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Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Word verification for comments? Word verification for comments?

I just turned on word verification for comments. This is a feature that requires that you see some weird text, and then key that in in order to comment.

I have been using this feature over at Ann Althouse's blog for quite awhile now, and I hate it. But the last two blog entries went up, and within minutes, had junk comments on them, typically selling someone else's blog.

So, now the few people who actually read this blog will have to do the same now. Sorry.

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Rove/Libby/Miller/Plame/Wilson Rove/Libby/Miller/Plame/Wilson

The special prosecutor is running out of time with his grand jury. I expect something one way or another in the next day or so. The pundits are going crazy. The libs, like Chris Matthews, are ready to put the handcuffs on Libby, Rove, and Cheny, by themselves, if it will help the special prosecutor.

I did find interesting an editorial from Gary Hart today in the Denver Post. Hart was, of course, at one time a Senator from Colorado, and sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee when the identity act was passed that was probably not violated by the outing of Plame. He also ran for president, before being caught on the "Monkey Business" with a woman not his wife sitting on his lap. More recently, he just makes a lot of money "consulting" and lives not far from my father and brothers west of Denver in the mountains.

Well, Hart went on and on about how evil it was that someone would endanger a covert operative by disclosing her identity. No mention was made, of course, about why it was disclosed, or even if she was covert at the time.

Oh, and one rumor is that neighbors of Wilson and Plame were reinterviewed today by the FBI trying to determine whether or not they knew of Plame's CIA employment before this all blew up. Personally, I find this rumor questionable, given how thorough the special prosecutor has been.

In any case, we should actually have some idea of what is going on in the next day or two. So all this prognostication is just hot air to me. And this means no more anonymous sources, even if doubly sourced (which was used a couple of times today to give extra credibilty to some anonymous sources).

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Spam (#3) Spam (#3)

I don't get it. I hadn't checked my mail since before dinner, maybe five hours ago, and found 31 new messages in my inbox. Three were quasi-legitimate, which left 28 as spam.

But of those 28, the five of the first six were identical, all supposedly coming from "info@fxoq.com", and all having the same unintelligable subject line. But then, another five were similar, with an email id of "info", a nonsensical domain name, and total garbage as the subject. I guess the idea is that if I saw so many of them, I must think that they were important, or something.

Oh, and one from "account@paypal.com" and two from "account@amazon.com" all apparently wanting me to give them the information they need to drain my bank accounts.

Do they really think this sort of thing really works? Someone must, or I wouldn't keep getting it.

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Condoleezza Rice running for President? Condoleezza Rice running for President?

This post is slightly modified, but was orignally written in response to a comment in a thread on Ann Althouse's blog suggesting hypocracy on the part of the party that opposes affirmative action in backing Dr. Rice for president.

I think that one answer to the point about the party opposed to affirmative action being excited about running an African American woman is that that is why it would be so effective.

Dr. Rice is not Secretary of State right now, nor was she National Security Advisor because she is Black. She got those jobs because she is good. Very good.

The reason that a lot of conservatives oppose affirmative action is that we prefer a race blind society. MLK said it well when he said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

What a Rice nomination would say is that the Republicans (and the country if she were to win) believe in a race blind society where anyone, regardless of color, race, religion, national origin, or sex, can rise to any level, as long as they are smart and work hard enough.

I personally think that is a much better message to be sending the inner city Blacks, Hispanics, etc. than that their failure is not their own fault and that they are somehow owed something by society because of it.

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New York Post:Times Trashfest New York Post:Times Trashfest

John Podhoretz takes the Gray Lady to task for its recent treatment of Judith Miller. As long as she was in jail refusing to divulge her sources, they backed her. But now, it turns out, that she had a relatively warm relationship with Scooter Libby, and, as a result, one article after another is coming out trashing her. Of course, no mention is made that this is how she has been getting her stories for decades. Esp. egregious are the vieled hints of some sort of almost romantic or sexual relationship between the two, despite the fact that both are married (to others) and Libby apparently has small kids at home.

But what the Times fails to point out is that this is all really about Iraq and our invasion thereof. Miller had been the NYT expert on WMD, and confidently predicted finding large quantities of them until it became obvious to all after our invasion that they had somehow disappeared. So, Podhoretz suggests that the trashfest against Miller by the Times is primarily about the fact that through her, they were involved in justifying the invasion, and thus, on the wrong side of "Bush Lied, People Died". And, this is unforgivable for the Times.

The NY Post has another editorial out on the same subject: "All the Smears Fit to Print". In it, they point out:
First and foremost, the "Dump on Judy" movement — both within and outside the Times — seems based not on her behavior in this matter but rather the left's continued fury over articles she wrote about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

That her reporting appears to have been wrong — at least about the presence of WMD stockpiles at the start of the war — is taken by her critics as symbolic of the war itself: Discredit her, and you've discredited the Bush administration.

In other words, this isn't about journalistic ethics — it's about partisan politics.

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Sunday, October 23, 2005

At Memorial Ceremony in Alabama, Rice Pays Homage to Victims of Church Bombing - New York Times At Memorial Ceremony in Alabama, Rice Pays Homage to Victims of Church Bombing - New York Times

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended a memorial service for the four young girls killed forty-four years ago in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. One of those girls, Denise McNair, played dolls with Dr. Rice, and her parents have a picture of her and Rev. John Rice, Dr. Rice's father, at their daughter's kindergarden graduation.

If this woman isn't running for president, she shold be.

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Saturday, October 22, 2005

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - U.N. Procurement Scandal: Ties to Saddam and Al Qaeda FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - U.N. Procurement Scandal: Ties to Saddam and Al Qaeda

Things just get more and more interesting. A number of interconnected companies with Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Russian Mafia, etc. connections turn out to have been on the U.N.'s list of procurement vendors. Money seems to have been flowing in all directions, including at least a million in bribes from the Oil for Food program. One company was blacklisted awhile back by both the U.S. and the U.N., but then later became the middle eastern agent for the primary company discussed. It is no longer blacklisted for funneling money to terrorists by the U.N., but is by the U.S. in Iraq. Yet, it was doing procurement business with the U.N.

And the liberals wondered why it was so important to get John Bolton to the U.N. The place just stinks more and more of corruption as time goes on.

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Friday, October 21, 2005

WaPo: U.N. Body Endorses Cultural Protection WaPo: U.N. Body Endorses Cultural Protection

PARIS, Oct. 20 -- In a vote cast as a battle of global conformity vs. cultural diversity, delegates to a U.N. agency turned aside strong U.S. objections Thursday and overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty designed to protect movies, music and other cultural treasures from foreign competition.

The 148 to 2 [US and Israel] vote at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization emerged as a referendum on the world's love-hate relationship with Hollywood, Big Macs and Coca-Cola.

It is apparently only going to take thirty countries ratifying this for it to take effect.

That said, I suspect that this isn't the end of our cultural imperialism. The problem is globalization. This is an attempt to slow it down. And, for the most part, it is going to fail.

A couple of years ago, France was trying to do this sort of thing. They were mandating French subtitling, pushing French works, etc. A lot of American terms were Frechized. To no avail. Almost all of the French, like most others in this world, preferred "PC" to the fifteen or twenty character name invented by the French Ministry of Culture for personal computers. And the French also seemed to much prefer American TV - even if they had to watch sattelite broadcasts.

Countries as big and powerful as China, Russia, and India, may be able to prevent a lot of American cultural influence. But the rest of the world? Esp. the third world? Highly unlikely. One sattelite in geosynchronous orbit above central Africa is likely to screw up censorship throughout much of that continent.

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Huffinton: Russert in Plamegate Huffinton: Russert in Plamegate

Much of what is in huffingtonpost.com is garbage. But there are a surprising number of actually interesting articles. Today, Arianna, in a post entitled: "Russert Watch: Let Me Count the Ways", points out the absurdity of Tim Russert in this scandal. For example, on July 17, 2005, he did an entire Meet the Press on Plamegate with Matt Cooper, Ken Mehlman, John Podesta, Bob Woodward, and others. He makes no reference whatsoever to his involvement in the affair. Yet, there is some evidence that Libby got his information on Wilson and Plame from Russert. In other words, you have one of the central figures in the entire scandal playing disinterested journalist as he interviews a bunch of people involved, many to a lesser degree than he is himself.

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Wilson, Plame, Rove, and Libby Wilson, Plame, Rove, and Libby

I commented in my immediately preceeding post about today's NYT article: "Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry". But even more interesting to me was its article five days ago by Judith Miller: "My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room".

It appears that at the time that Joe Wilson published his NYT article, "What I Didn't Find in Africa", it was becoming readily apparent that we weren't going to find the WMD in Iraq that almost everyone expected to find there. The obvious culprit would have been the CIA. After all, that was their job. So, they were in the process of bureaucratic CYA. And part of this CYA appeared to the Administration to have been the Wilson article. The CIA had sent him (at the suggestion of his wife who was employed there), and was at least somewhat complicit in the publication of his article. Worse, in Miller's second interview with Libby, he indicated that the VP's office's pique at being blamed for Wilson's trip when they hadn't authorized the trip, nor even received a report on it from the CIA.

So, at that point in time, we have Libby sitting there with a declassified version of the pre-war intelligence from the CIA indicating that they believed quantities of WMD to be present in Iraq, and having read the classified version which was even more adament. And then the CIA starts leaking like crazy trying to distance itself from all this. Add in the Joe Wilson trip to Niger and his damning NYT article, and no surprise that the Administration was getting increasingly upset at that Agency. It felt that the Agency had screwed up royally, and was trying to pass the blame to the Administration.

Since then, of course, we have heard a constant refrain of "Bush Lied, People Died", referring to just this controversy. But this ignores that the CIA appears to have been asleep through this whole thing, and then tried to move the blame to the Administration - and that the MSM, and, in particular, the NYT, were complicit in this.

Equally important though is to remember that the entire Wilson / Plame / Rove / Libby scandal is just a small part of the attempt by CIA employees to exonerate the Agency from its blatent intelligence failures leading up to our invasion of Iraq.

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NYT: Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry NYT: Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry

Interesting NYT article. Rove and Libby ready to be hauled off in handcuffs. No one quoted directly. All the information is apparently coming from the lawyers, though no suggestion is made of whose lawyers are talking. And, needless to say, it is all anonymous. There is no indication that any of this is coming from Fitzgerald or his staff.

Yet if you read the article carefully, I see little evidence presented (as yet) that would support an indictment of either. Rove's offense seems to be that, according to the NYT, he was immediately forthcoming with all of his conversations on the subject.

And Libby's? The NYT isn't quite sure, but does seem to be ignoring the latest revelations concerning his discussion by its very own reporter, Judith Miller, where he apparently mistakenly tells her (or she tells him) that "Flame" (misspelled) worked for "Winpac" (Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the C.I.A. that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons). Note though that Winpac is/was an organization on the analyst side of the CIA, when it turns out that she still actually worked on the operative side of the agency. These two facts seem to imply, at least to me, that Libby, at least at that point, was not operating on classified information.

Rereading Judith Miller's NYT article from five days ago, what jumps out at me is that what this case really revolves around is a battle between the CIA and the Administration over who was responsible for the botched pre-invasion Iraqi WMD estimates. Libby apparently was quite incensed that the CIA at that point was trying to backpeddle from its pre-war WMD stance, leaving the Administration out to dry there, after it had relied on CIA estimates.

The other thing that apparently incensed esp. Libby and his boss, Cheney, was that Wilson was using the VP's office as his excuse for going, yet they had never apparently specifically requested it and they had never received a specific response concerning the trip. In other words, the entire trip happened within the bowells of the CIA, and had not trickled up even to the director's (Tenet) attention.

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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Fox: Iraqis Nab Alleged Top Terror Financier Fox: Iraqis Nab Alleged Top Terror Financier

Apparently last night Iraqi security forces arrested Yasir Sabhawi Ibrahim, son of Saddam Hussein's half brother Sabhawi Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti in an apartment in Baghdad, after the Syrians pushed him out of the country and then told the U.S. where he was.

Ibrahim was supposedly the #1 financeer of terrorists in Iraq and the #2 Baathist terrorist leader, reporting directly to Younis al-Ahmad, the leader of the Iraqi born terrorists, and was the high level connection between the former Baathists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who heads Al Qaeda in Iraq and leads the foreign born terrorist infiltrating into Iraq.

This is interesting in a couple respects, esp. coming just a couple days after the recent elections, where the terrorists were far less able to disrupt things than they had been during earlier elections.

Probably the most notable is that even though Syria wouldn't turn him directly over to the U.S. or Iraq (as they had his father), they were willing to cooperate enough to push him out and then give his location to the U.S. IMO, this means that Syria has been under enormous pressure to cooperate, and the pressure is paying off. It should be noted that the combined US/Iraqi operations just east of the two countries' joint border may have pushed things a little bit in the right direction.

Secondly, this is further evidence that the insurgency is starting to fall apart. These arrests and arrest attempts ending in the death of terrorist leaders who try to shoot back are coming more and more frequently. That is very good news and is a good deal a result of ever higher levels of Iraqi involvement in security matters.

Indeed, it should be noted here, he was apprehended by Iraqi security forces. Not American ones. I am sure we had a Quick Response Team available if his men started to shoot back with a lot of heavy weapons. And the Iraqis may have had an American advisor or two along. But they did the heavy lifting here. They put their lives on the line, and it paid off.

My one worry is that maybe this arrest was announced too soon, for (Iraqi) political purposes. In the past, this sort of thing has been delayed for a couple of days so that there is a chance to roll up close accomplises before they figure out what happened.

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RM News:Southwest Airlines plans DIA stop for 2006 RM News:Southwest Airlines plans DIA stop for 2006

Great news. It looks like Southwest Airlines is finally coming to Colorado. I love that airline. In particular, I love that they don't gouge. Even Frontier does a little, and the big airlines, notably United out of Denver, do it a lot. For example, Southwest gives discounts for reservations up until three days before departure. And, the fares don't go up that much as you get closer.

Importantly to me, they only charge you the difference between the fare in effect when you change a reservation and what you had paid before. Thus, if you decide that you want to stay an extra day because you are having so much fun, you will only pay the difference between their full fares (almost as low as most carriers' discount fares) and what you actually paid. No rebooking charges. None.

What this means is that an average price for a ticket between Phoenix (PHX) and Salt Lake City (SLC) is maybe $200 on most airlines if you book at least two weeks in advance. Southwest may charge $150 that far out. But then, they might charge $100 each way for last minute reservations. Thus, if you stay over an extra day, it would cost you $25, which is $100-$75 (half of the $150). United would charge you the difference in fares (on much higher last minute fares), plus a $100 rebooking fee, which probably translates into $300 or so.

One interesting point in the article is that: "Also working in DIA's favor: the airport ranked No. 1 in the nation in on-time performance last year — an important factor for the nation's No. 1 on-time airline." DIA's on-time record is no accident. It is arguably the best designed and laid out airport in the world. It is set up currently with six runways radiating out in the four cardinal directions, with the ability to expand to twelve (three in each direction). As a result, it almost never has traffic jams on the ground, and you almost never have to taxi down to the other end of a runway to take off or land. Rather, when you land, you just come right off the runway and head straight to the terminals. Arguably, for $5.5 billion, Denver got the best airport in the world - at least from the point of view of the airlines.

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Malkin and Internment (rebuttal) Malkin and Internment (rebuttal)

In one of the few legitimate comments I have received on this blog, Ahistoricality in a comment to my previous post concerning Micelle Malkin's book on Japanese Internment has pointed out that much of what is in that book has been fairly effectively debunked in a series of posts on volokh.com:
Malkin does a lot more than "overplay her hand": she's taking material out of context, she's overinterpreting things, and she's plain made stuff up on occassion. The reviewer you cite is bending over backwards to avoid invalidating her entire argument, but ultimately even as friendly a venue as the Claremont folks can't say she's written a good history with a straight face. Try this for more detail. [BEH - highly suggested reading]

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Spam (#2) Spam (#2)

Overnight, in a matter of some eight or ten hours, I got a grand total of 79 emails. Of those, eight are of interest, including one from the Freakonomics authors, eight more I can take some responsibility for, and that leaves 61 total junk.

Of those junk email, I got three from PayPal telling me my (non existant) account has been suspended, and they need my account information to drain it. I even have a new AOL account from them. Two from Wells Fargo asking for my account information so that they can drain that (non existant) account too. I think over a dozen on-line pharmacy advertisements, plus at least two for HGH. Oh, and, even better, an URGENT REQUEST from someone in Nigeria who wants help repatriating my money there. I haven't seen one of these for a month or so.

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Spam Spam

Unbelievable. I have probably gotten 60 or so spam email messages in the last 24 hours. I must be getting at least one notice a day that I need to sign onto either Ebay or PayPal and give them my account information so that I can reactivate my (nonexistant) account with them. I probably get another 2 or 3 a week from other banks, where I also don't have accounts.

Probably even more common though are all my chances to get male performance enhancement drugs without the necessity of actually seeing a doctor, or, really, even of having the FDA approve the drugs.

It must work. But I sure don't see how. I would be frankly embarassed if I sent someone an email asking them for their banking information so I could clean out their checking account. But, I will get the same exact email from two or three people at the same time kindly making this offer to me.

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Winter - Mountain Watch Winter - Mountain Watch

Winter is on the way. I got an email today that there is a meeting of the volunteer program at Keystone resort that I have worked for the last three years scheduled for Nov. 9, obviously aimed at having some of us on the slopes when the resort opens two days later. I suspect that it will mostly be review. We will still be working for the Ski Patrol, so nothing big organizationally. And then, after a half an hour or so of the Ski Patrol director and the Mtn. Watch supervisior talking, we will be issued our uniforms.

We get the same uniforms as last year - this should be the (third and) last year for them. At the end of the season the last two years, they have asked if we were planning on coming back, and if we were, they marked our uniforms appropriately, and, importantly to us, they didn't look too closely at wear, etc. Even at Vail's wholesale prices, they are expensive.

So, I have about three weeks before I get to hit the slopes. Last spring, I was ready for it to end. Now, I am ready to start again.

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Ronnie Earle: DeLay Evidence Missing Ronnie Earle: DeLay Evidence Missing

Apparently, Ronnie Earle's second indictment of Tom DeLay, et al. depends on a certain Excel spreadsheet of donors, which is, unfortunately for Earle, not available. As most probably know by now, this indictment was an 11th hour affair after Earle's previous indictment turned out to have charged a crime that wasn't a crime at the time the alleged conduct occurred. And that supposedly was from the third grand jury that Earle had utilized for this. The fourth grand jury refused to bring changes, leaving a final, fifth, grand jury to do the honors. Not surprisingly, DeLay, et al., have cried foul, or, more accurately, prosectorial misconduct.

The second indictment has its own problems. It appears to be charging DeLay et al. with stuff that is again not a crime, plus seems to ignore that it is brought in the wrong venue - the Texas election laws would seem to require that DeLay be tried in his home county, and not in Ronnie Earle's ultra-liberal Travis county. Needless to say, the DA in DeLay's home county wouln't think of charging their home town hero.

But what is more interesting to me is that the second indictment is based on a document that is not in the possession of the Earle's office. Instead, they have a supposed predecessor document that doesn't show the same information as charged. Different names, amounts, and totals. And the document is unsigned.

From an attorney's point of view (who doesn't try criminal cases), I see a major proof problem here. In order to get a document introduced into court, a foundation must be built for it. The obvious two objections to the document they do have are irrelevant and hearsay. The typical way that an attorney would overcome a hearsay objection is to show that the document is an admission of a party to the suit. But that is unlikely to work here, as authorship of that document appears to be unknown, or at least, likely unprovable.

That said, one thing that I have not seen discussed is that the document they do have is apparently a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. What must be remembered about Microsoft Office documents is that they almost invariably contain "metadata" embedded within. This metadata typically includes a revision history for the document, including who created the document and who modified it, and when. There are readily available tools for viewing metadata embedded in Microsoft Office documents, and, theoretically, might be utilized here to trace who created and modified that spreadsheet. It is hard to believe that Earle's office won't be able to figure this out, given all the techies there in Austin. We shall see.

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Friday, October 14, 2005

The Claremont Institute: Hardships of War - Malkin and Japanese Internment The Claremont Institute: Hardships of War - Malkin and Japanese Internment

This was an interesting article looking at Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror". This book created a fire storm as conservative pundit and Filipino-American Malkin attempted to justify the internment of Japanese immigrants (the Issei) and Japanese-Americans (mostly Nisei, or second-generation) during WWII.

The book was a direct attack on the conventional wisdom. I, along with probably most law school students, was introduced to the subject in a discussion of Korematsu v. United States,323 US 214 (1944), 323 US 214, considered by most Constitutional law scholors as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, up there along with Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896), which validated "separate but equal". Korematsu essentially validated internment even of American citizens.

The problem with the conventional wisdom is that it is often wrong. Malkin points out that there were real security issues involved, including a lot of information gleamed from "Magic", the intercept and decoding of Japanese diplomatic traffic (classified until the 1970s) and that one of the pilots downed at Pearl Harbor had been given succor by a Japanese-American couple and a laborer born in Japan—even after they learned of the Pearl Harbor attack. The Japanese diplomatic intercepts talked about utilizing Issei, and even Nisei, to provide intelligence and maybe even participate in sabotage.

Malkin, as is her want, over plays her hand here. According to this article, she did overestimate some things, and used evidence that wouldn't have been available until later. Nevertheless, she does apparently make a decent argument for the internment.

One thing of interest though for me is the immediate relevance of this, which was, I think, her aim and timing for the book. We are now engaged in a War on Terrorism (WoT), where almost all of those we have apprehended here or have done us violence here (notably, the 9/11 hijackers) fall into a fairly well defined democraphic category: young Muslim males, somewhere between 18 and 28, most often of Middle Eastern, and in particular, Arab, descent. Those actually coordinating with our enemies over seas, such as OBL and Al Qaeda, are invariably born Moslem, whereas the "independants" are more often Islamic converts. I should add that this ethnic and religious profiling also turns out to be fairly accurate for the suicide bombers in both Israel and Iraq - with the troubling addition of the recent addition of a small number of young women.

I think that part of Malkin's point here is that the backlash from the Japanese internment during WWII is hampering our WoT. Currently, when we fly, screeners are making grandmothers take off their shoes, and, in some cases, even hand searching them. Meanwhile, they are constrained from more thoroughly checking people who fit the racial profile of our enemies. For example, the screeners apparently face numerical limits on how many of these people they can more intensively check on any given flight. In short, we are hampering our WoT by tying one hand behind our back, while inconveniencing many of us who aren't the least bit likely to be of danger. All in the name of political correctness.

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Thursday, October 13, 2005

Winter (#2) Winter (#2)

A couple of days ago, I commented that Loveland Basin had been making snow when I drove by there last Saturday (10/8). Well, they are going to try go open this weekend. Winter is really coming.

Of course, down in Denver today, it was 72 degrees, and is expected to stay like that through the weekend. If they really do open, there will still be a lot of people in Denver wearing shorts.

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WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo - race WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo - race

The thing that caused the most rucous eleven years ago when Charles Murray et al. first published "The Bell Curve" was their finding that IQ differed by race and ethnic group. In particular, they found that Blacks in this country scored approximatly one standard deviation below the norm, and Jews, one standard deviation above. This was the extreme of political incorrectness, which is why, to this day, the book is cause for immediate scorn by those invested in the equality theory.

A couple of years ago, when the human genome project was significantly further back than it is now, scientists were telling us that the amount of genetic material that differs by race was insignificant compared to the human variations in the remainder of the genome.

However, since then scientists have come a long way. At present, they can predict within less than 1% error rate the race of a person based on their genes - or I should say that in better than 99% of the cases tested, the race predicted for a person matched their racial self-identification.

But the white/black IQ difference stubornly remains. It really hasn't changed in that eleven years. Interestingly though, it seems to be larger for mathematical reasoning, and smaller for verbal reasoning. And I should note that this racial difference remains even when controlling for income level.

However, knowing how controversial this whole thing is, Murray has suggested a way to test this. Start with the fact that the average African-American today is approximately 80% black and 20% white, but that there are significant numbers of people ranging all the way from 0% to 100% black, and that this can be determined fairly accuarately by genetic testing. His proposal then is to test both the IQ and the racial genetics of a population. Then, for each subject in the study, determine the percentage of black genes or ancestry from the genetic results. And finally, see if subpopulation means do drop accordingly as the percentage of black ancestry increases. The supposition is that if race really is a factor here, the curve will be fairly smooth, running from 100 down to 84 or so as the percentage of black ancestry runs from 0% to 100%.

Will this proposed study be done in the near future? I think it highly unlikely, given the size of the population that would have to be tested, that genetic testing must also be done for each participant, and, most importantly, the political incorrectness of the entire subject matter.

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WSJ: The Bell Curve: A quick primer WSJ: The Bell Curve: A quick primer

A quick statistical primer may be in order here in reference to Charles Murray's recent WSJ article reintroducing "The Bell Curve" that he published eleven years ago.

A lot of phenomena in life and nature fall in a statistical distribution known as the "normal" distribution. Given its shape, this distribution is often called the "Bell Curve". One of those phenomena is IQ.

The normal distribution is typically described by two measures, its "mean" and its "standard deviation". The mean is its center point. As the bell curve is symetric, the mean is also the median. The standard deviation is its spread-outedness. The greater the standard deviation, the flatter the bell curve. The first standard deviation is at approximately the 16th percentile on the low end and the 84th percentile on the high end. Thus, approximately 68% of a normal distribution falls within its standard deviation, and 32% outside, 16% on either end.

IQ tests are typically "normed" or centered at 100. This means that the scores are adjusted so that a score of 100 is the statistical mean. Similarly, they are normed so that 15 IQ points are one standard deviation. Thus, the resulting normed distributions of almost all IQ tests look identical - bell curves with a mean score of 100 points and standard deviation of 15 points.

But what has to be remembered is that these means and standard deviations are averages for the entire population sampled. The distributions of subpopulations within that population will also almost invariably be normal - but sometimes with different means and/or standard deviations.

Thus, if we assume equal male and female populations, we might have a mean male spatial reasoning score of 105 and mean female score of 95, resulting in an averaged mean of 100. Similarly, the male standard deviation may be 18, and the female standard deviation 12, averaged to the normed 15.

Let us though assume equal IQ means between the sexes. Still, there is a difference based on standard deviations. At one standard deviation (84%) above the mean, the male score is 118 and the female score is 112. However, at one standard deviation below the mean, the male score is 82 while the female score is 88. At two standard deviations (98%) above the mean, the male score is 136, while the female score is 124. Of course that also means that at two standard deviations below the mean, the male score is 64 and the female score is 76. Going one more standard deviation (99.7%), the male score is 154 and the female score is 136.

One important thing to note is that, just as there are more smart males than females, there are correspondingly more dumb males than females.

Let me note here that I just picked the 18 (15+3) and 12 (15-3) standard deviations for males and females out of thin air. In reality, the differences is most likely different - Murray didn't say. But with those values, at the 136 IQ level, we have 2% (2 std deviations) of males while we have 0.3% (3 std deviations) of females. The ratio is approximately 7:1. While my figures were admittedly invented out of thin air, males do outscore females at approximately this ratio, 7:1, at the top 1% level on the math SATs. This is a very comparable result, and is best explained by precisely this phenomenum - a larger male standard deviation.

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WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo - sex differences WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo - sex differences

In this WSJ article, Charles Murray starts by addressing the sex issue, starting out with the Lawrence Summers affair last January, when he, the president of Harvard, got himself in serious trouble with liberals in general, and feminists in particular, by suggesting that maybe some research should be done to determine why women aren't adequately represented at the highest levels (esp. this week, the Nobel Prize level) of physics and mathematics.

The reaction of some of the feminists there (and later) was, frankly, hilarious. One apparently got almost physically ill that he would even broach this subject. A female professor getting physically ill over the thought that there might be some reason, outside of societal programming, behind this. If that is representative of the level of open mindedness at that august university, I will advise any parents I meet not to send their kids there. I surely will try to dissuade my daughter from going there.

Because, really, the evidence is already in. On average, males are somewhat better at spatial reasoning than are females (see my discussion a couple of months ago on "The Essential Difference"). Add to this that the standard deviation for male intellectual abilities is greater than that for females (meaning a broader bell or normal curve), and way out at the extremes necessary for the absolute top levels of performance in these areas, you have a lot more males. At the 1st male standard deviation, there is some male advantage. It becomes quite noticeable at the 2nd, and at the 3rd or so, it becomes overwhelming.

This is all simple statistics. And a Harvard professor got physically sick over it.

I should add that Murray also pointed out that at the higher ends of many professions, and, in particular here at, say, the Nobel Prize level of physics, an extremely high level of dedication and single mindedness is required. This, again, is a more male trait, if, for no other reason, than that woman are, by their nature, more susceptible to the pull of parenting. A male can more easily shut out any kids or spouse he might have and concentrate on his work than can women. This is no different than the established fact that if a kid cries during the night, that crying is far more likely to wake up the mother than the father (on average).

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WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo WSJ: The Bell Curve: The Inequality Taboo

Charles Murray strikes again. It has been eleven years since his Bell Curve hit the bookstore, and that book is still good for an argument. Every time I mention the book, I hear how the book has been debunked. But then, when I follow the links, if, and when there are some, I find that the debunking is nothing of the sort. Almost invariably, the research that is supposed to have debunked The Bell Curve doesn't directly address that mysterious quantity, "q", which is the essence of what is tested in IQ tests.

Lest you think that I accept the book and all of its tenets, I don't. But I do find it interesting, and I think it makes some good points.
The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public's misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders' assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.

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Monday, October 10, 2005

Winter - kinda, finally Winter - kinda, finally

Winter is on the way here in the mountains of Colorado. When I drove by Loveland Basin the other day on the way up from Denver, they had obviously started making snow. And then, Sat. night late, it started to rain. This turned into snow, and it snowed lightly all day, resulting in a couple inches everywhere from here at 9,000 feet on up.

Winter is coming. Keystone is scheduled to open in less than a month (11/11). Invariably, Loveland and Copper Mountain open even earlier, and the later usually has a week or so of racing camps before the officially open. Indeed, the first couple of weeks they are open, they seem to have half of the area on their few open runs dedicated to race courses - teams come from around the world for early season training, and buy "lane" space on the mountain. Combined with lodging, lifts, etc., this seems to make the resort decent money.

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Blogger interface Blogger interface

Moving around the Web, esp. the Blogospere, I have found that a number of other companies seem to do a better job at their user interfaces than blogger.com does. In particular, I find its spell checking almost useless. I find this both writing my own blog entries, and making comments on others hosted by blogger. I typically move my blog entries and longer comments to Word for spell checking first - but don't do it enough, resulting in a reputation on one site as being extremely careless in my spelling.

Commenting is in particular problematic, as the blogger commenting editor does not easily support HTML editing, and thus, you have to either hand code HTML (such as links) or write your comments in an HTML editor, and move them back to blogger before posting them. Others seem to do a much better job here.

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Server stuff - Email Server stuff - Email

In my ongoing project to bring up my own server (#G), One of my remaining action items has been to bring up a mail server. In this endeavor, I needed to figure out how it worked in order to get it operational, and, in particular, to debug my installation.

Email is ubiquitous on the Internet, probably almost as much as the World Wide Web. We all have email accounts these days. Indeed, you can't do much on the Web without one. Various companies have tried to implement their own proprietary standards, but, for the most part, they have fallen by the way side. Not even Microsoft or IBM has really been able to succeed here.

What is amazing is that the vast bulk of the email today is moved around the world and accessed using the almost original, fairly crude, simple, protocols. The two biggest ones are Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMNP) and Mail Office Protocol Level 3 (POP3).

The way it works is that your email client (i.e. MSFT Outlook, Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora) makes a connection with a mail server and utilizes SMNP to send one or more emails to that mail server. The mail server may then establish a connection with another mail server, and send one or more emails to it, again using SMNP protocol. Then, at the far end, your email client makes a connection with a mail server and (typically) utilizes POP3 protocol to query the mail server to see if you have email there in your mailbox, and if so, downloads it to the email client on your own system.

One, two, or more, mail servers may be involved, all communicating via SMNP. I had naively thought that usually there are a number involved. There usually aren't. Usually you have only two. More maybe if you go into or out of a corporate proprietary email system. In the early days, there was a lot of store and forward. But that seems to have gone by the way side, with your local mail server making TCP/IP connections directly with the mail servers of your recipients. I have added a third mail server into the mix by having my local server transmit my email to the mail server of one of my email providers first - but I may just drop that later out, and have it send the mail directly to the recipients' mail servers.

As I noted above, these two protocols are very simple. In the case of SMNP, you have the initiator make a connection. The recipient says HELO. The initiator asks for capabilities, and gets a response from the recipient. In particular, it indicates whether the initiator has to sign on or not. If it is required, then the initiator complies. It then tries to send emails, one at a time, by first specifying the recipient(s). The recipient of the SMNP connection decides, one by one, whether or not to accept that specific email, and if it does, it indicates this to the initiator, which then transmits such. The recipient mail server then acknowledges each email when complete, and the initiator then tries to transmit the next. When done, the initiator signs off. This is all done via a dozen or so short ASCII commands, such as HELO and BYE. POP3 is very similar, except that the direction is reversed and signing on is usually mandatory. Also, a mechanism is included to determine what is in the mailbox for the user and whether to delete the email from his mailbox upon completion of the transmission.

There is a subtlety though in SMNP. You don't always have to sign on to an SMNP server in order to utilize it, and they don't always have to accept each of the emails you try to send it. The way it usually works is that an SMNP mail server will either recognize you or will only take email for certain recipients. The alternative to this are called "open relays", which take email from anyone and relay it to anyone. You usually don't want this, because it is likely that it will be discovered and exploited, resulting in a lot of resource utilization and abetting of nefarious activities.

A couple of more things. A mail server can recognize you either from a log-in (userid/password) or via your computer's (usually TCP/IP) address. If it receives email this way (via SMNP) to one of the mailboxes that it supports (via POP3, Web, etc.), it can bypass spam and possibly virus checks. The other thing is that most mail servers only accept mail from unrecognized initiators of SMNP connections if they are hosting the corresponding mailboxes, but, except for local connections, this involves both an email (mailbox) name and a domain. This is causing me some trouble right now, as I have six or seven domains potentially feeding my mail server, but only expect a dozen or so mailboxes, with, for example, bhayden@domain1, @domain2, etc., all feeding to the same mailbox. Specifying this compactly and concisely is turning out to be a problem.

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Friday, October 07, 2005

Freakonomics - the Klan and real estate agents Freakonomics - the Klan and real estate agents

What do the Klan and real estate agents have in common? Information, or rather, that they thrive(d) on the lack of information.

Starting with the Klan. It had a couple of periods of success, notably during Reconstruction and First World War. As we started to integrate in the 1950s and into the 1960s, it was starting another resurgence, and then it pretty well died out. Why? Information.

The demise of the Klan can be attributed to one man, Stetson Kennedy, a man with the Klan in his bloodlines, but vehemently opposed to it. Because of his bloodlines, he was able to infiltrate it and learn of its secrets. He then took these secrets to Hollywood, and convinced the creators of the Superman series to use them. Then, for six weeks, Superman attacked the Klan, disclosing all of their secrets to the public, including their secret greetings, secret handshakes, etc. The result was that the group became the laughing stock of the country. And, has not recovered since then.

How does this relate to real estate sales? Because real estate sales people make their living based on our ignorance and insecurity. They convince us that they have our best interest at heart, yet have an incentive system designed contrary to this. Their economic incentive is to turn your house over as quickly as they can, even if at a slightly lower price. Not surprisingly then, when they sell their own houses, they sell them for more, and keep them on the market longer. But then, the incentives are in their favor. In the case where they are selling someone else's house, they, on average, make 1.5% of the increase in price if it sells for more (1/2 of 1/2 of the average 6% commission). They get 100% when they sell their own house.

As a side note, the price of term life insurance has plummeted over the last decade - because it is fairly standardized, and people can now easily comparison shop over the Internet. As a result, a lot of insurance sales people who used to specialize in life insurance have moved on to other areas of insurance that are not so vulnerable.

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Freakonomics - Why do drug dealers live with their mothers? Freakonomics - Why do drug dealers live with their mothers?

Why do drug dealers live with their mothers? Because they can't afford not to. The average corner drug dealer could earn more by working at McDonald's, than they can pushing drugs ($3.30 an hour), without facing the high likelyhood of getting shot.

So, why sell drugs? Same reason there are thousands of "actors" waiting tables in Las Angeles. The rewards at the top are extremely attractive. The top drug dealers in a city (in their case, Chicago) made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, tax free. The top of the local gang made almost $100k a year - but had almost 100 people working for him, most at below the minimum wage.

Interestingly, probably because of the danger involved, drug dealers are much faster to drop out of that business than are aspiring actors when they figure out they aren't going to make it to the big times.

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Freakonomics - Teachers and Sumo Wrestlers Freakonomics - Teachers and Sumo Wrestlers

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers? Cheating. In particular, it appears that at least some teachers will cheat, if they can get away with it, and if cheating will benefit them. With the emphasis on accountability, schools are being forced into standardized testing to provide metrics. But often school districts reward, directly or indirectly, the teachers whose students do well on these standardized tests. The authors found that they could identify when some teachers changed test results from their kids through the use of coding test results and then looking for patterns. Their findings were then corroborated by seeing how these kids did the next year, and in a large number of cases, dropped back to where they would have been without the cheating. Also, to further verify this, some classes of cheating teachers were retested by 3rd party testers, as were some control classes. The control classes had comparable scores. The classes of the cheating teachers had scores comparable to their previous year's (much lower) scores.

Sumo wrestling is the national sport of Japan. And, if you even suggest to the Japanese that there is any dishonesty, they are mortally offended. But the authors showed that there is a significantly probability that it does happen.

They did this by comparing match results. It turns out that Sumo wrestlers compete in regular tournaments where they have 15 matches in each. If they win a majority of such, they move up, if not, they lose. So, if they are 7-7 going into the last match, they are on what the authors call the "cusp". Statistically, if they were to wrestle an 8-6 opponent in their 15th match, they should win about 48% of the time. But they win around 75-80% of the time, and then lost comparably the next time they wrestle that opponent. And, then things drop back to normal.

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Freakonomics - parenting Freakonomics - parenting

In Freakonomics, the authors ask the question of what does it take to be a good parent. Rephrased, this asks what are the indicia that predict successful children. The results of their analysis are, to a very good extent, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

The following were found to be signficant - positive (+) or negative (-):
+ The child has highly educated parents
- The child's parents have high socioeconomic status.
+ The child's mother was 30 years or older at the time of her first child.
- The child had low birth weight.
+ The child's parents speak English in the home.
- The child is adopted.
+ The child's parents are involved in the PTA.
+ The child has many books in the house.

But the following were not significant:
* The child's family is intact.
* The child's parents just moved to a better neighborhood.
* The child's mother didn't work before kindergarden.
* The child attended Head Start.
* The child's parents routinely took him to museums.
* The child was regularly spanked.
* The child regularly watches TV.
* The child's parents read to him every day.

What is the difference between these two lists? The first is "nature" and the second "nurture". The biggest predictor of a child's success is his genes, and the first list (mostly indirectly) is correlated with such. On average, richer parents are smarter, as are parents who have more books in their house, women who don't have children until after 30, etc. On the other hand, adoptees tend to not be as smart as their adoptive parents (or the biological children of such), due to the economics of adoption. And, low birth weight babies also tend to be of lower socioeconomic status than normal, plus, they are more likely with teen aged mothers, also correlcated with lower socioeconomic status.

So, bye, bye, Baby Mozart.

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Freakonomics - crime Freakonomics - crime

Probably the most controversial thing in the book "Freakonomics" is the theory that one of the big reasons that crime dropped in the 1990s was Roe v. Wade, which ended up providing low cost abortions to the masses. The idea is that one of the big indicators for crime is being an unwanted child, and, these were precisely the bulk of the children not born as a result of this landmark decision.

The authors apparently did quite a bit of research here, looking at, for example, crime rates in those states that legalized abortion earlier than RvW, and finding that their crime rates did indeed start dropping before that of the other states.

Bill Bennett weighed in a week or so ago on this subject, to his peril, suggesting (tongue in cheek) that if we wanted to reduce crime (further), the answer was to abort all (or even a lot more) Black babies. As I have repeatedly pointed out though, he was not speaking from an anti-Black point of view, but from a stridently anti-Abortion point of view.

But the authors point out a better defense - which is that if accept their theory, and then compute the number of people these additional criminals would have killed if the aborted potential criminals had been born, it is dwarfed by the number of kids aborted.

I should add that they looked at a number of other potential causes for the reduction in crime, and found several others of merit: the increase in the number of police; the increase in sentencing and the number of criminals in prison; and, to a small extent, the graying of the population. On the other hand, they found essentially no impact from: innovative police techniques and gun laws (either way). The peaking of the "Crack Epidemic", by and of itself, was also not important, since crack usage hasn't really dropped that much - BUT there may have been a slight reduction in violent crime due to the crash of crack prices making turf wars less lucrative.

As an interesting note to the above, the author of the Tipping Point book I commented upon a couple of weeks ago wrote a blurb for Freakonomics. In Tipping Point though, the innovative policing techniques were portrayed as one of the primary causes of this reduction of the crime rate - which point was explicitly rejected in Freakonomics.

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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Server Server

I finally got my server (#G) mostly operational last night. I have Apache running as a web server and GuildFTPd as a FTP server. Both are working great. Apache is now configured for multihosting - different web site images depending on what destination address is specified. I only currently have one domain (softpats.com), but am planning on moving over another (highdown.com) when it expires at register.com in a couple of months. Plus, I would like to also host a site for our ski group, the Geriatric Tele Society.

FTP also works well. I am able to provide different images or files based on the user id specified, and able to limit those signing on to just that, and nothing else.

I was also able to test some of the routing through firewalls by specifying (via "lmhosts") my router's external address. Unfortunately, specifying the modem's external address gets me the modem and not the router (and computers) behind it. Still, it works well.

I should add that I brought up MSFT Virtual Circuits (VC) a couple of weeks ago successfully, and have used such remotely several times.

The only thing I have left is email. Hopefully, in another week or so, I will have that going too.

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Bypassing Acrobat (#2) Bypassing Acrobat (#2)

My brother may have figured out why I had problems with importing Acrobat .pdf files into Word. Apparently, the export from Acrobat reader at the resolution that they are being viewed at the time they are copied. The answer would thus seem to be to increase resolution BEFORE copying them.

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The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (Moynihan, 1965) The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (Moynihan, 1965)

Back as an incoming freshman in college in 1968, we were tasked to read "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Mr. Moynihan worked for four administrations, Democrat and Republican, and ultimately ended up serving three terms as a Senator from New York. He died two years ago, a national hero.

A year or so ago, I read a book on neo-conservatism, and was surprised to find that he was considered a charter member of that group, given his obvious liberal leanings. But then, they defined a neo-conservative as a progressive mugged by reality.

The URL above links to a Department of Labor version of the book, minus many of the tables and footnotes that made it so hard to read 37 years ago. Rereading it now is interesting, esp. in view of the recent flap by Bill Bennett and Freakonomics.

Moynihan, back 40 years ago, was bemoaning the breakdown of the "Negro Family". He blamed it on, among other things, urbanization - that Black families tended to break down as they moved from the rural south to the cities. And since then, it has only gotten worse. A lot worse. And, there are a lot of studies that show that there is an extremely high correlation between raising kids in fatherless households and crime. Indeed, this is one of the biggest, if not biggest, predictors of (and, presumably causes of) crime. Somewhere around 90% of those in prison, black, white, etc., were raised in such environments. So, no surprise that with the significantly higher percentage of Black children being raised this way, that the Black crime rate is significantly higher than average.

I would suggest though that Sen. Moynihan's solution made the problem worse. He was instrumental in the War on Poverty, and that is, in my estimation, one of the two major factors behind this explosion since he wrote that book. The War on Poverty provided financial incentives to women to have children out of wedlock - supporting them if they did, and cutting them off when a man entered the scene. And, secondly, the stigma of bastardry has been effectively eliminated. All this happened about the same time. And both worked to make raising kids without a father in the house viable and morally acceptable.

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Freakonomics - the blog Freakonomics - the blog

While looking up the full title to the book "Freakonomics", I found the first author's web site, and from that, his blog. Interesting discussions about his points. Probably though, the most heated has been about Bill Bennett's recent comments about reducing crime by aborting African-Americans.

What almost everyone there keeps forgetting though is that Bennett is stridently anti-abortion, and the book suggested that easy access by the poor to abortion was a big reason that crime rates dropped in the 1990s. So, Bennett made the logical, slippery slope, (or, as he called it, reductio ad adsurdum) argument that crime could be reduced even more by aborting all, or even a greater number, of African-Americans - esp. given that their crime rate is significantly above that of the population as a whole (for reasons having nothing to do with their race, and everything to do with their family and socio-economic condition). The discussion was frustrating, because Bennett was clearly making an anti-abortion statement, not an anti-Black statement, yet it was seen by many as the later.

Not surprisingly though, the author, in his blog, got into a number of other interesting topics, such as putting LoJack on bicycles and the fact that you will find the shortest waiting lines in ERs during major sporting events.

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Freakonomics Freakonomics

I managed to finally get "Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner from the library yesterday. It is every bit as good as I expected - though I do admit to cheating, having read a chapter or two a couple of months ago at the book store waiting for my daughter.

Levitt is a PhD economist, and economics is called the "dismal science". But he doesn't practice it the way you would expect. No Nobel Prize for him. He admits he can't predict the direction of the economy, optimal tax strategy, or, really much of anything that would keep the attention of most economists. Rather, he utilizes the tools of the economics trade to look at and explain real world situations.

Time permitting, I plan to spend more time on the various chapters of the book.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Aspen trees in the fall Aspen trees in the fall

Different places in this country have different kinds of beauty at this time of year. Here, in Colorado, it is the aspen trees changing color. They are mostly bright yellow at their peak, in huge patches across the mountain sides. Yes, down on the flats (i.e. the plains east of the mountains), you have the redder colors of the willows, oaks, etc. But somehow to me, and my ancestors, the aspens are king.

Maybe this is because aspen tours in the fall are a tradition with my family. My grandparents did it, starting in 1923 when they came here. My parents did it for 57 years - the last trip they made together was to see the aspens about two months before my mother died. They had to make it a short, half day, trip, due to her condition. But for 56 years, every fall they would take off for two or three days and tour western Colorado. When we were young, they would dump us with my grandmother.

The trick is to hit the right long weekend. The problem is that every year, the timing is a little different. Add to this, that aspens range from 5,000 feet (Denver) to 10,000 or so feet, and the higher the elevation, the earlier they change. So, it is not uncommon for them to be done in Dillon, while they are still glorious across Vail pass in the Vail valley.

One quick trip I took two years ago was quite nice. I had a speeding ticket in Edwards. So, I had to drive over Vail pass and most of the way to Glenwood to get there. Being that far down, I figured, I would just go home via Aspen. Down the Vail valley to Eagle was spectacular, as was the drive up the Roaring Fork to Aspen, with the obligatory side trip to the Maroon Bells. East of Aspen, over Independance Pass was done, as was Summit County, as I finished the circle tour. But, still, a nice morning trip, getting back to Dillon shortly after noon.

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Libraries Libraries

One of the things that I love about libraries is that I don't have to buy the books. For most books, you can eventually get them if you are willing to wait.

My daughter's philosphy is that she buys books either if she intends to read them a lot of times (i.e. Harry Potter), or the line is too long. So, she bought "Eldest" by Christopher Paolini this year, as there were almost a hundred kids a head of her in line at the library. This is the second in a series of fantasy by that young author. He was 15 when he started writing the first book in the series, "Eragon".

Well, my wait has paid off. Last week, I checked up on "Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt. I had requested it several months ago, and wondered whether I had dropped off the list. It turned out, I was #7 of some 120 or so in line. Today, I just got the email that it is in the library across the street.

Lest anyone hasn't heard of this book, it was in the news last week when Bill Bennett got himself in trouble with the suggestion that one way to reduce crime was to abort all black babies (which he summarily rejected, in the part of his quote the MSM mostly left out).

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