The Opinionated Bastard

Which everyone should subscribe to, its a great magazine:

Here’s the Article.

Here’s the conclusion:

Finally, a word of unsolicited advice to scientists who want to play in the public policy arena. Facts by themselves do not immediately entail the adoption of particular policies. Many of the scientific “facts” cited by activists arise from contested epidemiological data and controversial computer models. For example, if humanity is significantly warming the planet, it is entirely possible that the best policy is to encourage rapid technological progress and economic growth so that any problems caused by such warming can be dealt with more effectively and fairly in the future. And how does one make the trade-off between possibly harming a few species of birds through the use of DDT, and using the insecticide to prevent the deaths of millions of people each year from malaria? These are political decisions. Suggestive scientific data certainly help guide our decisions, but they do not mandate any particular policies—not even those championed by the most brilliant researchers.

Well said.

From a “market-based environmental group”. You can read it here.

While that’s not a great grade, it “suggests that the Bush administration has improved slightly on the Clinton administration in bringing market approaches into environmental policy.” Bush was better then Clinton? Hmm…

Here’s an interesting quote to whet your appetite:

Activists have created the impression that the Bush administration has virtually ended air pollution regulation in the United States. In reality, the administration has taken a series of actions that will eliminate the vast majority of remaining air emissions.

The President’s press conference from yesterday.

Interesting to compare the transcript with the news stories. All politicians give thoughtful, reasoned answers in general, which the media dumbs down to irrelevancy.

For reasons that are complex to explain, but basically, because NCLB forces our schools to actually see if they are working as schools.

Eduwonk from my Blog Roll is a fan as well, but today he? got a letter from an urban administrator praising NCLB. Its nice to hear stories from the trenches…

Read the Whole Thing

So Martha Stewart, who was convicted of insider trading for selling a stock she’d tried to sell 3 times before, and had discussed selling with her broker, goes to the big house, but Senators get a free pass?

So many issues in our society will be resolved for the better once Alternative Energy means something other than Energy that’s too expensive.

Winds of Change does a periodic round up of the news, which I fine useful. I also like their Wilsonian foreign policy perspective and their other news round ups as well. (They’re in my blogroll in the “news” category)

Here’s the link to the energy news roundup.

They have almost no understanding of how the economy actually works. Here’s an argument against any sort of incremental privatization of Social Security from Mike Kinsley, who according to Blog Maverick runs the editorial pages at the LA Times!

I’m going to fisk it, and I won’t be kind…however, as a bit of a disclaimer, I work on Wall Street for a mutual fund company so its possible that privatizing Social Security might help me professionally.

Mike Kinsley says:

My contention: Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless.

Discussion is never pointless, when the person is as wrong as you are.

The usual case against privatization is that (1) millions of inexperienced investors may end up worse off, and (2) stocks don’t necessarily do better than bonds over the long-run, as proponents assume.But privatization won’t work for a better reason: it can’t possibly work, even in theory. The logic is not very complicated.

Your logic is not complicated, that much is true, its just wrong.

\1. To “work,” privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. This bonus is supposed to be extra money in retirees’ pockets and/or it is supposed to make up for a reduction in promised benefits, thus helping to close the looming revenue gap.

Actually, it can “work” in a number of ways. It can provide people with more easy access to their SS-related retirement funds for instance. LA Times is a big company, so presumably, you have a 401K plan. I work for a small company, so I don’t, instead, I’m limited to this lame-ass IRA thing. Ever change jobs? Its a pain to move all that stuff. If President Bush just made 401K plans that were attached to the person instead the company, that would be a big win for millions of Americans, even if they never made a single dime more money.

An investment can also “work” if it provides other benefits. Some 401K plans let you borrow money against the plan, essentially paying yourself interest.

Imagine you want to finance $10,000 worth of car payment. If you get a bank loan, that $10K will cost you $15K. If you borrow against your 401K, that $10K will still cost you $15K, but you get the extra $5K for retirement.

“Working” could even mean as little as making Americans feel involved in the whole process and getting them to keep track of what is happening with Social Security.

So immediately, I challenge your assertion that it has to generate more money for it to work. But it doesn’t matter, because SS always invests in T-Bills by law (funding our National Debt), which is the least risky, but also least-returning form of investment. So its not hard to be.

\2. Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities: from greater economic growth, or from other people.

No, it can come from more efficient use of the same money. There’s something I call “conservation of money” in that in general, money is neither created or destroyed.

When you spend $100 on a good or service, you now have that good or service, but the vendor now has $100, which they presumably spend on some other good or service. So that $100 is still there, moving around the economy.

The Federal Government, when they take $100 away from you, spends it on $40 worth of goods or services, sucking $60 out of the economy, because they are do mind-numbingly inefficient.

So its far better to have $100 free in the economy then $100 in taxes. Its important to understand that there’s not just money, there’s whether that money produces anything. If your employer pays you $100, then you probably produced $110 worth in goods and services. If the government pays a welfare recipient $100, whether that welfare recipient is on AFDC, a corporation getting subsidies, or foreign aid going to a corrupt leader, that $100 produced nothing, terminating the economic cycle.

The government, merely by existing is a drag on the economy.

\3. Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these.

Or more efficient use of capital. The 1990’s saw a large amount of economic growth due to computerization leading to large efficiencies. Efficiencies that produced more profits, producing growth.

Its very important to realize that the economy is NOT a zero sum game, its a cycle. In private industry, $100 of capital is expected to produce $110 worth of good/services. All economic growth is based on that cycle…

So if the money can stay productive as long as it possibly can, it will lead to greater growth.

a) If nothing else in the federal budget changes, every dollar deflected from the federal treasury into private social security accounts must be replaced by a dollar that the government raises in private markets. So the total pool of capital available for private investment remains the same.

Well, at least you’re admitting that SS is basically a hidden tax of 15% on top of the existing income tax. In theory, ALL of the money in SS taxes was supposed to belong to the payee, that just never happened.

Anyways, its more complicated then that. If the government says: 1% of the 15% is yours to invest in something other then T-bills that’s not money the government is “losing”. Presumably the government would no longer have to pay out benefits attributable to that 1%, instead that would be a separate account that paid separate benefits.

b) The only change in decision-making about capital investment is that the decisions about some fraction of the capital stock will be made by people with little or no financial experience. Maybe this will not be the disaster that some critics predict. But there is no reason to think that it will actually increase the overall return on capital.

If you see the economy as a zero-sum game, no it wouldn’t. But the economy is NOT a zero-sum game, so it easily can. The key point you’re missing is that money in the government’s hands is nearly wasted, so by taking it (temporarily) out of the governments hands we increase the amount of productive money in circulation, increasing growth.

\4. If the economy doesn’t produce more than it otherwise would, the Social Security privatization bonus must come from other investors, in the form of a lower return.

Well, we have no way of telling what “it otherwise would”, but investing and the economy is NOT a zero sum game.

For heaven’s sakes, one of the main controls the Federal Reserve has is the M1, the money supply. How can you think its a zero sum game when the Government can adjust how much money exists in the economy at any point in time?

a) This is in fact the implicit assumption behind the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return. The bonus will come from those saps who sell the stocks and buy the bonds.

Actually, you could get a much larger return then SS just by buying something other then T-bills. There are other bonds besides T-Bills, but that’s all that SS invests in. SS privatization doesn’t have to be a big win, it can be a small win. If it just did a little bit better then inflation (which it doesn’t do now), that would help everyone.

b) In other words, privatization means betting the nation’s most important social program on a theory that cannot be true unless many people are convinced that it’s false.

c) Even if the theory is true, initially, privatization will make it false. The money newly available for private investment will bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks, while the government will need to raise the interest on bonds in order to attract replacement money.

Nope. More money in the stock market can also mean more new businesses, which means more new jobs, which means higher wages, which means a strong economy, which means more money in the stock market, which…

And which means more tax revenues. Were you asleep during the ’90s? Strong Stock market, Strong economy, strong tax base…

Plus there’s nothing that says the money would have to go into the stock market. It could go into bonds, thereby lowering interest rates, which would help relieve government debt…

d) In short, there is no way other investors can be tricked or induced into financing a higher return on Social Security.

If you were correct, which you’re not. You seem to think that we live on that mythical South Sea island that used large stones for money, so that the money supply was finite. Money is a lot more complicated in the modern world then that South Sea island. It moves in cycles, and the faster those cycles go, the more the economy grows.

Even on that South Sea Island, you had economic growth, because people could make new stones…

\5. If the privatization bonus cannot come from the existing economy, and cannot come from growth, it cannot exist. And therefore, privatization cannot work.

Q.E.D.

You seem to know very little about economics, and it stuns me that you are in any way affiliated with the editorial pages of the LA Times. The mind boggles.

Update: Original posting of Kinsleys email was here

Another update: This guy said it better Pie growing is more important then pie slicing.

One of the reasons I got interested in politics was I started reading the transcripts of the administration briefings. I was shocked at the difference between what the administration said, and what got reported they said.

Bottom line, CBS, NYT and WP are all capitalist organizations organized for profit. They make that profit by getting you to consume their product, and they get you to do that by making the news more exciting. One need not look for liberal bias, one need only look for “conflict bias”.

The news we see or read every day is more and more just “made up” in the newrooms. If Professional Wresting isn’t a “Sport” but “Sports Entertainment”, our media has become not “News” but “News Entertainment”. So something like “memogate” isn’t particularly surprising to me. I don’t expect 60 Minutes to be any more accurate in their coverage then CSI is accurate with the science.

Of course, you’re not going to be convinced by anything I say, so I’ll make a suggestion.

Stop relying on the mainstream media to report what the White House, DOD, etc. actually said. Instead, go to their websites and subscribe to the transcripts.

You’ll find, as I did, that the news we get from the MSM is so distorted/filtered as to be meaningless. Realize I’m not asking you to believe the Administration, I’m merely asking you to go directly to the source for what the Administration said, not let it be filtered by the media.

I’m a small-l libertarian, so mostly I’m in favor of legalizing things. Then I read this piece on samizdata.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

So if we legalized prostitution, then people who turned down said jobs could lose their unemployment.

Pretty good example of why policy is hard and you have to think of the big picture.

Update: You think I would have learned by now not to trust an article from the Telegraph. Turns out the story isn’t true. Snopes as always has wonderful coverage.

So I was in the the Noise Editorial meeting, and one of the guys there commented on how the right wing was “stupid” and ignorant.

Nope, I didn’t kill him.

I decided to write this post instead.

From my experience, its the left that are shallow and stupid, not the right. I often agree with the left on ends but not on means. It’s the how where the knee-jerk left seems weak, they don’t think things through. Policy is hard, and good science doesn’t always make good policy.

For an example, consider the environment. Imagine if there was a device that cost $500 that would reduce car exhaust emissions by 5%.

If I’m a lefty environmentalist, I’d want to pass a law forcing all auto manufacturers to include said device on all new cars. Sounds good right? It would cut emissions by 5%.

As a righty environmentalist, I can tell you, this would be a disaster for the environment. You have to look at this magic device in the larger picture of life.

Only one post so far.

It’s pretty interesting already though, seeing the left smack down the radical left.

In the wake of the Popular Mechanics great debunking of all the major 9/11 conspiracy nonsense I’ve seen lots of links to the article.

However, sometimes I think the blogosphere takes itself too seriously. So here’s a heretical thought.

Scientists have correlated admissions to mental health facilities with the incidence of magnetic storms in the atmosphere.

Which leads to the question: What if the Tin Foil Hat Brigade is right? Not that the tin foil protects their brains from the evil mind control rays of the (Aliens, Government, Israelis) per se, but rather that wearing tin foil on their head makes them a little less crazy.

Next time you have a headache or are feeling stressed, get out the Reynolds wrap…

Flu reports nationwide from the CDC.

Education is supposed to be this difficult problem.

It shouldn’t be. Teaching children at its core is a very simple problem. You need children to interact with an adult. The more time they interact with that adult, the more they learn. The more materials available to the teacher in the classroom, the more kids learn.

I know, that seems so obvious its stupid. Maximize time spent with a teacher, maximize the resources available to that teacher, and the child will learn more quickly.

But what then, am I to think of a bureaucracy in every state that forgets this simple fact? The education establishment tries very hard to improve our schools, but they’re like a guy in a rowboat rowing very hard the wrong direction: they just go around in circles.

A typical program in our school systems is Title XII. This program is designed to help kids who have fallen behind catch up. The typical way this is implemented is that they hire a separate part-time teacher to teach the Title XII kids. These kids are pulled out of the classroom for a certain number of hours a week so that the Title XII teacher can give them additional attention. Usually the Title XII teacher teaches 5-10 kids at a time.

See the problem yet?

I was mostly ignoring this case.

I can see both sides. Medical science now has the capability to torture people even unto death. Yet Dylan Thomas said it best: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

Unfortunately, the time has come for someone in the middle to comment on this tragedy.

Life is complex, and there are times when there are no good answers. This is one of those cases.

Ignore what you might have read. The media has spun this issue so hard that any story about it in the media at this point is bunk. The reality is that Terri Schiavo has been mentally dead for 14 years, and her husband and parents disagree about what to do about it. Everything else pro and con is just a distortion of the facts: believe nothing bad about her husband, and nothing good about her “condition”.

A number of well-meaning people on both sides of this issue have created an abomination. Neither of the two options: keeping a dead woman’s body alive indefinitely or starving her to death are acceptable answers to this conundrum. The logical, merciful thing would be to give her a drug overdose.

The fact that we have gone beyond logic and mercy in this case is what frustrates me so much with the media, and the politicians that think that screaming at each other is debate.

I wish Terri Schiavo a good death. It’s too bad she won’t get one.

Here’s a FAQ about the case if you’re interested: Hat Tip: Right Wing News

A while back, I wrote a piece on education and I asked some teachers with blogs for comments.

While most agreed with me that bureaucracy was the problem, the comments all had one theme:

Quality teachers are the answer to education, period.

Frankly, I was somewhat thunderstruck. This ran completely counter to everything I expected. The teachers talked about how some teachers were burned out, they advocated merit pay, etc.

Basically, everything the NEA (the teachers union) has fought against the last two decades the teachers were for, and everything the NEA fought for, the teachers were against.

Now, in retrospect, that shouldn’t be too surprising. My mother, despite being the shop steward for her union, hated the union. The only thing worse then the idiots in the union were the nincompoops in the district office.

Now, today, I find out that that NEA is suing the government over NCLB. Hat Tip: Eduwonk.

The core of the lawsuit boils down to the contention that No Child Left Behind is forcing school districts (and by extension states) to spend too much on education. This is, to put it mildly, a novel argument from the NEA.

Or as ScrappleFace put it, the NEA wants “No Bureaucrat Left Behind”.

Now I’ve never been a big fan of the NEA. This is an organization that rates schools not by whether or not the kids are learning, but on how much the school spends. We wonder why education keeps getting more expensive while kids seem to be learning less and less? Because the NEA is measuring the wrong thing.

As the son of a shop steward for the NEA, the grandson of a man who spent time in Leavenworth for running a labor union, I never thought I’d say this but:

It’s time to bust the Teachers Union.

Save our kids, kill the NEA!

From the WSJ:

Abuse of the taxing power is about as serious as corruption can get in our democracy, and it should be of bipartisan concern. In the 1990s, conservative critics of the Clinton Administration such as the Heritage Foundation had to endure suspicious audits. And of course the Nixon Tapes reveal that the former Republican President ordered tax investigations of Democratic opponents and donors. These columns recently raised doubts about an IRS probe of the tax status of the NAACP.

Effing Politicians on BOTH sides.

This posting on BookSlut brought up a hoary old chestnut about the Patriot act:

Ken Wainstein, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, made the disclosure in testimony to the House subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security. He argued that Congress should renew provisions of the USA Patriot Act that allow seizure of library and bookstore records.

Get ready for a fight

Realize, that there is no provision in the USA Patriot Act that specifically allows seizure of library or bookstore records.

Rather, there is a provision in the Patriot Act that requires seizure of 3rd party records to be approved by a judge.

Previously, this required approval of a grand jury.

In other words:

A subpoena now requires judicial review.

That’s it.

While perhaps libraries or bookstores should be singled out for special treatment, this actually has nothing to do with the Patriot act. Libraries or bookstores could always be subpoenaed for records, its a pretty basic part of our judicial system that people can be subpoenaed for records. (Duh)

The Patriot Act changed this to require a judge to review it, which if you knew anything about grand juries (only the Prosecution testifies, etc.) you’d realize meant subpoenas were basically rubber stamps. Judges are often more skeptical, because of the “fruit of the poisoned tree” rule.

So while there are probably definite issues with parts of the Patriot Act, hearing stuff like this constantly repeated just annoys me.

First, to quote Laura Bush:

George didn’t know much about ranches when we bought the place. … But I’m proud of George. He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.

Some too-tightly-wrapped-damn-yankee-pansy-ass conservatives have complained about Laura’s potty mouth. Link1Link2Link3

Let me tell you a story boys and girls. Its the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.

My wife used to work in the office at the Flagstaff Riding Center. One day, the young vet and the old vet are checking out the horses. One of the stallions has these strange sores on his penis. The younger vet is mystified. The older vet looks at it and says. “Hmmm… Looks like Summer Sores. Did this horse come up from Phoenix?”

Turns out it had. So the old vet says, probably Summer Sores. So they slice open the Horses penis, and worms crawl out…the penis is honeycombed with holes…

Seems that there are these flies, and they land on the horse’s penis and lay their eggs. The maggots then eat through the horses penis.

So every day after that, the stallions penis had to have ointment applied.

There’s only one way to apply ointment to a stallion’s penis…

Naturally, it fell to the junior horse trainer to perform this job.

After a few days of this, whenever that stallion saw her, the stallion we get an erection…

Anyone who thinks Laura Bush was being naughty is a pansy-ass-city-slicker-yankee. Raising animals isn’t like it is on a nature show…

About immigration. I mean, I love La Shawn normally, but stuff like this just irritates me.

I mean really, people in non-border states don’t know what they’re talking about.

It seems to me that there are only two sides in this debate:

Non-Border states: Yeah, we should close the border with Mexico. Border States: The border is closed? Someone should tell the Mexicans…

Do the math people!

Look, the border is 2,000 miles long, or 11 million feet.

Let’s say decide to implement your own border closing. The government must be stupid right? We just need to put up a fence. Well, lets see how much that would cost. We’ll want a 12’ high fence at least, plus about a foot of razor wire on top.

Looking around the internet, that will run us about $140/foot or $1.5 billion.

That’s for the fencing. Now we’re going to need some guard towers every 500 feet. Let’s say its $10,000 for a simple guard tower. We’ll need 22,000 of those, so that’s another $220 million. We’re assuming that the guards don’t mind peeing in a bucket, otherwise we’ll need 11 million feet of plumbing…

Total so far: $1.7 billion.

We’ll need 22,000 guards, at $100,000/year, 3 shifts a day, so that’s $6.6 billion in salaries every year.

Total so far: $1.7 billion for a fence with guard towers, plus $6.6 billion/year for guard salaries.

Have you non-border-state people shut up yet? No? Ok, well these guards need some way to get to the guard tower, so now we need 2,000 miles of road along the border. Say $800,000 a mile, so that’s another $1.6 billion.

Total so far: $1.7 billion for a fence with guard towers, plus $1.6 billion for a road so the guards can get to the towers, plus $6.6 billion/year for guard salaries.

Now we’ll have to maintain the fence and the road, figure 10%/year in maintenance costs for the fence, since it will be getting actively attacked, and 5% for the road. So that’s $250 million/year in maintenance costs.

Total so far: $9.9 billion the first year, $6.9 billion/year after that.

So ignoring the fact that our guards don’t have uniforms, guns, bathrooms, helicopters, training or supervision, we’re spending $9.9 billion to keep out 3-5 million Mexican immigrants/year, or $2000 per possible immigrant.

Currently, the Border Patrol has 9,000 agents stationed on the Mexican border. The reality is that the border patrol only patrols about 50 miles out of the 2,000 miles of border with Mexico. To patrol those 50 miles, will cost us $6.7 billion in 2006. So my numbers are probably very very low, but even so, just put to up a fence and man it at a minimal level would more then double the cost of the border patrol.

On the other hand if the 5 million people who cross the Mexican border generated $2500 in taxes instead of having to pay $2500 criminals to cross the border that would be $12.5 billion dollars in additional revenue to the government.

Like I said, if you don’t live in a border state, kindly shut up.

I really, really hate both sides of the abortion debate.

Both sides are too busy screaming at each other to really make any progress.

1.6 million abortions a year is too much, making it illegal won’t stop it.

Emergency Contraception would cut that by 75%, or it would prevent 1.2 million abortions a year:

PlanB

How It Works

The fact its, we could cut the number of abortions by 75%, and give women a another choice if PlanB was available without a prescription.

You’re Pro-Choice or Pro-Life and you don’t know what Emergency Contraception is? F* YOU! You are an idiot, and I’d rather smack you then talk to you.

Join the Mercutio Side today! Emergency Contraception should be next to the tampons in every supermarket in America!

Patrick Ruffini is reading the Pew Report

Which is basically a comprehensive survey of politics in America.

Now realize that Patrick worked for the Bush campaign, and you have some insight into how true political insiders think about things. Its more interesting reading his take on the Pew report then it would be to read the Pew report cold.

I’m adding him to the blog roll as an expert for that reason.

From BookSlut

Some Phoenix parents might be “startled” to learn the public library's new teen reading program is called “Shut Up and Read,” reports The Arizona Republic. They should just be grateful the library didn't go with their first choice, “Read a Book, You Fucking Pussy.”

You people who don't live in Arizona are wusses. Cowboys rule!

Kindly pull your head out of your ass please.

You guys have had it too easy for too long.

Unlike our parents, Generation X knows how to add. You dumped us in front of those video games, and you're surprised now that we know how to calculate our optimum economic strategies down to the gnat's ass? Legend of Zelda dude!

You self indulgent baby boomers are roadkill on the highway of history, you just don't know it yet. We're younger then you, smarter then you, and 300,000 hours of video games have honed our reflexes to a fever pitch. The only reason we haven't killed you all and taken over is there's just too damn many of you baby boomers. But you're getting older...

Stop lying to us. We know that its 15% of our paycheck, not 7.5% that's getting sucked into the cavernous maw of the government, we can count, and many of us have had to work as “independent contractors” for one of you greedy-ass boomers. Anyone who's ever paid “Self-Employment” tax knows isn't fooled anymore that government is a good thing.

Don't feed us this line about that really being our money either. We never believed you when you told us that you were holding our Social Security in “trust”. It was obvious at the time that the government was taking our money, giving some small fraction to seniors, and blowing the rest on hookers and crack. So now the bill is coming due, and you tell us nothing needs to be done?

As a member of the video game generation, I've spent more time managing artificial economies then the current board of the Federal Reserve. I know what works, and what doesn't. Stop lying to me, and fix Social Security, because I'm getting older and I need to start saving more for retirement.

If you don't, by the time you retire, we'll just drop the whole Social Security fiasco, and to hell with the Me generation, you can eat cat food.

Don't think numbers will help you. We're the video game generation, and all we have to do to keep you from voting is computerize the whole thing, and you dumbasses will never be able to vote again. Think you'll be able to vote? Let me ask you. Is your VCR blinking 12:00?

You have been warned.

In this book I just finished, Freakonomics, the author figured out why crime rates suddenly dropped in 1995 and kept going.

Roe v. Wade lowered crime.

Unwanted children are more likely to become criminals.

Think I'm pro-choice? Think again. As the author points out, 1.6 million abortions/year isn't exactly an efficient way to stop crime. Ask yourself if you're pro-choice, “How sure are you that abortion up until the moment of birth is a good thing?”

99% sure? ok, that's 16,000 preventable deaths a year.

When was the last time you were 99% sure about anything?

Like I said, before making it illegal isn't the answer, but neither is the status quo.

I'll say it again: Plan B

Oh, and by the way, I recommend the book. Did you know most drug dealers make under minimum wage? It's pretty interesting.

Just a few posts, but scary ones.

Right or Left, knowing the facts about alternative energy is a must.

Here's the latest briefing from Winds of Change

I'll say it again though, if it was practical, it wouldn't be “alternative” it would be “energy”.

That said, I'm thinking about putting a wind machine on my property. APS just got approval to raise their rates during the summer when all the Phoenix people turn on their air conditioners. But that means that my electric bill jumped $60. A $500/500 watt generator could save me $44/month, so it might end up paying for itself during the summer months.

I used to refute the claim that a man was 5 times more likely to be shot by his wife then by a stranger with the fact that he was 5 times more likely to be stabbed by his wife then a stranger, so shouldn't we ban kitchen knives too?

I figured it was obvious this was stupid. I guess not the British are talking about doing just that.

Its not that we need to control guns, its that we need to be nicer to our wives so they don't kill us, the evil witches. :-)

Is it acceptable for me to admit that if I walk into a Bar-B-Que Joint and the people behind the counter are black I start drooling?

Ditto with Fry Bread made by grey-haired Navajo ladies...

Mmmmm... Sushi made by Japanese people...

A Jewish Deli...

An Arab Shish-Ke-Bab joint...

Now mind you, I don't think it has anything to do with genes, I think it has to do with culture. If you come from a culture that has a distinctive food, you're going to be one up on someone from some other culture when you make that food. Even KFC, as homogenized as it is, tastes better in the south.

When will be be able to celebrate our differences instead of downplaying them?

Though come to think of it, I think Jewish delis are better not so much because of some delicatessen culture in Judaism, but because of the kosher rules. Also the best cheeseburgers in Santa Clara used to be found in this Teriyaki joint run by Japanese.

But as a general rule, black people know good Bar-B-Que.

So I took this political test, which not surprisingly labeled me “Libertarian”, given that I'm socially-liberal, economically-conservative. Though only mildly so, as I believe that the world is a little more complex then their questions imply.

Big surprise there...that's with a small-L in my case, I can't stand the Libertarian party.

Hat tip to cleverzenmonkey. I've taken these tests before, but this one is pretty well done.

I'd go around saying I was a moderate again...but I've talked to enough people on the left to know that if they're the left, I'm way over on the right...you know, the people who think NPR is too conservative...previous entry on this topic

I mostly view the TSA (Transportation Safety Authority) as a placebo, designed to reassure air travelers that its safe to fly. So people who criticize how they're doing security are missing the point: its supposed to be obnoxious.

In other words, TSA is a huge-ass subsidy to the airlines. Given that the 9/11 hijackers only got on with box cutters, the whole airline security thing seems ludicrous to me.

Here's my solution: Allow passengers to go armed, if they've been given the equivalent of the screening we do for Top Secret clearance.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But think about if from the hijackers point of view. Most of the rest of the world thinks of Americans as crazy cowboys anyways, and now, if you hijack a plane, there might be an American on the plan who was crazy enough to volunteer to do all that screening just so he can carry a gun on a plane. (Or at least be able to breeze through airport security.)

Even if there were only 100 of these nuts over the whole country, you'd never know as a terrorist if the plane you were on might have one.

And if it let you breeze through security, I bet you could get 10,000 Americans to sign up for this. Meanwhile, we could step all the airport screening way down, because basically, there would be 10,000 unpaid air marshalls flying around. That would save billions a year...

Just an idea. Wacky, I know. But I'm from Arizona, a state that has a town called “Tombstone”.

From one commenter:

if the holcaust happend and you go by the american version of WW2 the nazi-sozis were very evil.

but as a huge doubter of this history i can not see anything wrong with them. history is filled with lies and WW2 is so complex. i can not fathom that my people “the germans” did this great evil to the jews. it personally can not see evough evidance to deny that the holocaust did not happen or prove to my self that it did happen. there is little proof eather way. i can see both sides of the coin and am left blind to it. i just refuse to believe it.

i have see jews in action socially, i have heard accounts by people i trust and they are not a nice people and yes often they do harbor anomosity to non-jews, not that i believe the protocals of the elders of zion but many do dispise us in many ways. but hate is something left for those i used to love.

dislike? well all the ones i have met i could not say were out to get me but if they were in total control of a country i could see wanting rid of them. the germans were starving and screwed after WW one, so they blaimed the jews cause they did supposedly had a major control of germany. i can see that they were not simply a scapegoat, sorry but the history says some pretty nasty things about german life and well it seems that that way.

From another:

I saw an excellent show on Reagan one time, and I distinctly recall that Ron was gungho to get in the office and call the shots. He was surprised to find that he didn't get to do that. He was informed in no uncertain terms that this wasn't his function. Buzzkill, for sure. So he wrote lots of speeches instead. Look it up, and you'll see how it went for the Gipper.

It's no different for George. The genuine power is behind him somewhere, and will function with or without him. That is the nature of such things.

I'm sorry, I can't really see any difference between these two. They're both friggin' nuts. Its just that the Holocaust denier, he's politically incorrect these days, while the “corporations are controlling the President behind the scenes” guy is politically correct.

Now that you lefties are all indignant at being compared to a Holocaust denier, remember that the Germans at the time were politically correct too. Politically Correct is not the same thing as actually being correct. Many of them really did believe that the Jews and Communists were secretly running their country. That was politically correct at the time too, it just happened to be wrong.

So while I grant any lefty that the “Business of American is Business”, so that corporations often can get away literally with murder, its not that simple. There are a lot of interests in this country besides business, and most of the economy is still small businesses. So while I often look at things the government does and think “jeez louise” to myself, I'm just as likely to think that about left-wing stuff as right-wing stuff.

So take off the tin-foil hats guys. SNAFU is the real state of the world, and I've worked for enough corporations to know that if they were really running the world, things wouldn't be any better or worse, just different...

But I just don't believe it, because there would be very little profit in running the world. Influencing yes, running no.

So I wrote this piece Goose-Stepping Hippies which was about hypocrisy and how the left can be as dangerous to freedom as the right.

I got a lot of feedback on it, especially the part where I pointed out that the Nazis had “Socialist” in their name.

Now Volokh has piece about Mussolini's famous quote:

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Except, according to Volokh:

The problem is that a 'corporate' in Italian of the period is not a business organization. A corporate is a production planning board made up of workers, owners, and others involved in production advocated by the syndicalist school of socialism. Their beloved quote is actually Mussolini (or maybe Mussolini's ghost writer) making a connection between fascism and socialism . . .

So there you go, fascism is what happens when socialism goes bad. (Just kidding)

An interesting if long post from someone who linked to my Myths about Iraq piece. He talks about Abortion, War, Cloning, Stem Cells, Terri Schiavo but manages to tie it all into being really about Life and Death

So Karl Rove supposedly said some mean things about Liberals.

Except, if you read the full context he didn't really, he said mean things about MoveOn. Hat Tip: Red State

I mean, I can say mean things about MoveOn as well, because frankly, George Soros is the enemy of all that is good and pure in the world. This is a man who became a Billionaire, with a B, by stealing money from the third world.

You think Cheney is bad? Cheney is a piker compared to George Soros.

But he tosses more money then Cheney has made in his life at some hippies to fund MoveOn, and suddenly, he can do no wrong?

Meanwhile, even Instapundit is crediting Karl Rove with mystical powers. Somehow he knew that:

1. The Liberals would be dumb enough to jump all over him, thereby letting everyone trot out all those stupid things various people said post 9/11.

2. Whatever he said would be picked up immediately, unlike Durbin, so the timing would be perfect.

I don't buy it. Rove was saying that stuff at a meeting of the Conservative Party of New York. Of course he was going to trash the liberals at a fund raiser! I'm going to share a joke I've heard at both Democratic and Republican party fundraisers:

So those of you who are on the left can froth at the mouth if you want, and those of you on the right can think “Gee, Rove is so wily. Look at those Democrats go! The fools!”. Personally, I think you should relax. Nobody ever says “Those other guys aren't so bad” at a fundraiser. If Karl Rove was really that wily, we would have heard of him long before he became Bush's political advisor...for creating peace in the Middle East or something...

Huzzah to the Irish:

Ireland's advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management - then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road - and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.

Where do I sign up for this platform?

According to this China is not the reason for high oil prices. Fear accounts for $10-20, but it was $12/barrell in 1999.

Haven’t found out the reason why oil prices are high though. Fear due to Iraq is surely a good part, but either there are other causes or its pure speculation. Which actually means there could be a huge collapse in oil prices…

That is, the Transportation Safety Authority.

I mean, if it means that from now on, when I travel, I’ll get to watch women in short skirts and a thong bend over to remove their high heels, then get to watch them bend over again to put their shoes back on after being scanned, that will much improve the travel experience for me…

Kerry Seeks Release of Roberts' Documents

You can't make this stuff up.

I was on a business trip last week, so I missed most of the Katrina news. Luckily, here's a timeline

So the Opinionated Wife last week went and helped the National Guard collect stuff for Katrina relief. It was organized by Becky Dagget, who is famous in Flagstaff for her organizing Proposition 100. Proposition 100 was basically the “no WalMart Supercenter in Flagstaff” proposition. She hates WalMart with a passion.

However, the most generous business in town for Hurricane relief was WalMart.

At one point, Becky was talking to them, and they asked her to coordinate with someone at the corporate office, and she assumed that they wanted positive publicity. She told them that she would try, but that wasn't her main priority to get positive publicity for WalMart. They laughed and said that they didn't care about that, but that they had better sources of information then she did, so they could make sure supplies got to where they were best needed.

In fact, the local WalMart donated mostly diapers and such because based on where the local National Guard was going, that's what was most needed.

Meanwhile, one of the women working with my wife asked one of the National Guard guys if he would rather be in New Orleans or Iraq. He said Iraq, because if you shot an Iraqi by accident you could probably talk your way out of it, but if you shot an American citizen, that would follow you around for life.

I don't know what any of that means (I'm sure ernie will have a few choice comments) but I thought I'd pass that along.

From Brookings

Personally, I would have called the essay Why Cowboys Kick Ass and all you Liberals are Whiny Greenhorns but he works in Hollywood, where every movie has to have a single word title...

Great Photo Essay by an amateur. See it here

Clearly shows it wasn't the hurricane, it was the flooding.

Good article by a good thinker, James Dunnigan here.

Hat Tip: Austin Bay

A commenter wrote in reference to Bush:

How can someone claim to be so religious and then at the same time support assault weapons! Hypocracy in it's finest

You know, I have yet to meet someone in favor of banning assault weapons who actually knows what meets the definition of an assault weapon.

First off, “assault weapon” doesn't not mean “machine gun”. Fully automatic weapons have been illegal since 1920. Those are not “assault weapons”. So block that from your mind. Assault weapons have nothing to do with machine guns.

For a weapon to be an assault weapon, it has to have two things:

• A bayonet mount
• A large magazine capacity like say 30 rounds

Now I ask you. A bayonet is basically a knife you can stick on the end of your gun so that if you run out of bullets, you can use your gun as a really cumbersome spear. As far as the bayonet goes, are you really worried about people being knifed with guns? Probably not right? I'm sure someone has statistics on it somewhere “number of people stabbed by a gun every year” but you'd have to guess its a really low number. Like maybe one person a decade. Who probably put a knife on their gun, then tripped and fell on it. So banning bayonet mounts seems kind of dumb. What exactly is a bayonet mount anyways? I mean 3 pieces of duct tape would do the job. Are we going to ban duct tape?

So now we're down to the large magazine. Now I really don't get it to be honest. If you didn't hit anything with the first 10 bullets, having 20 extra probably isn't going to help you any. I guess at that point, the bayonet mount makes a lot of sense. But we're talking about banning weapons based on this, so I'll have to turn that around. Would you really be more scared of someone with 30 bullets in his gun then someone with 10? Is someone with a BB gun more scary then someone with a rifle? BB guns hold 100 BBs does that make them more dangerous then a single shot zip gun?

So basically, the only thing scary about assault weapons is their name. Yet our commenter above thinks that because Bush believes in God, he should therefore want to ban assault weapons.

Here's what I think. The assault weapon ban is a bad law. Its a bad law because it doesn't really know what its supposed to be banning. Some guns are “assault weapons” some aren't and they look almost identical. If I duct tape a butter knife to my BB gun does it make it an assault weapon? Probably.

So I'm against the ban, because I'm against laws that don't make sense. Not only am I against the ban, but I'm against anyone who is for the ban, because that means they aren't a serious enough person to look beyond the name “assault weapon”. There's a reason the right to bear arms is the 2nd amendment right after freedom of speech; because the founding fathers thought it was that important. So if you're going to mess with the 2nd most fundamental right we have, you want to tread carefully with eyes wide open. The assault weapons ban tromps forward with eyes blindfolded.

So I don't know about Bush, but I believe in God, and I don't believe in banning assault weapons even though I've never met God and don't own an assault weapon.

So I got a copy of the local art rag I write for occasionally this Saturday. The piece called Parking Lot Wars was actually written for them, but I got bumped due to lack of space because they had a long tribute article to a friend of theirs who committed suicide.

I read a few pages of the Noise and started seeing red. There was this long article about questioning the “official” 9/11 story. (Their quotes not mine.)

9/11 was one of the most heavily documented events in human history, and people still want to believe something other then the evidence of their own eyes. It's just amazing. In March of 2005, Popular Mechanics of all people had to run an article debunking all the 9/11 myths. Read it here

It was just infuriating. Frankly, I was ready to quit writing for the Noise, I didn't want to be associated with that kind of crap, in the same way that I wouldn't want to write for a paper that took Holocaust deniers seriously.

I work in the finance industry, which basically means I can't talk about how cool my company is or the SEC would knock at my door...

But it means I'm a bit of a finance geek, so this posting over at Marginal Revolution saying that Enron and WorldCom may have cost this country about 600,000 jobs is pretty interesting.

From the Guardian of all places.

The article basically argues that the welfare state has made things worse for the poor, especially blacks.

This all goes along with the idea of thinking that people who don't believe what you believe are evil or stupid that I talked about yesterday. I too believe that its in the best interest of all of us to give the poor a hand up, but I also believe the worst possible thing we can do is give the poor a hand out. Currently, my wife and I have basically adopted a homeless family and are attempting to do just that.

My wife had an interesting conversation with a black woman she worked with who came out of the inner city. It seems that prior to some of the welfare reforms, black men would specifically evaluate women by how well they could fill out the government forms. There was this whole subindustry in her area where you could go to certain women and they would help you fill out forms for this grant or that grant in return for a percentage.

The mind boggles. Generations of people trained in how to live off of the government teat.

Some of my hippie friends ask me how I could ever vote Republican, and I always ask them if they actually know any poor people. Few of them do.

The government programs we have to “help” the poor don't help people not be poor. If they did, there would be more education grants, college tuition would be tax deductible, etc. If anything, our social programs are self perpetuating.

Someone said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Bush gets mocked by the left for supporting “faith-based initiatives” but I've noticed that all of the religion-based aid organizations in town are very much geared toward helping people help themselves. They end up being much more effective, with fewer repeat customers. Somedays I think we should take the entire social portion of the federal budget and translate it into a mandatory personal charity donation by each citizen.

I think that the average citizen would do a better job picking social programs to donate money to then the government has done. In 10 years, the social portion of the federal budget would probably be a quarter of what it is now, because we'd be spending the money 10 times more effectively.

Hat Tip: My Own Thoughts

Ever wondered:

So what is “Light, Sweet, Crude” anyways?

Is there “Heavy, Sour, Crude”?

I've been learning about oil prices courtesy of my job. You can find out some of the details by reading between the lines from the data on this page but is basically boils down to this.

The oil prices you see on television are for Light, Sweet, Crude as priced on NYMEX. In America, that's called the WTI price, for “West Texas Intermediate”.

That price actually has very little to do with any actual gasoline production, rather that's sort of the benchmark everyone uses.

So the benchmark starts with light (meaning the crude oil doesn't need as much refining), sweet (meaning the oil doesn't have a lot of sulfur) crude oil delivered to the oil pipeline in West Texas.

That actually is only obliquely related to the price of gasoline. The first question an oil refiner asks himself is “where am I located?”. Depending on where the refiner is located, that WTI price quoted on television is going to be higher or lower then what the refiner actually pays. For instance, on the West Coast, a refiner might pay $2.75 less per barrel.

The next question for the refiner is “Where did this oil actually come from and what does its chemistry look like?” That “light, sweet crude delivered to West Texas” is really only a theoretical barrel of oil. That barrel of oil is actually a sort of mixture of all the oil in the world as defined by this company called “Platts”. You can read the details here. The reality is that depending on where the oil comes from, the refiner will have to adjust their process. Heavy oil takes more work to refine into gasoline, but it also produces more products. Sour oil takes even more work because you have to remove the sulfur. Platts has this converter where you can convert a barrel of oil from any oil field in the world to the equivalent barrel of oil from another field here. So for instance, 1 barrel of oil from the sea off Qatar is only worth 97% of a barrel of WTI.

Now Gasoline is only about 50% oil, the rest is additives like MTBE, ethanol, etc. which have their own prices.

You can get a taste for the refining process here and you can see all the different prices that go into a gallon of gas here.

Here's the interesting bit about how oil prices relate to gas prices. That WTI theoretical barrel is actually the maximum the refiner would pay for oil. Currently, Valero (the company I got most of this information from) is paying between $5.25 and $17.25 less per barrel then the WTI price. That means that they are paying 8-25% less then the price you see on TV. This is pretty consistent on a percentage basis, in the first quarter of 2003, they were getting about the same discount for using sour crude vs. sweet crude. Year to year though, the sour crude discount has been increasing. Charts from Valero So if oil goes up $1, the actual oil going into your gasoline might only go up $0.75.

Even more interesting, the proportion of sour-heavy to sweet-light oil has been increasing. That is, more and more of the oil is sour, heavy oil. Since some refineries can only use sweet light oil, the discount is going to keep getting bigger. Which means the benchmark is becoming less and less relevant...

Bottom line: Oil prices have a very vague relationship to gas prices and they're going to get even more so unless platts changes the benchmark. Which I suspect they might do, given this editorial from their site.

What that all means? I don't know, but it was interesting.

Here is someone who really knows about oil discussing oil production, etc.

It's a WMV File

However, this illustrates my point from before, that the additional capacity from Saudi Arabia is heavy sour crude so its less attractive to most refiners other then Valero, which is using that as a corporate strategy.

That doesn't mean oil production has permanently peaked, as the very low oil prices for decades meant exploration, coal liquification, tar sands, etc. weren't worth doing. It's never been that we'll run out of oil, but rather that we'll run out of cheap oil.

Platts has a good discussion of this here though you'll have to register to read the whole article. Tip: You have to click the headers at the top of the article if you want to read the whole thing.

Katrina: The Gathering

You'll only get it if you play the card game Magic.

Hat Tip: Miserable Donuts

Wow, the power to destroy bureaucrats. Wish I had that power.

Count me in on supporting her.

Basically, it comes down to this: Two many queens on the court and not enough worker bees. I remember reading Volokh venting on some Supreme Court decision that the Court desperately needed an actual practicing lawyer on the bench, because they were writing decisions that were unintelligible. Ginsberg and others sitting on the court have said the same.

Hence, Meirs.

Cheney confirms it:

...we think it was important as well to have somebody like Harriet who's got a strong legal background, but who doesn't come off the bench.

I think that Volokh agrees:

During that era and before -- though not as much since the Stevens appointment in 1975 -- Justices were often drawn from among practicing lawyers who had made their reputations as lawyers; and, as lawyers, they were more often likely to have developed relationships with the President who appointed them, or at least the President's team. Chief Justice Roberts in some measure fits that profile as well, though of course he was an inside-the-Beltway lawyer as opposed to Miers, Powell, O'Connor, and to a smaller extent White, who built their careers in their own states. They were not academics or judges; but the current heavy loading of ex-academics and ex-judges is a relatively modern phenomenon, not a settled long-term tradition.

Volokh goes on to say:

My point is simply that when one is looking at Miers' career and credentials, it may be helpful to avoid comparing her to the current crop of Justices -- the natural tendency whenever one is considering a new nominee -- but rather to nominees who come from a different, but just as historically well established, mold.

So to all the people on the left and right who are whining, give it a rest. Harriet Meirs is obviously capable of doing some heavy lifting, and that's why she got nominated. The President isn't trying to establish a judicial legacy, he's trying to fix something that is broken in the court; namely that the justices have been a little too far removed from reality.

I think both the left and the right should be happy with that. Certainly things like Kelo and other decisions were absolute disasters.

To quote Ann Coulter:

Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes.

Flagstaff seems to have hit upon a new method.

What has been happening lately is that Flagstaff is starting to have problems with the homeless. Now mind you, there have always been a fair number of homeless hanging out in Flagstaff in the summer. For one thing, they could camp in the National Forest, and as long as they moved every 14 days, that was pretty much legal. The reality would be that there would be a couple of camps where the rangers would more or less leave them alone, and a couple of hints from the rangers if they rousted someone would usually serve.

With temperatures reaching 110 degrees at 10pm at night in Phoenix, it was just part of the changes of the seasons, the homeless showing up in Flagstaff for the summer. When it got cold again, the homeless would usually drift back. Meanwhile, the mission on San Francisco street would provide services to them. It wasn't ideal, but it was an uneasy truce.

Lately though, the truce has been getting broken by the homeless. There are a couple of locations in Flagstaff with an “urban trail”. These have turned into “homeless sleeping areas”. So the people who live next to those trails have had the following problems:

• Garages and Sheds getting broken into.
• Petty Theft
• Trash getting filtered through, then tossed around

Which is one thing, but lately something much worse has been happening, because those “urban trails” were also the way that most of the kids walked to and from school. Basically, if you're a teenage girl, you can no longer walk safely on the urban trails. So the parents have been having to form neighborhood groups to walk the kids to and from school.

In previous years, the homeless had always sort of known the line and didn't cross it. Lately, they've been crossing it. From talking with some of the poorer people in town, its been the Indian homeless who have been the worst lately. I suspect what's been going on is that the Indians have been kicking them off their reservation, and they've been drifting over to Flagstaff.

So while its one thing to be reasonably tolerant of the homeless (especially since lots of people in Flagstaff are only about 2 paychecks from being homeless themselves), its another thing to have your kids accosted.

The city council has discussed this a bit, with one of the more liberal members saying we shouldn't do anything until “we improve the services for the homeless”. Well, that's a nice theory, but Flagstaff isn't a very rich town. We can't really afford more homeless services.

I'm not offering any solutions either. This is a tough problem. While it may be socially unacceptable to rummage through a persons trash and leave it scattered all over the street, or to say rude things to a young girl, the first one is only littering, and the second is free speech. Rudeness is not a crime.

Though its getting colder, this whole issue may blow over by the end of the month. I suspect what will happen is there will be an ordinance passed against camping within the city limits; that will give the police the tools they need to selectively roust the homeless. Given that the worst of the homeless tend to prey on the other homeless, that's probably a good thing all around.

Harriet Meirs is a worker bee:

Furthermore, Harriet Miers's background as a legal practitioner is an asset, not a detriment. She has spent her career representing real people in courtrooms across America. This is precisely the type of experience that the Supreme Court needs. The court is full of justices who served as academics and court of appeals judges before they were nominated to the bench. What the court is missing is someone who understands the consequences of its decisions on the American people.

This experience gap is a real one. With the exception of the newly confirmed chief justice, John Roberts, no justice on the court has been an advocate in a court of law in the past 25 years, and Chief Justice Roberts was involved only at the appellate level.

Harriet Miers, by contrast, has a long and successful career as a lawyer representing corporate and individual clients in a variety of state and federal courts. I am confident that this background provides her with an understanding of the burdens of modern litigation, a recognition of the problems with frivolous lawsuits and an appreciation for tort reform.

The DOD is reimbursing soldiers for buying their own gear.

I think we should run a lot of the DOD this way. Soldiers should be required to buy all their little stuff out of an account; they can then choose what how/etc. The camping equipment available to the average civilian is 100x better then the army stuff. Same with boots, hats. etc.

Imagine the FedEx deliveries to the next war... “Hey, my new tent/rifle/tank is here!”

I haven't commented much on Harriet Meirs other then to say it was obvious to me that she was picked to be a worker bee, which the court badly needs. Today, there is a tempest in a teapot because her 57-page answer to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questionnaire was “incomplete and insulting”.

Of course, in the days of the internet, you can download her answers yourself and make up your own mind.

My conclusion: Congress sucks.

Here are a couple of the “insulting answers”:

Q: Has anyone involved in the process of selecting you as a judicial nominee (including, but not limited to anyone in the Executive Office of the President, the Justice Department, or the Senate and its staff) ever discussed with you any specific case, legal issue or question in a manner that could reasonably be interpreted as seeking any express or implied assurances concerning your position on such case, issue, or question? If so, please explain fully. Please identify each communication you had prior to the announcement of your nomination with anyone in the Executive Office of the President, the Justice Department or the Senate or its staff referring or relating to your views on any case, issue or subject that could come before the Supreme Court of the United States, state who was present or participated in such communication, and describe briefly what transpired.

No.

Q Did you make any representations to any individuals or interest groups as to how you might rule as a Justice if confirmed? Please describe and provide four (4) copies of all communications by the Bush Administration or individuals acting on behalf of the Administration to any individuals or interest groups with respect to how you would rule if confirmed.

No.

Think Congress is surrounded by Yes-Men, don't want to hear from a No-Woman? The Senate needs the word No explained to them? That explains why the women in D.C. avoid the Capital building. Perhaps some NOW activists can picket the SJC with “No means No” signs...

Meanwhile, an important question on judicial activism got a 2 and a half page response, which had this great paragraph:

“Judicial activism” can result from a court’s reaching beyond its intended jurisdiction to hear disputes that are not ripe, not brought by a party with standing, not brought in the proper court, or otherwise not properly before the court because of the case’s subject matter. An additional element of judicial restraint is to be sure only to decide the case before the court, and not to reach out to decide unnecessary questions. The courts have the essential role of acting as the final arbiter of constitutional meaning, including drawing the appropriate lines between the competing branches of government. But that role is limited to circumstances in which the resolution of a contested case or controversy requires the courts to act.

I liked the whole 2.5 page answer, personally.

Here's her answer to the “dues payment” thing:

Q List the date(s) you took the examination and date you passed for all states where you sat for a bar examination. List any state in which you applied for reciprocal admission without taking the bar examination and the date of such admission or refusal of such admission.

State Bar of Texas Examination administered in July 1970.

Admitted to the State Bar of Texas on September 18, 1970.

Reciprocal Admission to the District of Columbia Bar on April 4, 1997.

Earlier this year, I received notice that my dues for the District of Columbia Bar were delinquent and as a result my ability to practice law in D.C. had been suspended. I immediately sent the dues in to remedy the delinquency. The non- payment was not intentioned, and I corrected the situation upon receiving the letter.

So Harriet volunteered some information, and now the Democratic members want details? Give it a rest! Maybe the DC Bar didn't send her a bill, so she didn't pay it.

Personally, I score it this way:

Cheap Publicity Stunt by the Senate Judiciary Committee: 0

Harriet Meirs: 1

Hat Tip: ScrappleFace who posted both some “fake answers” (ScrappleFace is a parody site) and linked to the originals.

From Opinion Journal:

The Miers debacle is beginning to remind us of New Coke--a product introduced in an effort to expand market share, which instead infuriated loyal customers. If Bush wants to “save his presidency,” the way to do so is clear: withdraw the Miers nomination and reintroduce Court Classic.

Er... You blew the metaphor there dudes.

 Old Coke had Sugar.

 New Coke had corn syrup and was somewhat sweet.

 “Coke Classic” has corn syrup and is slightly bitter. 

 I could digress into why we should end subsidies for sugar, or talk about how you can find people importing “real Coke” from Mexico because of NAFTA, but I guess we were talking about SCOTUS?

 So to follow the metaphor, Bush should wait until Meirs gets turned down by the Senate, then nominate another conservative candidate who will then sail through approval by the Senate because they'll have to show they're evenhanded... What Ann Coulter called a Potemkin nominee?

 Wow, a plot only Karl Rove could love. 

It's not the teachers that are the problem, it's the educators.

Pretty Interesting

Power to the citizen's media!

I support the Miers nomination. I had to make this post so that N.Z. Bear could find it and record my vote.

Pretty cool really this N.Z. Bear thing.

If you are interested why, it basically boils down to the fact that the Court has needed a non-judge-worker-bee-type on it for awhile now. That's basically what Meirs is (plus she's female). Too many court decisions lately have been almost impossible to interpret.

So complaining that she's not exactly like all the other judges is well, dumb. As for her politics, I'm a little less concerned about that.

Technorati Tags: Meirs

It’s probably still too soon, but I really could care less about all the stories about who dropped the ball with Hurricane Katrina.

Yeah, the Federal, State and Local governments were incompetent.

Why is this a surprise? Does the government continually amaze us with how competent they are? No. Quite the reverse.

We don’t need to “fix” FEMA. We need to take every bureaucrat in the Department of Homeland Stupidity and drop them in the ocean.

Meanwhile, if you live under sea level, between a lake and the ocean, and your local government is corrupt and continuously siphons the money away from local flood controls projects into their own pockets, when it starts raining, start walking…

Belgravia Dispatch had his plan for “rescuing” the Bush Presidency, but I didn't link to it, because it was well, lame.

Here's Thomas Barnett's which is much more reasonable.

See what the Marines have been ordering from Amazon

So there was this big article in the local paper about how the median home price in Flagstaff is now $333,000. Dean even commented on it in his column in the Flagstaff Live.

What the hell did the hippies expect? All this “smart growth” stuff is code for “no growth”, and that means that through the inevitable laws of supply and demand, house prices are going to go up. There's only so much land freely available in Flagstaff. Creating “low income housing” developments won't work, if you really want house prices to go down, encourage land swaps between the State and the Feds so that more acreage is opened up to development.

All that Smart Growth and Slow Growth stuff the Friends of Flagstaff Future guys like to talk about just makes it impossible for the little guys to build houses unless they're politically connected.

Sigh. You know, it really bugs me that these big developers are coming to Flagstaff and building all these gated communities. But it's an inevitable result of the stuff the hippies are always whining about. All this smart growth, environmental impact reports, blocking land swaps, etc. leads inevitably to this sort of thing happening. Once you squeeze the little guys out of the market, and you make building new homes more expensive, then you end up with big developers building expensive developments.

Meanwhile, they're selling homes in Bellemont 5 miles from Flagstaff as fast as they can make them. I paid $250K for my house 8 years ago, the guy down the street is asking $869K for his (though he's probably delusional).

So the Opinionated Wife and I were discussing the riots in France. A few years ago she had a friend who lived in France for awhile who married a Frenchman and moved back to America. Since the Blogosphere is starting to realize that this riots had little to do with Muslims, and more to do with fundamental problems in the structure of French society, I’ll offer up a point she made.

Underemployment. France enforces that the employer provide a number of benefits to employees after a year of employment. The vaunted shorter work week and month long vacation in the summer for instance. This has produced the unintended consequence that if you’re young and unestablished, your jobs last 10-11 months; after which you need to get a new job. Evedentially, the benefits are so onourus that French companies have instituionalized a cycle of hiring and firing.

So young French people are forced to have multiple jobs so that they can survive when one job lets them go to avoid the governmental restrictions. This makes it very difficult for young people to establish themselves, because in essence they must have two employers at all times for 20-30 hours a week each; then every 5 months they have to look for another job to replace one of those jobs.

Is your work week really shorter if it consists of 2 20-30 hour per week jobs? That sounds like 40-60 hours a week to me.

This is interesting because when I was in Germany a few years ago I was talking to one of the young Germans. If he wanted to work overtime, he had to go to the labor board and get permission each time. The end result was that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Instead, he moonlighted as a bouncer in a local nightclub instead. He bypassed the labor board by being paid in cash under the table.

I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone that France and Germany have dismal economies. The more I here about their countries, the more they remind me of Atlas Shrugged.

My wife’s friend loved France, but moved back to America because despite all their social programs, it was finanically impossible for her to finance her education, and therebe advance herself.

From Cafe Hayek:

Of course, the whole thing was a live version of the West Wing.  But what I found interesting was how little they chose to caricature the Republican's views, at least in the part I saw.  He wasn't a “compassionate conservative.”  And he wasn't a heartless monster.  He was about as Jeffersonian as you could imagine.  Whoever gets the Republican nomination the next time around ought to hire whoever wrote Alda's lines.  It would be even nicer to have a candidate to choose from who actually believed those lines as well.

The funny thing about West Wing is that both the liberals and conservatives on the show are actually reasonable, unlike in real life...

In fact, the liberals on the show often sound like conservatives...“Yeah, it would be nice to do that, but it would be too expensive, and it wouldn't work...”

When the New York Times, which hates Arnold, endorses 3 out of 4 of his propositions, and they still get defeated, you have to realize that all the people in California with any brains moved to Arizona about, say, 10 years ago...

Idiots. They should have at least passed the redistricting measure.

I wrote this long piece called Beliefs, which is one of my favorite pieces so far.

My co-worker Matt found this great quote that sums up the problem in two sentences:

Rather than blame the terrorists; rather than admiting they have to take action against them; their fear is transformed to anger and displaced onto President Bush. If everything is his fault, then the reality of what happened does not have to be faced (this also explains the intense psychological denial that these same individuals tend to have about 9/11).

Damn. If I wasn't having so much fun scooping the New York Times, I might have to stop blogging. (Yes, I'm gloating. Wouldn't you?)

Orin Kerr over at the Volokh Conspiracy weighs in on the new Patriot Act.

From this interview:

RF: How does increased compensation affect soldiers' decisions to re-enlist?

Moffitt: I have tried to build some simple models which assume that soldiers are forward-looking agents. Much of this work was co-authored with Tom Daula. I have found that the bonuses the military has offered to get soldiers to re-enlist do not have a large effect. They simply are not big enough to change most soldiers' decisions. What is more important is the type of training that a soldier can expect to get in the military. Let's say that you join when you are 18 and that you make a career of it, meaning you spend 20 years with the military. That means you get out when you are 38. Sure, you get a nice military retirement package when you leave. But at 38, you are still a relatively young man and you will want to have acquired skills that will allow you to have a career on the outside at a good job. Those type of issues tend to dominate compensation issues, especially when the compensation takes the form of a one-time bonus payment for re-enlistment.

I find this interesting, because one of the things I believe is that the US military has always provided a sort of social safety valve. Because it provides education to its members, while most raw recruits come from the lower strata of our society, it provides a clear path to the middle and upper class. As the ads say, “we'll page for college”, and they do; the average US soldier is better educated then the average American.

So while one day I see us dramatically drawing down our military, we'll have to find something to replace it with. The Peace Corp won't do it, they're kind of snobby; you have to have a college degree to join. Maybe we could have a “disaster” force that would respond to natural disasters all over the world, but that's my own weird twist on Thomas Barnett's SysAdmin force.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolutions

Work as a waiter? Put patriotic messages on your tabs to get bigger tips.

I'm a huge fan of PlanB the morning-after contraceptive. Some of you know this because I ranted about this before.

Instapundit this morning was complaining about the FDA's disapproval of PlanB for non-prescription use. So how come I've never ripped the Bush Administration a new one for not approving it? After all, this could hugely cut down on the number of abortions in this country. It should be win-win?

Because it turns out there's blame enough to go around. What the articles Instapundit linked to don't tell you is that when Barr Pharmaceuticals took over marketing of Plan B from the WCC, they changed the application to allow it to be marketed to girls as young as 15.

Here in Arizona, that's known as shooting yourself in the foot. Of course, its more complex than that.

Here's where Barr shoots themselves in the foot (from the GAO report):

October 9, 2003: At the request of Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a teleconference was held to discuss the upcoming joint public meeting of FDA’s advisory committees. Meeting participants from FDA included review staff within the Offices of Drug Evaluation III and V. According to teleconference minutes, review staff asked Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., about possible age restrictions for use of Plan B. Minutes also noted that Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., said that it intended to offer its product to women as young as 15 years of age. Also, Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., agreed to explore and report back to FDA on behind-the-counter marketing and the implementation of age limitations on the sale of Plan B.

This caused the FDA to worry:

January 23, 2004 ...meeting minutes noted that FDA officials told the sponsor that the Office of the Commissioner and the Acting Director of CDER had raised concerns as to whether there were adequate data to establish that minors (i.e., those under 18 years of age) would use Plan B appropriately in the absence of a learned intermediary. Potential options that were suggested from FDA and CDER management included the possible need to (1) collect additional data, perhaps from another actual use study targeted to minors, or (2) to impose an age restriction on the OTC sale of the product.

Basically, the FDA really, really, wanted to get the message across to teenage girls that this was emergency contraception (only 75% effective).

Barr senses which way the wind blows, and:

March 11, 2004 Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., submitted an amendment to its sNDA, proposing a dual-marketing strategy, making Plan B OTC for women 16 years of age and older and prescription only for women under 16 years of age.

But its too late:

May 6, 2004 FDA issued a not-approvable letter, denying Plan B OTC marketing status, citing a lack of adequate data regarding safe use among younger adolescents. The letter also stated that FDA was not able to conduct a complete review of the dual-marketing strategy in the amendment to the sNDA because of the absence of the draft product labeling describing how Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., would comply with both the prescription and OTC labeling requirements in a single package.

So what do I think?

First, the FDA should approve Plan B. But then again, I take weird not-approved-by-the-FDA Chinese Herbs for my health, so what do I know? I think the FDA is a total waste in general; this issue didn't exactly change my mind.

Second, Barr Pharmaceuticals should include a condom in each box labeled “for next time, idiot”.

Third, perhaps it should be behind the counter at the pharmacy, but without age restrictions.

Fourth, I agree with the director that teenage girls are idiots. I'm not sure that's science though, just informed observation. I don't think not having this drug available over the counter would help that problem though...

As for the blame? I blame the idiot who came up with the idea of the FDA in the first place... Exactly why do women need a prescription for birth control pills in the first place?

Why Mommy is a Democrat a children's book. Here's a couple of samples:

(pictures will “popup”)

That's right, Democrats will keep you safe from the evil rich guys, because we all know how many rich folk commit violent crimes. On the other hand, when that guy in the trenchcoat goes bezerk and tries to kill you, you'll be shit out of luck, since you won't have a gun to defend yourself. Or maybe the guy in the trenchcoat is a child molester released on early parole? Hard to say...

Wow, this is even more classic. Traditionally its been Republicans who've been for tax deductions for college, and Democrats who've been against. Note that Mom's a Vegan: her kids have to eat an apple and carrot for lunch.

Mom's a vegan, AND a communist. Mommy shares her toys with her kids? Hmmm... You could get arrested for that... Note that mom isn't giving the crazed homeless pedophile any help either...

This book is obviously a plot by Karl Rove. If I was a kid and I was forced to read this book, I'd be a confirmed capital-R-Republican...because the subtext of this book is that Democrats are pussies...

Hat Tip: Matt

Over at Opinion Journal, Peggy Noonan is trying to make some sort of point about Immigration policy:

What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?

Her whole point is severely diluted by her opening anecdote:

I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street.

Peggy, did you know that sleeping on a park bench in downtown Manhattan is illegal? Should I ask your grandmother the same questions you seem to be asking illegal immigrants?

I don't think you'd like the answers.

Peggy concludes with:

The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.

The problem with our elites is that they've never talked to an actual living immigrant, legal or illegal. That includes you Peggy.

A friend of mine from Australia is on his 5th year of living here on a visa. Each year he has to apply, and one year later, he gets the visa...in time for it to expire...

Our immigration system is totally broken, legal or illegal. Perhaps the real answer is not to worry about whether these “illegal immigrants” are breaking the law, but to look at the law itself. Perhaps what they're doing shouldn't be illegal?

I don't mean opening the border completely, but if you make it easier to be legal then illegal, people will be legal. This is the “iTunes” lesson.

Our immigration policy is designed to make the unions and the population feel good, but as someone who lives in a border state I can say its all window dressing. 3,000 miles of border is always going to be a problem. This sort of editorial just points out to me the vacuousness of the debate: Peggy is comparing her grandmother's experience during the period when immigration was relatively open to the Latino experience now? If her grandmother was willing to cross an ocean, alone, and sleep on a park bench isn't it possible she would have been willing to sneak into the country as well?

Bah. I'm beginning to think that only California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and Texas should be allowed to set immigration policy. The other 45 states are just getting in the way.

M-A-Y-O-R of San Francisco needs to lighten up.

Watch the Video

Hat tip: California Conservative

Nice to know the cops in San Francisco have a sense of humor even if the mayor doesn't.

So my neighbor had noticed the “W” sign on my lawn during the election last year and made a point of inviting me to the party (it was at his house). My other neighbor it turns out was cooking (he used to be a chef). Now strangely enough, the day before I'd gone to another Xmas party and had a long talk with a former serviceman who told me afterwards “It's nice talking to Republicans”.

So I went to the party. I enjoyed myself immensly. I didn't have to apologize at the party for being patriotic, for supporting the troops, for being pro-victory, or for being Christian at Christmas. It was immensely relaxing. Plus the food was outstanding, and the bar was open (and I could walk home).

This morning, I read this piece from a lefty:

Last weekend I did something I haven't done in a long time. Something I swore I'd never do again. Something I'm deeply ashamed of.

I stood during the singing of the national anthem.

This is why even though I'm not sure I'll ever be a capital-R Republican, I doubt I'll ever be even a small-d Democrat. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm not 100% happy with Bush, but the idiocy of his critics have made me a fan.

If you've never read it, go read this essay by Isaac Asimov about our national anthem.

Emily Weinstein, you are an idiot.

I am pro-victory. But if my only choice for being pro-victory is also pro-Republican, then so be it.

Citizen Smash says:

AS A STORM BREWS on Capitol Hill over revelations that the President authorized the NSA to conduct surveillance within our borders, now is a good time to take a step back, and examine our priorities.

Here are mine:

• We must defeat our enemies, and prevent further attacks against our nation.
• We must emerge from this war with our Constitution intact.

Yeah, what he said.

Read it here

My grandfather spent time in Leavenworth for being a Trade Unionist!

He had to get a Presidential Pardon to get out.

Guess I have a way to go to fill those shoes.

While the article is talking about sawmills, to me the article is really about how urban environmentalists who spend most of their lives removed from nature are screwing up environmentalism. Read it Here

Here's a quote:

Fifteen years ago, not long after the release of “Playing God in Yellowstone,” his seminal work on environmentalism's philosophical underpinnings, I asked philosopher and environmentalist Alston Chase what he thought about this situation. I leave you to ponder his answer: “Environmentalism increasingly reflects urban perspectives. As people move to cities, they become infatuated with fantasies about land untouched by humans. This demographic shift is revealed through ongoing debates about endangered species, grazing, water rights, private property, mining and logging. And it is partly a healthy trend. But this urbanization of environmental values also signals the loss of a rural way of life and the disappearance of hands-on experience with nature. So the irony: As popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines.”

Yeah, I hate “Disney” environmentalism.

Ironically, a friend of mine is trying to start a sawmill in Winslow. Not only would it provide jobs, it would actually be the best possible thing to happen to the Coconino National Forest. See, because humans have “meddled” with the forest by preventing it from burning every few years, there's actually now too many small trees in the forest. Which means we need to “meddle” with it some more by cutting some of those trees down.

Which like anything that involves lots of dealing with small objects, expensive.

My friends sawmill could make saving the forest pay for itself. I know he could do it if he got the money. Despite Jim Petersen's doom and gloom, my friend has already turned around one lumber company increasing their sales from $9M/year to $24M/year. He's even lined up the support of the Sierra club.

He needs some investors though (not a lot, he needs $1-2M at most) so if you or someone you know would be interested in this sort of investment, let me know at the@opinionatedbastard.com.

Well, illegal immigration has been in the news a lot lately. I’ve made a careful study of the immigration issue, and I’ve decided that the problem is not Mexico, the Immigrants, Osama Bin Laden, Arizona, California, New Mexico, or Texas.
No, the problem is the other 46 idiots, namely all the non-border states. Sorry North Dakota, your border with Canada doesn’t count; we’re not overly worried about the Canadians sneaking across the border to get away from socialized medicine. Sure it happens, but we’re not worried about it.
No matter what you think about Bush, Napolitano, Schwarzenegger, Perry, or Richardson they all end up coming to the same conclusion: Guest Workers. When you can get the governors of 4 states to agree, that’s probably the solution. You may not like it, but it’s probably the answer.
Really though, most of us in border states agree. Yet the other 46 states keep arguing with us. That’s because they suffer from a number of delusions. The first delusion that these people seem to suffer is that we can close the border.
Not going to happen. First off, its obvious that our border with Mexico is currently about as well patrolled as the Moon. All you have to do is actually talk with an illegal alien or someone who employs them, and you’ll find out that half of them go home for Christmas. I’m not kidding. People seem to have this picture in their mind that the illegal aliens are caught in a bad episode of the Fugitive; huddled in fear from “La Migra”.
Guys, they go home for Feliz Navidad. These are not people huddled in fear, these are people who have a slightly more complicated way to make travel reservations. One person with a green card so he could cross at will told me that the coyotes were a better deal because they didn’t steal half your Christmas presents like the border guards do.
Ok, so we don’t patrol the border now. “So we should!” the idiots cry. Right now, we patrol 50 miles out of 1951 miles of the border. That’s 2.5%, and it costs us $6B per year to patrol that much. Think the war in Iraq was expensive? How does $234B per year to patrol the whole thing sound? We could invade a different country in the Middle East every year and have money left over!
Like BART in San Francisco ($80,000/year/rider), closing the border is just, well dumb. Not quite as dumb as BART, it would only cost us $21,000 per illegal alien per year, but still, not the best use of our money to close the border. We could actually buy Mexico more cheaply, 10% of their GDP/year would only be $61B. If we bought the rest of Central America while we were at it we’d only have to patrol our border with Panama.
Of course, other people besides me have run these same numbers. Our politicians are only half as stupid as they seem on TV. So they’ve come up with their own solution. “We’ll hire the Mexicans to build a giant wall.”
My jaw just drops when I hear someone say that. Look, if your solution to illegal immigration is to hire illegal aliens to build a wall, I feel it necessary to give you additional advice: socks, then shoes, OK? I mean the mind just boggles when I hear our “statesmen” suggest such nonsense.
Besides, I’ve been around Flagstaff for awhile, and half the fences in town are already built by illegal aliens and we’re still talking about $150/foot. So that would be $1.5B just to build this giant useless fence. Note that the Great Wall of China didn’t keep the barbarians out...
But we have to keep out the terrorists I hear...
Sure, in this day and age, I can understand that fear. But remember, this is the Department of Homeland Stupidity. Do you really expect them to catch 10 terrorists out of 11 million illegal aliens? These are the people who make me take off my shoes when I travel, even if I’m wearing flip-flops... (I swear, I’m going to start going to the airport naked, just to save everyone time.)
No, if we want to keep out the terrorists, we have to change the math. We have to make it so that the Homeland Stupidity Department only has to look for 10 people sneaking across, not the 11 million going through the regular checkpoints. Which means, guest workers.
Look, no one likes this solution. We’d much rather that Mexico had honest government instead of this weird mixture of socialism and corruption they have now. We’d much rather be able to hire our neighbors kid to clean out our gutters and have them show up on time, and work hard. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one, where Mexico is seriously messed up, and so a bunch of Mexicans are willing to cross the burning desert, get shot at, robbed, and occasionally beat up, so that they can make $50 for cleaning out our gutters. With that sort of motivation, no wall or fence will ever be high enough.
So there’s only one choice. We can continue to pretend that we control our borders, or we can actually start controlling our borders by making it so that its legal for most of these people to cross. At that point, we merely need watch out for the illegal crossings, and that’s a much better position to be in then where we’re at now.
But first we have to beat those other 46 states into submission.

Technorati Tags: immigration

Camille Pagila summarizes all my frustrations with Iraq, Bush, and the Democratic Party.

She’s clearly on the opposite site of me politically (she voted for Nader?) yet, as she points out, the Republican party has become the party of liberty…she says every feminist in America should support the career of Condi…

Read it Here

So yesterday I filled out my sample ballot.

The Democrats obviously want to make this about Iraq, but there’s a saying “all politics is local”. Is your state senator going to be doing a lot of foreign policy? I doubt it. So I voted for the candidate with the best answers for whatever issues really affected me, regardless of party.

Filling out my sample ballot turned out to be pretty easy. What I found is that when I went to each candidate’s website, where they were prepared to say positive things about themselves it was really obvious to vote for. I didn’t always vote Republican nor did I always Democrat, but I always voted for competent vs. incompetent.

In Flagstaff, the gal running against Rick Renzi blamed EVERYTHING on Iraq, including potholes. “If only we hadn’t invaded Iraq, we could fix the potholes…” I didn’t vote for her, because while she was passionate about Iraq, she didn’t know anything about the real issues that would be affecting me. In short, she’d be completely useless as a congressman.

So this election, ignore the crap. Instead, Google every single candidate on your Sample ballot and read their website. Don’t vote for anyone who can’t give you a better reason to vote for them then “I’m not the other guy”.

You’ll find that when you look at the positives, its not really that hard to figure out who the best candidates are. More often then not, when there is a strong candidate, the other party will run a lame duck against them.

Pink Taxis for Women Only

In Russia, heartland of Capitalism!

Every time I see that “1-in-4 women will be raped” statistic it makes me grit my teeth. The local hippie rag (you know, the one I write for) trotted that one out a bit ago, and this article on Feminism at Newsvine I was reading said it lately as well.

I know I'm good at math, but does that mean no one else on the planet can multiply?

First off, even the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network only claims 1-in-6. But that number is obviously bogus, because on the same page, they say 200,780 victims/year.

200,780 victims/year over a life expectancy of 72 years is...14 million.

Out of 150 million women, that's 1-in-10. I guess RIANN can't multiply either.

Meanwhile, the FBI says 30.9/100,000. Over 72 years, thats 1-in-45.

But rape is underreported. According to RIANN, only 41% are reported.

So that 1-in-45 becomes 1-in-27. But that's nowhere near 1-in-4. You don't even have to be good at math to recognize that 1-in-4 is just a made up number. A woman is 8 times more likely to be mugged then raped, and being mugged is nowhere near 1-in-4, so there's no way rape could be that high.

Ok, so that said, lets talk about the other side. Just because the whole “bad at math” thing bugs me doesn't mean I think we should ignore the problem. I just think you have to get your numbers right before you can solve problems.

My wife has started carrying a baseball bat in her car, because she got tired of getting accosted by homeless people. She has had to pull it and threaten to use it nearly 3 times now in the last 6 months. My wife is not a small, helpless women, so I can't even imagine what its like for a less physically capable woman. We live in a fairly small city, Flagstaff AZ, so that's a pretty large number.

She got the idea when she was going to night school in CA 20 some years ago. There had been 20 rapes in a year on campus. When she called the local police the detective told her:

1. They weren't even allowed on campus until a crime had been committed.
2. The 20/year number.
3. That while he couldn't tell her she should start carrying a baseball bat, he could tell her that if the detectives daughter was going to Mt San Antonio College, he would give her a gun.
4. That bizarrely, the college had been reducing the number of security people.

So my wife started carrying a baseball bat.

The college starting hassling her, and after several other women on campus starting carrying bats instituted a rule that you weren't allowed to carry a baseball bat on school grounds. So my wife bought a length of pipe and put tape on it to make a handle...

Eventually, they threatened to expel her. So she told them they would be hearing from both her lawyer, and the press...

They didn't expel her, and the local paper ran a story, which got picked up by the LA Times, and the college hired 3 more security guards.

Why am I saying all this?

Because 1-in-4 is like the weather. It makes it sounds inevitable that you'll get raped if you're a woman. But 1-in-25 isn't inevitable. When my wife was carrying a baseball bat to class, the women students were supportive sure.

But the male students were even more supportive, and took it upon themselves to escort women to and from the far parking lots.

See, repeating 1-in-4 is like saying “All men are evil rapists”. But a rape rate of 60.9/100,000 women says that 99% of men are not evil rapists. So those good 99% of men can be part of the solution. But people who go around saying 1-in-4 don't seem to really want a solution.

Which I guess explains why I'm not a feminist. I'm a modern gentleman. Which means that I believe in chivalry. Men should protect women, not because the women are helpless, but because what it says about ourselves as men; might for right. On date nights, I open the door for my wife, not because doors are so hard to open in this modern age that she couldn't, but because of what that small kindness says about me as a man.

Too often, the dogma of feminism seems to get in the way of what I feel is the chivalrous ideal. I understand why; one need only look at a muslim country to see how my ideal of “protection for the weak” can turn into “we're going to lock you away so you can't get hurt”. So I understand, but I wish the feminists seemed more willing to work with the men to work out some sort of modern form of chivalry.

And I wish they could multiply.

Technorati Tags: politics, feminism, rape

The Movie wasn't his idea, he didn't write it, he didn't put up the money for it.

All he did was star in the movie, read his lines, and for that he won a Nobel Prize?

Technorati Tags: moonbat, Al Gore

According to my Dad, the jocks at engineering college were all football players.

That's the real reason the bridge in Minnesota collapsed.

Minnesota Bridge Collapse Causes and New Plans - St. Anthony Falls Bridge Photos - NTSB Report - I-35-W - Popular Mechanics]

I wrote this in response to David Brook's Op-Ed in the New York Times titled: The Biggest Issue

David's article is talking about education, which is actually my number one issue in this campaign. The problem is that both sides are wrong.

Without further ado, here is my letter to David:

You're not the first person to notice the dramatic fall off in our educational prowess starting in 1970. The problem though is that all of the pundits and studies are just wrong. Additionally, all of the proposed solutions are wrong as well.

Let's use NCLB as an example.

NCLB was really all about going back to teaching phonics in public schools. Phonics being the concept that there's an alphabet of letters, those letters form sounds, those sounds form words. Phonics being the method of choice for teachers for the past 3,000 years, it was supplanted in the classrooms starting about 1970 after Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) proposed a new method, "whole language". The problem with "whole language" is that it just doesn't work.

Now if you read the NCLB legislation, you'll never, ever see the word phonics. The legislation doesn't mandate any particular teaching method. What it mandates is that if you want to use a new teaching method, you have to see if it works first. (Something that was never done with "whole language", or no one would be using it now). It was actually, a really well crafted piece of legislation, and Bush and Kennedy deserve numerous kudos for it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the real problem in education, and in fact, it reinforces the real problem with education. The real problem with education I call either the "remoteness problem", or, if I'm feeling snarky that day, the "PhD problem". That is, the real problem with education in this country is that the people making the curriculum decisions in this country are 5-10 steps removed for the classroom. They may have PhD's, but they're asking the wrong question.

It doesn't matter whether "phonics" or "whole language" is a better method of reading instruction for most children. What teachers actually need to decide is which method of reading instruction is best for each child, and then make that decision 30 times. If phonics works better for 90% of the children, that means a typical classroom has 3 kids where it won't work for them.

Education, like many things in life, works better when run from the bottom up, and the problem with NCLB, the Democrat's proposals or the Republican's proposals is that they are reinforcing a top down approach where the bureaucracy dictates materials and methods to the teachers. Materials and methods that will never work for all of the students in their classrooms.

This has been happening since the 1970's in education. Even districts which give their teachers discretionary funds to spend on classroom materials never indexed them for inflation; at this point the budget a teacher has to spend on additional materials is a joke. Meanwhile, most private schools give teachers much, much larger budgets for materials and involve them directly in the purchasing process. In some cases, they are the purchasing process.

If we really want to get 100% of children reading in this country, the solution is simple. We need to give the teachers back control of their own curriculum. This solution to this problem is easy in this day and age: Setup a website exactly like amazon.com, but limited to educational materials. (Amazon or Barnes & Noble could do this very easily.) Instead of spending the enormous amounts of money a typical school district spends on PhD's, junkets to educational seminars in Hawaii, and textbooks based on the latest educational fad, divide up the money by classroom and deposit it directly to the website as gift certificates.

Let the teachers choose and review the text books on their own. What you'll find is that teachers won't buy just one set of books. What they'll buy is different materials to reach different students. Maybe they'll buy 30 phonics books to start the school year, but you'll find them buying 3 whole language books to reach the students who aren't quite getting it later on that same year, and 3 more advanced books to keep their more advanced students stimulated.

They'll also be ruthless and frank in their reviews of the materials. Once this is setup, it becomes trivial for a parent or service organization like Rotary to contribute additional funds, and knowing that the money contributed will go directly into the classroom, I think you'll find they will do so in record amounts. Even students in a poor neighborhood, if their child isn't learning, will find themselves motivated to contribute so that the teacher can buy their child additional materials.

Even as little as $25 given to a teacher by a parent for them to spend on books for your child could save this country thousands of dollars as the child wends their way through the educational system. So I would expect many, many corporate matching programs. Even small businesses could get in the act, offering to match funds donated by parents. Education is easily fixable, and America is uniquely poised to once again have the greatest educational system in the world. We merely have to go back to trusting our teachers.

Those hippie fascists in California are striking again.

Now they've banned fast foot restaurants in poor neighborhoods.

Hat Tip to Marginal Revolution

From the WSJ:

Just weeks ago the fragile commodities markets could be sparked ahead by a mere hint of bad news. That market psychology has reversed, with Monday's action showing that even war can't halt oil's current retreat.

Inside the commodity-trading pits and brokerage houses, the conversation isn't whether prices are pulling back in the near term, but how far and for how long.

That was made clear as markets digested increasingly violent images of conflict between Russia and the oil crossroads of Georgia. Oil prices fell to as low as $112.72 a barrel before settling at $114.45 a barrel, down 75 cents,

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.