The Missing Link

March 31, 2006

The Problem with Teacher's Unions

Oh how I hate teachers' unions--let me count the ways!

1) By calcifying a pay system that rewards teachers for seniority rather than skill teachers' unions contribute to a system that loses lots of ambitious teachers to other fields while keeping lots of untalented or burned out teachers in the classroom year after year.

2) By standing firmly against any school experimentation, whether charter schools or school vouchers or greater control for principles, teachers' unions prevent us from trying alternative strategies that might work.

3) Finally, teachers' unions--or at least the New York State Unified Teacher's Union--celebrate rather bizarre characters as heroes, as James Taranto points out today. In the union's newsletter we're told the story of Jack Powell, a substitute teacher "who makes a principled stand."

Powell has lived frugally for years. He works about three days a week as a sub, earning about $70 a day, with no benefits. From March to October, he rides his bike 20 miles to work when work is available.

Sometimes he works for a funeral home to make extra money. The shawl he has wrapped around himself on this winter day, he says simply, doubles as a blanket.

"I do whatever it takes to survive and live a socially conscious life," said Powell, who has a tepee in his yard.

Part of that survival — or so he thought — included shopping at Wal-Mart to take advantage of cheaper prices for himself, his partner and her two children. Then his discussions about Wal-Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, started churning inside him...

Powell put the brakes on his actions. Shopping at Wal-Mart? This is a place that encourages employees to get social services because it does not provide adequate health insurance or wages; sells goods made in sweatshops; and upsets entire communities by undercutting the downtown stores, then raising its prices when the locals go out of business.

"I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for," Powell said, noting the mega-chain's scanty health insurance for staffers. "Because of all those things they can lower the prices."

He and his partner agreed to go on food stamps for their family rather than shop at Wal-Mart any longer.

"I don't like to have to do that (use food stamps)," he said. However, the two children who are part of his family gave him extra courage because they had disliked shopping at Wal-Mart anyway, Powell said. They knew what the store stood for.

"I'm just trying to live my life. I try to set an example and do what I believe," said Powell.

So according to the teacher's union, it takes "courage" to voluntarily go on food stamps, and exemplifies how we ought to live? I certainly hope whoever approved that article never teaches one of my children.

Posted by Conor at 04:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Paying the Dane-geld

Eugene Volokh thinks this Rudyard Kipling poem is relevant to our times:

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Now it's the Danes who are being asked to pay the Dane-geld. Will they?

Posted by Conor at 03:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Big Government: You reap What You Sow

Libertarians are always warning that when the government seems to provide something free for citizens the bill is paid in lost liberty. Let's turn to the Netherlands, that bastion of democratic socialism, to see the libertarians vindicated:

AMSTERDAM — The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) has proposed recovering part of the cost of study from highly-educated women who decide not to seek paid work.

MP Sharon Dijksma, deputy chairperson of the PvdA's parliamentary party, believes the punitive measure is needed to stimulate more women to join the workforce. She outlined her ideas in 'Forum', a magazine published by employers' group VNO-NCW.

"A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work - that is destruction of capital," Dijksma said. "If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished."

The MP said a fine for non-working mothers is a logical consequence of the PvdA's intention to introduce a 'feudal system', under which graduates repay money dependant on their earnings. "If someone chooses not to work, then a substantial repayment is in order," Dijksma said.

A high proportion of Dutch women traditionally favour working only part-time or staying at home to care for their families.

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March 30, 2006

In Iran, A Rape Victim Sentenced to Death

Amnesty International reports:

On 3 January, 18-year-old Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by a criminal court, after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was seventeen at the time. Her sentence is subject to review by the Court of Appeal, and if upheld, to confirmation by the Supreme Court.

According to reports in the Iranian newspaper, E’temaad, Nazanin told the court that three men had approached her and her niece, forced them to the ground and tried to rape them. Seeking to defend her niece and herself, Nazanin stabbed one man in the hand with a knife that she possessed and then, when the men continued to pursue them, stabbed another of the men in the chest. She reportedly told the court “I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help�, but was nevertheless sentenced to death.

A petition to spare her life can be found here. I've signed it; you should too.

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The Plight of Unwed Fathers

Cathy Young is talking about the institutionalized sexism that some men face while attempting to raise their children:

One of the men profiled in the article, 23-year-old Arizona resident Jeremiah Clayton Jones, learned that his former fiancée—who had ended their relationship—was pregnant and seeking to put up the baby for adoption in Florida, where they had met while attending college. An adoption agency called Jones to ask for his consent to the adoption. He refused, fully intending to raise the baby himself. But Jones did not know that in order to exercise his parental rights, he had to register with the state registry for unmarried fathers. Because he missed the deadline, he lost all his rights and has never seen his child, now 18 months old.

Sadly, this case is all too typical. While divorced fathers complain that they are often treated as second-class parents, never-married fathers are much lower on the totem pole. True, their situation has improved since the 1970s, when an unwed father's children could be given up for adoption without his consent even if he had raised them.

Today, partly as a result of several legal controversies in which unmarried fathers successfully contested adoptions, the majority of states have "putative father registries" by means of which a man can assert his paternity. But the purpose of these registries often seems to be less to protect the rights of the father than to protect the rights of everyone else: the mother who wants to give up the baby, the adoption agency, and the adoptive parents. Some would say that they also protect the rights of the child. But that depends on whether you believe that a child is better off being adopted than being raised by the biological father.

In most states, the unwed father has to file with the registry either within a certain period of the child's birth—from five to 30 days—or, as in Massachusetts, at any time before the adoption petition is filed. But neither the mother nor the adoption agency has any obligation to notify the man of the adoption, or of the fact that he is a father or father-to-be.

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Photo of the Day

(link)

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Sending the Wrong Message

This is troubling news:

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

"For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority," Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

Glenn Reynolds gets it right:

If you don't like ideas, don't bother arguing with them. Just threaten to kill people. They'll back down. Or at least their booksellers, universities, and governments will. How long before other groups take this lesson to heart?

Advancing toward fascism, one cowardly institution at a time.

Posted by Conor at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thoughts on America

What can one say about Montebello High School? While rallying against tougher immigration laws student protestors lowered the American flag, raised the Mexican flag, then flew the Stars and Stripes upside down underneath it.

A protest can be chaotic and unpredictable. These students rushed out of class, their adrenaline pumping. Emotions ran high—some were rallying against laws that directly impact their mothers and fathers.

Even so, why did they use their protest to make a statement about America versus Mexico? Among Mexicans championing immigrant rights, why is there a faction that insists on denigrating the United States? Why are some people agitating for the right to live within the United States displaying symbols that suggest they find our southern neighbor a superior nation?

It doesn’t make sense… though you probably understand it as well as I do.

These protestors—and they don’t speak for all the protestors—look at America as a flawed country. They see poverty beside rampant materialism. In their daily life, they’re more likely to interact with a racist police officer or an unscrupulous contractor or a condescending shopkeeper than most Americans.

They see the hypocrisy in an immigration system that rarely punishes Americans who hire illegal immigrants, while routinely deporting the immigrants themselves.

They’ve got a point: America isn’t perfect. Many Americans are as quick to point out our flaws as any of the protestors we’ve seen this past week. Self-criticism is one of America’s strengths. We find flaws; then we try our best to fix them.

The criticism doesn’t faze most Americans. Even as we criticize this country we know deep down how great it is. We don’t need to say it out loud any more than we need to point out how athletic Michael Jordan is when we critique his baseball swing, or how beautiful a Hollywood celebrity is when we gossip about her ugly dress at the Academy Awards. We assume America’s greatness even when we lament its politicians, or its social problems or certain parts of its foreign policy.

Could it be, however, that America’s greatness is no longer something that every immigrant feels? Could it be that we name our strengths so seldom and our weaknesses so frequently that all perspective has been lost?

If that’s the case, I’d like to address all those immigrant protestors who view America as nation unworthy of admiration. Let me explain why so many Americans resent your judgment. Let me explain why we think you’re wrong. I’ll ignore every strength America possesses save those related to immigration, the topic you are protesting. I’ll argue that whatever our system’s flaws, it is the best immigration system that the world has to offer, which is a pretty good argument against disparaging our citizens and denigrating our flag.

America accepts more immigrants than any nation on earth, even if you don’t count the illegal immigrants within our borders. If you think we provide too few opportunities for legal immigrants, as I do, you must still acknowledge that every country on earth, the country of your ancestry included, provides far fewer opportunities.

Once here immigrants enjoy more economic opportunities than anywhere else on earth. In America Latinos aren’t even our most successful immigrant group economically, yet Latinos earn more here than they do anywhere else—their native countries included—and far more than, say, Algerian immigrants in France or Moroccan immigrants in Spain.

Let’s take the largest Latino group, Mexicans, who last year earned sufficient funds to support themselves and their families… and to send an additional $16 billion home to friends and relatives in Mexico. Do you realize how much that means to Mexico? $30,000 is an impressive annual income there. $16 billion is equivalent to providing roughly 530,000 Mexicans with $30,000 each. To be sure, Mexican immigrants work hard for that money.

It is equally certain, however, that they’d lack the opportunity to earn that money but for America, where the free enterprise system and low levels of corruption allow for the creation of wealth.

Do you perceive racism here? It does exist, as abhorrent as that is. Yet America is more welcoming to outsiders than any country on earth. We protect minorities as effectively as any nation, and far more effectively than most.

Of course, you know all this on some level, because you chose to leave your nation and to come to America among all the other nations on earth, most of which wouldn’t allow anyone from your nation to immigrate legally.

So if you are a legal immigrant, participate fully in the immigration debate. As someone who has written column upon column criticizing the current system, I’ll admit as quickly as anyone how flawed it is. If you’re an illegal immigrant, enjoy the fact that though you can’t vote, you can speak your mind here with impunity, a privilege undocumented foreigners enjoy in very few countries. I’ll acknowledge all accurate critiques; America is far from perfect.

However, don’t dare to denigrate this country. It insults us, sure, but that’s beside the point, which is this: given the merits of the American system compared to every alternative on earth, and the unprecedented success so many Latinos have achieved here, it makes no sense to single us out for special opprobrium.

If it made any sense, why would you be here instead of someplace else?

Posted by Conor at 05:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Peggy Noonan on Immigration

Peggy Noonan is perhaps the best columnist in America. Today she writes again about immigration. Here's an excerpt:

There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Conor at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Culture and Accomodation

Jonathan Zimmerman relates a thought-provoking anecdote about the challenges cultural differences can pose:

I don't remember her name. But I can still picture my sixth grade student's frightened expression when I asked her to give the first classroom presentation that morning.

"Where I come from," she said, in a quivering voice, "girls don't go first." She was an immigrant from a Muslim country in the Middle East whose family had moved to Baltimore a few years earlier. I was a young social studies teacher at her middle school, fired with passion and idealism. I believed in my heart that schools should respect national differences. But I also believed that we should treat boys and girls in an equal fashion.

So how should I have responded? For years, I've put this question to my graduate students. Most side with the girl, citing her distinct cultural background. By forcing the girl to go first, my students tell me, I would be telling her, and the class, that there's something inferior about her culture. And that's not a message our public schools should transmit.

A vocal minority of students bridles at this approach. Some invoke a brand of liberal universalism: Girls and boys are endowed with equal rights, no matter what different cultures might say about it. Others emphasize America's own national rights and imperatives.

Go here to see what he decided to do.

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March 29, 2006

How to Choose a College

Orin Kerr:

If you are conservative or libertarian, are you better off going to a school with lots of other conservatives or libertarians? We can ask the same question on the other side: If you identify as progressive, should you look for schools with lots of progressives?

My own take may be idiosyncratic, but let me put in a plug for attending an institution that does not share your basic ideological outlook. I think we can all agree that an open and respectful environment is essential. But beyond that, I think there are real educational benefits to being outside your ideological comfort zone. In my experience, at least, we tend to learn most when we are challenged; being forced to explain why you think how you think is the best way to improve your thinking. As an old boss of mine used to say, "If everyone is thinking the same thing, no one's thinking much."

As a conservative/libertarian who attended Pomona College, a liberal bastion, I agree. I learned as much arguing there as I did inside the classroom, although students less thick skinned than me found themselves intimidated by prevailing campus orthodoxies of thought.

UPDATE: Ilya Somin has more thoughts:

The issue of intolerance for conservative and libertarian viewpoints on campus, raised by David's post below, is often discussed in terms of the harm to the students who suffer for expressing their views. The more serious problem, however, is the impact on the quality of discourse on campus for students of all ideologies.

It is true that the vast bulk of the retaliation faced by students who express locally unpopular right-of-center views on intolerant campuses is relatively minor - social ostracism, petty harassment by the administration, and so forth. Most of the people involved will suffer little if any lasting damage. However, many will choose to keep quiet if the price of expressing their views is petty harassment or ostracism.

We can, if we want to, criticize these people and argue that they should be willing to take more risks. The practical reality, however, is that many (perhaps most) people care more about their social standing and about avoiding even minor harassment than they do about expressing their views on political issues. The predominantly leftist schools I attended were, on the whole, far more tolerant and open than 1980s Brandeis was, as David describes it. I usually said what I thought and didn't worry too much about the consequences (some of my classmates would say that I worried too little:)). Even so, I knew quite a few conservative (and even some moderate) students who kept their views to themselves for fear of hostile reaction.

The result may be a campus environment where debates about controversial issues such as abortion, race, or other matters will be one-sided because most of the adherents of the opposing view are keeping quiet. This reduces the quality of debate (and education) for all students, including those who adhere to the dominant view. The point applies to the expression of left-wing views at intolerant conservative institutions as much as the reverse. It just so happens that we have far more predominantly left of center schools than right of center ones. Thus, there is good reason to worry about political intolerance on campus even if we don't care much about the hurt feelings of conservative or libertarian students.

Posted by Conor at 03:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spanish Media and the Rallies

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:

LOS ANGELES, California -- The marching orders were clear: carry American flags and pack the kids, pick up your trash and wear white for peace and for effect.

Many of the 500,000 people who crammed downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to protest legislation that would make criminals out of illegal immigrants learned where, when and even how to demonstrate from the Spanish-language media.

For English-speaking America, the mass protests in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities over the past few days have been surprising for their size and seeming spontaneity.

But, like rallies involving other segments of American society, they were organized, promoted or publicized for weeks by Spanish-language radio hosts and TV anchors as a demonstration of Hispanic pride and power.

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Red Bull & Vodka

Even if you feel sober after drinking a Red Bull and Vodka... you're not.

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Be Like Mike... Drink Gatorade

It's a whole blog dedicated to Gatorade!

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The Collapse of Sweden?

Will Sweden survive the 21st Century? Fjordman doesn't think so. This post on rape in Sweden is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

Posted by Conor at 12:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Against Open Borders

Among those marching for illegal immigrant rights the Civil Rights Movement looms large. “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought the same way,� says Joseph Hernandez, who marched in Monday’s student walk-out. “We are all human and we all have the same rights,� says Chinonso Ezeh, another student. “This is America."

Pundits are beginning to pick up on the same theme.

“Historians, politicians, and civil rights activists hail the March on Washington in August 1963 as the watershed event in the civil rights movement,� Black News columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote this week. “It defined an era of protest, sounded the death knell for the near century of legal segregation, and challenged Americans to make racial justice a reality for blacks. But the estimated million that marched and held rallies for immigrant rights in Los Angeles and other cities dwarfed the numbers at the March on Washington. If the numbers and passion immigration reform stirs mean anything, the judgment of history will be that it also defined an era, sounded the death knell for discrimination against immigrants, and challenged Americans to make justice and equality a reality for immigrants, both legal and illegal.�

A careful historian, however, sees profound differences between the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the illegal immigration marches we’re currently seeing in our communities.

On August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream� speech, he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial invoking the heroic deeds of a great president and the principles established by America’s founding documents.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,� King said. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.�

In contrast, the illegal immigration marchers assert universal human rights, waving foreign flags as if to underscore the point. Whether rightly or wrongly, they believe that being human gives them the right to immigrate anywhere they choose to seek work, be near family members and raise kids. As they chant the slogan, “There’s no such thing as an illegal person,� the implicit message is that the United States sins against justice whenever it enforces any limits on immigration.

Whereas Martin Luther King worked to apply rights inherent in the American system to black citizens, today’s illegal immigration marchers are asserting rights found outside the American system, and demanding radical changes to our system to accommodate those rights.

I’m sympathetic to these immigrants and the case that they are making. It seems unfair that those lucky enough to be born American are automatically afforded economic rights that outsiders lack. I truly wish our world could accommodate open borders—I hope one day we reach that utopian reality, and I support high levels of legal immigration partly because I believe justice demands it.

Unlimited immigration is nevertheless a radical idea, and an awful one. There isn’t a single nation in the world that embraces it. That’s because by necessity nations aren’t simply economic entities producing wealth to be divided up as fairly as possible.

Our nation’s primary purpose is protecting the rights of citizens by establishing a framework for governing ourselves. Unlike Latin America, where corrupt governments are only tenuously answerable to their citizens, American democracy is vibrant and responsive, and an engine for the greatest material prosperity the world has ever known. That’s no accident. An educated citizenry that participates in government by choosing leaders, eschewing tyrants and voting for laws makes our prosperity possible.

Open borders would end that prosperity, eliminating the very incentive driving people to immigrate here in the first place.

It isn’t that illegal immigrants are bad people. It isn’t that they are lazy or inferior to Americans—quite the contrary. We must limit immigration because our ability to incorporate newcomers into American life, though impressive, isn’t unlimited. Anyone who favors citizen participation in democracy, a minimum wage, shared American values, relative economic equality among citizens or some sort of social safety net should quickly see that chasing a utopian scheme for open borders would destroy all these things.

Even most illegal immigrants currently within our country would be hurt if we truly adopted open borders. After all, the protestors waving Mexican flags this week come from a country far wealthier than many in the world. If America so chose, we could find sub-Saharan and southeast Asian immigrants far poorer than the Latinos who currently come here, as willing to work hard, and perhaps more willing to abandon ties to their homeland in the assimilation process.

"What are they going to do without all the Mexicans if they kick us out?� Chino High School student Kimberly Bermudez asks. “Mexicans do everything. America wouldn't work without us.�

In fact, Mexicans are no more or less special than any other nationality, something truly open borders would quickly make apparent. Surely Ms. Bermudez sees that Nigerians, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Guatemalans, Thais, Vietnamese, Philippinos and Haitians would compete for jobs currently done by Mexicans as surely as they would undercut their wages.

If justice really did require open borders, people whose flags weren’t flown during the recent rallies might rightly ask why Mexican proximity to the United States privileges their immigrants above the rest of the world.

In reality, however, justice demands a system of limited legal immigration—one that preserves American values and prosperity both for present citizens and future immigrants. Those who advocate the notion that any limits on immigration are unjust, or that everyone has a right to live and work in America, should be careful what they wish for. Since 1776 the United States has been a goose laying golden eggs for immigrants the world over. Open borders will kill it.

Posted by Conor at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 28, 2006

Wednesday Column - "What Part of Illegal Don't You Understand?"

In small towns throughout Mexico and Latin America children grow up amid crushing poverty and a complicated mythology about the United States. As their fathers labor for a rich landowner or a local merchant, never earning enough to improve their lot, they hear stories about an uncle or a cousin who headed north. Sometimes the story is about how they died crossing the desert. Sometimes it is about how they worked washing dishes for 5 months, turned to selling marijuana and got thrown into an American prison, then killed during a race riot by a black inmate.

But sometimes the story ends happily. The uncle or cousin earns enough to get married, to buy a house and to send his children to college. Each time someone in the town gets a new satellite dish to prop beside their two room house word spreads that the money came from a son or nephew in America. Sometimes a man returns from America rich enough to retire. He builds a new home on the edge of town, drives a car newer that everyone else’s and buys tequila for his friends at the local bar.

His children wear Nike shoes, and go to study in Mexico City.

If you’re a child growing up in that town, it doesn’t matter how many people are killed crossing the desert. It doesn’t matter how many illegal immigrants live ten to a room in America, never escaping poverty. You believe that if you head to America you’ll be among the immigrants who make it.

Today’s composite character, 29 year-old Manuel Garcia, came from a small town like that. His views about illegal immigration are very different from those we’ve heard in previous columns. He marched in Los Angeles last week, a Mexican flag draped over his shoulders. If you hooked him up to a lie detector test and offered him $350 for his blunt views on immigration, here’s what he’d say:

“My father worked his whole life, and when he died he left his family poor, hungry, with nothing. I’d rather die that have my wife and my daughter end up that way.

“When I came here my two friends got caught. I got through. My friend’s cousin said he’d hire for construction if I gave him my last $100. I’ve worked there for four years now, sending most of what I make home to my wife and kids.

“On the bus once someone asked me why I came here illegally, like a criminal. I never understood this. In my village the laws are for the rich people. They use the law to keep their power. If you are rich, you can break the law and no one stops you. The poor, even if you follow the law the police can say you broke it. You give them money or you go to jail. It all depends on whether you were born rich.

“Then there is God’s law. My mother taught the bible to us kids. Jesus said to honor God, and to treat others like you want to be treated. If you live with Mexican laws, you come to see that these are the laws a good man must follow.

“When I came here illegally I assumed that here in the United States it is the same thing. I understand now that Americans follow the laws more. I admire this. Still, I’d come illegally even today. Illegal immigration laws are like Mexican laws: the lucky people, the rich ones born in America, are just using their power to get what they can from poor Mexicans. They let us work, but they make us illegal because if they let us in legally they’d have to pay us more, treat us better.

“If America really doesn’t want us coming here, then why do they let so many come? It is Americans who hire us. Yet we’re blamed for coming here. We work hard. We make lots of money for Americans, and take just a little to send home to our families.

“You insult us for being illegal. Who enables us to be here?

“I’m proud to be here because I’m providing a future for my family. We Mexicans who make it across the desert, work hard for our families and don’t rob or cheat people… we Mexicans who follow Jesus’ law… we should be proud. That’s why I wear the Mexican flag.

“I yearn to bring my wife and my daughter here. We’d miss our little town. There isn’t any future there, though. If we could be here together, legally, then I’d fly the American flag every day. I’d tell my kids, this is a place where the law is fair for everyone.

“If my family can’t come here, do you expect me to fly your flag? If you want to deport me, even though I work hard for Americans who hire me, do you expect me to love your country? If you call me a criminal, a dirty Mexican, but you let me stay as long as you can make money on me, do you expect me to respect the laws Americans break?

“What part of illegal don’t you understand?�

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Press Think

FARK: "Government investigators sneak enough radioactive material into the US for two dirty bombs. CNN alerts Al Qaeda."

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Moral Outrage at Yale

David Bernstein is blogging about moral outrage at Yale Law School. I wonder whether any law students will protest the former Taliban official at the undergraduate campus.

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Afghanistan's Constitution

Andrew C. McCarthy is pretty unhappy with Afghanistan's constitution:

Here’s a riddle: What begins with words “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,� a formal Islamic salutation also commonly used by militants in their warnings, fatwas, and claims of responsibility regarding terrorist acts?

What extols the virtues of “rightful jehad� (also known as jihad) in its very first sentence?

What in its first article declares its sovereignty to be an “Islamic Republic,� and in its second installs Islam as the official “religion of the state�?

What, in its third article announces to the world that, within the territory it governs, “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam�?

What sets the national calendar by Mohammed’s historic journeys, requires the promotion of religious education, and even mandates that its national anthem must contain the battle cry “Allahu Akbar� (God is great!), most familiar to Westerners in recent times as the triumphant invocation of terrorists doing their dirty work?

What requires that same battle cry to be grafted onto its national flag, along with “the sacred phrase of ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet’�?

What, in the formation of families and upbringing of children, requires the “elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of [the] sacred religion of Islam�?

What requires the nation’s president to be a Muslim, and to swear to Allah, at the beginning of the oath of office, “to obey and safeguard the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam�? What requires the same oath of all public ministers?

What permits its judges to be schooled in Islamic jurisprudence (in lieu of any civil legal training) and requires that, upon assuming their offices, those judges take an oath “to support justice and righteousness in accord with the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam�?

What permits its highest court, even if predominantly comprised of judges trained in Islamic law, to interpret for all departments of government the meaning of any law or treaty?

What requires, when no other law directly applies to a question, that the courts decide it “in accord with the Hanafi jurisprudence� (Hanafi being one of the four major schools of Sunni Islamic law), with the lone exception that Shia Islamic principles can be applied in legal cases exclusively involving Shiite Muslims?

What permits any of its terms to be altered with the sole exception that: “The provisions of adherence to the fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam and the regime of the Islamic Republic cannot be amended�?

The answer, which will come as no surprise to followers of the Abdul Rahman apostasy trial in Kabul, is the Afghan constitution. This is the celebrated foundational law which came into force on January 4, 2004, to the ringing praises of Zalmay Khalilzad, then the American ambassador under whose kneading the drafting process was completed.

Ambassador Khalilzad — who would later bring this same magic touch to Iraq — cooed at the time that the new constitution “set[] forth parallel commitments to Islam and to human rights.� This was double-edged diplo-speak. If by “parallel,� Khalilzad meant there were some sonorous human-rights tropes in the document, that was surely true — enough to camouflage, at least for a while, the embarrassing fact that the Taliban itself could have ruled without much difficulty under the constitution’s terms. But if one takes “parallel� as it is normally understood — i.e., as connoting a sense of rough equality running along two related tracks — the State Department was deluding itself. Or deluding the rest of us.

American newspapers and television networks are in for a scolding too. I had no idea how extreme parts of the constitution are despite reading numerous stories about it.

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March 27, 2006

Explosive New 9/11 Testimony

I'm generally against the death penalty, but I can't say I'll be upset if this guy gets fried:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Laying out a stunning new version of his terrorist mission, al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he was supposed to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001, with would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and fly it into the White House.

But the jury also heard the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, now in U.S. custody, repeatedly state that Moussaoui was to be a part of a second wave of attacks unrelated to Sept. 11. In a 58-page statement read to jurors, Shaikh Mohammed said that he only wanted Middle Easterners for Sept. 11 so that Europeans like Moussaoui stood a better chance of mounting a subsequent attack after security was increased.

Testifying against the advice of his court-appointed lawyers, Moussaoui shocked the courtroom. Jurors who will decide whether he is executed or imprisoned for life were almost motionless during his nearly three hours on the stand. They didn't look down to take notes; all eyes locked on the bearded 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent — the only person charged in this country in connection with Sept. 11.

His testimony started in familiar territory. He denied he was supposed to be the so-called missing 20th hijacker of Sept. 11. He testified he was not intended to be a fifth terrorist on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed into a Pennsylvania field — the only plane hijacked by four instead of five terrorists.

Then came the shock.

Defense attorney Gerald Zerkin: "Before your arrest, were you scheduled to pilot a plane as part of the 9/11 operation?"

Moussaoui: "Yes. I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House."

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Western Civilization in Perspective

In a recent column Mark Steyn quotes Prince Charles talking to a gathering of 800 Islamic scholars:

"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."

It is rather incredible that an educated man, speaking to scholars from countries where minorities and strangers are tortured and murdered, concludes that the violence faced by Western countries over the Danish cartoon affair is due to our intolerance.

If the true mark of a civilized society is indeed how it treats minorities and strangers, Western societies are the most civilized the world has to offer.

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March 26, 2006

Everything You Need to Know About Health Care Reform

In three posts Jane Galt explains why we're unlikely to save lots of money on health care, why various schemes for socializing medicine are bad ideas, and a better solution that will improve the quality of health care while ensuring that the poor won't die because they cannot afford treatment.

Posted by Conor at 07:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Marriage and Black Culture

Joy Jones: "Marriage is for white people."

That's what one of my students told me some years back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in Southeast Washington. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title.

"That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children."

"Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."

And that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."

He's right. At least statistically. The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.

How have we gotten here? What has shifted in African American customs, in our community, in our consciousness, that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable?

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March 25, 2006

Mad Regulatory Disease

Reason reports on the tyranny of government regulation.

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Midwest in the House

Lazy Muncie is the hottest new music video.

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The Plight of Women

Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts feminism's focus where it ought to be:

Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.

How could this possibly be true? Here are some of the factors:

In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called "honor" killings, though honor has nothing to do with it.

Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called "dowry deaths," although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

Domestic violence is a major cause of death of women in every country.

So little value is placed on women's health that every year roughly 600,000 women die giving birth.

Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die; others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain.

According to the WHO, one woman out of every five worldwide is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

What is happening to women and girls in many places across the globe is genocide. All the victims scream their suffering. It is not so much that the world doesn't hear them; it is that fellow human beings choose not to pay attention.

It is much more comfortable for us to ignore these issues. And by "us," I also mean women. Too often, we are the first to look away. We may even participate, by favoring our sons and neglecting the care of our daughters. All these figures are estimates; registering precise numbers for violence against women is not a priority in most countries.

Perhaps the most shocking development is the regression of women's safety in Europe, where honor killings, genital mutilation and rape is rising do to immigrant populations avoided by police and largely uncriticized by mainstreat Western feminist organizations.

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"It's Not Islamophobia When There Really Is Something to Fear"

Eugene Volokh:

Trying to prevent people from being killed for their religious beliefs is not an "assault against Islam." It's defense against Islam, or to be precise against a certain strand of Islam that regrettably cannot be dismissed as just some unimportant lunatic fringe.

Be sure to read this whole post.

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One liner of the Day

"The founding fathers didn't trust George Washington with unlimited power. Why should we trust George Bush?"(link)

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March 24, 2006

Thoughts on Afghanistan

Over at the New Republic's discussion board I'm engaged in a debate about the war in Afghanistan. A commenter named Biggarcon writes: "Our best hope to defeat terrorism is to live honorably and give terrorists little or no reason to attack us."

I submit that it is impossible to both live honorably and give terrorists little or no reason to attack us.

Islamic terrorists seek, among other things, to gain political control over the Middle East and Europe, to re-establish the historic Muslim caliphate at the head of a far-reaching imperial empire and to institute Sharia law.

Isn't it obvious that if we let them perpetrate a genocide against Israel's jews, or oppress Hindus and Christians in the Middle East, or enact laws that call for the stoning of adulterous women and homosexuals, then we are not living honorably?

Isn't it as obvious that if we oppose these things Islamic radicals will continue to have a reason to perpetrate terrorist attacks against us?

Biggarcon quotes Ghandi, writing, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Fine. Here's the change I want to see in the world: I want a world where tyrants like the Nazis, the Taliban, genocidal Hutus, Muslim killing Serbs, and all the rest are opposed immediately and definitively by people of goodwill, who outnumber them so overwhelmingly that they can only succeed in murder when good people, whether through cowardice or pacifistic rationalizations, do nothing.

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The Fog of Journalism

Liberty Just in Case wonders why decorated veterans aren't getting more press coverage. (via Instapundit)

Posted by Conor at 04:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Language of Business

Heh.

It reminds me of this story.

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Jihad Light

Poisoning beer is abhorrent on the same karmic level as stealing surf boards or taking candy from babies.

Posted by Conor at 04:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Taliban at Yale: Is He The Most Deserving Afghani?

Given a choice between educating an Afghani woman or an official of the Taliban government, Yale chose the latter.

Posted by Conor at 04:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Joke of the Day

What's the difference between a scientist and a communist? A scientist would've tried it on rats first.

(Thanks to Tom Meyer for the punchline.)

Posted by Conor at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"To All the Women I've Rejected"

A college admissions officer is troubled by a new trend: discriminating against female applicants to maintain a gender balance on campus.

Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write "admit" next to her name.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation's top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.

It's academia's nightmare: they must choose between diversity and feminism.

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The Good News

(CNN) -- An Afghan man possibly facing execution for converting from Islam to Christianity is expected "to be released in the coming days," a source with detailed knowledge of the case said Friday.

Word of Abdul Rahman's release comes after days of international pressure and the day before the Afghan Cabinet was scheduled to discuss the case of the 41-year-old father of two. On Thursday, top Afghan clerics urged Muslims to kill Rahman if the government freed him.

Speaking Friday to reporters in Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. government is working with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government to free Rahman.

Karzai's government came to power after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the fundamentalist Taliban, an oppressive regime notorious for publicly executing people like Rahman.

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A Great American Dies

Best of the Web Today links to a stirring obituary:

Desmond T. Doss, Sr., the only conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II, has died. He was 87 years old.

Mr. Doss never liked being called a conscientious objector. He preferred the term conscientious cooperator. Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Mr. Doss did not believe in using a gun or killing because of the sixth commandment which states, “Thou shalt not kill� (Exodus 20:13). Doss was a patriot, however, and believed in serving his country.

During World War II, instead of accepting a deferment, Mr. Doss voluntarily joined the Army as a conscientious objector. Assigned to the 307th Infantry Division as a company medic he was harassed and ridiculed for his beliefs, yet he served with distinction and ultimately received the Congressional Medal of Honor on Oct. 12, 1945 for his fearless acts of bravery.

According to his Medal of Honor citation, time after time, Mr. Doss’ fellow soldiers witnessed how unafraid he was for his own safety. He was always willing to go after a wounded fellow, no matter how great the danger. On one occasion in Okinawa, he refused to take cover from enemy fire as he rescued approximately 75 wounded soldiers, carrying them one-by-one and lowering them over the edge of the 400-foot Maeda Escarpment. He did not stop until he had brought everyone to safety nearly 12 hours later.

Now that's supporting the troops.

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March 23, 2006

"The Obligation of Unwanted Fatherhood"

Jeff Jacoby writes on the man attempting to litigate his way out of child support payments:

The culture used to send a clear message to men in Dubay's position: Marry the mother and be a father to your child. Today it tells him: Just write a monthly check. Soon -- if this lawsuit succeeds -- it won't say even that. The result will not be a fairer, more equal society. It will be a society with even more abortion, even more exploitation of women, even more of the destructiveness and instability caused by fatherlessness.

And, in some ways saddest of all, even more people like Matt Dubay: a boy who never learned how to be a real man.

That sounds about right to me. Read the whole thing.

Posted by Conor at 07:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Driving Under the Influence

You shouldn't drive drunk.

And if you do, you definitely shouldn't rear end someone before falling asleep with a beer in your lap.

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Photo of the Day

I took this in Cinque Terre in May, 2005. Most weekends I think about how nice it would be to go for the weekend... Then again, I may well end up having a few beers over great conversation Friday or Saturday... and who can complain about that?

Posted by Conor at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

On Polygamy

William Saletan on why we should allow gay marriage but not polygamy:

Fidelity isn't natural, but jealousy is. Hence the one-spouse rule. One isn't the number of people you want to sleep with. It's the number of people you want your spouse to sleep with.

Posted by Conor at 03:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A Slip of the Tongue

Should this man be fired? I don't think so.

Posted by Conor at 03:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Genocide No One Will Stop

The Wall Street Journal: "One lesson of Darfur is that there really are limits to American power, and in its absence the world's savages have freer reign."

It's another argument for the Glenn Reynolds strategy for preventing genocide: give everyone a gun.

Posted by Conor at 03:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Killing Them with Laughter

A USA Today op-ed has a wonderful suggestion: we should start ridiculing terrorists.

History teaches that ridicule weakens the moral and political capital of our enemies. Ronald Reagan employed it with great effect during the Cold War. We all remember the "evil empire" speech, but what about the jokes? Two guys were standing in line at the vodka store. They were there for half an hour, then an hour, then an hour and a half. "I'm sick of this," one finally said. "I'm going over to the Kremlin to shoot (Mikhail) Gorbachev." The man left and returned about an hour later. "Well, did you shoot him?" "Heck no," he responded. "The line up there is a lot longer than this one."

The author argues that demonizing our enemies raises their stature, while ridiculing them weakens their ability to instill fear.

Many of Reagan's comments reached the underground press in the Soviet Union, no doubt encouraging dissenters against communism. Reagan understood that sowing fear in the West was a potent weapon for Moscow. By laughing at communism, the spell of fear was broken. It was the same during World War II. A cartoon of Donald Duck mocking Hitler and Mein Kampf no doubt was demeaning to the Führer.

We haven't employed ridicule in the War on Terrorism:

Thus far, the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorists has been to demonize them. "Their vision of the world is dark and dim," President Bush said in January at Kansas State University. "They have got desires to spread a totalitarian empire." During his March 11 radio address, he said: "The enemy we face has proved to be brutal and relentless."

Certainly, their actions and goals warrant such treatment. But that alone is a tough strategy to maintain psychologically because it can be exhausting.

So how do you ridicule the enemy?

I'm not suggesting that Bush start cracking Osama bin Laden jokes. And we should not mock Islam. Reagan joked about communist leaders but never about the Russian people. What the Bush administration can do is mock the terrorists.

For example, we should note that these self-professed warriors hide while they pay impoverished young men and women to become human bombs. We should play up Osama's privileged background. We should highlight the terrorists' ridiculous failures. The reality is that much like Soviet officials, terrorists are full of grand illusions about themselves and their mission.

The war on terror has military, political and economic dimensions. But it also has a critical psychological component. The terrorists are not 10 feet tall. We should engage in a psychological war that brings these thugs down to size.

The Missing Link finds this an excellent idea--expect a few examples in future posts.

One concern, though: has America become so humorless and hypersensitive that we're unable to employ humor as well as past generations? We'll see.

Posted by Conor at 02:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Taliban at Yale

John Fund at the Wall Street Journal continues hammering away at Yale for admitting a Taliban spokesman as an undergraduate and refusing to forthrightly explain and defend their decision:

Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn't look more closely into his curriculum vitae. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department's door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale's decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi's caliber apply but "we lost him to Harvard" and "I didn't want that to happen again." Mr. Shaw won't return phone calls now, but emails he's exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking.

The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics."

Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students. He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin." Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks."

Whether or not Yale cares what the outside world thinks isn't really the point. What is the point? An institution ostensibly dedicated to academic inquiry is unwilling to defend its intellectual positions. It's just one more piece of evidence that their position is indefensible.

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Hints From Heloise

The column "Hints From Heloise" is one of the most hilarious in newespapers today. Each week Heloise offers a household tip--this week's: toothpaste can buff out CD scratches--but the real hilarity begins when readers write in:

Dear Heloise,

I hate to throw away the bags that sheets or pillowscases come in, so now I have found various uses for them.

They make perfect traveling bags for toiletries, and they are also good for storing supplies in my toiletries cabinet. I put all the allergy medicines in one bag, all the bandages, gauze, ointment and tape in another, and all the lipsticks in another.

Also, I can prepare an emergency first aid bag and a travel bag with miniature toiletries for last-minute trips.

Yes, dear reader: bags can be used to hold things. Be advised!

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March 22, 2006

On Iraq and the Media

Debra Saunders:

When television news anchors announce bad news, they usually frame it as a reflection on Bush, not the insurgents.

Or as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it in a speech this week, insurgency forces "play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party. Every act of carnage adds to the death toll. But somehow, it serves to indicate our responsibility for disorder, rather than the act of wickedness that causes it. For us, so much of our opinion believes that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was so wrong that it is reluctant to accept what is plainly right now."

Posted by Conor at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The UN: Undermining Freedom of Speech

Eugene Volokh:

So, according to the UN, the age-old crime of blasphemy -- which I had assumed Enlightenment free speech principles had successfully interred, at least in Europe -- needs to be revived as a "violation" of the "freedom of expression." In this respect, the UN official wants to drag the West back into the 17th century. Will the West obediently go?

Posted by Conor at 08:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Religious Tolerance and Civilization

Glenn Reynolds:

I WAS A BIT SLOW to jump on the story of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Muslim who converted to Christianity and now faces a death penalty, because I was afraid it would be a rerun of the Dubai Ports story fiasco. But it seems to hold up, and it's a disgrace. Civilized countries permit freedom of religion. Uncivilized countries kill people for their beliefs. This will simply provide more ammunition for those who believe that Islam is incompatible with civilization.

Posted by Conor at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Body Count

Instapundit has some surprising figures on military deaths under the last five presidents.

Posted by Conor at 08:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Society of Lawyers

Leave it to a bunch of aspiring lawyers to take formal action against a professor's classroom preferences:

A group of University of Memphis law students are passing a petition against a professor who banned laptop computers from her classroom because she considers them a distraction in lectures.

On March 6, Professor June Entman warned her first-year law students by e-mail to bring pens and paper to take notes in class. "My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Entman said Monday. "The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."

The move didn't sit well with the students, who have begun collecting signatures against the move and tried to file a complaint with the American Bar Association. The complaint, based on an ABA rule for technology at law schools, was dismissed.

Posted by Conor at 08:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Economics of Hate

This is why I love economics.

Posted by Conor at 04:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A History Lesson

Bruce Bawer's new book While Europe Slept, which you should definitely buy and read, contains this fascinating anecdote about Danish Jews during WWII:

At the time of the Nazi occupation, the population of Denmark was about four million, including about 7,500 Jews, most of them well integrated into Danish society. In 1941, when Hermann Goring brought up the “Jewish question� with Danish foreign minister Erik Scavenius, he received the blunt reply: “There is no Jewish question in Denmark.� Two years later, on September 28, 1943, Hitler directed the head of the SS in Denmark to begin rounding up the Jews and deporting them to death camps on October 1. When George F. Duckwitz, a German military attaché, heard about the order, he got word of it to a member of the Danish resistance, who then told the leader of Denmark’s Jewish community. The news spread throughout Denmark, and the Danish people leapt into action, risking their lives to shelter Jews and transport them to safety in neutral Sweden. The Nazis figured out what was taking place, but it happened to quickly for them to respond effectively, and the Danish police and coast guard refused to help them.

Within a few days, the overwhelming majority of Danish Jews made it to Sweden. The Germans managed to arrest only 481 of them, who were sent to the internment camp at Theresienstadt. Somehow Danish officials persuaded German leaders not to send the Danish Jews to death camps; the Germans even agreed to allow inspections by the Danish Red Cross. Throughout the war, the people of Denmark continued to monitor the conditions at Theresienstadt and to send food and clothing to the Danish Jews imprisoned there. As a result, most of the latter survived the war and were able to return to Denmark at war’s end. And there’s one last extraordinary detail: “Almost everywhere else in Europe,� writes Louis Bulow, “returning Jews found their homes had been broken into, and everything of value stolen. When the Danish Jews returned, they discovered that their homes, pets, gardens and personal belongings were cared for by their neighbors.�

…How did this happen? How was it that the gentiles of Denamrk, in almost perfect unison, acted heroically, swiftly, effectively, and without hesitation to save their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis?

A few years ago, on three successive Sunday mornings, a historian presented the results of her research into that question at my parish church in New York. Part of the answer, she explained, had to do with geography and demographics: Denmark was a tiny nation with a relatively small Jewish population and was located across a narrow waterway from neutral Sweden, which made it possible for all the country’s Jews to be gathered together in one place almost overnight and smuggled by boat to safety. Yet she stressed that this remarkable secret project, in which almost every last gentile in Denmark was complicit, carried dire peril for all concerned and would never have been conceived and carried out had the Danes, gentile and Jew alike, not had a powerful sense of themselves as one people, belonging to the same community. When the Germans tried to separate the Danish Jews from the Danish gentiles, in short, it just didn’t make sense to the Danes; every cell in their bodies resisted it; they saw the profound wrong in it immediately, and resisted accordingly.

Thankfully, they didn't have multiculturalism back then.

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March 21, 2006

Photo of the Day

(From this blog.)

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Another Update on France

Paul Belien: "France is dying. We are witnessing its agony, while the patient refuses to take the medicine that can cure him."

But then he'd have to face the horrors of the American system!

UPDATE: USA Today makes a convincing case that we should do everything possible to prevent America from following the French "economic model". But then they argue that we shouldn't feel smug or superior. I'm less convinced about that.

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Black Republicans Explained

Why would a black person be a Republican? Eugene Volokh explains.

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The Pro-Capitalist French

Instapundit reports on counter-protests in Paris.

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A School Yard Brawl

I'm mystified by this story:

EVERETT - Parents of Hispanic students are raising concerns about racial tensions at Everett High School, less than a year after high-profile student complaints about discrimination.

The families are unhappy with how Everett police and school staff handled a March 6 fight between two Hispanic girls shortly after classes were dismissed.

After warnings to disperse, seven students were arrested and 13 were suspended. Most of them are Hispanic. Among them was an 18-year-old male student who allegedly shoved a female police officer to the ground.

Parents say Hispanic teenagers were unfairly targeted, and that school and police officials went too far. They say the situation is the result of long-standing tensions at the high school.

"The school has allowed a hostile educational environment to fester and now to boil over," said Erica Valdillez, whose 14-year-old daughter was one of those fighting and was expelled. "They refuse to look at our students as a group and address the race factor. They've chosen to ignore this."

Is there a race factor in a fight between two Hispanic girls? Ms. Valdillez must realize that when two students fight one another it is their fault, not the school's fault or the police's fault. Parents ought to be applauding the school and the police for breaking up the fight and working to keep campus safe. Instead, they are carping about perceived prejudice when, if we are to trust this newspaper story, their complaints are far from justified.

Here are more details:

In the most recent incident, school officials called police to help break up a fight between two teenage girls outside the school.

Officer Suzanne Eviston tried to pull the girls apart, but one refused to cooperate, according to a police affidavit filed in Everett District Court. Eviston pulled the girl's hair to bring her to the ground, court records say.

Then, an 18-year-old student rushed up and struck Eviston with his forearm from behind, police reported.

Officers Les Letoto and Jason Jones knocked the teen to the ground. Jones attempted to arrest the 18-year-old, who resisted and swung at the officer, police reported. Jones sprayed him in the face with pepper spray and tackled him to the ground. He was then handcuffed.

After being given medical attention, the teen denied assaulting Eviston. Instead he told the officer he "checked her," according to the police affidavit.

Four boys also were arrested for various misdemeanors. All but the 18-year-old were released to their parents.

Of those arrested, five were Hispanic, one was black and one boy's race wasn't specified.

Admittedly, I wasn't at this fight, but neither were the parents who are now complaining about its outcome. When students are trading physical blows, the police are going to get involved. Those fighting and those crowding around may not be handled with kid gloves. But the fact that an 18 year old male assaulted a female cop and got pepper-sprayed to the face, rather than batoned to the skull, seems to indicate restraint more admirable than what a lot of people could muster.

Unless there are significant facts left out of this newspaper reporter it is the fighting students that the parents ought to be condemning.

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Wednesday Column

What do you think about illegal immigration?

What about illegal immigrants?

Around the dinner table do you express opinions you wouldn’t at work? Alone in the voting booth, do you think things that you might not be comfortable expressing in the newspaper?

That’s what I thought.

It helps to explain why the immigration debate that happens in the newspaper and on television doesn’t really resemble the conversations people have with their friends, or their spouse, or their jogging buddies.

In a way it’s too bad, because we won’t reach a good compromise on immigration until we understand the life experiences, fears and prejudices that shape the way our fellow citizens think about this topic.

That’s why I’ve begun a series of columns that draw on hundreds of conversations I’ve had about immigration. It’s time to inject opinions into the immigration debate that, though common, seldom appear in print.

In American fashion, I’ll now reiterate my disclaimer: Some views I’ll channel seem quite sensible to me. I find others abhorrent. No matter. They are all real opinions I’ve heard, often from multiple people, and they span the political spectrum.

Today’s “based-on-a-true-story� character, a composite of numerous Latinos I’ve interviewed, lives in a Rancho Cucamonga tract home with her husband and their two teenage boys. She is a second generation Mexican American. Let’s call her Maria.

Here’s what she’d say if you hooked her up to a lie detector machine and offered to pay $1 million for her blunt thoughts about immigration:

“My mother came to this country when she was pregnant with me—I’m what some people call an anchor baby. My father came here illegally, but President Reagan granted him amnesty, and he’s been a proud American citizen ever since.

“Even before that my parents always raised us to be Americans. They seldom spoke Spanish to us even though they struggled with English. The one time I got spanked as a child, it was because I used Spanish to make fun of a neighbor so he couldn’t understand what I was saying.

“It’s only when I had my own kids that I fully understood how my parents were able to sacrifice so much. I’d do anything for my boys. If my husband and I were born in Mexico, we’d have paid anything to get our family here, even illegally. I can’t blame anyone who does that for their children. It changes their whole life. How could you not do it?

“That’s why those Minutemen make me so angry. I went to one of their rallies, and everyone seemed so angry at Mexicans. I saw my neighbor there. She’s sweet as can be to me, and she’s always nice to my kids, but I see her Mexican gardeners mowing her lawn every week, and then she goes and blames immigrants for coming here, shakes her fist at them during a protest. I wonder what she’s really thinking when she looks at my kids.

“At the same time, I understand people like her more and more as my kids get older. So many people are coming! My youngest son’s kindergarten class is almost twice as crowded as it was for my older boy. There are so many immigrants now the kindergarten teacher had the nerve to try instructing him in Spanish. It burned me up—I chewed her out good. Afterward, I felt bad, though. She’s 24 or 25, a white girl who’s Spanish is better than mine, and how could she know? Some of the Hispanic parents would yell at her if she’d only teach the kids in English. Then I feel guilty for wishing that they’d just go back where they came from. It’s like, if you’re not going to learn English and teach it to your kids you’re making the schools worse for my kids. And your kids are just going to end up on welfare, or without medical insurance, and my kids will pay for that too.

“And the Hispanic gangs are getting so bad. They’re as bad as the Crips when I was growing up in Los Angeles. Are they going to mistake my son for a gangbanger and shoot him on the freeway?

“Or if the Minutemen get their way and they start having round-ups away from the border it might be INS agents harassing my kids. I don’t want them feeling like their skin color makes them a target all the time. How else do you do roundups except pick out someone who looks Mexican and check their papers. Would you want your kid getting stopped on the street?�

That’s what our Hispanic mother would say. If you don’t think that way, now you know how some of your fellow citizens do think. That’s half the battle. The other half is telling them why you think they’ve got a point… or why they’re dead wrong. This column is posted at www.beyondbordersblog.com, and if you e-mail your thoughts to conor.friedersdorf@dailybulletin.com, I’ll post them there too.

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March 20, 2006

If We Don't Oppose Genocidal Tyrants, Who Will?

Christopher Hitchens re-writes history, exploring what should have happened during the Iraq war:

So, now I come at last to my ideal war. Let us start with President Bush's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, which I recommend that you read. Contrary to innumerable sneers, he did not speak only about WMD and terrorism, important though those considerations were. He presented an argument for regime change and democracy in Iraq and said, in effect, that the international community had tolerated Saddam's deadly system for far too long. Who could disagree with that? Here's what should have happened. The other member states of the United Nations should have said: Mr. President, in principle you are correct. The list of flouted U.N. resolutions is disgracefully long. Law has been broken, genocide has been committed, other member-states have been invaded, and our own weapons inspectors insulted and coerced and cheated. Let us all collectively decide how to move long-suffering Iraq into the post-Saddam era. We shall need to consider how much to set aside to rebuild the Iraqi economy, how to sponsor free elections, how to recuperate the devastated areas of the marshes and Kurdistan, how to try the war criminals, and how many multinational forces to ready for this task. In the meantime—this is of special importance—all governments will make it unmistakably plain to Saddam Hussein that he can count on nobody to save him. All Iraqi diplomats outside the country, and all officers and officials within it, will receive the single message that it is time for them to switch sides or face the consequences. Then, when we are ready, we shall issue a unanimous ultimatum backed by the threat of overwhelming force. We call on all democratic forces in all countries to prepare to lend a hand to the Iraqi people and assist them in recovering from more than three decades of fascism and war.

Not a huge amount to ask, when you think about it. But what did the president get instead? The threat of unilateral veto from Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Private assurances to Saddam Hussein from members of the U.N. Security Council. Pharisaic fatuities from the United Nations' secretary-general, who had never had a single problem wheeling and dealing with Baghdad. The refusal to reappoint Rolf Ekeus—the only serious man in the U.N. inspectorate—to the job of invigilation. A tirade of opprobrium, accusing Bush of everything from an oil grab to a vendetta on behalf of his father to a secret subordination to a Jewish cabal. Platforms set up in major cities so that crowds could be harangued by hardened supporters of Milosevic and Saddam, some of them paid out of the oil-for-food bordello.

Well, if everyone else is allowed to rewind the tape and replay it, so can I. We could have been living in a different world, and so could the people of Iraq, and I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.

I think that Hitchens is right. Unfortunately, the United States, Britain and Australia are among a small handful of nations possessed of the moral seriousness to oppose tyrants rather than hiding behind pacifistic doublethink, shortsightened geo-political jockeying and knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

The New Republic reports on this phenomenon in Afghanistan, where some NATO members are balking at peacekeeping that actually involves preventing Taliban remnants from killing people.

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The No Spin Zone

If you read just one profile of Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, let it be this one.

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The Taliban at Yale

Penraker: "Welcome to the class of '06, the first generation educated to become drones."

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The Abuse Heaped Upon Black Conservatives

Eugene Volokh is criticizing racism on the LA Times Op-ed page:

Why Did He Steal? Well, Partly Because He's Black:

That, I kid you not, is precisely what an L.A. Times op-ed from last week says. Black conservatives are bad, the theory goes; also, being conservative is spiritually bad for blacks; and that helps explain why White House adviser Claude Allen committed fraud: "It's hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don't exact a psychological toll at some point, and Allen's alleged dabbling in crime might have been that point for him."

Oh, and quite a charming little reference to "house Negro[es]" a couple of paragraphs before, as well -- plus the old traitor-to-his-race line of "I don't support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less." (I take this to mean "traitor to his race," since otherwise it makes no sense: Why would holding any view be worse if you're black, unless the theory is that somehow blacks ought not hold that view because it's supposedly bad for blacks?) When whites are called traitors to their race for supporting policies that are supposedly bad for whites, that's pretty roundly condemned as racism, and rightly so. Yet somehow condemning blacks as traitors to their race is seen by many as just fine.

Traditional racism still exists on the right fringe of the American political spectrum, and we ought to stay vigilant against it. At the same time, we've thankfully marginalized that racism so thoroughly that it's no longer acceptable behavior for transparent institutions or even tolerated in polite company.

The racism emanating from the American left is a more mainstream affliction, partly because its well-intentioned adherents obscure the reality that we ought to condemn it.

If you start from the self-evident principled position that all human beings are created equally regardless of their skin color, it is rather obvious to conclude the moral impermissibility of government institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. Yet it is usual for so called progressives these days to denigrate black conservatives, to favor affirmative action, and to lobby for racially segregated student organizations on college campuses.

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Toward Transparency

Will Wilkonson and Jane Galt have an excellent idea.

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The French: Threatening a Strike, Making a Scene

In France students and workers are protesting a new law that would allow firms to lay off workers under 26 during the first two years of their employment.

What's that you say? Isn't it quite normal for a firm to be able to lay off a worker if things don't work out?

Not in France, where it's so hard to fire anyone that firms are quite reluctant to hire anyone--hence the need for the law.

The French, though they never seem to muster enough will to resist fascistic dictators bent on genocide or to save their nation from creeping Islamic radicalism, will get motivated for a protest against the most mild of common sense economic reforms.

In fact, protests turned violent today, so that now it must be the North African immigrants in Paris who are watching the native French in disbelief, unable to fathom their anger or actions.

Of course, when it's Frenchmen rioting the police aren't afraid to respond, so the cars burned tally is a bit lower this time.

After a sunny afternoon of peaceful marching, violence flared during the evening at Place de la Nation in eastern Paris, prompting riot police officers to fire tear gas canisters to disperse demonstrators. In the Latin Quarter, the police used water cannon to repulse students who tried to break through barricades at the Sorbonne - the university that the police stormed a week ago to break up a sit-in and that is now a symbol of the struggle against the law.

The security forces arrested 167 people and were still holding 70 on Sunday morning, said Catherine Casteran, a spokeswoman for the National Police. She said that 34 members of the security forces and 18 demonstrators had been hurt in the violence. None of the injuries was serious, although one demonstrator was hospitalized with heart problems, Casteran said.

Ten shop fronts, including a Gap clothing store and a McDonald's restaurant, were lightly damaged, news reports said. Three cars were set on fire and a number of bus shelters and telephone booths were damaged.

In Marseille, one police officer was injured and six protesters were arrested. There were also clashes in the northern city of Lille, with the police responding with tear gas, in Grenoble in the east and in Clermont-Ferrand in the center, Agence France-Presse reported.

Jeez. And it isn't even the worst of times...

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March 19, 2006

Putting Things in Perspective

If you've ever compared America's religious right to theocrats abroad, or put question marks around the phrase "Western freedoms", or complained about the way Western governments treat minorities, or argued that sharia law is just another legal system, as valid as any other... you should read this story for some much-needed perspective:

KABUL, Afghanistan -- An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death on a charge of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under this country's Islamic laws, a judge said Sunday.

The trial is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take here four years after the ouster of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime.

The defendant, 41-yer-old Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told The Associated Press in an interview. Rahman was charged with rejecting Islam and his trial started Thursday.

How did this man happen to convert to Christianity?

During the one-day hearing, the defendant confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Mawlavezada said.

"We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam."

I wonder if the judge considers Islam a religion of peace.

UPDATE: I seem to remember a Nigerian adulterer saved from being stoned to death by a public outcry. I wonder if there is the same opportunity here.

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Marijuana Prohibition: Will It Ever End?

A new Zogby poll has pot legalization advocates cheering:

Washington, DC: Nearly one out of two Americans support amending federal law "to let states legally regulate and tax marijuana the way they do liquor and gambling," according to a national poll of 1,004 likely voters by Zogby International and commissioned by the NORML Foundation.

Forty-six percent of respondents -- including a majority of those polled on the east (53 percent) and west (55 percent) coasts -- say they support allowing states to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. Forty-nine percent of respondents opposed taxing and regulating cannabis, and five percent were undecided.

I think this is good news. Marijuana prohibition excacerbates smuggling on the border, triggers turf wars among drug dealers, gives violent street gangs an easy way to make money and costs society untold millions spent paying police officers, judges and incarceration costs.

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Islamic Radicals Appeal to Human Rights

Danish imam Ahmad Akkari is supporting an official complaint being lodged against Denmark at the United Nations. His argument: "...our point is that in failing to censure Jyllands-Posten, Denmark has committed a breach of its duties as a signatory of UN conventions on human and political rights as well as international agreements on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination."

Meanwhile Christians, Jews, Hindus, Gays, and women face human rights violations, political tyranny and discrimination across most of the Muslim world.

Will Western Civilization continue to allow farcical attempts by Islamic radicals to use our own tolerance against us?

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What Should We Do?

James Lileks has thoughts on the bird flu.

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Scientology and Cartoons

Jim Lindgren has an informative post about a controversial South Park episode that mocks Scientology. Andrew Sullivan has more on the same topic.

You'd think anyone who worked for multiple seasons on South Park would be immune to being offended... but you'd apparently be wrong.

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March 18, 2006

Book Recommendations

I'm reading a few good books at the moment:

An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds is about how technology is empowering individuals to compete with large organizations as never before. It's a must read book for anyone who wants to understand the future our society is headed toward.

While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer chronicles how European society has allowed Islamic radicalism to take root.

An Outline of History is H.G. Wells account of world history from the formation of our planet to the period just after World War I. It's a profoundly secular look at history--some would call it anti-spiritual, though I think that goes a bit too far.

All three books are excellent reads. I recommend them to anyone interested in those topics.

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March 17, 2006

Charging by Weight

BERLIN (Reuters) - A hotel in northern Germany has started charging its guests by the kilo for an overnight stay.

In the town of Norden, close to the Dutch border, guests now have to step onto the scales before moving into their rooms and fork out half a euro (35 pence) per kilogram (2.2 lbs).

"I had many guests who were really huge and I told them to slim down," said Juergen Heckrodt, owner of the three-star establishment. "When they came back the year after and had lost a lot of weight they asked me what are you gonna do for me now?"

Heckrodt said he hoped his initiative would inspire Germans to become leaner and healthier.

"Healthy guests live longer and can come back more often."

Larger customers may be reassured that the hotel turns no one away who refuses to step on the scales and charges no guest more than 39 euros, the normal single room price.

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Rioting for the Status Quo

Now the students are rioting in Paris:

Once again, there is high anxiety in France. Not revolution. Not 1968 revisited. But a great deal of political drama.

Students have shut down universities and are taking to the streets. The police are using tear gas to quell protests in the heart of Paris. Teachers, workers, labor union leaders, the jobless, even retirees are joining in. President Jacques Chirac and his ministers are pleading for dialogue. Opposition politicians with their eyes on presidential elections next year are fanning the flames of discontent.

On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets and marched in cities throughout France, and an even larger nationwide protest aimed at bringing more than a million marchers into the streets was planned for Saturday.

The protests have begun to invade middle-class city life. Masked protesters in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris hurled rocks at anti-riot police from the small park in front of the chic Bon Marché department store.

The police fought back with tear gas. Some protesters lobbed tear gas canisters at the police. Security guards barred people from entering the store, which is just blocks from Matignon, the building that houses the prime minister's office. The newspaper kiosk opposite the Hotel Lutetia across the street was set on fire. "Resistance! Resistance!" protesters chanted.

In Rennes, the police used tear gas to dislodge protesters from City Hall. In Bordeaux, protesters disrupted rail traffic. In Nancy, youths threw stones at the police. In Toulouse, the university was closed following clashes between students who wanted it shut and others who wanted it to stay open.

It is a moment of street theater and fierce debate, with sweeping commentaries about watersheds and crossroads and references to the unrest that shook Paris in May 1968.

Certainly, the images of cheering students occupying the 17th-century Sorbonne - the focus of the 1968 revolt - last Friday night evoked memories of that exhilarating, romantic youth movement 38 springs ago.

But May 1968 this is not. That was a time of student dreams and of student revolt aimed at transforming an authoritarian, elitist system. It pushed 10 million workers to go on strike in France and came close to forcing President Charles de Gaulle from power.

"Sixty-eight was a mass revolutionary movement to create a socialist society," said Henri Weber, now a member of the European Parliament, who was a Communist leader of the 1968 revolt and whose photo protesting in front of the Sorbonne appeared in Paris Match. "We had an idealistic vision."

The students' goal this time is dramatically more modest. They want the abolition of a new law known as the "First Employment Contract" that would allow employers to lay off young workers without cause after two years. The government argues that the plan is necessary to reduce the chronically high rate of unemployment among the country's youth. "We're not there in '68," said Nadjet Boubakeur, a 26-year-old history major at one of Paris's public universities and a leader of the student union movement UNEF. "Our revolt is not to get more. It's to keep what we have."

Hmmm... radical action to preserve a status quo that's slowly bankrupting the country? If you ever catch me throwing rocks at "the man" the cause will be far better.

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Photo of the Day

The image is from Weekly Shot -- check it out.

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How to Destroy George W. Bush

David Boaz:

Conservatives love Bush because the left hates him. If the New York Times would run a front-page story headlined "Bush Delivers the Big Government Clinton Never Did," and the lefty bloggers would pick it up and run with it, maybe conservatives would catch on.

So here's your challenge, lefty bloggers: If you don't like the tree-chopping, Falwell-loving, cowboy president - if you want his presidency fatally wounded for the next three years - then start praising him. One good Paul Krugman column taking off from that USA Today story on the surge in entitlements recipients under Bush, one Daily Kos lead on how Clinton flopped on national health care but Bush twisted every arm in the GOP to get a multi-trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for the elderly, one cover story in the Nation on how Bush has acknowledged federal responsibility for everything from floods in New Orleans to troubled teenagers, and maybe, just maybe, National Review and the Powerline blog and Fox News would come to their senses. Bush is a Rockefeller Republican in cowboy boots, and it's time conservatives stopped looking at the boots instead of the policies.

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A Fantastic Idea for Democratizing Iran

Timothy Garton Ash writes that Europe should be working on democratizing Iran:

Rather than sitting on the sidelines carping at whatever Washington does, we Europeans should do something better ourselves. Instead of merely expressing (justified) scepticism about an American satellite TV channel for Iran, which will be widely seen there as Bush administration propaganda, we should be urging the British parliament to make money available for a 24-hour BBC satellite television service broadcasting to Iran in Farsi. For the BBC does have real credibility in Iran. Rather than just sniping at Washington's sometimes clumsy efforts at democracy promotion, we should be developing our own.

When I say we, I mean all the member states of the European Union, pooling their resources and know-how. After all, we - not the Americans - have the diplomats, businesspeople and journalists on the ground in Iran. Between our 25 countries, we have a unique body of experience about how democratic states can encourage peaceful change in their less democratic neighbours. In the last decades of the cold war, West Germany tried to do this with its Ostpolitik, and Poland, having been on the receiving end, can help us to learn from the mistakes of that Ostpolitik. Not all the European precedents fit Iran, but some do. For example, we should be weaving a dense web of human contacts between Iranians and freer countries, as we did between the western and eastern halves of a divided Europe.

Our universities should invite their academics and students, who have often been in the vanguard of standing up for free speech and human rights in Iran. Our newspapers and journalism schools should bring over their journalists. Our trades unions should hitch up with their unionists, some of whom have organised major strikes. Our parliaments should establish links with their parliament which, though far from fully democratic, has been giving Ahmadinejad a rough ride.

Writers, artists and filmmakers should be encouraged to travel to and fro, carrying ideas in both directions. Women's movements in Iran, representing half the population systematically discriminated against, should be supported by women's movements in Europe. Iran's Islamic thinkers and jurists, both reformist modernisers and conservatives, should be engaged in dialogue by theologians and scholars from other faith traditions. All this should be done less by our governments than by our own societies, and not just by America and Britain - traditionally distrusted by many Iranians - but by all European countries, working separately and together. We need a European Iranpolitik.

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March 16, 2006

Soccer Tournament: Muslims Versus Gays

This pretty much sums up how serious Europe is about fighting Islamic radicalism:

A Dutch multicultural group is organizing a soccer tournament between gays and Muslims, hoping to counter what a study published on Thursday said was a rising tide of fear among gays.

A nationwide survey by the Police Research Academy said that most gays questioned feel unsafe and reported experiencing verbal attacks in the last year.

Yes, the problem is that the gays and the Muslims just haven't had enough contact with one another. If only someone would've organized a game between the Nazis and the Jews, or the Hutus and the Tutsis, or the apartheid government in South Africa and the blacks.

The story continues:

Of the 776 homosexuals who responded to an internet questionnaire, 80 percent said they believed their safety was threatened at some time during the year, said academy director Frits Vlek, who commissioned the research.

Only 3 percent said they were physically assaulted, Vlek said in an interview, but some 40 percent claimed they had been insulted or verbally abused.

Youths from Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds often were blamed for the incidents, Vlek said, since homosexuality is not widely accepted in many Muslim cultures.

"Parts of the Muslim community still resist homosexuality and receive little education about it," he said.

Actually, the Muslim community receives too much education about gays. They're told homosexuality is an abomination, that gays are insults to Allah, and that they ought to be stoned to death.

Then again, soccer can be fun...

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The Worst Idea Ever

Cathy Young has more on men's reproductive "rights".

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It's Not About Traditional Christian Values

At Brussel's Journal writer Paul Belien is upset about a new test required of prospective immigrants:

This so-called “integration test� includes a film which exposes the would-be immigrants to scenes of kissing homosexual men and topless women. The message is that “If you can’t tolerate gay lifestyle and public nudity, you can’t come.�

Citizens from EU member states and from Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan are exempt from the test. Fortunately this applies to the United States, too. Otherwise Americans – most of whom do not approve of the public display of depravity and nudity – would not be allowed to settle in the Netherlands.

Here's the thing, though: if you walk around a public park in Western Europe during the summertime, or stroll along a crowded beach, you're going to see topless women, men holding hands and kissing, etc.

Sure, some Americans might find that offensive, and many Muslim immigrants will. Those who favor requiring the video, however, can make the rather strong argument that it depicts reality in the Netherlands. We can disagree about whether that reality is the healthiest for Dutch society, but anyone hoping to immigrate to the Netherlands ought to be aware of that reality.

In other words, if it so offends them to see openly gay couples or topless women at the beach, maybe they shouldn't immigrate to a society where those displays are rather common.

Belien begs to differ.

I have argued before that Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war, between the proponents of secular hedonism, the defenders of traditional Judeo-Christian morality and the forces of Islamic Jihadism. For the secular hedonists currently holding sway in the Netherlands, Islamic Jihadism and the traditional morality of civilised people are one and the same thing.

I don't think that's the case. If the secular hedonists viewed American moral sensibilities as a threat commensurate to the one posed by Islamic Jihadism American immigrants to the Netherlands wouldn't be exempt from watching the video that Belien criticizes.

I suspect its message isn't so much, "You must embrace gay marriage if you move here," as it is "You musn't beat up gays on the street if you move here." Traditional Western morality views a topless woman as immodest--something a devout Christian might shake their head at. Radical Islamic morality views a topless woman as someone who is advertising her desire to be raped and assaulted by Muslim men, who after all can't be blamed given the provocation of a half-naked woman.

In Belien's view, however, the problems faced by Europe largely spring from the loss of this traditional Christian morality:

During the past decades the Netherlands have become the moral cesspit of Europe. I also pointed out in an earlier analysis that it is no coincidence that the collapse of Western civilisation, complete with political assassinations, has first become visible in the country which, in the past three decades, has taken secularization, multiculturalism, tolerance of alternative lifestyles, drug abuse and other fads to their furthest extremes.

Here Belien is lumping to many factors together for his statement to be meaningful. Has multiculturalism led to the current woes in the Netherlands? It certainly has. If you subsidize radical mosques, allow unassimilated immigrants who want to destroy your country to collect generous welfare benefits and subsidize Islamic schools that teach pupils to rebel against Western society, you're damn well going to excacerbate the effects of radical Islam.

Does Paul Belien really think that if only drug use were less rampant and gay marriage less accepted that the radical imams would stop their preaching, the unassimilated youths would stop their low-grade jihad and the man who killed Theo Van Gogh would've simply let him pass by on his bicycle?

I agree with Mr. Belien on the threat posed by radical Islam, the nature of the Danish Cartoon Affair, the foolhardiness of the European Union, the need for free market reforms across Europe, and a great many other issues.

But I think he is wrong to imagine that if only Europe practiced Christianity a bit better radical Islamists would no longer be poised to take over the continent. A society can very easily be more traditionally Christian than the Netherlands, frowning on homosexuality and topless bathing, and neverthless face a grave threat from Islamic radicalism. In fact, Spain is a perfect example of that dynamic.

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A Teacher Shares Her Thoughts

In my immigration column I recently wrote about the problems faced by teachers who have classes where there is a language barrier. Subsequently a teacher e-mailed to share her experience:

As a recently retired middle school teacher, I've had first-hand experience trying to cope with the mounting impact of illegal immigration. In my first year of teaching, every student could read, write, and speak English, no matter where they came from or how they got here. During my final year of teaching, nearly 15% of my students spoke little or no English; I spent hours of prep time and about one-third of class time focusing on these students' needs. Classes were overcrowded; no bilingual aide was assigned until the sixth month of the school year, and then only for the one class that had the most non-English-speakers. Copies of the text in Spanish were made available after the first quarter, but this was only helpful to those students who could read in Spanish -- about half of the "English Language Learners" couldn't read above 2nd grade level in any language. Did I do the very best I could for all of my students? Yes, by putting in 60-hour weeks -- no overtime pay, of course! Could I have done more for all of them had there been no communication barrier? Of course.

Food for thought.

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Denmark Won't Prosecute

The Danish newspaper that first published the Mohammed cartoons won't be brought up on criminal charges in Denmark.

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My Weekend Column (Draft)

My favorite sitcom, All in the Family, resonated because Archie, Edith, Michael and Gloria shouted arguments millions of regular Americans had around the dinner table, or at the bar, or at the bowling alley… but that never filtered up into political speeches, or academic discussion or newspaper columns.

Archie said terrible racist things, and Michael said idiotic naive things. We’d all be in trouble if either ran the country. Yet their bickering helped us to think about the great topics of the day because they articulated opinions lots of people shared… but few people would say in public.

On Sunday I proposed a similar experiment in this column.

In the last 8 months I’ve heard hundreds of blunt opinions from regular people about immigration. Illegal immigrant workers told me their stories, and why they feel the way they do about immigration. Anti-illegal immigration protestors shared their life experiences and political opinions too. I’ve eavesdropped at the post-office, the health club, Orange County piers and New York street festivals.

Now I’ll spend several columns amalgamating the hundreds of conversations I’ve heard into a few composite characters I’ll sketch. Some views I’ll channel seem quite sensible to me. I find others abhorrent. No matter. They are all real opinions I’ve heard, often from numerous people. It’s time the immigration debate playing out across the media included these views. If our goal is coming up with a compromise on immigration that improves the system, we’ve got to understand the experiences, fears and prejudices that motivate people to hold the opinions that they do, and give hints toward policies that people who seldom agree on anything might agree upon.

Our first composite character owns a small business in Orange County. They sell skateboards and related parts, a commodities they produce on site and ship from a warehouse to skate shops around the nation. We’ll call our manager Gregory. He’s white, 32 years old. Here’s what he’d say about immigration if you hooked him up to a lie detector machine and offered him $100,000 to truthfully express his blunt thoughts:

“I’ll tell you straight up: I used to think Mexicans were lazy. I’d mostly just see them playing soccer on the weekends in this park by my house, drinking beer or whatever. I mean, I had Mexican friends from high school, and one guy who played water polo with me in college. But they were, like, Mexican-American, you know. I didn’t even think of them as the same as the guys that cut the laws outside my office or that you say jay-walking across the street if you drove through the barrio after work.

“Then I started this business, and I realized that half these guys aren’t even Mexicans. They’re Guatemalan and El Salvadorian and Columbian.

“And most of them work their tails off. I’ve got so many guys begging me for overtime I feel guilty every time I expand and I hire new people.

“I’ve got to admit it, too: now I prefer hiring Mexicans to white guys. I mean, let’s be realistic, you hire anyone for $8 or $10 an hour, you’re going to get some screw ups no matter what. But a white guy who is taking a job in a warehouse lugging boxes, you’ve got to figure he’s screwed up somehow. It’s like, you were born here. What did you do? Drop out of high school? Get into drugs? Get arrested? I don’t want to hire a felon. No thanks.

“An immigrant, maybe he hasn’t had the opportunity to go to school or learn a skill, but he’s smart and hardworking. A white guy who is smart and hard working, he’s not going to be looking for a job moving boxes at my factory. And if he is smart, maybe he’s unscrupulous, and I end up with a workers compensation claim every other month, and he’s getting paid to sit on his butt.

“I’ve tried to hire some Asian immigrants too, and they’re hard working, but most of the guys I’ve got are Spanish speakers. If a few don’t understand English, there’s always someone to translate. A Chinese guy or a Vietnamese guy who doesn’t speak English too well, it’s just an added hassle.�

That’s what our factory owner would say. If you don’t think that way, now you know how some of your fellow citizens do think. That’s half the battle. The other half is telling them why you think they’ve got a point… or why they’re dead wrong. This column is posted at www.beyondbordersblog.com, and if you e-mail your thoughts to conor.friedersdorf@dailybulletin.com, I’ll post them there too.

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March 15, 2006

Custom Crafts

You too can order a dowel that fits your profile.

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What Amsterdam Can Tell Us About Rebuilding New Orleans

Brussels Journal offers an interesting comparison of Amsterdam and New Orleans, arguing that the former offers important lessons for the rebuilding of the latter.

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You Can't Do That on Television

Jeff Jarvis is looking at what the government considers obscene for the purposes of television. (Obviously, profane subject matter is discussed.)

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Censure and Move On?

If the Democrats regain control of the House in 2006 will they try to impeach President Bush? The Wall Street Journal seems to think so:

Republicans are denouncing Senator Russ Feingold's proposal to "censure" President Bush for his warrantless wiretaps on al Qaeda, but we'd like to congratulate the Wisconsin Democrat on his candor. He's had the courage to put on the table what Democrats are all but certain to do if they win either the House or Senate in November.

In fact, our guess is that censure would be the least of it. The real debate in Democratic circles would be whether to pass articles of impeachment. Whether such an inevitable attempt succeeds would depend on Mr. Bush's approval rating, and especially on whether Democrats could use their subpoena power as committee chairs to conjure up something they could flog to a receptive media as an "impeachable" offense. But everyone should understand that censure and impeachment are important--and so far the only--parts of the left's agenda for the next Congress.

This could get as ugly as the Clinton years... and as damaging for the country.

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When All the Whiskey Is Gone

James Lileks waxes nostalgic about an old liquor store:

After work I went to the inelegantly named Liquor Depot, a West Bank mainstay since my college days. It’s a dank place with cee-ment floors and girders overhead, but the wine selection is quite good. Even more to the point: they’re going out of business for a year. The entire block is being redeveloped for condos, like everything else along the newly reborn Washington Avenue, so they’re razing the ugly thing. It’ll reopen in a year, and I expect the name will change; I doubt people will want to pay half a million dollars to live over “Liquor Depot.� The entire stock is reduced, and every week the reductions accelerate; it’s a game of chicken. Will they sell out of the good stock before the price goes to 50 percent off? Locusts have already stripped the whiskey aisle bare; naught left but plastic jugs of “Clan McGregor� – they ought to sell that one with a white cane and dark glasses – and horrid abominations like Phillips’ vanilla-infused whiskey. Sno-shoe Grog seems in plentiful supply as well.

I asked the clerk if the new store would have that soaked-in spilled-beer smell that’s characterized the place for 30 years – and just then I noted a small sign posted on the check-out counter.

NO JOKING

Oh. Right, then.

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One Reason Why Health Care Is Expensive

Jane Galt articulates a reason I'd never thought of that health care costs are rising rapidly, and will continue to do so:

So, the first question: why is providing health care so hard? Why are health care and education the only major areas of life that almost everyone expects to have provided by the state?

Well, for starters, everyone needs them, and they're expensive, and getting more so. Education and health care are both victims of something called Baumol's cost disease. Baumol's is what happens when productivity growth is slow in a given sector (usually a service sector).

In other sectors, where productivity is growing faster, some of that productivity increase (generally about 70% over the long run) feeds through into higher wages for the workers. Now, the low productivity sector has to compete with other industries for workers; that means that they need to raise wages too, even though productivity isn't increasing. The result is that the cost of the service goes up. As Mr Baumol famously pointed out, it still takes as many people to play Beethoven's Fifth as it did when he wrote it, but symphonies are now competing with Microsoft for workers, instead of medieval peasant agriculture.

Thus, doctors and nurses have to be paid the kinds of salaries that bright, scientifically literate college graduates would attract if they chose some other field. But it still takes as many nurses to bathe a patient as it did in 1850. (Some of this work is being pushed down onto Physicians Assistants and Nurse's Aids--but even those jobs are highly paid, compared to how little nurses used to subsist upon.) That means that the cost of medical care will slowly, inexorably, rise.

The situation is made much, much worse by the cartel-power of doctors and the various health care unions, who have considerable power to resist productivity-enhancing change.

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You're Fired

A college newspaper editor has been fired for publishing the Mohammed cartoons.

Here are his thoughts on the matter:

After the Mohammad cartoons were published, I got phone calls from people asking me why I would put them at physical risk. Parents of Daily Illini staff members wrote letters expressing their concerns for the safety of their children. Illini Media Company began to enact safety precautions and put the staff on alert for anything suspicious. One staffer was worried about the DI office being firebombed.

Neither Chuck nor I ever received a single threatening phone call, note or email. We have never been hassled as we’ve walked on campus. That’s not to say that some people weren’t angry and vocal. There were definitely a number of Muslim students who felt that it was wrong to publish the cartoons. And they let us know about it. We’ve had some good and some not so good conversations. But the good news is that the conversations are still going on. A real dialogue rather than the paternalistic patter about "sensitivity" to feelings. That attitude treats Muslims as less than grown ups. That they are more fragile than the rest of us and have to be indulged. In a deeper sense the paternalism of the "sensitivity crowd" and their fear of Muslims prevent people with Islamic backgrounds from occupying their rightful space in the public square.

Muslim students, families and faculty are some of the strongest, smartest and most accomplished people on this campus and in this community. They can stand up for themselves very well.

Let’s stop this fear. Let’s stop patronizing people. Let’s get into real dialogue as equals.

He's got numerous blog entries about the matter--just keep scrolling down.

UPDATE: Apparently his replacement posted this to her blog prior to his termination:

I may or may not find out about the fate of my two bosses tonight, by the way.

Last night, the editorial board met with three Muslim professors on campus. They were super nice and very smart, and very good at explaining their side of the whole thing. It looks as though I might get my chance to implement Ethics and Sensitivity training for the reporters and editors. The editorial board is also going to visit the Masjid Mosque and Islamic Center for a forum this Friday night. (We’ve all agreed to drink green beer in the morning, sober up, go to the mosque, and then drink later.)

Nothing like a drunken trip to a Mosque in the name of cultural sensitivity.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile Glenn Reynolds notes a double-standard on campus speech.

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Understanding the Virus

Am I the only one who is deeply worried by this story?

One of the world's most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail.

The simulation pushes today's computing power to the limit. But it is only a first step. In future researchers hope that bigger, longer simulations will reveal details about how viruses invade cells and cause disease.

It's the double-edged blade of technology: by understanding viruses better humans will be able to treat them better than ever before... and produce killer strains better than ever before.

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Aging Japan builds robot to look after elderly

AP reports: "A Japanese-led research team said it had made a seeing, hearing and smelling robot that can carry human beings and is aimed at helping care for the country's growing number of elderly."

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Joke Tonight, Apologize Tomorrow

More evidence that Jay Leno is the anti-George Carlin.

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Photo of the Day

I've Seen Better is a cool photo blog--check it out.

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March 14, 2006

Bird Flu Warning

A bird flu expert is offering a frightening warning.

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WMDs and the Iraq War

Fred Kaplan thinks he has solved a puzzle about WMDs and the Iraq War.

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"We Will Get Him First"

In Florida vigilante prostitutes are roaming the streets:

Women involved in prostitution in Daytona Beach, Fla., have reportedly armed themselves and are searching for a serial killer behind the slayings of three residents, according to a Local 6 News report.

"Rather than run from the man police labeled a serial killer, streetwalkers here in Daytona Beach along Ridgewood Avenue say they are seeking the serial killer out," Local 6 reported Tarik Minor said. "They believe the man responsible for murdering three women here is someone they have come in contact with."

"We will get him first," streetwalker Tonya Richardson said. "Yeah, we are going to get him first. When we find him, he is going to be sorry. It is as simple as that."

Richardson said she and other women are carrying weapons on the streets after Laquetta Gunther, Julie Green and Iwana Patton were found dead in the city.

"I carry a switch blade with me now," Richardson said. "Everyone else does now too."

"We will get him first," streetwalker Tonya Richardson said. "Yeah, we are going to get him first. When we find him, he is going to be sorry. It is as simple as that."

The women are apparently teaming up and promising their own kind of justice, the Local 6 News report said.

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My Wednesday Newspaper Column

I’ve spoken to more people about immigration than I can count.

In Carlsbad, a woman told me she hated to complain about poor immigrants. I just don’t want to send my kids to a school where most of the kids can’t speak English, she said, because they’ll take up all the teacher’s time.

In Orange County a sweat-drenched illegal immigrant chased me half a block to return earphones I’d dropped on the sidewalk; he told me he mows Southern California laws to pay his elderly mother’s medical bills.

In New York, a legal immigrant told me he loves America more than anyplace in the world; then he tried to sell me a Che Guevara tee-shirt.

My conversations span the ideological spectrum. I met a man at an anti-illegal immigration rally who suggested posting snipers along the southern border. At the same rally, separated by quite a few police officers, a Latino man told me California belongs to Mexico. He wore a Che Guevara tee-shirt.

Most people I talked to told me things about their life. They told me about their parents or their kids, their home town or their work. Always their life experiences informed their views about immigration. The concerns they expressed always rang true, even when I disagreed with their conclusions.

Honest conversation is great that way.

We can all tell when people are speaking to us honestly, and it helps us to understand where they’re coming from. My conversations help me to understand why people feel so strongly about certain immigration laws, and to imagine compromises to improve our immigration system—things people who seldom agree on anything might agree upon.

When I talk to politicians about immigration it’s different. The whole conversation feels like an elaborate charade. The talking points and sound bytes are often designed to avoid saying anything. I always think, these people aren’t speaking honestly, and they think I’m too stupid to realize it. Or else they assume I won’t care because everyone expects them to talk that way.

We all do. It’s as if everyone who regularly talks to the media has an Orwellian filter between their brain and their voice box that sanitizes normal human thoughts for public consumption. Anything potentially harmful to the outcome they favor—whether because it’s too controversial, or too politically incorrect, or too uncomfortable a truth—gets trapped within forever.

A Congress like that can’t lead the conversation we need if America is going to figure out its immigration problem. We all agree that the system is broken. We disagree about how to fix it. If everyone is afraid to articulate their real beliefs—afraid of losing votes, or losing campaign contributions, or being called a racist—then figuring out how to compromise among our divergent beliefs is impossible.

Even reality television could produce better results than Congress.

Here’s a pitch: find 12 Americans who hold diverse views about the immigration system and how to fix it. Give them a meeting room and two attractive assistants who know how to write legislation. Find a publicity hound Congressional Representative and a Senator willing to co-sponsor whatever legislation they come up with. If the group comes to consensus on a bill that passes both houses of Congress everybody gets $1 million. If their bill fails they all walk away empty-handed.

I’d be most interested in the casting process: “Videotape yourself sharing your views on immigration.� Producers would choose the most earnest, brutally honest people in the group—well-meaning people who forcefully state opinions rooted in life experience, unapologetically sharing their ideas, worries and prejudices.

American media almost never offers as frank a discussion of immigration, though an airing of what people really think on the topic would greatly benefit everyone working toward a solution that is good for Americans and immigrants.

Therefore I’ll depart from conventional punditry in several future columns. Rather than a straightforward airing of my own opinions, I’ll articulate the views of others as I understand them, amalgamating the hundreds of conversations I’ve had into a few composite characters I’ll sketch.

I hope the exercise will allow me to share some perspectives I’ve heard with my readers, generating feedback that helps me toward a more nuanced understanding. These dramatized views will square with my own sometimes and at other times represent ideas I find repugnant.

It should be interesting.

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March 13, 2006

Some Norwegians Have All The Luck

OSLO, Norway - A woman thought she was in heaven when beer instead of water flowed from the faucets in her apartment in west Norway.

“I turned on the tap to clean some knives and forks and beer came out,� Haldis Gundersen told Reuters from her home in Kristiansund, in west Norway. “We thought we were in heaven.�

Beer in Norway is among the most expensive in the world with a 0.7 pint costing about $7.48 in a bar.

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On Pigs and Humans

Did the CIA purchase the movie rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm and change the ending?

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The End of Annoying Election Commercials?

The Note says political ads for Election 2008 will be different than any election before:

When it comes to campaign advertising in 2008, Time Magazine's Josh Tyrangiel says "forget about television ads. In 2008, candidates will watch your Web searches and cozy up to your friends." LINK

"From now on," says RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, "a smart candidate will reach you through your cell phone, your friends, the organizations you belong to and the websites you visit.''

Let's hope The Missing Link starts rolling in ad revenue.

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"Celebrity Death Pitch"

Mickey Kaus: "Democratic music and movie stars are still under the illusion that they can "use their celebrity" wisely for the cause. At some point, someone is going to get them (even Clooney) the message: We want your money but we don't want you! Your celebrity doesn't help us. It hurts us."

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Defending Las Vegas, Nevada

Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, is debating Bernard Henri Levy, the French writer who recently spent a year touring the United States.

The exchange begins with Fukuyama defending Las Vegas:

I want to begin by criticizing something I think you've gotten wrong, namely your dislike of Las Vegas. You find that sex is packaged there in a way that makes it, ironically, puritanical and sterile. This comes as a result of your visits to a strip club and one of those famous legal brothels in rural Nevada, and you keep referring to Las Vegas with considerable distaste throughout the rest of the book.

Now, I happen to know Las Vegas very well, not because I go to strip clubs or brothels, but because I've been going out there regularly with my family to visit relatives for the past 15 years. And that is precisely my problem with your account: You have this image of Las Vegas as "sin city", and then you were disappointed with the poor quality of the sin.

But this view of Las Vegas is at least thirty years out of date. Las Vegas is a real city with real people, not just sex workers, in it. It has been on and off the fastest growing city in the fastest growing county in the United States, with an incredible amount of energy and entrepreneurship. Much of the new employment centers around the gaming industry, but Las Vegas is as economically diverse as other American cities. It is home to huge numbers of retirees, like my relatives; it is the location of Nellis Air Force Base, host to Red Flag exercises and a lot of defense contractors; it has a burgeoning high-tech industry that has escaped the high costs of California; and it has a large Latino population working mainly in low-skill service industries and manufacturing.
©Damir Marusic

The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles." In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn't find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o'clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don't apply. Hughes' transformation of Las Vegas cleaned the city up: Mob influence was eliminated, and the Nevada Gaming Commission put the whole casino industry under tight regulatory controls (not necessarily tighter, of course, than the way prostitution is regulated in Amsterdam or Hamburg). Today the Bellagio, the Luxor and the MGM Grand are more like family-friendly theme parks than gambling halls. So it's ersatz and safe, but it hasn't pretended to be anything else for many years now. The Mormons, after all, are the religious group with the deepest roots throughout Nevada.

What you see when you stand in a buffet line in a Las Vegas casino is the real America: ordinary working- and middle-class Americans, with kids in tow, who want to be entertained. (You remark that you had a hard time finding America's "fat epidemic"; try a buffet.) Many sophisticates from the East look upon all of this with horror, but it's not Las Vegas they're reacting to. What they find distasteful is the American demos itself, with all of its excess and energy.

Go here to read Fukuyama's response or the rest of an at times quite interesting debate.

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Welfare and Immigration

Gary Becker explains how social welfare spending makes immigration less desirable:

Open immigration to America worked well during the 19th century because the government did very little for immigrants and their families. How immigrants voted after becoming citizens also mattered little because government decisions were not so important. With the growth of government during the past half century, neither of these conditions continues to hold, so the case for open immigration is fatally weakened.

As European attitudes toward immigrants demonstrate, the more social welfare spending a country doles out the less tolerant its citizens are toward immigrants, who impose a much greater cost on the nat8ive population when entitled to subsidized medical care, food, housing and education.

Those who pretend it is unconscionable to reform the welfare state must ask themselves whether it is better to take fewer immigrants eligible for generous social welfare benefits, or a greater number of immigrants eligible for very little help from the state. Whether you're basing your answer on the best interest of the United States or the best interest of immigrants the answer is unclear.

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Anti-Semitism in France

In Western countries significant energy has been dedicated to preventing violence against Muslims, and rightly so. In France, however, violence against Jews would benefit from commensurate concern:

Last week there were three more attacks on Jews by Arab and African immigrants in suburban Paris, according to police. None of the latest victims was seriously injured, but the attacks heightened the nervousness of French Jews. There is alarm that the antipathy of French Muslims toward Jews, long based on opposition to Israel, is reverting to the even more sinister prejudices that once pervaded Europe, making Jews the scapegoats for all social ills.

Read more here.

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Bird Flu To Spread to United States

Some immigration opponents argue that open borders facilitate the spread of disease. These days it seems the biggest risk isn't from migratory humans, but from migratory birds.

March 13, 2006 — - In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States.

Ready or not, here it comes.

It is being spread much faster than first predicted from one wild flock of birds to another, an airborne delivery system that no government can stop.

"There's no way you can protect the United States by building a big cage around it and preventing wild birds from flying in and out," U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Michael Johanns said.

U.S. spy satellites are tracking the infected flocks, which started in Asia and are now heading north to Siberia and Alaska, where they will soon mingle with flocks from the North American flyways.

I hope we're not counting on Dick Cheney to shoot them down.

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The World, Dubai

In the United Arab Emirates developers have put together one of the most astonishing real estate projects in history--see their promotional video here and prepare to be astounded.

Jane Galt offers some background:

Dubai is booming. The city has been growing for years now, but I have never seen as many skyscrapers being constructed than in my trip there last month. There are entirely new sections of towns being built, blocks and blocks of appartments, office towers, hotels and houses.

What's most remarkable about much of this new investment is the show-offy outlandishness of it. After Palm I and Palm II (palm tree shaped artificial islands in the Arabian Gulf, with houses on them), Dubai is building "the world" -- an archipeligo of individual islands shaped in a map of the world. The major draw is that you can buy, say, France, and have your address be "France, The World, Dubai, UAE". Dubai has also built the world's largest artificial ski slope, is building the world's tallest building, is constructing the world's first underwater hotel, which will kick into high gear just as soon as the world's largest submarine making factory pumps out the world's largest fleet of submarines to ferry guests to and from the hotel.

It's all a little mad.

It's also the coolest possible location for an annual paint ball tournament that pits opposing teams against one another on a world scale.

Posted by Conor at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

On Gay Adoption

Dhalia Lithwick:

There are 119,000 children waiting to be adopted in this country, about half of them racial and ethnic minorities. There are approximately 588,000 children in foster care. Legislators—like a clutch of Ohio Republicans—pushing bans on gay adoption and fostering must thus argue, without empirical evidence, that it's better for these children to languish in state custody, or bounce from foster home to foster home, than be raised by gay parents who want them.

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The Coolest Sidewalk Art

This is the coolest sidewalk art since Mary Poppins--there's much more here.

Posted by Conor at 01:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 12, 2006

Fighting Stanley Fish

Leon Wieseltier says that liberals can fight just fine. And he's right.

Posted by Conor at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quote of the Day

“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.�
-- David Brinkley

Posted by Conor at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

In Defense of Absurd Mansions

The Denver Post reports on gargantuan houses and those who would outlaw them.

They are the mega-homes, stunning houses of monstrous size that dot the Western landscape from this once-rugged cow town at the base of the Teton Mountains down into the ski meccas of Colorado. Homes that stretch the imagination and the architect's supply of ink to the breaking point, dwellings of 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000 square feet....

Today, Pitkin County is sending a message that is reverberating off the hills of Aspen and all the way into a lot of 1,800-square-foot pantries and 1,500-square-foot mudrooms: Enough is enough.

"It's time, said Pitkin County Commissioner Jack Hatfield, "to draw a line in the sand."

The proposal by the commissioners: No new home in or around Aspen could exceed 15,000 square feet.

Why do these County Commissioners feel they have the right to tell people what kind of house they can build on their own property? It's entirely unclear, though the sentiment extends outside Colorado.

Another battle in the living- room-the- size-of-Rhode-Island skirmish is playing out in the small yet stunningly wealthy Wyoming enclave of Jackson.

Teton County, Wyo., has, since 1994, restricted homes to 10,000 square feet of living space - 8,000 square feet of "habitable living space" and a 2,000 square-foot garage. In 1998, Australian Thomas Crow, founder of Cobra Golf equipment, finished building a 10,000-square-foot home that met those restrictions.

But a month after Crow and his wife, Cally, moved in, contractors began work, without any building permits, that added 3,000 square
feet of living space within the massive structure. (They added second floors inside the home and the garage, both of which had 30-foot cathedral ceilings.)

The county fined the Crows $363,000 for the renovation. But that wasn't the end of it.

"We want them to also be required to abate, or remove, all of the new work," said Jim Radda, Teton County deputy attorney.

From Crow's affidavit filed with that court: "We knew we would have to compete for our children's and our grandchildren's time, so we wanted to build a home where they would want to come and bring their friends. We felt the need to make a place that would be so attractive that other demands on their time would be overcome. Our approach has worked. We have been blessed with numerous visits."

Today, both sides await a ruling from the Wyoming Supreme Court.

The anecdote about the grandchildren is touching, but if these people want to build a gargantuan home so that they can fill it with gold coins, rolling around in them while cackling gleefully, the law shouldn't prevent them from doing so.

Posted by Conor at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Iraq, Bush, and Weapons of Mass Destruction

One reason I don't believe that "Bush lied" about WMDs in Iraq: many Iraqi soldiers believed their country possessed WMDs until just before the war. As the New York Times reports:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

Andrew Sullivan sums up what probably happened:

What we're seeing is classic screw-up. A dictator boasts of WMDs that he doesn't have, primarily to keep his domestic opposition scared and to keep up the ambiguity internationally to deter any attack. But that ambiguity is what made the attack inevitable. For Saddam it was rational enough. If he admitted to WMDs, allowed total U.N. access to his country and scientists to leave, then his spell of domestic terror would have disintegrated, and he feared an uprising. But if he played the shell game one more time, maybe he could buy off the West yet again, after twelve years of success. That's what he calculated. And he calculated wrong.

There are are surely valid criticisms of the Iraq War. The notion that the Bush Administration lied about WMDs, though possible, doesn't seem justified by the totality of evidence available to us.

Perhaps more importantly, blaming Iraq War failures on a Bush lie discourages us from examining the many other factors that have made intelligence gathering less effective than it might have been.

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March 11, 2006

Photograph of the Day

Chromasia is one of the best photography blogs on the Internet. Check it out.

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On Censoring Offensive Material

Eugene Volokh:

Of course I realize that some disagree, and see any even possibly pejorative reference to Mohammed — or for that matter any depiction of Mohammed — as a horrible emotional injury. But their subjective feelings, real as they may be to them, are not sufficient reasons for the rest of us to change the way we talk or write. "I'm offended" cannot be justification enough, either in law or in manners, for the conclusion "therefore you must shut up."

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"For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats"

The New York Times profiles Dr. Wafa Sultan:

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

It's a familiar theme these days among Islamist jihadists: stop stereotyping us as violent or we'll kill you.

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There's Nothing to Fear...

GM Roper: "How would unmitigated worry help me beat the cancer, a task I fully intend to complete?"

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Conor at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2006

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

This bicycle safety video from the early 1960s--well, let's just say words fail me.

Posted by Conor at 06:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A New York Sunset

(Taken in Central Park, November 2004)

Posted by Conor at 03:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quote of the Day

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."
--G.K. Chesterton

Posted by Conor at 03:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Next POTUS Annointed?

Remember back in 1999 when the Republican Party and the press annointed George W. Bush as the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination before most Americans new anything substantive about him?

ABC's The Note says the next GOP annointment may begin tonight.

Posted by Conor at 03:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

An Argument Against Restrictive Zoning

I've long argued that zoning regulations are among the biggest factors driving the affordable housing shortage in urban areas around the United States. Now I've got a Harvard professor far more knowledgable about these matters than I agreeing:

Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. He has previously noted (with a collaborator, Matthew Kahn) that 95 percent of the United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was, like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to construct higher buildings with more housing units.

So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations — which were enacted by locales in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the orderly growth of suburbs — had become so various and complex in the second half of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in nature and effect. Regulations in Glaeser's new hometown of Weston, for instance, made extremely large lot sizes mandatory in some neighborhoods and placed high environmental hurdles (some reasonable, others not, in Glaeser's view) in front of developers. Other towns passed ordinances governing sidewalks, street widths, the shape of lots, septic lines and so on — all with the result, in Glaeser's analysis, of curtailing the supply of housing. The same phenomenon, he says, has inflated prices in metro areas all along the East and West Coasts.

Anyone reading this blog post who doesn't own a house ought to realize how much more they'll be paying when they do buy thanks to zoning regulations favored by current homeowners and passed by municipal governments.

Posted by Conor at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

STD Vaccinations

On this round in the cultural wars I'm with the liberals.

Posted by Conor at 02:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech in History

Bill Frist is standing up for bloggers, and rightly so:

From the earliest days of our republic, freedom of speech and freedom of the press – be they anonymous pamphlets, celebrated essays, or local newspapers – were understood to be fundamental to the practice and defense of liberty.

Without the ability to convey ideas, debate, dispute, and persuade, we may never have fought for and achieved our independence.

Ordinary citizens – farmers, ministers, local shop owners – published and circulated their views, often anonymously, to challenge the conventional order, and call their fellow citizens to action.

Indeed, as Boston University journalism professor Chris Daly points out, “What we think of as reporting – the pursuit, on a full time basis of verifiable facts and verbatim quotations – was not a significant part of journalism in the time of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine… In historical terms, today’s bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers.�

And, today, it’s bloggers whom we now have to protect.

There are some who, out of fear or shortsightedness, wish to restrict the ability of our modern day-Thomas Paines to express political views on the World Wide Web.

They seek to monitor and regulate political speech under the guise of “campaign finance reform.� They argue that unfettered political expression on the Internet is dangerous, especially during the highly charged, election season.

Needless to say, I stand firmly against these efforts to hamstring the Internet and squarely with the champions of free speech – whether that expression takes place in the actual, or virtual, town square.

Free speech is the core of our First Amendment. And the Internet represents the most participatory form of mass speech in human history.

Thanks to the indispensable Instapundit for the pointer.

Posted by Conor at 02:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My Proposal for Immigration Reform

Mistrust is one reason comprehensive immigration reform is a tough sell. Those who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration and those who hope to improve the lives of immigrants mistrust one another’s motives, the political leaders brokering a compromise and the courts that will interpret it.

It’s hard to blame those who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration for their mistrust. During the Reagan Administration, they were promised that an amnesty for illegal immigrants already here would be accompanied by tight border security and robust workplace enforcement.

In the intervening decades border security has allowed millions of illegal immigrants to slip into the country, and workplace enforcement has remained laughable.

When immigration reformers today propose a similar compromise, combining a guest worker program with tight border security and robust workplace enforcement, who can blame anti-illegal immigration advocates for demanding successful enforcement before agreeing to a new amnesty?

It’s likewise hard to blame those who want to improve the lives of immigrants for their mistrust.

It is undeniable that some who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration have an added desire to end immigration entirely, and some animus toward illegal immigration is motivated by racism. It is unfair to portray those who oppose illegal immigration as anti-immigrant or racist because those factions in the movement are distinct minorities. Nevertheless, many who oppose a crackdown on illegal immigration do so partly because they mistrust the motives of those who favor it.

In this environment, a great compromise seems possible.

Congress should pass legislation that increases the number of legal immigrants accepted by the United States each year… but only after significant reductions in illegal immigration are achieved. One phenomena would trigger the other, so that the more success we had reducing illegal immigration the more legal immigrants would be admitted.

Among those who want to improve the lives of immigrants, legal immigration is the most desirable policy imaginable. The legislation I propose thus gives those who oppose a crackdown on illegal immigration today an enormous incentive to reverse positions. With a broad alliance behind reducing levels of illegal immigration—a sense, indeed, that illegal immigrants are preventing other immigrants from coming here to start a new life—tough new legislation would garner sufficient support and elected officials would face greater pressure to implement existing law.

Those who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration, meanwhile, will compromise this time without fear of betrayal, knowing that the essence of the compromise impels their political opponents to work toward the crackdown on illegal immigration that they most want.

Critics of this compromise will argue that we already permit sufficient levels of legal immigration, that a significant increase in legal immigrants will still tax our social welfare system, and that wages will still be driven down for American workers. Even if all these concerns are valid, however, these critics must face the fact that they haven’t the possibility of enacting the immigration reforms they favor. A compromise necessarily means abandoning the policy you find ideal for an inferior policy that is the best among possible reforms.

On the other side, critics will argue that any crackdown on illegal immigration is unfair to the hard-working illegal immigrants who have already built a life here. These critics must face the fact that another amnesty is the most politically impossible immigration reform of all, and that refusing the legislation I propose will cost many thousands of legal immigrants the chance for a new life, all in order to protect illegal immigrants no more deserving of a spot in the United States, and less deserving insofar as they broke existing law to get here.

* * *
I’d like as many readers as possible to e-mail conor.friedersdorf@dailybulletin.com, offering their reaction to this proposal. If you’re against it, tell me why. If you’re for it, give me specific suggestions about how it might be implemented. How would we reduce illegal immigration? How would we measure our success? How many additional legal immigrants would we accept?

I’ll post your thoughts and reactions to www.beyondbordersblog.com, and I may even include some responses in a future column.

Posted by Conor at 02:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 09, 2006

On a Moon Far, Far Away

There may be liquid water on one of Saturn's moons.

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Apology Accepted

The man who invented the cubicle says he's sorry.

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Defending Michael Crichton

An article in The New Republic is blaming author Michael Crichton for the poor reputation of experts these days:

During his career, Crichton has relentlessly propagandized on behalf of one big idea: that experts--scientists, intellectuals, reporters, and bureaucrats--are spectacularly corrupt and spectacularly wrong. (Not a terribly surprising response from a writer consistently patronized by critics.) Crichton's oeuvre has promoted, for an audience of millions, a damning critique of expertise. And the Bush administration has put this critique into action, trampling the opinions of government scientists, exorcising trained economists, muzzling the press, and stifling State Department wonks. Crichton, in other words, primed America for the Bush era.

His most recent book, State of Fear, expresses skepticism on global warming, and apparently received compliments from the president. The writer thus concludes the following:

By trashing the conventionally trained expert, Crichton has helped create an anti-intellectual ethos where the country's most powerful political leaders can embrace a science-fiction writer as a great authority.

Unfortunately the TNR article doesn't delve into whether Crichton's critiques of experts are accurate or inaccurate, something that seems rather relevant to whether we should applaud Crichton or fear his influence. If we assume that experts sometimes make mistakes, and that society shouldn't blindly follow them, it's only fair to judge those who critique experts on the merits of their position. Instead writer Michael Crowley regurgitates Crichton's assertions without the examples he uses to support them, implying that Crichton is both wrong and dangerous without ever refuting a single argument that Crichton offers.

So do experts make important mistakes? Or does their track record make skeptics like Crichton nothing but glorified conspiracy theorists? In the speeches he delivers around the country Crichton is rather convincing on the point that experts sometimes get things very wrong. Consider this excerpt from a 2005 speech:

In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.� International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war� as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.� The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs� of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.�

But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong. Fears of an ice age had vanished within five years, to be replaced by fears of global warming. These fears were heightened because population was exploding. By 1995, it was 5.7 billion, up 10% in the last five years.

Back in the 90s, if someone said to you, “This population explosion is overstated. In the next hundred years, population will actually decline.� That would contradict what all the environmental groups were saying, what the U.N. was saying. You would regard such a statement as outrageous.

More or less as you would regard a statement by someone in 2005 that global warming has been overstated.

But in fact, we now know that the hypothetical person in 1995 was right. And we know that there was strong evidence that this was the case going back for twenty years. We just weren’t told about that contradictory evidence, because the conventional wisdom, awesome in its power, kept it from us.

I think this message resonates in part because Crichton is citing specific examples that critics like Crowley never bother even attempting to refute, and in part because the wrongness of experts resonates with our own experience.

Anyone who regularly watches the evening news has been told that they ought to avoid alcohol for their health, and then that they ought to drink one or two glasses of wine a day to prevent heart attacks, or that they should avoid eggs due to their high cholesterol level... and then 5 years later the anchor reports that eggs aren't as bad as we thought after all.

Do you remember the Y2K hysteria, when experts recommended stocking up on food and flashlight batteries? Did you watch the Challenger blow up? Have you followed the progression of recommended diets that have coursed through our culture over the years? Did you watch the Berlin Wall fall and the Soviet Union disintegrate despite assurances from the experts that these things were years off, and might not ever happen?

Sometimes experts are spectacularly wrong, and their wrongness is excacerbated by media spreading the conventional wisdom that they are unquestionably right.

The point isn't that we should never trust experts, or that they're always wrong, or that nothing in this world is ultimately knowable. The point is that we ought to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism, especially when we're being told that we need to make tremendous sacrifices to stave off a catastrophe that hasn't been definitively proven, as is the case with human-caused global warming.

Society needs skeptics generally, whether or not they happen to be right in any one particular case. If those skeptics are know-nothings who spew forth empty rhetoric, better to ignore them completely.

If they make attempts at serious arguments, as Crichton has, we'd do well to evaluate those arguments with an open mind and offer well-reasoned rebuttals if we find them mistaken.

Such a method of evaluating the claims of skeptics will help society to come to the right answers on important questions.

Instead Michael Crowley has attacked the very act of being a skeptic who questions experts, a stance that seems to me the true example of cynical anti-empiricism.

Posted by Conor at 07:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Censorship on the Horizon

John Leo sees censorship on the horizon.

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The UNC Attack

Glenn Reynolds makes a good point about press coverage of the UNC car attack:

Quite a few commentators (e.g., Michelle Malkin and Mark Steyn) are criticizing the New York Times and other media outlets for playing down the Islamic angle to the U.N.C. terrorist attack of Mohammed Taheri-azar.

There's no question that this angle is being downplayed. But it's arguable that the papers are doing this to reduce the likelihood of copycats. This doesn't appear to have been any sort of organized attack, just a lone-wolf effort by a guy who's not too sharp. It's still terrorism, of course, of a sort -- after all, Eric Rudolph was a lone-wolf guy who wasn't too sharp, though he seems to have been considerably sharper than Taheri-azar -- but in some ways it's more like the school shootings of the 1990s than real Al Qaeda type terrorism. Hyping those shootings led to copycats, and made the killers look like martyrs to disturbed potential imitators. There's a pretty good argument that the same applies here, and that it's more responsible to address this in fairly muted tones.

As an authority on muted tones I think we should trust him.

Posted by Conor at 06:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Male Reproductive Rights

The Associated Press reports on a movement for male reproductive rights:

NEW YORK — Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child.

It sounds like the worst law ever, doesn't it?

The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood....

"There's such a spectrum of choice that women have _ it's her body, her pregnancy and she has the ultimate right to make decisions," said Mel Feit, director of the men's center. "I'm trying to find a way for a man also to have some say over decisions that affect his life profoundly."

In fact, men and women have some say over whether or not they'll be forced to deal with a pregnancy--the lesson here is that you shouldn't have unprotected sex with someone you aren't willing to have a child with.

It's actually the opposite scenario that I worry about: a man and a woman decide they want to have a child and the woman gets pregnant, but she changes her mind and decides to have an abortion. The man suddenly has no recourse to stop what he regards as the murder of his child... even though if the roles were reversed, and he didn't want the child, the woman could decide otherwise and demand child support.

So yes, I see the inequity at play.

But if our choice is between kids unsupported by their fathers or some men who accidentally got women pregnant being treated a bit unequally by the law the lesser of the two evils has never been easier to pick out. Unlike abortion jurisprudence, where the rights of the unborn baby are unclear, judges are quite unlikely to turn their backs on already born children to placate these men.

As for the legal argument, if Roe versus Wade is predicated upon a right to privacy I hardly see how its logic would extend a right to not pay child support to men.

UPDATE: James Taranto:

These guys do have a point: The law regarding "reproductive rights" is so skewed toward the distaff that the Supreme Court has even held a woman has the constitutional right to abort her husband's child without so much as telling him.

But their effort seems doomed to fail, for two reasons. First, few men are going to join a "men's rights movement," because it is unmanly to play the victim. The male ego turns out, at least in this instance, to be a friend of feminism.

Second, if feminism has harmed society by allowing women to be irresponsible about sex and reproduction, making it easier for men to be irresponsible will only compound the problem.

Posted by Conor at 04:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Why We Watch

Peggy Noonan, one of the best columnists out there, articulates why we watch the Oscars:

I don't think it's that we expect it to be a good show. It's that America loves movies. We've been watching them for almost a century. We invented them. They're our art form. To this day a good movie comes as a gift, an increasingly unexpected gift for which the audience is actually grateful. One of the happiest sentences in America is, "I saw a great movie, you've got to see it."

We like to see a good movie celebrated.

We also like to look at movie stars. So many of them are physically perfect, which is kind of fascinating, or at least startling. Most of us don't spend our lives surrounded by physical perfection. Once in Los Angeles I met a young actor who was so beautiful I thought, So that's what God meant. Even if you see such perfection as only freakish, it's still interesting.

On Oscar night movie stars are trussed and made up and bejeweled to look even more perfect than usual. They wear wonderful gowns and tuxedoes. As individuals, on the red carpet, they are often charming, sometimes modest, sometimes funny. They are also mere humans negotiating in public high-stakes parts of American life--success, fame, wealth--with varying degrees of grace, gratitude and personal destabilization. So even when they're not interesting they're . . . interesting.

I think there's one more thing too--it's a live show that lots of people watch. If something surprising happens, everyone will be talking about it, and we don't want to feel left out of the conversation. As America progresses toward a niche entertainment industry there aren't so many events like that anymore.

Posted by Conor at 12:19 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

A Wide Gulf

Immigration raids in Boston are provoking fear that more are on the way:

After 30 immigrants were arrested this week in the Boston area in a sweep conducted by federal immigration officials, some immigrant leaders in MetroWest fear more arrests could be coming to the area.

If immigrants break the law, authorities have to arrest them, they say, but the problem is sometimes immigrants who have not committed a crime, work hard and pay their taxes, are caught up in those operations.

"Unfortunately, there is a lot of people who do not deserve to get caught in a raid. They contribute to the community," said Fatinha Kerr, director of Marlborough Community Services.

Kerr said she hopes raids are not done "for no reason," and although she said she is not an expert, she assumes the operations are undertaken because enforcement officials are looking for specific immigrants who are wanted on criminal charges.

This story underscores for me how wide the gulf is separating the views of those who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration and those who focus on immigrants rights. The people in this story who represent the latter group seem unable to comprehend deporting illegal immigrants to enforce existing immigration law--they've taken the position that so long as illegal immigrants don't commit other crimes they deserve to be here, a position I find understandable on some levels but ultimately untenable if you think past individual circumstances and try to fashion a coherent immigration policy for the nation.

Posted by Conor at 12:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 08, 2006

"The Pimp Song"

John Leo is unhappy about the musical award at the Oscars:

For me, the biggest surprise was not that Crash won best picture. It was that the Hollywood geniuses let the pimp song get nominated and then (unbelievably) gave it the Oscar. So now it's right up there in filmdom's musical pantheon with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." This was surely a new low for Hollywood.

Even more amazing: Almost all the blacks in the audience–men and women of accomplishment, talent, and taste–seemed to be on their feet, delirious with joy at the honor paid to the gutter version of American black culture.

With critics as harsh as John Leo no wonder it's so hard to be a pimp! In seriousness, if you read the lyrics here it's pretty difficult to argue that this song is the best in any film last year.

Posted by Conor at 08:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Question of the Day

If you could choose the next president--any American citizen, famous or unknown--who would you choose and why? Send responses to conor.friedersdorf@dailybulletin.com

I'll post a selection of responses.

Posted by Conor at 06:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Islam: A Religion of ___________

Eugene Volokh and Max Boot explain why it makes no sense to call Islam a "religion of peace"... or a religion of violence.

Let's consider Volokh first:

Like all big religions, Islam not only has multiple well-defined subdenominations, but also varies greatly from time to time, place to place, and ultimately person to person. All of us know this about the religions we're most familiar with, such as Christianity and Judaism.

Is Christianity "a religion of peace"? Well, that depends on which Christians you're talking about, where they live, when they live, and what their personal temperaments are. Theological inquiries and quotations from the sacred texts will tell you very little about it.

Now Max Boot:

GIVEN THE monstrous crimes perpetrated in the name of Allah, it is easy to despair about the future of the Muslim world. Nonstop news about bombings, beheadings and general bedlam will no doubt lead more and more Westerners to conclude that we are at war with an entire civilization.

In reality, Islam has no fixed identity. Like other religions, it is based on vague generalities whose application varies widely across time and place. A thousand years ago, the Muslim world was a center of learning while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. Today, the positions are nearly reversed. But there are many different rooms in Dar al-Islam (literally, "house of submission"), and no two are alike. I recently visited two Muslim countries — Malaysia and Qatar — that each show, in their own way, that Osama bin Laden does not speak for more than a small minority of his co-religionists.

Posted by Conor at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

If You Spend $241,000 on Strippers... Don't Use Your Work Credit Card

There must be a fascinating story behind this bill:

NEW YORK -- An expensive night out at Scores cost a Missouri businessman his job, but his final tab for the evening in the topless temple will remain a secret.

A confidential settlement was reached in a lawsuit over a $241,000 American Express bill rung up at the club on Oct. 22, 2003, said attorney Donald David, who represented the strip club....

McCormick resigned after an investigation into the $241,000 bill charged to his corporate American Express card at the Manhattan club. McCormick and Savvis contended the bill at Scores should have been between $18,000 and $19,000.

I guess they have expensive drinks.

Posted by Conor at 02:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Against Attacking Women with Acid

It's good to see people taking a stand against those who disfigure women:

DHAKA, Bangladesh - About 2,000 men marched in Bangladesh's capital ahead of Wednesday's marking of International Women's Day to protest against acid attacks that permanently disfigure many women each year, organizers said...

A total of 268 people, mostly women, were attacked with acid last year in Bangladesh, a male-dominated, traditional society, according to the Acid Survivors' Foundation, which sponsored the rally...

Most of the victims are women attacked by spurned lovers, but recently more men and children are being splashed with flesh-burning, agonizingly painful sulfuric acid in family arguments or disputes over property, Rahman told reporters.

Barbaric practices like the acid disfigurement of women, forced female circumcision and genital mutilation remind us the time we spend debating whether or not feminism is dead in the United States would be better spent agitating for true victims of patriarchal oppression. Unfortunately American feminism seems uncomfortable condeming the cultural practices of foreign countries as uncompromisingly as those aspects of American life it finds objectionable.

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Teacher Blames Students for School Woes

Teacher Patrick Welsh says the problem with American schools is the students.

A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers — but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

The sad fact is that in the USA, hard work on the part of students is no longer seen as a key factor in academic success. The groundbreaking work of Harold Stevenson and a multinational team at the University of Michigan comparing attitudes of Asian and American students sounded the alarm more than a decade ago.

Asian vs. U.S. students

When asked to identify the most important factors in their performance in math, the percentage of Japanese and Taiwanese students who answered "studying hard" was twice that of American students.

American students named native intelligence, and some said the home environment. But a clear majority of U.S. students put the responsibility on their teachers. A good teacher, they said, was the determining factor in how well they did in math.

What's your experience been, student readers?

Posted by Conor at 01:43 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Case for Parenthood

(Taken at Seville's 2005 Feria de Abril)

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The Case Against Parenthood

Katherine Marsh: "I rushed to tell my husband that, in becoming parents, we risked becoming depressives, shut-ins, and paupers as well."

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March 07, 2006

Sending a Message

Eugene Volokh has caught Europe appeasing its enemies again.

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Iraq: At the Edge of Democracy or Civil War?

The National Review's media blog drew my attention to this beautiful New York Times photograph from Iraq:

The NRO blogger writes:

Initially our focus is on the van destroyed by a roadside bomb, with a distressed Iraqi police officer standing guard. But look behind them on the billboard. A familiar sign: the purple finger. The brutal attacks are tragic events; democracy is permanent change.

Democracy isn't always a permanent change though. Iraq the Model is sounding uncharacteristically pessimistic these days:

I always talk to my father when things get complicated; this man lived through the times of the monarchy, the first republic, the pan-Arab nationalists and the Ba'ath and he's from the generation that ruled Iraq for decades and many of our current politicians belong to this generation. This makes men like my father closer to understanding the way his generation thinks as well as its internal conflicts, so I threw at him the urging questions and confused thoughts I had in my head:

Me: How is this mess going to resolve dad?

Dad: it is not.

Me: Are you positive? Why?

Dad: People find solutions only if they wanted to and I think many of the political players do not want a solution.

Me: Is there a chance the situation will further escalate?

Dad: Most likely yes, we are a state still run by sentiments rather than reason which means it's a brittle state and any sentimental overreaction can turn the tide it in either direction.

Me: what kinds of challenges can make things worse?

Dad: Virtually anything…assassinating a leader, a fatwa, attack on a shrine like last time; we do not possess the institutions that can abolish the effects of severe sentimental reactions.

Me: Is there going to be no role for politics?

Dad: What politics are you talking about?! We are dealing with deeply-rooted beliefs…Yes, in politics everything is possible but with religion you find yourself before very few options to choose from and our people have mostly voted for the religious.

Me: And what's America's role here? Will they stand by and watch while things go against what the way they desire?

Dad: Why do you always put America in the face of the canon? America is a super power but it's not superman. These are our problems now and America has nothing to do with it. We have to fix our mess or no one will.

Me: But their interests and presence here makes Iraq's stability a top priority for them, right?

Dad: And this stability is not going to happen soon…Why do you always want things to be the way you like them? Failure exists just like success does.

Me: Will America leave Iraq?

Dad: Not now of course but they will at the nearest possible chance. Don't forget that America had been in the region long before 2003 and Iraq is not an irreplaceable base. Syria and Iran can be dealt with from Turkey of the gulf countries.

Me: We need another 9th of April.

Dad: There will be no new 9th of April.

Let's hope they're wrong.

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Is Europe Sinking?

Paul Belien compares Europe's leaders to passengers on the Titanic:

After the Titanic hit the iceberg it took a while before the captain, officers, crew and passengers realized that they were doomed. The first to realize that the vessel was going down were the passengers below deck. The same is true for Europe today. While the indigenous lower classes have – in a panic, but rationally – begun to vote in ever growing numbers for so-called populist, “islamophobe� politicians, the European establishment politicians and mainstream media are discussing how to revive the European Constitution which the voters in France and the Netherlands rejected last year.

Instead of trying to prevent an impending clash of cultures, the establishment politicians are totally absorbed in efforts to circumvent the rejection of their constitutional project. The assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the bombings in Madrid and London, the French riots, the Danish cartoon case, should have been so many warnings to even the blindest establishment, but all Europe’s politicians care about is that when Europe goes down it goes down with a constitution.

Given recent events Europe ought to be scrambling to intigrate, socially and economically, its minority of Muslim citizens.

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Blurring the Lines

Columnist Jonah Goldberg says that 9/11 has changed the way we think about American identity.

“Since at least the late 1950s, the American conversation about tolerance, minority rights, and obligations has been dominated by our view that we were divided into ‘two Americas,’ one black, one white…� he wrote this week. “Blacks were the frontline minority in the struggle for progress because America's sins — bigotry, poverty, family breakdown — fell upon them disproportionately.�

He believes the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed all that.

“The War on Terror, no matter what your attitude toward it, irreparably cracked the black-and-white lens. It reminded whites and blacks alike that we are all Americans… And 9/11 made Muslims the new frontline minority.�

If you believe, as I do, that most Muslims are peace-loving people, but that a radical Islamic minority represents a grave, distinct threat to American life, the challenge is this: society must protect the inalienable rights of Muslims while preventing Islamic radicals from killing us, blowing up our cities and destroying our way of life.

The vast majority of Americans share both of these goals.

Disagreement abounds, however, when it comes to specific policies. Is racial profiling an unjustifiable abrogation of Muslim American liberties or a critical tool to protect against a catastrophic terrorist attack? Should Muslim visitors to the United States enjoy all the rights of citizens? How far should American society go to accommodate Muslim cultural norms?

These are controversial questions, particularly because Americans disagree about how grave a threat Islamic terrorism poses and the likelihood that Muslims will see their civil liberties threatened. At least we still largely agree, however, that Islamic radicals neither represent all Muslims nor reflect the only understanding of Islam.

Unfortunately, an unwitting alliance of the far right and a segment on the left are undermining the distinction that separates moderate Muslims from Islamic radicals.

On the far right, the rhetoric is rather straightforward. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,� says Ann Coulter. "The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves,� says Pat Robertson. “Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers?"

On the left it’s a bit more complicated.

It begins benignly enough: we ought to practice respect and tolerance of other cultures, especially those we don’t fully understand, a segment of the left tells us.

Often that advice yields good results. But not always.

Consider the recent uproar at Yale University over Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former deputy secretary general of the Taliban. A recent New York Times Magazine article publicized his admittance as a Yale undergraduate. Critics wonder why an elite American university would admit a government official from one of history’s most anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-liberal regimes.

Here’s one Yale student’s answer, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund: "As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another."

In this case the student is uncomfortable making judgments about a regime that responded to nail polish on women by pulling out their fingernails.

Isn’t condescension implicit in such a stance, whether or not it’s intended?

Here’s the message I take away: if you’re a Westerner, I’ll presume that you’re sufficiently rational and civilized to justify condemning your barbarities; if you’re heritage is non-Western, or your culture unfamiliar to me, or your skin a bit darker, I’ll presume you’re unable to make even the most basic moral judgments, and I’ll refuse to condemn your barbarities any more than I’d condemn those of an animal.

I doubt the Yale student I quoted, or any substantial faction on the left, would ascribe to that philosophy if it was presented straightforwardly. When it is cloaked in the good intentions of tolerance and multiculturalism, however, this objectively abhorrent philosophy of non-judgment pervades a goodly segment of well-intentioned people.

It is true that mainstream Muslim culture and Western culture differ in important ways. But a license to torture women, to murder infidels, to fly airplanes into skyscrapers, to bomb subway cars, or to burn down embassies over the publication of cartoons isn’t among the differences.

In different ways the far-right and a segment on the left have both fallen prey to the mistaken idea that all Muslims are so different from us that we don’t even share the most basic norms of civilization.

That is manifestly true of Islamic radicals, and as false of a great many Muslims the world over—Muslims who abhor terrorism and demagoguery, and wouldn’t ever engage in it. How should public discourse conform to this reality? By refuting the prejudice inherent in condemning all Muslims… or refusing to condemn any.

Posted by Conor at 12:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 06, 2006

On Hollywood and Pimps

Dana Stevens, Slate's television critic, on the Academy Awards:

As a nation, should we be worried about the fact that the most heartwarming and spontaneous moment of last night's ceremony involved the idealization of the pimp? How hard is it out there for a ho? And is the academy's newfound pimp-love proof that race trumps gender as well, or would America be just as enamored of a white man singing a song called "Wife-Beater Blues"?

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Cinque Terre

There are few places in the world I'd rather be.

Posted by Conor at 03:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Taliban at Yale

John Fund has done more reporting about the former Taliban official attending Yale:

When I asked several people at Yale if the reaction to Mr. Rahmatullah would be different if he were, say, a former official of the apartheid regime of South Africa, the reaction was universal: Of course he would be barred. When I asked why, I was told I had no idea how liberal a place Yale was. "But what is liberal about the Taliban, then or now?" I innocently asked. Eric White, a senior, told me that many students believe that regimes run by whites, such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, come out of Western traditions and are judged differently than non-Western regimes. "There's a real feeling that we don't have the right or understanding to be able to hold those regimes to the same standards."

When I asked Prof. Vivek Sharma, who briefly had Mr. Rahmatullah in one of his seminars, about this double standard, he explained, "There's a belief among many at Yale that we really have to specifically understand the Middle East because of the American occupation there and that we must understand our enemies as deeply as we can."

I suspect the analysis offered above is partly right, and to me it is the height of racism: if you're a Westerner engaged in barbaric practices, we presume you are sufficiently rational to condemn; in contrast, if your heritage is non-Western and your skin a bit darker, we assume that you're so incapable of making moral judgments that we're as hesitant to condemn your barbarities as we would be of a child or an animal.

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Big Brother is Data Mining

Jane Galt: "Give me liberty,or give me a large thin crust with extra cheese and peperoni."

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Roe vs Wade Challenged

This is a big deal:

PIERRE, S.D. - Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman's life. It would make no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Planned Parenthood, which operates the state's only abortion clinic, in Sioux Falls, has pledged to challenge the measure.

Rounds issued a written statement saying he expects the law will be tied up in court for years and will not take effect unless the U.S. Supreme Court upholds it.

"In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society. The sponsors and supporters of this bill believe that abortion is wrong because unborn children are the most vulnerable and most helpless persons in our society. I agree with them," Rounds said in the statement.

The culture wars are heating up.

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The Bible Told Him So

The Washington Post tells the story of a man who dedicated his life to biblical scholarship... then stopped believing in Jesus and God.

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Quote of the Day

"If government were a product, selling it would be illegal."
- P. J. O'Rourke

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March 05, 2006

What is Vodka Anyway?

Here's the latest evidence that the EU is an enormous waste of time.

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Punk Rock Riots

The San Bernardino Sun reports on punk rock riots in San Bernardino.

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Jon Stewart at the Oscars

The Academy Awards aren't Jon Stewart's medium.

On the Daily Show, his strengths are biting topical humor and quick-witted banter.

As a political satirist he exposes the absurdities of the day. The Oscars, like all popular entertainment, depends upon suspending disbelief to enjoy oneself.

As an interviewer Stewart uses humor to soften tough questions as effectively as anyone I've ever seen. He can also expose a dissembling guest with a raised eyebrow or an ironic smile at the camera. The Oscars, where host and celebrity hardly interact, allow few opportunities to put those strengths to use.

When the Academy hired Jon Stewart I imagine myself as the demographic they tried to court. I'm 26, I like movies and I'm somewhat uninclined to watch the show. In fact, I wouldn't have watched it if, say, Ellen Degeneres or Whoopi Goldberg or Steve Martin would've been hosting. In that sense the academy suicceeded: Stewart sucked me in.

If they hire him again next year, however, I won't be particularly inclined to tune in. I enjoyed his shots at Hollywood as much as anyone--the uncomfotable moments more than the funny ones, actually--and I often roll my eyes at the facile political statements of Hollywood elites.

Yet a host like Stewart, even if you cheer his ability to poke fun at Hollywood absurdities, ultimately just puts the night's focus on poloitics more than it ought to be.

I like Hollywood elites insofar as they make great films. I like the Academy Awards insofar as they focus on movies and the people who make them. I like to be entertained by remebering great films of the past, and to see people realize their dreams by receiving the highest honor awarded in their field.

When Billy Crystal or even Chris Rock hosts the Academy Awards I can lose myself in all that, even if a Richard Gere or Michael Moore gives a political acceptance speech.

With Stewart, politics are an undercurrent running throughout the telecast. That makes me more likely to remember the reasons I don't like Hollywood, and less able to lose myself in the magic of movies--the very thing the entire broadcast is predicated upon.

Posted by Conor at 09:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Muslims: America's New Frontline Minority?

Jonah Goldberg says that 9/11 changed the conversation about minorities in America from a black - white paradign to one in which Muslims are the frontline minority.

Consider an unlikely example. The Chicago Tribune recently recounted the tale of the Universal School's girls' basketball team. The school is a private Muslim institution. The girls on the team may not be seen by any post-pubescent males unless the girls are wearing full-body robes. That means men and teenage boys cannot attend their games. The problem is that the universe of Muslim schools with girls' basketball teams in Illinois is pretty limited. So the girls want to set up some games with secular public and private schools — on the condition that no men attend the games. That means no dads, no brothers, and no male staff members allowed in the bleachers.

Whatever your reaction to this, it's really not comparable to the black experience. These Muslims are asking for segregation — by gender in this case — whereas the black civil-rights movement and its gay and feminist imitators worked against the logic of segregation.

Of course, Muslims also fight against prejudice and stereotyping akin to what other minority groups have faced. I think Goldberg is right, however, that Muslim minorities will raise different sorts of societal questions than past minorities.

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An Alley in Seville

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Eminent Domain Abuses

John Eastman says eminent domain abuses continue apace:

The latest outrage: The Long Beach, California Redevelopment Agency is about to condemn a Church--the Filipino Baptist Fellowship--apparently because it does not produce enough economic benefit for the City.

The Church is not blighted, but is rather home to a vibrant congregation whose benefits to the community are spiritual rather than economic. The City thinks the Church needs to be bulldozed to make way for "revitilization." We say that the City has lost its way if it cannot appreciate the revitilizing impact a Church can have on a community, and that the City seems to have forgotten that government's purpose is to secure the inalienable rights of its citizens, including the right to property!--not to collude with condominium developers to impose some city planner's vision of modern perfection in town.

Is your home, business or church safe from the city you live in?

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The Minimum Wage

Jane Galt explains why a minimum wage increase is a terrible way to fight poverty.

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March 04, 2006

I'll See the Airplane Version

Doh.

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A Principled Stand

Junaid Afeef, a Muslim offended by the Danish cartoons, is acting as the lawyer defending someone in trouble for publishing them. Why? He understands that freedom of expression benefits Muslims as much as anyone, and that they will suffer from its curtailment.

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An Attempted Murder

A hate crime has occured in North Carolina. I think Eugene Volokh has it right.

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March 03, 2006

Buy Private Health Insurance, Go to Jail?

This is truly radical:

A plan to outlaw private health insurance in California has been proposed by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Los Angeles). Senator Kuehl's bill, SB840, proposes to create the California Health Insurance Agency, a state government run single payer system for financing the health care of all Californians. Her bill, if enacted, would abolish all private health insurance in the Golden State. Her legislation essentially aims to replicate the system of socialized medicine in Canada which, until a recent court ruling in Quebec, made all private health care illegal. Her health care proposal is more authoritarian than the health care systems in the United Kingdom or Germany in which citizens can buy private insurance if they so choose.

Let's step back from contemporary political debate and grasp what this means: the government is pondering a law that would forbid citizens from ensuring that if they get sick they can afford a doctor to get well.

It's the kind of legislation that proves some liberals are no longer worthy of the name.

Posted by Conor at 09:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Preschool in Manhattan

The New York Times reports on preschools in Manhattan, convincing me that I'll never raise children in that city:

The fierce competition for private preschool in New York City has been propelled to such a frenzy this year by the increased numbers of children vying for scarce slots that it could be mistaken for a kiddie version of "The Apprentice."

Take the case of the Rabbani twins, who live on the Upper West Side. Their father, Usman Rabbani, graduated from Yale 10 years ago, has a master's degree from Harvard and works for a major drug company in Manhattan. Despite his accomplishments, Mr. Rabbani was stumped when he sat down to compose a short essay a couple of months ago.

His assignment? To profile his two toddlers. Of his 18-month-old son Humza he eventually wrote, "He knows that birds like to sit on rooftops when they are not on the ground, that cats and dogs like to be petted, and that the blue racquetballs in the can belong in the racquetball court upstairs."

About Humza's twin, Raza, he wrote, "He is happy to point out all his body parts when asked."

With those words, Mr. Rabbani conquered parental writer's block and entered this year's version of the altered universe of private preschool admissions. After years of decline, the number of children under 5 in Manhattan, where the most competitive programs are located, increased by 26 percent between 2000 and 2004, according to census estimates. Yet the number of slots has not kept apace.

"These are the kids who are 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old now, trying to get into preschool and kindergarten," said Amanda Uhry, the owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, a consulting firm for parents. "And it's a nightmare."

This is the moment of maximum anxiety for parents, many of whom have applied to so-called safety preschools, just hoping their children will be accepted somewhere. And the hot pursuit of slots has continued despite tuition that can run over $10,000 a year for 3-year-olds. Acceptance letters were sent out last Wednesday for private kindergarten programs, to be followed next week by the telltale thick or thin envelopes from the preschools.

Maybe I should start a preschool in Manhattan.

Posted by Conor at 01:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Weekend Column

These days each side in American politics is guilty of playing the race card.

On the left, an identity obsessed faction of political actors see racism every time someone opposes affirmative action or illegal immigration or the welfare system as it’s currently constituted.

On the right, the Bush Administration has lately employed similar tactics. If you question the No Child Left Behind education reform bill and you’re engaging in “the soft bigotry of low expectations.� If you doubt that democracy will take root in Iraq it’s because you’re prejudiced against Muslims. If you opposed the nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court you’re a sexist.

The latest such controversy: whether or not a company from the United Arab Emirates should be blocked from taking control of an American port. It’s a complex controversy on which I take no position—I haven’t the information necessary for it. Suffice it to say, however, that one can oppose the port deal without being a racist or a xenophobe.

You wouldn’t know it given the current political climate in America when it comes to identity politics, a monster unleashed by the left and lately cloned by the right.

Of course, when both political parties employ such cynical tricks the people usually bear some of the responsibility. In this case, politicians use the charge of racism, or sexism or homophobia to cow opponents into silence because it works. That’s partly our fault.

It’s a tricky topic because some people who oppose affirmative action really are racists, some who call for a crackdown on illegal immigration are xenophobic and some who favor welfare reform are motivated by a resentment of minorities.

Likewise, some who oppose No Child Left Behind really do doubt that inner city children can learn, some who oppose the Iraq War really do doubt that Muslims can be civilized, and some who opposed the nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court really are sexist.

And some, or perhaps many, who oppose the Dubai World Ports deal are motivated by a fear of foreigners or Muslims or both.

A great many people, however, hold the opinions I’ve just mentioned for entirely noble reasons that have nothing whatever to do with prejudice or bigotry of any kind. Anyone who jumps to the conclusion of racism or sexism absent any explicitly racist or sexist arguments should themselves be condemned for levying such a serious charge without evidence.

And anyone who chooses sides on a policy matter because they don’t like the motivations of some on the other side walk a foolhardy path. Consider that if you’re pro-choice, you’ve allied yourself with some white supremacists who like that abortion kills lots of black babies, and that if you’re pro-life you’ve allied yourselves with some misogynists who believe that a woman’s only function or worth is to produce babies.

Much better to decide a policy matter on the merits than to worry about the motivations of your fellow travelers. If Osama Bin Laden begins to champion AIDS research, hoping to save the Muslims who are disproportionately dying so that Muslims can muster greater numbers to overrun the Jews, I’ll fight him on the latter part of his plan but I won’t come out against AIDS research.

That brings us back to the Dubai World Ports deal. There are those who oppose it because they’ve stereotyped all Muslims as terrorists in their small minds. They’re wrong; having said that, their opinion is entirely irrelevant to whether or not the deal actually threatens Homeland Security.

The United Arab Emirates is an ally in the War on Terrorism, its leadership might cooperate with us more fully because we give them economic incentives and many security risks that arise from a foreign country managing a major port can be addressed by extra safeguards imposed by legislation or Department of Homeland Security rules.

On the other hand, the UAE has had ties to terrorists in the past, terrorists will find it easier to infiltrate a company based in the Middle East and the principle that we ought not discriminate on the basis of national origin is self-evidently flawed when you ponder whether we’d let a North Korean company, or an Iranian company, or even an Apartheid-era South African company take control of our ports.

The fact that we wouldn’t hasn’t anything to do with the race or religion of people from North Korea, Iran or South Africa. Rather, it reflects the fact that the policies, alliances and avowed intentions of some nations present a greater threat to the United States and its values than those of other nations.

Those are the factors to weigh as we decide about the ports deal. Focusing on racism or xenophobia will simply obscure the debate that we ought to be having as we make what is truly a difficult decision.

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March 02, 2006

The LSAT

There is now a movement to prohibit law schools from using the LSAT, the best of all the standardized tests I've taken.

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A New York Rally

A solidarity with Denmark reality will be held tomorrow in New York.

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The Architecture of Spain

Slate has a cool slide show about recent Spanish architecture posted.

Posted by Conor at 06:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Soviet Union Tried to Assasinate Pope John Paul II

The latest evidence that Pope John Paul II was a great man: the Soviets tried to kill him.

An Italian parliamentary commission concluded "beyond any reasonable doubt" that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 attempt to kill Pope John Paul II _ a theory long alleged but never proved, according to a draft report made available Thursday.

The commission held that the pope was a danger to the Soviet bloc because of his support for the Solidarity labor movement in his native Poland.

They were right.

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On Playing The Race Card

Conservatives have lately lamented the Bush Administration's domestic policies, arguing that programs like No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit excacerbate the expansion of the federal government beyond its appropriate bounds.

It is striking, indeed, to contrast Ronald Reagan's desire to abolish the Department of Education with the Bush Administration's expansion of federal control over education.

If FDR began the fight to redefine the size and scope of the federal government, the Bush Administration suggests liberals have finally won that fight. The federal government is going to be large and far-reaching, something I find troubling. Anyone who cares for the model of government established by the founding fathers--one predicated upon controling the size and scope of the federal government to avert tyranny--ought to be troubled too.

Yet Republicans today seem to have concluded that voters simply won't reward small government conservatives with electoral victory. Since the politics of big government seem more advantageous the fight for smaller government has been abandoned.

I fear a similar phenomenon is undermining conservative principles with regard to public discourse.

The Bush Administration, finding itself under fire for the Dubai Ports World deal, resorts to implying that those who oppose it are xenophobic. If that seems a familiar strategy, it's because the left has been limiting public discourse for years by painting those who oppose certain parts of its agenda as racists or politically incorrect neanderthals.

Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before the right began to fight fire with fire. If you oppose the Dubai World Ports Deal or the Iraq War or No Child Left Behind, some Republicans imply that it must be because you are xenophobic, because you doubt that Muslims want freedom or because you ascribe to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" respectively.

Of course, there are some who oppose the Dubai Ports World deal due to xenophobia; there are some who oppose the Iraq War due to prejudice against Muslims; there are those who believe No Child Left Behind won't work due to "the soft bigotry of low expectations." There's nothing wrong with pointing that out, and forcefully refuting those wrongheaded ideas.

It is important to acknowledge, however, that not everyone who holds those positions does so out of bigotry, just as it is important for the left to acknowledge that not everyone who opposes affirmative action, supports a crackdown on illegal immigration or favors welfare reform is motivated by racism, prejudice or bigotry.

A robust public discourse centered on ideas has the power to weed out orthodoxies of thought and to improve the policies our nation ultimately adopts.

A public discourse centered on accusations of racism almost inevitably produces more heat than light.

When a political actor on the left or right uses racism cynically as a way to subvert a discussion on the merits of a policy we'd all due well to punish them for it politically.

Posted by Conor at 12:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Only Falwell Would Find It An Objectionable Mistake

Jerry Falwell is at it again:

Earlier today, reports began circulating across the globe that I have recently stated that Jews can go to heaven without being converted to Jesus Christ. This is categorically untrue.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Posted by Conor at 12:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Black Flight

Katherine Kersten:

MINNEAPOLIS--Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.

As a result, Minneapolis schools are losing both raw numbers of students and "market share." In 1999-2000, district enrollment was about 48,000; this year, it's about 38,600. Enrollment projections predict only 33,400 in 2008. A decline in the number of families moving into the district accounts for part of the loss, as does the relocation of some minority families to inner-ring suburbs. Nevertheless, enrollments are relatively stable in the leafy, well-to-do enclave of southwest Minneapolis and the city's white ethnic northeast. But in 2003-04, black enrollment was down 7.8%, or 1,565 students. In 2004-05, black enrollment dropped another 6%.

Black parents have good reasons to look elsewhere.

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The Death of Harper's

Harper's Magazine has long since become a joke. Now it's an offensive joke.

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Hate Speech and Prison

Jeff Jacoby gets it exactly right :

''Freedom for the thought we hate" is never an easy sell, but without it there can be no true liberty. David Irving is a scurrilous creep, but he doesn't belong in prison. Austria should let him go free -- not for his sake, but for Austria's.

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Wisdom Earned the Hard Way

Tom McMahon shares what he has learned in 15 years caring for a brain damaged son.

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Are We Embarassing the Angels?

Peggy Noonan says we're embarassing the angels.

The best quote from her column, however, is just an aside:

I have been speaking a lot, for me anyway, which means I have been without that primary protector of American optimism and good cheer, which is staying home. Americans take refuge in their homes. It's how they protect themselves from their culture. It helps us maintain our optimism.

Anyone who does enough business travel can relate to that sentiment.

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Tell a Friend

Some bloggers ask for monetary donations from readers. Since the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and San Bernardino Sun are kind enough to pay me for your reading enjoyment, I ask only that you tell a friend about The Missing Link today.

The more readers I have the more likely that they'll keep paying me, and you'll get to keep reading me.

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Not Winning the Lottery

James Lileks articulates every would-be novelist's lament:

I have a large project that needs to be done. It’s the novel. The not-Joe-Ohio novel. Part of me wants to give in to the Elves of Self-Doubt, who show up by the score and bang me over the head with small hammers until I realize there’s no point to writing the damn thing, but I really like the idea. It’s a matter of finding the time. This is where “not winning the lottery� is a major impediment, because I cannot stroll back to the Writing Hut at the edge of the Manor and type uninterrupted. Everything else I can do with constant interruption, both external and internal – but it’s hard to get into the groove when something else is always nipping at my heels. No matter how good the idea is, enthusiasm is evanescent, and I worry that this one will just evaporate with time.

I've found not winning the lottery an impediment too.

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It Was Only A Matter of Time...

Latin America always seems to embrace leftist political trends.

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Seek and Ye Shall Find

Glenn Reynolds responds to those who doubt there are moderate Muslims out there.

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"The Rhetoric of Unreality"

George Will is unhappy with George W. Bush again. He has a point.

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March 01, 2006

Previously Unreleased Pre-Katrina Video

This video raises new questions about Bush Administration incompetence responding to Hurricane Katrina.

UPDATE: Powerline is defending Bush.

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The Foundations of Government

Harry Jaffa has written an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that ties America's understanding of legitimate government to our ability to export democracy to Iraq and elsewhere.

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Toward a More Conservative America?

Will demographic realities change the political makeup of the United States? In the current Foreign Policy Phillip Longman argues America will be more conservative next generation:

In the United States, . . . the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents.

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one's own folk or nation.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.

(Hat Tip James Taranto)

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Better Days

We all get preoccupied by our own human dramas.

Posts like this one are good reminders that despite them most of us are damned lucky.

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The Beauty of Space

(Hat Tip: Snarky Bastards)

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The Real World: 17 Years Later

Troy Patterson has written an amusing essay in Slate about the 17th season of MTV's The Real World.

We are thus entering a critical new phase of a program that's been increasing in self-awareness since its second season: The youngest of these seven people having their "lives" taped have known of the show for perhaps longer than they've known how to spell television. Reality TV isn't just a trend or a genre but an option. Spending a few months on The Real World is simply a thing that an elite corps of young adults does, like studying on a Marshall Scholarship or enlisting in Teach for America. They've been waiting 14 years for these 15 minutes, and getting them must feel like destiny.

Unlike most American journalists I'm unwilling to cast aspersions at reality television--I don't find it a particularly degrading form of television, and every time I hear someone talk about how awful reality tv is I wonder whether or not they've tried to sit through the prime time sitcom lineup any night of the week on UPN. Some reality shows are better than others--I'd go so far as to call The Apprentice, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway good shows.

By "good shows" I mean one can watch them credulously and enjoy them. By that definition The Real World certainly isn't a good show. The question is whether it's a watchable show. I'm sure there are those out there who watch it regularly and take everything at face value.

My own The Real World viewings almost invariably come that one weekend a year when I'm on the couch sick, and MTV replays all the episodes back to back, and it's either that or the first day of an LPGA tournament, and I spend the whole time sort of meta-watching the show--trying to spot misleading editing, picking up on clues as to what the editors are setting up to happen with the scenes they choose to show, wondering what motivates these people to do these things on camera knowing that their parents will one day be watching... it's sort of fascinating on many levels, and while it's much less fun than going surfing on a Saturday afternoon I can't say I regret those couple dozen episodes of The Real World I've seen over the years.

In this Slate piece, the author's interesting insight is that as past meta-viewers of The Real World, today's cast members are in effect meta-cast members:

During the cast's inaugural night out on Duval Street—a chance to unwind over a few Jell-O shots—Paula listens as John tries to engage Jose in some speculative conversation: "Would you mind seeing her with about 10, 15 more pounds on her?" This touches off what promises to be the first of a record number of crying jags. "When I drink, I just turn into a sobbing mess," Paula later says. "Unfortunately, right now I'm with six other people who have probably never seen a girl act like this." No, dear; of course they have—they've seen this show before. If they pause before trying to console you or control you, they are either waiting to make sure the camera's got a good angle or thinking up a way to vary this theme.

It is probably the former. Most of The Real World's tropes are just about played out. Consider the traditional scene in which the housemates take their wide-eyed tour of their deluxe dormitory. There are only so many ways to say "enormous" and "sweet" and "Oh. My. God." Perhaps next season seven jaded strangers will prance into their fishbowl only to scoff at the art in the poolroom, to whine that the hot tub suffers in comparison to the previous Real World Jacuzzis, to sneer at the fridge for not being a Sub-Zero.

But these kids know their duties.

If there are cast member duties, and these kids know them, is it possible that an avante garde will develop?

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A Sticky Situation

DETROIT (AP) - A 12-year-old visitor to the Detroit Institute of Arts stuck a wad of gum to a $1.5 million painting, leaving a stain the size of a quarter, officials say.

The boy was part of a school group from Holly that visited the museum on Friday, officials say. They say he took a piece of Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice gum out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler's "The Bay," an abstract painting from 1963.

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