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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Friday, December 16, 2005
More Dumb Than Videotaping Yourself Committing A Felony I've mentioned some examples of people too stupid to stay out of jail: two thugs who videotaped themselves shooting two people; a guy who is HIV-positive videotaped himself having sex with underage boys. Here's another example. Professor Volokh points to a newspaper article about a lawyer who allegedly emailed his client, who was facing DUI charges, and quite bluntly told her to commit perjury on the stand. Unless the emails (which are included in full in the newspaper article) are forgeries, the lawyer is in big trouble: You won't be charged with perjury. I've never seen them charge anyone with perjury, and everybody lies in criminal cases, including the cops. If you want to go tell the truth, then we'll just plead guilty and you can get your jail time overwith.I do not doubt that people perjure themselves frequently. You would think a lawyer would know better than to put it so bluntly in email. My Son Just Discovered Progressive Income Tax Rates My son and a friend work at the same restaurant. They get paid the same $7 per hour wage. They put the same exemption number on their withholding form. But my son worked 58 hours in the latest pay period, and his friend worked 52 hours--and what a dramatic difference in paychecks, because he seems to have crossed one of those painful boundaries in the tax tables. My son has been going through a very liberal phase the last couple of years, which is probably an inevitable result of having grown up in wealth, and living in an affluent and quite conservative area. I think I hear reality beginning to intrude on his ideology.... Books I've Recently Read I mentioned last month that Laurie David's attacks on Crichton's novel State of Fear, gave me no choice but to read it. So, my wife bought it for my birthday on December 5, and I started reading it that night. As usual, with a Michael Crichton novel, the writing is so-so, but the story is so compelling that it is hard to put it down. Had I not gotten a late start that evening, I would have read it in one sitting (as I usually do with Crichton's novels). This is going to sound like a nasty criticism, but it really isn't--as you will see in a paragraph or two. It must be wonderful to be an established, successful novelist like Michael Crichton. This guy could send a grocery list to the publisher, and it would come out in hardback. Michael Crichton's first novel, Andromeda Strain, was awash in footnotes to plausible sounding articles in plausible sounding journals--and so much of it was actually good science, largely inspired by the outbreak of Ebola at a research facility in Marburg, Germany in the 1960s. State of Fear is awash in real footnotes, to real journals, and Crichton lets you know at the beginning that while these are fictional characters and a fictional environmental organization, the science is real, and so are the footnotes. Those footnotes aren't a problem. There are a few chapters of the book, however, that as much as Crichton tries to anchor them as dialogs between the characters, are just a little too preachy--rather like Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, which presents the debate between Ptolemaic and Copernican solar systems in a similar form. Perhaps in the movie form (yeah, right) these won't feel so heavy. I suppose that I should mention the general plot of the book. The bad guys are a bunch of lawyers who run an environmental organization that is manipulating public opinion to scare people into believing that: 1. Global warming is taking place. 2. Human beings are the cause of it. 3. If we don't do something (involving lots of government) we are going to be in a world of hurt. At the same time, at least one of the evil lawyers is using a wealthy, well-meaning, but somewhat ignorant philanthropist money to create panic--I won't say how, to avoid spoiling it. Regular readers of my blog will know that I am skeptical of both the extent of global warming, and whether it is wholly or even partially the result of man's actions. Many of the facts cited in the papers that Crichton footnotes I have also seen, and blogged about. One item that he doesn't mention that somewhat startles me is the evidence that at least part of global warming is because solar output has increased. I am also a little surprised that he doesn't mention that Mars is also suffering from global warming--and this isn't so current that he couldn't have included it. One point that Crichton makes that I have not seen mentioned, is that if this is truly a global phenomenon, it is rather odd that the United States, on average, is showing almost no increase. Yet we have the longest dataset of temperatures for a large area, and we are also the nation supposedly making the biggest contribution to global warming. Is all the carbon dioxide immediately exiting our borders, leaving us alone? It seems unlikely. I did find the heroes of State of Fear a bit too smart, a bit too fearless, and a bit too brilliant--perhaps they are what Michael Crichton would like to be, if we were an international man of mystery. The Hollywood set and professional environmental lawyers that Crichton sketches for us, however, are very realistic characters, and remind me much of the fabulously rich set that I used to work with in California--people who confuse being able to make millions of dollars in telecommunications with being well-informed about science and the environment. I've had too many conversations like the ones in this book, with people who worship nature, and "traditional cultures"--with no awareness of what either really is. I can see why Laurie David (one of the Gulfstream Liberals) read State of Fear, put on the shoe, and realized that it fit her foot far too well. Most people, if they know who Fraser is, know him as the author of the Flashman novels. Quartered Safe Out Here is his memoir of his years in the British 14th Army, fighting the Japanese in Burma. As he makes very clear at the beginning, this is not a history of the war; it is his personal experiences, the things he saw, felt, and experienced. It is not a Politically Correct book by any stretch. He tells you how he felt about the Japanese, about the way in which they were willing to die and kill, and he clearly believes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified by both Japanese atrocities, and by the need to save lives, both Allied and Japanese. Much of it is rather somber, as you might well expect. People die in war, and people died around him. He describes war crimes--including the execution of unresisting, unarmed Japanese prisoners. It has its funny moments, however, such as his description of falling into a well during one battle--and being unable to get out. A riotously funny section describes what happened when he was directed to deliver an anti-tank weapon to what can only be called a usefully deranged British Army officer fighting guerilla warfare against the Japanese upriver. The only weak point of the book is that he reproduces the Cumbrian dialect of most of his fellow soldiers. (The British Army still had regionally recruited regiments at the time, as did our Army, at the start of World War II.) Perhaps if I were English, I would this less of a struggle. Fraser does provide enough footnotes explaining Cumbrian dialectic peculiarities that I was able to muddle through just about everything. I can't claim to know a lot about the English Reformation--I mean, not at the level of detail that I know about American history. When I found this in a used bookstore, I decided that it would be good for me. Dickens is one of the acknowledged experts on the subject, and I suspect that unless you really, really want to know a tremendous amount about this, you are going to find this book a bit more detailed than you want. The writing is what I consider pretty typical of an older generation of academic historians. While The English Reformation isn't awash in the trendy jargon that makes some of the recent history journal articles unreadable, it isn't quite as crisp or popularly written as it could be, or should be. Dickens writes unnecessarily complex sentences--long enough that you sometimes find yourself moving back to the start of the sentence to remind yourself of his point. More obviously, Dickens needs to spend a bit more time hitting ENTER; paragraphs sometimes run most of a page. I don't know enough about the existing secondary work (much less the primary sources) to make any meaningful judgments about how fair Dickens is to the various perspectives about the different disputes in the field. My impression, however, is that Dickens has tried to present not only his views, but to make sure that other perspectives are given a fair shake. One aspect that I found quite startling is that Dickens, without embarrassment, is a Christian. He is clearly a bit more liberal in his theology and politics than I am, but it is a rather pleasant surprise to find someone who is able to write a history of the struggles that led to the rise of Protestantism without feeling a need to engage in polemical attacks on the Catholic Church, on the Protestant reformers, or Christianity in general. Dickens is quite willing to tell you the darker sides of some of the players--but the portraits he draws are still subtle. Even fanatics often have a human side of mercy and concern--and even those figures that Dickens finds distasteful still receive a treatment that conveys their complexity. Labels: global warming End Times Lunatics In Charge of Nuclear Weapons No, no, not Bush and friends. Charles Krauthammer's Washington Post column today is sobering and worrisome--because what Iran is obviously preparing to do will lead to the first combat use of nuclear weapons since 1945. As you doubtless know, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denies that the Holocaust happened: To be sure, Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's destruction are commonplace in the Middle East. They can be seen every day on Hezbollah TV, in Syrian media, in Egyptian editorials appearing in semiofficial newspapers. But none of these aspiring mass murderers are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do: destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.Confidence inspiring, isn't it? If Iran launches missles at Israel (which is really a very small target), I think we can safely assume that Israel's response is going to be rather like Samson bringing down the Temple of Dagon. Israel isn't much influenced by world opinion, anyway (and with good reason), and knowing that there's probably not going to be much less of Israel afterwards but smoking, radioactive ruins will reduce their concern about what their enemies think of Israel even more. I know that for a lot of leftists, there is something fundamentally wrong about denying Holocaust-denying, terrorist supporting governments like Iran the possession of nuclear weapons. There are worse things than intefering in the internal affairs of Iran--like watching 40-50 nuclear weapons blow up over Israel, Iraq, the Palestinian National Authority (or whatever you call that open ward), and Syria. Labels: terrorism Okay, Radio Experts It turns out that the road from Boise to our new house has no cellular phone service right now, and probably not in the near future. There's also no landline phones in that stretch, either. So, what's the alternative? I know that the Family Radio Service radios are supposed to be mile range or less. I also know that some people report getting a range of several miles or more from them. Are they line of sight only? Recommendations on FRS radios to use for a range of ten miles or so? Drunk Driving Laws Instapundit links to Max Borders' Tech Central Station column about why our DUI laws are antiquated and "it’s time to rethink them from bumper to bumper." Borders' argument is that determining someone is drunk based on blood alcohol level (BAC) is wrong--because there's a lot of variation in how much alcohol impairs driving ability. There's no question about this fact. Very heavy drinkers, as with most abusers of intoxicants, develop a tolerance. It is entirely possible that an alcoholic can drive as well at .08% BAC (where the law in just about every state declares that you are DUI) as someone like myself could drive at .02% BAC. (I have the equivalent of a couple drinks a year.) Borders suggests that rather than rely on BAC, which isn't a perfect linear determinant of how impaired one is, we should make use of portable driving simulators instead: My tentative suggestion would be a portable driving simulator. If we train fighter-pilots and astronauts on sims, why not test drivers with them? In fact, there are all sorts of computer programs sitting on servers at different universities around the country, not to mention in for-profit companies. There are programs for everything from learning to drive an eighteen wheeler, to -- eureka -- testing people’s driving abilities under the influence. There are several problems with this. Cost is one; if we were starting from scratch, driving simulators might not be any more expensive than breathalyzers and BAC tests. But we aren't starting from scratch. A second problem is that, to put it bluntly, there are people out there who completely sober wouldn't pass those driving simulators. Do we make failure to pass evidence that you are driving impaired--even if you haven't had a drink? There might be an argument for this--but it is also an argument for considerably restricting the issuance of driver's licenses, too. A third problem is that you have some real possibility of knowing how much you have had to drink, but not how impaired you are. There's a lot of materials in driver's manuals now that help you to understand how many drinks will get you to a potentially unlawful BAC. You have some notice of what constitutes an unlawful act when it is tied to BAC; when the question is how much you are impaired, that's a much more subjective issue. I think it is only fair that if you are at risk of being charged with a fairly serious crime, that you have some objective way of determining whether you are about to break the law. BAC is pretty objective. Borders makes the point that BAC rather than the judgment by a police officer that you are DUI, prevents the problem of unequal justice. This is, unfortunately, a major point in favor of BAC (for all its faults)--and Borders just moves onto the portable driving simulator idea. If there is anything that this society needs less of, it is police officers making subjective judgments, both because police officers are human, and prone to certain prejudices, and because we have way too many lawyers looking to find police officer prejudices, whether they are present or not. My biggest argument with Borders, however, is his assumption that very low BAC levels aren't a problem: This will be a marginal improvement over rules yielding incidents like the one involving Debra Bolton who was arrested for a BAC of just .03 (that is, a single glass of wine). Allegedly Mrs. Bolton had forgotten to turn on her headlights, and the police pulled her over. But it is not clear that failing to burn one’s lights is probable cause for suspecting impairment. (Most of us forget from time to time. It doesn’t mean we’re drunk.)You don't have to be falling down drunk for alcohol to impair your driving performance. Back in the 1980s, Car & Driver magazine did an experiment when they administered measured quantities of alcohol to their drivers, then had them drive cars through a slalom course. Only one of their drivers managed to get even to the .05% BAC level before vomiting or becoming too sleepy to continue--and this was in daytime. (Back then, California's DUI definition was .10% BAC; from .05% BAC to .10% BAC, the officer needed other evidence that your driving was impaired to charge you with DUI.) Yet every one of the drivers recognized that they were dangerously impaired at levels far below .05% BAC. One place that I used to work celebrated firmware releases with champagne. I had about half a glass (my alcohol consumption for the quarter, I think). I waited about 30 minutes before driving home. Based on my weight, my BAC was perhaps .01%--certainly not more than .02%. Yet within about five minutes of getting on the road, I realized that I was not driving up to my standards of competent driving. I pulled off the road, reclined my seat, and dozed for about a half hour until I no longer felt impaired. There are a lot of people out there who can probably drink more than I can, and drive just fine--people for whom even a couple of glasses of champagne or a couple of beers won't reduce their ability to respond quickly to the complexities of driving. But a lot more typical is a young man that I worked with, long ago, who insisted one night, several drinks in, that he could drive better drunk than most people can drive sober. The person whose bravado tells them that they can drink several drinks, and still drive well, is also the sort of person who would be convinced that they will pass the portable driving simulator. It takes very little alcohol--as little as one drink, for most people--to take 10% or more off their reaction times--and to put it bluntly, most people can't afford to lose anything from their driving skills. Thursday, December 15, 2005
This Isn't Necessarily A Reflection on Embryonic Stem Cell Research Unfortunately, there's more fraud in the sciences than most people realize (the stories that some of my readers tell me!)--this isn't just a problem in the social sciences: The scientist who led the world in pioneering human cloning faked much of the data for his landmark research into embryonic stem (ES) cells, one of his close collaborators said today.Some people have ethical concerns about the use of embryonic stem cells. My concern is where it could lead, and the bigger problem that justifying abortion is causing a lot of people to bang the drum for embryonic stem cell research in preference to adult stem cell research--which, to my knowledge, has never caused any ethical concerns. Labels: abortion I Do Wish The Left Would Listen To Third World People More From, shockingly enough, a BBC report on the Iraqi elections: Iraqis are known for their spontaneous, and often poetic eloquence.And believe me, as soon as that point is reached, we're outta there! Stunning Expression of Idealism and Patriotism He was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in China. Tomorrow, he will be a 2nd lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps: But living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I've seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I've been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I've been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I've been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company's sale of nuclear fuel to other countries.Wow. There were a lot of people who joined the military in the days after 9/11, motivated by this same idealism and patriotism, people like Pat Tillman who had a bright future ahead of him--and people without his prospects. (If I hadn't been too old at the time, I would have done the same. My job evaporated within a couple of weeks of 9/11, anyway.) "Let us now praise great men...." House Project: A Little Surprise On The Financing I was led to believe that the $900 I was paying for a retroactive loan rate lock meant that I would be paying 4.625%. Noooo! It's actually 4.375%--knocking the payment down from about $1233 a month to $1198.29 a month. Labels: house project New Mexico Now Recognizes My Florida Carry Permit I knew that New Mexico gun rights activists were working on getting New Mexico to recognize permits issued by other states, but when I wasn't looking, they made it happen! The following is a list of state permits that will be recognized in New Mexico effective 11-30-05 as authorized by New Mexico Statute 29-19-1 through 29-19-14, 2003 as amended.I have a Florida permit, so there are now 34 states where I may carry concealed. Wisconsin About To Pass Non-Discretionary Concealed Carry Bill Governor Doyle vetoed a similar bill a while back, and has threatened to do so again. Sponsors keep making concessions to get 2/3 of each house willing to override the veto: Madison - Republican leaders in the state Assembly worked into early this morning to amend a measure that would allow Wisconsin residents to carry concealed weapons and rounded up enough Democratic support to fuel an override of the expected veto from Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.I can't really see any strong argument for the refresher training course, or for making a false application into a felony. (Don't we have enough felonies already? A felony used to be a serious crime.) The "school safety zone" is absurd, but if it gets the bill passed, I can't complain. Requiring you to be completely dead sober to carry a gun? I've long argued that guns and alcohol (or any other piece of dangerous machinery and alcohol) don't mix, so I'm not going to get upset about this. House Project: Good News & Bad The bad news yesterday was--no water! It turned out that the circuit breaker that was feeding power to the well pump was bad, and we haven't filled the water tank to the top in some months. Good news is that the counter depth refrigerator is in place, as are the washer and dryer. The refrigerator needs a hose to connect the water supply to the ice maker, but that's a pretty trivial operation.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Unfortunately, the washer and dryer were a little taller than specified--so the counter that the builder put in to just clear them wouldn't. The builder and the appliance delivery guys removed the top covers from both, and then they fit. I'm still not completely happy with this, and I think we are going to have him raise the counter an inch or two to clear the washer and dryer with the tops in place.  Click to enlarge The builder and I worked together on getting the Jenn-Air cooktop switched over from natural gas orifices to LP gas orifices. LP gas is denser, and has more energy in it, so you use smaller orifices for the cooktop. There's some interesting aspects to this cooktop. Click to enlarge The left side (in this picture)  Click to enlarge is a grill, with a little drain hole and a container to capture falling fat. The left side is a conventional two burner setup. The grill side, however, pops out in a matter of seconds (assuming that it is cool) to put a two burner setup in its place. The cooktop came with the spare two burner setup. I'm not sure how often we will use it, but it is a nice capability to have. The cooktop has a downdraft exhaust in between the burners that sucks all the smoke and smell down, and vents it to the outside of the house. You can turn it on manually, and it turns on automatically when you start the grill. Best news of all: Frontier Telephone insists that their DSL qualification tests indicate that they can give me DSL out there in the boonies. The real test, of course, is what happens when they run the line up the hill, and we try to sync up with the DSL access multiplexer at the other end of the wire. This is really good news, because the data rate will almost certainly be better than my wireless and satellite options--making winter telecommuting practical. All the inspections are supposedly complete, so we should have a certificate of occupancy shortly. Another view of the end panel of the jetted tub so that you can get access to the motor, if need be. Getting all the trim pieces to look just right is a source of irritation to my wife, and probably beyond that to our builder.  Click to enlarge The builder had to move the window sill a bit to handle the kitchen sink faucet. Here it is just lying in place:  Click to enlarge Final result:  Click to enlarge Garbage disposal installed:  Click to enlarge The interior of the dishwasher--yes, that's stainless steel:  Click to enlarge The extra fluorescents in the garage are installed:  Click to enlarge I mentioned that it looked like the plumber had been beamed up in the middle of the project the other day. This is what I meant:  Click to enlarge The master bathroom vanity still was lacking mirrors Wednesday night, but I think this has been fixed:  Click to enlarge Last house project entry. Labels: house project Christmas Prohibited in Federal Housing Project? I would like to see a bit more coverage of this dispute from another source, but it does not seem particularly implausible, in light of the reasoning behind a public library ordering its employees to not wear religious symbols. Scared bureaucrats go out of their way to avoid tangling with the ACLU--or even what they perhaps incorrectly perceive as what the ACLU might do: Managers in charge of two federally subsidized housing facilities have told residents in one case they cannot sing Christmas carols, and in another they can't decorate their own entry doors with religious symbols, according to a religious-liberty law firm. The Thought Police Are Calling... There are some ideas just too dangerous to express, it seems: AN AUTHOR has defended her right to free speech after expressing her views on gay adoption.There's an element of intimidation when you have to justify to the police why you have made a statement about what should or should not be public policy. Of course, that's the goal, isn't it? Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Where The "Chilling Effect" Takes You At least as far back as Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (1962), the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the position that certain actions that might otherwise be lawful will have a "chilling effect" on the exercise of Constitutional rights. The case in question involved the Florida legislature demanding the membership lists of the NAACP, supposedly to look for evidence of Communist infiltration. The Supreme Court decided that: The strong associational interest in maintaining the privacy of membership lists of groups engaged in the constitutionally protected free trade in ideas and beliefs may not be substantially infringed upon such a slender showing as here made by the respondent. ... While, of course, all legitimate organizations are the beneficiaries of these protections, they are all the more essential here, where the challenged privacy is that of persons espousing beliefs already unpopular with their neighbors and the deterrent and "chilling" effect on the free exercise of constitutionally enshrined rights of free speech, expression, and association is consequently the more immediate and substantial.I agree--especially since this was in an era and place where being a member of a group like the NAACP wouldn't just get you some impolite remarks at the supermarket, but perhaps a night visit from the KKK--who tended not to stop at impolite remarks. Chilling effects work in other forms, as well. Professor Volokh points to a recent case in Kentucky, Draper v. Logan County Public Library, 2005 WL 3358686 (W.D. Ky. Aug. 29), where a public library adopted rules for its employees that seem absolutely bizarre, first prohibiting offensive T-shirts (constitutional, and probably even a good idea, considering what some people wear to work): But then the library changed the policy to prohibit religious ornaments as well, and applied it to bar an employee from wearing a cross on her necklace. (Obviously the same policy would also ban stars of David and other religious symbols.) The library's justification? "[T]he policy is necessary to protect librarian impartiality on issues that could be the subject of patron inquiry," and "the policy is required to avoid the appearance of religious favoritism and to avoid violating the state's duties under the Establishment Clause."This impartiality claim is bizarre in its own right, but where did this concern about the Establishment Clause come from? I've mentioned before the insanity of the situation in California. One December, when my daughter's elementary school class was singing holiday season songs, she suggested "Silent Night." The teacher's response? "That would be illegal." The schools encouraged kids to bring books from home to read during what was called "free read time." (They were trying to encourage kids to read for pleasure--what a concept!) A friend's son brought a book for free read time--and the teacher told him not to bring that book to school again. It was not allowed. What was it? Something obscene? A violent comic book? No, a Bible! What is going on here? The ACLU, to my knowledge, has never filed suit to prevent kids from bringing Bibles to school, or to prohibit the singing of a religious song at school. (But if you find me an example, I wouldn't be surprised.) I can't imagine them filing suit claiming that a librarian wearing a cross constitutes a violation of the establishment clause--even though the ACLU has an extreme and ahistoric understanding of it. What has happened is the chilling effect. Bureaucrats are in terror of lawsuits by the ACLU, and with good reason. The ACLU filed suit against Adams County, Ohio schools for having the Ten Commandments on public property--and after they won, the ACLU demanded $80,000 in legal expenses from the district. So what happens when a question comes up like this? It is far easier for a bureaucrat to say, "Look, I don't know if allowing our employees to wear crosses at work, or allowing a student to bring a Bible to class, or allowing a Bible Club to meet at recess, is really an establishment clause problem or not, but I'm not going to take any chances on this." There is a pressing need for the Supreme Court to draw some clear lines on this--lines that end this chilling effect where bureaucrats impose absurd rules as a way to avoid expensive lawsuits that they fear (and perhaps with good reason) might be filed by the ACLU. UPDATE: Bureaucrats are notoriously paranoid of suit, and not just from the ACLU. When I lived in California, a friend worked as a security guard for the local drug store. The store also developed film. One set of rolls seemed to consist entirely of the rear ends of little girls leaning over on a school yard. The film developer asked my friend John his opinion--and John didn't see that they were unlawful--just creepy. John made a point of seeing who came to pick up the pictures, however. A few days later, John goes over to the elementary school where his daughter and mine attended. He sees Mr. Creepy on the edge of the playground--taking pictures of the little girls' rear ends. Remember that in California, there are signs warning visitors to go to the office before entering the grounds--otherwise, you are trespassing. John is a big guy--about 6'5", and built like a football player. He grabs Mr. Creepy by the arm, and says, "We're going to the principal's office." John tells the principal what Mr. Creepy has been doing, and about the rolls of film that Mr. Creepy has been dropping off for developing. The principal's first concern isn't about Mr. Creepy and his interest in prepubescent rear ends--it is, "John, you didn't force this guy to come to the office, did you?" John is not an employee of the school district. He isn't operating under any orders from the principal. The principal is more concerned that Mr. Creepy is going to file a lawsuit against the school for what John did than why Mr. Creepy is taking these pictures. Mr. Creepy now starts to make explanations. He is working for an architectural firm. That's why he is taking pictures at the school. "What architectural firm?" He doesn't remember their name. Or their phone number. He declines to see if he can find them in the phone book. There's no architectural work planned at this elementary school. And still, the principal is more concerned about smoothing Mr. Creepy's ruffled feathers--even though, to hear John tell it, Mr. Creepy is acting more like he wants to get out of and there disappear. House Project: Local Market Insanity I've been pressing my builder to get this house complete--and I asked him why the electrician is taking so long to complete what should be a few hours of work. "He's doing about twelve other houses right now, including one that's about 10,000 square feet." I went up last night, and the plumber had started several tasks, and completed none of them--which means that there is no running water anymore. The cooktop is in place--but not completely assembled. My wife suggested that when it gets to be 5:00 PM, it must be like the quarry that Fred Flintstone worked in--you pull the tail on the bird, and everyone runs out of there. My builder worked for UC Irvine in the mid-1970s, and he tells me that the local housing situation around here is beginning to remind of how things were in Southern California at the time. "Blue-collar workers I knew were paying $1000 to buy options on houses, which seemed just insane. Within a few months, they were selling those options for $10,000." The housing market is certainly cooling on the coasts, but it still seems to be running in full bore insane mode here in the Boise area. Last house project entry. Labels: house project Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Boise Bloggers The Idaho Statesman has an article about Boise-based bloggers here. They seem to get everything correct--and their list of Boise bloggers at least includes me. Chronicles of Narnia I saw this last night. I never read the C.S. Lewis books, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew that these were a very popular series aimed at kids, and I knew that they were clearly intended as Christian allegory. My overall reaction? Great film for the kids. I suspect that most adults will respond to the movie based on whether they read the C.S. Lewis books as a child or not. I know that the group of co-workers that I went with enjoyed it immensely; I found myself occasionally thinking, "This is dragging a bit." The special effects were cool--especially when the witch freezes people. Not quite as good as The Fellowship of the Ring (to which many people will doubtless compare it), but still okay. The dialog was reasonably clever. The opening sequences, where we see the children being evacuated out of World War II London to a country home really reminded me of how rapidly that period and its fashions are receeding into history. Forty Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2005 There are some real gems here--items that tell us an awful lot about how deeply some people can get their foot in mouth. I guess my favorite is this example of heterophobism: 35) "As a matter of fact, I was talking to my friend Laura, who sings on the record, and we're both getting to the point where we want to start families. We're convinced that if we have children, we're going to do everything in our power to make them gay. Like maybe drinking a lot of extra soy milk while she's pregnant, or anything that would work to make that happen. I'd just rather have a really sharp, interesting, smart gay son than some big dumb hetero meathead." -- MobyIf you want to know what drives a straight person like Moby to make remarks like this, go read Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The "Radical Chic" section is a discussion of when Leonard Bernstein threw a big fundraising party for the Black Panthers, inviting in New York's rich white liberals for an evening of overcoming their guilt. One of the reasons that our society never seems to make a clean transition away from leftist delusions about wealth is that every time the government suffers a temporary episode of sanity, and allows liberalization of the marketplace, we get this enormous burst of wealth production--and multimillionaires (and their often useless spawn) have to overcome their feelings of guilt by funding all sorts of deranged leftist groups. Of course, overcoming feelings of guilt is the positive view of what drives this. A more cynical explanation is that wealthy people, having reached that stage, push for laws that make sure that no one else gets to their level. After all, it wouldn't be so much fun at Aspen and Sun Valley if everyone could afford to go there, would it? As some clever person put it a while back, places like Sun Valley and Aspen are where real estate prices are such that the billionaires are driving out the millionaires. Monday, December 12, 2005
Rough & Ready Stroke Test: Not An Urban Legend The vast majority of desperately important stuff that gets forwarded to me is either wrong (the Bin Laden family did not get special dispensation to fly after 9/11) or woefully out of date (Congresscritters have been paying Social Security taxes for a couple of decades now). A new item just arrived--and to my shock and amazement, the snopes.com website confirms that it is legitimate: During a BBQ a friend stumbled and took a little fall - sheIt isn't a perfect test, but if someone suddenly starts to act oddly, and they fail any of these tests--and they haven't been drinking like a fish--it seems like a pretty good idea to get them to the emergency room, pronto, for further evaluation. Remember the Twilight Zone Episode With The American Officer Who Suddenly Turns Japanese? It's a memorable episode about a gung-ho Army officer, prepared to engage in a needless slaughter of Japanese soldiers in the closing days of World War II. He drops his binoculars--and when he picks them up, he is a Japanese officer ordering his men to attack U.S. soldiers holed up in a Philippine cave, two years earlier. Cary Tennis over at Salon is making noises that seem strangely familiar to me, from the early 1990s: At a certain point in the near future, if the current oligarchy cannot be removed via the ballot, direct political action may become an urgent and compelling mission. It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line. For the moment, however, although pressing and profound questions have arisen about whether the current government is even legitimate, i.e., properly elected, there still remains a chance to remove this government peacefully in the 2008 election. (Or am I living in a dream world?)One obvious difference is that we didn't have access to the news media back then. We still only have one friendly network, Fox News--and people like Cary Tennis still have the majority of news organizations on their side. Another large difference is that we did, finally, in 1994, change the composition of both houses of Congress. Why? Because in spite of the news media's overwhelming support for what Bill Clinton was doing, enough of the population became troubled by Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the federal assault weapons ban to say, "Wait a minute! Something is wrong here." Tennis's faction still controls the major news media--and in spite of all their efforts, they have failed to get a majority of their side. The most amusing difference, of course, is that the same crowd that has been working overtime to have the government disarm the masses is now making noises that imply violent overthrow of the government. What are they going to use? Super Soakers? House Project: Appraisal I'm a little disappointed. The appraisal came in at $300,000. Since the appraiser agreed with me that the land alone was worth at least twice the $55,000 we paid for it, this tells me that the $250,000 or more that we have put into improvements (septic, well, road) and building a house is now worth less than $200,000. I guess that I am going to have to assume that the appraiser is making a very conservative appraisal, because of the very thin market for houses in our area. (We are, after all, almost a half hour drive from one of the hottest housing markets in the U.S. right now.) Anyway, that means that I can't really finance more than $240,000 without paying PMI, so I have started to transfer some money over from my brokerage account to cover the discrepancy between the construction costs and what I will be financing. Last house project entry. Labels: house project Sunday, December 11, 2005
An Interesting Boring Entry It's interesting, of course, because I'm writing it, but it is about the use of tools to bore holes. I am starting on development of a new caster assembly for a somewhat more popular mount than the Losmandy--and instead of inserting inside the tripod legs, it goes on the outside of the legs--so instead of turning cylinders down to a size, I have to bore out a cylinder to accept legs of a certain size. The right way to do this is with a boring tool. (I thought of starting with a thick walled tube. For a variety of reasons, this doesn't really work very well.) A boring tool is essentially a sharp blade that plugs into the tool holder on a lathe going straight into the center of the workpiece. As you turn the workpiece, the boring tool cuts material; as you move the cross-slide, the boring tool cuts a larger and larger diameter hole. (If you have no idea what a lathe is--click here to see a diagram of a typical lathe.) Anyway, I think it is not a coincidence that "boring" describes both the tool and the process. I have read a great deal about this process as part of my research into early American gun making. Gun makers would weld strips of steel (known as "skelps") together by wrapping them around a rod in a red-hot state, and then repeatedly hammering them together. I gather this involved repeatedly dipping the skelps into the fire and repeating. This welding process didn't always work, and even into the early 19th century, it was considered okay for 13% of the barrels to fail "proof test," where they put a big gun powder charge in and fired it. The next step was boring the barrel--rather like what I am doing with the boring tool, but instead of an electric motor, the boring tool was turned by a water mill, by horses walking in a circle and turning a wheel, or by sheer human effort. The process was very physically demanding--I recall reading about a girl of about ten who had been apprenticed by an orphan's court to a gunmaker, and she was petitioning to be moved to a less physically demanding apprenticeship. I would expect that anyone working on the barrel-welding or boring processes probably made the guy who models for the Bowflex TV commercials seem like the "before" picture. It appears that boring (at least with a lathe of this horsepower) is a much slower process than turning the outside of a cylinder. The workpiece is large enough diameter that the three-jaw chuck doesn't hold it in place securely enough unless I take very, very light cuts--resulting in the workpiece launching itself across my garage with considerable velocity, but fortunately, little energy. (I have learned by experience to stand out of the line of fire, and no, it didn't really hurt much.) Anyway, there are two real tricks to doing this right: 1. I need to rough out the hole (which is going to be 1.390" ID) with a large drill bit first in a drill press. This means that I need to find a 1.25" or so drill bit that fits into a 3/8" chuck, and then use the boring tool to take the remaining 0.14" of material away. (Maybe I will get lucky, and find a 1.375" drill bit--this would turn the boring tool operation into 0.015" to remove.) 2. I need to find a better way to hold the workpiece. I have been drilling and tapping a 3/8"-16 hole in one end of the workpiece, and then using a small diameter holder with a 3/8"-16 bolt in the center to hold the workpiece. I started doing this so that I could turn the entire length of the workpiece in one smooth motion--only the holder is in the jaws. However, it turns out that the closer the jaws are together, the more securely they hold the material. My solution (not quite done yet) is that the jaws screw onto a 3/4"-16 male thread on the headstock. I have taken a piece of aluminum, bored it to 0.6875", then tapped it with a 3/4"-16 tap. (I don't have a tap wrench large enough to hold it--but I discovered that using an adjustable wrench and being very careful when I started it allowed me to do a fine job of accurately tapping the hole.) (See here if you are having trouble visualizing what a headstock is.) Now I have drilled and tapped a 3/8"-16 hole through this piece. I am still enlarging this hole so that I can get a 3/8"-16 socket head bolt in, and deeply enough recessed that I can then screw the entire assembly onto the 3/4"-16 male thread on the headstock. Once done, I will have something that holds the workpiece far more securely than the three jaw chuck. Assuming that I have centered and tapped the 3/8"-16 hole in the workpiece properly, the workpiece will be as accurately centered as if I had put it in the three jaw chuck. It Reminds Me of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia... It seemed that whenever they took someone out ("down the memory hole" as George Orwell would say), they had to put something else in that spot. Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's secret police chief, was replaced (not very well) with an entry on the Bering Sea. The DSM is the "Bible" of mental illness treatment. Over the years, quite a number of emotional problems have been removed from it. Homosexuality (at least, if you were happy with it), was removed in the mid-1970s, after a prolonged debate within the profession about it. A couple of years back, at the American Psychiatric Association conference in San Francisco, there was a debate about whether to remove some other sexual behaviors from the DSM: On Monday, May 19th, 2003 in San Francisco, at a symposium hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, several long-recognized categories of mental illness were discussed for possible removal from the upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.I blogged about this a couple of years ago--and how the parallel to what happened with homosexuality suggests that we are going to see the courts legalize child molestation in the same way that they overturned laws against homosexuality. (If you think I'm exaggerating--read this article that reads like satire, but isn't.) I received a few emails from people arguing that pedophilia shouldn't be considered a mental illness--just a crime. While I disagree with that point of view, I will confess that we don't have much consistency in how we distinguish mental problems from purely criminal acts. Exhibitionism is both a mental disorder in DSM (for the moment) and a crime--and a crime that we treat more seriously than rape. In most states, exhibitionists become registered sex offenders on conviction, and must notify the police every time they move--for life. I don't want guys running around exposing themselves in public, but I can tell you that a rapist is a far greater hazard to public safety than an exhibitionist. A garden variety rapist needs to be kept an eye at least as much as an exhibitionist--probably more. It is rather like our society regards rape as a natural act, but one that still needs to be punished, but exhibitionism regards as an unnatural act. Very peculiar. In any case, if the psychiatric profession wants to start removing from the definition of mental illness every weird little behavior that a majority doesn't like, then why are there psychiatrists proposing to add some new kinky behavior to the list? Once you see what the kinky behavior is, you won't be surprised: The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.I would actually agree that the guy who couldn't take a job because of his fear of having a gay co-worker has a serious emotional problem (or perhaps too much money in savings). But isn't this going just a little too far in the direction of a marvelous satire of Political Correctness? If DSM left it at those prejudices or biases that interfered with a person's daily life, I suppose that I wouldn't disagree that this is a significant emotional problem. I just have my suspicions that a vote at an APA convention would expand the definition of a "serious bias problem" to include the 60% of the population that does not approve of homosexuality. Here's a quote from the article that almost reads like someone wanted a real world example of "projection" (the tendency of a person with a serious problem to project it onto everyone else): "I don't think racism is a mental illness, and that's because 100 percent of people are racist," said Paul J. Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. "If you have a diagnostic category that fits 100 percent of people, it's not a diagnostic category."Speak for yourself Dr. Fink! "Prejudice" as a word means so many different things that it is almost meaningless. I can identify the following different attitudes, ideas, or beliefs that would fall into the left's catch-all definition of prejudice: 1. A person who hates or fears all members of group X--no exceptions. I don't know that I have ever met someone like this about race or ethnicity--although I know that such people exist. I have met people who hate or fear all gay men--and in every case, these were men who were sexually abused as children. (These are guys who think of me as a flaming liberal about homosexuality.) 2. A person who believes that members of group X have certain characteristics in common--but recognizes that there are exceptional individual members of race X: hence, "you are a credit to your race." There was a time when people actually said that--now it is only used as a comic line in fiction to discredit a character. 3. A person who believes that members of group X are more likely to have certain qualities or defects than the general population. This belief exists in an unadulterated positive form, "Asians sure are good at math!" It also exists in a positive form with a dark implication, "Jews sure are clever!" (implying that perhaps the intelligence is being used for nefarious purposes). There is also the negative form. "Blacks are violent." "Men are violent." What makes this category of prejudice especially complicated is that the stereotypes often have a grain of truth to them--members of group X may be disproportionately likely to engage in behavior Y. Most adults manage to figure out that these stereotypes, even if accurate, are only averages. My late father-in-law was (like a lot of men of his generation), pretty ferociously prejudiced. He would rant at times about blacks, Mexicans, and Jews--and often not using particularly pleasant terms. But he had worked with blacks and Mexicans quite well over the years, and his third wife was Jewish. He had been around long enough that even if he didn't like group X (as a whole), there were members of group X that were good and decent people, with whom he was quite willing to associate. The biggest problem with this category of prejudice is that sometimes, the costs of finding out if A, a member of group X, fits the negative stereotype of his group, are quite high. These negative stereotypes, if they actually describe a real behavior quirk, are often believed by members of group X as well. A few years back, I've read that a black man had a heck of a time hailing a cab after dark in DC. Yet I'm told that taxi drivers in Washington, DC were almost entirely black. A black man hailing a cab in DC was not likely to be a robber--perhaps a fraction of 1% of all black men were criminals--but the risk if you picked up one of that tiny fraction was enormous. I've written before about my own experience of seeing a woman almost running to get away from me--simply because I was a man, and therefore I was a member of a group that was twice as likely as the average to be a rapist. Prejudices like #1 should never be written into the law--and yet they often were. Prejudices like #2 and #3 should not be written into the law, either, simply because they (at best) reflect averages of group X--and our laws should apply only to individuals, not to group. At the same time, I am not happy when the government decides to punish people for holding prejudices like #3--especially when, as in the examples above, there may be substantial costs to pretending that these group averages have no meaning. (And yes, if that means that a daycare center decides to not hire members of group X because group X is disproportionately child molesters, so be it.) I don't doubt that people suffering from prejudice #1 above are probably very seriously emotionally disturbed people, and if the APA decided to add a definition to the DSM that included people with such severe prejudices, it would seem entirely appropriate. But I must confess with the way in which the APA swings back and forth about what constitutes mental illness (and seemingly more following fashion than science), I could easily see this definition of "pathological bias" expand to cover membership in the National Rifle Association, or regularly attending a church that doesn't ordain homosexuals. Labels: homosexuality The House Project: More Finishing Touches I know that a lot of my readers find this house project very interesting; I guess the rest of you are waiting for me to get this house complete, so that you can see my political and historical commentary instead. Believe me, I'm getting tired of this house project, too! It has consumed just about all my spare time for the last few weeks, and as we approach the end, it is gobbling even more time. The sequence is all beginning to jumble together a bit, but I think Thursday evening we went up there and discovered that to solve the problem of water pooling on the driveway apron, and then ending up in the garage, we know have a drain in the front.  Click to enlarge Supposedly there is a similar drain on the rear driveway apron, but I haven't thought to check. The motion detector exterior lights that met my wife's esthetic requirements are all in, and they definitely detect us driving up to the house. These lights are all on switches inside, so we can force complete darkness, complete light, or motion detector mode.  Click to enlarge On Friday, the counter guys finished putting the Silestone counters in place in the kitchen:  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge The builder discovered, as they were getting ready to cut a hole in the counter for the faucets at the kitchen sink, that he was going to have to raise the window sill a fraction of an inch. Even worse, Silestone is three centimeters thick--so the standard faucet attachment hardware isn't quite long enough. The plumber is having to hunt around a little for adapters to handle this.  Click to enlarge The cooktop is now integrated into its counter as well, although the heating guy still has to get everything connected up and working.  Click to enlarge The entry hall light fixture.  Click to enlarge The builder received a box of heating registers (the things that go into the heating/air conditioning vents in the floors), but Rhonda wasn't happy with the color--it went well with the color of the tile grout, but not with the tile, the carpet, or any of the rest of the interior color scheme.  Click to enlarge We found some registers that looked good with both tile and carpet, and then had to run around to two different Lowe's to get enough to finish the house.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Bathroom two at the far end.  Click to enlarge Bathrooms two and after the counters were installed, but the plumbing not yet done. |
