Listen, My Children...

Rangel on the Draft

When looking around for responses to Rangel's comments calling for a reinstatement of the draft, especially his claim that it's hypocritical to support the war but not support conscription, I haven't been able to find anyone pointing out the problem with that statement.  Perhaps it's because it's been said too often and is too obvious, but it isn't for people who haven't given the issue much thought.  Mr. Rangel, it's very possible to support the war and also believe that the best thing for assisting it to its conclusion isn't necessarily the addition of large numbers of unwilling, innately ill-equipped, or actively antagonistic people to the fighting force!

I've been in places (including a year in Germany) where there is a mandatory service year of the kind Rangel mentions -- in Germany, at least in 1998, the "year" of military service was several months shorter than the "year" of community service -- and I didn't hear too many complaints about it.  It would be great in a place like France, because it would give all high school graduates a year of having to do something and would also both take them out of the potential work force for a year and give them some skills for when they decide to reenter it.  It wouldn't go over too well here, though, as 1) we don't need a workforce reduction, 2) we're used to freedom (unlike many Europeans -- again, at least in 1998, German students had to a great extent their careers decided for them on the basis of pre-teen aptitude tests), 3) I doubt people would take too kindly to suddenly putting every 18-year-old in the country on the government's (taxpayer's) payroll, 4) colleges would have to add in even more remedial classes to compensate for a year without school (and, if it were after college (or you could defer it for college), you can bet people would try any loophole they could find to avoid doing mandatory community service or military service they don't want to do when they've got half-a-dozen offers for six-figure jobs upon graduation), 5) as is regularly shown, people are less likely to do things if they feel the money the government is taking from them is being spent on those things (like giving to charity), so
the overall tendency might be to make "civic duty" volunteers (those who help because they feel an obligation, not because it's their lifelong dream to be a homeless shelter volunteer) pull out, thinking that that's what the government's paying the 18-year-olds for.

UPDATE: There's a first time for everything -- FHayek at DailyKos makes my top point, and is right on the money the whole way through.  What's up?  Is he a secret conservative troll, as some commenters think?  Or is there really someone over there who has read basic economic theory? 

Babysitting

I had the good fortune to spend half of my high school career elsewhere (England and Germany), and never went on a school trip while in high school in Houston.  Due to that background, I might be forgiven for having had no idea why so many American teenagers go entirely crazy as soon as they get to college. 

At the American School in London, when we went on a school trip, the teachers would plunk us down in some foreign city and tell us to be back at the hotel in time for dinner.  We had an open campus, and we'd leave during lunch or an off period to go get a half-pint at the local pub (all within the legal drinking age, of course) or zoom downtown for some quick shopping.  If not exactly encouraged by our parents, it was with parental permission, and our parents were expected both to teach us how to take care of ourselves and to instill us with a sense of responsibility. 

When current American high schools (public, private, and parochial) take school trips even within the country, the children are watched night and day.  They are babied, told exactly where to go and what to do and when, and those who are acting in loco parentis must either believe they are acting as parents of nine-year-olds or that the parents they are replacing are nitwits who have instilled no self-control or maturity in their offspring whatsoever.  (To see the panic on students' faces when told they have to think up an activity on their own, perhaps there's some truth to that belief.) 

If they have never been allowed any freedoms, and have not been taught how to do things responsibly but have instead not been taught about anything at all (because ignoring the existence of things will mean they aren't ever thought about by your children, right? as my mother thought with the Kid Brother, before he bit his breakfast toast into a gun and shot her at four years old, at which point she realized responsible use or responsible disuse was better than ignorant obsession), is it any wonder American college students are, as a whole, remarkably immature and with absolutely no grasp of the practical repercussions of their actions? 

Foiled Attempts

Foiled attempts are a hard thing to prove.  Anne McCaffrey had fun with them in her books -- psychics would prevent terrorist attacks by warning about them ahead of time, but then, because the attacks would be foiled and not take place, people eventually started doubting the psychics and saying, in effect, "prove it."  How can you prove it?  By writing it down in an envelope and then having it opened after the attack takes place?  Only if you've got a total disregard for the people killed in the attack.  Same thing with Bush -- they're saying, "sure, sure, you've foiled attacks -- you're just saying that to back your spying up.  Prove it -- what have you foiled?"  But if he did the envelope trick, he'd be in more trouble (and justifiably) for having the knowledge and doing nothing about it. 

Sucks to be president.  Glad I'm not!

Jeff Goldstein: Optimist

He writes:

Personally, I think a series of terror attacks on civilian targets (buses, trains, malls, schools) within the US would effectively end the Islamist project; even an apolgetic anti-war or Arabist left wouldn’t be able to mitigate the cries for retribution that Americans would insist upon in order to regain their quality of life...

Ok, granted, on Sept. 11 itself, there wasn't much of it going around, but by the next day educated temporary Bostonians were printing articles -- which I still have, for posterity and all that -- saying how heartbroken they were that we had brought it upon ourselves and deserved that and more.  And he thinks making the US into Israel will make them oppose the US's enemies?  (Because, you know, they all oppose Israel's enemies, right?) 

Meh.  Now back to your regularly scheduled pessimism, doom and gloom, severe headcold, and lack of anything to say.

Cargo Inspection

People are always complaining about the low rate of cargo inspection. 

Some people I know in Houston acted like real Texans: instead of complaining, they decided to do something about it.  In the works is a technology that would allow all the big box cargo to be scanned without the current time-consuming process that makes universal scanning impractical. 

Something to keep your eyes on.

Quote of the Day

In the United States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day, I'm going to get that bastard..

A Day Late and a Dollar Short...

... Make that 7 years late and 12 billion dollars short.

I love boston: Double trouble for Big Dig: Number of tunnel leaks rises to 1,400.

Prison Reform

Two further points on prison reform and criminal justice and all that:

1) In My Dictatorship, certain levels of sex offenders would be castrated. 

2) One of the most amusing (or frightening, if it were Her Dictatorship) people I've come across on the subject of criminal justice was a girl who said that anyone who does nasty crimes either has a justification for them or has mental health problems, so, instead of imprisoning murderers, we should just provide them with lots of therapy.  Her reasoning: no well-adjusted person would kill someone without a very good reason for it, so it's just being intolerant of people with mental health issues to imprison murderers and so forth.  I only talked with her once, and briefly, and couldn't come up with a handy reason she didn't make sense, so I just ended up hoping that her opinion wasn't more widely held! 

(The judge in that article has a point -- if being on medication for depression is grounds for granting mental incompetency, well, we've got a heck of a lot of lunatics wandering the streets and running the world...)

Federalism

I'm not really discussing this case here -- I'm discussing it elsewhere, and other people have said my opinions online much better. But I do have one question: I keep hearing people like the lady who was just on the Early Show, saying, "the Florida courts have already made their decision. That should be final." Would those people be willing to have their reasoning hold in all cases? Should this bar appealing things to the supreme court? (The lower courts have already made their decisions, which should be final.) Should this really give the judicial system supreme authority, where other branches should never be permitted to call into question its judgments?

Pearl Harbor

From my grandfather: "Well, of course, we all had fun at UT. But I remember December 7. I was out having a nice brunch, and then the news came. There was no question whether or not you were going into the Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Corps. There was nothing to debate."

I have several friends, two of whom are in Iraq and others who are in military academies, who felt the same way about Sept. 11. Why is that idea so foreign to most people -- even Bob? They can't seem to get past the media line that the only people in the military are those who needed money and signed up without expecting they'd actually see any military action.