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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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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?"
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.
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.
Therefore, taking the results of the two papers and using the mystical mathematical operation known as subtraction, for the not quite 21 month period 1 September 2004 to 20 May 2006 the estimate of excess deaths in Iraq becomes 655,000 - 112,000 = 543,000 implying monthly and weekly average deaths of 25,857 and 6,028 respectively.
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.
"By confining the survey to a cluster of houses close to one another it was felt the benign purpose of the survey would spread quickly by word of mouth among households, thus lessening risk to interviewers."
This is much like saying:
"We invited the sample base to spread the word to not open their doors to us if nothing bad happened to them, and to overcome their understandable reluctance to open their doors, if something bad had happened. We also invited the sample base to consider in advance the opportunity to make a political statement to be published in an influential Western medical journal, in the form of claims about causes of death more specific than those stated on the death certificate."
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.
They also mention asking to see copies of death certificates, claiming to have seen 501 certificates for 545 reported deaths (because they report 547 deaths, I guess they forgot to ask for certificates for 2 of them, which is a flaw, but not likely a serious one).
In other words, 9% of documentable data were admitted without documentation. OK, it passed some sort of claimed consistency check, but we have no details on the methodology used for this check.
They also claim "The pattern of deaths in households without death certificates was no different from those with certificates." The phrase "pattern of deaths in households" is meaningless. If a statement has no precise meaning, but is used to justify the inclusion of undocumented data at identical weight with documented data, one wonders how it survived peer review and editing.
It is understandable that more children than women have died, because there typically are more children than women, and the children very likely spend more time wandering around outside the house. It is just not understandable that children are 5x as likely as women for their cause of death to be air strike, unless there have been extraordinary causes. Are we hitting schools or school buses from the air, or strafing roads at the times when children are going to or from school?
It is understandable that the likelihood of the deaths of women and children being from car bombs, are both low by comparison to men.
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."
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.
The bear was likely drawn to the yard by the scent of food from a barbecue, said Idaho Department of Fish and Game Conservation Officer Greg Johnson.
...
Henslee said her 3-year-old daughter Brooklyn and twin 2-year-old sons Cleo and Charles were playing in the backyard of their home on the Canadian border early last week when Brooklyn alerted their aunt by shouting "Bear! Bear!"
Henslee said her sister looked up and saw the bear running out of the woods toward the backyard. She grabbed the three children from the yard and ran inside the house, shutting the door.
After taking the children into a bedroom, the woman loaded a 7mm hunting rifle and returned to the back door, where the bear had pawed the screen door and broken the door frame.
When the bear looked away from the door, Henslee said her sister opened the door slightly and shot twice, killing the bear instantly.
Henslee said her sister had a valid Idaho bear hunting tag.
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.
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
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.
Let's be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. Let those who would make such an allusion instead be absolutely explicit about their assertion of moral equivalency between Holocaust deniers and those that they criticize.
This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system.
Let's declare a moratorium on the phrases "climate change denier" and "climate change denial." Let's invoke the equivalent of Godwin's Law in discourse on climate policy. Maybe call it the Prometheus Principle.
No more invocation of "climate change deniers."
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.
Barrett is active in a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, whose members say U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies," he wrote.
Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
"That's not comparing them as people, that's comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that's an accurate comparison that I would stand by," he said.
But he did say in an interview: "Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler."
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.
The Republican candidate wants a bigger fence along the U.S. border with Mexico, military troops patrolling the border and for any illegal resident caught in a routine traffic stop to be deported.
"Immigration and border security are inextricably linked," Republican candidate Bill Sali told The Spokesman-Review, saying "drug cartel operatives, gang members and terrorists" are entering the country.
Democratic candidate Larry Grant said the problem is primarily economic. "Unlike my opponent, I believe you cannot solve the border security problem until you solve the economic problem," he said. "As long as there are employers willing to hire them, they'll come in somewhere else."
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.
"When you provide employers with employees they need and employees with jobs they need and a legal way to cross the border, then you can go after the criminals," Grant said.
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.
But when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy came to Connecticut last week to help her campaign, Rep. Christopher Shays hit back.
"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died.
"Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added.
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.
In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews.
The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. He's never been charged with wrongdoing _ except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court.
Land deeds obtained by The Associated Press during a review of Reid's business dealings show:
_The deal began in 1998 when Reid bought undeveloped residential property on Las Vegas' booming outskirts for about $400,000. Reid bought one lot outright, and a second parcel jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported. The seller never talked to Reid.
_In 2001, Reid sold the land for the same price to a limited liability corporation created by Brown. The senator didn't disclose the sale on his annual public ethics report or tell Congress he had any stake in Brown's company. He continued to report to Congress that he personally owned the land.
_After getting local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, Brown's company sold the land in 2004 to other developers and Reid took $1.1 million of the proceeds, nearly tripling the senator's investment. Reid reported it to Congress as a personal land sale.
The complex dealings allowed Reid to transfer ownership, legal liability and some tax consequences to Brown's company without public knowledge, but still collect a seven-figure payoff nearly three years later.
Reid hung up the phone when questioned about the deal during an AP interview last week.
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:
Daniel Culotti was shot shortly after 11 a.m. by a 52-year-old man he was assaulting in an unprovoked attack, according to Seattle police. The victim of the assault was carrying a handgun and had a concealed-weapons permit, police said.
In July 2001, Culotti had attacked his mother, Melinda Culotti, inside the family's former residence on Palatine Avenue North near Woodland Park Zoo. He later returned and doused the floors inside the house with gasoline, setting the house on fire.
Culotti's mother, several child-care providers and seven children escaped unharmed.
Culotti later pleaded guilty to first-degree arson and was sentenced to just under two years in prison.
According to the state Department of Corrections, Culotti served approximately nine months in prison before he was released in Oct. 2002 with time off for good behavior. But jail records show that he was arrested three times this year for violating the conditions of his release into the community.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.
Since his release from prison four years ago, Daniel Culotti had been under the supervision of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and Seattle Mental Health, according to the DOC. As with others who were ruled a Dangerous Mentally Ill Offender (DMIO) after their release from incarceration, the state earmarked $10,000 to pay for Culotti's housing, medications and therapy necessary for his first five years outside of prison.
The Department of Corrections said Culotti, 25, complied with his therapy. However, he failed two drug tests shortly after his release from prison in October 2002 and told his probation officer he had used crack cocaine regularly "to help ease the stress," according to a community custody report filed in King County Superior Court.
"Mr. Culotti also has mental health needs and his history shows that use of drugs can cause him to become psychotic," his caseworkers wrote.
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?
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.
“The old ideas about how horses evolved made for a fairly simple and tidy story,” said MacFadden, whose 1992 book “Fossil Horses” is considered the definitive work on the subject. “But many of the concepts about horse evolution that came into being during the 20th century are now outmoded, giving way to an understanding of the fossil horse sequence that is much more complex.”
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.
But studies of ancient DNA tell a rather different story, suggesting the horses belonged to just two species.
These are the stilt-legged horses, now extinct, and the caballines.
The caballines are thought to be the ancestors of today's domestic horse.
"It looks like, as far as we can tell from the DNA, there is only evidence of two species in North America," Dr Alan Cooper from the University of Adelaide, Australia, told the BBC News website.
"We think that, in fact, people have been looking at these fossils and over-interpreting signs of changes in shape and size," he added.
"Probably these animals are adapting to local environments and perhaps they are [anatomically] more [changeable] than the palaeontologists had perhaps thought."
Mitochondrial clock
The work has implications for understanding other animals because horses are a textbook example of using fossil evidence to explain evolution.
Although the horse fossil record is very rich, our picture of when and where different species arose is clouded.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA from fossilised bones, only possible in recent years, gives scientists a new tool to study evolution.
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?
U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.
"We're still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture," said one official familiar with intelligence reports.
"There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn't clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives."
The underground explosion, which Pyongyang dubbed a historic nuclear test, is thought to have been the equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT, far short of the several thousand tons of TNT, or kilotons, that are signs of a nuclear blast, the official said.
The official said that so far, "it appears there was more fizz than pop."
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."
Tameca Drummer, a resident at Carriage House apartments at 1115 Frayser Blvd., told police the man, along with two others, forced their way into her home demanding money.
The people in her apartment, including her two children, were forced into the living room, while one of the intruders forced her into the bedroom looking for money, police spokesman Sgt. Vince Higgins said.
When that man struck her on the head with his handgun, she wrestled the gun away from him and shot and killed him, according to a police incident report.
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.
Luis Ernesto Derbez told reporters in Paris, his first stop on a European tour, that a legal investigation was under way to determine whether Mexico has a case.
The Mexican government last week sent a diplomatic note to Washington criticizing the plan for 700 miles of new fencing along the border. President-elect Felipe Calderon also denounced the plan, but said it was a bilateral issue that should not be put before the international community.
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?
Participants in Saturday's Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, which helped change straight people's tolerant attitudes toward gays.
"I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."
The parade, organized by the Los Angeles Gay And Lesbian And Bisexual And Transvestite And Transgender Alliance (LAGALABATATA), was intended to "promote acceptance, tolerance, and equality for the city's gay community." Just the opposite, however, was accomplished, as the event confirmed the worst fears of thousands of non-gay spectators, cementing in their minds a debauched and distorted image of gay life straight out of the most virulent right-wing hate literature.
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 peril
Other recent news articles include "U.N. airlifts food to starving French fashion models" and "Mexico to build 700-mile-long ladder."
By Vladimir Chang
Authoritarianism Correspondent
SEOUL -- South Koreans today thanked former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for putting their entire civilization within moments of thermonuclear annihilation.
"Yesterday I was just a fool thinking that the wonderful middle-class life I have created for myself and my family would continue indefinitely, perhaps even forever," said South Korean computer programmer Heung Moon. "Now I know that my job, house, family, and everything I hold dear in this world could be wiped out at any second upon the whim of a homicidal madman. Thanks, Jimmy Carter!"
"I've always wanted to see a beautiful orange mushroom cloud moments before being vaporized," said electronics company executive Lee Min. "Thanks, Jimmy Carter!"
South Koreans effusively thanked Carter for his famous 1994 trip to Pyongyang, during which he negotiated a deal, later finalized by then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright, in which North Korea pledged to halt its nuclear program. The North Koreans used the deal to buy enough time to build a handful of nuclear bombs, which now threaten the very existence of all 49 million grateful South Koreans.
Carter is known to be the only person on earth who actually believed the North Koreans would uphold their side of the agreement. But the ever-polite South Koreans thanked the former president for his efforts anyway, saying that they were happy to be the victims of such a nice, well-meaning person.
Carter insisted on Monday that the complete and utter failure of his diplomatic efforts in North Korea, which led directly to Kim Jong Il's acquisition of untold numbers of thermonuclear devices, did not prove that his negotiations 12 years ago were futile.
"I don't care what the newspapers say," Carter said. "I know my efforts were worthwhile because they won me the Nobel Peace Prize. Are you going to believe one little nuclear explosion or five experts selected by the Swedish Parliament?"
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:
Well, okay, then. [p. 70]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, incomprehensible--Republican victories in 2002 and 2004. He argues that the gay marriage state constitutional amendments on various ballots in 2004, while they might have helped a little, weren't the reason for the astonishing victory in 2004. It was actually that the Democrats were divided between those who wanted to win the War on Terror, and those that thought that terrorism was really more a police activity. Most importantly, the Democrats did not have a clue what was required to build a strong majority:The Democratic Party has not won a majority of white voters since 1964. They have not won 50 percent of the national vote since 1976, suggesting that a Democratic presidential victory in the modern era requires either a presidential resignation and an unelected incumbent (1976) or a campaign by H. Ross Perot (1992, 1996). And in the last six congressional elections--starting with 1994--the Democrats have not cracked 48.5 percent of the national vote.
Regular readers will recognize this claim--but when I quoted it two months ago, it was with respect to this election:
James Carville, architect of Clintons' 1992 win, understood the enormous opportunity that the Democrats faced against Bush in 2004. It was probably the best chance the Democrats would have for the forseeable future.
Twelve days before the election, Carville opined in his trademark colorful language in a star-studded Beverly Hills living room: "If we can't win this damn election with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55 percent of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direc tion, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs--if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party." [pp. 38-39]"We have to go back to 1974 (during Watergate) to find such a favorable environment," says James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. "If we can't win in this environment, we have to question the whole premise of the party."
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party didn't "completely rethink the Democratic Party" after the 2004 elections, and my guess is that if Karl Rove gets the weird sisters working over their cauldron hard enough to keep control of Congress (and it is beginning to look like that might be required--hey, maybe Chavez was right about the sulfur!), the Democratic Party will still not recognize that national security in time of war is really the only issue that matters--and everything else is strictly secondary.
I confess that I had forgotten some of the mindbogglingly stupid and even traitorous statements made by the multimillionaires' wing of the Democratic Party [* see note]--the George Soros, Michael Moore, Gloria Steinem, MoveOn crowd--those who have become obscenely wealthy through the benefits of capitalism, and now seek to close the door behind them on the rest of us. Geraghty's book includes a lot of really embarrassing quotes from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, such as Oliver Stone's October 10, 2001 defense of the terrorists as anti-globalization activists, and the dire predictions by Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker of mass starvation and bombing deaths of civilians that the war in Afghanistan would cause (pp. 124-5). There are embarrassing quotes from Rep. Cynthia McKinney, alleging that Bush knew in advance of 9/11, but took no steps to stop it (p. 141) There are statements from Rep. David Bonior and Jim McDermott arguing that Saddam Hussein was more trustworthy than George Bush (p. 146).
As I said at the beginning of the review, there's a real question as to whether Americans have long enough memories. There's no question that aspects of the Iraq War have been badly managed, and I've been critical of Bush's decisions on this--while recognizing that when you come to a fork in the road, there may not be a good choice.
As long as the Democratic Party refuses to grow up and take national security seriously, they are completely outside the realm of serious discussion of national policy. When I say, "take national security seriously," I mean telling the multimillionaire wing to go away. The multimillionaire wing engages in the false claim that Bush lied about WMDs, portrays pre-war Iraq as a land of smiling children and flying kites, spins wild fantasies about 9/11 being a Bush plot to enrich Haliburton, and claims that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition. When the Democrats tell this bunch of dangerous and traitorous defenders of totalitarianism to go away, then I will know that they are a serious political party again.
* I know that some of you are scratching your heads about "multimillionaires' wing," but the fact is that without the self-made multimillionaire radicals such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, and the fourth generation wealth of people like Ned Lamont and Howard Dean, there wouldn't be enough money for the tenured radicals of the academy and the scruffy anti-globalization crazies to have any influence at all.
When I lived in California, I worked with people with net worths exceeding $100 million--and not surprisingly, they were overwhelmingly Democrats and Greens. I knew one millionaire who was a Republican--and not a very conservative one. I've lost count of the number of liberal, left, or Marxist multimillionaires with whom I worked. There's something so bizarre about having a guy lecture you about the merits of Noam Chomsky's work--and then tell you about wrecking his Ferrari racing it over the weekend.
The Beautiful Society That Michael Moore Felt We Should Have Not Overthrown
From the trial in Baghdad:BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.
The question that I would like to ask the Democratic Party, which treated Michael Moore like an honored guest at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Why is George Bush's overthrow of this government a sign of his evil nature?
Speaking in Kurdish through an Arabic interpreter, the 31-year-old witness recalled what she saw as a 13-year-old girl who was detained during Saddam's offensive against the Kurds in the late 1980s.
...
The woman said several relatives disappeared during the offensive against the Kurds. "I know the fate of my family (members). They were buried alive," she testified.
The prosecution presented the court with documents showing that remains of the women's relatives turned up in a mass grave.
"I'd like to ask Saddam: 'What crime did women and children commit'?" the woman said in court.A 64-year-old farmer, Jalil Lateef Saleh, then testified that he, his wife and daughters aged 6 and 9 were arrested in 1988 in the wake of an army attack on their village near the northern city of Sulaimaniyah. Prison wardens separated him from his family, and he has not seen them since.
I know that there are many Democrats who do not agree with Michael Moore. They are what I call the adult supervision wing of the Democratic Party. What I want to know is why there were any of these Democrats left in the Democratic Party after Michael Moore's repeated treatment as a dignitary by the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Michael Moore is a propagandist for a torturocracy. The Democratic Party should have run like hell from this creep--instead of embracing him.
"They tore up my identity card and threw it into my face telling me that I was an Iranian and didn't deserve the Iraqi ID," he testified of his six months in detention.
A woman witness, wearing a headscarf, said she lost three children - including a 1-year-old daughter - while in detention in 1988. Her husband was taken to another prison and became "insane" and paralyzed after being tortured, said the woman, whose name was withheld.
"The traces of whips remained on his body one year after his detention," she said. "I don't know what was my fault or that of my husband to have endured all that. My daughter died in prison, while my two sons were buried in mass graves."
Safe Storage Laws Are A Trade-Off
In general, I agree that keeping guns secured in your home is a good idea, both to prevent burglars from stealing them, and to make sure that your kids don't get unauthorized access. I agree that you should spend at least as much energy gunproofing your child as childproofing your gun, but there's still a harsh reality about kids. Some significant number of kids, under the influence of puberty, living in a depraved and evil society, and all the confusions of the teenaged years, go a little crazy in these years.
It might be a brief moment of rage at being told, "No, you can't have a sleepover with your girlfriend." It might be a desperate cry for attention after months of merciless abuse by the monsters that inhabit many junior high schools. It might be severe depression that you missed, because teenagers are so moody, anyway.
All of these good reasons to keep guns properly secured around the house. But this news article is a reminder that safe storage laws, while they may prevent some tragedies involving kids, risk causing other tragedies:CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- A 14-year-old boy shot and killed a man who broke into his family's home Monday and threatened to kill him and his mother, Police Chief Bryan Smith said.
In most situations, it is best that teenagers not have access to a gun. But there are situations like this--and John Lott has gathered many other examples--where safe storage laws replace one tragedy with another.
Smith said the man, whose name was not immediately known, confronted a woman as she was carrying groceries into her home shortly before 1 p.m.
The man forced her inside and tied her and her son up. Smith said the woman was able to loosen the binding and free her son, who got his father's revolver from a security box beneath a bed.
As the man tried to break into the room where the two were and threatened to kill them both, the teen fired a shot through the door and hit the intruder in the head, Smith said.
Gee, Can Anyone Figure Out Why This Congressman Kept Quiet?
Apparently, Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) knew about sexually explicit communications between Foley and page as far back as 2000--and didn't bring it to the attention of House leadership:A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.
Just horrifying. Why wouldn't Kolbe bring this to the attention of the leadership? Oh, I think I see:
A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship. Last week, when the Foley matter erupted, a Kolbe staff member suggested to the former page that he take the matter to the clerk of the House, Karen Haas, said Kolbe's press secretary, Korenna Cline.
The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages. A timeline issued by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) suggested that the first lawmakers to know, Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), the chairman of the House Page Board, and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), became aware of "over-friendly" e-mails only last fall. It also expands the universe of players in the drama beyond members, either in leadership or on the page board.Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican in Congress, is retiring at the end of the year.
Is sexual orientation more important than political affiliation?
UPDATE: Rep. Kolbe now says that he did not see the emails in 2000, and was not informed that they were of a sexual nature:WASHINGTON - Rep. Jim Kolbe says he was never shown the exact content of Mark Foley's e-mails six years ago to a male congressional page he had appointed, and did not realize those messages were sexually explicit.
Unless someone has evidence otherwise, I'm inclined to take Kolbe's word on this.
In a statement released by his office Tuesday morning, the Arizona Republican said he promptly passed the former page's complaint in 2000 about Foley along to the former Florida congressman's office - and to the the Clerk who supervised the congressional page program.
"I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit," said Kolbe, who is Congress' only openly gay Republican.
Striped Jihadists
Well, we're getting somewhere on killing wasps. I noticed after we removed the next just under the roofline that there was a gap in the siding out of which wasps were coming. It appears to be a piece of siding that was ripped loose by our high winds--and led into the rafters above the garage.
So, Saturday morning, while my wife was out of the house at band practice, I put the cat in my car, and set off bug bombs in the crawlspace under the house, in the house, and in the rafters above the garage.
When I came back two hours later, there were hundreds of dead and dying wasps on the concrete around the house, largely concentrated towards the front. There were wasps crawling slowly and painfully out of the gap--and I just soaked the hole with wasp spray. The builder will be up this week to put the appropriate piece of wood in place to cover this gap, and I will screen over some coax connector openings at the end of the garage.
There are still wasps showing up on the front porch--but the numbers are declining. Even two mornings later, I see wasps hitting the concrete, clearly dying. I don't know that there is a nest in the rafters, but it does seem likely that after destroying the nest, any wasps that were still in the area went inside the rafters for warmth. (They cuddle together outside for warmth--how cute! It just makes it easier to get them all with one spray.)
The weather is definitely getting colder, and we will continue to bug bomb the rafters. There may still be more up there, but eventually, the toxic lethality inside the rafters, and the cold outside, should be enough. The only danger is that the wasp queen hibernates over the winter. When we are no longer seeing wasps flying outside, I may do a more thorough inspection of the rafters, to make sure that there's no Plan B nest up there.
The little pests did get their revenge on me, indirectly. I was washing down the concrete of their little bodies, and the surface was slippery enough for me to sprain my ankle. Its all wrapped up, but I am not walking much in the meantime.
It's All Bush's Fault!
Over at Liberal Idaho (which is sadly, not an oxymoron):Before the Bush apologists come out in their defensive droves; yes, this is a failure of the Bush Administration and those who continue with their support of this Administration.
The problem is that North Korea's current nuclear program started in 1995--seven years before Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech--at least according to this report from the Congressional Research Service, posted on the left-leaning Federation of American Scientists webpage:
I was in South Korea not too long after the Axis of Evil speech in which President Bush went ahead and named the nations for which he has plans. South Koreans were furious at Bush for taking back all the progress that the two countries had made over the last 10 years; he ruined 10 years of diplomacy with one single sentence.The Bush Administration disclosed on October 16, 2002, that North Korea had revealed to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly in Pyongyang that it was conducting a secret nuclear weapons program based on the process of uranium enrichment. North Korea admitted the program in response to U.S. evidence presented by Kelly. The program is based on the process of uranium enrichment, in contrast to North Korea’s pre-1995 nuclear program based on plutonium reprocessing. North Korea began a secret uranium enrichment program after 1995 reportedly with the assistance of Pakistan.
Perhaps North Korea is more scientifically advanced than we thought--they have the ability to predict who will be elected years into the future--and what that President will say!
Is Illegal Immigration a Problem?
It is unfortunate that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation wanted posters don't identify the country of origin of those that they seek. This collection of 45 wanted persons includes 26 persons with Hispanic surnames. At least two of them have first names that suggest that they might have been born here ("Martin" and "Bessie"). It is possible that the 24 that are wanted all or mostly came here lawfully. Somehow, I'm a bit skeptical.
The majority--probably vast majority--of illegal aliens come to America looking for jobs. But unlike legal immigrants, there's no background check, no verification that they aren't wanted in their home country. Criminals on the run have good reason to come to America to hide--especially because our criminal justice system is so much easier on them, even if caught, then prisons in most of Latin America.
I've seen the claim that illegal aliens are very disproportionately involved in violent crimes in the U.S. I don't find that hard to believe. When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I knew two different families irrevocably affected by murders committed by illegal immigrants. One was a couple that went through childbirth training with my wife and me. Their housekeeper (also illegal) tried to get her illegal alien boyfriend to stop being unfaithful, so she lied to her boyfriend, claiming that she was being forced to provide sex to her employer. He responded by murdering her employer and his wife. Another was the daughter of a co-worker. She broke up with her Brazillian illegal alien boyfriend--and he responded by murdering her. Both of these crimes took place in Marin County--one of the safest counties in California.
Did either one of these killers have a criminal history back home? I don't know. Perhaps, having no respect for the trivial laws, such as immigration, they were more inclined to ignore the more important laws, such as murder.
Religion and the Professoriate
Inside Higher Ed reports on a survey of university professors and religion. It turns out that they aren't all atheists:Listen to many critics of higher education, and you would think that faith had been long ago banished from the quad — or at least all those quads not at places like Notre Dame or Liberty or Yeshiva.
This is a bit of a strawman argument. I don't think anyone claims that they are all atheists.It turns out though, that there are plenty of believers on college faculties. Professors may be more skeptical of God and religion than Americans on average, but academic views and practices on religion are diverse, believers outnumber atheists and agnostics, and plenty of professors can be found regularly attending religious services.
However, as the study points out, quite a number of those who consider themselves "spiritual" hold beliefs that are pretty remote from even liberal forms of Christianity. The survey found that 10% were atheists and 13.4% were not simply agnostics ("I don’t know whether there is a God") but agnostics who asserted "and I don’t believe there is any way to find out." I can somewhat understand the "I don't know" claim--but to assert that there is no way to find out is a pretty amazing claim--one that sounds like it was intended to preclude any danger of finding out.
These are some of the findings of a national survey of professors at all types of institutions, conducted for a presentation sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. The survey was conducted and analyzed by two sociologists, Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University.
In March, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles released a study indicating that more than 80 percent of college professors consider themselves spiritual. The new study focuses more on religious belief — whether professors believe in God, attend services, etc., and how they classify themselves within their faiths.
Another 19.6% agreed with, "I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind." Well, better than the militant atheist or agnostic, but certainly out of the mainstream of even pretty liberal Christianity. The remainder were either firm believers in a personal God, or wavered in their faith--rather like a lot of Americans outside the ivory tower.
What was very interesting wasn't the averages, but the distribution by department and class of university.Faculty members at religious colleges made up about 14 percent of the sample in the survey and they were more likely to believe in God. While 52 percent of professors in non-religiously affiliated colleges believe in God either despite doubts or without doubt, 69 percent of those at religious colleges feel that way.
This is a head scratcher for me--why, oh why, are 31% of professors who don't believe in God teaching at religious colleges? Was that the only job available to them? It's rather like Marxists teaching capitalism, or Catholic priests teaching at a Marxist university.Professors are most likely to be atheists or agnostics at elite doctoral institutions (37 percent) and less likely to be non-believers at community colleges (15 percent).
Well, this doesn't surprise me. The "elite doctoral institutions" are built on pride, and if there is anything that Christianity discourages, it is pride. My impression also is that the elite schools are increasingly the narrowest places.
I attended Sonoma State University some years ago--not, to my way of thinking, an elite school, but there were faculty there that had aspirations to be Berkeley in the Vineyards. One of my professors confided to me that she had started to attend church, and made the mistake of letting this fact slip--and found herself subject to ridicule by colleagues because of it. Now, this was California--a place that prides itself on its openmindedness--so I guess that I am not surprised. I would expect that this same fierce opposition to heresy would be even more of a problem at the elite institutions.
I Can See A Saturday Night Live Skit Coming Out Of This
Colleges discussing affirmative action programs for gay students:Middlebury College is this year for the first time giving students who identify themselves as gay in the admissions process an “attribute” — the same flagging of an application that members of ethnic minority groups, athletes, alumni children and others receive, according to Shawn Rae Passalacqua, assistant director of admissions at Middlebury. His announcement surprised many of those who attended the session, and who said that they had never heard of a college having such a policy. (Officials of the Point Foundation, a group that provides scholarships to gay students, especially those denied financial support from their families, said that they had never heard of such a policy.)
Wait a minute! I thought that homosexuals were just like the rest of us, except for who they love? Now we learn that they really are different? Hmmm.
Passalacqua said that gay students bring “a unique quality” to the college, which he said tries hard not “to be too homogeneous.”Of 6,200 applications last year, 5 students noted their gay identities in their application essays and another 50-plus applicants cited their membership in gay-straight alliances. Passalacaqua said that Middlebury admissions officers were also likely to look favorably and give an admissions tip to “straight allies” of gay students — not just out of support for that view, but because a college benefits from having people who are “bridge builders.”
My mind just boggles. Homosexual and bisexual men are about 3-4% of the male population--and the claim is that women can't find dates because so much of the population is uninterested in women? This suggests to me that an affirmative action program for straight men might be in order there!
Several guidance counselors at the session said that they wanted to know what to tell their gay students who want to either write essays about their sexuality, or to make passing references to a love interest or crush in a way that would reveal the information. Panelists uniformly said that this information no longer hurts. And while no one matched Middlebury’s policy, an official of Claremont McKenna College said that he hoped his college would follow, and an admissions officer of Loyola University New Orleans said students shouldn’t feel they need to hold back their identities when applying to Jesuit colleges.
Mark Rasic, Western regional representative for Loyola, said that applicants shouldn’t assume that religious colleges don’t have many gay students. He said that the student newspaper at his institution recently interviewed admissions officers on whether the reason women can’t find dates on the campus is that so many gay men are enrolled.
One of the biggest problems with an affirmative action program for homosexuals is this: when will the university decide that it has enough? The "10% of the population is gay" claim has been thoroughly refuted for at least ten years. The actual percentages are about 3-4% of men, and about 1-2% of women. It is hard to believe that gay students are underrepresented on college campuses.
In addition, there are gay students applying to college who are not interested in being "out." Some may feel (for reasons that seem incomprehensible to me, considering the way that high school teachers and college professors fawn over gay students) that they aren't "safe" being out. Some may believe that this is a private matter, and see no reason to make an issue of it. This means that the university really has no idea how many gay students it has admitted. If half of the gay students do not identify themselves, and the admissions office decides whether it has met its affirmative action goals by the number who have openly declared their sexual orientation, then homosexuals will be overrepresented in the student body.
Questions About How Big of a Bang
The South Korean geologic institute reported that the North Korean nuclear test was the equivalent of 550 tons of TNT (or .55 kiloton yield). The Russian defense minister says that it was 5 to 15 kilotons. I am more inclined to think that the Russians have it right--they have quite a bit more expertise in interpreting nuclear explosions than the South Koreans.
Still, neither of these are exactly large explosions. If the Russians are right, this would be roughly the same, or a bit less, than the first nuclear weapons the U.S. detonated. If the South Koreans are right, it would be a puny weapon indeed.
North Korea has apparently worked on both enriching uranium, and separating plutonium from fuel rods in their nuclear reactors. If this was a uranium bomb, either low yield is very worrisome. A uranium bomb is extremely low tech; the U.S. didn't even bother to test the uranium bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima, because it was obviously going to explode. Because of their design, uranium bombs are limited to about a 400 kiloton yield, but they can be made relatively compact. This means that they make ideal terrorist weapons; not quite something that you can FedEx to the Capitol, but small enough to be of concern. They also make no sense for North Korea to put on an ICBM. If you are going to launch a nuclear weapon several thousand miles, you want a substantial amount of damage at the far end.
If this was a plutonium bomb, then the low yield may be an indication that North Korea still has some work to do. Especially the sub-kiloton yield reported by the South Korean geological institute would suggest that the bomb did not explode as intended. Plutonium bombs work by the rapid, simultaneous implosion of a low density sphere inside of a neutron reflector (originally cast iron, but I think beryllium is now preferred for this). All the charges forcing the implosion have to denotate in microseconds to at most one millisecond of each other, or you get a very imperfect, incomplete explosion. (The more precisely synchronized, the better the yield--hence the export restrictions on krytrons.) This is the only sensible explanation for the sub-kiloton yield, and even the Russian reported yield is pretty puny. You would think that especially for someone with as many insecurity problems as Kim Jong Il, he would want as big a bang as his scientists could make. It isn't like they were hiding their intentions to detonate a bomb.
If this explosion turns out to have been a plutonium bomb (which can be determined by measuring what radioactive isotopes are visible downwind), and especially if the sub-kiloton yield is correct, there's still a window of opportunity in which North Korea's nuclear weapons are primarily radiological risks to its enemies--not city destroyers.
If this explosion turns out to have been a uranium bomb, then North Korea is building terrorist weapons for export--and there's no time to dither any longer about destroying North Korea's capacity for production.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! One reader pointed out that krytons are used for implosion timing, not klystrons (right--updated), and also suggested that because the supercritical mass for U-235 is somewhat larger than for Pu-239, that a uranium bomb would have to be comparable in mass to Little Boy. I'm pretty that this is not correct. The supercritical mass for both U-235 and Pu-239 are classified (not surprisingly) but from all that I have read, it is something in the kilogram to tens of kilograms range for both categories of bombs.
The SADM--or Special Atomic Demolition Munition (a "backpack nuke" intended for use by Special Forces to crater Soviet-bloc airport runways). I have read that it weighed something like 57 pounds--at least small enough for one man to transport. This would have been a plutonium bomb, but the weight tells us that Pu-239 supercritical mass is somewhere below (probably considerably below) 57 pounds.
There are also ways to enhance the ability of a fission device. If you rely strictly on bringing together a supercritical mass to get a big bang, you need a lot more U-235 or Pu-239, because you need the neutrons that drive the chain reaction to spread very rapidly through the mass--or enough energy will be released to vaporize the bomb before you get full yield. I suspect that Little Boy was heavier than later devices such as the SADM because they did not take advantage of this. By pumping neutrons into the supercritical mass just as it comes together (either by hemisphere collision or implosion), it should be possible to get a much more efficient yield from a relatively small mass of fissile material.
UPDATE 2: Everyone in the blogosphere is talking about this. Over at Stop the ACLU (which seems a bit off topic of the title) there is talk that a second test is being rumored.
UPDATE 3: Belmont Club is suggesting that instead of failure, they might be testing a suitcase nuclear weapon of originally Soviet design. It is certainly the case that if you are planning to sell weapons to terrorists, demonstrating the ability to set off a low-yield, low-weight weapon is a selling point.
Another Sad Story
My co-blogger Pete Drum mentioned this over at Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog. There are a lot of superficially similar stories that we blog there that I can't really call sad. In many cases, the person who ends up headed to the hospital (or worse) is a career criminal--someone who makes a career of victimizing people for their property--or sometimes just for the sheer joy of causing suffering. I wish the criminal had made a better moral decision, but what makes those stories sad is that I feel sorry for the person who ended up pulling the trigger. The victim is likely to suffer considerable discomfort for a long time from that decision.
This story from the Seattle Times is a sad story because the news account suggests that the dead person was mentally ill (or perhaps severely intoxicated). The shooter, as near as I can tell, had not only legal justification for drawing his gun and firing it, but moral justification as well. The attacker gave the shooter reason to fear great bodily injury--and the shooter down on the ground, the opportunity for escape was severely limited:The case, according to police and witnesses, began at 11 a.m. Saturday with a 911 call.
Witnesses reported a man in a yellow shirt acting erratically, insulting and threatening passing pedestrians at Pike Street and Boren Avenue near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, said Seattle police spokeswoman Deb Brown.
A half-hour later, a man matching the same description was reported near Westlake Center. At the same time, a second man, described by witnesses as balding and wearing a leather jacket, was walking through the nearby plaza after finishing his lunch.
Neither man's identity was released by police on Saturday.
The man in the yellow shirt apparently focused in on the second man, saying, "I am going to kill you," Brown said. He then began punching and kicking the second man until the man fell to the sidewalk.
"He was down there, minding his own business. There is nothing to think he was anything but a random target," Brown said.
The victim happened to have a concealed-weapons permit, Brown said, and he was carrying a handgun. He pulled out the gun and fired once, hitting his attacker in the abdomen.
"It looked to me like he shot him in self-defense," said Linda Vu, who was across the street from the shooting, handing out fliers for political activist Lyndon LaRouche. "It's kind of crazy."
The man in the yellow shirt died after being taken to Harborview Medical Center. The King County Medical Examiner was trying to determine his identity, a task complicated by the fact that the man carried no identification.
Several nearby Seattle police officers heard the gunshot. When they arrived at the shooting scene, the victim, sitting on a streetside planter full of purple pansies, handed the gun to them and said, "I am the one who did this," according to Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel.
The man was arrested, but after questioning him and other witnesses, detectives determined they did not have probable cause to book him into the King County Jail. The man was released. Police said they were withholding his name as a crime victim — of the assault.
As the recent events at Dawson College in Canada, and at the Amish school in Pennsylvania demonstrate, there seems to be an awful lot of people out there with mental illness problems that desperately need treatment (examples: Patrick Purdy, James Huberty). Yes, some of the problem is people who can't be confined against their will because the ACLU has done such an effective job of destroying the civil commitment system in the U.S. But there's also an awful lot of people for whom the problem was lack of mental health resources either immediately available to them, or who seem not to go looking for help. There's no need for a blank check--but you do wonder if a bit more effort at mental health outreach might be a cost-effective way to solve some of these problems.
So, Is It Time To Move On?
A few years back, a certain elected official got caught lying about his sexual affairs. Worse, he lied during a deposition in a civil suit about it. The response of his defenders was that it was just about sex, a private matter, so this wasn't important, and we should just Move On.
I'm not going to tell you that Foley's actions were "just about sex" (although it never rose to the level of perjury). It was about a person of some considerable power taking advantage of that position for sexual gratification. Okay, Mark Foley wasn't as powerful as Bill Clinton, but in both cases, we are looking at evidence of at least incredibly bad judgment.
Still, I do find it fascinating how in one case, Bill Clinton lied to the American people, perjured himself in a civil suit--and managed to come out of it smelling like a rose--while in this case, the creep knew better than to defend himself, and apparently didn't try to lie his way out of it: Foley resigned.
It appears that there is now a real chance that Democrats will gain control of the House, and a very remote chance that they will gain control of the Senate, largely because of Foley's actions.
There's a lesson here for the Republican Party leadership. Yeah, yeah, it's a big tent, and we have to make room for all sorts--and I don't mean homosexuals (closeted or otherwise). If Foley had been vulgarly chatting up female pages, I doubt that the stink would have been much less.
There are three significant factions of the Republican Party. One group are social conservatives, who would have gladly lost a "safe seat" last year to get rid of Foley when the first questions came up. Another faction are the moderates, who are only concerned with business interests, and would only have regarded Foley as a problem if his indiscretions became visible. The final group are libertarians in the Republican Party, who would have crucified the social conservatives as "gay-bashers" for telling Foley to resign--after all, if it involves sex, it can't ever be a problem, can it?
Now, because the Republican leadership tends to listen to the libertarian and moderate factions (and pat the social conservatives on the head occasionally), there's a good chance that Democrats will control the House shortly, and a tiny chance that they will control the Senate.
I've had it with the factions that combine a completely values-free approach to governing (the moderates) and an at times openly anti-Christian perspective on morality (the libertarians). Any Republican officeholder who can't keep his zipper up (either literally or electronically) needs to resign as soon as he gets found out. No excuses--because it damages the credibility of the majority of Republican officeholders who either have the decency to behave themselves, or the good sense to not do it where they are going to get caught.
It doesn't matter if they are homosexual or heterosexual; what matters is an inability to follow their marriage vows, and an inability to recognize the poor judgment contained in those IMs. If the only way that Republicans can hold onto Congress is by backing creeps like Mark Foley or Jim West, then the cost is too high--and in the long run, we don't even get to hold onto Congress. If we can't hold on to Congress anyway, we can at least hold on to our self-respect.
Shocking Honesty From Gun Control Advocate
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has long been an advocate of restrictive gun control laws--but he has enough honesty to admit that the murders at the Amish school were not something that any form of gun regulation that he is willing to back could have stopped:The state governor said gun controls would not have stopped Amish school shooter Charles Roberts from acquiring the 9mm pistol, shotgun, rifle, stun gun, and 600 rounds of ammunition found on his body, because he had no police record or diagnosis of psychological illness.
The same wire service story quoted another gun control advocate, law professor Jamin Raskin of American University, in Washington, DC:
"I believe with all my heart that Pennsylvania needs stronger gun control legislation. But, I think we should all understand, no proposed law that I would think of or none that I've seen could have ruled out this situation," Governor Ed Rendell said. "I think we will need a movement for non-violence before we can meaningfully confront gun problems," said Raskin.
We already have a very sizeable movement for "non-violence" in America: do not attack me, and I won't hurt you. I suspect that what Raskin means is a pacifist movement--a position that violence under any circumstances is not justified. But such a movement is incompatible with sending policemen out with guns to disarm peaceful people. A "pacifist" movement that sends out armed people to disarm others is convenient pacifism. Professor Raskin needs to learn something about pacifism from the Amish, who are real pacifists.
I admire real pacifism, even though I disagree with it. Pacifism is tremendously difficult, because it is utterly contrary to our nature. Not taking revenge for a wrong is one level of self-discipline; not holding a grudge for a wrong someone has committed against you is another level of self-discipline. Refusing to defend another person, especially someone who is close to you, takes enormous self-control. Refusing to defend yourself, even when your life is at risk--that is the ultimate denial of one's human nature.
The reasons why the Amish are pacifist are rooted in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Professional armies marched across what is now Germany. When they weren't killing each other, they were entering little farming villages, taking any food, valuables, or females that they wished. The men would attempt to hide their wives and daughters--and the response of the professional soldiers was to torture them until they would reveal where the valuables were hidden.
These villagers had no arms, and even if they had, fighting back against professional armies of comparable size or larger would have been suicidal. Under these circumstances, the Amish, and a number of other Christian denominations of the period took Jesus Christ's instructions in Matthew 5:39, "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also," as mandating non-resistance to evil.
Pacifism is a plausible reading of this passage--although throughout history, Christians have generally understood this passage as meaning that petty insults and minor nuisances should be ignored. It is certainly good policy--why ramp up a minor insult or injury into something big? In the case of the German peasants, there was no realistic alternative. Not surprisingly, many of these peasants moved to Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century. Here they only had to worry about Indians, not the thugs who made up professional European armies.
Is Federalism Coming To Iraq?
This article from the Times of London says that the U.S. government may encourage Iraq to split into three autonomous regions: Kurd; Sunni; and Shiite:AN independent commission set up by Congress with the approval of President George W Bush may recommend carving up Iraq into three highly autonomous regions, according to well informed sources.
This may be the most sensible solution. While American states are not split along ethnic or religious lines, we have working examples such as Switzerland. Seventeen of the 26 cantons are German-speaking; four cantons are French-speaking; three cantons are bilingual; one canton is trilingual (German, French, Rumantsch). (That's only 25 cantons--I can't figure out the status of the 26th.)
The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is preparing to report after next month’s congressional elections amid signs that sectarian violence and attacks on coalition forces are spiralling out of control. The conflict is claiming the lives of 100 civilians a day and bombings have reached record levels.
The Baker commission has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls “cutting and running” or “staying the course”.
“The Kurds already effectively have their own area,” said a source close to the group. “The federalisation of Iraq is going to take place one way or another. The challenge for the Iraqis is how to work that through.”
The commission is considered to represent a last chance for fresh thinking on Iraq, where mass kidnappings are increasing and even the police are suspected of being responsible for a growing number of atrocities.
Of course, the danger is that once headed down the path towards autonomy, Iraq might well end up dividing into three nations--and the example of Yugoslavia reminds us that such a path is fraught with danger and bloodshed. Of course, so is the current situation.
"Why Can't We Be More Like Canada?"
This is the Democratic Party's constant refrain, and Little Green Footballs points out that the Democratic Party seems to take it very seriously--with the Democrats' web page complaining about the Republicans have hurt our military and veterans' families--but the picture of an American soldier on that page turns out to be a Canadian soldier (after some editing of the image to remove Canadian-specific insignia).
Does this affect the validity of their argument? Not really. It's just amusing that they don't know what an American soldier looks like enough to recognize that there's something wrong with thei picture. My guess is that multimillionaires' sons aren't going into the military.
Sometimes, You Don't Need To Bring a Gun To a Gunfight
The bad guys do it for you. This news item is astonishing--two criminals armed with a handgun, one victim armed only with teeth and determination--and the criminals are ones that get shot:HOLLYWOOD · A Hollywood man turned the tables on two robbers outside his home early Saturday morning, leaving one attacker dead from his own gun and the other nursing a bullet hole in his leg and a bite on his arm, authorities said.
Magano seems not to be a loss to the gene pool. I'm sure that we will hear more from Melendez over the next thirty years, and it won't be anything good.
Police say the two robbers were after new chrome rims on the homeowner's pickup truck.
Police identified the robbery suspects as Jason Robert Melendez, 23, and Ronald Magano, 22, both men with lengthy criminal histories, according to state records.
Magano died in the attack, and Hollywood police picked up a wounded Melendez a short time later. Melendez, who is on probation, will be charged with "a multitude of felonies, including felony murder," said Capt. Tony Rode, spokesman for the department.
The homeowner, Christopher Welker, 26, escaped the attack unharmed and is unlikely to face charges, Rode said. A grand jury will make the final decision.
"He was defending his property and his life," Rode said. "Mr. Welker was certainly justified in his actions."
Including Saturday's shooting, there have been four cases where victims have killed an attacker or intruder this year in Broward County, according to law enforcement records. Three of those cases have resulted in felony murder charges against surviving accomplices, those records show.
...
According to police, Welker heard a car pull into the driveway of his Hollywood Terrace home, which he purchased in July. It's a quiet, tight-knit neighborhood, so Welker assumed it was a friend or neighbor pulling in, police said. When he went to investigate, authorities said, he saw two men wearing ski masks in a red car.
As Welker's girlfriend and 16-month-old girl slept inside the house, Magano leapt from the car, put a handgun under Welker's chin and demanded the keys to his truck, Rode said. Welker had recently installed expensive chrome rims. Melendez jumped out to join in, Rode said.
Welker fought both men, and the gun fired several times in the struggle, Rode said. One shot struck Magano's head, killing him instantly. Another bullet hit Melendez's leg.
Welker ended the skirmish by biting Melendez's arm.
Melendez limped five blocks away before police tracked him down by following the trail of blood, Rode said. There, the suspect was bitten a few more times by a K-9 dog before being arrested.
Magano had been arrested six times, according to state records. Court records show he was sentenced to about a year in jail and two years probation in 2003 on two counts of burglary and one count of marijuana possession.
State records show Melendez has been arrested seven times. He was released from prison in January after convictions on charges of drug possession, forgery, robbery with a weapon and robbery with a firearm, according to state corrections records.
