Day: April 4, 2002

Judge Overturns Army’s Affirmative Action Promotion Policy

In March a federal judge ruled unconstitutional an U.S. Army policy that gave preferential treatment in promotion to women and minorities.

The Army’s written policy urged promotion boards to consider “past personal or institutional discrimination” when considering candidates for promotion. A white, male officer passed over for promotion in 1996 and 1997 sued, arguing that the policy was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

In his ruling, Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth noted that the Army had failed to establish that women and minorities had been discriminated against in the past during promotions. He cited statistics noting that since the 1970s the promotion rate for white and black officers had been almost identical.

“This [policy] undeniably establishes a preference in favor of one race or gender over another, and therefore is unconstitutional,” Lamberth wrote in his 68-page opinion.

The Army has not yet decided whether it will appeal, but since Lamberth framed his ruling very similar to Supreme Court decisions striking down affirmative action programs, overturning the verdict on appeal would be a long shot at best.

And imagine that — the Army having to judge people as individuals based on merit instead of based on their particular group membership. How will the nation ever survive such a radical notion?

Source:

Judge halts an army policy on promotion. Neely Tucker, Washington Post, March 5, 2002.

The Double Edged Sword of Success

Steven den Beste wrote yesterday about the double-edged sword of success. Traffic to his weblog has went through the roof since Sept. 11 (because his is easily one of the best sites on the net for analysis of the ongoing war on terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

My traffic is roughly double what Denbeste’s is (though he’s gaining on me fast) and I can sympathize with him. The deluge of e-mail is a big problem. In fact, Denbeste himself wrote me an e-mail along time ago that I never replied to simply because I did not have the time.

The mosting annoying requests I get are:

1. Hate mail from people who don’t understand my position. I run AnimalRights.Net which is very anti-animal rights, but I regularly receive e-mail from clueless people who don’t read past the domain name. I received a profanity-laden e-mail from a hunter in Arkansas, for example, that informed me about what a [profanity] I was for believing animals had rights.

2. Students who request information. It is bad enough that every 8th grader in the country sends me e-mails saying “I’ve got a paper on overpopulation due, could you answer these 10 questions.” Even worse, though, are the people who (and I’m not making this up) will send an e-mail saying, “I’m a graduate student at XYZ College doing my thesis on radical political movements. Could you send me all the information you have about animal rights?” Sure, for $50/hour I’ll be glad to do your research for you.

3. The “We Are Family” folks. These are the people who are generally in agreement with me, but the second I post something that doesn’t follow the strict ideological line, they bombard me with e-mails informing me I’m just as bad as the people I nominally oppose. The Objectivists who demand that I strip out their links, the cockfighting advocates — I even ran into one person who simply said that there were some claims that shouldn’t be repeated even to refute them, because that just lended the claims credibility (no, what lended them credibility was the fact that these folks let them spread unchallenged across the Internet).

4. People who demand to know who is paying me to say these vile things. Usually I e-mail these folks back smartass answers like “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” or just “Fnord.”

But overall, I have to say that most of the e-mail I get is very gratifying. There’s nothing cooler than having some journalist or CEO or bigshot at a large nonprofit e-mailing me for information.

Fortunately I haven’t run into many of these “you’re so unfair for not linking to me” folks. Reading other people’s blogs, there seems to be this odd idea of ownership over ideas, such that if I first hear about an article on site XYZ, I need to include that when I post my opinions about the article. I do that when its appropriate, but frankly I’m not going to do it every time nor do I expect others to do the same. I e-mail various people with story ideas all the time. Sometimes they credit me, sometimes they don’t. It’s not a big deal to me either way. (Remember that line about how you can accomplish things or take credit for them, but not necesarily both?)

Finally, Denbeste raises an issue that I’ve been thinking about — the thinkers vs. linkers issue.

Like Denbeste I’m more of a thinker than a linker, which just means I prefer to write several hundred word commentaries rather than just provide a long list of links to cool stuff on the web today.

I’m very glad that someone like Glenn Reynolds does what he does, but what I would like to see is someone go through his archives and produce an estimate of how many of the links he posted in 2001 still return valid pages. I’d wager that about 50 percent of the stuff he linked to is now 404.

On a couple of sites I run I used to try to post daily links to articles relevant to that topic, but well over half of the articles would return 404 errors after 6 months and the practice became pointless.

I am highly dependent to some extent on a site like Reynolds’ (and a number of others like this) but I much prefer topical weblogs that take one issue and just cover it obssessively.

Eliminate Saddam Hussein, Satisfy Arabs and Europeans and For Only $250 Million

Since George W. Bush seems intent on ridding the world of Saddam Hussein, I offer this foolproof plan for cheaply eliminating the dictator while at the same time winning kudos from Arab nations and Europeans for killing him.

The problems with going to war with Iraq are numerous. First, waging war is very expensive, likely to kill many innocent Iraqi civilians, and proving unpopular with Arab and European countries. Even though Hussein is spending millions of dollars to fund Palestinian suicide bombers, many of the United States’ erstwhile allies have reasons to oppose an all out war against him.

Fine. The United States should offer $250 million to the individual(s) who can kill Hussein, which will also be payable to the families of that individual(s) should the attackers die in the process. If Hussein can promise $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers killing Israeli civilians, why can’t the United States promise $250 million the families of any suicide bomber who manages to kill Hussein? (And maybe a lesser finders fee of say $10 million to people who try but for one reason or another fail to kill the Iraqi dictator).

This plan may seem extreme but it has an additional advantage — it will, of course, meet with resounding approval from Arabs and Europeans. If I read the Arab and European mindset correctly, when a country like Israel goes to war by traditional means, trying to target terrorists and eliminate the infrastructure used by those terrorists, it is horribly wrongheaded. But when Palestinians send suicide bombers to target civilians at religious ceremonies, they are acting in an understandable and defensible way.

So once the U.S. version of the suicide bomber compensation program is offered, we should expect a cascade of compliments from the Arab world and Europe for rejoining the civilized world and dealing with our problems like the progressive, peace loving society we aspire to.

It’s a win-win proposition on all sides (except for Hussein’s).

Obesity Beginning to Be a Serious Problem in the Developing World

In February, researchers meeting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting warned that obesity was becoming a problem even in countries that are extremely poor and where many people are undernourished.

The BBC quoted University of Rhode Island anthropologist Marquisa Lavelle as saying,

In terms of developing countries, we tend to assume their problems are related to under-nutrition rather than over-nutrition. What we have discovered is that worldwide levels of obesity have increased to the point where many cultures and many societies have both under-nutrition and over-nutrition.

Given the association of obesity weight chronic disease; with diabetes, with risk factors for heart disease and cancers of various sorts, this puts a burden on the developing world which it can ill-afford.

Oxford University’s Stanley Ulijaszek, who has studied obesity in Pacific Island nations, notes that one problem is that people in developing nations tend to see being obese as a positive thing. “Fatness is carrying your wealth on your body,” Ulijaszek told The BBC.

Source:

Developing world’s extra burden. Caroline Ryan, The BBC, February 16, 2002.

The Promises and Limitations of Animal Alternatives in Medical Research

In 1997 an alternative to animal testing for certain skin tests hit the market. The procedure — which uses lab-grown human skin samples — is beginning to increase in popularity with sales of the product growing by 40 percent per year.

On the one hand, this sort of in vitro test has a number of advantages to whole animal tests. They tend to be cheaper and faster than in vivo animal models. Animal rights activists like to pretend that animal research persists largely for economic reasons, but in fact any animal alternative that speeds the time it takes to get a product to market will find a ready market.

On the other hand, unlike the animal rights activists, those who develop and use such animal alternatives also recognize that they have inherent limitations. Technology Review quotes Charles Hewitt, director of surgical research for Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, noting that although he uses the bioengineered skin in his research, “We can’t get all the responses we need to test just from our model.”

In fact, as Technology Review notes, often these “animal” alternatives in fact end up being alternatives to traditional human clinical trials. A major use of bio-engineered skin, for example, is to screen compounds before sending them to human clinical trials.

Researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for example, evaluate drug under consideration for nasal use. They used to send such drugs directly to clinical trials, but now first use tests on the bio-engineered skin to screen out drugs likely to fail in clinical testing, so that only the most promising drug candidates are subjected to expensive clinical testing in human beings.

Animal rights activist claim that all animal tests could be replaced with alternatives tomorrow, but the reality is that a mix of human and animal, in vitro and in vivo tests and experiments will form the foundation of medical research for the forseeable future.

Source:

Saving skin. Alan Joch, Technology Review, February 11, 2002.

PETA's Earth Liberation Front Donation

After delaying and dithering for awhile, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals finally came clean in March about its $1,500 donation to the Earth Liberation Front. The donation went to a legal defense fund for Craig Rosebraugh.

PETA lawyer Jeffrey Kerr sent a letter to Rep. Scott McInnis who has been investigating ecoterrorism saying, among others things,

PETA does not provide financial or any other assistance to any person or group for the purpose of so-called terrorist activities. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong, defamatory, and the product of lobbyists, public relations consultants and other paid spokespeople for animal-exploitive industries.

Actually, Kerr’s statement is a lie. PETA provides philosophical justification and moral support for terrorism. If Kerr disagrees, please ask him to explain exactly what Bruce Friedrich meant when he said that he does not blow things up but that, “I do advocate it, and I think it’s a great way to bring about animal liberation.”

Kerr says that McInnis is part of a “new McCarthyism” for pointing this out, but McInnis doesn’t go around saying how he wished PETA’s headquarters would burn down or how he wishes people would break in and steal PETA’s property, as Newkirk has repeatedly said about animal facilities.

Kerr can try to spin this any way he wants, but as McInnis spokesman Josh Penry put it,

The remarkable thing is these people seem surprised that they’re getting called on the carpet for giving money to an eco-terrorist group. Here’s a hint: Stop underwriting domestic terrorist groups and people will leave you alone.

I have a better idea. If Kerr and PETA think they do nothing wrong when they give money to defend environmental and animal rights terrorists, why don’t they simply start doing so openly? Why not start including that fact in PETA’s fundraising literature? I’m sure the people who send donations to PETA would love to know that they are using those donations to help pay the legal fees of people associated with the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. What’s PETA so afraid of that they have to hide this from potential donors?

Hopefully this latest incident will finally push the Internal Revenue Service to reevaluate PETA’s nonprofit status. Surely if the guidelines for 501(c)(3) nonprofits mean anything they mean that openly advocating violence and contributing to groups that advocate violence need not be subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Source:

Group accuses Congressman with a ‘New McCarthyism’. Robert Gehrke, Associated Press, March 16, 2002.

No tax-exempt terrorism. Editorial, Rocky Mountain News, March 14, 2002.