| Thursday,
August 4, 2005 I am off for my morning walk. I seem to be
mostly recovered from yesterday's summer flu bout.
While I am gone you can ponder this (courtesy of
Kerk Philips)
Subject: something worse than social science
A book review for “Theory’s Empire”, apparently a
discussion of what English literature has become in these days of political
correctness and deconstructionism (found at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110007056 ) has this wonderfully
stupid quote:
Luce Irigaray - "Is E=MC² a sexed equation? Perhaps it
is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed
of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to
me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its
use by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the
fastest."
Clearly our academics have gone stark staring mad, and paying tuition to
be instructed by such people is itself an act of madness.
I am tempted to write more on this subject. Is this what academic freedom
is about? The right of colleges to collect money from students and pay it to
puffed up "Theorists" who spout nonsense and induce others to not only
listen to this, but major in the subject? Who have whole departments devoted
to "Feminist Theory" and various other branches of this madness?
I note the Academy gets up in arms when a school board in Kansas tries to
mandate that some alternatives to Darwinism be taught. Science is in danger.
Perhaps so; but I had not noticed that our major universities were
infiltrated with Creation Science. C. S. Lewis taught caution about the
disease of rationalism, but he never sought to undermine the entire
existence of scientific method by teaching deconstruction and "Theory".
The last place in the world that Marxism is entrenched and solid is in
the Modern Language Association and our college departments of English and
other "Humanities". Now I understand the urge to moderation in
enthusiasm about Science as the only thing worth understanding and studying.
There is more to life. Man does not live by bread, free trade, and maximum
production efficiency alone; at least not and stay human. C. P. Snow tried
to show some of this, and rightly. Science is a way to address certain
problems, and to answer many questions. It generates technology. It has
changed the world.
There can be and are legitimate criticisms of science from the
Humanities. C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man did a splendid job of
raising important questions, and his That Hideous Strength is a
demonstration in fiction of what can happen when we apply technology without
thought to ends. That, however, is not what "deconstruction" and Feminist
Theory and the rest of this academic shamanism is about.
Ah well.
==============
I see that the city of Fresno has
graciously allowed Maribel to plead guilty to
something or another so she can get off on probation and doesn't have to go
to jail. Meanwhile, the people of the US have been protected from Martha
Stewart who may have visited a Yoga Session. Can't have that. Can't have
that. See also mail.
Anarcho tyranny.
=============
An important warning from Peter Glaskowsky:
This morning I received several dozen spams with
subjects similar to "Iraq Bombing-- 140 Marines Killed". The message body
contained the first paragraph of a news story plus a link to the
continuation. The link was different in each message, but all went to the
vbnnews.com domain.
The HTML received by downloading the link contains
some kind of lightly encoded script or redirect function. I haven't tried to
figure out what it does, but it's definitely evil.
I've also received a few spams recently with subjects
similar to "Message ID 73010 - Message from eBay Member (eBay)". These are
fairly ordinary phishing messages with the usual bad grammar, but with one
interesting exception. The link they want the user to click actually DOES go
to eBay:
https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSSL=1
&pUserId=&ru=http://servlet.ebay.com/ForumController?dest=
http://217.159.171.237/.aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll/ebay/login.html
Somehow, the phisher figured out how to get eBay's
server to redirect a request to his own site. I haven't followed this one
through either, but I'm sure it's also evil, and may trap people who think
it's sufficient to examine the URL to make sure it goes to the expected
domain.
. png
========================
Sell CHARCOAL AND KITTY LITTER. THEN sell Aluminum
Foil. And go to jail.
Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug
Sting Operation New York Times, 5.8.4
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/national/04meth.html
By [3]KATE ZERNIKE
ROME, Ga., July 29 - When they charged 49
convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling
materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that
they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had
caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the
drug.
But weeks of court motions have produced many
questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly
unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of
transactional English mocked in sitcoms.
So when a government informant told store
clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish
up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something
about barbecue.
The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates
another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a
highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items.
Many states, including Georgia, have recently
enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and
nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of
charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed
this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of
over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer
in Texas. <snip>
What kind of horrible criminal would go buy charcoal, coffee filters,
aluminum foil, and kitty litter? Or sell those terrible things without
reporting it? Throw them under the prison. Uh -- but I saw all those items
in a shopping basket the other day. I might even buy all those in one trip
myself. I don't have a cat, so I probably wouldn't get kitty litter, but
perhaps I might as a favor to a neighbor.
The 18th Article of Amendment to the Constitution was required to make
the Volstead Act -- which made making or possessing ethyl alcoholic
beverages a Federal Crime -- constitutional. That Article was repealed.
Precisely which Article of Amendment makes marijuana a Federal Crime has not
been explained to me, but doubtless someone knows. And which Article makes
it illegal to sell aluminum foil and kitty litter really escapes me.
The drug problem is serious -- and the war is lost. We jail 10% of the
black male population of the US on drug charges (I made that number up but it's
probably an underestimate). (See below.) The arrest and jailing continues unabated
despite our previous successes. It has made the Prison Guard Union a
powerful force in politics. The Feds are talking about jailing California
physicians for prescribing marijuana in accord with a California
constitutional amendment that makes it legal to grow, use, possess, and
prescribe marijuana for medical purposes. Meth labs are going everywhere,
and people are burning themselves and their neighborhoods up trying to make
the stuff. Some horrendous percentage of our police and prison resources are
being consumed in trying to protect people from themselves. Now it's the
turn of the motel and convenience store owners. Can't protect them from
being robbed, but we can jail them for being insufficiently cooperative with
the new Drug Lords with Badges. And it's lucrative, too! Look how much we
can extort from Walgreen's Drug Stores!
I confess I don't know what to do about drugs and drug problems. I do
think it is time to Leave It To The States. They aren't very likely to be
wiser than Washington DC but surely they can't be a lot more stupid? I mean,
Washington can't even have good schools while spending more per student than
anywhere else in the country. The Congress can't run the city properly
despite clear constitutional authority to do so. Why can it tell rural
Tennessee how to manage its convenience stores? There are drug deals within
a block of the Capitol. When Washington solves its drug problem perhaps it
can turn to telling the rest of us how. Until then, Leave It To The States.
As to what the States might do, perhaps legalizing and making cheap some
form of getting high would induce people to stay away from the more
dangerous stuff? I don't know. Anyone who would sniff glue and keyboard
cleaning PerfectDuster to get high is probably beyond persuasion and will
simply need luck to survive into adulthood. But perhaps not. What is clear
to me is that jailing that kid isn't likely to be useful, and jailing the
guy who sold meth to the kid's (now absent, probably in jail) father isn't
doing us much good (and besides we are more likely to have jailed the father
than the supplier).
Having a good universal crime like possession of kitty litter, coffee
filters, and camp stove fluid is good for the anarcho-tyranny state which
thrives on being able to threaten anyone with jail who doesn't "cooperate"
by finking on someone else; but it's not so hot for a self governing
republic.
Am I concerned with people use addicting drugs? Yes, of course. Do I
think that in itself is a crime? Probably not. Getting drunk isn't a crime.
Public drunkenness and disorderly conduct is, some places and times, isn't
some others (Fat Tuesday in New Orleans). Getting high in itself, or even
being addicted: should that in and of itself be criminal? Jail time? Surely
it's not an excuse for real criminal activity but that's not the same thing.
Yes, it's easier on the police to get someone for tax violations, or being
high, than to convict a clever criminal on real criminal action charges; but
I hadn't thought the purpose of a republic was to make life easier for
police.
Anyway, you have been warned: you probably have, in your house, all the
materials needed to build a drug lab. Now all they have to do is stack it
all in the middle of your living room and charge you with paraphernalia
possession. But we were born free.
Salve, Sclave!
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