Tex doesn't seem to be entirely convinced that we have our priorities straight in this country. He might be right.

Via Damian Penny.

 
Daniel Henninger writes on Opinion Journal about the proliferation of technology and migration changing Tip O'Neill's maxim that all politics is local. Henninger discusses the matter in the context of the recent announcement by South Korean scientists that they have cloned a human embryo and notes that just saying "stop" won't halt such research. It will just move it offshore.

Good point. But doesn't "stop" pretty much characterize our war on drugs, too? Granted, there are more sticks and carrots employed in the drug war than there are in the effort to prevent the spread of various technologies such as cloning, but given time, the same techniques will eventually be used if we continue to want to prohibit the use of cloning techniques around the world.

Henninger's conclusion is that banning the use of cloning technology ranks up there with King Canute commanding the tides to recede: It ain't gonna work. I agree. And the war on drugs is not going to work, either.

 
President Bush announced today that he favors amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Dumb idea. You don't use the Constitution to freeze social policy. And what happened to federalism? Why in the name of all that is holy should the federal government have any position at all on what constitutes a valid marriage, any more than it should have a position on what constitutes a valid deed?

I thought we might have figured out that the Constitution should not deal with matters of social policy when we fought the Civil War. Slavery, as far as I know, is the only non-governmental institution enshrined in the Constitution. And as a result of the fact that the Constittion explicitly protected the institution of slavery, the slave states objected when Lincoln was elected President. There followed a war that left the South in ruins and from which it did not recover from for a century or more.

The durability of the Constitution stems entirely from its flexibility and the drafters' refusal to say "this is how it shall be for ever and ever, amen" on all but a very few carefully chosen subjects. The Constitution provides a sparse description of the government it creates and allows succeeding generations some latitude in interpreting its provisions.

So I'll vote against the amendment to ban gay marriage (and vote against those of my representatives, if any, who favor it) when the time comes. The Constitution ain't broke, so don't fix it.

That said, I must add that I think that the proponents of gay marriage have not thought through the consequences of their position. Assuming that gay marriage is allowed anywhere, will the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution require recognition of a gay marriage everywhere? Yes, I know that there is a federal statute saying otherwise, but you simply can't change or limit constitutional mandates by statute. Will marriage be limited to two people? What about three or more? Why (or why not)? Will there continue to be proscriptions on marriages between close relatives? If marriage is no longer assumed to be the vehicle it is now for procreation or child rearing, why should the ban on marriages between siblings (or parent and child) continue? What will the consequences of a marriage be? As it stands now, marriage involves rights to citizenship, property, pensions and inheritances, tax and other governmental benefits, and health insurance, among many other things. Will any of that change? Why, or why not? Will Donald Trump be permitted under the "new marriage" to marry all of his children a year or two prior to the Donald's death in order to entitle the children to the benefit of the estate tax marital deduction? It's a silly idea, I know, but, then, I'm not the one advocating a change in the nature of a basic social institution.

While I don't particularly object to the immediate changes being proposed, some thought really must be given to the scope of the changes being introduced and what effect they will have on the institution and the existing benefits and emoluments associated with it before the changes are permitted to take effect.

I also feel compelled to add that this proposed amendment will have zero effect on my vote for President in 2004. I'm with Martin Devon: This election is all about ________ (insert issue: jobs, marriage, tax cuts ...). None of us will have ___________ (jobs, marriage, tax cuts ...) if we are dead, and al Qaeda wants us dead.

Bush has already convinced me that he's serious about the war, so my vote is his to lose as of now. But if Kerry can convince me he, too, is serious about this war, he has a shot at my vote.

Not that it will make any difference. I live and vote in New Jersey, which will undoubtedly go heavily for whoever the Democratic nominee is.

 
TALK TO ME, KERRY

I graduated from high school in 1971, and from college in 1975. During my high school and college years, American involvement in the Vietnam War reached its peak, and slowly wound down. By the time I was eligible for the draft (Spring, 1972 was "my" lottery), America was was all but out of Vietnam.

I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I was thankful that I drew an extremely high number in the draft lottery and therefore wouldn't have to go. I was even more pleased that the draft was ended shortly after the lottery drawing (but nowhere near as pleased as the guy in my dorm who had drawn number 5 in the lottery).

The arguments about Vietnam were interminable. Some said that Vietnam was no threat to the US, whether under communism or some sort of right wing dictatorship. But even if a communist government in Vietnam was no threat to the US, surely the communists would not stop until someone stopped them. Since communists did not believe in real elections, or freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or whole bunches of other things that I thought were important, they needed to be stopped somewhere, sometime, and we were the only ones who could stop them. Others said we shouldn't ever have been in Vietnam to begin with, so we had to leave. But we were there, and leaving could (and later did) have disastrous consequences, both for us and for the Vietnamese who had placed their trust in us. Still others said we couldn't win. But it was clear that we could in fact win the conventional war, if not war for "hearts and minds". God knows, I'm no military expert, but surely there was at least one way for a superpower to prevail militarily over a backwards third world country. I think all we had to do was stop trying not to lose and use those tools available to us. No, not nuclear weapons, but Special Forces, more conventional troops, more air power, more actions designed to interdict the North's logistics train, etc. But I think the decisive thing for me is that I felt I could no longer trust what my government was telling me about what was happening on the other side of the world. General Westmoreland or the President (Johnson or Nixon) would say one thing, and another thing entirely would appear on my television screen during the nightly news.

So I opposed the war in Vietnam. Was that a result of the fact that I really really didn't want to go there? Perhaps in part. Anyone who actually wants to be sent halfway around the globe to be shot at by people who want to kill him is not, in my opinion, functioning on all cylinders. With the convenience of hindsight, however, it is obvious that both the Johnson and Nixon administrations were not prosecuting the war to win, they were attempting to avoid losing. Nixon even said so. He just wanted to get out while avoiding as much of the negative consequences of defeat as he could. That meant that the war never would be won. And that, in turn, meant that my contemporaries (not to mention the poor bastards unlucky enough to actually live in Vietnam) were killing and being killed in what seemed at the time to be a hopeless and ultimately pointless exercise without end.

Obviously, the anti-war forces eventually won the domestic political battle and the US withdrew from Vietnam. And then an odd thing happened. The peace accords so arduously and solemnly negotiated and signed by the US and the leaders of North Vietnam in Paris were utterly ignored by the North. It was obvious that the government of North Vietnam had never intended to abide by any agreement with us pertaining to the independence of the South. Shortly after Congress prohibited any further monetary support for South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese sent a conventional army south and took Saigon. And we did nothing. We didn't even send money or supplies to our erstwhile allies in the South. We abandoned our allies and enabled the North to impose their particularly vicious brand of government there. The fall of Saigon was followed rapidly by "re-education camps" and a flood of boat people.

Did we realize in advance that these things would happen? Absolutely. And the fact that it happened, and that we knew it would happen and that we knew about it while it was happening made me ashamed.

Now I'm fifty years old (ugh!), and, at least partly as a reaction to the shameful behavior of our government in abandoning the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the descendants of Ho Chi Minh to achieve a wholly fake "peace", my political views have changed. My skepticism concerning government pronouncements remains fairly high, but I have also become much more distrustful of the people who supported the years long farce that was the negotiation and "implimentation" of the treaty ending the Vietnam war, and my trust in governments other than my own, especially non-democratic governments, is pretty close to absolute zero.

Which is why I would understand if John Kerry's views about the Vietnam war, and war in general, have changed since he testified before Congress in 1971. Kerry testified that "we found that most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart." Well, yes, I am sure that being free of strafing helicopters and napalm attacks were things that people in Vietnam desired. But I think they wanted more. I think they wanted to be free. I think they wanted so badly to be free that some of them left everything they had ever known, everything they had ever worked for, and went to sea in old, leaky, overcrowded fishing boats in an attempt to reach Hong Kong and the haven of the closest democracy.

Because I would understand if Kerry's views on the Vietnam War and war in general had changed over the last 30 odd years, I need to hear from him whether they have and if so, in what way. I need to hear from him because he wants me to vote for him for President. He wants me to help place him in charge of our armed forces. Does he still believe that communism was no threat to the United States? Does he believe that North Vietnam honored the Paris peace treaty? If not, does he believe they should have, and what, if anything, would he have done to make them honor it?

On a more contemporary note, what, if any, military threats does Kerry believe the nation faces today. Does militant Islam pose a threat to the US? How would he deal with an attack of the scope of 9/11? Does he believe that, over and above any failure of intelligence which may have resulted in a failure to prevent it, the US bears any responsibility whatever for the attack of 9/11? I won't be satisfied with platitudes about "internationalizing" our response or "increasing law enforcement and intelligence efforts". I want specifics. He would not have gone to war in Iraq? OK. He needs to tell me what precisely he would have done. Then I can compare the likely results of his actions to those of George Bush, and I can make up my mind.

I have to say, though, that Kerry's explanation of how his opinions had evolved over the years will need to be pretty convincing in order to earn my vote. He'll have to explain to me why he voted against the first Gulf War, then in favor of the second, then against funding the war he was supposedly in favor of. And he won't get my vote simply by saying George Bush misled him. He has to tell me what he wanted to do and why that would have been a good thing to do. And given that Kerry is saying that the War on Terror is more of a police and intelligence matter than a military campaign, I'd also like to hear whether and why he voted to freeze defense spending, and wanted to cut the intelligence budget (these last items are from Smash, no links available). Oh, and while Kerry's explaining things, perhaps he can tell me why he voted against military pay raises, cost of living adjustments, and family housing almost every time they came up (Smash again).

Until then, I am left to compare Kerry's voting record, for which, in my opinion, the kindest characterization is an attempt to be all things to all people, with Bush's record of disposing of two despotic regimes with minimal loss of life and attempting to establish something approaching democracy in each place.

The comparison, in the absence of a cogent and particularized explanation from Kerry, is not flattering.

 
O! CANADA!

I've been getting a good long chuckle out of the bruhaha (brewhaha?) about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's appearance in Canada.

The "issue" was first brought to my attention by Damien Penny, who linked to this hilarious weather report by Triumph in Hawaii. Sample: "Howard [anchorman], don't worry about the light winds. Hurricane Isabel couldn't mess up your hair."

But a similar act in Canada about Canadians was, shall we say, not well received in certain quarters.

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien took his cameras to the Quebec Winter Carnival where he launched a satirical attack on French Canadians that is sure to further offend Quebeckers still stinging from comments made by CBC hockey analyst Don Cherry.

Canada's government has condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien turned out to be Conan the Barbarian on his road show into Canada this week. His NBC program threw oil and matches down our national fault line Thursday night with crude jokes about French Canadians. This one ran under the headline "Canada AmBushed by Loose Conan." Self parody just doesn't get much better than that. The linked article is worth reading just to see how the ijit worked Bush into this.

Oh, alright, I'll quote him: "Could it be that our growing U.S. criticism has set the Bush government out for revenge? Do the Americans secretly want to split up our two solitudes so they can pick up the pieces? Could the last week's events be part of a CIA plot to grab our oil, lumber, water and snow? Or our few remaining hockey stars?" Was he serious? Well, he was a few paragraphs earlier when he said "But I wonder how [Conan O'Brien would] feel if we let Canada's Insulting Beaver Puppet loose on U.S. TV to yuk it up about Sept. 11. We all have our raw nerves and O'Brien just hit ours. Where will this loose Conan take his show next? Maybe Ireland, where he could try out his Catholic-Protestant jokes?"

And the sketch that created all this furor? Two days later it was posted on the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

 
MMMMM, COMMENTS!

Dr. S.A. Robertson is hereby awarded a prize (consisting of something completely worthless to be determined later) for being my very first commenter. Ever. Thank you, Dr. Robertson.

He points out that the political beliefs of the pool of candidates are skewed left, probably by biases built into the system which discourage conservatives from entering the fields to begin with. He is undoubtedly correct about the politics of the pool of potential candidates, and probably correct as to why. He concludes that it is therefore entirely possible that there might be no discrimination in hiring.

A valid point.

However, it was also once true that in a given field of employment, there were few, if any, minority or female candidates. In some cases, it still is largely true. Would an assertion that "we tried to find a candidate from [pick your excluded group], but received no applications from qualified candidates" work as a defense against a claim of racial or sexual discrimination in hiring, even if the assertion were absolutely true? I am no employment law expert, but I think that such a claim, by itself, would be insufficient. At the very least, it would have to be accompanied by a showing that, however small the pool of candidates from the excluded group, that pool was thoroughly searched and all qualified candidates within that pool were encouraged to apply for the position. The alternative is a system of what I call quotas and others call "goals and timetables."

And that raises a larger question. By complaining about Dr. Brandon at Duke, I am not advocating affirmative action for political conservatives. I think Duke should hire the very best philosophy professors it can entice to North Carolina. If that means that the hires will be uniformly liberal in their political leanings, it is only because Dr. Brandon and his colleagues, by calling people from half of the political spectrum dumb and casually dismissing them and their political beliefs, have been stupid enough to discourage half of the highly intelligent people who might otherwise have been interested in the field from pursuing a career in it. The result of this discrimination is that scholarship in the field will suffer by either declining or (more likely) not achieving as much as it otherwise might. There are advantages to diversity.

I think it is unfortunate that Professor Brandon, and those of his present colleagues who are perpetuating the problem, are not likely to suffer the consequences of that perpetuation, given the time frame in which those consequences will manifest themselves. But the "cure" of affirmative action is far worse than the disease. I do not understand how anyone could expect to achieve the elimination of de facto discrimination (by race, by gender, by political belief or by any other factor not relevant to the position being filled) by creating and enforcing a set of rules which imposes approved types of discrimination. It boggles the mind (mine, at least) to believe that substituting one set of discriminatory practices for another could somehow end discriminatory practices.

On the other hand, I would find the irony of Dr. Brandon being forced to undergo "sensitivity training" hilarious.

 
PROGRESS

I remember reading a short book in either elementary school or junior high (I'm old enough to have pre-dated the "Middle School" craze that swept the American Educational Establishment) in which an Italian priest travelled to Moscow at the height of the cold war with a tour group and poked fun at the Soviet Union by lavishing praise on on humdrum things like plumbing as sterling examples of Soviet superiority.

In that vein, CognoCentric proudly announces the advent of Comments! None of that old fashioned whining, "Send me an email! Please!" No, no, no! Both CognoCentric readers (consisting of The Daughter and one other person who prefers to remain nameless, but whose initials are probably Carey Gage) can now fill the echo chamber with high praise about the low thoughts expressed on this site.

Comments will be unregulated, but I hope to have the problem of deleting obscene or abusive remarks.

The opinions expressed in the comments do not necessarily reflect the views of CognoCentric (duh!).

 
Welcome Instapundit readers (and thanks for the link, Glen). Take a look around while you're here. You might enjoy reading Speech Police.

 
I GIVE THE PROFESSOR A D

UPDATE (3/7/04)

This post was the subject of an Instalanche on February 13, 2004. Glen posted more on the subject on March 6, and linked to his original post. As a result, I have gotten a sort of "echo instalanche." For those of you seeing this post for the first time, there is more on the matter here (responding to this article), here (responding to my very first (!) commenter) and here.

END UPDATE

Brandon responds

This is the guy, a professor of philosophy at Duke, who said, "We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

The short version:

Brandon's points: First, his Mills reference was a joke now recognized to be not unfunny or untrue but "unappreciated in this context". He neither retracts the statement nor apologizes for having insulted half the population and throwing mud at his political opponents. Second, Brandon argues that, while the political views of the Duke Philosophy depatment are indeed well to the left of the general population, that could not be the result of any bias in hiring because of the demonstrably untrue "fact" that no job candidate's political views are known prior to hiring. Third, Brandon concludes from this that there must therefore be some set of traits or qualities of people on the left of the political spectrum which makes them good academics, but he can't tell us what those traits or qualities are. Fourth, Brandon thinks conservative Duke students should get over being called stupid by their professor and hone their political thinking, presumably into somthing along the lines of the political thinking of the professor. And fifth, instead of having to be insulted and discriminated against for the four years required to get an undergraduate degree, Brandon urges conservative students to continue the process for the rest of their lives by getting a doctorate and becoming professors of philosophy, where their careers can be limited based on their political views.

The long version (Brandon's statements are in bold):

... I am convinced that there is a large group of people in the country who are not at all interested in a calm rational discussion of the issues raised by the recent ad in The Chronicle taken out by the Duke Conservative Union.

That's true. There are such people, and Professor Brandon, you are one of them. Calm, rational discussion of the issues does not include characterizing your opponents as stupid.

... I accept the DCU's contention that the distribution of political views of Duke's faculty is significantly different from, and to the left of, the United States population as a whole. As a philosopher of science I see this phenomenon as worthy of exploration and explanation. I'll return to that shortly.

In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context. Furthermore, as a political philosopher Mill is a hero to both the left and the right. So, except to say that we should all read more Mill, I'll leave him out of this.

Was there an apology in there somewhere? Did he say the statement was untrue? No, just that the statement was a joke which was not (and could not be?) appreciated by the unenlightened neanderthals on the right.

... I think ... [there are philosophy courses where] ... the political leanings of the professor are exactly as relevant as those of your math professor. As a graduate student I was a teaching assistant in a logic course taught by a socialist. He used the textbook written by his colleague, a conservative Republican. If the teacher has been a Republican and the text written by a socialist I don't think the class would have been any different. But what about courses in philosophy of law, ethics and social and political philosophy? Here I accept that the course content might well be different were it taught by a conservative Republican vs. a liberal Democrat. Different, but not radically different.

Not radically different? Oh, please. In what courses taught by conservatives might Che Guevara and Fidel Castro be extolled as heroic figures? Name the courses taught by a conservative where the pharmaceutical industry is vilified for not giving away for free AIDS and other drugs that they spent millions, or even billions, to develop, test and bring to the market. Tell me where to take a course taught by a conservative in which capitalism is demonized as the root of all evil.

... There seems to be a widespread perception that professors reward students for agreeing with them and penalize those who disagree with them. That has certainly not been my experience; not as a student, nor a professor. Philosophers value good argumentation. If your professor is a Rawlsian and you offer a strong argument for preferring Nozick's position to Rawls' you will be rewarded. You don't need to agree with your professor in order to learn from him or her.

That's only partially true. You don't need to agree with the professor in order to learn from him. But you frequently do have to agree with the professor in order to get a good grade. In my college, the professors were, in general, fairly liberal (although not by today's standards) and the best of them could and did grade without politics in mind. But only the very best of them. I do not believe that was true of the majority. Even if I am wrong and it was true of each and every one of them, it would be an unusual student who expressed views diametrically opposed to those of his professor when said professor has publicly stated that those views (and the people who espouse them) are stupid. An application for your professor of the very ideas that he has indicated are stupid is generally not the best route to a high GPA.

So I agree with the DCU that conservative Duke students will in fact take a large number of their courses with a significant political content from professors whose politics differs from theirs. Why not see this as an opportunity to hone your political thinking rather than see it as an obstacle to the sort of education you want?

In other words, being exposed to Professor Brandon's politics is an opportunity to discard your stupid political beliefs in favor of the more intelligent ones advocated by ... Professor Brandon! How could conservatives have been so blind? On a more serious note, since we are talking about "political thinking" and, at least according to Brandon, not about course content, why is Professor Brandon suggesting that this is a one way street? Why should Brandon not welcome this opportunity to hone his political thinking, rather than dismissing those who don't agree with him as stupid?

Finally, let me go over what I did and did not say. The DCU seems to believe that the difference in the politics of the faculty vs. the population as a whole is due to hiring bias. The claim is that we liberals only want to hire other liberals. The process for hiring faculty in our university is largely decentralized. The hiring units in universities are departments, not the administration. I did not presume to speak for other departments, but I did categorically deny that there was any such bias in the hiring practices of Duke's philosophy department.

I don't doubt that Brandon denied the charge of hiring bias, but despite that denial, his Mills quote establishes beyond any doubt the contempt in which he holds conservatives, thus making the denial completely meaningless. Think of his statement as applied to minority candidates, instead of conservatives:

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as the Grand Wizard of the KKK said, stupid people are generally black, then there are lots of blacks we will never hire.

Would you believe someone who said that and followed it by denying that there was no racial discrimination in his hiring policies? I wouldn't.

None of us would want such a bias to be there...

Is that because liberals are too smart to entertain any bias with respect to those stupid conservatives?

... , and in virtually all cases there is no mechanism for it to be there. Typically, we know nothing about the candidates' politics until after they are hired.

Wrong. Just wrong. To do its job correctly, the hiring committee will have read the candidate's published works. It will know the institutions where the candidate worked and studied. The committee will have heard the candidate speak. It will have communicated with the candidate's thesis advisor and/or department chair. Any one of those things will provide a strong indication of the candidate's political beliefs, if not an outright statement of them.

... The serious and interesting issue is how do we explain the surplus of liberals in academia. If we rule out the hiring bias hypothesis, what's left?

But Brandon has not provided a reason to rule out the hiring bias hypothesis, other than the patently false claim that it could not happen because the people doing the hiring are blissfully unaware of the political leanings of the candidates prior to hiring.

The phenomenon could be due to the political indoctrination of new hires. But given the independent nature of most academics this is not at all credible.

Post hiring political indoctrination is Brandon's straw man, easily rebutted. The issue here is not political indoctrination of new hires, but political bias in selecting those new hires.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the only viable hypothesis left is something like the following: There is a statistical association between the qualities that make for good academics and those that lead to left-leaning political views. Said another way, a larger proportion of academics are likely to be liberal, but certainly not all, and this may also vary by field and subfield because of the nature of knowledge, learning and the advancement of knowledge in that field. But, stated this way the hypothesis still remains incredibly vague. What qualities, what traits are we talking about? What causal relations underlie these statistical associations? These questions are worth exploring, but I think the hypothesis is right headed.

Obviously, there is a strong correlation between one's politics and one's academic standing and advancement in some fields. I agree with Brandon that the real question is why such a correlation exists. Assuming that this is the natural order of things is, to say the least, unhelpful. And that is all that Professor Brandon does by hypothesizing the existence of a relationship between the qualities that make for good academics and those that lead to left-leaning political views. I keep waiting for him to tell me which traits and qualities of leftists are naturally selected for in the academic world, other than left leaning politics. But of course, he doesn't. And I think he can't, because they don't exist.

If conservative Duke students object to being taught by liberal professors, there is not much they can do about it in the short term.

I don't think Conservative Duke students were objecting to being taught by liberal professors. I think they were objecting to the hypocrisy of liberal professors who demand diversity based on skin color but uniformity of political thought. I think they were objecting to the disdain with which they were treated by liberal professors. I think they were objecting to the offhand dismissal of their political ideology as stupid by liberal professors.

But over the longer haul they could change the political landscape of leading research universities. Study hard, do well in school, go on to get a Ph.D. and get yourself a job teaching at a university.

Where your prospects for advancement will, by Brandon's own admission, be limited based on your stupid political views. Right. Only masochists need apply. Can you imagine the reaction this little bit of smug condescension would get if it had been directed at a minority student?

But if you do you might find that political indoctrination is not really what animates academic life.

As noted above, political indoctrination is a straw man, easily dismissed by Brandon. Political bias in hiring is the issue, here, which results in gross underrepresentation of conservatives in academia. Other than a wholly unsupported denial, Brandon has said nothing to refute the existence of that bias.

 
SUCH A DEAL!

The US has struck a deal with Liberia which will allow the Navy to stop and search Liberian flagged vessels on the high seas.

"The boarding agreement provides authority on a bilateral basis to board sea vessels suspected of carrying illicit shipments of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems or related materials," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday.

"It's based on the need to stop the proliferation in weapons of mass destruction and means to deliver them," he said.

If a U.S. ship suspects a Liberian vessel is carrying proliferation-related cargo, the captain can request the suspect vessel to confirm its nationality and if needed authorize the boarding, searching and possible detention of the vessel and its cargo, Boucher said.

The vessel has two hours from time of contact to respond.

Under the agreement, a Liberian vessel has similar rights with respect to suspect U.S. vessels.

I think the agreement could use some improvement.

The MSNBC story does not make clear what that last sentence means. Does it mean the (presumably nonexistent) Liberian Navy can stop and search US flagged vessels? Or does it mean that any Liberian vessel can stop any US flagged vessel? The first would be OK (well worth the trade off to be able to stop and board Liberian vessels). The second alternative would be completely unacceptable. It amounts to an open invitation to al Qaeda to charter a Liberian flagged freighter, and intercept, board and take over a US flagged vessel which could then be sailed into A us harbor with complete impunity.

And what about that two hours? The crew has an automatic 120 minutes to dump whatever they want to hide overboard. If the crew of a target vessel will, as a practical matter, know for more than two hours that the Navy is approaching them, then this provision doesn't make any difference. But I can think of several ways to sneak up on a ship at sea: aircraft and submarines (not to mention "stealthed" ships that the Navy is beginning to experiment with).

The other major "flag of convenience" nations are Panama (the most popular), the Bahamas (number three in the flag of convenience race) and Cyprus (number four).

From the MSNBC story linked above:

Panama has no such agreement and isn't currently negotiating one, Deputy Foreign Minister Nivia Rossana Castrellon said in Panama City.

She said the United States had not approached Panama with that request but that Panama was one of nine countries which signed an agreement last year that allows U.S. officials to search cargo once it has been removed from a ship and unloaded to a port.

That works for drugs, but not bombs. If there's a bomb, we can look for it once it has been taken off a Panamanian ship and put in a warehouse or on the dock. I think that might be just a bit too late to do any good, Madam Minister? We should definitely be talking to Panama (indeed, every nation having any ships under its flag) about this, and letting them know that the alternative to reaching a similar agreement is keeping their flagged vessels out of US waters. That might not go down too well with all those owners who have registered there. But then, it would not take too long for all those nice Panamanian flags to be exchanged for Liberian ones.

And Liberian flags are nicer looking, anyway.

 
Yes, we have no beal today.

 
I'M NOT ARROGANT, IT'S JUST THAT I'M SMARTER THAN YOU.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

What a remarkable thing to say:

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

"Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

Presumably a liberal (how many people describe themselves or their own political beliefs as "stupid"?), Brandon manages in a single paragraph to encapsulate many attitudes that liberals say they utterly reject. Arrogance. Elitism. Bigotry. Yes bigotry, since he characterizes roughly half the country as dumb. That puts him in the same class as people who characterize blacks as stupid (or Hispanics, or Catholics, or the Irish, or Poles, or ...well, just take your pick). They're bigots. And so is anyone else who baselessly characterizes large, diverse groups of people as stupid. I wonder if Brandon's statement can be said to be evidence of a hostile work environment for purposes of an employment discrimination claim. [UPDATE: What about a hostile academic environment?]

And, oh yeah: If reporters tend to be liberal, what does this NY Times correction say about liberals:

"An article on Friday about Consolidated Edison's repair of electrified service-box lids, manhole covers and lampposts misstated the way shoes protect people from shocks. They insulate; they do not act as a ground. (A grounded object conducts electricity.) A picture caption misstated a finding by The Times at a lamppost in Sunnyside, Queens. The post was conducting an electrical current, not emitting electricity."

(I couldn't find the Note article after a quick search, so I linked it through InstantManManManMan. The Times correction is via Powerline.)

If Duke really does try to hire the best, smartest people available, then, in Brandon's case, it appears to have failed to achieve its objective.

If I was paying The Daughter's tuition to Duke, I'd be seriously pissed.

 
FROM 70 LIBRARIES TO 70 VIRGINS, OR THE 1000 YEAR RUT

Via Rand Simberg:

Irshad Manji, a Canadian author and Muslim, on dissent and free thinking within Islam:

"Cordoba, probably the most sophisticated city in Muslim Spain, housed 70 libraries. Now when you think about it, that’s one for every virgin promised to today’s Muslim martyrs. Right? And obviously I am being cheeky when I say that, but it’s a reminder of just how far Islam has fallen from its height of tolerance and critical thinking."

Manji argues that an Islamic tradition of independent thought, itjihad, was crushed during or after (I can't tell which from the article) the 11th century. She says that this was done by the Caliphate, not those nasty Christians or Jews, to prevent political challenges, and that, as a result, for the last 1000 years, mainstream Islamic scholars have basically been repeating themselves.

That would be one hell of a rut to be stuck in.

 
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

Moira, now that she's been transplanted to the Midwest, is developing a broader sense of humor. She thinks this whole article is funny.

I, on the other hand, collapsed only when I read about Howard Dean's Yale career:

"The future Vermont governor showed a disdain for Yale politics and resigned from a fraternity order in a dispute over a coffee bar."

Sound familiar? It should.

"Dean got into a tense negotiation with the Episcopal Church, which owned land in the path's way. Dean won, but he still held a grudge against the church -- and not just the local diocese, but the entire denomination. He quit being an Episcopalian and became a Congregationalist. He acknowledged only a few months ago on national television that he had done so because of the bike-path dispute, although he has never publicly explained his motivation more deeply than that."

Coffee bars and bike paths. Such is the stuff of presidential candidates.