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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
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A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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White Christmas in Boise
Here's a picture out my bedroom window, taken with my HP PhotoSmart 812 camera (and this isn't even close to its highest resolution). Those of you in California can envy the scenic beauty of it; those of you in Chicago and the Northeast can envy that the snow mostly stays where it is scenic, but doesn't require shoveling!
The Coming Libertarian Utopia of California
The Washington Post reports on California's budget deficit now approaching $35 billion. What is really interesting about the situation is that the Democrats now control every statewide office, and both houses of the legislature by large margins (though not the 2/3 margin required to raise taxes). Governor Davis is talking about big budget cuts; Democrats in the legislature, of course, want to see tax increases to cover this shortfall (equal to about $1000 per person in the state). The difficulty is that even under the best of times, getting a budget approved is a struggle. California often ends up a month or more late on this, and when this happens, state employees sometimes don't get paid, or get paid with IOUs.
Now, this often happens even during the good times, such as during the dot-com explosion, when it seemed that practically everyone that lived there (except myself, of course) was making millions of dollars on stock options for companies with business plans that were laughable. ("Well, of course, revenue will double every 29 hours until the end of time.") All those 25 year old decamillionaires paid vast quantities of state income tax, bought Mercedes like other people buy rolls of toilet paper, threw outrageous parties, and paid heavenly bills. (If you don't recognize those last few words, you are too young, or I am too old.) Those days are over. Senate President John Burton added it was going to be very difficult to attract the Republican votes needed for a two-thirds majority to enact a tax hike.
Yeah, short-sighted, unlike the last fifteen years of letting the lunatic wing of the Democratic Party get everything it wants, with predictable effects on state spending.
"There are no Republicans who want to quote 'do Governor Davis a favor' and I think that's kind of a short-sighted approach," Burton said.
So, what happens if the Republicans decide to let the Democrats stew in their own juices, and refuse to vote for a tax increase, preventing budget passage? If past experience is any indication, a few weeks, while very uncomfortable for state employees, won't be tragic. Most financial institutions accepted the IOUs the state issued as though they were real money, not play money, figuring that eventually this problem would be resolved. But what happens if two or more months elapse? How much funny money will the banks be willing--or able--to accept before they start insisting that state employees give them real checks to cover their expenses?
How long can a state government operate with any actual funding authority? Will California turn into a libertarian utopia, where the government withers away? And when that happens, will workers insist that they get to keep the state income tax now being withheld from their wages, so that they buy the government services that they genuinely use? Many of the agencies of the California government are, at best, superfluous, such as the Bureau of Automotive Repair. My interactions with them, and my analysis of their performance from their own records, suggests that they accomplish very, very little that isn't just as easily done through small claims court. (In their own words, a few years back, "You should probably take the dealer to small claims court. We're not very good at dealing with consumer complaints.") Other divisions, such as the agency that regulates dry cleaners, are anachronisms that do no good at all.
What about the core services, the ones that even most libertarians agree are legitimate, like police and fire protection? Loss of fire protection would be a major problem, and it's hard to imagine that private sector alternatives will fill the gap very quickly.
The loss of police protection, however, might be one of the big surprises. Right now, in many California cities, there is so little public violent crime that the police are primarily there to deal with domestic violence. This isn't to denigrate the seriousness of this problem for those homes where the problem is real, but for most Californians, this is unlikely to seriously inconvenience their lives.
In quite a few other California cities, the police may not be much of a net gain. Yes, Los Angeles is filled with violent thugs who murder, rape, rob, and maim their way across the landscape, with impunity. But they do that even with the police present! Anarchistic Los Angeles would mean that law-abiding adults would be free to shoot back against the thugs; right now, the police, by prohibiting the carrying of handguns for self-defense by the law-abiding, may aggravate the problem of violent crime as much as they suppress it.
More Evidence That Canada Is Rather Like A Colder, More Extreme Version of California
Instapundit pointed me to James Lileks's wickedly funny demolition of a Canadian couple who are trying to destroy Christmas by putting up a billboard that says, "Gluttony. Envy. Insincerity. Greed. Enjoy Your Christmas." And their objections to Christmas? Santa is heterosexual, and the "religious exclusivity of Christmas." (I guess they don't realize what the first six letters of Christmas refer to.) One of Lileks's great moments:In truth, my Christmas will be nothing like the event the billboard pillories. Gluttony? We have a small turkey the size of a big dog's head, a cud of stuffing, a cup of gravy, a tin of peppermint chocolate. We live in an old house, you see; we don't have a vomitorium like most folks in the suburbs. I’m sure there are many who stuff their maws until their pants buttons pop off and ping against the walls like rivets on a sub that hits the ocean floor; I'm sure that all over this wretched land, gouty zeppelin-bellied men will stagger to their feet, raise a glass and shout ONE MORE WHALE LIVER SMOOTHIE FOR JESUS! I've never seen it happen, but I take the word of an insular, disapproving Canadian scold that it must happen, somewhere. Remember: the people who have no first-hand experience with the people they hate are always the keenest critics. (See also, Kulaks, Soviet Ukraine, disemboweling of)
Trent Lott: Why Democrats Don't Like To Reminded Of Their Past
Ann Coulter is one of those columnists whose writing is so funny that I can almost overlook her tendency to engage in unnecessary cruelty and oversimplification of complex issues. I am very pleased with this recent column by her, however:What the Lott incident shows is that Republicans have to be careful about letting Democrats into our party. Back when they supported segregation, Lott and Thurmond were Democrats. This is something the media are intentionally hiding to make it look like the Republican Party is the party of segregation and race discrimination, which it never has been.
In 1948, Thurmond did not run as a "Dixiecan," he ran as a "Dixiecrat" – his party was an offshoot of the Democratic Party. And when he lost, he went right back to being a Democrat. This whole brouhaha is about a former Democrat praising another former Democrat for what was once a Democrat policy.
Republicans made Southern Democrats drop the race nonsense when they entered the Republican Party. Democrats supported race discrimination, then for about three years they didn't, now they do again. They've just changed which race they think should be discriminated against. In the 1920s, the Democratic platforms didn't even call for anti-lynching legislation as the Republican platforms did.
Another Success For British Gun Control
A Reuters story carried in the Washington Post:"There is no 'street cred' in a sawn-off shotgun for the majority of today's armed criminals," London police Commissioner Sir John Stevens told reporters.
"Handguns, particularly those modeled on the James Bond Walther PPK -- real and replica -- are the weapons of choice for today's modern gunman."
Stevens was speaking out as gun crime rockets in the capital with gangsters more readily shooting rivals and the police. Most shootings are related to drug-fueled turf wars between Jamaican-based "Yardies" and, increasingly in some areas, Turkish and Kurdish gangs.
Police say there have been 200 shootings in the last eight months, compared to 171 in the same period last year, with 22 murders. Last year there were 38 fatal shootings compared to just 19 in 1992. Officers are now seizing an average of 144 guns every month.
As if to highlight Stevens' fears, two unarmed policemen were shot at in the early hours of Thursday as they pursued a suspect in the north London district of Islington, where Prime Minister Tony Blair used to live.
Two weeks ago in the same area, a policeman was shot in the stomach following a chase and is still in hospital. That same day four plain-clothes officers were shot at when they approached two suspected drug dealers.
Buying a Digital Camera for Christmas?
If you can't decide between an HP digital camera and one from another maker--I certainly wouldn't mind if you bought the HP. Company and division bonuses are dependent on sales revenue, of course, and I never object to you keeping my co-workers and myself fully employed. I just bought an HP PhotoSmart 812 for myself--it's a 4.1 megapixel camera, with 3x optical zoom.
Sen. Lott's Problems
I haven't had much to say about this, largely because others have been carrying this matter forward. My view has been that Lott's remarks sound like the sort of "let's be nice to Sen. Thurmond, since he's not going to be around much longer" stuff that I would expect a politician to say. Lott's problem was that he didn't immediately "correct" the misreading of what he said. (I put "correct" in quotes because I'm not sure that Lott actually said something he didn't intend.) This shows a lack of intelligence.
But watching how the sharks are circling, I am beginning to wonder whether the energetic efforts to push Lott out of Senate Majority Leader might have a bit more to them than just revulsion at his apparent endorsement of the 1948 segregationist ideas of Sen. Thurmond. Lott is part of the Christian Right of the party, and while a number of these groups took an early lead in expressing their disapproval of Lott's comments, it is significant tht libertarian bloggers have been so prominent in keeping the controversy going--even at a time when Democrats were not pushing it.
Is the libertarian wing of the Republican Party hoping to push Lott out as Senate Majority Leader so that someone less identified with the Christian Right ends up in that capacity? I would hope that this isn't a motivation. There aren't many libertarian Republicans, because there aren't many libertarians.
I can remember a time when attending a Libertarian Party meeting in a place like Santa Clara County meant that you only had to ask one question: software or hardware? Everyone, or almost everyone, was an engineer of some sort. Libertarianism is a wonderful ideology for intelligent, rational people who make long-term plans, and put long-term goals above immediate gratification. This is to say, it is almost completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people, who are lazy, stupid, only marginal rational, or who live for immediate gratification. (Those individuals who combine all those qualities spend a lot of time in jail or prison.)
Encouraging Lott to give up the Senate Majority Leader position is, I think, both morally right and politically savvy. But I would be a lot more impressed if the same energy had been spent on other racists who are often given a free ride, like Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson, or Louis Farrakhan.
More About Law Reviews vs. Peer-Reviewed Journals
Instapundit's observation about law reviews vs. peer-reviewed journals:No, I don't think that someone who engaged in Bellesiles' extensive pattern of fabrication and misquotation could get away with it in a typical law review. Law reviews check statements against footnotes to ensure that the sources cited in the footnotes actually say what the article claims they do. This isn't perfect -- nothing is -- but my experience is that it tends more often to be excruciatingly exact than sloppy. Bellesiles' fabricated probate records might not have been caught this way, as law review staffers wouldn't visit the archives, and might not have asked him to produce his summaries of data. But his many other misrepresentations would have turned up, and that probably would have led to him being asked to provide more support or have his article rejected.
I agree. My experiences with law reviews is that if they can't find a source that you cite, they want a photocopy of the pages you list, and the title page. It's not perfect--a clever person could fake up some very authoritative looking pages--but if anyone was stupid enough to do such a stunt (that is to say, pull a Bellesiles), he wouldn't be able to make a credible claim to being sloppy or careless. It would be obvious, when the truth finally came out, that this was fraud.
As Professor Reynolds points out, historians tend to look down on law reviews because they aren't "peer-reviewed." What does that mean? It means that if you have a paper that seriously offends the political sensibilities of one or two of the reviewers, they will make sure that it doesn't get published. They won't be so honest as to admit that this is why they are giving your paper thumbs down, but at least in my experience, it's pretty obvious when a reviewer is doing what they do for political reasons, not reasons of scholarship.
One of my history professors at Sonoma State University told me that even into the early 1960s, history journals would regularly reject any paper that was critical of U.S. foreign policy. Were all these papers defective? I doubt it. But in the same way that conservatives used their dominance to suppress papers that contradicted their view of the world then, the left now uses its control over the historical profession to suppress papers that contradict their view of American history.
So, what's the solution? Historians insist that the sort of rigorous fact checking that law reviews do is simply impractical for history journals. Okay, I understand, it's hard work to get everything correct, and it's not like history journals are doing anything where accuracy is that important. But it would not be difficult to have history journals pick, say, 5% of the citations, perhaps the 5% of claims that are the most interesting or amazing, and see how many of them are accurate? Even checking 5% of Bellesiles's citations would have raised the alarm very early on, and prevented a most embarrassing scandal.
I submitted a paper to Law & History Review (one of those very high prestige peer-reviewed legal history journals) a while back. Bellesiles had published a paper there in 1998 about gun control law in early America, which included a paragraph that was identical to the one on p. 73 of Arming America, but with a less impressive collection of footnotes. As I point out here, Bellesiles's sources do not support his claim. Most are irrelevant, and a number directly contradict his claims. In some cases, it is clear that these citations were copied out of a book about some other topic; there's not a word that's even close to relevant. There was nothing subtle about these sources; anyone who bothered to check them would have immediately seen that Bellesiles was lying. So I tried to get a paper published in Law & History Review politely correcting this bogus claim, especially because Bellesiles's paper was being cited in court decisions as an authority.
As is typical, four reviewers went over it. At least two of the four insisted that I was misrepresenting Bellesiles by quoting him:Colonial legislatures therefore strictly regulated the storage of firearms, with weapons kept in some central place, to be produced only in emergencies or on muster day, or loaned to individuals living in outlying areas. They were to remain the property of the government. The Duke of York's first laws for New York required that each town have a storehouse for arms and ammunition. Such legislation was on the books of colonies from New Hampshire to South Carolina.
As others have pointed out, positive reviews of Arming America quoted that same paragraph, and interpreted it exactly the same way--that all guns were required to be kept centrally stored, with only a few issued to individuals.
Now, what's going on with this? Pure and simple, at least two of the "scholars" who reviewed it were intent on protecting Bellesiles's reputation, and this piece of falsehood, in a prestige journal. They accomplished their objective--and it one of the reasons that while historians look down their nose at "law office historians" (as they characterize law professors who write about history), I have learned to look down my nose at journals like Law & History Review. Peer-reviewed history journal, from my experience, as often as not, means protecting the political status quo from inconvenient facts.
If you want see something even more outrageous in how historians protect fraud from exposure, take a look at this paper that I submitted to the Journal of the Early Republic, another high prestige peer-reviewed history journal. I was polite about it, but the point was clear: Bellesiles's book had some very serious accuracy problems. The editor decided that it wasn't even worth sending out for review. Here's his snotty, protect Bellesiles at all costs response.
It does make you wonder from whence comes the prestige of the high end peer-reviewed history journals.
A Funny Cheap Shot
From a recent newsgroup posting by William Levinson in talk.politics.guns:Caligula made his horse a Roman Senator. The American people elected Bill Clinton. At least the Romans got the ENTIRE horse.
So Much For European Multiculturalism
This news story about European nations banning kosher slaughtering of meat is quite disturbing. It's disturbing not only for the reason that the article mentions--that the Nazis did something similar at the start of their rule--but also because Poland between the wars did this as well, and for the same reason.
This is especially bizarre because European intellectuals are falling all over themselves trying to justify why European cultures have to change to suit their new Islamic immigrants:Then, in September 2001 (only five days, in fact, before the destruction of the World Trade Center), the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by "non-Western" immigrants–a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (who was described as having "lived for many years in Muslim countries") as saying that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims, explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."
Mark Steyn's column from the National Post concerning rape in Australia shows that this excuse making by intellectuals isn't confined to Norway:Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. I suppose I ought to say "Lebanese-Australian" Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian. During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be "f---ed Leb style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian pig."
The feminists must be overjoyed at the people with whom they have made common cause--excusing rape in the name of multiculturalism, while rationalizing anti-Semitic laws in the name of animal rights.
But, inevitably, it's the heavy sentence that's "controversial." After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?" Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:
"As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions."
Indeed. Many's the time, labouring under the burden of some or other ghastly Ottawa policy, I've thought of pinning some gal down and sodomizing her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for "root causes." Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few.
Unfortunately, by accident, I ran into another reminder that some people just don't learn:David Ahenakew, the former chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), defended the Holocaust to an assembly of native leaders, saying it was an effort by Hitler to ''clean up the world.''
In a rambling 45-minute speech to an assembly of native leaders in Saskatoon on Friday, Mr. Ahenakew attacked Jews and Asians. Later, when a reporter asked him to clarify his remarks, Mr. Ahenakew, for many years a respected senator in the FSIN, repeated his position.
''How do you get rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going to dominate?'' he told the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
