Manifest destiny for a new century

The Gentrification of Carmel, CA as seen by a former resident.

Gay "marriage" potpourri

Is there a right to be married? It's nowhere in the Constitution - not even within the emanation of a penumbra. Last I knew state govts could restrict it for various ways for straights. So it would appear to my non-legal mind that no such right exists even for straights. So what is up with this civil rights crapola we keep hearing from Andrew Sullivan?

Oh, but the govt has an interest in pairing us off; for once we have gays telling us promiscuity is a Bad Thing. Well, what about the other nonmarrieds, who by choice or otherwise remain single? Why should they pay any more so Gerald FitzPatrick and Patrick FitzGerald can share each others' health benefits? Should the feds buy match.com and set up the rest of us?

Hey, aren't most gays in the US white males? Is this some backdoor way to take something away from women and racial minorities?

And aren't there more gays than lesbians? Aha, another way for white males to extract benefits at others' expense.

Are handicapped people married at the same rates as everyone else? If not, doesn't this favorable treatment of marriage further handicap them?

And don't singles die younger even while they spend time covering for the marrieds who come in late after taking Johnny to school, or leave early to take Muffy to soccer practice, or stay home with sick kids, or just disappear from work for months at a time at their discretion to have kids? Maybe that shorter life expectancy is the excuse for taxing them at a higher rate, eh? Why make the remaining singles carry more?

And seriously now - when so many straights are getting divorced every year, what would possess gays and lesbians to want to get in on the act? And that's not enough - they want to adopt too, so they can have child support and visitation grief too.

Why must we pervert the traditional concept of marriage just to accomodate the whims of that fraction of the 2% of our population that is gay and is interested in marriage? With the brigades of lawyers and lobbyists involved in this, they could have drafted one hell of a code covering "civil unions" that could be adopted by statute by every state interested in doing so. Why not take that approach instead of doing what amounts to spitting in the eye of marriage traditionalists?

I'll tell you why. I'm sure there are some gays out there who are sincerely interested in their conception of a marriage. But IMO the gay marriage movement at its core is really about delegitimizing and ultimately destroying marriage.

XY + XX = HELL

Man, I was looking forward to some feedback from Acidman test-driving his new equipment. But I guess it's not ready to go yet, and in the meantime he's lamenting a woman that did him wrong.

Women! You can't put a bounty on them, but maybe this would cheer him up. (no pictures though - if you want something prurient you'll just have to go to see Susanna)

For PETA's sake...

...Don't tease us

Ghoulish pleasure

Indianapolis is deeply involved with publishing and distributing books, so it's easy to find cheap ones on about any topic imaginable. And since I'm interested in most of that, I wind up with books about a little of everything. I'm sure a shrink would have some fun noting recently acquired books on crying and two different books about cadavers.

You'll have to wait for the crying one and I'm only partway through the first cadaver book. Actually the name is "Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death". Most of the volume of this small book is about the entomological and other research that has gone into providing estimates of the time of death. It's far less exact than some would have you believe, and in one whopper a leader of the discipline erred by about a century. There are no pictures, and for all the talk of odors there's not even a scratch-and-sniff.

One has to admire the dedication it must have taken to carry out this research. For instance, corpses are covered with maggots very soon after death, and it is very important to know one kind of maggot from another. You might think maggots are fairly featureless, and that's mostly true, but entomologists are up to the task of identifying the species. How? By examining what conceptually at least is one of the most disgusting things around - the maggots' anuses. And their anal spiracles, through which they breath - that's pretty disgusting too, but then think of what's happening on the other end. Anyway, different species have different designs of anal spiracles, and these change during their various larval phases (instars). Sorry, no pictures of this either.

Gosh, I can hardly wait for the rest of the book. But first I'm gonna go to the refrigerator and eat some of the dead flesh therein. Bon appetit.

Can't we lock them *all* up?

There's no one to like in this case, courtesy of Therapy Sessions. Who's worse - the people who simply must have sex in public, or the guy who's been busted for videotaping them?

I suppose there are populations out there who have no choice but to copulate in public. I lived in a YMCA for a spell while in E-school and knew that the streetwalkers who couldn't be troubled with the hotsheet joint next door occasionally tore off a piece on the fire escapes. These typically weren't people anyone but anthropologist would want to videotape though.

A bit farther up the social scale, I've known people who couldn't wait to get home and had to get it on at work. Others couldn't go home because they were more likely to get caught there than at work. And many just thought the possibility of getting caught was incredibly erotic, but weren't quite ready for full-blown exhibitionism.

I'm suspecting that it was one of the latter group that was caught on videotape in the public park. Who would have guessed that they expected privacy?

This outdoor sex thing is overrated IMO. I didn't like it much even when I was a teenager. There's something about being interrupted by a spotlight from a sheriff's deputy's car that's just too counterlibidinous - I speak from experience.

Don't get me wrong - the videotape guy is about 99% likely to be a creep too. I leave him an out for perhaps some faulty reasoning - 1) human beings don't screw in parks, 2) I can videotape anything else, ergo 3) I can videotape this.

BTW, what ever happened to Ugly George?

Self restraint vs. censorship

Meryl Yourish pointed us to an item from LT Smash, about how someone is tasked with blacking out a reference to pork on Heinz 57 Sauce bottles where he's stationed. Can't you just hear Satan gnashing his teeth?

Well, it's easy to be snarky about this. But I'm not from that culture - as far as I know this is offensive to the average member of their culture. So I see it as an interesting cultural observation, but nothing more.

Besides, our cultural preferences are already built into the products sold here. For instance, Crisco can be used for a number of things that don't appear on the label. Do you suppose the omission of these uses is an oversight by the manufacturer? Or do they perhaps choose not to be associated with certain activities?

In our own culture it can be difficult to gauge what the public will find acceptable, and sometimes distributors overdo it. The funny pages can give us some examples as mentioned here. Starting around the late 60's or so, Beetle Bailey had a regular character named Miss Buxley, a young very attractive secretary who managed to show up in bikinis regularly. Cartoonist Mort Walker would draw navels on Miss Buxley and his distributor scratched them out. He eventually rebelled by drawing a strip that showed a box of strategically oriented navel oranges. Shortly thereafter Miss Buxley got her navel.

Animated cartoons have had their moments too. My favorite was when 3 1/2 seconds were cut from a cartoon in which Mighty Mouse was accused of using cocaine.

The earlier link about the Miss Buxley thing mentioned a recurring character in Dilbert called Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. But in the beginning Phil was actually Satan, which turned out to be too much for the distributor.

Devil references even affect fishing lures. The inventor of the Dardevle wasn't willing to spell out "devil" when he named his most famous product, and so it has been named for the better part of a century.

You can attribute the above to superstition, cultural tone-deafness or whatever. But at least some people are still attempting to restrain their own speech. Perhaps they recognize that there always will be restraints on free speech, and we ward off censors only by showing that we don't need them.

Diana from Gotham is back

...at the third site that I know of since I first linked her ages ago. Then you can find out what you get when you cross a Jew and a Hindu.

Did you bring bottles?

I've been jacking around with a post for a few days now. There's no telling how long it will be a-birthin', so in the meantime I'll post some interesting links related to it.

I stumbled across this site about the history of grocery stores. I won't attempt to do it justice - just check it out for a lot of history of the stores across the US.

Are you one of those people who doesn't like WalMart? You might like this from PBS, and get a touch of schadenfreude from deadmalls.com.

Here is some history of department stores.

This has a bit of retail history.

Goodbye to Last Page and Media Minded

A couple of days ago I wandered over to Last Page, who was one of my first links here. Say what - she's quitting!? Life can never be the same.

And now it's Media Minded, a very highly respected blog worth a visit if only for his nice long collection of quotes about the media on the sidebar.

Good luck to both of you!

Who's lying?

Once I heard a puzzle that went like this - a missionary was in an area where he knew there were two tribes. One tribe always told the truth and the other always lied. The two tribes knew this of each other and were otherwise indistinguishable.

The missionary is traveling to Oogabooga when reaches a fork in the road and doesn't know which way to go. He sees a native coming by and wants to ask him which road to take to OogaBooga - it's fair to expect the natives to know the right answer. What question can he ask of the native to make sure he can know the right way to go?

While you're thinking about that, I'll note a recent study that suggests that perhaps women lie about sex more than men do:

"Women are sensitive to social expectations for their sexual behaviour and may be less than totally honest when asked about their behaviour in some survey conditions," said Fisher. "Women appear to feel pressure to adhere to sex role expectations that indicate women should be more relationship-oriented and should avoid being seen as promiscuous."

"Before the study, we thought men would generally over-report their sexual behaviour and women would under-report it under certain testing conditions. However, we found that women were more likely than men to have different answers depending on conditions when they were surveyed."

Maybe the trick is to ask them not what they do themselves, but what their friends do.

Pollsters grapple with bias in questions all the time. I recall one poll I heard of on the radio once that noted how much difference some phrasing made. In broad outline, when a question was phrased as "would you deny X welfare payments", people were more likely to vote against, but if it was phrased as "would you not give X welfare payments" people were less likely to oppose. I guess the distinction was essentially "I wouldn't deny them as long as I don't have to chip in myself". Anyway, I'm sure somebody like Jane Galt has better examples of polling perversities.

So have you figured out what question to ask the native? Here it comes: "if I asked someone from the other tribe which of these two roads went to OogaBooga, what way would he tell me to go?" Then take the other road. Proof is left as an exercise....

Fly by night health care

Judicious Asininity tells us it's cheaper and faster to send English heart patients to India than to work on them in the UK.

Via Venomous Kate's Slutertarian.com

And you can square dance too

Aw, that's a lame headline for this. So where's perpetual Caption Contest contestant and repeat winner Charles Austin when we need him?

Via AMCGLTD.

Dead Victims of the Drug War

Strong stuff.

Via Radley Balko.

The best way to pick up women

Right here.

Greenpeace links to the KGB?

Did the Russians give Greenpeace money in return for help with propaganda campaigns?

Link via Bizarre Science.

I love the 80's...

...is a series by VH1. Imagine a video blog - it's full of short flashbacks to the time along with commentary by 30-something celebs about what it was like back then. Was it really so long ago?

And they're not through. They're producing a new series called "I love the 70's" and I'm sure I'll watch it too.

Legally gay?

Who knows who is gay and who isn't? And does it matter?

Yes, it matters. It seems that the Supreme Court and others think it's worse to pick on gays than it is to do the same to non-gays, in the name of "equal protection under the law".

Unfortunately they didn't tell us how to determine if someone is gay. This problem doesn't exist to the same degree with other groups SCOTUS has seen fit to protect. You can't necessarily tell if someone is black or a woman or handicapped 100% of the time either, but at least there are credentials like a birth certificate or driver's license. (Handicaps are ripe for scams this way too, as noted here, but that is not the issue du jour).

So what would happen if a landlord or other would-be discriminator asked the potential victim if they were gay or not? I've seen some ungodly questionnaires for tenant applicants and I don't recall ever seeing such a request. Would this be unlawful?

But if the landlord can't be shown to have known if the victim was gay or otherwise, how can they be shown to have discriminated? Surely this takes intent.

No, I'm not a lawyer, and it shows. But IMO if the law is going to take homosexuality into account for special protections, then people should be permanently identified as being gay or straight to prevent abuse of the system.

I'm a huge National Review Online fan and donor. Unfortunately they goof once in a while, and they did it in spades about nuclear power a couple of days ago.

The authors (a libertarian and a Naderophile) complain about the govt's involvement with nuclear power and alleged subsidies via waste processing and others. Giving them credit for fundamental integrity, I must assume that they didn't do much research into the history of the industry.

What is a subsidy? We can play word games, but in essence I would say the kind that ticks people off is when an industry petitions for special treatment and gets it. IMO that is not the case with the nuclear power industry. OTOH, the government wanted "atoms for peace", and to get the most done for its tax dollars, they offered inducements to reluctant electric utilities to get them to put up their capital to build nuclear power plants. I wrote about some of the relevant issues in much more detail about a year ago here and here. IMO it makes a big difference if the subsidy was extracted by political clout, or if it was initiated by the govt to carry out policy.

Some parts of the post were particularly asinine:

The federal government has always maintained a unique public-private partnership with the nuclear industry, wherein the costs of nuclear power are shared by the public, but the profits are enjoyed privately.

The government has always insisted on receiving radwaste to control nuclear proliferation, and it already has huge radwaste processing obligations stemming from medical, industrial and defense uses of nuclear material. It might be more accurate to say that the nuclear utilities did the govt a favor by providing the capital to build nuclear power plants, allowing the govt to achieve strategic objectives without having to raise the money itself. And there's nothing wrong with getting a return on the investment - to suggest otherwise is childish.

Despite extensive and continuous government assistance — including more than $66 billion in research and development alone — no nuclear-power plant has been ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973. After building more than 100 plants between 1954-1973, orders have been cancelled over the last 30 years, and capacity in the industry has stagnated since 1989.

The decline of nuclear power is a result of several factors: The Three Mile Island disaster heightened public-safety fears and citizen opposition to the siting of plants in their neighborhoods grew.

To read that, you'd think all of this happened organically without intervention of years of propaganda and legal skulduggery by what can only be called professional liars such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the various Nader organizations. Incidentally, one of the authors, Mr. Nayak, is from a Nader organization (US Public Interest Research Group). And considering some of what was left out of their presentation, Mr. Nayak is following the Nader playbook.

What did they leave out? For starters, the regulatory environment became grossly unstable, and existing plants suddenly had to be refitted with new safety measures. Obviously such things affected their financial viability, or would have had such costs been anticipated in advance. But Mr. Nayak apparently doesn't consider the concept of "sunk costs" - given a choice between paying the additional capital costs to be permitted to operate, and suffering a double whammy of losing a major power source and having to write off a major asset, it was clear that the old plants had to be refitted and kept in operation.

And note the extreme hyperbole. The Three Mile Island disaster? Compare the death toll from TMI to that of babies and small adults being killed by airbags in their cars (and while you're at it, note which one Nader supports and which one he opposes). If TMI was a disaster, then what happened at the World Trade Center?

But investors ultimately rejected nuclear power because it simply does not make economic sense. In truth, nuclear power has never made economic sense, and exists purely as a creature of government.

I'm glad to hear that economic sense is a criterion for govt programs. Maybe next these gentlemen will look at the abominations known as Social Security, Medicare and other govt liabilities. And recipients of these programs should shudder to see how these gentlemen are proposing to renege on promises made to nuclear power operators without which the plants would never have been built in the first place. And they can wonder if they aren't next.

Not that I'm conceding anything about economic sense. Nuclear power opponents make such claims by vastly inflating the costs of the allegedly intractable waste problem and the govt's insistence on maintaining custody of the fuel. The former is a strong function of threshold limits that we can set over a wide range, and it appears that traditional models of the biological impact of radiation have overstated the effects.

But don't blame the utilities for those costs. Their main mistake was trusting the govt to maintain a stable regulatory environment and keep their other promises.

In fact, a recent report by Scully Capital Services, an investment-banking and financial-services firm, commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), highlighted three federal subsidies and regulations — termed "show stoppers" — without which the industry would grind to a halt. These "show stoppers" include the Price Anderson Act, which limits the liability of the nuclear industry in case of a serious nuclear accident — leaving taxpayers on the hook for potentially hundreds of billions in compensation costs; federal disposal of nuclear waste in a permanent repository, which will save the industry billions at taxpayer expense; and licensing regulations, wherein the report recommends that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission further grease the skids of its quasi-judicial-licensing process to preclude successful interventions from opponents.

I discuss the Price-Anderson Act and waste issues in the links above - the short answer is that private utilities would not have built nuclear power plants without these conditions, so you have no one but the govt to blame for the problem. As for the permanent repository, the govt was to have delivered on that some time back and hasn't, but somehow it keeps collecting the money set aside by nuclear utilities to pay for their disposal.

As for the siting issues, power plants are very expensive capital investments with long lead times. It's not so strange to think that a utility would want to know up front it would be permitted to operate its billion-dollar range investments once it had built them according to the rules. Imagine if you had to buy your housing first before you could know whether you or anyone else could occupy it legally or not.

But even these long-standing subsidies are not enough to convince investors, who for decades have treated nuclear power as the pariah of the energy industry. Nuclear-generated electricity remains about twice as expensive as coal- or gas-fired electricity.

How do they know that? - no plants have been built recently in the US. Cost figures for the most recently constructed plants were inflated by factors that have nothing to do with nuclear power technology per se, and that's assuming that the technology stays stagnant. But in fact there are promising new technologies which would have entirely new cost structures.
Here is something else I wrote about the topic last summer.

Although the marginal costs of nuclear are lower, the capital costs are much higher.

Once you've built the place, the marginal costs *are* the costs. Thus we see operators running their nukes at capacity as much as possible and filling in the additional demand with other sources.

And again, most of the vast increases in capital costs occurred only because of the regulatory uncertainty and other unique conditions (inexperienced utilities and contractors building their first plant, for instance). And there's no reason why that regulatory uncertainty won't ever strike alternatives such as coal-fired plants (Kyoto, anyone?). The result is that no one is building much power capacity at all lately, and the day will come when we pay dearly for this.

And we have groups fearing nuclear proliferation. Fine, let's beat some swords into plowshares - burn up the bomb material in nuclear reactors once and for all. Ultimately the only way to overcome existing problems with nuclear technology is more nuclear technology, and that's why the govt needs to spend the money on R&D for nuclear technology.

I have left out a lot of detail above that may be found in the several links provided. I'll conclude by noting that the version of nuclear power technology currently in operation at US commercial nuclear power plants can stand plenty of improvement, and the govt's way of creating the industry might be questionable. But the technology can be and has been improved in many ways since then. And the real issue is not "subsidies", but whether or not industries of any type dare to trust the govt again.

Unintended consequences

Quick, let's free-associate. I'll throw out a concept and you say the first thing that pops in your head. Are you ready? OK, here it comes....

Strip joints.

Did you say "protected speech"? Well of course you did. If you're a liberal, or have never been to a strip joint, anyway. Of course free speech as we know it would cease to exist without women dropping their drawers and displaying the latest triumphs in depilatory science and mammoplasty, or straddling and humping about any stranger who waves a $20 at her.

Today's NRO included this from Eugene Volokh. He notes that nowadays even private clubs have to regulate private behavior lest they be held responsible for verbal sexual harassment or other crimes against political correctness.

The goal of workplace harassment law is to prevent offensive speech, by pressuring employers to adopt workplace speech codes. "Public accommodations harassment law," which is being built by analogy to workplace harassment law, extends such legally coerced speech codes to private clubs and other places (such as restaurants, bars, and the like). All those places would now have to control their members' and patrons' speech.

And nothing in harassment law is limited to slurs (the speech here included more than just personal epithets), or to campaigns to exclude members from a club. Workplace harassment is defined to cover a broad range of offensive speech: any speech (by the employer, coworkers, or even patrons) that is "severe or pervasive" enough to create a "hostile, abusive, or offensive environment" for a "reasonable person" and for the plaintiff based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and so on. Allegedly bigoted political statements can qualify. So can allegedly offensive humor. So can offensive art.

Now the same will presumably apply to clubs, too. A club's display of a painting containing nudity could now lead to hostile environment liability, just like display of sexually themed art in workplaces can lead to such liability. Likewise when club members say racially, sexually, or religiously themed jokes within earshot of other members who might be offended, or express allegedly bigoted political views. A South Dakota government publication already tells people that "racist or sexist statements displayed in a public accommodation which affect a person's ability to use and enjoy those accommodations" are illegal. Likewise, three years ago, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination found that an allegedly racist display in a bar was illegal, and fined the bar owner. To avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars in damages (plus attorney fees), clubs will have to err on the side of caution — just as employers now have to — and suppress any potentially offensive speech by club members.

Interesting. Does this mean that if a customer enters a strip joint and decides it's offensive, he can sue them for damages?