The advertising above is just a source of revenue, and sometimes, I don't know what will appear there.
Unique grips and accessories for your 1911!
Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.
Labels: house project Labels: house project Labels: abortion 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).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
Click here to find out why the Amazon.com Honor System paybox is no longer here.
RSS feed
Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
archives
Search only this site: Click here and enter your search string at the beginning of the search field.
Wonders of the Internet
I brought my laptop along, and I am very glad that I did. One of the customers for the ScopeRoller 11 Deluxe emailed that he was having problems with one of the casters; the locking mechanism was not reliably unlocking. I had some problems with one of these caster assemblies, but I thought that I had worked through it--some sort of metal burr that hadn't worked its way completely as delivered to me. I guess not.
Anyway, along with being able to respond to him, I was also able to send detailed instructions to my son to find a replacement part, forward the customer's address, and provide detailed instructions to my son to test the replacement part, packaging, how to ship it, instead of having to wait until I return on Wednesday.
The greater value of the Internet was that one of my suppliers who machines a particular part for me found that he didn't have enough stock to make all the parts that I need for orders that have either arrived, or are on the way. (Such a problem! I may have to start advertising.) I was able to submit an order to a raw materials vendor in Missouri; pay for it with PayPal; arrange direct shipment to my machinist; all without leaving my motel room.
Health Notes: Skin Cancer
I am here in Southern California assisting my father-in-law and his wife preparing to move. His struggles with skin cancer, and my youngest sister's problem with a misdiagnosed skin cancer, are pretty sobering.
My father-in-law's skin cancer was apparently not properly recognized and treated at first, and has required excavation of a very large part of his leg. Worse, it has spread into his lymph system. He probably has months to perhaps a couple of years to live. This was a very athletic mature man when my wife and I married 26 years ago, and he remained active as a golfer and tennis player until quite recently. (Being out in the sun so much, skin cancer on his leg is no surprise.) The loss of so much muscle tissue, as well as the consequences of chemotherapy, has had a predictable effect.
My youngest sister had a growth on her arm that her doctor did not regard very seriously--even when she continued to point out that it was growing. After several years, a dermatologist identified it as melanoma--but by then, it had grown to a size where she now has a very large scar on her arm. She was a sun-worshipper in her youth. When we were growing up in Santa Monica, three blocks from the ocean, we would walk down to the beach every day of the summer. She soaked in the sun, trying for that stylish brown tan that typified the era.
Anyway, I have never been focused on getting a tan. Partly because I was aware of the hazards, I have generally done my best to stay pasty white (or as pasty white as my odd mixture of WASP, Italian, and apparently German Jewish ancestry allowed). My wife noticed an odd little bump on my back recently, so with all these examples, I went to my family practice doctor. He didn't think that there was anything to worry about, but he referred me to a dermatologist for a second opinion, and measured it so that we can see if it is growing.
Stay out of the sun, or at least keep properly sun protection.
HAve someone do a thorough examination of your skin periodically to look for things that have changed. This is one of the advantages of being married.
If you have something that is growing, and your doctor refuses to consider he possibility of skin cancer--get a second opinion, ideally from a dermatologist.
UPDATE: A friend pointed me to an interesting article about sunscreens. According to this Washington Post article, sunscreens sold in the U.S. only block the short-frequency UVB rays, while those sold in a lot of other countries block the long-frequency UVA rays--which are suspected of also being a serious cancer hazard. Why is the U.S. lagging behind? In the United States regulatory scheme, sunscreen ingredients are regarded as drugs and are thus subject to intense scrutiny. Drugs' active ingredients have to pass FDA muster both in terms of their long-term safety (which manufacturers have to demonstrate through research) and their efficacy: You have to prove that these things really do what you say they do. This degree of regulation is both a blessing and a curse. It's meant to ensure that when you buy a bottle of sunscreen, it'll be safe and effective. But the process of securing the FDA's blessing can be long and arduous, and it can keep a promising product off the shelves for years.
You can, however, buy sunscreens that provide UVB protection as well, over the Internet. It sounds like it might be a very good idea if you spend much time in the sun.
In Europe, sunscreens are treated as cosmetics and are thus subject to far less oversight. That's why Europeans have access to 28 active ingredients in their sunscreens, whereas Americans are allowed only 16. Of those 16, seven, including avobenzone, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, are known to provide some protection against UVA rays.
Travel Notes
I am on the road, staying at the Laguna Hills Lodge in Orange County, California. This is a very nice place without being luxurious. It compares very favorably with some Hiltons and Sheratons in which I have stayed over the years.
In light of the blog entry of several days ago about nail clippers being taken away from armed Georgia National Guardsmen, there were a couple of amusing moments at Boise's airport. As we were waiting for our plane, there was an announcement over the PA system: "Would the person who left the bag with the nail clippers, cell phone, and scissors please return to the security area?"
I saw a kid waving around a plastic sword about three feet long; I don't know if he was going to fly that day, but it might have been amusing to see what happened when they saw that coming.
There's a car rental ad that suggests that if they didn't care, they would be like the other car rental agencies. You see this incredible line of people waiting to pick up their cars, and my reaction has always been that it was a mildly amusing ad, but an example of hyperbole. Nope! The Dollar Rent-A-Car at Los Angeles International was not so different. We literally stood in line for an hour to rent a car--and we had a reservation. They had about six people processing us, but they had an incredible number of people trying to rent cars. Amazing.
I am so glad that I don't live in this overcrowded place anymore. We heard more horn honking between the airport terminal and the rental car agency than we have heard in the entire 3 1/2 years we have lived in Boise.
Unfortunate Behavior
I'm not suggesting that this report shows that Americans are better than Britons about this sort of thing--but I am reminding everyone that the small number of anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S. after 9/11 suggests that we certainly aren't any worse of a nation. Of course, none of the 9/11 terrorists had homes and families here to attack: Police have today arrested three people after an attempted arson attack at the home of suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay.
Thames Valley Police said officers were called to Northern Road in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, shortly after 6.30am after reports of a strong smell of petrol in the street.
Police said a substance thought to be petrol or diesel had been located and the area sealed off. Houses adjoining Lindsay’s former home were evacuated.
Lindsay, 19, blew himself up on a Piccadilly Line London Underground train on July 7, killing 26 people in the most deadly of the four terrorist attacks that claimed 56 lives that day.
Armed police were also called to East London Mosque in Whitechapel, East London, after leaders there recieved a telephoned bomb threat in a second suspected resprisal attack.
The Importance of Semicolons
A vertical milling machine on eBay, described thusly: VERTICAL MILLING MACHINE WITH MITUTOYO DRO AND DRO ON THE QUILL. MACHINE COMES WITH R-8 COLLETS AND A VISE. ORIGINAL OWNER IN GOOD SHAPE.
So the machine hasn't eviscerated the original owner? How comforting!
Planting Forgeries in National Archives
Eric Muller points to a news story about forged documents being planted in the British archives, and opines that, "Now, that's devious." This is all well and good, except for the title to his posting: Well I'll Be! Look At This Document! So There Really Were Legions of Japanese American Spies!
Michelle Malkin's book in defense of the Japanese internment argued (and she isn't the first to make this argument) that there was substantial Japanese espionage activity among Japanese-Americans, and the internment was an understandable if excessive reaction. Muller has set himself up as principal advocate against Malkin's book.
Short of finding a Japanese government document that says, "We have made repeated efforts, but we have been unable to recruit spies among Japanese-Americans," the most that Muller and others could argue was that there is no evidence to support Malkin's claim. Malkin actually has produced evidence to support her claim, which is consistent with actions of some Japanese residents in China and the Philipines; I'm not impressed with Muller's counterarguments.
Muller's title for this implies that if evidence comes out of the National Archives that corroborates Malkin's claim, that he would assume that the documents were planted forgeries. "Don't bother me with evidence; I've made up my mind, and anything that contradicts my PC-driven belief must be forged." Muller reminds me of some Creationists with whom I have argued; anything that contradicts his worldview must have been planted by the Devil (or Michelle Malkin).
The Whispering Campaign: I Confess My 1970s Bad Clothing Taste
The left is again demonstrating how open-minded they are by running a whispering campaign suggesting that Judge Roberts is actually secretly gay! (It was bad enough when they started making that suggestion about his son--and then they discovered he was only four.) Reasoned Audacity has a number of examples of left-wing bloggers either explicitly raising the question, or implying it: Just a caution for my male readers: if there are any extant photos of you from the '70's in plaid pants, better get rid of them now. And it's not just the evidence of questionable fashion sense. Apparently now that's the goods on being gay.
For those of you whose knowledge of the 1970s is from watching That 70s Show (which I confess that I have never seen), let me assure you that it was nadir of American taste in men's clothing.
I can now come out of the closet (as it were), and tell you about some of the stuff that I wore back then. I had some red checked pants, and a blue checked shirt of the same pattern. When I wore them both at the same time, I kidded people that it was my optical illusion outfit. I can remember walking into the office one morning at Jet Propulsion Labs wearing this combination, and Kathy Kubler, one of the other engineers, who had just been putting down her coffee cup, immediately grabbed it for another dose, since she seemed a bit uncertain whether she was actually awake, or suffering some sort of nightmare.
I don't still have this crime against good taste. When we married, my wife went through my closet and insisted that I dispose of this unique pairing, along with my disco shirts and double-knits, and fortunately, there is no photographic evidence surviving.
More seriously: that leftists are trying to start such a whispering campaign about Judge Roberts almost certainly establishes that he is not a closeted homosexual, or the left wouldn't be trying this character assassination scheme.
Historically, these dirty tricks schemes really haven't worked that well for the party of tolerance and openmindedness. Making a big deal about Dick Cheney's daughter being gay turned out to be completely useless. I can remember a few days before the 1980 election, the CBS Evening News ran a minute or more piece showing Ron Reagan Jr. performing in a ballet. As a news story, it was completely absurd. As an attempt to suggest, "Well, this guy Reagan has a son who is probably one of them" didn't throw the election to Carter.
Now Bush Is Too Focused on Exercise?
This opinion piece by Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times really captures the pettiness of the left: A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise. When asked by the president of the United States how often he exercised, Wilkinson impressively responded that he runs 3 1/2 miles a day. Bush urged him to adopt more cross-training. "He warned me of impending doom," Wilkinson told the New York Times.
What I don't think Chait understands is that if you are under a lot of stress (and being President of the United States is a somewhat stressful job), your need for exercise increases. I work out between 45 and 60 minutes a day, five days a week. (I'm skipping today because I have to leave early to fly to Southern California at 6:30 PM.) I think that Bush's focus on exercise is a darn good idea--unless, of course, you want a heart attack to make Dick Cheney the President of the United States.
Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? I don't mean the fact that Bush would vet his selection for the highest court in the land in part on something utterly trivial. That's expected. What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.
Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise. His full schedule is not publicly available. The few peeks we get at Bush's daily routine usually come when some sort of disaster prods the White House Press Office to reveal what the president was doing "at the time." Earlier this year, an airplane wandered into restricted Washington air space. Bush, we learned, was bicycling in Maryland. In 2001, a gunman fired shots at the White House. Bush was inside exercising. When planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001, Bush was reading to schoolchildren, but that morning he had gone for a long run with a reporter. Either this is a series of coincidences or Bush spends an enormous amount of time working out.
British Understatement
Don't you just love how understated Britons can be? BBC correspondent Danny Shaw said there were unconfirmed reports police had said the man shot at Stockwell was the Oval bomb suspect.
Yeah, that describes it: "nervous."
Passenger Mark Whitby told BBC News he had seen a man of Asian appearance shot five times by "plain-clothes police officers" with a handgun.
BBC correspondent Graham Satchell, at the Harrow Road incident, said the focus of the large police presence appeared to be an internet cafe.
As well as armed officers in body armour, there were about seven police vehicles and an ambulance, he said.
People in the area were "nervous", he added.
Oh, and count on the professional whiners to second-guess the shooting: he Muslim Council of Britain said Muslims were concerned about a possible "shoot to kill" policy.
To my surprise, this BBC account actually gives an eyewitness account that I would say satisfies my due process requirement:
Spokesman Inayat Bunglawala said: "There may well be reasons why the police felt it necessary to unload five shots into the man and shoot him dead, but they need to make those reasons clear.
"It's vital the police give a statement about what occurred and explain why the man was shot dead." Another passenger on the train, Anthony Larkin, told BBC News the man had been wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out".
Hey, maybe this guy had some perfectly good reason to be wearing something on his person with wires sticking out the day after suicide bombing attempts.
"I've seen these police officers shouting, 'Get down, get down!', and I've seen this guy who appears to have a bomb belt and wires coming out.
"People were panicking and I heard shots being fired."
The House Project: Fun With Propane
We are going to be using propane for the cooktop, for the water heater, and for the furnace. It will also be the fuel for the emergency generator. Thursday I spent making calls and asking questions.
The obvious way to do this is an underground storage tank, both because aboveground tanks are unsightly, and because I really don't like the idea of a brushfire lighting up a thousand gallon tank of propane. But should we lease or buy the tank? The builder pointed out that if you lease, then you are tied to the propane vendor. If you buy, you can switch to a different vendor.
It turns out that in this area, there are only two real vendors to speak of: Suburban Propane and Amerigas. Amerigas won't lease underground storage tanks, and their purchase price for a 1000 gallon underground tank was $2942.40. Suburban Propane does lease the underground tank for $160 per year. Purchase price is about $2546. In both cases, if you buy the tank, you now have the cost of excavation and dropping it in. If you lease, they install it and run the line to the house. Let's see: at $2546 to buy or $160 per year, that's more than 15 years of leasing to buy the tank. Whatever advantage there might be to having multiple possible vendors of the gas, it is hard to see putting out that kind of capital on a tank--and then being responsible for maintenance of it.
How much propane will I use? Suburban thought it would be about 1400 gallons per year; Amerigas indicated that most customers use 500 to 1000 gallons a year. At about $1.79 a gallon, this would roughly equivalent to what we pay for natural gas here in Boise--and with the advantage that we are pretty much independent of the world for months on end. If al-Qaeda managed to disrupt our economy, and we were careful in our use of propane, we could live for many months without getting our tank refilled. Obviously, if we lost electric power, we would run through the gas rather more quickly.
Previous house entry.
Random Searches In the New York City Subways
This is both unconstitutional, and completely necessary: New York City will begin making random checks of bags and backpacks at subway stations, commuter railways and on buses, officials announced today in the wake of a second wave of bombings on the London transit system. The checks will begin on Friday morning.
It is clearly unconstitutional, at least under any existing understanding of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. It is also clearly necessary, because of the nature of the attacks in London. I can't imagine any other way to accomplish the legitimate and necessary goal of preventing a terrorist attack, except perhaps by prohibiting the carrying of bags, purses, and backpacks into the subways.
The announcement by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly represents a significant ratcheting up of antiterrorism security in the city. Previous efforts have been limited in order to avoid causing delays in a city known for the hustle and impatience of its denizens.
Officials said the city has never before attempted to regulate the possessions of passengers in its sprawling, complex transit system. The city's subway system alone has 468 stations and carries some 4.5 million passengers on an average weekday. Some of the larger stations have at least half a dozen entrances and exits. In New York City, relatively few people own cars, and the majority of those who commute via subway carry a bag of some sort filled with items needed for the entire day, including computers, business documents, gym clothes and makeup. Many people carry two bags. It is unclear how invasive the searches will be.
I've written before about why the ACLU, if it really cares about preserving our civil liberties, should be on the side of a quick and decisive victory in the War on Terror. If we are fighting al-Qaeda for the next twenty years, we are going to either have to substantially destroy our traditional freedoms by amending the Constitution, or judges will have to use the "living Constitution" (really, the mutating Constitution) excuses to excuse the loss of liberties to deal with the crisis. The net effect, either way, will be very destructive. This, of course, is exactly what al-Qaeda wants--the destruction of our freedoms, so that we become like most Arab countries.
UPDATE: Michael Williams describes the "I do not consent to be searched" T-shirts that civil libertarian zealots are printing up in New York as "terrorist uniforms." Well, no. These are more like terrorist assistants. All the time that the police will spend arguing with these clueless sorts about whether or not they can enter the subway stations will make it more difficult to find the people carrying bombs in backpacks. If you want to argue the legal points in a court of law, that at least won't be interfering with what is a legitimate effort to keep New Yorkers from being a red paint spatter.
Really Cool Artifacts From Pompeii
BBC is reporting: A set of ancient silverware has been dug up from Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcano 2,000 years ago.
The pictures in the article are really beautiful.
The hand-crafted goblets, plates and trays had been bundled into a wicker basket by an inhabitant fleeing the erupting Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
The tableware, well preserved in ash and mud, was discovered five years ago and archaeologists have used the latest techniques to separate 20 pieces.
The House Project: Walls Up!
The builder said that the exterior wall framing would be done today. Well, pretty much. The big square is the family room sliding glass door; the rectangle is the kitchen door:
Click to enlarge
Here's the east end of the house, with bedroom rooms near the center, the front door and living room on the right:
Click to enlarge
Here's my wife looking through the kitchen window. At least if you are standing at the sink, rinsing dishes, you have a great view!
Click to enlarge
More detail of the family room. Big windows on either side of the sliding glass door. That's the view we want to look at while talking to friends!
Click to enlarge
Here's a view from bedroom two (which I will probably use as an office, and from which I will probably be blogging):
Click to enlarge
And another view, facing south:
Click to enlarge
Here's the back of the house:
Click to enlarge
Here's the front of the house:
Click to enlarge
I took the water samples to Alchem Labs in Boise. The coliform bacteria test came back clean; the water is at least not biologically hazardous. We are still waiting on tests for lead, iron, arsenic, and hardness. To my surprise, these take a couple of weeks, I suspect because they send them out somewhere.
Previous house entry.
Did Iraq Cause The London Bombings?
Australian Prime Minister John Howard points out that several of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks precede the invasion of Iraq. The Bali bombing, for example, was in retaliation for Australia's role in liberating East Timor.
An acquaintance in Europe (an American citizen of British birth) is again banging the drum about how the Iraq war caused these bombings. In a sense, probably true--but al-Qaeda has been running around trying to get its way by brutality and murder for a lot longer than that. As I wrote to him: Throughout the world, Islamofascists have been engaging in acts of extraordinary brutality, such as that school in Beslan, murdering Muslim diplomats, cutting the heads off living people.
Why is it that in a battle between a culture that largely expands by selling people stuff that they want (like McDonald's) and a death cult that seeks an entire planet like Taliban Afghanistan (what they call Dar es Salaam--the House of Peace or House of Submission to Allah), you are trying to justify being neutral, or regarding the culture based on commerce as evil?
Mars The Historic Icebox
One of the reasons why so much of the Martian exploration activity is focused on water and looking for evidence of life is the belief that Mars at one time had large quantities of liquid water--generally considered a requirement for the evolution of life.
Looking only at solar history, this would seem an unlikely possibility. In general, our sun is getting warmer (measured over a period of billions of years). It would be unlikely that Mars a billion years back was warm enough for liquid water.
Looking at the surface features, however, you can see why areologists (Martian geologists) would be inclined to think that the place must have had lots of liquid water. The question is, for how long? This BBC report suggests that the periods of liquid water might have been infrequent: Although the current average temperature at the Martian equator is about minus 55 Celsius, many scientists believe that the Red Planet was once warm enough for water to have existed on its surface, and for life to possibly have evolved.
If correct, this suggests to me that the water erosion periods of Mars might be catastrophic events--perhaps asteroidal collisions that melted a lot of frozen water.
There is plentiful evidence that water has flowed on the surface. They include deep canyons, dried up river beds and many examples of deposits left behind by running water.
But the recent analysis, by David Shuster of the California Institute of Technology and Benjamin Weiss of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, of meteorites blasted from Mars seems to paint a different picture.
...
The gas argon is present in the meteorites as well as in many rocks on Earth as a consequence of the radioactive decay of potassium. A noble gas, argon is not very chemically reactive, and because the decay rate is precisely known it can be used to date rocks.
However, argon is also known to leak out of rocks at a temperature-dependent rate. The cooler the rock has been, the more argon will have been retained.
The researchers found that only a tiny fraction of the argon that was originally produced in the meteorite samples has been lost through the aeons suggesting that the Martian surface has been in deep-freeze for most of the last four billion years.
"The small amount of argon loss that has apparently taken place in these meteorites is remarkable. Any way we look at it, these rocks have been cold for a very long time," says Shuster.
"The ALH84001 meteorite, in fact, couldn't have been above freezing for more than a million years during the last 3.5 billion years of history."
Many years ago, I had an acquaintance who was working on his MS in Planetary Geology. The conferences he was attending about Mars were causing considerable discomfort to a lot of his colleagues, because the evidence was arguing that catastrophism was a more appropriate paradigm for understanding Martian structures than uniformitarianism. The apparently contradictory evidence of flowing water--and yet few periods of above freezing temperatures--seems to fit catastrophism.
This evidence would also suggest that we could waste a lot of money looking for evidence of life on Mars and never find it. If there was only above freezing temperatures for a million years out of 3.5 billion, what would the chances be of life evolving?
Border Patrol Auxillary?
It appears that even if President Bush isn't willing to do something about the border problem, at least some of the bureaucrats are getting in touch with reality--at least a little: The top U.S. border enforcement official, in what would be a significant change in approach, said yesterday that he is exploring the idea of having civilian volunteers work with the Border Patrol.
The rest of the article is very interesting. The Border Patrol union is concerned about being too closely allied with these "controversial" groups, and says something that makes perfect sense:
"We value having eyes and ears of citizens, and I think that would be one of the things we are looking at is how you better organize, let's say, a citizen effort," Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner told The Associated Press.
The proposal comes in the wake of civilian patrols in California and Arizona this year. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Fleming said Bonner supports efforts by groups such as the civilians patrolling the border near Campo and the Minutemen who operated in Arizona this spring.
"It is actually as a result of seeing that there is the possibility in local border communities, and maybe even beyond, of having citizens that would be willing to volunteer to help the Border Patrol – but with some training and being organized in a way that would be something akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary," Bonner said. "They wouldn't need to do this if they came up with a national strategy that makes sense," Bauder said. "The Border Patrol will never be successful if all they do is focus on the border.
Well, duh! But that would require offending employers of cheap labor by enforcing the existing laws about hiring illegals.
"All we're doing is focusing on the supply of cheap labor, not the demand. That's just one more aspect of the dog-and-pony show."
Jim Gilchrist, who organized the Minuteman Project, isn't thrilled about the auxillary idea, either. He says the real solution is to be serious about enforcement, with full-time law enforcement.
What is really disappointing is the extent of the problem. This news story from Washington State really shows the scale of the people against whom we are working: SEATTLE - Border and DEA agents, watched construction of an underground tunnel for months, before making arrests yesterday.
Maybe this tunnel was built to smuggle drugs. Maybe it was to smuggle illegals who would be obviously "not Canadian" (a euphemism for non-Anglos). Maybe it was to smuggle al-Qaeda operatives. I don't know. But someone spent a lot of time and money on this. Whatever the goal, this is a serious problem. If only the Border Patrol could work this aggressively to shut down smuggling above ground.
The smuggling tunnel ran from an abandoned greenhouse on the Canadian side, to an abandoned house near Lynden in northern Washington State.
...
Officials had been watching the construction for eight months. Why let them finish it?
"When you have something on this scale that requires that type of funding to accomplish you have to wonder who's behind the thing," he says. "To fill the thing with cement when it's half done doesn't answer those questions."
The tunnel is about 150 yards long, four feet wide and four feet tall with concrete reinforcement throughout.
This is believed to be the first such tunnel ever found in this part of the country.
Three arrests have been made. Specifics of the case were to be revealed later today.
UPDATE: Homeland Security has now nixed the idea of using auxillaries.
Bombs That Didn't Explode
It appears that all four bombs failed to explode--or more precisely, that the blasting cap or other detonator failed to set off the primary explosive charge.
I am going to explain this because my wife didn't understand it, so I suspect others are also confused. Most of the really interesting explosives--the ones that have very high velocity wavefronts, and can therefore shred not only people but also break concrete and cut steel--are fairly stable. You can't just light a stick of dynamite or a brick of TNT, and make it explode. Typically you need a detonator to set off a high explosive. A detonator may be fired electrically, by heat, or by impact.
It would appear that the detonators fired, in some reports, ripping apart backpacks being carried by the terrorists--but failed to set off the main explosive charge. The result was simply a loud pop, considerable smoke and fear, but no big blast. That this happened in all four bombs suggests that this batch of explosive was defective in some way.
From my reading into the industrial methods for manufacturing TNT, I suspect that the more interesting high explosives aren't all that easy to make in the bathtub. Another possibility is that the same batch that worked on 7/7 degraded in the intervening two weeks. Remember that just about all high explosives are nitrates, and are made by combining various materials with nitric acid. (TNT, for example, involves a rather specific temperature/pressure/time sequence of nitric acid combined with tolulene, an organic commonly used by "huffers" to turn their brains into succotash.) I suspect that a failure to properly remove excess nitric acid or some impurity from a homebrewed explosive might render it less prone to explode.
Just to clarify: I have never made high explosives at home. The closest that I have ever come to this was an attempt at making nitrocellulose (a form of gun cotton) with my brother when I was in junior high. In theory, it should have gone up in a flash of fire and smoke. It would not even light! We did successfully distill ethyl alcohol by combining sugar and yeast for a few days, then heated it on the stove, ran it through a condenser, and produced a very small quantity of reasonably pure alcohol in the Erlenmeyer flask at the bottom of the condenser. (No, we didn't drink it.) Can you tell that I was a chemistry major when I first went off to college?
UPDATE: The explosive in question seems to be one of the unusual type that doesn't involve nitrates. This abstract from the Journal of Forensic Sciences describes it as: An unusual primary explosive, triacetonetriperoxide (TATP), was found along with instructions for its manufacture from commonly available ingredients.
This discussion of the use of it by Richard Reid describes it as extremely sensitive--and that Reid's bomb had it mixed with PETN, a more conventional high explosive.
This is not surprising. I remember in organic chemistry class at UCLA our professor explaining that organic ethers (R-O-R, where R is any hydrocarbon) over time can oxidize to organic peroxides (R-O-O-R), "which are extremely explosive." From the back of the lecture hall, "Alright!" The professor explained that if you see old bottles of ether in a chemistry lab, and you see crystals in the bottle, do not pick it up. Immediately call the bomb squad, and evacuate the building.
Part of the advantage of TATP for terrorist actions is that because it contains no nitrates, bomb sniffing dogs can't find it. I think that most of the neutron activation scanning technologies also rely on the ability to detect nitrogen--and TATP would get right past that.
The only other non-nitrate based explosives of which I am aware are nitrogen triiodide (and xenon trioxide. Nitrogen triiodide isn't a high explosive), so probably not particularly worrisome. Xenon trioxide isn't something that I would worry about either. Xenon gas is a bit scarce and expensive, and the difficulties in manufacturing the trioxide are substantial. Xenon, until the 1960s, was believed to be completely incapable of making chemical bonds.
I Just Locked My New House Mortgage
I wish I had done it yesterday: July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Treasury notes dropped after China let its currency strengthen, boosting speculation the country will reduce purchases of U.S. government debt. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note reached the highest since May.
Falling Treasury prices means rising yields--and rising mortgage prices. I've seen a run up at my credit union from 4.125 to 4.375 in just the last week.
China is the second-biggest holder of Treasuries with more than $243 billion as of the end of May, up from $165 billion a year earlier, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Japan is the largest with $686 billion. China has been buying Treasury notes to keep the yuan at a fixed rate against the dollar.
``This does mean a shift away from investing in U.S. assets, and yields will move higher,'' said Peter Hooper, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank AG in New York, on a conference call. The firm is one of the 22 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the central bank's New York branch.
This will be good news for people with money to invest, and probably not such good news for people in interest-rate sensitive industries. A rising yuan, however, which is what this news is connected to, would probably solve some problems for U.S. manufacturers.
UPDATE: Daniel Drezner points to this Chinese central bank press release, indicating that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar, and indicating an initial revaluation of about 2%. Drezner doesn't think such a small revaluation will make much of a difference on the trade deficit, but that another revaluation will follow.
UPDATE 2: At the end of the day, the 30 year Treasury bond yield is 4.499%. A year ago, it was above 5%. I would not be surprised to see that yield in the 5.5-6% range in another year.
The U.S. Military...
is again sticking its nose into the internal affairs of a Muslim country. I'm sure that the left will be screaming and hollering about it: 7/19/2005 - KIGALI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, Rwanda (AFPN) -- A C-17 Globemaster III departed here July 18 carrying 95 Rwandan troops deploying to help ease the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.
I found the link to this press release over at Mudville Gazette who reports that he can't find coverage of this in the U.S. news media. What a surprise.
The airlift started the 86th Aerospace Expeditionary Group’s involvement in NATO’s support to the African Union expanded mission in the region. The airlift is expected to last 30 days.
“The people of Darfur need help,” said Col. Scott Schafer, the group commander. “This first airlift means that Rwandan troops are on the way.”
Hereditary Titles
One of the traditional rationalizations for hereditary titles was that the traits that made for a great ancestor made for great descendants. Americans have long regarded that claim with some skepticism, as Jefferson's famous last letter observes: The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
While reading about this Californian who is next in line to be the Earl of Essex, I found this rather curious coincidence: The 10th Earl of Essex, who died on June 5 aged 85, was a Lancashire grocer so bemused by his success in confirming his claim to the earldom in 1981 after years of research that he was initially uncertain as to whether he would take his seat.
And then there's the occupation of the California heir apparent to the title: SACRAMENTO - Retired grocery clerk Bill Capell woke up to a phone call from a British reporter last month informing him that a cousin had died. He told his wife to go back to bed, gave the reporter a comment and was snoozing minutes later.
Hey, I know that there are lot of people who work in grocery stores--but perhaps there is something to this claim about hereditary merit.
Capell's cousin was the 10th Earl of Essex and his death puts Capell, a born-and-bred Californian, one step away from the title. But he was largely unimpressed by the news that he might become a nobleman.
Finally, Some Action on Pornospammers
Spam infuriates me. I am using an email agent with a reasonably good spam filtering algorithm, but like any Bayesian filtering, it isn't perfect. Some spam still sneaks through (especially when you get hundreds of pieces a day), and because some non-spam gets misinterpreted, I have to go through my Junk folder periodically and make sure that I am not missing any important email.
All of this spam is a waste of my time. Much of it carries viruses in attachments. Some of the pornospam is really, really vile. I don't mean that there are pictures of naked women in it. I mean that there are pictures involving animals. The text on some of it is either implicitly or explicitly promoting child pornography--and when I receive this sort of stuff, I inform the FBI's task force. Yeah, a lot of these emails offering child pornography are probably fraud--but it is still repulsive.
Repellent; wasting bandwidth; wasting mailbox capacity; requiring me to run email clients just to filter our garbage; requiring me to run antivirus software (which slows the process down) to filter out the emails with virus attached. It is all an enormous waste of resources. I am therefore pleased to see this news item: WASHINGTON — Federal regulators accused seven companies Wednesday of hiring others to send illegal e-mails with pornographic messages to tempt consumers to visit adult Internet sites.
I presume that the ACLU will defend the pornospammers.
The government said four of the firms already agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million to settle the charges, making it among the most aggressive government crackdowns on pornographic e-mail operations.
The Federal Trade Commission described the practice as "electronic flashing" and said at least some of the unwanted e-mails were sent to children. The threat of children unwittingly receiving smut in their inboxes helped drive the U.S. government to impose restrictions on sending commercial e-mails last year.
Ann Coulter Isn't Happy With Bush's Supreme Court Nominee
She points out that he smells suspiciously like a stealth candidate: [H]e is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada.
On the question of stealthiness, Coulter observes:
...
But unfortunately, other than that that, we don’t know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever.
Since the announcement, court-watchers have been like the old Kremlinologists from Soviet days looking for clues as to what kind of justice Roberts will be. Will he let us vote?
Does he live in a small, rough-hewn cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and avoid "women folk"?
Does he trust democracy? Or will he make all the important decisions for us and call them “constitutional rights.”
It means absolutely nothing that NARAL and Planned Parenthood attack him: They also attacked Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter.
The only way a supreme court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial birth one. Finally, lets ponder the fact that Roberts has gone through 50 years on this planet without ever saying anything controversial. That’s just unnatural.
Look at this way: when Bush the Elder nominated David Souter, he was picked specifically because Republicans had learned that having a long history of engaging in public intellectual exhibitionism (that is to say, actually writing serious works about the theory of the Constitution) was a sure way to prevent confirmation by the Democrats. And where was Roberts back when Judge Bork was being Borked for thinking out loud? At a point where it was still within his power to go into deep cover. So perhaps there's hope that Roberts will turn out to be a conservative, or even better an originalist. Since I consider Bush a tremendously clever politician, I would like to think this is the case. I must confess, Justice Souter has left a foul taste in my mouth, and it makes me suspicious of Roberts.
By contrast, I held out for three months, tops, before dropping my first rhetorical bombshell, which I think was about Goldwater.
It’s especially unnatural for someone who is smart and there’s no question but that Roberts is smart.
If a smart and accomplished person goes this long without expressing an opinion, they'd better be pursuing the Miss America title.
Apparently, Roberts decided early on that he wanted to be on the Supreme Court and that the way to do that was not to express a personal opinion on anything to anybody ever. It’s as if he is from some space alien sleeper cell. Maybe the space aliens are trying to help us, but I wish we knew that.
Ward Churchill's Bizarre Explanation of the Bellesiles Scandal
There's an interview with him in one of the hard left publications: Consider the case of Michael Bellesiles, the young historian at Emory who wrote Arming America, a study devoted to debunking many of the more cherished myths of the country's thriving gun culture (for which he won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2000).
This is wrong and deceptive in more ways than I can count. Yes, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize--and it was then revoked--for the first time in the Bancroft Prize's history. The public nature of the fraud became so massive that even Columbia University couldn't ignore it anymore.It wasn't other academics who went after Bellesiles, but the National Rifle Association, which commenced a campaign alleging "academic fraud" even before the book was published (there were nearly 250 national articles published on the "Bellesiles Hoax" in less than two years).
Nearly 250 articles? Perhaps Churchill is counting when newspapers around the country reprinted a story that originally appeared somewhere else. The notion that the NRA "orchestrated" this is laughable. It was largely my doing, James Lindgren, and a few journalists who were concerned about this fraud. There were questions about Bellesiles's numbers before the book came out because many of the same claims appeared in a 1996 Journal of American History paper by Bellesiles--but while some historians, such as myself, thought he was in error about this, and perhaps that he was blinded by his ideological zeal, I don't know that anyone thought that Bellesiles was intentionally lying until his book came out. I certainly didn't think Bellesiles was making things up at first, and I don't know anyone who did.Ultimately, the "fraud" claim hinged on a single footnote in which Bellesiles gave the wrong archival location for certain documents he cited to demonstrate that gun ownership in early America was much less common than those of the NRA persuasion-which, by the way, includes me-would have it. The documents actually existed, and they said pretty much what Bellesiles said they said.
Bellesiles's problem was not just "wrong archival location"--it was that much of the data that he claimed to have extracted from various probate inventories couldn't be found in any archive. Bellesiles's answers about which archives he visited kept changing. James Lindgren has demonstrated that Bellesiles's numbers (from combining published sources and his supposed work in archives) were mathematically impossible. Several historians went back and checked some of the archives where the probate data that Bellesiles claimed to have used did exist, and found that Bellesiles's numbers were often far at variance from his claims for it.
Bellesiles's problem wasn't just the probate data--it was massive fraud involving vast numbers of documents that he misquoted, often to say the exact opposite of what they actually said. Nonetheless, in the face of an unrelenting barrage of negative publicity-the NRA was able to orchestrate nearly 250 articles on the "Bellesiles Hoax" in less than two years-a panel of "impartial" scholars commissioned by Emory to "investigate the integrity of Professor Bellesiles' scholarship" concluded that in this instance his handling of data was "less than professional."
They concluded a heck of a lot more than that. I don't know if Churchill can't read, or is simply relying on sympathetic accounts that leave out important details. The report found that his answers were often evasive. They were evasive for a reason--he kept changing his story about when a flood destroyed all of his notes; he was unable to supply the electronic form of the data from which the graphs must have been derived.
The rest of the interview is equally bizarre. He mentions Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment and argues that she plagiarized it: the fact is that the bulk of her argument on the World War II internment derives from a fairly obscure right-winger named Lillian Baker. Yet Baker's material is cited nowhere in Malkin's book.
I don't know what the truth of the story is about Lillian Baker; in light of Churchill's general regard for truth, I am inclined to believe Malkin over Churchill. But the claim that the left has engaged in "all but total silence" is absurd. See, for example, this spirited attack on the book.
...
What's the payout for Malkin? Let's start with a stint as a regular commentator-read, pet "minority" (she's Filipina)-on Fox News and Clear Channel. And let's end with an all but total silence about her "scholarly integrity" from the left.
It would appear that Malkin may be considering a libel suit against CounterPunch and Churchill.
Churchill refers to himself and Bellesiles as "oppositional" scholars. Yeah: in opposition to honesty.
UPDATE: I notice that a little deeper in the interview, Churchill gives a new book by Jon Weiner of UC Irvine as his source for his knowledge of the Bellesiles matter. This explains Churchill's highly inaccurate explanation of what happened.
Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice
The 2004 version with Al Pacino playing Shylock is really astounding. I understand that there has been a reluctance to do this play, because Shylock is such a hateful and stereotyped character. Not surprisingly, the Nazis were very partial to it. Still, I have enormous respect for what Michael Radford's direction has done with this.
Remember: relative to other portrayals of Jews in Elizabethan England, like Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (who has horns), Shakespeare's play is almost a sympathetic character. He is at least three dimensional, and his vengeful pursuit of a pound of flesh is shown as a response to the mistreatment that he has received.
Since my wife teaches Shakespeare, I am obligated to sit through all the different versions of every Shakespeare play--and then engage in detailed analysis of each version's strengths and weaknesses. (This isn't really as painful as it may sound to you.)
Radford's version of The Merchant of Venice is easily the strongest version that I have seen, and at least partly because there is an prologue to the play that helps us to understand far more effectively the anti-Semitism that makes Shylock into such a vindictive person. Understanding this turns Shylock from a nasty stock evildoer into a person that one can find both repellent and sympathetic--a person who does evil because the evil that he has received has embittered his soul.
The acting is absolutely first-rate throughout, and Pacino's performance is as strong as I have ever seen. He captures the torment of a man who has spent his life being called a dog, being spat upon--and yet his services as a moneylender, abhorrent as they are, are also in demand. The loss of his daughter, and the way in which he loses her, turns up the heat on his embitterment.
I have seen a couple of other versions. There is one version with Sir Laurence Oliver made in 1973, but set in late Victorian times. It just doesn't work for me, because by that point, the legal barriers for European Jews simply weren't there. There were certainly social obstacles, but nothing like the problems of Shakespeare's time.
I will tell you that one of the strong points of Radford's production is the decision to open up the play, and take advantage of the ability to use realistic sets. BBC has produced the entire set of 37 Shakespeare plays, faithful to the spirit of the Globe Theater--which means that the sets are about as minimal as they would have been on the stage. Where a film production might have hundreds of extras (for example, for an army), the BBC versions will use a handful. I appreciate the intentions of BBC in keeping all the plays in the original stage setting, but it makes it too obviously a play; something like Radford's production grabs those of us who lack imagination, and drags us into the human tragedy (and comedy) that are part of The Merchant of Venice.
The downside of Radford's production is that the film is rated R for a very odd reason. No, it isn't the violence; the most violence is when Shylock is spat upon. Remember, he never actually takes the pound of flesh "nearest the heart" of Antonio. The R rating is because, inexplicably, the prostitutes of Venice are constantly exposing their breasts, earning the R rating for nudity. I wish that I could say that this was because of the relentless pursuit of accuracy, but these prostitutes are prettier, younger, and look suspiciously like the work of Dow Corning, than I would expect real prostitutes of the period to be.
Now, I don't know if working girls of Elizabethan times were partial to exposing themselves this way. I wouldn't be surprised; San Francisco Gold Rush prostitutes would hang out of windows at street level (and hang out in both senses). By Napoleon's time (two hundred years later), even respectable women were wearing dresses with necklines that left nothing to the imagination above the waist. Still, it didn't add anything to the film, except turning what might have been a PG film into an R. Perhaps Radford was afraid that parents would assume that it was a kiddie film otherwise.
A Very Useful Service
Some years ago, when I was working for a company that developed digital loop carriers, I had to explain in a design manual why this new technology called DSL was the up and coming thing. (This was about 1994.)
I explained that one of the advantages of DSL was the ability to provide video on demand for customers that were sufficiently unusual that broadcasting or renting a video at the local video store wasn't likely to work. To fill these niche markets, I theorized, there would be niche video services providing streaming video over the Internet.
I gave two examples of unusual videos that DSL would help to sell, but would otherwise not stand a chance. The examples were: Helicopter Maintenance for Fun & Profit and Janet Reno Does the Dance of a Thousand Veils. If you don't remember Attorney General Reno and her charms, well, let's just say that you are fortunate indeed. It could be worse; she could send people over to set fire to your home and kill you and your family. (Oh wait, she did!)
Well, as it happens, while this sort of niche marketed Internet video store doesn't seem to have taken off in a big way (other than for pornography), there is a niche video store called Technical Video Rental. I recently had the chance to view Fundamentals of Machine Lathe Operation from Technical Video Rental.
Okay, it wasn't quite as exciting as Star Wars, but it was quite informative, filling in gaps in my knowledge and visually clarifying a number of questions that I had as a result of reading about machining using an engine lathe.
Why Computer Science Isn't Attracting Students
Bill Gates is surprised by the lack of interest in computer science degrees: Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he's baffled more students don't go into computer science.
I can think of two very important reasons why. The first is not a new problem. I can remember when I first returned to school in 1981-82, trying to get a BS in Computer Science. I was working for an electronics company at the time, so I had some real world experience. Most of my fellow students were traditional age, and saw a computer science degree as a ticket to a high paying job and perhaps even real wealth. Within a semester or two, the computer science program at Sonoma State University, which had been bursting at the seams, wasn't quite so crowded. A lot of these students really weren't that interested in computers; it was just a fast way to wealth--and my, it was hard. Part of why I eventually changed my major to history is that I could get As in two history classes with less effort than one computer science class. You couldn't BS your way through a programming class. Assignments had to work.
Gates said Monday that even if young people don't know that salaries and job openings in computer science are on the rise, they're hooked on so much technology - cell phones, digital music players, instant messaging, Internet browsing - that it's puzzling why more don't want to grow up to be programmers.
"It's such a paradox," Gates said. "If you say to a kid, 'Yeah, what are the 10 coolest products you use that your parents are clueless about, that you're good at using,' I don't think they're going to say, 'Oh, you know, it's this new breakfast cereal. And I want to go work in agriculture and invent new cereals or something.' ... I think 10 out of 10 would be things that are software-driven."
Even worse: there are a lot of classes that you need to take to get a computer science degree. Calculus. Differential equations. Statistics. These are all classes that if your primary and secondary education failed to teach you math (or more typically, you failed to apply yourself to learn math), you aren't going to get a computer science degree.
The second reason, however, why computer science majors are in decline, is buried at the end of the article: "The best investment we've ever made is having our Microsoft Research groups," Gates said.
It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out that for an American to get a computer science degree right now is equivalent to a young person in 1910 deciding to apprentice to a buggy whip maker, or in 1980, deciding that they wanted to train for work building television sets.
Modeled after academic research facilities, Microsoft Research focuses on work that is relevant to Microsoft's product lineup, such as security or search technology.
Products including the TabletPC have come out of the research arm, which has labs in Redmond; San Francisco; California's Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Beijing and Bangalore, India.
I think there are always going to be some engineering jobs in the U.S., especially at the lean and efficient companies that will be be able to compete with Indian and Chinese engineers. (The technosaurus American companies, however, probably can't.) I just wouldn't expect that engineering is going to be a spectacularly high paying job competing with Asian wage rates. Why work your tail off to get a degree that lets you compete with people who are prepared to work for $12 per hour? You can become a plumber, or an accountant, and make more money.
Goodbye, Columbus
The city in Ohio, not the Italian explorer: COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 18 - Looking to punish this city for enacting a ban on assault weapons, the National Rifle Association announced on Monday that it had canceled plans to hold its national convention here in 2007, an event that was expected to pump more than $15 million into the local economy.
The Columbus City Council passed a ban on sales of semiautomatic weapons, and requiring existing owners to register them. What is amusing about this New York Times article is how they actually provide enough information to make the pro-gun control forces look like idiots:
"Thanks to the Columbus City Council, 65,000 people will not be coming to your wonderful Greater Columbus Convention Center in 2007," Wayne LaPierre, the rifle association's executive vice president, said in a news conference here. "The only thing the City Council can expect out of their decision is the gratitude of those businesses in the city we go to instead.""We need anything that puts another tool in our belt to keep weapons out of criminals' hands," said Detective Daniel R. Jones, the officer who was wounded in that firefight and has lost hearing in one ear.
Yup. Full automatic weapons are fairly tightly regulated under federal law--and I guess it didn't work.
The weapon that injured Detective Jones was a fully automatic AK-47 rifle that was illegal even before Columbus enacted its ban on assault weapons, the police said.
Rethinking Multiculturalism
Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner has an astonishing collection of links to recent British newspaper articles that shows that the multiculturalist ideal may be in danger of being discarded in favor of a more American "melting pot" concept. Now, if only we could return to the melting pot concept here.
These articles are in the conservative British papers, of course, such as this Niall Ferguson article in the Telegraph. Still, this article by one of the non-Anglo Britons is titled, "Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism." This article by an antiwar liberal also argues that Britain has made a serious mistake: The thing about wet and woolly liberals is that all our dithering and fretting about the black/white, right/wrong, yes/no issues takes up so much mental strength that by the time we've come to clarity, we tend to stick with the decision. The Iraq war was wrong and there's an end to it, OK?
Oh my! The notion of right and wrong as something other than a culturally determined idea finally gets through to a liberal!
But when we stumble across something that's even wronger, huge pits open up at our feet. Suicide bombing London Tubes is wrong. Clearly black not white, clearly no not yes. The young men who perpetrated it were crazed. They either belonged to, or were influenced by, extreme Islamist groups.
All the terrorist groups I mention adhere to an ideology so lunatic that you feel slightly sick if you read their websites. It's a mad ideology that separates their kind of Muslim from any other kind of Muslim and separates all Muslims from evil Jews and Crusader-liberationist Christians.
Osama bin Laden praised the Spanish terror-bombing because he believes that Spain should return to its Muslim roots (huh?) and that the Caliphate should be re-established across that vile dissolute land.
The Tube terror-bombing doesn't alter my belief that we should never have gone to war in Iraq. Nor do I believe that we should bring British troops home: we helped to break it, we must stay to fix it. But I am beginning to feel unsettled about living in a multicultural Britain where everybody is entitled to their point of view and should be patiently heard. Think not now. Some points of view are unacceptable.
For example, old Abu Hook-hand should never have been allowed to preach extremism from outside his mosque in London (while guarded by bored coppers from the Met). The girl who insisted on wearing a jilbab instead of perfectly acceptable Muslim-type school uniform should not have been allowed to. Full stop.
A reader pointed me to this article about how the Netherlands is losing its cool: AMSTERDAM — For centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.
Well worth reading in full.
That Netherlands no longer exists.
The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose killer was convicted last week, and the assassination of the politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 marked the end of the Holland of Erasmus and Spinoza.
No, the Dutch suddenly did not become intolerant and insular. But these killings showed the cumulative effect of two forces that have shaken the foundations of Dutch civic society over the last 40 years: the cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the influx of Muslim workers during those years of prosperity.
While most of Europe points to that epochal year of 1968 as a watershed, perhaps no country was affected as profoundly by the radicalism of the times as the Netherlands. In less than 15 years most forms of traditional authority and hierarchy, the counterbalancing forces that made Dutch tolerance possible, were undermined.
...
Hence the current image of Dutch tolerance: marijuana served at coffee shops, police officers growing their hair as long as the Grateful Dead, gays and lesbians coming out of the closet without fear or hindrance, public television showing full nudity and, for those who prefer not to work, a government package of benefits that makes a toil-free life entirely feasible.
The second, simultaneous, change in Dutch life was the recruitment of young men from the Rif Mountains of Morocco, most illiterate and many with only a rudimentary grasp of spoken Dutch, to work in Holland's rapidly expanding industries. When they came to the country, often under long-term government work visas, they were faced with a highly educated but apparently decadent society in the grip of a cultural revolution. Many were astonished: Was this country some sort of freak show?
No, it certainly wasn't. Under the effusive "anything goes" exterior, the majority of Dutch people held on to their disciplined Calvinist values. To the immigrants, however, this core was all but invisible.
For a while, the immigrants did the dirty work for which no training was needed, and the two factions lived amicably. But during the technology- and service-oriented economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, the demand for unskilled work declined. The "guest workers" were no longer needed in such numbers, but they were also not required to return to Morocco. Instead they were given extensive social benefits and their families were allowed to come from Morocco to join them. It was the birth of the ethnic-religious ghettoes that surround our affluent cities and towns.
And thus the delicate mechanism of Holland's traditional tolerant society gradually lost its balance. The news media, politicians and artists gnawed away at the traditional values of Calvinistic civic society, while in the bleak Muslim suburbs resentment grew among the Moroccans' Dutch-born children, who found the promise of an affluent life unfulfillable.
More Advertising Banners
At least they load quickly. As you might expect, this house project has made me increasingly interested in taking advertising revenue. At least these load fast, since they are text-only. If you find these annoying--you can always use PayPal to make contributions, and wean me off the advertising habit!
The House Project: Well Pump, Water, Walls
I've gotten a bit behind in documenting this project, what with figuring out logistics for helping my father-in-law and stepmother-in-law, who are in declining health, get moved from Orange County in Northern Mexico to Boise.
My wife and I went up Thursday evening, and there is now a pump that had filled the water tank about half full (600 to 700 gallons), and a water line down to the house with a water faucet. Unfortunately, without a pump from the water tank, there isn't quite enough pressure to run the water four feet up the pipe to the faucet. I really don't see why this would be--the faucet is still several feet below the bottom of the water tank.
At the request of readers with dialup connections, I am now using thumbnails (which are reduced size pictures) which you can click to see the pictures full sized.
Here's the faucet:
Click to enlarge
The well pump interface to the well was a bit different than I expected. I assumed that they would take the cap off the well, and stuff the pipe and pump into it. No, they drilled a hole into the side of the well casing well below ground level instead. The yellow cord is temporary electrical power, until we the permanent electric meter and house wiring.
Click to enlarge
Here's the electrical power for the well pump (which goes all the way down into the bottom of the well) going into the top:
Click to enlarge
Thursday afternoon, we went through a close relative of this house (slightly smaller) with our builder, and suddenly, my wife and I found ourselves feeling very boxed in by how small it seemed. When we returned to our current home, we realized why: we have nine feet ceilings, and the house we went through only had eight foot ceilings in several of the rooms.
So Friday morning, I called Scott, and asked him if we could change this. The kitchen will now be a vaulted ceiling (like the family room, living room, and front hall), and the rest of the rooms will be nine foot ceilings. Since eight foot studs had already arrived, Scott had to call the lumber vendor, and ask them to do a swap. Scott is such a patient person.
We also noticed on Thursday evening that all the floor joists were in--but one--they had run out. At first I thought: "Programmers aren't the only people that have fencepost errors." A fencepost error is when you ask someone, "You are making a ten foot long fence, with posts one foot apart. How many posts do you need?" A lot of people will say, "Ten." The answer is actually eleven--one at each end. But after talking to Scott, I figured out that the real problem was that Scott normally put floor joists 24 inches apart--and because we are using tile flooring, he decided to go for 19 inch spacing. This reduces flexibility, which is the big enemy of any stiff material. Think about concrete, which breaks readily if it is not fully supported.
On Sunday afternoon, we took some pictures of the now completed subflooring, facing to the east.
Click to enlarge
Along the boards to which the studs mount are a series of carefully penciled (and sometimes, crossed out and moved) marks indicating where the studs should go, window centers, doors, etc. I spent a bit of time analyzing the abbreviations, and eventually guessed that "KS" stood for "King Stud," where two studs were mounted side by side. Then, I found "King Stud" actually written on one position. I guess I would have called them "Siamese Studs," but whatever.
Click to enlarge
Monday evening I drove up to fill the sample bottles for testing the water. I would not be surprised if we need to chlorinate at least the water tank initially, just because it wasn't clean when we started. In any case, we are testing for coliform bacteria, iron, water hardness, lead, and arsenic.
At least two of the walls are up. This is the east wall of the house, where the master bedroom and the bedroom that will contain my office go.
Click to enlarge
Here's the view through the hole where the sliding glass door of the master bedroom will go.
Click to enlarge
That will be quite a view to wake up to in the morning!
Here's the view from the master bathroom.
Click to enlarge
Here's the view to the east from the master bedroom.
Click to enlarge
Here's the view to the east from the bedroom that I am going to use for my office.
Click to enlarge
Previous house entry.
The Oompa Loompa Song
The Glittering Eye points to this news story about the Cadbury chocolate factory in Britain that inspired Roald Dahl to write Charley and the Chocolate Factory (from whence came the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory): “Oh yeah, the Oompa Loompas,” says Adam Harris in the Bournville inventing room or, as Cadbury prefers to call it, the “development kitchen”. “You’ve got no idea how many times I’ve been called an Oompa Loompa. I don’t really mind, because it’s quite funny. We were actually all singing the Oompa Loompa song before you came in here today. But we had to stop because it really does your head in after a while.”
You aren't kidding.
FAA Regulations Applied By Morons
Okay, we all know that the rules about nail clippers and scissors on airliners are probably being a little overzealously applied--but this story is so bizarre that, as some bloggers are pointing out, we've entered the Twilight Zone. It is absolutely surreal. This news story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a Georgia National Guard contingent headed to Iraq got on board the plane carrying M16s, sidearms, and I presume, their bayonets--and were informed that they had to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters.
Thanks to Different River and Bruce Schneier for pointing out this absurdity.
“If you have any of those things,” he said, almost apologetically, “put them in this box now.”
Interest Rates
The 30 year Treasury bond yield right now (about 3:00 PM Mountain time) is 4.466%--definitely on the upswing, although less than you might expect looking at the short-end of the yield curve. Greenspan says don't worry: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday flat long-term interest rates, despite the Fed's raising of short-term rates, should not be interpreted as a clear sign of economic weakness.
"A sharp flattening of the yield curve is not a foolproof indicator of economic weakness," Greenspan said in a written response to questions by the chairman of Congress' Joint Economic committee, Jim Saxton, a New Jersey Republican.
He said that most statistical models that look at the yield curve -- different interest rates along the spectrum of Treasury debt maturities -- to forecast economic trends project moderate growth.
I Like Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO)...
But not when he says stupid things like this: DENVER — A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons.
Would it upset and punish the Islamofascists? It sure would! And it would make most of the world's Muslims (perhaps all of them?) into enemies of the United States. Dumb, dumb, dumb!
Rep. Tom Tancredo made his remarks Friday on WFLA-AM in Orlando, Fla. His spokesman stressed he was only speaking hypothetically.
Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.
"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.
"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.
The use of nuclear weapons by Islamofascists would indeed cause some pretty dramatic responses--but this isn't one of them. Actions that I could see happening in response that might be workable (although perhaps not wise):
1. A Constitutional amendment clarifying that the establishment and free exercise clauses did not apply to Islam--followed by some sort of federal law putting Islamic religious into an inferior legal and tax status compared to other religions.
2. Expulsion of all non-citizens from Islamic nations.
3. Ending all oil imports from Islamic nations as part of a massive campaign to switch to other oil sources, and non-petroleum energy. (At least part of this would make the liberals happy.)
4. Invasion and subjagation of Islamic nations to remind them that if Allah is on their side, it isn't in the military realm.
UPDATE: A reader had similar ideas a couple of years ago about threatening to nuke Mecca as a deterrent. I understand the reasoning--but I have a sneaking suspicion that the leadership of al-Qaeda may not be the religious fanatics that their followers are. I say that because of the willingness of al-Qaeda to desecrate mosques (by, for example, splattering the interior with Muslim body parts), to murder other Muslims, and to engage in Koran desecration of their own.
Morgan Spurlock Watch
You probably know who Morgan Spurlock is, even if you don't recognize the name. He's the guy that made the documentary Super Size Me, in which he eats all of his meals for thirty days at McDonald's, and stops exercising. Not surprisingly, eating more than 5000 calories a day--and not exercising--does bad things for his health. This is part of Spurlock's attack on the evils of capitalism. He also TV series called 30 Days, about what happens when he and his girlfriend move to a strange big city, try to live on minimum wage jobs for a month, and the horrors of doing so. (One problem: apparently they had trouble finding jobs that paid that poorly.)
Anyway, there is now a blog devoted just to watching Morgan Spurlock's difficulty with accuracy. Here's an example: Spurlock, for example, writes the following:
Morgan Spurlock Watch then points out that the cited source (an FDA publication called FDA Consumer) says exactly the opposition--that: "The FDA has said aspartame may be linked to some uncommon but troubling side effects, including headaches, hallucinations, panic attacks, dizziness, and mood swings." (p. 98)
FDA calls aspartame, sold under trade names such as NutraSweet and Equal, one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved. The agency says the more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies it has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population.
The cited source mentions these claims only to emphasize that there is no basis for them. If Spurlock wants to argue that the FDA is suppressing evidence, fine. But citing a publication for "X is true" when it says "X is false" is dishonest.
Morgan Spurlock Watch serves a very useful purpose. Unfortunately, movies such as Super Size Me get shown in high school health classes--but few students will get a chance to find out how dishonest this guy is.
Need a Car Driven From Los Angeles to Boise?
I need to help my father-in-law and his wife get moved from Orange County to Boise next week. He is just coming out of the hospital, and she probably shouldn't be driving. (She had a stroke a couple of years ago.) This isn't the best time, obviously, but they had already sold their condo before he went into the hospital with a kidney problem.
My wife and I are flying down, planning to drive them back up in their car--but because of the amount of stuff that the moving company can't move (like their dog), we were planning to rent a car in Los Angeles and drive it to Boise.
It turns out that lots of tourists fly into LAX, rent a car, and then drop it off at San Francisco International--so there's a shortge of one-way rental cars at LAX, and a pretty heft rental fee because of it.
I know that there are companies that deliver cars from one part of the U.S. to another. If you know the name of such an operation (trying to google for such operations produces far too many irrelevant pages) that has a Los Angeles office, please let me know--or if you have a car that needs to be transported from Southern California to Boise, please let me know.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, since some readers misread this: I am not looking for someone to transport my father-in-law's car. I am looking for a transport company that needs a car transported, so that I don't have to rent a car to help drive some of my father-in-law's stuff that can't be safely packed.
The Los Angeles Times: A Good Argument For Honesty
Patterico has a very impressive example of the dishonesty of the Times. They made what was a very ignorant and incorrect claim about Bush's nominees, and how the list changed when it turned out O'Connor was leaving, not Rehnquist. They fixed it (sort of) in the web edition of the story--but didn't admit it. The story is still wrong: the list of leading potential nominees wasn't just "white men" (the print edition) nor even just "men" as the web version of the story claims.
The extent to which the left has to play these sort of games really shows how completely intellectually and morally bankrupt they are. If only they didn't control so many of the levers of powers, it wouldn't be so bad.
Never Offend With Style When You Can Offend With Substance
This blogger reports: A Fatwah has been issued against me by a known terror group. Corresponding groups have responded indicating that I will be eliminated shortly.
What did he do to get this much attention? This page, where he has video of "Team Infidel" using a Koran as a rifle target. This was a really childish thing to do, especially when you are dealing with what can only be called irrational people. (I have experience upsetting irrational people before.)
They have my name, address, telephone numbers, and the names and addresses of my friends and loved ones.
The FBI has been unable to tell me of any actionable threat, however they beleive that the threat is real. They have warned me to take the standard anti-terrorist precautions, suitable for Bogota or South Africa not Phoenix.
They are also contacting the people on the list that was distributed, including my mother, my stepfather and step siblings, and the people who worked on Team Infidel with me.
The thousands of hits I've been recieving from the JP domains with blocked referred information are anonymizer proxies used to hide the identities of those viewing my site.
As my resume is public information, my employers or former employers may also be targeted.
There is concern that staff at my former employers has fed them my personal and private information as well.
The FBI agents I spoke with clearly indicated that althoguh they had nothing direct or specific to an individual (and thus couldnt jsutify protective custody), they are very seriously concerned about this threat.
AnarchAngel seems to be well prepared for whoever might come after him, and if his goal was to be the cheese in a mousetrap for deranged terrorists, his actions might be enough to lure in deranged terrorist wanna-bes.
