McFreedom

A little off-topic ranting: As many of you may know, I'm a San Francisco Giants fan. Yesterday, I went to a day game, which the Giants lost, 1-0. Our pitcher, Kirk Reuter (obviously) did a great job, and our offense (even more obviously) was non-existant. Part of this had to do with our leadoff hitter, Shawon Dunston. Now, Mr. Dunston has had a long and storied carrier in the majors, and by all accounts is a great guy, but...what the hell was the coaching staff thinking? Lead-off? The man entered the game hitting .103...and left it hitting .094! The man's On Base Average (OBA) is .091! As leadoff, with 4 at-bats per game, that means he'd he'd get on base once every two-and-half games!

Dusty, I love you, and I've defended a lot of things you've done in the past. But what possible rational reason could you have for putting Duston in the leadoff spot?

The New York Times has a remarkable account of what happened above the impacts at the World Trade Center, put together from interviews with survivors and relatives (who found out from phone calls and emails). It must've been heatbreaking to do the research for this one...

According to this CNN article, the National Guard Troops in Pennsylvania didn't have their guns loaded; they were carrying loaded magazines on their belts. It's ridiculous to put military troops in a position like that. I'd noticed that at SFO, when I flew in November, 2001, the M-16s were unloaded, but in subsequent flights, they had magazines in the wells (obviously I have no idea about whether there were actually any rounds in the magazines). It was, of course, ridiculous to put the National Guard in airports to begin with, and I'm glad we're not wasting those people's time, anymore, but it's really ridiculous to say, "there might be a threat here, we need troops, but we're not going to let them load their guns." This is either monumental stupidity on the part of National Guard leadership, or it shows that they too realized that the greatest risk to these people in airports was an accidental discharge...

Update 05/31/02: My wife pointed out that I wasn't clear in this where these troops were carrying guns. I am, of course, referring to the National Guard troops who, until recently, were making sure no (small) group of terrorists stormed security checkpoints at airports.

StrategeyPage has an insightful story about the likelyhood and outcomes of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. They don't think it's very likely, but they point out that the direct destruction from such a campaign would be less than everyone thinks. Of course, they point out, the indirect destruction - economic collapse caused by panicked, fleeing civilians, and the resultant death and disruption from indirect causes like disease would be much worse than most people think.

I was. But I followed these simple steps and fixed it:

1) Log into "edit your blog."
2) Select "Settings." On the page that comes up, don't change anything, but click "save your changes."
3) Select the "Archive" tab of Settings. On the page that comes up, don't change anything, but click "save your changes."

Caveat: The exact problem I had was that, when I went into the "Archive" section of "edit your blog," it didn't have any entries for May. When I checked back there after those two steps, it had created an entry for May. I republished May from there, as well, but I suspect that isn't strictly necessary. If you follow the above three steps and it doesn't work, try republishing.

InstaPundit has been talking a lot about the risks of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, and why any person (sane or otherwise) would think this was a good idea. I haven't seen discussed there (or anywhere else) this chilling snippet from The Atlantic, March, 2002, titled "A Modest Proposal From the Brigadier." It's about a discussion with Brigadier Amanullah. He's Benazir Bhutto's secretary in Islamabad, working to try to allow the exiled ex-Prime Minister back into Pakistan.

Now, it may be just one lunatic's opinion, but the Brigadier outlines a Pakistani population so beaten down and discouraged that starting over, rising from the ashes of nuclear fire, looks like the better option:

"We should fire at them and take out a few of their cities—Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta," he said. "They should fire back and take Karachi and Lahore. Kill off a hundred or two hundred million people. They should fire at us and it would all be over. They have acted so badly toward us; they have been so mean. We should teach them a lesson. It would teach all of us a lesson. There is no future here, and we need to start over. So many people think this...If I were in charge, I would have already done it."

The rest of the article is similarly scary. Also, in Atlanticish news, they now have last month's cover story, "Tales of the Tyrant" available online. It's an extensive profile of Saddam Hussein.

From Reuters, that paragon of impartiality, a news service so impartial they don't call Osama bin Ladin a terrorist, Forumla Feeding Could Increase Risk of Crib Death - Study. Oh, except they actually called it "Breastfeeding Could Lower Risk of Crib Death -Study". It starts:

Mothers wanting to minimize the risk of crib death should breastfeed their babies because it could offer some protection against sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)...

All you mothers out there not wanting to minimize the risk of crib death should just keep forumla feeding, of course. The study finds a "weak" relationship between breast feeding and not having your kid die of SIDS, but it was based on self-reporting (and wasn't from a random sample; the sample was "people whose kids died of SIDS"). I'd imagine the real link is even stronger. "Excuse me, Mrs. Smith, I know your baby died recently and you're afraid it may be your fault, but, we were wondering, how long did you breastfeed?" Yeah, I bet no one exaggerated on that question. Their "weak" link, by the way, was that kids breast fed less than eight weeks were 3 - 5 times more likely to die of SIDS.

Er, except that the Feds just announced that they want airline pilots to be just as unarmed as the rest of us. Is it just me, or, shouldn't we be trusting these guys implicitly, since they could crash the planes on their own if they wanted to?

Heard a liberal newspaper editor on the "McNeil News Hour" tonight warning that we're going to have to learn how to live like Israelis. And my first thought was, "What, carrying guns all over the place?"

Besides which, this hysteria over "walk-in" suicide bombings in the US is ridiculous. The place is just too damn big, and the density of people willing to blow themselves up hereabouts is even less than it is over there.

Jury duty is over, BTW. Guilty.

The Washington Post is reporting that President Bush is considering pushing for a Revival of civics class. Apparently only 10% of high school students take a civics class, today.

I think this is a great idea, especially after my jury experience of a few days ago. 70 people were in my group called to the courtroom. They selected 18 of us to be the initial prospective jurors. I was one of the initial 18. We then went through an interview process, during which the Judge could excuse any of us "for cause." The vast majority of these people were excused for their opinions, not for economic cause. Economic cause didn't even come up, for most of them. Each person was asked about occupation, family, whether they'd ever been a victim of a crime, and whether they'd ever been arrested for a crime. I got to sit there for a total of ten hours over two days and listen to person after person after person detail every minor property theft they'd ever experienced and try to twist the details such that it made them so biased against anyone accused of a crime that they didn't have to sit. And if that didn't work they'd just start making outbursts about how obviously guilty the defendant was until the Judge excused them.

After the Judge had filtered them, each attorney got 10 "preemptory" challenges they could use for no reason, and then another 2 each to use on the alternate jurors. 70 people walked into the coutroom. 9 were never called. 22 were excused preemptorily (many, again, after trying to trump up any political opinion or familiar law-enforcement relationship in order to try to get one side or the other to exuse them). 12 were selected as jurors (me among them) and 2 as alternates. 25 were excused for cause. So, 67% of the prospective jurors were unsuitable, most of them because they weasled out of it. What you had left was a group either too stupid or too civically minded to lie to the judge to get out of four days' work (turned into six by all the people who dragged out the jury selection process). The defendent is a poor hispanic; all the obviously hispanic people in the pool either didn't know English well enough to answer the judge's questions, or pretended to not know English well enough, and were eliminated.

This is a juror of one's peers, how, exactly?

My wife said, "Isn't that what's on TV when there's no program?"

CNN has a story titled, "Study bolsters link between breast-feeding, intelligence." It's about how breast-fed kids, even when controlled for socieconomics and parental education, had, on average, six more IQ points as adults.

Since breast-feeding is man's natural condition, wouldn't it be more logical to call this story "Study bolsters link between formula-feeding, low intelligence?"

So, not a lot coming out from me, right now.

InstaPundit has been talking some in the past few days about the difference between genetic engineering and eugenics. A correspondant wondered why, if they're both dedicated to improving the human race, why everyone agrees that eugenics is bad, but some people think genetic engineering is good.

I actually did some research on this stuff back in school. Eugenics actually has a much wider history that many people realize, which is why it is so universally reviled (even by people who don't know what it is).

First, however, let's define eugenics, from my New Riverside University Dictionary, Copyright 1984 Houghton Mifflin:

eugenics The study of hereditary improvement by genetic control

This is something anyone who has children has engaged in. All of us have excercised genetic control by choosing the mate we thought would have the best genes to contribute to our offspring. And, of course, when you look at it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. Genetic engineering can, in fact, just be seen as an extension of this - we've always excercised as much control over the genes of our offspring as we possibly can, this is just a new set of tools to let us give our children the best shot we can.

So, where's the problem with eugenics? The problem comes from its history. It's not well known today, but the idea of eugenics was very popular in the US one hundred years ago. There were a lot of misinterpretations of Darwin's theories then (as now), and a common one was the idea that the human (or more likely, "white, Aryan") race should be "improved" in some fashion. This grew out of groups trying to improve livestock by similar means. The US eugenics movement had two major tools at its disposal. The first was "positive" eugenics - finding people who were "fit" (by some arbitrary definition, not the biological one) and encouraging them to have children, via tax incentives and education. This, of course, shows its difference with Darwin's theories - in evolution, the "fit" are by definition the reproducing, so you can't "encourage" fit people to reproduce - you could only encourage people with attributes you like to become fit. "Negative" eugencs was focused on finding "undesirables" and preventing them from having children - usually by forced sterilization. "Undesriables" were the insane, or criminal, and usually black.

In the US, the eugenics movement was almost completely racist. Their definition of "fit" started with white. So, for example, the eugenics movement was very supportive of laws that outlawed interacial marriage (because it would "weaken" the white stock, and would eliminate white racial "purity"). While I think most knowledgable people now realize that these sorts of ideas existed, I don't believe most people know that thousands of people (mostly poor blacks) were forceably sterilized in prisons and institutions during this time in the United States - an interesting counter-example to the folks who believe that the 2nd amendment is outdated and that something that awful could "never happen here."

In 1927 (a mere 75 years ago), the Supreme Court finally outlawed forced sterilization. But that wasn't the end of eugenics. In fact, by some definitions, the Nazis' program of centralized murder of Jews and other "undesirables" was a form of eugenics (since dead people have no children). As well, the Nazis sterilized hundreds of thousands . After the war, Nazi attrocities made it difficult for any thinking person to countenance racism of any type, and "eugenics" was similarly discredited.

So, back to the original question: Eugenics is like genetic engineering only in that people tend to throw a lot of unrelated baggage on the term. In its simplest defition, I don't know anyone who is opposed to voluntary eugenics - the idea that, as I said earlier, people should be able to choose their mates based upon some decisions about who would make a good parent. The problem is that, early in this century, eugenics became associated with forced eugenics, which any rational person has to agree is imorral and repugnant. I think similar concerns could be raised about genetic engineering. Would forced genetic engineering be repugnant? Absolutely, and I don't know anyone in mainstream society (or outside of it, frankly) who is advocating such a ridiculous idea. But to oppose genetic engineering research because it could lead to forced genetic engineering is like opposing vasectomy research because vasectomies could be used for forced eugenics.

Gene jogged my memory a bit more on the SDMI kickoff meeting. It was, I think, just after Diamond had beaten off the RIAA's ridiculous Rio case. We'd filed an amicus brief in that case, so neither the Diamond group nor the Goodnoise group was in much favor with the RIAA. I think we were both there with a goal of keeping our friends close and our enemies closer.

The meeting was down in LA, at an airport hotel, and Gene and I flew down that morning. I had a Hitachi laptop I was planning on getting some work done with, and a tape recorder to record the meeting in case some record company type said something anti-trusty (if they did, I didn't notice, because I ended up having trouble keeping my eyes open). The representatives from Diamond sat behind us, and they were really the pariahs of the meeting. One of the Diamond guys kept looking at us, putting one hand over one of his eyes (like an eyepatch), and saying, "Arrrr!"

Unfortunately, the screen on my laptop went out on that trip, so I wasn't able to get work done there, as I'd hoped. That was how I ended up reading the Wall Street Journal for a lot of the meeting. It was one of those weird experiences where you spend time mostly with people who agree with you - "encryption isn't what the consumer wants and will significantly harm a nascent market while not significantly stopping piracy" - and suddenly find yourself surrounded by a bunch of people just as self-assured that the opposite is true, that "encryption is what the consumer will be happy to take and is necessary to grow this nascent market and stop piracy." It would be like walking into a Flat-Earth Society meeting and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by people who believe it's completely obvious that, well, the Earth is flat.

Gene ended up doing several months' worth of expense reports, there, and then left all the receipts on the table when we left. Towards the end there, we ran into a few business associates, and Michael Robertson. That was before he called us a "stock scam" in the press and we simply had a kind of friendly competition with him instead of the open hostility that came later. Ironically, we never did end up competing with each other.

When we got to the airport, the security guard wanted me to turn on my laptop. "I can't," I explained. "Make something come up on the screen," he insisted. "It's broken!" I was afraid I was going to have to just throw it out or something - and lose my data - but he finally let me open it up, lay it flat on the belt, and run it through the X-Ray machine.

Do I just think to much, or is the quality of poll questions on the Internet terrible? Online polls are ubiquitous, yet they all seem to be so bad. Take this one (please!) from CNN: "Will the United Nations conduct an objective investigation into what happened at the Jenin refugee camp?" "Yes" and "No" are the two choices. It's actually clearer than many CNN polls, but it's still ambigious. It's attached to a story about how the UN may not investigate, after all. I think it's trying to ask, "If the UN goes ahead with its investigation of Jenin, will it be objective?" and not "Will the UN go ahead with its investigation?" (How should I know?) Most of them are more like this one, "Should Mexicans in the United States illegally be granted residency (Yes/No)?" Er, what, all of them? And granted residency exactly how? It's a complicated issue distilled down to a single-sentence yes/no question. Even the ones on dumb subjects are dumb, like Are you worried your biological clock will go off before you have children?" What does that even mean? "Are you worried you're going to want to have children before you have children?" Or do they mean "Are you worried you're going to have trouble having children when you want to?" And if so, why is it just yes/no and not have the options, "I don't ever want children" and "I'm going to have children when I'm young to avoid that problem?" Both of them are encompassed in "no," along with "I have my head in the sand am not at all concerned with the fact that it's harder to have kids when you're older."

And here's a beauty: "Will World AIDS Day be effective?" Effective at what? Preventention? Helping a cure? Getting press? If you mean generating idiotic polls on CNN.com, I'd guess the answer is pretty apparent. Although 84% of the people responding thought that it wouldn't be effective. At whatever.

Remember how back on September 12th, everyone kept telling us how the world had changed forever? Yahoo! has a great feature called The Buzz Index. It's what people are searching for most on Yahoo! and is a great index of what people are thinking about. It was full of "Osama bin Ladin" and "Terrorism" and "Afghanistan" six months ago. Now, you can look from top to bottom...Spider Man...Britney Spears (a constant fixture on the Buzz Index)....Star Wars...NASCAR...In the top 20, nothing of any substance.

Not that a world full of people spending their leisure time on leisure is a bad thing, mind you...