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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, April 11, 2003
Painfully Honest Description of a Used Car From Ebay: The winshield is cracked and the wipers do not work. Also not functioning are: temperature gage, oil gage and digital speedometer. There is no radio. Tilt steering is loose. Most of the interior is in need of repair and cleaning (several small tears and wear holes). Front power windows work but, rear windows not working properly. A/C works but the heater core is not hooked up. There is no spare or jack and it needs tires. It has a new battery. Radiator and water pump leak. This is a project that we don't have time for. I've only driven it a few miles, so I don't know if I've found everything that may need repaired.Oh yes, for the terminally clueless: I would have this car checked out before driving a long distance. Canadians Are Definitely in Combat in Iraq This news account from yesterday's Edmonton Journal describes a Canadian who joined the U. S. Marine Corps, and was recently wounded in combat: EDMONTON - A Lloydminster father didn't know whether to laugh or cry earlier this week when his son called him from a U.S. marine field hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad to say he'd been wounded -- but not badly.So what's a Canadian doing in the USMC (Uncle Sam's Misguided Children)? Schwartz said his son wanted to get into an elite fighting outfit. The Canadian Army was never an option -- too much old equipment. He got what he asked for, his father said. Just a Coincidence, I'm Sure From Canada's National Post, a column largely gloating over the coalition's victory, with this curious ending: The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter."I am beginning to think a lot of the "No War for Oil" screeching was either projection, or purposeful obfuscation. Why "Ivory Tower" Remains an Insult Eugene Volokh pointed me to this bizarre articlein Seattle Catholic--a strange mixture of leftist anti-Americanism and 19th century Catholic hostility towards freedom. (I hasten to add that I think the professor of history that wrote this is more typical of leftist intellectuals than of Catholics.) Read through the article carefully, and you see that what the author calls "American Pluralism" really means a society in which individual rights matter, people are free to hold a variety of religious views--not just Catholic. Some of the rhetoric is just astonishing in its ignorance: Catholicism has been both history's greatest defender of human reason as well as one of its most severe critics of man's errors and unacceptable passions. It cannot accept that anti-rational Triumph of the Will which the modern proponents of the liberation of the "natural man" have espoused, from Rousseau to the National Socialists to supporters of abortion to capitalist imperialists. The American Pluralist Regime claims to have opposed the Triumph of the Will by combating Hitler, and it has used its role in the Second World War as proof positive that it can never be accused of any irrational, arbitrary Nazi-like actions of its own. And yet it is now, with its program for "making the world safe for Americans," more openly promoting, defending, and disdainfully laughing away criticisms of this violently anti-Catholic principle than any other force since 1945;Sorry, but lumping together Rousseau, the Nazis, abortion supporters, capitalist imperialists, and American Pluralism? Well, they are all human, but that's about all they have in common. You can't even claim that they were all anti-Catholic, since "capitalist imperialists" included France, Spain, and Portugal (the latter two of which were prominently engaged in efforts to spread Catholicism in their colonies). The definitions of freedom, democracy, popular liberation, and peace promoted by the American Pluralist Regime emerged out of a long history of anti-Catholicism and irrationalism. They ensure that the strongest "free" wills and passions dominate, forcing "the people" to express its joy at submission to them. Failure to indicate happiness over such a liberation is seen as a sign that the people has not yet had its consciousness raised to the perception of the difference of good and evil demanded by the strong, and is therefore not yet ready for democracy.From where does this gibberish come? And this little gem, implying that American hostility towards totalitarian thugs is really neo-conservative plan for rearranging the world for the benefit of power-obsessed Israeli statesmen, oil tycoons, and American imperialists backed by Protestant Millenarianists....Yeah, that's it! We get our marching orders from the Jews! Great Moments in Predicting the War I had suggested some weeks ago that we start keeping track of the various predictions by the doomsayers, rather like The Skeptical Inquirer used to check the previous year's "psychic predictions" for accuracy. I am pleased to see that Andrew Sullivan has pulled some really choice quotes from several weeks ago by the usual suspects. I have only checked a couple for accuracy, but they seem to be correct and in context. Keep track of these, for the next time Molly Ivins, Gary Hart, Ted Rall, or Scott Ritter opens his mouth. Scott Ritter Demonstrating His Intellectual Honesty You remember Scott Ritter, don't you? UN weapons inspectors, suddenly turned (and maybe that word has two meanings here) into a peace activist concerning Iraq. Andrew Sullivan quoted Ritter's interview in Time from last September. It was so astonishing that I went and checked to make sure it was accurate and in context: You've spoke about having seen the children's prisons in Iraq. Can you describe what you saw there?So what turned Ritter? Here's another interesting part of the interview: Did you write a report, at the time you were doing inspections in Votkinsk in the Soviet Union in 1988 that said the group your wife worked for was full of spies?So Ritter's apparent interest in children--as something other than objects that might be used for propaganda--makes you start to wonder what embarrassing pictures might be sitting in some Iraqi filing cabinet, doesn't it? CNN's Self-Censorship--And They Admit It And you need to read it in full. It's by Eason Jordan, CNN's head news executive, about how they chose not to report the full horrors of Iraq's government, out of fear of what they would do to their employees. Here's one minor example: I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.Instapundit suggests that Maybe, you know, it's not worth the moral compromises involved in reporting from a dictator's capital, if you're not able to tell the truth.Exactly. CNN, by reporting from Baghdad, gave leftists the impression that Hussein's operation wasn't a great government, but that was all. Their self-restraint meant that those of us on the right saw CNN as an apologist for a very, very evil bunch. It would have been better, all the way around, for CNN to have shut down operations there, and said, "This is a government of savages. We can't tell you the truth about what we know without putting people we know at risk of torture and murder." UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has added a bit more to the story, by quoting from an interview that Eason Jordan, CNN's head news executive gave last year, in which this exact question was asked--do you shade the truth when reporting from a tyrannical government like Iraq? Shall we say that CNN's credibility is now zero with me? Thursday, April 10, 2003
Interesting Claim: Primate Cloning Can't Work Scientists who have been working on primate cloning have discovered that primates (that includes all of you reading this blog) have some significant differences in how egg cells reproduce compared to other animals. To clone, scientists harvest an unfertilized egg from a female donor, removing the genetic material and replacing it with new DNA from an adult cell of the animal to be cloned. An electric shock coaxes it into dividing. If all goes well, the egg grows into an embryo that can be implanted into a surrogate mother.Perhaps all the concern about the ethical hazards of cloning humans (and I count myself among those concerned about that) will turn out to be a tempest in a teapot. UPDATE: My wife's reaction: "Think of it as God's copy protection scheme. No exact duplicates allowed." I Keep Looking for Evidence That This Was an April Fools' Day Joke It's a proposal for a Unicode representation of Minoan Linear B. The Party's Over; All That's Left is the Hangover and Cleaning Up the Vomit I could have picked on a number of companies, but there's nothing so satisfying as pointing to a Silicon Valley disaster, for those of us in the software business: Software company Ariba Inc. (ARBAE) said on Thursday it restated or adjusted all but one of its financial statements since becoming a public company in 1999, citing accounting errors, dubious partner deals and questionable payments for chartered airplanes. Sean Penn, Peace Activist, Concealed Weapon Permitholder From the Daily Californian, the UC Berkeley student paper: Actor Sean Penn's car was stolen as he lunched at a Downtown Berkeley restaurant yesterday afternoon, police said.Now, I know that Sean Penn has admitted that "I am not sure whether or not I am ashamed to say it, but I am not a pacifist." Does anyone out there know if Penn has done any political work on behalf of gun control organizations? This is, by the way, one of the problems with California's very corrupt process for issuing concealed weapon permits. The vast majority of Californians can't get a concealed weapon permit, even those who have never been in jail for a violent crime. (Unlike Sean Penn.) Toy Gun Control New York State is suing Wal-Mart for selling toy guns that don't meet New York State's safety standards. At first glance, this might sound like a "isn't New York State stupid" story. Not really. I can remember getting quite a scare when I lived in San Jose, and what was probably a big for his age 10 year old walked into a park carrying what, at first glance, appeared to be a MAC-10. After a second or two, I realized that he was a little young to be a gang member, and the relative size of the kid and the MAC-10 suggested that it was a toy. But I could see how a cop in the darkness might shoot first. What is really interesting, however, is what this quote says about New York State, and the effectiveness of its absurd gun control laws: "It may be in North Dakota this isn't a problem, because they simply don't have this problem to deal with. We do," Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Thursday. "We're trying to protect children and we're trying to put law enforcement officers in the position to make the right decision."Maybe New York should look at fixing the underlying problems that mean that New York cops have to worry about this--and North Dakota cops, where there are few gun control laws--don't. Children's Jail For some curious reason, most mainstream media aren't giving much coverage to this story about Iraq's "children's jail," for those who refused to join Hussein's equivalent of the Hitler Youth: All you leftists who thought this war was illegal and immoral--are you prepared to admit that you were making a mistake? Is it really true that the U.S. is on a par with Hussein's govenrment? Donald Rumsfeld Says It All In One Sentence "Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators, and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom." Brian Whitaker's Description of the Toppling of Hussein's Statue Some very entertaining phrases from his article in the Guardian: The Americans were getting impatient, and their armoured vehicle lumbered up the podium steps with the elegance of a sexually aroused hippopotamus. Tobacco Settlements Perrmagringirl is expressing her lack of sympathy with states worried that the latest lawsuit may kill the goose that lays the golden cigarettes. I've just finished writing a review of Outgunned: Up Against the NRA in which one of the lawyers responsible for the cigarette company lawsuits took on gun makers--with far less success. It's pretty clear that the only major winner in the tobacco suits were the ambulance chasers who received the huge contingency awards. By the way, the attorney who was one of the authors of Outgunned used the phrase "ambulance chaser" to describe his colleagues--one of whom once went into an intensive care unit, to try and sign up as a client a guy with burns on 80% of his body. Wednesday, April 09, 2003
You Really Have To Visit This Photo Essay I really can't describe it--it's such a droll little essay about the evils of warfare and the moral righteousness of the anti-war crowd, with photographs illustrating their concerns. Some People Don't Watch CNN, I Guess My distant cousin Jane Fonda, making a fool of herself again: VANCOUVER -- Jane Fonda told a Canadian audience that she fears the U.S. campaign in Iraq will turn people all over the world against America.Of course, we can guess why she doesn't watch CNN: Fonda made her comments in Vancouver as part of the Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series. She also discussed Canada, the war, her acting career, and her three marriages and divorces.The last being Ted Turner. Proposal to Make Patriot Act Provisions Permanent This is worrisome. This article in the New York Times (which therefore makes it a little suspect as to accuracy) claims that some Republicans are trying to get the temporary provisions of the Patriot Act (due to sunset in 2005, unless Congress reapproves them) made permanent. I think it's time to light up members of Congress--especially Republicans--and let them know that if these temporary provisions need to be renewed in 2005, that's when to renew them. Don't make them permanent, and certainly don't make them permanent two years before they are due to expire. When The Troops Come Home It is still weeks, perhaps months away before our troops come home--but while we, the non-combatants are flushed with pride for what the armed services of the "coalition of the willing" have done, let's start to think about how we will we welcome them back. Yes, there will be victory parades and joyful homecomings. But at least some of the soldiers coming home are going to be emotionally quite injured by this. From my conversations with combat veterans of World War II and Vietnam--often while they were three sheets to the wind--as well as my reading on this subject, it is very clear that many of the soldiers who have been killing the enemy are going to be very troubled by what they have done. General S.L.A. Marshall studied U.S. troops during World War II, and discovered that even when they were in danger of being overrun, large numbers of soldiers would not fire at the enemy--the sense of wrongness involved in killing another person was too strong. There is reason to believe that this same sense of discomfort is going to be an issue for that minority of our servicemen and women who were actually involved in killing. (Remember that most of a modern military is logistics and paperwork.) It doesn't matter that they were legally in the right, and were serving a noble cause--freeing Iraq from a bunch of monsters--our culture does a very good job of inculcating the idea that killing other human beings is wrong. Even killing in self-defense is often quite traumatic. Some police officers find the experience so disturbing that they end up leaving police work--or delay firing too long the next time they are put into a kill or be killed situation. (Other police officers don't have any problems at all afterwards.) The disparity in firepower and competence between our forces and the Iraqis may also engender some guilt. To add to the problem, we know that civilians were killed by accident, and in crossfire between our forces and the Iraqis. One disturbing account I read a couple of days ago involved a U.S. soldier who had to kill a kid of 10 who refused to put down an AK-47. My suspicion is that a lot of our soldiers coming back--especially the younger ones--are going to be very, very reluctant to discuss the nuts and bolts of combat. If they want to talk about it, to unburden themselves of feelings of guilt, or to release confusion, let's listen as sympathetically and non-judgmentally as possible. If they don't want to talk about it, respect it. There may come a time, a few years down the road, when they will want to talk about it. I've noticed that many of the World War II veterans that I know who were engaged in the killing part of duty--a sniper, a Navy man firing white phosporous shells into caves on Iwo Jima, a frontline infantry grunt--developed serious drinking problems. This should be no surprise. If you have family or friends returning from this war, keep your eye on signs that intoxication is becoming a mechanism for dealing with their feelings. I'm hoping that the military will be providing some direction to family members about this. Unfortunately, intoxication to deal with this is a short-term fix, and can lead to addiction problems that add to the returning soldier's problems. War is a very ugly business. There is nothing noble about it. There can be something noble about the warrior who fights to end tyranny, who minimizes unnecessary death and destruction. There is no war in recent memory that better typifies this goal. But there is a cost to those warriors to go off to destroy a government like that of Saddam Hussein. Iraqis will be paying the price for many years for Hussein's government, and this war. So will our young men and women. The Statue is Down, and The Iraqis Are Riding the Head! I saw a brief live feed on CNN. The head of the statue is being dragged down the street while Iraqis ride on it. I'm sure that they would prefer to do this to the real man, not the statue. Affirmative Action in College Admissions: Ignoring the Bigger Problem Nat Hentoff's column in Village Voice points out that affirmative action programs engage in some fairly bizarre definitions of who is Hispanic, and who is black. What I found especially interesting and important is that affirmative action at the college admissions level ignores a much bigger problem: the vast number of blacks and Hispanics who never even graduate high school: Meanwhile, no matter how the Supreme Court decides on affirmative action, the problem of discrimination in schools remains. The court provided an integrationist mandate with its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education (which said that segregated public schools are inherently unconstitutional), but it has steadily betrayed that decision, so that there are now more segregated schools, with inferior resources, than there were in 1954. Because millions of blacks and Hispanics in those schools have been taught, destructively and inaccurately, that they are dumb, they don't apply to colleges. Many drop out of school entirely.It makes you wonder if affirmative action by colleges is primarily about improving the conditions of racial minorities? Or making the overwhelmingly liberal faculties feel less guilty. UPDATE: Hentoff's column makes a point of the ambiguous nature of some classifications of race. See this amusing description of a guy who insisted on filling in "mongrel" for his race back in 1963. Some Names We Must Never Forget Instapundit has a link to a powerful essay by James Lileks about the bureaucratic reasoning that led to a children's jail in Iraq. It's worth reading, but there was something at the end that struck a chord: Spellchecking this bleat, the computer choked on Uday and Qusay. Did I want the program to learn these words, in case I used them again?I disagree. We should never forget what was done. When my daughter was about nine, she asked, "Daddy, why do you have so many guns?" I told her about the Holocaust. About the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. About the massacres of the the Armenians (not the version that some Armenians like to tell, and not the version that the Turks pretend, either). By the time I was done, I was crying. Never forget. Forgetting is the first step towards making it happen again. Amitai Etzioni's Blog I have added a link to Amitai Etzioni's blog. He has an amusing example of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ad that he considers to be hitting below the belt. When you visit it, you will see that this is true in two senses. That Big Statute of Saddam Hussein in Central Baghdad On CNN this morning, the Iraqis were throwing shoes at it. Paula Zahn, CNN's anchor, of course had not a clue what the significance of this was. (She was obviously hired for her looks.) In traditional Semitic cultures, feet were a euphemism for sexual organs. Hence, the otherwise bizarre Isaiah 6:2: Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.Why would you cover your feet? What we learned in Ancient Near East class is that what was originally a euphemism for sexual organs because identified as impolite by association, and therefore in traditional Arab cultures, you don't show the sole of your foot or shoe to someone. Hence, throwing shoes at Hussein's statute, rather than throwing rocks. Next, the locals dragged in a big ladder, climbed to the base of the statute, dragged up the ladder, climbed to the top of it, and tied a rope around it. I left before they toppled this Stalinist echo down, but it was pretty clear that this was coming next. Liberation! All you leftists will just have to hate America for one more interference in the right of torturing tyrants to abuse the masses. Tuesday, April 08, 2003
A Couple of Surprising & Heartwarming Public Opinion Surveys Instapundit has links to both. It turns out that even in the San Francisco Bay Area--about as extreme an antiwar region as America has--63% support Bush's decision to go to war. And in Canada, whose government actively disapproved our actions? "The COMPAS survey shows 41% of people believe Canada should have given verbal support to the United States two weeks ago while 31% said the backing should have come in the form of both words and troops." Now, I don't how to read the meaning of that, because the article also reports that "only a slim majority, 56%, agreed with the U.S. decision to launch an invasion to bring down Saddam Hussein, while 34% opposed the attack." Does this mean that 72%-56% believed that the war was a mistake, but once started, Canadians should have backed it, at least verbally? Or does this mean that 16% of Canadians are confused? It reminds of surveys a few years ago that showed a majority of Americans agreed that there should be laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation--but a majority also believed that there were jobs that homosexuals shouldn't have, like teacher or Scoutmaster. Presumably, there was a sizeable minority that knew discrimination was bad, but didn't exactly know what it was. Polling Numbers With a Surprise The Washington Post reports a Washington Post/ABC poll of opinion about the war finds: 77 percent of Americans say they support the decision to go to war, a figure that has increased as news of the war turned positive. Just 16 percent say they oppose having gone to war.What's surprising to me is in the breakdowns by demographic groups. Some of the results aren't surprising--liberal Democrats and blacks are least supportive of the war (though a strong majority supports the decision in both groups). What is surprising is this: Viewed by age, the most ardent supporters of the war are those between 45 and 54. That means Americans who came of age in the latter stages of the Vietnam War, many of whom may have been involved in protesting that conflict, are now overwhelmingly pro-war in Iraq.I am surprised because so many of the antiwar activists that I know or are related to are in that age group. History books tend to emphasize the antiwar activism of that generation, which masks that most young Americans of that time did what they were told. Many volunteered. Many more registered for the draft and sometimes with great reluctance, went when they were called. A horrifying number came back dead, maimed, or emotionally scarred. There many weeks where the killed in action in Vietnam exceeded this entire war. I would read those counts in the newspaper every week, both because I was old enough to wonder if I was going to be drafted, and because I had brothers and cousins that wearing Army green at the time. Unlike this current war, where we can reasonably expect a liberated Iraq in exchange for our dead, there was precious little to show for Vietnam except a lot of headstones, a lot of emotionally blasted young men, a mountain of debt, millions of dead and injured Vietnamese, and a poisoning of the political culture of the Western world. To those of you who answered our nation's call 30 years ago: you didn't deserve to have your lives and service wasted. I am pleased to see that in spite of the nonsense of the Vietnam War, your generation isn't frozen in the perception that every war is Vietnam. To those of you who protested the Vietnam War 30 years ago: we were on different sides then. I don't hold anyone in contempt simply because they protested the war. No serious attempt was made by either Johnson or Nixon to persuade the American public that the war was necessary or sensible. Had they done so, we might have, as a nation, decided not to send in ground troops, or alternatively, made a serious attempt to win that war. Either path would have made more sense than what happened--maximum bloodshed with minimum possible gain. The war protests then were a sign that our government wasn't being serious; they should have listened, and realized, as our current president does, that war isn't a chess game. Monday, April 07, 2003
Excuse Me, While I Suffer a Symbolism Overload A Fox News story about one of the presidential palaces in Basra: In Basra, troops broke down the doors to Saddam's ornate palace, finding carved teak woodwork, marble floors, vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. The palace, which apparently had been unoccupied for months, was empty except for a flock of doves.So, are they like, going to release the doves, symbols of peace? Canadian Armed Forces Are, On a Very Small Scale, Engaged It's unfortunate that a contest for writing the most boring possible news headline some years ago included the advice that putting the word "Canada" in helped. From the Toronto Star, we find that Canadian Armed Forces are small scale participants in Gulf War II, not only at sea, but also on land. Canadian sailors are actively hunting Iraqis at sea on behalf of the United States, even though Canada has refused to join the war. Keeping Your Priorities Straight This New York Times article about libraries shredding patron requests so that the FBI won't subpoena them includes this interesting quote from the director of the Santa Cruz County library system: Ms. Turner, the library director here, said librarians did not want to help terrorists, but she said other values were at stake as well.Note that the Patriot Act, at least according to this article, doesn't allow indiscriminate gathering of all records. Instead, it allows the "Federal Bureau of Investigation to review certain business records of people under suspicion...." This is no different from the FBI going to a chemical supply house and asking to see records of sales of ammonium nitrate to a particular person. I am hard pressed to see that applying this same theory to library records infringes on free speech. More troubling to me: The FBI looks to see what particular individuals who are under criminal investigation have checked out of the library is more frightening to Ms. Turner than "the kind of terrorist acts that have come down so far...." Where was Ms. Turner on 09/11? Does she really think that asking for specific pieces of information as part of a criminal investigation is more terrifying than 3000 Americans killed on a September morning? The left is delusional. She could have argued, "This information is not likely to be useful in a criminal investigation." She could have made a slippery slope argument that if you let the FBI ask to see what books a suspected terrorist has checked out, next week they are going to be demanding a full download of all patron borrowing records. Instead, she makes a completely absurd argument--that a criminal investigation is more frightening than kilomurders. The article suggests that Ms. Turner's views are pretty typical of Santa Cruz. From my experiences there, and those of friends who attended school at UC Santa Cruz, I believe this be correct. Santa Cruz is definitely a "reality optional zone." Fallen Heroes List Fox News has a list of what it calls "Fallen Heroes"--American servicemen and women killed so far in this operation. It's worth visiting that list, and reflecting on these lives lost. Not every death is "heroic" in the conventional sense of the word--many were accidents--but they put themselves in harm's way to remove one of the most evil governments in the world from power. We can grieve with their families and friends over these deaths, and do our best not to forget the sacrifices that they made. It would be nice to have similar lists available of the dead from our other coalition partners. The British have lost a disproportionate number of dead; the Australians and the Poles, probably because they deployed small numbers of elite forces in combat, haven't lost any yet. (Let's not forget the Czechs, who while they were behind the front lines, in Kuwait, were at risk as well, if the Iraqis had successfully used chemical weapons on their missles.) If you find lists of the British dead, let me know. "All gave some; some gave all." UPDATE: Here's a list from CNN that shows all coalition force deaths, and pictures for most of them. It's even more sobering in its effect than the Fox News list--because you have a face as well as a name. Baghdad Civilians Rising? Fox News is reporting: "Major bloody confrontations are currently taking place between the residents of Baghdad and the regime's militia, killing dozens of Saddam's loyalists and forcing many of their leaders to leave their positions and change into civilian clothes," sources inside the city told KUNA.This would not be a surprise. Seeing American tanks in the streets of Baghdad--and the destruction of Hussein's statues--would be a strong indicator to the people that Hussein's days are numbered, and we aren't going to wimp out, unless Gulf War I. For All The Good Leftists Concerned About the Suffering of Iraq's Children These Last Few Years... Wonderful reporting from a British reporter for Sky News, describing the luxury of the presidential palace he visited with the U.S. 3rd Armored Division: The floors and walls are made of Italian marble and giant chandeliers hang from the ceilings. In the grounds, treelined walkways run alongside an ornamental lake.If Iraqi children were dying in large numbers of malnutrition, and lack of medicines, as leftists in the West claimed--why didn't Hussein sell off some of the gold taps? Where's the leftist rage about this? UPDATE: Another account, from the Australian newspaper, The Age, involving a presidential palace in Basra occupied by Royal Marines: The ostentation of the buildings and gardens struck the marines after they had pushed through scenes of appalling poverty and destruction. "It's fairly striking - the rich-poor divide, particularly having just driven through the outskirts of Basra and seeing the extraordinary poverty there," said Captain Oliver Lee, Operations Officer with 42 Commando. Nerve Gas Exposure in Iraq This isn't quite what we feared--a full attack. It sounds like a more likely cause is that some container in this compound is leaking. This should shut up the remaining, "There's no proof that Iraq has WMDs" crowd. And here's the smoking gun: missles with chemical agent warheads, just discovered. UPDATE: Now there's a report that says that the troops that fell ill were exposed to a pesticide, not Sarin. Not sure what to think of that. There doesn't seem to be any refutation of the missles with chemical warheads story, however. Labels: Iraqi WMDs 2/3 of Liberals and 70% of Democrats Support Bush's War Decision Instapundit pointed me to this Los Angeles Times poll. Even more amazing than the broad support for Bush's decision (3/4 of all Americans overall), is that a majority supports going to war against Iran if it continues developing nuclear weapons. Note: I'm not necessarily in that majority. Iran is a lot closer to democracy than Iraq was, and I think with some encouragement to democratic and liberal forces within Iran, it could get to a point of being a functional democracy (though probably not a liberal democracy anytime soon). Sunday, April 06, 2003
California Schools Going Down the Potty This is a really depressing article from the Independent, one of the British newspapers. It describes how California plans to let go 20% of public school teachers to deal with their budget crisis. While the article reports that liberals are trying to blame President Bush for this: States across the country are suffering their worst budget crisis for half a century, and few are receiving help from the federal government, which is pouring funds instead into counter-terrorism, the military and tax cuts for the wealthy. Anti-war activists like to call the education crisis in California an instance of "domestic collateral damage", holding the White House at least indirectly responsible.It also points out that California's own political leadership is also to blame. Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, is infuriating even his own party by refusing to contemplate substantial tax increases and handing out favours to campaign contributors, notably the prison guards' union. While the schools sink into oblivion, Governor Davis is insisting on building a new death row unit at San Quentin prison. The price tag: $220m.Of course, the real problem here is not what the federal government is spending--which is a tiny portion of the California K-12 public education budget--but that California's tax structure is a leftover from the 1970s Prop. 13 (limiting property tax growth) and the 1990s being a time of extraordinary revenue growth from all the dot-coms. (When people ask me if I did well on the startups I worked for in California, I tell them, "The IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board made a bit of money. I got to keep some of it.") What the article doesn't discuss is some of the other factors that play a part in making California school budgets such a problem. One of the problems was the Serrano decision, which was supposed to even out spending. Because property tax revenues varied greatly by the value of the property in the district, fairly wealthy districts, like the one in which I lived (Santa Monica) tended to have a lot more money to spend than poor school districts. The hope was that evening out the funding would mean that poor kids would get a better education. In practice, it seems like instead of there being very, very good schools in some areas, and pretty poor ones in others, they all ended up pretty poor. Another problem, and probably the larger one, was what happened when Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142). (Try not to be shocked when you notice that the link is to an article by Albert Shanker--the public school teacher union satirized as the cause of World War III in the Woody Allen film, Sleeper.) Shanker says what I have been saying for some time--the costs of full inclusion are dramatic, and the average per pupil funding statistics seem to hide the fact that the money being spent on the vast majority of the kids is in decline, because the kids with severe developmental problems often require extraordinary funding. The biggest problem here, however, is that California did something rather expensive a few years back--Governor Wilson (a Republican, no less), decided to set a maximum of 20 kids per classroom in the elementary schools. He did this in opposition to teacher unions, who wanted higher salaries instead. My wife was a substitute teacher at the time, and she tells me that the difference was dramatic--it was actually possible to get something accomplished in a classroom of 18-20 fourth graders, where it really wasn't possible in a classroom of 28-30. Now the fear is that California may not only have to abandon the 20 kid classroom, but perhaps go up to really huge classes. Now, some of you are probably saying to yourself, "My classes were 30-35 students when I was young, and it worked fine." You may also be aware that in Japan, class sizes of as many as 40-50 work okay. Of course, there's one difference between Japan now, and American then, and America now: most kids were pretty well behaved, because Mom and Dad emphasized good behavior, and most kids weren't raised in daycare. In just about every class I had in elementary school, there were one, sometimes two kids that were occasionally a problem for the teacher (all boys, in my recollection). Now, at least in California schools with which my wife has fairly recent combat experience, it is usually half the class--most of the boys, and many of the girls, are often a problem, with "behavior contracts" common as a feeble substitute for the corporal punishment approach that was used, very sparingly, when my wife and I were in elementary school. The biggest problem is that lots of parents have abdicated their responsibilities, and public school teachers have no realistic way of solving such a problem. High Ranking Iraqi General Defects The Times of London carried this article--apparently, now that his family has been spirited out of Basra, he's singing like a canary. Global Warming I've previously expressed my skepticism about some of the global warming claims that environmentalists make--at least partly because so many scientists have pointed to serious flaws in the evidence for these claims, and the fact that Mars also seems to be suffering from global warming the last couple of decades--and we know that whatever we might be doing to Earth's atmosphere, we can't be doing it to the Martian atmosphere. The Telegraph reports that a new study, about to be published in Energy and Environment, examined evidence of temperatures in the Middle Ages, and concludes that they were even warmer than today, with the Little Ice Age that starts in about 1300 creating a climate of extraordinary cold that makes the current warming look rather more dramatic than it really is. The Telegraph article doesn't discuss in detail how dramatic of a change the Little Ice Age was, but my other reading tells me that it doomed the Viking Greenland colonies because pack ice prevented regular shipping between Iceland and Greenland. I find myself wondering if the decline of the Moundbuilder civilization of the Mississippi River Valley around 1250-1400 AD might have also been associated with the declining temperatures. I have also frequently wondered if, rather than the Industrial Revolution causing warming (as global warming enthusiasts assume), it might be that changes in solar output, by increasing temperatures, which increased agricultural yields in places like Britain, made available the wealth required to capitalize some of what we call the Industrial Revolution. Labels: global warming |
