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Clayton Cramer's BLOG

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).



Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.

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Friday, May 23, 2003
 
Finally, Admission That The Infant Mortality Problem in Iraq was Hussein's Doing

All I heard from whining liberals for years was that the high infant mortality rate in Iraq was because of sanctions. Now, Iraqi doctors are telling the truth about the real problem:
Baghdad - Throughout the 13 years of UN sanctions on Iraq that were ended yesterday, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children.

"It is one of the results of the embargo," Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al-Baya told Newsday on May 9, 2001, at Baghdad's Ibn Al-Baladi hospital, just after a dehydrated baby named Ali Hussein died on his treatment table. "This is a crime on Iraq."

It was a scene repeated in hundreds of newspaper articles by reporters required to be escorted by minders from Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information.

Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded.

All the evidence indicates that the spike in children's deaths was tragically real - roughly, a doubling of the mortality rate during the 1990s, according to humanitarian organizations. But the reason has been fiercely argued, and the new accounts by Iraqi doctors and parents will alter the debate.

Under the sanctions regime, "We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed," said Ibn Al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. "Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt - but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces."
Forward this to your favorite whining liberal.


 
Time To Make Some Phone Calls

I don't normally run someone's press release in full, but this is important. I would emphasize the importance of calling members of Congress about this--it would be best politically for President Bush to not have to deal with this:

WILL YOU LET THEM RENEW THE BAN ON NORMAL-CAPACITY MAGAZINES AND THE RIFLE YOU WANT?

by Brian Puckett

RENEWING THE BAN

Remember the unconstitutional 1994 ban on a random list of semi-automatic rifles that they (mendaciously) called “assault weapons” that Bill Clinton and the Democrats pushed through?

It set a terrible precedent – any gun can be added to that list, including yours. And if a maximum of 10 rounds in a magazine is good, isn’t it better to have a 5-round limit?

This law will automatically expire in September of 2004 – unless the Republicans in Washington, many of whom we put in office (including G. W. Bush) – betray both us and their oaths of office and RENEW the law.

AND THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT DOING IT, RIGHT NOW.

Do you want to help wipe out this law? If so, you’ll have to actually do something -- but it’s easy.

WHAT TO DO – RIGHT NOW

All politicians say that feedback from voters determines how they vote on laws. I believe them. Why? Because it has nothing to do with your rights, or supporting the Constitution, or doing the right thing, and everything to do with what all politicians (except for Ron Paul of Texas) really care about – getting re-elected.

What kind of feedback? Phone calls and regular mail. They figure if you’ll take a few minutes and spend a couple of bucks for long-distance calls or postage, you’re serious about your message – and you’re a serious voter who’ll turn up at the polls on election day.

They don’t care about your emails, which take a few seconds to send and show no commitment. They dump them. Likewise, it’s easy to turn off the fax machine, or dump a pile of printed faxes into the garbage at the end of the day. Who has time to read them?

BUT – they do have paid staffers to take your phone calls, or listen to recorded calls, or read postcards and short letters and mark down “for” or “against” on a list of upcoming legislation.


IT’S ALL RIGHT HERE, AND IT’S EASY

Pick up the phone and call one, two, three, or all of these numbers, in this order:

Speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert — (202) 225-2976

House Majority Leader, Republican Tom DeLay — 202-225-5951

Senate Majority Leader, Republican Bill Frist — (202) 224-3344

Or you can try this toll-free number for the House of Representatives, ask for Hastert, or DeLay, etc, and when connected leave your comment: 1-800-839-5276

Last: the White House — (202) 456-1111


WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CALL?


The phone rings, someone picks it up and says “Representative X’s office.” Tell them you want to leave a comment.

They’ll say “Sure, go ahead,” and either take the message personally or switch you to their comment line. Tell them “If the Clinton gun and magazine ban is renewed, I will not (support/vote for Bush, Republican Party, etc)”. Keep it short.

The phone handler on the other end will say “Thank you”, and you’re done. I’ve done it many times and will do it many more.

A PHONE CALL IS BEST

Right now we’re not recommending letters or post cards. Why not?

First, the issue is being discussed right now by the Republican leadership. A phone call gets your message in immediately.

Second, due to the anthrax situation, mail to representatives may be delayed for several weeks.


 
How Promiscuous Are Homosexual Men?

Eugene Volokh is busily gathering and publishing data to show that:

1. Homosexual men really aren't that different from heterosexual men in their number of sexual partners.

2. A lot of people who have published claims that homosexual men are highly promiscuous are engaged in, at best, junk science.

He may have a point on #2. He's given an example of a very misleading use of a limited survey by Masters & Johnson, among others. But looking at Professor Volokh's examples raises some disturbing questions. He points out that the GSS data indicates that the median number of sexual partners since age 18 for heterosexual men is 6, and 10 for homosexual men. The averages, however, are 15 and 37, respectively. Now, it's true that the averages are a better way of figuring out what a majority is doing--but the median gives us a pretty good that the high end of the promiscuity curve for homosexuals could be pretty large. The median for homosexual men is 1.66 times that of heterosexual men; the average, however, is 2.46 times. This suggests that some significant minority of homosexual men have a lot of different sexual partners--although by itself, this doesn't tell us how large or how promiscuous this crowd is.

Another concern that I have about this data is that it doesn't seem to be age-adjusted. That is to say, if the average heterosexual man in the GSS is aged 50, and the average homosexual man in the GSS is 25, these numbers could be masking very high numbers of gay sexual partners per year. I would expect the highly promiscuous gay men to die much younger (because of AIDS) than highly promiscuous straight men (who are at much lower risk of AIDS because of the mechanisms involved). I'm not even assuming that gay men die younger because of violence and suicide, as some have claimed.

Another problem: Professor Volokh in another posting acknowledges that one of the reasons for discrepancies in sexual partner counts for straight men and women may be "that some women (e.g., prostitutes) have sex with very many partners, and they're also the ones who are less likely to respond to surveys. So they're undersampled, and their experience doesn't get revealed on the surveys." I would wonder if the "live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse" gay men that are engaged in highly promiscuous sex are also likely to be undersampled, and for the same reason: these tend to be younger and more marginalized people.

The issue again comes up: if homosexuals were just a bit more promiscuous than heterosexuals, why did AIDS burn through their population like a wildfire? Among heterosexuals in America, AIDS was a significant problem for IV drug abusers; prostitutes; sexual partners of bisexual men; and those who received tainted transfusions and transplants. Outside of those groups, AIDS is a trivial issue. Anal intercourse certainly encourages and assists in the transmission of AIDS, but without widespread promiscuity, the spread would not have been so dramatic. (From what I have read, some significant number of gay men do not regularly engage in anal intercourse--which makes the rapid spread astonishing. From reading the Internet newsgroup soc.motss, there seem to be some gay men for whom quite a bit of alcohol is required to relax the muscles sufficiently.)

Professor Volokh makes the point:
claims that, say, the median gay man has over 250 sexual partners in a lifetime makes gays seem in a way freakish and deviant, and makes it much harder for people to see gay sexual relationships as emotionally comparable to straight sexual relationships.
But of course, anyone who has spent much time in the San Francisco Bay Area can see that this is, in fact, an accurate description of large numbers of gays: freakish and deviant. This is why Gay Pride Parades are awash in sadomasochism and other forms of sexual weirdness that in the straight community, even in California, are seen as generally freaky and weird. One of the reasons that corporations have been able to afford the costs of "domestic partnership" coverage is that there have been so few requests for coverage--at least partly because the relationships among gay men are so transitory.

UPDATE: I'm gratified to see that Professor Volokh has published something by someone who was there in the 1970s, and which demonstrates that the wild side, even if a minority of gay men, is not looking for deep emotional relationships.


Thursday, May 22, 2003
 
Why Europe Is Missing Its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets

I found the link to the UPI story over on Hoosier Review, and it was too good to pass up:
European Union greenhouse gas emissions rose for the second year running in 2001, the European Environment Agency said Tuesday in its annual report on the bloc's strategy to curb global warming.

...

EU emissions of the six main gases believed to be responsible for rising temperatures levels are still 2.3 percent below 1990 levels, but this is largely due to the dash to gas in Britain and industrial restructuring in eastern Germany during the 1990s.

The EEA says the latest increase is due to a cold winter in many EU countries, higher emissions from the transport sector and greater use of fossil fuels in electricity production.
Yeah, I know, it's possible that the unusually cold winter is just a coincidence--but you would think that having to burn more fossil fuels because it's so cold would cause you ask some questions about the global warming question.

Labels:



Wednesday, May 21, 2003
 
Another Sobering Reminder That American Society Has Some Serious Problems Involving Children & Sex

From a recent conference concerning sex and teenagers:
Estimates from the three nationally representative data sets of the proportion of youth who have had sex at age 14 or younger are remarkably similar. Overall, these data indicate that 18-19% of youth have had sexual intercourse at age 14 or younger. Percentages increase with age — at age 12, 4-5% have had sex, increasing to 10% at age 13, and 18-19% at age 14.

....

Among 12-14-year-olds in the Add Health survey, 54% of girls and 66% of boys said they used some form of contraception the most recent time (as distinguished from the first time) they had sex. Three quarters of all youth in this survey who used contraception at most recent sex used condoms, and the vast majority of the remaining adolescents who used contraception used such relatively ineffective methods as withdrawal and rhythm.

...

Significant minorities of youth age 14 and under report a romantic relationship with someone three or more years older (girls far more than boys).

Relationships with a significantly older partner — compared with those with someone only slightly older, the same age, or younger — are much more likely to be sexual.

...

More than one in ten girls who first have had sex before age 15 describe it as non-voluntary and many more describe it as relatively unwanted.

...

Thirteen percent of girls in the NSFG who first had sex at age 14 or younger described it as nonvoluntary, clearly a cause for great concern. Even among those who classified their first sexual experience as voluntary, girls who had sex at age 14 or younger were significantly more likely to say that it was relatively unwanted, compared to girls who had sex for the first time at age 15 or older.
These are some of the reasons that:

1. You need to provide supervision for your kids. If your son or daughter is home without adult supervision, there is increased risk that they will either be one of those girls for whom sex is "nonvoluntary" (what a nice euphemism), or one of those boys who doesn't take no for an answer.

2. The situation with respect to older boyfriends is another reason why telling your 12 or 13 year old that she can't have a 16 year old as a boyfriend would seem like a darn good idea.


 
Horowitz on Gays and the Republican Party

David Horowitz has written an article (linked to by Eugene Volokh) in which he takes on the Religious Right for getting upset with the RNC Chairman for meeting with one of the gay rights groups (the presumptuously named Human Rights Campaign). He complains that Paul Weyrich warned that a perception that the Republican Party had gone soft on homosexuality would lead to mass defections from the Republican Party:
This is disingenuous, since you are a community leader and share the attitude you describe. In other words, what you are really saying is that if the mere perception is that the Republican Party has accepted the "homosexual agenda," you will tell your followers to defect with the disastrous consequences that may follow. As a fellow conservative, I do not understand how in good conscience you can do this. Are you prepared to have President Howard Dean or President John Kerry preside over our nation’s security? Do you think a liberal in the White House is going to advance the agendas of social conservatives? What can you be thinking?
I'm not Paul Weyrich, but I can make a pretty good guess what he and other social conservatives are thinking. They are thinking that the sort of society that they believe that the Human Rights Campaign wants is not a society worth defending.

I try very, very hard to take seriously the homosexuals that write to me and insist that they aren't like the sickos that dominate the public image of homosexuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I used to live. I am prepared to believe them. I know a number of homosexuals who are looking to live in peace, who don't think that public masturbation is an appropriate expression of Gay Pride, who think that the North American Man-Boy Love Association is a bunch of monsters who need to arrested and sent to prison. This crowd has stable, normal, lifestyles (other than the sex of their sexual partner).

But I know that the crowd that engages in anonymous, unprotected sex, unconcerned--or even actively seeking to catch AIDS--isn't a trivial fraction of homosexuals, either. One of the email exchanges I had for a while with a gay man found the notion of monogamy to be very seventeenth century. To him, sex wasn't about love, or emotion, but recreation, and the more partners the merrier.

There were 420,000 AIDS cases in the U.S. among homosexual and bisexual men through December 2001. Remember that homosexual and bisexual men are about 4% of the adult male population--so the cumulative cases are about 10% of homosexual and bisexual adult males--from one disease. (Yeah, you really need to have a cumulative total of homosexuals over the period, but it doesn't change the figures all that much to do the math correctly.) That's an astonishingly high percentage if there wasn't a lot of pretty careless sexual promiscuity involved.

This subset of homosexuals (at least, I would like to believe it is a subset) is a very dangerous population, not just because AIDS burdens both the public and private health systems in the U.S., but because there are so many social pathologies that are part of this very warped crowd: coprophilia (hence, the high rates of hepatitis among gay men); sadomasochism (favorite disturbing quote from the San Francisco Police Department while recruiting police officers in an S&M club in the early 1990s: "We don't have teach use of restraint devices to this crowd!"); either active support or tacit approval of groups like NAMBLA; the weird and insulting stereotypes of the histronic, effeminate male homosexual; the self-mutilation fetishism. Once you define homosexuality as "an alternative lifestyle," with all the protections of our civil rights laws, where does this take our society? Somewhere it shouldn't go. I am not interested in defending a society that makes excuses for child molestation.


Tuesday, May 20, 2003
 
More Interesting Stuff From My Berkeley Research Trip

I have just completed my first travel, to UC Berkeley's library--and I am pleased to tell you that I found some pretty devastating pieces of evidence--such as the Boston Gazette of 1741-42. I read more than a year of it, and most issues had at least one, and sometimes two merchant ads offering muskets and pistols for sale. I started at the beginning of the reel, planning to check every issue--and then realize that since there were than 1000 issues, it would take a long time. Instead, I decided to use a sampling technique. I checked 1720 and 1730 issues, and these showed fewer gun ads than the 1741-42 period--but still some examples in both years.

Similarly, the first issue of the New York Herald of 1838 (picked at random, while waiting for some microfilm to come out of the underground vault) contains an ad that lists 2000 pairs of pistols for sale at retail--and this ad appears repeatedly over the next few weeks. So much for Bellesiles's claims of "no civilian market for handguns" before Samuel Colt.

I was also able to fill in some gaps in my coverage of Virginia, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Carolina, and New Jersey's revolutionary governmental actions with respect to firearms. Virginia's Committee of Safety seems to have kept much more detailed and careful records of their gun purchases from private parties than Maryland's equivalent body--and so many purchases of these supposedly rare guns that I stopped recording the details after three weeks.

I was able to verify the accuracy of a number of quotes from secondary sources, as well as checking a number of business directories for the early Republic which list gunsmiths. With these, I should be able to produce some statistically valid estimates of the percentage of gunsmiths in early American cities--it would appear that while gunsmiths were not spectacularly common, they were present in every business directory that I checked--even those of cities with as few as 9000 people. ("Gunsmith" as a term of employment seems to have been used by both those who repaired guns, as well as those who made them.)

Along these same lines, I did some measures of the Philadelphia 1774 tax lists, so as to make it possible to determine minimum percentages of gunsmiths, as well as figuring out methods for evaluating how complete these tax lists are. (It appears that at least some gunsmiths appear in these tax lists, but are not identified as such.)

One interesting point about the business directories (which performed much the same function as a phone book today), was the job titles. Today, the male/female distinction on job titles is beginning to fade. Just a few years ago, an "actor" was a male performer, and an "actress" was a female. Increasingly, I am seeing "actor" used to describe either male or female. In these early Republic directories, the distinctions are alive and kicking! There are a lot of women who describe themselves as a "tutress" (a female tutor) and of course, "school-mistress" (which is still recognized as an archaic form today). While there are a lot of "seamstresses" back then, I didn't see a single "seamster" (the male equivalent). There were, however, many men who worked as a "tailor" and a few women who worked as a "tailoress."

While most single women listed in these directories have occupations such as "widow" or "gentlewoman" (usually a widow so rich that she didn't work at all), there were more women working at "untraditional" occupations than I would have expected. I didn't run into any female gunsmiths this time around (although I have in the past), but there were a surprising number of women listed as "grocer" (not "groceress," for some reason), and quite a few listed as "shopkeeper."

There are a lot of other interesting occupation titles that are a reminder of how many words have fallen out of use because the job no longer exists, or there is a different word today: a "wharfinger" (which, I gather, is someone who operated a wharf for unloading of goods); "town crier" (yes, there are still some of those in the first decade of the 19th century), a "housewright" (who does for houses what a shipwright does for ships), and my favorite, the "huckster" or "huxter." (I didn't see any huckstress listed.) I presume that a "malster" was someone who worked with malt in preparation for making beer.

There are also some reminders of how specialized even early Republic jobs were. Boston had a lot of people who said that they were a "lemon dealer." I was surprised to see large numbers of people who claimed to be a "comedian." (No tragedians, oddly enough.) I was also surprised to see the word "optician" this early. There were plenty of "chocolate makers" in Philadelphia and (I think) in Boston. Pittsburgh had a "cock founder," which I almost passed over in my pursuit of gunsmiths until I realized that this may have been someone who forged part of the firing mechanism of a flintlock known as the "cock." (Watch one fall, and you can see why one theory for the term "snaphaunce" claims that it comes from Dutch words for a chicken, pecking at the ground for seed.) Of course, it could also be the person who made the valve that goes into kegs of beer.

The most surprising official job title was in Boston: "Inspector of Nails." This was apparently a government official, I suspect somewhat like the sealer of weights and measures.

I am suffering from microfilm reading fatigue right now, but I will say that this three days in Berkeley was spectacularly useful--and quite interesting.


 
My Anger At The Spammers Is Rising, Fast

I am now getting hundreds of spam a day--offering me items that I not only don't want, but are singularly inappropriate to me: penis enlargers, ways to get out of debt, Viagra, HGH, and septic tank services. Talk about bad targeting: they might as well offer me breast implants. Yes, I guess I can spend the time and money in something a bit smarter than Internet Explorer to deal with this flood, but I resent this, immensely. Are the rest of you getting this level of unwanted crud? I found myself briefly wondering if someone was intentionally adding me to spamlists to overwhelm my email, and thus prevent me from getting anything done.

If this continues, I will have no choice but to abandon email.


 
Serendipity

One of my reasons for going to Berkeley's library was to verify quotes. In some cases, I had copied down text from a book, and found some discrepancies that made me suspect that I had scrambled a word or two.

In other cases, I was using quotes from a secondary source, and I wanted to verify that the secondary source had correctly quoted the primary source. This is a problem not just with those historians who intentionally deceive, but also with historians who are careless.

In this particular case, I had a quote from the Boston Gazette of 1741. There's a mention of a gunsmith in an ad, so I decided to verify the accuracy of the quote. The quote was accurate--but what was interesting was another ad on the same page by a merchant, listing a number of goods that he was trying to sell--including both muskets and pistols. I went forward and backward--and found that more than a year (to the end of the film reel), most issues of the Boston Gazette had at least one ad selling firearms, and some issues had ads from two different merchants offering firearms for sale. (I am excluding the ad from a merchant selling six pounder cannon.) Since Professor Bellesiles's book Arming America claimed that there was no significant market for guns in early America, most guns were kept locked up in government arsenals, and there were almost no guns for sale, this is pretty conclusive counterevidence.

I went back to the beginning of the Boston Gazette's print run, in 1719, and briefly tried to check every issue--but that's more than a thousand issues. Instead, I settled for checking 1720 and 1730 to see if gun ads appeared there as well. They did, but far less frequently (perhaps because Boston was a smaller town at the time, with less need for advertising).

On Monday, I was waiting for some stuff to come upstairs from the underground nuclear bomb-proof storage facilities of the library. (I think it's about as deep as the Bat Cave, but not so interesting in its decor.) While waiting, I pulled out the New York Herald of 1838. You see, Professor Bellesiles claimed (and large numbers of serious historians believed him), that there was no significant private market for handguns in America before 1848, when Samuel Colt started aggressively marketing handguns to Americans for the first time. Now, I know that this isn't true, but it was amusing that the very first issue of the New York Herald that I read had an ad for pistols--with hundreds available in one store--and that ad appeared off and on for several weeks, until I ran out of patience to read the microfilm. (I have similar ads from the same era from a few other newspapers as well, such as the Nashville Daily Republican Banner).

Now, I find myself wondering: how did so many historians, many of them specialists in this period, get taken so easily by Bellesiles? Almost every source that I check shows guns are widespread and cheap. How could any historian who had spent much time reading primary sources from the period have missed something this obvious?

Interesting item: also in the New York Herald of 1838 are lots of ads selling various patent medicines for treating syphillis. There's not beating around the bush in these ads. They are direct about the disease that they promise to cure, and refer to "organs of generation." Not what you expected to see in a newspaper then, is it?


 
The Decline of the Essay in High School

I saw this Los Angeles Times article yesterday when I was visiting the People's Republic of California.
High school junior Dominique Houston is a straight-A student enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes at Northview High School in Covina. She is a candidate for class valedictorian and hopes to double-major in marine biology and political science in college, preferably UCLA or the University of San Diego.

But the 17-year-old said she has written only one research paper during her high school career. It was three pages long, examining the habits of beluga whales.

Houston frets over whether she will be able to handle assignments for long, footnoted research papers once she gets to college.

"Bibliographies? We don't really even know how to do those. I don't even know how I would write a 15-page paper. I don't even know how I would begin," she said.

Her experience appears to be increasingly common. Across the country, high school English and social studies teachers have cut back or simply abandoned the traditional term paper.
While the article does criticize standardized testing for some of this, it also acknowledges that some of this is the result of a post-literate culture. Some of the college professors they quote are saying the same thing that my wife tells me:
All schools need to refocus that way, said Gary Orfield, a professor of education at Harvard University. During his public high school days, he wrote many research papers, including one on Shakespeare. Such assignments are rare today, he said, because "we're in such an idiotic period in education that we've simplified it into filling in this bubble."

"If we send students to college without being able to think, synthesize or write in a coherent way, students are going to be crippled, no matter what their test scores are," he said.

The result shows in the awful quality of many college term papers, said J. Martin Rochester, author of a book on failing education systems and a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

"I read every paper line by line," he said of his students' research projects. "It's one of the most painful ordeals you can ever go through. Students today cannot write a complete sentence."
I think the essence of the problem, however, is the quote about students not "being able to think, synthesize or write in a coherent way...." If you can't think or synthesize, what are you going to think? What television and newspaper journalists tell you.


 
Yeah, I Will Be Blogging Again, Real Soon Now

I returned from Berkeley last night, and I am still recovering from microfilm reading fatigue. If I were forced to do this eight hours a day, I would probably start drinking--perhaps heavily. I have lots to say, and much of it is quite interesting and amusing stuff from the 18th and 19th centuries.


Monday, May 19, 2003
 
Why Blogging Is Light

I'm at UC Berkeley, researching various topics in early American gun ownership. I will have a lot to say about Berkeley when I return--but I have found some amazing things during my research!