Cluelessness: We All Want To End The Iraq War

My daughter put up something on her blog that has been floating around the Internet about the sacrifices our soldiers are making. I agree with the sentiments of it completely--but it strikes me as a bit too much of an emotional appeal for me to blog myself. However, it does expose one of the dangers of relying on an image that you don't control.

The picture that goes with:

You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He patrols the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.

was at the Texans for Peace website. I guess once they found out that someone was using this picture to make Americans sympathize with our soldiers, they had no choice but to replace it with a picture that just says, "END THE WAR IN IRAQ!"

Now, I could understand that they might be upset if they are getting lots of hits on their website from people using that picture--especially since their goal isn't to create sympathy for the soldiers, but to get them brought home. But removing the picture completely makes far more sense than putting up something so simplistic as "END THE WAR IN IRAQ!" Lots of us want to end the war in Iraq. Withdrawing U.S. forces, however, won't end the war in Iraq. It will just mean that the people that use piano wire to cut faces off and use power tools to torture Iraqis won't have anyone blocking their path to power.

Alamar Ranch (Continued)

I mentioned the other day that my daughter spoke at the Boise County Planning Commission hearing as well. Here's what she had to say. I strongly encourage you to read it in full, to see how important it is to not give up on a troubled teenager.

Armed Bystanders

One of the claims that gun control supporters often make is that it doesn't do any good to be armed for self-defense, because a criminal will shoot you before you can draw your gun. This is wrong for several reasons:

1. Most violent crimes aren't committed with guns. Bad guys (as in the example below) sometimes are using knives or other contact weapons.

2. There is a surprisingly large number of cases where the criminal has his gun out, and the victim still has time to draw and fire before the criminal can pull the trigger. This may be because the criminals are drunk or otherwise intoxicated, and their reflexes are slow. But an acquaintance of mine used to keep two cap pistols that he would use for demonstrations where he would have the gun control supporter aim one of the toy guns at him--and he would consistently draw and fire his before the person playing the criminal could pull the trigger.

3. The case below is a reminder that while a bystander who observes a crime may not be able to intervene in time to stop it, he can intervene in time to make sure that the criminal doesn't get away--and doesn't kill the witnesses. From the August 5, 2007 KIRO channel 7 (Seattle):

SEATTLE -- Police said a man fatally stabbed a 48-year-old woman at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in south Seattle, then was shot and killed by a man who witnessed the attack.

According to police, the woman had a restraining order against the man who stabbed her at the 9100 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way during a birthday party early Sunday morning.

People at the scene tried to stop the attacker, and at least one other person was injured during that struggle, authorities said.

Police said the woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

The 39-year-old man suspected of stabbing the victim was the woman's former husband. He was transported to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries that he later died from, officials said.

Police said they questioned the shooter, a DJ at the party, who said he did not know the stabbing victim or her attacker. Authorities said he was released and no charges will be filed against him.

UPDATE: A reader points out that the reason that victims manage to draw and fire before the criminal even pulls the trigger is that many criminals are not expecting any resistance--much less armed resistance. My guess is that violent criminals are disproportionately of average or less intelligence; people with criminal tendencies and superior intelligence usually get themselves elected to public office instead. If a thug has not thought out what he are going to do in advance, responding to unexpected resistance may force him to think through his options a bit too long.

This goes both directions. If you are a good guy, this is also a good reason to consider all the possible situations that may come up, and figure out the appropriate responses to a criminal attack. From growing up in Los Angeles, I approach an ATM with considerable wariness, looking around for potential attackers. Similarly, when I was visiting Philadelphia several years ago, I was often walking on streets that were a little worrisome; I spent quite a bit of time planning my sequence of actions in the event that I was confronted by a robber.

I have had two terribly frightening experiences in my life when I thought that I was going to have to draw a gun and shoot someone. Afterwards, I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the circumstances, and exactly what the circumstances were that would both morally and legally justified drawing and then shooting someone. It is a sobering experience when you are in the situation, and it is best to have considered your options and your reasons for the decisions you might have to make when you are not suffering from adrenalin pumping through your system.

How Smart Do You Have To Be To Operate a Gas Pump?

Many years ago, I mentioned the absurdity of Oregon's law that prohibited self-service gasoline stations--a scheme for creating jobs for unskilled people with no other job prospects. One huffy liberal Oregonian responded that there was a good public safety reason for the law: Oregonians weren't smart enough to pump their own gas without training. Other Oregonians laughed at this, and correctly identified that the ban was a jobs program.

This evening, we stopped at the Albertson's gas station and minimart on the way home, and the lone clerk had to run outside. "There was a customer from Oregon--he couldn't figure out how to operate a gas pump." I shake my head in disbelief and horror. This guy can drive a car, but can't figure out from the very detailed instructions on the pump out to fill up his car? I am beginning to understand Oregon politics a bit better.

Rexburg, Idaho

As my previous posting mentioned, Rexburg is the home of BYU-Idaho, a Mormon school. As you might expect, it's about as squeaky clean as a town can be. (Boise is Sin City by comparison.) There are about 17,000 people there. It is growing fast--but downtown looks like a lot of other small Idaho towns.


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After the competition in which my wife's bagpipe and drum band played, we went to a sandwich shop for dinner recommended by a band member who had attended BYU-Idaho:


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One of the nice aspects of traveling to small towns across America is the discovery of local, non-chain restaurants that have their own unique style and flavor--and Millhollow is one of those discoveries. Great sandwiches at a price that will shock those of you from the coasts!

Is This Legal?

Rexburg, Idaho, is where Brigham Young University-Idaho (a Mormon private university) is located. When I was there over the weekend, I saw dozens of signs that looked like they might have drifted out of the 1950s:



Apparently, if you don't live on campus at BYU-Idaho, you are required to live in approved off-campus housing--and single men can only live in apartment buildings with other single men, and ditto for single women.

Now, let me be clear: I think that if BYU-Idaho wants to impose a requirement like this for its students, it should have that right. They are concerned about putting single young men and women in close proximity, tempting them to sexual immorality, and are trying to make sure that this doesn't happen. Since many (all?) public universities have gone to co-ed dorms over the last twenty years, I can somewhat understand BYU-Idaho's concerns. I can see why they might regard allowing young men and young women to share an apartment as a recipe for cohabitation.

I am hard pressed to see how requiring them to live in separate buildings enhances chastity. The distance between apartments in separate buildings was sometimes less than the distance between apartments within the same building. But okay, if BYU-Idaho students consider this absurd, then they don't have to go to BYU-Idaho. (And before you email me: "What about homosexual Mormons?" They do exist; I blogged several years ago about a Mormon man living a double life: sexually abused as a child, who believed that this was what caused his homosexuality, which led to his contraction of AIDS and subsequent death.)

What concerns me is that I'm not sure how this can possibly be legal. Under the Fair Housing Act:

As made applicable by section 803 of this title and except as exempted by sections 803(b) and 807 of this title, it shall be unlawful--

(a) To refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.

(b) To discriminate against any person in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling, or in the provision of services or facilities in connection therewith, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.

(c) To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.

Maybe there's some exemption for sex discrimination when done by a university in off-campus housing, but I can't immediately find it. Craig's List was being sued a few years ago for allowing people to post "roommate wanted" ads that specified the sex of the desired roommate.

I understand why the Fair Housing Act was passed, and I have only a vague intellectual discomfort with it. But I find myself wondering: why is this blatant discrimination above lawful in Rexburg? And if it isn't lawful, why are landlords allowed to not only discriminate based on sex, but advertise it loudly?

Sometimes the best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it to its absurd limits.

UPDATE: A reader points to this statement from BYU-Idaho that suggests that Title IX has an exemption for housing which is strictly for students, and does not allow non-students.

Photographers at Antiwar Demonstrations

I mentioned a couple of days ago my sister's concern about what she described as "the CIA" photographing people at antiwar protests. I received a number of interesting responses. One person suggested that people like zombietime.com might be the photographers in question--who just like to take pictures of the politically deranged at work. (Note: some of the pictures that zombietime.com features are not work-safe, and some are truly disgusting--such as members of Breasts Not Bombs protesting naked--and demonstrating that some of their members are men who haven't completed the sex change process, with female breasts, and male genitals.) This report from the Anti-American July 4th celebration in San Francisco really captures the ability of the left to be offensive, vulgar, and filled with ahistorical inconsistency all at once!

Another reader described submitting a Freedom of Information Act request some years ago about himself:

When I was young and nasty stuff in El Salvador and elsewhere was causing there to be talk of re-instituting the draft, I attended a couple of "anti-war rallies." One of them was at UC Berkeley's Sather Gate. It was a pretty innocuous gathering whose only memorable moment was that of Daniel Ellsberg burning his draft card. There were no obvious cameras in attendance.

Many years later, I did the FIOA requests to see what would come up. I had to be persistent. Eventually, I got my package. Most of it was noise, but interestingly, there was a picture of several people that included me at the rally just mentioned above. To this day, I don't know how 'they' correlated me in the crowd with one [name deleted]. If I remember correctly, that picture was courtesy of the FBI. There was nothing at all inflammatory in the remainder of the packet.

Another reader pointed to this Washington Post article of April 3, 2007:

A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.

For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.

The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.

FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.

The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.

Similar intelligence-gathering operations have been reported in New York, where a local police intelligence unit tried to infiltrate groups planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and in Colorado, where records surfaced showing that the FBI collected names and license plates of people protesting timber industry practices at a 2002 industry convention.

Several federal courts have ruled that intelligence agencies can monitor domestic groups only when there is reason to believe the group is engaged in criminal activity. Experts in police conduct say it is hard to imagine how asking questions about a person's political views would be appropriate in a trespassing case.

Hmmm. I can imagine how that would be appropriate. This December 13, 1999 Time magazine article about anarchists in Seattle points out the objectives of some of the lunatic fringe groups (which doesn't necessarily include every antiwar protester):

The anarchist movement today is a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine. Ironically, the groups are increasingly organized; the Pacific Northwest in particular, with its unionist past, grungy youth-culture present and ever Green future, is an anarchist hotbed. Add to that the hundreds of under-25ers from San Francisco to Vancouver who spent months learning nonviolent civil disobedience from groups like the Ruckus Society and the Direct Action Network. "The WTO," notes Ruckus Society coordinator Han Shan, "gave us home-field advantage by coming to Seattle." The '98 trashing of a Eugene, Ore., NikeTown was an informal dry run for last week's mayhem, some of whose perpetrators call themselves the Eugene Brickthrowers Local 666. "Their goal is to take things to the furthest edge of acceptability," says Seattle activist Dana Schuerholz of the Eugene radicals, "to get their message out by literally smashing the state."

That's the anarchist's primal goal: to replace central government with the sort of self-sufficient, egalitarian collective now aborning at 918 Virginia Street, a largely vacant building on the edge of downtown Seattle. The "squat" popped up two weeks ago as a protesters' crash pad. About 100 people a night sleep there. There's no power or water, but organizers have set up a kitchen and security and toilet systems. House rules hang on one wall: NO ILLEGAL DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO WEAPONS and so on, ending with NO VIOLENCE.

Oops. Most anarchists publicly decried last week's vandalism, which was perpetrated in part by local teens whose direct actions for social justice consisted of looting StarTACs from a cell-phone store. "Several press accounts have stated that there were only 'hundreds of anarchists'" in Seattle, an online activist wrote last week. "This would be true if you only counted teenagers dressed in black. This would have left out...the vast majority of us, who look just plain ole working class."

If there was not significant overlap between the anarchist riot bunch and the antiwar protesters, there would seem little good reason for the FBI to be taking pictures. But there is substantial overlap there, and identifying particular violent criminals who have a history of violent attacks in cities across the country--such as this incident described in the July 10, 2005 San Francisco Chronicle--seems to be a legitimate action:

A San Francisco police officer was in serious condition with a head injury and three suspects were in custody Saturday following a demonstration by anarchists who broke windows in the Mission District to protest the gathering of the Group of 8 leaders in Scotland.

Police did not release the name of the officer who was hurt in Friday night's melee. Deputy Police Chief Greg Suhr said Saturday that the officer was in serious but stable condition with brain swelling at San Francisco General Hospital. He has developed a blood clot, which doctors hope to dissolve before he is released, Suhr said.

The department's spokeswoman, Maria Oropeza, said the officer and his partner were driving on 23rd Street in response to a vandalism call when protesters threw a mattress underneath their patrol car.

"They got out to apprehend the suspects, at which point they were surrounded by a crowd," Oropeza said. "One of the officers was struck on the head by an unidentified object."

Police arrested Cody Tarlow, 21, of Felton (Santa Cruz County), Doritt Earnst, 31, of Berkeley and a third suspect who refused to identify himself.

They were being held on suspicion of attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery to a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and willful resistance to a police officer that results in serious bodily injury.

In addition, Tarlow was held on suspicion of wearing a disguise for the purpose of escaping discovery or identification with a public offense. Earnst was also suspected of removing a weapon other than a firearm from an officer, and the unidentified man was suspected of inciting a riot.

A posting on a Web site used by the organizers of Friday's protest said, "The legal team is working on getting (the suspects) attorneys and getting them released! There will be a meeting to organize support for them." The meeting is scheduled for this morning.

The protest was one of many from around the world in response to the summit in Scotland by leaders of wealthy nations -- the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. Representatives from China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico also attended.

The San Francisco protest was billed as the "West Coast Anti-Capitalist Convergence and March against the G-8." Protesters broke windows and glass doors at two Wells Fargo Bank locations, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and a shoe store. Red anarchy signs were spray-painted on sidewalks and windows.