The advertising above is just a source of revenue, and sometimes, I don't know what will appear there.
Unique grips and accessories for your 1911!
Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
Click here to find out why the Amazon.com Honor System paybox is no longer here.
RSS feed
Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
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
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
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
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
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
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
archives
Search only this site: Click here and enter your search string at the beginning of the search field.
Nice Column About the Iraq Matter by Christopher Hitchens
As you may be aware, Hitchens is a long-time British leftist, strong opponent of U.S. foreign policy for decades, and no friend of the Bush Administration. His column makes some very good points about the sudden change in tone concerning Iraq--why the oilmen around Bush wanted to drop sanctions in early 2001, and why Bush decided that there are things more important than oil:Feb. 24 — When George W. Bush was running for president, he campaigned energetically against Al Gore by objecting to the idea of “nation-building” (and, incidentally, to the Clinton-era practice of employing “secret evidence” in trials of suspected terrorists). After taking office, he opened an early discussion on the possibility of lifting Iraqi sanctions, which had obviously begun to suffer from diminishing returns. He even considered reviewing the “no-fly” zones that, for a wearisome decade or so, had placed an Anglo-American protective shield over the Kurdish and Shiite zones of Saddam’s awful dominion.
Interesting claim that Hitchens makes about France:
IN ALL OF THESE respects, Bush was giving a sympathetic ear to a group of oilmen and generals, the first of whom did not like to see Iraqi oil being traded only with other countries, and the second of whom did not care to risk their sophisticated aircraft on drab, routine missions. Within his Cabinet and elsewhere in his administration, the president included a number of people who still believed that his father had been right, in 1991, to evacuate Iraq while leaving the Saddam Hussein regime in place. (Of this group, as far as I know, George Bush Sr. remains a dues-paying member, as do Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger. Only Vice President Dick Cheney, of the original team, is understood to have changed his mind — and that could well be for reasons of loyalty.)Even the jackal Jacques Chirac has more sense than this: His only useful aircraft carrier is already in range in case he needs to switch sides.
Why France Is So Concerned About Upsetting the Arabs
This story, like a number I've read recently, is a reminder that France is being held hostage by a powerful fifth column:VITRY-SUR-SEINE, France (Reuters) - Dressed like boy rappers, four young women scurry toward their apartment tower home, and try not to think about the 17-year-old girl burned to death in a nearby garbage depot by a local teen-age boy.
Their figures masked by puffy jackets and baggy pants, they steal past some adolescent boys, baseball caps worn backwards, who are kicking a ball hard against a wall across the street.
"Boys and girls don't mix here," explains 19-year-old Sonja.
A short bus ride from Paris, a world capital of romance, teen-age girls trapped in soulless, Soviet-style housing complexes are too scared to wear skirts and balk at the idea of dating.
Imprisoned behind yellowed curtains that hang limply at windows, they stay indoors to avoid the jeers, bullying and the ominous risk of rape that lurks in dingy stairwells where gangs of boys of mostly North African origin hang out.
"It's everywhere, all the time. Beatings, rapes, the lot. The worst is the names they call you, especially if you're dressed in a girly way which makes you a slut," says Amel, 21.
Home to many immigrants from the Maghreb, such suburbs have seen a rise in radical Islam that has turned attitudes toward women even harsher. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils and forced marriages that snatch girls from college and a career are now commonplace.
Kings, Queens, & Thugs Rich People
From the Forbes list of the wealthiest people. Look at Arafat's wealth. I didn't realize the salary for terrorist leader was so high. I obviously went into the wrong line of work when I was young.
Using Weapons That They Don't Have, Doubtless...
From the Telegraph:If war comes to Iraq, the Kurds of Kifri will be right in the line of fire. Iraqi officials have threatened that the moment the first American bomb lands, they will reply with a chemical assault on the town.
But in the entire place, there is not a single gas mask to be had, and no detection posts, decontamination centres or safe houses.
In lieu of proper protection, the residents of Kifri have been doing what they can to prepare. The women have baked high-energy biscuits that will keep fresh for weeks. The men scour the town's bazaar for extra blankets and plastic sheeting.
At night families listen intently to the news on ageing radio sets.
"It's going to be hard on the children," said Ali Muhammad Nasir, 30, who lives with his wife, Runak, and two little ones. "But we know only too well what Saddam's capable of."
Tired of Being An Unemployed Firmware Engineer?
Would you like to live in a place where wages are nearly California level, but you can buy a new house (not a condo, but a real house) for $120,000? My current employer (whose name I dare not speak here) has a couple of positions open for experienced firmware engineers. One of the slots requires knowledge of Linux, source configuration management systems (ideally, ClearCase); the other requires hardware debugging of embedded firmware (ideally, strong knowledge of C++). Email me your resume; no promises, but it's very hard to get firmware engineers to move to a state with almost no gun control laws, almost no crime, cheap housing, and cheap car insurance.
Black Members of the Sons of the Confederacy
Interesting article, originally from the Washington Post, on History News Network's site:John Wayne Holland was one of the thousands disappointed when Alexandria's George Washington Birthday Parade was canceled for today. He would have been wearing a Confederate uniform in public for the first time, representing his great-grandfather, who went to war as a slave in 1863.
Some Southern nationalists have exaggerated the role of blacks in the Confederacy, attempting to reconstruct a non-racist, or at least, no more racist than the North, Southern past. I can understand why some historians get uncomfortable about bringing up that blacks fought on the Confederate side--but while most were slaves, and not allowed to carry weapons, some definitely were soldiers in every sense of the word.
"Next year, I will be there, most definitely," he said.
A new member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Holland, 48, tried on his uniform for the first time last week with the help of the great-granddaughter of the man who enslaved his great-grandfather Creed Holland. Hazel Holland Davis, 62, fussed with the long line of brass buttons on the butternut-colored jacket. "There is one that is loose here," she told him. "I can fix that for you."
Then she stood back, and Holland grinned at his reflection in the mirror in Davis's living room -- in the same house in Franklin County, south of Roanoke, from which his kin and hers had gone off to the Civil War.
"I am proud to represent my father's grandfather," Holland said later. "He was a strong man. He survived slavery and the war."
It's important to understand that the oversimplified model of the South, with all blacks as slaves, and all slaves on the edge of revolt, are almost as misleading and destructive of a real understanding of history as the whitewashed model that tries to pretend that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.
Excitement in Moscow, Idaho--and Our Correspondents Are There!
You probably saw the news coverage of the arrest of a University of Idaho grad student on charges of having raised funds and provided technical assistance to terrorist-involved groups:Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, was arrested Wednesday in Moscow, Idaho, and accused of supplying money and computer expertise to the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America.
My daughter, who is attending University of Idaho, tells me that it is really quite exciting up there: her usual parking lot was occupied by the bomb squad (apparently while they searched the grad student's van). She tells me that the town is awash in police officers, guys wearing dark suits who clearly are not local, television camera crews, etc. She also says that the arrested grad student was head of the Muslim Students Association.
Prosecutors said if he had disclosed his relationship with the group, his visa application would have been rejected.
Web sites operated by the Islamic Assembly praise suicide bombings and tout the use of airplanes as terror weapons, the government said.
It would appear that many of the Muslims there are of a fundamentalist bent; my daughter tells me that some of the Muslim women there wear burkhas.
Australia's Prime Minister Showing Great Courage
See this Wall Street Journal opinion piece by him:Not one person wants war. We all abhor it. Those who marched a week ago in the cities of the world do not have a mortgage on detestation of military conflict or of human suffering. They do not exclusively occupy the moral high ground. Have they seriously addressed the human suffering that could flow from the world's failure to deal once and for all with Iraq's 12-year-long defiance of the community of nations?
Are they morally comfortable with the suffering Saddam Hussein continues to inflict on Iraqi children through his corruption of the U.N.'s "oil for food" program? What do they say of the torture and arbitrary executions that are a part of everyday life in Iraq?
Military action against Iraq will involve casualties. But a powerful case can be made that the potential casualties will be much greater if the world does not act effectively and now.
How the Other Half Lives...
Someone is trying to sell their telescope on Astromart. But this isn't your run-of-the-mill sort of telescope:I am selling my Parallax Instruments 20" Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain.
Gosh, even if I was as fabulously rich as my average Sonoma County acquaintance, tying up this much capital in a telescope is something that would give me pause.
It is mounted on the Parallax Instruments HD-300C German equatorial mount, which is then mounted to a steel pier. My asking price is $48,800. The scope is 1.6 years old.
This is a precision 20" Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain.Optical quality is certified to better than 1/4 wave at the focus. Both mirrors are made from Astro-Sitall and are coated with 96% enhanced aluminum. The scope has 2 interchangeable focusers (an Astro-Physics 2.7" focuser and an Astro-Physics 4" focuser). The tube is carbon fiber.
The telescope mounting has an 18.3" Byers RA gear and a 15" Byers DEC gear. Load carrying capacity is 300 lbs. Mount is driven by 2 servo motors (18VDC), and is controlled by an Astro-Physics GOTO computer setup. Slewing speeds up to 1200X sidereal. Mount is powered by a Kendrick power supply.
Standing in the Shadows of Motown Soundtrack Wins Grammies!
Ordinarily, I wouldn't care about the Grammies at all, especially since they received an $800,000 grant from the federal government, but one of my friends co-produced this documentary, so it's kind of nice to see the soundtrack win an award.
Too Many Lawyers?
Or too many people too stupid to buy bread at the market without assistance?
I really like DiGiorno pizza:
Please explain these instructions on the back of the box:
Do not eat pizza without cooking? Remove pizza from box, overwrap and cardboard? There are people that need instructions like this, and we let them vote?
Sorry For the Lack of Activity Here...
I've been very busy corralling penguins at work, have no spare time during the day, and have no energy by the time I get home. (Those of you who are software developers will know of what I speak.)
