Oh, those wacky guys on the UN "Human Rights" Council.  They are now looking to Saudi Arabia as a model for protection of individual rights:

The top U.N. rights body on Thursday passed a resolution proposed by
Islamic countries saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of
religions and urging governments to prohibit it.

The European Union said the text was one-sided because it primarily focused on Islam.

The U.N. Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Arab and other
Muslim countries, adopted the resolution on a 21-10 vote over the
opposition of Europe and Canada....

The resolution "urges states to take actions to prohibit the
dissemination ... of racist and xenophobic ideas" and material that
would incite to religious hatred. It also urges states to adopt laws
that would protect against hatred and discrimination stemming from
religious defamation.

Saudi Arabia said, "Maybe Islam is one of the most obvious victims of aggressions under the pretext of freedom of expression."

"It is regrettable that there are false translations and
interpretations of the freedom of expression," the Saudi delegation
told the council, adding that no culture should incite to religious
hatred by attacking sacred teachings.

Hat tip:  Yet another Weird SF Fan

Update:  I am kind of amazed the irony is lost on some folks, so I guess I need to be more explicit:  I found it depressing that the UN Human Rights Council is calling for limits on speech.

Sorry, no big idea in this post.  I just thought that this definition of "victim" was kindof stretching the term a bit:

Authorities in Yavapai County say they're looking for additional
victims of a nude hiker who allegedly told women he encountered that he
was "getting close to nature."

Yavapai County Sheriff's spokesman Dwight D'Evelyn says deputies
were called to a trail in Sedona on April 28 by two women who had been
confronted by the nude man. The man offered to take pictures of the
women.

Apparently, the State of Texas is still trying to figure out what to do with those 400+ kids rounded up at the YFZ Ranch.  I don't really know enough about the case to comment on whether these kids were victims or not, though from reading this the evidence looks thin.

Here is my concern.  About 15 years ago I sat on a jury in Dallas.  The particular case was a child abuse case, with the state alleging a dad had sexually assaulted his daughter.  The whole case took about 3 days to present and it took the jury about 2 hours to find the guy innocent, and it took that long only because of one holdout.

The reason we found him innocent so quickly is because it became clear that the state had employed Janet Reno tactics (the Miami method, I think it was called) to put pressure on the child over a period of 6 months to break her out of her position that her dad had done nothing.  (By the way, is anyone else flabbergasted that Janet Reno, of all people, is on the board of the Innocence Project?).

Anyway, the dad was first arrested when the teenage babysitter told police that the daughter was behaving oddly and it seemed just like a story she had seen on Oprah.   Note, the babysitter did not witness any abuse nor did the girl mention any abuse to her.  She just was acting up one night.  At trial, the babysitter said her dream was to have this case propel her to an Oprah appearance of her own (I kid you not).

On that evidence alone, the state threw the dad in jail and starting a 6 month brainwashing and programming process aimed at getting the girl to say her dad abused her.  They used a series of negative reinforcements whenever the girl said dad was innocent and offered positive reinforcements if she would say dad had said X or Y.  Eventually, the little girl broke and told the state what they wanted to hear, but quickly recanted and held to the original story of her dad's innocent, all the way through the trial.

So, as quickly as we could, we set the dad free  (the last jury holdout, interestingly, was a big Oprah fan).  No one ever compensated for states abuse of the dad, and perhaps even worse, the states psychological abuse of his daughter.  I know nothing of what became of them, but I hope they are all OK.  I guess its lucky he did not get convicted, because while the Innocence project has freed a lot of people in Dallas, it sure is not going to work on this type of case with Janet Reno on its board.

Coming back to the YFZ case, I am worried that the state seems to be wanting to hold the kids for as long as possible, presumably to apply these methods to start getting kids to adopt the stories of abuse prosecutors want to hear.  In some ways, the YFZ case is even more dangerous from a prosecutorial abuse standpoint.  That is because there are a large number of people who think that strong religious beliefs of any type are, well, weird, and therefore are quicker to believe that other weird behavior may also be present.

The AP does a great job in this story reporting absolutely everything but the most important fact:

The Supreme Court has refused to offer help to Hurricane Katrina
victims who want their insurance companies to pay for flood damage to
their homes and businesses.

Wow, those insurance companies suck, and they have the Supreme Court in their pocket.  The only teeny-tiny fact missing is that the people suing had policies that very explicitly did not cover flood damage.    They sortof acknowledge this but say the insurance companies should pay anyway, because the flood was caused by a broken levee and that somehow is not really the same kind of flood, sort of.  Or whatever. 

People have been defaulting on mortgages for all of recorded history.  In Roman times, such a default could well result in the mortgage-holder getting sold into slavery, so things have improved a bit.  But seriously, people default on their mortgages all the time.  So what makes those currently in default more deserving of taxpayer aid than those before them or after them?  I mean, other than the fact that the press is paying attention to these particular defaults?  A similar question was reasonably asked of 9/11 victims who scored government compensation when victims before or after of other transportation accidents and building fires have not been so rewarded.

I challenge any politician to answer this question with an answer other than "well, these people are in the media spotlight right now and as a politician, I want to be in the spotlight with them."

Update: More analysis here, including the bright side of the burst housing bubble:

Countrywide wants to be
able to take its loans that the market won't accept and refi them under
FHA or FNMA. That's what this is all about. Don't forget that.

It's
not about homeownership. Let's look at the latest 25th percentile
(starter homes) list prices for a range of CA cities, compared to the
price in January 2007:

LA: $365,000/ $429,920
OC: $414,900/ $499,000
Riverside: $259,900/ $335,000
Sacramento: $229,900/ $316,477
San Diego: $325,000/ $392,279
San Francisco: $380,000/ $468,376
San Jose: $489,950/ $580,589
Santa Cruz: $489,000/ $577,400

What
you see above is great news for all the people who would like to buy
homes without going bankrupt a few years down the line. It's VERY bad
news for banks and financial companies that made the original bad loans
without bothering to check whether the borrowers could pay the danged
loan. You figure out who this country should reward - responsible
aspiring home owners or stupid banks.

Dave Barry used to joke that whenever he would argue for a free society, the first objection people would have is "but people would all have sex with dogs." ** Now, Barry is just being funny (as usual) but as in all humor, there is a strong core of truth in his observation.  For years, when I argued that private property rights should be absolute, folks would argue "but then everyone would trash their land."  It in fact became incredibly predictable that someone would ask "how would you stop people from burying nuclear waste on their property?"

Um, why would they?  Would you bury nuclear waste in your backyard?  Well, No.  Why not?  Because it would be dangerous to my kids, and it would reduce my resale value.  OK, so why would anyone else?  No answer.

I call this the "you can't give people freedom because they will do malicious things even if it is against their own self-interest" argument, and George Will observes that it is alive and well in the Democratic Party:

Speaking ill of lenders began when homo sapiens acquired language,
hence it is unsurprising that many people who until recently were
criticizing lenders for not making money available to marginally
qualified borrowers are now caustic about lenders who complied. Clinton
is fluent in the language of liberalism, aka Victimspeak, so,
denouncing "Wall Street," she says families were "lured into risky
mortgages" and "led into bad situations" by those who knew better. So, lenders knew their loans would not be fully repaid?

Jesse Jackson speaks of "victims of aggressive mortgage brokers." But
given that foreclosure is usually a net loss for all parties to the
transaction, what explains the "aggression"? Who thought it was in
their interest to do the luring and leading that Clinton alleges? While
granting that "borrowers share responsibility," her only examples are
those "who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income" and
"speculators who were busy buying two, three, four houses to sell for a
quick buck." Everyone else has been victimized.

This is exactly the point I made back in April, when I said that the mortgage market was about to become a capitalism Rorschach test, acting a a catalyst to reveal everyone's core beliefs and biases about free markets.  Which it certainly has with Hillary.  But we already knew where she stands, didn't we?

** You wouldn't believe the Google hits I get since I made this post. 

For a while now, I have been fascinated by the contrast between the Left's position on abortion and its position on universal health care. 

In the abortion debate, the Left was careful to try to establish a broader principal than just support for abortion.  Their position was (and still is) that the government should not interfere in a woman's decision-making about her own body.  Cool.  That's a general principal that any libertarian could love  (Note that there are many libertarians who accept this principal but argue that abortion is the one exception to it if one considers the fetus an independent life.)  The National Organization for Women have cleverly embodied this general principal in the T-Shirt below:

So now we come to universal health care.  And most every leftish plan has the government paying all of our health care bills.  Well I can absolutely assure you now, both via common sense and observance of practices in European countries with socialized medicine, that a couple of things follow from universal coverage:

1. The government will be the final decision maker for what care each person will or will not get, how procedures will be performed, and what drugs will be authorized.  If they did not take on these decisions, the system would simply implode financially.  The government cannot afford to pay the bills while allowing individuals to still make their own choices about their care.
2. The government will have a strong financial incentive to change people's individual lifestyles.  What they eat, how they exercise, their sexual practices, etc. all have a great influence on future health care costs.  Already, we see countries like Britain starting to meddle in these lifestyle choices in the name of reducing health costs.  It is why I have termed the health care Trojan horse for fascism.

I don't think even universal coverage supporters would refute these two points except to say maybe "yes, the government will do those things but we promise to be gentle."   Here is Jon Edwards:

"I'm mandating healthcare for every man woman and child in America and that's the only way to have real universal healthcare."

"Evertime you go into contact with the helathcare system or the govenment you will be signed up."

During a press avail following the event Edwards reiterated his mandate:

"Basically every time they come into contact with either the healthcare
system or the government, whether it's payment of taxes, school, going
to the library, whatever it is they will be signed up."

When asked by a reporter if an individual decided they didn't want healthcare Edwards quickly responded, "You don't get that choice."

So given that, how does the left hold universal coverage in their head at the same time as they argue that "a woman should make decisions for her own body"?  How can the NOW website sell "Keep your laws off my body" T-shirts while promoting universal coverage laws on their home page?  How do you reconcile "pro-choice" with Edward's "you don't get that choice."

I am really interested in someone taking a shot at this.  And don't tell me that the difference is that in universal coverage, the argument is just over what the government will and won't pay for.  I agree not having the government pay for something is not the same as banning it when there are plenty of private alternatives.  But in the systems being advocated by Democratic candidates like Edwards, there will be no "other system" -- the government will be the monopoly provider, or at least the monopoly rules-setter.  It will be what the government wants to give you or nothing.  And there won't even necessarily be another country to which one can run away to get her procedure, because America is that country today where victims of socialist medicine escape to get needed and timely care.

A while back, I mentioned that the police had, for the first time in my life, actually pursued and caught someone who had stolen my or my company's property.  The county has a process of notifying victims of progress in this case, and to this end I received a copy of their plea agreement.  They plead guilty to 2nd degree burglary, which the letter says is a "non-dangerous, non-repetitive 3rd degree felony".  However, I must not understand the word "non-repetitive" since the guilty parties plead guilty to five counts of this non-repetitive crime!

Every time I write that government funded health care and health nannyism are becoming a Trojan horse for fascism, I get several emails telling me I am being a paranoid flake.  So I will have to just keep posting this kind of thing (from England), via Overlawyered:

SOCIAL workers are placing obese children on the child protection
register alongside victims thought to be at risk of sexual or physical
abuse.

In extreme cases children have been placed in foster care because
their parents have contributed to the health problems of their
offspring by failing to respond to medical advice.

The
intervention of social services in what was previously regarded as a
private matter is likely to raise concerns about the emergence of the
"fat police".

Some doctors even advocate taking legal action against parents for
illtreating their children by feeding them so much that they develop
health problems.

Dr Russell Viner, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street
and University College London hospitals, said: "In my practice, I can
think of about 10 or 15 cases in which child protection action has been
taken because of obesity. We now constantly get letters from social
workers about child protection due to childhood obesity."

In what is becoming a Thursday night tradition, I am posting the next two chapters, numbers three and four, of my book BMOC.  The first two chapters were posted here.  The next chapters after these are here.  Before we start, here are some of the "reviews":

"Who
is this guy?  You're not allowed to portray lawyers in novels as
anything but dedicated warriors for the common good.  In the words we
teach all of our clients when they are suing for millions over
spilled coffee, "Ëœit is not about the money.'  We hate this book,
and if you read it, we will sue you."

"“
America's tort lawyers

"This
Meyer person obviously never read the instruction manual for writing
novels.  Journalists are supposed to be brave and honest, while
corporations are supposed to be evil and rapacious, not the other way
around."

"“
Other modern novel writers

"It's
not that bad here."

"“
The Harvard University administration

"I
was kind of proud that Warren wrote a novel, but then I read it and
saw the dirty stuff and all the bad words.  Now I am really
embarrassed."

"“
Warren's mother

"We
are shocked that anyone would imply that our legislative efforts are
aimed more at helping favored political supporters than championing
the common man."

"“
Congress

"This
is what he was doing at the office instead of driving the kids to
soccer?  Writing a novel? I thought he was doing work!"

"“
Warren's wife

"Warren
was never my student.  I swear.  Don't even think about blaming
this on me."

"“
Warren's high school English teacher

And now, chapters three and four:

chapter three

It was one
of those rare, perfect weather days in New York City "“ sunny and 70
degrees.  A few weeks from now, it would be slit-your-throat weather,
so hot and humid that the grime from the surrounding buildings would
seem to leech into your pores.  On a beautiful day like this,
everyone was in a better mood, and New Yorkers could almost creep up
the attitude scale to "human".  Now, it wasn't like they would
smile at you and wish you a good day, but it did mean that if you
keeled over unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk, someone might
check on you rather than just stepping over your body on their way to
lunch.

Continue reading ‘BMOC, Chapters 3 and 4’ »

I haven't really commented much on the local brouhaha over the Arizona 9/11 Memorial.  In short, critics argue the memorial does little to honor the actual victims, and spends too much time with irrelevant trivia and "America asked for it" messages.  The whole kerfuffle just reinforces my point that it takes time to gain a historical perspective on anything, and rushing to change building names or build monuments or put people on currency can often lead to decisions that are embarrassing given a bit more time for historical perspective to develop.

That being said, I thought this was a pretty good investigative report on the influences behind the memorial design (you may or may not be non-plussed by the alt-weekly writing style).  Of course, since it is impossible to get any real reporting out of our main paper, the story comes from our alternative free weekly, which runs rings around the Republic in terms of investigative reporting.

I don't know much about the ABC 9/11 special everyone is arguing about, except to say that I am always suspicious of dramatic reenactments.  If you want a quick answer to whose fault the attacks were, I will give it to you and save you time:  The terrorists.  And if you want to to know which party's president ignored terrorism the most, I will answer that as well:  It's a tie.  Clinton ignored it for longer**, while Bush ignored it closer to the event.  To be fair, no one really expected the type of attack on September 11, so the blame game is kind of silly.

If you want to watch a great documentary that focuses on the terrorists and their victims, and not the politicians, the National Geographic special Inside 9/11, in two 2-hour parts, is being replayed tonight.  It is fabulous.

** By the way, Clinton supporters could defend their man and his attentiveness to terrorism by pointing out that most of the Patriot Act was actually proposed by Clinton in the mid-1990's.   Interestingly, but not surprisingly, I haven't heard many Democrats making this particular argument.

From Kevin Drum, it's good when progressives make it clear to everyone what they want:  Control!

[emphasis added]  It's just that, left to their own devices, both humans and corporations
tend to act solely in their own self-interest. That's why we have laws
to control human behavior, and it's why we need laws and regulations to
control corporate behavior. I prefer a society in which people don't
gun each other down in the streets, and I also prefer a society in
which middle class workers prosper when the economy grows. I support
laws that encourage both.

Woah!  Can't let all those damn individuals do whatever they please of
their own voluntary self-interest.  Don't they know they are supposed
to do what we intellectuals think best for them?  I want to repeat
this line:

That's why we have laws
to control human behavior

Actually, in governments with a strong grounding in individual rights,
we have laws to prevent people from acting using force or fraud on
other individuals.  So yes, we do have laws to stop people from
shooting each other, but these laws are philosophically a long step away from
laws that tell people what wage they can and cannot legally accept.   Preventing someone from using force against another is waaaaaaay different than using government force to prevent one or more individuals from acting voluntarily in their own self-interest.  The whole point of government in a free society is to prevent people
from trying to control each other by force, not, as Drum wants, for the
government to be the very agent of this control and coersion. 

People who root for more government control need to learn their lesson.  Both parties tend to set up mechanisms of control as if their own guys are going to run this machinery forever, only to freak out when the opposition party takes over and uses this machinery of control for its own purposes.  Thus Democrats lament that the machinery they built to control the drug market gets taken over by Republicans to ban the morning after pill, and that the public education system Democrats so love is co-opted by ID curriculum.  As I wrote here:

Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these
conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme
to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that
the machinery of control you created would never fall into your
political enemy's hands.

Drum makes these statements in the context of arguing that moderate Democrats should be irate about Wal-Mart and should be seeking to have the government sit on Wal-Mart in some way:

And one of the things that's changed is that Wal-Mart has gotten a lot
bigger, unions have continued shrinking, working class wages have
stagnated, and corporate power has grown tremendously. It's perfectly
rational for even moderate, pro-business Dems to look at the record of
the past couple of decades and conclude that things have gotten pretty
far out of whack and that Wal-Mart is a good symbol of this imbalance

One problem with this meme beyond the others I have pointed out in the past is that Wal-Mart is generally not supplanting (with one exception) unionized retailers.  In fact, the implication that Wal-Mart is somehow setting back unionization is actually a complete reversal of how Wal-Mart used to be hammered by critics.  Traditionally, Wal-Mart has been blamed for replacing small stores and family businesses which certainly aren't unionized, usually don't have health plans, and often pay lower wage scales than Wal-Mart does.  Now they are trying to reverse history, and claim instead that Wal-Mart has somehow been supplanting high-paid union jobs.  The only place where this could be argued to occur is in the supermarket business, where strong unions have dominated.  But these old-line unionized supermarkets were falling to competition from other supermarkets even before Wal-Mart came along.  And as to all those Chinese imports, well, I would LOVE to see a liberal try to twist themselves into a pretzel to make a progressive argument for why an impoverished person in China counts for less than a middle class person in the US.

The only real change in employee's fortunes is that employees who work for Wal-Mart are now more visible than they were when they worked for thousands of tiny local retailers, but are they really worse off and more powerless, or just a better target for populist rhetoric?  In fact, even if pay and benefits are the same as in a small store (and I think Wal-marts are probably better), Wal-Mart also offers opportunities for advancement and training far, far beyond the ma and pa store.

By the way, you know its election time when you hear this:

The American economy has changed for the worse over the past couple of decades if you're part of the working or middle class

Ahh, it reminds me of those heady days when Clinton was able to portray a modestly growing economy under Bush 1 the "worst economy since the great Depression."   Election rule to remember:  Republicans try to get elected by running down the morality of Americans, Democrats do so by running down their economic success.

Postscript:  I will admit there is one group who sometimes must accept wages that are not the result of pure voluntary agreement with an employer: Illegal immigrants.  Those who read this blog a lot will know I am very pro-immigration, and would like to see full, open immigration and there be no such thing as an "illegal" immigrant, except in narrow cases of convicted criminals, etc.  Illegal immigrants in many ways have the same problem as prostitutes, in that they have only limited legal redress when they are victims of force or fraud in their work.  Making currently illegal immigrants legal would do more to help disenfranchised workers than any slate of goofy government legislation to try to reinvigorate unions.

Update:  My past response to charges of widening income distribution was:  So what?  Also alot more links here.

Until my visit to London, I would have said that a "politically correct war memorial" was an oxymoron, since political correctness nowadays seems to embrace a disdain for all things military.  However, I was proved wrong by this memorial:

Yes, that is a memorial to all the fallen animals in British wars.  There are statues of dogs, donkeys, horses, and elephants.  Remember that the UK is a country that finds it politically uncorrect to build a holocaust memorial (though the Imperial War Museum has a holocaust exhibit) and may well abolish its annual holocaust remembrance day because its considered insulting to Muslims (my history here must be a bit rusty -- I don't remember many Muslims in the SS).  Well, never-the-less, we can all rest easier now that we know that the donkey's will be remembered.  I know this was supposed to be serious and solemn, but I must admit that the key "tag line" on the monument only got me laughing:

Yeah, as if the human victims of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. did have a choice.

I think it was George Carlin (?) who used to ask "Do you know what the worst thing is that can happen when you smoke marijuana?" His answer was "Get sent to prison".  The implication, which I have always agreed with for most drug use, was that it is insane as a society to try to save someone from doing something bad to himself by ... doing something worse to him.

I think of this whenever I get in a discussion about security responses to 9/11.  The worst thing that can happen to this country as a whole  (as differentiated of course from the individual victims of 9/11) is to turn the country into a police state to combat potential future terrorist actions.  I personally would greatly prefer to live with a 1 in 100,000 chance of being the victim of terrorism than find myself living in an America that has abandoned its constitution.  I wrote more on this topic here.

To this end, though I tend to be slow to believe these type of stories, this one (via Reason) about domestic NSA wiretapping is pretty frightening:

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full
access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers'
internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in
its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T
worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against the company....

The source is just one low-level guy, so this story is still pretty soft.  I hope the investigation is allowed to play out.

In Florida, where there seems to be a substantial problem with people stealing property in the form of shopping carts from local merchants, the government has a solution: Fine the victims.

In theory, stealing a shopping cart is punishable by up to 60 days in
jail and a $500 fine. But police rarely catch anyone in the act.

So local governments across the state are tackling the battle in
other ways, typically requiring stores to keep carts in the parking lot
or pay a fine.

Hallandale Beach recently updated its laws requiring stores to
create plans for keeping carts on their property. Stores bigger than
35,000 square feet, about the size of many grocery stores, can be
required to install theft-prevention devices....Installation costs $20,000 to $30,000, Miller said....

But retailers are fighting back. The way they see it, the rules are
blaming the victim -- punishing stores for other people's stealing.

Thanks to Bob Houk for the link. 

If this post had a subtitle, it would be "give 'em enough rope to hang themselves with."  This week has brought one of those perfect examples of why free speech is important, and why it is especially important to let even stupid and evil people voice their opinions.  In what, incredibly, represents a moderation of the response to the Danish cartoons by Muslims (at least vs. shooting priests):

Iran's best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the
best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication in
many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad....

The
daily paper Hamshahri said the contest was designed to test the
boundaries of free speech -- the reason given by many European
newspapers for publishing the cartoons of the Prophet.

"A serious
question for Muslims ... is this: 'does Western free speech allow
working on issues like America and Israel's crimes or an incident like
the Holocaust or is this freedom of speech only good for insulting the
holy values of divine religions?'" the paper said on Tuesday.

Why would anyone want to stop them from doing this?  It will be thoroughly educational to see who steps up and declares their position on this.  Whenever people want to ban hate speech, I always try to point out that Hitler was telling everyone in the 1920's just what he wanted to accomplish, if only anyone really listened.  Hateful screwed-up people need to be put on the record with their most egregious work.  Censoring them only tends to moderate the public view of them and disguise the true dangers they may pose.  In fact,it is sometimes the case that when the media refuses to publish the most hateful or violent of speech, they are actually doing so because they have sympathy for the speaker, whose public image they are concerned about tarnishing, rather than just protecting the sensitivities of the speaker's targeted victims.

Government censors often try to rewrite the past, but Reason's Hit and Run passes on this funny story of British attempts to rewrite the future:

Britain's Meteorological Office has instructed forecasters to describe the
country's damp, dismal, seasonal-affect-disorder-inducing, godawful weather in
Bob Rossian terms:

Prolonged sunshine is expected under new "positive" forecast
guidelines issued by the Meteorological Office...

There is no need to dwell on a "small chance of showers" when "mainly dry"
tells a better story. If there are "localised storms" then it must be "dry for
most". Clouds over Manchester mean generally clear visibility for motorway
drivers

I don't know what the Brits are complaining about in a forecast such as "small chance of showers".  In the States, the same forecast would be communicated as "huge, civilization ending storm approaching - details at 11".  When I lived in St. Louis, I remember that the local news successfully predicted 11 of the last 3 snowstorms.

Update:  I appears that the media has also been reporting 11 of the last 3 murders:

Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state
and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by
officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the
response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its
victims.

Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and
rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana
Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue,
officials now say.

The sensational accounts delayed rescue and evacuation efforts already hampered
by poor planning and a lack of coordination among local, state and federal
agencies. People rushing to the Gulf Coast to fly rescue helicopters or to
distribute food, water and other aid steeled themselves for battle. In
communities near and far, the seeds were planted that the victims of Katrina
should be kept away, or at least handled with extreme caution.

I had my own commentary about media malpractice here.

Kevin Drum passes on this Times-Picayune story that apparently, New Orleans in general and the Superdome in particular were not quite the post-apocalyptic-mad-max killing zone they were portrayed as:

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two
sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime
had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national
media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just
accepted what people (on the street) told them....It's not consistent with the
highest standards of journalism."

....The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood
victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as
the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them.
[Mayor Ray] Nagin told [Oprah] Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost
animalistic state."

Drum has an odd way of introducing the story, saying that "conventional wisdom about the Superdome and Convention Center was wrong" and introducing the story as an "urban legend".  Conventional wisdom? Urban legend?  This isn't a story that was created around water coolers, this is a story that was reported like this by the major media.  If the Times-Picayune story is right, then a better lead would be "Major Media Greatly Exaggerated Deaths and Disorder at Superdome". 

What Drum is so coy about pointing out is that this is yet another example of the media falling in love with a story line and selectively choosing facts, and where necessary, suspending disbelief, to support that story line.  First, the media wanted what it always wants in a disaster:  the big story that will draw viewers  (Did anyone else notice last week during Rita that when the hurricane went from category 3 to 5, all the media said it was much more dangerous at 5, but when it went back down to 3, they all said its just as dangerous at 3 as 5).  As the days progressed, the media fell in love with a new story, the story of a racist administration that was abandoning blacks to chaos.

OK, well here is my new story line:  Its about a media that won't even trust General Honore when he announces the location of the hurricane Rita evacuation site without peppering him with 20 useless questions but is willing to believe, without evidence, that a mostly black population would in a period of two days descend into Lord-of-the-Flies level violence, murder, and yes, they even mentioned cannibalism.   Message to blacks from the media: The elite media types feel your pain, support litmus test issues like affirmative action, but they will assume that at your heart you are all murderers and cannibals.   Who are the freakin' racists here, anyway?   Heck, a black "social justice advocate" started the cannibalism rumor in print.  With leaders like these, do African-Americans need enemies?

And, by the way, there is a second really interesting story line here about how the major media's desire to portray the situation in New Orleans as bad as possible, even if the facts did not support it, actually slowed the pace of help to victims.  Any number of volunteers shied away from entering the damaged area, afraid for their own safety.  Many more were turned away from the area by authorities who were afraid they could not protect them.  There is no doubt in my mind that the media's fact-free coverage, skewed to make things look as bad as possible, made things worse for victims in the early days after the hurricane, all in the name of higher ratings.  If Walmart or Haliburton had done something to impede the rescue in the name of higher profits, they would be hung out to dry.  OK, I am waiting for a similar outcry against ABC and CNN and FOX, because it seems that that is exactly what they are guilty of.

Update:  From the LA Times:

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of
middle class white people," [New Orleans Times-Picayune Editor] Amoss said, "it would not have been a
fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

A lot of the blame, though seems to also fall at the footsteps of the Mayor and Chief of Police:

Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three
weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching
dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."...

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the
more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when
New Orleans' top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on "Oprah" a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of "the little babies getting raped" at the
Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

Mayor Nagin has for some reason chosen the strategy, which seems insane in retrospect, of hoping that making the situation look as bad as possible would somehow enhance his personal reputation.  This strategy seems nuts, but I will say that it is one that has worked well for black politicians for years, making political hay by pointing out how bad their black constituents have it because of outside racist forces and powers outside their control.  In this case, though, the chickens come home to roost as Mayor Nagin has been unable to shed that nasty, nagging question that African-Americans should have been asking of their black leaders for years: "Uh, but in this case weren't you the one in charge?"

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Media

If you didn't see it on Instapundit, LSU professor Jeffrey Sadow has a great post on the huge corrupt porkfest that is being proposed in Louisiana:

The $250 billion [in proposed federal aid] is not far behind the $350 billion
estimated spent on the military aspects and their aftermath of the war
of terror since Sep. 11, 2001 "“ which means in reconstruction terms
(leaving out the actual war-making expenses), Louisiana actually is
asking for more than countries with 10 times its population which face
far more damage.

The $40 billion [in proposed Corps of Engineering spending for Louisiana] is ten times the annual
Corps budget, and 100 times the annual amount typically received by
Louisiana which gets more such funding than any other state.

Also, it is nearly three times the size of the entire request for coastal restoration efforts in the state.

He concludes:

So, let's get this straight. Louisiana, from some of her federal officials through some state officials all they way down to city and other local governments,
countenanced negligence from benign to irresponsible in ensuring proper
flood protection and in dealing with hurricanes. And now these same
people have formulated a plan wanting the country to pay an incredible
sum of money to the state controlled by people from the state to deal
with the aftereffects and, apparently, Louisiana's past inability to
utilize our resources efficiently in other areas?

The rest of the country is going to look at this and think we're still stuck on stupid.

Glenn Reynolds also has a long post with other good links on the topic here.  I particularly liked this bit he quotes from John Fund:

Put bluntly, the local political cultures don't engender confidence
that aid won't be diverted from the people who truly need and deserve
it. While the feds can try to ride herd on the money, here's hoping
folks in the region take the opportunity to finally demand their own
political housecleaning. Change is past due. Last year, Lou Riegel, the
agent in charge of the FBI's New Orleans office, described Louisiana's
public corruption as "epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of
government is exempt."

Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected
officials per capita convicted of crimes (Mississippi takes top prize).
In just the past generation, the Pelican State has had a governor, an
attorney general, three successive insurance commissioners, a
congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president and a swarm of
local officials convicted. Last year, three top officials at
Louisiana's Office of Emergency Preparedness were indicted on charges
they obstructed a probe into how federal money bought out flood-prone
homes. Last March the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered
Louisiana to repay $30 million in flood-control grants it had awarded
to 23 parishes

Update: Lots more at Porkopolis. 

Louisiana population is 4,468,976, not all of which was
affected by the hurricane. A reasonable assumption is to say that half the
population was in the path of the hurricane. That would be about 2,234,488,
but to keep calculations simple we'll round up the affected population to 2,
500,000. That 2.5 million of affected Louisiana residents will make for an easy
calculation

$250 billion divided by 2.5 million affected residents
results in a disaster relief request of.....(drum rooooooooooll)...$100,000 per person!

And these juicy details:

• $100 million for "psychological trauma response early intervention,
  prevention, and disorder treatment by culturally competent counselors and mental
  health professionals for children who are 0 to 5 years of age; see page 38, line
  1.
• $100 million for mosquito abatement; see page 39, line 12.
• $1 billion "shall be used for a program to aid the travel and tourism
  industry"; see page 45, line 17
• $5 million for Project Serv under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and
  Communities Act; see page 49, line 13
• NOAA weather radio for every eligible person; see Sec. 526 .

Occasioning this statement:

"It's all vital," said Landrieu. "There's not
anything in here that we would consider a wish list or pie in the sky. This is
what we really believe is essential."

This is just the macro-scale version of this, business as usual in Louisiana:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Porkbusters

Whether it is the French influence or the long shadow of Huey Long's patronage driven socialist experiment, Louisiana has a tradition of bad government.  I remember several years ago the governor's race featured a Nazi running against a convicted felon (convicted in office of bribery and influence peddling, if I remember right).

So one of the problems with the management of Katrina problems is that Katrina hit Louisiana, the US's own version of Haiti.  Don't believe me?  This is already coming out, and you can be sure there is more:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

Following up on posts here, here, here, here, and here is yet another in a series on government preference for control over results, this time via Overlawyered.com:

In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman
several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered
to stop by a federal official because he wasn't registered with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency. "I begged him to let me continue," said Perlmutter,
who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come
to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. "People were dying,
and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans
International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers.
Two patients died in front of me.

"I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical
credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and
finally gave up. I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another
doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him
about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die
so the government wouldn't be sued, but he would not back down. I had to
leave."

In a formal response to Perlmutter's story, FEMA said it does not accept the
services of volunteer physicians:

"We have a cadre of physicians of our own," FEMA spokesman Kim Pease
said Thursday. "They are the National Disaster Medical Team. ... The voluntary
doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law
enforcement rules in a disaster area."

So for those of you who draw the conclusion from Katrina that we need more big government rather than less, that would help.... how?

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

In my post on "Respecting Individual Decision-Making",  which to-date I consider my favorite post, I wrote:

As a capitalist and believer in individual rights, one of the things
I notice a lot today is just how many people do not trust individual
decision-making.  Now, I do not mean that they criticize other people's
decisions or disagree with them -- in a free society, you can disagree
with anybody about anything.  I mean that they distrust other people's
free, private decision-making so much that they want the government to
intervene.

Interestingly, most people don't think of themselves as advocating
government interference with people's private decisions.  However, if
you ask them the right questions, you will find that they tend to fall
into one of several categories that all want the government to
intervene in individual decision-making in some way:  nannies,
moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.  Though the
categories tend to overlap, they are useful in thinking about some of
the reasons people want to call in the government to take over parts of
people's lives.

I then spent a lot of time with examples from each category.  On Sunday, Keith Thompson in the San Francisco Chronicle (of all places) wrote an article about his disaffection with the left, which said in part:

A certain
misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally
capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their
lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view
of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence
political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

I'm not sure that he and I are in exactly the same place, but we are both looking for allies who are consistent in their defense of classical liberal values and individual rights.

In a related post, Mickey Kaus, who I seldom read because he spends more time than I care on inside-the-beltway political tactics and media stuff, has an interesting related post about the left and trusting people to do right by their own lives.  Kaus resists permalinks, but the gist is:

Two good critiques of the ubiquitous, left-pleasing menace, George Lakoff--by Marc Cooper and Noam Scheiber. Oddly, neither attacks Lakoff at what would seem to be his central weak point, namely his conflation of politics and parenting--identifying "conservative" values with "the strict father" and "liberal" values with the "nurturant parent."

Is a country really like a family? Isn't that an idea with a ... checkered
history? A family is a relationship between inherently unequal,
not-completely-free people--parents and children. A country, at least
in one American conception, is the relationship of equal, autonomous
people. Using the family as the template for politics stacks the deck against social equality (the value I'd suggest as the liberal touchstone). For one thing, it lends itself all too easily to the condescending liberal notion of compassion,
an anti-populist idea if there ever was one. It's also horribly
misleading as a guide to practical policies--no wonder that when
Scheiber asks Lakoff about President Clinton's welfare reform, Lakoff
responds "Why did he have to do that? ... I still don't understand it
fully." In Lakoff's mind, Clinton wasn't changing the welfare system,
he was beating his family's children! Aren't there values that aren't
family values?

A good example of that in recent debate has been social security.  As I argued before:

Advocates for keeping forced savings programs like Social Security in
place as-is by necessity argue that the average American is too stupid,
too short-sighted, and/or too lazy to save for retirement without the
government forcing them.  Basically the argument is that we
are smarter than you, and we are going to take control of aspects of
your life that we think we can manage better than you can.  You are
too stupid to save for retirement, too stupid to stop eating fatty
foods, too stupid to wear a seat belt, and/or too stupid to accept
employment on the right terms -- so we will take control of these
decisions for you, whether you like it or not.  For lack of a better
word, I call this intellectual welfare.

Given these fairly accurate descriptions of the state of liberalism in America, it is ironic that several weeks ago, Kevin Drum made the following observation:

Whenever I talk about the underlying principles that should guide liberals, as
I did a couple of days ago, one of the ideas that always pops up is privacy
rights. In fact, it comes up so often that it strikes me that we're missing a
bet by not making a bigger deal out of it.

The reason, Mr. Drum, is that a true privacy right defined as you are considering it (in particular, one defined broadly enough to give women an absolute right to abortion) would undermine much of the left's statist agenda.   A true privacy right would force the government to respect individual free decision-making, and require that the government allow individuals to make what elites might consider are bad decisions for themselves. 

Does the Left really want broad privacy rights, or just a constitutional justification for abortion?  If they really want a general primacy of a woman's decision-making over their bodies, why do they support abortion yet oppose letting women choose breast augmentation or the use of Vioxx?  Why do the same leftist politicians that oppose parental approval or even notification for teenage abortion simultaneously support requiring parental permissions for teenagers to use tanning salons?  Why do they resist random searches for terrorists but support such searches to enforce seat belt laws?

As I wrote here,

A true privacy right would allow us complete freedom over who we sleep
with, what we do with our bodies, where we work, and what we pay for
goods.  And, not incidentally, how we choose to invest for our
retirement.  Both parties want the government to control parts of our
lives, so don't expect either Conservatives or liberals to be pushing
the privacy issue very hard.

The government is not our parent, not our boss, not our priest, and not our partner.  It is our servant.  Unfortunately, a large element behind creeping statism in this country is a desire by both left and right to "correct" individual decision-making, even when those decisions affect no one but the actor himself.

Well, Newsweek has admitted that it screwed up.  Big time:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it
erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the
Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of
deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately
reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that
personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the
Muslim holy book down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the
Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more
than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past
week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh,
Malaysia and by the Arab League.

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a
holy war against the United States.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and
extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the
U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Whitaker wrote in the
magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on
Monday.

It is not Monday morning quarterbacking to say that they should have known better -- many observers noted the danger right off the bat of posting such an inflammatory story based on only a single anonymous source.

The point I want to make is a different one than the obvious MSM-continues-to-slide-into-the-abyss observation.  That is:  We really, really seem to have dumbed down the whole "torture" thing.  When I grew up, torture was pulling out someones fingernails or whacking their genitals with a stick while they were tied to a cane chair or maybe starving them in a pit for a few weeks. 

Here is my fervent hope:  If I ever find myself imprisoned by hostile forces, I pray that they will torture me by sitting me in a chair and having me watch them flush books down the toilet.  The toughest part will be acting like I am really suffering watching a copy of some document I respect, maybe the US Constitution or Atlas Shrugged or the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, swirling down the pipe.  Then, if that does not work, I hope and pray that they then resort to stripping me naked and taking pictures of me in a human pyramid with other prisoners.  I just hope they don't find out that I already did something similar in college.

By the way, while we are inventing a kindler-gentler torture, can we also tone down our dedication to icons?  I have never understood the need to ban Koran flushing or American flag burning.  Both the Koran and the flag are symbols that have meaning to each individual.  If someone wipes their butt in public with the American flag, my  respect for the US and what it stands for is in no way tarnished - only my opinion of the flag-wiper has changed.

UPDATE:  WOW!  How did I miss this one?  I really, REALLY hope they choose this torture for me:

One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a
miniskirt and thong underwear during late-night interrogations with
prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close
contact with women who aren't their wives...

The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing
how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and
began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against
the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection....

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an
April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform
top, ran her fingers through a detainee's hair and sat on his lap. That
session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator
received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

Please, no.  Anything but that.  Las Vegas better watch out or it may start losing visitors to Gitmo.  I wonder if this is going to cause a problem for the ACLU, which has been opposing these interrogation techniques at Gitmo.  After all, doesn't this woman have a right to free expression?

Postscript:  By the way, I am serious that I think the media has purposefully dumbed-down the definition of torture to improve their story, and in the process has hurt the US internationally.  However, while I find most of the torture accusations a joke, I still absolutely oppose the whole Guantanamo Bay indefinite detention camp concept.  I don't like allowing US authorities to set up a civil-rights-free zone, and I think it is an incredibly slippery slope that we are climbing on.   And yes, I say this with full knowlege that some bad folks could be released back into the wild.  Guess what -- the American justice system does this all the time.  We have 200 years of history of preferring to let guilty parties go free rather than letting innocent parties rot in jail, and I am not ready to overturn our pretty succesful precendent on this matter.

UPDATE: And to be clear, this is torture, or close enough.  Its good these folks are being brought to justice.   I encourage the media to keep up the pressure on true misconduct -- the gratuitous "wrapped-them-in-the-israeli-flag non-tortures just dillute our focus.  I guess I would also encourage those of you who want to extrapolate from these events to a condemnation of the US military as a whole to inform yourself.  The US military, like any institution of human beings, has criminals in it.  However, that being said, our military has been by far the best behaved occupying force in history, bar none (And, if you don't think they should be occupiers at all, well, blame the politicians that sent them).  For every story of atrocious behavior by a US soldier are 20 stories of soldiers being fair and kind.  The fact that these 20 other stories don't make the paper doesn't make them any less true.

I have tried to resist the temptation to blog much on the whole Ward Churchill situation.  In part this is because it has been kicked around so thoroughly in other venues, and in part because I just knew I would get emails purposefully misunderstanding my point.  I have instead tried to focus some positive attention on emerging examples of scholarship where none existed before.  That said, I would like to try to add my own postscript on the whole Churchill fiasco.

First, while he has made some truly egregious statements that point to his moral bankruptcy,such as those he made about the 9/11 attacks and victims, I don't think that UC has grounds to fire him for these comments, at least based on the accepted rules and purpose of tenure.  One of the reasons for tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue scholarship in any direction, without threat of political retribution.

However, Churchill should be fired for his complete lack of quality scholarship or principled academic research.  Churchill, through his poor scholarship, plagiarism, and outright fabrications have helped to set back historic studies about Native Americans and their tragic interaction with Western Civilization.  Churchill has become the poster boy for one of the leading problems in academia today, that is the ability of certain individuals to substitute vocal leftist politics and minority status for intellectual rigor and true scholarship in getting tenure at major universities.   A non-protected group white male of moderate politics with the same body of academic work as Churchill couldn't get a job teaching at any self-respecting university, but put the same work under the banner of radical leftist native American, and suddenly he has tenure at the University of Colorado.

Anyway, Victor David Hanson has a great piece in NRO summarizing why Ward Churchill represents what is wrong in academia today.