Posted 1:42 PM by Floyd

The San Jose Mercury News -- the "Newspaper of Silicon Valley", though it can't figure out how to make a web site that works worth a shit -- has a special Opinion page feature on Saturdays: It publishes letters from children. In this special letters section the correspondent's name, age, and school is given.

Now I like kids, and plan to have some, and when there are TV or newspaper articles on "the things kids say", I am just as capable of saying "that's cute" as the next person. But I see no reason to have a newspaper publish letters from children specifically to air their opinions. The resulting product usually falls into two categories: brown-nosing and ill-informed environmentalism. Here are two examples from today's opinion page, with names redacted to protect the underaged:

HERE is a round of applause for Nancy Pelosi, who will become the highest-ranking woman in the U.S. Congress. Thanks go to her and other women who led the way into this new era. Because of them, females are now rivaling males, showing they are equal in mental capabilities.

Gender bias is slowly fading away as more women show their faces in areas traditionally blocked to women. Thanks to these women, my generation has new doors to open and possibilities to experience. We have a new role in society that is yet to be defined.

With the possibilities growing, I am hoping that in the near future there will be a woman president. A girl can dream, can't she?

"Jane Doe", 15
Henry M. Gunn High School
Palo Alto

YOU may live miles from San Francisco Bay and still be polluting its waters. Adults might think chemicals are fantastic, but they aren't. They are the source of water pollution.

Every time you pollute the bay you're harming the wildlife. You are also polluting the beaches. The next time you wash your car or take a bath, check to see if you're using too much soap.

Are you willing to help? It's your choice, you're in control. You're the solution to water pollution.

"John Smith", 9
G.W. Hellyer Elementary School
San Jose

By the way, Joanne Jacobs has discussed whether political speech by children in other contexts was really written by the children, or written for them by their parent or teacher. I have no opinion about the San Jose Mercury News letters. It's possible that these letters are written in classrooms, and the teacher gives suggestions about the subject matter.

Posted 1:24 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News frequently bugs the shit out of me; the worst is when it goes on a crusade to deny jobs to people from the Third World. For instance, several years ago the Merc ran an article on Vietnamese immigrants who perform piecemeal work assembling computers and such. This was a mini-crusade, with the Merc shocked and appalled that people would

• Work at home
  
• Work long hours
  
• Willingly expose themselves to chemicals that, when force-fed to rats, might make them more likely to develop cancer
  

Last week the Merc published a three-part series entitled "Silicon Valley's dark side". (There is no link, because I have better things to do with my time than trawl the Merc's hopeless RealCities site for the article. The 7-day archives link did not work, and a search did not bring up the article.) Here is a snarky summary:

Silicon Valley makes computers. When a computer is obsolete, it cannot be disposed of in a trivial fashion by, say, dissolving it in water. Nor can you open the case of a computer and eat its contents. It is expensive and difficult to dispose of computer equipment in the US -- I have a busted monitor sitting under my house because the nearest disposal site is nearly half an hour away -- so the slack is being picked up by enterprises in mainland China. Evil Silicon Valley companies beam mind-control waves at Chinese citizens to entice them to work with this hazardous waste.

These sorts of articles are made all the more stroke-inducing by the Moment of Shit that follows: A self-congratulatory editorial reminding the unwashed masses that it's not enough to gape slack-jawed at the Mercury News' incredible reporting skills; we must all Do Something About It. Quite a surprise isn't it -- We Approve of the Content of Our Newspaper. (By the way, guys, your editorial could actually have some miniscule value if it linked to the articles that you pontificate about. Well done, RealCities!)

But the real outrage is not the Merc's reporting skills or its thumb-sucking pontification. The reporters and editorialists who work for the Mercury News are unable, despite all their feverish commitment to diversity, to imagine life from the perspective of a poor person in China. Such people can work on a farm, doing backbreaking labor with little usage of modern agricultural equipment. Or they can go to a city and get higher-paying and easier work. Most Chinese do not need to reduce their risk of contracting cancer by 0.5%; they need a job, food on the table, education for their kids.

Here is the Merc's prescription: More expensive computers AND no jobs for Third-Worlders. The only person who wins in this scenario is the high-minded crusader who pats himself on his back for his commitment to "social justice".

Posted 1:23 PM by Floyd

I have just blogrolled Suman Palit, the Kolkata Libertarian. This site gets five to ten visitors a day, and the clickthrough rate from my sidebar is probably about 1% to 10%, split by the number of bloggers therein. So Suman will be the proud recipient of one referral from my blog by the year 2009. Feel the joy!

Posted 12:29 PM by Floyd

Steven Den Beste posted an examination of why India was not preparing to take military actions against Pakistan. His explanation is that the US has a long-term plan for defeating Islam by Westernizing Iraq and spreading the joy to other nearby Islamist states. India has been clued into this plan, and is hanging tight for the next few years.

Suman Palit (the Kolkata Libertarian) rebutted by posting a long list of reasons why the Indian military is incapable of taking preemptive action, and why the Indian government is unwilling for them to do so.

Another counterargument is much simpler: If the positions were reversed, and it were another nation telling Bush and company that they could sit tight because said country had a long-term vision for defeating Islam, do you really think the US would lay off on their military plans? After all, as Den Beste has said in many posts, nations have to look out for their own interests. Den Beste said that the US Westernization plan could take 20 years. I would not call the US feckless, but a consistent foreign policy does not last longer than a single administration.

Posted 5:41 PM by Floyd

The Arsenic Pen Award -- Letters from the San Jose Mercury News

Feel free to compare and contrast with Bill Quick's Letters from My Hometown feature

Beautiful sentiment from Khaled El-Bizri (he's not an anti-semite!):

MICHAEL O'Hanlon (Opinion, Nov. 26) describes the impending war against Iraq as if it is a life-saving surgery.

The ``skillful'' Secretary of Defense William Rumsfeld and his cabal are developing war plans behind our backs. They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an adventure that no one can explain except in terms of oil and securing the hegemony of Israel over other nations of the Middle East. How many Americans are prepared to spend a nickel for that?

History will not remember public relations odes written about the administration. It will more likely remember the millions of dead Iraqis, including the hundreds of thousands of children (according to the United Nations) who have died because of the U.S.-supported sanctions on Iraq.

The future of the Iraqi people lies between the bombs of Rumsfeld and tyranny. O'Hanlon made the choice for them. It is bombs. I wonder what he would he say if they included a sister, a son or a daughter of his.

It's wonderful when anti-war activists say that a Mideast war is only about oil; you have to have your fingers stuck pretty tight in your ears to fail to hear all the other arguments relating to terrorism, security, and oppression by dictators. Khaled El-Bizri (he's not an anti-semite!) adds to the winning formula: The US is motivated by oil and Israeli hegemony.

By the way, Khaled (and you're not an anti-semite!), I doubt if US war plans involve a personal bombing for every single Iraqi citizen.

Posted 1:25 PM by Floyd

(It was only after I created the first post that I realized how stupid this would look in a LIFO blog. Bear with me.)

Another one of Anne's postings complained about, among other things, the Bush administration's relaxation of clean air guidelines. (I'm not providing a link to the story Anne cited, because it's on the LA Times. The LA Times website makes you despair of ever reading a newspaper online again.) Here was my response:

... easing the Clean Air Act regs will likely lead to cleaner air. It used to be that industrial plants had to fully modernize when upgrading their plants. As a result they would not upgrade at all, and there was no improvement to pollution.

Republicans realize that regulations can have unintended or perverse consequences. It's one of the main reasons for their success over the last twenty years. Not only do they appeal to those burdens by regulation, but the recognition of unintended consequences makes Republicans seem intelligent and sophisticated.

Furthermore, the Democrats are continuously complaining that Republicans are attempting to poison or pollute or defund America to death. Fewer and fewer Americans are buying it. At some point these complaints will have only cathartic value for hard-core Democrats. (It's possible that the point has already been reached, as I don't remember the 33rd element being an issue in the 2002 campaign.)

Posted 1:17 PM by Floyd

A few days after Anne Salisbury was nice enough to blogroll me, I posted two contentious comments on her blog. (On Thanksgiving. Gratitude is my middle name.) My comments were about subjects that I have been interested in blogging, so I will expand on them here.

First, Anne linked to a San Francisco Chronicle article about a Capitola City Council election that was decided by one vote (after two recounts, I might add). Anne said that this was proof that your vote does matter.

Before the elections I saw a blog post about how your vote matters, and in the past I have seen similar articles in email, on Usenet, and in newspapers. The standard format of such an argument is to provide citations which appear at first glance to be urban legends. Consider that the city of Capitola's council election -- where 10,000 citizens selected from candidates with no discernable difference -- is the most important and largest election I have ever seen cited as evidence that your vote matters. (Also consider that the Capitola city council is unlikey to decide the legality of abortion, marijuana, or gun possession.)

Another argument I saw recently was that one vote per precinct in Florida would have elected Al Gore. This is hardly relevant, since I am not registered to vote in all of Florida's precincts. As Regis Philbin would say, I am only one man.

Posted 4:07 PM by Floyd

There has been some blogging -- by Instapundit and Matt Welch -- about a Bush administration proposal to reduce tariffs to zero by the year 2015. When I first heard read these reports, I rolled my eyes and waved my fist back and forth at a right angle from my crotch. 2015 is seven years after Bush will leave office, assuming he is reelected. I remember from my youth how Congress would pass "balanced budget" proposals to cut spending -- with the bulk of the cuts occuring ten to twenty years in the future.

You can tell from the following paragraph that the Bush administration plans to lose twenty pounds -- just as soon as it gets done finishing a really yummy bag of chocolates:

The key elements of the US proposal, according to industry and congressional officials briefed on the plan, are: A rapid reduction in high tariffs on non-agricultural products, so that by 2010 there would be no tariffs above 8 per cent. All tariffs would then be reduced progressively to zero by 2015. The elimination, no later than 2010, of all duties that are currently below 5 per cent. A parallel initiative calling for faster elimination of tariffs in many industrial sectors such as chemicals, paper, wood and construction equipment.

Let's see what tariffs will not be eliminated quickly:

• Steel, which tariff Bush whored for the three electoral votes of West Virginia;
  
• Agricultural products such as sugar, the tariff for which mademoiselles Terrell and Landrieu have pledged their undying support so that they may be elected Senator of Louisiana;
  

Also note that nothing has been said about federal subsidies to American farmers, which undercut foreign competitors. These subsidies average 17 billion dollars per year.

There are two positive notes which make me slightly less pessimistic about this proposal than the bullshit budgets I mentioned. First, any plan to reduce tariffs will involve negotiations with other nations. The people holding power in 2010 or 2015 will be more reluctant to trash these agreements than to undo a "balanced budget" act. Second, free trade was an issue in textile-producing North Carolina (current tariff: 17.5%). Liddy Dole was pro-free-trade, and crushed the anti-trade Erskine Bowles.

Still, I will believe tariff reduction when I see it. Bush lost a lot of political and moral capital with his steel tariffs. I see no reason to trust a person who stuffs his face with ice cream as he tells you about his plans for a diet.

Posted 5:46 PM by Floyd

Republicans and others are describing Nancy Pelosi, the new House Minority Leader, as a "San Francisco Democrat". Depending on your level of cynicism, you can translate this as "out of touch liberal" or "fag-loving liberal". In either case it's not going to make San Franciscans happy to vote Republican, but then the GOP hardly does better in SF than it does among blacks.

Al Gore's presidential campaign did something similar in 2000. They attacked Bush by portraying Texas as an open sewer. In the recent election, there was some buzz that the Democrats would contest the Texas Senate seat and the governorship, but they lost both and also the Texas house. I think a backlash against Gore's tactics is a possible explanation, though I have not seen anyone mention it. Certainly it's more intelligent to smear a city of 700,000 which massively supports the opposing party, rather than a state of 21,000,000 in which both parties are competitive.

Posted 5:30 PM by Floyd

Last night I turned to the local all-news radio station (KCBS, 740 AM) at :45 past the hour to get the latest football scores. There were no scores at 8:45 because the station was running an interview. KCBS does a half-hour interview with famous Bay Area people, and airs an interview each Sunday at 8:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Yesterday the guest was Peninsula congresswoman Anna Eshoo, a Democrat.

Eshoo was certainly well-spoken, but style isn't everything. Listening to the meaning of her words was an object lesson in why it's dangerous to assume that facile public speaking correlates to intelligence. I didn't listen to more than a few minutes, but in that brief time, Eshoo managed to sound like an idiot thrice over.

First, she explained her vote against the Iraq war resolution by saying that the US should take a multilateral approach, as opposed to Bush's unilateral approach.

Eshoo offered no justification as to why the large number of allies possessed by the US -- Qatar, Turkey, many of Afganistan's neighbors, Britain, Australia -- aren't sufficient to make the proposed war multilateral. For the US to derive moral sanction from the approval of the UN Security Council is insane; it means giving veto power to, for example, Syria. Presumably if Eshoo had been around in 1940, she would have told the British that first, it was immoral to resist Hitler unilaterally; second, all operations must be vetted through a random selection of powers including the hostile -- say, Hungary -- and the disinterested -- say, Colombia.

Eshoo also claimed that energy companies had "looted" California, that they had stolen 30 billion dollars in broad daylight. She claimed that the Republicans would not let her investigate. Then she mentioned that California had a 24 billion dollar deficit that was directly attributable to the alleged overcharging. This is ludicrous; the extra money that was supposedly paid to out-of-state energy providers came from customers' pocketbooks, not from the state treasury.

When I first turned on the program I heard Eshoo talking about Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco congresswoman who is the new House Minority leader. Eshoo said that "the opposition" would try to paint Pelosi as a radical. She said that while Pelosi was a liberal and proud of it, she was also a "conservative Catholic." What on Earth does that mean? Is Pelosi opposed to Vatican II, or reform of the priesthood? Is she opposed to gay priests or women priests? Or does she just want her masses in Latin? How dumb do you have to be to not know that conservative Catholics are opposed to abortion?!

Posted 11:21 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News published two items on its opinion page today that made me smile. First was Ron Unz's letter to the editor:

I appreciated your running O. Ricardo Pimentel's rather ignorant and personally insulting column condemning my efforts to eradicate bilingual education throughout America (Opinion, Nov. 20). The column effectively illustrates the severe weaknesses of my opponents.

Pimentel casually remarks that ``the facts favor bilingual education,'' but he never explains just what facts he is considering. In California, the test scores of over a million immigrant students have roughly doubled in the four years since Proposition 227 mostly replaced bilingual education with English immersion, but they have shown relatively little improvement in those districts that stubbornly kept their bilingual programs. Although this has been enough to make an English immersion convert of the founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, perhaps Pimentel regards these results as pure coincidence.

More troubling are Pimentel's lack of basic journalistic skills. For example, the main theme of his column is that money almost totally dominates political campaigns, with the higher spending side supposedly winning a remarkably precise 97.1 percent of the time. As his central example, he claims that our English immersion initiative campaign in Arizona outspent its opposition by about a factor of two, resulting in our November 2000 victory.

If Pimentel had bothered spending even five minutes consulting the Web site of the Arizona secretary of state, he would have discovered that we were actually outspent in advertising by about $500,000 to $40,000 in that election, nevertheless winning by a 27-point landslide.

Similarly, he fails to note that just two weeks ago a nearly identical measure won by an even wider 36 point margin in liberal Massachusetts, despite our not spending a single dollar on advertising to counter the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by our opposition.

Opinion columnists are entitled to voice their opinions. But when the facts they cite are riddled with complete error, their apparent journalistic laziness raises serious questions about their professionalism and hence the value of their writings.

Preach it, brother!

There was also a history of how the Proposition 13 tax revolt came to pass. This article was remarkable because it criticized Prop 13, but only obliquely. Hardly a week goes by without the Merc criticizing Prop 13 for depriving the state of California of much-needed tax dollars. You would think from reading the Merc that property taxes were California's only source of revenue, and that Prop 13 allowed each homeowner to send his jar of spare change to Sacramento.

In reality California is rapacious when collecting taxes. Anyone who has bought a home in the last decade is paying 1.1% on sky-high property values. Sales taxes are the highest I've ever seen -- 8.75% in most Bay Area counties. And there is an income tax with a top rate of 9.3%. California's government is awash in money. Of course it doesn't have as much as it "needs" -- no government ever does.

Posted 11:06 PM by Floyd

InstantMan linked to a story about a political song mocking German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The song was interesting, partly because of the weird lyrics that probably make more sense in German. I noticed this statement near the end:

Schroeder, who has thick black hair, won a court bid in May to stop a news agency repeating a suggestion that he dyed it.

You know, if I lived in a country that had been the home of the most vicious and destructive totalitarian state known to man, I would want that country to have a strong commitment to civil liberties. I don't remember Ronald Reagan -- you remember, the horrible cowboy ogre who offended the peace-loving Europeans every day he was in office -- ever attempting to censor anyone in the American media who asked how a 70 year old man could have such lustrous black hair.