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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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, July 31, 2004
The Transgendered Deception One of the grossest, most repulsive forms of delusion that has become fashionable is the "transgendered" one: the guy or gal who becomes convinced that they are the wrong sex, and need to be surgically mutilated into a poor simulation of the other sex. This article from the Guardian--hardly a traditionalist newspaper--reports on some of the tragedies. I believe that the medical community, in its enthusiasm for all things perverse, has bought into this lie, rather than putting a bit more energy into figuring out why there are people who are so confused about their gender: Two months ago, Marissa Dainton changed sex for the third time in 11 years. She started life as Mark Dainton in 1967. In 1992, a year before her first sex change operation, she took the name Patricia Vincent. Four years later, Patricia decided to go back to living as Mark. Now she has become a woman again. Sitting in the lounge of the small terrace house she shares with her wife, her eyes stray to the wedding photo on the mantelpiece. "What happened to me should be a lesson in the need to make sure you're really ready before changing gender," she says.Unfortnately, this is only an example. The article reports that although public acceptance has grown, and the laws now provide for legal recognition of the change, Paradoxically, a growing number of post-operative transsexuals are scathing about their medical care. International research suggests that 3-18% of them come to regret switching gender. The issue has gained public attention since January when the General Medical Council (GMC) began an inquiry into the UK's best-known expert on transsexualism, consultant psychiatrist Russell Reid. Last month the GMC announced that Dr Reid will face a charge of serious professional misconduct over allegations that he has put his patients' health at risk.Maybe Claudia wasn't in the wrong body; maybe she was in the wrong city. Unfortunately, this sort of mental confusion seems to be widespread among homosexuals. A lot of them know that something isn't right, but as homosexuality and its Frankenstein cousin "transgendered" has become accepted, a lot of confused people have been encouraged to take irreversible steps--and steps that many realize don't solve the problem. UPDATE: A reader pointed me to this sad story of what happens when feminist ideology refuses to face reality: the story of an infant whose circumcision was botched so badly that he was given a sex change--and guess what? In the battle of nature vs. nuture, nature won. Having screwed up this kid by trying to make him into a girl, he finally committed suicide. Labels: homosexuality, transgender Recent Harvey Mudd Graduate Seeks Job in Evanston, Illinois One of my nieces has recently received her in BS in Physics from Harvey Mudd College, and is looking for a job in the Evanston area, where her fiance is going to grad school. If you know of a position, let me know. If you don't what Harvey Mudd College is, think of it as a place for people a little too well rounded for CalTech, but still frighteningly smart. Amusing Bumper Sticker I was going through the pictures from my daughter's wedding in Moscow, Idaho last weekend, and I found one of a funny bumper sticker--and one that I did not expect to find in a college town: The fact that no one understands you does NOT make you an artist. A Bit More On The Oshkosh Gun Confiscation Flap This article would suggest that police asked for, and received consent from at least one person to search for guns, and then confiscated them for ballistic testing. It doesn't seem to be the warrantless searches that some have claimed, but it sounds like the police might have overstepped their authority a bit, and aren't too anxious to admit it: The ongoing search for a perpetrator continues to prove frustrating for residents of the otherwise quiet neighborhood near Smith Elementary School. Residents of the 1700 block of Minnesota Street had mixed things to say about the methods police used in searching homes Sunday morning in the aftermath of the shooting. Friday, July 30, 2004
A 9/11 Commission Recommendation That Really Shows How Serious Congress Is If Congress still considers that the national interest takes precedence over politics, they will implement this recommendation on page 396: Recommendation: Homeland security assistance should be based strictly on an assessment of risks and vulnerabilities. Now, in 2004, Washington, D.C., and New York City are certainly at the top of any such list.We understand the contention that every state and city needs to have some minimum infrastructure for emergency response. But federal homeland security assistance should not remain a program for general revenue sharing. It should supplement state and local resources based on the risks or vulnerabilities that merit additional support. Congress should not use this money as a pork barrel.I think it is a fair guess that most of Idaho is not on al-Qaeda's list of targets, unless their knowledge of this state is woefully inadequate. "Does a bomb going off make a noise, if there is no one there to hear it?" A Recommendation From The 9/11 Report That The ACLU Will Veto From page 390: It is elemental to border security to know who is coming into the country. Today more than 9 million people are in the United States outside the legal immigration system.We must also be able to monitor and respond to entrancesEspecially in light of the recent capture of an al-Qaeda suspect who illegally crossed into the U.S. across the Rio Grande, this is critical. I Doubt You Will See This Part of the 9/11 Report In Your Local Paper It's blunt and to the point--and a lot of the whiners on the left aren't going to be happy about it, starting on page 362: But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil.2 This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism—especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology. Census Bureau Tabulations From the New York Times: ASHINGTON, July 29 - The Census Bureau has provided specially tabulated population statistics on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, including detailed information on how many people of Arab backgrounds live in certain ZIP codes.The usual liberal groups are concerned about this, and I can't say that I disagree with them. Isn't it amazing that these same liberal groups don't seem to be concerned about the privacy implications of mandatory gun registration? Thursday, July 29, 2004
This Is Really Depressing. You May Not Want To Read It. It involves a two year old who died. This is why I get really, really upset when homosexuals start making artificial distinctions between "pedophiles" (those who seek sex with prepubescent minors) and "ephebophiles" (those who seek sex with those who have reached puberty) as part of their effort to get the age of consent lowered. Scroll down if you can handle it. From the Omaha World-Herald: Doctors examining a toddler who died two weeks ago found signs of a sexual assault and said the sexual assault may have caused his death, court records indicate. And Here's The T-Shirt To Wear To The Next Pro-Choice Rally Click here. It's the perfect companion to the Planned Parenthood "I had an abortion" T-shirt. UPDATE: Here's a far, far darker alternate T-shirt. Be warned before you click over--it's funny in about the same way that Holocaust jokes are funny. Labels: abortion You'll Never Think of Teletubbies The Same After This... Click here for a picture that every Bush supporter needs on his cubicle wall. Just Like The Rest of Us, Except For Who They Love From the Tennesseean--practically in Instapundit's back yard: In an undercover sting operation yesterday, Metro police officers and Metro Parks rangers cited eight men with indecent exposure, bumping up to 99 the total number of arrests since June 30.And it goes on and on. I'm tired of hearing that homosexual men are just like everyone else. This anonymous casual sex is a fundamental part of male homosexuality. I'm sure that there are homosexual men who are repelled by this type of behavior, and do not engage in it--but just about everywhere that homosexual men are, this sort of out of control promiscuity is common. Maybe your gay faculty colleagues are far too classy to do this sort of thing. But don't pretend that it isn't a problem. Everywhere that I have ever lived, the newspapers carry coverage of this problem. At many rest stop men's restrooms in California, there is graffiti on the walls making it clear that there are homosexual men who hang out there for the purpose of completely random and anonymous sex. It makes "meat market" singles bars seem positively romantic by comparison. One night stand? More like one minute. I know, I know, some liberals and libertarians are going to argue that children should expect to see people having sex in public, because it's a form of freedom of speech, or sexual privacy, or whatever excuse they have to make for the misbehavior of America's most out of control minority. You know what? I really don't care what excuses you feel you have to make for your little pets. Children don't need to be exposed to this. Adults don't need to be exposed to this. A woman shouldn't have to turn down lewd sexual propositions when she goes for a walk in the park. A guy shouldn't have to do this either. Homosexual men have plenty of places set up just for them to go and meet other guys to exchange diseases: gay bars; gay resorts; movie studios. Go there. Do what you want where the rest of us don't have to see it or hear it. For most Americans, watching homosexual sex has about the same effect as watching two people vomit on each other. John Kerry Needs To Read The Senate Select Committee Report So he doesn't run around making absurd claims like this: "I will immediately reform the intelligence system so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics," he was to say in reference to claims that the president relied on faulty intelligence in deciding to invade Iraq in 2003.The Senate Select Committee report concluded that the intelligence failure was not driven by political pressures. The Butler Report in Britain came to the same conclusion. Honest mistakes, not driven by politics. "And as president, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to," Kerry was to say.Is there anyone that thought going to war with Iraq was going to be a political advantage for Bush? It was clear to everyone that it was going to be expensive--even if it had been as easy as the optimists thought. There were lots of people who thought that this was going to a war fought with chemical weapons, and thousands of American soldiers killed. It was also clear by the time the fighting started that it was going to destroy a lot of goodwill that the U.S. enjoyed because of 9/11. Not only Bush, but government leaders in Britain, Australia, Spain--indeed, just about everywhere in Europe--were putting themselves at enormous political risk by invading Iraq. Some have already paid that price, such as the Spanish prime minister. Argue that the decision to go to war against Iraq was ill-advised if you want. (Most Iraqis would disagree.) Argue that we should have been more sure of the WMDs that were the primary motivation for the war. But arguing that we went "to war because we want to" is just absurd--especially because John Kerry voted to go to war. The World Before 9/11 Another interesting paragraph from the 9/11 Commission report (p. 343)--right up there with the guy who quit the U.S. Patent Office in the 19th century because there was nothing left to invent, and the explosives expert who asserted that the Manhattan Project would produce no useful weapon: It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11.For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that Bin Ladin was a terrorist leader, with the headline “U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.”8 The head of analysis at the CTC until 1999 discounted the alarms about a catastrophic threat as relating only to the danger of chemical, biological, or nuclear attack—and he downplayed even that, writing several months before 9/11: “It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of dealing with ‘catastrophic,’‘grand,’ or ‘super’ terrorism, when in fact these labels do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on U.S. interests.”UPDATE: A reader points me to this pretty compelling debunking of the claim about the guy who quit the U.S. Patent Office. Another Prescient Statement in the 9/11 Commission Report On page 196, in the closing days of the Clinton Administration, as they struggled about whether there was enough evidence of bin Laden's involvement with the USS Cole bombing to threaten the Taliban: Some of Clarke’s fellow counterterrorism officials, such as the State Department’s Sheehan and the FBI’s Watson, shared his disappointment that no military response occurred at the time. Clarke recently recalled that an angry Sheehan asked rhetorically of Defense officials:“Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?” Dumb Doesn't Mean Unconstitutional Instapundit complains "DUMB ALABAMA SEX TOY LAW UPHELD." He also argues, I haven't read the 11th Circuit opinion, but this seems implausible in light of Lawrence.I would like to read the 11th Circuit opinion (which is here), but I can't get Acrobat Reader to open the file. Now, I agree that this is a really dumb law. But dumb doesn't mean unconstitutional. You could, I suppose, construct a constitutional challenge to such a state law based on the lack of state laws regulating sex toys when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified--assuming that there were no such laws. But that would require demonstrating that there were no such laws. Since the Lawrence decision is based on a series of false claims about the origins of laws banning homosexual sodomy, I don't see any reason to take it seriously. Even if you take Lawrence seriously as guaranteeing a right to sexual privacy, you could also make a pretty good case that a law regulating sales sex toys isn't about sex at all. (Sex, after all, involves more than one person.) In any case, the law prohibits sales--a commercial activity that is hardly private, at least by the notions that liberals use when justifying regulation of all sorts of other transactions. I am becoming increasingly irritated by the way that liberals assert that practically everything of a commercial nature is a legitimate sphere of government regulation, at some level of government, but the privacy claim comes out for the following activities that are not particularly private, and are clearly commercial in nature: 1. An abortion performed for pay by a doctor licensed by the state, often in a publicly owned and operated hospital or clinic. 2. Advertising and sales of sex toys. Let's rewrite those two sentences, and tell me why liberals don't insist on that same right to privacy for these other cases: 1. A cosmetic surgery performed for pay by a doctor licensed by the state, often in a publicly owned and operated hospital or clinic. 2. Advertising and sales of assault weapons. Well, sure the assault weapon could be (and a very few will actually be) criminally misused. Guess what? The same is true of sex toys. I've read more than occasionally newspaper accounts that indicated that a rape included what California Penal Code sec. 289 delicately calls, "Foreign object, substance, instrument, or device." In both cases, such devices, along with perfectly legitimate purchasers, attract the attention of those who should not have them. In both cases, complete bans make no sense. But why do liberals insist that one is constitutionally protected under the non-textual "right to privacy" while the other is not constitutionally protected by "the right of the people to keep and bear arms"? Oh whoops! That's it! It's all about sex. That makes everything special and sacrosant from government regulation! As Malcolm Muggeridge observed: Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society. What Are We Afraid Of? From AP: WASHINGTON - The FBI (news - web sites) warned police in California and New Mexico that it received information about possible terrorist activity in their states. However, the warning wasn't specific about particular targets or a method of attack, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.Senator Ted Kennedy tells us: In the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt inspired the nation when he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Today, we say the only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush.So the FBI is concerned that Bush is going on a rampage in New Mexico and California? This pursuit of a good sound bite just makes Kennedy look like a fool. Corporation As Legal Person The notion that a corporation is a legal person under the Fourteenth Amendment has always struck me as a pretty absurd claim, since it is clear that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended by Congress and the states to protect the rights of individuals--specifically blacks--in the South. While liberals generally decry this notion or corporate personhood, this is also the basis on which the free speech rights of a newspaper corporation were upheld in Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233 (1936): Appellant contends that the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to corporations; but this is only partly true. A corporation, we have held, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause. Paul v. Virginia, 8 Wall, 168. But a corporation is a 'person' within the meaning of the equal protection and due process of law clauses, which are the clauses involved here.Still, I am a bit nonplussed by this recent decision from the 9th Circus Court of Appeals that declares In circumstances such as this, a corporation has acquired an imputed racial identity sufficient to take it out of the general observation about corporations made by Justice Powell in Arlington Heights.A corporation not only has personhood, it even has skin color! Thanks to Professor Bainbridge for the link to the 9th Circus decision. You Won't Be Reading About This In Your Local Paper Why? Because it won't help put John Kerry in the White House. This article at Tech Central Station explains an alliance I didn't know about: Called the Proliferation Security Initiative, this results-oriented alliance is now just over a year old. The work of the much maligned Under Secretary of State for Arms Proliferation and International Security John Bolton, PSI is already a great success in bringing nations that disagreed bitterly over the Iraq war together under one flag to deal with larger weapons proliferation issues, especially those relating to the Korean Peninsula.UPDATE: A reader points me to Greenpeace's criticism of the PSI: The US led Proliferation Security In t ative is supposed to enhance existing national and international export control enforcement mechanisms.But without official UN backing,and China and Russia notable by their absence,it is merely yet another coalition of the willing few in a self-serving effort to circumvent the fundamental principles of non-discrimination and universality[.]Sorry, but applying this principle means putting Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hussein's torturocracy of Iraq, Taliban Afghanistan, Khaddafi's Libya, and North Korea on an equal moral footing with the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, and Costa Rica. If you don't see the problem with this, there's probably not much point in having a discussion about this. It is also of dubious legal status and will be in breach of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea if it is extended to interdiction on the high seas of vessels not flying their flags or in the territorial waters of nations that have not signed up to the PSI interdiction principles.I really don't much care about any legal convention that relies primarily on the UN for its legitimacy. We aren't exactly talking about a high morality sort of operation. Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Someone Tell Me That This Is Nonsense The alternative is a bit too scary; this really isn't a good time for a revolution: OSHKOSH POLICE CONDUCT DOOR TO DOOR GUN CONFISCATIONSThis news account of the incident talks about "clearing houses" but says nothing about confiscating guns. This account also makes no mention of this. UPDATE: I'm told that the organization responsible for the original claim is prone to heated rhetoric, and its chief guy "says some pretty wild things from time to time. That gets him quoted in the papers regularly. It doesn't help gun owners." I certainly haven't found any confirmation on the warrantless confiscations. The Abortion T-Shirt That Planned Parenthood Should Offer I have kept my mouth shut about this, partly because I wasn't sure what to think. Planned Parenthood is now offering "I had an abortion" T-shirts for sale. The goal, I think, is to create an awareness of how many women have had abortions--rather like encouraging homosexuals to come out of the closet so that everyone would say, "Oh, they are such normal people." I suspect that if every woman in America who has had an abortion wore one of those T-shirts, it would certainly have an effect--but maybe not the effect that pro-choice sorts expect. The sheer numbers would indeed be startling--and sobering. I suspect that most Americans who are moderately pro-choice think of abortion as a relatively rare event, and are thus prepared to tolerate it. Even something that is a pretty rare event on a yearly basis isn't so rare when measured over the roughly thirty years that a woman is capable of bearing children. As I mentioned a few months back, several different studies suggest that almost one-third of women have at least one abortion during their lifetime. I also pointed out that because of repeat users of abortion, the actual number might be closer to 20% or 25%. That's still an awful lot--and enough that many of the sympathetic might be a bit less so if they saw all those T-shirts daily. At least North Carolina Planned Parenthood officials get it: "This is going beyond pro-choice," said Brian Lewis of Mebane, director of public policy for Planned Parenthood Health Systems.There are pro-choicers who argue that abortion is actually not that commonly done for light and transient reasons. If all the women who have had abortions started wearing those T-shirts, it would raise a lot of questions. I toy with the idea of a T-shirt that says, "I was too lazy to put on a condom, so my partner had an abortion." But I think that this would go over even worse, and there would be even fewer guys willing to expose themselves for the thoughtless clods that they are. Labels: abortion More On The Syrian Musicians The Washington Times reports that 13 of the 14 were here on expired visas: Almost all of the Syrian musicians who were questioned by law-enforcement officials after exhibiting suspicious behavior aboard a Northwest Airlines flight were traveling on expired visas.Okay, so it's mostly a technical violation. Still: Syria is one of seven countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism by the State Department, but Damascus has cooperated with the United States in the fight against al Qaeda, according to the State Department report for 2003, issued April 29.UPDATE: A reader tells me that while visas have an expiration date, this isn't what controls whether the person is here illegally, but rather the date written on the I-94 form when a foreigner arrives. The expiration date only limits during what period they can enter. It's a minor point, but worth remembering. I Doubt The Ivory Tower Will Like The Comparison In the 9/11 Commission report, there is a nice little history of the CIA. There's nothing new in it to me, but there was one amusing comparison on pages 89 and 90 that should cause some blood to boil in university faculty meetings: An innovation of Donovan’s, whose legacy remains part of U.S. intelligence today, was the establishment of a Research and Analysis Branch. There large numbers of scholars from U.S. universities pored over accounts from spies, communications intercepted by the armed forces, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and publications of all types, and prepared reports on economic, political, and social conditions in foreign theaters of operation.Of course, the whole WMD debacle also makes me think of a university: as the Butler Report observed about Britain's intelligence service errors, group-think took over. Why Does This Make Me Think of Lily Tomlin Sitting in the Big Rocking Chair? 
The ad offering this behemoth for sale is here. Why Border Security Matters This news account is one of those reminders why we really, really need to get control of our borders: A South African woman picked up in Texas almost 10 days ago may turn out to be a key, high-level al-Qaida operative.If 100,000 people illegally enter the U.S. every month (the vast majority of whom are just looking for a job), how can be hope to catch the ten illegal immigrants who are al-Qaeda operatives? I know that this is going to be painful to liberal Democrats, who are counting on illegal aliens to become Democratic voters, and to Big Business Republicans, who are counting on illegal aliens to keep wage rates of low-skilled Americans down, but we have to do something about border security. It can be done. It just takes some will and enough political courage to put the national security of the United States above political and economic advantage. Tuesday, July 27, 2004
So Much Heroism; Such Poor Planning The 9/11 Commission report isn't at all dry. It is a fascinating read--as good as many spy novels I've read, and absolutely riveting. The chapter "Heroism and Horror" starting on page 278 is astonishing. We knew that day that there were heroes in large numbers: police officers, firefighters, federal law enforcement officers, and civilians who put themselves in harm's way to save the lives of others. But it's still hard not to get teary-eyed reading these accounts of the courage of these people, who had to know that they were likely to die, firefighters and police officers who stopped at every floor on their way down after the evacuation order was given, searching for people who had been unable to leave. The sad part was the planning and technical deficiencies that prevented this heroism from making a bigger impact in saving lives. Radio problems, and the lack of planning for an unprecedented disaster, meant that many hundreds certainly died without cause. I Hope This FBI Agent Was Promoted For This From the 9/11 Commission report, p. 275, discussing the arrest in late August of Zacarias Moussaoui: There was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters as to what Moussaoui was planning to do. In one conversation between a Minneapolis supervisor and a headquarters agent, the latter complained that Minneapolis’s FISA request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.”The supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen and that they did not know if Moussaoui was a terrorist.And I hope the headquarters agent who said that this was not going to happen has a very black mark on his personnel records. How Richard Clarke Tipped Off Bin Laden This article by Rep. J.D. Hayworth explains how Richard Clarke tipped off Osama Bin Laden that we knew where he was, and thus prevented us from killing him in 1999. The claim that Hayworth makes is so strong that I went to the 9/11 Commission report to verify it. Sure enough. Clarke, apparently without authorization, informed the United Arab Emirates that their princes shouldn't be hanging so close to Bin Laden at an Afghanistan hunting camp--and within a week, the camp was dismantled, and Bin Laden gone. Monday, July 26, 2004
Why I Get Really, Really Uneasy About Abortion My primary objection to a complete ban on abortion is that there is no practical way to ban a procedure that enjoys unreserved support from a sizeable minority of the population, and limited tolerance from another sizeable fraction. Even the center of the political spectrum, while opposed to unrestricted abortion, is unprepared to go with a complete ban on all elective abortions. All sorts of really, really bad things start to happen when you try to enforce a law that even 10% of the population vehemently refuses to obey. You can construct your own list of laws that had widespread opposition: Prohibition; the laws about marijuana; the 55 mph national speed limit; the more severe gun control laws; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Trying to enforce these laws often corrupts the police, and produces general contempt for law. If you want to pass a law with a sizeable minority strongly in opposition, you are better off putting your time and energy into persuading the general population to take your position first. My impression is that the majority's grudging tolerance of abortion is because there are some very, very unpleasant outcomes from a complete ban: the rare, but horrifying cases such as anacephalic or spinybifidia pregnancies, and the less rare cases involving incest or rape. I think even most pro-life advocates recognize that a 12 year old giving birth, even if that baby gets puts up for adoption, is going to transform that mother's life in very unpleasant ways. This is probably why even many pro-life advocates are prepared to make some inconsistent exceptions for these difficult cases. As you move into some of the more common reasons for abortion, the majority's sympathy starts to decline: the married woman who has already had three kids and suffers a birth control failure doesn't get quite the sympathy. The single woman who gets careless about birth control, but isn't prepared to get married and settle down quite yet gets even less sympathy. Abortion as a form of sex selection is so repugnant that even Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has argued that it should be illegal. Partial-birth abortion is so repugnant that even many Democrats in Congress were prepared to vote for a ban. (Although performing an abortion at the same gestational age, but in a procedure that doesn't sound like something out of a concentration camp, doesn't generate the same rage.) This article from the New York Times magazine, however, describes the sort of abortion that makes a lot of people in the middle on abortion pretty angry. This is exactly the sort of irresponsible and callous behavior that makes me completely unsympathetic to the mother: Now I'm 34. My boyfriend, Peter, and I have been together three years. I'm old enough to presume that I wasn't going to have an easy time becoming pregnant. I was tired of being on the pill, because it made me moody. Before I went off it, Peter and I talked about what would happen if I became pregnant, and we both agreed that we would have the child."Eliminate": how... antiseptic. On the subway, Peter asked, ''Shouldn't we consider having triplets?'' And I had this adverse reaction: ''This is why they say it's the woman's choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That's easy for you to say, but I'd have to give up my life.'' Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn't be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It's not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.Why, how tragic! She decided to go off the Pill (and I guess that they don't sell condoms in New York City), gets pregnant--a calculated risk, of course, and is terrified that she might have to change her life. What a tragedy! Having to become like most Americans! How unfair! Yes, she went ahead and aborted the twins, and decided to keep the "standalone." I have no sympathy for this selfish twit. The only consolation is that someone this selfish would probably have been a lousy mother anyway. Labels: abortion United and American Airlines Put Options Before 9/11 Remember the suspicious amount of put options purchased just before 9/11 in these two airlines? This National Review Online article points out that the 9/11 Commission report lays to rest the suggestion that the terrorists purchased put options in the hopes of making money on the bad news that they knew was coming. Investigation of these trades showed that all of these admittedly odd trades made sense for business reasons unrelated to 9/11, and were by people and institutions with no ties to the terrorists. Syphilis & Lenin This news story from the Telegraph says that the evidence is quite clear that Lenin died of syphilis: Israeli doctors, writing in the European Journal of Neurology, say they used medical records pieced together from archives released after the fall of communism to reconstruct the first Soviet leader's illness and death.There have been claims that tertiary syphilis (where it goes into your brain) caused Idi Amin's tyrannical, genocidal madness, and at least some have tried to claim that Hitler's madness and anti-Semitism were both products of syphilis acquired from a Jewish prostitute. It would certainly be comforting to think that the great crimes of the 20th century could be blamed on syphilis, wouldn't it? Is There A List Online of English PhD Programs? I am looking for a list of universities where my wife can work on her PhD in English Literature, so that we can start building a list of places to consider moving too in two years. I can look up individual universities (U. of Oregon, U. of Washington, Washington State University, Pullman), but I was hoping to find a comprehensive list, so that I don't miss any. New York Times Public Editor Admits It The guy that deals with complaints about bias and accuracy, Daniel Okrent, admits what should be obvious to everyone--that they are so liberal that even their news coverage is hopelessly biased: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?Hold on to this, for the next time that some liberal insists that major news organizations are, if anything, a bit on the conservative side. Labels: abortion More Coverage of Terrorist Dress Rehearsals This Washington Times article summarizes Annie Jacobsen's article about her recent terrifying experience on a Detroit to Los Angeles flight (although it does appear that the 14 Syrians acting suspiciously were, actually, a band headed to Los Angeles). But other parts of the Washington Times article are pretty worrisome: Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.Thanks to No Left Turns for the links. Good News From Afghanistan, Part 2 Chrenkoff has another very long, very link-rich entry about the good news from Afghanistan that you aren't going to be seeing in your leftist-controlled local newspapers or on television. One of the things about blogging is that some bloggers pick out particular niches, and pursue those with energy--and this is one of the good examples. Thomas Sowell on the Wal-Mart Suit He points out the many reasons why Wal-Mart's management could be disproportionately men that do not require sex discrimination (the tendency of women to drop in and out of the workforce to have babies being among the strongest), but also includes this rather powerful point: People without the slightest knowledge of economics or the slightest experience running a business will boldly assert that women are paid only 75 percent -- or some other percent -- of what men make for doing exactly the same work.I don't intend to sound mean, but my impression is that Wal-Mart hires a lot of older women whose husbands flaked out on them, and these women have very limited education and job skills. There aren't a lot of men who sit home and raise children, who are suddenly forced back into the job market by a divorce after ten years being Mr. Mom. If there were, Wal-Mart would probably have a lot more poorly paid 40 year old guys in their labor force, waiting for a chance to move up into management. There is a real tragedy going on in America: women who married based on a belief that this was "until death do us part," and learned ten or twenty years later that this really means, "until you look old enough that your husband has to go find a younger woman so he doesn't get reminded of his own mortality when he looks in the mirror." I know a woman whose husband left her in her late 40s because "you're old." So was he--they were the same age. But the husband couldn't face this, because to do so would be to face his own mortality--and for people that believe that there is nothing beyond this, that's a pretty painful prospect. He walked out on her, sending her from housewife to J.C. Penney's, and started chasing the young babes that wanted a sugar daddie. This worked for him for a few years, but he died alone. Mexico Complains About Illegal Aliens Michael Williams points to a news story about an advocacy group that crossed the border into Mexico carrying a simulated WMD, and then back again into the U.S., as a demonstration that we really don't have any security against terrorists. The really funny part of the news story, however, is Mexico's complaint: The Mexican government is checking a videotape and may enter a formal complaint with the United States government.Oh yes, Mexico has a lot of reasons to complain about illegal entry! Interesting Union Complaint From Reuters: OSLO (Reuters) - Angry hotel workers in Norway want to ban pay-TV pornography to stop naked porn-watching guests calling room service to lure female staff to their rooms. Sunday, July 25, 2004
Java Native Interface Question Do you have an example Java program that calls a C function, and the C function in turn calls a Java method? If so, let me know. For some reason, I keep getting an Access Violation complaint when my C function executes the CallVoidMethod function to invoke a particular method. I suspect the problem is related to having the right value for the JNIEnv. California Continues Exporting Its "Problems" This story about a kids camp in Hawaii run by a convicted child molester is partly a story of an interesting exemption from the state's otherwise somewhat demanding regulation, but also a reminder that there doesn't seem to be any form of child molestation that will get you in serious trouble in California: According to a felony complaint filed Jan. 7, 1991, in Victorville Superior Court in San Bernardino County, Thomas, 49, was charged with six sex crimes alleged to have occurred from 1988 to 1990. Four counts involve lewd and lascivious acts, including sodomy, on a girl who was 6 at the time of the earliest offense.What, exactly, do you have to do to a child in California to get a serious prison term? Is This a Scam By Yahoo? Last year, I set up a domain and a Yahoo store for my father-in-law. After a few months, it became apparent that it wasn't going to bring in enough money to justify the operation, so I cancelled everything: the store, and the domain name. Then my credit card statement last month shows a $35.00 charge by Yahoo. I call up. It turns out that they renewed the domain--even though I cancelled both. I complain about this. Yahoo's customer service says it will take a couple of weeks to reverse the charge. I call back on July 20th, and find out that it will still take a couple of weeks. Tammy at Yahoo service tells me that they don't have enough staff to process complaints requesting a refund. I am beginning to wonder if the lack of staff at Yahoo to handle refund requests is intentional. Wedding & Aurora I'm back from my daughter's wedding. Friday evening was a bit tense, what with last minute procedures and the rehearsal, but the wedding and reception went very well. (I didn't start blubbering or crying at any moment, much to the surprise of both wife and daughter, although it was close!) The wedding was at a quaint little Baptist church in Moscow, and the reception was at the Best Western University Inn across town. My wife sang Paul Stuckey's The Wedding Song. She forgot to turn on the microphone, but it turned out that this was a good thing, because we had fought with the sound system and feedback the previous evening. The catering staff did a good job: polite, unobtrusive, with a fine buffet meal. They were supposed to feed 70, and while there wasn't a great deal left over, it appears that there wasn't any item completely cleaned out. If you need a place for a reception in Moscow, Idaho, I think you should consider them. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but i think it came to $960 for the room and the catering. I am a bit sore right now. I don't dance very often (largely because of my less than wonderful coordination), and the net effect is that my ankles and feet have a number of muscles that are now complaining about excessive workout. The wallet is a bit sore also, but I only have one daughter to marry off, so I won't be having to do this again. My daughter did just about all the organizing, spent money very carefully, and I think the total damage came to under $5000, including airline tickets for the honeymoon. I know from talking to others that this was pretty light--and yet I am quite sure that my daughter thinks she ended up with the fairy tale wedding that most young ladies want. Thursday evening, my wife, our friend Brad (who flew up from California for the wedding) went east of Moscow to look for dark skies--and we were rewarded with something that Rhonda has never seen before, and that Brad and I have only seen once on a very small scale: aurora borealis. At first we thought this was a distant searchlight, but over a couple of minutes, the movements, expansion, streaks, and shimmering curtain effects covering perhaps 60-90 degrees of the northern horizon demonstrated that this was an aurora. It was just about all a very pale white, with just hints of green and pink in places. Very awesome. |
