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Labels: house project Labels: global warming Labels: Iraqi WMDs
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.
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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.
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Laser Targeting of Airliners
There have been a number of news accounts of airline pilots being temporarily blinded by lasers on approach. Instapundit is reporting that some are suggesting that this isn't an attempt at bringing down planes, directly, but is part of target acquisition exercises.
Whatever this is, I am pretty darn sure that this is not accidental, or innocent. I have a bit of experience trying to engage targets at fairly close range with lasers. It turns out that many streetlights can be turned off by illuminating a light sensor on the top of the housing. (That's why the streetlights go off in the daytime.) Why would I want to do this? Amateur astronomy. Those streetlights are such a nuisance!
The standard laser pointer is just barely capable of turning off streetlights; the surplus supermarket scanner lasers, which I think are several times more powerful, will do it pretty easily. But the big problem is precisely aiming either device. I have done it with just a handheld unit--a few times. The notion that someone using a handheld laser pointer is successfully aiming a laser into a cockpit at these distances is absurd.
When I am aiming at a photocell on top of a streetlight, it is about one inch in diameter at a distance of typically fifty yards--requiring a pointing accuracy of about two minutes of arc on a stationary target. Hitting a aircraft cockpit's windows at a distance of say, two miles (including both altitude and distance along the ground) means hitting a target about thirty feet wide at 3500 yards. That's about one tenth of a minute of arc--and it's a moving target. This is not a trivial exercise, and it is not being done by accident.
It also isn't likely being done with common laser pointers. At night, a red laser pointer is visible at a distance of several hundred feet. If these lasers are temporarily blinding pilots at distances approaching ten thousand feet, when the beam has spread out to a circle that is many dozens of feet in diameter, these are probably lasers in the high end of the milliwatt range or brighter--not commonly found retail items.
Good News Of Various Sorts
I had to put another notch (inward) on my belt. At this point, the next step is going to have to be a new belt. I am very pleased.
We waited a bit long on the property we wanted to buy. We probably could have gotten it for $50,000 if we had made an offer a week earlier, but another offer came in while we were dithering, so we had to offer full asking price to be sure of getting it. It's still a bargain at $55,000 (assessed at $74,000 by Boise County back in 2000). I don't think you could get a parcel this size with these sort of views in Sonoma County for less than $500,000.
Here are some higher resolution pictures of the views from the property.
Prozac & Mass Murder: Disturbing News Report
I've never bought into the "Prozac [or whatever the new antidepressant of the month is] causes mass murder" argument. One of the reasons is because there is a bit of grasping at straws going on with this. Scientologists, through their anti-psychiatric front groups, have long argued that Prozac and other drugs are dangerous, at least partly because they perceive psychiatry as a competitor to Dianetics--and way too much of the "Prozac causes mass murder" stuff eventually turns out to be the Church of Scientology's campaign.
Another group that tends to grasp at this straw are gun rights activists, who are very interested in finding someone to blame for the seeming epidemic of gun murders in the 1980s and 1990s. I understand the desire to find a way of deflecting blame on this--especially because guns, even pretty high capacity guns, have been available for a long time in the U.S., without these sort of mass murders.
I have some anecdotal evidence that makes me suspicious about Prozac. A friend, many years ago, and a pretty serious gun owner, started taking Prozac for depression. Within a few weeks, he was having dreams that were very, very worrisome. In the dreams, he is sitting in a box in a church, throwing grapes at people, then throwing them into his mouth. You don't have to do much analysis of that dream to figure out what a "box in a church" is, and what those grapes are. Once I pointed out the obvious symbolism, he stopped taking the Prozac--and those scary dreams stopped. Fortunately, he did not become a headline.
Still, the evidence about Prozac has always been more coincidental than anything else--rather like the way that guns are often associated with crime, as are flies with garbage. Is this just a coincidence, or is because people taking anti-depressants are often people with serious emotional problems? Even if you establish that the correlation isn't a coincidence, there are some serious problems figuring out which is the cause, and which is the effect.
People who are very, very deeply depressed often have a hard time developing the energy to do anything that involves much planning. Perhaps--just perhaps--anti-depressants give these people enough energy to do something that they otherwise might not. I really don't know the answer, and I am a bit skeptical when anyone gets too insistent, based on a few incidents, that they know the answer.
Still, this news story suggests some improper actions by the maker of Prozac, and raises some questions about whether there might be some dangerous connections: LONDON (Reuters) - The British Medical Journal said on Friday it has sent documents to U.S. health regulators that appear to suggest a link between the antidepressant Prozac and suicidal behavior.
UPDATE: The British Medical Journal has retracted its claim about Eli Lilly failing to disclose this research. Thanks to Different River for the pointer.
In its Jan. 1 issue, the journal said an anonymous source had provided "missing documents" that included reviews and memos appearing to show that officials at Eli Lilly and Co., the drug's maker, knew in the 1980s that it had "troubling side effects."
The medical journal said the documents relating to clinical trials of fluoxetine, the generic name for Prozac, "went missing during a controversial product liability suit more than 10 years ago."
Indianapolis-based Lilly said in a statement that it has always sought to publicly disclose data and there has never been any allegation that documents were missing from the product liability trial brought by victims of Joseph Wesbecker or any other case.
Wesbecker in 1989 killed eight and wounded 12 before killing himself at a Louisville printing plant where he had been an employee. At the time, the 47-year-old was taking several medications, including Prozac. A jury found the company not liable, but Lilly had settled for an undisclosed amount with plaintiffs before the verdict was returned.
Not Getting Enough of My Blog?
Yes, I know that there are some people who spend hours at the computer, waiting for the next piece of wisdom or wit from yours truly. Here's a new bloggerwho seems to be smart (i.e., shares my general world view and knows how to write well) who tells me: I'm making the blog anonymous so that my employer, and potential future employers, can't figure out my political/religious views from Googling (is that a word?) my name.
Probably wise, since the left exercises enormous control over employment in the U.S.
This Tsunami Tragedy
I haven't had much to say about it because it doesn't surprise me very much--partly because I read a lot of books about the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, when the tsunamis caused most of the tens of thousands of deaths. What with the rising populations of this part of the world, it was probably inevitable that another such disaster would happen.
I was a little taken aback by hearing someone describe this as a solution to the overpopulation problem of those countries--right up there with Scrooge's "excess population" remarks in A Christmas Carol. I am also not impressed with those trying to argue that this is a consequence of global warming raising sea levels. Nope! Even a few inches of rising sea levels could not have contributed to this.
If you want to help, World Vision, my favorite international relief agency, is collecting money here.
If The Bush Administration Knew There Were No WMDs in Iraq...
and if they were the crooked monsters that the left claims--starting a war just to get oil--then they would have prepared for that eventuality, would they not?
If, before invading Iraq, the evil Bush Administration had believed that there were no WMDs, they would have made arrangements to find the WMDs anyway. About six weeks after the invasion, they would have "discovered" a cache of sarin in one of the remote desert bases--perhaps a few tons of it, enough that it would appear to be a serious production effort, but small enough that it could be fabricated and delivered by only a few, highly trusted people from CIA. After reporting the "discovery" of these WMDs in unsafe storage tanks, they would have destroyed it as a safety measure, after allowing a few reporters to look at it the cache.
There several conclusions that you can draw from the lack of such a staged discovery:
1. The Bush Administration is prepared to lie about why we went to war--but not prepared to lie about finding WMDs.
2. The Bush Administration is so stupid that they wouldn't think of making up a false WMD discovery--even though this was the primary reason for the war.
3. The Bush Administration honestly thought that they would discover WMDs in Iraq.
Now, if you believe that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the Haliburton-run conspiracy are really, really evil, then alternative #1 makes no sense at all. If you believe that they are so stupid as to make #2 likely, then you need to explain why the Democrats lost the election to these dunderheads. The most likely explanation is #3: an honest mistake, perhaps too much willingness to believe what a number of intelligence services misread about Iraqi actions and intentions--but an honest mistake.
Good News From New Zealand
Fortunately, New Zealand police know how little value mandatory gun registration is: The Government has finally abandoned the idea of registering firearms.
I do hope that this isn't a surprise to anyone. People that commit trivial crimes like murder, rape, and robbery, tend to be a bit careless about obeying the really important laws, such as gun registration.
Police Minister George Hawkins confirmed today that registration will not be in a bill he is preparing to tighten border control of illicit arms trading.
The legislation will bring New Zealand into line with international protocols on the control of weapons, parts and ammunition.
The registration of all the guns in the country was recommended seven years ago in a government-commissioned review of gun laws carried out by Sir Thomas Thorpe.
Neither the previous nor the present government acted on the recommendation, and Mr Hawkins said today it was off the agenda.
"Police told the Government it wouldn't make very much difference, and they recommended that we did not register every firearm," he said on National Radio.
"Police advice was that most of the times guns are used illegally, they are illegal guns and they don't know about them anyway."
Cue The Jetsons Theme Music
I don't know why it took so long (except that I am a cheapskate) to join the wireless age, but this is cool!. My wife is upstairs, asleep, so I'm down in the lobby, working on this port of this full text understanding system from C to Java. I couldn't remember one little quirky detail of the Java syntax? Just google for the magic set of keywords, and boom! There it is. I discovered that I didn't have a multiwindow program editor on this laptop? Just google for "emacs Windows download" and boom! Got it, downloaded it, and here I am working happily away.
What an amazing age we live in. Now, I just need to figure out why the battery on this laptop shrinks down at such an amazing rate.
Blogging From a Hotel Room in Moscow, Idaho
I finally went out and bought a wireless router and PCMCIA card for my laptop. But now with a wireless interface, I can now blog from a hotel room a long ways from home. I'm visiting my daughter for her 21st birthday. Do not expect to see a lot of activity here for the next few days.
