December 2006 Archives

Perhaps my least least favorite Democrat, John Edwards, has announced he is running for President in '08. Kip Esquire observes:

How astonishing — and depressing — it was to see a man intentionally making divisiveness the core theme of his campaign. It is wrong when conservatives do it ("us versus gays," "us versus immigrants," "us versus Muslims"), and it's wrong when liberals do it ("us versus the rich," "us versus Wal-Mart," "us versus Wall Street"). September 11th wasn't so long ago that such categorizations are proper.

We can never get so far away from 9-11 that it would be proper.

Richard sends me this meme - five things you don't know about me. Here goes, five things which my off-line friends and family know, but blog readers may not.

1. I was in a large earthquake in Medellin, Colombia. I was in a mountainside suburb at the time, with a view of the whole city. I could see the ground moving in waves, telephone poles swaying, and transformers exploding. It lasted about a full minute, which is a long, long time for an earthquake to continue. It was hard for me to tell when it was really over on account of my shaking knees.

2. Although I'm not a very good singer I was a member of several moderately renown choirs and a cappella groups in high school. On various occasions I sang in front of crowds of 1000+, and went on tour with a small group singing in churches.

3. I lived on my grandparents' farm/ranch in South Dakota in eighth grade. I done any hunting since, but one of these days I will again.

4. I've been a resident of at least 13 towns in six states and three countries.

5. I once spent several weeks playing a minor league professional golf tour.

Now I'm supposed to select five other bloggers and burden them with this little excercise. Andy, David, Jay and Deb, and Cal.

Perry de Havilland sends greetings to our shores:

The more I read about the flood of money coming into the City of London from the United States, the more I am convinced that in the spirit of Christmas and fraternal Anglosphere conviviality, the people of London should say a heartily thank you to Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes and Ohio Republican Michael Oxley.

I'd prefer we sent Sarbanes and Oxley personally. (And permanently)

Not very, says the Cato Institute. Nor are any other states.' Linda Seebach comments in the Rocky:

As for the results, the scores are all quite low - as you'd expect, given that there's essentially no free market in education. On market ratings, Wisconsin and Connecticut are tied at a score of 26 (on a scale of 1 to 100) and Colorado is 10, in a tie for 38th place with Oregon, North Dakota and Mississippi. On policy ratings, the leaders are Texas and Wisconsin, and Colorado is in a 37th place tie with Iowa.

Does that sound right? I have no idea. And unfortunately, it probably doesn't matter, because the constituency for a true free market in education could probably meet in Cato's conference room, if it has one, while the entrenched interests favoring the education system we have now are powerful and numerous.

That's a bit depressing. Here's Cato's state by state report [pdf]. Regarding Colorado it says:

Colorado falls below the national average with a score of 10. Although the state does have modest charter and private school sectors,virtually all of its students are enrolled in conventional public schools that are among the least free in the nation. In particular, parental choice within Colorado's conventional public schools is extremely constrained.
When we ignore current enrollment numbers and look only at Colorado's education policies, its score rises slightly to 13 out of 100, because there is some prospect for future growth in the charter school sector. Nevertheless, charter schools are themselves far from marketlike, so the potential for improvement is limited.

Can't wait for my kids to hit school age! I already have a headache.

I guess earthquakes really can happen anywhere. In 1886 Charleston, SC was hit by one which is estimated at 7.2 on the Richter scale, and lasted most of a minute. If you've ever been through one you know that's big.

At least 60 people were killed, and many buildings damaged.

Here's St. Phillip's Church after partially collapsing, from a fine collection of photos of the event here.

The recent E. coli outbreaks in the news have prompted calls for increased regulation of food producers. That may seem like a natural reaction, and nannyists are taking advantage of the situation. A couple of Sundays ago the Denver Post had this front page article:

E. Coli outbreaks produce new fears
It's not just meats but fruits, veggies. This year's onion and spinach scares reflect a rise in produceborne illnesses, bringing calls for more rules on food producers.

This year's onion and spinach scares reflect a rise in produce- borne illnesses, bringing calls for more rules on food producers. Fears over E. coli bacteria, for years, were focused on beef, but now outbreaks involving onions and spinach are prompting worries about the nation's produce markets.

The headline and sub tell you pretty much the whole story, but as I read the article I noticed that the only source referenced concerning the rise in illnesses is a representative of a certain advocacy group.

"Produce outbreaks have been consistently high since 1999," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"More people are getting sick," she said. "The size of the produce outbreaks are larger, sometimes twice as big as beef, poultry and seafood."

DeWaal's organization is urging the Food and Drug Administration to issue regulations to ensure safe production of fresh fruits and vegetables.

And-

The number of food-borne illnesses from outbreaks associated with fruits and vegetables has doubled over the past decade in the United States, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

There were 639 outbreaks associated with fruits and vegetables and nearly 31,500 cases of illness reported from 1990 to 2004, the center said.

The 1999 date is significant. Just a year before that the CDC began enhanced monitoring of E. coli. You can see from the following CDC table there was a significant increase in the number of reported E. coli cases in 1998.

There is a pronounced downward trend in cases after 1998.

This next table shows the trends for several illnesses caused by contamination, and continues to 2005.

It's pretty clear that you are less likely to catch E. coli or foodborne illness in general now than you were just a few years ago. I don't know that this has been mentioned by any major news sources, although it is vital to know when debating the course of future regulations.

As to the CSPI claim of an increase in produce related cases, it might be wise to keep in mind their less than trustworthy record. My guess would be that E. coli cases were just underreported before 1998.

Here's Judicial Watch's ten most corrupt politicians for 2006.

Republicans win over Democrats, six to four.

David Foster Wallace:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Via MR.

- from cheaper milk.

In 1910 Wilbur and Orville Wright established a team of aviators to exhibit their flying machine. In June of that year the Wright Exhibition Team made its first appearance at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and then continued to tour around the country. In November an exhibition was held at Overland Park in Denver. Ralph Johnstone was one of the pilots.

Here's the Dayton Daily News account of Johnstone's Nov. 18 flight:

Johnstone took off and after a few circuits of the course to gain height, headed toward the foothills. Still ascending, he swept back in a big circle and as he reached the north end of the enclosure he started his spiral glide.

He was then at an altitude of about 800 feet. With his wings tilted at an angle of almost 90 degrees, he swooped down in a narrow circle, the aeroplane seeming to turn almost in its own length.

As he started the second circle the middle strut, which braces the left side of the lower wing, gave way and the wing tips of both upper and lower wings folded up as though they had been hinged.

For a second Johnstone attempted to right the plane by warping the other wing tip. Then horrified spectators saw the plane swerve like a wounded bird and plunge straight toward earth.

Johnstone was thrown from his seat as the nose of the plane swung downward. He caught on one of the wire stays between planes and grasped one of the wooden braces of the upper wing with both hands. Then working with hands and feet, he fought by main strength to warp the planes so that their surfaces might catch the air and check his descent. For a second it seemed that he might succeed, for the helmet he wore blew off and fell much more rapidly than the plane.

The hope was momentary, however, for about 300 feet from the ground the machine turned completely over and the spectators fled wildly as the broken plane, with the aviator still fighting grimly in its mesh of wires and stays, plunged among them with a crash.

I probably wouldn't know about this event except that I work at Overland Park, now only a golf course. Back at the time of the exhibition Overland was also a race track. The walls of the modern clubhouse have pictures of the exhibition and of Johnstone before his flight.

The Wright Exhibition Team was disbanded the following November after only about a year and a half of existence. The Wright brothers found that the team wasn't helping sell planes, which probably had something to do with the fact that three of the ten team members were killed during exhibitions.

[FFT posted a day late!]

Glenn Greenwald has been writing about the story, with lengthy posts here and here.

He writes:

Ordinarily -- meaning when our Republic works the way it is supposed to -- grave misconduct of this sort is investigated by Congress, which has as one of its principal functions the duty of oversight. It is the responsibility of Congress -- and, really, only Congress can fulfill the responsibility -- to ensure that the vast law enforcement powers under the control of the Executive branch [in order (theoretically) to execute our laws] are not abused.

But, needless to say, our Republic hasn't been functioning the way it is supposed to, in large part because the Congress has been ruled by authoritarian followers of the President who believe that the Leader does not err. Therefore -- outside of Narco News and a couple of isolated, ignored reporters -- nothing relating to any of these events has been investigated, neither by the media nor the Congress. And that is really as pure of a microcosm of the last five years as anything I can think of.

There just must be a Congressional investigation into this entire matter. The extent of wrongdoing here is staggering. It would be one thing if it were just some rogue law enforcement officers engaging in excessive, criminal and/or violent behavior. By itself, that would compel all sorts of investigations and corrective actions, but that would be a more commonplace outrage.

This case goes far beyond that. Agents of our government worked with, paid and recorded a serial murderer who repeatedly tortured and slaughtered people with the knowledge of high-level DOJ and DHS officials.

Glenn is not wrong, but it is an error to frame this scandal in partisan terms. It takes very little imagination to see this sort of thing happening under Democratic Party rule. I believe under the Clinton administration there was an increasing manifestation of ruthlessness by federal agents with little to no accountabilty. You may remember such incidents as well. The biggest difference is the lack of public attention to this scandal, as opposed to the Branch Davidian or Randy Weaver standoffs of the last decade. There seemed to be very little effort in the previous administration or previous congresses to bring out-of-control federal agents to justice.

One of my former home towns is El Paso, TX, where a rather disturbing story is unfolding this week. Start with this article from the Observer:

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the first narrative account to appear in print. The story turns on one extraordinary fact: playing a central role in the House of Death was a US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, who was paid more than $220,000 (£110,000) by US law enforcement bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel. In August 2003 Lalo bought the quicklime used to dissolve the flesh of the first victim, Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes, and then helped to kill him; he recorded the murder secretly with a bug supplied by his handlers - agents from the Immigration and Customs Executive (Ice), part of the Department of Homeland Security. That first killing threw the Ice staff in El Paso into a panic. Their informant had helped to commit first-degree murder, and they feared they would have to end his contract and abort the operations for which he was being used. But the Department of Justice told them to proceed.

This story originated with a San Antonio reporter named Bill Conroy, who has been following it for quite a while. His series reporting for Narco News can be found here. It's a complicated multipart affair. I haven't had time to read through all those stories yet, but they seem to be pretty damning. And there's much more to it-

... San Antonio freelance journalist Bill Conroy: Federal agents visited his home and workplace trying to squeeze him for the source of a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo.

Conroy freelances investigative pieces about the drug war, border issues, and national security for Narco News, an online magazine covering Mexico and Central and South America. He is also the editor of the San Antonio Business Journal, but his work for Narco News is unrelated.
[...]
According to Conroy's lawyer, Ron Tonkin, a former assistant U.S. attorney specializing in drug cases, around 6 p.m. on May 23, a man and woman identifying themselves as internal affairs agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited Conroy's home.
[...]
Salazar didn't call Conroy back, but the next day, he and a male agent showed up at the Business Journal. Conroy escorted them to a conference room, where Salazar reportedly said, "I want to know your source" of a leaked, yet unclassified DHS memo that had been the centerpiece of one of Conroy's Narco News stories. Tonkin said Conroy refused to give up his source and told Salazar that if they planned on continuing to question him, he would record the conversation.

The agents left the conference room, reportedly asking Conroy, "Does your boss know you write for Narcosphere?"

The agents then took Conroy's boss into a conference room, where, according to Tonkin, he told them Conroy had done the work on his own time for another publication and there was nothing he could do for them.
[...]
Tonkin and Conrad speculated that the visits were "payback" for Conroy's stories that were embarrassing to U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas Johnny Sutton. On April 1, Conroy reported on an alleged cover-up regarding ICE agents who were reportedly protecting a criminal informant accused of multiple drug-related murders in Ciudad Juárez. The case fell under Sutton's jurisdiction.

There's much more at the above link, but we won't linger on that aspect of the story now. The cartel Lalo had infiltrated attempted to kill a DEA Agent. [again from the Observer account]

... one of Santillan's victims had revealed the address of Homer Glen McBrayer - a DEA special agent resident in Juarez who operated under diplomatic cover. At 6pm on 14 January, two men rang his doorbell continuously for 10 minutes. Afraid, his wife phoned him at work. McBrayer rushed home and ushered his wife and daughters into their car. As soon as they left the estate where they lived, they were stopped by a Mexican police car. Two civilian vehicles hemmed McBrayer's car in. Their occupants got out and waited while McBrayer talked to the cops. They were Santillan's men.

Having showed his diplomatic passport, McBrayer phoned a DEA colleague, who arrived within minutes. Unwilling, perhaps, to abduct two US agents, a woman and two children on a busy street, the cartel men backed off. As the standoff unfolded, Santillan twice called Lalo. He asked him to find out what he could about an American called Homer Glen - the corrupt police had not given McBrayer's surname. Santillan, claimed Lalo, said he thought he worked for the tres letras - code for the DEA - and intended to blow up his house.

The McBrayers were lucky to be alive, and the DEA, kept in the dark about the continued use of Lalo after the first murder six months earlier, reacted with fury
[...]
Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice counterpart, John Gaudioso.

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

According to the story, Sandy Gonzalez was forced to resign by senior managers of the DEA after writing that letter.

If you follow the links above you'll read much, much more, most of it horrifying. I'll have more here in coming days.

Or a pro-freedom instinct, if you will. I try to practice it, keep it honed. It tends to dull when I read a lot of news articles, which unsurprisingly, rarely consider liberty as part of reporting. Here's a cute story as an example:

N.Y. Cracks Down on Mystery Meats

A food safety inspector noticed an interesting special posted in the front window of a market in Queens: 12 beefy armadillos.

In Brooklyn, inspectors found 15 pounds of iguana meat at a West Indian market and 200 pounds of cow lungs for sale at another store. A West African grocery in Manhattan sold smoked rodent meat from a refrigerated display case.

All of it was headed for the dinner table. All of it was also illegal.

When I first noticed the story, via Amygdala, I reacted probably as the author intended. Eww, gross. But then I pondered this bit:

Authorities say the discoveries are part of a larger trend in which markets across New York are buying meat and other foods from unregulated sources and selling them to an immigrant population accustomed to more exotic fare. State regulators have stepped up enforcement, confiscating 65 percent more food -- 1.6 million pounds -- through September than they did in all of 2005.

And:

If all else fails, Corby will get a court injunction and shutter stores, something the state did 66 times in 2005 and 72 times through September of this year.

Holy cow! So to speak. That's a lot of meat! And a lot of people put out of business. Surely there must have been some tragic series of food poisonings which prompted drastic action. But I reread the story, and there's no mention of any such occurence. Maybe it's happened, maybe a batch of illegal cow lungs killed a bunch of folks there, but the newspaper story doesn't mention it. I think it would be crucial to the article, to dispell my libertarian suspicion that NY bureaucrats are making themselves busy at the expense of immigrant communities.

Too many people totally lack any such instinct. You may have seen this appalling story on ABC TV a couple nights ago. A vicious hoaxer called a McDonalds in Kentucky, claimed to be a policeman, and convinced the managers that a young female employee was suspected of theft. At the caller's behest, they strip searched the employee, and forced her to perform degrading sexual acts over several hours while the hoaxer remained on the phone.

Even more bizarrely, this hoax has been repeated at least 70 times over the last decade around the country, with varying degrees of success. The first thing that jumps out when hearing the story is the colossal stupidity of the people whe fail to recognize they're being had. The second, by my way of thinking, is the lack of healthy suspicion of the supposed authority figure on the phone. Even if they are dumb enough to believe the fraudulent caller, they should have enough respect for individual rights to balk at complying. These people are completely missing libertarian instincts.

It's Colombia News, a fascinating current events blog about a fascinating place.

Here's one especially interesting story from my old hometown, Medellín. There's much more.

Here's a nice editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Cynthia Tucker. A few bits:

On Nov. 21, an elderly woman was shot dead by Atlanta police officers who crashed through her door after dark to execute a "no-knock" search warrant for illegal drugs. Living in a high-crime neighborhood, apparently frightened out of her wits, she fired at the intruders with a rusty revolver, hitting all three. That's according to the police account, which says the officers then returned fire, striking Johnston in the chest and extremities.
[...]
The investigation may reveal police incompetence, and it may reveal police malfeasance. Unfortunately, however, it is unlikely to point to the root cause of this tragedy — a foolish, decades-long effort to curb illegal drug use through arrests and incarceration. Raging on mindlessly, the war on drugs has caused untold collateral damage — leaving children fatherless, helping to exacerbate the spread of AIDS and filling prisons with people who, with minimal rehabilitation, might be contributing to society rather than draining its resources.
[...]
Whatever led Atlanta police to the small, burglar-barred house in a downtrodden Atlanta neighborhood — contradictory claims have been offered about the search warrant — it's clear that Johnston was no drug dealer. Even if she had been, her crimes would not have justified the intrusive and dangerous tactics police used. Those tactics flow from a failed policy that emphasizes arrests — any arrests, no matter the offender's stature in the drug-trade hierarchy or the size of the cache of drugs. That policy has kept police busy with penny-ante dealers while the real drug trade flourishes.

The drug war is so obviously wrong you have to wonder what it would take to end it.

H/T Drug WarRant.

We stay local for this story. In 1859 a major gold discovery was made at what became Central City, Colorado. It was a rich find, and the mountains for miles around held more gold. Within a few years the area was honeycombed with mine tunnels reaching hundreds of feet underground.

Deep mining has some inherent engineering problems, one of them the problem of groundwater seepage. Many tunnels became flooded as nineteenth century technology couldn't drain the water as fast as it came in. The rather ingenious solution came in 1893 when work started on the Argo tunnel in nearby Idaho Springs. Idaho Springs sits about two thousand feet of elevation lower than Central City, and the surrounding mountaintops higher still. The Argo tunnel undercut many mines by drilling more than four miles nearly horizontally. Not only water but the ore from these mines was lowered into the Argo and then shipped out, which was much easier than raising the rock up to the entrances of the mines.

Fifty years later the Argo was still in operation, and then

It was on January 19, 1943, about quitting time, that a small crew of four miners worked to set off the last charge of the day. Conditions were miserable, the Kansas Shaft had quit pumping water anticipating that the Argo crew would find the shaft and drain it. The whole Nevadaville area was flooded with water twelve hundred feet deep; many of the flooded mines above the Argo were leaking into the tunnel; it was wet and hard to set off the charges.

As the miners would drill holes for dynamite charges, the water would squirt out the seams under high pressure, it was later estimated the water pressure was over five hundred pounds per square inch.

You can guess what happened next. The rock between the Kansas Shaft and the Argo tunnel gave way. The result was the Argo turning into something like a giant fire hose. If you can believe the locals the four unfortunate miners and their ore cars were shot several hundred yards across the valley. The January temperatures froze the water and turned it into an ice dam which blocked Clear Creek which in turn flooded buildings in Idaho Springs.

The seeping water from all those mines still runs out through the Argo. Those gold veins are multi-metallic, containing aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, cadmium, lead, arsenic and others. That stuff dissolves and comes out in the water. Nowadays the Argo is a Superfund site.

A fistfight breaks out in Mexico's congress. The constitutional crisis there isn't resolved yet, and it could get uglier as the leftists refuse to let president Calderon take office.

It's an open question whether brawls would be a bad thing in the U.S. congress, though.