Stupid Security Strikes again

From Peter Hitchens' column:

The mad dictatorship of the 'security' industry reached new depths of lunacy when a Japan-bound traveller was stopped at Heathrow for carrying a paperback thriller with a picture of a gun on the cover.

When Carolyn Burgess placed her Robert B. Parker novel, A Triple Shot Of Spenser, on the security tray she had it snatched away because it 'might upset passengers' on the plane. It had the image of a handgun on the front.

Eventually, after three officials had consulted each other on this serious matter, Mrs Burgess, a 58-year-old bank worker, was told she could take the book on the plane – provided she kept it in her bag and didn't read it.

A spokesman for BAA attempted to explain this loopy behaviour by saying: 'In certain circumstances, a passenger carrying an item which features an image or slogan that could be perceived as aggressive may be asked to cover it up or remove it. Security officers are advised to use common sense when making these requests.'

At least the book wasn't blown up in a controlled explosion.

Size matters

One of the canards of of the liberal elite is that IQ isn't real.  One of the best statements of this is Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" which asserts that general intelligence doesn't correlate with anything at all, and is just an artifact of the testing process.

From Science Daily:

A collaborative study led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), McGill University has demonstrated a positive link between cognitive ability and cortical thickness in the brains of healthy 6 to 18 year olds. The correlation is evident in regions that integrate information from different parts of the brain.
....

Previous studies have shown that intelligence and cognitive ability are correlated with regional brain structure and function. The association between regional cortical thickness and intelligence has been little studied and most previous studies of normal children had a relatively small sample. So with improvements in MRI-based quantification of cortical thickness and a much larger sample, researchers aimed to examine this relationship and to further characterize and identify brain areas where cortical thickness was associated with cognitive performance.

Cortical thickness may in part reflect the amount of complex connections between nerve cells. In other words, thicker cortices are likely to have more complex connections with consequences on cognitive ability. A positive link between cortical thickness and cognitive ability was detected in many areas of the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. The regions with the greatest relationship were the 'multi-modal association' areas, where information converges from various regions of the brain for processing.

Defending Marriage

"Doctor Zero" at Hotair.com posts a defense of marriage:
<http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/12/in-defense-of-marriage/>

Bite Mark Evidence

Radley Balko has an article at Reason Magazine looking at bite mark evidence.  After his client was acquitted of murder, his defense attorney, Christopher Plourd, decided to administer an impromptu "proficiency exam" to a noted forensic dentist.

Plourd selected West because, even though the dentist was still active in the Mississippi and Louisiana courts, he had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology since the mid-1990s, and therefore might not be aware of the somewhat notorious Krone case. Plourd was right.

In October 2001, working for Plourd, a private investigator named James Rix sent West the decade-old photographs of the bite marks on Ancona's breast. Rix told West that the photos were from the three-year-old unsolved murder of a college student in Idaho. Rix then sent West a dental mold of his own teeth, but told him that they came from the chief suspect in the case. He also sent a check for $750, West's retainer fee.

Two months later, West sent Rix a letter and accompanying 20-minute video. In the video, West meticulously explains the methodology he uses to match bite marks to dental molds. Using the photo of Ancona's bitten breast and Rix's own dental mold, West then reaches the conclusion Plourd and Rix suspected he would: That the mold and the photos were a definite match.

....

Following the methodology that he has used in more than 100 other cases over the years, West confidently matches a dental mold and a photo of bite marks that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, decorating the fiction with the language of science. Though West is dead wrong, he sounds convincing, and it isn't difficult to imagine how he might prove persuasive to judges and juries.

In February, the National Academy of Sciences published a highly critical report about how forensic evidence is used and abused in the courtroom. The study was especially critical of bite-mark testimony, noting that it has contributed to a number of wrongful convictions over the years. The report concludes that there's simply "no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others" using bite-mark analysis. Yet bite-mark testimony is still common, and there are still plenty of people in prison as a direct result.

It would be nice to see more "proficiency tests" like Plourd's with West, only not just from defense attorneys. More importantly, the criminal justice system needs to act swiftly when "experts" like West are shown to conduct bogus examinations.

I've worked for the City of Los Angeles for a couple of decades now.  I've seen what our labs go through in order to meet regulatory requirements.  They receive test samples from the regulators, and have to come up with the right answer.  They are also subject to being given unmarked samples, not identified as coming from a regulator so they don't get automatic special treatment, and the analytical result had better match the known results of the samples.

 

A forensic analyst needs to be able to perform to that same standard before his or her work is accepted in a court of law.

Charen on Marriage

Column today at Townhall.com:

Young women, especially poorly educated ones, have gotten the idea that marriage is all about them -- about their romantic hopes. In fact, while marriage often does deliver on the promise of happiness for adults, it is only secondarily about adult happiness. It is primarily about safety and security for children. The old stigma against illegitimacy was harsh and led to its own kind of suffering. But it prevented narcissistic young people from impairing the lives of their children on a grand scale.

Sowell on Same Sex Marriage

From last year at Townhall.com:

I thought I'd go through the archives and see what Thomas Sowell had to say on the subject.  Here's one piece:

Marriage has existed for centuries and, until recent times, it has always meant a union between a man and a woman. Over those centuries, a vast array of laws has grown up, all based on circumstances that arise in unions between a man and a woman.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law has not been based on logic but on experience. To apply a mountain of laws based specifically on experience with relations between a man and a woman to a different relationship where sex differences are not involved would be like applying the rules of baseball to football.

The argument that current marriage laws "discriminate" against homosexuals confuses discrimination against people with making distinctions among different kinds of behavior.

All laws distinguish among different kinds of behavior. What other purpose does law have?

....

Despite heavy television advertising in California for "gay marriage," showing blacks being set upon by police dogs during civil right marches, and implying that homosexuals face the same discrimination today, the analogy is completely false.

Blacks had to sit in the back of the bus because they were black. They were doing exactly what white people were doing-- riding a bus. That is what made it racial discrimination.

Marriage is not a right but a set of legal obligations imposed because the government has a vested interest in unions that, among other things, have the potential to produce children, which is to say, the future population of the nation.

Gays were on their strongest ground when they said that what they did was nobody else's business. Now they are asserting a right to other people's approval, which is wholly different.

None of us has a right to other people's approval.

...

Dead on its feet, but still necessary

Peter Hitchens wrote Sunday in The Daily Mail :

Our justified disgust at child abuse is being used to defraud us. One after another the little faces gaze out at us from beyond the grave – Maria Colwell, Victoria Climbie, Baby Peter – and each time our raw emotions are manipulated by the very liberal revolutionaries who are largely to blame for the hell of combined neglect and abuse in which so many modern children live.
Again and again, we draw the wrong conclusions and commemorate these deaths by handing more power to the liberal state, which in two generations has destroyed marriage, the best protection against abuse.
magine that more social workers, or better-trained social workers, will somehow stop this happening again. You might as well fight the Atlantic with a bath sponge. We pass laws that give the State ever-increasing powers to interfere in the home, and treat responsible parents as suspects.
After a recent horrible court case, we are also under pressure to slacken the rules of fairness and justice, so as to make it easier to convict abusers, even though this will also make it easier to convict the innocent.
....
We would do much more good if we admitted that we had been mistaken when we first weakened and then swept aside the institution of marriage, now dead on its feet in Britain. Research in Canada and Britain shows that non-married households, where there is a series of boyfriends who are not the natural fathers of the children, are startlingly more likely to be the scenes of abuse than are stable married homes.
The Canadian figures show that  a child is 50 to 100 times safer with natural parents than with a step-parent in the home. The British research found married homes were 33 times safer than those with serial boyfriends. 
Stable marriage safeguards children. This is not to say that there is no abuse in married families. Nor is it to say that all stepfathers are wicked abusers. It is simply to state a glaring statistical fact which all modern politicians prefer to ignore.
Yes, child-abusers of all kinds should be punished with grim severity, once they have been convicted in proper, fair trials. 
But all those who have connived at the dismantling of marriage, and continue to connive at it, should recognise their own grave guilt in sacrificing the welfare and happiness of children to the selfishness of 'liberated' adults who ought, above all, to be shielding the young from harm.

Torture, terror, correlation, and causation

This piece at true/slant looks at a correlation between terror attacks and human rights abuses.

...Now, the paper’s conclusions deal not just with torture, but with a broader category of “physical integrity rights” which “protect individuals from the extrajudicial murder, disappearance, torture, or political imprisonment by the authorities.” What it finds is that more respect for physical integrity rights, represented on the x-axis below, leads to less terrorism, represented on the y-axis...

Graph at link above.

So, what about torture specifically?

Torture has a negative and statistically significant relationship to terrorism in all three models. In other words, countries that engage in more torture (and thus have a lower score on the torture variable) consistenly experience more, not less, of both domestic and transnational terrorism. This mirrors the more general finding reported in the paper that respect for human rights is associated with less terror as well.

Now, correlation doesn’t prove causation. While Walsh and Piazza put forward a theory of causation (that violating physical integrity rights spurs terrorism, as mentioned above), it’s not conclusively proven by the paper.

More study is needed.

And, of course, there’s the question of whether the causation might be the other way around. As in: Do countries that experience more terror tend to adopt torture? Walsh answers this possibility in this comment on his blog:

This is an important point. I think it’s unlikely to be the case, but it’s not a open and shut case. The best way to address this with statistical data would be to use a two stage least squares or instrumental variable model. We’ve tried this but had difficulty coming up with an appropriate instrument. In the paper that’s referenced in the initial post we used a second best strategy of lagging terrorism by a few years. Our main findings held up, which suggests that the abuse is driving the terror and not the other way around. But this is a question that’s begging for a more definitive answer.

At the very least, this has to give supporters of torture (or “enhanced interrogation”) some pause. The proof that overly harsh tactics are counterproductive in a struggle like our is far from trivial. This is important work adding to that debate.

One of the things that's going to muddy the waters is that a lot of what we classify as terrorist attacks also violate the personal integrity of their victims. As terrorists ramp up their attacks, is it so unreasonable to expect people to want to violate their personal integrity?

Do interrogators torture?

The following was posted at Jerry Pournelle's day book. (He hates the word "blog", even though he admits he was blogging before almost everyone else.)

Dear Jerry,

Though there have been a trio of letters on the efficacy of torture, would you bear with me and possibly post this? I believe I have something of an insight here.

My qualifications:

I was trained in Interrogation at the United States Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

I served as an interrogatior for two and a half years, as well as teaching classes in the Law of War as it applied to POW's, and training line units in POW handling techniques.

Two points on torture as an interrogation technique, and one story:

The "utilitarian" arguments against torture, that it does not work and leads to inaccurate information are, to use a Good Old Untilitarian statement "nonsense on stilts"

False leads? Bad information? The very meat upon which any Intelligence system thrives is Information. Period. The more Information, the Better. Bad information, false leads, that is part of the Equation of Intelligence. That;s WHY we have Analysts! Intell Analysts exist to winnow Good from Bad Information. They are very good at it. Not to mention, that even "Bad" information often is valuable. It can show us what the Enemy is NOT aware of, is NOT doing, and that is often VERY valuable knowledge indeed.


....


The only good argument against torture is moral and ethical.

It's just wrong. It destroys the souls of all involved.


....


Now the story:

During the twelve week Interrogator Basic Course, we were incessantly drilled with techniques for tricking, cajoling, persuading and intimidating POWs into giving up vital information. All of that, and we were also constantly warned against "losing our cool" not to give in to the all too human urge to just smack the living daylights out of some smart ass detainee.

We began with twenty-four students. Sixteen graduated. Of the third that "washed out", most did so after the instructors deemed them temperamentally unfit for the job. That is to say, they lost their cool to easily when confronted with non-responsive subjects during mock interrogations.

It was never far from our thoughts, that violence was "verboten" as a questioning technique.

Came Graduation Day for the Interrogation Course.

No one in the classroom for the ceremony except the remaining sixteen students, the instructors, AND:

The head of the school, a Chief Warrant Officer. A thirty-plus year veteran, with "hash marks" the full length of his Class A sleeve, an interrogator had conducted thousands of real interrogations, going back to the Korean War, perhaps even the tail end of World War Two. That was the second time we had heard him speak, the other occasion having been his opening day address to the class, where he basically told us we had been handpicked out of a million man Army to be one of about a thousand specialists in a vital field, So Good Luck!

As he reached the podium, two of the instructor NCO's closed and locked the doors of the classroom, and stood before them.

The CWO looked around the room a moment, I have rarely seen a more serious face.

"For the last twelve weeks, you have been taught every technique the ingenuity of man has been able to devise to gain information from someone without inflicting physical pain. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they work very well. They do not always work. You will someday be forced to use pain. You will, I hope, hate yourself for having done so. But you will do what is needful."

"If anyone of you ever repeats what I have told you, I will deny it."

"Welcome to the club."

It was very quiet as we received our diplomas.

One of the arguments against torture is that a tortured prisoner will say whatever is needed to get the torture to stop, including lies and outright fantasies.

It seems to me, though, intelligence officers are supposed to have tools for sifting through information to weed out the bad and isolate the good. After all, I'm sure prisoners will attempt to pass off false and misleading information under legal interrogation. Informants are in no way guaranteed to be telling the truth, assuming they know it. (A known mole might be fed false intelligence rather than being arrested and telling his handlers they need to recruit someone else.)

Witnesses can misinterpret what they've seen. Ambiguous information can be misinterpreted.

Intelligence officers are supposed to know about these issues, and be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If they can't do this in the case of a tortured prisoner, why should I believe they can do this anywhere else?

Rifkin and Casey on the interrogation memos

From the Wall Street Journal :

The four memos on CIA interrogation released by the White House last week reveal a cautious and conservative Justice Department advising a CIA that cared deeply about staying within the law. Far from "green lighting" torture -- or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees -- the memos detail the actual techniques used and the many measures taken to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation.
Interrogations were to be "continuously monitored" and "the interrogation team will stop the use of particular techniques or the interrogation altogether if the detainee's medical or psychological conditions indicates that the detainee might suffer significant physical or mental harm."
An Aug. 1, 2002, memo describes the practice of "walling" -- recently revealed in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which suggested that detainees wore a "collar" used to "forcefully bang the head and body against the wall" before and during interrogation. In fact, detainees were placed with their backs to a "flexible false wall," designed to avoid inflicting painful injury. Their shoulder blades -- not head -- were the point of contact, and the "collar" was used not to give additional force to a blow, but further to protect the neck.

I wonder what else the Red Cross got wrong.

The actual intelligence benefits of the CIA program are also detailed in these memos. The CIA believed, evidently with good reason, that the enhanced interrogation program had indeed produced actionable intelligence about al Qaeda's plans. First among the resulting successes was the prevention of a "second wave" of al Qaeda attacks, to be carried out by an "east Asian" affiliate, which would have involved the crashing of another airplane into a building in Los Angeles.
The interrogation techniques described in these memos are indisputably harsh, but they fall well short of "torture." They were developed and deployed at a time of supreme peril, as a means of preventing future attacks on innocent civilians both in the U.S. and abroad.
The dedicated public servants at the CIA and Justice Department -- who even the Obama administration has concluded should not be prosecuted -- clearly cared intensely about staying within the law as well as protecting the American homeland. These memos suggest that they achieved both goals in a manner fully consistent with American values.

Carrie Prejean and the Joe The Plumber effect

Gay Patriot observes that the rabid supporters of same-sex marriage who have done their best to trash Carrie Prejean have only secured her fame.

Now, we’ve got the some web-site snooping around in her parents’ divorce record to uncover the origins of her homophobia. While I’ve read more than I care to about this controversy, I have yet to find one statement she has made showing a fear (”phobia”) of homosexuals or showing any animosity whatsoever against gay people. All I’ve heard her is express the viewpoint of a majority of Americans, including the Democratic President of the United States about the meaning of marriage.

So, now this website’s staff has rooted around in her parents’ divorce records, learned of some strange accusations lobbed between the parties to ask whether “Carrie believe gays broke up her parents’ marriage.” They’ve truly become obsessed with this woman.

Yet, the more they investigate her, the more they malign her, the stronger will grow her support among social conservatives. She will become their poster child to showcase the left’s intolerance of people favoring the traditional definition of marriage.

Should Miss Prejean lose her title over her “nudie” pictures (as appears possible), she won’t lose her fame. Few will know the name of her replacement as Miss California. Indeed, few will know the name of the woman who bested her for the Miss USA crown. But, they will know who Carrie Prejean is.

The uproar of her adversaries has secured her fame.

Remember Joe the Plumber?

He was in his own front yard, playing with his daughter, when Obama's campaign retinue passed by. Obama came to him and asked him if he had any questions for the Bringer of Hope and Change. Obama's camp didn't like Joe's question, and neither did any of Obama's supporters. Within the week, we knew all about Joe's back taxes, his income, his outgo, and his use of an assumed name. Crowds of people were eager to tell us everything except the answer to his question. That was fit only for the quickest possible burial.

Like Joe the Plumber, Carrie Prejean did not seek this controversy. A spoiled brat of a judge asked her a radioactive political question, against what is at least an unwritten policy of the Pageant. She answered. Now, the screaming left is doing its best to make the issue Carrie Prejean, and not the question asked, or the person asking it.

How do you pick experts?

One writer's answer here.

In response to the question:

"Can I ask how you made the judgment on which scientists to believe? I am interested in climate science and just started reading RealClimate, thanks in part to your post. To be honest, I respect your literary work and was surprised to hear you, as a science fiction author, naysay what I thought was serious and substantial scientific study.

L Neil Smith writes:

...lacking other data, I looked at the character of those pushing the idea of Global Warming. They included leftist politicos I knew to be opportunistic liars in other contexts—particularly gun ownership—along with movie stars and other brain-dead celebrities that flock to any cause that attacks private industrial capitalism and individual liberty. Some may criticize me for ad hominem thinking, but when you don't have reliable scientific information (which I didn't back then), what else can you rely on but your understanding of the personalities involved?

There was also my experience with previous predictions of disaster (some which I listed in the blog entry "The Badguys" that we're discussing ), and of conspiracy theories that seemed to me to have a similar structure. The whole "Paul is dead" thing comes to mind. I know a lot about this because I spent a lot of time in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy "movement".

....

I suppose my perception of precisely who stood to benefit from the spreading fear about Global Warming comes into it. Anyone who hates technology, of course, or the present economic system. Also, hordes who will get rich from all of the asinine proposals to reduce Global Warming—anyone who makes solar panels or water heating systems or nasty little cars that go short distances very slowly, carrying almost nothing.

Most persuasive, I suppose, was an anthropological understanding I have (that being my principle field of interest and study in college) of what constitutes a religion. The planet gets transmogrified into a goddess in the minds of the faithful, and all of the entities upon it, the birds and bees and flowers and trees (to quote an old song)—all of the entities, that is, except humans—become sacred objects. Exhaling carbon dioxide becomes Original Sin. Better that a thousand human babies should die than one single snail darter or a furbish lousewort.

Saturated greenhouse gases

blog post here.

At least it's out of copyright

Researchers are digitizing ancient documents before they crumble away.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.

In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

Among their latest findings: An alternate version of the Greek play Medea, later immortalized in a version by Euripides, on a darkened piece of papyrus, dated to the 2nd century A.D. In the newly discovered version -- written by Greek playwright Neophron -- Medea doesn't kill her children, says Dirk Obbink, director of Oxford's Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.

....

Also in the article is a list of neat links to archives of these documents:

Clicking On The Past

In the era of instant information, libraries, museums and universities are racing to scan rare manuscripts and artifacts in their collections and make them available online. Here are some of the most significant artifacts now on view on the Web:

The British Library

www.bl.uk/

The library began a massive digitization project in 2005 with Microsoft, and plans to scan 25 million book pages.

Key Works:

Mozart's composition books dating from 1784 to 1791, when he composed some of his most famous works, including five operas, several piano sonatas and his last three major symphonies.

www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/mozart/

accessible/introduction.html

Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. A collection of loose papers and notes, these 28 pages outline da Vinci's fascination with mechanics, bird flight and studies on reflections and curved mirrors. The Italian script is written in da Vinci's typical left-to-right "mirror writing."

www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/leonardo/

accessible/introduction.html

Jane Austen's "History of England," hand-written by Austen in 1791 when she was 15. The work is an engaging parody of British history textbooks -- Austen calls herself a "partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian."

www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/austen/

accessible/introduction.html

The Library of Congress, 'American Memory'

 http://memory.loc.gov/

ammem/index.html

This archive of American manuscripts, recordings, maps, films and images was launched in the mid-1990s and now contains about 15 million items.

Key Works:

The contents of Lincoln's pockets on the night he was assassinated: includes watch fob, pocket knife, handkerchief and confederate five-dollar bill.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/

stern-lincoln/objects.html

Four Walt Whitman notebooks, with writings from 1842 to 1937, including poetry, prose, proofs and correspondence.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

collections/whitman/

Former slaves' narratives: audio files recorded in nine Southern states between 1932 and 1975, with 23 interviewees. Some are being made publicly available for the first time and include transcripts.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

collections/voices/

The World Digital Library

www.wdl.org/en/

Last month, Unesco launched this new online archive of significant artifacts and manuscripts from 30 collections around the world.

Key Works:

Oracle Bone, about 1200 B.C., from the National Library of China. The flat piece of bone, inscribed with Chinese characters, was used for divination.

www.wdl.org/en/item/290/

Albert Einstein's application for citizenship, dated 1936, from the National Archives and Records Administration.

www.wdl.org/en/item/2745/zoom.html

Christopher Columbus's diary from 1493, in which the explorer describes the lands he discovered, from the Center for the Study of the History of Mexico Carso.

www.wdl.org/en/item/2962

Recent Breakthroughs

Digitization projects are also bringing previously unknown manuscripts to light -- and to the Web, where scholars and curious Internet surfers alike can look at high-resolution digital images of new discoveries from the ancient world.

The Archimedes Palimpsest

http://archimedespalimpsest.org

Researchers at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore uncovered a 10th-century copy of two treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, concealed underneath the text of a 13th-century prayerbook.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/

This represents one of the largest collections of ancient papyri, some 500,000 pieces excavated around 1900 in Egypt. One sample fragment on view online contains elegiac verses by seventh-century B.C. poet Archilochus.

Codex Sinaiticus

www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

manuscript.aspx

Portions of the 4th-century manuscript, thought to be the oldest complete Bible in the world, are now scattered in several collections around the world, but the complete text is being reassembled, in digital form, on the Web.

the legal ramifications of ssm

http://volokh.com/posts/1241641694.shtml

 

Not a slippery slope?

From Townhall blog:

The claim is, legalizing same-sex marriage will not open the door to polygamous marriages.

This is how the story opens: "Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something 'husband.' Says Sasha: 'I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.'"

 

Later in the story: "[T] he Maui-based World Polyamory Association, is pushing for the next frontier of less-traditional codified relationships. This community has even come up with a name for what the rest of the world generally would call a committed threesome: the 'triad.'

Right.....

Why Demonize?

Gay Patriot asks why the supporters of same-sex marriage feel the need to demonize their opponents.

Last fall, I received a good deal of e-mail from both sides of the Prop 8 campaign. In nearly every missive I received from the "Yes" said, the proponents of the measure were at pains to assure me they did not want to take away the state's domestic partnership program. The language was straight forward. They did not attack. They merely, as did Carrie Prejean, defended the notion of marriage as an institution defined by gender difference.

By contrast, the e-mail from the "No" side was overwhelmingly hostile, attacking supporters of the proposition as mean-spirited. To be sure, not all the e-mails were hostile. Lesbian friends who had gotten married just talked about their relationships.

It struck me how in the Prejean-Hilton exchange and the ensuing hullabaloo, we saw a replaying of that very campaign.

Why must so many gay marriage advocates label their adversaries as haters? Don't they even realize the irony that they are using hateful rhetoric to accuse others of hate?

What is behind this need to demonize?

Heather MacDonald on SSM

Over at Secular Right:

One overpowering cause of black social failure is the breakdown of marriage in the black community. Nationally, the black illegitimacy rate is 71%; in some inner city areas, it is closer to 90%. When boys grow up without any expectation that they will have to marry the mother of their children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility. A community without the marriage norm is teetering on the edge of civilizational collapse, if it has not already fallen into the abyss. Fatherless black boys, who themselves experience no pressure to become marriageable mates as they grow up, end up joining gangs, dropping out of school, and embracing a "street" lifestyle in the absence of any male authority in the home.

If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites', I would have few qualms about gay marriage. Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee.

Why might it further depress the black marriage rate? There is a logical reason and a visceral reason. First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love. It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised. And there are undoubtedly many other subtle meanings and effects of gay marriage that we cannot even imagine at the moment—which institutional shift is something that conservatives should be most attuned to.

As for the visceral reason: It is no secret that resistance to homosexuality is highest among the black population (though probably other ethnic minorities are close contenders). I fear that it will be harder than usual to persuade black men of the obligation to marry the mother of their children if the inevitable media saturation coverage associates marriage with homosexuals. Is the availability of homosexual marriage a valid reason to shun the institution? No, but that doesn't make the reaction any less likely.

What are the chances that gay marriage would further doom marriage among blacks? I don't know. Again, if someone can persuade me that the chances are zero, then I would be much more sanguine. But anything more than zero, I am reluctant to risk.

I suspect at this point, any risk above zero is too much.  The whole idea behind "tolerance" is that whatever is being tolerated is a negative.  We never have to speak of tolerating positive things -- the more, the better.

Misunderstanding the Memos

From the Wall Street Journal:

President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.

Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.

But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.

In the face of claims by critics that torture doesn't work:

Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.

Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."

The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.

And then as a final rhetorical flourish, critics will demand to know, "How would you like to be subjected to these techniques?"

I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.

 

How soon they forget

It seems Nancy Pelosi has been drinking milk of amnesia.

 

From the Wall Street Journal:

Nancy Pelosi is "pushing back" against charges that she was aware of -- and acquiesced in -- the CIA's harsh interrogations of terrorist detainees nearly from the moment the practice began, reports the Politico Web site. Maybe she's suffering from amnesia.

Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn't remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. "For more than an hour," the Washington Post reported in 2007, "the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

"Among the techniques described," the story continued, "was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder."

....

Or maybe the speaker missed what former CIA Director (and Bill Clinton appointee) George Tenet writes in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," about the CIA interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

"I believe none of these successes [in foiling terrorist plots] would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal -- read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. 'I'll talk to you guys,' he said, 'after I get to New York and see my lawyer.' Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats to the American people."

Mr. Tenet continues: "From our interrogation of KSM and other senior al Qaeda members . . . we learned many things -- not just tactical information leading to the next capture. For example, more than 20 plots had been put in motion by al Qaeda against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges and tunnels."

She has to know, if they have a Truth Commission, she'll be near the front of the line to be called in to testify under oath, on C-SPAN.