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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Lawyer Humor
Or at least, humor about lawyers: You know you need a new lawyer WHEN..........
Humor
I was going through old email, and I found this: A not necessarily well-prepared student sat in his life science classroom, staring at a question on the final exam paper. The question directed: "Give four advantages of breast milk."
What to write? He sighed, and began to scribble whatever came into his head, hoping for the best:
1. No need to boil.
2. Never goes sour.
3. Available whenever necessary.
So far so good - maybe. But the exam demanded a fourth answer. Again, what to write? Once more, he sighed. He frowned. He scowled, then sighed again. Suddenly, he brightened. He grabbed his pen, and triumphantly, he scribbled his definitive answer:
4. Available in attractive containers of varying sizes.
He received an A
ScopeRoller Product Line Expands Again!
I am now making a caster assembly for the Celestron NexStar telescopes. Unlike the ones for the Losmandy tripods, which slide inside the legs, these are sleeves that bolt onto the outside of the legs.
Someone With Too Much Time On Her Hands
Yeah, caffeine is a problem for some people. I've had to withdraw from caffeine addictions two or three times in my life. "A software engineer is a device for converting coffee into code." But seriously: (I-Newswire) - City of Shaker Heights, OHIO - ( Jan 17, 2006 ) Following a health trend that appears to be brewing up all over the nation, Mayor Judith Rawson has signed a proclamation for the City of Shaker Heights that addresses the issues regarding caffeine intoxication and dependency.
In the proclamation the Mayor is "calling upon all Shaker Heights citizens, public and private institutions, business and schools to increase awareness and understanding of the consequences of caffeine consumption."
The Observatory
I ran up to the new house this evening, partly to see if some of the annoying little problems are getting fixed (yes, they are), and partly because the sky was clear, and I wanted to drag Big Bertha out of the garage.
There are some problems with the new house as far as astronomy goes. The most serious problem is related to "twinkling." You may be aware that one of the ways to distinguish stars from planets is that, except under the most severe atmospheric turbulence, stars twinkle--and planets don't. This makes it very easy, most of the time, to pick out Saturn from stars of similar color and magnitude. But this doesn't work at the new house! There was so little atmospheric turbulence that I could not identify Saturn with the naked eye! This also means that the viewing conditions are going to be spectacular!
Dark: really dark. There was a little bit of cloud cover over Boise reflecting some light, but the Milky Way was just oppressively bright. I am going to have to relearn the constellations, because there are so many stars now visible that they wash out the magnitude 2 and brighter stars upon which I rely for finding my way around the sky.
The other discovery was that while I can roll Big Bertha out just fine--I don't have a stepstool up there to use to get to the eyepiece. For objects that are high in the sky (and just about all of them are right now), this is a problem, because Big Bertha's eyepiece is at about seven feet or more above ground level.
Oh yeah, it was cold up there--about 22 degrees when I left. At star parties, I'm used to being cold, but I am going to have to dress a bit more warmly.
The most uncomfortable aspect of observing up there is that we are in a pretty wild place. I'm still a bit nervous about having to explain the night sky to a mountain lion or a feral dog. There's no fence around the house itself--and I'm tempted to put something up for that purpose.
It is also so quiet that you have no idea how far away the few noise are that you hear. At one point, I heard someone whistling--but I couldn't see anyone out there at all. This might have been someone summoning a dog a quarter of a mile away, for all I know. I may need some time to get used to this.
Confusing Seinfeld With Real Life
I've been making the argument for some time that there's a good reason for laws that prohibit adults from having sex with minors. Jonathan Rowe, lawyer, law professor, gay activist, unsurprisingly, does not share that view. The particular case involves a 17 year old boy and a 33 year old woman, and I do agree with Rowe that what makes the situation especially exploitive is that the woman was a counselor assigned to help the 17 year old.
I would even agree with Rowe that there are legitimate distinctions based on the age of the minor. An adult having sex with a 10 year old is obviously much more serious in the damage it does than an adult having sex with a 17 year old. (For that matter, a 14 year old having sex with a 10 year old is still likely to be very damaging to both kids.) A number of states draw lines, making the punishment much more severe when the child is under 14, with a somewhat less severe punishment when the child is 15 or 16.
Still, I was amazed and amused by how Rowe defends a 33 year old having sex with a 17 year old: I don't agree that most people would find a 17-year-old female/33 year-old-male too disturbing. Not meaning to invoke a "reductio-ad-Seinfeldium," but remember Jerry Seinfeld "dated" Shoshana Lonstein when she was 17. It's frightening to think that if they traveled to Oregon, Seinfeld would have been a "child rapist."
Earth to Jonathan Rowe: Seinfield is not a documentary. (From the episodes that I have seen, I am not even persuaded that Seinfeld is a comedy.)
And yes, most people, at least most straight people, look on an age difference that dramatic when one party is a minor, with considerable discomfort--even if there is no sex involved at all. Most parents actually do their best to discourage their 16 or 17 year old daughter from dating guys that are more than 20 or 21, and on the rare occasions when the sexes are reversed, parents are usually not comfortable, and try to discourage these sort of relationships.
A lot changes between 16 and 21 for most kids.
UPDATE: A reader tells me that Rowe is referring to real-life actions of the actor Seinfeld, not the character he played on the show of the same name. It doesn't change things much, however. Perhaps in Hollywood, this isn't considered peculiar or suspet, but in the real world, most people would wonder a bit about a 33 year old asking a 17 year old out on a date--even if the relationship didn't become sexual.
Interesting Iran Report
As we learned with Iraq (and this shouldn't have been a surprise), opposition groups aren't always the most reliable and disinterested sources of information about WMDs: WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006 says a group opposed to the regime in Tehran.
The Foundation for Democracy citing sources in the U.S and Iran offered no further information.
The FDI quotes sources in Iran that the high command of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force have issued new orders to Shahab-3 missile units, ordering them to move mobile missile launchers every 24 hours in view of a potential pre-emptive strike by the U.S. or Israel. The order was issued Tuesday, Jan. 16.
Cats, Toxoplasmosis, & Schizophrenia
I've mentioned before some curious relationships between schizophrenia, cats, and the Toxoplasma parasite. New research is even more interesting: Pregnant women with high levels of Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood were more likely to give birth to children who would later develop schizophrenia. Torrey lays out more links in this 2003 paper. While none is a smoking gun, they are certainly food for thought. It's conceivable that exposure to Toxoplasma causes subtle changes in most people's personality, but in a small minority, it has more devastating effects.
If you are wondering why the title of the article is, "The Return of the Puppet Masters," it refers to the title of a 1951 Robert Heinlein novel.
A year later, Torrey and his colleagues discovered one more fascinating link. They raised human cells in Petri dishes and infected them with Toxoplasma. Then they dosed the cells with a variety of drugs used to treat schizophrenia. Several of the drugs--most notably haloperidol--blocked the growth of the parasite.
So Fuller and the Oxford scientists joined forces to find an answer to the next logical question: can drugs used to treat schizophrenia help a parasite-crazed rat? They now report their results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (press release). They ran the original tests on 49 more rats. Once again, parasitized rats lost their healthy fear of cats. Then the researchers treated the rats with haloperidol and several other anti-psychotic drugs. They found that the drugs made the rats more scared. They also found that the antipsychotics were as effective as pyrimethamine, a drug that is specifically used to eliminate Toxoplasma.
There's plenty left to do to turn these results into a full-blown explanation of parasites and personalities. For example, what is Toxoplasma releasing into brains to manipulate its hosts? And how does that substance give rise to schizophrenia in some humans? And even if the hypothesis does hold up, it would only account for some cases of schizophrenia, while the cause of others would remain undiscovered.
13 Is Too Young
It is an interesting case, because while the 22 year old went ahead and married the 13 year old in Kansas (after he got her pregnant), it appears that the prosecutor in Nebraska is pursuing the case as a violation of Nebraska law: LINCOLN, Neb. - A 22-year-old man faces criminal charges in Nebraska for having sex with an underage 13-year-old girl, although he legally married her in Kansas after she became pregnant.
There's a lot of state-to-state variation in age of consent laws (with respect to both sex and marriage). Some states have laws that just make me scratch my head and say to the legislators, "What were you thinking?" But just because I think the law is stupid doesn't automatically mean that the courts have some obligation or duty to overturn it.
The man’s lawyer said the couple, with their families’ support, “made a responsible decision to try to cope with the problem.”
Matthew Koso, 22, was charged Monday with first-degree sexual assault, punishable by up to 50 years in prison. He was released on $7,500 bail pending an Aug. 17 preliminary hearing.
Does This Violate The ABA Conduct Code?
I think so: WACO, Texas Jan 13, 2006 — A lawyer faces a felony charge of kidnapping for allegedly abducting a client from his wedding celebration in an attempt to collect legal fees.
Police say Paula Allen, 51, took Rolando Castelan from his Dec. 10 wedding and then drove him around in handcuffs as Castelan called friends and family from a cell phone to scrounge up the money he owed his lawyer, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported for its Friday edition.
Allen, who was arrested this week, referred calls to her lawyer, Ron Moody, when contacted by The Associated Press. Moody could not immediately be reached Thursday night.
Robert Ferrigno's Prayers For The Assassin
There are some books that you pick up, and you can't stop reading them--no matter how late it is. Take a look at the time stamp on this blog entry--and notice that I mentioned just a few hours ago that I was starting to read it. Quite literally, I could not sleep. I tried to stop a bit more than half-way through and go to sleep. I even took antihistamines. But it didn't work.
I will not tell you enough to spoil the plot--just what you find out on the back cover. The novel is set in the Islamic States of America in the year 2040, 25 years after nuclear weapon attacks on New York City, Washington, DC, and Mecca, have been blamed on the Israeli government. This is a detective novel involving a sociopathic killer, and a history professor who starts to turn up evidence that the attacks were done by... someone else. (If this premise seems ridiculous, notice how much of the left has now decided that the 9/11 attacks were done by the Mossad, or arranged by George Bush. Intellectuals are capable of believing all sorts of absurd things without batting an eye.)
Now, if you have read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Tower, set in an America where the Germans and the Japanese win World War II--and partition the United States between them--you are familiar with this type of novel. There's at least one science fiction short story that I have read, the title of which escapes me, in which a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos during World War II with qualms about the weapon that he is developing ingests peyote, and ends up a future where the Nazis win World War II. A defining characteristic of these "What if?" alternative histories is that there is some defining moment that changes history.
Sometimes it is a very minor event that causes the disruption. When I was young, my father liked to recite a little piece of doggerel that captures this idea of how even the smallest details can cascade into momentous results:
If I had to pick a single complaint in an otherwise gripping, crisply written, often powerful but subtle novel, it is Ferrigno's two premises that:
For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For the want of a rider, the battle was lost.
For the want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a nail!
1. In the event of an unprecedented national disaster, American religious beliefs are so tremendously malleable that large numbers of Americans would either genuinely become Muslims, or go through the motions of it.
2. That Hollywood celebrities, while tremendously of interest to many Americans, would be so effective in promoting such mass conversions to Islam. I go along with the almost unstated premise that much of Hollywood is so completely empty spiritually that they could be persuaded or manipulated into a new religion--but it wouldn't be Islam, which has rules, but more likely, it would be a "designer religion" such as Madonna's celebrity-modified Kaballah, or Oliver Stone's terribly convenient Buddhism.
Where this novel really shines, however, is how it paints what America (after most Protestants, black and white, had moved to a newly separated nation roughly corresponding to the South) might be like, with fundamentalist, moderate, and "modern" Muslims all jockeying for power. To Ferrigno's credit, he captures the tremendously brutal and totalitarian society that would result. Remember that even "moderate" Islam makes conservative Christians look like the ACLU by comparison. (Which makes the ACLU's current efforts to prevent the NSA from preventing terrorist attacks all the more disturbing.)
Best of all, Ferrigno paints with a fine camel's hair brush, not with a paint roller. You won't find the sort of clumsy speeches that, regrettably, marred Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I find it interesting that Ferrigno paints the centers of Islamic fundamentalism in the new America concentrated in the places most prone to leftist derangement today--places such as Seattle and San Francisco. While Ferrigno is never explicit about it, it is instructive that members of lunatic fringe groups seem to have no problem leaping quite astonishing political chasms--because it is the fanaticism that defines the kooks, more than individual belief systems.
I remember some years ago reading about a political science professor who, as an experiment, arranged for some Communists he knew to attend a neo-Nazi event--and a number changed allegiance. The fervor mattered more than the details--the sense of, "I have the truth, and everyone else is just not as smart as me." As an example, the Rev. Fred Phelps--the guy with the "God Hates Fags" signs at gay funerals--used to be a highly regarded left-wing attorney, with awards from the NAACP for his work.
As an example of Ferrigno's subtlety, there are perhaps three or four references in the book to air pollution, drilling in ANWR, and off the Southern California coast. There's no heavy points being made--these are just mentioned as part of the scenery, and they are exactly what we might expect such a society to do without debate or discussion, because of its totalitarian nature.
One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is that nearly all the characters are Muslims--although the protagonist is, by his own admission, a "bad Muslim." He never goes to mosque, seldom prays, and observes the rules only to the extent that the Religious Police enforce those rules. There are a couple of Catholic characters as well--and Ferrigno presents a scenario that at first seemed bizarre to me, of the Islamic government tolerating (sort of) Catholics, but not Protestants.
The more I thought about it, however, it struck me that much of the left in the U.S. regards Islam as less offensive than Protestant Christianity, hence the widespread efforts to inculcate an "understanding" of Islam in public schools after 9/11--with methods that would lead to a lawsuit from the ACLU, if the ACLU took seriously their ahistoric theory of "separation of church and state."
Ferrigno does a nice job of conveying what a tremendously brutal society this would be--with the heads of homosexuals mounted on the fenceposts along the Bay Bridge, stonings of adulterous women, assassinations by various mullahs jockeying for power--you know, just another typical week in some Arab countries for most of the last few decades. It is rather jarring, also, to imagine a society where instead of Disneyland, kids come to Palestine Adventure theme park near San Francisco, and get pictures taken wearing suicide bomber vests. (Alas, Ferrigno really isn't off the deep end on this--you may recall that Muslim children wearing simulated suicide bomber vests was all the rage at demonstrations in Europe a couple of years ago.)
Another example of Ferrigno's subtlety is how he merges liberal interest group goals--such as bans on private handgun ownership and personalized guns that can only be fired by the authorized government employee--and weaves them into the story. And he does it with a very deft touch.
One area where Ferrigno may have been a bit too subtle is with respect to taxation and legal disabilities. Muslim societies have always put non-Muslims at distinct disadvantages as a way to not very subtly pressure Jews and Christians into conversion (when not engaging in flat-out extermination, as sometimes happened). The Ottoman Empire, for example, annually taxed Jews and Christians on their net worth--at times as much as 10%. Think about how long it would take for a 10% annual tax of your net worth (as opposed to your income) to drive even a wealthy person into poverty, and you can understand why Islam was so effective at "converting the masses" everywhere it went. Ferrigno makes one very passing reference to Islam's tax of non-Muslims, and the role that this played in causing the masses to convert.
Now, this is definitely not a kid's book. One of the characters is a sociopathic assassin--and in perhaps Ferrigno's least subtle moment, his first name comes from that a rather prominent 19th century scientist. We can guess that while he went through the motions of being a Muslim to join the Fedayeen (assassin division), Mom and Dad probably gave him this name as a expression of their contempt for the values of Christian America. Being a sociopathic assassin, he enjoys killing people in ways that are horrific (except by the standards of al-Qaeda).
Dialog is, in a few places, a little more raw than I would want to expose a teenager to, and even a fair number of adults will regret what is, unfortunately, realistic adult dialog--especially when two of the protagonists are people trained to kill without remorse.
There is a bit of sex in Prayers for the Assassin, and again, perhaps a little more explicit than I would want to expose some teenagers to, and some adults who haven't lived in centers of depravity such as the San Francisco Bay Area may find it a bit more explicit than they would prefer. On the other hand, there are aspects to Ferrigno's depiction of the sexual degradation of women that are probably necessary, because this, unfortunately, is one of the problems in those Islamofascist societies that have gone off the deep end in their contempt for women.
I was a little surprised at the level of sexual adventuresomeness of the hero and heroine of the book, especially because both of them have grown up in a society vastly more censored with respect to erotica than America was in say, 1966. Of course, even Muslim societies, for all their supposed restrictions, have widespread problems with illicit sexuality. Homosexuality is utterly prohibited by Islam--and yet everyone knows that there is a lot of it, and much of it in the category of rape. I mentioned a couple of years ago my skepticism at the claim that sexual abuse of children is widespread in Middle Eastern societies--and then discovered that a folk song in Afghanistan has the lyrics: “There’s a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach. But, alas, I cannot swim ...”
A co-worker fluent in Turkish, at least conversant in Arabic, and widely traveled in that part of the world, confirmed that adult men pursuing little boys as sexual partners is widespread. Perhaps I should not assume that Ferrigno's hero and heroine are so unrealistic.
I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed reading it, and it serves as a valuable cautionary tale--and now that I am done reading it, I think I can finally get some sleep! As long as I don't think about the coming conflict with Iran about nuclear weapons....
UPDATE: A couple of readers have suggested that the story about the Los Alamos worker who is given a chance to see the future where the U.S. doesn't develop nuclear weapons is C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" (1958). I believe that this is correct. I am only slightly surprised to find that there is an entire website devoted to these "alternative history" books and stories: Uchronia: The Alternate History List is an annotated bibliography of over 2700 novels, stories, essays and other printed material involving the "what ifs" of history. The genre has a variety of names, but it's best known as alternate history.
A number of readers have also pointed out that what I found implausible--widespread conversion to Islam--is perhaps less absurd than it first sounds. One reader observes:
In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story. Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are "What if the Nazis won World War II?" and "What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?"Paul Johnson made the argument in his "History of Christianity" that Egypt and the African littoral readily converted to Islam because it solved the major disagreement they had over Christianity: the Monophysite heresy. By analogy, if you are a "modern, enlightened" Christian (think Bishop Spong), who believes that Jesus wasn't *really* the Son of God (you know, the "Jesus-was-a-great-teacher-and-philosopher" school), you might find Islam (God is God, Mohammed is His prophet) easier to swallow than your own orthodoxy!
Another reader pointed out that American Protestantism's strong democratic political structure would make it harder than control than Catholicism's more hierarchical form.
Finally, I should mention that one of the great recent surprises in the study of American slavery history is the increasing evidence that many African imports were Muslim--and this may have actually accelerated their acceptance of Christianity, relative to those Africans who were animists. Muslims at least accept the idea of one God, and regard Judaism and Christianity as substantially closer to Islam than purely pagan religions. Perhaps the trauma of being sold away from home broke a slave's confidence in his religion, and peer pressure from Christian slaves made these transitions easier.
The Chopping Block
My manuscript is now down below 117,000 words. I have not yet reached the point where I want to quote George Mason's remarks about putting his hand in a cutting box. (Of course, he was talking about his refusal to sign the Constitution--not removing more words.) This is a good thing.
The Advantages of Being a VIP
Before you laugh--I find leftist Idaho blogs (yes, they exist) that whine about how a "wingnut" like me gets over 1000 visitors a day. So while I am a pretty small fish compared to some bloggers out there, I am big enough that people send me stuff.
For example: Robert Ferrigno's new novel Prayers for the Assassin. I am going to take a break for reading Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring for a few nights and see how Ferrigno's book goes instead. Tolkien was writing fantasy; Ferrigno, in light of current events, I fear, could be writing future history.
Longitudinal Studies
The longitudinal study of children born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1977 seems to have produced an enormous body of information. Here's a paper that asks and answers the question, "Is Sexual Orientation Related to Mental Health Problems and Suicidality in Young People?" The answer turns out to be yes, but along the way, there's some fascinating data: The data were gathered during the course of the Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS). The CHDS is a 21 year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1,265 children born in Christchurch (NZ). At 21, 1,007 sample members were questioned about their sexual orientation and their sexual relationships with same sexed partners since the age of 16. Twenty eight subjects (2.8%) were classified as being of GLB sexual orientation. Over the period from age 14 to 21, data were gathered on a range of psychiatric disorders including major depression; generalised anxiety disorder; conduct disorder and substance use disorders. Data were also gathered on suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.
Of course, gay activists have long claimed that these problems have been because of growing up in a homophobic society. This longitudinal study involves people born in 1977 in New Zealand--so kids who grew up after homosexuality was no longer stigmatized in the Western world.
Results: GLB young people were at increased risks of: major depression (OR = 4.0; 95% CI = 1.8-9.3); generalised anxiety disorder (OR = 2.8; 95% CI = 1.2-6.5); conduct disorder (OR = 3.8; 95% CI = 1.7-8.7) nicotine dependence (OR = 5.0; 95% CI = 2.3-10.9); other substance abuse/dependence (OR = 1.9; 95% CI = 0.9-4.2); multiple disorders (OR = 5.9; 95% CI = 2.4-14.8); suicidal ideation (OR = 5.4; 95% CI = 2.4-12.2 ) and suicide attempts (OR = 6.2; 95% CI = 2.7-14.3).
A bit of data on those who identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual: Of the 1,007 subjects questioned at age 21, 20 (2.0%) identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual. In addition, a further 8 subjects self identified as heterosexual, but disclosed that they had had sexual relationships with a same sex partner since the age of 16. Using this information, a classification of gay, lesbian or bisexual orientation was constructed by including all of those who reported GLB sexual orientation or those reporting having same sex partnerships into the definition. Of the 28 subjects (11 males, 17 females) classified as GLB, 24 (86%) reported having sexual relationships with a same sexed partner since the age of 16. (Of the 20 subjects reporting that their sexual orientation was gay lesbian or bisexual, 9 were male and 11 were female).
It appears that the study attempted to see if the psychiatric problems were present throughout adolescence. If these were only present at adulthood, I suppose that you could argue that these were the results of a homophobic society, but the report seems to indicate that these problems were disproportionately present even at age 15.
The study also examined the possibility that the GLB (gay, lesbian, bisexual) group had an unusual family structure that might have caused their increased mental disorders. To examine the equivalence of the GLB and comparison groups a large number of comparisons were made on the childhood, family and social backgrounds of both groups prior to the age of 14.... These comparisons showed that with respect to the majority of these measures the GLB series and the comparison series had similar social, family and childhood backgrounds. However, the two groups were distinguished by two factors: GLB youth tended to have experienced a higher rate of parental change during childhood (P<.05); and GLB youth were more likely to have parents with a history of criminal offending (P<.05) than the comparison series.
This doesn't surprise me. I've mentioned before my hypothesis that childhood sexual abuse and adult homosexuality are connected. It is also clearly established that an absent father puts children at greater risk of sexual abuse, partly because stepfathers and live-in boyfriends lack the social taboos against sex with someone else's kid, and partly because fatherless boys and girls tend to look for father figures outside the home--putting them at risk from sexual predators.
To the credit of these researchers, they acknowledge that "homophobic society" isn't the only possible explanation for the high rates of psychiatric problems in the GLB group: Whilst there is an emerging consensus from recent studies that young people who disclose homosexual behaviors or attraction are at increased risk of suicidal behaviors and mental health problems, the processes that lead to these associations remain unclear. Although such findings are frequently interpreted as suggesting the role of homophobic attitudes and social prejudice in provoking mental health problems in GLB youth, alternative explanations are possible. These include: a) the possibility that associations are artefactual as a result of measurement and other research design problems; b) the possibility of “reverse causality” in which young people prone to psychiatric disorder are more prone to experience homosexual attraction or contact; and c) the possibility that lifestyle choices made by GLB young people place them at greater risk of adverse life events and stresses that increase risks of mental health problems, independently of GLB orientation.
Why Sexual Abuse of Children Should Remain Illegal
Jon Rowe, attorney, law professor, and gay activist, thinks I'm being "hysterical" about saying that adults shouldn't be having sex with minors. But studies like this are the reason that we have these laws (in spite of the ACLU's efforts): Childhood Sexual Abuse and Psychiatric Disorder in Young Adulthood: II. Psychiatric Outcomes of Childhood Sexual Abuse.
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 35(10):1365-1374, October 1996.
Fergusson, David M. PhD; Horwood, L. John MSc; Lynskey, Michael T. MSc
...
This is the second in a series of articles that describe the prevalence, correlates, and consequences of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in a birth cohort of more than 1,000 New Zealand children studied to the age of 18 years. This article examines the associations between reports of CSA at age 18 and DSM-IV diagnostic classifications at age 18.
Method: A birth cohort of New Zealand children was studied at annual intervals from birth to age 16 years. At age 18 years retrospective reports of CSA prior to age 16 and concurrently measured psychiatric symptoms were obtained.
Results: Those reporting CSA had higher rates of major depression, anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, substance use disorder, and suicidal behaviors than those not reporting CSA (p < .002). There were consistent relationships between the extent of CSA and risk of disorder, with those reporting CSA involving intercourse having the highest risk of disorder. These results persisted when findings were adjusted for prospectively measured childhood family and related factors. Similar but less marked relationships between CSA and nonconcurrently measured disorders were found.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that CSA, and particularly severe CSA, was associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorder in young adults even when due allowance was made for prospectively measured confounding factors. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry, 1996, 35(10):1365-1374.
Interesting Study About Abortion & Mental Problems
Unfortunately, I can't find enough information about the methodology to form a strong opinion about its validity: In the emotionally charged debate over abortion, no one could accuse Professor David Fergusson of ideological bias.
Longitudinal study: very good. This prevents selection bias problems.
He is "pro-choice" personally, but he admits his latest research - which suggests a strong link between abortion and mental illness - is liable to be used and misused as ammunition by the pro-life brigade.
Researchers found that at age 25, 42 per cent of women in the study group who had had an abortion also experienced major depression at some stage during the past four years.
This was nearly double the rate of those who had never been pregnant and 35 per cent higher than those who had chosen to continue a pregnancy.
"Those having an abortion had elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours and substance use disorders," said the researchers, whose study has been published in the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology.
The study - the largest of its kind internationally - is the latest analysis to come out of the Canterbury Health and Development Study, which has followed the progress of 1265 children born in Christchurch from mid-1977.
Professor Fergusson, who leads the project, said the paper was declined by a number of journals, he suspects because of the "controversial" nature of the topic.
"We went to four journals, which is very unusual for us - we normally get accepted the first time."
I can see how women with mental problems might be more likely to have abortions, but if I am reading Fergusson correctly, he seems to indicate that the mental problems increased after an abortion. Considering the complex hormonal interactions between the mind and pregnancy, I guess that I am not surprised.
I find it very interesting that no mainstream U.S. newspaper has mentioned this. I'm sure that this couldn't be for political reasons.
The ACLU's Lawsuit Against the NSA
Debbie Schlussel is an attorney who has a rather disturbing column about the plaintiffs in the ACLU's lawsuit against the National Security Agency. Some of the plaintiffs are exactly the people that I can see would not want the NSA listening in on them--and probably should be: I'm referring to ACLU lawyers Noel Saleh, Mohammed Abdrabboh, and Nabih Ayad, the ACLU Plaintiffs named in the yesterday's Complaint, attorney William Swor, a member National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Nazih Hassan--all named in the lawsuit. They are exactly the kind of people whom the federal government SHOULD be watching, but probably isn't. One of these men admitted to funding Hezbollah, one was accused of tampering with a witness, and a third signed a document contradicting statements he made in the lawsuit. Not to mention, one of these men engaged in exactly the same "spying" (on me) that he now opposes when done by the NSA.
Anyway, Schlussel is apparently filing an amicus brief on behalf of the NSA in this matter.
...
Take Noel Saleh. The thrice-disciplined attorney (who was suspended from the practice of law) openly stated at a town hall meeting with federal officials that he has financially contributed to Hezbollah. He heads an Arab welfare agency that gets millions in our tax dollars, yet was raided by the FBI for engaging in Medicaid fraud. The organization also spent thousands in our tax dollars on "job training" (commercial driving lessons and attempts at HazMat hauling certificates) for two men indicted as members of the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell. He has represented a number of Islamic terrorists, including Ibrahim Parlak and "former" PFLP terrorist Imad Hamad.
Then, there is Mohammed Abdrabboh, a Palestinian attorney and ACLU of Michigan Board Member.
Not only does he represent a number of accused terrorists, he lied in signed documents about it. In the ACLU lawsuit, Abdrabboh's ACLU claims: 86. As part of his criminal defense practice, Mr. Abdrabboh has represented and continues to represent people the government has suspected of allegedly having some link to terrorism or terrorist organizations.
But in a grievance Abdrabboh filed against ME to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission (designed to deny my right to free speech and get me to change this column about him--I didn't and won't), a year ago, Abdrabboh wrote (and signed his name to) the following:Without hesitation, I affirmatively state that I have never represented anyone accused of terrorism or money laundering. I can also affirmatively state that I have never represented or consulted with anyone accused/suspected/indicted of money laundering, let alone money laundering to finance Al-Qaeda. . . . Debbie Schlussel will not be able to provide the ADB [Attorney Discipline Board] with a single court appearance, document or public record that would indicate that I have ever represented a suspected terrorist or money launderer.
Hmmm . . . I think a grievance against Abdrabboh for lying either in Court or to the Grievance Commission is appropriate.
Carnival of Home Schooling 3
Is up here. We didn't home school. In retrospect, raising kids in Sonoma County, California, I wish that we had.
I Must Have Missed This Chance To Surrender On 9/9 Or 9/10
I don't watch The O'Reilly Factor much anymore, because...how to be polite about this...Bill O'Reilly is becoming too unpleasant to his guests. I recognize that you can't always let your guest ramble on at length within the constraints of broadcast journalism, but he interrupts them far too often. I almost always find myself feeling sorry for his guests--even his liberal guests, because he treats them so badly.
Tonight was an exception. O'Reilly was interviewing Michael Scheuer. Does the name ring a bell? Well, he's the CIA officer who was in charge of the bin Laden operation. A couple of years back, CIA allowed him to publish an anonymous book that was widely interpreted by the liberal media as attacking Bush policy. As I mentioned at the time, it is bizarre that the CIA would make an exception to their usual policy to allow a working CIA officer to publish such a book--and it smacked of an attempt by CIA to distract attention from their failure on the Iraq WMD question.
O'Reilly, not surprisingly, asked Scheuer about bin Laden's offer of a truce in Afghanistan and Iraq--wasn't that a concession of weakness on bin Laden's part? Scheuer's response was along the lines that a lot of people have been misreading it as such, but really, bin Laden was simply following a longstanding tradition in Islamic culture of offering enemies a chance to surrender before battle--and to hear Scheuer tell it, this is bin Laden being graceful, since we are losing so badly in both countries. Odd. But that graceful bin Laden must have forgotten to extend this opportunity to surrender before 9/11.
My Ancient Near East professor once made the point that a person doesn't usually devote most of his adult life to studying a society or culture unless he finds something rather attractive about it. He was using this to explain that he was a big fan of ancient Egypt, and was perhaps not as objective about its culture as others might be.
I find myself wondering if Scheuer's many years of studying bin Laden may have caused the "whose ambassador?" problem. One problem with diplomats is that if they spend too many years representing the U.S. to country X, they sometimes reach the point where they start to represent country X to our government more than they represent the U.S. to country X. Scheuer's tone gave me a disturbingly similar feel.
I Could Make Stuff Up Like This...
But you wouldn't believe it. Of Arms and the Law mentions that a gun control rally had to be called off in New Jersey because it was too cold. But the really amusing part is that one of the organizers of the protest is a registered sex offender--an exhibitionist, apparently, but convicted of sexual assault. (This is a bit confusing--two separate crimes?)
Of course, the story about this guy involves an attempt at restricting where pedophiles can live--and what organization is "concerned" about such a law? Civil libertarians are concerned that the restrictions could backfire, doing little to keep paroled sex offenders from committing additional crimes and inviting challenges to the measures' constitutionality.
"There still remains a very real problem of violence and a need to protect children and women in society from sex offenders. But it's important to not simply provide feel-good measures," said Ed Barocas of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
A Father's Lament
John Walker Lindh's father has broken his silence, and is asking President Bush for clemency: After years of silence, the father of American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh said Thursday he has asked President Bush to grant his son clemency, adding that the then teenager never raised arms against the United States.
It is very, very easy to understand Frank Lindh's pain. No one can feel good about what happened. But this wasn't a teenager vandalizing a wall. It wasn't a young man getting drunk and trying to drive home. John Walker Lindh joined up with a group committed to destroying the United States of America.
"In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man embarked on a spiritual quest," said Frank Lindh, swallowing back tears at times during a speech at the Commonwealth Club, a nonprofit organization.
I don't buy the rest of Frank Lindh's claims: John Walker Lindh, now 24, was captured by American forces on Nov. 21, alongside the Taliban. Frank Lindh said his son thought he had been rescued by U.S. soldiers until he was taken into custody and tortured.
Nice try. I've seen video of the event that this person is describing:
Charged with conspiring to kill Americans and supporting terrorists, the younger Lindh avoided a potential life sentence in 2002 by pleading guilty to lesser charges of supplying services to the Taliban in violation of U.S. economic sanctions and of carrying weapons against U.S. forces.Rhawn Joseph: When John Walker Lindh was kneeling in front of those two CIA agents, who pleaded with him to cooperate, who appealed to his conscience, who offered to help him, he never once said, "I am an American." He never once asked for help. He never once denounced the Taliban or al qaeda.
This is very sad, and when you raise kids in a enclave of the rich and spoiled, like Marin County, I suppose it is not too surprising. But there comes a moment when an adult is responsible for his actions.
One of the disturbing aspects of liberalism is the idea that there is no difference between adulthood and childhood. The ACLU argues that a 14 year old has a Fourteenth Amendment "due process liberty interest" in having sex with adults (which in practice means that an adult has the same right to manipulate a child into sex).
At the same time, many liberals argue that adults are really children. You wouldn't let a child own a gun, would you? Then why would you allow an adult to do so?
Unlikely Roommates
You have already seen the BBC story about this. But click over to my daughter's blog for an adorable picture of two critters that seem unlikely to share a cage.
Why Russia Needs To Sign The Kyoto Treaty
The global warming effects are definitely beginning to show: Arctic temperatures blanketed Russia for a fourth day on Thursday, sending electricity use surging and pushing the death toll from the cold wave to at least 31 people as even hardy Russians struggled to cope with the big freeze.
Moscow isn't Miami--where ice on the roads creates utter chaos. Russians know something about cold--but even for them, this is dramatic.
Temperatures in Moscow plunged overnight to as low as minus 24, said Tatyana Pozdnyakova, a Moscow weather forecasting service official. The temperature was the lowest recorded on Jan. 19 since 1927, she said.
Seven people died of exposure in the Russian capital in the previous 24 hours, city emergency officials said, pushing the nationwide death toll from the Siberian cold wave that swept into Moscow late Monday to at least 31.
A Very Clever Piece of Satire
The site is called "Rent-a-Negro.com". But don't share it with your white liberal friends without warning them that it is satire. They might bust our their credit cards before getting the joke.
I notice that the web site is described as "d.i.y reparations performance project"--presumably "do-it-yourself" slave reparations.
I found the link over at La Shawn Barber's website, where she described it as: It’s also the perfect solution for “diversity in theory only” white liberals who live nowhere near blacks, have no black friends, and want to impress their fellow white liberal friends.
The Catch-22 Murder For Hire Case
A British woman sued a hit man whom she hired to commit a murder. Weirder yet, she won the suit. But it gets better, when you find out why she sued the hit man, and who he was supposed to kill: A British court awarded a woman $3,518.90 because she hired a man to whack her and he failed, according to The Times of London.
I am reminded of the story of the Iowa police officer who pulled over a new Cadillac Sedan de Ville--and the back seat was filled with mud and pigs.
Maidstone Crown Court ordered Kevin Reeves, 40, to be jailed for 15 months and made him pay $3,518.90 compensation after he took $35,188.96 from a depressed friend, Christine Ryder, 53, who asked him to track down a hit man to help her end it all.
Reeves was reportedly generous enough to offer to do the dirty deed himself — but did nothing more than take the money and run.
A jury found Reeves guilty of deception after the annoyed intended victim sued the not-quite killer for breach of contract.
"Sir, why would you do this to such a nice car?"
"If it weren't for those pigs, I couldn't drive such a nice car."
There are times that you can tell the logic is defective, but you don't want to spend any energy figuring it out.
Blowing More Holes in the "Iraq Had Nothing To Do With Al-Qaeda" Claim
From the Weekly Standard: THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S.
intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
The First Paragraph Really Matters
One of my sisters--who is about as far to the left as I am to the right--maybe more so--sent me a link to something called The Archimedes Movement. This is apparently former Oregon Governor Kitzhaber's project to reform medical care in the United States. I don't agree with his solution--especially because he gives public education as the model that he wants us to use for health care--but it is a reminder that the first paragraph is sometimes enough to drive people away.
He makes an intelligent (although I think wrong) argument here , but the opening paragraph of the home page was an immediate turnoff: "What we need is a Revolution—not of violence but of vision; not of arms but of ideas. A Revolution through which we can replace our resignation with hope and our disengagement with a new community-based activism driven not by partisan politics but by an unwillingness to accept a system that has become obsessed with the delivery of health care as an economic commodity at the expense of health for the American people."
The fact of the matter is that "the delivery of health care" is "an economic commodity" and this isn't going to change, ever. Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, X-ray technicians, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies and their employees--all expect to be paid for their services. Voluntarism and selflessness are wonderful human qualities, but you can't construct a health care system around these unnatural traits, and expect that system to operate full-time. A health care system must be designed around recognition that it is "an economic commodity." To make such a system work well, you need to recognize that greed is one of the fundamental qualities of humans--instead of pretending otherwise.
One Of Those Vegetables Is Recovering
Michelle Malkin has a collection of news stories about a little girl who was beaten into a "vegetative state" by the stepfather. The Massachusetts high court went ahead and gave approval to starve her to death, since she wasn't going to recover--but the pesky little troublemaker, just as the doctors were getting ready to finish her off--is starting to recover! Whoops! How embarrassing for the experts!
Now, if she had been convicted of murdering several people, and was going to suffer a painless execution, Hollywood would indeed be lining up to save her. But she was a victim of a horrible crime, and was going to be starved to death--well, you got to save your energy for what matters.
I'm curious: did the ACLU file a brief in this case to prevent this little girl from being starved to death? Or are they still too busy defending NAMBLA's "how to get away with raping little boys" materials in that civil suit in the same state? I will be amused to see what excuse Professor Volokh comes up with to defend that pack of evil monsters.
Threatening To Use Nuclear Weapons Against Terrorist States
No, that's not the latest bellicosity from George Bush--but from France: BREST, France (Reuters) - France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent.
Gee, which country might that be? Let's play Jeopardy, shall we?
Deflecting criticism of France's costly nuclear arms program, President Jacques Chirac said security came at a price and France must be able to hit back hard at a hostile state's centers of power and its "capacity to act."
He said there was no change in France's overall policy, which rules out the use of nuclear weapons in a military conflict. But his speech pointed to a change of emphasis to underline the growing threat France perceives from terrorism.
"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part," Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in northwestern France.
"Your turn, Mr. Chirac."
"I'll take 'Mullahocracies for $100.'"
"This nation has a history of funding terrorist groups, and is currently preparing to become a nuclear power."
"What is Iran?"
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! Don't be a stranger! Come back soon!
Arbitrary Limits
Jon Rowe accuses me of being "hysterical": There are some forces in the blogsphere who are hysterical about the notion that society might allow the underaged to have sex with legal adults. But what about the reverse -- that society will be hysterical about the possibility and start to engage in witch hunts -- and lose its ability to rationally draw lines as seems to have been done in the above case?
The case he refers to involves a 33 year old woman youth counselor who ended up having sex with one of the 17 year old guys who was referred to her. Rowe's argument is that a 17 year old isn't being sexually abused by an adult, because a 17 year old guy is essentially an adult.
But reverse the sexes--and make this case involving a 33 year old male youth counselor who ends up having sex with a 17 year old female who had been referred to him. I think most people would recognize that there's something disturbingly exploitative about taking advantage of what is probably a troubled kid for sex.
Now, you might want to argue (as some like to do) that this isn't the same--that girls get taken advantage of sexually in a way that guys do not. But the courts would never tolerate a sexual double standard on this. So to protect the 17 year old girl from being taken advantage of, we need the same age limits for either sex.
The age of consent laws are arbitrary--just like red stoplights mean "Stop" and green ones mean "Go." There are some very mature 17 year olds out there; there are some very immature 20 year olds out there. The state legislatures pass laws based on their best judgment, and some states set these limits a little lower than others. Illinois, I understand, sets the limit at 17, not 18. Arbitrary doesn't mean unconstitutional, however, no matter how much the ACLU wants to believe otherwise.
Why Is Bin Laden Offering A Truce?
Bin Laden is threatening new attacks on the U.S.--and offering a truce in Iraq and Afghanistan: "The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. But the operations are happening in Baghdad and you will see them here at home the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission," he said.
Bin Laden wouldn't be saying this if it were true. It sounds like all those actions that the ACLU has been suing to prevent have been working."We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to," he said. "We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.
Offering a truce is the sign of someone who is weary of the war--or expects that continued fighting is going to defeat him. I would expect that leftists throughout the Western world will demand that the U.S. accept the truce, so that al-Qaeda can rebuild its strength."There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America."
It is just astonishing to me how closely the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party sounds like Osama bin Laden (or is it the other way around?) At least bin Laden didn't say "Halliburton."
PBS Series: The War That Made America
This started this evening, and appears to conclude next week. It's a documentary about the French and Indian War, and the title emphasizes the role that it played in setting up the circumstances that caused the American Revolution. While they have not discussed it yet, one side effect of the British victory over the French was the Proclamation Line of 1763--which effectively closed off much of the frontier to Colonial settlement.
While it isn't something that some people want to hear, British motivations were a desire to reduce potential conflict between the Indians and whites over land--and I get the impression that the British government took its paternal responsibilities to the Indians somewhat seriously.
I've never studied the battles or the political motivations of the French and Indian War in great detail, but something that I have studied in great detail for my upcoming book is the role of Colonial militias in this--and I am very pleased with the care that the first two hours are showing. The Colonial militia was nominally the free white men (and in a few places, and a few times, free black men and even slaves). In theory, they were obligated to turn and fight on behalf of King and Country.
In practice, by the time of the French and Indian War, "expeditionary forces" of the type that actually fought many of these battles were, in many of the colonies, actually made up of the bottom of the society, and not by choice! In Virginia, for example, no man who was eligible to vote could be drafted into these forces. Vagrants, free blacks, and others with no particular voice often made up a large part of these forces, and this documentary does show this, and articulate it.
These American soldiers were not particularly impressive at what they did, partly, I suspect, because they weren't there by choice, and partly because these expeditions were deep into the interior of the continent for motives that would have seen irrelevant to them. At least part of the reason that Colonial governments went along with British efforts to drive out the French was for Colonial land speculators. I can see why people at the bottom of the society would have little interest in fighting these battles.
I am pleased to see that the full brutality of Indian warfare has not been cleaned up or made PC. They do discuss why Indian allies of both Britain and France took scalps, and the massacre of British soldiers and dependents after the capture of For William Henry. The complexities of the cultural interaction are appropriately discussed, without making excuses.
This must have put an enormous number of Indians to work as extras. Graham Greene narrates this--and does what I consider a pretty inferior job. I've seen enough of his acting to know he's capable of better than this.
There used to be a saying that the Catholic Church is always fighting the last century's battles. The left seems to have the same problem. There have been wars fought strictly for the financial interests of the top of the society. There have been wars fought as matters of national survival. It seems like the left is still insisting on seeing the War on Terrorism as a replay of the French and Indian War, or of the Civil War, which was characterized, with some accuracy, as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," because the very wealthiest slave owners relied on the "twenty nigger rule" to exempt themselves from the Confederate draft.
But not every war fits this model. World War I was fought largely because of collective stupidity. As much as socialists at the start of hostilities tried to portray it as a tool for capitalists to get rich off the suffering of the poor, it was not. Military mobilization done for the purpose of scaring other powers soon created a situation where the major powers could not risk that others were bluffing. World War II was a battle for national survival against a monstrous ideology, as was the Korean War and the Cold War.
Advertising On My Blog
I've been pleased to see an increase in advertising on my blog--including WGBH (the Boston PBS affiliate) advertising their new American Experience about John and Abigail Adams.
You will also notice an ad from Avalon Cycle Works, which is run by a friend of mine, an electrical engineer who decided, after the last startup he worked for went kerplunk, that he just couldn't go back to living in Cubicle World. Instead, he is making motorcycle accessories.
Don't Read The Belmont Club
It will not make you happy and cheery. Wretchard points to a recent study of what happens when Iran gets nuclear weapons, from the U.S. Army War College. Short of invasion, there's probably no way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons--which will likely lead Arab nations in the region to get nuclear weapons as well, as a way of deterring Iranian ambitions. (They may all be Muslims, but Iranian desires to be the big cheese of the region will probably trump religious similarities.)
The comments on the article are quite thoughtful, and very disturbing. In some respects, this is 1936, when the Western powers had the option of responding militarily to Hitler's remilitarization of the Ruhr. They chose not to do so--and that is now recognized as the last time that Hitler could have been stopped without massive bloodshed. One commenter captured the rather significant hazard of waiting: But, as our capabilities can grow, so can those of Iran and its myrmidons the Islamists. You suggest we have a 5-year window. I think that if we wait those 5 years the number of dead in the ensuing war will be at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two orders of magnitude greater than if we strike now while our superiority in 'national strategic means' remains overwhelming.
By this, I think he means that if Iran reaches the point where they can carry out their President's wish--of wiping Israel off the map--this will lead to a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. I would also expect that Israel might engage in the Samson option--figuring that if more than a couple of nuclear weapons go off over Israel, they are not going to continue to exist anymore, they won't need American aid, they already don't much care what a bunch of whining Europeans think, and they might as well exterminate their enemies. That would likely mean destruction of Mecca, Medina, and all major Arab and Iranian population centers for which they have enough bombs.
I know this sounds overly dramatic, but I honestly believe that to avoid the fight before the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons is to ensure the fight with Islam turns into a Vernichtigungskrieg - a war of extermination.
If you thought that al-Qaeda and sympathizers were mad at the U.S. for having troops in Saudi Arabia, I think this would provoke a pretty sizeable fraction of Muslims in the Western world to join up. Follow that path to its logical conclusion, and we'll end up with all sorts of really ugly but probably necessary steps:
1. Mass arrests of Muslims, and mass deportation of those that aren't citizens. The ACLU will file all the "free exercise of religion" suits that they want, and the courts will ignore the Constitution because of the severity of the crisis. In Europe, it may be uglier, because the Muslim percentage is so much higher, and a much higher percentage of European Muslims are sympathetic to Islamofascism.
2. Nuclear retaliation by the U.S. when an Iranian weapon ends up in the hands of a terrorist group that uses it against the U.S. or one of our NATO allies.
3. If any other Muslim power has nuclear weapons at that point, they will be at war with the U.S. in short order, leading to an asymmetrical set of nuclear weapons uses. The U.S. will certainly lose a city (or two, or three), with hundreds of thousands dead, trillions in losses; countries that attack us--or are believed to have attacked us--will suffer millions or tens of millions of deaths. Some of these countries will rapidly return to the 14th century in technology.
4. Oil prices will skyrocket during all this, but the collapse of the world economy will solve that problem. What happened after 9/11 will be almost nothing by comparison.
Unfortunately, a U.S. attack on Iran will inflame patriotic sentiment in Iran--probably making any sort of overthrow of the mullahocracy impossible. We pretty much have to stop this madness before it reaches the point where we have to go to war.
Weird Question About Colt Mustang
I have a Colt Mustang .380 stainless steel pistol which I like very much. It is reasonably accurate, extremely compact, and it works exactly like my larger pistols. Kid all you want about .380 ACP being an inadequate defensive caliber, it is better to have a .380 ACP with you because it is light and compact, than to have a 9mm or .45 ACP pistol that you found too bulky to bring along. Even an inadequate defensive caliber is better than having to beg, "Please don't hurt me" if you have the misfortune to run into a sociopath. (Not likely, here in Boise, but you never know.)
I recently misplaced one of the spare magazines for my Mustang, and I am looking to buy another one. However, I notice that advertising refers to 6 round capacity. My factory magazines are 5 round capacity. Did Colt make a change that allows a 6 round capacity magazine to still be flush with the bottom of the gun? I know at one point there was an upgrade kit available for the M1911A1 pistol magazines that supposedly let you load eight rounds instead of seven. I bought some of these, and they almost worked.
Trouble Getting a Fair Trial? Really?
Gee, with his long history of sexual abuse of children, statements he made to the police after arrest, a surviving victim, I guess that I'm not surprised: Lawyers for convicted sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan III say they want a jury from outside Kootenai County brought in for their client’s murder trial in a case that has drawn worldwide news coverage.
One of the reasons that a few states abolished insanity as a defense is because it made it too easy for those found not guilty by reason of insanity to escape punishment for their crimes when doctors decided that they were "cured." I really don't much care whether someone convicted of a serious crime goes into a cage or a padded cell--but if the crime involves murder, rape, and kidnapping, I want them locked away from the rest of us for a very long time. Not for vengeance--but because they are too dangerous to have wandering loose.
Duncan, who could face the death penalty, is charged with three counts of murder in a crime authorities say was intended to let him kidnap two small children for sex. One of the children, 9-year-old Shasta Groene, was rescued alive, but her brother was found dead.
In motions filed Tuesday, Kootenai County public defender John Adams said Duncan, 42, who has a long record of sex crimes against children, cannot receive a fair trial from the residents of this Idaho Panhandle county of about 100,000 people.
“Given the massive pretrial publicity and demonstrated hostility toward Mr. Duncan in this county, a lengthy voir dire of a sizable jury pool will be necessary, with uncertain and unreliable results,” Adams wrote, referring to the process of interviewing potential jurors to determine if they have a bias in the case.
Adams also wrote that he intends to challenge the constitutionality of an Idaho law that bars insanity as a defense in criminal cases.
That law inflicts “severe punishment on the mentally ill” and violates the U.S. Constitution, Adams said.
The Collective Intelligence of the Internet
It seems to be far higher than the intelligence of the New York Times. Captain's Quarters is pointing out that the New York Times is again trying to argue that Bush's "sixteen words" about Iraqi attempts to buy yellowcake from Niger were intentionally deceptive--but the deception is actually by the New York Times, which is confusing "purchased" with "attempted to purchase."
Did Iraq purchase yellowcake from someone after Niger rebuffed them? Interesting question. One of the commenters at Captain's Quarters pointed to this Christian Science Monitor news story about health problems in Iraq after the war, when villagers looted a government installation--and found these wonderful water barrels. They just had to empty the yellowcake out first. (You can imagine the health risks.)
I'm Not Happy With The Results...
But I can't argue with either the legal reasoning or the supremacy of the voters of Oregon to make their own laws. You can read Gonzales v. Oregon (2006) here. This is the legal challenge by the federal government to Oregon's euthanasia law.
My reasons for going along with the majority:
1. The Controlled Substances Act, which was the basis of Attorney General Ashcroft first pursuing this matter under federal law, allows doctors to prescribe medications based on accepted medical practice. Ashcroft thought the federal government (actually, specifically the executive branch) should determine that physician-assisted suicide is not accepted medical practice. I am inclined to agree with those who argue that the definition of this is properly a state matter. The fact is that for a very long time, doctors have (quite illegally) accelerated the natural process of death to alleviate suffering, often at the very end. I've seen the claim that George V's death was accelerated by the royal physician simply to make sure that it was published first in the Times, not one of the lower class papers. It seems clear to me that the widespread use of morphine to alleviate pain in the terminally ill plays some accelerative role in the shutting down of the body--at least, that's the impression that I got from my father-in-law's death.
2. This is a federalism issue. Matters that are strictly within the scope of one state are properly matters for the state to decide. The Controlled Substances Act was intended to prevent the illicit use of various prescription drugs. The goal was to stop people from getting high, not to prevent doctors from alleviating suffering. As much as I am uncomfortable with euthanasia (because of where it can lead), this is a good example of an issue where the people or legislature of a state has the authority to make such a law.
I tried to look for something in Scalia's dissent that I could agree with, but it read like the sort of legalistic opinions that the left usually writes to cover over that they are on the wrong side of the history. The best point that Scalia makes is that the AMA regards physician-assisted suicide not to be within "accepted medical practice." I'll take the authority of the people or their legislative representatives over that of a trade group when it comes to defining accepted practice.
More interesting is Justice Thomas's dissent, where he points out that there is an inconsistency between this decision--which put Oregon law above an application of the CSA--and the Raich case, where they put CSA above California's medical marijuana initiative.
Even though I thought Raich was also wrongly decided, there is at least some plausible argument that the medical marijuana initiative provided cover for the sort of drug abuse that CSA was supposed to stop. The same can't be said for physician-assisted euthanasia. In fact, I get the idea from reading Thomas's dissent that he wrote this dissent primarily to chide the majority for having decided Raich wrongly--that he would have preferred them to have decided both Raich and this case in favor of the state: I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at ___ (THOMAS, J., dissenting); cf. Whitman, supra, at 486Â?487 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (noting constitutional concerns with broad delegations of authority to administrative agencies). But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent
I agree with Thomas's criticism. One of these decisions seems to have been wrongly made by the majority.
with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly
true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the StatesÂ? Â? Â?traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.Â? Â?2 Raich, supra, at ___, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The CourtÂ?s reliance upon the constitutional
principles that it rejected in RaichÂ?albeit under the guise of statutory interpretationÂ?is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
Why I Like Ann Coulter
I've often observed that Ann Coulter makes me laugh, and sometimes it is because she has turned a phrase rather well--and is being unfair in her characterization of her enemies. This recent column by her is, in a sense, unfair, because it is, to use a Kerryism, insufficiently nuanced in its characterization of why Americans have elective abortion. But I still had a good laugh--and even with the criticisms that I will make after this excerpt, she is still raising a very important point about the shallowness of the Democratic Party's focus on unlimited abortion: With all their hysteria about Valerie Plame, I had nearly forgotten what the Democratic Party stands for. It's good to be reminded that the sole item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion.
Now, I will point out that at least some of the elective abortions performed every year involve rape and child abuse. But even a lot of "pro-life" politicians are prepared to tolerate these as legitimate exceptions to a general ban on elective abortion. And when they do, pro-choicers, instead of saying, "Good! We have common ground on something!" call them hypocrites instead.
According to Dianne Feinstein, Roe vs. Wade is critically important because "women all over America have come to depend on it." At its most majestic, this precious right that women "have come to depend on" is the right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with.
There's a stirring principle! Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter, and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don't want to have children with is not exactly "Give me liberty, or give me death."
Still, the vast majority of elective abortions are going to adult women (81.9% were aged 20 or above in 2001)--not the result of child sexual abuse. There were more than 853,000 abortions in 2001--and while rape might explain some of them, there just aren't enough rapes to make even a small contribution to this. There were 90,491 rapes reported in 2001, and even if there were as many unreported rapes as reported (which is not very likely), the vast majority of rapes don't result in a pregnancy. The vast majority of abortions (81.6% in 2001) were to unmarried women--which rather well fits Ann Coulter's insufficiently nuanced description of what the Democratic Party has made their primary protective mission.
I've pointed out before that there are women out there who are using abortion as a form of primary birth control: His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.
If this doesn't bother you, consider that abortion, like any surgical procedure, is expensive and has some risks to it. Imagine what your reaction would be if you found that people were refusing to wear condoms when having sex with strangers, because AIDS treatment has advanced so far in the last few years.
The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."
Of course, it isn't just women who benefit from having abortion available as birth control. It is also men who aren't any more responsible. Some years ago, a co-worker came by my office to whine about the unfairness of the world. His girlfriend had been looking for him to get married. He wasn't prepared to do so. (You've probably seen the cartoon that depicts the different regions of a man's brain--the commitment region is very small.) She ended up pregnant--I really don't know if this was accident or trap.
He still didn't see any reason to get married--she should just get an abortion. She didn't want to do that--so she moved out--and informed him that he was going to be making child support payments for eighteen years--and no, she wasn't much interested in the marriage idea anymore. He, of course, saw this as very unfair. I saw it as the inevitable consequences of irresponsibility.
More "Global Warming" Anecdotes
I mentioned a few days ago a bunch of examples of record cold in Japan, India, Thailand, etc. Today's news item about record cold: Two people died of exposure and 14 more were hospitalized in a single day as temperatures plunged in the Russian capital, city emergency medical authorities said Tuesday. Temperatures dropped from about freezing Monday afternoon to minus-28 Celsius (minus-18 Fahrenheit) overnight as a cold wave hit after inflicting record-low temperatures across Siberia.
Other reports indicate factories are being turned off to prevent blackouts: As record cold temperatures moved into Moscow from Siberia, electricity suppliers have ordered power cuts at factories in order to prevent a blackout.
This account indicates that many Iowa school districts are in financial hard times, at least partly because of larger than normal heating bills caused by both higher energy prices and "record cold was recorded and single-digit temperatures were seen regularly."
A number of factories were expected to be without power for several hours Tuesday, in order to make up for the expected 10 percent to 15 percent rise in electricity consumption resulting from the cold snap, The Moscow Times reported.
A few anecdotes are not enough to prove anything--keep this in mind next summer when newspaper screech about a local heat record proving global warming--but you do have to wonder, when there are so many places suffering record cold winters, if the "global warming" claims might be just a little exaggerated.
Al Gore On The Importance of International Law
TigerHawk has a nice piece using a quote from Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies (you know, the guy that Democrats were in love with a year or two ago) about how Al Gore feels about the importance of following international law with respect to extradition: The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass." (pp. 143-144)
Now, one of the comments points out that Gore was in favor of "extraordinary rendition" to the U.S., not away from it. Other comments quote from other Bush-bashing books to point out that this isn't correct; the Clinton Administration had an "extraordinary rendition" program to Egypt. Perhaps Al Gore wasn't involved in those decisions, but his contempt for international law--at least, when he and his buddies were running the show--is clear enough.
If Gore had been consistently for the "rule of international law" (which is a joke, anyway), I could respect him as being idealistic. But it appears that his sudden concern for this, like the Democrats sudden concern about NSA surveillance shortcutting, is a bit more about partisan politics. If they were playing partisan political games about something low stakes, such as tax rates, or business regulation, I would be irritated. I am irritated when Republicans play the same sort of political games for relatively unimportant issues.
But the War Against Terrorism isn't low stakes. That what turns this into stupid, hypocritical, dishonesty into something treasonous. This is what tells me the left end of the Democratic Party knows that they have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.
Fiction Has To Make Sense
That's what distinguishes it from non-fiction. I must confess that this account of an adjunct history professor who "outed himself" as a member of a neo-Nazi group to get himself fired reads like the most bizarre satire on postmodernism: Throughout the course of my academic career, I came to hold in deep respect the scholarship of the French Deconstructionists, particularly Jacques Derrida and Michele Foucault (especially Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge and his History of Madness). At the same time, my work – in teaching and in academic writing – has been heavily influenced by the notion of Geistesgeschichte, as articulated by one of the premier medievalists, Ernst Kantorowicz. All of those scholars stress, each in their own way, the need for the historian to “become” her or his subject in order to develop a relationship with it.
And then, it gets weird. Worth reading in full--along with the comments.
I have also been a life-long non-academic author, primarily of poetry. In that capacity, I developed a feel – yes, “feel” is about the only way I can put it – for the poets of the Romantic Era, particularly the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, and the prose of Mary Shelley. Through reading them, in my own dolce styl nuovo, it slowly yet surely dawned upon me that any attempt to understand a group, a movement, or an individual psyche, would have to include becoming, as much as an individual can, the subject under study.
...
To move to the central point of this piece, why and how did I become a neo-Nazi (in fact, a rather prominent one) in February, 2005? In truth, I have never been a person of passionate political persuasion. Yet tyranny from either the right or the left has forever seemed anathema to me. And, after producing a novel centered upon highly personal, passionate and emotion material, I decided to shift gears and enter the political realm, for the purpose of gathering research to write a book on a political subject in which I could personally partake and which was “fringe” in the most essential aspect of the word. Those literary ruminations brought me to the National Socialist Movement, the most flashy neo-Nazi group I could find.
...
What of my dismissal from the Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University? In fact, the whole “dismissal” was very easily engineered.
...
You see, in late January, 2005, my school secretary informed me, on the sly, that no history adjuncts would be reappointed in September, 2005. Her reasoning was “financial cut backs.” Since, on top of my impending departure, I’d already held a tenured post (Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University of New Jersey, 1984-2000 [tenured 1988]) which I’d left in order to write and work with horses, I considered that the time was right to use myself as a human literary experiment. The letter itself, noting that I was a dangerous member of an international neo-Nazi group and also probably a member of the Irish Republican Army (nonsense, of course), was posted by me and mailed simply to “Editor, University Newspaper, Fairleigh-Dickinson University, 1000 River Road, Teaneck, NJ, USA.”
The ACLU's Suit Against the NSA Surveillance Program
At least according to this news account, their objection is: "By seriously compromising the free speech and privacy rights of the plaintiffs and others, the program violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution," the lawsuit states.
In what way does this surveillance program prevent freedom of speech? I suppose if you thought it was going to lead to an arrest for terrorism, yes, that would have a "chilling effect" on your free speech, but if so, the ACLU should just sue to prohibit criminal prosecutions for terrorism-related offenses that do not involve the actual setting off of bombs. (Of course, if the New York Times hadn't blown the whistle on this, there would have been no "chilling effect" at all.)
Privacy rights? From what I have read, the Fourth Amendment's protections related to warrants are limited to criminal prosecution: For the Fourth Amendment to be applicable to a particular set of facts, there must be a ''search'' and a ''seizure,'' occurring typically in a criminal case, with a subsequent attempt to use judicially what was seized.
It appears that the use of these wiretaps was to prevent terrorist attacks, which isn't the same as a criminal prosecution. There are a number of exceptions to the warrant requirements that, whatever you may think of them, suggest that circumstances far less severe than terrorism allow the government to perform searches without warrants: One curious case has approved a system of ''home visits'' by welfare caseworkers, in which the recipients are required to admit the worker or lose eligibility for benefits. 82 In another unusual case, the Court held that a sheriff's assistance to a trailer park owner in disconnecting and removing a mobile home constituted a ''seizure'' of the home. Supp.1
In addition, there are now a number of situations, some of them analogous to administrative searches, where '''special needs' beyond normal law enforcement . . . justify departures from the usual warrant and probable cause requirements.'' 83 In one of these cases the Court, without acknowledging the magnitude of the leap from one context to another, has taken the Dewey/Burger rationale--developed to justify warrantless searches of business establishments--and applied it to justify the significant intrusion into personal privacy represented by urinalysis drug testing. Because of the history of pervasive regulation of the railroad industry, the Court reasoned, railroad employees have a diminished expectation of privacy that makes mandatory urinalysis less intrusive and more reasonable. 84
I'm Both Amused and Angered At The Same Time
It sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit if "Network Practices" went on vacation. Michael Williams has a stack of news reports of pranksters pretending to be the police, calling up fast food places, and ordering employees to strip search each other and perform sexual acts under threat of arrest.
Look, I know that there are some really stupid people out there--but this stupid?
Education in America
John Stossel, who is as close to a conservative as will ever been allowed on the air at the big three networks, has this report about the problems of education in America: Jan. 13, 2006 — "Stupid in America" is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America's public schools and it's about time we face up to it.
You might think this is just a ghetto school problem, but former students of my wife tell her similar stories about Petaluma, California high schools. A student at one of the schools told her that kids were sitting in the back of some classes drinking alcohol, and getting progressively more drunk. Teachers take no action about it. At the other high school, a student told us that a kid rolled a joint in the front of the classroom, and the teacher said nothing.
Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, "You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It's a normal thing here." We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools to see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but officials wouldn't allow it.
Yup. Part of why we moved my son into a private school in seventh grade was that Creekside Middle School in Rohnert Park, California, was simply not an educational institution. He told us that in some of his classes, there was no teaching at all--the teacher spent the entire class period yelling at students to sit down and be quiet.
Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best classrooms in their district.
We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down in state after state.
Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C., allowed "20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked at two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says it's one of the best schools in America. Yet what the students taped didn't inspire confidence.
One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another "20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with his shirt off, in front of his teacher.
At his middle school here in Boise, the teachers knew that there was no point in trying to get kids to shut up--they just talked louder for the roughly half the students that were interested in learning. (This is an upper middle class district--one where the houses command a hefty premium because these are clearly the best schools in Ada County.)
Now, I have some serious objections to what public education has become in this country, and there is some real room for improvement. But part of the problem--perhaps the biggest part of the problem--is children that have not learned sufficient self-control to sit in a classroom and learn.
When my wife and I were in elementary school, there was usually one kid, sometimes two, who were discipline problems. It was almost always a boy. When my wife worked as a substitute teacher in Rohnert Park public schools, she was startled by how much worse the situation had become. Effectively every boy, and about half the girls, were discipline problems.
I talk to teachers who are frustrated that they are blamed for the declining performance of students. One problem is that in a democracy, telling the truth--that large numbers of parents are doing a poor job of teaching their kids respect for teachers and to sit down and shut up when asked--is not a path to public office.
Stossel observes: And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.
Unfortunately, teacher unions focus on increasingly spending, rather than figuring out how to spend that money more intelligently. For example, Idaho spent an average of $5629 per pupil for the 1999-2000 school year. I'm not sure what the average class size was for Idaho that year; this report would suggest that it was somewhere under 30. (Math and science classes were smaller than the social studies classes.) That means that each classroom was burning more than $160,000 a year.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.
"That is the biggest lie in America. They waste money," he said.
To save money, Chavis asks the students to do things like keep the grounds picked up and set up for their own lunch. For gym class, his students often just run laps around the block. All of this means there's more money left over for teaching.
Even though he spends less money per student than the public schools do, Chavis pays his teachers more than what public school teachers earn. His school also thrives because the principal gets involved. Chavis shows up at every classroom and uses gimmicks like small cash payments for perfect attendance.
Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city.
"It's not about the money," he said.
The average teacher's salary in Idaho that year was $35,155. Even if the benefits package cost 70% of the teacher's salary, that's less than $60,000 a year that ends up in the teacher's pocket. Where's the other $100,000 going?
I'm not suggesting that there's some deep dark secret involved. Schools cost money to build and maintain. I'm just asking if perhaps a little more investigation of where that $100,000 is going might be worthwhile.
Religious Fanaticism and Nuclear Weapons
I mentioned a few days ago the disturbing evidence that the President of Iran may be moving towards a nuclear confrontation with the West because of his apocalyptic belief system. Michael Williams linked to this confirming news story in the Telegraph: The most remarkable aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's piety is his devotion to the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and the president's belief that his government must prepare the country for his return.
One of the first acts of Mr Ahmadinejad's government was to donate about £10 million to the Jamkaran mosque, a popular pilgrimage site where the pious come to drop messages to the Hidden Imam into a holy well.
All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days. A common rumour - denied by the government but widely believed - is that Mr Ahmadinejad and his cabinet have signed a "contract" pledging themselves to work for the return of the Mahdi and sent it to Jamkaran.
Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect believes this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, regarded as the 12th Imam, or righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.
He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the ninth century, at the age of five. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.
This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Hidden Imam is expected to return in the company of Jesus.
Mr Ahmadinejad appears to believe that these events are close at hand and that ordinary mortals can influence the divine timetable.
The prospect of such a man obtaining nuclear weapons is worrying. The unspoken question is this: is Mr Ahmadinejad now tempting a clash with the West because he feels safe in the belief of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam? Worse, might he be trying to provoke chaos in the hope of hastening his reappearance?
Wal-Mart & Health Care
One of the arguments being used in Maryland against Wal-Mart is the claim that many of their workers don't have health insurance, and are a drain on the Medicaid system. Oddly enough, this isn't just a liberal argument. Even here in Idaho, Speaker of the House Bruce Newcomb--a fire-breathing conservative Republican who likes to put live puppies in a kitchen blender, to hear liberals here talk--is making this same noise: Meanwhile, Idaho House Speaker Bruce Newcomb has asked the Department of Health and Welfare to do some preliminary research, to determine whether a similar measure needs to be explored here.
Now, there's probably some truth to this. But why does the Maryland law only apply to large employers?
He says he is concerned Wal-Mart's practices-- and its ability to drive out small-town competitors-- could eventually hurt Idaho's economy and force other companies to lower their health care standards.
Here's a dirty little secret: retail--and especially the sort of Mom-and-Pop small town retail operations that Wal-Mart is driving out of business across America--usually don't have health insurance for their employees. If the concern is that Wal-Mart is sponging off the Medicaid system by failing to provide health insurance at a reasonable price, isn't this just as true for the vast number of burger joints, coffee shops, and little hardware stores? If Maryland's proposed law were something other than just labor union anti-Wal-Martism, it would apply to all employers, not just the big ones.
Over at Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling makes some good arguments and some bad arguments about this matter. One of the bad arguments is: Maryland liberals believe that there is something wrong with free markets if Wal-Mart workers do not have enough health insurance. However, if Wal-Mart workers want health insurance badly enough, eventually the market will find a way to provide it.
This would be true if Wal-Mart's low wage workers made enough to pay for health insurance, and still had anything left over. They don't. At best, they might be able to afford catastrophic coverage--things that send you to the hospital.
I don't really think there is a free market solution to the problem of low wage workers who don't have health insurance--except perhaps, that if enough of them die off, it will, in Scrooge's words "reduce the excess population" and drive up wages. Solutions that can work include:
1. Reducing the supply of unskilled and low skilled labor by enforcing the current laws against illegal immigration. This will drive up wages--perhaps enough that at least some of the low wage workers in the U.S. will be able to afford health insurance. This is a chance for Democrats to prove that they are on the side of legal residents who are struggling financially, and a chance for Republicans to prove that they aren't owned by Big Business.
2. Strongly encouraging the unskilled and low skilled workforce to get an education that lets them improve their wages. This is a hard thing to do; many unskilled and low skilled workers are in that category because they hold education in contempt, or have limited intellectual capabilities. Still, if 20% of the workforce that makes less than $7 an hour went to college or a trade school, and became $15 an hour workers, it would improve the 20%'s health insurance situation--and reduce the supply of low wage workers, forcing wages up.
One of Kling's good arguments is: In news reports on the Wal-Mart law, legislators were quoted as saying that one of their goals is to prevent Wal-Mart from taking advantage of the availability of Medicaid for its workers. A more straightforward approach would be to tighten the eligibility standards for Medicaid so that those making as much income as Wal-Mart provides its workers would be ineligible. Of course, such eligibility standards would apply to workers at other firms, not just the hated Wal-Mart.
Yup. If Wal-Mart could apply the same efficiencies of distribution that allow it to be a powerhouse in retail to health insurance, they might be able to provide good health coverage for less than eight percent. (But who wants to be shipped to Red China for medical care?) This is really about screwing Wal-Mart for being a non-union shop.
The law requires Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health care, whether or not this is enough to keep its workers from needing to rely on Medicaid. If Wal-Mart came up with a way to provide outstanding health care to its workers for 6 percent of its payroll, it would be in violation of the law unless it found a way to waste the other 2 percent on unnecessary health care. Conversely, if Wal-Mart offers a really lousy health plan, it would be in compliance with the law as long as it spent 8 percent.
More Curry, Please
A delicious way to fight cancer: Ladies, if you love your man, give him cauliflower curry with a side of kale for dinner. It may stave off prostate cancer, according to research released yesterday by Rutgers University.
My wife and I are both partial to curry dishes.
Though they don't often make the favorite menus of most men, cauliflower and kale -- along with cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, watercress and turnips -- contain a chemical that is a significant cancer-preventive.
But add curry powder to the mix, the researchers say, and the vegetables and spice are effective in treating established prostate cancers, the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men.
It all boils down to a pair of crucial chemicals that "hold real potential for the treatment and prevention of prostate cancer," the Rutgers study stated. The vegetables contain phenethyl isothiocyanate, or PEITC, while the curry contains curcumin, a yellow pigment found in the spice itself.
Both are considered phytochemicals -- nonnutritive substances in plants that have protective, antioxidant or anti-disease qualities.
"The bottom line is that PEITC and curcumin, alone or in combination, demonstrate significant cancer-preventive qualities in lab mice, and the combination of PEITC and curcumin could be effective in treating established prostate cancers," said Ah-Ng Tony Kong, the study's lead author and a professor of pharmaceutics at Rutgers.
...
He was inspired to investigate diet as a supplementary therapy after noting that while prostate cancer is common in the U.S., the disease is rare in India, where plant-based diets and curry are the norm.
Curry itself has prompted other significant findings. Last year alone, the University of Texas found it inhibited the growth of both skin cancer and breast cancer cells, while the University of California at Los Angeles found it stopped the spread of harmful brain plaque in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Mr. Kong had previously found convincing evidence, he said, that the two chemical compounds quelled prostate cancer cells grown in the laboratory. He has since tested his theory on mice injected with the cancer cells. Three times a week for a month, the test mice then received injections of PEITC and curcumin.
Separately, the compounds "significantly retarded the growth of cancerous tumors," Mr. Kong noted. "Using PEITC and curcumin in tandem produced even stronger effects." The research team also evaluated therapeutic potential of the compounds in mice with advanced prostate cancer to find they "significantly reduced tumor growth."
Student Arrested For Making Homophobic Remarks
I suppose that they could have arrested him for public drunkenness, but they picked the far more serious offense: A final-year Oxford University student from Belfast who called a mounted policeman’s horse gay will not be prosecuted, it was announced today.
To who? The horse? Apparently, the police were afraid that these remarks would have been offensive to those passing by:
Police stood by their decision to take Sam Brown (aged 21) to court for making “homophobic comments” after the Crown Prosecution Service today dropped the case.
Mr Brown approached the officer during a night out with friends in Oxford after his final exams, and said: “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?”
Moments later, two Thames Valley Police squad cars appeared in the High Street and Mr Brown was arrested under section five of the Public Order Act for making homophobic remarks.
His remarks were deemed likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.A spokesman said: “We present the case to the CPS and the CPS make the decision to proceed or not.
You wonder on which side the ACLU would have been if a similar law and case presented itself. On the side of the drunken student's free speech rights? Or the right of the community to not hear ideas that offend?
“He made homophobic comments that were deemed offensive to people passing by.”
A Blog Devoted To Corruption in the Democratic Party
Is it fair to have a blog that is devoted only to corruption in the Democratic Party? I think so, since the mainstream media seem to only have time to cover questionable or sleazy practices by Republicans.
The Secret Is Out
I was afraid that someone who spill the beans on this. Of course, unless someone upgrades the airport, I don't think people are going to be doing the daily commute from Modoc County to the Bay Area: ALTURAS, Calif. — In California's most remote corner, the air is crisp, the sweeping plains and towering peaks inspire awe, and the median home price just crested $100,000 for the first time.
Yes, you read it right.
Modoc is California's only county where the median price of a home has stayed so low for so long. It is the least expensive nook in one of America's priciest states, a place where home buyers live out the pluses — and many of the minuses — of that elusive concept, "affordability."
In Los Angeles County, $100,000 will just about cover the traditional 20% down payment for a median-priced house — certainly not the whole building, yard and garage. In Orange County, it's about 80% of a down payment, and in Marin County, the most expensive housing market in the state, it's less than two-thirds of what's needed.
Compare that to the county seat of rural Modoc, where a snug blue house on downtown's Court Street — complete with two bedrooms and a bath — was recently listed at $84,000, and one unimpressed local real estate agent complained that it was overpriced.
Machining: Thanks and A Question
I asked a few days ago for alternatives to finding a big drill bit (2 1/8" diameter with 1/2" shank) for boring a blind hole. I received a number of helpful responses, and yes, the Forstner bit was the solution. I made multiple attempts at buying a non-Chinese Forstner bit in 2 1/8" or 2 3/16" size--and no one had one in stock locally, and even looking for someone that could Next Day Air one to me was a waste of time. I was expecting to spend $30-$60 for the one bit.
Instead, I bought a 16 piece set of them made in China (of course) for $32--and I was able to walk into a store and buy one off the shelf. One local wordworking shop took almost six hours to get back to me--just too busy, it seems.
Anyway, the Forstner bit, which is made primarily for boring wood, works quite well for UHMW polyethylene. It isn't bllindly fast, but it produces a very smooth, very polished blind hole. I found that using a series of progressively larger bits worked most efficiently. Starting with a 2 1/8" bit means it is trying to excavate the entire hole at once. Moving slowly up through the sequence of bits means that each bit is only cutting a small amount of plastic.
When I was done, I had a 2.17" inside diameter bore--which is just a little oversized from the nominal 2.125" diameter bit. I needed 2.21", so I used the boring bit on my lathe to enlarge the hole to 2.210". It might be worthwhile to buy a 2 3/16" Forstner bit if this particular product turns out to be high demand. (They are out there--but somewhat scarce and consequently expensive.) The nominal size of 2.1875 would probably turn out to be 2.23" inside diameter--a little larger than I wanted, but without the slowness of using the boring bit.
Anyway, I am confronting two new machining questions.
1. What tool will give me the most precise 90 degree cuts on a round section? I find that the power miter saw that I am using makes pretty crisply accurate right angle cuts on small diameter rods (perhaps because I can clamp them down tightly), but when I get to 2.75" and large diameter plastic rods, they seldom come out very close to a right angle. It looks like the blade may be bending or twisting during the cut. This is important, because my lathe barely holds 2.75" or larger stock to face it (make right angle), and if the cut was much off of 90 degrees, it is just about impossible to get the chuck to hold everything tightly enough to face the end of the workpiece.
2. Assuming that I have stuff that needs to be chopped a little closer to 90 degrees, how would you suggest doing it?
Is Reality Beginning To Intrude on Britain?
This news report from the Daily Mail suggests that what was unthinkably American thought is becoming sufficiently respectable that Britain's newspapers are at least willing to voice it: Ordinary people should carry weapons if they want to be safe on Britain's crime-ridden streets, the father of murdered lawyer Tom Ap Rhys Pryce's fiancee said last night.
Oh, the father's an engineer. That may explain quite a bit of his suggested solution.
In a bitter denunciation of the lack of police officers on the beat and the lenience of the courts, Rod Eastman said it was better to risk arrest for carrying an offensive weapon than risk being murdered by muggers.
Mr Eastman launched his attack on 'this lawless society' as he comforted his daughter Adele, who was still struggling to come to terms with her fiance's brutal killing just yards from their North London home. "If you value your life and you want to protect yourself on the streets then the only way is to carry a weapon," said 58-year-old Mr Eastman, an electrical engineer who lives in Bishop's Nympton, Devon.
In an impassioned outburst sure to cause concern to police, Mr Eastman said: "The truth is that street crime is rampant. More and more people are becoming personally affected by violent assaults.
"If police catch you carrying a weapon you could be arrested and prosecuted. But isn't that better than being unable to protect yourself and losing your life? The police can't be everywhere and the sentences handed down by the courts are often far too lenient."
...
Adele, who had taken a taxi home earlier, spoke to him shortly before 11pm when he rang her to say he was taking the train to Kensal Green, near their home in Willesden, North London. She began cooking them supper.
But at about 11.45pm, shortly after leaving the station and just yards from his Bathurst Gardens home, 31-year-old Mr Ap Rhys Pryce was viciously and repeatedly stabbed by two men after they had mugged him of everything he had.
Neighbours reported hearing a man pleading with the thugs: "What more do you want from me? You've got everything."
...
Last night police described the incident as a 'gratuitous, sustained and senseless attack' by muggers who may have waited for up to 15 minutes to ambush their victim.
Detective Superintendent Julian Worker, who is leading the murder investigation, said: "Witnesses have come forward to say that there were two men in Bathurst Gardens before Tom walked into the road."
'He was pleading with them'
DS Worker said: "It is clear it was a robbery. We know that he had already handed over everything of value. He was pleading with them and they just produced knives and started stabbing him."
I've long noticed that your occupation tends to influence how you respond to a social problem. Lawyers think the solution is more laws to deal with a problem. (The dumb lawyers decide that we need more laws prohibiting weapons; the smarter ones think we need longer sentences.) Social workers think we need more programs to help disadvantaged youth not become criminals. Doctors need we need better emergency room care and first responders, so that the victims have a better chance of survival. Police, not surprisingly, think we need more police officers on the streets. I'm almost afraid of the solution that plumbers would come up with for a problem like this.
Engineers, and other technologists, not surprisingly, look for technological solutions. Creeps run around killing people? Shoot them!
Intentionally Seeking Infection
Another one of those depressing articles about people who intentionally seek infection with AIDS: "But why," I said at last, "would anyone choose to get Aids?" My priest friend, though used to the murky insides of men's minds, was stumped. We went over the story again.
There comes a certain point where you have to wonder why we are spending so much money on AIDS, when people are deliberately infecting themselves. There's a really suicidal faction of homosexuals out there: the crowd that mixes meth, Viagra--but no condoms--and guys like Tim who throw all caution to the wind. I presume that these are a minority of gay men--but there comes a moment when you ask yourself if there's really any point in trying to save someone who cares so little whether he lives or dies. It is like someone who starts smoking today. We know what the risks are.
The week before last, an old couple had knocked at my friend's door, quiet, apologetic, cap in hand. They were Catholic, they said, from the country; but their son - let's call him Tim - had moved to London to study.
After university, Tim came out as gay. He bought a flat, invited his HIV-positive boyfriend to live with him and though well aware of the dangers, became infected himself. Soon afterwards Tim developed full-blown Aids, then terminal brain cancer. Although his funeral was to be Anglican, he wanted a Catholic priest to deliver Last Rites.
Round at Tim's place, my friend began to feel uncomfortable - the boyfriend was hostile to Catholicism, and, it turned out, had been through the same horrific rigmarole before. His previous partner had also caught HIV from him and died not long ago.
There was a crowd by the bedside, said my friend, and an odd whiff of celebration in the air, as if this was a life not wasted, but sacrificed in a good cause.
There were other mysteries: why had neither Tim nor his predecessor protected themselves? Why did the boyfriend show no signs of regret or offer an apology to the parents?
I walked home with Tim on my mind, and a nagging sense of having forgotten an important clue. Something I'd read somewhere, something relevant. It came back to me in Burger King at midnight, as a tired Brazilian handed over a tired bun - an article in Rolling Stone magazine a few years ago about "bug-chasers" - gay men who look for sexual partners with HIV.
...
At 1am, after about an hour spent on Google, Tim's story began to make more sense. It became quite clear that for a large section of the urban gay scene, unprotected sex is the norm; that risking HIV is a buzz, a burst of routine impetuosity, like flooring the accelerator in the Jag on the M40 going home.
"Anyway," said Michael, the host of a very nasty site indeed, "Aids is a minor inconvenience these days. It's not the catastrophe it once was."
Then there was a darker side, the romanticising of Aids itself. Google led me underground, to gay clubbers with "HIV neg" tattooed on their biceps as an invitation for others to infect them, to online chats about HIV-spreading sex parties, talk of "conceiving" the virus like a pregnancy and the intense intimacy of infecting a partner.
"It offers a kind of permanent partnership," said a journalist for a gay magazine, "a connection outside time."
It's important not to trust the internet, it deals more in fantasy than fact, but at the very least, the fascination with Aids was real, and somehow desperately sad. Behind the thrill-seeking, there seemed to be a vertiginous desire to leap into the abyss, to hope the angels would be waiting with catcher's mitts, a sense that life would be more worthwhile in the face of a slow, painful death.
My priest friend telephoned on Tuesday, after Tim's funeral. The HIV positive boyfriend had a new boyfriend, he said, who had already moved into Tim's old flat, but the service was nonetheless romantic. Mourners told stories about the unique love between Tim and his boyfriend, which the vicar called sacrificial, "Christ-like".
An Interesting Contrast
Warning: this posting contains discussions of some pretty rough material about a real problem: virtual child pornography; pedophilia; and child rape.
Last March, a law professor who I respected and thought of as a friend posted a rather lengthy defense of torturing people to death. Now, I was surprised, and even a little shocked. But it was one of those situations where people tend to get a little emotional; the killer had raped and murdered children.
I disagreed with this law professor, but I was careful to phrase my disagreement as a matter of policy. Of course, it is a little sad that I (and many others) had to explain to a defender of the ACLU why torturing people to death is wrong. I could at least understand his rage, and because I respected him, so I was careful not to turn my disagreement into a personal attack: What I find especially disturbing is the notion, expressed by Professor Volokh, that this torturous revenge constitutes justice. Does it bring back the dead children? Does it go back in time and prevent their suffering? Does it make the living less traumatized by what happened to their children? No.
There's a famous quote by Gandhi, "An eye for an eye will blind the world." Perhaps executing monsters like this makes sense, especially if you live in a society where it is impossible to keep them locked up for life, or where powerful forces (like the ACLU) argue that murderers should not be executed, but people who have committed no crime should be starved to death. Adding torture to the execution doesn't do anything but lower our society to the level of the savages.
Alas, this consideration does not appear to operate in reverse.
A while back, in the midst of pointing to some efforts to suppress freedom of speech and religion in Italy, I pointed to a lawsuit attempting to prohibit the Catholic Church from claiming that there was a man named Jesus Christ, and I quoted a prominent atheist in Britain who argues that teaching children about religion is a form of child abuse. I made a rather snide remark, not really intending it to be taken too seriously: Ah, that's it! The ACLU will argue that children have a right to not be mentally abused by exposure to religion.
It was not intended to be taken too seriously--but it did reflect my perception of the ACLU as a fundamentally anti-religious and more specificially anti-Christian organization.
Professor Volokh asked me in email to clarify if I really thought the ACLU was intent on suppressing religious belief. I think that the ACLU's decisions about which suits to take, and which to ignore, do reflect the fierce atheism that is that the heart of the organization, and I said so. I was not expecting Professor Volokh to engage in the sort of personal attack that he did.
I've learned my lesson. You see, my "ACLU Derangement Syndrome," as Professor Volokh calls it, is largely driven by three actions of the ACLU. No, not the same-sex marriage issue. It is dumb and wrongly argued, but realistically, this isn't going to destroy American society. Making heterosexual divorce the norm did far more damage.
No, it isn't Lawrence v. Texas (2003). I agree with Justice Thomas's paraphrase of the dissent from Griswold: Texas's homosexual prohibition on sodomy was "an uncommonly silly law." Seldom enforced, it served no real purpose.
No, it isn't the absurd lawsuits against historical crosses in city and county seals, or Ten Commandments monuments. These were wrong on the history, but practically speaking, they don't make much of a difference.
The three actions that make the ACLU fundamentally evil are their argument that virtual child pornography is Constitutionally protected; that a NAMBLA document that plaintiff's attorney characterizes as a detailed manual for getting away with raping children is Constitutionally protected; and that minors having sex with adults is Constitutionally protected. Hmmmm, I'm beginning to see a pattern here--and that pattern is not freedom of speech.
Virtual Child Pornography
Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. As a public policy question, I am inclined to think that having relatively few restrictions makes sense, simply because the more you try to regulate, the more thinly law enforcement and court systems have to be spread to enforce these laws.
If you want to argue that bluenoses and prudes are being unreasonable when they object to some naked breasts in a movie, okay, I'll agree with you. I saw a movie about World War I The Long Engagement that had a bit more coupling than was really necessary, but I would hardly call it out of place or obscene.
I doubt that it does much (if any) damage for most adults to watch most hardcore pornography--although I might argue the point for some of the stuff that gets offered to me in spam. I do wonder if a steady diet of pornography that degrades women (for example, Google image search for "bukake") might encourage some impressionable young men into more contempt for women, but okay, if watching movies with titles like Barnyard Fun is what you want to do, it is probably doing more damage to you than anyone else.
I draw the line, however, at virtual child pornography. No real child is used in making this stuff, so no real child is damaged by it. But obscenity is not Constitutionally protected. There is no legitimate function for materials that make a child into a source of sexual excitement. There are probably borderline pedophiles for whom such material puts ideas into their heads--people who might have been sexually excited by dressed minors (prepubescent or young teenagers) and who find that virtual child pornography expands their fantasy world in a very dangerous way.
We know that some pedophiles use child pornography as a method of manipulating children into sex. "See? Other kids do this. It must be okay." I've blogged in the past about such cases that I have run into in newspapers.
Finally, there is nothing wrong with a society saying, "Children are not sexual objects. And if you want to cater to that market, we'll send you to prison." Our laws make moral judgments all the time--and if you see a moral judgment like this as a problem, then you are so sick that you must be a law professor somewhere.
The Curley Lawsuit
The Curley suit involves the parents of a little boy who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by two pedophiles, one of them a member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). The suit is against NAMBLA. The claim of plaintiffs' attorney is that NAMBLA distributed material on how to have sex with children and not get arrested for it. I don't know if that characterization is correct or not; that's a question for the jury to decide. The ACLU is defending NAMBLA claiming that free speech will be suppressed if the suit goes forward.
There are precedents on this. Some years back, Paladin Press published a book titled Hit Man, which purported to be a technical manual for paid killers. It was quite detailed, and at least one person used it as a manual, committing some murders for hire. Paladin Press was sued, and lost. The ACLU, of course, sided with Paladin Press.
Now, I've pointed out before that if Hit Man had been written as a novel, Paladin Press might well have been safe. I'm not happy about this, but there is a bit of a difference between a work that is clearly fiction, and an instruction manual on how to commit a felony.
Some people insist that the ACLU is only defending NAMBLA's right to advocate for a change in the laws. Nope. You can advocate for a change in the laws without writing an instruction manual on how to break the law. You can advocate that abortion is a terrible thing, even call it murder--without having to cross the line and advocate for the murder of abortionists. You certainly don't need to provide a detailed instruction manual in how to do it without getting caught.
The Limon Case
I've seen ACLU's defenders insist that the ACLU's brief in the Limon was not trying to Constitutionalize statutory rape. Instead, they argue that the right of the "teenager" they were arguing for was the 18 year old who tried to have sex with a 14 year old. (The 14 year old said, "No," so the ACLU had to defend the aggressor, of course.) I've gone back and re-read the section of the brief (which has disappeared from ACLU's web site, not surprisingly). The ACLU's brief at footnote 13 on page 17 said: While a teenager’s constitutional rights may be more limited than an adult’s in some circumstances, and while the state is more likely to have a compelling state interest that justifies intruding upon a teenager’s rights, it is well established that teenagers - like adults - have a due process liberty interest in being free from state compulsion in making these types of personal decisions.
An 18 year old is an adult. A 14 year old is not an adult. The ACLU is distinguishing "teenagers" from "adults" here. They are talking about the 14 year old. Clear?
Now, it is true that a "liberty interest" is not an unconditional guarantee. There are circumstances under which the government may override a liberty interest for some higher purpose. But in light of the brief's argument to which footnote 13 is attached--which lists a whole stack of rights that the ACLU will not acknowledge have any legitimate state regulation: Sexual intimacy, including same-sex intimacy, the Court explained, is protected by the same fundamental right to autonomy recognized in Griswold v.
How should we read this?
Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (striking down law against use of contraceptives by married couples); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (extending Griswold to unmarried persons), Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (striking down abortion restriction), Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U.S. 678 (1977) (striking down restriction on the sale of contraceptives); and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Lawrence, 123 S. Ct. at 2476-82; id., at 2476 (characterizing these cases as “the most pertinent beginning” of its analysis).
I'm not the only person who read the ACLU's argument this way. The Attorney-General of Kansas interpreted that argument in exactly the same way: {Kansas Attorney-General] Kline cited a footnote in the ACLU's brief for Limon, in which it said teenagers have a well-established "liberty interest in being free from state compulsion" in making personal decisions about sex and marriage.
Now, why is the ACLU making this argument?
"I'll tell you what: I would be deeply offended if, when my daughter turns 13, she walks out the door to meet her 30-year-old boyfriend, and I say 'no,' and she says, 'I've got a 1-800 number for the ACLU; it's my constitutional right,' " Kline said. "That's their argument. They have to live with it."
They didn't need this argument to argue that the "Romeo and Juliet" exception to the state's statutory rape law was unfair because it discriminated against homosexuals. It wasn't the 14 year old who was being prosecuted; if there was a "liberty interest" that the 14 year old had in making decisions about sex, it would protect the 14 year old--not the defendant, who was 18.
Pedophilia: The Dirty Little Secret Behind All of This
I remember about fifteen years ago having a conversation with my wife who claimed that behind a lot of the effort to get all sexual restraints loosened was one big target: children. I thought this was a bit bizarre, but increasingly, the ACLU is proving her point. These three actions of theirs have one thing in common. It isn't freedom of the press--that doesn't explain Limon. It isn't freedom of contract for children--virtual child pornography doesn't involve any real children, and the little boy murdered in Massachusetts had no freedom of contract at all. What all three of these cases that the ACLU has involved itself in have in common is a desire to see children as objects for the sexual gratification of adults.
Now, this isn't the first time that a society has done this. The Emperor Tiberius had little boys that he called "minnows" in his pool. You can read from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars here about it. When they ceased to be of interest to them, he threw them off the cliff. Our society has plenty of problems with this already--the last thing we need is for the ACLU and its defenders to make sex with children into a Constitutonal right, or to encourage pedophiles to think of themselves as normal.
I'm done with this issue--and I'm done with defenders of evil (which means, defenders of the ACLU). There are evils so great that no decent person should defend them, and no decent person should associate with someone who defends them.
