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Why Handing Over Your Wallet Isn't Enough, Sometimes
Police have for a very long time encouraged robbery victims to just hand over their valuables, and hope that the robbers don't hurt you. Here's one of those cases where the victim did what the police tell you to do--and the thugs were pretty clearly going to murder him, anyway.
From the December 24, 2005 Philadelphia Daily News: A Philadelphia Gas Works field worker shot and wounded one of two teenagers who held him up at gunpoint in Southwest Philadelphia yesterday, police said.
Even more surprising is that even this PGW employee was breaking company policy by being armed, the company isn't planning to publicly crucify him for defending himself and making Philadelphia a little safer--at least, not immediately:
The veteran PGW worker gave up his wallet and cash to the teens, police said, but decided to reach for his own weapon after he saw one of the teens "cock back the hammer of the gun."
The PGW worker managed to quickly fish his own gun out of his jacket.
"He fired three shots," said police Lt. John Walker. One of the shots struck one of the 17-year olds in the leg, but he managed to flee with his companion.
Roofers working nearby told police which direction the youths ran in, and two suspects were soon arrested.
The teen who was shot was admitted to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was listed in stable condition.
Police didn't release the names of the suspects, who are juveniles, or the name of the PGW employee, who had a permit for his weapon.PGW spokesman Doug Oliver said company policy prohibits employees from having "unauthorized weapons" at any PGW work area.
I spent some time in Philadelphia earlier this year, and I was so glad that I was allowed to be armed there. I can't imagine going there otherwise.
While Oliver said it appears the employee violated the policy, officials don't plan to address that issue right away.
"Our first concern is with our employee," Oliver said. "This was a very traumatic experience. It's not every day you find yourself in a position where you feel like your life is about to end."
Why No-Knock Warrants Are a Bad Idea
When no-knock warrants first became a subject of public debate back when I was young, I thought that they were a very bad idea. The vast majority of no-knock warrants, I suspect, are drug cases. Some gambling and white collar crime cases might require no-knock warrants to prevent loss of critical data. Bookies, for example, use to keep their records on what was called "flashpaper," a nitrocellulose material that went up in a flash when lighted, for this very reason.
There are probably a few instances where no-knock warrants make sense (other than drug cases). For example, if there is reason to believe that criminals are holding a hostage whose safety will be imperiled by knock and announce. I can imagine certain terrorism cases might occasionally fit that profile as well--where you don't want the terrorists to set off a bomb (maybe a very large bomb) while you waiting for them to open the door.
While I am not enthusiastic about repealing all drug laws, like I once was, I consider that the costs of evidence being flushed down the toilet are relatively small compared to the very high costs associated with no-knock warrants. For the very small number of scenarios that justify a no-knock warrant (hostages or terrorists, for example), they should probably exist. But for the rest of these cases, the benefits of no-knock warrants would seem to be exceeded by the costs.
What happens when the police fail to announce their presence before kicking in your door? If you are a criminal, you are assuming that it is the police. If you are a law-abiding person, you assume that it is a criminal. The law-abiding person is likely to shoot at those forcing entry--and with good reason.
I haven't said anything about the Cory Maye case for the simple reason that I understand that some of Radley Balko's initial claims about this matter turned out to be incorrect, and I would like a little time for this situation to mature. But the Cory Maye case is an argument against no-knock warrants. If someone kicks in my door, I will assume that they are criminals.
Here's an example of what happens when the police don't bother to announce themselves--and at least in this case, no one got killed: It was 28 seconds past 7:45 p.m. on Aug.18 when the 911 dispatcher took the call from Sascha Wagner. “There’s someone breaking into the house,” she yelled at the 911 operator, giving the address of the home she shares with David Scheper on the 800 block of West Lombard Street. “Send police now!”
Oh great! Don't announce yourselves as cops. Just try to force your way in:
Moments before, Scheper had opened the door to two strangers who then tried to force their way in. Scheper, who is 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds, slammed and locked the door on the would-be intruders, but he was in a panic as they smashed the glass in the 100-year-old door. He grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun and “was racking the slide over and over,” he recalls.
“I didn’t have any ammo for it, I’m racking the shotgun, telling them to get out. I’m not sure they’re in yet.” He ran to his basement in search of a usable weapon to defend himself and his girlfriend. “I was scared for her safety more than mine,” Scheper says.
In the basement, Scheper grabbed a CZ-52 semiautomatic. “I have this piece-of-junk Czechoslovakian pistol,” he says. “I put a magazine in it, racked the slide back. I was trying to check to see if there was a round in the chamber and I couldn’t rack the slide . . . so I was fighting it. The gun was jammed, and I was trying to get it operable. It accidentally went off into the floor of my basement.”
And with that, police say, Scheper committed the crime for which he was charged in Baltimore City Circuit Court: Discharge of a Firearm in Baltimore City. He faced up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Prosecutors dropped Scheper’s case Dec. 2.
The intruders? They got in. They took $1,440 in cash Scheper says he withdrew from his bank account in order to buy a used pickup truck. They hit a 70-year-old art-deco-style metal desk with an ax. They took 18 of Scheper’s guns—mostly inoperable antiques, he says—and some gun-shaped props he had built for movies. “They threatened to blow up my safe,” Scheper says, so he opened it for them. They face no criminal charges.
The intruders were William T. Bristol and Antwyne R. Jones, Baltimore Police Department detectives with the Organized Crime Division.Scheper says the detectives were looking for a housemate he had evicted some three weeks before, who in turn was connected to a man they had arrested. Police officers stayed in Scheper’s house for hours and left three empty pizza boxes there after turning the place upside-down, according to photos that Scheper says were taken just afterward.
All charges were dropped against Scheper--the day before trial, after his attorney obtained a copy of the 911 tape.
Scheper, a welder who often works 12 hours per day making sets and props for movie production companies, had no drugs other than some prescription pills. He had nothing illegal at all. He had no prior police record.
...
In the Statement of Probable Cause, P.T. Geare of the police department’s Southern District says the two detectives knocked on Scheper’s door, identified themselves as police officers, and asked to speak to him. “Mr. Scheper then quickly closed the door, locked it and ran into the home out of the detectives’ sight,” Geare says in the statement. “After a short time a loud noise came from the dwelling which these detectives believed to be a gun shot. . . . At this point, due to the detectives believing that they heard a gun shot and fearing that evidence may be destroyed or someone may be injured [the detectives] attempted to make entry.”
In fact, the police had no warrant to enter or search the home when they first arrived (the actual warrant came at 9:50, about two hours after the search began), and Scheper was within his rights to refuse them entry. Scheper says he thinks the police tried to force their way in immediately as a matter of procedure, so they could later claim they were granted entry by him. He says the plainclothes detectives did not identify themselves as police until after they started bashing in his door.
“If they had actually just asked me questions, there’s no reason that I wouldn’t have been cooperative,” Scheper says.
House Project: Cleanup, Water, Water, Everywhere--But Not Enough Pressure
The electrician was supposed to finish up some last minute details today, and it appears that he did. The heating guy was supposed to get the gas dryer hooked up, and the backup generator hooked up to its gas supply. The generator looks hooked up, but the gas dryer was not done, so I don't know if he was up there or not.
A couple of days ago, we took up the mailbox. The builder is going to have to put it on a temporary pole until the ground is warm enough to sink a permanent post. (Yes, the ground has been frozen solid until yesterday.)
My wife has an artistic side, so she "improved" the boring black mailbox:
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The other side is a bit blurry, not because she was experimenting with impressionism, but because I think I was a bit close.
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The tile guy was up on Wednesday repairing a number of cracked tiles. He thinks the underlying floor joists might have sagged; the builder thinks that the tile was placed on a boundary in the tile underlayment. I think I agree with the builder.
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We drove up Thursday afternoon, late, after a couple of days of light but consistent rain. Like the movie a few years, we opened the garage and discovered, a river runs through it.
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Now, sometime on Thursday, the gutter guy got the gutters over the two ends of the garage installed, so we may be seeing the effects of rain coming off the roof before the gutters went in. The next serious rainstorm will tell for sure.
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We went up today to do some cleanup around the exterior of the house. The builder is going to do that, but when he left for Christmas vacation, there was a thick layer of snow around the house, and there was ice holding many pieces of scrap in place on the driveway aprons. At least the warm weather has melted most of the ice, leaving a debris field:
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Out back, there is a bit of a lake. We need to put in a drain or at least a drainage ditch to let this empty over the side of the hill. (You can see the backup generator.)
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I asked a couple of days ago where to get a big bow for the house. Thanks for all the suggestions! I called the very nice salescritter at Chevrolet of Boise (Karen Martin) who sold us the Equinox last summer, and she told me where they get their bows made. I sneaked up around noon and attached the silver and red bow to the front door, so when my wife and I arrived in late afternoon, she was completely surprised.
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At least I didn't have to wrap the house in shiny paper.
Even after picking up scrap for a couple of hours, there's still some grading work to do.
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Now for the disappointing news. By the time we were done, I was aching, wet, and cold. So I thought, "I'll go fill the jetted tub and turn on the jets." I turned on the hot water. It wasn't much warmer than the cold water--and there's wasn't much of it.
So I checked the water heater. It was at the "WARM" setting, so I turned it up to one notch below "HOT." The water did get a lot hotter--but there wasn't much of it. The water pressure was so low that I checked to make sure that the pressurization pump was running. It claimed to be running, and the gauge said it was putting out about 65 psi.
Hmmmm. When my wife turned on a faucet while I was trying to fill the jetted tub, she got no water at all.
As near as I can tell, when the plumber installed the whole house lead filter, he verified that he got water out of the faucets--but didn't verify that he was getting much pressure. I found the installation manual for the filters, and they indicated at 10 gallons per minute (my nominal maximum flow), I should lose at most 0.5 psi of pressure because of the filters. My guess is that I am losing more like 50-60 psi of pressure.
So, what is it? The builder is away. I don't know the plumber's name. I am going back tomorrow to check if:
1. The filter housing is installed correctly. Perhaps there is a preferred direction, and it is backward.
2. Remove the filters from the housing, and see if the water pressure increases.
3. See if there is something really obvious, like a plastic cap over some part of the filter assembly that is constricting flow.
This is the first moment in the process where I have been really, really upset about how something has been done.
UPDATE: I went up this morning. The filter housing is installed correctly. There is plenty of pressure going into the filter housing. There's nothing obvious restricting flow. I think the problem is that the filters that remove lead are such a barrier to water flow that they are effectively unusable for their intended purpose. Even if this filter housing were upstream of the pressurization pump, they would so slow the flow of water into the pressurization pump as to make it impossible to get enough water. I am going to insist that the vendor take this back, and refund our money. I guess we'll put lead filters on each faucet. What a nuisance.
Last house project entry.
The Michelins Are Far Quieter Than The Goodyears
I had read a lot of comments by Corvette owners who had switched from the factory Goodyear GS F1 Eagle EMT tires to the Michelin Pilot A/S that the Michelins were noticeably quieter. Yes, without question. I didn't need to pull out my decibel meter to tell this--it was very, very obvious. The difference is most pronounced on concrete (where the Goodyears are noisiest) but even on asphalt, the Michelins are much quieter. My wife has agreed that the Corvette is now quiet enough to take on long road trips.
The Michelins don't feel quite as precise as the Goodyears, but remember that as tread depth drops, tire handling tends to become sharper. This is why in some types of street-based racing series, they commonly race on tires with half of the tread depth shaved away. I may just be seeing the results of comparing Goodyears with about 4/32" of tread left to Michelins with lots of rubber on them still.
Unfortunately, I can't tell if the extra tread on the Michelins is going to solve my snow problem or not. Probably because I ordered up the Michelins because of the snow traction problem, we have had unseasonably warm weather the last couple of days (in the 50s here in Boise!), and all the snow has melted from my new driveway. Still, the noise reduction alone might have been worth the substantial expense.
I will sell the used Goodyears on eBay. They still have substantial tread left on them, and for anyone who is driving on either dry or wet pavement, they are completely controllable and safe. I'll probably start the bidding for them at $75 for the pair (plus shipping, which may be entertaining); if need be, when the Michelins wear out, I can have them put back on in spring and probably get another 10,000 miles out of them.
I've gotten some email suggesting that buying Michelin (a French company) isn't a particularly good thing, in light of the geopolitical situation. It is certainly true that the French government sold us out about Iraq (and for terribly corrupt reasons). I wouldn't assume that every French corporation or individual goes along with that policy. I would also mention that France has turned out to be a very vigorous and effective ally against other forms of Islamofascist terrorism. Their motivation is certainly based on self-interest, but in war, getting too picky about why your allies are helping you is often not wise.
Painful Surprise on the House Project
I had originally taken out a construction loan with First Horizon. This was a "one-time closing" arrangement, where a lot of the closing costs associated with the final loan were rolled into the construction loan costs. As time went on, and interest rates rose, my credit union became far more competitive on the permanent loan, so I decided to make them my permanent lender.
We just did the closing on the permanent loan Wednesday--and it turns out that there is more than $8000 in fees associated with the construction loan, above and beyond the interest and payments made to the builder.
I don't know at this point that First Horizon did anything wrong. I need to go back over the paperwork, and make sure of this. But it was a painful surprise. I was expecting a loan origination fee of 1% of the loan amount--okay, that's about $2150. But where did all these other fees come from? Each time that they issued a draw to the builder, they charged an inspection fee for someone to come up and verify that the work being paid for had been done. There's title insurance. Still, there's more than $6000 after the loan origination fee. This is going to require some careful examination of the fees charged.
The experience with First Horizon hasn't been exactly wonderful up to this point, anyway. My builder has lots of experience dealing with construction loan companies, and he was startled at how slowly they processed draw requests--far longer than made any sense.
Lesson learned: next time, I'll sell bonds, and pay cash for the construction.
UPDATE: It turns out that about $1400 of this was interest for December, bringing down the unexpected amount to about $5500--I'll try to decode the babble of the closing paperwork and figure out where all that money went.
Last house project entry.
Will Justice O'Connor Find This Foreign Court Decision Persuasive?
I mentioned a couple of years ago that Justice O'Connor thinks that increasingly, the U.S. Supreme Court should be looking at the decisions of foreign courts in deciding domestic questions. Somehow, I can't imagine that she will be using this as an example: Adult movies will be banned from TV in the Indian city of Mumbai, Indiantelevision.com has reported.
According to this report, it doesn't apply to foreign broadcasters:
The Mumbai High Court yesterday passed an order restricting cable service providers or local cable operators in Maharashtra, Goa, Daman and Diu from telecasting “adult” films in violation of existing Indian laws.
Cable TV operators and satellite channels “must not telecast adult movies which are not suitable for unrestricted public exhibition,” said Justices R M Lodha and D G Karnik of the Mumbai High Court.The embargo encompasses risque Bollywood films but has controversially failed to affect foreign broadcasters, including media mogul RUPERT MURDOCH's Star network.
A Clearer Version of Something That I Have Previously Said
I'm not terribly impressed with most of what I run into over at LewRockwell.com, but this column by economist Gene Callahan expresses quite effectively one of my major arguments in favor of Intelligent Design at least getting a brief discussion in the classroom: I will declare up front that I don’t regard Intelligent Design as a likely candidate to supplant Neo-Darwinism as the accepted model for understanding the origin of species, and not merely due to the hostility it generates in the scientific establishment, but even more because of its own weaknesses.
Exactly! Discussing Behe's argument concerning irreducible complexity can be a useful method for showing students that science involves questioning, not simply absorbing the current received wisdom.
...
Despite the fact I suspect that ID is an intrinsically flawed approach, I still endorse the efforts to have it presented in schools as an alternative to the standard theory. If ID is included in a biology course, the enrollees should certainly be informed that Neo-Darwinism is currently the orthodox view, embraced by the vast majority of working biologists. But it is precisely such firmly entrenched orthodoxies that most cry out for challenges. Even if the dominant theory succeeds in repelling all rivals, they still can serve to rescue the mainstream from the danger of self-satisfied complacency. Furthermore, many of yesterday’s orthodoxies are now regarded as quaint curiosities, because some lonely dissenters refused to accept the prevailing wisdom. To me, teaching students that all scientific ideas should be open to criticism and that broad acceptance of a theory is no guarantee of its truth seems even more valuable than conveying the details of any particular theory.
I have had defenders of the current biological orthodoxy tell me that there isn't really any way to teach science in the lower grades except in the received wisdom model. Now, I will agree that there is a point where this is true. There's no point in trying to have 4th graders prove associative law, or getting into fine philosophical points about what constitutes a "law" of math. "Teacher! We've only tried A + (B + C) = (A + B) + C with the first 1000 possible values for A, B, and C! Maybe this doesn't work with prime numbers above one billion!"
On the other hand, by the time you get to high school science classes, some serious questions about the nature of truth, scientific proof, and how thorough of a test do we need to call something "proved" should not be beyond the abilities of many of the students. My concern is that it may be beyond the abilities of many of the teachers.
Think back to some of the teachers that you had in primary and secondary school. Did you ever find yourself asking them a question for which they didn't know the answer? Most of the time, when this happened, my teachers were not only prepared to admit it, but often appreciated that a student was thinking carefully enough to ask that question. A few of my teachers clearly did not like this; their response reminded me a bit of the fervor with which some Priests of the Holy Darwinian Church of the Evolution respond to heresy. I think the problem had a bit to do with discomfort at being reminded that they didn't have all the answers.
Global Warming & Scientific Journal Suppression of Contrary Papers
I don't know how I missed this article in the Telegraph from last May: Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.
Unfortunately, Science seems to suffer from the same problem that historians have: novel is more important than accurate. That's part of why Michael Bellesiles's fraud went undetected for so long--the novelty of his claim wowed historians, and that it wasn't true did not even occur to most of them.
A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.
The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.
The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.
Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.
However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.
They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.
Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet".
Dr Peiser insists that he has kept his findings strictly confidential. "It is simply not true that they have appeared elsewhere already," he said.
A spokesman for Science said Dr Peiser's research had been rejected "for a variety of reasons", adding: "The information in the letter was not perceived to be novel."
The article is worth reading in full: Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.
Unfortunately, this closing paragraph describes a real problem--one that has already damaged the reputation of American historians:
As with Dr Peiser's study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: "They said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish."
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."
He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.
As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. "Other scientists have had the same experience", he said. "The journals have a small set of reviewers who are pro-global warming."Dr Peiser said the stifling of dissent and preoccupation with doomsday scenarios is bringing climate research into disrepute. "There is a fear that any doubt will be used by politicians to avoid action," he said. "But if political considerations dictate what gets published, it's all over for science."
Planned Parenthood Protecting Rapists
I've mentioned in the past that Planned Parenthood has a history of telling 13 year olds who get pregnant that they don't have to worry about their adult boyfriend getting in trouble; everything is confidential. I've also mentioned that last year California changed its law requiring reporting of child sexual abuse, apparently so that Planned Parenthood wouldn't be required to report it--and traditionally, they haven't bothered to do so. (Planned Parenthood's motto: "You rape 'em, we scrape 'em.")
Now we have additional evidence that Planned Parenthood covers up not only statutory rape, and perhaps unforced molestation of children, but also forcible rape as well. Planned Parenthood of the Golden Gate had a series of "real stories" from their clients up on their website--and one of them was erased shortly after people started to link to it: It Keeps Us Safe
As Dawn Eden points out:
I was raped at 11, by my 17 year old boyfriend. I chose not to tell my parents because I didn't think their involvement would help, that was the right choice for me. Planned Parethood helped me deal with the aftermath of the rape allowing me to deal and cope as best as I could in my own way. I was 14 when I decided to start having sex, the day I made that choice I made an appointment to get birth control pills. I'm 17 now, I've been with my current boyfriend for about two years. During that time i've been HIV and STD tested four times. Right now I'm sitting in the waiting room while my boyfriend gets the results for his HIV test. We love each other so we're responsible and Planned Parenthood helps us to do that."It Keeps Us Safe"? Safe from what? Safe from parents finding out their little girls were raped? It certainly doesn't keep children safe from rapists.
The stories that Planned Parenthood chose to leave up, however, are also pretty disturbing:
To recap: An 11-year-old girl walked into Planned Parenthood, saying she had been raped. Not just statutory rape, either; forcible rape.
Planned Parenthood assured the girl that it would not contact her parents, and it was true to its word. Likewise, it must not have contacted the authorities either, otherwise the parents would certainly have been notified.
Thanks to Planned Parenthood, the rapist remained at large, still free to attack other little girls.Planned Parenthood Through the Years
That's California for you! Mom figures that her 14 year old is going to be having sex because she was invited to senior prom. I suppose it is better for the 14 year old to be using contraception rather than get pregnant--but the mother is aiding and abetting statutory rape.
My mother brought me to PP when I was 14. I had been invited to attend senior prom and she thought it might be good to “be prepared.” I have been a fan of PP for over 15 years now. PP provides some of the best, well rounded, thoughtful services available to women.
Population Change & Politics
Idaho is now the third fast growing state in the U.S.: The Gem State surpassed the Sunshine State to become the third fastest-growing state in the U.S.
For those of us in Boise, this is not a surprise; the number of California license plates is quite astonishing, but there's a lot of Oregon and Washington plates as well. (Of course, some of them might be tourists.) It also plays a part in driving up local real estate prices; there was a time when Californians would move here with the equity from their crummy little crackerboxes, look at the local housing prices, and collapse into fits of laughing.
Idaho's population grew by 2.4 percent — 33,956 people — from July 1, 2004, to July 1, 2005, for a total population of 1,429,096, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau today.
"Our strong economy continues to attract people and investment into the state," Idaho Commerce and Labor Director Roger Madsen said in a statement.
The majority of Idaho's population growth resulted from people moving to the state — 14,522 people came from other countries and 61,273 came from other states, the release says. Idaho's birth rate was sixth highest in the nation, with 7,776 births per 100,000 residents, more than offsetting its death rate — sixth lowest, with 3,656 deaths per 100,000 people.
The Census Bureau said that Nevada and Arizona were the two fastest-growing states, both at 3.5 percent.
Anyway, much of this growth is from people leaving other states, and there are some interesting political consequences: WASHINGTON (AP) - Southern and Western states are growing so much faster than the rest of the country that several are expected to grab House seats from the Northeast and Midwest when Congress is reapportioned in 2010.
In most cases, the net change in population will mean that after the 2010 census and reapportionment, there will a stronger Republican hold on the House, and an easier time for Republicans to elect the President. You may be wondering, "Why? If enough Democrats move from New York to Idaho, doesn't that just move a Democratic seat from New York to Idaho?"
Demographers and political analysts project that Texas and Florida could each gain as many as three House seats. Ohio and New York could lose as many as two seats apiece.
Several other states could gain or lose single seats.
Well, no. If 100,000 Democrats moved from New York to Idaho, and they ended up in a single House district, yes, that new Idaho Congresscritter would almost certainly end up being a Democrat. But in practice, people that are moving are distributed throughout their new state. In states like Idaho, Republicans are such a strong majority that even if every New Yorker that moved here was a Democrat (which would not be true), it wouldn't change the results of any particular House seat here--there would still be a Republican majority.
Another aspect of this is that many Americans simply do not have a strong political identity. People that may vote Democrat in New York (because of peer pressure) may end up voting Republican in Idaho (and for the same poor reason). Many years ago, when I lived in California, I worked with a couple that were originally Canadian, Randy and Beverly. They had lived in Research Triangle, North Carolina, for a while. One day after a volleyball game, Beverly was decrying how so many people that they knew, "sensible, right-thinking people" had moved to Research Triangle, and within a year, "They were going to church and voting Republican!" You could hear her disgust and amazement. They had conformed to the local culture.
It turns out that a lot of people are surprisingly malleable in their religious and political beliefs. They don't really stand for anything, so they will accept almost everything, with the right peer pressure. As long as the number of people moving into a new location is relatively small (say, .1% of the population per year), many of them will end up conforming to the local culture. Some will retain their values and stay; others will find it too difficult being part of a minority, and will leave for a more comfortable locale. Over time, many New Yorkers will be assimiliated into Idaho culture--and within a few years, they will be going to church and voting Republican.
What can stop this inexorable rush to Republican supermajority in the House? "The states in the Midwest are going through a transition," said Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett. "We're going from a heavy manufacturing economic base to a more service-oriented base, and that transition has been very painful."
He's kidding, but that might be the only hope the Democrats have.
"But if you ever banned air conditioning," Bennett added, "I think people would flock back."
What's Important? What's Not?
I mentioned yesterday the 6th Court of Appeals decision American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky v. Mercer County, Kentucky (6th Cir. 2005). It is an important case both for upholding (by 3-0) the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse display, and because it indicates that the test of offensiveness is based on a "reasonable person" and then says that the ACLU doesn't qualify as a "reasonable person." It also takes the ACLU to task for its continued use of "separation of church and state"--which is not in the Constitution.
I sent a pointer out to a number of law professors who blog. Some of them thought the very sharply worded district court decision Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (M.D. Penn. 2005) worthy of mention--but none blogged about Mercer County.
Very odd. Using Technorati.com, I looked to see how many law professors or lawyers mentioned the Mercer County decision. None. Yet a number have gotten around to mentioning the Kitzmiller decision. Maybe they are just too busy grading final exams to mention something Mercer County.
Roger Williams & Tolerance
There's a widely held belief that Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, was the first proponent of "separation of church and state." Here's one pretty typical use of Roger Williams for this purpose: Williams contended the purpose of government was "to protect the bodies and goods of its subjects." But when government "tried to save souls, it succeeded only in injuring bodies; when it tried to protect the true church, it succeeded only in transforming true into false," said Edmund S. Morgan, paraphrasing Williams. So government had to be protected from religion, lest it lead its people into assassinations, war and endless killing, by claiming it was God's will. And religion had to be protected from the state, lest freedom of religious conscience be compromised.
Roger Williams did believe that the government should tolerate many different religious beliefs--or even non-belief. Tolerance, however, meant simply that one would not be punished by the government. It did not mean that religion and irreligion were on an equal footing. The 1641 Rhode Island charter, for example, required legislators to take an oath of office: 1. It was ordered and agreed, before the Election, that an Ingagement by oath should be taken of all the officers of this Body now to be elected, as likewise for the time to come; the ingagement which the several! officers of the State shall give is this: To the Execution of this office, I Judge myself bound before God to walk faithfully and this I profess in ye presence of God.
An atheist could not truthfully take that oath.
Give credit to Roger Williams for promoting what was still a pretty radical idea--that it was not the government's job to tell people what religious beliefs to have. But if Roger Williams were writing laws like the 1641 charter today, the ACLU would be suing him for denying atheists and agnostics equal protection of the laws.
Are Police Necessary?
It is an interesting philosophical question--and now we have a real world experiment to which we can point. Remember that a professional police force is a pretty modern innovation; nearly all American cities until the 1830s had, at most, a "night watch" consisting of private citizens who were obligated to walk the streets, looking primarily for fires, and secondarily for criminals. (In the South, some cities had slave patrols.)
Now we have a real world example--and those who believe that police departments are not needed might want to consider what happened in Murtaugh, Idaho: MURTAUGH -- It's been common practice for the citizens of this community to leave their doors unlocked and their keys in their cars.
So it isn't that the police used to catch these criminals, but now aren't able to do so; the problem is that the presence of law enforcement acted as a deterrent to these sort of crimes.
But that era has come to end in this quiet community of about 700 residents.
Thanks, in large part, to an increase in crime during the last two months. Vandals and thieves have wreaked havoc at a number of residences between the South Hills and the Snake River canyon on the east side of Twin Falls County.
Farmers recently discovered parts and copper wiring missing from irrigation equipment. Vehicles have been stripped of personal belongings. Some folks have reported evidence of attempted home burglaries. And lately, gas stealing has become a problem.
Lt. Don Newman of the Twin Falls Sheriff's Department said his agency recently arrested two people under suspicion of stealing the copper wire. But he also said those thefts aren't necessarily related to the other crimes.
But why the sudden escalation of criminal activity?
An obvious presence of law enforcement on the East End disappeared in November when the city could no longer afford to contract with the sheriff's department for a full-time patrol deputy. But Newman noted that even with a deputy in the area on a frequent basis, it would be tough for him to catch someone in the act of committing the kinds of crimes that are being reported.
Alcohol Makes You Do Dumb Things
Really dumb things: TAVARES, Fla. -- An 18-year-old passenger who caused a fatal crash by pulling on the steering wheel pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter after prosecutors discovered a confession on his online blog.
Blake Ranking wrote "I did it" on his blurty.com journal three days after the October 2004 crash that caused a friend's death and left another seriously injured. He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its aftermath.
Blake was sitting in the back seat as he and then-17-year-old friends Jason Coker and Nicole Robinette left a party when he pulled the steering wheel as a prank, causing the car to somersault off the road.
His blood alcohol content after the crash measured 0.185, more than double the legal limit.
Robinette, who was driving and had no traces of drugs or alcohol in her system, was seriously injured. Coker lay in a coma at Orlando Regional Medical Center until he died Jan. 11.
U.S. 6th Court of Appeals Decision About Ten Commandments
The case is American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky v. Mercer County, Kentucky (6th Cir. 2005). The facts are somewhat different from the situation in McCreary County, where the ACLU successfully won, and forced removal of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse: On October 9, 2001, Carroll Rousey, a Mercer County resident, requested permission to hang a display entitled “Foundations of American Law and Government” in the County Courthouse. The display was to include the Mayflower Compact; the Declaration of Independence; the Ten Commandments; the Magna Carta (in two frames); the Star-Spangled Banner; the National Motto “In God We Trust” and the Preamble to the Kentucky Constitution (one frame); the Bill of Rights; and Lady Justice.
Because the Ten Commandments were simply one among many historical documents of relevance to the development of American law, and given no special prominence--and because there was no evidence that the objective of including the Ten Commandments was religiously motivated--the Court of Appeals allowed it:
After learning that the Kentucky General Assembly had recently passed a resolution authorizing the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in displays of formative, historical documents on government property, the Mercer County Fiscal Court voted to allow Mr. Rousey to hang the display as described. Mr. Rousey paid for, framed, and hung the display on the courthouse walls himself.In the Mercer County “Foundations” display, the Ten Commandments are part of an otherwise secular exhibit. “The Commandments are not displayed in larger text or otherwise more prominently than the other items in the display . . . .” Mercer County, 219 F. Supp. 2d at 794. The other items include the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, documents fundamental to American history. When placed on a level with other documents having such unquestioned civil, legal, and political influence, the Commandments’ own historical significance becomes more pronounced. These nine documents, along with the explanatory text, send the “unmistakable message” of the County’s acknowledgment of legal history. See Books II, 401 F.3d at 868 (“By virtue of the texts that are included and the content of the accompanying explanation, this display tells viewers that the American founders were inspired by a religious tradition that includes the Ten Commandments and that those values influenced the development of our law and government.”). That they appear in a courthouse only strengthens the message. See Van Orden, 125 S. Ct. at 2869-70 (Breyer, J., concurring) (stating that the Commandments’ legal message helps explain their presence in courthouses across the country). Furthermore, as discussed supra, nothing in the legislative history tends to show otherwise. To the contrary, the reasonable observer is affirmatively aware that Mercer County did not attempt to erect the monument in isolation or as part of a purely religious exhibit before posting the “Foundations” display. We therefore agree with the conclusion of the district court that the display of the Ten Commandments in the Mercer County Courthouse is not an endorsement of religion.
What is more interesting is the language used by the court with respect to the ACLU's claims: Were we to focus on the perceptions of individuals, every religious display would be “necessarily precluded so long as some passersby would perceive a governmental endorsement thereof.” Pinette, 515 U.S. at 779 (O’Connor J., concurring). Thus, we find unavailing the ACLU’s own assertions that it finds the display offensive and that the display “diminishes [its] enjoyment of the courthouse.” (Compl. ¶ 18.) Religion does not become relevant to standing in the political community simply because a particular viewer of a governmental display feels uncomfortable. Id. at 780 (O’Connor J., concurring); see Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 597-98 (1992) (“People may take offense to all manner of religious as well as nonreligious messages, but offense alone does not in every case show a violation. We know too that sometimes to endure social isolation or even anger may be the price of conscience or noncomformity.”). Our concern is that of the reasonable person. And the ACLU, an organization whose mission is “to ensure that . . . the government [is kept] out of the religion business,” does not embody the reasonable person. [emphasis added]
The ACLU’s argument contains three fundamental flaws. First, the ACLU makes repeated reference to “the separation of church and state.” This extra-constitutional construct has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state. See Lynch, 465 U.S. at 673; Lemon, 403 U.S. at 614; Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 312 (1952); Brown v. Gilmore, 258 F.3d 265, 274 (4th Cir. 2001); Stark v. Indep. Sch. Dist., No. 640., 123 F.3d
1068, 1076 (8th Cir. 1997); see also Capitol Square, 243 F.3d at 300 (dismissing strict separatism as “a notion that simply perverts our history”). Our Nation’s history is replete with governmental acknowledgment and in some cases, accommodation of religion. See, e.g., Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983) (upholding legislative prayer); McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) (upholding Sunday closing laws); see also Lynch, 465 U.S. at 674 (“There is an unbroken history
of official acknowledgment by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life from at least 1789.”); Capitol Square, 243 F.3d at 293-99 (describing historical examples of governmental involvement with religion). After all, “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Zorach, 343 U.S. at 313. Thus, state recognition of religion that falls short of endorsement is constitutionally permissible.
Second, the ACLU focuses on the religiousness of the Ten Commandments. No reasonable person would dispute their sectarian nature, but they also have a secular nature that the ACLU does not address. That they are religious merely begs the question whether this display is religious; it does not answer it....
Third, the ACLU erroneously–though perhaps intentionally–equates recognition with endorsement. To endorse is necessarily to recognize, but the converse does not follow. Cf. Mercer County, 219 F. Supp. 2d at 789 (“Endorsement of religion is a normative concept; whereas acknowledgment of religion is not necessarily a value-laden concept.”). Because nothing in the display, its history, or its implementation supports the notion that Mercer County has selectively endorsed the sectarian elements of the first four Commandments, we fail to see why the reasonable person would interpret the presence of the Ten Commandments as part of the larger “Foundations” display as a governmental endorsement of religion.
We will not presume endorsement from the mere display of the Ten Commandments. If the reasonable observer perceived all government references to the Deity as endorsements, then many of our Nation’s cherished traditions would be unconstitutional, including the Declaration of Independence and the national motto. Fortunately, the reasonable person is not a hyper-sensitive plaintiff.... Instead, he appreciates the role religion has played in our governmental institutions, and finds it historically appropriate and traditionally acceptable for a state to include religious influences, even in the form of sacred texts, in honoring American legal traditions.
Incestuous Pedophilia: The Musical
I had to check to make sure that this wasn't a "news" story from The Onion--because it reads like a satirical piece about the increasing depravity of our society. But no, it is from Variety, the entertainment magazine: Around the holidays, the biggest challenge for many theater companies is convincing audiences to care about yet another staging of "A Christmas Carol." This season in Atlanta, however, Actor's Express wants to stir up buzz about a less familiar property -- namely, a pedophile musical.
Yeah, but that's just because "ticket buyers" are narrow-minded reactionaries. I kept reading through the article, looking for something like revulsion or disgust, but the only disapproval was again of those narrow-minded people in Georgia:
The Express has already started pushing "Love Jerry," a new tuner written and composed by Megan Gogerty that follows the tortured story of Jerry, who develops a sexual relationship with his nephew while trying to stay friends with the boy's father.
A delicate, often heart-wrenching piece of theater, the show, which preems Jan. 22 at the Express, never descends to shock-value tactics as it explores volatile terrain, and its lilting country songs give the characters emotionally vulnerable texture. Should it manage to attract a crowd, "Love Jerry" could very well leave them cheering.
But how do you convince anyone to come sing along with a child abuser? It's a double-edged question: Not only can untested musicals be notoriously hard to launch, especially when the writer is an unknown, but pedophilia (not to mention incest to boot) has proven anathema to ticket buyers.To get more mouths talking, Express marketing director Sherry Ward has held meetings with local abuse survivor groups. She knows, though, that some of her most important work will be in crafting the images and taglines attached to the show's publicity.
I found the pointer to this horrifying article over at The Stones Cry Out.
"We are kind of starting at zero with this one," she admits. "The challenge has been that when (you are) doing a musical about child abuse ... some people might think it's campy, but we also don't want to go too dark."
With that in mind, initial poster concepts featuring a man putting candy in a child's hand were jettisoned as being too frank. Now the promos are more suggestive, featuring an eerie shadow of a man in a clown nose staring into a room. (The clown refers to a somewhat supernatural character who tempts Jerry.)
But no matter what the posters' design, the show's themes may still leave many Atlantans nonplussed. The city is famously prone to legit controversy. In 1993, a county commission rescinded all public arts funding rather than support a staging of Terence McNally's gay-friendly "Lips Together, Teeth Apart." And just last year, the police shut down a production of "Naked Boys Singing" -- which the Express hosted but didn't produce -- for indecency.
Where The President's Authority to Wiretap Comes From
Different River has a rather cheeky response to the upset from Senator Carl Levin, who wants to know where the President found his authority under the Constitution to order the NSA to perform warrantless wiretaps of conversations crossing national boundaries after 9/11: I am tempted to answer: “Right after the sentence in the Constitution that guarantees the right to an abortion.” After all, Carl Levin is a well-known supporter of abortion as a Constitutional right. I’d love to hear him admit that there is no more explicit mention of abortion in the Constitution than there is of wiretapping suspected terrorists – a position that the so-called “strict constructionist” school of jurisprudence has been making for a long time.
Different River has a lot more than just the cheeky response to explain his position. The guts of it, however, is that people that don't laugh or get upset about arguments that rely on “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance” are in no position to suddenly become strict constructionists in time of war.
While not quite as relevant to current events, Different River makes a point that I have also long thought important about the exclusionary rule (which prohibits illegally seized evidence from being used in a criminal case): There are two problems with this, a serious problem, and a really serious problem: First, freeing a(n otherwise) guilty person because of an illegal search does not really penalize law enforcement officers; it penalizes the general population, who are now subject to suffer future crimes by that individual, and a reduced deterrent to crime for other individuals; it also penalized the victim, who is denied justice. Law enforcement officers are not, generally speaking, “paid by the conviction"; the suffer no more than any other citizen when a criminal goes free. Thus, there is no reason to expect that the exclusionary rule actually deters law enforcement officers from conducting illegal searches at all. The exclusionary rule thus fails to achieve the purpose for which it is intended.
More seriously, by in effect limiting the “penalty” for an illegal search to the exclusion of evidence from a criminal trial, the exclusionary rule effectively gives law enforcement a free hand to conduct as many illegal searches and wiretaps as they want, so long as they do not use the evidence so obtained in a criminal trial. This is why J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI could conduct illegal searches wiretaps all over the place with impunity – if anyone discovered the search and complained, they’d just say, “Fine, we won’t use it against you in court."** This is fine if you’re guilty of something – but no consolation at all if you’re innocent. The FBI could put a hidden camera in your shower or your bedroom, and if you never do anything illegal, you would have absolutely no recourse. The exclusionary rule effectively superseded the common-law criminal and civil penalties for illegal searches.
Suppressing Diversity
It was a controversial idea of human origins--one that offended many people because of its implications for their religious beliefs. The idea had some worrisome baggage far beyond the area of biology. It scared the people in charge of the society, enough so that they felt a need to prohibit it from being taught in public schools.
But no, I'm not talking about the decision Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (M.D. Penn. 2005), which just prohibited Dover schools from teaching an alternative perspective about evolution. I'm talking about the Scopes trial. The parallels are really quite startling--but where these cases diverge is also quite amazing.
1. In both cases, legislative bodies, presumably acting on behalf of the voters, decreed what would or would not be taught in public schools. In the Scopes case, the Tennessee legislature prohibited the teaching of a new theory of human origins that contradicted a well-established and widely believe theory. In the current case, the Dover Area School Board required the teaching of what I would call a critique of Darwinian evolution. (It doesn't quite rise to a theory because it is intrinsically incapable of experimental verification; evolution, with enough time, might be capable of it.)
2. In both cases, there is baggage associated with the theory that offends people. As Professor Lindgren pointed out last year, the biology text from which Scopes was teaching evolution carried a lot of the Social Darwinist racism that led to the Holocaust, and such offensive examples of early twentieth century liberalism as Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld mandatory sterilization of the feeble-minded. From the text that Scopes was prohibited from using: At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
What offends opponents of Intelligent Design is that it has largely Christian proponents, and some have not been afraid to say that it is part of an effort by Christians to influence the teaching of science. (Oh, the horror! Soon they'll want to vote, too!)
3. Where these situations differ is quite dramatic. The ACLU was on the side of allowing multiple viewpoints in the classroom in 1925; now they are in opposition, because they believe that the establishment clause of the First Amendment trumps freedom of speech. The difficulty, of course, is that the ACLU's view of the establishment clause as requiring neutrality between religion and irreligion is ahistorical. The same Congress that passed the First Amendment took actions that suggest it saw no such requirement, and the federal government allowed the use of government buildings for church services until after the Civil War, and used federal money to support churches in Ohio.
The judge in the current case makes one of those claims that shows a pretty fundamental ignorance of the term "activism": Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an
The criticism of judicial activism is that a judge's job is not to make laws, but only to strike down those laws that are clearly contrary to the Constitution or contrary to laws passed by a higher authority (the state, for example). The job of a legislative body, at any level, is to write laws. Those laws may be good or bad, but to call a legislative body "activist" for writing laws is like criticizing a judge for presiding over a trial; that's their job.
activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board....
Materialism
One of the recurring complaints of the left is that Americans are letting values take precedence over economic considerations. This Harold Bloom article in the Guardian says something that many more political Democrats said after the election last November: When so many vote against their own palpable economic interests, and choose "values" instead, then an American malaise has replaced the American dream.
One of the assumptions that Bloom and other Democrats make I at least understand--the left believes that material possessions should matter more to the masses than values. They seem to think that if the masses were given the choice of an extra $20,000 a year in income, or recognizing gay marriage, well of course they should pick the money. It simply does not occur to the left that much of the population of this country considers morality sufficiently important that they will not abandon their religious beliefs for filthy lucre.
Would the left be insulted if we suggested that for enough money, they rationally should abandon their demand that the states recognize gay marriage? Of course. So why are they perplexed and confused that the majority isn't prepared to put money over values? Is this simply an elitist contempt for the masses?
The other assumption behind Bloom's argument is that the masses are voting Republican contrary to their economic self-interest. This one has me scratching my head. Now, keep in mind that I have some serious concerns about how wealth has damaged the character of Americans--and the example of the private high school on Long Island that cancelled prom on a permanent basis captures the problem well. But the moral problem that is causing such damage in America is too much wealth in often irresponsible middle class hands--not a problem of too little wealth. The masses aren't being fooled into voting against their economic self-interest--most Americans aren't hurting financially. Quite the opposite!
There are certainly very poor people in America, and while most of them have spent many years using alcohol, marijuana, and meth to get to that point, I will agree that there are poor people whose misfortune is not self-inflicted. But these are not a large segment of the population. I wonder if Bloom and other Democrats have spent so much time identifying with the poverty class that they simply do not realize that most Americans have gained from lower tax rates.
A Hungarian Variation on the "Merry Christmas" Fight
I think that some people are reading a bit too much in the efforts of some big chains to make sure that their employees say "Happy Holidays" not "Merry Christmas." Remember, for most Americans, this holiday isn't about the birth of Jesus Christ (even though this is the nominal Lord and Savior for most Americans), but about spending money and feeling guilty about not spending enough money. Just to show that the Hungarians are fighting a different battle: Hungarian shopper Istvan Hamza made a formal complaint to police that the star decorations in a record shop in the town of Szombathely were too much like the communist red star -- banned by law as a symbol of decades of dictatorship.
But the police let Christmas charity prevail.
"The shop's red stars are an irregular shape and their branches are not pointed but rounded, so they do not meet the specification set out in the law," spokesman Peter Kovacs said Monday, according to the local news agency MTI.
If This Happened Here, Would the ACLU File Suit?
You've probably received a form of this virus, attached to an email that claims to be from the FBI, informing you that you have been visiting illegal websites, and demanding that you fill out the attached questionnaire: BERLIN (Reuters) - A child porn offender in Germany turned himself in to the police after mistaking an email he received from a computer worm for an official warning that he was under investigation, authorities said Tuesday. "It just goes to show that computer worms aren't always destructive," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Paderborn. "Here it helped us to uncover a crime which would otherwise probably have gone undetected."
I suppose if someone did likewise here in the United States, the ACLU would file suit to block the prosecution. I'm thinking of this story (perhaps an urban legend) about the police hooking a guy up to a photocopier and telling him it was a lie detector.
George Bush, Tool of Crooked Big Business
More evidence that George Bush will allow crooked businessmen to get away with whatever they want! DENVER (Reuters) - Former Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q) Chief Executive Joseph Nacchio was indicted by a grand jury on 42 counts of insider trading on Tuesday, court documents showed.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the Department of Justice is just doing their job. But isn't it amazing how many white collar criminals Bush's DOJ has gone after--sometimes for crimes that took place under the Clinton Administration? Somehow, this doesn't fit the model that the "Bush=Hitler" crowd likes to screech.
The 11-page indictment handed up by a federal grand jury on Tuesday charges Nacchio with selling more than $100 million of Qwest stock between January and May 2001, at a time when he had been warned by other executives that the telephone carrier would not meet its targets for recurring revenue.
"Beginning as early as August 2000, Nacchio was specifically and repeatedly warned about the material, non-public financial risks facing Qwest and about Qwest's ability to achieve its aggressive publicly stated financial targets," the indictment said.
"Nacchio's stock sales accelerated in January 2001 as he became aware of additional material, non-public information," it said.
I Can't Imagine A Story That Better Typifies Communism
It reads like H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau crossed with Aldous Huxley's Brave, New World: THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.
Oh my, this has everything in it:
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.
The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.
And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.
...
Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.
Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.
Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.
1. Communism didn't believe in any of the bourgeois Christian moral values at all--hence, the brief experiments with abolishing the traditional family. Why not crossbreed humans and animals?
2. Communism believed that there were no absolutes. Humans could be transformed from greedy and self-interested creatures into True Socialist Man. Why couldn't Communism create new forms of life better suited to the needs of the State?
3. Humans didn't like being worked to death, fed poorly, and abused? Create a new subclass of slave semianimals.
Unfortunately, the left still hasn't abandoned ideas #1 and #2. They refuse to believe that there are any absolutes: in morals; in science; in human behavior. They don't believe that there are absolute truths, either, hence the deconstructionist argument that even physics is largely a social construct. (Read Professor Alan Sokal's brilliant parody here that Social Text published because they were so stupid that they didn't realize that they were being set up. Professor Sokal is an Old Left member--but even he knows that there are some absolutes.)
Need A Big Bow
My wife's Christmas gift this year is a house. (It sorta makes up for the years of me being a cheapskate, I guess.) Does anyone know where I can get a really big bow to put on the front door?
The NSA Surveillance Program
The left is busily trying to make a big deal out of NSA's surveillance program intercepting information crossing our national borders. I haven't been following the issue closely, partly because I have been busy, and partly because I didn't understand the surprise: National Security Agency has been lawfully intercepting messages crossing our boundaries for decades, and the courts have generally accept this. At least, this was my understanding from reading James Bamford's history of the National Security Agency, Inside the Puzzle Agency. Professor Orin Kerr has a detailed examination of the constitutional and legal questions here.
Falling Down On The Job
One of my readers mentioned to me that someone he bicycles with is also a reader, and was a little surprised at how little I have had to say concerning Iraq and related issues during some pretty momentous events--events that even some opponents of Bush agree reflect positively on him (such as Bush admitting significant errors in how the war was prosecuted, and why). (And yes, it feels weird to talk about one reader of my blog talking to another reader.)
All spare time has been gobbled up in the last details of the house completion, and expanding the ScopeRoller product line. My wife and I went up for a final cosmetic inspection of the house last night; I am now going over the price tag from the builder, looking for errors. Idaho Power, for example, appears to have billed both of us for running power to the house, and that was included the cost that the builder is billing me for.
A couple more days, and I will be back to my usual troublemaking self.
Poor Cary Tennis
I mentioned last week that Cary Tennis was implying that he and his fellow leftists were going to have to overthrow the U.S. government if they lost the next election. (That's teach them to push for restrictive gun control!) A reader points me to this amazing column by him from last year--in which he responds to a letter from a Jewish girl who had fallen in love with a young man who was going into the Air Force, asking Mr. Tennis's advice.
The letter that Mr. Tennis responds to reads like parody--the literary equivalent of the famous New Yorker cover that depicts everything west of the Hudson as a flat and foreshortened empty spot: My boyfriend and I got together in the middle of our senior year of high school and are still wildly in love --- he attends a Midwestern school and we see each other every two to three weeks via split-two-ways plane tickets. Last night he got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife, and I am typing this with a small but brilliant diamond glinting on my left hand.
How horrible: people are "clean" and "too polite." And what, exactly, is a "Christian" face? Does she mean that they don't "look Jewish"? Like I said, I want to believe that this was a setup, and Tennis wasn't smart enough to see that.
I feel so alone -- the rest of my friends and age mates are drunkenly hooking up with people left and right, going out to clubs, and having melodramatic roommate dramas that they relate to me with narcissistically joyful misery. I don't want to do those things -- I had my share of wild-oat sowing when I was in my middle teens, and I know that while fun, such things are not endlessly diverting. In the end they leave one hollow and cynical, but my friends look at me with rolling eyes when I gently try to relate this to them. Everyone finds it scandalous that I am in a committed, monogamous relationship with someone who isn't even around on a daily basis, and the fact that I'm engaged now is just plain peculiar.
...
I want to raise children with him and sleep in the same bed every night and cook for him and be delightfully retro with him -- but I don't know if I can bear to leave the East Coast. He will be in the Air Force after college; it is his chosen path in life -- but this means that he would be stationed in some godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere! I want to be a book-writing, head-shrinking New York City intellectual slash devoted mother of five.
I am scared of the Midwest. I know this is such a clichéd bias, but it is 100 percent accurate -- when I visit him he is the only good thing there. It's too flat and clean, people are too polite, everyone has hard, extroverted, cheerful, cornfed Christian faces, and everything just feels so alien to me.
Tennis's response sounds like a parody of leftism--and it makes you wonder how seriously Tennis is thinking about violent revolution, which tends to have rather unpleasant moral choices--often much more difficult than being a bomber pilot: And what about the killing that pilots do from such great heights? If he becomes a pilot and begins dropping bombs, will you find yourself wondering who the bombs fell on, what kitchens were atomized in an instant, who was standing at the stove when the air became a hammer? Will it be the kind of military marriage where you don't ask where he's been and whom he's killed? Or will you pose your morality against his necessity and create a domestic stalemate? Either way, well, these are just things to think about, which is why I say, much as I admire your spirit, go for a long engagement.
Snow, Traction, and My Corvette
I've mentioned previously that I was having trouble getting up my new driveway because of ice at the bottom. Now that we are getting real snowfall (not just a dusting of snow), I am having trouble getting traction around town.
It turns out that part of the problem is that my rear tires are a bit deficient in tread--which is very disappointing, because there's only about 13,000 miles on the rear tires; add yet another fault of the Goodyear GS F1 EMTs. I have enough tread to drive safely on dry or wet pavement; but snow and ice creates serious problems for tires as the tread wears down.
I have ordered the Michelin Pilot A/S tires from Tire Rack for installation by the local Big O. These are a bit cheaper than the Goodyears, but they still cost $320 a piece. (High speed rating, runflat, and big chunk of rubber.) I think I am going to take the old tires and either try to sell them on eBay (where there is, unsurprisingly, a market for used tires like this), or hold onto them until the Michelins wear out. I suspect that if I put them on in the spring in a couple of years, that I can get another 5000-10,000 miles out of them.
