Society & Culture: January 2008 Archives

Despite many proposals to "fix" the "broken" primary system, I may be the only American left who likes the undemocratic status quo. Most opponents of the primary system lament that a small handful of states do most of the winnowing, leaving the majority of citizens with only a few choices and little direct say in the nomination process. All true!

But remember: voting is not a "right", it is merely a means to an end. The goal is to create and maintain an honest, fair, and open government that will protect us and preserve our liberty. Democracy is one tool we can use to build that government, but democracy should not be seen as an end unto itself. Our Founding Fathers knew this, which is why the voting franchise was limited even though the rights protected by the Constitution were reserved for all people. They believed that the rights of everyone would be best protected by reserving the power to vote to a subset of the population. History has shown that they were right in some regards and wrong in others, but no one can dispute that America has been only somewhat democratic since its inception.

Even now there are a whole host of undemocratic controls built into our government to prevent tyranny by the democratic mob. The Senate is perhaps the most obvious example, its membership being based states rather than the citizenry. The Supreme Court is also undemocratic, as is the Electoral College, as is the President's veto power, as is the requirement that both houses of Congress approve a bill before it can be signed into law, and so forth and so on. These institutions are democratic to varying degrees in that the wielders of power somehow trace their authority back to the People, but that derivation is purposefully indirect. And these institutions have served us reasonably well for more than 200 years, preserving for us the most enduring Republic and the safest and freest society on the face of the earth.

And so the fact that my primary votes have never counted as much as those cast in Iowa or New Hampshire doesn't distress me. I think Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are fairly representative of the population as a whole, and I don't feel like the results would have turned out much differently if Missouri has been an early primary state. Additionally, I like that a little-known candidate can compete in these small states and ramp up their campaign gradually rather than having to fight in California, New York, and Florida right out of the starting gate. Without a system like we've got, Barack Obama would have had no chance against Hillary Clinton, and Mike Huckabee would have been dead in the water.

I for one hope that we stick with something similar to the current system. I'm not adverse to any change whatsoever, but I think it would be a mistake to make drastic changes to a system that has served us pretty well thus far. Remember that democracy is only a means to an end, a tool to help us maintain our liberties and security. It's ironic that people simultaneously complain about the primary system and how "one vote can't make a difference". Be content as a cog in our wonderful Republic that somehow keeps chugging along despite its flaws.

A fascinating account of the least civilized place on earth, nearly untouched by Western Civilization through the end of the 20th century.

Epochs of history rarely come to a sudden end, seldom announce their passing with anything so dramatic as the death of a king or the dismantling of a wall. More often, they withdraw slowly and imperceptibly (or at least unperceived), like the ebbing tide on a deserted beach.

That is how the Age of Discovery ended. For more than five hundred years, the envoys of civilization sailed through storms and hacked through jungles, startling in turn one tribe after another of long-lost human cousins. For an instant, before the inevitable breaking of faith, the two groups would face each other, staring - as innocent, both of them, as children, and blameless as if the world had been born afresh. To live such a moment seems, when we think of it now, to have been one of the most profound experiences that our planet in its vanished immensity once offered. But each time the moment repeated itself on each fresh beach, there was one less island to be found, one less chance to start everything anew. It began to repeat itself less and less often, until there came a time, maybe a century ago, when there were only a few such places left, only a few doors still unopened.

Sometime quite recently, the last door opened. I believe it happened not long before the end of the millennium, on an island already all but known, a place encircled by the buzzing, thrumming web of a world still unknown to it, and by the mesh of a history that had forever been drawing closer.

Humanity needs new frontiers, but it seems like there may not be any left.

For decades mortgage lenders were damned for refusing to lend money to poor, minority, aspiring home-owners, and now they're being damned for for lending too easily.

"People of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans," concluded the organization United for a Fair Economy in a recent report which estimated that minorities have seen between 163 billion and 278 billion dollars of their equity go up in smoke since 2000.

With its weakened economy and a large black population more used to renting, Cleveland has become a poster child of the subprime crisis in a country where some 2.1 million borrowers are behind on their mortgage payments.

City officials estimate that foreclosures have swallowed some 70,000 homes and turned entire neighborhoods into ghost towns.

The city has responded by suing lenders, accusing them of targeting black borrowers and steering them to the loans granted with few formalities and at hefty interest rates to people with poor credit histories.

Naturally the people being thrown out of houses they can't afford want the rest of us to rescue them from the consequences of their bad decision-making.

In the hardest-hit suburb of Cleveland, "nearly 24,000 people have lost their homes to Cleveland's Katrina," he told AFP. ...

"More than two years later, 6,000 homeowners (in St. Bernard Parish) have each received an average 65,000 dollars in government funds to rebuild their American Dreams. But in Cleveland and its suburbs, there is no disaster relief, no presidential visits, no good Samaritans to helps us."

"It would have been better if it was an earthquake or a hurricane, we respond better to natural disasters than to men in suits disasters," said city councilor Zach Reid.

First off, it was ridiculous to hand out so much money to Katrina victims. But secondly, at least they were victims of a natural disaster and not just people who bought more house than they could afford.

It seems very simple to me: don't live beyond your means. There's all sorts of things I'd love to own, but I can't because I don't make enough money. If I went out a bought a $10 million home but then couldn't pay the mortgage whose fault would that be? Would these same people be lining up to bail me out?

Only in California would an "environmentalist" fight to have redwoods cut down for casting shade on his solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they've done nothing wrong.

"We're just living here in peace. We want to be left alone," said Bissett, who with her husband has spent $25,000 defending themselves against criminal charges. "We support solar power, but we thought common sense would prevail."

Their neighbor Mark Vargas considers himself an environmentalist, too. His 10-kilowatt solar system, which he installed in 2001, is so big he pays only about $60 a year in electrical bills. He drives an electric car.

It's obvious that Vargas cares more about the money his solar panels save him personally than about the environment in general. And obviously anyone who drives a Prius cares more about looking environmentally-conscious than actually being so. What a ridiculous situation, but that's what happens when your religion is ridiculous.

(HT: Environmental Republican, Instapundit.)

More American babies were born in 2006 than in any year since 1961, which sounds like good news except for for this spin by unnamed "experts":

Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty.

Or, gosh, maybe Americans believe in our culture and our country and have hope for the future of our civilization? (Things which can't be said in many parts of the world.)

There are cultural reasons as well. Hispanics as a group have higher fertility rates — about 40 percent higher than the U.S. overall. And experts say Americans, especially those in middle America, view children more favorably than people in many other Westernized countries.

"Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, `Let's have another kid,'" said Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University.

Whew, for a moment I was afraid that Americans are reproducing faster than any other Western nation just because we're the poorest, dumbest, most oppressed people in the world.

The videos of Ezra Levant addressing the Canadian Human Rights Commission are priceless. I can't believe he was actually dragged before a "court" to answer for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammad in the Weekly Standard. Hopefully Canadians will see and object to how their government bureaucrats are spending their tax dollars.

Most colleges don't really teach computer science anymore, they just churn out Java programmers. I personally hate Java, and though I really like C# and the .NET framework in general I completely agree with Joel Spolsky when he writes that modern CS students don't really learn more than what's needed to generate monkey-level software and basic websites.

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I've seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they're usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

Yeah, it's too bad that most CS programs these days aren't hard enough to create good computer scientists... but then, real computer science is so hard that there just aren't many people who can do it (if I may be so humble). The fact of the matter is that the world needs code-monkeys, and Java (and the like) were created so that people closer to the mean would be able to contribute to the information age. There will always be a need for real computer scientists who can do the theorizing and architecting, but most programming jobs don't require that level of expertise.

(HT: Cypren.)

I spent a couple of minutes scouring the web but couldn't find strong data to support this hunch, nevertheless... I doubt that pregnant teens gain much benefit from special programs that help them earn symbolic high school diplomas.

Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The request is unusual in Colorado's public schools, where districts tend to deal with pregnant students or new moms with specialized programs or individualized education plans. ...

"It's critical that these young women have a chance to bond with their babies," Moss said. "Maybe we do need a policy. Clearly, as a district, we have to look at what is going on with our young women. We've got to look at the birth-control issues and teen pregnancy and how we best help them deal with it and still graduate."

Despite the fact that high school graduates earn more than drop-outs, I expect that girls who have babies while they're in high school earn about the same whether they end up getting a diploma or not.

"If there are young mothers asking for maternity leave, the board should listen to them," said Lori Casillas, executive director of the Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and Prevention. "If they think it is a barrier to graduation, the board should look at that."

Her organization advocates that schools provide child-care services for new moms. Too many girls drop out after giving birth, and schools must do something to keep them, Casillas said.

My hunch is that there's very little point. The 1.5% of teen mothers who go on to finish college are undoubtedly exceptional; I suspect that the vast majority of girls who get pregnant in high school will benefit very little financially from a symbolic piece of paper.

I've discussed the wisdom of the 19th Amendment before, but I've never sunk so low as to accuse women of voting on pure emotion!

Then Clinton began getting emotional: "It's not easy, and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know I have so many opportunities from this country just don't want to see us fall backwards," she said.

Then, her voice breaking and tears in her eyes, she said, "You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it." ...

After the event, Pernold Young told ABC News that she was glad Clinton showed emotion.

"That was real," Pernold Young said.

Another woman in the group, Alison Hamilton of Portsmouth, New Hampshire said she, like most of the people in the group, had been leaning toward voting for Obama.

But after seeing Clinton become emotional, she said she was going to back Clinton.

"That was the clincher," Hamilton said.

If I made this stuff up I'd be branded as a sexist. Can't Hillary, the voters, the media, and America do better?