Texas Judge Requires Sex Offender Warning

The New York Times has a story about the Texas judge who recently ordered 21 sex offenders to display signs on their homes and automobiles saying, “DANGER: Registered Sex Offender Lives Here.” This sort of requirement is irresponsible and goes well beyond reasonable bounds of community notification.

In Michigan, where I live, there is a law that requires the local police to make available the names and addresses of sex offenders. The state also maintains an online database where this information is available, and for the most part I think this is a good idea. We were able to look at our neighborhood, for example, and learn that the nice elderly man down the street has several sex offenses.

The real concern with such registries are a) concern about inaccuracies, especially in an area like the one I live which is close to 80 percent rental properties and b) worries about vigilantism. Most of my neighbors know that this man is on the sex offender list, but several years have gone by and nobody’s attempted any violence or even confronted the man about it. They’re just a little bit more aware of where their kids are and what they’re doing.

Posting a “Danger: Registered Sex Offender Lives Here” sign, however, seems to me to be an open invitation for random vigilantism. The elderly man in my neighborhood’s never attempted to harm or molest any of our children, and he wouldn’t likely get the chance now that we know his past. There’s cause for parents to be a bit more concerned than normal, but no cause for him to be subjected to the sort of things that would happen if he had a big sign in his yard.

In fact, I’d think such an action would make it much harder for a sex offender to ever become part of the community again and thus increase the risk of recidivism. Now, some sex offenders shouldn’t become part of the community again, but as the New York Times story notes, there is an enormous difference between say a person who molests and physically abuses a young child as opposed to someone convicted of statutory rape with a 15-year-old after a night of heavy drinking.

Israel’s Water Shortage

Israel is experiencing severe water shortages at the moment, though most of the shallow media coverage of the problem completely missed the main reason for the shortages — Israel’s massive subsidies that encourage wasteful water use.

The BBC recently reported that Israeli Water Commissioner Shimon Tal will call for a total ban on watering lawns for the next three years and cut available water supplied to Israeli industry by ten percent. The entire issue is a political hot potato since Israel diverts water from the Palestinian territories to provide it to Jewish settlements.

But the shortages are caused because the government underprices water to farmers. Since the 1960s, Israel has sold waters to farmers at a rate that is 35 percent below what it sells to households and industry (and the price it sells to households and industry is also likely below the market cost of water).

Not surprisingly, agricultural use of water is through the roof, with 500 million cubic meters of subsidized water expected to be used for agriculture in 2001 alone. One of the things driving this use is that much of the subsidized water use in settlements is used for nonagricultural purposes.

Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman wants to scrap the water subsidy, which is really the only way to restore a bit of sanity to Israeli water use. Unfortunately it is likely to be politically unpopular.

Sources:

Lieberman seeks end to water subsidy for farmers. Amiram Cohen, Ha’aretz, April 16, 2001.

Israel faces water crisis. Paul Wood, The BBC, May 23, 2001.

There’s Oil In Them Thar Kyrgyzstan Hills

Kyrgyz Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev recently announced a major oil find in Kyrgyzstan that could potentially supply that nation with all the oil it will need for most of the century.

The oil was discovered in the Western Dzhalal-Abad region, and preliminary estimates suggest there could be as many as 70 million barrels within the field. That would be enough to supply Kyrgyzstan with all the oil it will need for the next 70 years or so. The country currently imports 90 percent of the oil it uses from Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Production on the oil field should begin sometime later this year.

Source:

Kyrgystan finds oil. The BBC, May 23, 2001.

Kyrgistan discovers oil. The BBC, May 20, 2001.

Peter Singer's Last Word on the Bestiality Controversy

After the torrent of criticism that Peter Singer received over his review of Midas Dekkers’ Dearest Pet, which many people viewed as defending bestiality, Singer finally released a clarification of his comments. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have ended the firestorm, since again Singer seems to imply that non-violent sexual contact between human beings and animals may be morally permissible. Here is the entire text of Singer’s statement which was posted to several animal rights e-mail lists:

I agreed to review Midas Dekkers’ scholarly study of sexual interaction between humans and animals not because I support such practices, but because I wanted to reflect on what such sexual behavior tells us about the way in which we are like animals, and at the same time to seek to draw such sharp lines between ourselves and other species. I also wanted to suggest that, if our concern is for the welfare of animals, it is only too easy to find practices on every modern factory farm that are a great deal worse, for the animal, than some forms of sexual contact between humans and animals. (Sex, I might remind readers, does not only mean “intercourse.”) An objection to all forms of sexual contact between humans and animals, in other words, does not seem to be based on concern for animal welfare, in any obvious sense. Those who wish to sustain such a sweeping objection need to look for other grounds.

I thought my review might provoke some people to think about the issue of why some behavior towards animals is viewed as obviously wrong, while other behavior seems entirely acceptable — killing and eating them, for example, or experimenting on them to test the safety of new cleaning agents. Obviously, sexual acts involving violence or cruelty to animals ought to be prohibited. And there may well be good accounts of why the proscription against all sexual acts with animals — including acts that are neither intrinsically violent or cruel — has outlasted many other prohibitions against non-reproductive sexual acts. But very few people seem to have read the article as raising questions. Many seemed to see no more than the fact that it mentioned sex with animals, and that fact was enough to send them into hysterical abuse, including accusations that I myself was a “zoophile.”

Once again, Singer seems to have raised more questions than he’s answered about his position on this matter.

More Taliban Atrocities

This month in an Afghanistan sports stadium crowded with thousands of people, soldiers with the hardline Muslim Taliban movement carried out a criminal sentence — they gave a young man and woman accused of having premarital sex 100 lashes.

The man reportedly collapsed during the whipping. This comes on heels of reports that the Taliban plans to force Hindus within Afghanistan to wear yellow so that they may be more easily identified.

Source:

Taliban beat unwed couple accused of having sex. Feminist Daily News Wire, May 23, 2001.

PETA Making Waves About Foot-And-Mouth Disease Again

Once again People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is making news by again hoping that |foot and mouth| disease finds its way to the United States. This time around its Bruce Friedrich who sent a letter to officials planning the World Dairy Expo to ask them to cancel the event. In the letter, Friedrich reaffirms PETA’s belief that the disease would be a godsend for the animal rights movement in the U.S. As is typical with PETA, Friedrich’s claims are based on lousy logic and misinformation.

According to Friedrich, if animals in the United States came down with foot-and-mouth disease this would spare them from a trip to the slaughter house. In fact U.S. agricultural officials have planned a scorched earth policy for containing a possible outbreak of the disease that would likely make the British reaction seem mild in comparison. Such planning has been kept relatively low key, but a confirmed case of the disease would result in a very thorough and systematic slaughtering of animals in the area of the outbreak to contain the disease.

Friedrich and PETA also seem to be under the impression that a foot-and-mouth outbreak might turn more people into vegetarians. “I suppose if it happens [an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in the United States], we’ll write a massive thank you note because it’ll turn a massive amount of people into vegetarians.”

The immediate result of a serious outbreak would be a rapid increase in the cost of some meat, especially beef. But past disease outbreaks contradict the view that people would then turn to vegetarianism. Even in the UK, where mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth have garnered plenty of negative attention, people seem to prefer switching to meat they perceive as safe and/or cheap rather than become vegetarians.

Tom Thieding, communications director for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, came closer to the truth when he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “We’re not worried. We know there are nuts out there and PETA confirms that. We don’t get too hung up on anything that PETA says anymore.”

Source:

PETA welcomes foot-and-mouth disease. Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 24, 2001.