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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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Friday, October 18, 2002
Well This Sounds Promising Hmmm. We are looking for a white box truck, from inside of which the shooter may have been working: Later Friday, Montgomery County police said authorities were examining a shell casing found inside a white box truck at a car rental agency near Dulles International Airport in Virginia.There have been no shootings since Monday evening, and we find a matching truck at a rental agency near an airport. Can we hope that he has returned to the land of his ancestors? Or perhaps he has just changed his vehicle? UPDATE: It looks like this promising lead turned into nothing--rumors are that the cartridge case was the wrong caliber. Okay, You Need a Laugh Always keep your cell phone nearby--even when showering: A guest at a hotel in Milan had reason to be grateful for having his mobile phone in the bathroom after ending up with his hand stuck down the toilet for more than an hour on Thursday. The Sudden Increase in Autism This New York Times article discusses the results of a recent California study that found a 273% increase in profound autism among California children between 1987 and 1998. This is a very worrisome concern, especially because the usual suspects--improved awareness, broader diagnosis, possible vaccination influence, parents of autistic children moving to California--just don't explain the magnitude of this increase. I found another very interesting and disturbing article from Wired that points that Santa Clara County is one the big hot spots for this epidemic increase of autism. The article points out that one variant of autism looks like an increase form of computer geekdom: It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger's domain. Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' disorder." Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov's father told me that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers "could be diagnosed with ODD - they're odd." In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland observes, "I think all tech people are slightly autistic."The Wired article goes on to point why Santa Clara County may be experiencing a dramatic increase: The Valley is a self-selecting community where passionately bright people migrate from all over the world to make smart machines work smarter. The nuts-and-bolts practicality of hard labor among the bits appeals to the predilections of the high-functioning autistic mind. The hidden cost of building enclaves like this, however, may be lurking in the findings of nearly every major genetic study of autism in the last 10 years. Over and over again, researchers have concluded that the DNA scripts for autism are probably passed down not only by relatives who are classically autistic, but by those who display only a few typically autistic behaviors. (Geneticists call those who don't fit into the diagnostic pigeonholes "broad autistic phenotypes.")This could also explain the rise in autism in other countries, as more opportunities arise for computer geeks to mate and reproduce. UPDATE: A reader pointed me to this Time Europe article about autism that suggests that whatever is causing the increase is a bit broader than the "tech-genes" suggestion from Wired. It is a sobering article, discussing some of the current research. When my wife was studying psychology many years ago, the Freudian theory of autism was still in vogue--and to her, this was obviously nonsense. The behaviors of autistic children were grossly bizarre in a way that suggested miswiring of some sort. The recent brain research detailed in this article shows that indeed, there are some serious miswiring problems involved. More On The Bellesiles Scandal--And The Left Continues To Defend Lies Instapundit pointed me to Jon Wiener's article in The Nation. Wiener's defense of Bellesiles boils down to the following points. 1. Describing how critics of Bellesiles distributed literature outside a talk that Bellesiles gave at UC Irvine: people coming to the talk were greeted at the door of the Humanities Lecture Hall by four unusually large men passing out a brochure titled "The Lies of Michael Bellesiles." One wore a flak jacket, one had a shaved head; they did not look like faculty members or even history grad students. People coming to the talk were startled, and some were a little frightened, but Bellesiles said calmly, "Ah, so they did come."Did you picture a bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads? Did you notice that he didn't describe the race of the "shaved head" guy? If he had, it would have damaged this image of neo-Nazis a bit. 2. Wiener complains that, Lindgren has also contacted historians who wrote positive reviews of Arming America and, according to the Chronicle, "urged them to reconsider their positions--in print." This is pretty much unheard of in academia.Indeed. So is making up citations for a book. 3. Concerning the 1850s probate records that Bellesiles claimed to have found: The charges raised by Lindgren and dozens of others (including Alexander Cockburn in the April 8 Nation) have largely focused on one footnote to a table in the appendix to Arming America, which lists forty counties around the United States as sources of probate records--including San Francisco. That seemed unlikely to many historians, who know the San Francisco archives were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Bellesiles had re-created from memory the list of the counties where he researched probate records, after the flood destroyed his notes. He went back to San Francisco and found the documents in question across the bay, in the Contra Costa County archives. He photocopied and distributed the documents in question and posted examples on his website (www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BELLESILES/index.html). They are indeed headed "City and County of San Francisco." The Contra Costa archivists confirm that the documents are real--and that they come from the Contra Costa County archives, not San Francisco. That's error, not fraud.Sorry, but Bellesiles has a history of putting up false materials on his website. Too many independent researchers have now examined the "San Francisco" probate records that Bellesiles FAXed to reporters--and they are all Contra Costa County probate records. Wiener also makes the claim that the probate records are only a small part of Arming America. Very true. But Wiener, for some odd reason, neglects the much larger set of problems with Bellesiles's pack of lies: the altered quotes, the altered dates, and the misrepresentation of sources. There's no shortage of web pages that he could have pointed his readers to so that they could make up their own minds. Instead, he gives one, and only one web page address--and that's Bellesiles's web page. He could have pointed to this little collection, in which I provide images of some of Bellesiles's claims, his footnotes, and then the actual documents he misrepresents. I know that he is aware of it, because Wiener refers to me as, Clayton Cramer, a gun activist and amateur historian who savaged Bellesiles on the National Review website and who writes about him regularly for Shotgun News, pleads on his own website for readers to support his campaign against Bellesiles by sending him money).... It's interesting to see how Bellesiles's handling of this question about the missing probate records has turned into an embarrassment all by itself for Emory University. Also worth reading are the journalists who went and tried to track down some of Bellesiles's more imaginative claims, such as this National Review article. Or this article from Weekly Standard. 4. Wiener's intellectual integrity continues: Michael Zuckerman, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and a prominent Americanist, sums it up this way: "The critics' stuff on the probate inventories is bad news for Michael, but the book in no way depends on that. He's got myriad arguments. If people are so crazy about guns, why are there so few gun sellers? So few gun manufacturers? Why do they need a government subsidy? The critics are casting about for a way to discredit him, and they have fixated on the probate inventories, which is crackpot. They have refused to confront the cumulative force and extent of the argument. In fact, the argument is splendid."So few gun manufacturers? So few gun sellers? Let's see, how about visiting this site? It is a data base that I am only part-way through to completing that lists 2,273 gunsmiths and gun makers in America before 1840. For every gunsmith and gun maker that I included in that data base, there was at least one for whom we know that there was a gunsmith or gun maker, but for whom we don't have any exact dates. In a number of cases, we have guns of this early era with a maker's name, but we don't know where he lived, or when. 5. Wiener concludes with this utterly false statement: Perhaps the secret Emory review board has come up with new evidence, though that seems to me unlikely. Barring that, in the end, despite dozens of researchers devoting weeks and months to checking every line in the 125 pages of notes at the end of Arming America, the critics have come up with errors but have produced no proof of intentional deception, no proof of invented documents, no proof of fraud.Yes, we have the proof, and it is present on my web site. Try here, or here, or (if you have a very fast connection, and can wait for this 300 page monster to download), here. Wiener, like many academics, seems more interested in defending fraud to suit a political agenda than confronting the problem. Thursday, October 17, 2002
Ever Wondered Why Western News Media Are So Friendly To Iraq? See this really, really disturbing piece by Frank Foer in The New Republic: Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime--the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories--that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It's not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. "There's a quid pro quo for being there," says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. "You go in and they control what you do. ... So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq." In other words, the Western media's presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.It isn't surprising that Iraq's government does these things to control the media. What's disturbing is that our media play along, even though they know what sort of monster they are dealing with. Why Didn't This Get More Press? (I Think I Know Why) Another astonishing column from Michael Medved: In late September, the Shari'ah Court of the United Kingdom issued a "fatwa" condemning dramatist Terrence McNally to death for writing the controversial play, "Corpus Christi." In the course of that drama, a Jesus figure in Texas enjoys a torrid sexual interlude with Judas Iscariot and later endures crucifixion as "King of the Queers."Medved goes on to point out that contrary to the desires of multiculturalists in the West to believe that Islam is really not fundamentally inferior to Christianity or other religions, this is a reminder that there is a real difference: Islam, in short, stands out among the major world religions for its continued criminalization of expression and opinions. Five centuries ago, Christians might still burn heretics at the stake, but in the last two hundred years no Christian society (or Jewish society, for that matter) has punished religious dissenters with execution or imprisonment. In Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states, on the other hand, the death penalty still applies for the crime of blasphemy. Islam remains the only faith on earth that attempts to impose strictly theocratic rule through the governments it controls. Environmentalists & Littering A thoughtful yet amusing column by Michael Medved that starts with an example of environmentalist hypocrisy: The other day, having pulled my car to the side of the street to gather an especially unsightly accumulation of filth, I took special note of some of the paper work that accompanied the usual potato chip bags and Starbucks cups. Someone had tossed aside an opened piece of correspondence, complete with name and address, from the well-known conservation group the Sierra Club. The form letter began: "Dear Mr. Driscoll – We know from your record of generosity you are concerned about the environment …" and then went on to solicit funds in the battle to preserve the remote Arctic National Wildlife Reserve from exploitation by oil companies.The rest of Medved's column goes on to point out the destructive effects of how the mass media create a sense of helplessness among children about making the world a better place. Preventing Genocide: The Current Scheme Doesn't Work Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, also known as instapundit.com, has written a very powerful piece for Fox News about why the currently accepted method of preventing genocide--reliance on the international community's good intentions--hasn't worked, and suggests that an armed civilian population is a far more effective strategy for preventing the next Rwanda. Wednesday, October 16, 2002
The Liberal and Conservative Debate Over The War On Terrorism Just received from a friend. Origin: unknown. Deep Philosophical Value: unknown. Common Sense & Humor Value: priceless! Question: You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children. Suddenly, a dangerous looking man with a huge knife comes around the corner and is running at you while screaming obscenities. In your hand is a .357 Magnum and you are an expert shot. You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family. What do you do? Liberal Answer Well that's not enough information to answer the question! Does the man look poor or oppressed? Have I ever done anything to him that is inspiring him to attack? Could we run away? What does my wife think? What about the kids? Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand? What does the law say about this situation? Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me? Does he definitely want to kill me or would he just be content to wound me? If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he was stabbing me? This is all so confusing! I need to debate this with some friends for a few days to try to come to a conclusion. Conservative Answer I blow him into the next zip code. Global Warming On Pluto and Triton! Mankind is SO EVIL! See this article about the unexpected and not at all subtle global warming on Pluto. And you thought the evils of capitalism didn't reach that far! Labels: global warming Very Ambitious Telescope Project In the November 2002 Astronomy is an article by Ray Villard, "Unveiling the Dark Universe." This is one of those articles that reminds me why I gradually lost interest in a career in the hard sciences back about 1975. I don't mean this as a put-down--and there's a lot of interesting stuff in the article that I will get to later on--but first a little explanation of why I no longer worship at the altar of Science (with a capital "S"). Like a lot of kids who grew up post-Sputnik, I was raised to believe in Science, both as a means to a good, and also as a form of absolute Truth. I still vividly recall when my eyes were opened by a chemistry professor at USC, a very tall bearded Australian fellow. He was busily drawing electron shells, orbitals, and then the more accurate electron cloud representation. Suddenly, as though someone had hit the reset pulse on his microprocessor, he turned around from the blackboard, and told us, We really have no idea what's really gone on at this level. It could be angels dancing on the head of a pin for all we know. But it's a useful model for predicting what happens, and that's all science is really about.And that, as much as certain worshippers would like to believe otherwise, is the only Truth with a capital "T" about science--it's a model, useful for making predictions, but that not truth in any deeper sense. Let me quote from Villard's very well-written article a paragraph that really captures how silly it becomes if we lose sight of cosmology as a predictive model. Try not to laugh when you read this: Astronomers now realize those pedestals are embedded in an intangible bedrock called dark matter, which accounts for 30 percent of the stuff of the universe. Add to that the even stranger realization that a repulsive form of gravity -- dubbed dark energy -- may be pushing galaxies apart while accounting for 65 percent of the energy content of the universe. The light comes from ordinary matter, which makes up less than 5 percent of the mass-energy content of the universe. That leaves a lot out there we simply can't see.Somehow, I read a paragraph like that, and the difference between religion and science seems to boil down to: 1. Can we use this predict what will happen? 2. Do existing forms of knowledge tolerate new forms of knowledge without a big fuss? More interesting, and somewhat more down to Earth, is the article's discussion of the Large-aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a beast that will photograph effectively the entire sky down to 27th magnitude on a regular basis. It will produce image data at 500 megabytes per second. Remember: at that limiting magnitude, that's 600,000 galaxies per square degree of sky! The goal is to study dark matter by how it distorts the background--and somehow, in a way not adequately explained, LSST is going to see this distortion change over the time that the telescope is repetitively mapping the sky. The more practical interest for those of us in the here and now is that LSST will "also adroitly pick up the solar system's denizens of the night. It will chart the orbits of almost all asteroids and comets that pose a threat to Earth." This means that objects 500 feet and larger that are potential threats to Earth should be picked up an identified by this beast. Even if the pure science aspects of this project are a little too airy-fairy to be of value, identifying all, or nearly all the significant Earth-crossing asteroids makes this a very valuable investment. "I'm Shocked, Shocked I Tell You..." to discover that North Korea lied to our government. North Korea has apparently told our government that the agreement they forged (and yes, that's pretty much the right word) with President Clinton to abandon development of nuclear weapons? They didn't abide by it, and they aren't going to. It's going to be a long century. Ballistic Registration And Its Problems Here's a report from the California Department of Justice about the problems of building a database of ejected pistol cartridge cases, and using them to locate a gun used in a crime. The report makes the point that as the number of cases from different guns increases (and the vast majority are of the same caliber, and many from the same make and model of gun), the usefulness of the database declines, because the similarities between cases are too many. While case markings aren't the same situation as rifling marks on bullets, I would expect that the same problem would start to appear. If you have 15 guns, you can identify that a bullet almost certainly came from one gun out of the bunch--or probably didn't. If you have markings from 100,000 guns, and 30,000 of them are the same make and model, this becomes a statistical nightmare. To make this a bit easier to understand: Consider the case where you suspect that a stolen car is on a dealer's used car lot (perhaps he is a fence), but you don't have the serial number or license plate number of the stolen car. Let's say that there are ten cars on that dealer lot. Is the stolen car in that collection of ten cars? The odds are that while two or three might be the same make as the stolen car, they probably aren't the same model. Even if they are the same make and model as the stolen car, one will be red, one will be green. Some cars of the right make and model will have a sunroof, others won't. It's pretty easy to match up a description of a stolen car to one of those ten cars and say with some certainty, "It's here" or "It's not here." Now, increase the number of cars to 1000. You will have a number of cars that are the same make and model as the stolen car, and very likely at least two or three will be exactly the same color and options (because, just like gun makers, car makers tend to make a lot of very similar cars). You will still be able to pick out which stolen car you are looking for, because there will be distinctive traits, such as dents, or the number of miles, but it's a bit harder. Many of the cars will be close enough that you have to study them carefully. (For ballistic markings, that's where the firearms examiner comes in.) Now, increase the number of cars to 100,000. You will almost certainly have hundreds or perhaps thousands of cars that are the same make, model, options, and color. Some of them will be about the same mileage, and similar in condition. If you have 200 cars that you have to check for these details, you either have a very slow process, or you check only the 20 cars that are the most likely matches. But the stolen car might be number 129 for likelihood of match--so suddenly it's less likely to be spotted. (To make the analogy fit the gun situation--perhaps the car thief painted it a different color, or it is a lot more dented than when it was stolen.) Now, increase the sample group to one million, and you have a nearly useless database. The Sniper Story Gets More Bizarre By The Hour This account says that one of the witnesses says that the shooter used an AK-74. No, that's not a typo--an AK-74, not an AK-47. (If a reporter made a typo on this, I would more expect them to turn an AK-74 into the more well-known AK-47.) The AK-47 is chambered in 7.62x39mm--not a caliber that you could easily mistake for .223. The AK-74 is chambered in 5.45mm--which would easily be mistaken for .223. But here's the question: why an AK-74? This is not a typical rifle in civilian hands. I don't know that I have ever seen one offered for sale (though this doesn't prevent it from having happened). More sign of foreign involvement? This also tells me, unless the reporter just utterly screwed this up, that the witness is pretty darn knowledgeable about firearms. The AK-74 is superficially similar to an AK-47. Anyone that knew the difference and noticed it is probably not your typical observer. The more I think about this, the more I suspect that the witness probably noticed the difference in sound, then noticed that it was an AK-74. The 7.62x39mm cartridge has a very distinctive sound. I've never heard the Russian 5.45mm cartridge fired, but I suspect it sounds more like a .223 than a 7.62x39mm. UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that the Finnish-made Valmet, imported into the U.S. some years back, is the right caliber, and looks much like an AK-74. UPDATE: The New York Times coverage is quite emphatic that the gun is an AK-74, not an AK-47, and that the bullet is slightly smaller than .223 (which argues against the commercial Valmet rifle). UPDATE: There are apparently quite a few AK-47s chambered in .223 out there, so this doesn't add anything to the evidence for foreign involvement, after all. Both the articles linked above, however, are quite emphatic that this is an AK-74. A few of them have been imported, and a number of people are skeptical that a witness would have been close enough to easy distinguish an AK-47 from an AK-74. I don't know what to think. Curiouser and curiouser, as a character in Alice in Wonderland might say. This is a page about the AK-47, and this is one about the AK-74. "We love death, they love life." A quote from Dr Azzam Tamimi at a recent academic conference, concerning suicide bombers: The Al-Aqsa Intifada is horrendous, and there has been many casualties, but the Palestinians are not complaining. They are the victims, and they have the right to fight. They have guns, we have the human bomb. We love death, they love life.Yes, we can see the evidence in New York, Bali, Yemen. Islam, the religion of peace? Germaine Greer Making A Fool Of Herself Again Along with telling Australian women to start wearing black veils (good practice, I suppose, for what will happen if Greer gets her way on the War on Terrorism), she also makes this amazingly ignorant statement: Professor Greer also called upon all women to become more aware of "invasive medical procedures" she said were needlessly being carried out on women.Well, I can agree about "needless hysterectomies," but the Pap smears are done because women seldom know that they have been exposed to HPV. Men who are carrying it are asymptomatic. How does a woman find out that she has been exposed to HPV? Usually because her Pap smear comes back showing signs of it. Just out of curiosity: how many women are left when you exclude, "young women, young women who smoke and those who have been exposed" to HPV? I've had heard the claim that 60% of female American college students have HPV, and from what I am hearing from my daughter away at college, this doesn't seem implausible. Let's see: providing breast cancer screening is "part of a worldwide move to make women terrified [of] their bodies"? So what would Greer call it if the medical establishment gave up on breast cancer screening and regular Pap smears? Neglect of women? The feminist movement always had a certain level of nonsense connected to it, and I remember vividly an interview that Greer gave to Playboy, back when I thought myself "cool" for reading it. (This was obviously a very long time ago.) She struck me as an ignorant ideologue then, and she seems to be getting worse. Tuesday, October 15, 2002
What? And Interfere With My Vacation? Eugene Volokh has done a thorough job of dismantling Mary McGrory's hopelessly stupid column about why war is a bad thing. I wasn't prepared to put the effort into it. I'll just settle for the closing paragraph, which really captures the Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake!" flavor of why rich liberals (whoops, I'm being redundant) are so intent on avoiding the unpleasantness and tackiness of war: War could bring death to the fun in the piazzas on sunny afternoons. Filippo and Doris could lose their jobs. The Italian economy would suffer and so would we if we couldn't go to the country where kindness to strangers is a religion and you can't turn your head without seeing something beautiful, and you can't get a bad meal if you try.Yeah, Mary, it would be a bummer if you couldn't party in beautiful Italy. But there some matters more important than your hedonism. Like stopping a movement that celebrates mass murder; that thinks that a child born out of wedlock is grounds for burying the mother up to her neck so that she can be stoned to death; that thinks that educating girls is a criminal matter; that has so little confidence in its religion that it makes it a capital offense to promote any other religion. All your excuses and rationalizations come down to this: The party's over, Mary. There's real work to do. Redheads More Sensitive To Pain There's no deep political significance to this--it just caught my attention because I'm married to a redhead. It is a reminder that genetic diversity shows up in surprising ways. Redheads apparently require more anesthesia than non-redheads, and suggests some possible strategies for trying to figure out how anesthesia works. What Do You Know? Maybe Not One Of Those Angry White Male Gun Nuts After All The mass media have been doing everything but putting an NRA sticker on the sniper. I have been pretty careful to acknowledge that it could be a domestic nutcase, or it could be al-Qaida terrorists or sympathizers. I haven't seen anything terribly strong either way. The mass media, of course, want it to be a white male American so that they can blame the problem on our "weak" gun laws--and above all, give no indication that we might be involved in a death match against the savages that caused 9/11, and the bombing in Bali. But today's news includes what seems to be an indication that this might be al-Qaida related: For the first time, witnesses were able to give information about license plates on vehicles seen fleeing the scene, including a light-colored Chevrolet Astro van with a burned-out rear taillight.This conforms to the very first reports that suggests some swarthy sorts were involved. I'm Sorry, But This Is Too Good To Be True Instapundit pointed me to this, and the Scotsman newspaper is a reputable newspaper, but still... POLICE had to break up an animal rights protest yesterday when schoolchildren in Aberdeen pelted activists with cartons of milk."Milk for the masses"? I am imagining little Scottish socialists, clenched fists in the air, demanding the greedy capitalists turn over the product of the cow's labor to the proletariat. There are worse products of a cow that could have been used, of course. Monday, October 14, 2002
Run That By Me Again? Another woman shot in the head this evening, and this bizarre, "Run that by me again?" segment in the news account: Authorities in Baltimore, meanwhile, seized a white van and found an assault rifle, sniper manual and ammunition similar to the .223 bullets used in attacks that have killed eight people and wounded two others, WBAL-TV reported. "Jihad in America" might be an obnoxious punk's attempt at being cheeky; misspelling it sounds like a non-native speaker. I'm sure that there's a good reason why they aren't considering this relevant, but you do find yourself asking, "Why?" More On Those Juvenile Killers In Milwaukie A disturbing piece about the shattered homes from which those kids came. Many came from multiple felon parents; other were lacking fathers: "Why the hell weren't these kids in bed?" Court Commissioner Dennis Cimpl asked during a court hearing. Overbuilding Capacity The Washington Post has an article about the telecom boomtown--now busted--in northern Virginia: The empty buildings along the Dulles Corridor are the concrete-and-glass equivalent of fiber-optic lines underneath America's cities. Yup. I have plenty of friends out of work in the Telecom Valley area of Northern California. The 1990s boom is, unfortunately, typical of a particular class of business cycle, with wild enthusiasm leading to overblown projections of the future, and then to massive overinvestment. Once realism arrived, and venture capitalists realized that all those dot-coms weren't going to create demand for this enormous Internet that everyone assumed, the telecom market turned out also to be greatly overblown. It didn't help that many of the RBOCs seemed incapable of installing ADSL services which would have created a little of the demand for this tidal wave of Internet services. Even worse, some of them did their best to prevent their competitors from filling the need. (Yes, I am thinking of Pacific Bell and Covad.) Five years ago, a cocktail napkin and even one successful startup would get you all the venture capital you could want. Now, I have friends who have viable and clever new product ideas, business plans, and skilled bunches of workers who are, unfortunately, immediately available to build those products--and those irrational exuberant venture capitalists now won't invest in anything more risky than a Treasury bond. Why Saddam Hussein Must Be Overthrown--And Why Liberals Should Be In The Forefront It isn't just that the Iraqi government gases civilians, starts wars with adjoining countries, and is building weapons of mass destruction. It is the enthusiasm for torture and rape that the government shows: In an example of Uday's brutality, in an interview with Newsweek, Latif Yahia, an Iraqi exile who claims that he was for several years pressed into service as a body double for Uday, described an encounter where Uday spotted a young couple strolling through a park. He called out to the woman, but they walked on, pretending not to notice. Uday grabbed her by the arm and declared, "You're much too good for this simple man." (Her companion was wearing the uniform of an Army captain). The woman stammered that she had been married only the day before. Uday's guards dragged her to a hotel room, where Uday raped her as his guards watched from the next room. Latif, who says he witnessed the scene, says he heard the woman scream and then went to the balcony and saw her half-naked figure laying in front of the hotel entrance six floors below. Her husband, who cursed Uday, was executed for "defamation of the president." It is impossible to confirm Latif's story, but Iraqi media reported the execution of the husband, Saad Abd al-Razzek. From Amnesty International's website: In a report published today -- Iraq: Systematic torture of political prisoners -- the organization paints a grim picture of routine torture, whereby horrendous physical and psychological suffering is inflicted upon political prisoners and detainees. Other charming examples of how Iraq's current government does things: Al-Shaikh Yahya Muhsin Ja'far al-Zeini, from Saddam City, is a 29-year-old former theology student in al-Hawza al-'Ilmiya. On 2 July 1999 he was arrested in his parents' house following his arrival from al-Najaf. His father and two brothers had been detained as substitute prisoners until his arrest. Security men blindfolded him and took him to the building of the Saddam Security Directorate. Once there, he was taken to a room and his blindfold was removed. He told Amnesty International: Worrisome Behavior by Children Even the most vigorously pro-choice sorts should find this article disturbing: A 16-year-old girl has been pregnant 10 times since the age of 12, research has revealed. Sunday, October 13, 2002
Bring It On Some of you are probably wondering: why would al-Qaida launch this attack in Bali? There were apparently Americans killed, but the vast majority of the dead are likely to be Australians. Why attack Australia? While it is allied with the U.S., it has not been particularly loud in its support for the U.S. actions against terrorists, or Iraq, nor has it been noticeably pro-Israel. CORRECTION: It hasn't received much coverage in the U.S. (at least that I have noticed), but it appears that Australia has been one of the U.S.'s firm allies in this matter about terrorism and Iraq. These sort of attacks, if anything, are likely to strengthen support for the U.S. desire to clean out Iraq and other outlaw nations that are believed to have an interest in supporting al-Qaida. A few weeks back, I warned that al-Qaida and the broader Islamfascist movement was looking to get the West as upset as possible--that theirs is an apocalyptic vision, one that believes that in a battle between Islam (with them leading, of course), and the degenerate post-Christian West, that Islam's morality purity will give them victory over our purely materialist advantages. This attack makes sense as part of a campaign to get the Australians good and angry. The attack against a French oil tanker a few days ago makes similar sense (though the French seem to be doing their best to not let this little matter disturb them excessively). I would expect an attack against Britain next. Wake up. There is something terribly sick going on in the Islamic world--a dangerous movement that deludes itself that its moral purity (murdering non-combatants) makes it immune from our moral resolve and technological superiority. This group of fanatics need to be informed that they are incorrect. An example needs to be made of brutal thugs like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden--an example that will remind people throughout the world that brutality and savagery will be dealt with accordingly. UPDATE: Someone has taken responsiblity for the attack on the French tanker, and their explanation, contained in this London Times article, really captures why there is no way for Western nations to accommodate evil in the hopes of avoiding attack: A spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden told the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper yesterday: “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.” The group claimed to have carried out the attack to avenge the execution of one of its leaders, Abu Hassan, for the 1998 kidnapping of 16 Western tourists.We are all infidels. Even behaving characteristically French, and trying to avoid confronting Iraq, won't save the French from attack by al-Qaida, until France is Islamic. Al-Qaida is engaged in a death match with the West--and with civilized behavior. There are plenty of liberals who are running around explaining why the terrorist problem is caused by U.S. policy towards Israel. Here's an example, from Bruce Haigh, a retired Australian diplomat, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald's recent coverage of the disaster in Bali: "The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine."They are all infidels." Liberals had better face up to this. It isn't about Israel. It's about Islamofascism. Until American courts are stoning women to death for having children out of wedlock; until French courts are amputating hands for theft; until Britain abolishes television (which, after all, shows images of living things, a violation of the Koran); until Sweden requires women to wear burkhas; until Italy prohibits the making of wine; until Denmark stops making pornography; until Canada makes homosexuality a capital offense--there will be no peace. "Murder rate soars to highest for a century" In Britain, of course. The article from the Sunday Times of Britain requires you to be a subscriber (a recent innovation, and one that I don't particularly like), but here's some of the really entertaining quotes: BRITAIN'S murder rate has risen to its highest level since records began 100 years ago, undermining claims by ministers that they have got violent crime under control. Greater availability of guns? He is obviously talking about handguns, because he says, "carry them." Britain completely banned all handguns several years back--no exceptions, not even for the British Olympic shooting team. Oh, you mean the laws don't work when criminals want guns? |
