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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 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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, September 27, 2003
Discrimination in Academia David Brooks, a New York Times token conservative, wrote a piece about discrimination in academia against conservatives. He makes some good points. The more disturbing piece is by Juan Non-Volokh, in which he describes his experience at Yale as an undergraduate. Part of what he says is unsurprising: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I had several long discussions with my senior essay advisor about whether to pursue my PhD. My advisor, who was himself quite liberal, cautioned against it, largely because of my emerging, right-of-center political views. As he described it, succeeding in the liberal arts academy is tough enough as it is without the added burden of holding unpopular views.Okay, I know that it's unrealistic to expect liberal professors as a body to be open-minded (I know a few liberal professors who really do believe in it). After all, what's the advantage of being in charge if you can't abuse your power? But the next couple of sentences really, really makes me see red (and I don't just mean in the sense of being angry). To illustrate the risk, he noted that one of his colleagues on the graduate admissions committee explicitly blackballed each and every candidate who had ever received financial support (scholarships, fellowships, etc.) from the John M. Olin Foundation because, his colleague insisted, the Olin Foundation only funded people who thought like they did, and Yale did not want any graduate students who thought that way.Yeah. That's it. Those kind don't belong at Yale. You would think that at some point, the notion of academic honesty and respect for differing points of view would cause the the rest of the department to insist--quite loudly--that this sort of prejudice isn't appropriate at a respected institution such as Yale. Let me rephrase that: a formerly respected institution such as Yale. Friday, September 26, 2003
The Tip-Off That the eCommerce Industry Had Grown Too Fast... There's a story (perhaps apocryphal) that the reason J.P. Morgan wasn't hurt badly by the Great Depression was that he had sold his stocks very shortly before the Crash. Why? Because a shoeshine boy was giving him stock tips. To J.P. Morgan, this was a sign that people were investing in the stock market that should not have been there. A friend had a similar experience back in 2000. An old friend contacted him, and explained that she had finally saved up $500 (after many years of effort). She asked him which stock she should buy to double her money in two months. This should have been the tipoff that the wrong sort of people were relying on the bubble to keep expanding. Back around that same time, I received an email from a headhunter trying to interest me in a San Francisco, South of Market Street e-commerce startup. One of the benefits of this startup was that it was a "clothing-optional workspace." (As a co-worker here responded when I first told him this story, "Casual Fridays must be awful.") I had the wrong skill set for the job, and unfortunately, I look more like Dilbert than Arnold Schwarzenegger, so this was not a difficult position to decline. In retrospect, it was another of those indicators that the eCommerce industry was a big bubble, about ready to be deflated. Curious What The Coalition Provisional Authority is Doing In Iraq? Visit their web page! It is in both English and Arabic, and you can see the regulations and laws that are being handed down under Viceroy^H^H^H^H^HAdministrator Paul Bremer III's signature. I can't see anything too terribly wrong--and much of what appears as law on this website must seem like a breath of fresh air to Iraqis. This document suspends capital punishment, subsituting life imprisonment for all crimes where the Iraqi criminal code provided only for death, and prohibits torture, as well as prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, and ethnicity. I've heard a lot of criticism from gun rights activists of the weapons laws that we have imposed in Iraq. I believe that anyone who lives in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or California, would be overjoyed to have laws like these. (Okay, the .50 BMG rifles are prohibited, but you can have any weapons .30 caliber and smaller in your home, without license.) The Many Nations That Have Sent Troops to Iraq To Help This New York Post article by a Marine stationed in Iraq just casually mentions that the Marines are leaving Najaf. The 1/7 is now leaving Najaf, having handed off responsibility to a Latin American brigade composed of forces from Honduras and El Salvador.Why don't we ever hear in the leftist controlled media about the 28 countries besides the U.S. that are supplying military forces to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq? In Loco Parentis I've whined here before about what a mistake it was for universities to have abandoned the theory of in loco parentis--that at least with respect to undergraduates, the school would look out for the interests of the students in the place of the parents. From what my daughter tells me, at the University of Idaho, in loco parentis has been replaced with just loco. The things that students brag about are very disturbing. Alcohol has always been a big part of the lives of the college students, but when people start bragging about, "I had to take my girlfriend to the hospital so they could pump her stomach," I get very, very worried. I am hearing reports from other University of Idaho students that are even more worrisome--like whiteboards in some fraternities where members list (by name) which girls they have had sex with, and there are competitions for the biggest list. I grew up in a benighted time when girls (definitely not women back then) were regarded as second class citizens in many respects--but this view of women as primarily sexual gratification devices wasn't part of the crowd that I knew. If you know someone whose kids are attending University of Idaho (or anywhere, for that matter)--it might be a good time for Mom or Dad to give Tommy or Jessica a call, and have a little chat about death by alcohol poisoning; about the problems of rape while drunk; about STDs (almost unknown among her peers, my daughter tells me); about the long-term consequences of treating people like Dixie cups. A lot of college kids are behaving like mature and responsible adults--but there are a lot who definitely are not. You would never know that feminism is one of the controlling ideologies of American universities and secondary schools. It certainly isn't making much of an impact on the kids. Christopher Hitchens Reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy's Latest Book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Hitchens makes some interesting points: One of the many pleasures of Lévy's book is the care he takes to show the utter cynicism of the godfathers of all this. He quotes by name a Saudi lawyer who specializes in financial transactions:This might explain whyThe Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion continues to be taken seriously in the Arab world--when even neo-Nazis in the West aren't stupid enough to use this anymore."Islamism is a business," he explains to me with a big smile. "I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another, it all passes through our hands. We do the paperwork. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan. … Take the young ones in the madrassas. They see the high rollers in their SUVs having five wives and sending their children to good schools, much better than the madrassas. They have your Pearl's killer, Omar Sheikh, right in front of their eyes. When he gets out of the Indian prisons and returns to Lahore, what do the neighbors see? He's very well-dressed. He has a Land Cruiser. He gets married and the city's big-shots come to his wedding."Everything we know about al-Qaida's operations, as of those of Saddam Hussein, suggests that they combine the culture of a crime family or cartel with the worst habits of a bent multinational corporation. Yet the purist critics of "globalization" tend to assume that the spiritual or nationalistic claims of such forces still deserve to be taken at their own valuation, lest Western "insensitivity" be allowed to triumph. Wesley Clark: The Clinton Mold Drudge Report says that Clark gave a speech in early 2001 in which he said: During extended remarks delivered at the Pulaski County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 11, 2001, General Clark declared: "And I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice... people I know very well - our president George W. Bush. We need them there."I guess Bush has really blown it since then--or more likely, Wesley Clark wants to be President so badly that he will say whatever it takes to get elected. When Howard Dean attacks Bush's policies, I can disagree with him and yet still respect his integrity. Clark has some explaining to do. UPDATE: Dick Morris's column points out why Clark's candidacy is going to fade quickly, and why the Clintons back him--to make sure that no one ends up with the Democratic nomination without Clinton support. Telemarketers and the Do Not Call List As you are doubtless aware, two different federal judges told the FTC that it could not enforce its "do not call" list. One judge made this decision based on Congress not having given the FTC such authority. Randy Barnett points out that the much discussed problem of gridlock in Congress didn't apply here; in one day, the House voted 412-8 and the Senate 95-0 to grant FTC this authority. A more Gordian knot is the second decision, by Judge Nottingham in Colorado, which held that the "do not call" list violates the First Amendment right of free speech. A big part of Nottingham's decision is that because charitable organizations were not subject to the "do not call" list, while commercial telemarketers were, the government was engaged in content regulation. Had they simply prohibited all telephone solicitation, they might have been able to make this fly, but anytime the government regulates speech based on content, this is a no-no. Now, I am sympathetic to the essential argument here. If the government is allowed to regulate speech based on content, then they can ban neo-Nazi rallies while allowing ACLU rallies. If the FTC decided to ban all telephone solicitation, including the charitable groups, that wouldn't bother me at all. (Idaho Special Olympics called me up last night to annoy me.) I do think that the notion that the government may not ever discriminate against speech based on content (aside from criminal violations, such as fraud or inciting riot) has some unfortunate side effects. At least part of what has coarsened American culture over the last 25 years has been the widespread use of free speech to promote misogny, intoxication, vulgar language, and the notion that girls exist primarily for the sexual gratification of men. (Liberals must be so proud of what they have helped to spread throughout our society.) Some people call this "ghetto culture" but it's not specific to the ghetto; it is a culture of poor and degraded Americans everywhere, regardless of race. It's a bit more obvious to whites when it appears in rap music, but there are similar examples of this degradation that now appear almost everywhere. This Is Inexcusable I have been watching this travesty going on for years now. As much as liberals would like to blame the Bush Administration, the suits have been underway since at least the Clinton Administration, and the Interior Department has been making excuses and failing to do their job for, it seems, decades. If a private company had screwed up this big--and for this long--and with the Indians as the victims--the Democrats would be screaming about "heartless Republicans." Thursday, September 25, 2003
Is Being A Refugee Better Or Worse Than Staying in a War-Ravaged Country? John Ray points to a study that suggests that Bosian refugees were worse off mentally being refugees in Britain than staying in Bosnia--in spite of the chaos of Bosnia. I don't know what to make of this, although the study does point out that these refugees were more likely to be unemployed in Britain than the control group that stayed in Bosnia. Having been unemployed for several months in 2001, I do not find it hard to believe that the unemployment could be a part of the problem. UPDATE: I received a comment from a reader: I noted with interest the comment on Bosnian refugees. Refugee status or, in general, being displaced, is more dangerous than generally believed. I read a study pointing out that people relocated following the Chernobyl disaster had a higher morbidity/mortality rate than those who stayed. I don't know how well that study was done, but a similar calculation has to be made where I work, a major cancer research hospital. An Interesting Item About Genetic Origins of Mental Illness I just received this item from the www.schizophrenia.com newsletter. Schizophrenia and Manic Depression share gene flawIt seems like the sample size is a bit small, but it is a very interesting result. 1. It suggests a mechanism for identifying those at risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder before either illness strikes. This is quite important, because both diseases are easily misdiagnosed, especially bipolar disorder. 2. Understanding the mechanism by which these diseases cause the mental disturbances that they do could well lead to precisely targeted pharmaceutical treatments. If we can understand the process by which these genetic variances cause these problems, we have a better chance of building medicines that are specific to fixing the problem--without the unpleasant side effects of some of the medicines commonly used now. ---- Another article in the same newsletter was excerpted from the New York Times, and discussed an interesting new therapy that reduces the auditory hallucinations associated with schizophrenia. The auditory hallucinations are one of the few forms of mental illness that are commonly recognized by the average person, leading both to the stereotypes of mental illness, and to various forms of humor. Okay, I'll admit it, as serious a subject as this is, the first time I saw a T-shirt at a gun show that said, "The voices told me to go home and clean my guns," I laughed. But the real world of the person with schizophrenia isn't funny. I had a girlfriend, long, long ago. She had simple schizophrenia. She was a sweet gal, and while her illness was mild enough that she had not lost touch on reality, life was hard. She had the auditory hallucinations. After a couple of days without sleep (because the voices telling her "Kill yourself," were too loud), she checked herself into California's state mental hospital at Camarillo. After two days there, she called me up and said, "Come pick me up." Have you ever been inside a state mental hospital? At Camarillo, at least back then, the paint was peeling. There were broken windows. The last thing that mental patients, or their loved ones need, is a dark and depressing physical environment. Part of why she wanted me to come and take her back to her home was that the hospital was not sex-segregated, and one of the guys kept telling her that she had to either let him have what he wanted, or he would arrange to be alone with her long enough to take what he wanted. He was tall, and built like a bodybuilder. She was short and slight. What a tragedy. Our last date was the Jackson Browne concert at the Universal Amphitheater in Hollywood, about 1978 or so. She was a big fan of Jackson Browne. (I was a small fan.) But the combination of beer and her prescription medications meant that she passed out just as the warm-up band finished, and Jackson Browne came on stage. Over the next hour, she stood up, and fell into the next row of seats, then fell in the previous row of seats, and threw up on my shoes. I wasn't angry at her; I felt sorry for her. But I learned from the nine months or so that we dated that the Unix fortune program saying, "Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself," has enormous wisdom to it. There. I feel better getting that off my chest. I feel like crying, when I think back to how schizophrenia had taken a sweet and fairly intelligent girl, and rendered her helpless and dependent. I don't know if she ever completely recovered. Certainly, in the 1 1/2 years that I knew her, she was always struggling. Open Carry in Ohio I had mentioned yesterday that the correct solution to the Ohio Supreme Court upholding the state's ban on concealed carry of handguns was to start carrying openly (at least in those cities that have no local ordinance on the matter). This will so freak out the left that they will accept a licensing law. It appears that others are thinking the same way: Klein and the other plaintiffs - a hairdresser, a personal trainer and a pizza delivery man - had proposed that the ban on carrying concealed weapons be replaced with a new law that would allow licensed carriers to have hidden guns.I have been told (although I have no authoritative source for this claim) that part of what drove West Virginia to pass a non-discretionary permit law a bit more than a decade ago was people starting to carry openly, because there was no way to get a permit--and the West Virginia Supreme Court had decided that the restrictive licensing law that West Virginia had was defective. A few reminders: 1. Make sure that there is no city ordinance prohibiting open carry. That just complicates up the legal case. 2. Make sure that the police are aware that you are exercising what the Ohio Supreme Court has called a fundamental right--the right to bear arms. Since concealed carry is prohibited, and open carry is not, and the right is fundamental, all that is left is open carry. If you can't exercise the right to bear arms, it's not really a right at all. 3. Inform them that you are peaceable, and if they intend to arrest you for exercising a fundamental right, there will be no fight or argument from you--but you will be filing suit against the department and the officers for violating your rights under the Ohio Constitution. 4. Inform them that if they don't want people carrying openly, they can ask the legislature to pass a non-discretionary concealed weapon permit law. A Reminder That The Illegal Immigration Squabble Isn't a White vs. Hispanic Dispute Conservative Republicans in Idaho are in the forefront of efforts to encourage illegal immigration, but there are elected officials here who think this is a serious mistake. One of the Canyon County commissioners released this statement recently: As an elected official in Canyon County, I am appalled that our federal representatives are working on behalf of illegal aliens in Idaho.So who is this official willing to take on the juggernaut of encouraging illegal immigration? Some neo-Nazi? No. Robert Vasquez. The conflict isn't about race or ethnicity; it's about whether "illegal" means anything or not. Arnold's Position On The Economy See this article by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Telegraph today. It's a great, although simplistic statement of the importance of free markets. Now, if only Arnold believed this about gun control. Federal Judge Donald Walter's Comments On Iraq Now put into a more respectable forum, this New York Post column. Another opponent of the war who spent some weeks in Iraq, and has changed his mind. When we left in mid June, 57 mass graves had been found, one with the bodies of 1,200 children. There have been credible reports of murder, brutality and torture of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi citizens. There is poverty on a monumental scale and fear on a larger one. That fear is still palpable. I have seen the machines and places of torture.I have friends who have moved to Europe who insist (apparently based on the lying news media there) that only a few Iraqis had any reason to support the invasion, because only a few would have had reason to feel injured by Hussein's government. Even worse, I am told that to invade a country like Iraq that has tortured to death hundreds of thousands of its own people is "fascist." Thanks to Instapundit for the link to the column. Wednesday, September 24, 2003
The Fat Lady Has Sung I was just watching FoxNews. They intervewed the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program. He said: 1. Iraq had a sizeable quantity of chemical weapons in the 1990s. 2. Most of these weapons were either destroyed, or degraded. 3. He engaged in a cover-up of the WMD programs to prevent UN inspectors from seeing the extent of the programs, and that Iraq no longer had WMDs. 4. He speculated that Hussein pretended to have WMDs still in order to keep other nations afraid. 5. He said that the lack of WMDs was not for lack of interest, and that the WMD programs remained active, with plans to again build WMDs. This nails it down pretty well. There was someone lying about WMDs in Iraq, but it wasn't President Bush or Prime Minister Blair. It was the Iraqis. Under the circumstances, the belief that Iraq had WMDs was completely reasonable. This is equivalent to seeing a person that you know has robbed banks in the past with a shotgun, walking clumsily into a bank wearing an overcoat. When a cop approaches and tells him to put his hands in the air, and he refuses, and starts to reach under the coat--you draw and fire. Oh yeah, the Parliamentary report is out: The British government did not overstate Saddam Hussein's weapons capability before the Iraq war, but should have stressed that his regime was not an immediate threat to Britain, a parliamentary committee said Thursday.Now, it doesn't look like Blair is completely out of the woods on this, but the claim that the Blair government lied about the WMDs (as opposed to was misled by Iraqi's bogus "Beware of Dog" sign) doesn't appear to be surviving. Labels: Iraqi WMDs Ohio Supreme Court Upholds Concealed Carry Ban I guess I'm not too surprised. Ohio's law prohibits carrying a concealed handgun, but allows you to raise an affirmative defense at trial that you needed to do so for self-protection. In practice, it was only a few years ago that this affirmative defense was finally successfully used at trial. Even law enforcement officials who testified during the initial trial in Hamilton County couldn't agree on what was a lawful reason to carry concealed. Part of the opinion makes sense. They acknowledge that the right to bear arms under the Ohio Constitution is fundamental. But they also argue that fundamental rights are subject to reasonable limitations, and point to the fact that in both State v. Hogan (Ohio 1900) and State v. Nieto (Ohio 1920) the Ohio Supreme Court upheld limitations on carrying of arms as reasonable limitations. Because of constitutional conventions between 1859 (when the first ban was passed) and the present, which kept the Ohio right to keep and bear arms provision unchanged, they have a legitimate argument when they claim that this is evidence that concealed carry is not constitutionally protected. What is disappointing is how embarrassing both Hogan and Nieto are, and how unconcerned the Ohio Supreme Court is with citing these cases. The Hogan decision prohibited "tramps" from carrying deadly weapons, and the language is vitrolic, and irrational. Speaking of the class, the genus tramp, in this country, is a public enemy. He is numerous, and he is dangerous. He is a nomad, a wanderer on the face of the earth, with his hand against every honest man, woman, and child, in so far as they do not promptly and fully supply his demands. He is a thief, a robber, often a murderer, and always a nuisance. He does not belong to the working classes, but is an idler. He does not work, because he despises work. It is a fixed principle with him that, come what may, he will not work. He is so low in the scale of humanity that he is without that not uncommon virtue among the low, of honor among thieves. He will steal from a fellow tramp, if in need of what that fellow has, and will resort to violence when that is necessary. So numerous has the class become that the members may be said to overrun the improved parts of the country, especially the more thickly-settled portions.[State v. Hogan, 63 Ohio St. 202, 81 Am. St. Rep. 626, 58 N.E. 572, 574 (1900).]The legislature didn't want poor people to be armed, and failed to define what made someone a "tramp." The Nieto case is even more embarrassing. Nieto was charged with concealed carry in his own bed. The police went to arrest him for supposedly threatening someone with a gun--but it doesn't appear that he was ever charged with that. When they arrested Nieto in a company bunkhouse, he was asleep, and they found a gun in his clothing, and charged him with concealed carry. He was found innocent at trial, and the state appealed. The Nieto decision makes little sense when you start to check the citations. From my book For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (Praeger Press, 1994): The majority opinion, written by Justice Avery, pointed to such decisions as Dunstan v. State (Ala. 1900) [although they consistently misspelled it as Dunston], and Carroll v. State (Ark. 1872) for support for the position that the state could even prohibit concealed carry in one’s own home. With respect to the right to bear arms in general, the Court cited the Ohio Constitution and the Second Amendment, and asserted that the Second Amendment was only a restriction on the powers of the federal government, citing Aymette v. State (1840), Fife v. State (Ark. 1876), English v. State (Tex. 1872), and City of Salina v. Blaksley (Kan. 1905).On the issue of whether the current statute is unconstitutionally vague or not, the Ohio Supreme Court seems to have ignored the clear confusion of the law enforcement officials who testified at the original trial, and just decided that the language was clear enough to them. Justice O'Connor dissented, and while agreeing that regulating concealed carry is constitutional, argued that the right to bear arms, being a fundamental right, is subject to strict scrutiny. However, the right to concealed carry is not a fundamental right, since open carry is still lawful in Ohio. Concealed carry should be subject to intermediate scrutiny. {24} Under intermediate scrutiny, a regulation will be upheld only if the regulation is narrowly tailored to serve an important government interest and leaves open other means of exercising the right. Id. The state argues that the carrying of concealed weapons must be banned to protect public safety. Ensuring public safety is an important government interest that would satisfy the first prong of the test, if the statute were narrowly tailored. Further, the state correctly asserts that the statute leaves open the ability to bear arms by openly carrying a firearm, satisfying the third prong of the test.However, Justice O'Connor points out that no fundamental right should be subject to the affirmative defense requirement. {27} Under the current statutory scheme, an officer need not be concerned with whether the accused is engaged in a constitutionally protected, i.e., lawful, activity at the time of arrest. Rather, a person can be arrested anytime when carrying a concealed weapon, even if doing so for the constitutionally protected purposes of defense and security. This creates an unavoidable chilling effect on the free exercise of the right to bear arms for defense and security.Justice O'Connor would have overturned the statute, because it was not narrowly tailored. Here's a suggestion for you Ohioans: start to carry openly. There's no law against it--and here's a chance to make some money suing police officers who arrest you for exercising a fundamental right. It may also force the state legislature to finally pass a concealed weapon permit system. Labels: gun rights Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Too Good To Ignore--The Threat of Secession Rises Again! Except this time it's leftists talking about taking "their" states out of the Union, and joining Canada. (Thanks to Instapundit for the link.) As some of the comments on this blog entry point out, "their" states are really leftist urban enclaves surrounded by fairly conservative rural and suburban areas. But as another comment points out--the left is so fired up for gun control, what they going to do? Sing "We Shall Overcome" until our side runs out of ammunition? Perhaps Professor Lewis wasn't expecting us to take him seriously--but you can be sure that if some Southerner suffering from an excess of Southern nationalism made a similar remark, Professor Lewis would be demanding a criminal investigation and prosecution for treason. As far as I am concerned, if all the leftists who think Canadian politics are so wonderful want to move, that's fine with me. They have already ruined California, which used to be a pretty decent place to live. The only consolation is that millionaires (the only kind of leftist, in my experience, that you can find in quantity) aren't prepared to suffer from the extremes of real weather, and so we don't have to worry about them taking over Idaho. Unsurprisingly, the only county that Gore took here in 2000 was the county where Sun Valley is located--one of those places where the billionaires are driving out the millionaires. More Evidence of Media Misreporting About Iraq More Democratic Congressmen have returned from Iraq, and what they are saying is devastating: Journalists are giving a slanted and unduly negative account of events in Iraq, a bipartisan congressional group that has just returned from a three-day House Armed Services Committee visit to assess stabilization efforts and the condition of U.S. troops said.Unfortunately, the continual drumbeat from the mainstream media are giving a very false picture of the real situation in Iraq. If anything, the inaccurate reporting problem is worse in the European media. I have friends who have moved to Europe, and are comparing the U.S. occupation to what the Nazis did to Poland in 1939. Entertaining Slip of the Tongue I understand that the ACLU's attorney Rosenbaum, at the 9th Circuit hearing on the recall election controversy, slipped up, and referred to it as the 9th Circus. Yup! Monday, September 22, 2003
Federalist 10 and the Strategic Helium Reserve In Constitutional History class today, I explained the strengths and weaknesses of Federalist 10 and its theory of faction counteracting faction. I explained that while this theory of countervailing interests has often worked well when the dispute involved ideological concerns, when it comes to factions pursuing economic interests, the results have been a lot more mixed--because economic factions--especially small economic factions--have enormous economic interest in promoting their agenda, while their opponents have only a weak economic interest in preventing any particular faction from achieving their ends. The Strategic Helium Reserve--established in 1925 to make sure that the Navy's fleet of antisubmarine warfare dirgibles would be adequately inflated--didn't go away until 1996--at which point, it was, shall we say, of only limited importance to military operations. I even managed to fit in the story of the discovery of helium--when the little town that thought its fortunes were made by the huge natural gas gusher blew out the flaming hay bale that they shoved into the stream to prove to the pessimists who didn't believe it would really burn. I did resist the urge to explain the discovery of helium due to Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. Wesley Clark Is Apparently the Clinton's Boy For example, read this article from Congressional Quarterly. And you can really tell,when you see his claim that, “I would have been a Republican,” Clark told them, “if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls.”The next day: Unfortunately for Clark, the White House has logged every incoming phone call since the beginning of the Bush administration in January 2001. At the request of THE DAILY STANDARD, White House staffers went through the logs to check whether Clark had ever called White House political adviser Karl Rove. The general hadn't. What's more, Rove says he doesn't remember ever talking to Clark, either.A poor memory? Or has he been taking lessons in honesty and integrity from Bill Clinton? Arizona Recognizing A Bunch More State Concealed Weapon Permits The official website is here. They've hedged their language a bit. Along with the six states with which Arizona has established reciprocial recognition agreements ("you recognize mine and I'll recognize yours"), which includes Alaska, Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Utah, and Texas, Arizona law now recognizes concealed handgun permits issued by states with substantially similar laws. But rather than say, "These states conform to our requirements," they say that it appears that the following states issue permits that are in compliance. This leaves Arizona free of any problems caused by changes to the laws of these other states, so you could potentially break the law by carrying concealed in Arizona. However, I suspect that most Arizona peace officers are going to be working from this list of states, and unless you have done something that leads to an arrest, I can't imagine this being a problem. The list of states that Arizona thinks are in compliance, and whose permits are therefore valid is: Alaska*, Arkansas*, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky*, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan*, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas*, Utah*, West Virginia, Wyoming. The * states are those with which Arizona has reciprocal agreements. Whee! I'm up to 32 states now! Terrorists Steal Servers in Australia? I found this link over at National Review Online's The Corner. On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport. Sunday, September 21, 2003
Interesting Email Problem This evening, I suddenly was unable to contact the SMTP server at claytoncramer.com to send email. (My ISP is actually cableone.net, but I do all my email through my web host service, hostrocket.com.) Why? After a lot of experimenting, I discovered that all of my email accounts, even at different servers, were giving the same behavior--I could receive email, but I couldn't send it. Since I could ping the SMTP server in question, I was beginning to wonder if something was blocking port 25 transactions. I called up CableOne Technical Support, and they confirmed that they had recently blocked all port 25 transactions--specifically, so that no one could use them as an ISP to send spam through another server. The only lawful port 25 operations are to cableone.net's SMTP server. In practice, this means that my emails will now go out through cableone.net's SMTP server--but my email address is unchanged. It's a minor annoyance to have to change all this, but I can understand and respect cableone.net's desire to prevent spam by their customers. |
