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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 21, 2006
Say This Like Dr. Evil... According to sitemeter, this blog has just passed one million visits! 1,000,345 Lawyer Humor Or at least, humor about lawyers: You know you need a new lawyer WHEN.......... Labels: humor Humor I was going through old email, and I found this: A not necessarily well-prepared student sat in his life science classroom, staring at a question on the final exam paper. The question directed: "Give four advantages of breast milk." Labels: humor ScopeRoller Product Line Expands Again! I am now making a caster assembly for the Celestron NexStar telescopes. Unlike the ones for the Losmandy tripods, which slide inside the legs, these are sleeves that bolt onto the outside of the legs. Labels: telescopes Someone With Too Much Time On Her Hands Yeah, caffeine is a problem for some people. I've had to withdraw from caffeine addictions two or three times in my life. "A software engineer is a device for converting coffee into code." But seriously: (I-Newswire) - City of Shaker Heights, OHIO - ( Jan 17, 2006 ) Following a health trend that appears to be brewing up all over the nation, Mayor Judith Rawson has signed a proclamation for the City of Shaker Heights that addresses the issues regarding caffeine intoxication and dependency. The Observatory I ran up to the new house this evening, partly to see if some of the annoying little problems are getting fixed (yes, they are), and partly because the sky was clear, and I wanted to drag Big Bertha out of the garage. There are some problems with the new house as far as astronomy goes. The most serious problem is related to "twinkling." You may be aware that one of the ways to distinguish stars from planets is that, except under the most severe atmospheric turbulence, stars twinkle--and planets don't. This makes it very easy, most of the time, to pick out Saturn from stars of similar color and magnitude. But this doesn't work at the new house! There was so little atmospheric turbulence that I could not identify Saturn with the naked eye! This also means that the viewing conditions are going to be spectacular! Dark: really dark. There was a little bit of cloud cover over Boise reflecting some light, but the Milky Way was just oppressively bright. I am going to have to relearn the constellations, because there are so many stars now visible that they wash out the magnitude 2 and brighter stars upon which I rely for finding my way around the sky. The other discovery was that while I can roll Big Bertha out just fine--I don't have a stepstool up there to use to get to the eyepiece. For objects that are high in the sky (and just about all of them are right now), this is a problem, because Big Bertha's eyepiece is at about seven feet or more above ground level. Oh yeah, it was cold up there--about 22 degrees when I left. At star parties, I'm used to being cold, but I am going to have to dress a bit more warmly. The most uncomfortable aspect of observing up there is that we are in a pretty wild place. I'm still a bit nervous about having to explain the night sky to a mountain lion or a feral dog. There's no fence around the house itself--and I'm tempted to put something up for that purpose. It is also so quiet that you have no idea how far away the few noise are that you hear. At one point, I heard someone whistling--but I couldn't see anyone out there at all. This might have been someone summoning a dog a quarter of a mile away, for all I know. I may need some time to get used to this. Labels: telescopes Confusing Seinfeld With Real Life I've been making the argument for some time that there's a good reason for laws that prohibit adults from having sex with minors. Jonathan Rowe, lawyer, law professor, gay activist, unsurprisingly, does not share that view. The particular case involves a 17 year old boy and a 33 year old woman, and I do agree with Rowe that what makes the situation especially exploitive is that the woman was a counselor assigned to help the 17 year old. I would even agree with Rowe that there are legitimate distinctions based on the age of the minor. An adult having sex with a 10 year old is obviously much more serious in the damage it does than an adult having sex with a 17 year old. (For that matter, a 14 year old having sex with a 10 year old is still likely to be very damaging to both kids.) A number of states draw lines, making the punishment much more severe when the child is under 14, with a somewhat less severe punishment when the child is 15 or 16. Still, I was amazed and amused by how Rowe defends a 33 year old having sex with a 17 year old: I don't agree that most people would find a 17-year-old female/33 year-old-male too disturbing. Not meaning to invoke a "reductio-ad-Seinfeldium," but remember Jerry Seinfeld "dated" Shoshana Lonstein when she was 17. It's frightening to think that if they traveled to Oregon, Seinfeld would have been a "child rapist."Earth to Jonathan Rowe: Seinfield is not a documentary. (From the episodes that I have seen, I am not even persuaded that Seinfeld is a comedy.) And yes, most people, at least most straight people, look on an age difference that dramatic when one party is a minor, with considerable discomfort--even if there is no sex involved at all. Most parents actually do their best to discourage their 16 or 17 year old daughter from dating guys that are more than 20 or 21, and on the rare occasions when the sexes are reversed, parents are usually not comfortable, and try to discourage these sort of relationships. A lot changes between 16 and 21 for most kids. UPDATE: A reader tells me that Rowe is referring to real-life actions of the actor Seinfeld, not the character he played on the show of the same name. It doesn't change things much, however. Perhaps in Hollywood, this isn't considered peculiar or suspet, but in the real world, most people would wonder a bit about a 33 year old asking a 17 year old out on a date--even if the relationship didn't become sexual. Labels: child sexual abuse Interesting Iran Report As we learned with Iraq (and this shouldn't have been a surprise), opposition groups aren't always the most reliable and disinterested sources of information about WMDs: WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006 says a group opposed to the regime in Tehran. Cats, Toxoplasmosis, & Schizophrenia I've mentioned before some curious relationships between schizophrenia, cats, and the Toxoplasma parasite. New research is even more interesting: Pregnant women with high levels of Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood were more likely to give birth to children who would later develop schizophrenia. Torrey lays out more links in this 2003 paper. While none is a smoking gun, they are certainly food for thought. It's conceivable that exposure to Toxoplasma causes subtle changes in most people's personality, but in a small minority, it has more devastating effects.If you are wondering why the title of the article is, "The Return of the Puppet Masters," it refers to the title of a 1951 Robert Heinlein novel. 13 Is Too Young It is an interesting case, because while the 22 year old went ahead and married the 13 year old in Kansas (after he got her pregnant), it appears that the prosecutor in Nebraska is pursuing the case as a violation of Nebraska law: LINCOLN, Neb. - A 22-year-old man faces criminal charges in Nebraska for having sex with an underage 13-year-old girl, although he legally married her in Kansas after she became pregnant.There's a lot of state-to-state variation in age of consent laws (with respect to both sex and marriage). Some states have laws that just make me scratch my head and say to the legislators, "What were you thinking?" But just because I think the law is stupid doesn't automatically mean that the courts have some obligation or duty to overturn it. Does This Violate The ABA Conduct Code? I think so: WACO, Texas Jan 13, 2006 — A lawyer faces a felony charge of kidnapping for allegedly abducting a client from his wedding celebration in an attempt to collect legal fees. Robert Ferrigno's Prayers For The Assassin There are some books that you pick up, and you can't stop reading them--no matter how late it is. Take a look at the time stamp on this blog entry--and notice that I mentioned just a few hours ago that I was starting to read it. Quite literally, I could not sleep. I tried to stop a bit more than half-way through and go to sleep. I even took antihistamines. But it didn't work. I will not tell you enough to spoil the plot--just what you find out on the back cover. The novel is set in the Islamic States of America in the year 2040, 25 years after nuclear weapon attacks on New York City, Washington, DC, and Mecca, have been blamed on the Israeli government. This is a detective novel involving a sociopathic killer, and a history professor who starts to turn up evidence that the attacks were done by... someone else. (If this premise seems ridiculous, notice how much of the left has now decided that the 9/11 attacks were done by the Mossad, or arranged by George Bush. Intellectuals are capable of believing all sorts of absurd things without batting an eye.) Now, if you have read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Tower, set in an America where the Germans and the Japanese win World War II--and partition the United States between them--you are familiar with this type of novel. There's at least one science fiction short story that I have read, the title of which escapes me, in which a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos during World War II with qualms about the weapon that he is developing ingests peyote, and ends up a future where the Nazis win World War II. A defining characteristic of these "What if?" alternative histories is that there is some defining moment that changes history. Sometimes it is a very minor event that causes the disruption. When I was young, my father liked to recite a little piece of doggerel that captures this idea of how even the smallest details can cascade into momentous results: If I had to pick a single complaint in an otherwise gripping, crisply written, often powerful but subtle novel, it is Ferrigno's two premises that: 1. In the event of an unprecedented national disaster, American religious beliefs are so tremendously malleable that large numbers of Americans would either genuinely become Muslims, or go through the motions of it. 2. That Hollywood celebrities, while tremendously of interest to many Americans, would be so effective in promoting such mass conversions to Islam. I go along with the almost unstated premise that much of Hollywood is so completely empty spiritually that they could be persuaded or manipulated into a new religion--but it wouldn't be Islam, which has rules, but more likely, it would be a "designer religion" such as Madonna's celebrity-modified Kaballah, or Oliver Stone's terribly convenient Buddhism. Where this novel really shines, however, is how it paints what America (after most Protestants, black and white, had moved to a newly separated nation roughly corresponding to the South) might be like, with fundamentalist, moderate, and "modern" Muslims all jockeying for power. To Ferrigno's credit, he captures the tremendously brutal and totalitarian society that would result. Remember that even "moderate" Islam makes conservative Christians look like the ACLU by comparison. (Which makes the ACLU's current efforts to prevent the NSA from preventing terrorist attacks all the more disturbing.) Best of all, Ferrigno paints with a fine camel's hair brush, not with a paint roller. You won't find the sort of clumsy speeches that, regrettably, marred Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I find it interesting that Ferrigno paints the centers of Islamic fundamentalism in the new America concentrated in the places most prone to leftist derangement today--places such as Seattle and San Francisco. While Ferrigno is never explicit about it, it is instructive that members of lunatic fringe groups seem to have no problem leaping quite astonishing political chasms--because it is the fanaticism that defines the kooks, more than individual belief systems. I remember some years ago reading about a political science professor who, as an experiment, arranged for some Communists he knew to attend a neo-Nazi event--and a number changed allegiance. The fervor mattered more than the details--the sense of, "I have the truth, and everyone else is just not as smart as me." As an example, the Rev. Fred Phelps--the guy with the "God Hates Fags" signs at gay funerals--used to be a highly regarded left-wing attorney, with awards from the NAACP for his work. As an example of Ferrigno's subtlety, there are perhaps three or four references in the book to air pollution, drilling in ANWR, and off the Southern California coast. There's no heavy points being made--these are just mentioned as part of the scenery, and they are exactly what we might expect such a society to do without debate or discussion, because of its totalitarian nature. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is that nearly all the characters are Muslims--although the protagonist is, by his own admission, a "bad Muslim." He never goes to mosque, seldom prays, and observes the rules only to the extent that the Religious Police enforce those rules. There are a couple of Catholic characters as well--and Ferrigno presents a scenario that at first seemed bizarre to me, of the Islamic government tolerating (sort of) Catholics, but not Protestants. The more I thought about it, however, it struck me that much of the left in the U.S. regards Islam as less offensive than Protestant Christianity, hence the widespread efforts to inculcate an "understanding" of Islam in public schools after 9/11--with methods that would lead to a lawsuit from the ACLU, if the ACLU took seriously their ahistoric theory of "separation of church and state." Ferrigno does a nice job of conveying what a tremendously brutal society this would be--with the heads of homosexuals mounted on the fenceposts along the Bay Bridge, stonings of adulterous women, assassinations by various mullahs jockeying for power--you know, just another typical week in some Arab countries for most of the last few decades. It is rather jarring, also, to imagine a society where instead of Disneyland, kids come to Palestine Adventure theme park near San Francisco, and get pictures taken wearing suicide bomber vests. (Alas, Ferrigno really isn't off the deep end on this--you may recall that Muslim children wearing simulated suicide bomber vests was all the rage at demonstrations in Europe a couple of years ago.) Another example of Ferrigno's subtlety is how he merges liberal interest group goals--such as bans on private handgun ownership and personalized guns that can only be fired by the authorized government employee--and weaves them into the story. And he does it with a very deft touch. One area where Ferrigno may have been a bit too subtle is with respect to taxation and legal disabilities. Muslim societies have always put non-Muslims at distinct disadvantages as a way to not very subtly pressure Jews and Christians into conversion (when not engaging in flat-out extermination, as sometimes happened). The Ottoman Empire, for example, annually taxed Jews and Christians on their net worth--at times as much as 10%. Think about how long it would take for a 10% annual tax of your net worth (as opposed to your income) to drive even a wealthy person into poverty, and you can understand why Islam was so effective at "converting the masses" everywhere it went. Ferrigno makes one very passing reference to Islam's tax of non-Muslims, and the role that this played in causing the masses to convert. Now, this is definitely not a kid's book. One of the characters is a sociopathic assassin--and in perhaps Ferrigno's least subtle moment, his first name comes from that a rather prominent 19th century scientist. We can guess that while he went through the motions of being a Muslim to join the Fedayeen (assassin division), Mom and Dad probably gave him this name as a expression of their contempt for the values of Christian America. Being a sociopathic assassin, he enjoys killing people in ways that are horrific (except by the standards of al-Qaeda). Dialog is, in a few places, a little more raw than I would want to expose a teenager to, and even a fair number of adults will regret what is, unfortunately, realistic adult dialog--especially when two of the protagonists are people trained to kill without remorse. There is a bit of sex in Prayers for the Assassin, and again, perhaps a little more explicit than I would want to expose some teenagers to, and some adults who haven't lived in centers of depravity such as the San Francisco Bay Area may find it a bit more explicit than they would prefer. On the other hand, there are aspects to Ferrigno's depiction of the sexual degradation of women that are probably necessary, because this, unfortunately, is one of the problems in those Islamofascist societies that have gone off the deep end in their contempt for women. I was a little surprised at the level of sexual adventuresomeness of the hero and heroine of the book, especially because both of them have grown up in a society vastly more censored with respect to erotica than America was in say, 1966. Of course, even Muslim societies, for all their supposed restrictions, have widespread problems with illicit sexuality. Homosexuality is utterly prohibited by Islam--and yet everyone knows that there is a lot of it, and much of it in the category of rape. I mentioned a couple of years ago my skepticism at the claim that sexual abuse of children is widespread in Middle Eastern societies--and then discovered that a folk song in Afghanistan has the lyrics: “There’s a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach. But, alas, I cannot swim ...”A co-worker fluent in Turkish, at least conversant in Arabic, and widely traveled in that part of the world, confirmed that adult men pursuing little boys as sexual partners is widespread. Perhaps I should not assume that Ferrigno's hero and heroine are so unrealistic. I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed reading it, and it serves as a valuable cautionary tale--and now that I am done reading it, I think I can finally get some sleep! As long as I don't think about the coming conflict with Iran about nuclear weapons.... UPDATE: A couple of readers have suggested that the story about the Los Alamos worker who is given a chance to see the future where the U.S. doesn't develop nuclear weapons is C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" (1958). I believe that this is correct. I am only slightly surprised to find that there is an entire website devoted to these "alternative history" books and stories: Uchronia: The Alternate History List is an annotated bibliography of over 2700 novels, stories, essays and other printed material involving the "what ifs" of history. The genre has a variety of names, but it's best known as alternate history.A number of readers have also pointed out that what I found implausible--widespread conversion to Islam--is perhaps less absurd than it first sounds. One reader observes: Paul Johnson made the argument in his "History of Christianity" that Egypt and the African littoral readily converted to Islam because it solved the major disagreement they had over Christianity: the Monophysite heresy. By analogy, if you are a "modern, enlightened" Christian (think Bishop Spong), who believes that Jesus wasn't *really* the Son of God (you know, the "Jesus-was-a-great-teacher-and-philosopher" school), you might find Islam (God is God, Mohammed is His prophet) easier to swallow than your own orthodoxy!Another reader pointed out that American Protestantism's strong democratic political structure would make it harder than control than Catholicism's more hierarchical form. Finally, I should mention that one of the great recent surprises in the study of American slavery history is the increasing evidence that many African imports were Muslim--and this may have actually accelerated their acceptance of Christianity, relative to those Africans who were animists. Muslims at least accept the idea of one God, and regard Judaism and Christianity as substantially closer to Islam than purely pagan religions. Perhaps the trauma of being sold away from home broke a slave's confidence in his religion, and peer pressure from Christian slaves made these transitions easier. Labels: book reviews, Islamofascism, terrorism Friday, January 20, 2006
The Chopping Block My manuscript is now down below 117,000 words. I have not yet reached the point where I want to quote George Mason's remarks about putting his hand in a cutting box. (Of course, he was talking about his refusal to sign the Constitution--not removing more words.) This is a good thing. The Advantages of Being a VIP Before you laugh--I find leftist Idaho blogs (yes, they exist) that whine about how a "wingnut" like me gets over 1000 visitors a day. So while I am a pretty small fish compared to some bloggers out there, I am big enough that people send me stuff. For example: Robert Ferrigno's new novel Prayers for the Assassin. I am going to take a break for reading Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring for a few nights and see how Ferrigno's book goes instead. Tolkien was writing fantasy; Ferrigno, in light of current events, I fear, could be writing future history. Labels: book reviews, Islamofascism, terrorism Longitudinal Studies The longitudinal study of children born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1977 seems to have produced an enormous body of information. Here's a paper that asks and answers the question, "Is Sexual Orientation Related to Mental Health Problems and Suicidality in Young People?" The answer turns out to be yes, but along the way, there's some fascinating data: The data were gathered during the course of the Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS). The CHDS is a 21 year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1,265 children born in Christchurch (NZ). At 21, 1,007 sample members were questioned about their sexual orientation and their sexual relationships with same sexed partners since the age of 16. Twenty eight subjects (2.8%) were classified as being of GLB sexual orientation. Over the period from age 14 to 21, data were gathered on a range of psychiatric disorders including major depression; generalised anxiety disorder; conduct disorder and substance use disorders. Data were also gathered on suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.Of course, gay activists have long claimed that these problems have been because of growing up in a homophobic society. This longitudinal study involves people born in 1977 in New Zealand--so kids who grew up after homosexuality was no longer stigmatized in the Western world. A bit of data on those who identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual: Of the 1,007 subjects questioned at age 21, 20 (2.0%) identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual. In addition, a further 8 subjects self identified as heterosexual, but disclosed that they had had sexual relationships with a same sex partner since the age of 16. Using this information, a classification of gay, lesbian or bisexual orientation was constructed by including all of those who reported GLB sexual orientation or those reporting having same sex partnerships into the definition. Of the 28 subjects (11 males, 17 females) classified as GLB, 24 (86%) reported having sexual relationships with a same sexed partner since the age of 16. (Of the 20 subjects reporting that their sexual orientation was gay lesbian or bisexual, 9 were male and 11 were female).It appears that the study attempted to see if the psychiatric problems were present throughout adolescence. If these were only present at adulthood, I suppose that you could argue that these were the results of a homophobic society, but the report seems to indicate that these problems were disproportionately present even at age 15. The study also examined the possibility that the GLB (gay, lesbian, bisexual) group had an unusual family structure that might have caused their increased mental disorders. To examine the equivalence of the GLB and comparison groups a large number of comparisons were made on the childhood, family and social backgrounds of both groups prior to the age of 14.... These comparisons showed that with respect to the majority of these measures the GLB series and the comparison series had similar social, family and childhood backgrounds. However, the two groups were distinguished by two factors: GLB youth tended to have experienced a higher rate of parental change during childhood (P<.05); and GLB youth were more likely to have parents with a history of criminal offending (P<.05) than the comparison series.This doesn't surprise me. I've mentioned before my hypothesis that childhood sexual abuse and adult homosexuality are connected. It is also clearly established that an absent father puts children at greater risk of sexual abuse, partly because stepfathers and live-in boyfriends lack the social taboos against sex with someone else's kid, and partly because fatherless boys and girls tend to look for father figures outside the home--putting them at risk from sexual predators. To the credit of these researchers, they acknowledge that "homophobic society" isn't the only possible explanation for the high rates of psychiatric problems in the GLB group: Whilst there is an emerging consensus from recent studies that young people who disclose homosexual behaviors or attraction are at increased risk of suicidal behaviors and mental health problems, the processes that lead to these associations remain unclear. Although such findings are frequently interpreted as suggesting the role of homophobic attitudes and social prejudice in provoking mental health problems in GLB youth, alternative explanations are possible. These include: a) the possibility that associations are artefactual as a result of measurement and other research design problems; b) the possibility of “reverse causality” in which young people prone to psychiatric disorder are more prone to experience homosexual attraction or contact; and c) the possibility that lifestyle choices made by GLB young people place them at greater risk of adverse life events and stresses that increase risks of mental health problems, independently of GLB orientation. Labels: child sexual abuse, homosexuality Why Sexual Abuse of Children Should Remain Illegal Jon Rowe, attorney, law professor, and gay activist, thinks I'm being "hysterical" about saying that adults shouldn't be having sex with minors. But studies like this are the reason that we have these laws (in spite of the ACLU's efforts): Childhood Sexual Abuse and Psychiatric Disorder in Young Adulthood: II. Psychiatric Outcomes of Childhood Sexual Abuse. Labels: child sexual abuse Interesting Study About Abortion & Mental Problems Unfortunately, I can't find enough information about the methodology to form a strong opinion about its validity: In the emotionally charged debate over abortion, no one could accuse Professor David Fergusson of ideological bias.Longitudinal study: very good. This prevents selection bias problems. I can see how women with mental problems might be more likely to have abortions, but if I am reading Fergusson correctly, he seems to indicate that the mental problems increased after an abortion. Considering the complex hormonal interactions between the mind and pregnancy, I guess that I am not surprised. I find it very interesting that no mainstream U.S. newspaper has mentioned this. I'm sure that this couldn't be for political reasons. Labels: abortion The ACLU's Lawsuit Against the NSA Debbie Schlussel is an attorney who has a rather disturbing column about the plaintiffs in the ACLU's lawsuit against the National Security Agency. Some of the plaintiffs are exactly the people that I can see would not want the NSA listening in on them--and probably should be: I'm referring to ACLU lawyers Noel Saleh, Mohammed Abdrabboh, and Nabih Ayad, the ACLU Plaintiffs named in the yesterday's Complaint, attorney William Swor, a member National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Nazih Hassan--all named in the lawsuit. They are exactly the kind of people whom the federal government SHOULD be watching, but probably isn't. One of these men admitted to funding Hezbollah, one was accused of tampering with a witness, and a third signed a document contradicting statements he made in the lawsuit. Not to mention, one of these men engaged in exactly the same "spying" (on me) that he now opposes when done by the NSA.Anyway, Schlussel is apparently filing an amicus brief on behalf of the NSA in this matter. Thursday, January 19, 2006
Carnival of Home Schooling 3 Is up here. We didn't home school. In retrospect, raising kids in Sonoma County, California, I wish that we had. I Must Have Missed This Chance To Surrender On 9/9 Or 9/10 I don't watch The O'Reilly Factor much anymore, because...how to be polite about this...Bill O'Reilly is becoming too unpleasant to his guests. I recognize that you can't always let your guest ramble on at length within the constraints of broadcast journalism, but he interrupts them far too often. I almost always find myself feeling sorry for his guests--even his liberal guests, because he treats them so badly. Tonight was an exception. O'Reilly was interviewing Michael Scheuer. Does the name ring a bell? Well, he's the CIA officer who was in charge of the bin Laden operation. A couple of years back, CIA allowed him to publish an anonymous book that was widely interpreted by the liberal media as attacking Bush policy. As I mentioned at the time, it is bizarre that the CIA would make an exception to their usual policy to allow a working CIA officer to publish such a book--and it smacked of an attempt by CIA to distract attention from their failure on the Iraq WMD question. O'Reilly, not surprisingly, asked Scheuer about bin Laden's offer of a truce in Afghanistan and Iraq--wasn't that a concession of weakness on bin Laden's part? Scheuer's response was along the lines that a lot of people have been misreading it as such, but really, bin Laden was simply following a longstanding tradition in Islamic culture of offering enemies a chance to surrender before battle--and to hear Scheuer tell it, this is bin Laden being graceful, since we are losing so badly in both countries. Odd. But that graceful bin Laden must have forgotten to extend this opportunity to surrender before 9/11. My Ancient Near East professor once made the point that a person doesn't usually devote most of his adult life to studying a society or culture unless he finds something rather attractive about it. He was using this to explain that he was a big fan of ancient Egypt, and was perhaps not as objective about its culture as others might be. I find myself wondering if Scheuer's many years of studying bin Laden may have caused the "whose ambassador?" problem. One problem with diplomats is that if they spend too many years representing the U.S. to country X, they sometimes reach the point where they start to represent country X to our government more than they represent the U.S. to country X. Scheuer's tone gave me a disturbingly similar feel. I Could Make Stuff Up Like This... But you wouldn't believe it. Of Arms and the Law mentions that a gun control rally had to be called off in New Jersey because it was too cold. But the really amusing part is that one of the organizers of the protest is a registered sex offender--an exhibitionist, apparently, but convicted of sexual assault. (This is a bit confusing--two separate crimes?) Of course, the story about this guy involves an attempt at restricting where pedophiles can live--and what organization is "concerned" about such a law? Civil libertarians are concerned that the restrictions could backfire, doing little to keep paroled sex offenders from committing additional crimes and inviting challenges to the measures' constitutionality. A Father's Lament John Walker Lindh's father has broken his silence, and is asking President Bush for clemency: After years of silence, the father of American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh said Thursday he has asked President Bush to grant his son clemency, adding that the then teenager never raised arms against the United States.It is very, very easy to understand Frank Lindh's pain. No one can feel good about what happened. But this wasn't a teenager vandalizing a wall. It wasn't a young man getting drunk and trying to drive home. John Walker Lindh joined up with a group committed to destroying the United States of America. I don't buy the rest of Frank Lindh's claims: John Walker Lindh, now 24, was captured by American forces on Nov. 21, alongside the Taliban. Frank Lindh said his son thought he had been rescued by U.S. soldiers until he was taken into custody and tortured.Nice try. I've seen video of the event that this person is describing: Rhawn Joseph: When John Walker Lindh was kneeling in front of those two CIA agents, who pleaded with him to cooperate, who appealed to his conscience, who offered to help him, he never once said, "I am an American." He never once asked for help. He never once denounced the Taliban or al qaeda.This is very sad, and when you raise kids in a enclave of the rich and spoiled, like Marin County, I suppose it is not too surprising. But there comes a moment when an adult is responsible for his actions. One of the disturbing aspects of liberalism is the idea that there is no difference between adulthood and childhood. The ACLU argues that a 14 year old has a Fourteenth Amendment "due process liberty interest" in having sex with adults (which in practice means that an adult has the same right to manipulate a child into sex). At the same time, many liberals argue that adults are really children. You wouldn't let a child own a gun, would you? Then why would you allow an adult to do so? Unlikely Roommates You have already seen the BBC story about this. But click over to my daughter's blog for an adorable picture of two critters that seem unlikely to share a cage. Why Russia Needs To Sign The Kyoto Treaty The global warming effects are definitely beginning to show: Arctic temperatures blanketed Russia for a fourth day on Thursday, sending electricity use surging and pushing the death toll from the cold wave to at least 31 people as even hardy Russians struggled to cope with the big freeze.Moscow isn't Miami--where ice on the roads creates utter chaos. Russians know something about cold--but even for them, this is dramatic. Labels: global warming A Very Clever Piece of Satire The site is called "Rent-a-Negro.com". But don't share it with your white liberal friends without warning them that it is satire. They might bust our their credit cards before getting the joke. I notice that the web site is described as "d.i.y reparations performance project"--presumably "do-it-yourself" slave reparations. I found the link over at La Shawn Barber's website, where she described it as: It’s also the perfect solution for “diversity in theory only” white liberals who live nowhere near blacks, have no black friends, and want to impress their fellow white liberal friends. The Catch-22 Murder For Hire Case A British woman sued a hit man whom she hired to commit a murder. Weirder yet, she won the suit. But it gets better, when you find out why she sued the hit man, and who he was supposed to kill: A British court awarded a woman $3,518.90 because she hired a man to whack her and he failed, according to The Times of London.I am reminded of the story of the Iowa police officer who pulled over a new Cadillac Sedan de Ville--and the back seat was filled with mud and pigs. "Sir, why would you do this to such a nice car?" "If it weren't for those pigs, I couldn't drive such a nice car." There are times that you can tell the logic is defective, but you don't want to spend any energy figuring it out. Blowing More Holes in the "Iraq Had Nothing To Do With Al-Qaeda" Claim From the Weekly Standard: THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The First Paragraph Really Matters One of my sisters--who is about as far to the left as I am to the right--maybe more so--sent me a link to something called The Archimedes Movement. This is apparently former Oregon Governor Kitzhaber's project to reform medical care in the United States. I don't agree with his solution--especially because he gives public education as the model that he wants us to use for health care--but it is a reminder that the first paragraph is sometimes enough to drive people away. He makes an intelligent (although I think wrong) argument here , but the opening paragraph of the home page was an immediate turnoff: "What we need is a Revolution—not of violence but of vision; not of arms but of ideas. A Revolution through which we can replace our resignation with hope and our disengagement with a new community-based activism driven not by partisan politics but by an unwillingness to accept a system that has become obsessed with the delivery of health care as an economic commodity at the expense of health for the American people."The fact of the matter is that "the delivery of health care" is "an economic commodity" and this isn't going to change, ever. Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, X-ray technicians, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies and their employees--all expect to be paid for their services. Voluntarism and selflessness are wonderful human qualities, but you can't construct a health care system around these unnatural traits, and expect that system to operate full-time. A health care system must be designed around recognition that it is "an economic commodity." To make such a system work well, you need to recognize that greed is one of the fundamental qualities of humans--instead of pretending otherwise. One Of Those Vegetables Is Recovering Michelle Malkin has a collection of news stories about a little girl who was beaten into a "vegetative state" by the stepfather. The Massachusetts high court went ahead and gave approval to starve her to death, since she wasn't going to recover--but the pesky little troublemaker, just as the doctors were getting ready to finish her off--is starting to recover! Whoops! How embarrassing for the experts! Now, if she had been convicted of murdering several people, and was going to suffer a painless execution, Hollywood would indeed be lining up to save her. But she was a victim of a horrible crime, and was going to be starved to death--well, you got to save your energy for what matters. I'm curious: did the ACLU file a brief in this case to prevent this little girl from being starved to death? Or are they still too busy defending NAMBLA's "how to get away with raping little boys" materials in that civil suit in the same state? I will be amused to see what excuse Professor Volokh comes up with to defend that pack of evil monsters. Threatening To Use Nuclear Weapons Against Terrorist States No, that's not the latest bellicosity from George Bush--but from France: BREST, France (Reuters) - France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent.Gee, which country might that be? Let's play Jeopardy, shall we? "Your turn, Mr. Chirac." "I'll take 'Mullahocracies for $100.'" "This nation has a history of funding terrorist groups, and is currently preparing to become a nuclear power." "What is Iran?" UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! Don't be a stranger! Come back soon! Arbitrary Limits Jon Rowe accuses me of being "hysterical": There are some forces in the blogsphere who are hysterical about the notion that society might allow the underaged to have sex with legal adults. But what about the reverse -- that society will be hysterical about the possibility and start to engage in witch hunts -- and lose its ability to rationally draw lines as seems to have been done in the above case?The case he refers to involves a 33 year old woman youth counselor who ended up having sex with one of the 17 year old guys who was referred to her. Rowe's argument is that a 17 year old isn't being sexually abused by an adult, because a 17 year old guy is essentially an adult. But reverse the sexes--and make this case involving a 33 year old male youth counselor who ends up having sex with a 17 year old female who had been referred to him. I think most people would recognize that there's something disturbingly exploitative about taking advantage of what is probably a troubled kid for sex. Now, you might want to argue (as some like to do) that this isn't the same--that girls get taken advantage of sexually in a way that guys do not. But the courts would never tolerate a sexual double standard on this. So to protect the 17 year old girl from being taken advantage of, we need the same age limits for either sex. The age of consent laws are arbitrary--just like red stoplights mean "Stop" and green ones mean "Go." There are some very mature 17 year olds out there; there are some very immature 20 year olds out there. The state legislatures pass laws based on their best judgment, and some states set these limits a little lower than others. Illinois, I understand, sets the limit at 17, not 18. Arbitrary doesn't mean unconstitutional, however, no matter how much the ACLU wants to believe otherwise. Why Is Bin Laden Offering A Truce? Bin Laden is threatening new attacks on the U.S.--and offering a truce in Iraq and Afghanistan: "The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. But the operations are happening in Baghdad and you will see them here at home the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission," he said.Bin Laden wouldn't be saying this if it were true. It sounds like all those actions that the ACLU has been suing to prevent have been working. "We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to," he said. "We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.Offering a truce is the sign of someone who is weary of the war--or expects that continued fighting is going to defeat him. I would expect that leftists throughout the Western world will demand that the U.S. accept the truce, so that al-Qaeda can rebuild its strength. "There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America."It is just astonishing to me how closely the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party sounds like Osama bin Laden (or is it the other way around?) At least bin Laden didn't say "Halliburton." Wednesday, January 18, 2006
PBS Series: The War That Made America This started this evening, and appears to conclude next week. It's a documentary about the French and Indian War, and the title emphasizes the role that it played in setting up the circumstances that caused the American Revolution. While they have not discussed it yet, one side effect of the British victory over the French was the Proclamation Line of 1763--which effectively closed off much of the frontier to Colonial settlement. While it isn't something that some people want to hear, British motivations were a desire to reduce potential conflict between the Indians and whites over land--and I get the impression that the British government took its paternal responsibilities to the Indians somewhat seriously. I've never studied the battles or the political motivations of the French and Indian War in great detail, but something that I have studied in great detail for my upcoming book is the role of Colonial militias in this--and I am very pleased with the care that the first two hours are showing. The Colonial militia was nominally the free white men (and in a few places, and a few times, free black men and even slaves). In theory, they were obligated to turn and fight on behalf of King and Country. In practice, by the time of the French and Indian War, "expeditionary forces" of the type that actually fought many of these battles were, in many of the colonies, actually made up of the bottom of the society, and not by choice! In Virginia, for example, no man who was eligible to vote could be drafted into these forces. Vagrants, free blacks, and others with no particular voice often made up a large part of these forces, and this documentary does show this, and articulate it. These American soldiers were not particularly impressive at what they did, partly, I suspect, because they weren't there by choice, and partly because these expeditions were deep into the interior of the continent for motives that would have seen irrelevant to them. At least part of the reason that Colonial governments went along with British efforts to drive out the French was for Colonial land speculators. I can see why people at the bottom of the society would have little interest in fighting these battles. I am pleased to see that the full brutality of Indian warfare has not been cleaned up or made PC. They do discuss why Indian allies of both Britain and France took scalps, and the massacre of British soldiers and dependents after the capture of For William Henry. The complexities of the cultural interaction are appropriately discussed, without making excuses. This must have put an enormous number of Indians to work as extras. Graham Greene narrates this--and does what I consider a pretty inferior job. I've seen enough of his acting to know he's capable of better than this. There used to be a saying that the Catholic Church is always fighting the last century's battles. The left seems to have the same problem. There have been wars fought strictly for the financial interests of the top of the society. There have been wars fought as matters of national survival. It seems like the left is still insisting on seeing the War on Terrorism as a replay of the French and Indian War, or of the Civil War, which was characterized, with some accuracy, as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," because the very wealthiest slave owners relied on the "twenty nigger rule" to exempt themselves from the Confederate draft. But not every war fits this model. World War I was fought largely because of collective stupidity. As much as socialists at the start of hostilities tried to portray it as a tool for capitalists to get rich off the suffering of the poor, it was not. Military mobilization done for the purpose of scaring other powers soon created a situation where the major powers could not risk that others were bluffing. World War II was a battle for national survival against a monstrous ideology, as was the Korean War and the Cold War. Advertising On My Blog I've been pleased to see an increase in advertising on my blog--including WGBH (the Boston PBS affiliate) advertising their new American Experience about John and Abigail Adams. You will also notice an ad from Avalon Cycle Works, which is run by a friend of mine, an electrical engineer who decided, after the last startup he worked for went kerplunk, that he just couldn't go back to living in Cubicle World. Instead, he is making motorcycle accessories. Don't Read The Belmont Club It will not make you happy and cheery. Wretchard points to a recent study of what happens when Iran gets nuclear weapons, from the U.S. Army War College. Short of invasion, there's probably no way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons--which will likely lead Arab nations in the region to get nuclear weapons as well, as a way of deterring Iranian ambitions. (They may all be Muslims, but Iranian desires to be the big cheese of the region will probably trump religious similarities.) The comments on the article are quite thoughtful, and very disturbing. In some respects, this is 1936, when the Western powers had the option of responding militarily to Hitler's remilitarization of the Ruhr. They chose not to do so--and that is now recognized as the last time that Hitler could have been stopped without massive bloodshed. One commenter captured the rather significant hazard of waiting: But, as our capabilities can grow, so can those of Iran and its myrmidons the Islamists. You suggest we have a 5-year window. I think that if we wait those 5 years the number of dead in the ensuing war will be at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two orders of magnitude greater than if we strike now while our superiority in 'national strategic means' remains overwhelming.By this, I think he means that if Iran reaches the point where they can carry out their President's wish--of wiping Israel off the map--this will lead to a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. I would also expect that Israel might engage in the Samson option--figuring that if more than a couple of nuclear weapons go off over Israel, they are not going to continue to exist anymore, they won't need American aid, they already don't much care what a bunch of whining Europeans think, and they might as well exterminate their enemies. That would likely mean destruction of Mecca, Medina, and all major Arab and Iranian population centers for which they have enough bombs. If you thought that al-Qaeda and sympathizers were mad at the U.S. for having troops in Saudi Arabia, I think this would provoke a pretty sizeable fraction of Muslims in the Western world to join up. Follow that path to its logical conclusion, and we'll end up with all sorts of really ugly but probably necessary steps: 1. Mass arrests of Muslims, and mass deportation of those that aren't citizens. The ACLU will file all the "free exercise of religion" suits that they want, and the courts will ignore the Constitution because of the severity of the crisis. In Europe, it may be uglier, because the Muslim percentage is so much higher, and a much higher percentage of European Muslims are sympathetic to Islamofascism. 2. Nuclear retaliation by the U.S. when an Iranian weapon ends up in the hands of a terrorist group that uses it against the U.S. or one of our NATO allies. 3. If any other Muslim power has nuclear weapons at that point, they will be at war with the U.S. in short order, leading to an asymmetrical set of nuclear weapons uses. The U.S. will certainly lose a city (or two, or three), with hundreds of thousands dead, trillions in losses; countries that attack us--or are believed to have attacked us--will suffer millions or tens of millions of deaths. Some of these countries will rapidly return to the 14th century in technology. 4. Oil prices will skyrocket during all this, but the collapse of the world economy will solve that problem. What happened after 9/11 will be almost nothing by comparison. Unfortunately, a U.S. attack on Iran will inflame patriotic sentiment in Iran--probably making any sort of overthrow of the mullahocracy impossible. We pretty much have to stop this madness before it reaches the point where we have to go to war. |
