By the way, two of the great works of religious science fiction are discussed on different blogs. Claude Muncie posts on James Blish's A Case of Conscience, which he notes is a s good upon rereading in 2003 as it was when he first read it in 1976. Kevin Holtsberry posts on A Canticle for Leibowtiz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Kevin doesn't find "A Canticle" penetrable and asks for clarification. "Canticle may be dated because of both its pre-Vatican model of Catholicism and, oddly, its post-nuclear apocolyptic setting. I don't know, but I thought it was great. I would also nominate John Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth as one of the great SF religious alternate history novels - in Haldane IV's world, because Christ died during the final assault on Rome, people make the Sign of the Crossbow - and Anthony Boucher's The Quest for Saint Aquin as one of the great SF religious novellas.

Bottom line - I would have understood people getting upset with Sen. Santorum if he had compared homosexuality with necrophilia.

It must be the social climate, but public discussion of polygamy homosexuality and incest seem mundane. Even objections to "goat-love" seem to be a vestige of a Victorian heritage. But mention necrophilia and the hairs on the back of your neck start to stand up. And, yet, let's assume that the decedent signs a pre-mortem waiver and the, er, consensual activity happens in the privacy of the bedroom, would the "do your own thing because the government should not be in the bedroom" crowd maintain a consistent line on their principle. Maybe so, but it is creepy. I would suspect that is one area where the libertine cum libertarian crowd might turn a blind eye to state intervention. I mean, for heaven's sake, isn't there a slippery slope problem if we recognize post-mortem consensual friskiness? Certainly, there ought to be a law against that - dare I call it - perversion.

Strangely, that is the one activity which is not made illegal, at least in California, as I learned while simultaneously reading the Daily Journal and defending a deposition several weeks ago. [Apparently after forbidding sodomy, seduction, bestiality, orgies and various other menages, the Legislature decided to drop the subject.] Here is an article on a truly unsettling case. [Seriously, do not read the article if you have small children.] As the article notes:

"[The defendants] face a maximum of three years in prison if convicted. The alleged crime falls under the state's Health and Safety Code, which mostly addresses drug crimes. There is no state law against using a corpse for sexual purposes."

Which I found absolutely surprising.

Back now to the same sex activity issue and let's test my assertion that I don't think that the Constitution forbids anti-sodomy laws. Do I really support a legal principle which says that a state legislature can prohibit virtually any activity which is not explicitly protected by the Constitution? Does such a principle really make sense? Let's assume that a state legislature enacts a law that imposes the death penalty for intentional activity consisting of a person scratching his left elbow with his right hand. Would I believe that such a law was beyond Constitutional review?

Let's stipulate that such a law certainly seems to be irrational. But it is entirely possible for a legislatures to act irrationally in its legislative functions. Examples of such legislative irrationality are legion. Does the law violate some Constitutional right? I'd be hard put to think of a Constitutional right to scratch one's elbow. The activity seems innocuous, but doesn't seem to have the same weight that one associates with reproduction or, I'll agree, sex or employment or religious activity or art or speech or so on.

The best argument against such a law would probably be either a due process violation or a cruel and unusual punishment violation. I would think that due process requires that the legislature act rationally or have a rational basis for deciding to inflict punishment for the indicated activity. While the rational basis standard is not very burdensome, it does require some reason. I can't think of one for the elbow scratching law. I suspect, though, that an imaginative judge might be able to come up with some after the fact justification.

The Eighth Amendment prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment might have some traction here. Executing people for innocuous behavior would seem to be either cruel or unusual, or both.

Does this have some application to the sodomy case? Maybe it does. The SCOTUS could reach a conclusion that punishing a homosexual couple for behavior that doesn't harm others, particularly if it was truly private, is either excessive or irrational.

Oddly, I might support a decision framed on that basis.

And Speaking of Irrational Legislative Behavior: Never argue with Megan's Twelfth Rule of Internet Discourse - "You don't have to make up strawmen because the endlessly diligent internet will quickly provide real examples of the boundless genius of human stupidity." [OK, that's a paraphrase.] On which point TalkLeft has a post on the Alabama legislature vitiating its obscenity law. Apparently, in order to be constitutional under some Federal decision, the provisions about sex toys had to be removed. One Alabama legislator offered curative legislation which would have explicitly removed sex toys. Needless to say, no self-respecting, self-preserving legislator was going to be caught dead in the next election cycle in a situation where his opponent could run ads ads reading "Sen. Smith supports the Acme orgasmatron." Hence, the curative legislation went down in flames, to the sound of proponent shouting "you're making obscenity legal."

Sure, it's funny, but that particular Catch-22 is what led to Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned what Justice Stewart's dissent referred to as "an uncommonly silly law." Connecticut legislators simply could not bring themselves to vote in favor of prophylactics.

Likewise, for you Con-law geeks, the same dynamic led to the truly dangerous situation corrected by Baker v. Carr. In Baker, political deadlock had prevented redistricting of legislative districts for a substantial period of time. The situation was leading to the formation of gross inequities between the voting strengths of different regions, which could have recreated the Rotten Boroughs of Nineteenth Century England. Baker reversed field on the prior "political questions" doctrine which had precluded judicial review and established the "one man, one vote" formula.

These political logjams are very real. In general, I think that the interests of self-government should lead the Court to adopt a hands-off position. Sometimes the Court simply must intervene, because it's the only institution that can. Such interventions, however, should only be for weighty reasons, such as came together in Baker, which in fact dealt with the ability of voters to express their sovereignity through the political process.

Something of a Classic in the Michael Moore Hate-mail Category

IMAO: Hating Michael Moore

Constructing Fire-breaks

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today has an interesting post dedicated to the proposition that (a) homosexual marriages would not necessarily lead to polygamous marriages and (b) polygamous marriages are conceptually distinguishable from same sex marriages because of the empirically observable untoward effects of polygamy.

Well, that goes some distance to answering my question about why polygamy and homosexuality should not be compared. On the other hand, the whole argument seems to be an attempt to construct a last ditch firebreak once the fire leaps the fire lines. For instance, the social costs that the WSJ points to wouldn't be considered costs in a society that considers polygamy normal. The dysfunctions that the WSJ adumbrates would be considered the normal attributes of that healthy, functioning community by members of that community.

Don't get me wrong. I agree with the WSJ's point. I also part company with the libertarians in my belief that society may legitimately structure its institutions within certain limits to promote the development of healthy, responsible citizens who enjoy the maximum amount of individual freedom consistent with the maintenance of that society over time. I believe that the institution of companionate monogamous marriage did more to increase the value of women in society than any other institution. But I don't think that the dysfunctions of polygamous societies answers the argument about why polygamy - or incest - wouldn't be entitled to equal protection once the principle that consensual adult activities are entitled to "privacy" is coupled to the idea that the self-fulfillment of individual desires is the sine qua non of constitutional rights.

I mean, who cares if polygamy developes a class of frustrated males and dependent women so long as we get there through a series of free choices by people who individually are maximizing their own happiness? Likewise, who cares if we foster a subclass of society that is prone to suicide and intra-group violence, so long as members of that group feel they are maximizing their individual utlity at the time?

Ooh, be scared. The mighty Europeans are going to challenge Nato.

I guess they can all cut back on their vacations to finance a military. Yeah, like that's ever going to happen.

Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen has this post:

The Sunday London Times has a piece, by their Paris correspondent Charles Bremner on European politics which begins thus:
EUROPE'S self-inflicted wounds over Iraq will be on display tomorrow, when the leaders of France and Germany - dubbed the "Axis of Weasels" in America - start to try to lay the groundwork for a European Union military alliance that would compete with NATO.
Pardon me? An alliance which would compete with NATO? The only reason NATO exists is to protect France an Germany against an attack by the Soviet Union. Who are the Germans and the French going to protect themselves against? An attack by Luxembourg (which IS a member of NATO)?

The answer seems surprisingly obvious. I'm amazed that Galen didn't see it right off. The European Alliance would support those who would invade Europe. That way the Europeans can make money selling arms to the invaders and get the benefits of NATO bases subsidizing their local economies. The last time something like this happened was when Milo Minderbinder accepted a subcontract from the Germans to attack a bridge as to which he had a subcontract from the Allies to defend.

Who is ³×À̹ö ÅëÇÕ°Ë»ö :: '', and what are they saying about me in Korean?

Things Armenian

The Corner reminds us that this is the 88th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. FrontPage magazine provides the best description of the circumstances of the Genocide that I have seen. Of course, growing up in Fresno, I am not unfamiliar with the Genocide, but I had always attributed it to the dying spasms of the Ottoman Empire. The Front Page article makes it clear that the Young Turks were firmly involved, which makes the Jihadist tone of the Genocide somewhat odd.

The reference to the Armenian Genocide, and something else, put in me in a reflective state of mind, so I googled my old High School debate partner who was moving into the radical world of ethnic politics last time I saw him. Apparently, he is still there. He appears to be the author of a book entitled, Amazon.com: Books: "Gha-Ra-Bagh": The Emergence of the National Democratic Movement in Armenia, which is described in one of the Amazon reviews as "a dangerous book" and "full of hatred and false information." Way to go, Mark. [To be fair, other reviews describe the book as fair and objective.]

On the same note, this weekend I saw a review of Bloodvine by Aris Janigian. Aris was one year behind me in High School. I probably will get Aris's book which I am sure captures the unique colors of the Valley Armenian culture. I will probably never get Mark's book, which probably is a thoroughly partisan project of interest only to those with a desire to know the "inside game" of historical grievances. The funny thing is that when we Juniors in High School, Mark was supposed to be the lawyer and I was supposed to be the bitter ethnic partisan.

unbillable hours has a terrific reflection on his unsettled relationship with Lent and Easter.

As part of my never ending quest to position this site as a place of scholarship and reflection, please allow me to direct you to 300 reasons why we love The Simpsons.

I'm just getting around to annotating the citations that I have collected over the last few days. Here is an essay by Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online. The gist of Kurtz's argument is that Santorum has been unfairly accused of equating homosexuality with polygamy and incest. Kurtz believes, though, that Santorum has alluded fairly to a "slippery slope" argument.

I substantially agree with Kurtz' argument, but I would certainly not describe the extension of any principle announced in the future Texas sodomy decision as being the results of a "slippery slope." Slippery slope arguments, to me, seem to suggest a situation where a small, initial compromise is exploited to create a larger effect because there is no principled point to cut-off the application of the principle. "Slippery slope" arguments contemplate a series of progressively more substantive steps. The extension of employment protections to sexual orientation is a has led to a classic "slippery slope" situation. Gays were provided protection from termination of employment because of their sexual orientation. That concession has in turn led to the exploitation of the "gays as insular minority" point of view - care of Footnote 4 of the Carolene Products decision - which in turn has led to a situation where, through a series of moves, the Boy Scouts' essential beliefs have been subjected to an attempt to limit the Scouts' rights of association and belief. However one feels about the Boy Scouts or their code or homosexuality, you have to agree that this result was not foreseen by anyone as the necessary outgrowth of the enactment of fair employment legislation. In fact, the spectre of homosexual scout leaders would have been dismissed as mere irrational scare mongering.

The privacy interest that may be established in the Texas sodomy case is not a slippery slope situation; it is simply the extension of "law" to analogous situations. The situation is more consistent with the repeal of Jim Crow. Plessy v. Fergusson, of course, allowed Southern States to establish the segregated legal and social regime. Plessy itself, however, dealt with segregation of railroads. The case we all remember as holding that Jim Crow was unconstitutional - Brown v. Board of Education - dealt with segregation in primary schools. Strictly speaking, then, Brown did not overrule Plessy. When was Plessy overruled?

The answer is that it was truly overruled in Brown. Brown held that racial segregation was not consistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Badges and Indicia clause of the Thirteenth. After Brown, there was a cavalcade of cases that systematically eliminated Jim Crow in the multiple venues that Jim Crow was lodged. One of those unsung cases involved segregation in railroads. But Plessy was in fact overruled long before that case because there was not a razor edge of material difference between segregation in education and segregation in transportation.

Brown, therefore, was not a "slippery slope" situation. It established a principle on its face which transformed Southern society. I would argue that extending the definition of "privacy" to other than the narrow ground that it has previously rested doesn't threaten a slippery slope in which we will find ourselves suprised in some future. Rather, it involves the establishment of a neutral principle, the working out of which is altogether obvious. As Roger Ho notes it was this concern that made Bowers a 5 to 4 decision in the first place. According to Ho, this was stated in Bowers as:

"It would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home. We are unwilling to start down that road." -- U.S. Supreme Court Majority Opinion, Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986)

[Note, the swing vote - I think it was Powell - felt that the sodomy laws in Bowers should have been struck down on the basis of the Eighth Amendment. Namely, that the punishment of such private conduct was excessive. Bowers, however, did not involve any actual prosecution, so that issue was academic.] Now, there is something really interesting going on with respect to the attacks on Santorum. One sees consistently the argument that homosexual acts cannot be delinked from the person performing the acts. Former Fresno Bee movie guy, John Scalzi, for example, offers this:

"Rick Santorum, the Senate's third-ranked Republican who is under fire from gay-rights groups and Democrats, says he has 'no problem with homosexuality - I have a problem with homosexual acts.'" -- Associated Press
In logical terms, you could write this as "I have no problem with X, I have a problem with X' " in which X is any particular human condition, and X' is the action by which the condition of X is ascertained; indeed, without X', X exists in an unverifiable state if it exists at all, since it is the performance of X' that establishes X definitively. Thereby, in purely practical terms, if you have a problem with X', you must necessarily have a problem with X.

One interesting thing is that this argument could easily be made against, for example, pedophilia or incest or murder, but Scalzi, and others, absolutely, positively refuse to see that. The premise of the argument is that homosexuality is a "human condition" in a way that pedophilia is not. The other interesting thing is the vehemence in which the argument is stressed that homosexuality should not be equated with polygamy. I personally don't see it. Perhaps that inability is due to my voracious reading of history and science fiction. I could well imagine - thanks chiefly to the endless inventiveness of science fiction writers - societies where homosexuality was the norm - witness the Poul Anderson story collected in Dangerous Visions - or societies where incest was normal - consider the Ptolemaic dynasty - or societies where crime was institutionalized - see Kornbluth's The Syndic. I suspect that anyone in those societies would consider the norms of those societies as, well, normal.

It is odd that the failure of imagination is on the side of the critics of Santorum. For them, homosexuality is a fixed, invariant characteristic n a way that other sexual preferences are not. The effort to obtain Carolene Products status, however, has resulted in a worldview that puts homosexuality in a different conceptual category than, say, incest or polygamy. In short there is a "paradigm" in operation which defines how some people think about homosexuality. There is nothing irrational or illogical about the paradigm since the paradigms defines the rules of the argument. [What makes a paradigm illogical is either its own internal incoherence or its lack of consistency with the empirical world.]

Finally, perhaps the paradigm shift is pragmatically useful. Perhaps the belief that homosexuals have a higher moral status than polygamists will serve the function of institutionalizing and domesticating homosexuality by creating the web of duties and demands that any effective social construct must have. The best argument in favor of homosexual marrigage in my mind is that it may tend to make homosexuals more bourgeoise. Other than children, nothing makes a person more middle-class - more likely to be faithful, more likely to go to work in the morning, more likely to weed the crabgrass from the lawn - than the prospect of alimony payments and the hourly rates of divorced lawyers.

Which is why one gay friend of mine is so absolutely opposed to gay marriage. "It's just not needed" says this guy, who has already gone through one expensive heterosexual divorce.

Maybe it's about time, but we are all learning about Islam. The Raven has a post showing a photograph of the Shi'ites celebration of a feast of Mohammed's grandson Ali's death. The photograph shows people who are really quite bloody in their commemoration of the death of Ali. This Shia practice isn't easy to understand for everyone, apparently even the Sunni look with some concern at the practice according to alt.muslim - your muslim news community:

The Shia holiday of Ashura, celebrated this past weekend, is perhaps the biggest lightning rod for conflict between Shia Muslims and the majority Sunni Muslims. The traditional public displays of self-flagellation and bloodletting - meant to emulate the pain that Imam Hussain felt during his martyrdom - is difficult for Sunni Muslims to understand and is often responded to with jeering or even murder. However, this practice is banned in Iran and frowned upon in Lebanon. Many Shia clerics are calling for participants to donate blood instead of spilling it on the streets, although this call is resisted by those who feel that suffering is an integral part of the commemoration.

Apparently, questions about the practice aren't limited to Xians.

Actually, this article prompted some questions about Islam, as to which I felt there was no better time to ask than ... Easter. My parents invited their neighbors ... actually neighbors who moved in next door to the family home around the time that I left for law school...to Easter brunch. They are Persian - don't call them Arab - and they told me that the Persians are historically Shi'ite because of the tie between nationalism and religion. Like the Polish or the Irish, the Persians embraced Islam in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency of the dominant culture. Interestingly, for the first time in twenty years, I learned that Mrs. E. was ethnically Georgian. Apparently, after the Communist Revolution, her grandfather moved to Persia and Islamicized. If you have read any history of the Byzantium Empire circa 700 to 1100 A.D., you will recognize that pattern as the norm of the Caucasian nobility, which regularly moved between the Great Powers of Persia and Rome, or Byzantium, or whomever, throughout history.

Fascinating.

Mullings has a nice essay today.

Free Speech, Anyone?

Kevin Holtsberry has a post on some Blogville reaction to Senator Santorum's statements on homosexuality. Apparently, certain groups are trying to "Trent Lott" Santorum for his statement. Here is the precis of the statement:

In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press two weeks ago, Santorum, R-Pa., said he believes homosexual acts are a threat to the American family. He drew criticism from gays and Democrats after parts of the interview - during which he compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery - were published Monday.

''I have no problem with homosexuality - I have a problem with homosexual acts, as I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships,'' Santorum said during an interview taped April 7 in his Senate office.

''And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual,'' he said. ''I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.''

Given a chance to clarify his comments before the story was published, Santorum said: ''I can't deny that I said it, and I can't deny that's how I feel.''

In other words, Santorum is being criticized for being a practicing Catholic. Santorum makes the same distinction between homosexuality as an orientation or condition and homosexuality as a practice or act that the Catholic Catechism makes. So, it appears that, once again, some groups are attempting to develop a de facto concensus that Catholics may not be elected to public office.

But, incidentally, why is Santorum wrong? What is the principle that allows us to divide homosexual acts from, say, incest? Does the argument that the constitutional right of privacy includes consensual sexual relations in the bedroom where the government should be barred not apply with equal force to consensual private activities between brother and sister (after the age of consent)? If the right of privacy means that members of the same sex should be allowed to marry because the state or society has no right to impose its value judgment on gays, why should the state or society be allowed to impose a value judgment on those who are genetically disposed to love more than one person at a time?

What precisely is the principle? Emotional disgust? But thirty years ago, homosexuality evinced the same reaction that pedophilia causes today. How can we be sure that our emotional reaction against pedophilia won't look naive thirty years from now?

Is the principle simply that the distinction between incest and homosexuality is obvious? But how common is incest? Is there really a need for laws against incest? Why do we care what brothers and sisters do after the age of consent? Do we really think that brothers and sisters will start pairing off when they get old enough to vote. That hasn't been my observation about the relationship between siblings. [Don't even attempt to argue that the offspring of incestuous union are prone to health risks and imbecility. That view is superstitious and unscientific, particularly in the short run. In the long run, inbreeding and cross-breeding are ways of establishing "hybrid vigor." So, if you want to stake your prejudice against incest on science, realize that you are relying on a week reed.]

Finally, if you read Griswold, which held that the nebulous right to privacy included the right to purchase contraceptives, you will see that the actual constitutional right - the actual right to privacy - is the right to privacy in the individual's decision to have children. There is a solid argument to made that the State should not have the practical ability to either breed its citizens, or to mandate that its citizens breed, or that they selectively not breed. These were real concerns at the time. The eugenic policies of the Third Reich were not that far in the past at the time of Griswold. Likewise, the Supreme Court had made its own unfortunate foray into eugenic policy in Buck v. Bell where Justice Holmes had declared that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." In that historical light, Griswold made some kind of sense.

Roe, therefore, follows in the same line by protecting the "privacy" in making decision about reproduction. I may have been the only person not surprised by the prior sodomy decision, but I wasn't. Sodomy - homosexual practices - have nothing to do with reproduction and therefore don't fall into the Griswold line.

[By the way, I'm not making up any of this constitutional exegesis. It's all in the cases. Go read them.]

"Privacy" is an unfortunate term. "Privacy" would seem to implicate what one does in the bedroom. But that wasn't what the Supreme Court has meant by "privacy" in the past. Like I said, under prior case law, "privacy" meant "autonomy in decision-making," not "the right to do anything with your genitals that want to do so long as you do it in your own bedroom."

My prediction is that the Supreme Court has taken up the Texas case to knock-down sodomy laws. All things remaining the same - in a straight line projection of normal legal development - I think that decision will result in decision in the next twenty years constitutionalizing polygamy and striking down incest laws will follow. I suspect that there is a sufficient distinction concerning pedophilia to keep those laws intact, until someone start nicking at the age of consent, probably with scientific studies showing that children are really more mature than was previously believed. Does that sound incredible? Well, consider this, wouldn't it have seemed incredible twenty years ago that the Boy Scouts would be denied public accommodations because they refuse to allow homosexual scoutmasters? And we - members of the elite policy-making "new class" - think that development is unexceptional.

Check back in a decade and I wil say I told you so.

Update: That was faster than I thought. Here is an excerpt from The Volokh Conspiracy which theoretically justifies the decriminalization of bestiality:

Nonetheless, this is a distinctly secondary concern. Bans on bestiality are not, I think, justified, but neither are they tremendously oppressive. Bans on a form of behavior that is vitally important to many people's most important relationships -- that is as important to them, in fact, as heterosexual behavior is important to the human relationships in which we heterosexuals engage -- are indeed tremendously oppressive. Even someone who tolerates modest burdens on liberty should reject burdens that are as grave as this.

There is nothing wrong with this line of thought as a theoretical construct. There may, in fact, be nothing wrong with the application of this theoretical construct to human action. Is there a real risk that rampant "goat-love" willl break out? Probably not. And if the focus of constitutional jurisprudence is a utilitarian analysis of the individual's self-fulfillment, then the conclusion may be mandatory.

There are, I submit, several problems here. First, recent jurisprudence to the contrary notwithstanding, just as the Constitution does not enshrine "Mr. Spencer's social statics," it doesn't enshrine Benthamite utilitarianism or Millsian utilo-romanticism (romantic utilitarianism?) Nowhere does the Constitution say that legislative branch must enact legislative programs from the standpoint of whether a particular individual's happiness is concrete or that his neighbor's discomfort is mere comstockery. Pretty much, outside of narrowly defined constitutional interests, the legislative branch has broad discretion to make such value decisions.

Second, individual preferences can result in substantial social dysfunction because individuals can be quite irrational. As much as I want to believe in the beneficence of the "individual hand" as a libertarian fellow-traveler, it is not the case that the sum of felicitious individual decisions is felicitious social utility. An interesting book on this subject is Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton which describes how various social perceptions would result in tribes starving because they could not fish in a specific lake because of taboos. [Edgerton's book is a nice counterpoint to Marvin Harris' anthropological works that find the rationality behind various irrational taboos and, for that matter, Posner's book on law and economic which does the same thing for the common law.] Imagine, if you will, a society composed of individually satisfied bestialists. Would we believe that the maximizaiton of their separate individual utilities offset the broader social dysfunction in their society? [By which I mean, there would be happy contented man-goat relationships, but no children.]

Finally, what is the cost of constitutionalizing the value judgment that individual sexual self-fulfillment is the sine qua non of the legal order. We may think that today, but what if we're wrong? As Justice Scalia noted, however misguided our ignorant ancestors were, at least they bequeathed the opportunity to correct their mistakes. How certain are we that our descendants will share our value judgments?

If history offers any perspective, I submit that we should be extremely skeptical that they will.

This is timely. My partner - not the sensible Canadian, the other one - was just giving me the horse laugh about "organizing a scavenger hunt" to look for "weapons of mass destruction" because Rumsfield had admitted that "we weren't going to find any." I said that that didn't make any sense what with an Iraqi scientist pointing out sites which had housed WMD. Man Without Qualities explains that my partner's urban legend is coming out of Rumsfield statement that he didn't expect US troops to find WMDs, he expected that the the Iraqis would point out the sites.

Personal note. Blogging was light because I was in Los Angeles for depostions last week. I had kind of an epiphany. You see, I hate LA. I hate the traffic. I hate the traffic jams. I hate not knowing whether I will get where I expect to be when I expect to be there or whether I will be stuck in traffic for an interminable length of time for no apparent reason. I hate the "muscle memory" of the freeways.

Coming into LA on Wednesday night is a case in point. I arrived south of Castaic at about 9:30 p.m., when the flow of traffic went from 70 mph to a craw. After threading my way for an hour and about 5 miles, I went past a couple of flares and was up to 70 mph in a matter of seconds. Obviously, there had been an accident there several hours before and the traffic was still reacting to the obstruction like a python trying to clear an orange from its digestive track.

So, then I was talking to the LA attorney who we are working with. He had to go from from downtown to Simi Valley, which is a distance of about 15 to 20 miles. I asked him how long the trip would take at 4:30 p.m. He said, "not bad...about an hour." An hour to go 20 miles. Heck, I expect to be north of Merced in an hour. Then I realized that the problem was my expection. An hours to go 20 miles is not bad if that's what you're used to. I guess I just need to rethink my attitude about LA. I need to lower my expectations. LA's not that bad; it just takes three times as long to get anywhere.

In my humble estimation, this deserves circulation. Penner brought my attention to this Cold Fury post on Hillary Clinton's fabrication of telephone records, which her staff provided to Stephen Brill in what appears to be a petty attempt to pad her resume relative to New York's Senior Senator. As is the case with most such fabrications, a cursory investigation proved it to be fraudulent. [Also, note from the article how reports of Chelsea's location on 9/11 moved progressively closer to the World Trade Center with every report that Schumer's child was actually within five blocks of ground zero.]

It is endlessly amazing to me that people never change. I see it in my job all the time. I have noticed that con-men never change their con. The con stays the same; it just gets bigger and more complicated. It seems that personalities get formed early and they get formed permanently. You can easily imagine a sixteen year old Hillary padding her resume with imaginary accomplishments in her college applications. Probably her entire career has had similar recurrences of petty fabrication and evasions. It's really pathetic.

Catholic and Enjoying It! is back in business. Which is fortuitously timed since my Lenten deprivation was reading CAEI. [Also, William Sulik should be back in operation after his Lenten break.]

Instapundit hooks into an article on Burt Rutan's bid for the "X Prize." Here is Rand Simberg's links on the same subject.

When I was representing Scaled Composites and the Rutan Brothers - Home Town alert: they are both originally from Fresno - I visited the Scaled Composite place of business in Mojave a couple of times. I remember thinking that Burt and his crew had every twelve year old boys dream - they got to build model airplanes and fly them. They are actually a pretty goofy crew. I remember when my firm was representing them they were working on a low altitude, low speed, ground troop support aircraft for the Marines. I guess it didn't make it into production, but it was a fairly small plane - I think it was canard style - with a cannon mounted on one side of the fuselage. They loved telling stories of buzzing Mojave businesses with this really neat plane and just wanted some ammo for the cannon.

I hope Burt wins the prize. Actually, I hope anyone does.

The Command Post has been a redesigned.

Kieran Healy's Weblog has a post on plling data that shows that Republicans predominately think that homosexuality is "caused by upbringing," while Democrats feel that homosexuality is caused by genes. He then provides this:

This confirms a throwaway comment I read a few years ago, I think in the context of the Bell Curve debate. Conservatives think that everything but being gay is determined by the genes and Liberals think everything except being gay is caused by the environment. There’s a moral there somewhere.

I think the formulation is off the mark about Conservatives. I don't, for example, think that outside of some cliche of snobby country club elitism, Conservatives would argue that criminal activity or business success are caused by genetics. There is too much Pelagianism in the Conservative warp and woof for that. I will, though concede that it seems that arguments about the genetic basis of IQ have a conservative bent, although this may be modern well-poisoning. For example, Justice Homes - a darling of the liberals in other areas - was a major proponent of eugenics. See Buck v. Bell ["three generations of imbeciles are enough."]

On the other hand, the snide remark about Liberals seems true. No liberal would be caught dead arguing for genetic differences in any form of behavior, such as criminality or academic performance, nonchalantly accept the most egregious assertions of genetic determinism if it involves the infinitely nuanced behavior known as sex.