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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
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This Is Hilarious: The Longest Court Case Title Ever?
From the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals: a 59 page decision, of which 34 pages is the plaintiff v. defendant list. Thanks to appellateblog for the pointer. It makes me think of Dickens' Bleak House.
Civil Rights as Race War: No, That's Not From Some White Supremacist...
It's from Julian Bond, NAACP national chairman (thanks to Eugene Volokh for the pointer):Bond told an audience of more than 400 that black and white Americans have different perceptions about the existence of racial discrimination at the beginning of this century. While noting that polls show most white citizens believe some measures to counter discrimination are no longer necessary, Bond warned against "replacing race with economic class as the cause of disadvantage" and against dismantling affirmative action programs.
Spoils of war? I thought, when I was arguing with an older generation, a long time ago, that the Civil Rights Movement was about equality for all, regardless of race. If this is all that Bond sees the Civil Rights Movement as--the equivalent of looting an enemy's property--then the NAACP has lost all credibility, and affirmative action is rightly seen as just more racist hatred. My last vestige of sympathy for it as a bad solution to a real problem has just gone away.
"Affirmative action is under assault not because it has failed, but because it has succeeded. It is the just spoils of a righteous war. It created the sizable middle class that constitutes one-third of all black Americans today," Bond said.
From My Daughter...
My daughter Hilary is off at the University of Idaho, and sent me this tidbit:Tonight we watched dateline about the cloning people!!!! THEY ARE HILARIOUS!! The guy, Rael had a catholic mom and jewish dad, and its a little odd that the alien race is the Elohim and their symbol is a slightly different Star of David. Also, their company is Clonaid and they live in UFO land. YOU CAN'T GET MUCH MORE UNCREATIVE! My only thing is if they actually cloned a baby, it will grow up twisted and weird enough to be another hitler!
My advice, if you are going to make up a religion:
A) Don't name it after yourself. Rael runs the Raelians (which even SOUNDS like aliens).
B) Don't use movie slogans as your alien slogan (the raelians slogan is "If you build it, it will come," stolen from Field of Dreams).
C) Don't have interpretive dance programs with stupid alien masks (you lose so much credibility).
D) Lastly, dont base your names, symbols, or buildings on every other religion and cult in this world. (Their embassy is going to look like a crop circle pattern.)
He claims to have 600,000 followers. Instead of "America, where's the love?" it should be, "America, WHERE ARE YOUR BRAINS????"
Some People Are Very Quickly Bored
I saw this ad on astromart.com (a classified site for people selling used telescopes):Obsession 20-inch f/5 truss scope, 6 months old, shipped from factory in July, 2002. Galaxy primary mirror has optician's certificate, enhanced coating, 96% reflectivity. Secondary has EnduroBrite dielectric coating, with 99% reflectivity. Primary has 18-point stainless steel cell with integral 12v cooling fan.
Now, this is an awesome scope. From all that I have heard, the Obsession is aptly named; it is a telescope for the very, very serious amateur astronomer. So I read how much money this guy has put into this awesome scope, and I wonder what happened? Medical bills are forcing him to sell it? Perhaps he has lost his job? (There are a lot of very nice scopes that have been showing up on astromart.com since 9/11, as the suddenly unemployed have to sell their luxuries to pay for necessities.) No, the reason he is selling it is:
Mirror box, rocker box, and UTA all fabricated from hardwood plywood; no particle board on scope, all woodwork has 5-coat polyurethane finish. Wheelbarrow system uses 10-inch pneumatic tires and detachable handle extensions for loading & unloading.
Ultra-smooth JMI 2-inch Crayford-type focuser with 1.25" adapter. Telrad sight included. DSC system recently added, using JMI 8192-step encoders for high-resolution pointing, with Sky Commander on-board computer.
Truss poles lock in place with split clamps on mirror box and cam levers on UTA. Setup time is 5 to 10 mintes. Tailored nylon light shroud and rack for 2-inch eyepieces also included.
Owners video and documentation included, plus all receipts. Total investment, including my $550 shipping cost from Wisconsin factory, is $7250.
Will sell to highest bidder, but cannot ship due to expense. Prefer buyer to see telescope fully assembled, or will transport disassembled within 200 miles of my Southern California location.Scope is in like new condition, am selling to raise money for purchase of a Grand Piano! Digital photos on request for serious inquiries.
He buys this awesome scope, and six months later, he has decided he would rather have a grand piano? Oh my!
And yes, I am envious that he can afford to buy something like this, and probably take a bath selling it six months later.
Can You Believe That in the 1950s, Many Teenagers Had To Be Chaperoned?
What benighted times they were, especially compared to the liberated, unstifled period we live in now:A teenage "chugging contest" in an upscale home near Burr Ridge turned into rape when a 16-year-old girl passed out and four young men performed sex acts on her--and scrawled offensive words on her body with a marker--while they videotaped their crimes, a Cook County prosecutor said Friday.
The rest of the article is more unpleasant. If you have a teenager in the house, you would be well advised to engage in absurd, paranoid, and completely unreasonable efforts to protect them from being either the victim or the rapist in a similar such case. You can't assume that there are parents at home supervising them:Mateck said the "understanding of the victim" was that Missbrenner's parents were home, but prosecutors said that was under investigation. Campanelli would not comment on where they were.
My experience, at least from California, is that even if the parents were home, what actions would they take? Probably none.
That's Right! File a Lawsuit!
Victims of the DC snipers have filed suit against:
1. The alleged snipers. Aren't they jumping the gun on a bit, since neither has been convicted?
2. The gun store who either sold the gun improperly, or from which the gun was stolen. The details of how the gun left the gun store and ended up John Muhammad's hands are still a bit murky, but they might be able to make the case that the gun store either sold the gun improperly, or failed to recognize that the gun had been stolen.
3. The manufacturer of the gun. This is the most absurd part of the suit."We plan to show that less than three months after Bull's Eye received the Bushmaster assault rifle in its store, the firearm 'disappeared,' traveled across the country and was used in the sniper attacks," Seattle attorney Paul Luvera said in a statement Thursday.
I guess someone isn't aware of this amazing device called an "automobile" that allows almost anyone to travel across country--even with a rifle--in less than three months. Yes, that's clear evidence of negligence by Bushmaster! Perhaps they should included a special weight in the gun that prevented it from being moved cross-country so quickly. It will be rather large, I think.
"Such a swift 'time to crime' is highly indicative of grossly negligent sales and distribution practices on the part of Bull's Eye and the gun industry defendant," he said.
Let's see: Bushmaster sold the gun to a federally licensed firearms dealer. That dealer either broke the law by selling the gun without background check to John Muhammad, or the gun was stolen from the dealer, and at best, the dealer was negligent in failing to notice this. How does this make the manufacturer negligent?
Buchanan's sister, Vickie Snyder of Rockville, Md., said she hoped that, ultimately, there would be more control over who obtains firearms.
"I guess I really hope the shops will be more responsible in their paperwork and the manufacturers will be more responsible about who they sell guns to," she said.
If Bushmaster had sold the gun to John Muhammad directly, or to someone who didn't have a federal firearms license, they might have an argument about negligence. But Bushmaster did everything legally required of them. There was, at that time, no reason to believe that the dealer was breaking any laws or was negligent in checking whether guns were leaking out of the store. Why is Bushmaster negligent on this?
Oh yes, here's the explanation:The families are represented by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
To be more accurate, they should just shorten the name of their organization to "The Brady Center to Prevent Guns."Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Center, said at least three more families of sniper victims plan to join the lawsuit soon.
Actually, almost any centerfire hunting rifle made would have served the purposes of the killers equally well. Every single one of these killings involved one shot, and at quite modest ranges. There is nothing about Bushmaster's product that distinguishes it functionally from any hunting rifle. All those people out there that think the gun control crowd isn't out to ban all rifles better look at this suit, and explain why the same logic won't apply to a bolt-action deer rifle.
The organization has filed more than two dozen similar suits on behalf of municipalities and individuals.
"This assault rifle, which served the snipers' deadly purposes so well, did not fall from the sky into their hands," Henigan said.
Just a Reminder...
I will be keynote speaker at CounterAttack, a grassroots gun rights activist conference in Dallas February 8-9. If you haven't already made reservations, it's not too late! I will also be leading a workshop on issues of race, gun control, and how activists can deal with these issues.
Al-Qaida Linked?
Interesting news story about a fishing boat off of Australia found without crew or life rafts after weeks of good weather:"Relatives of the chief engineer received an unusually high phone bill after the ship was reported missing. Phone records show recent calls were made from Bali, Indonesia," a spokesman from Taiwan's Fisheries Association said Wednesday.
The crew was Indonesian, except for the captain and chief engineer.
Deadly Force in Self-Defense
Volokh Conspiracy points me to a USS Clueless posting that has a long philosophical discussion about the use of deadly force against a robber. He is responding to a European criticizing the use of deadly force against a robber:I received the following letter from Andrew:
I would simply Mr. Den Beste's discusison to this single paragraph:
You wrote, "The sad thing is that there are people in Europe who are in jail now because they did what Adams did."
No, the sad thing is that Americans cheer when a person dies. Punishment should be proportional, death is not such. The reason we consider Arabs to be less civilized than us is because they stone women for adultery. But how civilized are Americans when they shoot people for robbery?
Yes, this guy defended his property and probably the life of his employee. HOWEVER, property is worse less than a life and I would rather see someone walk away with what is mine than have his life on my conscience.
Who has shown that they value property above human life? It is the robber who has threatened to kill someone--to take away, as the movie Unforgiven eloguently describes it, "everything that has a man has and ever will have"--for the contents of the cash register. The robber has demonstrated that he regards the clerk's life as worth less than a couple hundred dollars. Why, then, should we regard the robber's life as more valuable than the clerk's life? By application of the transitive rule (if A > B, and B > C, then A > C), we can see that the robber has defined his own life as worth less than mere property.
UPDATE: It has been suggested that since most robberies do not result in murder, the robber may well be engaging in a bluff when he threatens the victim's life. The problem is that the victim doesn't know that this is a bluff, and often enough it isn't that a victim can reasonably assume that it is s serious threat.
Decline and Fall of the West (Part 34053)
I found this item concerning Greenland politics from the Guardian on the Volokh Conspiracy :The Arctic territory's home rule government, in office for only 37 days, fell apart because of its senior civil servant's penchant for what some politicians called "witch-doctoring and other mumbo jumbo" and others "plain exorcism".
Lest you think this is because of Greenland's large indigenous population:
The affair centres on the activities of Jens Lyberth, who called upon the services of a healer to drive evil spirits from the government's offices in Nuuk, Greenland's capital.
"When you move into new premises, it's normal to air the room and give the walls some fresh paint," he said, explaining why he had hired Maannguaq Berthelsen to "drive negative energy" from the building.
Mr Lyberth urged the 600 civil servants under his control to use similar methods to improve the strained relations between Greenlanders and Danes, who make up about a fifth of the island's population. Greenland, which is 15 times bigger than Britain, has a rich tradition of spiritualism and folklore, whose memory is preserved by many of its native Inuit.
Yup! New Age foolishness, and not just in California!
The cleansing ceremony is not claimed to be anything to do with Inuit culture.
Most of the island's 56,000 people belong to the Danish Lutheran church and Inuit traditional practices are confined to occasional celebrations.
Proof That New York City's Gun Control Laws Work!
From the New York Post, a column by William Tucker:What nobody has acknowledged is how routine these New Year's revelries have become. The police are cautious about mentioning it for fear of making things worse.
Breaking the silence is an ex-NYC police officer who now works in another state but has vivid memories of New Year's Eve 2000.
"I worked in 1998 in the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, where we had 35 homicides a year in a one-mile radius," he writes. "On New Year's Eve 2000 I was assigned to the roof of a housing project to make sure no one came up and started shooting in the air. Since I grew up in Queens, I didn't anticipate what was coming.
"At the stroke of midnight, shots rang out in every direction like you never heard before. People were shooting out their windows, from adjacent buildings, up from the street - everywhere. Most were shooting straight up in the air and the bullets were coming down all around us.
"The other officers and I crawled across the roof amidst all kinds of garbage to get to a rooftop door. We opened it and the senior officer yelled, "NYPD! This roof is closed." Gunshots rang out up and down the stairwell. We ducked behind a wall. We never called for help because we weren't hurt and didn't want to endanger other officers by having someone try to rescue us. We just stuck it out. It was the worst night of my life.
What Is The World Coming To?
When the BBC starts to run opinion pieces like this gem by Professor Joyce Malcolm?For 80 years the safety of the British people has been staked on the premise that fewer private guns means less crime, indeed that any weapons in the hands of men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger.
Go ahead! Read it, not because she is saying anything so startling (although she, of course, says it very well), but because BBC ran this!
Government assured Britons they needed no weapons, society would protect them. If that were so in 1920 when the first firearms restrictions were passed, or in 1953 when Britons were forbidden to carry any article for their protection, it no longer is.
Condoms: How Well Do They Work?
Instapundit has an item about the war on condoms. Contrary to what many think, the concern about condoms isn't just a bunch of narrow-minded Christians trying to stop people from having fun.
1. I've read what I consider fairly authoritative claims that condoms are not completely effective against HIV because of the size of the virus. Remember that the HIV virus is about 0.1 microns in diameter, much smaller than sperm cells or the syphilis spirochete, which is in the 1-5 micron range. Go here for an interesting article about this. (A number of sources that I have checked give comparable numbers for the size of HIV virus and spirochetes.)
UPDATE: Instapundit tells me by email that this claim is bogus. I don't see how it could be; the size of HIV is well-known, small enough relative to condom pore size to slip through, and as I mention in #3 below, HPV seems to get through condoms, and is probably about the same size as HIV. According to this FDA report, the test mandated by FDA for latex condom qualification "can reliably detect holes with diameters as small as 15 microns." Hmmm. That's about 150 times the diameter of the HIV virus. Admittedly, HIV isn't terribly clever; it doesn't know to go searching for holes in the condom. But consider if there were even a dozen five micron holes in a condom. How confident would you be that this was sufficient protection? I can see why the federal government at one time was promoting the idea that sex with an HIV+ partner should really be done through two layers of condoms. Even that seems like a rather risky idea.
2. I don't recall exactly when or where, but back when I used to read CDC's daily AIDS newsletter, I saw the results of a long-term study involving married couples using condoms where one party was HIV+--and in a year, a large percentage of the other partner had gone HIV+. Here's a study that gives the encouraging news that condoms are 90-95% effective in preventing the spread of AIDS when used consistently. (It's better odds than Russian Roulette, but not dramatically better.)
3. Condoms are not all that effective against HPV, and California government now requires a warning to that effect. Some strains of HPV cause genital warts; others cause cervical cancer. As is usually the case, the big losers from this this turn out to be women, because cervical cancer can sneak up on them, while men, at worst, end up with painful lifelong genital warts.
UPDATE: I received an email informing me:There are, apparently different strains and/or different diseases associated with HPV. I have a fellow-worker who undergoes surgery several times a year to have HPV-originated polyps ("laryngeal papillomatosis") removed from his vocal cords. (see, e.g., http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/disorders/vocal/vocal.html)
At present there is no cure, only treatment by repeated removal. Fortunately for him, this is done through the mouth, without any throat incision. At $7500 per operation, he has to be concerned about lifetime limits on medical benefits!
There are some real virtues to promoting abstinence, and to promoting a less casual attitude towards changing sexual partners for those who are not abstinent.
People Who Are Using Their Time Well
FlashBunny.org has a number of very sly, very clever pieces of political art available. One of my favorite is this cover of Limousine Liberal magazine.
Life Here is Short: Use It Well
I was talking to my sister on the phone this morning concerning a family crisis, and so when it came time to head off to church, my wife left by herself, and told me to join her when I was done. By the time I arrived at church, the universe had changed. My wife met me in the parking lot, and told her to follow her over to the hospital. A man named Ron with whom we are somewhat acquainted was not well, with pain in his back and both arms. He was now clammy and cold, and a nurse who attends our church immediately recognized this as a symptom of heart attack. (Even I know enough to recognize that.)
Ron is a mountain of a man--about 6'7" or so, in his 50s. At the hospital, Ron fainted away shortly after getting out of the car. His friend John, with help from the nursing staff, rushed him into the E/R.
Shortly after my wife and I arrived at the hospital, and joined the other friends and family, the nursing supervisor came in to tell us that when he arrived, Ron had no pulse. The doctors had just given up resucitation efforts; Ron was dead, apparently of a heart attack.
