Free Roman

I can hardly believe the news that Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland "at the request of the United States." Three decades ago, he pleaded guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl who had passed herself off as a legal adult in order to become a model. The judge in the case (now deceased) reneged on the agreed-upon plea agreement, instead imposing more jail time and deportation. Polanski fled the United States.

The victim won a settlement against Polanski and wants the case dropped. Nevertheless, the Justice Department renewed its efforts to pursue Polanski in 2005 (why?) and finally got its man - incarcerating a 76-year-old survivor of the Krakow ghetto for a thirty-year-old statutory rape. If he fights extradition - and I think he has every right to do so - he could sit in jail for months.

(Come on, people, this "girl" was and is my age. I don't take rape lightly. But why the hysteria? Do people think that she's still thirteen? Is this a case of "always a child" in the minds of those who are fanatical about "pedophiles"? Has Polanski really left a trail of raped children across Europe? I don't think so. This smells like a witch hunt.)

Why did the judge change his mind? And why has the U.S. pursued Polanski for so long, while allowing murderous former dictators to live in luxury in the United States (in Hawaii, yet)?

This is absurd. This smacks of the smear campaign against Fatty Arbuckle - who, despite being acquitted after three bogus trials was personally and financially ruined by a bunch of anti-Hollywood moralistic prudes who ultimately instituted the Hayes Office. (And we know what a boon that was for the aesthetic quality of films.) Someone is out to make an example of Roman Polanski.

It's also reminiscent of the chasing and cornering of Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion who was twice arrested for violating the Mann Act, because he crossed the state line with his white girlfriend (later his second wife). It didn't matter that this woman was an adult; she was white, he was black, and therefore he was committing the crime of "white slavery." However, what really motivated the vendetta against Johnson was the fact that he had just kicked the tar out of the undefeated (and white) James Jeffries, who had come out of retirement "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro."*

What really motivates the vendetta against Polanski remains to be seen. (Head on over to YouTube to see the hideously racist, anti-Semitic, repugnant comments regarding Polanski, equating him with O.J. Simpson and the like.) Ironically, the message to rape victims in this case seems to be: once a victim, always a victim. Get "raped" by a celebrity, and you don't have the right to move on, not as long as someone can milk the story or use the perpetrator for political ends. You're going to still be that "thirteen-year-old" the rest of your life.

Well, that does not make me feel safe.
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*Incidentally, was "Darwinism" or creationism the standard curriculum for public schools in 1910?
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UPDATED: Oh my, now the California prison system is facing budget cuts and releasing as many as 40,000 inmates. What a great time to go after Roman Polanski. What a wonderful use of California's tax funds, second only to keeping that asshole Charles Manson, and his harem of born-again gooney birds, alive. It's nice to see that the state of California and our Justice Department has its priorities straight.

(On the other hand, maybe they'll end up releasing all the harmless potheads that they locked up in this bogus War on Drugs. Holy crap, this country is mixed up.)

SECOND UPDATE: More of the story of the original plea bargain is coming out: it seems that Polanski objected to having his trial televised. For pity's sake, this wasn't even a jury trial! Televised? People certainly wanted to make a name for themselves at Polanski's expense.

The case is now an international incident (no surprise there). And this is all for the good of the victim, right?

Dead Bear Cub Covered with Obama Posters

This is cetainly not getting news coverage in the United States.

A dead bear cub draped in Barack Obama posters has been found at the entrance to a university in North Carolina, police said today.

Police and wildlife officials are investigating the incident at the Western Carolina University.

Maintenance workers found the 34kg (75lb) bear cub in front of the administration building at the entrance to the campus.

It had been shot, and Obama posters were stapled together and placed over its head.

"Someone evidently was wanting to draw attention to the election," Tom Johnson, the chief of university police, told the Asheveille Citizen's Times newspaper.

"If we find out who they are, we'll make sure they'll get some attention themselves."

Leila Tvedt, a spokeswoman for the university, said the institution "deplores the inappropriate behaviour that has led to this troubling incident".

"We cannot speculate on the motives of the people involved [oh, really?], nor who those people might be," she added.

"Campus police are cooperating fully with authorities to investigate this matter."

University police asked state wildlife officials to remove the dead cub and help in the investigation.

The bear hunting season in North Carolina began last week.

I can speculate as to the motivation:



The motivation seems pretty clear to me.

Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He's a fucking nigger, and he's a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They're gonna get all hung honeys, they're gonna get assassinated, they're gonna get killed."

"You liberal idiots. Dumb shits. Welfare bums. You guys just fucking come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies. That's all you guys do. And then suck up the welfare and expect everyone else to pay for your hospital bills for your kids. I just say let your kids die. That's the best move. Just let your children die. Forget about paying for hospital bills for them. I'm not gonna do it. You guys are lowlifes. And I hope you all die."

Wow, way to fight eugenics from the "Darwinists," you assholes. Way to fight the next "Holocaust" that a bunch of science teachers are going to foist on our society. Right.

I volunteered for ACORN way back in the 1990s. Do your worst. (Shrug.)

Racist Morons Boo John McCain in Lakeville

John McCain tries to do the right thing and set some people straight about Barak Obama:

1. Barak Obama is not a terrorist, and does not "consort with terrorists." (If these dipshits from Lakeville think Ayres is a terrorist, call the FBI! Come on, people, think! It won't hurt for long.)

2. Barak Obama is not a Arab. He is not a Muslim.



Incidentally, most Arabs in America are Christians, not Muslims. (And a fair number of them are atheists.) And one can simultaneously be an Arab and a "decent human being," their invention of algebra notwitstanding. I wish McCain could have brought that out as well, but he was dealing with a barely sentient ding-dong in a fright wig.

I have sincere respect for John McCain's love for this country and his wartime experiences (but he's not getting my vote). I doubt that all the members of this audience do. They're not voting for John McCain - they're voting against an e-mail hoax that got bundled, like toxic derivatives, into this campaign.

Regarding this recent, shameful confirmation of every cornfed yokel stereotype of Minnesota so much of us have worked to counter, all I can say is: Don't blame me! I live in the Twin Cities!

John McCain pandered to the right wing - and he got what he asked for.

UPDATED: Pastor giving invocation before McCain event proclaims: If Obama wins, God's reputation will suffer. Religion is a fucking joke.

Shimmies to Dispatches.

SECOND UPDATE: Then, on the left there's the walking-comatose Whoopi Goldberg, who in her ding-dong universe is worried about the prospect of "slavery" under a McCain presidency:



Right. Way to forget the Emacipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, Whoopi. I'd better not see you at any Juneteenth celebrations if you cannot remember that neither of those were Supreme Court decisions.

(Whoopi Goldberg should have no fear of being a slave, anyway. A slave is supposed to actually accomplish things. Who would want her?)

Now They Can Quit Pretending

The Discovery Institute does believe in eugenics after all.

Michael Medved claims that Americans are genetically superior to other human beings.

The radical notion that our national character stems from genetics as well as culture has always inspired angry controversy; many observers scoff at the whole idea of a unifying hereditary component in our multi-racial, multi-cultural society. Aside from the varied immigrants who now make up nearly 15% of the population, the forebears of today’s Americans journeyed to this continent from Asia, Africa, Latin America and every nation of Europe. Our stark differences in appearance, if nothing else, argue against the concept of common DNA connecting contemporary citizens of wildly divergent ancestry.

Gee, I guess different colors of paper also show that it can't all be made from trees. (I suppose that God made the nice colors - pink, blue, yellow - and Satan the colors that I like, like black, red, and hot pink.)

Nevertheless, two respected professors of psychiatry have recently come out with challenging books that contend that those who chose to settle this country in every generation possessed crucial common traits that they passed on to their descendents. In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life. The tiny percentage making that choice (perhaps only 2%, even in most periods of mass immigration) represents the very essence of a self-selecting group. Compared to the Irish or Germans or Italians or Chinese or Mexicans who remained behind in the “Old Country,” the newcomers to America would naturally display a propensity for risk-taking, for restlessness, for exuberance and self-confidence – traits readily passed down to subsequent generations. Whybrow explained to the New York Times Magazine that immigrants to the United States and their descendents seemed to possess a distinctive makeup of their “dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.”

John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School makes a similar case for an American-specific genotype in “The Hypomanic Edge”—celebrating the frenzied energy of American life that’s impressed every visitor since Tocqueville. The United States also benefited from our tradition of limited government, with only intermittent and ineffective efforts to suppress the competitive, entrepreneurial instincts of the populace. Professor Whybrow says: “Here you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace. That’s what gives us our peculiar edge.” In other words, “anything goes capitalism” reflects and sustains the influence of immigrant genetics.

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits. Among contemporary African-Americans, however, this very different historical background exerts a less decisive influence, because of vast waves of post-slavery black immigration. Some three million black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean arrived since 1980 alone and in big cities like New York, Boston and Miami close to half of the African-American population consists of immigrants, their children or grandchildren. The entrepreneurial energy of these newcomer communities indicates that their members display the same adventurous instincts associated with American DNA.

In other words, "Oh, we're not saying that white people are genetically superior to black people - we're just saying that white Americans are genetically superior to black Americans!" What a pig Medved is!

Naturally, PZ Myers takes down Medved's pseudo-genetics.

What utter nonsense! I've been to "command and control" Europe several times, and then had the shock of returning here. Europeans are lively - walking everywhere, meeting friends at the cafe instead of watching television, going out at night (without the kids, because they actually leave them with a babysitter or a nanny, whereas American parents drag their little darlings everywhere, even into bars and nightclubs, and then complain about the skimpy dress, raucous behavior, and unchurched language of child-free people like me who think that bars and nightclubs are for adults). I don't know how to put the difference more clearly than this photo:

And I wish this was an exaggeration.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Very well, you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at distributing social goods. This is not news. But there can be no goods or services without wealth, and surely the one thing American capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent Europeans need to improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But this is by no means obvious today. Europeans work less: but when they do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the US; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the US is now distinctly outperformed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, ...and France.

...Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. Yes, the European Commission periodically makes an ass of itself, aspiring to regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers. The much-vaunted Stability Pact to constrain national expenditure and debt has broken down in acrimony, though with no discernible damage to the euro it was designed to protect. And pensions and other social provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't more and more Americans facing foreclosure on their homes and mountains of debt? Didn't we have another serious recession after eight years of another moron in the White House? Didn't we have a major Depression in the 1930s? So how many Americans, showing their natural grit and "risk taking" behavior, fled their country to seek adventure and fortune elsewhere? How many Americans even go abroad anymore? How many speak a second language, even?

Medved is just riffing on the tired old "How-come-it's-always-the-black-folk-who-win-all-the-racing-medals-at-the-Olympics" argument, conveniently forgetting that appearance doesn't indicate race. As a matter of fact, it's mostly black Americans who win those medals, not Africans, a fact resulting from a miriad of causes including mixed heritage with whites, Native Americans, and other ethnicities, nutrition, socio-economic status, individual talent, and personal choices. And that holds true for everyone.

That's why Americans, who used to be risk-takers, adventurers, and creative inventors, are now largely superstitious, fatalistic, consumerist couch-potatoes. (I don't think the Founding Fathers and Mothers would recognize us.) It's due to the choices we've made. And that doesn't have to be our future. Strict genetic determinism has never been the consequence of evolution. Strict genetic determinism is just a cartoon vision of those who don't know (again) what the hell they're talking about. (But then again, the concept of strict determinism, or "cause and effect," is what convinces many people that intelligent design is persuasive.)

Human beings belong to only one race. "Race" is a social construct. It's a relatively recent idea that has no genetic basis and is literally skin deep.

But it doesn't surprise me at all to find out how racist, provincial-minded, and hate-filled the Discovery Institute minions are. Their yawping about how Darwin "caused the Holocaust" is filled with more envy than alarm. Like most revisionists, what they truly want is to purify the nation - their way.

While crying "Censorship! Tyranny! I was expelled!" they seek to censor, to expel, and to impose their own tyranny - their way. What they are "rebelling" against is the perceived weaknesses, not the "tyranny" of the scientific community. They want an umbrella of certainty held above their whole lives, and science can't give anyone that.

"Freedom" and "academic inquiry" to them mean conformity and unquestioning obedience. They are guilty of those very crimes which they see in others, everywhere.

Rust Belt Philosophy also takes Medved to task for his unwarranted genetic generalizations.

UPDATED: Our President George W. Bush has funded with our tax a "study" (being that they're so sciency and all) on "human dignity," chaired by a crank named Leon Kass, who is the President's advisor and bioethics. In that capacity, Mr. Kass warns the President about grave dangers to our human "dignity," and in this capacity he is deeply troubled by the social adoption of "animal behavior" such as licking ice cream cones and eating hot dogs on the street:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street - even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat - displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

But he has no problem shaking his finger at "aging bachelors" and advocating that all women welp like bunnies in the backyard.

Call me catty, but I think the next round of "no new human-animal hybrids" is going to be something else. They just want to protect us! Keep repeating the word "Freedom!"

UPDATED: Ben Stein says, "Scotland is the most intelligent race in the world." And I thought Scotland was a country.