April 2005 Archives

Update:
Based on the comments here and the reactions I've gotten from other readers, I've come to the conclusion that this post was out of line. I have nothing but respect for the police officers who risk their lives protecting me and mine, and I apologize for writing this post. I'm not going to take it down, because I don't like changing the record after the fact. I regret writing it, and I'm sorry.

Some friends and I just got back from lunch and several major streets around LAX are closed because of an investigation into the death of an LAX police officer who has not yet been named. Westchester Parkway was closed in both directions, and northbound traffic on Sepulveda was slowed to a crawl back up onto the 105.

When we first saw the traffic and police we thought there might have been a terrorist threat, and it was surprising to learn that so much disruption was caused by a single death. I can't even imagine how much money it costs to have a hundred police officers block off all those roads, not to mention the cost in labor hours for all the people stuck in traffic. The death of anyone, especially a police officer, should be investigated, but to what degree? What price should society bear to catch the killer and to learn the facts? It appears that the killer is already in custody, so why are the roads closed? Just to gather evidence? A murder investigation is worth spending money on, of course, but how much is too much? And if we put a limit on expenditures, does that mean that rich defendants can thwart the system by outspending it?

Update:
The officer's name was Tommy Edward Scott.

Officer Tommy Edward Scott, headed toward the airport, stopped the man walking along Lincoln just north of the airport about 11 a.m. and a struggle ensued, police said. The man, identified by police as 46-year-old William Sadowski, somehow gained control of the officer's patrol car and drove off, carrying the officer outside the driver's side. As Scott tried to regain possession of the car, it ran into a fire hydrant, sending a plume of water into the air, according to police and reports from the scene. "As the suspect basically drove away at a very high rate of speed, the officer attempted to disable that vehicle, attempted to gain control of it and it appears that he was carried for some distance," Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Michel Moore said at an afternoon news conference. "And unfortunately, the suspect drove off the roadway and struck a fire hydrant." Moments later, Sadowski commandeered a red Ford Expedition that was passing the scene, but crashed it about a half-mile away, crashing into and over the airport's perimeter fence and landing on a second fence on airport property, police said. "Somehow or another that vehicle ended up on (airport property), flipped over. The suspect ... has been removed, is still alive as of this time," Los Angeles police Chief William Bratton said. It was not immediately clear if any shots were fired in the confrontation between Scott and Sadowski. Sadowski was treated for injuries at UCLA Medical Center and will be booked on suspicion of murder, police said.

Aside from the interesting property of having two "h"s in a row, tax withholding is evil. However, with proper exemption management you can reduce your yearly refund from or payment to the IRS -- and remember, getting refunds is bad, because the IRS doesn't pay interest. According to this article about refunds on the IRS website, the average federal tax refund is over $2000 -- $40 per week -- not even including refunds for state taxes. I recommend asking your tax advisor, if you have one, about the number of exemptions you should claim, or else use the IRS withholding calculator. The site is pretty handy, and you can also check on when your refund will be processed and how long it will take to get your money.

The proposal by Senator Frist to limit debate on judicial nominees to 100 hours is incredibly sensible and upholds the alleged purpose of the filibuster. The Senate is supposed to have the opportunity to debate every issue thoroughly, but once every point has been made and every mind is set, it's time to vote. Filibusters should be used to ensure that the majority doesn't rush through decisions without proper consideration and illumination, but it shouldn't be a tool for the minority to permanently thwart the majority under the guise of perpetual debate.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) Wednesday called on Democrats to limit their debate on President Bush's judicial nominees to 100 hours and then to guarantee confirmation votes on the nominees. In exchange, Frist said he would not change Senate rules on filibusters.

"Judicial nominees are being denied. Justice is being denied. The solution is simple, allow senators to do their jobs and vote," Frist said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.

The Democrats don't want further debate, they just want gridlock. Yes, they are in a position that severely limits their power to screen President Bush's nominees, but they're in that position because they haven't won the power they need through elections. That's how the system is supposed to work.

I'm thinking of something. Yes or no questions only.

Here's a environmental philosophy I can support whole-heartedly: "environmental economics.

“THE environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest.” Those damning words come not from any industry lobby or right-wing think-tank. They are drawn from “The Death of Environmentalism”, an influential essay published recently by two greens with impeccable credentials. They claim that environmental groups are politically adrift and dreadfully out of touch. ...

If environmental groups continue to reject pragmatic solutions and instead drift toward Utopian (or dystopian) visions of the future, they will lose the battle of ideas. And that would be a pity, for the world would benefit from having a thoughtful green movement. It would also be ironic, because far-reaching advances are already under way in the management of the world's natural resources—changes that add up to a different kind of green revolution. This could yet save the greens (as well as doing the planet a world of good).

Read the rest of the article for a very brief synopsis of how market forces can be utilized to protect our valuable environment. It points out that stereotypical environmentalists generally roll their eyes at the application of economic principles such as cost-benefit analysis to the environment, but until they're willing to abandon emotional scare tactics for reason and logic it's unlikely that they're going to achieve any of their goals -- goals that I largely share, and would join them in if their methods weren't so hideously counter-productive.

This comment thread at Above Top Secret has a great list of security clearances and an informative discussion of what the various access levels and types mean.

Or at least it would be if anyone listened to it. DeoDuce asks "Can liberals be in the spotlight and not screw up?", but that question presupposes that Air America somehow qualifies as a "spotlight" which is rather doubtful. DeoDuce is referring to the recent Drudge item about Randi Rhodes threatening President Bush with an audio clip:

Government officials are reviewing a skit which aired on the network Monday evening -- a skit featuring an apparent gunshot warning to the president!

The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

Sounds at least as bad as the so-called abortion provider "hit lists" that earned the victims $100 million in damages from the writers. I think that award may have been a bit excessive, but it's definately not ok to use threats of violence to manipulate the political process. Plus, it's rather crude and unclassy, unlike the light-hearted humor of the conservative talk-show hosts.

(Generally, anyway. And if you're willing to threaten violence then you'd better be prepared for the establishment to use violence back against you. Not to ramble, but in the larger sense I think there are times when violence can be a good solution to a problem, but the initiator should realize that his escalation will not and should not go unchallenged. Ultimately, if a government cannot successfully defend itself with physical force then it doesn't really "deserve" to exist anyway, since it certainly wouldn't be reflecting the will of the people.)

Anyway, as for Air America's downward spiral, Brian C. Anderson had a good piece in the LA Times (!) last week. (Via himself in his interview at Powerline.)

Wait a second, you say, didn't I read that Air America has expanded to more than 50 markets? That's true, but let's put things in perspective: Conservative pundit and former Reagan official William J. Bennett's morning talk show, launched at the same time as Air America, reaches nearly 124 markets, including 18 of the top 20, joining the growing ranks of successful right-of-center talk programs (Limbaugh is still the ratings leader, drawing more than 15 million listeners a week).

And look at Air America's ratings: They're pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they'd be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

Anyway, I like gloating. Randi Rhodes and Air America should pay President Bush $100 million.

Update:
Randi Rhodes apologizes.

Via The Jawa Report, who recently joined the Bear Flag League, is a bit piece about Indonesian justice.

In Indonesia they give you 4.5 days in jail for every person you murder in the name of Jihad. On the other hand, if you're caught with some marijuana, you could just find yourself in jail for the rest of your life. Especially if you're a Westerner.

To summarize: the Islamic terrorist, Abu Bakar Bashir, who masterminded the Bali bombing that killed 202 people was given 30 months in jail (minus time served awaiting trial), while Australian Schapelle Corby who was arrested with 9 pounds of weed in the Bali airport was facing execution until prosecutors generously lessened their requested sentence to life imprisonment because of her "good manners". What's more, it appears there's a decent chance the drugs were planted, as Miss Corby claims.

This kind of stuff is why I'm wary of traveling abroad. Yes, you can get cheap travel deals to Mexico, but who wants to risk spending the rest of their lives in a Mexican jail for attracting the wrong attention from the Federalis? Maybe I'm just a chicken, but so be it.

One of my great hopes for the internet is that it will serve as a collective memory bank that will help mitigate the perpetual forgetfulness of the American public. Most Americans are so fat and happy and forward-focused that it's understandable that we so quickly forget the past, but amnesia comes at a price. Namely, every time some leftists start making predictions of doom and gloom we take them seriously and actually pause to consider their absurd objections. Heck, some of us are often even persuaded, and all because we completely forget the track record of leftist philosophy.

Time will not suffice for me to mention the horrible atrocities of communism and socialism around the world over the last century. Nor can I possibly elaborate further on the nonsensical ravings of environmentalists and pertroleum chicken littles. The anti-war left couldn't even get any of their dire pre-war preditions to come true, despite the best efforts of the media. And now we're supposed to worry about reforming Social Security?

Few Democrats or leftists of any stripe have come forward to applaud Bush's pragmatic, experimental social policy. Yet, they can't confess that their "principle," that government must always grow and never shrink, is something they pulled out of the air. Nor can they draw on the credibility they built up the last time a welfare state program was scaled back. In the Clinton-era debate over welfare reform, we were told (in The Nation) that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was crucial to "the fragile state of grace that suggests we are our sisters' and brothers' keepers. That is what community is fundamentally about." And we were warned that ending AFDC "will destroy that state of grace. In its place will come massive and deadly poverty, sickness, and all manner of violence. People will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar, everyone who can will move. Working- and middle-class communities all over America will become scary, violent wastelands."

Show us, please, all those hellish wastelands that have sprung up in the last nine years--and then tell us why we must not make any changes to Social Security.

It's my sincere hope that the internet and its related technologies will help reduce the allure of the idealistic yet infantile left. It's important to remember the hideous effects of "liberalism" and the poverty and enslavement that trail in its wake. The chief irony is that the supposedly "heartless" philosophies of the right end up benefiting everyone more than the supposedly "compassionate" philosophies of the left. That must be galling.

Randy Kirk is floating a few ideas for some Christian collaborative writing projects and asking for writers who are interested in contributing book reviews (of any genre) or short biographies of modern Christian heroes. The power of the internet is that it makes such collaboration easy and potentially profitable, and Randy intends to publish the results of these projects when they come to fruition. In any event, it sounds like a fun opportunity to get in on an interesting venture at the ground floor.

Los Angeles City Beat has an article about the "gentrification" of West Los Angeles from a perspective that's largely sympathetic to the gangsters that used to dominate the formerly crime-ridden streets of my old neighborhood. I don't live in West LA anymore, but I'd like to move back some day... though the rising cost of living that's driven out gang-bangers will also make it tough for me to justify returning.

The story is the same across the Westside: The vida loca in neighborhoods such as West L.A.’s Sawtelle district, Venice’s Oakwood area, and the Culver City-adjacent Del Rey barrio has turned into la dolce vita for high-income residents who are pushing westward. Thouhg LAPD still reports more than 50,000 gang members in the city, they have been shoved east by gentrification. For the Latino and black locals who called the Westside home for decades, dwindling gang membership is the inevitable result. Many neighbors and cops, of course, say good riddance (especially with gang crimes in West L.A. down 45 percent so far compared to last year). But some veteranos lament the end of an era, a time when taco-slangin’ lunch trucks were always around the corner and eses cast authoritative shadows on the street. ...

Eighteen-year-old Julio Ruiz sits on the steps outside an apartment building in Venice’s Oakwood area on a recent Saturday afternoon, pecking his girlfriend on the cheek. He lives with his mom and three siblings in a one-bedroom, $710-per-month apartment. He says the landlord could fetch at least $1,000 for the place and would be glad to see his family leave. But it’s a good price, based on their move-in rent of seven years ago. “They’re trying to kick us out,” says the Venice 13 member. “All my homies be moving to Inglewood.” ...

He’s not leaving anytime soon, and he has plenty of animosity for the mostly white, professional newcomers in his neighborhood. “They come out here like Venice gang is nothing,” he says, “like we ain’t shit no more.”

Well, no, it's just that people don't appreciate brutal murders and drug crimes. The article portrays gang life rather romantically and doesn't interview any West LA residents that aren't current or former gang members, but it's still honest about the murder and mayhem that the "gentrified" newcomers are struggling to eradicate. What it doesn't acknowledge is that the former gang members are some of the biggest beneficiaries of the ridiculous real estate prices in the area, often becoming millionaires.

James Taranto makes a great point about aborted abortions:

Abortive Abortions "The Bush administration said Friday that it would enforce a nearly 3-year-old federal law that requires doctors to attempt to keep alive a fetus that survives an abortion," reports the Associated Press in a dispatch bearing the weird title "White House to Enforce Abortion-Fetus Law." The New York Times has an even more bizarre statement:

In a telephone conference call announcing the new enforcement policy, [Dennis] Smith [director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations] could not provide a rule of thumb to distinguish a fetus from a "born-alive infant."

This is confusing only to those who insist on denying that a fetus is what it is, namely an unborn child. Once a child is born, he ceases being a fetus and is simply a child.

It seems to me that a baby who survives an abortion and ends up outside the womb should clearly be considered a "real" human being, even by those who favor abortion. It's interesting how often this must happen. Considering that there are around 1,000,000 abortions in the United States each year, even low abortion complication rates will lead to tens of thousands of incidents -- and I immediately question the veracity of any complication statistics collected by doctors who perform abortions; they've got a financial motivation to undercount.

Frequency:

* In the US: Frequency depends on gestational age (GA) at time of abortion and method of abortion. Complication rates according to GA at time of abortion are as follows: (1) fewer than 6 weeks, less than 1%; (2) 12-13 weeks, 3-6%; and (3) second trimester, up to 50%, possibly higher.

Not all complications result in the baby surviving his or her execution, but that's one of the potential complications listed. One percent of one million is ten thousand, which is an awful lot.

Update 050428:
Here's an article about a Florida woman whose son was unsuccessfully aborted.

A conservative legal group has filed two complaints against a Florida abortion clinic claiming the clinic refused to help a mother whose baby was born alive, despite a law that protects babies "accidentally" born during abortion procedures from being killed or left to die.

The mother, Angele, had gone to the EPOC clinic in Orlando, Fla., to get an abortion. After the first day of the procedure, she was required to return to the clinic the following day for an induced abortion. When her baby was born alive, the woman screamed for help, but the clinic workers refused to help her, according to the Liberty Counsel.

Reprehensible.

For anyone out there who cares, I was getting an error loading Visual Studio 6 project files (.dsp) using Visual Studio .NET 2003. The error said "Cannot load the project due to a corrupt project file" but gave no indication as to how to fix the problem, and there wasn't any solution online that I could quickly find. The answer turned out to be that the .dsp files needed to be converted to DOS file format rather than Unix. I'm not sure why VS6 would create the .dsp files in Unix format, or if the FTP server converted them, but once I opened the files and converted them to DOS using emacs "C-x ENT f dos" and re-saved them, .NET 2003 opened them just fine. (DOS text files have carriage returns and line feed characters at the end of every line, whereas Unix text files only have line feeds.)

StrategyPage has an interesting post about the cost of stationing American troops overseas (dateline April 14, 2005).

Stationing American forces overseas has not always been as large a financial burden on the United States that it appeared to be. As the economies in West Germany and Japan recovered after World War II, they reached a point where the United States demanded, and got, payments from those countries to cover part of the expense of keeping American troops there. Since then, Japan and Germany have paid over a hundred billion dollars in such payments, and since 1991, even South Korea has made similar payments. South Korea’s payments are now $661 million a year, but are being cut 8.9 percent to reflect the withdrawal of some American troops.

They also point out that the biggest costs are travel and the economic loss of having the soldiers spend their pay in another country. Additionally, if Iraq decides to keep American troops around long-term, we should expect them to pick up part of the tab.

I just ate a banana and it crossed my mind that banana peels aren't really as slippery as they're generally portrayed in cartoons and movies. I've stepped on banana peels before and haven't fallen; generally the peel just makes a squishy sound and gets goo on my shoe. What other common, everyday objects are often attributed unreal, vastly exaggerated properties in works of fiction? And I'm not asking about exaggeration based on ignorance -- such as a "hacker" who can break into "CIA mainframes" in 30 seconds -- but rather stereotypical portrayals that everyone knows are absurd. For example, onions that make their cutters bawl.

Commenter extraordinaire Ben Bateman deconstructs relativism in the comment thread of my earlier post about evil.

Mark: You seem to be using a weird liberal rhetorical device. Driving home, sometimes all I can get on the radio is Alan Colmes, and he does this all the time:

"You say X. But other people say Y. So how can we know?"

The implication is that we can't really know anything until everyone with expertise on the subject holds to a single view. This is impossible, of course, for anything but the most basic of logical truths, so it amounts to the claim that we can never really know anything. It thus amounts to a species of relativism.

As with all types of relativism, this argument is a weapon rather than a belief. For example, I have never heard a liberal say: "Sure, I think that taxes should be higher. But some conservatives disagree. So who really knows?" No, it is always the conservative belief that must dissolve into relativistic mud at the mere hint of a contrary liberal belief.

Mark puts up a good fight and the comments are better than my post, so go read them.

Dozens of leftist millionaires and billionaires convened the "Phoenix Group" in Scottsdale, Arizona, to discuss seeding some new liberal think tanks. The ironic thing is that the only way these think tanks will be able to come up with ideas that work is if they abandon the leftist ideals of these business-savvy but clueless donors.

George Soros told a carefully vetted gathering of 70 likeminded millionaires and billionaires last weekend that they must be patient if they want to realize long-term political and ideological yields from an expected massive investment in “startup” progressive think tanks.

The Scottsdale, Ariz., meeting, called to start the process of building an ideas production line for liberal politicians, began what organizers hope will be a long dialogue with the “partners,” many from the high-tech industry. Participants have begun to refer to themselves as the Phoenix Group. ...

The money details are several weeks away. “There aren’t dollar figures at this point,” Ingersoll said.

Soros, a Hungarian-born financier who donated more than $23 million to pro-Democratic 527 groups last cycle, gave the main presentation, said Ingersoll, who declined to name the other presenters.

Never let it be said again that the Republicans are the party of big money. Still, ideas win elections, and spending money to spread bad ideas isn't likely to be effective.

Many non-believers -- and indeed many Christians -- may not understand how the papacy relates to protestants, but the Baptist Press has a brief and informative explanation.

Amid expressions of appreciation for the conservative moral views of Joseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal who was elected as the 265th pope of the Roman church, various evangelical leaders reiterated their disagreement with Catholicism’s papacy from a biblical standpoint.

“Evangelicals do not find any biblical warrant for the office of the papacy or the elaborate structure of the Roman Catholic Church,” Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., told Baptist Press.

“Further, the Catholic system's emphasis on merit, works salvation and veneration of Mary and the saints are issues that those committed to ‘sola scriptura’ could never endorse or affirm,” Akin continued. “While we can appreciate the moral stand on life and marriage of the papacy, we will resolutely maintain that our High Priest is Jesus Christ in whom we have direct access to the true and living God.”

There's scripture in the article to back it all up.

CNSNews has a story about three Democratic senators who have recently changed their tunes on filibustering.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Ken Salazar (Colo.) on Wednesday planned to express support for the judicial filibusters taking place right now. But in the past, each man has expressed a different view on the topic of filibusters and judicial nominees. ...

And Sen. Joseph Lieberman - speaking in January 1995, when Republicans were the majority party in the Senate - stood up for the "rights of the majority."

Lieberman called it unfair for Democrats to use the filibuster to "confuse and frustrate the will of the majority."

In January 1995, he and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced a measure that would have eliminated filibusters designed to kill legislation or nominations that had majority support.

I don't have a problem with people changing their minds, but I really wish these senators would explicitly acknowledge their old positions and explain how and why they've changed. It's annoying to me that politicians in general think the public has no memory of the past, but now with the internet and blogs it'll eventually get harder to assume we've forgotten everything that's come before.

I don't know why I've been feeling so blah recently, but I'm afraid I'm starting to take it out on other people. My new job is stressful -- mainly because I'm still getting used to it -- but my life is really good. There's no reason for me to feel irritable or uneasy, but I have been and I'm trying to stop. I've been eating normally and exercising normally. My sleep schedule is shifting to be earlier than it was, thanks to my new job, but I've been getting enough rest I believe. Hrm. Maybe there's no explanation, it just is what it is.

I think the language in this AFP article claiming that the new pope "intervened in the 2004 US election campaign" is pretty disingenuous. When then Cardinal Ratzinger ordered bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters he wasn't attempting to affect anything as mundane as the presidential election -- he was addressing a religious issue that was highlighted by the publicity of the political climate. The cardinal didn't change the Catholic Church's position on abortion, he merely pointed out that the existing position should be applied in a certain way within that particular extremely public context. There's nothing out of place about a religious leader teaching others about how his religion applies to practical, real-life situations. As I wrote in my earlier post: politics should stay out of religion, but religion has every right to get involved in politics.