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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, August 21, 2004
I Hate These People The ones that write advertising software that gets installed into your computer, generating popups, and slowing your PC to a crawl. I've been helping some neighbors who have a couple of PCs--pretty fast boxes, actually, but running at glacial speed. I was trying to install wireless networking, and it took literally several minutes for the setup program to load off the CD and start running. Why? When I started digging around, I found WeatherBug--which displays weather information on your computer, in exchange for throwing popups and such at you, and generally slowing your computer to a crawl. I found all sorts of Search tools that purport to help you find stuff on the web--but really, just throw advertising at you. Even worse than the slowness is that many of these programs (at least ten that I was able to identify) are given misleading names in the Windows Add/Remove Programs list, so it is not immediately clear exactly what this program does. The uninstall scripts for a number of these pigs won't work unless you are online--but I wasn't online, because I had to install the wireless network, and the PC wasn't running fast enough to install the wireless network. Some of the install scripts force you to keep answering questions designed to persuade you not to uninstall the program. Others have the questions phrased in such a way that you will be misled, and leave the program in place. One program required you to "click here" to remove the program--but there wasn't anything to click except a "Download" button that would reinstall it. I have never bought anything because of a popup ad. I never will, because they are so annoying. Most of what I see advertised on a popup ads I wouldn't buy even if they weren't annoying. How can this revenue model work? Back about seven or eight years ago, a friend of mine and I had a clever idea for a smarter Internet search engine, one that learned from past choices. It wasn't brilliant, but it was better than the standard search engine approach. Part of why we didn't go forward on it was that we couldn't figure out a revenue stream. No one is going to pay for a smarter Internet search, and it didn't seem plausible that a company could actually make any money with an advertising-supported service like this. I still don't see how any advertisers are getting enough return on their Internet advertising costs to justify most of the advertising I see. New Campaign Slogan I'm told by a reader that this came from National Review Online's "The Corner": John Kerry: More Positions Than The Kama Sutra One of Those Odd Stories You Probably Won't See In Your Local Paper From AP: WARSAW, Poland - A French citizen has been arrested in western Poland and was being investigated as a terror suspect after he was caught taking pictures of a natural gas distribution plant, officials said Thursday.Oh yes, one little detail that AP left out, that this report included: The suspect is of Algerian origin, according to Poland's Fakt newspaper. The Practical Problems of Slavery Reparations To my disappointment, Alan Keyes has joined the slavery reparations bandwagon. There is the moral question of paying reparations for slavery. If the U.S. government decides to pay reparations for slavery, the Eastern Europeans, and many of the newly independent nations that used to be part of the Soviet Union can present a bill that will bankrupt Russia. How can we ignore the equally legitimate demand that England pay reparations to the descendants of Scots and Irish, Italians pay reparations to the descendants of all the people of the Roman Empire, Muslim nations pay reparations for their centuries of oppression of the Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the bill that almost every nation in Asia can present to Mongolia will be staggering. I am not being flippant. World history is a long chronicle of oppression of one group by another. Blacks held in slavery were certainly abused, and it was shameful. But they are not alone, nor even in the minority among victims in world history. But along with the moral question, there are also some severe practical problems. There are blacks whose ancestors were never held as slaves in the United States, but whose ancestors came here free: men such as Colin Powell, and many others of West Indian origin. They might have some claim against various European governments, but I can't see any argument for why U.S. taxpayers should compensate anyone for slavery that took place under another government's authority, and have enjoyed freedom, although not full equality, under this government. An additional complexity is not just those blacks whose ancestors were free in 1860, but who are descended from blacks who were free in 1640. I would expect that the number whose ancestors were ALWAYS free in what is now the United States is vanishingly small, simply because of intermarriage between them and those freed during the Revolution, in the early Republic, and after the Civil War. I would not be surprised to find that some American blacks, especially those from northern states, have not had an enslaved ancestor since 1800. (I was going through probate inventories for 1811 Indiana last night, and while not surprised, I was still depressed to see that contrary to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the estate included slaves, with instructions to sell them.) This does raise an interesting question: if the basis for reparations is an enslaved ancestor's inability to get on the American gravy train, and payment for forced labor, why should those whose ancestors were freed during the Revolution receive compensation equivalent to those whose ancestors were freed on Juneteenth, at the end of the Civil War? Those whose ancestors were freed before 1800 have a far weaker claim than those held through 1865. Should those whose ancestors were largely freed before 1800 receive a lesser payment? I also see some real problems figuring out how much to pay if compensation is paid to individuals based on some theory of individual injury because of enslaved ancestors. Consider a black person today who could trace back their ancestry (still very hard, but getting better) to their great-great-great-great-grandparents. He has 64 of those ancestors. If 16 of them were free, should he receive the same compensation as another black with 64 enslaved g-g-g-g-grandparents? If it seems absurd to make compensation match the number of enslaved distant ancestors, remember that some white people today probably have a g-g-g-g-grandparent who was a black slave. If they can prove one just ancestor, would it be fair for them to receive the same compensation as the person with 64 enslaved g-g-g-g-grandparents? I don't think so--and it just shows the problems that individual compensation leads to. Let me throw another can of gasoline onto the fire: what about blacks today whose ancestors include slaveholders? While abolitionists hyped this for both its prurient appeal and its emotional impact (and Hollywood continues to do so), if you could trace the ancestry of every black in America, you would find that some had slaveholder ancestors. How do you factor that into the equation of turning a number of slave ancestors into a compensation? Especially because at least some of the time, a slave woman managed to turn sexual availability (and sometimes genuine romance) into something that improved her status, and that of her children--very occasionally, freedom for herself and her children. (Let me emphasize that for many slave women--and, much more rarely, slave men, there was no negotiation.) The time to have compensated for slavery was in 1865. Forty acres and mule to every freedman (not every black, because many were already free, and some free blacks were rich) would have been inadequate, but at least it would not have been difficult to figure out who had been injured. (You will also notice that the compensation to Japanese-Americans, when it came, was to those who had been actually interned; that wasn't a hard one to figure out.) I can tell you a very great deal about my ancestors in 1865, partly because I have had relatives prepared to spend the time digging through records, and because my ancestors were white and free, those records exist. Blacks in America are starting at an enormous deficit on the essential records required, and this makes the entire notion of individual compensation hopeless as a matter of justice. I know that some of those arguing for reparations are making the case that instead of compensating individual American blacks, the reparations should be spent on social programs intended to help the poor (since there would be no lawful way to create racially discriminatory social programs--this might even stretch the current Supreme Court's patience). I think the case has been made pretty effectively that the Great Society did enough damage to blacks already, by unintentionally re-creating one of the more severe family problems of a slave society: it broke the natural connection between a father's work and the care and feeding of his children. It didn't matter how hard a slave father worked, his children would be fed the same by the master. Trying to turn the moral argument for reparations into an excuse to repeat the 1960s social programs is going to be politically less popular than individual reparations payments--and I suspect that any attempt to impose tax increases to fund individual reparations would cause a political earthquake that would dwarf 1980. Whenever I talk to people outside the academic community--even those of pretty liberal persuasion--I am just amazed at the hostility to the idea. As you can tell, I'm not happy with it either, but I do my best to explain the theory behind it, and the brutality of both slavery and Jim Crow. The idea of individual reparations is as much of a non-starter in America as any idea that I have ever seen. Another Reminder Of Security Problems This story reports on how hackers use Google to find servers that were put online with the default settings--including the default security settings: By searching for default server page titles, for example, an attacker can find easily exploitable servers. Applications left in default modes can also be found by searching for error pages generated by the software. And searching for specific file names can pinpoint vulnerable servers connected to the Internet. Another Argument Against Smoking From AP: BLACKSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) - Warning: smoking in the toilet can be dangerous. A portable toilet exploded Tuesday after a man who was inside it lit a cigarette. Interesting Piece of History Concerning Blacks in the North Carolina National Guard Geitner Simmons has an interesting piece here about blacks in the North Carolina National Guard at the start of the Spanish-American War--a very inauspicious time, when white supremacy as a political doctrine was reaching ascendancy. Friday, August 20, 2004
The Story Gets More Bizarre Every Day The doctor who claimed to have been Cipel's gay lover--and gave the utterly bizarre interview that I mentioned yesterday--has been ordered into a psychiatric evaluation: Miller, 51, pleaded not guilty to charges of impersonating law officers and public officials, creating false public alarm and making a false report to law enforcement. How Can You Tell A Journalist is a Liberal? By his ageism and sexism. From Michelle Malkin's account of being on Hardball with Chris Matthews: As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look. (There are quite a few people who are hung up on this.) "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age.I have long suspected that a lot of why liberals have remained focused on the triumvirate of sex, race, and class--even though most Americans have moved past prejudice on these issues--is that liberals think that the rest of America is as sexist, racist, and classist as they are. Thursday, August 19, 2004
Why Do People Buy Guns For Home Defense? Because of situations like this: A Dunwoody man Wednesday said thieves have traumatized his family three days in a row. The Brady Campaign Goes Into The Psychiatric Business From their press release, in which they demonstrate their ability to diagnose mental illness without ever seeing the patient: I'm glad that I don't have to actually touch their press release--I wouldn't want to get all the foam on my hands. Look, I own a rifle made by ArmaLite (back when they were still Eagle Arms). Lots of people I know own ArmaLite rifles. The rifles that ArmaLite has been selling for a number of years are different from the ones that they are taking orders for in the following ways: 1. They can now have a bayonet lug. 2. They can now have a flash hider. And buying such a rifle makes one an "extreme psychotic"? Who Does This Guy Work For? If he's trying to make McGreevey look like the victim of an extortion plot, he's failing. If he's trying to make homosexuals look like raving lunatics, he's doing a good job: The mystery man who claims to be Golan Cipel's ex-lover said yesterday that not only is the handsome Israeli gay - he's also still in love with Gov. Jim McGreevey.The money was not well spent. Iran Is Run By Idiots, After All I don't remember where I saw the expression "mullahs with their turbans wound too tight," but it sure describes the Iranian government. I thought that as evil as the mullahocracy was, that they were astute enough not to say things like this: DOHA (AFP) - Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.Look, the Bush Administration would prefer that Iran's population rise and overthrow the "turbans wound too tight" crowd. The last thing Bush wants is another war. (Our government has its hands sufficiently full cleaning up the mess after invading Iraq.) But a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces? Even under the predominant leftist understanding of the UN Charter, the U.S. would be completely free to invade Iran, unwind the turbans, and reform their political processes. And it would enjoy popular support in the U.S., and possibly even in Iraq, where Iranian agents have been long at work destabilizing the country. The Great Society and Crime Rates Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Thomas Sowell, but everyone (except me, of course) blows it occasionally, and Professor Sowell turns out to be human. In an otherwise sensible critique of the Great Society--Lyndon Johnson's well-intentioned but very destructive effort to alleviate suffering--Sowell makes the following claim: The murder rate had also been going down, for decades, and in 1960 was just under half of what it had been in 1934. Then the new 1960s policies toward curing the "root causes" of crime and creating new "rights" for criminals began. Rates of violent crime, including murder, skyrocketed.Since Sowell is trying to indict the Great Society for the skyrocketing murder rates, picking 1934 as the comparison year is misleading. Homicide rates* rose dramatically from 1900, picking up speed after Prohibition in 1919. From 1934 onward, they fell to rates that were still historically high--and they were already rising when the Great Society came into existence in 1965. It makes more sense to understand rising murder rates in the period 1960-1980 as a result of the baby boomers hitting their teenage years, when murder rates are highest. You might be able to blame the Great Society for aggravating a problem already under way, but there are any number of other changes going on during this period. *The "homicide rates" that this chart uses include at least some justifiable and excusable homicides, and are based on statistics provided by the states--not of all which were actually reporting homicides in the first few years of this chart. A Humorous Story With An Important Point According to this news story, the U.S. military is now including breast implants among the benefits of military service, and porn star and occasionally political candidate Mary Carey says that bullets are more important than breast enlargements. The serious side of this story is: does the military provide purely cosmetic surgery? Most private employers don't. Why should the taxpayers fund this? There was a big stink a few years ago when Oakland City Schools in California either went bankrupt, or threatened to do so, because the very generous benefits package included all sorts of cosmetic surgery, at great expense to the city. The function of our military is defense, not self-esteem. It is possible that someone has taken something out of context on this. There are circumstances where breast reconstructive surgery (such as after a mastectomy) is sometimes carelessly labeled as "cosmetic surgery" in the same sense that breast enlargement is. Breast reductions are sometimes medically necessary because of back pain. UPDATE: Over here is an explanation of what is going on. Apparently, it is for the purpose of giving military plastic surgeons experience in doing reconstructive surgery under non-emergency circumstances, and is done largely on a "as available" basis. Keep in mind that there will be circumstances where some female soldier is going to badly injured, and military surgeons are going to be expected to do a proper breast reconstruction. Better to practice on voluntary subjects. Slippery Slopes & DNA Testing Professor Volokh cited with approval Judge Kozinski's dissent from the 9th Circuit en banc decision U.S. v. Kincade (9th Cir. 2004) upholding the authority of the federal government to require convicted felons to provide DNA samples while on probation. The argument is that this is a slippery slope. As much as I worry about slippery slopes, I will tell you that I don't find the argument persuasive for this situation. There is a fundamental difference between a convicted felon, and everyone else. The government can lock up convicted felons in prison. They can't lock up the rest of us. Does that mean allowing the government to lock up convicted felons starts us down a "slippery slope"? Sure--if you are an anarchist, and believe that the government should have no authority to imprison felons, then allowing them to lock up felons creates a slippery slope. I greatly respect Judge Kozinski, and I generally find Professor Volokh's arguments logical. But if this is an example of a slippery slope, then so is allowing the federal government to maintain files of fingerprints from convicted felons--as Professor Volokh seems to suggest in his blog entry. Convicted felons lose many of their rights. We have a somewhat complex procedure, with a number of procedural guarantees, to make it unlikely that you will become a convicted felon without very good reason. Convicted felons lose lots of rights: in many states, the right to vote; throughout the U.S., the right to possess a firearm. While convicted felons are still under the supervision of the government, as they are during probation, they are effectively still in prison. The slippery slope argument would be persuasive for me if the government attempted to impose this requirement on people who have not been convicted of a crime--for example, as a condition of government employment. On this point, I do agree with Professor Volokh that the FBI's expansion of whose fingerprints they get to keep is a slippery slope example, when they crossed the line from keeping convicted felon fingerprints, to keeping those of government job applicants. Teddy Kennedy on the "No-Fly" List This news report says it was a "clerical error": CAPITOL HILL The Senate Judiciary Committee has heard this morning from one of its own about some of the problems with airline "no fly" watch lists.The clerical error, of course, was that he was supposed to be on the "no-drive" list--or at least the "no-drive while pretty young ladies not related to him are in the car" list. It Wasn't Just Sonoma County I was just reading an old blog entry by Ambra Nykola about parenting, and her description of the culture in which she grew up sounds rather like Sonoma County, California, the moral cesspool from which I moved my family several years ago: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the murderers from the attack at Columbine High School, somehow managed to have parents completely oblivious of their thorough and well thought out plans to kill their entire school. To be completely honest, I used to chalk this up to the "rich, white suburb mentality"; something I made up to help myself cope with dwelling amongst some of my troubled classmates in high school. These are the same classmates whose parents bought them alcohol for parties under the premise of "I'd rather have them doing it around me than somewhere else". It was under this same premise, that they allowed all kinds of madness to take place under their roof. There were guys whose parents let their girlfriends spend the night in their bedrooms. According to some parents, sex under their roof is better than sex on the school roof. I was fully convinced "my people" just didn't do things like this. After all, none of my black friends parents actually bought them liquor. I now realize, this was a very ignorant judgment call. The downfall of parenting has less to do with color than I first thought.The only area where I might disagree a bit with Ambra's essay is that even if you raise your kids with a certain set of values, if the overwhelming majority of your child's peers are savages (as in Sonoma County), doing the right thing may not be enough. I have a story that captures the essence of this. A friend of my wife worked as a ranger at Yellowstone one summer. One group of campers did everything right: food was in a sealed container, hung from a tree, some distances from their tent. Another group did everything wrong. The bear went after the bad campers, and in the ensuing excitement, the bear ran down the hill--right through the good campers' tent, destroying it, and badly hurt those campers. This, unfortunately, is analogous to the larger society, and why I have become considerably less sympathetic to the more extreme libertarian positions as I have grown older. Short of becoming a hermit, it is actually pretty difficult to isolate yourself from the destructive effects of someone else's stupidity. Sure, most of the injury falls on the irresponsible person, and their immediate circles of family and friends. (Unfortunately, minors usually don't have the choice of opting out of the chaos and damage caused by a parent's "lifestyle choice.") There are plenty of examples of the moral pollution that doesn't stay close to the idiot: the intoxicated driver who runs into another car, killing or injuring someone else; the drunk whose lowered inhibitions means that they molest a neighbor child; the mentally ill person whose delusions lead him to slash the throats of other homeless people; the person who sells a gun to a 15 year old gang member; the employer who could afford to pay his employees another fifty cents an hour, but refuses to do so; the promiscuous person whose decision to have dozens of sexual partners a month spreads AIDS--and drives up government health expenditures; the smoker whose dying medical bills get picked up by the state indigent aid fund, or Medicare. Black Bears Just Love to Party From CNN: SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday.Somehow, I can't picture Rainier deciding to use this as an endorsement. Wednesday, August 18, 2004
And This Country Has Too Many People Like Ted Rall I couldn't make up a person as vicious as Ted Rall--the liberal poster boy: Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Maybury. However, delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators.I presume Rall's parents are billionaires (or else his politics make little sense), but I can't quite place them. This Country Is Full of Young People Like This I don't know how; it must be in spite of the culture that the entertainment industry tries to create: A young Boisean who worked as a volunteer football coach for his high school and extended his Army enlistment to go to Iraq died Tuesday while on patrol in Baghdad. What Passes For Journalism At The New York Times This blogger points to an embarrassing example of bias in an interview with a Yale economics professor: NYT: As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.Okay, what is left out by the elipsis changes it a bit--but not a lot. NYT: But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society. John Kerry's Hunting License: Does It Exist? This blogger suggests that some clever person could probably embarrass the heck of John "Deer Hunter" Kerry: However, as we have seen with his claims of Christmas in Cambodia, there exists a written record that will undoubtably expose John Kerry to be the liar he is. And what record is that - simple, in order to hunt, Mr. Kerry would have been required to apply for a hunting license and a deer tag. If he hunts as often as he lets on, then he certainly can dig up some documentary evidence of this (and show how he has been licensed for years, not just the last year), and if not, then an audit of the state records in whatever state he crawled around with his trusty 12 guage in could show it. American Incompetence I've seen this material before, but it's worth being reminded that the function of the news media and soft-brained leftists hasn't changed in the last 60 years: to hold America responsible for everything that goes wrong, and predict the worst possible results of our actions: The first winter of peace holds Europe in a deathly grip of cold, hunger and hopelessness. In the words of the London Sunday Observer: “Europe is threatened by a catastrophe this winter which has no precedent since the Black Death of 1348.” Prozac in the Water Supply I saw this news story a few days ago, and it provoked both a serious and humorous reaction: LONDON (Reuters) - Traces of the anti-depressant Prozac have been found in Britain's drinking water supply, setting off alarm bells with environmentalists concerned about potentially toxic effects.When I took my family to Britain for a vacation in 1999, after spending a few days looking at the vast, expressionless, seemingly depressed London crowds, my wife's reaction was, "Someone needs to start adding Prozac to the water supply." And they did! But as the article points out, not a therapeutic dose. My more serious reaction is that while I do believe that mood-altering drugs perform a very useful function, I also think that they tend to be overprescribed--especially the anti-depressants. There are two big causes of depression: biochemical imbalances which seem to be genetic in origin, and situational. My impression is that people who are genetically depressed are rare relative to the situationally depressed. Situational depression is anger or disappointment that the person feels that they have to control or suppress. If you do this long enough, your body starts to respond inappropriately. From what I have seen of depression in family and friends, situational depression seems to sometimes turn into a biochemical problem such that even when the bad situation goes away, anti-depressants may be necessary to get the depressed person out of it. Used in that way, these are powerful and wonderful drugs. But what about the person who is prescribed anti-depressants for what is fundamentally situational depression? These can mask the problem, but they don't correct the situation. I've seen a lot of marriages over the years fail because the anti-depressants didn't correct the underlying problem of the marriage, but they did enable the depressed spouse to continue to function--until the pressure cooker finally exploded. I don't want to pick on Britain. My impression is that there's a lot of similar problems in America with overuse of anti-depressants. We just have a low enough population density that it isn't showing up in the ground water. Tuesday, August 17, 2004
The Income Gap News Story This AP news story appeared in a number of newspapers around the country: WASHINGTON (AP) — Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less.Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? It's that "two Americas" thing, isn't it? Well, to my surprise, some newspapers (including the Boise Idaho Statesman) and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are including a graph with the story that presents a bit more of the story--but neglect to point out what that graph tells us. The graph shows the mean household income in 2002 dollars, from 1967-2002 for the top 20% and bottom 20% of households. The top 20% are indeed, substantially better off (although this seems to be a measure of income not wealth--there is a difference). In 1967, the top 20% had $81,883 annual income; in 2002, $143,743. (Remember: all these amounts are inflation adjusted.) But even the bottom 20% are better off: $7,419 in 1967, $9,990 in 2002. If you want to argue that this is "unfair," because the top 20% have 75% higher household incomes than in 1967, while the bottom 20% have only a 35% higher income than they had back then, I guess you would be right. But there are some details getting lost here that make the story look a bit different. 1. A lot of those top 20% income households are two professional households. This is something that the left insisted was necessary: every woman working outside the home, and they passed laws that encouraged this. In 1967, there were relatively few mothers working outside the home in the top 20% income brackets. IBM, for example, would actually pressure its salesmen (and let me emphasize, they were salesmen) to have their wives not work outside the home. By contrast, I would guess that my home, if not in the bottom 20% of income in 1967, wasn't much above it, and both of my parents worked. I would guess that this is part of why the disparity between the top 20% and the bottom 20% is so much larger now; the bottom 20% of households in 1967 were much more likely to have a working mother because they had no choice in the matter. If the left really wants this disparity to end, they could do exactly what happened at the end of World War II, when employers made a "socially responsible" decision to fire women, so that jobs were reserved for men. A lot of those top 20% household income families would lose their second wage earner, and would be a lot closer to the 1967 level. 2. Household size has dropped quite a bit since 1967. In 1967, average family size was 3.63; in 2001, it was 3.15. Unsurprisingly, 35% more income with fewer children means that the bottom 20% are better off. 3. A lot of stuff that used to be quite expensive in 1967 is now cheap. As an example, even the poorest families in America have color televisions. In 1967, we certainly did not, because a color television cost hundreds of dollars back then--the equivalent of thousands of dollars today. (I can't say the quality of what is on the TV has improved any.) On a more important level, the quality of medical care is substantially better today than it was back then--even for the very poor. There are doubtless many other substantial differences that you could point to that make the story of America's bottom 20% incomes a bit less tragic--and also understandable as a consequence of leftist policies. I would expect that the increase in divorce rates (from 2.6/1000 people per year in 1967 to 4.2 in 1998 probably plays a part as well). But you won't be seeing that in your local paper, will you? What Matters To The British Electorate I had friends insisting that the British voters were hopping mad about Iraq. It turns out that this is way down their list: I am not keen on Tony Blair's "New Labour," but I do respect Blair for recognizing that Iraq was important, and choosing to do the right thing, even though it wasn't popular with the fiercely anti-American wing of the Labour Party. Even though I am more in agreement with the British Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher, I wish that there was something to respect there today. They seem to have turned into what Goldwater called "an echo" not a choice. More On Global Warming From New Scientist: The controversial idea that cosmic rays could be driving global warming by influencing cloud cover will get a boost at a conference next week. But some scientists dismiss the idea and are worried that it will detract from efforts to curb rising levels of greenhouse gases.But of course that's the whole point of global warming--to justify more governmental control over the economy. Labels: global warming For My Redding, California Readers Okay, this is a long shot. My mother has just moved from California to Oregon. Her cat Ditto ran away from the Motel 6 on Bechelli Lane in Redding Wednesday night. Ditto is a Siamese, 14 year old female. Black tail and ears, blue eyes, brownish back. Most of the rest of her body is fawn colored markings. Small and frightened inside kitty. She got out of the Motel 6 room on Wed night a little after midnight, Aug 11th. The motel is the one on Bechelli Lane in Redding, CA. You aren't likely to get too close to her, but if you see her, or know where she is, please let me know at once. Monday, August 16, 2004
My Wife Needs A Belt-Fed Machine Gun For Her Class No, it's not really that difficult a bunch. She's teaching a class in the spring on major authors of the 1920s, and the impact of World War I. If you live in the Boise area, and could bring your belt-fed World War I era machine gun (and I know many in the Boise area have such) to her class one evening, this would add considerable visual impact to the lecture discussing the role of the machine gun in changing the nature of warfare. She teaches at a private university, so there are no legal problems, but a dummy ammunition belt would be appropriate. If all you have is one of the magazine-fed World War I machine guns (a Lewis gun, for example), that would be better than nothing. Pollution & Dementia This article from the Guardian is, at first glance, very disturbing: The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.Okay, but there are other possible reasons for the increase in death rates. Pritchard claims that they have corrected for the change caused by the increasing age of the population: For other ailments, such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, the group found there had been a rise of about 50 per cent in cases for both men and women in every country except Japan. The increases in neurological deaths mirror rises in cancer rates in the West.Okay, so they adjusted for the population living longer. Have they adjusted for declines in deaths caused by heart disease? I was reading an article in the March 29, 2004 Newsweek "The War on Strokes," that contains the claim: Dr. John Marler, associate director of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS): as we get better at treating heart attacks, "more people are surviving a myocardial infarction and going on to have a stroke."Could the same thing be true with respect to these dementias--that the improving survival rate of heart attacks means that people that used to die of those now live long enough to have mental problems instead? Unfortunately, the Guardian article doesn't tell us if they have controlled for that possibility. The whole tone of the article, unfortunately, is awash in chemical hysteria: The causes were most likely to be chemicals, from car pollution to pesticides on crops and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of modern life, from processed food to packaging, from electrical goods to sofa covers, Pritchard said.So, Japan doesn't have increasing pollution, unlike the rest of the industrialized world, or they keep it out of their food? The only difference between Japanese and their descendants elsewhere is their food? I sure hope Pritchard is being misquoted by the Guardian. The alternative is that he is not much of a scientist. I don't find the claim absurd. But it strikes me as the "chlorinated hydrocarbons are causing our penises to get smaller" sort of science that environmentalists were trying to use several years ago to panic the population into implementing their policies--so obviously designed to provoke emotional reactions that I find myself suspecting intentional dishonesty, not simple error. One Way To Put a Damper on the Party This is a pretty serious subject--Virginia's efforts to stop statutory rape--but I was amused by this interesting attempt at using the materials: RICHMOND, Va. — The giant black and white billboard chides young men as they motor along Interstate 95 through Virginia's capital: "Isn't she a little young?" the sign slyly asks. It continues: "Sex with a minor. Don't go there."There was a time when parents used a somewhat more direct, less "sensitive" phrase to keep men (and by that, I mean adult men) away from their underage daughters. Here's the more serious and sobering part of the article--one that certain libertarian law professors will probably find doesn't fit their wonderful theories about statutory rape laws: It is difficult to know how widespread the crime of statutory rape is across the country, particularly among girls who willingly engage in sex with older men. Franklin said Virginia hospital records from 2001 show that in 70 percent of births to girls age 14 and 15, the father of the baby was at least three years older than the mother. That is a felony under Virginia law.I'm glad that it shocks Planned Parenthood. I've read that when Focus on the Family decided to test this, they had teenagers call up Planned Parenthood to discuss "unplanned pregnancies" and discovered that even when the caller told the Planned Parenthood worker that the father was an adult--and she was a minor--that Planned Parenthood indicated that confidentiality was not a problem. This article, gives examples: The potential for Planned Parenthood staffers to sidestep the law was revealed earlier this year when Life Dynamics, a pro-life investigative group in Denton, Texas, hired a 23-year-old woman to use her “little-girl” voice in a sting operation of sorts. The woman phoned family-planning clinics across the nation, telling the same story: that she was 13 years old, that she thought she was pregnant by her 22-year-old boyfriend, and that she did not want her parents — or anyone — to find out. In each case, she specifically asked clinic personnel if anyone would have to know about the age of her boyfriend. Labels: child sexual abuse And I Thought Assault Weapons Were the "Weapon of Choice" This news story tells us differently: BOSTON -- Police say they are seeing a surge in the number of gang-related attacks involving machetes, the huge knives that are a ubiquitous tool in rural Latin America, with blades as thick as an axe and nearly as long as a sword.Where have we heard this before? Updated Archive Index More than one reader has complained that the archive index on the left side (down a bit) doesn't include the latest issues. I've fixed that. I had no idea that anyone cared! |
