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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'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, May 05, 2007
Who Was Bass Reeves? I was watching something on the History Channel this morning, while enjoying my tea, and they discussed a man who was born a slave, and is believed to have been the first black U.S. deputy marshal west of the Mississippi. I did a little Googleing, and found this article: Born to slave parents in 1838 in Paris, Texas , Bass Reeves would become the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi River and one of the greatest frontier heroes in our nation’s history.This piece, including a 1910 obituary from an Oklahoma newspaper, mentions how Reeves' devotion to duty included arresting his own son for murder, and bringing him to justice. Labels: history Flying Pig Time If this appeared on Fox News, I would be pleased but not completely shocked. But when John Stossel's editors at ABC allow something like this to be published on the ABC News website--well, it's time for hats with big brims to protect us from what the flying pigs are going to dropping: This past Tuesday the governor of Virginia announced he would close the loophole that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to buy the guns he used to kill 32 people -- and himself -- on the Virginia Tech campus. OK, it's a good idea to keep guns out of the hands of people who are mentally unstable. But be careful about how far the calls for gun control go, because the idea that gun control laws lower gun crime is a myth. Labels: gun rights, gun self-defense Friday, May 04, 2007
This Came To Me In A Dream A spectre is haunting the world -- the spectre of anthropogenic global warming. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: England and Germany, Social Democrats and Greens. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. The largest struggle has been between those who work for a living, and those who live by taxing the workers. They have engaged in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that sometimes results in higher taxes and inferior living conditions for the toiling masses. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In every case, those who live off the sweat of their brow must support those who do not. The justifications were varied: that the nobles were military protection for the peasants; that there was a divine right of kings to rule; in the twentieth century, that those who toiled must be taxed to support the less fortunate. While there were often genuine needs that taxation of the masses met, these were merely excuses for the privileged classes to maintain themselves in luxury and to keep the working classes from reaching that same level of comfort. (John Kerry, for example.) The exploiting classes have long sought excuses to increase taxation on those who work. In the 1990s, those who toil became increasingly unwilling to continue support for a welfare system that created dependency and pathology, and the exploiting classes searched desperately for a basis upon which to erect a new system for impoverishing the workers, one that would be both new and old. The reasons would be new, and therefore not obviously false. The results would be old: the continued transfer of wealth from those who labor, preventing the bourgeois from acquiring the luxury of time that wealth provides, and which has hitherto only been enjoyed by the exploiting classes. The exploiting classes cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of taxation, and thereby the relations of taxation, and with them the whole relations of society. The need of a constantly expanding tax base to impoverish the bourgeois chases the exploting classes over the entire surface of the globe, looking for excuses in melting glaciers. It must build mansions everywhere, travel by private jet everywhere, establish environmental think tanks everywhere. The exploiting class has, through its exploitation of the bourgeois, given a cosmopolitan character to taxation and government in every country. The exploiting classes of every nation have found common cause in an uncertain theory of global warming with which it frightens the most easily misled segment of the masses into destroying their own future wealth and happiness. The exploiting class keeps more and more of the means of production, and of property, by developing new and more sophisticated methods of impoverishing those who work. It seeks to agglomerate wealth, centralize the control of production, and concentrate property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this will be political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, will become lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff. Let the exploiting classes tremble at a workers' revolution. Those who work for a living have nothing to lose but their carbon taxes. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite! Labels: global warming Thursday, May 03, 2007
The Right to Treatment as Blackmail In Rouse v. Cameron (1966), the federal courts found that criminals who had been confined because they were mentally ill had a right to treatment. What are the origins of this right? I did a little digging, and found an article by Dr. Morton Birnbaum, "The Right to Treatment," American Bar Association Journal, 46[May, 1960]:499-505. Birnbaum argued that since the state governments involuntarily institutionalized mentally ill persons, and failed to provide anything more than custodial care, the courts should find that such patients had a right to treatment. Birnbaum's argument for such a right to treatment was not based on any recognizable Constitutional provision, but simply that if this “right to treatment were to be recognized and enforced, it will be shown that the standard of treatment in public mental institutions probably will be raised....” This was a pragmatic argument; the courts should recognize this right to treatment because of the beneficial effects that it would have on psychiatric care. Birnbaum made no pretense that there was a theoretical basis for this claim, acknowledging that the courts were primarily interested in the questions of whether a patient's rights were sufficiently protected in commitment proceedings. Birnbaum openly stated that if the courts found such a right to treatment, it would act as a stick to force improved care, because the alternative was too worrisome—and that was release: To release a mentally ill person who requires further institutionalization, solely because he is not being given proper care and treatment, may endanger the health and welfare of many members of the community as well as the health and welfare of the sick person; however, it should always be remembered that the entire danger to, and from, the mentally ill that may occur by releasing them while they still require future hospitalization can be removed simply by our society treating these sick people properly. This is an important reason why the right to treatment is being advocated.I can't argue with Birnbaum's good intentions, and I don't doubt that state governments were being cheap with spending for mental hospitals. Unfortunately, when you bluff at poker, you are taking the chance that someone will call your bluff. I am beginning to think that the deinstitutionalization movement managed to give us the worst of both worlds: increased risk to the deinstitutionalized patients and to the society. Birnbaum didn't want patients sleeping on steam grates; he wanted the legislatures to provide more than just custodial care for those patients that could be helped. But once you Constitutionalize a public policy issue--once you claim that the Constitution mandates a certain behavior--it greatly limits the ability of a legislature to cut the sort of compromises that are required when confronting real world questions of resources. UPDATE: Oh yes, the plaintiff in Rouse v. Cameron was hospitalized because he had been arrested on a weapons charge, and found not guilty by reason of insanity. I haven't been able to find this decision yet (at least, not online) but I get the impression that he was hospitalized for several years not simply because he was carrying a gun and 600 rounds of ammunition. UPDATE 2: I found an article published in 1969 in Hospital and Community Psychiatry by Judge Bazelon, who wrote Rouse v. Cameron in which he echoed Birnbaum--that finding a right to treatment was a threat to force state legislatures to increase funding for mental hospitals--either they had to provide treatment to violent mental patients, or they had to release them to the streets. Labels: deinstitutionalization Homosexuality, Free Speech: Pick One Count on California schools, where liberals are firmly in control, to punish free speech. From WorldNetDaily, May 3, 2007: At least another 75 students have been suspended from school in California for wearing shirts that expressed their biblically-based opposition to homosexuality, and the district that, as WND reported, has been imposing the punishments, says those quotations aren't necessarily acceptable because they are from God's Word.Freedom of speech. Homosexuality. California schools seem to be saying, "Pick one." Labels: freedom of speech, homosexuality, political correctness Supposedly Bush Is Going to Veto This Bill... The bill is HR 1592, and while the White House is indicating that there are serious constitutionality problems with a federal bill that seeks to punish purely intrastate crimes, but Bush has turned out to be such a liberal, and the pressure from within the Republican Party "to not appear homophobic" will be so strong, that I think contacting the White House to demand a veto would be a good idea. There are so many reasons to veto this bill: 1. The constitutional problem. As even Dale Carpenter over at Volokh Conspiracy points out, the attempt to justify federal authority over hate crimes that do not involve any interstate commerce has already been found unconstitutional in U.S. v. Morrison (which struck down the Violence Against Women Act for not actually involving interstate activity). 2. The utter dishonesty of the law, which tries to use this absurd basis for claiming federal jurisdiction: (6) Such violence substantially affects interstate commerce in many ways, including the following:I guess by the reasoning of (E): Yup. Rapists often use knives, condoms, or rope that has traveled in interstate commerce. I guess we can make rape a federal crime. Forgers use pens that have traveled in interstate commerce. I guess we can make forgery a federal crime. People who get parking tickets are using vehicles that have traveled in interstate commerce. We can make that a federal crime, too. Oh wait, the oxygen you breathe has at least crossed state lines--and some of it has traveled in an airliner--so that's interstate commerce! We can make everything a federal crime! 3. The fact is that a lot of hate crimes are faked. This bill not only adds homosexuality to the list, but dramatically expands the rationale for federal involvement, so a great many crimes that would be properly prosecuted under state laws now become federal--and I don't have much confidence in the integrity of federal prosecutors, especially in an area that is emotionally quite important to a lot of lawyers. 4. If there is a violence problem, prosecute these as violent crimes. If someone takes a baseball bat to a gay man (or someone he perceives as a gay man), that's aggravated assault--potentially attempted murder. If your state makes that into a serious crime (as Idaho does), you don't need additional laws. If you live somewhere like California, that regards violent crimes as only slightly worse than voting Republican, perhaps you should make violent crimes into something serious. 5. It is not clear that homosexuals suffer particularly high rates of hate crimes relative to their percentage of the population, as I pointed out here. Labels: homosexuality More On The Kansas City Shooter This article from the May 2, 2007 Kansas City Star just makes me want to cry: David W. Logsdon lived in his next-door neighbor’s house and used her credit cards while her dead and battered body lay on the floor, evidence shows.The lessons here: 1. It seems unlikely that any gun control law short of a complete ban on gun ownership would have made a difference on this. He stole the primary killing weapon from a neighbor who he beat to death to get it. 2. Here was a person with a long history of mental illness who was spiraling down. Family intervened as best they could, but the mental health system failed to keep him hospitalized for suicidal tendencies. A few hours for someone in this state makes absolutely no sense. 3. Much like George Hennard, who committed the Luby's Cafeteria massacre in Killeen Texas, here was a person with clearly serious mental illness problems whose increasingly severe financial problems caused by legal troubles drove him over the edge. What a tragedy. Labels: crime, deinstitutionalization, gun rights So It's Not Just An Act On Stage A description of how the rapper 50 Cent's 52 room mansion is on the market: The rap artist (real name: Curtis James Jackson III) bought the 48,000-plus-square-foot house in September 2003 for $4.1 million. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization University of Communists, San Diego This reads like a parody from The Onion, instead of a serious article from Inside Higher Education (May 3, 2007): Benjamin Balthaser and Scott Boehm, two graduate teaching assistants who have led the campaign to restore the year-long Dimensions of Culture sequence to what they say is its original form, have not been re-hired for the upcoming academic year — a circumstance all parties agree is attributable to their efforts to change the curriculum from within."Hegemonic assumptions"--how did they come up with a curriculum description that failed to include "running dog lackeys" in it? As one of the comments about that article observed: So....the course is taught by contingent faculty — including other students? How much are they paid? What does that say about “social justice"? And since when are graduate students expert in the teaching of rhetoric, critical thinking, and academic writing?There comes a moment when the primary function of a composition class is to teach students to write coherent essays--not "de-territorialize" students or indoctrinate them about the evils of "hegemony." My wife teaches English composition at one of the local universities. She has the students read a variety of materials, and encourages lively class discussions as part of evaluating the arguments of the articles that they read. But the primary function of the class is to teach students how to write clearly and persuasively, understand and critically analyze arguments, and do research. That's her job. If these grad students want to be running indoctrination sessions (as the language used suggests), they are going to have to wait for the Revolution, when all the proletariat will attend classes after they finish their time working in the fields. Labels: political correctness A Very Disturbing Article Our image of the Amish is very positive. This article about how widespread child sexual abuse is in the Amish community--and how reluctant the court system is to pursue these cases on the rare occasions that the Amish community allows this abuse to become visible--will shock you. Labels: child sexual abuse Wednesday, May 02, 2007
I Was Thinking Further Ahead Than I Realized I took the Corvette into the dealership today because the fuel tank sending unit seems to be failing again. Sometimes I start the car up and says the gas tank is completely empty. Then I restart the car, and it works. Today it seemed to be a hard failure, so I drove in. This happened once before, and I knew it was an expensive repair, because they have to drop the gas tank to get to the sending unit. I thought that I had only bought a five year extended warranty on the car, but while pulling out the paperwork at the dealer today, I was pleased to discover that I had bought the extended warranty out to six years or 75,000 miles--so I still have warranty through September of 2008. (There is no way that I am going to run out of miles before I run out of years.) Is This How George Soros Is Spending His Money? A reader noticed that his local library system had a dozen copies of Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man--and the explanation from the librarian was that it was a very popular book. Two nearby library systems, he says, also had a dozen copies. I searched Boise Public Library, and they had seven copies--it looks like one in every branch (only one of which is actually checked out). Sonoma County Public Library system has thirteen copies--apparently one in every branch, and two in one branch. This being a county of multimillionaires, six of them are checked out. Santa Monica Public Library: six copies for all four branches. Four copies are checked out. Perkins' book is just wonderful and completely believable, if you read the leftist descriptions like this one. Publishers Weekly had this to say about it: He says he was trained early in his career by a glamorous older woman as one of many "economic hit men" advancing the cause of corporate hegemony. He also says he has wanted to tell his story for the last two decades, but his shadowy masters have either bought him off or threatened him until now. The story as presented is implausible to say the least, offering so few details that Perkins often seems paranoid, and the simplistic political analysis doesn’t enhance his credibility. Despite the claim that his work left him wracked with guilt, the artless prose is emotionally flat and generally comes across as a personal crisis of conscience blown up to monstrous proportions, casting Perkins as a victim not only of his own neuroses over class and money but of dark forces beyond his control. His claim to have assisted the House of Saud in strengthening its ties to American power brokers may be timely enough to attract some attention, but the yarn he spins is ultimately unconvincing, except perhaps to conspiracy buffs.One of the reviewers on Amazon.com sounds like he really wants to believe Perkins. Because the reviewer has a Mercer Island, Washington address, he is wealthy enough to be a fierce anticapitalist multimillionaire (unless that's just because he is still living with Mommy and Daddy). But even this guy points to some serious problems with it: "Confessions" is at once too good to be true and too vague to be believed. The author apparently had a successful career supporting requests for development loans for major electric utilities projects to the various less developed countries by grossly inflating their projected economic growth. His motivation for doing so was admittedly to keep his job (his boss was fired when he provided more realistic projections) and flourish in a consulting company whose financial success was clearly dependent upon the loans being approved so that their clients could get the lucrative contracts to do the construction work. Nevertheless, Perkins attempts to make what would just be another sordid tale of Enron-style numbers spoofing into a nearly epic story of official U.S. chicanery by alleging that fraud was perpetuated at the request of the American government in order to trap the borrower nations, apparently too ignorant or corrupt to watch out for themselves, into an eternity of economic and political servitude by intentionally burdening them with debts they could not pay. Unfortunately, despite Perkins career as a self-proclaimed "economist", his book is devoid of even a single statistic backing up this claim. Instead, it rests almost solely upon the words of a mysterious "Claudia" - a woman who present herself not as a U.S. government agent, but as a consultant to Perkins's employer - who in a series of secret meetings imbued this revelation to Perkins from on high as it were, much as Gabriel dictated the Qu'ran to Mohammed. To say that this story is hard to believe is to treat it with a respect it is manifestly undeserving. Perkins's main pitch seems to be that his own apparently solid status as an establishment insider is sufficient proof of his own credibility, despite his enthusiastic admissions that made a substantial fortune exagerrating and lieing for a living. Yet Perkins is no McNamara, but a best a midlevel manager in the "corportocracy" he exposes, and his story lacks the abundant details which made true insider accounts, like Phillip Agee's "Inside the Company" so unmistakably authentic and powerful. In fact, it is precisely its quasi-fictional nature, rather like Carlos Castaneda's dubious account of his dealings with Native American shamans, which makes "Confessions" such a good read. It reads like fiction because it basically is fiction, albeit interlaced with enough true events from the author's life and recent history to give it the veneer of plausibility.My reader asks asks if Perkins' book is being given to public libraries as part of a large scale propaganda campaign for Soros or one of the other billionaire leftists? The Soviet Union apparently did something similar during the Cold War--a way to get their ideas widely distributed, and put a lot of money into the pockets of a friendly author. There's nothing terribly wrong with this. But it is something of a reminder that part of why the left keeps winning is that they have the money for this sort of thing. If anyone has written a detailed examination of Perkins' claims, it would be a good book to give to library systems around the country. (Feel free to do that with my book Armed America, too!) There is one area where there might be something wrong with this: if Perkins' book is actually fiction, then it needs to be marked as such. Otherwise, it is fraud. Imagine if someone sent half a dozen copies of a book to every public library system that claimed that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to hide his involvement with cocaine smuggling, child prostitution, and planning 9/11. I rather doubt that many libraries would put it on the shelf--certainly, they wouldn't put a copy in every branch. Labels: economics Surprise, Surprise: Measured Global Warming on Mars From the London Times: Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake. Labels: global warming Civil Unions in Oregon; Incest Prohibition Repeal Coming Next Dale Carpenter at Volokh Conspiracy reports on Oregon legislature's passage of a civil unions bill for same-sex couples. Just to add to the excitement, Professor Volokh discusses the emerging movement to decriminalize incest, with the Green Party in Germany backing a brother and sister who have had four children together, and Jeff Jacoby gives details on a number of suits in the U.S. attempting to decriminalize incest. One commenter over at Volokh Conspiracy is clearly beginning to be bothered by the sight of the far end of the slippery slope which derives from the notion that anything that consenting adults do is okay: If majority-status "consent" is the only criteria for distinguishing an activity as legal, then what's stopping us from consen[s]ual gladi[a]torial contests involving lethal duels?The claim that what consenting adults do is none of the government's business would apply equally to racial discrimination in employment, or building a machine gun in your home, or having sex with animals, or torturing animals to death for a paying crowd. I think this would make a marvelous new reality show: "Let's see how long this dog stays alive, screaming in pain, while we slowly rip its skin off its body!" A lot of things involve consenting adults that civilized societies don't considerable acceptable--but in the pursuit of making one small group feel good about themselves by mandating legalization of same-sex marriage, the intellectuals are slowly destroying the basis for rules that define civilization. Just to add to the insanity, Professor Volokh mentions that one American state has a provision in its incest law that gives a special legal status to one particular religion, by exempting uncle/niece marriages from the state's law banning incestuous marriages: § 15-1-4 Marriages of kindred allowed by Jewish religion. – The provisions of §§ 15-1-1 – 15-1-3 shall not extend to, or in any way affect, any marriage which shall be solemnized among the Jewish people, within the degrees of affinity or consanguinity allowed by their religion.This means that members of one religion enjoy certain legal benefits that members of another religion do not. Imagine if an American state had a law on the books that said that the laws against child molestation didn't apply to Catholics. How many nanoseconds would it take for the ACLU to file suit for violating the First Amendment's guarantee against establishment of religion? There might an argument that not writing such an exemption for Jews into the law would violate the freedom of religion clause--but even then, such a provision would have to apply to every religion or to non-religious persons to avoid establishment of religion problems. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization, freedom of religion, homosexuality My Mind Swirls At What This Says About the State of Texas Justice I went over here to vote in one of those stupid online polls about whether Texas Governor Perry's proposal to abolish most of "gun-free" zones was a good idea or not. Then I noticed this poll about another legislative proposal that just makes my brain spin: A compromise bill in Austin would allow the death penalty for child predators twice convicted of raping a child 13 or younger. Do you support allowing the death penalty for repeat child sexual abuse offenders?What makes my mind boggle is the idea that someone who has been convicted of raping a child 13 or younger would ever be allowed outside of a prison cell. Labels: crime Tuesday, May 01, 2007
This Guy Was At Least Recognized As Mentally Ill... after the murder--but is waiting for space in a state mental hospital: THIBODAUX -- A Des Allemands man accused of killing his father 3 1/2 years ago has spent the last three years in the Lafourche Parish jail, waiting for room in the state hospital for the criminally insane.This is one of those unfortunate cases where it would appear that there really is a shortage of funds being spent on space in a mental hospital. I would be curious to know if there were any attempts to get him hospitalized before the murder. UPDATE: Oh yeah--it turns out that the mall was a gun-free zone. Labels: deinstitutionalization More "Ford's In Trouble" News I mentioned a while back that Ford seemed to be hurting more than GM--and I wondered if the boycott to punish them for their active support of homosexual advocacy causes might be part of it. I can't see that Ford's offerings (including the Jaguar X-type, which caused me to salivate a bit when I drove one) are so incredibly bad relative to where they have been in the past. This article indicates that the direction is still down, down: DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. (F.N: Quote, Profile , Research) said on Tuesday U.S. April vehicle sales fell 13 percent from a year earlier, hurt by a weak housing market and a cutback in fleet sales.My general impression is that the American Family Association's Ford boycott can't be all that effective--but then again, Fords are generally low cost vehicles, and conservatives tend to be relatively low income people. Perhaps Ford's insistence of funding homosexual marriage efforts matters more to upper management than sales. Labels: homosexuality No Surprise On This Concerning the man who went on a shooting spree in Kansas City Sunday from the May 1, 2007 Kansas City Star: Click on the label deinstitutionalization below to read all of my blog entries on this subject. Labels: deinstitutionalization Monday, April 30, 2007
This Film Is Not Yet Rated One of the cable channels that runs oddball documentaries had one about the MPAA's rating system with the title above. Now, I'm not entirely happy with MPAA's rating system. I've seen movies rated PG-13 for violence that seemed completely indistinguishable from other movies rated PG for violence. Roger Ebert's review of Hannibal (2001) makes a very trenchant observation about the utter inability of a movie to get an NC-17 rating for violence, no matter how gross and gratuitous, and Ebert's obvious revulsion at it: Many still alive will recall when a movie like this could not be contemplated, let alone filmed and released. So great is our sophistication that we giggle when earlier generations would have retched. The brain-eating scene is "special effects," the face-eating is shot in deep shadow and so quickly cut that you barely see the dogs having their dinner, and Julianne Moore explains in interviews that the story is a fable of good and evil (although she cautions that she "actually talked to my shrink about it").The MPAA rating system also isn't very consistent--and after Shrek 2's transgendered trashiness, I am convinced that the rating system is utterly defective for figuring out what films are appropriate for small children. I share the apparent concern of the filmmaker that unrealistic violence is given too low of a rating compared to realistic violence. I am concerned that at least some kids may fall into the "violence is a video game" attitude when nothing too terribly serious results from guns blazing everywhere. But there is a real danger that regular exposure to very graphic, very detailed violence may have a desensitizing effect as well. This may not make some people happy, but I think that even relatively graphic portrayals of a couple making love (as distinguished from having sex) is far less corrosive to the 8-17 set than the repeated portrayal of extremely graphic violence--or even the repeated portrayal of unrealistic violence. But of course, Hollywood has far too much interest in something kinky, something perverse, something degrading (almost always to women), and what seems to make Hollywood happiest of all--something that combines sex and violence. The more I watched of This Film Is Not Yet Rated, however, the more disturbed I became with the apparent major concern of the filmmaker and many of the people they interviewed, including a self-described First Amendment lawyer--that the MPAA rating system is a form of "censorship." It is nothing of the sort. Censorship is a governmental imposition, either through prior restraint or, in a rather indirect way, through punishment after the fact. The First Amendment has nothing to do with a purely private body like the MPAA. To my knowledge, even state laws that regulate what materials may be shown or sold to minors do not use the MPAA rating, but rather have rather specific definitions of what is prohibited. As near as I can tell, the big objection--the big point of this documentary--was that the MPAA's rating system, which is from my perspective way too loose for anyone raising kids to make good decisions, is blocking the access of filmmakers to American culture. What? If you don't want your film to have an MPAA rating, it isn't required. There are lots of art houses that will run it. If the MPAA gives it an NC-17 rating, this will limit your ability to get into a lot of theaters around the country. My only reaction is: "So?" Movies made in the 1940s and 1950s managed to address some rather significant and serious topics by the use of subtle writing. For example, the sequence in Spartacus where the slave's new master talks about how some people prefer oysters, and some prefer clams--and some prefer both--and immediately thereafter, the slave played by Tony Curtis runs away to join the slave revolt. I'm sure that the vast majority of young people that saw Spartacus when it came out didn't get the implication of that discussion--and that's okay. There comes a moment when you can understand this, and if you don't? No big loss. But it is a reminder that even with the standards that the MPAA operated under back then, it was possible to write serious works without being graphic. Ditto for Casablanca. There's not a bit of dialog that tells you how intimate the relationship was between Rick and Ilsa back in Paris, but the smoldering looks that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman exchange tell you that they had gotten a bit beyond holding hands--without hammering the audience over the head about it. Subtlety--a concept that could be reintroduced into filmmaking, without the MPAA's nasty ratings monopoly being any real obstacle to the business. Labels: film reviews, freedom of speech Stereotypes We all know the vicious stereotype of lesbians as grossly obese, hypermasculine sorts, right? I've worked with a few that worked overtime to fit that stereotype--including one who smoked big fat cigars, wore a motorcycle chain for a belt, and had bowling bumper stickers on her car. I've worked with one lesbian whose style gave no clues about her sexual orientation--and she was more in the closet about her gun ownership than about her lesbianism. This news article suggests that one of the nasty stereotypes is factual: LESBIANS are twice as likely as heterosexual women to be overweight or obese, which puts them at greater risk for obesity-related health problems and death, US researchers said.What? Now, I would agree that anyone who is focused on being bone skinny to the point of anorexia does not have a healthy body image. A few pounds too skinny or a few pounds too heavy--that is someone who isn't obsessing about their weight or appearance. That's a healthy body image. But 2.47 times more likely to be obese does not indicate "a better body image." I find it a bit more believable that the disproportionate obesity has a bit more to do with high rates of child sexual abuse of lesbians, as I have pointed out in statistics that I mentioned here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and anecdotal evidence here, and here, and here. Some women respond to child sexual abuse by building walls of fat around them, as a way to make sure that men don't ever see them as sexual objects. This is an understandable response to a traumatic situation, setting them up for a lifetime of disaster. It is also an enormous tragedy. Labels: homosexuality Why Liberal is a Dirty Word To Me Look at this apparently serious proposal by a retired U.S. diplomat published in the Toledo, Ohio Blade for how to solve our "gun violence" problem--and note that this guy is on the editorial board of that paper and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: When people talk about doing something about guns in America, it often comes down to this: "How could America disarm even if it wanted to? There are so many guns out there."Aren't you glad that liberals run America? Imagine if conservatives did so. UPDATE: For those who think I am being unfair tarring this guy with the label liberal: a few years back, Steve Peace, one of the liberal Democrats in the California state legislature, introduced a bill that would provide for traffic stops to search cars for guns--and only for guns. Drugs found in the course of a search could not be used as evidence. Apparently, Peace believed that guns were such a hazard that the Bill of Rights and its protections against unreasonable search could be, and should be ignored for guns--but not for illegal drugs. How liberal of him. It wasn't fear of government out of control--just fear of government interfering with drug abuse. Labels: gun rights Sunday, April 29, 2007
If You Have a Concealed Carry Permit For Your State You should feel obligated to be carrying at all times right now. The media attention to the Virginia Tech massacre--and now this tragedy in Kansas City--is going to put ideas into people who may have been thinking homicidal/suicidal thoughts. Protect yourself, your loved ones, and the general public. "Condi '08" Bumper Sticker Yup, I saw one of these today on my way to church in Boise today. I like the idea, but Condi is clearly too intelligent to be elected. Still, a Thompson/Condi ticket would be very attractive! Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Movies I've Seen Recently Shining Through (1992) with Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas. It's a World War II spy movie (which you learn at the very beginning, so I'm not giving anything away). It was better than I was expecting. There's a bit too much modernity that creeps into a lot of movies about this period, and maybe Melanie Griffith's character is a bit too aggressive for the normal female of that time--but other than that flaw, it's a pretty entertaining, almost plausible story. I guess part of why I found it interesting is that I worked with a guy many years ago who worked for OSS during World War II, and went into Germany. The tale he told emphasized how well he was trained and equipped (right down to authentic-looking German laundry marks on his underwear)--and not him at all. That was one of the reasons that I was prepared to believe him. People that make up stories like that usually make themselves, their courage, or their intelligence the center of the story. This guy was quite the opposite. I, Robot is a bit more recent--one of those movies that I was mildly interested in seeing, but never got around to it. The title comes from an Isaac Asimov story, and the Three Laws of Robotics come from Asimov's robotic short stories, but the rest of the story doesn't seem to come from any Asimov story that I recall. It is, in most respects, too sophisticated and thoughtful. I don't want to spoil the plot, but if you saw the previews you know that Will Smith plays a police homicide detective a few years in the future investigating a murder--and one perhaps committed by a robot. The rest of the story is what I imagine a Macintosh fanatic with paranoia might construct if he found out Microsoft was going into the robot business. There is a surprisingly thoughtful set of questions posed by the movie about what constitutes a soul, free will vs. determinism, the importance of keeping the population armed, the dangers of concentrations of power, and when a single company becomes too dominant on the economy. (Sorry, Microsofties!) It also has so many twists and turns that I kept changing my mind about who the bad guy was right up to the last few minutes. Will Smith being in it, there are a couple of subtle Christian messages scattered in the movie. At least the version that I saw on cable television was astonishingly clean. There are a few very, very subtle double entendres that small kids won't catch--just about as clean as a movie as gets made anymore that isn't animated. There is a bit of violence in it, but nothing terribly detailed or gross, since most of the violence involves robots, and robots don't bleed. Labels: film reviews, movie reviews Reasons Why Wikipedia Isn't Very Trustworthy I was looking for cases involving California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, and the Wikipedia article claimed that because of it, involuntary commitment was no longer possible except in criminal cases. This isn't correct--it's not even close to correct, so I updated it. But this is a really gross error. I shudder to think how many other deficiencies are contained therein. I'm not quite sure how to take full advantage of all the editing capabilities there, and I'm not sure that I can justify the time to do so, especially since someone may well come along and decide to change what I wrote. Perhaps keeping Wikipedia accurate is an attempt to fight entropy? Perfect Logic; Bad Results I was told some years ago that there are few involuntary mental health treatment facilities in California because the law makes it almost impossible to hold a minor against his or her will--even with parental consent. In reading In re S., 19 Cal. 3d 921; 569 P.2d 1286; 141 Cal. Rptr. 298; 1977 Cal. LEXIS 176 (1977). I can see that while that was an overstatement, it was not a huge overstatement. The California Supreme Court ruled that a minor 14 years or older was entitled to the same due process requirements as an adult under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act--which set a very high standard for commitment. One possibility was that you were "gravely disabled" which meant unable to obtain food, shelter, or clothing. No minor with functioning parents who cared about him or her would allow that to happen--and a parent who committed a child to a mental hospital would, under almost all imaginable circumstances, qualify as a parent who cared. The other possible basis for commitment under Lanterman-Petris-Short was that you had been found unfit for trial for murder, or some other felony that involved actual or threatened great bodily injury to self or to others. In short, a minor 14 to 18 with severe emotional or psychological problems who had not yet reached the stage of attempted suicide, murder, or darn close to it, could almost never be locked up against his or her will. I now understand why so many of the facilities to help troubled California teens are outside of California. I suppose if the ACLU knew that a troubled teen was on the way to one of those facilities, they could get a judge to order that the transfer not take place, so that the child could express their liberty interest and end up far worse off ten years down the line. California Parents should be glad that the ACLU isn't omniscient. I notice that one of the U.S. Supreme Court precedents that this decision was based on was In Re Gault (1967). If you read that decision, which affirms the right of due process in juvenile court proceedings (rather a different situation in terms of intentions and likely results than hospitalization), you may be horrified by the initial description of this kid being sent to reform school for making an obscene phone call at 15--as the decision describes it, "the remarks or questions put to her were of the irritatingly offensive, adolescent, sex variety." (If you are under 35, you may have trouble imagining it, but far more offensive stuff is probably going to be broadcast this evening. This was a long time ago.) But read a bit deeper, and you will see that Gault had a history of minor criminal activity going back some years earlier. What I find even more amazing about reading this decision is what it tells us about the state of America in 1964, when the police came out to arrest this kid. Can you imagine the police coming out to arrest a kid today for making an obscene phone call? It would seem that there was a shortage of really serious crimes--and I find myself suspecting that their willingness to come down hard on an obnoxious prank might have something to do with it. Labels: deinstitutionalization Responsible Television Stations I am still startled to see this--television stations using the "we won't run ads that are false" claim to benefit gun rights. From the April 27, 2007 Newsday: Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday questioned a Kansas television station's refusal to air an advertisement that is part of his antigun campaign, saying it is wrong to "censor" the spot.If there is actually a pattern of criminals obtaining guns from gun deal |
