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More Terrorism From the Religion of Peace
From Reuters: Some 35 corpses have been found and more were expected at the site of an explosion that demolished a military hospital Friday in a Russian region bordering rebellious Chechnya, Interfax news agency quoted a state prosecutor as saying.
Russian behavior in Chechnya has been deplorable at times, no question, but the behavior of the Chechnya rebels does nothing to make me sympathetic to their cause. The Islamofascist movement needs to be wiped out.
Senator Complains About Activist Supreme Court
Oh my. A member of the U.S. Senate is complaining about the Court's "torrent of aggressively activist and legally dubious decisions" and how it has "invalidated federal laws at the most astounding rate in our nation's history...." Which right-winger is whining? Hilary Clinton.
Wait a minute! I thought liberals liked activist judges? I guess it's just her ox being Al Gored.
John Wayne: Not Just a Movie Hero, It Seems
The Guardian reports that Stalin decided that John Wayne's fierce anti-communism represented a threat to the Soviet Union's plans to take over the world, and sent assassins to America to kill him.Joseph Stalin ordered the KGB to assassinate John Wayne because he considered his anti-communist rhetoric a threat to the Soviet Union, according to a new biography of the film star based on interviews with Wayne's close associates and the movie legend Orson Welles.
Stalin apparently learned of Wayne's popularity from the Russian filmmaker Sergei Gerasimov, who attended a peace conference in New York in 1949. Michael Munn, a film historian and author of John Wayne - The Man Behind The Myth, said Gerasimov told Stalin of Wayne's fervent anti-communist beliefs.
"Stalin decided that he would have him killed," said Mr Munn, who says he was told of the plot by Orson Welles at a dinner in 1983. Welles had said that the KGB was given the task of assassinating Wayne.
"Mr Welles was a great storyteller," said Mr Munn, "but he had no particular admiration for John Wayne." He said that Welles had offered the story without prompting, and that his sources were excellent.
A prominent Russian filmmaker, Alexei Kapler (who was imprisoned for an affair with Stalin's 16-year-old daughter, Svetlana), had told another Russian filmmaker, Sergei Bondachuk, about the order. Bondachuk was sceptical at first, but after Gerasimov confirmed the story, Bondachuk told Welles.
Larry Flynt Files For California Governor Race
They are having a recall election out there, and along with 123 other people that have filed papers (but not necessarily the required signatures), Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler has submitted his paperwork. "California is the most progressive state in the union," said Flynt, 61. "I don't think anyone here will have a problem with a smut peddler as governor."
As much as I disrespect California politics, I think there comes a point where even Californians can't take someone seriously--and Larry Flynt is that example. To Flynt's credit, he at least knows what he sells, and doesn't pretend otherwise. (Yes, I'm thinking of Bob Guccione.)
Cervical Cancer & Pap Smears
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has changed its recommendations on how often women should have a Pap smear done to check for signs of cervical cancer. The language is delicately worded to avoid insulting anyone, or even worse, raising questions about the advisability of having too many different sexual partners: Among ACOG's new recommendations:
Notice how carefully that was phrased, "acquiring high-risk types of HPV that cause premalignant cervical cancer"? It seems the medical establishment is playing along with the entertainment media on this--we can't dare say bluntly, "The more sexual partners a woman has, and the more sexual partners that her partner has, the greater her risk of picking up a strain of HPV that could lead to cervical cancer." That would sound too much like they were promoting chastity, or at least not changing sexual partners frequently (for both men and women).
Changes in Screening Frequency
· First screen -- Screening of cervical cytology (cervical cells) should begin by approximately 3 years after first sexual intercourse or by age 21, whichever comes first. (Previously, ACOG called for screening by the onset of sexual activity or by age 18, whichever occurred first.)
· Women up to age 30 -- Women this age should undergo annual cervical cytology screening. (Previously, ACOG did not distinguish between age groups.) Women under age 30 have a higher likelihood than older women of acquiring high-risk types of HPV that cause premalignant cervical disease, which should be ruled out before extending the testing intervals.
How Dare An Official Suggest The Most Effective Way of Preventing AIDS!
From Reuters: ATLANTA (Reuters) - The Bush administration's second-ranking health official on Wednesday advocated making abstinence a key pillar of HIV prevention programs for young Americans, prompting sharp criticism from AIDS activists.
Look: there is no question that the most effective ways to stop the spread of AIDS are not to share needles, and is to reduce the number of sexual partners per lifetime, including engaging in monogamy--and yet "AIDS activists" (which is a euphemism for homosexual activists) are jeering the suggestion. So why is there this big push for homosexual marriage if suggesting monogamy gets you jeers?
"Encouraging young people and young adults to abstain is the only appropriate initial strategy," Claude Allen, deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, told delegates at the end of the 2003 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.
"Delaying sexual debut is the first message they should hear," said Allen, a leading proponent of abstinence-only sex education and a former aide to conservative icon and former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.
While acknowledging that condoms could sometimes stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases, Allen said their use should not take priority over messages that stressed abstinence and monogamy to young people.
Allen's comments prompted jeers from hundreds of activists at the conference in Atlanta and came just days after the federal government reported that the number of AIDS cases had risen in 2002 for the first time in nearly a decade.
Pretty clearly, "homosexual marriage," at least for a lot of the activists, doesn't mean monogamy. I think if most Americans who support homosexual marriage realized that for many homosexual men, "marriage" means that you come home to the same guy each night after exchanging bodily fluids with complete strangers in the bars, they would be a bit less sympathetic to the concept. Before you accuse me of bigotry on this, read what homosexuals write about the subject. WARNING: some of the language from these newsgroup postings is offensive and vulgar. Of course, that's also a defining characteristic of at least one rather noisy gay subculture: here, and here, and here, and here. This is an especially blunt and crude statement of what some homosexuals think of the value of monogamy.
Oh yeah, here's a clear statement about monogamy that I can actually quote on my blog without altering the language:Umm, I hate to break this to you, but monogamy was developed by heterosexuals to aid in familial raising of children. There is no reason for homosexuals to be monogamous (unless that is the person you most want to be with) unless you are raising children.
Moving Good Jobs Overseas
This Time article will ruin your day--at least, if you have a good paying professional level job. The only consolation is that some engineering jobs that I know of that have moved to India--have moved back. It's hard to do some types of engineering remotely.
Yahoo Stores; Helping My Father-In-Law Set Up His Golf Putter e-Commerce Operation
My father-in-law asked me to help him get an Internet commerce operation going for him a little while back. I don't know anything about golf, but I do a bit about web pages, e-commerce, and related subjects. It was an interesting experience. I ended up using the Yahoo store interface (store.yahoo.com) because it was a pretty well packaged way to set up a store quickly.
The Yahoo store interface is really designed for the merchant that doesn't know anything about HTML, web pages, or e-commerce. Those of us who know just enough to be dangerous can do a bit more with it than they really intended. In exchange for making it painless (well, almost painless) technically, they charge $49.95 to host the store, and $22.95 for the merchant credit card processing (and no, you can't skip their merchant credit card processing business and just use PayPal--I asked).
Anyway, if you want to see what I do when I'm not writing software at work, or writing books, or writing articles, or blogging madly, or raising kids, you can visit my father-in-law's web site selling a somewhat unusual golf putter.
Rising Bonds Rates
It's nice to see bond rates beginning to rise. (Well, it's nice for me, maybe not for you.) I see municipal bonds with yields above 5%. While many of them are California state bonds, and probably not the most safe investment, there are reasonably safe municipal bonds all over the country with yields above 5% now. Almost all of them are callable before maturity--but nicely enough, many of them have these high, tax-free (at least federally tax-free for me) yields with prices below par--so even if they get called at par, as many of them can be, these are reasonably attractive yields.
There are long-term Ford and GM bonds with yields above 7%--and even a GM bond due in 2031 with a yield of 8.5%! These are encouraging signs. I do not think it implausible that I will be able to construct a diversified basket of corporate bonds with an average yield of 8% or even 9% within three years. Of course, to make that yield attractive, the Iraq situation has to be finally straightened up, our troops brought up, and the deficit spending ends. I don't find that implausible, however.
An Analysis of Arab Culture and Its Influence on Arab Warfighting Abilities
This is a very, very interesting article by an officer with long experience training Arab armies. He's not sneering at Arabs; he's saying that there are political and cultural constructs that have developed there in the last few decades, reinforced by the somewhat similar attitudes of the Soviet Union (long an ally of many Arab states) that cause these problems. It's a long, thoughtful, interesting article filled with useful and sometimes amusing examples. Here's a taste: Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for a foreign instructor, whose credibility, for example, is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to “sharing answers” in class — often in a rather overt manner or in junior officers concealing scores higher than those of their superiors.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer may feel he has been deliberately set up for public humiliation. In the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he may then become an enemy of the instructor, and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation — and learning becomes impossible.
How To Make A Lot Of Enemies, Very Quickly
I found these links over at The Cranky Professor, about a German professor who has published a bombshell about the Koran. He, understandably, writes under a pseudonym. NOTE: there are lots of special characters below--you may want to read the originals, if you know enough to make sense of the special characters. From the MSNBC account: In a note of encouragement to his fellow hijackers, September 11 ringleader Muhammad Atta cheered their impending "marriage in Paradise" to the 72 wide-eyed virgins the Qur'an promises to the departed faithful. Palestinian newspapers have been known to describe the death of a suicide bomber as a "wedding to the black-eyed in eternal Paradise." But if a German expert on Middle Eastern languages is correct, these hopes of sexual reward in the afterlife are based on a terrible misunderstanding.
There's a review in something called HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES that is a lot more scholarly in style, but makes similar points:
ARGUING THAT TODAY'S version of the Qur'an has been mistranscribed from the original text, scholar Christoph Luxenberg says that what are described as "houris" with "swelling breasts" refer to nothing more than "white raisins" and "juicy fruits."
Luxenberg--a pseudonym--is one of a small but growing group of scholars, most of them working in non-Muslim countries, studying the language and history of the Qur'an. When his new book is published this fall, it's likely to be the most far-reaching scholarly commentary on the Qur'an's early genesis, taking this infant discipline far into uncharted--and highly controversial--territory. That's because Islamic orthodoxy considers the holy book to be the verbatim revelation of Allah, speaking to his prophet, Muhammad, through the Angel Gabriel, in Arabic.
...
Luxenberg's chief hypothesis is that the original language of the Qur'an was not Arabic but something closer to Aramaic. He says the copy of the Qur'an used today is a mistranscription of the original text from Muhammad's time, which according to Islamic tradition was destroyed by the third caliph, Osman, in the seventh century. But Arabic did not turn up as a written language until 150 years after Muhammad's death, and most learned Arabs at that time spoke a version of Aramaic. Rereading the Paradise passage in Aramaic, the mysterious houris turn into raisins and fruit--much more common components of the Paradise myth.
...
The forthcoming book contains plenty of other bombshells. It claims that the Qur'an's commandment for women to cover themselves is based on a similar misreading; in Sura 24, the verse that calls for women to "snap their scarves over their bags" becomes in Aramaic "snap their belts around their waists." Even more explosive are readings that strengthen scholars' views that the Qur'an had Christian origins. Sura 33 calls Muhammad the "seal of the prophets," taken to mean the final and ultimate prophet of God. But an Aramaic reading, says Luxenberg, turns Muhammad into a "witness of the prophets"--i.e., someone who bears witness to the established Judeo-Christian texts. The Qur'an, in Arabic, talks about the "revelation" of Allah, but in Aramaic that term turns into "teaching" of the ancient Scriptures. The original Qur'an, Luxenberg contends, was in fact a Christian liturgical document--before an expanding Arab empire turned Muhammad's teachings into the basis for its new religion long after the Prophet's death. Western scholars have since the nineteenth century been aware of the influence of foreign languages, particularly of the dialect of Aramaic called Syriac, on the vocabulary of the Qur'an. Luxenberg assembles all of the pieces of this line of research into a systematic examination of the Arabic of the Qur'an in order to provide a general solution to its many textual difficulties. The conclusions drawn about the source of the Qur'an, its transmission history from Muhammad to cUthm¨?n, and its thematic content rest on arguments drawn from evidence collected and examined through the tools of philological and text-critical methods. No part of the method rests on a blind acceptance of religious or traditional assumptions of any kind, especially with respect to the Arabian commentators. Until now, Western critical commentators of the first rank have not been critical enough in this regard and Luxenberg directly and indirectly through his conclusions proves that their trust was betrayed. Hence any argument that seeks to prove Luxenberg's findings incorrect cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of the Qur'an. This is an important contribution of the study.
The rest of the review is well worth reading, for those as warped as myself who enjoy reading about philological analysis.
...
According to Islamic tradition, the Qur'an was transmitted in part by an uninterrupted chain of "readers," Arabic qurr¨??¯, contemporaries of Muhammad such as ibn cAbbas (d. 692) and maintained by such early authorities as Anas ibn M'lik (d. 709). Contradicting this is another tradition, that cUthm¨?n obtained the "leaves" of the Qur'an from Muhammad's widow Hafsa, and assembled them into a codex. The Islamic tradition is unable to pinpoint when the diacritical points were finally "fixed," a process that unfolded over three hundred years, according to Blach¨¨re. The reason for the difficulty in tracing the development of the Qur'an before cUthm¨?n is, as Tabar¨© points out, that cUthm¨?n destroyed all manuscripts with variant readings of the consonantal text which disagreed with his final recension.
...
If qury¨?n means "lectionary," and if the text itself claims to be a clarification of an earlier text, then that earlier text must be written in another language. The only candidate is the Old and New Testament in Syriac, the Peshitta. Hence the influence of Aramaic on the Arabic of Muhammad has an identifiable, textual origin. At the very end of the work, Luxenberg makes a compelling argument that sura 108 is a close allusion to the Peshitta of 1 Peter 5:8-9. Indeed this sura, which is only three lines long, is one of the most difficult passages for the Arabian as well as the Western commentators. Luxenberg shows why: it is composed of transcriptions into Arabic writing of the Syriac New Testament text, i.e., there is almost no "Arabic" in the sura. These are "revealed" texts, and insofar as the Qur'an contains quotations or paraphrases of them, the Qur'an is also "revealed."
This is potentially explosive (and this is the great understatement of the millenium). Wait, let me quote from The Cranky Professor on this, who also engages in extreme understatement:However, the outcome may be remarkable. For those of you who don't know, Christians NEVER held a position on the Bible nearly so exalted as Islam does on the Qur'an, and Biblical textual scholarship is still reverberating in Christianity. The effects on Islam could be interesting.
One of the traditional objections of Islam to Christianity was that it claimed that Christianity had "corrupted" the Word of God. If this professor's claims are true, it would seem quite the opposite--that the Koran is a corruption of early Syrian Christian doctrines, and that a serious effort was made in the time after Mohammed to create an Arab nationalist religion out of something that was apparently not originally intended to be a separate religion.
Of course, German School of Higher Criticism sorts used similar techniques to understand the Christian Bible at the end of the 19th century. While some of their arguments have withstood the test of time (at least, to liberal and even some conservative theologians), many have turned out to be far less persuasive as others have critically examined the arguments. Nonetheless, this raises serious and interesting questions--and potentially, blows great holes in the most fanatical of Islamic fundamentalism.
Drug Reimportation Dispute
I have kept my nose out of this one, but I have been irritated with the obviously false claims that allowing prescription medicines sold in Canada to be imported into the U.S. would endanger the health of Americans. I have explained to all those who would listen that while I don't like having American-made prescription medications more expensive here than anywhere else in the world, the alternative is the sort of price controls that the rest of the world has--and which have the net effect of Americans subsidizing the rest of the world. (The American drug companies make their big profits here, to compensate for the cheapness of Canadian prescriptions.)
I am pleased to see a very nice short explanation of the problems here.That's the truth, PhRMA guys, and I hope you're learning to live with it. All this "Seniors Coalition" fake-grassroots stuff doesn't cut it any more, and it was idiotic to think that it would. Similarly sparkling was that plan of writing the talking points for the Traditional Values Coalition, in such a way that reporters could see that the software was actually licensed to PhRMA employees. Oh yes, when my mortgage payment rolls around, I can take comfort in knowing that my livelihood depends on people who thought that this was a slick and effective move.
I agree that there are legitimate arguments about this, but they suffer from two problems:
I've said it before: the "unsafe drugs" argument is a loser. It smells, and the smell clings to people who take it seriously (or pretend to.) There are real arguments against drug reimportation, arguments that thinking adults have a reasonable chance of understanding and sympathizing with. But we can't make them while we're pretending that antihistamines from Edmonton are going to poison everyone, now can we?
1. They require intelligent people to understand those legitimate arguments. You may recall the (perhaps apocryphal) story about Adlai Stevenson being approached during one of his presidential campaigns, and one of his supporters gushing, "All of the intelligent people support you!" His response, "But madam, I need a majority."
2. Even if you managed to explain the problem to the 10% or so of the electorate who aren't too stupid, too lazy, or too stoned to listen, the argument becomes, "Please let us make unreasonable profits off the American public to subsidize the rest of the world." This is a real loser of a political argument when you want the American people to take your side.
There is something fundamentally immoral about overcharging Americans to subsidize the rest of the world, but this is one of those "free rider" cases that economists talk about a lot. I suppose that the only fair thing to do would be to negotiate with the other governments for a somewhat fairer arrangement--somewhat higher prices in Canada, Britain, and Western Europe, in exchange for somewhat lower prices in America. If there is anything to be learned from the free rider problems of economics, it is that appeals to the good intentions and morality of social democracies is about like appealing to the good intentions and morality of looters during a riot, or asking capitalists to restrain themselves for the public good.
I suppose that we'll just have to take on the chin, and consider it a price of being morally superior to a lot of other nations, that take advantage of our goodwill.
Thanks to Instapundit for the link.
This Is Not a Good Ally to Have...
The Catholic Church has tried to build alliances to non-Catholic churches in opposition to gay marriage.
A friend of mine once described the Catholic Church as "always fighting the last century's battles." At the beginning of the 20th century, as most intellectuals were turning against capitalism, the Church took up the battle against socialism. As socialism has collapsed at the close of the 20th century, the Catholic Church has taken up the cause of democratic socialism. They can't ever seem to get it right.
Ten years ago, I would have welcomed the Catholic Church as an ally against homosexual marriage. But first, I think the Catholic Church should try to do something about child molesting priests (most of whom are pretty obviously homosexuals, including the infamous Father Shanley, one of the founders of NAMBLA).
This Reads Like a Saturday Night Live Skit
From the Washington Times: SHREVEPORT, La., July 31 (UPI) -- Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Baptist Church in Shreveport, La., is eager for more diversity, so it will pay white people to attend services in August.
I can't argue with his good intentions, but paying people to attend church? Hmmm.
Bishop Fred Caldwell, who said the idea came to him during his sermon Sunday at the mostly African-American church, said he will pay $5 an hour for Sunday services and $10 for the Thursday service, according to the Shreveport Times.
Caldwell says churches are "too segregated ... and the Lord never intended for that to happen. It's time for something radical." He has gotten some positive response and expects to put out extra chairs this Sunday.
I've attended a number of churches over the years, and while some were pretty well integrated, it has usually been my experience that most churches are fairly monochrome. I don't think it is because racism remains much of an issue, but because American Christians have two distinctly different traditions of worship, divided along cultural lines. Whites tend to a more sober and buttoned down sort of worship; blacks tend to something a bit more colorful and enthusiastic. (Yes, white Pentecostal churches tend to be very colorful, enthusiastic, and a bit wild for my tastes, but they are atypical of white churches in America.) I can be reasonably comfortable with both styles (within limits), but I know that for many blacks, the average white church service is boring and dead; for many whites, the average black church service is a little too wild and emotional.
How Do You Know You Are Too Busy?
There's no punchline on this, unfortunately, just a a tragedy. A Boise infant died Wednesday after a mother having a hectic morning forgot to drop her child off at day care and left the baby in the car all day, Boise police reported.
That's more than "a little distracted," I fear.
Temperatures in Boise had reached about 105 degrees by the time the mother discovered the child in the back seat late Wednesday afternoon, police said.
The woman, whose name was not released, went to her workplace near Meeker Place and Explorer Drive in West Boise around 8 a.m., Boise police spokeswoman Deanna Lokker said. The baby remained inside the car until the mother left work about 4:45 p.m.
The mother drove to the day-care center intending to pick up her child, but shortly before she reached the center she realized the infant was still in the car, Lokker said.
The mother then drove the baby to St. Luke´s Meridian Medical Center, where the infant was pronounced dead.
“The indications are that she was a little distracted or something,” Lokker said.
This Has No Practical Value--But It's Still Neat!
A guy glided from France to England--without a glider. A 34-year-old Austrian mechanic became the first person ever to fly across the English Channel without the benefit of an aircraft, gliding from England to France wearing only a specially-designed suit.
Skydiver Felix Baumgartner started his unusual journey from a point some 9,000 metres (30,000 feet) over the English port of Dover at 6:09 am (0409 GMT), and ended it 1,000 metres above Cape Blanc-Nez, near the French port of Calais, where he opened a parachute and landed at 6:23 am.
To launch him on his high-speed glide, he was taken up from Calais in a Skyvan aircraft, from which he jumped from high above Dover.
Baumgartner, who reached a speed of some 200 kilometres (120 miles) an hour during his glide was wearing an aerodynamic suit fitted with a 1.80 metre (six-foot) long carbon-fibre wing for the 35 kilometre (20 mile) glide.
Voting Fraud & Electronic Vote Counting
Instapundit has blogged about this issue, and I strongly agree--this needs to be more carefully examined. I never thought about this issue until the 1980 campaign, when I had a long conversation with a guy who pointed out that, "When we counted ballots at the precinct level, poll watchers could compare the results to what the county published later, and make sure the numbers matched. Now the ballots are counted on tabulating machines run by government workers. Why do you have so much confidence that they aren't fudging the numbers to help their candidates?" It sounds so...paranoid, doesn't it?
How do you solve this problem? I read a report about voting software audits some years back, and the auditors found that the software was often defective, producing unreliable counts, sometimes as much as 11% off the correct numbers. This wasn't intentional fraud; this was just plain imcompetence by the people writing the software.
Altering the software is clever, but purely mechanical processes to alter ballots are often quite effective for accomplishing your desired ends. Back when I was in high school, I hung around the computer lab--which also did the school district's data processing. This had its advantages. Classes were scheduled by computer. I had been assigned to the wrong period of second year German ("wrong" because a young lady with whom I was irrationally infatuated was in the other period of second year German). When no one was watching, I "improved" my schedule, by finding the right cards in the output deck from the card punch, and making some adjustments. (The joys of the SOCRATES scheduling system!)
There was a downside to having access to some of this stuff. One of my fellow students (last I heard, a VP at BBN) who helped out in the lab somehow ended up with 46 unexcused P.E. absences--and an A in the class. He swore up and down that this was not his doing--just a data processing error. Sandy Rosenfield, one of the deans, never quite believed him.
Auditing software is a daunting task, especially if you are being really, really clever in how you put hooks into it to accomplish nefarious ends. One of my fellow students came to the realization one day that his student ID number was a carriage return character shifted left four bits. (In case you are wondering: this is a guy who was faster doing hexadecimal arithmetic than decimal arithmetic. Yes, we were computer geeks in 1972, before it was fashionable.) Back when all this stuff was written in assembly language, it would have been very easy to put in some obscure code to do all sorts of intriguing things on Dave's half, and only a very, very careful audit would have detected it. (Of course, that's what patches are for--to make changes that don't appear in th source, and so are immune to all but the most careful audits.)
Bush Addresses the Gay Marriage Issue
I don't know if this is just his moral concerns showing up, or if he has recognized the political opportunity to drive the Democrats to the left: President Bush said Wednesday he has government lawyers working on a law that would define marriage as a union between a woman and a man, casting aside calls to legalize gay marriages.
Even a lot of Americans who support repeal of sodomy laws aren't inclined to recognize gay marriage. The Democrats running for President are going to have to make a decision: agree with President Bush (and a majority of Americans), or play to a core constituency that funds the Democrats. The need to keep the money flowing from the gay and liberal factions of the Democratic Party, I think, is going to be too powerful of an incentive. As most of the nominees run to the left on this issue, along with all the other pandering to the rich leftists on the war, the environment, and raising marginal tax rates on those of us trying to become rich, I think they are going to make Bush's re-election next year pretty easy. (The recovering economy will help, too.)
"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and I believe we ought to codify that one way or the other and we have lawyers looking at the best way to do that," the president said a wide-ranging news conference at the White House Rose Garden.
Very Weird: Police Chief Cruising For Anonymous Gay Sex, Robbery Attempt, Shoots The Robbers
This is an extraordinarily confusing news story, but the guts of it is that the police chief in South Rockwood, Michigan, was apparently soliciting an act of homosexual prostitution online. (Another of those serious relationships that Justice Kennedy was talking about in Lawrence, no doubt.) The guys who responded sound like they were intending to rob their customer, not provide an act of prostitution. The police chief shot them under conditions that might have been self-defense. Lorie Brown stands by Walters no matter what the outcome, she said.
In the post-Lawrence world, isn't it being concerned about the police chief's credibility because of this incident just vicious homophobia?
"He's still my friend," she said. "If this is true, his judgment is not what it should be. But he's still my friend. If the allegations are true, then he's wrong in what he did. But it still won't change anything."
Dan Brown said he was shocked when he heard about the shooting incident and how Walters had arranged to meet one of the men. Now he just wants more information, he said.
"If the allegations are true, I wouldn't think he'd hold his position, because basically you can't do that and be a police officer with credibility."
Someone told Lorie Brown that Walters' wife and children were really upset about the alleged attempted robbery and shooting incident.
"I said, 'You guys just need to wait and see what comes out about it because he doesn't even have a wife and kids,' " Lorie Brown said.
Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist
That's the title of an article by Charles M. Brown. His description of his years working with Voices in the Wilderness is no surprise to me--it's the story of an organization whose members' ignorance about Iraq and its history was exceeded only by their hatred of the U.S.: My group, Voices in the Wilderness (henceforth, Voices), was founded in 1996. Its name is an allusion to the biblical prophet Isaiah, who cried out for justice in a wilderness of injustice (Isaiah, 40:3). The name clearly embodied the group's view of Iraqi sanctions: they were acts of injustice perpetrated by the United States government upon the people of Iraq. Someone had to cry out for justice—understood to be the unconditional lifting of sanctions—and Voices members saw themselves as modern-day Isaiahs, calling America to its conscience.
It's a long article, and while I can't call it interesting (none of what Brown says surprises me at all), it's worth reading, especially for those who see the "peace movement" in America as full of intelligent people who simply have a different vision. That's way too charitable. I think a better description is that the "peace movement" is a type of group neurosis.
Voices preached by its actions—more particularly, by conducting regular trips to Iraq to deliver medical and other supplies, all in violation of the U.N. sanctions regime as well as several U.S. laws and presidential executive orders. The quantity of aid we brought to Iraq was always a paltry, symbolic amount, but the real emphasis of Voices was to have group members "witness" the detrimental effects of sanctions for themselves, by visiting Iraqi hospitals, schools, and other areas—always in the presence of official "minders" of the Iraqi regime. These orchestrated trips provided the grist for group members, who returned home to educate their communities on the horrors of the U.S.-imposed sanctions. In my case, the propaganda fed to me in Iraq by regime spokespersons was my primary source of information on sanctions, which I then imparted to audiences all across the United States. The same was true of my colleagues.
Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.
Maybe You Can Find This Data--I Can't
It is "obvious" (there's a reason for those scare quotes) that the repeal of laws against homosexual behavior caused an increase in promiscuity within those states, or a movement of gays to gay-friendly states, and thus, facilitated the spread of AIDS. Of course, many things that are "obvious" turn out to be wrong. You can look at AIDS death rates in gay-friendly states like California, New York, and Florida, and compare them to death rates in gay-unfriendly states like Idaho and North Carolina, and it would seem to support such a supposition. But that's cherry-picking data. To do this properly, you would need to see if AIDS death rates had any relationship to repeal of sodomy laws.
There's another problem with a simple approach like that: AIDS has three principal methods of spreading in the U.S.: homosexual sodomy; IV drug abuse; and heterosexual prostitution (greatly aggravated, I'm sure, by the large overlap between prostitutes and IV drug abusers). The other methods by which AIDS spreads (blood transfusions, organ transplants, non-commercial heterosexual sex) are quite a bit less significant.
So, I decided to try and find some data to see if the hypothesis fits the facts. CDC's Wonder program is a wonderful data mining tool, indeed, but doesn't seem to record HIV deaths as such until 1987 (ICD-9 042). Furthermore, even this doesn't provide particularly useful information, because it doesn't distinguish AIDS deaths associated with homosexual sex from IV drug abuse, or heterosexual sex.
There is the AIDS Public Information Data Set, which provides a breakdown by exposure categories, but unfortunately, doesn't provide state-level data: by MSA; by region; but not by state. This makes it impossible to do the sort of state-by-state comparison that I would like to do. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find state by state, year by year, AIDS death rates by exposure category?
Felons Teaching Your Children?
This is a bizarre collection of news stories about convicted murderers, drug dealers, wife beaters, etc. on the faculty of prestigious educational institutions. Yes, I know, most faculty members aren't like these critters, and it's always nice to see a story like the one about Penn State University Professor Paul Krueger, who apparently turned his life around after murdering three complete strangers. Others, however, have problems a bit too close to the present.
Great Moments in Understatement
A New York Times article about attempts to reopen airline service to Baghdad: The provisional authority put out a formal call for applications from airlines around the world on July 2, with a deadline of July 8. The 20 or so that applied are mostly from North American, Europe and the Middle East. On July 21, however, the authority sent out to airlines a finely chiseled piece of understatement: "At this time," it said, "we still anticipate opening Baghdad International at the earliest possible time, but a few localized issues prevent full commercial operations into the airport."
As Predicted, Lawrence is Galvanizing Hostility to Homosexuality
From USA Today: WASHINGTON — Americans have become significantly less accepting of homosexuality since a Supreme Court decision that was hailed as clearing the way for new gay civil rights, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll has found. After several years of growing tolerance, the survey shows a return to a level of more traditional attitudes last seen in the mid-1990s.
There is a slight majority (I think statistically insignificant, based on the sample size) in opposition to homosexuality:
Asked whether same-sex relations between consenting adults should be legal, 48% said yes; 46% said no. Before this month, support hadn't been that low since 1996. (Related item: See poll numbers)
In early May, support for legal relations reached a high of 60%-35%.
The shift in attitudes occurs as gay issues have been in the news. In recent weeks, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law, a Canadian court decision allowed gay couples to marry in Ontario, and Wal-Mart expanded anti-discrimination protection to gay workers.
Conservative social activists see a backlash to those developments and the growing visibility of gay characters in entertainment, including such TV shows as Will & Grace. "The more that the movement demands the endorsement of the law and the culture, the more resistance there will be," says Gary Bauer, president of American Values.
Bauer says that sentiment will make it harder for elected officials to avoid taking positions on such questions as a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar marriage of gay couples.
Advocates for gay men and lesbians called the poll disappointing. "Clearly, the debate (over recent developments) has had an effect," says David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign. But over time, he says, "The country always ends up on the side of fairness, and I think they will here, too."
Those making the biggest shifts included African-Americans. On whether homosexual relations should be legal, their support fell from 58% in May to 36% in July. Among people who attend church almost every week, support fell from 61% to 49%.
The survey also found rising opposition to civil unions that would give gay couples some of the rights of married heterosexuals. They were opposed 57%-40%, the most opposition since the question was first asked in 2000.49%-46%, those polled said homosexuality should not be considered "an acceptable alternative lifestyle." It was the first time since 1997 that more people expressed opposition than support.
The greater opposition than support suggests that the undecideds are making up their minds, and largely on the side of opposing homosexuality.
If anyone wonders why many Democrats are shying away from support for gay marriage, those numbers are why--for a lot of Democrats, those numbers are close enough to decide an election against them--especially with so many African-Americans, who are a core Democratic constituency--now in opposition to legal homosexuality.
The Increase in AIDS Cases Seems To Be Among Gay Men
From Newsday: The number of new AIDS cases in the United States appears to have begun to rise for the first time in 10 years, U.S. health officials reported yesterday.
Even straight people are aware of, and concerned about AIDS. But gay men aren't? This makes no sense.
The number of Americans diagnosed with AIDS increased 2.2 percent in 2002, the first time the incidence of the disease has risen since 1993, according to preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
...
"Our biggest concern is what appears to be a resurgent epidemic in gay men," said Harold Jaffe, director of the centers' National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.
In fact, data from 25 states show the number of new HIV diagnoses among gay and bisexual men increased 7.1 percent from 2001 to 2002, marking the third consecutive year that infections have risen in that high-risk group.
"I don't think there is any one explanation," Jaffe said in a telephone interview. "Some of it may be related to treatment optimism: 'So what if you get infected? You can get treated.' Some of it may be related to the belief that if you are in treatment you may not transmit the virus. Some may be epidemic fatigue - being tired of hearing about it.
"I think the most compelling reason is that people aren't scared anymore. If you were a gay man in the 1980s, you were scared. You had a lot of friends who were sick and dying. If you are a gay man today you don't have a lot of sick peers."
No parallel increase in HIV infections has been detected in any other groups, Jaffe said. [emphasis added]
UPDATE: Another chilling article--and one that makes you realize how out of touch Justice Kennedy is with what at least a large segment of gay men consider deep and meaningful relationships: ATLANTA (Reuters) - A growing number of gay and bisexual men in the United States are engaging in risky sex with partners they meet on the Internet, raising fears that the AIDS virus could be poised for a major comeback in the group hardest hit by the epidemic.
Online chatrooms and Web sites are replacing gay bathhouses and sex clubs as the most popular meeting point to arrange high-risk sex, according to two new studies presented on Tuesday at the 2003 National HIV Prevention Conference.
...
In one survey by the California Department of Health Services, 23 percent of gay and bisexual men infected with syphilis admitted meeting sexual partners on the Internet, compared to 21 percent who had done so in bathhouses.
MORE SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS
Researchers noted that men who met partners online, in bathhouses or at sex clubs tended to have more sexual encounters than those who did not.
A separate study by the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California in San Francisco found that 39 percent of gay and bisexual males interviewed online admitted having unprotected anal sex with someone they had met on the Internet in the previous two months.
Eleven percent of these respondents were HIV-positive.
The Effort to Remove Child Molestation From DSM-IV
Interesting article about the effort to remove child molestation from the psychiatric community's definition of mental illness. On Monday, May 19th, 2003 in San Francisco, at a symposium hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, several long-recognized categories of mental illness were discussed for possible removal from the upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.
Dr. Spitzer, of course, is who led the effort to remove homosexuality from DSM-III in 1973.
Among the mental illnesses being debated in the symposium at the APA's annual convention were all the paraphilias--which include pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism.
Also being debated was gender-identity disorder, a condition in which a person feels persistent discomfort with his or her biological sex. Gay activists have long claimed that gender-identity disorder should not be assumed to be abnormal, when, they say, it is usually an expression of healthy prehomosexuality.
Dr Robert Spitzer responded to the symposium as a discussant, urging that the paraphilias and gender-identity disorder be retained in the psychiatric manual.
Disagreeing, Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented a paper entitled, "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal." They argued that people whose sexual interests are atypical, culturally forbidden, or religiously proscribed should not, for those reasons, be labeled mentally ill."The situation of the paraphilias at present," Moser and Kleinplatz conclude, "parallels that of homosexuality in the early 1970's."
Exactly. The struggle to legitimize child molestation is already well under way. I do not doubt that the Supreme Court will be asked to find child molestation constitutionally protected within another 30 years.
How Much Progress Has The Nation Made on Concealed Weapon Permit Laws?
I can now drive from Seattle, Washington, to Jamestown, Virginia, without unloading my gun, or removing it from concealment--and without breaking any laws. (The closest that there is to a "choke point" is where Colorado meets Oklahoma--and New Jersey and New York are obstacles to visiting New England.)
The Cleverest Satire This Week
Make sure you read it. I don't want to spoil the surprise by quoting any of it. Let's just say that it's about Congressmen upset about our failure to pacify an invaded country and find the dreaded dictator. And even though the events discussed took place a long, long time ago--we still have troops in that country.
2000 Year Old Fingerprints
From the Guardian: A sealed Roman container was opened today to reveal a 2,000-year-old cream - complete with fingerprints. The metal artefact, measuring 6cm in diameter and showing little sign of decay was unearthed during archaeological excavations at a Roman temple complex in Southwark, London.
How To Deal With Rivals For a Woman
Especially if the woman would rather be with your rival. Saddam Hussein's oldest son, Uday, fed his love rivals to caged lions, according to reports.
I keep reading these sweet, well-intentioned remarks about how the way to remove the Hussein government was for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to pray for these monsters to step down. What do you suppose the chances are of that working when they stayed in power with techniques like these?
Sadistic Uday, who was gunned down in a shoot-out with American troops last week, employed executioners to help carry out gruesome killings at his whim.
And his chief executioner has now told how he helped drag two 19-year-old students into a cage at Uday's farm to be devoured by the beasts.
The 36-year-old executioner, who has used the false name of Abu Ahmad, told The Sunday Times: "I saw the head of the first student literally come off his body with the first bite."
Ahmad was then forced to watch as the lions ate the two men.
"By the time they were finished, there was little left but for the bones and bits and pieces of unwanted flesh," he said.
He later learned that the victims had "competed with Uday where some young ladies were concerned".
By the way, the rest of the article is even a bit more depressing.
Sloppy Science?
This press release from UC Berkeley describes the defining psychological characteristics of conservatives. Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
Professor James Lindgren, who I greatly respect, points out that the "researchers" seem to have missed one of the highest quality data resources available on what conservatives feel and think, and it directly contradicts many of their claims:
Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
Terror management
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.The Jost article claims that conservatives are angry and fearful and it builds on a literature that claims that conservatives are unhappy. I find this strange, given the decades of superb data showing the opposite. In the NORC General Social Survey (a standard social science database, second only to the U.S. Census in use by U.S. sociologists), the GSS asks the standard survey question about happiness in general. In the 1998-2002 GSS, extreme conservatives are much more likely to report being "very happy" than extreme liberals--47.1% to 31.6%. Earlier years show a similar pattern.
Well, that's not so surprising, is it? If you are happy with the way things are, why would you want to upset the applecart? If anything, it would make more sense to want to change the status quo if you were unhappy. There's a lot more to Lindgren's critique, and it generally blows the bottom out of this little boat.
This conservative happiness carries over into most other aspects of life as well. Conservatives usually report being happier in their jobs than liberals. In the 2002 GSS, for example 65.2% of extreme conservatives report being "very satisfied" with their jobs in general, while only 50% of extreme liberals report being very satisfied. When the question is broadened to satisfaction with job or housework, a similar pattern obtains. In the 1998-2002 GSS, 61.0% of extreme conservatives reported being very satisfied, compared to 53.6% of extreme liberals.
As to finances, in the 1998-2002 GSS 34% of extreme conservatives report being satisfied with their finances compared to 26.4% of extreme liberals. More extreme liberals (34.5%) than extreme conservatives (25.8%) report being "not at all satisfied" with their finances.In the 1996 GSS, questions were asked about anger and fearfulness. Extreme conservatives were much less likely to report being mad at someone every day in the last week--7.3% to 24.2% for extreme liberals. Extreme conservatives were also less likely to report being fearful in the last week--32.5% to 56.3% for extreme liberals. In other words, a staggering one-quarter of extreme liberals report being mad at someone EVERY DAY and most extreme liberals report being fearful at least once a week.
There is a technical term for this study, I fear: projection.
If California government is serious about its budget crisis, I can see one area where they are wasting money.
What's Really Going On In Iraq?
"Chaos, quagmire, demoralized troops," if you listen to the liberal controlled media. Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal's editorial editor, has spent a bit of time there recently, and has a different story, one that you won't be hearing from the DNC's media wing at CBS, CNN, NBC, or ABC: Most reporting from Iraq suggests that the U.S. "occupation" isn't welcome here. But following Mr. Wolfowitz around the country I found precisely the opposite to be true. The majority aren't worried that we'll stay too long; they're petrified we'll leave too soon. Traumatized by 35 years of Saddam's terror, they fear we'll lose our nerve as casualties mount and leave them once again to the Baath Party's merciless revenge.
This last two paragraphs are especially important. Liberals have been screeching about the importance of human rights (at least, if the thugs in charge were allies of the U.S.) and democracy (as long as it doesn't involve state legislatures passing sodomy laws) for several decades, but now comes a real opportunity to do something about human rights violations in a country that makes the KKK look like Amnesty International (at least in relative scale of atrocities), and liberals are too busy trying to turn Iraq into a political football to use against Bush for the 2004 campaign.
That is certainly true in Najaf, which the press predicted in April would be the center of a pro-Iranian Shiite revolt. Only a week ago Sunday, Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable made Section A with a story titled "Rumors Spark Iraqi Protests as Pentagon Official Stops By." Interesting, if true.
But Ms. Constable hung her tale on the rant of a single Shiite cleric who wasn't chosen for the Najaf city council. Even granting that her details were accurate--there was a protest by this Shiite faction, though not when Mr. Wolfowitz was around--the story still gave a false impression of overall life in Najaf. On the same day, I saw Mr. Wolfowitz's caravan welcomed here and in nearby Karbala with waves and shouts of "Thank you, Bush."
The new Najaf council represents the city's ethnic mosaic, and its chairman is a Shiite cleric. Things improved dramatically once the Marines deposed a corrupt mayor who'd been installed by the CIA. Those same Marines have rebuilt schools and fired 80% of the police force. The city is now largely attack-free and Marines patrol without heavy armor and often without flak jackets. The entire south-central region is calm enough that the Marines will be turning over duty to Polish and Italian troops.
This is the larger story I saw in Iraq, the slow rebuilding and political progress that is occurring even amid the daily guerrilla attacks in Baghdad and the Sunni north. Admittedly we were in, or near, the Wolfowitz bubble. But reporters elsewhere are also in a bubble, one created by the inevitable limits of travel, sourcing and access. In five days we visited eight cities, and I spoke to hundreds of soldiers and Iraqis.
The Bush administration has made mistakes here since Saddam's statue fell on April 9. President Bush declared the war over much too soon, leaving Americans unprepared for the Baathist guerrilla campaign. (The Pentagon had to fight to get the word "major" inserted before "combat operations in Iraq have ended" in that famous May 1 "Mission Accomplished" speech.) But U.S. leaders, civilian and military, are learning from mistakes and making tangible progress.
One error was underestimating Saddam's damage, both physical and psychic. The degradation of this oil-rich country is astonishing to behold. Like the Soviets, the dictator put more than a third of his GDP into his military--and his own palaces. "The scale of military infrastructure here is staggering," says Maj. Gen. David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne. His troops found one new Iraqi base that is large enough to hold his entire 18,500-man division.
Everything else looks like it hasn't been replaced in at least 30 years. The General Electric turbine at one power plant hails from 1965, the boiler at one factory from 1952. Textile looms are vintage 1930s. Peter McPherson, the top U.S. economic adviser here, estimates that rebuilding infrastructure will cost $150 billion over 10 years.
...
Iraq's mental scars are even deeper. Nearly every Iraqi can tell a story about some Baath Party depredation. The dean of the new police academy in Baghdad spent a year in jail because his best friend turned him in when he'd said privately that "Saddam is no good." A "torture tree" behind that same academy contains the eerie indentations from rope marks where victims were tied. The new governor of Basra, a judge, was jailed for refusing to ignore corruption. Basra's white-and-blue secret police headquarters is called "the white lion," because Iraqis say it ate everyone who went inside.
"You have to understand it was a Stalinist state," says Iaian Pickard, one of the Brits helping to run Basra. "The structure of civic life has collapsed. It was run by the Baath Party and it simply went away. We're having to rebuild it from scratch."
This legacy is why the early U.S. failure to purge all ranking Baathists was a nearly fatal blunder. Officials at CIA and the State Department had advocated a strategy of political decapitation, purging only those closest to Saddam. State's Robin Raphel had even called de-Baathification "fascistic," a macabre irony to Iraqis who had to endure genuine fascism.
Muhyi AlKateeb is a slim, elegant Iraqi-American who fled the Iraqi foreign service in 1979 when Saddam took total control. (In the American way, he then bought a gas station in Northern Virginia.) But when he returned in May to rebuild the Foreign Ministry, "I saw all of the Baathists sitting in front of me. I couldn't stay if they did." He protested to U.S. officials, who only changed course after L. Paul Bremer arrived as the new administrator.
Mr. AlKateeb has since helped to purge the Foreign Ministry of 309 secret police members, and 151 Baathist diplomats. "It's an example of success," he says now, though he still believes "we are too nice. Iraqis have to see the agents of Saddam in handcuffs, on TV and humiliated, so people will know that Saddam really is gone." This is a theme one hears over and over: You Americans don't understand how ruthless the Baathists are. They'll fight to the death. You have to do the same, and let us help you do it.
...
The one word I almost never heard in Iraq was "WMD." That isn't because the U.S. military doesn't want, or expect, to find it. The reason, I slowly began to understand, is that Iraqis and the Americans who are here don't think it matters all that much to their mission. The liberation of this country from Saddam's terror is justification enough for what they are doing, and the main chance now isn't refighting the case for war but making sure we win on the ground.
"So I see they're giving Bush a hard time about the WMD," volunteers a Marine colonel, at the breakfast mess in Hilla one morning. "They ought to come here and see what we do, and what Saddam did to these people. This was a good thing to do."
Read the whole thing.
Segregation Lives! And Liberals Are Promoting It This Time!
I really wanted to believe that this was satire from The Onion: OBERLIN, Ohio, Updated 1:33 p.m. EDT July 28, 2003 -- A group of parents said they will fight a possible decision to allow a white teacher to lead classes in black history at Oberlin High School.
Does this mean that a black or Asian teacher shouldn't teach medieval history? How absurd.
NewsChannel5 reported that a scheduling conflict could cause the district to reassign the black teacher who has taught the course for seven years.
Using a white teacher at Oberlin High School would send the wrong message to black students, said A.G. Miller, an associate professor of American and African religious history at Oberlin College.
"The message is that we are not concerned about the importance of your historical background ... that that is less important than a schedule conflict," said Miller, whose three children graduated from Oberlin High School.
Jaqui Willis, a black Oberlin parent, said the teacher is a role model and that removing him from the class would be detrimental to students.
New York City is engaged in a different form of segregation: The city is opening a full-fledged high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students - the first of its kind in the nation, The Post has learned.
It appears from reading the rest of the article that the goal of this separate school was to provide a place where gay people could feel safe from violence and threats. That's a marvelous goal--I wish that schools had been similarly interested in making me safe from violence and threats when I was in junior high and high school. Relatively low level violence (no one gets killed) and intimidation (regardless of reason) is a major problem in many schools across the country. Why not solve this problem for all kids, instead of making homosexual kids "special" by giving them their own school? Does anyone besides me find it interesting that the excuse often given by segregrationists in the 1950s--preventing violence from "racially mixing" students--is considered acceptable today?
Operating for two decades as a small alternative program with just two classrooms, the new Harvey Milk HS officially opens as a stand-alone public school with 100 students in September.
The school, located at 2 Astor Place, is undergoing a $3.2 million in city-funded renovations approved by the old Board of Education in June of last year. It will eventually take in 170 students by September 2004, more than tripling last year's enrollment. The Hetrick-Martin Institute - the gay-rights youth-advocacy group that manages and helps finance the school in conjunction with the Department of Education - has hired the school's first principal.
Does anyone besides me find it a little bizarre that an advocacy group gets to make the hiring decision for a public school principal? If Moral Majority were making the hiring decisions for a "traditional values" high school in rural Georgia, the ACLU would be there in a flash filing suit.
HIV cases rise among U.S. gay men
From MSNBC: ATLANTA, July 28 — The number of gay and bisexual men diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, climbed for the third consecutive year in the United States in 2002, fueling fears that the disease might be poised for a major comeback in this high-risk group.
...
Although U.S. health officials have been preaching HIV prevention to all Americans, they have become particularly concerned in recent years by an apparent resurgence of infections among gay and bisexual males.
HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with men surged 7.1 percent last year, according to data collected by the CDC from 25 states that have long-standing HIV reporting. New diagnoses in this high-risk group have increased 17.7 percent since 1999, while remaining stable in other vulnerable communities.
Jaffe cautioned, however, that the jump in HIV diagnoses could have been caused by increases in the number of gay and bisexual males being tested for the virus and was not proof that this group was being infected at a faster rate.
Pirates of the Carribean
This was fun! There are some pretty awesome special effects, but unlike certain other recent films, they didn't spend so much money on them that they needed to fire the scriptwriters. The dialogue is witty, the fight sequences are cleverly choreographed--and after all the awesome moves that have made it into both serious and comic adventure films over the years, there are some sequences in the blacksmith's shop that startled me, and made me laugh.
There are anachronisms in this film, but they are intentional, and played for laughs. "They're more like guidelines than a code." One anachronism that is not played for laughs is a use of Nelson's "crossing the T" manuever (to my knowledge, originated by him against the French in 1805 at Trafalgar). Of course, Nelson didn't perform it in such an outrageous way. Having spent much of the last two years in the 18th century, studying British laws, customs, and weapons in the American colonies, I didn't see anything grossly wrong with the attitudes or materials involved.
Unlike a lot of traditional pirate movies, which were traditionally devoid of blacks, this film has them, and has them about right: they aren't unnaturally modern in their attitudes, and are largely background figures (as they were in real life). The woman pirate seems at first glance like an anachronism, but there were women pirates (not many). At least she isn't grossly anachronistic in her behavior or style.
Some of the pirates are undead, and might be a bit disturbing to young children (say, under 10). There was no objectionable language or content, at least to my recollection.
