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Labels: telescopes Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: global warming Labels: humor Labels: house project Labels: house project Labels: house project
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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Encoding Social Pathologies in the Structure of Our Buildings
That's the title of this post about New York City building an apartment complex specifically for people raising their grandkids--because the parents are dead, flaked out, or otherwise not fit to be parents. As TJIC points out: This is inordinately sad, pathetic, and wrong.
I agree completely. This, unfortunately, is not the first time that we have designed our buildings around a social pathology.
First of all, it’s sad, pathetic, and wrong and that the meme set in black inner city culture considers it normal that a (single) grandmother will raise her grandchildren, because (a) she has no husband; (b) her daughter has no husband; (c) her daughter is too young and flighty to raise her own out-of-wedlock children. I note that I watched the movie “I Robot” just yesterday, and Will Smith’s character had, apparently, been raised by his inner city grandmother. I note further that every picture illustrating the New York Times article illustrates this (which is not to say that this pattern of broken families is unknown in white suburbia; just that in the inner city the meme has reached and passed a critical threshold from “deviant” to “normal”).
Second of all, it’s sad, pathetic, and wrong that this social pathology is being encoded in permanent bricks and mortar: we’re actually building buildings that have features for the very young, and the very old, and no middle aged folks. Winston Churchill once said “we make our buildings and our buildings make us.”
Take a look at houses built in America in the 1920s and 1930s. They have nice front porches. Take a look at houses built in the 1970s and 1980s. Why did the front porches go away? Because if you left anything on the front porch in most of America during this time, it would get stolen. You see similar transformations of the relative positions of doors and windows--you won't find a big window adjacent to the front door--too easy to smash it in and unlock the door.
In one sense, it is probably prudent to design buildings around worst case scenarios, because buildings last for decades--but it is also very sad. It is an acknowledgment that our society has chosen to accept the social pathologies, rather than make a serious effort to fix them.
Foucault Test
If you are an historian or other academic, you may think that a "Foucault test" is one where you are asked to make sense of an incomprehensible block of deconstructionist text. But actually, there is another Foucault--one who came up with something useful.
Big Bertha, the 17.5" reflector I bought a while back (very cheap) has never performed as well at high magnification as it should. I've done enough experimentation now that I believe the problem is either a defective primary mirror, or the diagonal mirror is too large.
What makes a telescope mirror defective, and what is a Foucault test? You may recall (but more likely, you don't) that somewhere along the way, proponents of the New Math showed you a cone, slice about four different ways. My recollection of this was from fourth or fifth grade. I could not for the life of me see why I should care about the difference between a circle (cutting the cone parallel to the base), an ellipse (cutting the cone at a bit of angle), a parabola (cutting the cone parallel to the slope), or an hyperbola (cutting the cone at a sharper angle than the slope).
Here's a picture, to refresh your memory: 
Associated with every figure sliced from the screaming flesh of the cone are two foci. The two foci are on top of each other for a circle, and some distance apart for an ellipse. Here's how you use those foci to draw an ellipse:
It turns out that all planetary orbits are ellipses.
The parabola has two foci also--one real close, the other at infinity. The hyperbolas far focus is beyond infinity (which makes only a little less sense than saying it is at infinity).
What does any of this have to do with telescopes and Foucault?
It turns out that the ideal telescope mirror is a parabola: one focus is up close--about where you put your eye. The other focus is at infinity. A parabola takes the image at infinity (and for practical purposes, all astronomical objects are at infinity) and focuses all the light and image where you put your eye.
Making parabolic mirrors isn't easy. You normally start by grinding a telescope mirror spherical, and then altering its shape with some rather empirical methods, into a parabola. I've done this before, long, long ago, when I made a telescope mirror. It isn't easy--and until the middle of the nineteenth century, no one really knew how to tell when a mirror had reached the perfection of a parabola. Just to make life really miserable for telescope makers, to make a really good telescope mirror, you have to make that parabola so accurately that it is accurate within 1/4 wavelength of light. Yes, you read that correctly. This means that the surface of the mirror has to be within tolerances of millionths of an inch.
Until Jean Foucault (who also invented the gyroscope, Foucault pendulum, and proved that light moved more slowly in water than in air) came up with the Foucault test, figuring out whether a mirror was a proper parabola was largely experimental. You took the telescope outside, aimed at a star, and then tried to see if it would focus correctly or not. If it was fuzzy--if you couldn't get a crisp focus--it probably wasn't a parabola.
The Foucault test is capable of measuring those millionths of an inch difference between a spherical mirror, and a parabolic mirror--and doing it with surprisingly simple mechanisms. Here's a detailed description of it. The essence of it, however, is that different parts of a parabolic mirror--different "zones"--will come to slightly different focal points than a spherical mirror. For a light source at the focal point, the spherical mirror will bring all the light back to the same point. The parabolic mirror will bring the light from different rings on the mirror to slightly different points--and a few millionths of an inch turn into fractions of inch of difference on the focal points.
Anyway, I used to have a Foucault tester. I don't know. I am going to try and find someone locally who has one that I can use on Big Bertha's mirror.
Moonbats on Parade
Washington DC's delegate to Congress (meaning that she can only vote in committee, not for real) is a moonbat named Eleanor Holmes Norton. Congress is debating allowing law-abiding residents of the District of Criminals do something that the rest of us take for granted: buy a handgun. "Many people live in the District during the week who are members of Congress and they would like to be able to protect themselves in their homes," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas Republican who wrote the D.C. Personal Protection Act of 2005.
Delegate Norton did not simply oppose the measure as foolish, or potentially dangerous. I can at least understand when gun control advocates make the claim that guns are more dangerous to the owners than to criminals. There are certainly categories of people for whom this is probably true. If you have a history of severe depression, an uncontrollable temper, commonly drink or use drugs to the point of intoxication, or are so uncoordinated that you lack the ability to operate power tools without seriously hurting yourself, you are probably better off not having a gun in your home.
Mrs. Hutchison said if the measure passes, she will resume her longtime practice of keeping a handgun in her bedroom.
"Every woman in the District of Columbia should have the ability to protect herself in her home, particularly if she is there alone most of the time," Mrs. Hutchison said yesterday.
No, Delegate Norton engaged in what criminologist Don Kates calls "poisioning the well." She made a statement that inclines me to think that any gun control law that Delegate Norton wants should be opposed because she clearly suffers from a hate-filled paranoia that stuns me: But one lawmaker warned the result could be dire.
Read that carefully. She isn't saying, "Those gun nuts are so unconcerned about kids that they don't think about, or care about kids getting killed." She isn't saying, "Those gun nuts don't understand the enormous risk to which they are subjecting our children." (The District of Criminals is such a safe place, you know.) She is saying that proponents of allowing law-abiding responsible citizens to own handguns are trying to get children killed.
"They're trying to see to it that more children get killed," said D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat.
Whenever I hear someone whining about how DC should be treated as a state, with two senators (or even one), and regular members in the House of Representatives, I look at Delegate Norton and I find myself asking: Why? If they aren't going to pick someone rational for a pretend member of Congress, why would they do any better getting to send real members to the Capitol? Delegate Norton makes my old misrepresentative, Lynne Woolsey (D-CA), seem like a calm and sensible intellectual by comparison.
So why does this item start out the plural of moonbat? Eric Scheie over at Classical Values points out that moonbats are not limited to the left. Along with discussing Delegate Norton's derangement, he points to a discussion between Neal Horsley and Alan Colmes on Colmes's radio program. I am way too polite to quote the exact discussion, but remember Jimmy Carter's discussion that caused the ruckus in 1976, of "lusting in his heart" after women other than his wife? Mr. Horsley, who has since become a born-again Christian, should have kept the discussion of sexual lusts quite a bit more vague--and within species. The question, "Animal, mineral, or vegetable?" will never mean the same thing to me again. There are some things that you read and you don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just make circular motions of your finger next to your ear.
Where Do Your Web Pages Go When You Die?
No, I'm not planning to blog from Heaven--I rather doubt that there is Internet access there, and it would be rather heavily filtered, if it was. What I am thinking about is that all of us who put hundreds of megabytes of serious and important documents on our web pages (see my collection of primary historical sources for some examples) are going to die someday. (Except for Instapundit, who is counting on stem cell research and advances in life extension still unimagined.) What happens to these often useful pieces of material? As Roy Batty says in Blade Runner: I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
There's also a saying among oral historians that "every time an old man dies, a library burns down." All this information, lovingly and perhaps idiosyncratically stored on individual web pages--lost for all time.
As I was pondering this depressing thought today, I remembered something that I learned in Ancient Near East class (and may even remember correctly). Old Kingdom Egyptians may not have had a notion of an individual afterlife for anyone but the pharoah, his family, and a few lucky retainers who were killed to join him. Apparently by the Middle Kingdom, enough mid-level bureaucrats were beginning to have similar hopes for a life eternal, and so they start doing the mummification thing, too. To make sure that their tombs were cared for, and that someone would make appropriate offerings on their behalf, they set up what were effectively eternal charitable foundations with some of their wealth to keep someone doing the right thing--and I guess that at least for a few generations, this actually worked.
So perhaps a little corner of immortality for those of you who create web content (blogging or otherwise) might be to make sure that you leave enough money to pay your ISP in perpetuity. Obviously, this is going to get complicated, because ISPs are not immortal. Perhaps what we still start to see is those of us who have put together useful or interesting collections of stuff online leave our "papers" to university libraries--with a lump of cash to keep our materials online...forever.
A Recent Linux Convention
If you don't know what Linux is, you won't understand the joke. Just skip this one.
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The more readers I get, the more advertising revenue. Let's see, at current rates of readership growth, I'll be able to do this full-time around...oh, 2050. So feel free to pester your friends to share in the Clayton Cramer experience. You will see if you click the Site Meter at the bottom left of this very long page that I am averaging more than 1300 visitors a day.
Southern Lights
Really cool page of pictures from Antarctica. Go there. Click. Enjoy! Here's a sample:
The Nuclear Option
You know, the current cloture rule, requiring 60 votes to end debate, is really pretty recent: 1975. This history of cloture shows that the number of votes required for cloture has varied substantially over the history of the Senate--there's nothing particularly hallowed, sacrosanct, or traditional about the current 60 votes: In the smaller Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.
What if the Senate voted to make 55 the number of votes required for cloture? There's nothing magical about 60.
In 1841, when the Democratic minority hoped to block a bank bill promoted by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, he threatened to change Senate rules to allow the majority to close debate. Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton rebuked Clay for trying to stifle the Senate's right to unlimited debate.
Three quarters of a century later, in 1917, senators adopted a rule (Rule 22), at the urging President Woodrow Wilson, that allowed the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority vote, a device known as "cloture." The new Senate rule was first put to the test in 1919, when the Senate invoked cloture to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles. Even with the new cloture rule, filibusters remained an effective means to block legislation, since a two-thirds vote is difficult to obtain. Over the next five decades, the Senate occasionally tried to invoke cloture, but usually failed to gain the necessary two-thirds vote. Filibusters were particularly useful to Southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, until cloture was invoked after a fifty-seven day filibuster against the Civil Right Act of 1964. In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or sixty of the current one hundred senators.
Romanticizing Mental Illness
If you really want to see damaged thinking, look at how the artistic sorts romanticize mental illness, of which One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was among the most damaging in its effects on a generation of judges. This isn't a new problem. My wife tells me that Victorian writers did the same thing with tuberculosis that 1980s artsy-fartsy sorts did with AIDS: they turned the suffering into some sort of sign of being especially blessed by God. Here's an interesting column by Michael Judge about how at least at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the noted writer Frank Conroy played a part in stomping this foolishness into the ground: Like so many other writers and believers in what the poet James Wright called the "pure clear word," I will never forget Frank Conroy, the memoirist, novelist and longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who died of cancer last month at the age of 69. ...
{H]e was brave and kind enough to talk to a roomful of Iowans about the myths surrounding creativity and mental illness.
One evening in the early '90s, at the request of the local Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Frank, the poet Jorie Graham and the then-director of the U. of I. School of Art and Art History, Wallace Tomasini, spoke to a gathering of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, of people suffering from mental illness. The AMI folks were concerned that the arts community, and society in general, was romanticizing illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. You know the argument: If Vincent Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath had been treated with today's medicines, their art would have suffered, or never come into being.
The AMI members' fear was that this kind of reasoning might lead to various forms of mental illness going undiagnosed and untreated in talented young students, and that the fledgling artists and writers themselves might even believe depression or mania or other thought disorders were somehow a prerequisite to being a true artist--like the jazz artists who once thought heroin and a needle were the way to tap into the genius of Charlie Parker.
...
But it was Frank who spoke the most eloquently and freely on the subject. It's more than a decade later, and I still hear his words as if he were speaking to me now. "The artist creates despite these conditions, not because of them." He spoke of his father's problems and of other members of his family who suffered from, among other things, depression. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't recognize some of these tendencies in myself," he said bluntly, but with the same gentle assurance that made him such a fine teacher.
It Works For Fish
You know those offensive spam emails you get offering you drugs that will make some body parts larger? Why, you ask? Talk to the fish! You might think it's grand to be a well endowed fish. After all, some female fish prefer mates with larger sex organs, a new study finds.
...
The study was done on mosquitofish, which are like guppies. They're only about an inch long. That's body length. For the appendage, we're talking millimeters.
...
Data in hand, Langerhans exposed about 50 females, one at a time, to video images of a male of average proportions at one end of an aquarium and an outsized male at the other end.
"They chose the larger one over and over," Langerhans said. "All females had the same preference."
This Should Be a "Duh!" Report
But since there are people out there trying to justify that adults having sex with children doesn't cause the children any harm--and the ACLU argues that there is a constitutional right of minors to have sex with adults--I suppose it is worthwhile to remember that it causes serious harm: Although most research on the consequences of childhood sexual abuse has focused on female survivors, a new study suggests that men who were the victims of sexual abuse as children may suffer from similar issues.
The survey started with 17,000 adults who belonged to an HMO in California. That's a nice large sample size--although the fact that it was done in California may bias the data a bit. The highest rates of sexual abuse that I have seen in surveys have generally been in California. This could be because:
Researchers found the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the risk later in life of health and social problems was similar for both men and women. These problems include drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and marital difficulties.
The results of the study appear in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
1. More sexual abuse of children happens in California.
2. Californians are more willing to admit on a survey that they were victims.
3. People who were sexually abused as children move to California, where the rather dramatic problems that these people have as adults are more widely accepted.
The percentages abused are somewhat surprising, compared to a lot of other surveys: In the survey, 25 percent of females and 16 percent of males reported experiencing childhood sexual abuse.
What is surprising about this is the high percentage of males--most surveys done into the late 1980s in North America find this number closer to 9%.When asked about the gender of the perpetrators, women reported that men committed the abuse 94 percent of the time. But men reported that the abusers were nearly equally divided among men and women, with women accounting for 40 percent of the perpetrators.
This is surprising to me--women have not traditionally been even a small fraction of child sexual abusers. Note that because of the greater percentage of women that were sexually abused, this still means that men are disproportionately abusers.Previous studies in women have shown that childhood sexual abuse increases the risk of mental health problems as well as social problems, and this study confirmed that men share that risk.
No surprises on this. I do hope the ACLU will wake up and stop trying to constitutionalize child sexual abuse.
The study showed that a history of attempted suicide was more than twice as likely among both male and female victims of childhood sexual abuse compared with others.
In addition, sexually abused adults of both genders had a 40% greater risk of marrying an alcoholic and they were 40-50 percent more likely to report current problems in their marriage.
GM Reducing Offerings
This news article reports that GM is going to stop offering a full line of cars in all brands. If you don't follow this carefully, General Motors has several different divisions, originally because these were different car companies that GM bought: Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, and so on.
Once upon a time, there were very significant differences between the different brands. Buick had their own V8; so did Chevrolet; so did Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac. They shared a lot of other common parts, such as water pumps, carburetors, and Fisher Body made all the bodies, but there was a lot individual engineering, and a bit of competition between the different divisions.
In the 1970s, GM started to share engines. By the late 1980s, Chevrolet and Cadillac made V8s, the V6 was from Buick, and everyone mixed and matched. Every division wanted to have a car competitive with the other divisions--and increasingly, the cars were identical except for purely cosmetic body differences and a few minor options. A late 1970s Chevrolet Nova was essentially the same car as its Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick counterparts. Only the Cadillac version, the Seville, was substantially different.
Oldsmobile did a lot of original engineering work in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They produced some pretty interesting cars, like the Aurora. Unfortunately, Oldsmobiles had a reputation for being cars for old people with better taste than the ones that bought Buicks, but not quite rich enough to buy Cadillac. Hence, the "This is not your father's Oldsmobile" advertising slogan that they used for a while. It didn't work, and GM pulled the plug on Oldsmobile a couple of years ago.
The proposal now is to keep Chevrolet and Cadillac full line divisions, and make the others divisions "focused" on their specialties. This would suggest that Buick should become the luxury division, building full-sized sedans and SUVs only, and Pontiac should become the sports car division, building the GTO, the supercharged Bonneville and Grand Prix, and the rumored return of the Firebird Trans Am. Hummer would continue building SUVs for people with too much money and too little sense. Saturn would build inexpensive compacts.
This all makes sense--but it might make even more sense to knock Buick out of the running completely. There isn't even a market for Buicks with middle-aged sorts like me--I suspect the only 20somethings buying Buicks are the meth freaks buying Buicks with 200,000 miles on them.
Global Warming & Antarctica
A reminder that this is a complex subject, and getting arrogant is not wise: A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice - enough to reduce the oceans' rise by 0.12 millimetres per year. The ice sheets that cover Antarctica's bedrock are several kilometres thick in places, and contain about 90% of the world's ice. But scientists fear that if they melt in substantial quantities, this will swell the oceans and cause devastation on islands and coastal lands.
I mentioned a while back the problem of increased solar energy at the surface--and that we really don't know how much is associated with increased solar output, and how much is caused by atmospheric transparency changes--and exactly what the relationship is.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that sea level is currently rising at about 1.8 millimetres per year, largely through melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as a result of global warming. But the panel also expected that climate change would trigger an increase in snowfall over the Antarctic continent, as increased evaporation from the oceans puts more moisture into the air.
"This is a phenomenal piece of research, but it is what we expected, " comments David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. "These effects have been predicted for a long time, it's just that no one has measured them before."
Although the results of the satellite survey are in line with the predictions of global-warming models, the thickening of the ice sheet could still be explained by natural weather variability, warns Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, Columbia, a member of the research team. He and his colleagues present their results in the online edition of Science.
China & Taiwan (Humor)
I really can't call the People's Republic "Red" China anymore. It isn't really Communist, but closer to Fascism, with a weird mix of totalitarian politics, private and state capitalism, and not even a pretense of laissez faire. But people would look at you funny if you started calling it Black China.
Anyway, I'm re-reading Professor Anders Henriksson's Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students. There's a review of it by me here. The short version is that it is a collection of sentences out of college papers and exams that construct a history of the world that leaves you breathless with laughter.
Sometimes the humor is because of a particularly tragic spelling error (the kind that reminds you that many college students learn English now by listening, not reading): "The five European grade powers were England, France, Germany, Russia, and Australia-Mongolia." "Literature ran wild. Writers expressed themselves with cymbals." "There was a change in social morays." "The Civil Rights movement in the USA turned around the corner with Martin Luther Junior's famous 'If I Had a Hammer' speech. Martian Luther King's four steps to direct action included self purification, when you allow yourself to be eaten to a pulp."
Other tragicomic moments are the result of scrambled collections of facts--but scrambled across many centuries, rather as if Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) actually took place. (This is one of my favorite movies, by the way.) "Friedrich Nietzsche was a German movie producer who wrote Triumph of the Will and Superman." "The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac, and their twelve children. Judyism was the first monolithic religion. It had one big God named 'Yahoo.' Old Testament profits include Moses, Amy, and Confucius, who believed in Fidel Piety." "Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish Armada in Vanilla Bay."
A number of the amusing moments, however, suggest that contrary to the popular perception of wild college students, a number have been sublimating desires into their writing. "German unity was acheaved by William I coupling with Bismark. After several hurtful convulsions he culminated to power as the first Geyser of Germany." And the sentence on topic for the headline: "Manifest Destiny is China yarning to embrace Thai Won as a kind of imperialist foreplay." Well, yes, rather like the Rough Wooing of Scotland by England.
A Classified Ad From The Idaho Statesman
No, seriously: 3 EVIL BLACK WEAPONS: FAL .308 rifle, many extras. Nice! $895; SAIGA 12 AK-style Shotgun, like new. Tactical light and laser. No longer imported, hard to find, $395; Winchester 1300 tactical shotgun w/ "Cop Stock" folder. Like new, $295.
Why Can't We Get Judges This Liberal On The Federal Bench?
Imagine how different America would be if a judge this concerned about civil liberties were appointed to the federal bench: [She] was the only member of that court to denounce racist standards by which some police engage in stop-and-search operations:
What flaming liberal is this? California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown! I haven't looked up those cases myself--but when Nat Hentoff, well-known civil liberties attorney, writes an article making the case that Justice Brown is being unfairly and inaccurately portrayed as some sort of right-wing ideologue, it just makes you wonder what the real agenda of the Democratic Party is today. There might well be arguments against Justice Brown's confirmation--but it appears that the Democrats aren't playing particularly fair in their accusations against her.
"There is an undeniable correlation between law enforcement stop-and-search practices and the racial characteristics of the driver. . . . The practice is so prevalent, it has a name: 'Driving While Black.' "
She quoted a U.S. Supreme Court opinion by William O. Douglas (Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 1972): "If we are committed to a rule of law that applies equally to 'minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich,' we cannot countenance standards that permit and encourage discriminatory enforcement."
[This judge] added that while racial profiling is "more subtle, more diffuse, and less visible" than racial segregation, "it is only a difference in degree. If harm is still being done to people because they are black, or brown, or poor, the oppression is not lessened by the absence of television cameras." ...
In the case In re Visciotti (1996), [this judge] was in dissent on the death sentence of John Visciotti, who had been convicted of murder, attempted murder, and armed robbery. She said the sentence should be set aside because of the clear incompetence of Visciotti's lawyer. ...
In another case, In re Brown (1998), this purported enemy of civil rights and civil liberties went after the prosecutor in a capital case and reversed the death sentence of John George Brown because the prosecutor withheld evidence that could have been exculpatory.
In People v. Woods (1999), [she] sharply disagreed when her colleagues approved a police search of a suspected drug dealer's home because, as the cops said, his roommate had consented to warrantless searches as a condition of probation. ... "By their decision today, a majority of the court set the history of personal liberties back more than 200 years."
Is Racism a Factor in the Minuteman Project?
Professor Bainbridge wants to believe that even if everyone involved isn't doing it for racist reasons, that some are doing so. There might well be--although I confess that I've never met someone who hated Mexicans. I've met people who hated Jews and blacks. I've met people who had prejudices about Mexicans, but that did not prevent them from dealing with individuals of Mexican ancestry on a fair basis.
If you don't understand that last sentence, let me explain the difference between racial hatred and racial prejudice. Lots of people hold prejudices: assumptions about a group that don't necessarily prevent them from seeing individual members of that group in a positive light. Bigot A may regard members of group X as lazy, but if Mr. B, a member of group X, demonstrates that he works hard, Mr. A will hold Mr. B in high regard. Mr. A may still think of group X as lazy--but he thinks of Mr. B as a hardworking exception. To use a phrase of another time, Mr. A thinks of Mr. B "as a credit to his race."
If Mr. A meets enough examples like Mr. B, it may soften Mr. A's view of group X. Over time, Mr. A may even decide that group X isn't lazy. This is one of the reasons why integration often worked to reduce racial prejudice. The more that people like Mr. A had to work with and go to school with members of group X, the more examples there were to call into question Mr. A's prejudices.
The people driven by hatred, however, will not let Mr. B's hard work overcome that hatred. Mr. B will always be a member of group X, with all of group X's imagined flaws. At best, such people will find ways to reimagine Mr. B's positive qualities as some sort of sneaky and manipulative PR effort. The haters can't be educated, either formally or through meeting positive members of group X, into not hating; the hatred satisfies some fundamental need.
Karl Marx's famous observation that, "Anti-Semitism is socialism for stupid people" is still true. It is equally the case that socialism is anti-Semitism for intellectuals. The same motivation applies: the need to reduce every individual to a member of a class, a race, or a group, with all the real or imagined characteristics of the class, race, or group.
When I lived in California, there were certainly some widely held prejudices about Mexicans (although not necessarily about the larger class of Hispanics)--but they were just that, prejudices. As I said at the beginning, I don't think I ever met someone who hated Mexicans. They must be out there, but compared to those who hate Jews or blacks, they seem to be pretty rare. (Why this is would be a fascinating subject for examination.)
Anyway, the Minuteman Project has repeatedly emphasized that its efforts to stop the flow of illegals into the United States is not racially motivated. Now I see that they are hooking up with a California group called Friends of the Border Patrol--and look at the name of the chairman: The Minuteman Project has reached an agreement with the Friends of the Border Patrol (FBP) to help promote a new "border watch" aimed at assisting U.S. Border Patrol agents in apprehending illegal aliens on the California border near San Diego.
There are other Hispanics involved in these efforts, some of whom I have seen interviewed on Fox News. One of the activists trying to stop illegal immigration here in the Boise area is Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez.
FBP Chairman Andy Ramirez said more than 500 volunteers have signed up to patrol areas of the California-Mexico border in August, including former Border Patrol agents, retired police and military personnel and pilots. He said yesterday that at least 2,000 more applications from volunteers nationwide are still being reviewed.
This isn't about race. It is about border security, and the economic consequences for poor legal residents (of many races and ethnicities) of large numbers of illegals driving up the costs of the safety net, while simultaneously driving down wages.
The House Project
Well, it is beginning to look like site-built, not modular. Site-built is $79 per square foot--or about $158,000 for a 2000 square foot home. The equivalent modular home would be about $135,000--cheaper, but I suspect that the site-built home will look better at resale, simply because a modular home still doesn't look quite like a site-built home--although the better ones are close. The site development costs are about the same either way.
The current estimates that I am getting come to about $14,000 for the driveway--although about $8000 is for what they call "pit run," a type of large rock used as the road base on which the gravel goes. It turns out that the driveway will be going up a basalt spine that is probably superior to pit run for that purpose--I can't even get two inches down on this stuff before hitting what seems to be bedrock. It is likely that we will need either no pit run, or only a few hundred dollars worth for a couple of sections.
Excavations for the foundation come to about $3600. Concrete foundation, garage floor, patios, and a walkway around the house: about $10,000.
The well is being estimated at $10,000 (including water storage tank, pump, etc.), but this may turn out to be high, since I think we are going to get water at about 120 feet, not 200 feet.
The first septic tank estimate came in at $5,500, but the contractor thinks that he can use a different system and bring it down to $4,000.
Idaho Power is estimating $4,000 to run power to the house, and the trench to carry the power line is going to cost somewhere below $1,600 to excavate. (He is estimating 800 feet, but as I measure it, the distance from pole to house is closer to 600 feet.)
The house itself is still the biggest part of the cost. I had ambitions for something a bit more modern, but it turns out that hiring an architect would run about $10,000 to $15,000 to turn my drawings and ideas into blueprints. I am not so foolish as to think that a contractor should start from my design and start building.
Instead, we are talking the design of a nearby house that my wife rather likes (built by the same contractor), and expanding a couple of walls out to enlarge bedrooms two and three to a size where one makes sense as an office, and the other is big enough for my son--who may live there for a few minutes, a few months, or a couple of years--hard to say right now.
It still won't be a four bedroom house, but I am reluctant to get too large of a house payment on this. Right now I am employed, and probably next year as well. Two years from now, I would not be surprised to see my job being done in Shanghai, at higher net cost, and lower efficiency. It is therefore wise not to get too reliant on a software engineer's paycheck in an era where such jobs are largely disappearing from the United States.
Ann Coulter On Newsweek
As I have observed in the past, Ann Coulter isn't always very fair, and often goes for the cheap laugh instead of a more thoughtful approach. But when has her feline claws sharpened up, and the story involves the left's shameless hypocrisy, she can be devastating: When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.
I really have to ask myself; do the leftists that run the American media worry even a little about the prospect of living in an Islamofascist state? Aren't they even a little bit concerned about a future in which the United States, to prevent further terrorist attacks that our government can't stop because the ACLU runs the FBI and the Department of Justice, agrees to implement Shari'a?
When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.
When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post -- which owns Newsweek -- decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.
So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.
Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of
Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?
...
Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek's decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that "similar reports from released detainees" had already run in the foreign press -- "and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera."
Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion." (I didn't see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You're covered -- al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!
Top Two Vehicle Manufacturers in J.D. Powers Quality Poll
You probably know that J.D. Powers & Associates does a regular survey of new vehicle owners as a measure of quality. Okay, it is only a measure of quality in the first 90 days--the results might be quite different at the end of five years--but still, it is one measure of how well car makers are doing.
No surprise that first in the poll is Toyota. But who was second? Honda? Porsche? BMW? Surprise, surprise, it was GM: DETROIT — General Motors Corp. (GM) and Toyota Motor Co. (search) had the top vehicles in 15 of 18 categories in a closely watched survey of 2005 models released Wednesday by research firm J.D. Power and Associates (search).
When you consider where GM came from, this is even more surprising. GM Quality control was mixed (from fair to lousy) for a long time, with my 1977 Chevrolet Nova and 1978 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 being two examples.
Toyota's Lexus SC430 (search) was the highest-ranking vehicle for the second year in a row. Owners of the luxury sedan reported 54 problems per 100 vehicles, less than half the industry average of 118 problems per 100 vehicles. Suzuki Motor Corp. (search) had the highest rate of problems per vehicle at 151 per 100 vehicles.
Overall, Toyota had the top vehicles for initial quality in 10 categories, including the Toyota Prius compact car, Toyota Sienna minivan and Lexus sedans in all three luxury car categories. GM had five winners, including the Buick LeSabre full-size car, Chevrolet Suburban full-size sport utility vehicle and GMC Sierra heavy-duty full-size pickup.
My 1977 Chevolet Nova was pretty darn good as it came out of the factory, and I can't claim to have had any real complaints about it. After 45,000 miles of extremely hard driving, I had about $90 worth of repairs. Actually, this wasn't hard driving. It was insane driving, including sliding it sideways once when the speedometer needle was wrapped around into the gearshift indicator at the bottom of the dial--I was going "R"). Still, initial build guality wasn't impressive--the fit of body panels was slapdash, and the gap between hood and fenders suggested that someone really didn't care.
My 1978 Camaro Z28 was far worse on initial quality--I had a multipage list of either mechanical defects or bad build problems within three days of purchasing it. Then the crankshaft broke at 7800 miles. (Okay, I was going 117 at the time--but the dealer did agree it was defective, and fixed it under warranty.)
If you had asked me in 1980 if GM would ever get within scratching distance of the Japanese in build quality, I would have laughed. I liked GM cars, but it wasn't for how well they were built, but in spite of how well they were built.
So far, the wife's 2005 Chevrolet Equinox has been flawless--not a single thing wrong or misaligned. It is about at the quality that I used to expect from Japanese makers.
Now, if only GM could resolve the problem of health care costs....
Machine Tools: What Bargains!
A reader told me that because the Chinese are pretty much driving American manufacturing jobs into the ground, that in the Midwest you can get incredible bargains on vertical mills and engine lathes. I thought this sounded a little hard to believe--but looking at eBay, I am astonished I what I am finding. In some cases, pretty serious pieces of machining technology are available for pocket change (and the ability to move these rather heavy pieces of equipment).
This South Bend 10" x 30" engine lathe--current bid is $380. It wouldn't fit in my garage.
This Husky 10" x 20" lathe has a current bid of $9.50. It wouldn't fit in my garage--and I would have to drive to California to pick it up.
In many cases, benchtop minilathes are selling for comparable amounts or more because they can be shipped easily.
The Bush Theory of Infectious Democracy
This Washington Post report suggests that it is working: DAMASCUS, Syria, May 17 -- Beset by U.S. attempts to isolate his country and facing popular expectations of change, Syrian President Bashar Assad will move to begin legalizing political parties, purge the ruling Baath Party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007 and formally endorse a market economy, according to officials, diplomats and analysts.
Doubtless, leftists everywhere will be crying in their soup over this latest loss of control by thugs.
Assad's five-year-old government is heralding the reforms as a turning point in a long-promised campaign of liberalizing a state that, while far less dictatorial than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, remains one of the region's most repressive. His officials see the moves, however tentative and drawn out, as the start of a transitional period that will lead to a more liberal, democratic Syria.
Emboldened opposition leaders, many of whom openly support pressure by the United States even if they mistrust its intentions, said the measures were the last gasp of a government staggering after its hasty and embarrassing troop withdrawal last month from neighboring Lebanon.
Blogging vs. Journalism
Michael Williams points out that Reuters management, in justifying outsourcing its journalists to India, demonstrates that Reuters' definition of journalism sounds suspiciously like blogging.
MP George Galloway: He Has Something To Hide
An acquaintance in Europe who thinks it was a bad idea to overthrow Saddam Hussein's rapeocracy called to crow about how George Galloway made fools of the Senate committee investigating the bribes distributed by the Iraqi government. Oddly enough, British newspapers didn't see it that way. From the Scotsman:
From the Telegraph:
Despite a typically barnstorming performance full of bluster and rhetorical flourishes, the former Glasgow Kelvin MP was pinned down by persistent questioning over his business relationship with Fawaz Zureikat, the chairman of the Mariam Appeal - set up to assist a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia.
And it was a Democrat senator, Carl Levin, rather than the Republican committee chairman, Norm Coleman, who gave him the hardest time as Mr Galloway sought to turn the tables on his inquisitors, leaving him no closer to clearing his name than when he took his seat in front of the sub-committee of the Senate’s homeland security and government affairs committee in Washington.
Time and again, Mr Levin questioned him, requesting wearily that he deliver a straight answer to a straight question. But Mr Galloway could, or would not.Their questioning was calm at first. But it soon became heated when, to their evident irritation, Mr Galloway refused to answer direct questions.
Even the Guardian, among the most left-wing of British newspapers that don't have naked breasts on page 3, wasn't prepared to call what happened a vindication:
The MP's most difficult moments came at the hands of Sen Levin. He repeatedly asked whether Mr Galloway would be troubled if it emerged that his friend, the Jordanian oil trader Fawaz Zureikat, had paid illegal surcharges to Saddam.
Mr Zureikat was a chairman of the Mariam Appeal, founded by Mr Galloway to help a four-year-old Iraqi girl, Mariam Hamza, who suffered from leukaemia. It later became known that Mr Zureikat, who had close ties to the Iraqi regime, had also funded the Mariam Appeal.
Mr Galloway at first refused to say that he was troubled by his friend's alleged illegal actions. Instead he chose to emphasise the suffering of Iraqi children under UN sanctions.
That brought a swift rebuke from Sen Levin, a former civil rights lawyer.
Would he be troubled by that? the professorial senator asked again. "That is a very simple question."
When Mr Galloway appeared to evade the issue again, Sen Levin interrupted. To laughter, he said: "I know other things trouble you but can you just give us a straightforward answer?
"You give us a long explanation of other things that trouble you, which is your right. Now I am asking whether [Mr Zureikat's alleged illegal behaviour] troubles you."
The MP said he was troubled by the thought that Mr Zureikat, whose best man he was, might face prosecution.
...
Mark Greenblatt, who is in charge of the investigative team, detailed oil contracts M/9/23, M/11/04 and M/12/14, three of six contracts that named Mr Galloway as the beneficiary of the oil allocations. The contracts also named Mr Zureikat and the Mariam Appeal as involved in the alleged scheme.
Mr Greenblatt said: "It appears that George Galloway used the children's cancer charity foundation to conceal his oil allocations."
The investigators disclosed that they had spoken again to an unnamed senior regime official on Monday to check that references to oil allocations being granted to Mr Galloway were genuine.
The Iraqi was asked: "Does the name George Galloway [on the oil allocation approval document] mean that this allocation was granted to George Galloway?" The man said yes. He also authenticated the oil minister's signature on the allocations.And yet for all his anti-establishment credentials, Mr Galloway is as practised as any of his New Labour enemies at squirming away from awkward questions. Under scrutiny by Senator Levin, he deployed a classic example of the bait-and-switch technique that is the government minister's best defence in difficult questioning.
But Mr Galloway Goes To Washington had never really been an exercise in clarifying the facts. It was an exercise in giving Norm Coleman, and, by extension, the Bush administration, a black eye - mere days after the bloody nose that the Respect MP took credit for having given Tony Blair.
The Los Angeles Times! Supports Abolition of the Filibuster
You could have knocked me over with a feather. See this editorial, where they point out that filibuster has a sleazy history behind, blocking civil rights legislation.
How Not To Be Poor
This isn't news, but Professor Walter Williams reminds us that avoiding poverty isn't that difficult: Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there's a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.
In other places, I have read that 90% of poor people are in that predicament because they failed one or more of those steps.
Most jobs start with wages higher than the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15. A man and his wife, even earning the minimum wage, would earn $21,000 annually. According to the Bureau of Census, in 2003, the poverty threshold for one person was $9,393, for a two-person household it was $12,015, and for a family of four it was $18,810. Taking a minimum-wage job is no great shakes, but it produces an income higher than the Bureau of Census' poverty threshold. Plus, having a job in the first place increases one's prospects for a better job.
Certainly, what I have seen over the years leads me to believe that with a few relatively rare exceptions (a physical or mental disability being by far the most common), adult poverty is self-imposed. Poor children, unfortunately, have the misfortune to be born to people who failed one or more of those behavioral tests.
Sowell also points out that when you compare white and black kids growing up in equivalent homes (by the criteria above), poverty rates are pretty consistent: In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it's welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor.
This is why Bill Cosby's efforts of late to promote black self-reliance and responsibility are so important. I suspect also that the accusations against him that appeared only after he started his crusade are probably connected to that--the poverty pimps are absolutely terrified of the prospect of black Americans becoming like Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans, and all the other ethnic groups that have blended in so well that we don't think of them as "different." Victims needs leaders the same way that prostitutes need pimps.
How much does racial discrimination explain? So far as black poverty is concerned, I'd say little or nothing, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. But let's pose a few questions. Is it racial discrimination that stops black students from studying and completing high school? Is it racial discrimination that's responsible for the 68 percent illegitimacy rate among blacks?
The 1999 Bureau of Census report might raise another racial discrimination question. Among black households that included a married couple, over 50 percent were middle class earning above $50,000, and 26 percent earned more than $75,000. How in the world did these black families manage not to be poor? Did America's racists cut them some slack?
Thomas Sowell On Judge Saad's Background Report
You are probably aware that Senator Reid (D-NV) said something on the floor of the Senate recently about one of President Bush's judicial nominees, alluding to material in the FBI's background report. I knew that this was considered improper behavior--but until I read Thomas Sowell's column, I had no idea how improper. Sowell has some experience being on the receiving end of this sort of thing: a far worse remark by Senator Dirty Harry is that Michigan judge and federal judicial nominee Henry Saad has some things in his FBI file that should give Senators pause before confirming him.
What makes this dirty is that FBI files contain anything that anybody has said about you, whether it is true or untrue. That is why FBI files are confidential, because they include unsubstantiated statements that have not been evaluated by anybody.
Most Senators -- including Dirty Harry Reid -- have not and cannot see what is in the FBI file on Judge Saad because only members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are allowed to see that file. If any member of that committee said anything about that file to Senator Reid, that member violated confidentiality.
Even Judge Saad himself cannot see the file, so he has no way of knowing what Senator Reid is referring to -- and therefore no way to defend himself against whatever unknown statement may be there. Nor is there any way for him or us to know whether whatever is in the file is serious or trivial.
We have only the word of Senator Dirty Harry Reid.
It so happens that my own FBI file, compiled back in the 1970s when President Ford nominated me to the Federal Trade Commission, contains a claim that I was a Communist. Not even the people who were opposed to my nomination took that seriously. But anonymous statements to the FBI are a way to knife someone in the back.
Wal-Mart & Preparing For War With China
Matthew Yglesias discusses recent published reports in which a Chinese general discusses how, in the inevitable conflict with the U.S. over "reunification" with Taiwan, sinking a U.S. aircraft carrier would cause us to lose the political will to fight for Taiwanese independence: Chinese Major General Huang Bin explained the reasoning: “Once we decide to use force against Taiwan, we definitely will consider an intervention by the United States. The United States likes vain glory; if one of its aircraft carriers should be attacked and destroyed, people in the United States would begin to complain and quarrel loudly, and the U.S. president would find the going harder and harder.” China has equipped its advanced Sovremenny-class destroyers with Sunburn supersonic anti-ship missiles -- missiles designed to sink large vessels such as aircraft carriers.
Chinese generals have made not very veiled threats before. During the Clinton years, one of them told a U.S. counterpart during talks that he couldn't believe that we would be willing to sacrifice Los Angeles to defend Taiwan.
Ideally, of course, the Chinese government would not risk going to war with the United States over Taiwan. It would be irrational. But wars aren't always fought for rational reasons. World War I, for example, started at least partly because some of the combatants started mobilization of reserves as a form of threat--but once started, it was impossible for other powers to figure out if this was simply saber-rattling or actual preparation for war.
Why did the military dictatorship of Argentina invade the Falklands? It was an attempt to distract the masses from certain bad habits of the government (like torturing and murdering dissidents--hence the widespread leftist support for Argentina over Britain). Doubtless, the dictators thought that Britain was a toothless lion, and would respond with a lot of screeching but a negotiated settlement. I could see if China's population became sufficiently restive that it might be tempting to turn that upset outward, by invading Taiwan. (Think of Saddam Hussein's war on Iran, and his invasion of Kuwait.)
This is not a trivial or remote concern. I think that there is at least a 1 in 10 chance that we will go to war with China in the next 25 years. They have nuclear weapons, and methods of delivering them to the U.S. I could see both sides keeping the war conventional in a fight over Taiwanese independence--unless the Chinese government perceived that it was losing, or was in danger of a widespread popular uprising. In that case, the leadership might decide that while firing nuclear weapons at the U.S. would lead to a devastating retaliation, that it was better than being executed by a new Chinese government. The U.S. government might engage in a first strike if it believed that the Chinese were preparing to launch ICBMs.
So what does this have to do with Wal-Mart? Everytime you buy Chinese goods, you are putting money (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) into the hands of the Chinese government. I've seen the claim that 70% of the goods that Wal-Mart sells are Chinese. I have shopped there enough to find that a plausible claim. At least at Target, while some of the merchandise comes from China, the rest comes from an enormous range of countries (some, even from the United States)--none of which are making belligerent remarks about going to war with us.
Don't buy Chinese goods! This is quite painful for me because Harbor Freight Tools sells cheap (in both price and quality) Chinese machine tools--and I have to resist the urge.
If you buy at Wal-Mart, don't buy Chinese goods. This may get the message across to the CEO that Americans are willing to pay a little more for goods from countries that aren't threatening war.
Oh yes, it is entertaining to read the comments on Matthew Yglesias' posting--a reminder of how much of the left-wing of the Democratic Party would rather see a fascist kleptocracy (the current Chinese "Communist" Party) running Taiwan, instead of a democracy.
Treasury Yield Curve Flattening
If you look at the graph of Treasury bond yield plotted against maturity, you will notice that the yield curve has dramatically flattened compared to a year ago. Ordinarily, flattening of the yield curve means that big investors are expressing confidence that the prospect for long term inflation is quite low.
Indeed, if you get what is called a "Treasury yield curve inversion," where long-term bonds have lower yields than short-term bonds, it means that investors have decided that long-term inflation is not a problem, and they are piling on to buy long-term bonds. This drives up the price of the bonds, and because bond prices and yields to maturity are inversely related, the massive buying of long-term bonds drives the yield down.
Of course, there are other reasons why investors are piling on to buy long-term Treasury bonds. As I have mentioned previously, central banks of other countries may buy Treasury bonds as a way to prop up the value of the dollar, so that they can continue to sell their goods to us cheaply. But this article indicates that the private sector is part of the frenzy: Commentary: The Treasury International Capital (TIC) System report for March showed that foreigners increased their holdings of U.S. financial assets by $45.7 billion, substantially less than in the two previous months. Much of the drop in net foreign purchases resulted from sales of marketable Treasures by foreign "official" institutions, which offset record purchases by private sector entities. Foreigners concentrated their purchases on Treasuries with private sector purchases totaling a record $42.8 billion, followed corporate bonds. The big drop in holding of "official" institutions may reflect the reported currency portfolio rebalancing of central banks. Nonetheless, the exceptional strength of private sector purchases for U.S. financial assets appears to have been an important source of strength in demand in the fixed income markets in the first part of 2005.
Unlike foreign central banks, private sector investors might find themselves forced to unload these bonds by circumstances: for example, if interest rates started to rise suddenly, and the value of these bonds were to fall. If so, you could see a glut on the market produce a feedback loop driving yields up even more dramatically.
There's A Market For Everything...No Matter How Stupid
It reads like a Saturday Night Live sketch that the censors wouldn't allow: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A life-like prosthetic penis called the Whizzinator and other products promising to help illegal drug users pass urine tests provoked U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday to take legal action with subpoenas of manufacturers.
Lawmakers objected to attempts to circumvent drug tests with products such as The Whizzinator, a fake penis that can provide a flow of clean urine "again and again, anytime, anywhere you need it!" according to the Web site www.whizzinator.com.
...
Actor Tom Sizemore, who played a sergeant in the war movie "Saving Private Ryan," was caught using the Whizzinator to try and pass drug tests, California prosecutors said in February. He was put in jail after using a similar device and failing a drug test, prosecutors said.
Risk Factors
Professor Volokh has been blogging the last few days about an FDA decision that homosexual men should not be allowed to donate to sperm banks, because of the much higher risk of AIDS. He points out today that this perception that homosexual men are at higher risk of being HIV+ is not a vicious stereotype, but based on reality: A reader kindly passed along to me what seems to be the most recent, albeit geographically limited, data on the subject, from Texas Department of Health. The data seems to be 2003 data, based on then-living people in Texas with known HIV infections.
There's a similar, although not quite as dramatic difference in risk when it comes to child molestation. As I have pointed out in the past, homosexual men are at least 4-6x more likely to molest children than heterosexual men. Because nearly all sexual abuse of children is done by men, men of all orientations are almost twice as likely as women to sexually abuse children. Not surprisingly, our society (although not our laws) operate on prejudicial assumptions about men, and even more so, about homosexual men.
If you set aside IV drug users and hemophiliacs (I oversimplify slightly here) — groups that the FDA urges be excluded as donors, regardless of their sexual practices — and the unreported risk people, we have 7239 males that were apparently exposed through homosexual sex, and 920 through heterosexual sex. If we estimate that 4% of the male population is homosexual (the numbers that, to my knowledge, are most reliable), this means that the average male homosexual in Texas is nearly 200 times more likely to have HIV than the average male heterosexual; the rate for homosexuals is 7239/(.04*10,000,000) = 1.8%, while the rate for heterosexual is 920/(.96*10,000,000) = .0096%. (The male population of Texas is 10,000,000.) This is something of an oversimplification, and it's based on a limited sample. Still, I suspect that this is a decent back of the envelope calculation; if it's off by even a factor of 5, that's still at least a 40-fold higher risk. [emphasis in original]
Is this unfair to homosexual men, most of whom are not going to molest children? Sure. Is this unfair to straight men, most of whom are not going to molest children? Sure. But men are substantially more likely to be molesters, and homosexual men are even more substantially likely to be molesters. The risks to children are very high--and some hurt feelings or even limited vocational and avocational opportunities (you can't be a Scoutmaster) are a small price to pay.
This prejudice extends to other areas as well. Some years ago, I was walking home from class one night, and a woman ahead of me on a lonely path near the university became visibly frightened of me, because I was overtaking her. (I was taller, and therefore my stride meant that I was moving more quickly than she was.) I was at first terribly offended by her prejudicial assumption that I was someone of whom she had to be afraid. The more I thought about her situation, the more I understood.
1. Effectively all forcible rapes are committed by men.
2. Men are about 49% of the population.
3. Men are therefore 2x more likely to be rapists than the "average" person.
4. She did not know whether I was a threat to her or not. If she wrongly assumed that I was not a threat, she was at risk of serious injury. If she rightly assumed that I was not a threat, she gained nothing by allowing me to overtake her.
5. Her reaction--to walk faster and faster, until she was practically running--was therefore a rational response to a rational prejudice.
There are similar examples out there of what I call "rational prejudices." That is to say that because members of group A are disproportionately involved in a destructive or dangerous behavior, we are wise to avoid contact with members of group A unless we have some way of knowing the particular individuals with whom we are going to make contact.
Don't take my word for this. Ask Jesse Jackson. "There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery and then look around and see it's somebody white and feel relieved. How humiliating." Jackson was quoted in Paul Glastris & Jeannye Thornton, "A New Civil Rights Frontier: After His Own Home and Neighborhood Were Invaded by Street Punks, Jesse Jackson Dedicated Himself to Battling Black-on-Black Crime," U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 1994, cited in Nelson Lund, "The Conservative Case Against Racial Profiling in the War on Terrorism," Albany Law Review 66:2 [2003] 329-43.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Don't bother. I just loved all four books--perhaps because I was young. I used to think the world of Woody Allen's movies, when I was in college. Hence the use of "sophomoric" as an insult.
The movie didn't exactly follow the books, and in spite of a really game try, didn't manage to capture Douglas Adams' droll satire. I only found myself laughing about four or five times--and I am noted for how willing I am to laugh. Much of it was only cute, and in many places, not even that.
If you have nothing better to do, once it comes out on video, there are worse ways to waste two hours. I was pleased to see that it was PG--no sex, no swearing, no vulgarity. But perhaps you can't go home again, and the joys of your youth can't be recaptured.
"Newsweek Lied. People Died."
A number of people are mocking the left's favorite bumper sticker slogan--people like Michael Williams, among others. As long as we remember that this is satire, we are okay. At this point, the evidence is not that Newsweek intentionally lied, but that they were misled, and were negligent in rushing into print with a poorly substantiated story.
In this sense, there is a similarity to what happened about the WMDs that we couldn't find in Iraq. There is one rather substantial difference: the claims about Iraq and WMDs had enormous substantiation, from previous use, from mid-1990s nuclear weapon development, from Iraqi intransigence about UN inspectors, and from lies that Hussein told to his own military about these WMDs.
What did Newsweek have when it decided to blacken the U.S. reputation in the Islamic world? One anonymous source who thinks he saw some mention of this allegation of desecration of the Koran in a report--and now isn't so sure that he saw it.
As one of the comments on Michael's entry points out: The best point about this I heard on Prager:
Yup. I know that most Muslims kept their cool--but there is something truly bizarre about the intensity of childish behavior in response. If this same crowd were this angry about Muslims being murdered, most of the Arab world's governments would have been overthrown decades ago.
How many Buddhists rioted and killed people when the Taliban blew up Buddhists statues?
How many Jews rioted and killed people when Jewish graves were turned into bathrroms and Jewsish Temples were burned?
How many Catholics rioted when beasiality films were made with Priests and Nuns, or 'art' was made when a Cross was put in urine?
UPDATE: Over at Chicago Boyz is this suggestion that Congress should investigate, in order to find out if a government employee intentionally lied: Republicans in Congress should open an investigation of Newsweek, to determine who leaked this, what the basis was for the leak, what the motive was for the leak. If there is some basis of truth in it, we should know that. If not, we should find out who is responsible for this, and if they are government employees who circulated a lie, they should be disciplined. An appropriate committee should subpoena Isikoff and his colleagues. Make them produce all emails, notes, correspondence, telephone records. We may well find that the motive for this was partisan damage to the President. That is what I would bet on. Whatever the actual facts may be, they need to be extracted and put out in clear daylight. The people involved should be questioned in a public hearing. All persons identified as involved in this action should be similarly subpoenaed and compelled to appear and testify under oath. If Isikoff says he has a privilege to protect his sources he should be held in contempt of Congress and punished.
This is needed. We need to get to the bottom of this. The United States has just suffered a global strategic defeat akin to Abu Ghraib, and many people have lost their lives, and many more will in the future, probably all based on a complete lie.
Infecting the Arab World
The democracy virus is spreading--as some neoconservatives claimed that it would. Kuwait has just given women the right to vote and hold public office. This might have happened anyway. Kuwait has long been among the most progressive of Arab countries (which is rather like saying that Cadillacs are among the cheapest of luxury cars), but you wonder if seeing real elections next door where women took part might have caused some of the Islamists in Kuwait to back down.
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
I know that some of my readers look up to me, but here's a chance to do so in the literal sense. The lot to the north of mine overlooking Horseshoe Bend is going on the market. I don't have all the details yet from the owner, but he let me know that he will be listing it soon.
It is smaller than my parcel, and it doesn't have quite the view that I do--but it isn't a bad view, and of course, it has the same wonderful night skies. You can see his property in this picture, center and closer than the log cabin, but beyond that fence line:
He has a travel trailer parked there at the moment, in preparation for building that never happened. (A long story, not all of which I know.)
He has a well in, and according to the well drilling log, a pretty good one. He's asking $130,000 for it. I'll put up more details about the property when he responds to my email. If you are interested, contact me, and I'll put you in touch with the owner.
We Don't How It Works...
It just cures a particular type of cancer: ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - No one could have been more surprised than the doctors themselves. They were just hoping to relieve the symptoms of a deadly blood disorder - and ended up treating the disease itself. In nearly half of the people who took the experimental drug, the cancer became undetectable.
And here's the understatement of the month:
Specialists said Revlimid now looks like a breakthrough and the first effective treatment for many people with myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, which is even more common than leukemia.
...
In small studies, Revlimid also showed promise and with far fewer side effects. In a new study, doctors tested it on 115 people with MDS who have the most common chromosome abnormality that causes the disease.
After about six months on the drug, 66 percent no longer needed blood transfusions, said the study's leader, Dr. Alan List of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. A year later, three-fourths of them still don't need transfusions.
But the big surprise was that signs of the genetic mutation fueling the disease diminished in 81 patients and vanished in 51.
"The chromosome abnormality completely disappeared, something we've never seen before" from a drug aimed just at boosting red blood cells, List said.Dr. Jasmine Zain, a blood specialist from the City of Hope Cancer Center in New York, said the results warrant further testing on the drug.
"Nowhere do you see 60 to 70 percent responses," she said.
Ph.D. Programs in English Literature (cont.)
Here is a discouraging item by an English professor at Rutgers: Most have enjoyed the English major at Rutgers, have done well in their courses, love literature, and are drawn to the idea of spending their lives as classroom teachers.
Over here, Professor Dowling discusses in more detail his discouragement over the decline in academic standards.
Two decades ago, I was perfectly happy to encourage such students to go on to a Ph.D program, and was more than willing to write letters of recommendation.
Today, given employment prospects in college teaching and the decline in quality even of top graduate programs, I give a simple piece of advice: don't think about going on for the doctorate.
...
By now, you've probably heard rumors about how bad the job situation is for recent Ph.D's in English and American literature.
The rumors aren't exaggerated. In some graduate programs, it is not unusual for 30-40 Ph.D's to be looking for college or university employment and for only 1-2, at most, to get any kind of job offer.
The fact that some people do receive offers disguises an even harsher reality. Very often, appointments obtained by new Ph.D's are either temporary or dead-end positions, or are earmarked entirely for teaching Freshman Composition.
In non-selective institutions, which amount to well over 90% of U.S. colleges and universities, freshman comp now tend to be what was once called Remedial Writing. "Literature" courses, if they exist, tend to be classes in basic reading comprehension and remedial education.
Furthermore, there is now no good Ph.D program in literary studies in the United States. Even top-ranked programs now tend overwhelmingly to be devoted to Cultural Studies, with an emphasis on identity politics and popular culture rather than literature.
Even in a program like Harvard's, a graduate course in Shakespeare is today as likely to concentrate on talk-show motifs like "cross dressing" as on Shakespeare's plays as self-contained worlds of motive and action, or on such essential background as Renaissance neo-Platonism, medieval theories of kingship, 16th-century Anglican and Puritan theology, or the conventions of Elizabethan drama.
Finally, the level of training even in "top" programs has become quite weak. No program I know about demands competence in three languages (Latin, German, French). All have "hit or miss" examination systems allowing students to pick and choose among the works, genres, and literary periods on which they are to be tested, leaving huge blank areas in the knowledge essential for the Ph.D. And no program demands systematic training either in the earlier periods of English and American literature or in the method of "close reading" that is an indispensable prerequisite for competence in higher-order interpretation. Many programs now routinely award the Ph.D to candidates who are quite literally unable to make sense of a Shakespeare sonnet or a Donne elegy.
Remote Ph.D. Programs in English
My wife has run into the unfortunate discovery that an M.A. in English isn't terribly useful, at least if you want to teach at the college level, at least in Idaho. Even community colleges (what few there are in this state) have no problem hiring people with doctorates--putting a mere M.A. at a real disadvantage. (An M.A. is completely useless for teaching at lower levels--although that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.) The problem is that there is no Ph.D. program in English in Idaho. There is the Doctor of Arts in English program at Idaho State University, but even this is a four hour drive from here.
Does anyone know of a Ph.D. program in English that can be completed, at least in part, remotely? There are a few M.A. programs out there in English (and a few other subjects) that can be done this way, but remote English doctoral programs seem to be non-existent. If you know of such a program, please let me know.
Flowers & Soil
I'm seeing a very interesting and I guess not terribly surprising correlation between the underlying geology of my property, and the types of wildflowers that grow on it.
There's a pale yellow flower that seems to dominate on the lowest parts of the property, near the road: 
There is a seasonal stream that flows along the property just south of us--coming out of a spring in the sandstone. The stream itself seems to have eroded all the standstone away, leaving only basalt, and these intense purple flowers: 
On the parts of my parcel that, according to the geologic map and some excavations that I have had done, should be Payette Formation (Quarternary sandstone and siltstone layers), these white flowers appear in profusion:
Here's a more detailed picture of one of these flowers:
Here's the soil I extracted from what seems to be a standstone section:
It is pretty decent soil, with lots of organic material in it. By comparison, up on the basalt spine, I can't even get two inches of soil with a shovel--basalt, basalt, and more basalt. I suspect that either because of the shallowness of the soil, or the chemistry of the decay products, on the basalt spine of the property--and according to the geological maps, what should be basalt on the adjoining properties--we have these quite intensely orange-yellow flowers:
Over where I think the odds of a successful well are highest--partly based on geology, and partly based on the proximity of a successful well on my neighbor's parcel to the north, we are back to this wonderful black soil, which goes deeper than I was prepared to excavate with a shovel on a beautiful Saturday morning:
Looking up the slope from there you see a lot of shrubbery (try to say like the Knights of Nicht in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), suggesting that water (although perhaps not terribly deep water) is available:
Up on the basalt spine, and extending up the hill (towards the house with its own airstrip) you can see more of the orange-yellow flowers that seem to like basalt so much:
Responsible, Professional Journalists
The distinction between us bloggers (the guys that a CBS executive characterized as people working in their pajamas) and professional journalists is supposed to be the care to check sources that professional journalists use. So when I saw that Newsweek had reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had descrated the Koran--leading to anti-American rioting and deaths in the Islamic world, I was a little disappointed--in our government. It appears that I should have been disappointed in Newsweek: Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.
Whose side is Newsweek on? The side of Osama bin Laden, perhaps?
"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.
Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.
