Month: May 2010

Joseph Christopher Rocha, Former Petty Officer Third Class, U.S. Navy, writes a letter to the President:

After the recent letter by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recommended the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” be delayed, this is my plea to you on the behalf of the soldiers serving in silence to end this law now:

I never wanted anything more in my life than to be a career officer. My entire childhood I was exposed to abuse, violence, and crime. I came out of it all with a simple, yet overwhelming desire to serve. When my first attempt at getting into the Naval Academy failed, I waited restlessly until I turned eighteen. I enlisted on my birthday and set off to prove myself to the Academy. I was eager to leave the cruelty of my past and join a true family.

I knew I was gay, but it was irrelevant to me then. I was determined to join an elite team of handlers working with dogs trained to detect explosives. As I studied hard to pass exams and complete training, I was convinced that the current law would protect me. I knew that based on merit and achievement I would excel in the military. I never told anyone I

was gay. But a year and a half later while serving in the Middle East, I was tormented by my chief and fellow sailors, physically and emotionally, as they had their suspicions. The irony of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is that it protects bigots and punishes gays who comply.

Shop talk in the unit revolved around sex, either the prostitute-filled parties of days past or the escapades my comrades looked forward to. They interpreted my silence and total lack of interest as an admission of homosexuality. My higher-ups seemed to think that gave them the right to bind me to chairs, ridicule me, hose me down and lock me in a feces-filled dog kennel.

On one day in the Middle East, I was ordered by a superior to get down on my hands and knees and simulate oral sex on a person working in the kennel. We were supposed to pretend that we were in our bedroom and that the dogs were catching us in the act. Over and over, with each of the dogs in our unit, I was forced to endure this scenario.

I told no one about what I was living through. I feared that reporting the abuse would lead to an investigation into my sexuality. Frankly, as we continue to delay the repeal of this horrible law, I can’t help but wonder how many people find themselves in similar, despicable situations and remain silent. My anger today doesn’t come from the abuse, but rather from the inhumanity of a standing law that allowed for it.

Three and a half years later when the Navy started investigating claims of hazing, I had finally earned my place at the Naval Academy Preparatory School. But instead of celebration, I began to question the life of persecution, degradation, and dishonor DADT had forced on me. I questioned the institution — our great military — that would condone and endorse this kind of treatment of its own members. The only thing I had ever done wrong was to want the same thing my straight counterparts wanted: a brotherhood and something to stand for.

At NAPS I realized that a career of service under DADT would be a forfeiture of my basic human rights. It would be a forfeiture of basic job security, peace of mind, and meaningful relationships, particularly with my fellow straight service members whom I was forced to deceive and betray.

After completing a six-week officer candidate boot camp, my commanders said they wanted to offer me a leadership role. But after what happened in the Middle East and even the suicide of my close friend, I was mentally and emotionally depleted. And so — with my knees buckling — I offered my statement of resignation in writing:

"I am a homosexual. I deeply regret that my personal feelings are not compatible with Naval regulations or policy. I am proud of my service and had hoped I would be able to serve the Navy and the country for my entire career. However, the principles of honor, courage and commitment mean I must be honest with myself, courageous in my beliefs, and committed in my action. I understand that this statement will be used to end my Naval career."

They say some people are just born designed for military service. It‘s the way we are wired, and the only thing that makes us happy. For too many of us, it‘s the only family we ever had. I am sure now, more than ever, after all the loss and hardship under DADT, that all I want to do is serve as a career military officer.

Mr. President, any delay in repeal is a clear signal to our troops that their gay brothers and sisters in arms are not equal to them. I plead that you take the lead — fight for repeal — and allow qualified men and women to serve their country.

(Image by Jeff Sheng; his photobook of gay and lesbian service members can be bought here)

Robert Paarlberg says organic isn't the answer:

Africa faces a food crisis, but it's not because the continent's population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region's known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent's cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential.

One reason for this failure has been sharply diminished assistance from international donors. When agricultural modernization went out of fashion among elites in the developed world beginning in the 1980s, development assistance to farming in poor countries collapsed.

Behold the homeopathic bomb:

Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.

Video via Alex Knapp.

(Hat tip: Schneier)

Howard Gleckman bashes the homebuyer tax credit:

The credit-induced artificial deadline has helped create a toxic brew of hungry real estate agents, ravenous mortgage brokers, desperate sellers, and frantic and inexperienced buyers. We learned what happened with Homebuyer Credit I. That tax subsidy led to massive fraud (including a large fraction of people claiming the credit who never bothered to buy a house). It also produced both a rush to buy before it (almost) expired last fall, and the inevitable sag in sales that followed.

As my Tax Policy Center colleague Ted Gayer has noted, 85 percent of those who took last year’s credit would have purchased anyway, and the credit merely encouraged them to buy a few months sooner. As a result, Ted estimated it cost the government about $43,000 for each additional sale.

My bet is this year will be more of the same.

Thoreau defends the student but not the email. He takes on the substance of the e-mail in a follow-up post. He fairly reiterates the various defenses used by race and IQ theorists. Then he pounces:

The problem with these theories is that for most of the past several thousand years most people in this world were growing crops, herding animals, catching fish, or maybe working some sort of skilled trade making things for (and hence living among and marrying the offspring of) farmers, herders, and fishermen.  Yes, there have been great urban civilizations here and there, and these civilizations produced great works of creativity and intellect (some more than others).  However, the vast majority of the people in those civilizations were NOT living in the big city and working as poets or philosophers.  They were in the country growing crops, or in the city working as tradesmen or manual laborers.  And who said that farming isn’t or wasn’t cognitively demanding?  I certainly can’t imagine having to juggle all those different tasks!  The highly educated classes were a small fraction of the society (and probably not having more kids than their farming counterparts), so you can’t point to a few philosophers in the gene pool to argue for some sort of difference between descendants of Greek wheat growers and the descendants of Mexican corn growers, or descendants of fishermen on Crete and descendants of fishermen from the coast of Africa.

Also, genes spread.  A lot.

 Conquests spread genes.  Large migrations spread genes.  Migrations of individuals who moved for one reason or another spread genes.  Genes can diffuse from one village to another as people move around and marry.  They move across social classes–one needn’t postulate a huge degree of class mobility to recognize that over the span of centuries genes will move between classes as bastards and black sheep are disowned, or maids are seduced (or raped), or the lady of the manor sleeps with the gardener, or the nobleman has a girlfriend on the side, or whatever else.  The bottom line is that people like to mate, and they do it while traveling, they do it across class lines, they do it across ethnic lines (even in violation of cultural taboos), and so over time genes can move around the globe.

So, genes spread, and they spread in a world where for several millenia most ancestors of most people alive today were doing similar jobs (farming, herding, fishing) and hence facing similar cognitive tasks.  All of this makes it very unlikely that you’ll find big differences between racial groups (however we define those groups).

Now, maybe there are small groups, isolated over millenia by geography and/or social custom, who only bred amongst themselves and (for whatever reasons) faced unique cognitive demands (and hence unique cognitive selection pressures).  However, these groups are much smaller than an entire racial group (as racial groups are usually defined).  Maybe the people of the isolated valley named Lower Whatsitstan have religious traditions that emphasize study and economic practices that involves elaborate contracts.  Maybe the people of the isolated valley of Upper Whatsitstan are dumbasses who live in a lush climate where survival is easy and the geography has kept outsiders from coming in and taking their stuff, so they’ve never had to outwit anybody.  These groups are so small that they will have next to no impact on the average IQ of folks from Central Asia.

He goes further into the weeds in another post:

I’m trying to argue that if/when the first “intelligence gene” is discovered, whether that gene happens to be more common in one group or another is largely irrelevant for predictions about those groups.  The first “intelligence gene” discovery will not tell you about any other “intelligence genes.”  So we find Intelligence Gene #1 and it has whatever distribution among groups.  That won’t tell us whether Intelligence Gene  #2 (yet to be discovered) has a different pattern among groups.

By analogy, suppose that you studied the shark genome, and identified the genes that are responsible for it having fins.  Suppose that you found that dolphins are genetically different from sharks.  Would it follow that dolphins cannot possibly have fins?  No, because dolphins found their own ways to evolve fins.  So, if two groups of people faced similar selection pressures (because most of their ancestors performed similar tasks) and you find that Group #1 is somewhat more likely to possess a particular gene, it doesn’t mean that Group #2 didn’t evolve something that performed the same task.

Jonathan Rauch reviews Naomi Cahn and June Carbone's new book, Red Families v. Blue Families. Rauch writes that "if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory." His larger thought:

Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.

Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America's ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today's cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. Deferring sex and marriage until you get a college or graduate degree — until age 23 or 25 or beyond — is harder still. "Even the most devout overwhelmingly do not abstain until marriage," Cahn and Carbone write…

The result of this red quandary, Cahn and Carbone argue, is a self-defeating backlash. Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings.

Lexington muddies the waters:

It may be that preaching about family values forces people into premature or shotgun weddings which then fall apart. But it seems equally plausible that this story could be, in large measure, about class. Americans in poor red states are surrounded by family breakdown, so they fear it more, and make it into a political issue. The college-educated classes, who trend blue, have low rates of divorce and single parenthood. They are also better equipped, financially at least, to cope with the consequences of family breakdown should it occur. So they don't worry about it as much, and are repelled by politicians who wax sanctimonious about it.

Gunnison, Colorado, 6.30 am

George Hager argues:

There’s a short list of big, successful deficit-reduction efforts, and they all had at least two of these three elements in common: 1) The deficit situation had become dire or embarrassing, or both. 2) The president committed to the effort and/or signaled he’d give up a key pledge to get a deal. 3) The opposing party was willing to negotiate away a piece of its bedrock position to get a deal.

Bernstein takes issue with the second point:

What the three episodes [Hager] cites (1982, 1990, 1993) have in common was that in each case, the president's economic team told him that the problem was likely to have real, immediate effects on the economy, effects that would show up before the next election.  In each case, that seems to have been both necessary and sufficient.  Hager does include presidential involvement as one of his three conditions, but I'm making a slightly different claim: presidents will care about deficit reduction when they have an electoral incentive to care about it, and once they are on board, Congress gives it them to them.

Today on the Dish we compiled extensive commentary from the fourth-to-last day of the British election. Latest electoral projections here. Cameron considered full equality for gays, the Corner chimed in on Cameron, and some British Muslims supported the Tories. Niall Ferguson assessed the UK's finances.

Times Square bomb commentary here, here, and here. We also rounded up perspectives on the politics of the oil spill. Andrew chewed over Mearsheimer's latest take on Israel/Palestine (and addressed Goldblog's take), checked in on the Vatican sex scandal, and compared the GOP's anti-gay posture to its attitude toward Latinos. Reader reaction to Mearsheimer here. More Palin lies here.

Bill Maher stood up for South Park and free speech, TNC challenged Frum over profiling, and a Harvard Law student resurrected the Bell Curve debates. Yglesias award here, Malkin here, and more ugly rhetoric here. Creepy ad here.

— C.B.