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The Scooter Libby commutation inspires a detached nausea in me
One of the main selling points of the rule of law is that everyone has to abide by the same ones. Or not…
Bush commutes Libby’s prison sentence
President Bush commuted Monday the prison term of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, facing 30 months in prison after a federal court convicted him of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.Sure, the investigation seemed to be centered around something that wasn’t a crime. Fine. But Libby had every opportunity to plead the fifth and he didn’t. Instead he lied under oath.
I’ve long maintained that one of the great social blunders of my lifetime was not convicting Clinton for perjury in the Lewinsky case. Not that the crime itself was terribly notable, but setting a high, enforced standard of the rule of law would have changed subsequent presidents for the better.
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We’re entering the age of the Loner!
I came across this article on diversity and society somewhere on the City Journal. To quote:
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
It all makes sense, the more diverse, the less one has in common with one’s neighbors. The less one has in common, the fewer common goals, the more group competition and the payoff for community action is less. Therefore, you get less of it.
This would explain why people tend to live near people a lot like them. It would be upsetting to people who think we should all live in neatly arranged boxes supporting the “community” goals instead of our own individual ones. I think there’s lots of hugging in those boxes too.
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New Photo Gallery is up!
At long last, after much color correcting and tweaking in Photoshop, my last round of photography is online. I’ve put some samples on this page, just click any of them and it will take you to the gallery. Or you can just click here.
The lovely Michelle Overstreet was my model for the occasion. Her brother Scott (the only other person in any of the photos) was there as well taking pictures.
As you might notice the choice to go for color over black and white depends greatly on the total light available as well as the amount of concrete in the shot.
On the whole I think they turned out quite well. I was able to do some tricks with lighting I haven’t tried before, and the fiddler against the city skyline remains a solid idea. I particularly like the use of the Flash (on the later shots) and the cool golden glow the lighter provided. In post processing I created several utility Photoshop Actions (I’ll post those later) which sped up the color corrections and image resizing a great deal.
All of these were taken last Saturday on either Bishop Street in Midtown (near Atlantic Station, or at the North Highland bridge downtown. For my non-local readers, these locations are about five miles apart from each other in Atlanta. We started about 7:00 PM and went to 9:45. With the exception of the black and white conversion, cropping and color corrections, almost nothing was done in Photoshop.
Thoughts?
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Two things worth reading
- A DIY guide to building your own CNC machine (for about $600)
- Interesting thoughts on Global Warming
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Friday round up
- A look at where the I-Pod is made, it’s pretty much all of East Asia
- A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
- Coming Anarchy does math
- Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
- 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
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Quote of the moment
From this BloggingHeads episode:
The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.
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An odd sight
A couple of hours ago I made a caffeine run to a gas station I don’t often frequent. There were four old men playing some kind of video poker. They all stared silently at the machines, much the same way my age cohort plays Halo or Guitar Hero.
Doesn’t anyone ever outgrow video games? It would be nice if someone actually grew up. Granted, I don’t seem to be, but other people should.
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Local drug war update
Today’s newspaper brought mixed results. The Atlanta Police Department does seem to be cleaning itself up, indeed, much more than I expected. However, I haven’t read anything about any sort of judicial accountability; they’re the ones who approve the warrants, seemingly without even looking at them.
Rant Starts
Meanwhile, people like this guy send exactly the wrong message with his “How not to get busted” DVD series. The point of drug legalization is not to evade the law or get high, it’s to live in a free society where people can make their own mistakes and take responsibility for them. Instead we revive the notion of demonic possession in the form of “addiction” which is a “disease”, which is at the same time pitiful and criminal and a reason to treat us all like children in the hands of an all-knowing state.The end result of protecting people from the consequences of their actions is to fill the world with fools, and that seems to be what we’ve done.
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John Edwards sinks to the challenge
It reminds me of the adage “he came to do good and wound up doing very well indeed.”
From this NYT article
John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff.
Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show.
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The money paid Mr. Edwards’s expenses while he walked picket lines and met with Wall Street executives. He gave speeches, hired consultants, attacked the Bush administration and developed an online following. He led minimum-wage initiatives in five states, went frequently to Iowa, and appeared on television programs. He traveled to China, India, Brussels, Uganda and Russia, and met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street.I suppose helping the poor isn’t worth spending one’s own money. Happily the Democrats seem to be preferring the more honest hacks of Clinton and Obama.
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Immigration solved!
It would seem that Mexican women are having fewer babies. I’m always skeptical about stats from poor counties, but it is interesting. Immigration is one area where the demographic argument is compelling and probably correct. I’ve come to find the “Western Civilization is doomed due to low birth rates” argument viable.