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Labels: Islamofascism, terrorism However, at legal speeds on the highway slog out to GingerMan Raceway in South Haven, Michigan, the Solstice was admirably muted with the top up and, at 73 dBA at 70 mph, registered 3 dBA quieter than the Boxster. Also notable is the way the Solstice locks onto its lane; the Porsche is more prone to wander. Around the 11 turns and 1.88 miles of GingerMan asphalt, the precise-driving Porsche was clearly our favorite. Every millimeter of steering wheel and brake movement is accounted for and produces the expected response. Weight is transferred smoothly as the Boxster turns in obediently and hangs on neutrally, pulling 0.91 g on the skidpad versus the Solstice’s 0.85 g. But the Boxster doesn’t produce a ton of torque, so keep the revs up. That’s not a chore, in case you haven’t heard the 86 dBA of pure joy exhaled from the Boxster’s 2.7-liter flat-six at wide-open throttle. Labels: sinuses Craig S. Luckenbill said Thursday that he ran to get his 12-gauge shotgun, and his wife managed to close the door, but the coyote continued biting at the door and the front of the house. The coyote was in the front yard when Luckenbill went out and killed it with the shotgun, he said. "I'm a hunter but I've never seen anything like that." The Pennsylvania Game Commission confirmed Wednesday that the 40-pound eastern coyote Luckenbill shot on Sept. 21 had rabies, the first coyote to test positive for rabies in the state. Although the order includes numerous restrictions and conditions, neighbors who waited until the end of a lengthy board meeting Thursday night to hear the twice-delayed decision were dismayed. They say the center, which holds religious services and monthly lectures on topics related to Islam, not only has consistently violated township restrictions and an agreement with neighbors since it opened in 1994, but broke the rules this summer, even while the application was pending. While the zoning board said it "understands those frustrations," it found that it could not, as a matter of law, deny the requests, which include permitting operation of a school for students in kindergarten through eighth grades, a summer camp for children and increased attendance at some religious services. In a case members deliberated throughout the summer, the board found that the organization is operating as a school and does not qualify for an extension of the church's special exception as a religious use in a residential zone. The group had argued that its Christian-based instruction is a form of religious expression. Labels: establishment of religion Labels: global warming Labels: terrorism
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If Iraq Can't Be Won, Where Do We Go From Here?
I'm hoping that this can be won, but there is certainly going to come a point where the deaths and cost of Iraq are going to cause enough Americans to change their minds. We were watching CNN's coverage of the Iraq war this evening, and watching the pictures of the U.S. forces killed this week caused my wife to respond, "Those people don't deserve democracy." I explained that we aren't trying to infect Iraq with democracy primarily for the benefit of Arabs (although they will benefit from it), but because it benefits us. A culture that is reasonably free and reasonably prosperous should feel less need to produce suicide bombers.
But if the American people decide that the cost is too high, what is the alternative strategy? Leaving Iraq alone right now will lead to full civil war, and probably the crowd that likes to torture people to death with power tools will be back in power--just like the way things were under Saddam Hussein. As the declassified Key Findings of the National Intelligence Estimate last week pointed out, if we lose in Iraq, it will embolden jihadists throughout the world. The reason isn't hard to figure out: it will be perceived that like what happened in Somalia, Americans are weak, and lack the willingness to fight.
So what will we do? I can see a number of possible scenarios. I'm not endorsing any of these "solutions"--indeed, some of them are downright horrible. But if we can't make the Iraq Democracy Project work, these other methods of dealing with jihadis are dramatically worse.
1. "Fortress America": We secure our borders against terrorists entering either legally (as the 9/11 hijackers overwhelmingly did), or illegally (as could easily happen across our unsecure borders). But how do we do that? The ACLU (the fourth branch of the U.S. government) already objects to enforcement of the existing immigration laws. The dramatic increase in security to actually make us safe from terrorists coming here would be impossible, unless the ACLU ceased to have the influence in currently enjoys.
Along with terrorists, we also have to worry about WMDs. It would not be at all difficult to ship all sorts of nasty weapons into the U.S., either with long period timers on them, or with one legal resident of the U.S. prepared to set off the weapon when it arrived. The current volume of international trade is huge. To adequately secure against the arrival of WMDs would almost certainly cause a dramatic reduction in international trade--with deleterious effects on the U.S. economy.
2. Make al-Qaeda happy. Unfortunately, contrary to the fantasies of the left, it is not enough to withdraw U.S. forces from the Middle East. Al-Qaeda believes that interfering with rape and genocide in Darfur is also a sign of "Crusaders" and it was Australian interference in the gang rape of girls in East Timor by Islamofascists that led al-Qaeda to the Bali bombing. (Yes, feminists, there is a philosophy more oppressive to women than Christianity.) We would have to not only cut off aid to Israel, but stand by while Iran carries out its mission of extermination. Al-Qaeda has also repeatedly stated that conflict is inevitable until all nations are Islamic. I used to think this was so absurd that I questioned this premise of the novel Prayers for the Assassin. With the way that Americans are beginning to take the short view of this matter, maybe this is only very unlikely--not impossible.
The next three possible strategies would require enormous will, not only from the U.S., but from our allies. This will does not currently exist. Would it exist if there were a Beslan incident every month? You betcha. Why, even liberals might start to figure out that playing nice with al-Qaeda doesn't work.
3. Treat Muslim nations the way they have treated every other nation. Invade them; occupy; convert their mosques into churches; send in troops with orders to kill anyone that gives them any lip; assess a special tax on Muslims; pass laws that give Muslims less legal rights than non-Muslims, not just in ways that matter (say, a ban on Muslims possessing anything more deadly than a butter knife), but in ways intended to degrade them, like the laws that Muslims nations had prohibiting non-Muslims from riding horses. (Christians and Jews could only ride donkeys.) If we were prepared to do this as vigorously as Islam did to what had been the Byzantine Empire, in four generations, Islam would be a minority religion everywhere our soldiers went.
4. A war not to change hearts and minds, but to humble Islam. Remember last year when Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) suggested that a terrorist nuclear attack on the U.S. might cause us to use nuclear weapons on Mecca? I was horrified that he would say such a thing. The more that I think about it, the more I find myself wondering if it may come to that.
At least part of the core problem we are having with Islamofascism is that Muslims believe that they have a specially favored status before Allah--and at the same time, recognize that they are generally poor and miserable compared to the non-Muslim world--in spite of sitting on oceans of oil. These two positions create cognitive dissonance, which can force a rational person suffering it to abandon or modify one of those postions. Now, one rational response would be to solve the poverty problem by modernizing their economies. But unfortunately, Islamofascists seem more intent on destroying the economies of the West, so that this cognitive dissonance ends, because the West is as desperately poor as most Arab countries. (This may also be the reason the left is so sympathetic to al-Qaeda--they can end world poverty by making everyone poor.)
That horrifying concept of nuking Mecca? While Mecca itself isn't "special" to Islam, as I understand it, it would be difficult for Muslims to continue to hold on to this belief that they are "special" to Allah if they can't go on pilgrimage to the holy sites anymore. (The pilgrimage to Mecca is something that every Muslim is supposed to do at least once, if they can.) Such a destructive act would have to be thoroughly explained to the Muslim world to clarify its purpose: "You think that you are something special because you are Muslims? Sorry, you aren't. You won't rein in the monsters like al-Qaeda; this is a reminder that you worship a false god. Keep it up, and we'll nuke every significant religious site in the Muslim world."
5. There's one more step, if that doesn't work, and it is far more horrifying than that. Don't stop at nuking religious sites. If you are familiar with Randy Newman's satirical song "Political Science" you may think that I am being fiercely satirical. I'm not. This is a horrifying prospect--but I can see how, if Islamofascism can't be stopped by less barbarous methods, a generation from now this may be the only alternative to living in the Islamic States of America posited by Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin.
UPDATE: See here. I may have been mistaken about how dramatically the destruction of Mecca would be for destroying the overweening confidence of the Islamofascists in their righteousness.
The Dangers of Literalism in Translation
I've mentioned that my wife and I are leading a Bible study at our church about Creation, evolution, and related issues. A reader sent me a booklet by Don Batten and Jonathan Sarfati: 15 Reasons to Take Genesis As History (Brisbane, Aust.: Creation Ministries International, 2006). According to the author bios, "Drs Don Batten and Jonathan Sarfati are scientists with earned doctorates (in biology/plant physiology and chemistry/physics respectively) who have published in seclar scientific journals."
Before considering their arguments, I was curious to see what sort of papers they have had published. It is possible to make strong arguments with no previously published work, of course, but when you make a claim, it is helpful to see if it can be substantiated. Using scholar.google.com, I could find only one secular publication that cited Don Batten--but he does seem to have published several articles in journals such as Tree Physiology and Australian Journal of Plant Physiology. However, the Creation Ministries International web site had a list of Batten's secular journal papers, with links to these journals--and to say that he is a real scientist is not an overstatement. One example: "Ethylene and adventitious root formation in hypocotyl segments of etiolated mung-bean (Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek) seedlings" in Planta 138(3): 193–8.
There are no references to any published work by Jonathan Sarfati in any secular journal that I can find with scholar.google.com, but again, this seems to be more an indication of the weaknesses in scholar.google.com. Creation Ministries International has a list of Sarfati's secular journal articles, with links to what seem to be secular journals, such as "Tetraphosphorus tetraselenide: crystalline and amorphous phases analysed by X-ray diffraction, Raman and magic angle spinning 31P NMR spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry" in Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids 188(1-2):93–97. There might be a case that Sarfati, in writing this booklet, is working outside his area of expertise, but he is certainly a real scientist, who has done serious research in physical chemistry.
As the title suggests, the booklet contains 15 arguments for accepting the Genesis account as history--and by that, they are careful to emphasize[T]hat belief in inerrancy does not mean wooden literalism (a common straw-man argument). Inerrantists such as us apply the standard, orthodox, grammatical-historical hermeneutic, which recognizes the various forms of writing such as metaphor, hyperbole, etc. In other words, we take as literal history those passages which were clearly intended to be taken as such (including Gen. 1-11). [p. 5]
I wish that this were a straw-man argument. While well educated Christians--especially pastors--usually do not fall into "wooden literalism," as they describe it, there is plenty of it out there--and what makes this especially troubling is this literalism is based on English translations of Hebrew and Greek--with all the problems that this entails. Perhaps the most important is the problem of the multiplicity of meanings in Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek.
Modern English has, depending on whether you include all the scientific terms, somewhere in excess of a million words. In many cases, we have several different words that have exactly the same meaning--but in many other cases, there are some very subtle differences in either denotation or connotation. This wealth of parallel word choices is not true for many other languages. You may heard the claim before that the Eskimos (preferred term now is Inuit) have 44 different words for snow. I found a weird Mongolian/Eskimo/Russian dictionary in a bookstore in San Francisco many years ago, and sure enough, there really were 44 words for different types of snow! I suspect that the Kalahari Bushmen don't have even one word for snow.
Anyway, I've also been told that Biblical Hebrew had only about 10,000 words in its vocabulary. Strong's Concordance, which was published in 1890, shows from what every word in the King James translation of the Bible is translated. There's nothing "special" about the King James Version; the translators who worked on it did the best job that they could, but later translations are more accurate--although the majesty of the langugage (when it is still comprehensible to modern readers)--is still spectacular. (Let me recommend Adam Nicolson's history of the translation, God's Secretaries, published a couple of years back, if you want to know more about this language-defining process.) Strong's Concordance shows 8674 Hebrew words, and 5624 Greek words that were translated to English, so I find the claim that Biblical Hebrew had only about 10,000 words very plausible.
So what happens when you translate one language to another? Even for someone who is fluent in both languages, there are going to be times when some very subtle shades of meaning can get lost. Even worse, what if you are translating a language with 10,000 words into a language with 300,000 words? There are serious problems of context with any translation. The verb ratsakh in Hebrew is used in both the sense of "murder" (for example, in the Ten Commandments), but also in the sense of "kill" (such as an animal). When the King James Version was translated, they went for a very literal not but not very accurate translation; modern translations are a bit more careful to catch the distinction, and "You shall not murder" is more correct.
Let me get to the point: the Hebrew word used in Genesis's Creation account yom or yowm that is translated as "day" actually has a number of meanings: "from an unused root meaning to be hot; a day (as the warm hours), whether literal (from sunrise to sunset, or from one sunset to the next), or figurative (a space of time defined by an associated term)...." To insist that the Genesis account of Creation means only seven 24 hours days is not justified by the evidence. If you bring the assumption to the table that the Earth is very recent, then it makes perfect sense to translate yowm as "day." If you assume that the Earth might be quite old, then it is perfectly legitimate to translate yowm as "age" or "era."
There are similar translational issues with the word that the King James Version translated as "begat." This is also the origin of how Bishop Ussher came up with the date 4004 BC--assuming that this word meant "father of." The Hebrew word in the Old Testament is yalad, which according to the dictionary in Strong's Concordance, has a range of meanings: "a primitive root; to bear young; causatively, to beget; medically, to act as midwife; specifically, to show lineage:--bear, beget, birth((-day)), born, (make to) bring forth (children, young), bring up, calve, child, come, be delivered (of a child), time of delivery, gender, hatch, labour, (do the office of a) midwife, declare pedigrees, be the son of, (woman in, woman that) travail(-eth, -ing woman)."
Now, some of the Young Earth Creationists get quite insistent that yalad never means anything but "father of":Many Christian leaders also claim there are gaps in the Genesis genealogies. One of their arguments is that the word begat, as used in the timeline from the first man Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5 and 11, can skip generations. If this argument were true, the date for creation using the biblical timeline of history cannot be worked out.
Here's the problem: if yalad really does mean "father of" and only that, there are serious inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matthew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 3, and between those genealogies and the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies. Atheists like to point to the differences to reject the Bible. You have a choice here: either yalad can mean something other than "father of," in which case the genealogies in Matthew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 3 are picking out different important ancestors of Jesus--or it means only that, and two of the Gospels contradict each other, and the Old Testament.
I am more inclined to the idea that yalad means "ancestor of," partly because Luke's arrangement of Jesus's genealogy into 42 generations from King David to Joseph (14, 14, and 14 generations) almost certainly a numerological significance, because 14 is twice seven, and seven in Hebrew thought was the number of perfection.
If those who insist on sticking with "father of" as the only meaning of yalad are doing so because they believe that the Bible is inerrant, then they are creating a much bigger inerrancy problem with respect to Matthew and Luke. Their insistence on yalad as "father of" is actually just their interpretation of what that word should mean--and if they stick to it, they are denying the inerrancy of Scripture in an area that is not just their interpretation, but the literal meaning of the words in those genealogies.
This is already too long. I'll return to a discussion of Batten and Sarfati's booklet--and some problems with their arguments--in a later post.
More About Tesla Motors
Car and Driver 's October issue also has an article about the Tesla roadster--and does make this rather important point about recharging them:With a 220-volt, 70-amp charger made by Tesla that is hard-wired into your garage, the roadster will go from flat to flat-out in 3.5 hours. The car will be offered with a cord and a conventional 120-volt wall plug, should you be away from home, but charging time stretches to 33 hours. The pack will be warranted for five years or 100,000 miles.
Ouch! The reference to "hard-wired into your garage" suggests that this charger requires its own circuit breaker (do the math--220 volts times 70 amps is 15.4 kilowatts). Unless Tesla can figure out a deal to get lots of hotels to buy and install these chargers, these are not going to be practical for anything except daily commuting.
The Sky Is About to Fall
Car & Driver published a comparison of two sports cars: a Porsche Boxster and a Pontiac Solstice GXP. They clearly preferred the Boxster--but the Pontiac was faster on the race track:
Of course, the Pontiac is about 60% of the cost of the Porsche.
And no, I'm not planning to buy one, even at the new book sells 200,000 copies. (Maybe at 500,000 copies.)
Do Breathe Right Strips Make That Much of a Difference?
I completely forgot to put one on last night before I crawled into bed. I slept poorly, and when I awoke from one dream, it was a dream of being suffocated in a pillow. My sinuses are congested, and I am far less energetic than usual.
Cell Phones Are Useful Tools
But if you have filed for divorce, a gun might be more useful:Residents and workers at Idaho State School and Hospital in Nampa said good-bye to Colleen Hubbard late Thursday, gathering around a bonfire and drinking Cherry Pepsi, Hubbard's favorite soda.
Hubbard died late Wednesday after using her cell phone to tell Nampa police that her estranged husband had stabbed her and stuffed her in the trunk of her car. Hubbards' friends each wrote a note to Hubbard and threw it into the fire or attached it to a balloon and let it go, said Tom Shanahan, a spokesman for the state Health and Welfare Department.
...
Roger Hubbard, 36, is charged with several crimes, including second-degree murder, and is being held on $2 million bond in the Canyon County Jail. Police say he stabbed his wife and put her in the trunk of her car; they arrested him after a short car and foot chase. A Nampa officer pulled Colleen Hubbard, 42, from the car's trunk, but she died a short time later at a Boise hospital.
...
Court documents show that Colleen Hubbard had filed for divorce in July. The couple had been ordered this week into mediation for custody and visitation rights.
Guns For Self-Defense: Not Just Against Criminals
The vast majority of the accounts on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog involve criminal attacks, but every once in a while, we'll get a news story that reminds you that guns are useful in other situations as well:SINKING SPRINGS, Pa. - When a man and his dog dashed into the house with a rabid coyote on their heels, his wife slammed the door on the coyote's neck.
Bringing Justice To The Terrorists
I mentioned a few days ago my campaign to deal with wasp terrorists--and a reader informed me that I was assuming that because wasps have stung my son and my wife several times over the last few years that the wasps that are gathered around our new home are also likely to sting us. Yup, I plead to guilty to "racial profiling." The only reason that I am engaged in a genocidal campaign against wasps is because people that I know have attacked family and friends, sometimes in the Cramer Homeland. We haven't been attacked by ants, by grasshoppers (except for the incident with the holes in the screens--our "border defenses"), or by any category of beetle, but wasps are a serious problem.
Now, some people believe that the correct response to the possibility of wasp bites is to apply the law enforcement model--wait until a wasp bites someone, and then kill that particular wasp. (We must protect the accused wasp's right to due process, of course.) But I'm a primitive sort--I am not going to wait; if you wear the colors and make the noises of the wasps that attacked my family, I'm going to assume that you are a threat to me.
It hasn't been pretty. You can see the dead winged jihadists:
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
We have tried to avoid noncombatant deaths; my wife is very concerned that we don't spray the snake that is living on the east end of the house, or the beetles. But when you are carrying out night combat operations, it is easy to make mistakes, and I probably took out a few innocent beetles and grasshoppers last night; I'm sorry, but this is war. I have declared the porches around my house to be free-fire zones; if I can't make a positive ID, "if it flies, it dies." Fortunately, we are about to deal with the headquarters.
I'm not waiting for them to come to me. We are actively seeking them out, wherever they are. My wife and I had not been able to find the nest, and we had some concerns that they might have found an opening into the rafters--and built a nest there. But, as it turns out, while engaging in pre-emptive war against the enemy this morning, I believe that I found the nest. Sorry about the picture quality, but this part of the roof was backlit, and I had to do nasty things to contrast and brightness to bring it out of the shadows:
Click to enlarge
Tonight, when it cools down, and the terrorists go torpid, we are going to carry out a raid, using the combined firepower of two of these 20 foot range foam sprayers to soak the nest. In a day or two, we'll repeat the bombing mission, and knock down the nest. It's not a permanent solution, but the price of freedom from wasp stings is eternal vigilance.
I've had great fun writing this, but there is a very real difference between jihadists and wasps. The wasps are a darn nuisance, but they do not threaten the life of myself or anyone that I know (unless that person is allergic to wasps). The wasps aren't intentionally targeting humans; for the most part, they get confused, mistaking us for threats.
The jihadists aren't confused; they are evil, and their goal isn't self-defense, but the complete destruction of our way of life. They object to women being free to drive cars, and go to school. They refuse to acknowledge the right of people to worship God as they see fit--or the freedom to be an atheist. They do not simply disapprove of homosexuality--they seek to punish it with death. The left criticizes President Bush for having used the phrase "Islamic fascist" to describe our enemies, but it describes them well: they insist on the right to suppress all points of view with which they disagree, and they are not prepared to compromise, or settle for imposing their point of view in countries where a majority shares their views.
Fighting wasps is a disagreeable task, but if I drop the ball for a couple of years, it is only to be a little unpleasant. I can stay in the house behind the metal screens, and just not use the porch. If we drop the ball fighting Islamofascism, they won't stop until every woman in America is wearing a burkha--and homosexuals will long for the days when they might be arrested and only jailed for their sexual preference.
Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) Resigns
Apparently because of his explicit sexual discussions with a 16 year male page.
Is it that difficult for the Republican Party to find straight politicians? Or at least ones with enough decency to leave children alone?
Oh, this is no surprise:Officials with the national gay groups Log Cabin Republicans and the National Stonewall Democrats said they had no immediate comment on Republican congressman Mark Foley’s resignation from Congress, saying they wanted to learn more about the unfolding development.
Gee, I wonder why? And he likes them young. What a shock.
Luis Vizcaino, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay political group, said HRC had no comment on Foley’s resignation and the allegations against him. He said the group was not likely to discuss the development any time soon.
HRC had endorsed Foley in the upcoming congressional election based on the group’s policy of supporting incumbents that have strong records of support on gay rights. Foley has been a co-sponsor of nearly all pending gay rights legislation, including a bill that would ban job discrimination based on sexual orientation. He voted twice against a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
UPDATE: The more I see on Fox News about this, the more upset that I get. Apparently, this matter had come to the attention of some of the House leadership last year--and they took no action. Now, if they were morally offended by this, at least they should have been concerned about the political consequences of having someone this foolish running for Congress. After the McGreevey scandal, it should have been apparent that having a closeted homosexual in the party--and especially one that clearly can't keep his mind off teenaged boys--was a disaster waiting to be unearthed. If it wasn't this incident, you can be pretty sure that there would have been another incident down the road.
To hear some of the talking heads at work on Fox, this could be the final straw that puts the Democrats in charge of the House--not just because of Foley, but because it would appear that Republican Party leadership wasn't prepared to take any action to quietly push Foley out. I suppose if the Republican Party could work up the courage to offend homosexuals, they would point out that they didn't think it was safe to push a member of Congress out for his sexual orientation.
Who Is More Frightening?
People that torture people to death for fun? Or George Bush? Classical Values points out how since 9/11, a lot of the left has gone overboard in its efforts to take the side not just of Islamofascism, but to give legal preference to anything Muslim:One of the great ironies of the post-9/11 period is that while violent Islamic jihadists attacked this country, there is a constantly growing network -- both organized and unorganized -- of in-place apologists at virtually every level of society all ready to defend them. Criticize jihadists, and people on the left will call you a racist. An Islamophobe. A bigot. I have seen this too many times to count, and the reason I call it ironic is that before 9/11, feminists routinely criticized the veil. Gay activists did not hesitate to condemn Islamic homophobia. Atheists condemned Islam the same way they condemned Christianity. After 9/11, the PC crowd suddenly included a group which they'd previously neglected, and it seemed to me that the 9/11 attacks helped the image of radical Muslims with the left in this country. And in most newspapers, and on many campuses.
This network of PC critics is not only defensive in nature, but offensive. Hence, few American newspapers would dare print cartoons that would probably have been printed before 9/11 without so much as a passing thought. Before 9/11, few cared about the Supreme Court's image of Muhammad, or the many images of Muhammad (such as Salvador Dali's 1960s version). Now, even operas have to be careful. Lest they "offend." I'm tired of that crap, and a lot of people are. I don't agree that 9/11 supplied anyone with an excuse to be insensitive or act like a jerk. But then again, why in the world should a horrible attack like that make us more concerned with (what's the phrase?) "Islamic sensibilities"?
...
Unfortunately for me, I live close to a Saudi madrassa that I've complained about in a number of posts. They're not only too close to terrorism, they're too close to me. Yet the damned local government pays for school buses to take kids in and out of there for their indoctrination with what the half-Jewish neighborhood has every reason to suspect is anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-West hatred. (The "damned local government," of course, is funded with my tax dollars.) In violation of zoning regulations, they operated a school illegally, ran an unlicensed "halal" meat market, unlicensed restaurant, and summer jihad camps -- contemptuously violating their pre-9/11 covenant with the neighbors. Neighbors complained, and were treated by the bureaucrats with barely concealed contempt, as if we were an annoying group of bigoted crackpots. (Complaints of terrorist connections were dismissed as "irrelevant," for example.) The Zoning Board, however, couldn't ignore the blatant code violations, and hearings were held, but guess what? Over the objections of the neighbors, the madrassa got the "special exceptions" it had requested: In a 25-page order released last week, the board granted most requests by Villanova's Center for Islamic Education to expand operations, over neighbors' strong objections.
Not so for a Christian school in a nearly identical situation before the same board: The Lower Merion Zoning Hearing Board voted Aug. 18 to deny the American Academy's requests for zoning relief to continue meeting at Gladwyne Methodist Church.
If it is bigotry to want a Saudi madrassa to be treated the same way a Christian school was treated, then call me a bigot. I am getting sick and tired of this politically correct nonsense, as are a lot of people. And no; it is not all Muslims. Many Muslims, I am sure, don't want their kids indoctrinated in Wahhabist hatred. Many are tolerant of gay rights and stuff like that. It just seems to me that they'd be a little less afraid of speaking up if Americans weren't also so intimidated.
Bored? In Need of A Sleep Aid?
I need about five people to read over my patent application for clarity. I may not be able to get all the way to an issued patent without hiring a patent attorney, but I am trying to get as much of the process done as I can by myself. At least, most of the grunt work will be done.
So I need someone to read over my patent application (which is about 3000 words and 18 drawings) to make sure that they understand it. The theory is that a reasonably intelligent person should be able to read over a patent application, and figure out how to make the invention. If you see any inconsistencies between the drawings and the description, anything that you don't understand, that would be very helpful.
On the advise of one of my readers who is a corporate patent attorney (and who will probably give me some help on the legal aspects of what are called "claims"), I can't just put this out where everyone can see it. If you can help, email me something like:
"I agree to treat this as confidential material, and I will not reveal what it contains, in full or in part, to any other person."
I'll email you two PDFs that total a bit under 200K. If you can read these over and get back to me in the next couple of weeks (when said corporate patent attorney returns from vacation), it would be greatly appreciated!
Fighting Wasp Terrorists
I mean the things with wings--not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We've had a pretty amazing infestation of them around our new house. My wife and I have gone out sporadically and mowed them down with long range insecticides--stuff that comes in cans that promise 27 feet of range.
Now, the New York Times would doubtless say that building a house here angered them--that if we had left them alone, they would have been perfectly peaceful. I'm not so sure. Would they have been up here stinging cattle instead? I know that one of them engaged in an unprovoked attack in the Homeland on my son a few days ago, who is living in the old house down in Boise. My wife has been attacked by them several times over the last several years in our old house's garage, and in a park in Boise.
Of course, I have no proof that the wasp terrorists that we are exterminating here in Horseshoe Bend have any ideological connection or sympathy to the one that attacked my son--but they sure sound, act, and look the same. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
UPDATE: It could be worse. Alabama is suffering what sounds like one of those incredibly bad movies that the Sci-Fi Channel makes:MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.
Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests.
Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.
At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.
"It was one of the largest ones we've seen," McLean said.
Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.
...
The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.
...
In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.
Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February -- and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.
Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists.
"They were able to find food to colony through the winter," Ray said in a telephone interview.
He investigated a nest near Pineapple, measuring about 5 feet by 4 feet, that was coming out of the ground on a roadside. A southwest Pike County house in Goshen had a giant nest spreading into its roof.
...
He said the "super colonies" appear to have many queens.
"We're not really sure how this multiple queen thing works," Ray said. "It could be that the daughters of the original queen don't leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate."
Ray examined a collected nest from Macon County to count the queens in it.
"We found 12 queens so far, so that's definitely a factor," Ray said Thursday.
The Ten Commandments Fight in Boise
In summary, for those of you who don't live here: several years back, Rev. Fred Phelps (the guy who shows at veterans' funerals to claim that they are dying because America is too tolerant of homosexuals) threatened to sue the City of Boise if they didn't either:
1. Remove the existing Ten Commandments monument in one of the city parks.
2. Let him put up his own stone, decrying homosexuality. Phelps is someone who thinks Focus on the Family is in the wrong because they are trying to encourage homosexuals to become straight; Phelps just wants them dead.
Other Idaho cities have already struggled with this question, and won approval from federal courts to leave up their Ten Commandments stones in city parks. When Phelps made similar demands elsewhere, the response of the largely conservative, Republican city governments in other parts of Idaho was, "Go pound sand." They don't approve of his hatred, and they weren't going to give him an easy victory.
There were conservatives willing to defend Boise from whatever lawsuit Phelps filed, so there would have been no cost to the taxpayers if Phelps had filed suit. But Boise's City Council insisted that it could not afford to defend such a suit (even with others paying all the legal bills) and pulled the Ten Commandments out of the park. (And of course, it turned out that the crowd saying that there was no legal problem were right--the U.S. Supreme Court upheld essentially the same situation involving a Ten Commandments monument on the state capitol grounds in Texas.)
Nor would Boise City Council allow the voters to vote on it. Democrats were in control of the City Council, and if there is something that bothers Democrats more than Republicans, it is the notion that there are moral laws that can't be overturned with a stroke of the pen. Up and down this case went, and the Idaho Supreme Court told Boise that yes, the voters do get to vote on the matter.
Now, one of the arguments used by the Boise City Council to justify removing the Ten Commandments monument was that they were being fiscally responsible, avoiding an expensive lawsuit (even someone though else volunteered to pay for defending the city). So the Keep the Commandments Coalition, which brought the suit demanding that the people of Boise should at least get a chance to vote on it, decided to find out how much money the City of Boise spent fighting their lawsuit. I mean, if the goal was to be careful with the taxpayers' money, then obviously, Boise should have:
1. Accepted the offer of outside counsel to defend the city free of charge.
or
2. Not spent money fighting a lawsuit by the Keep the Commandments Coalition.
But how much money did Boise spend fighting that lawsuit? According to a press release from the Keep the Commandments Coalition, Boise doesn't know:*City of Boise cannot account for thousands of dollars spent fighting a ballot initiative giving Boise citizens the right to vote on the public display of the Ten Commandments.*
I'm not stunned at all. This was never about money. It was about making the ACLU happy.
In a letter sent to the Keep the Commandments Coalition, *the city says, "There is no record of costs associated with the legal action related to the ballot initiative..."*
The Keep the Commandments Coalition is stunned that the City of Boise cannot document and account for taxpayer funds spent on fighting the ballot initiative. KCC calls the practice negligent and troubling.
Torture, Power Tools, And Machining
The faint of heart may want to skip this one--there's a picture of my finger, and an unpleasant quote from a history book about Japanese torture.
This is a weird posting--a mixture of political commentary and machining. I heard a news report about the increasing number of bodies that are being found around Baghdad that were not just kidnapped and murdered--they were tortured to death with power tools. For those who think that listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers is torture, or having a pretty woman touch you is torture, consider what torture really means. It means someone uses an electric drill. (And yes, I will concede that waterboarding is, to my mind, on the other side of the line that separates torture from aggressive interrogation techniques.)
This is a subject of concern to me because of a mishap a couple of weeks back with a power tool. The Sherline vertical mill and lathe that I have are very, very cute. Their motors are also so weak that as long as you don't do something really stupid, the chances of injuring yourself with either tool aren't enormous. I think I've managed to get one cut that bled from using these tools.
However, the floor drill press that I bought recently is another matter. It has enough power (one horsepower) that the same level of caution that works for the Sherline is insufficient for this bad boy. I was using an end mill in the drill press to produce a nicely finished edge on a piece of aluminum. The end mill had not come to a complete stop when I tried to knock some shavings off the edge of the aluminum. Ouch! It has been about two weeks now, and my finger has still not completely healed.
Torture as a method of extracting information has a long and not very reliable history; people will say almost anything to stop torture. Even aggressive interrogation techniques need to be focused on obtaining operational intelligence--not something that will be used in a court of law. If operational intelligence can be verified (hopefully, by preventing a terrorist action), it can be justified because of the lives saved. If the use of these techniques doesn't produce any lifesaving information, it serves no legitimate purpose.
The Stalinist show trials demonstrated the uselessness of torture as a technique for obtaining material for use in a criminal court. Defendants confessed to crimes that they could not possibly have done. At least partly, the Soviet government's goal on this was not just to extract confessions to justify executing Stalin's political opponents, but also to remind everyone in the country that:
1. We can make you say anything--you won't be strong enough to fight it.
2. We don't care that what defendants are confessing to is ridiculous. It doesn't matter to us that the confessions are completely unbelievable, because we aren't particularly concerned with what anyone thinks of us.
I can imagine a few truly horrifying circumstances where the use of torture might be rationally justifiable, and nearly all of them read like scenarios that might be used in an episode of 24: the ticking nuclear weapon, hidden in a big city, and you have someone that you know beyond any reasonable doubt, was involved in placing it.
These situations are few and far between, and as I have pointed out in the past, these are so rare that we should not institutionalize such practices. If one of these doomsday scenarios comes about, I'm sure that the security forces will use whatever techniques they deem appropriate to get the information that they need--and they will throw themselves on the mercy of the President for a pardon. If the scenario is truly that extreme, and the evidence establishing that the suspected terrorist has this information is truly convincing, I have no question that such a pardon would be granted. The prospect of it not happening, and the consequent punishment that came from it, should act as a restraint on any decent law enforcement officer. (The others, I'm afraid, aren't likely to be restrained by anything.)
But torture isn't just for extracting information. Much of the torture being done in Iraq right now by these death squads involves people who could not possibly have any useful information. Unfortunately, there are people who just like to inflict suffering. David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy pp. 679-80, describes tortures performed simply as part of training others in interrogation techniques:A young Manchurian accused of being a Communist was then brought into the interrogation chamber which served as classroom and beaten up with fists. He was burned with cigarettes on cheeks, lips, and eyelids. A mixture of water and red pepper was poured down his nostrils to give him a taste of burning to death and drowning at the same time. He was hung up and whipped. Attendants burned pits into his privates with their cigarettes. A Japanese doctor of evident education and contempt for the proceedings entered the room bowing and smiling and resuscitated the victim with an injection. The young leftist's fingernails were torn out, then his toenails. Strips of flesh were cut from his body with a knife. His teeth were knocked out. Finally Instructor Kato, "using his favorite tool, the cigarette, methodically burned out his eyes."
That injury above was a fraction of second glancing blow from a 3/8" diameter end mill--and boy did it hurt! I have learned, to paraphrase the instructions at Disneyland, "Keep your hands in your pockets until the ride has come to a complete stop."
"Then, thank God," wrote Oleg, "he died."
The prospect of someone intentionally using a power tool to inflict pain fills me with rage. If the cut and run crowd of the Democratic Party gets their way, we will be granting control of Iraq to people who consider this not just a necessary evil to obtain information, but people who do this for fun. That is not acceptable.
If Your Email is "Nosy"
I know that you are reading my blog, but I keep getting bounces when I try to respond.
Why I Don't Think Much of the Bay Area
If people want to do these things, I don't see that the government needs to step in; STDs and damaged relationships will generally correct this sort of behavior in a far more dramatic way than anything the courts could ever do--and if it doesn't? Some people deserve each other. But this column below doesn't appear in one of those newsrack sex papers; it runs on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner--which are considered respectable, serious newspapers by San Francisco standards:Because I grew up in San Francisco, it makes perfect sense that I should be friends with an Elvis impersonator. Less so than Las Vegas, but it also makes even more sense that he met his girlfriend at an Elvis convention, because she's an Elvis impersonator, too. Of course. And she happens to work at one of the largest, busiest online kinky sex toy stores in the world. This is a perfectly pervy San Francisco love story, except that they now live in Los Angeles.
But they came up to visit recently and asked me if there were any fun sex parties to go to. Here? Maybe. Maybe like ten on a weekend. But the trick, the hot Elvises (Elvii?) told me, was finding a party that would appeal to their sexual sensibilities, would include people their age, and wouldn't be truly open to the public. It sounded to me like they wanted "Viva Las Vegas," the Folsom Street Fair and "Eyes Wide Shut," all in a single weekend. And as it turns out, you can get there from here. But only from here.
Isometric Drawing Program?
I need a tool that lets me easily make an isometric drawing of something for a patent application. Right now, I have side, top, and bottom views--but the Patent Office prefers isometric view line drawings of objects. If you have such a program, and can draw a very simple object, I would appreciate it. To give you an idea of the simplicity, see here.
UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded with suggestion that I try sketchup.google.com. And thanks to the person who whipped out a beautiful isometric line drawing. For those concerned that the drawing above might create problems for a later patent--they are part of the Provisional Patent Application that I filed last December. This provides the priority required to resolve any disputes about prior art.
California Refugees: Will They Turn The Intermountain West Blue?
This article from the Los Angeles Times by Ryan Sager, author of The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party (Wiley, 2006) sounds a bit like either wishful thinking or an attempt to scare Republicans into abandoning social conservatives. Sager's claim is that the huge swarm of Californians who have left for places like Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, have the potential turn these states Democrat, because the values of these Californians are largely libertarian or even somewhat liberal.
Excuse me while I start to laugh. Californians have been leaving that cesspool of depravity and nice weather for the intermountain Western states since the early 1990s--and the net effect was to make places such as Eastern Washington and Idaho substantially more conservative. Idaho, you know, used to regularly elect Democrats to Congress, to the governor's mansion, and in large numbers to the state legislature. Eastern Washington's House seat was held by a Democrat--the Speaker of the House, until 1994. At least part of what changed was a lot of Californians moved to these places because they were tired of being told that their values were incompatible with the left's agenda.
Of course, the Democrats managed to drive out a lot of their blue collar voters here the same way that they did in other parts of America:Many Idaho evangelicals are Republicans from California, who don't share the resource-industry traditions of native Idahoans. Idahoans deserted the Democratic Party in the 1980s because miners, timber mill workers and others blamed environmentalists with strong ties to Democrats for the loss of resource industry jobs.
I've talked to a lot of California refugees here in Idaho, and I'll tell you, I've met one that could be characterized as left of center. Far more typical are California refugees who moved here because they wanted to live somewhere where their kids weren't made to feel weird for being Christians. Maybe the situation is different in other parts of the intermountain West--but I find Sager's claim about how different the West is completely wrong for Idaho:Although California's 55 electoral votes have proved impotent to thwart the rise of a big-government-loving, big-religion-thumping GOP, the California diaspora into some of our nation's least populous states is looking like it just might do the trick.
That Sager thinks of Mormon as evangelicals shows a pretty comprehensive misunderstanding--but I'll grant that in general, Mormons are as least as social conservative as evangelical Christians--probably even more so. I have to wonder how evangelicals could make up only "29% to 34%" of the population in the eight Mountain West states. Perhaps because this doesn't include Catholics or Mormons--both of which are in much greater abundance in Idaho than I would have guessed before moving here, and both of which, I would guess, are not going to be voting for pro-choice Democrats. (They might vote for pro-life Democrats, but they might also vote for leprechauns, if those appeared on the ballot.)
The GOP has tilted too far toward its Southern wing, preoccupied as it is with religion, tradition and morality, and away from its Western wing, which is more concerned with freedom, independence and privacy.
...
Second, the states of the interior West are generally less religious than those of the South. Evangelicals make up 29% to 34% of the populations in the eight Mountain West states (Utah, with its large Mormon population, is an exception). That compares with 73% in Mississippi, 51% in Texas and 44% in Kansas.
This data suggests that the various conservative religious groups are probably enough to keep social conservatives in the driver's seat:
Catholics, Mormons, and "Conservative Protestant" combined come to 82.1%. Now, about half the Mountain West population is categorized as unaffiliated, so these three groups come to about 40% of the population. Obviously, not every member of those three group is a safe Republican vote--and it seems fair to assume that a fair fraction of the religiously "unaffiliated" will vote Republican, even for social conservatives.
Rocky Mountain West Region - Adherents as % of all adherents
In order of magnitude, the denominational breakdown in the Mountain West is: Catholic, 34.4%; Mormon, 27%;Conservative Protestant, 20.7%; Historic mainline Protestant, 9.5%; African-American Protestant, .4%;Eastern religions, .1%; Jewish, 2%, Muslim, .4%.
I also think that Sager's claim about this supposedly largely libertarian West must reflect other states. I have seen very little sign of libertarian anything in this state. There is a segment of Idahoans who are not terribly religious, but they are also pretty traditional. I recall one of the older gay men who spoke before a legislative committee in opposition to a proposed amendment to our state constitution who admitted that even he has some serious problems when he sees a wedding cake with figures of two men on it. I describe some of the things that were common where we lived in the Bay Area to raving liberals that live here, and they are shocked and clearly a bit disgusted.
A Discouraging Article About The Failure of Colleges to Teach History
Or is it the failure of students learn what they are taught? I'm not aware of any college that doesn't require at least a semester of American history--but the alternative is that students are simply not paying attention:Do our colleges and universities provide their students the American history and constitutional understanding needed to make them strong and responsible citizens?
Okay, I'm biased. I would love for the demand for history classes at the college level to rise to the point where I could actually teach history, even just as a lowly adjunct. (For those not paying attention, at most colleges, adjunct instructors are above pond scum in the ladder of status, but below janitors.)
A study released this week by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute--www.americancivicliteracy.org--demonstrates that the answers to both questions are no. The study concludes that "America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions." In a 60-question multiple-choice quiz ,"college seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2 percent, or F, on a traditional grading scale." And at many schools "seniors know less than freshmen about America's history, government, foreign affairs, and economy." ...
In the fall of 2005 ISI worked with the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy to ask "more than 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities across the country"--an average of about 140 each of freshman and seniors on each campus--what they knew about America's constitutional and governmental history and policies. The colleges ran from state institutions--the University of New Mexico and the University of California at Berkeley, for example, to Ivy League schools like Yale, Brown and Harvard, and less-well-known institutions like Grove City College and Appalachian State University.
Some colleges did better than others, but few of them added very much to students' knowledge of America's history or government. College freshmen averaged 51.7%, and the seniors averaged 53.2%, so there was a slight gain in knowledge. But the average senior scored only 58.5% on American history questions, slightly above 51% on government and America-and-the-world questions, and 50.5% on market economy questions. By every college's grading system those are failing grades.
Among college seniors, less than half--47.9%--correctly concluded that "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" was from the Declaration of Independence. More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the governmental establishment of an official religion, and "55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end" (more than one quarter believing that it was the Civil War battle of Gettysburg that had ended the Revolution).
UPDATE: A reader informs me it was possible to graduate from Duke without taking a single history course. Even more disturbing: one can be a history major at Duke without taking a single American history class. Perhaps I led too sheltered a life attending Sonoma State University--where no one got out without at least one semester of American history, and one semester of world history. Even more disturbing: this study of 50 of America's best universities found that large numbers do not require an American history class to graduate.
Understanding the Conflict With Islam As Tribalism
Power and Control has an interesting posting about how what we are fighting is really just an Islamic overlay on top of tribalism. There's really no way to summarize his points adequately, except to point out that the universalism that underlies the Judeo-Christian worldview is contrary to tribalism--and that this universalism is now endemic in the Western world, except for a few leftists who now worship it, I suspect because it isn't Western, and is "authentic" (as the left likes to call all destructive cultural behaviors that aren't white).
New York Times: The Paper of Cat Boxes
They used to be considered the paper of record; now they are the paper of catboxes. The declassified "Key Judgements" of the National Intelligence Estimate show that the article claiming that the NIE showed the Iraq war has increased the number of terrorists was engaged in deceptive, and out of context quotation. No surprise: this was all about helping the Democrats.We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.
Hmmm. This seems to say that cutting and running (the preferred strategy of what calls itself the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party) will strengthen the jihadist movement.
•The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
Significantly, while it says that the Iraq conflict has become a "cause celebre," and that it has cultivated "supporters for the global jihadist movement," it doesn't say that it made things worse. In 2001, the basis for this resentment by jihadists was U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (at the request of that government). In 1990, it was U.S. support for Israel. What was it in the 1930s, when the Muslim Brotherhood was promoting hatred of the democratic powers of the West--and allied with the Nazis? The core problem of the jihadis isn't the U.S., or Israel, but an unwillingness to face that Islamic societies are poor because of themselves.We assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate.
And of course, the left has aggressively worked to promote "pervasive anti-US sentiment" and opposes "real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms" in Muslim majority nations.
•Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq "jihad;" (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims--all of which jihadists exploit.
Pothead Fanaticism
Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler asked a mildly serious question implying that the new federal antidrug ads claiming that marijuana causes laziness isn't really a sufficient reason for marijuana to be prohibited. Not surprisingly, the libertarian crowd piled on in the comments.
Now, I've argued strongly in the past for decriminalization of all drugs, on the grounds that the consequences of illegality (high prices encouraging economic crimes, funding gang activity, balance of payments problems with drugs such as cocaine) exceed the social costs of having these drugs legal. Having lived in California when marijuana became effectively legal--and watching the enormous damage that meth is doing in some parts of the country--I am far less confident that decriminalization of all illegal drugs is going to be a net win. Certainly, the opiates might be a good case for decriminalization, but I am pretty sure that having meth available at the corner store would be very bad.
What bugs me most of all is the tendency for libertarians to refuse to admit that there are negatives associated with having intoxicants freely available, so I commented:All the comments are very cute, but pothead lazy people still have kids. My brother-in-law is one of those example potheads that many of you don't see as a problem, because you don't know people like him. He's pretty darn smart--but he was drinking heavily and smoking pot by 13. His life ever since has been a train wreck, with two failed marriages, frequent jail time for domestic violence, at least one incident of not terribly severe physical abuse of a stepchild, multiple DUIs, and one memorable incident where he was so drunk that not only did he not realize that he had gone down the wrong way on a one-way street, but he didn't even realize that he had been in a traffic accident (with a police car responding lights and sirens to another crime) until the enraged cop dragged him out of car without opening the door. By his own admission, he only steals from friends, because he lacks the courage to break into a stranger's home.
There's a saying that there is nothing more obnoxious than a reformed smoker, but there really is, and that's pothead evangelists--the sorts who are not only convinced that marijuana isn't a problem, but become abusive when you suggest that at least for some significant fraction of people, it is going to be a problem, just as alcohol is a problem for some significant fraction. The proof is contained in this email (which tender eyes might want to skip) from Henrick Levinousky (ruatool@hotmail.com):
I wish that I could say that my brother-in-law was a wild exception among the potheads that I have known over the years, but he really isn't. One of the problems with living in the ivory tower is that you are hanging around with people who share your general values. I'm sure that pothead law professors are substantially more responsible than potheads like my brother-in-law.One only has to see the car you drive to figure what kind of a moron you are. I enjoyed reading your pot post but couldn't find any negative examples of pot use. Everything you mentioned was booze related as are more crimes in this country than all illegal drugs combined, but of course booze is fine. As cigarette taxes zoom, it's been years since anyone raised taxes on alcohol. Why do you think that is. It's the drug of choice of politicians, cops, and the religious right of course, not to mention the power of their lobby. I bet when your brother in law isn't drinking, and just smoking, 99 and 44/100 % of people would pick him to stand next to rather than an opinionated, egotistical idiot like you. Enjoy your your (rich) kiddy car. Can't think of a more uncomfortable ride in my sixty years. Gotta have a real big ass or a kidney belt to ride in one of them for more than a few minutes at a time, which do you have? Really impresses the young honeys though doesn't it? And, of course, it also advertises your financial position. Have a real need to impress people do you? You should fire up a doobie yourself. You'd sell that ridiculous car, buy yourself some decent clothes, and mellow out a little. You need it.
I don't even know where to start, except with the factual errors:
1. The "religious right" is generally quite hostile to alcohol--that's part of why about 30% of Americans never drink. Even those of us who don't have a religious objection to alcohol drink very sparingly--I think I average about one to two glasses of wine a year.
2. The Corvette is not an uncomfortable ride. It rides a little more harshly than a luxury car, but not not really that badly.
3. Used Corvettes aren't expensive; I paid $32,500 for mine, when it was still under factory warranty. If anything, it underadvertises my financial position. (I used to get such a razzing from my co-workers about not buying a Ferrari.)
4. Decent clothes? I don't think I've posted any pictures that show what clothes I wear!
Like I said: if you want some evidence of the destructive, non-mellowing effects of pot, that email is Exhibit A.
The Truly Esoteric Patents
David Pressman's Patent It Yourself has a discussion of "claims," which are the specific aspects of an invention that you are claiming deserve patent protection. I am only part way through the chapter, but there's a discussion of how to keep each individual claim from being too longwinded--and he gives an example of a claim in a patent that is about as short as a claim can be. The patent is 3,156,523, and was granted to Glenn T. Seaborg, who created a number of elements above uranium:1. Element 95.
I looked it up at the U.S. Patent Office web site (I hope this link still works). The patent covers a lot more than just element 95--such as methods of creating and isolating it--but still pretty amusing.
A New Pedagogical Technique
Thanks to Different River for bringing to my attention this new and startlingly bold technique for educating our kids:A Stuart Middle School teacher won't be arrested for burning two American flags in his classroom because authorities said his students were not put at enough risk to warrant charges.
Like what? Raising the flag every morning? Or is that razing the flag every morning?
But teacher Dan Holden won't return to teaching until the Jefferson County school district decides whether he violated school rules with his unorthodox lesson on freedom of speech. He has been assigned to noninstructional duties.
Stuart Middle School seventh-graders were asked to write about what they saw in their classroom Aug. 18 when teacher Dan Holden burned U.S. flags. Their statements were included in the arson investigation file released yesterday. Names were not included because the students are juveniles.# "In social studies on Friday Mr. Holden took a lighter to the America (sic) flag and he burned it to get a reaction from us. Then he told us to go for homework ask are (sic) parents what they thought."
I think it might be time to work on spelling and grammar first, and worry about the abstract concepts of freedom of speech later.
# Holden "walked in and grabbed a lighter and the flag and caught the flag on fire then told us to right (sic) down what we thought so we did. Then he told us to go home and tell are (sic) parents and wright (sic) down what they said. Then class was over."
# "Mr. Holden was doing an experiment and wanted us to wright (sic) actual fillings (sic) of how we felt of him burning the flag. So it was just a little social studys (sic) activity."
Why There Needs To Be Serious Penalties For Abuse of Process
My co-blogger at the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog mentioned the original incident quite a while back--and that the district attorney concluded that it was a completely lawful defensive shoot. But being in the wrong is never going to stop a bad guy from filing a lawsuit:The man shot by a Janesville doctor in what authorities think was a burglary of the doctor's home has sued the doctor for negligently using excessive force.
Hey, I'm sorry that Prochaska is paralyzed and in pain. But there's an easy way to avoid it: don't break into someone's house, and when you get caught by someone with a gun, do as you are told!
Kurt Prochaska, 39, Janesville, still is awaiting trial on charges of burglary and felony criminal damage because of events late on the night of Oct. 31, 2005, when, police reported, he crashed through the ceiling of Michael Rainiero's home, 2520 Linden Ave., Janesville, in an attempt to burglarize the home.
Prochaska is now in state Department of Corrections' custody because his probation for earlier crimes was revoked.
His lawsuit does not specify an amount for damages.
In the suit filed in August in Milwaukee County, Prochaska admits being in Rainiero's home when he was shot once by Rainiero. But Prochaska claims in the suit:
"Rainiero then returned to his bedroom, retrieved a handgun from the closet, released the trigger lock, he then called out to his wife to call 911, whereupon he then returned to the hallway, his hands were shaking badly, he knelt down, yelled at the intruder to leave, in a split second he decided to fire the weapon towards the subject because he wanted him to leave.
"Rainiero negligently fired a shot and accidentally hit the plaintiff in the back, severing the plaintiff's spinal cord."
The lawsuit alleges Rainiero's negligent use of excessive force "in dealing with the intruder/plaintiff" harmed Prochaska by causing "severe and permanent injuries, severe and relentless pain" and medical expenses, loss of earning ability and diminished quality of life.
In his response to the suit, Rainiero, a surgeon in Dean Health System, denies any negligence or using excessive force. Rainiero maintains that he was exercising his right to defend himself and his family.
He also asked that the suit be tried in front of a jury in Rock County, where the incident happened and all the involved parties live, rather than in Milwaukee County, where the suit was filed.
Four days after the shooting, Rock County District Attorney David O'Leary said he would not charge Rainiero in the incident because the doctor had acted in self-defense.
"His actions were justified and reasonable," the district attorney said. "Not only was Dr. Rainiero entitled to defend himself, he was entitled to defend his family.
"Dr. Rainiero had no reasonable opportunity to retreat as the intruder was not complying with Dr. Rainiero's repeated demands to leave the residence and was still inside the residence with Dr. Rainiero's family," O'Leary said.
My Brain Hurts
I'm converting my provisional patent application into a regular patent application--which isn't as bad as starting from scratch, but still pretty painstaking work--rather like debugging interrupt service routines written in assembly language. I can do it, but where it is kind of fun for the first couple of hours, after that, it just exhausts me.
Thanks To Liberal Idaho For Giving Me a Reason To Back Bill Sali
Not because Liberal Idaho is knee-jerk supporting Sali's opponent (this wouldn't be a surprise)--but for pointing me to stuff that shows that Sali really does understand what's wrong:Where does Sali differ from John Kerry contributor and political newcomer Grant? In the GOP hopeful’s words: “On just about everything important. He wants to raise taxes to get rid of the deficit—I want to cut spending, including abolishing the Department of Education. What does a bureaucrat in an air-conditioned office in Washington, D.C., know about education in my hometown of Kuna? He calls for more funding for the arts—I want to close down the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire—I want them to be permanent, so there will be more jobs and a smaller deficit. He’s pro-choice—I’m pro-life. Do I need to continue?”
Abolishing the Department of Education? It may be a surprise to some of you, but education is almost entirely the responsibility of state governments and local school districts. Now, this isn't to say that the Department of Education doesn't do anything useful--but skinflint Bush's 2007 budget request is $63.4 billion dollars. Of that, $9 billion are "mandatory" (meaning that existing federal law requires them to spend the money on various programs), and $54.4 billion are discretionary.
Now, even if we abolished the Department of Education, some of these programs would continue to exist, and continue to be funded (for example, reimbursements to local school districts for dependents of military personnel). Remember, however, that the Department of Education spending on primary and secondary education is only about 8.2% of the estimated $555 billion spent annually. Even if every penny of this budget were returned to the Treasury, and there was no increase in state or local spending, it would be only a minor change.
More importantly, much of Education's spending isn't on actual support of education:The relatively small size of the Federal investment in education dictates an emphasis on promising, research-based programs that have the potential to leverage more effectively the much larger State and local share of national education spending to bring about real improvement in student achievement. This is the primary goal, for example, of the strong State accountability systems required by No Child Left Behind. Under the President's request, funding for NCLB programs would rise by more than $1 billion in fiscal year 2007, from $23.3 billion to almost $24.4 billion, an increase of $7 billion, or 40 percent, since NCLB was enacted.
I am not impressed with the quality of primary and secondary education in the U.S., at least relative to its state when I was going through it. I am not going to blame this on the research the educrats in Washington have funded--but I will say that considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Department of Education has spent on research since its separation from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1980, I would hope for better public education since I was young--not worse. I am not impressed with educational faddism, of which I saw far too much in public schools when my kids were young.
A big chunk of that 2007 budget is going to be spent implementing the No Child Left Behind Act. At least from what left wing teachers that I know tell me about NCLB, this has been at best, a waste of money, and at worst, somewhat destructive to education.
Liberal Idaho isn't happy about the possible cutting of the National Endowment for the Arts. I suppose that he should consider what his reaction would be if there were a National Endowment for Religion, that made grants to churches. Now, the vast majority of the churches the NER would fund would be pretty mild, but there would inevitably be grants made to operations that are the religious equivalent of some of the really offensive NEA artists. For example, how would Liberal Idaho feel about the NER funding the World Church of the Creator, or Church of Jesus Christ (Aryan Nations)? (These are both neo-Nazi organizations.)
Of course, a lot of taxpayers would say, "Why do churches need government funding at all?" And a lot of taxpayers say that about art. Yes, you can construct elaborate defenses of funding artists because they help to contribute to the overall sophistication of the population, and many European governments do it, too. But you could use the same arguments with respect to government funding of churches: they contribute to the spiritual well-being and concern for others of the population, and many European governments do likewise.
Art, like religion, is not the government's job to fund. These are luxury items, and reflect the personal tastes and beliefs of individuals. The government no more should be funding these than it should be funding television sitcoms.
I could go on, but it is apparent that Liberal Idaho is suffering from that most severe of liberal ailments--the belief that anyone that does not share his views is simply an idiot. The mark of a fanatic is that he is unable to recognize that there can be legitimate disagreements about appropriate public policy.
Wag the Dog?
Illya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy points to a Washington Post article from 1998 that demonstrates that, contrary to Bill Clinton's attempts to rewrite history, his actions against bin Laden were strongly supported by many Republican politicians:President Clinton won warm support for ordering anti-terrorist bombing attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan yesterday from many of the same lawmakers who have criticized him harshly as a leader critically weakened by poor judgment and reckless behavior in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.
A few senators, however, noted that the timing of the attack raised the question of whether Clinton had ordered it to deflect attention from his personal affairs. Others suggested the scandal may be preventing the president from paying attention to critical international problems.
But most lawmakers from both parties were quick to rally behind Clinton in a deluge of public statements and appearances yesterday, a marked contrast to the relatively sparse and chilly reception that greeted his Monday statement on the Lewinsky matter.
"I think the president did exactly the right thing," House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said of the bombing attacks. "By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists."
Gingrich said he was told "very precise details" of the attack before it occurred, and praised Clinton's aides for being "sensitive to making sure we were not blindsided in this." Other congressional leaders, several of whom were on vacation or difficult to locate, said the White House had made an effort to notify them before the attacks.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called the attacks "appropriate and just," and House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said "the American people stand united in the face of terrorism."
Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) praised Clinton for doing "the right thing at the right time to protect vital U.S. interests against terrorist attacks," and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the United States "should respond forcefully when U.S. lives are at stake."
It was clear from several lawmakers' statements that support for Clinton was not just a knee-jerk reaction, but also a response made easier because of former GOP senator and current Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. "I have enough confidence in [Cohen] to believe that he would not be involved in anything orchestrated for domestic political purposes," Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) said.
Gingrich dismissed any possibility that Clinton may have ordered the attacks to divert attention from the scandal. Instead, he said, there was an urgent need for a reprisal following the Aug. 7 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The Crisis Mongers
I'm old enough to remember the "global cooling" threat that State Senator Runner references in this article (link now broken on that one):A magazine news article warned of the impending doom of climate change:
The real hazard for Californians is a proposed carbon tax:
"There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production, with serious political implications for every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. ... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
You might be surprised that this gloomy scenario refers to global cooling, and comes from a 1975 Newsweek cover story that helped give rise to congressional hearings that warned of an impending Ice Age that would result in worldwide famine and poverty.
A mere three decades later, climate change is back in the news, and we hear similar predictions of devastation and calamity - yet now the culprit is global warming. In fact, many of the same alarmists who once advocated global cooling now suddenly embrace the theory of man-induced, catastrophic global warming.
There is no doubt that media hysteria is fueling this global warming debate. However, when formulating public policy, it is best to rely on objective science rather than the latest Hollywood movie.
It is generally accepted that the Earth is in a warming trend. However, we are led to believe the cause is human behavior - that it's our businesses, our cars and our power plants that are inducing the change, and that immediate action is necessary to save our planet.
On this point, more than 17,000 national and international scientists have signed a petition to demonstrate the lack of scientific consensus on the theory of man-induced, catastrophic global warming.
The petition reads, in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gases is causing catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently completed a study indicating that a review of more than 200 climate studies determined that the 20th Century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years. The most far-reaching is Assembly Bill 32, grandly titled the "Global Warming Solution Act." It imposes mandatory caps on carbon emissions in California, and gives the Air Resources Board carte-blanche authority to monitor and enforce emission levels.
This is no surprise; the green crowd is more concerned with their feelings of guilt than with the environment.
AB 32 would impose massive costs and burdens on California businesses and devastate our state's competitiveness.
The cement manufacturing industry, for example, is poised to experience a surge in production with the Legislature's recent focus on infrastructure. A hard emissions cap will force these businesses to shift their production to neighboring states, most of which are not as energy-efficient as California. When we consider the additional emissions generated to import the product, the net effect will be harmful to the environment.
In fact, a recent report from Gov. Schwarzenegger's Climate Action Team warns of this unintended consequence of California's "go it alone" approach, stating that "emissions may decline in the state, only to increase in neighboring states." Not surprisingly, the bill's proponents have yet to acknowledge or address this glaring problem.
UPDATE: A reader pointed me to an image of that Newsweek article, so I added a link to it. There is, of course, much of the same scare tactics, and of course, governments will have to do something and are failing to do so:Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
The good news for then is that at least the Chicken Little climatologists knew that they didn't know:Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not know enough to pose the key questions."
Oh yeah, make sure that you look at the "Average Temperature Change" graph--showing data from 1880 to 1970. Oh, does it look scary!
Justice of the Peace
They don't run stories about Brittany Spears' space alien love child, but the New York Times is fast reaching the level of trustworthiness of those supermarket tabloids. Still, I don't find this article about the deficiencies of the justice courts of New York completely implausible:For generations, justices have hailed them as “poor man’s courts,” where ordinary people can get simple justice with little formality or expense. But there are few more vivid spots to view their shortcomings than here in one of New York’s poorest corners: Franklin County, a place of rugged beauty on the Canadian border where only one of the 32 local justices is a lawyer.
I confess that I am of two minds on how to reform such problems. On the one hand, my republican (small R) sentiments tell me that our legal system should not be so complex that a decent citizen can't play an important role in running it, and the idea of lawyers running everything disturbs me--they already have far too much power and influence. On the other hand, some of these examples really do suggest that incompetents are running these courts.
The county’s justices have repeatedly drawn the attention of state judicial conduct officials, with 15 publicly disciplined since the late 1970’s, some twice. Justice Gori’s errors pale in comparison with those of some others: One justice freed a rape suspect on bail as a favor to a friend. Another sentenced a welfare recipient to 89 days in jail after she failed to pay a $1.50 cab fare. Franklin County justices have presided drunk, fixed cases and denied lawyers to defendants. One failed to appoint a lawyer for a 19-year-old mentally retarded alcoholic.
Here in Duane, a speck of a town in the center of the county, Justice Gori is in many ways a typical small-town New York justice.
A bricklayer and a former dog trainer with a high school education, he is an approachable man of 59, in jeans hitched up with suspenders. On Thursday nights he ambles down to the volunteer firehouse to hold court, such as it is. His grasp of the law is somewhat shaky. His temper sometimes gets the better of him.
He has no judge’s bench, few law books and no court clerk. He is something of an accidental judge, occupying the position for nearly a decade largely because no one else wants it, people here say. Although state officials have reprimanded him twice for fundamental lapses in the conduct of his job, few Duane voters seemed to know or care. “Nobody’s ever asked a question about it,” Justice Gori said.
He seems well-intentioned enough. Like many justices, he describes his job as public service, and he says he studies the law for several hours every week.
But there is evidence that that may not be enough. When the judicial conduct commission called Justice Gori to account for his handling of Mr. Betters’s case, his defense was startling, a transcript of the hearing shows. His own lawyer blamed the state for running the justice courts as it does: Judges, he said, with so little training — six days of classes, and a 12-hour refresher course once a year — could not possibly know the basic rules for handling a lawsuit.
The Advantages of Leaking Classified Documents
I've been meaning to blog for a couple of days about the New York Times story claiming that the classified National Intelligence Estimate shows that the Iraq war has increased the number of terrorists. The article below makes one of my points, which is simply that writing a news story based on a leak about a classified document is a marvelously effective way to mislead.
1. The document is classified, so if the leaked information is inaccurate, or is incomplete, the administration can't release the document to refute this claim without exposing methods and sources. Almost everyone outside the ACLU can see that there are some intelligence materials that need to be classified.
2. I know that one of the reforms proposed at CIA a few years ago was to allow minority reports to work their way up the chain of command. The majority opinion was the only report that went up the chain of command. I understand that analysts with minority opinions were simply never heard--and with the CIA's history of failure (most notably, its failure to see that the Soviet Union was on the edge of collapse), this is a real problem. Were the leaked materials part of a minority report?
3. The NIE was completed in April. Why is this leak happening now? To affect the elections? Playing politics with national security is completely unacceptable. Of course, the Democrats have been doing that for some time--for example, the Valerie Plame debacle, and Joseph Wilson's lies about what he found in Africa, and what he reported to the government.
Robert Kagan does a good job in this Washington Post article pointing out the problems with these claims:Based on the press coverage alone, the NIE's judgment seems both impressionistic and imprecise. On such an important topic, it would be nice to have answers to a few questions.
Please read the entire article.
For instance, what specifically does it mean to say that the Iraq war has worsened the "terrorism threat"? Presumably, the NIE's authors would admit that this is speculation rather than a statement of fact, since the facts suggest otherwise. Before the Iraq war, the United States suffered a series of terrorist attacks: the bombing and destruction of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since the Iraq war started, there have not been any successful terrorist attacks against the United States. That doesn't mean the threat has diminished because of the Iraq war, but it does place the burden of proof on those who argue that it has increased.
Probably what the NIE's authors mean is not that the Iraq war has increased the actual threat. According to the Times, the report is agnostic on whether another terrorist attack is more or less likely. Rather, its authors claim that the war has increased the number of potential terrorists. Unfortunately, neither The Post nor the Times provides any figures to support this. Does the NIE? Or are its authors simply assuming that because Muslims have been angered by the war, some percentage of them must be joining the ranks of terrorists?
As a poor substitute for actual figures, The Post notes that, according to the NIE, members of terrorist cells post messages on their Web sites depicting the Iraq war as "a Western attempt to conquer Islam." No doubt they do. But to move from that observation to the conclusion that the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat requires answering a few additional questions: How many new terrorists are there? How many of the new terrorists became terrorists because they read the messages on the Web sites? And of those, how many were motivated by the Iraq war as opposed to, say, the war in Afghanistan, or the Danish cartoons, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, or their dislike for the Saudi royal family or Hosni Mubarak, or, more recently, the comments of the pope? Perhaps our intelligence agencies have discovered a way to examine, measure and then rank the motives that drive people to become terrorists, though I tend to doubt it. But any serious and useful assessment of the effect of the Iraq war would, at a minimum, try to isolate the effect of the war from everything else that is and has been going on to stir Muslim anger. Did the NIE attempt to make that calculation?
Such an assessment would also require some estimate of what the terrorist threat would look like today if the war had not happened. For instance, did the authors of the NIE calculate the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the recruitment of terrorists or the effect of the bombings in Madrid and London? It is certainly possible that these events produced an increase in would-be terrorists by showing the possibility of sensational success. So if there is an overall increase, how much of it was the result of Iraq or the Danish cartoons or other perceived Western offenses against Islam, and how much of it is a continuing response to al-Qaeda's own terrorist successes before, on and after Sept. 11?
Finally, a serious evaluation of the effect of the Iraq war would have to address the Bush administration's argument that it is better to fight terrorist recruits in Iraq than in the United States. This may or may not be true, although again the administration would seem to have the stronger claim at the moment. But a serious study would have to measure the numbers of terrorists engaged in Iraq, and the numbers who may have been killed in Iraq, against any increase in the numbers of active terrorists outside Iraq as a result of the war. Did the NIE make such a calculation?
Wax On, Wax Off; The Joys of Patent Searching
Sunday afternoon, I waxed my wife's Equinox--and I discovered that the black plastic bumpers used on the cheaper LS model will accept wax just fine--they just don't want to give it up! Removing it means a lot of scrubbing with a coarse sponge.
Monday about noon I waxed the Corvette. No rough black plastic on it! It was gorgeous when I was done. My shoulder, on the other, brings up the immortal words of Pat Morita in The Karate Kid, "Wax on, wax off!" And this was only two cars, not 43!
Most of the evening has been spent searching through the U.S. Patent Office's patent database, to make sure that the Quick Release Toe Saver has no previous patents on it. I did a search through when I prepared the Provisional Patent Application that I filed in December of last year, but I figured that it would be good to make a more thorough effort.
Along the way, I discovered that you need a pretty recent version of QuickTime to display the pre-1976 patents. These aren't text searchable; you can only find them by looking up all patents in the current U.S. patent class and subclass that fit this product: 359/430. Fortunately, there's only 83 patents in this class, total.
Some of the patents make me scratch my head. There was one that I didn't read very closely, because it was clearly not relevant to the Quick Release Toe Saver--but it looks for all the world like the Springfield mounting developed at Stellafane in the 1920s, and that appeared in some articles that ended up in Scientific American's three volume set, Amateur Telescope Making. The prior art should have made this patent invalid to issue.
Another patent, as near as I could tell, was an attempt to patent the German equatorial style of mount--as long as the primary housing components were made of wood. I have a hard time seeing how this conformed to the patent requirements of being "nonobvious" and "novel."
At least I found nothing that even remotely touched on the Quick Release Toe Saver idea. To the extent that various people have patented improvements or variations on the German equatorial mount, they have either completely ignored the counterweight safety device, or settled for the traditional solution of a threaded, not very quick to remove nut.
Back to the Patent Offfice's need for QuickTime: The problem with QuickTime is that there is no current QuickTime download for Windows 98, and the version that I had for Windows 98 would only display the first inch or so each of these scanned pages--not very useful. There is no QuickTime reader for Linux (at least, that I could find), so I ended using my wife's computer, which runs Windows XP. I really need to upgrade my computer to something a bit more modern.
The European Patent Office is a lot more of a struggle. Maybe I'm just tired, but their patent classification scheme seemed unncessarily complex. Even worse, at least some of the patents don't even have English titles, and the English of some of the patents filed by Japanese are, as you might expect, good for a few giggles.
High Rates of AIDS Among Catholic Priests?
Professor Rasmusen points to several interesting articles that suggest that the high rates of AIDS among Catholic priests--almost eleven times the rate of the general population--are because Catholic priests are disproportionately homosexual. Depending on which survey or expert you believe, somewhere between 25% and 45% of priests are homosexual or bisexual in orientation--and the very high rates of AIDS among priests are because large numbers of them are not celibate.
I'm sure that the problem of pedophilia (and heavily focused on boys, not girls) in the priesthood is just a coincidence.
UPDATE: One of my readers takes issue with this, pointing out that the DSM-IV definition of pedophilia is sex with prepubescent children, and most of the priestly molestation was of boys who had reached puberty: -- An overwhelming majority of the victims, 81 percent, were males. The most vulnerable were boys aged 11 to 14, representing more than 40 percent of the victims. This goes against the trend in the general U.S. society where the main problem is men abusing girls.
-- A majority of the victims were post-pubescent adolescents with a small percentage of the priests accused of abusing children who had not reached puberty.
-- Most of the accused committed a variety of sex acts involving serious sexual offenses.
The law (as distinguished from the mental health profession) uses a less precise definition on this:The focus of pedophilia is sexual activity with a child. Many courts interpret this reference to age to mean children under the age of 18. Most mental health professionals, however, confine the definition of pedophilia to sexual activity with prepubescent children, who are generally age 13 or younger. The term ephebophilia, derived from the Greek word for "youth," is sometimes used to describe sexual interest in young people in the first stages of puberty.
I have received more than a few emails from homosexuals condemning pedophilia--but drawing this same distinction about ephebophilia, and who refuse to see the pursuit of young teenagers as a problem. You can't wait for a child to reach 17 or 18 (depending on the state)?
My reader seems to think that calling these abusers pedophiles somehow distances them from homosexuality. No, I'm afraid it doesn't. Not every pedophile is a homosexual, and most homosexuals aren't pedophiles, but there is a sizeable overlap--hence NAMBLA's presence in gay pride parades without apparent opposition into the early 1990s.
Never Make Assumptions About Parts Costs
I ended up specifying 8-32, 1 1/4" long socket head screws (the kind that use Allan wrenches) for the ScopeRoller 11 and 700 caster assemblies, largely because they were big enough to firmly lock the caster assembly into the tripod leg, and because, of course, the bigger the part you use, the more expensive it will be, right?
Wrong. It turns out that even though 8-32 socket head screws are substantially smaller than 10-24 socket head screws, in this length, the 8-32 socket head screws are more expensive--perhaps because something this thin is usually not this long. I suspect that the number of makers is very small. MSCDirect.com didn't even have 8-32 fully threaded socket head screws that long; McMaster-Carr had them, but they were only available in nylon (too soft to grab the aluminum of the tripod leg) and a low head version in steel that cost $5.11 per pack of 10. By comparison, going to 10-24 thread gave me more options, and even stainless steel was only $11.32 per pack of 100--so 11.3 cents each, vs. 51.1 cents each.
Jesus Camp
This is the title of new movie about fundamentalist church camps--and let's just say that it is apparently not a very positive portrayal. Eric Scheie over at Classical Values has a pretty devastating discussion of the way in which the left is attempting to demonize fundamentalist Christianity in the hopes of persuading Americans that fundamentalist Christianity is at least a comparable threat as Islamofascism (which is cleverly but inaccurately called "fundamentalist Islam" by the left). I encourage you to read it in full--but let me point out that Eric isn't an apologist for fundamentalist Christianity. He's an openly gay, somewhat right of center blogger who is smart enough to see when idiots are being idiots. He quotes from a New York Times review that asserts:Filmed during the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the movie visits a church at which the congregation prays in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of President Bush.
Eric knows enough to see that this is a gross misportrayal of what was going on:Praying in front of Bush? Now that intrigued me, because it evokes images of Bush deification -- something most fundamentalists would be wont to do, but which many BDS [Bush Derangement Syndrome] sufferers would like to imagine them doing.
Eric points to another article that points out that the congregation wasn't praying to Bush (talk about the ultimate violation of the "You shall have no other gods before me"), but praying for Bush--a long standing practice in Christian churches, to pray for wisdom for our national leaders.While I don't like to accuse Holden of pandering to "fundyphobia" (is that a word?), I got the impression that he really wants his readers to be afraid -- be very afraid -- not of the film, but of fundamentalist summer camps and their ultimate agenda. Lest there be any doubt that these people are dangerous, Holden leaves his readers with a comparison evoking mass murder:
It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out. Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
As most readers here know, I am adamantly opposed to the idea of fighting an American "culture war," and to the extent kids are being indoctrinated to believe in the concept, I'm against it. But I am not their parents, and the decision to send their kids to such a camp is up to them. But are they being trained to kill people in the name of God? I think if they were being trained in anything more deadly than fundamentalist proselytization, someone would be saying so. And loudly.
For this reason, I think the Red Guard comparison is unfair. If we consider that millions were murdered and imprisoned during the Red Guard period, I think that's a pretty strong charge to make against fundamentalist Christians. Outrageous, even. And in a movie review? (Well, at least Holden didn't make an al-Qaida comparison. Wouldn't want to "offend" anyone...)
If I Were An Artist...
Or at least, if I were applying for a National Endowment for the Arts grant, I could construct an entire exhibit filled with rage around this picture of roadside debris from where Idaho highway 55 meets Summit Ridge Road:
Click to enlarge
"Here we have an emblem of how the Republican Party has both seduced and betrayed the masses of Idaho--so impoverished by Republican tax policies that the masses can only afford the most declasse of beers, driving on dangerously unsafe tires until they suffer tread separation, so poor that they can only afford to buy one sock--and yet, Karl Rove still persuades them to vote against their economic interests!"
