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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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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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. |
Friday, September 08, 2006
There Are Times That You Wish You Could Make Something You Write Unlinkable To Some People I keep an eye out, through Technorati, who is linking to stuff on my web site. I was disappointed to see this neo-Nazi link to my article about the coup d'etat plot against Roosevelt. It doesn't bother me too much when various leftist conspiracy theorists link to that article--perhaps readers will read the rest of what I have to say, and realize what a crock the conspiracy theories are. Anyone that takes that neo-Nazi blogger seriously enough to follow any of his links to my articles, however, is probably a lost cause. This jerk isn't even subtle or clever. Action on The 9/11 Deniers Yesterday, I asked: Imagine if faculty members were running around denying the Holocaust happened. Yes, I know that there's Holocaust-denier Professor Butz (talk about an appropriate name) at Northwestern University, but he's tenured, and the university goes out of its way to express its disapproval of his nonsense. Where's the similar effort of universities to distance themselves from the wingnuts at" 9/11 Scholars for Truth"?The answer today: Hmmm. What is thermite? It's aluminum powder and iron oxide. Once you get enough heat going to disassociate the iron oxide back to oxygen and iron, the aluminum very energetically starts a very exothermic reaction of oxidizing. How else could thermite residue end up at the World Trade Center except "military denotations"? Let's see, what is the major metal used in airliners? Aluminum. What is the major structural component of skyscrapers? Steel--which is typically 98-99% iron. Iron rusts in moist climates, turning into iron oxide. What happens when you crash an airplane made of aluminum into a structure with lots of iron oxide, burning at 1800 degrees? How would you distinguish "evidence of thermite" from the consequences of this collision? UPDATE: A reader tells me: Just a note about Prof. Arthur Butz: I actually took a course (Communication Theory) from him years ago in graduate school. About midway throught the term, the school newspaper came out with the revelation (to most of us, anyway) that Butz didn't believe that the Nazis deliberately killed Jews. It certainly made me look upon him somewhat differently, I'll admit.Fortunately, Holocaust denial would be well outside the realm of an electrical engineering class. When the humanities or social sciences are the subject, it is astonishing how easy it is for bizarre and inappropriate stuff to end up in lectures. Thursday, September 07, 2006
The Moral Case For Treason Trials; The Pragmatic Argument Against It I mentioned earlier today the modern version of Holocaust denial; the academics who are insisting that 9/11 was an inside job--in spite of Osama bin Laden's bragging that he did it, and today's release of a video tape by al-Jazeera of Osama bin Laden meeting with the 9/11 hijackers before their operation. Then I saw United 93 on A&E this evening--it isn't any less powerful even with a bunch of commercials in the middle. Then I imagined: what would have happened if, a couple of years into World War II, a bunch of college professors started to claim that Pearl Harbor was an "inside job." By "inside job," I don't mean that Roosevelt's Administration failed to warn the commanders at Pearl Harbor of the imminent threat. I also don't mean that the Roosevelt Administration failed to adequately prepare for Japanese attack, or failed to fully appreciate the threat. These are both true, but the equivalent of what these leftist morons are doing would have been if professors had banded together in 1943 and claimed that the U.S. Army Air Force actually did the attack on Pearl Harbor--not the Japanese. Does anyone seriously question that they would have been tried for treason, for giving aid and comfort to our enemies in wartime? There seems to me no strong moral or legal argument against trying these liars for treason. The argument against trying them is pragmatic. The same crowd of leftists is insisting that America is a fascist nation, that there are no freedoms left, and that we have become like Nazi Germany. (While continuing to receive paychecks from state governments, instead of a visit from the Gestapo.) Whatever the legal basis for trying them for treason, it would just make these liars feel self-important, and give them even more followers on the left. It doesn't say much for the academic community in the U.S., however, that these liars aren't getting a lot of negative feedback from most of their fellow academics. Imagine if faculty members were running around denying the Holocaust happened. Yes, I know that there's Holocaust-denier Professor Butz (talk about an appropriate name) at Northwestern University, but he's tenured, and the university goes out of its way to express its disapproval of his nonsense. Where's the similar effort of universities to distance themselves from the wingnuts at" 9/11 Scholars for Truth"? Recent Arrivals in the Mail Jim Geraghty's Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership. My first reacton to the title alone is, "Whoa! I thought the 'Era of Republican Leadership' started with the Contract With America and Republican control of both houses of Congress in 1994!" At least from the blurbs on the back cover, the theme of the book seems to be that Americans don't really trust the Democrats on national security after 9/11. There's gotta be more than that to justify a book this thick. It would appear to be a history of the MoveOn wing of the Democratic Party's efforts to make sure that Osama bin Laden wins. There's A Blog For Everything Including this blog, Regime of Terror: "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism." Here's a recent excerpt:
It's good to know that someone is busily gathering information and making it accessible. How Much More Evidence Do You Need? This article from Britain's Daily Mail discusses what has replaced Elvis sightings, "we never went to the Moon," and other lunatic conspiracy theories among the hopelessly stupid (at least, those whose teach our kids):
And then we have this amusingly timed arrival: How much more do you need? Osama bin Laden has released tapes in the past claiming credit for 9/11. Now we have a tape showing him meeting with some of the hijackers. How much more evidence is required? Or is claiming that 9/11 was a BusHitler plot a requirement for tenure in some universities? Cross-Slide Vises I purchased a cross-slide vise at Harbor Freight the other day for $39.99. (There's a picture of it here.) A cross-slide vise, for those not familiar with this gadget, is a vise that lets you clamp an object, then move it in the X and Y positions--rather like a vertical mill does (although at this price, nowhere near the accuracy of a vertical mill). There is a big screw that moves the vise in one direction, and another big screw that moves the vise perpendicular to the first big screw. Obviously, at this price, this is not a substitute for a vertical mill--but it does give you the option of making relatively fine motions of a workpiece in two directions. How accurate is it? There's an adjustable collar on each direction's axis with thirty lines on it. A little experimentation revealed that these are supposed to correspond to 0.1 mm movements. When I was actually using it, however, I often found that where it put my workpiece was sometimes a bit off of what I expected. Was I converting inches to millimeters incorrectly? All of these X and Y positioning gadgets (including the good ones) rely on the regularity and dimensions of the screw thread. A 20 thread per inch screw advances the carriage by 1/20th of an inch with each revolution, and the divisions on the collar, if accurately marked, allow you to pick out regular fractions of 1/20th of an inch. I found myself wondering: wouldn't it be nice to replace the collars with the 30 0.1 mm divisions with some that measure in hundredths of an inch instead? What is the actual screw threads per inch? I made thirty revolutions of the screw, and discovered that each revolution is actually 2.9574 mm--not the 3 mm that 30 0.1 mm divisions would imply. This is about a 1.44% variance from nominal. So my next question was: is this actually an English system thread, perhaps eight threads per inch? No, it turns out to be .1164 inches per revolution--about 3% variance from .125 inches per revolution. I have a couple of interesting choices here: I can either continue to use it in metric form--but add about 1.44% to how much I think I need to turn the crank to get to the right place--or I could add twelve lines to the collars (or make new collars) that would roughly mark 0.01" of movement. I would be off by 3%, but I wouldn't be converting back and forth from English to metric--and to get this accurate, I am going to have to correct for the mechanical error of the thread, whether I stay in English or metric. I don't have a dividing head (a gadget used on a mill or lathe to very accurately measure rotation of an object), but I think that I can still do a pretty accurate job of putting twelve equally spaced marks on the collar. 1. You clamp the collar in the vertical mill's vise, and use a very small end mill to scribe the "0" line. 2. Then rotate the collar in the vise 180 degree until a level shows that the "0" line is exactly on the vertical, and mark the "6" line. 3. Rotate the collar 90 degrees, and use the level to get the "0" and "6" lines exactly horizontal, and mark the "3" line (which is perpendicular to the line connecting "0" and "6"). 4. Rotate the collar 180 degrees, and use the level to get the "3" line exactly on the vertical, and scribe the "9" line. 5. Use a protractor against the center of the collar to move the collar so that the "0" line is 30 degrees from vertical (using the level to make sure that the base of the protractor is vertical), and scribe the "1" line. 6. Repeat to scribe the "2" line 30 degrees from the "1" line. 7. Use the procedure in step 2 to mark the "7" and "8" lines, which are vertically opposite the "1" and "2" lines. 8. Use the procedure in step 3 to mark the "4" and "5" lines, which are perpendicular to the lines connecting "1" and "7" and "2" and "8", respectively. 9. Repeat to mark the "10" and "11" lines, which are perpendicular to the lines connecting "1" and "7" and "2" and "8", respectively. I don't have any letter dies for stamping the numbers in, but I suppose it worst comes to worst, I can drill some teeny tiny wholes next to each line, and fill them in with white paint--and just count the holes. UPDATE: The other axis is off in the other direction--each revolution is .135" of motion, or 3.432 mm, so off by 14%. Perhaps I will abandon any hope of using the collars for measurement, and just regard them as an easy way to make very fine adjustments. Mainstream Media Falsify History--But Guess Whose Ox Is Being Gored Now? Democrats! This is rich! From the Washington Post: The article goes on to point out a few examples. Now, it is clear that the Clinton Administration failed to take advantage of several opportunities to go after Osama bin Laden--but it sounds like ABC may have gone for easy (but not necessarily accurate) ways to convey this. This is unfortunate, because the focus will be on ABC's "fictionalizations" rather than on the actual situations where the Clinton Administration screwed up. Still, there's a point that I like to make. The Clinton Administration was reluctant to take any risks on this matter because, to put it bluntly, the American people weren't interested, and would have punished Clinton most severely for doing the right thing. It would have taken real leadership for Clinton to tell Americans the truth: "We've got a problem named Osama bin Laden, and he has declared war on us--we have to take action." That kind of leadership Bill Clinton just didn't have. Unlike another president, who has let his approval rating sink into the 30s rather than do what the left wants him to do--withdraw from Iraq. UPDATE: Just to clarify: unwillingness to withdraw from Iraq isn't the only reason for Bush's low approval numbers. His immigration stance has certainly alienated much of his conservative base. But let's face it: the left would not be working so hard to destroy Bush except for the Iraq issue. Wednesday, September 06, 2006
CPAP Titration Study I went for the CPAP titration study last night--even more unpleasant than the polysomnography study a few months back. The first mask we tried was a very small one that just went over my nose. To prevent an air leak, it was on pretty tight, and after a few hours of rubbing back and forth on my mustache, I woke up. I got used to the air pressure coming in through my nose pretty quickly--but you can't really talk or yawn with positive air pressure. Nor did it seem like I had slept very well. After I woke up, the technician put a larger mask on that covered both nose and mouth, and it wasn't as uncomfortable. I slept until about 5:30 AM, and it did seem as though I slept quite a bit better with the larger mask--I had some rather intense dreams towards the end (or so it seemed). The technician told me that with the smaller mask, I kept dropping into REM sleep (the dream stage), but I didn't stay there. With the larger mask, I was getting into REM sleep long enough to be dreaming. Still, when I awoke, I would say that the quality of sleep in the 7 1/2 hours that I was using the CPAP was inferior to what I have been enjoying with the Breathe Right strips. With the large mask, it was perhaps comparable to the Breathe Right strips, or perhaps even slightly better--but it was hard to stay sleeping because of how uncomfortable it was. Now, some of this was probably because I wasn't home, and the monitoring gadgetry. But the big problem is that the mask and its attachment strips is just plain uncomfortable. I think the idea of the positive air pressure mask works, but the discomfort of the mask so overwhelms the benefit, that it doesn't come out as a net gain for me. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?") Significantly, when I reached home, I was still in need of sleep. I put on a Breathe Right strip, slept for another ninety minutes, and woke up feeling really good. It is possible that if I spent enough time adjusting to the CPAP mask that it would work better than the Breathe Right strips, and CPAP might be the best choice for others. I'm just not persuaded that it justifies the complexity, discomfort, adjustment time, and money for what seems like a marginal improvement. Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Income Mobility My son-in-law pointed me to a pretty interesting graphical description of income mobility in the United States 1988-98, which matches pretty well with what I have read elsewhere--that there is a pretty amazing amount of class mobility in America. The graph shows American population by family income broken into quintiles, and what fraction of each quintile remained in the same income category ten years later. Not surprisingly, a bit more than half of the poorest quintile stayed poor. Also, not surprisingly, most families in the top quintile stayed there. What is a bit surprising is that the percentage of families in the top and bottom quintiles that stayed there after ten years--at least as represented by this graph--was the same. If you mouse over different quintiles on this graph, it shows you where families in each quintile in 1988 ended up in 1998. If you subscribe to the liberal understanding of the world, "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer," you are going to be a bit surprised. About 5% of the richest quintile ended up in the poorest quintile, and about 2.5% of the poorest quintile ended up in the richest quintile. Families in the middle quintile were slightly more likely to end up in the richest quintile than in the poorest quintile, and about equally likely to end up in the income quintile either just above or just below them. One aspect of looking at social mobility that can be a bit misleading is that it leads one to think in terms of a fixed level of wealth--and American society has definitely became wealthier. This article from the December 29, 2004 The Economist bemoans the decline in social mobility in America and the increase in income equality--but there is this rather important point buried in there: The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.If your concern about poverty is absolute human needs such as shelter, food, and medical care, it doesn't much matter how rich the rich are, as long as the poor have those needs met. The poorest quintile is 6.4% wealthier (after adjusting for inflation), so they are better off. But the Economic Policy Institute seems to be more concerned about income inequality than about absolute poverty. Let's do a thought experiment. If tomorrow, we could wave a magic wand, and every poor person in America had health insurance, medical care, a nice middle class home, a new car, and a full refrigerator, would that be a good thing? I think it would be wonderful. But to hear the income inequality whiners talk, if the top 10% of American families also became billionaires at the same time, this would be a bad thing. UPDATE: A reader points out that people in the top quintile are likely to stay there simply because there's nowhere to go up from there. You can always step down from the top of the ladder, but there's nowhere up from the top rung. However, to stay in the top income quintile over the ten year period 1988-98 doesn't just mean keeping your salary constant. The income of those in the top quintile during that period grew substantially (even after inflation adjustment). If you were at the bottom of the top quintile in income in 1988, an inflation-adjusted constant salary would drop you into the next quintile down (at least). Where Does Our Oil Come From? There's a widespread assumption that much of U.S. oil comes from the Middle East--that our bad habits about automobiles are funding those whose turbans are wound too tight. I thought this, also. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be the case. Total U.S. consumption in 2005 was 20.8 million barrels a day (which is an astonishing number), of which 12.2 million barrels a day was imported. But where does that imported oil come from? According to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy:
Note: The data in the tables above exclude oil imports into the U.S. territories. When I total the 2006 YTD column, the top 15 countries supply 11,518,000 barrels a day, or 94.4% of total imports. We are probably getting some oil from Middle Eastern countries that are not in the top 15, but it isn't enough to substantially change the percentages. Of that 11,518,000 barrels a day, Middle Eastern countries supply 2,761,000 barrels a day (or about 24% of imports from the top 15 countries)--and I think you could make the case that the imports from Iraq and arguably Kuwait are strengthening liberal democracy in the region far more than they help the extremists. Because imports are about 59% of U.S. consumption, Arab countries supply about 13% of total U.S. oil consumption.Now, there is an argument that we should not be putting money into Saudi Arabia--a country whose leadership is on our side, but which has important Islamofascist elements--but U.S. oil consumption is largely not coming from the Middle East. There are countries that have serious dependency problems on Middle Eastern oil, such as Japan, China, India, and many European countries. It is also true that a cutoff of oil from the Middle East would drive up prices for all oil, so it is clearly in U.S. interests to resolve the problems in that part of the world (if it is even possible). But let's not kid ourselves that everyone driving electric cars is going to dramatically change the geopolitical situation. Transportation demand (which includes trucks and trains) is about 2/3 of U.S. oil consumption. The good news is that it would be possible, without enormous suffering, to wean ourselves completely away from Middle Eastern oil--perhaps with a dramatic expansion of nuclear power, and a more aggressive use of oil shales and the various green power sources. The Europeans and the Japanese could probably do so also with more use of nuclear power--except that Germany, as well as Austria, Sweden, Italy, and Belgium have made the decision to phase out nuclear power. Sunday, September 03, 2006
What's Boise Like? My daughter, who only lived with us for a few months before she headed off to the University of Idaho in Moscow, is now back in town, and has posted her comments about life in Boise, here: After living in Moscow, which was a whopping 20,000 (most of which were college students), I am LOVING living here. The traffic isn't as bad as people say (they haven't driven in northern California or Seattle), and there's so much to do. We actually have a huge river here, and lots of ski areas, plus the perks of a bigger city (Target, a downtown among other things)! I met a great couple on Friday that were lecturing at the university. I asked what they thought of Boise, and they said they really liked it, people were nice, and people who were here, wanted to be here. What a nice thing! People are here because they chose it (so hopefully they like it).Oh, and this little sign that my daughter is growing up: I didn't watch the VMAs, but I've spent plenty of time flipping through pictures of who wore what and reading articles that debate whether the VMAs were boring or not. As I flipped through pictures I had two epiphanies: A Dark Thought, As We Approach The Fifth Anniversary of 9/11 I'm not sure that it changes the appropriate response, but what if Osama bin Laden's goal in attacking the U.S. was not to drive us out of the Middle East, and not to defeat us, but simply to impoverish us down to the level of the Arab world? At least part of what drives the Arab rage at the West is that the Arab world is so desperately poor--in spite of controlling vast petroleum reserves. As should be apparent to any particularly intelligent person, the Arab world is not terribly effective at creating wealth--the best that they can hope for is to sell a natural resource that they barely knew existed a century ago, and that they lacked the technology to exploit. Probably because of Islam's limitations on charging interest, the Muslim world, and even more especially, the Arab world, has lagged far behind other societies in figuring out how to create wealth. (Selling oil that someone else found under your land isn't creating wealth; figuring out how to turn a smelly black water pollutant into mobility and plastics is creating wealth.) Now, seeing everyone else pulling out ahead of you would be galling under the best of conditions, but when your religion tells you that you are superior to everyone who lives in Dar El Harb (variously translated as "house of war" or more figuratively, "those who are in rebellion against God") this is especially upsetting. If you can see that your culture and religion (and I'm not sure which is more important on this) is holding you back, you can either modify your culture and religion, accept your poverty, or find some way to impoverish those who are ahead of you. Certainly, 9/11 did that--it destroyed an incredible amount of wealth, both in capital goods that were destroyed (buildings, planes), intangibles (stock market valuation, decline in housing prices), and the human capital of thousands of lives. The complexities added to travel, the hard to quantify but nonethless real losses in freedom and sense of security have certainly made us less wealthy. The subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also cost well above $100 billion, and they will continue to drain us for decades. The war with Iran (which I think is probably inevitable now) is going to be comparable in price tag, unless Iran gets nuclear weapons--and the price tag on that will be measured in the trillions, depending on whether they succeed in nuking any American cities. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any alternative. What this may come down to is this: Osama bin Laden and his fellow jihadis may well have figured out that the only way that they can continue to feel good about their place in the world is by reducing the West to the same level of desperate impoverishment as the Arab world. This also explains the left's alliance with bin Laden almost from the beginning--they also share this resentment that the West isn't desperately poor (but not enough to give up their private jets and Ferraris). How Bush & The Republican Leadership Screwed Up This article reports on the increasing signs that the Democrats might win control of the House in November. How did this happen? 1. I still think the decision to go to war in Iraq was correct. The WMDs? Most of them were probably shipped out of Iraq in the 14 months of haggling with the UN Security Council (some of whose members, we now know, were corrupted by Iraqi bribes). Enough remained that we have, to date, recovered at least 700 chemical artillery shells (some of which were empty, others with degraded chemical weapons). However, the Bush Administration made some very serious mistakes along the way. Some of these mistakes were hard choices. Should we dismantle the existing Iraqi military? They decided that the risk was too high, and they have been right--but it meant that U.S. forces bore the full brunt of insurgent attacks for a while, and we put a lot of men out of work who knew how to blow things up, and probably knew where to find explosives. Other mistakes just make me scratch my head: why didn't they put more effort into securing Iraq's borders? It would have been relatively easy to declare a five mile wide "free fire zone" along Iraq's borders with Iran and Iraq, and had patrols regularly kill everything that moved in the area. 2. A number of commentators have criticized the Bush Administration's decision after 9/11 not to dramatically expand our armed forces. Rumsfeld had long criticized a bloated military bureaucracy, and encouraged a leaner, more efficient military. In retrospect, it seems clear that an overwhelming military presence in Iraq might have led to a shorter occupation. Instead of 100,000+ U.S. troops, perhaps 500,000 U.S. troops could have shut off border infiltration, and provided more internal security. 3. Abu Ghraib. This wasn't Bush's fault, but how did those pictures get out? I have seen it suggested that the lawyers for those soldiers who were being prosecuted for abuse of prisoners might have leaked them as part of an attempt to get the charges dropped: "You know, if these pictures came out in court, it would be very damaging to the U.S. You don't really want this to go forward, do you?" I would be upset if the soldiers involved in these abuses were let off with a light sentence--but it is clear that the U.S. suffered a body blow in the Arab world because of these pictures, and it probably strengthened the native Iraqi insurgency. 4. Failure to get Congressional approval for the foreign wiretap and data mining procedures. I suspect that in 2002 there would have been no problem at all getting broadened authority for both of these necessary steps. This was just dumb. 5. The immigration fiasco. I know, Bush and a lot of Republicans are dependent on corporate interests (as were Democrats, when they were in charge), but illegal immigration wasn't just a concern of conservatives. This is an issue on which there is broad support among both Republicans and Democrats for shutting off illegal immigration as a first step towards figuring out a sensible solution. While I don't believe that laws should be passed for playing partisan politics, doing the right thing would also have strengthened the Republican Party's hand in this election. They could have positioned themselves as the party concerned with blue collar citizens and legal residents--thus undercutting one of the Democrats' traditional talking points. 6. Bush's reluctance to address concerns of social conservatives--with the notable exception of stem cell research--has done nothing to motivate that base. My guess is that Bush is really more libertarian than conservative. Now, I understand that not everyone shares the conservative concern about embryonic stem cell research, but this was not a hard case to make in terms that others would at least understand the moral qualms about it--and that so far, stem cells derived from other sources seem to be a more likely path to wonderful new medical treatments. |
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