I Don't Really Want To Believe The "Homosexual Cabal" Claims About the Catholic Clergy...



But what's the alternative explanation for this admission:

BOSTON (AP) - The man who is now the bishop of New York's Brooklyn Diocese knew the Rev. Paul Shanley endorsed sex between men and boys when he promoted Shanley two decades ago to head a Boston-area parish, according to a sworn statement made public Monday.



At the time, Thomas V. Daily was chancellor, vicar general and auxiliary bishop in the Boston Archdiocese. Daily promoted Shanley to administrator and acting pastor at St. Jean's parish in Newton.



Shanley, 71, is one of the priests at the center of the sex scandal engulfing the archdiocese. He was indicted in June charges of raping or otherwise molesting boys while he was at St. Jean's from 1979 to 1989.



In the deposition, Daily said he considered Shanley a "troubled priest" who needed help. He also said he knew Shanley had attended a meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association and had spoken in favor of the group.



But under questioning, Daily said he had not received any reports of Shanley engaging in abuse himself.

Search Strings That Concern Me



When you dig through the list of http requests that go to your website, you often find some real interesting search strings. Like this one:



Host: 67.36.177.127 Url: /canaries.htm Http Code : 200

Date: Sep 19 12:17:51 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 7985

Referer: http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22how+to+make+poison%22&hc=0&hs=0&xargs= Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.0.0)



Name: adsl-67-36-177-127.dsl.chcgil.ameritech.net

Address: 67.36.177.127



The article that this search string pointed this user to, of course, doesn't tell you how to make poison. But this isn't the first time that someone has used that search string to get to that article. It worries me a bit. The last time that this exact search string led to that article was the evening of September 11, 2001. The request came from a library computer at the University of Chicago. I informed the FBI about that request, suggesting that they might want to take a look at who was searching for that information. To my knowledge, my detailed description of IP address, location of the PC, time, etc., was just dropped on the floor. I almost wonder if I would be wasting my time informing the FBI again.

More Evidence That Rep. Lynne Woolsey (D-LaLa Land) Is An Idiot



From today's Santa Rosa Press-Democrat:

"I truly don't believe our world and our country and our children will be safer if we do this," Woolsey said. "There are weapons of mass destruction all over the world. Saddam Hussein is a horrible person, but there are lots of horrible people around the world. What country is next?"

Actually, Congresscritter Woolsey, most countries do not have weapons of mass destruction, and those that do aren't generally run by people who are:



1. Aggressive;



2. Enjoy returning his own Cabinet ministers home in little pieces;



3. Gas their own populations;



4. Hate the U.S.



Once again, Woolsey is clueless, and so are most of her constituents.

A Very Persuasive Essay About Why The West Must Engage in Cultural Genocide



It's here. Den Beste says a lot of sensible things about the problems of the Middle East. You don't have to agree, but it raises some important issues about the manner in which envy drives much of the hatred of the West.



UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond's position is much the same as Den Beste's.



Let me make a couple of cautious points, however. Raymond is arguing for the revival of nineteenth century imperialism as a way to avoid "the likely alternative is nuclear megadeath, plague in our home cities, and the smell of Sarin in the morning." A few caveats on such a strategy:



1. Part of what brought about the various fundamentalist revivals of Islam was imperialism threatening traditional ways of living. The Shah of Iran's attempts to drag his people out of the fourteenth century played a strong part in putting the mullahs in power. (Dragging them into the fourteenth century with electrical devices attached to their genitals certainly wasn't going to help the Shah's position.)



2. Nineteenth century imperialism was a mixture of simple greed and high-minded idealism; as one of my textbooks in college pointed out, it was as much a Peace Corps sort of idea for some Europeans as the pursuit of resources and political control. This can be a good thing; if you could sell liberals on the idea that such imperialism would be for the purpose of liberating women, educating the masses, and promoting democracy, they could put all their good intentions to work on reforming the Middle East. The bad side, however, is that this is part of what got us into the mess of the twentieth century--local political leaders using our doctrines to argue for decolonialization. In the case of Africa, it's clear that the European powers, having done practically nothing to prepare these nations for modern nationhood, left too early, with horrifying results.



3. Let's not get too confident that the Japanese example of reform is going to work with Arabs. Japan was a culture very deeply accepting of orders and hierarchy. General McArthur came in, took over, and effectively replaced the Emperor as ruler of Japan. The Japanese, being a deference culture, accepted this. It is not at all clear that modern Japan's democracy really works the way that the formal constitution describes. This is a country with >99% confession and conviction rates, and where torture is commonly used by police--while judges simply refuse to see it, even when there are still marks on the prisoner's body.



4. Germany worked perfectly, because the sickness there wasn't very old. It was, in a sense, a recent overlay of totalitarianism on top of a mildly authoritarian culture. We weren't trying to remove centuries of a wildly different culture, as we would be in the Middle East.



ANOTHER UPDATE: It occurs to me if the West decided to simply starve out the Arab world by refusing to either buy or sell from them, in very short order, most of these countries would collapse. The Saudis can't eat oil. The difficulty is that such embargoes are very difficult to maintain for any length of time, as was discovered when Libya secretly violated the 1973 oil embargo to the West.

Is Multiple Sclerosis Sexually Transmitted?



This article examines a recently published paper that makes that claim. There seems to be quite a bit of strong and harsh criticism of this theory. The article mentions the outbreaks of MS that occurred in the Faroe, Orkney and Shetland islands during World War II. Previously, I have seen the claim that allied forces bringing dogs to the islands might have been the transmission medium.



I don't have any strong feelings about this particular claim, but it is certainly the case that STDs are a big problem, and the focus on AIDS has tended to obscure the large number of other STDs that are causing serious problems for kids.



About ten years ago or so, I was working on my BA. One of my general education classes was a biology class. Professor Benko (an interesting character, a concentration camp survivor) mentioned the research that had just been published that showed that cervical cancer was apparently caused by a sexually transmitted virus called HPV. (To be more precise, some forms of HPV cause cervical cancer; the others cause painful recurring genital warts.)



Research done in the early twentieth century had found that Jewish women had much lower rates of cervical cancer than Gentile women. One of the guesses that came out of that work was that circumcision might reduce the risks of cervical cancer. Actually, it now appears that Jewish women at the time were much less likely to have had multiple sexual partners than Gentile women--and thus were at reduced risk of exposure to HPV.



Professor Benko then said that as a woman's number of sexual partners rose above three, her risk of cervical cancer rose quite dramatically. You could hear the gasp from the gals in the class. (It is, after all, a sign of liberation, to have lots and lots of different sexual partners. You knew that. Why should girls act differently from drunken irresponsible frat boys?)



Anyway, the HPV problem is serious. I am hearing from college kids of a disturbing number of their peers who have already had hysterectomies because of cervical cancer. A whole culture has grown up in which lots of girls (notwomen) are sexually active, with multiple partners, by 14 or 15. Lots of them aren't getting annual Pap smears (which detect precancerous growths on the cervix). I guess it's not surprising that some of these young women are already having surgery in their 20s. It makes you wonder what it is going to be like in another ten years.



Condoms aren't completely effective at preventing the spread of HPV, though they apparently help. Men usually show no symptoms; they just pass it on from woman to woman. Try here and here and here and here for information.



So why aren't you hearing anything about this serious problem?



1. The losers are heterosexual women--who are of no value to the mass media.



2. It might suggest that both men and women should regard multiple sexual partners as a dangerous thing, and wouldn't that sound reactionary and narrowminded?



3. It would suggest that self-control ("a greatly overrated quality," to quote a political science professor at Sonoma State University) has survival value, and we all know how the left feels about self-control.

Why Saddam Hussein Didn't Use Weapons of Mass Destruction in the First Gulf War



This article quotes former Prime Minister John Major that we told Saddam Hussein that we would nuke Baghdad if he did, and he claims that the threat has been reiterated. (Okay, it's from the U.K. tabloid the Sun, but it sounds plausible.) At least part of why Japan didn't use chemical or biological weapons on U.S. troops during World War II is that we informed them, through intermediaries, that we had a lot more chemical weapon manufacturing capacity than they did, and if they started using such weapons, we would massively retaliate. It worked.



Even a liberal Democrat like Doug Bosco, who used to represent me in Congress many years ago, voted for production of chemical weapons for precisely that reason. Boy, that upset the local peaceniks, who thought they elected Bosco to replace all the guns with flowers, and cause the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

How Do Clueless People Get Rich?



I'm getting lots of questions about how Rep. Woolsey's district in California can be awash in clueless rich people. I will confess, this is one of those depressing discoveries that I made living out there.



1. Not everyone that is clueless is stupid. There are people with strong technical skills who are otherwise surprisingly ignorant about how the real world works. My favorite was one guy that I used to work with. He is a very nice person (other than being a flaming liberal). He is also fabulously rich now, having made a few hundred million on one of the more successful telecom startups. I remember one day explaining that the only way to get the City of San Jose to tow an abandoned car when we lived there in the 1980s, was if someone set fire to it. Otherwise, the typical time for the city to tow an abandoned vehicle was 90-120 days. I would watch cars slowly lose first their wheels, then body panels, then engine parts, until sometimes, all that was left was a frame and scattered fragments. (Of course, sometimes it was just vandalized, and then eventually taken away.)



This very nice person had grown up in the Midwest. His only question was, "Why don't you just call the city?" Where he grew up, city government actually tried to do its job, and often did. The notion that city governments exist primarily for their own ends, was beyond him.



2. Some people that are clueless are stupid, and either inherit their wealth, or marry it. Others are not stupid, but so guilt-ridden about having grown up rich that they can't understand anything except through the narrow framework of their guilt.



3. There is a surprisingly entrepreneurial form of New Age irrationalism alive in Northern California. My favorite example of this was in the mid-1980s, when there was a brief movement called "Breathatarianism." The proponent claimed that food was not required to sustain life, and that the belief that it was required was just an illusion. Shortly after getting out of prison, he hooked up with a Marin County gal with a graduate degree who had just returned from pilgrimage to Nepal. She was taken with this new empowering philosophy, and within a few weeks, he was teaching weekend seminars at $250 a head titled, "Becoming Breathatarian." The local TV stations covered this, and they were swimming in money and new students.



This went forward very nicely, but eventually, the manager/intellectual pimp for this scam artist noticed that contrary to his claim that he had eaten nothing but air and water for 19 years, he was actually grabbing Barbara Ann sweet rolls on long car trips. She was horrified; these weren't even good whole wheat natural products! His rationalization to her was that they were so nutritionally deficient that they didn't really qualify as "food."



She kept her mouth shut for a few weeks, until she started hearing from students who were heading to tops of local mountains for a month to learn to conquer the illusion that they needed food. At this point, her conscience took precedence over her "relationship" with this con man, and she blew the whistle.



For other examples, read the Pacific Sun, the Marin County alternative weekly. While much of their coverage is the sort of left-wing politics you might expect in a wealthy area like this, the articles and ads make you realize that much of the political left at least operates on the same plane of existence as you and I. They aren't out getting their chakras tuned, or visiting their shaman. (Yes, Marin County has, or at least had a few years ago, a shamanistic marriage and family counselors association.) The movie Serial is a parody of Marin County, but it does capture much of the weirdness of the place the way it used to be.



Remember: if you start out with five million dollars after taxes, you shouldn't ever have to work again. Even at the current disappointing interest rates, if you invest that money in municipal bonds, because that is exempt from both federal income tax and your state's income tax, you will earn about $215,000 a year in net income, with almost no risk. Unless you live very lavishly, most people, even raising a family, will have trouble spending that interest each year.



If five million dollars seems like a lot of money--it's not in Sonoma and Marin Counties. Lots of people have net worths well above that range; I can think of five or six people that I know by first name (and vice versa) with net worths in the ten million and up range that live in Sonoma County. I understand that in Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), it is very common for mortgage lenders to see loan applications with net worths exceeding five million dollars.



Just so no one gets the wrong impression: I'm not sour grapes (or at least not very sour). I worked for three startups, two of which were mildly successful, and one still owes me several weeks wages. I did okay, but I still have to work for a living.



UPDATE: Just so that there is no misunderstanding about this, let me emphasize that Sonoma County has lots of very rich people who are smart, concerned about their kids and the community in which they live, and are paying attention. A few of them (a very few of them) even see eye to eye with me on politics. They might even be a majority of the superrich that live there--but the clueless left-wing superrich stand out in my mind, because they are so frustrating, and because they played some part in making me unemployable when I promoted the idea in print that being fabulously wealthy includes a moral obligation to help those who are in need.