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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, February 01, 2003
Shuttle Destroyed on Re-Entry I may be wrong, but since NASA lost contact at 207,000 feet, I can't imagine that this could be the result of a missle. It was going 12,500 mph at the time; this sounds like a tile failed, causing a burn through the shuttle. All the fragments seemed pretty close together on the video footage that CNN was showing earlier--exactly what I would expect for a tile failure. What a tragedy. Friday, January 31, 2003
Ever Wondered About All Those Strangely Named Countries in Central Asia? This guide to the 'Stans is really funny. (Maybe not to the people that live there.) Treat it as humor--I am not responsible for what they natives do to you if you use this humorous description as a way of actually understanding that part of the world. Deleting Bellesiles From Reinhardt's Decision Doesn't Solve the Problem As several bloggers have pointed out, Michael Bellesiles has been deleted from Judge Reinhardt's Silveira decision. But after reviewing the changes, Judge Reinhardt seems to have done himself in. What the decision said before was: During the period that the Articles were in effect, both George Washington and Henry Knox, who was to become the nation’s first Secretary of War in the Washington Administration, urged the creation of a standing national military force, to no avail. H. Richard Uviller & William G. Merkel, The Second Amendment in Context: The Case of the Vanishing Predicate, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 403, 411-13 (2000). Washington in particular felt that the need was acute; in 1783 he wrote a document entitled Sentiments On A Peace Establishment, in which he recommended establishing a national militia that would exist along with those maintained by the individual states. Subsequently, he wrote to John Adams in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion that because of the lack of a unified national military force, “[w]e are fast verging to anarchy and confusion!” Letter from George Washington to James Madison (Nov. 5, 1786), in 29 THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1745-1799, at 51 (John Clement Fitzpatrick ed., 1931) (quoted in Michael A. Bellesiles, The Second Amendment in Action, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 61, 65 (2000)).All that Reinhardt has done on this footnote is delete (quoted in Michael A. Bellesiles, The Second Amendment in Action, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 61, 65 (2000)).Reinhardt hasn't made any other changes, and as I pointed out a few weeks ago, the problem is that the claim "because of the lack of a unified national military force" is not strongly supported by the context of that quote. Before, at least, Reinhardt could at least say, "Well, I was relying on Michael Bellesiles, who made that claim." Now he has deleted Bellesiles, and is asserting that the letter from Washington to Madison makes this claim. As I wrote here, Now, Washington certainly mentions the Shays's Rebellion in this letter--after discussing "anarchy and confusion!" But there isn't any discussion of "because of the lack of a unified national military force." One might at least as fairly assume that Washington was referring to the problems of finances and the previous inability of Congress to vote for a "paper emission." Washington was definitely a supporter of a standing army, having found militias to be a "week reed" upon which to rely. But this letter is quite a bit more ambiguous than either Bellesiles's representation of it, or Reinhardt's representation of Bellesiles.Reinhardt can't even blame this on Bellesiles now. He needs to either remove this very questionable claim about why Washington said what he said, or admit that he is making a highly arguable assumption. Of course, this level of intellectual integrity would destroy the rest of Reinhardt's decision--which cites a decision that argues that only weapons of "civilized warfare" are constitutionally protected as proof that military style weapons are not constitutionally protected. Labels: gun rights I've Always Regarded Modern Art as a Form of Torture... But the republican government of Spain apparently took it seriously. From the Guardian: A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.I've had that same experience at art galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. :-) Thursday, January 30, 2003
This Came Out of the Mouth of a Federal Judge? Who Appointed This Guy? When sentencing Richard Reid to life in prison for trying to blow up a jetliner with his shoe, Judge William Young's remarks are shockingly patriotic: "We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid," said the judge. "We are Americans. We have been through the fire before.This judge would be run out of town on a rail in Berkeley. Blatant Religious Discrimination Eugene Volokh has raised the issue of a professor at Texas Tech who refuses to write a letter of recommendation for any student who is not an evolutionist. Now, I am no fan of creationist ideas, but this is just stupid. Look at the excuse that Professor Dini makes: How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology? It is hard to imagine how this can be so, but it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance is the result of such decisions.Does Professor Dini think that this crisis in overprescription was because creationist doctors said to themselves, "I don't believe that we can evolve strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria, so I'm going to prescribe amoxicillin for anyone that comes into the office." This is absurd. Doctors overprescribe because they don't want to argue with a patient, because they are unsure whether a particular set of symptoms they are seeing are viral or bacterial, and because it's faster to write a prescription than to analyze the symptoms carefully. Until my sinus surgery last year, one of my struggles was sinus infections. Amoxicillin didn't work anymore; I had bred an amoxicillin-resistant variety. The doctor in charge of my medical care during this period was, I think I can say with some certainty, not a creationist. I think a more accurate description of Professor Dini's prejudices is that he doesn't want fundamentalists to become doctors. That smells like religious discrimination to me. Imagine if some professor decided that he wasn't going to write recommendation letters for medical school for anyone that didn't believe that life begins at conception. The excuse might be, "I'm afraid that someone with so little concern for the sanctity of human life will end up like those doctors that engaged in inhumane experiments in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany." But any professor that tried a stunt like that--and had the chutzpah to put it up on his web page--would be fired by his university, prosecuted for civil rights violations, and sued by anyone for whom he refused to write a recommendation letter. UPDATE: I have received a few pieces of email that make the claim that if someone doesn't understand evolution, then they really don't properly belong in medical school. I can agree with that. But that isn't what Professor Dini is demanding. He says he wants students not just to understand evolution, but to believe it--and without reservations, it appears, of any sort. Someone that used to be the pastor of a church I attended had been a petroleum geologist before he went into the ministry. He had an MS in Geology. He was a Creationist. I asked him if there was a problem being a Creationist and a petroleum geologist. He told me that it wasn't a problem, because petroleum geology is more about what's there now, not how it got there. You can believe all sorts of things that seem unlikely (the Earth is really young, created in six, 24 hour days, all species created in their current forms), and still believe that everything has been made to look very old, and very evolutionary. It's a bit strange of an idea, but it didn't prevent my pastor from being a successful petroleum geologist. Many years ago, I was sitting in freshman chemistry at USC, and one day, in the middle of a very detailed lecture about electron shells, orbitals, electron clouds, valence, etc., the professor suddenly turned around from the board, stared at all of us--bright young acolytes of the True Religion, Science--and informed us, "You know, we really have no idea what is going on down here at the subatomic level. It could be angels dancing on the heads of pins for all we know. But it's a useful model for predicting what will happen, and that's all that science is--a model for predicting what will happen." There was a lot of wisdom in that statement. One can be a creationist, consider evolutionary theory nonsense or worse--and yet still use it as a model for understanding what happened in my sinuses as the result of many years of amoxicillin killing off the bacteria that didn't have the ability to defend themselves from it. If the goal of Professor Dini was to make sure that only smart people who understood evolutionary theory ended up in medical school, he could do that by demanding that students really understand evolutionary theory. But that's not what he demanding--he is demanding belief in evolution, not as a "model for predicting what will happen," but as Truth with a capital T. Science is not a religion. When scientists start to think that belief is what is important--not just understanding the theory--they've crossed that line into a religion. Important Point About Liberty, Human Rights, & Islam Instapundit points to this thoughtful essay by Donald Sensing about one line out of President Bush's State of the Union speech: It's a little more detailed and subtle than that, but it makes some important points. I am reminded by Bush's line of the remarks of another American President, Jimmy Carter:The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity. "America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense . . . human rights invented America." Clayton's Garage Sale: Stripper Clips to a Good Home I have lots of the 5 round stripper clips for the M14 that I can't imagine ever needing. If you want them, I'm willing to let you have them for the cost of shipping. I have 12 10 round .223 stripper clips (with the loading tool for M16 magazines) as well. Ditto. Ditto for some SKS stripper clips (looks like 10 round capacity). I hate to throw away stuff like this, but I don't need it, and it's just taking up space. Reducing the Spread of AIDS in Africa Rod Dreher at National Review Online has a thoughtful article about why a Ugandan was in the audience at the State of the Union speech--and why a program that caused Uganda's serious AIDS epidemic to peak in 1991 is unacceptable in other parts of Africa, and to the Western AIDS establishment: In the late 1980s, when AIDS first came to Uganda, the Kampala government realized that it was being transmitted through sexual behavior. Authorities rallied religious leaders and others behind a massive campaign to convince the population to change its sexual behavior. "Zero grazing outside of your own field," was the slogan the government used to promote its "ABC." initiative. The message to the Ugandan people: Abstain from sex if you can, Be faithful to your partner, and if this doesn't work, use a Condom.This isn't just a problem in Africa, of course. There is a silent epidemic of STDs destroying the health of a generation of American young women, because they have been repeatedly encouraged by the popular culture towards promiscuity. At the same time, the life-threatening and permanently injuring consequences of HPV have been utterly ignored by the mass media. Why? Cultural trendsetters in this country don't particularly care how many others suffer permanent injury, so long as they get to promote their policies of promiscuity and the degradation of women. This is one of the reasons why "liberal" is a very foul word to me--liberals played a major role in promoting this culture of misogny and promiscuity all in the name of open-mindedness and diversity. A Stirring, Powerful Statement of European Integrity No, this isn't a sarcastic remark abou the French and the German governments. It's the statement by the leaders of eight European countries standing in solidarity with the United States, published in today's Times of London: January 30, 2003These are the days that make me especially proud to be an American, and for our nation to have such allies. Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Canadian Gun Registration: Why I Do Not Want Any Mandatory Registration Scheme This article from the Calgary Herald is really interesting, because it suggests that rather than admit that they made a minor mistake, the police ransacked this guy's house, confiscating stuff that isn't even close to being a legitimate subject for a police search. State of the Union There were some not too surprising parts of the speech--such as the Iraq part. But one surprising part was President Bush's call for $1.2 billion to fund hydrogen vehicle research, ostensibly for energy independence and air pollution. Now, I support sticking it to the Arabs as much as anyone. This is a region of the world that needs to be restored to its pristine, undamaged by exposure to the West state. After all, 14th century powers don't have the money to send terrorists to the other side of the world to hijack airliners, much less enough money to develop nuclear weapons. But I think before we get too wildly enthusiastic about the effects of such a program, there's a few things to think about. 1. Hydrogen is a low density fuel compared to gasoline. My understanding is that the only way to make hydrogen competitive with gasoline as a vehicle fuel is to use it in a fuel cell to produce electricity, and thus make it into a hybrid vehicle. This has some virtues, but so far, the hybrid vehicles have been hideously expensive compared to their gasoline-only equivalents. 2. Yes, when you burn hydrogen, you get out water vapor. No carbon dioxide to contribute to global warming (though some of you on the East Coast might not see this as a plus, right now); no nitrogen oxides, no sulfur oxides to contribute to smog. But how do you make hydrogen? Typically by electrolyzing water. This requires electricity. How do you make electricity? Nuclear power plants? The environmentalists won't allow that (and they may be right, for the wrong reason). Hydroelectric plants? Can't do that; it hurts the fish. Coal or oil? Is this a net gain for the environment? Probably not. It might be a net gain for energy independence, but let's not get too carried away with our enthusiasm yet. Labels: global warming Tuesday, January 28, 2003
How To Move a Bunch Of Stuff You Don't Need I have been disposing of various astronomical odds and ends the last few days by putting ads up on the classifieds section of Astromart.com. I am still in shock at how quickly stuff I put up for sale sells--like within one half hour of posting an ad. Life at Internet speed! Crimes Against Good Taste What can I say but, look at what someone did to this Mauser rifle. It reminds me of some of the "improvements" I have seen done to Corvettes. Monday, January 27, 2003
Remember: Television Doesn't Influence People From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Okay, This Is Funny... Over here, is a very funny question? Why is the go boom end of a bomb or rocket called a "warhead"? What other kind of -head could it be? And he answers the question. UPDATE: I'm told that others did it first, and better. You decide! |
