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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, April 28, 2007
NAACP Official Takes the High Road I am so glad to see this guy taking the right position, and calling this tragedy what it is--a failure of the black community to deal with a moral failure that is entirely within its power to fix: CLEVELAND -- The Cleveland NAACP responded Friday to criticism surrounding the shooting death of a teenage boy during a robbery.I remember some years ago the NAACP (I think) ran a commercial very briefly that showed a Klan rally somewhere, and then showed the number of black people that various hate groups had killed in the previous year--and then a stereotypical black gang member, and the number of black people that this bunch had killed in the previous year. It was like 10 to 10,000. There was a storm of protest--but the point was made: too much focus on white supremacists, not enough on the criminals who are destroying the black community. Labels: crime, gun rights Point-Prevalence Bias I was looking for current data on homelessness and mental illness, since it has been known since at least the 1980s that many homeless people are mentally ill--and this is likely a causal factor in their homelessness. While hunting, I found this article about something called "point-prevalence bias" in homelessness statistics. What in the heck is that? If you measure the number and characteristics of the homeless at a particular point in time (say, the night of December 15), you will get everyone that was homeless that night. People that are chronically homeless--the person who has been homeless for several years--will be overrepresented compared to those who are homeless for only a few weeks. This is "point-prevalence bias." If you are having some trouble understanding why this is bias, so am I. Yes, it means that the chronically homeless will be given more weight in the final results than measuring what they call "lifetime" homelessness--how many and what sorts of people have ever been homeless. In reading the paper, I smell something that sounds rather like, "We're having trouble getting enough sympathy for homeless people because the surveys show that more than half have histories of jail or prison and a big fraction of the rest have been in psychiatric hospitals, so let's emphasize the people who are short-term homeless, even though this is at any given time, a small fraction of the homeless population." It also looks like they are trying to create a huge population of people who have ever been homeless, even if only for a few days. It smells rather like Mitch Snyder's opt-repeated by journalists, "three and half million homeless--and growing" claim of the 1980s. By the way, I was surprised at the large percentage of this "point" studies that show jail or prison lockup. I learned something very interesting about this from talking to my daughter, who is working on finding housing for homeless families who are at the Booth Family Shelter. Here in Boise, the vast majority of landlords--even landlords who are cooperating on helping find permanent housing for these homeless families--will not rent to people with felony convictions in the last ten years, or were evicted and owe lots of back rent. I could understand the felony convictions stigma. While not every felony is something horrifying, trying to distinguish murder/robbery/kidnapping from turning back a car odometer/passing bad checks might be a bit of a struggle, and landlords don't want trouble. The evictions and back rent stigma, however, surprised me. My daughter tells me that some people owe many months of back rent from evictions. This tells me that there are landlords in this area who are not heartless. It appears that Idaho is one of those states where five days after you fail to pay the rent, the landlord can evict you. So if you owe many months of back rent, it means that your previous landlord must have accepted excuses for not getting rent paid far beyond what the law requires. Labels: deinstitutionalization It's Nice To Break The Wires You've probably seen the commercial for wireless notebooks with the marionette who finally gets to break the wires. That's how I feel! I'm out on the bad patio, as the sun sets, looking down on Horseshoe Bend's lights, while working on the next book. I just returned from a jaunt up Highway 55 towards Banks, with the top off the Corvette, enjoying the warm wind and the smell of the pine forest. Life is good! UPDATE: But once the sun was down, it started to get cold, and then the coyotes started to howl, so in I went! Mental Illness and Violence I was looking for information on the extent of mental illness among prison inmates, and I found this review of the literature in the journal Psychiatric Services. It reports that "6 to 15 percent of persons in city and county jails and 10 to 15 percent of persons in state prisons have severe mental illness." This is consistent with the recent work by Bernard Harcourt that I have mentioned previously showing that there is a strong negative correlation between institutionalization rates (mental hospitals plus prisons) and homicide rates. As the grand experiment of deinstitutionalization took place, murder rates rose. As the percentage of the population in prison rose, murder rates fell. This was even true when Professor Harcourt repeated the study using state level data. While there were a few oddball states such as Florida where the institutionalization rate seems to have no connection to murder rates, this is the exception. Almost every state had a statistically significant negative correlation, and no state had a statistically significant positive correlation. It doesn't take a genius to see that prison is a bad substitute for mental health treatment. Some mental illnesses can be treated. Some illnesses can be brought under control (such as bipolar disorder); some can be treated at least for the symptoms (such as schizophrenia). I doubt that mental hospitals are cheaper per year per patient than prisons, but if you can treat a patient to the point where he isn't a danger to others or himself, this seems preferable to throwing a patient into a prison instead--and might, if we can figure out a way to supervise the patient's medications upon release, save some money. Anyway, while digging around, I found a number of interesting papers about the question of violent crimes and the mentally ill. If you read most newspapers, almost any time that an article discusses mental illness, the reporter will insert a comment to the effect that the mentally ill are no more violent than anyone else. Why do they always insert this? Because this is now conventional wisdom, and like most conventional wisdom that reporters feel the need to insert in their articles, it appears to be incorrect. This 1976 article the American Journal of Psychiatry studied patients released from Bellevue's psychiatric division in New York City, and found that they were more likely to be arrested for rape, aggravated assault, and burglary than the general population of the "catchment area" for Bellevue. They were less likely to be arrested for murder and robbery, although not much less. This study seems a bit deficient in statistical significance information. This was contrary to a number of earlier studies that found murder and robbery rates higher among released mental patients. This 1978 study examined San Mateo County mental patients, and found that they nine times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than the general population of the county--and for some crimes, like murder, as much as 55 times as likely to be arrested. Now, it is possible that mentally ill people come to the attention of police, and are more likely to be arrested for that reason, but 55 times as likely? I think Harcourt's negative correlation is beginning to look correct. There are some significant differences based on age. Not surprisingly, the mentally ill in their 50s and 60s are not terribly likely to be arrested for violent crimes--much as is true in the general population. Not all forms of mental illness seem equivalently likely to produce violent behavior. But it does appear that much of the traditional view of the mentally ill--as having a higher potential danger to public safety--has some basis in fact. You may be wondering why that 1976 study in New York City found murder and aggravated assault rates among mentally ill comparable to the rest of the population. At the risk of being quoted out of context by a gun control advocate: there is a possibility that New York City's strict gun control laws make it sufficiently difficult for mentally ill persons released from the hospital to get hold of a gun, reducing their murder rates relative to, for example, the San Mateo County population in that 1978 paper. Aggravated assault charges usually involve a weapon--and I suppose that the inability to get hold of a gun might explain why that rate was about the same as the general population in New York City. I find this a plausible explanation because one of the arguments for why New York City had to pass its 1967 Gun Control Law was that "crazy people" (as some New York politician I saw once explain it) were buying guns and going immediately into the streets and shooting people. Still, this suggests that gun control laws make all of New York rather like a mental hospital--one that limits access to deadly weapons. It might have more sense to have asked why mentally ill people were being released to the streets to live on steam grates. Labels: deinstitutionalization Houston in September One of the colleges in the area is organizing having me come to debate the meaning of the Second Amendment with a prominent law professor on the other side. (I'm not identifying him yet until we get everything finalized.) When we get the details finalized, I'll be trying to organize other events in the area as well. Labels: gun rights, my books Carbon Indulgence Fraud At least when Pope Leo X was selling papal indulgences, we got St. Peter's Basilica out of it (along with paying the bribery debts of the Archbishop of Mainz). This article from the April 25, 2007 Financial Times is unsurprising: Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits. Labels: consumer fraud, global warming In Spite of the Virginia Tech Massacre? Or Because of It? The Kansas legislature overrode Governor Sibelius's veto: TOPEKA - Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' veto of a bill preventing local governments from imposing additional restrictions on Kansans carrying concealed guns was overridden Friday by the Legislature, allowing it to become law.In a society that doesn't lock up dangerously mentally ill people until they have killed someone, and where Congresscritters are talking about the dangers of terrorists obtaining guns, the last thing we need is more victim-disarmament zones. Labels: gun rights Here's a Bill That Is Too Dangerous I agree that there is some real danger of terrorists buying guns, and if I had confidence in the integrity and intelligence of the Justice Department, I wouldn't object. But this administration hasn't shown that its Justice Department can be trusted to do its job, and I sure wouldn't trust President Clinton's Justice Department to show integrity or intelligence: WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department and a Northeastern Democrat have formed a rare alliance intended to restrict gun sales to terror suspects.I would like to think that Homeland Security has enough agents to keep an eye on terror suspects who are buying guns. If not, either there are too many suspects on the list, or we are in a lot deeper trouble than anyone is letting on. I will be curious if Teddy Kennedy, who was upset about being on a "no-fly" list several years ago, would be upset about the government setting up a "no-guns" list without any due process requirements. Do you suppose the ACLU would fight such a measure? Labels: gun rights, terrorism Friday, April 27, 2007
Dangers of Credentialism I've long been hostile to the irrational focus on a degree when deciding whether someone is qualified for a job. I had this attitude when I was an undegreed software engineer, and I am not any more sympathetic to credentialism now that I have earned a BA and an MA. Requiring certain degrees is a cheap and easy way to reduce the size of the pile of resumes that someone has to carefully read, to decide who gets brought in for an interview. I suspect that, on average, those applicants with a degree are more qualified than those without, but my experience over the years tells me that the difference in qualification, at least in engineering disciplines, is not huge. I know a few millionaire engineers who did not finish college, and a few who are far wealthier who never attended college at all. This sad story, on the one hand, is about an integrity problem: Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.On the other hand, I find myself wondering: if having a degree--and one presumes, a graduate degree, if she ended up with the title of "dean"--is so fundamentally necessary to her job, how is that no one ever noticed her inability until now? Call me unimpressed with credentialism. A Description of the Disappearing Glaciers I was reading a travel account of the Rhone glacier in the Alps: The rocks are grooved and scarred away up hundreds of feet above the ice, showing that the glacier was once many times its present size. It is slowly melting away--dying, the scientists say. It may not last more than five or six thousand years longer, so if you want to see it you'll have to hurry.Okay, evidence of global warming? Well, perhaps, but this account predates the enormous increase in man's production of carbon dioxide. It is from Leander A. Bigger, Around the World: An Illustrated Trip for Education and Pleasure (New York: Lyceum Travel Bureau, 1916), 3:99, describing a round the world trip of 1904-05. Labels: global warming Thursday, April 26, 2007
HR 297 This is McCarthy and Dingell's bill concerning improving state reporting of information that might disqualify someone from purchasing a gun because of misdemeanor domestic violence or mental illness problems. Gun Owners of America is sending around an email warning that this is a horrible, dangerous bill: HR 297 would require the states to turn over mountains of personalAs I said on a radio broadcast this morning, I support the concept of improving state reporting of disqualifying mental illness problems, but the devil is in the details. So I have been reading over HR 297, and I am having trouble finding where "this bill would allow the FBI to obtain massive amounts of information" about individuals. The bill doesn't even require states to provide information--it only sets standards for how much money the state can receive for improving its reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System based on its level of data that it reports. Now, there might be something that I am missing hidden in the current regulations, but "State records of persons adjudicated mentally defective or committed to a mental institution" and reporting of misdemeanor domestic violence convictions doesn't immediately seem to be a fishing expedition. UPDATE: A reader who is concerned about this bill points out that the bill requires states that are receiving federal funds to improve their ability to feed firearms disability information to the NICBCS to provide records. If you don't want to provide those records, you won't get any money to improve your systems for feeding NICBCS. And why is this is a problem? If you don't want to provide data to NICBCS, then you don't need federal funding to improve your ability to feed data to NICBCS. The other objection is that one provision requires states to provide information that would allow determination of whether an alien is legally present in the country. Supposedly, this is a truck sized hole--one that allows the FBI to request vast quantities of information: Bank records, marriage license, birth certificate, property tax records, credit card records... every single one of them could in some way be used to determine whether someone is an illegal alien or not, right?Well, no. Birth certificate is about the only item that might be useful for determining whether someone is a citizen--and if they have a U.S. birth certificate, that makes them by law a citizen (with a few very weird exceptions involving diplomatic personnel). The rest of this stuff? I wish that it was different, but illegal aliens have credit card, bank accounts, pay property taxes, and marriage licenses. True, there are abuse potentials with information gathering, but I am hard pressed to see that this bill opens any more doors on this than the PATRIOT Act has already opened. Net effect on the powers of the snooping federal government: zero. Labels: gun rights Mark Twain's Remark About The School Board Needs Updating You may have heard it--something along the lines of "Before God made the idiot, he made the school board for practice." It needs updating to refer to Oklahoma University. Do you remember the student who blew himself up outside the stadium? The one who had become a Muslim, but of course, that and strapping a bomb to his chest right outside a crowded stadium--no, that can't be a terrorist attack? Well, the university decided to remember him: NORMAN, Okla. -- The University of Oklahoma has put up a memorial to a student who died when a homemade bomb exploded near the OU football stadium.Accidental suicide? What is that? A suicide is intentional; it's not an accident. If there was anything "accidental" about his death, it was probably premature detonation. He deserves nothing but our sorrow that his mental problems led him into the death cult variant of Islam. Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the pointer. Labels: political correctness, terrorism Institutionalization Records I was watching one of the news programs last night, and they were mentioning that Senator Schumer (not a friend of gun owners) and the NRA have made common cause on a bill to deal with the loophole that allowed Cho Seung-Hui to pass the national firearms background check. I guess this is progress; instead of focusing on the gun (trying to ban semiautos, or high capacity magazines), they are focusing on the person holding the gun. The reporter reading the story sounded a little incredulous that the NRA would support such a change, but really, this is not a surprise. The NRA's opposition to various background checks has never been with the concept, but with the implementation details. A background check was not a big problem for the NRA when the Brady Bill passed; it was the waiting period. From a constitutional standpoint, a background check that excludes felons, the mentally ill, minors, former U.S. citizens, and illegal aliens are all perfectly acceptable, based on the type of restrictions that were common and considered acceptable when the Second Amendment was ratified. We can argue about particular categories: should all felons be excluded, or only violent felons? What constitues "mentally ill"? Does it include a person who was depressed and sought outpatient psychiatric treatment? I would say that's absurd. But I think most people would agree that someone who has been hospitalized against his or her will because a court concluded that they were a threat to themselves or others is probably a valid basis for a firearms disability--at least for a few years. If someone doesn't end up hospitalized again after some period of time (five years seems like an adequate interval), there's a pretty good chance that this was a passing problem. I see from an article in today's Idaho Statesman (which I can't find on their website, but is substantially the same as this one) that Idaho is one of 28 states that do not share mental illness commitment information with the FBI for the national background check. The article explains that in some states, there are state privacy laws that prohibit it; in others, there are technical problems that make it impossible. (The state itself doesn't have the information.) I can understand why Idaho might not have put sharing this information at the top of their priority list--but it isn't like Idaho doesn't keep the information or use it internally. For example, Idaho Code 18-3302 already provides that you may not obtain a concealed carry permit if: (f) Is currently suffering or has been adjudicated as follows, based on substantial evidence:I am a little surprised that we don't share at least this information with the FBI for the national background check. I can't imagine that cost is an issue; we already have the data somewhere to run the background check for a carry permit, and in a state of 1.5 million people, I can't imagine that more than about 1500 people a year get dropped into one of these categories. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Wednesday, April 25, 2007
More On Mental Illness and Firearms Disability I found this rather disturbing but not surprising news item about Russell Eugene Weston, Jr. In case you have forgotten him already: Russell Eugene Weston Jr. told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he stormed the U.S. Capitol last summer, killing two police officers, to prevent the United States from being annihilated by disease and legions of cannibals.The disturbing item that I found was this: (CBS) Russell Weston bragged he was the son of John F. Kennedy, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart. He spoke to satellite dishes because he thought they carried his voice to Washington. He threatened neighbors. He'd been arrested and one day he was finally packed off by the state of Montana to a mental institution.Weston spent 53 days locked up in a mental hospital, and from all accounts, should not have been released. Labels: deinstitutionalization More About Institutionalization vs. Homicide Rates I mentioned yesterday a Texas Law Review paper by Bernard Harcourt about how adding mental hospital and prison incarceration rates together did a better job of predicting murder rates than other models--and that as the total of the two rates went up, there was a strong negative correlation to murder rates. Today, I heard from Professor Harcourt, who pointed me to a paper in process here which uses state level data and a broader range of social variables--and finds that while there is variation from state to state, the same essential results pop out: as states increase the percentage of population who are locked up in either mental hospitals or prisons, the murder rate declines. There are signs of elasticity on this. When the institutionalization rates drops to very low levels, murder rates don't continue upward at the same rate because nearly all the dangerous people are out on the street. When the institutionalization rates rise to very high levels, murder rates don't get any lower because those who are locked up increasingly include people who might be a bit eccentric, or mentally ill, but not dangerous to others. Labels: deinstitutionalization Adventures in Photography: New York City I lugged around the Pentax K10D while sightseeing in New York City--and it was a reminder of the tradeoffs that you make on cameras. There were many times during the day that I wished that I was carrying my HP Photosmart E427, because it slips into your pocket. The Pentax I carried in an old video camera bag, partly because it protected it from getting banged up, and partly because a criminal might have assumed that all I had inside was an analog video camera--which is probably not worth stealing, at this point. The upside of the Pentax is that I was able to take pictures that the Photosmart simply could not have, because it doesn't have a zoom, and because it doesn't have the ability to change ASA settings. (At least, I haven't figured out how.) In low light settings, such as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Building lobby, this is a huge advantage--especially in those places where photography is allowed, but flash is not. I do wish that there was a selector on the outside of the Pentax for changing the ASA setting; it is a bit clumsy to go through the menu to change the ASA setting. (There probably is a way to do this, but I haven't sat down with the several hundred page manual to figure it out.) I did see another tourist carrying the Panasonic Lumix FZ50, which is a long zoom digital camera that I considered, until I found that the lens isn't removable (which I need for astrophotography). Unfortunately, while quite a bit more compact than the Pentax, it is not quite pocket sized, but still a very reasonable alternative to the Pentax. Labels: photography Saul Cornell Ed Killoran has an article here about Saul Cornell's presentation in support of gun control at a church in Ohio: Cornell's main premise of the Second Amendment allowing gun control was based on the phrase, “well-regulated.” The last question I asked was how he defined "well regulated" as used the Second Amendment. I had several sources indicating it meant something different 200 years ago (smooth running, like a clock) but that was nonsense to him. He emphasized REGULATION. He noticed my copy of Clayton Cramer’s book, Armed America, and promptly said, “Cramer’s never met a gun law he liked.”Utterly false. I have long argued that laws that prohibit convicted felons and the mentally ill from having guns are both constitutional and probably provide some benefits to the society. This article, for example. And this one, where I chastise the Supreme Court for striking down the federal law that prohibits those convicted of felonies in foreign courts from possessing firearms. If Cornell is being accurately quoted, he is either insufficiently knowledgeable about my position, or he is lying. UPDATE: Saul Cornell has contacted me, and now knows that this isn't an accurate statement of my position. Labels: gun rights Deranged Democrats At It Again And one with such a fine last name, too: LAS VEGAS - A man accused of threatening a Nevada Republican Party official with a rifle was arrested Tuesday in a vehicle in which police found swords, knives, a shotgun, shells and a flare gun, authorities said.Did he think that he wouldn't be arrested for threatening violence? Labels: stupidity Democrats Say Iraq War Isn't About Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda doesn't agree: DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is orchestrating militants' operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior commander of Afghan Islamist group Taliban said in remarks broadcast on Wednesday.Democrats who say that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the War on Terror might want to tell the Taliban to shut up. Labels: terrorism Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Bernard E. Harcourt's "From the Asylum to the Prison" I've just finished reading this paper from Texas Law Review 84:1751-86 [2006]. I am not in a position to analyze his statistical work, but he makes an argument that I find quite persuasive, because of the book that I am currently writing about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Harcourt's primary claim is that social scientists need to look at both prisons and mental hospitals in understanding the incarceration revolution--that a great many of the failures to adequately predict crime rate changes go away if you look at both categories of incarceration--not just prisons. A secondary claim is that if you combine national prison and mental hospital incarceration rates for the period 1928-2000, there is a very strong negative correlation to homicide rates: -0.78, and that this strong negative correlation survives when you factor in unemployment and demographic changes. This should not be any big surprise; about 7% to 16% of current prison inmates are mentally ill. A fair number of people that might, in 1950, been locked up in a mental hospital, now wander the streets until they commit some fairly serious crime. In a few cases that make headlines, they commit mass murder, and follow it up with suicide. The current levels of prison incarceration, while high by the standards of the 20th century, when examined in conjunction with mental hospital lockups, just barely reaching the levels common in the 1930s through the 1950s. One substantial difference that Harcourt doesn't address--and which might influence the apparent causal connection on this--is that a surprisingly large percentage of pre-1960 mental hospital populations were syphilitic insane and elderly senile. Syphilitic insanity largely faded away with the introduction of penicillin after World War II, and the elderly senile, who contributed to that large mental hospitalization rate, transferred over to a variety of private nursing care facilities as a result of the Medicare program in the early 1960s. Labels: deinstitutionalization Students for Concealed Carry on Campus Yes, that's the name of this organization. They appear to have existed well before this tragedy at Virginia Tech. As the Frequently Asked Questions section explains: Students in Universities all over America are licensed to carry concealed weapons. Labels: gun rights Who Taught Cho To Hate? I mentioned yesterday that I thought that Cho Seung-Hui would have picked whatever ideology gave him a reason to hate, and I thought blaming the dominance of hatred for Christianity, capitalism, and wealth was missing the core problem: Cho Seung-Hui's insanity. Nonetheless, I am impressed how much racial hatred and violence one of Cho Seung-Hui's professors has spewed as poetry. VDARE.COM points to a number of examples of Nikki Giovanni's production of racial hate focused poetry and enthusiasm for hip-hop's worst elements. I doubt that this caused Cho Seung-Hui's decision--but if he had attended a fundamentalist Christian college, and had murdered 32 gay men, you can be sure that liberals would be running the engines of the mass media full-time demanding that something be done to suppress anti-homosexual teaching. Labels: political correctness Reading The Supreme Court's Decision on Partial Birth Abortion Ban Last week, Professor Orin Kerr described the Supreme Court's 5-4 upholding of Nebraska's partial birth abortion ban as using "the narrowest ground to uphold the ban...." When I read the decision, what struck me about Justice Kennedy's opinion was how tremendously detailed it was in describing the procedure that was being prohibited--far more detail than really seems necessary for a purely legal question. It is, however, exactly what you would write if you really wanted to impress upon the arm-waving theorists the monstrousness of this: A doctor must first dilate the cervix at least to the extent needed to insert surgical instruments into the uterus and to maneuver them to evacuate the fetus.... The steps taken to cause dilation differ by physician and gestational age of the fetus. .... A doctor often begins the dilation process by inserting osmotic dilators,such as laminaria (sticks of seaweed), into the cervix. The dilators can be used in combination with drugs,such as misoprostol, that increase dilation. The resulting amount of dilation is not uniform, and a doctor does not know in advance how an individual patient will respond. In general the longer dilators remain in the cervix,the more it will dilate. Yet the length of time doctors employ osmotic dilators varies. Some may keep dilators in the cervix for two days, while others use dilators for a day or less. ...If this starts to make you think of the brainsucking sequence in the terrible movie version of Starship Troopers, then I think Justice Kennedy achieved his goal. Doesn't it make you proud to be an American? Labels: abortion Imagine If Jerry Falwell Had Said Something Like This... They would have been screeching night and day about it--even worse than Don Imus's offensive remarks. These are far worse--but this isn't a national news story--because it was said by a Muslim, and therefore liberals must genuflect to show their support for diversity: A community debate over religious freedom surfaced in Western Pennsylvania last week when Dutch feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has lived under the threat of death for denouncing her Muslim upbringing, made an appearance at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.Instapundit turned it around nicely: When you come into the United States you must abide by the laws and customs that prevail here. You're supposed to leave this kind of medieval idiocy behind. If you keep it up, don't be surprised if you get thought of as some sort of medieval idiot.ElBayly does not seem to have crossed the line into directly saying that someone should kill Hirsi Ali, so I guess that he hasn't actually broken any laws--but compared to what Don Imus said, this is far worse. And you won't hear a word about it from the usual screeching heads on television. Labels: hypocrisy, Islamofascism, political correctness Monday, April 23, 2007
There Are Things Worse Than Gun Accidents The gun control movement works very, very hard to give you the impression that lots of kids get killed in gun accidents. It isn't true. Every such accident is a tragedy, and one that doesn't need to happen. You do have your gun properly secured, right? I hope so--not just to protect your child, or your child's friend, but to make sure a burglar doesn't use it on you. But stories like this are a reminder that there are situations worse than a gun accident. Much worse: Tied up and left to die in a burning apartment, a Columbia student used the blaze set by her sadistic rapist to free herself, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.Bitter over at The Bitch Girls linked to this story after explaining that this is why she has a pistol on her nightstand. Labels: gun rights The Sky Is About to Fall Hell is about to freeze over. Watch out for those flying pigs! I just saw Senator Schumer (D-NY) on The O'Reilly Factor admit that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. He went on to argue that the right isn't unlimited, just like the First Amendment "doesn't protect pornography." He even acknowledged that there is a right to defend yourself, and that can even include using a gun to do so. Now, I don't believe for a second that Schumer's definition of "reasonable regulation" of guns matches mine, but this is real progress. Either that, or he has already figured out that the Supreme Court is going to uphold Parker v. D.C. (D.C.App. 2007), and is figuring out how to hamstring that right so badly that it is meaningless. UPDATE: Professor Volokh points out that this isn't the first time that Schumer has acknowledged that the Second Amendment protects an individual right--although subject to regulation that most people would consider unreasonable. Labels: gun rights Book Tour: Adventures in Architecture New York City has some of the most amazing architecture--at least, the parts that aren't falling down, and covered in usually unartistic graffiti. Here are some examples that caught my eye as especially stunning or interesting. This is the Chrysler building, completed in 1930:  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge The rather gargoyle like eagles (or at least some sort of raptor) on the Chrysler Building:  Click to enlarge The lobby of the Chrysler Building is astonishing.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge On the ceiling of the lobby is this Socialist Realism art:  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Here's some pictures of the odd little critters on top of Grand Central Terminal, on 42nd Street.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge I'm not sure exactly where I was, but it was somewhere in this area that I saw this building with this rather interesting pattern.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge We found this amazingly medieval door somewhere east of Central Park:  Click to enlarge Book Tour: Demographic Surprises We booked a hotel in Flushing, largely because hotels on Manhattan were very expensive, the reasonably priced hotels that were closest to Manhattan on Long Island in Queens couldn't guarantee us a non-smoking room, and I wanted a place that was a short walk to a subway station. Flushing was also right next to LaGuardia Airport, which made for a short drive in the morning when we were ready to return home. The big surprise in Flushing was that there seemed to be almost nothing but Asians living there. Almost every sign was in Chinese and English--except for a few that were in Korean. The hotel itself, the Best Western Queens Court, was very well kept--better than some rather fancier hotels that I have stayed in lately. The help was very friendly.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Another surprise was when we went out to Long Island for dinner. I was always under the impression from the manner in which intellectuals denigrated Long Island (once you get east of Queens and Flushing) as a bunch of middle class white yahoos. We were surprised to find that at least where we ended up was quite racially diverse. While everyone seemed quite middle class in their values, it was black, Hispanic, and white--not at all what I expected. Labels: my books My Book Tour To New York City: Somewhat Disappointed at Turnout I'll break this up into several different postings, so that it doesn't get too long. (Besides, I have dinner in the microwave tonight--my wife is teaching a class--and I have some C compiling for work, so little chunks only.) On the good side, the interview on the Joey Reynolds show went very well. He definitely gave me a chance to talk--very polite guy. Since something like 82 stations carry his show, this should sell a bunch of books. The presentation Friday night at Ramapo College was a lot more lightly attended than I had hoped. The topic was both academic fraud and the subject of my book, so I thought that at least one or two faculty in the history of political science department might show up. Other than Professor Murray Sabrin, who organized this, not a single faculty member showed. A couple of students (I think), but the rest of the 20 or so people there were associated with the New Jersey Coalition for Self-Defense. They have a couple of hundred members statewide, so getting this many almost on the border of New York was pretty good. They worked quite hard to make this event happen, and I really enjoyed the time that I spent with Robert Kreisler and some of the other members while we were there. Unfortunately, NJCSD's efforts to get the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs to publicize the event (and perhaps get .1% of their 30,000 members to show up) didn't fly. My emails to officers of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association were either ignored or NYRPA members weren't much interested in what I had to say. Look, I know that I'm not Charlton Heston, but I'm not exactly chopped liver, either. To have this few people show up for what even my harshest critic (my wife) says was a really good speech was a bit disheartening. There are days that I wonder if the reason that gun owners have been losing for so long is that most really don't care that much. Labels: my books There's Enough Blame To Go Around, But This May Be Going Too Far American Daily suggests that the fierce anti-Americanism that dominates many of our schools may be to blame for the Virginia Tech massacre: Why did the Virginia Tech shooter write about his being pissed off at rich kids? Who often uses the phrase “evil rich”? Why did the Virginia Tech think that America was a diseased society? Ever listen to Howard Zinn and or Noam Chomsky? Did this young man come to college as the typical know-little-about-the-world freshman, and within three and a half years, become a menace to society because he was taught that society was no damn good?Well, if Cho Seung-Hui had been a rational person, I might be more inclined to buy this argument. But he was mentally ill. Paranoid schizophrenics get fixated on all sorts of things: very commonly, religion or politics. One of the mentally ill women that wandered the streets where I lived in Los Angeles--and actually received her fifteen minutes of fame on one of the national news shows in the late 1980s--was fixated on religion. You could read her distinctive handwriting on any flat surface along Wilshire Blvd. It was based on Christianity, but it made no sense to me. I've talked to other paranoid schizophrenics who fixated on politics. They would take some idea that most people regard as a little nuts (Trilateral Conspiracy, black helicopters, whatever) and make that the center focus of their thoughts and concerns. Because schizophrenia causes significant distortions of the senses, it is very easy to imagine the nerve impulses that they feel are bugs implanted in their brains, under their skin, and similarly worrisome problems. (If you watched A Beautiful Mind, you can see where this led John Nash.) My guess is that Cho Seung-Hui, had he been in an environment where Christianity was dominant, would have constructed an ideology based on destroying demons. If he had been working on a degree in political science, he might have left us a tape talking about the evils of Republicans cooking and eating poor people. As it was, he appears to have taken the dominant crackpot ideologies of the academy--the evils of Christianity and wealth--and turned that into a basis for his mass murder spree. Labels: deinstitutionalization Talking to Reporters I just got off the phone with a reporter for one of the Texas newspapers who was interested in knowing more about the copycat problem of mass murder. They are suddenly having a burst of murder/suicides after Cho's actions, and he found me because of my Journal of Mass Media Ethics paper. I talked about this, but I also emphasized that this is a larger problem--the problem of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, who have fallen through the cracks of the current system. Most are only a threat to themselves, but a small fraction become a serious problem to others, and a few, if they use a gun, become headlines--as happened in Virginia last Monday. If they don't use a gun, and only kill one or two people are only local news. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Mental Illness and Mass Murder I'm glad that a few other people are prepared to say it. From today's Wall Street Journal: I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.This Texas Law Review paper by Bernard Harcourt examines institutionalization--as measured by both prison and mental hospital inmates. He makes the shocking discovery that if you combine both measures and plot them against U.S. murder rates for the period 1928-2000, there is an almost perfect negative correlation: as institutionalization (in either prison or mental hospitals) goes up, murder rates go down, and vice versa. There's a lot of evidence that many of those who are currently locked up in prisons are mentally ill. It would appear that the great experiment of the 1960s--deinstitutionalization--simply transferred violent mentally ill people from mental hospitals to prisons, after a few decades of suffering, both by those mental patients, and by the society as a whole. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Sunday, April 22, 2007
Can I Find an Ambulance-Chaser to File a Fault Advertising Claim? This should be worth at least several million dollars. I noticed this advertising that United Airlines had it up in the Denver International Airport terminal:  Click to enlarge One would conclude that their new regional jets are actually an evolved form of butterfly, or perhaps as beautiful as butterflies--or maybe as low impact on the environment as a butterfly? Or most likely, some advertising creative guy could not figure out a coherent message that would make people happy, and settled for this. Labels: humor Amusing Examination of Nasty Capitalists Laying People Off Jim Geraghty observes: As you’ll recall from yesterday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is upset with Circuit City for laying off 3,400 workers, wagging her finger to management in a letter that declared, “these decisions are inconsistent with the fundamental compact between your company and its employees. This is the wrong way to deal with the economic pressures of the day — and the wrong way to treat workers who’ve given their all to your company.”Then he marshals the evidence that suggests that the layoff of 75 workers at Simon & Schuster were caused by the $8 million advance that they gave an author named...Hillary Clinton several years that seems unlikely to ever be covered by royalties. Was that just a bad call on the expected sales of the book? Or a disguised personal gift from a publishing company to a politician? Another Tragedy of Our Mental Health System, But This Won't Get As Much Press First, because there was only person killed, and second, because it didn't involve a gun. From the April 19, 2007 Santa Rosa (Cal.) Press-Democrat: The family of a man who allegedly stabbed his mother to death at her Rohnert Park home wrestled Wednesday with grief and their anger at a mental health system that they say failed everyone involved.This is a tragedy. Like a lot of other mental illness tragedies that I have talked about on this blog in the last several years, those who become violent are a small minority of the mentally ill (most of whom are a bigger threat to themselves than to others). But the unpredictability of a violent mentally ill person--and that they may attack people who have no idea that they are seen as targets--creates enormous fear in the general population. Unlike what happened at Virginia Tech last Monday, no gun control law would have prevented this tragedy. But like Virginia Tech, a mental illness commitment law that wasn't quite so far out on the civil libertarian extreme might well have prevented this tragedy. Labels: deinstitutionalization Back From New York City I'm drained--it may be tomorrow before I post anything. I had hundreds of emails waiting for me, and most of them, amazingly enough, weren't spam. Labels: my books |
