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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 11, 2003
North Korean: Friends of Mother Earth? This photo has been given as an example of the relative economic development of North and South Korean. I prefer to think of it as evidence of what good stewards of Mother Earth the North Korean government is. Soon, if the U.S. doesn't give into North Korean blackmail, and provide more economic aid, the Mother Earth loving government of North Korean will be able to enrich the soil of their beloved land with the organic fertilizer of millions of starving people.... Where Ideology Unfettered By Reality Leads You... Part of why I am no longer a pure libertarian is that there are a number of places where good intentions and pure ideology simply fail the most important test of all: what does it mean for a person who is injured and suffering? One of the most blatant examples is concerning mental illness. A whole generation of lawyers seem to have watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and let that define their understanding of the dangers of institutionalization. I can tell you one story; here's a speech I gave about my brother's descent into mental illness, and the failure of good intentions with respect to how mental illness is treated in the U.S. There are a lot of these tragedies out there. The Portland Oregonian ran a three part series December 29, 30, and 31, 2002, about the failures of the Oregon mental health system. If you want to read these articles, do it now, because they are only free for 30 days from publication. The article on December 30, "Free to Die," is about a young woman who, unlike many who suffer from a sudden, obvious schizoprenic breakdown (as happened to my brother), seems to have suffered a much slower, less obvious decline: An investigation by The Oregonian has found that at least 28 people have died in the past 3 1/2 years in the state after doctors, county mental health workers and other officials unsuccessfully sought to send them to psychiatric hospitals without their permission. The problem is almost certainly more widespread. The Oregonian studied only those whose deaths were documented in Department of Human Services records.Go ahead. Read the whole article. It is very sobering, and very well-written. This could have been your sister. It could have been you. In some pure sense, there is something very unfortunate about forcing an adult into mental health treatment, but consider what happens--and happens often in the U.S.--when this pursuit of ideological purity causes someone to die, often after enormous suffering and torment. In the case of Mary Boos, she starved herself to death because of paranoid delusions. A real human and her suffering trumps clever theories about how things ought to work. It's Always Nice To Be Quoted in a Newspaper The Washington Times covers the continuing Arming America scandal: Despite Knopf's decision to stop publication of "Arming America," officials of the company continued to defend Mr. Bellesiles. The Lott Controversy There has been discussion of late about a survey that John Lott did concerning defensive gun use in 1997. His hard disk crashed, and he can't seem to find any written documentation to establish that this phone survey actually took place. Why this has become an issue of importance: 1. Tim Lambert, a computer science professor in Australia, and a gun control advocate, has asserted that Lott didn't do such a survey at all, but fabricated it. 2. Lambert wants to do to Lott what I have done to Bellesiles. The comparison at first glance is worrisome. Lott's explanations for the lack of evidence for this phone survey are not terribly persuasive to those that are skeptical that the survey took place. Lott's explanations are at least possible, however. Where the comparison falls apart is that this survey is the only such example that Lambert can find of a non-reproducible claim, and were this single survey demonstrated to be a Bellesilesism, it would not significantly impact the conclusions of Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime, being only a question about what percentage of defensive gun uses involve shots fired. (It would, however, raise serious credibility questions about Lott.) There are disputes that Lambert has with Lott's work in other areas, but these are fairly arcane questions of statistical analysis where it is impossible to say (at least for me) that Lott is wrong and Lambert is right. James Lindgren has weighed in publicly on this question, clearly troubled by the lack of evidence for this phone survey that Lott says that he ran in 1997. Lott has recently written a letter to Lindgren on this subject, which Lott has given permission to publish, so I am doing so. I received this email from John Lott on Dec. 26 and he gave me permission to post it. In point 3 of his email below, Lott refers to a new study he did this fall. Dan Polsby inquired into this and confirmed that this 2002 study was done, talking and corresponding with people who did the fall 2002 study, as well as perused extensive phone calling records.This new survey may not resolve the question about the 1997 survey, but if it gives roughly similar results, it would at least raise the possibility significantly that the 1997 survey did take place, though without leaving any written evidence. UPDATE: Dr. Lott called me today, by coincidence. The survey to replicate the 1997 survey has been completed. While it has not yet been published, it is close enough to the 1997 survey results to be considered replicable. Taking Professional Standards for Historians Seriously From historynewsnetwork: The Society of American Historians has passed a resolution giving the organization the right to terminate the membership of any historian who fails to meet professional standards. Friday, January 10, 2003
Do You Know A Deaf Person in Boise Who Needs a TV? Or even better, a non-profit that provides services to the hearing impaired? I have a 27" RCA color TV that has lost the ability to make sound. It doesn't seem to be repairable (increasingly, TVs this size and price are disposables), but it works great other than that, and if you can't hear, or can't hear very well, using it in caption mode makes no difference. It's free to the first person who emails me and asks to pick it up. I would prefer to give it to a non-profit for the tax write-off, but an individual who wants is welcome to it as well. For those that are thinking this way: it's not the speakers (I tried to get it to work with the external audio jacks feeding external speakers). This, plus the clicking noise when you adjust volume, suggests a failure in the audio circuits upstream from the speakers. Every Multimillionaire Needs One Of These... 
A company called Solotrek is developing what is essentially a personal aircraft. They are apparently a bit short on development funds, and so: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a strap-on flying machine. And it could be yours on eBay for $1 million with just one catch -- you have to agree not to use it. Thursday, January 09, 2003
Michael Moore (Continued) This item from http://us.imdb.com/ was too good to pass up: American satirist Michael Moore has stormed out of Britain after a bust up with the London theatre hosting his one-man show. The Bowling For Columbine moviemaker performed Michael Moore - Live! to packed audiences for two months before Christmas at The Roundhouse in Camden, North London. But on the penultimate night he reportedly flew into a rage, verbally attacked everyone associated with the theatre because he thought he wasn't being paid enough. During the performance he complained he was making just $750 a night. A member of the stage crew says, "He completely lost the plot. He stormed around all day screaming at everyone, even the £5-an-hour bar staff, telling them how we were all conmen and useless. Then he went on stage and did it in public." Staff retaliated by refusing to work the following night, which led to the show being held up for an hour. Eventually he made a groveling apology to staff and the angry audience finally took to their seats. A source reports that Moore then packed his bags and flew to New York the next day without saying thank you or goodbye to anyone.Nice to see Michael Moore showing his sympathy for working people like that. I must say--only $750 a night--what a tragedy for a millionaire. And here's another gem, in this case, from an article in The American Prospect, a distinctly progressive magazine. And they take apart Bowling for Columbine from a different perspective, one that shows considerable intellectual honesty and integrity: My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America -- where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black -- without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. Instead, to explore a phenomenon that has devastated inner cities and is a horror primarily in urban areas -- nearly 70 percent of gun murders take place in cities, according to U.S. Deaprtment of Justice statistics -- Moore has made a movie that takes as its focal point the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., a type of crime (five or more victims) that represented one-tenth of 1 percent of murders that year and that occurred in a white, prosperous, suburban community.Well worth reading. Michael Moore isn't a progressive intellectual--he's a buffoon, who progressive intellectuals seem to rightly abhor. It Sounds Like HBO Is Planning to Rehabilitate Hitler From Yahoo News: HBO is developing a documentary based on a controversial book that claims Adolf Hitler was gay. Wednesday, January 08, 2003
"Orwellian Tactics" About Public Drunkenness Instapundit is again talking about the public drunkenness checks in bars in Virginia, calling them "Orwellian." So I read the article that he linked to, and there are some...problems. "We're not talking about someone who was enjoying a cocktail or two and enjoying a nice evening out," Bennett said, noting that the nine men arrested had blood-alcohol levels ranging from 0.14 to 0.22. "They drew attention to themselves by their actions."Hmmm. BAC of 0.14 to 0.22. How do you get a level that high from "enjoying a cocktail or two" unless you weigh 30 pounds? To get BACs that high is not the result of a drink or two. Unless you have a very high alcohol tolerance, those sorts of BACs are usually associated with sleep, giddy stupidity, or belligerence. Maybe there is something wrong going on there in terms of random inspections (which is not constitutional), but even this article trying to make the police sound overzealous suggests that the people they arrested were well and thoroughly blasted. Maybe they were quiet, well-behaved drunks, but I'm going to need to see a bit more evidence of this than just whining from bar owners and people questioned by the police. Absolutely Devastating Analysis of Canada's Current Gun Control Program--By A Canadian Gun Controller This column by John Dixon in the Globe and Mail, who played a key role in creating the gun control laws passed in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre, explains why the current insanely expensive program exists, and for the wrong reasons. Just so that you don't think he's one of us: We now know that the government's gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs rival those of core services like national defence. And it doesn't work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn't designed to control guns. It was designed to control Kim Campbell.After explaining that the imposition of the Firearms Acquisition Certificate was creating, slowly, a comprehensive gun registry for Canada, Dixon explains that this system didn't work quite as expected, because the police had real work to do: The FAC system was a very Canadian (i.e. sensible) approach to the registration of ordinary hunting and target firearms. If you were a good ol' boy from Camrose, Alta., and didn't want to get involved, you didn't have to -- as long as you didn't buy more guns. Good ol' boys die off, so younger people in shooting sports would eventually all be enrolled in the system.This is why, by the way, the New Zealand police ended mandatory registration of long firearms in 1983--the records were always 25% out of date, and they had work to do solving crimes, not registering guns. Dixon goes on to explain that because the previous gun control laws--stricter than most Americans would tolerate, I suspect--had been the accomplishment of Justice Minister Kim Campbell: Which is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to be "tougher" on guns than Kim Campbell, they had to find a policy that would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince the Liberals' urban constituency that Jean Chrétien and Allan Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on Parliament Hill.Powerful stuff. Thanks to instapundit for pointing me to it. Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Finally! Knopf Pulls Arming America Publication has been halted on a disputed book about the history of guns in the United States. Questions about Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America" had already led Columbia University to rescind the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history.Read it here. Britain, Gun Control, and Michael Moore In which Michael Moore demonstrates this book titled Stupid White Men describes himself. This column by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the British newspaper, the Independent, both shows what a shallow person Michael Moore is, what a tragedy is going on in Britain, and how Political Correctness has prevented the British government from facing squarely that gun control isn't a solution to a problem that is primarily cultural: I took my son to see Michael Moore live at the Roundhouse, in north London, before Christmas. The US radical and author of the best-selling book Stupid White Men was (mostly) clever, funny, angry, sharp, iconoclastic and sceptical about the lies and humbug processed by the US government and big business. Sure there were some flunked bits – you expect that, the troughs are part of the adventure, an evening with a well-worn rebel. History News Network Publishes A Piece By Me... This is about the need for political diversity in the history profession, so that embarrassments like the Bellesiles scandal get caught early. Sunday, January 05, 2003
Finally! Blue Sky Over Boise! Dark skies at night, and blue sky in the day time. The constant gray was getting a tad depressing. 
(Shot with my HP PhotoSmart 812 camera in the lowest resolution mode a couple blocks from my house.) The Failure of British Gun Control A great column by Mark Steyn in the Telegraph: You would think if "gun control" was going to work anywhere it would be on a small island. Particularly a small island at whose ports of entry the zealots of HM Customs like nothing better than performing intimate cavity searches on the off-chance you've got an extra bottle of duty-free Beaujolais tucked away up there. Surely, if you also had a Walther PPK parked out of sight, these exhaustive inspectors would be the first to notice.Go ahead--read it. It's worth doing. Shocking! Phyllis Schlafy and Instapundit on the Same Side of an Issue! See Schlafly's column about "copyright extremists," here. |
