Ministry of Truth at the PO

I love these little historical lies we are always being told.

USPS Notice 107, December 1998

Title - Some Things Were Never Meant to be Mailed

Included on the list -- ammunition.

And yet tons of ammunition was mailed over the years with perfect legality via the PO. What they really mean is that their current employees are unable to safely handle such cargoes so they can't accept it any more. But they need the security of a false historical claim to mask their contemporary incompetence.

Judicial Theology

It's been a while since I read the major Conscription/Conscientious Objector case from the Supremes -- UNITED STATES v. SEEGER. I had forgotten the Court's use of then modern liberal theology to decide that conscientious objectors to military service didn't have to believe in God but could get away with meeting the following test: "[D]oes the claimed belief occupy the same place in the life of the objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption?"

From Justice Clark's opinion:

4. Moreover, we believe this construction embraces the ever-broadening understanding of the modern religious community. The eminent Protestant theologian, Dr. Paul Tillich, whose views the Government concedes would come within the statute, identifies God not as a projection "out there" or beyond the skies but as the ground of our very being. The Court of Appeals stated in No. 51 that Jakobson's views "parallel [those of] this eminent theologian rather strikingly." 325 F.2d, at 415-416. In his book, Systematic Theology, Dr. Tillich says:
"I have written of the God above the God of theism . . . . In such a state [of self-affirmation] the God of both religious and theological language disappears. But something remains, namely, the seriousness of that doubt in which meaning within meaninglessness is affirmed. The source of this affirmation of meaning within meaninglessness, of certitude within doubt, is not the God of traditional theism but the `God above God,' the power of being, which works through those who have no name for it, not even the name God." II Systematic Theology 12 (1957). [380 U.S. 163, 181]
Another eminent cleric, the Bishop of Woolwich, John A. T. Robinson, in his book, Honest To God (1963), states:
"The Bible speaks of a God `up there.' No doubt its picture of a three-decker universe, of `the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth,' was once taken quite literally. . . . ." At 11. "[Later] in place of a God who is literally or physically `up there' we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically `out there.' . . . But now it seems there is no room for him, not merely in the inn, but in the entire universe: for there are no vacant places left. In reality, of course, our new view of the universe has made not the slightest difference. . . ." At 13-14.

"But the idea of a God spiritually or metaphysically `out there' dies very much harder. Indeed, most people would be seriously disturbed by the thought that it should need to die at all. For it is their God, and they have nothing to put in its place. . . . Every one of us lives with some mental picture of a God `out there,' a God who `exists' above and beyond the world he made, a God `to' whom we pray and to whom we `go' when we die." At 14.

"But the signs are that we are reaching the point at which the whole conception of a God `out there,' which has served us so well since the collapse of the three-decker universe, is itself becoming more of a hindrance than a help." At 15-16. (Emphasis in original.)

The Schema of the recent Ecumenical Council included a most significant declaration on religion: 4 [380 U.S. 163, 182]

"The community of all peoples is one. One is their origin, for God made the entire human race live on all the face of the earth. One, too, is their ultimate end, God. Men expect from the various religions answers to the riddles of the human condition: What is man? What is the meaning and purpose of our lives? What is the moral good and what is sin? What are death, judgment, and retribution after death?

. . . . .

"Ever since primordial days, numerous peoples have had a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events that make up the lives of men; some have even come to know of a Supreme Being and Father. Religions in an advanced culture have been able to use more refined concepts and a more developed language in their struggle for an answer to man's religious questions.

. . . . .

"Nothing that is true and holy in these religions is scorned by the Catholic Church. Ceaselessly the Church proclaims Christ, `the Way, the Truth, and the Life,' in whom God reconciled all things to Himself. The Church regards with sincere reverence those ways of action and of life, precepts and teachings which, although they differ from the ones she sets forth, reflect nonetheless a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men."

Dr. David Saville Muzzey, a leader in the Ethical Culture Movement, states in his book, Ethics As a Religion (1951), that "[e]verybody except the avowed atheists (and they are comparatively few) believes in some kind of God," and that "The proper question to ask, therefore, is [380 U.S. 163, 183] not the futile one, Do you believe in God? but rather, What kind of God do you believe in?" Id., at 86-87. Dr. Muzzey attempts to answer that question:

"Instead of positing a personal God, whose existence man can neither prove nor disprove, the ethical concept is founded on human experience. It is anthropocentric, not theocentric. Religion, for all the various definitions that have been given of it, must surely mean the devotion of man to the highest ideal that he can conceive. And that ideal is a community of spirits in which the latent moral potentialities of men shall have been elicited by their reciprocal endeavors to cultivate the best in their fellow men. What ultimate reality is we do not know; but we have the faith that it expresses itself in the human world as the power which inspires in men moral purpose." At 95.

"Thus the `God' that we love is not the figure on the great white throne, but the perfect pattern, envisioned by faith, of humanity as it should be, purged of the evil elements which retard its progress toward `the knowledge, love and practice of the right.'" At 98.

These are but a few of the views that comprise the broad spectrum of religious beliefs found among us. But they demonstrate very clearly the diverse manners in which beliefs, equally paramount in the lives of their possessors, may be articulated. They further reveal the difficulties inherent in placing too narrow a construction on the provisions of 6 (j) and thereby lend conclusive support to the construction which we today find that Congress intended.

5. We recognize the difficulties that have always faced the trier of fact in these cases. We hope that the test that we lay down proves less onerous. The examiner is furnished [380 U.S. 163, 184] a standard that permits consideration of criteria with which he has had considerable experience. While the applicant's words may differ, the test is simple of application. It is essentially an objective one, namely, does the claimed belief occupy the same place in the life of the objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption?

I guess it will be OK then to quote Robert P. George when arguing future cases on gay marriage.

Wireless Internet Cri de Coeur

Way back in 2000, I had a (circa) 128kbps wireless internet connection for an all-you-can-eat price of about $70 a month. It was the late, lamented, Ricochet service which is back in operation in a few cities after being bought for a pittance after Metricom's bankruptcy (August 8, 2001). One would think that after three years I would easily be able to buy an even faster, more widely spread, and more convenient wireless internet service -- but one would be wrong.

Every time I've checked since August 8, 2001, my Ricochet modem shows 3 or 4 poletop radios still going strong. Still sucking juice. Someone could easily have made $1470 from me since then just by enabling my connection and charging me $70/month (I had two accounts). I still look at the poletop units around my office and at the end of the street where I live. But I can't use them.

Current services from the major wireless voice companies are expensive, slow, and inflexible. They expect you to use them on your phone. All of the wireless modems are PC Card devices. The thought that you might like to use your desktop machine with a wireless internet service hasn't occurred to anyone. (Ricochet had USB modems available.) The companies don't promote these services and you have to dig deeply even to figure out what they are called. One has to hunt around on web sites (usually on the pages targeted at business users) to find anything.

Why can't anyone supply a wireless network that's:

- widespread,
- fast enough (128kbps+),
- cheap enough (>$50/month flat rate),
- easy to use (multiple connection PC card, USB, or Ethernet),
- usable with handheld, laptop, and desktop computers, and
- actually marketed (so people know about it)?

For the benefit of the 2 readers of this blog, and to give me an easy place to click, here are the current names, urls, prices, and speeds(ha!) of the major services. I'm ignoring equipment costs and only listing the monthly cost of the plan that lets you send and receive the most data.

AT&T
Mobile Internet
http://www.attws.com/mobileinternet/bus_plan.jhtml
$99.99/month for 100MB ($0.0010/KB thereafter) - $49.99/month Unlimited for their Blackberry service

Verizon
Express Network
http://www.verizonwireless.com/express_network/
$79.99/month Unlimited
Speed - 40kbps -140kbps

T-Mobile
T-Mobile Internet
http://www.t-mobile.com/tmobile_internet/rates.asp
$99.99/month for 200MB ($2.00/MB thereafter)

Sprint
PCS Vision (PCS Vision for Laptops and PDAs)
http://www.pcsvision.com/bconnect.html
$80.00/month Unlimited
Note: You actually have to look at the bottom of this page to get a hint that Sprint offers genuine mobile internet service.

Free Those Vectors!

Re Jacob Levy's latest on the topic:

[John Derbyshire] may not advocate sodomy laws, but his obsessive denigration of gay folks surely rivals that of the most devoted Leviticus-thumper. But still.

Then along comes a clear reminder that there are people it's simply indecent to even be in a broad-tent coalition with, that even in 2003 the most unreconstructed kind of southern racism is still out there. There are bounds of decency to be observed in every political direction; and everyone who hopes to be effective in politics has to engage in complicated and probably-unsatisfactory balancing acts.

Jacob Levy seems to spend a lot of time criticizing people as homophobic or racist. Is this useful politically? Since neither of those views is inconsistent with libertarianism (in the absence of the initiation of force), wouldn't it make more sense to criticize the views of people who believe in things like government schools, taxation, or even vector control districts? Those ideas are inconsistent with human liberty and more dangerous than racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, ageism, ad infinitum.

And Prof. Levy replies in a nice long juicy Volokh Conspiracy post:

... [F]irst of all, I don't measure my writing against the standard of whether it's useful politically in some general way. (Useful to whom?)

Second of all, I do think that it *matters* for political effectiveness that one draw some boundaries. ...

Third: extended argument about the rights and wrongs of one or another kind of state action require, well, extended argument. ...

The mainstream conservative movement learned this a long time ago; William Buckley knew that conservatism couldn't be effective without drawing clear lines between itself and, say, the John Birch Society. ...

[P]reserving some bit of shared common ground about decent public discourse has some priority. For similar reasons, procedural norms have a priority in politics that they don't have simply morally. Everyone in politics has an obligation to monitor their own side as well as the other side for rulebreakers, violators of procedures, those who pose some threat to the stability of democratic institutions or to the rule of law, and to take action against such rulebreakers-- ...

Read the whole thing it's worth it.

In the course of quoting my original note, Prof. Levy queried my use of the phrase vector control districts [?? JTL].

I can't tell if the question was "What's a VCD?" or "Why put VCDs on a list with taxes and government schools?"

It was on the list for humorous juxtaposition.

As libertarians, it's important to note the exact design of our chains. A VCD is a local agency that controls disease vectors (rats, skeeters, etc.). It's one of those classic public goods that people are always beating up libertarians about not supplying in their social non-designs.

Later, in a follow-up post Prof Levy discussed his correspondence on the subject:

[Jacob Levy, 9:04 AM]
"Vector control districts": Several people have written in to tell me that "vector control districts" are Californian administrative districts that have as their purpose the controlling of disease vectors, i.e. rats, mosquitoes. Some correspondents thought of them as yet another in the endlessly-proliferating number of pesky, slightly-intrusive, slightly-expensive Californian agencies and levels of government. Others thought their services obvious public goods. My original correspondent, the one who had listed them alongside taxes and state schools, writes: "It was on the list for humorous juxtaposition."

Residential Picketing

Eugene Volokh:

Cities are also constitutionally allowed to bar even peaceful residential picketing (the Supreme Court so held in Frisby v. Schultz (1989), which involved anti-abortion protesters), but to my knowledge Los Angeles doesn't have such an ordinance.

Isn't this misleading?

Doesn't Frisby v. Schultz (1989) just permit ordinances that bar "focused picketing" in front of the target's house. As long as picketers march up and down the block they can't be banned completely.

"We reject this suggestion. Our prior holdings make clear that a public street does not lose its status as a traditional public forum simply because it runs through a residential neighborhood. In Carey v. Brown - which considered a statute similar to the one at issue here, ultimately striking it down as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because it included an exception for labor picketing - we expressly recognized that "public streets and sidewalks in residential neighborhoods," were "public for[a]." 447 U.S., at 460 -461. This rather ready identification virtually forecloses appellants' argument. See also Perry, supra, at 54-55 (noting that the "key" to Carey "was the presence of a public forum")."

But...

"The First Amendment permits the government to prohibit offensive speech as intrusive when the "captive" audience cannot avoid the objectionable speech. The resident is figuratively, and perhaps literally, trapped within the home, and because of the unique and subtle impact of such picketing is left with no ready means of avoiding the unwanted speech. Thus, the "evil" of targeted residential picketing, "the very presence of an unwelcome visitor at the home," is "created by the medium of expression itself." Accordingly, the Brookfield ordinance's complete ban of that particular medium of expression is narrowly tailored. "

As to your comment:

"To my knowledge Los Angeles doesn't have such an ordinance."

Counter demos and armed householders are self-help options that are easier for targeted individuals to employ than obtaining protective legislation would be.

Modern Sin

KURTZ ON SANTORUM AGAIN

I have no objection to Catholicism identifying sodomy as a sin. I'm not Catholic, and it's a mistake for an outsider to critique religious doctrines on the grounds that they insufficiently resemble the principles of a liberal democratic state. On the other hand, the religious basis for a set of political views provides no immunity against their being criticized by non-believers, and indeed invites a new line of inquiry as to whether the line between the civic and the religious is being maintained in the right place and the right way. It's not bigotry to remind a politician of the truth Eugene's been emphasizing in his Ten Commandment posts-- that it's also a mistake to treat the internal doctrines of one's religion as sufficient reason for legislation and coercion, that it's a mistake to criticize the liberal democratic state for insufficiently resembling one's own church.

Of course the "doctrine of the liberal democratic state" is also not a sufficient reason for legislation and coercion. Those who object to the imposition of religious doctrine on the heathen have a point. But they lose that point when they choose to impose their legal regime on non-believers (the faithful).

So if you want persons who hold traditional religious views on sin and proper behavior to do their own heavy lifting instead of using the State to do it for them then you can't outlaw traditional methods of religious moral expression. The Church used to be in charge of domestic relations law, blasphemy, Sabbath keeping, etc. There's no reason that the churches couldn't do it again. I think that the takeover of such areas of law by the nation state during its growth phase was very unfortunate.

But if they are to do so you can't outlaw actions by believers designed to discourage sin which don't initiate force. You can't outlaw picketing of abortion clinics. You can't outlaw positive discrimination in favor of the righteous (the Christian Yellow Pages), economic boycotts of heathens or sinners, and a patriarchal family organization.

So out go antidiscrimination laws (which are major human rights violations in any case). Believers must be free to fire heathens or sinners, refuse to hire them, refuse to rent to them, etc. Picketing can't be punished with RICO suits. Churches must be allowed to defend their buildings and communities from attacks by their enemies. Thus communists or other leftists who attack churches must be held as "outlawed" (unprotected by civil law) while they are on church property. Churches and their members must be able to recognize only marriages which meet their standards and discriminate against those not meeting those standards. Since disfellowship will be their major means of moral promotion, churches and their followers must be allowed to discriminate economically against the heathen and they must be able to forcefully exclude the heathen from their religious services and properties. An independent legal regime of sorts. That status for religious properties has a lot of traditional support.

You must also either end Public Education, or at least compulsory education, or allow believers trapped in that unfortunate system to protect their children from the godless atheistic communism of educators. They must be able to exempt their children from sex education, earth-worship, secular ethics, and much of the rest of the curriculum. Unregulated private schooling and home schooling must be explicitly legalized.

The State can't both fail to protect the rights of traditionalists to lead traditional lives and at the same time prevent them from themselves protecting their right to lead traditional lives.

Towers' Strength Not Tested for a Fire, Inquiry Suggests

Towers' Strength Not Tested for a Fire, Inquiry Suggests

Federal investigators studying the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, say they now believe that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government agency that built the towers, never performed the fundamental tests needed to determine how their innovative structures would perform in a fire.

The preliminary finding, if it holds up, will undermine decades of public assurances by the Port Authority that the twin towers met or exceeded the requirements of New York City's building code, and therefore would be structurally safe in a large fire. The codes are based on tests of each building component in furnaces that subject the structures, and the fireproofing insulation that protects them, to the harsh conditions of a major fire.

"At this point, we don't know why the tests were not done," said Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, who is leading the eight-month-old investigation at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But Dr. Sunder added, "To the best of our knowledge, they were not done."

The article spends a little time discussing whether or not full scale fire resistance tests were performed on some of the design elements. The answer to this question is "no one knows". They do mention in passing the question of whether the lack of testing contributed to the collapse.

Completely undiscussed are questions like:

- Were full-scale fire tests of building designs standard engineering practice in the 1960s when the WTC was designed?

- Are full-scale fire tests of building designs (not computer simulations) standard engineering practice today?

- If no full-scale tests were done, does that mean that the Towers did not meet NYC fire codes in effect at the time?

- If no full-scale tests were done, does that mean that the Towers' design was dangerous?

- Should the tests have been performed with the originally-specified asbestos insulation in place, with the substitute insulation used on 100% of Tower 2 and 60% of Tower 1, or with modern insulation?

- Can we borrow the Empire State Building to crash a fully-fueled 767 into it to see how a traditionally-designed skyscraper survives the experience?

Priority of Taboo Maintenance

Yet More on Gay Marriage
Jacob Levy on Stanley Kurtz of NRO fame:

His [Stanley Kurtz's] panic at the thought of legalized gay marriage has always struck me as absurd. ... It's wrong; and it doesn't even try to make a case for the priority of taboo-maintenance over the moral concerns on the other side.

Traditional sex regulation is not absurd on its face. It was a broad based regulatory scheme that sought to control sexual behavior and channel it into heterosexual child-focussed marriage. Thus fornication, adultery, sodomy, and bigamy were outlawed as was prostitution. Because the authorities recognized that such behaviors were tough to control through the operation of the criminal law because of proof problems, they also banned lewd cohabitation (living in sin) and lascivious carriage (being in a compromising physical position with another) since these were easier to prove.

Now we as moderns may reject their desire to promote marriage and mixed-gender, monogamous-couple, child rearing but it's disingenuous to claim shock at the tradition. It's been around for a long time. Moreover, I can name hundreds (thousands) of modern regulatory inventions that are absurd on their face and represent significant violations of our traditional liberties: smoking bans, stock parking bans, outlawing discrimination against transvestites, requirements that home builders install wide bedroom doors, bans on private ownership of Kevlar vests ad infinitum.

Surely this statement by Orin Kerr can't be true:

The 2002 Wiretap Report is now out ... . Keep in mind that the report covers only wiretapping performed in criminal cases, and does not include wiretapping in national security cases. Those numbers are classified.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap numbers are reported annually. Here's the latest one covering 2001. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has a complete set of reports on this page.

Now, wiretaps of communications outside the US aren't under FISA but those conducted in the US are supposed to be.

The Pro Market Party vs the Pro Sodomy Party

As between someone who believes that all non-heterosexual-marital sexual activity ought to be criminalized and someone who does not believe that, there's a difference in kind, one I have trouble commensurating with the tax difference [between Republicans & Democrats].

Casting the Dems as pro privacy, pro protection of intimate relations, and pro sanctity of the home is disingenuous. Any party that claims the right to design your toilets and the width of your bedroom door for you [and imprison you for disobedience] can hardly gain absolution from charges of tyranny by permitting you some forms of sexual intercourse.

Consider a list of things the Democrat Party won't let you do "in the privacy of your own home.":

* Install high-water-volume flush toilets.
* Install narrow residential doors (must be wide enough for crips in chairs).
* Eliminate smoke/CO2 detectors.
* Hire/fire/teach/trade/earn/profess (with other consenting adults) as you please.
* Possess firearms (in many cases).
* Worship with others (zoning).
* Keep your own money and keep your own financial affairs secret.

In fact, the whole panoply of state regulation and taxation extends into the home. If the Feds can design and mandate your toilets, that is certainly "government regulation of an intimate association".

But what about the Democrat Party and issues of sexual behavior. I see little evidence that their position is preferable to the Republican position -- and it's arguably worse. Republicans consist of religious conservatives, BoBos (bourgeois bohemians), and libertarians. Those groups differ in specifics but not even all religious conservatives believe that intimate relations should be controlled by the criminal law. On the other hand, the Democrat Party is pretty monolithic in believing that certain forms of intimate sexual relations should be controlled by government.

Sodomy yes -- Modesty no!

There are many forms of intimate sexual (or gender) behavior that the Dems seek to suppress. Here are a few:

* Patriarchy (note that Patriarchy is a form of gender preference that should logically be protected if other sexual and gender preferences are).
* Modesty
* Sexual Restraint
* Innocence

If you seek to pursue traditional intimate relationships, the Dems will try anything to stop you including criminal punishment. Teachers will attempt to destroy the innocence of your children (if you send them to government schools). The various "Children's Services Divisions" in the states will invade your home and arrest you if you deviate from modern approved child-rearing techniques. (I've often wondered why those who are criticized for spanking or other forms of domestic discipline don't defend themselves by referring to it as Bondage & Discipline.) The law will prevent you from controlling or even knowing about the medical treatment of your children. Massive taxation combined with massive wealth transfers will destroy the ability of a husband to support a wife and children and have the effect of replacing patriarchy with state tyranny.

MORE ON LIBERTARIANS, DEMOCRATS, AND REPUBLICANS

A reader writes: What perplexes center-left types like myself . . . who are often sympathetic to Libertarian attitudes on cultural questions is why most Libertarians privilege issues of tax policy and economic regulation on which they are more closely aligned with Republicans over issues of privacy (sexual and otherwise) and free expression

About 15 years ago, I heard a pretty good answer to this question, from a fellow named Charles Fuller. As I recall, he put it more or less this way, of course as a broad generalization: The Republicans want to control my sex life, and the Democrats want to control my economic life; these days -- perhaps not always, but these days -- it's much harder for the government to control my sex life than my economic life, so the Democrats are the bigger threat.

Two quotes from PJ O'Rourke can help with the analysis:

"Republican politicians are better than Democrat politicians because they don't support gun control so if you don't like them you can just shoot them."
[The following is not a quote but a restatement, I can't remember the quote.]
"Republicans want to control my sex and drugs while the Democrats want to control my money which means that they want to control my whole life." [Since money touches on all of life.]

I would also deny your correspondent's claim that the Reps are worse on Free Expressions than the Dems. The Reps have been much friendlier to Free Expression in conflicts over broadcasting deregulation, commercial speech liberalization, corporate political speech, speech on campus, campaign finance, union dues/forced political contributions, and even street picketing (abortion clinics) than have the Dems. And the Republican dominated Supremes are more liberal than the Warren Court on Free Expression.

PERSONAL OR MORAL VALUES

More importantly, the question is not whether incest, or for that matter homosexuality, is "acceptable" to "a higher power above self," or whether one should say about it, "if it feels good, do it." Rather, the question is whether people should be sent to jail for engaging in this behavior. Even if, as a Christian, you believe that (1) being rude to your father or mother, (2) taking the Lord's name in vain, (3) engaging in premarital heterosexual sex, or (4) committing incest are immoral, there's still the further question of whether coercive secular force (as opposed to, say, moral suasion, or divine retribution) should be used to punish those who engage in this behavior. Simply saying "this is immoral" or "this violates the Biblical rules" by itself says nothing about what civil government should do about it.

Indeed Christ, himself, in his major disquisition on Jurisprudence in Matthew 18:15-17 says what punishment should consist of:

15: Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
16: But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
17: And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.

Apparently, he favored disfellowship to imprisonment or execution as the ultimate punishment for transgressions. I wonder if the unbelievers (heathen) and the IRS agents (publicans) realize they are being punished.

Read Prof. Volokh on the "Santorum Scandal":
A FAUX SCANDAL

Good stuff.

As for the Santorum quote itself:

"And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

I'm not that hot for incest or adultery. I'm hoping to privately practice consensual firearms ownership, teaching, practice of medicine, and the general buying and selling of goods in my home without any control by the Criminal Law.

The Iraqi War is officially over.

How do I know? Through yesterday BBC News 24 was streaming its full video feed through links like this.

Today all we are left with is a dumb New Headlines loop.

I want 24 hour video to my desktop. I'll even pay. I had it back in '98 from the Fox News Channel but they stopped allegedly over the streaming ad ban. Why is something I had in '98 so hard to get today?

Handful of Lawmakers Send Their Kids to War

WASHINGTON — For U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., her vote to support the troops was also a vote to support her son.

The mother of a sailor currently serving on a Navy submarine tender in the Mediterranean, Musgrave is one of a small group of congressional members who have sons currently serving in the military and possibly participating in the war with Iraq....

Though there is no comprehensive list, there are at least seven members of Congress with children in the Armed Forces — a small number, but not surprising, according to historians who say the number of congressional sons and daughters serving in the military has declined steadily since the Vietnam War era.

"My suspicion is that it's pretty rare," said Donald Zillman, a military expert and professor of law at the University of Maine. “Basically, that's not where congressmen's kids are heading off."...

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., a National Guard member and a Persian Gulf War veteran — one of at least three Gulf veterans in the House, including Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., who was called to active duty in the Gulf last week — said he is heartened that his son has received such superior training.

"It gives me encouragement, knowing the training they've had," he said of his son Alan, 29, who is a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard and is likely to be activated. Alan is the oldest of three sons — the other two are a Naval Academy graduate and a cadet in the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corp. ...

During the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 American lives were lost, anti-war protesters made much of the fact that 118 out of 234 House members' and senators' sons eligible for the draft took college deferments to avoid service. ...

Today, there is no draft, and the numbers are even lower, indicating that military service is no longer a badge of honor for the political elite, or encouraged for their children, said Zillman.

So let me get this straight. Members of Congress and their children are underrepresented in the US armed forces. "At least seven members of Congress with children in the Armed Forces." That's the numerator of the equation. Where's the friggin' denominator. How many non-members of Congress have children in the Armed Forces?

Since this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I'll grab the 1997 World Almanac off the shelf and determine that in 1995 we had circa 1,547,000 persons on active duty and 2,045,000 in the reserves. This totals 3,592,000. I don't know if the National Guard is included. So, assume that there were about 270,000,000 Americans at the time, that gives us a figure of 1.33% of the population in the Armed Forces. We can also assume that 1.33% of fathers and 1.33% of mothers (living or dead) have a child in the Armed Forces (ignoring for simplicity's sake multiple-service families). Multiply 535 Members of Congress (House + Senate) times 1.33% and you get 7.12. So Congresscritters seem to map reasonably well with the general population.

Now I know this isn't a definitive study because we don't have real numbers for Congressional kids (and Members!) in the Military. And we haven't normed Congress to adjust for age and parenthood and numerous other factors but it's probably close.

So why do reporters make unsupported claims as above when some of them, at least, could be easily checked?

In an Instapundit piece on militia action in Saddam City, Master Reynolds writes:

"Sadly, the story doesn't really shed much light on the how-armed-are-Iraqis question,"

But in this radio piece from NPR's All Things Considered, today, the reporter says that the Shiia militiamen were so happy to play with their AK-47s because they couldn't have guns under Saddam.

Here's the Real Audio link.

Here's the money quote:

"... these Shiia men; they clearly are enjoying walking the streets with their AK-47s they're shooting them in the air at night because they could never carry these weapons under Saddam."

Armed Human Shields -- from the WSJ (Subscription Required)

From a WSJ article on Iraqi engineers, Marines, and human shields at the Sabanissan Water Treatment Project in Baghdad:

The human shields, mostly Western antiwar activists who placed themselves in harm's way to discourage the U.S. from bombing civilian sites, added to Mr. Kinany's wartime headaches. The five men and two women from the U.S., England, Japan, Norway and Australia arrived at the end of February, accompanied by Iraqi intelligence agents, and promptly set up a commune of sorts in the top managers' office suite. It fell to the engineers to provide them with food and water. "To be frank, we hated them in the beginning," Mr. Kinany said.

He got to know the group and grew to like them, especially after the invasion of Baghdad began and looters started prowling around the plant. Thursday night, Marc Eubanks, 41, an American peace activist who spent four years each in the U.S. Army and the Air Force, and another shield agreed to patrol the grounds with an AK-47 assault rifle taken from a stash the engineers kept. On Friday, Mr. Kinany and Mr. Eubanks confronted looters, with the former G.I. speaking English and leaving the impression that perhaps he was an American soldier.

"Go and tell your partners the Americans are here, and they will destroy your houses" if you don't leave, Mr. Kinany yelled at the looters in Arabic.

"It was rather an ironic situation -- first we wanted to protect them from the Americans and then from [Iraqi] looters," said Geir Angell Oygarden, a 35-year-old Norwegian shield and social scientist.

I guess human shields who pretend to be American soldiers are worth more than those who don't. But doesn't that violate some sort of Human Shield Code of Ethics or something?

What if Iraq Had Revolted Instead?

It is generally agreed that the people of Iraq would have been justified in organizing and carrying out a revolution to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein.

If they had revolted, and particularly if they had succeeded in overthrowing the government, the cost in material and human terms would have been high. Vast amounts of money and time would have had to have been expended. Physical damage from war fighting would have been massive. Casualties among the revolutionaries, the populace, and the government forces would have been very high.

The revolution would have taken a while. It would have been fought with relatively primitive weapons and the revolutionaries would have been unable to overawe large chunks of the government forces into running away without fighting. On top of everything else, the risk of the revolutionaries losing would have been great.

In the event, Iraq got its revolution for free with minimal damage to property and minimal loss of life on all sides. The nation is already receiving the first of what will be billions of dollars in aid. All in a war that the "Forces of Free Iraq" couldn't have lost.

As a US taxpayer, I might have a logical right to complain about our generosity to the Iraqi Revolution. But I can't see the logic of any complaints from Iraqis (or others). Anyone who thought that Saddam should have been forced out got his wish fulfilled on the cheap.

Cops use ID info in criminal cases

Scanning a driver's license at the local liquor store can reveal more than just age.

When a patron's ID is scanned to ensure authenticity at a liquor store, the person's purchase and identification information is added to the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's (PLCB) electronic database in Harrisburg, PLCB spokeswoman Molly McGowan said.

Police can retrieve the information for use in criminal cases, she said.

For example, an underage man died of alcohol poisoning at a party in Bloomsburg about two years ago, McGowan said. Going back through the electronic database, authorities were able to locate where the alcohol was purchased and find the person responsible for bringing it to the party, she said. The buyer was later criminally charged for his involvement, she added.

Why are people using DLs for ID. Always use your passport. It can't be challenged and it has no useful info on it. No number anyone but State can track. No address. Nothing. I use my drivers license once every 4 years to renew my drivers license. I also use it when stopped by cops while operating a motor vehicle which happens twice a decade. Finally I use it to rent cars. No other reason.

OPERATION LIBERTY SHIELD--WHERE'S THE PROBLEM?

Given my work on the Japanese American internment, I was initially skeptical of the program, but when I looked at the program carefully I learned that the interviews were voluntary (as the government said they were),...
Compared to prior wars, stretching all the way back to the war of 1812, and especially compared to the excesses of World War I and World War II, the program is positively gentle.

I certainly agree that the Post-September 11th enforcement activities have been less intrusive than WWI, WWII, and even the early 1950's. More than 200,000 were interned (Japanese and others) after Pearl Harbor.

I would quibble however with the author's (and everyone else's) comment that the Liberty Shield interviews were voluntary. All police interviews are voluntary. All government interviews are voluntary except some of those conducted in court. You never have to chat with cops or enforcement types.

SCALIA'S INTERESTING QUESTION

The State of Michigan, of course, contends just the opposite; its position is that racial diversity is one crucial component of elite-level academic excellence. I’m inclined to agree; my own personal experience of teaching for four years at a racially homogeneous law school (the University of Wyoming) and now at a racially integrated one (UNC) tells me that racial diversity does in fact contribute importantly to full and rigorous discussion and debate in a law school classroom. So at the end of the day, I guess I disagree with Scalia.

Since racial minorities tend to have the same ideology as law school professors and law school students, isn't it arguable that a better mix could be achieved by discriminating in favor of libertarian and conservative students and professors than in favor of [some] racial minorities?

St. Louis Official Resigns Over Joke
"Public Defender in St. Louis Resigns Over Racial Joke He Told to Underlings at Work"

But in a major journalistic failure, the story doesn't tell us the joke.

Senate Approves Soviet-Style Exit Tax

The Senate voted unanimously Thursday for an old Democrat proposal -- an exit tax on those who renounce US citizenship. This is supposedly an offset for the tax reductions for service personnel contained in the Armed Forces Tax Fairness Act of 2003. This is one of those fake budget deals where a tax cut has to be offset by a tax increase or a spending cut to "pay" for the tax cut (even though a tax cut is largely costless).

The bill would declare expatriation a taxable event and assume all your property was sold on the day before expatriation. You would then owe taxes on the "sale". There is a $600K exemption and some exemptions for minors and dual-national-at-birth-non-US-residents who renounce.

The House version of the bill lacks the exit tax provision so it's off to Conference.

See my Official Taxpatriates Page for more information on this topic and a list of those who have renounced recently.

TruthAboutWar.org (a libertarian site) has been publishing misleading claims about the US supplying Saddam with chemical and biological WMDs. This is strange complaint since libertarians presumably favor free trade in chemical and biological materials and precursor technologies as well as private possession of same. The claims (which have appeared elsewhere) are misleading because tight restrictions on the distribution of such materials were not put into place until the end of the 1980s. Additionally, anyone who knows anything about Iraq's order of battle knows that he got most of his weapons from the Soviet Union.

Here is a letter to the editor from today's WSJ that is too important to hide:

From the Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor Page 26 March 2003 [Subscription Required]

Those Iraqi Weapons Are Not U.S.-Made

In regard to Robert L. Bartley's Thinking Things Over column and the editorial-page commentary by Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz, both published March 24, referencing U.S. exports to Iraq that were approved by the Commerce Department during the 1980s:

Before readers assume there was some hidden agenda at Commerce to promote commercial sales to Iraq at the expense of U.S. security, the following additional points not mentioned in either article ought to be considered:

• It was the explicit policy of the U.S. government from the mid-1980s until the Iraq trade embargo in August 1990 that any Commerce Department approval of a commercial export to Iraq occur only with the prior consent of the Defense Department to ensure there would be no military benefit from the sale; certain commercial sales, but no weapon sales, were approved;

• Some of the items referenced as "approved by Commerce" in the Milhollin/Motz article were in fact not approved by Commerce because they required no approval for export to Iraq or any other country for that matter -- they were not on the control list at the time. Those agencies responsible in the U.S. government for defining the technologies that have weapons uses didn't include many biotech and chemical items in their assessments until 1989. Items on the control list that were "approvable" at the time were a matter of public record;

• Although not widely publicized, Commerce withheld export approval of many items destined to Iraq even though Defense had okayed the sales and there was scant legal basis at the time to deny the transactions. The combination of technology and end users didn't pass the "I want to sleep tonight" test. In some cases, Commerce officials telephoned U.S. executives to dissuade them from shipping and encouraged them to withdraw their export applications -- which worked more often than not, even though the reasons were often classified and couldn't be revealed to the exporter;

• Commerce was (and still is) an advocate in Washington for establishing U.S. and multilateral controls by key exporting nations on sensitive chemicals, biotech products and commercial products with nuclear weapons or missile applications. U.S.-led efforts were largely successful in the late 1980s and 1990s in getting other countries to agree to common restricted lists of these items. (Cooperation on implementation has not always been uniform, however.);

• Finally, in coordination with other agencies, Commerce issued regulations in early 1991 creating the legal authority to deny any U.S. export, even pencils and paper clips, if the destination was related to weapons of mass destruction, not just in the Persian Gulf region, but also in a number of areas around the world. Moreover, this authority has been used in real time by Commerce Department officials to interdict shipments that were already in progress but had not reached their final destination.

The weapons of the Iraqi military shown now on television are not U.S.-made, and any "blame America" suggestions don't have a basis in fact.

With 20-20 hindsight, we can all wish there had been a multilateral commercial trade embargo against Iraq long before 1990, so as to remove any doubt that a U.S.-made product might even tangentially contribute to keeping Saddam in power one second longer.

We can wish that U.S. intelligence assets were targeted to a greater extent on the Persian Gulf region in addition to the Soviet Union during the 1980s, so that the U.S. and other countries might have known more and acted sooner against the Iraqi regime.

But these issues were hashed out during the first Gulf War and are largely old news.

We can also wish the lessons from pre-1990 trade with Iraq would be learned and applied by the U.S. government to other countries with dubious leadership. In fact they were, more than 10 years ago, in export regulations issued by the Department of Commerce. Somehow, this is still news.

James M. LeMunyon
Oak Hill, Va.

(Mr. LeMunyon was the deputy assistant secretary for export administration at the Commerce Department from 1989-1993.)

Updated March 26, 2003

Wearing Hats at the Council of Trent

New York Times hit piece on conservative Catholics (and Mel Gibson) due Sunday. According to the NY Post's Page Six:

Mel Gibson's unholy Sunday

MEL Gibson is furious at the New York Times over a story that will depict him as a pope-hating, conspiracy-minded cultist.
...
It's no wonder Gibson was upset. In a story in this Sunday's Times Magazine, Noxon writes that Gibson embraces an ultra-traditional "strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives."

The traditionalists disdain the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, say Mass in Latin, and fast on Fridays. Women wear hats in church.

What bizarre cult practices are next. The rosary, family prayer, kneeling? Perhaps if Mel wanted to satisfy the Times' exquisite religious sensibilities, he should have adopted more orthodox practices like latex, B&D, animal sacrifice, or yoga.

God Is An Anarcho-Capitalist A Heretical Hypothesis on Liberty

Both believers and unbelievers in God seem willing to continuously quote Matthew 22:21 as the basis for secular government, and wisely so in my opinion, as far as government is concerned. The verse linked, which is an answer to a question posed to Jesus about payment of taxes, and references whose portrait and inscription appears on a coin, states,

[Matthew 22:17-21 quoted for fuller understanding and translation changed to the KJV for esthetics.]
"17: Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?
18: But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?
19: Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.
20: And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?
21: They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."

Since JC's skills as a rhetorician were unaffected by the fact that he was human, it's important to note what this remark doesn't say. He was clearly trying to be ambiguous to avoid the trap his enemies had set for him. His statement doesn't take a position on the question "Who is Caesar"? and it doesn't really supply a definitive answer to the question "What, specifically, is Caesar's"? Pretty slick -- as one would have a right to expect. For his listeners, the phrase "things which are Caesar's" could be taken either way. And in our era, the replacement of Caesar with sovereignty by "all of us" in some nations leaves open the possibility that if "we are Caesar", we can render to ourselves. Not a justification for government in any case.

Now Improved Clinch goes on to quote the excellent verses from Samuel:

"And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, ... he will take your daughters, ... he will take your fields, ... he will take the tenth of your seed, ... he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, ... He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants." -- First Book of Samuel, Chapter 8, Verses 11 to 17. [My condensation]

I guess having a King is a rejection of God.

In addition to those there are quotes like:

"In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." -- The Book of Judges, Chapter 17, Verse 6.

And King David's punishment for the major sin of conducting a census:

[1] And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.
[3} ... but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord's servants? why then doth my lord require this thing? why will he be a cause of trespass to Israel?
[7] And God was displeased with this thing; therefore he smote Israel. 1 Chronicles 21.

And then we have JC's discussion of jurisprudence from Matthew 18

Here's his idea of conflict resolution:

15: Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
16: But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
17: And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.

In other words -- disfellowship the ultimate punishment. A pretty anarchist idea.

A "publican" was a tax farmer BTW. For those unfamiliar with this species of insect, a tax farmer was someone who placed a bid with the central government as to how much he would pay in cash for the right to collect the taxes from a given district. He then got to tax the residents for all he could get. His profit was the difference between amount paid to the central government and the amount he managed to extract. Publicans occur throughout the gospels whenever JC or someone wants to think up the worst form of humanity they can imagine.

Gods and Generals Redux
Professor Volokh speaks about the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. I differ.

But I hope that our soldiers are not being asked to defend the one item that the Ninth Circuit said may not be included in the teacher-led Pledge, which is our nation's being "under God." Theologically speaking, I don't think they can defend this, since our nation is or is not under God whatever our soldiers might do. Practically speaking, I don't think it's wise for us to be fighting wars over "under God." Morally speaking, they ought not be required to defend this. We can exhort our soldiers to believe in "liberty and justice," and even demand that they do so; and we can rightly say that a soldier who doesn't believe in liberty and justice is a worse American than one who does. But we ought not exhort our soldiers to believe in God, we may not demand that they do so, and atheist, agnostic, polytheist, or pantheist soldiers are just as worthy as monotheist ones.

I'm not sure that we can or should demand that our soldiers believe in "liberty and justice" either. Wouldn't such an exhortation suffer from the same 1A problems as God apparently does. After all what about our communist soldiers, socialist soldiers, Democrat soldiers, Republican soldiers, etc. They can't all be forced to profess libertarianism.

Which raises the general question of modern Church-State law in America -- why is religion unique? Apparently a government school is free to teach socialism or psychology as "truth" but not anything officially designated "religion". Indeed, many government schools do teach these belief systems (perhaps to the detriment of their pupils). One could make a whole list -- feminism, environmentalism, pedagocracy (to coin a word), esthetics, the political and moral superiority of the oppressed, etc. -- of belief systems that can (and are) taught in government schools without constitutional problems. Conservatives claim, in fact, that the schools are teaching the "religion of secular humanism" and it may be so. They certainly inculcate strange belief systems in their children (one reason I never sent mine to such institutions).

Now in the reverse case -- privileges for religion -- the Supremes in the two major conscientious objector cases UNITED STATES v. SEEGER, 380 U.S. 163 (1965) and WELSH v. UNITED STATES, 398 U.S. 333 (1970) determined that non-religious objections to all war - even a well-developed political philosophy in Welsh - was sufficient to give rise to CO status.

Why then is religion treated differently from other philosophies in government schools? Now it would be impossible to ban teaching of all philosophies (science, for example) in school so it seems to me that one must either end government education or end the discrimination against a single form of philosophy.

MP apologizes for 'bastards' remark

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

OTTAWA -- A Liberal MP quickly apologized Wednesday after making an offensive offhand remark about the United States.

Carolyn Parrish was walking away from reporters after expressing frustration about the likelihood of war in Iraq when she said in mock exasperation: ''Damn Americans, I hate the bastards.''

But can Americans be bastards if no one else can? And is it appropriate for a Canadian elected official to make a religious statement concerning the status of the soul of another.

Lost in all the anger and angst about this remark is the peculiarity of a hard left MP using such a politically incorrect word as "bastard" or a religious term like "damn".

Persons of her ilk aren't even allowed to call bastards bastards these days. Since in modern law "[o]bviously, no child is responsible for his birth..." bastardy has been eliminated. Which would suggest that "Americans" must be free of that ancient stain as well.

And as for her claim that Americans are bound for Hell, I can't imagine that this is the official position of the liberal party.

I think perhaps that she should make an attempt to update her invective. Safer to call us fascists or racists or something.

So in December 1992, I was in a meeting on the 68th floor of One World Trade Center to discuss the business resumption plan of an organization with which I had a contract. The discussion turned to possible threats that might cause us to need a business resumption plan. Natural disasters were thought of as the major risk. Lower Manhattan is at risk from ocean surge flooding and earthquakes are possible. Someone finally mentioned terrorism as a possibility. The consensus seemed to be that that risk was low. I pointed out that, even though we were then apparently at peace, war was also a risk.

Two months later, terrorists detonated a bomb in the basement of the building we were meeting in.

Nine years later, the whole complex was destroyed in an attack which can only be characterized as an act of war.

I was as surprised as anyone.

The 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City

Wednesday 26 February 12:18 PM EST is the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing.

The attack killed six people and injured over a thousand.

Killed were John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child.

Here is the [now destroyed] memorial to that bombing:

Its inscription read:

On February 26, 1993, a bomb set by terrorists exploded below this site. This horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured thousands, and made victims of us all.

Thanks to the International Foundation for Art Research website.

A one-foot-square fragment of marble from the memorial was recovered from the WTC site and will be used in a temporary memorial [New York Times -- Registration required].

Most of the 1993 conspirators have been tried and are in prison. None received the death penalty because they were tried in the Southern District of New York whose juries are reluctant to impose that penalty.

From The Guardian: A new breed of terror

As an FBI helicopter took him to a cell on Manhattan, Bill Gavin, the head of the FBI in New York, leant forward and eased [Ramzi] Yousef's blindfold away from his eyes. "Look down there," he said to Yousef, gesturing towards the twin towers. "They're still standing." Yousef squinted and looked out of the window. "They wouldn't be if I had had enough money and explosives," he replied defiantly.

Bibliography of the 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center

Best book is the out-of-print Two Seconds Under the World: Terror Comes to America - The Conspiracy Behind the World Trade Center Bombing by Jim Dwyer, Deidre Murphy, Peg Tyre, David Kocieniewski.
----

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. -- The 91st Psalm

So I was watching Guilty by Suspicion the other day and noted that lefties oppose some coerced Congressional testimony (by the Hollywood 10 -- for example) but favor it when the targets are people like Imelda Marcos' lawyers (Congress decided that Attorney-Client Privilege doesn't apply to Congressional testimony), or Ken Lay, or Martha Stewart. Shouldn't one oppose all coerced testimony or support (at least the right of Congress to coerce) all?

I've got my biometric national ID -- do you?

I say national ID not national ID card because it's not a card. I spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of National ID and it occurred to me that anything that identifies you as a national (of a country) is a national ID.

Now, not to change the subject, my mother is a paper magnet. She was cleaning out her house recently and dumping whatever she could on her children. She sent me my file. Sort of a TIA Data Mining file; mother style. It included my original birth certificate, the hospital bill for my birth ($75.00), some kind of hospital record with my footprint, and my baptismal certificate. Every piece of paper indicates that all events occurred in California.

Now that file constitutes genuine, legal, biometric, proof of my nationality and my identity. I think I'll start carrying it around in case anyone asks me to prove that I exist.

New York Sun and Treason continues...
Prof Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy commenting on the Sun controversy:

MORE ON THE NEW YORK SUN: Best of the Web recently came to the defense of The New York Sun's "antiwar speech as treason" editorial; Brendan Nyhan in SpinSanity has a quite persuasive response to that defense, as does Jesse Walker in Reason's Hit & Run. I generally very much like Best of the Web, but think that on this point its author erred.

I'm not sure I understand. Accusing the opposition of treason is a traditional part of robust American (and most other) political discourse. I gather that Best of the Web was arguing that if lefties can attack us with excessive rhetoric, we can attack them the same way. After all, many marchers are accusing the current US administration of war crimes and crimes against humanity ("Hitler" comparisons). Accusing the government of this sort of behavior is the exact equivalent of accusing individuals of treason. Note that both sorts of crimes can be punished by death.

The beauty of the Net is that it has restored vibrant disputation after a century of boring monopoly media. I have long predicted that this new culture would infiltrate backwards into traditional media and that seems to be happening. Seems like a good thing to me.

I'm sick and tired of having to treat those I think of as commie scum with kid gloves because it's not somehow "nice". They certainly don't treat me that way.

Complaints spur name change for school play

Technical High School students involved with the play "Ten Little Indians" will make some changes to tonight's opening after people complained to the school's administration about the title.

The administration asked the artistic director to explain before the play begins that the title isn't meant to offend American Indians. The program will be printed with "And Then There Were None," the name of the Agatha Christie book on which the play is based, in large print and the title in small print.

That was, of course, the American title of Agatha's novel. The British title was "Ten Little *******." [Fill in the plural of a dialect variation of the Spanish word for black.] If the students had used *that* title, they'd be hung.

What Would Jesus Shoot?

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (CNSNews.com) - Religious leaders and politicians here are protesting a group that wants to portray Jesus Christ carrying a revolver and causing the death of a child. The portrayal is to take place during Rio's Carnival celebration, which starts later this month.

Collateral damage during a shootout with Satan.

I'm not sure Christ would carry a revolver, however. I think he'd be a large frame semi-auto man. Maybe even a Streetsweeper for his famous intervention in the foreign currency markets of Temple of Jerusalem.

Guns & Duct Tape on Curtis & Kuby WABC Radio

On WABC radio in NYC this morning, Curtis Sliwa (head of the Guardian Angels) and Ron Kuby (radical lawyer, communist, and partner of the late William Kunsler) were chatting about terrorist attack preparations. Ron repeated his point that guns and plenty of ammo were the most important part of any emergency survival kit.

Ron's classic quote: "Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns."

Man[Person]-eating lions dine on ecotourists

Ecotourists are helping nature in an unexpected way - by becoming "fast food of the bush" for man-eating lions, it was claimed today.

Reports of lions eating humans are increasing in Africa, and one reason may be more tourists camping on the big cats' doorstep.

Craig Packer, of Minnesota University, told New Scientist magazine: "There have been a fair number of attacks on humans in the last couple of years, including some in South African camps.

"The problem is, there is a growing number of camps putting people in the bush right next to lions."

Ah the glory of nature. Gaia detects an excess in certain populations and as "though by an invisible hand" acts to readjust the balance.

Instapundit Exclusive--Sauron Lives!

THE LOCAL CHAPTER OF EARTH FIRST! has partially covered a billboard for "Hooters" with this sign reading "Frodo Has Failed -- Bush Has The Ring." (A couple of them -- looking very chilly -- are "occupying" the sign, as you may be able to make out on the lower right. And yes, this is actual, firsthand photojournalism here on InstaPundit.)

So, let's unpack this. EF! is claiming that George Bush is Sauron. But Sauron, as all right thinking persons know, is a non-human, dark-hued practitioner of an alternative faith/lifestyle who is oppressed by humans and their Elven and Hobbit running dogs. They all appear in a series of novels written by a racist, misogynist, Christian for g*d's sake. Sauron was the good guy, wasn't he? Or at least misunderstood.

Does that make W our second Black (or at least Dark) President?

Surviving the Khmer Rouge

Francois Bizot is thought to be the only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment during their genocidal control of Cambodia in the 1970s.

The book he wrote in 2001 on his experience, 'The Gate', has been recently published in English.

He's teaching at the Sorbonne. By all means listen to this short actuality from the BBC.

He talked to the BBC's East Asia Today programme about his horrific ordeal, and his relationship with his interrogator, the notorious Khmer Rouge leader [actually their chief torturer] known as Duch.

The interview and the book are full of "banality of evil" sorts of quotes. "When I saw the killer's mask drop from him, what I saw behind the mask was not a monster...I saw someone looking like myself." Translation -- Duch was an idealistic, communist academic who naturally found himself torturing people. Just like "us" or like those of us who are idealistic communist academics.

"What I learnt from Duch and the torturers was that, altogether the good and the bad are in ourselves."

Truth Detector: Who's Mean-Spirited Now, Esquire?
So Eric Alterman has apologized for the following remark in an Esquire piece:

ESQ: "As a liberal who do you find more objectionable, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, or Rush Limbaugh?"

Alterman: "No question it's Limbaugh. He has an army. O'Reilly and Matthews are entertainers. I don't think anybody would follow the other two into a fire, but Limbaugh is different. The lack of civility that he demonstrates toward liberal politicians is really dangerous to our political public. I hate to say it, but I wish the guy would have gone deaf. I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners."

But lost in the reaction to the remark is that Rush is, in fact, profoundly deaf. He has regained hearing bionically but he's still deaf. An interesting case because he apparently got almost as good results as it's possible to get from his implant. Many people have problems with the devices. I would guess it's because he spent 35 years listening to people and sounds coming to him over headphones and he had to interpret them. We are what we do. Whatever we spend time doing our brains change to facilitate the doing. Action begets physical transformation of the circuitry.

I wonder what Alterman means by the phrase "danger to our political public". Does Rush encourage assassinations? What about his affect on our non-political public? Just wondering.

How to Invade Iraq Without Violating the Non-Aggression Principle (In case you felt the need to)

1) Fire the 82nd Airborne and abandon Fort Bragg.
2) The 82nd Airborne finds itself in the vicinity of a great deal of abandoned land, equipment, and ordinance and sees the entrepreneurial opportunities.
3) The 82nd Airborne begins to mix its labor with the soil and homesteads the former Fort Bragg. Sells naming rights on the open market. Fort Bragg becomes Fort Viacom.
4) Motivated by the need to meet payroll costs for 14,000 trained troops, the 82nd Airborne forms a joint stock company and issues shares (NASDAQ Ticker AIRB). Retains name "82nd Airborne" to preserve powerful brand identity.
5) Forms joint undertaking with ExxonMobile (XOM), Shell Oil (SC), and British Petroleum (BP) to prospect for under-exploited oil reserves in the Middle East.
6) Identifies oil development opportunity in land claimed by the so-called Government of Iraq (an outlaw entity that claims to rule territory by threat of force).
7) Cuts a deal with the recently privatized 25th Infantry Division
8) Lands forces in unoccupied territory.
9) Brings the oil fields of "Iraq" into a regime of private ownership by mixing their labor with the soil and converting them from unowned to owned property.
10) Are attacked by the armed forces of the self-styled "Government of Iraq".
11) Blows away the attackers thus preserving their property rights.
12) Note the absence of non-aggression axiom violations.

For those who doubt that a Libertarian Anarchist can legitimately violate the (nonexistent) national sovereignty of a nation without violating his principles, I can only point out that L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach features an "invasion" of Germany by a 1000 airship fleet from the North American Confederacy and also an accepted claim by the Hamiltonian invaders from an alternate timeline that free societies can't object to armed groups entering their (non) territory. I would think that LNS qualifies as a moderately pure libertarian.

Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts

But do these economists support tax increases? Some do presumably even though our tax burden (Federal + State) is more or less as high as it's ever been. But what about the rest? If they don't support Bush's tax cut then they are supporting a tax increase for most Americans. That's because the State governments are busy increasing their already record-setting tax burden.

So you've got a choice. Support offsetting Federal tax cuts or favor a tax increase at this point in the business cycle.

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
The latest in a series from the WSJ on the various flavors of "Conservatism." I guess that that pedagogical purpose justifies an Introduction to Libertarianism that would have been more suited to 1973 or 1983 than to 2003. Too bad Ms. Lee took a rather unnuanced approach to the subject.

Let's parse this puppy:

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
Libertarians have more fun--and make more sense.

BY SUSAN LEE
Wednesday, February 12, 2003 12:01 a.m.

...Libertarianism is simplicity itself. It proceeds from a single, quite beautiful, concept of the primacy of individual liberty that, in turn, infuses notions of free markets, limited government and the importance of property rights. In terms of public policy, these notions translate into free trade, free immigration, voluntary military service and user fees instead of taxes....

...To libertarians, on the other hand, the model of a free market functions as a template for all things. Not only does the market operate as a continuous process for sorting through competing ideas as well as goods, it also allows each individual to express himself or herself....

A number of comments in the essay like this one suggest that libertarians' support for liberty is utilitarian. That we are all Benthamites because freedom is the best way to (self-organize) society. That has been part of libertarian philosophy but most libertarians base their politics on natural rights/natural law not utilitarianism. Mill not Bentham. We support the free market not because of efficiency but because a free market is what happens when individuals' freedom of action is not politically constrained. Libertarians focus more on the morality of liberty than its efficiency.

...Libertarians are not comfortable with normative questions. They admit to one moral principle from which all preferences follow; that principle is self-ownership--individuals have the right to control their own bodies, in action and speech, as long as they do not infringe on the same rights for others....Libertarians do not concern themselves with questions of "best behavior" in social or cultural matters.

Here libertarianism is given too much and too little in the same paragraph. Too little because libertarianism is one of the most highly normative political philosophies. As political philosophers, libertarians can quickly and easily test various political proposals against the non-aggression axiom and downcheck everything from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the local Vector Control District (free those vectors!). On the other hand, the author gives libertarianism too much by stating that libertarians don't propose norms of best behavior in social matters. This assumes that libertarianism in a "complete" philosophy. It's not. Libertarianism qua libertarianism is only a political philosophy and lacks theories of esthetics, ethics, theology, epistemology, and personal behavior. Libertarians as individuals are perfectly free within their political philosophy to espouse white supremacy, pacifism, private ownership of nuclear weapons, Anglo-Catholicism, atheism, the worship of Shiva, vegetarianism, the Atkins' Diet, grammatical prescriptivism, progressive education, etc.

By contrast, conservatives are comfortable with normative issues....These values are not the result of the agnostic process of the free market; they are ontologically inherent. Because conservatives assume that there is a recognizable standard of excellence...For example, they argue that the state of marriage between a man and a woman possesses great virtue. And they can go on to distinguish lesser states of virtue in other types of relationships. This process of distinguishing isn't an entirely epistemological argument, however; it is based, in part, on tradition and, in part, on sociology taken from assumptions about "best behavior."

Libertarians believe that marriage between a man and a woman is just one among other equally permissible relationships; ...Conservative thought proceeds from absolutes, hierarchies and exclusivity. Libertarian thought promotes relativism and inclusiveness--although, admittedly, this tolerance comes from indifference to moral questions, not from a greater inborn talent to live and let live....

I can't tell here whether the author is accusing conservatism of the sin of epistemology or reliance on authority or what. Actually, both conservatism and libertarianism have a long tradition of committing both sins. Aristotle is beloved of libertarians and conservatives. Aquinas and C. S. Lewis both used logic and epistemology in their explorations of theology. Lewis' argument against priestesses in the [Roman or Anglican] Catholic Church and Robert P. George's contemporary argument against same-sex marriage are rigorously based on the proposition that such arrangements are not wrong but logically impossible. On the other hand, libertarians have also sometimes relied on tradition (The Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers) and sociology (utilitarianism) in butressing their arguments.

All this falls to the bottom line in obvious ways. Conservatives are against gay marriage, they are often ambivalent toward immigrants, and patronizing toward women; they view popular culture as mostly decadent and want to censor music, movies, video games and the Internet. They crusade against medical marijuana. For their part, libertarians argue for legalizing drugs; they are in favor of abortion and against the government prohibition of sex practices among consenting adults. They abhor censorship. In the conservative caricature, libertarians believe in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll--but it is not far from the truth. Unfortunately, these debates are often animated by the fact that conservatives see libertarianism only as the face of what it defends: transgendered persons adopting children, video games of violent sadism and, yes, cloning. Simply put, the shocking and repellent decline of civilization. But for libertarians, these are merely some of the many aspects of a civilization that is advancing through vast and minute experiments. The exercise of freedom trumps the discomforts of novelty.

Libertarianism (as discussed here) is not a lifestyle choice. I know plenty of libertarians who have conservative or even reactionary social views. There are also conservatives (the Amish, for example) who eschew government authority and practice their traditionalism on the basis of voluntary organization. The real argument is between conservatives and "liberals" who favor a central, coercively organized social system and conservatives and liberals who favor voluntary arrangements.

...Now, few doubt that Hayek has won and that the economic argument has been settled in favor of free markets. What remains is the battle over politics and culture. One down, two to go.

I hope the battle of economics has been won. The remaining battle is purely over politics and that is not going well (since governments continue to grow in size and power). There can't be a battle over culture since absent political intervention, traditionalists will be able to live as they choose. No battle. A traditionalist PUD would be able to exclude gays and the godless at will and discriminate against decadence on any grounds it chose. If the more extreme libertarian anarchists were to win the political battle, a pro-life PUD could even punish abortion by death (among its population) if it was so organized. The "culture wars" are only a problem because governments can attempt to impose the ideas of one side or another on everybody. It's better to think of the conflict as being between monopoly and choice rather than as being between tradition and post modernism.

Official Taxpatriates Page

Every quarter since the end of 1996, the US Internal revenue Service has published a list of US citizens who have renounced their citizenship. As of the 4th quarter of 2002, 4159 names have appeared on this so-called taxpatriate list.

I just updated (more or less) my Official Taxpatriates page. In spite of its name, the Page itself is not official. Only the Lists are (and indeed are linked from the online version of The Daily Newspaper That Rules our Lives aka the Federal Register).

The .csv taxpats database has been updated but I have yet to update the JFILE and MobileDB versions. Is there anyone other than myself carrying the Taxpats list around?

CPO SPARKY is defending the Relocation of the Japanese from the US West Coast during WWII. Thanks to Instapundit for the link:

Some Facts (Not PC Shrill) on the Relocation of Japanese During WWII

The terms "internment" and "relocation" are often confused and used interchangeably. By law (an over 100-year-old Federal statute), no U.S. citizen could be "interned." That term applies only to detention of enemy aliens. When interned, enemy aliens were placed in Department of Justice camps under Army control. The people who were interned were considered threats to national security, subject to judicial review, and were allowed to have their families accompany them on a voluntary basis. Only some 11,229 Japanese (plus 5,620 Nisei who renounced their U.S. citizenship) were interned, along with 14,426 Germans, Italians, and other enemy aliens.

Evacuees were altogether different: those that were relocated were allowed, at least initially, to go anywhere they wanted in the interior. Note, also, that those of Japanese heritage who lived outside the Military exclusion area (California, the western half of Washington and Oregon, and southern Arizona) were not sent to relocation centers, although many of Japanese heritage living outside the exclusion area did request to be allowed to move into a center.

However, to suggest that 120,000 people were "locked up" as Mr. Floyd Mori suggests is, to use his own words, "outrageous and uneducated" and "patently incorrect."

Then perhaps CPO SPARKEY can explain why Mitsuye Endo had to file a Habeas Corpus petition to get out of her "Relocation Center" if she was in it voluntarily.

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case comes here on a certificate of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, certifying to us questions of law upon which it desires instructions for the decision of the case. Judicial Code 239, 28 U.S.C. 346, 28 U.S.C.A. 346. Acting under that section we ordered the entire record to be certified to this Court so that we might proceed to a decision, as if the case had been brought here by appeal.

Mitsuye Endo, hereinafter designated as the appellant, is an American citizen of Japanese ancestry. She was [323 U.S. 283, 285] evacuated from Sacramento, California, in 1942, pursuant to certain military orders which we will presently discuss, and was removed to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center located at Newell, Modoc County, California. In July, 1942, she filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of California, asking that she be discharged and restored to liberty. That petition was denied by the District Court in July, 1943, and an appeal was prefected to the Circuit Court of Appeals in August, 1943. Shortly thereafter appellant was transferred from the Tule Lake Relocation Center to the Central Utah Relocation Center located at Topaz, Utah, where she is presently detained. The certificate of questions of law was filed here on April 22, 1944, and on May 8, 1944, we ordered the entire record to be certified to this Court. It does not appear that any respondent was ever served with process or appeared in the proceedings. But the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California argued before the District Court that the petition should not be granted. And the Solicitor General argued the case here.

This case was decided the same day as Korematsu (which upheld the exclusion zones). Here the court decided that once the Feds excluded the Japanese, they had to let them go. Obviously not a view shared by the Feds or the War Relocation Authority because they didn't let anyone go (except into the armed forces) prior to this decision.

More in my next post on MAGIC intercepts, etc.

NYC Group Give Away Toy Guns in Protest

Friday February 7, 2003 4:00 AM

NEW YORK (AP) - The Manhattan Libertarian Party conducted a ``Guns for Tots'' toy giveaway Thursday outside a public school in protest of a city bill that would ban the imitation weapons.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg interviewed, Friday, on WABC radio was upset as well. He claimed to be unable to understand why people would think or behave "like this". On the other hand, libertarians can easily understand why Mayor Mike would think and behave as he does. The advantage of outsider status I guess. Greater understanding.

I hope that the City Council toy gun ban has exemptions for museums, collectors, and New York's toy industry the way bans on real guns often do.

There are probably quite a few toy guns in museums and private collections in NYC. NYC is also the center of the American toy industry. I wonder how one can be expected to design and market toy guns without possessing them? But presumably that's the point.

Jacko Talks About His 'Disturbing' Life
Which reminds me of the old joke:

Young Man in Confessional: Father, is it really a sin to sleep with a girl?

Priest: No, my son. It's not a sin to sleep with a girl but the problem with you young people is that you don't just sleep.

Librarian's Dilemma

The editorial explains that some libraries have responded to the USA Patriot Act by deleting records so the government can't get them.

I do find the attitude it reflects pretty disturbing, especially given that (as I understand it) at least one of the Sept. 11 hijackers used a public library computer to make his flight reservations for 9/11/01. The thinking seems to be that national security investigations to stop terrorism are a greater threat to America than terrorism itself, such that it's better to have the FBI come up with nothing than to allow the FBI to collect evidence successfully.

This is not restricted to libraries. There has been a long debate about the use of encryption and other technologies to preserve privacy and anonymity online. Some ISPs offer various levels of anonymity and delete logs to facilitate the process.

Arguments in favor of this practice take several forms:

1) Government agents are more dangerous than the persons they seek. Governments killed many more people in the 20th century than did anyone else.

2) Since most federal government law enforcement actions do not involve defense of the realm against foreign enemies or prevention of Common Law (and hence serious) crimes one should not be expected to surrender various liberties in service of a lesser (or non-existant) value. Note that if something wasn't a crime at Common Law it can hardly be a serious breach of anything. They were bright people and would have noticed the problem. Immigaration, money laundering, drugs, taxes, administrative violations, etc. make up the bulk of Federal LE activities. Not crimes at Common Law so not serious. If the Feds restricted themselves to serious crimes maybe we'd care less about giving up privacy.

3) The Zone of Privacy arguement.