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Labels: house project Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: transgender Labels: child sexual abuse, homosexuality Labels: house project
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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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House Project: The Sills Are In, And The Gravel Is Mostly In Place
I previously mentioned some excitement about the sills. They still aren't quite what we have in the current house, but everything is nailed in place, and they look okay--not enough for my wife to jump up and down about. (Not that she is a terribly excitable person, anyway.) Anyway, we went up Wednesday evening, and this is what the sills now look like.
Click to enlarge
Our builder was waiting for the first heavy rain before having gravel dropped on the driveway; others we would have had to pay someone to come up and dump water on the road so that it would sink into the underlying loose rock. This stuff is called "road mix"--a combination of gravel and sand, and quite a bit less tasty than trail mix. 
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
As should be evident from the tire tracks, it has not all sunk in even yet, but at least there aren't big sharp rocks sticking up to attack the underside of my Corvette. With time (and more rain), it will pack down into something more like a road. They didn't run it all the way to the concrete apron in front of the garage, and they didn't drop any on the driveway behind the house, so it's time for another visit.
Our builder is having a heck of a time finding construction workers, because so many people are building houses in the Boise area right now--increasingly, his family and friends (and now us) are providing the labor. Since this is a cost-plus contract, the more work that we do, the less he charges us, so it isn't entirely a bad thing.
I drove up this morning to mix my labor into the house. I ran around this morning putting patch material (which has a disturbing similarity in texture and appearance to thick whipped cream) on nail holes, and using a nailset and hammer to get a few nails down below surface level. Unfortunately, these are a very, very small grade of finishing nail, and some of them insisted on bending instead of sinking.
The clouds still had the sun obscured when I shot this picture about 9:00 AM.
Click to enlarge
Here the sun has finally broken through.
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It is so quiet up there!
Last house project entry.
Dumb Criminals Department
You know, robbing a gun store is really dumb--for the reason that appears at the bottom of the attached article. Robbing a gun store when you don't have a gun is really, really dumb. From the October 20, 2005 Odessa [Texas] American: Police have arrested two suspects in Tuesday’s failed robbery attempt at Gun Sport Ltd.
Perhaps they were driven to this act of desperate stupidity by the incredibly dumb names that someone gave them: Jameyl? Crayshon?
According to an OPD news release, two men entered the store Tuesday afternoon, and one pepper sprayed an employee.
The employee, whose name was being withheld, managed to keep one of the men from leaving the store by holding a gun on him, according to Sgt. Bob Forbus. The other man reportedly fled on foot.
On Tuesday, police arrested Jameyl Loud Webb, 19, 2617 San Andres Drive, inside the store and charged him with robbery.
Webb remained in custody at the Ector County Detention Center Wednesday. No bond has been set.
On Wednesday, police arrested Crayshon Dewayne Cromer, 19, 312 Lindy Ave., after a 2 a.m. foot chase.
Cromer was charged with evading arrest, giving a false ID to an officer and robbery.
...
The owner of Gun Sport Ltd., Jon Thomas, said he was surprised and pleased at how quickly police arrested suspects in the robbery, but that he felt sorry for them.
“Here’s a young guy, doesn’t look stupid, but he may spend the next 10 years making little rocks out of big ones,” he said.
Thomas said the robbery was the first time in 30 years of owning gun shops that one of his was held up.
“Gun shops, by and large, aren’t targets because we have guns,” he said. “It’s like someone trying to rob a snake farm.”
A Prescient Letter From One of the 2000
Once upon a time our culture lauded the spirit of honor, duty, and self-sacrifice that went with being a warrior in a righteous cause. Even a culture as remote in time and values as classical Greece--we could admire the devotion to duty of the 300 Spartans who held back perhaps 150,000 Persians at Thermopylae--and they were wiped out to the last man. But the several days that they held back a far larger army enabled the rest of Greece to prepare.
Michelle Malkin reports that one of the 2000 American servicemen killed in Iraq, Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, had some sort of premonition that he might not get back home, and left a letter on his laptop to his girlfriend--a letter that Cindy Sheehan probably wouldn't want to read. A particularly stirring excerpt: Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.
What an eloquent statement from a man of phenomenal courage. Part of what makes soldiers able to risk death is that they know that the odds are in their favor--that the vast majority of soldiers in a war will come back alive. Corporal Starr seems to have realized that his number was up--and he was not afraid. Malkin quotes Starr's uncle: Mr. Lickness also told me: "Even more than a Marine, Jeff was a man of God. At a recent memorial service at Camp Pendleton for the 16 Marines from his unit killed in Iraq we got to meet the men who were with him when he died. They told us of his bravery under fire, his leadership, his humor and his humanity. America lost the best it has, but the family knows he's with his Heavenly Father and we will see him again."
Rosa Parks & The End Of Segregation
Different River asks how segregation could have collapsed so quickly: how else could a centuries-old system have collapsed in less than two decades?
The problem with this question is that segregation was not a centuries-old system. Segregation was largely a post-Civil War phenomenon. De Tocqueville (among others) noticed that in the South, blacks and whites socialized and engaged in public amusements together in a way that simply did not happen in the North. Under slavery, there was no practical way to segregate housing, because slaves lived on the owner's plantation (with a few exceptions for absentee owners and some urban slaves), and of course, schooling wasn't an issue: most slave states made it unlawful to educate a slave, and many of the Southern states didn't even have public schools until just before (and in some cases, just after) the Civil War.
I don't know how much this has worked its way out to the masses yet, but historians working on the civil rights movement have discovered that immediately post-World War II, there was a very sizeable movement in the South against not only the most grotesque actions, such as lynching, but even against school segregation. Some of this seems to have been returning servicemen from Europe, who saw concentration camps, and drew some lessons about where this could lead. Even Southern Baptists took a strong position against the excesses of the white supremacist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
A recent Thomas Sowell column points out that segregation of many privately facilities open to the public largely came about after blacks lost the vote: It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.
If you find this hard to believe--that evil capitalists were more supportive of equality for the races than the virtuous instruments of democracy--well, go read Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case that decided "separate but equal" conformed to the Fourteenth Amendment. It isn't just blacks who refused to stay in the black cars that were at risk:
It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.
The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.
These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply.
None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront. The third section provides penalties for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railway companies to comply with the act....
At least sometimes, private companies let their greed take precedence over the government's desire to segregate the races. It obviously happened enough that the government found it necessary to provide for punishing companies and their employees who lacked sufficient zeal for the holy cause of segregation.
The Libby Indictment
You can read it here. My first reaction when I heard that they were indicting Libby for making false statements to the FBI and to the grand jury (which is perjury) was, "This is going to be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt." After all, proving that someone's statement about what they remembered is intentionally false (as opposed to mistaken) is pretty difficult--you have to have a number of pieces of evidence that someone's testimony is intentionally inaccurate.
If the indictment accurately reflects Libby's testimony, and that of the several reporters who also testified, Libby has a lot to be worried about. Here's a hint, if you are someone who spends a lot of time trying to spin things to the news media: if you are doing something that might be illegal (like blowing the cover of a CIA operative), tell it to one reporter only: then it becomes your word against his at trial.
There's no indictment for the underlying crime--blowing the cover of Valerie Plame. It sounds like Fitzgerald is still trying to construct a case around that. But it sounds like the combination of events required to establish all the elements of the crime (intent to expose Plame, undercover and overseas in the last five years, identifying Plame) may not have been present in any single person. At least, I don't see anything that clearly fits that description in the Libby indictment.
I do notice that the indictment is careful not to point out that the statements made by Joseph Wilson that seemed to have provoked Libby's actions were, in fact, lies. It isn't relevant to the crimes alleged, of course, but it does seem a bit unfortunate that one person who lied up a storm for political reasons gets away with it, and another gets indicted.
To quote the Washington Post--hardly a conservative newspaper: Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
Perhaps this is why Joseph Wilson is a hero to the left.
Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.
Bolling v. Sharpe (1954)
Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Bernstein points out that one of my preferred replacements for Sandra Day O'Connor, Michael McConnell (who is probably a distant cousin of mine--there's a long genealogy story there) will be ripped unmercifully by the Democrats for having criticized the methodology of Bolling v. Sharpe (1954).
At this point, you are probably saying, "Never heard of it." On the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of state public schools was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Bolling v. Sharpe ruled that the District of Columbia's segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
Okay, you are saying to yourself, that makes sense: if the states can't segregate public schools based on race, then why should the District of Columbia be able to do so?
The problem is that Brown was decided based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment--which only applies to the states and their subsidiary governments. There is no equal protection clause that applies to the federal government.
I can certainly understand the Court's discomfort. The states were being told, "You can't discriminate based on race in school assignments"--but the District of Columbia was? The decision somewhat acknowledges that they have a problem--but they just decide that it is the right thing to do, and they do it: We have this day held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the states from maintaining racially segregated public schools. The legal problem in the District of Columbia is somewhat different, however. The Fifth Amendment, which is applicable in the District of Columbia, does not contain an equal protection clause as does the Fourteenth Amendment which applies only to the states. But the concepts of equal protection and due process, both stemming from our American ideal of fairness, are not mutually exclusive. The "equal protection of the laws" is a more explicit safeguard of prohibited unfairness than "due process of law," and, therefore, we do not imply that the two are always interchangeable phrases. But, as this Court has recognized, discrimination may be so unjustifiable as to be violative of due process.
The problem here is that the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process is pretty specific: No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
Black students weren't being deprived of life, liberty, or property by segregation of DC schools. You might be able to make a case that being sent to inferior public schools deprived of them of opportunities to acquire property later on, but that's a pretty abstract and indirect deprivation. This is not what the Framers had in mind when they wrote this.Segregation in public education is not reasonably related to any proper governmental objective, and thus it imposes on Negro children of the District of Columbia a burden that constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of their liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause.
I understand the political dilemma that confronted the Court, and I can't imagine any good reason for DC schools to be segregated, but this is exactly the sort of sloppy reasoning that the Supreme Court has done repeatedly--and why I don't have much respect for it.
In view of our decision that the Constitution prohibits the states from maintaining racially segregated public schools, it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government.
Another Reason Liberal Is a Dirty Word To Me
This column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's just a taste of this deeply offensive, judgmental, hypercritical and profoundly ignorant column: Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?
And yes, all those links were in the original article. You know, there's only one thing worse than a libertine insisting that there's nothing really wrong--and that's a libertine getting self-righteous about someone else's gross immorality.
And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with you people?"
But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.
Surprise, Surprise: Which Countries Benefitted From Oil-For-Palaces?
The final report about the Oil-for-Food scandal is showing that companies in three countries had preferential treatment in the corruption--and guess which three countries? More than 2,000 companies taking part in the United Nations oil-for-food programme paid illegal surcharges and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, an inquiry has found.
Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has delivered a fifth and final report, which details how thousands of companies and individuals around the world were involved in illegal transactions to circumvent the UN programme.
This is Paul Volcker's fifth and final report
The New York Times newspaper said three members of the UN-established Independent Inquiry Committee had confirmed that the report would show that "the country with the most companies involved was Russia, followed by France."
...
Preferential treatment was given to companies from France, Russia and China, the report says, all permanent members of the Security Council, who were more favorable to lifting the 1990 sanctions than the America and Britain.
The independent inquiry committee, which began its work in 2004, said in an earlier report that the program became deeply corrupted as Saddam arranged for surcharges and kickbacks while an overwhelmed UN headquarters failed to exert administrative control over the program.
University Punishes Student For Off-Campus Statements
Isn't it awful that a Catholic university would expel a student for his off-campus support of gay rights? Shouldn't something be done about that? Yeah!
Oh, whoops! I knew something didn't sound right about that! They are threatening to expel the student for calling homosexuality "subhuman": PITTSBURGH -- A Duquesne University sophomore will risk being kicked out of school rather than write an essay as punishment for expressing his view that homosexuality is "subhuman."
Now, I wouldn't use an expression like "subhuman." Of course, I'm not 19, and I have enough knowledge of history to know that "untermensch" (subhuman, in German) has an historical meaning that is quite disturbing. But can you imagine the uproar if the school was going to kick him out for taking a position in support of homosexuality?
Ryan Miner, 19, of Hagerstown, Md., was sanctioned by Duquesne after posting his view in The Facebook, an online directory that is not related to the university.
Miner opposed an effort by other students to form a Gay-Straight Alliance group, an issue that is still being debated by the university.
Miner needs to take a government class still, I think: "I believe as a student that my First Amendment rights in the Constitution were subverted and attacked," said Miner.
It is a private school, and they have the right to expel him for violating their anti-harassment code--even though it is hard to see what he did as harassment. Still, it does tell you something about how Politically Correct even a Catholic university can be that they feel the need to expel students for a nasty remark. Perhaps he should have called homosexuality "priestly" instead.
There's No Surprise On This
I gather that Illinois has adopted a new definition: "sexually dangerous." I don't know exactly what that means, but this article details the first female so designated under the new law--and when you read about her history, you can't claim to be surprised: “Sexually dangerous,” that’s what a Woodford County teenager is being labeled by the State of Illinois. She's also the first female in the state with that designation. 17-year old Tammy Wheeler of Eureka has been designated “sexually dangerous” after being charged with fondling two young boys earlier this year.
From all that I have read, pedophiles usually were victims themselves. For reasons that remain unclear, most victims of sexual abuse do not become abusers themselves (except to the extent that they destroy themselves with alcohol, drugs, self-mutilation). A few do--and sometimes they are girls.
According to Woodford County Court documents Wheeler admitted to fondling other children before that incident. The documents say she suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder from physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, and has uncontrollable sexual urges.
This is very sad--and part of why I get so angry when the courts side with the ACLU in making sexual abuse of minors a minor crime.
This Crime Brought To You By The Letters "Q" And "W"
I hate to be too critical of Turkey. For a Muslim nation, they are shockingly liberal (in the "classical liberal" sense of the word). But they really do need to get past their need to oppress ethnic minorities like the Kurds--and especially they need to stop oppressing "Q" and "W": DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - A Turkish court fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law banning characters not used in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said Tuesday.
The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, but are used in Kurdish.
Under pressure from the European Union, Turkey lifted bans on teaching and broadcasting in Kurdish in 2002, but bureaucratic resistance has delayed implementing the reforms.
Another Method for Getting Rich: Attending Church
This study only shows correlations--I think it would be silly to claim that church attendance directly increases income. More likely, the underlying factors that cause one cause the other: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attending religious services may enrich the soul, but it also fattens the wallet, according to research released on Tuesday.
The study also found that those who more frequently attend church
"Doubling the frequency of attendance leads to a 9.1 percent increase in household income, or a rise of 5.5 percent as a fraction of the poverty scale," Jonathan Gruber of the economics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in his study.
"Those with more faith may be less 'stressed out' about daily problems that impede success in the labor market and the marriage market, and therefore are more successful," Gruber wrote in the study, which was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.correlate to higher levels of education and income, lower levels of welfare receipt and disability, higher levels of marriage and lower levels of divorce....
The Zimmerman Telegram
You are probably aware that the Zimmerman Telegram was the document that brought the U.S. into World War I on the side of Britain. The telegram from German Foreign Secretary Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico City asked Mexico to invade the U.S.--and after Germany defeated the U.S., Mexico would get the Southwest back. Britain's codebreakers intercepted the telegram, decrypted it, and used the contents to get President Wilson to ask Congress for a Declaration of War.
Anyway, the original decrypted document has long been assumed to be lost or destroyed--but no, it has been found: An original typescript of the deciphered Zimmerman Telegram, one of the greatest coups mounted by Britain's intelligence services, has been discovered.
Thanks to Different River for pointing this out.
The document is believed to be the actual telegram shown to the American ambassador in London in 1917 that proved Germany's hostility to the United States and guaranteed President Woodrow Wilson's entry into the First Word War.
Historians say no single piece of paper did more to guarantee victory in the Great War for Britain and her allies.
It was intercepted and deciphered by Room 40, a predecessor of GCHQ, the Government's top secret listening post, in January 1917.
So many documents surrounding the affair were destroyed on the orders of Adml Sir Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the director of naval intelligence, it was assumed the original typed "decrypt" was gone for ever. But the official historian of GCHQ found it while researching an "official", that is to say secret, history of the organisation.
"It is a chance survival," said the historian, who asked not to be named. "It is thrilling to have got it."
The Hazards of STDs
Professor Volokh launched a bit of a firestorm in the comments section by pointing out that STDs caused by promiscuity represent a significant public health hazard: An interesting article, S.H. Ebrahim, M.T. McKenna & J.S. Marks, Sexual Behaviour: Related Adverse Health Burden in the United States, Sexually Transmitted Infections, vol. 81, pp. 38-40 (2005), reports that sexually transmitted diseases were responsible for nearly 30,000 deaths in the U.S. in 1998. A third of the deaths were among women, and two thirds among men. ... Three quarters of the deaths were from HIV, but nearly 5000 were from cervical cancer, which seems to be generally caused by some strains of human papilloma virus, and nearly 2000 were caused by sexually transmitted hepatitis and hepatitis-caused liver cancer. (The study purported to take into account the fact that not all hepatitis is sexually transmitted.) There were also over 100 deaths from syphilis and fewer than 10 from gonorrhoea (presumably from the very rare gonorrhoea-caused heart disease), but apparently modern antibiotics have done a great deal to limit death and serious illness caused in the U.S. by bacterial sexually transmitted diseases.
Of course, he makes it very clear that he has no moral objection to promiscuity and casual sex:
The study also reported that sexually transmitted disease causes some 600,000 cases of infertility per year (overwhelmingly among women); and of course hepatitis, cervical cancer, liver cancer, and HIV can be quite painful and disabling even when they don't cause death.I don't have moral objections to casual sex or to promiscuity; and I certainly don't support criminalization of consensual adult sexual behavior. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we need to acknowledge that sexually transmitted disease is a serious matter, and there are real medical costs (as well as real hedonic benefits, plus real hedonic costs) to the glamorization of relatively casual and promiscuous sex that seems present in our culture (though not in all of its subcultures).
Go and read the comments--it is amazing how many people insist that there was no Sexual Revolution in the 1960s.
Genetic Stuttering & Gender Confusion
I've mentioned in the past that it is possible that at least some of the "transgendered" set may actually be that way for genetic reasons--although I have my reasons for suspecting that for many the cause has more to do with child sexual trauma. One woman I spoke to over lunch many years ago was married to a guy about to become a gal--and he grew up with a hypermasculine Marine father, and a mother who desperately wanted a daughter--so she dressed her little boy as a girl until he was old enough to rebel, and spent a lot of time putting make-up on him. Mom playing "Dollie" and Dad's understandable rage and rejection don't make it hard to figure out the source of this guy's confusion.
Here's an article that reports on a study that found a "stuttering" pattern in the genes overrepresented among men suffering from gender confusion: The researchers say the findings are very preliminary and should be “interpreted with the utmost caution,” due to the small sample size used in their study.
The sample size isn't huge--"29 male-to-female transsexuals (men who wish they were women) and 229 healthy males." The article goes on to treat homosexuality as an established genetic trait--which what I have read remains a highly controversial claim, with significant variation from study to study.
Nonetheless, they say, the results might shed some light on the rare condition, transsexualism. It is estimated to afflict about one in 30,000 men, some of whom follow through on their sense of their correct gender by getting sex-change operations.
More broadly, the research could help clarify one of the most contentious and poorly understood questions in biology: what creates “gender identity”—the sense most people have that they are either a man or a woman.
...
Transsexualism “raises important questions as to how the gender identity is moulded in humans,” wrote the researchers, who included Susanne Hennigsson of Göteborg University and Mikael Landén of the the Karolinska Institute in Göteborg and Stockholm, Sweden, respectively.
They describe the research in the August issue of the scientific journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
If their findings are correct, the risk of becoming a transsexual may depend partly on variations in the length of certain segments of DNA where the genetic code “stutters,” that is, a few “letters” of the code repeat themselves in the same order many times.
Notably, scientists found in a study published last December that these repeat sequences may be the sites of some of the most common genetic mutations, and thus may underlie some of the fastest evolutionary changes in life’s history. Evolutionary theory holds that mutations produce evolution, because the occasional mutations that are advantageous spread through populations, changing these populations’ characteristics, and over time gradually create new species.
In that study of last year, researchers found that the muzzle length of dogs depends on the length of certain repeat sequences.
In the transsexualism study, the researchers examined a repeat sequence in each of three genes known to affect the sexual development of the brain, in hopes that one or more of these might shed light on transsexualism. They studied several common variants affecting the length of these repeats in different people.
Vertical Mill
My used but seemingly operational Sherline 5000 vertical mill arrived yesterday. What, exactly, is a vertical mill, you may be asking? A vertical mill is a gadget with three axes: X, Y, and Z, and threads that enable you to move a piece of material into a rotating tool very precisely (in thousandths of an inch) in all three directions for cutting at a piece of metal, wood, or plastic. In the same way that a lathe lets you make very precise cuts on a piece of rotating material, a vertical mill lets you make very precise cuts on something that is roughly rectangular. (Some vertical mills have all sorts of extra motions for making even more elaborate shapes.) You can see a Sherline 5000 here, in case you are having some trouble visualizing it.
It seems to be in better condition than the used Sherline 4000 lathe that I bought a while back. I did notice that when I was machining a 9" long piece of Delrin completely flat, one end was close to .01" thicker than the other. Why? It turns out that the column holding the mill wasn't exactly perpendicular to the table, so I loosened the four screws that hold the gearing to the column, and got this as perfect as I could with a square. Now I can't actually measure the thickness difference--it must be on the order of .002" or less over the length of 9" of Delrin if I can't see it with my cheap micrometer.
UPDATE: Okay, when I tried to make a nice parallel piece of Delrin, I ended up with a .025" discrepancy. There's obviously something to be learned here still.
I've Been Out of Service Most of the Day
Cable One ("Watch us make you smile") lost internet service this morning about 10:30 AM--and it just came back. Part of why I knew it was system-wide was that calling their customer service number gave the "All circuits are busy" recording.
This was a day that I stayed home to catch up on editing my book, and becoming competent with my new vertical mill. The vertical mill activity worked fine, but that didn't take that long.
Kansas Supreme Court on Limon
I mentioned this decision here a few days ago. I misread one rather critical part of it: instead of repealing the "Romeo-and-Juliet" provision that made adults having heterosexual sex with minors less than four years younger into a less serious crime, they only repealed the part that made it applicable to heterosexuals. Rather than punishing 18 year old guys who manipuate a 14 year old girl into sex as severely as homosxuals--they decided that homosexual molesters get the same light sentence as heterosexual molesters.
I am disappointed. The Kansas Supreme Court could have taken an equal protection position that punished both homosexual and heterosexual molestation equally seriously, or they could have struck the entire law down, but instead, they decided that they could just strike out one part of the statute.
I Have A Publisher For My Book...
And I am still utterly floored by it. There's a a very large advance--which suggests that they intend to print a lot of copies.
I'll give you details as soon as the contract is signed.
Wake Up! California Culture Is Spreading
Dan Popkey is a columnist for the local paper, and like nearly all journalists, very liberal. But I guess he just got a wake-up call, judging by his most recent column: As moderator of the Idaho Summit on Teen Dating Violence, I realized how clueless I was about a dangerous curve ahead — a culture that cultivates emotional, sexual and physical abuse.
Gee, he might even wake up to the destructive culture that liberals have promoted by saying that everything is okay, and nothing is wrong. Nah.
I met national and local experts, read Dr. Jill Murray's eye-opening book, "But I Love Him," and reviewed work by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Idaho Partners Against Domestic Violence and the American Bar Association to push back against dating abuse.
Twice, I found myself weeping, once during a talk by Murray, a leading national expert on dating violence, and a second time watching gut-ripping public service announcements produced by students at Eagle High.
One in three high school girls report physical or sexual abuse by a dating partner. But 81 percent of parents either don't believe or don't know if teen dating violence is a problem.
"It's definitely happening," Tanya Greenwood, a 14-year-old from Ketchum told me.
I learned from Greenwood that to "hook up" has a new meaning: casual sex, from petting to intercourse, with no expectation of future intimacy. Sometimes these meetings are coerced. Sometimes they lead to abuse. Every time, I say with my middle-aged sensibility, they are sad and demeaning.
...
I've discovered degrading language is common. It's now acceptable to call a girlfriend "bitch." I've learned about the warped practice of "rainbow parties," where girls put on different colors of lipstick and line up to leave their mark on the sex organs of a string of boys.
Anya Alvarez, a 16-year-old from Tulsa, Okla., a victim of abusive boyfriends, came for the summit.
She described dating older men. When she was 15, her 21-year-old boyfriend was ready for sex. "When I told him I'm waiting until I'm married, he said, 'No, I want to take your virginity.'"
Boyfriends phoned her obsessively; called her stupid; told her how to dress and do her hair; isolated her from family and friends. And, with control typical of abusive relationships, one took something very valuable. "Sexual abuse is awful," said Alvarez. "It takes a part of you that you can't get back. And you feel cheapened."
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When you suspect an abusive relationship, seeing a controlling, demeaning boyfriend, ask your kid, "Is that loving behavior?"
Listen to lyrics. Beware if it's misogynous stuff like Insane Clown Posse's "Girl ya know I love ya but now ya gotta die."
Talk to them about how women look on MTV. Ask what they think about shorts marked "Juicy," T-shirts saying, "Cute, but psycho — things even out," and watch faces that read, "Hi Loser."
Good News: Promoter Of Exterminating Whites No Longer Employed By North Carolina State
At least, according to this news story, Kambon was not rehired at the end of the spring semester.
Astonishing News: Anne Rice Changes Direction
During a discussion of movies that I most regretted having seen, I mentioned that I considered Interview With the Vampire the most spritually-injuring: it "made me wish I could take steel wool and chlorine bleach to my soul afterwards." Now I see that Anne Rice, who made a huge amount of money writing the novels in this series, has found God: After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002.
Madonna is concerned about the destructive influence of television on her kids. Anne Rice will now only write novels that glorify Jesus Christ. What next? Will Michael Moore turn Republican?
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In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord."
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Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
Some Subjects Are More Vital Than Others
To my surprise, the Idaho Statesman published a piece by me today, and with only a few changes for space: Is the State Board of Education making a mistake emphasizing math and science over the humanities? I am more conflicted than most about this: my B.A. and M.A. are in history; I have five published books, four in American history; I have taught history at local universities.
But I am also a software engineer. I have taken far more chemistry, physics and math than the vast majority of my fellow graduates in the social sciences.
I really do not believe that this must be a zero-sum game — but some subjects are fundamental, others build on that base, and yet other studies are strictly luxuries. Revolutionary John Adams observed that he had to study politics and war so that his sons could study mathematics and philosophy, so that their children could study the arts. Some subjects are more essential to a society than others.
Certain subjects are at the core of our economy: mathematics, the sciences, and the ability to understand and make logical arguments. Our society is failing to adequately prepare large numbers of young people for the high-paying jobs that use these skills.
As an example, I have seen a local employer attempt to hire an electrical engineer using the H-1B visa process. Before the company can hire a non-resident, they must demonstrate that there are no citizens or permanent residents in the United States able and willing to take that position — and the salary range is $101,000 to $134,000 a year.
This is not the first time that I have seen such high-paying positions unable to attract a qualified American.
There are other subjects that are important not because they provide good jobs, but because they make citizens into effective decision-makers at election time; our Republic is not a spectator sport. We teach history, political science, and economics (among others) for this reason. These disciplines are built at least partly on the core subjects. Without the ability to understand logical arguments, these subjects become simply emotional outbursts.
The subjects that John Adams hoped his grandchildren would study are the luxuries of art and music. These are luxuries, not because they are without purpose, but because a society can afford them only when it is wealthy — when most of our college graduates have a reasonable expectation of being able to find $50,000-a-year jobs that do not involve back-breaking labor. We do not need for every high school senior to be able to calculate the time it takes for a rock to fall from a 10-story building, and write an essay defending his election choice before we expand teaching of the luxury subjects — but from what I have seen, we are a very long ways from that happy condition. There are far too many students graduating high school woefully deficient in the core subjects of math, science and English composition.
You do not buy a widescreen plasma TV if you do not have a place to live; necessities have to take precedence over luxuries. Right now, we have to worry about how our children and grandchildren are going to make their way in a world where they will be competing for jobs with the children of India and China — nations that seem to recognize that math and sciences are the road to the wealth that lets a society indulge in luxuries such as art and music.
Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer with a Boise company.
The House Project: Garage Doors, Window Sills
I haven't blogged much about the house the last few days, but not because I haven't been busy, but because I've been up there too much to have time to blog! (Along with getting the machine shop in the current house squared up. More about that in a later entry.)
We went up Wednesday evening to see how the interior finish work was going. The garage doors were in place! Hurrah!
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Door frames, a subject of some struggle a few days earlier, all looked good. These are the double doors leading into bedroom three, and the door leading into bathroom three.
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This, however, was the extraordinarily boring window sill--not at all what we were supposed to get. Fortunately, Scott hadn't nailed any of them in place.
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This led to a mad scramble to figure out what the correct molding was for the window sills to match the tasteful sills in our current house--more about that later in this entry.
Out in the garage--what is this football-sized object? Thats a Grundfos pressure pump. Ordinarly, these are big monsters, because they contain a 30-120 gallon tank. We have 1400 gallons as the backup, so all we need is this cute little gadget.
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This gadget is a particulate filter put in by the well pump guys. We are going to have a whole house lead filtering system (ANSI standard 53 compliant) go in series with this. More about that in a few days.
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On the other side of the furnace there's a pipe that comes out of the wall, and then goes back into the wall. Scott tells us that the building codes now require that houses be plumbed for a water softener. Our current house was not plumbed for one--and when I asked what it would cost to install a water softener, I was quote about $1000--largely because the plumbing wasn't there.
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Next to the meter there is now a gas pipe fitting sticking up out of the ground. This is where the backup generator will connect.
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On Saturday morning, I ran over to Franklin Building Supply (who supplied the door frame moldings) and tried to find a matching sill. Nope! The bottom part, a corbel sort of thing, was the same as the header molding on the doors--but the top of the sill was produced with a router table, and was not a standard item. So at lunch, we took pizza and Cokes to Scott's hard working team (much of it is his family, because of a shortage of available construction workers) to see what he could offer us.
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Those two pieces are wood really aren't different router bits, and different patterns, although I could barely see it. It makes my wife happy, and that's what matters. We had some neighbors in San Jose, Dick and Anna, who were building a new house--and they doing much of the construction themselves. They told us that they had read that one out of four couples building a home get divorced, and one out of seven having a home built for them get divorced. I don't know if those figures are still true or not, but I guess this can be stressful if the two of you have markedly different tastes.
Not only are the garage doors in, but the automatic garage door openers, as well.
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Great view out the front--it almost looks like you could just drive off a cliff. Actually, you could. We are going to put up some boulders (of which we have many) at the edge.
Last house project entry.
