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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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Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Great Graphics! A little tired of bumper stickers with hackneyed phrases like, "You can have my gun when you take it from my cold, dead fingers" and "Fear the government that fears your guns"? Okay, there's newer ones that work a bit better, like, "Dictators prefer unarmed peasants." Bumper stickers bother me a bit; it is rare for a single phrase to actually capture the complexity and subtlety of important ideas. At best, bumper stickers convey an emotion, but often they use humor to sell an oversimplified idea. You may recall the bumper sticker "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam." It was cute, it was short--and it wasn't very accurate. The situations were actually quite different. Over at this website, someone has put together some really astonishingly well produced posters that use a few more words than your average bumper sticker, and some carefully composed photographs--and the net effect is both thought provoking and emotionally powerful.         I am especially impressed with this subtle touch--the tattoo on the man's arm. I used to get my ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins on Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica from a woman with an Auschwitz number tattooed on her arm, so there's a powerful emotional resonance for me in seeing this detail. The real thing was smaller and less artistic than this, but it would have been hard to recognize in a poster, so I accept it as artistic license. The real thing, however, when I took economics in college many years later, started a chain of thought. We serial number expensive capital goods. The woman behind the counter was fortunate that her productive value as a "capital good" exceeded her "scrap value" or the Nazis would have "parted her out" for her fillings, her hair, and her skin, just like we do with cars that have reached the end of their useful life. This is the reason for the Second Amendment--to make sure that governments never reach the point where they can treat human beings like machines, to use and destroy as convenient.  Labels: gun rights, humor Fun With Machining Last night's "fun" was that I received some tripod feet from Celestron, and I was planning to expand my ScopeRoller product line accordingly. So, I start boring out a chunk of Delrin with a 5/8" Forstner bit--and it gets stuck. Boy, does it get stuck! As try as hard as I could, there was no way to get it loose. It appears that I bored too quickly, the Delrin melted--and then solidified around the shaft of the bit. You know how sculptors claim that they start out with a block of marble, and then remove everything from it that isn't the statute? Well, that's what I did. I put the Forstner bit, captive in the block of Delrin, into first the power miter saw, then the lathe, and "sculpted" away everything that wasn't a Forstner bit--or at least enough that I could force it out the end. At least I didn't damage the bit--and Delrin is relatively cheap. But I am unable to work on new development for this Celestron tripod until I get some more 2" Delrin rod, probably on Tuesday. Maps Again I've added a few to the list, and removed a few that have sold. As before, $3 for any map, postage paid in the U.S. I notice some interesting characteristics of the maps that National Geographic published before 1960. It is usually on much heavier paper, and it has stood up well to the ravages of time. The colors are less contrasty, and I don't think this is an aging issue; maps published in 1958 are noticeably less brightly colored than maps published in 1961. The older maps tend to have much more even scales, such as 1:11,000,000, or 1:3,500,000, instead of 1:4,942,080. Did they decide to start using standard paper sizes, and therefore had to fit maps into those dimensions?
Friday, May 26, 2006
Why I Haven't Gone to VoIP If you don't recognize VoIP, it stands for Voice over Internet Protocol--which means that your phone plugs into a box that converts your voice, and your dialing, into a bunch of information that goes out over your high-speed Internet connection, where it is then magically reassembled into a normal phone conversation. It is a very cool idea, and often a good bit cheaper than conventional phone service plus Internet. The reason that I have not made the switch is that Internet service is still at least one order of magnitude less reliable than a boring and antiquated copper wire phone. Right now, my Internet service is not working at the new house--and it isn't immediately clear why. Fortunately, Frontier Telephone, for all the goofs that they have made along the way, at least has it together enough for me to call Bitsmart and complain about a lack of connectivity. This would be especially important during a medical emergency. Moving Day Is Coming! Today was my son's last day of high school. One thing I am not going to miss is trying to raise him from the dead for school--he takes after his mother on that, I'm afraid. My son is moving in with a couple of his friends who are also going to Boise State in the fall. (The drive from the new house, especially in winter, is just too long.) One aspect of living in Boise that is rather nice is how cheap housing is here. They are moving into a very, very nice apartment complex--as nice as any that I ever lived in--and the total is only $975 a month for a three bedroom with hardwood floors and new, fairly high-end appliances. Try that in California on a pizza delivery driver's income! We had offered him a subsidy to make sure that working too much didn't cause him to drop out of school--but to my slight surprise and pleasure, he wants to see if he can support himself, at least as an experiment. My wife's plans to teach a Drama class this term fell through because the university couldn't drag enough students in for it, so she's busily packing everything that isn't truly essential for daily living, and moving it to the new house. An Organization This Afraid of Internal Debate... Shouldn't be telling everyone else that free speech is a good idea: The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization's policies and internal administration.I'm not shocked at all. This is basic Stalinism--and for much of the left, they are turning to the roots of the ACLU, originally an instrument for implementing communism, and whose leader Roger Baldwin admitted that civil liberties were merely a means to that end, not an end in itself. And Professor Volokh wonders why I think so little of the ACLU! Ever Wondered Why The News Media Are So Hostile to Bush? The blogger over at Little Green Footballs received a death threat from someone who was offended by his remarks: I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut....Okay, there's a lot of kooks out there. But it turns out that the IP address from whence this threat came turned out to match the IP address of Reuters news agency. LGF makes a pretty good case that the employee of Reuters who sent the threat is Inayat Bunglawala who "was selected as one of seven 'conveners' for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling extremism among young Muslims...." Hmmm. Maybe you need to hire experts about Islamic extremism for this sort of thing, but perhaps they don't need to be experts because of on-the-job training. Offensive Language Not Allowed in School And when you find out the offensive language, and from what image it was removed, you are going to be a bit startled: A Keller school district parent said political correctness has run amok at her daughter's elementary school, where the principal chose to omit the words "In God We Trust" from an oversize coin depicted on the yearbook cover.Yes, especially when idiots are making decisions. Not surprisingly, the ACLU thought this decision--like something that Winston might have done at his Ministry of Truth job in 1984--was correct: Michael Linz, a Dallas attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the district's move was appropriate, sensitive and constitutional. Thursday, May 25, 2006
Global Warming? Admittedly, it's just one more data point--but you would think, if global warming was actually happening, that we wouldn't be seeing widespread problems like this: BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- A late-April frost devastated young buds on grape vines in several western New York counties and beyond, challenging growers who had been hoping to rebound from a small crop last year. Labels: global warming I Think This Is Taking the Idea of "Casting Against Type" A Bit Too Far Who is going to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming movie? Cate Blanchett will play Bob Dylan in his "androgenous phase" in a new biopic of the great poet-songwriter's life, it was announced, as Dylan turned 65.I think they meant "androgynous phase," but why should I expect a wire service to know how to spell polysyllabic words? Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Life is Good It was a pretty spectacular day. My employer puts a great premium on charitable activity, and as a result, they encourage us to go out and do good works on company time. This afternoon, I went out as part of something called "Paint the Town," whereby we help low income people that need some help with house painting. The little old lady in question suffered a stroke a couple of years ago, but to be honest, she wouldn't have been up to the task, anyway. She recently retired from Albertson's after working for them for 34 years! She and her (I assume, late) husband bought this house in 1972. The house was built in 1934, and was in desperate need of a paint job. I volunteered for the power wash part of the project, figuring that with temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s, getting a little wet has to be better than being part of the scrape, caulk , and paint phases. Indeed, it was quite nice. I've never used a high pressure gadget like this before. The label claimed 2200 psi, and I did not find that hard to believe. Along with removing, dirt, spider webs, and mold, it was also removing layer upon layer of paint. The top layer was gray-green; under that was a mustard yellow, then white, then something so neutral that it might have been the bare stucco. On the wood trim (at least, the wood trim that didn't fall right off the house--there was a bit of that), it was surprisingly easy for the sprayer to take it right down to bare wood. Anyway, by the time I was done with my half of the house and the garage, I was covered from head to toe with water and vast numbers of little specks of many colors of paint. If my choice was wrestling with laser printer simulators, or power washing houses for this kind of pay, this wouldn't be a hard choice at all! (Of course, if people were regularly paid to power wash houses as well as I was being paid this afternoon, there would be murders committed to get the job.) In the evening, we had arranged to have a gun safe mover come to the house. If there is a single piece of furniture more unpleasant to move than a gun safe, I haven't moved it. Pianos, at least, have handles on the back. Gun safes? The gun safe mover brought over some suction cup gadgets which apparently work great on highly polished surfaces, but on the crinkle finish of the low-end Browning safes, not so well. By wild coincidence, the gun safe mover is someone that attends the same church as us, and as soon as my wife saw his wife getting out of the truck, I realized, "Oh yeah, you wrote 'Cliff's' on the paper. That's Cliff's Gun Safes!" So this was a bit more pleasant of a situation than I was expecting. It was still a physically demanding task getting the safe downstairs (hint: don't ever put the gun safe upstairs again), but there are worse ways to spend the early evening. Just before I left the house, I received an email from the first recipient of ScopeRoller's latest product, the Leg Plug for the Losmandy GM-8 mount. The customer is very happy! Coming back down the mountain from the new house, Styx's recording of "Come, Sail Away" was playing. With the Michelin Pilot A/S tires, the Corvette is a joy to drive, just as a way to get from point A to point B--without any need to squeal tires or test the outer limits of its cornering. All I could think was, "Life is good." Labels: house project There Are Days That The Educrats Become Impossible To Parody Because any parody you came up with would be indistinguishable from what they are actually doing. I've mentioned before that a number of universities have started to replace "BC" and "AD" with the more PC "BCE" (Before Common Era) and "CE" (Common Era). Since most Americans have no idea what these mean, it is the triumph of an insular minority over effective communication with the majority that pays for the schools. Now, Michigan schools have decided to do something about that offensive A-word--you know, "American": In perhaps a well-intentioned, but pernicious example of political correctness, the Michigan Department of Education is attempting to ban the "America" and "American" from our public schools. Even though the word "America" appears in the department's own civics and government benchmarks, the department's style protocol for the Michigan Education Assessment Program requires that "America" and "Americans" be expunged from our testing and grade level expectations. Last week, the department ordered that our hard-working teachers not utter the words. Professor Barnett's Cherry-Picking Of Quotes Over here, Professor Randy Barnett pulls a quote out of an 1805 Supreme Court decision as more evidence of the "libertarian" presumption of the Constitution: "Libertarian" Constitutional Quote of the Day III:If this is Barnett's idea of a libertarian presumption, it shows that he is grasping at straws. The decision in question (which you can read here), is: Now, these are important questions of law as to whether the federal government should or should not enjoy a preference in bankruptcy court over private creditors, but there's nothing "libertarian" or even close about this decision. And, you will notice (if you read the whole decision): The majority of this court is of opinion that the United States are entitled to that priority, and therefore the judgment of the circuit court is to be reversed, and the cause to be remanded for further proceedings.So the Court upheld the federal government's priority over private debtors in bankruptcy court. How does this qualify as "libertarian"? The whole manner in which Professor Barnett cherry-picks quotes to find some libertarian presumption in the Constitution reminds of Professor Saul Cornell's methods for finding no right to keep and bear arms in decisions that strike down gun control laws explicitly based on the right to keep and bear arms. Ideology is trumping data. UPDATE: I looked back on some of Barnett's other libertarian examples from American history, and it is embarrassing. He quotes from Andrew Jackson's veto of the renewal of the Bank of the United States charter. Jackson, of course, was no libertarian. He was quite supportive of the various Georgia removal acts, which confiscated Cherokee lands to give to whites, and forced the Cherokees to leave the state. Quoting Jackson's veto message as evidence of libertarian ideas is like pointing out that the South didn't have public schools before the Civil War, and therefore the South (you know, the slave owning states that made distribution of abolitionist literature a capital crime) was libertarian. Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Uh-Oh It sounds like the mutation that everyone has feared may have happened: May 23 (Bloomberg) -- All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus.It might be time to build up your stockpiles of food that doesn't go bad--and since I am very partial to cinnamon, which definitely is imported, time to stockpile that as well. How I'm Voting in the Republican Primary Today I should mention that in a number of these races, I'm operating on what information I can find on the Internet. Idaho House district 14, seat A Mike Moyle, largely because I can find enough information about him to see that we agree about many social issues; his opponent, Ben Simpson, apparently didn't respond to the survey. Idaho House district 14, seat B Jim Borton. Raul Labrador is undecided about the Idaho Marriage Amendment; Borton supports it. Idaho State Senate District 14 Rod Beck. This was a hard one; his opponent, Stan Bastian, is clearly much more supportive of public funding of community colleges than Beck. On the other hand, Bastian sounds a bit liberal, and has the support of the Idaho Statesman. Idaho First Congressional District Bill Sali. This wasn't an easy choice. There were five reasonably conservative Republican candidates, and one who was somewhat liberal, Sorenson. I am picking Sali because: 1. Sali is, I think, more likely to get the votes needed to stop Sorenson. 2. Vasquez is definitely a bit more liberal than I would prefer, especially on the draft. (Vasquez has expressed support for bringing it back--which bugs me, and is also bad politics.) Governor I'm voting for "Butch" Otter. Yes, he leans a bit more libertarian on social issues than I am completely happy with, but his willingness to listen to his constitutents about the Federal Marriage Amendment suggests that he is trainable. State Controller This is a no-brainer. Donna Jones is the Executive Director of the Idaho Real Estate Commission; Royce Chigbrow is a CPA, with a BS in Business Adminstration. This isn't exactly a policy sort of job; I want someone who thoroughly understands accounting in charge, and that's almost certainly Chigbrow, not Jones. Attorney-General I see no reason to turn out the incumbent, Lawrence Wasden. Superintendent of Public Instruction There are three candidates in the Republican primary. Steve Casey is a high school principal, and doesn't see the pressing need for higher standards in math and science education. That blows him out for me. Tom Luna gets it; Smylie seems to get it, also. But Luna supports an education tax credit, and opposes state funded preschool, while Smylies supports it. I'm voting for Luna. Ada County Commissioner, District 1 I can't decide who to vote for on this one. The incumbent, Peavey-Derr, sounds just a little too much like a career politician, but her responses, and her opponent Kimball's responses, don't really give me any strong reason to unseat Peavey-Derr. Ada County Treasurer I can't see any strong argument for one over the other. Both Ingram and Robinson sound highly qualified for an uncontroversial job. Monday, May 22, 2006
McGreevey Tells All--Perhaps More Than We Wanted To Know It is an article of faith in some circles that what former Governor McGreevey of New Jersey describes is actually atypical of homosexual men: NEWARK -- Recently released excerpts from his upcoming book tell the story of a troubled man resorting to anonymous homosexual trysts at highway rest stops as he wrestled with desires frowned on by his Roman Catholic faith and his family.If you want to know why the Catholic Church is still paying out vast sums of money to resolve child sexual abuse cases--which disproportionately involve boys, not girls--well, here's what McGreevey thought would be a solution: At one point, he told The Post, he considered entering the Catholic priesthood because he hoped its vow of chastity would solve the dilemma.A lifelong vow of chastity, for most men, is delusion. It is rather like telling an eagle to take a vow of flightlessness. Yes, there are going to be men who can live up to such a vow, but most are going to find it a continual struggle. What grieves me about this whole story is that McGreevey, rather than confront this honestly, kept playing games--in particular, his remarks about "avid womanizer" show that he had a serious sexual self-control problem--and also show what was considered acceptable behavior in New Jersey political circles. It is no surprise that as a consequence he had self-control problems about who he hired, and what that person did for a princely government paycheck. As Michael Williams points out: Unfortunately, I don't think that our culture is morally equipped to deal with homosexuality. We aren't prepared to significantly condemn the heterosexual "womanizing" that apparently pervades the New Jersey political scene, so how can society legitimately resist homosexual promiscuity? The truth is that sexual addictions of all sorts can only be effectually treated if the addict is willing to recognize that sex itself can only rightly exist within a proper moral framework: marriage between a man and a woman. A homosexual trying to "cure" himself by oogling women is like an alcoholic trying to switch to cigarettes -- what's the point? Labels: child sexual abuse Media Bias: Defining Extreme Dave Kopel's latest Rocky Mountain News column points to this interesting example of how a journalist defines "extreme": Analyzing the 5th Congressional District Republican primary for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Post's Erin Emery claimed that six of the seven candidates were "running hard to the extreme right." The headline repeated the claim that the candidates in the Colorado Springs-based district were "extreme" and the subheadline called the candidates "arch-conservative." In support of the epithets, the article supplied a large chart detailing the candidates' views on three issues: abortion, gay marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research.Argue if you want that a majority of the people (55%) are wrong--or that a very, very large minority of the people (36%) are wrong--but to call "extreme" positions that at least one-third of the population agree with, redefines "extreme" to mean, "I don't agree." Labels: abortion "Dinosaurs on the Ark": Groan Regular readers know that I am more than a little irritated by the High Priests of Atheist Evolution who refuse to admit that there are some genuine questions about the mechanisms--questions that Intelligent Design asks rather well. Where the High Priests of Atheistic Evolution get me upset is their arrogant certainty about matters that are, at best, in the area of speculation. There's another group that upsets me as well, and that is the bunch that insists that the Earth is 6000 years old (maybe 10,000 years, for some of the really liberal members of this crowd). Okay, I will admit that it is possible that the Earth is actually vastly younger than it appears--but if so, it means that someone (or perhaps Someone) has put a lot of energy into making the Earth falsely appear to be quite old. The Young Earth claim is rather like those who claim the Holocaust didn't happen. Yes, there is an extremely remote possibility that a vast, tremendously competent conspiracy made lots of films, falsified records, arranged for me to meet survivors with numbers tattooed on their arms, talk to people who knew survivors, etc. It just isn't very likely. It is far more likely that what the evidence shows is what really happened. So, last night, just to give them the benefit of the doubt, my wife and I watched a video put out by Dr. Kent Hovind, who runs something called Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adenture Land in Florida. The video's title was, "The Age of the Earth" and the cover materials claimed that it would demonstrate that science shows that the Earth is actually only 6000 years old. First problem: at least thirty minutes in, he had advanced no argument to support this claim, except Bishop Ussher's early eighteenth century century claim based on adding up the years recorded in the Old Testament. Even nineteenth century opponents of evolution were quick to acknowledge that the word translated as "begat" in the King James Version of the Bible does not necessarily mean a son or daughter, but only a descendant. In short, the important figures are listed, but not necessarily all members of the line. This blows out any attempt at using the "begats" as a method of determining precise dates. Second problem: for someone who puts a big focus on the Bible as the source of all knowledge, Dr. Hovind doesn't seem to know it very well--or at least he quotes it out of context. At one point in his rambling and not well organized lecture, he mentions that George Washington was bled to death by doctors who thought that this was good medical procedure, and then Dr. Hovind quotes from Leviticus 17:11, that "the life is in the blood" to show that Washington's doctors should have looked to the Bible, instead of their own limited understanding. But read in context, you can see that this quote is about the eating of animals, not about medical care: 10 "'Any Israelite or any alien living among them who eats any blood--I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from his people. Third problem: Dr. Hovind is great fun to listen to, cracking jokes--but the result is more like standup comedy than a serious discussion of the questions related to cosmology, evolution, and the title issue that he can't seem to get around to discussing in a timely manner: "The Age of the Earth." Worse than this is that Dr. Hovind's mocking of evolutionists is not conducive to serious debate of the questions. It is irritating when I hear evolutionists suggest that all skeptics of their theory are ignorant knuckle draggers, and I am not any happier to see creationists such as Ken Hamm and Dr. Hovind engage in the same sort of nastiness. (It is even less acceptable when such persons are claiming to follow Jesus.) Fourth serious problem: Dr. Hovind attempts to show that the dramatic expansion of the teaching of evolution in public schools, starting around 1959, reaching a peak in pages of science textbooks in 1963, caused higher crime rates, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, etc. There are actually a whole bunch of other changes that are happening in that same period, of which the most important is that a huge number of baby boomers born in the years following World War II were reaching sexual maturity. It is also unclear whether Dr. Hovind's charts are showing raw counts, or rates per 100,000 people. The U.S. Supreme Court also struck down laws mandating prayer in public schools; broadened protections for criminal defendants; effectively gutted laws against obscenity. Trying to nail evolution in biology textbooks for the social changes when you have so many other possible factors is absurd. Okay, all of this could be carelessness--but while many of his graphs show rates for these antisocial behaviors up to 2000, his crime rate chart stops at 1990--even though the data is readily available. Why? Because violent crime rates started to fall in 1991, and have dropped to levels that we haven't seen since the early 1960s--and this wouldn't be so easy to explain with his simple model of blaming evolution in textbooks. Fifth serious problem, and the one that got us to turn it off: dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. The word used in the Hebrew that is sometimes translated as "the world" has several meanings, including "the known world." There is no geologic evidence for a world wide flood. There is abundant evidence for at least one catastrophic regional flood in Mesopotamia--large enough that to the people of that time, the distinction between "the world" and "the known world" might have been quite irrelevant. (Or at least that's what the textbook my professor assigned for Ancient Middle East says.) Dr. Hovind, of course, insists on a world wide flood--and then claims not only that dinosaurs are contemporaneous with man, but that Noah took baby dinosaurs onto the Ark. Where, oh where, are there any dinosaur remains that have not been fossilized? We have examples of mammoth bones that were used by humans for making shelters--and these bones are recent enough that they are still bone, not stone. But there are no T. rex teeth, or bones, or leather. Why? Because it has been millions of years since the dinosaurs. Labels: intelligent design I Guess I'll Be Voting For Sali in the First Congressional District Race I confess that while I have some misgivings about Sali--he just seems a bit too slippery, while Vasquez seems more real--Sali more closely matches my views, and Sali seems like he is more likely to win the primary. I just hope that if Sali wins the Republican primary, the Idaho Statesman doesn't see this as some sort of vindication of their open borders philosophy, because that has been Vasquez's single issue--stopping illegal immigration. |
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