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Labels: welcome to Idaho Shaking. Sweating. Pacing. Unable to concentrate. Unable to focus on anything other than . . . their next gun buy. Pennsylvania's gun addicts are already going through withdrawal, as the planned four-day halt on gun sales to allow the state to update its computerized background checks grows closer. The Pennsylvania Instant Check System is used by gun store owners to do state and federally required criminal background checks on potential customers. It will be closed for upgrading from 6 p.m. Sept. 2 to noon Sept. 6. That means that no guns can be sold. Gun store owners are hot. The shutdown coincides with the beginning of the early dove and goose hunting season, a popular time - at least in some parts of the state -for gun sales. One Harrisburg lawmaker, Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, is also in a snit. He's claming that this is an attempt by Philadelphia liberals to limit the rights of gun owners. The outcry has us a little worried about just how stable some of these gun addicts are. We've seen actual junkies more behaved than this when they hear they can't get their hands on their stuff. But four lousy days with no guns? And with plenty of warning so those who want to buy new hunting rifles can plan ahead? Labels: gun rights Labels: terrorism Like many other movements, gay and lesbian groups turned to media to help spread the word. Diversity is one example of that. Another is an innovative Web site built by Jody May-Chang, a Boise Web developer who moved to Idaho from California in 1999. PrideDepot.com, May-Chang's Web site, has a national feel to it, but it's built and maintained in Boise as a labor of love and a necessity, May-Chang said. She and her partner wanted to raise her young son in a place that was more quiet and peaceful than Santa Barbara, Calif., where she'd lived since 1978. They moved to Boise, and although they loved their new home, its political and social situation were a far cry from California's liberal centers. "It was really culture shock, coming here," May-Chang said. May-Chang had been an activist in California, where the gay and lesbian movement is a vibrant and accepted part of the social whirl. Not so in Idaho. So, when the lesbian couple and their son moved in, they peeled the provocative political stickers from their car and tried to settle comfortably into their new, pleasant life in Idaho. May-Chang was happy as a mother, and her son thrived here. "Parenting really is a form of activism, if you think about it," May-Chang said. "I take that as a deep form of social responsibility." But over time, May-Chang said, she began to notice a number of limitations in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community here, not the least of which was its apparently small size. "It was very fragmented," May-Chang said. "It's nobody's fault. But it felt like I stepped back 10 years." Her reaction is traditional in two ways. As a parent, she wanted a better place for her child. Labels: homosexuality The release by the FBI on Monday of photographs of two men who had been spotted in "suspicious" behavior on state ferries comes at a time when authorities are getting increased reports of unusual activity on the nation's largest ferry system. Asked to specify the behavior, Gomez said: These two men "showed an inordinate interest in the operation of the shipboard systems as opposed to the beautiful scenery passing by." Gomez said he would not be more specific because to do so would alert potential terrorists on how to better mask their intentions. The Seattle FBI -- which houses both bureau and interagency analytic centers -- has been tracking suspicious activity on ferries for several years. Last year, a Justice Department report named the Washington State Ferry system as the No. 1 target for maritime terrorism, sharing that status with Gulf Coast petroleum tankers. Behind that dubious distinction was the work of the FBI's field intelligence group and the Washington Joint Analytic Center. Supervisory intelligence analyst Ted Turner of the Seattle FBI office told the Seattle P-I last year that "there was an extremely high likelihood, in a handful of incidents, that there was pre-operation planning" for a terrorist attack on the ferry system. Labels: political correctness, terrorism And at house parties, there are no chicks that become uncontrollably drunk and then attempt to show you how they can "fire dance," accidentally setting fire to the host's potted plant/small dog/infant. Exposed boxer shorts and thongs would be illegal in any public place in Atlanta if the City Council approves a proposed amendment to the city's indecency laws. The target is young men who wear their pants low off their hips to show off the two pairs of boxers they wear beneath their saggy pants, said Atlanta Councilman C.T. Martin, a college recruitment consultant who sponsored the ordinance. Saggy pants are an "epidemic" that are becoming a "major concern" in cities and states around the country, the ordinance reads. "Little children see it and want to adopt it, thinking it's the in thing," Martin said Wednesday. "I don't want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go. I want them to think about their future." Under the proposed ordinance, women also couldn't reveal the strap of a thong beneath their pants. Nor could they wear jogging bras in public or show off even a wisp of a bra strap, said Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. The proposed ordinance states that "the indecent exposure of his or her undergarments" would be unlawful in a public place. It would go in the same portion of the city code that outlaws sex in public and the exposure or fondling of genitals and the breast of a woman. Martin said the penalty would be a fine in an amount to be determined. Seagraves said any legislation that creates a dress code would not survive a court challenge. She said there's no way the law could be enforced in a nondiscriminatory way. She said it targets a cultural phenomenon that came out of the black youth culture. "This is a racial profiling bill that promotes and establishes a framework for an additional type of racial profiling," Seagraves said. Labels: vulgarity Labels: media manipulation, terrorism Labels: homosexuality Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory. The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities. To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes. “What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.” To Dr. Bailey’s critics, his story is a different kind of morality tale. “Nothing we have done, I believe, and certainly nothing I have done, overstepped any boundaries of fair comment on a book and an author who stepped into the public arena with enthusiasm to deliver a false and unscientific and politically damaging opinion,” Deirdre McCloskey, a professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of Dr. Bailey’s principal critics, said in an e-mail message. The hostilities began in the spring of 2003, when Dr. Bailey published a book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience. “The next two years,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview, “were the hardest of my life.” Many sex researchers who have worked with Dr. Bailey say that he is a solid scientist and collaborator, who by his own admission enjoys violating intellectual taboos. In his book, he argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies. Dr. Bailey described the alternate theory, which is based on Canadian studies done in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by telling the stories of several transgender women he met through a mutual acquaintance. In the book, he gave them pseudonyms, like “Alma” and “Juanita.” Other scientists praised the book as a compelling explanation of the science. The Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that promotes gay, bisexual and transgender literature, nominated the book for an award. But days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination. Dr. Conway and Dr. McCloskey also wrote letters to Northwestern, accusing Dr. Bailey of grossly violating scientific standards “by conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study.” They also wrote to the Illinois state regulators, requesting that they investigate Dr. Bailey for practicing psychology without a license. Dr. Bailey, who was not licensed to practice clinical psychology in Illinois, had provided some of those who helped him with the book with brief case evaluation letters, suggesting that they were good candidates for sex-reassignment surgery. A spokesman for the state said that regulators took no action on the complaints. In an interview, Dr. Bailey said that nothing he did was wrong or unethical. “I interviewed people for a book,” he said. “This is a free society, and that should be allowed.” But by the end of 2003, the controversy had a life of its own on the Internet. Dr. Conway, the computer scientist, kept a running chronicle of the accusations against Dr. Bailey on her Web site. Any Google search of Dr. Bailey’s name brought up Dr. Conway’s site near the top of the list. The site also included a link to the Web page of another critic of Dr. Bailey’s book, Andrea James, a Los Angeles-based transgender advocate and consultant. Ms. James downloaded images from Dr. Bailey’s Web site of his children, taken when they were in middle and elementary school, and posted them on her own site, with sexually explicit captions that she provided. (Dr. Bailey is a divorced father of two.) Ms. James said in an e-mail message that Dr. Bailey’s work exploited vulnerable people, especially children, and that her response echoed his disrespect. Labels: homosexuality, transgender Shortly after 7 AM on Thursday, July 26, McGee got a short phone call from The New Republic’spublisher. The magazine staff had tracked his anonymous web postings to his work station near the publisher’s office. Her message was short: “Your services were no longer needed.” The magazine was at least as consumed by finding the whistle-blower (McGee) than in presenting a full accounting to its readers. McGee’s says his leaks were not motivated by ideology. He told me he “didn’t feel an ideological distance when I worked there. I felt pretty comfortable.” He said he felt frustrated that the magazine could not do the simplest thing: admit they’d made a mistake, that their fair-minded critics had raised some good points and that they would address it as best they could. It is odd that McGee has been the only one fired over the Beauchamp scandal. Wouldn’t Foer be a likely candidate? Or the fact-checkers who failed to do their duty? Or Elspeth for knowingly bringing Beauchamp into its respected pages? Instead, the left-o-sphere turned on its attack machine and pointed it at… McGee. An attack on McGee in the Huffington Post outed the former publisher’s assistant as gay. Labels: homosexuality, low standards of journalism Labels: terrorism Labels: enviromental lunacy In an effort to ensure that no Muslim doctors ever again try to bomb Glasgow Airport, bureaucrats at Glasgow’s public hospitals have decreed that henceforth no staff may eat lunch at their desks or in their offices during the holy month of Ramadan, so that fasting Muslims shall not be offended by the sight or smell of their food. Vending machines will also disappear from the premises during that period. Apparently the bureaucrats believe that the would-be bombers were demanding sandwich-free offices in Glasgow hospitals during Ramadan. This kind of absurdity is what happens when the highly contestable doctrine of multiculturalism becomes a career opportunity for the semi-educated and otherwise unemployable products of a grossly and unnecessarily swollen university system. Doctors and nurses in Scotland should refrain from eating in front of their Muslim patients and colleagues during the month of Ramadan according to the Scottish NHS. Staff in hospitals north of the border were advised by the Scottish Executive and the Scottish NHS to avoid “working lunches” and to move food trolleys away from Muslim colleagues in the month when Islam forbids eating and drinking during daylight hours. The guidance, also sent to teachers and police stations by a Scottish Muslim consultancy, includes pointers on how to accommodate staff observing Ramadan. Flexible working hours and time off to break the fast are recommended during the four weeks beginning on September 13. Mary Scanlon, Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing in the Scottish Parliament said the move was a “step too far” for political correctness and unnecessary. “Scotland is a very tolerant, sensitive and welcoming country” but she added, “I don’t see it’s necessary for Ramadan to affect the lives of people of other beliefs,” she told Times Online, “It would be like saying Protestants shouldn’t eat meat next to Catholics who want to eat fish on a Friday.” Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain supported the advice given about Ramadan. “My own experience when fasting is that non-Muslims do want to be sensitive about eating in front of those of us who are hungry,” he said. Jim McCaffery, director of acute services and workforce, NHS Lothian said the email was sent to a number of senior managers in order to “continue to promote cultural awareness”. A spokeswoman for Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS denied that staff had been “banned from eating food at their workplaces” but said they had asked employees “to show consideration” for colleagues and patients observing Ramadan. Labels: terrorism A rare set of identical quadruplets, born this week to a Calgary woman at a Montana hospital, are in good health and two of them were strong enough to be transported back here Thursday. The naturally conceived baby girls -- Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia -- were delivered by caesarean section Sunday in Great Falls, their weights ranging between two pounds, six ounces and two pounds, 15 ounces. Their mother, Calgarian Karen Jepp, was transferred to Benefis Hospital in Montana last week when she began showing signs of going into labour, and no Canadian hospital had enough neonatal intensive-care beds for all four babies. Indeed, physicians said Thursday the quadruplets have a good prognosis. Although they will likely require between four and six weeks of continued hospitalization, Calissa and Dahlia were well enough to be brought back to Calgary's Foothills Medical Centre Thursday, accompanied by their father. Karen Jepp, 35, is expected to be transported to Calgary with Autumn and Brooke today or Saturday. Lange said local physicians had been closely monitoring Jepp's pregnancy and were anticipating her newborns would require care at Foothills' neonatal intensive care unit. But when Jepp began experiencing labour symptoms last Friday, the unit at Foothills was over capacity with several unexpected pre-term births. There was no room at any other Canadian neonatal intensive care unit, forcing CHR officials to look south of the border. Jepp was transported to Benefis hospital in Great Falls last Friday -- making her the fifth Alberta woman to be transferred south of the border this year because of neonatal shortages in Calgary. [emphasis added] Saskatchewan spends $4 billion a year on health - 44% of the total provincial budget - on a population of under one million, and those dollars are increasingly directed to more centralized systems of delivery. While debate about "wait times" tends to revolve around diagnostics and scheduling of surgery (especially "elective" surgery such as knee and hip replacement), few consider the "wait time" facing the farmer in Val Marie with a crushed pelvis or severed artery. For when it is decreed that your local hospital is no longer "economically viable" (a curious complaint to put forward under not-for-profit ideology), bureaucrats gather a few hundred miles away, debate the best way to release the bad news, and with a big red pen, draw a line through your town. They will apologize, quite properly, while they advise you, quite improperly, to be grateful that health care is still "free." You'll just need to start out a little earlier in the morning to get to it. Welcome to zero-tier health care. While the sacred cow of "universality" grazes on in the world of the reality-challenged, vast regions of the country are being transformed into zones of health care prohibition. With every new cut, more and more rural Canadians are faced with travelling long distances over crumbling roads to seek emergency care - the "vibrating gurney" of the rural ambulance. The only thing "universal" about the system is the rate of taxation and the powerlessness of the very people who pay the bills - the taxpaying patients. The patient taxpayers. After waiting 10 days on oxygen in an intensive care ward, where it was more likely that a knowledgable visitor would tend to a distressed patient or dysfunctioning equipment than any of the five nurses charged with holding down chairs, we began to wonder when the lung specialist planned to show up to discuss our mother's condition. He had to be reminded, as it turned out. Standing over the duct-taped linoleum, he shared the diagnosis and advised it was terminal. With no hope of treatment, we arranged for her return by ambulance the 120 miles to our local rural hospital, where she was finally treated for pain and was tended to by a nurse she knew as a friend. Thank heaven for small mercies - for it had been slated for closure earlier that year. Thanks for reposting this. It made me think of my own Mom's passing away in 1997. She had liver cancer. My Dad had to threaten to punch a hospital manager back into the stone-age just to get her moved out of the hallway. At the time they had an entire wing shut down. Not economically viable, apparently. This was in Toronto, by the way. I will never forget that and what they put our family through. Here in B.C., one of the biggest problems, once you get outside the Lower Mainland, is lack of specialists in most communities, requiring long trips to the few communities where said care is available. Combine that with drastically overcrowded and under equipped hospitals, and you have a situation where medical staff are in constant crisis mode. This causes a lot of good people to take early retirement, exacerbating the shortage of staff. Governments talk of recruiting in Third World countries to fill the positions. The fact that those countries will now have shortages doesn't seem to matter, even while we're castigating the U.S. for raiding our doctors and nurses. Eventually, even the most "socialist" will realize the current system is failing, probably when enough of us die in the Emergency ward, and we'll have to open the system to private medical providers. As a doctor I can tell you that in our system people suffer constantly due to this. In addition there are many medications for both cancers and auto-immunue diseases not covered by our system which are covered by both the priavte and public systems in the US. Moreover our system results in worse outcomes in terms of mortality and morbidity for myocardial infarctions and cancer therapy compared to the US. Labels: health care Labels: gun history, gun technology Labels: terrorism Labels: gun technology THE CHRISTIANIZED MILITARY: Add to this, the takeover of our military by unquestioning evangelical officers and we are another step closer to a single-party state run by the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Gonzales team. As documented in a recent interview of Michael L. Weinstein on Los Angeles City Beat, LA City Beat states, “He [Weinstein] found an unconstitutional infiltration of the entire U.S. armed forces by believers of ‘dominionist Christianity,’ who reserve the right to either convert or kill anyone, including American soldiers, who doesn’t believe in what Weinstein calls a ‘weaponized Jesus Christ’ – and use your tax money to do it. ” Here are a few excerpts of Mr. Wienstein from that interview. Where he uses the phrase dominionist Christians, just substitute right-wing authoritarian. Labels: welcome to Idaho Labels: economics, foreign aid
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Another Leftist Loses It
Over at the Huffington Post, Martin Lewis writes a letter asking General Pace to arrest President Bush! Even more bizarre is that he defends this crackpot idea vigorously against other leftists who point out that, as much sympathy as they have for the idea, the Constitution does specify that the military is subordinate to civilian authority. See Article II of the U.S. Constitution: The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States....
So what has Martin Lewis done? See 18 USC 2385:Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Because Lewis' letter is addressed to General Pace, 18 USC 2388 could apply as well, depending on whether the courts can agree on whether the AUMF qualifies as a declaration of war:
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates,sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity,desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.(a) Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully makes or conveys false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies; or
I think asking General Pace to arrest the President of the United States qualifies as an attempt to "cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny".
Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or willfully obstructs the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or the United States, or attempts to do so -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
One of the things that has always impressed me is how willing the Bush Administration is to tolerate statements that, during World War II, would have led to arrest, trial, and imprisonment. So much for "Bush=Hitler."
UPDATE: Amusingly enough, liberals have been swarming in the comments section over at Volokh Conspiracy to explain why a military coup overthrowing the elected civilian leadership is constitutional, lawful, and appropriate.
The Most Encouraging Words That I've Read in a Long Time
From PJ Harrison and DR Weinberger, "Schizophrenia genes, gene expression, and neuropathology: on the matter of their convergence," Molecular Psychiatry 10:[2005]40. They compare the state of research into Alzheimer's and schizophrenia:In the absence of definitive genes or pathogenic molecular mechanisms, it is not surprising that there is no equivalent of the secretase inhibitors and vaccines being developed in Alzheimer’s disease. However, the situation seems about to change; indeed, it may be changing already.
About 1% of the adult population of the U.S. suffers from schizophrenia; as of the early 1990s, the costs of both treatment and lost productivity was $61 billion a year. This is the single most destructive of the psychoses--especially because it seems to disproportionately hit the upper end of the bell curve of intelligence.
And For Really Big News...
One of the things that I like about living in Boise County is that what constitutes "big news" is a bit different here than in other places.
Heck, even what constitutes "big news" in Boise (which is in Ada County, just to confuse you) is a bit different from other parts of America. A reporter from an Ohio newspaper called me up a while back to interview me about the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog. While discussing Boise, I mentioned that (at least at that point), murders were rare enough that they were a front page, above the fold news story. Some murders would remain front page stories for days on end, just because there is so little murder here. This Ohio reporter sounded a little disappointed when he told me that at his newspaper, murders were so common that sometimes they weren't even considered worth putting inside the newspaper. They weren't news.
Well, here's the headline from the latest issue of the Idaho World, Boise County's newspaper--and as the masthead observes, Idaho's oldest continuously published newspaper:
Click to enlarge
Hey, that's big news here! But what would they do if they had a really big news story to report? What font size would they use? I fear that the headline "Global Thermonuclear War" would be so big that the "G" would take up the whole front page.
Imagine If All Bars Or Abortion Clinics Were Shut Down For Four Days
Snowflakes in Hell points me to this astonishingly stupid editorial in the August 24, 2007 Philadelphia Daily-News:MY NAME IS JOE. I'M A GUN ADDICT.
FOUR-DAY GUN SALE SHUTDOWN PUTS SOME IN TIZZY
LOOK AT THEM.Instead of sitting around moping, why not take a field trip? Ride through some of the state's larger cities and their suburban towns, where gun violence has grown. Let's call it a reality check. Some of these guns used to kill are on the street, thanks to straw purchasers who patronize the state's gun stores, and then sell the guns illegally.
The hunting weapons, with a few exceptions, aren't the cause of the violence in Philly. It's largely handguns. Maybe they should ask why it is that the hunting parts of Pennsylvania--which are awash in guns and Republicans--don't have anywhere near the problem with murder that Philly and cities with the misfortune to be too close to Philly have? Hint: it's the culture, and the unwillingness to send murderers away, not the guns.
The Al-Haramain Suit
CNN's God's Warriors mentioned this foundation which is alleged to be a terrorist support group, based in Oregon, and interviewed Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who grew up in a "mystic" Jewish family in Ashland (a very New Age sort of place), became first a Muslim (which his parents thought was really cool), then joined what Gartenstein-Ross now alleges was a terrorist support group. No word if Mom and Dad still thought that this was cool. I hope that they would have gotten a little peeved if Daveed had showed up at the door wearing a swastika armband, but you can never tell what aging hippies are going to think is a sign of a child's intellectual independence.
Anyway, Zombietime (which is fast becoming one of my favorite deranged leftist tracking sites), has a very, very detailed web page about the background to the suit, and the results of watching the hearing before the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals here.
She has also has some reporting about the behavior of reporters after the hearing--swarming around the attorney representing Al-Haramain, while ignoring lawyers representing the U.S. government and AT&T (who has gotten dragged into this because they are alleged to have exposed their fascist sympathies by trying to help the government catch terrorists).
One of these days, if the left isn't careful, they are going to find out that this isn't a game--that al-Qaeda and friends aren't like-minded progressives because they have the same enemies. When Robert Ferrigno's novel Prayers for the Assassin describes the Golden Gate Bridge lined with the heads of homosexuals, that's not a wild leap of imagination, but the likely consequence of the left's obsession with making sure that America loses the war on terrorism.
And yes, as much as the left wants to believe that it is possible to make sure we lose the war on terrorism without al-Qaeda winning, this fight is a zero-sum game.
Wow! I Never Would Have Guessed!
There are moments that you find yourself reading or hearing someone make a statement that just makes your head spin, and you find yourself asking, "Are you really this utterly clueless?" One of those moments was many years ago, sitting outside at All-American Burger on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, shortly after Tom Hayden's forces had taken over the city government.
There were two "progressive" sorts having a chat at the next table, from their accents, not West Coasters. One of them observed, "The Los Angeles economy is very robust, in a laissez-faire sort of way, but you know there is absolutely no provision for public policy planning." Gee, you think there might be a connection?
I think back to where I lived in Santa Monica, as the New Yorkers arrived, gratified that apartments were available near the ocean, relatively cheaply, and without having to engage in the bizarre sub-sub-sub-sub-subletting commonly done in New York City to get into a rent-controlled apartment. And so within a few years--they passed a rent control law to help make Santa Monica like the place that they couldn't afford to live.
Sometimes people recognize that there is a gap between what they would like to believe, and what is. When we first moved to Boise, we met a doctor and his wife at a social event. When he finished his residency, and they were ready to settle down, they looked all across the country--and picked Boise, because they wanted to have kids and raise a family. They somewhat sheepishly admitted that while they were both very, very liberal, and felt a little strange about moving to Boise--they also admitted that it was a much better place to raise a family than the liberal areas where they might have felt politically more comfortable. At least they recognized (in some abstract sense) that there was a gap between their politics and what was good for child rearing.
Bryan Fischer brought to my attention this article about Boise's homosexual activist community from the June 6, 2007 Boise Weekly that shows a really serious cluelessness:
UPDATE: Just to be clear on this: I'm not saying that California's very supportive approach to sexual orientation is what makes it a bad place to raise kids (although I don't think it is a positive, either). I'm saying that all this stuff goes together: the supportiveness of homosexuality, the tolerance of groups like NAMBLA, the unwillingness to punish violent crime (while pursuing gun ownership like it is somewhat sort of perversion).
Not Newsworthy
Oh yeah. This is one of those stories that reminds you that liberalism has lost its way (if it ever had it). From the August 22, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Some of the Seattle newspapers and media used the photos. But not the Post-Intelligencer!The P-I elected not to publish the photos, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns, which editors felt outweighed the newsworthiness of the images. "We have no confirmation that these men's behavior was anything but innocuous, and to forever taint them by associating them with terrorism under these circumstances is not consistent with our policy," said David McCumber, P-I managing editor.
The comments from readers are pretty amazing. The leftists (who seem to dominate the Seattle area) are convinced that this is all racism and paranoia and neo-conservatives out to market fear. Amazing. I am beginning to wonder if I just imagined what happened on 9/11.
When Even Artsy Sorts Make Fun of an Event...
You know it has passed from edgy/pseudo-sophisticated to just plain dumb. This column by Violet Blue (which anywhere else you would assume was a nom de plume, but heck, in the open ward that is California her parents might well have given her that name) in the August 23, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle is occasionally a little too explicit for me to quote, but these opening paragraphs really capture the idiocy of artsy pretense associated with the Burning Man festival:Burning Man and safer sex
I've long been of the opinion that most of this countercultural stuff that San Francisco is awash in would evaporate overnight if the government confiscated all wealth exceeding one million dollars. It would also starve the Democratic Party of resources.
Free your mind, but watch out for crabs
While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don't hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they're talking about when they use terms like "the burn," "the man" and "off the grid."
When Engineers Get Bored
You end up with Rube Goldberg gadgets like this. What's funny is that Rube Goldberg only drew these absurdly complex devices, while people like this are making them.
This Well-Intentioned Proposal Is Doomed
A member of the Atlanta City Council is proposing a law that is doomed to failure--and that's really unfortunate. From the August 22, 2007 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
"Black youth culture"? No, it actually comes out of the black gang culture. (The ACLU may not recognize that there's a diference.) Lots of jails and prisons don't allow belts, both for the risk of suicide and the potential to use a belt as a weapon. Gang members and young black men who wanted to look like gang members stopped wearing belts--and intentionally wearing their pants baggy to expose their boxers--as a way of saying, "I'm a gang member--or I want you to think I'm one." Now it has become fashionable--in spite of being among the most unclassy styles that I have never seen.
I completely sympathize with Councilman Martin's concerns. My guess is that Martin wants young black men to be seen by whites as decent and respectable members of American society, and is therefore attempting to rid Atlanta of this absurd symbol of gang culture. It reminds me of bikers wearing swastikas in the 1950s and 1960s. Did they wear swastikas because they sympathized with the Nazis? No, but it was a way of saying, "I'm bad, and I spit on everything that my parents' generation did."
Unfortunately, the problem with such an ordinance isn't just that the ACLU will challenge it as "racial profiling" or violating freedom of speech. The problem is how do you define "undergarments"? Boxer shorts are not so different from shorts in appearance these days. Would someone wearing briefs, then boxer shorts, then sagging pants be in violation if the boxer shorts were visible?
For women, the definitional problem is even more severe. The camisole used to be considered an undergarment, but now many women wear them as outerwear. Spaghetti strap camisoles with a bra strap showing would certainly qualify as a violation of Martin's proposed ordinance. (Not to mention that the combination looks ridiculous.) But the camisole alone can range from profoundly provocative to really, really gross, depending on who is wearing it. Is a camisole an undergarment or not?
I don't have much hope for an ordinance like this to be enforceable. It's rather like banning the wearing of swastikas, which even ignoring freedom of speech claims, is too easy to get around. You can define a swastika, but what happens if someone wears a swastika with one arm broken off? It's no longer a swastika within the law, but everyone stills knows what it is.
Somehow or another, there needs to be a great spiritual change in black inner city America to solve this particular problem. There are a lot of serious problems that laws can fix, but I rather doubt that this is one of those problems.
CNN's God's Warriors
CNN has run three, two-hour programs about God's Warriors, which seemed to be trying to draw some moral equivalence between Islamic jihadists, Jewish extremists, and the Christian Religious Right. The problem was that while there are vast numbers of Islamic jihadists beheading people, raping, murdering, etc., there's a real shortage of those among Jews and Christians.
Yes, there was the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and there have been other dangerous Jewish extremists out there. But I suspect that if you totaled up all of them over the last 30 years, their victims wouldn't exceed a typical day's victims from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq.
Yes, CNN reminded us of abortion clinic bombings and assassinations by Christian pro-life murderers (and yes, I use "pro-life murderer" together for the irony of it all). But again, the Christian "God's warriors" that CNN profiled weren't terrorists--they were people working through the political process, trying their best to raise their kids, really no different from their liberal counterparts.
I suppose if CNN had compared the Religious Right to libertarian ideas about minimal government, they could have made the Religious Right look like dangerous totalitarians (or something close). But being CNN, they can only really compare the Religious Right to liberalism or leftism--at which point the Religious Right is less statist than liberals, and far less statist than the average hardcore left-wing Democrat. You can argue about which values should be given preference in writing laws--the majority (why the Religious Right has generally supported allowing legislatures and initiatives to prevail) or the elite (why the liberals and left rely on judges to overturn popular government). But such a comparison doesn't make liberals and leftist look too good.
What really impressed me was the amount of attention that this report gave to Ron Luce's evangelistic operation Teen Mania, which runs an event called Battle Cry. Luce is 46, someone who came out of a very messy family situation, was headed down to destruction when he found Jesus, and turned his life around. I was also impressed with some of the people that CNN interviewed that work for Teen Mania--one 22 year old young lady who, in spite of what I am sure was CNN's best effort to make her look like a fanatic, came across as a reminder that no matter how broken a life we have had, we can move beyond it.
Best of all was the contrast between what happened when Battle Cry came to San Francisco, and the bunch that showed up to protest that groups like Battle Cry shouldn't be allowed in San Francisco. To quote Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." (Those lefties: so tolerant that they excuse pedophilia and naked half-transgendered people in public, but not Christians encouraging kids to turn away from a culture of drugs, suicide, and despair.) As I mentioned last year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actually passed a resolution condemning Battle Cry.
As much as CNN may feel the need to draw bogus moral equivalences, they failed. What is wrong with Islam isn't a few kooks on the edges, but a large and dangerous faction of Islam.
Teen Mania runs a school in Texas where they train their people. They have all sorts of very strict rules: no smoking; no alcohol; no R-rated movies; and skirts have to be a certain length.
Amanpour had the nerve to suggest that this was like the Taliban. Yes, except the Taliban executed homosexuals, "loose women," prohibited girls from receiving an education; banned clapping at sporting events; made apotasy from Islam a capital crime; blew up the symbols of other religions. Yes, that's quite similar to a dress code. How did I miss the comparison?
My Wife and I Had A Fascinating Conversation This Evening...
With a man a bit older than us. He's been married for more than 30 years--but in a discussion of living in the Bay Area, he casually mentioned that he knew the place and the perversions well. He had walked away from the homosexual life when he became a Christian in 1971. It is always gratifying to meet those who have been successfully freed from bondage to sin.
There are homosexuals who can't break the bonds that hold them. I wish that I knew why. I wish that there was more known about the causes and cures. But there are men like this who have fought the battle and won. They are no different from those who have fought the battle with alcoholism, or sexual lust, or gluttony, or materialism, or hatred.
We all fight battles with sinful desires. Some people are more successful at those battles than others. But pretending that there is no sin is like pretending that there is no gravity, because it is inconvenient.
Transgender Politics
I can't claim to be surprised. I don't know if Professor Bailey's book is junk science or not--but I do know that the fact that certain people get offended by it doesn't make it wrong. From the August 21, 2007 New York Times:
Pontiac 2005 Sunfire Repair Manual: Remove & Replace Power Window Mechanism
Does anyone have this? Amazingly, there are no repair manuals available locally that come up to 2005.
Homophobia & The Left
Interesting article about how when The New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp articles turned out to be fraud--and a member of the The New Republic's staff named McGee anonymously informed people investigating the fraud that Beauchamp's wife was a fact-checker for the magazine (and apparently a fact-checker on her husband's article)--they fired him. And then, the left started to engage in smears of McGee because he was gay!
Yale Law Journal Article About Guantanamo Bay
It's here. Make sure that all your friends who compare it to Nazi concentration camps read it. If this appeared in the Weekly Standard, no one would take it seriously. But Yale Law Journal?
Big Mosquito
Part of why Instapundit gets orders of magnitude more readers than me is his sharp wit when engaged in satire. After discussing an article in the New York Times admitting that DDT is a necessary part of saving lives in the Third World--and that there seems to be consensus on this:The debate over DDT is over. There's scientific consensus. Anyone who disagrees is a DDT denialist and a mouthpiece for Big Mosquito.
What's The Truth On This?
Theodore Dalrymple's article in the August 17, 2007 City Journal had a claim to it that seemed just a bit extreme to be true:
According to the August 14, 2007 Times of London, this was not a response to the Glasgow bombings, and the guidelines were quite a bit less severe than this:
Canadian Health Care System
I hear terrible things about it from my relatives who live in British Columbia. Now there's this story about a Canadian woman who had to be flown to the United States to deliver--because there weren't enough intensive care neonatal units in all of Canada to take care of her quadruplets. From the August 17, 2007 Calgary Herald:
One of the criticisms that I have long heard is that Canada's health care system works well for "normal" health care problems, but tends to fail for anything advanced or specialized. I had not realized that premature birth was specialized or advanced. Over at Small Dead Animals, Kate expressed her anger over the failure of the Canadian health care system:After my mother died, my brother quipped sarcastically that no one should be admitted to Regina General unless they first survived two hours on a vibrating gurney.
Along with Kate's depressing story, there are gobs of comments by Canadians (some of them in the health care business) recounting what a disaster it has turned out to be:
and:It's not just rural areas that are suffering. My wife’s elderly grand parents have been to the emergency room in Mississauga 4 times in the past few years. They have not had to wait less than 6 hours on any of those visits. Even the local clinics for minor stuff usually come with a 2 hour wait. There is no benefit from our health care system to working people in this country. We get poor service at a premium cost.
and:
and this comment that reminds of the joke about how in most urban areas, "Order a pizza. Dial 911. See which gets there first." Profit motive may not make us very happy as a method for getting people taken care of, but it's reliable and consistent in getting things done:Another personal story: My dog was sick so I took her on a weekend to Vetrinary Emergency Hospital paid the fees and she was attended to in 30 minutes. My daughter had to be attended to after a cat attack and went to the local emergenency for the required stitches and shots.It took 4 hours but it was paid for indirectly by my taxes. What kind of society offers faster treatment to its pets than to its kids.Welcome to Leftyland.
and this remark from a Canadian doctor:The problem with a monopsony (fi you want to define the Public Health care system that way) is that it results in an inefficient quantity purchased as compared to a competitive market.
Gun Stuff
A friend brought over some of his toys this evening. I haven't shot a rifle in some years now (more by being too busy than anything else). One of them was a Century International Arms copy of the H&K 91. This uses a U.S. made receiver and a number of imported parts to get around the import ban on assault weapons that President George Bush I put in effect back in 1990. I've always heard very good things about the H&K 91, and it does seem to be a well-made rifle.
There are a few quirks of the design that I don't know if I dislike them because they are different from what I am used to in battle rifles, or because it is genuinely a poor idea. For example, the H&K 91 has what seems to me to be an excessively complex charging handle compared to the M1 Garand, M14, M16--just too many moving parts for something that is just forcing the bolt back against the recoil spring.
Another H&K quirk (at least until quite recently) is that there is no bolt hold open on the last shot. When you have fired the last shot from the magazine, the bolt closes again, and you get only a "click" when you pull the trigger. The owner called this the "dead man click," presumably because if you are in combat, and you hear this click, it tells you that you are out of ammunition, and whoever you are firing at now has you at a disadvantage. The design that I am more used to on combat weapons--where the magazine locks the bolts
open, enabling you to drop the magazine, insert a fresh magazine, release the bolt, and be ready to resume firing--seems much more logical to me.
Yet another H&K quirk is that it seems that you have to cock the bolt in order to remove an empty magazine. At the magazine release is a simple button--definitely more intuitive than an M14 magazine release.
The H&K 94 was a fun little weapon. Since it fires 9mm, the recoil isn't bad at all. I've fired the MP5, which is the full auto version of the H&K 94, and I think highly of it. All the same design quirks that bug me about the H&K 91 apply to the H&K 94 as well.
This is the first time that I have ever fired an M1 Garand. This is really a pretty impressive weapon, considering that it was introduced into service 70 years ago, and has been out of front line U.S. service for 50 years. I still can't get used to the spring clip flying up and out of the gun after the last shot!
Democrats Rewriting History
A nice video of Democrats whose names (Reid, Clinton, Edwards) you know explaining why Iraq and Iran are threats to the security of the United States. If they want to argue today that they were duped by the Bush Administration in 2002, that's fine. But how to explain the remarks from Democrats in 1998? They were duped by the Clinton Administration?
Pretty Astonishing Video of an SUV With Minigun
I'm not sure what actual use something like this might have. Presidential motorcade? Only in a comic book, or North Korea.
Lunatic Fringers
I take a look to see who is linking to me, and sometimes, I am just astonished. For example, this paranoid blog linked to my 1995 History Today article about the plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. Why? Because America is on the edge of a military coup d'etat:
If all the "dominionist Christians" in the United States got together and organized a coup d'etat, there wouldn't be enough of them to take over Horseshoe Bend. I'm pretty sure that I've never met one. The only place that I have ever seen a "dominionist Christian" is being interviewed on some Bill Moyers documentary.
I ran into a book in an airport bookstore recently that blathered on about the imminent dominionist Christian takeover of America, and the more I read, the more I began to wonder what country he had been visiting. I sense a lot of projection going on from the left; because they are intent on imposing their viewpoint on the majority (which even many liberals would be taken aback by), they assume that anyone that disagrees with them is on the edge of coup d'etat.
Rafting on the Boise River
We went rafting on the Boise River today, from Barber Park down to Ann Morrison Park. (Click here for information on renting a raft. It cost us $42.40 to rent a four person raft with four lifejackets and two oars.)
This wasn't a white water adventure. I was told that the worst of the rapids we went through were class 1--maybe class 0.5, according to my daughter! I'm not a spectacularly strong swimmer--in fact, I didn't learn to swim even at my current unimpressive level until I bought a house with a pool in California some years back--so I've always regarded the trips that you see in films with considerable trepidation.
Anyway, this was a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, floating, occasionally getting some adrenalin rush as we went over somewhat rough water, and enjoying the beauty of the tree-lined banks of the river.
Food Aid
I mentioned a couple of days ago a New York Times article about how food aid sometimes makes problems worse in the Third World. One of my readers tells me:If you are interested in the topic I suggest P.T. Bauer's Reality and Rhetoric. It was published in 1984 so is probably a bit dated, but it is the classic in the field of development. He lays it on the line. Development aid harms far more than it helps, for good reasons any libertarian would understand. Aid empowers the already powerful.
I saw this myself during my 2 years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. I was in a small mountain village, too remote to have electricity. Every single individual in that town of farmers received food 'aid'. Canned chickens came from Denmark, cooking oil, flour and corn the US. Foreigners also built the local school and the regional radio station. I read Bauer's book shortly after coming home, and it all came into sharp focus, all the things I had seen but not fully understood.
These people were not starving, and the great majority of the population was farmers. But my guess is that there was hardly a person in the country that did not receive some kind of aid. Of course, I was part of that.
