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Thoughts from San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture
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June 29, 2005
Migraine Headaches By Gail Heriot Oh dear! It looks like my fellow Right Coasters and I have been maintaining radio silence yesterday and today. Sorry. I at least will endeavor to correspond on a more regular basis. But not today. My excuse is that I have a migraine headache--something I am afflicted with from time to time. When I get one, it usually lasts about two and a half days. My doctor tried to flatter me about them last year. He said they are especially common among tall, smart women. I don't know if he's right, but somehow it wouldn't make me feel any happier even if he is. What does make me feel is little better is the hope that magnesium supplements will help. I had been dutifully taking them for the last couple of months, but then I forgot for a while. I won't forget again. June 27, 2005
"No, not Gonzales!" That Really Might Be the Kind of Cronyism that the Federalist Objected to... By Gail Heriot In a column entitled, "No, not Gonzales!," Robert Novak reports a "torrent" of leaks from the White House that Alberto Gonzales will be Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court no matter whose resignation creates the vacancy. Conservatives are hoping this is not true. And maybe it isn’t. (Indeed, as of this writing it’s not even clear that there is a vacancy.) Gonzales has a lot of opposition on the right. Pro-life advocates object to him on account of the views he expressed while he briefly served as a Bush-appointed member of the Texas Supreme Court. Opponents of racial and gender preferences, on the other hand, remember that Gonzales energetically intervened over the objections of Solicitor General Ted Olson, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Ralph Boyd and Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights Gerald Reynolds to prevent the United States from coming out in full support of Barbara Grutter and Jennifer Gratz, the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the University of Michigan over its race-based admissions policies. Grutter and Gratz felt betrayed by the luke-warm, limited endorsement. And there is reason to believe Gonzales' intervention affected the outcome of the cases. "I know that I’ve been helped because of my ethnicity," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Personally, I’m not offended that race is a factor. But it should never be the overriding factor or the most important factor." Would any GOP member of the Senate vote against Gonzales on this account? Perhaps not. Most Republicans agree that a President, no matter what party he is from, must be given substantial (though not infinite) discretion to appoint judges of his choice. Bush insists that conservatives are mistaken about Gonzales. He knows the man well. Their personal friendship goes back many years. Shouldn't he then be cut some slack to make his choice? But some would say that the fact that Bush and Gonzales are friends is just the problem. The one occasion that everyone agrees that the members of the Senate should be willing to resist an ill-considered nomination is when it is inspired by family connection or personal attachment. Bush's argument is favor of Gonzales is precisely that: I know this guy well. He says "trust me." But people make mistakes when they deal with friends. In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton argued that the Senate’s role in the confirmation process should be largely passive. Members of the Senate should not second guess the President. It’s his choice. But they must act as a check upon "the spirit of favoritism" on the part of the President: "To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity." We'll see what happens. June 25, 2005
Politics of faculty hiring By Tom Smith I think Gordon Smith is recommending to law school teaching applicants that they fly their colors, whatever they happen to be, when applying for law school jobs. There may be philosophical reasons for doing this, but I don't think it's the way to maximize your chances of getting hired somewhere. As Gordon must know, all it takes is a little prejudice on the margin to keep you out, in a hyper-competitive market. This is all the more true if you are gunning for a top 20 law school, need to be in a certain city or region, or want to teach some popular subject. I think I could have gotten a Supreme Court clerkship if I had just given Justice White the answer he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear that I didn't like technical, analytical philosophy. I knew that's what he wanted to hear, but I just couldn't bring myself to say it. It would have just been a little, White lie (get it?!). He was supposedly a difficult man to work for. Might not have been fun. But probably would have been helpful to the old career. I regret not having at least changed the subject, or something. There's a lot of prejudice out there, and not just against Republicans, Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals and various others. Being gay will help you some places, but hurt you others. Being a dyed in the wool Marxist is probably a problem, but being on the left is just fine. Federalist Society associations probably hurt well more than they help, at least that used to be the case. Jewish is good, but religious Jewish, I'm not so sure. Israeli-American, I can well imagine being an issue. You don't want to deny who you are, but it's not really the University's business, is it, where you worship? Most of the prejudices are unconscious, so it's meaningless to be assured, oh no, we're happy to have applications regardless of, etc. Moreover, it's not as if people annouce they are being swayed by prejudice, even when they are. Many people think they're doing the world a favor by keeping conservatives out of law teaching; it's sort of a radical, subversive thing to do, to certain way of thinking. It's what you call invidious. You will be judged fairly. But that's after you die. In the meantime, discretion is the better part of valor. Go ahead and send your application here, though. None of these shortcomings aflict us. Big bad blog fight By Tom non-Volokh Smith Geez. You check out of the blogosphere for a couple days, and in your absence a major blogfight breaks out. I feel like I dropped into the Men's, to return to a major barroom brawl. In the movies, you would break a chair over the first guy you saw, but in real life, you just sit down and watch the fists fly. June 24, 2005
Are state schools a good idea? By Tom Smith The most interesting thing about this editorial is that it appears at all in the MSM. I'm not sure I have a coherent position on this one. It does seem likely to me that the benefits of a voucher system would far outweigh the costs. But here in California, even reducing pre-tenure years for public school teachers from 5 to 2 is controversial. Merit pay raises more eyebrows than sodomy. So vouchers may be a pipe dream, anyway. I also think that some pretty unreasonable people are driving this debate. It's perfectly reasonable for parents not to want their 6 year olds to be exposed to official indoctrination about homosexuality. At the same time, it's nuts to think that biology or geology should be taught in a manner consistent with the proposition that the earth is 10,000 years old. Way too much of this debate is driven by rights talk, and excessive concern for ideological minorities. I mean, if you can't stand bible-thumping Christianity, maybe you should consider moving away from Cowpie. Similarly, maybe you should consider that whatever saying God just dropped the comet in mid-orbit is, it ain't astronomy. My kids go to a Catholic school and still get exposed to all kinds of rubbish, such as that the ultimate ethical act is recycling. In fact, most recycling is an utter waste of time and money. Here's what you do. You sit your cute little beggar down on your knee, and you say, "Son, recycling is bullshit. But remember to be polite to your teacher." Most indoctrination problems can be taken care of this way. You want to teach them to be pretty questioning, skeptical sorts, anyway, lest they become Howard Dean supporters. But if you really want your kids to reject a large part of modern science, I think it is a lot to ask that the public schools help you. June 23, 2005
Finally, a commerical use for male underarm sweat By Tom Smith It sells magazines. Really. Also, video games and violence. Eye of Sauron found in deep space. I always hated the stuff anyway. My theory on this one is that the smart, sluggish guys kinda ride the wave . . . Nice work if you can get it. Cheer up, pizza face. Hard men. Nano-guys fight cancer. June 22, 2005
UK horror story By Tom Smith This story is getting some play on talk radio and in the UK press. Pretty shocking. O'Connor, Not Rehnquist? And Gonzales to Replace O'Connor? By Gail Heriot Idle speculation by Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard. It's been a long month. Summer reading By Tom Smith Ah summer. Time for big, chunky books with little redeeming social value. I discovered the Merrily Watkins mysteries on Amazon, and they're pretty delicious. Hard to describe, however. P.D. James meets Stephen King? Some reviewers call it a new genre, but in fact the "supernatural detective" is as old as the detective genre itself. LeFanu and Blackwood both practiced it. In these mysteries, the Rev. Watkins is asked by her bishop (who turns out very badly, but I won't spoil it) to be the "deliverance consultant" for the C of E diocese in Hereford, a very old English town in the Midlands. Lots and lots of English atmosphere, and evil in new and some very old forms. Supernatural stuff seems to happen, but on the margins; so the King analogy in inapt. I had to send William down the driveway to get the UPS packages. The driver will no longer come up our driveway, being afraid of our dogs. I suppose I am now officially a Jamulian. The dogs are scary, but harmless. I especially like Denali's big, bellowing, slobbering bark. It is not true that I was ordering packages just so they'd have something to do. English mysteries with clerical detectives? Am I going soft or something? What happened to miniguns turning VC into red mist? Calm down, savage readers. Here's the book you want. Kent Anderson's Sympathy for the Devil, recommended by a loyal reader, gets five hand grenades for searing action and psychological realism. Hanson is a raw recruit drafted into Vietnam who volunteers for the Green Berets to escape the mediocrity and oppression of ordinary infantry life. He adapts only too well, and evolves into a lover of war, with everyone except his Yard fighters and other Special Forces becoming the enemy. As Hanson says at one point, he's not trying to win the war; he just likes the work. This book goes way beyond the cliches of Apocalypse Now and Platoon. Senator Durbin's Comments and the Okinawa Suicides By Gail Heriot What happens when an army has a reputation for brutality in its treatment of prisoners ? Their opponents fight back all the harder in order avoid becoming prisoners. More people on both sides end up dead. That’s why the American military has a long history of attempting to cultivate an image of humane treatment. And with a few exceptions they’ve earned the image they seek. The New York Times ran a particularly poignant story earlier this week about the World War II Battle for Okinawa in 1945 that can be seen as a variation on this theme. In that terrible episode, Japanese civilians were misled by the Japanese Imperial Army into believing that the approaching Americans were savages who would rape and torture them. Many killed themselves to avoid that terrible fate. Then the real Americans arrived ...too late for some ... bearing candy and cigarettes. I quote from the article: "For a long time, the Japanese Imperial Army announced that, on other islands, the women had been raped and killed, and the men were tied at the wrists and tanks were driven over them," said Mr. Nakamura, now a guide at a museum housed in a traditional dwelling that bears bullet holes from the American attack. As Japanese defenses crumbled on the island in late March 1945, 56 of the 130 residents committed suicide, he said. Fleeing with family and neighbors, he said, he passed one cave where 10 villagers had killed themselves. "I heard my sister calling out, 'Kill me now, hurry,' " Mr. Nakamura said, recalling how his 20-year-old sister panicked at the approach of American soldiers. His mother took a rope and strangled her. "I tried to also strangle myself with a rope," he recalled, lifting his now weather-beaten hands to his neck. "But I kept breathing. It is really tough to kill yourself." Minutes later, the Americans took them captive. "The U.S. soldier touched me to check if I had any weapons," he recalled. "Then he gave us candy and cigarettes. That was my first experience on coming out of the cave." His mother lived into her 80's. "We talked about the war," Mr. Nakamura said. "But to the end, she never once talked about killing her daughter." A horrific story, isn’t it? That’s part of what makes Senator Durbin’s statement inexcusable. America’s reputation for the humane treatment of those it takes prisoner isn’t just a nice thing to have. It’s vital. Sooner or later lives will depend on it. America’s current enemies (like its former enemy the Japanese Imperial Army) already have every motivation to mislead. It is wrong to make it easy for them by making foolish comparisons between Guantanamo Bay and the Nazi, Soviet, and Pol Pot regimes. Does that mean that Americans should refrain from criticizing Guantanamo Bay abuses altogether? Of course not. Indeed, a public debate that neither exaggerates nor minimizes the situation may actual bolster our credibility. But a little persepctive is required. Glen on defeatism By Tom Smith I suppose it would be in the American interest if some communist hell hole were our ally against the Iraqi 'insurgency.' Then think of all the American lefties who would flock to the cause. "We must save the PRSWO [People's Republic of Somewhere or Other]! Their prisons may be full to bursting with political dissidents, but they gotta heckova health care plan!" Instead, we're stuck with defeatism. I agree that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job selling the program. If we're going to be neo-imperialists (I mean that in a nice way), we could do with a neo-imperialist press, or at least one that didn't see its job as flacking for Joe Biden, or whoever. June 21, 2005
Hummers are for weenies By Tom Smith If you see someone driving one of these, then you can be impressed. Recess appointment for Bolton? By Tom Smith No doubt the politics are complicated, but at this point I don't see why not. The Teaching Company's Nostalgia for Mao's China By Gail Heriot This is an excerpt from Red Guard: From Schoolboy to "Little General" in Mao's China by Ken Ling, written about the events of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The story takes place at a secondary school in Xiamen, where the author was a student: "At twelve o'clock ... as a few of us were on our way back from a swim ..., we heard screams and shouts as we approached the school gate. Some schoolmates ran up to us shouting, 'The struggle has begun! The struggle has begun!' I ran inside. On the athletic field and farther inside, before a new four-story classroom building, I saw rows of teachers, about 40 or 50 in all, with black ink poured over their heads and faces so that they were now in reality a 'black gang.' Hanging on their necks were placards with words such as 'reactionary academic so-and-so,' 'corrupt ringleader so-and-so,' 'class enemy so-and-so,' 'capitalist roader so-and-so": all epithets taken from the newspapers. On each placard was a red cross, making the teachers look like condemned prisoners awaiting execution. They all wore dunce caps painted with similar epithets and carried dirty brooms, shoes and dusters on their backs. Hanging from their necks were pails filled with rocks. I saw the principal: the pail around his neck was so heavy that the wire had cut deep into his neck and he was staggering. All were barefoot, hitting broken gongs or pots as they walked around the field crying out: 'I am black gangster so-and-so.' Finally, they all knelt down, burned incnese, and begged Mao Zedong to 'pardon their crimes.' I was stunned by this scene and I felt myself go pale. A few girls nearly fainted. Beatings and torture followed. I had never seen such tortures before: eating nightsoil and insects, being subjected to electric shocks, being forced to kneel on broken glass, being hanged 'like an airplane' by the arms and legs. Those who immediately took up the sticks and applied the tortures were the school bullies who, as children of Party cadres and army offiers, belonged to the five 'red' categories, a group that also included children of workers, poor and lower-middle peasants, and revolutionary martyrs .... Course and cruel, they were accustomed to throwing around their parents' status and brawling with the other students. They did so poorly in school that they were about to be expelled, and presumably resented the teachers because of this. Greatly emboldened by the instigators, the other students also cried 'Beat them!' and jumped on the teachers, swinging their fists and kicking. The stragglers were forced to back them up with loud shouts .... The heaviest blow to me that day was the killing of my most respected and beloved teacher, Chen Ku-teh ... Teacher Chen, over sixty years old and suffering form high blood pressure, was dragged out at 11:30, exposed to the summer sun for more than two hours, an then paraded about with the others carrying a placard and hitting a gong. Then he was dragged up the the second floor of a classroom and down again with fists and broomsticks all along the way. On the second floor some of his attackers ran into a classroom to get some bamboo carrying poles with which to beat him further. I stopped them pleading, 'You don't have to do this. This is too much!' He passed out several times but was brought back to consciousness each time with cold water splashed on his face. He could hardly move his body. His feet were cut by glass and thorns. But his spirit was unbroken. He shouted, 'Why don't you kill me? Kill me!' This lasted for six hours, until he lost control of his excrement. They tried to force a stick into his rectum. He collapsed for the last time. They poured cold water on him again--it was too late. The killers were stunned momentarily, as it was probably the first time they had ever beaten a man to death, and it was the first time most of us had ever witnessed such a scene...." Unfortunately, stories like this about the Cultural Revolution are abundant. According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, by the time it ended, the dead numbered between 400,000 and 1 million, although some estimates are as high as 3 million. Large numbers of victims were professors, school teachers, scientists, writers and actors. Some were actually eaten by their attackers--at least 137 in Guangxi, mostly teachers and college principals. It was a time of almost unimaginable horror. The members of the Red Guard, most of them teenagers, who committed these atrocities were not acting on their own. Mao Zedong himself launched the movement. And he and his CCP-controlled media relentlessly egged on the young thugs. (Local CCP cadres even joined in the "feast" at Guangxi). Mao's motives were, of course, ugly. He had lost much of his governmental authority (although not his party authority) as a result of his disastrous Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution was his way of getting it back. According to Margolin: "The Chinese Communist Party had a long tradition of anti-intellectualism, and Mao was a particularly noteworthy example. Red Guards everywhere repeated his slogan: ‘The capitalist class is the skin; the intellectuals are the hairs that grow on the skin. When the skin dies, there will be no hair.’ Officials became incapable of pronouncing the word ‘intellectual’ without adding the adjective ‘stinking.’" Why I am bringing this up today? I've been listening to the Teaching Company’s audio series "From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History", hoping to learn something about China's long history. (Up until now, my knowledge of early Chinese history had been mainly derived from the study of Chinese art, and that has its limitations. I could tell you a bit about the T’ang dynasty ceramic horses, but I couldn’t tell you much about the actual T’ang dynasty.) But after listening to all 36 lectures, I’m not sure if I what I learned from the tapes about early Chinese history is reliable. When the lectures reached events that occurred during my lifetime, it became pretty clear I was listening to a white wash. The first hint was the lecturer’s description of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s big push toward large-scale collectivization from 1957 to 1961. The author seemed a tad too eager to describe its successes along with its failures. This seemed like a funny way to describe what quite possibly was the greatest famine in history. (As my fellow Right Coaster Maimon is fond of saying "Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play...?") Then the lecturer described the Cultural Revolution as being "chaotic" but then went on to say that "in some ways [the forces] Mao unleashes ... are anticipatory of things like the Solidarity Movement in Poland." Yikes. Well, I suppose they are similar in the sense that both were movements purportedly for the benefit of working people in avowedly communist countries on the Eurasian landmass. But the similarities end there. The Solidarity movement was a grassroots movement that was all about loosening the grip of totalitarianism on the people of Poland. The Cultural Revolution was instigated by the Chairman of the Communist Party and was about tightening that grip on the Chinese people–by sending teenaged thugs out to neutralize "enemies" of the revolution. Especially elderly school teachers and opera singers. Finally, the listener is told that Mao was committed to women's equality, that the status of women has "deteriorated quite significantly" since Mao's time and that, in particular, "educational opportunities for women have declined" since he was in charge. What rubbish! The notion that anyone's education opportunities have declined since Mao’s lunatic reign is absurd. Mao’s idea of supporting education was his July 26, 1966 order to close all secondary schools and institutions of higher education for six months. Why? He needed gangs of schoolchildren to terrorize, humiliate, and sometimes murder school teachers, that's why. By the way, Margolin reports that the Cultural Revolution "class enemies" who were forced to parade around in ridiculous costumes and hats for the amusement of Red Guard gangs were disproportionately women. That should be no surprise. Cowardly thugs always prey disproportionately on women. Modern China continues to have serious problems. But only a fool would be nostalgic for Mao. June 20, 2005
Send in that lady with the hammer By Tom Smith Well, this is disturbing. (via instapundit). The Chinese version of MSN Spaces is linked to the new MSN China portal, launched last month in partnership with Shanghai Alliance Investment, a company funded by the city government here. Last week that partnership plunged Microsoft into the long-standing controversy surrounding the Chinese government's internet censorship policies, after Asian blogs and news reports revealed that MSN Spaces The words and phrases blocked by Microsoft include "Taiwan independence," "Dalai Lama," "human rights," "freedom" and "democracy." In a statement, lead MSN product manager Brooke Richardson said, "MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates. The content posted on member spaces is the responsibility of individuals who are required to abide by MSN's code of conduct." Mao dismisses that statement as disingenuous. The company, he says, is going above and beyond official censorship practices, which deal decisively with speech critical of the ruling communist government, but don't outright ban words like "freedom." Impeach Bush Now! By Tom Smith Oh, alright, just kidding. But the inimitable Brian Leiter lashes out at various legal academics for arguing it can't or shouldn't be done, for constitutional or prudential reasons. Brian makes some good points amidst the fury. I must say, I have always been rather curious myself as to the normative basis of originalism. I think it is clear that whatever it is, it can't be any worse than, because "we" think it's a good idea, which sums up a lot of contemporary jurisprudence. I have never, however, gotten anything but rather impolite answers whenever I posed the question, so I've stopped doing so. I do think some thoughtful originalists wrestle with it from time to time. Still, it would be nice to have a full-dress, philosophically sophisticated answer to the question, So what if the original meaning of the whatchamacallit clause was X? If the answer was published in a 1991 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, then the cite will do. Personally, I prefer the original meaning of the Constitution, but I admit it's just a preference, because as a matter of historical accident, I think the Framers had a much better understanding of how politics works, human nature, and law generally, than we do. David Souter. James Madison. I rest my case. I notice Brian has chosen green as the color of his new blog format. Is green the new red? As to whether a President can be impeached for lying to the American people, well, obviously not. I thought we settled that. Lying is a deeply personal matter, between a President and his or her family, confessor and close political advisors and fund raisers, whether indicted or not. As to the Downing Street memos, I have only read news accounts of them, but if it really is the case that the Bush administration set out on a conspiracy to deceive the public into believing that war against Iraq was necessary because of the threat that Iraq had WMDs that they could at any moment put into the hands of terrorists, knowing as they did so that no such thing was true, well, that would certainly be a crime in my book, and I wouldn't shed any tears if a President were impeached for it. I don't happen to believe that's the case, and the bobbing to the surface of the Downing Street memos should not convince anyone that it is. I doubt it is even possible to find out something like that, but sure, investigate away. Oversight is something Congress can do that wastes money at a much slower rate than most of their activities. More broadly, I think it is almost impossible for outsiders to judge whether the Iraq War was successful foreign policy or not until we see how it turns out. Disaster seems possible but not inevitable. In fact, if we stay long enough to thoroughly crush the "insurgency", I think it is likely to count as a significant victory for American power and prestige. Of course, that is precisely what many critics of the policy fear. I worry some about hubris in trying to democratize the middle east, but who knows. And if you want to see someplace that reminds one of Europe before WWII, I suggest . . . Europe! Just don't wear a yarmulke. Social security lockbox for you and me By Tom Smith Gail's friend John Fund touts what actually seems like a good idea: putting the payroll tax surplus into personal social security lockboxes so Congress couldn't spend them on the usual pork-for-pals. A little chip of ownership, and restrainst on spending at the same time. Krugman better get busy making up some new numbers on this one. I asked my personal expert on Social Security what she thinks, but she's against it. Ed Viesturs retires By Tom Smith American's leading mountaineer is calling it a day. He's a climer's climber in my book. Accomplished (the only American to have climbed the world's 14 highest mountains), extremely strong, and sane, he's the model. You don't hear any of Mark Twight's I'm not afraid to die alone in a blue hole rubbish out of him. If Twight's still alive at 45 it will be a miracle, and he does not have anything like Viesturs's high altitude resume. One thing the article does not stress is that Viesturs was amazingly strong at high altitude. He did all his peaks alpine style, and without oxygen. He was conservative about risk by modern standards (hence his not being dead) but he was a machine going up steep ice and snow. If you watch him climb in the Everest IMAX movie, at 26,000 feet or so he looks like he's on the stairmaster at the gym. In terms of cardiovascular capacity, he must be something of a mutant, like Lance Armstrong. Anyway, good on him for setting a positive example for a change in the world of adventure sports. Here's what I mean. Missing boy in Utah By Tom Smith Stories like this drive me crazy. On balance, Boy Scouts do a lot of good work, but I have never been comfortable with the level of precautions taken. I was in scouts for some years as a kid, and it's amazing no one was ever killed. On one memorable trip to Pistol Lake, in the Idah0 Primitive Area (now Church Wilderness), one scout, the butt of many jokes, emerged from the lake to warm his backside at the fire. Unbeknownst to him, some demon had put a can of aerosol deoderant in the fire. Of course, it exploded, sending the young victim running into the woods. He was eventually found. Some years later I got called back to be Senior Patrol Leader of a newly formed troop. Some nice kids, but also plenty of hoodlums. I kept them from commiting any serious crimes, but shortly after I left some of them found a bulldozer at a construction site and inflicted upon it many thousands of dollars of damage. How they managed to do this while on some scouting thing, I don't know, but they did. They got caught and in a lot of trouble. Thank God it wasn't on my watch. Managing boys together is daunting work. I just hope that Utah boy didn't fall into the Bear River, but that does seem the most likely explanation of his disappearence. BOY FOUND. That's some good luck. That and high powered Mormon prayers. June 19, 2005
Canadian MD fights the good fight By Tom Smith Here the site of a Canadian MD who's fighting to reform the system. Where's Hercules when you need him? Still, you gotta wish the guy luck. Not ready for prime time By Tom Smith By all means, let's take our cues from the Yerapeans on all the really important stuff. Steyn on Gitmo By Tom Smith He has it about right. It seems as though the Democrats are determined to demonstrate they are the party not to be trusted with the national defense. To be fair, I don't think Bush has done a particularly good job keeping the country informed and inspired over this war, but not very many politicians could do that. If we are going to close down Gitmo, I sure hope we get those Pershing missiles out of Europe at the same time. It sends the wrong message to the Soviets, and makes us look like war-mongers to the entire world. I also think it is very important that internees at Gitmo be able to sue in American courts for damages, including punies. If ATLA ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. BTW my source in the Pacific says that the extremely remote Johnston Island is being considered as the new location for Club Fed (Terrorist branch). It has an interesting status legally. Under some statute or other (ask Gary Lawson) it is legally considered a United States Ship at Sea. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds like pretty plenary authority. Perfect place for prison. Wonder what the Supremes would have to say about that. Just the flight there sounds like torture to me. We might have to invent something special, like Terrorist Class, so we don't get in trouble with Amnesty International. Happy Juneteenth By Gail Heriot Although Abraham Lincoln' s Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863, word didn't reach Texas until June 19, 1865, when Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived to read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston. From there, word of freedom spread quickly to Texas' 250,000 or so slaves. Within a few years, "Juneteenth," as the occasion was called, came to be celebrated each year by former slaves throughout Texas, sometimes with gatherings as large as 30,000, and also in Louisiana and Oklahoma. Its popularity declined somewhat in the 1960s, but it has since enjoyed a revival of interest, particularly in Texas itself, where it is now a state holiday. Juneteenth--which celebrates an actual event of huge importance in history--provides an interesting contrast with Kwanzaa, a "traditional" holiday that was in fact made up in the 1960s Maulana Ron Karenga (a/k/a Ron Everett), a so-called Black Nationalist from Los Angeles who was convicted and served time in prison for the brutal torture of female members of his gang. Loyal readers may recall that I have written on Kwanzaa before. Not-so-loyal readers (and forgetful readers) should click here for that discussion. June 18, 2005
Ars Gratia Artis By Gail Heriot My friend John Fund and I went to the Getty Museum up in L.A. on Thursday. It was my first pilgrimage to that great shrine of high culture. There’s no denying that the setting is spectacular. The buildings and plaza are so brilliantly white they are almost blinding. And the view from the Getty’s mountaintop perch seems to take in all of Southern California. But there's something unnerving about a shrine on that scale dedicated to art for art's sake. It's too spectacular. Instead of making the art collections seem important, it makes them seem unimportant. They can't compete with the view. Lest we forget, they are just a bunch of paintings. It's easy to understand how religious faith inspires human beings to build grand cathedrals and temples. A shrine to the Creator of the Universe ought to be magnificent. It is also easy to understand why Americans, who do not always share the same faith, might long for a few monuments that we can all share in. But builders of monuments must be mindful of scale, and when God is taken out of the picture and replaced with man's handiwork as the object of attention, a grand scale may no longer be appropriate. Rather than feeling uplifted, the viewer may end up feeling a little foolish for climbing a mountain to see a few paintings, photographs and sticks of eighteenth century French furniture. Among other things, we saw the Rembrandt show. It’s entitled "Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits" and will be on display until August 28th. It consists of seventeen portraits painted in the last decade or so of the artist’s life, portraying Christ, the Virgin, Matthew, Paul, Bartholomew and a number of other significant figures of the Christian faith. Among the paintings is the well-known "Self Portrait as the Apostle Paul." I liked the show. A lot. And I was even willing to put up with annoying crowds and commentary from tour guides talking about the importance of brush stroke to see it. But I couldn't help wondering whether I would have liked it even better in a more intimate setting or a setting that emphasized its importance as an expression of faith rather than as a set of paintings. By the way, if you find pompous art criticism either annoying or amusing, one of the funniest books ever written is Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics by Burton Silver and Heather Busch. June 16, 2005
62.7 percent of New York Times editorials are complete rubbish By Tom Smith Can you spot the glaring logical error in this op-ed piece in the ever lovable NY Times? Terrorism expert Peter Bergen did some surveys and discovered most of a group of well-known terrorists went to college, at least for a while. Therefore, we should stop criticizing madrassas for spewing out America-hating zealots who are tomorrow's terrorists. Where to begin with such dumbness? This is just like saying, "Some people claim toadstools are poison. I have surveyed 100 famous cases of death by poison and found that a mere 2 percent of them involved ingesting toadstools. The poisonousness of toadstools is greatly exaggerated. Indeed, it is THE TOADSTOOL MYTH!" Alas, this is extremely tupid, as my kids used to say. I don't know what this fallacy is called, but you cannot reason backwards in this way. What you want to do is look at a nice sample of madrassa graduates (and don't forget your kevlar!) and count how many of them are terrorists, disposed to commit terrorism, support terrorism against the US, whatever it is you want to measure. Then you can compare something sensible, such as, disposition to support terrorism before and after going to the madrassa, or correlation between having gone to a madrassa and probability that one has C4, nails and rat poison strapped to one's tummy. But showing that most famous terrorists had some college education tells one nothing about madrassas. There's also the bias in the sample problem. If you want to take this backwards approach, you should at least get terrorists from across the board, including those who blew off their feet trying to place the IED, not just the spectacular "successes." Of Blogs and Stare Decisis By Tom Smith What do blogs and stare decisis have in common? Just as some blogs (Instapundit, DailyKos, etc.) get a lot more hits and links than others, so some cases get cited more than others, a lot more. In fact, a lot, lot more. I recently did some calculations on my Web of Law data and found to my shock that a mere 1000 of the total of more than 4 million state and federal cases get 80 percent of all citations. The vast majority of cases are dead -- they have never or rarely been cited and will almost certainly never be cited again. For USSC cases, it is the same story. A mere 2 percent of USSC cases get 96 percent of all cites to USSC cases. I don't know about you, but this rather changes the way I think about stare decisis. Shouldn't it? I'm not exactly sure what I thought before I knew this, but I think I just assumed most cases had some fate other than complete oblivion. In any event, in the interests of self promotion, the revised version of my paper is here. It has these numbers, plus some charts showing this phenomenon occurs on every jurisdictional level, federal to state. I also strongly suspect the same distribution characterizes legal scholarship. I am trying to get the data now. It will turn out, I betcha, that the vast majority of law review articles rarely or never get cited. The top 5 percent of articles (cite wise) will get maybe 90 percent of all cites, or something equally shocking. The physics scholarship network has such a highly skewed distribution. Does this mean that legal scholarship is a waste of time? It doesn't seem to have slowed down physicists much. If an article gets cited say, six times in total, does that mean it was wasted effort? (Top articles get cited thousands of times.) Hmmmm. "Is Legal Scholarship a Waste of Time?" sounds like the title of a law review article that might appeal to student editors. June 15, 2005
The End of Europe: The Pre-quel By Gail Heriot Tom, you are joking when you suggest that Americans didn't stop looking to Europe for cultural validation until sometime the 1980s, aren't you? The end of Europe By Tom Smith Robert Samuelson on the decline of Yerp. Some of us are old enough to remember when Europe was the really cool place, the center of new ideas, progressive thinking, all of that. Seems like a long time ago. History, food, some nice country, definitely, but the sense of shift is palpable. Funny that American culture had for 200 years or so been looking East for cultural validation, and then sometime in the 80's, that just stopped. June 14, 2005
Gallup Poll Reports "Major Racial Divide" on Michael Jackson Verdict By Gail Heriot According to a Gallup poll, 48% of Americans "disagree" with the Michael Jackson verdict while only 34% "agree." The figures break down rather strikingly by race. Among white respondents, 54% said that they disagreed with the verdict and 28% said they agreed. Among non-white respondents, 26% said they disagreed and 56% said they agreed. The Michael Jackson poll gap is not quite the size of the O.J. Simpson poll gap (Whites 62%/27% – Non-Whites 24%/67%), but it bears some similarity. I’m in the minority (of those who weighed in) this time. I admit that it’s entirely possible that I would have a different view if I had been present at the trial (or even if I had paid more careful attention to the news reports), but guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a tough standard and I’m not at all convinced that standard was satisfied here. I’m not even sure that I would have found Jackson guilty under a lesser evidentiary standard. The extraordinary fact that was proven (indeed admitted to) was this: Several years after Jackson paid huge sums of money to settle a claim that he had molested a young boy, thus avoiding prosecution by the skin of his teeth, Jackson was still inviting young boys into his bed, thus risking further prosecution and lawsuits. To me, this proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Jackson is either a child molester who just couldn’t stop himself or very, very odd and out of touch with reality. The problem is that Jackson clearly is very, very odd and out of touch with reality, so maybe the evidence doesn’t really prove anything new. And he’s rich. That’s makes him the perfect target for a grifter, which the complaining witness’s mother appeared clearly to be. Here's hoping that justice was done. In other science news . . . By Tom Smith Iomega: watch out for movie industry assassins. Ha ha to self indulgent yuppies: new, better, cheaper flat screens on the way. Cute animals. Let's eat them. In the future, Instapundit will use this to teach and blog at the same time. Query whether law deans will require this. Query whether law deans will still be necessary. (Hmmmm. "Claytronics" they call it. More here.) Important problem that needs to be addressed by 100 page, 500 footnote law review article, reaching no ultimate conclusion. My recommendation: go ahead and treat patients with what works and hit critics on the head with a big shoe. I really want to visit the high arctic; looks like I should hurry. But looking like John Kerry is overdoing it. Another reason to oppose cell phone use on flights, in addition to avoiding savage in flight beatings. In addition to wearing boxer shorts, watch porn with 2 men and 1 woman. Great new astronomy and space site By Tom Smith Here. Gamers unintentionally make huge contribution to understanding universe. Talk about unintended consequences. June 13, 2005
Cheney understands By Tom Smith Story here. Some people want Gitmo closed because it is an effective weapon against terror. For whatever weird reason a British academic or a French bureaucrat would get satisfaction out of more suicide bombings on American soil, they are similarly against interrogating illegal combatants. Then there are Democrats who think they can use the issue for their political benefit, and they're not very strong on national security anyway. While the temptation to think that whatever is the opposite of what these people think, must be right, should probably be avoided, the notion their views should carry any weight is baffling to me. I do think maybe it would be better if suspected terrorists captured in places like Afghanistan just disappeared into scattered locations only the military and the CIA knew about. Gitmo is a lightning rod for publicity. But there may be good reasons for having one central location. One thing is for sure. If Castro were in charge of the prison, criticism of it would be out of bounds for the left. Instead we'd be hearing about how great medical care is for their children (which is a good thing: you can pick up a lot of nasty things when you don't have shoes). In fact, Castro's prisons really are gulags, and you don't hear much about them. I guess for a gulag to be a gulag it has to not really be a gulag. Or something. Weird. As far as Gitmo's effect on our reputation, I think our reputation would be hurt far more by closing the place under the pressure of our various enemies. It would earn us a deserved reputation for weakness and lack of resolve. Indeed, all the criticism of the place presents an opportunity to stand up to it, and show we really do mean business. If Hillary gets elected, we will have plenty of problems, but I don't think softness on terrorism will be one of them, and then all of these objects of criticism will magically be transformed into non-issues. June 12, 2005
Congressman Sells House to Defense Contractor, Which Immediately Puts House Up for Sale and Ultimately Sells at $700,000 Loss By Gail Heriot Is it a case of corruption? Or rock stupidity? Or both? June 11, 2005
What do the bookies know By Tom Smith Tyson is clearly done. Boxing won't miss him much. He apparently doesn't have the shape to do it any more. Tough deal for his many creditors. You have got to respect boxers, even if they are crazy to do it. Boxing is like the aerobics class from hell, where if you don't keep up, you get your brains or guts pounded out. The live in their own universe of pain. It's like the aerobic hell of rowing or cycling, but every so often, someone hits you in the head or your ribs with a pipe. It must be a pretty foul gutter to think boxing is the way to crawl out of it. You could have made a lot of money on this fight. Tyson was a 12 to 1 or so favorite. I guess he must have been working out in secret, or something. Somebody watching him train probably would have been able to tell he did not have the wind to go the distance with McBride. Maybe he really will quit now. McBride was 271 pounds. What a monster. Something like six-five. Supposedly a good, but not a world class fighter. If he's smart, he'll get out before too much more damage gets done to his squash. He seems like a nice enough fellow. Hate to think of him drooling away his old age in some clinic. June 10, 2005
A book for Clinton haters to hate By Tom Smith I just don't understand why some people hate Bill Clinton. It is a paradox, a mind-exploding puzzle. He was a flawed man, yes, and aren't we all, yet, in his complex combination of subtle intelligence and almost byzantine appreciation for the many sides of every argument, he was, if anything, the moderates' moderate, the blah blah blah blahblahblah . . . I think they might have a computer at the New York Times to write this stuff. Anyway, here is the review in the Times of John Harris's book on the slick one. It must take a special kind of mental discipline, Zen like in its elusiveness, to maintain the state of not understanding why a lot of people hate Bill. It is not thinking, little grasshopper. It is not-thinking. I mean, puh-leeeese. How about a little trip down memory lane? First, we get scared witless that mom and dad, and then us, and maybe our kids are going to be stuck in some nightmare of Hillary care. Remember the fear that it might actually happen? Those were happy days. Anybody who's had a close encounter with state health care (I lived in the UK for two years and learned in a big hurry not to get sick) was good and scared. Thank God for the big drug companies. Then, remember gays in the military? That was fun, and a great way to start the term. Soon after, Blackhawk down. Incompetence, betrayal, and indifference, all packed into a few weeks. Got to love the big guy. Yes, yes, we got welfare reform. And we owe that to Bill? I seem to recall something about the Republicans shoving it down his throat. But he raised taxes! And that's what set off the recovery, because it lowered interest rates you see, and that led to investment, which led to all that wonderful growth . . . ! I hate taxes. Middle East? A total, compromised, unprincipled mess. Terror on the rise. And then the wonderful second term. (With a few loose ends, like Vince Foster, left over from the first.) I just loved the "Daddy, what's a blow job?" questions. Why, son, it's something our Presidents get from misguided college girls in the house of Lincoln and Roosevelt and the Gipper, that's what! I really miss those days. Wall to wall coverage. Democrat party hacks swarming all over the cable channels to lecture us that lying is not lying, and Ken Starr, whose idea of a wild time is a coke and a ball game on TV (and no cigar), is the real pervert. All the time wondering, am I crazy, or has the country gone insane? In the background, all kinds of stuff to make your hair stand on end. Would you really fire all U.S. attorneys just to get rid of the troublesome one in Arkansas? Serious people actually frightened of the Clintons, like they're the Corleones. And maybe they're right. That girl from Oxford sure isn't talking. People who know people telling you downright troubling things about what's going on in the White House. Pretty in pink and the vast right wing conspiracy. And the press. Remember the press? The good, old, pre-blogosphere press? And it just went on, and on, and on. Juanita Broderick. Dude, he raped her. But never mind. It's Chinatown. The impeachment, now airbrushed out of the official Times history. You just don't see that word a lot. And then the pardons, to all appearances simply bought, and practically stealing the silverware and rugs when they left. How very amusing. Those darn Clintons. Why do I hate Clinton? I don't know; just one of those mysterious, incomprehensible, idiosyncratic quirks, I guess. The man wasn't a president. He was a disease. And now there's 2008. Well, sufficient unto the day are the catastrophes thereof. O Canada, your health care system is funny By Tom Smith You can't make this stuff up. It leads me to propose a kind of anti-Hayekian principle. Just as markets and other free institutions result in spontaneous orders that are more elegant and useful than anything we could have planned, so governments blunder into situations that are more bizarre and more hilarious (in a dark way) than anything we could make up. On a more serious note, it always struck me as bizarre that the various leftotrons cannot see that there is a fundamental moral right involved in the freedom to pay someone to fix your body. If you were walking down the street with one of those Inuit arrows sticking out of your back, don't you have a moral right to give somebody money to get him to pull it out and fix you up? How is that different from the right to buy food? I suppose if you have something better than the market as a way of allocating food and medical care, you might have an argument, but of course, not only do they not have a better alternative, they have created enormous human catastrophes trying to prove that they did. At some point, don't you have to say, I'm sorry doctor, but the leeches don't seem to be working? The question remains, will Canada slip towards sanity, or come up with something even more zany? Maybe, you have the right to buy medical services, but you can't use your own money? Maybe, you can buy medical services, but must pay in fish? It confirms the cosmic centrality of the USA: to the south we have tragedy, and to the north, comedy, eh? Why some rats are such rats By Tom Smith Vole dads come in two sorts, good dads and bad dads. The difference is not in their stars, but in themselves, their controller DNA more specifically. This from an important article in the forcoming Science, reported today in the NYT (which still has pretty good science reporting, even if it is a big termite chewing at the foundations of civilization). That in turn determines the effect certain hormones have on their behavior. You see, it is all about hormones in the end. Note the term used at the end of the article by the science guy at U. Illinois -- "sociogenomics." You knew it was coming. June 09, 2005
Suggestions for Ground Zero By Tom Smith Malkin on the Ground Zero kerfuffle. In the spirit of helping the IFC, I have the following, kind of big think themes that they might find helpful in planning their, uh, educational project. 1. Big hole? What big hole? 2. The KKK did it. 3. So many different kinds of freedom fighters. 4. Native Americans. The original owners of Manhattan. 5. "Terrorism" 6. The fall of Saigon and other great moments of American humiliation 7. Abu Gharib--who's really to blame? 8. Brave journalists: the wars they cover and the questions they ask 9. Firefighters: brave fools or ill-prepared heros? 10. Famous Hollywood political prophets I am a wireless God. Oh wait. No. I am in wireless hell. By Tom Smith I just want to say goodbye to all our loyal RC readers before I join a monastery where the most advanced technology they have is a rock. For reasons I no longer remember, I decided to install a wireless printer on the Smith wireless network. First I had to add the little wireless antennae thing to the new desktop. And lo, it actually worked! I was a wireless God. Now, to get the notebooks to talk to the printer so I could actually use its wireless capability! (For the desktop I cheated and used a USB cable.) The notebooks seemed standoffish. Various firewalls objected to this congress with the newcomer. Norton security warned me the printer was in fact a Trojan, bearing gifts. No problem. Turn that sucker off. Now the notebooks talk to the printer! Kids can print their homework from downstairs! Then, I notice, I can't seem to get to my bank website. I can't get to google news. What the &*^%? Fiddle with firewall. No change. Uninstall printer software. No change. Recheck all settings on wireless network. Nope. I give up. Call Cox internet help. They are actually very nice and prompt. But they are stumped too. Maybe the Norton security files have been corrupted. Maybe God just wants me to suffer. Five hours I have been at this. I want to kill something, many things. Still at it, all this morning. Three calls to Cox later, I take the notebook upstairs. Going to try bypassing the router, and see if I can talk to the bank then. I decide to reboot the cable modem and the router, just for the hell of it. Poof! Now everything works fine, I say, tempting fate. Something still ate the Norton program on one of the notebooks. It has turned into an empty shell in the Programs file. None of this matters, however, as we are all one, and the rock is a rock. Go in peace, little grasshopper. Sex in San Diego By Tom Smith The world wide conference of endocrinologists here in San Diego this year just ended. Some 8000 endocrinologists, or hormone doctors to the rest of us, converged on San Diego this week to discuss stuff most of us, including me, do not understand. It was a truly international event. Many came from Europe (including Euro-ladies, LWJ said cattily, "trying to look glamorous") and Asia, as well as here in Norteamerica. Lovely wife Jeanne said you could spot the endocrinologists all over San Diego, usually walking, she said, for endocrinologists are frugal, as MD's go. OB/Gyn's drive sports cars (not risk averse; look at their malpractice exposure); surgeons prefer Benz's or beamers (rich and want you to know it), but endocrinologists prefer aging Volvos and public transport. I know, you want to know about the sex part. Bear with me here, because for some reason I have never been able to get my arms around the whole glandular thing, which is both complicated and not as interesting to me as say, electricity. Anyway, one of the most dramatic papers at the conference, according to LWJ, was given by a lady doc from Mass General or some similarly prestigious place, and argued that endocrinologists should just stop giving androgen therapy to post-menopausal women. (I apologize in a blanket manner for all phonetic spellings.) According to the presenter, there simply was not enough good data to support any reasonable conclusions about what the therapeutic results and side effects of such therapy are. This was a very controversial proposal to make, because androgen therapy is the major tool endorcrinologists have to treat reduced sex drive in post-menopausal women, and any other woman, for that matter. Apparently, some 40 percent of women complain of this condition, presumably even more for PM women. Discussion and some outrage, of a decorous endocrinological sort, ensued. The thing that seemed really interesting to me was the remark reported to me, made by one male doctor, who said something like, "look, post-menopausal women play different roles in today's society and our job is to help them fill that role." I would have had no idea what that meant, but apparently every MD there knew what he meant was, it is simply no longer the case that older women are content with not wanting to be sexually active, and it is doctors' job to help them out with that. This led me to think about how very profound that changes have been in even the past dozen years or so regarding sexual behavior. You could almost call it a second sexual revolution, led by the same people who led the first. Both have a lot to do with medical technology. The Pill was one thing, Viagra is another. And now it seems there must be a lot of pressure on drug companies and doctors, to do something similar for women--come up with technology that will extend a satisfying sex life further into one's, ah, mature years. I am as brainwashed as the next person to think of this the way Ely Lilly et al want me too. I watch the Cialis commercials and think, yes, I want to be good to go, or whatever the slogan is. Old people should be riding horses, shopping for antiques, walking on beaches, and having sex, just like the rest of us, except I can't really afford most of what they are doing on the commercials. But more objectively, one wonders about what effect, socially and economically, it will have to have so much time and energy invested in making sure the over 50 set is getting it on them. I wonder how much of this is driven by the priorities of an overly sexualized society, which is that way, I think, because sex is such good business. We already spend vastly more on keeping old people alive than we do on keeping children healthy, I would bet. It won't be long, before we are spending more on making sure 70 year olds can have great sex, than we are on health for kids. I'm not calling for some new government program or tax. That might be fine for Canada, where there is so much less sex anyway. But not here. All I'm saying now is, it's a strange world, and getting stranger. And yes, I plan to be entirely hypocritical in this respect. When the time comes, and may I live that long, I will be all over the best technology has to offer. Who am I stand in the way of history, and it's also the perfect way to end a nice day of antiquing. Tyson v. McBride By Tom Smith Nothing would please me more than to see a country boy from Ireland beat the hell out of Mike Tyson. But Tyson is heavily favored. One of Tyson's lackeys said, this is going to be a pit bull versus a big, soft labrador. I like labs, too, but they are not the best fighters. Tyson seems, um, highly motivated this time around. He has his general rage at being born, plus he is said to owe creditors some $40 million. June 08, 2005
Outrageous 9/11 memorial By Tom Smith This really is an outrage. A small cabal of various left-wing lawyers and academics has the contract to plan the 9/11 memorial on ground zero, and it looks like it's going to be one of those dreadful PBS style history lessons on how awful humans, but especially Americans, are. So the same people who are suing Rumsfeld for interrogating terrorists and not being nice about it, get to plan what we look at when we walk through all that is left of the Twin Towers. This is like letting Jane Fonda plan the Vietnam memorial. Yes, yes, I'm sure the ACLU has some points worth making, out of all the points they have that are not. But to put people in charge of the memorial who have the least in common with the firefighters and police who died there, and probably most of the victims, if they could speak (those last few minutes roasting alive were probably quite an education in the nature of our enemies), is an insult to the whole country. Or more precisely, it is taking people who are in the business of regularly insulting this country, and giving them the contract for what ought to be ground as sacred as any in this country. We didn't have somebody who thought, really, you have to look at slavery from both sides now, give the Gettysburg address. The Holocaust Memorial doesn't have little show-and-tell lessons on why the Germans hated the Jews so much, with the implicit message being, really, you can see why. This is something worth a little internet campaign. Maybe the feds should step in. Congress could just declare the area a national monument or something. Just the threat of doing so would put things in perspective for the planners in a big hurry. This absolutely should be taken out of the hands of the Manhattan and Hollywood political types. Ground Zero is sacred ground, not just to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, but to the whole country. It was a battlefield in a war that will go on for some time. There is a powerful national interest in not letting people who apologize every morning for being American turn this graven place into some kind of sick shrine of national self-loathing. Universe is too weird By Tom Smith Quantum physicists tell us that when the states are various thingies are observed, it changes their states. This can be used in cryptography. Apparently, you can tell if your stream of particles has been observed because observing them changes them. Sort of a "who's been eating my porridge?" effect. You won't be reading about this on the Volokh Conspiracy By Tom Smith Patriarchy cleared of bogus charges. June 07, 2005
In Defense of Cliches By Gail Heriot A phrase as old as Methuselah? Well, yes ... but what of it? Sometimes the attack on cliches can itself be a tedious cliche. Not all familiar turns of phrase deserve to be condemned. Any good conservative knows that. We are lucky enough to have been born into a world that has already produced century after century of literary, artistic, social, scientific and political insight. We can ignore the legacy and try to re-invent the universe every time we open our mouths. Or we can tap into it in our speech and writing by sometimes using familiar phrases to refer to complicated, otherwise difficult to express ideas in a shorthand way. Hence, when we say that "there is nothing new under the sun," we don’t just mean that nothing has been new lately. We mean nothing has been new in the thousands of years that have passed since the writing of Ecclesiastes. We hint that we might agree with the Teacher that "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." We subtly salute the faith of our fathers. We even suggest that we might have been alert enough to use an old phrase to make the point that everything is old. Can it be overdone? Of course. And it frequently is. But it's a mistake to believe that freshness is always the highest virtue in speech and writing. The world’s a bit more complicated than that. Why am I bringing this up now? I just read an annoying review in the Weekly Standard (subscription required) of Thomas Friedman's new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. Entitled "The Cliche Expert: He’s Never Met a Hackneyed Phrase He Didn’t Use–Twice," the review accuses Friedman of having the literary talent of "middling high school student." Its shrill attack on Friedman's word choice is over the top. I’ve never been a fan of Mr. Friedman, who for all I know is too fond of time worn phrases. But if anything could cause me to run out and buy the book, it would be this review. And aren't nasty and sophomoric book reviews a bit of hackneyed literary genre too? June 06, 2005
Immortality for Jamul By Tom Smith Somehow I missed it, but the February 2005 edition of Sunset Magazine ran a feature on my very own strip of paradise, the stretch of Highway 94 that runs from Jamul to Jacumba, on the Mexican border. It calls the stretch "one of the best backroad drives in California." Golly! I learned some important facts about my adopted home I did not know. For example, I did not know that Highway 94 was once one of the main thoroughfares of the West, being the Yuma to San Diego stage coach route. It was superceded in 1920 with the construction of Old Highway 80, now replaced in turn by various interstate highways. Noted also are Simpson's famous nursery, which has great prices, but which does not deliver and does not take credit cards, two features most modern homeowners find useful, and the Dulzura Cafe. Could that cafe really be 100 years old? If you looked at it, you would guess yes. I have never eaten there, something about large groups of big motorcycles making feel just un peu unwelcome. I have eaten at the Barrett Cafe, however, consuming the famous fried fish and hush puppies. For those of us more familiar with seared Ahai than Crisco, it is an experience. I would not suggest doing it less than 72 hours before exercise, however. I was impressed to discover also that Campo, and in particular Gaskill's general store, was the site of one of the more bloody civilian gun battles in the old West, in 1875. (If 3 dead gets you to that status, then a lot of Westerns must be greatly exagerated.) Mexican banditos, or what we now call trans-border persons of extra-legal disposition, attempted to rob the store and flee back across the border. To their surprise, but not to mine, they encountered some well armed gringos. Here is the touching story from a website on the history of Campo. Writing for "The Southern California Rancher" In June 1945 Guard D. Gunn quotes Charles H. Cameron's personal account of the early events including the famous raid on the Gaskills: "I knew Lumen H. Gaskill and his older brother Silas E. Gaskill well and I'll tell you the true story of the raid on their store, and of the stone store building which the County has made into an historical monument. There was a band of Mexican horse thieves that operated on both sides of the Border and as far north as San Joaquin valley. They would steal horses one place and sell or trade them someplace else. One day five of them crossed the Border on horseback, aiming to rob the Gaskill store which at that time was a frame building straddling the creek where the bridge now is. They tied their horses under some oak trees a short distance away and started to the store. Seeing Lumen in the store, they fired at him and wounded him. He fired, back and wounded one of the Mexicans, then dropped into the creek through a trap door in the store floor. The trap door was used to let fresh meat, butter, eggs, etc. into the cool creek waters - sort of like a refrigerator, you know. Lumen figured he could run to a nearby building and get another loaded gun and keep on fighting. Silas was working in the blacksmith shop back of the store when the fracas began, and running around the side of the store with his gun he wounded another Mexican. Lumen got a third bandit, then the other two ran to their horses and galloped away, leaving their three wounded companions. The captured bandits were put in a cabin near the store and Jimmy Keys was left to guard them. That evening a bunch of cowboys driving some cattle through the country heard of the shooting and came over to Campo. It was a cool evening and about dark they went to the cabin and offered Jimmy a drink of whisky to warm him up a bit. Jimmy took it and was soon fast asleep but the cowboys loafed around until nightfall. Next morning when Jimmy awoke, the cowboys were gone and the three bandits were hanging to a big oak tree nearby. Their bodies were buried near the creek and later the bank washed in and all trace of the graves lost. But the old tree still stands just inside the gate of Camp Lockett (on the south side of the street opposite the present East County Lumber and Ranch Supply building, but now a dead trunk with most of the top cut away). The Mexicans who escaped continued their escapades elsewhere. The old frame store was torn down long ago and the present stone store building was built by the Gaskills in 1885 - I know the date because I helped build it. It took two years to finish it." Out here in East County, that's called "due process." June 05, 2005
Love, European Style By Gail Heriot I was in St. Lucia about a year ago soaking in a little Carribean sun. While there, I had lunch with a European couple (since Europeans seem to spend their lives on vacation, there were lots of them there). I don’t remember their names. But she was Swedish. He was Dutch. They had been married several years and lived in Switzerland together. They were both obviously well-educated and intelligent (as well as tall, blonde and beautiful). They both had responsible positions with NGOs in Geneva. In short, they were both members of Europe’s extended ruling class of bureaucrats. One of the things that struck me during our conversation was how common these international marriages seemed to be these days. Each time one of them mentioned a friend or relative of theirs it would always turn out that the friend or relative was married to someone from a different European country and quite frequently living in yet a third European country. I said nothing at the time, but I remember filing it away in my mind as evidence that Europe was much further along in social integration than I had thought–and that this must be part of a genuinely modern trend. No, I’m not foolish enough to think that just because political elites marry outside their nationality as readily as they marry within it, that garage mechanics and hairdressers are doing the same. I figured that this couple and their friends were probably a bit like the old Chinese mandarinate. As early as the Sung dynasty, Chinese elites were arranging marriages between their daughters and their sons from every corner of the Empire. That didn’t mean, however, that the local peasant boy wasn’t marrying the peasant girl next door. But that's just the point. China was even then a reasonably integrated political unit in a way that Europe only aspires to be (or at least Europe’s elites aspire for it to be). I took the St. Lucia couples’s marriage as evidence of a new trend that would ultimately result in European political integration. Europe was becoming more like China. Despite, this past week’s news, I’m still inclined to think that further integration is inevitable. (I’ll leave aside for the moment whether I regard that as good, bad or ugly). But no less a personage than Antonin Scalia has now disabused me of the notion that the St. Lucia couple’s situation was indicative of something new in Europe. I had occasion to be at a gathering up in Napa Valley that Scalia dropped in on. And while he was commenting on the constitution fiasco, he talked about something that really hadn’t occurred to me before: European elites have always married across national boundaries. They’ve been doing it as long as the Chinese have. A thousand years ago, European elites were intermarrying and otherwise grouping themselves in ways that transcended national boundaries. And looking down upon the democratic and nationalist concerns of everyone else. Maybe things aren’t changing as much as I thought. Indeed, maybe the political struggles going on today in Europe aren’t new at all. What we're witnessing is simply the Counter Reformation. For many years, the concept of a Unified Europe was synonymous with Catholicism, which in turn was synonymous with anti-nationalism and rule by distant bureaucratic elites. Protestantism in contrast appealed to nationalist tendencies and to those who favor more local governance. The issues haven't changed. It's just that one of them--religion--has dropped out. Under such a view, Brussels may be the new Rome -–anti-nationalist, anti-democracy, pro-bureaucray, but strangely stripped of Rome's spiritual element. And the complex networks of governmental and non-governmental organizations of today are analogous to the vast Vatican bureaucracy and the many monasteries and convents that once dotted Europe. Close your eyes and you can see the clerical garb on the all folks inhabiting the buildings in Brussels One thing has changed though. There are now hordes of these modern monks and nuns taking six-week vacations to the Carribean. History never repeats itself exactly. That would be insufficiently entertaining. "I guess you broke into the wrong rec room!" By Tom Smith This reminds me of that great moment in this under -appreciated film. Harvard diversity fandango By Tom Smith This on Harvard's plan to spend $50 million as penance for Harvard President Summer's indiscrete comments on where more women aren't at the top of hard sciences. Just imagine what $50 million could do for people who really needed it. You could spend $50 million on scholarships to get kids out of rotten public schools. Or $50 million to get kids off the streets in Lima or Mexico City. Or $50 million in plain old scholarships to deserving youths. What a long list that would be. The thing to worry about is how much harm the whole diversity in science movement might do to science. Look at every other field it has touched. June 04, 2005
Amputees from Iraq war By Tom Smith Interesting story here. There's going to be a time, before too long, when everybody here will have had enough of trying to get Iraq on its feet. June 03, 2005
Pat Buchanan on Watergate and Deep Throat By Tom Smith He has some points. I also wonder how many Vietnamese and Afghans and Iranians and Nicaraguans and so on, would still be alive, but not for the Watergate fiasco . . . June 02, 2005
Made-Up Names ... By Gail Heriot ...are not a good idea according to this study. I have some doubts about some of the conclusions the author draws from his results. But let me leave that aside. The question that interests me is why less educated parents are more likely to name their children made-up names in the first place. (And I believe that this is a characteristic less educated whites as well as blacks. The study happens to focus solely on black children). It’s not that all made-up names are unattractive in the abstract. Some can be quite lovely. LaQuisha (the name the study's author uses as an example) may not be the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard, but it’s more pleasing to the ear than some popular traditional names that I would nevertheless prefer to have just because they are traditional. Maybe the parents who are most likely to name their children made-up names are those who feel no connection with the past. They don’t see themselves as part of a tradition that must be upheld, built upon and refined–whether it’s a family tradition, a religious tradition or the tradition of their newly-adopted country. Making up a name is thus an expression of their lack of connection to the rest of society. If so, that's a bigger tragedy than just a few oddball names that kids make fun of the playground. USD's Wild Parrots By Gail Heriot If you ever come to visit your Right Coast correspondents here at the University of San Diego, keep an eye out for our resident flock of green parrots. I'm told there are most commonly seen in the early morning hours, but since I'm not an early riser, I cannot verify that. But they were out there in front of the law library this evening. They're quite a sight. June 01, 2005
Treating Your Parents Well By Gail Heriot Father’s Day is June 19th--seventeen shopping days away. Among other things, it is a time to ... uh ... reflect upon the parent-child relationship, especially the relationship of the adult child to the elderly infirm parent. Or at least that's how I’m going to treat it this year. Devotion to one’s children is easy to explain in terms of fashionable theory. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Darwinian trait. The genes of parents who won’t make sacrifices for their children don’t get passed on to later generations, since neglected children don’t survive infancy, much less produce a new generation. This isn’t to say that no parent mistreats his child; some obviously do. But serious mistreatment is the exception rather than the rule. The reverse relationship is a bit tougher. Of course, young children’s devotion (including obedience) to their parents can be explained in terms of immediate self-interest without any need to resort to a Darwinian or any other explanation. Even tiny tots intuitively know that the hand that feeds them is very, very nice hand and that biting it is an unwise policy. When they do bite it, they find that bad things sometimes happen. But what about adult children? What makes adult children make sacrifices for their elderly parents? Surely we as members of society would like adult children to make reasonable sacrifices for the benefit of their elderly parents. But neither immediate self interest nor Darwinian considerations will necessarily be at work here.. It may well be in the interest of both the adult child and his genes to tell Mom and Dad to take a hike the moment they cease to be useful to him. I don't know if it's wise to depend too much on love here. It’s been my experience in life that when love isn’t grounded in some kind of self-interest, it's not quite as powerful a force as all that poetry suggests. And the problem that the elderly face is that often they reach a state of health in which there’s very little likelihood that they can benefit their children anymore. They are–not to put too fine a point on it–a burden. Maybe that’s why every culture that I am aware of recognizes filial piety as a virtue. It’s a recognition that an individual’s self interest (and hence our natural predilections) may be insufficient to produce good behavior, so they have to be bolstered with a moral imperative. You must care for your elderly parents, because it’s the right thing to do, and the rest of us will think ill of you if you don’t. Both the Shinto and Confucian traditions are well-known for their emphasis on filial piety. And Christians, Jews and Muslims are taught from an early age that the need to honor one’s mother and father is among the most important of virtues. Note that there is no parallel commandment to do right by your children. There’s less need. It comes more naturally. The closest the Ten Commandments come to a requirement that children be looked after properly is the adultery ban. But not every culture is equally devoted to the concept of filial piety and not every individual is equally willing to make sacrifices for good old mom and dad, and I find it interesting to speculate on why. Harry Chapin’s song the Cat’s in the Cradle identified a "what goes around comes around" theory. Parents who were neglectful of their children will often find their children neglectful of them. And I don’t doubt that he was right. But there are other considerations as well. And some of them have some implications for public policy. The extent to which the particular parents control wealth that can be conferred upon whomever they please (or consumed themselves) is sure to be one of of those other considerations. If they are wealthy relative to their children, one would expect their children to be pretty solicitous of their wants and desires. That sounds dreadful doesn’t it? The notion that adult children will be kinder and more helpful to their elderly parents if those parents are sitting on piles of money is distasteful. But we all have to be realistic about human shortcomings. The civilizing effect of a prospective inheritance is one of the best arguments that I know of against onerous estate taxes(although I do not consider it an argument in favor of abolishing estate taxes altogether). It’s an ace in the hole for the elderly at least in those jurisdictions in the world where disinheriting one’s children is legally permissible. It can be taken to extremes, of course. Remember the Dallas television series. Fabulously wealthy Jock Ewing owns Ewing Oil. His two adult sons–JR and Bobby-- live in their father’s house (along with their wives), work for Ewing Oil and (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) vie for his approval. And Jock Ewing is a tyrant who constantly uses his position to intervene in his sons’ lives too much. Dallas, however, is hardly your typical case. Not too many families own giant oil companies. But a lot own farms. And it wouldn’t surprise me to find that filial piety is higher than average among such families (and perhaps even among rural families that don’t own farms, but are influenced by the conduct of their circle of friends, which is likely to include farm-owning families). And it also wouldn’t surprise me to find that it rarely is taken to excessive levels. On the other hand, in families in which children receive a big transfer of wealth at ages 18-21 in the form of Harvard Law School tuition and thereafter are in a position to generate their own wealth sufficient to allow them to live at least as well as their parents, one might expect somewhat less devotion or sacrifice over the long haul. Sons and daughter in that position move away to another city and they won’t always make it back for the holidays. Or at least so run my speculations this evening. What got me thinking about this today was actually the high price of real estate in Southern California (and elsewhere). I’m curious whether this has an effect on the parent-child relationship during the parents' middle to early old age. These days, large numbers of parents with twenty- and thirty-something children own modest, but extraordinarily expensive homes. Their children have decent jobs, but nevertheless stand little chance of saving enough for a down payment on a similar home without parental help. I wonder if that sort of arrangement tends to forge stronger than average parent-child bonds. Oh well, I guess that’s enough musing on this topic for now .... |
