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December 2004 Entries
Great-Great-Grandma
My mother recently wrote and published a book about my great-great-grandmother, Jessie Calloway Hale. The Sierra Sun recently published a bit about the book called Shedding Light on the Donner Party.
posted @ Sunday, December 19, 2004 6:42 PM | Feedback (1)
Whither Global Warming?
I really like Michael Crichton. I linked to a speech on environmentalism a while back. Here's another one on global warming.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
which is soon followed by
Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?
It's a very interesting article to read. He talks alot about consensus in science. He also talks about second hand smoke. The more I've read about the second hand smoke the less I believe it causes any health problems. I'm certainly in favor of reducing smoking in public places but I don't want to twist science. We know now that silicon breast implants don't have major health problems. What's next for scientific consensus? (I also like where he compare SETI to religion.)
posted @ Thursday, December 16, 2004 9:57 PM | Feedback (1)
Who do Racial Preferences Help?
Here's an interesting article on the effects of racial preferences on black lawyers. There were a couple of interesting quotes in the article:
Once in law school, "around 50 percent of black students [end up] in the bottom tenth of the class; and around two-thirds of black students are in the bottom fifth." Only 8 percent of black students place in the top half of their classes.

So 92% of blacks are in the bottom half of their law school class? The other quote is

The solid pillars of Sander's statistical analysis are that 1) black students do just as well in law school as whites with comparable undergraduate grades and LSAT scores; 2) this fact proves that blacks' academic difficulties stem from racial preferences, not from any racial problems in law schools;

Hmmmm. So if you take someone who's actually qualified to be in a given law school then they do just fine. I just can't believe these results suprise anyone. Racial preferences may be good or bad but we certainly need to understand their impact on the people they are supposed to be helping.

posted @ Friday, December 10, 2004 10:32 AM | Feedback (1)
The United Nations
I've been on a bit of an anti-United Nations kick for a while now. Especially since I read somewhere that we provide 22% of the budget for the UN. I'm thinking we should ask for our money back. Or at least stop funding some of the idiocy out there. Case in point:
The inequality and injustice of the treatment of Israel becomes most obvious in comparison with the U.N.'s treatment of human-rights violations elsewhere in the world. A U.N. General Assembly resolution on Iran could only be adopted last week after any notion of creating a single investigator into human-rights abuse in that country was eliminated. No resolution was even attempted on countries like China, where 1.3 billion people are without basic civil and political rights, or Saudi Arabia, where gross discrimination against women is endemic and more than a million female migrant workers are essentially slaves. Resolutions put forward on Sudan and Zimbabwe were prevented this week from even coming to a vote. The grand total of the GA's 2004 country-specific criticism of human-rights violations around the globe in the 190 U.N. members, excluding Israel: One resolution for each of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan. It was on November 24 that the U.N. General Assembly defeated action on Sudan and Zimbabwe. Simultaneously, U.N. delegates in the adjoining room adopted nine resolutions condemning Israel.

This is from an article in National Review titled Fatal Failure. It really focuses on the hypocrisy of the United Nation's treatment of Israel. While the scandal with Kofi Annan unfolds its important to remember just what a messed up organization this is.

posted @ Wednesday, December 01, 2004 2:15 PM | Feedback (1)
Kofi Annan must go
Norm Coleman has an editorial in the WSJ titled Kofi Annan Must Go.
posted @ Wednesday, December 01, 2004 7:13 AM | Feedback (1)
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