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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).
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Lincoln Town Car--Who Buys These Pigs? I rented what Budget calls a luxury car because I needed enough room for my wife, son, and my sister, along with too much luggage to transport everything to my daughter's wedding. What I won in the rental car lottery was a Lincoln Town Car. I've never driven one before. I am profoundly unimpressed. This makes the Cadillac Sedan de Ville that Avis handed me a couple of years ago as a replacement vehicle look like a sports sedan. This Town Car combines relatively poor road isolation with too much body roll. It isn't gutless, but it's nothing special. Steering is better than I am used to from a Ford product, but still very isolating from road feel. Lousy rear visibility, a surprisingly small trunk for such a large car, and controls are really, really clumsy and counterintuitive. The only innovative aspect was that one of the controls lets you move the brake pedal--useful for people who can't get close enough to the steering wheel and the brake pedal at the same time. I would think especially for people who are 5'4" and shorter this might be a real advantage. UPDATE: One more good thing--the sensors that detect that you are about to collide with something when you are in reverse. I didn't really need it, but I would suspect that a few parking lot accidents have been avoided by this system. On the down side, the seats are so uncomfortable that I am in considerable upper back pain today--something that is new to me from driving a car. Another irritating aspect to the Lincoln Town Car is that there are no cupholders, either front or rear--but it does have a dual ashtray in the front. That tells me a lot about who the buyers are expected to be. My wife found the steering so imprecise that she calls a "hand-eye coordination problem" and suggested that if a policeman ask the car to close its eyes and put its finger on the tip of its nose, it would often fail the sobriety test. Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Humor If you remember the song "Cats in the Cradle," you'll appreciate this one! As my wife said, "Some people have too much spare time!" Completely Unfair It's a picture of the national security team having fun. I still got a good laugh out of it. Light Blogging Until After My Daughter's Wedding It will be hectic and emotional the next few days. They grow up so fast. What Moon Landing? Maybe the skeptics were right after all! At least, you might get that impression from reading the Library of Congress's "Today in History" page. Tom McMahon points out that today's entries there prominently feature the birth of Anne Hutchinson, and the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights--and nothing else. Now, both are important events. If you really want me to, I can bore you silly with Anne Hutchinson's part in the struggle for power in 1630s Massachusetts. She led a movement so threatening to the status quo that the government disarmed Hutchinson's followers. The Seneca Falls Convention, also very important as part of the synergistic relationship between feminism and abolitionism. But the Moon landing today in 1969 isn't exactly chopped liver, either. Monday, July 19, 2004
Wow! Blog Ads From Movie Studios? I was shocked to see a paramount.com email address on the newest ad, for The Manchurian Candidate. (This is the remake of the version made in the 1960s.) I haven't seen either the remake (of course, it's not out yet) or the original, but the previews lead me to believe that where the brainwashers were Red Chinese in the original, they are a corporation in the remake. My first reaction was indignation--that to modern filmmakers, a corporation is somewhat equivalent to Red China. My second reaction is, "Like corporations need to brainwash politicians? I thought those were called political contributions." Federal Assault Weapon Expiration Date: Where Is It? I've looked through the appropriate sections of title 18 of the U.S. Code, and I can't seem to find either the words "ten years" or "September 13" anywhere. Everyone agrees it expires ten years after it was first passed, but I can't see what makes it expire. I couldn't seem to find it in the CFR (although I didn't read it line by line). Can anyone give me a pointer to the specific part of the statute that makes it turn into a pumpkin on September 13, 2004? UPDATE: Wow, what a readership I have! In just a short time, several different readers were able to point me to this. Ann Coulter's Column About Ambassador and Liar Joseph Wilson IV There's nothing really new here, but she does make it funny: I'm not sure we were waiting for any more evidence on whether Wilson was an idiot, but this week we found out he's a liar, too. The Senate report on the CIA's intelligence gathering concluded that, contrary to Wilson's statements about his own report, his findings had bolstered rather than undermined the case that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger. We Just Can't Win Iraq the Model has some amusing stuff up, one of which really captures the problems that the U.S. has: no matter what we do, we're in the wrong: Like all Iraqis, I hate Americans. Of course. Here is why: Why They Hate Us Instapundit links to a several month old Mark Steyn column that explains why both Islamofascists and, it seems, nearly every intellectual of Old Europe, hates us: Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. They’re both right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free market in churches enables religion to thrive. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Ireland, Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into a bunch of wimpsville self-doubters, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely.If you had said this to me last year, I would have thought the statement a bit over the top about the Europeans. But over the last few months, I have seen something like insanity take hold of people I know. What is a Brit with whom I used to work who is now a U.S. citizen; the other is a Frenchman with whom I used to work. When I say, "insanity" I don't mean that we disagree about foreign policy. I mean that one of them has become so deranged on the subject that he compares Abu Ghraib to Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago; Bush to Hitler; and all the rest. I know for a fact that much of his rage at Bush is because Bush is a born-again Christian; his last girlfriend in America was also a born-again Christian, and when that relationship collapsed (because of their very different religious beliefs), he seems to have gone off the deep end. The other fellow is calmer, but I can't claim that he makes any more sense. He purports to read a variety of news sources, and yet seemed completely unaware just a few weeks ago about the UN Oil-for-Palaces scandal. When he asked me if I could point him to a news source for this, I was only able to find about 880 published articles on line discussing it. When the Economist ran an article about the Butler report, he summarized it as "Blair lied"--even though the Butler report went out of its way to emphasize that this was an intelligence assessment error, and there was no evidence of intentional deception by anyone. When I pointed this out--with quotes from the Butler report--he changed the topic. I know that this guy has a pretty strong hostility towards Christianity as well, and has tried hard to persuade me that Bush's foreign policy are widely disapproved of by Republicans throughout the United States (a position that is laughably wrong; even among Democrats there remains a significant level of support). The recurring theme I keep seeing is a furious hatred of anything Christian from a very secular fraction of the population. It is really quite astonishing. As Steyn observes: Last year, I had a long talk with a ‘senior EU official’ and I was amazed at the way, quite unprompted, he used the phrase ‘Europe’s post-Christian future’, presuming that I would agree with him that this was a condition to aspire to. Europe’s quite post-Christian enough, and most of the horrors of our time came about through the most prominent expressions of its post-Christian state, Nazism and Communism. And yet faith in secularism is indestructible. The other day a correspondent emailed a swipe at me by the Independent’s Johann Hari in a vain effort to goad me into swiping back. Mr Hari was discussing the term ‘Islamofascism’: ‘It has been picked up by some people, like the vile Mark Steyn, who seem to think that all Islam is evil. I dislike all religions and would happily see the whittling away of every last church and mosque, but to imply that all Islam is on a par with al-Qa’eda is grotesque.’ Why Send Martha To Jail, With This Alternative? I am not very sympathetic to Martha Stewart's plight, but Michael Williams points out that there was an alternative punishment that Martha Stewart requested that makes a lot of sense: she wanted to serve her sentence "helping underprivileged women launch their own businesses." Like Michael, I would prefer that non-violent offenders be punished in more creative ways than a jail cell, if there is any way to do so. This sounds like it would have been a healthy alternative that might have helped others. A Labour PM Is Concerned About The Results of the 1960s? Michael Williams blogs about an astonishing speech by Tony Blair. Williams quotes this press account of a recent Blair speech: In a speech which risked a backlash from single parents' groups and Labour MPs, the Prime Minister said the culture of the "Swinging Sixties" was partly to blame for crime and social breakdown. ...As Williams points out: Wait, I thought judges and (not-necessarily-racial-)minorities were supposed to be in charge? Indeed, Mr. Blair, we see the same things here in America, though some deny it. I Guess Bloggers Are Becoming Important Or establishment leftists wouldn't be so busy attacking us as a class, such as this Los Angeles Times opinion piece does: However, bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.Wow! He reads my blog! Calling Al Gore, Calling Al Gore From the Telegraph: Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.Refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty is going to turn out to have been one of the more courageous actions of the U.S. government. Labels: global warming Sunday, July 18, 2004
My Father's Birthday My father, Edwin Frederick Cramer (usually just "Fred") was born today in 1910, in Port Townsend, Washington. A friend's father died recently. It's a day for taking stock, I suppose, and considering one's losses. My father was one of those people who, had he been born in 1940, would have gone to college, and become a mechanical engineer. Had he been born in 1950, perhaps an aerospace engineer. He wasn't brilliant, but he was clever, funny, occasionally witty, with an excellent, near photographic memory, very determined--and very gentle. Perhaps had his parents not separated when he was young, he would have gone to college. Unfortunately, his father was a cad--clever, in a shark-like way, but unfaithful to my grandmother--and I suspect that his mother discovered his infidelity the way that many women of that generation did, because my father's father was a frequenter of brothels. My father's fraternal twin Glenn finished eighth grade, and went off to sea; my father finished high school, and became a bookkeeper. At the start of World War II, welding was paying about three times as much as accounting, and he went to work building the ships that helped win the war. After the war, my father sold encyclopedias door-to-door, worked as welder, sometimes in remote places like Alaska. As I was growing up, it seemed that he could build almost anything out of scrap parts. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but when I wanted a telescope, he did some pretty amazing things to make do. C&H Sales in Pasadena, a surplus optics dealer, had a Coulter 8" f/7 parabolic mirror, new, but marked down to $50. Over the next few weeks, we went all over the Los Angeles basin, buying concrete forms for the tube, cutting old pots and pans into dust covers, and building a crude but useful telescope mount out of pipe fittings and a wheeled tripod we found in a scrap store in Venice. And when we were done, it looked like hippie artillery (due to the psychedlic paint job on the tube), but it showed the rings of Saturn, the satellites and cloud bands of Jupiter--and I learned what a craftsman my father was, and how far he was prepared to go for his kids. I have lots of painful memories of car repair projects. He wasn't a hot rodder. We generally had older cars, because that's what we could afford. I think the 1964 Chevrolet Malibu station wagon was the first new car my parents had ever owned--the 1960s were a prosperous time, at least for my family. But there were always repairs that needed to be done, and he had the tools, the knowledge, and the time to do them. That meant that I had to help. I wasn't happy about it, partly because I would rather have been reading, and I did the minimum I needed to keep him happy. In retrospect, I wish that I had recognized the opportunity to absorb decades of knowledge about the use of tools. At one point we rebuilt the transmission of my sister Marilyn's beat up Triumph. It was one of those reminders of why there used to be a bumper sticker that said, "The parts falling off of this car are of the finest British manufacture." My father was a tinkerer, and mechanic, but also a really well-read man. He didn't go to college, but he read a variety of serious books about history, world affairs, philosophy, and animal behavior. He was an early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam--although like many of his generation, he was very, very taken aback by the countercultural behavior that accreted onto the antiwar movement. Education was important to both of my parents, and when we moved to the Los Angeles basin in the early 1960s, they picked Santa Monica because of the quality of its schools. This was, for me, the single best decision that they ever made. I am still astonished at the quality of education that I received there. I was never entirely sure what his politics were. Like much of his generation who had grown up during the Depression, he seemed skeptical of highly ideological views of economics. I can remember a lot of conversations with him as I was growing up in which he would ask me questions that left me short of an comfortable answer. When I was about 13 or 14, I think, I expressed the opinion that welfare recipients shouldn't have the vote, since they weren't paying taxes. I wasn't sufficiently knowledgeable at the time to understand exactly what welfare was, or why people ended up on it, or that even poor people pay all sorts of taxes other than income taxes, but I knew that my parents worked very, very hard, and had little to show for it. It didn't seem fair that others received money for doing nothing. My father's response was a simple question, "Does that mean that rich people should get more votes, because they pay more taxes?" He had a fairly strong respect for Ayn Rand and her ideas, although his general skepticism of strong ideologies tended to keep him back at a safe distance from them, I think. I think in the entire time that I was growing up, I saw my father lose his temper once. He would swear under his breath while working in the garage on building stuff, but I never saw him throw a tool, pound his fist on a table, or yell at anyone (including me, when I often deserved), except once in a Sears store where a series of miscommunications had reached epidemic proportions on a car repair. He was a very even-tempered guy, confronting some terribly difficult times in which to to raise kids. I don't think I ever gave him any great struggles, but I know that some of my siblings more than made up for it! My parents had moved to Barstow after my first year of college at USC, and bought a condemned house for $5000, and then brought it back up to code. It wasn't their first choice, and I regret that my reluctance to move off to college immediately after high school may have prevented them from going where they first planned, on the Oregon coast. My father died in 1976 in Barstow, probably as a result of incompetence by the staff. He was diabetic, and had already had three heart attacks in previous years. They withheld some of his medication, and this may have contributed to his death. There wasn't really enough to pursue any sort of wrongful death claim--but I recall the hospital was shut down eventually (at least for a while) for failure to meet state standards. A neat guy, held by a stack of problems not of his making. 
I think this was taken when we lived on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica. 
With my mother when we lived on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica. UPDATE: Writing something like this stirs up memories. In my father's case, good memories. We needed a finderscope for the "hippie cannon." In a surplus store, my father found a right angle telescope that had originally come off of a tank. (As you might expect, it was also "built like a tank.") The reticle in the eyepiece had a series of horizontal lines, so my father disassembled the eyepiece, and used a diamond tipped tool to scratch another very precisely perpendicular to the horizontal lines. Now we had a crosshair eyepiece! Then he drilled a hole into the edge of the eyepiece housing. By putting a small red flashlight to the edge, we had an illuminated reticle as well. My father introduced me to all sorts of amazing places in Los Angeles, a town that he had grown up in the 1920s. One example is the Angels Flight funicular railroad near downtown, disassembled in the 1960s, and now restored. Another was Acres of Books, which is still there in Long Beach, and claims to be "California's largest second-hand bookstore." I doubt that there is room for a larger one! When I needed a particular Russian grammar book, my father figured that they would have it--and they did! There's a saying among historians that, "Every time a old man dies, a library burns down." It's true. My father was full of events that he had seen--a small town in Montana where the winter was so bitterly cold that a boy had leaned against a metal tank--and frozen his ear to the metal. They had go get coffee to free him. Coffee grounds reused so many times during the Depression that the grounds were white. (You can imagine the quality of coffee it made.) He worked on builing the Wheeler Ridge pumping station as part of the California aqueduct. One weekend we walked through these enormous, twelve foot pipes that run many miles up the north side of the Tehachapis. One night we tried to take the "hippie cannon" up to our favorite dark sky site in Pacific Palisades--and a California Highway Patrolman told us we couldn't go up there. "The governor's home tonight." (Yes, we picked the hillside by Ronald Reagan's house.) Like the character in Blade Runner says: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die." Labels: telescopes An Interesting Item in a Very Ordinary Pro-Life Article A reader asked me to comment on this article in The Spectator (free registration required). I call it "very ordinary" because it doesn't address any new or interesting points on the abortion debate--a debate that seems to move relatively few people either direction. But there is one very interesting part: A few weeks ago, newspapers published photographs of a 12-week-old male foetus. It was not a blob of tissue but a proto-human. Yet for a further 12 weeks after the pictures were taken it would have been legal to kill this pre-baby in the womb. Other stories appeared. A child had been born at 23 weeks. That is within the legal limit for abortions. It had lived.This is an interesting point. If the original law was not intended to create "abortion on demand," what changed? As the article points out (and not terribly originally, but I think quite accurately): Over the past 40 years, the abortion clinic has become an indispensable part of the life-support system of the permissive society. The unrestricted enjoyment of sexual licence requires not only contraception but retroactive contraception. Almost everyone now takes this for granted, though few people enjoy discussing the subject. But it would be politically inconceivable to place extensive restrictions on the right to an abortion.There are pro-life advocates who argue that abortion is wrong because it takes away the consequences of sex. I don't find that argument very persuasive, because it assumes that sex should have negative consequences. The argument that I find persuasive is the question of whether abortion needlessly kills a human being. Killing another person in civil society is prohibited with a very few exceptions, all of which are predicated on the notion that the person being killed has taken some action that places them outside the law. Anyone is allowed to use deadly force to prevent murder or great bodily injury. The assumption is that you have a choice about whether to commit crimes that may lead to murder or great bodily injury, and if you choose to commit such a crime, you have chosen poorly, with severe consequences. The life of innocents is more important than the life of a criminal. There are a very few hypothetical circumstances where you may use deadly force against an innocent person to protect another innocent person, but you have to work really hard to come up scenarios where these are likely. I suppose that one might involve someone operating dangerous machinery that will clearly kill others in the next few seconds, but you have no way to contact the operator or warn the likely victims, but you do have a way to kill the operator. If you can find an example in the real world, let me know! This is part of why I have a big problem with capital punishment. Unlike self-defense, or the defense of another, a convicted felon can go to prison for life. The death penalty is not necessary for the protection of others. (Okay, we can work on some great scenarios for science fiction: the killer with telekinetic abilities who must be executed before he makes all the prison locks open again. But in the real world?) UPDATE: Oh my, the amount of email I received on this! One reader pointed out that with respect to the scenario of killing the operator, and no way to avoid the deaths of innocents otherwise: you are at the controls of a fighter jet on 9/11, you know that two hijacked flights have already crashed, and you know that the flight headed to the Pentagon has been hijacked. Perfect example. Rare--but perhaps becoming less rare in the future. A number of readers took issue with my statement about pregnancy as a negative consequence of sex. Obviously, for someone who is trying to have children, it's not a negative. Both of our children were planned and wanted, and pregnancy wasn't a negative. I can still remember telling a friend of mine at work that my wife was pregnant, and he said, "You know, there are things you can do about that." It didn't even occur to him that anyone would intentionally have kids. There are pregnancies that are negatives, at least for the mother, and unless she puts that child up for adoption, perhaps for the child as well. I think everyone can agree that 13 year olds should not be getting pregnant. When my wife and I went through Lamaze class for our first child, there was a girl of no more than 14 in there who was going to give birth. She was from New York, she had gotten pregnant as girls that age often do (too much partying), and she was going through with it because a couple wanted to adopt that child. She was clearly too young, and had to have a C-section because of it. Sad follow-on: a year or so later, the couple was murdered in their home. Their maid tried to get get her boyfriend Jose (an illegal alien) to stop chatting up the other girls, saying that the husband was forcing her to have sex. She gave Jose a key to the house. Jose went in, and murdered both the husband and wife--a very sweet pair. The police arrested Jose and the maid. The maid admitted that she had made up the sexual accusations. Jose found out that he had committed murder based on lies, and hung himself. The maid was convicted of murder because she conspired and assisted in it--and then tried to use "battered wife" defense to get her sentence reduced. With respect to the question of whether pregnancy is a punishment or not: I have talked to pro-life activists who have argued that even married couples should not use contraception. I can understand why there could be objections to methods that prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, but even barrier methods seemed to be anathema. Now, I know that this is not generally the view of pro-life people, but it is a sentiment that I have run into often enough to find disturbing. Concerning capital punishment: yes, life in prison often turns out to be quite a bit shorter than that. I support real life in prison, not "We'll let you out in 20 years if you are nice." Yes, prisoners sometimes murder guards or other prisoners. Prisoners dangerous enough to be locked up for life should be in prisons that minimize their contact with other prisoners, and with guards. At least part of why Timothy McVeigh dropped his appeals of his death sentence was the prospect of spending 23 hours a day in a cell for another 50 years. I would imagine that at least some prisoners who commit suicide do so for this reason. If prisoners murder other prisoners, this is not good, but as long as reasonable precautions are taken to prevent it, this isn't the state's fault. I do think that people who are in for life because of crimes that deserve death (say, terrorists, or monsters that torture people to death) should be segregated from people who just can't stop drunk driving, or repeat burglars, or other lesser crimes. Labels: abortion Marvelous Example of Free Speech and Attempts to Suppress It Read this for an example of a high school student attempting to express himself, and the way in which the left suppresses freedom of expression: My name is Bryan Henderson and I am an 18 year old senior attending Princeton Senior High School. Better known as Templar_Crusader on the PW forum, I am the proud leader of the small but growing PHS chapter of ProtestWarrior. |
