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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 31, 2004
Other Recent Articles About Slavery I was sitting in a doctor's office this morning, and I found an article by Andrew Cockburn that covered some of the same material that Landesman did--and some of it seems to confirm Landesman. Andrew Cockburn, "21st Century Slaves," National Geographic, September 2003, 2-25. Concerning Jack Shafer's criticism of Landesman about where are the convictions? Why aren't police doing something about this if they know about it? On p. 23: In 1995 more than 70 Thai women were rescued after laboring for years behind barbed wire in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte,... while federal and state law enforcement repeatedly failed to obtain a proper warrant to search the premises.Cockburn then goes on to list other cases where federal law enforcement managed to free slaves in Washington and Florida--in one case, seizing millons of dollars in ill-gotten wealth. None of these were sex slave cases, but they show that slavery does exist in the U.S., and often involving large numbers of slaves. Cockburn's story on p. 22 includes a picture at a shelter for child prostitutes in Southern California. The caption explains that one girl was "forced to work as a prostitute in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada before escaping her captor." The child prostitutes shelter has helped about 10,000 victims over the last 25 years--although I would assume that most were runaways, and not slaves. Another photograph on p. 25 includes the caption explaining that the pictured "three boys living in a Mexico shelter, one 12 years old, the other two no more than 15. All had been shuttled between Tijuana and San Diego, California, and prostituted to pedophiles." None of this confirms the scale of the sex slavery in the U.S. that Landesman describes--although Cockburn's article mentioned many of the same figures, and seems to accept that the scale Landesman indicates is plausible. Understanding Engineers An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want." Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, and that I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool." Friday, January 30, 2004
The Sky Finally Cleared in Boise And so the Photon Instruments refractor finally had a chance! I am a little disappointed. First of all, it took a very long time for the refractor to finish cooling--although I will be the first to admit that this was a very dramatic drop in temperatures this evening. After two hours, it seems that the optics stopped changing. Viewing conditions were less than ideal. While transparency was pretty good, and even turbulence was low, we have a slightly more than half-full Moon, which definitely puts a lot of skyglow into the sky. To give me a standard of comparison, I put out the Televue Ranger that I have as well. Saturn In the Photon Instruments, the Cassini Division was visible as a gray line, pretty much all the way around Saturn, at 127x. The darker yellowish cloud bands above the equator were visible. Unfortunately, the image was not crisp, and the planet and rings were clearly more yellow than they should have been. In the Televue Ranger, Cassini's Division was not really visible, even as a darkening of the rings, at 120x. There was only a hint of the cloud bands on the planet. The image was crisp--like a good photograph, and both planet and rings were close to brilliant white, with just a hint of yellow. M42 (Orion Nebula) The clouds around the Trapezium at 91x were clearly visible, and seemed to have some detail. The four stars of the Trapezium were visible, crisp, and not wavering. Very nice. None of the fainter stars were visible. Unfortunately, by the time I dragged out the Ranger, clouds had obscured M42. Moon This was a real pain to look at--the Photon is so long, and the mount on which it sits is so low, that I had to lie down to look through it. At 91x and below, the Moon was glorious: sharp, no discernable chromatic aberration. At 127x, the image was beginning to fuzz up a bit, and I noticed a slight purple and yellow edge on the limb and terminator. The color was not objectionable, but it was, I'm sure, the source of the fuzziness. Star Test One of the traditional measures of the preciseness of a refractor is the star test, where you examine the rings that appear around a bright star at high magnification just inside and just outside focus. To the extent that the rings are circular and symmetrical, and similar on both sides, you have a well corrected piece of glass. The rings were easily visible when looking at Rigel at 127x inside focus (the outermost ring being way too heavy), but the rings were simply not there outside focus. I can't remember right now if that means severe undercorrection, or severe overcorrection, and I'm too tired to look it up this evening. However, I did this while the glass was still cooling. I may also need a bit more magnification to have a proper test. I used a green filter, which often helps to get a more consistent set of diffraction rings, but it didn't help. I'll try again. Overall, I would say this telescope is a bargain--but it does not provide any advantage over my 8" reflector--and it may actually be somewhat inferior. I am not sure that it makes any sense for me to keep it. It may make more sense to resell it, and spend the extra money on an apochromat. UPDATE: I had the 6mm and 9mm eyepieces reversed in the eyepiece case. I was actually using 190x on the Photon Instruments. This still doesn't help the Ranger much. When I used the 9mm last night so that I was comparing 127x on the Photon with 120x on the Ranger, the views--and the amount of detail visible on Saturn--were very similar. In both cases, Cassini's Division was just barely visible, as was the cloud band just above the equator. The Ranger's color was better, and the image was crisper. The Photon does a better job on faint objects, of course, because of the extra aperture--almost four times the light gathering ability, and it is a bargain by comparison. But I sure don't need the Photon, and the Ranger, and my 8" reflector. Labels: telescopes Blog As Weapon! From the U.S. Navy: The ONR and NUWC are leading a government-industry team to develop a blog as a promising new approach to speeding up the exchange of information on new defense technologies—and thereby speed up getting the technologies into the field. Marylanders: Your Legislature is Considering an Assault Weapons Ban I'm confused--is SB 288 a replacement for an existing assault weapons ban? I can't imagine that your masters would have left you this much freedom for so long. Of course, these guns are so dangerous that you can't be trusted with them--but law enforcement, of course, can be. The Democrats are anxious for all the voters to forget about their anti-gun past--and yet Democrats in Maryland are still busily trying to buy off the deranged set that thinks gun control makes more sense than locking up violent felons. The Burmese Sex Slave Trade Here's a description of a documentary from two years ago. This doesn't have any direct relevance to Landesman's article about the sex slave business in the U.S., but it is a reminder that there are parts of the world where this stuff just happens, and the government has financial reasons not to do anything about it: Their stories are horrifying, none more so than that of “ZuZu,” a seemingly innocent 16-year-old who was raped as a child and, like so many other girls, sold into prostitution to pay her family’s debts. The details are staggering: Zuzu recalls being forced to have sex with several men at a time, narrowly escaping a leech farm, and suffering a violently induced abortion, which “made everyone happy because then I could go back to work.”Leech farm? A friend who hear the director being interview summarized it like this: The "leech farm" mentioned in that capsule summary turns out to be more horrible than one could possibly imagine. It is said that some girls who refuse further prostitution, are sold into even worse circumstances. In one case the new "job" was to go into leech infested water to feed the leeches with one's own blood. The leeches were being grown as traditional medicinals. NAACP Image Award Nominee: R. Kelly From the Howard University student newspaper: Take a look at black awards shows and it just might make you sick to your stomach. Today's predominately African-American awards shows have typically become breeding grounds for stereotypical depictions of blacks. The black community, young and old, was outraged by the farcical and embarrassing nature of last year's Source Awards. Besides that, each year we watch the Soul Train Awards lean further away from soul and closer towards thug life. Now, much to our dismay, yet another black awards show is going to the dogs.From WLS TV in Chicago: January 30, 2004 (Bartow, Florida) — Lawyers for R-and-B singer R-Kelly have asked a judge in Florida to suppress nude pictures found on a digital camera, saying they were seized during an illegal search.Yes, yes, he hasn't been convicted on anything yet, but why nominate someone for an "Image" award who is awaiting trial on such serious charges? There is an explanation, of course: Kweisi Mfume, the president of the NAACP, admits there's a problem with the way the NAACP picks its nominees because half the voters aren't actually members, but people in the entertainment industry.Of course. The charges are serious on Planet Earth, but in the entertainment industry, perhaps not as bad as say, being a Republican. Confusion Professor Volokh points to a disturbing piece on the Palestinan Authority web site that tries to blame the Jews for murdering Jesus. What makes this piece (written by someone named Mark Glenn) so weird is that: 1. If he is trying to appeal to Christians, it makes no sense. Christianity teaches that Jesus had to die, to atone for the sins of the world. Blaming Jews for that death makes about as much sense as me "blaming" GM for my Corvette (scroll to the bottom). 2. No Muslim could ever properly call Jesus "Christ," which means Messiah. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet--not Messiah. Why would the Palestinian Authority consider this appropriate, except as cynical and ineffective propaganda aimed at Christians? UPDATE: A reader points me to a page that claims that the Qur'an teaches that Jesus did not die on the cross, but was swapped for an infidel. Is this considered a legitimate view of Islam? Mel Gibson and the Holocaust Some people are a bit sensitive about Mel Gibson at the moment, perhaps because of Gibson's new movie (which my sister saw in a special private screening--and she was powerfully impressed and moved by it). Professor David Bernstein, whose opinions I respect and often agree with, asks if Gibson is a Holocaust denier: The following, however, is at least troubling and deserves further explanation:I think Professor Bernstein is trying a little too hard to tease meaning out of this statement.'YOU'RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?" Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader's Digest for March.There are some serious problems with this statement, include the gratuitous lumping of the Holocaust with other tragedies that were not relevant in context, that suggest an aggressive hostility to Noonan's question (the question itself would seem a bit strange, but for the fact that Gibson's father is a Holocaust denier), and at best a desire to put the Holocaust into "context". I read Gibson's remarks as saying the Holocaust was a very bad thing, and it was part of a century of similar mass murders. Some people try to see the Holocaust as special; unfortunately, there was nothing terribly special about it. It was larger and better organized than the Armenian genocide; it was specific to an ethnic group, unlike the atrocities in the Soviet Union, Red China, and Cambodia. It has received far more attention than similarly monstrous atrocities throughout history, perhaps because Jews in the U.S. have been in especially influential positions in the publishing and media business. This doesn't mean the Holocaust is unimportant, and I don't begrudge the efforts to make sure that we never forget. It does mean that the lesser known atrocities of the 20th century need more popular attention. William Raspberry's Column About Marriage Raspberry, of course, being a liberal--a black liberal that--has to denigrate the value of Bush's proposal to encourage and defend marriage--but he recognizes that the concern is legitimate and serious: The president's proposal may not be entirely serious, but the state of marriage in America is. And when marriage is in trouble, the society is in trouble. More Threats to Free Speech More reminders that some ideas are so threatening to the status quo that they will not be tolerated: BRUSSELS – One of Belgium's leading civil rights groups has announced it intends to sue Belgian cardinal Gustaaf Joos for violating the country's anti-discrimination laws. The Rotenburg Cannibal Is Sentenced The Cranky Professor had been expressing concern that Germany's "probationary case for readmission to Western Civilization" was hanging in the balance, depending on whether it was possible to get a conviction for killing and eating someone--when the cannibal had videotaped the crime. Good news (sort of) from Germany, however: the cannibal was convicted, but of manslaughter, not murder. The story is still chilling: Meiwes’ video of the killing, which made for chilling viewing inside the courtroom, has convinced prosecutors that Bernd-Jürgen B.’s death was voluntary.Oddly enough, while the article admitted that Meiwes had done this for sexual gratification, it neglected to mention that this was a form of homosexual activity--and that there were hundreds of others who had volunteered to be Meiwes meal. Thursday, January 29, 2004
Jack Shafer and the Sex Slave Business Jack Shafer's column at Slate tries to discredit Peter Landesman's recent article about the international sex slave trade. Shafer raises a couple of good points, but over all, I am not impressed with his refutation. Landesman might indeed have gotten carried away, horrified by a few isolated incidents; he might be sloppy; he might be even making it up, as at least one critic implied by comparing Landesman to Stephen Glass. Shafer's critique, however, does not do much to persuade me that Landesman is wrong: Landesman's breathless performance, in which he asserts that "hundreds" of "stash houses" inhabited by foreign sex slaves dot America's metropolitan landscape, offers almost nothing in the way of verifiable facts about the incidence and prevalence of this heinous practice.Gee, why would it be anonymous? Many of the participants are ashamed of what they have been forced to do; many are afraid of corrupt Mexican police; many more are certainly afraid of the people engaged in this trade coming and murdering them. Anecdotal? As Shafer admits, this isn't exactly easy to take surveys on. "Excuse me, how many teenagers have you raped and turned into prostitutes under threat of death?" Shafer claims: But except for prosecutions and border interdictions, there's little hard data about the number of sex slaves smuggled into the country. And that makes the numbers incredibly elastic.And then Shafer quotes U.S. government statistics that match Landesman's numbers, because Landesman quotes those numbers. Sure they are elastic. Why does Shafer therefore discount the government statistics that Landesman quotes? Shafer doesn't consider one of Landesman's sources credible: he lets Kevin Bales of the nonprofit group Free the Slaves hype his premise with the speculation that the number is "at least 10,000 a year." How credible is Bales? How credible are his numbers? Bales claims 27 million slaves around the world, which is only 10 times larger than the estimate of the Anti-Slavery Society, which puts the number at 2.7 million.Which of them is correct? I don't know. The Anti-Slavery Society's estimate, however, by their own admission, is probably low: In arriving at our estimate of 2.7 million slaves, we use the common law definition of slave (see the next page: "What Is Slavery?"). This definition excludes excludes other forms of servitude, such as bonded labor and forced labor. In addition, it only includes one category of trafficked women and children. Some would probably say that our definition - which is the common law definition - is too narrow.I don't know why Shafer didn't give the URL for the Anti-Slavery Society's page where they actually give the 2.7 million estimate, instead of their home page. It would have simplified demonstrating that Free the Slaves' estimate might be too high, but not clearly and obviously so--and the Anti-Slavery Society's estimate is not an obvious contradiction. Shafer also has this curious paragraph: State Department go-to guy on slavery John Miller tells Landesman that the 10,000 new sex slaves a year estimate by Bales "could be low." But the fact is nobody in the field seems to have a good handle on slave traffic numbers or the sex slave population in the United States. So, when Bales surmises that there are between 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in the United States at any time, don't feel the need to believe him. Nobody really knows the true answer, but we do know whose interests are served by any inflation of the numbers.Whose interests are served by inflation of the numbers? Shafer seems to see someone getting some benefit from inflating these numbers. The State Department? John Miller? The organization Free the Slaves? Law enforcement agencies? Shafer's next paragraph utterly startles me: Landesman introduces other dubious figures. He writes early in the piece that "law-enforcement officials say [there] are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area--mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago--where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive." But if police know of dozens of active stash houses in the metro area and hundreds more in other cities, why haven't they busted them? If they have, Landesman isn't telling.We have this curious document in America. It's called a Bill of Rights. It means that the police can't just go kicking in doors because they believe that a crime is taking place. They need probable cause to get a search warrant, or to see a crime in progress to skip the warrant. I do not doubt that you could ask law-enforcement officials how many crack houses there are in their city, and get at least within an order of magnitude of the correct number. I can't believe that Shafer doesn't know that police officers often have knowledge that is reasonably accurate, but not actionable. Shafer attacks the credibility of one of Landesman's witnesses: One of Landesman's pseudonymous ex-sex slaves, "Montserrat," says she's lived in Mexico City "since she escaped from her trafficker [Alejandro] four years ago." But Montserrat also talks about how Alejandro took her to see Scary Movie 2 in Portland, Ore. This would be impossible. Scary Movie 2 was released in 2001.Alejandro might well have taken "Montserrat," to see Scary Movie (released in 2000, now four years ago), and having seen Scary Movie 2 in the meantime, she has conflated them in her memory. Also, as people who do surveys will tell you, the problem of "telescoping" memories is quite real; events that took place last week are pretty clear about how long ago they were; get back before a year, and two years, three years, four years, all sort to slip together. Did she escape in 2000? In early 2001? In late 2001? Shafer has another criticism that at first glance sounds quite reasonable: Other minor annoyances populate "The Girls Next Door." Landesman writes about a Glendale, Calif., highway rest stop that's used as a transfer point for sex slaves. Glendale is a densely populated Los Angeles suburb, like Pasadena or Burbank. If there's a highway rest stop there, it's news to me."Highway rest stop" has a very clear meaning to you and I. I wonder if it has the same meaning to "Montserrat" as it does to an American. A place with restrooms, and a couple of benches might well be a "highway rest stop" to someone not yet familiar with the United States. I also wonder if "Montserrat" said "Glendale" and Landesman assumed "Glendale, California." Glendale, Arizona would be a plausible division point for slaves headed west on I-10 to Southern California, as well as north on I-17 to Flagstaff, and then to San Jose, California. Shafer also attacks the credibility of another witness, Andrea, who is uncertain of her real name and age, because she was sold so young: Slate colleague Josh Levin notes that much of the sensational material in "The Girls Next Door" comes from "Andrea," a source who can't remember her real name or age. Andrea does remember, though, that one American businessman read to her from the Bible before and after sex, that she witnessed a 4-year-old boy being purchased for $500, that she was regularly passed off to customers at Disneyland, and that one regular john was a child psychologist. (It's difficult to imagine that tidbit coming up in conversation.)Let's take those one at a time. 1. Does anyone find it plausible that a guy very guilt-ridden about what he was doing might salve his conscience by reading from the Bible before and after purchasing an act of prostitution? I find it shameful and abhorrent, but not unbelievable. A few years back, one of San Francisco civil servants--I think he may have been the controller--was arrested in a San Francisco brothel with a 14 year old prostitute. News coverage at the time reported that she was told to call him, "Daddy." (And yes, he was definitely old enough to have children that age.) Unbelievable? No, just repulsive. 2. Andrea claims to have seen "a 4-year-old boy being purchased for $500." What is hard to believe about that? There is a whole organization filled with guys who would certainly pay that much: the North American Man-Boy Love Association. 3. Regularly passed off to customers at Disneyland? Read Andrea's own account: ''At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.''What's so hard to believe about this? 4. Shafer finds it hard to believe that the occupation of a customer would come up in conversation. Why is that hard to believe? I don't find it hard to believe that the pimp would tell the prostitutes that their customers were people of importance: police officers, child psychologists, and other status occupations. Landesman quotes Andrea on this very topic: ["]We had customers who were police, so you were not going to go talk to a cop. We had this customer from Nevada who was a child psychologist, so you're not going to go talk to a social worker. So who are you going to talk to?''It is possible that Landesman has really screwed up this story good, exaggerating it horribly. But what he is describing--a vast international sex slave ring, with children terrorized into obedience--isn't new. San Francisco from the Gold Rush forward for decades had a huge problem with thousands of Chinese girls sold into slavery, terrorized into working as prostitutes. When she was on further use as a prostitute, the girl was placed in a small cell where she had the choice of taking her own life or being murdered.[Anne Seagraves, Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West (Hayden, Idaho: Wesanne Publications, 1994), 139]Other accounts that I have read indicated that she was given a large quantity of opium with which to overdose, no food, no water, and locked in complete darkness. Henry Mayhew was a journalist in mid-19th century London. His accounts of things that he saw--four year olds being drugged so that they would not resist being raped by very old men in brothels, London police taking bribes to ignore girls being held against their will for prostitution--horrified polite British society. Rather than fix the social problems and police corruption that Mayhew exposed polite society blamed Mayhew for informing them how bad things were. I fear that some of what is going with the reaction to Landesman's article is liberals reacting in shock and horror at the awful discovery that there are monsters among us. If what Landesman describes is rare, it is tragic, evil, but it doesn't say much about our society. What Landesman's article depicts, however, is not just a few slavemaster pimps, but easily dozens to hundreds of them--and even more disturbing, at least tens of thousands of customers a year in the U.S. that enjoy sex with toddlers, brutal sex, against those who are completely defenseless. What calls itself liberalism today is premised on the delusion that human beings are fundamentally good, and only systems make people bad. To confront that there is a large subculture that needs to be caged is very, very disturbing. Maybe Landesman lost all perspective on this, letting a few horrifying and rare cases freak him out. But I think it is just as likely that Landesman, like Henry Mayhew a century and a half ago in London, revealed a dark underside of our society that is just a bit too painful for liberals to confront. Another News Story That I Would Not Make Up This seems to be from one of the Norwegian TV stations: Animal sex is not illegal in Sweden, and every year between 200 and 300 pets are injured because of sexual assaults.Oh, and no surprise about the end of the article: Not illegalJustice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence warned about where ruling homosexuality is a constitutionally protected act would take our society. Why Do Liberals Hate George Bush? Bush is asking for a 15% increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. If I had my way, the whole program would be scrapped. As Professor David Bernstein points out, Bush is, in many respects, outliberaling the liberals. Ann Coulter Has An Amusing and Ferocious Column About John Kerry Np permanent link yet: Kerry sure as hell can't talk to anyone about the plight of the middle class. Kerry's life experience consists of living off other men's money by marrying their wives and daughters. Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Interesting Quotes From Homosexuals About Pedophilia I found this recently. (The numbers are footnotes, scroll to the bottom.) Those of my readers who are homosexuals and are horrified by pedophilia (and I believe you when you say that you are horrified by it) need to answer me a single question: why is it so easy to find people who identify themselves as homosexuals and write in defense in child molestation? Maybe they are a minority--but in the cases below, it would be like quoting President Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld on U.S. foreign policy--and claiming that this was a weird, minority viewpoint in the Republican Party: The Historical Connection between Pedophilia and the Gay Rights MovementHey, maybe I've been misled by the number of homosexuals whom I have talked to, or whose work that I have read, defending child molestation. Maybe they are really a weird, strange, tiny little minority of homosexuals. But it sure seems that other people are having no problem finding other publications by homosexuals promoting child molestation (excuse me, "intergenerational sex"). Labels: child sexual abuse Woman Hates Gun; Uses Gun; Loves Gun This article is about how Susan Gonzalez learned to get past her fear of a gun: Bleeding and weakened from the bullet wound in her chest, Susan Gonzalez aimed her husband's .22-caliber pistol, the one she hated, and emptied it into one of the robbers who had burst through the front door of her rural Jacksonville home. Save Time! Let a Computer Make Up Your Conspiracy Theories! Remember when Mad magazine had those MadLibs articles where you picked words and phrases to make up a story? Visit here to reduce time and effort imaging new conspiracy theories about that evil Mr. Bush! They will make about as much sense. The New Middle Passage It is from New York Times Magazine, and it is about the international sex slave business--and the sheer scale of it in the United States. It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.It is hard to tell how accurate the figures in this article are: The thrust of the president's U.N. speech and the scope of the laws passed here to address the sex-trafficking epidemic might suggest that this is a global problem but not particularly an American one. In reality, little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country. In dozens of interviews I conducted with former sex slaves, madams, government and law-enforcement officials and anti-sex-trade activists for more than four months in Eastern Europe, Mexico and the United States, the details and breadth of this sordid trade in the U.S. came to light.Pretty obviously, there is no way to get an accurate measure of a trade that is unlawful, and involves trafficking in people who are in terror of being murdered, often drugged, and where the criminals are among the most ferocious of organized criminals. I don't think you can read it without becoming indignant. It is the modern equivalent, perhaps even in the annual number of victims, of the Middle Passage. The article emphasizes that these are not prostitutes, at least in any voluntary sense. They are children (including toddlers), young teenagers, and young adults, threatened, drugged, locked inside apartments to prevent them from escaping. The article suggests that they are overwhelmingly females, but does acknowledge that boys are trafficked as well. At this point, some of you are going to say: "Ah, but if it were not for the laws against prostitution, this wouldn't be a problem." No. Quite a number of these sex slaves are too young for legal prostitution (except, of course, if the ACLU had its way): Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners -- toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens -- as well as what she called a ''damage group.'' ''In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,'' she explained. ''Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it's always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.As the article points out, the increasingly depraved pornography that the Internet makes available seems to be encouraging increasingly depraved behavior: If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years, said: ''In America we had 'special jobs.' Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.'' She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex.I'm not sure that the auction is believable; this sounds more like a website catering to sick fantasies more than offering real product. You may be saying, "Ah, but if it were not for our immigration laws, this would not be such a problem." No, I'm afraid not. Unlike the illegal immigrant working in a factory who is afraid of la migra deporting him for reporting labor code violations, these sex slaves worry about being murdered. Unlike the illegal factory worker, the sex slaves aren't free to leave their places of "employment," and many aren't sure that it would be safe to tell the police, even if they could. Much of the sex slave trade in Mexico is protected by corrupt officials, as the article makes very clear. If anything, this article leads me to think that the sheer volume of illegal immigration makes it too easy for sex slaves to be imported to the United States. With millions of illegal immigrants crossing the border annually, the chances of stopping those immigrants who are being forced across the border is very small. Our only realistic hope of stopping this horrifying business is to put a real stop to illegal immigration, no matter how much grief it might cause American businesses (who rely on cheap labor) and political parties (who rely on the understandable sympathies of many Hispanic-Americans). Authentication Needed: But Does Anyone Find This Unbelievable? From the Washington Times, under the headline "Iraqi govt. papers: Saddam bribed Chirac": BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.Our government, of course, is a bit more discreet about these things: A senior Bush administration official said Washington was aware of the reports but refused further comment. Short-Term Bond Yields Rising I am seeing some surprisingly good yields (okay, it's all relative) in short-term corporate bonds. I grabbed some Daimler-Chrysler bonds yesterday due 4/15/04 with an annualized yield of 1.75%. There are GM bonds with maturites between 03/15/2004 and 07/15/2004 with annualized YTMs of 1.65% to 1.90%--a giant leap up from money market funds at the moment. If you are sitting on big chunks of cash in your money market fund right now, unsure whether to buy stocks or not, but disheartened with the 0.5% return that you are getting, these short-term bonds are not a bad choice if you are a little concerned (as I am), that stocks may be, if not overpriced, at least more likely to drop 10% than to rise 10%. UPDATE: And don't I feel smart saying that, considering what happened half an hour later to the stock market. Or maybe it is just my many readers all panicked, and put in SELL orders. :-) Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Wisconsin Concealed Weapon Law Override Vote on Hold in State Assembly From WBAY: Assembly leaders say they won't vote Tuesday on overriding the governor's veto of a law allowing concealed weapons. Republican leaders originally put the override vote on the calendar but Assembly Speaker John Gard says he wants to make changes to the legislation to see if it can get more support.Okay, Wisconsinites, it's time to call your Assemblycritters. Melt their phones! Monday, January 26, 2004
Offshoring In case you missed this link from Drudge Report, the Financial Times reported two seemingly contradictory actions: 1. "India's technology industry has attacked proposed new US legislation that bans the outsourcing of federal work to low cost countries arguing it is a protectionist measure contrary to the spirit of free trade." 2. "The move by the US Senate coincides with decisions by a number of foreign companies to halt further outsourcing to India because of a new domestic tax ruling that would enable the Indian government to tax part of their worldwide earnings." American high-tech workers should be pleased by #2. I know that I am certainly pleased. I am not even upset about #1. Yes, as a taxpayer, I certainly would like the federal government not to pay too much. But I am also pleased that the American government is keeping the work "in the family," so the speak. I also wonder if there might be some security arguments for not outsourcing federal IT work to a foreign country. I presume that nothing terribly secret was being sent overseas anyway--but there are sometimes some astonishing relationships between apparently disparate pieces of information and systems. Budget Deficits The last I looked, a couple of months ago, Congressional Budget Office was projecting a $12 billion surplus (including the unbelievably named "off-budget" part of the budget) in 2012. Now, CBO projecting a $13 billion surplus in 2014. I know that they are required to make projections that are conservative; a few more quarters like 2003Q3, and we could get back to surplus a bit quicker. Unfortunately, Bush is having to pull a Clinton to win the election--triangulation--pandering to the middle of the road voters with spending programs, and pandering to the middle class with more tax cuts (although the set that took effect in 2003 seems to have caused the spectacular 2003Q3 growth in GDP). The bad thing about democracy is that you have to appeal to the basest instincts of people to get elected--and if you don't, someone prepared to appeal even more basely (the Democrats) will beat you. A small consolation prize: as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, the deficits drop from 4.2% of GDP in FY 2004 to 2.0% of GDP in FY 2007, and drop quickly thereafter. This doesn't sound like enough to be a drag on the overall economy. I Couldn't Make This Up If I wrote fiction this absurd, no one would believe it: NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding "A" students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.Imagine: a whole society built around the notion that equality of outcome is the highest ideal. Offshoring Runs Into a Snag From the Financial Times: India's technology industry has attacked proposed new US legislation that bans the outsourcing of federal work to low cost countries arguing it is a protectionist measure contrary to the spirit of free trade. Sunday, January 25, 2004
An Interesting Observation on Gay Marriage from Down Under Mark Richardson made an interesting observation about the effects that gay marriage may have on our society over here. He quotes from an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun about a "commitment ceremony" for two gay men: “It was just like any other wedding, involving a touching declaration of love and the exchange of rings. (Oh, except the groom was wearing red Speedo bathers for the ring-exchanging ceremony which was held in a pool lined by guests waving sparklers.)”Okay, I assume that most gay men aren't planning "fabulous" weddings (I wish there was some way to get the right tone on "fabulous" so just imagine it), and I would expect lesbians, who tend to be a bit less... flamboyant aren't going to be anywhere near this silly. I also admit, having come from California, even heterosexuals wedding ceremonies have been known to be a little on the non-traditional side (nude weddings, on roller coasters, skydiving, underwater). Of course, there's always Britney Spears as an example of heterosexuals destroying the sanctity of marriage. The core problem, unfortunately, is that the dominant values of homosexual male culture have already influenced our culture in quite powerful ways. Tongue piercing (in order to improve one's ability to perform fellatio)--came out of male homosexual culture. It is now ubiquitious in straight society in California, and not unknown in the United States. (A friend of ours in California learned far, far more than she wanted to while getting her hair done--as the two young ladies doing her hair discussed the "technical" advantages of tongue rings in making one self of interest to men, the problems of getting to work while awaiting trial on DUI charges, and all the rest of what makes California the place it is.) Can anyone imagine the Britney Spears/Madonna interaction on TV happening if homosexuals had not been so effective at promoting their "anything goes" philosophy for the last ten years? Can anyone imagine the ACLU arguing that statutory rape laws are unconstitutional if the minor and the adult were different sexes? I'm afraid that the homosexuals have won. Even National Review, in their desire to be accepted by homosexuals, is afraid to publish articles that point out that the Lawrence decision is based on falsification of American legal history. The battle is largely over. Performing Very Late Abortions One of the arguments often advanced for abortion is that fetuses or embryoes with very severe defects should be "terminated" before they are born, saving a lot of pain, suffering, and grief for not only this "tissue" but also for the parents. Many of the roughly 1/3 of pregnancies that spontaneously abort are believed to be defects so severe that the child will not be viable anyway. Pro-lifers take the position that this is playing God--deciding which lives are worth saving, and which are not. Certainly, some of these defective fetuses will be born, and die within a few weeks or months of birth--but this is not for us to decide, the pro-lifer says. After all, doctors sometimes gets surprised. The science of figuring out which fetus is defective, and which is not, is not error-free. I recall some years ago a woman filed a "wrongful life" suit because an amniocentisis had missed that her child was going to be born with Tay-Sachs--and thus, the mother did not abort. (Tay-Sachs is always fatal by age 5.) There are many people who agree with the pro-choice position--but they do draw the line when a child becomes viable. Generally, by five or six months, there is at least a chance that a fetus could survive outside the womb--and fortunately, this is also the point at which Roe v. Wade (1973) allows the states to prohibit elective abortions (although few do so). When I was living in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, one of the local murder cases involved a third trimester abortion in which the fetus was delivered alive. The doctors didn't know what to do, so they put it in a closet until the baby died. (I'm told that this is not unknown in late abortions, even though it is clearly unlawful.) The strict pro-lifers insist that life begins at conception, and therefore, it doesn't matter when you abort during the pregnancy, you have still taken a human life. The strict pro-choicers insist that anytime before birth is okay--acknowledging that there is a clear dividing line at birth. (As long as the head is still inside the birth canal, however, feel free to punch a hole in the skull with scissors, and suck the brains out--rather like the gruesome sequence in the dreadful movie of Starship Troopers.) Until now. The Scotsman has an interesting article about a pro-choicer who supports aborting post-birth fetuses (to use the euphemism that I am sure will be used): A GOVERNMENT adviser on genetics has sparked fury by suggesting it might be acceptable to destroy children with 'defects' soon after they are born.Gee, Professor Harris, how much after birth is okay? Five minutes? Five hours? Five years? How serious of a defect is sufficient? The article goes on to report that Professor Harris "recently expressed support for the sex selection of babies for social reasons." Odd. I didn't realize that being the wrong sex was a defect. There are those who claim that homosexuality is a genetic trait. I don't really believe this, but if a baby being the wrong sex is an adequate reason to abort them--perhaps even "post-birth"--I certainly don't see why aborting pre-homosexuals, post-birth, wouldn't be a legitimate action as well. My stomach turns when I see intelligent, well-educated people in positions of influence making arguments that suggest that they are graduates of the Dr. Joseph Mengele school of medical ethics. |
