The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The North Korean Crisis and The Dumbness of Political Parties As you have doubtless seen, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution providing for severe sanctions against North Korea for going into the nuclear weapons business. North Korea claimed that this was "gangster-like" action--which is pretty funny coming from a nation that is engaged in counterfeiting U.S. currency, drug trafficking, torturing to death political prisoners, and causing hundreds of thousands to starve to death. What really is the subject of this posting, however, is the absurd idiocy that comes out of organized political parties--where members feel the need to defend mistakes made by other members of the party for partisan advance. Fox News had a couple members of the House Armed Services Committee, one Republican, one Democrat, and of course the Democrat had to explain that this was the Bush Administration's fault, because the Clinton Administration had resolved this problem in 1994, by persuading them to abandon plutonium processing. The Republican member pointed out that within two years, North Korea had started work on uranium enrichment instead, so this approach clearly didn't work. The Democrat responded by saying that we could have used the same engagement approach that we used to persuade them to stop processing plutonium. At this point, all I could think was, "Big deal. They lied to us in 1994, and you think that this was a constructive approach?" Friday, October 13, 2006
Andromeda Galaxy Through Big Bertha Through 70mm binoculars, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is a smudge. Even in an 8" reflector, it's not much to look at--you can see why there was serious debate, even into the beginning of the 20th century, whether this was a gas cloud in our galaxy (admittedly, one with a lot of stars in between us and them), or another large collection of stars--an "island universe" to use the picturesque expression first used to describe another galaxy. Our word "galaxy," by the way, comes from the Greek "galactos" for milk. The Milky Way, of course, is our galaxy. And yes, there is a dwarf satellite galaxy named Snickers, although there is some dispute about whether it is a galaxy or simply a hydrogen cloud--but it is the ultimate form of product placement, I suppose, for Mars Corporation, the maker of Snickers candy bars. Anyway, back from the etymological/peanuts/chocolate tangent. I dragged Big Bertha out this evening, and after a little hunting with the 70mm binoculars, I was able to find the Andromeda Galaxy--and then I was able to aim Big Bertha at it well enough. Picking the right eyepiece for a deep sky object is always an interesting challenge. As the magnification increases, all other things being equal, contrast drops. For an object with low surface brightness, such as a galaxy, it helps to keep magnification low. At the same time, if the magnification is too low, you have a high contrast object surrounded by blackness. Of course, I was using 2" eyepieces for this. The Russell Optics 85mm eyepiece was a bit low a magnification (23.5x); the 18mm University Optics orthoscopic (111x) gave just the bright core of the galaxy and a little bit of surrounding haze of stars. There's a weird military surplus eyepiece that came with Big Bertha that, while a pretty poor eyepiece in some abstract sense, turned out to be close to perfect for this application. I think it may be about 60mm (33.3x). The bright core was plenty visible, but enough of the surrounding halo of stars was visible that you could see where the long exposure photographs of Andromeda give that spectacular image that most of you know:  Anyway, it inclines me to want to find some way to make Big Bertha equatorially mounted, so that I can do some long exposure astrophotography. Labels: telescopes That Lancet Paper: You Can Make a Career Out Of Its Flaws I mean, if anyone would pay you to do so. Readers have responded to my previous entry about this. In response to my pointing out that the death rate would have been 546 deaths per day--not very likely, since news coverage makes a big deal of finding 65 murder victims in one day--one of my readers observed: On page 6 of the Lancet report the authors write: "Application of the mortality rates reported here to the period of the 2004 survey gives an estimate of 112 000 (69 000-155 000) excess deaths in Iraq in that period. Thus, the data presented here validates our 2004 study, which conservatively estimated an excess mortality of nearly 100 000 as of September, 2004." The 2004 study estimated 98,000 (8,000-194,000).That means 861 deaths a day--which takes the problem that I have already observed, and rachets it up even more. It means during the almost two years from September 1, 2004 to May 20, 2006--when media hostility to the Iraq war was far worse than at the beginning--there must have been many hundreds of days with more than 1000 deaths caused by the war, or many tens of days with more than 10,000 deaths caused by the war. Another reader points out what might be the cause of this bizarre error: Here is one clue:This reader also points out that if this sampling in just a few neighborhoods included places where there had been a fierce firefight or bombing, there might indeed have been a lot of deaths in that location, but be very unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. Imagine if you dropped survey teams into New Orleans, and asked people to tell you about family members who had become homeless recently, or who had died by drowning. Now scale the results up to the nation as a whole. This same very insightful reader observes: They do, a bit later, claim to have made some sort of consistency check on household composition at beginning and end of interval vs. the tallies of births and death and immigration/emigration to/from the household, but they have failed to report the specific incidence of inconsistencies. The Dangers of Machiavellian Thinking; the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party I know of a Republican blogger who is backing a Democrat for Congress at least partly because he hopes that Democratic control of the House will be such a disaster that it will make it easier for Republicans to hold the White House in 2008, and regain control of the House. No question: Democrats in charge of the House would end up being a strong argument for putting Republicans back in charge; Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the cut-and-run wing of the Democratic Party would end up strengthening al-Qaeda's position so dramatically that a lot of Americans would overlook every other issue in the following election to elect candidates committed to national security. I shudder to think of the damage that Pelosi and friends would do in two years. Some years ago, I engaged in this same sort of Machiavellian thinking. California had just switched to open primaries. I voted for what I perceived as the weakest Democratic candidate for governor, figuring that he was such an unimpressive speaker--and he wasn't personally wealthy--that the Republican nominee would roll right over him. That "weakest Democratic candidate" was Gray Davis--who, because he was bought and paid for by the unions, ended up being an enormous disaster for the people of California. I learned my lesson. It is hard enough to figure out what is going to happen in politics when you do the right thing; doing something sneaky adds enormous complexity to the equation. At the end of Election Day, you at least need to go to sleep with the knowledge that you voted for the best person that you thought could be elected to the post. Along those lines, I am very troubled by the battle for the soul of the Republican Party, not because there aren't legitimate arguments about the proper role of government, but because the food fight that people like Ryan Sager are promoting looks a bit too much like a cynical attempt to see Republicans defeated next month so that social conservatives are purged from party leadership positions. First, a little terminology. The term "social conservative" seems to have been coined to distinguish them from libertarians (laissez faire, minimal government, no laws regulating private sexual behavior and precious few regulating public sexual behavior). A fair number of Republicans have been historicaly reluctant to call themselves "libertarians" for two reasons. One reason was the Libertarian Party, which had more than a few activists who took ideologically pure but extreme positions: drunk driving shouldn't be a crime unless you hit someone; statutory rape laws should be repealed; antitrust laws should be repealed. Most members of the LP when I was a member weren't extremists, but the extreme ones tend to get the attention. Social conservatives were truly conservatives. They also supported laissez faire on economic issues--but those who were elected officials sometimes had to take positions to satisfy their constituents. Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), who represents me in the Senate, has long been lambasted by libertarians for his support for the absurd sugar price support system. I'm sure that Senator Craig knows this program is absurd; he also knows that if he took a principled position on this, he would be replaced at the next election by a Democrat--and one that would be hostile to laissez faire on far more issues than Senator Craig. Politics is full of dirty little compromises, and a libertarian-dominated Republican Party would be full of different dirty little compromises--for example, support for expanding anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation. Anti-discrimination laws for any group are fundamentally anti-libertarian, but I'm sure that libertarian Republicans would come up with a justification, just like Senator Craig does for sugar supports. Ryan Sager provides here a letter from Dick Armey attacking James Dobson, and by implication, social conservatives, for supporting a tax increase in Alabama to improve failing public schools. Now, the next time you hear liberals whining about how conservatives hate public schools--and especially how those Religious Right sorts want to scrap all public schools--remember this. Conservatives (as opposed to libertarians) do not fundamentally challenge the validity of public schools. Yes, many conservatives would like more choices of where to send their kids for an education, but they recognize that dreams of public schools disappearing are pie in the sky delusions. There are a stack of reasons for this, some historical, some because a fair number of parents simply don't much care about education at all. But conservatives saying, "Look, Alabama schools aren't working, and they need additional funding" is a pretty good indicator that there was a real problem there. I think that libertarians bring a lot of good ideas to the table--and sad to say, most of the intellectuals and academics of the Republican Party are libertarian, not conservative. What concerns me is that there is an arrogance and smug self-righteousness among the libertarians that prevents them from seeing that just because an idea looks good in a law review paper, doesn't mean that it is going to work with real people, who are shockingly uneducated, short-sighted, and often as not, stupid. Remember: by definition, 49.99999% of the population is below average in intelligence. The United States isn't a Mensa meeting, nor is it the Libertarian Party of Santa Clara County (where LP members used to kid that the only question you had to ask about someone's occupation at a meeting was, "software or hardware?") If the Democratic Party were in full retreat, if we (as a nation, and as a civilization) were not in the middle of the fight of our lives, I could see that this fight over the soul of the Republican Party would make some sense. This is not the time. Promoting this fight right now looks to me to be a Machiavellian attempt to destroy the Republican Party's chances next month so that the libertarian wing can become ascendant. What they don't seem to realize is that a libertarian Republican Party is going to be about as successful as a Democratic Party dominated by people like Howard Dean and Michael Moore. Yes, you can feel so pristine and intellectually pure, but no matter how much money you have to spend on elections, you still need voters to show up and vote. Libertarian ideas are very popular among some intellectuals, but they are not as popular among the masses as social conservatism. This need to fight it out for control of the Republican Party should have made that clear. UPDATE: Groan. Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is one of the people I knew from my days as a Libertarian Party activist. Partly because of her daughter's painful and unpleasant relationship with John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, she now spends much of her energy promoting her belief that neo-conservatives stole the soul of the Republican Party. The latest announcement from her, which somewhat fits into Sager's argument, although with a truly weird twist: Is George W. Bush the Beast predicted in the Bible? Are the Evangelical Churches the weapon of Satan?And all this time, I was worried that "Bush=Hitler." Thursday, October 12, 2006
The Cat Is Out Of The Bag I always have some misgivings about exposing potentially dangerous information. For example, I don't blog about how to make poison gas from common materials. Almost any reasonably well educated person can cheaply, easily, and without attracting suspicion, buy the materials to quickly make poison gas in any town in America. If you don't know how to do this, I'm not going to make it easy for a deranged nutcase, or freelance Islamic terrorist. Nuclear weapons design is a somewhat more complicated situation. When I was young, not only were all the details of how to make fission bombs pretty well hidden away, but few people knew even the general outline of how nuclear weapons worked. Now, it seems, information that I had painstakingly gathered over many years of reading and conversations is available on the Internet quite readily--and lots of subtle details that I did not know. Unlike poison gas--where the details aren't universally known, but the ingredients are--nuclear weapons seem to be an area where the details are now very widely distributed and easy to find --but the ingredients are not. I can't recall ever seeing plutonium for sale at Wal-Mart (but I'm sure that they would have a spectacular price on it!) and I'm not too worried about an unstable sort building his own uranium hexafluoride gaseous diffusion plant at home. It was enough of a struggle for the United States government to do it during World War II. It also tends to attract attention of the authorities, especially when your fluorine tank valve fails, and a stream of gas sets the water in your swimming pool on fire. I've mentioned on a couple of occasions that the mass required to make a nuclear weapon is classified. Apparently it is not. There are a surprising number of sources that tell you what the mass is. They don't all agree, but the amounts suggest that my concerns about terrorists buying bombs that could be shipped via FedEx (when it positively has to be destroyed over night) are properly placed. This table shows critical mass required for uranium enriched to various levels of U-235, with various neutron reflectors, as well as critical mass for various isotopes of plutonium. For uranium bombs, the masses aren't huge--like less than 15 kilograms for high purity U-235 with a good neutron reflector. What's especially worrisome is that for 100% Pu-239, with a 10 cm thick layer of uranium as the neutron reflector, the critical mass is only 4.4 kilograms. There's a lot more to an atomic bomb than the plutonium and the neutron reflector--but I would not be surprised if it is possible to build a plutonium bomb that weighs as little as 80 pounds. Other sources are not in complete agreement, but the critical mass that some of them show is consistent with this number. The prospect of either Iran or North Korea producing bombs of this weight--and because of the density of plutonium and uranium, probably a pretty small package--is truly disturbing. I do hope that Americans understand the critical nature of the prospect of either country producing nuclear weapons. Iran would supply such weapons to terrorists to use against the U.S. strictly for ideological and religious reasons; North Korea would do it for the money. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Make Sure You Hire A Qualified Babysitter 1. CPR trained? 2. Background check? 3. Current hunting tags for intruders? From the October 12, 2006 Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph: PORTHILL, Idaho -- A northern Idaho baby sitter shot and killed a 422-pound black bear that broke into a backyard where three toddlers were playing. Innumeracy Among Journalists The more I think about the Lancet article, the more obviously bogus the results are. The claim is 654,965 excess deaths caused by the war from March 2003 through July 2006. That's 40 months, or 1200 days, so an average of 546 deaths per day. To get an average of 546 deaths per day means that there must have been either many hundreds of days with 1000 or more deaths per day (example: 200 days with 1000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1000 days with an average of 450 deaths), or tens of days with at least 10,000 or more deaths per day (example: 20 days with 10,000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1180 days with an average of 381 deaths). So, where are the news accounts of tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths? Where are the news accounts of hundreds of days with 1000 deaths or more? This article claims that there are perhaps 100 Iraqis a day now being killed in sectarian violence--and this is described as escalating violence. This horrifying article talks about 65 bodies found around Baghdad--with the claim that the day was "notable in its number." Either the news media have been ignoring hundreds of days with 1000 or more deaths--or tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths--or the Lancet article is utterly wrong. Oh Dear, I Guess I Have To Worry About Being Tried As a War Criminal The enviromental movement has a new plan: It's about the climate-change "denial industry," which most of you are probably familiar with. What you may not know about is the peculiar role of the tobacco industry in the whole mess. I've read about this stuff for years and even I was surprised by some of the details.There's nothing quite like fanaticism and hatred to run a political movement. By the way, make sure you understand what "climate-change denier" really means, from Roger Pielke Jr., at the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research: Let's be blunt. The phrase "climate change denier" is meant to be evocative of the phrase "holocaust denier". As such the phrase conjurs up a symbolic allusion fully intended to equate questioning of climate change with questioning of the Holocaust. Labels: global warming Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Did You Know That We Have Caused The Death of 2.5% of the Population of Iraq? Well, the Lancet, the top British medical journal, has just published a paper claiming that we have caused the deaths of 2.5% of the population of Iraq: We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979 - 942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 (426,369 - 793,663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gun fire.Short of setting up concentration camps, or intentionally spreading disease, or carpet bombing cities, I'm not sure that we could do that even if we were trying. There comes a point in every statistical study when you need to do a sanity check. "Gee, is it really true that birds can't fly?" "Wow! I had no idea that every third Californian is psychotic!" "At this rate of growth, by the year 2050, every American will be named Miguel!" Do you want to know how ridiculous this claim is? During World War II, the Allied air forces carpet bombed German cities, using high explosives and incendiaries with a callous disregard for civilian losses. The euphemism was "strategic bombing," but it was terror bombing--by day and by night. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report developed some estimates of deaths as a result of this indiscriminate and indefensible use of bombing against civilian targets: Official German statistics place total casualties from air attack -- including German civilians, foreigners, and members of the armed forces in cities that were being attacked -- at 250,253 killed for the period from January 1, 1943, to January 31, 1945, and 305,455 wounded badly enough to require hospitalization, during the period from October 1, 1943, to January 31, 1945. A careful examination of these data, together with checks against the records of individual cities that were attacked, indicates that they are too low. A revised estimate prepared by the Survey (which is also a minimum) places total casualties for the entire period of the war at 305,000 killed and 780,000 wounded.So the Lancet wants us to believe that we have caused almost twice as many deaths without carpet bombing of cities, without creating firestorms like Dresden, without leaving vast rubble heaps where cities used to stand--and where our own compunctions, as well as world opinion, have prevented us from treating Iraqis as callously as British, American, and Russian air forces treated Germany? Give me a break. Japan suffered about two million deaths (about 2.7% of its total population), both military and civilian, over a period of six years. This includes 192,000 deaths from atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 100,000 killed in a single firebombing raid on Tokyo in 1945. And these liars want us to believe that we have caused a roughly comparable percentage of deaths of Iraqis over the last three years largely with firearms? If You Haven't Already Seen The David Zucker Ad That The GOP Thought Was Too Hot To Use You should. It's available here for the moment. Yes, this is the guy behind Airplane! and a bunch of other very funny movies--who after 9/11, suddenly turned Republican. (You think he woke up one morning and said to himself, "Gee, would a Jew be able to make films if Osama bin Laden wins? Or could Jews only make soap?"*) As with the Zucker ad for the Club for Growth in 2004, it is uproariously funny and not completely fair--although there's a germ of truth in there--some wings of the Democratic Party are a bit ingenuous when dealing with murderous tyrants. * Before anyone emails me--yes, I know, I've read Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, and I know that other than some brief experiments that didn't work out (there wasn't enough fat left in concentration camp inmate bodies to make soap commercially), there wasn't any soap made from Jews. I was just making the sort of dark, outrageous joke from this that David Zucker would use in one of his movies. The University of Wisconsin Really Knows How To Hire Them This guy is teaching his students that the U.S. government set up 9/11--but not to worry, he agrees that the comparison of Hitler to Bush isn't fair--to Hitler: The book is on the syllabus for the twice-a-week course, "Islam: Religion and Culture," being taught by part-time instructor Kevin Barrett, but only three of the essays are required reading, not including Barrett's essay.I knew that there was a reason that I can't get a teaching job. I lack the ability to figure out the IQ scores of a madman dead for more than sixty years and compare them to a man that I've never met. I've Been Concerned About This Republican Bill Sali vs. Democrat Larry Grant in the Idaho 1st Congressional District race: BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- As a growing number of immigrants flock to Idaho for agricultural work, candidates for the state's 1st Congressional District seat are proposing starkly different ways of dealing with illegal immigration.Unfortunately, they are both right. (Well, except for the "come in somewhere else" claim--are they going to swim across the Gulf of Mexico?) We need a fence. And we need to make the economic costs to employers hiring illegal aliens so high that they won't knowingly do so. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has done a dramatically worse job than the Clinton Administration on enforcing the existing law. However: it is abundantly clear from the rest of Grant's remarks that he has no intention of shutting off the flow of illegal aliens: Grant said legitimate workers should be able to enter the country legally.Grant seems to be saying that it is perfectly fine to have vast numbers of aliens entering the United States, driving down wages for those who are U.S. citizens and lawful residents, and causing significant economic problems for local governments that have to deal with the costs of schools and medical care. Sali seems unwilling to take a position about enforcement of the existing law that is supposed to punish employers for knowingly hiring illegal aliens. His web page is strangely silent about this, unless you interpret, "Our government refuses to enforce immigration law and that must stop" as meaning, "enforce the existing laws about employers knowingly hiring illegal aliens." There's some pain involved for everyone, and I see no reason why employers shouldn't be part of this. That's one of the reasons that I was partial to Vasquez--he recognizes that there are employers who are part of the problem. We don't need a new law--there's already a law in place, and the Bush Administration needs to be reminded forcefully that they are supposed to enforce this law. Plunge Milling I'm trying to mill a rectangular hole in a piece of Delrin--and I'm having a heck of a time doing so. The hole needs to be 2" deep, 1.00" x 1.09". The obvious (at least to me) solution was to use a .750" end mill to rough out the hole, and then use a small end mill to square up the edges. This would require doing a plunge cut at one edge of the hole (the Z direction), then moving in the X and Y directions to complete a rectangle. The problem is that when I try to move in the X direction, there's enough force generated to pull the workpiece out of the mill vise. I am suspecting that because I am trying to cut using the edge of the mill, and I am trying to cut about an inch of Delrin at a time, this is too much effort. Perhaps I should be limiting myself to edge milling in 0.1" depths? If so, I am thinking the more time-effective way to do this would be start out by hogging out a 1" diameter hole using a drill press and a wood boring bit--then using a small end mill to convert the 1" diameter hole into a 1.00" x 1.09" rectangle. This would involve plunge cuts using the end mill, rather than cutting on the edges. Any suggestions? If You Are Attacking A Republican For Inappropriate Actions of Other Republicans... Generally, it isn't too wise to ask Chappaquidick Ted to help you out on holding the high moral ground: WASHINGTON -- When the congressional page scandal broke last month, Democrats across the country saw a chance to lambaste Republican leadership - including Diane Farrell, who called on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to step down.Foley, as repugant as his behavior was, is still head and shoulders above Sen. Kennedy. You will also notice that when Foley got caught engaged in some morally reprehensible behavior, he resigned. Ted Kennedy's actions may well have caused Kopechne's death (there being some question about whether she might have survived if Kennedy had sought immediate assistance after the accident)--and Senator Kennedy still represents Massachusetts. The Culture of Corruption The Democrats were trying to make a big deal of what they call the culture of corruption in Congress--even though at least some of those getting in trouble were Democrats. This Washington Post article makes me think that trying to pin this culture of corruption all on the Republicans is a bit of projection: WASHINGTON -- Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show. Deinstitutionalization's Victims I mentioned an incident a few days ago in Seattle in which a person acting rather strangely attacked a guy who was carrying a gun. The attacker died. I expressed my opinion that we would find out that the attacker was mentally ill. A little more detail on the attacker: A 25-year-old man who was fatally shot while attacking a stranger Saturday at Westlake Plaza had previously served time in prison for setting fire to a day-care center his mother operated out of her Phinney Ridge home.Yes, the mental health system failed once again: A man shot and killed Saturday after authorities say he attacked a stranger in Westlake Plaza was one of 70 dangerously mentally ill people in King County.Am I the only person who finds something incredibly crazy about defining someone as "a Dangerous Mentally Ill Offender" and then releasing him from prison? Thanks to Sound Politics for following up on this. Not surprisingly, the comments over at Sound Politics include the usual leftists blaming Ronald Reagan for this. Hints: 1. Reagan was governor of California, not Washington. I had no idea that Reagan was so powerful. 2. Reagan's term as governor ended before this guy Culotti was born. 3. Reagan's presidency ended when Culotti was eight years old. I rather doubt that any policy that Reagan enacted had any impact on this. When will the left admit that its deinstitutionalization policies were a failure? Labels: deinstitutionalization Horse Evolution I remember when I was in elementary school, my sister Marilyn had some project for a science class about the evolution of horses. We spent a bit of time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History as part of that project--a place that I just loved to visit. You may recall from your science textbooks that the evolution of the horse has long been considered the classic example of transitional species and evolution. Generally, it has been presented in a very oversimplified form, almost like the "goal" of evolution was the modern horse. As is usually the case, the scientists have corrected this, but the textbooks still show the oversimplified form: According to conventional notions, horses simply became bigger over time and switched from being diminutive shrub nibblers to the statuesque, grass-eating masters of the open plains, said Bruce MacFadden, a UF paleontologist whose article appears in this week’s issue of the journal Science. But the new horse sense is that the equine mammals are adaptable critters whose size, diet and range depended on geography and climate, he said. Anyway, while digging around for materials showing the classic oversimplified model--as well as more current work--I found this interesting article from that well-known Creationist, fundamentalist organ, the British Broadcasting Corporation: As the Great Ice Age came to an end, some 11,000 years ago, North America was thought to be home to as many as 50 species and subspecies of horse. Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Very Interesting Show On Discovery Health Channel I tend not to watch Discovery Health Channel, since too many of the programs either strike me as gruesome (oh boy, we get to watch surgery!) or about tragedies that I really don't want to think about. They had a very interesting documentary on this evening, however, called Hypersexual Behavior. It was about sexual addicts--people for whom the desire for sex has become a destructive behavior. What constitutes a destructive behavior? Well, the sex addiction therapist was talking to one guy who, by his own admission, spends seven hours a day online looking for men for sex. The therapist did a masterful job of asking questions until you could see the light go on over the patient's head: he was spending more time each week trying to find different complete strangers for sex than he was spending at work. Another sex addict was a woman named Marnie whose first marriage collapsed--and whose second marriage almost collapsed--because of her compulsive pursuit of what she imagined were affairs--but were, by her own admission, simply ways to rationalize what would otherwise have made her feel like a whore. With one exception, everyone that they interviewed who described himself or herself as a sex addict was engaged in highly promiscuous, highly risky behavior. The one exception was a woman who was demanding (not asking) sex at least three times a day from her boyfriend. The therapists and psychologists that they interviewed emphasized that there is, like other addictions, a component of biochemistry involved, and they theorized that at least some of this reflected problems of childhood that had screwed up brain chemistry. However, the woman whose demands on her boyfriend were causing problems seemed to have come from a home where emotional intimacy was completely absent--and not surprisingly, she had a difficult time expressing herself to her boyfriend, except in terms of a demand for frequent sex. On the other hand, at least two of the five people that they interviewed had come from sexually traumatic situations. A man named Sean, who described how almost every day was spent pursuing multiple sexual partners, both men and women, explained that he was kidnapped at age 12, used to make child pornography, and tortured. He overcame his alcohol and cocaine addictions as a young adult--but he indicated that overcoming his sex addiction was much harder. Marnie explained that from age 5 to age 20, a friend of the family had exploited her sexually, creating both knowledge and encouraging age-inappropriate sexual appetites. I guess one of the reasons that I found this so interesting is that one of my readers responded to my critical comments about the San Francisco Chronicle's sex clubs column by telling me that he was part of the swinger scene, and that this was everywhere in America. This wasn't any great surprise to me, and in the course of an email exchange, he told me that after he got married, after three months of fidelity, he could think of nothing else but sex with other women. All that I could think when reading "could think of nothing else" was: this is not healthy. I like to eat; I like to eat too much; but as long as I get to eat three meals, I don't spend hours on end thinking about food. There's too many other things to do and to think about. Perhaps the most startling aspect of this documentary was one of the psychologists explaining his concern that the ready availability of pornography through the Internet (why my daughter refers to hers as the "porn generation") is creating an enormous population of of sexual compulsives. Somehow, we've gone from a generation of sexually repressed to a generation dangerously far in the other direction. I just don't see how to fix this through market forces. The North Koreans Apparently Failed To Go Nuclear At least, that's what both Michel Yon is saying: A very well-placed government source told me Tuesday afternoon that the North Korean explosion was non-nuclear. The explosion may have been an actual nuclear test — this is unknown — but the source reports the outcome was non-nuclear.... The source reported that American physicists with access to the information see no sign of nuclear activity, however. My source also mentioned that Japanese sensors picked up no radiation signatures.Bill Gertz, who writes on national security matters for the Washington Times, is reporting the same thing: U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday.This causes me to scratch my head. If this was an attempt at a nuclear explosion, then hundreds of tons of TNT equivalent is simply far too much. There's no need to use that much explosive to cause a plutonium implosion, and they would know that. It would make more sense to think that North Korea is bluffing at being a nuclear power. Yet a yield this low would cause the West to either think this was a test failure, or a suitcase nuke test. But are they stupid enough to think that we would be fooled by an explosion that had no radiation signature? Michael Yon indicates that there is a real possibility that this explosion was actually on behalf of the Iranians. Is this an attempt to distract attention from the Iranian nuclear program, or Iranian involvement in the Iraqi civil war? Remember: the Iranians invented chess. "If You Try To Defend Yourself With A Gun, The Criminal Might Take It From You" This is a recurring claim of gun control advocates--usually aimed at women, who everyone just knows are too weak-willed to defend themselves. I've had a police chief make this claim--and when I asked him to give me even one example of a woman (other than a female police officer) who has been disarmed by a criminal, he was utterly stumped. But once again, someone has brought to the attention of the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog the exact opposite. From the October 10, 2006 Memphis Commercial-Appeal: A Frayser woman shot and killed an intruder who kicked in her apartment door and tried to rob her around midnight Sunday.I look forward to the day that gun control advocates start warning criminals, "You really shouldn't use a gun in a crime. Your intended victim may take it away from you, and use it on you." Rep. Kolbe Now Says That He Never Saw the 2000 Emails I've updated the previous posting about Kolbe's knowledge of complaints concerning Foley in 2000. It's A Small World (Part 5) I called up a distributor of acetal rod today for ScopeRoller--and the guy at the other end asked, "Are you the Clayton Cramer with the blog?" Mexico Talks About Taking The Border Fence to the U.N. The left likes to talk about national sovereignty as the reason why the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq, and why we shouldn't be upset about North Korea or Iran having nuclear weapons. For all the left talks about its respect for human rights, that they choose to align themselves with nations like North Korea and Iran shows that human rights are less important to the left than their hatred of the U.S. However, the latest little twist in leftist thinking is that the U.S. doesn't have the authority to enforce our border: PARIS -- Mexico's foreign secretary said Monday the country may take a dispute over U.S. plans to build a fence on the Mexican border to the United Nations.Now, I can see why Mexico's government doesn't want a fence on the border. There is the real danger that a fence preventing massive illegal immigration would cause internal pressures in Mexico to rise to a point where they might have to confront their corruption problem. But to argue that the U.S. doesn't have a legal right to control who enters our country? That's amazing! Perhaps the ACLU will represent Mexico on this matter. Need Some Laughs? The Onion is pretty funny, and has been known to skewer leftist delusions on occasion, such as this marvelously funny--and quite accurate piece: WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA–The mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, a hard-won civil-rights victory gained through decades of struggle against prejudice and discrimination, was set back at least 50 years Saturday in the wake of the annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade.Still, their overall assumptions are pretty much on the left side--and their language is sometimes not work safe. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a satirical website on the right end? There is scrappleface.com, which is sometimes more clever than funny, but there is also a new website that seems to be aiming more at the scrappleface.com paradigm: Guns'n'butter. A recent example: South Koreans thank Jimmy Carter for their mortal perilOther recent news articles include "U.N. airlifts food to starving French fashion models" and "Mexico to build 700-mile-long ladder." Labels: homosexuality Monday, October 09, 2006
The Swiss and the Nazis Stephen Halbrook, The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Casemate, 2006). You may recall several years ago that there was considerable press coverage of claims of Jews against Swiss banks, alleging that money deposited before World War II by European Jews had quietly disappeared, after the account holders were exterminated by the Nazis. There were a number of other depressing stories as well, of the Swiss government requiring German Jews to have a "J" on their passport, so that the Swiss could refuse them entry, and of Germany shipping cattle cars full of Jews across Switzerland, on their way to concentration camps. I didn't pay a lot of attention at the time, not because I was uninterested, but because I looked at Switzerland's location--completely surrounded by the Axis powers--and I concluded, "They had a hard choice, didn't they?" Stephen Halbrook is rather a fan of Switzerland, at least partly because of their militia system, and I admit that I have long had a warm spot in my heart for them as well. I can remember being enthralled in elementary school when I first read about the battle of 1291 that brought together the first three cantons, Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz in defiance of the Hapsburg Empire. Halbrook's goal with this book is clearly to set the record straight--to show that Switzerland was not sympathetic to the Axis powers--not even neutral, except in a very formal, legal sense. Instead, Switzerland did its best to protect itself from being swallowed up--as almost all countries on the continent were. Within the limited range of actions that it could take without provoking a Nazi invasion, Halbrook argues, the Swiss did their best to take in refugees, covertly aid the Allies, and make the cost of invasion so high that the Axis powers would see no benefit to it. I won't claim to have enough detailed knowledge of the subject to tell you whether Halbrook's defense of the Swiss is accurate or fair. It certainly seems fair, and Halbrook often provides evidence that shows that while the Swiss failed to take action to protect victims of the monstrous crimes taking place in occupied Europe at the beginning of the war, they were hardly alone. The full extent of the Holocaust was nothing more than rumors and unbelievable stories until 1942, and even then, Switzerland did more, with less resources, than many other neutral nations (including the United States). As you might well expect, much of Halbrook's book focuses on Switzerland as the porcupine--a nation that Germany's technologically superior and larger military could certainly defeat--but at enormous cost. German interest in occupying Switzerland was a mixture of racial ideology, and the desire for industrial capacity. Most Swiss were of German ethnicity, and while Nazi propagandists sometimes called the Swiss "Mountain Jews" (because of their capitalist traditions), the desire to add Switzerland to the German Reich reflected Nazi ideology about a single German nation. Racial ideology would not have justified a bloody and protracted war. Switzerland also held significant manufacturing capacity in the area of modern weapons--and surrounded by Axis powers or their puppets (such as Vichy France), Swiss businesses managed to smuggle out small but industrially important goods to Allied industries, such as diamond dies. Halbrook shows how the Swiss militia system and rugged Alpine terrain--and more importantly, a strong determination on the part of the Swiss population to resist a repugnant philosophy--made it possible for a small country with an antiquated air force to steer a nominally neutral course. The Germans could almost certainly have defeated the Swiss militia--but by the time they had occupied the country, most of the industrial capacity would have been destroyed. Halbrook includes a great many interviews with Swiss describing the privations of wartime, with people subsisting largely on two day old potato bread. Why two days old? To discourage people from eating it for pleasure. He also uses interviews with Swiss Jews and Jewish refugees to demonstrate that there was no place for anti-Semitism in wartime Switzerland. To the extent that Switzerland tried to keep out Jewish refugees in the first three years of the war, it was because the country was already in desperate straits regarding food supplies. Also, the Swiss government was concerned about German agents entering the country by pretending to be Jewish. Nazi agents, both German and Swiss, were a continuing problem throughout the war. Halbrook devotes considerable energy to demonstrating that while the Swiss government remained neutral during the war, almost all the energy devoted to defense was either directed at Axis invasion, or to be able to tell Germany that Switzerland would not allow the Allies to invade through Swiss territory. The analogy to the Cold War situation is quite strong; Switzerland's military throughout the post-World War II period claimed to be concerned with invasion by any enemy, but the bulk of its preparations were for Warsaw Pact incursions. I've read several books by Halbrook about constitutional history, and while all of them are well-written, I rather enjoyed this book more, perhaps because of the human interest stories that make up much of the book. Bad News About The North Korean Nuclear Test A reader whose knowledge I respect pointed out from the footage that the North Koreans released, evidence that this low yield was not a failure, but intentional: I believe it very unlikely that this was a fizzle. A couple of minutes ago, I saw video footage of the test on the news. The shot hole had trunks of cables leading to a number of surrounding instrumentation trailers. I would have to see it again to be certain, but it appeared that the perimeter of the cone of collapse stopped just short of the line of trailers. To me, this says that they knew what the maximum yield would be, positioned the instrumentation as close as they could, and got the result that they designed for.I saw the same footage, and now that I think about it, this makes perfect sense. I can see several possibilities: 1. The goal is to make low yield weapons that would be well suited for terrorists or for delivery on relatively small missles. 2. The goal is to conserve their fissile material, and they know enough about what they are doing to produce and successfully fire a low yield weapon. 3. They want us to think that they had a failure. None of these are good situations. If the U.S. allows any low yield weapons to leave North Korea, nuclear blackmail is going to be a serious problem for decades. Right now, if al-Qaeda threatened to detonate nuclear weapons in dozens of U.S. cities, it would be recognized as a bluff--almost certainly not a realistic possibility. Five years from now, it might not be a bluff--and we would have no way of being certain that it was not. Voting To Kill Jim Geraghty, Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership (Touchstone, 2006). This might turn out to be a prophetic book--if in spite of the Foley Follies, Republicans retain control of the House next month--or it might turn out to be a reminder that democracies have short memories, if Democrats regain control. Geraghty's thesis is that for the last 25 years, the American public has been developing a perception--rightly--that the Republican Party is the party of national security (for lack of a better symbol, "Dad"), and the Democratic Party is the party of putting bandages on injuries, cups of hot cocoa when the first boyfriend breaks up with you, and encouraging words when you don't do well on the SATs ("Mom"). With the end of the Cold War in 1991, Americans gravitated towards Mom because Mom made them feel good about themselves in a world that looked like Andy Hardy's neighborhood. Dad was a little cold and unapproachable, even though he meant well, but the things that Dad worried about were pretty remote. Sure, there had been a couple of burglaries in the neighborhood. Someone had stolen a couple of our bikes. Little brother got punched by some of the bullies on the way home. But overall, we didn't worry too much about our safety. We worried about our self-esteem, and nice meals, and going out on dates. On 9/11, several thugs smashed in the front door, dragged away the middle sister, raped and killed her. Dad's constant hassling us about locking the doors was suddenly no longer just Dad being silly. Dad was serious about our safety all those years, but it was just an abstract concern. Now Dad is organizing a neighborhood watch, and he and the other Dads nearby are behaving in ways that would have scared us before--but not now. Yeah, we don't like seeing Dad and the neighbors headed off to the shooting range, but it's a bit comforting at night to know that if the bad guys come back, Dad's not taking any prisoners. And during the week, Dad and the other men who live nearby are ignoring the police, kicking in the crack houses on the other side of town, and sometimes not being too careful about how they find the bad guys. Geraghty points out that this national security concern of the Republican Party didn't develop overnight on 9/11--and what I call the adult supervision wing of the Democratic Party did not evaporate overnight either. He gives a brief history of America's wars and police actions, and while he provides the evidence that the Republicans were taking this seriously, and Democrats increasingly were not, he is careful not to force the evidence to fit his thesis. Indeed, there are a couple of places where I think he may have bent over backward to be fair to the Democrats. For example, his discussion of the 1983 invasion of Grenada suggests that it was done for psychological reasons: The fight represented a psychologically uplifting miniwar against a Communist regime, even if the geopolitical strategic importance of Grenada was, uh, debatable. In 1984, Reagan often joked that the island had to be invaded because it was the world's largest producer of nutmeg, adding, "You can't make eggnog without nutmeg."However, Geraghty's summary points out that there was something a bit serious involved: THE THREAT: A Marxist takeover of Grenada suggested that the island's airstrip was being prepared to accommodate Soviet and Cuban transport craft as part of an effort to arm and aid Central American insurgents. In addition, the presence of 600 American medical students on the island spurred fears of another hostage crisis. [p. 70]Hmmm. By that measure, Grenada's "geopolitical strategic importance" rises a bit, don't you think? Throughout, Geraghty uses public opinion surveys to demonstrate that the national security question played a major role in the continuing--and to the Democrats, incompreh |
