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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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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 ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 28, 2006
Hamas Wins Palestinian Elections This is disturbing, especially because of the ties between Hamas and Iran. Imagine the following sequence of events (a worst case scenario): 1. Hamas continues its unofficial attacks on Israel. 2. Israel eventually says, "Wait a minute! You guys are the government now! This means war!" 3. Israel invades the Palestine National Authority's areas. 4. Iran tells Israel to withdraw, or get nuked. 5. Israel makes a lot of radioactive glass in Iran. This could get really ugly. On the other hand, Hamas might discover that it is easier to complain about the Palestinian National Authority than to make it work. I can't remember where I read it, but someone observed that Hamas was like the dog trying to catch a car--and now it has caught it. What will it do with it? I certainly see no reason for our government to keep subsidizing an operation that combined kinder, gentler terrorism with high-grade kleptocracy--especially now that the new party in power is committed to real terrorism. (I'm not sure that I saw a strong reason to subsidize before, except as a form of paying extortion to a bunch of thugs.) "The Criminal Will Just Take Your Gun Away From You And Use It On You" I used to hear this a lot from gun control advocates--especially for why women (you know, the weaker sex) shouldn't be encouraged to defend themselves with guns. Yet oddly enough, except for police officers (who have to get a lot closer to a criminal than you or I will ever need to do), it is extraordinarily rare for an unarmed criminal to take a gun away from a victim. On the other hand, this is not the first time that I have added an entry like this one to the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog--where the gun changes hands--and the criminal loses because of it: A man who was being robbed at a motel on Airpark Drive got the gun away from the young robber and held it on him until police arrived early Friday morning. ScopeRoller Keeps Expanding! I have completed the first set of caster assemblies for the Losmandy HGM Titan mount:  These are pretty substantial units, because the HGM Titan mount weighs well above 150 pounds, and can support 100 pound telescopes. The shelf that the tripod legs rest on is 1/2" Delrin--and that is pretty darn strong material. Labels: telescopes Friday, January 27, 2006
What Happened To The Democratic Party? That they lost the 2004 election to Bush--in the middle of a war that was being spun as, at best, a horrible mistake--says a lot about what has happened to the Democratic Party's base over the last generation. Ronald Reagan was at one time a liberal Democrat--heck, he was a union president--of the Screen Actors Guild. He once explained that he didn't leave the Democratic Party--the Democratic Party left him. Reagan wasn't the only traditional Democrat who felt the Party abandoned him. One of my readers has a blog that while it isn't exactly along my lines of interest, has a version of Reagan's "the Party left me": My late wife, Myrna, was ostracized in Woodstock, NY for her anti-feminist views, and because she respected and admired men. So, I’m quite familiar with the hysteria of the left. And the tactic was always the same… screaming that Myrna was chained to the oven and brutalized at home. Trouble with the theory was that Myrna was the training director of an international corporate law firm, a jazz and blues singer and a first rate intellect.My sympathies when I was growing up were vaguely liberal Republican. I went through a libertarian phase in the late 1970s and 1980s, because I thought a consistent ideology was very cool, and because it seemed an appropriate antidote to the rampant leftism that dominated where I lived in California. I'm a conservative now--but on a lot of issues, I'm not so terribly far from where I was in the early 1970s--it is just that "liberal" has turned into something utterly monstrous. Labels: abortion A Million Little Plaintiffs I mentioned recently The Smoking Gun's devastating analysis of James Frey's fraudulent book, A Million Little Pieces. At the time, I observed that as much as class action lawsuits are abused, there was an argument for them in a case like this: I do hope that some lawyer decides to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the buyers of his book against the publisher for lying to them. As much as I don't like the overuse of class action lawsuits, lying in publishing (and academia) needs to be brought into check.Of course, lawyers being lawyers, they had to go overboard. They could not just file class action lawsuits for the cost of the book. Ted Frank over at Overlawyered points out: Another class action over the James Frey affair; this one, in Seattle, seeks, inter alia, recovery for "lost time" spent reading the book, prompting the Bookslut blog to reconsider its opposition to tort reform. It is the third class action filed; an underpublicized class action was filed in California on the 13th, and we reported on the more prominent Illinois class action on Jan. 17. Of course, if "lost time" is actionable, everything is, and we might as well turn over the keys to the country to ATLA.ATLA is the Association of Trial Laywers of America--the group that makes a strong case for why there should be no hunting limits on lawyers. Technology To Make Your Head Spin This article reports on plans to test fly a Mach 19 aircraft next year: A Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle-1 (HTV-1) is now on the books for a less than one-hour flight in September 2007. Attaining Mach 19 (19 times the speed of sound), the glided air vehicle will briefly exit the Earth’s atmosphere and reenter flying between 19 and 28 miles above the Earth’s surface. This inaugural voyage of HTV-1 would end in the Pacific Ocean.Mach 19 is a bit more than 12,000 miles per hour. If you don't see the need for aircraft like that, you've never sat cramped in the middle of six across seating from Chicago to London for what seemed like eternity. Just think of it: Los Angeles to Australia in a couple of hours (because of time spent getting up to speed and slowing down); no more need for forward bases when bombing Osama bin Laden--from the U.S. to any part of the globe and back in two hours. Corrupting the Blogosphere It turns out that the Dutch tourism agency paid to have a bunch of bloggers to travel to the Netherlands: A disclosure statement at Bloggers in Amsterdam provides the details: free air travel, five nights in a choice of two five-star hotels, and a card that will get them free transportation, free entrance into Amsterdam museums and restaurant discounts. In return, the government of Netherlands gets premium advertising space on the participating blogs for one month, as well as the right to interview the bloggers after the trip and potentially use their comments in online or offline promotions.Now, some people see this as terribly corrupting. I agree--especially because I didn't get the invite. Satires on Google's Logo If you regularly use Google to search for things, you know that they often make clever little changes to the word "Google" on the search page--things like replacing the two "o"s in the middle of Google with Easter eggs for Easter. Michelle Malkin has been gathering satirical revisions of the logo related to Google's shameless pandering to China on censoring search engine results. Some of them are quite funny--especially the results if you search for "tiananmen square massacre". Make sure that you click over and look. Oh, if you don't know the significance of Dr. Evil and Mini-Me (two characters from one of Mike Myers' really vulgar comedies) in one of the screenshots: Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil." Thursday, January 26, 2006
Gun Safety Starts With You Or perhaps with your state legislator: A state lawmaker's handgun accidentally discharged in his office Thursday as he tried to unload it, sending a bullet zinging across the room.Your handgun safety lesson for the day. 1. Do not put your finger inside the triggerguard until you are ready to fire the gun. 2. If you need to unload the handgun, drop the magazine, retract the slide, and make sure that the chamber is empty. 3. Only then--after you have removed the magazine, racked the slide, visually verified that there is no cartridge in the chamber--do you have any reason to pull the trigger to drop the hammer. 4. Ask yourself: do I really need to be loading or unloading my gun in a public place? If you loaded it at home, you probably should not need to fiddle with the rest of the day. I'm told that accidental discharges by police are most common among those who have been officers for a few years--for the same reason that general aviation accidents tend to be somewhat more common among those with 1500 hours or so of flying, than among complete novices. It is a little too easy to get cocky with something that you have mastered. Don't be stupid, and don't be cocky. I Don't Think the "Evil Wal-Mart" Message Is Getting Through... I'm not a fan of Wal-Mart, Red China's arm for marketing generally poor quality junk. Still, I can get this amusement from this Chicago Sun-Times article, which should be causing labor union activists great misery today: Eighteen months after the Chicago City Council torpedoed a South Side Wal-Mart, 24,500 Chicagoans applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart opening Friday in south suburban Evergreen Park, one block outside the city limits.Yeah, Wal-Mart might not be a great place to work. Their health insurance system doesn't cover many of their works, and the ones it does cover apparently find it pretty expensive. But somehow, there were 25,000 people who found that there was a worse prospect than working for Wal-Mart. The only reason that Wal-Mart gets treated differently from Target and Costco is that they aren't a union shop. That's a lousy reason. Thanks to The New Editor and Instapundit for the pointer. UPDATE: A reader points out that Wal-Mart isn't the only non-union big retailer--but it is the biggest of them, and that makes them the target (instead of Target). Also, Wal-Mart Supercenters has been devastating in an area of retail that is, in some areas, heavily union: groceries. iPOD Shuffle Bug? My son got a deal on a new iPOD Shuffle. But when he actually downloads music into it--it won't play it. Even worse, even though this is only a 512 MB iPOD, after the download of songs, iTunes now claims it is a 30 GB iPOD. Hmmm. We are doing this on an eMachines PC running Windows XP I just bought for my wife--because iTunes won't run on my son's HP Pavilion running Windows ME--or rather, the PC just shuts down when he runs iTunes. Okay, we get the iPOD Updater program, and reset the iPOD to factory defaults. Now iTunes sees it having the right size. Download songs? Splat! So, my son calls Tech Support. They have him go replace it. The new one behaves identically. I'm thinking: 1. Is iTunes unable to run correctly under Windows XP? That seems most unlikely. 2. Is iTunes incompatible with the eMachines PC? That seems only slightly less likely. 3. Is there something about the music files that is the problem? This seems to happen with a lot of different music files. I've done a bit of digging through iPOD online documentation, and it suffers a bit from a problem that I have noticed for decades with Apple--documents that are more beautiful and sometimes clever than useful. I couldn't find anything that describes the problem. UPDATE: Problem solved. This sounds like it might be the cause. They Didn't Torture Him, However One of your sources of wasted time and grief just got hit hard: ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A man who sent billions of junk e-mails hawking online college degrees, sexually explicit Web sites and "generic Viagra" must pay more than $5 million in penalties to America Online, a federal judge ruled.As far as I am concerned, he should be sentenced to twenty billion hours of community service running SpyBot S&D and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware program, and updating spam filters on the computers of ordinary people. Then, we use the punishment from A Fistful of Yen. Oh yeah, time for the obligatory ACLU-smack: In an initial response to AOL's lawsuit, Smith's lawyers denied wrongdoing and questioned the constitutionality of the Can-Spam law.Had he been spamming child pornography, I'm sure that the ACLU would have considered taking his case. Iraqi Air Force Official Explains About The Missing WMDs Okay, he was only the #2 man in Saddam Hussein's air force, so perhaps he's just blowing smoke. Or perhaps it is because he has a new book out. But isn't it odd that this news story quoting Georges Sada and an Israeli general saying the same thing--is being ignored by the mainstream media? I mean, even if both these guys are lying, it's still news, unless you can prove them wrong: The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.He gives detail about when and how: Mr. Sada, 65, told the Sun that the pilots of the two airliners that transported the weapons of mass destruction to Syria from Iraq approached him in the middle of 2004, after Saddam was captured by American troops.The article goes on to quote a number of people that vouch for Sada's integrity, and points out that Sada is putting his life, and his family's life at risk with this: Short of discovering the weapons in Syria, those seeking to validate Mr. Sada's claim independently will face difficulty. His book contains a foreword by a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, David Eberly, who was a prisoner of war in Iraq during the first Gulf War and who vouches for Mr. Sada, who once held him captive, as "an honest and honorable man."The American left won't like it either, but their notion of retaliation is failing to invite you to their next wine and cheese party. As I have pointed out previously, Jordan confiscated 20 tons of chemical agents from al-Qaeda operatives planning to use them in an attack in the Jordanian capital. This report tells us that Jordan's government says the chemical agents were driven in from Syria--and that one of the agents, VX, was beyond Syria's ability to make--but Iraq had made VX in the past. This article from May 2, 2004 quotes an Israeli general: Israel's military chief told an Israeli newspaper there is "no doubt" that Iraq possessed both chemical weapons and the means to deliver them. In the first two days of the war, the United States -- acting on tips from Israeli intelligence -- destroyed the aircraft Saddam had prepared to carry chemical munitions, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said. The munitions themselves were buried, or transferred to other countries. You are not going to hear about this on NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, or NBC. I even doubt that you will hear it on Fox. You aren't going to read it in your daily newspaper. Why? If not for Michelle Malkin, I wouldn't have known. Labels: Iraqi WMDs Visualize Industrial Collapse Make sure you read this piece over at the Gates of Vienna. This is just a taste: This afternoon I made an expedition to the main library, and when I got to Charlottesville I discovered to my chagrin that the downtown area was clogged with traffic. A big banner hanging across Market Street informed me that the Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival was celebrating a healthy lifestyle for the ninth straight year, and as I fought to find a parking place I saw that Lee Park and the surrounding streets were filled with festival-goers.The Coalition supports the abolition of all technology, in order to live under something called "Anarcho-primitivism." It gets more disturbing. Hint: what has to happen to most of the Earth's population to live in the Stone Age? Sonoma County was awash in similar environmentalist nonsense. I recall hearing a conversation involving a bunch of bunny-huggers at the end of the Russian River discussing the then current bubonic plague outbreak in India. "Why can't these things happen in America?" There's a lot of this fierce anti-capitalist, pro-extermination mentality floating about the more fringe elements of the environmental movement. The only consolation is that the economic collapse that would come from their successes would force a lot of these multimillionaires to actually get real jobs. Canada: No Longer An Amusement Park I mentioned last year that it seemed as though the Canadian government thought it was running an amusement park--because it would not arm its border guards. It appears that the new Conservative government of Canada knows that they aren't running a amusement park called ToqueLand: VANCOUVER, CANADA -- A prominent member of Canada's incoming Conservative government said Wednesday that the party will stand behind its promise to arm border guards, a day after guards fled posts because two murder suspects were heading for the border from California. Anti-Male Bias in Schools The problem is real; boys are increasingly falling behind in the lower grades, and women are becoming disproportionately college students. There is, I think, a legitimate question as to whether the educational establishment went too far in its efforts to make girls feel comfortable with schooling--and may have unintentionally made boys feel unwelcome. Still, this lawsuit reads like a parody: It's not that girls are smarter than boys, said Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at the high school.Duh! As I have pointed out before, there has been a dramatic breakdown in the ability of children to go to school and behave themselves. This is true for both boys and girls. It may be more of a problem for boys, simply because boys are, on average, less prone to sitting still. But "sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say" describes a great deal of what you need to do to be successful in adult life, unless you are fortunate enough to end up fabulously rich in your 20s (as many people seem to do). This isn't evidence of discrimination, but of an outbreak of poor parenting. More Frauds Getting Published I mentioned recently another faux Indian publishing a "memoir" that turned out to be pure fiction. The Smoking Gun has a very detailed examination of James Frey's claims about his alcohol and drug destroyed life in A Million Little Pieces. Because Oprah's Book Club picked it up, he is now extremely rich--and a complete liar. It is worth reading in full just see how a careful investigation can expose such a complete fraud. If James Frey, by all accounts, a middle class kid growing up in an upper middle class home with all the benefits that go with this wants to write unpleasant fiction, that's certainly his right. But to pass it off as fact is fraudulent. I do hope that some lawyer decides to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the buyers of his book against the publisher for lying to them. As much as I don't like the overuse of class action lawsuits, lying in publishing (and academia) needs to be brought into check. There's certainly a place for fiction that is written in a form that pretends to be reality--but it still needs to be identified, somewhere, as fiction. Certainly, the author and the publisher shouldn't pretend otherwise. UPDATE: Let me point out that because The Smoking Gun quotes Frey's book repeatedly--and Frey in interviews--the language is quite raw. The ACLU and Unlimited Freedom of Speech A reader pointed me to this interview with Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU, in Reason in the early 1990s: Reason: What is the ACLU's position on the idea of extending the Fairness Doctrine to all media, including print? Should people be ensured of venues in which to express their views?Now, I can understand why the ACLU took the position that they did with respect to the Fairness Doctrine, and why they were beginning to move away from that position. Both are perfectly reasonable positions, depending on the context of the times and technology--but it isn't the unrestricted freedom of expression position that the ACLU now takes with respect to virtual child pornography, defending NAMBLA in a civil suit, or arguing that prohibiting an advocate of terrorism from working in the U.S. is censorship. Wednesday, January 25, 2006
How Americans Feel About NSA Wiretapping From a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics survey of Americans: By 58 percent to 36 percent, Americans think the president should have the power to authorize the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor electronic communications of suspected terrorists without getting warrants, even if one end of the communication is in the United States. Furthermore, six in 10 say they are personally okay with the NSA monitoring their international telephone calls.Okay, no surprise. Most Americans recognize that there is a war on, and that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you call someone overseas. But what I find interesting is this result of the poll: About half of the public (46 percent) attributes the absence of a terrorist attacks in the United States to the success of security measures, while 22 percent think it is more likely that no new attacks have been planned since 9/11 (20 percent say it’s some of both).Wait a minute: this isn't an "and" question. It is an "or" question. You can read it here: Do you think the absence of a terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 is more likely because U.S. security measures are working or no attacks were planned?If "no new attacks have been planned 9/11" then the absence of attacks isn't because of security measures. I would love to know what the breakdown of that 20 percent on these other questions! Pope Benedict's Encyclical He's got it half right: Pope Benedict XVI warned in his first encyclical Wednesday that sex without unconditional love risked turning men and women into merchandise.Unfortunately, while I completely agree that "sex without unconditional love risked turning men and women into merchandise" he seems to have neglected to mention the other side of this: expecting large numbers of men to be celibate their entire lives risks turning altar boys into catamites. The child molesting priests are a small minority of the Catholic clergy, but they have brought enormous shame on the Church, and caused enormous physical and spiritual damage to the children that they have taken advantage of sexually. The Church's eleventh century decision to require celibacy of all priests has created a bizarre situation where men who go into the priesthood must cut themselves off from what is a very core part of being human: the desire for sexual and romantic intimacy. This causes enormous problems--rather like telling people that they should not ever enjoy eating. I suspect that many of the priestly molesters were prone to that, and went into the priesthood in the hopes that it would cure them. I rather doubt that someone with completely normal adult desires became a molester because of the vow of celibacy. But I wonder if some of these horrible crimes might have been avoided if clergy were expected, as is the case in most other Christian churches, to marry, and stay married. Property Taxes Idaho is going through a big debate about property taxes right now. You can read some of the discussion in the Idaho Statesman. There are a number of problems, but what is clearly the driving force behind popular upset about rising property taxes is rising property values. The house that I bought for $238,500 in 2001 is worth somewhere between $350,000 and $400,000 today. I rather shudder to think what is going to happen to my property taxes the next time Ada County re-assesses it. Throughout Idaho, there are people in the same situation--but for whom a 25% increase in property taxes may be the final straw that forces them to sell their home, and move down. Remember: people who are in 35% marginal income tax brackets get to reduce their federal and state income taxes by 35% of the increased property taxes. People who are in 15% marginal income tax brackets only get to reduce their income taxes by 15% of the increase. Some of the proposals are obvious: increase the homeowner's exemption from $50,000 to $75,000 or $100,000. A person whose $80,000 house is now worth $120,000 will be spared the brunt of the increased valuation. (For those of you on the coasts--you can stop laughing now. A $120,000 house in many parts of Idaho is a perfectly nice place. For example, here's a $77,000 3 bedroom, 1 bath house in Burley.) Other proposals involve limiting how much school districts can increase taxes: Bills that will be considered next week include several introduced Tuesday, including a plan from Rep. Bill Deal, R-Nampa, to limit increases in property taxes that can be collected by schools for maintenance and operations.If this sounds similar to what happened in California in the 1970s with Propositions 13 (the Jarvis-Gann Spending Limit Initiative) and 4 (the Gann Initiative), well, yes, it is. I have long thought that Proposition 13 was a meat-axe solution which has produced some serious distortions in California government. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any other way to get the attention of the local and state officials in California. Special interest groups kept demanding more spending on their pet projects, and the majority was ignored until Jarvis and Gann whacked them with a 2x4 (or a 13x4, if you will). One of the core problems with rising property values driving up property taxes is that there is no direct relationship between property values and the cost of government services. My house has risen at least 47% in value since I bought it in 2001, and once the county re-assesses it, my property taxes will rise by the same percentage. But fire protection costs haven't risen by 47%. Police protection services haven't risen by 47%. The cost of providing sewer service hasn't risen by 47%. Doubtless, some of these costs have gone up a bit because of inflation--but most of the increase should have been in wages of government employees--not 47% in a little over four years. (Idaho government employees would be dancing in the streets if they had averaged raises of 10% a year.) Perhaps it is time to reconsider how we calculate property taxes? Instead of a fixed percentage of the assessed value of a property, government agencies should calculate the cost of providing services. Take the total budget of the fire department, and split it over the number of properties, with adjustments for building type. Obviously, a 10 story office building is a much greater fire protection cost than a one story residence. A one story commercial building with fire sprinklers everywhere and a fire exit within 30 feet of every workspace might have a much lower fire protection cost than either the multistory office building or a two story residence. I suspect that with a little bit of careful accounting, every year the fire department could look at what calls they actually made by building type, and adjust the fire protection tax for the following year. Police services work the same way. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that bars have more police service calls than houses of worship, and I suspect (although I don't know for sure) that retail establishments have more police service calls than wholesalers. (Shoplifters and armed robbers, for example.) At the end of the first year, the police department could use its service call record to figure out which businesses were the heavy users of police services, and adjust the police protection tax accordingly. There are certainly some services that are hard to attach to particular residences. Roads and schools are a common good--but it is certainly true that new roads and new schools are going to primarily benefit homes along those new roads and within that school district. In California, this would be an "impact fee" assessed against the developer (who depending on the elasticity of demand, passes on some, perhaps all the cost to the house buyer). Under my proposal, these costs would be assessed against the property owner. While the developer is still busy grading and building, he would get stuck with these costs. After he sells the house, the owner gets stuck with them. You may be asking, "Why break down fire protection and police costs by building type? Why not do it on a property by property basis?" One problem with this approach is that it discourages--I think too much--calling for fire or police protection in marginal cases. If you get woken up at 3:00 AM by what sounds like a door being forced open, I do not want someone to delay calling the police out of concern that it will increase property taxes next year by $900. Also, you might see landlords retaliating against tenants who called the police department. This is a revenue neutral proposal. I see no reason why it should alter the total revenue coming in, and perhaps there's still an argument for having a homeowner's exemption. But it would solve the problem of rising property values lifting property taxes. ACLU Hard At Work Interesting article about a new suit by the ACLU: NEW YORK (AP) - The ACLU sued the federal government Wednesday for blocking a Muslim scholar from entering the United States, arguing that the government should not use anti-terrorism laws as "instruments of censorship."Now, there's two questions here: 1. Does the government have the right to refuse a work visa for someone who espouses terrorism? 2. Is Tariq Ramadan in that category? If the ACLU's argument is that Tariq Ramadan has not endorsed terrorism, then that should be their argument--not that anti-terrorism laws are being used as "instruments of censorship." I suppose that there's a consistency by the ACLU on this--that all forms of speech are equally protected: child pornography; incitement to riot; and libel (at least of government officials and public figures). This is an ahistoric view of the First Amendment, and one that until quite recently, our courts have not accepted. Still, you do reach a certain point where you want to remind the ACLU, "You know, there's a war on at the moment." If item #2 above can be accurately answered in the affirmative, then there's no reason why our government has any legal obligation to allow a non-resident to come to the United States to promote terrorism. Daniel Pipes argues that the evidence is reasonably clear that Tariq Ramadan is in that category. Stephen Schwartz makes the same argument--and reports that Ramadan is still denying that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks. A legitimate argument might exist about whether Professor Ramadan promotes or encourages terrorism; only the ACLU would argue that our government is obligated to allow entry to enemies during wartime. I suppose that during World War II, if the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (a Nazi ally) had applied for a work visa for the United States, the ACLU would have sued on his behalf. (Yeah, when pigs fly.) More evidence that the ACLU is not primarily concerned with civil liberties: TAMPA - The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida urged the government Monday not to retry Sami Al-Arian, who was acquitted in December on eight counts of terrorism-related charges in a federal trial in Tampa. The jury hung on nine counts, with 10 jurors favoring total acquittal on all but an immigration charge.Here's the ACLU's press release--which suggests that this news account accurately portrayed their concerns. Now, it is a legitimate question as to whether to retry on the hung jury charges--but that isn't a civil liberties question. If Sami Al-Arian violated an immigration law, and there is enough evidence to justify taking him to trial, they should do so. There's nothing pointless or vindictive about retrying after a hung jury; it happens pretty often. Nor is there any reason to see trying Al-Arian has some sort of anti-immigrant conspiracy. There were specific concerns about Al-Arian and his fundraising activities; he wasn't indicted as "Towelhead #3." Spending millions of dollars of government money is something that the ACLU is suddenly concerned about? This from the organization whose "vindictive" suit against an Ohio school district for having the Ten Commandments out front demanded $80,000 from a poor rural school district. The cost of a new trial is an excuse. The ACLU is terribly afraid that our government might actually get a conviction of someone who, at a minimum, is strongly sympathetic to terrorists. A New Endangered Species Fairies. No, I'm not using the insulting term for homosexuals. A developer in Scotland has been forced to stop work because the local planning agency was concerned that the building would disturb the fairies: VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.Post-Christian Britain isn't necessarily secularist--more like neo-pagan. I fear that in another generation or two, The Wicker Man (1973) might not be fiction! I'm Just A Bit Incredulous It sounds like something out of James and the Giant Peach--or something that a Creationist might come up with the explain the presence of snails in remote places: LONDON (Reuters) - Land snails, not the quickest of creatures, managed to travel from Europe to remote islands in the South Atlantic by hitching rides on birds.The article first says "species" then later says "same genus," which makes me wonder if the writer of this article understands the difference. How, exactly, do snails not only get on a bird--but stay on it for more than one thousand miles? Seat belts? UPDATE: A reader says that it isn't the snails hitching a ride; it is snail eggs on the legs of the birds. I would expect that this would only work occasionally--maybe 1% of 1% of the time? But repeat a low probability event every year for millenia, and it will happen. Labels: intelligent design I'm Trying Hard To Be Appalled I'm not having any trouble being mildly amused--at least by the cleverness of those operating the soup kitchens: Charity groups with far-right links serving pork soup to homeless people face a crackdown by French officials.Yeah, this is definitely an attempt to make non-pork eaters (which realistically, means Muslims--how many homeless French Jews abide by kosher eating rules?) feel like outsiders. But it isn't as though this "Identity Soup" was something invented just to offend Muslims. Pigs have been part of French cuisine (and French politics) forever. Google Knuckles Under to China According to this report, Google has decided that making China's government happy is very important: Google announced that it is officially launching its services in China, a move that will require the Internet firm to subject itself to self-censorship.Now, remember, Google is refusing to cooperate with the U.S. government about providing statistical information about online pornography searches--which does not directly impair anyone's freedoms--but they are willing to cooperate with the Chinese government to censor political content. Hypocrites. I was wondering what I could do that would reflect my displeasure--and David Pinto got me thinking: I've removed Google AdSense from my website due to their agreement to censor searches in China.I decided to take a more precisely targeted approach. I have been using Google's AdWords service to advertise ScopeRoller products. No longer. I just sent them an email: I guess making China's government happy is really important to you. Fine. You don't need my money, then.I haven't turned off the AdSense service at the top of my blog--because that only takes money from Google, and doesn't put any of my money back in their pockets. UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg nails the hypocrisy of the left about the Department of Justice request for search statistics: The Department of Justice is in a lawsuit with the ACLU over the Child Online Protection Act, which is designed to help prevent kids from being exposed to online porn. The law ran afoul of the First Amendment, according to a lower court, and the Supreme Court asked for additional information pending its final decision on the matter. The Department of Justice asked Google, as well as MSN, Yahoo!, and Time Warner (AOL's parent), to provide data on their search engines from a one-week period. (The Associated Press scarily refers to the request as a "White House subpoena," as if the White House could actually issue subpoenas.) No personal information was asked for and none has been given. Everyone but Google complied, because there's really no reason not to. Google, however, sees itself in a very idealistic light and has decided to stand on principle against the government, prompting huzzahs from all the predictable sources. Global Warming It just keeps getting better: Europe's deadly freeze covers Acropolis in snow Labels: global warming Publishing Fraud There's a devastating article here about a guy who claims to be an Indian, but isn't. No, it isn't Ward Churchill. He wrote a novel about gay soldiers in Vietnam--and claimed to have been in Vietnam. No, it's not Professor Ellis. He's a writer who claims to be Navajo, with a bunch of published books that have been pretty clearly demonstrated to be fraud. He's not a Navajo; indeed, he has a WASP lineage that is almost as impressive as mine. Apparently, he was a prominent S&M gay writer--before getting kicked out of the movement--so he reinvented himself as an Indian who grew up in desperate poverty. The article is worth reading in full. At some point, publishers are going to have to start taking their obligations to integrity more seriously. House Project: Almost Done The phone was supposed to be hooked up by Frontier Telephone on Monday. Nope! The phone jack in the family room, which had unaccountably been missed by the electrician, is in. The jetted tub works great! Now I just need some clean filtered water. The drain along the rear garage door is in; the ditch is excavated along the front garage door, but the drain isn't in yet. Last night was clear--but when I rolled Big Bertha out, I soon remembered while I had been leaving it in the back yard. It takes a long time for the mirror to cool down to the outside temperature--especially when the garage is perhaps 45 degrees, and the air outside is 22 degrees. Perhaps, once I get moved up there, Big Bertha will stay outside under a tarp. Last house project entry. Labels: house project Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Idaho Marriage Constitutional Amendment I'm told that a marriage amendment to the Idaho Constitution has been introduced, and the first committee vote was 11-4, with Republicans Bob Ring of Caldwell (Dist. 10) and Janet Miller of Boise (Dist. 17) voting against, as well as two Democrats Elaine Smith of Pocatello (Dist. 30), and Ann Pasley-Stuart of Boise (Dist. 19). I'm not completely pleased with the language: MARRIAGE. A marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.I would have preferred something like: The authority to define marriage is reserved to the legislature and voters of Idaho.I have a strong objection to the judiciary deciding that they know better than the voters what the laws should be. If there is a genuine conflict with the federal or state constitution, fine, but the arguments used by judicial activists to impose same-sex marriage on the states are profoundly dishonest. I would strongly oppose the legislature recognizing same-sex marriage--but it seems clear to me that if they and the voters are that stupid, they have the right to do so. The judges do not have that authority--and that is why I would have preferred language that reserves this power to the legislature or voters. Many Democrats, and a fair number of Republicans, will use the excuse of "We shouldn't carve this in stone" to prevent this constitutional amendment from going before the voters. That's a pragmatic reason for a "reserved powers" amendment. If we can't get a "reserved powers" amendment through the legislature, I'm prepared to vote for this text above, because it at least prohibits state judges from imposing their will on the people. It just isn't optimal from a theoretical standpoint, or from a politically pragmatic position. You Really Should Visit This Blog Booker Rising is a conservative/moderate black blog--pulling some important and thoughtful quotes--sometimes from liberal black leaders who have enough courage to say things that need to be said: "The popularity of hip hop trades off on voyeurism, right? So you're watching something illicit in a keyhole. The white kids watch their sexual activity in the keyhole, and they go back to their rooms and do their algebra and go to Harvard. The black kids, somehow, are trying to crawl through the keyhole. What I'm trying to figure out is why our kids, metaphorically, want to crawl through that keyhole and embrace those modes of behavior as authentically black. It is killing our people. And it makes me sick." — Henry Louis Gates, Jr., liberal chair of the African and African American Studies department at Harvard UniversityThere's a lot of interesting stuff there. I'm adding it to my blogroll. Blood Pressure Everytime I give blood, they take my blood pressure and pulse. Most of the time, they do this after they have pricked the end of my finger to do the iron content test. This is dumb; my blood pressure, not surprisingly, seems to be pretty high as a result of the pain. Anyway, today they took my blood pressure and pulse before poking my finger. Pulse: 70. Blood pressure: 130/74. The systolic pressure (130) is still a bit higher than it should be, but as I understand it, the diastolic pressure (74) is usually the bigger concern--and I guess the year and a half working out at the gym is doing me some good. Al Gore's Impeccable Timing A few years back, it was giving a speech on global warming--during a record cold snap in New York City. Today's Drudge Report has an amusing collection of headlines: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Labels: global warming House Project: Backup Generator, Telephones, Water, Security I haven't made any mention of the house project since January 4. That's because we have been waiting on a lot of stuff. Backup Generator The backup generator wouldn't run. This turned out to be: 1. Too much LP gas pressure. The LP gas company installed a regulator on that line. 2. It had the natural gas jets in it--although that was probably not a direct problem. It now starts up when grid power cuts out. Excellent! Phones It took a while because of snow, but Frontier Telephone at least ran a temporary phone line to the house. (When the ground thaws, they'll put it underground.) Over the weekend, I bought a new 2.4 GHz cordless phone, and installed it. No dial tone. At first I thought the battery just hadn't charged enough, but no, it turns out that the problem was more serious. The network interface box that the phone company puts on the side of the house did not have the house phone wiring connected. I called them up, and found out that apparently two entirely different service calls were required--one to run the cable and screw the network interface box to the house, and someone else to plug the wires into the connectors. I hope that this is a union jurisdiction matter; the alternative is that someone is hopelessly stupid. Water Filtration The 5 micron and 1 micron filters have arrived. The housing in which they will sit have not. Until this arrives, I am reluctant to drink the water. Water Tank The Grundfos pressurization pump kept shutting down, and the Alarm LED came on. It turned out the float in the 1400 gallon water tank that tells the well pump whether to run or not had fallen to the bottom. Consequently, there was no water in the tank. The Grundfos correctly identified a "no water" problem, and protected itself. I suspect that the remarkably brown water may have been because we were draining the bottom of the tank. It may well be that once we start using the water on a regular basis, all the stuff at the bottom will get washed out and caught in the filters. Drainage Issues My wife and I got ourselves thoroughly cold and muddy digging some draining channels in a rainstorm a few weekends ago. Everything is now draining nicely. The "river runs through it" problem of the garage mystified the concrete guy, because the slope of the front driveway was more than building code required. It appears that the problem was that we had a remarkably heavy and horizontal rainstorm, and water was accumulating at the front of the door faster than it drain away down the driveway. The solution is to add another drain across the concrete right in front of the door. I'm told that this is already done. I've haven't been up there recently to check. Security The builder erected two stone cairns on either side of the driveway, and there is now a steel cable that runs between them. This was a cheaper and less visually obtrusive solution than a gate. My theory is that the vast majority of burglars are teenagers looking for an easy score of fenceable goods. With this cable locked across the driveway at the bottom of the hill, 90% of all burglars are going to say, "I either have to walk up the hill, hope that there's something work stealing, hope that there's no one home who is going to chase me off with a gun, and then have to carry the stuff down the hill--which will attract attention. I'll go look for an easier target." Those that have a 4WD could go up the side of the hill instead, but this attracts attention in a way that driving up the driveway does not. I think it also likely that most of the amateur burglars out there are driving a Chevrolet Vega, a Yugo, or a two wheel drive Japanese pickup. None of these are going to make it around the gate. Last house project entry. Labels: house project Sharp Blades Make All The Difference I have been struggling with a power miter saw (called a "chop saw" in some circles) that just wouldn't cut some of my thicker plastic rods cleanly. In some cases, a 90 degree cut was so far from 90 degrees, because the blade was fighting the plastic, that I could not get the resulting pieces to stay in the 3-jaw chuck so that I could face them. Last night, I replaced the 80 tooth 10" blade that was supposed to best for aluminum and plastic with the 40 tooth 10" blade that came with it--a blade intended for wood. Now, instead of struggling with the 3.25" diameter plastic rod, it cuts through it like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Nice, smooth finish, and fast. I suspect the core problem here is that the 80 tooth blade has become dulled by cutting too much aluminum rod. Still, I know what to replace next time I have a problem. Global Warming: How Much We Don't Understand To hear some people tell the story, scientists are unified in their belief that global warming is primarily anthropogenic (man-caused), and well-understood. That's nonsense. I know that there is enormous uncertainty about the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbonate formation. Carbonates (limestone, generally) form in the oceans as a result of atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolving in water, and then combining with calcium compounds in seawater. There's about 40 times as much carbon dioxide locked up in carbonate rocks as there is in the atmosphere--but like many equilibrium reactions (where both sides of a chemical reaction take place simultaneously, at differing rates), there's a big difference between measuring these rates in a laboratory, and measuring them for the Earth as a whole. What happens as ocean temperatures rise? It reduces the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater, and probably reduces the carbonate fixing reaction rate. Of course, raising the temperature of the oceans means that the sea level rises (from expansion alone, and increased melt of sea ice), increasing the surface area. Increasing the surface area increases the amount of carbon dioxide that dissolves into seawater. Predicting the net effect, when you factor in the enormous differences in solubility based on temperature is a non-trivial problem. Here's a new article emphasizing how little we know: After dropping for about 15 years, the amount of sunlight Earth reflects back into space, called albedo, has increased since 2000, a new study concludes. |
