Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Know your enemy
By Tom Smith

Hollywood money. Beverley Hills is its own city. Why can't they be their own country. I acknowledge their right to exist. I just don't want to live in the same nation.
posted by thomas at 7/30/2004 10:46:00 AM

 
Dreams 
By Tom Smith
 
People post dreams on blogs, and I agree it's generally a bad idea.

But what the heck.  Unfortunately, my dreams are the sort that hardly require interpretation. 

Last night I dreamed I was in some fancy hair salon and the stylist was saying adamantly that I need more hair.  Well, duh.  I'm not crazy about the fact that my hair isn't growing right.  I can't even seem to get male pattern baldness right.  It's sort of asymmetrical.  Sprouty.  Uneven.  But I figure if Donald Trump has to do that egregious thing with his hair, then there's little to be done.  OTOH a friend of mine actually got plastic surgery of some sort on his head to put in more hair.  It looks good.  But I could never do that.  Too expensive and violates my religion of manliness, the first commandment of which is 'deal with it.'

Dream 2:  I am at some sort of jujitsu practice and at the end of the practice are going to be challenge matches.  I am getting more and more psyched up for it -- afraid, but also looking forward to it.  Somehow this gradually evolves into my being in some kind of minor tournament being held in a decayed arena in TJ.  It is a UFC style tournament, with both striking and grappling allowed.  I'm a pretty lousy boxer, but I have confidence in my grappling skills.  It turns out I am to fight some guy reputed to be a good striker.  I keep asking different people how my opponent fared against this or that fighter.  I keep getting the same answer:  "he took him apart."  I get really tired of hearing this.  It implies a scientific dissection I find unnerving.  I ask my crowd (I seem to have some informal coaches -- they are a very rum looking lot) how to handle it, and I am advised "you'll just have to take it."  I get tired of hearing this too.  Finally, my opponent shows up, really late.  That pisses me off.  He looks like Daniel Day Lewis and has an entourage of hip-looking, black leather clad groupies.  They're all dressed in black and looking very hip and gothic.  Now I am really mad and can't wait to get into the ring.  He walks past me and gives me this look that infuriates me, like I don't worry him.  Now I am really, really mad, and really, really ready to fight.  Then I wake up.  I wonder when I stopped being mysterious.
posted by thomas at 7/30/2004 10:06:00 AM

 
Kerry or Carey?
By Tom Smith
 
I watched part of Kerry's acceptance speech last night, but I went along with the family vote to switch to Ace Ventura Pet Detective (the sequel set in Africa).  It was a good choice.

I can't help but be appalled by the Kerry war hero shtick (an interesting word btw;  do any readers know its origins and exact meaning?)  What I don't understand is, how is it supposed to attract swing voters?  I understand his medals make him the perfect war protestor;  they remove the stigma of cowardice.  I also get that the Democrats don't care if the Vietnam hero thing offends pro-military Republicans;  they're not voting Kerry anyway.  But what is the logic for the undecided voter?  They must have focus grouped it, but it still puzzles me.  Perhaps they think something about the war hero/war protestor paradox will appeal to the person who has not made up his mind yet, who must be someone wired up a little funny.

I saw Bush's new stump speech this morning.  I thought it was good.  Rove et al. seem to think the real heartland vs. Hollywood theme will work in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, and maybe they're right.  Bush's cultural attacks were coded enough to be polite.  The implicit constrast between schoolteacher Laura and most-successful-widow of all time, Madame Kerry, was pulled off with a light touch.  He defended the war in straightforward terms.  Tax cuts versus tax increases.  Referring to Cheney as not the prettiest candidate worked, I thought.  To me, he seemed much more genuine, but there's obviously a cultural divide in the country.  MSNBC spent most of the time before the speech training its camera on the enormous backside of one female Bush supporter, just a little example of your fair-minded media at work.

But I've given up trying to see things from the point of view of potential Kerry supporters.  Beyond looking more presidential, I just don't get it.  I can't transcend my market segment any more.
posted by thomas at 7/30/2004 09:09:00 AM

 
Red state optimism
By Tom Smith
 
Maybe the democrats should consider not having conventions.  Maybe a virtual convention. Anyway, Red State is encouraged.  Via instapundit.
posted by thomas at 7/29/2004 04:51:00 PM

 
Did I mention that the 9/11 commission's recommendations suck? 
By Tom Smith
 
The way to fix things in government is centralize them?  Maybe competition would be a better idea.
posted by thomas at 7/29/2004 04:51:00 PM

 
Just because you have a Blackberry, doesn't mean you have something to say
By Tom Smith
 
Howard Fineman from the DNC.  This is an example of the baleful influence of blogging.  It might, might be interesting what Belle du Jour had to drink, and so forth.  Howard Fineman, no.  All the name dropping only reminds me that journalists are not reporters, but just schmoozy fellow travelers.  Howard doesn't need a Blackberry, he needs an SOB editor, like that guy in Spiderman.  Someone to shout, You call this news!

posted by thomas at 7/29/2004 04:51:00 PM

 
Brit super soldiers
By Tom Smith
 
New hard core Brits on the case.

Also, check this out.
posted by thomas at 7/27/2004 07:44:00 PM

 
Lady Heinz speaks
By Tom Smith
 
What can the DNC powers be thinking?  Why put a mean, snooty-seeming Social X-Ray girl with a French accent, in front of the national audience to give a speech about her kept husband?  Isn't that un peu risque?  (French bad, and I don't care).  Why are they doing it?  Did She Who Must Be Obeyed (I mean Lady Heinz, not Hillary) demand it?  If they want to humanize Kerry, there must be better ways.  Maybe they want to humanize her.  But can she humanize herself?  I doubt it. Maybe they figure very few people will be watching anyway.
posted by thomas at 7/27/2004 12:22:00 PM

 
Interesting review of young conservatives
By Tom Smith
 
Here.

I'm not sure what the American anti-war right has to offer.  The Old Right was certainly right about communism.  To the extent "anti-war" means anti-war in the sense of "the anti-Vietnam war left", I think that view has clearly been discredited.  There is more to be said for the right wing anti-war view, that defending Vietnam was never worth what we should have known it would cost.  Clearly, fighting that war in a way calculated to lose was a huge mistake.  In a way, it led to the revolution in Iran, and jihad in Afghanistan, the consequences of which we have yet to deal with completely. 

Old style Robert Taft isolationism, however, I just don't see as having much of a future.  We have to be able and willing to defend ourselves against threats from abroad, and terrorism and terror-sponsoring states are a reality, whether we like it or not.  I agree with The American Conservative sorts who distrust the Straussians, which the neo-cons are to the extent they are intellectuals.  In addition to Leo Strauss, their hero is Pat Moynihan, who in my book was just another sappy liberal.  Intelligent, sure, but basically a guy who thought only big government, inhabited by Harvard-trained intellectuals or their equivalent, could save American society from itself.  They're just New Deal technocrats who want another shot, promising that this time they'll get the programs right.  They may be better than post-modern left-liberal nihilists, but that's not saying much.  I think some of the neo-cons do entertain grandiose ideas about spreading American democracy around the world.  They are dangerous, and it is troubling that Bush foreign policy seems to be so influenced by them.  However, they seem to be right about Iraq, and would probably be so about Iran and North Korea as well.  But I wouldn't want them to be in charge of the store indefinitely. 

I also think the essay linked above over-estimates the extent to which the right is in the thrall of Bush.  Lots of conservatives, such as me for instance, are willing to admit to being less than thrilled with Bush.  He would be a better President if he had 10 or 20 more IQ points, but he is smart enough.  He lacks strong principles of limited government and spends too much money, a lot for political reasons.  He's too willing to get in bed with corporate interests.  But he's certainly no worse than the democrats would be in this respect, with their protectionism, farm subsidies, and endless programs.

As I've said before, the conservative movement has to be popular and populist.  The neo-cons are elitist in principle, right down to the philosophical/Straussian grounds that if Plato were still around, they would be his special boys.  They're just the Harvard version of the sweating weirdos in some storefront church in Dirtville, Georgia who think that they truly are God's elect.  The Harvard version is in a position to do a lot more harm.  You bet they bear watching, but they happen to be right about Iraq.  If they start talking about the need to democratize Africa with the Marines, however, they need to replaced in a big hurry. 

There is never going to be a popular conservatism in this country that does not include strong national defense and appreciation of the military.  To that extent, the anti-war right is wasting its time.  But empire we don't need.  You can be pro-national defense and anti-imperialist.
posted by thomas at 7/27/2004 10:25:00 AM

 
Can a stealth candidate win?
By Tom Smith
 
It is an interesting question whether a candidate can win by hiding his personality and views from the electorate.  Steyn is skeptical and so am I?  Via RCP.

Did Kerry really say he hunted deer by crawling around with his trusty 12-gauge?  I know it's possible to hunt deer with a 12-gauge, but not many people do it, when a rifle is so much more accurate.  And crawling around in the mud?  He's obviously thinking about ducks, which maybe someone in his social group hunts occassionally. 
UPDATE:  Several readers wrote in to say hunting deer with a shotgun is common in heavily forested states such as Michigan.  In parts of some states, it is even required.  I did know that buckshot was for bucks, I just thought everybody used rifles, as they do in Idaho, with rare exceptions.  Crawling through the mud for a deer still sounds phony, however.  I suppose you might if you were sneaking up for a close shot, but I don't know, as I come from a dry state where there's not a lot of mud crawling.  If Kerry wants to be cool, maybe he should say he only hunts with a spear.  That way, he could be ultra-manly and not offend the gun-control crowd.


posted by thomas at 7/27/2004 08:01:00 AM

 
Stealing Elections
By Gail Heriot
 
Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund’s new book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" isn’t on the shelves yet, but it will be in a month or two. Since Fund is a friend of mine, he gave me a copy of the manuscript on the condition that I alert him of any typos or other glitches. (Yes, I found a couple of minor ones, but as a charter member of the American Association of Ethical Proofreaders, I am honor bound not to disclose them, not even the funny one.)

If you want a one-sentence summary of the book, it would be this: When it comes to elections, the United States is in many ways a third-world nation. Sloppy is one word for it. But it goes way beyond sloppy. According to Fund, "At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon were actually able to register in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11." Thanks in part to the lax standards of the Motor Voter Law the voting rolls are rotten with non-citizens, non-residents, dead people, fictional people, dogs, cats, and at least one elephant. And a good number of them vote.

Check the book out if you get a chance. It is filled with both amusing and scary anecdotes from every part of the country. I’m not usually an anecdote person. I don’t like to generalize from a few stories that there is something wrong (or something right) with the world. But Fund has uncovered so much that it’s impossible to disagree with him. Something really is wrong with our election practices.

Sorry, but I don't have a link for the book, since it's not in print yet.  But here's a link to Fund's column today, which, interestingly enough, is on blogs.
posted by Gail at 7/26/2004 04:09:00 PM

 
Cinder story
By Tom Smith
 
We'll probably see more and more stories about what a jerk Kerry is, and that's fine with me.  Here's a little sample:

Granted staggering wealth on the basis of marriage, Kerry seems to believe he deserves it, and perhaps always has. Such, at least, is the popular perception among the voters who know him best. "One of the surest ways to get the phones ringing on any Massachusetts talk-radio show is to ask people to call in and tell their John Kerry stories," says Howie Carr, the Boston Herald columnist and radio host. "The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: The junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives. The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: 'Do you know who I am?'" Just For Kerry is a common Bostonian take on what his initials stand for; and a possible insight into his priorities could be inferred from his tax records for the year 1993 (when he was between wives), in which he earned $130,345 and gave exactly $175 to charity, while indulging in an $8,600 Italian-made mountain bike for himself.

via RCP.  I'm not sure it matters if POTUS is a jerk, as far as policies go.  It will be nasty if we have to watch the press suck up to JK and Lady H, however.  Watching people get sucked up to, who want to be sucked up to, is the worst.

Maybe somebody should start a website where authentic Kerry anecdotes could be posted.

posted by thomas at 7/26/2004 09:55:00 AM

 
Thumbs down from Betsy on Manchurian Candidate remake
By Tom Smith
 
As I watched a trailer for the remake of the Manchurian Candidate, I wondered vaguely what would be the evil force substituted for Communism in the new movie.  I guess now I know.  Evil American capitalists of course.  Leave it to Hollywood to turn a brilliant piece of anti-communist paranoia into a high-tech anti-capitalist tool.  What a shame. The original with Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury (of subsequent Murder She Wrote fame) is a little gem of 1950s Americana (though actually it was made in 1962, it feels like the '50's).  I personally find Lansbury's performance the most chilling.  She can really act;  the queen bee of evil routine works for me.

Somebody needs to explain why Hollywood is so Red.  Is it just historical path dependency?  It started out that way and now has reproduced itself?  Here are all these people living the most sumptous lives in the history of planet, and yet their politics is Henry Wallace left, or something.  Part of the explanation might be that the human capital that makes you a great actor (looks plus a weird talent something like the ability to lie well) does not necessarily correlate with intelligence or judgment at all.  You can be as beautiful as a supermodel and thick as two short planks, as anyone who as watched cable TV knows.  Maybe entertainer leftism is just a suddenly rich person's grab at intellectual respectability.  In any event, it's all rather too bad, because in a country where 10 percent of people think Elvis lives, movies have a big influence on opinion.

posted by thomas at 7/25/2004 09:15:00 AM

 
Where the Democrats' money comes from
By Tom Smith
 
Washington Post does some reporting.

posted by thomas at 7/23/2004 08:27:00 PM

 
Abortion update
By Tom Smith
 
This is more sad than funny.

I love the line about handicapped people making a fuss about the aborting of non-person persons with disabilities.  They are a fussy lot.  First, they take up all those parking places, and now this.  True, they did get us those spacious toilet stalls, but still.  Imagine them thinking that saying aborting disabled fetuses opens the door to disposing of disabled people who are walking, or wheeling around, as the case may be.  Ridiculous! 

It relates to this, TV's insistence on treating abortion as a touchy, morally ambiguous topic.

It's so annoying when people just don't get morally desensitized on schedule.  Maybe we need some shows for kids that would depict a trip to the abortion clinic in a happy, upbeat, above all normal context.

"Where are you going today, dear?"
"I'm going to get an abortion, Mom!"
"Good choice, Mary!  Have a nice abortion!"
"I will, Mom! Thanks!"
Cut to scene of Mary skipping away, hopping on her bike and pedalling cheerfully away to the clinic.

A lot of euphemisms out there to deal with.  Planned Parenthood.  It's not really about becoming a parent, is it?  Quite the opposite really.  And it's not really about planning either.  More like, you didn't plan and now you're going to be a parent.  Maybe they should take a clue from bail bondsmen.  They come right out and say what their business is: "Get out of jail now!"  So maybe something like "Clean Kill Abortion Clinic."  Needs some work, but you get my drift.

I like "reproductive freedom."  I want financial freedom of the same kind.  I could spend my money, and still have it.

posted by thomas at 7/23/2004 03:35:00 PM

 
Why do they hate us?
By Tom Smith
 
Other folks on the right are wrong.  We should sit down with the terrorists and find out what they want.

The thing is, while we are sitting down with them, someone should come from behind them with one of these.  Just a suggestion.
posted by thomas at 7/23/2004 03:18:00 PM

 
Envy
By Tom Smith
 
Envy is a primitive emotion.  It's been around since we were just pretentious apes.  It still works in politics. via RCP.

posted by thomas at 7/23/2004 09:27:00 AM

 
Postmark: Washington, D.C.
By Gail Heriot

Great Britain's political capital is also its financial, commercial and cultural capital. Ditto for Argentina, France, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Japan, Mexico and Sweden. Indeed, there are few countries in the world where the political capital is just a political capital and nothing else.

Washington is an exception (as are capital cities like Ottawa and Brasilia). Although Washington is a thriving city, its sole claim to preeminence is in the political realm. It is neither the country's financial, commercial, industrial, entertainment nor fashion capital. Prior to its selection as the political capital, it was a cow pasture. Indeed, photos that are only about a century old show happy farm animals grazing on the White House and Capitol lawns.

How did this happen? Thomas Jefferson wrote that it all started at a little dinner party at his home-away-from-home in New York attended by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. At the time, New York was the country's temporary capital. Hamilton was eager to get Madison's (and the other Virginians') vote in Congress in favor of the federal assumption of Revolutionary War debt. Madison and his fellow Virginians were less than enthusiastic for a number of reasons, not least among them that Virginia had already paid off its own debt, so federal assumption was not in their interest. A deal had to be struck.

And it was. According to Jefferson, the debate over where to locate the nation's capital was going on during the same time period; cities like New York, Philadelphia, Trenton and Carlisle were vying for the honor. The Virginians as well as many Marylanders wanted it along the Potomac. Hamilton was happy to give them that little plum in return for a few votes for federal assumption. (Yes, there may have been a bit more to the deal than that, but it doesn't matter to my point now.) The rest is history.

Hamilton is usually portrayed as shrewd for making such a deal. The federal assumption of debt was a vital part of his financial plan for the United States. The location of the capital was just a little piece of patronage. Why not trade it?

But I wonder what the long-term consequences of that deal have been. Has the federal government been less sympathetic to commerce and industry that it would have been if the capital had been located in New York or Philadelphia? Do any such long-term effects remain? I have a hard time believing that there has been no effect, but then history does not disclose its alternatives, so it's hard to say for sure.

It is worth noting that Jefferson, Madison and their Virginia and Maryland allies didn't just want a capital that would be within their territory. (Recall that the District of Columbia originally included what is now Arlington County, Virginia.) They wanted a capital that would be away from the evil and corrupt cities. In effect, they wanted a cow pasture and they got it--far from the corrupting influence of financiers, merchants, and manufacturers. What would our antitrust law look like today if the capital had been New York? Or our industrial policy? Or our agricultural policy?

If our capital were New York, every mid-level civil servant would be married to a mid-level employee of a bank, an investment firm or a major corporation. Members of Congress would have bankers and businessmen as neighbors. It would be different. (No, having lobbyists as neighbors is not the same; lobbyists are part of the culture of government, not the culture of business and enterprise.) I don't know if this would have been bad or good, but it would be different. Did Hamilton give away more than he intended?

If you're wondering from this post whether I have finally finished reading Ron Cherow's biography of Hamilton, the answer is yes.
posted by Gail at 7/21/2004 11:30:00 PM

 
Curiouser and curiouser
By  Tom Smith

The documents that Berger has acknowledged taking -- some of which remain missing -- are different drafts of a January 2000 "after-action review" of how the government responded to terrorism plots at the turn of the millennium. The document was written by White House anti-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke, at Berger's direction when he was in government.
 
This from WaPo.  This fits the Smith hypothesis.  Maybe somebody should ask Clarke under oath whether earlier drafts contained tougher language on the Clinton administration's performance.

Update:  NYT protects us from getting the wrong idea.


posted by thomas at 7/21/2004 09:41:00 PM

 
Irresponsible speculation about the Berg(l)er
By Tom Smith
 
Andrew Sullivan wants to know why Sandy "the Sock" Berger took drafts of the post-action report of the Millennium plot from the National Archives. 

Here is a theory.  It might be that the 9/11 commission had a copy of the final report, and perhaps even one or more non-final drafts of the final report (though the latter seems unlikely to me).  But perhaps there were earlier non-final drafts of the report that included even more damning language about the Clinton administration's anti-terror activities than did the final version.  If so, these earlier drafts might be quite embarrassing in themselves to the Clintonistas, and the revisions weaking the language would suggest the White House pressured whoever wrote the report to tone down the language, which happens all the time in our nation's capitol, but still seems sleazy, in part because it is. 

It seems unlikely the 9/11 commission would have requested the Millennium plot post action report and all of its earlier drafts.  It seems quite possible that the only copies of the early drafts in existence might have been in the National Archives.  If Sandy deep-sixed those (as we learned to say in Watergate days) then they would be gone forever.  And, isn't there one document that was "inadvertently" destroyed?  Maybe that was the draft which included a sentence later removed which read "But for that rarity, an unusually alert Border Guard, we would still be digging the bodies out of LAX."  Or maybe not.  Jus' speculatin'.

Before all this gets out of hand, I think we need to remember it is time to move on, that everybody takes highly classified documents and destroys some of them, and occassionally stuffs notes in his or her socks and/or underwear.  What you put in your socks, and especially in your underwear, is a personal matter, and not a matter for a criminal investigation.  When will we ever learn? 
posted by thomas at 7/21/2004 02:02:00 PM

 
Interesting conservatives, some of them Catholics
By Tom Smith
 
Check this out.

As to who Pantagruel was, and what a new one might be, see this.  Maybe I should read Rabelais.  Doesn't this sound just right?

With this mirthful temperament towards all that is humane and with frightful anger directed against the forces that would squash such things, Rabelais used laughter, parody, and what the Russian Literary Critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “grotesque realism” as a means of subverting the pillars of official culture and the proto-totalitarian orders of society. Pantagruelism is, according to Rabelais, “a certain jollity of mind pickled in the scorn of fortune.” It is that odd cast of mind which allows one to see the corruption everywhere, including in oneself, while still loving the world.

To me that sounds like just the frame of mind one should have.
posted by thomas at 7/20/2004 10:54:00 PM

 
The bad David Brooks
By Tom Smith
 
I really am not cynical about most of the truly important things.  This country, the rule of law, babies, forests, mountains, large fish, wild animals, fast and/or large cars, beauty in all of its forms especially the fair haired kind, but I'm afraid this Brooks column makes me want to heave.  Is that wrong?  Maybe I'm going through an anti-Yale phase.  A foreign service officer who was especially proud of his note taking skills?  Oh lordy.  And Henry James.  I hate James.  I got half way through the Ambassadors and finally admitted to myself that I could not give a shit if the little old maid man who was the main character . . . oh, forget it.  How could anyone write a whole long  novel about a guy whose job is running a literary journal and errands for a rich Boston society gal?  As if that was a great gig?  Pathetic.  Mencken was so right about James.  He needed to spend some time in Chicago and get in touch with life.  Going to England just made him worse.  Holmes has a description somewhere of trying to see James while in England.  Holmes was close, of course, to William James.  Henry just dithered and dathered about what day would be best and whether he should come by this train or that until Holmes just said to hell with it.  For all of James's infinite variety of pastel shadings of observations, his stories are about venal social climbers about whom it is impossible to give a damn. 

And one more thing.  How can anyone take Kissingerian grand strategy seriously after Reagan won the cold war?  And didn't Paul Kennedy's book about the end of American power turn out to be a bit premature?  Now we're the hyperpower, the sole super power.  Oh, gosh, I guess he was full of it.  What do you call grand global think when it turns out to be dumb?  And Kissinger's book on Metternich is the paradigm of pompous pseudo-scholarship, and it's supposed to be the proof of his historical brilliance.  Lucky for him so few people have read it.  I guess I do know why Brooks's column makes me ill.  It is nothing more than name dropping and apple polishing dressed up as a fine appreciation for the really deep and fine things, which is in fact little more than Jamesian style social climbing.  Why can't we all be as great as you guys whose boots I'm licking?  And be, like, really good note takers!  In the most desperate way, Brooks needs to get out of New York and Washington and spend a few weeks in Iraq or Afghanistan, long enough to realize grand strategy is just of a bunch of poseurs flattering each other.

posted by thomas at 7/20/2004 10:54:00 PM

 
Read this very nice essay by a Ninth Circuit Judge
By Tom Smith
 
Yep.  He's nailed it alright.
 
Canada, America, cowboys, the frontier, thumos.  What more could you want?
 
Just one little nit.  I don't think you ever want to call a cowboy a mid-Westerner.  Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and everything south to Texas is the West. And west obviously, until you get to California, which is California, except for LA, which is LA, and the Bay Area, which is the Bay Area.  The West extends to the Cascades, west of which is whatever they call that moldy country.   Rainland.  Moldavia.  PCifica.  Texas is Texas.  I don't know what you call Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oklaholma, etc., but I doubt they like mid-West. 

posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 05:18:00 PM

 
I haven't been able to stop crying
By Tom Smith
 
I'm so upset.  How could he say that?

posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 04:27:00 PM

 
A touching tale
By Tom Smith
 
A colleague brought this touching tale of modern maternity to my attention. 
 
It's a good thing they don't give frequent flyer miles for abortions, or they'd all be dead.

posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 12:02:00 PM

 
Hispanic gang culture
By Tom Smith
 
This is a disturbing article.  In the City Journal via RCP.
 
I always suspected that police unions and other stupid turf wars prevent one of the most important steps we need to take in response to these problems.  More police on the streets.  We could use more aggressive anti-gang legislation, as well.  Good luck getting that through Sacramento.  One reason LA has so much more random gang violence than NYC, I think, is that NYC has much higher police to population ratio. 

posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 12:02:00 PM

 
How bad would a Kerry victory be?
By Tom Smith
 
How bad would a Kerry victory be?  Sages say pre- Labor Day polls mean nothing, and I hope that's true.  That last time I remember telling myself how little polls meant was when Bush Sr. was running against some skirt-chaser from the swamplands.
 
But maybe a Kerry victory would not be all bad.
 
1.  If Kerry wins, Lady Heinz would be first lady, which is actually a pretty demanding job.  She would make John miserable for getting her in that position, and he certainly deserves it.
 
2.  The first thing that happens, and I've heard this from both Republicans and Democrats, when you become President is all the Generals and intel community heavies come in and explain to you what a big bad world it is, accompanied by stuff with lots of code-words stamped on it.  The new President then spends the next few days working on bladder control.  Given that Kerry is basically an opportunist and has no anti-war principles or any other sort for that matter, he will figure out that the best way to get a second term is not to allow any big American city get wiped out by a nuke or turbo-smallpox, even if Teresa tells him not to be so Ameri-centric.
 
3.  Having Edwards in office reduces the chances of regular programming being interrupted by a Vice Presidential funeral.
 
4.  Kerry will undoubtedly give right wing bloggers plenty to complain about, and Teresa will be an inexhaustible source of obnoxiousness to decry.  Hit city!
 
5.  Maybe higher taxes will energize tax planners to come up with something that would do some good to people like me.  Necessity is the mother of loopholes.
 
6.  If he is President, Kerry will give lots of speeches, and Democrats will have to pretend they are not the most boring, self-serving things anyone has ever heard.  That will be funny to watch.
 
7.  It could be an opportunity to squeeze out some of the phonies, stchick artists, and hangers-on in the Conservative Movement.  Sometimes you need to lose. 
 
8.  Blessing number 104:  I may not be worth $50 million, be really handsome and be Vice President, but at least I have a cute, blonde wife who knows how to work a treadmill.
 
9.  Maybe ex-President Bush could buy the Padres and beat some sense into the pathetic collection of bums, before somebody points out that we have the highest ratio of stadium to team quality in the history of sports.
 
10.  Remember, God never closes a door, but that he opens a window.  Also remember you're not supposed to jump out of the window.


posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 11:22:00 AM

 
Oil for terror
By Tom Smith
 
Just when you thought you couldn't get any more cynical about the UN.  Via instapundit.
 
Instapundit a liberal blog?  I don't think so.  Libertarian or techno-libertarian, maybe.  But not liberal.  I realize liberal is hard to define, but if instapundit were liberal, I could not read it as often as I do without some serious GI meds.  And I do read it, with no chemical assistance.


posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 11:01:00 AM

 
Time for Radio Free Canada?
By Tom Smith
 
 
Fox News, threat to the Canadian way of life?  BTW, what is Canadian culture?  And is it worth preserving?

posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 11:01:00 AM

 
Marathon
By Tom Smith
 
This is interesting:  Astronomers recalculate the date of the original marathon run. 
 
It seems perfectly plausible to me that the run was in August rather than September, but then I know nothing about ancient Greek calenders.  But even if it had occured in the mid-80's temperatures of September, rather than the low 100's of August, Phidippides (sp?) could still have run himself to death.  His internal body temperature would have been a function of the outside temperature and the amount of work he was doing.  To die in the '80's just means you have to run faster.  I suppose you have to say he did his job perfectly.  Had he run any faster, he probably would have died before he reached Athens;  slower, and Athens would have had less time to prepare for Salamis (also sp?).
 
Heat exhaustion really sucks.  Our high football coach back in Boise was a sadistic meathead who ran us to death in August two a day practices, and then literally made us beg for water.  He would stand in the middle of a big scrum of desperate players, holding the jug of water over his head, and then pour it out to the ground.  We would have to jump up, like dogs with our mouths open, trying to get a mouthful of water before it hit the ground.  He was a sick man, and I still hate his guts.  (We all have our issues.)  It's a miracle no one collasped and died, but then it was a Catholic school.  He eventually got fired, but not for abusing players.  I quit after my sophomore year, and took amazing amounts of abuse from my peers for it.  The thing that makes me maddest is that it was lousy training.  You don't get any stronger from that sort of nonsense.  From talking to a former trainer of mine who was a defensive back in San Diego State's very serious football program, I know that high level football now incorporates pretty enlightened training principles.  But as usual, I digress.
posted by thomas at 7/19/2004 10:28:00 AM

 
Suburban life update
By Tom Smith
 
I have been left at home by my lovely wife Jeanne and declared a lump, while she takes the four boys shopping for pet supplies, shoes, Target miscellaney and who knows what else.  The lump remark is due to my refusal to endorse a family visit to the La Jolla tide pools today.  I am somewhat lumpish, it is true, but driving 45 minutes to an hour each way, competing with hordes of beamers and lexi for a parking spot, all so we can look at some f%^&*ing sea urchins just doesn't do it for me. 
 
The weekend, since sometime yesterday morning, has been a two day slumber party/birthday celebration extraveganza, with Patrick's three best friends staying the night.  They constructed a tiny hobo village with lincoln logs, went swimming, fought with water balloons, played with the birthday toys, played on the play station, fought with the foam swords, experimented with freezing water baloons, played with the lizards, examined the snake, and played with the dogs.  I made my signature chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, which they ate outside.  Last night was chile and hamburgers.  Now the house is strangely quiet and I have a weird urge to weep in gratitude.
 
The little hobo village was cute.  It featured  Turd Lake where the hobos relieved themselves and Sacrifice Lake where they could drown themselves if they got depressed.  Don't look at me;  I have no idea where this stuff comes from.  We have watched a couple of movies set in the Great Depression lately.  That's probably it.
 
Biscuit seems to be recovering from her wounds fairly well.  She had to have a second surgery when a patch of skin died and would no longer hold stitches.  The little gobbets of blood she is leaving around the house may be contributing to a certain amount of inter-familial tension, but she is such a brave dog and I try to clean up after her.  The family room carpet is trashed anyway.  What's a spot more or less?
 
We have a new lizard.  Word must have gotten around the reptile world, as we did not purchase this one, but rescued it.  It is an escaped or abandoned Australian bearded dragon, about a foot long.  Heidi, our excellent nanny, captured him as he scampered from the road into our iceplant.  Much appreciated by the boys, but smelly.  It must have somehow known our house was a sanctuary for his kind, the Big Rock Candy Mountain for the scaly.
 
The trip to Las Vegas ten days ago seems long past.  The Ritz-Carlton in Henderson had a family deal going for the fourth, and Jeanne decreed that we would spend the long weekend at a fancy resort.  And fancy it was.  When were ensconced in the elevator, which had its own chandelier, Patrick opined "This is the fanciest place I have even been in my life!"  William, age 8, allowed after returning from the facilities in our rooms, that "That was one quality toilet."  The first evening, there was a spectacular fireworks display, and a concert by some famous country singer whom we did not buy tickets to see.  We could watch the fireworks, though.  They were somethin'.  The next day we drove to the Hoover Dam and did the tour.  It really is a treat, if you are intrigued by those big fascist structures of the 1930's.  The guides stressed the dam was really a flood control structure, which made me wonder whether it justified its cost.  Is there anything that used to be flooded by the Colorado that was worth protecting?  Just asking.  It was 114 in the shade when we visited, but cool inside the dam.  We had ice cream at a coffee shop straight out of film set. 
 
The food at the Ritz was great, no big surprize, and the service first rate, except for one concierge who seemed to think she should reply to inquiries as if to questions from hostile counsel at a deposition.  You get some odd sorts in Vegas.  It is the end of many lines. 
 
On Monday, we went to the well known water park on the Vegas strip, and my democratic sentiments were challenged to the full.  It was packed.  I now know everything I ever need to about tattoos, piercings and obesity in America.  America is fat, and America doesn't give a shit.  It was a lot of fun, but I would recommend a few days of Cipro if you swallow any water.  And remember the simple rules of politeness, such as, if a large white guy with a shaved head and an Iron Cross tattooed on his neck cuts in front of you, just pretend you didn't notice.  The water park had a slide six stories tall, which begins as 25 foot nearly vertical drop, and then describes some conic section gradually to the horizontal.  You have to reach speeds of 40 mph or more, and the acceleration can't be much less than free fall.  I forget the name of the ride-- it is right next to Der Stutka, tastefully named after the dive bomber with which Hitler terrorized Europe.  I took my 12, 10 and 8 year old on the ride, and I was proud of their fearlessness, or at least their unwillingness to show fear.  A number of riders got to the top of the tower after a long wait in line, then turned around and walked down.  No one in line seemed to hold it against them.  I couldn't get much out of my kids about the experience.  I asked my 12 year old what he thought of it.
 
"Freaky," he said. 
 
"Do you want to do it again?" 
 
"No."
 
That evening we went to a Japanese restaurant reputed to have the best sushi in Vegas, at the Hyatt on Lake Las Vegas.  This was also to celebrate Patrick's birthday, being the family, as opposed to the kid party.  I'm no great expert, but it sure seemed like great sushi to me.  I ventured forth a little and had some raw eel in addition to varieties of tuna.  It was all great.  The service was a trifle slow, but otherwise excellent.  I hope no giant worms burst out of my head in weeks to come.
 
One bad thing happened on the trip.  We failed to properly close our door and someone slipped into our room and stole an expensive watch I had given Jeanne a couple of years ago on Valentine's day.  The Ritz has an elaborate security system which allows them to log each key that opens a door.  They were able to tell no employee had entered the room with a key during our short absence.  The security shift manager, who seemed like a New York detective who had had enough of the city, told us that we had probably been taken by a "door pusher."  Door pushers are thieves who walk down the halls of upscale hotels pushing on doors.  If one opens, they knock, and if no one is there, they quickly scan for things they can steal quickly.  Cheaper hotels have doors that slam and lock automatically, but the Ritz and other five star hotels consider slamming doors tacky.  The doors close quietly, but don't always latch all the way.  Hotels fight door pushers with "hall walkers," security agents who just walk the halls of the hotel checking doors.  On this weekend, however, the security people had their hands full with outside activities.  No doubt the savvy Vegas thieves saw their chance and took it.  We decided not to get upset about the watch.  It wasn't a child, or a dog or even a wedding ring.
 
So, overall, I can recommend the Ritz-Carlton on Lake Las Vegas in the summer, if you are looking for a place to just chill by the pool, eat great food, and maybe do a little shopping or gaming if you like that sort of thing.  Even at summer rates, it is tres spendy, but at least you get a really elegant experience for your money.  Next to the elevator, on a notepad thoughtfully provided by the hotel, I found this note scrawled in a child's handwriting:  "This place is second best to the Sant. Regis."  You might also want to check that out.

posted by thomas at 7/18/2004 01:08:00 PM

 
Young conservatives 
By Tom Smith
 
Interestingish article in NYT about young conservatives.  I guess tempermentally I'm really a libertarian, since I panic when I see a young person dressed like the young conservative in the photo.  Did the Times photographer specify that the subject wear something nerdy?  I know, there's nerdy hip, but there is also just nerdy.  A good rule of thumb is, avoid madras.  Avoid seersucker, too, unless you really are a Southern senator who's drunk all the time.  Khaki or olive poplin is OK, but for heaven's sake, any salesman at a Brooks Brothers in a medium sized city can give you a dozen better options.
 
For what it's worth, here's my deep thought about the future of the American right.  A big problem with the Ivy League traditionalist conservatives, the neo-conservatives and quite a few libertarians is that, like liberals, they swoon at the thought of being elites.  Deep down, they don't have much respect for ordinary people, who really aren't very ordinary.  Reagan understood this viscerally;  he was a great communicator because of his respect for people.  He was what used to be called natural gentleman. Bush Sr. was hopeless in that respect, which is why the "silver spoon in his mouth" cut so deeply.  Bush the Younger, I'm not sure about.  The neo-conservatives are hopeless intellectual snobs, which makes the accusation of starting a war by too clever behind the scenes machinations half-believable.  And Bill Buckley, for all his historical accomplishments, was at his most tedious in his frequent adumbrations about how wealthy was his lifestyle and that of his father.  "My limosine has miles to go before I sleep," etc. etc.  I know it was a come back to endless whining about the poor, but as anyone west of the Hudson could tell you, showing off your wealth lacks class.  National Review still has something of that flavor, though it has gotten better.
 
The only cultural hook-up the Right has with "the people" now is Christianity, and that raises various problems.  It doesn't help that the free-market economic populism of Reagan has been undermined by its own success.  Nor that Bush Jr.'s big government conservatism is incoherent to the point of defying characterization.  I think what the American Right needs is not so much bright young things with connections to National Review, as some sound thinkers who can explain the connections between economic liberty, and  preserving the cultural institutions that make liberty possible and worth having.  Maybe we could make an exception to the ban on human cloning and get ahold of Hayek's hairbrush.

posted by thomas at 7/18/2004 11:43:00 AM

 
Angry crowds gathered at the site, chanting "God is great (but he needs to work on his air-defense capability)"
By Tom Smith
 
Sorry, I felt I just had to say that. 
 
It seems different somehow when the Iraqi government approves the air strike.  Apparently, Fallujah has become the place to see and be seen if you're a foreign terrorist in Iraq.  If you are seen, however, there's a good chance something will descend on you from above, and it won't be a beam of saving grace.

posted by thomas at 7/18/2004 11:32:00 AM

 
David Brooks on Values
By Tom Smith
 
Brooks can be funny, when he's not trying to be nice.   Via RCP.
posted by thomas at 7/17/2004 08:56:00 AM

 
Awaiting information on black holes
By Tom Smith
 
Stephen Hawking rethinking black holes.
posted by thomas at 7/16/2004 09:20:00 PM

 
I, White Person
By Tom Smith
 
I took sons numbers one and three to see I, Robot today.  It was a perfectly pleasant waste of a couple of hours, with plenty of gee whiz technology and special effects on display.  Its subtext or theme or whatever the appropriate lit crit term would be, however, was a bit alarming and puzzling.
 
The movie was unusual in that almost all the good guys were black and all the bad guys were white.  The robots themselves, in particular the new N5 (or whatever) model, are super-whiteys.  With their pale, glutinous faces, they look like somebody shaved all the hair off a convention full of well preserved DAR matrons.  The robots are the ultimate ice people, emotionless and menacing.
 
Will Smith is having none of this, of course.  He knows the robots are up to no good.  Strangely, he is suspicious of the positronically-brained kind as a result of having been saved by one, at the expense of a little girl, because the robot calculated he had a better chance of surviving drowning than did the little girl.  The mechanics of this accident take most of a scene to explain and aren't worth repeating now.  Let's just say the exposition in this movie has some bugs in it.  
 
(Spoilers to the plot, such as it is, follow.)  Of course, it turns out the robots and the big central computer in the big, bad corporation have developed a heartless intelligence of their own, and want to take over the world, saving humans from themselves, even if it means killing a lot of us in the process.  The robot race justifies this with a liberal construction of the three rules of robotics, but I don't think the movie is trying to be a parable in support of originalism.
 
But what is it?  Heartless, pasty faced white robots attempt to steal the world, and can only be stopped by a passionate, intuitive black cop, who will not be slowed down by the accusations of prejudice thrown his way.  The CEO of US Robotics taunts him with "You just don't like their kind," which phases Will Smith not a bit.  He knows a sub-human when he sees one.
 
The female lead is a hyper-brainy white ice queen.  The director must have told her to play the role as utterly asexual, because that's what she does.  In a Hollywood where female litigators invariably wear tight black ultra-minis, don't tell me this is inadvertent.  In fact, the movie is weirdly sexless for a Hollywood flick, except perhaps for the shots of Will Smith in the shower, Will Smith working out, etc. etc.  I suppose the scene in which ice queen examines Smith's robotic arm might be considered sexy, but just barely.
 
The climax of the flick  is like one of those dreams that don't require interpretation (A gigantic woman named Cravath was smothering me, but I was tied up with golden rope and couldn't escape!)  The big central computer, named  Viki, and holographically projected in the image of a nondescript white woman, is actually a big round electronic blob that floats in the US Robotics central atrium.  Will Smith, Ice Queen, and the one good white robot must get to the blob and inject into in a canister full of little, swimming nanites, that will denature the gigantic, positronic brain.  Does this remind you of anything?  I know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but come on.  I am not sure from what crack-pot ideology comes the tenant that ejaculation will triumph over oppressive female, white, scientific oppression, but Immanuel Kant, it ain't.
 
So, in spite of appearances, this little sci-fi nugget lives up to our culture industry's predilection of producing gobbets of poison.  In I, Robot we learn that whiteys are smart, but heartless and ultimately evil, even if they profess to have the best of intentions.  We learn not to worry if this sounds like racial prejudice;  remember the pasty-faces aren't really human.  They don't have that inner juiciness that makes a bro a bro.  Don't trust white technology;  it will turn on you.  Street smarts will beat tricknology every time.  You go, sun people.
 
None of this has anything to do with Isaac Asimov, of course.  He would probably be appalled at the movie, old fashioned liberal that he was.  Why Hollywood should be turning out this slick little piece of fringe black racism, I have no idea.  Some movies, such as Phenomenon, with John Travolta, are obvious ideological vehicles, in that case for Scientology.  No surprize;  Travolta, although a big talent, is a Scientologist nutter.  But who woulda thunk of turning I, Robot into a sermon on don't-trust-whitey?  I mean, really.  Is nothing sacred?  It's Issac Asimov as read by Leonard Jeffries. 
 
It leads to the question, what does Hollywood have against civilization?  They seem to have done pretty well out of the deal.  But that is a matter for another day.
posted by thomas at 7/16/2004 05:21:00 PM

 
Fighting Back Against Nigerian E-Mail Scams 
By Gail Heriot
 
This is pretty amusing.
posted by Gail at 7/15/2004 04:17:00 PM

 
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
By Tom Smith

You know you're addicted to love, but why? Scientists (and not the kind that will blind you -- sorry, too much MTV in the '80's) have some insights. Via Brian Leiter, defender of science.

Actually, I think the scientists' interpretation is off. I don't think we love our babies, for instance, because our critical facilities are turned off. We love them because of the genetic "self-interest," which means that our critical facilities don't have to be on in the first place. In other words, I think they've got their causality reversed. At least as the article explains it, the scientists speak as if love is a judgment we make based on some object's qualities. I don't think so. Attachment to relatives is very deep, much deeper than anything remotely like judgment. Birds and bees literally do it. I don't think drones sacrifice themselves for Big Mama because they are blind to her faults.
posted by thomas at 7/15/2004 08:00:00 AM

 
A Fractured Sense of Fractions
By Gail Heriot

Here's one of my pet peeves: Why do so many people completely misunderstand the original United States Constitution's "three-fifths of a person" rule?

This time it's the Rev. Jesse Jackson. My friend John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary news service (sorry no link possible) that Jackson recently questioned the analogy between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. "'Gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution ...,'" he said. He thus implies that it would have been better to be regarded as a full human being.

The three-fifths rule was, of course, a compromise. Some people wanted to count each slave as a full human being. Some wanted to count them as zero. But it's important to remember who was on what side of the debate.

Slave owners wanted to count slaves as full human beings, not because they wanted slaves to enjoy the full rights of free and equal citizens. Perish the thought. The main issue under deliberation was how to apportion seats in Congress among the states. Southerners (including Southern slave owners) wanted slaves to count in the head count in the same way other non-voting persons--like unpropertied men, women, children, imbeciles, felons and the insane--would count. The propertied men would be presumed to be voting in the slaves' interest, just as they were presumed to be voting in the interests of their wives, minor children and other non-voters.

Opponents of slavery in the North recognized the three-fifths rule as a travesty. But their argument wasn't that a slave should count as a full human being. Quite sensibly, they didn't want slaves to be counted at all. In other words, they wanted slaves counted as zero (although they were no doubt comforted by the fact that, if Congress ever decided to impose a direct tax, slaveholding states would pay more if slaves were counted in the population). To count them as even three-fifths of a person would be to indulge in the complete fiction that Southern slaveholders were acting in the best interests of slaves.

Interestingly, the three-fifths rule had a major impact on history. Without it, for example, Adams would have been elected to a second term. Indeed, the long run of slaveholding presidents from Virginia--Jefferson, Madison and Monroe--would never have occurred. These men energetically opposed any discussion of slavery. In contrast, Adams took the position that to defer the issue of slavery indefinitely would eventually lead to catastrophe. And, of course, he was right. It makes you wonder if we'd be better off today had opponents of slavery gotten their way on the apportionment issue and slaves been counted as zero. Perhaps emancipation could have occurred earlier and with less bloodshed.

posted by Gail at 7/14/2004 03:46:00 PM

 
More on John and Lady Heinz
By Tom Smith

Michele Malkin is too much of a lady to say the sort of things I say, and that's good. But my take is that John Kerry is sort of Lady Kerry's walker, her Senator-toy, and so it's not really fair to compare them to a normal married couple.

All my friends are normal. I don't think I know anybody with pre-nup, for example. I know, that's embarrassing, but that's the little world I live in. Someday I hope to be rich enough to know some prenuptualized people, but that's in the future.

It's hard to have a normal marriage when you are a politically powerful but not very rich Senator, and you're married to a billionairess with her own Gulfstream and a pre-nup. For all we know, there is a clause in that pre-nup that allows her to treat him like her exasperating teenage step-son, and he just has to take it. Cut John-John a little slack. He's cute, in an overbred dog sort of way, keeps himself in shape, obviously tries hard to be manly, and is no doubt very attentive to his unbelievably wealthy, if snooty and condescending spouse. It is a rare wife, let me tell you, whom you could drop a billion dollars on and still find her adoring her husband. Her second husband at that. How would you like to compete with a dead man who left his wife a great fortune? To many women, that is the pinnacle of the perfect spouse. As a husband, I will just note, adoration is in short supply. I was thinking of asking my lovely wife Jeanne the other evening if she adored me, but she was reading. I have learned you really don't want to interrupt your wife when she is reading to ask if she adores you. It comes over as sort of needy, in a negative sense. I do sometimes ask my yellow lab Biscuit if she adores me, but it is just a rhetorical question, as it is clear she does. If she had a billion dollars, though, who knows?
posted by thomas at 7/14/2004 09:44:00 AM

 
Why Iraq war was justified
By Tom Smith

At NRO.
posted by thomas at 7/14/2004 09:44:00 AM

 
Is there a way to keep disgusting people out of high office?
By Tom Smith

How to keep awful, self-promoting politicians out of high office? It may be there is no way. Here is the latest story on Kerry's yucky self promotional habits. There are lots of stories like this floating around the web. But it's all rather dog bites man. On a much humbler scale, at a July 4th parade here in little Jamul a few years ago, we were standing in the crowd watching the local fire department, high school band, and truly deplorable local dance troupe march (using the term liberally) by. Some little ones were in the front so they could see. Then this jerk who was running for reelection to the school board or something appears, pushes his way to the front, and stands right in front of the little kids, who now can't see the parade. I wanted bongo his head, but settled for telling him (as did other parents) could he please move so the little kids could see the parade. There is probably some principle of politics that says you can at least be sure that anyone elected to head a school board doesn't give a sh!t about children. Hayek and others have observed that public office tends to attract the worst. The most decent men and women personally (though not necessarily the most effective leaders) often seem to get into high office by accident, or with a big leg up via heredity. Kerry I gather was a relatively impoverished old line WASP who married money (twice, and got better at it)-- not a good sign. Kerry and Lady Heinz are a rarity in that they are a couple consisting of people who have both married for money. That must make for an odd marriage. Lovely, of course, but odd.

One of the things I like about our Framers is that they were, of course, very pre-Romantic, 18th century, hard, and worldly men who had no illusions about the nature of politicians or factional politics. They deliberately set out to build a republic that would work even if men were not particularly virtuous. And a good thing, as it turns out.
posted by thomas at 7/14/2004 09:11:00 AM

 
Class-Based Affirmative Action: Are the Numbers Reliable?
By Gail Heriot

In “Beyond Race-Based Affirmative Action,” the always-thoughtful Nat Hentoff quotes this year’s commencement address at Amherst College given by its president, Anthony Marx:

“‘At our top colleges,’ said Amherst’s president, ‘only one-tenth of our students are drawn from the poorer half of the population [and] only 3 percent from the bottom quarter. Three-quarters of top college students come from the wealthiest quarter of society.’”

These numbers are taken from an article by Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose entitled “Socio-Economic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions,” which appears in America’s Untapped Resource: Low Income Students in Higher Education edited by Richard Kahlenberg. They show a rather pronounced skew. And critics on both the right and the left have seized upon them to push their view of the world. The right uses them to argue that race preferences (which often benefit well-to-do minorities) are misguided; the left uses them to argue for class-based preferences in addition to race-based preferences.

But I wonder if these numbers mean what they are thought to mean. The typical American household does not fit neatly into one of four quartiles over the course of its history. Its economic status is fluid. Singles, young couples and young families tend to be financially strapped. The younger the breadwinners, the lower their income is likely to be. As the breadwinners progress through their careers, however, their incomes get higher. They may never get rich, but a lot more than 25% of households will at some point in their history make it into the top 25%. ((Mae West’s experience was probably like many Americans': “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is better.”))

College freshman tend to have parents who are in their forties and fifties. Overwhelmingly, those parents are much better off financially than they were in their twenties and thirties. Age has its privileges. As a result, even in an extraordinarily egalitarian society, one would expect a disproportionate number of college freshman to come from households in the top quartile of income. (The exception I would expect would be for community college students, who are often late starters, several years out of high school, and hence no longer part of their parents’ households.)

Carnevale and Rose are obviously not wrong that wealthier Americans are more likely to send their children to elite colleges than poorer Americans. Anyone who have ever attended (or even set foot on) a highly-selective college surely noticed that many of the students are well-heeled-–sometimes incredibly so. (As a 17-year-old college freshman from a blue-collar neighborhood, I was a little intimidated by some of the wealthier students at Northwestern University, until I realized I was killing them on the exams.) If, however, these figures do not take into consideration this “age factor” (which I suspect is substantial), then there is reason to take them with a grain of salt. I look through the article and found no evidence that this was taken into consideration, and one would think that if the authors did go to that trouble, they would have said so.

Anyway, more on class-based affirmative action later ....
posted by Gail at 7/13/2004 06:17:00 PM

 
A step toward more rational public lands management
By Tom Smith

In a nutshell, the environmentalists want public lands declared roadless to protect them from development. The problem is, what this means in practice is that forest land, like that in Idaho, doesn't get managed at all. The trees build up fuel and after some years of fuel build-up, drought and disease, there is a catastrophic fire. Forests are destroyed, habitats are ruined, homes are destroyed. This line that these areas must be preserved for wildlife and recreationists is, to put it in the delicate Idaho way, a pile of moose crap. I have spent a fair amount of time in Idaho wilderness areas and other wildernesses. There's nothing less recreational than a burned out forest. The old environmenalist preservationist line is just completely, intellectually bankrupt. It represents the triumph of an irrational, unscientific ideology over both good science and common sense. This approach to preserving forests destroys forests. It is as if environmentalists are so opposed to logging, they would rather see a forest destroyed by fire than preserved through logging.

The new Bush policy will incorporate more state level participation in management decisions. These means there is at least a chance that people in places like Idaho, Montana and Colorado will get a chance to bring about policies that actually take forests as recreational resources seriously. I'm not even talking here about balancing timber industry interests against anything else. I personally don't care that much about the timber industry. But I and lots of other Westerners have just had it with environmentalists who think Mother Gaia or the White Goddess will somehow magically manage stands of Poderosa Pine so long as we don't desecrate them with the wheels of our pickups. Unbelievable rubbish. Forests have to be thinned with controlled logging, and cleared occassionally with controlled burns. Some roads are necessary to do this, and to make the areas accessible to hikers, hunters and others. Sweeping declarations of roadless status for millions of acres is misty eyed environmentalism over solid policy based on how trees grow, how fires burn and how people get to the wilderness and what they do there. It is hard to live next to forests, and many people in the West do, and be as stupid about them as most of the environmental lobbyists in Washington seem to be. That's why a more federalist approach to land management policy makes sense.
posted by thomas at 7/13/2004 02:29:00 PM

 
Elections and terrorism
By Tom Smith

Rick Hasen has a post on postponing elections due to terrorist attacks.

I don't know about the law of postponing elections, so I will let others opine on that. I do think some people are underestimating how disruptive terrorism could be of a national election. It would not take that much. Suppose terrorists managed to drop anthrax at a few polling places, then announced they had distributed anthrax at hundreds of places around the country. Would public health officials have any choice but to shut down polls and test them for contamination? Wouldn't millions of people stay away from polls for fear of catching the disease? Unfortunately, I fear the day when getting to vote is like getting on an airplane, in terms of security, is coming.

Personally, I think the idea of having national elections on a single day is sub-optimal for a lot of reasons, some of which can be modeled with real option theory. But that's another story. If you could avoid significant disruption by postponing an election for a couple of weeks, say, I think it would be worth it. Also, it seems to me having a plan to postpone in the event of attacks makes the terrorists' job harder, so long as the postponement is well planned and organized.


posted by thomas at 7/13/2004 09:38:00 AM

 
I'm glad somebody is willing to read Senate reports
By Tom Smith

Some highlights of the the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Hard to believe, but mass media reports have been both grossly oversimplified and misleading. Via instapundit. (And sorry, Glen, but this isn't a very good photo either. May I, in all humility, suggest a color photo, an expensive haircut, and a candid shot. As the most unphotogenic person in the world, I know these things.)
posted by thomas at 7/13/2004 09:21:00 AM

 
Reply to Brian: I am not unhinged
By Tom Smith

Brian Leiter, my favorite far-left voice in the blogosphere, describes me as coming unhinged in one of my recent comments on this blog. I think I may be guilty of being unclear, but not unhinged. I sometimes express myself elliptically, assuming that people will follow my leaps in logic, but someone with very different assumptions might not follow the course of my thinking. In any event, I don't think my point is that far out, or even particularly unusual. It is this:

My greatest fear is that there will be a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. that is an order or orders of magnitude worse than 9/11. That is, one with 50 or 100 thousand casualties, or even more. If that happens, I think it is likely that, for want of a better term, American society would go insane. I think the restraints that now keep the U.S. from inflicting massive (or as Brian might say, even more massive) casualties on other countries, would be gone. People who counseled restraint would get beaten up in bars. Worries about balancing national security and civil liberties would be out the window. If it turned out that the nuke that destroyed an American city came from North Korea, I think there is a good chance we would go to war against North Korea, and given their massive army and nuclear capability, I think there is a decent chance we would do that with a preemptive nuclear attack. If Iran was involved, ditto. The point I am trying to stress is that an event like a catastrophic attack would have a transformative effect on American politics. We would enter a profound disequilibrium, and there's no telling where we would end up, but it could well be a very bad place.

I am a bit of a WWII history buff. I have queried my dad endlessly on what the war in the Pacific was like, what Okinawa was like, read books, and so on. My speculation is that if the US had had twenty atomic bombs in 1945 and the "Young Tigers" palace coup had succeeded in continuing the war after Nagasaki, that we would have used all 20 bombs if necessary to defeat Japan. It was like that. If you get a feeling of what the attitude of Americans was toward Japan during WWII, you see a depth of enmity and ruthless determination that younger Americans usually don't appreciate. Consider that opposition to Japanese internment was negligible at the time. My fear is that a catastrophic terror attack against the US would bring a similar psychology about, and that the result could be, in effect, a world war, or something like one. Maybe this is a worst case scenario, and no doubt I expressed myself unclearly, but I don't think that is unhinged. If someone could convince me that a massive terror attack on US soil would not be an utterly transformative event in American politics and lead to war against all nations and groups we thought were involved, I would be relieved. But I doubt anyone can.

The second point Brian might be making, but is relevant in any event, is that we should not be so worried about a terrorist attack involving a WMD, such as a nuke or possibly a biological agent. I am not an expert on the terrorist-WMD nexus, and many of the people who write about it don't seem to be either. However, I do think the probability that terrorists could get their hands on a catastrophically destructive technology is non-trivial. Even the small probability of a catastrophe justifies investing a lot in precautions. I think the possibility that Saddam or his minions would have allowed chemical or, in the future, nuclear bomb technology to get into the hands of terrorists, more than justified regime change in Iraq, especially when you consider Saddam was essentially a criminal leader holding his population hostage. I also think Iran's nuclear ambitions will have to be curbed definitively soon, by force, if diplomacy won't work. I support a policy that says, the US simply will not allow states that have established ties with terrorist organizations to have WMDs. Call it the Smith doctrine. North Korea also remains a very big problem, but it also seems several powerful countries have an interest in curtailing their nuclear weapons program, so that might be resolvable without war. This might be a controversial set of views to hold, but it is not unhinged. I wouldn't be surprized if a majority of Americans, or at least a third, would agree with them.

The remark I made which I find harder to justify in my current cooler mood is saying that sometimes I think left-wing nuts want America to lose the war on terror, or that there should be another big attack against the US. I do find some of the positions some on the left take hard to account for otherwise, but I certainly have no stake in this view. I hope it's not true. After 9/11, however, I think there actually was some sentiment on the left to the effect that America had it coming, that there was some poetic justice in it. Sometimes I think I detect a similar sentiment in current broad gaged attacks against what I see as very legitimate efforts of self-defense by this country. But if it turns out that the American left really is patriotic, but just thinks our national security is better served by "soft power" means, and so forth, well, I think they're wrong, but I would be glad it is just a disagreement about means.

In short, I do get upset sometimes and sound like I am crazy, but if you listen to what I am actually saying, you will usually find it to be pretty reasonable. I also want to assure Brian that occassions are bound to come up in the future where I find it necessary to mock institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Yale Law School, though the subtlety of what I do is probably not captured by the word "mock." I do like Brian's references to me as an "intelligent person" and a "distinguished corporate law scholar." Brian needs no praise from me to add to his illustrious CV, so I will just add that when I was referring to left-wing nuts, I was not including Brian. He is not a "nut."
posted by thomas at 7/12/2004 06:00:00 PM

 
Thoughts on the National Urban League's New Diversity Report
By Gail Heriot

Ask a fuzzy question and you'll get a fuzzy answer. And the National Urban League's new report on diversity is proof.

Entitled "Diversity Practices that Work: The American Worker Speaks," the report gives the results of a poll of over 2000 employees across the country on the subject of workplace diversity. And it seems to be getting a fair amount of publicity in the media, including an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Approximately 59.0% of the employees interviewed were women and 41.0% were men. Racially, they broke down approximately as follows: White 35.6%, Hispanic 11.0%, African American 20.2%, Asian American 18.1%, and Native American 15.1%. The group was thus dominated by both women and minorities--a problem in a poll that purports to study race and gender issues. I saw no suggestion in the report that the overall responses were weighted to take account of the country’s actual demographics, and my quick calculations suggest that it is unlikely they were. It is, however, impossible to say for sure.

But that’s just a minor problem with the report. Other problems are more serious. I will touch here on only two, one dealing with fuzziness and the other with the profitability of employers with strong diversity initiatives.

Perhaps the most important "key finding" of the report was this one:

"Unfavorable Views at Many Companies: Although they consider the subject of diversity important, American Workers often view diversity initiatives at their own companies unfavorably. In fact, fewer than one-third of American companies believe their company has an effective diversity initiative."

The suggestion here appears to be that employees would like to see their employers ramp up their diversity initiatives. But what is the basis for that suggestion?

According to the report, 65% of the employees interviewed responded favorably to the statement, "A diverse work force improves creativity and innovation in the workplace." No surprise there. Many people, including me, believe that, all other things being equal, most businesses will benefit from having a workforce that is diverse as the race, ethnicity, sex, age and other things. That doesn't mean these same people believe that most diversity initiatives are a good thing. The excessive bean-counting and preferential treatment that usually go hand-in-hand with those initiatives turn a lot of people off (again, including me).

The National Urban League calls it "a wake up call" that only 32% of the employees responded "favorably" (and fully 26% responded "unfavorably") to the statement "My company has an effective diversity initiative.'" But it's impossible to know what the employees meant. Maybe those who thought their companies did not have an "effective" diversity initiative did so because they thought that no such program is ever useful or effective. They're either happy that their companies have no program or unhappy that they do have a program that is inevitably destined to be "ineffective." Or maybe they thought their companies were too small for a special program; a significant number of the companies studied had fewer than 20 employees. Of those who believed that their employers did have an "effective diversity initiative," some may have done so because their employers had no program and they thought that best. The study is simply indecipherable.

One thing is quite clear, since study after study shows it. Americans oppose diversity initiatives that involve preferential treatment based on race. All you have to do is ask them. In a Washington Post poll, for example, 94% of whites and 86% of African Americans said hiring, promotions and college admissions should be based "strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity." Similarly, in another poll, a strong majority (69%) said that college applicants "should be admitted solely on the basis of merit even if that results in few minority students being admitted." The National Urban League report carefully avoids inquiring into this area. At every turn, it denies the employees any opportunity to express misgivings of this kind.

My second point concerns the another part of the report, in which the reader is invited to take a look at companies with diversity policies that are seen as particularly admirable. Here the report really breaks into nonsense. The reader is told these companies are "18% more productive than the United States economy overall." The suggestion here is that employers need not sacrifice profits for a strong diversity initiative and that perhaps diversity initiatives add to profits. Note, however, that the word used is "productive" and not "profitable." In fact, the measure being used here is revenue generated per employee. Such a measure is not only not a measure of how profitable a company is, it is not even a rough and ready proxy for profitability. It is closer to being a measure of how capital intensive a company is. A company that is highly capital intensive will tend to have a high level of productivity per employee, all other things being equal. A company that is labor intensive will tend to have a lower rate of productivity per employee.

Interestingly, it is capital intensive industries that are considered most vulnerable to unionization and other phenomena that are at least perceived by management as being a damper on profitability. With their heavy investment in real estate, equipment and other capital, they sometimes lack the flexibility to get out of the way when demands are placed on them from the outside. Are they similarly vulnerable to demands for diversity initiatives? It's hard to say whether there is a connection here, but it's worth considering.
posted by Gail at 7/11/2004 02:45:00 PM

 
Reading crisis
By Tom Smith

Americans are reading a lot less, apparently. That's bad. I agree with Solomon, that reading is really necessary to mental health, at least if you're not a hunter gatherer with lots of other mental challenges.

I read a lot. My reading is quite disorganized, but I read several hours every day. I make my kids read an hour every day over the summer. At first they objected. But I made it clear that if they don't do their reading, no video games, no TV, no nothing. (And I don't allow them to watch TV anyway, except perhaps an hour on weekend mornings, even during the summer. We do watch a lot of movies, however, at the theater or on TV. You can control the content better, fast forward through the raunchy bits or just stop watching if you disapprove.) Once they understand they must read, they do, and they seem to enjoy it. They get interested in the book, and finish on their own. Even little William is reading. We went to the book store yesterday to get more books, especially for William. He was hard to please. He wanted fantasy, like Lord of the Rings. "But no mice," he told the book store lady. "I hate mice." So we got a book involving owls, who eat mice. I have found the sales clerks at Barnes and Noble have a rich fund of knowledge on kids' books.

I disagree with Solomon that reading on the internet does not count as reading. I don't find it as relaxing as reading a book, but I think that's because it's more of a strain looking at a screen. Most of what I read on the internet are newspaper or magazine articles. I use blogs mainly for the links, or read short posts. I'm not a huge fan of long essay posts, except my own, of course.

Speaking of books, I read part of Solomon's book, The Noonday Devil, about depression. Its evocation of depression was so convincing that it was really depressing, so I stopped reading the book. There's probably a really good book about prostate cancer out there too somewhere.
posted by thomas at 7/10/2004 04:39:00 PM

 
Funny stories
By Tom Smith

A couple of funny stories from our dinner last night with old friends Greg and Melinda. They have friends, the dad of whom is a biologist. Their oldest son is named Darwin and very interested in biology. He was saying his prayers one night (they're religious evolutionists -- there are a lot of us) and the boy prayed "Dear God, please help my parents mate so I can have a little brother."

Anyway, he did get a little brother, and he turned out to be a bona fide genius, of the Little Man Tate variety. Mom would go into his room every morning and say "hello, baby!" to the little critter in the cradle. When the baby was two months old, mom went and said "hello, baby!" and the baby replied "hello!" At that point the mom said she waited to see his head spin around. But it turns out he's just a genius.
posted by thomas at 7/10/2004 01:41:00 PM

 
African uranium
By Tom Smith

Call me a cynic, but I have a hard time believing Wilson would go to so much trouble to throw investigators off the scent of a Nigerian uranium deal just because he was a partisan critic of Bush's policy. What if any were Wilson's business interests in Africa? Did he have reason to suck up to public officials in Niger? Like maybe big, fat consulting contracts in his future? Maybe he's doing the French thing.
posted by thomas at 7/10/2004 01:41:00 PM

 
Susan Eaton
By Tom Smith

Susan Eaton was an assistant professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard and a very committed labor organizer and workers' rights advocate. I knew her when she and I were in the Telluride Association Summer Program at Cornell in 1974. In addition to being one of the smartest girls there, she was the prettiest. It saddens me that she has died at the young age of 46 from cancer.

My parents, my mother anyway, always jokes about her friends dying, how the obituaries are the first thing she reads, how she knows more people in the cemetery than anywhere else, etc. etc. Somebody young dies, and I think, you can't do that. Sometimes somebody you knew in school dies and you think, well, he is in a better place, and so are we. Other times you feel a sense of loss, even though it's someone you were unlikely to run into again. It makes you feel the ache of your mortality. I know it is "the fate man was born for," but it makes you wonder if cleaning your driveway is the best use of your time. But what else are you going to do? It needs cleaning. When a contemporary whom you admires dies, especially one who was more virtuous than you in most respects, it's an odd and unpleasant feeling. Dan Case, in my class of Rhodes Scholars and the president of investment bank Hambrecht and Quist (and brother of AOL founder Steve Case) who did many of the high profile internet IPOs of the '90's, died a year or so ago of brain cancer. He was not a friend, but a friend of friends, who was widely loved and admired. One of my best friends in England, a near-Olympian swimmer and very interesting man named Frank Allen, died within a few years of coming back to the states. Elaine Hefty, also in my class of Rhodes, went on the Johns Hopkins medical school, became a physician, wife and mother, and then was struck down. I get an uneasy feeling of, what I am doing here, when they're not? I know it doesn't work that way. Fortuna plays by her own rules.

I don't know what I can do, except remember the smartest, prettiest 16 year old girl this kid from Boise had ever seen. If God has any favorites, Susan will be one.
posted by thomas at 7/10/2004 12:02:00 PM

 
Easy to forget
By Tom Smith

Krauthammer is right as usual:

Hunger is a scourge that has always been with us and that has not been a threat to humanity's existence for at least 1,000 years. Global warming might one day be, but not for decades, or even centuries, and with a gradualness that will leave years for countermeasures.

There is no gradualness and there are no countermeasures to a dozen nuclear warheads detonating simultaneously in U.S. cities. Think of what just two envelopes of anthrax did to paralyze the capital of the world's greatest superpower. A serious, coordinated attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction could so shatter America as a functioning, advanced society that it would take generations to rebuild.

What is so dismaying is that such an obvious truth needs repeating. The passage of time, the propaganda of the anti-American left and the setbacks in Iraq have changed nothing of that truth. This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do.

It is puzzling that people credulous enough to believe or at least entertain the idea that Bush lied about WMDs in order to, what, make profits for oil companies or get advance bases for American empire, or whatever, find utterly unbelievable the idea that terrorists could get or have gotten their hands on WMDs either from Iraq or another terrorist sponsor state. Or, for that matter, in the deep black market. I think some on the left really want an American city to go up in flames, and to see the resulting fury of the American people, which could very well include martial law, mass deportations, and the like, because it would confirm their paranoid fantasies about American society. These people will disappear as fast as the pro-fascists did after Pearl Harbor if this happens, but by then the damage will have been done.

The idiots on the left have no idea what they are playing at. There is no Soviet Union to restrain the US anymore. In WWII, the US firebombed cities in Japan and Europe, nuked two cities in Japan, and mobilized itself to a degree unprecedented in world history. Now, the US is far more powerful than it was then, and in many ways far more democratic and responsive to popular whim. A catastrophic attack on US soil would create the will and the means to wreak havoc on our enemies and near-enemies on a scale never seen before. It might give US leftists some weird feeling of justification to see us wipe North Korea and Iran off the map (suppose the nuke that destroys Houston was manufactured in North Korea and passed through Iran -- we can find out these things), but there are a lot of Koreans and Iranians who deserve better. But those arguments will fall on deaf ears in the aftermath of a big enough attack.
posted by thomas at 7/09/2004 10:37:00 AM