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Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: global warming Labels: abortion Labels: house project
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
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Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
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Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
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Real Artists
I'm a real savage with respect to art. I am not impressed with most art done since Impressionism. I confess that my favorite artist is Johannes Vermeer. I was reading through an art history book one day when I was at Lincoln Junior High, and I quickly flipped past a photograph (I thought) of a Dutch city. Then I asked myself, "What's that doing here?" And when I flipped back, I was stunned. Click here for a high resolution image of View of Delft. (And this does not even begin to capture how precise of a painting it is.)
There are still some profoundly talented artists out there, but most of them are commercial artists. Still, if you want to be impressed with this unique combination of trompe d'oeil and anamorphic art, look here.
Styrofoam-Eating Bacteria
Yet another environmental bugaboo may be about to bite the dust (okay, bite the Styrofoam): Despite being made 95 percent of air, Styrofoam's manufactured immortality has posed a problem for recycling efforts. More than 3 million tons of the durable material is produced every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Very little of it is recycled.
Help may come from bacteria that have been found to eat Styrofoam and turn it into useable plastic. This is the stuff recycling dreams are made of: Yesterday's cup could become tomorrow's plastic spoon.
Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin and his colleagues heated polystyrene foam, the generic name for Styrofoam, to convert it to styrene oil. The natural form of styrene is in real peanuts, strawberries and a good steak. A synthetic form is used in car parts and electronic components.
Anyway, the scientists fed this styrene oil to the soil bacteria Pseudomonas putida, which converted it into biodegradable plastic known as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates).
PHA can be used to make plastic forks and packaging film. It is resistant to heat, grease and oil. It also lasts a long time. But unlike Styrofoam, PHA biodegrades in soil and water.
Someone Needs To Wipe The Silly Smile Off This Woman's Face
Click here to see her mugshot. She has now been arrested for the second time for killing someone with a motor vehicle. The first time, several years ago, she was convicted: The woman arrested in Tuesday's hit-and-run death of a South Richmond hotel worker spent several years in a Tennessee prison for the 2001 killing of a 13-year-old girl, authorities said yesterday.
You want to know why I am so darn skeptical of the utopia that will supposedly result from decriminalization of what are now illegal drugs? Because there are too many like this floating about who can't seem to learn from their past inability to handle alcohol.
Kelly Dinelle Payne, 33, pleaded guilty in May 2002 to vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident in the July 29, 2001, death of 13-year-old Elizabeth Rose Melton of Jackson, Tenn.
A Circuit Court judge sentenced her to five years for the homicide charge and two years for leaving the scene of an accident, and she was released last October, according to the Madison County, Tenn., Sheriff's Office.
Richmond police have identified Payne as the driver of a white Ford pickup truck that ran down hotel worker Ashokkumar M. Patel, 51, as he was walking home Tuesday afternoon along a grass median between Midlothian Turnpike and the northbound ramp entrance to Chippenham Parkway.
Police officials said Payne will be charged with second-degree murder and felony hit-and-run in Patel's death. Officials said she also will be charged with felony hit-and-run for fleeing the scene of a 4 p.m. wreck in the 6700 block of Midlothian Turnpike, which occurred moments before she allegedly crossed three lanes of traffic to get to the ramp and struck Patel.
...
Officials did not release the results of Payne's breathalyzer test after her arrest Tuesday night. Back in 2001, when Payne surrendered to the Madison County Sheriff's Office eight hours after the hit-and-run death of the Tennessee teen, her blood alcohol level was .07 percent. The legal limit in Tennessee and Virginia is .08 percent.
While Richmond-area courts show no recent criminal or traffic offenses, Madison County officials said Payne was declared a habitual offender in 1992 after a driving-while-intoxicated conviction in Albemarle County. She also had prior offenses in 1991 for speeding in Orange County, Va., and for driving with a revoked or suspended license in 1991 in Charlottesville.
Without Shame
Back when I was young, and I thought that it was possible to shame politicians into doing the right thing, I voted for an initiative in California that required electoral district lines to be as compact as possible, and to not cross county or city boundaries when possible. The motivation for this was some truly repulsive gerrymandering that California's legislators had done after the 1980 elections to guarantee "safe" seats for Democrats.
State Senator Diane Watson's district in Los Angeles was an octopus, with a central body in Watts, and "tentacles" reaching out to the black sections of Pacoima, Venice, East Los Angeles, and San Pedro. To create a "safe" Democratic Congressional seat for Carey Peck (Gregory Peck's liberal son, who had never held a real job in his life), they drew a district that ran from Malibu to Laguna Beach. One section ran along the coast in front of Los Angeles International--a place where there was literally not a single residence--a mile or so deep, and several miles long. The goal was simple: if you want a safe Democratic seat, you need a lot of rich people. In spite of this, and in spite of Republican "B1 Bob" Dornan's rather bombastic approach to politics, Democrats kept missing (by very small margins) putting a Democrat in that seat.
The other side of this gerrymandering was some truly amazing districts for Republicans. I can't remember his name now, but there was one Republican who got a "safe" Republican seat because the Democrats needed somewhere to stuff the Republicans and non-citizens--and this guy's seat was not only safe, but relatively cheap to run in, because a truly astonishing fraction of his constitutents could not lawfully vote for him, anyway. (Oh yeah, he had a district that ran from Los Angeles to somewhere near Reno--another warpedly weird district that must have been tiring to visit.)
I thought that some of these ugly district lines inflicted after the 1980 elections were as bad as it could get. (So bad, as it turned out, that the combination of the gerrymander and the four-year state senate elections meant that some voters went six years without a chance to vote for or against their state senator.) But now I see this monstrosity, which like the "safe" district intended for Carey Peck, is again a "rich people vote Democratic" coastal margin. I've driven this section more times than I can count--and what a cynical attempt by the Democrats to retain power.
If I were in charge of drawing district lines, I would do it very simply:
1. Start in the northwest corner of the state.
2. Accumulate census tracts to the east and south in as square a pattern as possible.
3. When you reach the required number of people, according to the census tract, draw a line around that collection.
4. Resume collecting just to the east of the previous district line.
5. When you hit the eastern boundary of the state, create a rectangle instead of a square, until you get enough people.
6. Do not allow any of the people involved in the process to look at any data about the race, income, age, or voting characteristics of people in these census tracts.
Easter Island, Land of Many Myths?
You may be aware that some anthropologists in the 1920s were briefly convinced that the Easter Islanders were remotely related to the Scots, because of some of their dances. Only later did it turn out that they these "ancient traditions" were the result of a Scotsman who had lived there (cattle ranching, I think) some years earlier. Margaret Mead is, in some ways, the archetypical anthropologist of the period--capable of visiting exotic, remote locations, and seeing what she wanted to see.
It appears that one of the other great myths about Easter Island is about to be demolished--the myth that Easter Island was settled almost two thousand years ago by Polynesians, who destroyed paradise by uncontrolled population growth: The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until 1200 AD, up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests.
Worth reading in full.
The revised estimate is based on new radiocarbon dating of soil samples collected from one of oldest known sites on the island, which is in the South Pacific west of Chile.
The finding challenges the widely held notion that Easter Island's civilization experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow growth. If correct, the finding would mean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island.
The study, conducted by Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, Manoa and Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.
...
Crucial to the conventional account of events on Easter Island is the time when settlers first arrived. If colonization didn't begin until 1200 AD, then the island's population wouldn't have had time to swell to tens of thousands of people.
"You don't have this Garden of Eden period for 400 to 800 years," Hunt said in an accompanying Science article. "Instead, [humans] have an immediate impact."
Also, the few thousand people Europeans encountered when they first arrived on Easter Island might not have been the remnants of a once great and populous civilization as widely believed. The researchers think a few thousand people might have been all the island was ever able to support.
"There may not have actually been any collapse," Lipo told LiveScience. "With only 500 years, there's no reason to believe there had to have been a huge [population] growth."
Hunting For A Car For My Son
This is not a pleasant experience. I would prefer to buy a car that is still under factory warranty, because it makes it simpler and cheaper to buy an extended warranty. At the same time, such cars command (rightly) more of a premium than they used to. It is so much simpler to be buying cars in economic hard times.
Either that, or buy a disposable automobile--one in good enough shape that I feel comfortable having him drive it, but that is cheap enough (say, under $1500) that if needs a major repair in a couple of years, that I won't feel like I am throwing good money after bad to junk it.
One surprise: there seems to have been major improvements in crash safety over the last few years. Cars that I did not even consider to wrap around my precious cargo, like the Hyundai, Kia, and Suzuki sedans--have crash ratings equivalent to the 2001 Malibu that he totaled without serious injury.
What Causes ACLU Derangement Syndrome?
When the chairman of an organization with Islamic terrorist ties ends up on the board of the Florida affiliate of the ACLU. Read Stop the ACLU's collection of links--it is another reminder that the ACLU is on the enemy's side.
Public Trust in Institutions
This will just fry the leftists. A new Harris Poll finds that the institution mostly highly trusted by the American public is the military: A total of 47 percent of Americans said they have a "great deal" of confidence in the military. Some 38 percent of Americans said they had "only some" confidence and 14 percent said they had "hardly any" confidence in the military.
And at the bottom of the list? At the bottom of the survey, released March 2, were law firms at 10 percent, Congress at 10 percent, organized labor at 12 percent, major companies at 13 percent and the press at 14 percent.
As the sign on one of the local businesses here in Boise says, "99% of lawyers make it hard on the rest."
Dr. James Dobson Attacked For Being Too Pro-Gay
No, seriously. Read all about it here. Apparently, he backed a proposal that, as an alternative to gay marriage or civil unions, simplified hospital visitation and medical care direction issues for unmarried couples--and groups that fancy themselves more conservative than Dobson are attacking him for doing so.
We Must Have Driven Him To Do It!
That's going to be the left's explanation for why someone we held at Gitmo did this: A former Guantanamo prisoner has been arrested in Moscow on charges of blowing up a gas pipeline in Russia’s Muslim Tatarstan Republic in 2005, Interfax said Thursday.
Oh yeah, here's another one we released:
Two residents of Naberezhnye Chelny, Ravil Gumarov and Fanis Shaikhutdinov, and local resident Timur Ishmuratov disrupted a gas pipeline in the centre of Bugulma, not far from the local Federal Security headquarters, in January 2005, according to the investigators. The explosion however caused neither casualties nor serious damage.
A trial by jury ruled that the Gumarov and Shaikhutdinov’s guilt had not been proved and set them free in September 2005, but the Supreme Court of Russia anulled the ruling and called for another trial. The trial was scheduled for February 2006, but had to be delayed for the absence of the defendants, who now have been detained.
Gumarov and Ishmuratov were engaged in terrorist groups’ activities in Afghanistan and served terms at the Guantanamo base in Cuba with other Taliban and terrorist suspects. Later they were extradited to Russia. Ishmuratov was detained in January while attempting to cross the border with Ukraine.A former prisoner of the US military base Guantanamo in Cuba, Rasul Kudayev, was detained in Nalchik Sunday, the Interfax news agency reported citing its sources in the republican law enforcement agencies.
It makes you wonder a bit about the ones that we consider so dangerous that we haven't released or extradited them, doesn't it?
The sources said Kudayev was arrested by local police after they had questioned other suspects arrested in the wake of the Oct. 13 raid. “There is evidence that he was involved in an attack on a traffic police post in Khasanye,” the source said.
Meanwhile, a journalist by the name of Orkhan Jemal told Ekho Moskvy radio that Kudayev had been released from Guantanamo after it was established that he had committed no crimes. He has lived in Nalchik for the past 18 months.
Thanks to Gateway Pundit and Western Resistance for bringing these to my attention.
A Guilty Laugh
It reads a bit like a Monty Python skit, and I want to laugh--but it is really a tragedy as well, when you consider his victims, and how mentally ill this guy must be to think that he could bite himself to death: A multiple killer tried to bite himself to death while in Broadmoor high security psychiatric hospital, the Old Bailey has heard.
Daniel Gonzalez, who stabbed two men and two women to death in September 2004, allegedly suffered from auditory hallucinations which commanded him to kill.
Dr Edward Petch, Broadmoor's psychiatric consultant, said of the apparent suicide attempt: "I have never seen anyone bite himself with that ferocity. A number of staff described it as a clear attempt to die."
The prosecution claim that Gonzalez wanted to be a famous serial killer and "kill at least 10 people" in a campaign of murder stretching from the South Coast of England to London.
Dr Petch told the jury: "I think we felt that, given his history, at that moment he was genuinely trying to kill himself. He felt his was a job not complete. He allegedly had killed four people and tried to kill six and we all felt there was one more left - and that was himself - and he would not stop until he had succeeded."
The defence concede that Gonzalez killed each of his four victims. But they claim he was suffering from auditory hallucination which diminished his responsibility and meant he was guilty of manslaughter and not murder.
Do You Have Some Good Books That Need A New Home?
Well, don't send them to me! I have too many already. But the New Orleans Public Library system is in need (not surprisingly). This just came through one of my academic mailng lists: DONATE NEW AND USED BOOKS TO NEW ORLEANS LIBRARY...
This is for a great cause, please, send your books to New Orleans...
The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after Katrina.
The staff will assess which titles will be designated for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising.
Please send your books to:
Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112
If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate.
Bizarre Conspiracy Theories, Part 1,230,459
A friend of mine who is starting to "dabble" in Treasury bonds points me to this sad little discussion on the Bureau of the Public Debt web site of bizarre theories leading to fraud: There has been a proliferation of bogus sight drafts and bills of exchange drawn on the U. S. Treasury Department. These documents have now appeared in a majority of states and have been used in an attempt to pay for everything from cars to child support. The so-called "redemption" theory being asserted by those who promote this scheme is bizarre at best. Click on the thumbnail image at left to view a full-size image of a "Bogus Sight Draft" (230K JPG file, uploaded 12/12/2002).
Oh my. I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at such attempts.
A stripped-down version of this theory is as follows: When the United States went off the gold standard in 1933, the federal government somehow went bankrupt. Then with the assistance (somehow) of the Federal Reserve Bank, the government converted the bodies of its citizens into capital value, supposedly by trading the birth certificates of U.S. citizens on the open market. After following a complicated process of filing UCC documents with either the Secretary of State of the person's residence or another state that will accept the filings, each citizen is entitled to redeem his or her "value" by filling out a sight draft drawn on their (non-existent) Treasury Direct account. {Treasury Direct is a system maintained by the Bureau of the Public Debt for holding book-entry Treasury bills, notes and bonds}. The theorists assert that their social security number is also the number of their Treasury Direct account. As a part of the scheme, participants also file false IRS Forms 8300 and Currency Transaction Reports in the name of law enforcement officials and other individuals they seek to harass.
The Dunblane Massacre, Ten Years Later
Do you remember Dunblane? Ten years ago, a very evil person--one who had been warned by police that he was far too interested in little boys--went on a rampage, murdering 16 children with handguns. In response, something called the Snowdrop Campaign persuaded the British Parliament to ban all handguns. Now, remember, that handguns in Britain were very restrictively licensed in 1996. It was easier to get a permit to possess a handgun in New York City than in Britain. Yet this guy, who the police were already concerned about, had a license to own a handgun.
There have been allegations floating around for some time that Hamilton had a cozy relationship with the local police, and was allowed to keep his handgun license, in spite of reasons to think that he was a pedophile. Apparently, quite a number of documents related to the official inquiry into what happened were put under a 100 year seal, supposedly to protect the privacy of children that Hamilton had molested. But this report indicates that there were many documents sealed that do not fit into this explanation: LETTERS between Labour and Tory ministers and correspondence relating to Thomas Hamilton's alleged involvement with Freemasonry are part of a batch of more than 100 documents about the Dunblane mass murder which have been sealed from public sight for 100 years.
The Guardian, which is definitely on the left end of the newspaper spectrum in Britain, also raised questions about this:
The documents include a letter connected to Hamilton, which was sent by George Robertson, currently head of Nato, to Michael Forsyth, who was then Secretary of State for Scotland.
Until now it was thought that a 100-year public secrecy order had only been placed on one police report into Hamilton which allegedly named high-profile politicians and legal figures. However, a Sunday Herald investigation has uncovered that 106 documents, which were submitted to the Dunblane inquiry in 1996, were also placed under the 100-year rule.
The Scottish Executive has claimed the 100-year secrecy order was placed on the Central Police report, which was drafted in 1991 five years before the murders, to protect the identities of children named in the report. Hamilton had allegedly abused a number of children prior to his 1996 gun attack on Dunblane primary school in which 16 primary one children and a teacher died before Hamilton turned his gun on himself.
However, only a handful of the documents, which the Sunday Herald has discovered to be also subject to the 100-year rule, relate to children or name alleged abuse victims.
The most intriguing document is listed as: 'Copy of letter from Thomas Hamilton to Dunblane parents regarding boys' club, and flyer advertising Dunblane Boys' Sports Club. Both sent to Rt Hon Michael Forsyth, MP, Secretary of State for Scotland, by George Robertson MP.' Also closed under the 100-year rule is a 'submission to Lord James Douglas Hamilton, MP, Minister of State at the Scottish Office, concerning government evidence to the Inquiry'.
Another document relates to correspondence between the clerk of the Dunblane inquiry, which was presided over by Lord Cullen, and a member of the public regarding 'possible affiliations of Thomas Hamilton with Freemasonry ... and copy letters from Thomas Hamilton'.
SNP deputy justice minister, Michael Matheson, said: 'The explanation to date about the 100 -year rule was that it was put in place to protect the interests of children named in the Central Police report. How can that explanation stand when children aren't named? The 100-year rule needs to be re-examined with respect to all documents.'
Matheson has written to the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, asking why the 100-year rule applies and how it can be revoked. He has so far had no response. He also asked First Minister Jack McConnell to explain the reasons for the 100-year order but received 'no substantial answer'. Matheson is to write to Colin Boyd a second time, in the light of the discovery that more than 100 other documents are also sealed, asking him to account for the decision.There have been allegations that the lengthy closure order was placed on the report after it linked Hamilton to figures in the Scottish establishment, including two senior politicians and a lawyer.
Now, at least some of these documents were apparently released last year, and Dr. Mick North, father of one of the children who was murdered, had some harsh words:
But the crown office says the decision to impose the ban - by Lord Cullen, who chaired the inquiry - was made to protect the identity of children who may have been abused by Hamilton, and their families.
Following Wednesday's Scottish cabinet meeting, it was announced that the lord advocate, Colin Boyd QC, would look at the feasibility of publishing the report with the children's names deleted.
But Michael Matheson, the Scottish National party's shadow deputy justice minister, questioned whether the lord advocate's review would go far enough.
He said: "There are more documents covered by the 100-year rule than this police report. Some of them have nothing whatsoever to do with children. We need to look at why such a lengthy ban has been imposed on them.
"I have been contacted by a number of families affected by the tragedy who are anxious to ensure this information becomes public. And so far we have no guarantee that it will. We only have a review."
The report banned under the 100-year rule was com piled by Paul Hughes, then a detective sergeant with Central Scotland police, and concerns Thomas Hamilton's activities at a summer camp in Loch Lomond in 1991, five years before the shootings.
Selected extracts published during the Cullen inquiry revealed it recommended that Hamilton should be prosecuted for his activities at the summer camp and that he should have his gun licence revoked.
The report, however, was ignored. Although Lord Cullen referred to it in his inquiry, it does not feature in the index or appendices to his final report. Dr Mick North, whose daughter Sophie died, said the authorities missed several opportunities to take action against Thomas Hamilton before he killed 16 children and their teacher.
There are allegations which appeared in a Daily Telegraph article (now beyond the archive wall) that Hamilton was allowed to keep his handgun license--in spite of clearly not being a "suitable" person to have one--because he was a supplier of child pornography to important people within the police force and government:
He was speaking after reviewing hundreds of documents that were to have been "closed" for 100 years, but which will be made available for the first time today.
The files reveal that several complaints were made about Hamilton's behaviour towards children before the shootings at Dunblane Primary School in 1996.
Dr North said: "The documents I viewed confirmed what I believed I knew about the role of the police and the involvement of the procurator fiscal service. There was incompetence.
"Hamilton's behaviour in the years before the massacre caused great concern and the documents prove a lack of joined-up thinking among police and prosecutors.""I believe that Hamilton was a major provider of pornographic photographs and videos to a ring of men prominent in Central Scotland, including police officers who protected him from numerous allegations of physical abuse at boys' camps and clubs he ran. They protected themselves after the massacre which conveniently ended in his suicide."
Of course, bizarre conspiracy theories are always more interesting than simple police incompetence. But you have examples such as the "Lords of Bakersfield," where a small circle of sexual misfits in important positions seem to have used their influence to cover up little matters such as the sexual abuse of teenagers and murder.
Last year Ms Uttley's former partner, Mick North, whose five-year-old daughter Sophie was killed, said he was "convinced" of a cover-up.
I don't know what the truth of the matter is with respect to Dunblane. I do know that police corruption in the issuance of gun licenses in those parts of the United States where police have discretion has been a problem for many decades; I would be startled to see this not be a problem elsewhere.
I suppose if restrictive licensing actually worked as claimed--that it keeps guns away from people that are dangerous, or who can't be trusted with guns--there might be some argument for it. I still think the argument is not persuasive, but the fact is that people like Hamilton got a handgun license in Britain tells me that restrictive licensing does not even do a good job within the "We're from the government, and we know better" model.
The partner of the father of one of the victims has written a very controversial book: The book, Dunblane Unburied, has been written by Sandra Uttley, the former partner of Dr Mick North, an anti-gun campaigner whose five-year-old daughter, Sophie, was killed in the massacre.
I suppose that I should get a copy of it.
...
The book includes allegations of a cover-up involving senior police officers and legal figures about their links with Thomas Hamilton, the gunman who shot dead 16 pupils and a teacher before killing himself on March 13, 1996, at Dunblane primary school.
It claims Lord Cullen, who conducted the inquiry into the massacre, was deliberately denied access to more than the 1,000 witness statements and concludes that the handgun ban was unnecessary.
Uttley, who lived in Dunblane for 20 years, said the aim of her book was to set the record straight about the protection she believes Hamilton received from official sources. “The parents wouldn’t help, so I went to the next biggest aggrieved group — shooters,” she said.
“It has always been my aim to get the truth. The handgun ban was to be the great legacy of this horrendous mass murder and, as a former Dunblane resident, I supported the Snowdrop petition to do away with guns.
“However, the more involved I became in the background surrounding the massacre, the more I realised that the gun ban was beside the point. Hamilton could have been stopped. The legislation in 1996 was strong enough. It was corruption that gave him guns.["]
Religiously Offensive Cartoons
Oh dear, a student newspaper at the University of Saskatchewan published a religiously offensive cartoon. But no, not offensive to Muslims. The previous week they had discussed the controversy around those cartoons, but did not actually publish them: Then-editor-in-chief Will Robbins wrote an editorial telling readers the Sheaf would not publish the cartoons, which have offended so many.
So what did they publish? The newspaper is issuing a mea culpa after a cartoon depicting Jesus performing a sex act on a capitalist pig was published in Thursday's edition of the Sheaf.
Yeah, right. (Michelle Malkin has reproduced it here, if you really need to see it. It lacks artistic merit as well.)
"The comic was actually laid out and went to print as a result of an editorial oversight and a mistake," production manager Liam Richards said Monday. "It was not our intention to have a (public) reaction to it.
Now, I expect this sort of simultaneously offensive and ignorant cartoon at a university. Leftist professors encourage this sort of cartoon-like view of important issues, and not surprisingly, students follow through on it. What I find despicable is the way that the left goes out of its way to not offend Muslims, while printing cartoons like this.
The Left Isn't Against Theocratic Oppression; They Are Anti-America
You are probably aaware that the Taliban's Ambassador-at-Large is now attending Yale University--in spite of only a fourth grade education. A Yale graduate wrote a letter recently to Yale's president, complaining about this double standard--that they regularly turned down highly qualified applicants, and when her husband attended Yale on an ROTC scholarship, he had to spend an hour traveling--because Yale wouldn't allow ROTC there, because of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about homosexuality: The last time I checked, the US military doesn't kill anyone for being a homosexual. Nor would any soldier-on-soldier hate crime ever be tolerated. On the other hand, the Taliban advocated murdering any homosexual and anyone else they felt violated their version of Islam. So ROTC isn't acceptable because it offends Yale's standards, but a Taliban leader who condones the Taliban's policy of brutally killing homosexuals and stoning women for not wearing a burka should be recruited lest Harvard win his matriculation?
This is why I hold the left, and their allies, the mainstream media, in such contempt. They sue to prevent the Ten Commandments from being a public park; they threaten suit for an historic cross on the County of Los Angeles's seal; they compare the Religious Right to the Taliban (when the American Religious Right is practically the ACLU, compared to the Taliban)--and then they admit to Yale a guy who was an apologist for a despicable theocratic totalitarian government, and by any objective standard, unqualified.
Apparently when you combine a sub-par 4th grade education, a B+ college average in a special program, and a job history as a spokesperson for a regime that hates America, destroys priceless Buddhas, oppresses women, stones homosexuals, and enforces brutal sharia law in violation of UN Human Rights agreements, you have the magic formula for admission to Yale. Next time I get a phone call from a high school senior in tears over Yale's rejection, I'll tell them to visit a local museum and blow up some sacred Buddhas, stone a homosexual or threaten to beat his/her mother to death if she refuses to wear a burka.
Thank you very much for helping me understand Yale Admissions.
The left doesn't really object to theocracy or totalitarianism. They just object to Christianity. This is why I hold the ACLU and the rest of the left in such contempt. They are hypocrites and liars.
My Son Had His First Car Accident Monday
He got a couple of bruises, but otherwise uninjured. He was turning left from a shopping center onto Chinden Blvd., which is a very busy four lane highway, and he misjudged how fast a car coming towards him was moving. The body shop called yesterday and told me that the total was at least $11,000, so I expect that Progressive will total it.
I'm not sure if they give us retail or wholesale blue book value for the car--I've never had a car totaled before--but I'm hoping that it is the retail value, since that is what it will cost us to replace it. I'm disappointed, because this was a very nice car, a 2001 Chevrolet Malibu LS, with leather upholstery, sunroof, and a very nice factory stereo (with both CD and cassette in-dash). On the several occasions that I have had to drive it recently, I have found myself saying, "Gee, if something happened to the Corvette, and I was reduced to driving the Malibu again, I could live with this very easily."
A few months back, my son was trying to prove his independence by wanting to buy his own car, and complaining that the Malibu only gets around 20 mpg around town. My wife and I were reluctant (even though it would have meant being able to sell the Malibu) because the used cars available at a price that he could afford did not meet our standards. The Malibu weighs about 3000 pounds, and considering the speed of the collision, did a fine job of protecting our son. The other cars that he was looking at were 2000 pounds or so, and some of them were in such unroadworthy state that I wanted to firebomb them, just to make sure that no else would drive these heaps. (Yeah, that's my inner liberal at work.)
One VW Golf he looked at I named Frankenstein, because it was assembled from pieces of several Golfs. The seller explained that he had bought this car from someone who had found an engine control computer here, an engine there, but had mixed and matched the wrong components, and he had spent a bit of time getting the right engine control computer for this year, etc. It drove well enough, but it wasn't confidence-inspiring.
Anyway, I suppose that we will be looking for another mid-sized car, perhaps even another Malibu of similar vintage, for him to drive to college. My wife had a reminder last night of the importance of having some mass around when driving; she met a young man missing an arm and a leg. No, not a war injury, but a car crash when he was a teenager. Would buying a Bradley Fighting Vehicle for my son be excessively protective?
Room Sizes
Michael Williams asks the question: Given 2000 square feet for a home design, how would you allocate it between rooms? More small rooms, or fewer big rooms? Let's say that the 2000 square feet is after any hallways are accounted for. How many bedrooms and bathrooms would you put in, and how big? What about the kitchen and family rooms?
My wife and I went through this questioning process a few months back, while designing our new home. (Perhaps "designing" is a bit strong--we modified an existing design.)
There has been a strong tendency the last decade or two for bedrooms--especially master bedrooms--to be very, very large. Look, there's two things that you do in bedrooms, and neither of them requires a lot more floor space than a bed and a chest of drawers. (Unless you are doing things that I don't want to know about, and genuinely need a lot more room than a couple needs.)
Bathrooms are another area where architects seem to have gone a bit overboard on space. Our new house we may have gone a little too far in the other direction (largely because we didn't plan on the size of our jetted tub for two early enough in the process), but again, a bathroom is a place you shower or bathe, shave or apply makeup (perhaps both, for you metrosexual urban elites). It isn't a room that I plan to spend hours on end, nor is it a room that typically needs space for more than two.
Formal dining rooms are a very nice thing--but if I have my choice of a large formal dining room or a small formal dining room and a small "breakfast nook," I'll take a single large formal dining room. If you have a dozen friends over for dinner, the large formal dining room lets you entertain everyone in one room, perhaps by pushing together two tables. Otherwise, you have two dinner parties. (This would be a less abstract issue if my wife and I had enough friends in Boise to invite over to a dinner party. But alien life forms are always as a disadvantage in this respect.)
The more open the floor plan, the more airy the house feels, and the more air that you can actually get to blow through the house on a warm summer's day. That's part of why the house that we had built has high open arches between living room, dining room, kitchen, and family room. You can see the floor plan here. The only substantial modification was that we moved the wall of the master bathroom one foot into the master bedroom for the bigger tub--which has swapped places with the toilet, and the vanity is now in the corner where the tub is on these drawings.
Why Capital Punishment Makes Me Uncomfortable
There's this news report in the Idaho Statesman today that reminds you how fallible (at best) the human beings are that operate criminal justice systems: IDAHO FALLS — A man sentenced to life in prison in 1991 for murdering a 15-year-old girl in Ashton will face a new trial and could soon be free on bail.
Okay, bad news. Both of these are worrisome matters--certainly matters that raise questions about whether Grube received a fair trial. But it gets worse--one of those list of "horribles" that makes me think of that old Vicki Lawrence song, "The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia":
Rauland J. Grube was convicted for the June 1983 murder of Amy Hossner, who was found shot to death.
Last month, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ordered a new trial for Grube after he determined that state investigators withheld a key witness in the original trial and that police logs had been tampered with, the Idaho Falls Post-Register reported Sunday.Meanwhile, it's been more than 10 years since Grube's conviction and several pieces of evidence used in the case are no longer available.
Maybe this guy Grube is guilty, and the police only "improved" the evidence a bit. These are the sort of incidents that make me very, very disinclined to execute anyone who hasn't confessed to the crime.
The ballistics evidence was one key element in obtaining a conviction, but it has since been disavowed by the FBI, Winmill said. And former Police Chief Ed Sebek, who could testify about the police log alterations, is now in prison on an unrelated crime. [emphasis added]
And He Would Know!
George Lucas, on why big budget movies are doomed: "The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie," said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. "Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'" The portly Lucas, whose "Star Wars" sequel was nominated for the Oscar in makeup, was clearly in Yoda mode at Saturday's Weinstein Co. party — Harvey Weinstein's first Oscar bash since he abandoned Miramax to Disney last year. "I think it's great that the major Oscar nominations have gone to independent films," Lucas told me, adding that it's no accident that the "small movies" outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. "Is that good for the business? No — it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art!"
And he should know. I never saw the last Star Wars movie in the theaters. I had heard that it was a thinly disguised attack on George Bush, and most people were complaining about the quality of the dialog.
We borrowed a DVD of it from one of my wife's students over the weekend, and I am glad that I didn't waste my money on it. Yes, there were a couple of lines put in the words of the bad guys that sounded like Bush's post-9/11 speech. I was even more disappionted to hear Obi-Wan Kenobi make the claim that, "A Jedi never speaks in absolutes." But part of the attraction of the first three Star Wars movies--part of what makes them blockbusters in an era when Hollywood was still in love with antiheroes and moral relativism--was that they involved a fight between good and evil.
Yes, there were shades of good and evil. Han Solo was a mercenary--but when push came to shove, it was possible to appeal to his better nature. By the third movie, we could even see that as evil as the Emperor was, there was still a faint glimmer of humanity in Darth Vader. (The Emperor, however, was completely evil.)
From an artistic standpoint, however, this movie was a disaster. The dialog, except in the last ten minutes or so, was written by a robot, and the actors playing Anakin Skywalker and his wife delivered incredibly bad dialog with a level of emotion that made the dialog look good.
Part of what made the first three movies so interesting was that while there was an element of the supernatural to the powers of the Jedi, they were not completely removed from the natural world. Obi-Wan had some limited power to influence the minds of the weak-willed, and some limited telekinetic powers, but he wasn't exempt from physics and gravity.
By comparison, this movie was more like a video game. Our heroes aren't just doing gymnastic leaps--they are making jumps that are simply beyond the realm of human capability. The result was curiously uninteresting--although I suppose that 13 year old video game junkies might have enjoyed it.
The last ten minutes of the movie finally reached a point where I could feel something coming out of the movie besides cynical marketing manipulation, as Anakin's wife dies, and the soon-to-be Emperor manipulates Anakin's grief into anger. I would say that there is little danger of Lucas being pressured into making a sequel to this turkey.
Global Warming: Heavy Snowfall In Sahara Desert
Oh yeah, this really persuades me: Algeria - Heavy snow has cut off villages and clogged key arteries leading away from the Algerian capital Algiers for several days, national police said on Sunday.
Record cold snap impairing crops growth in Florida:
Djelfa, which had 70cm, was "totally paralysed", the Algerian Press Agency reported.
At least 60cm of snow blanketed villages near Djelfa and Medea, respectively 270km and 80km south of Algiers.
An AFP reporter said only donkeys and mules could ply the roads around the villages.
Snow is unusual in the north African country, but last winter saw snowfalls of more than two metres in several parts of the north-east.
The main roads remained dangerous even after they were cleared, authorities warned.
The weather improved on Sunday but more snow was expected overnight at altitudes of over 700m, and rain elsewhere. A cold front swept across Florida early in the week of Feb. 14 to 19. This cold frontal system set record lows across the state, with temperatures averaging two to seven degrees below normal at
major cities. Areas from the Panhandle down to the southern peninsula experienced some frosts and hard freezes. Most chilling lows at the beginning of the week were below freezing with several stations recording record lows in the lower to upper 20s, but by the end of the week, temperatures were back in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Daytime highs were in the 60s, 70s and the lower 80s by the end of the week.
In West Virginia record cold causing problems for the homeless.
In Missoula, Montana: In Missoula, it was the coldest temperature ever recorded for a Feb. 18 - 23 below zero was predicted - and the National Weather Service said it expected another record low for Feb. 19.
In the San Francisco Bay Area:
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The frigid weather closed Montana Snowbowl to public skiing Friday, doubled the population at the Poverello Center, and caused elementary schools to cancel recesses and keep children indoors.
It burst sprinkler systems at several businesses, setting off alarms at fire stations around town, and had towing companies hustling to keep up with the number of drivers who needed jump-starts. BRRRRR. That chill you feel is bona fide record-breaking cold, fresh from the darkest depths of Canada, delivered via air-mail on a jet stream that's looped backwards to drop it on you here in California.
In Denver:
And more gifts are on the way. So when you wake up Sunday morning, after shivering through what promises to be a wet, cold, nasty Saturday afternoon, look to the hills. Because that white you might see glittering in the welcome sun will be snow, snow, snow.
But by then, the National Weather Service promises, the jet stream will have moved on and the worst will be over.
This morning's chill shattered long-standing temperature records across the Bay Area and tying low-temperature mark in San Jose that had endured for 94 years.
Downtown Oakland's 38 bested the 30-year-old mark of 43 degrees set in 1975. San Rafael hit 32 degrees, a record. Mountain View's 34 degrees edged out the previous low, 35 degrees, set in 1946.
But it's the weekend weather that has forecasters and public officials concerned. Up to three inches of snow could blanket the Big Sur highlands Saturday night. Snow, cold and rain throughout the Bay Area and down the coast promise an ugly surprise to anyone unprepared out for a day-hike or outing.The temperature at Denver International Airport fell to a record low of 12 below zero early this morning, after a high Friday of just 12 above.
In Seattle:
Wind chills overnight were as cold as 25 degrees below zero.The winds quieted down Friday, but the National Weather Service predicted record cold overnight, with lows in the Seattle area in the 20s and in the single digits in the Tacoma area.
I suspect that the "Global Warming" fantasy will continue until polar bears start to eat environmentalists at global warming conferences in Miami.
"We think it could be the coldest night of the year, with possible record-setting lows," said meteorologist Johnny Burg.
Thomas Kinkade & A Lesson In What Wealth Does
Whenever I get irritated that I still have to work for a living (unlike lots of people I have known over the years--you'll sometimes see them in, "Why I bought two Gulfstream V jets" ads)--I see sad stories like this one, about Thomas Kinkade--a person wealthy enough now that he has no excuse for sharp or questionable business dealings. I can understand the person who is struggling to pay his bills who plays a little fast and loose with creditors--but when you become a multimillionaire, and are still engaged in sharp business practices, my sympathy declines.
Now, it is possible that the arbitration award of $860,000 against Kinkade for defrauding two gallery owners is less than it appears. The allegations are that Kinkade misrepresented the profit potential of opening galleries selling Kinkade's art, and engaged in practices that wiped some of them out: "I love to talk about my faith," he said in a deposition. "I try to embrace people with love, unconditional love, like Christ did."
Former dealer Jim Cote said he was hard-pressed to feel the love. He has filed an arbitration claim, alleging among other things that he was a victim of Media Arts Group's pressure to saturate the market.
"In the beginning it was fine," said Cote, of Birmingham, Mich., who opened his first Signature gallery in 1996. "Sales were great because Thom at that point was very popular and there were limited outlets to buy his art."
But as time went on, Cote alleges, Media Arts Group pushed him to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own outlets in his territory. Cote eventually had three stores, all of which failed.
"This is not bread and milk," he said. "You can't have galleries on every corner."
Cote said his net worth of more than $3 million had been erased. Gone are his marriage, his house and most of his possessions. He doesn't blame his divorce entirely on his galleries' failure, he said, but "it certainly didn't help."
He shut his last store in December and has filed for bankruptcy protection.
"At this point, I've got a dog and an apartment, and that's it," Cote said. "This is not where I thought I'd be at 56."
It is possible that these gallery owners were misled--but there's some real truth in the aphorism, "You can't cheat an honest man." People sometimes get into business deals that make very little sense because they have been blinded by their greed. Many conmen rely on this, and the proof is left to your email, where people pretending to be the heir of some African government official asks for your help in moving millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains. You will get a million of it, if you just transfer a few thousand dollars from your account here, to an account in Nigeria. I am sorry for people that get scammed like this, but not very sorry. They were expecting to get rich with no real work, and instead made someone else rich with no real work.
If Kinkade's problems were limited to allegations of shady business practices, I would not know whether there was something there or not--but the article includes so many other signs of a person who is out of control, failing to live up to his proclamation of the Christian faith: In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.
None of us are without sinful tendencies and occasional behaviors. I am sympathetic to the Christian who thinks he has it together, and falls into sin. But you know, you can fall into sin, and learn not to repeat the situation--and if you keep putting yourself in that same sinful situation again and again, my sympathy declines. The guy (or gal) who has a bit too much to drink on a business trip, and ends up in an adulterous one-night fling--that is a tragedy. But if this keeps happening, it raises some serious questions about whether they truly have put Christ first in their life.
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John Dandois, Media Arts Group's senior director of retail operations from 1995 to 1999, testified in a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.
"Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn't tell where the boundary was," he said. "And then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff."
Dandois, who left the company to become chief executive of a group of galleries owned by Kinkade's brother, Patrick, recounted that about six years ago the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas that people seated nearby moved away from him.
"I think it was Roy or Siegfried or whatever had a codpiece in his leotards," Dandois testified. "And so when the show started, Thom just started yelling, 'Codpiece, codpiece,' and had to be quieted by his mother and Nanette."
At other times, Kinkade could be downright nasty, Dandois testified, recalling an incident in which Dandois' wife tried to help the allegedly inebriated artist to his feet in a bar.
"He had been falling down, and he fell off the stool, and he was laying on the ground and just looked up at her and flipped her the bird and told her, you know, just to 'F you' several times," Dandois testified.
In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s for the artist's appearance on the "Hour of Power" television show at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. On the eve of the broadcast, Sheppard said, he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking. As they walked to their rooms, according to Sheppard and another person who was there, Kinkade veered toward a nearby figure of a Disney character.
"Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to 'mark his territory,' " Sheppard told The Times.
In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he "grew up in the country" where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said it might have happened.
"There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don't recall it," he said.
Rock Tumbler?
Do you have a rock tumbler? My wife wants to try an experiment with some basalt from our land, before we spend the money on a rock tumbler.
Muslim Student Association Now Has Editorial Control Over Oregon State University Student Newspaper
Tired of being offended by blatantly hostile remarks towards their religion, Muslim students now have "persuaded" the Oregon State University student newspaper to give them editorial approval over articles: At the Daily Barometer, editors said e-mail and phone calls poured in. Senior editors have met with the Muslim Student Association.
If the Christian Student Association were given editorial control over offensive articles, the ACLU would be filing suit immediately. But if it offends Muslims, liberals fall all over themselves trying to make them happy.
"The pain that it caused ... did not subside with time," said DD Bixby, the Barometer's editor-in-chief. "It kind of just festered."
She said editors have been checking copy with Muslim students, and on Tuesday deleted one paragraph from a piece scheduled to be published the next day.
Camille Paglia Can Get Away With This
Not many others can. Of course, that's because she's an openly bisexual femniist, that she can insult the feminists of Harvard with this particular line: While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.
The rest of the article is worth reading as well.
Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues at too many American universities.
Rumsfeld v. FAIR (2006)
This was the case where Congress passed the Solomon Amendment, which required universities to allow military recruiters equal access as other potential employers, or lose federal funding. Not surprisingly, law schools, which have long imposed a requirement that employers not discriminate based on sexual orientation, sued. The decision is here. It was an 8-0 decision in favor of the Solomon Amendment.
I heard some commentator discussing this on Fox News this morning, and he made the point that there is nothing that so clearly establishes the gap between the university elite and the masses than this suit. The law schools were insisting that they had a right to both take money from the federal government, and ignore their rules.
Personally, I hope the universities stop taking the money. As far as I am concerned, places like Harvard and Yale are so much more on the side of al-Qaeda anyway, perhaps they should be requesting their funding from bin Laden. It would certainly be more honest.
Parental Notification & Abortion
I've learned not to be too trusting of studies that appear in the New York Times, but this is interesting, nonetheless: For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.
Now, I have always been a little skeptical that parental notification laws make that much of a difference in abortion rates. My argument for parental notification is that in most states, you can't get your ears pierced, or medical care, without parental consent (much less parental notification). Abortion, in case you hadn't noticed, is a bit more significant of a procedure than an ear piercing. As a parent, I am responsible for caring for my minor children, and to not even by notified that a child had surgery--much less be involved in the decision about whether to have it--is insane. (But of course, that's what the ACLU's function is--to constitutionalize insanity.) Whether parental notification raises or lowers abortion rates is irrelevant; I am responsible, as a parent, for the actions my minor child takes. I should be involved in those decisions.
The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.
For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.
Since the United States Supreme Court recognized states' rights to restrict abortion in 1992, parental involvement legislation has been a cornerstone in the effort to reduce abortions. Such laws have been a focus of divisive election campaigns, long court battles and grass-roots activism, and are now in place in 34 states. Most Americans say they favor them.
"It's one of the few areas that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed states to legislate, so it's become a key for lowering the abortion rate," said Mary Spaulding Balch, director of state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee. Ms. Balch said she believed that consent laws were effective.
Yet the Times analysis of the states that enacted laws from 1995 to 2004 — most of which had low abortion rates to begin with — found no evidence that the laws had a significant impact on the number of minors who got pregnant, or, once pregnant, the number who had abortions.
A separate analysis considered whether the existence or absence of a law could be used to predict whether abortions went up or down. It could not. The six states studied are in the South and West: Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. (A seventh state, Oklahoma, also passed a parental notification law in this period, but did not gather abortion data before 2000.)
The article makes a point that the pro-choice extremists probably don't know about, since they live in a fantasy world, anyway: Supporters of the laws say they promote better decision-making and reduce teenage abortions; opponents say they chip away at abortion rights and endanger young lives by exposing them to potentially violent reaction from some parents.
Here's a harsh reality. A lot of people who are horrified by abortion in the abstract are surprisingly willing to have their daughters get abortions rather than have the child and put it up for adoption. Some of this is based on shame. Some of this is based on a genuine concern for their daughter, and the complexities that this is going to introduce into her life. I suspect that this is why survey after survey finds a majority of Americans want abortion discouraged, but not prohibited. They know that there's something wrong with it--but they can also imagine what the situation would be if their own teenaged (or younger) daughter ended up pregnant.
But some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.
...
But providers interviewed in 10 states with parental involvement laws all said that of the minors who came into their clinics, parents were more often the ones pushing for an abortion, even against the wishes of their daughters.
"I see far more parents trying to pressure their daughters to have one," said Jane Bovard, owner of the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, N.D., a state where a minor needs consent from both parents. "As a parent myself, I can understand. But I say to parents, 'You force her to have this abortion, and I can tell you that within the next six months she's going to be pregnant again.' "
Renee Chelian, director of Northland Family Planning Centers in the Detroit area, said she had had to call the police on parents who wanted their daughters to have abortions, "because they threaten physical violence on the kids."
We need to be focused more on root causes:
1. A culture that promotes early sexuality--and it isn't like teenagers need any encouragement on this.
2. An unwillingness of parents to provide an appropriate level of supervision. When most parents are working full-time, there's no one at home after school--which is where and when most teenaged sex is happening.
3. An unwillingness to face up to the fact that making contraceptives available may encourage teens to have sex--but it will also reduce pregnancies among those teens are going to have sex, regardless.
4. The entertaiment media's unwillingness to discuss the enormous STD hazards associated with promiscuity.
When my wife and I were going through Lamaze classes, just before the birth of our daughter, there was a girl in the class from the East Coast who was no more than 15. She was going to give birth. A very nice couple was there to coach her, because they were going to adopt the baby. (A couple of years later, they were murdered in their home by the jealous boyfriend of their maid, who had falsely told him that the husband was forcing her to have sex.) This girl was, even for her age, pretty immature. I just cringe at the number of girls like her, who shouldn't be having an abortion or giving birth.
Winter
I am so tired of winter cold. Spring in Boise is beautiful--sometimes crisply cold, but at least sunny. Fall in Boise is beautiful. Summer can be unpleasantly hot--but at least nights are pleasant. Winter, however, is too many days like today, that open gray and cold, and stay that way.
Shipping Stuff To The Far Side of the World
I just received my first ScopeRoller order from New Zealand--and I am shocked to see that I can ship a 9 pound package to the other side of the planet for $28.10--and have it there in 4-10 days. Amazing!
House Project: Front Drain In
Okay, so we drove up there Friday night, and the rain and snow had been pouring all day. We get there, and the drain in the drainage channel at the front door of the garage is in place.
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But there was a snowdrift in front of the garage door--and inside, while not anywhere near as bad as before ("A River Runs Through It"), there was still a bit of water accumulated.
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I'm not sure what is left to do, without extending the roofline several feet--and because the snow was blowing horizontal on the garage door at the time, I am not sure that this would make much of a difference.
Anyway, we were able to get quite a few more books on the shelves in the office.
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But we are also starting to move my wife's literature books, and since those are going on bookshelves not yet moved (or even completely emptied), they are sitting in little forlorn piles in the corner.
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On the way back out, we experienced what is probably the reason this area hasn't developed a bit faster--horizontal snow. I am really wondering if putting a wind generator on our hill wouldn't quickly pay for itself in electricity generated. The snow was flying into us at about twenty degrees below parallel to the ground, and once we started driving, it seemed to be going completely horizontal.
My wife and I, both be California kids, have no experience with snowstorms this intense. The combination of the huge amount of it falling, that it is coming straight at the windshield, and in the dark, meant that we were beginning to have serious second thoughts about driving back down to Boise--perhaps camping out for the night in the new house. It was just on the edge of scary.
We went back up Saturday with more books, and then did a careful inspection of the tile. The tile guy is supposed to come back this coming week to replace some cracked tiles--probably caused by settling over the last several months, as well as temperature changes. We went through very carefully, marking every cracked tile or cracked grout.
The builder still doesn't have a solution for the three doors that close themselves. A common trick of bending the hinge pin to increase friction doesn't seem to be doing it. I think that I may have come up with a very clever solution--perhaps clever enough to be patentable--and it doesn't require removing or altering the hinges. I'll keep my mouth shut for a few days, until I get a chance to fiddle with this idea in my machine shop.
Last house project entry.
