Rounding out the news I read this morning, Mr. Pat Buchanan wrote an article on the debt forgiveness proposal that bears commenting on.[1] In a couple respects he is correct. He is correct that the clause talking about the need to take anti-corruption measures is a joke. It means that either no debt relief will occur, or that no reforms will. He is also right when he says that we the tax payer will ultimately bear the burden for this.

But he utterly ignores the fact that we would be doing so anyway. These debts are beyond the resources of the current, admittedly corrupt, governments to pay. With the current financial structure, the presence of these bad loans would have served as reason to further prop up these governments, lest they get overthrown and the new government not agree to honor the debts. Further, for the most part, only interest was being paid anyway, the debt was not decreasing.

While it would be nice to see the IMF and the World Bank held accountable for these loans, it is useless to say that it should happen just as it would to “any U.S. government bank” for two reasons. One, there ARE no “U.S. government banks. The Federal Reserve bank has a U.S. mandated monopoly on the production of money, and uses government resources to do so, but it is a private bank. As are all the other banks. Secondly, only small banks are allowed to fail anyway. Bigger banks get rescued by the Federal Reserve or by Congress directly just as big corporations such as Lockheed or United Air have been. This is exactly the same thing.

It is also the right thing to do. Yes, these loans should never have existed. And yes, the governments are corrupt. But that does not excuse us crippling any chance these countries have for even minuscule advancement under the heavy debt burden that currently exists. If we do not accept what are ultimately our own mistakes (through our elected and appointed officials), these countries will never have a chance to give their people a decent life. And that alone tells you what the right course of action is. It is our fault they have these loans, our fault that the interest cripples them. It is thus ours to bear the default on them.

[1] http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44789

Ms. Phyllis Schlafly has some interesting facts on the way the courts have furthered the destruction of the concept of fatherhood in our society.[1] You see a similar dynamic in the areas of sexual assault and domestic violence: you are considered guilty from the moment the charge comes out. You are considered guilty even if found innocent. Your attempts to defend yourself will just earn you greater enmity from society, from your persecutors, and from the legal system. Both crimes are real. Both deserve severe punishment. But we have forgotten that not all men accused are guilty. We have even forgotten that not all men are even accused of them.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20050613.shtml

Mr. Robert Novak provides some details on the Kyoto accords that I had not previously heard.[1] I have been against this treaty simply because I think it is utterly misguided. From what I gather, it does not seem that we can undo the damage of global warming that we have done so far, whatever amount of damage is our fault. The push then seems to be couching a desire to minimize future damage in terms of preventing inevitable catastrophe. This seems wrong-headed. If the catastrophe is coming, we should push forward as best we can to have the technology on hand to survive it.

Mr. Novak asserts that this treaty is about more than environmentalism however. If he is right, it is also an explicit attempt to use environmentalism to cause Americans to accept a decrease in our standard of living. This causes a blip in my radar screen because it was one of the things that was predicted in the Federal Reserve book that I never finished. It had some kooky Lockness Monster type name. Anyway, one of the ideas of the part of the book that I did read was that various situations would be used not to raise the third world up to first world lifestyles, but to level the playing field by bring down the average. Were this to actually happen, it would not surprise me to see it coming with heavy European and Chinese pressures, as these are socialist and communist governments already. I am not saying that the book is right, just that this sort of tendency bears watching.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050613.shtml

Mr. Jeff Jacoby is an idealist. He thinks that the states might be persuaded to give up their right to indoctrinate the majority of children for the first thirteen years of their education.[1] He is absolutely right, the public school model is not the only model that would ensure the education of our children. If we privatized the public school systems and repealed the taxes that pay for them (primarily the property tax), we would all have enough money to pay for their schooling. If someone worries that this might not be enough, we can provide further tax credits for it as well. And of course religious schools could provide scholarships, and so on.

Further, the public schools currently get several times the amount of money per student that the Catholic schools do, and yet no one can seriously say that the Catholic school systems do worse at providing education. In fact, many parents say they do a better job. This leads to an interesting line of thought: where does all that extra money go? Well, some of it goes to higher salaries for teachers, the fact that you take a pay cut choosing to work in a Catholic school is well known. But some of it also goes to the higher levels of beurocracy in the public school system, the teachers’ union, so on. All fat that could be cut from their budget to make the schools more competative. This is the sort of thing that has led to the success of so called “charter schools” in some school districts, where a private firm gets a contract to run a school as long as they can improve the results the school gets on the SOLs (I might be somewhat inacurate here defining charter schools. I do not know too much about them).

Another important point to remember is that universal public schooling is a relatively recent invention. One of the reasons that you see the use of public funds to provide bus service to Catholic schools in some north eastern states is because these schools were the “public” school system for a long time, until the states had the political preasure to build their own. In the South on the other hand, you did not see this development of schools. The richer families home schooled, and the poorer simply did not learn much. As a result you had the rise of the white cracker subculture in the south, that closely mirrors the black culture today[2]. Going into the Civil War then, you see that the illiteracy rate in the south was very high, much higher than in the north, though neither had what we would understand today as public schooling.

But the failure of the south to educate really does not argue for the existance of public schooling. Rather, it speaks to the simple fact that education was widely believed to be unnecessary in the society constructed in the south. The sustinence farmers certainly did not need it, and the plantations needed only a few who could read and write. Similarly, in the small town, one’s word was either good or not, reguardless of the form an agreement took, and everyone knew it.

On the other hand, the failure of the public school system to adequately educate is pertinent. Illiteracy is still higher than it should be, especially amoung inner city students. Even where literacy exists, understanding of history, math, and science often lags. Critical thinking is nearly universally unknonw. We have gone from a culture that nearly requires a highschool diploma to succeed, to one that nearly requires a college dilopma to succeed. From men being ready to take on responsibility at 18 and 20, to men still in some sort of extended adolecence nearly till 30, assuming they ever grow up and embrase responsibility. Clearly we are failing. It should then be just as clear that the system does not work, and simply throwing more money at it, to do the same thing, will not work.

Still, common sense tells us that this will not happen. The teachers’ union is one of the more effective lobbying efforts on the left, and it would be political suicide to try to privatize education. Further, even were a state to try to do so, the federal laws would likely “preempt” and require state spending on it anyway. The political cost then, in terms of careers burned, for something with no grassroots preasure, is prohibitively high, and this post, like Mr. Jacoby’s column, is very nearly a waste of space.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/jj20050613.shtml
[2] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050610.shtml

The bias is subtle in a current New York Times article talking about the morality of treating children with severe birth defects.[1] It starts off okay, talking about how one doctor advocated treating them and another did not, and society gradually took the choice out of the doctors’ hands in favor of treating everyone. But then it goes on to find two patients who “wish [they'd] never been born.”[1] And then it continues to correlate the meningomyelocele cases the rest of the article had been talking about to infants with very low birth rates. While admitting that we can now keep such children alive, it highlights the problems some (many?) such children will have later in life. And ends by asking if we should be treating such children at all.

The problem here is that this is consistently looking at the issue from a quality of life perspective. That is fundamentally wrong. The Church teaches us that even the most handicapped life is worthy of full respect as life, and is worth living. God has seen fit to give life to these babies, it is not for us to decide that they should die, and to deny them basic treatment is to commit murder. Perhaps they will never have a “normal” life, but perhaps the next Beethoven is among them. Or perhaps they will bring a smile to one parents face with the love they can give. Either would be a reason enough to have lived. And certainly their example will make us all appreciate more the gifts we have.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/health/policy/14essa.html?ex=< ?php echo urlencode(”1276401600&en=4b3526a5f99ec105&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss”); ?>

A miserable day. Friday was bad, I was all head-achy, though I managed to stay awake, which is an improvement over Thursday. Saturday was okay, I was stuffy and a lot of drainage, but more or less okay. Sunday was bad. My voice sounded like laryngitis and I was borderline head-achy all day. Today is not much better. I hate being sick, whatever cold I have caught is a pain. I am pretty sure its just a cold though, I am sick, but not in an infection sort of way, I have had enough of those to know.

Nothing too noteworthy in the news today. Same old same old. I rented “Ocean’s 12″ and “Electra” from Block Buster’s yesterday. I enjoyed both. “Electra” was a little odd, and I am somewhat disappointed that it never mentions Daredevil at all. Will she remember him? Lots of eastern mysticism type stuff, but not too much, not the overload you saw in the later Matrix movies for example. “Ocean’s 12″ was very enjoyable. I understand why people do not like it as much as the first one, but it was funny and enjoyable. It also closed things out rather more cleanly than the previous one did. The Julia Roberts acting as someone acting as Julia Roberts thing was odd, and some of the lines in those scenes were forced, but it did not spoil it for me.

But today I’m still not feeling right, my voice is all messed up still, I am coughing some which I think is just the decongestants finally taking some effect (as I am not so stuffy). I am also looking at moab again. I hate moab. I think that it partly solves a non-problem and partly takes too much configuration to be worth the few problems it does solve. It also seems to be very much a pain in the neck to get working correctly and keep working correctly. I am not pleased.

I wonder what Bruce Schneier will say about the recent claimed discovery of md5 collisions in human meaningful postscript documents.[1] I also wonder when the academic paper version of this will come out, not that I would be likely to read it, but because it will make it more official.

[1] http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/

In the news today is something that really ought not to surprise, but yet qualifies as “news.” Apparently scientists, human as we all are, have been fudging their results.[1] Sometimes to fit their instincts, sometimes to match past work, sometimes to please those who provide the funding. Yahoo News, apparently quoting a Washington Post article, is careful to call these falsifications “minor,” and to say that they do not qualify as “outright misconduct.” I, however, ask the question: how often did the modifications of the experiment design or results cause the overall result to change? How often was global warming predicted because contradictory data was thrown out? How often was it predicted by an experiment that “they knew would not give accurate results?” How often do we see 10 studies “proving” something because the authors published the same data twice? These lapses are admitted to by four to fifteen percent of scientists (depending on which exact offense you are looking at), which to me makes the problem seem fairly widespread for a process that we are supposed to trust implicitly.

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1804&e=3&u=/washpost/many_scientists_admit_to_misconduct

Apparently the marijuana users did argue that there was no interstate commerce involved here.[1] They grew their own. Thus there was no commerce at all here. However, under an unnamed Supreme Court ruling 63 years ago (I really need to learn when the Warren court was, but if I did, I would just forget it, I am bad with dates), the commerce power extends beyond the true interstate commerce because “the cumulative effect of even minor and local economic activities can have interstate consequences.”[1] While I understand the logic here, I am not sure that I agree with its necessity, and I am fairly certain that I dislike its consequences. It certainly moves the current decision from being questionable to being certain. All told, I think Justice Thomas’ words sum things up well: “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything” thus “the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”[1]

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20050608.shtml

Taking morphine is addictive, but we proscribe it for the dieing to ease their pain. This is good. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are both practices in which we do things that kill all cells because they happen to kill cancer cells faster. We use these treatments on patients every day, we have nothing better, and sometimes they work. So I am very sympathetic with those who have been prescribed marijuana as a pain killer by a competent doctor. The doctor may be right, the cost of not taking it may be higher than the cost of the addictiveness and side effects.

But it is illegal. And everyone knows it is illegal, and so it is highly irresponsible for these doctors to be prescribing it anyway. And Mr. William F. Buckley is correct, it is laudable for the Supreme Court to refuse to legislate from the bench.[1] While I might question the constitutionality of the illegal drug laws themselves, I do not think I would win even with courts benched by constitutionalists. And given that, it was the right decision, it seems to me that a strong case can be made that this is interstate trade. Of course, if it were not universally illegal, perhaps it could be grown in California for use in California pharmacies, but that argument was not made here, or at least in the report of it I see.[1]

But Mr. Buckley does make one rhetorical error. He criticizes Mr. John P. Walters, President Bush’s drug czar, for “dogmatic positions.” I infer from this wording that Mr. Buckley thinks the positions are not backed by fact. That dogma is necessarily somehow less than science. An utterly bogus line of reasoning. Perhaps Mr. Walters’ statements are dogmatic. Perhaps he is wrong, but he is not wrong because his statements are dogmatic.

Mr. Buckley then goes on to state that because you can find some people helped by marijuana, statements that it has not been “medically established that marijuana uniquely grants such relief as is being touted” must be inaccurate. I wonder if Mr. Buckley is familiar with the use of placebos in medical research. I wonder if he is aware that we do so because some people will experience relief simply because they think they should. The relief is no less real, it is not hallucination. It is simply evidence that the mind, the will, can act in ways science cannot explain. Mr. Buckley should also take a look at the current FDA rules and regulations, and how hard it is to get a new drug approved, before he criticizes the drug czar’s statements in this manner. He should perhaps be talking about reforming FDA instead.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/wfbuckley/wfb20050607.shtml