Sorry about the bad taste in the title. I realize it's a bit like chuckling over the irony of Eichmann being considered a "Jewish expert," but the whole sordid Ahmadinejad affair has caused such a cognitive disconnect that it reminds me of a debate between advocates of gay marriage and advocates of sodomy laws.

What shocks me the most is the way so many people leaped to the defense of a man who not only denies the Holocaust while advocating another one, but who has the blood of Jews, American soldiers, gays, women stoned to death, and more on his hands.

A morally indefensible man was given a propaganda opportunity, and as the LA Times makes quite clear, he has walked away the winner:

Bollinger clearly had an American audience in mind when he denounced the Iranian leader to his face as a "cruel" and "petty dictator" and described his Holocaust denial as designed to "fool the illiterate and the ignorant." Bollinger's remarks may have taken him off the hook with his domestic critics, but when it came to the international media audience that really counted, Ahmadinejad already had carried the day. The invitation to speak at Columbia already had given him something totalitarian demagogues -- who are as image-conscious as Hollywood stars -- always crave: legitimacy. Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its courtesies as core social virtues. To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained.

Back in Tehran, Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leading Iranian reformer and Ahmadinejad opponent, said Bollinger's blistering remarks "only strengthened" the president back home and "made his radical supporters more determined," According to an Associated Press report, "Many Iranians found the comments insulting, particularly because in Iranian traditions of hospitality, a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him. To many, Ahmadinejad looked like the victim, and hard-liners praised the president's calm demeanor during the event, saying Bollinger was spouting a 'Zionist' line."

All of this was bad enough, but the almost willful refusal of commentators in the American media to provide their audiences with insight into just how sinister Ahmadinejad really is compounded the problem. There are a couple of reasons for the media's general refusal to engage with radical Islamic revivalists, like Ahmadinejad. He belongs to a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam, the Haghani, which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Madhi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. Serious members of this school -- and Ahmadinejad, who was a brilliant university student, is a very serious member -- believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming. "The wave of the Islamic revolution" would soon "reach the entire world," he has promised.

As a fundamentally secular institution, the American press always has had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Islamists like the Iranian president mean what they say and that they really do believe what they say they believe.

It bothers me to see the debate framed as being about free speech. Or politeness. Here's Mark Bowden:

....I am no fan of Ahmadinejad. I have written about him in this column and in my book Guests of the Ayatollah, where I noted his central involvement in the criminal seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Ahmadinejad is a dangerous zealot and the public face of a ruthless and oppressive regime that has enforced its own narrow and reactionary religious rule in Iran for more than a quarter of a century. He is given to buffoonish displays of ignorant hostility toward Israel and even modern history. He is by any measure an enemy of the United States and of the most basic values of Western society.

But he was a guest. I have no problem whatsoever with the roasting Ahmadinejad took in the New York press, or the laughter that greeted his more inane remarks - welcome to a free society, Mahmoud. But there is no excuse for Bollinger's rudeness. I suspect it was intended to emphasize that an invitation to speak is not an endorsement of the speaker, but there was a bigger principle at stake. Columbia University's decision to bring Ahmadinejad to campus needed no defense. Indeed, it was a demonstration of the openness of American society, something we ought to take pride in. Bollinger's remarks turned that expression of freedom into something that looked more like an ugly stunt, and succeeded in actually making fair-minded people feel sorry for Ahmadinejad. The moment was saved from becoming a complete Ahmadinejad triumph only by his own daffy comments.

But again, focusing on manners strikes me as a little creepy, and a bit misplaced if we take into account the overall circumstances of Ahmadinejad.

Similarly, the debate over whether the man raised valid questions about the definition and nature of homosexuality struck me as unseemly last week. Which was why I was delighted by Andrew Sullivan's remark:

"Ahmadinejad was right, you see? There are no gays in Iran. Just ask the Queer Studies Department."

Glenn Reynolds links this post by David Bernstein discussing the views of a Columbia professor who argues that:

.... there are no homosexuals in the entire Arab world, except for a few who have been brainwashed into believing they have a homosexual identity by an aggressive Western homosexual missionizing movement he calls "Gay International." The article is called, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," and it appears in Volume 14, issue 2 of the journal Public Culture, and was elaborated upon in a book, Desiring Arabs, published by University of Chicago Press (UPDATE: BTW, I read the article, which is accessible through my GMU library account, but not the book). According to the author, "It is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist" (emphasis added).

The author doesn't deny that same-sex sexual contact exists in Arab countries, but claims that the category of "homosexual" is purely a Western one exported to the Arab world by Western cultural imperialists. He suggests that by encouraging Arabs to adopt a Western homosexual identity, westernized Arab homosexuals have naturally provoked a counter-reaction against the importation of decadent Western culture into their societies. The article, to say, the least, is not at all sympathetic with the Western gay rights movements, and the author could easily write, replacing "Iran" with "the Arab world," "in the Arab world we don't have homosexuals like in your country." (See here for a good critique of the author's thesis.)

Much time is devoted in the comments to arguing over what is and what is not homosexuality. While this is a topic to which I have devoted a good deal of time since the beginning of this blog (yes, I do care about it), I think it's pretty sickening that the debate has been occasioned by a man who believes in executing people for participating in homosexual acts. I mean, we can argue till we're blue in the face about whether a guy who has sex with a guy is gay, or bi, or just doing his thing for reasons known only to him. But if he's blue in the face from dangling at the end of an Iranian rope, isn't that the larger issue here?

Isn't the point that there's no sexual freedom in Iran?

David Bernstein thinks so:

The issue of homosexual identity is surely a fascinating one, but I would emphasize (1) it's possible to claim Western origins for modern homosexual identity without one's writing dripping with disdain for the gay rights groups that work to advance sexual freedom in Arab countries, where severe punishment for homosexual activity is common; (2) either one finds both Ahmadinejad and Massad to be engaged in respectable commentary on the differences between the Arab/Muslim world and the West re sexual orientation, or neither; and (3) the critique I linked to strikes me as quite sound, and written by an expert on the subject.

It's a legitimate topic, but I think it's rather unsettling to have to parse a murderer's words and judge their theoretical meaning according to the trends of the latest Post Modernist jargon.

Yeah, I'll probably be called an angry right wing nut (or maybe a "Cheeto-stained piece of chickenshit") for it, but this picture makes me feel inclined to do to Ahmadinejad what his regime did to these two men.

The reaction of the Queer Studies Departments seems to be intellectual handwringing.

(Like asking "Why do they hang us?")

MORE: This video explores the possibility that there may be personal issues involved.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who expresses his hope "that the image of Ahmadinejad in a slinky red dress atop the piano gets plenty of circulation with the folks back home."

I'm all too happy to oblige with the imagery.

Every little bit helps.

And once he admits his denial, he's got the problem half licked!

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all!

Glenn also links this post from Jeff Goldstein about Burma, and the trivialization of evil, assisted by the stultifying moral flattening which accompanies pacifism. (And hey, if Ahmadinejad and his propaganda victory is a joke, why take the savage repression in Burma seriously? I'm sure that many Columbia students see no difference between Bush, Ahmadinejad, and the brutal regime currently ruling Burma. Jeff links his earlier post about the Ahmadinejad, with a link to video showing students applauding. They'd probably applaud a Burmese government spokesman too.

Glenn also links Ron Rosenbaum, who notes the failure of so many to express outrage (and who links this chilling discussion of Ahmadinejad's holy nuclear agenda).

Instead of expressing outrage, they're congratulating each other for being tolerant of free speech. And as Rosenbaum notes, for being brave:

And what's equally laughable is their belief that their arguments, their rhetoric their desire above all for dialogue will make a differnce in a kumbaya way, to the victims of a theocratic Stasi-like state.

Are they aware of how student dissidents are beaten and tortured in Terhan? Only in the abstract, I imagine. I suggest they read this harrowing account of an Iranian student hunted down, beaten and tortured, that was just published in London's Observer.

Read it? Now tell me the best response: protest or "dialogue"? I wonder if that Iranian student was grateful for the super, super brave bloggers who boasted of their courageous lack of "fear" of dialogue with the representative of a theocratic fascist regime.

When Ahmadinejad began his remarks by swinging back at Bollinger, several in the audience actually applauded him. More applause occurred when he called for Palestinian self-determination (which is, in itself, curious, since Palestinians have recently self-determined that they want to be led by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas). When Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran was the victim of U.S.-sponsored terrorism and was "the first nation that objected to terrorism," there was even more applause. When he defended Iranian executions by asking, "Don't you have capital punishment in the United States?", more applause. When he said that nuclear weapons go against "the whole grain of humanity," more applause. When he suggested that George W. Bush was "retarded," more applause. And when he finished his performance, there was another spate of applause, just for good measure. How hospitable of them.

[...]

Oh, but how the audience guffawed when Ahmadinejad said Iran doesn't have "the phenomenon" of homosexuality.

They really showed him.

UPDATE: Sean Kinsell links this post (thanks Sean!) with an interesting discussion. Be sure to read it.

A maddening little mini (and I mean that literally) crisis earlier sent me scurrying onto the Internet in search of solutions. An SD memory card flat out refused to work properly, as the camera kept refusing to take pictures:

"MEMORY CARD LOCKED"

There was no finding it and sticking it back in, as these things are barely larger than a grain of sand. I nearly drove myself crazy pulling another teensy slider lock out of a freebie 16MB card which came with my camera and will never be used, and imagine my chagrin when it didn't fit a card from another manufacturer.

Initially, I thought the switch was actually a switch that did something inside the card. Not so; it turns out that it's just an indicator akin to the tabs in VHS cassettes, which switches an actual switch inside the camera. The latter looks for the correct gap and if it finds it, the SD card "locked"; if it doesn't find it, it's unlocked:

"The switch / notch works in same way as the notches on compact audio cassettes and videotape cassette tapes or floppy disks. A closed or covered notch is writable, while an open notch (or removed tab) is protected.

If the switch becomes broken or falls off then the card will become a write-protected ROM card and no longer be writable. A possible troubleshooting solution would be to apply tape over the notched area (avoiding the connectors and the other notch) to configure the card in a permanent writable state."

Here it is; larger than life:

I think it is time to digest the results of the Israeli air raid on Syria that happened on September 6th and see how it has affected Iran. Let us start with an early report from the Guardian.

Syrian air defences opened fire on Israeli aircraft that violated Syrian airspace overnight, a Syrian military spokesman said today.

The Israeli planes broke the sound barrier and "dropped ammunition" over deserted areas of northern Syria, the official Syrian Arab news agency quoted the official as saying.

"We warn the Israeli enemy government against this flagrant aggressive act, and retain the right to respond in an appropriate way," the spokesman said.

Syria said the Israeli aircraft entered its territory through the northern border, coming from the Mediterranean and then heading east. "Air defence units confronted them and forced them to leave after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage," the spokesman said.

Witnesses said they heard five planes or more above the Tal al-Abiad area on Syria's border with Turkey, around 100 miles north of the Syrian city of Rakka. They said the planes then headed south.

LONDON (Reuters) - A British newspaper said on Sunday Israeli commandos seized North Korean nuclear material in Syria to help secure U.S. approval for an Israeli air strike that destroyed a suspect weapons plant on September 6.

The Sunday Times report, citing Israeli and U.S. sources, was the latest version of an incident shrouded by contradictory accounts from officials and diplomats and by Israeli military censorship of media operating in the country, including Reuters.

As with previous such reports in foreign media, Israel's own public broadcaster led bulletins with the Sunday Times account.

Elements of the story, which did not say when the commando raid took place, coincided with what political sources in the Middle East told Reuters on September 6 and subsequently -- that an air strike reported by Syria that day was linked to a covert Israeli ground raid and that this was linked to Israeli fears its neighbor was developing "weapons of mass destruction".

ROME (AP) - A senior U.S. nuclear official said yesterday that North Koreans were in Syria and that Damascus might have had contacts with "secret suppliers" to obtain nuclear equipment.

Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation policy, did not identify the suppliers but said North Koreans were in the country and that he could not exclude that the network run by the disgraced Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan might have been involved.

He said it was not known whether the contacts had produced any results. "Whether anything transpired remains to be seen," he said.

SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 22 (AP) -- North Korea's No. 2 leader met with a Syrian delegation in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on Saturday, the North's media reported, amid growing international concerns about weapons technology cooperation between the countries.

Kim Yong-nam, head of the North's rubber-stamp legislature, had "a friendly talk" with the Syrian delegation, led by Saaeed Eleia Dawood, director of the organizational department of Syria's Baath Arab Socialist Party, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

The Syrian official expressed satisfaction that the "friendly and cooperative ties" between the countries were growing under President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Kim Jong-il of North Korea, the news agency said.

On Friday, the Syrian official held talks with Choe Tae-bok, a senior official of the North's ruling Workers' Party.

Some people have a different idea about what might have been discussed.

On September 6, 2007, something very important may have happened in northern Syria near the Turkish border. It is believed that Israeli Air Force (IAF) F-16s and F-15s attacked a site in Syria that may have had nuclear material. What is alarming is not the increase in tensions from Syria and Israel, but the silence that exists on both sides. Complicating matters is the contention that North Korea is involved in Syrian nuclear ambitions.

There are scattered and unverifiable reports that Israel carried out a strike against a Syrian target. What exactly the target was and what was struck is not yet clear; however, something very important may have occurred, akin to the strike on Osirak in Iraq in 1981. Global Security has constructed a timeline of the events and news reports that have leaked out since the incident occurred.

An unnamed source stated four days after the incident that a pilot nuclear enrichment operation was the target of the strike. The next day, a U.S. government official stated that the target was a Syrian weapons shipment destined for Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. On September 13, 2007, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler wrote that "...a former Israeli official said he had been told that it was an attack against a facility capable of making unconventional weapons." On September 15th, Kessler reported that an Israeli official provided the U.S. with evidence of Syrian-North Korean cooperation on a nuclear facility.

Even more interesting is the Russian connection.

Military experts conclude from the way Damascus described the episode Wednesday, Sept. 6, that the Pantsyr-S1E missiles, purchased from Russia to repel air assailants, failed to down the Israeli jets accused of penetrating northern Syrian airspace from the Mediterranean the night before.

Evidently Iran is none too happy about the failure of the Russian eqipment to defend Syrian airspace.

September 28, 2007:
Information coming out of Iran indicates that the military there is very dismayed at how ineffective new Russian anti-aircraft systems were during the Israeli September 6th air strike on a Syrian weapons development facility near the Iraqi border. Syria and Iran have both bought billions of dollars worth of the latest Russian anti-aircraft missile systems. Apparently the Israelis were able to blind these systems electronically. Syria isn't saying anything, nor are the Israelis, but Iranian officers are complaining openly that they have been had by the Russians. The Iranians bought Russian equipment based on assurances that the gear would detect and shoot down Israeli warplanes.

Over the Summer Russia delivered the first dozen or so (of 50) Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft systems to Syria. It is believed that some of these systems are going to Iran, if only because Iran is apparently paying for them. Russia made the sale to Syria, despite $13.4 billion still owned for past purchases. Russia forgave most (73 percent) of the old debt, and is taking some of the balance in goods. In return, Syria is able to buy $400 million worth of anti-aircraft systems, mainly the self-propelled Pantsir-S1. This is a mobile system, each vehicle carries radar, two 30mm cannon and twelve Tunguska missiles. The missiles have a twenty kilometer range, the radar a 30 kilometer range. The missile can hit targets at up to 26,000 feet. The 30mm cannon is effective up to 10,000 feet. The vehicle carrying all this weighs 20 tons and has a crew of three.

"Everyone in the government and military can only talk of one thing,' he reports. 'No matter who I talked to, all they could do was ask me, over and over again, 'Do you think the Americans will attack us?' 'When will the Americans attack us?' 'Will the Americans attack us in a joint operation with the Israelis?' How massive will the attack be?' on and on, endlessly. The Iranians are in a state of total panic.'

And that was before September 6. Since then, it's panic-squared in Tehran. The mullahs are freaking out in fear. Why? Because of the silence in Syria. On September 6, Israeli Air Force F-15 and F-16s conducted a devastating attack on targets deep inside Syria near the city of Dayr az-Zawr. Israel's military censors have muzzled the Israeli media, enforcing an extraordinary silence about the identity of the targets. Massive speculation in the world press has followed, such as Brett Stephens' Osirak II? in yesterday's (9/18) Wall St. Journal. Stephens and most everyone else have missed the real story. It is not Israel's silence that 'speaks volumes' as he claims, but Syria's.

Why would the Syrian government be so tight-lipped about an act of war perpetrated on their soil? The first half of the answer lies in this story that appeared in the Israeli media last month (8/13): Syria's Antiaircraft System Most Advanced In World. Syria has gone on a profligate buying spree, spending vast sums on Russian systems, 'considered the cutting edge in aircraft interception technology.' Syria now 'possesses the most crowded antiaircraft system in the world,' with 'more than 200 antiaircraft batteries of different types,' some of which are so new that they have been installed in Syria 'before being introduced into Russian operation service.' While you're digesting that, take a look at the map of Syria: Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel. An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace. And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6th. Nothing.

El blanko. Silence. The systems didn't even light up, gave no indication whatever of any detection of enemy aircraft invading Syrian airspace, zip, zero, nada. The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn't even know they were blinded. Now you see why the Syrians have been scared speechless. They thought they were protected - at enormous expense - only to discover they are defenseless. As in naked. Thus the Great Iranian Freak-Out - for this means Iran is just as nakedly defenseless as Syria.

I can tell you that there are a lot of folks in the Kirya (IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv) and the Pentagon right now who are really enjoying the mullahs' predicament. Let's face it: scaring the terror masters in Tehran out of their wits is fun. It's so much fun, in fact, that an attack destroying Iran's nuclear facilities and the Revolutionary Guard command/control centers has been delayed, so that France (under new management) can get in on the fun too. On Sunday (9/16), Sarkozy's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner announced that 'France should prepare for the possibility of war over Iran's nuclear program.' All of this has caused Tehran to respond with maniacal threats. On Monday (9/17), a government website proclaimed that '600 Shihab-3 missiles' will be fired at targets in Israel in response to an attack upon Iran by the US/Israel.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

A really nice piece in the Grateful Dead style. I wish I knew Hebrew better. I'd like to be able to converse with some of the lovelies. Women who pack heat turn me on.


Music by Vlado Kreslin

More Women of the Israeli Army
Some More Women of the Israeli Army

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers






Thanks to Instapundit for the 'lanche.

Via Glenn Reynolds, a perfect example of what should not be illegal, but which makes me sick.

If wanting to keep such disgusting things legal is part of my "freedom fetish," then all I can say is there's nothing sexual about it.

Most of the readers here know what I think about the Drug War. I'd like to end it, and I'd love to roll back the drug laws -- not all the way to the Middle Ages, but to the days when my father was a kid. Say, back to 1913 -- the year Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was first performed. It seems that in the haste to modernize the world, busybodies decided that the government ought to get into the business of deciding not only how much of our money we're allowed to keep, but what we are allowed to put in our bodies. In a flurry of "progressive" legislation, they abolished the founders' taxation philosophy with the 16th Amendment, changed way the Senate is elected with the 17th Amendment, passed the Harrison Narcotic Act, and then finally enacted Prohibition with the "telltale" 18th Amendment. At least income taxation, the Senate change, and Prohibition were enacted in a constitutional manner; the criminalization of drugs was simply unauthorized Big Brotherism, and probably the biggest single leap towards Nanny State government that the country had yet seen.

I realize that people disagree with me on the drug war, and I know that repealing the laws is almost utopian thinking.

But do we really need to be expanding them?

An innocuous shrub with relatively mild effects, Catha edulis (known as "khat") has been chewed for countless centuries, mainly in the Mideast. Its effects are similar to drinking strong coffee, and it has never caused any major problems anywhere. Had it not been for the Gulf War (and the war in Somalia), the only Americans who even knew about it would have been Mideast scholars and a few travelers. But servicemen discovered it while they were over there, and one thing led to another. In 1993, headline-grabbing bureaucrats added it to the endlessly expanding "Schedule 1" controlled narcotic list.

And so today I opened the Inquirer to see a scare headline -- "Exotic shrub a choice of cabbies. Seizure of 'khat' a first encounter for Phila. police." I don't know whether the idea is to get us all on board with more anti-drug hysteria and yet another newly created criminal problem, but I do so tire of reading -- and blogging -- about these things. Yet if I don't complain, who will?

So, on to the "problem":

An ancient drug has found a new illegal market in Philadelphia.

The drug, khat, is a stimulant with varying degrees of potency. It is found in the leaf of an evergreen shrub from East Africa and the Arabian peninsula, both places where it is widely used.

Philadelphia police said yesterday they seized 740 pounds of khat wrapped in burlap and packed in 17 boxes in a house in East Falls on Wednesday.

Inspector Aaron Horne said nobody had been arrested but investigators had a "person of interest." The seizure apparently was the first of its kind in Pennsylvania.

"We've never experienced khat before," Horne said, adding that police contacted their counterparts in New York to determine what they had found.

Horne said that authorities believe the market for khat is within the city's African immigrant community but that they wanted to alert the public to the drug's existence because it is cheap and may have moved outside its traditional market.

"Unsuspecting parents might not recognize it as a drug," he said. "One tip-off is if you see your kid take a sudden interest in 'chewing tobacco.' "

The active chemicals in khat - which predates coffee - are ingested by chewing the leaf or brewing it as tea.

Abdelgabr Adam, a gastroenterologist from Sudan, said he knew khat was being consumed in Philadelphia.

"It's used here all the time, especially by those who drive cabs, those who want to stay up all night," he said.

He said that despite its acceptance in some communities, khat is still a dangerous substance. "Like any other amphetamine, it is dangerous," Adam said.

In one West Philadelphia neighborhood yesterday, a man from Burkina Faso, who asked not to be identified by name, also confirmed khat's presence in the city.

"A lot of people use it, a lot of taxi drivers," he said.

In the places where the shrub Catha edulis is grown, khat is often sold by roadsides and is widely used by truckers.

But it is banned in the United States and other countries because it contains the stimulant cathinone when it it is fresh, or cathine, when it is dry.

Cathinone is a powerful Schedule 1 narcotic under federal law, and cathine is a less potent Schedule 4 narcotic.

Horne said the seized khat was dry and qualified as a Schedule 4 narcotic.

Besides acting as a stimulant, khat can induce a sense of euphoria and sometimes psychosis, officials said.

British researchers earlier this year reported that out of 20 addictive substances, khat ranked last in harmfulness as assessed by health, crime and science professionals surveyed.

Furthermore, khat is a cultural tradition, and persecution of khat users runs afoul of now-traditional multiculturalism! (Hmm... There might even be a religious issue, akin to peyote. Um, yes, there was. But it wasn't explored.)

Anyway, color me unimpressed by the "danger" factor. But there's the newly inflated "street value":

The 740-pound khat seizure has a street value of $140,000 compared with $100,000 for a kilo - or 2.2 pounds - of cocaine, said Horne.

I really think that if tobacco and coffee were newly discovered and brought back U.S. troops, they'd be put in Schedule 1 by the geniuses who want to run our lives.

The fascinating thing about khat is I have seen it go from no problem at all to a front page headline "problem" with all the "street value" nonsense that goes with it, in just 14 years.

The War on Khat strikes me as the Drug War in microcosm.

UPDATE: As a commenter has pointed out that khat can have side effects, it's worth noting that reports of psychosis are rare.

Should exceptional reports of psychosis be enough to justify adding a substance to the drug war?

Well, what about the numerous studies confirming caffeine psychosis?

Here is a nice Velvet Underground clip complete with psychedelia. I saw them live at Winterland when The Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead were on the same bill many years ago. Gone are the days.

First let me introduce you to a man you ought to know.

Tim Flannery, named the 2007 Australian of the Year for his work in alerting the public to the dangers of global warming, said the issue was the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century.

Flannery said predictions in a 2001 UN report, warning the atmosphere was likely to warm by 1.4 to 5.8°C from 1990 to 2100 now appeared conservative.

"In the six years since then, we've collected enough data to (check) whether those projections are valid or not," he said. "It turns out they're not valid, but in the most horrible way - because for the key performance indicators about climate, change is occurring far in advance of the worst-case scenario."

Something pretty strange even for a climate scientist.

We really did not understand climate change until recently. That was largely a result of the computer models that we were relying on for vital data. These computer models were inherently conservative and a lot of the feedback was biased as a result.An example of this can be found in the way that data on the relation of global warming to hurricanes was projected. In 2004, the computer models predicted that global warming would increase hurricane activity by 20% by 2080. The next year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. With new computer models available to us, we have been able to measure the increase in the energy produced by hurricanes over the last three decades and we now know that it increased by 60% during that period. There is no way that this rise can be accounted for by hurricane cycles.

Another example of the way that new data is helping us understand global warming comes from the taking of core samples from the earth. In 2006, the first sediment core from the Arctic Ocean has shown that the ocean temperature in this area was around 24 degrees Celsius fifty-five million years ago. This was much warmer than has been previously realized, almost tropical in fact, and is dramatic proof of how the earth's climate does change.

The evidence for global warming has been there all along and I really regret that it has taken us so long to understand it.

I suppose it could if you assume natural cycles. However, I don't think Mr. Flannery would agree with that.

This is craziness.

In any case Mr. Flannery knows what to do.

The more I think about it, the situation is like that of the people who launched the anti-slavery campaign in the late 1700's. One of the group's leaders, William Wilberforce, is a great hero of mine. When they began their efforts, people were getting rich by degrading the lives of the slaves brought over from Africa to work on the plantations in the West Indies and America. It must have seemed hopeless at first, faced by the opposition of corrupt parliaments and wealthy merchants and planters. Yet, these Abolitionists changed the world by the force of their moral argument and I believe that moral argument will win the day and lead to solutions for global warming.

Actually, the two causes, the abolition of slavery and stopping global warming are closely linked. In the 1800's, the labor of slaves was replaced by steam-powered machines powered by coal and oil. Now, the use of these fossil fuels is confronting us with a moral dilemma and I am confident we will make the right choice.

Pretzel logic.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don't know, but this morning's cartoon (from the editorial page of the Inquirer, but once again, not from the web site!) gave me a chuckle:

Tough to tell whether they're just taking advantage of a handy opportunity to ridicule both men at the same time, or whether there's a larger comparison. If it's the latter, I'm reminded of something I've been saying for at least a year:

Whenever two apparent adversaries agree with each other, it worries me. Right now, I see agreement along the following lines:

RESOLVED: Gays do not belong in the Republican Party.

Of course, the idea may just be to compare Ahmadinejad and Craig, and not Iran and the GOP. Either way, I think it's a bit of a stretch....

Speaking of Iran, last night I watched an early 90s film which I do not believe could be made today -- "Not Without My Daughter," starring Sally Fields as an American woman tricked into moving to Khomeini's Iran with her disguntled, deceitful -- and ultimately physically abusive -- Iranian husband, who will not allow his wife and their American daughter to return to the U.S. She finds herself helpless and literally a prisoner of her husband's hostile and paranoid family, and finally risks her life to venture a hazardous escape through dangerous countryside. Her complaints about the forced veiling, the religious brainwashing inflicted on her daughter, the backward and primitive Iranian theocracy and its brutally sexist religion would probably not be presented sympathetically in a major Hollywood film today.

After all, today's Iranian rulers, well yes, they're a little backward....

But aren't they really just misunderstood and comic, along the lines of Larry Craig?

UPDATE: I found the cartoon at artist Rob Rogers' web site.

Dr. John Beresford has died.

Dr. John Beresford died on September 2, 2007 in a hospital in Canada. British-born John Beresford began his psychedelic research interests in 1961, when he resigned his post as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the New York Medical College and founded the Agora Scientific Trust, the world's first research organization devoted to investigating the effects of LSD. In contrast to Leary's invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," Beresford wanted to keep LSD in proper perspective as a tool of scientifically trained specialists.

The Nazi Comparison

by Dr. John Beresford

Drug War prisoners that I correspond with call themselves POWs. Some write "POW in America" in the corner of an envelope under the writer's name and prison number. "Political prisoner" and "gulag" are terms that enter conversation. Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago are works sometimes referred to.

America's vast network of prisons, boot camps, and jails invites comparison with the detention machinery of former totalitarian regimes. The certainty of conviction that an accusation of a drug law violation brings -- through confession ( 95 percent ) or trial and a finding of guilt ( the remaining 5 percent ) -- matches the idea of automatic conviction that goes with popular belief about the nazi and communist systems. "Nazi" is a term used by Drug War prisoners and non-prisoners alike, as though it were a given that the mentality behind Nazi behavior a half-century ago and the operation of today 's Drug War is no different.

The comparison is an uncomfortable one, and one's first inclination is to reject it. A US judge has objected that nothing in the conduct of today's Drug War resembles the terror tactics in Nazi Germany where SS troops could storm into a person's home and no one saw or heard of that person again. The objection is understandable, but it rests on a false premise. The Nazis were not a bunch of crooks, operating outside the confines of the law. Everything they did had legal backing, and if on some occasion a law was needed they composed one.

Flat out, it will be objected that a world of difference separates a prison from a death camp. Drug War prisoners are not intended for a holocaust. Ominously for our peace of mind, however, until the last minute neither were the people held in concentration camps. They were held there to protect the health of society. Moreover, with the obsession with death that gains ground daily, it is probable that death is in the cards for people accused of drug law violations in the future. A questionnaire is making the rounds in Congress that has Yes and No boxes for questions which include: "Do you favor the death penalty for drug trafficking?" Who in their right mind in Congress, I wonder, will check No to that question, "trafficking" being the loaded term for what most people call dealing?

Someone will point to the absurdity of thinking that America would ever tolerate a "Fuhrer," a wild man with a funny mustache and a way of haranguing crowds burlesqued by Charlie Chaplin. The point, though, is that the Nazi comparison refers not so much to rhetoric, inevitably different in two quite different places and at different times, as to the dehumanization and trashing of large numbers of people for lifestyles and practices that violate the norms of mainstream society. For this we do not need a Hitler. We can do it the American way.

Myself, I am sympathetic to the Nazi comparison. I was in Nazi Germany as a child.

In the summer of 1938, when I was 14, my parents sent me on a two-week vacation with a family in a village in north-west Germany. There were Mr. and Mrs. Otting, their daughter Irmgard, and the youngest son Wolfgang, who wore his Hitler Jugend uniform at Wednesday night meetings. The two older sons I never saw. One was in the army. The other was doing two years of voluntary farm labor, which excused him from army service.

Mr. and Mrs. Otting were old-time Christians, and had the family bible on display in the china cabinet in the dining room. On the shelf above the Holy Bible you saw the red and white dust jacket of Mein Kampf, Hitler's version of scripture. No one said anything about it, but there had to be a copy of Mein Kampf on display for two reasons. Every five or six houses or apartments had an informant who could sift through mail, collect gossip, and pay a visit to make sure the householder did not have suspicious material lying around. Also, schoolchildren were taught to report suspicious behavior to the police.

There wasn't any TV, but there was plenty of entertainment -- parades, outdoor concerts, Hitler on the radio, sports.

The economy was great. Everyone had a job. Germany was strong. Hitler wanted peace. New construction was going up everywhere. The trains ran on time. You didn't see beggars in the street, hanging around. Undesirables had been rounded up, got out of the way.

The newspapers were full of praise for the Nazi system. A weekly periodical with pictures showed who the Untermenschen were, the underclass of people who had no place in decent society. In those days the underclass consisted of gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, the wrong sort of artists, trade unionists, and communists. They were described in terms we now call demonization and scapegoating.

The universities had their share of academics who endorsed Nazi policy. Doctors, engineers, race specialists, and others spelled out theories which gave the Nazis a green light.

At 14 I was barely aware of all this. Yet by the end of my two weeks with the Ottings I had a feeling that to this day remains hard to describe. I took this feeling home to England, where I promptly forgot it. It wasn't the sort of feeling you had there. I didn't have it during the war, which started the next year. I didn't have it when I studied medicine, emigrated to America, became an American citizen, and lived in New York for 20 years. I didn't have it in Canada, where I practiced psychiatry for 15 years. I didn't have it when I retired from practice and spent time in a Buddhist monastery.

On and off, I would read about Nazi Germany, but the feeling that I had when I was briefly in Nazi Germany as a child had gone.

In the fall of 1992 an ad appeared in the personal column of High Times Magazine, sent in by Brian Adams. Brian wrote that he was 18 years old, just out of high school, when he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for passing out LSD to his friends. If a High Times reader was interested in LSD sentencing methods, the reader could write to Brian and learn something.

I wrote to Brian, who introduced me to Tim Dean, who introduced me to other LSD prisoners and soon I was in the thick of a correspondence which has not stopped growing. In 1993 I began to visit Drug War prisoners in prison. I drove to the Canadian border, crossed into the United States, and talked with Pat Jordan in County Jail in Nashville, Tennessee. I drove to Michigan City to talk with Franklin Martz, sentenced to 40 years in the Indiana State Prison in that city. I drove to other prisons to speak with Drug War prisoners, paying attention to the information they provided. That started my Drug War education.

One day something happened. I realized that every time I left the monastery and entered the United States I was struck with a weird feeling that left as soon as I re-entered Canada. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was as real as day. When the meaning of this realization dawned, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The feeling I had acquired in Nazi Germany and forgotten more than half a century before was back. My Drug War education had clicked in.

The feeling told me everything. The exponent of democracy had fallen on hard times. America was treading the same path as Nazi Germany. The War on Drugs and Hitler's war on anyone he took exception to -- the symptoms in the two cases were identical.

One thing I had to accept was that I could not stay on in the monastery. I could not sit back and watch disaster unfold. I had to get out in the world and become an activist, whatever becoming an activist entailed. Even if no one else saw the War on Drugs in the same light I did, I had to do what might lie in my power to stop it.

I won't go into what has happened since, except to mention a friendship with Nora Callahan and a tie to the November Coalition. It is a relief to know that others share the perception that historically we are in big trouble, without their having once glimpsed life in Nazi Germany.

Where it will end, no one can say. But there is reason for hope. In 1938 people in Germany did not know the price they would soon pay for subscribing to Nazi policy. We, looking back, do know. With the benefit of hindsight and with concerted effort we may still halt the juggernaut, free Drug War prisoners, reverse an unsalutary policy, and restore meaning to the words "liberty and justice for all." If we don't, we will have no one to blame for the disaster that lies just around the corner but ourselves.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don't know how many readers listen to XM Radio, but last night I was a guest on XM's POTUS '08 radio show. Hosts Tim Farley and Rebecca Roberts couldn't have been nicer (despite my limited radio experience), and I chatted about blogging, the debate, and the candidates.

What's incredibly cool about this is that POTUS '08 is also the home of the new Pajamas Media Radio Show. The show's producer Cameron Gray happens to be an old friend, and it was great to see him again and catch up. Cameron expressed interest in meeting La Shawn Barber (who was featured on CNN the other day) so they could interview her, and I couldn't have been more delighted to make the introduction.

I only wish I could have heard their entire show, but I was buried in my laptop, which wasn't configured to stream XM radio.

But I'm planning to be a regular listener.

Bear in mind that you don't need to run out and buy satellite equipment in order to listen to XM Radio; it is Internet-streamable, and they're running a free trial offer right now.

MORE: Via Media Bloggers Association's Robert Cox, a photo of live radio!

AND MORE: Yow! Glenn Reynolds links this post and says I should have my own show??? (But I always thought I had a voice made for blogging!)

My liveblogging skills are not what they should be, and that is mainly because my typing skills are not what they should be.

And now for my "blame a bad childhood" defense: I didn't grow up at a keyboard the way a lot of younger people have, and when I was in high school, essays were hand-written save the occasional "project" which required typing -- a special skill often farmed out to others for money. Even as late as 1982 when I took the California bar exam, essays had to be written out by hand, and there were no computer terminals to use. Although there was a "typing room" for old-fashioned typewriters, a minority of test-takers used it. In high school (which is when one normally learns these things) computers were a big deal, reserved for the super nerds only. Remember, this was the late 60s and early 70s; my school had what was called a "computer room" but that wasn't a computer in the modern sense, and I'm not even sure it was a true computer, because in order to use it you had to not only know what you were doing, but reserve "computer time" -- which meant that it called the "real computer" located somewhere else. This was a big deal, and if you didn't know what you were doing, they wouldn't let you use it. I actually did look at it once, it had a telephone dial, and spat out computer tape which looked like a long strip with lots of tiny nonsensical holes. Hardly the sort of thing which would have inspired typing skills. I never learned to type, and when I worked as a lawyer, I had a secretary. I didn't start going online until 1994, and I found myself hunting and pecking, and over the years I got faster at it until I don't need to look at the keys all that much.

I'm therefore self taught, but typing is a second language, and I'm slow. Last night, I was barely able to keep pace with the debate's questions and answers, and I kept noticing and impulsively correcting errors, which gave me no time to think or evaluate. It felt as if I was a scribe, and a semi-literate one at that.

For me the most interesting part of the debate was not the debate at all -- but the opportunity to interact with other bloggers and see old friends.

I met up with a number of old friends. Here I am with La Shawn Barber:

And here are the people most responsible for my being there last night -- Newsbusters' founder Matthew Sheffield and Media Bloggers Association's Robert Cox:

And here's the great blogger and video producer extraordinaire Ian Schwartz with Matthew Sheffield:

OK, now for what would have been a very exciting topic for the debate.

One of the questions (asked by PBS's Ray Suarez) concerned the death penalty.

Suarez: Congressman Paul, support has gradually been slipping for the death penalty among all Americans. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports a large minority of whites still support capital punishment, while Blacks and Latinos do not.

Now, I know this is mostly a state function, but the president does appoint appellate judges, and of course, the highest appellate judges in the land, the Supreme Court justices, who often review death penalty cases.

Do you think the death penalty is carried out justly in the United States? And do you want to see it continued during your presidency?

Ian Schwartz posted about it, and Newsbusters links the original Smiley remark, made on the Geraldo Rivera show on October 24, 2000:

Geraldo Rivera found someone more extreme than himself, a star of another cable network's evening interview show, who told Rivera: "As far as I'm concerned, Bush in Texas is nothing more than a serial killer."

That charge came from Tavis Smiley, host of BET Tonight on the Black Entertainment Television channel. MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens noticed how Smiley opined during the October 24 Rivera Live on CNBC:

"There are, there are some issues on which if you are a voter of color, certainly if you are an African-American, you have a hard time choosing. For example, both of these guys support the death penalty. As far as I'm concerned, Bush in Texas is nothing more than a serial killer. But we, but we cannot expect that much more out of, out of Gore, because this guy supports the death penalty as well."

What a conundrum.

Does Gingrich think that's "responsible" commentary?

Maybe it's because I'm a pit bull owner, but I admire spunk, and I really enjoyed watching Matt elbow his way past the hordes of fawning reporters to get right up to Tavis Smiley and ask him about the serial killer remark. Smiley's response was pure politics, and zero journalism:

"I never said that."

Once again, Smiley the pure:

"I don't remember saying that."

I'm sure that Smiley thinks no one will ever notice, but I did. A lowly blogger (or, a "citizen journalist" as the big guys sometimes grudgingly allow) dared to ask the reigning media figure of the evening about what he said which goes to the heart of his political bias (and which was clearly relevant to an important question in the debate), and he first issued a flat out denial, then backtracked to not remembering, and then he was out of there.

A seemingly insignificant matter? I don't think so. I see it as a classic example of what blogging is all about. Tavis Smiley would have everyone believe that he is the guy who talks truth to power, yet here he can't even acknowledge the truth of what came out of his own very powerful mouth.

Who are the politicians? Who are the journalists? Here a guy who presents himself as a "man of the people" style journalist behaved as a classic prevaricating politician, and the real journalist was Matt Sheffield.

Once again, I think it was very disappointing that the leading GOP candidates failed to show up. While it's not much of an excuse, the fact is that they did behave in the way politicians often behave.

So what is Tavis Smiley's excuse? Should I just consider him another politician? He certainly walked, talked, and acted like one. (Sure, he's not elected but he behaves as if he's a member of the ruling class.)

It must be galling for someone like that to have real journalism appear -- especially when it takes the form of a blogger asking uncomfortable questions.

UPDATE: Via Matt Sheffield, Ian Schwartz got the video of Smiley being asked the question by Matt, and his haughty reply -- the exact words of which are quite specific:

"I have never called President Bush a serial killer," Smiley asserted. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Adds Matt,

When confronted with an exact citation (October 24, 2000 on CNBC's "Rivera Live," Smiley became far less definitive. "I don't ever remember saying that," he said. Smiley left immediately thereafter.

Calling a future president a "serial killer" on national television shortly before an election is not the sort of thing most people would forget saying.

(Not that I much blame Tavis Smiley for wanting to forget.....)

MORE: I'm glad Ian Schwartz got this on video, because now that I've watched it, I think Smiley is the kind of guy who might actually try to deny that he ever gave the above answer.

And now there's no denying the denial!

My thanks to Ian Schwartz and Matt Sheffield for the links!

Tavis Smiley's opening remarks castigated the missing Republicans in no uncertain terms:

Finally, some of the campaigns who declined our invitation to join us tonight have suggested publicly that this audience would be hostile and unreceptive. Since we're live on PBS right now, I can't tell you what I really think of these kinds of comments.... When we meet the six candidates who are here tonight, I know you will join me in showing them your respect.

Fortunately, there are some in the Republican Party who do understand the importance of reaching out to people of color.....

No word from any of the candidates yet.

Tavis Smiley poses an initial question for the candidates, "What's the depth of your love for everyday people and what will be the quality of your service to them?" and introduces two of the original Little Rock Nine.

And now it's Michael Steele.

9:10: Steele talks about Little Rock, and what it means. Says Republicans have an opportunity, and goes on to the candidates.

Huckabee, Ron Paul and Sam Brownback are introduced to warm cheers, as are Tancredo, Hunter and Keyes.

Question -- opening statements.

9:15: Huckabee: "I am embarrassed." Says he got 40% of black vote in Arkansas

Ron Paul: Freedom and emphasis on Constitution, fruits of labor. Bring troops home.

(Loudest applause yet.).

Brownback says it's a disgrace they're not here. They talk about the base and this would be the way to broaden it. Suggests that black voters show their clout by registering and voting "for one of us" (meaning those who came to the debate.) This draws applause.

Tancredo then draws applause by reminding audience that he was the only Republican candidate at the NAACP.

9:18: Hunter says he wants to talk about Iraq and the U.S. border. He wants their vote, but doesn't draw as much applause.

Keyes gets in a dig at the candidates for not showing up at the values debate. (Which was the first debate he was included in) Says he was barred from the debate in Michigan. "At least one black person they're afraid of." Applause.

Smiley cut him off before he finished.

9:21: Question posed: "WHAT POSITIVE LEGACY WILL YOU LEAVE?"

Huckabee -- reminds voters that Eisenhower was president during Little Rock. Talks about the unfairness of drug sentences, and health care.

Ron Paul -- a freer society equal justice, repeal of unfair drug laws, prosperity means property rights, stopping military industrial complex. (Loud applause.)

Brownback -- rebuild the family, pushed that in DC, symbols are important. Would open African American Museum on the Mall. We need to pass an official apology for slavery and segregation.

Tancredo -- destructive to talk only about race. Bad for all. Dscusses need to reduce immigration.

Hunter -- reminds audience of Eisenhower. Need of all Americans to be shielded from pornography, but then says we need less regulation. (That's what he said.)

Keyes -- there is no deep divide between blacks and whites. The moral consensus is that we are all created equal by God. We need to restore God, faith values. Raises voice and gets a bit emotional about need to restore moral values (he's again cut off)

9:29: Cynthia Tucker asks about high unemployment rate in black community.

Huckabee -- there isn't equal opportunity. Those who try to lift themselves up get a heel on their back.

Ron Paul -- prior to minimum wage laws there wasn't such inequality. Minimize taxes, wise foreign policy. No payroll taxes. Give them a chance to get ahead.

(It sounds as if Ron Paul has paid applauders.)

Brownback -- there are great inequalities and a lot of racism. Stimulate growth where it is needed.

Tancredo -- cannot agree with race baiting comments about why we have these problems. Blacks were moving up the ladder in the 1950s. What happened? One, the welfare state, and two, the importation of millions of low income workers who depress wages.

Hunter -- Republicans reformed welfare, forced it on Clinton. Average incomes went up. 32% increase in employment. Did very well by breaking the cycle of welfare. (He's cut off)

Keyes -- most important factor was the destruction of moral values. Black men find values in prison. Upbringing of children. Culture of promiscuity and selfish hedonism Marriage the most important thing. Keyes is yelling again, and he's cut off. (He's coming across as very shrill.)

Immigration question What to do about the 12 million.

Ron Paul -- don't just round them up; get rid of welfare state.

Brownback -- (feed is getting lost) Americans want border secured. Workplace enforcement. No new paths to citizenship.

Tancredo -- main question is what to do. Simply enforce the law.

Hunter -- build the fence. Extend it.

Keyes -- border is matter of security. Remember why we lost control. Corporate interests want cheap labor. Black Americans hurt the most.

Huckabee -- put a penalty on employers.

9:45: Juan Williams' question: criminal justice system. Mentions Jena 6. Name one criminal justice reform to ensure that young black and Latino Americans have equal justice.

Brownback -- his bill would help.

Tancredo -- too many criminal statutes (especially drug laws). It should be at the state level. (Actually sounds quite sensible.) Welfare state is a problem too.

Hunter -- rules of law, accountability. Criminal accountability in Jena. Learn from the military. (Reminded that the question was not answered.) Trial by jury is the best system of justice.

Keyes -- restore real local self government. Justices of the peace who live in the community. Young people not necessarily crooks. Make sure that communities agree to take prisoners back before they are released.

Huckabee -- drug or alcohol problems. We have incarcerated people who need rehab. (He's right!) Quit locking up all the people we're mad at and lock up the people we're afraid of. More drug courts, a lot less incarceration.

Ron Paul -- inner cities punished unfairly in war on drugs. 63% of prisoners. REPEAL WAR ON DRUGS! IT ISN'T WORKING! (Loud applause.) This is a disease.

Cynthia Tucker asks about voting rights, DC statehood, and voter ID. Would it hurt minority voters?

Tancredo -- no statehood for DC. Voter ID is not asking too much. (He gets applause.)

Hunter -- would be more open for statehood if they allowed DC residents to own guns. Aliens are voting.

Keyes -- DC belongs to nation. Maintain that symbol. Preserve it the way it is.

Huckabee -- DC should be allowed to be a state. Photo ID needed.

Ron Paul -- Thinks ID needed, but no national ID card.

Brownback -- amend the Constitution for DC voting rights.

9:59: Health care issue.

Hunter -- discrepancies should be addressed. Bring back family doctor, cut back on malpractice claims.

Keyes -- Bring back the family. Support and encourage marriage and two parent household. Mental and physical health would improve. Health care linked to employment. Encourage entrepreneurship.

Huckabee -- too much focus on intervention. Need to focus on prevention. Costs need to be controlled. Portability and privacy of records.

Ron Paul -- managed care hasn't worked well. Too much corporatism and monopoly. Get the government out. LOUD APPLAUSE AGAIN.

Brownback -- more markets, not more government.

Tancredo -- look to selves, take responsibility, more individual freedom.

QUESTION from Juan Williams. First he introduces Vernice Armour -- "first female black combat pilot in U.S. history."

Asks What about Iraq? (Says blacks oppose it.)

Keyes -- effort to defend all Americans. Our rights come from God. Goal is security.

Huckabee -- not helping veterans. Need Veterans Bill of Rights. Veterans should get their benefits paid.

Ron Paul -- shouldn't have war unless it is declared. False pretenses, no WMDs, attackers were Saudis. All the money is going overseas. We'll be bankrupt! (HUGE APPLAUSE.)

Brownback -- we voted to go to war. Military is doing a great job, but the political situation in Iraq is terrible.

Tancredo -- can't micromanage war from Congress.

Hunter -- we can win and will leave Iraq in victory. Key to security is reliable Iraqi army. Make sure all Iraqi battalions get full tour, then return home in victory.

QUESTION by Cynthia Tucker about Darfur genocide

Huckabee -- talks about genocide of abortion.

Ron Paul -- we have no moral authority. Food goes to enemy military. Come home from everywhere.

Brownback -- I couldn't disagree more. We need to stand up against genocide. Can't repeat Rwanda.

Tancredo said something, but I missed it

Hunter -- troops get there late in Darfur. Teach villages self defense.

Keyes -- we can't turn our backs on the universal mission of humanitarian and military order.

10:18 QUESTION about death penalty. Is it carried out justly?

Ron Paul -- no longer believe in federal death penalty. Only the poor get it, not the rich.

Brownback -- we need a culture of life. Difficulty with death penalty. Should be used very sparingly.

Tancredo -- death penalty is a state issue, but supports it for treason.

Hunter -- death penalty is a deterrent for some people.

Keyes -- supports death penalty. Basis in universal justice. Respect for life.

Huckabee -- dislikes death penalty. Had to carry it out. Sounds very sincere. It is not easy. Necessary part of criminal justice system, but needs to be administered with conscience.

10:24 Question from Juan WIlliams about intergration and Brown v.Board of Education.

Huckabee -- supports integration.

Tancredo -- likes charter schools and voucher.

Out of time! (Missed the last answer; the last question did not give time for anyone to answer fully.)

Debate ends.

Well, this is the first time I've done this, and while it's not my shtick, at least I can now say that I've done it.

My feeling is that Huckabee did the best job. His sincerity was obvious, and he was very articulate as he spoke from the heart. Brownback came in second, and the rest, well, Hunter was sorta OK (although his pornography remark sounded almost bizarre), as was Tancredo, while Keyes and Paul sounded desperate and shrill. (I thought Keyes would be a little more articulate and reasoned, but he sounded almost defensive, and really seemed to be yelling.)

Anyway, that's my fix on the evening.

Again, it's a pity that the big guys were all no-shows.

(Please forgive the typos that I know run all through this post!)

On Tuesday night I saw the Philadelphia Orchestra perform one of the all-time greatest symphonies ever composed -- Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

It'a hard to blog about something that has to be heard to be appreciated. Anyway, we've all heard bits and pieces of it, as it's been used in countless soundtracks, and anticipated countless others. The shower stabbing music in Psycho, the theme song from Jaws, and other similarly imitative music -- all finds origin in the Rite of Spring.

At the time (1913) it caused quite a shock, even rioting broke out. I guess the blatant Paganism ("The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience") and Nijinsky's manic dancing must have been something for a largely monarchical world still steeped in stodgy traditions.

Philadelphia's conductor Christoph Eschenbach did a splendid job. I sat in row three, so I could watch the interaction between him and the musicians in ways I normally can't. Conductors are supposed to stay ahead of the actual music you hear, and being up close like that really gives the full sense of that lag. It would not be easy to stay ahead of what you're hearing, and I can't imagine how much time it must take to learn how to do that for every instrument in the orchestra.

Of course, the Rite of Spring seemed to anticipate World War I, which came a year later, when the tension between the old and the modern finally exploded.

Whether this tension was settled, though, is debatable. The Rite of Spring is "traditional" now, but I think it's still ahead of its time.

Well, here I am at Morgan State University, more than four hours before the start of tonight's Republican debate, but I thought I'd get set up and test this thing.

There's almost no one here to block my view of the live feed screen. Here's how it looks:

Nothing to report at all, and there won't be for quite a while.

(Now that I've said that, maybe there wlll...)

MORE: This and the rest of the posts I'm writing tonight will automatically be fed to the Media Bloggers Association Republican Presidential Forum.

Here's a view from above:

.

Writing in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Tavis Smiley (host of tonight's Republican debate) likens the no-show candidates to cautious children who are told never to talk to strangers:

We all remember the words of parents or guardians who warned us never to talk to strangers. While that might be an important warning for small children who face danger and harm from lurking criminals, I'm not sure it's the best tactic for the people who want to lead the country.

Unfortunately, some members of the GOP leadership are still heeding that advice. In fact, several of the leading Republican presidential contenders (all white males) have strategically avoided talking to some of the nation's leading groups of color. Not the NAACP, not the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), not Univision, and not any major groups representing Asians or American Indians.

I think the implicit assumption is being made that the GOP considers minorities to be potential Freddy Kruegers. While I see the point (as I said yesterday I think the candidates should all attend), an argument can also be made that the Republican right wing has been demonized so consistently as a group of evil white men that they, too, might be seen as potential Freddy Kruegers.

Tavis Smiley doesn't buy the "schedule conflict" excuse, and neither do I:

I'm sure the candidates all have pretty grueling schedules, and there have been quite a few public debates already - but isn't that part of the process of earning America's vote? In the most multicultural, most multiracial, most multiethnic America ever, should the president of the United States be elected without addressing issues of concern to communities of color - soon to make up the majority of Americans? I think not.

So what's to be gained by talking to strangers - especially if you're running for the highest office in the land? For starters, when you meet someone face to face, you're no longer a stranger. You have a chance to learn more about your common ground rather than your differences, a chance to chip away at what separates you. No, you can't achieve all that in one meeting - but no meeting doesn't cover much ground either.

According to the web site linked by Tavis Smiley, here's what the lineup looks like right now:

If just one of the fearful Republicans who's currently rated "X" were to show up, I think it might very well amount to a campaign coup of sorts.

I'll be there as part of the Media Bloggers Association, and the plan is to live-blog the event.

(I'd just love to be able to report any surprise visit.....)

Much as I disagree with him, I'm fascinated by the idea that General Pace's latest remarks about gays in the military are "hurtful":

"We need to be very precise then, about what I said wearing my stars and being very conscious of it," he added. "And that is, very simply, that we should respect those who want to serve the nation but not through the law of the land, condone activity that, in my upbringing, is counter to God's law."

Anti-war protesters sitting behind Pace jeered the four-star general's remarks with some shouting, "Bigot!" That led Committee Chairman Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to abruptly adjourn the hearing and seal off the doors.

The hearing resumed about five minutes later in which Pace said he would be supportive of efforts to revisit the Pentagon's policy so long as it didn't violate his belief that sex should be restricted to a married heterosexual couple.

The hearing resumed about five minutes later in which Pace said he would be supportive of efforts to revisit the Pentagon's policy so long as it didn't violate his belief that sex should be restricted to a married heterosexual couple."I would be very willing and able and supportive" to changes to the policy "to continue to allow the homosexual community to contribute to the nation without condoning what I believe to be activity - whether it to be heterosexual or homosexual - that in my upbringing is not right," Pace said.

Pace's lengthy answer on gays was prodded by Sen. Tom Harkin, who said he found Pace's previous remarks as "very hurtful" and "very demoralizing" to homosexuals serving in the military.

In March, the Chicago Tribune reported that Pace said in a wide-ranging interview: "I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."

But unless I have lost my ability to be logical, this amounts to a disagreement, does it not?

Since when is a disagreement "hurtful" to anyone? The man stated his opinion, and it reflects what he says is his religious view that homosexuality is "counter to God's law."

What makes that hurtful? Either you believe in God or you don't. If you don't, then why on earth would you worry about what someone says God says? And if you do believe in God, then you either agree with General Pace's interpretation of God's law or you do not. You might have a different interpretation, as I do.

Suppose for a moment that you're a pagan, and you believe that your religious rights include the right to engage in what amount to sexual rites, including homosexual rites. (Rights are rites, right?) Would this be "hurtful" to others?

If so, then religion is inherently hurtful. I don't think it is.

Unless the goal is an orgy of mass delusions of persecution, I think people need to get over it.

MORE: Can Hollywood be hurtful too? Read about the "Brokeback mountain of lies"! (Via Glenn Reynolds.) Shouldn't inclusion be a two-way street?

I've noticed that a sure sign of when Hillary Clinton is in trouble (at least, when her campaign perceives she needs help) is when her husband steps in to help.

Here's where she's in trouble:

A leaked Democratic poll has suggested that Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner in the race for the party's presidential nomination, could lose the 2008 election because of her "very polarised image".

The survey by the Democratic pollsters Lake Research indicated that both Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama, second in the Democratic race, trailed Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front runner, in 31 swing congressional districts.

The private memo, leaked to The Washington Post, painted what researchers described as a "sobering picture" for Democrats who believe that President George W Bush's disastrous favourability numbers almost guarantee they will capture the White House next year.

All party preference polls show that Democrats are much more popular than Republicans. But when the names of individual candidates are used, the gap narrows considerably.

"The images of the two early [Democratic] favourites are part of the problem," the memo said.

The leaked poll found that Mr Giuliani, a centrist Republican with liberal stances on issues such as abortion and gay rights, leads Mrs Clinton by 49 per cent to 39 per cent in the swing districts.

The former New York mayor enjoyed a much slimmer lead of just one per cent over Mr Obama in the poll, conducted in August. It has long been known that Mrs Clinton has "high negatives" among voters but the assessment of Mr Obama that his "image is soft, and one-fifth of voters do not gave a firm impression of him" was a surprise.

The poll found that Mrs Clinton, in particular, could damage the chances of congressional Democratic candidates on the ballot. The sensitivity of the issue was underlined by the reluctance of Democrats to discuss the survey.

"We're not commenting on this poll," said Daniel Gotoff, co-author of the memo accompanying the Lake Research poll. "It was leaked and obviously not by us."

Clinton put on his best "angry face" during the clip. "This was classic bait-and-switch.... These Republicans that are all upset about Petraeus - this is one newspaper ad. These are the people that ran a television ad in Georgia with Max Cleland, who lost half his body in Vietnam - in the same ad, with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. That's what the Republicans did."

Clinton also brought up the "Swift Boat" attack on John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. "These are the people that funded the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. And the President appointed one of the principal funders of the Swift Boat ads to be an ambassador. But they're really upset about Petraeus. But it was ok to question John Kerry's patriotism on the blatantly dishonest claims by people that [sic] didn't what they were talking about."

The clip, which lasted less than two minutes, aired during the last 15 minutes of the 5 pm hour of "The Situation Room." Host Wolf Blitzer played the clip at the beginning of a segment with CNN chief national correspondent John King and new senior political analyst Gloria Borger. The full interview will air on Wednesday's "Anderson Cooper 360." Host Anderson Cooper was the one who interviewed Clinton

Regardless of the reasons, it's kind of cute when Bill pretends to "lose his temper." The best "tantrum" in recent memory was when he played the role of "angry satyr" to Mike Wallace. This latest one doesn't quite rise to that level, but then, the election's still a long way away.

Notice how Bill keeps baiting what he called the Republican "sliver" last year. (This time, it's the Swift Boat people, but the idea is that they're the right wing fringe, and "it" is in control of the party.)

As 2008 strategy, I don't think they'll rely on Swift Boat bashing. What the Democrats most need this time -- especially the Clintons -- is the Republican War on Sex, and they are bound and determined to keep it going, by any means necessary. (A recent post I wrote on the subject drew a very angry response, which confirmed my suspicions.)

I may be wrong, but I still think that more than anything, they want to run against Gingrich. That way, Hillary can claim to be the less "polarizing" candidate.

Any successful polarization strategy, though, would require neutralizing moderates and political non-conformists. Now that people are in communication with each other, such a strategy would be a tricky business, and if it backfired, there could be unanticipated consequences.

UPDATE: Here's Tammy Bruce:

....MM (the new SS) tapes and watches everything non-leftists do and say in the media.

Ultimately, you will see these sorts of attacks ramped up as we move into the 12 months prior to the '08 election. The left, Soros, and his political and media thugs, cannot withstand independent voices and they will work overtime to silence them. Let's make sure these new gestapos fail.

Media Matters is of course a Clinton operation. (Not that there's anything newsworthy about that....)

So said Philadelphia Art Museum curator Michael Taylor in a discussion of Salvador Dali:

"He's so perverse and shocking and outrageous, and he gets people's knickers in a twist," Taylor commented. "He just manages to find the buttons to push."

Not that there weren't plenty of reasons to hate Dali in the old days. Not only was he called a Nazi supporter (an absurd idea I've discussed previously), but he was slammed as an atomic war lover in the Soviet Encyclopedia:

"If one is to believe the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsyclopedia (vol. 41, the article "Surrealism"), then 'the well-known representative of surrealism--the painter Salvador Dali--paints pictures extoling atomic war'. This is succinctly and expressively stated, but unfortunately it does not quite correspond to the truth. Dali does not extol any kind of war, and in general he neither extols nor passes judgment on anything. Salvador Dali, as is true of all surrealism, is a considerably more complicated phenomenon, although both are completely in conformity with the development of Western art. I don't intend to examine in detail the essence of this phenomenon, the ancestor of which is unquestionably Freud and his cult of the subconscious. I would only like to consider why museums and exhibitions which display abstract art are almost always empty, whereas there are always large crowds in front of Dali's paintings..."

As button-pusher extraordinaire, Dali even managed to push the buttons of the great George Orwell himself, who condemned Dali in the strongest terms imaginable:

...in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would--a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even--since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard--on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

Which is interesting, because there's no indication that the two ever met. Orwell (a favorite writer of mine) died in 1950. He tended to change his mind, though, and he might have revised his thinking had he known that Dali was also known for reversing his positions, eventually coming to fancy himself a savior "destined for nothing less than to rescue painting from the void of modern art."

Dali died in 1989, and he's my favorite artist. His personal character is about as relevant to whether I like his art as the character of Jerry Garcia (my favorite musician) is to my appreciation of his music. You either like someone's art or you don't.

Either way, I guess there's a tendency of button pushing all the way around.

I have not been taking the Republican debates as seriously as I perhaps should. Something about the lineup and the forum has struck me as ridiculous from the start, and it annoys me that these debates are being held so long before the election that no one will remember them.

Notwithstanding my concerns, I agreed to cover tomorrow night's GOP debate at Morgan State University in Maryland. Naturally, I assumed that all or most of the candidates would be there.

So it was a bit of a shocker to read this editorial by Robert Cox:

One by one, the four leading candidates for the Republican nomination for president have announced they will not participate. This is not only a strategic mistake for these campaigns but also a major embarrassment for the Republican Party.

How can voters take seriously a candidate asking for their support to be leader of the free world when that same candidate is unwilling to take questions from black journalists, in front of a predominantly black audience?

The absence of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson from what has been, so far, the only nationally televised debate to focus solely on topics of interest of black Americans sends a very clear message that not only is the Republican Party not interested in courting the "black vote" but is not even willing to engage on issues of importance to African-Americans.

This goes beyond any one campaign. It is nothing less than a disgrace for the entire country. Is it any wonder that when Kanye West blurts out "President Bush hates black people" on national television that many black Americans nod their heads in agreement?

I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I'd really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington.

Enough is enough. Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is.

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades -- a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate -- with the enthusiastic support of President Bush -- rose up on Tuesday and said: "No way, baby."

At least 57 senators favored the bill, a solid majority. But the Republicans prevented a key motion on the measure from receiving the 60 votes necessary to move it forward in the Senate. The bill died.

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities.

I should try to keep my sense of humor, I guess. Hey, it's more than the gay voters got, which was a big fat zero. (Bear in mind that Bush got 25% of the gay vote, which was considerably more than the black vote.)

Joe Gandelman criticizes the GOP as the "no show" party, and notes they're running away from the Latino vote as well.

Maybe the message is "when you're slapped in the face, you'll take it, and like it!"

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's always bad politics to appear to insult any group of people. On the other hand, identity politics can get crazy in a way that even single issue politics can't. To illustrate, suppose the NRA hosted a debate, and billed it as a focus on issues of interest to gun owners. Candidates who failed to show could fairly be judged as unfriendly to the NRA's goals. Similarly, if a major anti-abortion or anti-immigration organization held a debate, one could judge the candidates' position on those issues.

But when you move from there to a larger organization said to be speaking for a group of people sharing characteristics which are not inherently political, who gets to say what those positions should be, and who gets to speak for whom? If the N.O.W. hosted a debate, and Republicans failed to show, would they be slapping all women in the face? Or only supporters of N.O.W.?

It gets complicated. But all of these concerns aside, I think that from a political perspective, it is very poor judgment on the part of Republicans to not attend tomorrow night.

Quite astutely, James Joyner criticizes the Republicans as too cowardly to make a principled argument against identity politics:

citing "scheduling conflicts" is a rather lame way of excusing these snubs. The Democratic candidates all managed to fit it into their schedule with far less advanced notice; indeed, this date was selected after agreement of all the major Republican candidates (except perhaps Thompson, who wasn't officially in the race at the time). It would have been far better to take the stand that they're only going to debate American issues, not "hypenated American" issues. Simply rejecting the whole notion of segmenting the debates as if there are presidents of Gay America or Black America or White America would have been a far more courageous position -- and one consistent with Republican principles.

Broadcast live nationally on PBS-owned stations, as well as live and on tape delay on PBS affiliates and on NPR, the All-American Forum represents a unique opportunity for Republicans to do something they have claimed to want for many years -- a chance to speak directly with black Americans -- and all Americans for that matter -- on issues of race without the filter of self-appointed black leaders or black organizations beholden to the Democratic Party.

Knowing that about nine out of 10 black voters have cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate over the past two decades, the candidates can have little doubt that the audience at the All-American Forum is not likely to be receptive to Republican candidates or Republican policies.

But how can Republican supporters, many of whom labeled Democrats "cowards" for refusing to debate on the Fox News Channel, remain silent while their candidates run and hide from Tavis Smiley, one of the most congenial black talk show hosts on TV today?

It's not too late. There are still two more days until the debate.

Let's hope that the front-running GOP candidates have a change of heart. If the Republican Party wants to be taken seriously on issues of race, especially in the black community, then the time has come for its presidential candidates to show up -- or shut up.

Thomas Jefferson: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."

Camille Paglia: "Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."

Camille Paglia: "The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them".

Camille Paglia: "It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behaviour, career, and sexual orientation."

From Samizdata

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

The symbolic meaning of owning a gun is to reclaim political power, demonize minorities, distort the issue of crime in America, express contempt for women gaining access to power, and distract Americans from the real issues of democracy.

It's a sobering thought, though, to consider that there are people who read such evils into an important constitutional freedom, because it just never crossed my mind that gun ownership demonized anyone, much less minorities or women. I mean, don't plenty of minorities and women own guns too? Considering that disarming black people was the earliest form of gun control in this country, I think a good argument can be made that it is actually gun control which demonizes minorities, and gun ownership which empowers both minorities and women. Women have a long history of owning guns in self defense. Witness the muff pistol! And the famous "Equalizer" advertising slogan,

Be not afraid of any man,
No matter what his size.
When danger threatens, call on me
And I will equalize.

Speaking of ads, I have an Iver Johnson pistol that's over 100 years old which I was cleaning earlier. Searching online in an attempt to locate the model number, I found an absolutely precious ad, which indicates that there's been a bit of a change in both advertising and product placement since the gun was made:

Somewhat disparagingly, the website titles it "Send Your Baby To Bed With An Iver Johnson Revolver."

I don't think that's exactly what the company intended to say, and I'd be willing to bet that the ad was never meant as a serious suggestion that babies be put to bed with handguns -- any more than this ad was meant to suggest that your American Tourister suitcase ought to be left in the hands of gorillas for safekeeping:

Rather, the picture of the gun with the baby (while unthinkable today) was the company's way of pointing out that the revolver was designed so that the firing pin retracted after firing, and stayed inside so that it would not fire accidentally as the older ones did. Thus, a small child like the little girl in the picture would not have made it go off by playing with it or dropping it, unless she managed to actually pull the trigger (not an easy thing for a baby to do).

It its time, the hammer on the Iver Johnson double action revolver was considered so safe that the company also ran the following ad, advising customers that they could "hammer the hammer!"

Nowadays, they'd probably have to say something like, "Kids, don't try this at home!"

I'm not about to try the hammer experiment, but looking at the diagram of the action, I think the "hammer the hammer" ad probably gets it right.

But beware!

According to one very insightful commenter, hammers are dangerous!

Statistics show that '3 million'children a year' are killed by hammers and that 'every three hours' someone dies as a result of being hit by a hammer.

The symbolic meaning of owning a hammer is to reclaim political power, demonize minorities, distort the issue of crime in America, express contempt for women gaining access to power, and distract Americans from the real issues of democracy.

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for the link, and a warm welcome to all!

The Elements. A song by Tom Lehrer.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

I have been wondering for a long time why the Black Community supports the drug war, which is doing so much damage to that community. My old friend Cliff Thornton provides an answer. Cliff comes at politics from a Green point of view, but he is spot on about this one.

Racism, classism, and the war on drugs are inextricably parts of one huge lie, one cannot address one part effectively without addressing the other. This is not a war on drugs but a war on poor people, primarily people of color. I can talk about the race issue, which is well documented and blacks as usual are the perceived primary pariahs, but what I want to talk about is the burgeoning class separation. The religious community has always been the backbone of the black community. We have seen this through out our history with slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement. Why are they (black politicians, preachers and leaders) bemoaning racial profiling and not the war on drugs, when racial profiling is a direct result of the drug war? Why are they not talking about AIDS and that the war on drugs is the primary culprit for the spread of this incurable disease in their communities? Why do they have this dumb look on their faces when you mention that intravenous drug users, through homosexual and heterosexual encounters are the primary conveyers of AIDS in prisons and our communities? Is it because the religious community is tied to local, state and federal funding and the authorities forbid discussion? Is it because they have become employers and employees of the drug war through rehabilitation centers and drug counseling etc.? Is it because they have become gatekeepers where their prosperity depends on not solving the drug problem but perpetuating it?

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Far be it from me to complain in any way about a "lack of manhood" in anyone. Despite the fact that I managed to summon the balls to criticize GQ magazine in the last post, I don't generally believe in such concepts (at least, not in having them defined for me).

So, while this isn't a complaint about emasculation or anything like that, an incident I witnessed in front of my house yesterday reminded me of the decreasing ability of men to be what is called "handy." I initially saw this discussed by Glenn Reynolds and the Wall Street Journal, and the journal linked another post by Glenn, and that post linked a long list of basic tasks that today's men can no longer do.

What I didn't see anywhere was something I always took for granted was a basic task: changing a tire.

Late yesterday afternoon, I heard that vaguely scraping "thwack-thwhack-thwhack" sound that I associate with a tire that's gone so flat that the car is being driven on the rim. Mildly curious, I went outside to investigate after a few minutes, and sure enough, an SUV was disabled just a few feet from my driveway with a tire that was beyond flat. A gaping square hole in the side had ripped a tear two-thirds of the way around the rim, and the rim showed clear signs of damage from having been driven too far. The driver was visible a hundred yards down the road, and appeared to be walking aimlessly (as if trying to figure out where he was), but came back when he saw me staring at the beyond-flat tire. Wanting to be as helpful as I could, I volunteered that I had a floor jack and tools, and asked if he had a spare. He refused all help and immediately and hurriedly insisted that the car had no spare, so he had called for help. I figured he must know what he was talking about, but it struck me as very strange that this perfectly ordinary looking SUV would have no spare (not only do most cars come with them, but Pennsylvania law requires spare tires, and cars which don't have them flunk the annual inspection). Meanwhile, this perfectly healthy young (25 or so) man stood around looking helpless. I had this sneaking suspicion that he had no idea whether there was a spare tire or not, and that he didn't want to be bothered looking for it, but it wasn't my business so I went back inside. (I could watch the whole thing easily from the house, though, and I strongly suspected total incompetence and rather enjoy live comedy.)

After a half an hour or so, an older guy (I'd say 45-55) arrived, not driving a tow truck, but another SUV. Obviously, his first question was the same as mine, for the next thing that he did (in seeming irritation) was to open the back of the SUV to look inside, and started rooting through the stuff to expose the spare tire set-up. Sure enough, there was a spare and a jack and the older guy busied himself throwing stuff to the pavement in disgust while the young guy watched. Of course, the older guy's inefficiency was painful to watch (it took over an hour to change the tire -- a problem I could have solved in ten minutes with my floor jack and spinner lug wrench), but I was so irritated at my offer to help being spurned that I resisted the temptation to just wheel out the floor jack and barge in.

What irritated me the most was the absolute cluelessness of the healthy young man, who I could tell was in good physical condition and of at least normal or above intelligence.

Again, this is not meant as an indictment of today's youth. Surely, most young men can change a tire, can't they? And if I can, and I'm a 53 year old who has conceptual difficulty with the "manhood" concept, then maybe it's not a manhood thing at all. I mean, surely women change tires just as easily as men, right? Is this really about manhood? Or does it involve some form of creeping decadence? It occurred to me that I would never hire this young man to cut my lawn, as I'd be afraid he'd take all day, or else cut his foot off and sue me.

And right after that I read about using old guys for military service. Or something. No, it was public volunteer service, detailed in a post by Ilya Somin:

One of the most interesting (and in my view sinister) aspects of proposals for mandatory "national service" is that they virtually always target only the young, usually 18-21 year olds. This might be understandable if the proposals were limited to military service. But most current proposals (including those by Charles Rangel, John McCain, Bill Buckley, the DLC, and Rahm Emanuel noted in my last post), incorporate civilian service as well. When it comes to office work and light menial labor, there are many elderly and middle-aged people who can do the job just as well as 18-21 year olds can, if not better.

What I can't figure out is whether changing a tire is an age-related skill, or whether it's a generational thing.

Reading about GQ magazine's cowardly behavior in spiking a story about the Clinton campaign made me want to cancel my subscription.

First rule of Today's GQ Man: Be a wuss! Josh Green is an excellent magazine writer, so his piece on Hillary campaign infighting is unlikely to have been killed by GQ magazine because it was bad. That leaves Politico reporter Ben Smith's explanation--that it was spiked by GQ's editor Jim Nelson because of pressure from the Clinton camp, in the form of threatened denial of access to Bill Clinton for an upcoming GQ cover story. ... Maybe Nelson will have something more to say that will make him look better than he looks now. But there's one way to find out how good the piece was. Publish it--somewhere. That's what the Web is for, no? ... Note to Josh: I'll do it if no one else will. ... Or is GQ not only spiking the piece but refusing to let Green place it elsewhere? That would be full-service journalism for the Clintons. ...

No doubt about it; this is definitely "cancel my subscription" time.

The problem is, I don't know how to do that. So I went to the website to find out.

As it turns out, you have to have a subscription before they'll allow you to cancel.

I may cancel at any time during my subscription and receive a full refund on any unmailed copies by calling 1-800-XXX-XXX.

It's like totally unfair.

It's too bad I can't cancel, though, because in addition to being a pretty decent men's fashion magazine, GQ markets itself as offering cutting edge political coverage.

The website conveys an unmistakable impression that GQ is no-holds barred, fearless type of publication. As to political fashion-consciousness, this does appear to be true. A blog by The Style Guy (Glenn O'Brien) does a pretty thorough job of dishing of the candidates' styles, and has an absolutely nauseating picture of a full face kiss between an overweight former vice-president and a leading democratic candidate for president, and I found it very amusing. Anyone with the slightest interest judging the candidates by what they wear (there is the old saying that "clothes make the man" -- and the debates don't leave much else to go on), ought to read it.

So I can't believe that a magazine showing clear signs of fearlessness (or at least slouching towards something resembling fearlessness) would back down from a piece that might have really put them on the fearless journalism map, simply because they wanted Bill Clinton's puss on the cover. I could see the point of spiking a story if maybe a leading fashion designer had threatened to withhold his mug if they didn't pull a story about a lapel width or trouser cuff war or something (they are, after all, GQ) but this?

Let's face it, some things are worth being a wuss over, and some aren't.

All of the hysteria over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speaking at Columbia University is so tiresome for so many reasons....

Notwithstanding my penchant for "gallows humor," I'm irritated enough by all of this that I'll even supply a picture of an execution of gays in Iran:

All things considered, I'd rather spend my eternity in hell with them than the madman whose moral cluckings and posturings placed the noose around their necks.

Meanwhile, moral clucker Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that there are no gays in Iran:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skirted a question about the treatment of homosexuals in Iran on Monday, saying in a speech at a top US university that there were no gays in Iran.

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," Ahmadinejad said to howls and boos among the Columbia University audience.

"In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don't know who has told you that we have it," he said.

At the same time that his government is busy executing gay people, Ahmadinejad has the temerity to claim that they don't have "homosexuals" in his land. I wonder then who it is that the government has been executing. Or maybe he believes this policy has been so successful that he can now declare his nation free of homosexuals, just as the Nazis, once they deported and murdered the Jews of the various regions they conquered, could declare them "Judrenrein" (free of Jews).

Gay people can disagree whether or not state courts should accord same-sex unions the same recognition they offer to different-sex couples who opt for marriage, but we should be united in opposing a regime that executes our fellows; whose leader brazenly claims that there are no gays in his country.

Can you imagine the outcry if some social conservative claimed there were no gays in various regions of the United States? The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) would be issuing a variety of statements. Indeed, in reacting to the Iranian leader's statement today, a blogger at the Huffington Post even went so far as to suggest American social conservatives have found a "soul-mate in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." It seems the only way some on the left can spin this story is to twist it to denounce American conservatives.

Roger L. Simon has more:

he still was well received in the audience. How in the world could they do that? Let us see now if the supposedly pro-gay left wakes up and sees where the danger really is. I'm not holding my breath. They didn't wake up in the 1930s - why should they now?

The Human Rights Campaign has been quick to issue press releases and organize vigils when it connected the killings of gay people to a climate of hate. Yet now, when an openly gay candidate is murdered after being demonized by establishment politicians and journalists, HRC is silent. And the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which considered the Persian Gulf War a vital gay issue, sees no relevance when a man who stood a good chance of becoming the world's first openly gay head of government is savagely cut down.

As for the merits of Ahmadinejad's claim, he must not be watching his own state-run Iranian government television.

Otherwise he might have seen this:

Or this:

The full video is here.

And while it never managed to find its way into the government video, what about this?

Just kidding, folks. I'm sure there are no gay ties.

(Some things really aren't funny. I guess that's the whole point of gallows humor...)

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and the comment about the photoshop, which I hasten to add was very respectful.

Welcome all!

UPDATE: Alas, I see that civility does not exactly reign in the comments section below! I should probably remind new readers (as well as those unfamiliar with this blog) that my primary purpose here was to highlight what I perceive as inconsistencies -- even outright silence -- displayed by some left-wing gay activists in the face of a horrid regime that dictates that gays be executed. I don't think it's necessary to point out that I am not in favor of censorship, but a few people seem to think I do. Where they might get that idea I don't know, but if my goal was to censor people, I'd probably be censoring or disallowing comments, wouldn't I?

UPDATE: "Ahmadinejad was right, you see? There are no gays in Iran. Just ask the Queer Studies Department."

So says Andrew Sullivan, noting that this statement from Columbia's Queer Studies Department echoes Ahmadinejad:

....we would like to strongly caution media and campus organizations against the use of such words as "gay", "lesbian", or "homosexual" to describe people in Iran who engage in same-sex practices and feel same-sex desire. The construction of sexual orientation as a social and political identity and all of the vocabulary therein is a Western cultural idiom. As such, scholars of sexuality in the Middle East generally use the terms "same-sex practices" and "same-sex desire" in recognition of the inadequacy of Western terminology. President Ahmadinejad's presence on campus has provided an impetus for us all to examine a number of issues, but most relevant to our concerns are the complexities of how sexual identity is constructed and understood in different parts of the world."

MORE: While I do appreciate the incoming traffic from leftie blogs like Instaputz, the comments reflect the presence of new readers with brand-new impressions of this blog -- some of which are comical. The idea that I am pro-Saudi was especially amusing, considering that there are few blogs anywhere as anti-Saudi (or as opposed to current U.S.-Saudi policies) as this one. How many posts does it take for me to credentialize my anti-Saudism?

Those are only a very few among many. I've also written a number of posts complaining about a Saudi madrassa in my neighborhood. Why, I've cheered military helicopters for flying over it.

What more's a blogger to do? Ridicule the king and Bush?

Via Tim Worstall, I see that Amanda Marcotte has gone from calling me a sociopath to merely misunderstanding me. I guess that's progress, although she certainly does a great job with the latter:

...the real world debate over women's sexual freedom doesn't even enter into Eric's radar. He mainly doesn't get why anyone on the right would want to control ability of men to purchase the opportunity to have a sexual experience involving a woman whose body is routed for his pleasure and not put to use for her own--his entire defense of a right wing view of sexual liberation is the male right to purchase and use pornography and the male right to use prostitutes. I'm serious --right after he gives the entire ownership of sex to the left, he follows it up with a semi-defining statement that made me jaw drop.

How the hell did sex get put on the f--ing left?

Really, since when are centerfolds images of cultural and political leftism?

Sex=centerfolds. I've read a lot of sexist oinking pigs define sex in ways that obscure that women have desire, but I've never heard one that obscured that women have 3 dimensional bodies. He does extend his defense to prostitution and gay sex, but not gay people--he doesn't rouse himself to defend gay marriage or fight against discrimination, leaving room for horrible laws affecting gay people while allowing straight-identified people to enjoy same sex couplings, a la Larry Craig or the imaginary bisexual free spirits who hate legal abortion. But not a whiff of one of the most common manifestations of sexphobia in this country outside of homophobia--the anti-choice movement. It's almost as if women aren't rights-bearing people worth mentioning, just warm, inviting holes that could be available for purchase if it weren't for those damn anti-prostitution laws.

But I especially like the exciting choices I'm given in the comments section. There's this:

I can't even imagine what kind of sexual fantasies he has.

F)cking cute left-wing hippie bitches perhaps. He is the right-wing daddyo. All they need is a little right-wing c0ck and shout Praise Jesus!!! as he gives them their most stupendous orgasm ever.

He'd rather get on his knees and beg for conservative c0ck, even if they beat him for it, than stand up for gay folks.

I'd like to say I'm thinking it over! But alas, Amanda also says I can't think my way out of a paper bag! So I should plead guilty as charged, I guess.

(Parenthetically, the real problem with my post in this context is an audience related one. My primary disagreement was with those conservatives (a shrill minority in the GOP) who wage war on sex. I see this as not only being destructive of sexual freedom, but as giving fuel to the left. That a leading leftist blog would see the post as as a defense of the conservative war on sex and as an attack on women makes me wonder whether they might not be comfortable with what I'm really saying, which is that they're not only delighted with the conservative war on sex, but they're waging their own war against sexual freedom.)

However, I'm running into a problem pleading guilty as charged, because of the sexual confusion that can be created. I've tried to make it clear that I really don't think readers are interested in my sex life, nor am I interested in theirs. I even pointed that out in the very post for which I'm now under attack:

....I tend to leave my discussions of sex at the theoretical level. I'm not interested in turning my readers on or off, and this is not a sex blog. I'm not especially interested in reading about other people's sex lives, and I'm really not interested in having people read about mine.

And what about my admitted sexual confusion? I'm at least as confused about sex as I am about everything else, and one of my big objections to the world has always been that people care about things that it is none of their business to care about -- in this case, the sex lives of others. Now, the usual stereotype (which I've complained about a lot) is that moral conservatives care too damned much about what other people do with their genitalia. Yet in this case, the antics of the commenters make it quite clear that concerns about other people's sexuality are not limited to the right wing.

Normally, I try not to avoid issues of concern to readers, but on the other hand I don't want to alienate anyone, and I don't want to break with my tradition of leaving my own sex life (or lack thereof) out of this blog. But still, there are these stubborn choices which confront me. What do I prefer? Am I

A "right-wing daddyo" who wants to "f--k cute left-wing hippie bitches" who need "a little right-wing c0ck" and "shout Praise Jesus!!! as I give them "their most stupendous orgasm ever"?

"...rather get on [my] knees and beg for conservative c0ck, even if they beat me for it, than stand up for gay folks"?

Smart girls don't f--k anti-choice boys.

So I thought I should let you, the readers, decide.

Think it over carefully, though, because what you decide might have terrible consequences.

Please note that I hate to put my kind readers in a difficult position of forcing themselves to decide my preference for me. So, after much soul-searching, I finally managed to come up with with a third option for readers who might be as frustrated as I was with the first two choices. (This was not meant to offer my own opinion, but only to broaden the diversity of choice.)

Sigh.

This is all very troubling, as it touches on an unsettled question I asked when in my discussion of Amanda's claim that I am a sociopath, I asked:

Should I care more? Or should I care less?

I'm often at a loss to understand the constantly evolving nature of moral claims, much as I try. Yesterday, I touched on whether animals are more innocent than people (such "innocence" is not a new issue in this blog, the contradictions are profound ones).

In a great comment to my last "Right to Dry" post, "Brett" opined thusly:

Americans have been insisting their personal preferences are moral imperatives since the colonization of Massachusetts.

I find it intriguing that the intellectual descendants of the Puritans are to be found in our universities, laboratories, and hospitals rather than churches. The secular denizens of the educational/medical establishment would consider themselves the antitheses of the Puritans, but that is because they think they really are qualified by their superior morality to bully the rest of us.

Their landlord, Carnegie Hall, wants to evict them from the garret apartment they've shared for 30 years. So before they start laboring on the project that will admit them to the pantheon of the starchitects, they must first find a Manhattan condo they can afford.

And, oh, yes: They must hurry back so they can join their neighbors Oct. 3 for a street protest against Carnegie Hall's plans to convert its 30 remaining artist studios into a music institute.

"We were originally going to get one of those big blow-up rats," Tsien said, sounding as if she were recounting the technique for one of her exquisite, hand-worked architectural details. "But then we decided just to wear black T-shirts."

Newly divorced and unemployed, Williams discovered in 1974 that he could rent a cheap, postage-stamp-size studio with 20-foot ceilings in Carnegie Hall, in a suite of apartments built over the rafters of the concert hall. To survive, Williams teamed with a friend and set up an architecture studio in the apartment.

They squeezed six desks in the tiny front room, and Williams inserted a sleeping loft just below the north-facing garret windows. While there was hardly room to stand, the light was fantastic, and he could glimpse the greenery of Central Park every morning.

When Tsien showed up, she was assigned one of the desks. The small practice survived by designing corporate interiors and retail spaces. "It taught us a lot about putting materials together," Williams recalled.

Eventually, he moved the fledgling firm to Central Park South. But Tsien stayed at Carnegie Hall, and the two married. Not only did they raise their son in the 900-square-foot space, but they also often hosted Williams' two children and a rotating cast of visiting architects.

No wonder they're rushing back Oct. 3 to protest their eviction by the Carnegie Hall management.

Struggles over rents there go back to at least 1981, when the argument was made that Carnegie was essentially subsidizing artists:

Mr. Karlsson said the corporation had started by arguing that the tenants were not covered by rent control or rent stabilization. ''Our main position,'' the attorney said, ''is that the tenants for the most part have been in Carnegie Hall for a long period of time, with leases periodically renewed at relatively reasonable rent increases.''

He said they were arguing ''cultural impact - they need space that probably cannot be replaced elsewhere.'' He said it was up to the corporation to operate so that rents could remain ''reasonable.''

Miss Shuman said the corporation was abiding by a city policy ''to maintain artistic balance,'' so that if a rental unit was given up by a painter it was ''obligated to try to find another artist'' to move in.

Even then, artist-tenants complained that this is not what happened:

The artists - including painters, dancers, singers and musicians - contend that the management of the city-owned building is is destroying its artistic nature by asking what they consider to be unfair rents.

The Carnegie Hall Corporation, which manages the concert hall and the studios under a lease from the city, maintains that it is only trying to charge enough so that the studios pay for themselves at rents still far below the market rate.

''This is one of the rare buildings in the city where artists can live and work,'' said Lorraine Geiger, the tenant leader. She said that rent was only one of the issues in the controversy. Another, she said, is that studios used for years as artists' residences are being changed to commercial use for architects and other high-paying customers. Carnegie officials deny this.

In a piece on the recent dispute, the New Yorker touches on the genuine resentment that the artists feel over the evictions:

Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read "AVOCADO." He'd been in the space since 1970, having inherited it from his father, the composer Arthur Schwartz. "I represent Carnegie Hall when I'm out in the world," he said. "I hope that's not presumptuous."

He lives here with his cat, Nelson (named after Nelson Riddle), and occasionally with his wife, whom he married in the building in 1984. The wedding was in Studio 906, which had belonged to Joe Raposo, who wrote music for "Sesame Street." Wilfrid Sheed and Jerzy Kosinski had been there. "The party spilled out onto the landing," he said. "We had a big glass bowl of caviar."

The studio, full of books, CDs, and not much else, gave rise to that old misguided desire for a prison sentence that would afford a man the time to catch up on his reading. "That's one of the points here," Schwartz said. "There are dozens of studios like this in the building that have, if not this essence, then another like it. It's not a conceit--it's a feeling. To dislodge us is insulting."

However, I don't want to focus on legal issues here. Legally, Carnegie Hall is the owner, and the people living in these studios are tenants, so ultimately Carnegie Hall will prevail.

What I do think is going on is that self interest has been translated into a claim of morality. Morally speaking, few people like landlords. In American popular culture, we were raised to think of landlords as evil Snidely Whiplash types, evicting widows and children at Christmas time. Tenants are downtrodden. The near-universality of this appeal can be found in quotations from either Marx or Jesus.

On the other hand, New York is New York. Apartments sell for millions and rent for many thousands of dollars a month, and no one has a right to live in New York without paying the going rate. I can't afford to move there (nor do I want to), but let's suppose I managed to find a rent-controlled apartment through some wild miracle and moved in, by what system of morality would I have a right to live there forever at a low rent? I'd see it as a windfall. Of course, if condo-coversion "eviction time" were to occur, the temptation to fight for the maximum buy-out would be enormous.

Having a cheap and cool place in New York is a bit like having won the lottery. Or striking gold. And it's human nature to fight like hell to keep these things.

Thus, a prominent architect fights to portray himself as a victim. Of immoral behavior by the landlord.

I understand why he fights, as it's natural to defend what you see as "yours."

But it's the moral claim with which I have trouble, as I can't perceive that there is any rule. Much of what we call "morality" is just made up according to circumstances.

In many of these situations, it is really important to be seen as a victim. That's where the comparison with the gold rush claim-staker fails. The guy who strikes gold and fights to keep what is his is not a victim. Rather, he behaves more like a warrior. He came, he found, he won. And he will keep what he found. The people who managed by whatever means to get hold of these rental units also came, found, and won. But they are not behaving as warriors; they are behaving as whiners.

It's hard to see a prominent architect as a victim, though, and I'd have more respect for him if he just said he's fighting the bastards so he can keep the place he's had for so long that he feels that it's his and spared me the protest march and the implied moral lecture that goes along with it.

The whole thing reminds me of a horrendous dispute I had years ago which should never have happened at all, but which became viciously personal. I built a fantastic nightclub pretty much from scratch, and in so doing I had to go through all the necessary and lengthy permit applications. Berkeley is one of those cities which just says no to almost everything, and the power of neighborhoods is very strong. (Especially anything which might touch on "tenants' rights.") Fortunately for me, the location of the club touched no sacred cows, and seemingly, on no one's rights, at least not the rights of the kind of humans who could be expected to whine. On one side was a fence bordering a freeway, on another, the back side of a huge quasi parking lot which stretched for hundreds of yards under the freeway exit and on to a nearby restaurant. On another side, the parking lot fronted a large salt water lake, and on the other side was an operational railroad track, with a signal crossing device that anyone coming into the nighclub would have to drive through. (It seemed there'd be maybe get three or four trains a day, but I didn't count.)

For blocks around, the entire neighborhood was zoned industrial and commercial, and there weren't any houses anywhere nearby. This made the usual concerns over nighttime noise superfluous, and no hearings were held. One of the bureaucrats did do a driveby to verify this, and I was told by him and by the police chief (who also had to sign off) that I couldn't have found a better location for a nightclub if the goal was to avoid city concerns about noise and traffic. So the permits were issued.

It didn't take long for trouble to start, though. The nearest building to the club was a deteriorating industrial warehouse just across from and right alongside the railroad tracks. An ugly building made of corrugated rusting steel, it didn't even seem to be used for anything in particular, and of course it was zoned as an industrial building (which use was reflected in the city records). But the problem was, some lazy landlord had leased it out to artists -- not residentially, of course, but as studio space. Meaning they weren't supposed to live there, because after all it had no insulation nor any of the amenities required by the code.

Any guesses as to whether the artists lived there?

They damned well did, and they considered it their "home." And I became the invader of their "privacy" and "tranquility." These people did not fight me legally, but they fought -- and fought dirty. There were numerous acts of vandalism, and the most irritating thing they did was to trigger the railroad signal box so that the barricade came down and blocked the road. Except there was no train! When this would happen, pandemonium would result, especially on a busy Saturday night. Eventually, customers broke the barricades to drive through, (there was no way to make them go back up), and a lengthy dispute developed between me and the railroad rep, who insisted that what happened could not have happened as the signal was tamperproof. I explained to him that it was not, and that anyone with a piece of electrical cable or a battery jump cable could make it go down simply by jumping the opposite tracks (that was what had been happening, but it was hard to find in the dark). He said this was not possible, but his attitude changed dramatically when I took him out and showed him by fastening the jumper cable to the rails. Lights started flashing, and down the damned barricades went!

Anyway, the tenants were driven by one especially frustrated artist who not only hated having to listen to the loud thumping music all night, but who hated the club's design, not out of sincere artistic concern, but because (in a sick and bizarre coincidence) she had once had an affair and been passionately in love with the club's artistic designer. So attacking the club became a very personal vendetta for her. She led the other tenants in what they did their best to disguise as legitimate moral indignation.

Again, I call such morality "manufactured," because I think it is. I'm not much of a believer in religious texts, but I think a good argument can be made that recently manufactured human morality is harder to grapple with than the stuff said to have been dictated by God. (At least you can look the latter up, and argue over things like context, date of manufacture, etc.)

What annoyed me the most about the artist who messed with my nightclub was the way she considered herself an aggreived, "innocent" victim. In her view, this gave her a claim to moral superiority, and the right to victimize her persecutors. Never mind that she had no right to live there.

Imaginary innocence is worse than guilt.

In a post discussing the changing standards of morality, Clayton Cramer points out (correctly) that crimes against dogs are taken more seriously than crimes involving sexual solicitation:

If only Michael Vick had solicited sex in a men's room, instead of organizing dogfights!

It says quite a bit about how rapidly the definition of "immoral" has changed in our society that Michael Vick probably wishes that he and Senator Larry "Happy Feet" Craig could change places.

Hmmm....

Who would rather be arrested for what? I honestly don't know, but I just can't make these assumptions. Society would have freaked out along the following lines:

"MICHAEL VICK IS A CLOSET HOMO!"

"LARRY CRAIG IS AN EVIL DOGFIGHTER!"

I think either man would have faced serious career consequences either way, because of the important positions they occupied. However, I am not sure that standards of morality can be judged simply by reference to celebrities and politicians, because such people are demographic outliers. I think it is more fair to look at the consequence to an ordinary citizen.

What is worse? A dogfighting charge, or a solicitation charge? If I had to select one or the other of these charges to face, I'd probably go with sexual solicitation. Not that I'm into that (for the record, I am neither a dogfighter nor a T-room sex-seeker), but I do think that it is far likelier to face major criminal charges in a dogfight case. Dogfighting is a federal crime and a major felony in most states, while sexual solicitation is usually a misdemeanor. Also, there's the sympathy factor; dogfighters are despised and considered evil, while men who seek sex in bathrooms are more likely to be either pitied or maybe laughed at. As dogfighters are considered morally worse than men's room sex seekers, the former is probably a worse thing to have on your record. Whether this means morality has changed, I'm not sure.

In Vick's case, what he did was far worse than dogfighting, as he tortured dogs to death for refusing to fight. This makes him (in my view) a cruel and vicious man, certainly more morally opprobrious than Craig, who strikes me as most likely in a pathetic state of denial. I realize others will disagree with me, but I would have thought the same thing thirty years ago, and I think a lot of people would. Sure, society goes easier on bathroom solicitors and harder on dogfighters than they used to. This reflects increased tolerance for homosexuals, and decreased tolerance for animal cruelty. To that extent, Cramer is right. Whether this is good or bad can be debated. I think the animal rights stuff has become maniacal, although I'm not sympathetic to public sex. But I have seen no proof that Craig intended to have sex in public. (Had he done that or exposed himself, the charges would have been much more serious.)

There is no question that from a moral standpoint, crimes against animals are often being taken more seriously than crimes against people. I think that this account of a Philadelphia robbery made it into the Inquirer mainly because the victim's dog was shot -- notwithstanding the fact that the man was severely pistol whipped. It's a pretty sickening story, headlined "Robber beats victim, kills his dog":

A robber who held up a West Mount Airy man who was walking his dog late Thursday became so incensed when he found out that his mark was carrying little of value that he took it out on his victim and the animal.

When the assault was over, Richard Feder, 48, had suffered a broken nose and his dog, a 5-year-old Labrador-border collie mix named Precious, was dead.

Yesterday, Feder and police gave this account:

About 11 p.m., on Westview Street near Wayne Avenue, the robber approached Feder, asked for directions to a bus stop, and quickly pulled out a silver handgun.

Feder emptied his pockets, placing his keys on the ground. The robber then searched Feder, but came up empty. He became so angry that he pistol-whipped his victim and shot at Precious. At that point, both men ran off in opposite directions.

Feder said that when he got to Wayne Avenue, he flagged down a taxi and returned for his dog. By then, Precious was dead.

Feder was taken to Chestnut Hill Hospital, where he was treated for a broken nose and a swollen eye.

"The injury is nothing compared to the fear," Feder said yesterday. "It was very fast, and very scary."

He said he could not remember anything like this happening in the neighborhood.

"This is a really safe neighborhood," Feder said, adding that he walked his dog every night. "This stuff doesn't happen here."

Feder, a lawyer, said things could have ended up worse.

I'm "terribly sad for my dog and my family," he said, "but I am thankful the shot didn't come at me."

But I think the main reason the story appeared in print is because the dog was shot. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that many of the Inquirer readers were a lot more outraged reading about the dog being killed by a robber than had they read an account of a man being killed by a robber. Why? After all, armed robbery and aggravated assault are much more serious legal charges than shooting a dog. But it's not the law that's the issue here; it's morality. In moral terms, the dog is seen as totally innocent, while the man is seen as, well, maybe he shouldn't have tempted fate by walking down the street not carrying his "mugger money." Or maybe the robber had a chip on his shoulder and had an unhappy life, or believed his victim "owed him" over some imaginary cosmic debt. No one is allowed to feel hostility towards a dog, and no one would defend the robber for it. Shooting a dog is completely beyond the pale, whereas shooting a man is often seen as at least partially excusable by the apologist classes. Anyway, the dog owner here was beaten, and beating a man, even severely, is not necessarily always seen as a major crime. The Jena 6 is a good example, for the beating victim seems to have been singled out not for anything he did, but for acts committed by others of the same race.

But had the accused suspects in Jena killed someone's dog, I somehow doubt as much sympathy would have been generated for them. Why? Because dogs are innocent, and people are guilty (at least in someone's eyes).

This is not rational stuff, but morality rarely is.

My search for facts was prompted by this post by my friend Eric at Classical Values. I have found a few.

First off let me say that of all the main stream reporters so far Jason Whitlock has actually done his homework.

Now we love Mychal Bell, the star of the 2006 Jena (La.) High School football team, the teenage boy who has sat in jail since December for his role in a six-on-one beatdown of a fellow student.

Thursday, thousands of us, proud African-Americans, expressed our devotion to and desire to see justice for the "Jena Six," the half-dozen black students who knocked unconscious, kicked and stomped a white classmate.

Jesse Jackson compared Thursday's rallies in Jena to the protests and marches that used to take place in cities like Selma, Ala., in the 1960s. Al Sharpton claimed Thursday's peaceful demonstrations were to highlight racial inequities in the criminal justice system.

Jesse and Al, as they're prone to do, served a kernel of truth stacked on a mountain of lies.

There are undeniable racial and economic inequities in our criminal justice system, and from afar the "Jena Six" rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s.

But the reality is Thursday's protests are just another sign that we remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium.

Althouse complains that she can't seem to get a straight story from the Big Liars Media. Yep. The Narrative has taken over and there is not much truth to be found.

So let me start with the nooses that are supposed to be an ignored hate crime. This seems like a credible report from a local:

The square at Jena High School has been known for the center of school spirit and/or pranks for many years. I've seen everything from "funerals" of opponent football teams to the tree and surrounding area covered with toilet tissue. Jena High School is known for themed activities surrounding football games. This particular week, JHS was playing a team in which the mascot is Cowboys! Hence, the nooses in the tree..."hang'em high!" Not for one moment did the thought of racism cross my mind or the majority of the others. It was football season. We were playing the cowboys. The kids, girls and boys, wore boots to school and had a western themed pep rally! Nooses = cowboys and horse theives in my world. Maybe I've watched too much Gunsmoke, but racism was not even a thought. Due to the reaction of ADULTS in the black community, not the kids at the school, the boys were suspended. The entire punishment for those boys was never published because of the confidentiality of the issue. However, the boys were suspended. They and
their families were required to go to counseling. The boys had hours of community service. The boys and their families continue to receive threatening phone calls, but yet no one has addressed that issue.

Eddie Thompson, a pastor in Jena, seems to have been ambushed by the drive by media.

The truth is no longer important. Jena is officially the poster child for prejudice and bigotry in the south. America found a perfect, flawless lamb to be offered on its national altar of racism. Practically drooling with anticipation, reporters and professional race-crusaders poured into the small southern town of Jena, where the country accents are as thick as the pines that cover the rolling hills of central Louisiana. With such severe charges placed upon the six black students known as the "Jena Six," the logical conclusion was "racism." Any inconvenient facts that contradict that conclusion have been dismissed in an Orwellian attempt to shape this story into "Mississippi Burning" revisited. The "Jena Six" can thank their lucky stars that it was a white student and not a bulldog they are accused of beating then stomping on December 4, 2006. Otherwise, PETA and the national media may have pounced on them with the same vitriol afforded Michael Vick. Instead, Jena certainly has a color problem now: black and white and yellow--prejudice, bigotry, and slanted journalism.

My name is Eddie Thompson. I am the white pastor referenced by Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune in his article that forced the story of the "Jena Six" onto the national stage. On December 8, 2006, when I wrote my article concerning racism in Jena Louisiana I believed that perhaps the biggest obstacle to our town's prosperous future was the ignorance of prejudice and bigotry. I am now convinced that the biggest enemy to our future as a whole community has become the misinformation, lies, and prejudice of a national media that refuses to seek out the truth concerning the events of last fall. My evolution forces me to voice the concerns of the majority of our town who believe that any interview or statement given to the media will simply be twisted and mangled to support the forgone conclusion that we are nothing but country hicks, rednecks, who have no compassion on the minorities in our community. Most of the white community would not be content with me being such a mouthpiece for their perspective, but since they won't speak, I'll do my best to speak for them. The following are questions and statements I've heard privately from the white community:

Eddie also had this to say about athletic privilege:

The "Jena Six" have repeatedly been held up as heroes by much of the race-based community and called "innocent students" by the national media. Some of these students have reputations in Jena for intimidating and sometimes beating other students. They have vandalized and destroyed both school property and community property. Some of the Jena Six have been involved in crimes not only in LaSalle Parish but also in surrounding parishes. For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena. Despite intervention by adults wanting to give them chances due their athletic potential, most of the Jena Six have extensive juvenile records. Yet their parents keep insisting that their children have never been in trouble before. These boys did not receive prejudicial treatment but received preferential treatment until things got out of hand.

Here is a time line that gives the barest outline of events. They seem to be missing a lot of nuance. I have already provided some. I'm probably missing things. However, we are at least getting a little closer to the "truth" which is ultimately unknowable. A complete dissertation on epistemology is for another day.

The Naked Emperor, a former resident of Jena has a few words. Among them:

Was charging the alleged assailants racist? I find no evidence of it. If a victim chooses to press charges, and there is sufficient evidence to support those charges, it is the duty of the District Attorney to file said charges. That is a matter of law.

At one point, the alleged assailants were charged with attempted murder. Even a cursatory glance at the situation shows those charges to be unwarranted, and they were not pressed. But there does seem to be enough evidence to bring the current charges.

And are the alleged assailants guilty? I have no clue. That's a matter of fact, not law, for a jury to decide.

And while we are on the subject of the jury, one of the assailants has already been tried. Much has been made of the fact that the jury was all white. But of the 150 people receiving jury summons, only 50 showed up, and there were no blacks in that number. Sorry, but lack of performance of civic duty is not the DA's fault.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Michael Totten visited Ramadi in Anbar and reports.

"It was nothing we did," said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Drew Crane who was visiting for the day from Fallujah. "The people here just couldn't take it anymore."

What he said next surprised me even more than what I was seeing.

"You know what I like most about this place?" he said.

"What's that?" I said.

"We don't need to wear body armor or helmets," he said.

I was poleaxed. Without even realizing it, I had taken off my body armor and helmet. I took my gear off as casually as I do when I take it off after returning to the safety of the base after patrolling. We were not in the safety of the base and the wire. We were safe because we were in Ramadi.

What happened? It seems like living under Islamic fascism is not as popular in practice as it is in theory.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

The activities I am about to describe may seem repetitive and illogical to some. But I hope it will be borne in mind that Coco is a dog, and it really isn't fair to hold her to the standards of most of the people who read this blog.

Coco has an absolutely infuriating toy, which looks like a tennis ball morphed into a tire-shaped object by students of topology. When I throw it, it has a way of rolling, and driving her crazy. This gives her endless pleasure:

And she can't get enough of it; she's always ready for more:

But it does get a little boring for me just throwing it and having her bring it back for me to throw again when I want to be allowed to enjoy the beach a little. Eventually, I thought it might be time for both of us to give it a little rest. So I saw a handy dead tree, and I thought that if I just put the awful green thing on one of the limbs, it could stay there for awhile.

Initially, Coco tried the approach of logical evaluation. At least, it seemed that way:

But alas! Instead of removing it as you or I would, simply by lifting it in an upwards direction till it cleared the limb, Coco attempted to do what most of us would consider impossible -- trying to pull the thing as if she thought that if she pulled hard enough, the tree would break or something.

No such luck! No matter how much pulling she did, all that would happen is that the green ring would stretch and flex a little (just enough to infuriate and thus encourage her, I'm afraid).

And no matter which direction she pulled, Coco could not budge it:

The stubborn tree held it fast, no matter what Coco did. Nothing worked. Not even making a cute expression, and not even looking directly into the camera:

I soon tired of the tree-tugging activity too, as I realized that the toy would not hold up. Eventually, she would have severely torn it so that it would have been unable to float.

And we can't have that, can we?

This week's Philadelphia City Paper (a leftish alternative weekly) has an editorial about guns.

Yes, I know what you're already thinking. ("Here goes Eric with another lengthy diatribe about the complete stranglehold that the anti-gun mentality holds on all of Philadelphia's newspapers.")

If you're thinking along such lines, you can stop right there!

Because this editorial is not the usual tripe to which I've become so sadly accustomed. In fact, it's so out-of-the-ordinary that I had to read the piece twice to verify that it wasn't carefully dissembled satire pretending to take the side of the "gun nuts" only to reveal the sarcasm in the last sentence.

Michael Washburn (not a token gun nut they're indulging this one time, but a regular writer and editor at Philadelphia City Paper) piece is titled "On the Defensive -- If we ban guns, only the criminals will be armed," and it's as serious and articulate a defense of the Second Amendment as I have ever seen anywhere (least of all in Philadelphia newspapers). Washburn begins by relating two accounts of successful home self defense incidents -- one involving a 79-year-old man who shot two burglars, and the other involving a woman who managed to successfully free herself from captivity, get hold of her gun and shoot two invaders bent on robbing and raping her and a female houseguest:

Cases like the two above illustrate the essential role of guns in protecting people who are physically no match for the aggressors, or who are confronting criminals possessing guns illegally. Cases within just the past few weeks -- listed online at the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog and in local media outlets around the country -- could fill every page of this City Paper.

Sadly, the notion of self-defense as an imperative -- even a right -- has eroded a great deal in our political culture. Those who exercise the right court the label "racist" -- because they might shoot a criminal who happens to be black -- or "trigger-happy," and many employers bar their workers from resisting thugs. Ronald B. Honeycutt, a Pizza Hut employee in Indiana who shot a thug trying to rob him during a delivery, learned this when Pizza Hut fired him. Attorney Rick Whitham told World Net Daily, "I hope the media will realize the incredible unfairness of a huge company telling its employees -- in essence -- they must agree to die for the company rather than use legal means to defend themselves."

But some people are sending that message on a wider scale. Look at the 79-year-old man in Dry Ridge. Gun control would have told him, in essence:

You're going to have to let the robbers do with you as they will. You might survive their blows, and you might not. You might avoid a fatal heart attack, and you might not. In the event that you survive, you can call the police, who may or may not catch the perps. Will the courts and jails keep them off the streets? Sheesh, how naive are you?

But this is one American who decided to cut out the middle man. Those of you who live in Philadelphia should be grateful that one of your fundamental rights is intact.

My hat's off to the Philadelphia City Paper.

Is it too much to hope that this editorial might help empower closeted Second Amendment sympathizers at the Philadelphia Inquirer?

Gateway Pundit has an explosive bit of news on the Hsu scandal.

Ever since Hsu became a major fundraiser, there have been notable similarities between his and Hochberg/Lillian Vernon's contributions that strain the limits of coincidence. Not only is there significant overlap among several far-flung candidates who wouldn't typically be of much interest to New York businessmen, but the size and timing of many of the transactions further suggest the efforts are coordinated...

Yes, Fred Hochberg, a dean at the school where Hsu served as a trustee, one of Hsu's fellow HillRaisers, CEO of the company that officially bundled at least one of Hsu's direct contributions as recently as this summer, and the apparent architect of Hsu's favored candidate slate, was installed as one of the country's senior-most federal policymakers by Bill Clinton.

Fred Hochberg and his life partner Tom Healy hosted a fundraising event at their home in New York with Hillary for Minnesota senatorial candidate Amy Klobuchar in 2006.

If this sinks Hillary who else do the Dems have besides Nation of Islam friendly Obama?

Who is Fred Hochberg?

From 1998 through 2000, he served as deputy then acting administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), an agency elevated to cabinet rank by President Bill Clinton, with more than 4,000 employees and 100 offices across the country.

Update: See Suitably Flip who has done the heavy lifting.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Yesterday I had a bit of fun at the expense of the "Right to Dry" movement, mainly because I dislike the manufacture of new morality, and I worry that the invocation of morality leads to a slippery slope. People who want to do something because they believe it is their moral duty to do it do not merely seek the right to do it. Rather, they see the right to do it as a starting point to making other people do it -- by government force if necessary. Some vegans, for example, do not merely seek the right to be vegans. Because they believe their veganism is rooted in morality, they see their own veganism as only a beginning. The right be a vegan leads to demands that vegan meals be made available on airplanes, in government cafeterias, and the ultimate goal of some of these people is prohibition of meat. So naturally, I worry that the "Right to Dry" can lead first to irritating guilt trips, then to demands that others (especially governments and public institutions) avoid using dryers, and quite possibly limitations on the sale or use of gas and electric dryers. Things that seem funny now can have a way of becoming mainstream in a surprisingly short period of time. When I was a kid, people burned leaves; now many communities prohibit leaf blowers, and there are many people who would ban power lawnmowers.

Glenn Reynolds linked a piece called "Coase, Clotheslines, and Climate Change" which proposes an economic solution to the members of homeowners associations who seek an exemption from the laws aimed at preventing eyesores like the lovely tie-dyes on the left:

...homeowners associations could "bribe" right to dry advocates not to hang clothes by giving them a piece of the increased values of homes that result from electric dryers, either in the form of cash or carbon credits, or both. (Presumably, cash is the better choice.)

Whew! Everyone walks away a winner, no matter what the happens to the law.

The theorem states that when trade in an externality is possible and there are no transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property rights.

The other problem is that while some of the Right-to-Dry-ers might accept compensation, what about those who believe that the use of a dryer is inherently immoral? This is what I mean by manufactured morality. Once a new form of morality emerges, the moral issue is often seen as trumping any economic argument.

For example, I think it would have been a great idea for the federal government to have ended slavery by simply compensating every slave owner for the value of each and every slave. Not only would this have been a win win for all concerned, but it would have been far, far cheaper than the huge economic and human costs of fighting the Civil War. If we use the Civil War costs as a reference figure, there would probably have been enough money left to house, feed, and educate every slave until each one had been resettled in a new and comfortable life. The problem with implementing this would have been moral objections on both sides. On one side, slave ownership was deemed a moral right and even a religious right ordained by God, while on the other the practice of slavery was so inherently immoral that the buying of slaves by the government would have been deemed inconscionable. (And there'd have been a national chorus of "That's not fair!" by people justifably upset to see slaveholders being given billions of dollars in public funds as a reward for their immoral behavior.)

Lest anyone think morality does not infect economic arguments nowadays, Lawrence Kudlow recently noted that more money has been spent on Hurricane Katrina than it would have cost to buy every single person living in New Orleans a new home:

The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief).

That's right: a monstrous $127 billion. Of course, not a single media story has highlighted this gargantuan government-spending figure. But that number came straight from the White House in a fact sheet subtitled, "The Federal Government Is Fulfilling Its Commitment to Help the People of the Gulf Coast Rebuild." Huh?

This is an outrage. The entire GDP of the state of Louisiana is only $141 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. So the cash spent there nearly matches the entire state gross GDP. That's simply unbelievable. And to make matters worse, by all accounts New Orleans ain't even fixed!

You might be asking: Where in the hell did all this money go? Well, the White House fact sheet says $24 billion has been used to build houses and schools, repair damaged infrastructure and provide victims with a place to live. But isn't everyone complaining about the lack of housing?

Perhaps all this money should've been directly deposited in the bank accounts of the 300,000 people living in New Orleans. All divvied up, that $127 billion would come to $425,000 per person! After thanking Uncle Sam for their sudden windfall, residents could head to Southern California and buy homes that are now on sale thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and bid up the sagging house prices in the state.

This all begs the question of what is morality. If you don't believe CO2 is a serious threat to humanity, you're unlikely to ever be persuaded that using an electric dryer is a moral issue. But if you do, you might resent the hell out of people who don't.

As for me, I hate my lawn. No, seriously, I really and truly do. I'm placed in a damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don't situation. If I let it grow, I'm seen as evil by the neighbors. If I cut it or pay people to cut it, I'm evil in the eyes of the environmentalists because lawn mowers are responsible for a whopping "5% of the nation's air pollution and a good deal more in metropolitan areas." Now, I don't believe in the inherent evil of this, but the truth is, I'm a lazy son of a bitch who does not want to cut the grass. Not only that, I'm a cheap son of a bitch who doesn't want to pay other people to do it.

Obviously, the solution is to have my neighbors pay me to cut the grass.

But will they do it?

(I might have to threaten to do the morally correct thing, and "restore the native flora"....)

Via Sean Kinsell, I am very sorry to read that Virginia Postrel has breast cancer, and starts chemotherapy next Friday. Fortunately, her prognosis is "good, thanks largely to the monoclonal antibody drug Herceptin." (More about the mechanism here.)

My mom had breast cancer when I was in early adolescence, and in those days, treatment pretty much consisted of the dreaded radical mastectomy. (Which she had, and which worked, as the cancer never recurred.)

"Cancer" in those days was a word which evoked fear, and it was generally uttered in tones typically reserved for discussions of taboo topics like death and sex. Not so now, and I think that's a major change for the better. Cancer is now so treatable that three of the major contenders for president talk about their own personal experiences with it in an almost nonchalant manner. This is good. My mom's cancer was not something I felt free to discuss with my friends. (Not that it helped that they constantly chattered about female breasts, but what the hell. They didn't know, and my family's "stuff" wasn't their fault.) Anyway the don't-talk-about-cancer taboo was well worth getting rid of. I think we all have medical technology to thank. Most cancer is now treatable, and many forms are survivable. I look forward to the day when all cancer will be survivable as so much of it is now.

I join Sean in wishing Virginia Postrel the best.

Over at Climate Audit they are discussing "Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis".

Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion.

The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle.

Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And yet the money rolls on.

If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new.

Our current ratios are out of balance.

Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters.

If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication.

Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy.

In many way science is like religion. Woe be unto him who strays from the canon.

Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count".

Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything.

When I started writing this post yesterday, progressive bloggers were being scolded for not paying enough attention to a case known as the Jena 6. Considering that the case occupies much of the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer (rallies were held in Philadelphia yesterday), I'm sure there's no longer any need to scold progressive bloggers for ignoring the case. However, I'm not sure about a system of blogger "accountability" for issues not written about, regardless of the political perspective of the blogger. How do you keep score, for example, on who wrote about Larry Craig while ignoring Norman Hsu or vice versa? There's no way to write about every issue, and right now I'm sure I am ignoring vital issues of concern to countless other bloggers.

My immediate reaction to the Jena 6 (which I read about earlier in the summer) was that the factual scenario is complicated (see the Wiki entry, Orin Kerr, and Radley Balko), with a ton of third hand information, much of it driven by emotion. Black kids (it is alleged) sit under "white" tree. White kids put nooses in tree. Fights erupt, in various places, not always at the school, and not always involving students. Members of both races are beaten. Blacks end up being charged as adults for attempted murder of a white kid who was beaten until he was unconscious, then recovered quickly.

Here's a typical account of some of it:

A few weeks after the nooses were discovered in September, an arsonist torched a wing of Jena High School. Race fights roiled the town for days, culminating in a schoolyard brawl that led the LaSalle Parish district attorney to charge six black teenagers with attempted murder for beating up a white teenager who suffered no life-threatening injuries.

Mychal Bell, the first of the six to be tried, is scheduled to be sentenced in September. He was convicted in July by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. Like his co-defendants -- Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore Shaw and Jesse Beard -- Bell had no prior criminal record.

He faces up to 22 years in prison, and civil rights advocates say the reduced charges were still excessive and did not fit the crime. "Can they really do this to me?" Bell asked recently, sitting in his jail cell looking frightened and numb.

The problem with this case is that I'm accustomed to seeing murderers walk free, kids who smack other kids on the ass facing felony charges, and people sentenced to life imprisonment for marijuana. You zero in on any of the individual cases, and each one is an outrage.

It all leads me to ask, what sort of justice is this? To look at particular incidents of racial injustice and declare the entire system racially unjust ignores the fact that there are innumerable criminals who don't receive the punishment they deserve. Many others rot for decades for things I don't believe should be a crime, while others are completely innocent of anything. I'm not prepared to take it on faith, though, that if they're black, it's necessarily racial injustice, because there are plenty of whites rotting away. Why would a drug dealer sentenced to 200 years for dealing crack be an example of racial injustice only if he was black? Why would a white drug dealer sentenced to 200 years for dealing crank be just a routine case in the "drug war"? How about a group of Hispanics facing over 1200 years for drug sales? Does the race of the man who was sentenced to 200 years for possession of child pornography matter? Does race matter in the case of a man facing 606 years for selling veterinary steriods?

Looking at the big picture, I'm more inclined to call this a system of random injustice than racial injustice. So many things are illegal now that it's almost like a gigantic prosecutorial dartboard.

I'm struck by one particularly truthful statement that the Jena District Attorney made:

I can make your life go away with the stroke of a pen.

Had he wanted to, he could have done the same thing to white students, Hispanic students, gay students, or just someone who looked cross-eyed at him. The reason is that everything is illegal.

Well almost everything. Apparantly, there's no law against hanging nooses in trees.

And that's what's getting the lion's share of the attention. This reaction I found at Yahoo is quite typical:

What white Southerners still fail to realize is their complicity in some of the most vicious and effective terrorism the world has ever seen. Lynchings were only the most visible and brutal embodiments of a system to terrorize the black minority. A noose is a symbol the way a swastika is a symbol. A noose hanging from a tree in that context is an almost unimaginably vicious act. Those white teens, instead of being ashamed of their terrorist ancestry, reveled in the evil. The adults who are charged with the education of all the students deemed it merely a prank.

By declaring the kids guilty of having a "terrorist ancestry" they're implying that the image of the noose is a cultural trait, passed on from generation to generation. Might as well declare that it's part of their "cultural DNA." If people are bigots by birth, then all reason is lost, and frankly I'm seeing less and less reason being applied to this case. What's next? A movement making the tying of certain knots a criminal offense? (It's already a fireable offense, regardless of intent.)

This case is being taken over by media-driven hysteria, and I'm already at the end of my, um, rope, even though this is the first post I've written about it. I still can't claim to know what all the facts are, but I think it's pretty clear that the narrative is taking over. As a group, blacks are judicially lynched for attempting to defend themselves against white terrorism, while white terrorists walk.

If you disagree with the narrative and you're white, it's because you have terrorist DNA.

You should be ashamed to the core.

MORE: Speaking of the facts (as if such things mattered) via Glenn Reynolds, the Kansas City Star's Jason Whitlock points out that the nooses did not trigger the attack:

There was no "schoolyard fight" as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.

Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.

A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the "Jena Six" case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker's assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the "Jena Six" in reaction to Walters' extreme charges of attempted murder.

You won't hear about any of that because it doesn't fit the picture we want to paint of Jena, this case, America and ourselves.

UPDATE: Radley Balko (whom I thank for coming) left a comment below which I think belongs here:

The "racist DNA" stuff is garbage.

But this is one case where the narrative probably fits.

I wonder if Whitlock has ever been to that part of Louisiana.

I have. I spent five days investigating down there this past June. Race is pervasive--suffocating, even--in some of these small towns in the South. The town I visited is still basically segregated. Black people are scared to death of the local police. The Klan is still active. When people heard a journalist was in town, black women came to me with photos, hospital reports, and witness statements of relatives and boyfriends who'd been beaten by local police.

As for U.S. Attorney Washington, he's a very conservative Republican. I'm working on another case where his office turned a blind eye to the actions of some local racist sheriff's deputies, then wrongly prosecuted and convicted a 57-year-old grandmother of being the biggest crack kingpin in Louisiana.

She was later released from prison, and the charges against her were dropped--with prejudice.

My point: That Washington is black doesn't mean he isn't wrong.

Finally, this is the same state that gave David Duke 671,000 votes for governor in 1991, and nearly pushed him to a runoff election for Congress in 1999.

I'm as dubious of false racism claims as anyone else. But in my experience, in this area of the country they carry the ring of truth.

UPDATE: My thanks Glenn Reynolds for the link -- and especially for quoting what I said about a "gigantic prosecutorial dartboard." (Coming from a law professor, that is a real honor.)

Welcome all.

A lot of people are furious about the Ahmadinejad visit, as am I. The idea that he would even be allowed near Ground Zero is appalling, and I completely agree with Senator McCain that his visit there would be a desecration of sacred ground, and he should be physically blocked, if necessary. This man is not only an enemy of the United States, he is a Holocaust-denying advocate of genocide against the Jews.

Fortunately, it appears that the City of New York is refusing to allow him to visit Ground Zero (but apparently he's still trying). They damned well better stop him. Or else. By that I mean that outraged Americans have a long history of considering certain things to be worth rioting over, and the so-called "authorities" would do well to keep this in mind.

It's one thing for Ahmadinejad to be popular at Daily Kos, but you'd think Columbia University would display a little more sensitivity than inviting him to speak, especially considering the history of anti-Semitism there. Sure, there's free speech, but why didn't it apply to Larry Summers in California? I agree with Michelle Malkin, who said:

Why anyone would consider sending their kid there is beyond me.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is no doubt trying to strike a blow for free speech, no matter how odious. I'd applaud him for that if he were more consistent and was allowing the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, ROTC, back to campus as well. Amazingly, the ROTC remains banned from Ivy League schools with the exception of Princeton and Cornell. MIT has them. This is nuts, an outgrowth of Vietnam era protests. How can a university president allow a lunatic antisemite to speak on campus but not allow America's military to recruit? The military's ban on openly declared homosexuals is part of the reason and it seems crazy to me, anyway, that gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military--assuming they abided by the same code of conduct as other members of the Armed Forces. But if discrimination were the standard for banishment from campus why not Catholic groups? After all, the church bans women from becoming priests? I had a friend at Columbia who was in ROTC. He had to go to Fordham University in the Bronx for his training. Harvard students have to haul over to MIT. Please. John McCain has made this point too and he's right.

Ahmadinejad and his murderous terrorist government don't discriminate against gays; they kill them.

The man has blood on his hands not just of gays but many other innocent victims (like the women stoned for "adultery"), and he's long been drooling over the opportunity to inflict mass murder on the Jews.

I believe in free speech, but I wish this man could simply be arrested for his involvement in crimes against humanity. That way, he could be allowed to speak at his trial before sentence was pronounced.

In a darkly ironic way, I guess Ahmadinejad belongs at the UN. (However, it would be more appropriate if Kurt Waldheim were still there to welcome him.)

MORE: There's been some talk that if Ahmadinejad wants to visit Ground Zero, the Secret Service is duty-bound to protect him. According to this news report, the "US" (specifically including the Secret Service) has turned him down.

If my understanding of the command structure is correct, the Secret Service is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, which answers to the president.

In other words, President Bush has the power to deny Secret Service protection to Ahmadinejad.

Assuming he has that power, I think he should use it. He could always issue a formal executive order forbidding the Secret Service from protecting Ahmadinejad if he attempts to visit Ground Zero.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I like my tax dollars being used to protect this genocidal maniac at all. Maybe Bush should issue an executive order denying him any Secret Service protection.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story of a woman in trouble for hanging her laundry on a clothesline -- in violation of the rules of her subdivision:

The regulations of the subdivision in which Ms. Taylor lives effectively prohibit outdoor clotheslines. In a move that has torn apart this otherwise tranquil community, the development's managers have threatened legal action. To the developer and many residents, clotheslines evoke the urban blight they sought to avoid by settling in the Oregon mountains.

"This bombards the senses," interior designer Joan Grundeman says of her neighbor's clothesline. "It can't possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood."

Ms. Taylor and her supporters argue that clotheslines are one way to fight climate change, using the sun and wind instead of electricity. "Days like this, I can do multiple loads, and within two hours, it's done," said Ms. Taylor. "It smells good, and it feels different than when it comes out of the dryer."

The battle of Awbrey Butte is an unanticipated consequence of increasing environmental consciousness, pitting the burgeoning right-to-dry movement against community standards across the country.

The clothesline was once a ubiquitous part of the residential landscape. But as postwar Americans embraced labor-saving appliances, clotheslines came to be associated with people who couldn't afford a dryer. Now they are a rarity, purged from the suburban landscape by legally enforceable development restrictions.

Clothes dryers account for 6% of total electricity consumed by U.S. households, third behind refrigerators and lighting, according to the Residential Energy Consumption Survey by the federal Energy Information Administration. It costs the typical household $80 a year to run a standard electric dryer, according to a calculation by E Source Cos., in Boulder, Colo., which advises businesses on reducing energy consumption.

Why stop with clotheslines? Wouldn't an old fashioned washtub in the front yard also be better for the environment? Fetching water from a well with a bucket is probably a good idea too, because you use less that way.

And don't forget! Rain barrels should be used to collect water, in the most visible place possible, to best encourage backward neighbors to do the same!

As to laundry soap, I'm sure the soap industry is guilty of horrid environmental monstrosities, and I think it might be time to return to making soap the old fashioned way. Just collect the grease, get some lye, and boil it in the front yard!

The recipe's easy, and all you need is an outdoor boiling tub, like this:

If we all work together to build a better future, the environment might be saved.

And instead of going to the wasteful supermarket, chickens could be raised at home, and maybe a little varmint hunting in the front yard could add supplemental protein.

The more I look at this here environmentalism stuff, the more I like what I see.

I'm also thinking about the insane regulations requiring these stupid and wasteful lawns which have to be mowed regularly. Grass is an introduced, hateful, water-loving, wasteful species, causing lawnmowers driven by environmentally wasteful aliens to spew out greenhouse gases, right? As I've noted before, lawns should be banned!

So what on earth are they doing throwing this poor woman in jail?

OREM - Betty Perry pleaded innocent Tuesday to charges she failed to water her lawn and resisted arrest when an officer attempted to cite her.
Perry appeared in 4th District Court in Orem to enter her plea in a case prominent Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred described as a gross injustice.
"Today, law enforcement in Orem has enshrined itself as the laughing stock of our country by prosecuting a 70-year-old great-grandmother for allegedly not watering her lawn," Allred said. "This ill-conceived action ensures Orem's law enforcement authorities first place in the [Guinness World Records] for stupidity."
Perry's next appearance will be on Oct. 11 for a pre-trial conference.
In July, Perry was cited by Officer James Flygare of the police's Neighborhood Preservation Unit for failing to water her lawn. Perry refused to give her name to the officer and, when Flygare tried to stop her from going back inside her house, she reportedly tripped and injured her nose.
She was arrested and taken to police station but released shortly afterwards.
An investigation by the state Department of Public Safety cleared Flygare of any wrongdoing, and city officials pressed charges against Perry on the landscape violation, a class C misdemeanor, and interfering with a police officer, a class B misdemeanor.
Allred, a high-profile Los Angeles attorney who has represented the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson's murdered wife, said she was there to provide support for Perry, whose criminal defense is being handled by M. Paige Benjamin, a Provo attorney.

Obviously, we have our priorities backwards, when we need to be moving forward.

Why are all these environment-haters fighting progress?

MORE: In retrospect, I think it's obvious that these people were the original progenitors of today's environmentalist missionaries:

I used to watch their show as a kid, but no one knew that they were way ahead of their time.

We should have listened to them, but we are all in debt to the Clampetts.

A small carbon footprint for a family, a giant leap forward for humanity!

MORE: Weeeeeh doggies! My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for bravely giving succor to unlikely environmentalists! Welcome all!

I noticed that a few commenters are taking me seriously. So let me make one thing perfectly clear: I support the right to keep and bear clotheslines.

And I as I was forced to point out below,

Hillary can put her hemp underwear on me when she pries my fruit-of-the-loom from my stinking corpse!

Yes, let me start by admitting to my own erotophobia. My fear of sex does not manifest itself as fear of people having sex, but rather it's the fear of discussing it. I don't like to write about sex too much, because it's contentious, and it's very easy to be misunderstood. Talking about sex is like talking about politics or religion, except the penalties are worse. For starters, my blog can get blocked if I get too graphic. Because I know that my sexual opinions don't suit the tastes of some of the readers, I figure, why bother stirring stuff up? Plus, I'm kind of a fanatic about privacy, and I consider sex to be a very private thing. So I tend to leave my discussions of sex at the theoretical level. I'm not interested in turning my readers on or off, and this is not a sex blog. I'm not especially interested in reading about other people's sex lives, and I'm really not interested in having people read about mine. It's undignified, and at heart I'm kind of prudish. But that's just me, and has nothing to do with my belief in maximum sexual freedom. (Similarly, I'm 100% in favor of relegalizing all drugs, but I don't take any drugs; not even pot. If I did, I would consider it similarly irrelevant.)

Susie Bright and Jessica Cutler are sexually very outspoken people, who take pride in celebrating their sexual freedom, in a public manner. Why they are on the left, I am not entirely sure. I would like to think that people who support socialism and nanny state politics do so because they truly believe in these things and not because of emotional responses to perceived "erotophobia" on the right. But I think it's a topic which needs discussing.

This morning, Glenn Reynolds linked a fascinating interview of Jessica Cutler by Susie Bright. I wanted to focus in on their discussion of one of the most extreme expressions of sexual freedom, which is having sex in exchange for money:

SB: I want to know what your own response is to that [charge of being a sex worker without the paycheck, party girl "whether it meant drugs, dancing, great sex, bad sex, crazy adventures"], Jessica. Because I've also been characterized as a full-time pro. And I have not run my life as a prostitution business. Not because I think it's wrong, but it's just not my life story.

So I find when I get that sort of attitude from someone, I get kind of feisty. In many respects, I identify with whores. If I'm around other whores, I feel like part of the crew. Because we'd have some things in common, in terms of our life experience, in the way people perceive us. And I can identify with a lot of their values - their sense of the reality of what really goes on with sex that people don't like to talk about. I wonder if you feel the same way, or if you just want to be as far as possible from anyone thinking you have anything to do with it.

JC: The latter is totally not the case. When I start to feel defensive, my attitude is sort of like, if people are calling me a whore, "Well, what's wrong with being a whore?" You know? I mean, I think girls who are sex workers -- and men, all sex workers -- they see another side of humanity and sexuality. People who've never worked in the sex industry -- people who've never done it -- don't know the half of it.

I've heard girls I know who escort say, "I think every woman should do this, because you find out a lot. You learn a lot about men." They tell me, "You don't even know. You wrote a book and even you don't know the half of it." And I'm like... "Yes, I want to know all about it..."

I really don't know what the hang-up is about that. I don't know why people really seem to dislike prostitutes. I don't understand that attitude at all.

I don't understand that attitude at all.

How many times I have said similar things to myself! Seriously, it does not bother me that someone would have sex in exchange for money. Why would I care?

Well, I do care that people care, and because I try to understand these things, I'll try to take this a step further. I think what Bright and Cutler are talking about involves not so much a failure of understanding so much as a failure to empathize. Fear of sex is like fear of snakes; you either have it or you don't. While those who are horrified by prostitution are not necessarily afraid of prostitutes in the normal sense of the word "fear," the strong moral disapproval involved usually stems not from disagreement, but a feeling. In the case of prostitute haters (or disapprovers) and prostitute lovers (or approvers), there is a mutual inability to feel the disgust (or approval) that the other side feels.

In many ways, it is like snake haters versus snake lovers. Neither can explain their hatred or their love, and even if they can verbalize it, the feelings are not shared. While it is often claimed that this is an inability to understand (I use the term myself), it's more complicated than that. I think the disapproval of homosexuality, while not identical to the disapproval of prostitution, can spring from a similar disgust over the fact that these are people who simply do not regard the sex act as.... well, in the same way that those who disapprove think they should. The horror over pornography is similar. Some people freak out, while others (myself included) have no emotional reaction whatsoever. Others are turned on. (Pictures just don't have that much of a sexual effect on me.)

While I think I've admitted my bias, I don't want to say that one side is right and the other side is wrong. I may be wrong, OK? Prostitutes may be very bad in ways beyond my understanding and emotional grasp. So might homosexuality. Now, I don't think so, but I'm not so arrogant as to refuse to admit the possibility that I might be wrong. My question is this:

How the hell did sex get put on the f---ing left?

Really, since when are centerfolds images of cultural and political leftism?

What is logical about doing that? How did it happen?

There was a time in this country when most cities had red light districts, and in many places prostitution was legal. In Alaska this past June, I visited Dolly's House, the last of Ketchikan's Creek Street brothels, before prostitution was made illegal in the late 1950s. That's not all that long ago; I was a kid. Brothels and prostitution are an American tradition. They are also a classical tradition; the Pompeiian brothels are a much bigger tourist attraction that Dolly's House. When something is both traditional and classical, it deserves a tad more respect than it gets from the people who attack it in the name of "tradition," but I don't want to seem argumentative, so I'll avoid the inflammatory word "values."

Anyway, while I recognize that people disapprove of prostitution and gay sex, I think it is a huge mistake to declare that this is modern political conservatism, and that the Republican Party stands for such disapproval. It's just plain bad political math, as all the Democrats have to do is nothing, and occasionally admit they're human if they get caught having sex. (The unnoticed irony is that the Democratic Party has plenty of people who are just as deserving of the "erotophobe" title as Republicans.)

To further illustrate, for the sake of argument, assume unorthodox sex is bad, and that prostitution and homosexuality are dangerous, risky behaviors. (I don't think they necessarily are, but of course they can be.) Returning to the snake analogy, let's liken sexual outliers to keepers of venomous snakes. Trust me, they can be kept in captivity, but if you kid around like this idiot did, terrible consequences can follow.

It might surprise readers, but at a leading venomous snake aficionado web site, a political poll was recently conducted. Can anyone guess which party drew the most support?

Huh?

I can't hear you.

OK, I won't play the "keep scrolling" game.

It was the Republicans! I kid you not:

Here are the results, from VenomousReptiles.org:

Democrat 20% (30)
Republican 45% (67)
Libertarian 9% (13)
Green Party 3% (5)
Other 10% (15)
I don't vote 12% (18)

A den of vipers!

There's no reason why right wing activists would do this, as this is a tiny fringe issue affecting very few voters, but if they did, the consequences would be predictable. But what has the keeping of venomous snakes to do with Republicanism or conservative principles? The GOP's traditional smaller government philosophy, and belief in individuality and in risk-taking would seem to militate against it, and it is reflected in the above poll.

Nevertheless, people who are sexual risk takers have been conditioned to believe that not only are they hated by "bigoted" and "hypocritical" Republicans, but the Democratic Party has their best interests at heart. I don't think it is rational for Republicans to declare war on sex and to appear to embrace erotophobia, because of their traditional "leave people alone" philosophy, but there's not a damned thing I can do about it except write posts like this. As to the Democrats, they see sex not as a form of freedom to be embraced, but as something to be manipulated to gain power. What is being forgotten is that neither party is monolithic, and that there is nothing intrinsically liberal or conservative about sex.

This issue is becoming less and less pleasant for me to write about. Emotions related to sexual politicization are higher than ever before. Not only have the GOP sex scandals not helped, they may have thrown fuel on the fire, and I think the fire is headed for a powder keg.

As I say, I have come to dread talking about this, because it's gotten so damned contentious. I think that the anti-sex wing of the GOP is colluding with the Democrats to make other Republicans afraid. Not merely afraid of sex, but afraid to talk about sex unless they condemn it.

My biggest fear is that this is going to hurt the Republicans. They should remember that they're running against a woman who's been around the block, and who knows how to play Republican sexual fear like a violin. Her husband cheated on her, and she forgave him. Never mind that she knew all about Bill and his philandering ways for years, and that the forgiveness act may have been completely phony; to ordinary people (you know, the kind who have occasional sexual and marital difficulties) it came across as healthy realism, and counterbalanced Bill's lies. For that alone they'd have been reelected had they been able to run again. Now they can.

The irony is that this time, the Republicans have candidates who can also be seen as real people who have had occasional marital difficulties. The left would have ordinary voters see them as "hypocrites." I hope it doesn't work. I'd hate to see things reach the point where Democratic and Republican activists reach agreement that the GOP is and should be fighting a war on sex, because it's a war the Republican Party is going to lose.

My biggest fear is that the anti-sex wing of the Republican Party wouldn't mind that one bit.

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds for the link. I do appreciate all comments.

Via Pajamas Media, ShrinkWrapped has a great review of a great movie (3:10 to Yuma --which is compared and contrasted to High Noon). I saw the 3:10 film and loved it.

In the post -- a focus on the rites of passage from boys to men -- ShrinkWrapped contrasts the growing up/American Western theme with an exhibit of psychedelic kitsch art. The latter is embarrassing by contrast:

Mild embarrassment was my initial reaction. The exhibit documented a time and place that was ultimately unserious to the extreme. By that I mean that the counterculture was all about prolonging childhood rather than finding new and improved ways to be come adults. For a brief moment, it seemed that growing up had become optional, that the longstanding connection between cause and effect in human affairs had been severed. The free expression of our impulses without consequences was the hallmark of the times.

Actually, I think that much of what occurred in the 1960s was a media conflation event. You had these artists and wild bohemian types living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. In earlier times, they would have been a localized phenomenon, and perhaps tourists would have bought things from them and taken them home, and a word-of-mouth buzz might have occurred. Doubtless some of the artists and musicians would have made it as some of them did. But there's a big difference between a local scene (even a famous local scene like the Harlem Renaissance), and that same local scene becoming an overnight national sensation and a "movement" simply because the participants were placed in the living rooms of virtually every middle class household in America. While television was not entirely new, by the mid-1960s it had become a giant roving lens. By focusing in on things and projecting them into millions of homes, brand new contexts could be created. Literally, it became possible to effect cultural change (or at least the appearance of it) overnight.

Thus, people who had no interest in being "leaders" (in fact often quite the opposite) suddenly were "role models" to millions of lost kids in need of followers. Few were aware of what was going on at the time.

In a fairly long post, I explored this issue, and I offered the following YouTube video as a fairly good example of how the phenomenon works:

I won't quote from my post, but I think the same thoughts apply. However, the idea of "growing up" intrigues me, because there is a problem with people who will not -- and in some cases cannot -- grow up. (At least, not as society envisions it.)

In the context of boys into men, an especially stubborn category consists of something that's risky to write about, but what I'll call the "Born That Way High IQ Gay Men" for lack of a better term. Whether anyone likes it or not, society (and I include gay culture, which is very bigoted towards this type of person) really has no comfortable niche for young men who share the following two characteristics:

obviously gay (and thus incapable of the "closet" option)

extremely high IQ

This is not to say that the 1960s generation consisted of people like that. But they were among the core group of highly creative, no-niche types. Social misfits, who were transformed by an irrational process into "leaders."

Thinking back to my personal experience, I wasn't into being a follower, and I was in my mid teens, so during the period in which "the rites of passage" was all up for grabs, I didn't really look up to anyone. All people (especially the 1960s follower types who were a few years older -- especially pacifists) struck me as screwed up, and the only people I liked were those I found personally entertaining. In retrospect, this was probably a childish way to regard the world, but it was entertaining, and they hadn't started dying yet. (I even went to law school imagining that it would help enable a anarchic community of interconnected households.)

In many ways, it was death which grew me. Whether this was from boyhood to manhood, I can't say. I never considered that sort of thing anyone's business but their own.

(Theirs not mine, and mine not theirs.)

UPDATE (09/21/07): It galls me to see that the above YouTube video has been taken down:

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

And why would it have been taken down? Because old news documentaries are copyrighted? No fair comment is allowed?

All I can say is that the copyright people suck. Seeing a classic like that pulled makes me want to commit deliberate, premeditated terms-of-use violations as a matter of principle!

Oh well. I guess you can buy it on ebay (along with a 1966 Mike Wallace documentary called "THE HOMOSEXUALS.")

I guess I'm still allowed to quote from a film review:

It was forty years ago that young people from around the United States flocked to the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. Media coverage took what had been brewing in Haight-Ashbury for a couple of years and exposed Hippies to the national audience. The Summer of Love lasted only that one summer, but flower children returning to their homes spread the hippie counterculture across the nation. Two years later Woodstock helped define the generation and Altamont helped end it.

Friday - Sunday August 3, 4 and 5 at 7:00 THE HIPPIE TEMPTATION A CBS Special Report with Harry Reasoner. This report took the avuncular Mr. Reasoner to Haight-Ashbury to report to the nation just what was going on and he wasn't happy with what he saw. The report is filled with wonderful footage of the psychedelic scene with the high point being Mr. Reasoner's visit to the Grateful Dead house. There he asks the members of the band if they use drugs. They happily admit they do.

UPDATE: My mistake in referring to ShrinkWrapped as "Dr. Sanity" above. The errors have been corrected.

Regarding the issue of whether adult sexual activity can cause harm to third persons, this story makes me feel morally obligated to issue a qualification. Or maybe that would be a caveat. Anyway, if these facts are correct, I'll have to issue something:

MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) - A 22-year-old carnival worker blames two friends having sexual intercourse in the back seat of his car for an accident in which his Chevrolet S-10 Blazer struck a telephone pole.

Joshua D. Frank, who is living in a trailer parked on the Latah County Fairgrounds, pleaded guilty Monday to a misdemeanor charge of failing to notify a police officer of a traffic accident. That's after he left the vehicle at the site of the mishap. He was fined $188.

Frank told Moscow Police Department officers that he was driving the vehicle near downtown early Saturday while a man and woman were having sex in the rear of the vehicle.

According to a probable cause affidavit, Frank told authorities that the actions of the pair in the back caused the Blazer, which "was top heavy anyway," to become "tippy" and lose control.

Frank left the accident scene with a minor head wound and returned to his trailer.

The other two occupants of the vehicle were treated for injuries, according to the affidavit, though further information on their condition wasn't available.

there is no legitimate moral argument that what one adult does sexually with another consenting adult does intrinsic harm to anyone else, much less society.

There's an old saying "as long as you don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses" which comes to mind here. How far that goes, I don't know. (There are people who are more afraid of sex than horses are, and some have called them "erotophobes," so it isn't something to be dismissed airily.) My argument presupposes that sex is done in private, and whether the back of a Blazer is a private or public place, I'm not sure. But is privacy really the issue here? No one complained that these people were visible; only that they made the Blazer "tippy." Something like that could have occurred if the vehicle were curtained or paneled.

So, perhaps the rule should be that sexual activity should be performed not only in private places, but also in places where the moving and the shaking which tends to occur is unlikely to cause injury or property damage.

Obviously, sex should not be engaged in while driving or operating heavy machinery. Anyone who thinks I am engaged in frivolity here should bear in mind that this is a very serious issue, and at least one film has been made which grapples with the issue of "auto"-eroticism:

....an entire cult formed around the erotics of car crashes, including Colin Seagrave (Peter MacNeill), a former race-car driver who collaborates with Vaughan in restaging famous car crashes (such as those involving James Dean and Jayne Mansfield), and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who wears leg braces and a full-body support suit like fetishistic paraphernalia. It all sounds like a joke, but the film rigorously, solemnly follows these characters as they compulsively replay and comment on a crash video in Swedish, restage accidents, have sex in cars, photograph people having sex in cars and crash victims (one of Vaughan's activities), or crash their cars into one another's as a kinky kind of love play.

It's probably a good idea to avoid sex in canoes too, as they're inherently unsteady. See how complicated this can get?

And what about earthquakes and other acts of God? I've been through several of them, and I'm glad I wasn't having sex, because it might have been very difficult to run for cover. I was in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, and I got stuck on the Bay Bridge (which actually broke). Clearly, sex would have been a bad idea at the time. If your city is experiencing a hurricane or tsunami or something similar, that's probably also a bad time to be screwing. (I mean, what if the dam breaks right in the middle of, you know....) Ditto for wars, urban insurrections, nuclear attacks, etc.

There's probably stuff I'm missing, but you know, I really hate writing about sex, because it can be disruptive. (BTW, I would never blog while having sex or have sex while writing a blog post, so I'd advise against that too.)

It probably comes down to common sense.

(Geez, I almost said "There is no hard and fast rule.")

The New York Sun reports that a prominent Saudi cleric, Salman al-Awdah, once praised by Osama has turned against him. Howerver, that is not the most interesing point of the article.

Mr. al-Awdah asks, "Have we reduced Islam to a bullet or a rifle? Has the means become an end?"

The editor of an Arabic International Daily, Asharq Alawsat, Tariq Alhomayed, suggested the letter was published too late.

"Sheikh Salman al Ouda's distancing himself from Bin Laden at a time when those absolving themselves of Al Qaeda's leader have nothing to lose and no price to pay." Mr. Alhomayed wrote in an editorial published yesterday. "This comes at a time when no one is shedding any tears for the leader of Al Qaeda organization."

The big deal of course is the bandwagon. Osama is no longer driving it. In fact he appears to have been thrown under the wheels.

H/T Insatpundit

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

It has now been officially determined that whoever threw the unknown oily substance all over the Vietnam War Memorial committed an act of vandalism:

The unidentified substance that was found splashed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial earlier this month was the result of vandalism, the U.S. Park Police said yesterday.

Sgt. Robert Lachance, a Park Police spokesman, said that a detective made the conclusion but that officials would provide no more details because the investigation is continuing.

Lachance said the case would involve a long-term investigation. "It's a terrible crime, and we want to solve it," he said.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the Wall, offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.

The oily substance was first reported to police the evening of Sept. 7, National Park Service officials have said. Yesterday, dark blotches remained along a stone curb at the base of the Wall for much of its length, and at least 14 of its 140 inscribed panels, marked with pieces of blue tape, bore what appeared to be stains from something being splashed on them.

Park Service officials said they did not know what the substance was and at first said it was unclear whether it was the result of vandalism or some kind of accident.

While they have no idea who did it, the Memorial Fund designer doesn't think any organized group could have been involved:

The black granite Wall, dedicated in 1982, bears the names of more than 58,000 men and women killed or missing in the Vietnam War. It is one of the most visited tourist sites in Washington.

"It's deplorable that someone would vandalize what's really a national shrine," said Jan C. Scruggs, founder and president of the Memorial Fund. "It's an outrage. It's sad."

He said the memorial is open 24 hours a day year-round and has been visited by an estimated 80 million people.

"No organized group would ever be a part of anything like this," he said. "But there are deranged individuals in our society, and I think one has visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial."

The kind of people who hold signs like this....

...are precisely the kind of deranged individuals who would vandalize the war memorial.

It would not surprise me if whoever was slimy enough to do this was also a slimy attention seeker who bragged about it somewhere. For a $5,000 reward, it might be worth monitoring some of the loony left bulletin boards and hate sites.

With enough people looking, maybe something will turn up.

I do hope they catch whoever it is, as this is akin to vandalizing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In ancient times, those who died in battle were venerated, and desecrating them was considered an intolerable offense. Fortunately for the vandal, we're too civilized to give him the Roman treatment for his crimes.

I wrote this post to help spread the word about the reward, and because I don't think this is getting the attention it should, especially now that it has been established that it was vandalism.

This was an attack on all Americans.

We do rock music a lot around here. Here is a short piece (about 40 seconds) of some Gabrielli. I was not able to track down which of the Gabriellis wrote this (Som Metal - is the name of the ensemble) so if any one has a clue leave a comment. Was it Giovanni Gabrielli (the most likely choice)? Domenico Gabrielli? Or one of the other members of that illustrious family?

Updated to show that Som Metal is the name of the ensemble. More in the comments. Thanks Eric Blair.

Quick question: What is health care?

I guess the answer isn't quite as simple as the question. What is health? The state of not being sick? The state of being well, or getting well? Because of the nature of humanity there is no right to be well or get well, so in that sense there can be no right to health. So, the words "health care" in the context of "right to health care" must refer to a right to attempt to be well, or to stay well.

Obviously, there are many ways to attempt to stay well. But don't we all have the right to attempt to do whatever we can do? As soon as I finish writing this post, I plan to run my three miles; not because I want to (I usually hate running, in fact), but because I have this caretaker inside me that makes me do it -- the idea being that if I do it, I'll be healthier than if I didn't do it. So, isn't my running a form of health care? Do I have a right to it? Of course. It's part of my right to be alive, and I have as much of a right to run as I do to eat and breathe.

But the left uses the word "right" in a different way. What Hillary means by the "right" to health care means that I would have a right to have other people pay if I can't afford it. This is absurd, and (I believe) unconstitutional. Not only does the federal government lack power to do it, but it violates the most basic notions of fairness, as well as personal conscience.

Let's stick with my example of running as a way of taking care of my health. Do I have the "right" to do that even when there's snow and ice on the ground and it is impossible or unhealthy to run outside? Well, maybe, but I'd have to either buy a treadmill or find an indoor track. These things cost money, though, and while I think I have a right to pay for them, do I have a right to compel other people to pay for them? It's my health care, isn't it? Eating healthy food is also health care; do I have a "right" to have other people pay for that too?

Or are these things not health care? Surely, they're of as much value as a regular visit to the doctor even though there's nothing wrong with me. But the reason I run or visit the doctor is ultimately to prolong (extend) my life.

It's a death avoidance scheme. Yet we all die, without exception. The extent that we manage to put it off, whether by exercise, eating properly, driving carefully, not touching high voltage lines, visiting the doctor, all these things and more affect how long we will live. Because they improve the quality of life, they might also be called self improvement.

Obviously, we all want to avoid death, and we would all like to improve the quality of our lives.

On what basis does medical care qualify above and beyond everything else we might do, as a special "right" (a word which is being misused) for which other people should have to pay?

Try as I might, I can't see Hillary's mandatory health care plan as anything other than a requirement that everyone who can afford it must pay for the medical care of everyone else.

What is really crazy is the way it's being likened to auto insurance:

Joking that her proposals "won't make me the insurance industry's woman of the year," Clinton said companies would no longer be able to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions or genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.

The centerpiece of Clinton's latest effort is the so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance just as most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Such a mandate has detractors at both ends of the political spectrum, and questions abound over how it would be enforced.

"Perhaps more than anybody else I know just how hard this fight will be," said the New York senator.

Clinton adviser Laurie Rubiner said the mandate could be enforced in a number of ways, such as denying certain tax deduction to those who refused to buy insurance. But she stressed that a specific mechanism would be worked out once the plan was passed.

But compelling someone to have health insurance, simply because he is alive? Again, what is health? What is sick? We know what auto insurance is for. Cars hit each other, causing property damage, personal injuries, and death. But what is health care? Anyone who thinks this comes down to common sense should think again. Suppose I have a sore throat. Do I have to go to the doctor? What if I fall down and sprain my leg? Suppose I develop ugly warts and want them removed. Or what if I just feel bad and don't know what is wrong with me? Don't I have the option of going to the doctor or not? What if I just don't want the hassle, or want to save money? Or suppose I'm so crazy that I experienced a really severe injury, like a gunshot wound, and just decided to treat it myself. Don't I have the right to not go to the doctor; to not have health care? If I don't have to go to the doctor, by what right does society have a right to make me (and everyone else) pay for what I do not want?

Then there's the coverage issue. What if I only want a major medical, catastrophic coverage type of policy which won't pay for ordinary health care. Shouldn't I be allowed to pay for less if I use less? And if so, then why shouldn't I be allowed to pay for none and use none?

There's also a distinction I think is lost between the right to health care and the right to insurance. They are not the same thing. There already is a right to emergency health care. No hospital in the United States is allowed to refuse emergency care, but if something is not an emergency, then what right can there be to obtain care for it? The idea that someone has a right to see a doctor for a sore throat (and have that paid for by everyone else including people who refuse to see a doctor for a sore throat), it seems to me that this violates the human conscience.

There are other matters involving conscience. Should religious opponents of abortion have to pay for abortion-related health care? What about Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists, and people who disagree with the allopathic approach to medicine? Is there a right to see a shaman?

The answers aren't staring at me, but the two things that bother me the most are the mandatory nature of this, and the deception involved in calling something like health care a "right."

Health care may be many things, but it is not a right. Not the way they're talking about it here. It's mandatory nature makes it a duty. All who can pay, must pay. Whether they need it or want it for themselves or not, they must pay for those who can't. That's the real idea here.

Why can't they just admit that this is socialism?

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need:

In her plan, Clinton said families would receive tax credits to help pay for coverage. The tax credit would be designed to limit the premiums to a percentage of a family's income.

Federal subsidies would be provided for those who are not able to afford insurance, and large businesses would be expected to provide or help pay for their employees' insurance.

She would let the uninsured buy into two existing government insurance programs or buy private insurance, offer them financial help in paying premiums, and help small businesses cover their employees.

She would pay the $110 billion-a-year cost of the plan by raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 and by taxing companies that did not insure their employees.

"If you're one of tens of millions of Americans without coverage or if you don't like the coverage you have, you will have a choice of plans to pick from and you'll get tax credits to help pay for it. If you like the plan you have, you can keep it," she said.

It's easy to say that people who vote for her will get what they deserve. What about the rest of the country?

The only right I want is the right to opt out -- a right I still have. What hurts more than losing a right is to be told that losing it constitutes a "right."

MORE: I guess we should be grateful that Hillary isn't proposing a "right to work" along the same lines. (All people would work! And all not currently employed would have to go to work for the state!)

UPDATE (09/19/07): Here's Jacob Laksin:

...the new Clinton plan should make even a first-year economics student wince. For instance, Clinton proposes massive regulation of the insurance industry as means to "end discrimination" against those with pre-existing health problems. Aside from exaggerating the insurance industry's sins in this regard -- industry representatives say that that insurance companies reject only about 3 percent of claims, many of them for experimental procedures -- it also increases government regulation, and thus government's inefficient reach, into healthcare. An analogous flaw underlies Clinton's plan to compel drug companies to "offer fair prices." Instead of letting the free-market operate, the federal government will become the arbiter of fairness. One need only recall the disastrous price and wage controls of the seventies to see how well this will turn out.

According to today's Wall Street Journal, now that the government tobacco subsidy is over, tobacco is back as a normal cash crop:

CARMI, Ill. -- Tobacco is back in the American farm belt.

Three years after the federal government stopped subsidizing it, the leafy crop is gaining new popularity among U.S. farmers. Cheaper U.S. tobacco has become competitive as an export, and China, Russia and Mexico, where cigarette sales continue to grow, are eager to buy. Since 2005, U.S. tobacco acreage has risen 20%. Fields are now filled with it in places like southern Illinois, which hasn't grown any substantial amounts since the end of World War I.

Mr. Barbre's profitable tobacco business adds a wrinkle to the debate over the farm bill Congress is preparing to take up. Many farmers say that without the system of subsidies for commodities like corn, cotton and soybeans, they'd be at risk of going under. But critics say the system fosters inefficiency, distorts international trade and supports mainly the wealthiest farmers. Now these critics can point to tobacco as evidence that subsidies are unnecessary.

No Subsidies

With tobacco, "we are finding that farming can be done without subsidies," says David Orden, a professor at Virginia Tech and an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Oh my God!

That's an amazing discovery in itself. I always took it on faith that not only could nothing be grown without the federal government's help, but that nothing could not be grown unless the taxpayers paid people not to grow it.

You learn something every day.

Interestingly, there's more money to be made even after deregulation caused a drop in prices. That's because farmers once had to rent government quotas. With the quotas gone, there's no need:

Arnold O'Reilly, for one, figured it made sense to grow even more. Before the buyout, he says, the tobacco he grew on his Hardinsburg, Ky., farm was selling for about $1.98 a pound, but he paid up to 80 cents per pound to rent a quota, knocking down his effective price to as low as $1.18. These days, he says, his tobacco fetches about $1.60 a pound, and there's no quota payment taking a bite out of it.

"Before the buyout I couldn't expand," he says. As a result, "we weren't competitive on the world market." Today he is growing 120 acres, double the 60 acres he grew just before the buyout. He has invested more than $300,000 in new farming equipment, barns and land. "I'm unlimited in my opportunities," says Mr. O'Reilly, 42. "I have nobody that can hold me back now."

It wouldn't surprise me if the bureaucrats who like to control these things imagined that once their controls were lifted, the market would collapse, and there'd be no more tobacco grown. (A bit like imagining the Grand Canyon should "close" if no one is there to charge admission. Or "closing" beaches because of a lifeguard strike.)

In some quarters at least, ending the subsidies was seen as the correct moral approach, but one with dire consequences for farmers:

The government could better spend dollars intended to support tobacco growers by helping those farmers transition to growing other crops.

On the Other Hand...

Ending the program will not reduce the number of smokers or the number of smoking-related illnesses or deaths. Instead, it will be the nail in the coffin of the rural economy in many parts of the country.

The WSJ piece touches briefly on arguable morality:

Some local residents are unhappy that farmers are growing a crop used for a product that causes cancer. Mr. Vaughan's mother, Carol, says when her husband and son started growing tobacco, she resigned from the board of a local tobacco-free coalition that passed out literature about smoking. "To me it would have been a conflict of interest" to stay, says Mrs. Vaughan.

But Mr. Barbre says the opposition has quieted. Overall, he doesn't have any moral qualms growing tobacco, he says. "Somebody's going to grow it," he maintains. "People are smoking it."

But from an economic standpoint, this is good. And economics is morality, is it not? If we believe in a free market, then the more freedom there is in the marketplace, the better off everyone will be.

I'm not economist, but Arnold Kling is, and he remarked recently that government regulation creates disorder:

....when government tries to control supply, disorder emerges. Profit opportunities are created in crime and corruption. Compare the crime and mayhem in the market for drugs with that in the market for cigarettes. Or compare the disorder that resulted from alcohol Prohibition with the order that prevails today.

I don't smoke, but I noticed that cigarettes in New Jersey are over $6.50 a pack, which I believe extortionately penalizes schizophrenics, who are increasingly unable to afford the cigarettes they need as self-medication for their illness. If extortionate taxes on cigarettes represent a growing trend, I'm wondering at what point it will be considered disruptive. (After all, we are dealing with a legal product that millions of people consume.) Will there be a growing public demand that the taxes be lowered? Or might some lobbying group bewail the unfair double standard -- of zero regulation at one end, versus extortionate taxes at the other? I'm not sure what the economic laws are, but my common sense tells me that they can't keep raising the taxes at these extortionate rates without consequences.

I like the non-regulation of growers, and if I smoked, I'd seriously consider growing my own.

You can order high-quality tobacco seeds and growing guides here. In my area of Pennsylvania, Amish farmers grow high-quality tobacco, and while it probably involves more work than does home distillation, there are no laws restricting growing tobacco for personal consumption.

I just have this feeling, though, that somewhere there are people who are just itching to have the government close what they see as an "immoral" loophole.

Of course, in a free market, normal people would not grow their own, would they? It is only because of the intervention of forces of public "morality" that such an abnormal situation becomes attractive.

What about morality as a disruptive economic force?

Do moral disruptions ever "win"? Or do they just generate further cycles of disruption?

So I'm reading Stuart Taylor guest blogging over at The Volokh Conspiracy and one commenter notes that a previous guest blogger only lasted for two posts.

No disrespect to her but maybe she was unfamiliar with the level of discourse on the blogging medium?

So my friend Eric at Classical Values makes a similar point today.

I'm convinced there has to be a blogging gene. I mean, who would do this voluntarily without pay, day in and day out? Think about it.

So my motto is "Will blog for abuse. At least it increases the traffic." I'm in this for the abuse. Pile on.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Clayton Cramer links a provocative piece in Mother Jones magazine about sexual fluidity and the reparative therapy movement. Titled Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity, it explores various perspectives, and reports unsurprising evidence that some people can and do move in either or both directions sexually.

What I immediately disliked was the premise of the sub headline:

News: If science proves sexual orientation is more fluid than we've been led to believe, can homosexuality still be a protected right?

Whether someone is born with a tendency to do something is of little relevance to the right to do it. If a pedophilia gene were discovered, would this give anyone the right to engage in pedophilia? Would a dishonesty gene confer a right to steal? Should psychopaths have the right to commit heinous crimes simply because they might be "born that way"? I think the answer to all of these questions is an unequivocal "No," because innocent, non-consenting or non-adult third parties are harmed by these actions, and thus society has an interest in criminalizing them. Not so with adult homosexuality. No matter what people think of it, there is no legitimate moral argument that what one adult does with another does intrinsic harm to anyone else, much less society. Lots of people might disapprove, just as they might disapprove of drinking or smoking. But it isn't their business. And while it might be a legitimate field of scientific inquiry to want to examine why people might do certain things, it isn't the government's business to force them one way or another.

As far as switching sexual preferences, there are of course homosexuals who have "gone straight," although I suspect many of these are bisexuals who've just decided to switch their emphases. (And what, by the way, would we call a monogamous bisexual?) I have to say that in the half a century I've lived, I have known many more former heterosexuals than former homosexuals, but the very fact that people can go in the straight to gay direction means they could theoretically also go in the other. I do think that as a practical matter, heterosexuals are more tolerant of former heterosexuals than homosexuals are of former homosexuals, because (rightly or wrongly) the latter tend to be perceived as sitting in judgment. Most of the former homosexuals are presented along the lines of "I used to be what you are, and now I am not, and you can change too!" and when you say that to people who have no interest in doing that, it can come off as condesecending. (Add defensiveness and the type of group dynamics that can express itself at a gay event, and there's a recipe for some serious conflict.) But I try not to make it my business what people do, as long as they don't try scolding me about whatever they might think I do. I think most people just want to be left the hell alone.

I think this dispute is aggravated by religious co-factors, because the fact is that many of the people in the reparative therapy business are not in the therapy business, they're promoting religious "cures." Normally, we do not think of "sin" as a disease to be cured, but as a choice made by the sinner. Implicit in this choice, though, is the recognition by both the religious "treatment giver" and the religious "patient" (if that is the right word) that the behavior is a sin. Someone who does not share the religious belief that homosexuality is sinful is thus unlikely to benefit from any religious cure. It makes about as much sense to offer to cure pork eaters of their disease by converting them to a religion which forbids pork.

The argument that homosexuality is a sin leaves largely unresolved the tension between the choice model and the disease (or medico-scientific) model. This leads to a certain inconsistency in the application of the disease model. Think about it; if homosexuality is an inappropriate sexual choice, then all that would be needed to "cure" homosexuals would be medically supervised lessons (probably aided by a sexual surrogate) in the finer arts of penile-vaginal intercourse.

Is that what the religionist cure advocates want? Hardly. Most of them would condemn the idea out of hand, for the goal is not to much to treat homosexuality as it is to oppose an idea. According to the Dobson religious model, the idea of totally free choice in sexual matters would appear to come from Satan:

....a minion of James Dobson's Focus on the Family cheerfully explains the Gay Agenda to me: "It's doing whatever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want, wherever you want."

"Well, just for the sake of argument," I ask, "what's wrong with that?"

"I'm sure the people who follow that agenda believe what they believe, but they don't realize that they're pawns in a great cosmic battle, that they are perpetrating a lie."

"Pawns of?..."

"Satan," he informs me, "is the author of lies, chaos, and confusion."

On the other hand, the Mother Jones piece also points out that gay activists can also be quite intolerant of free choice:

Aaron doesn't put it this way, but he thinks of himself as a member of a sexual minority--not forced into the closet by an oppressive society, but living under the restrictive view that sexual orientation is a biological category, something we are born with and that is impossible to change. When I tell him about some of what I saw at NARTH--like when Nicolosi, recalling one of his antagonists at the apa convention, said, "I knew that she was a lesbian--I don't know why; she was wearing a muscle shirt"--Aaron doesn't defend the organization. He knows that NARTH doesn't like gay people much (he's attended one of their meetings). But he's more concerned with a different kind of intolerance. "Not all homosexual men want to lead a gay lifestyle. Gay activists shouldn't be threatened by that. I mean, here I am, as a liberal, telling gay people to accept diversity."

The larger issue is why so many people care about personal concerns which properly belong to the people affected. Unless someone asks for help, I don't see how it becomes anyone's business to reach out and mess with him.

Maybe it is human nature for people to try to tell others what to do, though, because even gays (people who often consider themselves the victims of intolerance) do not hesitate to display intolerance towards other gays who they deem in need of "reform." This video shows an effeminate gay man with a complaint I've heard before: "mainstream" straight-acting gays are intolerant of effeminate gays. (Which almost mimics the position of "straight society" that gays are effeminate and therefore repulsive.)

I don't see much functional difference between telling this guy that he should "butch it up" and stop being effeminate and telling him he should start acting straight and dating women.

(I'm also wondering who will cure the bloggers, but that's another issue. I'm convinced there has to be a blogging gene. I mean, who would do this voluntarily without pay, day in and day out? Think about it.)

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter has taken me to task for advocating slavery, in this passage:

Not so with adult homosexuality. No matter what people think of it, there is no legitimate moral argument that what one adult does with another does intrinsic harm to anyone else, much less society. Lots of people might disapprove, just as they might disapprove of drinking or smoking.

Are you saying that the abolitionists, and those Union soldiers who signed up for combat specifically to free slaves, were wrong?

Not so with adult homosexuality. No matter what people think of it, there is no legitimate moral argument that what one adult does sexually with another consenting adult does intrinsic harm to anyone else, much less society. Lots of people might disapprove, just as they might disapprove of drinking or smoking.

Does it help now that I have issued a clarification? Was anyone else confused?

Seriously, is there anyone who thought I was advocating slavery?

The New York Times has a bit up on the Canon (Culture) Wars and how they have affected academia. It centers around a discussion of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

Today it's generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there's a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren't drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate -- especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration," Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, "Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut." Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard's curriculum reform committee, concurs: "The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren't humanists? That's been tough, really tough."

Bloom was wrong about Rock 'n Roll though.

Clayton Cramer has some thoughts.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The first stage of identity politics is using a word to describe yourself. Thus, I've always hesitated to call myself a liberal or a conservative, and I've just about reached the same point with the word "libertarian." Ron Paul hasn't helped much, and I can think of no one who has done more to discredit the word. It's a real pain in the ass to call yourself something which is more and more evocative of paranoid beliefs, if not outright 9/11 Trutherism.

But Ron Paul is only part of the problem. Putting on any word which goes to your identity word is a bit like putting on clothes. Right there, I would have said "political identity" but the personal has become so increasingly political that what's the difference?

Increasingly, people (even respected authors and journalists) are unable to distinguish between advocacy and conduct. So, a libertarian who thinks the government should stay out of the bedroom and pornography should be legal becomes a "hedonist." Or, in the latest terminology, a "freedom fetishist."

(Parenthetically, I do think that it was a very clever rhetorical move to dirty up the word "freedom" with a little sexual innuendo, and my congratulations to Ms. Hymowitz, or whoever thought of it first. Freedom was probably in need of sexualizing, because so many people pay more attention to the latter than the former. Rather than rant about the "war on sex" again, I should try to take a broader, more general view.... If freedom is successfully sexualized, perhaps more people will support it!)

But doesn't this beg the question of what is freedom? Might the focus on sex be muddying the waters? What I have never been able to understand is how opposition to laws against something is seen as support for whatever conduct the law would prohibit. I try to be polite to people, but I oppose criminalizing rudeness. For example, I would oppose the criminalization of words I would never use. How does that mean I advocate using them? There's a movement to criminalize the "n" word which I oppose. Does that mean I believe in what they call "license" to use the word? Not at all.

I'll give a recent example of the kind of thing that rankles me. There's now a proposal for a mandatory federal bank dress code -- and I do not mean for bank employees, but for customers. Bank robbers often wear sunglasses and hats, so the idea is to stop the crime by stopping criminal attire from the get go, and make it illegal for banks to serve customers wearing hats or sunglasses. When I heard about this on the radio last week, it was reported that the banking lobby is solidly behind this legislation. Unfortunately, I can see why. Banks (like most businesses) are not free to do things like enact their own dress codes for customers. Think about it. Customer walks in wearing a hat and sunglasses. The guard or the clerk tells him it's against the bank's dress code. Angry scene erupts, in which the authority of the employee is challenged, and he is subjected to insults. The bank manager then has to step in and explain that it is the bank's policy, etc. If they're lucky, the ill-attired customer will merely leave (and maybe take his account to a competing bank which does not have the dress code). If they're not lucky, the customer will go straight to the ACLU and file some sort of civil rights lawsuit. So, there's no question that implementing such a dress code would tend to create many unpleasant scenarios.

But with a federal law, the banks could point to signs reciting the law, and it would be a situation of "Our hands are tied!"

I'm not blaming the banks for wanting a legal solution. My complaint is with a society that has become so paralyzed that individuals and businesses are increasingly unable take any individual initiative. It leads to grotesque big brotherism, and I think the rise of the nanny state is directly related to the mentality that only the government can prohibit anything. What this means is more silly and crazy laws. ("Children are free to use the "n" word! The government must get involved!")

Does this mean I am in favor of some "freedom" to wear hats and sunglasses in banks? Absolutely not. I don't think this is a question of freedom, as I think banks should be allowed to ask customers wearing sunglasses and hats to take them off or leave. If anything is a question of freedom, it is the right of banks to decide with whom they do business, and how. But that is a freedom they have lost. That's what's being missed. Banks are not allowed to have dress codes.

It is not so much a question of what is forbidden and what is permitted so much as it is a question of who gets to decide.

Increasingly, only the government gets to decide. It might be a minor point, but I'd rather have the banks decide what their customers should wear.

The problem is that it's a right the banks don't want. There's something creepy about the abnegation of duty and responsibility involved. It's almost analogous to parents (fearful of the nanny state and child protection police) demanding a statute requiring them to spank their children for certain conduct.

Whether this is a freedom fetish or not, I don't like seeing personal autonomy and individual rights destroyed in the name of individual rights. At the rate things are going, they'll say I have a right to health care, and that "right" will translate into forcing me to pay for insurance I don't want, while making it illegal to go to whatever doctor I want. How dare the government pretend to give me such "rights"?

This touches on the conflation of rights and freedom. The more the government gets involved, the more the definitions of both are blurred. Rights are seen as government-bestowed largesse, and freedom is seen as official license.

Pretty soon no one will know what these words mean, and everyone will look to the government, which will be in charge of freedom and rights.

The more they give, the more they take away.

Anyway, I'm less and less interested in conforming to someone's definition of "libertarian," so I think I'll just let other people call me that if they want to, and not let it alter my thinking. But I should probably not call myself that, lest I fall into a trap of having to live up to the standards set by anti-libertarians as well as libertarians. Drug-crazed, foul-mouthed hedonistic libertarianism can be exhausting, especially when you're trying to be a libertarian war supporter.

(Can't I just think what I think without having to be in a three-way with Larry Flynt and Ron Paul?)

UPDATE: Thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a very warm welcome to all.

As this post is an attempt to think out loud, the comments are very much appreciated. (So far, I can't beat Arnold Kling's suggestion that "civil societarian" might be the right term.)

UPDATE (09/28/07): My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post a second time, in his discussion of Ms. Hymowitz' Commentary article which characterized as a "taunt" Glenn's statement that libertarians"can even think that traditional childrearing and marriage are generally a good thing without insisting on social mores that punish those who live differently."

Well, I've criticized bloggers for dressing as slobs, but I'm against punishing them for it. If that's a "taunt," I would think it would be a taunt directed against the blogger slobs, right? Unless all disagreements constitute taunts, I think it's a real stretch to call it a taunt against those who believe in punishment when I don't.

As Ms. Hymowitz pointed out in an email to Glenn, that the word "taunt" was not hers but was inserted by an editor. I think the editor saw a taunt where none exists. This was not a taunt, and Glenn does not taunt people.

(For those who really want to see what real taunting looks like, I suggest reading what Amanda Marcotte and her commenters said about me.)

Dogs have souls.

So argues Burt Prelutsky:

...if an entire species is, by its very nature, warm-hearted, conscientious, loyal and brave, one would be hard-pressed to maintain that, in spite of all these virtues, they are soul-less.

She was very attached to Puff, and she spent a great deal of time looking for him after he died. Here they are not long before he had his fatal injection on my front porch:

It strikes me that there cannot be a definitive answer to whether dogs have souls until there is a definitive answer to whether humans have souls. But I think if we do, then they do. When you spend fifteen years together with a loyal being, and the familiarity, intimacy, and emotional interdependence develops and deepens, that's real life you've got invested. Life lived. A dog becomes a part of you, and you become a part of that dog. I can't prove souls, but I am convinced that if we've got 'em. they've got 'em.

To illustrate, here's a real life age progression, showing me and Puff.

1990

2004

I was a Navy man before it went co-ed. Dang.

H/T Villainous Company.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

So says Alan Greenspan.

To which I'd add:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the modern appearance and relentless growth of Saudi Wahhabism -- and its vicious offshoots like al Qaeda -- is largely about oil."

The fact is, if the damned Saudis didn't have the vast oil wealth, if we heard of Wahhabism at all, it would only be because we'd read about the quaint little religion as we looked at pictures of obscure goat and camel herders in the pages of the National Geographic.

So yes, it's all about oil. Without the oil, no one would care about this sickening, oil-soaked religion, or the fringe ideology that goes with it. Without oil, there'd have been no incentive and no money to train the Saudi bastards who flew the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

So ultimately it's all about oil. So what?

Does that mean we weren't attacked?

Does that mean that Saddam Hussein didn't invade and annex Kuwait, thus setting the stage for al Qaeda's original declaration of war against the U.S.?

I expect Greenspan to be much cited in support of the "NO BLOOD FOR OIL!" meme, but I think most of the people who will do that forget an elementary principle: war is caused by undefended wealth. People tend to start wars over whatever they think they can get.

Oil is just one form of wealth, right? So, "NO BLOOD FOR OIL!" might as well be "NO BLOOD FOR UNDEFENDED WEALTH!" Or "NO BLOOD FOR SELF DEFENSE!" Or "NO BLOOD FOR WAR!"

On the other hand, considering that peace is desirable, and a lack of an adequate defense invites war, it would be equally logical to say "NO BLOOD FOR PEACE!"

(Yeah, and "POVERTY IS VIOLENCE!" Someone tell the rich Wahhabis quick!)

Sigh.

I try to be patient, but reading these things makes me tend to lose all patience, because it's such a steady barrage. Writing blog posts does not make it stop. The best I can do is attempt to find humor in it. (The problem, though, is that illogical people don't enjoy laughing at their logical silliness. Well, if poverty is violence, then I guess humor is violence too. And of course war is peace!)

UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for the link, and a warm welcome to oil all!

UPDATE (09/18/07): Greenspan says his remarks about oil are being taken out of context and Jonah Goldberg (via Glenn Reynolds) has more:

Greenspan called the Post -- Bob Woodward, no less -- to say that, in fact, he didn't think the White House was motivated by oil. Rather, he was. A Post story Monday explained that Greenspan had long favored Saddam Hussein's ouster because the Iraqi dictator was a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil passes every day. Hussein could have sent the price of oil way past $100 a barrel, which would have inflicted chaos on the global economy.

In other words, Greenspan favored the war on the grounds that it would stabilize the flow of oil, even though that wasn't the war's political underpinning. "I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan told Woodward, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential."

But does this mean Greenspan would agree with my pro-war interpretation (and embellishment) of his remarks?

(I would hope so, because I've always liked the man.)

The melting of Arctic sea ice has caused the North West Passage to open up again.

The Northwest Passage is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean along the northern coast of North America via the waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The various islands of the archipelago are separated from one another and the Canadian mainland by a series of Arctic waterways collectively known as the Northwest Passages or Northwestern Passages.

Sought by explorers for centuries as a possible trade route, it was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903-6.

How about some other voyages:

1940 Canadian RCMP officer Henry Larsen
1957 the United States Coast Guard cutter Storis
1977 sailor Willy de Roos
2005 47 ft aluminium sailboat, Northabout, built and captained by Jarlath Cunnane

I blame it on man made global warming. Except for 1903-06, 1940, 1957, and 1977.

Fortunately The BBC knows the real truth.

The most direct shipping route from Europe to Asia is fully clear of ice for the first time since records began, the European Space Agency (Esa) says.

Historically, the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has been ice-bound through the year.

But the agency says ice cover has been steadily shrinking, and this summer's reduction has made the route navigable.

The findings, based on satellite images, raised concerns about the speed of global warming.

The Northwest Passage is one of the most fabled sea routes in the world - a short cut from Europe to Asia through the Canadian Arctic.

Recent years have seen a marked shrinkage in its ice cover, but this year it was extreme, Esa says.

It says this made the passage "fully navigable" for the first time since monitoring began in 1978.

Update: 16 Sept 007 1321z

Evidently this is not the first time in the 21st Centiry the BBC has found an opening.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

From: The Victory Caucus - A Gathering of Eagles. The url on the poster leads you to The People's Cube. A most amusing site.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

For the past couple of days, I've been reading about conservatives who are defending fired UC Irvine's law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

There are way more conservatives than I can count. In "Righties defend dismissed lefty law dean Chemerinsky," the LA Times listed some of the more prominent ones. While I can't list them all, Glenn Reynolds has linked a huge number of posts by libertarians and conservatives who all -- without exception -- demand that Chemerinsky be hired back. The most recent are: John Leo, Eugene Volokh, Ilya Somin, and Hugh Hewitt. There's more here, including Ann Althouse's view that the dean should step down, and a link to Victor Davis Hanson.

Plus there's Captain Ed. And at least two more roundups from Glenn Reynolds, including this one which supplies direct or indirect links Gay Patriot, Walter Olson, Professor Bainbridge, and many others.

My point is not for this post to be a linkfest (unfortunately, I lack the patience to do those things), and again, this is in no way comprehensive. I'm simply trying to figure out something. When Chemerinsky was fired, the original LA Times piece quoted the dean as telling Chemerinsky that "he did not realize the extent to which there were 'conservatives out to get me.'"

Try as I might, I can't find the conservatives who were out to get him. Can anyone name one? Unless my logic is wrong, it seems to me that either there were conservatives who were out to get him, or there were not. If there were, then who were they? I'd like to know, as it sounds awfully peculiar.

And if there weren't, then why would the dean be saying that? Was he hoping to float a lie on what he perceived was some sort of narrative? Where might he have gotten that idea?

Considering the sort of paranoia discussed here, I wonder:

With such vast disparities between the threat professors envision and the actual security they enjoy, one would think that more people would recognize the problem of ideological bias on campus. But they don't, and the reason lies in a campus advent that has nothing to do with psychology. Instead, it's a sweeping sleight-of-hand that liberal professors have executed in their discipline. We see it operating in this very essay in Academe, and in the sentences I just quoted. Did you spot it? Professor Kilmer worries that a student who "is resistant to feminist theories and ideas" may sit in her class as a "plant," someone to incriminate her and send her upstairs for punishment. That's how she interprets uncongenial students, and it's an astounding conversion. In her class, any student who contests feminist notions falls under a cloud of suspicion. The ordinary run of skeptics, obstructionists, gadflies, wiseacres, and sulkers that show up in almost every undergraduate classroom is recast as an ideological cadre. If a student in a marketing class were to dispute the morality of the whole endeavor, no doubt liberal professors would salute him as a noble dissenter. But when he criticizes feminism, he violates a trust. He doesn't just pose intellectual disagreement. He transgresses classroom protocol.

If there's a meme being constantly repeated that conservatives are "out to get" all liberals in academia, I can easily see how this might incline a dean to simply fabricate a claim that conservatives were after Chemerinsky, without so much as a brief check.

I mean, why bother? To follow out this sloppy thinking further, even if we suppose there weren't any conservatives out to get him, isn't it obvious that there might as well have been?

MORE: According to an LA Times post that Glenn Reynolds links, no one has found the mysterious "right-wing bogeymen" relied on by the dean.

(I think if there were any, they'd have turned up by now, although I suppose someone could run a "MISSING RIGHT WING BOGEYMAN" ad on a milk carton.)

Instead of focusing on putting criminals away or taking away the guns they are prohibited from having, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Johnson (now "suddenly" embattled) continues to blame guns, and in a maneuver which I think is clear grandstanding, is now seeking help from the Nation of Islam-affiliated Millions More March organization. (Grandstanding works, for the AP story was linked by Drudge today.) If you go to the MMM website, you'll see pictures of local demagogue Michael Coard, who has threatened to sue the NRA. He also tried but failed to intimidate a close friend of mine, whose crime (in Coard's view) was simply that he dared to speak out publicly against the transformation of the Independence Mall into what he calls "Slavery Mall." Quite shamefully in my opinion, the federal government yielded to Coard's tactics. From Coard's bio at the MMM site:

As an activist, he is a founding member of Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) that, through unyielding protests, persuaded the federal government to finally agree to have a historic memorial built to honor the enslaved African descendants held in bondage by George Washington at America's first "White House," which was located in Philadelphia at the current site of the new Liberty Bell Center.

Back to today, the Inquirer has a piece on Commissioner Johnson's plan, titled Wanted: 10,000 men to stop violence, and despite the fact that Philadelphia's problem is overwhelmingly one of criminals -- who are not allowed to have guns -- shooting each other, the words "crime" and "criminal" do not even appear.

What fascinates and suprises me is not that NOI and its affiliates believe marching will stop criminals from shooting each other, but that Commissioner Johnson would grandstand this way instead of simply focusing on what he's supposed to do, which is run a police department. The reason for a police department is to solve crimes, make arrests, and assist in criminal prosecutions.

It's hard not to notice another article -- "Joining forces in fighting violence" -- on the Inquirer's front page. The Pennsylvania State Police are being deployed to help the Philadelphia police, who are fed up with Commissioner Johnson:

The number of troopers involved in the operation was not disclosed, nor were the specific areas where they would be deployed. The troopers will ride with city Highway Patrol officers in marked state police cars.

The police union president, Bob Eddis, said the move reflected "incompetence in management" and called for Johnson to step down or be replaced.

"Bringing in outside help is a slap in the face to our officers," Eddis said. "The commissioner should be deploying his personnel differently."

Johnson, who had resisted calling in the state police or National Guard to back up city police, said yesterday that the initiative had been in the works for several months.

"We need them, we appreciate them, we're glad to have them," Johnson said of the troopers.

Jack Lewis, the state police spokesman, said Gov. Rendell initially proposed that the state police look at ways to help Philadelphia, and that the program came together this week with funding from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Johnson, for his part, sounds a tad defensive:

Johnson, standing with his own commanders and officials from the state police and governor's office, said the program did not signal a state police takeover or a crime emergency in the city.

"They didn't say, 'We want to come in there and start patrolling your streets,' " Johnson said. "What they basically said is, 'We want to come in there and work with you, let's work as partners.' "

For starters, there have been many calls for him to go, and for many years. Why, they have not been reported in the Inquirer, I do not know.

Johnson has been repeatedly described as "bulletproof" but according to this police oriented web site, a lot of cops have long believed he should have resigned. From the story, "Bulletproof or not,'it's time for Sylvester Johnson to go', BY Jill Porter":

There are cops and former cops, public officials and former public officials who think, as I do - though they refuse to say so on the record - that it's time for him to go.

They say he hasn't adapted to a smaller police force by restructuring and redeploying personnel - reducing special details, for instance, and eliminating administrative jobs - to get the most street presence he can.

They say he's failed to devise a comprehensive strategy to deal with soaring gun crimes, and is "out of ideas."

They say he is too nice to make tough decisions.

They say he's too compliant and "[Mayor John] Street is running the show."

And they agree that his public profile has been defeatist and defensive.

"I don't believe that law enforcement is ever going to change the quality of life," Johnson told the Inquirer last week.

That's hardly the bold, aggressive message I want to hear from the man in charge of public safety in my town.

Not to mention that there are whole neighborhoods in this city whose residents don't seem to trust the Police Department to keep them safe.

They apparently don't believe police can protect them from the ruthless druglords who rule their streets; they refuse to cooperate when they witness a shooting or a murder.

That can hardly be considered a vote of confidence in Johnson.

Sure, Johnson is hamstrung in his efforts to battle crime - by inadequate numbers of police, by an archaic department structure, by needing to answer to a mayor and managing director who have their own ideas.

And, yes, guns are an unbelievable problem here. Shooting someone has become the resolution of first resort for far too many people.

But if the police commissioner can't rally the citizens with a bold, can-do message, inspiring confidence that the problem can and will be solved, then we risk being overtaken by the crisis.

"If the city gets a reputation as being unsafe, we're through," said Philadelphia magazine editor Larry Platt, who also called for Johnson to step down in his magazine column.

"Say goodbye to the restaurant boom. Say goodbye to the condo boom."

It may be wishful thinking in the waning days of an administration to urge a change in leadership in the Police Department. Who would want the job?

But it needs to be said, no matter how nice a man Sylvester Johnson is:

It's time for invigorated leadership, new vision, new energy.

It's time for him to go.

As a blogger I'm free to speak my mind, but the pragmatic thinker in me is forced to recognize that the Inquirer is between a rock and a hard place. They have a duty to report the news fearlessly. But if the owners know that certain news will be bad for the city, the pressure not to report it (or "downplay it") must be enormous.

Hell, there are a lot of things I don't say in this blog. In fact, I don't especially writing negative things about a public figure who by all accounts is a decent man. I think his position on guns stinks, but so what? Philadelphia's kneejerk support of gun control is intractable and unchangeable. As I've pointed out, supporting the right to keep and bear arms is a fringe idea around here, and the situation reminds me of the "Parliament of Clocks." So, it would be delusional to think that getting rid of Johnson would change this thinking in any way.

As to why Philadelphia is stuck with Johnson, local bloggers like Attytood and Phillyblog have sounded off, and the Free Republic has preserved another Jill Porter piece -- "WHAT DID he know and when did he know it?" -- with a fascinating theory of what might make Johnson so uniquely untouchable: he may have ensured Mayor Street's reelection following the discovery of the FBI bug which had been planted to listen to telephone conversations between city officials and Imam Shamsud-din Ali in a corruption probe. Philadelphia Weekly discussed Johnson's possible involvement in uncovering the bug. In the paradoxical world of Philadelphia politics, the FBI bug led to Mayor Street's reelection, for the bug was successfully spun as Mayor Street being a victim of Bush and FBI "racism." (For more background on the bug, its original discovery, and the successful exploitation of the race angle, see my posts from 2004.)

Some say that Johnson's staying power stems from his ability to play politics. This was discussed in Mark McDonald's "bullletproof" piece from last summer's PhillyNews:

PHILADELPHIA has been in crisis over gun violence and a rising homicide rate for well over two years.

Remember that 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs was shot to death in front of his school in February 2004 and that the murder rate in 2003 was 21 percent higher than the year before.

And yet through it all, including last year's 15 percent increase in homicides, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, the likable, soft-spoken, ever-accessible cop, remains firmly secure in his job.

Inside the Street administration, there's no stomach for chucking Johnson.

In the political arena and among neighborhood groups, there are no calls for Johnson's ouster.

No public official is saying it's time for new management with fresh ideas. In short, Johnson is politically bulletproof.

Even retirement is a nonstarter.

[...]

As one close observer noted of Johnson's relationship with a mayor in the twilight of his term: "At this point, I'd say they are married to each other. Sylvester can't leave now with the homicide rate like this and allow his legacy to be defined in those terms."

A second source close to both men said: "Sylvester is really the bulletproof vest for the mayor. As long as Sylvester is out there, you have to go through him to get to the mayor."

[...]

Having a fine-tuned political sensibility has served Johnson well.

Jannie Blackwell, City Council majority leader, said, "Not only is Sylvester bulletproof now, but I've talked to many of those who want to run for mayor and they say what I say: 'If I was running for mayor, I'd keep him in office.' People know he's accessible and a man of his word."

Even a sometime critic like Councilman Frank Rizzo says Johnson is safe in his job because of his courting of neighborhood groups.

"He's a survivor because he comes across so well at community meetings. He works hard and shows up at the right places," he said. "It's tough to take on someone who has been doing so well serving your needs."

Pick the worst Commissioner in recent times

Sylvester Johnson [ 53 ] [49.53%]
John Timoney [ 5 ] [4.67%]
Richard Neal [ 31 ] [28.97%]
Willie Williams [ 9 ] [8.41%]
Kevin Tucker [ 2 ] [1.87%]
Gregore Sambor [ 1 ] [0.93%]
Morton Solomon [ 4 ] [3.74%]
Joseph O'Neil [ 0 ] [0.00%]
Frank Rizzo [ 2 ] [1.87%]

The Philadelphia City Paper discussed speculation about Johnson's possible role in letting Mayor Street know about the notorious bug (which had been installed to intercept calls between the Philadelphia city officials and Imam Ali, convicted now in prison). It's a bit unsettling to read about the connections between black Muslim gangsters and City Hall (especially in light of today's news), but here's what the City Paper reported:

A day after The Bug's discovery, Ali's home and Keystone Information & Financial Services' office were raided. The Mt. Airy building housing Ali's collection agency is owned by his wife Faridah Ali. (Ironically, Keystone is supposed to go after tax delinquents but Faridah Ali owes the city more than $9,000 in back taxes on the building, records state.)

In January 2001, police arrested Faridah Ali's son, Azeem Spicer, after allegedly finding a semi-automatic pistol and $30,000 worth of grass in his apartment, located above the collection agency. (Though Spicer walked, sources claim the FBI is still investigating. Fox broke a story claiming the FBI is investigating whether the Spicer case was fixed.)

Until 1984, Shamsud-din Ali's name was Clarence Fowler. In 1972, Fowler was convicted of murdering a Baptist minister in North Philly and served five years before his sentence was overturned on a technicality. While in prison, he was part of the Fruit of Islam, a Black Muslim paramilitary force which used violence to enforce its will, sources say. (Ali and his wife refused comment when Underworld visited their Elkins Park home last week.)

Organized-crime files show police believed Fowler controlled Black Muslim prisoners, including some leaders of the ultra-violent Black Mafia. Former Philly cop turned professor and author of Philadelphia's Black Mafia Sean Patrick Griffin says, Authorities alleged that Fowler, a.k.a. Ali, was the one to go see if you were going to prison he could make sure you would not be harmed once you got into prison.

In 1987, cops followed Steve Traitz, then boss of the Roofers Union, to Ali's West Philly mosque where police sources say he went to arrange protection for fellow roofers facing prison.

Sources claim black gangsters have frequented the mosque and that Ali has maintained connections to Muslim prison gangs. Though police admit they don't know whether he still maintains contact with prison gangs, recently retired organized-crime investigators say that in the early '90s, the organized-crime squad was ordered to release files to an all-black team of police investigators. It was thought that African Americans could move more easily in those neighborhoods, gain the trust and get informers and follow what was happening in black organized crime in this city, one says.

Several police sources say that plan didn't pan out.

The black squad never did anything on black organized crime , said one source. So for the last 13 years, while we've been watching Merlino and the newer groups like the Russians and the Chinese, nobody has been keeping track of black organized crime in this city.

While the police department's press office did not return a phone call seeking comment by press time, two law-enforcement sources -- one a current investigator -- watching the federal probe say many of those reputed black gangsters are walking the streets.

You see faces cropping up that were in our old files, says the active investigator. Former black gangsters now hanging around and working in City Hall. How did they get there?

As the Daily News noted in July, Johnson is at the twilight of his career right now, as he's retiring soon.

So why the need for all this grandstanding? Why is this Police Commissioner going out of his way to be remembered as a cheerleader for activists instead of an effective crime fighter? I would think that the focus right now would be on finding a successor with a plan to get tough on crime.

You'd almost think there are people who don't want crime fighting to be the function of the police department.

(As well as journalists who'd rather remain silent about things that make Philadelphia look ugly.)

MORE: Speaking of the hopelessly intractable support for gun control in big cities, Glenn Reynolds post reminded me that Johnson's predecessor, Miami Police Chief Timoney is facing corruption charges. But it may just be that there's a "culture of corruption" which prevails among big city gun grabbers.

Notwithstanding Timoney's current problems in Miami, a lot of people around here were very sorry to see him leave Philly, and see his Police Commissioner stint as the good old days.

UPDATE (09/17/07): I can't believe it, but I actually read this in the Inquirer:

....don't say anything that would lead visitors to believe that what we have is anything less than "world class."

Ever since its invention discovery in 1985, the Ozone Hole has been hovering malevolently over our sore earth's southernmost spot, and like a cosmic hemorrhoid, it causes the earth great pain -- right in the axis!

Last year, the Ozone Hole was the biggest on record, according to NASA. (The biggest since 1985, of course.)

Ouch!

But to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol, scientists are claiming "success." Apparently, success is not defined in terms of appreciable shrinking of the Ozone Hole, but by the promulgation of regulations which (it is asserted) will cause the Ozone Hole to shrink by reducing the chemicals said to cause Ozone depletion. Thus, regulation of anthropogenic global warming will work!

The hole still exists. Indeed, last year it was the biggest ever, spreading across more than 10 million square miles above Antarctica. Scientists do not expect it to recover for at least a half-century.

But the agreement, the Montreal Protocol, nonetheless has been hailed as an environmental success and a possible template for how global warming can be addressed.

"Twenty years ago, getting rid of ozone-depleting chemicals looked really hard," said David Doniger, climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"But it turned out to be quite easy. When we get serious about global warming, we're going to find that it wasn't as hard as it looked."

By 2005, according to a U.N. report, more than 95 percent of the chemicals the protocol covers had been phased out.

The benefits, Doniger and others say, have been huge.

A recent EPA report concluded that 6.3 million skin cancer deaths may have been prevented by 2165 in the United States alone. It cited an expected $4.2 trillion worth of "societal health benefits" between 1990 and 2165.

By 2165, reduce the incidence of melanoma skin cancer to 14 new skin cancer cases avoided per 100,000 people from the 1990 baseline of 13.8 cases avoided per 100,000 people.

[...]

We estimate that from 1990 to2165, worldwide phase-out of ODS will save 6.3 million lives from fatal skin cancer, avoid 299 million cases of nonfatal skin cancers....

Moreover, if Steven Milloy is right, there are no studies demonstrating a link between ozone depletion and skin cancer:

no scientific study has ever demonstrated a link between ozone depletion and such overexposure or any health effects.

A December 2003 article in the journal Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences, for example, would only go so far as to say that "The potential health effects of elevated levels of ambient UV-B radiation are diverse, and it is difficult to quantify the risks."

Ravishankara said that ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have shown a measurable decline, although the ones still there would remain for as long as 100 years.

At meetings in Montreal next week, the United States will push for moving up the phase-out of HCFCs, the interim replacement for CFCs. DuPont supports the move.

Meanwhile, researchers will be getting their first glimpse of what this year's ozone hole looks like.

The sun, which prompts the chemical reactions in the stratosphere, is just making its annual appearance over Antarctica.

It might prove embarrassing, though, if the hole fails to shrink or continues to grow despite the phasing out of chemicals said to be responsible.

I don't blame them for celebrating victory now.

UPDATE: My thanks to Clayton Cramer for linking this post.

Eric says the mere mention of the following names gets him in trouble with long time readers. Since I'm looking for trouble.

Vince Foster           Ron Brown

Bring it on.

That's right. There is Nazi S&M porn in Hebrew. Written by Jews. In lurid comic book style.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

The most famous Stalag, "I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.

In America we tend to do popular culture S&M in True Detective type pulp fiction. A matter of taste and culture I suppose.

Here are some nice pictures of Israeli women who may have qualified with heavy weapons. From Maxim NSFW. It is only tangentially related to to the subject at hand. But you know. I. Just. Couldn't. Resist.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Judging from the front page of today's Inquirer, the most important issue Philadelphia faces is the need for gun control. Yes, in a quadruple-authored article, Police Commissioner Johnson is quoted today as blaming the "availability" of guns for the fact that young thugs shot at each other last night, spraying a city bus with bullets and wounding the driver and a passenger:

Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson called the shootings a disgrace. He and Grace repeated their calls for stricter gun-control legislation.

"The availability of weapons out there is out of hand," Johnson said. "I don't know how people in the community can tolerate arming these thugs."

But there's not much I can say about gun control that I haven't already said. There's no more debating people who think guns are immoral than there is debating people who think gays are immoral. The best that can be hoped for in moral debates is that an old-fashioned thing we call "civility" might allow both sides to "agree to disagree." And it's easy for me to agree to disagree, but the problem is what to do if the "debate" ever reaches "give us your guns or go to jail!" At that point it's no longer merely an intractable debate, so I worry long term....

Because this is so hopeless, I often wish I could take a break from the gun control debate.

Surely I can find a better topic, one which won't bore the readers to tears.

[Brief break, during which many tears flow.]

But this post must go on, even though my eyes are still wet from crying! Let me explain.

As it happens, I get email, and on a variety of subjects. While I don't get too many emails about celebrities, this morning I did, along with a link to a highly emotional YouTube video with one of the most poignant, tearful messages I have ever seen.

The title is "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" and it is a gem.

Wow. It's an uncanny and downright eerie coincidence, but that YouTuber has captured the exact, precise essence of how the Inquirer makes my inner child feel about gun control!

Obviously not anticipating how deeply the YouTuber's angst would resonate with my feelings on the gun issue, the email which sent me the link made a gratuitous (and wholly unnecessary IMO) insinuation about the YouTuber's appearance:

"There's talk that it's a guy.....???"

The video has left me deeply moved. I feel the pain and the angst, and I'm taking the message to heart.

And I hereby solemnly pledge that I will leave Britney alone.

(If only the Inquirer make the same pledge about my guns....)

If you are, then do not miss miss the premiere of the new comedy webcast called "NewsBusted."

The premise is simple, and stated by Matthew Sheffield along the following lines:

Politics is absurd, so is most of what we call"news." Why not have a few laughs along the way?

Anyway, "Newsbusted" is very funny.

So go check it out!

UPDATE: Episode 2 is up! Check it out on YouTube:

Glenn Reynolds links a piece by Kay Hymowitz in the Wall Street Journal, and my purpose here is not to debate the merits of my alleged "freedom fetishism" or even whether I should be judged guilty of the "libertarianism" claimed by Ron Paul.

I simply noticed an error in the Hymowitz piece:

Murray Rothbard, for example, became a fan of Che Guevara and the Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown. Karl Hess, a libertarian/anarchist said to have written Barry Goldwater's famous lines about "extremism in the defense of liberty," was an equal-opportunity revolutionary; during the 60s, he symbolized his move to the New Left by donning a Castro-style beard and jacket. And many young libertarians spent the decade moving back and forth between the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom and the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society.

The point in rehearsing this history is not to play gotcha; many good people did and thought things during those days that they would prefer not to remember (assuming, as the joke has it, they can remember). Rather, it is to suggest that when one's moral compass consists of nothing more than doing "whatever the hell you want" and avoiding physical harm to anyone else's person or property, it is very easy to get lost.

This is not open to serious dispute. Libertarian sites like Mises.org and Lew Rockwell on the one hand, and conservatives such as Heritage's Lee Edwards also say it was Jaffa. Even the Karl Hess Club (which might certainly be expected to claim credit if Karl Hess had written the words) has a long, link-filled post noting that Jaffa was responsible. (The latter expresses eternal gratitude for getting the credit, but nonetheless maintains steadfastly that he was only quoting Cicero.)

Moreover, this dispute (if it is that) has been settled for a long time. In 1999, Jonah Goldberg even went so far as to scold Libertarians who persisted in claiming that Hess wrote the line:

Some of you Libertarians took a break from your free-love lifestyles to insist that Karl Hess wrote the Goldwater "Extremism" Speech instead of Harry Jaffa. I knew this would happen. In modern American politics, no speech has been more unpopular when delivered, yet had more people dying to take credit for it. This is a fight I do not want to get in the middle of. But my extensive research (what are you laughing at? I can do research) reveals that at least the credit for the extremism line goes to Jaffa. That is what Goldwater, Jaffa, John Judis, and quite a few others who've dug into this have deduced. Hess drafted the speech, but the line goes to Harry. I was right and you were wrong, which is why we cleverly put "clarification" next to "correction" in the title -- so I can gloat sometimes.

Libertarians may be to blame for a lot of things (I certainly think Ron Paul has done enormous harm to the "l" word), but their only crime in the context of the "extremism in the defense of liberty" quote seems to be that some of them -- years ago -- tried to misattribute it to a libertarian before it was settled.

Again, my point is not to write a marathon essay disagreeing with Ms. Hymowitz's assessment of libertarians. (Besides, M. Simon's great post beat me to it.) However, if libertarianism is in fact "the natural home of assorted cranks and crazies," and "thus to continue to provide fodder for its at least partly deserved caricature," as she suggests it is, it will have to manage to get along without the credit for Goldwater's memorable line. Its author Harry Jaffa is not a libertarian.

Not that it would matter much if he had been a libertarian. Because Jaffa was not writing as a libertarian; by his own admission, he was quoting Cicero.

Whether Cicero was a libertarian is very questionable.

However, in light of this blog's theme, I figured that just for today, maybe I could declare myself a small "l" Ciceronian libertarian. Has a nice ring, doesn't it?

Not so fast.

My Ciceronian libertarianism might be short-lived! Because it turns out that Cicero was defending hasty executions. Here's William Safire with the full Cicero quote:

As best I can reconstruct it, the inflammatory speech was largely written by Hess, with a quotation -- of Marcus Tullius Cicero defying the conspiratorial Catiline -- contributed by Professor Jaffa; Goldwater (or one of his acknowledged ghosts) wrote later that "I had heard it earlier from the writer Taylor Caldwell."

Cicero, criticized for his hasty execution of five of Catiline's supporters, said, "I must remind you, Lords, Senators, that extreme patriotism in the defense of freedom is no crime, and let me respectfully remind you that pusillanimity in the pursuit of justice is no virtue in a Roman."

It may have worked oratorically for Cicero but backfired when used by Goldwater.

Maybe I should think it over....

MORE: Wiki claims that Cicero worked with Cato to shift the Senate majority to vote in favor of the executions.

(Far be it from me to argue against Cato....)

AND MORE: I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but hasty executions seem to be a contemporary topic, and Ciceronians as well as libertarians are defending the right to criticize them.

I'm into Clinton nostalgia lately, and I hope readers will indulge me, because the patterns in the recent campaign scandals are so similar to the old scandals that it's downright spooky. I mean, check this out this vintage Washington Post piece from 1997:

The exploits of indefatigable Clinton bag man Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie produced the hit of the week at last week's Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearings on campaign finance. Mr. Trie in early 1996 had temporarily shifted his attention from the president's reelection campaign to his legal defense fund. He had showed up once with a brown envelope containing $460,000 in $1,000 contributions, some on sequentially numbered money orders made out in different names but the same handwriting.

Mr. Trie's role as a conduit for campaign contributions seems to have been well known. An agricultural cooperative in Thailand wired him $100,000 a couple of weeks before two of its executives were to meet the president at a White House coffee. At least half the money was converted to cash shortly afterward; what happened to it next is unclear. The coffee was arranged by DNC fund-raiser John Huang and a businesswoman, Pauline Kanchanalak, who was the co-op's U. S. representative and herself a major Clinton campaign contributor. Some if not all of her contributions have been returned by the DNC because of questions about their source.

Before Congress left town last week, the principal Senate sponsors of a campaign finance reform bill warned that, if the Republican leadership continued to refuse to give the bill floor time, they would start in September to tie up the Senate and force consideration by offering it as an amendment to other legislation. The president, whose own abuses of the campaign finance law are part of the rationale for the legislation, joined them in the call. Once again he converts his own record of misconduct into an agenda.

It's time, past time, that Congress begin to clean up this system that has been so cynically exploited by all, and in particular by this White House. The ease with which money flows now into campaigns - the ways in which candidates have come to slurp up every bit they can, from whatever source, no questions asked and obvious implications ignored - needs no additional documentation. The Trie hearings are a vivid example, but only the latest in a long string.

Anyone still remember Commerce Secretary Ron Brown -- whose death has been described as saving the Clinton Administration? I'm not interested in conspiracy theories over his death, as things like that make little difference. It's like the Vince Foster conspiracy theories; what I always wanted to know about was what was in his hard drive, not which way some crackpot said the blood ran, or whether X-rays were "missing." There were no criminal cases, and there never will be, so worrying about dead bodies strikes me as silly. Documents, however, are another matter, because they speak for themselves. They don't commit suicide or die of natural causes, and hard drives cannot accidentally destroy themselves. Bodies decompose, but documents are forever!

At least, they're supposed to be. When documents die, it's inherently more suspicious than when people die, because there isn't as much room for ambiguity.

To continue this exercise in nostalgia from a decade ago, Ron Brown was annoyed that the financial shenanigans of the Clintons had turned him into a peddler of trade mission seats:

Hill painted a picture of her friend Brown as furious with the White House, and especially first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instigating the plan. "I'm not a [mother-expletive deleted] tour guide for Hillary," Brown complained privately to Hill, according to her account.

Brown's business associate also testified that toward the end of his life the Commerce secretary had said he was just "doing my chores for Hillary Rodham Clinton." Hill further said Brown resented the first lady and the "Arkansas crowd" of insiders for perverting the trade missions, with the apparent blessing of the president himself.

Hill said of Brown: "Ultimately, he believed the president of the United States was at least tangentially involved."

Brown was killed when the government plane carrying one of his international trade missions crashed into a mountainside in Croatia in 1996.

Hill portrayed Brown as fearing he was an outsider in the Clinton Administration, despite his ties to the president while serving as head of the Democratic National Committee.

"He never felt he had that strong a position and he was always worried," Hill said. Hill claimed Brown had privately complained that he was also racially "demeaned by that Arkansas crowd."

Hill said Brown once showed her a stack of documents on Commerce Department letterhead suggesting to contributors their gifts could help win trade mission seats. She said Brown was furious that one his aides had written the letters. "He knew it was not right," Hill testified. She said she urged Brown not to destroy the documents because an independent counsel was investigating and it would be seen as obstruction of justice. "I told him it was a great risk because surely they existed someplace else," she said.

Hill testified, often grudgingly, under prodding by staunch administration critic Larry Klayman. The head of a group named Judicial Watch, Klayman called Hill to testify in his lawsuit to force the Commerce Department to release documents which he claims will confirm the sale of the trade mission seats for campaign gifts of $50,000 or more.

....not much of anyone in Washington beyond a few reporters seems to have noticed that on December 22 a federal district judge denounced the behavior of a group of Clintonesque former Commerce Department officials as akin to "hooligans" and "scofflaws." What's more, he said the department's handling of a lawsuit over the late Ron Brown's trade junkets has been so untrustworthy that he is appointing a special magistrate to keep an eye on them.

Judge Royce Lamberth found that the facts "strongly substantiate the claim that the agency was deliberately destroying and jettisoning documents," ending "in a flurry of document shredding" in Secretary Brown's office after his death in Bosnia in April 1996. He describes the department's four years of legal stonewalling as an "egregious . . . disregard for the law."

Again, one must ponder the Beltway's apparently eternal mysteries: Does anyone connect the dots down there anymore, or do all the capital's solons and scribes really believe the whole issue is just Bill Clinton's pattycake habits?

"No adequate explanation has been given as to why these documents were destroyed." Furthermore, the judge said: "[the Department's] misconduct in this case is so egregious and so extensive that... the agency [should be held] fully accountable for the serious violations that it appears to have deliberately committed".

Especially if they're resistant to the reforms inspired by their original conduct.

Enough nostalgia. I should get with the real world of today.

UPDATE: The Washington Post is waxing nostalgically too, about "An Unwelcome Echo."

Hmmm....

Some clever candidate ought to reecho this book and title it "A Choice, not an Unwelcome Echo."

MORE: I do not mean to suggest that everyone who expresses skepticism about the official conclusions regarding the Foster death is a crackpot. Some are, some aren't. (My apologies to anyone who took that characterization personally. If it's any consolation, I often refer to myself as a crackpot.)

This essay Freedom Fetishists by Kay Hymowitz is making the rounds in libertarian and conservative circles.

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy has some things to say about Kay Hymowitz, Libertarianism, and Lifestyle Excesses:

To reiterate a simple but oft-misunderstood point: that which should be legal is not coextensive with that which is desirable or right. Libertarians believe that racist and communist speech should be legal; that does not mean that libertarianism implies support for such speech. The same is true of excessive drug use, cheating on your spouse, and so on. "People ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, so long as they aren't hurting anyone else" is not "the libertarian vision of personal morality." It is the libertarian vision of the limits we should place on the power of government.

How can drug use still be called destructive when people who chronically take drugs do so because of medical need?

Addiction Is A Genetic Disease

Heroin

PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System

People who think drugs are a "lifestyle" issue have bought into the "conservative" view of the subject. Of course it is why after 90 years of trying we have made so little progress. We are lost in "choice" when we should be focused on "need".

If we don't want people to take drugs to solve their problems then we have to make sure their problems are solved some other way. Of course that just multiplies government intervention. Better than jailing people for their needs and jailing their suppliers for serving those needs.

So of course the question comes up what portion of the chronic drug users population is need based on need and how much is recreation.

Actually we don't know if those who need are a few, many, most, or all.

No comprehensive studies have ever been done on the subject. The closest we come is Dr. Lonnie Shavelson's book/study mentioned in the above "Heroin" link.

He found that 70% of the women chronically using heroin were sexually abused when children. So for women using heroin we can say the number is at least 70%.

My take on the subject: no one will do the study because our whole drug war will be seen to be based on a wrong premise. You might as well say insulin use is a life style choice.

Ever notice how hard the courts fight the medical necessity defense? There is a reason for that. It would open the floodgates if allowed.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

This could be the biggest election financing fraud in history, even surpassing the Nixon crimes committed during the 1972 election.

So do I.

So does American Thinker. And so does Hot Air's See-Dubya, who cites two $4600 Rosenman contributions in March.

I found these, but they may be duplicates of the above. I'm no expert on these things, but I'm also wondering how this $9200 contribtion by the company might fit in.

And why isn't Hillary releasing her campaign records? It seems she's been "late" for an awfully long time.

$9,000 here, $9,000 there might not look like much, but if this process is being repeated, the total might translate into real money. (And what about this guy?) If Rosenman and his family are such staunch Hillary supporters that they're stretching their legal contributions to the max, and if their company "recently" "invested" $40 million in a very shaky looking deal (only to now declare they want it back), I'm just wondering whether they (and possibly a lot of other donors) aren't playing some sort of financial shell game of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't.

A variation on the old kiting scheme? You write me a check and I write you a check and you write me a check, and so on, and they all get deposited in such a manner that eventually it won't be clear whose check was the one that started the bounce, or (in this case) where the money originated.

Here's Captain Ed:

Did some other deep-pocketed entity front the money for Hsu in order to thoroughly launder the cash? It seems like the perfect long con -- show some flash up front and steal big in the end, but it still requires someone to supply the up-front money.

Well, if we look at the bright side, Clinton scandals are no longer relegated to the realm of 1990s nostalgia for political junkies. They're in vogue again.

But will Hillary remain a "Hsu in" for the White House?

MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, a link to puns and more nostalgia:

HsuGate is a flashback to the scandals of Clinton's husband -- John Huang and the Buddhist temple; Johnny Chung transferring cash for a Red Chinese military officer, including $50,000 delivered directly to the then-first lady's chief of staff; Charlie Trie, who was cozy with a front firm for the Chinese military.

Does funny money run in the family?

MORE: I don't think we should forget Peter Paul and Spider Man, as the same pattern may have been repeated many times.

I found an old book in the basement which I can only partially understand because it's in Ukrainian, so call I can do is look at the pictures. It's very dogeared and it's been scribbled on in a lot of places, and because it starts out with the alphabet, I think its purpose is to teach kids how to read. A sort of "Ted and Sally -- Run! Run! Run!," type of book.

I don't know how old it is, but I suspect it's from pre-Communist times, because there are pictures of churches, and none of Lenin or Stalin.

And the games children played in those days! They'd never be tolerated today.

To illustrate, I scanned a page:

Can anyone read it well enough to help out with a translation?

Does anyone remember playing a game like that as a child?

In modern terms, it's easy to say that this book "sets a bad example" by showing children harnessing and whipping each other. Certainly, no such picture would make it into a modern reader. But did it really set a bad example for children of that era?

Or am I a "moral relativist" for posing such a question?

I hate it when I make up a word that's already been pre-anticipated for me and "invented" by others. In this case, it's been pre-anticipated 3400 times, but numbers are not the issue, and have nothing to do with the uniquely original originality of what I originated first! Naturally the fact that I'm saying I pre-anticipated it first will make them claim otherwise -- as if the fact that they used the word online before I did means anything in terms of ultimate truth! Whoever said something first is not necessarily the most original sayer of what was said, OK? I realize that explaining this is complicated, so I won't. It is beneath my dignity! I mean, why ruin a perfectly good meme by allowing facts to get in the way of originality?

Besides, I was diving in dumpsters before most of these pipsqueaks were born. Don't get me wrong. I only took good stuff from dumpsters, and these people are stealing garbage; I'm just saying that my diving was more original than theirs, as is my use of the word "freaganomics."

Anyway, the freeganomics movement has now gone national with this LA Times "exposé":

Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.

"We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending."

Nelson used to spend more than $100,000 a year for her food, clothes, books, transportation and a mortgage on a two-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village. Now, she lives off savings, volunteers instead of works, and forages for groceries.

She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.

"I used to have 40 work blouses," said Nelson, sipping hot tea with mint leaves and stevia, a sweet plant she picked from a community garden. She shook her head in shame. "Forty tops, just for work."

Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like "Food Not Bombs," an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that's often donated by businesses.

Freegans are often college-educated people from middle-class families.

In recent years, Internet sites like Meetup.com have posted announcements for trash tours in Seattle, Houston and Los Angeles and throughout England. Some teach people how to dumpster-dive for food, increasing the movement's popularity. At least 14,000 have taken the trash tour for groceries over the last two years in New York. Another site, Freegankitchen.com, offers lessons for cooking meals from food found in dumpsters, such as spaghetti squash salad.

Though recycling clothes and furniture doesn't strike most people as unusual, combing through heaps of trash for food can be unthinkable to many.

One recent night, Weissman and Nelson led a trash tour through New York for about 40 experienced and first-time diggers, including college students, a high school teacher, a taxi driver and a former investment banker. One veteran handed out plastic gloves.

And the caption:

Janet Kalish, center, with a papaya she collected during a New York City trash tour for people interested in becoming freegans -- anti-consumerists who, in the words of one advocate, are "opting out of capitalism in any way that we can."

In light of the admission of one of them that she "took home a salmon carcass from D'Agostino's trash and made ceviche," and "was somewhat surprised she did not get sick," I suppose that the stores' legal departments will weigh in, and Trader Joe's dumpsters will eventually have to be secured and up -- safe from the prying hands of the conspicously virtuous. Hey, maybe they can have a showdown! Dumpster divers get arrested! For trying to save the planet!

Not being a trained or licensed economist (I'm assuming they're as licensable as lawyers), I'm not competent to run the stats or do the number crunching which might shed some light on the extent to which the dumpster divers are actually saving the planet. However, because the word "freeganomics" is now in the public domain, I'm hoping someone will. There's probably a Ph.D. in the works. And imagine how much fun the field research would be!

But anyway, I wasn't planning a post on freeganomics until I saw this farmer's lament posted at Mrs. du Toit's blog:

....I don't want to turn this into a lament for times past. Time marches on, and the changes that have occurred have been good in the grand scheme of things. Cheap plentiful food means fewer hungry people. I'm convinced that there is no longer hunger in this country. I feed leftovers from the local free food pantry to my pigs. That's undeniably a good thing.

But... What has been lost?

What has been lost is the character of the American farmer. The people that build, that create, that civilize the wilderness, that value their independence and freedom above all else. The only people I know like us are over the age of 60. I don't feel worthy to count myself as one of them, as each and every one of them is infinitely more competent than I am.

Raw economic efficiency is the way decisions are inevitably made in America. That process does not consider the effects those decisions have on the non-economic aspects of our lives and our national character. We are an economic powerhouse, with a high standard of living and influence the world over. But what's so great about exporting culture, when culture consists of a McDonald's in every major foreign city? McDonald's isn't food, it's merely a shoddy facsimile of food. And it certainly isn't culture. Quality, taste, and beauty are rare things in our culture, at the expense of faster, cheaper, more convenient, and less effort. That's what our culture has become.

My wife and I have chosen to live differently. We work hard and produce nearly all of our own food. We take additional steps towards complete independence every year.

Seen this way, the dumpster diving phenomenon, while childish, histrionic, and neurotic, represents a pathetic, possibly instinctive desire for simpler times when there was hands-on involvement in the obtaining of food. Fortunately, the divers aren't smashing store windows to demonstrate against the WTO, but dismissing this mindset as idiotic (which it is) ignores its appeal.

Why do we laugh at the dumpster divers? I think it is because they are on a moral crusade. They take themselves seriously. They believe that they are saving the planet. They are making a statement that we are wasteful, that we are ruining the planet, and that they are not.

The irony here is that by trying to take them seriously, I will irritate them more than if I resorted to pure ridicule. They would see my attempt to understand the involvement of human instinct as condescending in the extreme.

Is it? Is it condescending to laugh at serious matters like instinct? I do it all the time, and I like to think I am also laughing at myself. I'm not planning to become a farmer, nor am I planning to take up dumpster diving and call it "freeganism." (For starters I am not a vegan, and never will be.)

OK, before I write another word, let me stress that I do not mean to make fun of farmers here. Nor am I in any way making a moral equivalency argument between American farmers and spoiled brats who think it's cool to pilfer from Trader Joe's dumpsters while solemnly proclaiming that you're better than everyone else. My father grew up on a farm, and my grandfather was a farmer until he died. Farmers are great people, and it's a shame to see the way their lifestyle has been rendered anachronistic, and almost impossible. To live the life my grandfather lived would be impossible. To illustrate, here's a picture I recently found of him, using horse-drawn farm equipment.

Yeah, I suppose if I went to a lot of time and trouble, I could manage to do that. I'd be willing to bet that the emotional reward would be enormous, too. But would it be cost effective? More likely, it would cost me more money to buy and maintain a fine set of plough horses and a tractor they could draw than it would to buy a tractor. And at the prices I might be able to get for whatever I could manage to grow using these methods, I'd be lucky to feed the horses, much less meet the mortgage payments on the acreage.

It's a crying shame. No, the dumpster divers are in no way comparable to the farmers. But I think my grandfather would have gotten quite a kick out of the modern urban trash thieves.

He made fun of my father for taking up life in the big city and did his best in the small amount of time I spent with him to make sure I knew that no one -- least of all him or his son, my father -- should ever be taken too seriously. No, I will not repeat what he said, lest he be as misunderstood as I often feel that I am. But it was a lifelong moral lesson, and I never forgot it.

The problem with people who take themselves too seriously is that a lot of them don't stop there. The younger and more emotional ones want to take things to the next step, which is telling other people what to do, and then to the next step -- which is working to enact their idiocy into actual laws. (I'm old enough to remember laughing at things like the anti-smoking movement, which is now solemnly mainstream, and not funny at all. I remember when decent people would never have castrated a normal male dog.) Freegans are militant vegans, santimonious moralists who believe not only in saving the planet personally, but in making me save the planet according to their rules. If they had their way, they'd stop me from eating meat, owning a dog with genitals, driving my car and probably a lot of other things I've never thought of.

My natural reaction is scorn and ridicule, but when I try to temper it with understanding, I guess I go too far. I probably have the defective liberal brain gene, but that's another topic.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I think my grandfather was onto something.

So was Freud.

But I think the freegans confuse instinct with emotion, and emotion with morality.

UPDATE: I just learned that the horses pictured with my grandfather were named "Prince" and "Topsy."

MORE: This video might shed some light on the nature of the dispute between my father and my grandfather.

"Country Ain't Country," by Travis Tritt

It actually brought tears to my eyes when I first heard it (probably because the dispute is in my blood.) (YouTube link here.)

Instinct? Or emotion?

Don't ask me what happened then. Seriously, I barely remember that awful year. Truly one of the worst in my life.

So it's easy for me to forgive Fred Thompson's 1992, er, transgression. Even if he was a "lobbyist for Libya," which Glenn now says was a mistaken assertion. While I don't think there was all that much to the story in the first place, I don't think Glenn was "snookered," because let's face it, doing any sort of legal work (even indirectly) for accused Libyan terrorists has a rather ugly ring to it, and we have higher moral and social standards about these things now. But this TNR story (on which Glenn's original source relied) is a deliberately misleading, rhetorically charged, partisan hit piece, which exaggerates Thompson's role, and judges him as if it happened last year. By contrast, even the New York Times (no friend of Thompson) presents the facts --such as they are -- in a more evenhanded manner.

While there's a seemingly bad retrospective aroma in having given Libyan terrorists indirect legal advice, the fact is, nothing morally or ethically wrong was done. John Culver, another member of the law firm for which Thompson worked, was handling the criminal matter for the accused Libyans, and he briefly consulted Thompson about venue. Thompson had no control over the case, and he did not lobby for Libya. Personally, I hope he overcharged the sons of bitches for the small amount of work he did, and anyway, his record shows that he has never been a friend of Libya, and always voted consistently against terrorism.

As "scandals" go, this is a non-starter, and it will not hurt Thompson. I can think of only one reason the left would be interested in pursuing it. Anyone remember Bill Clinton's notorious executive clemency for the FALN terrorists? Clinton's own Justice Department opposed the move, and FBI said were still a threat, but a later investigation was stymied:

An investigation ensued, and the Senate voted 95-2 to condemn Clinton's action (the House also condemned the pardons, by a 311-41 vote). During the House Committee on Government Reform's investigation of the pardons, the Clinton Justice Department prevented FBI agents from testifying, and that together with Clinton's use of executive privilege effectively put a lid on the inquiry.

Only eight weeks before President Bill Clinton offered a clemency deal to a group of convicted terrorists from the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a reputed leader of that group directly petitioned Hillary Clinton to support such a deal, implying she could gain Puerto Rican political support if she did so.

Mrs. Clinton is running for the U.S. Senate in New York. where there is a large Puerto Rican population. In August, she first tacitly supported clemency for the terrorists. Then, under intense media pressure, she publicly criticized them for taking too much time to make up their minds before eventually accepting her husband's offer to let them out of jail.

As to the 1990s, I think it's fair to say that in many ways, the 90s were like the 1930s -- a "low dishonest decade."

This is not to say that it was desirable for Thompson to have given criminal advice to a lawyer working for Libyan terrorists. But 1992 was not only pre-9/11, it was way pre-9/11. Thompson's 1992 legal work simply cannot be judged by the standards of 2007, any more than it's fair to call Richard Nixon a "homophobe" because of private remarks he made about San Francisco in 1971. Times, and people, change.

So it's not time to play this 1972 song.

Come to think of it, don't ask me what I did in 1972 either!

MORE: Speaking of nostalgia, Fred Thompson's 1975 book, "At that point in time: The inside story of the Senate Watergate Committee" has gone waaay up in price.

MORE: Considering the comment below, I might have failed to make it clear that Thompson did no direct work for the Libyans, but only talked to their criminal attorney. I thought this was clear from my discussion of the facts, but I added the word "indirect" above to make sure no one misunderstands.