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The AFL
2006-12-29 03:42:00
No, not the American Football League, I'm talking about the proposal reported in the Herald-Tribune and Boston Globe to significantly increase the presence of non-citizens in the US Army. I think it's a good idea. It's worked for the French with the Foreign Legion, and the Brits still have the Gurkhas. Include the ability to gain citizenship through service, and it's a great idea - it'll help solve the manpower problem in the Army, and it'll give some of the illegals a way to become legalized (yeah, I'd give them the benefit of this idea). Granted, it seems a bit mercenary, but if it works for the Pope and the Swiss Guard, it's worth a shot.
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Some Thoughts on Immigration
2006-12-28 03:45:00
Quite a number of recent news stories on immigration have crossed my desk in the past few days. While the noise about immigration has died down recently, something still needs to be done. I don't know exactly what the answer is -- I object to all of the amnesty and path to citizenship talk on the grounds that it is rewarding illegal behaviour, however, I am pragmatic enough to realize that mass deportations would be logistically impossible and have major effects on the economy, so I could live with them. And that's apparently what's going to happen:WASHINGTON — Legislation reportedly being developed ahead of Congress' return next week aims to expand the number of illegal immigrants that could become eligible for citizenship beyond the estimated 7 million given the opportunity in a bill that won Senate support earlier this year but fell in the House.The bill would mark a significant shift in immigration strategy because it would abandon a requirement that would force illegal i...
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Updates
2006-12-28 02:30:00
Nothing new on the Fighting Monks of Mount Athos, unfortunately. From what I can tell they're still holed up in the monastery.However, there is some additional information about farm subsidies that I just came across, from Cato and the WSJ, on how agricultural subsidies are a de facto form of protectionism and hurt impoverished nations.More on why the government shouldn't ban transfats from LewRockwell.
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Brady and Guns
2006-12-28 02:26:00
There are few things that are quite as much fun as when some partisan group impeaches its own credibility with its own data. This time it's the Brady Campaign to Destroy the 2nd Amendment. As you probably know, so far as the Brady Campaign is concerned no one but the government can be trusted with firearms. This has led them to try and sway public opinion against gun ownership. One of the ways they do this is by issuing a report card on each state, grading by how difficult it is for law-abiding citizens to legally get a gun.Problem is, it turns out these grades are negatively correlated with crime, according to ChronWatch:Even worse for Brady, violent crime trends are not spread equally across all states. RTC [Right-to-Carry] states (average Brady grade “D”) saw an aggregate 7.8% drop in violent crime, while non-RTC states (average Brady grade “B”) saw a 5.2% decrease. Even when Brady grades synchronize with violent crime trends, it fails to give an accurate picture: Brady ...
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A Rare Victory for Freer Trade
2006-12-28 02:21:00
The Bush Administration today repealed 14 year old tariffs on steel that artificially propped up the cost of importing steel, a move that was cheered by the auto industry and panned by the steel industry (which shows why protectionism doesn't work -- you're not actually protecting the US economy, you're just shifting what industry is hurt). It's a rare step toward freer markets for the Bush Administration, which has consistently shown itself to be protectionist, not pro-free markets. More accurately, pro-free markets for US goods internationally, but protectionist internally.However, one sector which has not seen free markets for quite some time -- and is unlikely to in the near future -- is agriculture. Each year, the government spends $15 billion in farm subsidies, usually evoking the image of a modern-day Abe Lincoln splitting rails and planting seeds manually. But this is not the truth:Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearl...
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Quick Hits
2006-12-27 19:02:00
From ABC:MANCHESTER, N.H. Dec 26, 2006 (AP) — Police say a man they pulled over for driving drunk continued to swig his beer during his arrest. Patrick Allain, 35, faces numerous charges after his arrest Monday night, the fourth time he's been arrested for driving while intoxicated. Police say he hit two other cars and initially refused to stop when officers tried to pull him over.When he finally stopped, Allain allegedly continued to drink a 40-ounce bottle of beer, telling officers, "You can charge me with whatever you want. It's not going to stop me from drinking and driving."This is funny enough without any comments.Most popular job in Iraq, also from ABC:BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26, 2006 — The impending death of one of the most notorious dictators of the 20th century has caused a morbid contest in Baghdad as Iraqis express an interest in executing Saddam Hussein.Bassam al-Husseiny said he receives eight to 10 phone calls a day, and 20 to 30 e-mails by those who want the assign...
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RIP Gerry Ford
2006-12-27 18:29:00
As I'm sure everyone has heard already, Gerry Ford passed away last night, roughly a month after passing Ronnie for oldest living ex-president (though, as Colbert reminded us, Ronnie still held the record for elected presidents.I have mixed feeling about Ford as president, on the whole I think he was somewhat mediocre. However, I do think he was the right person at the right time for the post-Nixon era.I am not going to try to eulogize Ford. Instead, I recommend the Times's obituary here.

More trouble with the Iraqi police
2006-12-26 22:31:00
Some of the stuff that goes on in Iraq always amazes me. Shockingly, this time it turns out the Iraqi police are in trouble again:From the BBC:More than 1,000 UK troops have stormed the headquarters of an Iraqi police unit to rescue 127 prisoners, dozens of whom they had feared would be killed....A Ministry of Defence spokesman said 1,000 troops were involved and hundreds of seized files and computers have been taken as evidence.An Iraqi security official said: "The interior minister decided to cancel the serious crimes unit in Basra city and replace it with a new one based inside the headquarters of Basra police.It came after seven Iraqi officers were arrested on Friday suspected of corruption and leading a death squad at the unit....The troops carried out medical assessments of detainees before transferring them to another police station, and said there was evidence of torture.Some had crushed hands and feet, and electricity burns and gun shot wounds to the legs, they said.It woul...
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Merry Christmas
2006-12-24 17:38:00
(From NORAD's Santa Tracker. I hope it updates.)
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Quick Hits
2006-12-23 20:23:00
From ABC:CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa Dec 21, 2006 (AP)— An employee working the drive-through window at a McDonald's will have a tale to tell. When the worker went to the open window thinking the car pulling up had already ordered, the people in the car threw a dead cat through the window, police said. ... Which McDonald's promptly used to make a new batch of Chicken McNuggets (tm)From BBC:Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has told Lagos airport staff not to let the vice-president's official jet take off with him on holiday, reports say. It comes a day after Vice-President Atiku Abubakar was chosen by an opposition party as its candidate for next April's presidential election. Don't you hate when your political partners misbehave and you have to take away the keys to the Learjet?From CNN:To the clink of champagne glasses and strains of classical music Wednesday, Russia's President Vladimir Putin saluted Russia's resurgent secret services for their role in guarding national intere...
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Socialised Health Care
2006-12-23 20:20:00
Why socialised health care doesn't work. A must read.(Hat tip: Shukhevych for pointing out this piece.)
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Whatever Happened to Freedom?
2006-12-22 05:00:00
I'm constantly amazed by the extent to which basic freedoms such as free speech, eating what you want, and deciding what behavior to allow in a private establishment are under attack in the western world. (And to update the trans-fat story, both California and Connecticut have jumped on the trans-fat bandwagon.)This week in Europe brought the release of David Irving from prison in Austria. He had been sent to prison not for doing anything, but for saying the wrong thing. And what did he say? Did he shout fire in a theatre? Did he incite a riot? No, he said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. It's an idiotic statement, but in Austria, it's also a crime. Similarly, in Turkey, Nobel prize winner Orham Pamuk was tried for insulting "Turkishness." France is considering a law making it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. The FCC is arguing that certain words "harm children" and wants to fine people for daring to say these words.This really is a disturbing trend. A free society ...
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Updating A Story
2006-12-22 03:37:00
More on our rebel monks from yesterday from the Boston Globe:THESSALONIKI, Greece --Police posted a guard Thursday outside a chapel at an Orthodox monastic sanctuary where rebel monks remained barricaded following clashes that left seven people injured....Monks at the rebel Esphigmenou monastery in northern Greece have turned against other monasteries on the all-male, self-governing peninsula of Mount Athos.Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians, has ordered the monks to leave Athos for refusing to recognize his authority.More on the fascinatingly absurd story as it develops!
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Quick hits
2006-12-22 03:36:00
From the Boston Globe:THESSALONIKI, Greece --Rival groups of monks wielding crowbars and sledgehammers clashed Wednesday over control of a 1,000-year-old monastery in a community regarded as the cradle of Orthodox Christianity, police said.Let he who is without sin swing the first crowbar.... (More here)From ABC:WARSAW, Poland Dec 20, 2006 (AP)— Lawmakers have drawn up a resolution naming Jesus Christ as the honorary king of Poland, but have failed to win support from the country's powerful Roman Catholic church.Well, that would certainly give new meaning to "The king is dead, long live the king!"Also from ABC:CHESTER, England Dec 20, 2006 (AP)— In an evolutionary twist, Flora the Komodo dragon has managed to become pregnant all on her own without any male help. She is carrying seven baby Komodo dragons.Hmm... December... virgin birth.... Does one of the new dragons get to be king of Poland?Boston Globe:LONDON --Robots might one day be smart enough to demand emancipation from t...
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Religious Notes of the Day
2006-12-21 03:01:00
ROME --Fidelity in marriage and premarital abstinence from sex are the key weapons in the fight against AIDS, a senior cardinal who prepared a study on condom use said Wednesday.(Source: Boston Globe) I can't really argue with the cardinal when he says this. Fidelity and abstinence can be important weapons in the fight against AIDS. Given that sex is the leading mode of transmission for HIV, it would seem to make sense to say less sex and fewer partners could help reduce transmission. However, for the cardinal and the Pope, these are not just tools, they are the entire toolbox (though some are arguing for change):The Roman Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms as part of its overall teaching against contraception. It advocates sexual abstinence and sexual faithfulness between husband and wife as the best ways to combat the spread of HIV.But several leading churchmen have spoken out on the issue in recent years as the Vatican has come under increasing criticism.Some, such as re...
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Nothing Motivates the Base...
2006-12-20 05:14:00
... like a little xenophobia.A letter from Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) about Keith Ellison (D-MN):Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States...
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Pot Tax
2006-12-20 03:57:00
Looks like Mark was right, taxing marijuana probably would not bring in much in taxes:Given much lower prices and removal of the legal barriers to obtaining marijuana, consumption almost certainly would rise, as new consumers entered the market and current consumers smoked more often. But it's doubtful that consumption would rise enough for marijuana to generate anything like the excise tax revenue from cigarettes, mainly because, given the differences in the two drugs' effects, pot smokers (as a group) are never going to smoke as heavily as cigarette smokers. With a tax rate comparable to the U.S. average for cigarettes, we might be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year, or maybe a billion or two, as opposed to $15 billion.Not to say that there wouldn't be a positive economic effect:Yet the big drop in marijuana prices, the very development that would make excise tax revenue surprisingly modest, would put billions of dollars in consumers' pockets, allowing them t...
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What We Already Knew
2006-12-20 03:41:00
The DoD has finally acknowledged what everyone already knew:Armed militiamen affiliated with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr now pose the gravest danger to the security of Iraq, surpassing Sunni extremists and even al-Qaida as the greatest obstacle to stability, according to a Defense Department report to Congress.Really? A radical who hates the United States, has a private army, and so controls the prime minister that he asked us to abandon a kidnapped soldier rather than search Sadr's territory -- and we shamefully complied -- is a grave threat?Thankfully there was talk of trying to destroy Sadr's influence in the government last week, but I haven't heard anymore more about that since. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the private militias are the single greatest obstacle to stability in Iraq. So long as the Sunnis and Shiites have their own armies, the bloodshed between them will continue. It's almost the broken windows theory on a grander scale. If we do n...
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Speaking of...
2006-12-20 02:53:00
Speaking of government playing nanny, both Baltimore City and Maryland state are considering smoking bans, however, as the Cato institute points out, they have no right to do this anymore than they have the right to ban transfats.
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No Fat for You!
2006-12-20 02:48:00
Apparently a Massachusetts lawmaker wants to follow NYC's lead and tell you what you cannot eat:State Rep. Peter Koutoujian, D-Waltham, co-chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Health, filed a bill Tuesday to make Massachusetts the first state to impose the ban."It's basically killing people," Koutoujian said.The article did not provide a rational for why he thinks the government has any right to say you can't eat this, but it does provide a response from a restaurant owner:"You know not to eat hamburgers and cheeseburgers every day. That's just common sense," he said. "What are they going to do next? Tell me what to wear?"But apparently it's not common sense, according to a 19-year-old, who, ironically enough, was interviewed while eating a Big Mac:"A lot of people eat McDonald's food multiple times a day without knowing how horrible the food is," he said. "I think it's a good idea. I just don't know how effective it will be."I don't know what's more di...

Are People Really This Stupid?
2006-12-19 18:21:00
From ABCNews:HAWTHORNE, Fla. Dec 18, 2006 (AP)— A North Carolina woman was arrested after complaining to a police officer that the crack cocaine she had just purchased wasn't very good, authorities said.Eloise D. Reaves, 50, approached the Putnam County sheriff's deputy at a convenience store Friday, telling him that another man had sold her "bad crack" that contained wax and cocaine.She pulled an alleged crack rock out of her mouth and placed it on the deputy's car for inspection, the Palatka Daily News reported for Tuesday editions.The deputy told Reaves that she would be arrested if the crack tested positive for cocaine. She was charged with possession of cocaine and bonded out for $1,504.It's people like this that half make we want to include sterilization in the penal system to improve the gene pool.... But, if nothing else, these people are good for a laugh.
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Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights
2006-12-19 05:24:00
Religion in the classroom, always fun. I may be areligious personally, but it still has its place.This, however, struck me as a bit much:Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering alawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary. “If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”Really? Telling students they belong in hell? I would expect comments like that from Tehran ...
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A New Cash Crop?
2006-12-19 04:46:00
Care to guess what the most valuable cash crop is in the US?Hay, at $12.2bln grown per year?Soybeans at $17.6bln?$23bln worth of Corn?Nope. In fact, the $23,000,000,000 worth of corn grown in the US is still an amazing $12 billion behind #1, according to a story in the LA Times.Number one? The $35,800,000,000 worth of pot that we grow -- and that's using $1,600 per pound, rather than the $2,000-$4,000 the government usually sites. If one uses the $4,000 figure, the cash value of the pot grown in the US would be $89.5 billion. Does anyone else see a solution to the deficits?What good comes from making pot illegal? According to a spokesman for ONDCP, there is a distinct risk that would come from legalizing it:Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of foreign countries that have struggled with big crops used to produce cocaine and heroin. "Coca is Colombia's largest cash crop and that hasn't worked out for them, and opium po...
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From a comment...
2006-12-18 05:51:00
Mark wrote:"While I am not a fan of rewarding law-breakers, have you considered the fact that as the border is more militarized, it only encourages more of the illegals to not only stay for a longer time, but to bring their families with them? We had a perfectly good guest worker program known as "bracero" 30, 40 yrs ago. Most illegals want to work here 2-3 yrs, then go home with their new-found wealth. A militarized border makes it harder for them to leave. Therefore, they decide "if it's that hard, might as well go for the long run and bring the whole family."Immigration reform should include a guest worker program, so more apply legally, so the border patrol can focus on more dire issues, such as drugs or terrorism."Actually, I hadn't considered that it would encourage a longer term stay. It's an interesting point, but with a truly secure border, wouldn't it become a non-issue?I certainly am in favor of legal guest worker program (as I'm pretty sure I said), and realize that...
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Once More Unto the Breach
2006-12-18 05:23:00
Like MacArthur unto Philippines, I have returned.After a month and a half sabbatical, prompted mostly by a drastic increase in my workload at work and a need to rethink how I wanted to write for this blog, my motivation has returned.I will not be posting the dozen plus stories a day that I had been doing. Instead, I want to focus on longer articles, with more analysis rather than just a comment on a story -- though I will not entirely give up on that format, sometimes it is all a story deserves.I also want to incorporate a bit more frivolity, such as youtube videos -- being serious all the time grows old quickly.So, let the games begin!
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