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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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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).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Thursday, September 26, 2002
The Trailer Trash Quiz Take it here. Here's the first two questions, just to encourage you to go visit it: 1. Do you let your 12 year old daughter smoke at the table in front of her kids? Okay, before anyone gets angry at me, it's humor. As the author says here: Offended? You might be, but keep in mind, I'm not making fun of poor people. I'm making fun of trash. It doesn't cost a penny to pick up the yard. Besides, I LIVE in a trailer. Just because you live in a trailer doesn't make you trash, but needless to say, there are a lot of people out there that keep the term, "trailer trash" going. Okay, It's Time For a Laugh And who better at providing it then the FBI and a self-confessed al-Qaida member? The FBI accidentally gave a few classified documents to "Accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui..." and then figured out that they better get those documents back--from Moussaoui's jail cell. How few documents? "The government initially said two classified documents were in Moussaoui's possession, then acknowledged there were seven before finally determining there were 48." (Hmmm. Why am I not surprised that they had some trouble preventing September 11th?) Moussaoui seems to have a sense of humor about all this. At one point he filed, "Motion to Expulse the United States from the Arabian Discovery Cave." How To Deal With Holocaust Deniers One of the biggest concerns that I hear about the Holocaust deniers writing books is, "What if people start to believe them?" I am no believer in censorship--but I do believe that if someone sells you a book that purports to be history, and it is actually fraudulent, they should be sued for fraud. I don't mean that the book is manipulative, or leaves out details--that would include most non-fiction books published, I fear. In addition, any really large book is going to have mistakes: typos; transcription errors; an author reading his sources too quickly. But as Ian Fleming once wrote (I think in Casino Royale, "Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action." There is a point at which where there is no question that the author has intentionally lied to this reader. If you find hundreds of examples of quotes altered; quotes taken out of context; dates changed; texts misrepresented, and these "problems" are all or nearly all in the same direction, it's not an accident--it's fraud. Instapundit alerted me to this item on History News Network by Professor Jerome Sternstein. Professor Sternstein exposed an academic fraud of similar brazenness back in the 1960s--but over an obscure question about 19th century tariff policy. (The book was S. Walter Poulshock, The Two Parties and the Tariff in the 1880s published in 1965 by Syracuse University Press--then retracted once the fraud was exposed.) Bellesiles, at least, was risking everything for something he considered important! Poulshock's fraud just makes you roll your eyes. Professor Sternstein points out that Bellesiles's apparent reprieve from a final conclusion to Emory's investigation looks really, really bad for Bellesiles. Bellesiles appears to have taken advantage of a 30 day appeal process. From Emory's "Policies and Procedures" statement: "The accused has the right to appeal the decision of the Investigative Committee to the Provost and the appropriate Vice President within 30 days after the final report of substantial. . . misconduct." Pretty clearly, Bellesiles wasn't appealing from an investigation that cleared him. Unlike Bellesiles gets that time machine of his working again, so that he can go retrieve all those missing documents (and alter the hundreds of documents that are easy to find, and that contradict what he claims they say), he's hosed. If Bellesiles had sold people a wonderful exercise machine that would cause you to lose five inches a week off your waist while you slept, he would be pursued criminally, and civilly. Some lawyer, somewhere, would bring a class action lawsuit against him for fraud on behalf of all the defrauded purchasers. Bellesiles wrote a book that claimed to be non-fiction, and made extensive use of all the traditional scholarly forms to give that illusion. Alfred A. Knopf published this book under similar pretenses. It is clear now that Arming America wasn't just incorrect, or carelessly researched--it was an intentional deception, with altered quotes, gross misrepresentation, and the like. (Click here for a short version with images showing the fraud, here for a longer version, here for a version that I submitted to a history journal, and here for the version so long that it will bog your computer to a crawl while downloading all 300 pages.) If you are wondering why I am not afraid of Bellesiles suing me for libel, it's for a simple reason: one of Bellesiles's colleagues, Deborah Lipstadt, said something similar about David Irving, an almost respectable Holocaust minimizer. Irving sued Professor Lipstadt for libel in a British court, where libel laws are much more friendly to the plaintiff. Irving didn't just lose, he got stuck with a huge bill for Lipstadt's court costs. Consider this an invitation: Michael Bellesiles's book Arming America is an intentional work of fraud. It is not careless; it is not sloppy. It is fraud, and I can prove it without any hesitation or question. So, isn't it fraud to pass off a book that is intentionally deceptive as a serious work of history? Shouldn't all the tens of thousands of people that paid good money for the book have the right to recover the money they paid for it? I think so. Now, it is true that many of the buyers don't realize it's a fraud. Quite a number don't even care it's a fraud. (After all, there are a lot of history professors out there, and many of them don't seem to mind.) There's a procedure for that; the lawyers advertise in the newspapers that you can remove yourself from the class action suit if you wish. But the result will be the same, even if most buyers elect to do so: Knopf and Bellesiles will be held liable for at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. This will send a message to both Knopf and Bellesiles that dishonesty is not okay. Knopf was warned more than a year ago that there were serious problems with Arming America. My contacts in the literary world supplied them with detailed descriptions of the evidence of fraud, and Knopf went ahead anyway. This tells me that either Knopf doesn't mind publishing a fraudulent book, or was negligent in failing to evaluate the seriousness of the charges. My Piece About the 17th Amendment I received several friendly requests for a citation to some evidence for my claim about the purpose of the Senate, specifically that the goal was to protect property interests. See the UPDATE on the original. It Will Be Very Quiet Here Today and Tomorrow... I am in a COM for Firmware class for the remainder of the week. Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Isn't It Amazing The Crowd That We Have For Our Enemies? I couldn't make up monsters this bad. See this news story about Islamofascists forcing entry into a charitable organization in Pakistan that helps the poor, binds the people inside to chairs, taped their mouths, then shot them in the head. It's hard not to turn this into a crusade to wipe out an ideology like this. Paying Attention To Mohammed Atta's Will Mohammed Atta's will includes the following interesting requests:
Well, darn, we never got a chance to bury Atta, since he would appear to have been incinerated, along with thousands of his innocent victims, at the World Trade Center. I guess we can consider the World Trade Center Atta's grave. So, here's a little way for American women to show Atta the respect that they have for him: go to the World Trade Center. (Especially if you are pregnant! Where did Atta think he came from? A camel?) Email me photos of your visit to Atta's grave--perhaps we can produce a little memento for Atta's friends and admirers. Ordinarily I don't encourage sexually provocative clothing in public (for men or women), but perhaps skanking it up a bit for your visit to Atta's grave might be in order--just for Atta, you understand! (If only he could see you from whatever fiery furnace Atta now enjoys!) Repealing the 17th Amendment Todd Zywicki points to John Dean's CNN column about the 17th Amendment. Dean makes some good points about the mistake made when we changed from the Constitution's original plan--having state legislatures elect U.S. Senators--to the current scheme of popular elections. I would make another point, one that is something of a parallel argument. The Framers intended for the House of Representatives to represent the masses, and the U.S. Senate to represent the property interests. This is why the Constitution, Art. I, sec. 7, requires that, "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives...." It was understood that taxes would fall most heavily on the working people of the country, and that government expenditures primarily benefited the wealthy. It had been that way for centuries in England, and it remains that way today. In spite of the progressive income tax, really wealthy people have never been as heavily burdened by taxes as ordinary people--and really wealthy people get the most benefit from the government in protection of their property, government subsidies to their businesses, and influence on the politicians. So why did the Framers come up with a scheme that puts the Senate in the hands of the wealthy, and the House in the hands of the ordinary folks? The Framers knew full well that any sort of socialism was at best unlikely; "Gracchianism" was what some members of the convention called it, after Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a Roman who proposed redistribution of surplus land to the poor. What concerned them more was the prospect that a wealthy demagogue would rouse landless and impoverished masses of some future era into a scheme that purported to help the poor, but actually redistributed wealth from the poor to the the demagogue and his friends. (Can you say Teddy Kennedy?) In addition, because wealthy people are usually smarter than the masses (but no more honest), members of the Senate were given responsibilities that the House did not have, such as impeachment, confirming judges, and ratifying treaties. These are areas when you want people with the guile of snakes involved, and people elected by the wealthy interests of the state legislatures were likely to be that. The Senate, by representing the interests of the wealthy, created an arena in which jealousy and concern for individual interests would cause wealthy people to check the interests of other wealthy people. Imagine the way in which insurance companies (one wealthy faction) check the interests of trial lawyers (another wealthy faction). The corruption associated with the selection of Senators, while a bad thing, had the virtue that it was an attempt by different wealthy interests to jockey for position in each state. Demagogues relying on their oratorical powers had little advantage over less flashy candidates. For the most part, legislators picked Senators based on their interests, and probably less on emotional appeal than the masses pick members of the House. Popular election of Senators changed all that. Now, the same techniques that work to elect members of the House--huge campaign budgets; a winning smile; the ability to influence the masses, who are both ignorant and gullible--work to elect Senators. The balance has been changed; there is no longer a division between the House, whose members are elected by ignorant, gullible, but generally disinterested electors, and the Senate, whose members were elected by the smart, usually crooked, and calculating sorts. UPDATE: I received a few requests for some sort of authoritative source for some of my claims. Page Smith, The Constitution: A Documentary and Narrative History (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1978), 64-65, discusses the influence of the Gracchus brothers and their agrarian reform efforts on the Convention: Few debates on the question of suffrage and the nature and function of an upper legislative branch took place without reference to the danger of Agrarian Laws.... Consequently the concern of the American constiitution makers that the have-nots might at some day in the future be tempted to take from the haves is understandable. Two points must be made in fairness to them. First, that there were probably more property owners in colonial America in proportion to the general population than in any other post-tribal society of which history has a record and that property was, in addition, more equitably distributed, there being less distance between the richest and the poorest than in any modern nation. Moreover, if the framers of constitutions were anxious to protect the propertied class from the avarice of the people, they believed themselves to be equally concerned with protecting the people from the predatory and "self-aggrandizing" instincts of the rich, whose desire for wealth was theoretically insatiable. Or so history suggested. The protection of those of modest means against the exploitive inclinations of the rich was to be ensured by giving the former control of the finances of the state through their representation in the "popular" house and their exclusive authority to initiate all bills appropriating money. Everyone happy now? Tuesday, September 24, 2002
A Letter I Just Wrote To Governor Davis of California Feel free to let him know how you feel at governor@governor.ca.gov Dear Governor Davis: I don't live in California anymore. In December of last year, for a variety of reasons, I moved myself and my family to Idaho. There were a number of reasons, but one of the most depressing aspects to life in California was the continual reminders that the mental health system in the Golden State was broken. It isn't just the mental health system that is broken. It is the lives of tens of thousands (at least) of Californians who, as mental illness destroys their ability to reason, spiral down into homelessness, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and death. In a few cases, this decline led to senseless crimes against strangers as these confused people imagine themselves victims of conspiracies both grand and minor. You can't walk through any California city of any size without being depressed by the swarms of homeless people. Overwhelmingly, these people are not homeless just because of poverty. The core problem is the well-intentioned deinstitutionalization of mental patients, starting in the 1960s. Since the 1970s, when the full impact of the Lanterman-Petris-Short became apparent, I have lived in Los Angeles County, Orange County, Sonoma County, and Marin County. I have traveled throughout California. I have talked to mental patients living on the streets who clearly belonged in hospitals for their own benefit. In many cases, these sons, daughters, brothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, mothers, were so severely ill that they did not see how much they were endangering themselves by refusing to take their medicine, and living on the streets, filthy, infected, and degraded. I have talked to a few mental patients living on the streets who belonged in some sort of locked facility for the safety of the general public. One man I spoke with in 1997 in Sonoma County--camping behind the church that I attended--was very severely mentally ill. How ill? He didn't realize that the court papers he was showing me revealed that his children had been taken away because he was molesting them. Yet, rather than prosecute this man, the courts turned him loose. He lived out of a tent, receiving $650 a month in Social Security benefits. He was a ticking time bomb, completely out of touch with reality. I could list example after example of mental patients who were clearly unable to care for themselves, or were a hazard to others, but the mental health system, because how L-P-S has been misinterpreted by judges, did nothing about them. I'll drop just one name that I'm sure you'll recognize, that of a mental patient receiving government disability payments, whose criminal history clearly demonstrated that he needed treatment, whether he wanted it or not. He used those disability payments to buy himself an AK-47 and a pistol. His name was Patrick Purdy. His crime was spectacular, but there are plenty of less well-known examples. This is a topic of great concern to me for a very simple reason. My older brother has at times been one of these mentally ill people wandering loose, refusing medication, to the hazard of himself and sometimes to others. This problem is not an abstraction to me; this is a brother who I looked up to as a child, who was laid low in young adulthood by paranoid schizophrenia. The best years of his life have been lost, because the mental health system operates in a manner that is simultaneously inefficient and destructive of both the mentally ill and the general population. I have talked to psychiatrists and peace officers throughout California about this problem. I have studied both the legislative history of L-P-S, and the case law associated with L-P-S. What has become apparent from the conversations and my research is that L-P-S has degraded both the care of both the mentally ill in California, and the protection of the general population. I don't know if AB 1421 is the best solution or not. I know that leaving the law as it is in California is inexcusable, and any minor step to change the current disaster is a step forward. Allen Ginsburg's poem "Howl" includes a line that might have been written about someone like my brother: "I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." Please sign AB 1421. Very Truly Yours, Clayton E. Cramer Labels: deinstitutionalization Clinton Explaining Why He Didn't Take Bin Laden When The Sudanese Government Offered Him Instapundit pointed me to it; I read the account, and listened to the recording of Clinton explaining why he decided not to take advantage of the opportunity. Yeah, Clinton was probably correct that bin Laden had not yet committed any crimes in the U.S., but it makes you wonder what might have happened if the U.S. had delivered him to say, Israel. We already knew bin Laden was not our friend. Think of this as one of those missed opportunities. Ellen Goodman Is Suddenly Concerned About Privacy Ellen Goodman's column is concerned about what seems to be a pretty broad approach to crime solving by the Storm Lake, Iowa, police. A newborn baby was found dead. Attempts to figure out who might have abandoned it, and therefore killed it, went nowhere. "Nevertheless, when the investigation reached a dead end, the police went on a fishing expedition - through the lives of the women of Buena Vista County. They subpoenaed the medical records of every woman who had taken a pregnancy test between August and May." Then they went out and took DNA samples from all the women in question to try and identify who was the mother. Planned Parenthood refused to go along. Goodman's concern about an overreaching police force is legitimate. But imagine if the police found a dead body shot with a 9mm handgun, and went to every gun store in the area asking who had bought a handgun in that caliber--or since Goodman lives in Massachusetts, went and checked all the mandatory handgun registration records. Would you be upset about the loss of privacy? Of course not. She would be talking about how there's no expectation of privacy when you buy a gun. When liberals start to actually take seriously that there are limits to the government's power in areas besides sex and abortion, then liberals will start to get some respect. Until then... Labels: abortion More Mainstream Coverage of the Iraq/Oklahoma City Bombing Connection This from Chicago magazine, it discusses David Schippers' (the attorney who prosecuted the impeachment of Bill Clinton) involvement in investigating this disturbing sign that intelligence agencies have been looking the other way concerning Iraqi terrorism against the U.S. since at least 1995. Another Bizarre Story from Los Angeles, But One That Sounds Like A Movie Opportunity Just keep singing the Gilligan's Island song, "a three hour tour, a three hour tour." This guy decides to sail from Long Beach to Catalina Island, off the Southern California coast. It should have taken a few hours. Instead, 3 1/2 months later, the U.S. Navy retrieves him off the coast of Costa Rica. He has been living on sea turtles he killed with a baseball bat, pulled into his damaged sailboat. He ate parts of the turtles, and used the rest as bait to catch birds. "When the warship's boat neared, they saw a man cooking a sea gull on a makeshift grill – the ship's wooden trim supplying the fuel." Oh, yum! Seagulls are as filthy a bird as there is. A Bizarre Example of Where Sexual Orientation Anti-Discrimination Laws Lead At first glance, it doesn't seem completely ridiculous. A guy was applying to a Los Angeles beauty school. For whatever silly reason, he wants to dress as a woman. The beauty school was a little uncomfortable; which restrooms would he/she use? The gals, for obvious reasons, would be uncomfortable, knowing that he was a guy. The guys probably wouldn't be that much more comfortable sharing a restroom with someone for whom cross-dressing is so important that he has to file suit over it. (Of course, Gloria Allred--one of those reminders that there aren't enough traffic accidents out there to keep lawyers busy chasing ambulances--is his attorney.) So what's the solution? "Allred said that, under the settlement, Sandy will use a special restroom with a lock that has been set aside for him." So for one person who is, shall we say, "special," the beauty school will have a restroom just for him/her. Would it be that hard for this guy to dress as a guy while he's at school? Why It's Taking So Long For Emory To Fire Michael Bellesiles Instapundit mentioned that the Emory University student paper carried an article explaining why he hasn't been fired, in spite of the university's self-imposed beginning of fall semester deadline: Bellesiles appealed the decision of the independent panel. I guess that means that they weren't impressed with the fine scholarship shown in Arming America. If you want to know what the controversy is all about, go here. It would be tempting to say that I have made a cottage industry out of finding "discrepancies" in Arming America but "industry" implies that someone is buying. If you have an in with a serious publishing house somewhere, please get in touch. Oxford University Press looked at my book about this fraud, and their reviewers called it "persuasive, almost unrefutable" and no, they weren't interested. Monday, September 23, 2002
My Review of Reign of Fire from Shotgun News I added "What Caliber Do You Use For Your Dragons?", Shotgun News, October 14, 2002, 21-22, a movie review of Reign of Fire, on my web site. Another Powerful Piece of Journalism by Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times This report is about the assassination by al-Qaida of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001. It isn't difficult to see in hindsight that the U.S. really blew it, by failing to identify that our interests involved overthrowing the Taliban. Of course, the same crowd that now says that the U.S. is responsible for September 11 because we intervene in the affairs of other countries would have been upset had we assisted the Northern Alliance several months earlier. Does Iraq Already Have Nuclear Weapons? This article in the Asia Times argues that it may already have nuclear weapons, and claims that the Israeli government believes that Iraq has at least three 10 kiloton bombs. The article also discusses the question of the 200 nuclear weapons that some Ukrainians claim are missing. When To Lock Your House Loan... Part of what is driving interest rates down is the fear of war. As scared investors buy the only really safe investment--U.S. Government bonds--it drives up the price. Because price and yield are inversely related, as the price of bonds go up, the effective yield drops. Since so many mortgages are tied to bond yields, your best opportunity to get a really spectacular interest rate on a mortgage is to lock your loan rate when yields are low, prices are high--and investors are scared. My guess is that the first day of the war will be the day to lock your loan. I expect that the war will be over in days, and once that becomes clear, pressure on bond prices will drop, yields will start to go up, and so will mortgage rates. For those of will a bit of capital floating around, buying Treasurys now, and selling them on the first day of the war would seem a fairly safe way to make a short-term capital gain, along with gathering a small amount of interest. Obviously, this works best the longer term of a Treasury you buy (being most influenced in price by market conditions). Of course, if something happens to prevent a war, such as Hussein's military performing a 7.62x39mm impeachment, boy, are you going to feel stupid! Hussein's Views About Jews The New York Times took time out from their ranting against the Bush Administration to reprint Saddam Hussein's response to the U.S. demands for a resolution against Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction. Take a look at his explanation of why the U.S. is pushing for this: In targeting Iraq, the United States administration is acting on behalf of Zionism, which has been killing the heroic people of Palestine, destroying their property, murdering their children and seeking to impose their domination on the whole world, not only militarily, but also economically and politically. Now, strictly speaking, Zionism isn't all Jews, but this "seeking to impose their domination on the whole world" makes me want to laugh, and then to cry. Zionism has some fairly unpleasant aspects to it (Judaism without Yahweh, and a strong socialist economic origin), but the rest of this paragraph sounds like Hussein has been reading The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and taking it seriously. (You can find an online edition here--and these tweak-outs actually believe this obvious Czarist secret police fraud.) What is really interesting to me is how "progressive" sorts are allying themselves with the sort of anti-Semitic nonsense that wasn't believable in 1911, wasn't believable in 1939, and still isn't believable. Does anyone seriously think that if a conspiracy like this existed, the conspirators would have reduced it to print so that it could be stolen? Proof That Some People Don't Have Enough Sense to Buy Bread At the Store Without Assistance From USA Today, this disturbing report: An increasing number of American youths who use the club drug Ecstasy are mixing it with the anti-impotence drug Viagra, leading drug-abuse specialists to warn about the health risks of a combination that users say fuels all-night dancing and marathon sex. |
