Pete The Elder

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September 30, 2005

Freaky Bennett

Bill Bennett got some flack this week for talking about a hypothetical situation where aborting black babies would reduce the crime rate, even though it seems like Bennett was saying this would be a bad thing to do. This is very similar to the Freakonomics argument I discussed here.

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame posted his thoughts on Bennett's statement here and included a full transcript of what Bennett said. He writes:

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

Ramesh Ponnuru has a good response to Levitt's post at the corner:

People fall into confusion all the time when they ignore the fact--which Levitt, to his credit, mentions in his book--that the legalization of abortion increased the conception rate by 30 percent (while causing the birth rate to drop by 6 percent). Many times I have heard pro-lifers make comments about how there would be 40 million more taxpayers if not for Roe. That sort of comment is what spurred Bennett's discussion. There are a lot of flaws with this type of reasoning--Bennett was, in my view, absolutely right to note that it is a distraction from the decisive moral issues--but what's important here is to remember that not every abortion represents a child who would have been conceived absent legalization. The flip side also holds true: As paradoxical as it sounds, there are children who would never have been born without legal abortion.

So the effect of legal abortion is to change the mix of people in the next generation somewhat and to reduce its numbers somewhat. We have no reason to be certain that the net effect is to reduce the number of children in crime-prone groups. For example, it could in theory be that the effect of abortional choice is to reduce the number of kids born to middle-class, married black couples while raising the number of kids born to poor black single mothers--in which case it could raise the crime rate. Whether it's true depends on the validity of Levitt's empirical claims; its truth can't simply be deduced. (I am at work on a book that deals with this question, among others.) Bennett's hypothetical, in which all black babies are somehow aborted, isn't open to the same objections.

Another interesting response to Levitt's abortion/crime theory can be found here, which quotes a lot from James Q. Wilson:

You would never know it from this book, but not only have these claims been criticized, but several scholars have offered rival theories. On the issue of abortion rates alone, the economists John Lott and John Whitley have written that, even before Roe, many anti-abortion states allowed abortion if the life or health of the mother was at risk; in these states, there were at least as many abortions per 1,000 live births pre-Roe as in states that had made abortion legal. Why, then, attribute falling crime rates to legalized abortion?

Levitt and Donohue have rejoined that, in those states where abortions were still nominally illegal, it was well-to-do white women who mainly availed themselves of the loopholes in the system. But there is no evidence of this; to the contrary, black women were over-represented among those having abortions in such states.

Now look at homicide rates by the age of suspected offenders. In the late 1990s, roughly a quarter century after Roe, the murder rate was falling for offenders aged twenty-six and older -- a class of offenders much too old to have been affected by Roe one way or the other. As for the youngest offenders, those between sixteen and twenty, their murder rates had jumped up in the early 1990s, probably because of involvement in the crack cocaine trade. Again, no Roe effect.

I suspect targeted abortions could lower the crime rate in the future, but then so could the targeted killings of groups of adults and teenagers along with forced group amputations and sterilizations, and a whole other host of policies most moral people would be opposed to. I think that was the part of the point of Bennett's argument: just because something could potentially be an effective means to a good end does not make it moral policy. Both means and ends matter as do motivations and virtue. Which ones matter the most and in what proportion is the tricky part and economics only helps us determine part of how effective the means are not whether they are moral.

Bennett would probably be in less trouble if he had avoided race since it is very hard for public figures to have an honest, open discussion about race in this country if anyone talking includes conservative ideas. Bennett should have instead said that aborting all male babies would lower the crime rate since males are more likely to commit every crime in this country, except for prostitution and running away from home. At least that is what the author of Demonic Males claimed.

Related to this is an interesting question: How do all these theories apply to China and its crime rates? If the Demonic Males theory is right and human males are predisposed to be more likely to commit crimes than women and if China's one child policy makes it more likely that males are a much larger portion of the population than females because of targeted abortions (and the related infanticide) of girl babies, then what will be the effect on China's future crime rate?

On a side note when talking about crime in these discussions I think it is important to talk about rates, not individual instances. How many murders per ten thousand people is a more important statistic in these discussions then the total number of murders committed.

Posted by Pete at 06:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 29, 2005

New Blogs

I have added a few new blogs to my blog roll. First is Harry's Place, an interesting leftist blog. Unlike most leftists, the bloggers at Harry's Place supported the removal of the fascist dictator Saddam Hussein, even though it was George W. Bush that destroyed Hussein's regime. After reading Freakonomics, I decided to link to the Freakonomics blog by the authors of that book. Finally because he has forgotten more about American politics than I will ever know, Michael Barone and his new blog get a place on my blogroll. It says something about how far blogs have come that journalists as well known and respected as Barone now have blogs of their own. The format of a blog seems right for commentators of Barone's experience and skill.

Posted by Pete at 07:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pope Questions

So I have some random questions about the pope. When someone becomes pope does his actual name change or is this just a title? As in does he have to get a new drivers license and redo his voters registration and whatever his country's version of the social security card is like when a regular person gets a new name? Does he change citizenship since he now rules Vatican City, which is its own nation? If an American cardinal became pope, could he still get summoned to jury duty in America? Enquiring protestants want to know!

Posted by Pete at 07:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I Am Ready For Some Football, Are You?

One of the weirder things in San Antonio since the Katrina Hurricane has been the reaction to the Saints temporary move here. Some people here think that this is a chance to show the NFL that San Antonio can support a team even though San Antonio is only about the 37th largest metropolitan TV market in the country (although the eight largest city) and Texas already has two other teams, one of which has a huge following. I think the NFL would be crazy to move a team here before moving one to a city like Los Angeles, the second largest TV market in the country and a market with a history of supporting two teams at once.

None of the three scheduled Saints games have sold out as of Monday, partly because the teams they are playing here, Buffalo, Carolina, and Atlanta are not that interesting. The other part is that the tickets are expensive. I have not been to an NFL game before and like football so I looked into buying tickets and including ticket fees (and assuming you were cheap about shipping and got will call tickets instead of UPS) two nosebleed level, end zone seats would put you back around $90 plus parking and food, etc. I decided against buying and lucky for me someone gave a friend of mine some tickets so I get to go to Sundays Bills/Saints game for free! Take that NFL!

In other sports related news, my favorite baseball team the California Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles California will be going to the playoffs two years in a row for the first time in franchise history.

Update 9/30/05: Dangerous Dan writes:

Yeah, NFL tickets get a little pricey. I'd still think about splurging on tickets for the Alamodome, though, just to say I went to an NFL game in San Antonio that featured a team from another city. SA can't support a team. Not with the Cowboys and Texans in-state. People there are also pretty thrifty and/or solidly middle/lower-class enough, they won't spend the money for tickets. Besides, a study done in 2002 (I think) said it would take almost $200 million to renovate the Alamodome up to NFL standards. That's almost half the cost of NEW domed stadium. I like the looks of the Alamodome (from the outside at least) but it's always been a white elephant for the city.

Dan tried to leave that as a comment, but my comment filter blocked it, I suspect because it talked about buying tickers. I do not get any comment spam any more, only trackback spam.

Posted by Pete at 07:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 26, 2005

Pork

Instapundit and NZ Bear are leading the charge against federal pork with their new Porkbusters campaign. Instapundit has many good posts on this subject that he and his readers are coming up with. See this post which shows how clueless many senators and congressmen are when it comes to this issue. Here are several form letters constituents received from their congressional representatives that do not even address the concern about pork that the original letters from constiuents were about.

As much as I desperately hope that this campaign works, I am very pessimistic about it. Neither party wants to limit government spending. And as much as most people will say that they want to limit government spending, when it comes down to it many of these same people are too fickle to let any cuts occur when the cuts start effecting the pet programs they like. So nothing gets limited and the federal budget deficit continues to rise even as federal and state tax revenues increase. The sad thing is that our federal government could be running a surplus in the tens of billions of dollars fairly easily, but no majority in congress or in the public wants it bad enough so that they are willing to sacrifice their own pet projects. Projects that, in the end, most people would not miss if they were gone.

Posted by Pete at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Freakonomics

I finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and have mixed reactions to it. I think that Levitt did a good job with showing how to look at problems from an economic standpoint, but there are a few problems with the book. Most of his reasoning is fairly amoral and unemotional, which reminds me why I know longer watch TV news, which tends to be overly moral and emotional and devoid of cold reasoning. His footnotes are decent, but it would have been better to include some more information from the studies he is citing. He asserts for instance that crime dropped in the late nineties because of legalized abortion and although he cites papers to back this up he could have gone into more detail since the book barely clocks in at two hundred pages. I ended up agreeing with most of his reasoning about the crime rate drop of the last decade. Like many major trends I think there are likely multiple causes, most notably increased prison sentences for repeat offenders, increased numbers of police, and changes in demographics, which might be in part be because of increased abortions among women who are likely to give birth to eventual criminals as Levitt argues.

Levitt does a good job laying out arguments for why information is valuable and when he does lay out an argument he does a good job of explaining his reasoning. He repeatedly reminds readers that correlation does not equal causation, but I wonder if he always follows that advice himself. My other quibble with the book (which may be the fault of the editors) is the recurring quotes praising the author that make him sound arrogant. Even if you are extremely smart, you put the quotes that say that on the back of the book or at the very beginning, not every thirty pages or so.

I am continuing to get through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Nazis are still not in power. Some interesting facts about Hitler I did not know: Hitler was in love with his niece, who either committed suicide or was murdered by other Nazis. The second interesting thing is that after his failed beer hall putsch Hitler was determined to take control of Germany through legal and non-violent means. One weird thing about the Germans that I have noticed from this book, from the history of Germany I learned years ago, and from current events like the recent German elections is that for a nation known for its work ethic and discipline the Germans sure do expect the government to have lots of welfare programs to take care of them.

I also recently finished Elements of Murder: A History of Poison and have found it to be morbidly interesting, although not what I had hoped for. I would not have thought of intentionally using lead as a poison, but some people have used it successfully to poison others. I also never thought of tin or nickel as poisons, but they can be poisonous although they probably have never intentionally been used as poisons. I have started reading A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa, a philosophy of history book which so far has tried to describe recent history in terms of energy flows. For instance, agriculture represents an energy flow in the form of calories from the countryside moving to the cities. Money works as a reverse energy flow as it gets energy to move from one place to another in the opposite direction the money goes. One of the main points of the author is that it is a mistake to assume that history is in anyways progressing or that history is headed to an ultimate or necessary end.

Posted by Pete at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Climate of Fear Part 29

Some of Senator Chuck Schumer's employees have been caught trying to get a credit report on Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, one of Schumer's political opponents. This is a felony because they used his social security number and lied in order to obtain the report and it is against federal law to do this. It is unclear when Schumer learned of this and if it was he who contacted the FBI about his employees behavior or if it was the other way around. Remarkably even though his employees have committed a felony they have not been fired, only suspended with pay.

I think this story qualifies as a climate of fear case even though no violence occurred because they were breaking the law in order to go after and possibly intimidate a political opponent. Hugh Hewitt has advice for the employees and has some questions for reporters to ask Schumer.

The main question is did Senator Schumer know that his employees were doing this and if they did not do it with his authorization, did he contact and cooperate with federal investigators. Captains Quarters has more background info on the two staffers in trouble.

Previous Climate of Fear post.

Posted by Pete at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 22, 2005

Galloway - More Evil Than Ever

Galloway now claims that the US invented Bin Laden, that Israelis are responsible for Muslims being angry, and that the dead innocents on flight 93 on 9/11 were equivalent to the Taliban. But of course accodring to these commenters I am wrong to call Galloway evil. With someone like Galloway it is important to remember that they are not anti-war, they just want the other side to win.

Here is Andrew's notebook which has sound recordings of Galloway's evil rantings:

Some of the highlights included Galloway proclaiming he predicted that 9/11 was inevitable because the US and Britain invented Bin Laden in answer to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Along that line, Galloway compared the wives and mothers of the doomed 9/11 flight 93, to the mothers and wives of fallen Taliban.

According to Galloway, and many others throughout history for that matter, the main reason there is conflict in the world, especially the Middle east, is because of those damn Jews. Im paraphrasing of course, but he does blame Israel for Islamic hatred and intolerance.

Posted by Pete at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 21, 2005

Photo ID's

Instapundit links to a couple of good posts on the need for photo ID's when voting. Reynolds points out that it is earier to vote without an ID than it is to buy a beer without an ID. Considering that people have an incentive to lie about who they are in order to either illegally buy beer or to illegally vote in someone else's name I think it is obviously why photo ID's are necesarry for clean elecections. Reynold's notes that Jimmy Carter is in favor of photo ID requirements and Carter isn't even that good about making sure the elections he monitors are honest.

Will Wilkinson makes the case for why illegal votes are as bad as legal votes not getting counted:

The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.

If somebody's dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here's another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they're both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy's votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

And because I have not linked to it in a while, here is my updated list of voting reforms. I am thinking about following what has happened in Iraqi voting by adding the requirement that all voters get their finger marked with indellible ink so that they can not vote more than once, although I am not sure how that would work with early voting.

Posted by Pete at 09:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

TV Makes You Smarter

One of the arguments in the book Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson is that much of today's TV is extremely complicated with multiple characters and plot lines and that these shows intentionally leave out information, all of which forces viewers to think harder about what they are watching and that encourages discussion of the show with their peers, which also forces the viewer to think more. John J Miller (uinintentionally possibly) makes this point in his review of Lost today. I have yet to watch an episode of Lost, but it seems to fit the mold of The Wire, Sopranos, 24, etc.of the type of show which I might like because you have to think.
Miller writes:

Here's why I like Lost: Every episode gives viewers something substantial to think over and discuss, whether it's a new puzzle about the island or a revelation about a character's life before the crash of Oceanic Flight 815. I'm not familiar with another TV program that's so ripe for Thursday-morning water-cooler conversation a 21st-century version of the 19th-century serial novel. Moreover, the acting is good and the writing is solid. When this show was being pitched, some TV executive must have complained that there's no way the audience could keep track of more than a dozen characters. Yet Lost succeeds, through a deft combination of mystery, drama, and humor.

A second part of Johnson's argument is that the rise of new media like TV shows on DVD encourages people to rewatch shows to figure out new clues, which is why these shows could not succeed in the past. Miller writes:

I do know that the invisible thingamajig that terrorizes our favorite group of castaways since Gilligan's Island may not be invisible after all. It just might have black tentacles.

I know this because I own Lost: The Complete First Season on DVD. During a slow-motion replay of the final-episode scene of Locke being dragged through the jungle and yanked into a hole, it looks like there's a black cord wrapped around his leg. A botched stunt device that viewers aren't supposed to see? Or a hidden clue that's meant to feed speculation among obsessed fans? If this article were a radio talk show, I'd open the phone lines right now.

Posted by Pete at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 19, 2005

Yet More Rome

Dan sent me some links to some interesting posts on a supposed obsession with the Roman Empire on the part of some conservatives, especially conservatives who think that America is in a decline similar to the one that Rome went through. Many conservatives (especially paleoconservatives) argue that Rome fell because of a decline in morals and that America will go through the same sort of decline because of its decline in morals. This reminded me of when I went to a speech by George Will almost a decade ago where he said something to the effect that Rome probably did not recognize that it was declining while the decline was happening and that the same could be true for America today.

Dean Esmay writes,

I also wonder at the fascination some conservatives have for the ancient Romans. They were a vicious, savage people, given to mass murder on a scale that would make Saddam Hussein seem like a piker--and that was while their Empire was growing. Julius Caesar, before he seized power and turned Rome into an Empire, boasted of slaughtering over 100,000 people in just one of his jaunts into Gaul. Not 100,000 on the battlefield either--no, this included razing villages, hacking off the heads of children, women, old men, the crippled and lame. This was celebrated as a part of Ceasar's greatness, with triumphal celebrations and murals and statues showing in gory detail as Ceasar and his troops raped barbarian women and sliced barbarian children's heads off.

All that, and Rome's greatest days were yet ahead of her.

Furthermore, if you look at the history of the Romans, you'll find that well before they were an Empire, when they were merely a Republic, their values included a casual attitude about homosexuality--it was frowned on for a patrician to take the "submissive" role in sexual relationships (to catch rather than pitch, to put it crassly) but nothing whatever was thought of a male Roman taking the dominant sexual position in a homosexual encounter, whether married or not. And nobody cared at all what slaves did--slaves making up the majority of the inhabitants of Rome by most estimates, at least throughout most of the Republic and early Empire periods.

Over at the Jawa Report there is this related post,

These are the guys at your church that think God has an invisible shield over the U.S., and that as America slouches toward Gomorroh he slowly raises the shield. This line of thought can go to the extreme and become one that basically says were doomed, DOOMED, DOOMED!

In many ways, this argument is very similar to the namby-pambies of the 'hate America first' Left and self-proclaimed paleocons on the Right who share the belief that America is destined for failure, soon, because that is the fate of all empires.

The remedy? End the empire, bring troops home, etc. Only by ending the empire can America be saved.

Which, of course, is stupid, since at any point in Rome's history the same argument could have been made. Bring troops home from Palestine now, one could have argued in 70 C.E. Of course, 300 years later you would have found the city of Caesaria, near modern Haifa, bustling with activity--all of it Roman.

This brings up several epistemological and ethical problems along with the question of whether the US is even an empire (I would argue that it is not). The first is how do you know what a country or society's overall ethical state is at? How do you weigh ethical progress or regress over the centuries and which ethical or moral problems are weightier than others? Many people take Rome's ethical fall as a given, but I do not think it is that obvious. First there are those that think Rome fell because it embraced Christianity, which encouraged Romans to put their first allegiance to God and not to the state. While I do not necessarily think that was a primary cause, it is a defensible position and I think it is easy to argue that Rome as Christian State was more moral than it was as a pagan state. Christian Roman emperors for instance greatly enhanced the treatment of slaves by making it harder for their masters to punish or kill them and eliminated things like gladiatorial combat.

Similarly there are those that argue that America is far less moral now than it was at X point in history. But what point are you talking about and which actions are less moral? For instance abortion and out of wedlock births a higher now than they were at earlier points in America's history, but slavery has been eliminated almost completely and poverty and the suffering caused by poverty have been reduced by a great amount as well. And while poverty has been reduced, there are those that have responded to this reduction with greed or sloth. There is no ethical thermometer or balance to easily weigh the overall morals of any society. While it may be possible to compare the overall morality of the individuals of a society it seems to be much harder to do this with an overall society over time and if you are going to do it you better be pretty specific about which dates and which moral or immoral actions you cite to prove this.

There are those that argue that God is able to do this and with God being omniscient this would be possible. If you take the related position that God punishes societies for their ethical failures, then it may be possible for the decline of societies to be a response of God's judgment, but the difference here is that God is omniscient, while those of us trying to figure out whether Rome was or America is declining morally are not.

But as Brian at Junkyardblog notes, there are many instances where empires rose by being immoral and cruel, but Brian still thinks that God is sometimes responsible for these rise and falls (he also does not think the U.S. is an empire):

We're not an empire. We aren't dealing with the same circumstances that the Romans dealt with. And God doesn't often move in obvious ways, or even in ways that make sense at all to use mere humans on the ground. As Dean Esmay notes, Rome rose when it was cruel and fell after it became Christian. To take another example, Russia rose when Christianity was legal, and came apart after a few decades of barbarous athiestic Communism. The Aztecs ruled one of the most evil empires in history; contact with Christians proved to be their undoing, even though the Christians ended up enslaving and killing millions of them while building their own empire from the ruins of the Aztec's. And Japan became a unified police state largely by exterminating about half a million Christians in unspeakably cruel ways over the course of a few decades. Japan prospered mightily while Christianity was an illegal religion for 300 years, its followers crucified or beheaded, and went on to become a harsh Buddhist/Shinto empire, but one that was dismantled by a better armed majority Christian republic--the United States. Was that divine justice? It's hard to say.

And here is the LaShawn Barber post about how America's declining morality and culture is compared to Rome's decline as a power that started this whole discussion:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, author Edward Gibbon discusses several reasons for the great civilization’s demise, including the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home and the decay of religion.

America has been compared to the Roman Empire in secular and religious ways. Regardless of its ultimate legacy, America is a civilization on the decline. A couple of centuries from now (or sooner), someone will write a book called The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

Historians will lament the loss of a once-great civilization that brought prosperity to the world and tried to make it safer for democracy. The glory that was the United States will lay in ruins, brought down not by terrorists but its own debauchery and complacency.

Posted by Pete at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 15, 2005

I Do Not Like Senators

I tried watching a little of the Senate hearings of John Roberts the other day, but it reminded me why I do not like senators and why I think I would be an efficient senator if not necessarily a very popular or effective one. I gave up watching after a minute or two. First off, I would be an efficient Senator because I do not love the sound of my own voice. I do not care for public speaking, although I am not afraid of it an do not think that I am even that bad of a speaker. I am simply too introverted to want to be in front of a big group of people for that long and find the experience draining if it happens too often. For several classes and for one job I had in the past, I had to do some fairly regular public speaking and I think I always got my point across without being boring or wasting anyone's time. Thus, compared to the typical senator I would a breath of fresh air as nominees before me would get to answer lots of brief, relevant, and well phrased questions and would have plenty of time to give in depth answers. On the negative side I would be almost useless in a traditional filibuster.

I watched about a minute of the hearings this morning and Judge Roberts was answering a decent question from Senator Leahy about how many cases the Supreme Court should be hearing. According to Roberts the Supreme Court hears half as many cases as it did a few decades ago and Roberts thinks it could and should be hearing more. If only all the questions were as relevant and as ethically answerable as that one.

Speaking of senators it looks likes one of mine reads the Volokh Conspiracy. This post makes it look like the senators on the committee (including Cornyn) talked too much instead of actually interviewing Roberts.

Speaking of politicians I do not like, Tom "no fat left to cut" Delay may be joining that list as he ludicrously claims that there is no more fat to cut from the federal government. See this list from Ramesh Ponnuru of just a few places to start cutting billions from the federal budget. Republicans like Delay show what is wrong with the Republican Party and what could cause limited government voters like me to stop supporting it. What ever happened to the Republicans of 1994? The only thing holding me onto the Republican party is that the Democrats are just as bad on spending and increasing the size of the Federal government and the Democratic Party as a whole is spineless and opportunistic on issues of national defense.

Posted by Pete at 09:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2005

Rise and Fall

I have learned a few things I did not know about the early days of the Nazi Party from listening to the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I did not know that Hitler personally lead a group of storm troopers on a raid to beat up a speaker from another political party, which prevented the speaker from giving his speech. Hitler ended up spending a month in jail for this crime, which I think is very light sentence for that severe of a crime. Unfortunately, too many people today still think these sorts of actions are appropriate.

The other thing I have learned, which I found sort of humorous considering that it was part of an anti-Semitic accusation, was that some other members of the Nazi party who were worried about Hitlers rise to power in the party and his dictatorial tendencies published a pamphlet that quite accurately accused him of being a self centered dictator. That strange part is that the pamphlet also accused Hitler of acting like a Jew and said he was secretly working to advance Jewish interests. I think accusing Hitler of trying to advance a secret Jewish agenda is a sure sign that you have a problem with anti-Semitism and even the other Nazis who were no strangers to wild accusations and conspiracy theories about Jews seemed to think that this was a strange accusation to lodge against Hitler.

Posted by Pete at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogoversary

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the first post to this blog!

Posted by Pete at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 12, 2005

Demonic Males Part 3

Remember, given the chance, most mature male chimpanzees will try to kill you if they feel like it.

Chimps weighing in at over 300 pounds and supported by Johnny Carson try to get at Nebraska zoo visitors:

No people were hurt, state patrol spokeswoman Deb Collins said. The zoo is located in Royal, a northeastern Nebraska village of 75; one of its major donors was the late entertainer Johnny Carson.
After the chimps lifted the padlock and broke out, employees immediately moved visitors in an office area, but the chimps tried to get into the building, Schlueter said.
"When it became apparent there'd be danger here, they had to be destroyed," Schlueter told the Lincoln Journal Star.

Previous Demonic Males Post.

Posted by Pete at 05:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rome and Murder

I finished the Modern Scholars lecture of The History of Ancient Rome last week and was for the most part impressed. It was a bit short to cover all of Rome in the detail I would have liked, but most of the conclusions of Professor Titchener made sense and she was a very good choice for lecturer with her focus on the cultural reasons for Romes power. I am still not sure I agree with the conclusion that Christianity was the main reason Rome fell because other Christian based Empires have succeeded and many of the enemies Rome fell to like Attila the Hun were Christian as well. I think mainly Rome got as big as it could with the technology available to it, but there was no way for it maintain itself at that size with that form of government it used and with the technology it possessed.

Speaking of Empires I have now begun listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It is a whopping 44 tapes long, but these are divided into four smaller collections of 11 tapes so I may take breaks and listen to something else in between the sections.

I am through the first section of Elements of Murder: The History of Poison and though I do like it, I was hoping for a more linear take on the history of poison. The first section deals with mercury and the second section is about arsenic. The most interesting thing I learned so far is that pure liquid mercury is not that dangerous to drink and that some people drank it daily for years as a laxative without any ill effects (although I would not recommend trying this for yourself). Ingesting mercury compounds can be very dangerous as can inhaling the fumes that pure mercury is constantly giving off.

Dan, you might be interested in his take on thimerosal injections, which he does not think cause autism. He does think mercury might have a role in austism because of a study that showed autistic children have far less mercury in their hair than non-autistic children. This may mean that autistic people have difficulty processing and getting rid of the tiny amounts of mercury that we all naturally absorb from the environment.

Posted by Pete at 04:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Katrina Relief Part 3

I think a lot of the criticism of FEMA and the Federal government’s response has been a bit off base and too unspecific over the past few weeks. This is especially true considering that the Federal government did rescue thousands of people under very difficult conditions and, as Jack Kelly notes, its response to this hurricane was much faster than its response to previous hurricanes.

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

There are some areas that I think for which FEMA can be criticized fairly, however. I have been helping some Katrina refugees (or evacuees if you do not like calling people who are seeking refuge from a storm refugees) fill out FEMA’s online aid applications and there are several problems. The applications are not well designed and for people with no experience filling out online forms or using computers they are a bit too confusing. These people tried to use the phones to do this, but the phone lines were always busy when they tried calling. FEMA also does not seem to have either enough servers or bandwidth to handle the online applications. Some people who were correctly filling out their online forms had to start all over again multiple times because the FEMA website was working so poorly. I can understand not having enough people to answer phones because people need to be trained to do that and you do not need the same number of phone operators the year round, but the automated online part should be prepared to handle a large and sudden increase in applicants.

Previous Katrtina relief post.

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September 07, 2005

Climate of Fear Part 28

The peace loving activists of Berkeley show how much they love peace by calling for the murder of Republican officials they do not like. Andrew McCarthy reports on one Rick Sterling's plans

Sterling comes out of the box with this: "If Paul Wolfowitz thinks his enemies are trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. This man is a terrific danger. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."

MrCarthy also suggests that the proper response may be to arrest and try Sterling for violating Federal law

Federal law makes it a felony to solicit or endeavor to persuade others to commit acts of violence if such acts would themselves be punishable under the U.S. penal code. (Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 373). In this instance, the code does criminalize violence and threats of violence against public officials. Specifically, it is a federal crime to "forcibly assault[] or intimidate[]" current and former federal officers "on account of the performance of official duties" during their terms in office.

Previous Climate of Fear post.

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September 05, 2005

Argonauts

One book I recently finished is the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodus. You made not have heard of this epic poem before and for good reason. Although the basic story is decent, Apollonius was not that great of a poet. Over the past few years I have listened to several ancient poems: The Odyssey and Iliad by Homer and the Aeneid by Virgil. I have enjoyed each of them enough to want to listen to them again, especially the Aeneid since I was only vaguely familiar with the story the first time and will probably get more out of it now.

I hope I never read the Argonautica again. It tells the story of Jason and the Argonauts, but leaves out important chunks of the story. For instance it starts with Jason coming out of the ocean with one sandal and because I remembered from reading this story years ago that this was prophesied to the relevant king I knew this was important, but the poem only implies its importance. Maybe Apollonius assumed that all of his listeners already knew the story and did not need to be reminded that a man with one sandal was prophesied to cause king Pelias death or that Jason had carried the goddess Hera in disguise across a river on his back (which is how he lost the sandal), but it felt incomplete without that information laid out bluntly. Considering the poem is over 150 pages long and contains lots of stuff that could have been left out I do not think that it is too much to ask that he include the prophecy and other interesting details. The ending was also way too abrupt and contained no resolution and in ancient poetry like the ones mentioned above the resolution was usually some of the most interesting stuff, whether it is Troy burning down, Odysseus killing his wife's suitors or Rome being founded by Aeneis. From this poem you have no idea how Jason ended up or that he was killed by a beam falling on his head years latter when visiting the Argo.

Although the poem is not that good overall, Apollonius did do some scenes decently and others were even pretty good. The scene of the defeat of the harpies and King Phineus was decent and the deadly boxing match between King Amycus and Polydeuces was fairly exciting. According to the introduction of the book many of Apollonius' contemporaries did not like the poem that much either and the first version he wrote was heavily criticized by them. This book also made me think more highly of the Old Jason and The Argonauts movie, which had the giant metal guy with a weak ankle full of lava and the skeletons that came up from the ground after dragon's teeth were sown into the ground. In the poem and other versions it was giants that came up from the ground, but the movie director probably realized that claymation skeletons would look cooler and would almost make more sense than giants. On the plus side for Apollonius, he did get to run the Alexandrian library and his name was pretty cool so he had that going for him.

Posted by Pete at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 02, 2005

Katrina Relief Part 2

A friend of mine who grew up in Louisiana is driving there tomorrow to bring relief supplies so the wife and I went to the grocery store a few hours ago to get water and some other supplies for him to take with him. Some of the institutions and schools I work with are now also starting to take in refugees.

Posted by Pete at 10:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 01, 2005

Katrina Relief

Here are links to Instapundits, and N.Z. Bear's Hurricane Katrina relief blog burst support pages, where you can find lots of good reccomendations on where to give. My money is going to two intitutions: the Salvation Army, for whom I volunteered one summer a few years ago and which has decades of experience in this sort of thing and a well deserved reputation for caring for the needy. The other institution is Samaritan's Purse, which I used last year for Christmas presents. Historically Smaritan's Purse uses a very high percentage of the donations it gets to actually help the people the money is donated for and not all charities are like that unfortunately.

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