Halloween Movie Post

The following is an expanded version of last year's Halloween movie post.  If you are looking for something seasonal to rent or order from Netflicks, I am your man. 

The U.S. has five holidays that are really celebrated: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Valentine's Day.  Halloween comes second in terms of store displays and yard ornaments, and, after Christmas, it is my favorite holiday.  This is due to the simple fact that I am incurably fond of the spooky story.  In case you are looking for a good Halloween movie, I have some suggestions.

The best single Halloween movie is, well, Halloween, John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece, if only on account of its subject.  It builds on the plausible and provocative idea that real monsters lurk in the subconscious mind, and is carried by master performances: Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis.  If you want something more suitable for children, try The Adams Family.  This superbly crafted homage to the old TV show is perfect for watching while munching on popcorn and distributing candy to miniature ghouls at the door. And don't forget Ghost Busters, which is also safe for the kids.  GB was a genuinely novel idea: demon fighters who approach their job as if they were plumbers.  Also, the mix of the supernatural and science fiction genres has roots in the beginnings of modern horror fiction.  You find it obviously in Frankenstein, and in Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Unfortunately, it all but falls out of almost all the vampire movies. 

If you want something classic, go back to the 1930's, when our four basic Halloween monsters saw their first moonlight.  Frankenstein (1931) ranks as the undisputed father of the modern monster story, with a number of scenes that have become cultural motifs.  And you gotta love Boris Karloff as the monster.  But Bela Lugosi as Dracula (also filmed in 1931) is an almost perfect horror film.  There is a collection out now that includes a Spanish version, filmed at night using the same script and sets, for Mexican audiences.  My kids got it for me for Christmas.  Karloff appeared a year after Frankenstein in The Mummy. The plot serves as a template for later versions of Dracula: resurrected man/demon pursues a woman who reminds him of his long lost love.  I think it's Karloff's best role.  Ten years after Frankenstein came Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man.  Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.  The inescapable and undeserved curse sets this one apart from all the others. 

I would add one movie to this list oldies that never gets the credit it deserves: The Tingler (1959), with Vincent Price.  It represents the best work of William Castle, the Alfred Hitchcock of B movie horror.  Like Ghost Busters, this story is based on a genuinely innovative idea.  Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, who discovers that the tingling feeling we get when afraid is caused by a creature that lives in the spine of every human being.  When we get scared, it grows.  When we scream, it shrinks back to insignificance.  Castle actually had the seats in some theaters wired to produce a mild shock during a moment when the audience is supposed to be scared, and a narrator urges them to scream in order to save themselves.  But it needs no such theatrics.  Great acting and a strong screenplay make it a true gem.   

For a few laughs, try Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein, in my view, Brook's best movie. There is more than a little sexual innuendo, but it will fly right over the heads of most young trick-or-treaters.  Not safe for children, but delicious for more mature audiences, is The Rockey Horror Picture Show.  A good rock and roll soundtrack, and a lot of young men and women with too much time on their hands, made this into one of the most successful musicals of all time.   It's a good spoof on the Frankenstein story, with a lot of B movie sci fi thrown in.  I myself had the honor of playing the criminologist for one performance when Rockey was produced at Northern.   Finally, almost any collection of The Simpsons Tree House of Horror is good for the holiday. 

If you are looking for some more undiscovered but sinister gems, rent Bubba HoTep. This happens to be my favorite movie.  A geriatric Elvis (Bruce Campbell) and a Black man who thinks he is JFK (Ozzie Davis) battle a mummy in a nursing home.  In the climax, when Ozzie Davis starts his motorized wheel chair in motion to challenge the mummy, well, I still get tears in my eyes.  If you want something with more bite, try Cat People, with marvelous work by Natassja Kinski and Malcom McDowell.  The movie is transformed into a masterpiece by Giorgio Moroder's dense electronic score, which is every bit as good as the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire.  Another good bet is Demon Knight, a tale that pushes all my buttons.  A lone warrior who carries what amounts to the blood of Christ battles to keep a legion of demons from invading the world.  Mortally wounded, he passes his mission to a teenage girl who, like Barabbas, was a thief.  That, I submit, is a story.

If you are drawn to the zombie genre, there is no substitute for George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  It is not easy to recommend any of the spin-offs, other than the remake Dawn of the Dead (2004).  But I warn you, the latter is a very dark and genuinely scary movie.  Also scary is 28 Days Later, a movie that introduced the fast zombie to the genre.  It's not a true zombie movie, as "the infected" are living human beings who have been turned into proto-zombies by a  rabies-like virus. If you want something cheap and cheesy, try Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972),  a very amateurish drama about a troop of amateur thespians who manage to wake up an army of corpses.  It is a cult classic that I just happened to have watched for the first time tonight. 

Finally, if you are wondering what to order from Netflicks and you are in the mood for something very dark but culturally expanding, you might dip into some Asian horror.  Three excellent choices for All Hallows Eve are Ringu (The Ring), Ju-On (The Grudge), and The Eye.  The first two have American made versions.  Unlike most A-Horror fans, I think the American Ring is as good as the Japanese original, but avoid the English version of  The Grudge.  The Eye, from Hong Kong, is wonderfully produced and acted movie with beautiful cinematography, and it is a deeply moving story.

Happy Halloween.

Newsweek

Power Line:  "Newsweek's Neoconfusion"

Nobel Lie

Time will tell whether Al Gore deserves great praise for pushing the issue of global warming.  What is clear right now is that the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike the other Nobel prizes, has become a pathetic joke.  In fact, this has been clear for some time. 

The Peace Prize ought rightly to go to someone who has done something extraordinary for the cause of peace.  Glancing back over the list of past winners, you can find a lot of worthy recipients.  Jimmy Carter (2002), for example, certainly deserved the award.  I stand second to none in my contempt for Carter's behavior in recent years, but President Carter did broker peace between Israel and Egypt.  That achievement stands to this day as one of the few successes in Middle East diplomacy.  And it was Carter's personal achievement.  He mastered the details of the situation in a way that few Presidents could have done, and brought the power of the United States to bear on it. 

By contrast, the 2006 award to Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank was absurd.  Now I think the Grameen bank is one of the most promising and beautiful social experiments of the last century.  The bank gives small loans to the most marginal persons in the third world, allowing them to make some investment that gives them a purchase on their own destiny.  What a great idea!  It just doesn't have anything to do with war and peace.   Of course the argument is that economic development at the bottom will lead to peace, and in the very long run that might be true.  But in the short run the very opposite is often true.  Economic development often leads to war, as it did with Germany in the 19th century, and may yet do with China in this one.  There ought to be some Nobel prize for people like Yunus, but the peace prize isn't it. 

And then of course, there are the obscenities.  Yasser Arafat shared the prize in 1994.  No one ever dedicated more of his life, with more fervor, to the promotion of war and the murder of innocents than Arafat.  The peace agreement between Arafat's PLO and Shimon and Rabin's Israel was a mirage.  Arafat had neither any intention nor indeed the power of making peace.  One might better have awarded the Peace Prize to Saddam Hussein. At least he could have chosen to avoid all the wars he started.

The most obvious problem with the Peace Prize is that it doesn't follow the model of other Nobel Prizes, like literature or physics, which are typically given to people whose great achievements happened decades before the award.  That may be sad for the scientists who have wait until their hair is gray, but it gives the judges a better perspective on what really deserves the honor.  The Peace Prize could easily be awarded the same way, but instead it's like the academy award for best soundtrack.  Who remembers the music from Passage to India, which won it?  Who doesn't remember the music from The Natural, which didn't.  The Peace Prize is typically given to this year's greatest left-wing hit.

And this year's hit is Al Gore.  Here is how the Norwegian Cardinals justified their choice of a Pope:

I Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated  with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the livingconditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and   lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

Now consider how tenuous is the connection Gore and the IPCC, on the one hand, and peace on the other.  The work of the former may lead to real progress on the environment. Or not.  Given that Gore's swimming pool has a larger carbon footprint than my neighborhood, I have my doubts.  But there is no way to know whether Gore's ministry will result in any achievement whatsoever.  And while it is conceivable that global warming might lead to "violent conflicts and wars," it is just a likely that measures to combat global warming will place "heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries."  Vulnerable countries are, well, more vulnerable than developed nations when the economies of the latter turn south. 

It's been a good year for Al Gore to feel better about himself.  Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize was idiotic. 

Roy Rosenzweig

My heartfelt condolences go out to the family of historian Roy Rosenzweig, who passed away yesterday from lung cancer.  Professor Rosenzweig may not register immediate recognition from your average history buff, but for anyone involved with digital history the name certainly sticks out.  Rosenzweig was a professor of history at George Mason University and helped found the Center for History and New Media, an important site fostering the scholarship of the digital frontier, and also played a large part in the September 11 Digital Archive.  He's an inspiration to many, and will be missed.

Social Conservatives, Presidential Politics, and Moral Victories

Here is snippet from a news report of a speech Abraham Lincoln gave at Lacon, IL in 1848:

He scored with the most scathing language, that ``consistency'' of the Abolitionists, which, while they professed great horror at the proposed extension of slave territory, they aided in the election of Mr. Polk; for which, and its disastrous consequences, they were responsible, as they held the balance of power.

In 1844 the small Liberty Party ran James Birney for president.  The Whigs ran Henry Clay.  Together Clay and Birney, the anti-slavery candidates, gained the majority of the vote, but since that vote was split between the two of them, James Polk, the pro-slavery candidate, was elected president.  "Liberty men" objected to Clay because Clay, although basically anti-slavery and opposed to the annexation of Texas, a key anti-slavery position, was himself a slaveholder.  Clay also was not for immediate abolition. 

Abe Lincoln for some time remained bitter that some anti-slavery voters had deserted Clay, throwing the election to Polk.  This, he insisted, was promoting consistency over victory.  A vote for Clay was a vote for almost everything the Liberty men wanted.  A vote for Polk was a vote against everything the Liberty men desired.  So by voting for the purist, Birney, the Liberty men ensured that the worst possible scenario became reality while denying victory to Clay, who would have enacted almost the entirety of the Liberty platform.  Anti-slave forces would make the same mistake in 1856, splitting their votes between John C. Fremont and Millard Fillmore, throwing the election to James Buchanan despite the fact that the Fremont-Fillmore vote accounted for 400,000 more votes than Buchanan. 

Republicans are threatening to do the same in 2008.  In the debate this past week, both Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul could not bring themselves to say they will support the party's nominee, no matter who it is. Meanwhile, social conservatives are threatening to form a third-party if Rudy Giuliani is the Republican nominee.

The most certain outcome of such a third-party effort is the election of the Democratic nominee, likely Hillary Clinton.  So the "success" of the social conservatives would be to elect a president totally antithetical to their beliefs.  The issues about which the social conservatives care most, abortion and same-sex marriage, are subjects of judicial inquiry and Clinton appointed judges would certainly continue the activist practice of defining policy on these matters rather than leaving them to the American people.  Giuliani, whatever his policy preferences, is likely to appoint judges friendly to the social conservative cause. As president there is virtually nothing he can do to effect policy on these matters, and to the extent a president can Giuliani has indicated he'd side with social conservatives (for example in denying federal dollars for abortion services). 

Because Rudy Giuliani is not "consistent" with the social conservative outlook, some social conservatives would rather elect Hillary Clinton than Giuliani. Like the Liberty men of 1844, in pursuit of consistency social conservatives supporting a third-party candidate will become responsible for the victory of their opponent's policies.

I suppose such social conservatives will call this a moral victory.  They will take pride, right after their fall, for remaining consistent in their views.  Like Tom Tancredo they will pat themselves on the back for not voting for the "lesser of two evils" and ignore the fact that they helped elect the greater of two evils.  Acting like children crying over not being able to get exactly what they want, they will get exactly what they don't want.

As a friend of mine likes to say, in one sense a moral victory is a kind of victory.  In another more important sense, a moral victory is a defeat.      

Gored

Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for Peace is like the end of a political comedy.  I mean, does he really think that global warming is "the most dangerous challenge we have ever faced"?  You can't make that stuff up.  Whatever one thinks of Gore's claims, the idea that he has done more for world peace in the last year than anyone else on the planet is ludicrous.  I tend to side with P.J. O'Rourke, who once wrote that every year the award should go to the United States military, since they do more for world peace in one day than all the Ben and Jerry's ice cream ever made.  Steven Hayward has it about right:

Parson Al winning the Nobel Peace Prize was as predictable as his Oscar for Best Documentary, and represents the final debasement of a once-prestigious award. It used to be that the award went to people of genuine humanitarian or diplomatic accomplishment, like Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer or Doctors Without Borders. Now it goes to frauds and poseurs like Rigoberta Menchu, Yassir Arafat, the U.N. (three times now, counting Gore’s co-winner, the U.N.’s climate change panel), and Jimmy Carter. About the only way to top this would be to give the next Peace Prize to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Sen. Clinton Panders on Free Trade

One of the most important achievements in the U.S. Constitution, when the Founders turned it over to the state ratifying conventions, was the Commerce Clause.  In effect, it turned the United States into a free trade zone, preventing the states from using their tax powers to discriminate against imports from other states.  This is one of the reasons that the United States became the economic powerhouse of the world over the next two centuries.  Europe only caught up with the U.S. in recent decades. 

President Clinton (42) realized this, or anyway acted as if he did, when he pushed NAFTA through Congress.  The Washington Post notes this:

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton had to fight many powerful lobbying groups to win approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. None was more imposing than that most Democratic of constituencies, organized labor. Mr. Clinton stood up to the unions: He publicly condemned the AFL-CIO for its "roughshod, muscle-bound tactics" against undecided Democratic members of Congress. In the end, he was rewarded for his persistence. Not only did NAFTA pass, but Mr. Clinton won reelection in 1996 -- with the unions' support. Fourteen years after NAFTA was approved, the case for free trade remains the same. Though it imposes costly dislocations on workers in less-competitive industries, it benefits the country as a whole by increasing efficiency. Over time, the result is more jobs and lower prices.

Senator Clinton, with her eye on the nomination, has chosen to repudiate her husband's and her own good sense. 

Yet Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) seems to have forgotten her husband's winning formula. Campaigning for president, she has been busily repudiating his legacy on free trade, voting against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in the Senate and backing away from NAFTA. In an interview published yesterday by USA Today, she called for a "timeout" on further trade agreements until their impact can be fully studied. Ms. Clinton even suggested that it might be time for NAFTA to be "adjusted." Her reasoning was not terribly clear: This is a candidate, after all, who has voted in favor of free-trade deals with Singapore and Chile.

Virtually all economists, and everyone who employs common sense, agree that free trade is good for all the economies involved, and that protectionism is bad.  Protecting an industry against competition from abroad is only necessary if that industry cannot compete on its own.  So protectionism always protects inefficiency.  It hurts producers in the foreign country, who cannot export their products at a reasonable price, and it hurts domestic consumers who have to pay more for their shirts and shoes. 

But the more important effect is on the economies as a whole.  Trade is to economies what the blood stream is to the body: it gets stuff where it needs to be in the most efficient way possible.  NAFTA promoted healthy circulation between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.  Despite Ross Perot's warning of "a giant sucking sound" as U.S. jobs were sucked south of the border, U.S. job growth has been strong under NAFTA.  It is obviously a good idea to extend free trade to nations further south.  Turning the Americas into a free trade zone will make the Western Hemisphere a giant compared to Europe, and keep us competitive with the growing economies of Asia. 

Senator Clinton is smart enough to know this.  Her earlier votes show it.  But she has chosen the low road toward the White House.  Maybe she will come around, should she win the Oval Office.  She may be forced to.  Bush (43) found his moment to pander to the steel industry.  But in the contemporary world, it is a lot harder to protect one industry without a lot of others crying out in pain.  When Bush coddled American steel, he hurt every other industry to consumes steel.  We are probably moving toward a free trade world, like it or not.  If Ms. Clinton could summon the courage to point this out, she might deserve the Oval Office. 

Dozier Internet Law and Direct Buy

Dan of tdaxp has been on the case of a cease-and-desist letter sent out by DirectBuy to InfomercialScams.com, which has received a lot of pushback for its actions across the blogosphere.  You can read about the background here, and more here and here.

Another Lauck Review

This time it's from the Rapid City Weekly.  Be forewarned!  The link includes a picture of Mr. Lauck at a book signing. 

I just finished Lauck's book Daschle v. Thune, which is about Italian cooking.  But seriously folks, it is a fine overview of the events surrounding that historic Senate race right here in our fair state.  The book is readable and full of information. The particular strengths of the book are showing the ways in which Tom Daschle's success in Washington brought about his downfall here in South Dakota and the way in which certain media sources avoided covering stories unflattering to Mr. Daschle.  Lauck notes that one could have learned more about Tom Daschle's record from following the national news than by reading the state's largest newspaper.  Of course Mr. Lauck goes into some detail regarding the various ways in which blogs, such as this one, served as an alternative news source and helped define the campaign.  If you are interested in South Dakota politics or in political campaigns in general, buy this book. 

The wost aspect of the book is that Todd Epp and Sibby get mentioned but I never do.  Maybe I'll return it and ask for my money back. 

For full disclosure, yes, Jon Lauck used to write for this site.  But, no, no one currently writing on this site was affiliated with the blog during the 2004 campaign.  And yes, we do owe our unquestioned allegiance to His Majesty John Thune.  Where is my paycheck? 

Virtue and Vice In Taxation

The various governments do get their money in some funny ways.  The Aberdeen American News reports that the gaming industry, aka gambling, is thriving in South Dakota. 

Today, gamblers in South Dakota can go to 12 tribal casinos, 1,477 video lottery parlors, 629 lottery ticket retailers, 114 Deadwood gaming halls, two horse tracks and four simulcast horse- and dog-racing rooms.

In just the past 20 years, legal gambling in South Dakota has surged from a nearly nonexistent industry to one that raked in $1.742 billion of wagers in 2006 alone.

In fact, now a full 18% of revenue to the state comes from gambling. 

Today, South Dakota's state government, through its various fees and taxes, relies on gambling to produce nearly 18 percent of its revenue, according to research by Richard McGowan, an associate professor of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. In the United States, McGowan reports, only Nevada is more reliant on gambling to fill its state coffers.

“The state's probably more addicted to that revenue than any gambler is,” McGowan said last week. “And I think that's not exaggerating it. It's very difficult for them to replace that revenue, because it's pretty painless revenue from the state's point of view.”

What does Mr. McGowan mean by painless?  Surely those lives ruined by the vice of gambling have experienced pain.  What he means, I suspect, is that it is painless for the legislature who can get loads of revenue without having to ask for a sacrifice on the part of the general population. 

This is similar to the cigarette tax.  Here is John McCain from the Republican debate earlier this week discussing the SCHIP program:

Another one [the president] should veto is the SCHIP program, which he should say, "Take the "C" out of, because now it's for everybody, like every other entitlement program." And, by the way, a dollar a pack increase for cigarettes? So we want to take care of children's health and we want everybody to smoke? I don't get it.

According to Congressman Tim Walberg, in order to fund the proposed massive increase in SCHIPS funding, which is funded by cigarette taxes, we need to add another 22 million smokers over the next ten years. 

As we now know, since we South Dakotans raised our cigarette tax last year we have actually seen a decrease in revenue from that source.  It might be that some people are going to reservations or across state lines to purchase cigarettes.  The state should have anticipated this.  Or it may be that, hallelujah, people are stopping smoking because of the cost.  This goes to the problem of funding programs with cigarette taxes:  if the tax accomplishes what its advocates desire, the elimination of smoking, it will yield zero revenue.  Good news for our health, but bad news for the appropriators in Pierre. 

Either way, it seems unjust for the government to receive significant revenue through the taxation of vice.  First, this targets a minority of the population to pay for the services we all receive.  Yesterday I noted that the federal government is funded by the relatively rich minority.  Cigarette taxes and gambling are a way to raise money from another unpopular minority, the poor, who disproportionately engage in both vices.  In both cases the government targets a minority to pay for programs for the rest of us.  Both cases are of dubious justice. 

Finally, these sources of revenue make the state a partner in vice, an enabler so to speak.  The state of South Dakota cannot afford to have people acting virtuously, meaning stopping smoking and gambling.  If this occurs the state legislature might have to make some painful decisions.  And who wants that. 

The Mouth Of Democratic Truth

I have jokingly called Badlands Blue website "the Democratic mouthpiece" and have chided them for simply repeating the Democrat Party press without a hint of criticism. Well, it turns out they are the Democratic press.  Lowell works under Steve Jarding, who works for Tim Johnson.  And the site is sponsored by the South Dakota Democratic Party. 

If anything, this makes me think better of the site.  Both political parties have their operatives whose job it is to argue that everything their party does is right and everything the other party does is wrong.  It is their job to never question the party line.  So now we can read Badlands Blue with eyes wide open.  It appears to be, in essence, a Tim Johnson campaign site. 

A Response to My Keloland Colleague, David Newquist

My NSU colleague Emeritus and current Keloland colleague, Professor David Newquist, nurses a deep grudge against this blog and its participants.  It is a grudge that shows no signs of fading with time.  From time to time he sends a load of abuse our way, and sometimes we decide to respond.  Professor Newquist's current post is a long meditation on the "ad hominem" fallacy, along with a lot of  a lot of complaints about bloggers with whom  he is displeased.   We at SDP get this:

South Dakota blogs are particularly afflicted with the personal- attack-as- discourse syndrome. In fact, some blogs celebrate their defamations and scurrilous personal attacks as their claims to eminence and fame. South Dakota Politics, for example, was largely devoted to a systematic pogrom of character assassination against Tom Daschle. It was a paid component of the political campaign against him. The authors of the blog claim to have been the deciding factor in John Thune’s winning the election, which is a dubious claim because of the few voters who were aware of blogs at the time. But the blog revealed the tactic of personal attack and defamation that was the dominant strategy of the campaign. No doubt, it worked.

Now I am not sure how the word "pogrom" gets in there, a Yiddish term indicating a riot in which Russians attack Jews.  I am pretty sure that "systematic" riot would be an oxymoron.  But on the specifics, South Dakota Politics originated as an anti-Daschle blog in the days before the last Senate election.  I was not a participant in the blog in those days or even a reader of the blog in those days, so I can take neither credit nor blame for it.  Readers who are curious can check out the archives, which I think include all the posts from that period.  What  they will find is a spirited and very partisan blog, but one that is well within the standards political argument in any modern Western democracy.  What they will not find is a single Russian throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Jew. 

The participants from the days when this blog was involved in the Thune campaign have all left.  I and my current SDP colleagues all joined the blog after the election.  I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I have no communications with the Thune organization or any other partisan body. It is not true that the authors of this blog, if by that Professor Newquist means the current authors, seriously claim that SDP was the "deciding factor" in John Thune's election.  But it is an understandable error.  It originates, I suspect, in a post of mine from 2005.

At APSA I attended a panel on blogging that included Scott Johnson and Paul Mirengoff of Powerline. When it came my turn to ask a question, I announced myself as a representative of SouthDakotaPolitics, the blog that brought down Tom Daschle.  For reasons of time, of course, I didn't bother to mention that I joined this blog only after the election.  At any rate, a lot of folk in the audience had heard of SDP.

Now I thought it reasonably clear that this was a joke.  The guys from Powerline thought it was funny.  I am sure Newquist doesn't.  I certainly do not claim or believe that SDP brought down Tom Daschle.  John Thune did, and the truth of the matter is that he did it the old fashion way: he earned  it fair and square.  Daschle faced a very competitive Republican in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats.  He had the bad luck that this happened when a lot of external factors brought almost every viable voter to the polls.  If there was a deciding factor, it was the story of Daschle's wonderful house.  I don't think that issue should have been a factor at all, but it was. 

On a more important issue, Professor Newquist is not altogether wrong when he says that "South Dakota  blogs are particularly afflicted with the personal- attack-as- discourse syndrome."  In that same post he calls people he disapproves of "ad hominoids," and "regressives." Isn't that kinda personal, David?.  He connects the use of ad hominem arguments, and thus us ad hominoids and regressives, to Nazis, Stalinists, Islamists, and Orwellian villains.

It is all part of attacking people and defining individuals or groups as depraved and deficient and inferior.

Well, alright.  But a little earlier in his post he said this:

Literacy also discerns the distinction between human communication, which establishes cognitive contact between senders and receivers, and the cries in the night of the lower orders that assume their howls dispel chaos and form the center of the universe.

Lower orders?  Is that dogs he is referring to, or dog-like people?  I can't be sure, but there is this:

The ad hominem fallacy can be a very effective tool to use on those who are not educated in the functions of language and the laws of reasoning.  Those people tend not to understand or find any interest in issues, but they experience human society as a state of resentment.  For them language is simply a means to growl and howl in their struggle to be of some consequence on the dog pack level of existence. Reason and competent communication are not considerations where the total motive is to find some power-niche in the hierarchy of the dog pack [except for the first instance, these are my italics].

When you accuse people of a "dog pack level of existence," isn't that kinda like "defining individuals or groups as depraved and deficient and inferior"?   Neither Tom Daschle, nor John Thune, nor my Keloland colleague Todd Epp, nor my blogosphere pals Anna or Doug Wiken, ever talk about people in this way.  This is quite literally dehumanizing rhetoric.  You will not find anything like it at South Dakota Politics. David's blog is the blog he warns us about. 

 

Another South Dakota School Joins The Dark Side

Yet another school district goes to the dark side:

Riggs High School staff and students continue to get more comfortable with the school’s laptop computer program.

This is the first year for the school to be part of the statewide computer connection program which provides computers to all high school students. Riggs students and staff have been provided tablet computers.

Computer coordinator Phil Rose says the computer staff continues to work out the bugs. He says so far, there has been few problems.

Administrators said last month, they were pleased with the first results from the computer program.

Once again, go here for a summation of the data on laptops in schools showing that at best broad use of laptops in schooling has no effect on education, and perhaps has a slightly negative effect.

In Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln he discusses the new Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield.  The museum attached to the library was intentionally created with a maximization of visual stimuli and a minimum of words.  The brains behind the museum (a former Disney employee) told Ferguson that today's kids have a "dazzling capacity for processing information," especially visual information. The problem with most museums, the Disney guy suggests, is that they haven't caught on that nobody reads any more, thus the museums are too "text driven."  My point in relating this story is that in a video and computer world it is possible that we are becoming very sophisticated in our ability to understand visual information.  It may also be that we no longer know how to use words.  Is this one reason why our politicians struggle to inspire us?  Is it that they lack the facility with words that helps interpret significant events and give them meaning?  And if they had such ability, would the population understand them?  I note again that the average high school graduate today has half the vocabulary of a high school graduate of a couple generations ago.  One fails to see how greater use of laptops helps remedy this problem.  The ubiquity of laptops in schooling perhaps only accelerates the advance of the post-literate society. 

Taxes And Justice

Glenn Reynolds started a bit of debate about the progressive tax and justice in the American tax code. Reynolds points to this story from the "Tax Prof Blog." 

New data released by the IRS today offers interesting insights into the distributional spread of the federal income tax burden, new analysis by the Tax Foundation shows. The new data shows that the top-earning 25% of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned 67.5% of the nation's income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86%). The top 1% of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2% of the nation's income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4% of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1% of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95% of tax returns.

These stats show that the rich pay virtually all of the income tax while the poor and lower middle class pay virtually nothing.  But, some argue, this discussion only involves the individual income tax, not all of the federal taxes we pay, such as Social Security tax.  See a discussion here. 

One can go to this report (pdf alert) from the Congressional Budget Office to get some data. See pages 5-6.  It shows that even when one takes into account all federal taxes like Social Security, excise taxes, gas taxes, etc., the poor and middle class get off pretty well.  When one looks at the effective tax rate (i.e., the rate actually paid after all adjustments), the poorest 20% of households paid 4.5% of their income to the federal government while the next 20% paid 9.8%.  It should be noted that both groups have a negative effective tax rate for the individual income tax.   Meanwhile the richest 20% paid 25.1% of their income to the government, with the richest 1% and 5% paying about 30%.  Put another way, the poorest 20% account for only .9% of all federal revenue, with the next 20% accounting for 4.5% of all federal revenue.  Meanwhile, the richest 20% account for 67.1% of all federal revenue, while the richest 5% and 1% accounted for 41.3% and 25.3% respectively of federal revenue.

There is a question to ask, sure to raise the dander of the populist crowd, whether it is healthy for a free people to have a significant number of citizens, say 40%, who bear virtually no financial responsibility for the upkeep of their government. 

Political Diversity

Today's must read comes from the Des Moines Register, which carries an article by Emory University Professor Mark Bauerlein entitled "History department at U of I flunks test of political diversity."

UPDATE:  See this Michael Barone piece on the decline of the American university.  HT to Julie Ponzi over at NLT.

Anna and the Ken on Clarence Thomas

My fondness for Anna of Dakota Women continues to increase.  She is currently failing students in American History.  We are now not just pals, but kin.  I seem to have drawn Anna out of retirement, at least briefly, by my posts on gender and sex and on Clarence Thomas.  It is too bad that K at Dakota Women seems to have no stamina for this sort of thing.   I reply to Anna. 

I am going to leave [K] to deal with my now real-life pal Ken Blanchard's interesting view on biological sex. I will say, however, that it would be a pretty sad world if, as men and women, we were nothing but the sum of our chromosomes and reproductive functions.

I am still waiting for K to respond.  But in my post I distinguish gender, which is socially constructed, from sex, which is biologically fixed.  The fact that we can "assign" gender means that we are more than "the sum of our chromosomes and reproductive functions."  I am male, and the father of two.  But I can also recite Jabberwocky from memory. 

As to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill matter, I am inclined to believe the former whereas Anna is inclined to believe the latter.  Another word for that inclination is bias.  Neither Anna nor I know who was telling the truth.  I do submit that if someone she cared about, say Hillary Clinton or another politician to her liking, were subject to an identical accusation, Anna wouldn't side with the accuser.  Anna says:

Justice Thomas can be upset about his confirmation hearings if he wants, but his effort to smear Anita Hill is just as unreasonable.

It isn't a smear, Anna my friend, if Justice Thomas is telling the truth. 

News Flash: Academia Dominated By Liberals

Joe Knippenberg directs us to this study (pdf alert), nicely summarized here, which provides an in depth analysis of the political opinions of college faculty.  Not surprisingly, academia leans heavily to the left. Indeed in the social sciences the Marxists outnumber the conservatives. 

One interesting finding is the prevalence of academics who call themselves moderates.  Here is a flaw in the study's methodology.  The study asks academics to identify their own political ideology.  Another method would be to ask the academics their opinions on an array of political issues (they were asked about some), and the researchers could assign an ideology based on the responses.  The problem with the researchers' methods is that academia is so far to the left that many professors who are perfectly liberal think of themselves as "moderate" because compared to other academics they might be. 

An example.  I once knew a college professor who was a garden variety liberal.  He was pro-choice. He was pro-gay rights.  He supported the expansion of the welfare state.  But he was also a military veteran who, consequently, did not loathe the military.  For this reason alone he was considered a conservative by his colleagues.   This man, who was by any measure a political liberal, thought of himself as a moderate simply because he was closer to the political center than all of his radical colleagues.   You have to understand that for many academics the simple act of voting Democratic as opposed to Socialist is considered an act of heroic moderation.

Update: Skimming the actual study one sees more methodological problems.  The researchers generate misleading statistics by renaming as "moderate" those who call themselves "slightly liberal" and "slightly conservative."   Coincidently, the former were 18% of respondents while the latter were only 10%.  They do the same with party affiliation.  They call respondents "independents" who lean toward one party but think of themselves as independent.  In fact, we know through voting studies that these "leaners" almost always vote for the party towards which they lean.  So while 51% of academics consider themselves Democrats (as opposed to 13.7% who are Republicans), about 71% vote Democratic while about 21% vote Republican. 

Some Thoughts on Native American/Italian Pirate Day

My esteemed Keloland colleague, Mr. Todd Epp, has this on one famous son of Genoa:

The fact that South Dakota changed the name of the holiday from the butcher's/imperialist's name to celebrate our state's indigenous peoples is significant.

I agree with Todd that changing the name of today's holiday in South Dakotan is significant, and I agree that it was a good thing.  Columbus' achievement was extraordinary.  Few individuals have left so deep a mark on history as he, or done so much on the strength of a simple idea.  But I am not sure his personal bit of genius is worth a national holiday, and I suppose that whatever is worth celebrating about the American world in general, or the United States in particular, it isn't the way in which Europeans colonized the Western Hemisphere.  The existence and culture of Native American Tribes is something Americans can take pride in, and so South Dakota wins marks for recognizing them.

I took a quick look at Wikipedia's article on Columbus, and found this note at the beginning. 

Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled.

I suppose an article like this on a day like this gives rise to editorial wars at Wikipedia. Reading on, I came to this paragraph. 

Knowledge of the Earth's spherical nature was not limited to scientists: for instance, Dante's Divine Comedy is based on a spherical Earth. Columbus put forth arguments based on the circumference of the sphere. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy's claim the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180 degrees of the terrestrial sphere, leaving 180 degrees of water.

Columbus, however, believed the calculations of Marinus of Tyre, putting the landmass at 225 degrees, leaving only 135 degrees of water. Moreover, Columbus believed one degree represented a shorter distance on the earth's surface than was commonly held. Finally, he read maps as if the distances were calculated in Italian miles (1,238 meters). Accepting the length of a degree to be 56⅔ miles, from the writings of Alfraganus, he therefore calculated the circumference of the Earth as 25,255 kilometers at most, and the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km, or 2,300 statute miles) Columbus did not realize Al-Farghani used the much longer Arabic mile (about 1,830 meters).

Assuming all this is accurate, and any Wikipedia article is suspect until verified, it tells a very interesting story.  Columbus "discovered America" for all practical purposes by letting the secret of its existence out of the bag.  He did so because of a simple, earth-bending idea: that one could get to the east by sailing west.  This is something of which no one in the Americas at the time could have conceived, at least in such a way as to act on it.  But neither could he have done what he did if he hadn't dramatically underestimated the size of the earth.  No one who knew the true circumference of the planet would have tried to sail west from Europe to Asia.  If the Western Hemisphere hadn't been in the way, Columbus and his crew would have died of thirst.  Columbus in fact discovered Cuba, looking for India, on the basis of a brilliant idea and a lot of bad calculations.  That is a story.

Columbus may have been both a "butcher and an imperialist," as Todd said, but he was hardly out of place in America for that.  The Aztecs and the Incas were just as "imperialist" and easily as prone to butchery as any empire Columbus was familiar with.  Can any reasonable person doubt that the empires of pre-Columbian America would not have invaded and colonized Europe, if the opportunity had presented itself? Jerad Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel has the best explanation as to why history moved west rather than east at this point in time.  The explanation turns not on genius, of which the Aztecs, Incas, and countless other civilizations had more than their share.  It turns on the geographical fact that Eurasia has an east-west axis, whereas the Americas have a north-south axis.  If you want to know what that means, read the book. 

I also note that, were it not for Columbus or someone like him sailing the ocean blue, most of the peoples south of El Paso (and a lot of folks north of the fence) would never have been born.  That doesn't excuse anything, it just reminds us of everything.  All of us owe our lives to countless accidents, and countless deliberate deeds, both heroic and noble, generous and despicable.  Whether we call it Native American Day or Columbus Day, it is good time to reflect on this.

Theocracy!

While campaigning...er...speaking at a South Carolina church on Sunday, Barack Obama stated that he wants to be an "instrument of God" and "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth" (see this story).  George Bush has been assailed for suggesting that it might be his God appointed mission to fight against terrorism and for democracy in the Middle East.  Yet even Bush has never gone so far as to declare that we should work to create the Kingdom of God here on Earth. 

One is reminded of Karl Popper, who once wrote, "Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."  I am sure I saw this quote associated with this story some time today, but I can't remember where.  So whomever I am stealing this from, I thank you. 

Oh, The Cleverness of Me

A couple instances of self-love in South Dakota.

Rep. Bill Napoli writes in the Rapid City Journal:

THE UGLY: That there are still people out there who believe we can "Negotiate" or "Go Along with these extremist sub-human terrorist murderers," and if we treat them nicely, they will be nice to us. Yeah, right!

What a great power to declare whole categories of people "sub-human."  While I admire Rep. Napoli's vigor in opposition to international terrorism, I wonder which other human beings he considers "sub-human."  Let's agree that certain actions are inhumane, i.e., not consistent with humanity.  But it precisely because the terrorists are human that we hold them morally accountable for their inhumane actions.  The law against murder is written on their hearts, yet they still murder.

Then there are the Sioux Falls High School Socialists.  For a while this story was even on Drudge.  I guess some right-wingers are put off by the young Bloomsbury Groupies.  Yet, the proper reaction is laughter.  One can just see these inchoate Trotsky's, having read a little Kerouac and a little Salinger, understood about half of it; read a little of the Communist Manifesto, understood about a quarter of it.  They listen to some trendy alternative music, wear this year's uniform of rebellion, and think social commentary peaked with "The Matrix."  They read The Nation and American Prospect and pat themselves on the back for being so much more socially aware than their superficial classmates.  One is reminded of the Pete Townsend song "Misunderstood."

Just wanna be misunderstood
Wanna be feared in my neighborhood
Just wanna be a moody man
Say things that nobody can understand

I wanna be obscure and oblique
Inscrutable and vague
So hard to pin down
I wanna leave open mouths when I speak
Want people to cry when I put them down

I wanna be either old or young
Don't like where I've ended up or where I begun
I always feel I must get things in the can
I just can't handle it the way I am

Why am I so straight and simple
People see through me like I'm made of glass
Why can't I deepen with graying temples
Am I growing out of my class

I always feel I should be somewhere else
I feel impatient like a girl on the shelf
They say that I should live sera sera
But I am such an ordinary star

Coolwalkingsmoothtalkingstraightsmokingfirestoking
Coolwalkingsmoothtalking, yeah

Just wanna be misunderstood
I wanna be feared in my neighborhood
Just wanna be a moody man
Say things that nobody can understand

Daschle v. Thune

See this from the Rapid City Journal:

Sioux Falls author and historian Jon Lauck, a senior adviser to Sen. John Thune, will be at Borders in Rapid City at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7, to sign copies of his new book on the 2004 U.S. Senate race between Thune and former Sen. Tom Daschle.

Lauk's book, "Daschle vs. Thune: Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race," was praised by U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone as "must reading for Democrats as well as Republicans."

Lauk, a lawyer and former history professor, was an insider during the 2004 campaign, supporting Thune in his bid to unseat Daschle, a 26-year-veteran of Congress who rose to the powerful position as majority leader in the U.S. Senate. Daschle was still leading the Democratic minority in the Senate when he lost to Thune in an expensive, often-bitter battle that featured constant attacks from conservative Internet bloggers, including Lauk.

A Madison native, Lauk is now a senior adviser to Thune. He previously wrote "American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953-1980."

Try to ignore the misspelling of "Lauck" in the article.  I would wonder when the Argus Leader will find the space to report on this book.  Note that Dave Kranz devoted his column the other day to two more books, one of which was written by Daschle's press secretary.  That makes today's Randell Beck column laughable, which says it is critical for newspapers to present a wide variety of perspectives.

UPDATE:  Blogosphere colleague Bob Schwartz emailed me to point out that I spelled Mr. Beck's name wrong, always embarassing when you note the spelling of a name in an article is wrong and then you do it yourself.   It's been corrected, and I apologize to Beck.  Meanwhile, check out reports on Jon's book from KEVN and KNBN.