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Labels: abortion Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: humor Labels: humor Labels: Iraqi WMDs Labels: deinstitutionalization
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).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Amitai Etzioni's Blog
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Michael Williams -- Master of None
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
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Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
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A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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Why Values Matter
It is very fashionable in some circles to think that lowering the drinking age to 18 would solve the problem of underage drinking. Articles like this one are a reminder that the values that kids are raised with matter--and lowering the drinking age to 18 would not have made any improvement: As the whiskey and wine he drank during a fraternity initiation began to kill Gordie Bailey, some of his fraternity brothers wrote racial, misogynist and sexual vulgarities all over his body as he lay passed out in the Chi Psi library.
One of the most troubling aspects of the 20something generation is the widespread contempt for others, and utter disregard for suffering, of which, "It sucks to be you" is about the most descriptive form. I am sure that good little liberals will be moaning about the racial slurs, and the sexual slurs--but that's just an expression of a deeper problem: a society that liberals have created, by insisting that right and wrong are purely cultural norms, subject to revision as needed. Liberals insist that there is nothing right or wrong about sexual behavior; about theft; about lying; about killing inconvenient life--and then they get upset about racial epithets and sexual slurs?
On the morning of Sept. 17, when it became apparent that the 18-year-old was not breathing, someone tried to wipe off the slurs written on his face. The University of Colorado at Boulder freshman was soon pronounced dead, and at the coroner's office, more markings were found on his arms, legs and body.
The phrases, which Bailey's father said he learned from the coroner, included "It sucks to be you," "Penis ankle" (written on his ankle) and "(Expletive) me." There were also drawings of male genitalia.
"Bitch" was written on the fingers of his right hand. Other phrases included an offensive six-letter racial slur.
UPDATE: One reader points out that along with this sort of idiocy, there are a lot of 20somethings signing up for military service--and sometimes, without any economic pressure to do so. That's very true. We have a lot of people growing up who are showing character above and beyond my wildest expectations, for their generation, or for mine.
Another reader tells me that: I went thru the same sort of crap in college with fraternity and lettermen's groups and it was really drunk out the night I had my sergeants strips nailed on. During those events you learned not to get so drunk that you left yourself at the mercy of your brothers. Had he lived, and the vast majority of us do, he would have felt terrible with both a hangover and the knowledge that he put himself in a condition of total vulnerability. His brothers were sending him a strong message about what can happen when that occurs.He should have spent the better part of the next day groaning, scrubbing and resolving to never get that drunk again, hopefully it would be a hard lesson learned, tragically he did not survive. These kinds of deaths occur every year along with prom auto deaths, we adults work at prevention and education every year and I submit that the writing on this boys drunk, passed out body was a loud and direct message from his peers and would have been educational had he lived. These boys thought they were sending a message not defacing a body.
Doubtless true. But this is why fraternities need some adult supervision. The problem is that making rational decisions about whether you have had enough--or too much--are not easy to do--because you are not in a rational state by the fifth or sixth drink. Peer pressure especially adds to the problem.
Sorry It Has Been So Quiet Here
Friday and today have been spent editing my book. I added about 150 pages to it in the process of revising it for the publisher, and now I am going back through it. Some chapters haven't required much revision. In other chapters, I added so much material that it is requiring significant rearrangements of material. In some places, I have added so much material that I need to go through and summarize what I have, both for length, and to avoid putting the reader to sleep. ("Now what was the point that Clayton was trying to make when we started this exploration of firearms manufacturing contracts in 1776 Pennsylvania?"
Prime Minister John Howard Re-Elected In Australia
For all the screeching from the left in Australia, it appears that the average Australian voter has his head screwed on straight: Australian Prime Minister John Howard managed to secure another term as leader after election results released Saturday handily declared him the winner.
Yup. Great nations recognize their responsibilities in the world, instead of tucking tail and running, like Spain.
With nearly 80 per cent of the votes counted, it looked like Howard would do better than most analysts expected. It seemed likely the Australian leader would increase his government's majority.
"My fellow Australians...I am truly humbled by this extraordinary expression of confidence in the leadership of this great nation," Howard said in front of a cheering crowd of supporters in Sydney.
"I rededicate myself and all of my colleagues to the service of the Australian people."
Defeated Labor Party Leader Mark Latham told his supporters "Tonight was not our night," saying he had called Howard to extend his congratulations.
International observers said the election was a kind of referendum on the invasion of Iraq. U.S. President George Bush faces voters next month, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will probably call an election for sometime next year.
The Labor Party promised voters it would bring the approximately 900 Australian troops serving in Iraq home by Christmas.
Howard, however, said the troops would stay until Iraqis asked them to leave. During their time in Iraq, Australian forces haven't suffered any casualties, and they haven't taken on any combat roles.
I Don't Care If Kerry Is Catholic Or Not
I do care if he is lying about his faith, because I don't want someone lying to get elected (at least, lying more than the industry standard for politicians). From Sobran's: But Kerry and his defenders insisted that he was a Catholic in good standing, and the issue faded away. Still, there were unanswered questions about how seriously Kerry took his Catholicism. Had he gotten his first marriage annulled before marrying Teresa Heinz? Why did he attend Protestant services instead of Catholic Mass, even taking communion in the Protestant rites — things Catholics have always been forbidden to do?
A long profile of Mrs. Kerry in The New Yorker casually answers some of these questions. Judith Thurman writes, “After a brief courtship, a short period of cohabitation, and the signing of a prenuptial agreement, the Kerrys were married in a civil ceremony on Nantucket in 1995.”
There is a world of meaning here for Catholics, and for anyone who takes Kerry’s professions of faith seriously. He and his wife, both baptized Catholics, are living together in defiance of Catholic teaching. In the eyes of the Church, their marriage is invalid: Catholics may not marry outside the Church. The issue of abortion aside, the Kerrys are both ineligible to receive Communion.
Catholic rules on this are ancient and firm. They are no longer firmly enforced, since the Second Vatican Council has created (or been used to spread) the false impression that the “old rules” have somehow lapsed. In fact, annulments are now scandalously easy to obtain. It’s become common for long-married couples with several children to get rulings that their marriage never existed. Annulments, once rare, have become the Catholic answer to no-fault divorce.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Kerry didn't bother to wait for an annulment (which he claims to have belatedly applied for recently) before marrying the widowed Teresa Heinz. This confirms the suspicion that Kerry is, in fact, a thoroughly secularized man, whose regard for Catholicism is minimal.
And if Kerry takes Communion in Catholic churches, he is, in Catholic eyes, committing the grave sin of sacrilege — receiving the Body of Christ unworthily, as St. Paul puts it. This would also make him a hypocrite.
Runaway Slave Ads Online
Obviously, these aren't current. For some time, Tom Costa has had a web site of runaway slave ads culled from Colonial Virginia newspapers here. I also see this collection of 1842-53 runaway slave ads from Baltimore County, Maryland. Useful the next time someone tries to argue that slaves were pretty happy with their lot in life.
This Is A Bit Worrisome
I just received an alert from Gun Owners of America about a bill that does all sorts of things related to national security. Some of them, unfortunate as they are, are inevitable and unavoidable--such as setting a national standard for drivers licenses. Other provisions sound like they might have some serious abuse potential. I'm not worried about how Attorney General Ashcroft might use these powers--but if a Kerry Administration put someone like Janet Reno in charge of the Dept. of Justice, it would be very worrisome: Unfortunately, many of the so-called Republicans in the House are pushing this nightmarish legislation which would:
* Create a massive government database containing personal information on every American man, woman and child;
* Standardize (i.e., nationalize) the process of issuing driver's licenses -- thereby taking the final step toward creating a national ID card; and
* Set up a system whereby any employer or industry identified by the Attorney General would have to submit employment applicants to the government for approval -- complete with fingerprints or other "biometric identifiers."
School Security
After what happened in Russia, this is not a comforting piece of news: Oct. 7, 2004 — Schools in six states in particular are being watched closely based on information uncovered by the U.S. military in Baghdad this summer, law enforcement and education officials told ABC News.
Here's your bad news: we are not dealing with a bunch of people prepared to negotiate. The crowd with their turbans wound too tight are not prepared for anything but complete and utter annihilation of us and our children. Why?
A man described as an Iraqi insurgent involved in anti-coalition activities had downloaded school floor plans and safety and security information about elementary and high schools in the six states, according to officials.
I've mentioned previously the way in which polygamy creates a serious problem of single young men with no realistic hope of marriage. It is not a coincidence that one expression of Islamofascism in the Sudan involves widespread murder of black African men, and rape of their women. In some cases, the Arab Muslims tell the women they are being raped to make light-colored babies. In Beslan, the Islamofascists raped some of the children they were holding hostage.
What does a male lion do when it takes over an existing pride? It often kills the cubs associated with the previous dominant male. What does a zebra stallion do when it takes over an existing harem? It kicks any pregnant females until they miscarry. There is nothing surprising about this; it is the cruel manner in which the new male's genes become dominant in the gene pool. It is, I suspect, the reason that sexual abuse of children is far more commonly done by the stepfather or new boyfriend than by the biological father. Abuse of your own children puts them at a distinct disadvantage; the same selfish concern isn't present in some other male.
This doesn't mean that every stepfather is a monster, but it is because we have worked aggressively to promote the concept of concern for children. I doubt that this is natural for any children but your own.
What we may be seeing with these most brutal and ferocious expressions of Islamofascism is simply the struggle of those who have been thrown out of the gene pool to express themselves--either by rape (replacing men who would otherwise be allowed to reproduce) or by murder (if I can't reproduce, you won't either).
Even one Beslan-like incident in the United States, and the ACLU and the other groups that are telling lies about the PATRIOT Act are going to look pretty darn stupid. If the ACLU is truly concerned about the state of civil liberties, and not just engaged in a partisan political campaign, they should be looking very seriously at the most effective way to make Americans safe--and that isn't by playing games about this matter.
After 9/11, it was not the ACLU that prevented extraordinary measures from being taken against American Muslims--it was a conscious decision of President Bush to emphasize the specific nature of our enemies. If on 9/12 President Bush had ordered all non-resident Arabs and Muslims deported within 48 hours, I suspect that he might have gotten away with it. If he had asked Congress for a law deporting all Arabs and Muslims who are not citizens, I suspect that Congress would have actually discussed it. It is a mark of Bush's self-restraint that he didn't ask the U.S. to behave as badly as it did after Pearl Harbor.
If They Forgot Kerry, Would This Be a Small Story?
I don't think so. It would be a sign of the fascist plot to deny Americans the right to vote! VAN BUREN, Mo. - Officials in one Missouri county are reprinting absentee ballots for the Nov. 2 general election after discovering that President Bush (news - web sites) and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) were left off.
I am inclined to think that any voters that did not notice this minor oversight are probably not qualified to vote--or perhaps to drive.
The ballots were mailed beginning Sept. 21, and Carter County Clerk Becky Gibbs said several voters noticed the oversight.
"We are rectifying it," she said. "There was no intent to leave them off."
Maybe Mandatory Gun Safety Classes Wouldn't Always Be Good
This is definitely a candidate for a Darwin Award: A drive-by shooting suspect has died two days after accidentally shooting himself in the head, police said Monday.
A.P. Einstein Gallegos, 17, of the 100 block of Buena Vista, was a suspect in a drive-by shooting that wounded two 16-year-old boys at 12:53 a.m. Saturday in a vacant lot in the 5800 block of Macias in the San Juan area of Central El Paso, police said. The boys were shot in their arms.
Rolling Back The SUV Tax Break
It looks like Congress is making some efforts to rein in the so-called SUV tax break. As I have discussed before, this is really a business vehicle deduction that has been abused, because it was based on the gross vehicle weight rating--something that includes a lot of serious business vehicles, but a number of SUVs turn out to be (sometimes intentionally) just heavy enough to take advantage of it--producing an unintended result: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional negotiators closed a controversial tax loophole on Wednesday that allowed small business owners to write-off the full cost of the biggest and most expensive sport utility vehicles.
Of course, you can still take the deduction for business vehicles, but the people buying Hummers and Cadillac Escalades are going to find with the deduction limited to $25,000 per vehicle, it isn't quite such a nice little advantage anymore.
The auto deduction is part of a long-standing tax provision covering depreciation of business expenses. It was originally intended for farmers and construction workers who need heavy duty vehicles to haul goods and materials.
Lawmakers expanded the popular write-off from $25,000 to $100,000 last year and lifted depreciation schedules to enable taxpayers to take the deduction all at once. This created a huge incentive for anyone running their own business to buy big SUVs, which have skyrocketed in popularity.
...
The Bush administration urged Congress this week to shrink or eliminate the advantage, despite objections from some Republican lawmakers that doing so was tantamount to a tax increase.
But the final version of a corporate tax bill approved by congressional negotiators on Wednesday rolled back the deduction to $25,000 for most purchases.
I'm not surprised that Bush supports correcting this problem--around here, about the only Kerry bumper stickers I see are on SUVs--especially the Hummers.
I Don't Know If This Is Good Or Bad...
It sounds good at first glance, but the devil is in the details on almost any funding measure like this: [National Alliance for the Mentally Ill] is happy to announce that on Oct.6 the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed S. 1194, the "Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act of 2004".
The problem is real. A reader tells me of a friend from grade school who recently drove 80 mph through many red lights in Los Angeles trying to kill herself because of mental illness. She was hospitalized, of course, but within six weeks, was out on the street, and still dangerous to herself and others.
S. 1194 authorizes grants to states and local communities to foster local collaborations on developing strategies to more effectively respond to non-violent juvenile and adults offenders with mental illnesses or co-occurring mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. Grants from S. 1194 can be used for a variety of strategies, including jail diversion programs, treatment programs for incarcerated offenders with mental illnesses, community reentry programs, and cross-training of mental health, law enforcement and corrections.
Since there are certain differences between the House and Senate passed versions of S. 1194, the bill will now be sent back to the Senate for a vote on the version passed by the House. It is anticipated that the Senate will vote to adopt the House version. Once this occurs, the bill will be sent to President Bush for his signature.
Artsts Dont Ned to Spel Wright Anywa
This is so California--but soon, it will be everywhere, as California's educational and family rearing standards become the national norm: Artist to Correct Spelling
UPDATE: Here's another story about it, and the artist demonstrates that most Californian of attitudes:
Misspelled words contained within a work of art in front of the new Livermore Library will be corrected.
The city council voted 3-2 to spend $6,000 plus expenses to have the artist replace the tiles in the mosaic containing the incorrect words. Mayor Marshall Kamena and Marj Leider were in the minority. Kamena said he had a problem correcting other people’s artwork. Leider stated, “It seems foolish to me to spend this much to fix eleven words. People look at the mosaic and see a work of art.”
In voting to replace the incorrectly spelled words, the council rejected a less expensive option that would have placed a plaque listing the words incorrectly spelled along with the correct spellings. This option would have avoided the risk of damaging adjacent tiles and could be accomplished quickly, according to a staff report.
...
The misspelled words have caused an uproar, particularly since the mosaic is situated in front of a library. Library director Susan Gallinger told the council a variety of comments had been made, ranging from concern with regard to the spelling all the way to those who believe the misspellings add to the childlike nature of the work.
Some of the incorrect words include Shakespere instead of Shakespeare; Schuman rather than Schumann, and Eistein in place of Einstein.
A discussing whether a work of art is exempt from correct spelling ensued following the motion to replace the tiles.
Kamena commented he was torn between artistic license to do things and insistence that things be done correctly.
Councilmember Mark Beeman said that to be considered as artistic, the misspelling should have been an intent. If that were true, misspelled words would have occurred throughout the work. “I believe these are simply mistakes.”
Jim Piper said the artist admits to simply having made mistakes. Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names.
"The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people," Alquilar said. "They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work."
Alquilar said it took her quite a bit of her own time and money to create and install the work, and that it sat idle at her Santa Cruz studio for two years until the city cleared the way for its installation.
There were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters, she said.
"Even though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, I didn't see it," she said.
The mistakes wouldn't even register with a true artisan, Alquilar said.
"The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words," she said. "In their mind the words register correctly."
More Humor
I don't know the original source of this, but Dan Gifford sent it: How CBS, ABC, and NBC would have reported the events of D-Day, the 6th
of June, 1944, if they happened today:
June 6, 1944. -NORMANDY-
Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more wounded today in the first hours of America's invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children.
Most of the French casualties were the result of artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated and reaction against the American invasion was running high.
"We are dying for no reason," said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. "Americans can't even shoot straight. I never thought I'd say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler."
The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, threatening the species with extinction.
A representative of Greenpeace said his organization, which had tried to stall the invasion for over a year, was appalled at the destruction, but not surprised.
"This is just another example of how the military destroys the environment without a second thought, " said Christine Moanmore. "And it's all about corporate greed."
Contacted at his Manhattan condo, a member of the French government-in-exile who abandoned Paris when Hitler invaded said the invasion was based solely on American financial interests. "Everyone knows the President Roosevelt has ties to big beer," said Pierre LeWimp. "Once the German beer industry is conquered, Roosevelt's beer cronies will control the world market and make a fortune."
Administration supporters said America's aggressive actions were based in part on the assertions of controversial scientist Albert Einstein, who sent a letter to Roosevelt speculating that the Germans were developing a secret weapon, a so-called "atomic bomb." Such a weapon could produce casualties on a scale never seen before and cause environmental damage that could last for thousands of years.
Hitler has denied having such a weapon and international inspectors were unable to locate such weapons even after spending two long weekends in Germany.
Shortly after the invasion began, reports surfaced that German prisoners had been abused by Americans. Mistreatment of Jews by Germans at so-called "concentration camps" has been rumored but so far, remains unproven.
Several thousand Americans died during the first hours of the invasion and French officials are concerned that uncollected corpses pose a public health risk. "The Americans should have planned for this in advance," they said. "It's their mess and we don't intend to clean it up."
Kerry Bumper Stickers
Dan Gifford sent me this collection: Vote Kerry - The Sears Tower Is An Eyesore, Anyway
John Kerry - Vietnam War Hero - But For Which Side?
Whatever you believe, I do, too - Kerry '04
John Kerry - Saying Whatever It Takes To Get Your Vote
John Kerry - Won't Just Take A Stand On The Tough Issues, He'll Take Two Or Three Of Them
John Kerry: Betraying America Since 1971
John Kerry: Al Gore But Without The Charisma
John Kerry: Pretending To Fight Against Special Interests Since Very Recently
John Kerry: Screwing Veterans One Day At A Time
Don't vote for anyone who looks like a Q-Tip
Kerry - Endorsed by Al-Qaeda, Al-Jazeera, and Al-Gore
Everything To Everyone - Kerry 2004
Help Me To Help You Screw Up America - Kerry
John Kerry: The President Dukakis We Never Had
Keeping too much of your own money? Vote Kerry!
Kerry - Anti-Pro-whatever
Kerry - Citizen of the United Nations
Kerry - The same economy as Clinton, without the burning sensation.
Kerry: Catholic When It Counts!
Kerry - More Positions Than Gumby
Kerry - More Waffles than Belgium
Kerry - On the issues, he's everywhere you want him to be
Spending Money Left, Left, and Far Left - Vote Kerry
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Teresa.
These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others. - Vote Kerry
Bad Editing, Or An Attempt At Humor?
JPL's recent press release mentions the evidence that the area the Rovers are exploring was not only wet once, but wet twice--which might explain why the press release is a bit repetitive: About six months ago, Opportunity established that its exploration area was wet a long time ago. The area was wet before it dried and eroded into a wide plain. The team's new findings suggest some rocks there may have gotten wet a second time, after an impact excavated a stadium sized crater.
Or are they worried that many people need to be told the news twice, to make sure it sinks in?
By six months ago, Opportunity had established that the area it is exploring was soaking wet long ago, before it dried and eroded into a wide plain. New findings raise the possibility that some rocks there may also have gotten wet a second time, after an impact excavated a stadium-sized crater in the plain.
"I Am Dead, But I Expect My Condition to Improve"
A friend told me a funny story today from about 1988, when he was in the Air Force. His paychecks stopped arriving, and when his commander made inquiries as to why, it turned out that my friend had been identified as "deceased" by payroll. It took more than a month and a half to get this resolved, but in the meantime, he was getting complaints from various creditors, to some of which he could only respond that he was not receiving his paychecks because, "I am dead, but I expect my condition to improve shortly."
His commander's take on it was that half the airmen on the base might as well be dead, but that didn't prevent them from getting paid.
Senator Edwards Thinks CNN Is A Reliable Source of Information
This news story just amazes me: ``He won't acknowledge the mess in Iraq. All you have to do is turn your television on,'' Edwards said. ``They still don't recognize that there's any problem with jobs and the economy'' despite rising health care costs and record job losses.
Do you suppose that Bush might have access to somewhat more reliable sources of information about the situation in Iraq than CNN or CBS? Scrappleface has a very funny piece of satire over here, headlined, "Bush Replaces CIA with CNN, Thanks to Edwards" that really captures this.
There are days that I want to assume that Kerry and Edwards are so desperate to take the White House that they will say almost anything. Then I see remarks like this, and I find myself wondering if Edwards really is what he appears to be: a pretty boy with not a thought in his head.
If Bush didn't recognize that there are some problems with the economy, he wouldn't be making speeches emphasizing the recent job growth, or taking credit for how the tax cuts caused it. (I'm not saying that Bush is completely correct about this, but he at least knows that unemployment is an issue to be concerned about.)
Edwards isn't much brighter than Cameron Diaz, it seems.
Whatever Works
The ACLU will do whatever it takes, and advance whatever argument is needed to win its battle on behalf of homosexuality. The argument in Louisiana was that an initiative banning homosexual marriage and civil unions covers two separate issues--and they found a judge prepared to buy that argument. Their argument in Arkansas (where the Arkansas Supreme Court refused to block a vote on a marriage initiative) was that the proposed constitutional amendment didn't fully explain limits it would place on marriage-type unions.
The ACLU obviously believes that the people of Arkansas are too stupid to understand on what they are voting. This is absurd. The problem is that the people do understand what is at stake here, and do not approve.
...
The ACLU said the wording that will be included on the ballot would leave voters in the dark about the proposal's full implications. During arguments Sept. 23, Justice Donald Corbin noted that the ballot language and the actual amendment mirror each other — so the ballot title had to fully explain the amendment.
I expect the U.S. Supreme Court to void all the state constitutional amendments on this, and impose gay marriage, using the argument that opposition to homosexuality is irrational, and therefore the states may not legislate on it. But all the arguments that they use to defend this position apply equally well to polygamy, bestiality, necrophilia, and a host of other horrifying practices. Yet the same crowd that uses this argument to impose gay marriage claim that this is a different situation.
What is really going on is that the legal establishment of this country doesn't really believe its own theory on this, and would not strike down laws against the list of horribles above; it is simply that they think that the overwhelming majority of Americans are ignorant yahoos, and they are using this argument to protect what they regard as a victimized group. It is also a way for law professors and lawyers to express their contempt for the dominant religion of the United States.
We are fast approaching the point where the question will be who rules the United States: the people? Or the lawyers? You can see why the left end of American politics believes so strongly in gun control--because they know that when push comes to shove, Americans are not going to go along with lawyers running the country.
No Torture For Oil
It is increasingly apparent that the biggest criticism made by the left in its opposition to the Bush/Blair decision to go to war in Iraq was actually a form of projection:
"No Blood for Oil": It turns out that the Iraqi government was buying off important figures in three governments to stop the war: Saddam was convinced that the UN sanctions - which stopped him acquiring weapons - were on the brink of collapse and he bankrolled several foreign activists who were campaigning for their abolition. He personally approved every one.
Will the left admit that the "principled" stand of these nations was actually based on bribery? Of course not.
To keep America at bay, he focusing on Russia, France and China - three of the five UN Security Council members with the power to veto war. Politicians, journalists and diplomats were all given lavish gifts and oil-for-food vouchers.
Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, told the ISG that the "primary motive for French co-operation" was to secure lucrative oil deals when UN sanctions were lifted. Total, the French oil giant, had been promised exploration rights.
Iraqi intelligence officials then "targeted a number of French individuals that Iraq thought had a close relationship to French President Chirac," it said, including two of his "counsellors" and spokesman for his re-election campaign.
Will the left admit that their accusations of corruption were wrongly aimed? Of course not, because the left is prepared to do anything to bring Bush down. Lies; stormtrooper attacks on Bush campaign offices; billionaires spending whatever it takes on scum like MoveOn.org. It is beginning to look as though it may work, too.
I've just kicked in another $250 to the Bush campaign. You can do it with a credit card, here. (The URL is a little odd, but go to the campaign web page, and click on the Donation link.) I want to hear that many of my readers have kicked in at least a few dollars. A Kerry victory is likely to mean a recurring series of terrorist attacks, because bin Laden and friends will perceive that Kerry can be threatened into giving up the fight.
Make Sure You Read The Summary Of The Iraqi Survey Group
Not the media's oversimplified presentation. The summary is here. Interesting points: • The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants
UPDATE: The full report is available here.
understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but verbal comments and directions to them.
...
One aspect of Saddam’s strategy of unhinging the UN’s sanctions against Iraq, centered on Saddam’s efforts to infl uence certain UN SC permanent members, such as Russia, France, and China and some nonpermanent (Syria, Ukraine) members to end UN sanctions. Under Saddam’s orders, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) formulated and implemented a strategy aimed at these UNSC members and international public
opinion with the purpose of ending UN sanctions and undermining its subsequent OFF program by diplomatic and economic means. At a minimum, Saddam wanted to divide the five permanent members and foment international public support of Iraq at the UN and throughout the world by a savvy public relations campaign and an extensive diplomatic effort.
...
Given Iraq’s investments in technology and infrastructure improvements, an effective procurement network, skilled scientists, and designs already on the books for longer range missiles, ISG assesses that Saddam clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems and that the systems potentially were for WMD.
• Iraq built a new and larger liquid-rocket engine test stand capable, with some modification, of supporting engines or engine clusters larger than the single SA-2 engine used in the Al Samud II.
• Iraq built or refurbished solid-propellant facilities and equipment, including a large propellant mixer, an aging oven, and a casting pit that could support large diameter motors.
• Iraq’s investing in studies into new propellants and manufacturing technologies demonstrated its desire for more capable or effective delivery systems.
...
ISG uncovered information that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) maintained throughout 1991 to 2003 a set of undeclared covert laboratories to research and test various chemicals and poisons, primarily for intelligence operations. The network of laboratories could have provided an ideal, compartmented platform from which to continue CW agent R&D or small-scale production efforts, but we have no indications this was planned. (See Annex A.)
• ISG has no evidence that IIS Directorate of Criminology (M16) scientists were producing CW or BW agents in these laboratories. However, sources indicate that M16 was planning to produce several CW agents including sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, and Sarin.
• Exploitations of IIS laboratories, safe houses, and disposal sites revealed no evidence of CW-related research or production, however many of these sites were either sanitized by the Regime or looted prior to OIF. Interviews with key IIS officials within and outside of M16 yielded very little information about the IIS’ activities in this area.
• The existence, function, and purpose of the laboratories were never declared to the UN.
• The IIS program included the use of human subjects for testing purposes.
...
ISG judges that in 1991 and 1992, Iraq appears to have destroyed its undeclared stocks of BW weapons and probably destroyed remaining holdings of bulk BW agent. However ISG lacks evidence to document complete destruction. Iraq retained some BW-related seed stocks until their discovery after Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).
• After the passage of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 687 in April 1991, Iraqi leaders decided not to declare the offensive BW program and in consequence ordered all evidence of the program erased. Iraq declared that BW program personnel sanitized the facilities and destroyed the weapons and their contents.
• Iraq declared the possession of 157 aerial bombs and 25 missile warheads containing BW agent. ISG assesses that the evidence for the original number of bombs is uncertain. ISG judges that Iraq clandestinely destroyed at least 132 bombs and 25 missiles. ISG continued the efforts of the UN at the destruction site but found no remnants of further weapons. This leaves the possibility that the fragments of up to 25 bombs may remain undiscovered. Of these, any that escaped destruction would probably now only contain degraded agent.
• ISG does not have a clear account of bulk agent destruction. Official Iraqi sources and BW personnel, state that Al Hakam staff destroyed stocks of bulk agent in mid 1991. However, the same personnel admit concealing details of the movement and destruction of bulk BW agent in the first half of 1991. Iraq continued to
present information known to be untrue to the UN up to OIF. Those involved did not reveal this until several months after the conflict.
• Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha Al ‘Azzawi, head of the bacterial program claims she retained BW seed stocks until early 1992 when she destroyed them. ISG has not found a means of verifying this. Some seed stocks were retained by another Iraqi official until 2003 when they were recovered by ISG.
French Government Finds More Bush Air National Guard Memos
You will have to scroll down a bit: UPDATE: FRENCH GOVT. FINDS BUSH AIR GUARD MEMOS IN CAVE
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin announced today that a team of French government paleontologists have discovered a cache of Texas Air National Guard memos painted on the walls of a cave near the village of Lascaux.
"Despite his thirst for war in Iraq, it now appears that the American president was not only absent from his Vietnam duties, but also missed several bison hunts," said Villepin in an interview with Paris Match.
...
As of press time, it was unclear whether the French cave memos are related to a recent cache of Texas ANG memos found in a sarcophogus in Luxor, Egypt.
How To Make A Small Fortune
An amusing and useful piece of information from someone who made a large fortune when Apple went public--and how he turned it into a small fortune.
I don't know that there are many startups anymore, but if you are fortunate enough to work for one that flies instead of fries....
The British Mosque & The Murders in Russia
The Guardian reports: A member of the group responsible for the Beslan school massacre last month is a British citizen who attended the infamous Finsbury Park mosque in north London, The Observer can reveal.
Surprise, surprise.
Two other members of the group, loyal to Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, are also believed to have been active in the UK until less than three years ago. They are suspected of taking part in the raid on the school in which 300 people, half of them children, died.
This Anti-Republican Violence Is Getting Out of Hand
This time, from Florida: ORLANDO, Fla. -- A group of protestors stormed and then ransacked a Bush-Cheney headquarters building in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday, according to Local 6 News.
Now, the Sandinistas made extensive use of turbas or "divine mobs" in Nicaragua, much like the National Socialists made sure that police stood by on Krystallnacht. Since the left end of the Democratic Party is the intellectual and ideological heirs of the National Socialists and the Sandinistas, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised by the similarity in tactics.
Local 6 News reported that several people from the group of 100 Orlando protestors face possible assault charges after the group forced their way inside the Republican headquarters office.
...
One of the protestors said she wanted to send a message.
"We want to send a clear message to Bush, we want him to take his hands off our overtime pay," protestor Esmeralda Heuilar said.
Local 6 News learned that most of the protestors were from the AFL-CIO and were taking part in one of 20 other coordinated protests around the country.
A spokesperson with the AFL-CIO told Local 6 News that the Orlando protest did not go as planned.
UPDATE: A friend pointed me to this video coverage of the violent demonstration that mentions that another of these planned demonstrations in Miami also turned violent. Just a coincidence? The AFL-CIO, like most labor unions, has a long history of violence to accomplish its ends. If a conservative group had a similar level of coordinated demonstrations turning into criminal acts, the mainstream media would be calling for Congressional investigations, prosecutions for conspiracy, and so on.
UPDATE 2: According to this, there were three of these incidents, this one in Wisconsin. One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels uses the expression, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." It's time to start a criminal investigation to see who is directing this attempt at intimidating Republicans.
Written Under The Influence of Bitter Chocolate Gelato In Philadelphia
I am about three months from finishing my current book. This is sort of a rough outline of the introduction to the next book that I will be writing. I have a clear picture of what the book will be about, and I have obviously read many of the federal court decisions, and much of the background behind the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act which started California down the road to hell. My research may cause me to make significant changes along the way.
----
The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions: Mental Illness, Deinstitutionalization, and Homelessness
Every book has a starting point, the moment where the author finds himself saying, “This could be an interesting story to tell.” Sometimes, if the issue is critical enough, the author says, “This is a story that must be told.” It may be five years or ten from when the writer has that “Aha” moment to the day that he starts to research it, but for this book, that moment was in 1977. I was not ready to write that book—-but I knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and something needed to be done.
I had gone looking for my older brother in a seedy hotel in downtown Los Angeles—what most people then would have called a flophouse. In 1900, this was probably a first class hotel. As I walked through the halls, the smell of urine was nauseating. Sitting in the lobby, a group of men from their 20s to their 60s sat passively in front of a television, most smoking cigarettes. They had nowhere to go, and no reason to go anywhere, either. As depressing as this rundown hotel was, it was better than living out on the street, sleeping on park benches, or looking for one of the beds at the Salvation Army or another rescue mission. As the month progressed, many of these men—-and a few of the women—-would run out of money. Shortly after the first of the month, when Social Security Disability checks arrived at General Delivery in the nearest post office, they would again be solvent, and back in a flophouse.
As a billboard for the Boise Rescue Mission says, “Not a bum—-but someone's grandfather.” True, but the full story is a bit more complicated than that. Overwhelmingly, these homeless people-—largely men-—are where they are because they are mentally ill. Often their mental illness was overlaid with alcoholism or drug abuse. Traditionally, American society saw “bums” or “hoboes” as lazy, or morally weak, because it was easy to focus on those problems, instead of learning how these people had ended up where they were.
Occasionally, popular songs or movies romanticized them as “free spirits,” unwilling to be tied down to conventional stability. Think of Roger Miller’s 1960s hit “King of the Road”:
Third boxcar, midnight train
Destination...Bangor, Maine.
Old worn out clothes and shoes,
I don't pay no union dues,
I smoke old stogies I have found
Short, but not too big around
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road.
. Further romanticizing these “free spirits” was the counterculture of the 1960s, idolized in the movie Easy Rider. But unlike a generation who had the option of living free of conventional job and living arrangements—-and then settled down to fairly conventional lives in the 1970s-—this new class of homeless people do so not by choice.
In the 1980s, the homeless were reimagined again, not as lazy, and not as free spirits, but as victims of the heartlessness of capitalism, and specifically Reaganomics. Only reluctantly did the activists who championed the cause of the homeless admit that mental illness was widespread in this group-—and even then, there was a strange causal inversion, claiming that homelessness caused mental illness—-not the other way around.
Alcohol and drug abuse are not the only layers of complexity on top of mental illness. Sometimes mental illness leads to criminal behavior. In the late 1990s, a rather strange character showed up at the church we attended in Rohnert Park, California. Jim had been sleeping in the fields on the edge of town with his dog, getting around by bicycle with a little trailer for the pooch. Our pastor had previous experience with mentally ill people, having worked in a homeless shelter, but this man did not quite fit the mold.
Jim did not have an obvious drug or alcohol problem, and he told a story of governmental oppression that for the first five minutes, I could not immediately discount. His kids had been taken from him. His wife was locked up in a mental hospital. It was all a vast conspiracy against him! The more I talked to him, however, the more apparent it was that his thought processes, while not completely chaotic, were scattered and confused. Then he showed me the paperwork that had taken away his children. Jim was so confused in his thinking that he did not realize what that paperwork showed.
Jim's wife had been confined to a mental hospital, apparently because of physical abuse of their children. Jim's parental rights had been terminated—-apparently permanently—-by a court order in another county some months back, because Jim had been showing hardcore pornographic films to his five year old and his three year old, then molesting them. Why had the county not prosecuted Jim? The documents provided no information, but it seems likely that the prosecutor realized that a successful prosecution would require two small children to testify against their father—-having already lost their mother to mental illness. Under the best of conditions, this would have been a hard case to win in court, and it would certainly have been traumatic for the children.
Obviously, Jim was potentially a hazard to other children. In 1950, his mental illness would have earned him a commitment to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane. Even without the necessity for a criminal conviction, a judge would certainly have committed Jim against his will based on the testimony of a psychiatrist. Not today. Instead, Jim wandered the streets, telling his tale of woe. The best that we could hope for is that his mentally disordered thinking would be obvious enough to prevent anyone from putting their children at risk from Jim.
The encounter with Jim was not the reason for this book. Nor was it the burst of sometimes highly publicized murders committed by mentally ill people throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Had it not been for my brother, I might well have scratched my head at these seemingly isolated events and looked for meaning in the popular theories of the time. For a while, it was fashionable to blame Prozac, or gun availability. There were some bizarre conspiracy theories floating around that had their adherents as well. My brother put a face on this tragedy—that of someone who I had grown up admiring and loving, who taught me to read, who took me on my first plane flight.
My brother's fall into mental illness was, I suspect, not so different from many others of that time. My brother had always been a bit on the odd side. He was really smart-—certainly smarter than me. But like a lot of very smart people, he was quite introverted, and he could be cruel at times. His extensive use of LSD when he was in the Army may have pushed a person genetically predisposed to schizophrenia over the edge. The similarities of the LSD trip to schizophrenia is one reason that legitimate scientists experimented with LSD in the early 1960s, before it became apparent that while there were interesting parallels between the LSD trip and schizophrenia, LSD was not a path to a cure.
My brother Ron had been out of the Army for a couple of years when the break happened. I was still in high school. Ron was taking classes at UCLA, and doing very well in them: honors calculus, honors physics, chemistry, and a remedial English composition class. Over a period of perhaps six weeks, his behavior became increasingly hard to comprehend. One evening, he invited my parents and I over to his apartment to show off a new stereo. For some reason, he kept changing the station every few seconds, and gave very strange explanations for why he did so. Somewhere during this time, he told my parents that he was seeing patches of color appearing on walls. He was disturbed by it, and so were my parents, but no one knew what it meant.
His behavior to my sisters—-who he regarded as having married men unsuitable to them-—became increasingly inappropriate. One night he visited my sister Marilyn, and kept missing the hint from Marilyn and her husband that it was bedtime, and he should be getting on his way. To express his disapproval of their choices, he suddenly started dating a black woman (which in the early 1970s, was still rather a daring action). My parents were disturbed by how transparently this was done to shock and offend them; Stracey seemed like a nice young lady, and my parents were more concerned about Ron’s use of Stracey for this purpose than Stracey.
Perhaps seeking answers for what he was experiencing, my brother became involved with various unusual religious groups of the time, such as Nichiren Shoshu. It all came to nothing, and soon, he no longer seemed concerned about things that he did not understand. He moved back in with us, because he either could not, or would not, hold a job. Then, he became irrationally violent. One afternoon my father, my brother, and myself went to the local Safeway for some shopping. While my father was in the store, my brother suddenly leaped out of the car, grabbed an old man sitting on a bench, and yelled at him, “What did you say?”
The old man, in terror, responded, “Nothing, nothing!”
My brother yelled, “Well, you better not say it again!” When he returned to the car, Ron was grinning as wide as the Cheshire cat. “I sure showed him!” I was not yet afraid of my brother, but I was worried. What would he do next?
All of this had been odd, disturbing, and unfortunate, but the moment that the world shattered down around our family came one evening when Ron decided that there was something wrong with him, and he went to the mental health outpatient clinic where we lived in Santa Monica, California. It is a night etched in pain for me, even now. My mother drove him down to the clinic, with me in tow. After a brief conversation, the full extent of Ron's problem became apparent, and the psychiatrist decided that Ron needed to be hospitalized—immediately. An ambulance arrived. For their own safety, the attendants wanted to restrain him on the way to the locked ward of St. John's Hospital. My brother did not want to do that-—and began yelling and cursing his disapproval. (This was a long time ago, when adults did not use language like that in front of children, and many words that are now common were never heard on television or radio.)
My mother, already fearful of what was wrong with Ron, tried to persuade the attendants to dispense with the straps. Her well-meaning intervention was not making anything easier on the doctor or the ambulance attendants, and the doctor told my mother to butt out of this situation, or he would send Ron home with her instead. Eventually, Ron was forcibly restrained, and hospitalized. My mother were emotionally overwhelmed by this scene, as you might expect, and so was I. My mother spent what seemed like an eternity screaming herself to sleep, loud enough that I am sure that many of our neighbors could hear-—and we lived in a house. I cried myself to sleep that night.
The next few months were chaos and confusion. My brother was first held for 72 hours observation, then for another fourteen days. From all that I could see and understand, the doctors and staff at the hospital were concerned and caring people, doing a very difficult job. Unsurprisingly, there was a bit of black humor to all of it. My brother was in the locked ward of the hospital. During one of my visits to my brother, I approached one of the staff and explained that I was ready to leave, “You can’t do that!” he explained.
“But I’m just a visitor here.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Of course, he was just kidding, and promptly unlocked the door. As I write these words, it sounds cold and heartless, to make a joke about something like this—but when I think of the working conditions and the tragedies that the workers in these facilities confront, I can’t criticize their attempt at finding what laughs they could.
The hospital pumped Ron full of the wonder drugs of the time, including, I think, chlorpromazine (Thorazine). Ron certainly calmed down. But this calming effect was a mixed blessing—and for a reason that is the core of this book. As one of the psychiatric technicians explained, “After fourteen days of Thorazine, very few people appear dangerous, and the judge will almost certainly release him.” This turned out to be prophetic. Just a few years before, the California legislature had, with the best of intentions, changed California's mental illness commitment laws, making it much harder to institutionalize mental patients against their will. As with so many dramatic social changes of the time, there were many reasons for this change. For the most part, the intentions were good. Nearly all other states followed this same path, and for many of the same reasons that California did.
During the 1960s, a series of federal court decisions substantially limited the authority of governments to lock up mental patients. As we will examine in later chapters, these decisions were rational responses to abuses of mental commitment laws. Traditionally, mental illness commitment had been a policy question for the legislatures: who should be institutionalized? For how long? For what reasons? The federal court decisions changed the equation dramatically. Because these decisions were based on assertions of Constitutional rights, much of what had been within the discretion of state legislatures to decide based on public input, psychiatric opinion, and the actual conditions of the society, were now locked into a much tighter framework. State governments had not always made the decisions right before—but they at least had considerable freedom to correct mistakes in the law in response to public pressure or expert psychiatric opinion. No longer.
The introduction of wonder drugs such as chlorpromazine gave psychiatrists hope that many of the traditional strategies for dealing with mental illness were no longer necessary—and many psychiatrists were glad for the chance at a new approach. In some ideal world, every psychiatric hospital would have been a cheery place filled with concerned people committed to curing the curable, and caring for those who could not get well. The reality was much uglier than that. Even in mid-1960s California, flush with public funding, journalists reported conditions in state mental hospitals that shocked the conscience. I had occasion to visit Camarillo State Mental Hospital in the late 1970s to pick up a friend. It was better than those news reports of ten years earlier, but I still wanted to cry when I saw the conditions inside—-and I was angry when I found out how dangerous it was inside. The hospitals were not sex-segregated-—and my friend was being threatened with rape if she didn’t give into the sexual demands of another patient, a very big, very strong man. She did not believe that the staff would protect her.
Another factor in the transformation was the death of insanity. In the 1960s, the British psychiatrist R.D. Laing proposed that schizophrenia was not insanity, but a sane reaction to an insane world—a position that must have sounded great to someone, somewhere, but makes no sense to those of us who have spent decades watching family, friends, and acquaintances confront schizophrenia. Somewhat along the same lines, Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and then the 1975 film version, created a widespread perception that mental hospitals were run by sadists, and that mentally ill people were just free spirits in need of some love and friendship. As I talked to people who work in the mental health profession over the years, this one film was high on their list of problems with judges who refused to commit patients.
The costs of mental health treatment, without question, played some part in the deinstitutionalization movement. Especially because such a large number of psychotics are, for practical purposes, not curable, the costs are staggering, relative to other health care costs. As we will see in a later chapter, while cost was not the primary motivation for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, it was certainly an attractive notion that conforming to federal court decisions was both required and less expensive. As we will see, the savings on mental hospitals meant an increase in other expenses: homeless shelters; repeatedly arresting mental patients for minor crimes; burying homeless people who froze to death on a cold winter’s night; increased police services in urban center to deal with mental patients engaged in bizarre and sometimes dangerous actions.
There were many good intentions behind deinstitutionalization. Even those aspects that turned out to be wrong—-such as R. D. Laing’s clever reimagining of schizophrenia—-had good intentions behind them. The consequences, however, turned out to be the title of this book: The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions.
Charging Michael Moore With Bribery
Before you accuse the Republican Party of going over the top on this: LANSING, Mich. (AP) - Republicans say filmmaker Michael Moore should be prosecuted for offering underwear, potato chips and Ramen noodles to college students in exchange for their promise to vote for John Kerry.
Sorry, but a few years back I saw news coverage of a guy who won an election for county commissioner in Kentucky or Tennessee, and the Democratic Party went to court, and persuaded a judge that the successful candidate's promise to lower taxes was a bribe offered to voters--and forced him out of office!
The Michigan Republican Party has asked four county prosecutors to file charges against Moore, charging that his get-out-the-vote stunt amounts to bribery.
"We want everyone to participate in this year's election, but not because they were bribed or coerced by the likes of Michael Moore," said Greg McNeilly, executive director of the state Republican Party.
Moore, a Michigan native, is touring the country and imploring "slackers" who usually don't vote to head to the polls this year, saying they could make the difference in the presidential race. He has made stops at three Michigan universities as part of a 60-city pre-election tour.
During each program, habitual nonvoters are invited on stage to pledge to vote for Kerry. First-time student voters are offered gag prizes such as clean underwear.
"No Man Is An Island"
Traditionally, liberals have used this John Donne poem to criticize what they regard as an atomistic view of economics and social welfare: All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
There is great merit to this argument. Unless you are a hermit, almost everything you do, in some indirect sort of way, influences others. I think there are many merits to capitalism, but it is the case that at least on occasion, the thoughtless or greedy actions of one person can do significant damage to others--and in ways that even in a libertarian utopia would not be correctable.
What makes this truism that "no man is an island" dangerous is when it becomes an excuse to exercise control over the actions of others, where the negative effects of what one person does are very indirect or minor to others. For example, I burn some charcoal briquets in the back yard to cook a steak. Without question, it has some influence on global warming, and perhaps even causes some localized air pollution, but these effects are minor.
That does not mean that burning charcoal in the backyard is constitutionally protected. If millions of other people take the same action, that minor effect can add up to the point where it can be a legitimate concern of the government. (I recall reading a few years ago that the Air Quality Management District responsible for the Los Angeles Basin was planning to ban charcoal lighter fluid and certain types of spray cans for this reason.) The federal and state constitutions grant considerably more power to the governments than it is always wise for them to exercise, but our constitutions work (or at least used to work) on the assumption that most of the time, the will of the people, expressed through their representatives, would be the best restraint on absurd or destructive power.
In the case of the federal government, out of what turned out to be quite legitimate fears, we imposed additional restraints through a Bill of Rights. Most state governments, for similar reasons, have done likewise. The authority of state governments to regulate air pollution seems to be a pretty clear-cut exercise of their police powers, and to the extent that air pollution crosses state lines and affects business, it seems a clear-cut exercise of federal authority to regulate under the commerce clause. Whether particular laws are the best ways of performing these actions can be a legitimate question, but it takes a pretty hardcore anarchist to deny that these are legitimate governmental actions. (Note: creating markets in pollution rights are a governmental regulatory action as well. Try to imagine a market trading pollution rights without a government to deal with violators.)
Similarly, what consenting adults do in private is in the same category as the charcoal barbecue. As long as you don't insist on doing it in front of a window, or in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco, it really isn't the government's business what you do. Again, this doesn't make it a constitutional right. Governments have regulated sexual behavior (especially outside of marriage) in America from the very beginning. It may not be wise or necessary, from my point of view, to regulate private adult consensual behavior, but the solution to your problem is to persuade the population--not to rely on judges to arbitrarily decide that judges are smarter than legislators or the population at large. A privacy argument here goes a long ways with me; insisting that the government recognize your marriage is not a privacy argument--quite the opposite!
All of this is a rather roundabout way of getting to the news article that provoked this--an example equivalent to the million people lighting up the barbecues turning an individual act of freedom into a collective concern that justifies governmental action: PALM SPRINGS -- In the year since health officials warned of a growing syphilis problem here, the alarming but easily curable disease continues to overrun the Coachella Valley.
So why is this a problem for anyone but the people getting the disease? Because there isn't enough information for those at risk to know that they are at risk:
Despite a year of education and testing efforts, Palm Springs alone has a syphilis rate of 81.8 per 100,000 people in 2003, twice the rate of the nation’s No. 1 city for syphilis, San Francisco.
...
The disease, health officials say, is being spread in the desert almost exclusively by gay men, many of whom are also HIV-positive. Cole says syphilis in the Coachella Valley is among the biggest health problems in the entire county -- and it isn’t just a "gay problem." Bisexual men could eventually spread the disease to others, including wives or girlfriends.
Unfortunately, it does not do much good to appeal to those spreading the disease to be concerned for the general good:
"I wouldn’t want the heterosexual community to feel like they’re not at risk, because this is going to spread to other communities," said Robin Johnson, assistant director of social services for the Desert AIDS Project, the lead agency on desert syphilis.
Syphilis is of particular concern because while it is easily treatable with antibiotics such as penicillin, it can be deadly. Left unchecked, syphilis can cause blindness, neurological damage, heart disease and death. And it is often left unchecked. Research suggests that some gay men are no longer concerned about HIV and AIDS and have grown tired of the safe sex message. Health officials say an increasing number are participating in high-risk sexual behavior at resorts or bath houses, or through meetings initiated over the Internet.
This is interesting. I understand that the open sores of syphilis mean that it can spread through contact in areas that aren't covered by a condom--but does that not suggest that HIV could be spread through those same open sores?
Even if men are heeding the safe sex message, the disease can get around it. Condoms don’t necessarily stop the spread of syphilis.
Another problem here is the lack of concern about the risks of spreading syphilis and AIDS: Locally, according to the county health department, about 75 percent of the gay men infected with syphilis also have HIV.
Now, some of you are going to be saying, "There goes Clayton again, making all homosexuals look bad because of a few." But how few is this? The rate is 81.8 per 100,000 people in 2003--and nearly all of these cases were gay men. Men are slightly under half the population, and since about 4-4.5% of the adult male population is gay or bisexual, that means that less than 2227 per 100,000 people are gay or bisexual men. This means that at least 3.7% of the gay/bisexual male population in Riverside County has contracted syphilis and been diagnosed--and it would seem a certainty that there are others who have not been diagnosed with it, but still have it, and are still passing it. (I've made some simplifying assumptions, since in spite of the best efforts of the ACLU and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, most males under 13 are not sexually active. Even including the entire age range of males only has the effect of overstating the number of gay or bisexual men in the population, and thus understating how prevalent this syphilis problem in that community.)
Several people in the valley think same-sex apathy applies at least to a portion of the desert’s gay community.
"They think ‘If I get AIDS, it will be like I have diabetes. All I have to do is take a pill every day,’ " said Charlie Sharples, executive director of the Desert Business Association, which represents nearly 400 gay and lesbian businesses in the valley.
Sharples said from his perspective gay men in the Palm Springs area are aware of the risks, but some engage in unprotected sex anyway.
"It’s like people who want to smoke. They say ‘Well, George Burns smoked and he lived to 100,’ " he said.
Also, he said, "there’s people out there who just don’t care."
So here's your thought experiment for the day: explain why all the traditional nasties of laissez-faire capitalism justify governmental regulation and control--but this does not.
Buying the Election
If you want to know why the left has so much power in this country, just look at who is funding 527s. Of the top 25 contributors to 527s, 23 are on the left, funding Democrats, environmentalists, and other left-wing causes; two are funding Republican or conservative causes--and they are Carl Lindner (#10 on the list) and Paul Singer (#20 on the list).
Every person on the list has given more than $500,000 to 527s during the current election cycle (and presumably money to individual candidates as well). The top leftists have given more than ten million dollars to 527s. And the Democrats are the party of ordinary people, compared to the Republicans as the party of privilege?
Louisiana Constitutional Amendment Overturned By Judge
This news story reports that a state judge overturned a state constitutional amendment passed overwhelmingly by the voters in September: Judge William Morvant said the amendment - overwhelmingly approved by the voters on Sept. 18 - was flawed as drawn up by the Legislature because it had more than one purpose: banning not only gay marriage but also civil unions.
Now, I understand why some state constitutions limit initiatives to a single subject, and that makes sense. But gay marriage and civil unions are one subject.
If the legislature writes two initiatives the next time, one banning gay marriage, and another banning civil unions, what will be the argument be then? I'm sure the ACLU will come up with some reason why they had to be one initiative.
I am beginning to wonder if we should just abandon the pretense that our government's ultimate authority is the people, and just admit that all power flows from the ACLU.
Electoral Vote Predictor
Most of the headlines are about the popular vote--but that's not who elects the president. It's the electoral college vote. (Here's your curious fact of the day--my neighbor John is one of the electors pledged to Bush for Idaho. How did he get to be that? He was, until recently, a member of the Idaho State Senate, and he is a bit of a mover and shaker in Republican Party politics here.)
How's the electoral college vote look? This web site updates daily with the average of the last three recent polls taken in each state, and classifies states into Strong, Weak, Barely, or Tie for each candidate, depending on whether the margin is >10%, 5-9%, <5%, or dead even. Grouping all the Strong, Weak, and Barely states together shows Bush with 321 electoral votes, and Kerry with 200. Since only 270 states are required to win, Bush would be a winner--provided that he keeps all the Barely Bush states.
Since the margin of error on most of the state polls is in the 4-5% range, Bush supporters should not get their hopes too high. The Barely Bush states are clearly battleground, and even if votes were taken today, it is quite possible that half those states could end up going for Kerry. (Of course, it is quite possible that half the Barely Kerry states could go for Bush.)
Still, this looks somewhat encouraging. There are 94 electoral votes in the Barely Bush group as of today, and 42 votes in the Barely Kerry group. Bush has to lose more electoral votes in these states to Kerry than Kerry has to lose to Bush for Mr. Windvane to end up in the White House.
A couple of weeks back, I had decided not to send any more money to the Bush campaign, because they clearly didn't need it. I guess I will be writing them a check after all--they need it to score a clear knockout victory.
Crazy People Shooting Into Presidential Campaign Headquarters
First it was bigots burning swastikas on the lawns of people with Bush signs. Yeah, that's why Democrats support gun control--to keep their side from doing crazy things like this: An unknown suspect fired several shots into the Bearden office of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign Tuesday morning.
UPDATE: Another incident recently, along similar lines:
The headquarters are located at 4618 Kingston Pike, next to Noveau Classics and in the same shopping plaza as Long's Drugstore.
According to Knoxville Police Department (KPD) officers on the scene Tuesday, it is believed that the two separate shots were fired from a car sometime between 6:30 am and 7:15 am.
One shot shattered the glass in the front door and the other cracked the glass in another of the front doors. The Secret Service was contacted Friday to help investigate a shot fired at the Cabell County Republican headquarters in Huntington.
Spitting on the sidewalk is a "random thoughtless act." This sounds a bit more serious, don't you think?
Supporters of President Bush had gathered at the 4th Avenue headquarters Thursday night to watch the president accept his party's nomination. About two minutes into the speech, someone fired a shot through the front window of the building.
Nobody was hurt, but there was plenty of anger in the aftermath.
"This is pretty low and shows how desperate the Democratic Party is," said Republican Amanda Beach.
Bobby Nelson of the Cabell County Democratic Executive Committee disagreed. "I hope it doesn't take on a political connotation, that this was done for politics," Nelson said. "I'd like to say it was some random thoughtless act."The bullet hole pierced a sign that said marriage is between "One Man, One Woman."
That doesn't sound very random to me. Stable, monogamous marriages (not freak shows pretending to be normal marriage) are one of the foundations of a humane society. I can see why certain deranged sorts might feel the need to take a shot at a sign like that.
I Really Want To Believe This...
Michael Williams pointed me to this news report, and like me, wants to believe it, but is skeptical, to say the least: (CNSNews.com) - Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.
Michael Williams points out:
One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support terrorist attacks against Americans in Somalia. The memo was written nine months before U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed in Mogadishu by forces loyal to a warlord with alleged ties to al Qaeda.
Other memos provide a list of terrorist groups with whom Iraq had relationships and considered available for terror operations against the United States.
Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world's most wanted terrorists. Zarqawi is believed responsible for the kidnapping and beheading of several American civilians in Iraq and claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings in Iraq Sept. 30. Al-Zawahiri is the top lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, allegedly helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the U.S., and is believed to be the voice on an audio tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television Oct. 1, calling for attacks on U.S. and British interests everywhere.October surprise? Hm, if this were orchestrated by the Bush Administration, don't you think it would have come out before the first debate? And wouldn't it have been leaked to a more prominent news agency?
If this was something done by the Bush Administration, it would have been better timed a few weeks ago--when it would have destroyed Kerry's credibility on this issue. It wouldn't have come ouf CNS, but Fox. If this is some renegade inside military intelligence doing this, why did they not go up through the chain of command? This would completely destroy the charges of incompetence and dishonesty that Kerry throws around with such abandon.
Bigots Burning Stuff On Your Lawn
Isn't it awful when bigots misuse someone's symbols to terrorize people? Yes--and when it's leftists doing in a university town, it does not make it any better: MADISON, Wis. -- Madison homeowners are livid after vandals defaced their homes.
I will be curious to know in which department of the university the bigots work or are majoring.
Someone burned an 8-foot-by-8-foot Nazi swastika on a home's lawn near where Bush-Cheney signs were posted. The vandals used grass killer to spray the symbol.
Several nearby homes were vandalized -- all were within a two-block radius on the West Side, near Ice Age Trail, News 3 reported.
Holdings vs. Dicta
If you are a law student, this entry is probably of interest. The rest of you should be interested, because it is part of the bag of tricks that judges use to give preference to judicial power over legislative action and popular intent.
Larry Solum has a discussion of how advocates of legal formalism and realism deal with the question of holdings vs. dicta. (You law students might well benefit from reading it.) Legal formalists distinguish holdings from dicta in this way: a holding has precedential value, and represents a court's belief that this is how a law or constitutional provision should be interpreted. Obiter dictum (plural, obiter dicta) are statements made by the court which are not intended to be binding, because they do not define such an interpretation. Think of them as chaff; statements made by the judge writing the decision that may be interesting, perhaps specific to this particular case's facts, but not otherwise a binding rule.
Perhaps my readings of right to keep and bear arms cases have given me a somewhat jaundiced view, but along with the legal formalism definition, there also seems to be a bit of, "I don't like that holding, so I'll pretend it's mere dictum" out there as well. Perhaps the clearest example is Aymette v. State (Tenn. 1840), in which the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld a ban on concealed carrying of a Bowie knife, and claimed that Simpson v. State (Tenn. 1833) was not binding: In the case of Simpson v. The State, 5 Yerg. 356, Judge White, in delivering the opinion of hte court, makes use of the general expression that, "by this clause in the constitution, an express power is given and secured to all the free citizens in the State to keep and bear arms for their defence, without any qualification whatever as to the kind and nature."
Go here to read Simpson v. State (Tenn. 1833), and you will see that this is simply not the case. While the Simpson case was decided primarily because the elements of the crime ("affray") were not charged, and therefore the case was defective, the prosecution argued that the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons" constituted affray based on the Serjeant Hawkins case under English law. The decision specifically rejected this argument, and did so based on the state constitution's guarantee of a right to keep and bear arms:
But in that case no question as to the meaning of this provision in the constitution arose, and the expression is only an incidental remark of the judge who delivered the opinion, and, therefore, is entitled to no weight.By this clause of the constitution, an express power is given and secured to all the free citizens of the state to keep and bear arms for their defence, without any qualification whatever as to their kind or nature; and it is conceived, that it would be going much too far, to impair by construction or abridgement a constitutional privilege which is so declared; neither, after so solemn an instrument hath said the people may carry arms, can we be permitted to impute to the acts thus licensed such a necessarily consequent operation as terror to the people to be incurred thereby; we must attribute to the framers of it the absence of such a view.
The meaning of the state constitutional provision was a fundamental part of how the Simpson decision struck down this prosecution; to assert that it was dictum is wrong--and pretty typical of the judicial wilfulness that has typified one strain of right to keep and bear arms case law in the United States.
More On The Oil-For-Food Corruption
From the Sunday Times of London: A LEAKED report has exposed the extent of alleged corruption in the United Nations’ oil-for-food scheme in Iraq, identifying up to 200 individuals and companies that made profits running into hundreds of millions of pounds from it.
Yes, Senator Kerry, this is why we need to submit the security needs of the United States to a "global test," which really means a French veto.
The report largely implicates France and Russia, whom Saddam Hussein targeted as he sought support on the UN Security Council before the Iraq war. Both countries were influential voices against UN-backed action.
A senior UN official responsible for the scheme is identified as a major beneficiary. The report, marked “highly confidential”, also finds that the private office of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, profited from the cheap oil. Saddam’s regime awarded this oil during the run-up to the war when military action was being discussed at the UN.
The report was drawn up on behalf of the interim Iraqi government in preparation for a possible legal action against those who may have illicitly profited under Saddam. The Iraqis hired the London-based accountants KPMG and lawyers Freshfields to advise on future action.
It details a catalogue of alleged bribery and corruption perpetrated by Saddam under the UN programme, revealing how the regime lined its pockets and those of influential politicians, journalists and UN officials.
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The report says oil was given to key countries: “The regime gave priority to Russia, China and France. This was because they were permanent members of, and hence had the ability to influence decisions made by, the UN Security Council. The regime . . . allocated ‘private oil’ to individuals or political parties that sympathised in some way with the regime.”
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The other main allegations included in the report are that:
Benon Sevan, director of the UN oil-for-food programme, received 9.3m barrels of oil from the regime which he is estimated to have sold for a profit of £670,000. Sevan has always denied any improper conduct.
A former senior aide to Putin allegedly organised the sale of almost 4m barrels of oil at a profit of more than £330,000. At the time the oil was sold, Russia was blocking the UN from supporting America’s demands to attack Iraq. According to the report, the aide, who worked in the presidential office, received 3.9m barrels of oil between May and December 2002.
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A French oil company teamed up with the regime to bribe a UN-appointed inspector monitoring exports of Iraqi oil. The inspector, a Portuguese national working for Saybolt, a Dutch firm, was paid a total of £58,000 in cash to forge export documents.
The French firm is linked to a close associate of Jacques Chirac, the country’s president. A spokesman for Saybolt said it would be investigating the allegations.
Why Is Islam So Violent?
Not all Muslims, of course, but it is interesting how many of the world's problems today involve violent Muslim men: blowing up buses in Israel; murdering children in Russia; murdering children in Iraq; murdering New Yorkers on 9/11; murdering young people in Bali; murdering Indians in Kashmir; murdering just about everyone in the Philipines.
A friend sent me an article by William Tucker that apparently appeared in The American Spectator in June 2004 (although I can't find it on their website). Tucker makes a very good point, and one that should have occurred to me after reading David Courtwright's Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City: polygamous religions, because they put many men out of the marriage market, are always going to have more single young men than monogamous religions: Anthropologists like to recount how 75 percent of the world's cultures practice polygamy. This provocative academic exercise is true but highly misleading. The vast majority of these cultures are individual tribal units counted as separate entities. Seventy five percent of the world's people live in cultures that prohibit polygamy and sanction monogamy.
This is as plain as day. A society in which you have large numbers of men who are single--and no prospect of ever getting married--has to do one of several things:
Among major population groups, polygamy is largely limited to tropical Africa and the Middle East. In East and West Africa, it is a holdover from tribal society that survived into modern life. In small villages, a successful man may have three or four wives. In contemporary urban settings, leading business magnates and politicians can accumulate anywhere from 20 to more than a hundred wives.
Islam is the only major religion that specifically sanctions polygamy. This has a historical context. The nomadic desert tribes that first embraced Islam in the seventh century were already practicing polygamy (just as the Ancient Hebrews practiced a mild form of it during the wandering years of the Old Testament). The Koran's prescription that a man may have five wives is actually a limitation. (Muhammad himself had this number.) Even so, many sheiks and sultans have managed to skirt the Koran. Osama bin Laden's father had 52 children by an estimated 11 to 16 wives.
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WHAT IS IT ABOUT POLYGAMY that keeps a society from advancing? The answer lies in simple arithmetic.
Biologically, approximately the same number of males and females are born into each society. If the society practices monogamy, then every male and every female has an equal chance of mating--there is "a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl."
If even a small number of predominant males are allowed to accumulate more than one wife, however, the equation begins to change. There is now a "female shortage" and competition among men for finding mates becomes much more intense.
Societies solve this problem in different ways. One is the "brideprice," a fee that families charge for an eligible daughter. (Brideprices are the signature of polygamy, while dowries--a bonus to make a daughter more attractive--are the signature of monogamy.) Brideprices encourage men to be more productive, since it costs money to get married. Older and more established men are favored. If the woman shortage becomes too intense, a society may resort to child marriage--where an adult man is betrothed to a prepubescent girl and must wait until she reaches maturity.
The more common outcome, however, is that young, single men become an unattached cohort with very little chance of mating--the "bachelor herd" of mammalian biology. Life in the bachelor herd is often nasty, brutish, and short. Status competition is endless, with males vying for the few positions where they may get the chance to mate. A handful of "social" species (baboons are the best example) have incorporated the bachelor herd into the troop as a kind of praetorian guard, banished to the perimeter but kept on hand for defensive purposes.
Human societies that practice polygamy have tried various strategies for dealing with the bachelor herd. Long stretches in the military were common. The attendants to the king's harem were made eunuchs. The Mamluks, an all-male Egyptian military culture of the 13th through 16th centuries, dispensed with women altogether and kidnapped their male progeny. The best solution, however, has always been to try to harness the violence and point it outward as aggressive defense or conquest.
IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC societies, polygamy constitutes about 12 percent of marriages. This is not as high as Africa (where it can approach 30 percent), but sizable enough to leave a small, solid residue of unattached men. In Africa, these are the "school-leavers," an amorphous urban mass that creates social unrest and provides easy recruits whenever a revolutionary army arrives on the scene. In Islamic societies, on the other hand, the mass of unattached men is tightly organized by religion.
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Young men, on the other hand, are required to repress their sexual impulses by devoting all their energies to religion. In a recent lengthy portrait in the New York Times Magazine, Mansour Al-Nogaidan, a prominent Saudi Arabian dissident, recounted his own enlistment into the ranks of fundamentalist Islam. "You can't have a girlfriend in this society," he said. "It's too expensive to marry and as a young man, all you're thinking about is sex. So the teachers tell us, 'Don't worry, no need now, when you kill yourself you'll have plenty of girls in heaven.'"
In a society where not all men will be able to reproduce, excess males have very little social value. Therefore, it is not surprising to find among this bachelor cohort three major characteristics: (1) an excess of pent-up sexual frustration, (2) an internalized sense of personal worthlessness, and (3) an extremely nihilistic--shall we say "suicidal"--disposition toward self-immolation and violence. Suicide bombers are easily recruited in these ranks.
1. Persuade young men that they really don't want sex. (Yeah, right.)
2. Turn a blind eye to homosexuality. Islam is very, very hostile to homoseuxality--but in practice, it seems to be very common in many parts of the Middle East.
3. Kill them off, preferably in a way that makes them think that they are doing something worthwhile, so that they don't turn their energies into overthrowing the existing power structure.
I've generally taken the view that while Islam is a false religion, it's not necessarily a destructive religion. This article by Tucker, pointing out the consequences of sanctioning polygamy, has caused me to rethink that position.
UPDATE: The Comedian points me to an article of his from 2002 that points out that China has potentially a similar big problem, because its "one child only" policy, combined with widespread female infanticide and sex-selection abortion, has produced a generation of forty million men who can't get married. He points out the risks of having that many single men.
Courtwright's book (mentioned above) describes how Chinese immigrants to America ran into an even more extreme problem. The 1880s laws that excluded Chinese immigrants meant that Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women by a very large margin, and social pressure (and in a few states, laws) prevented them from marrying whites. Courtwright describes how this led to polyandry in the Chinese community, with five and sometimes even ten Chinese men living together and sharing a single Chinese wife.
Bizarre Dream Last Night
My wife and I bought a house in the south of England--a very big house. We hadn't really explored the cellar adequately, but as we wander through it (it's that big), we discover that there are subterranean caverns--and the deeper we go, the more evidence we find that that the caverns go under the English Channel, and lead to France.
Eventually, we run into the subhuman cannibals, rather like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells The Time Machine. When I woke up, one of the cannibals was chewing on my arm, while I was squeezing on his eyeballs with the other arm, trying to force him to let go. At the same time, I was reluctant to put out his eyes, for fear that I would have nothing left to use as a bargaining chip to get him to stop chewing on my arm.
I haven't read or watched anything on these lines. I ascribe this dream of subhuman cannibals to excessive contemplation of French foreign policy and their betrayal of us over Iraq.
Reading Carefully
One problem that historians often confront (or at least, are supposed to confront) is how to deal with texts that can be read in multiple ways, or where the larger context might suggest an alternative meaning. As an example, in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, 10:700, is this statement: Col. Robert Peebles for an order drawn by James Pollock & Samuel Laird, Esq'rs, Commissioners of Cumberland County, for Two Hundred Pounds, being in part for 100 muskets made by Col. Peebles, to be charged to said Commissioners.
I have been chasing down firearms transactions and appraisals in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras for which I can identify the full purchase price and the number of guns. So far, I have records of 2088 Revolutionary War purchases (average price two pounds, one shilling sterling), and 300 other Colonial era purchases and appraisals (average price one pound, one shilling sterling).
If I were in a hurry, it would be easy to read that statement above as a 200 pound payment for 100 muskets--for an average price of two Pennsylvania pounds each. Since my objective is to show that the price of guns in early America was, contra Bellesiles's claims, pretty low, reading that statement in such a way would be very, very easy. If you are just looking for transactions, that "in part" can slip through quite easily.
Another possible reading of it was that the 200 pounds purchased 100 muskets as well as other goods ("in part" meaning 100 muskets was part of the transaction). This would make the muskets less than two Pennsylvania pounds each.
The most likely reading, based on the price of muskets actually contracted for, is that Col. Peebles had already received an advance or down payment on those 100 muskets, and this is only payment "in part" for those muskets--or perhaps that Col. Peebles would receive another payment as well. Consequently this is the not the full price, and I have excluded it from my database of gun purchase transactions.
All three of these are all ways to read the statement, and the worst that you might say is that the alternate readings are incorrect or questionable. The historian must be careful to consider all possible readings, and look carefully at the context--especially if one of those readings fits his hypothesis better than the other possible readings (in my case, that guns were cheap).
Now, a few weeks ago, I made the following statement concerning how certain law professors and historians to form a "truth squad" to attack Michelle Malkin's new book about the Japanese-American internment: There are professional historians who take what they do seriously, regardless of the political consequences of what they find. But I no longer have any illusion that these "professional standards" are adhered to by the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S.
Now, Dr. Luker has read my remarks as saying that the vast majority of professional historians are not conforming to professional standards. I concede that my statement can be read that way--but it can also be read (and others have also read it this way) as meaning, "While many or most are conforming to the professional standards, the vast majority are not doing so, with a sizeable minority failing to do so." Especially in light of the sentence about, "There are professional historians who take what they do seriously" just before it, it would at least be a plausible alternative reading. I have made this point repeatedly in email to Dr. Luker, who keeps insisting that there is only one possible way to read my statement--that the vast majority of historians are failing to conform to professional standards. (That would mean that only a tiny minority of historians are conforming.)
Now, with historical sources, you can't go back and question them. You can't ask for clarification. Dr. Luker has had repeated opportunitities to say, "Okay, that's not what I understood you to mean, but I can see how that is another possible reading." I find myself wondering how well Dr. Luker (a professional historian) interprets historical documents that admit of multiple readings, if he can't even back off when someone tells him, "Sorry you misread it that way, that's not what I meant." Perhaps the reason that Dr. Luker finds it necessary to interpret my remarks in a way that harshly criticizes his profession as almost entirely unprofessional and politically driven--and ignores my professed meaning for that statement--says a lot more about Dr. Luker's view of himself and how he does history.
Unfortunately, Dr. Luker seems to have gotten himself into a hopeless tizzy about this, because the fact is that there is a sizeable number of historians who bought into Bellesiles's completely unbelievable claims (almost no Americans hunted, even on the frontier; whites almost never committed violent crimes against other whites in early America; only about 10% of American men had guns; Americans, if they had an opinion about guns, disliked them; axes were superior military weapons to guns; seventeenth century England's violence was almost entirely between rival groups of Morris dancers)--and defended those ridiculous claims even after it became apparent that they were fraudulent. The manner in which many historians have turned a blind eye to less severe, but still significant problems with the "historical evidence" that the Supreme Court used in the Lawrence decision last year tells me that the problem of results-oriented, politically driven history continues.
