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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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, April 10, 2004
How Do You Forget Your Gun In A Restroom? Especially when you are an air marshal? A gun was found in a bathroom at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport Thursday night, reported NewsChannel5.When I carry a gun, I am always aware of it. I could no more "forget" my gun in a restroom than I could "forget" my pants. If you carry in a shoulder holster, there's no reason to remove it. If you carry in a hip holster, the temptation to pull the gun while your pants are down is pretty strong--but you put the gun into the crotch of your pants, to make sure that you don't forget it! How hard is this? Friday, April 09, 2004
Is The ACLU Asleep At The Wheel? Let me emphasize that I do not want them trying to suppress this event in a public school. Yes, it is a cultural event. It is also a religious event. But because it isn't a Christian religious event, it seems to be allowed without ACLU filing suit: Thailand native and assistant kindergarten teacher Warunee Koonrajaksebonde, known by the students as Mrs. Doi, led the school in a Thai new years celebration — complete with dancing and water blessings.This is a religious event in about the same way that a creche on public property is a religious event--one with strong cultural components as well. Yet the ACLU wouldn't think of suing to prevent "diversity" as long as the event isn't Christian. Thanks for the pointer to Silflay Hraka, who, being an intelligent person, came to similar conclusions. Need A Reader Or Two For An Article Aimed At Amateur Astronomers I need two readers to look over an article that I am hoping to submit to a couple of astronomy magazines. It's a product comparison, and I want to make sure that it is clear enough, since this isn't an area in which I normally write. Yes, I'm beginning to branch out a bit, since, aside from my Shotgun News column, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to get anything published in gun magazines anymore. This is about 1 MB of article because of the pictures, so you might not want to volunteer if you have a slow connection. UPDATE: Thanks, I have two readers! Do Laws Affect Behavior? Professor Volokh's defense of why obscenity prosecutions won't really change anything without an extraordinary level of government intrusiveness, and Michael Williams' comments about the struggle over Partial Birth Abortion, suddenly cause me ask: do libertarians believe that laws do not change behavior? I would agree that a law that is overwhelmingly opposed by the population will require extraordinary efforts to enforce it--and that enforcement will usually not change attitudes. But what about a law that does enjoy general support? In particular, the civil rights laws passed by Congress in the early 1960s. They enjoyed broad, although perhaps shallow support. Would anyone argue that these laws did not change behavior, and eventually, attitudes? Did they require an intrusive federal government? Sure. It didn't turn out to be quite as intrusive as some of the principled opponents worried, but it was real, nonetheless. Now, perhaps Professor Volokh really means that laws that discourage pornography are a bad thing. That's a question of public policy on which reasonable people can disagree. That's not the same as his claim that such laws will have little or no impact without Big Brother efforts to enforce it. Labels: abortion Racism Is In The Eye of the Beholder? I was reading through the British government's report on "Racist Incident Monitoring"--what we would call a hate crime. The total number of crimes motivated by religion isn't huge: 18 cases in a bit more than a year, with 10 of them involving Muslims. While the number of cases isn't huge, the victims are disproportionately Muslim--no surprise after 9/11. Or are they? First of all, in at least 6 of those crimes, both defendant and victim were Muslim. (See pages 35-36.) More important is the definition used by the Crown Prosecution Service: 1.2 For the purposes of this report, the police and CPS have used the Macpherson definition of a racist incident, which states that:Think about this for a second. The victim might well be right about the racist intent of the attacker. The victim might well be wrong, paranoid, or intentionally lying to get more sympathy, or to increase the seriousness with which the crime is treated--which would not be at all surprising, considering that there are more than a few al-Qaeda sympathizers among the Muslims of Britain.‘a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. If two people of the same race get into a fight, no one assumes that it is driven by race. If two people of different races get into a fight, it is surprisingly easy for the victim to honestly (and still wrongly) suspect racist intent. The Crown Prosecution Service needs a more rational definition. Israel's Pig Brigade A friend tells me that Joseph Farah's "G2 Bulletin" (a subscription online service) is reporting the following. I report it as much for your amusement as news: A special Israeli security group, known as "Gdud Ivri," or Jewish Legion, is enlisting pigs in its life-and-death fight with Islamic terror, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.I'm told that while Islam has similar exceptions to Judaism regarding pigs, that at least in some Muslim countries, the cultural baggage associated with pig contact is vastly more powerful than any religious objections--or exceptions. BBC Taken Over By Fundamentalists Well, Instapundit will doubtless think that, after reading this article: Promiscuity 'fuelling HIV spread'Oh surprise, surprise! Here's another part of the article, designed to infuriate the ACLU's campaign for "sexual autonomy" for 14 year olds: In another article, researchers in Canada said abstaining from sex is the best way of protecting against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.There's a whiner in every bunch: The UK charity Terrence Higgins Trust expressed doubts about the ABC strategy.I'm trying hard to make sense of this statement. He seems to be saying that unlike Uganda, women in London don't have any "control over their sexual encounters." What? Or does he mean that monogamy is unrealistic for his constitutency? More On Volokh's Argument About The Ineffectiveness of Laws Professor Volokh is still trying to defend his position that laws do not change behavior: A bit more about the federal government and obscenity: The chief defense that I've seen of the federal government's obscenity crackdown (for instance, see Clayton Cramer's post, though several other correspondents made the same point) is that it may decrease the availability of porn through non-Internet commercial channels: cable, for instance, or hotel pay-per-view.The fact is that in hotels, most consumers of porn do not have Internet access, or a computer with them. Many consumers (especially the casual consumers) aren't going to go out and get a broadband connection just to watch porn. The notion that removing porn from cable TV and hotel pay-per-view is going to produce a "tiny decrease" in availability is laughable--unless pornography is similar to an addictive drugs in how much effort consumers are willing to expend to get it. The bigger problem, of course, is that prosecuting most of the current "mainstream" pornography under the constraints of Miller v. California (1973) is not going to work. The successful prosecutions are going to be of porn that depicts rape, sex with minors, bestiality, and similar materials. UPDATE: When I say "depicts... sex with minors" I mean movies that while using adult actresses, intend them to be seen as being underage. Volokh now says that his argument, however, was about what the next step would be for the government: Rather, I was asking what the government's likely next steps would be. One possibility is that the government prosecutes some U.S. pornographers, sees some apparent success as hotels and cable channels stop running porn, notices that people are still using lots of Internet foreign-distributed porn, and decides "OK, we've done all we really can. Sure, all our prosecutions aren't really changing people's consumption, but that's fine. We'll either keep going with the futile prosecutions, or close up shop."But this is based on Volokh's assumption that nearly every current consumer of porn, if it isn't available with a click of the TV remote, at home, or in a hotel, is going to get a broadband connection at home, or start taking a laptop with them, only checking into hotels with broadband service. This is clearly incorrect, and so this won't be "apparent" success, but actual success. Sure, there will be those who start downloading stuff on the Internet, and paying for it--but unless Volokh knows something that I don't, paying for downloaded porn isn't going to be as cheap as pay-per-view cable porn--and more than a few consumers are going to be reluctant to give their credit card number to a web site, for fear of its abuse. (I understand that more than a few people who have charged porn downloads have spent months trying to get unauthorized charges to stop.) The other possibility, though, is that the government isn't going to be happy just with the limited effects that Cramer and the others describe. Remember that the planned prosecutions are of the producers, not of the cable companies and hotels, which after all are also distributing porn and thus potentially legally liable -- this makes me doubt that the government's ambitions are limited to blocking the hotel and cable distribution. Rather, people will say: "Look at this foreign cyberporn loophole -- we've got to close it." And what will they need to do to close it? Well, either my option #2 (mandated nationwide Internet filtering by service providers, with a blacklist of sites maintained in real-time by a federal agency) or option #3, locking up porn consumers.Option #2, however, would require a new federal law--one that will be vigorously opposed by ISPs for technical and liablity reasons, and might well run afoul of Constitutional questions, unless the blacklist is very, very narrowly defined to satisfy Miller v. California (1973). A blacklist that met this requirement would exclude relatively little porn--indeed, the Miller test would likely have the effect of removing only a small percentage of the current porn. To the extent that it imposed any changes on how porn is produced, it would likely be to make it more like regular movies--with something recognizable as a plot. Option #3, unless it is targeted only at clear and knowing violations, is going to be politically unpopular, and again runs into not only the question of defining obscenity, but also runs afoul of Stanley v. Georgia (1969). Thursday, April 08, 2004
Makes You Proud To Be An American... From the Dallas Morning News (registration required), a column by Steve Blow. Warning: the language is pretty explicit, and not suitable for children or too innocent adults. But then again, it's quoting from an album whose song won the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards: Warning to readers: The following column contains vulgar and sexually explicit language. It is about a children's award. More Evidence That Guns Aren't Magic---and Criminals Are Sometimes Hopelessly Stupid From Kokomo, Indiana: KOKOMO, Ind. -- A Kokomo bar owner says he just did what he had to do when a man armed with a shotgun walked into his bar around closing time early Wednesday morning. Exporting Not Just Jobs, But The Machinery As Well I've been of mixed feelings on the outsourcing issue. I have also been concerned that at least part of why China is getting so many jobs is the Chinese government's manipulation of exchange rates. I don't know how to react to this story, except with some serious misgivings: America's sunset industries are rising in the East. Literally. Gun Controlled Britain Make sure you visit the Guardian's page here. Keep telling yourself: restrictive gun control works in Britain! Safe Handgun Storage A reader recommends this product for those who can't justify a big gun safe, but still need to adequately secure a handgun. What Parents Expose Their Kids To I mentioned a couple of days ago that I am always amazed at the stuff that parents expose their kids to--usually violence, but sometimes sex. A reader sent me this story: You might be interested in something I saw in the movie theater one afternoon. A Reminder Of The Sort of People With Whom We Are Fighting I have had way too many leftists tell me, "Well, wouldn't you do the same thing if someone invaded the U.S.?" Not if the invaders knocked over torturocracy like Saddam Hussein's government--and I wouldn't make threats like these: Iraqi militants are today threatening to burn three foreign hostages to death unless their country quits the US-led coalition.These are monsters that must be exterminated. There's no two ways about it. If you negotiate with savages like this, it had better be in the category of saying, "Nice doggy" while looking for a rock. There is nothing heroic about these monsters; there is nothing courageous about them. Anyone that makes excuses for this sort of behavior is a savage also. Another Publisher Says No University of North Carolina Press rejected this as well. It is rather unfortunate that are no scholarly conservative or libertarian publishing houses. The Mechanics of Cracking Down on Obscenity Professor Volokh presents a standard libertarian argument: even if the Justice Department's campaign to shut down obscenity is constitutional, and good public policy, how are you going to implement it? Let me start out by saying that while there is a lot of material that is clearly obscene under Miller v. California (1973), there is an awful lot of erotica that would probably survive the Miller test--and it would not be difficult to find ways to rework many of the hardcore porn movies into something that could survive such a test. Softcore porn on cable TV is pretty well safe under the Miller test, since much of it seems to be of about the same artistic and literary merit of your average teen slasher movie. (Yes, this is not a high bar to clear.) Whether the Justice Department's apparently broad brush approach is good public policy is another matter. You can make an argument that some of the obscene material involving young looking "actors" or violence might be a good use of resources to suppress, simply because of the corrosive effects that it has on the society, especially to the extent that its availability makes certain creeps feel "normal." I am not so sure that the resources are well-spent trying to suppress most of the obscene materials currently on the market. However, Professor Volokh's argument that suppressing U.S. manufacture will simply drive the marketing of this stuff off-shore misses one rather fundamental point: the mere fact that something is illegal to produce will tend to reduce the supply of it in most commercial channels. Yes, if someone really wants to download obscene materials, they will go ahead and purchase it online, and download it. You won't find it available as a "premium" channel when you check into a hotel, however, nor will it be offered by your cable provider. We can argue about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is that when you make something illegal, it removes it from "respectable" distribution channels. You always have to ask the question: will removing a commodity from "respectable" channels make much of a difference with respect to the social problems that you seek to solve? Drug addicts will still seek out their drug, even if it is illegal. Most people will not seek it out, even if the drug is legal. The people that are likely to be removed from the market for the drug are those who were not addicted, but were using it occasionally--and they aren't usually the problem. The real gain may be the people that do not even start to use the drug because of its illegality, and who wish to avoid the stigma or the risk of purchasing through black market channels. I am not sure that the analogy of obscenity to drugs works very well. While there are people who are addicted to obscenity (in a psychological sense), I do not get the impression that they are the mass market for it. Making obscenity illegal means that a lot of people who occasionally watch the clearly illegal materials will find it more difficult to obtain. For many, this will be enough of a barrier to switch them to erotica that do not violate the Miller test, or find some other source of entertainment. For those who want to draw the analogy to gun laws, the argument is equally valid. My disagreement with the gun prohibitionists is that they assume that guns are intrinsically bad or evil. I do not. I would agree on one point, however: complete laissez faire with respect to guns would not be a good thing. I support laws that discourage convicted felons from possessing firearms by threatening them with prison. (I would be more supportive of such laws if they applied only to convicted violent felons.) I like the idea of laws that require background checks for criminal history or mental illness as a condition of receiving a firearm. If the gun prohibitionists weren't using the so-called "gun show loophole" argument as a cynical way to shut down gun shows--if they were willing to apply the same law to all transfers, everywhere--we might be able to find some common ground. Background checks don't work perfectly; if they can made to work in a manner that disproportionately disarms felons and mental patients, while having minimal (not necessarily zero) impact on others, I could live with this, and would even regard it as a law worth having. Gun prohibitionists, however, don't support background checks for that purpose; they support such laws to disarm everyone, because they refuse to acknowledge that there is a difference between a convicted felon and a law-abiding adult. Professor Volokh has fallen into the traditional libertarian trap: the assumption that a law must be 100% effective to be worthwhile. It only has to influence people at the margin to change their behavior in a positive direction, without introducing counterproductive behaviors. I am not convinced that the Justice Department's current efforts (assuming that they are accurately portrayed) are necessarily the best way to do this--but I am also not convinced that they are intrinsically doomed to failure. Good News For The Unemployed--And Those Employed As President From Reuters: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless aid dropped sharply last week to the lowest in more than three years, the government said on Thursday in a further sign of a reviving employment market. Ten Commandments Case Going To En Banc Hearing in 8th Circuit The Omaha World-Herald reports that the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated a three judge panel's order to remove the Ten Commandments from a city park, and called for an en banc hearing instead. The Fritz Feds blog reports that under 8th Circuit rules, this means that a majority of the active judges had to have voted for an en banc hearing--and that of the eleven judges that could be on this panel, eight were put there by Republicans, and three by Democrats. Fritz thinks this is likely to be a ruling in favor of the Ten Commandments monument staying there. Of course, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is a reminder that being appointed by a Republican doesn't guarantee anything--but it seems likely that a majority of the judges would vote for an en banc hearing because they don't agree with the decision of the three judge panel. Thanks to How Appealing! for the links. Sexual Orientation and Smoking Michael Williams points me to an interesting article in New Scientist that finds that lesbians smoke at very disproportionate levels: Teenage lesbian or bisexual girls are many times more likely to smoke regularly than straight girls their age. They are the worst hit by tobacco among all groups of young people, according to a new US study.The real sign of the inability of the researchers to get around the PC assumptions is in the next paragraph: "We were surprised," says lead researcher, S Bryn Austin at Children's Hospital Boston, Massachusetts. "Antigay stigma and harassment, rejection from family and friends, and sometimes even physical violence can create a hostile environment for many young people coming to terms with their sexual orientation. This, combined with the tobacco industry's targeted marketing to lesbian and gay communities, is putting lesbian and bisexual girls in harm's way."Gee, do you suppose that you could imagine another reason for this? I've posted before about studies that show homosexual and bisexual women are disproportionately IV drug abusers. "Women who have sex with women," to use PC terminology, are about 1-2% of the U.S. population--but 20-30% of IV drug abusers in this study. I've mentioned the San Francisco Department of Public Health study that found that 28% of homosexual men and 48% of homosexual women reported having been sexually abused as children [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, p. 24.] Some were just beginning to recover memories of these events [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, 55-56]. That child sexual abuse victims end up disproportionately substance abusers is also well-established--and yet these curious coincidences of high rates of sexual abuse victimization, of substance abuse, and a plausible causal relationship between sexual abuse as children and adult sexual orientation--it's treated as a form of flat-Earthism. Labels: child sexual abuse Teaching As Therapy The experience of my wife and I attending Sonoma State University was that there seemed to be a number of professors for whom class was a form of therapy--a way for them to deal with their demons. Not surprisingly, these were among the more wasteful classes (at least for the students). I had an ethnic studies class where the professor insisted quite frequently that attitudes about race in America hadn't changed since the 1950s--and here he was, a black guy who was a tenured professor and an elected member of the school board in an overwhelmingly white city. He told us that in the 1950s, he and a white girl that he knew would respond to apartment rental ads just for the reaction of the landlord. (He told us that they stopped doing this when one landlord's response was to have a heart attack.) My wife had a professor for a Women's Studies class whose notion of scholarship could be deduced from the fact that much of the reading for the class was 10-15 year old articles from Time and Newsweek. She handed out a fairly silly paper written by some overprivileged undergraduate about how white privilege and male privilege are very similar institutions, and then asked students to critically analyze the paper. My wife's paper pointed out the many flaws in this analogy, not just the obvious one that females aren't disproportionately raised in impoverished homes. I sat outside the professor's office while this "professor" ranted and raved at my wife for writing such a negative paper; it was pretty obvious that my wife had made a serious mistake: she actually analyzed the paper's flaws, instead of gushing over it. From then on in class, whenever my wife would raise her hand, the professor would look around, look right at her, and say, "No questions? Okay, we'll move on." You will notice that the examples that I have given are from two of the joke departments: American Multi-Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. I don't think that either of these has to be a joke--but in practice, ethnic studies departments at many schools came into existence as a way of getting the Administration Building back in one piece, and Women's Studies were started because, "Well, blacks have an ethnic studies department...." A few weeks back, I mentioned the professor at Claremont-McKenna College whose car was vandalized in a "hate crime"--and then, it turned out, that witnesses reported that she had vandalized the car herself. Her own statement's inconsistencies soon demonstrated that she was lying. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that she has a previous criminal history--and one that reminds me of our experiences at Sonoma State, where the line between emotional problems and teaching was often invisible: Police and court records show Dunn's other side. Labels: fake hate crimes Spirit Of America At Work in Iraq Unsurprisingly, the recent dramatic increase in violence is making it more difficult for U.S. forces to do their secondary jobs of winning hearts and minds. I recently received this note from Jim Hake at Spirit of America (one of my blog advertisers): With the recent violence Iraq it's been more difficult for the 1st Marine Division to conduct the rebuilding projects and engage with local Iraqis as they had wished. Nonetheless, progress is being made and we're beginning to see distribution of the flying disks ("Frisbees"), school supplies and medical supplies donated by Spirit of America.I appreciate the money that some of you have been kicking into the PayPal jar--but that's not a charitable contribution. Helping out Spirit of America will help you on next year's taxes, help ordinary Iraqis (most of whom aren't trying to hurt anyone), and perhaps create some goodwill towards the U.S.--which can only make things safer for our soldiers and Marines over there. Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Authoritarian vs. Totalitarian The distinction that U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick used to make between totalitarian and authoritarian states was that authoritarian states didn't much care what you thought, but they did care what you did. You could think "bad thoughts"--and even say them, quietly, to your friends. Totalitarian states, on the other hand, weren't content with your behavior--they wanted a uniformity of thought as well. Some would argue that this reflects the fundamentally pseudo-religious nature of political orthodoxy in totalitarian societies. Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai observed that during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards would use Chinese words to describe Mao and Maoism that had been formerly used in a religious meaning. Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil also conveys, although less directly, the essentially religious nature of Soviet Marxism (at least for the true believers). National Socialism, while not ideologically atheistic in the same way as Communism, suffered this same problem of transplanting a religious fanaticism into a political ideology--with disastrous results. What the National Socialists of Germany did with a pre-World War I slogan is quite instructive. Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Gott! emphasized that Germany (only unified in 1870) was one nation, one people, with one God (because Protestants, Catholics, and Jews all worshipped the same God). The National Socialists replaced "Ein Gott" with "Ein Fuehrer." This was idolatry every bit as much as calling Mao Zedong "The Great Helmsman." Not surprisingly, this fanaticism dressed up in twentieth century political clothing produced the same sort of barbarism that we associate with the worst of the the medieval Church's heresy trials and tortures. Burning people at the stake? Ripping a man's genitals off with hot tongs? Thumb screws? Pouring molten lead into a boot in which your foot was held? The worst abuses of medieval and Renaissance Europe were quite comparable to the actions of the collectivist political orthodoxies of the twentieth century. If there is a big difference, it is that the Century of Genocide had both technology and will to murder in the tens of millions. The Inquisition seems positively small potatoes next to that. The desire to control not mere actions, but inner beliefs shows up now in the insistence that employees not merely behave a certain way, but believe a certain way: DENVER, April 7 (UPI) -- A federal court in Denver has upheld the rights of a fundamentalist Christian who was fired for disapproving of homosexuality.This is not like the recent case in which a Hewlett-Pakard employee was fired for putting up Bible verses outside his cube condemning homosexuality. Mr. Buonanno was not accused of taking an action to make homosexuals uncomfortable. He was fired because he refused to lie and say that he "value[d]" homosexuality. If the goal of the company is to prevent harrassment or discrimination, it really does not matter what an employee thinks; what matters is his actions. That AT&T felt it necessary to cross the line from action to thoughts really says a lot about the fundamentally totalitarian nature of where "diversity" seems to be taking us: you will not even think incorrectly. What does it say about a religion--or a political ideology--when you are intent on controlling what people think? To me, it says that you don't have much confidence in the rightness of your position, that you feel the need to control what goes on inside someone else's brain. Humor My friend Don Kates sent this to me. I don't normally retell ethnic jokes, but this could almost work if the names were Jones and Smith: Six retired Floridians were playing poker in the condo clubhouse when Meyerwitz loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest and drops dead at the table.And the other joke Don sent me: why do they call it PMS? A Rather Bizarre Argument in a Ten Commandments Case Perhaps the newspaper is quoting this as a statement of belief when it is merely a statement of what his opponents believe, but at first glance, the guy arguing for removal of the Ten Commandments seems to be taking a rather odd position: While apparently thinking aloud from the bench, the judge questioned civil-rights attorney Brian Barnard, representing the Society of Separationists, on his assertion in the lawsuit that the commandments were personally delivered by God to Moses.Hmmm. If this quote is correct (and I'm real skeptical), Barnard's argument is that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses, and for that reason, should be removed! I find myself bemusedly thinking of James 2:19: You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder.Link via How Appealing! Make Sure You Show This Article To Your Spouse I'm a bit too polite to quote this article from MSNBC, but let's just say that there is something that the two of you can do together that appears to reduce the risk of the husband getting prostate cancer. For Those Who Kick In Money Via PayPal: Thanks! Even the little chunks that roll in keep me in telescope accessories, or move me closer to the day when I can write for a living. I will assume that the rest of you are either family members, friends, or starving students. The rest of you may continue to read, but you are no longer allowed to enjoy yourself as you do so! (This, of course, assumes that you are enjoying yourself now. For all I know, you are being forced to read this as part of an Abnormal Psychology class assignment.) Try Not To Go Into Shock: I'm Quoting A Gender Studies Professor And one who calls himself a progressive. He explains that Victorian attitudes about women and their bodies created shame around sexuality, and today is just different, not better: But all too frequently, my students loathe their bodies with the same puritanical intensity as their forebears. They may not be as ashamed of their sexuality as their great-grandmothers were (though some are still understandably shy), but they are still ruthlessly critical of their own flesh. The negative judgments however, are now rooted in aesthetics. Fat has replaced desire as the primary enemy to be contained and controlled. If self-control and exercise fail, there is always the surgical removal of the offender (fat) through liposuction and body sculpting.Exactly. It is very difficult for me to see a big difference between the epidemic of cutting, and the epidemic of body piercings. Both are attempts to conform to a model of "what's cool"--with the body piercings in some ways even more exploitive, because of the amount of money that young people are spending to have someone inflict pain on them--and sometimes scarring, and some health risks as well. (There's a reason you can't give blood for a year after a tattoo or a piercing, and it isn't because a bunch of spoilsports disapprove of your esthetic choices.) It does not surprise me that this ugly and bizarre habit of facial and genital piercing came out of the homosexual community--a subculture built around "Look at me!" Link via Candied Ginger. The 1960s Muscle Car: A Good Investment? From Tech Central Station: The original muscle cars were scorchingly fast and imposingly noisy mid-size cars with big engines. And now their prices are being driven skyward at car auctions where they are the hottest things past the gavel. Many of the bidders are boomers who have made it and can now afford to buy a prime piece of nostalgia from their lost youth.Hey, these were cool cars back then--but automotive technology has moved on--and improved. Yes, these were impressive automobiles--but a 1996 Chevrolet Impala SS will outperform nearly all the muscle cars of that era, in acceleration, in top speed, in braking, and in cornering. The Big Block Corvettes were all the rage in the 1960s--but at least in factory tune, none of them would out-accelerate my 2000 Corvette. The horsepower numbers that everyone focuses on from those years--the numbers that the car companies advertised--were gross horsepower figures, and did not reflect actual output in a functioning car with all the smog equipment installed. Starting in 1972, the car companies started advertising SAE net horsepower numbers. It is no surprise that the best muscle cars of today will match or sometimes beat the best muscle cars of that era. Of course, with those sort of auction prices, the temptation to buy a 1971 Malibu SS396, spend $20,000 having it rebuilt and restored in the hopes of making a killing on it is very strong--but by then, the nostalgia craze will have moved to something else. It Almost Reads Like Parody Michael Williams reports that a number of environmentalists are expressing concern about the ethics of terraforming Mars. If there were life there, this would be worthy of concern from the standpoint of lost information--but that would be the extent of the problem. (I am very skeptical that we are going to find life of any sort on Mars.) I think the bigger issue is the cost of terraforming Mars. We are talking about a major investment with a payoff measured in (at best) tens of thousands of years--and this is assuming that whatever photosynthesizing life we introduce can produce water vapor faster than it leaves. You need a lot of oxygen to produce an ozone layer, to prevent photodisassociation of water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen--and the hydrogen is moving fast enough to leave in a hurry. (There's a detailed treatment of exospheric temperature, escape velocity, and root mean square law in Dole and Asimov's Planets for Man.) Right now, governments and corporations float 30 year bonds to pay for capital improvements worth billions and even tens of billions of dollars. Imagine the cost of terraforming Mars--and then imagine the number of centuries those bonds will take to pay off. Now imagine the interest rate such speculative bonds are going to have to carry to be attractive. I think that some projects are so massive that only a totalitarian state would have a sufficiently long-term view to start them. Thanks, I'll be happy to live in a relatively free society on one planet instead. That Horrible Three Strikes Law in California If you can handle reading a pretty graphic description of this one monstrous child rapist's crimes (who would be released immediately if Three Strikes were repealed or struck down by the courts), go here. I've long been troubled by the Supreme Court's decision in Coker v. Georgia (1977) that: Rape is without doubt deserving of serious punishment; but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, it does not compare with murder, which does involve the unjustified taking of human life.Reading the account of the rapes committed by Joseph Noble tells me that Coker was wrongly decided. Alanis Morisette "Protests" Censorship Protests is in scare quotes because she actually didn't strip naked on TV to protest, but to a body suit designed to make her look naked. Michael Williams has some pretty scathing criticism of her: It may be hard to believe, but we're not afraid of you, we just don't like you. We find your nakedness and superfluous cursing to be aesthetically unpleasing. We don't want our kids to grow up to be like you, because absent the publicity machine of the fading music industry you're a pathetic, angst-ridden loser. You've written some music some people like, and that's a nice accomplishment, but it gives you about as much moral authority to pontificate on war, censorship, and politics as Humpty (pronounced with an "umpty").Williams also makes the case for file sharing violations of copyright, just to reduce the enormously outsized political influence of twits like Morisette, by cutting off their supply of money. Chernobyl Today Here's a really sobering tour of the dead zone around Chernobyl. Thanks to Jennifer's History and Stuff for the link. What Does Jupiter Look Like Through the Photon Instruments 127mm Refractor? This photograph (taken with a Celestron CGE-1400 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain) approximates it pretty well. 
Labels: telescopes Ashcroft's Campaign Against Pornography Instapundit, of course, is upset, and quotes another blogger to the effect that: The Baltimore Sun article quotes Attorney General John Ashcroft saying that porn "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet." No, Mr. Ashcroft, that's incorrect; Americans persistently invite porn into our homes through the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet.Sorry, but there is a lot of uninvited porn that comes through the Internet. I get hundreds of pieces of spam a day; my wife gets dozens; my kids get dozens to hundreds. A big chunk of this is not even solicitations to purchase porn, but pictures that pop up (at least under Microsoft Outlook) that are actual, legally obscene material, as defined by Miller v. California (1973): "Barnyard Fun," "young teens," and various forms of excretory fetishes. I've had to install spam blocking software on my computer because of the sheer volume of spam (both obscene and non-obscene)--and I don't like to do that, because it makes mistakes, sometimes throwing away stuff from friends. I've reconfigured Microsoft Outlook on my wife's computer so that it doesn't automatically show the beginning of each email, which was a nice feature--until this garbage started showing up. Do I think the government should be running around pursuing softcore pornography that people purchase in hotel rooms and on their cable TV service? No. But the Justice Department does have an obligation to enforce existing obscenity laws. Perhaps those laws don't make sense as written, but if there is this vast sea of support for pornography that Instapundit thinks there is, Ashcroft's enforcement of the laws currently on the books should cause a groundswell of public opposition, right? A few weeks back, I pointed out that Gregg Easterbrook had attacked Ashcroft for prosecuting obscene movies--and actually misrepresented that the Justice Department was pursuing all pornographic movie makers, when the article that Easterbrook linked to as his source was very clear that Justice was only prosecuting Extreme Associates, makers of movies that portray rape and murder. At the time, I pointed out this misrepresentation by Easterbrook, I let lots of influential bloggers know about this, including Instapundit, who had linked to Easterbrook's incorrect claims. Instapundit chose not point out Easterbrook's statements were simply false. My respect for Instapundit has fallen immensely because of this. I have no idea whether the original Baltimore Sun article is correct or not. It might well be that Justice is actually pursuing all forms of pornography with this new policy, in which case they are going to certainly run into serious problems in the courts. Even Miller v. California (1973), while more restrictive than Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), still leaves a lot of opportunity for sexually explicit materials: Sex and nudity may not be exploited without limit by films or pictures exhibited or sold in places of public accommodation any more than live sex and nudity can be exhibited or sold without limit in such public places. At a minimum, prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct must have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to merit First Amendment protection.The example that I gave to my Constitutional History class was Bob Guccione's Caligula, which relied on its portrayal of historical facts as an excuse for portrayal of all sorts of graphic and perverse sex. (I didn't see it; a very liberal friend--as I was at the time--went to see it, and walked out.) In some circles, it is very fashionable to be unconcerned about the coarsening effects of pornography on our society, especially on young people, whose concepts of male-female relations are still developing. A steady exposure to any idea will certainly have some influence on the viewer; that's the whole point of political propaganda and commercial advertising. This is even more true when the viewers are young people. Most adults can correctly identify the world of pornography--where women are available for sex with strangers at the drop of a hat, all sex is spectacular, and there are no STDs, unexpected pregnancies, or emotional damage from being manipulated into sex--as fantasy. The same is not true for 12 and 13 year olds, who are increasingly being soaked in pornography through email solicitations, and through its omnipresence on unsecured cable TV. (I'm just amazed at the movies that many adults consider appropriate for 5 year olds--not pornographic, but so violent that it is certainly going to create problems.) Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Sneezing Students: There's Some Truth To It After All I mentioned a couple of days ago about a bunch of students getting around a ban on prayer at a graduation ceremony. It turns out to be a bit garbled version of a real event: The Truth The Importance of Safe Storage of a Gun I'm not even quite sure that I believe this one--at least the way the newspaper tells it. Nonetheless, this is not the way to keep a gun handy: A man in Granite Falls, Wash., who slept with a pistol beneath his pillow woke up one morning last week to find the gun had gone off and shot him.Other than in bad action movies (in particular, Ice Station Zebra), there are very, very few people that have good reason to sleep with a gun this close at hand. Some people sleepwalk; some have a surprising amount of muscular activity that they can perform while completely asleep. Having a gun this close just sounds like trouble. If you are living in a situation this risky, it would be better to have the pistol between mattess and boxspring, in a holster (preferably a very stiff one). This makes it fairly inconspicuous to an intruder, and is still fairly accessible. But if you are living in a situation this risky, you really need to either: 1. Leave; 2. Secure windows and doors such that you have time to wake up, and grab your gun before the intruders get in; 3. Have someone stand watch. I had one very, very frightening weekend in Irvine when the Night Stalker was torturing, raping, and killing people within five miles of us. That Saturday nigth we had our apartment as secure as we could; there was a handgun on my wife's nightstand, and an AR-15 against the wall on my side of the bed. Fortunately, Ramirez was caught a couple of days later. UPDATE: A reader points out that a revolver is unlikely to go off by accident (hard to cock and fire without some pretty deliberate action)--and he didn't wake up? More likely, he is covering up a suicide attempt, or a murder attempt by someone else. Violence in Literature: Are There Limits? Professor Volokh links to a San Francisco Chronicle story about a creative writing class at Academy of Art University in San Francisco in which a student turned in a story so graphic and gruesome that eventually, San Francisco homicide investigators interrogated the student (warning: the article is very graphic--I've left out by far the worst parts): The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the teacher [Jan Richman] panicked, wondering what to do now that she had already handed out copies to her class to take home and read.If you have a strong stomach, the sentence following this in the story, where the instructor tells us that a particularly gruesome element of the story isn't even the first time that she has seen this in student homework, prompts me to think that something is very wrong in America. Professor Volokh observes: I sympathize with administrators' concerns about the risk of violence, aimed both at students and at administrators and teachers. But a lot of literature has violent and disturbing themes (perhaps because a lot of life has violent and disturbing themes). Are university students and professors really supposed to entirely avoid it, on pain of expulsion and firing?Sure, a lot of literature has violent and disturbing themes, and to the extent that it reflects life, there's certainly a point where you can't avoid it. But how far down the path does a university really need to descend? Do you really have to swim in the sewer to know that it smells bad? One of the difficulties with the tendency of our society to turn everything into binary opposites is that discretion and judgment cease to be options. There are stories that are dark; I read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" last night, and it's disturbing. But once you abandon the notion of judgment, why not assign American Psycho? What makes one tale of madness and murder acceptable literary material, and another unacceptable? From a legal standpoint, it's very difficult to draw a bright line between the two--even though most everyone (outside the ACLU) can see the difference. My wife took a literature class in which the instructor assigned a whole bunch of murder mysteriy stories. Having grown up in Los Angeles, she had too many friends and acquaintances who had been murdered, raped, mutilated (yeah, it was that sort of place back then). She wrote an essay explaining why she refused to read through them all. The professor was more than accommodating. From the description in the Chronicle news story, one might conclude that this student was so immersed in this crud that he couldn't see the problem. FBI Competence Terry Nichols' trial on state murder charges in Oklahoma is producing more embarrassing evidence that the FBI's competence is a little deficient: McALESTER, Okla. (AP) - An FBI fingerprint examiner Tuesday said he mistakenly testified earlier in the week that he had found Terry Nichols' prints on a piece of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case.If you read the trial transcripts of McVeigh's trial, this will not be a surprise. It's tempting to assume that the FBI manipulated the evidence to get a neat clean case that didn't raise too many questions, but it could be simple incompetence. And we are relying on these guys to protect us from terrorists? If You Need a Better Example of Europettiness Than This... Here is the story of a man who ended up legal trouble for selling stuff to his customers in non-metric units: Steven, known affectionately as the Metric Martyr, became the people's champion for his courage in standing up for his customers' right to buy their fruit and vegetables in imperial measures. He was, however, when asked, the first to point out that he was not anti-metric, he just wished his customers to have the freedom to choose, and he provided scales and pricing accordingly.No, really, and they confiscated his scales as well. He's dead now at age 39. Thanks to The Edge of England's Sword for the link. Government Employees At Prayer From the Detroit Free Press: Detroit police officers held hands and listened to sermons, saying that prayer -- coupled with community involvement -- was the only solution to the city's surge of horrific crimes.Now, the experts say that this wrong: "That sounds like a police agency that's thrown its hands in the air," said Lance Smith, the director of community policing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.Think about it for a moment: what's the single most important determinant of murder rates? The attitude of the people. If people overwhelmingly subscribe to old-fashioned ideas like "You shall not murder," do you suppose that it just might have some impact on the murder rate? There's a reason that murder rates vary so dramatically in the U.S.--and the moral code of the people is clearly an important component of that. This should be self-evident; murder is a moral problem. Now, if you subscribe to the ACLU misreading of the First Amendment as a ban on any governmental involvement with any sort of religious activity, then this is a clear violation. But if you recognize, as the men who passed the First Amendment in 1789 did, that religion is one of the methods by which humans restrain their worst and most animalistic passions, then this sort of general support is not a problem. As George Washington's Farewell Address to Congress observed: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.Maybe professors and other intellectuals can be moral people because of the "influence of refined education" (although I haven't generally seen that to be the case), but for most Americans--the rabble that pays the taxes and does most of the production in our society--religion remains a fundamental part of the moral structure. Without it, you end up with Detroit. Gutsy Woman Performs C-Section On Herself It reminds me of that famous picture of the president of Johns Hopkins Medical School doing his appendectomy early in the 20th century with a mirror and all his students standing around watching--except he was using local anethestic. This woman was just using alcohol: LONDON (Reuters) - A woman in Mexico gave birth to a healthy baby boy after performing a Caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, doctors said Tuesday.Don't try this at home, kids. It's 11:00 PM. Do You Know Where Your Mortgage Payment Is? Front Page has a pretty astonishing article about how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--two semi-governmental mortgage lenders--are contributing milions of dollars a year to fund hard left political organizations: When purchasing a home, most young couples do not dream they are contributing to an organization that funds radical, anti-Bush, left-wing advocacy groups. However, it isn’t only the philanthropic foundations that give leftists cash in droves anymore; it’s also publicly-traded, government-protected, taxpayer-subsidized companies, such as the real estate mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both can be seen channeling money into these divisive groups with motivations far left-of-center.Worth reading in full. Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science I have had a very interesting exchange with a reader about this subject. If the advocates of the intelligent design argument are correct (that certain basic components of life do not appear to be the result of random processes, but show "intelligent design"), is this science? My answer is a qualified no. What is the purpose of science? To come up with a methodology for predicting the future. We study chemistry so that we can say, "If I put ten kilograms of sodium into a container with five kilograms of water, what will be the end product?" What makes science useful (and not simply an entertaining exercise) is this ability to predict the future. In that sense, it doesn't matter what is actually happening at the lowest levels. As one of my chemistry professors at USC observed, part-way through a lecture about shells, subshells, electron clouds, probabilities, etc., "We have no idea what is going on at the subatomic level. There could be angels dancing on the head of a pin for all we know. But this lets us predict what will happen, and that's all that science is." Evolution, whether right or wrong, is a predictive tool. It lets us make some informed guesses about what will happen--although it seems unlikely that any major changes that it can predict will happen within the lifetime of our civilization. Intelligent design, even if it turned out to be true, is not a predictive tool. If living organisms are actually indicative of intelligent design, we can't predict what that intelligence is going to do, can we? In that sense, intelligent design isn't really science in the same sense that chemistry is. However: intelligent design arguments, to the extent that they raise serious questions about the blind and random process claims of evolution, are a legitimate restraining force on the dogmatism that characterizes biology teaching in primary and secondary education (and to some extent, even at the college level). If there are biological structures that do not seem to fit the blind and random development model of evolution, this is important, and worth discussing. Dogmatism is a dangerous tendency: in religion; in politics; and in science, because it shuts off serious questioning. Unlike many of the Creationist arguments, intelligent design presents some serious challenges to the more doctrinaire forms of evolution. Labels: intelligent design Monday, April 05, 2004
More About Wholesome Movies Making Money From an article in the Telegraph: The findings, taken from an analysis of box office earnings in the US, were compiled for the Christian Film and Television Commission, a viewers' campaign group, and published in its monthly magazine Movieguide.A British film critic had this to say: Sheridan Morley, the broadcaster and critic, believes that British audiences were tiring of action thrillers. "I am surprised by these findings because they go against all the wisdom of recent Hollywood," he said. "It just shows, once again, how out of touch Hollywood is with what the audience wants.Of course, the left has to justify producing depravity like Hannibal: Will Self, a film critic and columnist for London's Evening Standard, dismissed the findings as "politically tendentious. The 'moral' films that they examine tend to be films with huge publicity campaigns, merchandising tie-ins and largely aimed at family audiences, so that is far more likely to explain their box office success", he said. Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere From the Jerusalem Post article about the barbarism at Fallujah: Gliding his straight razor over a client's face, Ahmed Kadduri, of the Kadduri barber shop in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Adamiyeh, lifted his eyes long enough to spit out, "It was the Zionists and the foreign organizations that did it."Hmmm. I have some serious problems with the MTV culture's degradation of women, but the last I checked, the rape rooms of Iraq were established by Saddam Hussein, not Viacom. Along with some really degrading aspects of MTV culture, there is also considerable freedom for American women as well--it doesn't take the testimony of two women to equal a man in our culture. Perhaps there's some projection going on there. The essential problem, I fear, is well-described here: Dr. Gilan Mahmood Ramiz, a Princeton-trained Iraqi political scientist banished by Saddam in the early 1990s, observed that the people of Fallujah are "provincial and primitive. They are at base still a tribal society." Lifeboats & Abortion One of my sisters, who volunteers at Planned Parenthood, and is a strong pro-choice advocate--even to the point of opposing the Partial Birth Abortion law--sent me a page from the November 2001 Marie Claire with two accounts of abortion choices that two different women made. One involved a fetus with Down's Syndrome and heart defects. That mother was a devout Catholic, and chose to keep the baby. The other account was another devout Catholic, but the baby was anecephalic. (A serious neural tube defect meant that there was no brain. Not small--but none.) She elected to have an abortion. If abortion was almost entirely the sort of cases that this article describes--a serious birth defect (Down's Syndrome) and a devastating, lethal defect like anecephaly--we would not have the enormous dispute that we have about this subject. There would be some who would be quite concerned about the Down's Syndrome case because these kids do grow up to be deficient, but not utterly helpless. There would be relatively few people prepared to argue against aborting the anecephalic babies. In any case, these are pretty rare. Oregon's rate of anecephaly, for example, fell from 0.53 per 1000 live births and fetal deaths in 1971 to 0.19 per 1000 in 1993. Spina bifidia, another usually fatal and monstrous (in the 19th century sense of the word) defect was 0.30 per 1000 in 1971, and 0.36 in 1993. The anecephalic cases--and many of the other neural tube defect tragedies--aren't going to live much past birth anyway. There's either no brain, or too little to sustain independent life. These are tragedies, but they aren't the reason for abortion being so common. The Down's Syndrome cases aren't quite so rare; for example, about 1 in 600 births in Britain is a Down's Syndrome child. Still, this isn't the big fraction of abortions. Unlike the neural tube defects, there is a serious moral dilemma involved. A lot of these kids grow up to be relatively independent adults. They aren't "monsters" in the same way that the anecephalic birth is. I don't consider Down's Syndrome to be a completely bogus argument for abortion, like abortion for sex selection. I do worry that it is a lifeboat argument. The lifeboat case ("Who do we throw overboard to save the rest of us?") is a powerful technique for questioning absolutes--but one of the problems that I have with it is that once a general principle has been discarded this way, it seems difficult to draw the line anywhere at all afterwards. One you accept the notion that it is okay to throw an innocent person overboard to save the rest of the passengers in the lifeboat--an extraordinary situation, one that almost none of us will ever be in--what happens once you apply this model of "there is nothing intrinsically right or wrong" to an everyday situation? Is it okay to withhold medical care from people who are going to die anyway, so that there are more resources available to care for the rest? Since there are few certainties in a prognosis, what percentage of certainty is acceptable for pulling the plug on someone who is "likely" to die soon? How soon is soon enough? No one gets out of here alive. At what point is it legitimate to decide that a person's remaining months of life aren't of sufficient value to justify medical care? These are troubling ethical questions, and once you cross a bright line that says "this defect is lethal" to "this defect is undesirable," we are in real danger of the eugenics ideas that led to the Holocaust. Labels: abortion Smells Like An Urban Legend To Me, But It's Still Really Cute Forwarded by a friend from a British judge friend of his. Analyze it carefully, and you won't believe it for a second, but it's still funny, and presented in that spirit. (Of course, if you can find documentation for it, let me know!) They walked in tandem, each of the ninety-three students filing into the already crowded auditorium. With rich maroon gowns flowing and the traditional caps, they looked almost as grown up as they felt. Dads swallowed hard behind broad smiles, and moms freely brushed away tears. More Signs of the Recovering Economy From Reuters: A key measure of the vast U.S. services sector grew with surprising strength to hit a record high in March, offering further evidence that economic recovery is gaining traction, a report showed on Monday.I can see the recovery in my local Wal-Mart. I was in there Saturday, and they were quite open about the fact that they are short-handed. Wal-Mart is hiring, and perhaps the best evidence that jobs are readily available are the beggars at the end of the parking lot, with little signs saying, "Homeless, need food." (Yes, it is a long walk to where Wal-Mart is hiring.) These sort of displays, in my experience, are more common once the economy is going well, and there are people feeling guilty about buying things that they don't really need. Of course, this "homeless, need food" young man seemed, at first glance, to be what an Elizabethan would have called a "sturdy beggar." He was young, didn't seem to be incapable of physical labor. Of course, the problem might be mental illness, or some obscure physical ailment that prevents him from working for Wal-Mart. (Oh yes, Wal-Mart drug tests potential employees. Hmmm. Maybe I see now what the "obscure physical ailment" might be that prevents him from working there.) Ninth Circuit Dissents The Ninth Circuit was asked for an en banc rehearing of the Nordyke case, which challenged a county ban on guns on county property on Second Amendment grounds. While we lost the battle to have the case reheard, you can read the arguments of those who supported rehearing here--and wow! How the world has changed in the last thirty years! Federal judges making the argument that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms--and not to go hunting, or even for individual self-defense--but to keep the government afraid of the people. Judge Kleinfield: I join fully in Judge Gould’s superb dissent, which explains coherently and most admirably why the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.From Judge Gould's dissent (in which Judges O’Scannlain, Kleinfeld, Tallman, and Bea joined): An “individual rights” interpretation, as was recently adopted by the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Emerson, 270 F.3d 203 (5th Cir. 2001), consistent with United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939),2 is most consistent with the text, structure, purposes, and history of the Second Amendment, as well as colonial experience and pre-adoption history. It also reflects what I consider to be the scholarly consensus that has recently developed on the question of how to best interpret the Second Amendment. We should recognize that individual citizens have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, subject — in the same manner as all other core constitutional rights — to certain limits.There was a time, even twenty years ago, when you probably could not have found one federal judge in the 9th Circuit willing to make these arguments--now we have lots of them willing to do so. Thanks to Don Kates for alerting me to this. Labels: gun rights Why Ann Coulter Bugs Me She can be very, very funny. She has a sharp (often razor-sharp) wit. But then she writes columns like this one that leave out some rather important points. In the 1970s and 1980s, everything in U.S. foreign policy (with the singular exception of support for Israel) was subjugated to the Cold War. We overturned the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 because of a perception (perhaps rightly so) that he would be too friendly to the Soviet Union. Yes, I know that oil plays a part in this, but as the article I link to points out, a couple of years had passed from nationalization until the U.S. & British backed coup--it was the worrisome ties to the Iranian Communist Party that drove a lot of the fear. We didn't overturn the Mexican government when it nationalized American oil companies in 1938--and they were a lot closer. (We also have previous experience with overturning Mexico's government.) Cold War proxy issues dominated the relationship with Iran and Iraq throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as we first backed Iran against the Soviet-leaning Iraqi Baathist Party, and then provided very minimal assistance to Iraq against the Iranian mullahocracy. The attempts to get on the good side of Iraq's government were driven by the Cold War; it made sense at the time, but oh, what a lot of terrible alliances we made because of this (to which President Bush's democracy in the Middle East speech a few months alluded). I really can't get any enthusiasm up for defending Frat Boy Clinton's actions concerning terrorists. There are just enough tantalizing clues that suggest that the FBI may have known about Iraqi and Mohammed Atta involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 that were probably ignored because it served Clinton's political interests to cast this as a "right-wing militia" issue. Nonetheless, what, exactly, could Clinton have done, considering the political will of the American people about foreign intervention? Until 9/11, Americans weren't prepared to risk blood or treasure for problems far away. Yes, Clinton could have tried to sell the American people on why this was important--but that would require a level of statesmanship that Bill Clinton simply lacked. Tony Blair has it--and may lose his job for it. Prime Minister Aznar of Spain had it--and he lost his job for it. W developed it after 9/11--and there is still a small chance he may lose his job for it. I can't blame Clinton for refusing to take a risks on a problem that, at this point, was a widely scattered set of deaths, spread over more than a decade, and nearly all overseas. Forest. Trees. Immigration. Welfare. What About Wages For Workers? Tyler Cowen and David Bernstein over at Volokh Conspiracy are both expressing their preference for immigration over domestic welfare spending. (At least, I think that is what they are saying.) Professor Bernstein's remarks are a little more clear: he recounts his experience asking a liberal about open borders and welfare spending: I once asked a very prominent "modern liberal" scholar, someone everyone reading this blog would likely have heard of, how he reconciled his support of a Social Democratic welfare state with general principles of liberalism holding that each individual has equal value, given that stringent immigration restrictions would inevitably be required to sustain the lowest echelon of society at the levels he had deemed (in print) necessary. Surely, I noted, he wouldn't argue that U.S. taxpayers were obligated to raise all Mexicans' standard of living to U.S. levels. He agreed, and initially argued that he also was against stringent immigration restrictions, lamely arguing that the affordability of massive levels of social welfare spending would not be affected by high levels of immigration. He eventually gave up on that one, acknowledging that ensuring that millions of new immigrants met his required standard of living for all Americans would be incredibly expensive. He then paused for a moment, and sheepishly said something to the effect that "maybe there is some kind of theory that we owe more of a duty to those already within our own political community." I'm with Tyler on this one; borders are arbitrary, and a political theory that strongly prefers the well-being of someone in El Paso to someone in Ciudad Juarez who wants to move to El Paso may somehow be justifiable, but it isn't liberal. I prefer the classical liberal tradition of (relatively) open borders and a (relatively) meager welfare state to a more closed Social Democratic system.What leaves me a bit mystified is the rather narrow focus that both seem to be using on this. Open borders (or effectively open borders, which is what we have today) drive down wages of existing workers. For all the complaining (some of it quite justified) about H-1B visas driving down wages among engineers and other professionals, the big losers from open borders aren't people making $50,000-$100,000 a year, it's the guys and gals making minimum wage and just a little bit above it. These workers aren't collecting welfare as cash payments, but are likely to strain the Medicaid program, because they don't get paid enough to buy health insurance, and with a few exceptions, their employers aren't providing health insurance. They are also most likely to be using food stamps, and are clients of state and local welfare agencies. These are also the workers most likely to respond to the Democratic Party's largely dishonest class warfare message. (I say, "largely dishonest" because Democratic Party policies are even more corruptly tied to corporate welfare than Republican Party policies.) I immensely respect people who are working, but could perhaps find a way to collect a welfare check. This shows a pretty astonishing level of character, or of long-term thinking. Any action that our government takes that encourages these people to stop working is a bad thing. Open borders aren't just a security problem; they create incentives for Americans at the bottom to become dependent on assistance, instead of being able to stand on their own two feet. More About My Reflector Project When I finally finished removing all the parts from the tube, I was astonished to find that it weighs nine pounds! This is astounding! I would have to buy a carbon fiber tube, or one of these fiberglass honeycomb tubes, to get anything lighter--and they wouldn't be a lot lighter. I used epoxy to patch all the holes left from the rotating ring tube assembly, sanded it. My helped me repaint it a very, very glossy bright white on the outside, and then I used flat black spray paint on the inside. It isn't quite the smooth surface that it was when Parks first made it, but then again, a little surface texture helps to hide some of the scars. This was also an opportunity to repaint the mirror cell, diagonal holder, and focuser mount flat black. I expect to put it back together this evening. Unfortunately, I still haven't ordered the new rings--one supplier makes a very nice looking set, but they don't take credit cards or PayPal, so I have to send them a check. Another supplier takes credit cards, is slightly cheaper, but I can't get a decent picture of the rings, and they paint them gray. Still waiting to see if they can paint them black or white. The rebuilt reflector will weigh 21 pounds. Even with new rings and the Losmandy dovetail plate, this is 25 pounds--compared to 35 pounds with the Parks rotating rings and the weird adapter to connect it to the dovetail plate. I'm expecting to be able to do some very high quality astrophotography with this scope, once I get it on the Losmandy mount. Yahoo! 30-Year Treasury Bonds Above 5% Again! This is a good sign that the economy is recovering in a big way. This Is A War: Some People Need To Figure This Out The headline comes from a reader. The facts make this clear to all but the most hopelessly befuddled: MADRID, Spain - The suicide apartment house blast that killed the alleged ringleader of last month's Madrid train bombings and four other terror suspects left the core of the terror group either dead or in jail, Spain's interior minister said on Sunday.Paying the Danegeld by promising to withdraw from Iraq didn't help; the terrorists were planning other bombings. The End of Trash Cans I'm impressed how much email I have received on this topic. One reader tells me that we are already there (at least about trash cans) in DC: [A]fter 9/11 in the D.C. area Metrorail subway all inside the system trash cans, newspaper vending machines, etc. were removed or closed off. And right now during rush hour the subway driver constantly repeats a low emphasis warning about "reminding someone if they've forgotten a belonging" or telling the driver about it, clearly an attempt to mitigate a Madrid style attack. (FortunatelyAnother reader tells me something that I thought was the case from my trip to London in 1999, but I wasn't sure: I saw the same in London about 12 years ago or so. I was looking for a trashcan to throw something out, and couldn't find one anywhere. Reason: It was too easy to put bombs in them. I also remember seeing signs around Buckingham Palace and the Guards Museum that said one could not leave a bike unattended - pipe bombs. If you peddled up to these places and went for a walk you wouldn't get 100 feet away before the bombsquad hauled you and your bike away. Encouraging News From Maryland A state ban on 19 named assault weapons died in committee. If this can happen in Maryland, it's a pretty good sign that "assault weapon" bans have lost much of their potency as a tool of political foolishness. The other good news is that Governor Ehrlich had threatened a veto. Why Only Cops Can Be Trusted With Guns From the New York Post: April 2, 2004 -- A court officer accidentally fired a gun inside Brooklyn Supreme Court - because the off-duty parole officer who brought it to the courthouse insisted it was a lighter that only shot flames, The Post has learned. |
