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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, April 26, 2003
Sodomy Law Repeal and the AIDS Explosion I've received a few emails claiming that I have simply screwed up in claiming a causal connection between the repeal of sodomy laws and the AIDS explosion. I've been pretty careful in how I have described the situation until now, anxious to keep this a family blog. But it appears that a lot of you who didn't live in the San Francisco Bay Area have no idea how weird and sick things were out here in the 1970s and early 1980s. By 1979, there were gay bathhouses, many of them in the South of Market area of San Francisco, where gay men would like on their stomachs for hours at a time, and dozens of men would come through and sodomize the recipients. This was completely anonymous sex. (Yeah, homosexuals are just like straight people.) From what I have read and been told, quite a number of gay bars by this time had private rooms where this sort of completely anonymous sex was happening on a regular basis. In 1970, if such institutions had existed, the San Francisco Police Department's vice squad would have gone undercover, arrested the participants, and closed the bathhouse or bar where this was going on. (I can say that with some confidence, because at about that time, the vice squad was still sending undercover cops into adult theaters to arrest people like the Rev. Jim Jones, founder of People's Temple, for fondling other men.) In 1970, this was a criminal offense: sodomy. In 1979, even if the political will existed to do this, there would have been no legal basis to arrest the participants. The bathhouses and gay bars where sex was taking place might have been shut down as public nuisances because of STDs, but in practice, it took the discovery of AIDS and an enormous political struggle in San Francisco to get the bathhouses closed. The gay community was so protective of anonymous sex that even knowing that these places were spreading a disease that was killing vast numbers of gay men, the gay community fought against closing these dens of sickness. Under different names, a number of these same sort of institutions are again in operation in San Francisco. Yes, I know, there are gay men in long-term monogamous relationships. But there aren't many--which is part of why domestic partners benefits coverage has turned out to be so cheap for American corporations to provide--the anticipated swarm of homosexual domestic partner relationships just didn't happen. Some of you are going to say, "Most gay men in San Francisco weren't part of the bathhouse and gay bar scene." This is probably true--but "monogamous relationship" in the gay community doesn't seem to mean what it does in the straight community (and believe me, I know that a lot of straights are engaged in adultery). I've read too many accounts by gay men who talk about their partner, and then discuss going to a gay bar to pick up someone for a one-night fling. Monogamous relationship in the gay community often means, "Who I go home to sleep with after a night of casual sex." This is part of why major disease spreading locations like gay bathhouses and gay bars rapidly infected a large fraction of the gay men in San Francisco, and caused so many deaths, so quickly. I have had it suggested that California is an especially twisted place, and that repeal of sodomy laws in Texas wouldn't lead to a similar continual orgy situation. Sorry, I don't buy it. You know, California used to have a reputation as a fairly conservative place. Once upon a time, Republicans dominated the state government. Do you what to know how sick and depraved the Bay Area has become? A few years back, there was a political victory party for some initiative related to the stadium that San Francisco was going to build. In the middle of this celebration, the "entertainment" started. A man and woman stripped naked. The woman then tied the man down, cut a design into his back with a razor, and urinated on the cuts. All sorts of public officials were present--with the county supervisors heading for the exits when this started. It was briefly a subject of discussion in the local newspapers as "Babylon by the Bay." But to my knowledge, no one was arrested for it. In 1955, if this had happened at a major political event, it would have been the end of the political careers for all who were present or even connected vaguely with the organizers of the party. The participants would have been sent to a mental hospital. In 1965, there would have been arrests of the man and the woman, probably mental hospital stays (for a short while), and the scandal would have destroyed political careers. In 1975, there would have been arrests, and embarrassment for the politicians. But when this happened in the late 1990s, it was only another big joke. This is what happens when you let homosexuals dominate the political process in a big city--everything is okay, all forms of depravity are considered "entertainment." Friday, April 25, 2003
Looking to Sell My SKS: Idaho Residents With Concealed Handgun Permit Only, Please Yes, the law lets me sell to any resident of Idaho, but I would feel much more comfortable either selling it to someone with a carry permit, or who can process it through a friendly gun store. I really don't want a gun that I own to end up in a newspaper headline, and this is a very certain way of preventing that. It's one of the Chinese SKS with the folding spike bayonet, the 10 round fixed magazine, and the really cheesy sling that came with these. I also have the 20 round fixed magazine as well--pops in pretty well. I've resurfaced the stock (and I will tell you, rubbing with linseed oil alternating with fine sandpaper improves the look everytime I do it), and put one of the brown plastic handguards on it. I have about 800 rounds or so of FMJ ammunition for it, about 200 of it in 10 round stripper clips, with one of those terribly retro chest ammo packs that holds more ammunition than you can ever fire in a real battle (but perhaps your comrade in the People's Liberation Army would be able to the us the remaining 100 rounds after he liberates it from you). I just can't picture ever needing this SKS again, and it is taking up space in the gun safe. When I lived in California, and had a carry permit there (my, was that a chore to get), I kept it chained in my trunk as a, "Ohmigod, there's a lunatic in there killing people" tool. It just doesn't make much sense here. I would like to liberate perhaps $200 (or something close to it), and put it into savings. 
 The Continuing Sodomy Law Debate Glenn Reynolds, to his credit, linked to my defense of sodomy laws--or at least the right of states to pass such laws. (I am only a lukewarm advocate of such laws, and principally as a way of encouraging homosexuals to move to California.) But he called my argument absurd that repeal of the sodomy laws played some part in the dramatic expansion of AIDS from a disease so rare in the West that it wasn't even recognized, to something that is a major cause of death. He points out that Saudi Arabia has sodomy laws, and a big AIDS problem. We have laws against murder, and yet we still have a big murder problem. Laws work at the margins. Laws in representative governments reflect majority will, and not surprisingly, most people don't break laws that they support. (At least, the important laws.) There's usually a minority (ideally, a small minority) that are going to do X regardless of what the law says. It's the people in the middle--the ones that might break the law against X, if there were no discouragement--that laws influence. This is reiminiscient of two forms of logical fallacy common in gun control debates. The first fallacy is the "100% react this way" mistake. Gun rights activists often insist that gun control laws do nothing--criminals will be armed no matter what the laws are (although usually insisting that the law-abiding will be disarmed, and therefore at risk). Gun control advocates usually insist that gun control is very effective--that almost everyone will obey the law, reducing gun deaths. The reality is that without Draconian enforcement, most gun control laws influence people at the margins--the hardened criminal will be only slightly discouraged from getting a gun. Some lowlifes who shouldn't have guns may find the obstacles enough to prevent them from getting a gun--but they are typically only a small part of the problem. Really serious otherwise law-abiding gun nuts are going to be armed, regardless. It's the people in the middle, most of whom aren't a problem with a gun, who will be the most discouraged. Adding to the problem is that most of the gun control laws that gun control advocates push for don't even influence the right people at the margins! I don't expect that sodomy laws are going to make homosexuality go away, nor do I expect such laws to make AIDS disappear. I do expect that if you don't have your choice of hundreds of different gay bars and casual sex clubs to go to for anonymous sex, because you are worried about being identified as homosexual, that it will slow down the rate of transmission a bit. (Of course, it's a bit late now to close the barn doors about AIDS; the disease is widely spread.) The second fallacy is the "Britain has gun control and low murder rates" argument. (This is becoming less true by the year, by the way.) Pointing to other nations with serious AIDS problems and strict sodomy laws is like pointing to Britain's gun control laws and arguing that this causes the low murder rates. The strongest evidence of the effects of a law aren't comparing two countries with radically different cultures, populations, and demographics, but comparing the same society before and after a change in the law: what sociologists call an interrupted time series. AIDS didn't appear suddenly in the late 1970s. We have frozen tissue samples from the 1950s that demonstrate that it was around, and killing Westerners who had visited West Africa. It just didn't spread rapidly. There is simply no credible evidence that I have seen that suggests that AIDS mutated from a mild, not very communicable disease to a virulent, fast spreading one between the 1950s and the 1970s. Suddenly, in the late 1970s, when homosexuality became both legal and widely accepted in California and New York City, it spreads--with incredible speed, considering that it isn't something that you can transmit casually. There's both a causal argument, and the interrupted time series to go with it. Software Product Ideas Are Appearing in My Dreams Kekule was a 19th century organic chemists who played a major part in figuring out the molecular structure of benzene--supposedly, in a dream. (You try and figure it out without an electron microscope, Mr. Smart Guy.) We now know that his model was an oversimplification, but it was a step in the right direction. My dreams, when I remember them, tend to be weird--one in particular involved a swaying footbridge across a busy freeway in New York City. As I crossed it, on hands and knees, I suddenly realized that it was made of corned beef, and started munching away, to the displeasure of my friends who were behind me. A couple nights ago, I guess all the work I'm doing on rewriting my book Armed America: Guns and Hunting in the Early United States got to me. I dreamed an entire software product--one that, when you entered a footnote in Microsoft Word, would use Google.com to search for the quote in the main body of the text, , verify its accuracy, and then insert a hyperlink to it. (The anti-Bellesiles's tool.) There were many, many details of how to do this in the dream, most of which vanished from my memory within a few minutes of waking. Composition: The Lost Art This AP news story I found over at sfgate.com is very true, and very important: Ask high school juniors to write a paragraph about a haunted house, and nearly half are unable to do so satisfactorily.Hmmm. (We actually have two great foes, not one--but I know what Gaston meant.) When my wife was teaching college composition, a few years back, this failure of the high schools to teach composition was glaringly obvious. You only had to read the students' essays. For more than a few of the students in her freshman composition class, the paragraph concept was apparently new material; forget about a coherent logical flow through the entire essay. I read a few of these essays, and I felt sorry for these kids. Whoever kept the "school" sign on the building in which these kids had sat for 12 years had clearly engaged in a fraudulent act. Note: this wasn't the bonehead English class that many universities have. The essays were better in the upper division English composition class that my wife T.A.ed--but she still read some embarrassingly painful papers. Some of the papers, however, were reasonably competent. The kids weren't stupid--but we saw signs that we are returning to an oral culture. My daughter tells me that she was somewhat unusual at her high school because she read for pleasure--not just for class. This was an elite private high school in California, where 99% of the graduating students went to college, by the way, and the student parking lot was filled with three year old BMWs (the hand-me-downs from Mom and Dad, generally). It makes you wonder what the situation is like in ghetto schools. Another contributing factor, I fear, may be the evaporation of grammar teaching in public schools. My 9th grade English teacher, Mr. Friedman, spent what seemed like a decade on sentence diagramming, parts of speech, and what, when I started programming, I would call sentence parsing. (Considering what Shawn Sullivan was wearing to class most days, I am amazed that I--or any of the other boys in the class--remembered anything that Mr. Friedman said. Dress codes have their place.) Grammar seems to have vanished from California public schools. From what I see of my son's 9th grade English homework here in Boise, the teachers are content with making sure that students understand the parts of speech. It appears that sentence diagramming has gone the way of the buffalo. Polygamy Laws Eugene Volokh quotes from an email about polygamy laws, arguing that the 19th century effort by the Congress to suppress polygamy in Utah Territory can be understood as: Anderson and Tollison argue that men used their greater voting power to induce the government to crack down on polygamy among the Mormons.What's interesting is that the Mormon Church (still supporting polygamy at the time) gave women the right to vote in 1870, and it was Congress that took it away in 1887, as part of an anti-polygamy law. The Mormon Church apparently didn't think that women voting would be a problem for polygamy. The more logical explanation for federal efforts to suppress polygamy is that it was contrary to Christian doctrine. It's hard to read the polygamy decision in Reynolds v. U.S. (1878) any other way, even though the essential argument is about the dangers of "patriarchy" (in the Old Testament sense of it). I don't have a problem with values that are shared by the vast majority of the population (like 90%), even religious values, being written into law. Most of our laws are of that form: murder, rape, robbery. Even the claim that "these involve injury to others" doesn't buy anything here--the notion that you shouldn't injure others is a religious value in our culture (though not in some others). If a state wants to legalize polygamy, and there is a broad agreement about it, that's fine with me. If a state wants to ban it, and again there is a broad agreement about it, that's fine with me, too. Ditto for sodomy, and bestiality, and all the rest. The nice thing about the federal system is that if you really can't bear to live in a state where depraved monsters are dominant (i.e., California, or at least the San Francisco Bay Area), it's not so difficult to move. I just wish I had left Babylon West a few years earlier. UPDATE: A bit more information about the polygamy disputes is at Nathan Oman's blog. (That's the permalink--but it looks like Mr. Oman hasn't updated his archive yet.) But Where Will They Conceal Their Guns? A light-hearted article from USA Today about Southwest Airlines firing two pilots for their clothing-optional cockpit: Southwest Airlines has fired two pilots for allegedly turning their cockpit into a clothing-optional playpen.Apparently, they didn't break any laws: While the incident occurred on a Boeing 737 in flight, there's no implication that safety was breeched. And a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman says there's no specific prohibition against flying naked.Naked pilots--let's not think about that. No Man Is An Island John Donne's famous quote: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main....was about how we are all interconnected. This article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the rapid increase in AIDS in the South is a reminder that atomistic theories of mankind aren't realistic. This is part of where libertarian ideas, as intellectually satisfying as they are, simply fail in the real world. A rare disease--one that had been kicking around Africa and even a bit in the West for decades--took off because California, in the mid-1970s, decided to repeal its laws against sodomy and oral sex. Those laws weren't specific to homosexuals--but their repeal certainly played a part in encouraging homosexuals to concentrate in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. They also removed the mild restraints on behavior that these occasionally enforced laws had created. Because so many homosexuals engaged in risky and unhygenic behaviors way beyond anal sex (most of which I am far too polite to discuss here, because some of you will become nauseated by learning about them), a relatively rare disease spread rapidly through the gay community in big cities around the Western world. Homosexuals will insist that they aren't any more promiscuous than the heterosexual population. This certainly wasn't true in the late 1970s (see the survey results in Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny's Human Sexuality, 4th ed.), and I doubt that it is true today. There were clubs in San Francisco where gay men lay face down waiting for complete strangers to come through and do as wished--with dozens of completely anonymous sexual partners a day. This is why AIDS devastated gay communities so rapidly, and why projections about how fast AIDS would spread into the non-IV drug abusing heterosexual population were so completely wrong--even in the disco era, very few straights were quite this outrageous. The acceptance of non-fatal STDs as a normal part of life also aggravated the problem. As one gay activist with whom I have spoken told me, "The STD clinic was a great place to meet new partners, because everyone was already infected!" When I asked him to justify this acceptance, his response was, "It wasn't a big deal. You got a disease. You went to the clinic. You took antibiotics for a few weeks. No big deal." Impaired immune systems and existing open sores provided an easier time for AIDS to infect and destroy. Because there is significant overlap between the intravenous drug abuse community and the homosexual community (a subject of considerable research, it turns out, for many years now--the San Francisco Department of Public Health has done at least one significant survey on this issue, and the bibliography of similar studies was huge), AIDS spread rapidly among heroin addicts, prostitutes, and then into those portions of the black community that weren't homosexual. So here's my point: this notion that what adults do in private is none of the government's business is based on a very libertarian model that says: 1. The government shouldn't pick up the bills for all these people dying slow and and often horrifying deaths. 2. Everyone is mutually consenting. Of course, neither of those situations is true. The first isn't likely to ever happen, primarily because the costs of people dying of AIDS rapidly exhaust private resources and insurance companies, and governments will not let a powerful political group die off. (I mean homosexuals; I doubt that the government cares in the least what happens to black prostitutes and their customers.) The second isn't true, because many of those infected with AIDS didn't know that they were infecting others. We know that at least some of those spreading AIDS today know that they are spreading it to unsuspecting victims. Yes, all these arguments could be advanced for banning smoking, if second hand smoke is truly the danger that the anti-smoking advocates claim. I am skeptical that it's true. (Some of these arguments, such as the health care costs, can be advanced for smoking even if second hand smoke isn't the great killer that is claimed.) Let's just drop the pretense that what kind of sex consenting adults have in private is never the government's business. I agree that most of the time, there are no externalities that legitimize government involvement. Even illegitimate children don't require government intervention, because it is generally possible to find the father, and stick him with the bill. (Those mothers who have no idea who the father was are a good argument for laws against extramarital sex--if only I could find a way to write a law that says, "If you are too promiscuous to know who fathered this child, and you are demanding government assistance, here's a $5000 fine, since the government is going to be paying for your stupidity for the next eighteen years.) Prostitution, because it spreads gobs of STDs, including, to some extent, AIDS, is another item with externalities that inevitably justify governmental intervention. (It may be a regulated form of it, as some Nevada counties have, might make more pragmatic sense than the bans present everywhere else in America.) Male homosexuality definitely is one of those examples of a consensual activity that produces enormous externalities that justify government intervention. (Lesbians don't seem to be spreading AIDS, both because of the mechanics involved, and because lesbians do not generally engage in the wanton, anonymous, highly promiscuous sex that is common, though not universal, among male homosexuals.) Does it offend you that your freedoms are being violated? Good. My freedoms are violated by having to pay for treatment for AIDS--a disease that almost no one who became sexually active after 1990 should be getting. It's not that hard to dramatically reduce the spread of AIDS--but you have to be willing to not use dirty needles, use condoms, and change sexual partners less often than you change socks. For many homosexual men and heroin addicts, that seems to be more willpower than they can muster. Thursday, April 24, 2003
Where Do These Jerks Come From? And Can We Make Them Go Back To Where They Came From? I just got a call from daughter, away at college. Someone came through selling magazine subscriptions, and badgered her into subscribing to a bridal magazine. (Yes, she's at the dreaming, wishing, hoping stage--of course, being her father, of course, I think she's too still young.) She wanted to subscribe to six months; he badgered into writing a $64 check for three years. Now she has to run off in the morning to stop payment on the check. From her description, this jerk made inappropriate sexual remarks that actually made her feel a little afraid of him--a technique that I'm sure works often on women, who would rather subscribe to a magazine and hope that the creep will just leave. The creep works for a group named Success Club, Inc. Funny that this would be the case--some years ago, my wife had a similar unpleasant encounter with an extremely aggressive, pushy, magazine salescritter who wouldn't stop the badgering until she subscribed to a bunch of magazines. We had to resolve that one also with stopping of payment on a check. When I heard my daughter say the name, it rang a bell. A few years back, when I lived in San Jose, I had a magazine salescritter walk into my garage where I was working on a telescope. He started his pitch, and I politely explained that I wasn't buying. He persisted. I again said, "Sorry, I'm just not interested; you are wasting your time." He persisted, and I became less polite, and told him to leave. It wasn't until I told him that I was going into the house to call the police to have him arrested for trespassing that he left. Until we moved to Idaho, we have always had a "No Soliciting" sign on our door because of creeps like this. But it's amazing how many come to the door anyway--and pretend that they don't know what "No Soliciting" means. New Primary Sources on My Web Page I added Rhode Island militia statutes of 1699 and 1718 to the primary sources pages under Rhode Island. Like the other colonial militia laws, this one required almost every white man in the colony to be armed, and show up with those guns for militia musters. I also added the 1756 Georgia statute prohibiting Acadians from possessing guns, except on their master's plantation here. Thomas Sowell With a Rare Worthwhile Epigram Most really clever pithy sayings have all the depth of bumper stickers--cute, they make you chuckle, but the ones that aren't wrong are so shallow as to be meaningless. Consider the favorite of the 1960s: "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote." In the context of the times, it meant that if you could be drafted at 18, then you should be able to vote. Did that mean that women, who weren't drafted, shouldn't be allowed to vote? Did it mean that those beyond draft age shouldn't be allowed to vote? You see where cleverness gets you. Thomas Sowell is generally too careful of a thinker to produce spectacularly entertaining epigrams. I own a number of his books, and I respect him a great deal. He is a very skilled writer--clear, in a way that more than a few economists are not. However, I read Dr. Sowell's books to learn, not to be entertained. So I was very pleased to look at a recent Thomas Sowell column, and see this amusing statement: France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance. Has Iraq's Minister of Information Found a New Job? From an AP news story: The North's Korea People's Army vowed to "put all people under arms and turn the whole country into a fortress" and urged its soldiers to become "human bombs and fighters ready to blow up themselves" to protect leader Kim Jong Il.I don't want to make light of the matter. North Korea has a real military, and Kim Jong Il is a far more effective totalitarian thug than Hussein was. I also would be reluctant to support a war against North Korea, because that military could and would cause hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Soeul. But the parallels in language and threats are quite interesting. The Left End of the Democratic Party Takes A Stand Drudge Report is saying (no permalink, sorry), that Gov. Dean, one of the Democratic Party candidates for president, said this during a CNN interview: Asked if the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam, Dean said, "We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance."Hmmm. No electricity, vs. being tortured to death, eyes gouged out, children being tortured to force parents to confess. Well, we know where Dean stands on the subject of totalitarianism. I can see why the left end of the Democratic Party likes him so much. Amusing Article About a Very American Event This is from the London Times: THE race was over before most Americans even knew it had begun. About 148 participants, driving everything from a custom-built 655hp car to a VW camper van, tore up 3,000 miles of highway between San Francisco and Miami, collecting 500 speeding tickets and countless police mugshots along the way.Go ahead--read it. You need some laughs. Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Why Does "bell hooks" Refuse To Use Capital Letters? I've been wondering for some time about this. When I decided that I needed to know, I found one that explained it (and the reason was every bit as pretentious and trendy leftist as I expected); the other is a blog entry on Sand in the Gears that was pretty amusing. "Television Doesn't Influence Kids..." This happened in Maryland: Hollywood Video store manager Vicky McLaughlin wasn't sure what to make of the bandit pointing a silver handgun at her and declaring, "I'm going to stand this place up." His gun looked real and he was dressed in all black, with a sweat shirt hood pulled tightly around his head. Where Being An Intellectual Leads You Eugene takes the bait from Sen. Santorum: Santorum's point is that if the Constitution is interpreted to secure a constitutional right to consensual gay sex, then it would be likely to be interpreted to secure a constitutional right to (presumably consensual on all sides) bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery. This is actually quite a plausible prediction; if two gay men are constitutionally entitled to have sex (as I think they should be), then adult siblings would similarly be constitutionally entitled to have sex (as I think they should be); one could draw a legally viable distinction, but there's a good chance that the courts wouldn't be persuaded by such a distinction, and conclude that the two should be treated equally.UPDATE: I am gratified to see that others who disagree with Sen. Santorum and me can't explain why incest wouldn't be protected as a privacy matter. Consider this article in Slate, in which the author admits that neither he, nor the grossly misnamed "Human Rights Campaign" (a gay rights group) can come up with an explanation of the difference: The way I see it, stable families are good, homosexuality isn't a choice, and therefore, gay marriage should be not just permitted but encouraged. Morally, I think incest is bad because it confuses relationships. But legally, I don't see why a sexual right to privacy, if it exists, shouldn't cover consensual incest. I think Santorum is wrong. But I can't explain why, and so far, neither can the Human Rights Campaign. Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Signs That The Internet Is Too Easy To Use Some jerk here boasts about the 2000 Chevrolet Corvette he just bought. However, one of the skeptics right clicked on the picture, read the properties section, and immediately went over to here (where I first put my picture of my Corvette a few months ago). Maybe the Internet needs to be harder to use. Why Am I Such A Narrow-Minded Bigot? It's stuff like this that makes me inclined to think that states keeping sodomy laws serve a useful function--it makes this sort of insanity stay in California, Massachusetts, and similarly crazy places: The Democrat-controlled California Assembly passed a bill today mandating fines of up to $150,000 against business owners – including Bible bookstores and nonprofit organizations such as the Boy Scouts – for refusing to hire cross-dressing and transsexual job applicants.Sorry, but this isn't a matter of privacy. If you want to do the drag queen thing, or the butch thing, that's your business--but don't force employers to hire you in your silly get-up. I used to work for an electronics company out in the Bay Area, and like all good Bay Area businesses, it was very liberal. I remember one very memorable employee. She dressed as a man--but it was more like an insulting parody of a man--the most masculine jeans imaginable, with a chain for a belt, and smoking the shortest, fattest cigar that I think I have ever seen. Her car with decorated with bowling stickers (again, a parody of a blue collar man), and another charming bumper sticker that informed the world, "I snatch kisses and vice versa." Yeah, I know that most homosexuals don't cross-dress, and most don't insist on going out of their way to engage in insulting stereotypes of men and women. (At other employers, I worked with homosexuals who weren't exactly closeted, but they weren't going out of their way to be offensive, either.) So why do homosexuals feel the need to promote this sort of offensive behavior by passing laws to require employers to put up with this childish behavior? Imagine if an entire movement built up around blackface, insisted that they had the right to show up for work this way, and insisted that the government pass laws prohibiting discrimination based on this? Liberals would have a cow about it. This is the sort of nonsense that is why I am glad to be out of California--and why I hope that the Supreme Court comes to its senses, and decides that sodomy laws are constitutional. At least this sort of juvenile behavior can stay in California. Whine Time You may recall that I elected to disengage from Amazon.com's Honor System payments because they were insisting, against all common sense, on selling a book that was a thinly disguised promotion of child molestation. Doing business with a company that sells books like that just didn't seem...honorable. I don't blog for the money--if I did, you would have to wonder about my sanity. Still, it was nice to see contributions of $5 or $10 (sometimes even larger) get dropped in occasionally. Now I just have the PayPal tip jar on my page--and no one's throwing even $1 chunks in. Is it that few of you have PayPal accounts? Is it that April 15 hit you a bit harder than you expected? Or are you just not feeling generous? Or do I only have the same loyal audience that's already thrown money in? (If so, I need to expand my readership, not annoy the loyal audience.) Inquiring minds want to know! Stock Market Goodness The Dow 30 Industrial index is up 156 points for the day! The NASDAQ is up almost 27 points! If we keep this blistering pace up, the NASDAQ will be back to 1999 in how many decades? I'm trying not to be cynical. The IRS lets you carry forward capital losses, up to a maximum of $3000 loss for the year (combining the carry forward and the current year's capital gains). At this rate, it will be many years before I pay capital gains taxes again. Oh, This Is Rich "No War for Oil!" Well, in a sense. These articles from the Scotsman and London Times detail the evidence that a British MP, popularly known as the "Member from Baghdad Central" for his opposition to the war, and support of Hussein's thugocracy, was actually getting paid by the Iraqi intelligence service with oil that he sold through a third-party, worth at least $500,000 a year. The Daily Telegraph newspaper said a confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his head of intelligence showed Mr Galloway had asked an intelligence operative for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil-for-food programme.From the Times article: The newspaper said that the left-wing MP, who fiercely opposed the US-led military action, entered into partnership with a named Iraqi oil broker to sell oil on the international market.It makes you wonder how many other antiwar protesters might have had "special arrangements." What Limits Are There On Consensual Adult Sex Laws, If The Supreme Court Finds Sodomy Laws Unconstitutional? Instapundit clearly thinks that Sen. Santorum's recent remarks: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," Santorum, R-Pa., said in the interview, published Monday.are absurd. But I don't see that Santorum has made a mistake here. All states have laws that criminalize particular behaviors, such as bigamy, polygamy, and incest, and many still criminalize adultery. (Not California, of course, where adultery is one of the more popular indoor sports.) The arguments against sodomy laws fall into several categories, of which these two are the ones being used by the libertarian/sodomite coalition: 1. They are irrational, and reflect a religious-based moral code. The same is true of bigamy, polygamy, and adultery laws. The case can be made that incest laws, because they prevent the birth of children with potentially serious defects, are a public health and welfare measure, but that's not why incest laws exist. They exist because incest is contrary to the Judeo-Christian moral codes that still dominate the United States (once you get out of ACLU meetings and law schools). 2. Some sodomy laws apply only to homosexuals (such as the Texas law now before the Supreme Court). These laws therefore discriminate against homosexuals. Sure. Does this mean that all discrimination based on sexual behavior is unconstitutional? Polygamy is a sexual behavior. So is adultery. Should these laws therefore be struck down? I understand that libertarians aren't very sympathetic to sodomy laws. I understand this, and I'm not very sympathetic to those laws, either (although there are some pragmatic arguments that can be made for them based on public health issues). But just because you don't like a law doesn't make it unconstitutional. There has to be a reason that these laws are unconstitutional--not just that they upset gay faculty. Laws prohibiting sodomy--in both homosexual-specific and all-inclusive forms--existed everywhere in 1789, when our Bill of Rights was adopted by Congress, and in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by Congress, imposing bits and pieces of the Bill of Rights against the states. Sen. Santorum is right. Once the Supreme Court strikes down Texas's sodomy law (as I expect that they will), there will be no defending laws against polygamy, bigamy, incest (at least, if both parties are adults), or adultery. All will fall before the legal academy's fierce contempt for the religious beliefs of 90% of the population. It will be a bit longer before child molestation is found to be a constitutionally protected form of sexual activity, but I do not doubt that within a generation, the legal academy will have rationalized why those laws are irrational leftovers from a more primitive time. That's about the point where I expect the population to rise up--or at least, I hope it does. UPDATE: Jack Balkin (sorry, the permalink isn't working, you might have to scroll down to find this) essentially argues that constitutional rights are based on evolving values, not on any timeless notion of rights: But this argument overlooks an important point about how constitutional rights get their content. In fact, the scope of the constitutional right of privacy is determined by evolving social norms, not by legal logic. It is determined by politics and social movement contestation, even if judges don't recognize this fact or admit it to themselves. We often think that fundamental rights should reflect basic values that do not change over time. In fact it is quite the opposite. Through social movement contestation, people demand that the articulation of fundamental rights keep pace with their changing ideas of what values are most important and fundamental. Rights become timeless, in other words, when the time is right for them.If the argument is that the masses have come around to the idea that homosexuality is perfectly okay, that would be a legitimate argument--except that's not what has happened. Some states repealed their laws against homosexuality through the democratic process (California being one example that I remember, and that I supported at the time). But in a number of other states, the courts have struck down these laws--because the majority did not want these laws repealed. Really, what Jack Balkin is arguing for, is that "Rights become timeless, in other words, when the time is right for them" and the determiner of that time isn't democracy, but judges overruling democracy. I am no fan of unlimited democracy. There is a strong case for judges overruling democracy when fundamental human rights are being violated. But we have a procedure for determining what are fundamental human rights--it's called the Bill of Rights, and what is going on in the current battle over sodomy laws isn't based on the Bill of Rights (except in a "some animals are more equal than others" interpretive way), but on the desire of judges to show how intellectually superior they are to the unwashed masses--who, for the most part, are not prepared to repeal state sodomy laws. Monday, April 21, 2003
Those Who Think "Courage" Is Giving An Unpopular Speech Need To Come Face To Face With The Real Thing From the St. Petersburg Times: The word "hero" is tossed around so casually these days that it has almost lost its meaning. Then comes the story of Army Sgt. Paul Smith, who reminds us what a real hero is. The 33-year-old soldier from Tampa was killed April 4 after valiantly fending off an Iraqi assault on his command post. More On The Theft From the Baghdad Museum This is from an Iraqi expatriate who is now back inside: I spoke by sat-phone with friends in Baghdad. According to them, the breakdown of authority familiar to the world is getting better. Citizens groups are forming to keep order in the streets, and meeting little preliminary resistance. People want to be safe, and now that the ministries have been ransacked, it appears the worst of the looting has passed. In Basra, too, I understand these same groups are forming. One friend told me that the looting of the National Museum--something that cut deeply into me--was the work of newly deposed Baathist officials, who had been selling off our patrimony as they saw their days were numbered. As the regime fell, these (ex-)Baathists went back for one last swindle, and took with them treasures that dated back 9,000 years, to the Sumerians and the Babylonians. One final crime perpetrated by Saddam's thugs. Tongue Piercing, and Other Signs of Cultural Decay From dentalreference.com: The study found gum recession in 35% of its participants with pierced tongues for four years or more.I've heard (purely anecdotal evidence) that tongue piercings increase cavities. This would not be a surprise; you are putting a piece of metal in your mouth, and one is likely to have slightly different electrochemical properties from any fillings that are already present. What happens, over a long period of time, as you move electrons around? You move ions as well. More detail on the gum loss. This is a summary of an article from last year out of Journal of Periodontology: The study found receding gums, a problem that can lead to tooth loss, in 35% of those who had pierced tongues for four or more years and in 50% who had worn the long-stemmed barbells for two or more years. Researchers say that during tongue movement, long-stemmed barbells are more likely to reach and damage the gums than short barbells. Hussein's Evil A sobering article from MSNBC about the evil--and incompetence--of Saddam Hussein's police state. All those peace activists who are so concerned about the deaths of this war should read this. The article describes both the tortures of the regime: While NEWSWEEK’s Melinda Liu was analyzing the IIS documents in Baghdad, Rod Nordland was piecing together another part of the Saddam story from both Baath Party documents and interviews in the southern city of Basra. One former prisoner he talked to, Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein’s periodic crackdowns on deserters from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak’s ears were sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with 750 men, all with bloody stumps where their ears had been. “They called us Abu [Arabic for father] Earless,” recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him because of his disfigurement.There's also the reminders that in any given year, more Iraqis were probably murdered by Hussein's government than were killed in this entire war: Kubba’s money insulated his family from mayhem, but it did not shield him from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his people. Last week he recalled a “scene that haunts me still.” Kubba was driving his Mercedes through Basra’s Saad Square when he came upon some 600 men who had been detained while police checked their IDs. According to Kubba, “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq, stopped and inquired, “No IDs? Just shoot them all.” Kubba watched as “they shot over 600 people in front of me.”Read the whole thing. Email it to your "peace activist" friends, concerned for the people of Iraq. What Do These People Do? I was asked to complete a survey by my employer concerning a web page redesign. One of the questions on the survey was: "Please indicate your job function" and one of the choices was, "Do not know." Another Reminder That Free Speech Is Only For Some Groups From Fox News: A Christian secondary school teacher in Canada is being punished for a letter he wrote to a local newspaper criticizing homosexual promiscuity, reports the Vancouver Sun. Labels: freedom of speech This Sounds Suspiciously Like Those IBM Commercials With The Business Binoculars That Can See Into the Future But if it isn't a delusion, or a scam, this is the beginning of the end of Arab wealth, and therefore the end of Islamofascist terrorism. These guys claim to have a way to convert almost anything--even turkey guts and feathers--into oil, and at $8 to $12 a barrel. In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.Oh yeah, the obligatory Soylent Green paragraph: Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.Even better, because it disposes of a variety of waste materials, it turns what used to be nuisances that had to be buried, or otherwise disposed of, into a profitable operation. This sounds like as much of a leap forward as the Industrial Revolution--the end of our dependence on fossil fuels. UPDATE: A friend who remembers Soylent Green predicts the future: "Mobil 1 is people!" More realistically, even if the price of the resulting oil was comparable to fossil fuels, it would still be a win. I'm not a fan of using taxes to fiddle with economic relationships, but I think almost everyone would agree that being able to excavate existing landfills to produce oil would be a giant win over the continuing stinky situation of the Middle East. For purely patriotic reasons I would gladly pay 10% more for gasoline that didn't continue putting money into the pockets of the House of Saud; I might even tolerate a similar tax to disengage us from concern about a culture that needs to return to herding goats. There's also something very appealing to me about the idea of turning the last fifty years of trash into oil, plastics, and tires. It's not going to be a perfect system--there is inevitably some loss here, of materials and energy--but even reducing by 80% the amount of new fossil fuels we use is elegant compared to the current scheme. Why Journalists Are Often of No Value in Totalitarian Societies John Burns's New York Times article about the terror of Hussein's government is well worth reading in full, but this section here is especially important: Secrets and LiesUnfortunately, this soft-peddling of the problems is a recurring difficulty. It's tempting to assume that the soft coverage of totalitarian governments is because journalists, being out on the left, are naturally sympathetic to totalitarian states. But this playing along is probably a more common problem--the desire to stay on the job means that many journalists will simply not tell stories that leave them free to cover the thug's government. I'm sure that journalists rationalize it as, "Well, better to tell half the story than not to tell it at all." But if the effect is to give the illusion that they are telling the story, it is better not to tell the story at all. This is part of why intellectuals throughout the Western world were prepared to engage in a moral calculus that regarded Bush and Hussein (or more typical among intellectuals, Bush and Hitler) as equals. According to the story, Burns was persona non grata in Iraq because of his previous stories about torture. Thanks to Orin Kerr for the link. |
