cheerful iconoclast

Idiot Parents Refuse to Vaccinate Their Children

2008-03-24T17:48:00.002-04:00

Megan McArdle links to this New York Times article about what Megan calls "twee Bobo sociopaths" who refuse to vaccinate their children, either due to religious beliefs or woo-woo personal antipathy toward vaccination. As the article points out, kids who aren't vaccinated expose other kids to possible infection, not to mention adults whose immunity has faded. They think vaccines are dangerous -- which they are to some small extent -- and so they expose their own children, and other children, to the much greater risk of the underlying diseases, effectivley free-riding off the parents who have had their children immunized.

But some parents go beyond leaving their children unvaccinated. They actually expose their children to the actual diseases the vaccines are intended to protect them from:

Some parents of unvaccinated children go to great lengths to expose their children to childhood diseases to help them build natural immunities.

In the wake of last month’s outbreak, Linda Palmer considered sending her son to a measles party to contract the virus. Several years ago, the boy, now 12, contracted chicken pox when Ms. Palmer had him attend a gathering of children with that virus.

“It is a very common thing in the natural-health oriented world,” Ms. Palmer said of the parties.

Oh, well, then it's OK then. If it's common in the "natural health" world, then it's fine and dandy.

Megan thinks that the unvaccinated ought to be barred from exposing members of the public to risk of disease:

Of course, I recognize that people have a right to abide by their conscience, and I would not want public health officials to force children to be vaccinated. I just think that people who are unvaccinated, unless they have a legitimate medical reason for same, should not be allowed to use public roads, public sidewalks, or public services. They have a right not to vaccinate their children. But they do not have a right to risk my health.

I suppose we could have "Natural Health Colonies," along the lines of leper colonies, for those who forego vaccination. They might get wiped out by diseases from time to time, but I suppose that there would always be a new crop of natural health nuts to fill them back up. And yet administering this system seems a bit difficult. What are we going to do, tattoo a "U" on the forehead of the unvaccinated?

I prefer the option she rejects: have public health officials force children to be vaccinated, even if the parents object on religious or other grounds. In general, I believe in personal freedom, and if people want to risk their own health, so be it. Jump out of airplanes, smoke cigarettes, drink raw milk, go to an acupuncturist when you have cancer -- I really don't give a damn. Your body, your life.

But we all agree that children are a special case, because they are not yet mature enough to make decisions about their own lives. (Some adults aren't either, but that's another post.) So somebody has to decide things for children. But who?

Well, one answer is that the state could do it. The problem with that is that the state tends to do a pretty bad job at that sort of thing. Most parents love their children and in general are motivated to do a good job of taking care of them. That doesn't mean they don't screw up at times, but they do a better job than the goverment would if it tried to raise all children en masse.

But we recognize exceptions to that general principle. Parents are required to give their children basic nutrition, clothing, and shelter. If Jewish or Muslim parents don't want to feed their kids pork, that's fine, but they have to feed them something. Spanking is still legal, but severe beatings are not allowed. Nor does it matter if parents are motivated by religion as they abuse their kids. Christian Reconstructionist parents are allowed to believe whatever they want, but they can't stone their children for talking back. If parents lock their kids in the attic, as in that awful Flowers in the Attic book, then social workers are supposed to come and take them away to a nice foster family, where, one hopes, the children won't be locked in the attic or sodomized by the kid in the next bunk. Granted, that's not always a given, which is why children are only taken away for good reason. But abuse or neglect is a good reason.

Failure to vaccinate your child ought to be considered a form of neglect, just like denying that child any form of medical care. Now, some kids have legitimate medical reasons to not be vaccinated, and of course they should be exempt. But "personal beliefs" or "relgious objections" Give me a break. Somebody might have a religion that requires him to sodomize his kid every Tuesday night, but we don't let people do that.

If a person't religious or personal beliefs cause them to forego medical care, fine. But their children aren't capable, yet, of making an informed and rational choice. Since the parents obviously aren't either, the state should require vaccination. And anybody who takes their kid to a "measles party" to intentionally infect them ought to lose all parental rights and have some serious time in the slammer.

Mr. Intellectual Honesty Is At It Again

2008-03-03T18:15:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I chided "Reality-Based" blogger Mark Kleiman for a post in which he simultaneously claimed that his side -- however defined -- had the edge in intellectual honesty while at the same time urging his allies to refrain from criticizing General Ricardo Sanchez, apparently even if such criticisms were true. I argued at the time -- and it still seems to me to be true -- that it's self-contradictory to trumpet your own intellectual honesty while at the same time urging your political allies to refrain from advancing what they believe to be

Well, he's at it again. A couple of weeks ago, he declared a "Cease-Fire" on Hillary Clinton, saying that "anyone looking for criticism of Hillary Rodham Clinton or her campaign will have to look elsewhere from now on" Why? Because, in his estimation, Obama had it won and Obama supporters should "aim their fire at John McCain."

Today he threatened to revoke his unilateral cease-fire, in a short post:

Yes, we've been observing a unilateral cease-fire.

But if you keep lying about our candidate, we might just have to start telling the truth about yours.

And that wouldn't be fun for anyone, would it?

To begin with, I am not at all sure that his fellow Obama supporters have been observing the cease-fire. Or maybe Kleimain means "I" here, and he's using the "Royal We." Nor am I sure he has the authority to declare cease-fires or the resumption of hostilities on behalf of the Obama campaign.

But leave that aside. Kleiman seems to be saying that there are true bad things about Hillary Clinton that Barack Obama supporters haven't been saying? And, as of a week ago, when he though it was in the bag, that he thought they shouldn't say. Where is the intellectual honesty in that? Shouldn't Kleiman just say what he thinks the truth is, rather than refraining out of short-term political expediency? And if we know that Kleiman will lie by omission, by refraining from saying bad things about Hillary, and if he urges others to do the same, why should we believe him when he says (or fails to say) stuff about other candidates? He's already admitted that political maneuvering takes precedence over telling the truth as he sees it.

His attitude makes perfect sense for Senator Obama himself, or for people officially-connected with his campaign. If he wins the nomination, he's going to need the support of Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton. At some point, it makes sense for him to ease off if he's got it won. Running up the score doesn't do him a lot of good.

But so far as I know, Professor Kleiman isn't officially connected with the Obama campaign. He's a Professor who happens to support Barack Obama. Which is, you know, perfectly fine. Call me an idealist if you want, though, but I think that Professors ought to think of themselves as Priests in the Temple of Truth. They might believe in a particular political candidate, and they should certainly feel free to advance arguments in favor of the person they support. But figuring out the truth and stating it ought to be Job One.

Heck, even if he supports Obama, he ought to be willing to criticize Obama if and when he thinks the Senator is wrong. And the same is true of supporters of Senator McCain, of course. Recently, McCain stated that "there's strong evidence" that thimerosal causes autism. "Nonsense on stilts," as Megan McArdle put it. So what should a McCain supporter do? And intellectually honest McCain supporter, I mean, and one not deluded into thinking that thimerosal causes autism.

An intellectually honest McCain supporter should say "I support Senator McCain for these four reasons, but he's spouting crap on this." Given his statements, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Professor Kleiman would take such an intellectually honest position were Obama to make a similarly nonsensical statement. He may think himself "reality based," but his statements about the "Cease Fire" make it clear that he values political outcomes ahead of telling the truth as he sees it.

Being Obama

2008-02-29T10:57:00.005-05:00

If Barack Obama does win the Democratic nomination, we are undoubtedly going to be treated to a tiresome parade of complaints about imagined racial slights. Here's one: Saturday Night Live had Fred Armisen (who?) play Barack Obama in a recent skit. Ann Althouse links to this Washington Post piece about the ensuing outrage.

Why the outrage? According to the WaPo article, Armison is of white and Asian heritage. Oh gosh, can't have that, can we? Well, the sort of people likely to take umbrage at this sort of thng have taken umbrage:

Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune put the question bluntly: "Call me crazy, but shouldn't 'Saturday Night Live's' fictional Sen. Barack Obama be played by an African-American?" Ryan went on to conclude: "I find 'SNL's' choice inexplicable. Obama's candidacy gives us solid proof of the progress that African-Americans have made in this country. I guess 'SNL' still has further to go on that front."

You're crazy Maureen. But you aren't the only one. My favorite comment comes from Todd Boyd, a "Professor of Critical Studies" at USC:

Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California, says viewers might have a different reaction if the roles were reversed. What if, he says, "SNL" had cast a black woman to portray Hillary Clinton? "Do you think there's ever going to be a day when we start casting Queen Latifah to portray Princess Diana?" he asks. "We just don't have the same representations going in other direction.

You know, if I were a professor in a politically-driven pseudo-discipline, I would avoid being quoted in the newspaper, if only to avoid having people ask what a "Professor of Critical Studies" actually you know, studies. I suppose, though, that if you're going to pretend that being a community organizer is a real job, you might as well pretend that a Professor of Critical Studies is a real Professor. (Unlike Barack Obama, who is not, contrary to some claims, a Professor of Constitutional Law.)

But I digress. This gripe is so stupid on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start.

Well, start with the obvious: as the WaPo and Professor Althouse both observe, SNL has a long history of having blacks play whites, and vice versa. Eddie Murphy played white characters, and Billy Crystal played Sammy Davis, Jr. Heck, SNL did some skits where men impesonated women: Dan Akroyd as Julia Child, and Will Ferrell as Janet Reno.

As Professor Althouse says, the question for Saturday Night Live isn't whether a particular actor is the same race or gender as the person he or she is impersonating -- the question is whether the impersonation is funny. And you know, by the standards of modern-day SNL, I think that Armison's impersonation really is kind of funny. Not Dan-Akroyd-as-Julia-Child funny, but SNL hasn't been that funny in a long time.

But in Obama's case it is particularly dumb. As Paddy O, one of Professor Althouse's commenters put it: "How is Obama any more black than white? Is there some kind of one drop rule in effect?" Sure, Obama may choose to identify himself as "black," and he may have joined an Afrocentric church, but none of this alters the fact that his mom was white. In terms of pure ethnic background, it's no more inappropriate to have a white guy impersonate him than to have a "pure" black Obama imitator. If you are insisting on racial verisimilitude, why not go all the way and demand he be impersonated by a man of mixed race whose dad was Kenyan and mom was a white chick from the midwest? Fred Armisen is of mixed race, if not quite the same mix as Obama. In that sense, he is more appropriate than either an all-black or all-white actor.

Look, if somebody of importance actually says something racist about Obama, I'll jump on them with both feet. But this crap is just nonsense.

Patriotism Gap

2008-02-27T16:47:00.003-05:00

Megan McArdle thinks this anti-Berkeley ad is weird:

She thinks it's stupid to run the ad on Fox News in D.C., because the Berkeley City Council is unlikely to be affected by the actions of Washingtonians. Well, sure.

But that isn't the point. It's a culture war thing. The whole point is to make people riled up about the fact that there are still "blame America First" leftists out there.

And if you want to tie it to the election, well, it's pretty obvious that the sort of people who boo National Guard ads in movie theaters are, in general, the sort of people who vote for Democrats. And of course Mrs. Obama played right into that when she made her unfortunate but revealing remarks about being proud of her country for the first time. Personally, I don't give a shit whether Barack Obama wears a flag in his lapel bin. But the Patriotism Gap is a serious problem for the Democrats. And stuff like the antics of the City Council of Berkeley only make it worse.

Dhimmi Watch: Harvard Edition

2008-02-26T22:55:00.002-05:00

Via Instapundit, this article about an effort to make Muslim Harvard students more "comfortable" in the gym. By instituting women-only gym hours. They're being instituted at the insistence of -- you guessed it -- the Harvard Islamic Society:

Harvard Islamic Society's Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on a trial basis. The special gym hours will be analyzed over Spring Break to determine if they will continue, she said.

Aljawhary said that she does not believe that the women-only gym hours discriminate against men.

"These hours are necessary because there is a segment of the Harvard female population that is not found in gyms not because they don't want to work out, but because for them working out in a co-ed gym is uncomfortable, awkward or problematic in some way," she said.

Will we never stop giving in to Muslim demands? Gender integration in places like the gym is a part of Western Civilization's acceptence of gender equality. It's a good thing, damnit, something that makes us better than the Muslim world where they keep women wrapped up in "modest" attire, lest men be driven into a sexual frenzy at the sight of an exposed ankle. Our culture is better than theirs -- that's why we make the airplanes that they have to hijack. And it's worth fighting for, inch by inch if we must.

Maybe working out in a co-ed gym is "uncomfortable, awkward, or problematic" for some Harvard students. But that can be a useful part of getting an education, or adopting a new culture. If these women are so "modest" that they can't don a pair of sweatpants (no rules says that have to wear leotards) and work out, well maybe they ought to move to Saudi Arabia.

Where they will be more "comfortable."

Paging Doctor Mengele

2008-02-26T17:47:00.004-05:00

Megan McArdle links to this article by Graeme Wood arguing in favor of harvesting the organs of executed convicts. But wait! It turns out that most methods of execution ruin the organs. How do you get around that? Wood argues in favor of the "Mayan Protocal" -- executing people by removing their organs:

But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.

I suppose you might find doctors willing to go along and ignore that "First Do No Harm" thing. And if you did, well, think of the lives you could save!

Given the overlap between libertarians and science ficiton fans, it's hardly surprising that "Lou," Megan's first commenter, brought up the Larry Niven short story, "The Jigsaw Man." To give away the punch line: in that futuristic society, they required that death row inmates have their organs harvested. As a result, legislatures expanded the death penalty to include more and more offenses, until the defendant in the story faces the death penalty for being a recidivist traffic offender.

I don't think that it would go that far -- but there are ample reasons why the citizenry ought not receive collateral benefits from criminal punishments. (Following this theory, David Friedman has trumpted the virtues of inefficient punishments.)

Disaffected Convservatives

2008-02-13T15:55:00.005-05:00

Andrew Sullivan points to this article by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg's point? Well, as Sully succintly puts it, "McCain = Bush." As Goldberg points out, "most of the criticisms aimed at McCain can be directed at President Bush himself. " Bush signed McCain-Feingold, after all, and backed amnesty for illegal immigration, both supposedly reasons conservatives have a problem with McCain. If you wanted to add to the list, you could observe that Bush expanded the federal role in education through No Child Left Behind and not only supported by actively pushed for the creation of a new entitlement program.

Goldberg thinks that a lot of the animosity toward McCain is really anti-Bush animosity:

According to many pundits, McCain won the Republican Party's "anti-Bush" wing, made up of moderates and independents. But this is largely a media-driven narrative imposed on a somewhat different reality. There is, in fact, a much broader anti-Bush sentiment in the party. The "right wing" of the GOP is suffering from a deep buyer's remorse of its own.

All I can say is: about goddamn time. Seriously, I understand why many conservatives thought that Bush was a real conservative back in 2000 -- I thought the "compassionate conservative" crap was election-year hooey. Well, I was wrong, much to my regret. Jonah is wrong when he implies that conservatives haven't jumped ship -- in fact, quite a few conservatives have turned on Bush. (As a libertarian, I don't really count, but I've certainly turned on him.) By any objective measure, George W. Bush is not a conservative, and his presidency has erased nearly all the gains of the conservative movement for the last thirty or so years. Democrats are going to be running against George W. Bush for the rest of my lifetime. Conservative should be attacking George W. Bush at every opportunity, not backing the guy up.

So why haven't conservatives jumped ship in greater numbers? Well, I think that there are a number of overlapping reasons.

First, many conservatives remained honestly convinced that the Iraq war, while possibly mishandled, was a necessary step in the War on Terror. Now, I think, in retrospect, that the war was a huge mistake which has cost both lives and treasure, and which has been tactically counterproductive. Now, if you believe that the war wasn't a mistake, you are far more likely to see Bush as a source of steadfast leadership.

Second, there is the issue of judges. While the Harriet Miers nomination garnered a lot of conservative pushback, most conservatives are pretty happy with Roberts and Allito, as well as the bulk of the lower court judges. This is important to conservatives, because they fear -- with some validity -- that lunatic far left judges will attempt to advance the leftist agenda through the courts if allowed to do so.

Third, Bush has the right enemies. Goldberg discuses this particular point in contrasting Bush and McCain. As he puts it:

In terms of body language, the contrast with McCain couldn't be more stark. Bush has always been the sort of politician who relishes being loathed by The New York Times. McCain simply loves being loved by the Times and the national media generally. It's his base.

Add to that the folks over at DailyKos, Moveon.org, the 9/11 Truthers, the people from that town in Vermont who want Bush arrested. Whatever his other faults, Bush pisses off the right people. I think many conservative have a feeling that since the left hates Bush with such passion, he cannot possibly be all bad.

Fourth point -- related to the third -- is that support for Bush is part of being on "our team." Conservatives have historically found themselves at home in the Republican Party. They've come to identify with the Republican Team, they way some folks like the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees. Democrats, of course, have similar propensities: they identify with members of the Democratic Team, regardless of policy. If Bush had done all the same things but been a Democrat, lots of "convservatives" would hate his guts. Likewise, if Bill Clinton had been a Republican, many conservatives would love him.

Finally, I will add a factor I wouldn't have even considered before this primary season. Bush is an Evangelical Christian. I think the success of Huckabee shows that quite a few Evangelicals aren't "conservatives" in the William F. Buckley sense of the term -- they're not principled adherents to conservative ideology. They're cultural conservatives on things like the Ten Commandments, gays, porn, abortion, and other hot button cultural issues. But, they're not so big on limited government and free markets. For that kind of "conservative," well, Bush is great. He's an apostate on the stuff they don't care about, but he stands firm on the culture war issues. Evangelical Christians care a about a candidate's overt and stated faith. Because Bush claims to pray all the time and imbues his speeches with God Talk, they think he's doing the right thing. He's got faith, after all! He could do the opposite of what he's done on most issues, and if he talked about God enough, that would be enough for the Evangelicals. They support Huckabee for the same reason: he's one of them. He has faith.

McCain as the nominee will get the support of many conservatives, despite his apostasy on some issues, for some of the same reasons Bush has. Certainly many conservatives will back him on War-On-Terror issues, and he will probably appoint pretty good judges (from a conservative viewpoint). And as the election nears, the whole "our team" thing will kick in. Paradoxically, if his love affair with the media ends before the election rolls around, many conservatives will probably like him better, because he will have at least some of the right enemies.

What he will never get, though, are the solid core of Evangelicals who still support Bush and who now support Huckabee. They are identity politics voters, and McCain just isn't one of them.

Obama's Che Flag

2008-02-13T01:07:00.002-05:00

A bit of a back-and-forth between John Cole over at Balloon Juice and Captain Ed. Captain Ed slammed Obama because -- get this -- his campaign office in Houston features a Cuban flag with a picture of Che superimposed on it hanging on the wall. Cole calls Ed a "loyal party hack" and talks about our Cuba policy. Which of course is quite beside the point -- a Cuban flag with a picture of Che on it isn't a critique of America's inane boycott of Cuba; it's an endorsement of a brutal communist despotism and a murdering thug.

In a later update, Cole clarifies that it was Obama volunteers, not staffers, who put up the flag. Well, call me unmoved. If any Republican candidate had volunteers who put up a Nazi or Fascist emblem, or even a Confederate Flag, this would be seen as emblematic of Republican racism and fascism. Surely it says something about Obama -- and the left wing of the Democratic Party -- that his volunteers think a communist emblem is just dandy.

But this shouldn't be a surprise -- it's all part of the double standard. Communism was every bit as evil as fascism -- more evil, by pure body count. And yet Che is chic. Disgusting.

Sorry About the Hiatus

2008-02-13T01:01:00.001-05:00

Faithful readers, if you are still with me, I apologize for the long blog-break. Combination of travel and illness. However, I'm back, and I will try to update with more regularity these days.

More Lefty Self-Congratulation

2008-01-09T15:11:00.000-05:00

"What''s the matter with Kansas?" asks Mark Kleiman. His answer: witchcraft. Kleiman purports to think that Democrats need to stop treating Republican voters with contempt if they want to, you know, win elections. And so he commends a blog post from Tim Burke at Easily Distracted which does exactly that, at some length.

Burke starts with the classic telling but not necessarily representative anecdote: an NPR interview with a woman who works as an assistant manager at a store in Texas, a woman who (according to Burke) sounded "bone-weary about both politics and life." Apparently this particular woman has a bug up her ass about illegal immigration, and -- if the NPR interview accurately depicted her views, a possibly-dubious assumption -- she blames all her woes on illegal immigrants.

According to Burke, she is like the dirt-poor African peasant in Zimbabwe who believes that witchcraft is the cause of all his woes. Seriously, he says that -- I'm going to quote at length because my summary simply cannot capture the man's arrogance:

In the early 1990s in Zimbabwe, one part of my research concerned how the visible ownership of commodities performed or communicated wealth, and therefore aroused the dangerous jealousies of neighbors. This is a different kind of “mystery of capital” than what Hernando de Soto discusses. I am completely sympathetic to how southern Africans invoke ideas about witchcraft to explain how some people obtain wealth. Obviously it isn’t my own explanation, but there’s a sense in which it’s a completely reasonable attempt to connect the visible surface of material and economic life with the largely invisible mechanisms that move resources and capital around beneath the surface. How did your neighbor get a hold of bricks to complete one wall of his township house when you can’t get any? Where did the family next door get those new shoes, when you know that they don’t have any more access to wage earnings than you do? How did that man keep his job when you lost yours?

One story struck me as particularly potent. I was curious about zvidhoma, spirit beings who are basically the same as the tokoloshe that South Africans talk about. They’re said to be the tools of witches, able to exact invisible revenge on their victims by beating, wounding or causing illness in their targets. But on a number of occasions, I was also told cautionary tales about why you should never pick up what seems to be abandoned or unowned wealth or goods (like a bag of money or a wandering goat) because often these will have zvidhoma “stuck” to them who will then infest the unlucky soul who picks them up. Money and wealth circulate mysteriously, and carry hidden dangers. The people who get rich, in this worldview, are those who’ve learned to manage malevolent spiritual powers. If you’re not one of those people, you’ll just end up a victim if you chase after phantoms.

. . . .

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now.

Right. That's the way to win over Red-State voters: tell them they're all a bunch of ignorant savages who believe in witchcraft. Condescend to them while claiming to do the opposite.

This post could only have been written by an intellectual. Ordinary people can believe dumb things, but this level of concentrated stupidity requires a very intelligent mind. Seriously, where to start?

To begin with, there's the blithe assumption that the typical "Red State" Republican voter is so badly off that the Zimbabwe analogy makes sense. Now, I don't deny that there are some people in the United States who struggle economically, or who are economically insecure in various ways. But still, the notion that this assistant manager's plight is analogous to the most destitute resident of Zimbabwe is a bit much. As is his assumption that she is typical.

As it happens, I live in a blue portion of a red state, but I do get out of the house from time to time -- attending state fairs and country music concerts and the like. Places where I meet and see likely Republican voters of the sort that Kleiman and Burke would like to attract. And you know, in the parking lot I see plenty of $40,000 SUVs and pickup trucks. Some of them even have indoor plumbing and electricity. Yes, there are people who have real economic problems. But there are plenty doing just fine, thank you.

Nor do I deny that there are plenty of people who believe screwy things. Not all of whom are Republicans -- I once had a conversation with a retired union member and lifelong Democrat who was utterly convinced that the oil companies had suppressed an engine which runs on sea water. Heck, John Edwards is trying to convince primary voters that a free trade agreement with tiny Peru will be an economic disaster for the United States. And he's one of these "competent" Democrats who presumably believes stuff based on evidence.

This assistant manager's concerns about illegal immigrants are not analogous to the belief in zvidhoma because, unlike zvidhoma, illegal immigrants actually exist. Moreover, it's not irrational for a person with fewer job skills to think that his or her wages and benefits are driven down, at least to some small degree, by illegal immigrants. The assistant manager may well exaggerate the size of this effect, but her view that competition from illegal immigrants affects those, like herself, who are in a more precarious economic position isn't obviously superstitious or irrational.

But all this is just a warmup. Because after comparing ordinary red-state Americans to destitute African peasants who blame their bad fortune on evil spirits, Burke goes on to assert that "competence" is a cultural value of unique importance to blue state intellectuals. Competence is not something that the poor benighted folks in red states care about, you see.

He really said that. I'm not making it up. Here's the paragraph I skipped in the block quote above:

I’ve written before in my blog about how “blue state” elites in the United States continue to walk into the trap of blandly assuming that competency, skill and experience are sufficient and universally appealing attributes for a political candidate in national elections, as long as that candidate also has generally liberal views. Following the Iowa caucuses, I’m returning to this theme, because it’s one claim that seems to rub a lot of my readers the wrong way and I’m desperately hoping that this time, the message gets across to Democratic voters.

He is saying that "'blue state' elites" who assume that competency, skill, and experience are desirable attributes are wrong in so believing. He values competence, of course, because he can see its importance, unlike the red state rubes:

Competency is something I value. I believe in it, I vote for it. It is what makes a leader (institutional, national, local) both legitimate and charismatic in my eyes. But that’s significantly because I inhabit social and economic worlds where competency has a very immediate and obvious impact on whether those worlds function well or not.

Are there social and economic worlds where competency isn't important? Burke inhabits an academic world, a world of words and ideas, and so he sees "competency" as a function of one's ability to manipulate words and idea. I have no doubt that, if asked to research a historical topic and write an essay about it, he would exhibit competence.

People from working-class backgrounds may be competent at different things, but it's profoundly condescending and demeaning to suggest they don't value competence like he (and his fellow blue-state elites) do. For example, I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that if the pipe under his sink develops a leak, Burke, like me, would call a plumber. I'm guessing he takes his car to Jiffy Lube when the oil needs changing. Odds are he has no clue as to how to safely clean a gun. A man who changes his own oil, does his own home repairs, and hunts regularly might consider Professor Timothy Burke to be profoundly incompetent at a whole range of important activities.

I hate to tell Professor Burke this, (well, actually, I don't) but I cannot, offhand, think of any social or economic worlds in which competency isn't important. From the local dry cleaner to the farm, to the grocery store, smooth operations require competence.

Now, I am a frequent critic of President Bush, and I certainly believe he's been incompetent in executing his duties as President. But it's not as if he ran for President in 2000 on a platform of incompetence. In fact, hearkening back to his father and advisors such as Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, he depicted himself as the more competent candidate. Going back to 1980, Ronald Reagan sold himself as the antidote to the feckless and, yes, incompetent Jimmy Carter. If there's anything close to a universal American value, it is respect for competence -- the ability to do things well.

I have a thought: maybe "red state" voters don't vote against the preferred candidates of "blue state" intellectuals because they believe in witchcraft or don't care about competence. Maybe they vote against them because they believe that blue state intellectuals like Timothy Burke look down on them. And maybe they are right about that.

Holiday Break

2007-12-21T13:15:00.000-05:00

Even atheists like to give (and get) presents, and also to go on vacation. This blog won't be updated for about two weeks, until early January. Best holiday wishes to all my loyal readers. Merry Christmas, even if I am not on board with the whole Christianity stuff.

And Happy Festivus!

Huckabee and the Theocrats

2007-12-21T12:56:00.000-05:00

Usually, I tend to be skeptical about hysterical denunciations of the Christian Reconstructionists. As this 1998 Reason article makes clear, they are indeed batshit crazy -- they really do want to establish a theocracy in the United States. Sort of the Christian equivalent of Muslim Sharia Law, right here in the U.S. of A. Typically, the folks who try to drum up fear of the Christian Reconstructionists do a six-degrees-of-separation act to "prove" that a mainstream conservative really is under their sway.

Now, via Andrew Sullivan and Brink Lindsay, this Robert Novak column which mentions in passing that Huckabee held a fundraiser in the home of Dr. Steven Hotze, a Christian Reconstructionist of some note. Brink Lindsay has the lowdown on this guy, and he's one scary dude. He's associated with the Coalition on Revival, which really and truly does want to establish a no-kidding Christian theocratic state. Here's one of their statements, dug up by Lindsay:

We affirm that the Bible is not only God’s statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible.

Yeah, that's right. They want a Magisterium-style totalitarian theocracy, based on their interpretation of an inerrant Bible.

And Huckabee didn't accidentally accept a campaign contribution from this guy. He went to the man's home and held a fundraiser there. Andrew Sullivan throws around the term "Christianist" with far too much abandon. But in Huckabee's case, it fits.

Department of Unintentional Humor

2007-12-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

From Ann Althouse: "Of course, Bill Clinton can't be saying of Hillary, 'She sucks less.'"

No, but all know it's true, don't we?

Apple Threatens Nine-Year-Old

2007-12-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

One of Fortune's 101 Dumbest Moments in business last year was what seems like a bonehead move by Apple Computer:

Nine-year-old Shea O'Gorman sends a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggesting ideas for improving her beloved iPod Nano, including adding onscreen lyrics so people can sing along. She gets back a letter from Apple's legal counsel stating that the company doesn't accept unsolicited ideas and telling her not to send in any more suggestions.

Might I suggest that, while this may have made her feel badly, there's a simple reason why Apple sent her the letter: Next year, after Apple introduces, say, the sing-along iPod, it doesn't want everybody to be reading the story of how it stole the idea from now-ten-year-old Shea O'Gorman and she's suing them.

Seriously, in our litigious society, does Apple have any choice about not accepting unsolicited ideas from people?

Competitive Grovelling

2007-12-20T23:12:00.000-05:00

I have remarked before that one aspect of religion that I find most puzzling is the apparent need that God has to be worshiped. This is part of the reason I find it difficult to believe: the notion that an entity capable of creating this entire universe gives a rat's ass about being worshiped strikes me as being inherently implausible. Think about it: what kind of entity creates sentient beings and then demands ritual grovelling at periodic intervals? In my experience with people, those who demand the most obsequious displays from others are the least worthy of them. If God really cares whether people worship a golden calf, he's a megalomaniac. As I said before, if I were God, I'd think it was funny. (Or I would take the golden calf to be a crude representation of Me, made by primitives incapable of understanding My true glory. It's the thought that counts, right?)

I realize that religious people seem to be happy, but honestly, it makes me wonder about people. Why, outside of a kinky sex scenario, would anybody find this sort of ritual self-abasement to be fulfilling? Kneeling, bowing, singing songs that say "I suck and you, invisible being, are great." What's the fun in that? I certainly can't prove this, but it strikes me that religious denominations that require less grovelling have to psychologically more healthy than those which tend to require more. So churches that don't do the whole kneeling thing are better than those that do. At least from this perspective.

Anyhow, as religions go, Islam is certainly very high on the we-require-grovelling scale. As Christopher Hitchens observed, Islam "invokes prostrate submission or 'surrender' as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain." Like Hitch, I want to push back, hard, against the deference and respect that Muslims demand -- which is why I support recreational Koran desecration.

In any case, those looking to explain how screwed-up and backward most of the Islamic world is might consider that the abnormally-high level of abject surrender demanded by Islam might be a part of the picture. P.Z. Myers recently linked to a story illustrating just how screwy Islam is. You know what a "zebibah" is? Well, I didn't, before reading this story. It's Arabic for "raisin," but it refers to a mark on the head caused by bashing one's head on the ground five times a day in prayer, as Muslims are wont to do. Having such a mark is now a status symbol among Egyptian Muslims -- "I'm more pious than you, because I bash my head harder."

Seriously, is it any wonder that Muslims blow themselves up for Allah and whip women for showing some ankle? They think God wants them to bash their heads on the ground five times a day. If you live in a universe run by such a sick deity, it is hardly surprising that you do sick things.

Blade Runner Rocks, Dude

2007-12-20T21:39:00.000-05:00

Stephen Metcalf over at Slate discusses the five-dvd Ultimate Edition of Blade Runner (note to Main Squeeze: there are still five days 'till Christmas), and he doesn't much like the movie. According to Metcalf, audiences were bewildered, when they saw it back in '82, and the movie, while visually-stimulating, is a bunch of hooey:

The movie is a transfixing multisensory turn-on from beginning to end. But because its story is underplotted and its characters almost totally opaque, the weight of the film falls to its sumptuous visual palette—its abiding strength—and to its quasi-Nietzschean theology—its abiding weakness.

First of all, they call them motion pictures; the fact that the film is visually-arresting is hardly a point of criticism. As for it being "underplotted" with "opaque" characters, well I suppose if you might think that if you lack imagination or intelligence. Audiences may well have been "bewildered" by the film back in '82, but if so, they were stupid. If the characters seem opaque to Metcalf, maybe it's because he's shallow. (Birds of a feather: his wife laughed at the ending.) The plot is intricate and perfectly-structured; the characters are complex and ambiguous. The phrase "quasi-Nietzschean theology" is pretentious claptrap.

When I saw it in 1982, even as a teenager, I knew it was a great movie. In fact, I saw it three times in the theater during its original release. I was right, and the world was wrong. This illustrates a lesson: when the world says x, and I say y, bet on me.

But his theory about why the film gained popularity is even more idiotic than his musings on a cinematic masterpiece which will undoubtedly outlive his callow prose. I have to quote this passage, lest anybody think I am summarizing him unfairly:

If nothing else, Blade Runner is mesmerizing when caught in pieces; it murmurs beautifully in the background. Unloved on the big screen, Blade Runner found its perfect medium in VCRs and cable TV—in the fragmented, ambient multiplatform afterlife that has become, over the past 20 or so years, the common stuff of movies.

Well, to be fair, there's a glimmer of truth here: were it not for VCRs and cable TV, Blade Runner might have remained obscure, a forgotten masterpiece. But only a glimmer of truth. The notion that it's better when caught in pieces, well, that's ridiculous. I suppose if you lack the intelligence to follow the plot or decipher the "opaque" characters, it's less frustrating to have it on in the background as eye candy rather than actually trying to follow it. But if you want to appreciate the movie, it has to be seen all at once, watched carefully, because it's crafted so that details matter. And, well, the idea that it's "perfect" on the small screen is just absurd. When the final version was re-relased, the Main Squeeze and I saw it together on the big screen, at a late night showing. While that showing did involve a disturbing incident, the film itself is gorgeous on the big screen. Yes, it looks good on TV. But the visual appeal -- which even Metcalf isn't blind to -- is utterly captivating on the big screen.

Blade Runner is proof that greatness wins out, even when not appreciated at first. And Metcalf is proof that some minds are too small to be won over.

Government = Santa Claus

2007-12-20T15:36:00.000-05:00

I have often remarked to friends that modern liberals attribute to government the characteristics that small children attribute to Santa Claus. I wish I had said it here, on my blog, because if I had I'd have the perfect "gotcha" moment. As it is, I have such a moment, but those inclined to be skeptical can say (correctly) "but you never wrote it down."

Anyhow, believe me when I tell you that "modern liberals attribute to government the characteristics that small children attribute to Santa Claus" is a Cheerful Iconoclast aphorism. Well, I just saw this Hillary Clinton ad, via Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse:

I have seldom seen more vivid proof of one of my pet theories.

As Ann Althouse says, "Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?" Yes and no.

In truth, yes, of course. The recipients of these "presents" have to pay for them.

But in the mind of her target audience, the answer is no. The modern liberals that she's trying to reach think the government is Santa Claus. And so Santa can come up with these goodies, and nobody has to pay.

You know, there are a lot of libertarian-leaning people who tend to vote Republican who are very disaffected with George W. Bush and the Republican Party he has forged. This ad vividly reminds them of why they don't like Democrats.

Mike Huckabee -- The Anti-Corporatist

2007-12-19T22:44:00.001-05:00

Some of our friends on the left seem convinced that Mike Huckabee is the genuine anti-establishment, anti-corporatist Republican candidate. Glenn Greenwald wrote a long (well, it's Greenwald) bit -- with five updates! -- about the anti-establishment candidates -- Ron Paul, John Edwards, and Mike Huckabee. Now, it's pretty ridiculous to call Edwards and Huckabee anti-Establishment -- Edwards is a trial lawyer with standard liberal "populist" views, and Huckabee is the ideological heir to George W. Bush. But it's interesting that he quotes, apparently approvingly, Huckabee's claim that he's not part of the "Wall Street-to-Washington axis, this corridor of power." Likewise, Jon Ponder claims that the members of the "corporatist Republican establishment" won't cede power to a Yahoo like Huckabee. Dave Neiwert has similar observations.

Guys, I'm sorry to tell you, but you have it exactly backwards. First of all, Huckabee is the direct ideological heir to George W. Bush. If you hate Bush, you should loathe Huckabee. He's even more of a religious fruitcake than Bush, and, in terms of policies, he seems not to differ from Bush a whit on, well, much of anything.

Sure, Huckabee talks like a populist anti-corporatist. But will that matter a whit in the end? Huckabee is the sort of big government Republican who will undoubtedly embrace all sorts of government programs, rules, regulations, and giveaways. As I noted in this post, corporatism isn't the result of bad people in office -- or not just the result of bad people. It's the result of structures and incentives. And I assure you that Mike Huckabee is not going to fundamentally alter the incentive structures that create corporatism. Nor will Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama, or anybody else with a plausible chance of winning.

The bigger the government we have the more corporatism we will have. And from the sound of things, Mike Huckabee wants a very big government indeed.

Obama's Free Ride

2007-12-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

This Howard Kurtz article in the Washington Post has gotten some traction in the blogosphere. Kurtz's question: is Barack Obama getting a free ride from the media? Are they leaning in his favor? Hillary's operatives make the obvious claim: the media has been far more harsh and negative about her than toward him. One of Obama's people has a hilarious response:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton says the accusation of softer treatment is untrue but "the Clinton campaign whines about it so much, it becomes part of the chatter. No candidate in this race has undergone more investigations and examinations than Barack Obama has," he says, citing lengthy pieces in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. "As Obama says, running against the Clintons is not exactly a cakewalk. Their research operation has ensured that if there's any information about Obama to be had, it's been distributed to the media."

Over at TPM, Greg Sargent doesn't take a side, but instead asks readers for their view.
Clive Crook, by contrast, states the obvious: "there's no question that Obama has been given an easy ride." But Crook suggests that this isn't a result of media bias per se -- or not just media bias -- but instead reflects deeper feelings within the populace as a whole:

But is this sentiment peculiar to the press, I wonder, or a feeling in the country at large? I suspect the latter. The United States may have doubts about Obama's policies (if it knows or cares) or lack of experience (compared with Hillary's such as it is), but it likes him. He is new, and the country is giving him the benefit of the doubt. When it comes to Hillary, there is no such instinct. She is asking for eight years in the White House--another eight years, as her claim of greater experience keeps reminding people--and people seem tired of her already.

I suspect that's a part of it. And you can add to that the fact that he seems like a fairly likable guy. And she isn't. Likable, that is. Well, she's not a guy either, but that's not my point. And the whole underdog-wins narrative is fun, too.

Pardon me for mentioning the obvious, but there's another thing going on as well. In our society today, the worst thing you can be accused of (other than child molestation) is racism. And this means that members of the chattering classes generally avoid saying things that may get them accused -- falsely or not -- of being a racist. In Obama's case, this translates into a certain reticence about critcism or investigation. It means pretending that being a "community organizer" is actually a real job, and writing fawning articles like this. It means paying very little attention to the fact that he is a member of what is effectively a black-supremacist church. But the thing is, Obama is black (or half black, and that means he is "black" by cultural argeeement), and he's not obviously insane, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Obama is the affirmative action candidate.

And the worst part is, the Democrats can't complain, given their institutional commitment to pervasive racial preferences. This is what they asked for, isn't it?

UPDATE: Weird editing glitch fixed.

"Senators For Segregation." OK, Not Really. But Who Cares What They Really Said?

2007-12-18T22:07:00.000-05:00

A Post By Matthew Yglesias:

Remember when Trent Lott was lavishing praise on Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for president on a white supremacist platform? Remember how most of his fellow conservatives disavowed him? Well, here's Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) praising Lott's defense of white supremacy. And then Orrin Hatch (R-UT) did it. And then Arlen Specter (R-PA) did it.

If you read Matt's post without following the links and watching the links, you would think that Lott defended white Supremacy and that Senators Smith, Hatch, and Specter agreed with that defense. That's the plain meaning of Matt's statement.

But if you follow the links, and watch the videos of the statements by Senators Smith, Hatch, and Specter, that's not what they're saying at all. They're saying that Lott's statements were unfairly misconstrued, and that he did not, in fact, defend white supremacy.

These three Senators are not "praising Lott's defense of white supremacy. They're saying it wasn't a defense of white supremacy at all. That the meaning attributed to him was not his true meaning, and that he was unfairly maligned. Now if you want to argue they're wrong, and that he was maligned fairly, fine. Make that argument. But don't attribute statements to people that they didn't make.

Here are the YouTube videos from Matt's links, if you care to judge for yourself:

The Case Against Ron Paul

2007-12-18T08:40:00.000-05:00

Stephen Bainbridge outlines a conservative case against Ron Paul (via Instapundit). Some of Bainbridge's issues don't bother me -- he's a conservative, and I am not. But Bainbridge leaves out the main reason to not support him: he's a kook. He's your crazy uncle, if you have one. Charming, well, I think so. Lovable, sure. Funny, when compared to, say, Mitt Romney, who is the ultimate blow-dried politician. Yes, I'd like to see a Republican Party with more Ron Paul in it. I think that the New Deal and Great Society were big mistakes, and that we'd be a lot better off today with much less government than we have now.

But what Ron Paul and many libertarians don't understand is that Americans are naturally conservative, in the sense that they tend to resist radical change. Sure, they say they want "change," but they want change within a certain range. The real challenge for a serious libertarian is finding a path from here to where we want to be. A way of unwinding the administrative/welfare state.

Even if you agree that we'd be a lot better off with less government -- and I do -- the fact is that people do depend on government programs right now. It's all well and good to say we'd be better off thirty years from now if we adopted more libertarian policies, but if you want to sustain a transition to a more limited government, you have to find some way to ameliorate the transition. And that is a question that Ron Paul seems not to even have thought about.

Keeping Food Cold

2007-12-16T23:09:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan's Face of the Day is a poor little kid in Tulsa who is still without power due to snowstorms. He supposedly is seeking a hot meal at a local church because they lost all their food in the refrigerator due to the loss of electricity. Now, honestly, I don't begrudge somebody caught in a natural disaster a hot meal. Of course they should feed the kid and his mom.

But the story, as written on Sully's site, doesn't make a lot of sense. According to weather.com, the high temperature in Tulsa has been in the thirties for the last week. Under those circumstances, I can imagine many problems, but having food go bad due to lack of refrigeration wouldn't be one of them. If the kid's mom lost her heat due to the storm, her house or apartment would soon be below refrigerator temperature anyway. Just leave food out on the counter. If she has an alternative source of heat, and the home is too warm, she could leave perishables outside. If that's not practical, go outside and get some snow. Use the fridge as a cooler.

Now I can understand how, absent electricity, she might not have the facilities to cook anything. That makes sense. But the whole bit about losing food in the fridge, when it's in the thirties outside and there's snow on the ground, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

What About Those Universities, Cass?

2007-12-16T13:38:00.000-05:00

Clive Crook links to this Cass Sunstein article discussing the phenomenon of "enclave extremism." According to Sunstein, there is strong evidence that hanging around with like-minded people causes people to become more extreme:

About 60 Americans were brought together and assembled into a number of groups, each consisting of five or six people. Members of each group were asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers engage in affirmative action by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming?

As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of "liberal" and "conservative" enclaves — the former from Boulder, the latter from Colorado Springs. It is widely known that Boulder tends to be liberal, and Colorado Springs tends to be conservative. Participants were screened to ensure that they generally conformed to those stereotypes. People were asked to state their opinions anonymously both before and after 15 minutes of group discussion. What was the effect of that discussion?

In almost every case, people held more-extreme positions after they spoke with like-minded others. Discussion made civil unions more popular among liberals and less popular among conservatives. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it far more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion, but they strongly opposed it after discussion. Liberals, mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became fiercely negative about affirmative action after discussion.

Sunstein's particular concern in this article is the internet: according to him, it makes it a lot easier for people to form homogenous enclaves where opinions get radicalized. Arguably you see such enclaves in the form of Free Republic on the right and Daily Kos on the left. It seems clear that mutual affirmation by like-minded is a big part of what's going on at sites like this.

Professor Sunstein does ignore one salient point, though. While it's easy for people to seek out opinions that confirm what you already believe, people of a more (ahem) iconoclastic mindset can certainly find independent and thoughtful voices across the spectrum. And blogging encourages you to read people you disagree with, if only to hammer them.

But I wonder why it is that Professor Sunstein ignores one of the most obvious places where the like-minded can form enclaves: university faculties. University faculties lean well to the left, particularly elite universities. You can hardly expect university professors to be immune to this sort of effect. And you don't need a study to know that "disciplines" like "women's studies," "African-American studies," and -- my favorite -- "peace studies" have to be among the worst

From a practical standpoint, if you believe in freedom of speech, there's not a lot you can do about the whole problem of like-minded enclaves on the internet. I realize that, in Professor Sunstein's case, this is an open question, but for most of us the idea of a regulatory solution is anathema. But in the case of universities, it's easy to imagine policies that would increase ideological diversity. But Professor Sunstein doesn't mention that. I wonder why not.

Costs of Prohibition

2007-12-15T23:12:00.000-05:00

Clayton Cramer has an interesting post on drug prohibition and related issues in which he makes a number of very interesting points. It's well worth reading in full, even if you disagree, and I may come back to it in the future, but for now I want to focus on one issue. In discussing the experience with alcohol prohibition, Cramer makes this point:

As I have mentioned before, cirrhosis of the liver rates fell roughly in half within a few years of the start of Prohibition. They came back up again (although not as quickly) with a few years of the end of Prohibition. Pretty clearly, alcohol consumption, and especially the regular, high consumption of alcohol associated with cirrhosis of the liver, fell because of Prohibition. Whether the other negative consequences of Prohibition (such as gangsters and corrupt politicians) was too high of a price to pay is a legitimate question. It is also a legitimate question whether Prohibition disproportionately discouraged those drinkers who weren't the social problem. I rather suspect that people that had the occasional beer before Prohibition, or some wine at home with dinner, weren't the ones hitting speakeasies--and they weren't the problem that Prohibition was trying to fix. But let's not pretend that prohibiting a commodity doesn't affect consumption rates.

First of all, I concede that of course prohibition, whether of alcohol (then) or illegal drugs (now) does affect consumption rates. When you raise the price of something, you have less of it -- that's darn near close to a universal truth.

That said, "gangsters and corrupt politicians" weren't the only cost associated with alcohol prohibition, though it is the one that libertarians tend to talk about the most when discussing the parallels between alcohol prohibition and the current War on Drugs. Rather, one of the costs was that people who wanted to drink were prohibited from doing so. Clayton is right that "people that had the occasional beer before Prohibition, or some wine at home with dinner, weren't the ones hitting speakeasies--and they weren't the problem that Prohibition was trying to fix." They may not have been "the problem Prohibition was trying to fix" -- although Temperance crusaders, like drug warriors, weren't big on the distinction between recreational and abusive uses. But so what? It was illegal for them, too. And because they were, for the most part, law-abiding people who enjoyed some beer or wine but were perfectly willing to do without, they generally did without rather than incurring the risks of breaking the law. And they were thereby deprived of the experience of having a bottle of wine among friends over dinner. Taking that pleasure away from people -- well it's obscene.

I am fully aware that alcohol has very real social costs. And yes, I think that Al Capone and the other gangsters and hoodlums who prospered during Prohibition were indeed a good reason to do away with it. But the infringement on liberty alone was sufficient reason to object to prohibition. I enjoy having a glass of wine with dinner from time to time, or a beer with my pizza, and I don't see why I should be deprived of that pleasure because some people cannot drink responsibly.

Likewise, the War on Drugs has very real costs, some of which I've touched on before. I think those costs are good and sufficient reasons to get rid of the war on drugs. But that's not the only reason. For the most part, I think I think that taking now-illicit drugs is a bad choice, and if the sorts of drugs that people now use recreationally were legalized, I doubt I'd partake in them. But that would be my choice. People who decide to use heroin or meth might well be throwing their life away, making a very poor choice. But it's their life, and their choice. They should have the freedom to make it.

Shouldn't Huckabee Go Back To Preaching?

2007-12-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

My left-leaning Godless friends directed me to this old article regarding Mike Huckabee and his religious faith. It does nothing to belie the notion that Huckabee is one of those scary Jesus freaks:

The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," he said. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior."

. . . .

"Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does," Huckabee said. "Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed."

. . . .

I'm often asked why taxes are so high and government is so big. It's because the faith we have in local churches has become so small. If we'd been doing what we should have -- giving a dime from every dollar to help the widows, the orphans and the poor -- we now wouldn't be giving nearly 50 cents of every dollar to a government that's doing ... what we should have been doing all along."

Huckabee also explained why he left pastoring for politics.

"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives."

Seriously, is it me or does this make no sense at all? If the "real answer" lies in accepting Jesus, and not in government action, then wouldn't Huckabee do more good preaching the Gospel than running for President, or, before that, serving as Governor? I just don't understand his basic logic here -- the real answer lies in accepting Jesus, not government. So that's why he's running for office? He's an ordained minister -- couldn't he do more, by his own logic, by preaching?

Barack Obama Is Not a Constitutional Law Professor

2007-12-12T08:56:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama has at least once, uttered the sentence "I was a constitutional law professor." This has been repeated, uncritically. One of Sully's correspondents, for example. Mark Kleiman, who really ought to know better, called him a "Con. Law Prof."

As Powerline noted back in April, this is, shall we say, a bit of puffery. Obama has taught courses in constitutional law, and so in casual conversation his students might well refer to him as "Professor." But he is listed on the University of Chicago web page as "Senior Lecturer in Law." His publications page lists his two autobiographical books, but no academic work of any sort, much less any academic writings on constitutional law. Now, given his relatively strong academic credentials and the extent of affirmative action in academic hiring, if Obama had written articles about, well, pretty much anything, he would undoubtedly have been able to get hired at an elite law school in a tenure-track position. But he didn't.

Barack Obama may well know a lot more about constitutional law than the average person, or even the average lawyer. But he is not a Professor of Constitutional Law. Nor is he an assistant professor or associate professor. At most, he's an "adjunct professor," which is not the same thing at all.

Cory Maye and No-Knock Raids

2007-12-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

Radley Balko has a long and moving post about his recent trip to Mississippi where he visited the family of Cory Maye. Now, I sometimes think that Radley goes off the rails, but his work on the Cory Maye case has been exemplary. There's a lot of detail involved in the case, and while I don't claim to have followed every twist and turn, this Radley Balko Reason piece gives some background. Maye's home was raided by the cops late one evening. Awakened from his slumber, Maye ended up shooting and killing one of the police officers on the raid. He claimed he didn't know they were cops, that he was acting in self-defense, albeit mistaken self-defense. The jury rejected his claim and convicted him.

The case touches all sorts of issues involving, poverty, criminal procedures, and the use of arguably-unreliable forensic evidence. But to me the key point is this: so long as we have the "war on drugs," we are going to have cases like Maye's. It's something I touched on in my last post, talking about this California case in which a homeowner shot and killed two young men who broke into his home. In that post I argued that the fact that the homeowner shot the intruders in the back mattered not a whit because it was simply unreasonable, in that confused situation, to demand that he instantly take stock of what his intruders were doing.

By the same token, somebody who is asleep in his or her home, in an environment where a homeowner is entitled to feel safe and secure isn't in a great position to take stock of the situation when a door is broken down in hte middle of the night. People have the right to defend themselves and their homes from attack, and in America they exercise that right. Inevitably, some informants will be unreliable -- they're looking for drug dealers, after all, and most drug dealers don't hang out with schoolmarms and librarians. Inevitably, cops will write down the wrong address, or people will move out. And then, inevitably, some cops and some citizens will be killed. It's just one cost of the war on drugs. One of many.

More On Felony Murder

2007-12-10T19:07:00.000-05:00

This is a followup to my earlier post on felony murder, in which I took Radley Balko and some other bloggers to task for their characterization of the facts of a case discussed in a New York Times article on felony murder. In that case, a guy named Ryan Holle was convicted of murder because he loaned his car to his friends -- after being informed that they intended to use it for a burglary, and that it might be necessary to do violence to a young lady named Jessica Snyder in the course of this burglary, Jessica, age 18, was bludgeoned to death by Mr. Holle's friends.

Radley Balko has now added an update to his earlier post, graciously admitting that he should probably have included in his original post the fact that Holle initially told police that he had been informed about the intended robbery and possible battery. But these facts don't change his mind:

It didn’t affect my opposition to the charge, though, because the guy also said he was drunk, and thought his friends were joking. So his crime here seems to have been an error in judgment. Or maybe an error in judgment affected by drinking too much. I can certainly imagine a scenario in college where I, having no criminal record (this guy didn’t, either), may have had too much too drink at a party, had some acquaintance say, “hey, can we borrow your car?” respond, “why?” and they respond, “because we want to break into someone’s house and steal their weed”,” there’s at least a chance I might have thought they were yanking my chain.

To begin with, Radley seems to be taking Holle's current version at face value, accepting it as fact. But it seems to contradict what he told the police at the time and his own testimony that he'd been told it might be necessary to "knock out" Jessica Snyder. I realize that he works on a lot of these "police abuse" cases, but it isn't necessary to take every convict's claims at face value. More to the point, while Holle apparently didn't have a record, we don't know whether his buddies had records, and that's the relevant question, in determining whether it's likely that Holle thought they were kidding. Sure, if one of my friends said, "can I borrow your car to rob somebody," I'd assume they were joking. But then, there's a pretty good chance (as in, a near-certainty) that they would be joking, because I don't hang out with criminals. If Holle hangs out with criminals, he'd be much less likely to think they were yanking his chain.

But that's not Radley's sole argument:

Believe that about this guy, or don’t. I don’t know how credible this guy is. It does seem clear, though, that he didn’t sit down with these guys and plan the burglary. There’s no mention of him getting a cut of the drugs they planned to steal. His culpability here seems to boil down to a split second of bad judgment. No premeditation. No specific intent. The guy who lent someone his car–after a night of partying under terms where there’s some doubt about whether he knew the real intentions of the lendees–got the same charge and sentence as the guys who committed a premeditated robbery, during which they smashed in a woman’s face with a metal safe. That really sound like a just outcome?

Well, I would have sentenced the actual killer to death, so that would eliminate the disparity between Holle's sentence and the killer's. And I can certainly see arguing for reform of the felony murder rule -- maybe making felony murder a form of second degree murder. But, while Holle didn't plan the murder, he did facilitate by providing transportation. So no, it doesn't strike me as being particularly unjust. He was part of the criminal enterprise.

If the case of Ryan Holle gets your goat, though, this California case really ought to drive you bonkers.

Here's what happened: three young black men, including a 22-year-old named Renato Hughes, broke into the home of Shannon Edmonds, who is white, intending to steal some marijuana. During the course of the burglary, they beat Edmonds' stepson, Dale Lafferty, with a baseball bat, causing permanent brain damage severe enough to render him unable to live independently or even feed himself.

During the course of the robbery, Shannon Edmonds managed to get his gun, and he shot the intruders, killing both of Hughes's accomplices. Edmonds had both marijuana and prescription drugs in his system, but he had prescriptions for both (remember, California has legal medical marijuana). Edmonds isn't charged at all. Renato Hughes, by contrast, is charged with felony murder under the California "provocative acts" doctrine. That's right, he's charged with felony murder in the death of his accomplices, despite the fact that it was the homeowner, not charged, who pulled the trigger.

Predictably, some people are playing the race card. They claim the victim ought to be the one in the dock:

The NAACP complained that prosecutors came down too hard on Hughes, who also faces robbery, burglary and assault charges. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.

The Rev. Amos Brown, head of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP and pastor at Hughes' church, said the case demonstrates the legal system is racist in remote Lake County, aspiring wine country 100 miles north of San Francisco. The sparsely populated county of 13,000 people is 91 percent white and 2 percent black.

Brown and other NAACP officials are asking why the homeowner is walking free. Tests showed Edmonds had marijuana and prescription medication in his system the night of the shooting. Edmonds had a prescription for both the pot and the medication to treat depression.

"This man had no business killing these boys," Brown said. "They were shot in the back. They had fled."

Note the use of the term "boy," despite the fact that the two invaders were 21 and 22, old enough to vote, sign contracts, even buy a beer. All a way of posthumously deflecting responsibility for their own criminality. (I guess Reverend Brown follow the Maureen Dowd theory of childhood.)

According to Reverend Brown's apparent theory, a homeowner has to turn on a dime and hold his fire the second his attackers begin to flee, even if they are still in the house and still a potential threat. That is simply unreasonable -- a home invasion creates a situation of total confusion. Edmonds had no way of knowing whether these people were no longer a threat. And even if they had begun to flee, we have no way of knowing that, with the adrenaline and confusion, this fact had reached his brain at that point. It is absurd to second-guess a homeowner subjected to this sort of attack. (Another reason why police no-knock raids should be strictly limited.)

It is hardly surprising that Hughes's mother is equally outraged. She thinks that her son and his friends were there to buy drugs, not rob the place. Well, I suppose that it is barely possible that this is some sort of drug-deal-gone-bad situation, but it seems unlikely. Most drug sellers don't shoot their customers, and her version doesn't account for the beaten stepson.

It is undoubtedly difficult to face a situation in which your son may well spend the rest of his natural life in prison for a crime he committed at a very young age. It is equally difficult to accept the fact that your son is a thug. But maybe if Judy Hughes and Reverend Brown had done a better job teaching Renato not to break into people's homes to rob them, they wouldn't be facing this predicament today. As in the Jena 6 case, it's a lot easier to cry about racism than to accept responsibility for thuggery.

Frankly, I have sympathy for the real victim, Dale Lafferty, who suffered permanent brain damage. And for Shannon Edmonds, who will undoubtedly suffer anguish over the killings, no matter how justified they were. I have no sympathy left for Renato Hughes or the other two invading beasts killed in the act of their crime. And lest anybody claim racial animus here, I assure you I would have a similar reaction if the invading beasts had been white. If Hughes rots in jail for the rest of his life, well, it's not so bad as what he did to his victims.

This case hasn't gotten a lot of traction in the blogosphere, but I imagine that, if it did, Hughes would get a lot more sympathy, though not from me. I want to acknowledge SteveAudio, whom I credit for the link to the original article. SteveAudio is troubled by what he characterizes as "vigilante style action" by the homeowner. I'd be troubled too if Edmonds had tracked the two guys down and killed them weeks later. But I think it's pretty reasonable to kill attackers who are in your house, particularly when they have beaten one of the occupants with a baseball bat.

Jeralyn over a TalkLeft is also troubled by this case, saying, "I don't like the idea of making defendants liable for the acts of victims." Honestly, I don't see why not -- if the act of the victim is a natural and foreseeable consequence of the crime. In this case, it is eminently predictable that a homeowner might fight back and kill one of the invaders.

Jeralyn also says something else that is quit bizarre. She says that Hughes should be charged with the beating of Dale Lafferty, "assuming it wasn't self-defense." At first I thought this had to be some sort of strange thinko, but then she goes on to say that one of the details she'd like to know is "Was the stepson brandishing a weapon (like a rifle or a gun) at the time he was beaten?"

This suggests that Jeralyn actually believes that these home invaders somehow had the right to engage in "self-defense" with a baseball bat if Dale Lafferty was brandishing a weapon. That's insane -- Lafferty was in his home. He had every right to brandish a weapon at intruders coming into his house. I would argue he had the right to fire a weapon at them. Once you break into somebody's house, you don't have the right to engage in "self-defense."

Live or Memorex?

2007-12-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

Megan McArdle says she's with Ogged, who thinks that music sounds better recorded than in concert. There's something to be said for the virtues of recorded music, and it's certainly true that much of the appeal of a live performance comes from sharing the experience with an audience and seeing performers who are really putting out to give a good show.

Most artists don't sound quite as good in concert as on CD, but they make up for it by putting on a good show. Some artists sound significantly worse in concert -- I saw Montgomery Gentry this summer, and I thought they were horrible. Alan Jackson darn near killed me with a saccharine overdose.

But there are some artists whose live show is so transcendently good that it blows their recorded music away. The best example to me is Brad Paisley -- before I saw him in concert, I considered him a middle-of-the-pack country guy with a few funny songs. After I saw him live, however -- well, all I can say is that man can play the guitar. He's not just a singer who plays a note or two and lets his band do the musical heavy lifting Nope, he's a guitar god in his won right, up there with guys like Clapton and Hendrix. Another example would be Martina McBride -- I knew she had a good voice, but she sounds even better live than on CD.

Romney's "Faith" Speech

2007-12-07T10:39:00.000-05:00

I listened to Romney's "Faith" speech, and I read the transcript, and I have to say I really do admire how slippery the guy is. His thesis is that religion doesn't matter in politics, except when it does. We shouldn't ask people about their religious beliefs, except when we should. He was absolutely masterful in how he precisely he calibrated the level of attention one can give to his Mormon beliefs. All the weird or bizarre parts are ruled off-limits to discussion, but he gets to take credit for his "faith" in general. So no discussion of how some of us get to be gods of our own planet someday, or whether he wears the funny underwear, but he gets to talk about all the "values" stuff where he agrees with the Christian conservatives.

Here's a key passage, which nicely illustrates his balancing act:

There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

Romney wants to stay the heck away from the "distinctive doctrines" of the Mormon Church, because Evangelical Christians would think him an apostate, and people not familiar with the more eccentric aspects of the Mormon faith will think he's a weirdo. Objectively, it's no weirder than any other religion, but, like Scientology, it's got a bad science fiction vibe to it. This hilarious video gives a primer:

Romney doesn't want to get into all that. Instead, he wants to focus on shared moral beliefs:

It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the latter - on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.

There's a certain internal tension here, shall we say. As David Frum puts it:

To be blunt, Romney is saying:

It is legitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the son of God?"

But it is illegitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the brother of Lucifer?"

It is hard for me to see a principled difference between these two questions, and I think on reflection that the audiences to whom Romney is trying to appeal will also fail to see such a difference. Once Romney answered any question about the content of his religious faith, he opened the door to every question about the content of his religious faith.

The reason for that is that he thinks some Evangelicals won't vote for him if he doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is the savior. But he also wants to avoid getting into the nitty-gritty details of Mormon theology, because if he does he's screwed. Hence the "distinctive doctrines" dodge. (Also take a look at Marc Ambinder and Ross Douthat for similar thoughts.)

It's true that most mainstream American religions probably have a common core of moral beliefs, but that's because they're part of a wider American culture that tends to pound down the theological differences (i.e., "distinctive doctrines") that result in disparate outcomes. For example, some people used to use the the doctrine of the "Curse of Ham" to justify the enslavement of blacks and then racial segregation. That "distinctive doctrine" went away under the pressure of a wider American culture that found it repugnant. Similar Mormon beliefs regarding blacks have been modified, over the years.

The "distinctive doctrines" of various churches are relevant to a whole host of hot-button issues, including abortion, use of stem cells, etc. Within Islam, doctrines regarding jihad and the application of Sharia law are of great import.

The line that Romney wants to draw is a very difficult line to maintain. Nonetheless, he doesn't have much of choice. He's got a constituency of Evangelical Christians that he needs to vote for him. Now, I do think that urban elites tend to overstate how narrow-minded such people are, but there really are some folks who think that being a Bible-believing Christian is a necessary qualification for office. No Republican candidate for President can ignore that constituency in the primary, and in a fifty-fifty country, he needs almost all such people to show up and vote for him to win the general election. So Romney has to communicate to that group "I am one of you." But if they start asking questions about Mormonism, he knows they will conclude he's not. Hence the balancing act.

The one group that gets left out are the atheists and agnostics. Indeed Romney's arugment is that religion is necessary for the maintenance of a free republic:

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams' words: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people."

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

This is actually a pretty common view. The idea is that if people don't have some religion, they'll just run riot. On this view, religion doesn't have to be true; it's just that it's necessary to keep people in line. This makes the "pick a faith, any faith" line seem reasonable. This is an empirical thesis that is certainly subject to testing. The obvious thing to do would be to look at the children of atheists and agnostics, correct for all the other variables, and see if they are more likely to grow up to be serial killers.

I suspect that the extent to which "human passions" are actually bridled by religion is at least somewhat overstated. And then there is the problem that religion, when taken too seriously, can inflame the passions rather than bridling them -- inspire people to murder doctors who commit abortion or fly airplanes into skyscrapers.

Ryan Sager appears to have been particularly stung by Romney's failure to even mention the possibility of good atheists:

The most remarkable thing about Romney’s address — and even folks at National Review picked this out, notably Ramesh Ponnuru — is that is wrote atheists and agnostics out of the American nation. Whereas even President Bush, whose own cynical politics have done so much to pit believers versus non-believers, has long gone out of his way to include “good people of no faith at all” in his vision of America. While the president’s need to qualify that phrase with the word “good” might be offensive, it’s a warm embrace of the faithless compared to Romney’s declaration that “freedom requires religion.”

Got that? Those of us who don’t believe in Christianity, those of us who don’t believe in God, those of us who don’t believe in the divinity of human-written holy books have no place in the American experiment, can’t be relied on to uphold the principles of our Constitution, and don’t have the morality necessary to keep a Republic.

I think that's the upshot of his thesis, Ryan. I think that's intentional. He's saying to the Christian Conservatives that they have a common enemy: secularists. He is trying to say that the differences between Mormons, Evangelical Christians, and Catholics don't matter, because there are these folks out there who want to take "In God We Trust" off the coins and destroy the Republic. From a purely political perspective, this is probably a good move in his part.

He's not losing many votes, because, while a few atheists and agnostics (like me) adopt a libertarian free market approach, most of the Godless embrace the Big State with both arms. Many substitute a belief in an omnipotent God with a belief in an Omnipotent state. Which is even worse, since religious belief has harmless manifestations, while statism does not.

Which is why, at the end of the day, Romney's musings on faith don't particularly interest me. So long as his religion doesn't motivate him to do something screwy or desstructive, I don't care what he believes. I'd much rather have a candidate who wears funny underwear and is bucking to be God of his own planet than one who wants to raise my taxes, increase the scope of government regulation, and take away my freedom. His feelings toward my atheistic beliefs matter not a whit, so long as he pushes policies preferable to the other candidate.

Hugh Hewitt On Romney's Speech

2007-12-07T09:25:00.000-05:00

Hugh seemed to like it:

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece. The staging and Romney's delivery, the eclipse of all other candidates it caused, the domination of the news cycle just prior to the start of absentee voting in New Hampshire on Monday --for all these reasons and more it will be long discussed as a masterpiece of political maneuver.

In other news, Hewitt reports that Romney's spooge tastes like a vanilla milk shake from one of those fifties-style diners.

Felony Murder

2007-12-06T16:14:00.000-05:00

This New York Times article discusses the felony murder rule, using the case of Ryan Holle, now serving life in prison, as a jumping-off point. As one might expect, there are conflicting interpretations of the facts, but the basic story is this: Holle was out partying with some friends one night, when, at least somewhat intoxicated, he loaned his car to a friend. His friend and three other individuals drove over to the home of a local marijuana dealer with the intent of robbing it. Which they did. In addition, they bludgeoned to death the dealer's 18-year-old daughter, Jessica Snyder, with a shotgun they found at the residence.

All four were convicted of murder, as was Holle, under the felony murder doctrine, which the New York Times describes as "a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies." This rule "generally broadens murder liability for participants in violent felonies in two ways. An unintended killing during a felony is considered murder under the rule. So is, as Mr. Holle learned, a killing by an accomplice."

The New York Times notes that the Brits -- whose common law brought us the rule -- abolished the doctrine in the late fifties, while India and other common law countries have done so as well, including our Canadian neighbors. The argument against the rule, generally, is that it is disproportionate, because the defendant is being held responsible for something he didn't personally do. The counter to that is that all participants in a felony share blame for the foreseeable consequences.

Holle, according to the Times article, "had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary." Indeed, he also testified that "he had been told it might be necessary to 'knock out' Jessica Snyder." So he knew both that a robbery was planned and that violence might well be necessary. Now Holle claims he didn't actually believe them -- he thought that the talk of the robbery was a joke. If true that might well be exculpatory, but, based on the sketchy account in the article, it sounds like the jury didn't believe him.

The problem with The New York Times article is that it conflates two distinct issues. The first issue is Holle's case, and the second issue is the felony murder rule, in general. The article tries to cast doubt on on Holle's culpability, and thereby to undermine the rule, in general. But that doesn't necessarily follow. Even if you believe that the evidence wasn't sufficient in his case, or that he didn't do enough to help that he ought to found guilty, you can still believe in the rule's application, in general. That said, Adam Liptak, the author of the article, deserves credit for fairly presenting the facts that would tend to show Holle did know of the car's intended use and is therefore at least arguably culpable.

The same cannot be said of all the bloggers commmenting on the article. The dishonesty is particularly apparent at TAPPED, where Brad Plumer says:

Do I have this right? Florida courts have long rejected the argument that gun wholesalers are at all responsible for any murders committed with the weapons they sell. But, as The New York Times reports today, if a groggy 20-year-old in Florida lends some friends his car one morning, and they end up killing someone, he can be convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole?

[Correction: he isn't at TAPPED. See update below.] Conveniently left out is that Holle's pals didn't just "end up killing someone," as if by accident. Nor did Holle innocently lend some friends his car. Rather, he lent it to them after being told that they were going to use it for a burglary.

Scott Lemieux is equally dishonest, stating that "Via Brad Plumer, Adam Liptak discusses the case of a 20-year-old in Florida serving life without parole for lending some friends his car. " Sure, that's true enough -- but utterly misleading, as it leaves out the fact that he was told it was going to be used in a burglary.

Radley Balko makes a similar error -- he quotes a passage from the the same New York Times article, and just like the guys at TAPPED, he leaves out the salient facts. Instead, he says this:

Maybe this guy should have been more careful who he lent his car to. Maybe he shouldn’t have drank so much. Maybe he shouldn’t have been partying with such shady characters. But life in prison? Come on.

Or maybe he shouldn't have loaned his car to people who told him they planned to use it in a burglary.

Not surprisingly, Balko's old nemesis, Patterico, is on the case. As Patterico observes, "Balko’s post makes it sound like this fellow simply lent his car to some people, without any idea that they were going to go commit a burglary or hurt anyone."

If you want to argue against the felony murder rule, fine. Personally, I don't have a problem with it, in most instances -- I think that those who participate in or facilitate serious felonies share moral culpability with those who actually pull the trigger or do the beating. And such liability is easy to avoid: if you hang out with people who like to beat, rob, or rape other people, don't loan them your car.

But why is it that the folks who are so critical of the felony murder rule have to lie about the facts, or rather leave out salient facts? If they really think it's a bad rule, then they ought to be willing to argue that Holle shouldn't be held liable for murder even if he knew they were going to be bludgeon the girl to death and lent them the car anyway. Heck, if you really don't think the felony murder rule is a good rule, only the guy who actually did the bludgeoning should be convicted of murder -- even the other burglars get off the hook.

If that's their argument, they ought to make it, rather than twisting the facts to try to make it seem as if an injustice is occurring.

UPDATE: In the comments, Brad Plummer corrects an error on my part -- I had said he was associated with TAPPED, which is not the case. Brad Plumer has his own blog, which I could have noted by the simple expedient of reading. I had found his article following the link from Scott Lemieux at TAPPED, and somehow I got it in my head they were both TAPPED bloggers. One might note the irony of my making a simple factual mistake in a post which accuses other bloggers of getting the facts wrong.

Brad is also quite good-natured about my reference to the way he and the other bloggers referred to the facts, which made me feel worse than I would have if he had launched a scathing attack on me. I used the term "lie" to describe their accounts, and I now think that was overstating. Do I really think they consciously lied? Well, probably not, so I apologize to Brad Plumer, Scott Lemieux, and Radley Balko for using that term.

I suspect, instead, that they didn't see Holle's knowledge of the intended use of his vehicle as being a salient fact. My guess is that this is the reason why all three failed to include it in their original posts. For reasons I've tried to articulate, I think it is the key fact. I continue to believe their descriptions are misleading without it. But a lie is an intentional misstatement of fact, and that was an overstatement on my part. I should not have accused them of bad faith.

I still think they were wrong, though.

UPDATE 2: I fixed a couple of typos.

UPDATE 3: Additional Thoughts Felony Murder Here.

Big Government Is Big Business

2007-12-05T16:29:00.000-05:00

Radley Balko puts together a couple of interesting tidbits. First, you've got this, from Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute, showing that the number of federal subsidy programs has increased by about 25% since 2000. (Edwards notes the irony that there are now 1,776 such programs.)

And then Balko points to this from the Washington Post: an article about how lobbying is a big growth industry. Apparently, the number of lobbyists has nearly doubled since the year 2000, and they are raking in the bucks.

Balko uses this as an excuse to take a shot at Bush and the Republican Congress, and lord knows they deserve it. But, as I noted before in talking about agriculture regulations, the problem isn't bad people in power, or at least isn't just bad people. The problem is structural. The United States has a 13 trillion dollar economy. The federal government spends about 20% of that, and its policies greatly affect the other 80%. Try this experiement someday, if you can get Bill Gates to fund it for you: fill garbage cans with $100 bills and randomly leave them in Central Park. I suspect you won't have to wait long before people start hanging around in the park, trying to be there for your next money drop.

The same is true of the federal government. They have so much money to toss around and their rules and regulations have so much impact on the rest that people would be stupid not to hire lobbyists and influence peddlers. Want to get rid of it? Fine -- reduce the size and scope of the federal government. But, people being people, it's too much to expect that they won't respond to the incentives generated by a massive, intrusive, federal regulatory/welfare state.

You Know You're in Trouble When . . .

2007-12-05T16:08:00.001-05:00

Whoopi Goldberg is the intellectual giant in a group.

(Credit to Yglesias.)

Fox & Friends: Apparently Still Dumb

2007-12-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

Instapundit links to this amusing tirade by Instapunk regarding the stupidity of the Fox News morning show, Fox & Friends. Apparently he actually watched the show for an hour and a half, and he emerged from the resulting vegetative state to report that Fox & Friends failed to cover the most important story of the day and instead covered fluff. Next he will be telling us that there's gambling in Las Vegas.

Seriously, I've known Fox & Friends was idiotic for years, and I don't think I could survive more than an hour of it. I salute Instapnuk's stamina, if nothing else, and he has earned the right to pepper the Fox & Friends on-air "talent" with gratuitous insults, if so inclined. Which he is. He roundly insults all of the anchors at Fox & Friends, and in most cases his comments are both amusing and on-target.

Still, he crosses the line when he refers to "ballooning midlife insanity of Wellesleyite Page Hopkins, who would like somebody to notice and perhaps have sex with her." Granted, Page Hopkins does bear a startling resemblance to the Joker, but I am still pretty sure she can get a man to have sex with her, when she is in the mood.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

An Obaminable Attack

2007-12-03T21:11:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias is outraged by a recent Clinton-campaign attack on Obama. As he puts it, "Um, seriously, the Clinton administration is attacking Barack Obama based on an essay he wrote in kindergarden. They follow up with an account of something he did in third grade!"

Yes, it sounds utterly ridiculous. But if you follow his link, and actually read the statement, in context, it is a lot less unfair than Yglesias would have us believe. Obama has attacked Hillary Clinton, arguing that, unlike her, he hasn't been angling for the Presidencey for decades. Hillary Clinton's camp issued a press release which quotes Obama repeatedly telling people, from his law school classmates to his brother-in-law, that he planned to run for President. Yes, the Clinton camp cited statements he made back in kindergarten and third grade, but only as a part of a pattern on his part.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Every American has the right to want to grow up and run for President -- most Americans get over it. Some Senators (subliminal voice: Joe Biden) ought to get over it. But if one of Obama's claimed advantages is that he only recently considered running for President, then it is surely responsive and relevant to point out a long string of contrary statements, apparently going back as far as kindergarten.

UPDATE: About ten minutes after posting this, I noticed that Glenn Reynolds has picked up the story. He links to both Robert Reich and Dan Riehl, neither of whom seems to approve. (Riehl is nice enough to link to the original press release, rather than a news story about it, which I think is the better practice. So I thank him for the link.)

I am not generally a fan of Hillary Clinton, but read in context, I think she is making a fair point. Obama says he hasn't been thinking about running for President. He claims that as an advantage, a reason why he is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton I think it's perfectly fair for her to point out a series of statements which belie his claim. There's nothing wrong with writing an essay about how you want to President in grammar school. I don't think that Hillary Clinton argues to the contrary. But if you are claiming that you never thought about running for President, the fact that you've been thinking about is since kindergarten is a pretty compelling rebuttal.

Mike Huckabee Phones God -- and Sully Freaks

2007-11-30T18:46:00.000-05:00

Sully links to this blurry YouTube video of Governor Huckabee talking to God -- on his cell phone. Sullivan dubs it "horrifying," but I think that's going too far. It would be "horrifying" if Huckabee actually heard God on the other end of the phone, issuing instructions. I don't think he believes that God is actually on the other end, although with Huckabee you can't be sure.

It's my sense that Huckabee was just trying to be funny, although it's not nearly as successful as his Chuck Norris ad. But, while it's not horrifying, it is derivative: he's just copying an old Ellen DeGeneres act.

Was that horrifying too? Well, I suppose it was.

More On Gerson

2007-11-29T13:02:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I talked about the way Michael Gerson is getting hammered by conservatives, but, predictably, he has a few defenders. Ross Douthat links to this Josh Patashnik defense of Gerson, over at The Plank. Patashnik thinks that conservatives are being unfair to Gerson by characterizing him as a statist big-government leftist. In fact, according to Patashnik, Gerson's actual policy proposals are pretty small-bore, despite his highfalutin' rhetoric:

Gerson doesn't want a massive new federal effort to combat social injustice; he wants a modest effort, but one imbued with an awesome new sense of moral purpose. It's Tommy Thompson's ideology wrapped in RFK's rhetoric. One can question whether this is really a unique political philosophy meriting a big book deal, but Great Society liberalism it ain't. To me--and I mean this in a good way--it seems more or less like run-of-the-mill centrism; he probably could have just joined the Republican Main Street Partnership or the DLC and been done with it, though that wouldn't have earned him very much money.

So what exactly is the difference between a small-bore government program with a modest budget that gets implemented because people kinda sorta think it might do some good and exactly the same program "imbued with an awesome new sense of moral purpose"? Does the grandiose rhetoric have any independent value?

I think that the reason for the conservative reaction to Gerson has a lot of roots. To start with, small government types are often tarred from the left with the "you don't care about the poor" brush. Most of the time, it's a stupid, irrelevant distraction from the real policy question about whether big government programs actually achieve their stated goal, but it is a quite common rhetorical strategy. To have that idiotic leftist mantra repeated verbatim by one who is supposed to be one of our own is infuriating.

Further, when Gersonian rhetoric is accepted by folks who are supposed to be conservative, it leaves fiscal conservatives and libertarians rhetorically disarmed when somebody comes along and employs the grandiose rhetoric in support of grandiose programs. Gerson and his ilk may not support massive big-government programs (although I am unconvinced that they don't), but they redefine the terms of the debate in a manner favorable to statist big-government liberalism.

There's also something else going on as well, I think. Quite a few conservatives and libertarian-leaners who have tended to vote Republican have already broken with George W. Bush. And yet, quite a few conservatives still have some residual loyalty to President George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Let's face it: Gerson's philosophy isn't that far from that of is former boss. Attacking Gersonism is a way of attacking Bushism without going after Bush.

I've already recommended Matt Kibbe's review of Gerson's book, and again, it is well worth reading in full. Kibbe thinks that Gerson is being stupid when tries to read small government types out of the movement:

It’s true that there has always been some tension on the Right between traditionalists and small-government proponents, but the coalition has also been conservatism’s greatest strength. By arguing that one must pick one or the other, Gerson is indicating a willingness to hack off a huge chunk of the conservative coalition — all the while claiming that this is the way to save it.

True. But isn't that equally true of Bush? Sure, Bush managed to win two terms in the Oval Office for himself, but he's managed to burn down the house Reagan built.

Consider the following passage, from a post by left-leaning blogger Publius at Obsidian Wings:

But 2008 is a new world. The modern conservative movement is both intellectually and practically exhausted. It’s still a powerful force, but the fires ain’t burnin’ like they were 20 years ago. There’s a window here to shift the course of the river – to enact not only a stable progressive majority, but to chart a lasting progressive course on the big issues of our day (health care, climate change, foreign policy).

Can you even imagine a paragraph like that being written tweny years ago? And why is the conservative movement in such shambles? Well, the reason is pretty obvious: the rise of "compassionate conervatism" and the presidency of George W. Bush, along with the Gersonian rhetoric Bush has embraced.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Gerson couches so many of his arguments in terms of what Republicans need to do to wine. Because Gersonism -- or Bushism -- is a sure fire way to get that "stable progressive majority" that Publius yearns for.

UPDATE: Minor editing glitch fixed.

Gersonism and Conservatives

2007-11-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

I confess: I am going to break one of my own rules. In general, I make it a practice to refrain from criticizing books I have not read. But after perusing Michael Gerson's column archives at the Washington Post, well, readings of Heroic Conservatism are starting to look like a viable alternative to waterboarding. Still, the world doesn't need me to read the book and criticize it, because Gerson is absolutely getting hammered.

Start with the personal stuff: The Atlantic published an article by Gerson's former White House colleague Matthew Scully which accuses Gerson of self-aggrandizement and exaggeration of his own role in various matters. And of taking credit for other people's work. David Frum weighs in, saying:

I worked closely with Gerson and Scully, and I know both men well, as I do the third member of that once-intimate band, John McConnell. I witnessed the events Scully chronicled, and I can attest to the accuracy of Scully's account.

Frum then goes on to accuse Michael Gerson of plagiarism, which is a pretty serious charge. I mean, you've got to be pretty desperate to plagiarize David Frum.

While this bickering among former Bush Administration insiders is undoubtedly amusing, it isn't of great import. Of course Gerson is a climber who exaggerates his own importance and shades accounts to make himself look good. This distinguishes him not at all from his fellow members of the political caste.

In addition to the nasty, vindictive personal stuff, the book has attracted a lot of substantive criticism as well, particularly from conservatives. George Neumayr at Human Events referred to Gerson's "Heroic Liberalism," and characterized the whole Gersonian enterprise as a "cowardly retreat from conservatism." Jonah Goldberg asked "Why is This Man Called a Conservative"? Even Ross Douthat, who is the sort of squish who might be susceptible to Gerson's style of argument, penned a negative review for Slate, and he's had a couple of blog posts following up on it.

So what, exactly, is Gerson's philosophy? What is "Heroic Conservatism"? Well, as I said, I haven't read the guy's book, and I have no intention of doing so. But it's not clear that such exertion is really necessary. Gerson is the sort of intellectual who would only be so-classed because he's a member of the political caste. Gerson's "Heroic Conservatism" is a warmed-over version of Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism." In his column, he tells us that he cares a lot about the poor, and that people who disagree with him on this or that are uncaring.

In this column, for example, he goes after Dick Armey and Phil Gramm, before going after his real target: the libertarian-leaning wing of the Republican Party. Typical Gersonian rhetoric:

But the moral stakes are even higher. What does a narrow, anti-government conservatism have to offer to urban neighborhoods where violence is common and intact families are rare? Very little. What hope does it provide to children in foreign lands dying of diseases that can be treated or prevented for the cost of American small change? No hope. What achievement would it contribute to the racial healing and unity of our country? No achievement at all.

Ross Douthat quotes him as saying fiscal conservatives are "small minded, cold and uninspired," and Gerson's columns are imbued with this sort of rhetoric. Gerson is very comfortable sitting astride his moral high horse.

Gerson takes pains to distance himself from traditional big-government statist liberals, but, in practice, his arguments has exactly the same form as do theirs: I care about the poor and dispossessed, while you small-government types don't. He doesn't seem overly concerned about whether his favored nostrums actually achieve their stated goals, whether they have unintended consequences, or whether market solutions are indeed a superior alternative. But, for Gerson, it's not about that. Matt Kibbe's scathing review is worth reading in full, but he absolutely nails it, when he says of Gerson:

But what’s important to note is that it’s indicative of Gerson’s worrisome approach to governing. In his world, it’s not just about creating policy that works, but policy that makes him feel good. He doesn’t want government to get out of the way; he wants to use it to help him find meaning.

The urge to find meaning through politics is one of the most pernicious and destructive urges in human history. At its worst, it leads to atrocities: the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Gulags, death camps. In its most mundane form it leads to bad policies. It's what is wrong with liberalism in its modern sense, and, for that matter, a lot of what's wrong with the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Good Job, Princess Cruise Lines

2007-11-28T20:07:00.001-05:00

This is amazing: via Radley Balko an account of a poor old lady who spent ten years saving for an Alaska cruise. Princess Cruises even booked the lady's air travel. Booked her on three different flights, on three different airlines, all to get her to Alaska in, one presumes, the cheapest way possible. So of course this poor elderly pensioner misses the boat, due to ubiquitous travel snafus.

And here's the fun part: not only won't Princess Cruises refund her the money she took ten years saving, they've taken, and apparently plan to keep, the partial refund she got from the airlines. And, stupidly, they continue to be adamant even after being contacted by a Washington Post reporter.

I have to say that if I were a competitor of Princess Cruises, I'd give the old lady a free cruise to Alaska. Then I'd have her tape a commercial saying "Princess Cruise Lines screwed me out of my money, but Cheerful Iconoclast Cruises treated me like a queen!"

Government Largesse: Some Strings Attached

2007-11-28T19:48:00.000-05:00

Radley Balko links to this article about the Supreme Court's refusal to review a challenge to a San Diego program in which government officials searched the homes of welfare applicants. People were free to refuse to be searched -- but if they did, they couldn't get benefits. As Mr. Balko points out, the notion that applying for government benefits constitutes consent to a search is pretty broad:

I suspect the law-and-order response to the policy in San Diego would be something along the lines of "if they can’t prove they’re clean, they don’t deserve my tax dollars." Of course, if everyone who received any sort of government assistance had to consent to a search of their home, the Fourth Amendment would be pretty much null(er). For example, I’d guess there’d be quite a bit more outrage if these fishing expeditions/searches were being done on the homes of, say, middle class kids applying for government-subsidized student loans instead of low-income people applying for welfare.

There might be more outrage, but of course many of the same justifications for searching the homes of welfare recipients might apply to student loan recipients. In any case, this practice points to one of the often-unappreciated costs of the massive welfare state: it inevitably leads to increased government monitoring of the beneficiaries of welfare programs. And of course as people become accustomed to searches of all sorts, the willingness to object or resist declines.

The power to do something for you is also the power to do something to you.

Presidential Candidates Lie, and It Is (Sometimes) a Good Thing

2007-11-27T15:31:00.000-05:00

Over at PowerLine, Paul Mirengoff says that he thinks Bush was lying back in 1999, when he started spouting on about "compassionate conservatism:"

When I first heard George W. Bush talking about "compassionate conservatism" in 1999, I figured (and certainly hoped) that it was at least 80 percent ad campaign and no more than 20 percent policy guide. Eight years later, it seems to me that, in practice, the Bush administration probably hasn't strayed too far to the wrong side of that proportion.

I must confess that I too thought it was PR: I thought that Bush was a straight-up Reagan conservative, and that the "compassionate conservative" crap was about getting votes from the soccer moms.

Unlike Mirengoff, however, I wish that Bush had been lying when he talked about being a compassionate conservative. But he wasn't! Bush managed to ram the prescription drug entitlement program through a Republican Congress at just the time when the "spoiled generation" -- the Baby Boomers -- are about to start retiring and getting sick and bankrupting us all. Bush gleefully signed the "No Child Left Behind Act," a bill with no real benefits that massively increases the role of the federal government in education -- something real conservatives have been trying for decades to reduce. And of course we have the near-miss of the Bush amnesty for illegals. He's gotten his way on plenty of those "compassionate" policies -- enough to do real damage.

And, worst of all, he's gotten Christian Conservatives -- who might have been a lost cause anyway -- used to the idea that big government is their friend, thereby fracturing the Republican coalition. And bringing us "serious" candidates like Mike Huckabee, who, despite having hilarious ads with Chuck Norris, manage to combine the worst elements of nanny-state big government tax-and-spend liberalism with know-nothing Christianist moralizing. Thanks, Bush!

So yeah, I too hoped he was lying back in '99. I was right, but it turned out that he was lying about the "conservative" part.

Mona over at Unqualified Offerings is outraged by Mirengoff's post, but for quite different reasons. She's mad that Mirengoff approves of the lying in the first place. As she puts it, "the point is, Power Line is not just conceding, but approving that a Republican presidential candidate lied to get elected." (Emphasis in original.)

I would be terrified at the thought of having a President who didn't lie, repeatedly and well, in order to get into the Oval Office. Because any Presidential candidate who isn't a good liar would have to actually believe all the nonsense that any person who wants to be President has to say.

What do we want in a President? We want a person who is reasonably intelligent, with an IQ of between, say, 125 and 150 -- no higher because super-geniuses tend to be erratic, but no lower, either. We want somebody who is intellectually curious about the world, well-informed on major issues, who has at least some substantive knowledge of economics and statistics and political theory. We want somebody who is a good manager, and who is good at picking people and evaluating their performance. We want somebody whose world-view is evidence-based rather than faith-based. We want somebody who can think for him or herself, who makes independent judgments about matters.

Note that this is very generic -- it's not about ideology, but about the general intellectual characteristics we would seek in a President.

It's my thesis that any person who meets these criteria will have views that will render the candidate unelectable if expressed openly. Consider the following propositions:

Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme designed to ensure support for big government, but we are stuck with it for the present. America's farmers are a bunch of welfare queens and farm subsidies should be abolished. Evolution is true, and creationists are a bunch of know-nothings. DARE is a waste of money and it should be defunded. Worse, the whole War on Drugs is pernicious. The attack on Iraq was a huge tactical blunder, but having gotten into the war, we need to do anything possible to avoid ignominious defeat. Free trade is a good thing, and the United States should unilaterally abolish all trade barriers. We shouldn't worry about opium being grown in Afghanistan.

All of these propositions are totally defensible in reasoned argument, but, if espoused bluntly, any one could render a candidate totally unelectable. I'm not saying that a qualified candidate would have to believe any or all of these claims, but most independent thinkers of requisite intelligence are likely to believe at least something that renders him or her unelectable.

And so we have a choice: we can insist on total honesty, and we can select a candidate so stupid, dull, or unimaginative that the candidate has no heterodox views. Or we can accept the fact that presidential candidates, like all politicians, lie. They lie frequently, openly, and with great skill. If they didn't, they couldn't get elected.

Free the Small Farmers -- And Everybody Else, Too

2007-11-27T12:37:00.000-05:00

Given the vitriolic nature of much left/right "debate" on the web, it's nice to see a civil exchange between people who nonetheless disagree quite fundamentally. So I want to congratulate Libby Spencer at Newshoggers and Jim Henley for the tone of a recent exchange that nonetheless nicely illustrates the differing mindset between those who instinctively support the modern liberal regulatory state and those who are more skeptical of it.

Spencer points to this Nation article, which focuses on the travails of one small Michigan farmer in dealing with overbearing regulators, but which discusses, more generally, the issues facing small farmers (often organice) who embrace a direct-to-consumer model. Reading this article in The Nation, I got the momentary sensation I was reading Reason instead. Witness this passage, for example:

But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to "protect" us from pathogens and other dangers.

Wow, I thought you had to be a libertarian to put "protect" in sneer quotes like that. Still, there is the inevitable swipe at big business and the "mass-production factory system" of agriculture. So it's The Nation after all. Spencer reads this article and concludes that reducing regulations will do nothing but "allow the corporations to more easily foist off bad food." But the regulations have to be done correctly, which, according to her means that "they need to be enforced against the commercial facilities they were designed to oversee, not wrongly used to destroy privately owned competition."

Jim Henley responds, in a post amusingly titled "Wishing for a Free Range, Organic -- Pony." Henley's argument is that this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the regulatory/farm welfare system we now have in place:

Three-quarters of a century of regulatory-state agriculture has left us with a system of subsidized corporate farms who deplete the soil, abuse animals and enjoy a coziness with state agents while the same state agents hassle independent operators and crusading eccentrics out of business. It’s as if, my man IOZ would say, there’s a pattern.

The pattern is that reforms are put in place to regulate evildoers, but the evildoers soon harness the regulatory agencies to reduce competition. There's even a term for that: it's called "regulatory capture." The classic example is the Interstate Commerce Commission, originally created to regulate railroads that quickly turned into a way for existing enterprises to restrict competition.

But Spencer doesn't see it that way. According to her it is all the fault of Big Bad Bush:

I'm not unaware that Bush didn't build the bureaucracy singlehandedly, but he stacked the agencies with industry cronies, putting them in charge of oversight. Under his administration, regulations have been relaxed from previous safety standards for everything from consumer goods to coal mining. Enforcement against corporate entities is practically nonexistent.

In other words, her view is that it's bad people enforcing the regulations, not the existence of the regulations themselves that causes the problem.

So who's right? Well, as a person who leans libertarian, I am naturally inclined to agree with Henley, but that could well be confirmation bias at work. And yet, I think that the evidence leads to that view. It may well be true that regulators have been unusually compliant under Bush -- I honestly don't know enough to make such a global judgment -- but as I noted earlier, the classic example of regulatory capture is the Interstate Commerce Commission, an agency created over 100 years ago. Nor is it limited to just the ICC -- it happens in basically every field when an all-encompassing regulatory agency takes over. The "bad people" explanation gets weaker and weaker when something happens over and over again.

I also have to wonder whether Ms. Spencer read the article in The Nation with sufficient care. The farmer who is highlighted, Greg Niewendorp, had problems not with the federal bureaucrats appointed by the Evil Bush, but instead had difficulties with the Michigan Department of Agriculture, a state regulatory agency. And, as the article highlights, the regulatory difficulties of these independent producers involve both state and federal regulators. Which, again, suggests a more structural problem, rather than the "bad people" explanation that Spencer seems to favor.

And there is at least some irony here. Niewendorp, the farmer whose plight was highlighted by the article in The Nation, objected to a program which is supposed to test cattle for bovine tuberculosis. In general, I am not a huge fan of government regulation, but as health-and-safety regulations go, requiring that beef critters be tested for communicable diseases doesn't strike me as being that onerous or unjustified. Now, Niewendorp's claim is that he's just a small-scale producer and that his customers trust his practices. As somebody with libertarian procilities, I am more willing than a lot of people to let people assume this sort of risk. However, if you are the sort of person who believes in the case for lots of government regulation generally, I don't see how you can say that the guy ought not have his cattle tested.

Likewise, the article talks about small-scale producers who do their own butchering, and sellers of raw milk and cider:

Federal and state agriculture and health authorities say farmers are violating all kinds of regulations to meet fast-growing consumer demand, such as slaughtering their own hogs and cattle instead of using state and federally inspected facilities, and selling unpasteurized dairy products and cider without the proper permits.

Raw milk is a matter of huge controversy. Personally, I don't enjoy throwing up all that much, and as a result I am a big fan of of pasteurization. Silly me, but I think Louis was onto something with this whole "germ theory" thing. That said, I think that if people want to purchase clearly-labeled raw milk, they ought to be free to do so. Likewise, I think that if people want to purchase cows or pigs that were slaughtered by the farmer in his barn, rather than in a government-inspected slaughterhouse, you ought to be free to do so, so long as there is full disclosure. But if you are the sort of person who read The Jungle and who believes generally in the case for government-inspected slaughterhouses, I am not sure why you ought to make an exception for "local, organic" farmers.

Note To MSM: Stop Lying

2007-11-26T15:30:00.000-05:00

I recently blogged about CNN's decision to label Democratic-Party activists "undecided voters." Now, via Instapundit, this little tidbit, claiming that the San Francisco Chronicle's online edition has a feature which allows moderators to delete comments in a particularly sneaky way. Lots of sites allow comment deletion -- blogger lets me delete comments, although I seldom do so, and certainly would never do so simply because somebody disagrees with me. (In fact, the only comments I have ever deleted thus far have been comment spam.)

But the Chronicle feature deletes the comment for everybody except the person who originally posted it. The person who made the original comment gets a cookie which identifies them, and they still see their own comment. (Of course the person can purge the cookie, or go to a different computer, in which case it won't be visible.) Apparently, the idea is to prevent people from getting up-in-arms about having their comments deleted.

If they want to delete comments, it's their site. There are no "equal time" rules requiring newspapers to allow comments. But if you delete comments, don't lie to the people who made them and pretend the comment has not been deleted.

Might I suggest that this willingness to lie is part of the reason why the "MSM" is in such trouble these days? Hint: if you want to get your credibility back, then, at a minimum, stop lying.

Lispin' Rudy

2007-11-19T22:41:00.000-05:00

Ann Althouse links to this YouTube video of Mo Rocca making fun of Rudy's lisp, and James Taranto's comments in response.

Taranto says that Rocco is being homophobic. Professor Althouse is underwhelmed by Taranto's argument:

I guess he sort of has a point. But it seems to me Mo Rocca is mostly making fun of himself. Also he says nothing about homosexuality, and other political figure with a lisp he refers to is Winston Churchill — who, like Giuliani, is quite macho.

Um, Ann, given Rudy's propensity to flounce around in women's clothes, are we sure he's "quite macho"? Maybe the "macho Rudy" thing is an act? Could he be compensating for something?

Logically, neither Rudy's speech patterns nor his propensity to run around in women's clothing ought to affect his candidacy. Still, if his "macho" attitude is perceived as an attempt to cover up a somewhat less-macho reality, it will surely hurt Giulianni's candidacy. Al Gore may have won his debates against Bush on purely intellectual grounds, but his more effeminate mannerisms (including, according to some, a slight lisp) undoubtedly hurt his campaign, particularly among men. If Rudy is perceived as effeminate, he's toast.

Chuck Norris For President

2007-11-19T18:03:00.000-05:00

This Mike Huckabee ad is all over the place.

Sully links to RedState saying it is "insanely good," as well as Ezra Klein, who (despite some criticism) calls it "The Greatest Ad Ever." Mathew Continetti at "Campaign Standard" thinks it "is funny and fresh, but in terms of substance it's lighter than air." Yglesias calls it "strange but funny."

Well, funny it certainly is. I have to say, though, that I agree with Ezra Klein: the ad is funny if you know about the whole phenomenon of "Chuck Norris facts." As a viral video it is incredibly good -- everybody's linking to it and embedding it, after all. But won't the average voter be a bit confused by Huckabee's claim that Chuck Norris moves the Earth when he does pushups?

"Undecided Voters" = Left Wing Activisits

2007-11-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

Fresh off the Clinton-campaign mini-scandal regarding her planted questions, CNN decided to up the ante: via Glenn Reynolds, this link to a Hot Air video demonstrating that nearly every "undecided voter" asking a question at the recent Democratic debate was a left-wing activist of some sort.

Seriously, if CNN thinks that anti-war activists, union organizers, and other sundry Democratic Party agitators will ask better questions that randomly-selected average questions, fine. In fact, I rather dislike the whole "Town Hall" concept myself. But characterizing these people as mere "undecided voters" is so misleading as to be tantamount to a lie. Sure, they may well be undecided in the sense they've not yet formally endorsed a particular Democratic candidate, but they're not undecided in the ordinary sense of the term. They're activists!

Let them ask questions if you like, but identify their affiliation. I mean, all I want is the truth. Is it that hard?

By the way, while I don't like Obama, I do admire the fact that he didn't pretend that he didn't know the lady whose question was directed toward him. It was a softball, but he didn't try to pretend she was a stranger to him.

Live From VRWC Central

2007-11-16T08:13:00.000-05:00

Always on the lookout for his readers, the intrepid Cheerful Iconoclast penetrated the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy last night, attending a black-tie dinner at a convention of the dreaded Federalist Society. The dinner, which celebrated this secret cabal's 25th anniversary, featured speeches from quite a few notables, including three Supreme Court Justices and President George W. Bush. It got covered by the AP and Washington Post, and undoubtedly by other outlets as well.

I loved this bit from the AP:

Inside the historic Union Station, crowd gave Bush a standing ovation complete with cheers and hollering. Supreme Court justices and members of the nation's judiciary and legal communities sipped wine and ate beef and veal medallions. Outside, a small group of protesters shouted "War criminal Bush" and "Stop waterboarding." The latter was a reference to a controversial interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

This is a great example of writing that's factually accurate but utterly misleading. It makes it sound as if the convention featured a sybaritic feast worthy of an Iron Chef. In fact, if the audience "sipped" its wine, because drinking it normally would have meant tasting it. The wine was a step or two above Thunderbird, but nothing I would buy myself. The Viognier tasted like Kool-Aid, and the Cab harsh and tannic. You can get better wines at the $5.00 bin at your local grocery store (if you live in a state that allows local grocery stores to sell wine, that is). As for the veal and beef medallions, it was difficult to tell whether the minute portion size was a blessing or a curse. Yes, they were described as gourmet tidbits in the printed menu, but they might as well have been mystery meat: overcooked nuggets of meat smothered in sauce. As it was, upon returning home, the Main Squeeze and I shed our formalwear and warmed up some leftover pasta, which I assure you far surpassed the night's repast.

It was banquet food. Better than your old school lunch, but certainly in the same genre. And not enough of it!

As for President Bush's welcome, members of the Federalist Society are nothing if not polite to their guests. It is certainly true that a poll taken in that room would probably make President Bush seem more popular than a poll of, say, the American People. But you would expect him to be more popular among self-identified conservatives. It is hardly news that a group of conservative lawyers gave a sitting Republican President a warm welcome.

However, Federalist Society members can and do differ among themselves about President Bush's policies. In particular, any number of libertarian-leaning Federalist Society members are harshly critical of some aspects of the Bush administration. Of course, in order to find that out, the reporters would have had to, you know, actually talk to people, rather than listening to the President's speech and dashing from the room when he finished. If one had approached me, I would even have been happy to express my candid views. I might even have shared a bite of beef medallion, and a sip of wine.

Tough Talkin' Tancredo

2007-11-14T08:52:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan doesn't like this Tom Tancredo advertisement:

He compares Tancredo to Rudy, characterizing this tactic as one favored by "small men in search of a balcony," his favorite tag for Rudy. Sorry, but this ad actually has a couple of things going for it. The first is honesty: it uses the phrase "Islamic terrorists," identifying the likely source and motivation for a major terrorist attack. Give Tancredo credit for that, at least.

The second is that Tancredo's proposed security measure -- better border security -- actually has some likelihood of achieving beneficial results. Unlike, say, harassing innocent photographers, or the idiotic security theater at airports, it is actually possible that potential terrorists might seep through our lax border security and commit terrorists acts.

Of course, there's no particular reason for likely Islamic terrorists to go to the trouble of swimming the Rio Grande, or risk heat stroke in the Arizona desert, when they can just get a student visa, like the 9/11 terrorists did. The Bush administration has done all sorts of really stupid things in response to the 9/11 attacks -- undermining the liberty of millions of Americans. Denying student visas to Saudi and Egyptian nationals would have been both simple and effective, and it would neither have expanded government power nor invaded the rights of Americans. So of course the Bush Administration didn't even consider it.

Light Blogging

2007-11-07T19:05:00.001-05:00

I am going to be out of town for a few days, and so blogging will be light to nonexistent until next week. I hope my adoring public manages without me!

Rudy, Toughness, and Torture

2007-11-07T18:02:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine sent me the link to this Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by ostensibly-liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz decries what he considers to be a "pacifistic stance" among the Democrats, and he argues that Rudy Giuliani appears to be doing well in the polls because "the post- 9/11 Rudy conveys a sense of toughness, of no-nonsense defense of America."

Well, maybe. But to me the post-9/11 Rudy conveys something else: the puffed chest and macho posturing of a small, fearful man. I don't think his attitude conveys strength and toughness; I think it conveys fear, weakness, and paranoia -- the same sort of fear that leads an Amtrak employee to become overwrought about an elderly Japanese photographer. Rudy's message: be afraid all the time. Sacrifice our honor and our most important values.

When asked whether waterboarding was torture, Rudy said it was, the way it was described by the "liberal media," but he seemed to leave open the option that there could be some forms of waterboarding that wouldn't count. Well, Jonathan Adler at Volokh links to this article, an article written by somebody who was an instructor at SERE school, a man who has undergone waterboarding and performed it on American soldiers in training. A real tough guy, one who doesn't need to engage in Rudy-style macho-posturing to prove his manhood. He says, simply, "when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt." This article has been cited extensively in the blogosphere, so you may have seen it already, but this is a passage that I think every American ought to read:

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

History’s Lessons Ignored

Before arriving for my assignment at SERE, I traveled to Cambodia to visit the torture camps of the Khmer Rouge. The country had just opened for tourism and the effect of the genocide was still heavy in the air. I wanted to know how real torturers and terror camp guards would behave and learn how to resist them from survivors of such horrors. I had previously visited the Nazi death camps Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. I had met and interviewed survivors of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Magdeburg when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. However, it was in the S-21 death camp known as Tuol Sleng, in downtown Phnom Penh, where I found a perfectly intact inclined waterboard. Next to it was the painting on how it was used. It was cruder than ours mainly because they used metal shackles to strap the victim down, and a tin flower pot sprinkler to regulate the water flow rate, but it was the same device I would be subjected to a few weeks later.

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture … he spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson: “If you want to survive, you must learn that ‘walking through a low door means you have to be able to bow.’” He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French. He remembered “the Barrel” version of waterboarding quite well. Head first until the water filled the lungs, then you talk.

Is that what we wish to become?

Now, it does seem that waterboarding has not been used particularly often -- at least if recent reports are to be believed. This ABC News report claims that only three people have been waterboarded by the CIA, and it has not been used at all since 2003. As Julian Sanchez, observed, you can't have it both ways: you can't claim that the technique is vital to national security when it hasn't been used at all since 2003. The ABC report indicates that, after being waterboarded, Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed. Of course, we know we can make people confess to pretty much anything if we torture them. He probably is guilty of at least some of the things to which he confessed, but the hard truth is that the fact that he confessed under torture tells us nothing.

And because of his treatment, it is now virtually impossible to try him in a real court. If we had treated him in a humane manner, we could have tried him before a real court, with real lawyers, a real judge, and a real lawyer. And the result would have been real justice. Would some have refused to believe he had gotten a fair trial? Sure. But for those who could be swayed, giving him a fair trial would have been an important symbolic act.

But what about the favorite example from those who wish to justify torture: the ticking time bomb scenario? Professor Dershowitz discusses this situation:

Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism--the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:

"You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over."

First of all, it never happens. You never know enough to know there's a ticking time bomb and that you have the person who knows where it is. If you know for sure that it's the guy and you know about the bomb, you probably know all sorts of other things which are likely to lead you to the bomb. So why spend all this time discussing a scenario that never happens?

Second, the ticking time bomb is the scenario in which torture is least likely to work. If the terrorist can ever hold out, or construct a convincing lie, this is the time he will do it. Because he knows that he just has to last a limited period of time, and then the bomb will go off.

I am curious to know how far people are willing to take this. Suppose, for example, that the terrorist has a child. We grab Terrorist Mastermind at home with his child. And somebody gets the bright idea of making the Mastermind watch as we crush his eleven-year-old son's testicles -- something John Yoo claims the President has the inherent power to do. So do we do it? Just how far do we go?

Let me make a somewhat different argument. If there were an imminent attack on America, and you could stop it at the cost of your own life, would you do it? I don't know for a fact that I would sacrifice my own life, but I certainly hope I would. And I assume our CIA and FBI agents, and members of our military would make the same choice. Likewise, I hope that they would sacrifice their freedom in order to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States. So here's my proposal: if the ticking time bomb ever happens, the CIA or FBI agents or whoever can torture the mastermind and then, after the attack is foiled, turn themselves in, plead guilty, and accept punishment. If your answer is that they are not really willing to do that, well, I suspect it is because they don't believe that torture is really necessary. And if a President believes it is really necessary, well, let him (or her) authorize it, and the resign from office and accept the legal consequences.

I think that we can defend our country from terrorists without throwing away our honor. We don't need to torture people, and we sacrifice something about what makes America great when we do so. Yes, be tough on terror. But do so in a manner that is consistent with American values.

A Frightening Thought

2007-11-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias doesn't think that any of the potential Republican nominees have a chance at the nomination. This leads to a problem, since the Republicans have to nominate somebody.

And then he had a nightmare epiphany: "Brokered convention leads to Jeb Bush nomination."

All I can say is that if that happens, I will vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it might be. Kucinich, Gravel, Clinton, Obama -- it just doesn't matter.

No. More. Bushes.

EVER.

From The Land of the Brave To A Nation of Bedwetters

2007-11-06T11:59:00.000-05:00

My buddy Sully links to this article about a tourist's run-in with security conscious officials. At the outset, I want to add the same caveat I suggested in the case of the Jena 6 when I first began to read about the case. It is possible that this story is a hoax, or that it's been exaggerated, or that salient facts have been omitted. Of course it would be a good idea to have independent verification, to hear more accounts, to know more facts.

Still, assuming the article is accurate, it's a horrible story: an elderly Japanese tourist who speaks no English is riding an Amtrak train from New York to Boston. He rides along, threatens or bothers nobody, and then does the unforgivable: he starts to take pictures. Well, we can't have that, can we? Sensing danger, the heroic Amtrak conductor swings into action:

The train is a half hour west of New Haven when the conductor, having finished her original rounds, reappears. She moves down the aisle, looks, stops between our seats, faces the person taking pictures. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or from this train.” He starts, “I…….” but, without English, his response trails off into silence. The conductor, speaking louder, forcefully: “Sir, I will confiscate that camera if you don’t put it away.” Again, little response. “Sir, this is a security matter! We cannot allow pictures.” She turns away abruptly and, as she moves down the aisle, calls over her shoulder, in a very loud voice, “Put. It. Away!” He packs his camera.

And it gets worse! When the train arrives in New Haven, two police officers enter the train and remove him, apparently because he "refused" an order he couldn't understand. Hopefully these dim bulbs managed to find somebody who spoke Japanese, determine that he wasn't a terrorist, and send him on his way.

I got in a bit of trouble in the comments a while back when I said that some (though not all) TSA screeners were morons, and I suppose that I may offend an Amtrak employee here, but I don't really care. I don't know whether the "policy" against photography from speeding trains is an actual Amtrak rule, or merely a policy put in place by an idiosyncratic conductor on a power trip. I suppose the theory behind it is that terrorists could scout locations for attacks from the train and use photographs in their planning.

But this is utterly idiotic. What are the chances that terrorists would actually scout locations and take photographs from a speeding train? Wouldn't they be far more likely to get off the train and take pictures of their targets? And how many terrorists use photographs anyway? This policy is beyond stupid. It has no possible intelligent defense.

As to this conductor, if the policy is a real policy rather than simply her own personal policy, then she may not have had any choice but to enforce it. However, even if she had no choice, she didn't have to be an asshole about it. She didn't have to call the cops on a guy who obviously didn't speak English and who represented no threat. She didn't have to go into that whole "this is a security matter!" act. She could have been nice about the whole thing.

I know nothing about this woman, or her life. Maybe she is just somebody who hates her job and takes it out on the passengers, whom she resents. Maybe she's just a small person who gets to feel big by pushing people around. But one of the worst aspects of the War On Terror and the security theater it has engendered is that it gives uniformed bullies a chance to throw their weight around. When we give petty officials the power to enforce arbitrary and stupid rules, it is hardly surprising that many of them become abusive.

I sometimes think that our friends on the left get overwrought, and maybe I am a bit overwrought myself, but I have to ask: what kind of a people have we become? What kind of country is this? Is this the America we want to live in? Do we have to be afraid all the time, so afraid that we put in place stupid security measures against phantom dangers?

Let me make a radical suggestion: let's stop being afraid. The object of terrorism, after all, is to inspire fear. I am fine with putting in place reasonable precautions, with hunting down the folks behind attacks on the United States and killing them. But we can't sacrifice what we are as a country. This constant, unreasoning, debilitating official paranoia just has to go.

Why (This) Libertarian Hates Unions

2007-11-06T10:26:00.000-05:00

Why do some libertarians hate unions? Megan McArdle says that liberals believe that libertarians hate unions because "they raise wages and improve working conditions for their workers at the expense of profits." Citing this article on tollbooths and the adoption of technology like the EZ-Pass, Megan says that the "the central problem with unions, to the extent that there is a problem, is not that they demand higher wages, but that they reflexively oppose productivity enhancing change." And she cites a couple of examples -- the dockworkers' strike and the Big Three autoworkers who sit around being paid to do nothing.

Megan is right that one problem with unions is that they tend to oppose productivity-enhancing innovation, and this is indeed a good reason to hate unions. But, from a libertarian perspective, the central problem with unions is that they depend on the coercive power of the state. Property rights and freedom of contract are fundamental rights. Under current law, if 51% of the workers at company X vote to join a union, the employer is legally required to contract with that union. (The Democrats want to change this to require compulsory contracting if 51% of the workers can be persuaded or intimidated into signing a card.) The employer cannot refuse to contract with that group, contract individually with the other 49%, offer payment to workers in exchange for an agreement not to join a union, or seek employees willing to give a better deal. Every private sector union contract in force today exists in part because a people with guns say "bargain with them, or else."

Under libertarian rules, workers would, of course, be free to form unions or join existing ones. They would be free to seek a favorable contract from their employer. By the same token, the employer would be allowed to bargain individually with people who chose not to join a union, to refuse to bargain with the union, or to offer contracts which forbade unionization. I am not a big fan of unions, but that is largely because, under current rules, they have the heavy hand of the state behind them.

Calling All Wingnuts

2007-11-06T07:37:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias, who has a somewhat-undeserved reputation to being open to points made by his ideological adversaries, nominates Steven Den Beste for Kevin Drum's "All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest." Matthew's follow-up is here.

Note that Matthew never actually, you know, quotes a Steven Den Beste post and takes issue with his argument or analysis. Not that Matthew couldn't do this -- it's fair to say that the Steven Den Beste archive is a target-rich environment. But calling somebody a "wingnut" does not an argument make.

So my question is, what is the point of this exercise? Is the idea just to give liberal bloggers a chance to point at people they don't like and jeer? A Two Minute Hate for lefty bloggers, what an idea.

My Top Five Ever

2007-11-05T14:13:00.000-05:00

Megan McArdle links to this Ogged post criticizing the whole enterprise of nominating the best blog posts ever. She says she is more interested in what people would pick for their own best blog posts. So interested, she says, that "I'm like, this close to tagging five bloggers . . . except that I'm afraid they wouldn't do it, and then I'd be like that kid who nobody comes to his birthday party."

Megan's display of insecurity is charming, but of course utterly without rationality. She is an A-lost blogger who gets to hang out with all the cool kids. I mean, there is a whole blog dedicated to running her down, which proves that she is a certified A-lister. However, if she is really worried about "tagging" bloggers and having them ignore her, here's a foolproof method: tag five bloggers much lower in status than herself. They will be so delighted to get a link from Megan McArdle that they will probably name their firstborn son "Megan" just to curry favor with her.

In any case, I am so anxious to curry favor with Ms. McArdle that, in addition to naming my firstborn son "Megan," I will do her bidding even without being tagged.

So here they are: the best of The Cheerful Iconoclast.

At number five, I would put this post, entitled "Libertarians Against Vouchers -- Accpeting Members Now." Granted, it's not exactly consistent with my attempt to curry favor with Megan McArdle, since I express disagreement with her, but I hope that the Mighty Megan can tolerate some amount of dissent.

My fourth favorite post continues my pattern of disagreeing with my heroine Ms. McArdle. This is the post where I articulated the cultural rationale for opposing the Bush-McCain immigration amnesty bill. Essentially I argued that American culture is better at wealth-creation and democratic institution-building than Mexican culture, and that letting more Mexicans in is therefore a bad idea.

I've done a lot of blogging on the whole Jena 6 matter, and a number of my posts on that have stood up pretty well. I considered naming my very first post on the matter, in which I called for skepticism on the media narrative. Or the one (linked by Instapundit!) where I said "I told you so." But my favorite Jena 6 post, and my third favorite overall, is the post where I called the Jena 6 a Mob of Cowardly Thugs.

My second favorite post deals with my favorite topic: religion. The title of the post is "Suck It, Jesus. You Too, Mohammed." In it, I defend Kathy Griffin's comments at the Emmy Awards. Note that I don't just defend her right to say them -- I defend the comments themselves.

Finally, in my favorite blog post (so far), I trash Mother Teresa and her Sadomasochistic Theology. Yep, beating up on a nun is even better than showing Rudy in drag.

Why Does Sully Do This?

2007-11-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

On Friday, Andrew Sullivan graced his readers with a snarky one-line post: "Glenn Reynolds vs a real libertarian on torture." The "real libertarian" is the author of Glenn's stalker-site, Instaputz, and the post to which Andrew linked is here.

One reason I am not the biggest fan of blogwars is that if you come in in the middle of one, it's hard to untangle who said what, when, and who is misrepresenting whose statements, etc. And often it seems like it's not worth the trouble. But here goes, anyway:

Glenn's original post is here. Glenn links to this Andy McCarthy piece from The Corner which shows that Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Charles Schumer and Bill Clinton have all, at various times, admitted to the necessity of coercive interrogation (or even torture). Glenn then points out that there is a double standard at work: "Somehow, they are fit to lead the Democratic Party but the suitability of Mukasey — who has taken a more measured stance — to be attorney general is in doubt? What am I missing here?"

From this double standard he concludes that "the 'torture' debate is a political tool, and otherwise unserious." Taken in context, he's not arguing that we ought to have torture, or that the debate is unimportant, or anything of the sort. He is taking isssue with hypocrisy and double standards. He's saying that if you condemn Mukasey you should logically also condemn Clinton, Clinton, Obama, and Schumer. Failing that, he contends, that the torture debate is primarily political.

Now, it is possible to make logical arguments against Glenn's position. One could track down the original statements by Clinton, Clinton, Obama and Schumer, for example, and argue that they are, in fact, less sanguine about torture than McCarthy suggested. One could argue that the Attorney General should be held to a higher standard. One could even contend that both parties are hopelessly corrupt and that all of these people should be condemned.

Does Instaputz do any of those? Does he take issue with any of Glenn's facts and reasoning? No. He simply quotes the sentence where Glenn says that the "The torture debate is a political tool, and otherwise unserious." But he gives no hint as to the chain of reasoning that led up to that conclusion. He's followed up on it, but again, he makes no attempt to come to grips with Glenn's reasoning or argument.

So why does Andrew Sullivan give an uncritical link to this snarky little jab? Note that it's not the first time -- Sullivan is a repeat offender.

Well, if Sullivan can put words in people's mouths, I can psychoanalyze the guy from a distance. Particularly since I am being clear that this is utterly speculative, although it is based on my observation of Sullivan's blogging over the past few years. Let me suggest a theory. Sullivan likes to accuse his opponents (particularly Bush) of having a Manichean world-view.

He may well be right about Bush, but the same is true of Sullivan himself. He seems to think that people are all good or all bad -- there's no in-between, there are no good-faith differences among well-meaning people, not even really any hard issues. Now that he sees Reynolds as a bad guy, well, he must be pro-torture, even though he's never said anything that one could plausibly interpret as being pro-torture. It's enough that Reynolds hasn't worked himself into a high dudgeon about it.

We saw this dynamic in Sullivan's attitude toward President Bush. the immediate aftermath of 9/11. At first, Sullivan saw George W. Bush as our mighty-thewed leader in the War Against Islamo-Fascism. But then, something happened, and Sullivan turned against Bush. Now he writes about Bush like he's a jilted lover. Don't get me wrong, I'm a harsh critic of President Bush myself. But at the same time, I don't feel any great sense of personal betrayal, because I never expected that much from Bush to start with.

And the same is true, though to a lesser extent, of Reynolds. Back in 2001 and 2002, they were fellow warriors in the war against Islamo-fasicism, but not that Sullivan has turned against the Iraq war and President Bush, Reynolds is a doulbe-plus ungood enemy. And he has always been an enemy!

You see the same dynamic now, with Sullivan's blossoming man-crush on Barack Obama. I finally made it through Sullivan's essay on why he wuvs Obama, and it is Andrew Sullivan at his self-indulgent worst. It is nearly as bereft of rational argument as his exchange with Sam Harris on religion. Sullivan admits that Obama's policy views are bog-standard left liberal views, but Obama will unite us all and heal our divisions because he's young, and handsome, and black. Did I mention handsome? Now maybe Sully's crush on Obama will last forever, but I suspect that, this year or next, Obama will dissapoint, and then Sullivan will give him the same sort of spurned lover treatment he now gives to President Bush and Glenn Reynolds.

Did People Really Dress Like This?

2007-11-02T18:09:00.000-04:00

Well, did they? (H/T Sully.)

Islam's Woman Problem

2007-11-01T15:27:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan links to this article about statements by Nik Abdul Azia Nik Mat, described as "the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party." It seems that Nik is worried about the emotional abuse of men:

“We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen,” Nik Abdul Aziz said. “Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.”

So what is it that gets Malaysian men so riled up? Women who wear sexy clothes in public.

Just another fruitcake, you say? Well, maybe -- it is important to remember that he is a leader of the opposition party, and that it is therefore safe to assume that most Malaysians don't agree with him. It is certainly a mistake to view all Muslims as one undifferentiated mass. Still, in a country of about 25 million people, his Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party claims 800,000 members. That is an appreciable portion of the population. And Malaysia is a non-Arab Muslim country -- it's not Saudi Arabia.

It's not unusual for left-leaning secularists to warn against christian reconstructionists and dominion theology -- which is fair enough, since those people are nuts. But you know, the chances that the country which brought Jessica Alba to the world is going to devolve into a theocracy where sassing one's parents is punishable by death is pretty low.

Which is why, while American secularists ought to oppose what Andrew Sullivan calls "Christianists," we ought to recognize that views which are relegated to the lunatic fringe among western Christians are, in fact, quite mainstream in the Muslim world. So, for example, while every majority-Christian country has a legal code undoubtedly influenced by Christianity, none have adopted any form of "Biblical Law" which purports to apply Biblical commands directly. Yet a number of countries have, in form or another, adopted some form of Sharia law.

Islam is a real problem, and you don't have to take a "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim" view to recognize that fact. Not all Muslims are Islamists, but it is not clear, as of now, that Islam is compatible with a secular state that is tolerant of religious differences. And it might be a good idea for my atheist friends to stop obsessing about ultimately trivial stuff like moment of silence laws and worry more about a religion many of whose members actually do want theocracy.

Carnival of the Godless

2007-10-29T15:38:00.000-04:00

The Haunted House edition of Carnival of the Godless is up, and I want to thank Greta for doing an excellent job.

I Question Your Patriotism

2007-10-29T14:22:00.000-04:00

I don't normally do actual direct reporting -- except for my restaurant reviews. Typically, I will see something somewhere, and I will link to it and bloviate.

But something happened over the weekend, and I just had to blog about it. Something of no great import, but it really struck me. On impulse, the Main Squeeze and I went to a late night showing of the latest cut of Blade Runner. The movie itself was great -- fun seeing Blade Runner again on the big screen, and of course it's nice to see Ridley Scott's version, as opposed to the happy-ending version foisted upon him by the studio.

Before the film they had the obligatory advertisements, including a music video-style ad for the National Guard. I looked for it online without success, and I would have posted the video if I had found it. Essentially it was a montage of the National Guard throughout history -- citizen soldiers fighting the Redcoats, more recent conflicts, and it also showed them in non-combat duties, like disaster relief and emergency rescue. It was kind of what you would expect from National Guard ad.

Here's what shocked me: after the ad ended, I heard boos and hisses from some other members of the audience. Not all of the audience, by any stretch, but an appreciable number booed the National Guard.

Now, it is certainly unfair to make generalizations about an entire group based upon a smattering of people in a late-night showing of an old science ficiton movie. However, given the demographics of the area, it's nearly certain that most of the people in that theater (myself and the Main Squeeze excepted) would identify themselves as being on the left.

Granted, many people who would self-identify as being leftists would be as revolted by that display as we were. Nonetheless, the modern left really does include within its ranks a fairly important group which thinks nothing of booing the National Guard. I will be blunt: while most Democrats are undoubtedly as patriotic as the next person, the fact is that somebody who would boo the National Guard in a theater is almost certainly a Democrat. And if they are not a Democrat, it's because the Democratic Party is insufficiently leftist and anti-American.

In the long run, I think that is a bad thing. Bad for America, bad for the Democratic Party, possibly even bad for democracy.

I have not blogged a lot about the Iraq war, but it's fair to say that I have some reservations about it -- in the long run, I think it may have been a tactical mistake. And I think that the cost of the war, both in terms of lives and treasure, may outweigh any possible benefits. Still, I have to say that I find much of the anti-war left utterly off-putting, because I think that a lot of them are, well, the sort of person who would boo a National Guard ad at a movie theater.

A while back, Blackfive posted a video by Australian country music singer Beccy Cole. Cole may be wrong on the merits, but culturally I feel a lot more affnity to her than those Code Pink people. Culturally, I have a visceral antipathy to the sort of people who would boo a National Guard ad. And yes, I question their patriotism.

To end this on a postive note, here's that wonderful Beccy Cole video:

UPDATE: Frequent commenter Society Girl was able to identify the video/ad. It's the song "Citzen Soldier" by 3 Doors Down. And the video is indeed available on YouTube.

All Hail the Darwinian State

2007-10-26T14:24:00.000-04:00

Richard Dawkins gave an interview with a German newspaper in which he said, well, something about a "Darwinian state." I don't speak German, but the folks over at Panda's Thumb translate as follows:

Q. In “the Ancestor’s Tale” you mention the Welfare State as a challenge to Darwinism. How can one justify this challenge”

Dawkins: No self respecting person would want to live in a Society that operates according to Darwinian laws. I am an passionate Darwinist, when it involves explaining the development of life. However, I am a passionate anti-Darwinist when it involves the kind of society in which we want to live. A Darwinian State would be a Fascist state.

This quotation got picked up by First Things, and it made its way over to Dembski's blog, where contributor Barry A tries to make rhetorical hay out of it. After quoting a passage from one of his books where Dawkins appers to be saying that we all dance to the music of our genes, Barry claims that Dawkins contradicts himself:

In the last sentence Dawkins asserts that Darwinian determinism is absolute. It is, therefore, incoherent for him to suggest that we can “rise above” our biological nature. For if he is correct then we are nothing but material objects dancing to DNA’s tune, and it makes no sense to suggest that an object can rise above itself.

It is just here that O’Leary’s work in “The Spiritual Brain” comes into play. I can rise above my material body ONLY if an immaterial ”me” exists that is separate from, and superior to, my body.

I think I know what Dawkins meant to say: that belief in Darwinian evolution doesn't entail a belief in some form of crude social darwinism.

But still, he could have chosen his words a lot more carefully. I mean, what the heck is a "Darwinian State" anyway? A state where children face each other in gladiatorial games where the winners are allowed to reproduce? One where everybody gets IQ tests and the low scorers are culled? Nazi Germany? I don't know what a "Darwinian State" entails, and I don't know of anybody who wants one. I don't think it's a coherent or well-specified concept. Tell me what it is, and I will tell you if I like the idea.

Dawkins seems to be saying that belief in evolution is wholly compatible with the sort of European-style Social Democratic welfare state that, as a good left-leaning European intellectual he tends to favor. Which of course is true. But believing in evolution, or being an atheist who also believes in evolution, doesn't necessarily lead to any particular political agenda or economic theory. It is quite possible for somebody to be an atheist, and to believe in evolution, and be a Marxist, or a libertarian, or a Burkean conservative, or even a monarchist. Being an atheist is certainly incompatible with certain political positions -- Sharia law, Christian Reconstructionism, pretty much any other form of theocracy. But it is wholly compatible with a wide range of mutually-incompatible political belief systems.

Like it or not, Richard Dawkins is a big "name" atheist -- probably the most widely-known advocate of atheism on the stage today. He is also a science writer who has written a lot of popular stuff about evolution, and he's a big foil for the creationists. Given that position of notoriety, it is probably a mistake for him to make statements that the creationists can twist into some sort of concession. He can express whatever political views he wants, but he should probably avoid terms like "Darwinian state."

Possibly Earth-Like Planet Discovered

2007-10-26T08:18:00.000-04:00

Via Newmark's Door, scientists have discovered a planet that just might be able to support life. Dubbed Gliese 581c, it's in the neighborhood, circling a star in the constellation of Libra called, oddly enough, Gliese 581, a mere 20 light years away. Two other planets have been discovered in the system as well. It's a bit bigger than Earth, and it is closer to its sun than Earth is to Sol, but Gliese 581 burns at a lower temperature, so it is within the zone where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface -- thought to be a prerequisite for life. Or at least life as we know it.

I wonder how long it will be before the science fiction writers start cranking out the stories about the first mission to Gliese 581. Do science fiction writers still do that? Follow the science news and incorporate the latest discoveries into their fiction, I mean. If they don't, they should. If I can no longer walk beneath the hurtling moons of Barsoom, I wish to walk beneath the hurtling moons of Gliese 581c.

Still More on Torture

2007-10-25T16:03:00.000-04:00

This is a continuation of my ongoing dialogue with a conservative Catholic friend, whom I have dubbed "CC" for purposes of this discussion. In my first post on this matter, I outlined my basic anti-torture position. My second post was a reply to CC's emailed response. CC has taken the time to e-mail additional thoughts, and this post continues our dialogue. I am here quoting both some of my own prior statements and CC's response to them:

Well, as a religious believer it seems to me that you probably ought to apply a categorical command against torture. You do, after all, believe that Christ (whom you consider to be a manifestation of God, right?) was tortured by the Romans. This ought to lead you to a certain sympathy for the victims of torture, regardless of whether it works.

Response: There you go again. The word "torture" is inherently ambiguous. I agree that the Romans inflicted pain on Jesus of Nazareth and killed him. Christ's suffering serves as inspiration to me inspires a "certain sympathy" for all persons who suffer pain at the hands of any government, including our own. Jesus taught us to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek, and so, as a Christian, I try to live up to these ideals. It is not easy, however, to love terrorists who, if they could, would kill every man, woman, and child in the United States. But, Jesus calls us to do so, so those of us who are Christians must strive to do so. On the other hand, Jesus did not call anyone to be suicidal, nor did he suggest that worldly notions of justice should be abolished with his dying on the cross.

I agree that there is some inherent ambiguity in the term "torture," but I also think that the tactics which appear to have been utilized by the United States government fall well outside of any possible grey area.

As for the religious implications, my only point is that it seems odd to me that Christian conservatives appear to have so enthusiastically embraced harsh interrogation techniques, when in fact their theology cuts in the opposite direction. As a non-believer, I feel no particular obligation to even try to love terrorists. I'd be all in favor of torturing terrorists were it not for two things. The first is the risk of error, of torturing people who are not, in fact, terrorists. This isn't just a fantasy, it appears to have actually happened to a man named Khalid El-Masri, who was kidnapped by the CIA, flown to Afghanistan, and tortured. Or at least he so alleges. (He recently lost in his attempt to sue the United States, but not on the merits of his claim.) On TV, they always get the right guy, but life isn't a TV show, and we are talking about fallible government agents, here.

The other reason is that I don't trust the government to have the power to torture people. I think that if the 20th century shows anything, that power will be expanded, abused, and applied against the innocent. It's not about them -- it's about us.

That said, I agree that torture ought to be subjected to a largely utilitarian calculation. However, I think that the resolution of those calculations is actually pretty easy. Torture is an information-gathering technique which may or may not even work, and if it does work produces information which may or may not be particularly reliable. Its benefits are dubious and relatively short-term.

Response: Again, if one eliminates all forms of ineffective coercive interrogation techniques, what is left? Anything? Your position seems to be this: certain effective coercive interrogation techniques are should be permitted -- so long as the coercion does not exceed your "mild discomfort" standard; but other effective coercion techniques should be prohibited because they involved "torture," which apparently is more excessive coercion than "mild discomfort."

To begin with, "mild discomfort" was probably a poor choice of words. As I have tried to explain, my use of that language was intended to convey the fact that I'm not one of those who believe that any distress or discomfort constitutes torture. Nor do I believe that people captured on the battlefield need to be given Miranda warnings or the like. In my first post of this conversation, I cited this article about a study which says there's no evidence harsh interrogation techniqes work and these reports which suggest the same. I propose we use the techniques that past interrogators claim actually worked: learn their culture and language and talk to them. It's not as satisfying as waterboarding, but it may be more effective in actually protecting our loved ones.

But let me be clear on this: even if torture worked, I would be against it, for all of the Libertarian reasons I've outlined. I think that letting agents of the state get used to having this power is a Bad Idea. And that the state is far more dangerous, in the long run, than terrorists could ever be.

The immediate cost is a loss of credibility of the United States, a massively-reduced level of soft-power and ability to exercise moral leadership. It means we have a far more difficult time complaining if our own people or our allies' people are mistreated by an enemy. I'm not a huge fan of the Bush/Clinton notion of war as social work, but if the idea is to remake Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies, might not our own conduct have a certain teaching function? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" isn't exactly the lesson we were trying to impart. In addition, while you may not think that the pain inflicted on terrorists or their sympathizers ought to count, the torture inflicted upon innocent people tortured by mistake certainly ought to count. And then there is the psychological cost borne by the torturers who have to live with what they've done in subsequent years.

Response: I agree that the reasons cited above weigh against "torture." But your analysis assumes that there are no benefits to aggressive interrogation techniques, and continues to avoid defining exactly what is "torture."

Given the lack of evidence that there is any up-side that cannot be achieved through other means, I think it more than weighs against it -- I think it's dispositive. As for the definition issue: "the deliberate infliction of severe physical or psychological distress."

CC and I actually agree at this point that that nuclear terrorism is fairly unlikely:

First, the danger of terrorists getting a nuke, "suitcase" or otherwise, is pretty small, for the reasons articulated by Gregory Cochran in his 2 Blowhards interview. And if we are worried about that, the best way to prevent it is not to go around torturing terrorists; it's to work with the Russians and the Chinese to keep the supply of nuclear weapons bottled up tight.

Response: I thought I sent a follow-up e-mail that acknowledged that the chances of terrorists obtaining a nuke is pretty small.

CC did indeed send such a follow-up, and I was in error to not acknowledge it.

That leaves "conventional" suicide terrorism. And he's right that terrorists can indeed kill a lot of people if they are so inclined. In fact, we can imagine all sorts of low-tech things that terrorists could do that are almost impossible to stop -- drive around medium-sized cities lobbing Molotov cocktails out the window of their vehicle, for example. But the number of people who are actually willing to do that seems to be fairly small. The chances of CC's kids, or my Main Squeeze being killed by conventional criminals is a lot greater than the chances they'll be killed by terrorists. The off-chance that a terror plot that would kill a lot of people will be foiled by torture isn't worth the very real costs associated with institutionalizing the practice.

Response: I generally agree, but the difficulty with making a risk assessment here is that we are not privy to confidential information in the hands of the government.

We agree? What's the fun in that.

I do agree it would be nice to have information now in the hands of the government. But the problem with relying on "trust us, we know what we are doing" is that government officials always have an incentive to increase their own power and cover up mistakes. At the end of the day, I don't trust the government to have this power, and that applies regardless of which party or person happens to be in office.

"My Bad"

2007-10-25T12:32:00.001-04:00

I'm now in the midst of my first Instalanche, due to this post, to which Glenn Reynolds linked this morning. Obviously I am delighted, and the traffic is way up.

But in that post, I made a mistake. A minor mistake, not a big deal, but a mistake nonetheless: I misspelled Glenn Reynolds' name. I spelled it "Glen" with one "n," rather than "Glenn," with two, as he spells it. Now, obviously he cannot have been too badly offended, since he gave me the link, but if I were him I would be annoyed. Even worse, I did it twice, and when an anonymous commenter pointed out my error, I only corrected it one one place. I had to be nudged to correct the mistake in the first line of the post.

Do I feel stupid? Sure. A bit embarrassed? Yep. But I made a mistake; I've admitted it, and it's been fixed. It ain't the end of the world.

My readers now know that I can be a little careless, that I missed a detail -- one "n" or two -- and that proofreading isn't my strong suit. I try, really, but anybody who reads this blog regularly knows I make more typos and such than I would like. I sometimes get excited and say things that are maybe a bit more strongly worded than I would like, in retrospect. I am, in short, human. I think that most people can understand that.

But how stupid would I look if I wrote a post explaining that a lot of people spell Glen with one "n," and that, really! "Glen" is the right spelling. So Glenn Reynolds really ought to spell it Glen, not Glenn. He's the one who's wrong! Or if I blithely insisted that I hadn't spelled it with one n in the first place -- no mistake had been made at all.

I'd look like a complete jerk. Or, for those of you who already think I am a jerk, even more of a jerk. Everybody's heard the expression "when you are in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging." And they've also heard, "it's not the crime, it's the coverup." Both variants on a simple concept: when you make a mistake, stop making the mistake, admit it, and fix it.

I have been thinking about that this morning, because by a weird coincidence, Glen -- just joking, uh Glenn -- has been blogging up a storm about the whole Scott Thomas Beauchamp/Franklin Foer/New Republic mess. And here's the thing: The New Republic screwed up. They published reports that were, uh, embellished. Not what you want to do, and a pretty serious mistake -- more serious than misspelling "Glenn." But a mistake.

And instead of admitting their error, they stonewalled, delayed, obfuscated, and generally made asses of themselves. So you have Glenn linking to this Washington Post Article, This Pajamas Media Roundup, and you have this post with more links than I care to copy, and this one too, and I am sure I could find find more if I weren't too lazy.

Has it ever occurred to the guys at The New Republic that if they were to just admit the mistake that maybe there wouldn't be so much continuing attention to what idiots they are?

Farrah Olivia by Morou

2007-10-25T08:59:00.000-04:00

I've been a huge Iron Chef fan for years, and, while Iron Chef America doesn't quite live up to the original, it is nonetheless entertaining. If anything, The Next Iron Chef is even more fun: watching these eight really accomplished chefs go through a gruelling series of challenges.

Two of the judges -- Michael Ruhlman and Andrew Knowlten -- have blogged about the show. The latest casualty is Morou (he has a last name, but prefers the single-name moniker, like Cher), chef at Farrah Olivia in Alexandria, Virginia. Both Knowlten and Ruhlman had problems with Morou's plating style. You see, he makes a lot of "deconstructed" dishes -- small piles of food with artistic splashes of sauces and powders and the like. His plates really do look gorgeous -- like works of art, more than plates of food. Knowlten criticized Morou for "for consistently (and tediously) plating his dishes with all sorts of swishes, spurts, and splashes." Despite his apparent annoyance with the plating style, Knowlten said that Morou's dishes were "complex and full of interesting flavors and techniques." Ruhlman was even more harsh, saying Morou's food was "too fussy, dainty, and compartmentalized."

Well, nothing like judging for yourself. So, the Main Squeeze and I headed out to Farrah Olivia the fairly complex dishes -- . It's a smallish place, tastefully decorated, with some onsite parking. Our waiter wasn't going to ever win a "world's best waiter" award, but he had the basics down: he got to our table, took our orders in a timely manner, brought us more bread and water when we needed more, got the orders right, and generally did his job. If he had a weakness, it was in explaningMorou uses foams and powders and sauces and the like spread all over the plate, and a "world's best waiter" candidate would have it all down cold. You could tell he'd been trained on it, but he didn't quite, have it down the way he should. For example, he didn't know what the foam on my lobster was -- in fact it was "banana air." Yes, it was on my menu, but I had forgotten.

But the food itself came in a timely manner, and it was every bit as gorgeous as it seemed on TV. Yes, Morou's style includes unusual combinations -- butter poached lobster with tapioca and banana air, for example. And yes a lot of his dishes are deconstructed. But you know what? Butter poached lobster with tapioca and banana air happens to be really good, at least when Morou is preparing it. I suspect that if I tried it, it would be a disaster. And isn't that the point of a fancy restaurant? To get something you can't do at home yourself? The Main Squeeze's scallops with bacon powder were likewise delicious -- I just wished she had been more generous with her loving husband.

I'll take issue with Ruhlman's characterization of Morou's cuisine as being "dainty." Yes, it is complex -- if all you want is a big slab of meat on a plate, go to Outback, or, for a better slab, go to the Capital Grille. He uses really high quality ingredients -- my steak was very tender -- and he works magic to impart flavor. But the meat was hearty and well-seasoned, the opposite of dainty. And yes, he puts sauce on using artistic splashes and spurts. But that allows the diner to taste the meat first without any sauce at all. It was great -- tasted like steak, but with a layer of complex flavors to let you know that you were paying for more than just a seared chunk of animal flesh. And, when dipped in the sauce, it added additional complexity and flavor. Whatever you say about his flashy plating, the man knows how to cook meat.

And his deserts. Well, all I can say is "hang on to that pastry chef -- you have a winner." Amazing, fun, interesting flavors.

Truth be told, I like the way Morou plates his dishes, and I like the way the guy cooks. The food was uniformly excellent, with some really nice flavor combinations. It's unique and interesting -- he follows his own vision, sort of like Howard Roark in the kitchen. Maybe he won't be the Next Iron Chef, but the man can cook, and his restaurant is well worth a visit.

I will add, in the interest of full disclosure, that our waiter mentioned to Morou that we had seen him on The Next Iron Chef, and that we liked his plating style. He was nice enough to come out of the kitchen and say hello as we were leaving. Does that affect my judgment as a critic? Possibly, although I was a pretty happy well-fed camper when I got up from the table, before I had met him. Morou seems like a really great guy, and I hope that being a losing Next Iron Chef contestant gives him a boost. Would I like to see every restaurant plate its food like he does? Well, no. But his cuisine is unique and interesting, and well worth a try.

Gosh, What a Surprise

2007-10-24T19:27:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds links to this Christian Science Monitor article by Craig Franklin about the Jena 6 case. Franklin is a local journalist who has covered the case for the local paper, and his article is a damning indictment of the media's coverage:

The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

In fact, Franklin contends that nearly every aspect of the popular narrative is wrong. He goes through it one-by-one. The whites-only tree wasn't really whites only. The nooses hung on the tree were aimed not at black students but instead at members of the school's rodeo team. The District Attorney never threatened black students. Robert Bailey was punched in the face, not hit with a beer bottle, as he subesequently claimed. (True to form, Newsweek embelished this to his being pelted with beer bottles.) Bailey and his friends did indeed jump a white guy at a convenience store and steal his shotgun. And, finally, Mychall Bell really did hit Justin Barker from behind, and he really was stomped upon by a mob of black students.

Gosh, who could have predicted that the media narrative would turn out to be a bit overstated? Me, maybe? In fact, my first post on the topic, back on September 7, was a call for skepticism about the media narrative. I hate to say "I told you so, but . . ." OK, who am I kidding. I LOVE to say I told you so.

I told you so.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Glenn. A hearty welcome to all my new readers. Feel free to check out all my posts on the Jena 6 matter, or look around and see what I have to say about torture, or George W. Bush, or even read some of my restaurant reviews.

UPDATE 2: Minor error fixed.

Morimoto

2007-10-23T11:51:00.000-04:00

We finally got a chance to sample Morimoto, the Philadelphia outpost of Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, and it really is an experience. Sleek and modern, the interior looks like something from a sci-fi movie. Upon entering the restaurant, one is greeted by attractive hostesses in short skirts, always a welcome sight. It's almost like going into a cave, because it's dark and the blond wood ceiling is so low. The undulating ceiling rises up as one enters the restaurant proper, almost like you are entering another world. In a way, the ceiling struck me as being reminiscent of the bamboo rollers used to roll sushi, while the dividers between the tables were reminiscent of Bento boxes. The tables and chairs are really funky looking, and each table has upon it a strangely phallic electric "candle." The place was loud and packed with people. Nonetheless, we were seated promptly at the time of our reservation, which suggests they run the front of the house pretty well.

We got the "Omakase" menu, which I am given to understand is Japanese for "trust me." Ideally, for an Omakase menu, you'd want Morimoto himself standing there, picking stuff and fixing it for you. But the guy has three restaurants, the Iron Chef gig, cookbooks and the like, so I think it's fair enough that he has, supposedly, personally designed the Omakase menu to highlight his cuisine. There are actually three different price levels for the Omakase, we got the highest one, at $120 a pop. We were told that the number of courses actually remains constant, but that price of the ingredients goes up at higher prices. So with the high-end menu you get the toro and lobster and wagyu beef and such, while if you pay $45, it's the dog food for you.

Part of the fun of the Omakase menu is that it's a surprise. Unlike the normal tasting menu, they don't tell you in advance what's coming up. Or even how many courses there are. So if you are thinking about enjoying the Omakase menu at Morimoto, the bottom line is that it's great, and it's well worth the (high) price, if you enjoy that sort of cuisine. Don't read any further if you want to be surprised.

We also got the medium beverage omakase, which was mostly wine -- one dish came with a Morimoto Martini, and the sushi course came with sake. At the highest end, you can have all sake. The beverages were good, and they paired well with the main courses, but at Morimoto the food is definitely the star, and the beverages are a very good supporting player.

The first four courses were effectively the appetizers for the meal. All pretty small servings of some form of raw fish. To me, the item that stood out the least of this bunch were the three oysters topped with different sorts of gunk. I slurped 'em down and enjoyed them, and Morimoto showed a bit with the different toppings for the oysters, but they didn't blow me away. They were raw oysters. Good raw oysters, topped with some pretty interesting gunk on the top, but nothing to write home about. The second least appealing of the first four items was, believe it or not, a sashimi sampler. Again, it was good, and I cleaned my plate, but it wasn't knock-your-socks off good. I expected Morimoto's sashimi to really stand out, and it didn't.

The other two items in the first group were more than good -- they were incredible. One was the first item served, and it was heck of a way to begin the meal. The ubiquitous tuna tartare, something you see a lot these days. But this wasn't your average tuna tartare appetizer; it was toro tartare with caviar and wasabi. This is also on the appetizer menu, and I will say, if you like tuna tartare, get it. It was what I expected his sashimi to be: the best example of that thing I've ever had. An incredible, complex, balanced dish. And it also showed some originality, the way it combined the toro, the caviar, and the wasabi.

Finally, the other item from the first flight of four was a scallop carpaccio. Yeah, I know there's no such thing as scallop carpaccio, but there is now at Morimoto, and it's incredible. The scallop was sliced inhumanly thin, and it was arranged on the plate in one of those presentations you could never match. It looked like a work of art, and it tasted, well, like a work of art. Out of this world good.

I will say that, after four raw fish dishes, we really were hankering for some cooked food. And we got it: what was effectively the first half of the main course: the eight spice lobster, served with a dipping sauce made out of creme fraiche with some stuff in it. Yeah, the creme fraiche dipping sauce sounds weird, but it worked. The spices gave the lobster some real zip, and the sauce cooled it down. The dynamic is almost the same as good buffalo wings with bleu cheese, except about a million times better because of the underlying quality of the ingredients. The spices were really good, the dipping sauce was great, and what's amazing is that, with all this going on in your mouth, the lobster itself still came through. It was not overshadowed at all. I tend to like lobster a lot, but I also tend to prefer it plain, rather than all gussied up. This was absolutely one of the best things I have ever tasted. Lobster like I've never had it before, absolutely delicious combination that really shouldn't work. Truly worthy of an Iron Chef.

Next was the Kobe Beef, and it was great too. Absolutely delicious flavor. This was also one place where the drink pairing stood out: it was paired with a South African pinotage that was good on its own but which really stood out when paired with the Kobe Beef. Then came the sushi course with sake, and it was some of the best sushi I've ever tasted, particularly the toro. There was nothing particularly creative or weird here, just really good sushi.

We ended with a desert that was good but forgettable. In fact, I've forgotten it already. But you don't go to a place like Morimoto for desert -- you go for two things: creative edge cuisine that you haven't had before and raw fish. In both cases, Morimoto delivered. I probably wouldn't want to eat that way every night, but it was a real experience.

If I had one criticism of the Omakase menu, it was a bit heavy on the raw fish. Don't get me wrong, I like the raw stuff, but five of the eight courses were based on raw stuff from the water. I'd have been happy with four. In addition, I wish it had included a tempura dish. This may have been a function of the fact that we were sitting near the back, and all night viewed waiters and waitresses carrying the tempura appetizer past our table. It looked really good.

The service gets an A minus. Generally good, but it could have been a bit quicker between courses. The hosting staff at the front of the house did a good job, and for the most part they explained each dish well. A couple of times we weren't told about the wine, but mostly the seemed knowledgeable and attentive without hovering.

Morimoto was definitely a fun experience, and I'll give it another try at some point in the future. Although next time I will probably order off the regular menu, and I will definitely get the tempura.

Porkbusting

2007-10-23T10:19:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds links this Examiner report about Senate Republicans who still support pork projects, even those designed to help Democrats. Sixteen Republican Senators wouldn't even vote to kill three Harlem projects inserted by Charlie Rangel and named for him.

I am as offended by this sort of pork as anybody. If Bill Gates wants to fund a building and have it named after himself, great. But it is outrageous that members of Congress get to use taxpayer money to name projects after themselves. If Charlie Rangel or Robert Byrd or any other politician wants to name a project after himself, he ought to damn well pony up the cash out of his own pocket. Not mine.

Glenn Reynolds says our politicians "lack essential self-discipline." Perhaps so, but I am suspicious of the claim that we'd be in better shape if only we had "better people" in office. That's always the claim about socialism -- if only they had been better, more virtuous people, socialism would work. No it wouldn't -- socialism will fail no matter how virtuous the officials. We have the politicians we have, and they are responding to the incentives offered them.

Let me propose a different culprit: United States Constitution, Amendment XVI. The income tax amendment. Once the federal government got easy access to all of our pockets, it was inevitable that politicians would take money from the citizens and use that money to try to get reelected. Pork barrel spending is the inevitable consequence of the sort of government we have. And until people decide they don't need or want this kind of big government, we're stuck with it.

More Thoughts on Torture

2007-10-22T14:43:00.001-04:00

In my last post on this topic, I argued that the government ought not be given the power to torture people because, if the 20th century has shown us nothing, it is that giving the state the power to torture people is just a really bad idea.

In that post, I discussed a dinner conversation with an old friend, whom I will refer to as "CC" for "Conservative Catholic, regarding this issue, and I used that conversation as a springboard to my discussion. Well, CC has since e-mailed me to clarify his position, and he has suggested that I misquoted him. Of course I misquoted him! I was too busy swilling down a really nice wine to take notes.

In any case, his position is probably more nuanced than I gave it credit for being--- more nuanced than mine, for that matter -- and in his e-mail he raised some interesting points. Here's what he said:

I am generally against "torture," but, frankly, the label "torture" fails to capture the issue. The challenge the government faces is to obtain most effectively critical intelligence information as rapidly as possible. I recall that you endorse the notion that the government may inflict "mild discomfort" but not "torture" in order to accomplish this goal. There are not, however, bright lines between what some may call "mild discomfort" and "torture." Let's take an example: sleep deprivation. Women of infants are sleep deprived typically because they are taking care of their children. Are they tortured? Mildly discomforted?

The reference to "mild discomfort" is, I think, the result of CC's misunderstanding of my position, or perhaps my own lack of clarity. The point which I was making to him when I used those words is that I don't consider some of the things I've read about to be "torture" as that word is used in English. For example, I don't think it's "torture" to smear somebody with menstrual blood, or to make them watch you pee on the Koran, or for a female interrogator to strip off her shirt and parade around in a bra. Some folks on the left claim this kind of thing is tortue, and I think they're nuts. There are people who if you put detainees up in the Ritz will insist that only the Four Seasons would be good enough. I'm not one of them.

I can even agree with CC that it can be difficult to draw bright lines -- there are indeed grey areas. But techniques like waterboarding, forcing people to stand in "stress positions" for hours, sensory deprivation and waterboarding aren't in any gray area -- they're torture. Sure, to some extent women caring for children are slightly sleep deprived. But those women are allowed to take naps between feedings, and to get some sleep some of the time. Likewise, some people work standing for hours on end. But they aren't forced to work standing in a "stress position" designed to produce agony. Here's a hint: most of these techniques were pioneered by totalitarian regimes. Maybe that tells us something.

As CC sees it, there are actually two issues:

The "torture" issue presents two real sub-issues: (a) whether "torture" is an effective means of obtaining intelligence; and (b) whether "torture" violates some human right against cruel or inhumane treatment. As to (a), I offer no opinion. I agree that the governments hould not use any interrogation or intelligence-gathering technique that is not effective, but, then, only sadistic people would suggest otherwise.

Even sadistic people won't say otherwise overtly, but that doesn't rule out sadism as a potential motive. I certainly can't prove this, but to a great extent I think that the Cheney/Addington/Yoo/Tenet position on torture is indeed motivated by sadism. Oh, not sexual sadism of the whips-and-chains variety, but a desire to hurt people, or a callous indifference to their suffering. The desire to inflict suffering is strong enough that it predisposes the advocates of harsh measures to believe that those measures are necessary and effective. This may explain the popularity of TV shows like 24, as well as the ubiquitous ticking time bomb scenario. And this is why I will never, ever vote for Rudy: at the end of the day I think he wants to hurt people.

The human rights question is more difficult and depends upon a variety of factors: the gravity and imminence of the harm; the information sought; the type of interrogation technique being considered; and a reasonable likelihood for success. There may be other considerations. But I do not believe there is a bright line, especially in times of war when, as now, the national security is threatened. This may come down to a largely utilitarian calculation of choosing among a variety of bad options.

Well, as a religious believer it seems to me that you probably ought to apply a categorical command against torture. You do, after all, believe that Christ (whom you consider to be a manifestation of God, right?) was tortured by the Romans. This ought to lead you to a certain sympathy for the victims of torture, regardless of whether it works.

That said, I agree that torture ought to be subjected to a largely utilitarian calculation. However, I think that the resolution of those calculations is actually pretty easy. Torture is an information-gathering technique which may or may not even work, and if it does work produces information which may or may not be particularly reliable. Its benefits are dubious and relatively short-term.

The immediate cost is a loss of credibility of the United States, a massively-reduced level of soft-power and ability to exercise moral leadership. It means we have a far more difficult time complaining if our own people or our allies' people are mistreated by an enemy. I'm not a huge fan of the Bush/Clinton notion of war as social work, but if the idea is to remake Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies, might not our own conduct have a certain teaching function? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" isn't exactly the lesson we were trying to impart. In addition, while you may not think that the pain inflicted on terrorists or their sympathizers ought to count, the torture inflicted upon innocent people tortured by mistake certainly ought to count. And then there is the psychological cost borne by the torturers who have to live with what they've done in subsequent years.

And you have the huge potential down-side of people who work for your security services getting used to the idea that they are allowed to torture people. While terrorism is indeed a danger, a state with security services acclimated to the idea of torturing people is a far greater danger in the long term. If you say that "terrorists" can be tortured, it's a pretty easy step to define one's political opponents as being terrorists.

My friend CC, however, doesn't see it that way. He seems to think that I underestimate the danger associated with Islamic terrorists:

The notion that the "terrorists" are weak is generally accurate in the conventional military sense, but there is the possibility, at least reported, of suitcase nukes obtained via the black market, suicide bombers, and the like that could result in large numbers of casualties. The real danger with Islamic terrorism is that (1) the terrorists seek to kill as many Americans as possible, including all men, women, and children (including my wife and children and you and [the Main Squeeze]; and (2) the terrorists are willing to carry out their murderous schemes by suicidal means. This presents almost unimaginable possibilities for mass murder and must, unfortunately, affect the analysis of the types of interrogation techniques that are possible, at least with respect to those that are effective.

First, the danger of terrorists getting a nuke, "suitcase" or otherwise, is pretty small, for the reasons articulated by Gregory Cochran in his 2 Blowhards interview. And if we are worried about that, the best way to prevent it is not to go around torturing terrorists; it's to work with the Russians and the Chinese to keep the supply of nuclear weapons bottled up tight.

That leaves "conventional" suicide terrorism. And he's right that terrorists can indeed kill a lot of people if they are so inclined. In fact, we can imagine all sorts of low-tech things that terrorists could do that are almost impossible to stop -- drive around medium-sized cities lobbing Molotov cocktails out the window of their vehicle, for example. But the number of people who are actually willing to do that seems to be fairly small. The chances of CC's kids, or my Main Squeeze being killed by conventional criminals is a lot greater than the chances they'll be killed by terrorists. The off-chance that a terror plot that would kill a lot of people will be foiled by torture isn't worth the very real costs associated with institutionalizing the practice.

No Shirt, No Problem. Well, Actually There Is a Problem

2007-10-19T16:31:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan (who else?) links to this page about the antics of a group of guys who go to a set location and take their shirts off en masse. They targeted the New York Abercrombie and Fitch, which apparently has a shirtless male model at the door to greet entering patrons. A rather amusing stunt, I suppose, although the folks at Abercrombie and Fitch don't seem to have appreciated it.

I remember walking by that store in a local mall, and while it didn't have a shirtless male door-greeter, it was festooned with photos of male models. Even the shopping bags had pictures of male models on them.

Seriously, why would a straight guy ever shop at Abercrombie and Fitch? It's decorated like a gay teen's bedroom, and the last time I got one of their catalogs in the mail, I thought I'd accidentally been put on the mailing list of a gay porn magazine. I just don't get their marketing approach, but I guess it works.

Hot Israeli Babes

2007-10-18T21:13:00.000-04:00

Blogger Mark Shea objects to this video, which shows Israeli girls in bikinis, on the beach:

He thinks that this might undermine Israel's support among Evangelical Christians:

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder how long American Evangelicals (and even some Catholics) can be snookered by the notion that Israel is something other than a secular nation-state. The Golden Calf appeal to Money Sex and Power evident in the commercial is perfectly representative of typically debased postmodern secular culture and has nothing to do with "fulfillment of prophecy". Israel has the rights and responsibilities of any secular nation-state, but to concoct some notion that it gets special privileges as God's Chosen State is rubbish.

Speaking for myself, I don't think that Israel ought to get special privileges as God's Chosen State. Nonetheless, I find it noteworthy that it is simply impossible to imagine any Muslim state using women in bikinis to promote itself. In that sense, Israel is like us in a way that no Arab state is or will be in the forseeable future.

This doesn't mean I support everything Isreal does, and I agree that it has the same rights and responsibilities as any nation-state. And yes, I think that Israel sometimes deserves criticism. But this video makes me more sympathetic to them, not less.

(Both Mike Potemra at NRO and Insty have a similar take, although as a religious believer Potemra is a lot more into the "Chosen People" stuff than I am. To me, the key point is that Israel is a secular state where women can run around in bikinis if they are so inclined.)

Rudy: I'm Not Really a Republican

2007-10-17T13:18:00.001-04:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Rudy explaining that he's not really a Republican:

Is anybody really shocked at this?

On Torture

2007-10-17T07:22:00.001-04:00

No, I'm not talking about the sight of Rudy in pantyhose; I'm talking about actual, physical torture. As used for interrogation.

A while ago, the Main Squeeze and I had dinner with an old friend, and that topic came up. I took the position then, as I have here, that torture is bad, and that it ought to be rejected as a tactic in the Global War on Terror. My friend -- a decent, humane guy, an old-fashioned Church-going Catholic -- expressed some disagreement. Referring to his children, he said "I would be inclined to agree with you were it not for the fact that really bad people want very badly to hurt my two kids." He admitted that torture was brutal, and that it inflicted suffering. But then, so too does war, and war is sometimes necessary as well. I understand his desire to protect his children, friends, family, loved ones, and fellow Americans from harm, but he's dead wrong about the desirability of torture.

To begin with, I'm not convinced that torture is actually likely to be an effective way of extracting information. Bill O'Reilly (via Balloon Juice and Flopping Aces) thinks it does, because, well, the torturers told him it did:

Both former CIA chief George Tenet and former CIA official Michael Scheuer, once the head of the bin Laden unit, told me that coerced interrogation methods often provided accurate intelligence that potentially saved thousands of lives.

Well, there you have it. It works -- case closed.

Seriously, of course George Tenet says "enhanced interrogation" works. He was the guy in charge at the CIA when a lot of this stuff was goig on. Of course he wants to claim that it was necessary, that it saved lives. In order to really evaluate his claim, a disinterested observer would have to have full access to all of the Super Top Secret burn-before-reading files and see what was gleaned. Unitl that happens, Tenet is saying "trust me." Has George Tenet done anything to earn that trust?

Publicly-available information does not suggest that torture or "enhanced interrogation" is particularly effective. At least one government study by the Intelligence Science Board found that there's no scientific evidence that torture works. Anecdotal evidence suggests that less coercive methods can be very effective indeed. A recent report of the reunion of World War II veterans of a unit known then as "P.O. Box 1142" has caused a bit of stir. The members of that unit extracted information from people, and they did it without torturing them. Likewise, this Anne Applebaum column from 2005 notes that the French used torture in their (losing) war in Algeria, and there's no real evidence it actually, you know, worked. She also quote quite a few past and present interrogators who concluded that harsh methods aren't all that effective. I'm sorry, but I trust these guys over George Tenet.

But let's suppose that it turns out that torture or "enhanced interrogation" really is effective, at least when done properly in some cases. It's still a bad idea. Glen Greenwald is right when he points out that small-government conservatives are often inconsistent with their own stated values when they support expansion of state power in the War on Terror.

Terrorists are indeed bad people intent on hurting us. But there are limits on what terrorists can do. They succeeded in killing several thousand Americans on September 11, 2001, and it's possible they will launch another attack that will be equally murderous. Even so, there is a reason why they had to use hijacked airliners rather than their own. At the end of the day, terrorism is a technique used by groups that are fundamentally weak. It is tragic for the people who are killed and their loved ones, but it's not an existential threat.

There is, by contrast, no limit to the amount of damage that can be done by an oppressive government. Murder by millions. Industrial scale torture. Seizure of property. Imprisonment without a fair hearing.

I don't want the government to have the power to torture people for one simple reason: I don't want to the government to have the power to torture people. I am, reluctantly, forced to admit that we need to have some government, but there is ample reason to not trust the government or its agents to not abuse their power. If the 20th Century taught any lesson at all, it ought to be that you don't want to live under a government where the agents of the state are given the power to torture people. Conservatives ought to understand that, and before President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney took office, they did.

Pantyhose Policy

2007-10-16T08:18:00.000-04:00

Mathew Yglesias links to this article about an unnamed Republican Senator who makes all his or her female staffers wear skirts with pantyhose. Well, if CI were a Senator, he certainly wouldn't require female staffers to wear pantyhose. Although all female staffers under 35 would be required to dress like Catholic Schoolgirls.

On the bright side, when Rudy is President, male staffers will also have to wear pantyhose.

Send in the FEMBOTS!

2007-10-16T06:18:00.000-04:00

This article speculates that we will soon use robots for sex. Even marriage.

(HT Sully.)

Stop Ordering People Around

2007-10-15T16:16:00.001-04:00

A while back there was a blogospheric blip about washing machines. It seems that the feds mandated greater energy efficiency, and as a result, Consumer Reports found that the newer machines (at least ones that cost less than $900) don't get clothes particularly clean. As John Tierney observed, this was the predictable result of the new standards. Indeed, it was predicted, but the advocates of more regulation just shrugged it off. Alex Tabarrok makes even more interesting point: the new regulations might not even save energy if, as a result, everybody washes their clothes twice.

This is why Megan McArdle gets it exactly right when she argues in favor of a carbon tax. A carbon tax (or cap-and-trade system, which she argues against on other grounds) doesn't require any government official sitting around in Washington to figure out how much energy a washing machine ought to use, and whether it's worth trading some level of cleanliness for cost savings. It doesn't require somebody in Washington to decide whether the energy savings of compact fluorescent bulbs outweigh the ugly light, or the best way to calculate gas mileage.

All it requires the government to do is to set the tax rate, measure the output, and collect the taxes. The market can take it from there.

Mark Kleiman On Intellectual Honesty

2007-10-13T23:08:00.000-04:00

General Ricardo Sanchez is making a few waves, having decided to let loose on the Bush Administration. Mark Kleiman seems happy to have General Sanchez on the "right" side. Returning to his prior theme of the "hack gap," Kleiman has advice for how Iraq war opponents ought to treat Sanchez:

I'm not one who regrets the "hack gap." I'd rather be on the side with the edge in intellectual honesty rather than the side with the edge in the tactical capacity to misrepresent the truth. But in politics, words are weapons, and if for the moment Gen. Sanchez has chosen, at some personal risk, to take our side, we ought to do what we can to reward that behavior rather than punishing it.

Whatever honestly can be said in Gen. Sanchez's praise ought to be said now, and criticism of him ought to be suspended, if only as a matter of incentives management.

Right. Kleiman is arguing (again) that folks on "the side" he's on (however defined) have the edge in intellectual honesty. And he is simultaneously urging members of that side to avoid criticizing General Sanchez, not because such criticisms would be false, but rather because they wouldn't further his political objectives.

Can you say self-refuting argument?

The Psychohistorians Are Coming

2007-10-12T10:43:00.000-04:00

Reihan, blogging for Ross Douthat, links to this article about a guy named Bueno de Mesquita who uses game theory to make predictions that out-predict the CIA. Now, this may not seem like much of a feat, but apparently he's got a pretty good record:

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

This is way cool -- not for the first time, I wish I was better at math. He uses lots of math and game theory for his predictions, and for some reason he absolutely drives many of his critics bonkers.

So am I the only one who is reminded of Asimov's pyschohistorians?

UPDATE: Some skeptical points in the comments to Reihan's post. I agree that in order to really assess this guy, you'd need a database of predictions in advance, which you could then check against other methods, or just random chance. But I still like the coolness of it all.

Eat Shit and . . . Live?

2007-10-10T12:10:00.000-04:00

This Slate article suggests that Americans should consume a bit more waste in our diets. The theory behind this is that the near-surgical level of cleanliness that many kids experience these days make them like the boy-in-the-bubble, with weak immune systems. So when a bit of infected food makes it through, it can be fatal. I don't have the scientific expertise to evaluate this claim, but I just love counterintuitive stuff like this.

By the way, didn't George Carlin advance a similar theory?

Graeme Frost and the Oprahfication of American Political Discourse

2007-10-10T07:10:00.000-04:00

There's been quite the kerfluffle about young Graeme Frost, and his family's financial situation. A couple of weeks ago, the Democrats had Graeme Frost -- age 12 -- deliver their response to President Bush's radio address. Not surprisingly, the folks at Thing Progress are delighted with this little stunt -- the Democrats, you see, are "daring to put a human face on the SCHIP program at a time when Bush was proposing a 'diminishment of the number of children covered.'”

How daring of them.

Apparently the folks at Thing Progress think our politics aren't emotional enough. If there is one thing we are not short on, it's human faces. If anything, we need fewer human faces, and more cold, hard analytical reasoning. Putting a twelve-year-old on the radio like one of Jerry's Kids is emotional and manipulative, a way of bypassing reasoned debate and argument. It's all part of the Oprahfication of American political discourse, and it is, in general, a Bad Thing.

I'm old enough to remember when people were discerning enough to ridicule Jimmy Carter for seeking his daughter Amy's advice on arms control. We really ought to ridicule the Democrats for sending twelve-year-olds to respond to the President. And it's incredibly hypocritical for the Democrats to become outraged when people decided to check the anecdote they were using and began questioning whether the Frost family is needy enough that it "deserves" government aid. Here's a hint for our friends on the left: if you don't want people to check your anecdotal claims about the necessity of government programs, then stop using anecdotes. But if you put the poster kid in the wheelchair up on stage, don't act all outraged if somebody decides to check if the kid can walk. (I'm using that in a metaphorical way, since Graeme does seem to be ambulatory.)

As Mark Steyn put it:

Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party's 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts' Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man's job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it's incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you're welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.

Now, all that said, I do think that hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings has a point: get the facts right. As it turns out, Graeme's family owns a nice house, but they bought it years ago when it was dirt cheap because it was in a bad neighborhood. Graeme attends a pricey private school, but he does so on a scholarship. From what I can tell he does seem to be the sort of lower-middle-class kid for whom the program appears to be intended. But there's no reason, in principle, why people shouldn't check the telling anecdotes used to advance certain policies.

More Bathroom Antics

2007-10-06T15:21:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan links to this story about a Republican candidate arrested for public bathroom antics which in turn links to this Times-Picayune article. It seems that Joey DiFatta, a Republican Councilman and (now former) State Senate candidate has twice been detained for bathroom incidents in a mall. It's worth observing that DiFatta was never convicted in connection with either arrest, and that he denies any wrongdoing. So he may well be innocent.

Here's the story:

Kenner police issued a misdemeanor summons to DiFatta in September 1996 in connection with a peeping Tom incident in a men's bathroom at the former Mervyn's department store at The Esplanade mall, according to a Kenner Police Department incident report obtained by The Times-Picayune.

The report states that DiFatta watched a man use the bathroom while peering through a hole in a bathroom stall. The man held DiFatta until police arrived, at which time he was issued the misdemeanor summons and ordered to appear in court.

DiFatta said the man eventually withdrew his complaint, and the case was dismissed. A spokeswoman for the Kenner Police Department said the record was expunged.

Tapping foot in stall

In the second incident, Jefferson Parish deputies working an undercover detail in a men's bathroom at Dillard's at Lakeside Shopping Center in March 2000 stopped DiFatta after he indicated a desire to engage in sex with an undercover deputy in an adjoining bathroom stall, according to an interoffice memorandum written by Sgt. Keith Conley, one of the deputies involved in the investigation.

The report said DiFatta slid his foot into the deputy's stall and tapped the deputy's foot. In the report, Conley noted that such activity is common among men to indicate a willingness to participate in sex.

The deputy inside the stall, Detective Wayne Couvillion, responded by tapping his foot, and DiFatta reached under the partition and began to rub the deputy's leg, the report states.

The detective asked DiFatta, "What do you want?" according to the report, and he replied, "I want to play with you."

DiFatta also used a hand signal to indicate that he wanted to engage in sex and used language that indicated the same, according to the report. Conley, who is now the Kenner city attorney, confirmed the report's authenticity Thursday.

The incident did not culminate in an arrest because the deputy in the bathroom with DiFatta terminated the investigation after several children entered the bathroom, the report states. Conley noted in the report that DiFatta appeared well-versed and comfortable with the routine.

Sully's take:

I should say my sympathy is ultimately with the Republican. I don't think this stuff is a threat to public order or should be subject to police stings. But, sadly, if you are representing a party that believes in the necessity of publicly stigmatizing homosexuals, you're pretty vulnerable to this kind of trauma.

Forget Sully's loaded phrasing and gratuitous swipe at Republicans. What struck me was how casual and accepting he seems to be about this sort of activity in a public restroom. He seems to think it's, well, normal.

It's not the same "threat to public order" as, say, bank robbery, but when I'm using a public restroom, I don't want some other guy peering at me. Now maybe Sullivan doesn't mind if guys check him out as he's peeing. Heck, maybe he likes it. But most guys don't, and yes, it is a "threat to public order," because it's something that can provoke a physical confrontation. Likewise, while I'm a little less directly impacted if two guys are going at it in the stall next to me, I don't think it's something that bathroom-users ought to have to put up with. Perhaps police bathroom stings are going a bit far, but it really is legitimate for the cops to prevent people from having sex in public.

More to the point, Andrew Sullivan has spent a good amount of energy advancing the cause of tolerance for homosexuals -- most particularly arguing for gay marriage. Now, I realize that there is no logical connection between bathroom sex and other gay rights issues, but he might consider at least acknowledging that having sex in a public bathroom is a really gross thing to do. It's gross in the (rare) case when straight people do it, and it's gross when gays do it. But this casual acceptance of public gay sex -- something widespread enough that gay guys have developed an elaborate code -- certainly fuels the argument of guys like Clayton Cramer who notice that certain rather repulsive antics don't get much condemnation from within to the gay community.

ALL The Planes Are Late

2007-10-05T14:53:00.000-04:00

I've been known to post a missive or two about bad customer service, and particularly about how U.S. Airways customer service really sucks. Now James Fallows links to this Patrick Smith's latest Salon "Ask the Pilot" column about why that plane is always late. According to Smith the answer is simple: the airport doesn't have enough slots to accomodate the number of takeoffs and landings at peak times. In particular, he thinks that regional jets are the big villain:

It's an airline scheduling issue, plain and simple. Carriers have created this mess through a self-defeating insistence that frequency of flights is the ultimate key to success. Over the past several years, they have portioned capacity onto smaller and smaller planes making more and more departures. The results of this strategy can be seen on any afternoon at airports such as JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Washington National, where small regional jets (RJs) account for up to half of all takeoffs and landings. It is not the total volume of passengers slowing things down, it's the inefficient way they are divvied up. In some places, 50 percent of the traffic is carrying a quarter of the people.

How bad does it get? Two weeks ago I was working a flight from Europe to JFK. We landed shortly after 5 p.m. -- several minutes ahead of schedule, ironically -- only to spend the next two hours -- two hours -- taxiing from the end of the runway to our parking position. Our assigned gate was open and available the entire time, but the airport had become a spaghetti snarl of planes. Taxiways were blocked; aprons, clogged. It was literally gridlock -- with scores of 50- and 70-seat RJs jockeying for space with A340s and 747s.

Fair enough -- he's a pilot, and he can see and make sense out of what he sees outside his own window.

If you are like me (fat chance) your market-oriented libertarian instincts kick in: the obvious choice is simply to charge more for takeoffs and landings during peak periods. Yet Smith rejects this obvious solution:

So-called peak-period pricing is a popular and controversial idea, akin to levying heavy tolls on automobile drivers as a way of reducing downtown traffic jams. In cities like London, apparently, such disincentives have met with success. But jetliners are not cars, and airlines are not private motorists. The result would be higher fares with a minimal effect on congestion. Speaking last week to the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security, Zane Rowe, a vice president at Continental, said that peak-period pricing "will do nothing more than reduce service to small communities, reduce job growth and raise fares for commercial passengers." Rowe is partly right. The bit about small communities is certainly an eyebrow-raiser, now that RJs operate on mainline trunk routes as much as they fly to minor cities. (Out of New York, they service such "small communities" as Chicago, Miami and Dallas.) He's correct, however, about costs being passed along to fliers. With average ticket prices as low as they are, it'd be relatively easy for airlines to pass along a modest rise to customers. You already pay extra to fly at the choicest times (even if your flights don't actually leave or arrive when they're supposed to). You'd probably pay more. For the scheme to encourage any measurable consolidation, fees would need to be fairly radical, which is to say very expensive, and I don't foresee that happening. The airlines are too strong, regulators too timid. Instead, the probable result: pricier tickets, same delays.

This can't be right. Basic economics tells us that if the price goes up, the amount demanded will go down. You cannot have pricier tickets and no reduction at all in the commodity being priced. At the margin, some travelers will shift to less-popular times. "Pricier tickets, same delays" is simply not a possible outcome.

Now, if they set the price for peak hour departure too low, then it won't have much of an impact, and so we will have pricier tickets and only slightly reduced delays. But if the congestion fee is that modest, well, ticket prices won't go up that much, either.

Besides, having government set the fee for a particular time is a clumsy and stupid way of going about implementing a congestion-fee system. The obvious solution is to figure out how many takeoffs and landings an airport can accomodate during a particular period and then auction off the rights to prime slots. Instead, Smith prefers a command-and-control solution:

If you ask me, the only hope is for carriers to consolidate departures and wean themselves away from their berserk obsession with regional jets. They can do this voluntarily, or the government can force them to by imposing caps. For example: At Kennedy, no aircraft with fewer than 100 seats shall be allowed to take off or land between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Or, during that same time frame, each carrier serving the airport must reduce its schedule by a certain prorated percentage that reflects its share of total passengers.

I'm quite certain this man knows more than I do about flying an airplane, or even about the mechanics of how airports work, but it's goofy to think that government-imposed caps will work better than a price system. If nothing else, he claims that government won't set the price high enough because of the strength of airlines and weakness of regulators. Then why, pray tell, does he imagine that government will set the cap correctly? And if he bans planes with fewer than 100 seats, doesn't he just create an incentive to produce airplanes with exactly 101 seats?

For the life of me, I just don't understand the appeal of command-and-control regulations, when market-based solutions are obviously superior.

UPDATE: Reading the comments, I must say, great minds think alike:

Surely the simplest and market friendly solution would be to cap the number of slots at the most congested airports and conduct an open auction for the right to use the slot. This would give the larger airliners an advantage in that their per seat slot cost would be lower than commuter and executive jets and would have the extra advantage of raising funds for the upgrade of traffic control systems.

Alas, this insightful commenter was anonymous, but whoever it was, he or she got it exactly right.

Free Gonzo Stross

2007-10-03T11:31:00.000-04:00

Ann Althouse links to this story about a Michigan artist named Ed "Gonzo" Stross who faces a jail term for painting a mural on the wall of his own studio. Background: "In 1997, Stross got permission from the city to paint the 1,100-square-foot mural on an outside wall of Gonzo Fine Arts Studio at Gratiot and Utica roads, but with conditions: no letters, no genitalia and regular maintenance of the artwork." He then proceeded to paint a mural on the wall based on Michalangelo's "The Creation of Man" which -- gasp -- shows one of Eve's breasts. The city claimed that the breast was barred under the agreement, and brought him up on charges of some sort. A jury agreed with the city, and he's been ordered to serve 30 days in jail, pay a $500 fine, and serve two years probation.

His lawyer from the ACLU is, of course, focusing on the bluenosery of the whole thing:

Marlinga said the sentence is absurd given the fact that the mural is based on artwork in the Sistine Chapel and that the part some say is offensive is minimal.

“You would have to be a puritan out of the 16th Century with a magnifying glass in order to spot Eve’s nipples,” Marlinga said.

Yeah, yeah. And as Ann Althouse observed, breasts aren't genitals, at least not if we are talking about humans.

Of course that is all true, but it seems like they're focusing on the piddly stuff. Sure, it's based on a famous painting, but so what? Would it really be any less outrageous if the artwork were wholly original? And sure, only a prude could get all outraged about Eve's boob, but even if it were a giant size picture of Bambi the Stripper with enormous breasts, the case would still be outrageous.

First of all, why the hell is this a criminal case? If he violated an ordinance or broke his agreement, why not bring a civil case, ordering him to paint over the offending mural, or modify it -- paint pasties on Eve's nipples, or the like. Even if you assume that the city has the right to control how people paint their own property, there is no justification at all for criminalizing offending murals.

But I am not willing to make that assumption. I realize that the whole concept of defending property rights is anathema to the ACLU, but it's his own damned building. He should be able to paint it however he wants. Art, advertising, political advocacy, bright garish colors. The government has no business telling people how they decorate the outside of their own buildings.

Maybe you could convince me to allow government restriction of flat out raunchy porn on the wall. But this notion that the local government should be making aesthetic judgments about how people paint their property is just ridiculous. People should be able to do what they want with their own property without getting permission from some idiot bureaucrat.

Oh, and there has to be more to this story. He first got permission in 1997. That means the mural has been up for ten years now. If Eve's boob were that offensive, they'd have noticed it before then. There has to be some new reason the local authoritarians decided to go after this guy now. Some other grievance they have against him.

Go My Team!

2007-10-02T12:23:00.000-04:00

Tim F. over at Balloon Juice exhibits a fine bit of reflexive anti-Republican my-team-ism in this post. He links to this John Fund piece about Rudy Giuliani's propensity to take telephone calls from his wife in the middle of speeches. On the merits I agree with Tim (and John Fund) that this is really rude, and also a bit weird. If Rudy is this rude to people, and has this sense of entitlement now, it's hard to imagine how he'd behave if he were actually elected President of the United States. Given how much kowtowing the President gets, actually being elected could push Rudy to James Bond movie-villain level megalomania.

Tim seems to think that Rudy will end up being a weak candidate because he is so personally unlikable. On that I agree with him. But what struck me about Tim's post was this comment:

On the downside, if Giuliani self-destructs too soon he could put the race within reach of a real candidate like Huckabee. Go Rudy go.

Tim seems to be saying that he wants Rudy to be the candidate precisely because he will be a weak candidate. This, to me, is an example of a rather desctructive my-teamism.

Whoever he turns out to be, the Republican candidate will have some chance at winning the general election. Maybe not a big chance, but some. As an American, it seems to me that you should root for both parties to nominate the person who you believe would make the best President. Maybe not the best candidate, but the best President.

The same would be true of die-hard Republicans -- they should want the Democratic Party to nominate the individual whom they believe would make the best President, if elected. It's fine to be mad at Republicans -- I am pretty annoyed with them myself, these days. But the polity is healthier when both parties field strong candidates.

Jena 6: Somebody Else Finally Gets It

2007-09-29T08:26:00.000-04:00

Via Steve Sailer, this article by Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain. Professor Swain seems to think that the Jena 6 may have been the victims of disparate treatment, but for very personal reasons, she understands that a group beat-down can have terrible consequences:

Much sport has been made of the deadly sneaker that the district attorney introduced as a weapon. What is missed is the fact that sneakers and fists can become lethal weapons under the right circumstances.

Almost a year ago, my 41-year-old brother, Kevin Henderson, died from injuries he sustained on his job after he was attacked by a group of teenage boys.

According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack, five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.

My heart goes out to her -- her brother is dead, beaten to death by a gang of cowardly thugs. Since Professor Swain is black herself, her brother is most likely black as well. So here we have an innocent black man, stomped to death by a gang. Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Al Sharpton? Where are the demonstrators? Where, for that matter, is CNN?

As Professor Swain puts it:

Black crime is a serious problem that stereotypes all black youth. And it must be dealt with by a united black community that stands up and says enough is enough. Unfortunately, too many of our media-appointed leaders have failed to vigorously condemn the attack of the six against the one. This is unfortunate.

Indeed it is. But if they condemn the attack, they have to recognize that maybe, just maybe, the thugs who attacked Justin Barker deserve punishment. And we can't have that, can we?

Jena 6: The Prosecutor Speaks

2007-09-27T10:54:00.000-04:00

Via Ann Althouse, this New York Times op-ed by the much-maligned Jena 6 prosecutor, Reed Walters. All-in-all, he gives a pretty good account of himself, emphasizing some points that have been getting lost. Most importantly, he makes short work of something I've taken issue with myself: the characterization of the case as being about a "schoolyard fight."

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

Precisely. The defenders of the Jena 6 keep using that term because of the image it creates: two young men engaged in equal combat. I'm actually probably a bit more indulgent of the classic schoolyard fight than most school officials these days. But youthful fisticuffs used to be governed by a code of honor, and the Jena 6 attackers don't know the meaning of the word.

Hsut Up Already

2007-09-26T18:49:00.000-04:00

Glen Reynolds is having a poll on whether he hsould Hsut up with the Hsu puns.

I vote to ditch 'em. Alas, my fellow Instapundit readers appear to be outvoting me.

I fear a Hsunami of Hsu puns.

"Your Agonizer, Please."

2007-09-26T13:47:00.000-04:00

I have a bad feeling about this. Courtesy of Radley Balko, this article about a new weapon with an appropriately Orwellian name: Silent Guardian. Made by Raytheon, it's a ray-gun. Really -- it works by emitting "an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings." And it's supposed to hurt like hell.

Here's the kicker: the beam from the Silent Guardian barely pentrates the skin -- just far enough to cause pain, but not far enough to cause permanent damage. Or leave marks. Silent Guardian is being billed as a humane, non-lethal weapon which can be used to disperse crowds and the like. But as the Daily Mail article points out, it's the perfect torture weapon:

Perhaps the most alarming prospect is that such machines would make efficient torture instruments.

They are quick, clean, cheap, easy to use and, most importantly, leave no marks. What would happen if they fell into the hands of unscrupulous nations where torture is not unknown?

The agony the Raytheon gun inflicts is probably equal to anything in a torture chamber - these waves are tuned to a frequency exactly designed to stimulate the pain nerves.

I couldn't hold my finger next to the device for more than a fraction of a second. I could make the pain stop, but what if my finger had been strapped to the machine?

Dr John Wood, a biologist at UCL and an expert in the way the brain perceives pain, is horrified by the new pain weapons.

"They are so obviously useful as torture instruments," he says.

"It is ethically dubious to say they are useful for crowd control when they will obviously be used by unscrupulous people for torture."

Unscrupulous people? You mean like Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and the whole "enhanced interrogation" crowd? This thing is barbaric, and it's going to be used. This thing is going to cause a lot of pain to a lot of people, and decent people everywhere will curse those who invented it.

Somebody was bound to invent something like this one of these days. Did it really have to be an American company working for the United States military?

A (Different) Mob of Cowardly Thugs

2007-09-25T19:54:00.000-04:00

Via Your Lying Eyes, this YouTube video showing a group of black kids beating up a thirteen-year-old white kid in Norfolk, Virginia. In all likelihood, there won't be any blogstorm over this -- just another beat-down, after all. And the poor dears are only being charged with misdemeanor mob assult, so there can be no claims of overzealous prosecution. I wonder if anybody will bother to protest this behavior. Well, I don't actually wonder -- I know the answer.

Cops Complain of Speeding Tickets

2007-09-25T11:34:00.000-04:00

Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings links to this bizarre site, in which, believe it or not, cops complain about getting speeding tickets from other cops.

Now, to be fair, the site claims it's about "officers getting traffic tickets that ANY normal civilian could get a warning on, verbal or written." In fact, I think you could make a case enforcing traffic laws more strictly against off-duty police officers. After all, they don't need "warning," because they are presumably already aware of the law. Moreover, one might argue they should be traffic-code moral exemplars for the rest of us. Still, I don't favor giving anybody -- even cops -- tickets for going three miles per hour over the speed limit. (Speed limits are set way too low anyway.)

But, in fact, if you read the site, it's not about cops griping about getting rinky-dink tickets for stuff that civilians would get off for. Nope -- it's about cops griping about getting any tickets at all. The accounts show this incredible sense of entitlement. An entitlement to not be ticketed out of a sense of professional solidarity with other cops. I'm not naive enough to be surprised that such attitudes exist. What makes me a bit shocked is that the cops who demand this sort of treatment exhibit their demands in such a brazen and public way.

One guy complained because the Illinois State Police ticketed him for going 84.9 miles per hour. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm being holier-than-thou -- I have to admit I've driven 85. But if I were pulled over, I wouldn't gripe that much about getting a ticket.

Or read this complaint:

I am an active police officer in the NYPD and was driving down to Florida on March 4th 2007 which was the first time I have driven to Florida, not realizing in time the sign changed 65 to 45 i was slowing down and was nailed doing 61 in a 45 by Officer Brown 2416 (the summons copy is light) of LAWTEY PD Bradford County FL. I had to pay $185 which I didn't have on this avoidable summons. This officer could have cared less that he was writing another active police officer, I go out of my way to take care of other cops no matter where you may be visiting from.

I suspect that the reason the abrupt change from 65 to 45 is what is known as a "speed trap," and that there's s a reason why cops lurk there. I object, in in principle, to such tactics, but if the rest of us are going to get nailed for this sort of thing, well, I don't see why the NYPD should be immune. Likewise, I think it's abhorent that the NYPD officer admits to going out of his way to "take care of other cops."

Or consider this account:

On June 22, 2007 I was heading up US59 in Houston to go do my quarterly firearms qualification. Unfortunately, I was running late and was pulled over by Officer J.W. Harris, traffic enforcement, with Houston Police Department. I immediately pulled over and gave him my license and insurance. Officer Harris asked why I was speeding and I informed him that I was late for a range day and that I understood he was doing his job. I then showed him my credentials since I had my weapon on me. Officer Harris then checked to make sure that my inspection and registration were up to date and went back to his car.

Officer Harris took approximately ten minutes so I figured he was going show some professional courtesy and only make me “wait” awhile longer instead of stroking me a ticket. That wasn’t the case. Officer Harris ticketed me even after I identified myself as a law enforcement officer. I am currently working under cover in a Federal position and informed him that I too had previously been a police officer in both Houston and Dallas, Texas and had pulled over multitudes of Houston Police officers while working radar and had always shown them professional courtesy and sent them on their way.

What, the rest of us aren't in a hurry, either? If I'm pulled over because I'm late to something, and I explained that as the reason, the cop would be quite justified in responding "you should have left earlier." Apparently, "professional courtesy" is a euphemism for "cops get to break the law. All I can say is, good for you, Officer J.W. Harris.

Nobody tell Balko about this. His head might explode.

UPDATE; Mr. Balko found the site, and he seems to have survived. Just to be clear, this is one instance where I stand in solidarity with Radley Balko and my libertarian friends.

Jena 6: The Facts Do Matter

2007-09-24T21:12:00.000-04:00

You know, I'd be a lot more inclined to share the outrage in the Jena 6 case if the outraged people were a bit more careful about the facts. Case-in-point: Amina Luqman's Friday Washington Post column. This is Luqman's summary of the facts:

The basic points are these: In the predominantly white town of Jena, La., white students hung three nooses last September after black students sat under a schoolyard tree where white students normally congregated. The white students were suspended for three days. After black students protested peacefully, the LaSalle Parish district attorney threatened them, saying: "I can make your life go away with a stroke of a pen." Eventually there was a schoolyard fight in which a white student was beaten; he was treated for a concussion and multiple bruises. Although the student was well enough to attend a school function the same evening, six black boys between the ages of 15 and 17 were arrested, five of whom were charged as adults with attempted murder and conspiracy.

Where to start? Luqman ignores the beating took place several months after the noose incident. Ignores the fact that the District Attorney's comment was made after there had been several racially-tinged fights on campus, and that there is a factual dispute as to whether the "stroke of a pen" statement was directed toward just the black students or the entire student body.

Likewise, the characterization of the attack on Justin Barker as a "schoolyard fight," while not uncommon, is so misleading as to be tantamount to a lie. The word "fight" implies some degree of mutual combat. Justin Barker appears to have been coldcocked and stomped on by a group of attackers. Mychal Bell, had multiple prior convictions. The "school function" that he attended that night was a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at a small-town school. This would have taken, what, ten minutes of googling? Or the two minutes it took to read my summary of the facts.

So why didn't Luqman bother? Because actually sitting down and thinking about the facts introduces ambiguity, uncertainty, shades of grey. Because you might not be so sure where you stand after a while. But Luqman prefers righteous indignation:

This language presumes a legitimacy to both sides, a fair fight. Yet there is nothing balanced or fair about what is happening to these boys. Black Americans crave the same outrage the media rained down on Michael Vick for his unjustified abuse of dogs. For mainstream America, Vick's actions were beyond debate. "How could he be so cruel?" we lamented. Whatever the reason, mainstream America said clearly that what Vick did was wrong. Shouldn't America be at least as appalled by how Jena has treated these six black teens?

Maybe America should be more appalled by what these six black teens are accused of doing. And by the fact that many of their defenders don't seem to care.

The Jena Shotgun Incident: I Knew There Might Be More To It Than That

2007-09-24T18:10:00.001-04:00

The primary argument made by the "Free the Jena 6" crowd is that there's been racial disparity: the Jena 6 are, they claim, being treated less favorably than whites who committed similar, or even more serious offenses.

The "shotgun" incident inolves a student named Matt Windham, who pulled a shotgun on three black students, including at least one of the Jena 6, Robert Bailey. This incident has received huge play among those who believe the Jena 6 have suffered an injustice. Nearly all of the discussions of this incident state or imply that the white with the shotgun was the agressor. Few give any indication that there is a substantial factual dispute. Over at collorofchange.org, for example, they summarize it thusly:

Black students at a convenience store were threatened by a young white man with a shotgun. They wrestled the gun from him and ran away. While no charges were filed against the white man, the students were arrested for the theft of the gun.

Radley Balko, in his e-mail to Glen Reynolds says "In one case, a white kid pulled a shotgun on three black kids." Michael David Murphy, who has been giving this story quite a bit of attention, has a similar characterization:

Three black teens were in the store, including two of the Jena Six, and when they left, they were confronted by a white man with a loaded shotgun. The teens wrestled the gun from him and fled.

NPR has a somewhat more detailed report:

The next day, tensions escalated at a local convenience store. Bailey exchanged words with a white student who had been at the party. The white boy ran back to his truck and pulled out a pistol grip shotgun. Bailey ran after him and wrestled him for the gun.

From these cursory and one-sided reports, you would hardly think that there was any controversy at all regarding the shotgun incident. Yet, when I heard about it, I kept scratching my head, wondering if that was all there was. Lo and behold, Patterico at Patterico's Pontifications linked to this story in the local Jena Times (you have to scroll down a bit to find the story). It turns out that there are two sidies to this shotgun incident, after all:

The victim, Matt Windham, alleges that three black males attacked and robbed him while the three accused are claiming self defense.

Both the victim and those arrested offered different statements to police, however, eye witnesses to the event unrelated to the victim or those arrested gave a report of the incident that corresponded with the victim.

Now, maybe the Jena Times is a racist rag covering up for a corrupt power structure. Maybe they're just sloppy about the facts. Maybe they don't want their town to look bad. I don't know whether this report is accurate. And I sure don't know what happened in that parking lot.

I do know one thing, however. I know that there is a factual dispute as to what happened. I know that both sides are claiming self-defense. Now, the pro-Jena 6 folks are free to believe Bailey's account if they like. But, at a minimum, honesty should compel them to acknowledge that the facts are in serious dispute.

Once it is acknowledged that, indeed, the shotgun might well have been pulled in self-defense, that element of the claim of racial disparity evaporates.

Are UAW Auto Workers Nuts?

2007-09-24T13:11:00.000-04:00

Insty links to this report that General Motors workers are now officially on strike.

Are they crazy? Do they want to drive General Motors into bankruptcy? What are they thinking? The American automobile industry is in deep, deep trouble, and the workers go on strike. I am utterly speechless at this lunacy. (See The Hutch Report for similar thoughts.)

Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

2007-09-21T19:45:00.000-04:00

In the past, I have been critical of President George W. Bush, but I do try to be fair. For example, just this morning I went after some people who criticized President Bush in a particularly stupid way. But this latest report is deeply weird, and even a bit creepy. Creepy in the "Oh my God, this man controls nuclear weapons," way.

It's based on something in the book Dead Certain, which I own but have yet to read. According to Hilzoy at Obisidian Wings, Sid Blumenthal's review in Salon takes note a very odd practice: Josh Bolton, White House Chief of Staff, greets President Bush with the phrase "Thank you for the privilege of serving today." Every. Morning.

I honestly have trouble believing this. It has to be another plastic turkey, doesn't it? I am willing to believe that this is a bizarre hoax, or that Draper just made it up. Or even that Blumenthal read it wrong -- maybe he said it once, and that got transmuted into saying it every day. I would suggest it was some kind of ironic inside joke, but somehow I get the feeling that Bush doesn't do irony.

Because the alternative is even worse. The alternative is believing that Bolton really does this every day, and that Bush lets him do it. Likes it, even.

Now if Josh Bolton were really poor, and he had to engage in this kind of obsequious display in order to feed his kids, I would understand. But I'm pretty sure he could find lucrative private sector employment. So, what kind of man is willing to do this sort of belly-crawling on a daily basis? Possibly even thinking it is appropriate to do so. Is that the kind of person we want as one of the President's principal advisors?

That's a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is "no."

Letting somebody do this us really bad management. One problem in Washington D.C. is that "you are wrong" is not a phrase that powerful people are accustomed to hearing. But, from time to time, it's a phrase they need to hear. One of the worst choices that any political leader can make it to hire flatterers and yes-men. Anybody who greets his boss like that deserves to have his face in the dictionary under the word brown-noser. If I were President (stop laughing) and my Chief of Staff said that to me, I'd bust out laughing and tell him to get a hold of himself. If he did it for three days in a row, I would tell him that the pressure of the job was just too much, and he ought to spend some more time with his family.

Worse: what kind of man accepts that sort of obsequious display on a daily basis? As Hilzoy says:

Stop and think for a moment: if your assistant greeted you every morning with the words "Thank you for the privilege of serving today", how would you respond? I think I'd make light of it the first day, but if it continued, I'd say: I appreciate the compliment, but it's really not necessary. If, God forbid, my assistant went on saying it, I would at some point have to sit him or her down and explain that it made me uncomfortable. The one thing I really can't imagine is letting someone go on saying that day after day. It's just too crazy.

No shit.

The fact -- if it really is a fact -- that President Bush accepts this degrading ritual is most disturbing. What kind of man allows that? Even likes it? It sounds like something a meglomaniac would demand, or a Third World dictator. Not the President of the United States.

This is just psychotic.

UPDATE: Rising Hegemon says something I thought but didn't quite have the guts put into words: "You can literally see Bolten already in the next room masturbating." As one of his commenters says, "Eeeeeeewwwwww."

Jena 6 -- More Fact, More Thoughts

2007-09-21T14:46:00.000-04:00

The Jena 6 have hit the big-time, now, with several A-List bloggers chiming in. Instapundit, Megan McArdle, and Orin Kerr over at Volokh have all weighed in, now. I think that all of them share Professor Kerr's sense that it's hard to get a sense of what the real facts are. One of the -- many -- things about the pro Jena 6 activists that rubs me wrong is their absolute certitude about what the facts are, when there is a great deal murk to the whole thing.

As I noted earlier, this case is a situation in which everybody has to be on the lookout for "confirmation bias" -- the natural human tendency to view the facts in the light most favorable to preexisting beliefs. It's quite possible that I myself fell for that, to some degree, when I wrote my Cowardly Thugs post. At the time I wrote that post, I was not aware that some claims of factual innocence had been made. Since then, my position has evolved somewhat. I read one report that, if true, would raise serious questions as to the procedural fairness of Bell's trial.

While I still suspect these are the guys who did the deed, if I were writing my Cowardly Thugs post today, I would clarify that Barker's attackers are cowardly thugs, whoever they might turn out to be. That is, I would admit to at least some uncertainty as to their guilt. I still think that a one-against-many beatdown is cowardly, but I admit of some uncertainty as to whether these guys are the cowards in question.

Since my prior posts on this matter, a couple of interesting factual tidbits have come my way. First, this local article, which I found courtesy of Kevin at Megan McArdle's, as well as this informative writeup bit by a local minister, via Steve Sailer.

The local news article helps to flesh out some of the facts, and also exposes a perspective I've tried to highlight here: that of the victim:

All you hear is, 'Justice for the Jena Six,'" David Barker said of his son's case. "I wouldn't mind justice for the one. It doesn't matter the race -- what matters is what happened to our son."

Absolutely right. The victim is getting lost in all this -- lost or even attacked. While claims of racism need to be addressed, too many people are losing sight of the fact that there was a real-live victim here. Even worse, some people are going so far as to claim that he deserved it. For example, one of my own commenters said, Caps Lock and all, "SOMETHING TELL ME JUSTIN WILL THINK TWICE BEFOR HE GOES CALLIN BLACK PEOPLE NIGGERS. " One of Megan's commenters was equally vile in his sentiments, if more literate: "First, the kid who was beaten was taunting the students. If you taunt someone and you get your ass kicked - it's your own fault."

These constant attempts to claim that Barker wasn't really hurt all that badly, or that he deserved it, or that a tennis shoe isn't a deadly weapon -- as if his attackers took off their shoes and slapped him with them, rather than stomping on him on the ground -- really rub me the wrong way. And it is 100% clear that if the races were reversed in this case -- if a group of white football players stomped on a black kid -- the folks who are trying to minimize the victim's injuries would be howling for blood.

Eddie Thompson, a local minister, has penned a very informative essay about the controversy, which I commend to my readers in full. Interestingly, Thompson admits that Jena has problems with racism and bigotry, and he seems to think that the Jena 6 were overcharged, which is probably reasonable. But he also provides a firsthand perspective not always reflected in media and blogger accounts.

Granted, some of his points are a bit, uh, trivial. For example, he says that there were two nooses, not three, in the infamous tree. Well, OK -- the point is that there were nooses. The exact number isn't critical.

But other factual claims are certainly interesting, if in fact they are true. For example, as I noted in my synopsis of the background facts, it has been widely reported that the students who put up the nooses were given a short in-school suspension. Thompson claims this isn't true, or at least it's not complete:

The actions of the three white students who hung the nooses demonstrate prejudice and bigotry. However, they were not just given “two days suspension” as reported by national news agencies. After first being expelled, then upon appeal, being allowed to re-enter the school system, they were sent to an alternative school, off-campus, for an extended period of time. They underwent investigations by Federal and Sate authorities. They were given psychological evaluations. Even when they were eventually allowed back on campus they were not allowed to be a part of the general population for weeks.

If true, this suggests that the original noose-hangers were not given just given a slap-on-the-wrist. And he adds some disturbing details about the fight itself and its aftermath:

There was no “fight” on December 4, 2006 at Jena High School, as the national media continues to characterize the event in question. Six students attacked a single student who was immediately knocked unconscious. According to sworn testimony, they stomped him, as he lay “lifeless” upon the ground.

Justin Barker, the white student attacked, was not the first white student targeted by these black students. Others had been informed they were going to be beaten, but stayed away from school and out of sight until they felt safe.

CNN reported that there were “obviously no witnesses to the fight.” In fact, over thirty eyewitnesses, students and teachers, were questioned immediately following the attack, all of who implicated one or more of the black students arrested in the case. In fact, some of the accused black students did not stop stomping Barker until they were pulled away from him by some of the teachers, according to testimony given in the trial of Mychal Bell.

The media continues to make the point that Justin Barker “attended a party” later that evening, insinuating that his injuries were not very severe. The Barkers, by no means a wealthy family, face medical bills already over $12,000 from the emergency room visit. Imagine what an overnight visit would have cost. Justin Barker was advised to remain hospitalized but decided he would not let the event keep him from participating in the once-in-a-lifetime, traditional Ring Ceremony at First Baptist Church in Jena, where class rings are presented to the upcoming senior class.

[Formatting altered somewhat because I'm too much of a klutz to duplicate his exact format on Blogger.] All of this, I think, points to the brutality of the attack, and the unfairness of using the fact that Barker attended a ceremony that night against him. Particularly disturbing is the allegation that the attack wasn't some spontaneous outburst brought on by Barker's taunting, but was instead premeditated.

And he supports what those of us night blinkered by our ideology have already figured out. These kids are not a bunch of angels, but are instead a bunch of juvenile delinquents who have been coddled because they're football players:

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.

This article says it all. Mychal Bell was on probation until his 18th birthday for a battery which occurred on Christmas Day, 2005. In early September of 2006 -- just a few months before the Jena 6 attack -- Bell was "adjudicated" for battery and criminal damage to property. A few days later, he rushed for 108 yards and three touchdowns.

Another Stupid Attack On George W. Bush

2007-09-21T10:26:00.000-04:00

I am a frequent and harsh critic of President George W. Bush -- I think he's screwed up in so many ways I won't even try to name them all. Nor is he particularly eloquent.

But Ann Althouse is right -- "you have to will yourself into idiocy not to understand what he means here." The folks at Think Progress are hacking away to George W. Bush for supposedly asserting that Saddam Hussein killed Nelson Mendela, when in fact Mandela remains very much alive.

For the literal-minded, let me explain it. He's saying that people who might play a role in Iraq similar to the role Mandela played in South Africa are dead, because Saddam Hussein killed them. Not Mandela himself, but Iraqis like Mandela. This is what is known as a "metaphor." The tipoff, maybe, was when he "Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas" referring to more than one possible Mandela. If you don't understand he's being metaphorical, the statement makes no sense at all. Unless, that is, you imagine that George W. Bush thinks that South Africa has a clone army of Mandelas, which Saddam Hussein wiped out.

There are all sorts of really good things to criticize George W. Bush about. Why do people waste their time on idiocy like this?

UPDATE: Opinionjournal links to this Reuters article which makes the same dumbass mistake.