May 1, 2008: This post is obsolete and wrong in places. For something better, go to:
http://rasmusen.org/t/2008/04/illegal-immigrants-cause-21-of-crime.html
How much does crime by illegal immigrants cost America each year? My estimate is $84 billion per year.
Is this a way to stop block spam? My published address is smith2@indiana.com. All emails sent there go to a garbagecan, but first stimulate a reply to sender that says,”Your email went to a spamblocker. The true address may be found by adding 3 to any numeral in the email address, so that, for example if the address you first sent to were
jones24@indiana.com
Then you would resend the message to
jones26@indiana.com.
Please resend your email to the corrected address.
May 1, 2008: This post is obsolete and wrong in places. For something better, go to:
http://rasmusen.org/t/2008/04/illegal-immigrants-cause-21-of-crime.html
I just ran the numbers to see how much crime is caused by illegal immigrants. I conclude that they cause about 21% of it, a crime rate 6 time that of legal residents, meaning that illegal immigrants cause 3,360 murders, 19,950 rapes, 450,000 burglaries, and 1.45 million serious thefts, besides other categories of crimes.
Here’s my methodology, since this kind of data, despite its obvious importance, isn’t available readily from the government, no doubt as part of the general policy of nonenforcement of immigration laws. My source notes are at the end of this post.
A lifeboat will hold 5 people without sinking in the next storm (an inevitable one), but 6 are in it. All will die unless one is thrown out.
1. Should law and morals allow one person to voluntarily and unilaterally jump overboard and die?
2. Should they be allowed to agree unanimously to draw straws and use a gun to kill one person? (kill, because after he finds he has the short straw he changes his mind)
3. Suppose we know they would all have agreed, but they don’t actually have the discussion. Instead, one of them, a very honest person, draws a straw for each of them. If he had the short straw, he would have killed himself, but he is lucky and Sam has the short straw. He then shoots Sam with the gun and they thrown Sam overboard. Is that OK?
4. Suppose they have a discussion, and they and we know that everyone *would* agree to the scheme if it was a choice between all 6 drawing straws and all of them dying. Sam, however, says: “I won’t agree. I know that even if I hold out, the other 5 of you will do a 5-straw scheme and one of you will go overboard and the rest of us will be saved. So I’m opting out.” Is it OK to include him in the straw scheme anyway, against his will?
5. Suppose that they have a discussion and Sam sincerely says he is opting out because even if his opting out would sink the boat, he doesn’t want to have any chance of being thrown overboard now instead of dying in 30 minutes when the storm hits. And in fact if he doesn’t agree, the resulting bickering will prevent even a 5-straw scheme. Is it OK to include him in the straw scheme anyway, against his will?
This is a picture of a Best-Western Hotel in Cincinnati that has a
drive-through window for checking in and out. What a great idea!
The Catholic Encyclopedia says:
“Another statute, of the first year of William and Mary, prohibited Catholics from residing within ten miles of London…
In 1700 an Act was passed which, Sir Erskine May observes, “cannot be read without astonishment”. It incapacitated every Roman Catholic from inheriting or purchasing land, unless he abjured his religion upon oath…
Concerning this Act of William III Hallam remarks, “So unprovoked, so unjust a persecution is the disgrace of the Parliament that passed it.” But he goes on to add, “The spirit of Liberty and tolerance was too strong for the tyranny of the law and this statute was not executed according to its purpose. The Catholic landholders neither renounced their religion nor abandoned their inheritance. The judges put such constructions upon the clause of forfeiture as eluded its efficiency.” No doubt this is generally true. But as Charles Butler tells us in his “Historical Memoirs” (London, 1819-21), “in many instances the laws which deprived Catholics of their landed property were enforced.” He adds that “in other respects they were subject to great vexation and contumely”. They were a very small and very unpopular minority in an age when a common creed was regarded, in every European country, as the chief bond of civil polity and dissidents from it were more or less rigorously repressed. As a matter of fact, it is to a great English magistrate that we owe the ruling which placed an almost insuperable difficulty in the way of the tribe of informers. At the trial of the Rev. James Webb on the 25th of June, 1768, at Westminster, at the suit of a notorious common informer named Payne, Lord Mansfield told the jury that the defendant could not be condemned “unless there were sufficient proof of his ordination”. Such proofs, of course, were not forthcoming. Lord Mansfield, as Charles Butler relates in his above-mentioned “Historical Memoirs”, discountenanced the prosecution of Catholic priests and took care that the accused should have every advantage that the form of proceedings, or the letter or spirit of the law, could allow. And at that period the same temper animated English judges generally….
In this year, 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act was passed. It repealed the worst portions of the Statute of 1699 above mentioned, and set forth a new oath of allegiance which a Catholic could take without denying his religion.
Harry Lime: “Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?”
“The cuckoo clock.”
(From Orson Welles, The Third Man, as repeated here)
… Hitchens is unlike other atheist writers in his ability to write. But in one sad fact, he is just like them. He is morally indignant. Instead of taking refuge in the (comparatively) strong fortress of nihilistic relativism, and laughing at all the poor blinkered dopes who still think that truth and beauty are still ambulatory in this sorry world, Hitchens (like all these other recently published guys) calls us and raises us ten. “You have puritanical indignation at our unbelief? Well, watch this.” And the atheist, a complex chemical reaction according to the best contemporary science, uncorks with scathing observations on the hypocrisies of other complex chemical reactions. Hitchens does this in the first five lines of his book, and shows no sign of letting up. Given his premises, it is like being indignant with a tornado, or vegetable soup, or sand on the beach — but Hitchens does it. They all do it.
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
I found an interesting website with See: examples of trying to translate Nietzsche’s maxims.
Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie? - Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.
Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)
I’d seen that as
Man does not live for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)
Though less accurate, I like the mistranslation better.
Sorry about the gap in my posting. I was out of town, and couldn’t get my posting program to let me in. I’m back home now.
I was just reading some old posts on patristics at Professor Atwood’s Three Hierarchies that sparked some thoughts. It is common for people to want to rely on the early Church as an example. This is done in two ways. The churches of Rome and Greece argue that the early Church was pure and passed down those pure traditions across the ages. Some Protestants argue that the early Church was pure and we should figure out what it did and return to those pure practices.
Both are wrong, because their premise is wrong. Why should we think the early Church was pure? Why should we think that it knew good doctrine or practice any better than we do now? Why should we think that its members behaved better than we do now?
Mark Steyn has a good column on the inanity of trying to make people safer by preventing them from defending themselves.
…It was a “gun-free zone” except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.
[This post has gotten long and sprawling as I investigated more. I’ll leave it that way, as a source of material for other people to analyze]
David Klinghoffer in the Weekly Standard tells us how Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State, was denied tenure. Reporting is usually so bad that it’s impossible to tell whether somebody was denied tenure for good reason (his scholarship) or bad reasons (for example, his political views). But this story caught my eye because it says:
According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez’s scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department’s standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.
Yet in turning down Gonzalez’s appeal, ISU president Gregory Geoffroy claimed that the astronomer “did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.”
Typesetting has been moving to the developing world in the past ten years. That seems natural: it requires a lot of moderately skilled labor and little capital or propinquity, since files can be sent over the Internet. But maybe the trend will reverse. I’m seeing from personal experience that the Third World lacks one crucial input: dependability. (more…)
Benjamin Barton, in Do Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?, says (I see fromDo Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?, says”> Emprical Legal Studies)
Many legal outcomes can be explained, and future cases predicted, by asking a very simple question: is there a plausible result in this case that will significantly affect the interests of the legal profession (positively or negatively)? If so, the case will be decided in the way that offers the best result for the legal profession.
Fischel, I think, had a good article on the Professional Ethics part of this.
It’s common for liberals to call any political group they don’t like, “right-wing” or “conservative”. The Nazis as conservatives are an example. The National SOCIALIST party complained about rich people, were anti-Christian, wanted stronger government control, and had no interest in restoring the Kaiser or any other German government system that had ever existed. They were anti-Stalinist, but so, of course, were the Trotskyites. Similarly, in the 1980’s we used to hear about Kremlin conservatives and conservative Maoists— by then, even the Communists were honorary conservatives to liberals.
I came across a funny example of that in a column about India by Martha Nussbaum.
One of the many stupid things about Windows is that despite the overwhelming amount of useless stuff on the Control Panel, there is no way to see which programs start up automatically when Windows boots, or what different processes are for. Googling, I found a thread with a good post by Pete C. , who recommends the two programs Autoruns and Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel, both of which seem well-designed and easy to install.
This topic came up at lunch.
- In 2001, the average charge for a surgical abortion at 10 weeks’ gestation was $468; but since most abortions in the United States are performed at low-cost clinics, women on average paid $372 for the procedure. (31)
How much does a medical abortion cost? In 2001, the average charge for a medical abortion was $487. (31)
Who pays for abortions?
- Some 74% of women pay for abortions with their own money; 13% of abortions are covered by Medicaid, and 13% are billed directly to private insurance. Some women who pay for the procedure themselves may receive insurance reimbursement later. (31)
Does the U.S. government help poor women who need abortions pay for them?
- Congress has barred the use of federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortions, except when the woman’s life would be endangered by a full-term pregnancy, or in cases of rape or incest. As of November 2006, 17 states used their own funds to subsidize abortion for poor women. (38)
Which is the best way to write this proposition?
(1) “If x =2z, then y = 3z; and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”
(2) “If x =2z then y = 3z, and if x =2v then y = 3g.”
(3) “If x =2z, then y = 3z and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”
(4) “If x =2z, then y = 3z, and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”
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