than the administration.
posted by Clayton at 12:08 PM

 
They Wouldn't Do This In California...

My son tells me that "God Bless America" was played over the PA system at his high school today as part of the commemoration of 9/11. This is Boise. He was kidding that in California, it would have been "Bleep! Bleep! America."
posted by Clayton at 10:11 PM

 
President Bush's Speech This Evening

Sorry to say my wife and I missed it. If you missed it also, you can at least read the text.
posted by Clayton at 9:51 PM

 
Nigerian Scams Seem To Be Increasing...

Or at least, I am getting way more of them in my inbox than I did a year ago--like three to five a week. This raises an interesting question.

Northern Nigeria is heavily Muslim, and parts of it are definitely under the sway of the fundamentalist branch of Islam. A woman has been sentenced to death for extramarital sex; sentence is delayed until she weans her baby. (Yeah, I linked to the National Organization of Women's accounts just to irritate the liberals, who spend 90% of their time telling us to appreciate diversity, and 10% of their time upset when that cultural diversity includes oppressing women.)

Is this increase in attempts to bamboozle stupid Americans out of their money part of an al-Qaida effort to increase funding? It would certainly be interesting to track down some of the scammers, and figure out if they are disproportionately Muslims, and if so, if there are connections to terrorist groups.

By the way, these scams must take in very, very stupid or very, very greedy people. Even before I read any accounts of these scams, I would get these emails and immediately recognize them as scams. (Indeed, I am sure that my 14 year old son would recognize the best of them as scams.) The scam emails that have been popping up in the last year are even more clumsily and obviously scams than the ones I received in 2000 and early 2001.

Tell me: where do these scam artists find people stupid enough to be conned?

Update: if you want to know more about these scams, here's a good explanation. An amusing examples of scamming the scammers is here.

Make sure that you also read the letter by G.T. Gobena in this Salon letters column in which the scam artists are explained as victims of colonialism, reduced to this because of the evils of the West.
posted by Clayton at 2:53 PM

 
The Only Humor That Anyone Can Salvage From What Happened Last Year

The Onion, to my surprise, managed to find something humorous but respectful last September from this: Mohammed Atta and friends surprise at discovering that they didn't make it to Paradise for committing mass murder.
posted by Clayton at 2:04 PM

 
A Song For Today

Over at instapundit.com, Professor Reynolds is noting that at the Flight 93 memorial, they sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" not "Amazing Grace." No surprise. Both are powerful songs, but one is a song of just war, and there is nothing more appropriate today, and for the next few months. I found this Lee Greenwood recording of it on this site--and even with his Southern accent, it is powerful. (For reasons that I don't understand, the owner of wavthis.com was upset with me linking directly to the song, and asked me to copy the file to my site, so that's what I did.)

The lyrics can be found at the University of Oklahoma Law School -- worth reading and contemplating on a day when we remember the thousands dead, and the costs of the war that is to come.
posted by Clayton at 10:35 AM

 
In Britain, A Man's Home Is No Longer His Castle

A depressing story from the London Times. The story starts out, "A FATHER-OF-TWO who stabbed a 'career criminal' to death with a bread knife after finding him burgling his family’s home was found guilty of manslaughter yesterday." But that doesn't fully capture the injustice of the jury convicting Barry-Lee Hastings of manslaughter.

Barry-Lee Hastings found his front door forced open, believed his family was at home, and feared that a burglar was inside with his kids. He picked up a bread knife, was attacked by the burglar who was carrying a "jemmy" (probably British for a prybar), and in the ensuing fight, Hastings stabbed the burglar to death. The burglar had a long criminal record, and was wanted by police at the time.

Another sad point about the decline in the British system of justice: a criminal conviction by 10-2 -- not unanimous.

UPDATE: John Anderson points out that Mr. Hastings had a previous criminal record also, for burglary, and for carrying a knife. I'm not sure that this is, or should be relevant, however. Hastings was in his own home; the person he killed had forced entry; there is no reason given in the article to believe that the death wasn't the result of a fight between an unlawful felon and the resident.
posted by Clayton at 9:15 AM

 
Britain Remembers

Very touching evidence that in spite of the whining from Britain that gets the press, there are a lot of people there who understand our pain and anger.
posted by Clayton at 8:18 AM

 
It's 11:00 PM. Do You Know Where Your College Students Are?

My daughter recently started at the University of Idaho. U of I is in Moscow, up in the panhandle, a few miles from Pullman, Washington, where Washington State University is located. The tales that she tells me are a little disheartening.

The first week of classes, she visited her boyfriend over in Pullman. By her account, there were thousands of people in the streets, openly drinking alcoholic beverages in public. Girls were busily pulling up their shirts to flash their breasts. The police were not enforcing any laws against public consumption of alcohol or public nudity. (Does Washington have such laws? I can't imagine that they don't.)

Instead, Pullman police seemed to be concentrating their energies on picking up the students who were unconscious, and breaking up fights. I wasn't there, so I'm going to have to trust my daughter's description. Some of these disgusting video tapes that you see advertised on late night television shows, "College Girls Out of Control" suggest that what she saw isn't that unusual.

Once upon a time, colleges operated in loco parentis with respect to their students. (That's Latin for "in place of the parents." If like myself you are the parent of a college student, you are forgiven for believing that it actually means, "the parents are now loco.") It all seems so quaint now, but colleges made some effort to at least discourage sex, alcohol, and some of the other matters that tend to get young people in a world of hurt (especially the morning after--or the month after).

I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events, but I would expect that both the drop in voting age to 18, and the generalized relaxation of the 1960s played some part in colleges abandoning this effort. Is it just a sign that I am getting old and crotchety, or do others agree with me that perhaps in loco parentis served a useful function?

Somewhere out there in that vast swarm of data that calls itself the Internet, I saw a very funny comparison of the 1960s and the 1990s. One of those examples was the incident from 1969 in which feminists burned their bras; the 1990s equivalent was the videotape "College Girls Go Wild!"

I always thought that bra-burning was an example of the silliness of feminism, looking for oppression in a minor matter like clothing instead of the larger issues of jobs, education, and rape. (Of course, I don't wear a bra, so perhaps that's why it seems like a minor issue.) But still, feminism in the 1960s, for whatever excesses it sometimes involved, said, "I am a woman, and I deserve to be respected for my mind, and not as a sex object." It appears that for a disturbing number of young women going to off to college these days, being a sex object is high on their list of objectives.

This interest in being a sex object is obviously not something that takes place in a vacuum. As someone cynical and witty once observed, "Women would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think." There are some cultural problems that have developed that make me long for my high school days, when a girl attracted a boy with her wit, her charm, and her ability to dress attractively--not by flashing her breasts in public. "Girls" (they weren't women back then) were second class citizens; but they weren't first and foremost sex machines for the pleasure of this month's guy. They were a bit on a pedestal back when I was young, and dinosaurs ruled the Earth. That's certainly better than the current model, which seems to be quite a bit degraded.

I wonder if a lot of the open-minded college administrators who at least acquiesced in the collapse of in loco parentis find themselves asking what went wrong. For much of a generation of college-bound young women, there has been a troubling transition from feminists who asked to be treated as the legal, social, and intellectual equals of men, to college girls exposing themselves randomly as sexual objects.
posted by Clayton at 10:17 PM

 
Promoting Virtue and Discouraging Vice

I'm beginning to receive email responding to my blog (which is a good sign that someone besides me is reading it). Another self-professed libertarian-leaner agreed with me that it bugs him to hear libertarians arguing for drugs as a positive thing, as distinguished from "it's not the government's job." I'll go a bit beyond that, and say that there are some actions that are so clearly counterproductive and stupid that it doesn't bother me to see the government spend a little of our taxes on advertising campaigns to discourage vice and encourage virtue.

Now, this is obviously subject to abuse. I wouldn't want a heavy-handed anti-gun advertising campaign funded with my taxes. (Wait a minute, a really heavy-handed campaign might be just the ticket! It might make guns as popular as cigarettes have become among teenagers.) But let me throw out some examples of campaigns that I think would qualify as good things to do (at a reasonable price), and would engender relatively few objections (especially when you consider the alternative of some coercive law that tried to accomplish the same ends):

1. Seat belts: they're good for you. They reduce the blood spatter on your windshield.

2. Use condoms if you aren't in a monogamous sexual relationship.

3. Are one-night stands a good idea? (Some HPV strains clearly cause cervical cancer; the risks are high; a woman's risk increases dramatically as the number of sexual partners rise.)

4. Unless you have a very good reason, it's usually safest to keep your gun locked up when not in use. If you have kids in the house, make sure that they understand that guns are a serious business, and secure the guns from unauthorized access.

5. Is getting drunk really that good an idea?
posted by Clayton at 8:45 PM

 
Noelle Bush's Drug Problem

This news item about Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter's alleged continuing drug problems is really heartbreaking. Some will use this as a political abuse weapon. I would hope that they would regard it the same way as we should regard the drug problems and death of Carroll O'Connor's son, or the recurring legal problems of Robert Downey, Jr: a tragedy that reminds you that contrary to liberal and libertarian thoughts, addiction enslaves people.

Any rational person would recognize that if you are in a court-ordered drug rehab program, you stay clean. Even if you are just going through the motions to make the court happy, rational analysis would suggest that your fastest way out of there and back to your life of drug abuse on the outside is stay clean long enough to finish the program. This suggests that Ms. Bush's problems are pretty darn serious.

I used to work for a company that did pre-employment drug screening, and occasionally did drug screening for those already employed. I must confess that I find such programs distasteful and insulting. But another employee explained the way in which this company did it:

1. Two weeks advance warning that drug screening was coming up.

2. If you failed the drug test, you were warned that, maybe it was a mistake in the lab, so they would come and ask for another sample two weeks hence.

3. If you failed the second time, they referred you to drug counseling to deal with it.

4. If you got belligerent or refused, they canned you.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that the employee with this much opportunity to stop his cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, etc. either:

1. Couldn't stop.

2. Considered his job less important than his drug habit.

Yes, I expect a lot of you to tell me that the War on Drugs causes enormous problems, driving up the price of drugs, making illegal trafficking more profitable. I agree. Prohibition creates an enormous set of problems, spreading individual crises into social disasters. This is part of why corporate drug testing programs became popular (with a little encouragement from the government); they were an attempt to affect the demand side, not the supply side. The only people injured by reducing demand were the dealers and importers.

Yes, alcohol certainly causes more problems in our society than many of the illegal drugs (though I would argue that on a per capita basis this might not be true for methamphetamines). Having raised children in Sonoma County, California, which is a major producer of alcohol, marijuana, and meth, I can tell you that the case for discouraging alcohol is at least as strong as the argument for discouraging the use of the currently illegal drugs. Imagine a county where many adults supply marijuana and beer to their junior high aged kids. Not surprisingly, Sonoma County has a special full-time unit in the district attorney's office for prosecuting rapes of teenaged girls passed out at parties (not 16, 17, 18 girls, either, but 12, 13, 14). That unit, in some years, is very busy. From talking to other parents, as busy as that unit is, many of these crimes aren't being reported.

The problem isn't just rape. My daughter attended an awful lot of funerals the last two years we lived there. She knew kids who died of cirrhosis of the liver, and many kids killed in drunk driving accidents.

What am I saying? I'm tired of being told by people not just, "Adults should be free to use drugs" (a statement that I reluctantly agree with) but, "There's nothing wrong with getting high." There are people who can drink a beer, and have a glass of wine with dinner, and that's as far as it goes. I used to occasionally drink a glass of champagne at a company celebration once or twice a year, and never felt the urge to start drinking heavily. Lots of people are like that; there are, I'm sure, lots of adults who can smoke pot once or twice a month without turning it into an addiction or a religion.

But there are lots of people, especially kids, who can't take just one drink, or one toke. A 13-year-old's brain is still developing, and messing with it chemically is a dangerous experiment. What I became most tired of, living in Sonoma County, was a society where your kids are made to feel weird or strange for being sober in seventh grade; where your kids are repeatedly offered marijuana, alcohol, and harder drugs for free because drugs are effectively free, and there is so much social pressure to conform, and get high.

If the doper class wants to have places like Sonoma County where, for practical purposes, marijuana is legal, kids drink alcohol while classes are in session (Petaluma High School), kids roll joints in class (Casa Grande High School, also in Petaluma), other drugs are given away in high schools, and intoxication is a citizen's duty, fine. Just let some of us enjoy "backwaters" like Idaho where a majority of teens do not drink or use drugs. (Yeah, there are still places like that.)
posted by Clayton at 1:35 PM

 
Why Are Professional History Journals So Shockingly Undiverse?

The Journal of American History has published a special September 11th edition of their esteemed journal. Of course, they are only giving away excerpts from the articles as a tease. In reading through these excerpts, I am struck by the enormous level of agreement that they reflect.

As an example, "Michael H. Hunt questions the historical analyses that undergird the 'war on terrorism'sparked by the horrors of September 11. He warns against justifications for U.S. policy that rest on simple and self-congratulatory binaries—the battle of modernity and tradition or the defense of civilization against barbarism. Americans bring to the crisis a nationalism that is universalist, ahistorical, and inclined to simplify other cultures. An alternative, he suggests, is to recognize the hostility created by a half century of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and the yearning for domestic renovation that fuels Islamic politics."

Yup, it is sure is a "simple and self-congratulatory binary" to think that murdering almost 3000 civilians is "barbarism." One can even buy the argument advanced by Bruce B. Lawrence that, "To address the cause of that hatred and not just its violent expression, the war on terrorism must also be a war against poverty, injustice, and dictatorship" and still recognize that mass murder is barbarism. (After all, to the left, Hiroshima was barbarism, but somehow what al-Qaida did should not seduce us into "simple and self-congratulatory binaries....")

Of course, a professional history journal isn't complete without a mass of jargon like this: "As the United States was launching its effort to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Bush administration and the U.S. media focused on the need to rescue Afghan women and children from oppression. Emily S. Rosenberg draws on recent scholarship on gender and international relations to examine the competing 'social imaginaries' animating such wartime calls for rescue. One imaginary takes shape within a tradition of male-coded nationalism and claims of Western superiority." Who was that argued a while back that the Taliban's oppression of women wasn't really any worse than what we do to women in America?

posted by Clayton at 1:03 PM

 
We Really Are At War.

See the Reuters news story that Yahoo has about deployment of anti-aircraft missles at the Pentagon and around Washington. Sobering stuff indeed.
posted by Clayton at 8:18 AM

 
Insular and Unconcerned

Suman Palit has a mildly amusing description of why the rest of the world, upset with Americans for being insular and unconcerned, are going to regret that we are no longer in that situation. Cute, but there is a more pithy description, reputedly said by Admiral Yamamoto after the spectacularly successful surprise raid on Pearl Harbor, "We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve."

Right now, the left is trying their darndest to spread the idea around that September 11th is at least partly America's fault; we need to understand the poverty and suffering that causes this sort of thing; we needed to be more involved in the Middle East situation; we needed to intervene less in the affairs of other countries (never mind that this someone contradicts "more involved"); evils of capitalism, etc.

Unsurprisingly, Americans have calmed down a bit under this onslaught of excuse making for mass murder. One more attack at even close to the level of September 11th, and all the left's control over our mass media and educational institutions won't be enough. Americans will be justifiably angry about actions that make Pearl Harbor seem positively chivalrous by comparison.
posted by Clayton at 9:27 PM

 
Delayed Damage from 09/11

Yahoo has a Reuters news story about the large number of emergency workers who are going to be retiring on breathing related disabilities caused by the dust kicked up by the WTC collapse. Unsurprisingly, there has been a dramatic increase in stress-related problems among emergency workers as well. While stress-related psychiatric disorders are among the easiest opportunities to scam the system, it isn't any great surprise that an event of this magnitude, and with so many friends and colleagues killed, would cause dramatic increases in such maladies.

More disturbing: "As many as 200,000 New York City children may have developed psychiatric problems after Sept. 11, according to a recent study by the New York Psychiatric Institute." Yeah, psychiatrists are looking for ways to scam some money out of the system, but I don't find it at all hard to believe that this event has done some real serious damage to a lot of impressionable kids--and not just in New York City.

Consider the damage that al Qaida has done to America: lives lost; children orphaned; spouses widowed; buildings destroyed; permanent disabilities; business records lost irrevocably; children traumatized. How many decades of capitalism would it take to produce this much injury? (Of course, capitalism would have also produced some benefits as well, as even the most hard leftists would grudgingly admit.) And yet the left is still running around looking for reasons to excuse al Qaida's actions.
posted by Clayton at 3:16 PM

 
Financial Columnist Jim Cramer on War

Read Jim Cramer's column about September 11th. It is the confession of someone who believed, "I love you, you love me, we are a happy family, this land is your land, this land is my land; you get the picture." He has wised up a bit. (No, I doubt that Jim and I are related, Cramer being a very common name.)
posted by Clayton at 2:40 PM

 
Vesey's Rebellion & The Controversy Over It

John Rosenberg draws a parallel between conventional wisdom with respect to the Denmark Vesey slave revolt of 1822 and the Bellesiles scandal. Having read Michael P. Johnson's William & Mary Quarterly article and the responses to it, I am not sure that I quite buy this parallel.

Johnson's claim is that historians have been too willing to believe in a vast slave conspiracy to rise up against their masters, even when the evidence consists of confessions which seem to have been sometimes tortured out of slaves, and other times coerced out of them by the threat of death. Johnson has an important point here, and I will tell you that I share his concern that the desire to find heroic slaves willing to risk all for their liberty may have caused historians to read into the evidence what they want to find.

Black history in the last twenty years has been infected with the doctrine of "agency." Once upon a time, historians, dependent largely on written sources by whites, saw black slaves as little more than pieces on the chessboard, moved and directed by masters. "Agency" is the notion that slaves, through passive resistance, manipulation, playing sick, use of contraceptives, abortifacients, infanticide, individual murders, and rebellion, influenced their lives and their relationships with each other, with masters, and with the larger white society.

It would be utterly foolish to think otherwise--but I have increasingly seen this notion of "agency" reach the point in some black history that you wonder who were the masters, and who were the slaves. As with most pendulum swings in the writing of history, we seem to be past the midpoint on this one.

Johnson also points to a recent collection of primary sources by Edward A. Pearson that combines and misquotes--extensively--trial transcripts and depositions associated with the conspiracy. Johnson has done a valuable service to the historical community by demonstrating that Pearson's book is so incredibly flawed as to be dangerous.

Unlike Bellesiles, Pearson's response doesn't play for time: "In his condemnation of my work, however, Johnson is half right. I plead guilty to his charge that my transcription of the trial record is deeply flawed. He is correct, therefore, to alert the historical community to its unreliability as a source, providing overwhelming evidence about material inadvertently introduced or omitted in my version. Moreover, Johnson's discussion of the trial record effectively demonstrates the ways in which I inadvertently corrupted the document. Although I openly admit to these mistakes for which I take sole responsibility and for which I unreservedly apologize, I should note that they were made not with malice aforethought, in some misguided and devious effort to load and distort the record in a way that makes my own interpretation of the plot unimpeachable, but through, as Johnson notes, 'unrelenting carelessness' (p. 926). "

Concerning Johnson's other claim, however, I am not completely persuaded, and this is another area where the parallel to the Bellesiles scandal doesn't work. Johnson raises some very important points about the unreliability of tortured and coerced testimony, and the peculiar situation in which a blatantly racist court that clearly knew what it wanted to hear is trusted by modern historians. Douglas Egerton, in other otherwise...hmmm..."edgey" and not terribly persuasive response observes, "If historians had to rely only on statements willingly made to officials in open, democratic courts that lacked any racial or class bias--as if such a venue has ever existed in any society--the available scholarship on the law and popular resistance to it would be thin indeed."

If you find this subject interesting, read all the responses to Johnson's claims, as well as Johnson's response to the comments. I don't think this matter is all that settled, but it will certainly make me a little more careful in how I teach the significance of Vesey's Rebellion.

posted by Clayton at 1:39 PM

 
Ken Hamblin's Column

Ken Hamblin's column yesterday in the Denver Post mentioned a paper that I wrote some years ago about "The Racist Roots of Gun Control." He didn't mention that it was published in the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy in 1995, and can be found here.
posted by Clayton at 9:33 AM

 
Going to Chicago for the American Society of Criminology Conference

I will be participating in a panel discussion about the controversy over historian Michael Bellesiles's book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000) at the American Society of Criminology conference in Chicago. This panel will be from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM on November 14. I will be in Chicago from the afternoon of the 13th through the evening of the 15th.
posted by Clayton at 8:55 AM

 
Read Dave Barry's Column

I read Dave Barry's column whenever I need to laugh. At his best, my sides ache from reading his column; on his off days, I can usually get at least a smile or a chuckle. This column is different. It's about the heroes of Flight 93, and it's a powerful tribute that brings tears to my eyes. Let's not forget that the passengers on Flight 93 weren't just heroes; they were husbands and fathers whose families are paying daily for the savagery of Al Qaida.
posted by Clayton at 7:43 AM

 
They're Going to Party Like It's 1399

Why is anti-Muslim feeling rising in America? See this news story from the September 8th Daily Telegraph about the organization of the "Islamic Council of Britain (ICB), which will aim to implement sharia law in Britain and will welcome al-Qa'eda sympathisers as members." "The people at this conference look at September 11 like a battle, as a great achievement by the mujahideen against the evil superpower."

Paul Johnson once described an intellectual as someone who loves ideas more than people, and that certainly describe this bunch. I keep waiting for moderate Muslims to create a groundswell of outraged response. After all, groups like this claiming to speak in the name of Islam makes anti-Muslim sentiment even stronger, and will eventually lead to the sort of bigotry and legalized religious discrimination that doesn't belong in America (but seems to be right at home in Saudi Arabia). Moderate Muslims need to speak out, now, and loudly, denouncing this sort of hate-filled nonsense, or raise the suspicion that the Islamic Council of Britain is just being honest about Islam.

Trade unionists in America in the 1940s and 1950s were in a similar position with respect to communism, and overwhelmingly, they spoke against totalitarianism. It was both morally right, and political astute.

Isn't it interesting how the left of American politics, so terrified that the Religious Right will exercise undue influence on America, isn't terribly concerned about a group whose goal is the worldwide imposition of an Islamic theocracy that would make Moral Majority look like an ACLUless convention? The Islamic Council of Britain's goal--imposition of sharia law worldwide--makes Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale seem positively liberal.
posted by Clayton at 10:18 PM

 
Sinus Surgery

For those of you who have been following the trials and tribulations of my sinus surgery--I haven't added anything to it in some weeks, because everything is going so well. For those of you who need an appetite suppressant as part of your weight loss program--it is a fairly detailed description of the experience. (No pictures, however, lucky you!)
posted by Clayton at 8:54 PM

 
Nightmares & Nanotraumas

I had an interesting nightmare a couple of nights ago--a peculiar intersection of two nanotraumas of my recent life. One of these events was the first door ding on my new (to me) 2000 Chevrolet Corvette; the other involved moving two cubic yards of river rock from the driveway to the backyard for a "Honey-Do" project.

I dreamed that I had returned to Petaluma, People's Republic of California (from which my family and I only recently escaped). I drove into downtown, into an "unimproved parking lot." (This is bureaucratese for a dirt lot that no one has figured out to build anything on yet.) If you know downtown Petaluma as it was several years ago, you know the lot I mean. I park my shiny red Corvette in the corner where the ground level is a bit lower than the rest, and duck into a nearby convenience store for a Coke. When I return, where's my Corvette?

The locals are standing around grinning, and I am becoming increasingly disturbed by this. Have they stolen my car? It's nowhere to be found. Suddenly, I realize that the depression in the corner is now level with the rest of the lot. It's been filled up with this cursed river rock! Under this enormous pile, my Corvette now rests.

Alas, another two cubic yards of river rock is about to be ordered, with disturbing consequences for arms, shoulders, neck--and probably future dreams.
posted by Clayton at 8:42 PM

 
Another Victim of Peer Pressure

Welcome to Clayton Cramer's weblog. (Everyone else was doing it, and it didn't seem quite as dangerous as smoking pot, jumping off a pier, or any of the other examples that go with, "If everyone else was doing X, would you?") My good friend Brian Reilly finally pushed me over the edge.

I will be doing this somewhat experimentally at first, so don't expect a lot of volume until I have gotten the hang of it.
posted by Clayton at 7:46 PM